I once heard that most car/train accidents involve local people - who have grown accustomed to the trains and the crossings and take chances that someone unfamiliar with the crossing wouldn't take.
I suppose the same could be said of pedestrians using the tracks as a convenient path. I used train tracks in the winter as a kid as a route home after delivering newspapers. (The rails provided a snow free path that made the 1 1/2 mile trek back home significantly easier. I only had to jump off the tracks into the snow filled ditch once a month or so. More frequently, I only had to jump to the other set of tracks going the other direction.)
Suppose that different actions of a car have different sound effects - turning right, left, or going straight. Forwards or backwards. Accelerating or braking. Then suppose that for IP/copyright reasons, different car manufacturers have different sounds - perhaps even down to the model.
SOMEONE will take a bunch of these cars in a huge parking lot and make performance art out of it.
The CNN article is just trolling, designed to create churn for their website and show advertisers that CNN is still relevant.
Sure, a move to tablet IT and personal/handheld IT presents a risk to Microsoft - and Dell, HP and Lenovo - and even Apple to some extent. It also presents a risk to software developers due to the always-on nature of the devices. Windows users have gotten used to frequent (daily or more) reboots, and this has more to do with the erratic quality of various third party software. Because MS doesn't control the hardware as tightly as Apple does, it isn't able to integrate device drivers as well. Third party software will need to cope better with applications that run for weeks or months, rather than just hours.
I've got a Sony-Ericsson C905a feature-phone. I left it on for 6 or 8 months (charging it regularily, of course) - and it started malfunctioning one day. Help desk said to reboot it - and that was what it needed.
I don't think that software for any device capable of downloading applications will ever be ready do do without rebooting.
A colony of bacteria is not like a group of people
on
Gambling On Bacteria
·
· Score: 1
I would think that a colony of bacteria are all (genetically) identical - where as a group of people are not.
Behavior that enhances the survival of the gene is what is going to be demonstrated - not necessarily survival of an individual.
A colony of bacteria is more akin to an individual than it is to a group of people, which makes the "sporulating" behavior described more akin to a person moving their hand away from a hot flame - while still staying close enough to a fire to keep warm.
The article demonstrates a great deal of ignorance of genetic selection (Darwinism), although I don't know whether to blame the journalist or the Professor - or the translation.
I am not a customer of the advertisers. I (and my family) are a resource or commodity they don't have to pay for but are selling to other people. They only care about me insofar as my shrieks of pain at being abused don't cause the advertising customers (clients) to stop buying advertising from them, or the web hosting sites from selling space to them.
There are so many advertising agencies - all trying to harvest money from their clients - all chasing each other to the bottom of the gutter.
Given the lack of enforceable, public standards involving advertising - and given the innate nature of the relationships and accountability mechanisms involved, I don't see why I shouldn't block every advertising agency I encounter, as aggressively as I can. I also don't see this as being an unreasonable attitude. If anything, it strikes me as perfectly sane, like closing my windows before it rains, washing and bathing, and locking the doors to my house when I'm not home. Good, sane, common sense.
The cost to me of an advertising failure is enormous. Lost access to the web. Possible lost acccess to the internet for employment related uses. Huge chunks of time cleaning up some mess. The risk of Identity theft, etc.. There is even a cost to me of advertising success - slower access to web pages I do want to visit, and cluttered web pages too. But I don't see a benefit anymore. I don't even want to listen to them justify their existence anymore. Give me back my junk postal mail and local newspaper weighed down with advertising flyers. I feel much safer with them - and if paranoia strikes me there, I can handle that stuff with rubber gloves when dispossing of the dross - and only once a day at that.
Back in the misty reaches of the past (Internet Time), I could be convinced to tolerate advertising on the web as part of a mechanism to pay for the free content that I was interested in. Back in those misty times, I usually used Netscape on a Solaris box. I had a Windows/9x machine at home - but hardly used it for the Web because with a new family, I was too tired at night.
These days, for my home LAN, I agressively block huge chunks of the internet - with FreeBSD "ipfw" tables and by running my own DNS relay that blocks many domains - hphishing, advertising, hosting, and ISP (by making the authority a IP address in a range that my FreeBSD router returns a "network unreachable" for.) Firefox has AdBlock+ and NoScript. Safari is used rarely. Chrome only for 2 sites - all to keep the cookies segregated.
