I'm afraid, sir, that I do get to say "Bay of Pigs". Those were US trooops on Cuban soil. What Cuba had, and Finland lacked, was a nuclear superpower as a direct ally. Numerous NATO allies have been used US military support for decades to prevent the USSR from conquering them, so there are some reasonable points to compare. I also get to say "Cuban Missile Crisis". Getting nuclear weapons stationed by allies also helps.
Goodness, the Finns small army even did serious, serious damage to the numerically larger Soviet army and encouraged other nations to believe that the Soviets were ill-trained and incompetent at war as they had just shown themselves to be. It helped encourage other European countries to believe that they could stand together and resist the much feared Soviet expansion after World War II.
I suspect you're quite correct that Microsoft wouldn't imperil Windows 7 by resurrecting that incredibly bad idea. As I understand WinFS, it actively destabilized the filesystem by providing deep hooks into operations that are normally done by the file system itself, and failed to cooperate with the normal filesystem tools for accessing those files.
But the common people don't have the resources to get law enforcement to do _anything_ about such privacy invasions. If someone managed to publish my personal identity from my Slashdot alias, I'd have little chance of getting any law enforcement to act in any way to get the logs of the web server that did so, at least in the USA. Are you suggesting that the "little people" of the UK would have any luck getting the police to assist in such an investigation?
No, they'll just add features and set the next round of clients to use the new features by default. They can also do a 2-stage process: publish updates to their clients to make it compatible with the newer servers, then update the servers. When they get support calls, tell them "just do a software update!!!".
No, the EU courts have not stopped this practice. Simply because they ruled that Microsoft engages in such anti-competitive practices does not mean Microsoft has stopped, only that they know to be more cautious.
And Microsoft also has a long, still active tradition of providing not only useless but clearly erroneous documentation. The rulings by the EU in 2007, and the latest round of trying to get the real documentation for Samba development, were _after_ Microsoft had provided even more useless documentation due to a 2004 ruling.
This is not something that can be published once and everything is fixed. Poor, inconsistent, and actually mistaken API's are the norm for their office suite.
Yes, they do have to maintain some compatibility. But that compatibility is to be able to read _old_ versions, not to keep new files from new versions of MS Office compatible or even legible to old versions of MS Office. Upgrades that work for MS owned software seamlessly, in particular, but by default save old files in new formats, are absolute hell to keep interoperating with third-party tools.
The result is that features can be added to Outlook that are not compatible with _any_ third party software, and even directly violate third-party API's, and they can and will say "gee, you should have used Exchange/Outlook/Word/Excel! That works!!!!"
Sadly, it's unlikely to work well past t he next Exchange or MS Office upgrade. You _cannot_ maintain compatibility when the primary authors of a product are determined to break your compatibility, and it certainly fits Microsoft's history to do so.
It's very common in DC analog circuitry, and can be theoretically useful in high frequency signal transfer. It helps reduce ground coupling and ground bounce, properly done, and helps reduce signal coupling to other parts of your device by using balanced signals.
So do poodles. This doesn't make their technologies robust, effective, or scalable.
The Soviet Union, and now Russia, suffer from a great burden for innovation: central planning. The raw cunning and human resources burned to get equipment and tools there to fulfill changing needs for industry and research that weren't on the 5-year plan are stunning and detract directly from time available to do good work. The result is that titanium nosecones are well manufactured, but there's no market, so they wound up selling them to Americans to use as vats for microbreweries.
I could use the laughts: I've got friends learning the hard way that their managers lied outright about the value of their corporate benefits and the company's chances in this economic crisis.
No, I'm antique enough that I'e learned how things actually work. The TLD's are hardcoded into the default configurations of most DNS servers, as a default, in case you don't have a local upstream DNS server. So almost everyone I've worked with in the field starts with their TLD's hardcoded, especially lightweight sys-admins who are merely running an internal DNS service and don't trust their provider's upstream DNS server. Even most serious ISP's hesitate and test before altering such a critical service, because they typically only have a few people who have the privileges and the knowledge to really make the changes in their core services. Add the economic problems right now, and those key people are _busy_. Upstream DNS servers have gotten better, I'll admit, but if you _Are_ the upstream server, you need to be particularly careful.
I've worked with numerous DNS servers, for many years. The ability to completely misconfigure your DNS services in a way that is not apparent until days laterr, especially with local caching, having downstream DNS servers to publish your configuration changes to and where someone might have failed to back up their local changes, then knocking themselves right off the network when their changes get overwritten, is pretty amazing. I've actually seen this happen several times in my career, including once last year. (Wasn't my system, we knew better, but I did help walk a colleague through getting enough of his network running to recover his old files from an old server he had given me for other uses and which I hadn't wiped yet.)
