I wonder what it would take to convince the world that these unsecured machines are an actual security threat, rather than an annoyance?
About a billion dollars? That's what was spent promoting XP in the first place.
That or a little more time. People are figuring out that the insecure part of a PC is MS. They don't and won't hear similar stories from other OS. The "Linux will get owned if more people run it" line is falling flat.
Do you think that they want annoy you and bombard you with useless information? Of course not, that wastes your time and their money, no one wants that.
All advertising is a waste of time, duh.
The best targeted advertising is already annoying. The grocery store already knows what I buy and always gives me coupons for all the WRONG brands. It's annoyingly invasive and wrong.
What's so bad about studying them[shopping patterns]?
Here's a short list of things that you might not want everyone knowing:
Your drinking habits.
Your method of birth control.
Medications especially for things like anti-depressants or treatments for STDs.
The books you read.
All of these things can be used against you by your employer or insurance company.
You only think you want targeted ads. Imagine your wife getting ads for the wrong brand of tampon at just the right time. That's how invasive and awful your phone company's snooping can be. The grocery store comes close right now. The targeting works as intended and is as annoying as hell because the stupid coupons are always for the wrong brand.
Finally, ask yourself what snooping through your garbage has to do with phone service. Is this why federal, state and local laws protect incumbent phone providers from competition? BellSouth, thank you for a new low.
Seriously here people, most free software is complete tripe. The popular projects you hear about, Linux, Firefox, etc. are just a small fraction of what's out there. Peer review only works if people are interested in your project.
You realize what you said is true, circular and bad news for commercial software, don't you?
What you call "tripe" is what the author wanted to get done and what no commercial software vendor would provide. Score one for free software - meeting user needs.
The "popular" projects do indeed rock and will be better than anything commercial because no firm can match the development effort. Look at the gnu debugger. The last time I checked it had more than 87 authors. Show me a commercial debugger that gets that much attention. That's just one of the thousands of gnu projects that make free software actually work. Score two for free software - in the end, what needs to get done gets done better.
Finally, you are half right about peer review only working on projects that other people care about. If you can't find a single other person in the world interested in your project you have a rare project indeed and won't find any help. Most people are not so original and will usually find dozens of projects that do something very close to what they want to do. So far, so good, where did you go wrong? When you turned a blind eye to the most popular non free software getting no such help at all. For all your customers can tell it was written by a lone monkey paid in bananas who was forbidden contact with the rest of the world. Final score - free software 3, commercial software zero.
This message composed and transmitted on a system run with complete tripe that just happens to have more features and run much better than any commercial software available.
it will probably mean that commercially-available code is more expensive and cause major problems for free and open source software developers.
Everyone knows that most free software, by virtue of peer review, has fewer bugs and errors than commercial code does. If what he means is that you have to be licensed, bonded and "protected" by a corporate staff of 800 pound gorillas to write code, then free software will have problems. Such a missallocation of resources still won't buy him better code.
This whole issue is a troll the non free software companies come up with every few years. It's a mistake for them, however, and will blow up in their faces. Free software will overcome such nonsense the same way Good Samaritans do. Worse, what kind of society would outlaw exchanging of advice on how to do something? That's what sharing source code it. Why not outlaw engineering texts instead?
a windows pc.. sitting in a hotel room? thats like using old sheets.
Ewww, a keyboard in a motel room. Now Wash Your Hands.
The difference between the sheets, keys and Windozed is that Windoze lets 250,000,000 13 year old punks put their seed on the machine from anywhere. Now that's dirty.
The thing I've not been satisfied with yet is the idea that the PC itself would engage in a man-in-the-middle attack.
That's why I'm going to keep carrying my laptop. I don't trust non-free software, especially Microsoft junk. I'll use a windoze box in a pinch, but I won't put a password into it. There are just too many key loggers out there and the platform is too open to abuse. As long as there's a network, I have full OpenSSH access to my data from my cable box. It's rare that I need all of it, but what I need is unpredictable. That's not something the average Windoze box can do and I would not trust it if it could.
Would I trust a free computer? That depends on my trust of the owner. I trust my friends and their computers. Do I know a hotel chain? No, and so the laptop saves the day again.
My trust in businesses has been shattered by the last decade of data mining they have done. The grocery store tracks my spending and spits out coupons. The credit card company tracks my spending even the gas station want's a piece of the "action". This is only the tip of the database nation iceburg.
