The minute I read this commentary I thought of a way to do this: LEDs blinking randomly and being matched up by robots as their own. I read the article second, and guess what? That isn't how this works, but it seems similar.
If you consider lights and motion similar, sure. Recognizing the thing moving as the thing to imitate is much trickier than seeing a blinking light to blink after. We can imagine this robot would not blindly follow a rolling ball, for example, because it "knows" what it looks like and can recognize itself at any distance within reason.
Some people who skim the article too quickly might be fooled by the illustrative picture. In the picture, you can see the blinking lights. If you look closely you realize the robot can't. You only think it can because your perspective allows you to see over the card between the lights and the mirror, much like a boy in a tree might imagine people on the sidewalk can see a baseball game because he can.
... it's pretty easy to avoid "surveillance": just leave the thing behind.
How about making laws that forbid the use of public services to spy on people? How much money does it cost the phone company to keep track of everyone's position? All they really need to centralize is how much you owe them, which is currently based on airtime and how far you call. Building data pipes so they can sell the information to vendors like M$ is not just invasive, it's a waste of public money. That kind of gossip should be outlawed.
The M$ wherabouts clock has a default date of 1984. Instead of protecting people's privacy, my government is encouraging data collection of the most detailed sort so it can spy on normal citizens too. I'm disgusted with them all.
This is most likely due to the upcoming Intel transition.
While M$ is weak on x86, they do think it's their strong point.
Their decision to drop "support" for Mac came soon after Apple announced they would make a browser of their own and base it on KHTML. At the time they said something like, "we can't compete on someone else's platform and won't."
You would expect them to give away a Mac version as part of their announced plan to run all the world's computers. In fact, you would think they would make the Mac version better than their own to encourage switching. The problem M$ is having is that Apple is eating their lunch in media, so they want to simply destroy them now. Fat chance.
Dismantle the BSA, or at least have them stop threatening and suing public school systems. At that point, I will consider closed source software less of a menace.
The upshot of increased freedom of trade, is increased wealth overall.... As their middle class expands, so does their ability to buy goods from the USA and Europe.
It all depends of freedom.
Everyone in the USA and Europe already buy all their stuff from China. Unless you count a second rate OS and other increasingly made abroad IP, I'm not sure what there is to buy from US anymore. I wish it were different. IP is a tenuous export at best, but it's a bogus one when it's based on imported research.
All the money in the world won't really standards of living in China because they are not free. People making goods there will continue to be abused by their owners who pocket it all.
It only takes one non free country to screw everything for everyone.
Does anyone know if Nokia will be releasing the handwriting recognition software
Graffiti like handwriting recognition comes and goes on OpenZaurus. Rosetta and Xstroke have done the same. Why it goes away, I don't know, but when it's there it's about as good as Palm's ever was and WAY better than any M$ device ever dreamed of being. You should be able to apt-get it if it's available for use.
Bluetooth and WiFi are great, but being able to read/write common external storage devices are important too. The lack of them is what killed it for me.
It's supposed to work with ssh. If that's true, you should be able to drag and drop your files from any computer using Konqueror.
I've done similar with a Zaurus running OpenZaurus. Using GPE, you can even run stuff via X forwarding, which is kind of fun, but silly if you are really intersted in a laptop replacement that fits into your pocket.
Yes, having a CF and MMC/SD slot on the Zaurus was nice. I put in a 512MB SD and used the CF for wifi. The SD worked as a/usr and extra home space. This device has the wifi built in and you will be able to do the same thing with the compact SD as you can with an SD.
The world of Linux handhelds has been sweet for a while now, but things are getting much nicer all the time. It does not take much to run Debian as this wacko from my LUG demonstrates. If a 150 MHz P1 with 70MB of RAM can do it, handheld devices are not far off. 128 MB of RAM should be more than enough, if only they had a 4Gig hard drive on it for OS storage, you could run a full distro. Such machines are on the way and they will be running Debian or some other version of free software.
[M$] couldn't win their arguments to stick with MS formats, so instead they try restructuring the Government of MA???
People joke that Louisiana is the northernmost bananna republic. I hope not to have to welcome Mass to the club, but turnabout is fair play.
