It says it all and you're a fool to ignore what Unix started out as and what dangerous idiocy is still contained within its frightening depths. Like a nuclear reactor, it has its uses but should always be treated with great respect. If you're relying on the reactor to produce needed power and not contaminate the countryside, then leaving the control room wide open to any child that walks in is like leaving the average person in root on any given *nix box that is being relied on. Either thing is stupid and asking for trouble.
It's not for nothing I half-rejoice at the option of using Run As on XP Pro but still await the concept of the machine not running every freaking thing as root. Until then, Windows will still be massively vulnerable as will every *nix box administered by someone following this guy for advice. Thankfully, the OpenBSD adherent where I work would laugh themselves into an asthmatic attack if they read his statement.
...let's get one thing straight: an impact will not lead to a Cowboy BeBop future, I don't care how cute you think Ed and Ein are or how sexy Faye is. Wishful thinking.
With the fanboy wave-off out of the way, I would like to say that the mere threat of this should get our notice. We're not in danger right now of running out of oil but sooner or later we will be, and without energy on hand, getting access to nuclear fissile materials will be next to impossible never mind refining them and we still won't magically overnight be any closer to getting fusion or mass-energy conversion working.
Add to news of the Yellowstone mega-caldera and the possibility that we're headed towards a cooling phase planet wide, and this rock being in the neighborhood ready to drop in and we're looking at a pretty good picture of a species with less security than a corporation firewall administered by your neighbor's five year old and much more serious ramifications.
Of course we need to spread out and make sure the species can sustain itself past such an event. Problem is, will anyone really grasp it when so much more pressing stuff is on the plate, like who's still in the running on Amazing Race?
On a more serious note, this is pretty much a non-issue given that people can use VLC to preview incomplete files and will delete whatever seems non-kosher. If we further subdivide the hashing to blocks/parts then there's no way each individual part container will hash exactly in match with the original. Try massaging the hash for thirty separate parts. Non-trivial.
I've said it before. P2P is advancing apace with all sorts of things and within a short time will render this totally irrellevant. They just keep illustrating how badly they still don't get it. It's as if they trying to combat piracy using VCRs by attacking the mechanism of Super-8 film cameras.
No, really. This should be almost powerful enough to run next years (cr)applications from Macrodobe.
Okay, seriously, it is impressive and another good illustration of the strengths of OSX over every horrible thing Apple called the Macintosh OS before they went over to the *nix base.
Oh yeah, that Star Wars t-shirt guy reminds me of what I looked like before I became older, grayer, and crustier. I'm so glad I stopped wearing shirts like that.
Microsoft doesn't practice security by obscurity, they don't practice security at all.
Microsoft is still deeply locked into a corporate LAN mindset where all hosts are trusted, no one does anything shifty, and all users are business users. Meanwhile, they rule the civilian end-user market and the civies aren't remotely trustworthy, have too much free time on their hands, etc. The Internet is not a twenty seat LAN in Bismarck.
On top of this, you have Microsoft's usual bad coding practices, lack of thorough testing inhouse, and this has gone on for years and only compounded itself over and over again. An entire operating system is designed and coded with development tools which are themselves far from bulletproof which were coded on the prior OS iteration which itself was far from bulletproof having been coded on the prior development tool which itself was...
It's like standing between two opposed mirrors, except they're funhouse mirrors and you're sitting there trying to grind them accurate with a handful of abrasive,a sponge, and bucket of water and your boss keeps tossing them out and replacing them with new ones that are only slightly closer to true. "Leave it to the buyer to find the distortions!"
They practice obfuscation, but it has nothing to do with security. They're practicing obscurity in development. Sort of like erasing pieces of your blueprints at random as you think you've built that section correctly.
I see comments that Adobe apps are (supposedly) stable. Since when? I've had to try twelve straight times and do some massive registry editing and uninstallation of codecs to get Premiere just to install, and another five days of further fiddling to get it to start correctly, and even then, I could still go for a bike ride around my entire county and come back before it did finally finish loading.
It looks to me like Adobe is competing with Microsoft for needlessly bloated code.
Macromedia apps on the other hand install right the first time and start correctly, but never seem to do anything that I want them to do, that the docs explicitly state they should do.
So now we get apps that won't install correctly, won't start in a reasonable amount of time when you do finally shoe-horn them in, and then won't do what they are supposed to? This is like the graphic design equivalent of Windows 95 first release.
I second, third, fourth, etc. the question on the wisdom of allowing the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging without a viable #3 and #4 fast behind to become the new #2 and #3. Are we to expect Corel to pull a miracle out of their nether regions to compete? Will we b*tch and moan if MS steps to the plate with offerings that it bundles with Windows?
