Broadcasting 480i (with actual resolution of 720x480, and better color) that can be received by anyone with a standard OTA TV receiver doesn't sound like "blocking access" to me.
Disney's MovieBeam already did something like I describe, only the PPV part was carried as a digital signal within the analog OTA transmission. As I said, the only reason MovieBeam doesn't still exist is market forces...there is no technical, legal, or even moral reason a similar system can't exist in the framework of US digital TV. If TV stations find that not showing free HDTV is a better economic solution, then nothing can stop it. But, never fear. It's obvious that since the majority of cheap reality programming is now also shown in HD that there's no returning to SD any time soon.
The other direction, though, is quite successful...my local ABC station doesn't need anywhere near 19.3Mbps to get good quality 720p, so the sub-channel that shows the Retro Television Network is nice.
Last, though, based on the number of people who can't tell SD from HD (which astounds me), I don't think that TV stations can do anything to "piss off the landlords" other than completely cancelling American Idol.
A couple of 10s or 100s of MiB of RAM usage is not going make much difference to the '%AVERAGE%' user, who's computer now probably has either Vista + 2GiB+ or XP + 1GB+.
It wasn't until just this last year that mainstream computers started coming with at least 2GB of RAM installed, with all of that brought on by pressure from Vista and the glut in the RAM market.
Today, it's not hard to find a $500 computer with 4GB of RAM, but even this time last year, it wasn't easy. The 2008 Black Friday limited availability "doorbusters" could get you a $500 machine with 2-4GB, but regular systems had 1GB at most.
It's stupid not to have a system today with less than 4GB, seeing as how it will cost about $50 for DDR2. But, if you are building a newer system with an eye toward it lasting for a while, you're going to pay between $75-100 for 4GB of DDR3. To keep total system cost down, that means companies like Dell will have to cut corners somewhere, and it's either the power of the system (CPU speed, amount of RAM, etc.), or the quality of the components.
You won't be getting HDTV with one of these converter boxes, but you'll be getting the SD sub-channel
This is incorrect.
The digital TV specification in the US requires that all receivers be capable of decoding all ATSC-compliant data in the signal. This means that even these cheap coupon-eligible converter boxes which only output 480i have enough horsepower to decode any HD format listed by the ATSC standard as adopted by the FCC.
They will just down-res the signal to 480i. This is one thing that made the first digital TV receivers in the US a lot more expensive than boxes designed for other countries (like Great Britain, Germany, and Australia). All the digital TV standards for other countries require that broadcasters provide an SD-only stream, and so the lower priced receivers only have to handle SD decoding.
The advantage to the US system is that every STB can receive and decode every signal, and it's only other features of the box (output formats, connectors, programmability, etc.) that differ.
Though I don't doubt that content owners would surely love to impose DRM on broadcast content, it's simply not provided for in the ATSC specifications for MPEG2 over-the-air transport streams.
Actually, the ATSC spec does allow any abitrary types of packets to be inserted into the stream. These could be used for DRM authorization, etc. The ATSC spec as adopted by the FCC is a more relevant link, as is the conditional access specification, which specifically deals with this sort of thing.
But, the FCC requires that the OTA broadcast be unencrypted, so normal MPEG-2 that is receivable by all will be there as long as the FCC controls the station license.
The upshot of this is that nothing prevents a station from sending a 480i MPEG-2 stream as the unencrypted one, and adding an encrypted MPEG-4 1080/60p stream for paying customers. At this point, only market forces (in particular, network affiliations) will keep this sort of thing from being the standard for OTA TV in the US.
You seem to mostly be talking about "install bloat", not "runtime bloat".
Although both are bad, I think that these days it's pretty much agreed that using 2GB more hard drive space probably isn't a big deal.
The problem is that Windows has so many background things running that really are required to do anything useful (like using the network), plus all the extra background tasks that you might not feel you need, but turn out to be required for things like applying updates. A Windows XP install with just the Microsoft standard background tasks takes about 300MB of RAM to do nothing, and Vista is far more bloated than that.
Good examples:
I have a Linux system running MySQL, and it has a backup system that copies the files to a Windows machine using Samba (the Windows machine has the tape backup installed). It does all this while using a grand total of less than 150MB of RAM. It boots just fine with 256MB of RAM (and just as fast as with 1GB).
Another Linux box is running Fedora 10 with the Gnome desktop, and is acting as a router and has a few other services enabled (including remote access to the desktop). It uses less than 200MB of RAM to do this. There is no way you could get a Windows install to provide these services on that little RAM.
