So, rolling their own, with no experience then...
on
Why PBS Won't Do Android
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer, they are a dime a dozen, and every two bit Newspaper, TV station, TV-Network, football team, Grocery Chain, Department store, and gossip site has an app. They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Stop hiring, and write a contract. Apps like these aren't that hard.
Did the first iPhone or iPad do anything better than existing solutions?
That isn't even close to the proper comparison. Those were complete system. This is simply an input device.
Did the first mouse save any time over just using the keyboard? Did the touch screen (even today) save any time or effort over just using the mouse?
Did any of those inventions work to any real usable level right off the inventors work bench? No, of course not.
The point here is that this is an early conceptual device, which might not come into being a commercial success any time soon, but they still show a promising way forward, away from requiring a space for a keyboard and mouse, and away from a perpetually smudged touchscreen. If and when perfected, it will be game changing, on a grander scale than any other input device.
When the mouse and touch screen was invented, you couldn't buy anything but a keyboard. That's the whole point of invention.
And the first mice and touch screens pretty much sucked and were a total "Just So" story when first introduced. You had to contrive a use case, and the were more trouble than they were worth.
And the mouse/touchscreen inventors were pretty much lost to history, and never made any significant money, and never built a cult like following.
The point of my post was to rip the title of the summary, equating these two with people who invented nothing but self aggrandizement, rather than true inventors who were scoffed at, but ended up just about defining the personal computer world, PDAs, cell phones, and tablets.
Seems to me these guys would be the new Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse or E.A. Johnson, and Hurst, inventors of the Touchscreen rather than likening them to the twin gods of Woz & Jobs, who really invented nothing.
If it works we may eventually see the demise of keyboards and mice.
As for mountains eroding at a millimeter per, I'd like to know how they calculated that. If they simply measure the sediment in melt water and extrapolate that to cubit meters of rock and spread it over the entire watershed they would find that glaciated areas drop a lot more sediment than non-glaciated areas.
On the other hand if they are doing actual height measurements, how do they arrive at that level of precision, or explain the fact that there is no visible or measurable sign of millimeter depth erosion on the tops of mountains?
If it is, it is a sickness inspired by fear mongering to sell this to the U.S. budget. Way over the line. They don't need new toys, they need counseling.
And the fear mongering continues. They've ordered the embassies closed all over the middle east, and warning American travelers to stay home for a month. Apparently the risk expires at the end of august. Terroristic must have gotten a hold of some explosives with short "best if used by" dates.
But hey, this justifies all the spying, right? We're all good, then? We can forget all this Snowden stuff, righr?
Too soon? Here, we'll have Ahmed throw a real grenade, go ahead, Ahmed, toss it at those mannequins over there, here, let me get that pin for you.
The honeypot plants may have been more real than real plants. Chances are real plants have nothing this sophisticated.
(Some of these honeypots were designed to look like they were "located" in China, Russia, Australia, and Brazil. Did they think the attackers would be fooled by these things? Not all of those places would be running the same model of water plant.).
Then it says:
None of the attacks displayed a particularly high level of sophistication, says Wilhoit, but the attackers were clearly well versed in the all-too easily compromised workings of industrial control systems. Four of the attacks displayed a high level of knowledge about industrial systems, using techniques to meddle with a specific communication protocol used to control industrial hardware.
Well which is it? Not too sophisticated, but the busted into his lame decoys easily enough.
He was able to access data from their Wi-Fi cards to triangulate their location.
He claims to have triangulated where the attacker was based on their wifi card. REALLY? How is that done? He knows where every wifi router in the world is does he? Triangulate!!! All Wifi cards use three routers? Who knew! Each of which has its position known?
Somewhere there are some people chuckling at this guy.
Interesting, because the screen shots I glanced at really reminded me of it. I guess that just means KDE does really provide a framework for consistent application look and feel.
Well I only have 2.5 on my machine, waiting for OpenSuse to push 2.7, and most of Calliga looks decidedly bland, like they have done the bare minimum to get it working.
My version has move all the controls from the top to the side, which works great for documents, not so great for spread sheets, but they spent so little time doing this that the sidebar controls are obtuse. No hover help.
On the upside, it opens everything I've thrown at it, although selecting all text in a document and changing font family maxed out one of my processors for so ling I had to kill the task.
It depends on the time available. Redoing every thing in a software package, even one you are very familiar with might, be too time consuming. It tends to be fiddly work, taking time that might be better spent.
Take a look at what exists, and carry that documentation around with you on your walkabouts, and adorn it with a huge pile of postit notes (with circles and arrows and color glossy photos) and add to the existing documentation that way, as you tour the facility. Make notes on every item, making special notes about that rats nest of wires in the corner, and where the wire runs go, and the patch panel labeling, those modems hiding over there, and that looking machine in the rack.
