Disqus - Latest Comments for Roland Dobbins

Re: Why cloud computing doesn't get us out of the woods yet...

Roland Dobbins — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:47:16 -0000

The problem is that you've conflated what's essentially a server farm composed of VMs with true cloud computing. A true cloud isn't going to 'provision more servers', it's simply going to open more TCP sockets, HTTP listeners, whatever.

Now, the resources which power the cloud may well consist of VMs (like EC2); but the cloud isn't the VMs, it's the common code running amongst them which essentially transforms them into a single logical entity.

Re: Why cloud computing doesn't get us out of the woods yet...

Roland Dobbins — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:15:03 -0000

I don't think they've arrived at the true cloud yet - I think they're in a transitional state, and folks such as Amazon, FlexScale, Mosso, et. al. are providing the underlying infrastructure for what will evolve into clouds. My view of a cloud is that I can just write my code and fling it into the cloud, along with some metadata specifying resource allocation parameters, and I'm off to the races.

Re: Why cloud computing doesn't get us out of the woods yet...

Roland Dobbins — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:25:54 -0000

Oh, I agree with you that folks need to consider the issues you raised; as other have pointed out, there are ways of dealing with this, albeit imperfectly. Your points are well-taken, which is one of the reasons I subscribe to your weblog - you're bringing up valid issues.

In my mind, 3Tera are closest to enabllng what I consider to be a 'true cloud'. Right now, Amazon, Mosso, Terremark, FlexScale, Slicehost, et. al. allow customers to essentially build their own 'virtual private clouds' atop VMs running on a common infrastructure; 3Tera seem to be offering the whole enchilada, or at least more than the others, at present. And with full instrumentation, too.

Re: New full-text RSS feed

Roland Dobbins — Wed, 03 May 2006 22:25:36 -0000

Your old feed was an Atom feed, actually. And it was producing full-text; also, you could determine your readership just fine without going to FeedBurner.

The new feed fails validation, FYI:

http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/techliberation

Since Atom is a standard and RSS isn't, you'd be far better off using Atom, IMHO. At any rate, thanks for the informed commentary and the full-text feed, irrespective of which syndication technology you use.

Re: eBay for Black Hats?

Roland Dobbins — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 23:00:35 -0000

There's a very real miscreant economy, and many things, including exploits, access to botnets for DDoS (useful for extortion, etc.), and so forth are bought and sold daily. I've never heard of an exploit going for $50K, but they do go for amounts into the thousands.

I've never heard of anything like an 'eBay' for miscreants', most of the transactions are negotiated over IRC and IM, AFAIK.

Re: In Defense of Brain Drain

Roland Dobbins — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:36:58 -0000

Um, not everybody believes that 'liberal immigration is undeniably beneficial to the world as a whole'. That may be your belief, but it's certainly deniable - and I deny it vehemently.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Once Again, Why Not Meter Broadband Pipes?

Roland Dobbins — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:45:47 -0000

The two-tier scheme can be found many places outside the US.

No, there's no technical obstacle - the SPs have the necessary technology (how else could they decide whom to police down, heh?), and metering is common for enterprise transit (big pipes for companies/orgs). The obstacle is a Mexican standoff - nobody wants to do it because the first one to go metered will be savaged by the competition.

A two-tier metered sytem is the solution to the broadband downloading capacity issue as well as the 'network neutrality' issue. But it seems that no broadband SP is willing to stick its neck out for fear of having its head chopped off.

Re: 2 Kindle or Not(ebook) 2 Kindle

Roland Dobbins — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:14:43 -0000

Just use the iPhone app to read Kindle books. I love my Kindle, but if the iPhone app had been around when I bought it, I would've just stuck with the iPhone app - reading books on the iPhone had worked out well for me with Bookshelf, and I've read 1.5 novels via the Kindle app, so far.

Re: The Least Privilege Delusion

Roland Dobbins — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 23:03:01 -0000

You overstate the case against least-privilege. Yes, there are certainly other things to worry about - but it raises the bar. For example, by running non-privileged on my MacBook and fixing Apple's broken perms in /Applications/*, etc., I at least guard against something malicious coming in under my luser context pwn3ing my apps. Yes, they can whack data in my home directory or on any fileshares to
which I've connected and authed (maybe a poisoned .gif or .mp3 or something which triggers a buffer overflow, simple rm -rf *, whatever), but it raises the bar; and you of all people know that 'mainstream' security is mainly about raising the bar.