Sorry, but as a tech with some scruples I gotta say we shouldn't be letting the creation of a new Microsoft of the graphics world get going: a behemoth company that puts out stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't care but you don't have much of a choice because you're already joined at the hip and reliant upon their stuff for your daily business.
Just because you can tickle the keys, doesn't mean you should have to. Actually, Cisco knows this and does have GUI software for much of their hardware configuration and it is ever so much faster than typing over one thousand lines of code every time and yes, I've typed that many on a Cisco router before. I thought my fingers would bleed and my eyes fall out.
You cannot overestimate the chances of keyboard typos either when the user has to type in that much. One wrong entry not caught and the config saved and oops, no entry into the new paperweight.
Humans are visually oriented critters and GUIs just make more sense. Drag and drop interface dynamics have been well known forever and they should be used for easy quick administration. I should have my time freed up from inane drudgery for more serious involved tasks and thats why there are people catering to that need and want and I for one, welcome our new GUI writing overlords.
Fonts are programs, as odd as that may sound. Postscript fonts are the obvious examples here, but Truetype fonts are also interpreted bytecode.
Of course, by this logic, so are Applesoft shape tables and every vector graphic because they tell other code through interpretation what to do, ie, tell it which direction to move and light up a pixel and in what color, etc.
Come to think of it, so too would commands given to people and things as they are interpreted instructions and thus programs of a sort, even if run on the buggiest operating system known. I wonder which dog instructor licenses the "heel" instruction. Am I violating IP by not publishing the source code when I tell my co-worker to "knock it off"? Can I just make a text file availible on a web site?
IMHO, this is all really insane.
No argument there at all.
Hey Slashdotters, did this reply get rendered in a GPL font on the machine in front of you? Feel free to use it. Just remember to publish the souce code and consider, will you be publishing it because I instructed you to and you interpreted the instruction or because you were supposed to?
Now we can stop using everything and except a thumb on one hand, the other hand, and... Nevermind.
Seriously, we need more interface physical activity in this chair/couch potato land. Maybe some sort of Wushu interface where you have to move in three dimensions to make anything work. Combine with 3d goggles and you get to web surf and work out. No more cubicle-butt!
...but I am too apathetic to look for it. What follows is no troll. I swear.
My first reaction to this and the article was, "what amount of crack is being smoked now and by whom?"
My second reaction was, "this is par for the opportunistic and predatory but too stupid to live course."
Once again, late to the party and like the worst newbie's granddad, going "ooohh, what's this I hear about this inter thing?" Anyone remember their take on the VCR for years and years? It was the money people reacting to the new dynamics of the entertainment market with the entrenchment of the VCR that led to the end of all crap straight to the first run cinemas theme of the 70s and beginning of the straight to video with those what were we thinking mistakes theme of the 80s on.
I think the experienced net-going public's desire to adopt a DRM-ified torrent system is about like their desire to see a musical version of Trainspotting starring Andy Dick. We know that DRM is going to be the first thought on their minds. I think we can also see some sort of iTunes-like pruveyor appearing and it being half-assed to start, broken repeatedly, the IP providers getting stern and filing lawsuits, and the system progressing to some sort of bastard offspring of Tivo and BitTorrent.
Seconded. His website was a dizzying assault on my sense of being in IT and like standing under a clear moonless starry night, it made me feel real small for a moment. I am in awe. Bookmarked.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here. Windows doesn't work right out of the box? Since when? The fact is that if you can and do read the documentation which is in fact quite voluminous unlike the *nix world, it does very much so work right out of the box
I RTFM with *nix all the time, and the best docs found on a distro still are contradicted by the code itself, forcing me to creatively interpret what the coder, brilliant as he or she may be, incompetently thought up for documentation. I should not have to interpret documentation. It should work exactly as written and either the code changed to reflect the docs which is the *nix way, or the docs written to conform to the code as written which is the Windows way and come to think of it, the way of auto manufacturers, electronics builders, and just about everyone else living in the sane logical world.
Seventeen tries to get Captive NTFS working just once is insane. And when I ask why it isn't, the most helpful answer I get should not be that I am too stupid to understand what the doc writer was implying.
With no prior experience in doing so at the first job I had to deal with it, I managed to network DOS/Win3.11 and OS/2 2.1 machines with Token Ring and Ethernet simultaenously in less than four hours of work. All because the docs were well written, the code did exactly what the docs said, and I did what the code expected of me.
Linux is easy enough if someone wraps a lot of stuff around it and includes eye candy to distract from the harder stuff, but when experienced techs need to spend more time reading more docs and still asking questions of others and still researching Usenet and web forums for answers, it's not remotely a contender for a system that does more often than not work right out of the box.
