The big problems with the Lisa were hardware, not software.
When they first came out, a friend of mine worked in a group that bought a Lisa for doing graphic arts things. Everybody thought it was totally wonderful. Unfortunately, the Lisa used a weird proprietary floppy. The entire group had to share one floppy for backups. That was all they could get -- turned out Sony (the only supplier) couldn't produce them in anywhere near the required volume.
Steve Jobs is a classic example of a non-techie who is totally infatuated with New and Wonderful technology. NeXT had exactly the same problem -- built with wonderful new technology that couldn't be mass produced at the time.
Engineering is the art of ordering things out of catalogs. -- sgs
Methanol is not ethanol. Methanol is toxic when drunk, toxic when the vapor is breathed, toxic when absorbed through the intact skin, and really bad news if you squirt a couple of drops in your eye.
Don't forget 100% miscible with water. Spill the stuff and any ground water or reservoir it gets into is going to be poisonous....
Methanol is a perfectly fine chemical, as long as you take good care of it. As a large scale fuel, its toxicity makes it Right Straight Out.
Ideally, they could do the same thing to produce ethanol, which is essentially harmless. Unfortunately, that attracts the attention of Mister Tax Man.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, the *real* pirates just make a bit-by-bit master and start stamping disks....
A few (or even a few thousand) college students swapping MP3s won't make a blip on an album's bottom line. Studies I've seen (in pre-MP3 days, true) show that people who copy and swap music buy more of it than those who don't -- the record companies are ticking off their best customers.
The issue, as always, is control. "You WILL listen to what WE TELL YOU to. You WILL buy what WE TELL YOU to. We will jerk you around because WE WANT TO, and there's not a DAMN THING you can do about it."
As artists figure out how to make money themselves off the net (not yet a solved problem) and start putting the squeeze on the big labels, I look for the Big Guys to get even more obnoxious. More petty lawsuits. More restrictive contracts with artists, stores, and broadcasters. More big money to politicians.
I would guess that they add up all the time the sysadmins spent fixing the problems, all the time that their managers spent yelling at them, all the time the users had to wait while the sysadmins were fixing things, all the time that the Poo-Bahs spent talking to the press, etc, and added the usual Government multiplier for "overhead" (100% - 400%, the last time I looked.)
Question -- what the bleep do sysadmins do for a living? Seems to me that keeping crackers out of the Web pages would be featured prominently in the job description. As far as I'm concerned, the sysadmins screwed up by letting him in and then they had to work overtime to clean up the mess. Big deal. Far as I can see, it's part of the job.
The crackers that "deface" Web pages are *not* the ones you worry about. Think what you could do by changing some subtle bits of information....
In any case, Zyklon seems to be utterly clueless. He needs to learn that he's a big boy now, and his actions can have real consequences. In particular, twisting the tails of the Powers the Be can get you into Real Trouble (tm). It's their laws, their cops, and their courts.
The sentance is, IMHO, 'way too severe, but not at all surprising.
When you're at the polls, nobody can tell how you voted. If you're at home or at work, others can make sure you vote the "right" way. Or just throw a big "internet votng party" with lots of booze and good times for one candidate.
The Iowa experiment simply looks like a way of tallying the votes over the Internet. Not particularly interesting.
In any case, the reason that folks don't vote is that they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their vote won't make a difference to anything they care about. The "inconvienence" of going to the polls is simply a convienent excuse.
Obviously, as im so naive i need explanation as to what you are actually losing by allowing this mostrosity of privacy invasion to happen... any takers?
Well, right now, if you have no MP3s on your system that the recording industry might define (now or in the future) as "pirated", not much. If the list of MP3s on your machine matches the CD list, the recording industry presumably won't care.
If it doesn't match, you may be called upon to demonstrate that all of your MP3s are "legal" copies, in a court of the recording company's choosing. The court will be in New York or Los Angeles, whichever one you're furthest from.
Further down the line, when it gets established that software companies can monotor your computer use, all of the software you use can make very sure that you are really honoring all of those shrink-wrap agreements.
If you're very careful to never do anything that even looks like it might be something that somebody wouldn't like, I suppose you wouldn't care.
Remember, we have a glut of lawyers in this country, all of whom think that the rest of us owe them a good living.
For the, uh, suits, its a mark of status. Consider the concept of the "power suit", or, even sillier, the "power tie". An anthropologist could have all sorts of fun with corporate power relationships.
