IIRC, the main difference that MS is touting over traditional *IX shell environments is that pipelines can exchange typed data instead of simply text.
It's an interesting idea, though I'm not sure that I'd call it earth-shattering. This is an interface that applications need to support.
I think that the main way that they could offer value over the *IX world is by providing an lower-learning-curve-shell. Traditionally, this is how Microsoft has managed to offer value over Unix.
I'd like to see the *IX world get a fully-blown DAG-of-programs data stream processing environment, instead of just a linear pipeline. Gegl (the GIMP redesign) does this for graphics, but there's no reason that this can't be a feature that shells provide and something that works with data other than image data.
(Technically you can do this in Unix today with named pipes, which the Windows world sadly lacks, but it's not as nice and transparent as it could be.)
Actually, I guess you could do this with the mingw port of netcat in Windows...hmm...but even less transparent.
The shell that MS had for a while wasn't great, but the virtual terminal absolutely sucked. It was slow, laggy, required you to use the mouse for common operations, didn't follow accepted selection convention, hard-wrapped lines when copying text out of the thing, didn't grow the scrollbar as the scrollback buffer grew, lacks tabs, and about eight million other problems. That, I think, is one of the biggest things that they could improve.
That's a big reason PBFA 2 and the follow on Z machine were made. They let DOE check the computer simulations and do basic research that would otherwise require nuclear testing. One of the biggest areas of interest is what happens when the materials in a bomb age. A lot of those weapons are getting quite old.
Entropy -- facilitating nuclear disarmament since the dawn of time.
Did every law enforcement guy and spook get *stupid* WRT PR?
Let's take a look at the list of bright ideas for names:
Total Information Awareness. (Federal tie-databases-together project, never needed a public face in the first place.) Project has spooky logo containing giant floating eyeball in pyramid looking at the world. This is a good example of what we call a very bad idea from a political standpoint
Carnivore. (FBI email monitoring program.) Project has unspecified capabilities to monitor email, lots of techies saying scary things about it already. Bad image.
Sentinel. (FBI database system.) Current bad idea.
Now, let's take a look at what the people doing this could learn from:
Magic Lantern. (FBI keylogger) Good name. Whimsical. Nonthreatening. You can get a picture of a sort-of-elflike FBI guy skipping merrily through the trees. Congress is not going to get complaints from scared citizens demanding that they cut funding on something called Magic Lantern.
Operation Enduring Freedom. (name for the US invasion of Iraq, part two) See, no matter how much you don't like Bush, he managed to hold back on names like Operation Oilgrab, Operation Polishing Daddy's Legacy, and even the (increasingly obviously inaccurate due to news reports) intended name of Operation Infinite Justice. It's not bloodthirsty. It's happy and upbeat.
Department of Defense. In the United States, we don't *have* a Department of War, and haven't for many years, ever since someone figured out that it's harder to get funding for war than for defense. Nor do we have a Department of Offense. The Department of Defense is a friendly shield covering kitties and sleeping babies. This is a good name.
Social Security. Okay "social" might have been a bad idea, as it smacked a bit too much of socialism, but "security" is always safe. Calling this Handout From Our Kids or Federal Pyramid Scheme was avoided. Good choice.
Freedom fighter. The United States does not back terrorists. We have terrorists for *enemies*. We assist freedom fighters in overcoming their cruel oppressors.
There are things that it's okay to attach scary appellations to. Fighter jets -- Fighting Falcon, Tigershark, Hornet, Cobra, Phantom, Demon, Banshee, Fury. Those are supposed to be scary, because it gives people a sense of vicarious power and excitement. Naming domestic monitoring and law enforcement systems (and that is, with the addition of counterintelligence, the job of the FBI) anything scary-sounding is a very bad idea.
While the United States doesn't usually do this, here are some other points:
Do not name a product after living people. With dead people, there's a only a slight chance that some scandal will be discovered later. With live people, you may have your newly-minted Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! be represented by an individual that abuses women, bites ears off of people, and rapes people.
Do not name anything after an ethnic group. Ethnic groups change their names constantly to avoid political friction, and old acceptable terms rapidly become unacceptable. Even the Bureau of Indian Affairs sounds a bit creaky next to Bureau of Native American Affairs, and National Association For the Advancement of Colored People is just plain out-of-date.
Codenames sometimes become product names, as Motorola found out with the PowerPC G3, G4, and G5. People can be sued for codenames, as Apple found out with Sagan. If you're going to have marketing people handing out internal codenames, think first. Or have a separate, external codename to use on products.