This Forbes article noticed that Google searches were good and speculated that Google would get into web applications and that this is why Microsoft hated Google. So they are not getting into applications, why does Bill Gates hate them so?
Bill Gates is a paranoid loser, that's why. He's got more than enough money. He's got more than enough power. But he still let's other people's excellence bother him. Ha ha ha, he'll never be happy and that is what a loser is.
most cameras don't operate with 16 bit/channel color. I know mine has 12 bits/channel in the raw format. That still means I lose a tiiiny little bit when processing with a 8 bit application, but I honestly can't see any difference.
Most video cards only do 32 bit "true color", that is 8 bits each for R,G,B and an 8 bit alpha. You won't see any difference between 8, 12 and 16 bit per channel images with most cards. You might have a fancier card with fancy drivers that are set well. Then you might be able to see the difference.
... what he really means is that no sane business enters a contract in which the terms are fair, or that they don't have complete control over their ability to screw the customer in the future.
Yes, that's what he means. He's also full of shit. The short lived 1996 Telcom act proved that there are lots of companies ready willing and able to profit by offering fair service. People want telco and someone will make money providing it. People have been singing and dancing forever, they are not going to stop because of some stupid copyright laws. Getting rid of the RIAA, MPAA is about the best thing that could happen to the industry but even those turds will still be around in a free digital world.
HBO is not attacking BitTorrent the program, they're attacking people misusing BitTorrent to share copyrighted material illegally.
HBO is attacking the internet itself. They are trying to attack a few people but they are going to harm everyone else and seem not to care. Movie downloads are huge already. What HBO is doing by injecting garbage makes those downloads many times as large. That's shit that gets in the way of legitimate traffic that has nothing to do with HBO and their crappy little TV shows. I don't even want to think about accidents where their program automagically DoS's a file that just happens to have the wrong name. This is clearly anti-social behavior.
Filling the network with garbage is an outrage. It's going to cost ISPs money and it's going to slow things down for everyone.
A judge decided that what my.mp3.com was doing, was copyright infringement.
The judge was an idiot or bought. MP3.com offered a legitimate service much like any other ripping software. They only difference was centralization of resources to save everyone time and trouble. Considering that a republication that violates copyright will one day be seen as equally absurd as carrying around dozens of CDs to play music one CD at a time.
Laws should follow morals rather than morals following laws. Absurd decisions don't make something right. What you and I believe is right makes it so. Common sense really does make the law and that's why big dumb companies spend billions of dollars trying to convince you that you have no interest in anything but consumption.
do you want a site that could be busted to have a history of what you downloaded and of your upload download amounts?
With the kinds of files I want, there should never be a bust. I don't want content from big dumb companies that don't want me to have it. They can rot.
I welcome anything that can protect those downloads from accidental DoS by those same big dumb companies. Unfortunately, there is no real cure for their anti-social behavior.
I resent the network congestion HBO's stupid tactics will cause. People who want their shows will get them anyway and they will share them with their friends. All HBO's DoS will do is cost everyone in between more bandwith. That's all fine and good with them as they try to outlaw p2p publishing in general. I resent that even more. They don't care if their stupid DoS software floods networks or accidently nails my legitimate files.
No, no, Bob was much more than Clippy. It was a whole 256 color pallet immersive experience, like Pee Wee's big brother, play house in hell. Wile offering no real security of privacy, it demands all sorts of information before you can even use it. It even contains a financial planner, which we can be very happy never went live except as M$ Money, bank forms and other phishing bait. It's instructive to not that the Bob dissaster was the last project Bill Gate's girlfriend worked on and that elements of it KEEP COMING BACK. The pop up dialogs are almost identical to the ones used on Win 2000 and XP. XP comes close to hiding as much information as Bob did. So, while one of the most frequent questions asked of Microsoft support is how to turn off Bob features, Microsoft keeps putting them in.
In the past, PC makers that offered non-MS variants were allegedly punished by MS with higher prices,
Not if they offered those non M$ variants on crappy hardware at higher prices. The astroturfers claimed it always cost more to put something other than Windoze on because no one wanted anything but windoze. Then M$'s emails all came out in court.
I'm not convinced that anything has changed. A real change would be Dell offering business customers PCs decked out with Red Hat, etc, and Open Office for substantially less than they can sell the same PC decked out with M$ equivalents. When I see that, I'll know the M$ monopoly is finally over because free and open software does not cost $500 per seat even if you get the "Pro" edition.
he envisioned back in '80s that PC with DOS will be good enough even in 2005.