That was called 'Trusted Computing', and formerly it was called 'Palladium'. It's a toolkit built into some modern motherboards to do robust encryption, and authentication, and most especially DRM. And Microsoft planned to be the root authority for signing and issuing keys, and storing the private keys "for recovery and law enforcement purposes".
Be very, very frightened of any such approach of storing centralized keys.
I see you've used HTTPS for Subversion, where the canonical implementation stores your passwords in clear-text in your home directory, and raising a concern about this gets you told "if your client isn't secure, you shouldn't be doing source control from it".
This makes explaining to people why you will not allow them to use the same passwords for Subversion on HTTPS as they use for their email and X logins a bit of a problem.
No, you were foolish. ".mobi" is a new top-level domain, approved for portable devices, not for mail servers. You cannot expect most core DNS systems to support it until their next round of upgrades: since the domain was approved in 2006, and the economy is very tight, that could easily be 2011 before it works properly. And frankly, I'd block SMTP to it altogether on the grounds that people shouldn't be runnig mail servers on portable devices and any such address is automatically quite suspicious.
Inserting a new top-level domain into a major DNS infrastructure is a big issue that takes thought and planning: that's not "micromanaging", that's protecting your company's internal organs from careless surgery.
I think the British police are a bit touchy about web pages with personal information included. You see, recently, someone posted the membership of the British Nationalist Party. That's the Nazi party in England, for folks who don't keep track of crazy political groups. The list is still available at http://wikileaks.org/wiki/British_National_Party_membership_and_contacts_list%2C_2007-2008, and it included at least one active policeman.
So, they're understandably a bit touchy about anyone revealing personal details of any member of the government right now, not merely for the physical safety of families of those members, but for the potential political scandal that personal facts can reveal. After all, they recently lost the head of British Petroleum for his perjuring himself about where he met his lover (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1737811.ece). When even such powerful people people as the crown prince can lose his wife because the tabloids get proof of his affairs, well, that government is going to be a bit touchy about anonymous news services that encourage revealing secrets of those in power.
I'm afraid it's an _excellent_ example. They were not convicted of the trumped up child porn charge. They were convicted on bestiality charges, in Tennessee, for material that had been previously established as legal in California. The actual conviction was a successful bait and switch, to get them in court on the _fraudulent_ child porn charges by the postmaster. That wasn't "entrapment". They didn't order the child porn, they didn't even open the box, and it was clear from the signatures on the warrants and on the invoice for the child porn box confirmed that it was the postal inspector who sent it. They never even tried to commit that legal act: the only one who acted illegally there was actually the postal inspector, for sending it.
But as soon as they appeared in court, a court in a state in which they were not trying to do business, they were convicted on local laws they could not be reasonably expected to be aware of, much less follow from California. The case was _nasty_, and should have been overturned on many different issues.
There seems to be a fundamental error with this sentence: an appointed position merely leaves the political process in the hands of a few people doing the appointments, especially behind closed doors. It can work well, but it can also produce a crop of judges who merely rubberstamp the policies of their appointers.
For some idea of how much damage this can do, take a look at what happens when the US Supreme Court is dominated by appointees of one president.
Or send them child porn. Even if they don't open the box, you can use it as an excuse to force prosecution in a place where their site is considered illegal.
In case you think I'm kidding, take a look at the old 'Amateur Action' case. (http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/AABBS_Thomases_Memphis/). It's fascinating material.
>...and that problem is its creeping bureaucracy. Numerous well-established, notable, encyclopaedic articles have been deleted due to the politics or groupthink du jour.
Articles? Sir or madam, entire _societies_ have been deleted due to the politics and bureaucracies that couldn't be bothered to notice the natives or take the people who actively live in that culture seriously, and simply stole or re-allocated resources the natives relied upon for bureaucratic reasons. (For examples, take a look at the history of the South Pacific, and take a look at what England did to create Iraq as a single nation.
The danger of Wikipedia is not, however, that it is doing editing. Due to the attacks on content, some editing by a central authority is necessary to protect some topics from abuse by attackers. The danger is that their editiing policies have been secretive and unanounced, without any well documented avenue of appeal. Now, _that_ is begging to create sacrosanct territories owned by the "Wikipedia Cabal".
They're not the only uneducated ones. Have you ever used Subversion? Have you read the notes from its managers (who mostly work in the Linux and UNIX world) that it's OK that it saves your remote site passwords in clear text, because if you don't trust your local computer, you shouldn't use it?