At home, web pages look like swiss cheese. Sometimes, I white-list a site - but not often. But I'm (mostly) satisfied. I'd like to block even more.
There's no documentation in the article of either the results or the methodology - other than a vague description of a custom 1000 thread engine that was used for the probing.
There is mention of the number of domain names and SSL Certs issued - and some documentation of probing of ports 80 and 443, but no documentation of how many ports at 443 were scanned.
Bad article, not providing enough information to verify it's conclusions.
Looking at some of the other art projects on that website, I doubt very much that the greenery on the vehicle is live. It looks very much like branches "harvested" (reclaimed?) from artificial christmas trees.
And, if it is solar powered, the panels that charge the batteries aren't located on the vehicle.
A great art project, but without some more technical documentation, not very satisfying to my inner geek.
As for a technology demonstration - I can't really say. It's more than I could afford to do, unless I found a very cheap, used electric golf cart - and even then, it demonstrates construction skills I don't think I could match right away.
Could a solar-sail driven space-craft be used to navigate around the geostationary orbits and collect dead satellites in a big net? In order to prevent the relative velocities of the catcher and the target from causing things to break apart, it would probably take months to position the catcher.
A big net could probably only be used once - it would be rather difficult to disentangle the target from it. What other low-speed capture mechanisms would work?
A big net (described above) would limit the number of times the catcher could operate - it could only carry so many nets. Unless real fantasy came to the rescue with nano-bots that could consume and remanufacture the old net and target into a new net.
Who would control the catcher? For how long until the security and command-and-control protocols were subverted?
Does it even make sense to take months (if not years) to capture a malfunctioning satellite and move it? How often is a situation like Galaxy 15 likely to happen, where the electronics get partially fried?
What happens if the catcher's electronics get partially fried - and (since someone decided to use an AI for navigation and catching), it decides to go after other satellites on it's own?
This would seem to be as good an idea as deep-water oil drilling.
This sure seems like Secunia trying to create a market and drum up business to me too.
On the other hand, the Mac world isn't innocent of this - if youve got a Mac loaded with a bunch of applications (mostly games), there's likely the same kind of mishmash of updaters too - and the HP Printer updater is the worst since it fails silently (but still nags you to do the update.)
Frankly, if you've got a bunch of independent applications and no standard way to update an application (or even if you do), then you're going to have update chaos.
Ubuntu gets around this by insisting you get all your applications through Ubuntu, rather like apps for the iPhone.
Another remark about "two decades" - VAX/VMS had a fine (or finer) grained security model than the Unix user/group/other/root model. When was the last time VAX/VMS made any kind of technology news? There have been other Operating Systems with much more sophisticated security models - generally special purpose and research systems that haven't enjoyed widespread success with 3rd party software.
Unix (Linux) suffers from a simplistic security model that was good enough for a multi-user system in a time of limited networking when viruses, spam, and phishing couldn't be done anonymously.
Windows (at least older versions) suffers from trying to maintain compatibility with a lack of a security model - and a nearly unrestricted 3rd party software model.
Both have had added security glue applied - but with limits for compatibility (i.e.: "It wouldn't be (Windows|Unix) if we did THAT!")
There are trade-offs between between security and utility - but they're worse when improvements to security come after the original design is laid down.
I don't recall hearing dialogue that was anti-technology. However, I did hear a lot that could be construed as anti-corporate, especially about how the primary purpose of the human mission there was return on investment for the shareholders.
There was also the entire motivation of the human character - a former soldier for a government that could restore function to a wounded soldiers limbs (legs) but wouldn't because it cost too much.
What about the "costs" of blundering in other endevors?
Medical errors in because doctors are too time pressed to make an proper diagnosis? Or because interns are too sleep-deprived to think clearly?
Highway accidents caused by drivers lacking sleep or drunk?
Legal errors by lawyers or their aides?
Political errors caused by politicians and media personalities playing up the wrong aspects of some tragedy?
