The BBC micro (as far as I can tell, a little before my time) simply dropped the user into a BASIC prompt and left the rest to their imagination.
Not necessarily. The BBC micro had 5 ROM sockets and some of the more sophisticated applications were shipped on a ROM chip. You didn't actually have 5 free, however, because 1 was taken up by the OS and you needed at least one "language" ROM (a ROM that announced that it could provide some sort of user interface). Many people upgraded their BBC to connect to a floppy disk drive; this took up another ROM socket. Therefore, you usually wound up with 2 free.
IIRC the BBC went through each ROM in turn and dropped you into the first language ROM it found. This was almost invariably BASIC, if only because the computer shipped with BASIC in the first socket, but there's no reason it couldn't be something else. Move the chips around and presto! You've got a machine that drops straight into a word processor as soon as you turn it on.
It's not the components or engineering behind the card that cost $30k. NetApp prices it so high because the card boosts the performance of their filers by about the same amount as a ~$50k shelf of SAS disks (click that link and go read NetApp's own marketing documentation). They have got to have price points that make sense to customers.
I would actually say "Because NetApp must".
Were they to sell their unit at, say, $5 or 10,000, they'd be marketing "equivalent performance boost for a tenth/a fifth of the price!", they'd have a huge problem. "Twenty percent cheaper for equivalent performance!" is the sort of marketing message that is believable - but your competitors can probably offer discounts on the order of 20% without anyone really batting an eyelid. "Forty percent cheaper!" is pushing it, but with a strong sales team I daresay you might get away with it.
"Eighty/Ninety percent cheaper!" sends out a very strong message. Specifically, the message it sends out is "This product is so terrible we've pretty much got to give it away just to get shot of it! Please, Christ, just take it off our hands so we can get the space back in our warehouse!". This can work OK when you're selling a product that's an impulse purchase and if it doesn't work out, the buyer can just shift it on eBay. But that's not true for NetApp's products or the market they're selling into.
In its most basic form (ie. without all the bells and whistles that Sharepoint consultants are hired for), Sharepoint is a perfectly capable document management system which does a fairly passable attempt at eliminating the "where the hell did I put that file?" question you get with a plain fileserver.
This is an extremely good point - Sharepoint is fairly obviously the future, and I imagine in a few years many companies won't even run a vanilla SMB fileserver. Which should be just in time for Samba 4 to come out.
And gaining confidence is an art which big companies are very good at.
It's more than that. I missed it in my original comment, but a lot of people perceive a product has a value broadly equivalent to the amount it's being sold at. (This is part of the reason Apple are able to sell the iPad for a relatively high price yet nobody else can sell a clone for anything like that price. Apple have a reputation of selling a premium product which no other consumer technology firm can really claim - therefore when Apple say "an iPad is worth £400" it follows that a clone product is worth considerably less).
So when a product is being punted at a big fat zero - you might as run an expensive advertising campaign with the catchy tagline "This product is so appalling we can't even give it away" because that's the perception you're feeding.
No, same problem. Customs and habits of our society are bound to creep into such a system, which means that if our society doesn't exist in a few thousand years, nor will anyone who can figure out the symbols.
Maybe some sort of redundant array of well-known languages could act as a kind of English-to-(whatever we all speak 3,000 years from now) dictionary.
Not necessarily, you put Windows onto a domain and all of a sudden you're one person with Domain Admin rights and a stupid password away from having the whole lot compromised.
Throw in the sort of corporate politics that often leads to non-technical senior managers demanding (and getting) domain admin rights and there you go.
First up: Any government department that's got a significant investment in IT can't just go out and replace, say, Microsoft Office with LibreOffice overnight. There's a huge amount of testing to do, and when you hit upon things like Access databases and Excel spreadsheets that have become an entire department's IT system, it's very tempting to say "Stuff it. We'll stick with Office."
It's even more tempting when the F/OSS firm says "Yes, we can replace all those things - it'll cost £X hundred thousand, mind." The cost of a migration to a newer version of Office isn't seen by the higher-ups for the exact same reason that these databases and spreadsheets were able to become so widespread without anyone noticing - the people that maintain them won't make a big song and dance, they'll simply quietly beaver away tweaking their database so it works in the Latest Greatest Version. The cost of that isn't seen.
Second up: Something that a lot of people in IT don't realise unless/until they start their own business. Marketing something with any degree of success is remarkably hard - and it's as much an art as it is a science. At first, "make it free of charge" (or even "Make it remarkably cheap") sounds like an absolute corker of a strategy. How can anyone fail to sell a product when the cost is zero? Hell, you could probably throw up a website and have the world beating a path to your door inside a few days!