Sometimes I think way too many people are still having flashbacks to the upgrade from Win3.11 to Win95 but that was ten years ago. Can we fast forward to now and see the current reality is that XP works very nice, its other more technical and ethical problems notwithstanding? No one is saying it is secure, merely that it is still far and away easier to use and install, and much more so for the average newbie than anything else.
Finally, for those who are thinking corporate support means anything with regard to ease of use, you need only look at IBM and OS/2 Warp 3. Money is not the reason. Acceptance of the logic that the vast majority of the public lives by and not the tortured illogic we techies sometimes live be is what will lead to products that people want. Apple illustrates this quite well and though I hate Jobs with a titanic passion, I must admit they've finally started to wake up over there. Now, will the *nix community?
People have been predicting things like this for years. Anyone who deals with P2P traffic in ISP work knows that this isn't going to fly. For crying out loud, Video over DSL hasn't gone anyplace and DBS is still running in circles chasing its tail. Why? Ease of distribution and bandwidth.
Sure, there's something to be said about content but not nearly as much as all this. And when it comes to content, people don't want ten million Internet broadcasters clogging up the Internet with pointless vanity crap they won't want nearly as much as a high cost well polished production like CSI or Queer as Folk or whatever.
Cable provides the best bandwidth out there as of right now and even that tops out at a couple hundred high definition channels. To broadcast over the net introduces new TCP/IP overhead robbing you of bandwidth further. Imagine if ten thousand people all choose one of a thousand broadcasts to watch simultaneously in one city alone. Imagine repeating this every night across every city and town. We'd need to start building fiber pipes measured like sewer pipes as in feet in diameter.
Okay, so we use a lower resolution and we settle for lag and breakup? No, I don't think so. Who would be willing to watch Battlestar Galactica if it were webcast at 320x240 when you could watch it on cable or satellite as it was shot? Doesn't that defeat the whole movement towards richly detailed hi-def content?
I don't see it happening for these interrelated reasons: bandwidth, resolution, content, viewing experience, etc. As much fun as some webcams can be, I can't see a future of all sorts of amature broadcasters ever going anywhere.
To be honest, it's what everyone in the Unix world did from the start, Microsoft does more than most people change their socks, every browser coder does by not meeting someone else's, and what your parents do whenever you surprise them.
Seriously though, who writes the standards? Whoever is purveying the popular thing of the moment. Who follows the standards? Those who want to weasel market share from the one writing the standards. Who changes the standards? People who rightly or wrongfully think they should. Who makes us follow them? No one.
(Aren't you glad that "no one needs more than 640K" standard is not?)
I prefer not to deal with standards beyond common sense and knowledge of the species using the thing based on the standard, except where important like engineering requirements for structures and so on. The only other time I'd bother is if I'm trying to interact with those who insist on adherence to some standard.
Rambling, incoherent, without standards./. standard it seems.
...this generator's output is about as coherent as the statements by "Father" In Equilibrium. If you twist yourself into the land of tinfoil hat paranoid, you can almost begin to think it makes sense, the way you start to hallucinate whispered voices in white noise if you have to listen to it too long. A couple more years of work and this will be even funnier because the output of such code will seem perfectly normal and it will take longer to realize that it is a joke. In the meantime, this is just perfect. I think I'll have to start padding my resume now. : )
Hardware encryption which runs transparently between the controller and the hard drive has been availible for a while now. Nothing on the drive is in plaintext, not even the boot sector, and without the key it won't work.
Put the disk on a machine without the encryption system and key and you get gibberish which you will take from now until the end of the sun's expected lifespan to figure out.
Add software encryption loaders at boot and then OS loading encryption on top of that and finally file level encryption with PGP and what was what is never going to be figured out. If this is on Windows and it crashes, you'll never recover anything. I'm not sure if you can get an image off the drive in its encrypted form and have to do backups from the running decrypting state and encrypt back-ups separately as far as back-ups are concerned.
Do a simple random overwrite once booted and no one will ever recover enough of anything to decrypt through the layers even if they have some Star Trek-ish futuristic technology.
Problem solved. If the data is that sensitive in the first place, it should have transparent hardware encryption in the first place at the very least. I don't understand why so much data is kept in plaintext from the start and no thought given to this portion of the problem from the start.
...to the question about free drivers: yes, maybe, I certainly hope, all of the above.
We already get our drivers for $free on most platforms. Free as in open and easy, I certainly hope so. While we've made great strides in compatibility over the years, getting the hardware people on board and co-operating is still lagging.