Do not make your name a funny joke, especially an in-joke. It's definitely uproariously funny at the time, and then it just creates misery for every person down the road who has to explain it to ev
So the point of offshoring all those jobs...was to free up resources so that we can pay people to do nothing but paw through my communications all day?
Why don't we lock a tape recorder onto a collar on every employee and have the security guard unlock it at the end of the day? That way we don't miss any verbal communications either!
America has the worst human rights track record in the developed world, so China with its censorship isnt really anything new from the point of view of an American.
The British Empire and how it treated its colonies wasn't exactly all roses and spice. Nor was the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Russia has plenty of problems, most recently the Stalinist purges. Germany had the Nazis.
Actually, while the US may not be a shining flower of virtue, it's also not at the bottom of the heap either. The big gripes that human rights advocates have with the US are (a) it screwed the Indians out of its land (not going to change back, sorry libertarians), (b) it enslaved a vast number of people (yup, nasty, got resolved), (c) it still has capital punishment (the sum total of all of which does not compare to the deaths in even a small war).
We need laws of the sort that would allow us to punish Citigroup for this kind of data loss It should be bloody painful for any company that ships masses of (plaintext) financial data out of their building. It is *not* hard to require them to encrypt the goddamn data, nor is it expensive (especially given what financial companies consider expensive). There is no good reason not to make extremely painful penalties for not doing so.
RFID is not the next Internet. The Internet was something that businesses didn't appreciate that turned into a massive platform that allowed leaps and bounds in technology development and service delivery. The Internet did not grow explosively because of marketing. The Internet grew explosively because it created a new (useful) ecosystem that had never existed before.
RFID is the next XML. XML is a technology (do I ever hate that word) with limited but useful business applicability. It is format for building other things, things which are useful. It also has certain limited, but widespread benefits to businesses (all those people who are unhappily trying to fit their various archaic databases together now have some glue to do so). As a result, every businessperson in the world has been inundated with content about XML being a vital, essential business technology for years. RFID is useful for certain tasks. It is also very overhyped, its limitations are rarely appreciated, and while theoretically interesting and useful systems can be built with it, it's not all that interesting on its own. Pretty much like XML.
I remember all the "XML-enabled" stuff, the bad books about XML, the heavy use of the term "XML technology", and the filling in of the "XML checkbox" on products that had no direct benefit from filling in that checkbox other than making some purchaser happy who vaguely understood some article he read about XML. It's going to happen, all over again, with RFID. We now have that idiotically-termed "RFID-powered mouse" as a harbringer.
Man, I'm going to learn to hate the word over the next few years.
Of course, if you *don't* build arms, you don't get the funding to do competitive bleeding-edge robotics work. Bit of a Catch-22, eh? If the NSF got the funding that the DoD is provided with to make tomorrow's killing mechanisms, we wouldn't have these kind of dilemmas, would we?
Don't be an asshat. The end goal is to build automated supply convoys.
Automated supply convoys? Dude, you're dumber than a bag of bricks.
A friend of mine does robotics work at CMU. He was building a "autonomous search and rescue vehicle" for the DoD, went through all the vision and mapping and what-have-you work and was appalled when he was supplied with the final control system and discovered that it sported a big red "Weapon" button.
Nobody in the military is going to ask for funds to build an autonomous bloody kill-bot, for the obvious political reasons. However, once you *have* an autonomous platform and a human-tracking system (so, you know, you don't "accidentally drive into your soldiers", or so you can "find them on search and rescue missions"), you stick a couple of servos and a gun on top and you have a basic version of your kill-bot. Once you have *that* done, it's a much smaller political step to request funding for improvements to "help ensure that none of our boys get accidentally shot", or something along those lines.
Remember the unmanned Predator? Yeah, that "unarmed", "reconaissance" aircraft? The one we stuck a Hellfire air-to-ground-missile to and used to assassinate some al Quaeda suspect (and a couple of people that happened to be in his car) in Yemen, waaay back in 2002? Once you have a vehicle platform, sticking weapons on it is not hard.
You really think that the armed forces would allow their budgets to be threatened by unmanned combat vehicles?
Naturally, you mean *other* than the abovementioned Predator (and the other unmanned aircraft that can serve as weapons platforms). And other than cruise missiles. Come on, man. Face reality. They've been doing this for a long time.
Commanders only think about how many men they command.
Wow. You have one heck of a simplistic view of the people in the military. If that was true, we wouldn't have most manpower-reducing military hardware we do today -- just lots and lots of infantry.