Needless barking about the "costs" of mistakes where the methodology is arbitrary and capricious?
I thought that the issue with these devices (and other electronic devices) is that the power consumption when these devices are "off" (standby) is so much greater and isn't reflected in the EnergyStar ratings.
Frankly, I wish my home electronic devices wouldn't require reconfiguring when I really remove power from them.
And as a side note - aren't large screen / HDTVs the Hummer equivalent of home entertainment?
Normally, I'd beg to differ on the utility of a phone book - I'd give the example of how much faster I can find a local phone number with a dead-tree version than he can on-line. However, the other day, while looking for a phone number for a consignment shop, I ended up having to go online.
I'm still think of the phone book as useful - especially one I can carry in my car that has local maps, etc. so I don't need to go through cell-phone hell trying to figure something out.
On the other hand, I usually end up with 3 or 4 phone books per year. Two "minis" and a "normal, large" by one publisher, and another "craptastic" one by another publisher. That's ridiculous.
Don't worrry about the "geek" part. Worry about the marriage part.
When I first got married, we were so happy with each other that we tried to accomodate each other in all kinds of ways. However, the willingness (and perhaps ability) to maintain a change contrary to your nature is hard. You (plural) may find yourself slipping out of agreed-upon changes back into old habbits - or compromise habbits - with the result that "settled issues" become unsettled.
I'm not sure I can offer anything more than that. I was married for 14 years when my wife decided that her latent lesbianism meant that she couldn't live with me anymore. While I was married, I'd been struggling to maintain personal changes so much that I delegated much of my judgement about social and family things to her, and prioritized those above all else. The divorce was a terrible shock.
Since then, by depending solely on my own judgement - no longer delegating it - I've been much happier.
So, I'm not sure I can offer much more advice than what I've given directly and by example.
Back in the fall of 1980 while dropping me off for college in Ann Arbor, my father said: "My God, the women are sure ugly this year". And he was right. Bad crop that year. Or something. Maybe it was Reagan vs. Carter vs. Anderson. My father was a die-hard Democrat living in the Republican Wilderness of southwestern lower Michigan.
For the next few years, Young Republicanism dominated campus. Puffy, blow-dry hair. This was the Rise of the Business School. A few hairballs in suits tried to get in to business school through the Engineering school, but (at least in Electrical and Computer Engineering), they stood out more for their incompetence. They were problably the only ones who raised their hands when asked if they thought working for an automobile company was a good career path. Of course, there were hardly any women in engineering - and the ones who were were usually disgusted by the men - either the men were empty headed hairball suits or they had no familiarity with soap and water.
It was bad during the Reagan years. Lots of look-but-don't-touch, as if they'd shatter under the slightest stress. Empty headedness became a goal of both sexes. Lots of bland, dull colors.
Bush was bad too. A hangover of the Reagan years. More dull and drab colors.
Clinton was fun. Lotsa colors. One drawback of the Clinton administration (post Monica) were the little tiny "pince-nose" eyeglasses. Real wicked-witch-of-the-west stuff. That, and plumbers pants.
Bush was bad. Really down. Little tiny eyeglasses got more popular. More plumbers pants. And the tatoos were the worst. Yuck. Perhaps the tat-wearers thought that nobody could see how bad they looked with the plumbers pants, since the eye-glasses were so useless. Colors by JCPenny.
I haven't really had a chance to look much yet this year. Things seem somewhat better, but I haven't had a chance to watch young women much yet.
I relate this as if it were political, but it could be economic too. Or maybe prions in the food supply.
"Usability" concerns like this is what lead Microsoft to add so many features to their products that have made malware so easy on their platforms (and "compatability" lead to maintaining these features far too long.)
If you, as a business, are worried about the convenience to your users of visible passwords in order to use your site, then perhaps you ought to re-evaluate why you need a login at all. If it's just a matter of user preferences, then perhaps you should do without passwords entirely - if you're willing to take the hit when your users start messing each other up.
And if you're concerned about the "usability" impact of passwords on your site, then surely you must throw a fit if you actually do any e-commerce - all that extra stuff to do the credit-card or PayPal will surely drive your users away.