When 95% of each sector of the hardware market is co-operating, then we'll just have to hope coders are doing something useful with the platforms now that they're working.
I'll put this in my personal "Good News" category for future reference.
...that unless and until the difference between root and other levels of access are clearly explained as well as sudo, this will keep on being old news.
Look at the false security of WinXP Home. "Oh, I'm not worried, I can't log in as Administrator unless I go to Safe Mode." So what? The average user's account is Administrator group by default and it's always root access. No end to the misery you can get into. Trojans can get total system access without their coders trying very hard at it. There's a reason they're called script kiddies.
I've said for years that ease of use is the number one make or break thing for the Linux world and it is, but there's no need to sacrifice all the wonderful better things just to make it happen. That's just distro builder laziness. As with the Debian bunch, I'm willing to wait a little for stability and security.
So all you distributors hard at work out there, when you're doing your conceptualizing, try conceiving of a step-by-step welcome on boot explaining this very important thing called security. A little bit of education would go a long way. Hint: try asking some of the people who do CGI out there to make an animated penguin presentation for you if you need help getting the average user's attention.
...and someone will try to bring back the bloated corpse to life. This is what Enterprise was about, there's no getting around it, and it deserves to go.
Can we toss Berman out an airlock at the same time?
Such a thing, using POV-Ray would give new meaning to "script".
I love POV-Ray, though rusty, but then again... I mean...
I'm at a loss with that one. Seems as improbable as Enterprise revising Trek cannon successfully. Let's hope it isn't, but not hold our breath either.
The producers of Enterprise OTOH may feel free to hold their breath forever. So I'm a little angry with them. What's the percentage of long time Trek fans who aren't?
...*AA don't belong on I2. They aren't researchers, they aren't proper party to its development, their desires aren't germane to what I2 is for.
In addition to avoiding spending a single penny on any of their crud, sooner or later, they are going to go upgainst one or more people who will fight them tooth and nail in court in a to-the-death legal slugfest of attrition. All they are doing is making themselves look like greedy bastards.
I'm not paranoid that they will eliminate file sharing whether legal or questionable, or wipe out fair use altogether. I'm confident they'll lose in the end. It just amazes me that they can be so dense as to think lawsuit frenzy will win them converts to their arguments or make enough people fear them. They ain't the government and don't have its police powers, no matter how many suits they file.
How did they get on I2 and why? Is there an action that can be taken against them being there? Fine, supposed IP was being shared. Shotgunning lawsuits was not the answer. And to attack universities where the ratio of anti to pro corporate/ip-Nazi sentiment is so lopsided? They need to receive a Darwin Awards Lifetime Achievement trophy.
I've never gotten any calls from Cox and they can kiss my behind if they have a problem with me making use of sockets. The very concept that a well-known port must be used by the well-known service is assumption-based cr*p. I've run various things on 80 and 23 and so forth for no better reason than I felt like it.
By default, I always put any serious ongoing usage on some nonstandard port. Thanks to OpenSSH I can SFTP to my heart's content and they have no idea what the traffic is inside.
The bandwidth caps made much more sense pre-DOCSIS when all-you-could-eat upstream was the rule. Now we're set at specific levels based on what the area can handle which is entirely based on the head end and its backhauls. Right now, 768K is the max for my area. If everyone in my neighborhood were file sharing it wouldn't bring the node to standstill.
With regard to the RIAA/MPAA, they too can kiss my rear. I don't listen to their artists, I don't bother buying their cruddy CDs, I see them as worse than Microsoft selling beta code as finished product. They sell anti-artistic expressions of contempt for my audio sanity as if they were soul-changing sounds from Heaven, market them as if they were life-saving elixir, and tenaciously hold on to them as if they were platinum bars. Bill Gates saying Windows is a solid OS is orders of magnitude less laughable than saying that the latest Fifty Cent brag-fest is intellectual property.
Advances in file-sharing are coming which will lay them low and I can tell you that ISPs most manifestly do not want to be the b*tch for these agencies. They want to do as little as possible on the content side and as much as possible just to keep the pipes flowing and making the money. They're more concerned with virus and spam traffic than anything else.
What annoys is how easily the legislative branch is willing to kiss these agencies' behinds for a few election donations. Surefire bet they won't pass a law to shut their influence out. We of the networking world will have to provide the solution to these pests by our usual reliance on knowing the technology better than they do, putting redundancy, distributed processing and storage, cryptography, steganography, and so forth to use and engange in ongoing peaceful non-violent non-co-operation.