So, while in the long term there are certainly bigger things to worry about (in the long term, we're all dead, as Galbraith pointed out), encouraging least-privilege isn't harmful, and actually is helpful, though not the panacea some make it out to be.

Re: Month of VersionTracker Bugs

Roland Dobbins — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 02:21:03 -0000

I guess I've a more basic question - what does a VLC bug have to do with a supposed Month of Apple bugs?

Re: Attacking “Photoshop Encryption”

Roland Dobbins — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 21:34:41 -0000

It seems to me that the safest way to blank things out is to simply excise them from the image with a crop tool, then insert a black rectangle over the cropped area to show the elision.

Re: A Little Challenge To Our Mac Advocate Friends

Roland Dobbins — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:17:33 -0000

Since 99.99999% of Mac users run as admin, and since Apple have dorked up the perms for the /Applications hierarchy such that the admin user can write to /Applications and everything below it, a browser exploit for OSX can be used to trojan anything under /Applications, so that the user can be induced to run arbitrary code of the attacker's choice. FileVault doesn't matter, as the code will be running in the context of the user; the contents of his home directory can be rifled, copied off somewhere, etc.

Re: Educating Millennials - Why We’re Doing it Wrong

Roland Dobbins — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:03:14 -0000

I find it quite revealing that the word 'book' did not appear once in your original post.

I'm a 'digital native', too, albeit older than you - I built my first computer from a kit with my father when I was 9, I was a BBS junkie, I set up UUCP nodes, participated in BITNET, was on CompuServe, BiX, USENET, IRC, then migrated over to IM (still use email, too), read all my books these days on my Kindle, get all my music and video content online, IM & email constantly from my mobile phone, read 1000+ syndication feeds/day, love to play FPS on my gaming PC & XBox 360, et. al.

That being said, I never figured that anyone ever owed me an education in anything. I got bored, dropped out of high school at 17, & embarked upon my present career.

So, I ask you - why is it that your post seems based on the assumption that the history of mankind began with your birth? Why is it that you fail to take into account the fact that people were educated before computers and networking and the Internet were ever invented, and have continued to be educated thereafter (albeit increasingly poorly)? Do you *really* think that human nature is that malleable, that there's something 'special' about you and your cohorts? It's pretty obvious that you've failed to do even the most cursory online search with regards to the set of issues you describe, else you'd already have found a lot of discussion of these subjects which would've informed your essay, whether you agreed or disagreed with them (here we see the phenomenon of the 21st Century Digital Boy unwilling/unable to use Google effectively, heh. Ironic, no? ;>).

I would be interested to know how many books you read in the last year or so, and what they were, if you don't mind sharing. Have you read any of the classics of the Western canon at all? It's pretty obvious that you haven't read many of the books, essays, and other forms of commentary and discussion regarding educational 'reform'.

You seem to be an intelligent chap, and you make some trenchant observations; however, you seem to be almost completely unconscious of the origins of the historical/cultural milieu you inhabit, and completely ignore millennia of experience, expertise, and insight which are directly related to the subject at hand. You also seem incapable of much in the way of introspection, and the self-centered nature of your worldview (which I believe a direct result of your immersion in self-directed, essentially narcissistic communication modes, rather than time spent reading and thinking) shines through in your original post.

To your credit, you acknowledge that there are meaningful differences between males and females, and don't buy into the politically-correct hype which asserts otherwise, in the face of all scientific evidence. You also seem to reject the junk-science 'diagnosis' of the nonexistent ADD/ADHD, which are merely cop-outs for lazy parents and cash registers for greedy doctors.

You do need to read and to think a bit, IMHO, instead of spending so much time with Twitter, Facebook, and other such attention-wasters. You'll end up much more well-rounded, and have the background & depth to make a more meaningful contribution on this or any other subject to which you turn your attention.

