Personally, I'd be fine with the poisoning software trashing the disk, as long as it left an easy-to-find message saying, "Get some better security for your system! You got hacked!" If it got even 10% of the people so affected informed about the issue, it would be a major vicotry.
The other thing you've forgotten is that until this time the car companies had worked closely with the Union of Auto Workers to provide very generous pensions, healthcare, etc for their employees, and through the UAW's monopoly on the industry, basically subsidized all of these things by charging higher prices for cars. This was fine with the Big Three in Detroit, since starting up a car manufacturing firm required a ton of capital (I think GM was the world's bigger corporation at one point), so that even if you wanted to undercut them on prices you wouldn't be able to start operating.
Enter Japanese auto firms, with smaller margins, lower overhead, and government assistance with pensions and healthcare, and the rest is history.
One of the things I've noticed about the computer culture on the internet is that these people like to read technical articles on cool new stuff. One of the reasons for the various BSD's increase in mindshare is that they've started doing more presswork, so that they announce stuff, here, on kernelthreads, etc, when there's a new feature or mechanism and how it's great. OpenBSD does this especially well. It usually starts flamewars about this vs. that, but the point is that it gets people to read about the product. If I read about the compelling features in the latest *BSD, or the newest Linux distro, and there's an easy link to download an ISO, I am much more likely to try it out than if I have to subscribe to a developer's blog or read an mailing list.
Think about it--what's the current status of DragonflyBSD (if you use it or are involved with it, you don't count)? I know the general status of FreeBSD and OpenBSD because they frequently announce their stuff, but I haven't heard more than a whisper about DragonflyBSD since the project started. I never see stuff on slashdot or other newsy sites about OpenSolaris, and if they want to build a community and encourage a following, they need to rectify this.
If anyone at Sun is reading this, tell your boss to pay some developer an extra $100 or so a month to write about the system online and post it to prominent places (even better would be a to have an unofficial 'community liason' who knows how all the stuff works, but spends his full time working with stories, comments, etc rather than developing).
FORTRAN, Lisp, and Cobol have all lost ground. BASIC and Pascal used to be the big dogs instead of also-rans, and if Ada ever had any ground in the first place, it lost that.
Even Perl isn't as popular as it used to be, now that other languages have started to fill its niche.
Times change, and it should be unsurprising that the dominant programming languages change along with it. Some day, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, Python, and Ruby will all be obsolescent as well. Thirty years ago, computers were vastly different than they are now. In another thirty years, there will have been another quantum leap (intended) in computing. Why should the languages we program them with remain the same?
There was a lot of talk a while back of Apple buying up Sun or SGI, or having a merger, which would enable them to muscle into the hard-core server market, soup up their unix-based OS, and get a ton of chip-level hardware wizards on board. Now knowing that this is basically impossible, I wonder if execs at those two now also-rans are getting ready to byte the bullet or bail out.
Someone please tell me how this is different from running rsync in the background whenever someone connects a device.
Right now it only connects between computers: check In the future it could be connected to more mobile devices: check We would need to dick around with the program a lot to be able to do that: check
It seems to me it'd be a tough row to hoe, marketing-wise. Places like Marshall's and Kohl's have conditioned customers to expect slightly-flawed merchandise and deep discounts, not minor discounts. If it's true that they aren't substantially more efficient than quad cores, then (under the assumption that energy is increasingly the greatest cost) there's not a terribly good reason for anyone to buy one.
Personally, I would sell them at dual-core prices and get rid of the whole lot pronto.
Laser engraving, seriously. There's some project out there.... ah yes, here, that seeks to preserve all the languages of the world by laser-engraving them onto stainless steel plates. They've changed things up a bit, but the basic idea is the same: put it somewhere it won't get lost or corrupted, and if it's important, people will figure it out later. If it's not important, then it doesn't matter.
Very few things in the world are really worth keeping for even a lifetime. If your grandkids inherit all of your stuff, what will they save and keep, and what will they throw away? If you know what they will throw away, why not save them the trouble and toss it yourself?
We've gotten ourselves into this mindset where making backups of every piece of data you've ever owned ought to be saved, for no other reason than because it's easy and cheap. I think everyone should have a periodic storage meltdown to force them to reconsider what it is they really need to have.
WIth quantum computing on the rise, we will then have three different sets of multiplies, one for base 2, one for base 4/quantum base 2, and one for base 10. All of them will be mutually misused, leading to a situation which is more ambiguous, not less.
No, what you must do is put unqualified idealists in teaching positions and call it experimental. When it works, you get the credit, and when it fails, the teachers take the blame.