(I tend to look at patch panels, wire closets, switch gear, and the racks, and look for huge kludges in these areas because if the physical plant is well designed and laid out, the rest will be easier, and chances are the network is at least documented. Drag your smart phone around and take pictures of stuff, especially the writing on the panels, or any diagrams posted).
Then flesh that out with what ever tools best suits your needs after the fact. If there is something in place for this (software or paper system), by all means stick with that rather than try to replicate it in something else. If nothing is there, its probably more worth your time with the incumbent to just gather knowledge in a notebook, or as notations on what ever existing documentation is found.
If you sit down and start re-doing the documentation from scratch while he's there it might leave a bad taste in his mouth as he would see it as a comment on his work. Improve upon what they have in place, or at least satisfy yourself that it is adequate. Plan any total documentation replacements for later.
Not knowing the size, and the budget I'd hesitate to recommend any given software or management package.
The Free ones are neither weak or crippled. True, there are additional capabilities in the some of the paid versions.
Number 2 used to be true. Sadly there is a lot of post Snowden rethinking of this.
Number 3 is pretty much false, because even air-headed teenagers know to put a find-phone-app on their phone and the best ones are free, and even Plan 9 (Morning after pill of find-phone-apps) is free.
The State of Utah would get far more in tax revenue from the feds if it could tax the power this site is going to use.
Some of that tax money would be paid by Utah citizens via their Federal Income tax, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of it would come from the rest of the US tax payers in other states.
As it stands now, Utah tax payers are going to have to pick up the slack for the free-loading federal government.
TL/DR: maybe they're being sincere when they deny knowing what's going on. Not sure if that would be disturbing or re-assuring, though.
Oh, come on!! Even YOU don't believe that tripe.
Director: What do all you guys in this room do? Guys: Secret stuff sir. You don't want to know. Director: Right, well, I'd like to stay, but its lunch time. Gotta run. Guys: kbye!
State tax agencies swear they informed the NSA about the impact of the law when it was still under debate; NSA officials denied knowing anything about it
Ladies and gentlemen, here are the guys whose job is information processing for the security of your nation...
Fine, have it your way. But before you do, lets get a discovery motion in front of a judge and we will see exactly what the NSA knew and when they Knew it.
But Lookout has ballooned in size over the years, 9Meg!!, and is not particularly stealthy. (Crooks will find it easily). There are dozens of these apps on the Play market, and virtually all of them take less room than Lookout. (often less than 1/10 the space).
Then there is Plan B. (also in the app store at above link), for when you forget to install any of these ahead of time.
Seems to fill the purpose of lot of other apps like Android lost, etc... What I would really like to see is a nice way to migrate from an old phone to a new one.
One wonders why Google wanted in this market, when it was so (more than) adequately populated with other apps.
Its not the first application space totally taken over by Google to the detriment of some of the very same developers Google was clamoring for early on.
The big difference here is that some filing clerk or HR drone, or Sales exec leaving, pissed or not, does not put your entire infrastructure at risk. A pissed sales exec might try and take his customers with him. The HR drone won't be missed, they are a dime a dozen.
But the Sys Admin, leaving pissed, can put you in a world of hurt by just changing his phone number, not doing any skulduggery. A vindictive ex-sysadmin can put your company down for the count months or years in the future, when you least expect it, from a cafe in Puerto Viarta.
Hope he is leaving on a good note, and not holding grudges.
Then systematically go through each machine for which he has a password and have him record these in some secure password vault application of your choice. And also any root passwords he has. Passwords to routers, print-servers, off site corporate backups, corporate accounts (supplier's web sites etc), certificates owned, domain names, email accounts, etc. (You'd be surprised how many small to mid sized businesses wake up two years hence to find their website unreachable because the renewal went to some gone-guy's inbox and/or bounced).
Go over the system layout (map of the network, interconnects, lans, NAS's, servers, etc), and for EACH NODE, ask if anything has been changed since it was created. If you ask if the document is up to date, he'll just say "pretty much" but if you go over it one router at a time, he will remember things that don't appear in the notes for one reason or another.
But mostly pray he's leaving happy, and not pissed.
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This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer, they are a dime a dozen, and every two bit Newspaper, TV station, TV-Network, football team, Grocery Chain, Department store, and gossip site has an app. They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Stop hiring, and write a contract. Apps like these aren't that hard.
Did the first iPhone or iPad do anything better than existing solutions?
That isn't even close to the proper comparison.
Those were complete system. This is simply an input device.