This kind of bloat where Microsoft has "important" background programs running that you can't turn off but don't really need just does not happen in a Linux install. Yes, there are some stupid Linux installs that have too many services running by default, but you can just turn off the ones you don't use, and nothing else stops working.
The are two things that I find is vastly easier with a GUI:
partioning disks, especially when LVM and RAID are involved
setting up firewall rules
In both cases, I can use the command line, and there are some things you just can't do in both without using a command line (or manually editing config files), but these just seem easier with a GUI for most day-to-day work.
If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway, as it looks like politics makes up more of the workload than engineering. I'm reasonably sure that engineers are engineers because they DO NOT want to be politicians.
Based on TFA, I definitely think that the supervisor of the two engineers made the wrong decision.
When you are tasked with cutting your direct report headcount, you don't let the sneaky, conniving bastards keep their jobs, because the next round of cuts will have one of them replacing you.
You especially don't keep the sneaky one when the "nice" guy is just as technically skilled.
...and it will likely be missing many features when it is released, too.
Current Samba (3.0.24 and 3.2.5 installed here) claims to have supported DFS for quite a while, but it just doesn't work. At least 3.0.24 doesn't do anything bad...it just fails to follow the DFS re-direction.
On Fedora 10 with kernel 2.6.27.5-117, Samba 3.2.5 causes a kernel panic if you try to access a DFS filesystem.
Compare with Linux -- until you chmod +x, or unpack the archive, it's not dangerous.
Although Windows does have serious problems, this just isn't true.
Any app on Linux with a scripting interface has the exact same problems as a Word document on Windows...security is only as good as the scripting language sandbox. The biggest advantage Linux has is that most (if not all) of the apps with scripting interfaces are open-source, so someone is looking out for potential issues. We've all heard about how you can write potentially evil Firefox add-ons, but very few exist in the wild because the source can be examined.
I can't argue about the service, but that's very trusting of you, sending your data as well. I can't imagine any business users doing this.
When a drive is "dead" as far as the user is concerned, how would you expect them to erase the data in such a way that the warranty wasn't voided?
I think that if Seagate found out you had passed the drive under a really big magnet, they would say "tough luck". In addition to erasing data, a big enough magnetic field can wreak havoc on the drive electronics.
Any other way (acid bath, sledgehammer, thermite, etc.) to destroy the data would definitely void your warranty.
So, you disable it, and now you can't download or install Windows Defender or IE7
I guess this has changed, because earlier this week I downloaded IE7 without any validation check, and I don't have any WGA installed on the system that did the download.
Of course, it might be that they bypass some checks if you aren't using IE to do the download (I used Firefox 3.0.5). I only needed IE7 for a few minutes to check the behavior of a Java applet, and didn't even think about using IE6 to perform the download.
Then, there's the Citibank credit card site, which doesn't work with Firefox if scripting is enabled, but gives full functionality (although without drop-down menus, etc.) if scripting is disabled.
On the other hand, that site works fine with IE with scripting enabled.
Not too long ago, this MD5 crack allowed a trusted SSL CA cert to be created.
Although it's not "in the wild", the listed steps are such that pretty much anybody can do the same thing today. Plus, the actual hack required using real, live CA servers, and not just lab systems.
If you learn about about depth-of-field, you'll find out that it is not linear, but is relative.
If you are a very short distance away from a subject, the absolute depth-of-field is smaller than if you are far away, but the ratio of out of focus near/in focus/out of focus far remains very similar.
The key is, in the out of focus part, anything without sharply defined lines should quickly blend into a blur, especially for anything with any repeating pattern (including something fractal like a rock surface). This is especially true for the out of focus far portion of the picture, as that's what gives a picture "good bokeh".
Thus, the rock in the crab shot should be fairly close to nothing but a blur, but it isn't.
Part of the reason is that most P&S cameras (including the one taking the crab shot) can't open the aperture, focus at a short distance and get a longer focal length. This is what you need for extremely short DOF. For more information, use this DOF calculator.
In the other direction, most P&S can't close down the aperture enough to get really deep DOF, although the smaller sensors do help this a bit.
These days, a few feature films are now shot directly and entirely in 1080p "HD", but they are still in the miniority.
This is a different story. At 1920x1080, HD cameras have far less resolution than film, and no one who understands the format disagrees with that.
In the world of digital still pictures, though, you can easily find 5000x3000 (16MP) cameras, which is starting to approach the full resolution of film.
