Tying this is with the recently expanded capability of their enterprise level document search tool (it no longer requires HTTP-only access to documents) perhaps we are not the target here. Currently the enterprise provides the network capacity for their search tool. Perhaps this is an entrepoint to provisioning enterprises.
Surprisingly, they are slowly climbing down the ladder towards SMB's (small to medium businsses) as well with their tools. It would not suprise me in the least if, eventually, they did end up as an ISP but achieve it in reverse of the standard model. Much the way CompuServe did, way back when before AOL bought and essentially gutted it.
Yet one more thought has to do with their API forming the basis for Foundstone's SiteDigger 2.0 which aids enterprises in identifying leaked corporate sensitive data, configuration mistakes, system vulnerabilties, etc. Again network intensive.
Do remember everything to date that Google has done has been leveraged from their search technology. Even GMail, despite the any first thoughts, leverages their search capability (only one copy of any mail is stored, you really didn't think you had a gigabyte, did you?). An interesting approach and I wish them well. The day someone puts a stake in the heart of AOhelL is the day I celebrate.
The problem with that article, and the Wired article, is that there are those of us with Asperger's that multi-task very well, thank you. While visibly working on one task our minds are working on numerous other tasks simultaneously. Frequently here, for example, I will be reading five or six sites, conducting two or more instant messaging conversations, and working on a program, systems test, and whatever other task, all the while listening to radio and/or watching TV. The visible part, my reading/typing in one window has nothing to do with the mental activity I am engaging in at the time.
What is interesting is that when we do focus on one activity is that we tend to draw from numerous fields and engage in tangential thinking, dragging in what are, to outsiders, completely unrelated abstract concepts and applying them to new fields.
I spent a couple of decades in the hands of the psychologists either looking for an outlier for their statistical studies or simply confused with someone that not only wacked their tests but explained to them what they were testing and when they were doing it wrong. Oh well.
As currently taught and structured, the 'normal' human mind can only handle a relative few simulataneous tasks (roughly seven from my experience). That current testing reflects current educational strictures/structures should be no suprise. That the supposed experts are simply unable to recognize that their testing is only testing current methods rather than possibilities is to be expected. You don't detect tachyons if you are only looking for particles traveling less than the speed of light folks.
Eventually there will be a paradigm shift in education replacing our current system of factory schools with an information age system of education. Until then we will have what we have now. A dysfunctional education system with dysfunctional kids unsuited for a dysfunctional society which is the result of the dysfunctional education system.
Me? I taught myself to read, and everything since then with rare exceptions. Thank God!
Simon, the only problem with your analogy is that I, standing a security watch say at the front gate of Naval Air Station, North Island or on the quarterdeck of my (now sunk) US Navy Destroyer, don't have the least clue how to identify which federal identifications are valid, falsified, or fakes.
At no time while I was serving in our military was I trained on any of the various forms of identification currently extent. This from someone that was responsible for identifying and nuetralizing terrorists. Perhaps with one form of identification we, the people supposedly securing our federal installations, might have a clue when we are confronted with a falsified or fake identification.
This is not to invalidate your point. Any identification made by man can be duplicated by man (E. E. "Doc" Smith) and the technology only becomes increasingly sophisticated. Still I feel this is a step in something of a right direction.
I guess I'm one of the ones leaving no tracks in the weblogs (never, EVER, volunteer anything folks!) and every machine I touch I try to do the same for the uninitiated unto the mysteries. As for polls, when will you idiots, I'm referring to the pollsters, realize that people are not black or white, but can be many shades of gray?
As a statistician (one of my many fields), I know quite a bit about survey design and asking for one specific response, and how you ask for that response, can determine the outcome of the poll.
Now how am I supposed to answer the question of which OS I am running? My personal machine, just one of five with more on the way, is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise as the base OS. In virtual machines I have Win'98 SE+ (highly modded '98SE for 1GB+ machines), Win Adv. Server 2000, two copies of Win'XP (SP1 and SP2, for dev work), Mandrake 10, Knoppix, AROS, UAE (gotta have mi Amiga somehow!), MS-DOS 6, and I'll be adding Novell and FreeBSD to the mix here in a day or so.
