Maybe because in the real world, we can't have everything we want. We also can't afford everything. I'd like a vacation home on a lake, but I can't afford it because my taxes are too high. Our children WILL NOT be able to afford to pay for this level of medical care when we get old at the current rate of health care rates. In fact, they will also not be able to afford health insurance for themselves at the current rate of increase either - it will be 10 times their income.
At some point you have to say "We can save this one baby or we can provide reasonable health care for 100 people." Yes, there IS a limit on what we as a society can reasonably afford and should pay for. This is why we don't have class sizes of 10 students to one teacher either.
Is this harsh? Yep it is, but LIFE is harsh. Deal with it.
Um, I am NOT used to popups anymore, because I use a browser that doesn't totally suck. When I DO get a popup, like one of these things, I get annoyed. If I want to chat, I'll click on the chat button. Never popup unsolicited - that's just rude.
Um, if you go to THEIR site, they can track you any way they want.
I however HATE these things. Don't pop shit up on my screen. Ever. If I close it, don't keep trying to chat with me and popping the window up again. Yet another reason to disable java and ONLY enable it when you want to use it. Just wish Mozilla made it easy to disable flash too.
Um, and you want Linux programmers to support your platform with that attitude?
"Bend to our will. We are the Borg."
Please. If you knew any computer history AT ALL, you would know that the Unix API has been around over twice as long as the Windows API. Taking the sockets interface as an example, WHY did MS take a perfectly working interface and fuck it up and make it hard to use? Maybe because their idea of multitasking was so screwed up that they couldn't make it work right??? Who's bright idea was it to associate networking with a Window handle???
MS has gone out of their way to make writing portable software difficult (hint #2 - java.) Hell, they make ANY programming difficult. This was done on purpose. Those of you that bought into the brain-damaged system are finally finding out that it has drawbacks - and your answer is that the rest of the world needs to change to a proprietary API? Riiight.
Bwahahahaha! Good one. Here's another. Maybe they will find it more stable and open. Maybe MS programmers will start participating with the community and answering questions on the developers newsgroups.:-)
But one the serious side, all too many Windows developers get sucked into this idea that they are going to get rich off "shareware." It's just not fun. The developers who are just in it for fun are going to move to a truely open platform where they can share in the work of others in an evironment that fosters those ideals instead of the ideals of greed.
So anyway, I don't think it's Windows programmers transitioning to Linux, it's just that most Windows programmers are greedy.
True, but in the same timeframe (1987) we had Minux that did decent multitasking which proves that it was doable on the 8088. QNX was multitasking on the 8088 even earlier. The 386 did make it MUCH easier however.
Bottom line is that MS really does not have a good excuse for piss poor multitasking in Win 3.1 - Win ME, Definately not from win95 on in any case which (if my memory is working right) needed a 386 minimum.
Heck - I'm still amazed that the GUI in Win2K seems to have an unreasonable number of locks which makes you think that the NT Kernel's multitasking sucks (which it doesn't.) Sure does make the system unresponsive though - a win2K p3-550Mhz with 512M ram feels less responsive than my old A1000 7Mhz with 512K ram did.
you can't really drop a generic Linus kernel into any of the commercial distros and expect it to work properly
Huh???? Generic kernels work just fine. You just need to configure them with the correct options. All RH and others do is take a generic kernel and add some additional patches such as IPSec, updated drivers, etc., but none of those are needed for day to day usage for the most part. These are NOT forks of the linux kernel.
In fact, it's a very good idea to maintain your own kernel with just the options you need. Why do you want the bloat of a kernel that supports 800 different network cards, Ham Radio protocols, etc???
Note that I'm not 100% happy with the way you have to deal with the Linux kernel. Adding drivers is a pain. I hate having to download and patch to get working SATA support for example, and alsa in 2.4 sucks to deal with (resolved in 2.6.) It was a Pain in the ass to get Debian Sid up on my new system.
The thing that bugs me with various distros has nothing to do with the kernel - it's things like system administration - where is the IP address configured? Is it inetd or xinetd? Is apache's conf in/etc/httpd or/etc/apache? Oh hell, theve gone and taken a nice simple/etc/exim/exim4.conf and split it into a huge directory tree. Once you are up to speed on one distro, it takes a bit to figure out the ideosyncracies of another.
BSD has it's own issues, but I have confidence in MD. I've used his stuff way back in the Amiga days - he's a very good coder. I'm going to be taking a Very hard look at DragonFly.
