Have you ever seen this in action outside of a demo? I guess not.
This monstrosity not only sucks up far more drive space that you'd think reasonable, but saturates bandwidth with it's proprietary and inefficient transport mechanism. When you're mobile (presumably the environment this will be used) drive space and bandwidth are really precious commodities. Then there's the question of incorporating Groove content into the enterprise -- it can't be done. The proprietary format means no enterprise data can get to Groove and no data can be obtained from Groove except by manual file import/export. With Groove, you pretty much throw out every other system you have.
Function is far more important than style, and while Groove is stylish and pretty, it just won't do the job that Homeland Security needs it to do. The pat on the back should be reserved for those who actually improve Homeland Security rather than spend scarce taxpayer dollars on shiny baubles like this.
No, Groove isn't practical at all. It's a bloated mess of crapola that allows message boarding, email, document collaboration and whiteboarding that sucks up every last bit of bandwidth in a black box system that can't share data with any other system but Groove. Homeland Security and a few intel agencies think this is Really Neat (tm), but it's a solution in search for a problem.
First responders have radios. They work. Replacing those functional radios with laptops and forcing people to type (or draw low-res pictures) to each other is a complete waste. Data collection systems exist or are in development that understand that data requires analysis and evaluation. Groove treats everything as a free-for-all where nothing gets analysed, just thrown all over the place because it's the easiest thing to implement. Analysis requires thought, but throwing everything out there to inundate everyone with random garbage is just So Much Easier.
I can almost guarantee that this is the usual marketing bullshit from BEA Systems (British Aerospace contactor that inexplicably has an in with U.S. Homeland Security) who has been peddling this crap for a few years now. Too stupid to develop custom solutions, they expertly peddle off-the-shelf stuff at a huge markup to glassy-eyed bureaucrats who get wowed because some Tablet PC can share data with some other Tablet PC without using ethernet cables. And it runs XP Tablet Edition version 1.0! Neato! Wanna see it reboot again?
Some god-forsaken police or fire department leader is going to get saddled with yet another fraglie and tempermental piece of battery-dependent equipment that will serve only to force him to talk to higher-echelon bureaucrats instead of doing his job. I pray he'll have the sense to use it to extinguish a precise 12 inch by 18 inch portion of a conflagration where it will be far more functional than it's intended purpose.
I'd be cautious about MS anything, particularly MSSQL. Most of the features they add tend to involve supporting other MS proprietary standards that are usually rather insecure and vulnerable. Now as they struggle to kludge.NET into somewhere it doesn't belong, it's no surprise they're having a hard time making it happen.
As far as Oracle, I haven't seen anyone use it based on Oracle's technical merit. The only reason I ever hear to use 9i is that it has "market share". It's hard to manage, it's inconsistent, convoluted, and just plain difficult to work with. The limitations of PL/SQL, SQL*Plus and Server SQL are amazing -- there's no 'if' statement, and you can't write DDL with it.
One database per server. Index creation gets logged and can fail (hanging indefintely) if the log fills up. The 'create database' command doesn't yield a functional database. Oracle is an absolute pig with system resources -- worse than Microsoft. It's data replication is terrible. It's a real mess.
If you're looking for a linux-friendly database, look at Sybase ASE 12.5, the LinuxWorld Reader's Choice awardee. You'll find it less expensive than Oracle or MSSQL, also.
That enlisted man with a masters had a degree in mathematics and worked at Defense Mapping Agency for his "real job". He was really an invaluable resource since all the maps we used were made by guys like him, and he could define a lot of minutae that was particularlay useful for mortar fire direction computations. He was a whiz at field surveys, and that made him even more valuable to us. No need to call him useless, or simply a "transportation device for an M-16". He's a fine man, and I'm proud to have served with him.
Training in some academic discipline is not absolutely relevant to military service, and it's particularly irrelevant where leadership skills are concerned. Technical skills are fairly easily acquired anywhere, but real leadership ability is a real scarce commodity. That's what promotions are all about -- leadership training, and demonstrated leadership capabilities. I've spent a lot of time in the military with graduates of Georgetown, University of Maryland, UVA and VT, and while I'll readily admit they were pretty smart, they didn't have any greater predisposition for leadership than a high-school dropout. Sometimes quite a bit less, in fact.
I'm just telling you what I've seen and what I've learned, and I can tell you that a degree doesn't make you an officer, and an officer with a degree isn't automatically someone who will be a good officer. Some will be, and some won't. Some enlisted men for various reasons had degrees and had no interest in getting a comission. I was enlisted and never got offered a comission because of it my degree, but still managed to get promoted up to E-6.
In a military role, a BA/BS degree says you've had the good fortune and tenaciousness to get a degree, which is imporant and does count, but it's not the only ticket punch you need to get anywhere.
One of the requirements for getting a comission is that you have at least a Bachelor's, but having it in no way fully qualifies anyone to be an officer. My platoon of 11C's (indirect fire infantryman) had six bachelor's and two masters degrees, and only one officer. In the reserve component these days, you'll probably find about half of the NCO's have bachelors or masters degrees.
If you have a degree in computer science, you are no more worthy for promotion than if you had a degree in tiddlywinks. I've never seen an OER or NCOER for that matter that specified your major. Promotion is based on training, performance, time-in-grade, PT scores and a couple of other merit-based standards. They are not given out on the basis of "you're a computer science major and you don't suck."
You sound like the only time you've ever worn a uniform is for holloween.