If I'm a general, and someone offers me something that means that I don't have to send people out into a meat grinder, suffer political pressure, pay death benefits, pay to replace someone, deal with photos of dead soldiers making their way into the press...no, I'd have to say that I'd be pretty quick to look into those kill-bots.
That doesn't mean that it's necessarily *bad*, having robots do killing for the United States. We just have to be aware of what we're getting into, and be sure that this is a path that we want to take. Occupations of a country may someday consist of just dumping robotic sentry vehicles all over it, things that shoot on sight anyone that isn't carrying the appropriate radio identification device (or is moving outside of their prescribed limits). No American soldiers need be killed, but we have to consider what happens when wars are cheap and easy to fight, and the media doesn't stir up the public over them.
(a) As some later posters have pointed out, you get a new or refurbished m100, m105, or m125. Best transition you could hope for would be a m100-to-m125.
Wait until someone mentions the tactic of stealing a new Playstation by "buying" a new Playstation, swapping it with a broken one, and returning it as "broken". People who would never dream of shoplifting a Playstation will happily do this. Damnest thing.
Why, all we have to do is lobby to extend copyright for *another* fifty years, and we can keep milking more money out of long-dead artists, now using their acts even after their body has given out!
This is all something we accept when we click "OK" to Google's TOS, without even reading it. If you don't like it, you can always use some other alternative, no guarantees that it will be able to match up with what Google can provide.
Yes, and how many people do you know, and email, that use Gmail? Probably non-zero, right? And let me guess...they don't use PGP/GPG, right? Yup, thought so again. So Google can read at least some of your private correspondence.
Same goes for anyone that emails Yahoo, Hotmail, and so forth users...I wonder how many decades later email could come back to haunt someone.
The news here is that it wasn't just a vulnerability published, nor a proof of concept, it was a full fledged crack attack against one of the sites that represent the corporation itself.
They want to pretend like security is something that can be applied like a coat of paint, but in the end, incidents like this prove that it's the same old crap rolling out of Redmond.
I'm not arguing that Microsoft does a good job of producing secure systems (it's really unrelated to this thread, but I'd say that they have poor security practices, too-complex-to-secure systems, APIs that lend themselves to insecure programming practices, and an unfortunate tendency to twist "security" to mean "DRM"). I'm arguing that a website defacement is not a good argument against a company's software.
I'll bet that *.microsoft.com has a lot of Web-based software that can be toyed with remotely.
As for using CVs, I can't wait until Sourceforge moves to Subversion. I've been using ClearCase recently, and despite all of the things that I dislike about ClearCase, at least the thing can version file and directory renames. It's a pain for a whole lot of open source authors to not be able to version moves.
...I'm probably just not doing a humorous response justice, but when I say "broadcast", I'm referring to the general sense of the word -- one sender that sends a message to an entire group. Consider a USENET posting or an Ethernet broadcast.
Okay, I admit. That pretty much confuses hell out of me. Like every computer user in the United States, my valiant, decade-spanning efforts to avoid being buried under AOL's media spam have left me wondering *why* people are selling the things.
Is there some kind of value to the things? Do people actually *collect* AOL CDs? Is there someone, somewhere, who desperately wants free AOL hours?
It's called having a good reputation. We wouldn't want the next company considering mugging Tux and his friends to have any false illusions about what happens to people who give that path a try.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the main difference that MS is touting over traditional *IX shell environments is that pipelines can exchange typed data instead of simply text.
It's an interesting idea, though I'm not sure that I'd call it earth-shattering. This is an interface that applications need to support.
I think that the main way that they could offer value over the *IX world is by providing an lower-learning-curve-shell. Traditionally, this is how Microsoft has managed to offer value over Unix.
I'd like to see the *IX world get a fully-blown DAG-of-programs data stream processing environment, instead of just a linear pipeline. Gegl (the GIMP redesign) does this for graphics, but there's no reason that this can't be a feature that shells provide and something that works with data other than image data.
(Technically you can do this in Unix today with named pipes, which the Windows world sadly lacks, but it's not as nice and transparent as it could be.)
Actually, I guess you could do this with the mingw port of netcat in Windows...hmm...but even less transparent.
The shell that MS had for a while wasn't great, but the virtual terminal absolutely sucked. It was slow, laggy, required you to use the mouse for common operations, didn't follow accepted selection convention, hard-wrapped lines when copying text out of the thing, didn't grow the scrollbar as the scrollback buffer grew, lacks tabs, and about eight million other problems. That, I think, is one of the biggest things that they could improve.
That's a big reason PBFA 2 and the follow on Z machine were made. They let DOE check the computer simulations and do basic research that would otherwise require nuclear testing. One of the biggest areas of interest is what happens when the materials in a bomb age. A lot of those weapons are getting quite old.
