I believe your trying to argue that since the USA paid it's contractors a larger sum of money than other countries that they should have sole ownership of the station. This seems unreasonable as the USA signed agreements to provide its partners with access to the station with prior knowledge of how much each country was contributing.
The USA would no doubt not care that it is paying more because the $25 billion it budgeted was going to US contractors, and many of the partner countries also paid substantial amount to US contractors. A boost for the US economy all the way around. Pay $25 and get $30 out of the deal!
Now the dollar figures I don't think can be compared directly without in depth analysis. The USA has a history of overpaying, sometimes in the extreme, aerospace contractors and have had many failures in space recently. I think many suspect ineffeciency and ineffectiveness on the part of the USA in this endevour. What would the European nations or Canada delivered for US$25 billion? Would it have taken as long? Would they have been more effecient? It would certainly be in metric!;-) Perhaps the USA did do a good job, however no one here can determine that. It's not possible to reasonable compare each nations contribution.
Each nation did contribute, and they had an agreement as to how the station would be used. The USA economy got an economic boast from the construction of the station. It got countless billions from it's own government, and more from other governments as well. The US economy has benefited, and now it's government refuses to provide the partners what they agreed to. Their breaking their word.
The point is that the USA did not pay for everything. However when they cut back their budgets they also denied other parties access to the station that was jointly paid for by the USA and other nations. Canada paid $1.4 Billion for their part of the stations and now they don't get to use it. The changes that USA is proposing are in direct violation of an agreement they had signed.
Actually, indivduall access to differing viewpoints is greater now than at any time in history.
Yes, but those in power have greater access, by orders of magnitude, to serfs/citizens then they ever have before. The powerful can influence greatly, to the point of defacto control, the information we have access to. Can you name any individual who can deliver his/her point of view in in 30 second catch-phrases repeated very 20 minutes to the majority of the nation?
Even with your solution, which is valid IMHO, you still need a package manager to check dependencies, perform auditing, and make installation and upgrades simpler. The RPM package manager allows your to choose the root that the files will be installed under. So your solution could be used in conjuction with so-called relocatable RPM packages. You could choose to install RPMs under/opt instead of/. In fact many of us choose not to go with the Solaris/opt naming and just use/usr/local (not that it makes a difference).
Someone else also commented that many sysadmins don't put every software package in its own directory, and choose to separate run-time data, and configuration files from the directory of the package. Your statements are fantastic but I think you've gone overboard that saying that all sysadmins adhere to your standard, and thus implied that anyone who doesn't isn't a sysadmin.;-) There isn't "one right way" for installing software; that's why GNU configure has so many options.:-)
I have worked on such a kind of universal contact database. I've implemented it several times as SQL tables and am currently working on an object-relational version (for deployment on PostgreSQL). I intend to release the SQL under the GPL when I'm satified that it is complete and correct. In the mean time if you'd like a copy at the earliest release opportunity please email me and I'll add you to a list of people who want early copies.
Allow me to describe briefly how my database is organized.
The database models people, companies, etc. as "contactable entities" (CEs) and allows any CE to be a member of any other CE for the purpose of arbitrary grouping. For instance if there is a CE for a company and multiple CEs for the employees of that company, the employees could have a membership relationship with the company CE. There is a parent CE relation that all specific CE inherit from (this is an object-relational feature of postgresql). It is possible to create new CE types by simply creating a new table and inheriting the parent CE class. Frankly the design has worked in the past with just people and "groups"
CEs can have any number of arbitrarily defined identifiers. For instance, some people want to identify their contacts by their full name, however, in some cases people are given unique usernames, or customer numbers, or other unique identifier criteria. These identifiers can be stored easily and not all CEs have to share the same unique identifiers. Currently I'm having some problem enforcing integrity constraints on these identifiers effeciently.
The database also models "contact methods" (CMs) in an flexible way. CMs are phone numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Just like the CEs, CMs are defined by sub-classing a parent CM relation/table. You can create new CMs but just defining a new table that inherits the parent. A CE can have any number of CMs and two different CE's can share one CM.
All CMs have validity ranges. So change of address actions can occure naturally. You don't just replace the old address with the new one, you actually keep the old address in the database, insert a new address record and mark the valid_end_date of the old one appropriately and the valid_start_date of the new one appropriately. This is very handy.
I'm currently working on adding tables for tracking actually contact instances (phone calls, emails etc) but have not completed any signifcant work on this portion.