True, broadcast TV has been recorded on videotape (originally, on huge AMPEX machines) forever, but this is material that was intended to be shown at NTSC quality anyway. If they'd shot it on cinema-quality film, you'd just see the rough edges on the sets, the crappy costumes, and the overdone makeup that were used because they looked okay on NTSC.
For many years, only the cheapest of broadcast TV was originally recorded on videotape. Almost all of it was filmed. Shows from the 60s (Hogan's Heroes) to the 90s (Cheers) have been restored from their original film and then re-telecined at HD resolution, and they generally look stunning. Although some of the lack of full-quality set dressing does become apparent at times, there are also instances where you are shocked to see the level of detail that went into these shows. As an example, the notices posted on the barracks in Hogan's Heroes are quite readable in HD, and they are real text, not nonsense.
Because if they could afford that much for TV equipment and multiple full-function STBs, what's the chance that after owning HD equipment for 3-5 years that they didn't have all their TVs covered?
The coupons have only been available for a little over a year, but digital TV equipment has been available in the US for nearly 9 years. Most people who had OTA digital TV set up before the coupons were issued didn't need the coupons. Also, most of them would not want them, as a $100 STB will give you full HDTV output, while the coupons are only good for STBs that output 480i at most. The full-featured STBs can be used with any TV, even older ones.
Also, I don't want to encourage the generation of electronic waste, as once those older TVs are replaced, the coupon STBs would be trash, since the new TV will have a built-in, full-featured ATSC tuner.
This guy may have an interest in the outcome, but he and Obama have a point: the public isn't ready for the changeover, and won't be until those coupons are in their hands (and maybe not even then, but they'll have the coupon for the box and if they choose not to use it that's their problem).
That is, in reality, the actual problem.
Theoretical funding for the coupons has run out, but that's assuming all coupons are redeemed. There are quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth that have not been. Although it is extremely unlikely they will be, the goverment can't just issue more coupons without money behind them.
The correct solution is just to have Congress allow another $100M or so of coupons to be printed, with the caveat that all coupons (even those previously issued) must be redeemed by March 1, 2009 (or some other very near, hard cutoff date).
Also, I really hated the fact that anybody could ask for coupons. I know people who have already invested over $10K in HDTV equipment who asked for them. I don't know if they used them, but it seems silly to me that they would, since they can only be used to purchase basically inferior devices (limited to 480i output). But, those coupons count against the budget.
The various scammer companies employed around 1000 people. If they took in $172M in 9 years, that's $19,111 per employee per year.
I'm not saying that someone didn't make some money out of this scam, but it's hard to make a lot of profit at even $30K income/year/employee, no matter how poorly paid your employees were.
Unless these companies were complete scammers and didn't pay any bills during that time (which is actually pretty unlikely), then there had to be some actual costs associated with peforming the scam, and I suspect that it was larger than people here guess.
In the case of writing FOSS, much of this would be replacing existing software rather than creating new software projects.
At $2B investment, that would be 10000 man-years of development (if you assume that a programmer costs $200K/year including all benefits, workspace, tools, etc.).
Although I can think of many pieces of existing non-free software that could be replaced with that many resources (like Exchange), there's also some middle ground:
making Samba 100% interoperable with the moving target that is Microsoft networking
Building a better SSL certificate infrastructure
Standardizing e-mail encryption for better interoperability
Then, there are some real new projects that could be tackled:
Implementing a secure replacement for DNS better than DNSSEC
Cryptography research
Making P2P less of a problem for ISPs while still allowing it to work well
Software that improves the ability of students to learn (either more fun, or just better)
I'm just throwing some things out there that come to mind right now...I'm sure there's a bunch more.
Why should I scan removable devices? The only removable devices I use are my own removable devices..
Because it's possible that whatever virus scanning system that was running when the files were written on the removable drive missed something.
Basically, you need to scan every file that comes in to your computer. A really good AV scanner algorithm would notice the volume ID of the removable drive and keep some sort of checksum of all files written to it. Then, when you put the drive back in, it would only scan files that aren't in the "already scanned before it was copied there" list, and only on access.
Part of the problem with AV is that most of it doesn't try to optimize its work, and so you have performance issues. If the AV did an initial scan and checksum of all executable files, then hooked all writes, you'd never have to worry about it slowing down opening most of your executables, because they would be on the "already scanned and they haven't changed" list. There are lots of optimizations that could be done, including better user control over exactly what is and is not scanned.
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Historically, OTA TV has been 480i.
Broadcasting 480i (with actual resolution of 720x480, and better color) that can be received by anyone with a standard OTA TV receiver doesn't sound like "blocking access" to me.
Disney's MovieBeam already did something like I describe, only the PPV part was carried as a digital signal within the analog OTA transmission. As I said, the only reason MovieBeam doesn't still exist is market forces...there is no technical, legal, or even moral reason a similar system can't exist in the framework of US digital TV. If TV stations find that not showing free HDTV is a better economic solution, then nothing can stop it. But, never fear. It's obvious that since the majority of cheap reality programming is now also shown in HD that there's no returning to SD any time soon.
The other direction, though, is quite successful...my local ABC station doesn't need anywhere near 19.3Mbps to get good quality 720p, so the sub-channel that shows the Retro Television Network is nice.
Last, though, based on the number of people who can't tell SD from HD (which astounds me), I don't think that TV stations can do anything to "piss off the landlords" other than completely cancelling American Idol.
A couple of 10s or 100s of MiB of RAM usage is not going make much difference to the '%AVERAGE%' user, who's computer now probably has either Vista + 2GiB+ or XP + 1GB+.
It wasn't until just this last year that mainstream computers started coming with at least 2GB of RAM installed, with all of that brought on by pressure from Vista and the glut in the RAM market.
Today, it's not hard to find a $500 computer with 4GB of RAM, but even this time last year, it wasn't easy. The 2008 Black Friday limited availability "doorbusters" could get you a $500 machine with 2-4GB, but regular systems had 1GB at most.
It's stupid not to have a system today with less than 4GB, seeing as how it will cost about $50 for DDR2. But, if you are building a newer system with an eye toward it lasting for a while, you're going to pay between $75-100 for 4GB of DDR3. To keep total system cost down, that means companies like Dell will have to cut corners somewhere, and it's either the power of the system (CPU speed, amount of RAM, etc.), or the quality of the components.
You won't be getting HDTV with one of these converter boxes, but you'll be getting the SD sub-channel
This is incorrect.
The digital TV specification in the US requires that all receivers be capable of decoding all ATSC-compliant data in the signal. This means that even these cheap coupon-eligible converter boxes which only output 480i have enough horsepower to decode any HD format listed by the ATSC standard as adopted by the FCC.
They will just down-res the signal to 480i. This is one thing that made the first digital TV receivers in the US a lot more expensive than boxes designed for other countries (like Great Britain, Germany, and Australia). All the digital TV standards for other countries require that broadcasters provide an SD-only stream, and so the lower priced receivers only have to handle SD decoding.
The advantage to the US system is that every STB can receive and decode every signal, and it's only other features of the box (output formats, connectors, programmability, etc.) that differ.
Though I don't doubt that content owners would surely love to impose DRM on broadcast content, it's simply not provided for in the ATSC specifications for MPEG2 over-the-air transport streams.
Actually, the ATSC spec does allow any abitrary types of packets to be inserted into the stream. These could be used for DRM authorization, etc. The ATSC spec as adopted by the FCC is a more relevant link, as is the conditional access specification, which specifically deals with this sort of thing.
But, the FCC requires that the OTA broadcast be unencrypted, so normal MPEG-2 that is receivable by all will be there as long as the FCC controls the station license.
The upshot of this is that nothing prevents a station from sending a 480i MPEG-2 stream as the unencrypted one, and adding an encrypted MPEG-4 1080/60p stream for paying customers. At this point, only market forces (in particular, network affiliations) will keep this sort of thing from being the standard for OTA TV in the US.
You seem to mostly be talking about "install bloat", not "runtime bloat".
Although both are bad, I think that these days it's pretty much agreed that using 2GB more hard drive space probably isn't a big deal.
The problem is that Windows has so many background things running that really are required to do anything useful (like using the network), plus all the extra background tasks that you might not feel you need, but turn out to be required for things like applying updates. A Windows XP install with just the Microsoft standard background tasks takes about 300MB of RAM to do nothing, and Vista is far more bloated than that.
Good examples:
This kind of bloat where Microsoft has "important" background programs running that you can't turn off but don't really need just does not happen in a Linux install. Yes, there are some stupid Linux installs that have too many services running by default, but you can just turn off the ones you don't use, and nothing else stops working.
The are two things that I find is vastly easier with a GUI:
In both cases, I can use the command line, and there are some things you just can't do in both without using a command line (or manually editing config files), but these just seem easier with a GUI for most day-to-day work.