I'd like to see a collection of teams provide their best effort, even if it falls a little short of the mark. The purpose of this is to inspire innovation, and to whatever degree it develops it's worth it. The teams that fail might have useful things to contribute, and the more exposure everyone gets, the bigger the pool of innovation we'll have to draw from.
Remember the first season of BattleBots? Few of them would probably make it to what today's challenges are, but they threw out the ideas that ultimately created the pool of successful design ideas. A lot of them were just silly, a few of them were decent but poorly implemented, and some were proven to be pretty good. That first generation of designs got copied, refined, and modified to become a next generation of systems that delivered some really cool shit, and had there been "qualifying rounds" then that limited the visibility of these ideas, I'd bet it would have been a longer development cycle. Instead, they went with the best they had and let things sort themselves out over the long haul in a really meritorious way. It worked.
I think it's a mistake to have qualifying rounds and to set a minimum mileage to win. Allow everyone you can, limit the course length but accept the one that goes the farthest, and make the goal achievable, with the best solution winning the prize. The goal is to foster creative solutions, and even a creative solution that accomplishes 50% right now is a winner if it's better than all the competition. Next year you might get 75%, and the next 100%, but the goal isn't the end point, it's the progress towards it.
This universal baseline of labor regulations and environmental laws is a complete myth, unless you somehow think that US law somehow is the international standard for commercial regulations. How about the EU? Are we somehow immoral because we don't have a 35 hour workweek, 6 weeks of paid vacation a year and their other variations from US law? If this argument is to hold any water, we should just re-write all US labor and environmental law to comply with EU law so we can improve our regulation to the level of this "baseline".
I doubt many of us would really be interested in this as the net effects would slash personal incomes by about 40% and double the unemployment rate. Every regulation diminishes the profitability that companies can achieve, and if you think impersonal corporations and "fat cats" are the only ones affected by this you're gravely mistaken. Those profits pay salaries and reward investors, and it's pretty well established that the only factor that actually positively impacts environmental quality is wealth.
When we push regulations here and abroad, we have to be conscious of the economic impact those regulations will have. In a bunch of cases you and I will think that the pain we'll have to collectively absorb is worth it, but it's silly to evaluate the merits of regulations without regard to the economic impacts. To try to foist these regulations on other countries so we don't feel the effects of our decisions as badly as we are right now seems morally repugnant. We made these choices, and we have to live with the consequences. Other nations aren't responsible for relieving any self-inflicted pain we may be suffering.
Right now unemployment is well below 6%, long considered the absolute lowest possible sustainable unemployment rate. Personal incomes are rising across the board, and the proportion of Americans who are investors has risen well above half from a tiny fraction as little as 30 years ago. We're experiencing economic success (even now) well beyond the wildest dreams of our parents and grandparents. I don't get all this dire talk about us becoming a nation of "burger flippers" and WalMart retail employees because of free trade when all the evidence seems to show that we're far better off than the generations that preceeded us.
Of course we can remedy this success by imposing additional regulations on our economy, making foreign producers even more efficient in comparison. Or we can start ramming regulatory "reform" down the throats of countries we trade with so they'll be less able to purchase the high-value goods we tend to produce in the U.S. We can accomplish a "level playing field" in the same way that communism did, by lowering the standard of living of everyone except a small selected elite to near poverty. Yeah, that's going to help us and our environment!
I'm surprised there isn't more comment on this supposed 10s of zillions of dollars that we can supposedly obtain by auctioning off spectrum allocated to HDTV. Given Reed's history in FCC auctions, I'd think there's be a lot more skepticism.
I was part of the team that built the FCC auctions system, back in the "C" block days of the mid-1990s where we would set a new world record in auction "revenues" every few months. This was the initial cell phone stuff that gave us Sprint and the other early wireless providers. We talked about balancing the federal budget solely with FCC auctions revenues for years to come, FCC economists painted rosy pictures about the tsunami of revenue providers would make with all the new services this spectrum would allow, and made these companies think it was worth pledging billions of dollars in order to get their hands on that spectrum. They were heady days.
After these record breaking auctions, where fledgling companies would have to make humongous down payments on their licenses out of their seed capital, these companies built out their networks and started marketing to consumers. The only problem was that they couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to cover their FCC obligations, and they started to default or disappear altogether. Then there was the little matter of the FCC yanking back licenses without following the rules about defaults and auctioning off the defaulted licenses only to have the courts order that spectrum be restored to the appelants after it had been transferred to new licensees.
In the same way that AOL put the screws to the internet revolution with it's "fsck 'em" mentality of squeezing every last dollar from everyone they could mug, the FCC mugged the telecom/wireless industry for everything it could possibly extract and left the industry in the same ruin that AOL helped to create in the dot-com implosion. But this was government, with much bigger weapons to employ in it's greedy neo-capitalist slash-and-burn strategy.
So Reed Hundt wants to do the same with spectrum pledged to the broadcast media to entice them to roll out HDTV, and then squeeze every last dollar possible out of whoever might be interested in using that spectrum. Who's going to finance this? How many investors are eager to finance businesses that have as their only substantial asset an FCC license?
Be very wary of Reed Hundt prognosticating a windfall of billions, and suspicious of any company that thinks it's going to make a good return on investor's money used to buy spectrum at astronomical prices. There was no free money then, and there's certainly not going to be any free money with this same failed idea in the future.
If president Bush uses his desk drawers as a library for storage of Republican National Committee documents, and someone manages to get their hands on them, I'm not going to raise a stink about it. I'd be asking why taxpayer-owned property was being put to that use.