Entropy -- facilitating nuclear disarmament since the dawn of time.
Specifically, 24 minutes of anything that you might be ashamed of?
Let's take a look at the list of bright ideas for names:
Now, let's take a look at what the people doing this could learn from:
There are things that it's okay to attach scary appellations to. Fighter jets -- Fighting Falcon, Tigershark, Hornet, Cobra, Phantom, Demon, Banshee, Fury. Those are supposed to be scary, because it gives people a sense of vicarious power and excitement. Naming domestic monitoring and law enforcement systems (and that is, with the addition of counterintelligence, the job of the FBI) anything scary-sounding is a very bad idea.
While the United States doesn't usually do this, here are some other points:
So the point of offshoring all those jobs...was to free up resources so that we can pay people to do nothing but paw through my communications all day?
Why don't we lock a tape recorder onto a collar on every employee and have the security guard unlock it at the end of the day? That way we don't miss any verbal communications either!
America has the worst human rights track record in the developed world, so China with its censorship isnt really anything new from the point of view of an American.
The British Empire and how it treated its colonies wasn't exactly all roses and spice. Nor was the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Russia has plenty of problems, most recently the Stalinist purges. Germany had the Nazis.
Actually, while the US may not be a shining flower of virtue, it's also not at the bottom of the heap either. The big gripes that human rights advocates have with the US are (a) it screwed the Indians out of its land (not going to change back, sorry libertarians), (b) it enslaved a vast number of people (yup, nasty, got resolved), (c) it still has capital punishment (the sum total of all of which does not compare to the deaths in even a small war).
We need laws of the sort that would allow us to punish Citigroup for this kind of data loss It should be bloody painful for any company that ships masses of (plaintext) financial data out of their building. It is *not* hard to require them to encrypt the goddamn data, nor is it expensive (especially given what financial companies consider expensive). There is no good reason not to make extremely painful penalties for not doing so.
RFID is not the next Internet. The Internet was something that businesses didn't appreciate that turned into a massive platform that allowed leaps and bounds in technology development and service delivery. The Internet did not grow explosively because of marketing. The Internet grew explosively because it created a new (useful) ecosystem that had never existed before.
RFID is the next XML. XML is a technology (do I ever hate that word) with limited but useful business applicability. It is format for building other things, things which are useful. It also has certain limited, but widespread benefits to businesses (all those people who are unhappily trying to fit their various archaic databases together now have some glue to do so). As a result, every businessperson in the world has been inundated with content about XML being a vital, essential business technology for years. RFID is useful for certain tasks. It is also very overhyped, its limitations are rarely appreciated, and while theoretically interesting and useful systems can be built with it, it's not all that interesting on its own. Pretty much like XML.
I remember all the "XML-enabled" stuff, the bad books about XML, the heavy use of the term "XML technology", and the filling in of the "XML checkbox" on products that had no direct benefit from filling in that checkbox other than making some purchaser happy who vaguely understood some article he read about XML. It's going to happen, all over again, with RFID. We now have that idiotically-termed "RFID-powered mouse" as a harbringer.
Man, I'm going to learn to hate the word over the next few years.
Of course, if you *don't* build arms, you don't get the funding to do competitive bleeding-edge robotics work. Bit of a Catch-22, eh? If the NSF got the funding that the DoD is provided with to make tomorrow's killing mechanisms, we wouldn't have these kind of dilemmas, would we?
Don't be an asshat. The end goal is to build automated supply convoys.
Automated supply convoys? Dude, you're dumber than a bag of bricks.
A friend of mine does robotics work at CMU. He was building a "autonomous search and rescue vehicle" for the DoD, went through all the vision and mapping and what-have-you work and was appalled when he was supplied with the final control system and discovered that it sported a big red "Weapon" button.
Nobody in the military is going to ask for funds to build an autonomous bloody kill-bot, for the obvious political reasons. However, once you *have* an autonomous platform and a human-tracking system (so, you know, you don't "accidentally drive into your soldiers", or so you can "find them on search and rescue missions"), you stick a couple of servos and a gun on top and you have a basic version of your kill-bot. Once you have *that* done, it's a much smaller political step to request funding for improvements to "help ensure that none of our boys get accidentally shot", or something along those lines.
Remember the unmanned Predator? Yeah, that "unarmed", "reconaissance" aircraft? The one we stuck a Hellfire air-to-ground-missile to and used to assassinate some al Quaeda suspect (and a couple of people that happened to be in his car) in Yemen, waaay back in 2002? Once you have a vehicle platform, sticking weapons on it is not hard.