You could also just use a hardware encryption accelerator, couldn't you? And that has the advantage of enhancing *all* your crypto, not just the disk-based stuff.
because when you IM people, you get to use all the chat abbreviations that show how cool you are. 2moro, idk my bff jill, etc.
The funny thing is, even though it's stupid and more work to do, most young (30) people use SMS exactly as a chat feature, to drag conversations that would normally last 45 seconds into 10-minute affairs. The only reason for this that I can think of is that people are ingrained with the minutes=money formula, but strangely not texting=money. (even though word for word, SMS is more expensive that talking on most plans anyway).
But then, I'm the guy who thinks people should go back to having face to face conversations with IRL friends instead of myspace, facebook, phones, and SMS.
I disagree, the solution is to do away with the concept of any sort of proof-of-identity mechanism. Whatever you come up with, people will always be able to forge it or fake it or commit fraud with. Banks and things like the current situation with the SSN because it gives them someone to go after in the short-term. In the long-term, of course, they have to give you back the money they took, but to do that requires the victim of fraud/identity theft to jump through quite a few bureaucratic hoops to prove they were a victim. In the meantime, the financial institution can get help from the FBI, the Secret Service, and usually the IRS to go after whoever it was that really did it. You get your money back, sans interest earned on it and less legal expenses, fees, and the time you put in. They also don't fix your credit for you, and you can bet you'll still be answering questions to the IRS about it for months, if not years.
Banks could do a lot more to prevent fraud before it happens without having a social security number, but they don't bother because they know either way they end up ahead. Putting them, and not the consumer, on the hook when they get duped by scammers will go a long way towards shoring up bank security and personal information privacy.
It's tempting to say that they're unpatented because MS doesn't want to document their functionality, which would force them to keep supporting older versions (instead of just forcing people to upgrade everything whenever a version of something comes out).
However, I think the real reason is that MS is realizing that sw patents are a god-awful waste of time and resources to obtain. If you have 20 or so new protocols, the fees plus attorney time, plus appeals, plus developers having to document the necessary features, etc can really add up, and it's not altogether clear that such a patent will hold up in court. IBM clued into this a while ago, and MS may have figured out that they make enough money with branding, and vendor and user lock-in that the potential costs of patent licensing outweigh the financial gains.
I'm sure they do, and I'm sure they're very talented. But, my point is, they don't make their money through technical exploits. They do audits and maybe even some white-hack attempts at penetration, but they aren't real cyber-criminals like in the Real World (tm).
If I'm mistaken, please correct me. Also, see what kind of havoc you can cause next year by flooding the pipes with useless data. If the box is too busy serving bogus requests and it drops some legit ones, that counts as service outage, right?
Yes, people will be speaking English in 50years. At the very least you have to wait for the current crop of Americans to die off. No, it doesn't matter if Seagate still exists then, because whoever is selling computer storage will do the same thing. Lastly, it's only become incorrect because people like you showed up and said, "Hey! This is wrong now!" starting in 1999. By contrast, the ANSI and the IEEE made a standard in '91 that said it was right.
So, in summary: there are real bad reasons not to use the new system, and all of the good reasons are spurious. This is a solution desperately in search of a problem.
Well, okay, if you want the long explanation: planes are run by software. That software controls the engines, the wings, the cabin pressure, the radar, etc etc etc etc. If that software (which operates hardware, and is hence an 'operating system') has a bug in it, guess what happens? If you're lucky, the plane doesn't take off. If you're unlucky, the thing conks out and everybody nearly dies. If you're really unlucky, everybody does die, and sometimes people in other planes or on the ground also die. You can't tell a pilot "Okay, remember, when there are two small blips on the radar between 6am and 8am, there could actually be three with one in between the other two. It's a known issue, we're trying to fix it."
Instead, you test everything ad nauseam beforehand, in simulators and in actual flight, under every circumstance imaginable and with a lot of regression testing. You saw how all the Delta flights were grounded because of a mechanical problem that went unfixed? Well, if there were a software bug in a commercial plane you can bet not a god damn one of those planes would take off until it was patched, tested, installed, tested again, and tested at least once more before they could take off again.
So, given how wrong the OP's understanding of software is, I must question the rest of his conclusions as well.
Oh, so you make your living breaking into systems and either selling the information you find, or exploiting it directly to get rich?
My point wasn't that they didn't hire security professionals, or that they didn't hire people who knew how to break into systems. They hired people who don't break into systems professionally, and that's what you'll be up against in the real world. It's like putting Home Guardsmen on the front line.
I think the point is that they won't specifically block them. They will block browser programs that are known to be unsuitable, like the Netscape 2, or IE 4, or Mosaic.
