You were right on target. Most people don't check. And while Linux doesn't have any known viruses in the wild, systems do get hacked from time to time. It's a good idea to check your logs and connections now and then, or have someone help you with that. In an org it's essential to watch what the network's doing, run honeypots and snap misbehavior off at the access port automatically and in real time.
And then you had to go say this:
Yah; I'm talking about the *current* version of Windows, not the version that shipped almost a decade ago. Comparing 2009 Linux to 2001 Windows, now that's some FUD!
Look, I was in the store today. Systems were on the shelf new, with Windows XP. As far as I know, that's the definition of a current version.
So he's right - you're just another Microsoft astroturfer like the ones who were extolling the virtues of Vista, and bashing people who were complaining about performance by saying they should try it on a "modern" computer when their computers were brand new, modern PCs that Vista just struggled with. And here we are 2 years on and more and more systems are coming out completely unable to run that crud. XP is still on the shelf, and if you want to be free of the crud in this article you can run Linux but usually I just tell people to "get a mac".
Oh, and open source adds security to Linux in the same way that peer review lends credibility to science. If your process is well documented and your results reproducible, you've come a long way towards proof.
They showed up within 24 hours of her getting broadband. I downloaded this utility that fixed her right up. It only took 20 minutes. I did have to reinstall her Picasa though. At the same time we upgraded her printer to one of the newer HP multifunction things so she can print and upload her digital photos, and scan recipes - her old one was a broken Lexmark. The utility seems to be 100% effective against all of these things. Grandma really likes it - it's been a year and now when I visit it's only to chat, not to fix her computer.
Anyhow, the utility is called "Jackelope" for some odd reason. It's available here.
And so you know that the user has had unauthorized software running on the PC with administrator privileges, capturing and relaying customer login information for all their accounts, sampling files for interesting data and uploading them to unknown sites for further processing, flagging systems with system and user DSN's for special manual handling - for an unknown period of time but almost certainly across more than one reboot.
But you've killed all the evil processes and deleted the software that is known by the scanner vendor to be bad.
And now you can comfortably give that computer back to the end user to attach to your network and start processing work again because it's all better now, right? That is what you said?
No malware can be reliably removed any more. That hasn't been the case for at least five years. If your system has legitimate malware on it, it's time for a wipe and reimage. Please don't encourage this bad practice.
Mars doesn't have a pervasive biosphere because we haven't rehabilitated it yet. On a global level there's little difference in difficulty level between rehabiltating Mars and rehabilitating Earth. On Mars opposing ventures aren't going to counteract your efforts. Martian climate is about that of antarctica, and the establishment of a biosphere will change that. Either Martian or Terran solution is going to have to leverage biogenic action because self-replicating actors are cheaper than man-manufactured ones, especially on a global scale. I'm sure we have samples of phtotosynthetic biogenic organisms that operate in low pressure and cold environments even without bioengineering anything new. I think may be easier to Terraform Mars than it is to Terraform Earth.
Mars's atmosphere is currently frozen at its poles. In order to engage some Martian Global Warming we'll need to thaw the CO2 and convert massive quantities of water ice to CO2 and hydrocarbons (We'll need some carbon). Still no Nitrogen but if we can't find any in the soil we should be able to mine it somewhere.
I've been thinking about this Mars thing a lot lately. A rocket sled to Deimos seems inefficient and unreliable even though there's some gravity assist if you use the Olympic skijump model of ramp made of ice. I think that it should be easy enough to build a cannon out of the available ice and use steam propulsion to launch multiton ice slugs up to Deimos, if you can adequately control the steam pressure and timing. If you want to get fancy you might put some minor steam propulsion in the ice slug and some minor intelligence to guide it. If you miss your shot it falls to barren Mars, so lots of practice shots are possible.
The gravity on Deimos is only 400 Micro G, so the shot's got to get pretty close. Once you have tons of water in a shallow gravity well with plenty of electrical energy you've changed the game for off-earth work and life.
Martian global warming might just be a side-effect of us doing what we're supposed to do: explore. Hopefully in 200 years the very idea of activating a Martian atmosphere will sound silly.