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It says it all and you're a fool to ignore what Unix started out as and what dangerous idiocy is still contained within its frightening depths. Like a nuclear reactor, it has its uses but should always be treated with great respect. If you're relying on the reactor to produce needed power and not contaminate the countryside, then leaving the control room wide open to any child that walks in is like leaving the average person in root on any given *nix box that is being relied on. Either thing is stupid and asking for trouble.
It's not for nothing I half-rejoice at the option of using Run As on XP Pro but still await the concept of the machine not running every freaking thing as root. Until then, Windows will still be massively vulnerable as will every *nix box administered by someone following this guy for advice. Thankfully, the OpenBSD adherent where I work would laugh themselves into an asthmatic attack if they read his statement.
...let's get one thing straight: an impact will not lead to a Cowboy BeBop future, I don't care how cute you think Ed and Ein are or how sexy Faye is. Wishful thinking.
With the fanboy wave-off out of the way, I would like to say that the mere threat of this should get our notice. We're not in danger right now of running out of oil but sooner or later we will be, and without energy on hand, getting access to nuclear fissile materials will be next to impossible never mind refining them and we still won't magically overnight be any closer to getting fusion or mass-energy conversion working.
Add to news of the Yellowstone mega-caldera and the possibility that we're headed towards a cooling phase planet wide, and this rock being in the neighborhood ready to drop in and we're looking at a pretty good picture of a species with less security than a corporation firewall administered by your neighbor's five year old and much more serious ramifications.
Of course we need to spread out and make sure the species can sustain itself past such an event. Problem is, will anyone really grasp it when so much more pressing stuff is on the plate, like who's still in the running on Amazing Race?
We call them Brittney MP3s.
On a more serious note, this is pretty much a non-issue given that people can use VLC to preview incomplete files and will delete whatever seems non-kosher. If we further subdivide the hashing to blocks/parts then there's no way each individual part container will hash exactly in match with the original. Try massaging the hash for thirty separate parts. Non-trivial.
I've said it before. P2P is advancing apace with all sorts of things and within a short time will render this totally irrellevant. They just keep illustrating how badly they still don't get it. It's as if they trying to combat piracy using VCRs by attacking the mechanism of Super-8 film cameras.
No, really. This should be almost powerful enough to run next years (cr)applications from Macrodobe.
Okay, seriously, it is impressive and another good illustration of the strengths of OSX over every horrible thing Apple called the Macintosh OS before they went over to the *nix base.
Oh yeah, that Star Wars t-shirt guy reminds me of what I looked like before I became older, grayer, and crustier. I'm so glad I stopped wearing shirts like that.
Microsoft doesn't practice security by obscurity, they don't practice security at all.
Microsoft is still deeply locked into a corporate LAN mindset where all hosts are trusted, no one does anything shifty, and all users are business users. Meanwhile, they rule the civilian end-user market and the civies aren't remotely trustworthy, have too much free time on their hands, etc. The Internet is not a twenty seat LAN in Bismarck.
On top of this, you have Microsoft's usual bad coding practices, lack of thorough testing inhouse, and this has gone on for years and only compounded itself over and over again. An entire operating system is designed and coded with development tools which are themselves far from bulletproof which were coded on the prior OS iteration which itself was far from bulletproof having been coded on the prior development tool which itself was...
It's like standing between two opposed mirrors, except they're funhouse mirrors and you're sitting there trying to grind them accurate with a handful of abrasive,a sponge, and bucket of water and your boss keeps tossing them out and replacing them with new ones that are only slightly closer to true. "Leave it to the buyer to find the distortions!"
They practice obfuscation, but it has nothing to do with security. They're practicing obscurity in development. Sort of like erasing pieces of your blueprints at random as you think you've built that section correctly.
I see comments that Adobe apps are (supposedly) stable. Since when? I've had to try twelve straight times and do some massive registry editing and uninstallation of codecs to get Premiere just to install, and another five days of further fiddling to get it to start correctly, and even then, I could still go for a bike ride around my entire county and come back before it did finally finish loading.
It looks to me like Adobe is competing with Microsoft for needlessly bloated code.
Macromedia apps on the other hand install right the first time and start correctly, but never seem to do anything that I want them to do, that the docs explicitly state they should do.
So now we get apps that won't install correctly, won't start in a reasonable amount of time when you do finally shoe-horn them in, and then won't do what they are supposed to? This is like the graphic design equivalent of Windows 95 first release.
I second, third, fourth, etc. the question on the wisdom of allowing the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging without a viable #3 and #4 fast behind to become the new #2 and #3. Are we to expect Corel to pull a miracle out of their nether regions to compete? Will we b*tch and moan if MS steps to the plate with offerings that it bundles with Windows?
