As general-purpose chips get smaller and cooler, there is less and less need to code a particular radio standard into the chips - it becomes possible to support multiple standards (Wifi, BlueTooth, GSM, etc.) Either switching between them, or even in parallel.
Spam is moving off open relays and onto pirated home computers. Spammers and virus writers together have already designed a distributed architecture in which they can send emails from hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of 'owned' personal computers.
The solution is to accept that email will become 99.9(n) junk, and that the challenge then becomes to extract the signal, not filter the noise.
One solution I foresee is "data clearing houses" which store-and-forward email, using a reputation management system to rank and score email (and other data, for the problem is general).
If there is one thing Sun could do to boost OOo that would be to buy the openoffice trademark so that the product can actually be promoted as "OpenOffice" and not "OpenOffice.org".
why categorize the styles of thinking in terms of sexes...
Because it's simple and accurate and honest. Personality differences are not random or accidental, people are adapted to working in social teams of various kinds and the primary factor deciding what "role" someone will take is gender.
Since most teams are not built by psychologists, and most people are more complex than it is possible to pinpoint with a "category", profiling people with psychological tests prior to placing them in teams simply does not product great results. One good HR person (typically a woman)will do a much better job at selecting people than a panel of (typically male) psychologists.
I'm sorry for the generalizations, which I know annoy many people who believe that it's impolite to state such beliefs as if they were facts. I'm also sorry for spelling corollary wrongly, it's just one of those slippery words.
But for many people struggling to understand why they have problems with colleagues and bosses, simple and generally accurate explanations about why people behave in certain ways can be very helpful.
As for constructing teams, I have a very simple and generally accurate model that does not need psychologists. A team handling rich problems (covering technical, social, commercial, legal aspects) can be viewed as a family unit. Father and mother figures, sundry aunts and uncles, children of different ages. A clear hierarchy of knowledge, power, and responsibility. A clear sense of common purpose and common survival. A mix of capacities with everyone learning and everyone teaching. A division of labour so that the elephant is processed completely.
Seriously... in European high-tax countries this means that the state gives a discount of 40-50% on the item (plus VAT back!).
Even grown men like to play games now and then. And the N-Gage is surprisingly snappy, not like playing Java games on other GSMs, which is slow and boring.
MAME on N-Gage is a great addition, Nokia should try to license these arcade games since many of their potential clients (men aged 30+) are probably more familiar with some of them than with the "real" games actually available on the thing.
(And this is quite important, so please don't flame me for being politically incorrect or whatever)...
Men tend to solve problems in this way, defining approximate solutions, slicing the problem into pieces and delegating the smaller tasks, focussing relentlessly on technical details, until the elephant has been hunted, killed, skinned, chopped, carried back, eaten, and the fat melted down into candle wax.
Women tend to solve problems by exchanging points of view and information, and arriving at approximate solutions by averaging the solutions they have learned about.
The difference is crystal clear: technical problems cannot be solved by "averages", social problems cannot be solved by "analysis" (unless you're a genius for understanding people).
Of course there are many man who think like women, and vice versa. Gender roles are not iron-clad, they are poles to which people stick more or less.
Both types of problem-solving skill are necessary in solving real-world problems, which are as often social as physical. I.e. if it's a real elephant you're hunting, it's a man's job. If you're constructing a new house, you really need to have a lot of discussion first.
Well-organized teams therefore mix women and men not because they are equal and equivalent (we are not), but because we're complementary.
Except that errors are not truly random, they are generally structural, i.e. a particular kind of error will be repeated until enough customers complain and it's fixed. Businesses that structurally make errors in the customer's favour will simply be selected against. "Bzzzt! You're Bankrupt!!" Leaving the professionally incompetent in charge...
Since everyone is going to ask, the female approach is to exchange opinions about the elephant's skin texture, color, smell, etc. until the elephant falls asleep from boredom, upon which point the women can drape the elephant in colorful cloth and decorate it tastefully.
OK, all three female Slashdotters can flame me at once now. I'm ready...
All human problem solving (especially the male approach) tends to be a exercise in discovery, generally done by making an approximate solution, testing it against the reality of use, then refining this until it's "good". Different people have different skills in this regard, some are good at overall designs, some at details.