Intel was buying optical processor technologies a quarter century ago. I don't see any threats to their dominance in the next quarter century. They're not dumb. They could launch a 100GHz photonic processor if they needed to. They just don't need that advancement yet. I can't think of a better reason to buy AMD processors than that: Intel is not going to give us the good stuff until their dominance is threatened.
If we're going to set a course of deliberate climate change, I'm going to go out on a limb and nominate Mars for the pilot project. Let's try it there and if it works, bring it home.
Intel has moved the northbridge and the GPU onto the processor. I understand the southbridge is next. The keyword is "SOC" or System on a Chip. They're not inventing this here -- others have done it long ago. The southbridge is the part that talks to the physical port controller (PHY) for the network. PHYs will remain discrete components because of their radically different power requirements - until we go optical. But Intel hasn't promised us multiple 10Gbps optical ports on consumer equipment until next year, and 100Gbps per port could be 10 years out.
Larrabee is supposed to be a massively parallel cache-coherent x86 architecture with 24/32/48 cores on one chip.
But of course for serious work you could put four of them in one 2U system and use your fancy Infiniband to interconnect your 192-core nodes. You'll need some insane power and cooling to fill a rack with 22 of those but at 172TFlops per rack (If the thing hits 2GHz with 32 cores), maybe it's worth it: you're in the top 20 supercomputers in the world, in one rack. I'd probably go with a shared PCIe bus myself, though, and tie together 8-packs of servers in a tiered arrangement, but I'd put five in each server that wasn't a PCIe hub. I'm cheap that way - I'll go asymmetrical to save a few bucks. On the upside, there's space in there for 172TB of local SAS storage as well. Come to think of it, I might try and fit in some SSD.
The Larrabee add-in cards had better come equipped with external DC power connectors and external water or compressed air connectors so they can fit in a single-wide slot. There's no way the PSUs or thermal solutions in servers are going to handle those Watts - unless it comes in significantly under the expected TDP.
$6,000 is the median - so fully 1/2 of the homes sold sell at less than this. I imagine a much higher fraction are selling for more, but less than $20,000 - still far cheaper than available rents. The numbers are definitely skewed because some people are buying the homes for $100 and selling them again the same week for $2000 to someone who turns it over again without ever having seen it. It's an interesting game of hot potato because if you're holding the thing on tax day you can owe more taxes than you bought the house for.
The agency responsible for this brilliantly witty perspective is Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. They've done some marvellous work here. I can't wait to see more of their efforts. Their spin on Macenstein's Mac Chick of the Month (NSFW) would be the bees knees.
I thought paying Seinfeld ten million bucks for three commercials was a brilliant investment too! Without his classic humor Vista might not have done even as well as it did. He's what got the man on the street to give it a go.
They should give them three to five more years before they give up on this crew. Their genius is subtle, but you need a good pool of data before you know how strategic marketing is working. And of course they'll be needing a bigger budget. This needs a wider audience to good market penetration. Maybe they could buy some leader space on DVD's, some long spots during the fall sports classics - the jocks will eat this stuff up. I'm thinking a few spots during the Thanksgiving day parade with real captured Windows 7 Launch Party footage will be just the thing.
I wish it weren't so, really. It's an abomination and we knew it when the thing was released, but there it is. Friends don't let friends use IE6. It's common and more reasonably secure browsers aren't supported on sites that require IE6. Enterprises need IE6 for intranet sites and they can't afford to or aren't able to rewrite sites to adhere to standards.
They could choose to fix this problem by requiring their development teams to adhere to standards, but that's not the direction they're going -- instead the job ads are full of requirements that for successive iterations of Microsoft deprecated versions of.net. The persistence of stupidity is remarkable, but that's a different topic.
This paradigm is inherently flawed: the network is not a trusted environment and in that environment a Windows server should be the least trusted element. Microsoft themselves admit this when they force you to choose between the latest version of their server operating system or the latest version of their mail server, but not both, putting you in the position of choosing either an OS that's currently as secure as it can be, or a mailserver that is, but not both.
