And, I had an engineer - used computers all his life - ask me about "this Linux thing, how different is it?" I explained that it was all just the same, but most of the names have changed. "So, if I want to edit a document, like Word, what do I use?", "That's called Open Office Writer", "Oh, hmmm... and I'll want to edit some pictures, I usually use Photoshop", "there's something called Gimp that's very similar", etc. by the time we got to the fourth thing that had a different name, he was very discouraged - you see, it sounded like an awful lot of effort to him to learn new names for everything.
Linux isn't a hobbyist OS. Hasn't been in over a decade. A RHEL or Suse license costs plenty, and you definitely get a strong warranty against backdoors.
You know that, I know that, anyone competent in the field knows that, but above a certain level in a large company, people tend to be less than competent in the IT field - but that doesn't stop a most of them from pushing their philosophy down the organization.
The higher levels also tend to listen to ALL of their advisors: legal, financial, sales, marketing, human resources, and even the ones who know nothing about computers still have opinions.
Linux has convinced a good portion of the IT and engineering world, but incase you haven't noticed, we're not exactly in control.
If I were a too busy to be bothered executive, my high level opinion of the hobbyist operating system would be that it's bound to be full of backdoors put in by the coders. What's worse, is when those backdoors cause my golden parachute producing institution serious financial harm, there's nobody to sue. At least if Microsoft were to do something dastardly, there's a few billion in assets to get the lawyers worked up over.
Sounds like a lot of jobs to me, isn't that what we're supposed to be addressing, all the idle hands?
In principle, I agree with you. However, I cannot help but think that there might be more productive activities than groping four-year-olds or tossing around bits of lead in foreign locales.
I'm not sure our education system is enabling a lot of people to be more productive than that.
Also fine, don't force me to spend my money on failed military adventures into the Mountains of Afghanistan. The Russians weren't inept or weak, and after nine years trying, they just recently proved that there's nothing to gain from a military occupation there, do we really need to repeat their mistake, but more expensively?
If you really want to impress the world with your military might, a precision guided asteroid strike on a nuclear weapons production bunker would probably do the trick. Think long and hard enough and you might even come up with a "peaceful, scientific" pretext for the practice/demonstration (smaller) asteroid diversions.
I'm willing to wager a long term habitat on the moon would look disturbingly similar to the ISS . . . . but on the moon.
Define long term. To me, a long term habitat on the moon grows its own food. That won't be the first moon base, but in my perception, it's where the payoff starts coming.
Find water, build grow houses, when they can produce surplus food, energy and growing/living space, that's a long term habitat.
If the Moon is like North America to the Europeans of 1500, the ISS like a rowboat bobbing somewhere a few miles off the coast. I wouldn't expect much to come from the rowboat.
Somewhere in the 1970s, a lot of people in power took the position that progress is out of control and regardless of the field, space exploration, medical technology, fusion power, they just throw on the brakes. They didn't manage to get a handle on computer networks before they became highly disruptive, but if we had simultaneous disruptive progress in several major fields at once, it would make things very challenging for the old guard.
Progress only benefits people who aren't already at the top of the heap.
Or maybe because even most scientists (actual scientists, not armchair commentators on slashdot) can't find an actual utilitarian reason to build a moon base other than juvenile delight at living out their sci-fi fantasies?
And invading Iraq was productive exactly how?
If we're going to go on another adventure, let's try to make it something new, different, and with relatively few civilian casualties.
The Moon looks like a lot better payoff than the Middle East.
In the 1970s some remote controls used ultrasonics - ultra to humans, not to parrots... not sure if the bird was changing the channels on purpose or not, but it would make a whistle and the channel would change.
It goes in cycles - McCarthy / JE Hoover were a high point, somewhere between Nixon and Clinton was a low, I hope we've topped out after more than a decade of "war on terror" - only time will tell.
You still have the option to hand carry your paycheck to the bank, stand in line to deposit it, write out all your correspondence long hand and wait a week or more for a reply, go to a friend's house to talk... all these things are still possible, it's just that in the past there wasn't an alternative.