The more I think about it, the more Microsoft looks like the United Fruit Company. The only differences are that the United Fruit Company actually built real infrastructure, like railroads, and you can only grow a bananna in the tropics. It looks like you can farm PCs and treat their users like peons at any latitude.
Let's see if a great US state with some of the best IT staff and best universities for IT in the world can resist bribery and persue excellence. If they can't, no one can. That's what this is all about. The world is watching and M$ is desperate to "demonstrate" that IT experts want M$ junk.
What's funny is that their demonstration proves only that M$ is used only because it's forced on people by idiots.
Everyone use Google and wealth and wisdom will ensue!
That's a nice joke, but the old saying "No knowledge no bread, no bread no knowledge" is true. People who know computing use free software and Google. People who don't really care use M$ and junk search engines. The true careless still watch TV to stay informed, well entertained. Poverty follows carelessness as surely as the laws of nature punish stupidity. People like Bill Gates will take their money.
If you don't like people who take advantage of the weak and the stupid, don't give them your money and elect people who will enforce laws instead of using them to protect the abusers.
WinXPSP2 running Firefox is probably about as secure as Linux would be if Linux were as popular as Windows.
and IIS is about as secure as Apache if Apache were as popular as IIS, right? Honk, Honk, try again.
Those idiots in Redmond like to say that nothing is better than their crap, but they can't or won't make it so. Windoze will approach free software stability when you can net install the latest version and freely share and improve the source code. Other than that, you are at the mercy of who knows what that you can't remove that is maintained by relatively few people who's bosses are all about the $ not the code. I'm not going to say free software is perfect, but I will say that it's much better than anything else. Equating the quality of free software with M$ is one of the more insulting lies Microsoft ever came up with.
So where is this wide open back door? In every one of your applications.
No it's not. That's one of the major reasons to use free software and one of the best reasons to use a carefully audited free software distribution like Debian. Backdoors are just one of the nasty things that you can check for with an army of careful volunteers.
The only place I've really seen bad practices like this is with expensive closed source junk that gets shared out with Windoze users. The passwords are to prevent access to the program itself, how backward! There's hardly a point to using SSH on such a buggy and exploited platform as Windoze and Windoze lacks X forwarding, so few bother to use anything but telnet and ftp. They try to protect the kludge by putting it behind a firewall and locking down the wireless to the point of uselessness, but people walk their laptops in and out and something is always broken, everything is slow and full of popups. What a cesspool. I don't even want to think about what I've seen "upgrading" banks because I'm going to bed soon and don't want nighmares.
By way of contrast, my home network is all free. A gateway computer shares the network out, rather than restricts access into it. People are welcome to plug into my open wireless router, because they will see the same thing any of the other 250,000,000 internet users do. I've been running this way since 2000 or so and have yet to have a real problem.
Finally one university that clues in to the problem of oversupply of engineers?
Yep. The school of business, the cost of which are bankrupting the whole school, will continue to grow. The graduates will continue to have Forbes fueled dreams of sucksess. You know, clueless and greedy morons who chase IP nonsense. They think of themselves as corporate raiders ready to continue a fine tradition of dismantling US industry, offshoring and putting money in their pockets. Most will end up serving coffee, clerking in banks an stuff like that. Some will actually learn the folly of their ways, but most will keep chasing the corporate wet dream and so enable others to do foul things to people who care.
How the hell would a bunch of random people on Slashdot know what you should do in some strange particular circumstances that we couldn't possibly know the details of since we aren't on the staff for your school?
Slashdot readers just happen to include at least one New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, myself. I'd love to know more, so why don't you shut up?
One thing I can contribute is that Tunlane is dead wrong about their admissions. They say,
"We realize that at post-Katrina Tulane, the size of our incoming first-year classes may be smaller. Rather than lower our admission standards in order to admit more students, we will maintain our academic standards by becoming smaller yet stronger."
What they might be having problems with are servicing the huge debt that Dr. Kelly left them with when he built up their business school and people deciding not to return. They might also have trouble housing people who want to stay, though you can see that most places students lived were not flooded, so the live on campus is also misguided.
What ever the problems are, the school is determined to make them worse and I would not want to study anything technical at Tulane now. It was mostly a party school and few people attended for engineering to begin with. I imagine it would be a great place to teach and you can do what you want with what you have. Well, it used to be that way. Now that they are firing everyone, it will surely suck and it will be hard for a student to get a well rounded technical education.
