So, completely separate from the issue of using SSL for secure transport we need a easy-to-use, transparent Web client so that encrypted attachments in your Google inbox may be viewed by recipients.
As earlier posters have mentioned, public key encryption use is not widespread. Yes, corresponding nerds have gone to key signing parties, verified ASCII armor, have strong pass phrases, and know how many links away they are in a web of trust. But 98% of the computer using public, and that includes at least 70% of my correspondants, have absolutely no clue about how to handle encryption.
What they need is for my GMail attachment to include a reference to download a Java viewer/application that helps them to setup a public key, read, search, email etc.
The important thing is that it would have to be done on top of the GMail interface. Of course it would be nice if it could be used for other free email account interfaces, too, such as hotmail.
Another advantage of this technology would be that spam filtering could be reinforced as users decide that only messages coming from a certain verifiable senders are worthwhile, etc.
Don't you realize that you're not supposed to desire or legally need more than 1000 songs!
...the report states. "Hard drive players with such large capacity for content go above and beyond not only the music that most consumers want on their portable music player, but also beyond the digital music that they own."
I'm sure you'll come around real soon and agree with us on this. Our good friends at RIAA heartily endorse this point of view for Responsible Hardware Manufacturers United Against Piracy, Pedophaelia and Terrorism. You're not a pedophile, are you?
Besides, why do you think popular radio stations play from a repertoire not to exceed 1000 songs? Like, duh!
Sincerely,
The Man
P.S. Don't be thinking about becoming too attached to non-DRM formats and interfaces like USB 2.0, Ethernet, neither. It upsets us.
My money is on using social engineering techniques to determine everything possible before launching an attack.
Even the attack itself would be more successful if it were tripped by an insider doing something stupid (clicking on an Outlook attachment with some local context softcore pr0n hint).
Given the current software environment, it's the people that leak like sieves.
work these days is not really "white collar" (I dont like these terms presonally).
Have you noticed?
That sometimes the more lowly paid jobs require people to adhere more to a dress code with "white collars"?
Sales people working for $10/hour wearing suits and ties bow and scrape before me, who wears blue jeans, and I'm making a lot more than they ever will.
If this trend continues, people in the upper echelons may veer away from the traditional suit and tie because they might be mistaken for a low level service employee.
Not really, though. There are those subtle gradations between pre-made and tailor made suits, silk vs polyester ties, etc. My sympathies go out to poorly paid people that have to wear uncomfortable clothing, stay on their feet all day, put up with bullshit from the random bad attitude public, etc.
For years everyone's been saying that using FOSS software gives you reliability, quality, no vendor lock-in, at much lower cost.
Yeah, yeah. Fine. Great.
Practically, though, there are two interesting side developments:
If you run a test deployment of Linux or some other FOSS, and make enough noise about it, you can obtain a discount from MS at your next negotation session if you appear serious about threatening to move to open source software. You might feel apprehensive about such a big move, but then again you might find that following through on the threat and assuming some risk and discomfort might be worthwhile.
If you successfully compete against Microsoft, you can obtain more money by working for them instead of against them. Become proficient at selling open source solutions. Make a big enough sales victory and you, too, can opt for safely feeding from an almost inexhaustible source of money.
These are two winning strategies.
The losing strategy (for customers) is just to throw tons of money to buy MS products without asking any questions.
Even though the "nobody got fired for buying $LONGSTANDING_BIG_VENDOR..." mentality has seemed like a safe fallback in IT purchasing, everyone should look at all their options fresh each purchasing cycle for both hardware and software and ask what they've been getting for their money, is what I have reasonably adequate for my actual business needs, etc.
"Competitors", "regulators", "reviewers", EU fines, settlements with Sun, Minnesota, AOL-Netscape, Apple bailout, etc. It's all just the cost of doing business as a monopoly.
The marketplace is still working, just not in the way we might have hoped or imagined.
I was looking recently at the Karma, Neuros and iRiver for something that I could use to record quality FM broadcasts from a local college station. Yes, I want multiple codecs, sync up to my collection via Ethernet, etc.
Note: some of these players have FM receivers but do not allow recording directly off FM.
as in this entry from the FAQ for the iRiver H140:
Q. Can I record from the FM Tuner on the H100?
A. FM Recording is not a feature of the H100, however Voice recording and Line-in recording are built in.
Another nice feature would be low power FM transmit so that you could easily use your portable player to feed into your car stereo.
Or to feed into another nearby player with an FM receiver. But we all know what kind of virulence that capability would unleash - the end of civilization as we know it.
As long as they [Apple & Red Hat] are around, all MS will get is "corrective" action.