IT Worker Shortage:
There has never been an "IT worker shortage". There is a "shortage of IT workers at the salary we offer". Raise the salaries and workers will come out of the woodwork. Hint -- look at housing prices. A mid-level worker should be able to buy a mid-priced house with no more than a 20 minute commute.
As to what the B-schools are up to, there are a number of obvious trends:
1. Foreign workers. They get paid less and are far more docile than domestic workers.
2. Overseas outsourcing. Move the whole operation to India or Russia. Even cheaper than #1, but they lose control over the workers.
3. The search for a magic "software engineering methadology" that will enable illiterate Malaysians to crank out top quality code for US$0.18/hour like they crank out sneakers.
Seems to me I've seen this same rant, on and off, since the 1950s. Colleges suck, professors suck, students don't get a real (tm) education. The solution is the author's particular brand of snake oil.
Here, the solution is "The Virtual University", which Schank never says anything about except that it uses computers. Got news for you -- people have been trying to use computers in education since the 1960s, with "programmed instruction". There are a few minor successes (typing tutor programs come to mind), but by and large, they have failed miserably.
IMHO, Schank has very little understanding of the purposes and goals of a University education. The interview was littered with fallacies. A few of the more glaring ones --
* Tests and exams are "bad". But how do the students rate their own progress?
* Prerequsites are "bad". Ever been in a class with an obnoxious moron without the prerequisites, who nags the professor to explain things he should already know?
* Required survey courses are "bad". Students are expected to be familiar with all aspects of a field when they enter it.
* Tenure is "bad". Professors should be fired for expressing politically unpopular opinions, or for being "dead wood" (whatever that means).
* Like many modern academics, he does not see the difference between a university and a trade school.
These are just the ones that come to mind immediately. There are more.
There are certainly problems with University education. But they're not going to be solved by someone who can't even come up with an answer to the question "Why should I go to Harvard instead of the University of Maryland?" (Hint -- who are your classmates?)
If Schank thinks so highly of his Virtual University, let him get off his butt and build it. I agree fully with the other posters who have said that it will either be a diploma mill or a long, expensive Microsoft commercial.
I just got the spam from NS, and it was a bit different than described. The account name was the administrator's last name with a random number added; not the domain name as described. The password was as described; the account name with "nsi" added to the end.
A bit better; anyone trying to screw up somebody's account would have to know how to use WHOIS and guess a short number.
Clueless. Utterly clueless. And these are the guys who claim to be running the Net??
My password is now a random string that I've already forgotten. Why would I need another e-mail account anyway? Don't you have to have an e-mail address (contact point) to set up a domain name?
Simple. You rate your pages "voluntarily". You will get it wrong. (What is the difference between "crude speech" and "vulgar speech"?) Another poster mentioned 10K "keywords"; I think this is about right.
You are now a "criminal", along with every other Web page designer on the planet. This means that any government on the planet can go after you any time they want.
We would have a situation similar to what we have in the US with respect to traffic laws. It is essentially impossible to drive without violating traffic laws; this gives the police the right to stop anyone, any time. After all, they "violated a traffic law!"
It's another lever for governments to go after anybody they don't like.
Great. My wife has this nasty habit of voting for jerks. Now, with Internet voting, I can look over her shoulder and make sure she votes for the right people.
Also, with the bars closed on Election Day, it's hard to get a good voting party going. This way, I can throw a big party, serve lots of booze, and make sure lots of folks vote for the right people.
Seriously, electronic voting is wide open to all forms of coerced voting. The ward heelers and party bosses will love it. Marion Barry controlled Washington, DC for years with a variant of the second tactic above.
(Disclaimer -- If you think I'd actually do something like that, you don't know me very well. Get off yer arses and *work*, not just vote, for your candidates.)
According to a story a year or so ago in the Washington Post (any reference I might have had is long gone, unfortunately), all the wiretaps in the world are useless for hunting down the local drug dealers.
Problem is that they use a combination of cellphones, pagers, pay telephones, and constantly shifting slang that's so confusing and fragmented that the cops never know what they're hearing. This was true even with analog cellphones, which can be eavesdropped without a warrant. All you need is a scanner. You probably couldn't use the warantless eavesdropping as evidence, but you could us it to be in the right place at the right time. With digital cellphones, you just need a fancier scanner. Near as I can tell, the only cellphone technology that's really encrypted is GSM, and it is being phased out in the US. (Note -- "spread spectrum" is not encryption, despite press releases from cellphone companies.)
So what's their *real* target? Given the LE abuses of the past, I would say political dissent. Gotta make sure that anybody who gets elected is solidly pro-FBI!