Sure, it's not murder. I grasp the concepts just fine. When you have quotes from Bill Gates talking about "cutting off Netscape's air supply," it's Quite clear that he inteneded to litterally kill Netscape as a viable company - which he pretty much did. The "unfair means" that I was refering to include bundling at a loss, restrictive contracts with manufacturers, etc. All analogies comparing monopolies to other things like Insider Trading or anything else are weak because monopolies are special. For example, the "insider knowledge" comparison. It goes well beyond knowledge, it's knowledge and power, and using that knowledge and power to prevent fair competition and / or damage a competitor.
How MS became a monopoly is a not important, but what is is the fact that they have been officially declaired a monopoly. As everyone SHOULD know by now, this means that they are bound by law to play the game differently than other software companies. While bundling at a loss and restrictive contracts are not normally illegal, they CAN be if the company is a monopoly.
What I'm talking about is when a monopoly does something very bad, governments are allowed and obligated to take special steps to resolve the problem. Many or the normal restrictions on remedies are gone. Now they can force the monopoly to (in this case for example) open up their software.
It's actually unfortunate that governments frequently wait WAY too long before reigning in a company that is becomming a monopoly before they ARE one. By waiting, the damage is already done, and recovery is Much harder. I'm currently looking at the banking industry where BoA bought Fleet, Oil industry where Mobile bought Exxon, ClearChannel and Infinity buying up all the local radio stations, etc. As these massive mergers continue and competion decreases, consumers and businesses are hurt in many ways that are often unclear at the time.
While I will admit that MS is capable of innovation, we will never know where the state of computing would be now if MS had been delt with 10 years ago. Look at the Amiga that had pretty damn good multi-tasking back in 1985 when MS was just releasing Windows 1.0. Hell, it wans't until MS had IBM teach them how to do it that they even had decent multitasking, and then only in the NT (OS/2) kernel line (1991 timeframe) which was "business only" until XP came out!!! That's almost 15 years of poor multi-tasking on the consumer edition for no damn reason other than incompetance!
Anyway, maybe if the "we are better off with MS being a monopoly" people knew a little more history, they wouldn't be so pro-MS, and would understand the frustration we long-time techs have with the disaster that is Windows.
If you RTFA (which the submitter didn't do obviously) you find out that this technology still uses WiFi or Bluetooth or other wireless technology to communicate.
You seem to be making the invalid assumption that it's realistic to do business without using any microsoft products whatsoever. Believe me, I've tried. While my main desktop environment is linux, I can't use it exclusivly. Open office does NOT do perfect conversion. Frequently it's not even close.
When you look at those cities that were considering alternatives, they are usually pilot projects, and not everyone is involved. Invarialbly the senior staff gets their excell, word, powerpoint, Outlook, etc. Then they found that document sharing was still an issue which is why they went back. Lower prices just made it an easier decision.
You also completly ignore all the custom and specialty software that government / businesses use which is generally single platform. MS is not afraid of losing their customer base anytime soon.
Let me add to my assertion that a fine won't help. It will actually HARM consumers since MS will just raise prices. As they are a monopoly, people will have little choice but to pay. This is why opening the file formats / protocols, etc is so important. It is the ONLY remedy that will make a difference in the long run.
The problem is that MS has been acting like an axe murderer and killing off the competition by unfair means according to the law. A fine is not enough. Name a fine that would be big enough to make a difference. 10 billion? 20? They will just raise their prices a few bucks to make up for it.
What is needed is something that will actually repair the damage caused by MS's illegal behavior. Microsoft needs to be held responsible for the damage they caused, which means that they need to pay the price. The damage is so significant to Thousands of companies worldwide, it needs to be a very large price - one that will reinstate true competition.
Personally, I could care less about the code which we all know sucks - I want the file formats, protocols, and API's opened. May need to force a few patents open too (at least RAND licensing with an open source exemption.)
Going back to the axe murderer land owner (poor) analogy, think of it as a life sentance of restitution.
... Because that's what we see for the most part. It's the same as with dynamic IP space. I assume at this point that any mail comming from dynamic IP space is a malware or spam so it's all blocked now.
I haven't blocked.biz yet, but I was considering it. I have yet to see ONE legit non-spam email comming from a.biz address. Just like any mail from China, brazill, mexico, korea, etc. which are all blocked. It's sad that it's come to this. Spam hurts everyone - the legitimate people that get blocked due to being indirectly linked with spammers most of all. I feel for you, but mail admins are fed up with this shit and we are taking drastic steps to reduce the impact of spam. Expect it to get MUCH worse before it gets better.
The experts say that RS232 actually doesn't like twisted pair cable, RS-485 however Does. This is why Cisco equipment ships with flat ribbon cable for the console cable. Saying that, I worked at a company MANY years ago where we used cat3 and cat5 cable to run hundreds of serial terminals hundreds of feet away from the terminal servers. We didn't have any problems at 38K.