In the past I've implemented this design about 4 times in SQL and each time it has been a little different with a lot of unique compromises. I'm working on a design that I hope with be more universal and truely reusable now.
If indeed these grades are based no self-evaluation reporting then it is possible that the agencies in question reported terrible problems in an effort to gain additional financial resources. I believe the fact that they reported poor performance to the Office of Management and BUDGET is in line with such a theory.
Perhaps in effect they said, "We dunno nothin' 'bout dem puters securin matters. Duh. Maybe you give us money to get dat der schoolin? Or maybe we could hire someone whats smarter 'en us?"
Last night in Edmonton, Canada the Aurora was incredible. However that is nothing unusual since we get to see the Northern Lights all the time here in the north. Last night was the first time I've seen the light RED however. The normal green kind were visible but there was a hazy red type as well. The lights were not the normal shape either; they did not appear to "dance" but at time made a large arc across the whole sky, the dispersed to make a huge crown in the sky with the red and green parts overlapping each other.
Haha! Do anything BUT that. I'm a decent admin. Excellent with Linux, competent on Solaris, experienced in a wide variety of commercial Mach/BSD flavours. But if someone judged me on my slashdot posts, I doubt they'd have a high opinion. On the other hand my karma's good.
However, in all seriousness, when I've had to interview sysadmin candidates, I DO go looking to see they've posted to any well known technical mailling lists. Slashdot brings out the worst in people; technical mailling lists help highlight people's technical skills.
It is interesting that you compare registering for toaster warranty and registering for MS support. MS products come with no warranty. It is probably the law that your toaster has to come with some form of warranty. Further an MS passport account requires giving up much more than your name and address; as well we all know.
How about this. MS offers warranty on its products and includes a small slip of paper called a Warranty Registration Card that asks for the registrants name and address. I don't think any of us would object to that. The objection raised against MS is that its process are being reported as similar to existing practices which are reasonably when in fact their practices are far from reasonable and are not analogous to any tradition support practice. MS isn't evil; its just bad: bad software, bad support, bad business. I'm told that investors who got in a long time ago are happy though.
Adobe is wrong when they call Elcomsoft's product a digital lockpick. I believe their choice of analogy indicates their malice in this situation. A better analogy is one of a "digital cart" or a "digital dolly". Adobe's product, by design, makes a user's files cumbersome to move and difficult to work with. Like a file-cabnet or a heavy safe. Elcomsoft has provided something to make moving file cabinets and heavy safes easier.
Someone can use a dolly or a cart to steal a safe or a filecabinet, but that doesn't make the manufacturer of the cart or dolly a theif!
Alan Cox has legitmate concerns about his safety if he enters the USA. He is also pointing out to other software authors that they should be concerned. This isn't a political game... the USA is arresting people for giving lectures on software design and security!
I work in the area of network security and I just turned down a contract in the USA. I won't touch foot on US soil until the DCMA is struck down.
Where are the Thalidomide kids from the Japanese bombings?
There arn't any.
http://rex.nci.nih.gov/NCI_Pub_Interface/raterisk/ risks90.html
Research sponored and/or conducted by the USA is not a valid source of information about effects of the atomic bombings used in their attach of Japanese civilian targets in WWII. It is suspect as American Revisionist Propaganda.
Although in some instances it's better for all involved to use an atomic weapon than to use conventional weapons. Like the Invasion of the Japanese Home Islands...more lives would have been lost on both sides than were lost by the atomic bombing.
Your statment is fuddle. Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian target causes loss of life.
The utility of environment variables is indicated by the name. The environment that a program runs in should have influence on its behavhior. For instance the program should decide how many columns of text to display from a config file... what if the screen has 80 columns by the config file says 40? Environment variables should describe to a program what environment it is running in. Environment variables should answer quesitons like, "what is the name of the user running me?", "what is my current working directory?", "where should I find my config file?", "what kind of terminal am I running on? do I HAVE a terminal?".
I think that there is nothing wrong with the same data being represented in a config file and the environment. In fact the best way is to have a global config file in/etc, a user specific config file (.somethingrc), and allow environment variables to override the config files. I disagree with the idea of replacing all your environment variables with a single once that just has the location of a config file. If your environment variables do indeed describe the working environment for the program then they should be in the environment.