Exactly.
So the recent concerns about the slow pace at which the consent decree's prescribed API licensing and documentation are having any effect on bringing about new competition in the server space are zero surprise to anyone in this forum.
As mentioned in an earlier/. story, Microsoft is making a very pragmatic push to buy legal settlements as part of a business strategy.
How much will it cost them to settle with Massachusetts? I'm sure MS can afford it.
In the longer term, the company has only to worry whether a lid can be kept on the cost of legal settlements. Since they're not in a line of business that creates human health problems (the cost of which is rising at a terrific rate) like tobacco or asbestos (or possibly even fastfood, MS will probably be able to play this strategy out for some time.
The officials responsible for the decision to use electronic voting will herald its use as part of India's grand entry into the technology revolution.
Companies providing the equipment will highlight its features, talking about security and speed with which results are available.
Winners of the elections will be too elated to spend time dwelling on the nuts and bolts of the technology used to bring them to power.
Losers of the elections will call into question any irregularities as well as the inherent problems with the electronic voting machines that motivated some of the world's best computer scientists to disapprove of electronic voting.
More complaining will occur for closer elections. Media coverage of the complaining will vary depending on how close the elections are.
In the end we'll all accept the inevitable results:
because they're offering product liability insurance to both developers and users."
Now this is a weird situation.
And before anything else let me say that I am a strong advocate for free software and think Pamela Jones and groklaw have done a wonderful service to the community by applying intense legal play-by-play to the SCO case.
But.
If they're in the business of selling insurance against copyright attacks on Linux, does that not represent a conflict of interest?
If they were after the money, I would have expected their assessments to have at least a small note of ominious nature so that potential clients would be inclined to buy that insurance.
In an era when every other day you hear about yet another lapse in corporate ethics, with the problems that Arthur Anderson got into by offering consulting services to the same clients to whom they offered auditing services, people have to be a lot more careful.
As soons as workers in China can organize their own union, independent of any state-controlled union, and can elect officials from any party and not the state-controlled party, then they'll be free.
As it stands now, if you have friends in high places in China you can survive inconveniences such as not paying your workers for months at a time, or ever.
And if the government decides to flood huge tracts of land with a new hydroelectric project, them's the breaks.
I'm all for job opportunities for workers in India and China and everywhere else. At least India is a democracy, even if there are problems with religious tolerance. China, on the other hand, has an authoritarian government. In the long term, all the happy faced Walmart products we buy from China will either empower an authoritarian regime or give rise to a violent revolution there from workers that get mad about high officials reaping the benefits while they scrape by (Marx and Mao would be rolling in their graves if they saw what was going on in China now; nominal communists have discovered the wonders of being capitalists in the 19th century sense of the word.)
The average users don't want to remember text commands and syntax, it is as simple as that. Yes the command line interface is more efficient at many tasks, however the learning curve is deeper.
Perhaps users don't like to have to remember text commands and syntax. But they are pre-programmed for text interfaces just because reading and writing are done this way. And as much as dramatic and visual arts have progressed, their effectiveness for conceptual communication is much more of a niche (eg, using pictures to illustrate geometry, picking points on an object, creating a spline curve).
GUI's have been over utilized on occassions where a text-based interface would have sufficed. For drawing, for manipulating geometric objects a GUI is perfect. But opening up a dialog box and inputting a text string and moving a mouse to click OK?
The usefulness of text based interfaces accounts for so much of why many small businesses are more than happy to run off some crusty old DOS program they installed in 1988. It gets the job done and there's no technical or economic reason for migrating to a GUI.
Regarding the learning curve: The learning curve for text interfaces can be just as well or as poorly designed as the learning curve for a GUI interface. Either way, you need a good help system with keyword searches, etc. And, as a confession, I end up going to google now more than doing "man -k" to find out answers to questions that really only need a text answer and I do use Mozilla instead of Lynx.
I try to breath it all in and come up with a consistent world view that connects all of the facts together.
I see many disturbing things, but still it all comes up gray and there are loose ends.
Too many, on the right and the left, see the world as full of black hats and white hats.
It's more complicated than that. As much as we'd all like to be able to have an easy, logically-consistent, cohesive world view, there isn't one. If you adopt one, it's going to be wrong some of the time.
Even then, customers are drawn into dealerships by the promise of low, low monthly payments.
Which might account for the 40% rate of upside down car loans, where the loan balance exceeds the market value.
I maintain my cars and try to drive them into the ground, except for the time one of `em got totalled. It was tough getting much of a settlement from the insurance company on a Honda Civic with 170k miles, but I really meant to drive that up to 300k miles or so when major engine or transmission work might be required.