Don't mistake me - I think it's good that you've taken the time to set down some thoughts on this issue, and you've sparked a lively discussion. What I'm trying to say is that with more breadth & depth, your thoughts will be more complete and cogent, and that you will have something original and of lasting import to say, on this or on any other subject.

Re: #8: Doing my Silicon Valley homework — hello from HDTV land

Roland Dobbins — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:50:54 -0000

The Cinema Display you were looking at must've been misadjusted, because the 23-inch Cinema Displays I have at home and at the office are gorgeous. They look so good that when I'm using Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac to work on a 9-hour, 360-slide presentation in PowerPoint, I can put it into slide-sorting view with each slide shown on the screen and see enough detail on each slide to re-order them at will.

As far as the single-button mouse goes, Apple did come out with the somewhat lame MightyMouse. For myself, I use a Microsoft Intellimouse with my PowerBook when 'docked', and use the built-in trackpad with a utility which allows me to split it up into a 'left' and 'right' portion.

Re: James says PodTech site sucks: I agree

Roland Dobbins — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:16:16 -0000

This isn't an either/or situation - offer both. Yes, you'll have to decide which is the default, but make the control to toggle the mode big and put it at the top of the initial page.

Re: Taking the week off

Roland Dobbins — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:04:56 -0000

This whole thing is ridiculous, straight out of junior high-school, and I'm surprised you're playing into it, Robert.

My 69-year-old mother used to run a restaurant when she was a petite little wisp of a woman in her 20s and 30s, and was also a government employee for many years - and was threatened to her face by young men much larger/stronger (and drunker) than herself on several occasions. And yet, she didn't sit in her house, afraid to go out, writing angsty notes in her diary, etc.; she spat in their faces and kept right on living her life.

I don't know about you, but my parents taught me at an early age that you don't give in to bullies, or they just keep coming back for more. I don't know Kathy Sierra, I've never read her weblog until today, but it seems to me that if she's so shocked/horrified by all this, she's led a -very- sheltered life. I mean, this barely rises to the level of some IRC 'conversations' I've seen, you know?

And by acting all terrified and intimidated, she's teaching her children a horrible lesson, IMHO.

Anyone who's lived out in the real world for a while has been threatened with physical violence and/or death on more than one occasion. If Miss Sierra's reaction to this is genuine, then I think she needs some help, because it's obvious that she is -way- too emotionally invested in the echo chamber of the 'blogosphere' and not well enough grounded in the real world.

Face it, weblogs aren't special, anymore - any fool with a keyboard and an attitude can get one. There is no 'community', any more than there's a 'community' of all the people in the world who drive automobiles, or whatever. There are jerks everywhere; and even if one is a female single parent (I would argue -especially- if one's a single female parent), one has a moral responsibility to stand tough, to ignore the idiots, and to set an example of courage, not cowardice, for one's children.

This whole thing is overblown, and this overwroughtness by a bunch of supposed adults over the idiocies of a few jerks is very disheartening to me. Have we really become so soft and easily-intimidated? That's the real tragedy here, not Miss Sierra's inexplicable hysteria over the equivalent of jeers from a bunch of morons.

I really wish everyone involved in this stupidity would shut up, soldier on, and stop acting like a bunch of scared and/or self-righteous little children. You're all playing into the hands of the morons, and don't even seem to see it.

Re: Taking the week off

Roland Dobbins — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:23:13 -0000

Again, this is ridiculous - supposed adults cringing because of what a bunch of morons said on some Web forum.

Sure, call the police, that's certainly reasonable to do when someone threatens your life. But you don't -cancel speaking engagements and cringe in your house- and demonstrate to your children that cowardice in the face of bullying is the 'adult' reaction.

The adult reaction is to get in their faces, defy them, carry on with your life and what you want to do, period. Anything else gives them the power, and they win.

I hate to say it, but it seems that most of the people commenting here have led sheltered lives, too, if they think this is such an -awful- thing. I've seen awful, and this isn't it - it's annoying, stupid, disgusting, and wrong, but it isn't -awful-. And mature, grown-up men and women don't act like a bunch of crybabies.