It doesn't work like that. If you're buying a product of any significance, the choice of product probably comes more from the salesman than from the product itself. As soon as you start saying things like "the software is free, but you'd have to pay for consulting to make it all work together" - you've got two huge problems. "The software is free" is the classic "sounds too good to be true" offer that will usually be regarded with extreme suspicion - and as soon as you say just one thing that makes your prospect suspicious of you, that's it. You've lost their trust and you won't get it back again. If you've ever watched Dragons' Den (I believe the US equivalent is called "Shark Tank"), you'll have seen exactly this happen.
The second problem is the "you'd have to pay for consulting" bit. The IT consulting industry doesn't exactly have a spotless reputation; anyone who's been in industry for any length of time can tell you all about the consultant they brought in at great expense who over-promised and under-delivered. At least with a COTS package there's the possibility of being able to evaluate it for some time before going ahead, that's greatly reduced when you're paying for one-off work.
The biggest "detail" is probably "Nobody has a way to drive a display that size. Yeah, sure, we could build one but the engineer time would be expensive, not to mention tooling up a factory which doesn't come cheap. So unless we can spread that cost over many hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions - of units, the unit price will be so high that few will want to buy it. We have no idea whether or not we could sell that many in the first place, so we're not about to ask someone like Foxconn to run off an initial batch of 250,000. Look what happened when HP did that."
It's not refresh rate that's the problem, it's responsiveness. While an LCD will happily display a nominal 60Hz, there's a certain amount of responsiveness lacking in older LCDs - the time it takes to go from black-white-black again can be rather more than the 16ms-per-frame that 60Hz implies. It's not too noticeable on a desktop, but when you're looking at movies or games it manifests itself as a sort of ghosting effect. The image is changing 60 times/second all right, but even after the display has changed from one frame to the next there's a slight afterglow from the previous frame visible.
Problem with that is that wood-pulp paper goes brittle over time - so such a book would eventually reach a point where as soon as you open it it will fall apart.
However, I understand you can make a paper-like material from the pith of the papyrus plant - I wonder if you could print onto that...
I've been of the opinion since the PlayStation 2/DreamCast/original XBox era game consoles should have standard notebook optical drives in them since it's the most likely part to fail. We could use tool-less removal systems like most 1U servers have to swap them.
I don't get it. If they do that, you might not buy a new console when the old one packs up.
Fifteen years ago,.org,.net and.com made sense and by and large companies registered the domain that made sense for their business.
Then businesses decided that letting someone else own, say, cocacola.net didn't make a lot of sense from a branding point of view. (Which is entirely true; the domain system was devised with little thought given to commercial interests or how they'd likely play out).
Today, most businesses of any size can be counted on to register every TLD that is even remotely well-known - if only to ensure that a porn site in their name does not appear under that domain. Registrars encourage this by heavily advertising every TLD they can think of. So we now get a mad rush of registration every time this happens.
Right now this is at the very early discussion stage - "how would we do this, should we be the last resort rather than the first resort, what sort of judicial oversight should there be etc etc?"
Now is the time for action - the time to write to Nominet and say "I don't want you doing anything without a court order". Because you can guarantee that the police will be writing to Nominet to say "Of course we won't abuse the system! Just let us shut down anything we want. Even better, save us the trouble of having to contact a human being and give us a web portal we can log into to suspend.uk domain names. Judicial oversight? Pah, unnecessary."
It does, but you have to explicitly tell Windows before you shut it down "Look out, I'm going to be booting on different hardware next time around".
The purpose of this is to aid deploying to dissimilar hardware, and it works just fine. But the scenario you describe, it wouldn't work at all because you wouldn't get the opportunity to shut Windows down in this fashion.
1. It's still in alpha stage and it's aiming at a moving target. The idea is it will eventually be broadly equivalent to Windows XP/2003 - I confidently predict that by the time it becomes even remotely stable, we will look upon XP/2003 in much the same way as we look upon NT 3.51 today.
2. Patents. We've seen what happens when a disruptive Linux-based product comes on the market with Android - everybody and his dog is suing Google. The fact that Linux doesn't try to ape Windows - combined with support from the likes of IBM - has kept Linux on the server relatively free from lawsuits (with the obvious exception of SCO) - ReactOS doesn't have anywhere near the level of support from large commercial organisations; I can't imagine many smaller companies wanting to publicly support something that is essentially painting a big target on its back and shouting "Hey, Microsoft! Aim here!".