The pickup truck might have rust holes in the body, but it's got 265k miles on it and still works fine.
Any CIO that can't take exposure to zealots isn't a qualified CIO.
Any large sized internal IT organization has its share of zealots already that have to be dealt with.
Further, these are the same CIO's that have to withstand the sales droid talks "We Have One System That Will Solve All Your Problems".
Good CIOs have a Teflon-coated asbestos suit and knows enough to ask their objective technically-educated staff to evaluate any details that they don't understand themselves because they don't have the time.
I've generally caved to ignorance of the masses, but only partially.
I used to ask people to resend those attachments as PDF files so I could read them, and I still do that to some extent (most people, even oblivious users of Windows boxes, understand that Word is not Word is not Word, that different versions of Word, Macs etc., can all affect how a a document appears). More now, if I have to view it, I just open it up in Open Office and create my own PDF.
Otherwise, if I have to run Word to contribute to a collaborative document, I just do barebones "get the content in" and spend zero time worrying about making Word do the right thing.
My life's too short to futz with Word's formatting quirks. I still take time to get things right in LaTeX, but at least my files will still as good in 20 years as they were 20 years ago.
And I look forward to the inevitable faster web rot that will accompany contents that are offered in this moving target "standard" format. It will teach people that ".doc" is not a good thing for archival and, dare they think it, for everyday use?
Plus, be part of the solution: Compose and send email that is plain ASCII text.
What is really needed to obliterate.doc,.ppt and.xls and other strange formats is for a superseding XML format like SVG, with precise vector-based formatting, dynamic effects, to start taking over the web. For this to happen, though, we need:
Slashdot Mirror
So, completely separate from the issue of using SSL for secure transport we need a easy-to-use, transparent Web client so that encrypted attachments in your Google inbox may be viewed by recipients.
As earlier posters have mentioned, public key encryption use is not widespread. Yes, corresponding nerds have gone to key signing parties, verified ASCII armor, have strong pass phrases, and know how many links away they are in a web of trust. But 98% of the computer using public, and that includes at least 70% of my correspondants, have absolutely no clue about how to handle encryption.
What they need is for my GMail attachment to include a reference to download a Java viewer/application that helps them to setup a public key, read, search, email etc.
The important thing is that it would have to be done on top of the GMail interface. Of course it would be nice if it could be used for other free email account interfaces, too, such as hotmail.
Another advantage of this technology would be that spam filtering could be reinforced as users decide that only messages coming from a certain verifiable senders are worthwhile, etc.
Mr Consumer, you are out of line!
Don't you realize that you're not supposed to desire or legally need more than 1000 songs!
I'm sure you'll come around real soon and agree with us on this. Our good friends at RIAA heartily endorse this point of view for Responsible Hardware Manufacturers United Against Piracy, Pedophaelia and Terrorism. You're not a pedophile, are you?
Besides, why do you think popular radio stations play from a repertoire not to exceed 1000 songs? Like, duh!
Sincerely,
The Man
P.S. Don't be thinking about becoming too attached to non-DRM formats and interfaces like USB 2.0, Ethernet, neither. It upsets us.
Some polling booths have been ordered to re-poll due to malfunctions
"Uh, excuse me, sir, your vote does not seem to have been registered in the computer properly."
"Would you mind coming back and verifying the machine is working properly by voting for Lyndon LaRouche? It's just a test."
My money is on using social engineering techniques to determine everything possible before launching an attack.
Even the attack itself would be more successful if it were tripped by an insider doing something stupid (clicking on an Outlook attachment with some local context softcore pr0n hint).
Given the current software environment, it's the people that leak like sieves.
These would be great for getting around if it weren't for the 20 second time limitation.
So if I have to compromise and give up on a having a rocket pack or flying car, can I get a MagLev skateboard instead?
We had VRML.
And an XML based X3D (?)
Were those other formats that bad that we need U3D?
work these days is not really "white collar" (I dont like these terms presonally).
Have you noticed?
That sometimes the more lowly paid jobs require people to adhere more to a dress code with "white collars"?
Sales people working for $10/hour wearing suits and ties bow and scrape before me, who wears blue jeans, and I'm making a lot more than they ever will.
If this trend continues, people in the upper echelons may veer away from the traditional suit and tie because they might be mistaken for a low level service employee.
Not really, though. There are those subtle gradations between pre-made and tailor made suits, silk vs polyester ties, etc. My sympathies go out to poorly paid people that have to wear uncomfortable clothing, stay on their feet all day, put up with bullshit from the random bad attitude public, etc.