Sure, password masking suggests security that might not be there - and so perhaps discredits those sites where security is taken seriously. However, password masking does add *some* security - especially if it's done by the browser rather than some ad-hoc Javascript. At least with the browser, there's only ONE piece of code to secure (by taking precautions to wipe the password from memory after it's been used.)
On the other hand, the issue of the "Reset" button has some validity - I do like having a reset button, but it shouldn't be placed too close to the input areas. More often, though, I find my input being wiped by the browser when I use a key-stroke that does an "erase-to-end-of-line" in my favorite editor that instead wipes my entire input and sends me off some strange direction. Compared to that, the "Reset" button is far less relevant than focus issues of my GUI/window environment.
BTW: What makes this guy a "Usability Expert", other than having written a bunch of articles since 1995? Has he actually been involved in improving any product or process? Who vouches for this guy?
This certainly adds a new twist to the cloud computing - if you put all of your IT into "The Could", it could disappear in a flash due to an FBI raid on someone else.
It also adds an interesting twist to what happens if the data center is involved in supporting outsourced government services - like DNS.
And just think of what would happen to internet services as a whole if this happened to Akami or Edgesuite.
The NYTimes article claimed that the "secure network" would be implemented transparently - meaning that the real issue of flaws in the hosts (PCs, servers, etc.) will remain, since there won't be any need to re-engineer the flawed applications and services.
25 years ago - when DEC was still pushing DECnet, IBM was pushing SNA, the Europeans were pushing OSI, and the phone companies were pushing X.25, the big issue was Host Security vs. Network Security (as well as centrally managed versus a distributed management model.)
Some sites wanted security functions implemented in the network - so that they wouldn't have to do it in the host. (Packet) Networking people - Internet types - thought that security functions are best implemented in the host, especially as that is where the security needs were best known.
DECnet, SNA, X.25 were all centrally managed networking systems. If you wanted to do something new, you had to get network management buy-in. To some extent, we've returned to those days with managed switches, et. al. - in part because hosts don't implement security as well or as flexibly as necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I once heard that most car/train accidents involve local people - who have grown accustomed to the trains and the crossings and take chances that someone unfamiliar with the crossing wouldn't take.
I suppose the same could be said of pedestrians using the tracks as a convenient path. I used train tracks in the winter as a kid as a route home after delivering newspapers. (The rails provided a snow free path that made the 1 1/2 mile trek back home significantly easier. I only had to jump off the tracks into the snow filled ditch once a month or so. More frequently, I only had to jump to the other set of tracks going the other direction.)
Suppose that different actions of a car have different sound effects - turning right, left, or going straight. Forwards or backwards. Accelerating or braking. Then suppose that for IP/copyright reasons, different car manufacturers have different sounds - perhaps even down to the model.
SOMEONE will take a bunch of these cars in a huge parking lot and make performance art out of it.
The CNN article is just trolling, designed to create churn for their website and show advertisers that CNN is still relevant.
Sure, a move to tablet IT and personal/handheld IT presents a risk to Microsoft - and Dell, HP and Lenovo - and even Apple to some extent. It also presents a risk to software developers due to the always-on nature of the devices. Windows users have gotten used to frequent (daily or more) reboots, and this has more to do with the erratic quality of various third party software. Because MS doesn't control the hardware as tightly as Apple does, it isn't able to integrate device drivers as well. Third party software will need to cope better with applications that run for weeks or months, rather than just hours.
I've got a Sony-Ericsson C905a feature-phone. I left it on for 6 or 8 months (charging it regularily, of course) - and it started malfunctioning one day. Help desk said to reboot it - and that was what it needed.
I don't think that software for any device capable of downloading applications will ever be ready do do without rebooting.
I would think that a colony of bacteria are all (genetically) identical - where as a group of people are not.
Behavior that enhances the survival of the gene is what is going to be demonstrated - not necessarily survival of an individual.
A colony of bacteria is more akin to an individual than it is to a group of people, which makes the "sporulating" behavior described more akin to a person moving their hand away from a hot flame - while still staying close enough to a fire to keep warm.
The article demonstrates a great deal of ignorance of genetic selection (Darwinism), although I don't know whether to blame the journalist or the Professor - or the translation.