So what can you do? The Google solution actually looks like a good answer at first, but then realize that it enables and empowers people to continue using a browser that's known to be bad. If a server is on the intranet it's presumed to be safe (itself a different problem), if a server self-identifies as being OK for Chrome the user gets a secured sandboxed environment. But on the Internet, where users will go, if a server doesn't self-identify as preferring Chrome the user is browsing a site with a browser that's known to be insecure. So by enabling users to browse in a secure environment when the server offers it, Google is actually enabling people to not update to a more secure browser.
It's a clever hack, but the premise is fatally flawed.
In the heirarchy of information technology it's the role of the Network Administrator (NA) to identify and defeat threats to the network and its nodes, to be the enterprise's last line of defense against the leakage of proprietary or sensitive information and to defend each node not just against the wider world but also against each other. The network is not a trusted space no matter how many firewalls you have, and it was never intended to be. Far more attention is paid these days to connectivity. Disconnectivity is a far more important and neglected role of the NA.
User agents should (must) trust this because their ability to interact on the Network Administrator's network is controlled by the Network Administrator. That's the price they pay to use network resources, including Interent access and shared resources like printers, file shares and enterprise database connections.
As an enterprise NA if you're not probing every client that connects at least within the first 60 seconds for unauthorized ports, and again every day - if you're not sniffing every unencrypted packet for honey telltales and limiting encrypted channels to trusted personnel - if you're not shutting down network access to nodes that probe other nodes or violate disclosure policy within 100ms, you're not doing your job.
The Fine Article calls processes that maintain aspects of these network security requirements "ants". That's a fair term if you're using distributed processing to analyze behaviors. A sufficiently Darwinian process should be able to create sufficient numbers of detector nodes to identify and isolate emerging threats, though the false positive problem becomes challenging.
But far too many NAs still rely on the perimeter defense model which has proven to be as effective as the defense of Troy against the Achaeans.
But the problem can be narrowed down from Internet Service providers to Electricity providers. It can be factually proven that five nines of computer software, music and video piracy is supported by the electricity utilities. All of the hardware used to decode, transmit and receive this intellectual property theft is powered by the irresponsibly unlimited distribution of electrons by the power utilities. The electrons themselves are unknowing innocents in this matter. They are enslaved in "generating plants" by the evil power distributors and put to their fell tasks by consumers by the trillion to be ultimately demoted to a lesser form of energy, heat. Very few are briefly promoted to photons chasing through a fiber optic pipe before suffering this indignity in addition to being put to the cruel task of piracy.
The cure is of course to prevent the generation and transmission of electrical power. There will be some minor collateral consequenses, but they're of little import relative to the protection of intellectual property that is America's greatest stock in trade.
"Analog" also has a responsibility here. The approximation of inherently continuous information to digitized forms, such as sound pressure levels to digital samples and photon frequency samples (pixels) to photon counts, and of course the reverse conversion, is an evil attempt to circumvent the right of every individual to create works based on their observations and edit them, or to invent them from whole cloth. All electronic circuits that convert from analog to digital, or from digital to analog should therefore be banned. If a medium is analog it should stay analog, as God intended.
If they sell 6,000 of them in the first year at 100% margin, they can pay back the principal. If they sell 40,000 at 20% margin, they can pay back the principal plus interest. At a more normal 5% margin, they have to sell 160,000 of them before they turn a profit. How big is the market for $90,000 hybrid sports cars?
If the profitability isn't there and the engineering and production aren't being done in the US how is this not a US government subsidy of the european auto industry?
4Q 2009. Intel will be bringing the vitality of the Windows Mobile Experience to Mobile Linux (Moblin) by porting Microsoft Silverlight to it. We may all anticipate the usual robust stability, inherent security, device and application compatibility and outstanding performance we've traditionally seen from mobile Windows products.
An Intel spokesperson might say:
We look forward to a durable and productive partnership with Microsoft on the Linux platform. Based on the long history of Microsoft product partnership successes and their long-term commitment to driving adoption of Linux from the palmtop to HPC, Microsoft has shown itself capable and well motivated to help us achieve our goals with Moblin.
Dude. You're in Antarctica and it's September. You've got bigger problems than Slashdot moderation. Are you receiving resupply yet? Mobile Internet service must really suck down there. What kind of bandwidth do you get? It may interest you to know that it only gets 11C colder on Mars than it does there.