When you think of multi-room audio, think "background music". The levels are low enough that multi-pathing isn't an issue. With multiple speakers, you don't NEED the volume cranked. Better on your ears too!:-)
The modern residential standard is 2 RG6U quad shield, and 2 cat-5e cables to each room. Some rooms you may want 2 sets of jacks for flexability in placement. When you think of all the issues with fiber and expense of termination, it just isn't worth it. Cat 6 is much harder to work with as the tolerances are much smaller. The gain over cat 5e is minimal.
Careful about using 3" conduit, not to mention that you can't run it horizontally in a standard 4" wall. You are better off with multiple runs rather than one big one. Flexible PVC conduit is really nice because you don't use elbows, there are no splices, etc. Nothing to snag on and no sharp turns. Some code may require firestop putty at the ends of your condiut. Check your local building code.
Second, keep your low-voltage cable at least 4 inches away from AC wires. Code says 2" minimum, but it's better to be safe. When you need to cross an AC wire, do so at a 90 degree angle to minimize interfearance and keep far away from flourescent fixtures.
Use electricians pull string and Not standard string. It lasts longer, is very strong, and resists shreading.
Wireties are nice, but don't cinch it tight. Velcro is better.
Try and do all your runs on interior walls - it makes things easier when you don't have to deal with insulation and you don't puncture the vapor barrier. Use low-voltage boxes - these generally don't have backs to allow room for wires to get pushed back into the walls without kinking and to maintain a minimum bend radius. Leave about 18" of extra cable at each jack as a "service loop" - this is where not dealing with insulation Really helps.
Take Pictures of your walls with all the cables / wiring / plumbing before the wallboard goes up! It makes changes MUCH easier later...
Finally, check out Leviton's web site - while you don't have to use all their stuff, they have some products that make residential structured wiring easier.
Except that the viruses and trojans violate the AUP and are damaging others. It's not legit usage.
Second, telling people how to setup their software to use the internet is a far cry from offering patches and troublshooting worm infestations.
Finally, the excess bandwidth used and problems caused by infected machines far outweighs the money received. It's a no brainer. You actually may get MORE users if the service isn't as worm and spam infested.
... Or you maintain a pool of loaners and send one out same / next day. Down time even less. Then you pop-out the HD, stick in as a second into your analysis machine, scan it or what ever. Or just image the thing back to a known state.
Laptops are Very prone to problems by nature, and your users need to know that they need to backup their documents to a CD, zip, network, etc. on a very regular basis. Any IT department that isn't totally clueless knows this, and maintains stock images that they can just blast out with ease.
You can also provide users with a "rescue" cd that can boot the machine into a known state where you can remotely troubleshoot.
All things that Good IT people know about and can do.
You can buy business service (like I do) for a residence just fine. It costs more, but comes with an SLA, great support, no restrictions on servers in the AUP, etc. Hell, you can probably find an ISP willing to sell you an OC3 line if you are willing to pay for it.
If comcast are going to cut people off they need to offer people a CD with the fixes on it. Informing someone they have a virus and then cutting them off from the means of downloading a new signature file is irresponsible.
It's not comcast's responsibility to provide patches. Are they going to support OSX, Debian, RH, Win98, win2K, winxP, os/2, Xbox, etc.? How often do they need to release this CD, every day? No. That's insane. You are not thinking this through.
If you get your machine compromised because you are too lazy to keep it updated, run AV or a firewall, it's YOUR problem. Not Comcast's. If they cut you off, you are going to have to get off your ass and visit a computer store, friend, or get dialup somewhere to get patches. After all, how long should they wait for you to get your machine fixed before cutting you off? 24 hours? 48? a week? Your system can inflict massive damage on others in just a few minutes. They need to cut you off ASAP.
Comcast is selling INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, not OS support. If you need OS support, you need to go elsewhere. I don't want MY rates to go up to pay for support personel troubleshooting clueless people's virus problems.
I think you and the parent are missing the point entirely. These compromised machines are a HUGE problem on the net, stealing bandwidth away from other users, attacking other users / servers, spreading malware and spam, etc. ISP's that don't enforce their AUP's are as much of a problem as the users with compromised machines. In fact, maybe ISP's need to go one step further - start charging users a fee - like $200 for dealing with the issue - reconnection charge or something.
