It would require an attacker with a good understanding of the software and how Microsoft file formats are structured to exploit the hole
Somehow I suspect that line came from a Microsoft PR guy and not Symantec. After all, they know that any script kiddie will be able to easily exploit the hole once a single expert writes the script/program to generate or modify a XLS or PPT file that skirts the security checks. Even Microsoft should know this, but a PR guy's job is to gloss over how serious the problem really is.
My second favorite quote, immediately after it, reads:
The vulnerablity was first brought to Microsoft's notice about two months ago by Symantec.
TWO MONTHS!. I suppose Microsoft had their hands full with all these other worms/virii. Two months to respond to a major hole and write the patch is a great indication of how seriously (not!) Microsoft takes the security of their customers.
...the RBL, MAPS' database of IP addresses which have been proven to originate or facilitate the sending of unwanted email...
Even without the words "have been proven", this is an bold faced LIE. MAPS has a regular practice of blocking large groups of IP numbers (often an entire ISP), with the intention of disruption to the spammer and many non-spammer customers at that same ISP.
When these non-spammers complain to MAPS that their IP numbers, which certainly don't originate spam and don't facilitate the spammer's activity, have been blocked, the response from MAPS it that these non-spammer need to seek a different ISP.
To even get close to the truth of how MAPS really operates, perhaps it should read:
...the RBL, MAPS' database of IP addresses which may be originating or facilitating unwanted email, or have some loose association with present or prior unwanted email, including unsuspecting users and businesses who happen to be customers at the same ISP as a suspected spammer.
Of course, there's no requirement to tell the truth in a press release... but this lie is about as blantant as Microsoft's recent press releases claiming IIS is attacked because it's the market leader (when apache is the #1 web server by a considerable margin).
MAPS only maintains a database that provides information to others, who seek that information.
Vixie (who runs MAPS) is the CTO of a backbone internet provider (abovenet) which just happens to be one of those who "seek information". They have a regular history of blocking traffic... of course without explicit permission (and usually without even the knowledge) of downstream ISPs and their unsuspecting customers.
This is quite a bit different than end users making an informed decision to subscribe to the "service". Likewise, some ISPs subscribe to MAPS on their user's behalf, sometimes without informing them, and other times while leading them to believe the service doesn't impact non-spam messages.
That database expresses an opinion: in the opinion of MAPS, the networks listed in the database are suspected of passing through or generating spam.
This is true....at least true if "passing through" includes lots of unsuspecting non-spam businesses and users who simply connect to those spamming-suspected networks.
The lie is in much of the promotion regarding how accurate these opinions are, and the lack of disclosure regarding the non-spam users who are also intentionally blocked. It's
quite questionable how well MAPS blocks spam.
At the same time, there is no question that MAPS has been responsible for disrupting non-spam communication time and time again.
For a good taste of the deceptive nature of MAPS, check out their Realtime
Blacklist Policy Page. They claim four there are four ways to become blacklisted:
Spam Origination
Spam Relaying
Spam Support Services
Netblock Inheritance
The section about "netblock inheritance" claims that some unsecting users obtains IP address space that was once occupied by a spammer. Note that it doesn't say that they will discontinue listing the non-spammer who is blocked due to "netblock inheritance". But that's only scratching the surface of the deception.
What that MAPS policy page doesn't clearly explain (or really explain at all) is their regular practice of listing large netblocks, which contain large numbers of non-spammers. It isn't explained that MAPS uses this strong-arm tactic to pressure ISPs that are hosting some spammers by blocking not only the spammer but all of the ISP's unsuspecting non-spam customers.
MAPS's policy page also doesn't explain that there is no notification to these innocent and unsuspecting bystanders that their communication is being intentionally disrupted simply because some other customer at their ISP is sending spam.
MAPS's policy page doens't state that they will refuse to stop discrupting messages to non-spammers when it is brought to their attention that a non-spammer has been affected by a netblock that also contains a spammer. (yes, believe it or not, Vixie/MAPS has a long history of refusing to un-block non-spam users when they complain that they are blocked) It certainly doesn't state that it is their intention to block messages to non-spammers and spammers alike, if they happen to be hosted at an ISP that (in MAPS's rather extreem and un-accountable opinions) isn't working hard enough to stop spam.
Sure, MAPS is entitled to their opinions, and they have the free speech right to share those opinions. Where the line is crossed (IMHO) is:
Upstream providers, not end users, subscribing to the service... thereby forcing MAPS's rather extreem opinions on end users without giving them a choice.
Misrepresenting their blacklisting policy to imply that they only target spammers and those directly involved in spam... when in truth they intentionally target unsuspecting non-spammers (and never even notify them) simply because they inadvertently chose the same ISP as a spammer did (and the ISP didn't respond by immediately cutting service to an existing customer who MAPS says is a spammer)
What would happen if "copyright term" ended up as one of those columns? And "open source at end of copyright term" was another column?
One would imagine that speed, system requirements and reliability would be on the list, if only software consumers cared about them.
In fact, I'd be supprised if anyone pays much attention to those feature charts, and if they do I doubt they put much effort into reading and understanding what the features really are.
In the mid 90s, when there were about a half dozen word processors for the Mac (and Word had only recently appeard for the PC), there was a little word processor... I forget the name... which attempted to challenge MS Word and the others, primarily marketed as fast, reliable, able to run on older Macs, and cost much less. I had an older mac, and I purchased it. It worked quite well. It disappeared from the market in less than a year after I purchased it.
Of course, computers got faster and software got slower... the net result is new Macs with MS Word that have lots of features I wouldn't use, and they run about as fast as MS Word 4.0 on my 1992 Mac 2ci (25 MHz 86030 processor).
Let's assume (in some mythical different dimension) that illegally-distributed music isn't a problem for the industry
Right here, in this very real dimention, illegally distributed music isn't a problem for the music industry.
At least that's what their bottom line says... they're making more money than ever. CD prices have remained high, despite the recently anti-trust investigations. Their one bogus study during the Napster hearings showed that sales were down, but only near colleges where internet-based ordering was significantly up. Other more indepentent studies, at least so far, have generally found that CD sales are increasing.
Perhaps the "problem" is fear that future sales might be impacted, or some other non-profit definition of problem (like pride, control over the market, having new musicians by-the-balls, etc)
Perhaps the "problem" is all those "lost sales" from people who heard the music without paying, but the truth is that this is nothing new... they had this "problem" when radio began, they had this "problem" when recordable cassette tapes appeared, etc.
Just checking back on the replies to my post... I'll post one quick reply to the replies...
There were two major points I made:
In the course or a real programming project, like writing a device driver or even doing something simpler like porting NSIS to linux/unix/posix APIs, it is often necessary to get basic factual information, which is most easily copied from headers (if they are available somewhere). I posted my recent NSIS porting experience as a concrete example. Even simply porting software can be a lot of work and depends heavily on having certain types of information.... and since a lot of slashdot readers don't understand this concept, I tried to post a good and recent story.
Factual information is not protected by copyright (tho IANAL, but this is really a no-brainer). Facts can be protected (IP) as a trade secret, but publically publishing the header file with those facts nullifies any possible claim that it's a trade secret. The factual information of how data is arranged, no matter how hard it was to reverse engineer, is still basic factual information that isn't protected by copyright. A C language struct representing this infomation will look very similar regardless of wether it is copied from Søren's headers or independently reverse engineered. Coping factual information from a publically published document is not "IP Theft", because facts themselves are not protected by copyright, patents or trademarks, and they aren't a trade secret if they've been lawfully obtained and publically published.