I didn't know that joke RFCs had drafts. Note that the bibliography contains an unpublished "proof" of Fermat's Last Therom.
Near as I can tell (given the grammar) he assumes:
1. Numbers in different bases are "really" in some sense different. In other words, 192(decimal), C0(hex), and 11000000(binary) are all "different numbers". So he has no problem with getting more than 2^32 addresses in 32 bits, because he is working in decimal, not binary.[1]
2. The "dots" in the standard notation for Internet addresses really mean something. (In reality, they're just placeholders, like the commas in "100,000,000".)
3. A "subnet" is magically attached to an IP address. (He seems to catch this error later on.)
What he is doing is letting his addresses overlap.
Now, since he has ambiguous addresses, he has to carry the subnet mask around in the IP packet. Instead of having a 32 bit address, we have a 32 bit address and a 32 bit subnet mask that we have to carry around in our packet. For some reason, he thinks this is better than a 64 bit address. (This would also make routing essentially impossible, but that's another story.)
If you're going to mess with the address length (no matter how you define address!), you might as well go straight to IPv6. The whole point of IPv6 was that *any* change at all in IP was going to be such a pain that we might as well go to a whole new IP protocol.
If you need local addressing, use address masquerading. It works, and the protocol wonks hate it.
-- [1] Q: Why can't Real Programmers tell the difference betwen Halloween and Christmas?
The numbers I've seen for the "tax" look like the only ones that will be affected are major spammers. Lotsa zeros after the decimal point. So what's the problem?
Think about it for a minute. What would the Gov't need to collect a tax like this? Well, every e-mail client and gateway would have to have a secure component to log e-mail messages. This component would have to be queried by the Gov't computers to calculate the "tax".
Now a simple software upgrade can also tell if you are sending messages to an "inappropriate" location.
Expect the "upgrade" sometime in President Buchannan's second term....
Slashdot Mirror
The big problems with the Lisa were hardware, not software.
When they first came out, a friend of mine worked in a group that bought a Lisa for doing graphic arts things. Everybody thought it was totally wonderful. Unfortunately, the Lisa used a weird proprietary floppy. The entire group had to share one floppy for backups. That was all they could get -- turned out Sony (the only supplier) couldn't produce them in anywhere near the required volume.
Steve Jobs is a classic example of a non-techie who is totally infatuated with New and Wonderful technology. NeXT had exactly the same problem -- built with wonderful new technology that couldn't be mass produced at the time.
Engineering is the art of ordering things out of catalogs. -- sgs
Methanol is not ethanol. Methanol is toxic when drunk, toxic when the vapor is breathed, toxic when absorbed through the intact skin, and really bad news if you squirt a couple of drops in your eye.
Don't forget 100% miscible with water. Spill the stuff and any ground water or reservoir it gets into is going to be poisonous....
Methanol is a perfectly fine chemical, as long as you take good care of it. As a large scale fuel, its toxicity makes it Right Straight Out.
Ideally, they could do the same thing to produce ethanol, which is essentially harmless. Unfortunately, that attracts the attention of Mister Tax Man.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, the *real* pirates just make a bit-by-bit master and start stamping disks ....
....
A few (or even a few thousand) college students swapping MP3s won't make a blip on an album's bottom line. Studies I've seen (in pre-MP3 days, true) show that people who copy and swap music buy more of it than those who don't -- the record companies are ticking off their best customers.
The issue, as always, is control. "You WILL listen to what WE TELL YOU to. You WILL buy what WE TELL YOU to. We will jerk you around because WE WANT TO, and there's not a DAMN THING you can do about it."
As artists figure out how to make money themselves off the net (not yet a solved problem) and start putting the squeeze on the big labels, I look for the Big Guys to get even more obnoxious. More petty lawsuits. More restrictive contracts with artists, stores, and broadcasters. More big money to politicians.
It's gonna get ugly for a while
I would guess that they add up all the time the sysadmins spent fixing the problems, all the time that their managers spent yelling at them, all the time the users had to wait while the sysadmins were fixing things, all the time that the Poo-Bahs spent talking to the press, etc, and added the usual Government multiplier for "overhead" (100% - 400%, the last time I looked.)
....
Question -- what the bleep do sysadmins do for a living? Seems to me that keeping crackers out of the Web pages would be featured prominently in the job description. As far as I'm concerned, the sysadmins screwed up by letting him in and then they had to work overtime to clean up the mess. Big deal. Far as I can see, it's part of the job.