ISP's also need to start taking more responsibility though. They should be shipping their modems with a built-in firewall pre-configured to block all inbound connections (and allow the customer to manage it via a decent web-based interface or something,) and running AV on their email servers. VERY few ISP's do either.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because in the real world, we can't have everything we want. We also can't afford everything. I'd like a vacation home on a lake, but I can't afford it because my taxes are too high. Our children WILL NOT be able to afford to pay for this level of medical care when we get old at the current rate of health care rates. In fact, they will also not be able to afford health insurance for themselves at the current rate of increase either - it will be 10 times their income.
At some point you have to say "We can save this one baby or we can provide reasonable health care for 100 people." Yes, there IS a limit on what we as a society can reasonably afford and should pay for. This is why we don't have class sizes of 10 students to one teacher either.
Is this harsh? Yep it is, but LIFE is harsh. Deal with it.
Um, I am NOT used to popups anymore, because I use a browser that doesn't totally suck. When I DO get a popup, like one of these things, I get annoyed. If I want to chat, I'll click on the chat button. Never popup unsolicited - that's just rude.
Um, if you go to THEIR site, they can track you any way they want.
I however HATE these things. Don't pop shit up on my screen. Ever. If I close it, don't keep trying to chat with me and popping the window up again. Yet another reason to disable java and ONLY enable it when you want to use it. Just wish Mozilla made it easy to disable flash too.
Um, and you want Linux programmers to support your platform with that attitude?
"Bend to our will. We are the Borg."
Please. If you knew any computer history AT ALL, you would know that the Unix API has been around over twice as long as the Windows API. Taking the sockets interface as an example, WHY did MS take a perfectly working interface and fuck it up and make it hard to use? Maybe because their idea of multitasking was so screwed up that they couldn't make it work right??? Who's bright idea was it to associate networking with a Window handle???
MS has gone out of their way to make writing portable software difficult (hint #2 - java.) Hell, they make ANY programming difficult. This was done on purpose. Those of you that bought into the brain-damaged system are finally finding out that it has drawbacks - and your answer is that the rest of the world needs to change to a proprietary API? Riiight.
Bwahahahaha! Good one. Here's another. Maybe they will find it more stable and open. Maybe MS programmers will start participating with the community and answering questions on the developers newsgroups. :-)
:-)
But one the serious side, all too many Windows developers get sucked into this idea that they are going to get rich off "shareware." It's just not fun. The developers who are just in it for fun are going to move to a truely open platform where they can share in the work of others in an evironment that fosters those ideals instead of the ideals of greed.
So anyway, I don't think it's Windows programmers transitioning to Linux, it's just that most Windows programmers are greedy.
Oh yeah, give this post a half
True, but in the same timeframe (1987) we had Minux that did decent multitasking which proves that it was doable on the 8088. QNX was multitasking on the 8088 even earlier. The 386 did make it MUCH easier however.
Bottom line is that MS really does not have a good excuse for piss poor multitasking in Win 3.1 - Win ME, Definately not from win95 on in any case which (if my memory is working right) needed a 386 minimum.
Heck - I'm still amazed that the GUI in Win2K seems to have an unreasonable number of locks which makes you think that the NT Kernel's multitasking sucks (which it doesn't.) Sure does make the system unresponsive though - a win2K p3-550Mhz with 512M ram feels less responsive than my old A1000 7Mhz with 512K ram did.
you can't really drop a generic Linus kernel into any of the commercial distros and expect it to work properly
/etc/httpd or /etc/apache? Oh hell, theve gone and taken a nice simple /etc/exim/exim4.conf and split it into a huge directory tree. Once you are up to speed on one distro, it takes a bit to figure out the ideosyncracies of another.
Huh???? Generic kernels work just fine. You just need to configure them with the correct options. All RH and others do is take a generic kernel and add some additional patches such as IPSec, updated drivers, etc., but none of those are needed for day to day usage for the most part. These are NOT forks of the linux kernel.
In fact, it's a very good idea to maintain your own kernel with just the options you need. Why do you want the bloat of a kernel that supports 800 different network cards, Ham Radio protocols, etc???
Note that I'm not 100% happy with the way you have to deal with the Linux kernel. Adding drivers is a pain. I hate having to download and patch to get working SATA support for example, and alsa in 2.4 sucks to deal with (resolved in 2.6.) It was a Pain in the ass to get Debian Sid up on my new system.
The thing that bugs me with various distros has nothing to do with the kernel - it's things like system administration - where is the IP address configured? Is it inetd or xinetd? Is apache's conf in
BSD has it's own issues, but I have confidence in MD. I've used his stuff way back in the Amiga days - he's a very good coder. I'm going to be taking a Very hard look at DragonFly.