Now I will admit that Søren really does deserve credit for his hard work, and if the info (basic facts, remember) in the linux headers was copied from his code, it was rude on the part of whoever copied the info to not include a comment recognizing the original source. He "deserves" based on social conventions of good will and gratitude, not any intellectual property law. Using his hard-obtained factual information without recognizing his is rude.
But, there's a big difference between being rude or ungrateful compared to "IP Theft". A lot of people, at least emoitionally, probably feel like being rude, ungrateful and inconsiderate is probably more wrong that "stealing intellectual property". I am neutral regarding that matter... my only point is that being rude and inconsiderate (which are not against the law) are different from "IP Theft", which is a voilation of some combination of copyright, patent, trademark and/or trade secret law.
Now, to specifially respond to the one and only Anonymous Coward to post in this thread....
Who on earth is saying Soren is giving bad PR for Linux?
I did. I also likened his reponse to knee-jerk flaming, when cooling off and thinking about for a day would have been wiser. The entire thing reads like an angry rant, specifically intended to tarnish someone else's reputation and stir up contraversy, not some sensible "you need to mention my work with a link and the following words to give my credit where credit is due."
Firstly, isn't/. running this story? By your definition then/. is giving the bad PR, cuz I sure wouldn't have known this story from any other place.
Yes, slashdot, not known as a shining example of journalistic integrity, posted a story which amounted to an angry rant, and called it "IP Theft" in the title, when only basic factual information (not intellectual property) was "stolen".
Slashdot does have the redeeming quality of admitting when a story was inaccurate and posting responses and followups. Maybe whoever at redhat wrote the linux driver will respond with some explaination (and if they're sensible an apology if they did indeed obtain the info from Søren's headers)
Then why are you posting? By posting, you are contributing to a page to give bad PR to Linux!
To make the two points above, which I believe were fairly clear in my original post, but I've restated them once more... in addition to insightful replied from "rhavyn" and "bacchusrx". I hope you can get the point (facts aren't protected by copyright and real work depends on factual informtaion) from my first message, this reply, and the posts from rhavyn and bacchusrx.
And finally...
RU trying to say that if OSS ppl steal your code then you should stay quiet and shut up?
It should be abundantly clear by this point what I'm trying to say.
If someone does use your hard-found facts (not "steals your code") without being polite and mentioning your name and recognizing your hard work, I'm not saying you should "stay quiet and shut up". I am saying you should avoid an angry rant posted to a forum like slashdot as your first action.
Maybe flaming in a widely viewed public location is justified after going round-and-round with the linux developers in question and getting request after request to be recognized for your hard work rejected over and over. Even then, calling it "IP Theft" is inaccurate and deceptive. Saying "Linux developers build on others hard work and a bunch of ungrateful jerks unwilling to recognize who contributed" might be reasonable.... in the very unlikely case that they would refuse to actually add some comments in the code to recognize his hard work.
But if a closed source company steals your code you have a right to call a holy war upon them?
Perhaps you read this in some else's comment, or you're just used to the daily microsoft vs linux, closed vs open source theme of slashdot. Either way, you're reading something into my writing which simply does not exist (or more likely you didn't read it at all, judging from the lack of understanding shown).
Are OSS ppl exempt from the licenses we insist others follow?
One last time....
Facts (legally obtained and published publically) are not intellectual property. Everybody is exempt from whatever terms and conditions the license may specify when they only copy the basic factual information and republish it in their own expressive manner. (well, IANAL, so this is only my uninformed opinion, not legal advise)
The only facts that can be protected are receive the relatively weak protection of "trade secret" status, and that clearly does not apply in this case. Copyright, patent and trademarks can not apply to factual information.
A couple days ago, I started some work to port
Nullsoft's NSIS Win32 Installer Builder to a native linux app (that builds win32 installers). After converting several HANDLEs into FILE*'rs and just ifdef'ing out a few difficult bits that I don't care about, I ran into all sorts of constants that get defined somewhere in the giant mess that is #include<windows.h>. Lots of things like MB_OKCANCEL, MB_YESNOCANCEL, SW_SHOWMAXIMIZED, IDCANCEL, HOTKEYF_ALT, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ARCHIVE, etc.
After a few grim moments of comtemplating actually buying and installing Visual C++, it occured to me that these things are probably defined somewhere in the mingw stuff. Sure enough, I found them all in various headers within the mingw package. I copied all these (and a bunch of other little win32 kludges) into a win32stuff.h file that I started including in the various.cpp files.
So did I cross the line? I copied a few dozen lines from various header files in the mingw package (I didn't mention in the file that I got them from the mingw project, but I probably should before I release the port to anyone). Did the the mingw guys copy this stuff from somewhere in all the stuff included by #include <windows.h> ??
Ok, I'll admit that a bit struct that represents the on-disk format of something that was reverse engineered is a bit more substantial than a bunch of constants... but calling it "IP Theft" seems to be leaping to some strong conclusions. Even if both programmers did their reverse engineering independently, aside from using different names, there's not a lot of different ways the struct could look. Even if the linux developer did look at the BSD header file to learn the data formats, how different could one expect his code to possibly be ?? If it's an algorithm with some creative implementation, I can see the accusation, but over a header file that simply documents simple facts seems a bit much. Sure, it can be hard work to get those facts by reverse engineering, but still, the "IP Theft" is simple facts (not really protected by copyright, in my limited understanding of copyright law... IANAL).
And finally, if Søren really does hope "an amicable solution can be reached", why's he turning this into a bunch of bad PR for linux and redhat ?? It's sounds to me like a case of getting mad and posting flames instead of cooling off for a day and thinking it through more carefully.
As far as my porting work for Nullsoft's really cool (SuperPiMP) installer, I hit a big block of very win32 specific code, CEXEBuild::do_add_file at the end of script.cpp. Unlike many of the other bits that I ifdef'd out, this is the one that actually puts the files into the install image, so I can't just chop it off. I will need to completely rewrite this using unix/posix APIs, probably using C library regex patterns instead of whatever wildcard matching win32's FindFirstFile does. I'll probably get back to porting NSIS in a week or two... I might even try rebooting and running it in windows a few times! And, I'm not going to lose any sleep over copying a few dozen constants out of someone else's header files.
If ICANN really wanted the new TLD's to mean something (other than a carbon-copy of the existing dot-com), their dispute resolution policy would contain language that the domain name would be awarded to the party whose purpose is most aligned with the intended use of the particular top level domain, perhaps in the absence of bad faith (swatting, intentionally misleading, etc).
But they don't. Most of the language is oriented to give the name to the trademark holder, with some consideration of wether the respondant is using the domain name or registered it in bad faith. It doesn't matter if you register a.info, and put up a few simple pages with some information about a company... if they have a trademark on the name, the rules (and grim reality of the dispute process) is exactly the same as if it were a.com,.biz, or whatever. There's no consideration written into the dispute policy for wether the respondant chose the correct TLD for their content (assuming they're not just squatting).
