Re:The fundamental zombie problem
on
Zombie Report By ISP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
>End users just *don't care*.
Not meaning to sound flippant, but you're giving them too much credit.
For most people, that their computer might be part of a world-wide network of zombie slaves to an international cybermob is just not within their ability to fathom.
So no, they don't care, but it's on the level of caring that their Chinese-made desk lamp was made by people who can't read about democracy on MSN. That's not quite it, but the point is it's simply not part of their world.
People call me to fix their "broken" computers. When I remove the viruses and other crap and explain the problem, they *always* express outrage that someone would do that to innocent little them.
Until then they don't care because they don't understand. Anyone who does understand feels violated and tries to do something about it.
Google is guilty of a bit of overconfidence, maybe, in expanding into areas they know little about, but I think Google Scholar is why there is a Google.
Google's founders were academics. Their focus is on creating ways to find information. Finding academic information ought to be their pet project.
The kicker is that if someone else does it better, Google will just buy them.
I like touchpads, but a lot of people don't. Some people like the Thinkpad nipple, but I don't (there's only one in the middle, and I can't get used to that:-).
I think it would be harder to keep from making mousing mistakes with a scroll pad than a wheel, which requires more effort to engage.
But still, people who like touchpads will probably like the scroll pad. People who make mistakes with touch pads probably will not like the scroll pad, either.
I applaud your creativity, but that's bad training.
Some users may never see the virus-laden email, since the junk email controls you have implemented (haven't you?) will catch your message.
Users will bypass it. Word will quickly spread about the test, probably by an email "hoax warning" from that tech wannabe in the office. Users will have a heightened resistance to your mail, or on the other extreme may open it since they know it's from you.
It sets up the IT department as the villain, perpetuating the "us vs. them" mentality.
It doesn't give the users enough A:B comparisons between good attachments and bad ones.
Generally speaking, positive reinforcement (reward for good behavior) works better than punishment for bad behavior. Punishing bad behavior may get results, but it also reduces overall performance for both the individual and the group, by engendering fear of failure.
Negative reinforcement (rewarding good behavior by removing punishment) can work well in the right circumstances. The punishment should have been already earned and deserved, and both the good and bad behavior should be related somehow to the punishment.
Users are demanding the ability to use their email as a file copying and storage mechanism. We as sysadmins can point out that we have a much more efficient means of doing that - this file server over here - but they don't seem to like that. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.
If you really want to do some training:
Make a fake virus that when run gives the user immediate feedback, lying to them that it's doing damage.
Make another attachment that just says "bad choice, I could have been a virus".
Make other messages that are harmless text or pdf attachments
Set up a formal testing session in which the users are given a bunch of regular spam, good mail, and a mix of your attachments. Tell them not to open bad attachments but to try to open the good ones.
After the formal training session, do a real world test in which they are rewarded for the good attachments they open. This time for the bad choices, only include the "I could have been a virus" ones.
Done in a spirit of cooperation, rather than confrontation, you should see an immediate sharp reduction in the number of viruses that people open.
People do not need college to get ahead. You don't need a butane lighter to start a fire, either.
Statistically speaking, college grads will do better, but the system is rigged in favor of college grads. That's reality. Which is enough of a point to stop, but I'll go on anyway.
"Getting ahead" is not the point of an education. Education is its own reward. Earning more money is how to justify the expense.
Education changes people. It changes the way people think about themselves and the world around them. Education should help people understand and communicate better with the educated and uneducated.
Education is more than technical training. There are lots of "technical" courses that have no bearing on any particular real-world setting. They are valuable precisely because they don't have an immediate application. The student learns how to learn things that don't have an application, that aren't interesting, that don't fit his style, that don't come easily.
Yes, there are people who don't need school to get ahead. There are many, many more people, billions the world over, whose intelligence is wasted because they didn't go to school. They never caught that one key idea, learned that one problem-solving technique, or were exposed to that one viewpoint that would have let them change the world for the rest of us.
Solaris users probably get quite a bit done with their relatively immature software as well.
You must be referring to Solaris on Intel. I still don't think "immature" is the right adjective. The problem with Solaris on Intel is mostly hardware support, and that's not going to change with age. Hardware popularity shifts faster than Sun's ability to support it.
"Stodgy" and "crusty", maybe, but not "immature".
For vanilla hardware in a server, it does just fine.
The bill proposes that third parties may submit prior art challenges for up to six months after the date of publication.
Why only six months? Why not forever? After six months of a patent's existence, only the person with prior art could file an objection.
If the interest of the law is justice, then it shouldn't matter when an error is discovered. It also shouldn't matter that some company has made an investment in a particular technology based on the belief that their patent is good.