FreeDOS is not your father's old DOS.
Still, I'd be happier if they would just disk image Mepis or something. It's not like the extra step would cost them anything. It would be even better if they put pressure on their suppliers to release specs so free drivers could be made.
It is a market in need of consolidation because there are to many packages selling to relatively few users for not enough money. The execs of the company being bought do it because they get rich cashing out and could care less about either the employees or customers both of whom usually get screwed.
What the market needs is free software. There are NEVER enough packages to do the job from the user's perspective. CAD software is painfully easy manipulation of two and three dimensional objects. All the building blocks are in place for a free software. QCad and PythonCAD are good starts and there's plenty of good stuff that can move in from projects like Inkspace. CUPS has the printing back end taken care of. With a little bit of effort these things can all be rolled into FEM work to make something as good as Solid Works. The CAD community has the talent to do this and will. It's just a matter of time and not being worked to death by too few, too large employers who have too good a relation with government.
When a company goes under like this, everyone loses even the execs. The money made selling out is nice but it does not add up as well as a healthy company provides in a healthy market. Commercial software is obviously not a healthy market because something of value is about to be destroyed.
... and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
"Fools!" cried their second in command, who most resembled Uncle Fester. He then made a great commotion with chairs in his office and moaned like a Wildebeast, "I will KILL NETSCAPE! I have done it before and I will do it again."
So the New XP, according to it's master's instructions, reported the offenders who dared challenge the The Browser and there was a great plague on device drivers for the unfortunate users and other dependents.
For Yeah, HP had not learned the Digital Research Lesson, and though they slew their own son, the Beast of Redmond is impossible to satisfy without perfect Obedience.
The plaintiff in a civil action begins as he must with the assertion that the defendant has done him wrong.
Well, duh, there had be good evidence of real damage and obligation before you waste everyone's time in court. It makes you wonder how any of these RIAA requests were ever granted. There are no contracts, damages or even evidence outside a few ill gotten computer records that prove little more than a p2p application was run on a computer.
You seem to know a lot. Can you tell me what kinds of evidence is presented and how that adds up to any damage that would warrent public money being spent? Can you explain how republishing without permission became a crime or how putting a file on your computer came to be thought of as a publication? Can you show me any real damages from such behavior. Most important, can you tell me how you can tell between someone who's sharing free works and someone who's sharing non-free copyrighted crap?
From here it looks predatory. You know, a shake down of people who have done nothing wrong but have no means to defend themselves designed to scare people away from using their computers to share anything.
Dispensing tea and yympathy is not the business of the american federal courts. The soccer mom can expect to take her lumps just like anyone else.
I'm hoping her counter suit dispenses enough lumps to finally shutdown the RIAA. They need a big fat fine for being dumb enough to extort the life savings out of their fans.
If you use P2P to share original works of art... why would you really care about someone fighting the RIAA regarding copyright issues?
You don't care if you have all of the wrong assumptions. You would not care if you presumed the woman guilty, as you and the RIAA have. The criminal justice system is not supposed to work that way, copyright is not a part of criminal law and a single mom and the RIAA are not the ideal equal oponents required to gain justice in a civil case. Most importantly, you would not care if your were naive enough to believe these cases were about copyright infingment rather than shutting down an alternate source of legal distribtuion like mp3.com.
Once again, emotional attachment to code evaporates when exposed to a paycheck. That 75% finished code will never see the light of day and 12 of 13 developers don't care.
Once again, code ownership will spawn lawsuits. How much of this can society really afford?
While I'm ordinarily inclined to feel bad for the victim of such obviously anti-competitive practices, it's hard to feel bad for software owners. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
Here's a good reason to use free software: It can't be stolen out from under you.
The only sad part is that it is *so* close to the supposedly non-absurdist version.
Yes, you have to wonder how keeping people from distributing an IPod map is contributing to the purpose of the subway. Legally, however, the subway has won.
Your intentins are good, but if you don't have training you will be a hinderance and a liability.
Bullshit. It sounds good at first but it breaks down when you think about it. As long as they bring food and shelter for themselves everything they do is appreciated and useful. Training is better, co-ordinated trained people are best but no one is useless. Turning people away for lack of paper work "certs" is one of the worst things that happened. All help is appreciated by decent people and there are plenty of them in New Orleans, Slidel and on the Gulf Coast.