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I'm afraid, sir, that I do get to say "Bay of Pigs". Those were US trooops on Cuban soil. What Cuba had, and Finland lacked, was a nuclear superpower as a direct ally. Numerous NATO allies have been used US military support for decades to prevent the USSR from conquering them, so there are some reasonable points to compare. I also get to say "Cuban Missile Crisis". Getting nuclear weapons stationed by allies also helps.
Goodness, the Finns small army even did serious, serious damage to the numerically larger Soviet army and encouraged other nations to believe that the Soviets were ill-trained and incompetent at war as they had just shown themselves to be. It helped encourage other European countries to believe that they could stand together and resist the much feared Soviet expansion after World War II.
Size isn't the only factor. Cuba does OK against the USA, for example.
I suspect you're quite correct that Microsoft wouldn't imperil Windows 7 by resurrecting that incredibly bad idea. As I understand WinFS, it actively destabilized the filesystem by providing deep hooks into operations that are normally done by the file system itself, and failed to cooperate with the normal filesystem tools for accessing those files.
But the common people don't have the resources to get law enforcement to do _anything_ about such privacy invasions. If someone managed to publish my personal identity from my Slashdot alias, I'd have little chance of getting any law enforcement to act in any way to get the logs of the web server that did so, at least in the USA. Are you suggesting that the "little people" of the UK would have any luck getting the police to assist in such an investigation?
No, they'll just add features and set the next round of clients to use the new features by default. They can also do a 2-stage process: publish updates to their clients to make it compatible with the newer servers, then update the servers. When they get support calls, tell them "just do a software update!!!".
No, the EU courts have not stopped this practice. Simply because they ruled that Microsoft engages in such anti-competitive practices does not mean Microsoft has stopped, only that they know to be more cautious. And Microsoft also has a long, still active tradition of providing not only useless but clearly erroneous documentation. The rulings by the EU in 2007, and the latest round of trying to get the real documentation for Samba development, were _after_ Microsoft had provided even more useless documentation due to a 2004 ruling. This is not something that can be published once and everything is fixed. Poor, inconsistent, and actually mistaken API's are the norm for their office suite.
Yes, they do have to maintain some compatibility. But that compatibility is to be able to read _old_ versions, not to keep new files from new versions of MS Office compatible or even legible to old versions of MS Office. Upgrades that work for MS owned software seamlessly, in particular, but by default save old files in new formats, are absolute hell to keep interoperating with third-party tools.
The result is that features can be added to Outlook that are not compatible with _any_ third party software, and even directly violate third-party API's, and they can and will say "gee, you should have used Exchange/Outlook/Word/Excel! That works!!!!"
Sadly, it's unlikely to work well past t he next Exchange or MS Office upgrade. You _cannot_ maintain compatibility when the primary authors of a product are determined to break your compatibility, and it certainly fits Microsoft's history to do so.
What if we copulate with food animals?
It's very common in DC analog circuitry, and can be theoretically useful in high frequency signal transfer. It helps reduce ground coupling and ground bounce, properly done, and helps reduce signal coupling to other parts of your device by using balanced signals.
So do poodles. This doesn't make their technologies robust, effective, or scalable.
The Soviet Union, and now Russia, suffer from a great burden for innovation: central planning. The raw cunning and human resources burned to get equipment and tools there to fulfill changing needs for industry and research that weren't on the 5-year plan are stunning and detract directly from time available to do good work. The result is that titanium nosecones are well manufactured, but there's no market, so they wound up selling them to Americans to use as vats for microbreweries.
It's *good* to be king.
I could use the laughts: I've got friends learning the hard way that their managers lied outright about the value of their corporate benefits and the company's chances in this economic crisis.
jargon82 did correct me on what .mobi is for: my point that I wouldn't want to block SMTP to it also fell apart with that correction.
No, I'm antique enough that I'e learned how things actually work. The TLD's are hardcoded into the default configurations of most DNS servers, as a default, in case you don't have a local upstream DNS server. So almost everyone I've worked with in the field starts with their TLD's hardcoded, especially lightweight sys-admins who are merely running an internal DNS service and don't trust their provider's upstream DNS server. Even most serious ISP's hesitate and test before altering such a critical service, because they typically only have a few people who have the privileges and the knowledge to really make the changes in their core services. Add the economic problems right now, and those key people are _busy_. Upstream DNS servers have gotten better, I'll admit, but if you _Are_ the upstream server, you need to be particularly careful.
I've worked with numerous DNS servers, for many years. The ability to completely misconfigure your DNS services in a way that is not apparent until days laterr, especially with local caching, having downstream DNS servers to publish your configuration changes to and where someone might have failed to back up their local changes, then knocking themselves right off the network when their changes get overwritten, is pretty amazing. I've actually seen this happen several times in my career, including once last year. (Wasn't my system, we knew better, but I did help walk a colleague through getting enough of his network running to recover his old files from an old server he had given me for other uses and which I hadn't wiped yet.)