Sorry, but as a tech with some scruples I gotta say we shouldn't be letting the creation of a new Microsoft of the graphics world get going: a behemoth company that puts out stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't care but you don't have much of a choice because you're already joined at the hip and reliant upon their stuff for your daily business.
Looks like they've solved the Afterlife Transfer Mode problem already.
Just because you can tickle the keys, doesn't mean you should have to. Actually, Cisco knows this and does have GUI software for much of their hardware configuration and it is ever so much faster than typing over one thousand lines of code every time and yes, I've typed that many on a Cisco router before. I thought my fingers would bleed and my eyes fall out.
You cannot overestimate the chances of keyboard typos either when the user has to type in that much. One wrong entry not caught and the config saved and oops, no entry into the new paperweight.
Humans are visually oriented critters and GUIs just make more sense. Drag and drop interface dynamics have been well known forever and they should be used for easy quick administration. I should have my time freed up from inane drudgery for more serious involved tasks and thats why there are people catering to that need and want and I for one, welcome our new GUI writing overlords.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Fonts are programs, as odd as that may sound. Postscript fonts are the obvious examples here, but Truetype fonts are also interpreted bytecode.
Of course, by this logic, so are Applesoft shape tables and every vector graphic because they tell other code through interpretation what to do, ie, tell it which direction to move and light up a pixel and in what color, etc.
Come to think of it, so too would commands given to people and things as they are interpreted instructions and thus programs of a sort, even if run on the buggiest operating system known. I wonder which dog instructor licenses the "heel" instruction. Am I violating IP by not publishing the source code when I tell my co-worker to "knock it off"? Can I just make a text file availible on a web site?
IMHO, this is all really insane.
No argument there at all.
Hey Slashdotters, did this reply get rendered in a GPL font on the machine in front of you? Feel free to use it. Just remember to publish the souce code and consider, will you be publishing it because I instructed you to and you interpreted the instruction or because you were supposed to?
Now we can stop using everything and except a thumb on one hand, the other hand, and... Nevermind.
Seriously, we need more interface physical activity in this chair/couch potato land. Maybe some sort of Wushu interface where you have to move in three dimensions to make anything work. Combine with 3d goggles and you get to web surf and work out. No more cubicle-butt!
...but I am too apathetic to look for it. What follows is no troll. I swear.
My first reaction to this and the article was, "what amount of crack is being smoked now and by whom?"
My second reaction was, "this is par for the opportunistic and predatory but too stupid to live course."
Once again, late to the party and like the worst newbie's granddad, going "ooohh, what's this I hear about this inter thing?" Anyone remember their take on the VCR for years and years? It was the money people reacting to the new dynamics of the entertainment market with the entrenchment of the VCR that led to the end of all crap straight to the first run cinemas theme of the 70s and beginning of the straight to video with those what were we thinking mistakes theme of the 80s on.
I think the experienced net-going public's desire to adopt a DRM-ified torrent system is about like their desire to see a musical version of Trainspotting starring Andy Dick. We know that DRM is going to be the first thought on their minds. I think we can also see some sort of iTunes-like pruveyor appearing and it being half-assed to start, broken repeatedly, the IP providers getting stern and filing lawsuits, and the system progressing to some sort of bastard offspring of Tivo and BitTorrent.
No thanks. They still don't get it? Indeed.
Seconded. His website was a dizzying assault on my sense of being in IT and like standing under a clear moonless starry night, it made me feel real small for a moment. I am in awe. Bookmarked.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here. Windows doesn't work right out of the box? Since when? The fact is that if you can and do read the documentation which is in fact quite voluminous unlike the *nix world, it does very much so work right out of the box
I RTFM with *nix all the time, and the best docs found on a distro still are contradicted by the code itself, forcing me to creatively interpret what the coder, brilliant as he or she may be, incompetently thought up for documentation. I should not have to interpret documentation. It should work exactly as written and either the code changed to reflect the docs which is the *nix way, or the docs written to conform to the code as written which is the Windows way and come to think of it, the way of auto manufacturers, electronics builders, and just about everyone else living in the sane logical world.
Seventeen tries to get Captive NTFS working just once is insane. And when I ask why it isn't, the most helpful answer I get should not be that I am too stupid to understand what the doc writer was implying.
With no prior experience in doing so at the first job I had to deal with it, I managed to network DOS/Win3.11 and OS/2 2.1 machines with Token Ring and Ethernet simultaenously in less than four hours of work. All because the docs were well written, the code did exactly what the docs said, and I did what the code expected of me.
Linux is easy enough if someone wraps a lot of stuff around it and includes eye candy to distract from the harder stuff, but when experienced techs need to spend more time reading more docs and still asking questions of others and still researching Usenet and web forums for answers, it's not remotely a contender for a system that does more often than not work right out of the box.