Now toss in another machine with dual-boot Mandrake 10 and Win Server 2003 Web. Next a Win 2000 Small Business Server setup acting as the worlds most delicious honeypot (seems to attract script-kiddies like crazy). I'll leave the other two unspecified. Again, more machines are on the way, more OS'es to go on. I've got the licenses to burn.
Now idiots, err... monsieur pollsters, what is my primary OS? Uh? Hmmm... Okaaaay. Define 'is' please?
This isn't meant as a brag sheet but a point of order. I do serious work across the spectrum of operating systems, applications servers, platforms, etc. How do you categorize me or any hardcore techie like the denizens here? We are all very versatile, not pigeons to be pigeonholed folks!
Meanwhile, I see that 2,763 (had to revise that twice!) people have joined the/. team. Good start. We need more.
The method used to slice up an asteroid was solved a long time ago, it is called a parabolic mirror with the added proviso that you use sunlight as the source. If you want to get really fancy, you could use diamond film mirrors to steer the beam but it is not really required. That's the simple stuff.
Well you could use a real monitor. GeForce MX, Sony G400, 1600x1200x32 in 120 dpi with no problems on Server 2003 and XP. The only glitch I've
ever
seen was with Noia2 theme on Firefox rendering an extra piece of each button in the Options. As for console windows, you can change the properties to any monospace type you desire, as well as background, foreground, size, and so on. Or is Properties too hard to do? In X-Windows it's even more trivial to set a default. Sheesh!
Actually, using the FPGA design that Jeri is using, or heck her design with a 68030 or 68040 on the card, is shouldn't be too hard to emulate Agnus, Denise, Gary, and especially Paula (SID+). Possible, yes. Likely? Who knows. I can wish too. Even with my kickass PC (which still out-benches most off the rack stuff and she's a year older), emulation sucks! 'Sides, I miss Ports of Call.
The first rule of system security is that the only security is PHYSICAL security.
What are the flaws here? It's a publicly accessible machine. Anyone can walk up and since it is publicly accessible, can merrily publicly access away. The presence or absence of the Google search tool in and of itself means nothing. In addition, with the tools that I have here, even if you DID have individual accounts I can own that machine, one way or another, in under a minute. It would slow me down some if someone with real Windows knowledge set up the system secuirty, but that is all that would happen, it would slow me down. After all, I do this for a living (systems security consultant). Don't be overjoyed Linux users, if I know your version, I can get you too. I track the vulnerability lists on a daily basis and no one save the truly paranoid (moi, of course) patches THAT quick!
Now, in the context of a personal PC, whose ox is getting gored here? No one. By definition. Note, I said personal PC. My personal PC, fully locked down Win'Server 2003 Ent., or as fully locked down as you can get with Windows (snort), happens to have this beast installed and yes I did pause to read the documentation, EULA, and all the warnings that they posted. This is just another search tool that just happens to use a web server front end so you can search using a browser interface that looks just like Google. Powerful (not Windows Find in my book) search tools have existed for eons in the computing world. This is yet another one and pretty spiffy actually. I was pretty impressed that it found in under a second something that I had been searching for for days, yes even with some pretty powerful search tools. Nice job!
Now, is my system less secure? No, if someone walked up, or happened to break into my system from the outside (about as likely as hell freezing over), then yes, having this available to them is a bit more of a problem but if they get in the door, then they already know where to drill down for personal information. Anything I'm really interested in protecting (under NDA, etc.) is already living on an encrypted HD with a VERY long key. Again, I'm paranoid. For the average user, again, once in somehow the presence of this tool changes nothing.
What is interesting is the potential for abuse in the case of a family or office setting. Be assured that half the problem in knowing where to go in those settings is identifying the interesting places and then you can identify the system security penetration required. This is NOT recommended for use in an office setting, but Google points out that it was not intended for such use anyway and spells it out most eloquently in the EULA as well. You do read the EULA, don't you? I do.
For the home, how much do you want to hide from your parents, spouse, or kids? Having no spouse of kids, I can't say. As for my parents, I'm the one locking down their systems;-). You need to make that decision yourself but I do admit that most kids can find out what they need to know to penetrate any parents computers VERY easily. I do cruise the script-kiddie boards (often) to see what they are up to and the tools are all there within easy reach (Google search;-) ).