Reading further, it looks like they are a bunch of jerks you don't want to be around. Try this on for size, which looks like more of the same:
a Board of Tulane task force has been charged with redefining how the Newcomb College and Tulane College names and endowments will be used to support the new structure while also acknowledging those colleges' important historic ties to Tulane University.
So, having spent all of their money, they are going after other people's money. They have been trying this for decades and I hope it does not work now. Newcomb has some excellent programs and is far more open minded than Tulane, some programs of which are more like mindless indoctrination camps than education.
What do they want to keep? What do they want to actually pay for in their search for excellence while they trash the school of medicine and the engineering school? Their business school will continue to churn out clueless asses who will follow all the greedy trends, like outsourcing engineering to India. From their own page, we find some real junk surviving majors:
African and African Diaspora Stud.
Anthropology - not so junky really.
Communication
Consumer Behavior - Marketing
Legal Studies in Business
Marketing (see Consumer Behavior)
Mathematical Economics
Political Economy
Social Policy and Practice
Women's Studies
The Women's studies group actually shared space with the Civil Engineers. The kinds of crap they left on the board beggars description. They thought the new building was built for them at the time and it turns out they were right!
With priorities like that and all the chances to shovel shit "rebuilding" the city being promissed as mandatory exercises, I think it's time to move on or stay gone.
Clue #2, there's more where that came from and they are cheaper where they are. It's easier to find bright people when you have a billion to chose from.
Currently, those you see here are more "motivated". When you have a chance to leave a $3 trillion economy for a $12 trillion economy with one quarter the population, or 16 times the wealth. People in India still starve to death, while "poor" people in the US are fat.
All this gets around the fundamental problem, the use of slave labor. Microsoft, like GE and other big dumb companies think they can use IP laws to keep control of the world without real intellectual effort. It's a suicidal betrayal to put research facilities offshore. Those that do are those that know. In time, they will develop better weapons systems than we have and the "slaves" will break free. What kind of neighbors they will be is largely dependent on how we treat them now. As big dumb companies have used such labor moves to threaten their own employees, the treatment of others is bound to be poor.
All the money in the world is not enough.
on
Security's Shaky State
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The number one threat is the Microsoft Desktop. It's closed, so you can't fix it, ever. Some would say it's broken on purpose but intentions are less important than the result.
There's not much you can really do about it. You can buy all the "security" in the world and the next M$ worm will still take out your servers and your desktops. The only thing more staff does is make the recovery faster, but the limit is how fast Microsoft themselves fix the real problem. Beyond that, you block ports and services until things go away, which is not much better than broken.
At big companies, the problem is NOT a lack of resources, it's resources poorly spent. The quoted ratio is 1:5, one Unix admin can do the work of five Windoze admins.
A customer who thought he was brilliant cut out one of our logos from an ad and taped it onto a competitor's coupon. The delivery driver didn't recognize the coupon, and when he saw the tape he peeled it off in front of the customer who, of course, pleaded ignorance.
The customer might have been ignorant. There are dirt bags who sell "discount" coupons, much like gift checks to the unwary. It sounds like a good deal for everyone, except the vouchers are little more than coppies made with some image manipulation program. The scam is prevalent in college towns with foreign students.
Other pranks have been committed like this without a profit motive. There have been several cases of people making bogus coupons and emailing them as chain spam. Store clerks often take them without knowing any better.
The silly world of coupons, gift cards and other marketing ploys invites this kind of abuse. That's why they are a stupid idea to begin with. An honest price well advertised is a better deal.
You try to start a new cable company in your town and see how far you get.
Try to start any kind of 21st century publishing company and see how far you get. Cable carries everything that paper and radio waves once did and will soon take the place of public libraries. Can we really afford to give the same kind of control to this new media that we gave to Radio and phone companies based on conditions and limits that no longer exist?
The last mile barrier must be broken by re allocating existing bandwith. Using demonstrated technologies, there is no bandwith shortage now or ever again. Many social problems can be solved by eliminating wasteful allocation of useful radio spectrum. Such a move will destroy the companies that were built on creating that last mile in the first place. They are no longer needed because the last mile can be bridged without granting exclusive control over it. The net social gain will be many times larger than the loss of obsolete services.