That was called 'Trusted Computing', and formerly it was called 'Palladium'. It's a toolkit built into some modern motherboards to do robust encryption, and authentication, and most especially DRM. And Microsoft planned to be the root authority for signing and issuing keys, and storing the private keys "for recovery and law enforcement purposes".
Be very, very frightened of any such approach of storing centralized keys.
I see you've used HTTPS for Subversion, where the canonical implementation stores your passwords in clear-text in your home directory, and raising a concern about this gets you told "if your client isn't secure, you shouldn't be doing source control from it".
This makes explaining to people why you will not allow them to use the same passwords for Subversion on HTTPS as they use for their email and X logins a bit of a problem.
Thank you, I seem to have gotten the purpose of .mobi backwards.
But my comments on the difficulty and risks of adding TLD's in an established network stands.
No, you were foolish. ".mobi" is a new top-level domain, approved for portable devices, not for mail servers. You cannot expect most core DNS systems to support it until their next round of upgrades: since the domain was approved in 2006, and the economy is very tight, that could easily be 2011 before it works properly. And frankly, I'd block SMTP to it altogether on the grounds that people shouldn't be runnig mail servers on portable devices and any such address is automatically quite suspicious.
Inserting a new top-level domain into a major DNS infrastructure is a big issue that takes thought and planning: that's not "micromanaging", that's protecting your company's internal organs from careless surgery.
I think the British police are a bit touchy about web pages with personal information included. You see, recently, someone posted the membership of the British Nationalist Party. That's the Nazi party in England, for folks who don't keep track of crazy political groups. The list is still available at http://wikileaks.org/wiki/British_National_Party_membership_and_contacts_list%2C_2007-2008, and it included at least one active policeman.
So, they're understandably a bit touchy about anyone revealing personal details of any member of the government right now, not merely for the physical safety of families of those members, but for the potential political scandal that personal facts can reveal. After all, they recently lost the head of British Petroleum for his perjuring himself about where he met his lover (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1737811.ece). When even such powerful people people as the crown prince can lose his wife because the tabloids get proof of his affairs, well, that government is going to be a bit touchy about anonymous news services that encourage revealing secrets of those in power.
I'm afraid it's an _excellent_ example. They were not convicted of the trumped up child porn charge. They were convicted on bestiality charges, in Tennessee, for material that had been previously established as legal in California. The actual conviction was a successful bait and switch, to get them in court on the _fraudulent_ child porn charges by the postmaster. That wasn't "entrapment". They didn't order the child porn, they didn't even open the box, and it was clear from the signatures on the warrants and on the invoice for the child porn box confirmed that it was the postal inspector who sent it. They never even tried to commit that legal act: the only one who acted illegally there was actually the postal inspector, for sending it.
But as soon as they appeared in court, a court in a state in which they were not trying to do business, they were convicted on local laws they could not be reasonably expected to be aware of, much less follow from California. The case was _nasty_, and should have been overturned on many different issues.
There seems to be a fundamental error with this sentence: an appointed position merely leaves the political process in the hands of a few people doing the appointments, especially behind closed doors. It can work well, but it can also produce a crop of judges who merely rubberstamp the policies of their appointers.
For some idea of how much damage this can do, take a look at what happens when the US Supreme Court is dominated by appointees of one president.
Or send them child porn. Even if they don't open the box, you can use it as an excuse to force prosecution in a place where their site is considered illegal.
In case you think I'm kidding, take a look at the old 'Amateur Action' case. (http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/AABBS_Thomases_Memphis/). It's fascinating material.
You wrote:
> ...and that problem is its creeping bureaucracy. Numerous well-established, notable, encyclopaedic articles have been deleted due to the politics or groupthink du jour.
Articles? Sir or madam, entire _societies_ have been deleted due to the politics and bureaucracies that couldn't be bothered to notice the natives or take the people who actively live in that culture seriously, and simply stole or re-allocated resources the natives relied upon for bureaucratic reasons. (For examples, take a look at the history of the South Pacific, and take a look at what England did to create Iraq as a single nation.
The danger of Wikipedia is not, however, that it is doing editing. Due to the attacks on content, some editing by a central authority is necessary to protect some topics from abuse by attackers. The danger is that their editiing policies have been secretive and unanounced, without any well documented avenue of appeal. Now, _that_ is begging to create sacrosanct territories owned by the "Wikipedia Cabal".
They're not the only uneducated ones. Have you ever used Subversion? Have you read the notes from its managers (who mostly work in the Linux and UNIX world) that it's OK that it saves your remote site passwords in clear text, because if you don't trust your local computer, you shouldn't use it?