So that's my two cents. Mere FUD. BTW, what idjit uses a public computer and expects no one to know what they are doing? Apparently a LOT of idjits accordinig to a fellow SysOp elsewhere that happens to have a day job at a large library. If the cops want to catch a lot of kiddie porn and kiddie stalkers, I can tell them right where to go, but they aren't listening (sigh).
torpor, gawd knows I've argued this one till I'm blue in the face but this is the real face of Linux in the future, the embedded device. Whether it be the laptop or the Palm or whatever device you conjecture, Linux has that future wrapped up, nice and neat and bowtied.
There are still a lot of true believers that somehow wish somehow, someway, MS would disappear (along with Sun for instance) and the corporate desktop will fall into their laps. That may happen but the actual mechanism will not be OO, StarOffice or any of the other corporate hijack tools (I'm using MS terms here, please excuse me) but it will definitely come about by the fact that MS has never, ever, really recognized the fact that something that fits in a palm or a wristwatch can actually, ACTUALLY, do the work, oh my gawd WORK, or a desktop.
While my desktop is second to none, I still realize that her [yep, I'm sexist!] are numbered. I still have my dreams set on an 8-way Opteron or a full rack of IBM Blade-servers. Still, I do know which way my microelectronic bread is buttered on and it isn't in the way MS thinks things are going.
We may, may not, have home servers. All other machines at the home, the office, on your wrist, and on your cell will be embedded of one sort or another. That is simple economics and I do know economics. Actually, given the NetFlix/TiVo linkup and what I expect Blockbuster to do in kind (and MS to follow... ), even the home server part is a bit of a non-sequitir.
The whole industry is spinning a bit out of control and guess what, those that get there with the mostest for the cheapest will own a good part of that industry so long as our congress-critters will get out of our way.
And that is the ultimate question. Will they get out of our way. [I'll leave this for another discussion as a security 'expert' I'm already in violation of the law and that's just by breathin'.]
This one feature request has always been a mystery to me. Why do we need a central server to manage (mismanage) document coordination. In the real world what we have with paper are a bunch of people trying to manage (mismanage) document coordination via paper with multiple verions on paper cycling around the office.
Now in real life what we need is the AUTHOR of the paper or document in question being the maestro for this document with all suggestions/corrections being submitted as addendums to that document and the cycle begining anew with each and every new document.
Why are so many people beholden to the server/client model when this does not match reality in the least? Reality is, perhaps, a documecentric model that revolves around the originator, not something that revolves around the current computer model of the year/decade/whatever.
Unfotunateson, yes that is always the question and has been since I entered the industry oh so many years ago. I can still remember wheeling my first contract into the computng center on a dollie (25,000 data cards with another 2500 program cards) many an eon ago it seems in computer time and MY how the industry has changed since then. Methinks that I've earned these grey hairs, just trying to read the journals (magazines to you young punks;-) to keep up!
While I do like the notion of keeping VBA compatibility at some level there does come a time to abandon the old and embrace the new. I've been through many a database migration where we took COBOL and converted to the new and yes, it was not pretty but we did get there. I would like to see someone at least hang on to the old when it comes to Excel as it actually is a bit of decent modeling engine (econometrics is one area I still play in). As for Access, well upgrade to SQL or die is my motto and I'm not one to like SQL but at least is has something of a commonality with all the other enterprise tools I play with.
As for Word, I'm the wrong puppy to ask. I stopped upgrading text/word editors around the days of Emacs/microEmacs, so I'm a verifiable fossil! Still living although that is debatable at times.
What I see is a bunch of people willing to toss out the old without respect to paying attention to what works with the old to make the new. VBA is a bunch of crap, always has been, always will be, but in certain respects there are pieces of it that are usable with the new. The kids toss the whole thing out and call it junk. Sorry, but an algorithm, despite coming from the evil empire, is still an algorithm. I may not like that but that is life. I've sure done a heck of a lot with Excel than I've yet to match with any other machine since my Amiga days [Thank you Khalid!}
I can't say that any of this is a big part of my business since they retired me, so in a sense I'm a threat to YOUR business everytime I open my yap. Still, there are potential opportunities out there for thee and me in the.NET/Mono worlds. Get out a bit, circulate some and smell some nice roses. It's a bit more interesting than it was before some people at MS pointed a gun at someone over there and said, VBA, you be dead. Thank God. It was more than time!