Actually, in times of war gone by, ALL transoceanic mail was subject to opening and reading. Nevermind communication monitoring across the iron curtain during the cold war.
What's new is that we have this low cost, high bandwidth communication medium that everybody is using.
In the past, you were restricted from broadcasting your ideas past the local pub - and even there, people would listen and repeat to the local authorities things they overheard.
Solved with public/private key pairs (long ago), short version:
Server publishes public key and has internal copies of its private key and all authorized users' public keys.
User wants to authenticate, server challenges with a unique nonce (sampled from background radiation, or whatever) authenticated with server's private key if you're paranoid.
User responds with self-authenticated version of the nonce, possibly encoded with server's public key for good measure.
The only hole is key control, which is where the two+ factor stuff starts playing in.
Somebody recently (a couple of years ago) demonstrated a build it yourself Beowulf that'd do
Restrict the system to one login attempt per user per second. intruders only get 3x10^7 attempts per year, regardless of their equipment.
You're assuming they're using networking logins. I'm assuming they've got your in your box and have got/etc/shadow and can go at it at their leisure. Ha, haaaaa!
Sorry.:-) Assume the worst. Hope for the best.
Yeah, my favorite analogy is that you're encasing your secret in a strong box, but the people trying to break in have unlimited unfettered access to it. So, even if it's one meter thick titanium/diamond composite alloy, it might be expensive and slow to get in, but if they throw the resources at it, they'll get in eventually.
Of course, current crypto theory allows for exponential growth of cracking difficulty with linear growth in password length, so, under current theories, you can easily make it impractically expensive to ever break in - if your users can remember a sufficiently complex password for the front door.
Slashdot Mirror
And, I had an engineer - used computers all his life - ask me about "this Linux thing, how different is it?" I explained that it was all just the same, but most of the names have changed. "So, if I want to edit a document, like Word, what do I use?", "That's called Open Office Writer", "Oh, hmmm... and I'll want to edit some pictures, I usually use Photoshop", "there's something called Gimp that's very similar", etc. by the time we got to the fourth thing that had a different name, he was very discouraged - you see, it sounded like an awful lot of effort to him to learn new names for everything.
Linux isn't a hobbyist OS. Hasn't been in over a decade. A RHEL or Suse license costs plenty, and you definitely get a strong warranty against backdoors.
You know that, I know that, anyone competent in the field knows that, but above a certain level in a large company, people tend to be less than competent in the IT field - but that doesn't stop a most of them from pushing their philosophy down the organization.
The higher levels also tend to listen to ALL of their advisors: legal, financial, sales, marketing, human resources, and even the ones who know nothing about computers still have opinions.
Linux has convinced a good portion of the IT and engineering world, but incase you haven't noticed, we're not exactly in control.
If I were a too busy to be bothered executive, my high level opinion of the hobbyist operating system would be that it's bound to be full of backdoors put in by the coders. What's worse, is when those backdoors cause my golden parachute producing institution serious financial harm, there's nobody to sue. At least if Microsoft were to do something dastardly, there's a few billion in assets to get the lawyers worked up over.
Then you can go on about how the actual rates of sexual assaults have dramatically declined since the advent of easily accessible porn....
Surprised nobody has extended this to China, where they have too many men anyway...
It takes us over 5 years to train most humans well enough to pass a Turing test, reasonable to think that it might take longer to train a machine.
pointless wars and security theatre.
Sounds like a lot of jobs to me, isn't that what we're supposed to be addressing, all the idle hands?
In principle, I agree with you. However, I cannot help but think that there might be more productive activities than groping four-year-olds or tossing around bits of lead in foreign locales.
I'm not sure our education system is enabling a lot of people to be more productive than that.
pointless wars and security theatre.
Sounds like a lot of jobs to me, isn't that what we're supposed to be addressing, all the idle hands?
Also fine, don't force me to spend my money on failed military adventures into the Mountains of Afghanistan. The Russians weren't inept or weak, and after nine years trying, they just recently proved that there's nothing to gain from a military occupation there, do we really need to repeat their mistake, but more expensively?