The Red Cross know what it's doing, unlike FEMA or that horrible woman who did not know she was in command of the National Guard and delayed aid for days without reason. Contact Them and join an organized response. They might even tell you what to fill your truck with.
Now, let's see what people in New Orleans are saying. "Please open a Wal Mart"! Family members report that the one grocery store open smells like the fridges they taped shut and put on the curb. I think they can use almost ANYTHING but beer is in short supply.
Your backs will also be useful. There's plenty of cleaning up you can offer people who are unable to do such things on their own. They will be happy to see you.
Of course, there are some real jerks there too. I've heard plenty of stories about people who not only expected heroism on their behalf, they expressed anger to those helping them. I have it first hand that, as in other urban dissasters, police and firemen were shot at while putting out fires. Some people have such a strong sense of entitlement they are angry they were not rescued earlier and have been asking questions like, "Where's my appartment?" for weeks. Don't let them deter you.
Slashdot Mirror
About a billion dollars? That's what was spent promoting XP in the first place.
That or a little more time. People are figuring out that the insecure part of a PC is MS. They don't and won't hear similar stories from other OS. The "Linux will get owned if more people run it" line is falling flat.
All advertising is a waste of time, duh.
The best targeted advertising is already annoying. The grocery store already knows what I buy and always gives me coupons for all the WRONG brands. It's annoyingly invasive and wrong.
Of course, there are lots of things you don't want other people sharing.
Here's a short list of things that you might not want everyone knowing:
All of these things can be used against you by your employer or insurance company.
You only think you want targeted ads. Imagine your wife getting ads for the wrong brand of tampon at just the right time. That's how invasive and awful your phone company's snooping can be. The grocery store comes close right now. The targeting works as intended and is as annoying as hell because the stupid coupons are always for the wrong brand.
Finally, ask yourself what snooping through your garbage has to do with phone service. Is this why federal, state and local laws protect incumbent phone providers from competition? BellSouth, thank you for a new low.
You realize what you said is true, circular and bad news for commercial software, don't you?
What you call "tripe" is what the author wanted to get done and what no commercial software vendor would provide. Score one for free software - meeting user needs.
The "popular" projects do indeed rock and will be better than anything commercial because no firm can match the development effort. Look at the gnu debugger. The last time I checked it had more than 87 authors. Show me a commercial debugger that gets that much attention. That's just one of the thousands of gnu projects that make free software actually work. Score two for free software - in the end, what needs to get done gets done better.
Finally, you are half right about peer review only working on projects that other people care about. If you can't find a single other person in the world interested in your project you have a rare project indeed and won't find any help. Most people are not so original and will usually find dozens of projects that do something very close to what they want to do. So far, so good, where did you go wrong? When you turned a blind eye to the most popular non free software getting no such help at all. For all your customers can tell it was written by a lone monkey paid in bananas who was forbidden contact with the rest of the world. Final score - free software 3, commercial software zero.
This message composed and transmitted on a system run with complete tripe that just happens to have more features and run much better than any commercial software available.
Everyone knows that most free software, by virtue of peer review, has fewer bugs and errors than commercial code does. If what he means is that you have to be licensed, bonded and "protected" by a corporate staff of 800 pound gorillas to write code, then free software will have problems. Such a missallocation of resources still won't buy him better code.
This whole issue is a troll the non free software companies come up with every few years. It's a mistake for them, however, and will blow up in their faces. Free software will overcome such nonsense the same way Good Samaritans do. Worse, what kind of society would outlaw exchanging of advice on how to do something? That's what sharing source code it. Why not outlaw engineering texts instead?
Ewww, a keyboard in a motel room. Now Wash Your Hands.
The difference between the sheets, keys and Windozed is that Windoze lets 250,000,000 13 year old punks put their seed on the machine from anywhere. Now that's dirty.
That's why I'm going to keep carrying my laptop. I don't trust non-free software, especially Microsoft junk. I'll use a windoze box in a pinch, but I won't put a password into it. There are just too many key loggers out there and the platform is too open to abuse. As long as there's a network, I have full OpenSSH access to my data from my cable box. It's rare that I need all of it, but what I need is unpredictable. That's not something the average Windoze box can do and I would not trust it if it could.