You don't need a conspiracy theory
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Assume a background of random errors. Now in usual circumstances, clients are able to fix mistakes quickly: if someone overcharges in a shop, or if you get shoddy goods or service, it's easy to complain and get your money back. As more and more sales get done online, as credit card statements get longer and more complex, as suppliers get futher and further away, we will see the less disciplined suppliers making more profit.
Example: the company I use for registering domain names made a mistake and charged for a domain name that was actually not available. Now, after some hours of trying to get service, I just let it fall. Hours' work to get $35 back is just not worthwhile. I'm not even annoyed with the company, it's my choice to let it slide.
So, over time, there will be an inflation in the greyness of transactions, ironically quite the reverse of what you'd expect from a more and more automated system.
Haha, this gives me a terrible idea. In decades from now, I guess we'll have shifted to a system whereby basic consumables are paid by taxes levied on our level of income. Much simpler and eventually the same result. Think RIAA taxes, but on the entire arena of consumer products.
True, this is an unpickable lock, and my assertion fails.
However, it is impossible (as far as I can see) to actually implement this in an unbreakable manner. At some point, a cryptographic lock that is used by people depends on human interaction, and at that point, it can be picked, often in the most simple of ways:
"Hey, random dude, what's your passphrase?" "Oh, I can't tell you that!" "Go on, I'll give you a free pen" "OK, it's MyDogIsSickAgain". "Cool, thanks!" "You won't use it, will you...?" "Nah, of course not!"
Eliminate all computer users, you eliminate security problems.
You're right that it is a matter of definition and perspective. I will anyhow try to change your perspective...:)
There are many cases where complex problems are best understood by looking at people not so much as intelligent, proactive agents of change, but rather as dumb followers of rather simple rules:
- traffic jams
- crowds and riots
- stock markets
- economic systems
- political systems
- transport
etc. All hefty problems that only make sense when you ignore human proactivity and see people as role-playing components.
Regulation is not the basis of human civilization, it is an effect of it. Whenever people get together to try to cooperate on solving a common problem (and this is the basis for human society), they will define rules and an authority to enforce those rules.
Attempts to plan or regulate society without respecting the natural tendencies of people tend to create disasters. (Think of any "planned economy").
And yes, I believe that viruses will never cease to exist. It's been 20 years, and we have not seen one single effective solution to viruses, despite significant attempts at many levels.
Parasitical software is not a technical challenge like - e.g. VoIP or 3d animation. It represents a new class of problem: a self-replicating organic pest that uses human weakness to infest a technical infrastructure. So long as there are people, there will be viruses.
If you believe that this is simply because of poor security in Windows, bad email clients, etc., consider the very first wild virus, which ran on a Univac mainframe.
Parasitical code can run on any programmable system that is connected to others.
It is true that in an ecology we see replication and selection, which appear to be missing from the Internet "ecology".
However, look closer, you will see that these do actually take place. Software competes for space on hardware, for network bandwidth, and for user attention. Every CPU cycle and packet absorbed by a parasite means less for honest software. Every minute spent deleting spam is a minute less for honest work.
The key point is that the Internet is not just a million computers, it is a zillion computers plus a zillion people.
It's the people and their ways of using the Internet that turn it into a natural ecology.
Laws are not the answer: it will just create a criminal underground. You cannot legislate against human nature - look at the "war on drugs".
Tighter security is not the answer: every lock designed by a human can be picked by a human.
Open source is not the answer: any suitably complex system, transparent or not, will have security flaws, usually at the user interface point (think: weak passwords).
Security patches are not the answer: parasitical code can spread many times faster than any human reaction time.
I believe the answer is that computer systems will have to evolve something similar to an immune system, based on recognising friend-or-foe, and capable of regular pseudo-sexual exchange to scramble the locks against parasitical code that has adapted. Finally, it is likely that parasitical code will eventually be co-opted (just like the bacteria in our guts) into less harmful roles.