Somehow over the years political parties have felt that they were entitled to use government property for party activities. From VP Gore using White House facilities to compaign, to party staffers using Capitol Hill IT infrastructure to manage their strategy documents, this feels like an unethical misappropriation of taxpayer resources for non-public purposes. NARAL, PETA and other organizations don't get taxpayer-funded IT resources, and the DNC and RNC and their affiliates shouldn't feel entitled to use them simply because their members happen to work in government facilities.
I really doubt that the Democratic Party couldn't afford their own servers that they could use for strategy papers and the like. They've got plenty of "soft" money they can't use on campaigns anymore, and have no need for me to provide them with IT resources through the taxes I pay. If they actually own the resources and they get hacked, they have a legitimate beef arising from their private property interest in the equipment. When they don't own the equipment and their use of it is unethical in my view, my reaction is "It serves them right."
Let's classify "a government document", because the term "government" document isn't really descriptive.
Who presumably authored these documents? Congressional staffers and congressional representatives, who are public employees. For what purpose? For the purpose of political strategy related to political parties, not official business of the U.S. Government. Where were these documents located? On computers owned by the government (public property) and provided to judiciary committee members and their staffs.
What expectation of privacy is appropriate regarding political party strategy memos stored on publicly-owned servers? I would say ZERO expectation. I would also argue that publicly owned computer resources are not an appropriate place to store and manage the documents of a political party. Should a political party store their documents on a government computer and then attempt to restrict access to that computer, I would consider that theft of government resources for nongovernmental purposes.
Political parties can buy their own damned computers, and run them over their own networks. I'm not willingly going to provide the democratic or republican party with IT resources out of the public treasury when they have millions of dollars of their own in the bank. If they OWN a system, then they can bitch when someone acceses documents on it without their permission. But when that system belongs to me and they store their crap on it, if they whine about "unauthorized access" they can go pound sand.
NSA and DOD don't have political party operatives running amok, suborning public property for exlusive use by party officials. So your analogy is a little off there.
NSA and DOD computers are nominally open subject to FOIA requests, which do restrict access according to laws passed by congress and signed by the executive. Nonclassified data is available to other government employees subject to other legislative restrictions, and classified data is available and routinely exchanged with other government employees subject to the rules governing classified data. It's still YOUR data, but your representatives have voted to restrict it based on YOUR expressed wishes.
Of note is the even more restrictive warning screen that pops up that tells users in no uncertain terms what the system may be used for and that there is absolutely, positively NO expectation or privacy. You put political party data on one of those, and you can just about bet the farm it'll be in the hands of some network security employee at some point.
"If I access your computer..." is a terrible analogy. This isn't a private computer. This is public property used to conduct the public's business.
Or have we decided as a country that we should provide political parties with information technology at public expense that the people have no right to access?
This isn't Democratic Party data or Republican Party data, this is MY data, because it's sitting on MY server that MY tax dollars paid for and it's maintained by MY tech who is paid by ME. If democratic party strategists what to keep their "confidential" data on MY hardware they better expect problems. It's open to the public, although probably through the mechanics of a FOIA request, but FOIA doesn't apply to government employees, which these staffers clearly are. So quitcherbitchin.
Every time you sign on a government(read PUBLIC)-owned computer, you get a nice little blurb about how all your data on that system is government-owned when you login. Everything you put on that system belongs to the public. If you want to whine because other government employees saw that data, you friggin agreed to it at login. Whiners about this are dumber than a box of hammers.
If democratic strategists want to keep data about their machinations confidential, they can put that data on their own systems that communicate on their own networks that they pay for themselves. Same goes for republican party operatives. I'm not interested in paying for computer systems with public funds that are considered the personal property of any political party. They have plenty of money of their own and don't need me to subsidize their IT infrastructure any more than I should be subsidizing their other party activities.
I'm pleased that this happened. Political parties are not entitled to exclusive use of public resources.
You'd need to port the AvantGo client to ARM/linux, not just develop stuff at the server side. I wish I had access to the client source code, but I don't. Maybe if things get slow I'll try to, but it'd be a longshot.
I don't see much embedded/mobile linux yet either, and that's largely a marketing thing. Few out there know there's a linux handheld. Perhaps that will change. At least there's the chance to deploy mobile java apps on Zaurus, and there's a big play there that I've actually pitched a couple of times.
Qtopia isn't something I've dabbled with, but I imagine it's not a whole lot different than the boatload of other tools I've played with, except I'll bet it works better, is easier to debug, and has a solid emulator.
The certification covers a specific install, and depending on the circumstances under which a certification is granted, you might have a lot of flexibility, or very little. Back in the early days of Common Criteria, Windows was certified under the provision of no floopy drive or network card, but somehow waivers were granted, exceptions allowed and the like.
Now I'm not all that involved in this, but my take is that EAL3 will make a difference in being able to get your foot in the door. Once it's in, it's a minor bureaucratic hassle to modify the configuration, but if that modification is necessary in order to perform some government function, a waiver isn't that hard to get.
I have a fair amount of experience with Sybase SQL Anywhere in DOD installations, which has certifications that require a certain configuration. I've never encountered that configuration at any DOD installation, I've seen versions used that are more recent than the certification specifies, and I've never seen anyone question these departures. The variances make sense though, and I think they're good decisions, but for a real cross-the-t-and-dot-the-i type, this would probably be a major no-no. The only impact I've ever actually encountered is in bidding and sales efforts.