Did the first mouse save any time over just using the keyboard? Did the touch screen (even today) save any time or effort over just using the mouse?
Did any of those inventions work to any real usable level right off the inventors work bench? No, of course not.
The point here is that this is an early conceptual device, which might not come into being a commercial success any time soon, but they still show a promising way forward, away from requiring a space for a keyboard and mouse, and away from a perpetually smudged touchscreen. If and when perfected, it will be game changing, on a grander scale than any other input device.
When the mouse and touch screen was invented, you couldn't buy anything but a keyboard.
That's the whole point of invention.
And the first mice and touch screens pretty much sucked and were a total "Just So" story when first introduced. You had to contrive a use case, and the were more trouble than they were worth.
And the mouse/touchscreen inventors were pretty much lost to history, and never made any significant money, and never built a cult like following.
The point of my post was to rip the title of the summary, equating these two with people who invented nothing but self aggrandizement, rather than true inventors who were scoffed at, but ended up just about defining the personal computer world, PDAs, cell phones, and tablets.
Seems to me these guys would be the new Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse or E.A. Johnson, and Hurst, inventors of the Touchscreen rather than likening them to the twin gods of Woz & Jobs, who really invented nothing.
If it works we may eventually see the demise of keyboards and mice.
Oh, but if we can pin yet another thing on global warming it will make it so much more scary.....
Except you have lots of jaggy sawtooth peaks where there are NO glaciers and U shaped valleys where there are glaciers.
As for mountains eroding at a millimeter per, I'd like to know how they calculated that. If they simply measure the sediment in melt water and extrapolate that to cubit meters of rock and spread it over the entire watershed they would find that glaciated areas drop a lot more sediment than non-glaciated areas.
On the other hand if they are doing actual height measurements, how do they arrive at that level of precision, or explain the fact that there is no visible or measurable sign of millimeter depth erosion on the tops of mountains?
If it is, it is a sickness inspired by fear mongering to sell this to the U.S. budget. Way over the line. They don't need new toys, they need counseling.
And the fear mongering continues.
They've ordered the embassies closed all over the middle east, and warning American travelers to stay home for a month. Apparently the risk expires at the end of august. Terroristic must have gotten a hold of some explosives with short "best if used by" dates.
But hey, this justifies all the spying, right? We're all good, then? We can forget all this Snowden stuff, righr?
Too soon? Here, we'll have Ahmed throw a real grenade, go ahead, Ahmed, toss it at those mannequins over there, here, let me get that pin for you.
Not sure I believe density correlates with income in the third world.
The honeypot plants may have been more real than real plants. Chances are real plants have nothing this sophisticated.
(Some of these honeypots were designed to look like they were "located" in China, Russia, Australia, and Brazil. Did they think the attackers would be fooled by these things? Not all of those places would be running the same model of water plant.).
Then it says:
None of the attacks displayed a particularly high level of sophistication, says Wilhoit, but the attackers were clearly well versed in the all-too easily compromised workings of industrial control systems. Four of the attacks displayed a high level of knowledge about industrial systems, using techniques to meddle with a specific communication protocol used to control industrial hardware.
Well which is it? Not too sophisticated, but the busted into his lame decoys easily enough.
He was able to access data from their Wi-Fi cards to triangulate their location.
He claims to have triangulated where the attacker was based on their wifi card. REALLY? How is that done? He knows where every wifi router in the world is does he? Triangulate!!! All Wifi cards use three routers? Who knew! Each of which has its position known?
Somewhere there are some people chuckling at this guy.
Interesting, because the screen shots I glanced at really reminded me of it. I guess that just means KDE does really provide a framework for consistent application look and feel.
Well I only have 2.5 on my machine, waiting for OpenSuse to push 2.7, and most of Calliga looks decidedly bland, like they have done the bare minimum to get it working.
My version has move all the controls from the top to the side, which works great for documents, not so great for spread sheets, but they spent so little time doing this that the sidebar controls are obtuse. No hover help.
On the upside, it opens everything I've thrown at it, although selecting all text in a document and changing font family maxed out one of my processors for so ling I had to kill the task.
I'm really looking forward to the 2.7 release.
Mother Jones cites the actual studies, so you are shooting the messenger.
It depends on the time available. Redoing every thing in a software package, even one you are very familiar with might, be too time consuming. It tends to be fiddly work, taking time that might be better spent.
Take a look at what exists, and carry that documentation around with you on your walkabouts, and adorn it with a huge pile of postit notes (with circles and arrows and color glossy photos) and add to the existing documentation that way, as you tour the facility.
Make notes on every item, making special notes about that rats nest of wires in the corner, and where the wire runs go, and the patch panel labeling, those modems hiding over there, and that looking machine in the rack.