If you didn't think of it first, you shouldn't get a monopoly on it, ever.
You cant put so many heads over the disc because the head is orders of magnitudes wider than the track.
Current heads are bigger because they have to move around. The actual functional part of the head is by definition exactly the width of one track. And width along the disk radius is the only dimension that really matters. Height along the spindle axis and length along the track arc are bounded, but of less concern.
you could not keep them calibrated, plus even IF you could, seek times would get MUCH worse because of resonanz modes of the arm complex, increased inertia, ect.
Ah, I see your trouble. There is no arm. The head is fixed. Calibration is done one time. The only movement between platter and track is due to vibration and heat expansion, which are problems on different level: that's about track size and fly height, not feasibility. Once it's working, then you can worry about making it work better.
A serious problem with current drives is the reliance on the Bernoulli effect and fly height. With fixed heads, you could (mostly) evacuate the chamber, leaving just enough air (or some gas of your choosing) to allow filtration of microscopic debris.
Another neat thing that fixing the heads allows is better shock resistance.
A lot of the time innovation comes from people on the fringe of an industry with a fresh perspective.
I believe its been tried before. Do a google search on "drum memory". Was slow, even for its day.
It was only slow because they didn't know what we do now about how to fabricate electronics. They were using clunky wound-core magnetic pickups, which suffer from impedance problems: you can only make a magnetic field of a given size and strength expand and collapse so fast.
With modern fabrication and magneto-resistive heads, it should be possible to make head arrays of (say) 32 tracks, which read 32 bits at a time. Whatever is needed to adapt to the geometry of the disk. Or you could just use one big array, but that might result in board layout problems. Some bright engineer can figure that one out.
With enough head arrays, you could cover the entire disk. That would eliminate seek time, get rid of the head actuator motor, and drive up reliability while driving down cost. Drives could be smaller and use less power, or other things being equal could spin faster.
Given a fixed-head drive with one head per track (and probably you'd use several heads per track on the outer tracks), the time to read a particular sector would be about 1/2 the rotation of the disk, or 1/20000th of a minute for a 10K drive. That's 3ms.
However, since the head is fixed, you could get a call to read a certain sector and immediately begin reading the track it's on into cache. So for files larger than half a track, after the first half track the data comes from cache and you can go on to the next read. With even a naive read-ahead cache algorithm, most of your reads would come from cache.
Whatever other objections someone might have to this I have a trump card: for some applications, having a fixed head array makes sense. Once the technology is in use, eventually I think every hard disk would be made that way.
In sports, each coach has his own system. Sometimes they're really well crafted, honed over years of experience, and work really well. Sometimes they're stupid. However, even a crappy system can result in victory if the players all play within it.
A business works the same way, usually. A crappy boss can ruin efficiency, but a boss in business is really one of the players. Adherence to the system is the surest path to success, since only by adhering to it can you tell if it's working.
And so it is with democratic republics. The election may have various kinds of errors, but generally half the errors will be for each candidate. For that matter, the voters can be "wrong", but since it's an election the voters are not wrong, by definition.
Ask for a recount, accept the results and go back to chasing ambulances.
Will users be more likely to migrate from Linux to Apple, or from Windows to Apple and Linux? I think Microsoft will lose market share to both Apple and Linux.
People want different things from Linux and than they want from Apple+OSX. Linux folks want freedom at a bargain. OSX folks exchange a smidge of freedom and some cash for a lot of comfort and Macness.
Also, when you decide to switch to Linux you generally keep your computer and wipe it. Switching from Windows to Apple+Intel will continue to mean a buying new computer. Which kind of switch is easier depends on the person.
The FOSS developer base should grow along with the user base. If Apple's user base grows faster than the Linux user base, or vice versa, so what?
This will start us down a dangerous, slippery slope: first SSC will start making cartridges for all Lexmark and other printers. Then people will start using those $9 refill kits instead of buying new cartridges that cost O(new printer).
The next generation of our youth will think nothing of using free software instead of paying for the commercial kind. People may even start bicycling or - brace yourself - walking to work. Civilization will come to a halt.
</irony>
Every once in a while, my faith in The System gets a little boost.
In the Foundation trilogy (*), Isaac Asmimov portrayed a stilted society full of academic "scientists" who never ventured into a lab, but did their scientific work by critiquing the work of others.
While he was mostly lampooning the way academic scholarship can replace actual research, I think he would have smiled knowingly. A news organization whose workers are lost without the ability to have news delivered to them would have fit perfectly into the pre-Mule galaxy.