If this is such a huge problem for ISPs, why don't they run spamassasin on their outgoing SMTP traffic, block all outgoing spam and entirely avoid the possibility that a BL is going to list them? If an ISP was responsible about what outgoing traffic was being sent through their servers, this wouldn't be a problem.
I don't get it. Wouldn't it be easier and less of a hassle for an ISP to catch outgoing spam internally and boot offenders than deal with hundreds of complaints flooding the abuse/postmaster address?
If I could get my hands on the AvantGo client source code, I'd get a port for the Zaurus environment up as fast as possible, but alas, I'm not in product engineering. If enough people out there complain about it, Waterloo might add it though.
EAL is certainly not the ultimate determination of a system's actual security, but right now it's the U.S. Government's (and a few other governments) standard. That standard really doesn't mean much outside of contracting with the feds. As far as indicating to non-government entities whether a product is secure or not, it's slightly better than worthless.
My company does a lot of professional services with DOD and some other agencies, and it's been a huge pain for me that linux wasn't certified under Common Criteria. If I set up something to demo to DOD that was running on a linux box, because it's easier and works better, it was immediately shot down because it didn't meet their standards. End of discussion. Once you get the certification you can play ball, but until that time you can't do squat. So now that we are in the game, you better believe the introduction of linux in the federal government is going to be a flood. I know of a couple of civillian agencies ready to take the plunge (more often than not replacing Solaris with linux, but some dumping of MS as well), and some DOD R&D has been with linux but not much production stuff is in place -- yet. The three letter agencies are interested, and EAL3 is going to make a big difference there.
SuSE probably hasn't "increased" security to make this happen at all, but simply paid the money and took the time to have one of the evaluating companies perform the certification tests. It described the installation method, the packages to be installed and the way the system would be managed, and the evaluating company ran the battery of tests for level 3 and certified that it passed those tests. Heck, given enough time and money SLES will comply with level 5, and the only thing keeping this from happening is the amount of investment SuSE, Novell and IBM are willing to make for this.
EAL really says nothing about the security of linux based systems, but is says a ton about how receptive governments will be to employing it. This is indeed good news.
We can fight back against spammers with a growing number of tools that are becoming increasingly effective. Unsolicited Commando (http://www.astrobastards.net/uc) and Web Form Flooder (http://formflood.sourceforge.net) are a couple that allow you to make the databases that spammers collect less valuable to them.
It's the profit motive of the spammers that needs to be attacked, and additional laws are unlikely to help a lot. The more we make their businesses unprofitable, the less we might see of them.
I do handheld development using Sybase and AvantGo products, and have been forced to deal with all sorts of crappy systems. First I had to deal with CodeWarrior and PalmOS, perhaps the worst IDE ever created, that compiled the crappiest bytecode imaginable, and then loaded it onto PalmOS 3.x, which meant that you had to have the old paperclip handy to hard reset the device hourly. POSE (the emulator) worked pretty well, though, and we got through some projects that were fairly stable in production after fighting a lot during development.
Then I got confronted with WinCE/PocketPC. I never imagined it would get worse. The emulator won't run. Period. Been that way for over a year, no matter what we did. The IDE is a bit better, but whatever gets compiled seems to have memory leaks. Things slowly degrade and destabilize rather than the old PalmOS "kablooie" response, and I'm not sure that's a lot better, since you're forced to hard-reset preemptively since you never know if it's your code or some memory management problem making things act weird. The tools suck, and vary by hardware vendor, so it's a new adventure with every device to figure out why the 802.11 isn't working. iPAQ, Dell, Symbol, Intermec -- everything is different outside of the standard apps, and it often behaves differently in a networked environment.
So we got a pre-market Fujitsu tablet PC to work with, and I hoped that perhaps this was the deliverance I had hoped for. Nope, it was worse -- far worse. We have to pull the battery every 15 minutes because WinXP Tablet PC edition is a total piece of crap that locks up like clockwork. Can't get the pointer to match where the pen is hitting the screen, which is mildly annoying, and setting up network stuff is a royal pain in the arse with about nil control over network configuration.
So I spent my money on a Sharp Zaurus for my own mobile device and have a CF 802.11 card for it with an SD memory slot still available. Works like a charm. Haven't rebooted in over four months. Compile with gcc, java, can write Qt apps for it, and have wlan-ng tools available for network configuration. Can replace the entire stack on the thing with OpenZaurus should I ever feel the need, but since everything is open source and works well, haven't bothered with it.
Palm has gotten a lot better, but still suffers from it's architectural design flaws. WinCE is crap, which should be obvious when they keep changing the name and the PocketPC 2003 is labeled internally as WinCE 4.2 (more confusion, less accountability). Tablet Edition is everything an MS version 1.0 is expected to be. Linux is still good-old-linux, on any device, as capable, solid and easy to work with as on a desktop.
I just wish it was better marketed, so I wouldn't have to put up with this crappy MS garbage.
If you are concerned about privacy, run privoxy or any of the other proxy apps. Tell iptables to redirect all port 80 traffic to the input port for privoxy, and you won't have to configure a thing past that. All your browsers, and anything else outgoing on port 80 is handled.
Adblocks are only the beginning. Deanimate GIFs, block banners, rewrite HTML/JS on the fly, replace HTTP header entries, and control by host if you want. There's a lot you can do.
I'd never depend on a browser to do security work in linux, as there are better specialized tools for that.
Now how this company is supposed to get through privoxy, squid and iptables, and start a process on my linux box is beyond me. I can't help but wonder if this stupid scheme is dependent on some "feature" available only in MSIE and/or WinXP.