(I tend to look at patch panels, wire closets, switch gear, and the racks, and look for huge kludges in these areas because if the physical plant is well designed and laid out, the rest will be easier, and chances are the network is at least documented. Drag your smart phone around and take pictures of stuff, especially the writing on the panels, or any diagrams posted).
Then flesh that out with what ever tools best suits your needs after the fact. If there is something in place for this (software or paper system), by all means stick with that rather than try to replicate it in something else. If nothing is there, its probably more worth your time with the incumbent to just gather knowledge in a notebook, or as notations on what ever existing documentation is found.
If you sit down and start re-doing the documentation from scratch while he's there it might leave a bad taste in his mouth as he would see it as a comment on his work. Improve upon what they have in place, or at least satisfy yourself that it is adequate. Plan any total documentation replacements for later.
Not knowing the size, and the budget I'd hesitate to recommend any given software or management package.
The Free ones are neither weak or crippled. True, there are additional capabilities in the some of the paid versions.
Number 2 used to be true. Sadly there is a lot of post Snowden rethinking of this.
Number 3 is pretty much false, because even air-headed teenagers know to put a find-phone-app on their phone and the best ones are free, and even Plan 9 (Morning after pill of find-phone-apps) is free.
Sigh.....
The State of Utah would get far more in tax revenue from the feds if it could tax the power this site is going to use.
Some of that tax money would be paid by Utah citizens via their Federal Income tax, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of it would come from the rest of the US tax payers in other states.
As it stands now, Utah tax payers are going to have to pick up the slack for the free-loading federal government.
TL/DR: maybe they're being sincere when they deny knowing what's going on. Not sure if that would be disturbing or re-assuring, though.
Oh, come on!! Even YOU don't believe that tripe.
Director: What do all you guys in this room do?
Guys: Secret stuff sir. You don't want to know.
Director: Right, well, I'd like to stay, but its lunch time. Gotta run.
Guys: kbye!
Maybe because they stored it in the UTAH data center, and haven't paid the power bill.
Ladies and gentlemen, here are the guys whose job is information processing for the security of your nation...
Fine, have it your way. But before you do, lets get a discovery motion in front of a judge and we will see exactly what the NSA knew and when they Knew it.
What is it going to accomplish? Are ye Daft?
It accomplishes exactly what any tax does. You were expecting the Feds to pick up and move their data center?
Exactly.
But Lookout has ballooned in size over the years, 9Meg!!, and is not particularly stealthy. (Crooks will find it easily).
There are dozens of these apps on the Play market, and virtually all of them take less room than Lookout. (often less than 1/10 the space).
Then there is Plan B. (also in the app store at above link), for when you forget to install any of these ahead of time.
Except that this feature has been in available for Android from a couple dozen different sources for years.
Now who would you rather trust? Joe Small Company, hosting overseas, or Google or Apple in bed with the NSA?
Seems to fill the purpose of lot of other apps like Android lost, etc... What I would really like to see is a nice way to migrate from an old phone to a new one.
One wonders why Google wanted in this market, when it was so (more than) adequately populated with other apps.
Its not the first application space totally taken over by Google to the detriment of some of the very same developers Google was clamoring for early on.
Because part of it stems from the fat
Sell now all of the taste is from stems.
The big difference here is that some filing clerk or HR drone, or Sales exec leaving, pissed or not, does not put your entire infrastructure at risk.
A pissed sales exec might try and take his customers with him. The HR drone won't be missed, they are a dime a dozen.
But the Sys Admin, leaving pissed, can put you in a world of hurt by just changing his phone number, not doing any skulduggery.
A vindictive ex-sysadmin can put your company down for the count months or years in the future, when you least expect it, from a cafe in Puerto Viarta.
Ok, we're getting off you lawn now Pops, calm down, maybe sit a spell...
Hope he is leaving on a good note, and not holding grudges.
Then systematically go through each machine for which he has a password and have him record these in some secure password vault application of your choice. And also any root passwords he has. Passwords to routers, print-servers, off site corporate backups, corporate accounts (supplier's web sites etc), certificates owned, domain names, email accounts, etc. (You'd be surprised how many small to mid sized businesses wake up two years hence to find their website unreachable because the renewal went to some gone-guy's inbox and/or bounced).
Go over the system layout (map of the network, interconnects, lans, NAS's, servers, etc), and for EACH NODE, ask if anything has been changed since it was created. If you ask if the document is up to date, he'll just say "pretty much" but if you go over it one router at a time, he will remember things that don't appear in the notes for one reason or another.
But mostly pray he's leaving happy, and not pissed.