JackOfShadows@NetBlackOps.com
"Trust but verify." Ronnie may not have been great but at least he got it right once. I've lost count of the number of times that I've downloaded StarOffice from the Sun site and OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org. As a MS partner I happen to know that at least ten of the Office 2002 (or XP depending on what they are calling it this week), Office 2003 (another 10, at least) and so on licences that they are counting are mine. Hmmm..., twenty licenses for less than 5 computers and at least one of those isn't even running Windows.
Face it, we have an industry that is doing the same idiotic things that the record companies have been doing for decades. Counting shipped (and in our case downloaded) product as installed/used product and WE, the stupid idiots that we are, believe that this MEANS something.
So long as we let the bean counters and marketers drive us into a herd that says 'me2, me2' we are stuck with this type of reporting and accounting.
I'm not a me2. Are you?
JackOfShadows@NetBlackOps.com
Slashdot Mirror
Surprisingly, they are slowly climbing down the ladder towards SMB's (small to medium businsses) as well with their tools. It would not suprise me in the least if, eventually, they did end up as an ISP but achieve it in reverse of the standard model. Much the way CompuServe did, way back when before AOL bought and essentially gutted it.
Yet one more thought has to do with their API forming the basis for Foundstone's SiteDigger 2.0 which aids enterprises in identifying leaked corporate sensitive data, configuration mistakes, system vulnerabilties, etc. Again network intensive.
Do remember everything to date that Google has done has been leveraged from their search technology. Even GMail, despite the any first thoughts, leverages their search capability (only one copy of any mail is stored, you really didn't think you had a gigabyte, did you?). An interesting approach and I wish them well. The day someone puts a stake in the heart of AOhelL is the day I celebrate.
What is interesting is that when we do focus on one activity is that we tend to draw from numerous fields and engage in tangential thinking, dragging in what are, to outsiders, completely unrelated abstract concepts and applying them to new fields.
I spent a couple of decades in the hands of the psychologists either looking for an outlier for their statistical studies or simply confused with someone that not only wacked their tests but explained to them what they were testing and when they were doing it wrong. Oh well.
As currently taught and structured, the 'normal' human mind can only handle a relative few simulataneous tasks (roughly seven from my experience). That current testing reflects current educational strictures/structures should be no suprise. That the supposed experts are simply unable to recognize that their testing is only testing current methods rather than possibilities is to be expected. You don't detect tachyons if you are only looking for particles traveling less than the speed of light folks.
Eventually there will be a paradigm shift in education replacing our current system of factory schools with an information age system of education. Until then we will have what we have now. A dysfunctional education system with dysfunctional kids unsuited for a dysfunctional society which is the result of the dysfunctional education system.
Me? I taught myself to read, and everything since then with rare exceptions. Thank God!
At no time while I was serving in our military was I trained on any of the various forms of identification currently extent. This from someone that was responsible for identifying and nuetralizing terrorists. Perhaps with one form of identification we, the people supposedly securing our federal installations, might have a clue when we are confronted with a falsified or fake identification.
This is not to invalidate your point. Any identification made by man can be duplicated by man (E. E. "Doc" Smith) and the technology only becomes increasingly sophisticated. Still I feel this is a step in something of a right direction.
As a statistician (one of my many fields), I know quite a bit about survey design and asking for one specific response, and how you ask for that response, can determine the outcome of the poll.
Now how am I supposed to answer the question of which OS I am running? My personal machine, just one of five with more on the way, is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise as the base OS. In virtual machines I have Win'98 SE+ (highly modded '98SE for 1GB+ machines), Win Adv. Server 2000, two copies of Win'XP (SP1 and SP2, for dev work), Mandrake 10, Knoppix, AROS, UAE (gotta have mi Amiga somehow!), MS-DOS 6, and I'll be adding Novell and FreeBSD to the mix here in a day or so.