The crackers that "deface" Web pages are *not* the ones you worry about. Think what you could do by changing some subtle bits of information
In any case, Zyklon seems to be utterly clueless. He needs to learn that he's a big boy now, and his actions can have real consequences. In particular, twisting the tails of the Powers the Be can get you into Real Trouble (tm). It's their laws, their cops, and their courts.
The sentance is, IMHO, 'way too severe, but not at all surprising.
When you're at the polls, nobody can tell how you voted. If you're at home or at work, others can make sure you vote the "right" way. Or just throw a big "internet votng party" with lots of booze and good times for one candidate.
The Iowa experiment simply looks like a way of tallying the votes over the Internet. Not particularly interesting.
In any case, the reason that folks don't vote is that they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their vote won't make a difference to anything they care about. The "inconvienence" of going to the polls is simply a convienent excuse.
Obviously, as im so naive i need explanation as to what you are actually losing by allowing this mostrosity of privacy invasion to happen... any takers?
Well, right now, if you have no MP3s on your system that the recording industry might define (now or in the future) as "pirated", not much. If the list of MP3s on your machine matches the CD list, the recording industry presumably won't care.
If it doesn't match, you may be called upon to demonstrate that all of your MP3s are "legal" copies, in a court of the recording company's choosing. The court will be in New York or Los Angeles, whichever one you're furthest from.
Further down the line, when it gets established that software companies can monotor your computer use, all of the software you use can make very sure that you are really honoring all of those shrink-wrap agreements.
If you're very careful to never do anything that even looks like it might be something that somebody wouldn't like, I suppose you wouldn't care.
Remember, we have a glut of lawyers in this country, all of whom think that the rest of us owe them a good living.
Suits:
For the, uh, suits, its a mark of status. Consider the concept of the "power suit", or, even sillier, the "power tie". An anthropologist could have all sorts of fun with corporate power relationships.
IT Worker Shortage:
There has never been an "IT worker shortage". There is a "shortage of IT workers at the salary we offer". Raise the salaries and workers will come out of the woodwork. Hint -- look at housing prices. A mid-level worker should be able to buy a mid-priced house with no more than a 20 minute commute.
As to what the B-schools are up to, there are a number of obvious trends:
1. Foreign workers. They get paid less and are far more docile than domestic workers.
2. Overseas outsourcing. Move the whole operation to India or Russia. Even cheaper than #1, but they lose control over the workers.
3. The search for a magic "software engineering methadology" that will enable illiterate Malaysians to crank out top quality code for US$0.18/hour like they crank out sneakers.
Magazines:
Skroom. They're dinosaurs anyway.
Seems to me I've seen this same rant, on and off, since the 1950s. Colleges suck, professors suck, students don't get a real (tm) education. The solution is the author's particular brand of snake oil.
Here, the solution is "The Virtual University", which Schank never says anything about except that it uses computers. Got news for you -- people have been trying to use computers in education since the 1960s, with "programmed instruction". There are a few minor successes (typing tutor programs come to mind), but by and large, they have failed miserably.
IMHO, Schank has very little understanding of the purposes and goals of a University education. The interview was littered with fallacies. A few of the more glaring ones --
* Tests and exams are "bad". But how do the students rate their own progress?
* Prerequsites are "bad". Ever been in a class with an obnoxious moron without the prerequisites, who nags the professor to explain things he should already know?
* Required survey courses are "bad". Students are expected to be familiar with all aspects of a field when they enter it.
* Tenure is "bad". Professors should be fired for expressing politically unpopular opinions, or for being "dead wood" (whatever that means).
* Like many modern academics, he does not see the difference between a university and a trade school.
These are just the ones that come to mind immediately. There are more.
There are certainly problems with University education. But they're not going to be solved by someone who can't even come up with an answer to the question "Why should I go to Harvard instead of the University of Maryland?" (Hint -- who are your classmates?)
If Schank thinks so highly of his Virtual University, let him get off his butt and build it. I agree fully with the other posters who have said that it will either be a diploma mill or a long, expensive Microsoft commercial.
I just got the spam from NS, and it was a bit different than described. The account name was the administrator's last name with a random number added; not the domain name as described. The password was as described; the account name with "nsi" added to the end.
A bit better; anyone trying to screw up somebody's account would have to know how to use WHOIS and guess a short number.
Clueless. Utterly clueless. And these are the guys who claim to be running the Net??
