At what point did knowing what recommendations are being made to congress become useless for the general public? Is the public supposed to just let the government do what it does, and never stop to take a look at what their congressmen are being told or what they are doing?
Keep in mind that the NRC is charged with doing research for congress; hence, most of what they put out is related to policy issues that were being debated at the time when the study was made. That being said, you can get some insight into how congressmen might be thinking about our nation's policy issues by reading NRC reports.
It would only be a matter of time before everyone had a camera with this feature. My guess is that it will never be mandatory, but that companies will do it to appease the Justice Department (see: laser printer watermarking).
Not in information theory. Suppose I had an unfair coin; a priori, you know that the probability of the coin landing "heads" was 3/4. If I perform the experiment, how many bits of information will you gain when I tell you the outcome? It is clearly less than 1 bit, because if I perform the experiment 100 times, I will not need to send you 100 bits to describe the outcome of each toss (I should be able to compress that string, since there will be a strong bias).
At least thin client computing is a meaningful (well, somewhat meaningful) term. "Cloud computing" seems to have no meaning whatsoever, people just use the term "cloud" to refer to whatever technology they want. Remote data storage? Cloud. Grid computing? Cloud! Batch processing? Yes, that is "cloud" too! It can even be "cloud" if you are not outsourcing anything.
Further demonstrating just how meaningless the term "cloud computing" really is. What you described is exactly the setup my university has for the research clusters, which have been around since before "cloud" was associated with "computers."
Considering the broad support for strong copyright/trademark/patent laws in both the Democrat and Republican parties, I doubt that such an amendment would make a difference: the amendment would just be repealed.
Who do they think these guys are going to learn from? Most of the "hacker underground" just wants some lulz or quick and easy cash these days. If the North Koreans think they are going to get their spies in touch with the Stuxnet authors, they have another thing coming.
This is just "the war on terror," with a new target: scary hackers who can magically take over computers, control nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, and make your entire identity disappear.
Note that that attack relies on the user allowing an applet to run on their system; a user who is serious about anonymity is probably not going to allow applets to run (or they are uninformed; the point is that this attack is fairly easy to defend against).
Of course not; it is always possible that someone has put a camera in your room, or that there is a keystroke logging program that shipped with your motherboard, etc.
You may have missed the news: Microsoft was found guilty, and the antitrust oversight last for a few years. Now it is over, and Microsoft can go back to their same old tricks. It is a lot harder for people to claim that Microsoft is abusing their monopoly position when Apple is competing so effectively against Microsoft.
In actual use, KDE tends to be much more of a mixed environment than Mac OS X. Even if it was the same as the Resume feature in Lion (it's not), there would be much more in the way of rough edges. This is not a trivial distinction, and is in fact one of the reasons Linux is such a poor choice for a consumer desktop OS.
Except that this is not relevant at all: KDE is supposed to serve the same purpose that Aqua/Cocoa serve in Mac OS X. It is a complete desktop environment, and your entire OS could be KDE/GNU/Linux plus some libraries. The fact that people do not typically use it this way is not important, it just means that either KDE is not good enough or that its userbase needs more than KDE can provide -- the same users would have been running terminals and X11 applications on Mac OS X.
As for resume, again, let me be clear that I am talking about KDE3. In KDE3, this was automatic for any application that had opened a file through KIO (this is any KDE application, and possibly others) -- in effect, it was KIO that was being resumed, which would then respawn your applications and hand them the files you were working on (this included things like HTTP connections, SSH/SFTP/etc.). I can concede that this is a little less clean than what Cocoa will be doing (at least as far as I can tell), but I do not think it is wrong to say that the feature was there. I do think it is a stretch to claim the Cocoa will have this revolutionary, completely unheard of feature give than KDE3 was doing some very similar.
As for it being built into ITS, that's interesting, I honestly would like to hear more about it. But if it's just a form of filesystem snapshotting, it's cool (especially for such an old OS), but still quite different from how Versions works.
It was not snapshotting. In ITS, a file was identified by a pair; the first part of the pair was a number that indicated the file's version, and the second part was a unique identifier (the filename). You could open any version of the file that you were interested in, or you could use the ">" character to indicate that you just wanted the latest version (in the case of a write, this meant creating a new "latest version" by incrementing the version number).
Apple can change how their Frameworks work, and all applications suddenly gain new capabilities.