For years everyone's been saying that using FOSS software gives you reliability, quality, no vendor lock-in, at much lower cost.
Yeah, yeah. Fine. Great.
Practically, though, there are two interesting side developments:
These are two winning strategies.
The losing strategy (for customers) is just to throw tons of money to buy MS products without asking any questions.
Even though the "nobody got fired for buying $LONGSTANDING_BIG_VENDOR..." mentality has seemed like a safe fallback in IT purchasing, everyone should look at all their options fresh each purchasing cycle for both hardware and software and ask what they've been getting for their money, is what I have reasonably adequate for my actual business needs, etc.
What hasn't Microsoft bought?
"Competitors", "regulators", "reviewers", EU fines, settlements with Sun, Minnesota, AOL-Netscape, Apple bailout, etc. It's all just the cost of doing business as a monopoly.The marketplace is still working, just not in the way we might have hoped or imagined.
Solar powered is great, but what happens when those Montreal winters come blasting?
Most batteries don't fare well as the temperature plummets towards -40, either.
As a Borg I must take exception with your denigration of the more cube-shaped Rio Karma.
You seem to require assimilation.
Bingo.
I was looking recently at the Karma, Neuros and iRiver for something that I could use to record quality FM broadcasts from a local college station. Yes, I want multiple codecs, sync up to my collection via Ethernet, etc.
Note: some of these players have FM receivers but do not allow recording directly off FM.
as in this entry from the FAQ for the iRiver H140:Another nice feature would be low power FM transmit so that you could easily use your portable player to feed into your car stereo.
Or to feed into another nearby player with an FM receiver. But we all know what kind of virulence that capability would unleash - the end of civilization as we know it.
As long as they [Apple & Red Hat] are around, all MS will get is "corrective" action.
Exactly.
So the recent concerns about the slow pace at which the consent decree's prescribed API licensing and documentation are having any effect on bringing about new competition in the server space are zero surprise to anyone in this forum.
As mentioned in an earlier /. story, Microsoft is making a very pragmatic push to buy legal settlements as part of a business strategy.
How much will it cost them to settle with Massachusetts? I'm sure MS can afford it.
In the longer term, the company has only to worry whether a lid can be kept on the cost of legal settlements. Since they're not in a line of business that creates human health problems (the cost of which is rising at a terrific rate) like tobacco or asbestos (or possibly even fastfood, MS will probably be able to play this strategy out for some time.
All this by showing half an interest and sounding like you know what you're talking about. But then, maybe the IT department here is useless.
Dude, show competance like that and you'll be drafted into the IT department and then you'll really be sorry.
Will it work?
Oh, yes.
The officials responsible for the decision to use electronic voting will herald its use as part of India's grand entry into the technology revolution.
Companies providing the equipment will highlight its features, talking about security and speed with which results are available.
Winners of the elections will be too elated to spend time dwelling on the nuts and bolts of the technology used to bring them to power.
Losers of the elections will call into question any irregularities as well as the inherent problems with the electronic voting machines that motivated some of the world's best computer scientists to disapprove of electronic voting.
More complaining will occur for closer elections. Media coverage of the complaining will vary depending on how close the elections are.
In the end we'll all accept the inevitable results:
[Damn! Applied the wrong firmware again!]
because they're offering product liability insurance to both developers and users."
Now this is a weird situation.
And before anything else let me say that I am a strong advocate for free software and think Pamela Jones and groklaw have done a wonderful service to the community by applying intense legal play-by-play to the SCO case.
But.
If they're in the business of selling insurance against copyright attacks on Linux, does that not represent a conflict of interest?
If they were after the money, I would have expected their assessments to have at least a small note of ominious nature so that potential clients would be inclined to buy that insurance.
In an era when every other day you hear about yet another lapse in corporate ethics, with the problems that Arthur Anderson got into by offering consulting services to the same clients to whom they offered auditing services, people have to be a lot more careful.
Quit taking advantage of them
As soons as workers in China can organize their own union, independent of any state-controlled union, and can elect officials from any party and not the state-controlled party, then they'll be free.
As it stands now, if you have friends in high places in China you can survive inconveniences such as not paying your workers for months at a time, or ever.
And if the government decides to flood huge tracts of land with a new hydroelectric project, them's the breaks.
I'm all for job opportunities for workers in India and China and everywhere else. At least India is a democracy, even if there are problems with religious tolerance. China, on the other hand, has an authoritarian government. In the long term, all the happy faced Walmart products we buy from China will either empower an authoritarian regime or give rise to a violent revolution there from workers that get mad about high officials reaping the benefits while they scrape by (Marx and Mao would be rolling in their graves if they saw what was going on in China now; nominal communists have discovered the wonders of being capitalists in the 19th century sense of the word.)