Likewise, there was all sorts of talk about registeration in various new TLDs requiring that you show that you really belong in that TLD. Well, it looks like it's all turned into a simple matter of paying money to the registars (the more you pay, the better the chance of being picked to receive the desired name, regardless of wether it may be appropriate for you to host a site within that TLD).
Because, as powerful as the US is, we can't save the world. We can't just dump money on every country. What about all the poor african countries? What about all the poor South American countries? ... But there are other countries that we help, and no one should forget it: countries that are struggling toward freedom.
We, the USA, have a long ang ugly history of supporting dictators, often who produce and sell drugs and commit human-rights abuses. We have a long history of subverting legitimate govts in various countries, usually by supplying arms and training to gurillas.
Did you know, Reality Master 101, that Ossama bin Laden was trained by the CIA and received modern weaponery and other support from the US thoughout the 80s, when Afghanistan was occupied by the USSR ??
Bin Laden claims that we, the USA, have supported the King of Saudi Arabia, who is a (reportedly) unpopular dictator. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not, but it is a fact that Saudi Arabia is not a democracy nor does it represent the ideals of "freedom" that we, the USA, preach to the world... yet we support this dictator. They apparantly produce more oil than any other Arab nation, yet they are badly in debt with only a relatively small population. Hardly sounds like the will of the people is being heeded by their King. Yet, we the USA support him. It's hard to take the claims of a terrorist seriously, but his claim that the USA is helping keep their unpopular King in power rings quite familiar to our involvement with the Shaw of Iran (and when that dictator was finally overthown, we armed Saddam of Iraq)
Among the many reasons the Arab world hates the USA so much, our strong support of Isreal comes up quite often. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that they've treated their own non-Jewish citizens quite badly.... certainly nothing like the sort of "human rights" and "democracy" dogma that we like to believe in. Depite obvious violence against innocent Arab people (terrorism, if you will), we the USA still provide a lot of support (money and weapons) to Isreal. Unconditionally supporting them, without imposing sanctions for abuses they commit hardly sounds like the sort of good-willed American Freedom crusade you'd like to believe we persue.
It really makes me sick when I hear about all these extreemly nasty things we (the USA) have done in the past. My tax dollars help pay for it, as do all other American taxpayers who largely wouldn't support this sort of shit. How's that for democracy? It's usually 10-20 years after the fact that the truth of our involvement comes to light, but even with what's known today (ignoring the high likelyhood of much worse activity kept classified Top Secret), saying that we help countries because they are "struggling towards freedom" shows unbelieve blindness to the ugly facts. Certainly we have aided many countries, but that does change the long history of abusive manipulation that we, the USA, have engaged in and are still probably committing today. Perhaps Reality Master 101 isn't such a good handle??
Personally, I think a lot could be done to prevent terrorism in the future by taking a long hard look at why these people hate us so much, and then begin a substantial campaign to right these perceived wrongs. If that means imposing sanctions against Isreal or other allies until they clean up their human rights abuses, well, together with getting the message out to the world about it, that's what it'll ultimately take. We don't need to become saints, but it would require making (and promting, as a PR campaign) changes that these people can see as having a real improvent over the percieved injustices they feel. Unfortunately, this requires honesty and the ability to admit ones mistakes... things we Americans aren't so good at doings, particularily as a nation and by our government.
What'll probably happen is a violent military action that kills several hundred thousand Arabs. It'll probably keep them in fear of us for several years, but the underlying hatred will only become more severe. Meanwhile, we'll probably keep up with our long-standing history of arming questionable people to attack and cause disruption in countries we don't like, who will ultimately have the means and experience to turn on us and launch more terrorist attacks in the future.
it is in the marketers best interest to get as much advertising to you as they can in the shortest amount of time, and the more they know, the more they will.
This will saddly remain true for scams and fraud, where the goal is to find a few hundred desparate/stupid people among many millions, with no regard for pissing off everyone with the good sense to know they're not going to "get rich quick".
But for marketing legitimate products and services, more will not always be better for advertisers. Ultimately sales are what matters, and pissing off customers and damaging ones reputation among them just doesn't make good long-term business sense. Sure, there are some examples of mass-mailing, but in the long run semi-targeted email is what will work for legit products. There are plenty of people like Mike that don't mind getting a few messages a week that are actually along his line of interest.
It's crap this these (all received in my inbox within the last few days) that will be the things that make sense to mass-email without any targeting. Just inside anyone reading this doesn't know what true garbage anyone who's publically visible and widely distributes their email address has to put up with, here's a little sampling (about 20%) of the spams I've received in the last 4 days:
You have been specially selected to qualify for the following:
Premium Vacation Package and Pentium PC Giveaway
To review the details of the please click on the link
with the confirmation number below:
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100% Bulletproof! Meaning it will never get deprogrammed!
This ad is sent in accordence with all applicable laws yeah, right, like the DMCA, traffic'ng in circumvention devices, et all
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(yadda, yadda, yadda)
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* What if the company paid you EVERY DAY?
* What if it was a New York Stock Exchange Company?
* What if there was no "real" competition and everybody needs our service?
* What if you got paid when somebody goes to your website and views the hottest video presentation ever and signs up?
If you are the least bit curious about why this CD ROM is making us Fortunes, all you need to do is simply send an email to:
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For more information visit our site (We have been working on the
site and it may not be available..if it is not, please follow the
instructions below..thanks in advance! yep, they know they're a spammer and their lame website at a tripod.com user account will be shut down within an hour or two
MAJOR CONTRACT ANNOUNCEMENTS AND HUGE NEWSLETTER
COVERAGE THIS WEEK FOR XXXX !!!
Revenues for XXXX, a 10-year old, fully-reporting company, have skyrocketed 600%
higher this year to over $8 Million on substantial US Government and Insurance on and on... they really want to pump and dump this poor penny stock, don't they?... and here's another lame stock tip, from a forged address as a russian server, no less:
OTCBB Stock Alert's Last Two Picks:
XXXX from $.60 to $2.50 in 10 days for a GAIN OF OVER 400%!!!
XXXX from $.49 to $1.62 in 7 days for a GAIN OF OVER 300%!!!
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BUY AT $0.92
SELL TARGET $4.60 = DIAMOND PLAY !!!!
snipped a bunch of horseshit about how this isn't a get rich quick scheme... "well, what does work then" it goes on
I'm looking for the entrepreneurial minded, GOAL =
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Well, that's about 20% of the spams I've received in the last 4 days. There were some really amazing ones in there but they were a giant mess of html... not easy to copy into slashdot. I kept holding out for one of the really dumb sex pills ads... ah, here it was (yet again) on Sept 5th:
End Erectile Dysfunction Forever With This Groundbreaking New Method
And FREE YOURSELF From Expensive Pills And Useless Herbal Concoctions
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If you are like the millions of men who seek to reclaim their sexual power
or simply increase their size and endurance, THIS IS FOR YOU!
The Male Performance Method is a comprehensive regimen of doctor-recommended
excercises and diet tips that is GUARANTEED to increase your size and
performance in 30 days or your money back.
Of nearly TWO THOUSAND men who have tried this method , only 2 - TWO -
have not seen any improvement. You just can't argue with those statistics!
When you try the Male Performance Method for just two weeks, you and
your partner will FEEL the difference. Just imagine the look on her face
when she sees what you can become in this short time...