Nothing will start a mass migration towards an open-source OS/browser as an enraging stunt like this if that's the case. Go ahead and exploit every security hole/feature in Windows, I don't care. Make MSIE/Windows the platform of self-selected victims more than it is now. In the end users will choose between OSX, Linux or BSD, and the internet will be far better for it.
Perhaps I'll stop getting Swen.W32 every single day then. I'm so terribly tired of suffering the effects of users choosing Windows.
PDA (palm or PPC? WiFi, CF, SD...?)
How about Sharp Zaurus? Runs linux (and has an alternate open OS), has CF and SD slots. I have one and am thrilled with it.
PPC on the other hand (I develop for mobile devices and have to play with all of them) is fragile, you have little control over the system, and well, it generally sucks. Palm has gotten better, but you still have to keep a paper clip handy to reset the darned thing fairly often.
My Zaurus has been rebooted ONCE in the six months I've owned it. Nice.
Most countries seem to have a charter/constitution that "allows" rights to be exercized by citizens, but those fortunate enough to be citizens of the U.S. have a Constitution that guarantees rights of the citizenry and limits powers of the government.
This might seem like a minor distinction to many, but it's the difference between saying "Nothing in the Constution gives you the right to do X" and "Nothing in the Constitution grants the federal government the power to restrict X". Those are really, really major differences. Living under one model is vastly different than the other.
If we see government as the grantor of our rights, we have to go begging to the federal government every time we want to do something new and hope they'll take pity on us. If we see the Constitution as a contract between government and citizens where citizens grant a specific number of powers to government, no begging is required when something new comes up that government hasn't already restricted.
Specific to the/. crowd, it might be relevant that the federal government has no legal power to control personal communications, and that would apply to the internet, regardless of MIME type. The feds may think they have the power to impose restrictions, which they probably can exercize, but they have no legal authority to exercize a power like that. And they can't prevent you from becoming an ISP with a more reasonable (to you) TOS and running ISP's with silly TOS requirements out of business.
We are the collective of the people, or "We, the People", who have the rights (government only has powers), who can make this internet anything we want it to be, by becoming a part of it's infrastructure or paying to be members of this virtual community. Who's stopping you, unless you're a "subject" or citizen of a country where you've been fooled into believing that the source of your rights is some government?
Slashdot Mirror
This monstrosity not only sucks up far more drive space that you'd think reasonable, but saturates bandwidth with it's proprietary and inefficient transport mechanism. When you're mobile (presumably the environment this will be used) drive space and bandwidth are really precious commodities. Then there's the question of incorporating Groove content into the enterprise -- it can't be done. The proprietary format means no enterprise data can get to Groove and no data can be obtained from Groove except by manual file import/export. With Groove, you pretty much throw out every other system you have.
Function is far more important than style, and while Groove is stylish and pretty, it just won't do the job that Homeland Security needs it to do. The pat on the back should be reserved for those who actually improve Homeland Security rather than spend scarce taxpayer dollars on shiny baubles like this.
First responders have radios. They work. Replacing those functional radios with laptops and forcing people to type (or draw low-res pictures) to each other is a complete waste. Data collection systems exist or are in development that understand that data requires analysis and evaluation. Groove treats everything as a free-for-all where nothing gets analysed, just thrown all over the place because it's the easiest thing to implement. Analysis requires thought, but throwing everything out there to inundate everyone with random garbage is just So Much Easier.
I can almost guarantee that this is the usual marketing bullshit from BEA Systems (British Aerospace contactor that inexplicably has an in with U.S. Homeland Security) who has been peddling this crap for a few years now. Too stupid to develop custom solutions, they expertly peddle off-the-shelf stuff at a huge markup to glassy-eyed bureaucrats who get wowed because some Tablet PC can share data with some other Tablet PC without using ethernet cables. And it runs XP Tablet Edition version 1.0! Neato! Wanna see it reboot again?
Some god-forsaken police or fire department leader is going to get saddled with yet another fraglie and tempermental piece of battery-dependent equipment that will serve only to force him to talk to higher-echelon bureaucrats instead of doing his job. I pray he'll have the sense to use it to extinguish a precise 12 inch by 18 inch portion of a conflagration where it will be far more functional than it's intended purpose.
As far as Oracle, I haven't seen anyone use it based on Oracle's technical merit. The only reason I ever hear to use 9i is that it has "market share". It's hard to manage, it's inconsistent, convoluted, and just plain difficult to work with. The limitations of PL/SQL, SQL*Plus and Server SQL are amazing -- there's no 'if' statement, and you can't write DDL with it.
One database per server. Index creation gets logged and can fail (hanging indefintely) if the log fills up. The 'create database' command doesn't yield a functional database. Oracle is an absolute pig with system resources -- worse than Microsoft. It's data replication is terrible. It's a real mess.
If you're looking for a linux-friendly database, look at Sybase ASE 12.5, the LinuxWorld Reader's Choice awardee. You'll find it less expensive than Oracle or MSSQL, also.
Training in some academic discipline is not absolutely relevant to military service, and it's particularly irrelevant where leadership skills are concerned. Technical skills are fairly easily acquired anywhere, but real leadership ability is a real scarce commodity. That's what promotions are all about -- leadership training, and demonstrated leadership capabilities. I've spent a lot of time in the military with graduates of Georgetown, University of Maryland, UVA and VT, and while I'll readily admit they were pretty smart, they didn't have any greater predisposition for leadership than a high-school dropout. Sometimes quite a bit less, in fact.