I am not a customer of the advertisers. I (and my family) are a resource or commodity they don't have to pay for but are selling to other people. They only care about me insofar as my shrieks of pain at being abused don't cause the advertising customers (clients) to stop buying advertising from them, or the web hosting sites from selling space to them.
There are so many advertising agencies - all trying to harvest money from their clients - all chasing each other to the bottom of the gutter.
Given the lack of enforceable, public standards involving advertising - and given the innate nature of the relationships and accountability mechanisms involved, I don't see why I shouldn't block every advertising agency I encounter, as aggressively as I can. I also don't see this as being an unreasonable attitude. If anything, it strikes me as perfectly sane, like closing my windows before it rains, washing and bathing, and locking the doors to my house when I'm not home. Good, sane, common sense.
The cost to me of an advertising failure is enormous. Lost access to the web. Possible lost acccess to the internet for employment related uses. Huge chunks of time cleaning up some mess. The risk of Identity theft, etc.. There is even a cost to me of advertising success - slower access to web pages I do want to visit, and cluttered web pages too. But I don't see a benefit anymore. I don't even want to listen to them justify their existence anymore. Give me back my junk postal mail and local newspaper weighed down with advertising flyers. I feel much safer with them - and if paranoia strikes me there, I can handle that stuff with rubber gloves when dispossing of the dross - and only once a day at that.
Back in the misty reaches of the past (Internet Time), I could be convinced to tolerate advertising on the web as part of a mechanism to pay for the free content that I was interested in. Back in those misty times, I usually used Netscape on a Solaris box. I had a Windows/9x machine at home - but hardly used it for the Web because with a new family, I was too tired at night.
These days, for my home LAN, I agressively block huge chunks of the internet - with FreeBSD "ipfw" tables and by running my own DNS relay that blocks many domains - hphishing, advertising, hosting, and ISP (by making the authority a IP address in a range that my FreeBSD router returns a "network unreachable" for.) Firefox has AdBlock+ and NoScript. Safari is used rarely. Chrome only for 2 sites - all to keep the cookies segregated.
At home, web pages look like swiss cheese. Sometimes, I white-list a site - but not often. But I'm (mostly) satisfied. I'd like to block even more.
There's no documentation in the article of either the results or the methodology - other than a vague description of a custom 1000 thread engine that was used for the probing.
There is mention of the number of domain names and SSL Certs issued - and some documentation of probing of ports 80 and 443, but no documentation of how many ports at 443 were scanned.
Bad article, not providing enough information to verify it's conclusions.
Does this make us Thrint?
Looking at some of the other art projects on that website, I doubt very much that the greenery on the vehicle is live. It looks very much like branches "harvested" (reclaimed?) from artificial christmas trees.
And, if it is solar powered, the panels that charge the batteries aren't located on the vehicle.
A great art project, but without some more technical documentation, not very satisfying to my inner geek.
As for a technology demonstration - I can't really say. It's more than I could afford to do, unless I found a very cheap, used electric golf cart - and even then, it demonstrates construction skills I don't think I could match right away.
Could a solar-sail driven space-craft be used to navigate around the geostationary orbits and collect dead satellites in a big net? In order to prevent the relative velocities of the catcher and the target from causing things to break apart, it would probably take months to position the catcher.
A big net could probably only be used once - it would be rather difficult to disentangle the target from it. What other low-speed capture mechanisms would work?
A big net (described above) would limit the number of times the catcher could operate - it could only carry so many nets. Unless real fantasy came to the rescue with nano-bots that could consume and remanufacture the old net and target into a new net.
Who would control the catcher? For how long until the security and command-and-control protocols were subverted?
Does it even make sense to take months (if not years) to capture a malfunctioning satellite and move it? How often is a situation like Galaxy 15 likely to happen, where the electronics get partially fried?
What happens if the catcher's electronics get partially fried - and (since someone decided to use an AI for navigation and catching), it decides to go after other satellites on it's own?
This would seem to be as good an idea as deep-water oil drilling.
The people in Europe and Africa would be pointing at their toes.