... as the author of a modestly-sized website (about 100 pages), it would be nice to know which parts people are actually reading. Actually, what I've often wanted to know is what parts confuse my readers and where they need more help. Sometimes I get this via email questions, but still it's very hard to know what to do to improve specific parts of the site.
Of course, there probably would be abuses of privacy by "marketing firms", but in the case of website that actually try to provide really useful information, this sort of feedback could really help direct the very limited time and effort towards improving the parts of the site that really need it. In my own case, it's often the classic example of a long-time expert not being able to identify with the pains of brand new users.
Of course, there is the traditional usability study approach. Maybe someday I'll spend some money and do it.
All along the arguement about tying the broser to the OS installation has bothered me. Sure, it's probably anti-competitive and done to ruin Netscape's market share.
What's bothered me is that nearly every linux distribution includes one or more web browsers. Recently they also include spreadsheets, graphic manipulation (gimp), and soon they'll all include word processors similar to MS Word and email/calendar/contact magangement similar to MS Outlook.
It seems quite dangerous to establish a legal precedent against including a popular application with the "operating system". At the rate things are going, in a few years a Linux distribution will probably come with work-a-like replacements for every major proprietary application.
as for your "Big Problem": my point was that MS has the clout to SOLVE this big problem. MS could single-handedly cause the entire MS-using world (which constitutes a sizable chunk of the REAL world) to swich to these devices. and I'm saying they would be doing us a favor, for once.
How fast does the entire world (or perhaps the USA) upgrade their microsoft operating system? It's pretty safe to say that win 3.1 is nearly gone, but there are a lot of win 95 machines out there. Win 98 seems to be pretty common now, but judging from how 2000 and ME took the upgrade market by storm, it will be quite a long time until XP runs on the majority of PCs... not to mention the 80-90% needed to make smart cards "universal". Even 50-60% installed base on XP (vs earlier MS systems AND non-MS systems) is going to take quite a while.
I see this same statement all the time, and while I generally agree with it, just yesterday it finally occured to me why I find it so bothersome. That reason is simply:
They can't really use Microsoft Windows either.
These masses of "average joe" users who will never be able to use linux really don't know how to use windows either. Almost everything about the computer is "too hard" for them... except playing a couple simple games, reading email and surfing the web, and sometimes struggling through a word processor.
In all of these cases where the "can" use windows, they are blissfully unaware of 95% of the features that the software offers them. They save their files whereever the "save as" dialog defaults, and later if someone asks them to copy the file onto a floppy, they have no idea how to do it or even where they put the file on their drive. These are the masses that constantly need someone to "fix the computer". I could go on and on (but not today).
The point is that saying "linux is too hard" is usually meant to imply that "but windows is easy". The sad truth is that the vast majority of the population can't really use ANY operating system, linux, windows, macos, Be, whatever. Of course, the vast majority of the driving population can't change their car's oil or probably even a tire, and they can't program their on-screen controls VCR, etc, etc.
Sure, windows is probably overall a bit easier, largely because of automated install programs and more commercial software (that has a lot of work put into reducing costly tech support queried).
For these mainstream novice users, the system they've invested hundreds of hours not really using in any signifcant way, but stumbling and strugging through to get the minimal "productivity" they manage is going to be easier than anything that is a change, not matter how much a change for the better it may happen to be.
Well, that's enough ranting for now. There's already hundreds of messages, so it's highly unlikely many people will read this... but I feel a bit better finally coming to terms why "people can't use linux" bothers me, when I generally agree with the statement.
Just add a little line saying "We are NOT affiliated with Comedy Central's Battlebots. The Battlebots official website can be found here."
Battlebots.com will get their hits from people mistakenly typing in battlebots.org, and everyone can get along!
As I understand, this was one of the two things he proposed in his response. The other was giving them the name for just under $6000 (losses expected from not having the name)... which may be a lot of money to you and me, but really that's pocket change for a TV studio.
Perhaps he really is offering a "bona fide Internet bots service". You wouldn't know it from the web page, of which every single word seems to be about the domain name dispute.
Disregarding viral infections, how much money does American business lose annually to Windows crashing?
I'd wager it's a smaller number than losses due to incompatibilities arising from some new program (like a fancy screensaver) overwriting files like c:\windows\msvcrt.dll with the version it wants.
MonsterHut has sent 96 million e-mails. That means just under two million people have to complain before reaching the 2% threshold. Oops.
Even if this is true, it's not necessarily 2 million people, but 2 million emails. They send the same thing out over and over, so in all likelyhood most of the complaints will be about many messages. Maybe in this case the slashdot effect will do some good for the world....
I've been dreaming about setting up an anti-spam program and service (free, I hope) that would use real-time reporting like MAPS/ORBS and user feedback like spamcop. The idea would be to keep an near-real-time updated list of regexes with match all the recent spams but are highly unlikely to match any normal emails.
I wonder if anyone else is doing this sort of real-time-regex list?
I often wonder why consumers spend so much trouble worrying about how fast their CPU and other computer harware is, and then go and buy software without giving even a moment of thought into how fast it will perform.
Ok, some software like 3D rendering does have performance specs, but the vast majority of software has no attention paid to performance, by consumer or programmers.
I read the entire thing, looking to see which one may be fastest. I have vmware now... and it's "livable" in terms of speed (full screen with their vga-fifo driver installed). At least it's ok running windows 95 on a 800 MHz machine, but there is noticable slowness. It's not nearly as fast as running native.
Saddly, what little mention of speed they had was very vauge statements that certain things were too slow. They did minimal testing on each one, and what they did try wasn't even the same or similar software on the different emulators.
So I'm no closer to knowing if I win4lin, for example, would be overall faster (as they claim) than vmware which I currently own (well, license, but I paid, damnit). I very well may shell out another $79 if something like win4lin is significantly faster. They say it is... but like all software it comes with no warranty and they won't take it back and refund me if it doesn't live up to their promises.
Wouldn't it be great if, say, some magazine were to compare these emulators and publish some useful comparisions?
<rant mode on>
Well, it'll probably be quite a while until we see any real comparison of these emulators, since these ZDnet bastards just cranked out this lame-ass deadline-driven excuse for a review.... not that they give a damn... reporters always use the "tight deadline" excuse for doing a poor job, instead of actually feeling sorry about it.
This little rant won't solve anything, but at least it makes me feel a bit better. Maybe someone from vmware, netraverse, or menta might read through these comments. The anonymous idiots/authors at zdnet/metagroup certainly aren't, since they seem to care so little about about this topic.
I can say from experience that providing mp3 player kits can turn into some frustrating tech support. Most of the people we've sold kits to never emailed or called for support. I suppose no news is good news and they got them to work. But for those who did have trouble, it was rare that I could figure out what was wrong. That's frustrating. When the board was assembled and tested before shipping, there's a much smaller set of things that tend to go wrong.
When we ran out of kits, we didn't make any more. It takes a similar amount of time to sort the parts into nicely labeled bags as it does to stuff parts into a bare board. We've had several people who _really_ want kits to assemble, so we're going to do one more round of kits.