Really, don't let it get to you. The moderation here is pretty spotty - it works in the general case, not the specific. But it's the best moderation system I've seen yet because it's self-policing (low maintenance) and uncensored (browse at -1 and you can see everything, no matter how it's moderated, and posts can't be edited or deleted). Some of us find an amusing game trying to grab attention (interesting) and be controversial enough to garner as many moderations to a single post as possible. That's a tricky game because nobody downmods the +5s, or upmods the -1's usually. Moderation annoys me now and then, but if a moderation is really abusive you can just follow up with another post that's topical and interesting, and mention by-the-way that the parent was abusively modded and another moderator will fix it. Now and then I'm deservedly down modded and I have to take my lumps. Sometimes I do it on purpose.
Awesome pics on your website by the way. I've got that bookmarked now. Probably beat up your webserver with wget this weekend building a local mirror.
The answer to your question is: be patient. There isn't a special repository that I know of for mobile-optimized apps, but remember - the mobile platforms that are truly open really aren't shipping in volume yet. Once they are, a repository will be set up, Debian (and hence, Ubuntu) will have thousands of apps, and you'll be able to search for it on apt-url with the name of your platform and the type of thing you want to do. And it will be free because that's how this stuff works.
The Intel Moblin platform will be just like all the other linux platforms I've seen. Users will buy it because it's known to be Linux compatible and wipe that Silverlight and other bundled crap off it - to replace with a really open platform like Debian or Ubuntu before operating it at all. It's just like businesses that wipe the OEM install of Windows with the preinstalled crudware in preference for a clean install of XP with their own apps. Don't worry - it will come.
Of course I agree with you. Any organization of a reasonable size has desktop PCs coming off the regular rotation. Right now that means systems like these DC7600s. They have 3.2GHz single core processor and a gig or two of RAM and gigabit networking. 4 year old Dells have the same Spec. I have a cluster of 8 of these I use for quick stuff down in the basement - they're set for wake on LAN and netboot. Add a cheap gigabit switch and some DRBL configs, and you've got a beowulf cluster. They're useful for checking stuff out, testing VDI solutions and whatnot.
If you're rotating them out they're costless and if your problem works with asymmetrical nodes and you have good power, you've not only solved the computation deficit you've deferred the recycling problem as well. If you have to buy them at $1000 for five, that's $200 per core and you're probably better off buying modern quad-core desktops. The Small Form Factor ones work best for ad-hoc clustering.
But this only works if your needs are smaller - like for a pilot - and if the problem you're solving is not very granular (it can be divided only into larger chunks). For fine grained problems best approachable with shared-memory solutions, or scaling to thousands of cores, you get more bang for your buck with the GPGPU solutions because they have 600 cores on one $1,500 card.
That said, I do agree with you - the problems solvable by a rack of surplus desktops are numerous and interesting.
Moblin will fail because Intel has decided to let Microsoft own the user experience with Silverlight. Silverlight on Moblin. This one's over before it started.
As if it weren't muddy enough, apparently Intel is porting Silverlight (not Moonlight, Silverlight) to Moblin.
Every time I think Intel has got it all figured out they pull something like this to remind me that they don't really understand. They're like the 7 year old kid that steals his parents car and drives it 40 miles down the road to buy ice cream, and then tries to pay with lego blocks and a wilted Yugi-oh card. Genius, but misguided genius. They're the RainMan of IT.
Intel, one more time: IT'S A TRAP!. It's always a trap. What are you going to do if this thing is really popular and causes an huge swell of support for your product and puts Silverlight over the adoption knee where it's taking over the world? Do you really think Microsoft won't come out with a Silverlight 6 - Now with No Moblin but enhanced Windows 8 Mobile? Then what? Your name is then mud in consumer electronics - again - because you can't maintain a consistent experience. You guys have been here the whole time. You should know better. Is there no institutional memory in that place? Alzheimer's setting in? What?
Oh, and Miguel de Icaza: Congratulations. You've been had. Again. But then you knew that.
Slashdot Mirror
So they're all running Windows then?
You were right on target. Most people don't check. And while Linux doesn't have any known viruses in the wild, systems do get hacked from time to time. It's a good idea to check your logs and connections now and then, or have someone help you with that. In an org it's essential to watch what the network's doing, run honeypots and snap misbehavior off at the access port automatically and in real time.