I'm just telling you what I've seen and what I've learned, and I can tell you that a degree doesn't make you an officer, and an officer with a degree isn't automatically someone who will be a good officer. Some will be, and some won't. Some enlisted men for various reasons had degrees and had no interest in getting a comission. I was enlisted and never got offered a comission because of it my degree, but still managed to get promoted up to E-6.
In a military role, a BA/BS degree says you've had the good fortune and tenaciousness to get a degree, which is imporant and does count, but it's not the only ticket punch you need to get anywhere.
One of the requirements for getting a comission is that you have at least a Bachelor's, but having it in no way fully qualifies anyone to be an officer. My platoon of 11C's (indirect fire infantryman) had six bachelor's and two masters degrees, and only one officer. In the reserve component these days, you'll probably find about half of the NCO's have bachelors or masters degrees.
If you have a degree in computer science, you are no more worthy for promotion than if you had a degree in tiddlywinks. I've never seen an OER or NCOER for that matter that specified your major. Promotion is based on training, performance, time-in-grade, PT scores and a couple of other merit-based standards. They are not given out on the basis of "you're a computer science major and you don't suck."
You sound like the only time you've ever worn a uniform is for holloween.
Remember the first season of BattleBots? Few of them would probably make it to what today's challenges are, but they threw out the ideas that ultimately created the pool of successful design ideas. A lot of them were just silly, a few of them were decent but poorly implemented, and some were proven to be pretty good. That first generation of designs got copied, refined, and modified to become a next generation of systems that delivered some really cool shit, and had there been "qualifying rounds" then that limited the visibility of these ideas, I'd bet it would have been a longer development cycle. Instead, they went with the best they had and let things sort themselves out over the long haul in a really meritorious way. It worked.
I think it's a mistake to have qualifying rounds and to set a minimum mileage to win. Allow everyone you can, limit the course length but accept the one that goes the farthest, and make the goal achievable, with the best solution winning the prize. The goal is to foster creative solutions, and even a creative solution that accomplishes 50% right now is a winner if it's better than all the competition. Next year you might get 75%, and the next 100%, but the goal isn't the end point, it's the progress towards it.
I doubt many of us would really be interested in this as the net effects would slash personal incomes by about 40% and double the unemployment rate. Every regulation diminishes the profitability that companies can achieve, and if you think impersonal corporations and "fat cats" are the only ones affected by this you're gravely mistaken. Those profits pay salaries and reward investors, and it's pretty well established that the only factor that actually positively impacts environmental quality is wealth.
When we push regulations here and abroad, we have to be conscious of the economic impact those regulations will have. In a bunch of cases you and I will think that the pain we'll have to collectively absorb is worth it, but it's silly to evaluate the merits of regulations without regard to the economic impacts. To try to foist these regulations on other countries so we don't feel the effects of our decisions as badly as we are right now seems morally repugnant. We made these choices, and we have to live with the consequences. Other nations aren't responsible for relieving any self-inflicted pain we may be suffering.
Right now unemployment is well below 6%, long considered the absolute lowest possible sustainable unemployment rate. Personal incomes are rising across the board, and the proportion of Americans who are investors has risen well above half from a tiny fraction as little as 30 years ago. We're experiencing economic success (even now) well beyond the wildest dreams of our parents and grandparents. I don't get all this dire talk about us becoming a nation of "burger flippers" and WalMart retail employees because of free trade when all the evidence seems to show that we're far better off than the generations that preceeded us.
Of course we can remedy this success by imposing additional regulations on our economy, making foreign producers even more efficient in comparison. Or we can start ramming regulatory "reform" down the throats of countries we trade with so they'll be less able to purchase the high-value goods we tend to produce in the U.S. We can accomplish a "level playing field" in the same way that communism did, by lowering the standard of living of everyone except a small selected elite to near poverty. Yeah, that's going to help us and our environment!
Sheesh.
I was part of the team that built the FCC auctions system, back in the "C" block days of the mid-1990s where we would set a new world record in auction "revenues" every few months. This was the initial cell phone stuff that gave us Sprint and the other early wireless providers. We talked about balancing the federal budget solely with FCC auctions revenues for years to come, FCC economists painted rosy pictures about the tsunami of revenue providers would make with all the new services this spectrum would allow, and made these companies think it was worth pledging billions of dollars in order to get their hands on that spectrum. They were heady days.
After these record breaking auctions, where fledgling companies would have to make humongous down payments on their licenses out of their seed capital, these companies built out their networks and started marketing to consumers. The only problem was that they couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to cover their FCC obligations, and they started to default or disappear altogether. Then there was the little matter of the FCC yanking back licenses without following the rules about defaults and auctioning off the defaulted licenses only to have the courts order that spectrum be restored to the appelants after it had been transferred to new licensees.
In the same way that AOL put the screws to the internet revolution with it's "fsck 'em" mentality of squeezing every last dollar from everyone they could mug, the FCC mugged the telecom/wireless industry for everything it could possibly extract and left the industry in the same ruin that AOL helped to create in the dot-com implosion. But this was government, with much bigger weapons to employ in it's greedy neo-capitalist slash-and-burn strategy.
So Reed Hundt wants to do the same with spectrum pledged to the broadcast media to entice them to roll out HDTV, and then squeeze every last dollar possible out of whoever might be interested in using that spectrum. Who's going to finance this? How many investors are eager to finance businesses that have as their only substantial asset an FCC license?