This isn't a slight or insult or sarcasm at all; you would probably find a book on the history of unix to be of benefit. You've obviously got the wisdom to ask, "why do we need these variables" when so many others just use them for EVERYTHING or use them for NOTHING. You'll get more insight from a book drawing your own conclusions than from us here.
Oh, and if your program core dumps when a variable isn't set... that's just bad coding and you should be as suspicious as your are.:-)
I like the idea of there being many repositories for third-party or special packages. There are lots of these for both.deb and.rpm packages. For RPM there is even the rpmfind.net system for searching repositories of RPM by various criteria.
What is lacking is some way to identify which packages can be trusted and which can't. For instance if you go to the rpmfind.net homepage you'll find out they their DNS was hacked and that any RPM's downloaded recently should be suspect. There is no way to verify RPM or DEB packages other than a PGP signature. Most thired party packages don't include a PGP signature, and even when they do there is no way to verify it, and even when there is little way to use that as a basis for establish trust. Even if you know the package was signed by "Joe Smith" and "Jim White" has also signed Joe's signature, you don't know why you should trust either of them.
Both DEB and RPM could benefit from a system for identifying what a package should and shouldn't do if it is to be "trusted" and what information about the package and packager should be verifiable, and how it can be verified.
Redhat's new contrib area will hopefully be an excellent central repository and storage area for third party RPM packages. RPMfind.net is cool too. I think something else is needed at this point though. We need some way to build trust between RPM Packagers and RPM users.
RPM already allows one to embed a PGP signature, but this doesn't allow one to trust the RPM, it only gives you a new tool to assist in verifying some information about the RPM. It would be nice if there was an external mechanism to track other verifiable information about RPMs and RPM packagers.
I'm willing to setup a mailling list at trustedrpm.net if any RPM packagers are interested in dicussing how a system of trust could be developed
Your analysis of Cyc shows a lacks insight and background. I recommend reading Lenat and Guha's "Building Large Knowledge Based Systems." Cyc is not mearly a catalog of atomic dictionary definitions. It is an ontology: every symbol has its meaning made explicit in the context that it is used. It is also a reasoning system. It is also a method of representing knowledge. These combine to form a potent technology.
As for you comment that Cyc does not aquire information that is "full of noise" or based on "self-generated observations" I think you should do a bit more study about what the CYCORP ontologists do. My readings indicate that indeed Cyc does have to deal with noise and generates many of of its observations which are tested in many ways.
I have NO idea what AI is. I don't think a comparison of Cyc to AI has any meaning in determining weather Cyc is a potent technology.
Cyc does not make their entire ontology available freely. Only the upper ontology is available for us to use. It is unclear who, besides CYCORP has access to the entire ontology; it remains a matter of speculation what they are doing with it.
This method doesn't work on all Unix systems. as the setgid bit on directories is interpreted differently. However it will work on MOST Unix systems, Linux and Solaris included
I'm a consultant that handles Internet related problems for my clients. Sometimes what I do is technical but sometimes what I do is beuracratic. For instance customers often ask me to register domain names for them, or obtain SSL certificates, or handle licensing agreements all of which require the signing authority of an officer of the company. I noticed a lot of other consultants will do the job "half-way" and leave all the signing for someone in the company who hasn't got a clue as to what their signing. This is how domain bills don't get paid for... an officer of the company authorized the purchase but hasn't got a clue what he just bought and when asked two months later by the billing department, "did you authorized $39 for "netsol 1 year" they 'nope.'
As a result I started asking my clients to make me a special agent with signing authority on behalf of an officer of the company for technical matters. They love the idea and I LOVE the title.
I think that the market for "newbie Internet surfer" is at, or near, the saturation point anyway,
The market is no where near the "newbie internet surfer" saturation point. There are hundreds of millions of North Americans without Internet access. However, in the context of Windows XP this means nothing, because the bulk of the people currently without Internet access would never use anything as unreliable and complicated as a PC to access information resource and services.
AOL will someday break the remainder of the market, probably when they starting giving away wireless information access devices for free or cheap when they charge for their service. M$ can't break into the remainder of the "newbie" market because their executives are too scared to do anything that might not promote the desktop bloatware model that has been so rewarding to their investors.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe your trying to argue that since the USA paid it's contractors a larger sum of money than other countries that they should have sole ownership of the station. This seems unreasonable as the USA signed agreements to provide its partners with access to the station with prior knowledge of how much each country was contributing.