To put this into context: the wars in your intestine started with the very first life forms and have been one of the basic engines of change in evolution for 3.5 billion years (along with climate change). I believe we're only at the very first stages of this process with the Internet, but inevitably we will follow a similar route.
Anyhow, I will be long dead before this actually happens. It's just idle speculation.
The Internet is not a planned system. It grows and connects like a natural system obeying laws such as Zipf's Law.
When it comes to security, the best model for what is going on in the Internet is also an organic model, namely the naturally occuring phenomenon of parasites, and the way these evolve in any real or simulated ecology.
My opinion is that until we use natural models, and learn from them, we will not be able to stop the rising tide of parasitical code that infests the Internet.
"Monocultures" are a large part of the problem, and the Economist rightly argues that opening the Windows source code to third parties would create more variety and thus more security. But I think we have to go much further, towards systems that actively evolve to protect themselves against parasites.
I've been criticised for saying this by people who say "it's just a metaphor, it does not mean anything". This is untrue: it is a model, one that we can use to understand what the heck is going on: what are the dynamics behind the process, what are the weaknesses of today's infrastructure, and what are the best solutions.
Let me summarize this one more time: The internet behaves like an ecology, obeys the same laws as natural ecologies, falls prey to the same problems as natural ecologies, and if we want to create structures that survive these problems, we must understand things in terms of an ecology, not a planned design.
Re:Decreasing air pressure...
on
Eating in Space
·
· Score: 1
You misunderstood me: 5 mod points at some point in the future to boost whatever comments that person makes. I'm trading in mod points futures.
And no, multiple accounts won't help, Slashdot discriminates on the IP address.
Re:Decreasing air pressure...
on
Eating in Space
·
· Score: 1
An interesting comment but not really an answer. I believe this discussion demands a serious (as in swallows and coconuts) analysis and conclusion. In full shade, in Earth orbit, how fast would a hot turkey (say 12 lb?) cool, and to what temperature. In full sunlight, what would the answer be?
First complete answer, even approximate, gets my next five mod points.
I retract my argument based on the rubber tube demonstration.
Do you have any idea how fast heat radiation will cool an object in space? Stick a warm turkey in a plastic bag, chuck it out into space, how long will it take to freeze, and how cold will it get?
Or will the turkey remain nicely hot for ages? If space is an insulator, this is what we'd expect...
DNS is being used to exchange the Torrent files, which are small, not the data itself, which is large.
The Torrent files are indexes that tell your BitTorrent program where and how to get its data.
This sounds very useful, since what was missing from the BitTorrent network was a way of distributing cached Torrent files, and this is exactly what DNS provides.
Remains to be seen whether it actually works, but it's a neat concept.
I remember a great demonstration given in the Toronto Science Museum. A piece of rubber tubing placed into a bell jar. A vacuum pump extracting the air until it reached a near-vacuum. Pause... allow air back into the bell jar. Strike rubber with small hammer, rubber shatters and when touched, little pieces of it are _very_ cold indeed.
An object in a vacuum radiates its heat and unless there is an equally warm object radiating heat back, it will cool off until it reaches the temparature of the surrounding radiation, which is (I believe) quite close to absolute zero in darkness, and probably somewhat higher (but nothing like 0 Celcius) in direct sunlight.
Actually I always believed that astronauts sucked pastes of different colors out of plastic sachets, brown-orange was "beef with carrots", and brown-yellow was "turkey breast with potatoes".
If the often-nauseous smells coming from the gally aboard a plane are any indicator, the odour of heating food could be really nasty in space.
And what's this about "no freezer"? What exactly is outer space, if not cold? No airlocks aboard the ISS?
Sometimes I wish I'd finished 3rd grade so I could finish sentences correctly. Well, I meant "yes, better". Usually I flame my own posts when I find obvious errors in them. You beat me to it.
Back to the story, I think trains, planes, airports and terminals are about the only places where WiFi has a real future, where there is a captive market with notebooks and money to spend on keeping up to date with their latest Slashdot karma.
Slashdot Mirror
As general-purpose chips get smaller and cooler, there is less and less need to code a particular radio standard into the chips - it becomes possible to support multiple standards (Wifi, BlueTooth, GSM, etc.) Either switching between them, or even in parallel.