Be very wary of Reed Hundt prognosticating a windfall of billions, and suspicious of any company that thinks it's going to make a good return on investor's money used to buy spectrum at astronomical prices. There was no free money then, and there's certainly not going to be any free money with this same failed idea in the future.
You're confusing NPF with Journalism. An easy enough mistake to make when they bandy about the term "news" so often...
Somehow over the years political parties have felt that they were entitled to use government property for party activities. From VP Gore using White House facilities to compaign, to party staffers using Capitol Hill IT infrastructure to manage their strategy documents, this feels like an unethical misappropriation of taxpayer resources for non-public purposes. NARAL, PETA and other organizations don't get taxpayer-funded IT resources, and the DNC and RNC and their affiliates shouldn't feel entitled to use them simply because their members happen to work in government facilities.
I really doubt that the Democratic Party couldn't afford their own servers that they could use for strategy papers and the like. They've got plenty of "soft" money they can't use on campaigns anymore, and have no need for me to provide them with IT resources through the taxes I pay. If they actually own the resources and they get hacked, they have a legitimate beef arising from their private property interest in the equipment. When they don't own the equipment and their use of it is unethical in my view, my reaction is "It serves them right."
Who presumably authored these documents? Congressional staffers and congressional representatives, who are public employees. For what purpose? For the purpose of political strategy related to political parties, not official business of the U.S. Government. Where were these documents located? On computers owned by the government (public property) and provided to judiciary committee members and their staffs.
What expectation of privacy is appropriate regarding political party strategy memos stored on publicly-owned servers? I would say ZERO expectation. I would also argue that publicly owned computer resources are not an appropriate place to store and manage the documents of a political party. Should a political party store their documents on a government computer and then attempt to restrict access to that computer, I would consider that theft of government resources for nongovernmental purposes.
Political parties can buy their own damned computers, and run them over their own networks. I'm not willingly going to provide the democratic or republican party with IT resources out of the public treasury when they have millions of dollars of their own in the bank. If they OWN a system, then they can bitch when someone acceses documents on it without their permission. But when that system belongs to me and they store their crap on it, if they whine about "unauthorized access" they can go pound sand.
Serves them right.
NSA and DOD computers are nominally open subject to FOIA requests, which do restrict access according to laws passed by congress and signed by the executive. Nonclassified data is available to other government employees subject to other legislative restrictions, and classified data is available and routinely exchanged with other government employees subject to the rules governing classified data. It's still YOUR data, but your representatives have voted to restrict it based on YOUR expressed wishes.
Of note is the even more restrictive warning screen that pops up that tells users in no uncertain terms what the system may be used for and that there is absolutely, positively NO expectation or privacy. You put political party data on one of those, and you can just about bet the farm it'll be in the hands of some network security employee at some point.
Or have we decided as a country that we should provide political parties with information technology at public expense that the people have no right to access?
This isn't Democratic Party data or Republican Party data, this is MY data, because it's sitting on MY server that MY tax dollars paid for and it's maintained by MY tech who is paid by ME. If democratic party strategists what to keep their "confidential" data on MY hardware they better expect problems. It's open to the public, although probably through the mechanics of a FOIA request, but FOIA doesn't apply to government employees, which these staffers clearly are. So quitcherbitchin.
Every time you sign on a government(read PUBLIC)-owned computer, you get a nice little blurb about how all your data on that system is government-owned when you login. Everything you put on that system belongs to the public. If you want to whine because other government employees saw that data, you friggin agreed to it at login. Whiners about this are dumber than a box of hammers.
If democratic strategists want to keep data about their machinations confidential, they can put that data on their own systems that communicate on their own networks that they pay for themselves. Same goes for republican party operatives. I'm not interested in paying for computer systems with public funds that are considered the personal property of any political party. They have plenty of money of their own and don't need me to subsidize their IT infrastructure any more than I should be subsidizing their other party activities.
I'm pleased that this happened. Political parties are not entitled to exclusive use of public resources.
I don't see much embedded/mobile linux yet either, and that's largely a marketing thing. Few out there know there's a linux handheld. Perhaps that will change. At least there's the chance to deploy mobile java apps on Zaurus, and there's a big play there that I've actually pitched a couple of times.
Qtopia isn't something I've dabbled with, but I imagine it's not a whole lot different than the boatload of other tools I've played with, except I'll bet it works better, is easier to debug, and has a solid emulator.
Now I'm not all that involved in this, but my take is that EAL3 will make a difference in being able to get your foot in the door. Once it's in, it's a minor bureaucratic hassle to modify the configuration, but if that modification is necessary in order to perform some government function, a waiver isn't that hard to get.
I have a fair amount of experience with Sybase SQL Anywhere in DOD installations, which has certifications that require a certain configuration. I've never encountered that configuration at any DOD installation, I've seen versions used that are more recent than the certification specifies, and I've never seen anyone question these departures. The variances make sense though, and I think they're good decisions, but for a real cross-the-t-and-dot-the-i type, this would probably be a major no-no. The only impact I've ever actually encountered is in bidding and sales efforts.
I don't get it. Wouldn't it be easier and less of a hassle for an ISP to catch outgoing spam internally and boot offenders than deal with hundreds of complaints flooding the abuse/postmaster address?
If I could get my hands on the AvantGo client source code, I'd get a port for the Zaurus environment up as fast as possible, but alas, I'm not in product engineering. If enough people out there complain about it, Waterloo might add it though.