Also, our little player was designed to be mostly easy-to-solder through hole components. The MP3 decoder and DAC are surface mount, but they're the 1.27 mm low density pitch that's reasonable to solder by hand. I've played with the Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip a bit, and it is a 0.5 mm pitch high density surface mount part. Very few people can solder this by hand, and I am in that group, despite 15 years of occasional soldering. You certainly wouldn't want a kit with such fine pitch surface mount parts. Saddly, there don't seem to be any ethernet controller chips (that aren't obsolete) in lower density packages.
I think Sean's going to sell some pretty cool players. I know I've had a number of people ask me for ethernet streaming added to my little project... but that just isn't very feasible. The VFD also looks damn nice.
I noticed the were some links to blank pages that may someday be open-source firmware? Is this just wishful thinking?
traceroute to www.mpaa.com (216.217.160.183), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 207.149.244.1 (207.149.244.1) 17.148 ms 33.000 ms 15.192 ms
2 router.inetarena.com (206.129.216.3) 33.016 ms 15.767 ms 56.093 ms
3 at-1-2-317.ussttl3-j20c.savvis.net (64.242.127.97) 21.450 ms 20.780 ms 34.566 ms
4 500.POS2-0.GW10.SEA1.ALTER.NET (157.130.191.61) 24.304 ms 20.673 ms 43.967 ms
5 122.ATM3-0.XR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET (152.63.105.254) 42.023 ms 31.879 ms 21.024 ms
6 194.at-0-2-0.TR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET (146.188.200.118) 28.649 ms 24.882 ms 31.065 ms
7 * 110.at-6-1-0.TR2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (146.188.140.13) 41.351 ms 50.155 ms
8 0.so-7-0-0.XR2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.3.198) 49.494 ms 35.993 ms 47.665 ms
9 0.so-0-0-0.XL2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.54.1) 35.704 ms 40.110 ms 36.923 ms
10 * 184.ATM7-0.BR4.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.52.213) 42.812 ms 36.069 ms
11 204.255.168.10 (204.255.168.10) 41.345 ms 41.608 ms 41.114 ms
12 c2-pos10-0.snjsca1.home.net (24.7.76.82) 54.857 ms 44.503 ms 51.297 ms
13 c1-pos2-0.slkcut1.home.net (24.7.65.138) 96.155 ms 93.494 ms 95.119 ms
14 wbb1-pos2-0.pop1.ut.home.net (24.7.75.142) 88.055 ms * 120.956 ms
15 10.253.92.34 (10.253.92.34) 81.110 ms 81.002 ms 82.484 ms
16 attsbh.com (216.217.160.183) 81.686 ms 82.358 ms 81.374 ms
Somewhere along the line, they have to connect to the Net, just like us.
Only if you consider DSL/cable/dialup "just like" leasing a dedicated server (probably server cluster) in a massive data center.
What if a bunch of people just started accusing them of copyright infringement and getting their service cut?
Since their service is a decicated server, you'd be accusing them of unauthorized distribution from their server... an unlikely circumstance that's easily verified to be a false accusation.
MPAA members own the copyrights to nearly mainstream all movies, and they license rights to a great portion of the mainstream recorded music, so it's hard to imagine what you'd accuse them of pirating... software or books ??
So basically, an employee who can stay focussed on one thing for long periods of time is going to have higher productivity than one who has to handle constant interrupts.
It all depends on what that one thing might be. For example, remaining focused on reading slashdot comments and making first posts and trolls probably isn't going to be very productive....
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I suspect that line came from a Microsoft PR guy and not Symantec. After all, they know that any script kiddie will be able to easily exploit the hole once a single expert writes the script/program to generate or modify a XLS or PPT file that skirts the security checks. Even Microsoft should know this, but a PR guy's job is to gloss over how serious the problem really is.
My second favorite quote, immediately after it, reads:
TWO MONTHS!. I suppose Microsoft had their hands full with all these other worms/virii. Two months to respond to a major hole and write the patch is a great indication of how seriously (not!) Microsoft takes the security of their customers.
Even without the words "have been proven", this is an bold faced LIE. MAPS has a regular practice of blocking large groups of IP numbers (often an entire ISP), with the intention of disruption to the spammer and many non-spammer customers at that same ISP.
When these non-spammers complain to MAPS that their IP numbers, which certainly don't originate spam and don't facilitate the spammer's activity, have been blocked, the response from MAPS it that these non-spammer need to seek a different ISP.
To even get close to the truth of how MAPS really operates, perhaps it should read:
Of course, there's no requirement to tell the truth in a press release... but this lie is about as blantant as Microsoft's recent press releases claiming IIS is attacked because it's the market leader (when apache is the #1 web server by a considerable margin).
Vixie (who runs MAPS) is the CTO of a backbone internet provider (abovenet) which just happens to be one of those who "seek information". They have a regular history of blocking traffic... of course without explicit permission (and usually without even the knowledge) of downstream ISPs and their unsuspecting customers.
This is quite a bit different than end users making an informed decision to subscribe to the "service". Likewise, some ISPs subscribe to MAPS on their user's behalf, sometimes without informing them, and other times while leading them to believe the service doesn't impact non-spam messages.
That database expresses an opinion: in the opinion of MAPS, the networks listed in the database are suspected of passing through or generating spam.
This is true. ...at least true if "passing through" includes lots of unsuspecting non-spam businesses and users who simply connect to those spamming-suspected networks.
The lie is in much of the promotion regarding how accurate these opinions are, and the lack of disclosure regarding the non-spam users who are also intentionally blocked. It's quite questionable how well MAPS blocks spam. At the same time, there is no question that MAPS has been responsible for disrupting non-spam communication time and time again.
For a good taste of the deceptive nature of MAPS, check out their Realtime Blacklist Policy Page. They claim four there are four ways to become blacklisted:
- Spam Origination
- Spam Relaying
- Spam Support Services
- Netblock Inheritance
The section about "netblock inheritance" claims that some unsecting users obtains IP address space that was once occupied by a spammer. Note that it doesn't say that they will discontinue listing the non-spammer who is blocked due to "netblock inheritance". But that's only scratching the surface of the deception.What that MAPS policy page doesn't clearly explain (or really explain at all) is their regular practice of listing large netblocks, which contain large numbers of non-spammers. It isn't explained that MAPS uses this strong-arm tactic to pressure ISPs that are hosting some spammers by blocking not only the spammer but all of the ISP's unsuspecting non-spam customers.
MAPS's policy page also doesn't explain that there is no notification to these innocent and unsuspecting bystanders that their communication is being intentionally disrupted simply because some other customer at their ISP is sending spam.
MAPS's policy page doens't state that they will refuse to stop discrupting messages to non-spammers when it is brought to their attention that a non-spammer has been affected by a netblock that also contains a spammer. (yes, believe it or not, Vixie/MAPS has a long history of refusing to un-block non-spam users when they complain that they are blocked) It certainly doesn't state that it is their intention to block messages to non-spammers and spammers alike, if they happen to be hosted at an ISP that (in MAPS's rather extreem and un-accountable opinions) isn't working hard enough to stop spam.
Sure, MAPS is entitled to their opinions, and they have the free speech right to share those opinions. Where the line is crossed (IMHO) is:
We do? Since when??
What would happen if "copyright term" ended up as one of those columns? And "open source at end of copyright term" was another column?
One would imagine that speed, system requirements and reliability would be on the list, if only software consumers cared about them.