And then you had to go say this:
Yah; I'm talking about the *current* version of Windows, not the version that shipped almost a decade ago. Comparing 2009 Linux to 2001 Windows, now that's some FUD!
Look, I was in the store today. Systems were on the shelf new, with Windows XP. As far as I know, that's the definition of a current version.
So he's right - you're just another Microsoft astroturfer like the ones who were extolling the virtues of Vista, and bashing people who were complaining about performance by saying they should try it on a "modern" computer when their computers were brand new, modern PCs that Vista just struggled with. And here we are 2 years on and more and more systems are coming out completely unable to run that crud. XP is still on the shelf, and if you want to be free of the crud in this article you can run Linux but usually I just tell people to "get a mac".
Oh, and open source adds security to Linux in the same way that peer review lends credibility to science. If your process is well documented and your results reproducible, you've come a long way towards proof.
They showed up within 24 hours of her getting broadband. I downloaded this utility that fixed her right up. It only took 20 minutes. I did have to reinstall her Picasa though. At the same time we upgraded her printer to one of the newer HP multifunction things so she can print and upload her digital photos, and scan recipes - her old one was a broken Lexmark. The utility seems to be 100% effective against all of these things. Grandma really likes it - it's been a year and now when I visit it's only to chat, not to fix her computer.
Anyhow, the utility is called "Jackelope" for some odd reason. It's available here.
And so you know that the user has had unauthorized software running on the PC with administrator privileges, capturing and relaying customer login information for all their accounts, sampling files for interesting data and uploading them to unknown sites for further processing, flagging systems with system and user DSN's for special manual handling - for an unknown period of time but almost certainly across more than one reboot.
But you've killed all the evil processes and deleted the software that is known by the scanner vendor to be bad.
And now you can comfortably give that computer back to the end user to attach to your network and start processing work again because it's all better now, right? That is what you said?
/shudder.
Some people should be restricted only to a Linux live CD like Knoppix.
You could always make an interesting and realistic Internet Simulator that's supported by advertising.
No malware can be reliably removed any more. That hasn't been the case for at least five years. If your system has legitimate malware on it, it's time for a wipe and reimage. Please don't encourage this bad practice.
Mars doesn't have a pervasive biosphere because we haven't rehabilitated it yet. On a global level there's little difference in difficulty level between rehabiltating Mars and rehabilitating Earth. On Mars opposing ventures aren't going to counteract your efforts. Martian climate is about that of antarctica, and the establishment of a biosphere will change that. Either Martian or Terran solution is going to have to leverage biogenic action because self-replicating actors are cheaper than man-manufactured ones, especially on a global scale. I'm sure we have samples of phtotosynthetic biogenic organisms that operate in low pressure and cold environments even without bioengineering anything new. I think may be easier to Terraform Mars than it is to Terraform Earth.
Mars's atmosphere is currently frozen at its poles. In order to engage some Martian Global Warming we'll need to thaw the CO2 and convert massive quantities of water ice to CO2 and hydrocarbons (We'll need some carbon). Still no Nitrogen but if we can't find any in the soil we should be able to mine it somewhere.
I've been thinking about this Mars thing a lot lately. A rocket sled to Deimos seems inefficient and unreliable even though there's some gravity assist if you use the Olympic skijump model of ramp made of ice. I think that it should be easy enough to build a cannon out of the available ice and use steam propulsion to launch multiton ice slugs up to Deimos, if you can adequately control the steam pressure and timing. If you want to get fancy you might put some minor steam propulsion in the ice slug and some minor intelligence to guide it. If you miss your shot it falls to barren Mars, so lots of practice shots are possible.
The gravity on Deimos is only 400 Micro G, so the shot's got to get pretty close. Once you have tons of water in a shallow gravity well with plenty of electrical energy you've changed the game for off-earth work and life.
Martian global warming might just be a side-effect of us doing what we're supposed to do: explore. Hopefully in 200 years the very idea of activating a Martian atmosphere will sound silly.