Sometimes I think way too many people are still having flashbacks to the upgrade from Win3.11 to Win95 but that was ten years ago. Can we fast forward to now and see the current reality is that XP works very nice, its other more technical and ethical problems notwithstanding? No one is saying it is secure, merely that it is still far and away easier to use and install, and much more so for the average newbie than anything else.
Finally, for those who are thinking corporate support means anything with regard to ease of use, you need only look at IBM and OS/2 Warp 3. Money is not the reason. Acceptance of the logic that the vast majority of the public lives by and not the tortured illogic we techies sometimes live be is what will lead to products that people want. Apple illustrates this quite well and though I hate Jobs with a titanic passion, I must admit they've finally started to wake up over there. Now, will the *nix community?
People have been predicting things like this for years. Anyone who deals with P2P traffic in ISP work knows that this isn't going to fly. For crying out loud, Video over DSL hasn't gone anyplace and DBS is still running in circles chasing its tail. Why? Ease of distribution and bandwidth.
Sure, there's something to be said about content but not nearly as much as all this. And when it comes to content, people don't want ten million Internet broadcasters clogging up the Internet with pointless vanity crap they won't want nearly as much as a high cost well polished production like CSI or Queer as Folk or whatever.
Cable provides the best bandwidth out there as of right now and even that tops out at a couple hundred high definition channels. To broadcast over the net introduces new TCP/IP overhead robbing you of bandwidth further. Imagine if ten thousand people all choose one of a thousand broadcasts to watch simultaneously in one city alone. Imagine repeating this every night across every city and town. We'd need to start building fiber pipes measured like sewer pipes as in feet in diameter.
Okay, so we use a lower resolution and we settle for lag and breakup? No, I don't think so. Who would be willing to watch Battlestar Galactica if it were webcast at 320x240 when you could watch it on cable or satellite as it was shot? Doesn't that defeat the whole movement towards richly detailed hi-def content?
I don't see it happening for these interrelated reasons: bandwidth, resolution, content, viewing experience, etc. As much fun as some webcams can be, I can't see a future of all sorts of amature broadcasters ever going anywhere.
Other than that omission, I will add it to my "must waste time at Borders sipping coffee and avoiding my insane family" reading list.
To be honest, it's what everyone in the Unix world did from the start, Microsoft does more than most people change their socks, every browser coder does by not meeting someone else's, and what your parents do whenever you surprise them.
/. standard it seems.
Seriously though, who writes the standards? Whoever is purveying the popular thing of the moment. Who follows the standards? Those who want to weasel market share from the one writing the standards. Who changes the standards? People who rightly or wrongfully think they should. Who makes us follow them? No one.
(Aren't you glad that "no one needs more than 640K" standard is not?)
I prefer not to deal with standards beyond common sense and knowledge of the species using the thing based on the standard, except where important like engineering requirements for structures and so on. The only other time I'd bother is if I'm trying to interact with those who insist on adherence to some standard.
Rambling, incoherent, without standards.
It just occured to me... much C code is about as farsical as are the Prez' statements.
...this generator's output is about as coherent as the statements by "Father" In Equilibrium. If you twist yourself into the land of tinfoil hat paranoid, you can almost begin to think it makes sense, the way you start to hallucinate whispered voices in white noise if you have to listen to it too long. A couple more years of work and this will be even funnier because the output of such code will seem perfectly normal and it will take longer to realize that it is a joke. In the meantime, this is just perfect. I think I'll have to start padding my resume now. : )
Hardware encryption which runs transparently between the controller and the hard drive has been availible for a while now. Nothing on the drive is in plaintext, not even the boot sector, and without the key it won't work.
Put the disk on a machine without the encryption system and key and you get gibberish which you will take from now until the end of the sun's expected lifespan to figure out.
Add software encryption loaders at boot and then OS loading encryption on top of that and finally file level encryption with PGP and what was what is never going to be figured out. If this is on Windows and it crashes, you'll never recover anything. I'm not sure if you can get an image off the drive in its encrypted form and have to do backups from the running decrypting state and encrypt back-ups separately as far as back-ups are concerned.
Do a simple random overwrite once booted and no one will ever recover enough of anything to decrypt through the layers even if they have some Star Trek-ish futuristic technology.
Problem solved. If the data is that sensitive in the first place, it should have transparent hardware encryption in the first place at the very least. I don't understand why so much data is kept in plaintext from the start and no thought given to this portion of the problem from the start.
...to the question about free drivers: yes, maybe, I certainly hope, all of the above.