This sure seems like Secunia trying to create a market and drum up business to me too.
On the other hand, the Mac world isn't innocent of this - if youve got a Mac loaded with a bunch of applications (mostly games), there's likely the same kind of mishmash of updaters too - and the HP Printer updater is the worst since it fails silently (but still nags you to do the update.)
Frankly, if you've got a bunch of independent applications and no standard way to update an application (or even if you do), then you're going to have update chaos.
Ubuntu gets around this by insisting you get all your applications through Ubuntu, rather like apps for the iPhone.
Another remark about "two decades" - VAX/VMS had a fine (or finer) grained security model than the Unix user/group/other/root model. When was the last time VAX/VMS made any kind of technology news? There have been other Operating Systems with much more sophisticated security models - generally special purpose and research systems that haven't enjoyed widespread success with 3rd party software.
Unix (Linux) suffers from a simplistic security model that was good enough for a multi-user system in a time of limited networking when viruses, spam, and phishing couldn't be done anonymously.
Windows (at least older versions) suffers from trying to maintain compatibility with a lack of a security model - and a nearly unrestricted 3rd party software model.
Both have had added security glue applied - but with limits for compatibility (i.e.: "It wouldn't be (Windows|Unix) if we did THAT!")
There are trade-offs between between security and utility - but they're worse when improvements to security come after the original design is laid down.
I don't recall hearing dialogue that was anti-technology. However, I did hear a lot that could be construed as anti-corporate, especially about how the primary purpose of the human mission there was return on investment for the shareholders.
There was also the entire motivation of the human character - a former soldier for a government that could restore function to a wounded soldiers limbs (legs) but wouldn't because it cost too much.
What about the "costs" of blundering in other endevors?
Medical errors in because doctors are too time pressed to make an proper diagnosis? Or because interns are too sleep-deprived to think clearly?
Highway accidents caused by drivers lacking sleep or drunk?
Legal errors by lawyers or their aides?
Political errors caused by politicians and media personalities playing up the wrong aspects of some tragedy?
Needless barking about the "costs" of mistakes where the methodology is arbitrary and capricious?
I thought that the issue with these devices (and other electronic devices) is that the power consumption when these devices are "off" (standby) is so much greater and isn't reflected in the EnergyStar ratings.
Frankly, I wish my home electronic devices wouldn't require reconfiguring when I really remove power from them.
And as a side note - aren't large screen / HDTVs the Hummer equivalent of home entertainment?
And cats will supplement their diet too. Who says your neighborhood needs songbirds?
Normally, I'd beg to differ on the utility of a phone book - I'd give the example of how much faster I can find a local phone number with a dead-tree version than he can on-line. However, the other day, while looking for a phone number for a consignment shop, I ended up having to go online.
I'm still think of the phone book as useful - especially one I can carry in my car that has local maps, etc. so I don't need to go through cell-phone hell trying to figure something out.
On the other hand, I usually end up with 3 or 4 phone books per year. Two "minis" and a "normal, large" by one publisher, and another "craptastic" one by another publisher. That's ridiculous.
Don't worrry about the "geek" part. Worry about the marriage part. When I first got married, we were so happy with each other that we tried to accomodate each other in all kinds of ways. However, the willingness (and perhaps ability) to maintain a change contrary to your nature is hard. You (plural) may find yourself slipping out of agreed-upon changes back into old habbits - or compromise habbits - with the result that "settled issues" become unsettled. I'm not sure I can offer anything more than that. I was married for 14 years when my wife decided that her latent lesbianism meant that she couldn't live with me anymore. While I was married, I'd been struggling to maintain personal changes so much that I delegated much of my judgement about social and family things to her, and prioritized those above all else. The divorce was a terrible shock. Since then, by depending solely on my own judgement - no longer delegating it - I've been much happier. So, I'm not sure I can offer much more advice than what I've given directly and by example.
What about shoe laces? Velcro has conquerored footware!
Back in the fall of 1980 while dropping me off for college in Ann Arbor, my father said: "My God, the women are sure ugly this year". And he was right. Bad crop that year. Or something. Maybe it was Reagan vs. Carter vs. Anderson. My father was a die-hard Democrat living in the Republican Wilderness of southwestern lower Michigan.