Is the novelty 1. Using this technique for viruses? 2. Using a dedicated honeynet?
How about someone thinking that dedicating 800,000 computers to guarding Bill Gates' crappy OS is a good use of resources? Give me a break, you could run Google 2 with that kind of processing power.
Where you live is public information, Just thought you should know.
Yeah, it's published in the phone book along with all the places you shopped last year, your mother's maiden name your city and state, how many hospitals are near you. The normal state of affairs, however, is that none of the information is connected and most people's private lives are just that. The database nation phone book links all of it together, along with lists of what you buy. It's more invasive than your most paranoid fantasies.
Am I paranoid? Not enough to have dreamed up Microsoft and the whole Wintel nighmare.
You forgot two other reasons: One: So called Earnings.... Two: balancing out the 30 day return.
So you lie to your shareholders about your earnings. Why not? The whole deal is a big FU to the customer and the employee.
I know someone who actually worked at a CompUSA and they hated it. They told me the whole place was all about sucking the maximum amount of money from the customer and that it was a miserable place to work. The work was monotonous and management was as abusive to them as they were told to be to the consumers. If you think rebate coupons are rotten on your end, think about the peon on the other side of the register.
This person was amazed when I told them that I had worked at places that actually cared about their customers and tried to get them what they needed instead of what earned the most money in order to build customer loyalty and trust. It was like a culture shock after so many months of abuse.
The whole Wintel group is a kind of anti-company. A company exists for the benefit of three groups: the shareholders, the employees and the customers. No one group should be screwed for the others and any company that does will get around to screwing them all. Microsoft, CompUSA and ComputerWorld all collude to screw people. Microsoft has the upgrade train to move their software and other people's hardware. CompUSA tells you how smart you are to buy into it all, when they are not telling you to suck it up for a "rebate" you may or may not ever receive. When someone tell you to "suck it up", you are in bad company and it's time to go somewhere else.
The whole thing is a huge fraud. Not sending the rebate checks at all is not beneath companies that have paid PR firms to write letters from dead people to congress critters, sued public school systems, operated close to 20 years before paying a dividend and think spyware and popups are part of business as usual. I'd rather spend a few hours making a computer from the garbage work than I would filling out rebate forms with what some dumb slob thinks is valuable marketing data.
Nice to see that the US doesn't have a monopoly on loony government agencies and legislation..
What makes you think M$ did not have a hand in this? Name the big French software publisher that wants to quash it's competitors and I might think this is somehow different from the DMCA and other stupid laws. While the US might not have a monopoly on digital bad laws, US monopoly business is certainly one of the leading causes.
Slashdot Mirror
If you consider lights and motion similar, sure. Recognizing the thing moving as the thing to imitate is much trickier than seeing a blinking light to blink after. We can imagine this robot would not blindly follow a rolling ball, for example, because it "knows" what it looks like and can recognize itself at any distance within reason.
Some people who skim the article too quickly might be fooled by the illustrative picture. In the picture, you can see the blinking lights. If you look closely you realize the robot can't. You only think it can because your perspective allows you to see over the card between the lights and the mirror, much like a boy in a tree might imagine people on the sidewalk can see a baseball game because he can.
My can can recognize it and other reflections in a mirror. It uses reflections to pounce on my other cat, which is not as bright. Can you make something as clever? The dude presenting the robot is all over the publishing world. I bet he would try to encourage you and your blinking lights. Animals call to each other when they want to be recognized. Blinking lights are a good way to do that. The bigger problem is identifying "others" like human beings that could easily be smashed if the robot is not careful.
This is functionally different from Windoze in what way?
How about making laws that forbid the use of public services to spy on people? How much money does it cost the phone company to keep track of everyone's position? All they really need to centralize is how much you owe them, which is currently based on airtime and how far you call. Building data pipes so they can sell the information to vendors like M$ is not just invasive, it's a waste of public money. That kind of gossip should be outlawed.
The M$ wherabouts clock has a default date of 1984. Instead of protecting people's privacy, my government is encouraging data collection of the most detailed sort so it can spy on normal citizens too. I'm disgusted with them all.
