Wie teuer ist “ein Admin-Team”? So teuer wie Deine AWS Rechnung hoch wäre, und die ist in den meisten Läden dreimal bis fünfmal höher als ursprünglich gedacht. Das ist das Ausmaß des Understaffing in Operations in den meisten Firmen.

Accenture (vormals ARZ - Allgemeines Rechenzentrum, siehe https://newsroom.accenture.de/de/subjects/%C3%B6sterreich/accenture-vereinbart-uebernahme-des-arz.htm ), nach eigenen Angaben "führend in Digitalisierung, Cloud und Security" und quasi in jedem österreichischen Ministerium präsent, hat offensichtlich eine Abneigung gegen Elliptice Curve Cryptography.

A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting a table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.

Authorized transcript of Bruce Sterling’s lecture during the TU Eindhoven conference AI for All, From the Dark Side to the Light, November 25, 2022, at Evoluon, Eindhoven, co-organized by Next Nature.

YouTube link of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB461avEKnQ&t=3325s

In Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence, deception is placed at the centre of the test to determine a machine’s capacity to exhibit intelligent behaviour.
...
And even tho deception was never the main objective, creating the illusion of intelligence rather than intelligence itself became the force driving sentient-like technologies like AI.

I've been aware of the Bechdel Test since the late 1990s and actively using it as part of my unconscious checklist for how to write a novel that doesn't suck in some way, but even keeping it in mind, I sometimes fail. And I think it's worth looking at where and why that happens.

So I decided to compile this score card for my books. (SF novels first, then Merchant Princes and Laundry Files.)

The US, China, and the EU are exporting their domestic regulatory models in an effort to expand their respective spheres of influence, pulling other countries into the orbits of the American, Chinese, or European digital empires. The US’ global influence today manifests through the dominance of its tech companies that exercise private power across the global digital sphere. China’s global influence can be traced to its infrastructure power, where Chinese firms—all with close ties to the Chinese state—are building critical digital network infrastructures in countries near and far. The EU exercises global influence primarily through regulatory power that entrenches European digital norms across the global marketplace.

Fringe Science Warning Signs

“Money in the Bank,” a new story by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Researchers at Google say they used existing noise-canceling headphones to get pulse readings by updating their software

Chile was building an analog of our modern internet way back in the 1970s. A massive, national communications network for business and government to coordinate efficiently. The engineer (Stafford Beer) who designed it was from Surrey, in the UK, and worked for the Allende goverment that was building this system.

After the 1973 coup, General Pinochet had the system destroyed.

Had it caught on, we might have had global internet in our homes in the 1970s.

The relation between expert communities and society at large does not take place in a vacuum, but in a field marred by vested interest. For if policies change, this creates winners and losers—and potential losers have an interest in the status quo remaining in place. One strategy they can choose is to accept the facts and openly fight for their interests. But often, these potential losers choose another strategy: undermine the public dissemination of the facts that would suggest that change is needed.

How can we reset the expectations we have of connected devices, so that they are again worthy of our trust and money? Before we can bring the promise back, we must deweaponize the technology.
Guidelines for the hardware producer

These are things we want consumers to expect and demand of manufacturers.

• Control
  *Think local
• Decouple
• Open interfaces
• Be a good citizen

LibreOffice-Anwender:innen wähnen sich hier oft auf der sicheren Seite und ändern, wie vermutlich auch viele MS Office Anwender:innen, nichts an ihrer Konfiguration. Das BSI hat aber auch für LibreOffice Richtlinien entwickelt bzw. entwickeln lassen:

• Sichere Konfiguration von LibreOffice: Empfehlungen für Unternehmen mit einer verwalteten Umgebung
• Sichere Konfiguration von LibreOffice – Empfehlungen für kleinere Unternehmen, Privatanwender und Privatanwenderinnen

Auf der Seite LibreOffice – Aber sicher! sind die Empfehlungen in Form einer LibreOffice XCD-Datei als Service zum Download verfügbar. Die enthaltenen Direktiven wirken vergleichbar zu Gruppenrichtlinien bei Microsoft Office und sichern LibreOffice entsprechend dem Leitfaden. Die Datei herunterladen und im Installationsverzeichnis von LibreOffice in den Pfad share/registry/res ablegen. Wenn man danach LibreOffice startet wird diese Vorkonfiguration automatisch angewandt. Damit lassen sich komplette LibreOffice-Deployments für viele viele Workstations sichern ohne die Anwender:innen das alles selbst machen zu lassen.

Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.

Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut

Sovereignty is the absence of strong dependencies on third parties. The Sovereign Cloud from AWS is a misnomer here.

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere.

The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

Work software isn’t really about work anymore -
It’s all about organizing how you’re planning to complete tasks, instead.

There are six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial:
I. Pure denial (Workers are happy, no negative env. impact, ...)
II. Markets can solve problems, governments can't
III. Consumers and workers are to blame
IV. Government cures are always worse than the disease
V. Helping people only hurts them
VI. Everyone who disagrees with me is a socialist

so I've been reading a lot about terminals lately. i asked the question "what distinguishes a terminal from a dispaly+keyboard?" and here are the conclusions i've come to:

1: terminals are not merely displays with attached IO. these have existed historically, and no one called them terminals, meanwhile terminals that actually existed all have output behavior that's strongly divergent from just displays

2: terminals are a very rich domain, and few people know the great diversity of terminals that existed historically