My password is now a random string that I've already forgotten. Why would I need another e-mail account anyway? Don't you have to have an e-mail address (contact point) to set up a domain name?
Simple. You rate your pages "voluntarily". You will get it wrong. (What is the difference between "crude speech" and "vulgar speech"?) Another poster mentioned 10K "keywords"; I think this is about right.
You are now a "criminal", along with every other Web page designer on the planet. This means that any government on the planet can go after you any time they want.
We would have a situation similar to what we have in the US with respect to traffic laws. It is essentially impossible to drive without violating traffic laws; this gives the police the right to stop anyone, any time. After all, they "violated a traffic law!"
It's another lever for governments to go after anybody they don't like.
Great. My wife has this nasty habit of voting for jerks. Now, with Internet voting, I can look over her shoulder and make sure she votes for the right people.
Also, with the bars closed on Election Day, it's hard to get a good voting party going. This way, I can throw a big party, serve lots of booze, and make sure lots of folks vote for the right people.
Seriously, electronic voting is wide open to all forms of coerced voting. The ward heelers and party bosses will love it. Marion Barry controlled Washington, DC for years with a variant of the second tactic above.
(Disclaimer -- If you think I'd actually do something like that, you don't know me very well. Get off yer arses and *work*, not just vote, for your candidates.)
The "magic word" that you need for the search engines is "infinite variance".
A quick look in AltaVista gives lots of hits, including a 1994 textbook.
This ain't fresh news.
According to a story a year or so ago in the Washington Post (any reference I might have had is long gone, unfortunately), all the wiretaps in the world are useless for hunting down the local drug dealers.
Problem is that they use a combination of cellphones, pagers, pay telephones, and constantly shifting slang that's so confusing and fragmented that the cops never know what they're hearing.
This was true even with analog cellphones, which can be eavesdropped without a warrant. All you need is a scanner. You probably couldn't use the warantless eavesdropping as evidence, but you could us it to be in the right place at the right time. With digital cellphones, you just need a fancier scanner. Near as I can tell, the only cellphone technology that's really encrypted is GSM, and it is being phased out in the US. (Note -- "spread spectrum" is not encryption, despite press releases from cellphone companies.)
So what's their *real* target? Given the LE abuses of the past, I would say political dissent. Gotta make sure that anybody who gets elected is solidly pro-FBI!
I didn't know that joke RFCs had drafts. Note that the bibliography contains an unpublished "proof" of Fermat's Last Therom.
Near as I can tell (given the grammar) he assumes:
1. Numbers in different bases are "really" in some sense different. In other words, 192(decimal), C0(hex), and 11000000(binary) are all "different numbers". So he has no problem with getting more than 2^32 addresses in 32 bits, because he is working in decimal, not binary.[1]
2. The "dots" in the standard notation for Internet addresses really mean something. (In reality, they're just placeholders, like the commas in "100,000,000".)
3. A "subnet" is magically attached to an IP address. (He seems to catch this error later on.)
What he is doing is letting his addresses overlap.
Now, since he has ambiguous addresses, he has to carry the subnet mask around in the IP packet. Instead of having a 32 bit address, we have a 32 bit address and a 32 bit subnet mask that we have to carry around in our packet. For some reason, he thinks this is better than a 64 bit address. (This would also make routing essentially impossible, but that's another story.)
If you're going to mess with the address length (no matter how you define address!), you might as well go straight to IPv6. The whole point of IPv6 was that *any* change at all in IP was going to be such a pain that we might as well go to a whole new IP protocol.
If you need local addressing, use address masquerading. It works, and the protocol wonks hate it.
--
[1] Q: Why can't Real Programmers tell the difference betwen Halloween and Christmas?
A: It's obvious that 31(oct) = 25(dec)
Has anybody out there had NASE pay a claim?
A few years ago, a friend's wife (insured through NASE) went through a rough (and expensive) childbirth. A year later, NASE still hadn't paid up.
It doesn't matter how cheap/good the plan looks if they don't pay off.
From the comments here, talking to an independant insurance broker looks like the best idea.
The numbers I've seen for the "tax" look like the only ones that will be affected are major spammers. Lotsa zeros after the decimal point. So what's the problem?
....
Think about it for a minute. What would the Gov't need to collect a tax like this? Well, every e-mail client and gateway would have to have a secure component to log e-mail messages. This component would have to be queried by the Gov't computers to calculate the "tax".
Now a simple software upgrade can also tell if you are sending messages to an "inappropriate" location.
Expect the "upgrade" sometime in President Buchannan's second term