All applications written for that framework. You can run X11 applications in Mac OS X, and every computer literate Mac OS X user I have ever encountered has done so. You can run terminal applications, and again I have seen people do so. None of these applications are going to benefit from changes to Cocoa, any more than GNOME applications benefit from changes to KDE.
acting like these aren't great strides for a consumer OS is a bit odd.
Perhaps I just do away with distinctions like "consumer OS." I would say that GNU/Linux, even back in the KDE3 days, could be used by consumers. That it is vastly overshadowed by Windows and Mac OS X in the market for personal computers is not something that I consider to be very relevant. To be fair, I was not exactly drawing examples from mainframe OSes; even ITS had been designed by people who wanted to have their own personal computer (the term "PC" did not exist at the time, but the ITS hackers wanted exactly that: a computer all to themselves. ITS was only written because they were told to either enable timesharing on their computer, or they would lose the computer and it would run CTSS. ITS did have a mode that allowed the user to gain complete control over the system and not use the timesharing features, which I understand was the mode used during late nights).
It might be fair to say that this will be a great stride for consumers, in which case things like market share are very much relevant. Yes, the people who buy Apple's desktops and laptops will benefit from these features in ways that they probably never imagined were possible. I think that says more about consumers and consumerism than it does about technology.
Except that resume does not seem to work for non-cocoa applications -- like X11 applications, terminal programs, etc. That is essentially what KDE3 had -- KDE applications could be resumed, but other programs could not (actually, some non-KDE programs could be resumed, because of KIO).
point is that people who opt to use some kind of UNIX as their primary machine are usually not technically clueless
That has not been my observation; the majority of Mac OS X users I know of do not know a lot about their computers, nor are they interested in learning. They purchased a system with Mac OS X because they heard that it was easy to use and would give them fewer headaches than a Windows system.
The second point is that most UNIX distros (including OS X) come with hundreds of tools to monitor the system, inspect binaries etc.
Tools which only the most experienced users can use to detect malware; even technically literate people may not be able to spot suspicious behavior.
Also, good chunk of software is downloaded as source and compiled and the localhost. This also gives you a chance to look at code directly.
Allow me to introduce you to my favorite programming contest:
To this date there have not been any viruses (i.e. self propagating code that infects machines without user intervention) for Mac OS X and I'm pretty sure Linux as well.
You should at least try using a search engine before making a remark like that:
I say this as someone who has used nothing except GNU/Linux for many years now: there are viruses out there that will infect a vulnerable GNU/Linux system. Do not be fooled, these things are out there. As an exercise, you can try to write a very basic virus that targets the vi text editor and inserts itself into any C program a user creates (if you want bonus points, have the virus remove itself from the program whenever the user opens it with vi). This is not a hard thing to do if you are a halfway decent programmer.
But if you have a literate UNIX user, then tricking them is usually harder
I can say the same about Windows users. Literate Windows users generally avoid malware: they know what not to do with their computers. What is your point? That uninformed/easy to manipulate users will be the targets of malware infections?
Well, keeping in mind that Windows is not actually intended to be compatible with Unix (despite the "better Unix than Unix" remark from Gates), it does ship with at least two scripting languages: JScript and VBScript, and I would not be so quick to deride the power of JScript as a language. Also, to the best of my knowledge recent Windows versions include PowerShell, which I hear is pretty good although I have not tried it myself.
As for Mac OS X shipping with a BSD toolset, this was mainly to allow Apple to market it as a Unix OS and to placate "power users" who like being able to drop into a terminal and write scripts. Apple cannot really ignore power users if they want to compete in the market for expensive desktops and laptops. That being said, Apple's approach to personal computers is still based on those systems being appliances that the user never opens up, and the iPad/iPhone/* line exemplifies that. My prediction is that over the next few years, we are going to see the Mac OS X that retains power user appeal to be pushed into more expensive, high-end lines of computers, with the low and medium range of Apple's offerings being filled with iOS or some sort of iOS/OS X hybrid, and Apple's non-"pro" notebooks will not come with shells or scripting environments.
That is good to hear; when I last looked into it, I was given the impression that manually fiddling with the mandatory access controls was not officially sanctioned/supported by Apple.