3: the best definition of "terminal", which distinguishes them from displays+keyboards, at least in the context of historical terminals, is: A terminal is a computer peripheral that transmits and receives data from a host computer, the data being best understood as an instruction or command (both to the host machine and the terminal), and where there is typically some internal state maintained on the terminal which describes the current displayed content and interaction possibilities (but which may not include all the possible content that can be understood as "displayed")

the rest of this thread is going to be a discussion of terminals of different forms, likely many of them will be unfamiliar to you, or if they seem familiar, the details of what they could do and how and why will likely be unfamiliar. anyway, let's see some terminals

the archectypal terminal in many peoples minds, the thing that people think of when you mention terminals, is the Character-oriented terminal. the oldest form of these were just teletype machines, literally just typewriters that were electrically controlled and which could be used to communicate with a computer, which could type characters, and also receive typed characters. here's an ASR 33 teletype, which is a particular machine used for communicating with computers. because these were literally type writers, they are called hard copy terminals
a teletype integrated into a stand

the upgraded form of this is the glass teletype or video display unit, which enables far more possibilities. probably the most widely known character-oriented glass teletype is the VT100, which still forms the basis of many minimum viable terminal emulator programs today. character-oriented VDUs were effectively just video based versions of teletype terminals. instead of a paper print out, they stored a screen's worth of characters in internal memory
a vT100 showing a display with a cable-attached keyboard

its worth pausing here and bracketting these two toots by observing the large gulf in time and cost and so forth between these machines. we're talking like decades between the first teletypes and the first VDUs. teletypes existed looooong before computers, even. and even when VDUs existed, teletype terminals were still commonplace, because VDUs were expensive as heck initially

the expense was not because of the CRTs or anything like that, it was because of memory. that is to say, computer memory, not just terminal memory. and also because of computer speed

what i mean by this is, well.. let's consider a situation where you just drive a TV from a computer. suppose its, i dunno, 1960. everyone's got a TV in 1960 so they're cheap, right?

but now, if you want to drive it from a computer, you need to invent some mechanism for outputting a video signal. how are you gonna do that? real-time digital synthesis in the computer? fat chance! you might be able to control an oscilloscope that way, and many demos existed, but not a TV, with its raster graphics. and while you're doing the oscilloscope control, what else do you have time for? depends on the complexity of the thing you're drawing. funny lines for art or simple games? maybe. but text? forget it. you have no time for other programs

if you use a teletype as your output, you can just send a command to print a single character, it does, and then the character is still there on the paper indefinitely even if the computer turns off. so your program and just proceed to the next thing it needs to do

but what if you still want to use a TV? i mean, teletype machines are loud and fiddly mechanical devices

maybe you think, why not replicate the teletype's page, by storing character data in the computers memory and then use some specially designed circuit to non-destructively read that memory very quickly and generate a video signal? some sort of "video unit"

well that's nice, but for a computer in 1960, you're gonna use a lot of memory. i mean, suppose its 6 bits per character optimistically, then a standard 80x24 terminal takes 11520 bits, which is not a HUGE amount of memory but not dirt cheap either

in the 1960s you could get core memory for about a dollar a bit, which meant your little video output would be over $10,000. just for the memory! why bother when you can just use a bog standard mass produced teletype?

plus, if you were doing this by video, you'd have to wire up locations for video signal transmission to the remote displays. whereas a teletype can just be connected to a phone line if you need it. or you do wireless transmission of video? but that's still a lot. now you need radio engineers involved. why bother.

EVENTUALLY memory chips started to be built in the late 60s and costs really dropped for memory, and the size of the chips were small enough that you could actually start building VDU terminals that could produce some semblance of a terminal like the VT100

BUT the first VDUs weren't character-oriented! they weren't just glass teletypes!

the first VDU terminals to be produced were actually what are called BLOCK-oriented terminals. a block-oriented terminal does not send and receive data one character-qua-command at a time, but rather in large blocks. and the data was not merely a pile of characters but a far richer thing

the data that was received was an entire menu or form (like an HTML form), sometimes with things like data format validation info, and data sent was either a menu item selections or form field information

technically there were some hard-copy block-oriented terminals as well but they're pretty rare, because of the complications of making them work, and they're not merely a teletype

an example of a block oriented terminal, which is from 1964 (not the earliest but a fun one regardless) is the IBM 2260. it stored a very small number of characters in a delay line memory, which was probably the cheapest option for the amount of memory needed at the time. another fun one, from 10 years later, is the hp vt2640
a man using a 2260 in a computer room
a man using a 2640 in an office

these terminals LOOK an awful lot like the sorts of things we normally think of as terminals, they LOOK like character-oriented terminals like the VT100, but they were controlled very differently, and you used them very differently. you'd basically send them a large blob of data describing the entire screen, with form fields and so on, including layout information, subdivisions of the screen into static data regions vs. form regions, etc etc.

then, the user would be able to navigate around the menu items and form fields and enter data, all of which was stored locally on the terminal. only when the user pressed a send button was all of that information bundled up and shipped back to the host machine

there is, incidentally, another kind of text-oriented terminal that is "line-oriented", and all i could find about those is that they were, well.. line oriented. which i assume means that the data came across to it in blobs of one line at a time

i don't know if it sent data one line at a time as well. character-oriented terminals typically sent data for every keypress. modern terminal emulators are character oriented on send, but we typically use them with shells that simulate a line-oriented send

now, you may think this is the end of things for terminals but this is just the beginning

well actually you're right to say its the end sort of because character-oriented terminals were VERY popular and lasted a VERY long time, and also they sort of were the LAST thing that was developed

but its not the end of the thread, at least :p

the next kind of terminal that i'll discuss is a vector terminal. i mentioned before the idea of controlling a CRT like you control an oscilloscope, and some very folx realized that this is actually a REALLY good idea, because vector art is quite small in size, so you can get very far with a very small amount of memory