And no one has old disks lying around with old versions of the compiler from before the server was compromised?
You assume that the compiler was compromised in the most recent server compromise. For all you know it was compromised ten years ago and every compiler ever since has been compromised. Go back far enough, if you'd done that early enough in the evolution of Linux distributions it's entirely possible the C compiler on every distribution and architecture is compromised.
Myself, I take from that paper that for practical purposes there is no such thing as a computer you can offer a cast-iron guarantee is not compromised. The best you can hope for is "as far as we can reasonably tell".
I'd go one step further - for many it's any email they don't want to get. I've seen plenty of people complaining of "spam" from mailing lists that are utterly uncommercial in nature.
I'm not a programmer, but I'm not entirely ignorant either... which leaves me with a question... Assuming that the Kernel was compromised, and the scenario you describe came into being. Isn't it just a matter of examining the Kernel code until you find the naughty bits and expunge them? Or are you basing your nightmare on this infiltration not being detected?
Not at all - the paper describes how one could write a custom C compiler which would automagically insert malicious code when it saw a particular pattern.
With a properly crafted attack you couldn't even compile your own "known clean" compiler - the attack takes advantage of the fact that most modern C compilers can't be compiled without an existing C compiler of some sort. Provided the existing compiler is the malicious one, all it needs to do is insert its own malicious payload as part of the compiler compilation process and every subsequent compiler on that system is equally malicious even though the source code is perfectly clean.
Thing is, the iPad's been out about - what, nearly 18 months now? I reckon if anyone was able to make and sell a similar tablet for $200, they'd have done so by now.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that unless you commit to millions of units (a hell of a risk when nobody has been able to emulate Apple's success to date), it is not physically possible to manufacture a tablet for much less than US$300. By the time you add on the profit margin for distributors and retailers - particularly bricks & mortar retailers - you're not going to be able to sell it for much less than $450-500.
The Raspberry Pi device is a SoC-based computer. It's an ARM chip from Broadcom and it runs Linux. So it'd be dead easy to start people off with Python or Ruby.
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The BBC micro (as far as I can tell, a little before my time) simply dropped the user into a BASIC prompt and left the rest to their imagination.
Not necessarily. The BBC micro had 5 ROM sockets and some of the more sophisticated applications were shipped on a ROM chip. You didn't actually have 5 free, however, because 1 was taken up by the OS and you needed at least one "language" ROM (a ROM that announced that it could provide some sort of user interface). Many people upgraded their BBC to connect to a floppy disk drive; this took up another ROM socket. Therefore, you usually wound up with 2 free.
IIRC the BBC went through each ROM in turn and dropped you into the first language ROM it found. This was almost invariably BASIC, if only because the computer shipped with BASIC in the first socket, but there's no reason it couldn't be something else. Move the chips around and presto! You've got a machine that drops straight into a word processor as soon as you turn it on.
In a 3 words: because NetApp can.
It's not the components or engineering behind the card that cost $30k. NetApp prices it so high because the card boosts the performance of their filers by about the same amount as a ~$50k shelf of SAS disks (click that link and go read NetApp's own marketing documentation). They have got to have price points that make sense to customers.
I would actually say "Because NetApp must".
Were they to sell their unit at, say, $5 or 10,000, they'd be marketing "equivalent performance boost for a tenth/a fifth of the price!", they'd have a huge problem. "Twenty percent cheaper for equivalent performance!" is the sort of marketing message that is believable - but your competitors can probably offer discounts on the order of 20% without anyone really batting an eyelid. "Forty percent cheaper!" is pushing it, but with a strong sales team I daresay you might get away with it.
"Eighty/Ninety percent cheaper!" sends out a very strong message. Specifically, the message it sends out is "This product is so terrible we've pretty much got to give it away just to get shot of it! Please, Christ, just take it off our hands so we can get the space back in our warehouse!". This can work OK when you're selling a product that's an impulse purchase and if it doesn't work out, the buyer can just shift it on eBay. But that's not true for NetApp's products or the market they're selling into.
That will change, believe you me.
In its most basic form (ie. without all the bells and whistles that Sharepoint consultants are hired for), Sharepoint is a perfectly capable document management system which does a fairly passable attempt at eliminating the "where the hell did I put that file?" question you get with a plain fileserver.
This is an extremely good point - Sharepoint is fairly obviously the future, and I imagine in a few years many companies won't even run a vanilla SMB fileserver. Which should be just in time for Samba 4 to come out.
And gaining confidence is an art which big companies are very good at.