The USA would no doubt not care that it is paying more because the $25 billion it budgeted was going to US contractors, and many of the partner countries also paid substantial amount to US contractors. A boost for the US economy all the way around. Pay $25 and get $30 out of the deal!
Now the dollar figures I don't think can be compared directly without in depth analysis. The USA has a history of overpaying, sometimes in the extreme, aerospace contractors and have had many failures in space recently. I think many suspect ineffeciency and ineffectiveness on the part of the USA in this endevour. What would the European nations or Canada delivered for US$25 billion? Would it have taken as long? Would they have been more effecient? It would certainly be in metric! ;-) Perhaps the USA did do a good job, however no one here can determine that. It's not possible to reasonable compare each nations contribution.
Each nation did contribute, and they had an agreement as to how the station would be used. The USA economy got an economic boast from the construction of the station. It got countless billions from it's own government, and more from other governments as well. The US economy has benefited, and now it's government refuses to provide the partners what they agreed to. Their breaking their word.
The point is that the USA did not pay for everything. However when they cut back their budgets they also denied other parties access to the station that was jointly paid for by the USA and other nations. Canada paid $1.4 Billion for their part of the stations and now they don't get to use it. The changes that USA is proposing are in direct violation of an agreement they had signed.
Actually, indivduall access to differing viewpoints is greater now than at any time in history.
Yes, but those in power have greater access, by orders of magnitude, to serfs/citizens then they ever have before. The powerful can influence greatly, to the point of defacto control, the information we have access to. Can you name any individual who can deliver his/her point of view in in 30 second catch-phrases repeated very 20 minutes to the majority of the nation?
Even with your solution, which is valid IMHO, you still need a package manager to check dependencies, perform auditing, and make installation and upgrades simpler. The RPM package manager allows your to choose the root that the files will be installed under. So your solution could be used in conjuction with so-called relocatable RPM packages. You could choose to install RPMs under /opt instead of /. In fact many of us choose not to go with the Solaris /opt naming and just use /usr/local (not that it makes a difference).
Someone else also commented that many sysadmins don't put every software package in its own directory, and choose to separate run-time data, and configuration files from the directory of the package. Your statements are fantastic but I think you've gone overboard that saying that all sysadmins adhere to your standard, and thus implied that anyone who doesn't isn't a sysadmin. ;-) There isn't "one right way" for installing software; that's why GNU configure has so many options. :-)
I have worked on such a kind of universal contact database. I've implemented it several times as SQL tables and am currently working on an object-relational version (for deployment on PostgreSQL). I intend to release the SQL under the GPL when I'm satified that it is complete and correct. In the mean time if you'd like a copy at the earliest release opportunity please email me and I'll add you to a list of people who want early copies.
Allow me to describe briefly how my database is organized.
The database models people, companies, etc. as "contactable entities" (CEs) and allows any CE to be a member of any other CE for the purpose of arbitrary grouping. For instance if there is a CE for a company and multiple CEs for the employees of that company, the employees could have a membership relationship with the company CE. There is a parent CE relation that all specific CE inherit from (this is an object-relational feature of postgresql). It is possible to create new CE types by simply creating a new table and inheriting the parent CE class. Frankly the design has worked in the past with just people and "groups"
CEs can have any number of arbitrarily defined identifiers. For instance, some people want to identify their contacts by their full name, however, in some cases people are given unique usernames, or customer numbers, or other unique identifier criteria. These identifiers can be stored easily and not all CEs have to share the same unique identifiers. Currently I'm having some problem enforcing integrity constraints on these identifiers effeciently.
The database also models "contact methods" (CMs) in an flexible way. CMs are phone numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Just like the CEs, CMs are defined by sub-classing a parent CM relation/table. You can create new CMs but just defining a new table that inherits the parent. A CE can have any number of CMs and two different CE's can share one CM.
All CMs have validity ranges. So change of address actions can occure naturally. You don't just replace the old address with the new one, you actually keep the old address in the database, insert a new address record and mark the valid_end_date of the old one appropriately and the valid_start_date of the new one appropriately. This is very handy.
I'm currently working on adding tables for tracking actually contact instances (phone calls, emails etc) but have not completed any signifcant work on this portion.
In the past I've implemented this design about 4 times in SQL and each time it has been a little different with a lot of unique compromises. I'm working on a design that I hope with be more universal and truely reusable now.