In fact, I'd be supprised if anyone pays much attention to those feature charts, and if they do I doubt they put much effort into reading and understanding what the features really are.
In the mid 90s, when there were about a half dozen word processors for the Mac (and Word had only recently appeard for the PC), there was a little word processor... I forget the name... which attempted to challenge MS Word and the others, primarily marketed as fast, reliable, able to run on older Macs, and cost much less. I had an older mac, and I purchased it. It worked quite well. It disappeared from the market in less than a year after I purchased it.
Of course, computers got faster and software got slower... the net result is new Macs with MS Word that have lots of features I wouldn't use, and they run about as fast as MS Word 4.0 on my 1992 Mac 2ci (25 MHz 86030 processor).
Right here, in this very real dimention, illegally distributed music isn't a problem for the music industry.
At least that's what their bottom line says... they're making more money than ever. CD prices have remained high, despite the recently anti-trust investigations. Their one bogus study during the Napster hearings showed that sales were down, but only near colleges where internet-based ordering was significantly up. Other more indepentent studies, at least so far, have generally found that CD sales are increasing.
Perhaps the "problem" is fear that future sales might be impacted, or some other non-profit definition of problem (like pride, control over the market, having new musicians by-the-balls, etc)
Perhaps the "problem" is all those "lost sales" from people who heard the music without paying, but the truth is that this is nothing new... they had this "problem" when radio began, they had this "problem" when recordable cassette tapes appeared, etc.
There were two major points I made:
- In the course or a real programming project, like writing a device driver or even doing something simpler like porting NSIS to linux/unix/posix APIs, it is often necessary to get basic factual information, which is most easily copied from headers (if they are available somewhere). I posted my recent NSIS porting experience as a concrete example. Even simply porting software can be a lot of work and depends heavily on having certain types of information.... and since a lot of slashdot readers don't understand this concept, I tried to post a good and recent story.
- Factual information is not protected by copyright (tho IANAL, but this is really a no-brainer). Facts can be protected (IP) as a trade secret, but publically publishing the header file with those facts nullifies any possible claim that it's a trade secret. The factual information of how data is arranged, no matter how hard it was to reverse engineer, is still basic factual information that isn't protected by copyright. A C language struct representing this infomation will look very similar regardless of wether it is copied from Søren's headers or independently reverse engineered. Coping factual information from a publically published document is not "IP Theft", because facts themselves are not protected by copyright, patents or trademarks, and they aren't a trade secret if they've been lawfully obtained and publically published.
Now I will admit that Søren really does deserve credit for his hard work, and if the info (basic facts, remember) in the linux headers was copied from his code, it was rude on the part of whoever copied the info to not include a comment recognizing the original source. He "deserves" based on social conventions of good will and gratitude, not any intellectual property law. Using his hard-obtained factual information without recognizing his is rude.But, there's a big difference between being rude or ungrateful compared to "IP Theft". A lot of people, at least emoitionally, probably feel like being rude, ungrateful and inconsiderate is probably more wrong that "stealing intellectual property". I am neutral regarding that matter... my only point is that being rude and inconsiderate (which are not against the law) are different from "IP Theft", which is a voilation of some combination of copyright, patent, trademark and/or trade secret law.
Now, to specifially respond to the one and only Anonymous Coward to post in this thread....
Who on earth is saying Soren is giving bad PR for Linux?
I did. I also likened his reponse to knee-jerk flaming, when cooling off and thinking about for a day would have been wiser. The entire thing reads like an angry rant, specifically intended to tarnish someone else's reputation and stir up contraversy, not some sensible "you need to mention my work with a link and the following words to give my credit where credit is due."
Firstly, isn't /. running this story? By your definition then /. is giving the bad PR, cuz I sure wouldn't have known this story from any other place.
Yes, slashdot, not known as a shining example of journalistic integrity, posted a story which amounted to an angry rant, and called it "IP Theft" in the title, when only basic factual information (not intellectual property) was "stolen".
Slashdot does have the redeeming quality of admitting when a story was inaccurate and posting responses and followups. Maybe whoever at redhat wrote the linux driver will respond with some explaination (and if they're sensible an apology if they did indeed obtain the info from Søren's headers)
Then why are you posting? By posting, you are contributing to a page to give bad PR to Linux!
To make the two points above, which I believe were fairly clear in my original post, but I've restated them once more... in addition to insightful replied from "rhavyn" and "bacchusrx". I hope you can get the point (facts aren't protected by copyright and real work depends on factual informtaion) from my first message, this reply, and the posts from rhavyn and bacchusrx.
And finally...
RU trying to say that if OSS ppl steal your code then you should stay quiet and shut up?
It should be abundantly clear by this point what I'm trying to say.
If someone does use your hard-found facts (not "steals your code") without being polite and mentioning your name and recognizing your hard work, I'm not saying you should "stay quiet and shut up". I am saying you should avoid an angry rant posted to a forum like slashdot as your first action.
Maybe flaming in a widely viewed public location is justified after going round-and-round with the linux developers in question and getting request after request to be recognized for your hard work rejected over and over. Even then, calling it "IP Theft" is inaccurate and deceptive. Saying "Linux developers build on others hard work and a bunch of ungrateful jerks unwilling to recognize who contributed" might be reasonable.... in the very unlikely case that they would refuse to actually add some comments in the code to recognize his hard work.
But if a closed source company steals your code you have a right to call a holy war upon them?
Perhaps you read this in some else's comment, or you're just used to the daily microsoft vs linux, closed vs open source theme of slashdot. Either way, you're reading something into my writing which simply does not exist (or more likely you didn't read it at all, judging from the lack of understanding shown).
Are OSS ppl exempt from the licenses we insist others follow?
One last time....
Facts (legally obtained and published publically) are not intellectual property. Everybody is exempt from whatever terms and conditions the license may specify when they only copy the basic factual information and republish it in their own expressive manner. (well, IANAL, so this is only my uninformed opinion, not legal advise)
The only facts that can be protected are receive the relatively weak protection of "trade secret" status, and that clearly does not apply in this case. Copyright, patent and trademarks can not apply to factual information.
... I'm sure everything else slashdot has linked to is still entirely accurate....
After a few grim moments of comtemplating actually buying and installing Visual C++, it occured to me that these things are probably defined somewhere in the mingw stuff. Sure enough, I found them all in various headers within the mingw package. I copied all these (and a bunch of other little win32 kludges) into a win32stuff.h file that I started including in the various .cpp files.
So did I cross the line? I copied a few dozen lines from various header files in the mingw package (I didn't mention in the file that I got them from the mingw project, but I probably should before I release the port to anyone). Did the the mingw guys copy this stuff from somewhere in all the stuff included by #include <windows.h> ??
Ok, I'll admit that a bit struct that represents the on-disk format of something that was reverse engineered is a bit more substantial than a bunch of constants... but calling it "IP Theft" seems to be leaping to some strong conclusions. Even if both programmers did their reverse engineering independently, aside from using different names, there's not a lot of different ways the struct could look. Even if the linux developer did look at the BSD header file to learn the data formats, how different could one expect his code to possibly be ?? If it's an algorithm with some creative implementation, I can see the accusation, but over a header file that simply documents simple facts seems a bit much. Sure, it can be hard work to get those facts by reverse engineering, but still, the "IP Theft" is simple facts (not really protected by copyright, in my limited understanding of copyright law... IANAL).