Spam is moving off open relays and onto pirated home computers. Spammers and virus writers together have already designed a distributed architecture in which they can send emails from hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of 'owned' personal computers.
The solution is to accept that email will become 99.9(n) junk, and that the challenge then becomes to extract the signal, not filter the noise.
One solution I foresee is "data clearing houses" which store-and-forward email, using a reputation management system to rank and score email (and other data, for the problem is general).
If there is one thing Sun could do to boost OOo that would be to buy the openoffice trademark so that the product can actually be promoted as "OpenOffice" and not "OpenOffice.org".
Backing up my media onto CDROM is taking too long and is too painful.
Now, I'd love to see a portable FireWire DVD rewriter for $100. Then we truly have the floppy for the new millenium.
why categorize the styles of thinking in terms of sexes...
Because it's simple and accurate and honest. Personality differences are not random or accidental, people are adapted to working in social teams of various kinds and the primary factor deciding what "role" someone will take is gender.
Since most teams are not built by psychologists, and most people are more complex than it is possible to pinpoint with a "category", profiling people with psychological tests prior to placing them in teams simply does not product great results. One good HR person (typically a woman)will do a much better job at selecting people than a panel of (typically male) psychologists.
I'm sorry for the generalizations, which I know annoy many people who believe that it's impolite to state such beliefs as if they were facts. I'm also sorry for spelling corollary wrongly, it's just one of those slippery words.
But for many people struggling to understand why they have problems with colleagues and bosses, simple and generally accurate explanations about why people behave in certain ways can be very helpful.
As for constructing teams, I have a very simple and generally accurate model that does not need psychologists. A team handling rich problems (covering technical, social, commercial, legal aspects) can be viewed as a family unit. Father and mother figures, sundry aunts and uncles, children of different ages. A clear hierarchy of knowledge, power, and responsibility. A clear sense of common purpose and common survival. A mix of capacities with everyone learning and everyone teaching. A division of labour so that the elephant is processed completely.
It is the only tax-deductible gaming system.
Seriously... in European high-tax countries this means that the state gives a discount of 40-50% on the item (plus VAT back!).
Even grown men like to play games now and then. And the N-Gage is surprisingly snappy, not like playing Java games on other GSMs, which is slow and boring.
MAME on N-Gage is a great addition, Nokia should try to license these arcade games since many of their potential clients (men aged 30+) are probably more familiar with some of them than with the "real" games actually available on the thing.
(And this is quite important, so please don't flame me for being politically incorrect or whatever)...
Men tend to solve problems in this way, defining approximate solutions, slicing the problem into pieces and delegating the smaller tasks, focussing relentlessly on technical details, until the elephant has been hunted, killed, skinned, chopped, carried back, eaten, and the fat melted down into candle wax.
Women tend to solve problems by exchanging points of view and information, and arriving at approximate solutions by averaging the solutions they have learned about.
The difference is crystal clear: technical problems cannot be solved by "averages", social problems cannot be solved by "analysis" (unless you're a genius for understanding people).
Of course there are many man who think like women, and vice versa. Gender roles are not iron-clad, they are poles to which people stick more or less.
Both types of problem-solving skill are necessary in solving real-world problems, which are as often social as physical. I.e. if it's a real elephant you're hunting, it's a man's job. If you're constructing a new house, you really need to have a lot of discussion first.
Well-organized teams therefore mix women and men not because they are equal and equivalent (we are not), but because we're complementary.
Except that errors are not truly random, they are generally structural, i.e. a particular kind of error will be repeated until enough customers complain and it's fixed. Businesses that structurally make errors in the customer's favour will simply be selected against. "Bzzzt! You're Bankrupt!!" Leaving the professionally incompetent in charge...
Since everyone is going to ask, the female approach is to exchange opinions about the elephant's skin texture, color, smell, etc. until the elephant falls asleep from boredom, upon which point the women can drape the elephant in colorful cloth and decorate it tastefully.
OK, all three female Slashdotters can flame me at once now. I'm ready...
All human problem solving (especially the male approach) tends to be a exercise in discovery, generally done by making an approximate solution, testing it against the reality of use, then refining this until it's "good". Different people have different skills in this regard, some are good at overall designs, some at details.
