June 2nd 2010
I’ve been using Framemaker to create large documents for almost two decades. I’m currently participating in an email discussion group of Frame users, and someone asked about comparing Microsoft Word and Frame. Someone else suggested Googling for the answer, since lots of people like to talk about it.
So, here is my own contribution to the question.
April 18th 2010
Jeremy Epstein reported this terrific report to Peter Neumann’s Risks List: a school kid logged in as superintendent of schools. This was in Fairfax County, where I grew up. They use Blackboard, just like the college where I teach.
And yes, we’re talking about a nine-year-old. It turned out to be a security policy problem. A teacher can add a student to a class, and a teacher has the power to change a student’s password.
The kid found out his teacher’s Blackboard password. They don’t say how in the news, but it may have been written on a post-it, or some other piece of paper, or it may be the same as a password the kid watched the teacher use somewhere else, or it could just be an easy-to-guess choice.
February 25th 2010
Marcus recently finished this ‘creative project’ as he calls it. Having just walked a class through numeric risk assessment, the basic lesson is especially apt..
January 8th 2010
Back in 1964, Boston’s public TV station, WGBH, did a show on interactive computing at MIT. They interviewed Fernando Corbató, MIT’s timesharing pioneer, who demonstrated the old CTSS system. The Computer History Museum got permission from MIT and WGBH to post the episode on YouTube:
During the episode, Corby explains how timesharing (multiprogramming) works, in terms of taking turns between programs using round-robin scheduling.