And finally, if Søren really does hope "an amicable solution can be reached", why's he turning this into a bunch of bad PR for linux and redhat ?? It's sounds to me like a case of getting mad and posting flames instead of cooling off for a day and thinking it through more carefully.
As far as my porting work for Nullsoft's really cool (SuperPiMP) installer, I hit a big block of very win32 specific code, CEXEBuild::do_add_file at the end of script.cpp. Unlike many of the other bits that I ifdef'd out, this is the one that actually puts the files into the install image, so I can't just chop it off. I will need to completely rewrite this using unix/posix APIs, probably using C library regex patterns instead of whatever wildcard matching win32's FindFirstFile does. I'll probably get back to porting NSIS in a week or two... I might even try rebooting and running it in windows a few times! And, I'm not going to lose any sleep over copying a few dozen constants out of someone else's header files.
But they don't. Most of the language is oriented to give the name to the trademark holder, with some consideration of wether the respondant is using the domain name or registered it in bad faith. It doesn't matter if you register a .info, and put up a few simple pages with some information about a company... if they have a trademark on the name, the rules (and grim reality of the dispute process) is exactly the same as if it were a .com, .biz, or whatever. There's no consideration written into the dispute policy for wether the respondant chose the correct TLD for their content (assuming they're not just squatting).
Likewise, there was all sorts of talk about registeration in various new TLDs requiring that you show that you really belong in that TLD. Well, it looks like it's all turned into a simple matter of paying money to the registars (the more you pay, the better the chance of being picked to receive the desired name, regardless of wether it may be appropriate for you to host a site within that TLD).
We, the USA, have a long ang ugly history of supporting dictators, often who produce and sell drugs and commit human-rights abuses. We have a long history of subverting legitimate govts in various countries, usually by supplying arms and training to gurillas.
Did you know, Reality Master 101, that Ossama bin Laden was trained by the CIA and received modern weaponery and other support from the US thoughout the 80s, when Afghanistan was occupied by the USSR ??
Bin Laden claims that we, the USA, have supported the King of Saudi Arabia, who is a (reportedly) unpopular dictator. Perhaps this is true, perhaps not, but it is a fact that Saudi Arabia is not a democracy nor does it represent the ideals of "freedom" that we, the USA, preach to the world... yet we support this dictator. They apparantly produce more oil than any other Arab nation, yet they are badly in debt with only a relatively small population. Hardly sounds like the will of the people is being heeded by their King. Yet, we the USA support him. It's hard to take the claims of a terrorist seriously, but his claim that the USA is helping keep their unpopular King in power rings quite familiar to our involvement with the Shaw of Iran (and when that dictator was finally overthown, we armed Saddam of Iraq)
Among the many reasons the Arab world hates the USA so much, our strong support of Isreal comes up quite often. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that they've treated their own non-Jewish citizens quite badly.... certainly nothing like the sort of "human rights" and "democracy" dogma that we like to believe in. Depite obvious violence against innocent Arab people (terrorism, if you will), we the USA still provide a lot of support (money and weapons) to Isreal. Unconditionally supporting them, without imposing sanctions for abuses they commit hardly sounds like the sort of good-willed American Freedom crusade you'd like to believe we persue.
It really makes me sick when I hear about all these extreemly nasty things we (the USA) have done in the past. My tax dollars help pay for it, as do all other American taxpayers who largely wouldn't support this sort of shit. How's that for democracy? It's usually 10-20 years after the fact that the truth of our involvement comes to light, but even with what's known today (ignoring the high likelyhood of much worse activity kept classified Top Secret), saying that we help countries because they are "struggling towards freedom" shows unbelieve blindness to the ugly facts. Certainly we have aided many countries, but that does change the long history of abusive manipulation that we, the USA, have engaged in and are still probably committing today. Perhaps Reality Master 101 isn't such a good handle??
Personally, I think a lot could be done to prevent terrorism in the future by taking a long hard look at why these people hate us so much, and then begin a substantial campaign to right these perceived wrongs. If that means imposing sanctions against Isreal or other allies until they clean up their human rights abuses, well, together with getting the message out to the world about it, that's what it'll ultimately take. We don't need to become saints, but it would require making (and promting, as a PR campaign) changes that these people can see as having a real improvent over the percieved injustices they feel. Unfortunately, this requires honesty and the ability to admit ones mistakes... things we Americans aren't so good at doings, particularily as a nation and by our government.
What'll probably happen is a violent military action that kills several hundred thousand Arabs. It'll probably keep them in fear of us for several years, but the underlying hatred will only become more severe. Meanwhile, we'll probably keep up with our long-standing history of arming questionable people to attack and cause disruption in countries we don't like, who will ultimately have the means and experience to turn on us and launch more terrorist attacks in the future.
This will saddly remain true for scams and fraud, where the goal is to find a few hundred desparate/stupid people among many millions, with no regard for pissing off everyone with the good sense to know they're not going to "get rich quick".
But for marketing legitimate products and services, more will not always be better for advertisers. Ultimately sales are what matters, and pissing off customers and damaging ones reputation among them just doesn't make good long-term business sense. Sure, there are some examples of mass-mailing, but in the long run semi-targeted email is what will work for legit products. There are plenty of people like Mike that don't mind getting a few messages a week that are actually along his line of interest.
It's crap this these (all received in my inbox within the last few days) that will be the things that make sense to mass-email without any targeting. Just inside anyone reading this doesn't know what true garbage anyone who's publically visible and widely distributes their email address has to put up with, here's a little sampling (about 20%) of the spams I've received in the last 4 days:
Well, that's about 20% of the spams I've received in the last 4 days. There were some really amazing ones in there but they were a giant mess of html... not easy to copy into slashdot. I kept holding out for one of the really dumb sex pills ads... ah, here it was (yet again) on Sept 5th:
The old saying goes:
If it sounds too good to be true....
Of course, there probably would be abuses of privacy by "marketing firms", but in the case of website that actually try to provide really useful information, this sort of feedback could really help direct the very limited time and effort towards improving the parts of the site that really need it. In my own case, it's often the classic example of a long-time expert not being able to identify with the pains of brand new users.
Of course, there is the traditional usability study approach. Maybe someday I'll spend some money and do it.
What's bothered me is that nearly every linux distribution includes one or more web browsers. Recently they also include spreadsheets, graphic manipulation (gimp), and soon they'll all include word processors similar to MS Word and email/calendar/contact magangement similar to MS Outlook.
It seems quite dangerous to establish a legal precedent against including a popular application with the "operating system". At the rate things are going, in a few years a Linux distribution will probably come with work-a-like replacements for every major proprietary application.
Don't forget their one truely innovative creation, not copied, stolen, acquired, or mimiced from any other company:
Ok, maybe they came up with NetBui all on their own too....
How fast does the entire world (or perhaps the USA) upgrade their microsoft operating system? It's pretty safe to say that win 3.1 is nearly gone, but there are a lot of win 95 machines out there. Win 98 seems to be pretty common now, but judging from how 2000 and ME took the upgrade market by storm, it will be quite a long time until XP runs on the majority of PCs... not to mention the 80-90% needed to make smart cards "universal". Even 50-60% installed base on XP (vs earlier MS systems AND non-MS systems) is going to take quite a while.