It's more than that. I missed it in my original comment, but a lot of people perceive a product has a value broadly equivalent to the amount it's being sold at. (This is part of the reason Apple are able to sell the iPad for a relatively high price yet nobody else can sell a clone for anything like that price. Apple have a reputation of selling a premium product which no other consumer technology firm can really claim - therefore when Apple say "an iPad is worth £400" it follows that a clone product is worth considerably less).
So when a product is being punted at a big fat zero - you might as run an expensive advertising campaign with the catchy tagline "This product is so appalling we can't even give it away" because that's the perception you're feeding.
No, same problem. Customs and habits of our society are bound to creep into such a system, which means that if our society doesn't exist in a few thousand years, nor will anyone who can figure out the symbols.
Maybe some sort of redundant array of well-known languages could act as a kind of English-to-(whatever we all speak 3,000 years from now) dictionary.
Not necessarily, you put Windows onto a domain and all of a sudden you're one person with Domain Admin rights and a stupid password away from having the whole lot compromised.
Throw in the sort of corporate politics that often leads to non-technical senior managers demanding (and getting) domain admin rights and there you go.
Hmm. Actually, that's not a bad idea.
The only thing that concerns me then is that languages don't last forever. How many people speak fluent Latin today, for instance?
First up: Any government department that's got a significant investment in IT can't just go out and replace, say, Microsoft Office with LibreOffice overnight. There's a huge amount of testing to do, and when you hit upon things like Access databases and Excel spreadsheets that have become an entire department's IT system, it's very tempting to say "Stuff it. We'll stick with Office."
It's even more tempting when the F/OSS firm says "Yes, we can replace all those things - it'll cost £X hundred thousand, mind." The cost of a migration to a newer version of Office isn't seen by the higher-ups for the exact same reason that these databases and spreadsheets were able to become so widespread without anyone noticing - the people that maintain them won't make a big song and dance, they'll simply quietly beaver away tweaking their database so it works in the Latest Greatest Version. The cost of that isn't seen.
Second up: Something that a lot of people in IT don't realise unless/until they start their own business. Marketing something with any degree of success is remarkably hard - and it's as much an art as it is a science. At first, "make it free of charge" (or even "Make it remarkably cheap") sounds like an absolute corker of a strategy. How can anyone fail to sell a product when the cost is zero? Hell, you could probably throw up a website and have the world beating a path to your door inside a few days!
It doesn't work like that. If you're buying a product of any significance, the choice of product probably comes more from the salesman than from the product itself. As soon as you start saying things like "the software is free, but you'd have to pay for consulting to make it all work together" - you've got two huge problems. "The software is free" is the classic "sounds too good to be true" offer that will usually be regarded with extreme suspicion - and as soon as you say just one thing that makes your prospect suspicious of you, that's it. You've lost their trust and you won't get it back again. If you've ever watched Dragons' Den (I believe the US equivalent is called "Shark Tank"), you'll have seen exactly this happen.
The second problem is the "you'd have to pay for consulting" bit. The IT consulting industry doesn't exactly have a spotless reputation; anyone who's been in industry for any length of time can tell you all about the consultant they brought in at great expense who over-promised and under-delivered. At least with a COTS package there's the possibility of being able to evaluate it for some time before going ahead, that's greatly reduced when you're paying for one-off work.
The biggest "detail" is probably "Nobody has a way to drive a display that size. Yeah, sure, we could build one but the engineer time would be expensive, not to mention tooling up a factory which doesn't come cheap. So unless we can spread that cost over many hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions - of units, the unit price will be so high that few will want to buy it. We have no idea whether or not we could sell that many in the first place, so we're not about to ask someone like Foxconn to run off an initial batch of 250,000. Look what happened when HP did that."
It's not refresh rate that's the problem, it's responsiveness. While an LCD will happily display a nominal 60Hz, there's a certain amount of responsiveness lacking in older LCDs - the time it takes to go from black-white-black again can be rather more than the 16ms-per-frame that 60Hz implies. It's not too noticeable on a desktop, but when you're looking at movies or games it manifests itself as a sort of ghosting effect. The image is changing 60 times/second all right, but even after the display has changed from one frame to the next there's a slight afterglow from the previous frame visible.
Problem with that is that wood-pulp paper goes brittle over time - so such a book would eventually reach a point where as soon as you open it it will fall apart.
However, I understand you can make a paper-like material from the pith of the papyrus plant - I wonder if you could print onto that...
I've been of the opinion since the PlayStation 2/DreamCast/original XBox era game consoles should have standard notebook optical drives in them since it's the most likely part to fail. We could use tool-less removal systems like most 1U servers have to swap them.