Assume a background of random errors. Now in usual circumstances, clients are able to fix mistakes quickly: if someone overcharges in a shop, or if you get shoddy goods or service, it's easy to complain and get your money back. As more and more sales get done online, as credit card statements get longer and more complex, as suppliers get futher and further away, we will see the less disciplined suppliers making more profit.
Example: the company I use for registering domain names made a mistake and charged for a domain name that was actually not available. Now, after some hours of trying to get service, I just let it fall. Hours' work to get $35 back is just not worthwhile. I'm not even annoyed with the company, it's my choice to let it slide.
So, over time, there will be an inflation in the greyness of transactions, ironically quite the reverse of what you'd expect from a more and more automated system.
Haha, this gives me a terrible idea. In decades from now, I guess we'll have shifted to a system whereby basic consumables are paid by taxes levied on our level of income. Much simpler and eventually the same result. Think RIAA taxes, but on the entire arena of consumer products.
OK, sorry, ruined your evening.
Does that make it FAT32 that is patented, not FAT16?
None of my cameras use long filenames either, all 8-character ones.
Does Linux infringe these patents when it reads/writes FAT(32) systems?
True, this is an unpickable lock, and my assertion fails.
However, it is impossible (as far as I can see) to actually implement this in an unbreakable manner. At some point, a cryptographic lock that is used by people depends on human interaction, and at that point, it can be picked, often in the most simple of ways:
"Hey, random dude, what's your passphrase?"
"Oh, I can't tell you that!"
"Go on, I'll give you a free pen"
"OK, it's MyDogIsSickAgain".
"Cool, thanks!"
"You won't use it, will you...?"
"Nah, of course not!"
Eliminate all computer users, you eliminate security problems.
You're right that it is a matter of definition and perspective. I will anyhow try to change your perspective... :)
There are many cases where complex problems are best understood by looking at people not so much as intelligent, proactive agents of change, but rather as dumb followers of rather simple rules:
- traffic jams
- crowds and riots
- stock markets
- economic systems
- political systems
- transport
etc. All hefty problems that only make sense when you ignore human proactivity and see people as role-playing components.
So why not the Internet and viruses?
You confuse cause and effect.
Regulation is not the basis of human civilization, it is an effect of it. Whenever people get together to try to cooperate on solving a common problem (and this is the basis for human society), they will define rules and an authority to enforce those rules.
Attempts to plan or regulate society without respecting the natural tendencies of people tend to create disasters. (Think of any "planned economy").
And yes, I believe that viruses will never cease to exist. It's been 20 years, and we have not seen one single effective solution to viruses, despite significant attempts at many levels.
Parasitical software is not a technical challenge like - e.g. VoIP or 3d animation. It represents a new class of problem: a self-replicating organic pest that uses human weakness to infest a technical infrastructure. So long as there are people, there will be viruses.
If you believe that this is simply because of poor security in Windows, bad email clients, etc., consider the very first wild virus, which ran on a Univac mainframe.
Parasitical code can run on any programmable system that is connected to others.
It is true that in an ecology we see replication and selection, which appear to be missing from the Internet "ecology".
However, look closer, you will see that these do actually take place. Software competes for space on hardware, for network bandwidth, and for user attention. Every CPU cycle and packet absorbed by a parasite means less for honest software. Every minute spent deleting spam is a minute less for honest work.
The key point is that the Internet is not just a million computers, it is a zillion computers plus a zillion people.
It's the people and their ways of using the Internet that turn it into a natural ecology.
Laws are not the answer: it will just create a criminal underground. You cannot legislate against human nature - look at the "war on drugs".
Tighter security is not the answer: every lock designed by a human can be picked by a human.
Open source is not the answer: any suitably complex system, transparent or not, will have security flaws, usually at the user interface point (think: weak passwords).
Security patches are not the answer: parasitical code can spread many times faster than any human reaction time.