I see this same statement all the time, and while I generally agree with it, just yesterday it finally occured to me why I find it so bothersome. That reason is simply:
They can't really use Microsoft Windows either.
These masses of "average joe" users who will never be able to use linux really don't know how to use windows either. Almost everything about the computer is "too hard" for them... except playing a couple simple games, reading email and surfing the web, and sometimes struggling through a word processor.
In all of these cases where the "can" use windows, they are blissfully unaware of 95% of the features that the software offers them. They save their files whereever the "save as" dialog defaults, and later if someone asks them to copy the file onto a floppy, they have no idea how to do it or even where they put the file on their drive. These are the masses that constantly need someone to "fix the computer". I could go on and on (but not today).
The point is that saying "linux is too hard" is usually meant to imply that "but windows is easy". The sad truth is that the vast majority of the population can't really use ANY operating system, linux, windows, macos, Be, whatever. Of course, the vast majority of the driving population can't change their car's oil or probably even a tire, and they can't program their on-screen controls VCR, etc, etc.
Sure, windows is probably overall a bit easier, largely because of automated install programs and more commercial software (that has a lot of work put into reducing costly tech support queried).
For these mainstream novice users, the system they've invested hundreds of hours not really using in any signifcant way, but stumbling and strugging through to get the minimal "productivity" they manage is going to be easier than anything that is a change, not matter how much a change for the better it may happen to be.
Well, that's enough ranting for now. There's already hundreds of messages, so it's highly unlikely many people will read this... but I feel a bit better finally coming to terms why "people can't use linux" bothers me, when I generally agree with the statement.
As I understand, this was one of the two things he proposed in his response. The other was giving them the name for just under $6000 (losses expected from not having the name)... which may be a lot of money to you and me, but really that's pocket change for a TV studio.
Perhaps he really is offering a "bona fide Internet bots service". You wouldn't know it from the web page, of which every single word seems to be about the domain name dispute.
I'd wager it's a smaller number than losses due to incompatibilities arising from some new program (like a fancy screensaver) overwriting files like c:\windows\msvcrt.dll with the version it wants.
MonsterHut has sent 96 million e-mails. That means just under two million people have to complain before reaching the 2% threshold. Oops.
Even if this is true, it's not necessarily 2 million people, but 2 million emails. They send the same thing out over and over, so in all likelyhood most of the complaints will be about many messages. Maybe in this case the slashdot effect will do some good for the world....
I've been dreaming about setting up an anti-spam program and service (free, I hope) that would use real-time reporting like MAPS/ORBS and user feedback like spamcop. The idea would be to keep an near-real-time updated list of regexes with match all the recent spams but are highly unlikely to match any normal emails.
I wonder if anyone else is doing this sort of real-time-regex list?
Ok, some software like 3D rendering does have performance specs, but the vast majority of software has no attention paid to performance, by consumer or programmers.
Saddly, what little mention of speed they had was very vauge statements that certain things were too slow. They did minimal testing on each one, and what they did try wasn't even the same or similar software on the different emulators.
So I'm no closer to knowing if I win4lin, for example, would be overall faster (as they claim) than vmware which I currently own (well, license, but I paid, damnit). I very well may shell out another $79 if something like win4lin is significantly faster. They say it is... but like all software it comes with no warranty and they won't take it back and refund me if it doesn't live up to their promises.
Wouldn't it be great if, say, some magazine were to compare these emulators and publish some useful comparisions?
<rant mode on>
Well, it'll probably be quite a while until we see any real comparison of these emulators, since these ZDnet bastards just cranked out this lame-ass deadline-driven excuse for a review.
This little rant won't solve anything, but at least it makes me feel a bit better. Maybe someone from vmware, netraverse, or menta might read through these comments. The anonymous idiots/authors at zdnet/metagroup certainly aren't, since they seem to care so little about about this topic.
<rant mode off>
The data says they're using a CS4334, which is 4-wire I2S input. There are chips from Cirrus that convert I2S into SPDIF.
When we ran out of kits, we didn't make any more. It takes a similar amount of time to sort the parts into nicely labeled bags as it does to stuff parts into a bare board. We've had several people who _really_ want kits to assemble, so we're going to do one more round of kits.
Also, our little player was designed to be mostly easy-to-solder through hole components. The MP3 decoder and DAC are surface mount, but they're the 1.27 mm low density pitch that's reasonable to solder by hand. I've played with the Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip a bit, and it is a 0.5 mm pitch high density surface mount part. Very few people can solder this by hand, and I am in that group, despite 15 years of occasional soldering. You certainly wouldn't want a kit with such fine pitch surface mount parts. Saddly, there don't seem to be any ethernet controller chips (that aren't obsolete) in lower density packages.
I think Sean's going to sell some pretty cool players. I know I've had a number of people ask me for ethernet streaming added to my little project... but that just isn't very feasible. The VFD also looks damn nice.
I noticed the were some links to blank pages that may someday be open-source firmware? Is this just wishful thinking?
Apparantly AT&T:
traceroute to www.mpaa.com (216.217.160.183), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 207.149.244.1 (207.149.244.1) 17.148 ms 33.000 ms 15.192 ms
2 router.inetarena.com (206.129.216.3) 33.016 ms 15.767 ms 56.093 ms
3 at-1-2-317.ussttl3-j20c.savvis.net (64.242.127.97) 21.450 ms 20.780 ms 34.566 ms 4 500.POS2-0.GW10.SEA1.ALTER.NET (157.130.191.61) 24.304 ms 20.673 ms 43.967 ms
5 122.ATM3-0.XR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET (152.63.105.254) 42.023 ms 31.879 ms 21.024 ms
6 194.at-0-2-0.TR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET (146.188.200.118) 28.649 ms 24.882 ms 31.065 ms
7 * 110.at-6-1-0.TR2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (146.188.140.13) 41.351 ms 50.155 ms
8 0.so-7-0-0.XR2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.3.198) 49.494 ms 35.993 ms 47.665 ms
9 0.so-0-0-0.XL2.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.54.1) 35.704 ms 40.110 ms 36.923 ms
10 * 184.ATM7-0.BR4.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.52.213) 42.812 ms 36.069 ms
11 204.255.168.10 (204.255.168.10) 41.345 ms 41.608 ms 41.114 ms
12 c2-pos10-0.snjsca1.home.net (24.7.76.82) 54.857 ms 44.503 ms 51.297 ms
13 c1-pos2-0.slkcut1.home.net (24.7.65.138) 96.155 ms 93.494 ms 95.119 ms
14 wbb1-pos2-0.pop1.ut.home.net (24.7.75.142) 88.055 ms * 120.956 ms
15 10.253.92.34 (10.253.92.34) 81.110 ms 81.002 ms 82.484 ms
16 attsbh.com (216.217.160.183) 81.686 ms 82.358 ms 81.374 ms
Somewhere along the line, they have to connect to the Net, just like us.
Only if you consider DSL/cable/dialup "just like" leasing a dedicated server (probably server cluster) in a massive data center.
What if a bunch of people just started accusing them of copyright infringement and getting their service cut?
It all depends on what that one thing might be. For example, remaining focused on reading slashdot comments and making first posts and trolls probably isn't going to be very productive....