Would I trust a free computer? That depends on my trust of the owner. I trust my friends and their computers. Do I know a hotel chain? No, and so the laptop saves the day again.
My trust in businesses has been shattered by the last decade of data mining they have done. The grocery store tracks my spending and spits out coupons. The credit card company tracks my spending even the gas station want's a piece of the "action". This is only the tip of the database nation iceburg.
Bill Gates is a paranoid loser, that's why. He's got more than enough money. He's got more than enough power. But he still let's other people's excellence bother him. Ha ha ha, he'll never be happy and that is what a loser is.
Most video cards only do 32 bit "true color", that is 8 bits each for R,G,B and an 8 bit alpha. You won't see any difference between 8, 12 and 16 bit per channel images with most cards. You might have a fancier card with fancy drivers that are set well. Then you might be able to see the difference.
Nvidia 7800 has up to 128 bpp. So do other fancy cards.
My crummy nforce4 has no such options, even with the nvidia driver. This is no big deal to me now.
Yes, that's what he means. He's also full of shit. The short lived 1996 Telcom act proved that there are lots of companies ready willing and able to profit by offering fair service. People want telco and someone will make money providing it. People have been singing and dancing forever, they are not going to stop because of some stupid copyright laws. Getting rid of the RIAA, MPAA is about the best thing that could happen to the industry but even those turds will still be around in a free digital world.
HBO is attacking the internet itself. They are trying to attack a few people but they are going to harm everyone else and seem not to care. Movie downloads are huge already. What HBO is doing by injecting garbage makes those downloads many times as large. That's shit that gets in the way of legitimate traffic that has nothing to do with HBO and their crappy little TV shows. I don't even want to think about accidents where their program automagically DoS's a file that just happens to have the wrong name. This is clearly anti-social behavior.
Filling the network with garbage is an outrage. It's going to cost ISPs money and it's going to slow things down for everyone.
The judge was an idiot or bought. MP3.com offered a legitimate service much like any other ripping software. They only difference was centralization of resources to save everyone time and trouble. Considering that a republication that violates copyright will one day be seen as equally absurd as carrying around dozens of CDs to play music one CD at a time.
Laws should follow morals rather than morals following laws. Absurd decisions don't make something right. What you and I believe is right makes it so. Common sense really does make the law and that's why big dumb companies spend billions of dollars trying to convince you that you have no interest in anything but consumption.
With the kinds of files I want, there should never be a bust. I don't want content from big dumb companies that don't want me to have it. They can rot.
I welcome anything that can protect those downloads from accidental DoS by those same big dumb companies. Unfortunately, there is no real cure for their anti-social behavior.
I resent the network congestion HBO's stupid tactics will cause. People who want their shows will get them anyway and they will share them with their friends. All HBO's DoS will do is cost everyone in between more bandwith. That's all fine and good with them as they try to outlaw p2p publishing in general. I resent that even more. They don't care if their stupid DoS software floods networks or accidently nails my legitimate files.
HBO, you suck.
Compare to Next, CDE, KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox and other really innovative GUIs, even bash for getting actual work done. Wikipedia's Bob Page with links to screenshots of hell.
Not if they offered those non M$ variants on crappy hardware at higher prices. The astroturfers claimed it always cost more to put something other than Windoze on because no one wanted anything but windoze. Then M$'s emails all came out in court.
I'm not convinced that anything has changed. A real change would be Dell offering business customers PCs decked out with Red Hat, etc, and Open Office for substantially less than they can sell the same PC decked out with M$ equivalents. When I see that, I'll know the M$ monopoly is finally over because free and open software does not cost $500 per seat even if you get the "Pro" edition.
FreeDOS is not your father's old DOS.
Still, I'd be happier if they would just disk image Mepis or something. It's not like the extra step would cost them anything. It would be even better if they put pressure on their suppliers to release specs so free drivers could be made.
What the market needs is free software. There are NEVER enough packages to do the job from the user's perspective. CAD software is painfully easy manipulation of two and three dimensional objects. All the building blocks are in place for a free software. QCad and PythonCAD are good starts and there's plenty of good stuff that can move in from projects like Inkspace. CUPS has the printing back end taken care of. With a little bit of effort these things can all be rolled into FEM work to make something as good as Solid Works. The CAD community has the talent to do this and will. It's just a matter of time and not being worked to death by too few, too large employers who have too good a relation with government.