The average users don't want to remember text commands and syntax, it is as simple as that. Yes the command line interface is more efficient at many tasks, however the learning curve is deeper.
Perhaps users don't like to have to remember text commands and syntax. But they are pre-programmed for text interfaces just because reading and writing are done this way. And as much as dramatic and visual arts have progressed, their effectiveness for conceptual communication is much more of a niche (eg, using pictures to illustrate geometry, picking points on an object, creating a spline curve).
GUI's have been over utilized on occassions where a text-based interface would have sufficed. For drawing, for manipulating geometric objects a GUI is perfect. But opening up a dialog box and inputting a text string and moving a mouse to click OK?
The usefulness of text based interfaces accounts for so much of why many small businesses are more than happy to run off some crusty old DOS program they installed in 1988. It gets the job done and there's no technical or economic reason for migrating to a GUI.
Regarding the learning curve: The learning curve for text interfaces can be just as well or as poorly designed as the learning curve for a GUI interface. Either way, you need a good help system with keyword searches, etc. And, as a confession, I end up going to google now more than doing "man -k" to find out answers to questions that really only need a text answer and I do use Mozilla instead of Lynx.
Consider that not all readers are after accuracy.
Accuracy, breadth, and depth.
I try to breath it all in and come up with a consistent world view that connects all of the facts together.
I see many disturbing things, but still it all comes up gray and there are loose ends.
Too many, on the right and the left, see the world as full of black hats and white hats.
It's more complicated than that. As much as we'd all like to be able to have an easy, logically-consistent, cohesive world view, there isn't one. If you adopt one, it's going to be wrong some of the time.
No matter how impressive the architecture happens to be, it will be evaluated by comparing it with a rack of P4's.
How many Power server systems does IBM ship compared with x86 systems?
Revenue per system might be better for high end systems, but the volume - the market size - is just not growing.
Even then, customers are drawn into dealerships by the promise of low, low monthly payments.
Which might account for the 40% rate of upside down car loans, where the loan balance exceeds the market value.
I maintain my cars and try to drive them into the ground, except for the time one of `em got totalled. It was tough getting much of a settlement from the insurance company on a Honda Civic with 170k miles, but I really meant to drive that up to 300k miles or so when major engine or transmission work might be required.
The pickup truck might have rust holes in the body, but it's got 265k miles on it and still works fine.
If maglev is what it takes to move people off the roads
A quadrupling of the price of gasoline would move people off the roads quite nicely.
It'll happen someday, slowly, but inevitably.
Think about it and be ready for it.
If you are waiting to be forced into something
There's a big problem here where, in some churches, a few people will take it upon themselves to "thus saith the Lord..." and tell people what to do.
People want to short-circuit the process of praying and listening for a still, small voice.
It's one of the many ways that God gets the rap for what people do and say in His Name.
We don't need to have CIOs potentially exposed to
Any CIO that can't take exposure to zealots isn't a qualified CIO.
Any large sized internal IT organization has its share of zealots already that have to be dealt with.
Further, these are the same CIO's that have to withstand the sales droid talks "We Have One System That Will Solve All Your Problems".
Good CIOs have a Teflon-coated asbestos suit and knows enough to ask their objective technically-educated staff to evaluate any details that they don't understand themselves because they don't have the time.
I have lamented about this for many years.
I've generally caved to ignorance of the masses, but only partially.
I used to ask people to resend those attachments as PDF files so I could read them, and I still do that to some extent (most people, even oblivious users of Windows boxes, understand that Word is not Word is not Word, that different versions of Word, Macs etc., can all affect how a a document appears). More now, if I have to view it, I just open it up in Open Office and create my own PDF.
Otherwise, if I have to run Word to contribute to a collaborative document, I just do barebones "get the content in" and spend zero time worrying about making Word do the right thing.
My life's too short to futz with Word's formatting quirks. I still take time to get things right in LaTeX, but at least my files will still as good in 20 years as they were 20 years ago.
And I look forward to the inevitable faster web rot that will accompany contents that are offered in this moving target "standard" format. It will teach people that ".doc" is not a good thing for archival and, dare they think it, for everyday use?
Plus, be part of the solution: Compose and send email that is plain ASCII text.
What is really needed to obliterate .doc, .ppt and .xls and other strange formats is for a superseding XML format like SVG, with precise vector-based formatting, dynamic effects, to start taking over the web. For this to happen, though, we need: