It isn't a false limitation at all. At any point in time, only so much hardware exists, which can only provide so much bandwidth. Of course new hardware can be added, but it has to be paid for, and as bandwidth usage goes up so do costs. If you actually need to install new cable, that gets very expensive indeed.
The old flat-rate prices were based on the assumption that only a very few people would be heavy users. As the average usage goes up, ISPs have to pay more, leaving them with the choice of either (a) increasing prices; (b) changing the terms of service, such as by adding usage caps; or (c) going broke.
(Of course this assumes that the ISPs in question weren't horrendously overcharging to begin with. This is probably a safe assumption where real competition exists, but might not be true in all areas.)
I guess that another factor is that Mac OS X shares a lot of code with other products/projects. Many (perhaps most) of those projects are probably unwilling to postpone releasing security updates until Apple are ready. Microsoft don't have that problem, or at least not to the same extent.
The underlying design of Windows is bad from a security standpoint, but that of Unix isn't really any better, IMO.
It's slightly easier for exploit code to elevate itself to kernel privilege on Windows, but I'm not convinced the distinction is significant; I don't think a cleverly written Mac exploit would have too much trouble getting the admin password out of the user sooner or later.
(A well-designed OS would authorize the activities of a process based on what role said process is playing, not on what account it is attached to. So, for example, a word processor would only be allowed to write to the document the user opened, not to any other file.)
I'd have thought if the domain was deregistered the DNS queries would be stopped at the root servers for.com or.org (whichever) and would be no big deal.
However, concern that the domain name might then be acquired by black hats seems valid, and is something I hadn't thought of. It's a shame there isn't a way to blacklist a domain name so it can't be acquired by anyone else - but doubtless there would be political problems in even proposing a mechanism for doing this!
I think the take-away lesson here is that when designing a service intended to be used on this scale, you have to consider your exit strategy.
Not quite my understanding. Positron-electron pairs don't get created spontaneously as this would violate the conservation of energy. However, a pair of what are called "virtual" particles can appear spontaneously if one of them has a negative mass.
Now, a negative mass particle can't normally exist for very long, so it has to recombine in short order with the original particle and they cancel each other out.
However if the negative mass particle is trapped by the event horizon, "not very long" gets stretched out indefinitely by the time dilation, and the positive mass particle can escape. The total mass of the black hole goes down because the particle entering it has a negative mass.
Of course, this is all just a way of visualizing what goes on so that it seems to make sense. It doesn't necessarily correspond in any meaningful way to reality.
Perhaps because this works even if the BIOS password is set? Even if the case is alarmed or otherwise secured?
If the attacking computer is small enough to be mistaken for a disk drive, you could even conduct this attack while being supervised.
There seems to be some debate over whether this can be fixed in software or not. If it can, Microsoft should do so. If it can't, the affected computers should be recalled. Bottom line: the situation is unacceptable.
Well, since most vulnerabilities are disclosed to the vendor when discovered, you can cover a "reasonable number" without paying a thing.
Of course, covering a "reasonable number" of known vulnerabilities doesn't actually help, since the bad guys are going to use the other ones. Ultimately, the only "reasonable number" of known vulnerabilities to fix is "all of them".
How is subscribing to ten "good reliable" companies going to help if the next vulnerability is discovered by a not-so-good, not-particularly-reliable company?
They've already been paid. They have a customer base, or so they claim; and it is certainly in the interests of their customers, or their customers' customers, that the information also be provided to the vendor - unless, of course, their customers are planning to use the information maliciously.
I think that at some point it would be accepted that the device was probably working - which isn't quite the same thing!
For my part, I wouldn't want to draw any really significant conclusions without independent confirmation, i.e., at least one other apparatus of different design producing the same results.
The problem is that the actual cost of providing unlimited X Mbps access is significantly more than you're likely to want to pay. Traditionally (American) ISPs have taken advantage of the fact that only a certain percentage of users are downloading/uploading at a time to provide faster speeds at lower costs. This is (presumably) becoming infeasible without data caps due to the way the traffic is changing.
Here in New Zealand broadband access has always had data caps. However, paying extra for excess data was understandably unpopular, so nowadays ISPs typically offer schemes in which you pay no extra but your bandwidth gets cut to modem speed once you hit the data cap.
For a while some ISPs were offering unlimited data with a "fair use" policy but this seems to have disappeared. I suspect it proved unworkable. (IHUG still have a scheme which uses the words "fair use" but this now has explicit data caps so isn't really the same thing.)
> If anybody is failing to "think different," it's Apple themselves, [...] Something different would be to find > a way to encourage all those hipster Apple fans to come to their store by, say, public transportation
I think you've missed the point. Apple didn't want to get rid of the traffic meters so that customers wouldn't need to pay; they wanted to get rid of them because (they think) they look ugly.
Actually, I think you've missed the point.
There is no law (that I am aware of) requiring the copyright notice from an original work to be included in a derivative work.
Of course, you have to comply with the terms of the license you use to create the derivative work. In this case, that is the GPL. The GPL does not require that copyright notices from the original work be included.
The BSD license isn't a law; as with any other license, it only applies to you if you accept it. If source code is exclusively BSD licensed then you have to accept it in order to legally make copies or derivative works. If you fail to follow the terms of the license, your copies or derivative works violate copyright law.
In this case, the copyright on the original work explicitly permits you to make copies or derivative works under the terms of GPL instead of the BSD license. If you choose to do so, the terms of the BSD license don't apply to you.
So NetFlix makes it "easy to reach a human"... as opposed to using email, which I suppose is written by trained monkeys, or outsourcing... well, we all know them thar durn furriners ain't really human, don't we?
Sheesh.
Not that I don't think this is a good thing for customers, so long as electronic communications are also available; but honestly, don't you think the article could have been expressed slightly better?
Won't GPL3 pretty much kill embedded Linux? Richard Stallman has said one of the design criteria of GPL3 was to prevent "Tivoisation", i.e., embedding.
(Granted I gather there are no plans to GPL3 the Linux kernel, so as long as you aren't using any of the GNU components I guess you'd still be OK.)
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't a false limitation at all. At any point in time, only so much hardware exists, which can only provide so much bandwidth. Of course new hardware can be added, but it has to be paid for, and as bandwidth usage goes up so do costs. If you actually need to install new cable, that gets very expensive indeed.
The old flat-rate prices were based on the assumption that only a very few people would be heavy users. As the average usage goes up, ISPs have to pay more, leaving them with the choice of either (a) increasing prices; (b) changing the terms of service, such as by adding usage caps; or (c) going broke.
(Of course this assumes that the ISPs in question weren't horrendously overcharging to begin with. This is probably a safe assumption where real competition exists, but might not be true in all areas.)
This seems relevant:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=3694104&page=1
Disclaimer: I'm not an American, so I know next to nothing about baseball - and care less!
I guess that another factor is that Mac OS X shares a lot of code with other products/projects. Many (perhaps most) of those projects are probably unwilling to postpone releasing security updates until Apple are ready. Microsoft don't have that problem, or at least not to the same extent.
The underlying design of Windows is bad from a security standpoint, but that of Unix isn't really any better, IMO.
It's slightly easier for exploit code to elevate itself to kernel privilege on Windows, but I'm not convinced the distinction is significant; I don't think a cleverly written Mac exploit would have too much trouble getting the admin password out of the user sooner or later.
(A well-designed OS would authorize the activities of a process based on what role said process is playing, not on what account it is attached to. So, for example, a word processor would only be allowed to write to the document the user opened, not to any other file.)
I'd have thought if the domain was deregistered the DNS queries would be stopped at the root servers for .com or .org (whichever) and would be no big deal.
However, concern that the domain name might then be acquired by black hats seems valid, and is something I hadn't thought of. It's a shame there isn't a way to blacklist a domain name so it can't be acquired by anyone else - but doubtless there would be political problems in even proposing a mechanism for doing this!
I think the take-away lesson here is that when designing a service intended to be used on this scale, you have to consider your exit strategy.
Or, better still, remove the address from DNS?
Not quite my understanding. Positron-electron pairs don't get created spontaneously as this would violate the conservation of energy. However, a pair of what are called "virtual" particles can appear spontaneously if one of them has a negative mass.
Now, a negative mass particle can't normally exist for very long, so it has to recombine in short order with the original particle and they cancel each other out.
However if the negative mass particle is trapped by the event horizon, "not very long" gets stretched out indefinitely by the time dilation, and the positive mass particle can escape. The total mass of the black hole goes down because the particle entering it has a negative mass.