If indeed these grades are based no self-evaluation reporting then it is possible that the agencies in question reported terrible problems in an effort to gain additional financial resources. I believe the fact that they reported poor performance to the Office of Management and BUDGET is in line with such a theory.
Perhaps in effect they said, "We dunno nothin' 'bout dem puters securin matters. Duh. Maybe you give us money to get dat der schoolin? Or maybe we could hire someone whats smarter 'en us?"
Last night in Edmonton, Canada the Aurora was incredible. However that is nothing unusual since we get to see the Northern Lights all the time here in the north. Last night was the first time I've seen the light RED however. The normal green kind were visible but there was a hazy red type as well. The lights were not the normal shape either; they did not appear to "dance" but at time made a large arc across the whole sky, the dispersed to make a huge crown in the sky with the red and green parts overlapping each other.
Komodo from Activestate is very "Visual Studio"-ish and supports PERL, Python, PHP, and a lot more.
You might look at Sun's Forte as well.
Haha! Do anything BUT that. I'm a decent admin. Excellent with Linux, competent on Solaris, experienced in a wide variety of commercial Mach/BSD flavours. But if someone judged me on my slashdot posts, I doubt they'd have a high opinion. On the other hand my karma's good.
However, in all seriousness, when I've had to interview sysadmin candidates, I DO go looking to see they've posted to any well known technical mailling lists. Slashdot brings out the worst in people; technical mailling lists help highlight people's technical skills.
It is interesting that you compare registering for toaster warranty and registering for MS support. MS products come with no warranty. It is probably the law that your toaster has to come with some form of warranty. Further an MS passport account requires giving up much more than your name and address; as well we all know.
How about this. MS offers warranty on its products and includes a small slip of paper called a Warranty Registration Card that asks for the registrants name and address. I don't think any of us would object to that. The objection raised against MS is that its process are being reported as similar to existing practices which are reasonably when in fact their practices are far from reasonable and are not analogous to any tradition support practice. MS isn't evil; its just bad: bad software, bad support, bad business. I'm told that investors who got in a long time ago are happy though.
Adobe is wrong when they call Elcomsoft's product a digital lockpick. I believe their choice of analogy indicates their malice in this situation. A better analogy is one of a "digital cart" or a "digital dolly". Adobe's product, by design, makes a user's files cumbersome to move and difficult to work with. Like a file-cabnet or a heavy safe. Elcomsoft has provided something to make moving file cabinets and heavy safes easier.
Someone can use a dolly or a cart to steal a safe or a filecabinet, but that doesn't make the manufacturer of the cart or dolly a theif!
DCMA := Disney Corporation Manufactured Amendment. :-)
Alan Cox has legitmate concerns about his safety if he enters the USA. He is also pointing out to other software authors that they should be concerned. This isn't a political game... the USA is arresting people for giving lectures on software design and security!
I work in the area of network security and I just turned down a contract in the USA. I won't touch foot on US soil until the DCMA is struck down.
Where are the Thalidomide kids from the Japanese bombings? There arn't any. http://rex.nci.nih.gov/NCI_Pub_Interface/raterisk/ risks90.html
Research sponored and/or conducted by the USA is not a valid source of information about effects of the atomic bombings used in their attach of Japanese civilian targets in WWII. It is suspect as American Revisionist Propaganda.
Although in some instances it's better for all involved to use an atomic weapon than to use conventional weapons. Like the Invasion of the Japanese Home Islands...more lives would have been lost on both sides than were lost by the atomic bombing.
Your statment is fuddle. Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian target causes loss of life.
The incident mentioned in the article was an act of vandelism, not terrorism.
The utility of environment variables is indicated by the name. The environment that a program runs in should have influence on its behavhior. For instance the program should decide how many columns of text to display from a config file... what if the screen has 80 columns by the config file says 40? Environment variables should describe to a program what environment it is running in. Environment variables should answer quesitons like, "what is the name of the user running me?", "what is my current working directory?", "where should I find my config file?", "what kind of terminal am I running on? do I HAVE a terminal?".
I think that there is nothing wrong with the same data being represented in a config file and the environment. In fact the best way is to have a global config file in /etc, a user specific config file (.somethingrc), and allow environment variables to override the config files. I disagree with the idea of replacing all your environment variables with a single once that just has the location of a config file. If your environment variables do indeed describe the working environment for the program then they should be in the environment.