Also, I think it's SP3 you mean about the tampering with IE. It'll install IE7 if you want it or not unless you already had it installed.
I have many XP machines with SP3 installed, and none have IE7.
Since there are no options to the SP3 install, I can't see how someone could choose not to install IE7 if it was actually part of SP3.
If the management above is unable to see which of the two in the example is worth keeping, perhaps it's not the best place to work anyway, as it looks like politics makes up more of the workload than engineering. I'm reasonably sure that engineers are engineers because they DO NOT want to be politicians.
Based on TFA, I definitely think that the supervisor of the two engineers made the wrong decision.
When you are tasked with cutting your direct report headcount, you don't let the sneaky, conniving bastards keep their jobs, because the next round of cuts will have one of them replacing you.
You especially don't keep the sneaky one when the "nice" guy is just as technically skilled.
...and it will likely be missing many features when it is released, too.
Current Samba (3.0.24 and 3.2.5 installed here) claims to have supported DFS for quite a while, but it just doesn't work. At least 3.0.24 doesn't do anything bad...it just fails to follow the DFS re-direction.
On Fedora 10 with kernel 2.6.27.5-117, Samba 3.2.5 causes a kernel panic if you try to access a DFS filesystem.
Compare with Linux -- until you chmod +x, or unpack the archive, it's not dangerous.
Although Windows does have serious problems, this just isn't true.
Any app on Linux with a scripting interface has the exact same problems as a Word document on Windows...security is only as good as the scripting language sandbox. The biggest advantage Linux has is that most (if not all) of the apps with scripting interfaces are open-source, so someone is looking out for potential issues. We've all heard about how you can write potentially evil Firefox add-ons, but very few exist in the wild because the source can be examined.
I can't argue about the service, but that's very trusting of you, sending your data as well. I can't imagine any business users doing this.
When a drive is "dead" as far as the user is concerned, how would you expect them to erase the data in such a way that the warranty wasn't voided?
I think that if Seagate found out you had passed the drive under a really big magnet, they would say "tough luck". In addition to erasing data, a big enough magnetic field can wreak havoc on the drive electronics.
Any other way (acid bath, sledgehammer, thermite, etc.) to destroy the data would definitely void your warranty.
So, you disable it, and now you can't download or install Windows Defender or IE7
I guess this has changed, because earlier this week I downloaded IE7 without any validation check, and I don't have any WGA installed on the system that did the download.
Of course, it might be that they bypass some checks if you aren't using IE to do the download (I used Firefox 3.0.5). I only needed IE7 for a few minutes to check the behavior of a Java applet, and didn't even think about using IE6 to perform the download.
Then, there's the Citibank credit card site, which doesn't work with Firefox if scripting is enabled, but gives full functionality (although without drop-down menus, etc.) if scripting is disabled.
On the other hand, that site works fine with IE with scripting enabled.
Not too long ago, this MD5 crack allowed a trusted SSL CA cert to be created.
Although it's not "in the wild", the listed steps are such that pretty much anybody can do the same thing today. Plus, the actual hack required using real, live CA servers, and not just lab systems.
If you learn about about depth-of-field, you'll find out that it is not linear, but is relative.
If you are a very short distance away from a subject, the absolute depth-of-field is smaller than if you are far away, but the ratio of out of focus near/in focus/out of focus far remains very similar.
The key is, in the out of focus part, anything without sharply defined lines should quickly blend into a blur, especially for anything with any repeating pattern (including something fractal like a rock surface). This is especially true for the out of focus far portion of the picture, as that's what gives a picture "good bokeh".
Thus, the rock in the crab shot should be fairly close to nothing but a blur, but it isn't.
Part of the reason is that most P&S cameras (including the one taking the crab shot) can't open the aperture, focus at a short distance and get a longer focal length. This is what you need for extremely short DOF. For more information, use this DOF calculator.
In the other direction, most P&S can't close down the aperture enough to get really deep DOF, although the smaller sensors do help this a bit.
These days, a few feature films are now shot directly and entirely in 1080p "HD", but they are still in the miniority.
This is a different story. At 1920x1080, HD cameras have far less resolution than film, and no one who understands the format disagrees with that.
In the world of digital still pictures, though, you can easily find 5000x3000 (16MP) cameras, which is starting to approach the full resolution of film.
True, broadcast TV has been recorded on videotape (originally, on huge AMPEX machines) forever, but this is material that was intended to be shown at NTSC quality anyway. If they'd shot it on cinema-quality film, you'd just see the rough edges on the sets, the crappy costumes, and the overdone makeup that were used because they looked okay on NTSC.