...and all your X11 applications or terminal applications will be excluded from your very simple solution. If you are restricting the discussion to "only Cocoa applications," then I will respond by noting that restricting the discussion to other frameworks -- "only KDE3 applications, only LibreOffice/Uno applications, etc." leads us to the conclusion that this has been implemented before. Yes, if your framework forces applications to use a well-define "save" function, rather than something like POSIX API functions (open, write, etc.), this is a simple thing to implement -- that is why it has been done before. However, Mac OS X does not require all applications to use such a convenient API, and being a Unix is one of the Mac OS X selling points.
The simple Unix security model is better than the (largely historic) Windows model because users do not have the ability to make systemwide changes. This ensures that even if malware infects a user's machine, it is always possible for the root user -- what Windows refers to as an "Administrator" -- to remove the infection, and the worst case is that the user's files are all gone.
A Windows system can be set up to have the same security model as a Unix system, and this has been recommended by Microsoft for years. However, so many legacy applications expect "administrator" privileges in Windows that this is not the easiest thing to do.
Modern security requires a lot more than just separating user accounts. For a home user, losing all the files in their home directory or having their account compromised can be a worst case -- it can mean a raided bank account, lost family albums, etc. I am of the opinion that the answer lies with mandatory access control: an unverified program that you download from the Internet should not be able to access files in your home directory even if it is running under your username, unless you specifically authorize it to do so. This is possible to set up in Windows, GNU/Linux (using SELinux; you can also simplify things and run your web browser in the SELinux sandbox, which confines downloaded programs to the same sandbox, and by default deletes those programs when the sandbox is closed), FreeBSD (with TrustedBSD), TrustedSolaris (if anyone still cares about Solaris), AIX, etc...but I am not sure that this is something that is officially supported in Mac OS X. That being said, Mac OS X does have mandatory access control built into its kernel, and as far as I know that is what is used to implement "parental controls."
As a final note, Mac OS X is routinely the first system to be defeated at pwn2own; some say this is because it is less secure, others say it is because the participants want Mac OS X systems more than Windows systems.
explain how you're gonna make Flash movies or do any sort of programming on a Mac with iOS-like restrictions.
That is something that only professionals who are willing to pay a premium for their computers need. All those home users can just get by with applications from the App Store.
The Apple concept of computing is that home users should treat their computers like appliances: plug it in, and never worry about technical details. Sure, professional and "power" users demand more, but they represent a very small fraction of Apple's target market at this point, and Apple can get away with charging them more (they are likely to have paid for a higher end system to begin with). The consumers who just "want a system that works," which is obviously not a "PC" but is a "Mac" (which is not a personal computer and which obviously does not run Windows) will get a locked down system, and Apple is betting (perhaps wisely) that most of them will never even notice the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
At what point did knowing what recommendations are being made to congress become useless for the general public? Is the public supposed to just let the government do what it does, and never stop to take a look at what their congressmen are being told or what they are doing?
Keep in mind that the NRC is charged with doing research for congress; hence, most of what they put out is related to policy issues that were being debated at the time when the study was made. That being said, you can get some insight into how congressmen might be thinking about our nation's policy issues by reading NRC reports.
It would only be a matter of time before everyone had a camera with this feature. My guess is that it will never be mandatory, but that companies will do it to appease the Justice Department (see: laser printer watermarking).
Aren't bits discrete?
Not in information theory. Suppose I had an unfair coin; a priori, you know that the probability of the coin landing "heads" was 3/4. If I perform the experiment, how many bits of information will you gain when I tell you the outcome? It is clearly less than 1 bit, because if I perform the experiment 100 times, I will not need to send you 100 bits to describe the outcome of each toss (I should be able to compress that string, since there will be a strong bias).
At least thin client computing is a meaningful (well, somewhat meaningful) term. "Cloud computing" seems to have no meaning whatsoever, people just use the term "cloud" to refer to whatever technology they want. Remote data storage? Cloud. Grid computing? Cloud! Batch processing? Yes, that is "cloud" too! It can even be "cloud" if you are not outsourcing anything.
It's entirely possible to have an internal cloud
Further demonstrating just how meaningless the term "cloud computing" really is. What you described is exactly the setup my university has for the research clusters, which have been around since before "cloud" was associated with "computers."
Considering the broad support for strong copyright/trademark/patent laws in both the Democrat and Republican parties, I doubt that such an amendment would make a difference: the amendment would just be repealed.