However, if you use browsers don't support plug-ins/protocols/captchas/whatever that paypal demands of the browser, you may still be SOL.
In short: I expect there will be a black-list of unacceptable browser versions, rather than a white-list of accepted browser versions.
You're forgetting one thing: people have already adapted to the "old" usage. Dictionaries already exist saying that "mega-" can mean a factor of 1048576 units of computer data. If we change the system now, what will not happen is that everything disambiguates itself, and the hard disk companies stop lying to customers. What will happen is that
1) Seagate et al. will continue to market their products in terms of GB and TB. 2) Users will be outraged that their 232GiB hard disk only has 231 or so GiBs of usable space due to formatting, thus leaving the problem unsolved. 3) People will lose good slang abbreviations like Meg and Gig to Kib, Mib, Gib (or Jib), Tib, and Pib, which not only sound stupid but will also be hard to distinguish in normal conversation. 4) PHBs will misuse the binary-only versions as if they were base ten, especially if it catches on that "mebi-" is more than "mega-". Techie: Hey boss we've got new computers with 100 mebibytes of L1 cache. PHB: How much is a mebibytes? Techie: 1048576 bytes. PHB: Oh, so it's about a million then. Cool. Next Day PHB: Hey guys, we shipped nearly 2 mebi-units of dongles this quarter. Board: What's mebi-units? PHB: Well, it's.... Proceed into incorrect explanation that convinced Board of Directors that Boss is "with it" 5) As a corollary to 4), people will start using those prefixes to refer to everything in a computer. The new chip is 3.2 GiHz, it draw 25 kiW of power, it weighs 21 Kig, etc. 6) People will always think you are a douchebag.
And that's not even getting into the confusion caused by having two different sets of prefixes for slightly different multipliers, maybe, during the transition.
No, no, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong. Saturday is the seventh day. In Judaism, it's the Sabbath, the day the Lord rested after creation.
In Christianity, which according to itself supersedes Judaism, it is now proper to keep the Sabbath on the Sunday, that is to say the first day of the week, because that is the day Christ rose from the dead and opened the gates to the kingdom of Heaven.
Certain Quaker groups still refer to days and months by numbers, First Day, Tenth Month, etc., so you're not too far off there.
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Personally, I'd be fine with the poisoning software trashing the disk, as long as it left an easy-to-find message saying, "Get some better security for your system! You got hacked!" If it got even 10% of the people so affected informed about the issue, it would be a major vicotry.
The other thing you've forgotten is that until this time the car companies had worked closely with the Union of Auto Workers to provide very generous pensions, healthcare, etc for their employees, and through the UAW's monopoly on the industry, basically subsidized all of these things by charging higher prices for cars. This was fine with the Big Three in Detroit, since starting up a car manufacturing firm required a ton of capital (I think GM was the world's bigger corporation at one point), so that even if you wanted to undercut them on prices you wouldn't be able to start operating.
Enter Japanese auto firms, with smaller margins, lower overhead, and government assistance with pensions and healthcare, and the rest is history.
One of the things I've noticed about the computer culture on the internet is that these people like to read technical articles on cool new stuff. One of the reasons for the various BSD's increase in mindshare is that they've started doing more presswork, so that they announce stuff, here, on kernelthreads, etc, when there's a new feature or mechanism and how it's great. OpenBSD does this especially well. It usually starts flamewars about this vs. that, but the point is that it gets people to read about the product. If I read about the compelling features in the latest *BSD, or the newest Linux distro, and there's an easy link to download an ISO, I am much more likely to try it out than if I have to subscribe to a developer's blog or read an mailing list.
Think about it--what's the current status of DragonflyBSD (if you use it or are involved with it, you don't count)? I know the general status of FreeBSD and OpenBSD because they frequently announce their stuff, but I haven't heard more than a whisper about DragonflyBSD since the project started. I never see stuff on slashdot or other newsy sites about OpenSolaris, and if they want to build a community and encourage a following, they need to rectify this.
If anyone at Sun is reading this, tell your boss to pay some developer an extra $100 or so a month to write about the system online and post it to prominent places (even better would be a to have an unofficial 'community liason' who knows how all the stuff works, but spends his full time working with stories, comments, etc rather than developing).
FORTRAN, Lisp, and Cobol have all lost ground. BASIC and Pascal used to be the big dogs instead of also-rans, and if Ada ever had any ground in the first place, it lost that.
Even Perl isn't as popular as it used to be, now that other languages have started to fill its niche.
Times change, and it should be unsurprising that the dominant programming languages change along with it. Some day, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, Python, and Ruby will all be obsolescent as well. Thirty years ago, computers were vastly different than they are now. In another thirty years, there will have been another quantum leap (intended) in computing. Why should the languages we program them with remain the same?