I believe the answer is that computer systems will have to evolve something similar to an immune system, based on recognising friend-or-foe, and capable of regular pseudo-sexual exchange to scramble the locks against parasitical code that has adapted. Finally, it is likely that parasitical code will eventually be co-opted (just like the bacteria in our guts) into less harmful roles.
To put this into context: the wars in your intestine started with the very first life forms and have been one of the basic engines of change in evolution for 3.5 billion years (along with climate change). I believe we're only at the very first stages of this process with the Internet, but inevitably we will follow a similar route.
Anyhow, I will be long dead before this actually happens. It's just idle speculation.
And people are starting to understand it.
The Internet is not a planned system. It grows and connects like a natural system obeying laws such as Zipf's Law.
When it comes to security, the best model for what is going on in the Internet is also an organic model, namely the naturally occuring phenomenon of parasites, and the way these evolve in any real or simulated ecology.
I've gone into boring detail in my journal.
My opinion is that until we use natural models, and learn from them, we will not be able to stop the rising tide of parasitical code that infests the Internet.
"Monocultures" are a large part of the problem, and the Economist rightly argues that opening the Windows source code to third parties would create more variety and thus more security. But I think we have to go much further, towards systems that actively evolve to protect themselves against parasites.
I've been criticised for saying this by people who say "it's just a metaphor, it does not mean anything". This is untrue: it is a model, one that we can use to understand what the heck is going on: what are the dynamics behind the process, what are the weaknesses of today's infrastructure, and what are the best solutions.
Let me summarize this one more time: The internet behaves like an ecology, obeys the same laws as natural ecologies, falls prey to the same problems as natural ecologies, and if we want to create structures that survive these problems, we must understand things in terms of an ecology, not a planned design.
You misunderstood me: 5 mod points at some point in the future to boost whatever comments that person makes. I'm trading in mod points futures.
And no, multiple accounts won't help, Slashdot discriminates on the IP address.
An interesting comment but not really an answer.
I believe this discussion demands a serious (as in swallows and coconuts) analysis and conclusion. In full shade, in Earth orbit, how fast would a hot turkey (say 12 lb?) cool, and to what temperature. In full sunlight, what would the answer be?
First complete answer, even approximate, gets my next five mod points.
Yes, very clear.
I retract my argument based on the rubber tube demonstration.
Do you have any idea how fast heat radiation will cool an object in space? Stick a warm turkey in a plastic bag, chuck it out into space, how long will it take to freeze, and how cold will it get?
Or will the turkey remain nicely hot for ages? If space is an insulator, this is what we'd expect...
DNS is being used to exchange the Torrent files, which are small, not the data itself, which is large.
The Torrent files are indexes that tell your BitTorrent program where and how to get its data.
This sounds very useful, since what was missing from the BitTorrent network was a way of distributing cached Torrent files, and this is exactly what DNS provides.
Remains to be seen whether it actually works, but it's a neat concept.
Vacuums are not insulators.
I remember a great demonstration given in the Toronto Science Museum. A piece of rubber tubing placed into a bell jar. A vacuum pump extracting the air until it reached a near-vacuum. Pause... allow air back into the bell jar. Strike rubber with small hammer, rubber shatters and when touched, little pieces of it are _very_ cold indeed.
An object in a vacuum radiates its heat and unless there is an equally warm object radiating heat back, it will cool off until it reaches the temparature of the surrounding radiation, which is (I believe) quite close to absolute zero in darkness, and probably somewhat higher (but nothing like 0 Celcius) in direct sunlight.
Actually I always believed that astronauts sucked pastes of different colors out of plastic sachets, brown-orange was "beef with carrots", and brown-yellow was "turkey breast with potatoes".
If the often-nauseous smells coming from the gally aboard a plane are any indicator, the odour of heating food could be really nasty in space.
And what's this about "no freezer"? What exactly is outer space, if not cold? No airlocks aboard the ISS?
Sometimes I wish I'd finished 3rd grade so I could finish sentences correctly. Well, I meant "yes, better". Usually I flame my own posts when I find obvious errors in them. You beat me to it.
Back to the story, I think trains, planes, airports and terminals are about the only places where WiFi has a real future, where there is a captive market with notebooks and money to spend on keeping up to date with their latest Slashdot karma.