Capital punishment? I doubt doubt it; more likely, they would want indentured servitude.
Who do they think these guys are going to learn from? Most of the "hacker underground" just wants some lulz or quick and easy cash these days. If the North Koreans think they are going to get their spies in touch with the Stuxnet authors, they have another thing coming.
!news
The people of California voted for the representatives who approved this tax.
This is just "the war on terror," with a new target: scary hackers who can magically take over computers, control nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, and make your entire identity disappear.
Note that that attack relies on the user allowing an applet to run on their system; a user who is serious about anonymity is probably not going to allow applets to run (or they are uninformed; the point is that this attack is fairly easy to defend against).
I don't think you can get 100% safety.
Of course not; it is always possible that someone has put a camera in your room, or that there is a keystroke logging program that shipped with your motherboard, etc.
You may have missed the news: Microsoft was found guilty, and the antitrust oversight last for a few years. Now it is over, and Microsoft can go back to their same old tricks. It is a lot harder for people to claim that Microsoft is abusing their monopoly position when Apple is competing so effectively against Microsoft.
In actual use, KDE tends to be much more of a mixed environment than Mac OS X. Even if it was the same as the Resume feature in Lion (it's not), there would be much more in the way of rough edges. This is not a trivial distinction, and is in fact one of the reasons Linux is such a poor choice for a consumer desktop OS.
Except that this is not relevant at all: KDE is supposed to serve the same purpose that Aqua/Cocoa serve in Mac OS X. It is a complete desktop environment, and your entire OS could be KDE/GNU/Linux plus some libraries. The fact that people do not typically use it this way is not important, it just means that either KDE is not good enough or that its userbase needs more than KDE can provide -- the same users would have been running terminals and X11 applications on Mac OS X.
As for resume, again, let me be clear that I am talking about KDE3. In KDE3, this was automatic for any application that had opened a file through KIO (this is any KDE application, and possibly others) -- in effect, it was KIO that was being resumed, which would then respawn your applications and hand them the files you were working on (this included things like HTTP connections, SSH/SFTP/etc.). I can concede that this is a little less clean than what Cocoa will be doing (at least as far as I can tell), but I do not think it is wrong to say that the feature was there. I do think it is a stretch to claim the Cocoa will have this revolutionary, completely unheard of feature give than KDE3 was doing some very similar.
As for it being built into ITS, that's interesting, I honestly would like to hear more about it. But if it's just a form of filesystem snapshotting, it's cool (especially for such an old OS), but still quite different from how Versions works.
It was not snapshotting. In ITS, a file was identified by a pair; the first part of the pair was a number that indicated the file's version, and the second part was a unique identifier (the filename). You could open any version of the file that you were interested in, or you could use the ">" character to indicate that you just wanted the latest version (in the case of a write, this meant creating a new "latest version" by incrementing the version number).
Apple can change how their Frameworks work, and all applications suddenly gain new capabilities.
All applications written for that framework. You can run X11 applications in Mac OS X, and every computer literate Mac OS X user I have ever encountered has done so. You can run terminal applications, and again I have seen people do so. None of these applications are going to benefit from changes to Cocoa, any more than GNOME applications benefit from changes to KDE.
acting like these aren't great strides for a consumer OS is a bit odd.
Perhaps I just do away with distinctions like "consumer OS." I would say that GNU/Linux, even back in the KDE3 days, could be used by consumers. That it is vastly overshadowed by Windows and Mac OS X in the market for personal computers is not something that I consider to be very relevant. To be fair, I was not exactly drawing examples from mainframe OSes; even ITS had been designed by people who wanted to have their own personal computer (the term "PC" did not exist at the time, but the ITS hackers wanted exactly that: a computer all to themselves. ITS was only written because they were told to either enable timesharing on their computer, or they would lose the computer and it would run CTSS. ITS did have a mode that allowed the user to gain complete control over the system and not use the timesharing features, which I understand was the mode used during late nights).
It might be fair to say that this will be a great stride for consumers, in which case things like market share are very much relevant. Yes, the people who buy Apple's desktops and laptops will benefit from these features in ways that they probably never imagined were possible. I think that says more about consumers and consumerism than it does about technology.