There was a lot of talk a while back of Apple buying up Sun or SGI, or having a merger, which would enable them to muscle into the hard-core server market, soup up their unix-based OS, and get a ton of chip-level hardware wizards on board. Now knowing that this is basically impossible, I wonder if execs at those two now also-rans are getting ready to byte the bullet or bail out.
Someone please tell me how this is different from running rsync in the background whenever someone connects a device.
Right now it only connects between computers: check
In the future it could be connected to more mobile devices: check
We would need to dick around with the program a lot to be able to do that: check
It seems to me it'd be a tough row to hoe, marketing-wise. Places like Marshall's and Kohl's have conditioned customers to expect slightly-flawed merchandise and deep discounts, not minor discounts. If it's true that they aren't substantially more efficient than quad cores, then (under the assumption that energy is increasingly the greatest cost) there's not a terribly good reason for anyone to buy one.
Personally, I would sell them at dual-core prices and get rid of the whole lot pronto.
If they're really your friends you will.
Laser engraving, seriously. There's some project out there....
ah yes, here, that seeks to preserve all the languages of the world by laser-engraving them onto stainless steel plates. They've changed things up a bit, but the basic idea is the same: put it somewhere it won't get lost or corrupted, and if it's important, people will figure it out later. If it's not important, then it doesn't matter.
Very few things in the world are really worth keeping for even a lifetime. If your grandkids inherit all of your stuff, what will they save and keep, and what will they throw away? If you know what they will throw away, why not save them the trouble and toss it yourself?
We've gotten ourselves into this mindset where making backups of every piece of data you've ever owned ought to be saved, for no other reason than because it's easy and cheap. I think everyone should have a periodic storage meltdown to force them to reconsider what it is they really need to have.
WIth quantum computing on the rise, we will then have three different sets of multiplies, one for base 2, one for base 4/quantum base 2, and one for base 10. All of them will be mutually misused, leading to a situation which is more ambiguous, not less.
No, what you must do is put unqualified idealists in teaching positions and call it experimental. When it works, you get the credit, and when it fails, the teachers take the blame.
You could also just use a hardware encryption accelerator, couldn't you? And that has the advantage of enhancing *all* your crypto, not just the disk-based stuff.
because when you IM people, you get to use all the chat abbreviations that show how cool you are. 2moro, idk my bff jill, etc.
The funny thing is, even though it's stupid and more work to do, most young (30) people use SMS exactly as a chat feature, to drag conversations that would normally last 45 seconds into 10-minute affairs. The only reason for this that I can think of is that people are ingrained with the minutes=money formula, but strangely not texting=money. (even though word for word, SMS is more expensive that talking on most plans anyway).
But then, I'm the guy who thinks people should go back to having face to face conversations with IRL friends instead of myspace, facebook, phones, and SMS.
I disagree, the solution is to do away with the concept of any sort of proof-of-identity mechanism. Whatever you come up with, people will always be able to forge it or fake it or commit fraud with. Banks and things like the current situation with the SSN because it gives them someone to go after in the short-term. In the long-term, of course, they have to give you back the money they took, but to do that requires the victim of fraud/identity theft to jump through quite a few bureaucratic hoops to prove they were a victim. In the meantime, the financial institution can get help from the FBI, the Secret Service, and usually the IRS to go after whoever it was that really did it. You get your money back, sans interest earned on it and less legal expenses, fees, and the time you put in. They also don't fix your credit for you, and you can bet you'll still be answering questions to the IRS about it for months, if not years.
Banks could do a lot more to prevent fraud before it happens without having a social security number, but they don't bother because they know either way they end up ahead. Putting them, and not the consumer, on the hook when they get duped by scammers will go a long way towards shoring up bank security and personal information privacy.
It's tempting to say that they're unpatented because MS doesn't want to document their functionality, which would force them to keep supporting older versions (instead of just forcing people to upgrade everything whenever a version of something comes out).
However, I think the real reason is that MS is realizing that sw patents are a god-awful waste of time and resources to obtain. If you have 20 or so new protocols, the fees plus attorney time, plus appeals, plus developers having to document the necessary features, etc can really add up, and it's not altogether clear that such a patent will hold up in court. IBM clued into this a while ago, and MS may have figured out that they make enough money with branding, and vendor and user lock-in that the potential costs of patent licensing outweigh the financial gains.
Let's hope so!
I'm sure they do, and I'm sure they're very talented. But, my point is, they don't make their money through technical exploits. They do audits and maybe even some white-hack attempts at penetration, but they aren't real cyber-criminals like in the Real World (tm).
If I'm mistaken, please correct me. Also, see what kind of havoc you can cause next year by flooding the pipes with useless data. If the box is too busy serving bogus requests and it drops some legit ones, that counts as service outage, right?
Yes, people will be speaking English in 50years. At the very least you have to wait for the current crop of Americans to die off.
No, it doesn't matter if Seagate still exists then, because whoever is selling computer storage will do the same thing.
Lastly, it's only become incorrect because people like you showed up and said, "Hey! This is wrong now!" starting in 1999. By contrast, the ANSI and the IEEE made a standard in '91 that said it was right.
So, in summary: there are real bad reasons not to use the new system, and all of the good reasons are spurious. This is a solution desperately in search of a problem.
Well, okay, if you want the long explanation: planes are run by software. That software controls the engines, the wings, the cabin pressure, the radar, etc etc etc etc. If that software (which operates hardware, and is hence an 'operating system') has a bug in it, guess what happens? If you're lucky, the plane doesn't take off. If you're unlucky, the thing conks out and everybody nearly dies. If you're really unlucky, everybody does die, and sometimes people in other planes or on the ground also die. You can't tell a pilot "Okay, remember, when there are two small blips on the radar between 6am and 8am, there could actually be three with one in between the other two. It's a known issue, we're trying to fix it."
Instead, you test everything ad nauseam beforehand, in simulators and in actual flight, under every circumstance imaginable and with a lot of regression testing. You saw how all the Delta flights were grounded because of a mechanical problem that went unfixed? Well, if there were a software bug in a commercial plane you can bet not a god damn one of those planes would take off until it was patched, tested, installed, tested again, and tested at least once more before they could take off again.
So, given how wrong the OP's understanding of software is, I must question the rest of his conclusions as well.
Oh, so you make your living breaking into systems and either selling the information you find, or exploiting it directly to get rich?
My point wasn't that they didn't hire security professionals, or that they didn't hire people who knew how to break into systems. They hired people who don't break into systems professionally, and that's what you'll be up against in the real world. It's like putting Home Guardsmen on the front line.
and Red men FealEx cash, but I have no idea what that means.
I think the point is that they won't specifically block them. They will block browser programs that are known to be unsuitable, like the Netscape 2, or IE 4, or Mosaic.
However, if you use browsers don't support plug-ins/protocols/captchas/whatever that paypal demands of the browser, you may still be SOL.
In short: I expect there will be a black-list of unacceptable browser versions, rather than a white-list of accepted browser versions.
Well trolled, sir. Well-trolled.
(Also OT: You obviously don't have anything to do with avionics software.)
You're forgetting one thing: people have already adapted to the "old" usage. Dictionaries already exist saying that "mega-" can mean a factor of 1048576 units of computer data. If we change the system now, what will not happen is that everything disambiguates itself, and the hard disk companies stop lying to customers. What will happen is that
1) Seagate et al. will continue to market their products in terms of GB and TB.
2) Users will be outraged that their 232GiB hard disk only has 231 or so GiBs of usable space due to formatting, thus leaving the problem unsolved.
3) People will lose good slang abbreviations like Meg and Gig to Kib, Mib, Gib (or Jib), Tib, and Pib, which not only sound stupid but will also be hard to distinguish in normal conversation.
4) PHBs will misuse the binary-only versions as if they were base ten, especially if it catches on that "mebi-" is more than "mega-".
Techie: Hey boss we've got new computers with 100 mebibytes of L1 cache.
PHB: How much is a mebibytes?
Techie: 1048576 bytes.
PHB: Oh, so it's about a million then. Cool.
Next Day
PHB: Hey guys, we shipped nearly 2 mebi-units of dongles this quarter.
Board: What's mebi-units?
PHB: Well, it's.... Proceed into incorrect explanation that convinced Board of Directors that Boss is "with it"
5) As a corollary to 4), people will start using those prefixes to refer to everything in a computer. The new chip is 3.2 GiHz, it draw 25 kiW of power, it weighs 21 Kig, etc.
6) People will always think you are a douchebag.
And that's not even getting into the confusion caused by having two different sets of prefixes for slightly different multipliers, maybe, during the transition.
Ask any Brit: How much is a trillion?
No, no, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong. Saturday is the seventh day. In Judaism, it's the Sabbath, the day the Lord rested after creation.
In Christianity, which according to itself supersedes Judaism, it is now proper to keep the Sabbath on the Sunday, that is to say the first day of the week, because that is the day Christ rose from the dead and opened the gates to the kingdom of Heaven.
Certain Quaker groups still refer to days and months by numbers, First Day, Tenth Month, etc., so you're not too far off there.