Or maybe I'm just reading more into the story than the WSJ folkd deserve. Maybe it's just a sign of the times that email has so thoroughly penetrated business operations.
---
(*) I haven't read Asimov in 20 years, so I apologize for my hazy memory and the arrogance to expound on it.
I'm not sure if I have the right to publish an email sent to me in general...
Even if they explicitly tell him not to do so, he can still make public the information in the letter.
They have copyright on the letter. What he needs to do is paraphrase the letter, with attribution, and quote only the most unbelievably stupid parts.
As for the original program, they need to tell him which specificy rights of theirs he is violating. The is no such thing as generic "intellectual property". There are only copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, and contractual rights.
Unless they have a patent on the method his program uses to perform the activity his program performs, or he's violating an NDA or using their trademark, they can't stop him from performing the activity.
Bottom line: they can't stop him from publishing his code, only theirs. Using the same methods they use doesn't violate their copyright.
any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.
If you have a bunch of data in a MySQL database, ordinarily Google can't find it. You have to create a static link somewhere with a URL for the search you want to make googlable. Those take maintenance.
There may be some sites that want certain areas crawled, but not others, and those areas aren't maintained by the webmaster or only the top-level part should be hidden from search (which is awkward or impossible to handle with robots.txt). There are always user pages, maverick corporate departments, or whatever.
This offers a way to do all of that in a systematic way. Very nice way to solve several seemingly unrelated problems at once.
Actually, their statement is accurate, as far as it goes.
For this quarter, the decreased revenue is primarily due to a shinking market for commercial Unix. Their long term prospects for increasing Unix revenue have been effectively squelched by the lawsuits.
But their decreased cash position is due to paying lawyers.
Do the folks who meta-mod the raters actually get more rater points, or is it like a certain well-known site (hint: rhymes with "cashbot") where you can meta-mod all the time and never get to mod?
Every time I ignore that certain site (rhymes with "'stache rot") for a few weeks and come back, voila, I'm rewarded with mod points. I don't like that. When I come back after being away, I want to spout off, not critique. Gimme mod points after I've been active every day for a while, so I know what to do with them.
Leeloo: Leeloo Dallas mul-ti-pass. Mul-ti-pass. Korben: Yeah, this is my wife, Leelo. Leeloo: Mul-ti-pass. Korben: Newlywed, just married. Leeloo: Mul-ti-pass. Korben: Yes, she knows it's a multipass! Anyways, we're in love.
For breakfast, I have two eggs, fried in olive oil, with chives or onions.
Then I work a while on my bicycle. It has a fork for extra spice, and a three cheeses for more gondola.
I remember putting together my Heathkit computer, with the round things and the keyboard. We didn't have mice back then, except in the basement. Now they come in everywhere, and I can't seem to trap them.
Slashdot Mirror
>End users just *don't care*.
Not meaning to sound flippant, but you're giving them too much credit.
For most people, that their computer might be part of a world-wide network of zombie slaves to an international cybermob is just not within their ability to fathom.
So no, they don't care, but it's on the level of caring that their Chinese-made desk lamp was made by people who can't read about democracy on MSN. That's not quite it, but the point is it's simply not part of their world.
People call me to fix their "broken" computers. When I remove the viruses and other crap and explain the problem, they *always* express outrage that someone would do that to innocent little them.
Until then they don't care because they don't understand. Anyone who does understand feels violated and tries to do something about it.
Google is guilty of a bit of overconfidence, maybe, in expanding into areas they know little about, but I think Google Scholar is why there is a Google.
Google's founders were academics. Their focus is on creating ways to find information. Finding academic information ought to be their pet project.
The kicker is that if someone else does it better, Google will just buy them.
I like touchpads, but a lot of people don't. Some people like the Thinkpad nipple, but I don't (there's only one in the middle, and I can't get used to that :-).
I think it would be harder to keep from making mousing mistakes with a scroll pad than a wheel, which requires more effort to engage.
But still, people who like touchpads will probably like the scroll pad. People who make mistakes with touch pads probably will not like the scroll pad, either.
I applaud your creativity, but that's bad training.
Generally speaking, positive reinforcement (reward for good behavior) works better than punishment for bad behavior. Punishing bad behavior may get results, but it also reduces overall performance for both the individual and the group, by engendering fear of failure.
Negative reinforcement (rewarding good behavior by removing punishment) can work well in the right circumstances. The punishment should have been already earned and deserved, and both the good and bad behavior should be related somehow to the punishment.
Users are demanding the ability to use their email as a file copying and storage mechanism. We as sysadmins can point out that we have a much more efficient means of doing that - this file server over here - but they don't seem to like that. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.
If you really want to do some training:
Done in a spirit of cooperation, rather than confrontation, you should see an immediate sharp reduction in the number of viruses that people open.
People do not need college to get ahead. You don't need a butane lighter to start a fire, either.
Statistically speaking, college grads will do better, but the system is rigged in favor of college grads. That's reality. Which is enough of a point to stop, but I'll go on anyway.
"Getting ahead" is not the point of an education. Education is its own reward. Earning more money is how to justify the expense.
Education changes people. It changes the way people think about themselves and the world around them. Education should help people understand and communicate better with the educated and uneducated.
Education is more than technical training. There are lots of "technical" courses that have no bearing on any particular real-world setting. They are valuable precisely because they don't have an immediate application. The student learns how to learn things that don't have an application, that aren't interesting, that don't fit his style, that don't come easily.
Yes, there are people who don't need school to get ahead. There are many, many more people, billions the world over, whose intelligence is wasted because they didn't go to school. They never caught that one key idea, learned that one problem-solving technique, or were exposed to that one viewpoint that would have let them change the world for the rest of us.
Serves them right.
>joke
I wondered why my hair was parted down the middle.
You must be referring to Solaris on Intel. I still don't think "immature" is the right adjective. The problem with Solaris on Intel is mostly hardware support, and that's not going to change with age. Hardware popularity shifts faster than Sun's ability to support it.
"Stodgy" and "crusty", maybe, but not "immature".
For vanilla hardware in a server, it does just fine.
The bill proposes that third parties may submit prior art challenges for up to six months after the date of publication.
Why only six months? Why not forever? After six months of a patent's existence, only the person with prior art could file an objection.
If the interest of the law is justice, then it shouldn't matter when an error is discovered. It also shouldn't matter that some company has made an investment in a particular technology based on the belief that their patent is good.
If you didn't think of it first, you shouldn't get a monopoly on it, ever.
Current heads are bigger because they have to move around. The actual functional part of the head is by definition exactly the width of one track. And width along the disk radius is the only dimension that really matters. Height along the spindle axis and length along the track arc are bounded, but of less concern.
Ah, I see your trouble. There is no arm. The head is fixed. Calibration is done one time. The only movement between platter and track is due to vibration and heat expansion, which are problems on different level: that's about track size and fly height, not feasibility. Once it's working, then you can worry about making it work better.
A serious problem with current drives is the reliance on the Bernoulli effect and fly height. With fixed heads, you could (mostly) evacuate the chamber, leaving just enough air (or some gas of your choosing) to allow filtration of microscopic debris.
Another neat thing that fixing the heads allows is better shock resistance.
A lot of the time innovation comes from people on the fringe of an industry with a fresh perspective.
It was only slow because they didn't know what we do now about how to fabricate electronics. They were using clunky wound-core magnetic pickups, which suffer from impedance problems: you can only make a magnetic field of a given size and strength expand and collapse so fast.
With modern fabrication and magneto-resistive heads, it should be possible to make head arrays of (say) 32 tracks, which read 32 bits at a time. Whatever is needed to adapt to the geometry of the disk. Or you could just use one big array, but that might result in board layout problems. Some bright engineer can figure that one out.
With enough head arrays, you could cover the entire disk. That would eliminate seek time, get rid of the head actuator motor, and drive up reliability while driving down cost. Drives could be smaller and use less power, or other things being equal could spin faster.
Given a fixed-head drive with one head per track (and probably you'd use several heads per track on the outer tracks), the time to read a particular sector would be about 1/2 the rotation of the disk, or 1/20000th of a minute for a 10K drive. That's 3ms.
However, since the head is fixed, you could get a call to read a certain sector and immediately begin reading the track it's on into cache. So for files larger than half a track, after the first half track the data comes from cache and you can go on to the next read. With even a naive read-ahead cache algorithm, most of your reads would come from cache.
Whatever other objections someone might have to this I have a trump card: for some applications, having a fixed head array makes sense. Once the technology is in use, eventually I think every hard disk would be made that way.
In sports, each coach has his own system. Sometimes they're really well crafted, honed over years of experience, and work really well. Sometimes they're stupid. However, even a crappy system can result in victory if the players all play within it.
A business works the same way, usually. A crappy boss can ruin efficiency, but a boss in business is really one of the players. Adherence to the system is the surest path to success, since only by adhering to it can you tell if it's working.
And so it is with democratic republics. The election may have various kinds of errors, but generally half the errors will be for each candidate. For that matter, the voters can be "wrong", but since it's an election the voters are not wrong, by definition.