You really think that the armed forces would allow their budgets to be threatened by unmanned combat vehicles?
Naturally, you mean *other* than the abovementioned Predator (and the other unmanned aircraft that can serve as weapons platforms). And other than cruise missiles. Come on, man. Face reality. They've been doing this for a long time.
Commanders only think about how many men they command.
Wow. You have one heck of a simplistic view of the people in the military. If that was true, we wouldn't have most manpower-reducing military hardware we do today -- just lots and lots of infantry.
If I'm a general, and someone offers me something that means that I don't have to send people out into a meat grinder, suffer political pressure, pay death benefits, pay to replace someone, deal with photos of dead soldiers making their way into the press...no, I'd have to say that I'd be pretty quick to look into those kill-bots.
That doesn't mean that it's necessarily *bad*, having robots do killing for the United States. We just have to be aware of what we're getting into, and be sure that this is a path that we want to take. Occupations of a country may someday consist of just dumping robotic sentry vehicles all over it, things that shoot on sight anyone that isn't carrying the appropriate radio identification device (or is moving outside of their prescribed limits). No American soldiers need be killed, but we have to consider what happens when wars are cheap and easy to fight, and the media doesn't stir up the public over them.
I'm more concerned with Fortune 500 disposal. The databases are far larger.
But I guess Mom and Pop don't have lobbyists...
(a) As some later posters have pointed out, you get a new or refurbished m100, m105, or m125. Best transition you could hope for would be a m100-to-m125.
(b) Why is everyone so rabid to rip Palm off?
Wait until someone mentions the tactic of stealing a new Playstation by "buying" a new Playstation, swapping it with a broken one, and returning it as "broken". People who would never dream of shoplifting a Playstation will happily do this. Damnest thing.
Why, all we have to do is lobby to extend copyright for *another* fifty years, and we can keep milking more money out of long-dead artists, now using their acts even after their body has given out!
Why would you credit Bush with this mission? What did he have to do with it?
You might try setting your gpg keyserver ("keyserver" line in ~/.gnupg/options) to the same server you used with PGP and see if that helps.
This is all something we accept when we click "OK" to Google's TOS, without even reading it. If you don't like it, you can always use some other alternative, no guarantees that it will be able to match up with what Google can provide.
Yes, and how many people do you know, and email, that use Gmail? Probably non-zero, right? And let me guess...they don't use PGP/GPG, right? Yup, thought so again. So Google can read at least some of your private correspondence.
Same goes for anyone that emails Yahoo, Hotmail, and so forth users...I wonder how many decades later email could come back to haunt someone.
Let me know when the apache.org website is cracked. That would be the FOSS equivalent to this incident IMO
okay
The news here is that it wasn't just a vulnerability published, nor a proof of concept, it was a full fledged crack attack against one of the sites that represent the corporation itself.
And how is this not equivalent?
They want to pretend like security is something that can be applied like a coat of paint, but in the end, incidents like this prove that it's the same old crap rolling out of Redmond.
I'm not arguing that Microsoft does a good job of producing secure systems (it's really unrelated to this thread, but I'd say that they have poor security practices, too-complex-to-secure systems, APIs that lend themselves to insecure programming practices, and an unfortunate tendency to twist "security" to mean "DRM"). I'm arguing that a website defacement is not a good argument against a company's software.
I'll bet that *.microsoft.com has a lot of Web-based software that can be toyed with remotely.
As for using CVs, I can't wait until Sourceforge moves to Subversion. I've been using ClearCase recently, and despite all of the things that I dislike about ClearCase, at least the thing can version file and directory renames. It's a pain for a whole lot of open source authors to not be able to version moves.
Sorry. Difficult to think outside of a US context. You are correct.
...I'm probably just not doing a humorous response justice, but when I say "broadcast", I'm referring to the general sense of the word -- one sender that sends a message to an entire group. Consider a USENET posting or an Ethernet broadcast.
These provide the receiver with anonymity.
Linux needs some scalps hanging from its belt
There is an urgent need for Tux-with-scalps desktop backgrounds!
Okay, I admit. That pretty much confuses hell out of me. Like every computer user in the United States, my valiant, decade-spanning efforts to avoid being buried under AOL's media spam have left me wondering *why* people are selling the things.
Is there some kind of value to the things? Do people actually *collect* AOL CDs? Is there someone, somewhere, who desperately wants free AOL hours?
It's called having a good reputation. We wouldn't want the next company considering mugging Tux and his friends to have any false illusions about what happens to people who give that path a try.