I don't get it. If they do that, you might not buy a new console when the old one packs up.
Fifteen years ago, .org, .net and .com made sense and by and large companies registered the domain that made sense for their business.
Then businesses decided that letting someone else own, say, cocacola.net didn't make a lot of sense from a branding point of view. (Which is entirely true; the domain system was devised with little thought given to commercial interests or how they'd likely play out).
Today, most businesses of any size can be counted on to register every TLD that is even remotely well-known - if only to ensure that a porn site in their name does not appear under that domain. Registrars encourage this by heavily advertising every TLD they can think of. So we now get a mad rush of registration every time this happens.
Actually, I don't think XP/2003 is all that bad. It's reasonably stable, it does what it says on the tin.
It does tend to over-complicate a lot of tasks that should be very simple, but all commercial software does that to a certain extent.
Right now this is at the very early discussion stage - "how would we do this, should we be the last resort rather than the first resort, what sort of judicial oversight should there be etc etc?"
Now is the time for action - the time to write to Nominet and say "I don't want you doing anything without a court order". Because you can guarantee that the police will be writing to Nominet to say "Of course we won't abuse the system! Just let us shut down anything we want. Even better, save us the trouble of having to contact a human being and give us a web portal we can log into to suspend .uk domain names. Judicial oversight? Pah, unnecessary."
It does, but you have to explicitly tell Windows before you shut it down "Look out, I'm going to be booting on different hardware next time around".
The purpose of this is to aid deploying to dissimilar hardware, and it works just fine. But the scenario you describe, it wouldn't work at all because you wouldn't get the opportunity to shut Windows down in this fashion.
ReactOS suffers from two huge problems:
1. It's still in alpha stage and it's aiming at a moving target. The idea is it will eventually be broadly equivalent to Windows XP/2003 - I confidently predict that by the time it becomes even remotely stable, we will look upon XP/2003 in much the same way as we look upon NT 3.51 today.
2. Patents. We've seen what happens when a disruptive Linux-based product comes on the market with Android - everybody and his dog is suing Google. The fact that Linux doesn't try to ape Windows - combined with support from the likes of IBM - has kept Linux on the server relatively free from lawsuits (with the obvious exception of SCO) - ReactOS doesn't have anywhere near the level of support from large commercial organisations; I can't imagine many smaller companies wanting to publicly support something that is essentially painting a big target on its back and shouting "Hey, Microsoft! Aim here!".
And no one has old disks lying around with old versions of the compiler from before the server was compromised?
You assume that the compiler was compromised in the most recent server compromise. For all you know it was compromised ten years ago and every compiler ever since has been compromised. Go back far enough, if you'd done that early enough in the evolution of Linux distributions it's entirely possible the C compiler on every distribution and architecture is compromised.
Myself, I take from that paper that for practical purposes there is no such thing as a computer you can offer a cast-iron guarantee is not compromised. The best you can hope for is "as far as we can reasonably tell".
I'd go one step further - for many it's any email they don't want to get. I've seen plenty of people complaining of "spam" from mailing lists that are utterly uncommercial in nature.
I'm not a programmer, but I'm not entirely ignorant either... which leaves me with a question... Assuming that the Kernel was compromised, and the scenario you describe came into being. Isn't it just a matter of examining the Kernel code until you find the naughty bits and expunge them? Or are you basing your nightmare on this infiltration not being detected?
Not at all - the paper describes how one could write a custom C compiler which would automagically insert malicious code when it saw a particular pattern.
With a properly crafted attack you couldn't even compile your own "known clean" compiler - the attack takes advantage of the fact that most modern C compilers can't be compiled without an existing C compiler of some sort. Provided the existing compiler is the malicious one, all it needs to do is insert its own malicious payload as part of the compiler compilation process and every subsequent compiler on that system is equally malicious even though the source code is perfectly clean.
Thing is, the iPad's been out about - what, nearly 18 months now? I reckon if anyone was able to make and sell a similar tablet for $200, they'd have done so by now.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that unless you commit to millions of units (a hell of a risk when nobody has been able to emulate Apple's success to date), it is not physically possible to manufacture a tablet for much less than US$300. By the time you add on the profit margin for distributors and retailers - particularly bricks & mortar retailers - you're not going to be able to sell it for much less than $450-500.
I wondered if anybody would get that.
A job for two who are now of job age, you might say?
?!
The Raspberry Pi device is a SoC-based computer. It's an ARM chip from Broadcom and it runs Linux. So it'd be dead easy to start people off with Python or Ruby.