sevenfeet

danox said:

DAalseth said:

If Rome had been built like modern computer systems, the first woodpecker would have destroyed western civilization.

As others have pointed there is a lot of blame to go around. I however agree with Delta’s CEO. Windows is way too fragile for us to be using it as a foundation for our whole economy and safety net. I finally got out of IT because I was fed up with replacing crappy broken Windows systems with crappy NEW windows systems. This was an accident. The next one may be as well. Down the road though it won’t be. Someone will deliberately target the house of cards that is Windows and we will discover that everything grinds to a halt, melts down, or bursts. Then rebooting to Safe Mode and deleting a file won’t fix it. 

Microsoft needs to fix their OS kernel, AI and the Surface need to take a back seat Nadella probably needs to get those third parties out kicking and screaming and that is going to be a massive undertaking?

Imagine if Microsoft had forked Windows and fixed the Kernel outside the EU and the EU was the only place where this fiasco happened? If the EU continues they will be left behind outside the EU it needs to be fixed.

Right now there a little shock in the system for American tech companies but soon they get over it and start to design around the EU.

As usual, this ends up being a pretty complicated situation that has predictably devolved into a lot of finger pointing. So here is my take, as someone who actually works in enterprise support for a well known international tech company.

1. Crowdstrike. Yes, they deserve the lion's share of the blame here. While I get the fact that there is often a race against the clock to get out new descriptions for Crowdstrike Falcon to protect clients and servers from active threats, they should understand that they can also bring computers completely down with bad software or description files. And not only does this get back to having a 24/7 testing regime to make sure that nothing hits the download servers until it has been vetted....period. Clearly that was not going on, and its very inexcusible.  Second, their software which has kernel access on Windows has lousy file validation to inspect description files before using them. Dave Plummer, former Microsoft Windows programmer all the way back in the Windows 3.1/NT days said on his Youtube channel that the lack of error correction in their product reeked of incompetence. I would agree. This is also not the first time this has happened to Crowdstrike. They had two other issues with Linux distros in recent years, but it didn't make the headlines since it wasn't something widely used in critical systems like RedHat.

2. Microsoft. They don't get off easy here. They let a 3rd party kernel driver into Windows that could update description files without going through all the possible scenarios of how a bad update could bork an entire machine (or in this case, 8.5 million of them). And Microsoft has to think about all the ways a bad actor or state sponsor could use the very same flaw to create all kinds of havok worldwide. Break into a Crowdstrike download server (not easy, but not impossible) and you could paralyze millions of machines intentionally. And yes, I know Apple figured this out years ago and ejected 3rd party kernel extensions from the OS, replacing it with a security framework that gives certain software lower level access to restricted APIs without running in kernel mode. Yes they ran afoul of the EU but they needed to make a better case on why this would be better for the world and still allow competition. Finally, this situation exposed a critical problem where this kind of scenario not only crashed millions of machines, but fixing them literally took IT professionals to put hands on the machine. For Delta, this took DAYS to recover from...no wonder their CEO is pissed. I don't agree on forking Windows to solve this.  Windows is complicated enough as it is.

3. The EU. Leave the security technology issues to the professionals. Sometimes they know better than you.

I had just begun my career out of college with Apple in 1988 but was working part time as an Apple student campus associate in 1987 when this video came out. This article strikes the video as "boring" but the context is what things were like in the 80s. This video is very much Alan Kay's vision, with him visualizing some of these concepts with his "Dynabook" paper all the way back in the late 1960s.

We showed this video to big customers and at our yearly internal meetings. I kept a copy on VHS tape for years after I left the company. And I remember our leadership at the time saying they were working on everything seen in the video "except for the folding screen. That's science fiction".  Turns out that wasn't science fiction after all.

The Knowledge Navigator shown is very much in the design aesthetic of the day if you look at upcoming Mac models like the SE, SE/30 and the Mac II.  LCD screens were on the horizon with the Apple Portable and color would come a few years later in 1992 with the Powerbook 180c. These days design is much thinner and elements like a front facing camera are huge versus modern ones. There might have been a decision to make it larger for the video just so everyone would know what people were looking at. And while video conferencing was being proposed and demoed by companies like AT&T since the 1960s, using it in a Zoom-like call alongside your computer GUI desktop was a new thing as opposed to using a standalone device.