When a company goes under like this, everyone loses even the execs. The money made selling out is nice but it does not add up as well as a healthy company provides in a healthy market. Commercial software is obviously not a healthy market because something of value is about to be destroyed.
Why not just install Mepis? What good is the best of browsers on M$?
"Fools!" cried their second in command, who most resembled Uncle Fester. He then made a great commotion with chairs in his office and moaned like a Wildebeast, "I will KILL NETSCAPE! I have done it before and I will do it again."
And he laughed a cruel laugh as he ordered his Developers to craft all manner of Evil for Netscape. "My master says this is His Platform and none can compete therein. HP shall be punished and blamed for their insolence." Before a single unit was shipped the trap was laid.
So the New XP, according to it's master's instructions, reported the offenders who dared challenge the The Browser and there was a great plague on device drivers for the unfortunate users and other dependents.
For Yeah, HP had not learned the Digital Research Lesson, and though they slew their own son, the Beast of Redmond is impossible to satisfy without perfect Obedience.
Well, duh, there had be good evidence of real damage and obligation before you waste everyone's time in court. It makes you wonder how any of these RIAA requests were ever granted. There are no contracts, damages or even evidence outside a few ill gotten computer records that prove little more than a p2p application was run on a computer.
You seem to know a lot. Can you tell me what kinds of evidence is presented and how that adds up to any damage that would warrent public money being spent? Can you explain how republishing without permission became a crime or how putting a file on your computer came to be thought of as a publication? Can you show me any real damages from such behavior. Most important, can you tell me how you can tell between someone who's sharing free works and someone who's sharing non-free copyrighted crap?
From here it looks predatory. You know, a shake down of people who have done nothing wrong but have no means to defend themselves designed to scare people away from using their computers to share anything.
Dispensing tea and yympathy is not the business of the american federal courts. The soccer mom can expect to take her lumps just like anyone else.
I'm hoping her counter suit dispenses enough lumps to finally shutdown the RIAA. They need a big fat fine for being dumb enough to extort the life savings out of their fans.
You don't care if you have all of the wrong assumptions. You would not care if you presumed the woman guilty, as you and the RIAA have. The criminal justice system is not supposed to work that way, copyright is not a part of criminal law and a single mom and the RIAA are not the ideal equal oponents required to gain justice in a civil case. Most importantly, you would not care if your were naive enough to believe these cases were about copyright infingment rather than shutting down an alternate source of legal distribtuion like mp3.com.
Does that clear things up for you?
Once again, code ownership will spawn lawsuits. How much of this can society really afford?
While I'm ordinarily inclined to feel bad for the victim of such obviously anti-competitive practices, it's hard to feel bad for software owners. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
Here's a good reason to use free software: It can't be stolen out from under you.
Yes, you have to wonder how keeping people from distributing an IPod map is contributing to the purpose of the subway. Legally, however, the subway has won.
Especially one that works on your Ipod.
If you outlaw subway maps for ipod, only terrorists with ipods will have subway maps. No one will get anywhere and the subway will have won.
Bullshit. It sounds good at first but it breaks down when you think about it. As long as they bring food and shelter for themselves everything they do is appreciated and useful. Training is better, co-ordinated trained people are best but no one is useless. Turning people away for lack of paper work "certs" is one of the worst things that happened. All help is appreciated by decent people and there are plenty of them in New Orleans, Slidel and on the Gulf Coast.
Contact The Red Cross.
The Red Cross know what it's doing, unlike FEMA or that horrible woman who did not know she was in command of the National Guard and delayed aid for days without reason. Contact Them and join an organized response. They might even tell you what to fill your truck with.
Now, let's see what people in New Orleans are saying. "Please open a Wal Mart"! Family members report that the one grocery store open smells like the fridges they taped shut and put on the curb. I think they can use almost ANYTHING but beer is in short supply.
Your backs will also be useful. There's plenty of cleaning up you can offer people who are unable to do such things on their own. They will be happy to see you.
Of course, there are some real jerks there too. I've heard plenty of stories about people who not only expected heroism on their behalf, they expressed anger to those helping them. I have it first hand that, as in other urban dissasters, police and firemen were shot at while putting out fires. Some people have such a strong sense of entitlement they are angry they were not rescued earlier and have been asking questions like, "Where's my appartment?" for weeks. Don't let them deter you.
Good luck, you are going to need it.