Except that resume does not seem to work for non-cocoa applications -- like X11 applications, terminal programs, etc. That is essentially what KDE3 had -- KDE applications could be resumed, but other programs could not (actually, some non-KDE programs could be resumed, because of KIO).
point is that people who opt to use some kind of UNIX as their primary machine are usually not technically clueless
That has not been my observation; the majority of Mac OS X users I know of do not know a lot about their computers, nor are they interested in learning. They purchased a system with Mac OS X because they heard that it was easy to use and would give them fewer headaches than a Windows system.
The second point is that most UNIX distros (including OS X) come with hundreds of tools to monitor the system, inspect binaries etc.
Tools which only the most experienced users can use to detect malware; even technically literate people may not be able to spot suspicious behavior.
Also, good chunk of software is downloaded as source and compiled and the localhost. This also gives you a chance to look at code directly.
Allow me to introduce you to my favorite programming contest:
http://underhanded.xcott.com/
Well if we can just redefine words like that...
The point is that this feature is not an Apple original, it has been done before.
To this date there have not been any viruses (i.e. self propagating code that infects machines without user intervention) for Mac OS X and I'm pretty sure Linux as well.
You should at least try using a search engine before making a remark like that:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Linuxvirus
I say this as someone who has used nothing except GNU/Linux for many years now: there are viruses out there that will infect a vulnerable GNU/Linux system. Do not be fooled, these things are out there. As an exercise, you can try to write a very basic virus that targets the vi text editor and inserts itself into any C program a user creates (if you want bonus points, have the virus remove itself from the program whenever the user opens it with vi). This is not a hard thing to do if you are a halfway decent programmer.
But if you have a literate UNIX user, then tricking them is usually harder
I can say the same about Windows users. Literate Windows users generally avoid malware: they know what not to do with their computers. What is your point? That uninformed/easy to manipulate users will be the targets of malware infections?
Well, keeping in mind that Windows is not actually intended to be compatible with Unix (despite the "better Unix than Unix" remark from Gates), it does ship with at least two scripting languages: JScript and VBScript, and I would not be so quick to deride the power of JScript as a language. Also, to the best of my knowledge recent Windows versions include PowerShell, which I hear is pretty good although I have not tried it myself.
As for Mac OS X shipping with a BSD toolset, this was mainly to allow Apple to market it as a Unix OS and to placate "power users" who like being able to drop into a terminal and write scripts. Apple cannot really ignore power users if they want to compete in the market for expensive desktops and laptops. That being said, Apple's approach to personal computers is still based on those systems being appliances that the user never opens up, and the iPad/iPhone/* line exemplifies that. My prediction is that over the next few years, we are going to see the Mac OS X that retains power user appeal to be pushed into more expensive, high-end lines of computers, with the low and medium range of Apple's offerings being filled with iOS or some sort of iOS/OS X hybrid, and Apple's non-"pro" notebooks will not come with shells or scripting environments.
That is good to hear; when I last looked into it, I was given the impression that manually fiddling with the mandatory access controls was not officially sanctioned/supported by Apple.
...and all your X11 applications or terminal applications will be excluded from your very simple solution. If you are restricting the discussion to "only Cocoa applications," then I will respond by noting that restricting the discussion to other frameworks -- "only KDE3 applications, only LibreOffice/Uno applications, etc." leads us to the conclusion that this has been implemented before. Yes, if your framework forces applications to use a well-define "save" function, rather than something like POSIX API functions (open, write, etc.), this is a simple thing to implement -- that is why it has been done before. However, Mac OS X does not require all applications to use such a convenient API, and being a Unix is one of the Mac OS X selling points.
As a final note, Mac OS X is routinely the first system to be defeated at pwn2own; some say this is because it is less secure, others say it is because the participants want Mac OS X systems more than Windows systems.
explain how you're gonna make Flash movies or do any sort of programming on a Mac with iOS-like restrictions.
That is something that only professionals who are willing to pay a premium for their computers need. All those home users can just get by with applications from the App Store.
The Apple concept of computing is that home users should treat their computers like appliances: plug it in, and never worry about technical details. Sure, professional and "power" users demand more, but they represent a very small fraction of Apple's target market at this point, and Apple can get away with charging them more (they are likely to have paid for a higher end system to begin with). The consumers who just "want a system that works," which is obviously not a "PC" but is a "Mac" (which is not a personal computer and which obviously does not run Windows) will get a locked down system, and Apple is betting (perhaps wisely) that most of them will never even notice the difference.