Intel was buying optical processor technologies a quarter century ago. I don't see any threats to their dominance in the next quarter century. They're not dumb. They could launch a 100GHz photonic processor if they needed to. They just don't need that advancement yet. I can't think of a better reason to buy AMD processors than that: Intel is not going to give us the good stuff until their dominance is threatened.
If we're going to set a course of deliberate climate change, I'm going to go out on a limb and nominate Mars for the pilot project. Let's try it there and if it works, bring it home.
Intel has moved the northbridge and the GPU onto the processor. I understand the southbridge is next. The keyword is "SOC" or System on a Chip. They're not inventing this here -- others have done it long ago. The southbridge is the part that talks to the physical port controller (PHY) for the network. PHYs will remain discrete components because of their radically different power requirements - until we go optical. But Intel hasn't promised us multiple 10Gbps optical ports on consumer equipment until next year, and 100Gbps per port could be 10 years out.
Larrabee is supposed to be a massively parallel cache-coherent x86 architecture with 24/32/48 cores on one chip.
But of course for serious work you could put four of them in one 2U system and use your fancy Infiniband to interconnect your 192-core nodes. You'll need some insane power and cooling to fill a rack with 22 of those but at 172TFlops per rack (If the thing hits 2GHz with 32 cores), maybe it's worth it: you're in the top 20 supercomputers in the world, in one rack. I'd probably go with a shared PCIe bus myself, though, and tie together 8-packs of servers in a tiered arrangement, but I'd put five in each server that wasn't a PCIe hub. I'm cheap that way - I'll go asymmetrical to save a few bucks. On the upside, there's space in there for 172TB of local SAS storage as well. Come to think of it, I might try and fit in some SSD.
The Larrabee add-in cards had better come equipped with external DC power connectors and external water or compressed air connectors so they can fit in a single-wide slot. There's no way the PSUs or thermal solutions in servers are going to handle those Watts - unless it comes in significantly under the expected TDP.
It's called Larrabee. Coming soon.
$6,000 is the median - so fully 1/2 of the homes sold sell at less than this. I imagine a much higher fraction are selling for more, but less than $20,000 - still far cheaper than available rents. The numbers are definitely skewed because some people are buying the homes for $100 and selling them again the same week for $2000 to someone who turns it over again without ever having seen it. It's an interesting game of hot potato because if you're holding the thing on tax day you can owe more taxes than you bought the house for.
I guess it depends on where you work. If you still have a blue collar job in Detroit you can buy a median home for $6,000 down and no payments ever .
Nooooooooooo..... They're doing GREAT.
The agency responsible for this brilliantly witty perspective is Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. They've done some marvellous work here. I can't wait to see more of their efforts. Their spin on Macenstein's Mac Chick of the Month (NSFW) would be the bees knees.
I thought paying Seinfeld ten million bucks for three commercials was a brilliant investment too! Without his classic humor Vista might not have done even as well as it did. He's what got the man on the street to give it a go.
They should give them three to five more years before they give up on this crew. Their genius is subtle, but you need a good pool of data before you know how strategic marketing is working. And of course they'll be needing a bigger budget. This needs a wider audience to good market penetration. Maybe they could buy some leader space on DVD's, some long spots during the fall sports classics - the jocks will eat this stuff up. I'm thinking a few spots during the Thanksgiving day parade with real captured Windows 7 Launch Party footage will be just the thing.
The Macbook Air also has no firewire.
I wish it weren't so, really. It's an abomination and we knew it when the thing was released, but there it is. Friends don't let friends use IE6. It's common and more reasonably secure browsers aren't supported on sites that require IE6. Enterprises need IE6 for intranet sites and they can't afford to or aren't able to rewrite sites to adhere to standards.
They could choose to fix this problem by requiring their development teams to adhere to standards, but that's not the direction they're going -- instead the job ads are full of requirements that for successive iterations of Microsoft deprecated versions of .net. The persistence of stupidity is remarkable, but that's a different topic.
This paradigm is inherently flawed: the network is not a trusted environment and in that environment a Windows server should be the least trusted element. Microsoft themselves admit this when they force you to choose between the latest version of their server operating system or the latest version of their mail server, but not both, putting you in the position of choosing either an OS that's currently as secure as it can be, or a mailserver that is, but not both.