Ask for a recount, accept the results and go back to chasing ambulances.
Will users be more likely to migrate from Linux to Apple, or from Windows to Apple and Linux? I think Microsoft will lose market share to both Apple and Linux.
People want different things from Linux and than they want from Apple+OSX. Linux folks want freedom at a bargain. OSX folks exchange a smidge of freedom and some cash for a lot of comfort and Macness.
Also, when you decide to switch to Linux you generally keep your computer and wipe it. Switching from Windows to Apple+Intel will continue to mean a buying new computer. Which kind of switch is easier depends on the person.
The FOSS developer base should grow along with the user base. If Apple's user base grows faster than the Linux user base, or vice versa, so what?
This will start us down a dangerous, slippery slope: first SSC will start making cartridges for all Lexmark and other printers. Then people will start using those $9 refill kits instead of buying new cartridges that cost O(new printer).
The next generation of our youth will think nothing of using free software instead of paying for the commercial kind. People may even start bicycling or - brace yourself - walking to work. Civilization will come to a halt.
</irony>
Every once in a while, my faith in The System gets a little boost.
In the Foundation trilogy (*), Isaac Asmimov portrayed a stilted society full of academic "scientists" who never ventured into a lab, but did their scientific work by critiquing the work of others.
While he was mostly lampooning the way academic scholarship can replace actual research, I think he would have smiled knowingly. A news organization whose workers are lost without the ability to have news delivered to them would have fit perfectly into the pre-Mule galaxy.
Or maybe I'm just reading more into the story than the WSJ folkd deserve. Maybe it's just a sign of the times that email has so thoroughly penetrated business operations.
---
(*) I haven't read Asimov in 20 years, so I apologize for my hazy memory and the arrogance to expound on it.
Even if they explicitly tell him not to do so, he can still make public the information in the letter.
They have copyright on the letter. What he needs to do is paraphrase the letter, with attribution, and quote only the most unbelievably stupid parts.
As for the original program, they need to tell him which specificy rights of theirs he is violating. The is no such thing as generic "intellectual property". There are only copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, and contractual rights.
Unless they have a patent on the method his program uses to perform the activity his program performs, or he's violating an NDA or using their trademark, they can't stop him from performing the activity.
Bottom line: they can't stop him from publishing his code, only theirs. Using the same methods they use doesn't violate their copyright.
Can command '66' be far off?
Go into exile, we must.
If you have a bunch of data in a MySQL database, ordinarily Google can't find it. You have to create a static link somewhere with a URL for the search you want to make googlable. Those take maintenance.
There may be some sites that want certain areas crawled, but not others, and those areas aren't maintained by the webmaster or only the top-level part should be hidden from search (which is awkward or impossible to handle with robots.txt). There are always user pages, maverick corporate departments, or whatever.
This offers a way to do all of that in a systematic way. Very nice way to solve several seemingly unrelated problems at once.
Actually, their statement is accurate, as far as it goes.
For this quarter, the decreased revenue is primarily due to a shinking market for commercial Unix. Their long term prospects for increasing Unix revenue have been effectively squelched by the lawsuits.
But their decreased cash position is due to paying lawyers.
Everybody knows the Newton was really the work of DEC, who were the true innovators with their Leibnitz line of handhelds.
The Leibnitz never caught on, due to the unique marketing approach that was synonymous with Digital.
I thought, "what do multiple orgasms have to do with DNA research?"
I wonder if they use meta-moderation?
[rant]
Do the folks who meta-mod the raters actually get more rater points, or is it like a certain well-known site (hint: rhymes with "cashbot") where you can meta-mod all the time and never get to mod?
Every time I ignore that certain site (rhymes with "'stache rot") for a few weeks and come back, voila, I'm rewarded with mod points. I don't like that. When I come back after being away, I want to spout off, not critique. Gimme mod points after I've been active every day for a while, so I know what to do with them.
[/rant]
Two older couples are out for a walk. The men are walking behind the women.
Man 1: We ate at a great restaurant last night.
Man 2: Oh really? Which one.
Man 1: The name escapes me right now ... what's the name of that flower, you know, with the thorns?
Man 2: A rose?
Man 1: Yes, that's it. Rose, where did we eat last night?
I start the day off with a brisk walk.
For breakfast, I have two eggs, fried in olive oil, with chives or onions.
Then I work a while on my bicycle. It has a fork for extra spice, and a three cheeses for more gondola.
I remember putting together my Heathkit computer, with the round things and the keyboard. We didn't have mice back then, except in the basement. Now they come in everywhere, and I can't seem to trap them.
I think I'll lay down a while.