Now toss in another machine with dual-boot Mandrake 10 and Win Server 2003 Web. Next a Win 2000 Small Business Server setup acting as the worlds most delicious honeypot (seems to attract script-kiddies like crazy). I'll leave the other two unspecified. Again, more machines are on the way, more OS'es to go on. I've got the licenses to burn.
Now idiots, err... monsieur pollsters, what is my primary OS? Uh? Hmmm... Okaaaay. Define 'is' please?
This isn't meant as a brag sheet but a point of order. I do serious work across the spectrum of operating systems, applications servers, platforms, etc. How do you categorize me or any hardcore techie like the denizens here? We are all very versatile, not pigeons to be pigeonholed folks!
Meanwhile, I see that 2,763 (had to revise that twice!) people have joined the /. team. Good start. We need more.
The method used to slice up an asteroid was solved a long time ago, it is called a parabolic mirror with the added proviso that you use sunlight as the source. If you want to get really fancy, you could use diamond film mirrors to steer the beam but it is not really required. That's the simple stuff.
ever
seen was with Noia2 theme on Firefox rendering an extra piece of each button in the Options. As for console windows, you can change the properties to any monospace type you desire, as well as background, foreground, size, and so on. Or is Properties too hard to do? In X-Windows it's even more trivial to set a default. Sheesh!Actually, using the FPGA design that Jeri is using, or heck her design with a 68030 or 68040 on the card, is shouldn't be too hard to emulate Agnus, Denise, Gary, and especially Paula (SID+). Possible, yes. Likely? Who knows. I can wish too. Even with my kickass PC (which still out-benches most off the rack stuff and she's a year older), emulation sucks! 'Sides, I miss Ports of Call.
The first rule of system security is that the only security is PHYSICAL security.
;-). You need to make that decision yourself but I do admit that most kids can find out what they need to know to penetrate any parents computers VERY easily. I do cruise the script-kiddie boards (often) to see what they are up to and the tools are all there within easy reach (Google search ;-) ).
What are the flaws here? It's a publicly accessible machine. Anyone can walk up and since it is publicly accessible, can merrily publicly access away. The presence or absence of the Google search tool in and of itself means nothing. In addition, with the tools that I have here, even if you DID have individual accounts I can own that machine, one way or another, in under a minute. It would slow me down some if someone with real Windows knowledge set up the system secuirty, but that is all that would happen, it would slow me down. After all, I do this for a living (systems security consultant). Don't be overjoyed Linux users, if I know your version, I can get you too. I track the vulnerability lists on a daily basis and no one save the truly paranoid (moi, of course) patches THAT quick!
Now, in the context of a personal PC, whose ox is getting gored here? No one. By definition. Note, I said personal PC. My personal PC, fully locked down Win'Server 2003 Ent., or as fully locked down as you can get with Windows (snort), happens to have this beast installed and yes I did pause to read the documentation, EULA, and all the warnings that they posted. This is just another search tool that just happens to use a web server front end so you can search using a browser interface that looks just like Google. Powerful (not Windows Find in my book) search tools have existed for eons in the computing world. This is yet another one and pretty spiffy actually. I was pretty impressed that it found in under a second something that I had been searching for for days, yes even with some pretty powerful search tools. Nice job!
Now, is my system less secure? No, if someone walked up, or happened to break into my system from the outside (about as likely as hell freezing over), then yes, having this available to them is a bit more of a problem but if they get in the door, then they already know where to drill down for personal information. Anything I'm really interested in protecting (under NDA, etc.) is already living on an encrypted HD with a VERY long key. Again, I'm paranoid. For the average user, again, once in somehow the presence of this tool changes nothing.
What is interesting is the potential for abuse in the case of a family or office setting. Be assured that half the problem in knowing where to go in those settings is identifying the interesting places and then you can identify the system security penetration required. This is NOT recommended for use in an office setting, but Google points out that it was not intended for such use anyway and spells it out most eloquently in the EULA as well. You do read the EULA, don't you? I do.