If you really want to impress the world with your military might, a precision guided asteroid strike on a nuclear weapons production bunker would probably do the trick. Think long and hard enough and you might even come up with a "peaceful, scientific" pretext for the practice/demonstration (smaller) asteroid diversions.
I'm willing to wager a long term habitat on the moon would look disturbingly similar to the ISS . . . . but on the moon.
Define long term. To me, a long term habitat on the moon grows its own food. That won't be the first moon base, but in my perception, it's where the payoff starts coming.
Find water, build grow houses, when they can produce surplus food, energy and growing/living space, that's a long term habitat.
If the Moon is like North America to the Europeans of 1500, the ISS like a rowboat bobbing somewhere a few miles off the coast. I wouldn't expect much to come from the rowboat.
Somewhere in the 1970s, a lot of people in power took the position that progress is out of control and regardless of the field, space exploration, medical technology, fusion power, they just throw on the brakes. They didn't manage to get a handle on computer networks before they became highly disruptive, but if we had simultaneous disruptive progress in several major fields at once, it would make things very challenging for the old guard.
Progress only benefits people who aren't already at the top of the heap.
And if that's what we're doing, I'd rather do the measuring with Saturn Vs and Energias than Humvees and IEDs.
Or maybe because even most scientists (actual scientists, not armchair commentators on slashdot) can't find an actual utilitarian reason to build a moon base other than juvenile delight at living out their sci-fi fantasies?
And invading Iraq was productive exactly how?
If we're going to go on another adventure, let's try to make it something new, different, and with relatively few civilian casualties.
The Moon looks like a lot better payoff than the Middle East.
Because these days the law is pretty much nothing more than someone with a lot of money and power says it is.
By "these days" you mean: for the last 6000 years?
In the 1970s some remote controls used ultrasonics - ultra to humans, not to parrots... not sure if the bird was changing the channels on purpose or not, but it would make a whistle and the channel would change.
It goes in cycles - McCarthy / JE Hoover were a high point, somewhere between Nixon and Clinton was a low, I hope we've topped out after more than a decade of "war on terror" - only time will tell.
You still have the option to hand carry your paycheck to the bank, stand in line to deposit it, write out all your correspondence long hand and wait a week or more for a reply, go to a friend's house to talk... all these things are still possible, it's just that in the past there wasn't an alternative.
Actually, in times of war gone by, ALL transoceanic mail was subject to opening and reading. Nevermind communication monitoring across the iron curtain during the cold war.
What's new is that we have this low cost, high bandwidth communication medium that everybody is using.
In the past, you were restricted from broadcasting your ideas past the local pub - and even there, people would listen and repeat to the local authorities things they overheard.
Nothing new - governments have always monitored "the media," the Internet is the new media.
Can't run Qt? Can't be a Pi.
Solved with public/private key pairs (long ago), short version:
Server publishes public key and has internal copies of its private key and all authorized users' public keys.
User wants to authenticate, server challenges with a unique nonce (sampled from background radiation, or whatever) authenticated with server's private key if you're paranoid.
User responds with self-authenticated version of the nonce, possibly encoded with server's public key for good measure.
The only hole is key control, which is where the two+ factor stuff starts playing in.
Better still, you can outsource your work to India and they can sign in with your token.
You can't give away sales tax in this manner.
If Amazon were decent about it, they'd refund it to the customers.
Somebody recently (a couple of years ago) demonstrated a build it yourself Beowulf that'd do
Restrict the system to one login attempt per user per second. intruders only get 3x10^7 attempts per year, regardless of their equipment.
You're assuming they're using networking logins. I'm assuming they've got your in your box and have got /etc/shadow and can go at it at their leisure. Ha, haaaaa!
Sorry. :-) Assume the worst. Hope for the best.
Yeah, my favorite analogy is that you're encasing your secret in a strong box, but the people trying to break in have unlimited unfettered access to it. So, even if it's one meter thick titanium/diamond composite alloy, it might be expensive and slow to get in, but if they throw the resources at it, they'll get in eventually.
Of course, current crypto theory allows for exponential growth of cracking difficulty with linear growth in password length, so, under current theories, you can easily make it impractically expensive to ever break in - if your users can remember a sufficiently complex password for the front door.