For many years, only the cheapest of broadcast TV was originally recorded on videotape. Almost all of it was filmed. Shows from the 60s (Hogan's Heroes) to the 90s (Cheers) have been restored from their original film and then re-telecined at HD resolution, and they generally look stunning. Although some of the lack of full-quality set dressing does become apparent at times, there are also instances where you are shocked to see the level of detail that went into these shows. As an example, the notices posted on the barracks in Hogan's Heroes are quite readable in HD, and they are real text, not nonsense.
The "out of focus" area is still pretty much in focus...it's not dissolving into nothing.
Here's an example of a picture of one of my dogs. Notice how quickly the background blurs into an even smear.
These days, too, Costco/Sam's Club/BJ's Wholesale/etc. pretty much mean that you need a 2nd fridge and 2nd freezer to take advantage of the prices.
I still haven't bought that 4-pack of pianos, though.
Because if they could afford that much for TV equipment and multiple full-function STBs, what's the chance that after owning HD equipment for 3-5 years that they didn't have all their TVs covered?
The coupons have only been available for a little over a year, but digital TV equipment has been available in the US for nearly 9 years. Most people who had OTA digital TV set up before the coupons were issued didn't need the coupons. Also, most of them would not want them, as a $100 STB will give you full HDTV output, while the coupons are only good for STBs that output 480i at most. The full-featured STBs can be used with any TV, even older ones.
Also, I don't want to encourage the generation of electronic waste, as once those older TVs are replaced, the coupon STBs would be trash, since the new TV will have a built-in, full-featured ATSC tuner.
To be pedantic, 37-1/2 years ago.
The single was released on June 29, 1971, and Who's Next was released on July 31, 1971.
This guy may have an interest in the outcome, but he and Obama have a point: the public isn't ready for the changeover, and won't be until those coupons are in their hands (and maybe not even then, but they'll have the coupon for the box and if they choose not to use it that's their problem).
That is, in reality, the actual problem.
Theoretical funding for the coupons has run out, but that's assuming all coupons are redeemed. There are quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth that have not been. Although it is extremely unlikely they will be, the goverment can't just issue more coupons without money behind them.
The correct solution is just to have Congress allow another $100M or so of coupons to be printed, with the caveat that all coupons (even those previously issued) must be redeemed by March 1, 2009 (or some other very near, hard cutoff date).
Also, I really hated the fact that anybody could ask for coupons. I know people who have already invested over $10K in HDTV equipment who asked for them. I don't know if they used them, but it seems silly to me that they would, since they can only be used to purchase basically inferior devices (limited to 480i output). But, those coupons count against the budget.
37 years ago, there was a very timeless statement made:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Basically, politicians are all pretty much the same, in that their primary goal is to keep themselves and "their side" in power.
The various scammer companies employed around 1000 people. If they took in $172M in 9 years, that's $19,111 per employee per year.
I'm not saying that someone didn't make some money out of this scam, but it's hard to make a lot of profit at even $30K income/year/employee, no matter how poorly paid your employees were.
Unless these companies were complete scammers and didn't pay any bills during that time (which is actually pretty unlikely), then there had to be some actual costs associated with peforming the scam, and I suspect that it was larger than people here guess.
In the case of writing FOSS, much of this would be replacing existing software rather than creating new software projects.
At $2B investment, that would be 10000 man-years of development (if you assume that a programmer costs $200K/year including all benefits, workspace, tools, etc.).
Although I can think of many pieces of existing non-free software that could be replaced with that many resources (like Exchange), there's also some middle ground:
Then, there are some real new projects that could be tackled:
I'm just throwing some things out there that come to mind right now...I'm sure there's a bunch more.
Why should I scan removable devices? The only removable devices I use are my own removable devices..
Because it's possible that whatever virus scanning system that was running when the files were written on the removable drive missed something.
Basically, you need to scan every file that comes in to your computer. A really good AV scanner algorithm would notice the volume ID of the removable drive and keep some sort of checksum of all files written to it. Then, when you put the drive back in, it would only scan files that aren't in the "already scanned before it was copied there" list, and only on access.
Part of the problem with AV is that most of it doesn't try to optimize its work, and so you have performance issues. If the AV did an initial scan and checksum of all executable files, then hooked all writes, you'd never have to worry about it slowing down opening most of your executables, because they would be on the "already scanned and they haven't changed" list. There are lots of optimizations that could be done, including better user control over exactly what is and is not scanned.