For the home, how much do you want to hide from your parents, spouse, or kids? Having no spouse of kids, I can't say. As for my parents, I'm the one locking down their systems
So that's my two cents. Mere FUD. BTW, what idjit uses a public computer and expects no one to know what they are doing? Apparently a LOT of idjits accordinig to a fellow SysOp elsewhere that happens to have a day job at a large library. If the cops want to catch a lot of kiddie porn and kiddie stalkers, I can tell them right where to go, but they aren't listening (sigh).
NetBlackOps
There are still a lot of true believers that somehow wish somehow, someway, MS would disappear (along with Sun for instance) and the corporate desktop will fall into their laps. That may happen but the actual mechanism will not be OO, StarOffice or any of the other corporate hijack tools (I'm using MS terms here, please excuse me) but it will definitely come about by the fact that MS has never, ever, really recognized the fact that something that fits in a palm or a wristwatch can actually, ACTUALLY, do the work, oh my gawd WORK, or a desktop.
While my desktop is second to none, I still realize that her [yep, I'm sexist!] are numbered. I still have my dreams set on an 8-way Opteron or a full rack of IBM Blade-servers. Still, I do know which way my microelectronic bread is buttered on and it isn't in the way MS thinks things are going.
We may, may not, have home servers. All other machines at the home, the office, on your wrist, and on your cell will be embedded of one sort or another. That is simple economics and I do know economics. Actually, given the NetFlix/TiVo linkup and what I expect Blockbuster to do in kind (and MS to follow... ), even the home server part is a bit of a non-sequitir.
The whole industry is spinning a bit out of control and guess what, those that get there with the mostest for the cheapest will own a good part of that industry so long as our congress-critters will get out of our way.
And that is the ultimate question. Will they get out of our way. [I'll leave this for another discussion as a security 'expert' I'm already in violation of the law and that's just by breathin'.]
Now in real life what we need is the AUTHOR of the paper or document in question being the maestro for this document with all suggestions/corrections being submitted as addendums to that document and the cycle begining anew with each and every new document.
Why are so many people beholden to the server/client model when this does not match reality in the least? Reality is, perhaps, a documecentric model that revolves around the originator, not something that revolves around the current computer model of the year/decade/whatever.
While I do like the notion of keeping VBA compatibility at some level there does come a time to abandon the old and embrace the new. I've been through many a database migration where we took COBOL and converted to the new and yes, it was not pretty but we did get there. I would like to see someone at least hang on to the old when it comes to Excel as it actually is a bit of decent modeling engine (econometrics is one area I still play in). As for Access, well upgrade to SQL or die is my motto and I'm not one to like SQL but at least is has something of a commonality with all the other enterprise tools I play with.
As for Word, I'm the wrong puppy to ask. I stopped upgrading text/word editors around the days of Emacs/microEmacs, so I'm a verifiable fossil! Still living although that is debatable at times.
What I see is a bunch of people willing to toss out the old without respect to paying attention to what works with the old to make the new. VBA is a bunch of crap, always has been, always will be, but in certain respects there are pieces of it that are usable with the new. The kids toss the whole thing out and call it junk. Sorry, but an algorithm, despite coming from the evil empire, is still an algorithm. I may not like that but that is life. I've sure done a heck of a lot with Excel than I've yet to match with any other machine since my Amiga days [Thank you Khalid!}
I can't say that any of this is a big part of my business since they retired me, so in a sense I'm a threat to YOUR business everytime I open my yap. Still, there are potential opportunities out there for thee and me in the .NET/Mono worlds. Get out a bit, circulate some and smell some nice roses. It's a bit more interesting than it was before some people at MS pointed a gun at someone over there and said, VBA, you be dead. Thank God. It was more than time!
JackOfShadows@NetBlackOps.com
Face it, we have an industry that is doing the same idiotic things that the record companies have been doing for decades. Counting shipped (and in our case downloaded) product as installed/used product and WE, the stupid idiots that we are, believe that this MEANS something. So long as we let the bean counters and marketers drive us into a herd that says 'me2, me2' we are stuck with this type of reporting and accounting. I'm not a me2. Are you? JackOfShadows@NetBlackOps.com