For the next few years, Young Republicanism dominated campus. Puffy, blow-dry hair. This was the Rise of the Business School. A few hairballs in suits tried to get in to business school through the Engineering school, but (at least in Electrical and Computer Engineering), they stood out more for their incompetence. They were problably the only ones who raised their hands when asked if they thought working for an automobile company was a good career path. Of course, there were hardly any women in engineering - and the ones who were were usually disgusted by the men - either the men were empty headed hairball suits or they had no familiarity with soap and water.
It was bad during the Reagan years. Lots of look-but-don't-touch, as if they'd shatter under the slightest stress. Empty headedness became a goal of both sexes. Lots of bland, dull colors.
Bush was bad too. A hangover of the Reagan years. More dull and drab colors.
Clinton was fun. Lotsa colors. One drawback of the Clinton administration (post Monica) were the little tiny "pince-nose" eyeglasses. Real wicked-witch-of-the-west stuff. That, and plumbers pants.
Bush was bad. Really down. Little tiny eyeglasses got more popular. More plumbers pants. And the tatoos were the worst. Yuck. Perhaps the tat-wearers thought that nobody could see how bad they looked with the plumbers pants, since the eye-glasses were so useless. Colors by JCPenny.
I haven't really had a chance to look much yet this year. Things seem somewhat better, but I haven't had a chance to watch young women much yet.
I relate this as if it were political, but it could be economic too. Or maybe prions in the food supply.
"Usability" concerns like this is what lead Microsoft to add so many features to their products that have made malware so easy on their platforms (and "compatability" lead to maintaining these features far too long.)
If you, as a business, are worried about the convenience to your users of visible passwords in order to use your site, then perhaps you ought to re-evaluate why you need a login at all. If it's just a matter of user preferences, then perhaps you should do without passwords entirely - if you're willing to take the hit when your users start messing each other up.
And if you're concerned about the "usability" impact of passwords on your site, then surely you must throw a fit if you actually do any e-commerce - all that extra stuff to do the credit-card or PayPal will surely drive your users away.
Sure, password masking suggests security that might not be there - and so perhaps discredits those sites where security is taken seriously. However, password masking does add *some* security - especially if it's done by the browser rather than some ad-hoc Javascript. At least with the browser, there's only ONE piece of code to secure (by taking precautions to wipe the password from memory after it's been used.)
On the other hand, the issue of the "Reset" button has some validity - I do like having a reset button, but it shouldn't be placed too close to the input areas. More often, though, I find my input being wiped by the browser when I use a key-stroke that does an "erase-to-end-of-line" in my favorite editor that instead wipes my entire input and sends me off some strange direction. Compared to that, the "Reset" button is far less relevant than focus issues of my GUI/window environment.
BTW: What makes this guy a "Usability Expert", other than having written a bunch of articles since 1995? Has he actually been involved in improving any product or process? Who vouches for this guy?
This certainly adds a new twist to the cloud computing - if you put all of your IT into "The Could", it could disappear in a flash due to an FBI raid on someone else.
It also adds an interesting twist to what happens if the data center is involved in supporting outsourced government services - like DNS.
And just think of what would happen to internet services as a whole if this happened to Akami or Edgesuite.
The NYTimes article claimed that the "secure network" would be implemented transparently - meaning that the real issue of flaws in the hosts (PCs, servers, etc.) will remain, since there won't be any need to re-engineer the flawed applications and services.
25 years ago - when DEC was still pushing DECnet, IBM was pushing SNA, the Europeans were pushing OSI, and the phone companies were pushing X.25, the big issue was Host Security vs. Network Security (as well as centrally managed versus a distributed management model.)
Some sites wanted security functions implemented in the network - so that they wouldn't have to do it in the host. (Packet) Networking people - Internet types - thought that security functions are best implemented in the host, especially as that is where the security needs were best known.
DECnet, SNA, X.25 were all centrally managed networking systems. If you wanted to do something new, you had to get network management buy-in. To some extent, we've returned to those days with managed switches, et. al. - in part because hosts don't implement security as well or as flexibly as necessary.