While M$ is weak on x86, they do think it's their strong point.
Their decision to drop "support" for Mac came soon after Apple announced they would make a browser of their own and base it on KHTML. At the time they said something like, "we can't compete on someone else's platform and won't."
You would expect them to give away a Mac version as part of their announced plan to run all the world's computers. In fact, you would think they would make the Mac version better than their own to encourage switching. The problem M$ is having is that Apple is eating their lunch in media, so they want to simply destroy them now. Fat chance.
It all depends of freedom.
Everyone in the USA and Europe already buy all their stuff from China. Unless you count a second rate OS and other increasingly made abroad IP, I'm not sure what there is to buy from US anymore. I wish it were different. IP is a tenuous export at best, but it's a bogus one when it's based on imported research.
All the money in the world won't really standards of living in China because they are not free. People making goods there will continue to be abused by their owners who pocket it all.
It only takes one non free country to screw everything for everyone.
I think you misspelled "chairs".
That's "stool."
Graffiti like handwriting recognition comes and goes on OpenZaurus. Rosetta and Xstroke have done the same. Why it goes away, I don't know, but when it's there it's about as good as Palm's ever was and WAY better than any M$ device ever dreamed of being. You should be able to apt-get it if it's available for use.
It's supposed to work with ssh. If that's true, you should be able to drag and drop your files from any computer using Konqueror.
I've done similar with a Zaurus running OpenZaurus. Using GPE, you can even run stuff via X forwarding, which is kind of fun, but silly if you are really intersted in a laptop replacement that fits into your pocket.
Yes, having a CF and MMC/SD slot on the Zaurus was nice. I put in a 512MB SD and used the CF for wifi. The SD worked as a /usr and extra home space. This device has the wifi built in and you will be able to do the same thing with the compact SD as you can with an SD.
The world of Linux handhelds has been sweet for a while now, but things are getting much nicer all the time. It does not take much to run Debian as this wacko from my LUG demonstrates. If a 150 MHz P1 with 70MB of RAM can do it, handheld devices are not far off. 128 MB of RAM should be more than enough, if only they had a 4Gig hard drive on it for OS storage, you could run a full distro. Such machines are on the way and they will be running Debian or some other version of free software.
People joke that Louisiana is the northernmost bananna republic. I hope not to have to welcome Mass to the club, but turnabout is fair play.
The more I think about it, the more Microsoft looks like the United Fruit Company. The only differences are that the United Fruit Company actually built real infrastructure, like railroads, and you can only grow a bananna in the tropics. It looks like you can farm PCs and treat their users like peons at any latitude.
Let's see if a great US state with some of the best IT staff and best universities for IT in the world can resist bribery and persue excellence. If they can't, no one can. That's what this is all about. The world is watching and M$ is desperate to "demonstrate" that IT experts want M$ junk.
What's funny is that their demonstration proves only that M$ is used only because it's forced on people by idiots.
That's easy: He told 5,000 people to get to work right now, "code for Bill." At the same time, he told 4,999 of them they were fired.
Something tells me the man who disparages US education is going to soon tell a few thousand US programmers the same thing.
Ah, the wonderful closed source lie: sell me your effort and I will make you rich. It's about as believable as the last BSA wopper: buy closed source junk and you will magically have more money! Why do people listen to this BS?
That's a nice joke, but the old saying "No knowledge no bread, no bread no knowledge" is true. People who know computing use free software and Google. People who don't really care use M$ and junk search engines. The true careless still watch TV to stay informed, well entertained. Poverty follows carelessness as surely as the laws of nature punish stupidity. People like Bill Gates will take their money.
If you don't like people who take advantage of the weak and the stupid, don't give them your money and elect people who will enforce laws instead of using them to protect the abusers.
and IIS is about as secure as Apache if Apache were as popular as IIS, right? Honk, Honk, try again.
Those idiots in Redmond like to say that nothing is better than their crap, but they can't or won't make it so. Windoze will approach free software stability when you can net install the latest version and freely share and improve the source code. Other than that, you are at the mercy of who knows what that you can't remove that is maintained by relatively few people who's bosses are all about the $ not the code. I'm not going to say free software is perfect, but I will say that it's much better than anything else. Equating the quality of free software with M$ is one of the more insulting lies Microsoft ever came up with.