My company does a lot of professional services with DOD and some other agencies, and it's been a huge pain for me that linux wasn't certified under Common Criteria. If I set up something to demo to DOD that was running on a linux box, because it's easier and works better, it was immediately shot down because it didn't meet their standards. End of discussion. Once you get the certification you can play ball, but until that time you can't do squat. So now that we are in the game, you better believe the introduction of linux in the federal government is going to be a flood. I know of a couple of civillian agencies ready to take the plunge (more often than not replacing Solaris with linux, but some dumping of MS as well), and some DOD R&D has been with linux but not much production stuff is in place -- yet. The three letter agencies are interested, and EAL3 is going to make a big difference there.
SuSE probably hasn't "increased" security to make this happen at all, but simply paid the money and took the time to have one of the evaluating companies perform the certification tests. It described the installation method, the packages to be installed and the way the system would be managed, and the evaluating company ran the battery of tests for level 3 and certified that it passed those tests. Heck, given enough time and money SLES will comply with level 5, and the only thing keeping this from happening is the amount of investment SuSE, Novell and IBM are willing to make for this.
EAL really says nothing about the security of linux based systems, but is says a ton about how receptive governments will be to employing it. This is indeed good news.
It's the profit motive of the spammers that needs to be attacked, and additional laws are unlikely to help a lot. The more we make their businesses unprofitable, the less we might see of them.
Then I got confronted with WinCE/PocketPC. I never imagined it would get worse. The emulator won't run. Period. Been that way for over a year, no matter what we did. The IDE is a bit better, but whatever gets compiled seems to have memory leaks. Things slowly degrade and destabilize rather than the old PalmOS "kablooie" response, and I'm not sure that's a lot better, since you're forced to hard-reset preemptively since you never know if it's your code or some memory management problem making things act weird. The tools suck, and vary by hardware vendor, so it's a new adventure with every device to figure out why the 802.11 isn't working. iPAQ, Dell, Symbol, Intermec -- everything is different outside of the standard apps, and it often behaves differently in a networked environment.
So we got a pre-market Fujitsu tablet PC to work with, and I hoped that perhaps this was the deliverance I had hoped for. Nope, it was worse -- far worse. We have to pull the battery every 15 minutes because WinXP Tablet PC edition is a total piece of crap that locks up like clockwork. Can't get the pointer to match where the pen is hitting the screen, which is mildly annoying, and setting up network stuff is a royal pain in the arse with about nil control over network configuration.
So I spent my money on a Sharp Zaurus for my own mobile device and have a CF 802.11 card for it with an SD memory slot still available. Works like a charm. Haven't rebooted in over four months. Compile with gcc, java, can write Qt apps for it, and have wlan-ng tools available for network configuration. Can replace the entire stack on the thing with OpenZaurus should I ever feel the need, but since everything is open source and works well, haven't bothered with it.
Palm has gotten a lot better, but still suffers from it's architectural design flaws. WinCE is crap, which should be obvious when they keep changing the name and the PocketPC 2003 is labeled internally as WinCE 4.2 (more confusion, less accountability). Tablet Edition is everything an MS version 1.0 is expected to be. Linux is still good-old-linux, on any device, as capable, solid and easy to work with as on a desktop.
I just wish it was better marketed, so I wouldn't have to put up with this crappy MS garbage.
Adblocks are only the beginning. Deanimate GIFs, block banners, rewrite HTML/JS on the fly, replace HTTP header entries, and control by host if you want. There's a lot you can do.
I'd never depend on a browser to do security work in linux, as there are better specialized tools for that.
Nothing will start a mass migration towards an open-source OS/browser as an enraging stunt like this if that's the case. Go ahead and exploit every security hole/feature in Windows, I don't care. Make MSIE/Windows the platform of self-selected victims more than it is now. In the end users will choose between OSX, Linux or BSD, and the internet will be far better for it.
Perhaps I'll stop getting Swen.W32 every single day then. I'm so terribly tired of suffering the effects of users choosing Windows.
PDA (palm or PPC? WiFi, CF, SD...?) How about Sharp Zaurus? Runs linux (and has an alternate open OS), has CF and SD slots. I have one and am thrilled with it. PPC on the other hand (I develop for mobile devices and have to play with all of them) is fragile, you have little control over the system, and well, it generally sucks. Palm has gotten better, but you still have to keep a paper clip handy to reset the darned thing fairly often. My Zaurus has been rebooted ONCE in the six months I've owned it. Nice.
This might seem like a minor distinction to many, but it's the difference between saying "Nothing in the Constution gives you the right to do X" and "Nothing in the Constitution grants the federal government the power to restrict X". Those are really, really major differences. Living under one model is vastly different than the other.
If we see government as the grantor of our rights, we have to go begging to the federal government every time we want to do something new and hope they'll take pity on us. If we see the Constitution as a contract between government and citizens where citizens grant a specific number of powers to government, no begging is required when something new comes up that government hasn't already restricted.
Specific to the /. crowd, it might be relevant that the federal government has no legal power to control personal communications, and that would apply to the internet, regardless of MIME type. The feds may think they have the power to impose restrictions, which they probably can exercize, but they have no legal authority to exercize a power like that. And they can't prevent you from becoming an ISP with a more reasonable (to you) TOS and running ISP's with silly TOS requirements out of business.
We are the collective of the people, or "We, the People", who have the rights (government only has powers), who can make this internet anything we want it to be, by becoming a part of it's infrastructure or paying to be members of this virtual community. Who's stopping you, unless you're a "subject" or citizen of a country where you've been fooled into believing that the source of your rights is some government?