We already get our drivers for $free on most platforms. Free as in open and easy, I certainly hope so. While we've made great strides in compatibility over the years, getting the hardware people on board and co-operating is still lagging.
When 95% of each sector of the hardware market is co-operating, then we'll just have to hope coders are doing something useful with the platforms now that they're working.
I'll put this in my personal "Good News" category for future reference.
...that unless and until the difference between root and other levels of access are clearly explained as well as sudo, this will keep on being old news.
Look at the false security of WinXP Home. "Oh, I'm not worried, I can't log in as Administrator unless I go to Safe Mode." So what? The average user's account is Administrator group by default and it's always root access. No end to the misery you can get into. Trojans can get total system access without their coders trying very hard at it. There's a reason they're called script kiddies.
I've said for years that ease of use is the number one make or break thing for the Linux world and it is, but there's no need to sacrifice all the wonderful better things just to make it happen. That's just distro builder laziness. As with the Debian bunch, I'm willing to wait a little for stability and security.
So all you distributors hard at work out there, when you're doing your conceptualizing, try conceiving of a step-by-step welcome on boot explaining this very important thing called security. A little bit of education would go a long way. Hint: try asking some of the people who do CGI out there to make an animated penguin presentation for you if you need help getting the average user's attention.
...and someone will try to bring back the bloated corpse to life. This is what Enterprise was about, there's no getting around it, and it deserves to go.
Can we toss Berman out an airlock at the same time?
Such a thing, using POV-Ray would give new meaning to "script".
I love POV-Ray, though rusty, but then again... I mean...
I'm at a loss with that one. Seems as improbable as Enterprise revising Trek cannon successfully. Let's hope it isn't, but not hold our breath either.
The producers of Enterprise OTOH may feel free to hold their breath forever. So I'm a little angry with them. What's the percentage of long time Trek fans who aren't?
...*AA don't belong on I2. They aren't researchers, they aren't proper party to its development, their desires aren't germane to what I2 is for.
In addition to avoiding spending a single penny on any of their crud, sooner or later, they are going to go upgainst one or more people who will fight them tooth and nail in court in a to-the-death legal slugfest of attrition. All they are doing is making themselves look like greedy bastards.
I'm not paranoid that they will eliminate file sharing whether legal or questionable, or wipe out fair use altogether. I'm confident they'll lose in the end. It just amazes me that they can be so dense as to think lawsuit frenzy will win them converts to their arguments or make enough people fear them. They ain't the government and don't have its police powers, no matter how many suits they file.
How did they get on I2 and why? Is there an action that can be taken against them being there? Fine, supposed IP was being shared. Shotgunning lawsuits was not the answer. And to attack universities where the ratio of anti to pro corporate/ip-Nazi sentiment is so lopsided? They need to receive a Darwin Awards Lifetime Achievement trophy.
I've never gotten any calls from Cox and they can kiss my behind if they have a problem with me making use of sockets. The very concept that a well-known port must be used by the well-known service is assumption-based cr*p. I've run various things on 80 and 23 and so forth for no better reason than I felt like it.
By default, I always put any serious ongoing usage on some nonstandard port. Thanks to OpenSSH I can SFTP to my heart's content and they have no idea what the traffic is inside.
The bandwidth caps made much more sense pre-DOCSIS when all-you-could-eat upstream was the rule. Now we're set at specific levels based on what the area can handle which is entirely based on the head end and its backhauls. Right now, 768K is the max for my area. If everyone in my neighborhood were file sharing it wouldn't bring the node to standstill.
With regard to the RIAA/MPAA, they too can kiss my rear. I don't listen to their artists, I don't bother buying their cruddy CDs, I see them as worse than Microsoft selling beta code as finished product. They sell anti-artistic expressions of contempt for my audio sanity as if they were soul-changing sounds from Heaven, market them as if they were life-saving elixir, and tenaciously hold on to them as if they were platinum bars. Bill Gates saying Windows is a solid OS is orders of magnitude less laughable than saying that the latest Fifty Cent brag-fest is intellectual property.
Advances in file-sharing are coming which will lay them low and I can tell you that ISPs most manifestly do not want to be the b*tch for these agencies. They want to do as little as possible on the content side and as much as possible just to keep the pipes flowing and making the money. They're more concerned with virus and spam traffic than anything else.
What annoys is how easily the legislative branch is willing to kiss these agencies' behinds for a few election donations. Surefire bet they won't pass a law to shut their influence out. We of the networking world will have to provide the solution to these pests by our usual reliance on knowing the technology better than they do, putting redundancy, distributed processing and storage, cryptography, steganography, and so forth to use and engange in ongoing peaceful non-violent non-co-operation.