Of course, this is all just a way of visualizing what goes on so that it seems to make sense. It doesn't necessarily correspond in any meaningful way to reality.
Oh, and of course, once this is working on Vista (perhaps it already does?) it will bypass BitLocker and any other drive encryption software.
Perhaps because this works even if the BIOS password is set? Even if the case is alarmed or otherwise secured?
If the attacking computer is small enough to be mistaken for a disk drive, you could even conduct this attack while being supervised.
There seems to be some debate over whether this can be fixed in software or not. If it can, Microsoft should do so. If it can't, the affected computers should be recalled. Bottom line: the situation is unacceptable.
Well, since most vulnerabilities are disclosed to the vendor when discovered, you can cover a "reasonable number" without paying a thing.
Of course, covering a "reasonable number" of known vulnerabilities doesn't actually help, since the bad guys are going to use the other ones. Ultimately, the only "reasonable number" of known vulnerabilities to fix is "all of them".
How is subscribing to ten "good reliable" companies going to help if the next vulnerability is discovered by a not-so-good, not-particularly-reliable company?
They've already been paid. They have a customer base, or so they claim; and it is certainly in the interests of their customers, or their customers' customers, that the information also be provided to the vendor - unless, of course, their customers are planning to use the information maliciously.
And the next "security research" company? And the next one? And the one after that? And ... well, you get the picture.
Alun Jones expressed it best: http://msmvps.com/blogs/alunj/archive/2008/02/07/1501848.aspx
I think that at some point it would be accepted that the device was probably working - which isn't quite the same thing!
For my part, I wouldn't want to draw any really significant conclusions without independent confirmation, i.e., at least one other apparatus of different design producing the same results.
The problem is that the actual cost of providing unlimited X Mbps access is significantly more than you're likely to want to pay. Traditionally (American) ISPs have taken advantage of the fact that only a certain percentage of users are downloading/uploading at a time to provide faster speeds at lower costs. This is (presumably) becoming infeasible without data caps due to the way the traffic is changing.
Here in New Zealand broadband access has always had data caps. However, paying extra for excess data was understandably unpopular, so nowadays ISPs typically offer schemes in which you pay no extra but your bandwidth gets cut to modem speed once you hit the data cap.
For example, look here: http://www.ihug.co.nz/products/broadband/bband1_detail.html
For a while some ISPs were offering unlimited data with a "fair use" policy but this seems to have disappeared. I suspect it proved unworkable. (IHUG still have a scheme which uses the words "fair use" but this now has explicit data caps so isn't really the same thing.)
My favorite free games are on rinkworks.com; but be warned that these are adventure and RPG style games, not shoot-em-ups.
> If anybody is failing to "think different," it's Apple themselves, [...] Something different would be to find
> a way to encourage all those hipster Apple fans to come to their store by, say, public transportation
I think you've missed the point. Apple didn't want to get rid of the traffic meters so that customers wouldn't need to pay; they wanted to get rid of them because (they think) they look ugly.
Actually, I think you've missed the point. There is no law (that I am aware of) requiring the copyright notice from an original work to be included in a derivative work. Of course, you have to comply with the terms of the license you use to create the derivative work. In this case, that is the GPL. The GPL does not require that copyright notices from the original work be included. The BSD license isn't a law; as with any other license, it only applies to you if you accept it. If source code is exclusively BSD licensed then you have to accept it in order to legally make copies or derivative works. If you fail to follow the terms of the license, your copies or derivative works violate copyright law. In this case, the copyright on the original work explicitly permits you to make copies or derivative works under the terms of GPL instead of the BSD license. If you choose to do so, the terms of the BSD license don't apply to you.
So NetFlix makes it "easy to reach a human" ... as opposed to using email, which I suppose is written by trained monkeys, or outsourcing ... well, we all know them thar durn furriners ain't really human, don't we?
Sheesh.
Not that I don't think this is a good thing for customers, so long as electronic communications are also available; but honestly, don't you think the article could have been expressed slightly better?
Won't GPL3 pretty much kill embedded Linux? Richard Stallman has said one of the design criteria of GPL3 was to prevent "Tivoisation", i.e., embedding.
(Granted I gather there are no plans to GPL3 the Linux kernel, so as long as you aren't using any of the GNU components I guess you'd still be OK.)