So what can you do? The Google solution actually looks like a good answer at first, but then realize that it enables and empowers people to continue using a browser that's known to be bad. If a server is on the intranet it's presumed to be safe (itself a different problem), if a server self-identifies as being OK for Chrome the user gets a secured sandboxed environment. But on the Internet, where users will go, if a server doesn't self-identify as preferring Chrome the user is browsing a site with a browser that's known to be insecure. So by enabling users to browse in a secure environment when the server offers it, Google is actually enabling people to not update to a more secure browser.
It's a clever hack, but the premise is fatally flawed.
In the heirarchy of information technology it's the role of the Network Administrator (NA) to identify and defeat threats to the network and its nodes, to be the enterprise's last line of defense against the leakage of proprietary or sensitive information and to defend each node not just against the wider world but also against each other. The network is not a trusted space no matter how many firewalls you have, and it was never intended to be. Far more attention is paid these days to connectivity. Disconnectivity is a far more important and neglected role of the NA.
User agents should (must) trust this because their ability to interact on the Network Administrator's network is controlled by the Network Administrator. That's the price they pay to use network resources, including Interent access and shared resources like printers, file shares and enterprise database connections.
As an enterprise NA if you're not probing every client that connects at least within the first 60 seconds for unauthorized ports, and again every day - if you're not sniffing every unencrypted packet for honey telltales and limiting encrypted channels to trusted personnel - if you're not shutting down network access to nodes that probe other nodes or violate disclosure policy within 100ms, you're not doing your job.
The Fine Article calls processes that maintain aspects of these network security requirements "ants". That's a fair term if you're using distributed processing to analyze behaviors. A sufficiently Darwinian process should be able to create sufficient numbers of detector nodes to identify and isolate emerging threats, though the false positive problem becomes challenging.
But far too many NAs still rely on the perimeter defense model which has proven to be as effective as the defense of Troy against the Achaeans.
But the problem can be narrowed down from Internet Service providers to Electricity providers. It can be factually proven that five nines of computer software, music and video piracy is supported by the electricity utilities. All of the hardware used to decode, transmit and receive this intellectual property theft is powered by the irresponsibly unlimited distribution of electrons by the power utilities. The electrons themselves are unknowing innocents in this matter. They are enslaved in "generating plants" by the evil power distributors and put to their fell tasks by consumers by the trillion to be ultimately demoted to a lesser form of energy, heat. Very few are briefly promoted to photons chasing through a fiber optic pipe before suffering this indignity in addition to being put to the cruel task of piracy.
The cure is of course to prevent the generation and transmission of electrical power. There will be some minor collateral consequenses, but they're of little import relative to the protection of intellectual property that is America's greatest stock in trade.
"Analog" also has a responsibility here. The approximation of inherently continuous information to digitized forms, such as sound pressure levels to digital samples and photon frequency samples (pixels) to photon counts, and of course the reverse conversion, is an evil attempt to circumvent the right of every individual to create works based on their observations and edit them, or to invent them from whole cloth. All electronic circuits that convert from analog to digital, or from digital to analog should therefore be banned. If a medium is analog it should stay analog, as God intended.
If they sell 6,000 of them in the first year at 100% margin, they can pay back the principal. If they sell 40,000 at 20% margin, they can pay back the principal plus interest. At a more normal 5% margin, they have to sell 160,000 of them before they turn a profit. How big is the market for $90,000 hybrid sports cars?
If the profitability isn't there and the engineering and production aren't being done in the US how is this not a US government subsidy of the european auto industry?
4Q 2009. Intel will be bringing the vitality of the Windows Mobile Experience to Mobile Linux (Moblin) by porting Microsoft Silverlight to it. We may all anticipate the usual robust stability, inherent security, device and application compatibility and outstanding performance we've traditionally seen from mobile Windows products.
An Intel spokesperson might say:
We look forward to a durable and productive partnership with Microsoft on the Linux platform. Based on the long history of Microsoft product partnership successes and their long-term commitment to driving adoption of Linux from the palmtop to HPC, Microsoft has shown itself capable and well motivated to help us achieve our goals with Moblin.