This isn't a slight or insult or sarcasm at all; you would probably find a book on the history of unix to be of benefit. You've obviously got the wisdom to ask, "why do we need these variables" when so many others just use them for EVERYTHING or use them for NOTHING. You'll get more insight from a book drawing your own conclusions than from us here.
Oh, and if your program core dumps when a variable isn't set... that's just bad coding and you should be as suspicious as your are. :-)
I like the idea of there being many repositories for third-party or special packages. There are lots of these for both .deb and .rpm packages. For RPM there is even the rpmfind.net system for searching repositories of RPM by various criteria.
What is lacking is some way to identify which packages can be trusted and which can't. For instance if you go to the rpmfind.net homepage you'll find out they their DNS was hacked and that any RPM's downloaded recently should be suspect. There is no way to verify RPM or DEB packages other than a PGP signature. Most thired party packages don't include a PGP signature, and even when they do there is no way to verify it, and even when there is little way to use that as a basis for establish trust. Even if you know the package was signed by "Joe Smith" and "Jim White" has also signed Joe's signature, you don't know why you should trust either of them.
Both DEB and RPM could benefit from a system for identifying what a package should and shouldn't do if it is to be "trusted" and what information about the package and packager should be verifiable, and how it can be verified.
Redhat's new contrib area will hopefully be an excellent central repository and storage area for third party RPM packages. RPMfind.net is cool too. I think something else is needed at this point though. We need some way to build trust between RPM Packagers and RPM users.
RPM already allows one to embed a PGP signature, but this doesn't allow one to trust the RPM, it only gives you a new tool to assist in verifying some information about the RPM. It would be nice if there was an external mechanism to track other verifiable information about RPMs and RPM packagers.
I'm willing to setup a mailling list at trustedrpm.net if any RPM packagers are interested in dicussing how a system of trust could be developed
.Your analysis of Cyc shows a lacks insight and background. I recommend reading Lenat and Guha's "Building Large Knowledge Based Systems." Cyc is not mearly a catalog of atomic dictionary definitions. It is an ontology: every symbol has its meaning made explicit in the context that it is used. It is also a reasoning system. It is also a method of representing knowledge. These combine to form a potent technology.
As for you comment that Cyc does not aquire information that is "full of noise" or based on "self-generated observations" I think you should do a bit more study about what the CYCORP ontologists do. My readings indicate that indeed Cyc does have to deal with noise and generates many of of its observations which are tested in many ways.
I have NO idea what AI is. I don't think a comparison of Cyc to AI has any meaning in determining weather Cyc is a potent technology.
Cyc does not make their entire ontology available freely. Only the upper ontology is available for us to use. It is unclear who, besides CYCORP has access to the entire ontology; it remains a matter of speculation what they are doing with it.
This method doesn't work on all Unix systems. as the setgid bit on directories is interpreted differently. However it will work on MOST Unix systems, Linux and Solaris included
I think its a BSD-ism but can't recall for sure.
find $HOME -type d -exec chmod o-r {} \;
While your files will still be readable, the directories that contain them will not be. People can't use "ls" to list your directories this way.
I'm a consultant that handles Internet related problems for my clients. Sometimes what I do is technical but sometimes what I do is beuracratic. For instance customers often ask me to register domain names for them, or obtain SSL certificates, or handle licensing agreements all of which require the signing authority of an officer of the company. I noticed a lot of other consultants will do the job "half-way" and leave all the signing for someone in the company who hasn't got a clue as to what their signing. This is how domain bills don't get paid for... an officer of the company authorized the purchase but hasn't got a clue what he just bought and when asked two months later by the billing department, "did you authorized $39 for "netsol 1 year" they 'nope.'
As a result I started asking my clients to make me a special agent with signing authority on behalf of an officer of the company for technical matters. They love the idea and I LOVE the title.
Special Agent Winterstorm, at your service.
I think that the market for "newbie Internet surfer" is at, or near, the saturation point anyway,
The market is no where near the "newbie internet surfer" saturation point. There are hundreds of millions of North Americans without Internet access. However, in the context of Windows XP this means nothing, because the bulk of the people currently without Internet access would never use anything as unreliable and complicated as a PC to access information resource and services.
AOL will someday break the remainder of the market, probably when they starting giving away wireless information access devices for free or cheap when they charge for their service. M$ can't break into the remainder of the "newbie" market because their executives are too scared to do anything that might not promote the desktop bloatware model that has been so rewarding to their investors.