No it's not. That's one of the major reasons to use free software and one of the best reasons to use a carefully audited free software distribution like Debian. Backdoors are just one of the nasty things that you can check for with an army of careful volunteers.
The only place I've really seen bad practices like this is with expensive closed source junk that gets shared out with Windoze users. The passwords are to prevent access to the program itself, how backward! There's hardly a point to using SSH on such a buggy and exploited platform as Windoze and Windoze lacks X forwarding, so few bother to use anything but telnet and ftp. They try to protect the kludge by putting it behind a firewall and locking down the wireless to the point of uselessness, but people walk their laptops in and out and something is always broken, everything is slow and full of popups. What a cesspool. I don't even want to think about what I've seen "upgrading" banks because I'm going to bed soon and don't want nighmares.
By way of contrast, my home network is all free. A gateway computer shares the network out, rather than restricts access into it. People are welcome to plug into my open wireless router, because they will see the same thing any of the other 250,000,000 internet users do. I've been running this way since 2000 or so and have yet to have a real problem.
Yep. The school of business, the cost of which are bankrupting the whole school, will continue to grow. The graduates will continue to have Forbes fueled dreams of sucksess. You know, clueless and greedy morons who chase IP nonsense. They think of themselves as corporate raiders ready to continue a fine tradition of dismantling US industry, offshoring and putting money in their pockets. Most will end up serving coffee, clerking in banks an stuff like that. Some will actually learn the folly of their ways, but most will keep chasing the corporate wet dream and so enable others to do foul things to people who care.
Slashdot readers just happen to include at least one New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, myself. I'd love to know more, so why don't you shut up?
One thing I can contribute is that Tunlane is dead wrong about their admissions. They say,
"We realize that at post-Katrina Tulane, the size of our incoming first-year classes may be smaller. Rather than lower our admission standards in order to admit more students, we will maintain our academic standards by becoming smaller yet stronger."
But they have actually had MORE applications this year than last. The news acted as advertising and actually increased interest in the school!
What they might be having problems with are servicing the huge debt that Dr. Kelly left them with when he built up their business school and people deciding not to return. They might also have trouble housing people who want to stay, though you can see that most places students lived were not flooded, so the live on campus is also misguided.
What ever the problems are, the school is determined to make them worse and I would not want to study anything technical at Tulane now. It was mostly a party school and few people attended for engineering to begin with. I imagine it would be a great place to teach and you can do what you want with what you have. Well, it used to be that way. Now that they are firing everyone, it will surely suck and it will be hard for a student to get a well rounded technical education.
Reading further, it looks like they are a bunch of jerks you don't want to be around. Try this on for size, which looks like more of the same:
a Board of Tulane task force has been charged with redefining how the Newcomb College and Tulane College names and endowments will be used to support the new structure while also acknowledging those colleges' important historic ties to Tulane University.
So, having spent all of their money, they are going after other people's money. They have been trying this for decades and I hope it does not work now. Newcomb has some excellent programs and is far more open minded than Tulane, some programs of which are more like mindless indoctrination camps than education.
What do they want to keep? What do they want to actually pay for in their search for excellence while they trash the school of medicine and the engineering school? Their business school will continue to churn out clueless asses who will follow all the greedy trends, like outsourcing engineering to India. From their own page, we find some real junk surviving majors:
The Women's studies group actually shared space with the Civil Engineers. The kinds of crap they left on the board beggars description. They thought the new building was built for them at the time and it turns out they were right!
With priorities like that and all the chances to shovel shit "rebuilding" the city being promissed as mandatory exercises, I think it's time to move on or stay gone.
Clue #2, there's more where that came from and they are cheaper where they are. It's easier to find bright people when you have a billion to chose from.
Currently, those you see here are more "motivated". When you have a chance to leave a $3 trillion economy for a $12 trillion economy with one quarter the population, or 16 times the wealth. People in India still starve to death, while "poor" people in the US are fat.