The KN was a touch screen interface predating the iPad by 23 years (although unlike the iPad, it had a Mac interface). You have no idea how cool this was to see visualized back then. Star Trek: TNG would use something similar when that show premiered in the same timeframe.

Other technology elements were pretty out there but turned out to be spot on. Apple would introduce Wifi to the world built into a Mac in 1999 (iBook). There were rudimentary search tools like Gopher on the then-Arpanet (the true open Internet was not a thing in 1987) but true powerful search engines like Altavista and later Google would be years later. The ability to have multiple people work on a common document is pretty routine these days but back then, it was fantasy but Apple would introduce its first version of that idea as OpenDoc.

And now we come to the Chatbot agent itself, the guy with the bowtie. This seemed the most "sci-fi" of all back then but we were told at the time that scientists were working on it. But as we know with Apple, hard times would befall them in coming years and many of the long term research projects fell by the wayside as unaffordable luxuries. But we're pretty close to that personalized agent as part of our devices.  Context and intent are fast approaching what was shown in the video, along with knowing personal details like the professor's mother, his friends and colleagues, personal schedule, all his files, and even listening in and (hilariously) interjecting in a conversation.  All this time since the iPad was introduced and later Siri and its (better) chat agent cousins, I've wondered how long it would take us to get to Knowledge Navigator. It looks like we won't have to wait that much longer.

blastdoor said:

I sure would love to know more about the Apple silicon used in those servers 

This was rumored before the event and verified by Apple during the show. The rumor was that Apple was building custom servers based on the M2 chip. This makes sense for a few reasons. They have a lot of experience with making this chip now, the yields are probably pretty good and even though they aren't 3 nm, they are still far more power efficient than anything else out there per watt, especially Nvidia. Nvidia right now has the class leading AI chip that everyone wants, but Apple doesn't have to use it for their Private Compute Cloud. And the programming behind the scenes for Apple engineers is identical to what they are doing on M2 Macs. And since the chip is in a server environment, it can run at full speed without having to worry about power draw.

Of course it's interesting that Apple is building servers at all, but they are well suited to do so. There is likely a lightweight server version of MacOS that they are running (Darwin + necessary libraries). The real trick is how you handle things like high availability, high speed networking and keeping the pipelines fed. Since Apple has experience handling a lot of Siri requests a day, I'm sure they have some idea of how to build what they need.

Finally, I'm sure that Apple could build a custom AI server chip of their own that biases itself toward the a massive neural engine. Whether that happens or if Apple just chooses to build custom boards with M2s or later chips on them will remain to be seen.

Last week I went to a security conference at Vanderbilt University, focused on the threat from China.  Speakers included the top leadership from the NSA, CIA, DEA and FBI Director Christopher Wray, among many others. And many of the speakers were asked about TikTok. It didn't matter who it was or whether they were liberal or conservative, or if they worked in the Biden, Trump or Obama administrations. ALL OF THEM said that Tiktok had to go because of national security and specifically the spying on Americans they already knew was going on by the CCP.

toddzrx said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

emoeller said:

That’s President Al Gore you’re speaking of and he deserved to be on the BoD.

Please enlighten us as to his contribution?

"An Inconvenient Truth" is considered a seminal work on climate change and bringing attention to it the general public.  Apple changed the industry to consider "performance/watt" instead of just raw performance.  Apple has been pushing green initiatives and recycling in a higher profile way than any other large tech company and probably any other corporation period.  It pervades their entire image.  

An Inconvenient Truth is a pile of pseudoscience. It was debunked the moment it was released.  Please, get your information from reliable sources. Al Gore isn’t one.

toddzrx said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

emoeller said:

That’s President Al Gore you’re speaking of and he deserved to be on the BoD.

Please enlighten us as to his contribution?

"An Inconvenient Truth" is considered a seminal work on climate change and bringing attention to it the general public.  Apple changed the industry to consider "performance/watt" instead of just raw performance.  Apple has been pushing green initiatives and recycling in a higher profile way than any other large tech company and probably any other corporation period.  It pervades their entire image.  

An Inconvenient Truth is a pile of pseudoscience. It was debunked the moment it was released.  Please, get your information from reliable sources. Al Gore isn’t one.

My wife has a PhD in what you call "pseudoscience". Thousands of researchers around the world who do this kind of work in the field, labs and classrooms would like a word with you. Science doesn't conform to politics....it just is. Ignore it at your...and all of our peril.