I guess this episode does in fact say something about the 'blogosphere' - that it's populated by people who are so weak and disconnected from reality that they have no sense of proportion, and who jump like scared rabbits whenever someone says, "Boo!".

What a sorry state of affairs. I'm sure Miss Sierra is a nice woman, but the hysteria and hyperbole aren't warranted, and again, she's setting a terrible example for her children.

Show some strength! Defy the morons!

That's the way to win.

Re: Taking the week off

Roland Dobbins — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:51:35 -0000

It's not the 'calling out injustice' part (though this hardly meets the criteria for 'injustice', it's more of a nuisance) that's a bad example, it's the "I'm-so-scared-I'm-canceling-my-speaking-engagements-and-cringing-in-the-house" bit which is such a bad example.

Look, I'm sure Miss Sierra is a very nice lady and of course she doesn't deserve this kind of idiocy (no one does), but she's merely encouraging them by her hysteria and demonstrating the wrong lesson by hiding under the bed (literally, by the sound of it).

Even though it was a pretty awful, needlessly ahistorical movie with terrible acting and wooden dialogue, I think a good dose of 'Lord of the 300' is indicated, in this case.

Re: I want to public domain my RAW photo files

Roland Dobbins — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:10:04 -0000

What you should probably do is publish the .jpg exports, and then make the source files available via a linked download.

But I would urge you to consider converting the files from whatever proprietary manufacturer-model-specific RAW format you happen to be using at the moment into Adobe Digital Negative format, also known as DNG. This will ensure that the photos can be read and processed decades from now, as DNG has been put into the public domain by Adobe.

Re: I want to public domain my RAW photo files

Roland Dobbins — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:28:17 -0000

If you did want to convert to DNG, it would be a one-time operation, if you're using a workflow application like Adobe LightRoom. In future, you'd just import as DNG (LightRoom makes this quite easy).

It would be helpful if John Gibson@20 would share his thinking regarding the longevity of the DNG format.

Re: Palm did what Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft couldn’t: build a better experience than Apple

Roland Dobbins — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:50:56 -0000

You're WAY WAY WAY wrong, now.

Apple have the ecosystem and the momentum. They've come from zero experience in the phone business to dominate the field in the space of 18 months, and seem to have unstoppable momentum. They have iTunes, they have VPN, they have Exchange integration - and they have the App Store.

Palm lost the plot long ago, and no cute CDMA-only/Sprint-only phone is going to save them, no matter how cool the device itself may be. In the next couple of years, virtually everybody but Apple will be out of the mobile business except for Nokia at the lower end, and the Chinese clone-phoners at the lowest of the low end (and that's only due to clone sales abroad and the peculiar proprietary Chinese wireless specs in China itself).

Palm have zero chance of staging a comeback. Zip, zero, nada - and I say this as an original Palm Pilot user back in 1996, who stuck with them for a long, long time. You need to step back and look at the bigger picture, and realize that Palm had the future in its hands, and fumbled the whole thing, and now Apple have come up with an unbeatable ecosystem, customer enthusiasm, and developer mindshare.

It's over.

Re: amazon kindle outside of the US

Roland Dobbins — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:03:14 -0000

Keep/get a US credit card/debit card w/Visa capabilities, and use a US-based remailer firm (Web search will find you plenty). Have you Kindle shipped to the remailer, and then forwarded on to you. Use the US-based card (tied to your remailer address) for purchases, and you're set.

Note that Kindle currently only support US English, there's no support for foreign-language character-sets nor content at this time.

Re: amazon kindle outside of the US

Roland Dobbins — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:23:23 -0000

I'm an American expat, and I've kept my US-based credit cards and used the method I detailed above and it works just fine for me, FWIW.

Re: Amazon in the ebook age, reconsidered

Roland Dobbins — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:56:24 -0000

I can read for equal lengths of time on my Kindle or on my iPhone. From my standpoint, the only thing missing from the iPhone Kindle app is support for landscape mode, and I've written them to ask for it.

As a side-note, one can't purchase Kindle ebooks from within the Kindle reader app on the iPhone; one can, however, purchase them from the free Amazon Mobile app which has been avaialble for the iPhone for ages, then download them via the Reader app.