All this gets around the fundamental problem, the use of slave labor. Microsoft, like GE and other big dumb companies think they can use IP laws to keep control of the world without real intellectual effort. It's a suicidal betrayal to put research facilities offshore. Those that do are those that know. In time, they will develop better weapons systems than we have and the "slaves" will break free. What kind of neighbors they will be is largely dependent on how we treat them now. As big dumb companies have used such labor moves to threaten their own employees, the treatment of others is bound to be poor.
There's not much you can really do about it. You can buy all the "security" in the world and the next M$ worm will still take out your servers and your desktops. The only thing more staff does is make the recovery faster, but the limit is how fast Microsoft themselves fix the real problem. Beyond that, you block ports and services until things go away, which is not much better than broken.
At big companies, the problem is NOT a lack of resources, it's resources poorly spent. The quoted ratio is 1:5, one Unix admin can do the work of five Windoze admins.
The customer might have been ignorant. There are dirt bags who sell "discount" coupons, much like gift checks to the unwary. It sounds like a good deal for everyone, except the vouchers are little more than coppies made with some image manipulation program. The scam is prevalent in college towns with foreign students.
Other pranks have been committed like this without a profit motive. There have been several cases of people making bogus coupons and emailing them as chain spam. Store clerks often take them without knowing any better.
The silly world of coupons, gift cards and other marketing ploys invites this kind of abuse. That's why they are a stupid idea to begin with. An honest price well advertised is a better deal.
Try to start any kind of 21st century publishing company and see how far you get. Cable carries everything that paper and radio waves once did and will soon take the place of public libraries. Can we really afford to give the same kind of control to this new media that we gave to Radio and phone companies based on conditions and limits that no longer exist?
The last mile barrier must be broken by re allocating existing bandwith. Using demonstrated technologies, there is no bandwith shortage now or ever again. Many social problems can be solved by eliminating wasteful allocation of useful radio spectrum. Such a move will destroy the companies that were built on creating that last mile in the first place. They are no longer needed because the last mile can be bridged without granting exclusive control over it. The net social gain will be many times larger than the loss of obsolete services.
How about someone thinking that dedicating 800,000 computers to guarding Bill Gates' crappy OS is a good use of resources? Give me a break, you could run Google 2 with that kind of processing power.
Yeah, it's published in the phone book along with all the places you shopped last year, your mother's maiden name your city and state, how many hospitals are near you. The normal state of affairs, however, is that none of the information is connected and most people's private lives are just that. The database nation phone book links all of it together, along with lists of what you buy. It's more invasive than your most paranoid fantasies.
Am I paranoid? Not enough to have dreamed up Microsoft and the whole Wintel nighmare.
So you lie to your shareholders about your earnings. Why not? The whole deal is a big FU to the customer and the employee.
I know someone who actually worked at a CompUSA and they hated it. They told me the whole place was all about sucking the maximum amount of money from the customer and that it was a miserable place to work. The work was monotonous and management was as abusive to them as they were told to be to the consumers. If you think rebate coupons are rotten on your end, think about the peon on the other side of the register.
This person was amazed when I told them that I had worked at places that actually cared about their customers and tried to get them what they needed instead of what earned the most money in order to build customer loyalty and trust. It was like a culture shock after so many months of abuse.
The whole Wintel group is a kind of anti-company. A company exists for the benefit of three groups: the shareholders, the employees and the customers. No one group should be screwed for the others and any company that does will get around to screwing them all. Microsoft, CompUSA and ComputerWorld all collude to screw people. Microsoft has the upgrade train to move their software and other people's hardware. CompUSA tells you how smart you are to buy into it all, when they are not telling you to suck it up for a "rebate" you may or may not ever receive. When someone tell you to "suck it up", you are in bad company and it's time to go somewhere else.
The whole thing is a huge fraud. Not sending the rebate checks at all is not beneath companies that have paid PR firms to write letters from dead people to congress critters, sued public school systems, operated close to 20 years before paying a dividend and think spyware and popups are part of business as usual. I'd rather spend a few hours making a computer from the garbage work than I would filling out rebate forms with what some dumb slob thinks is valuable marketing data.
What makes you think M$ did not have a hand in this? Name the big French software publisher that wants to quash it's competitors and I might think this is somehow different from the DMCA and other stupid laws. While the US might not have a monopoly on digital bad laws, US monopoly business is certainly one of the leading causes.
Don't tell that to my zaurus.