Dude. You're in Antarctica and it's September. You've got bigger problems than Slashdot moderation. Are you receiving resupply yet? Mobile Internet service must really suck down there. What kind of bandwidth do you get? It may interest you to know that it only gets 11C colder on Mars than it does there.
Really, don't let it get to you. The moderation here is pretty spotty - it works in the general case, not the specific. But it's the best moderation system I've seen yet because it's self-policing (low maintenance) and uncensored (browse at -1 and you can see everything, no matter how it's moderated, and posts can't be edited or deleted). Some of us find an amusing game trying to grab attention (interesting) and be controversial enough to garner as many moderations to a single post as possible. That's a tricky game because nobody downmods the +5s, or upmods the -1's usually. Moderation annoys me now and then, but if a moderation is really abusive you can just follow up with another post that's topical and interesting, and mention by-the-way that the parent was abusively modded and another moderator will fix it. Now and then I'm deservedly down modded and I have to take my lumps. Sometimes I do it on purpose.
Awesome pics on your website by the way. I've got that bookmarked now. Probably beat up your webserver with wget this weekend building a local mirror.
The answer to your question is: be patient. There isn't a special repository that I know of for mobile-optimized apps, but remember - the mobile platforms that are truly open really aren't shipping in volume yet. Once they are, a repository will be set up, Debian (and hence, Ubuntu) will have thousands of apps, and you'll be able to search for it on apt-url with the name of your platform and the type of thing you want to do. And it will be free because that's how this stuff works.
The Intel Moblin platform will be just like all the other linux platforms I've seen. Users will buy it because it's known to be Linux compatible and wipe that Silverlight and other bundled crap off it - to replace with a really open platform like Debian or Ubuntu before operating it at all. It's just like businesses that wipe the OEM install of Windows with the preinstalled crudware in preference for a clean install of XP with their own apps. Don't worry - it will come.
Of course I agree with you. Any organization of a reasonable size has desktop PCs coming off the regular rotation. Right now that means systems like these DC7600s. They have 3.2GHz single core processor and a gig or two of RAM and gigabit networking. 4 year old Dells have the same Spec. I have a cluster of 8 of these I use for quick stuff down in the basement - they're set for wake on LAN and netboot. Add a cheap gigabit switch and some DRBL configs, and you've got a beowulf cluster. They're useful for checking stuff out, testing VDI solutions and whatnot.
If you're rotating them out they're costless and if your problem works with asymmetrical nodes and you have good power, you've not only solved the computation deficit you've deferred the recycling problem as well. If you have to buy them at $1000 for five, that's $200 per core and you're probably better off buying modern quad-core desktops. The Small Form Factor ones work best for ad-hoc clustering.
But this only works if your needs are smaller - like for a pilot - and if the problem you're solving is not very granular (it can be divided only into larger chunks). For fine grained problems best approachable with shared-memory solutions, or scaling to thousands of cores, you get more bang for your buck with the GPGPU solutions because they have 600 cores on one $1,500 card.
That said, I do agree with you - the problems solvable by a rack of surplus desktops are numerous and interesting.
Moblin will fail because Intel has decided to let Microsoft own the user experience with Silverlight. Silverlight on Moblin. This one's over before it started.
As if it weren't muddy enough, apparently Intel is porting Silverlight (not Moonlight, Silverlight) to Moblin.
Every time I think Intel has got it all figured out they pull something like this to remind me that they don't really understand. They're like the 7 year old kid that steals his parents car and drives it 40 miles down the road to buy ice cream, and then tries to pay with lego blocks and a wilted Yugi-oh card. Genius, but misguided genius. They're the RainMan of IT.
Intel, one more time: IT'S A TRAP!. It's always a trap. What are you going to do if this thing is really popular and causes an huge swell of support for your product and puts Silverlight over the adoption knee where it's taking over the world? Do you really think Microsoft won't come out with a Silverlight 6 - Now with No Moblin but enhanced Windows 8 Mobile? Then what? Your name is then mud in consumer electronics - again - because you can't maintain a consistent experience. You guys have been here the whole time. You should know better. Is there no institutional memory in that place? Alzheimer's setting in? What?
Oh, and Miguel de Icaza: Congratulations. You've been had. Again. But then you knew that.