Sure, it's not murder. I grasp the concepts just fine. When you have quotes from Bill Gates talking about "cutting off Netscape's air supply," it's Quite clear that he inteneded to litterally kill Netscape as a viable company - which he pretty much did. The "unfair means" that I was refering to include bundling at a loss, restrictive contracts with manufacturers, etc. All analogies comparing monopolies to other things like Insider Trading or anything else are weak because monopolies are special. For example, the "insider knowledge" comparison. It goes well beyond knowledge, it's knowledge and power, and using that knowledge and power to prevent fair competition and / or damage a competitor.
How MS became a monopoly is a not important, but what is is the fact that they have been officially declaired a monopoly. As everyone SHOULD know by now, this means that they are bound by law to play the game differently than other software companies. While bundling at a loss and restrictive contracts are not normally illegal, they CAN be if the company is a monopoly.
What I'm talking about is when a monopoly does something very bad, governments are allowed and obligated to take special steps to resolve the problem. Many or the normal restrictions on remedies are gone. Now they can force the monopoly to (in this case for example) open up their software.
It's actually unfortunate that governments frequently wait WAY too long before reigning in a company that is becomming a monopoly before they ARE one. By waiting, the damage is already done, and recovery is Much harder. I'm currently looking at the banking industry where BoA bought Fleet, Oil industry where Mobile bought Exxon, ClearChannel and Infinity buying up all the local radio stations, etc. As these massive mergers continue and competion decreases, consumers and businesses are hurt in many ways that are often unclear at the time.
While I will admit that MS is capable of innovation, we will never know where the state of computing would be now if MS had been delt with 10 years ago. Look at the Amiga that had pretty damn good multi-tasking back in 1985 when MS was just releasing Windows 1.0. Hell, it wans't until MS had IBM teach them how to do it that they even had decent multitasking, and then only in the NT (OS/2) kernel line (1991 timeframe) which was "business only" until XP came out!!! That's almost 15 years of poor multi-tasking on the consumer edition for no damn reason other than incompetance!
Anyway, maybe if the "we are better off with MS being a monopoly" people knew a little more history, they wouldn't be so pro-MS, and would understand the frustration we long-time techs have with the disaster that is Windows.
How about the people from Jamaca being refered to as African-American's? That is even more stupid.
I agree. It's time for this overly PC crap to stop.
If you RTFA (which the submitter didn't do obviously) you find out that this technology still uses WiFi or Bluetooth or other wireless technology to communicate.
You seem to be making the invalid assumption that it's realistic to do business without using any microsoft products whatsoever. Believe me, I've tried. While my main desktop environment is linux, I can't use it exclusivly. Open office does NOT do perfect conversion. Frequently it's not even close.
When you look at those cities that were considering alternatives, they are usually pilot projects, and not everyone is involved. Invarialbly the senior staff gets their excell, word, powerpoint, Outlook, etc. Then they found that document sharing was still an issue which is why they went back. Lower prices just made it an easier decision.
You also completly ignore all the custom and specialty software that government / businesses use which is generally single platform. MS is not afraid of losing their customer base anytime soon.
Too hard. Just use personal nicknames. "John the prick" and "John the backstabber" for example.
Let me add to my assertion that a fine won't help. It will actually HARM consumers since MS will just raise prices. As they are a monopoly, people will have little choice but to pay. This is why opening the file formats / protocols, etc is so important. It is the ONLY remedy that will make a difference in the long run.
What about the opening of the proprietary APIs, protocols, and formats? Did Balmer agree to that as well?
Didn't think so.
Oh please. That's pure flaimbait, troll, whatever.
The problem is that MS has been acting like an axe murderer and killing off the competition by unfair means according to the law. A fine is not enough. Name a fine that would be big enough to make a difference. 10 billion? 20? They will just raise their prices a few bucks to make up for it.
What is needed is something that will actually repair the damage caused by MS's illegal behavior. Microsoft needs to be held responsible for the damage they caused, which means that they need to pay the price. The damage is so significant to Thousands of companies worldwide, it needs to be a very large price - one that will reinstate true competition.
Personally, I could care less about the code which we all know sucks - I want the file formats, protocols, and API's opened. May need to force a few patents open too (at least RAND licensing with an open source exemption.)
Going back to the axe murderer land owner (poor) analogy, think of it as a life sentance of restitution.
... Because that's what we see for the most part. It's the same as with dynamic IP space. I assume at this point that any mail comming from dynamic IP space is a malware or spam so it's all blocked now.
.biz yet, but I was considering it. I have yet to see ONE legit non-spam email comming from a .biz address. Just like any mail from China, brazill, mexico, korea, etc. which are all blocked. It's sad that it's come to this. Spam hurts everyone - the legitimate people that get blocked due to being indirectly linked with spammers most of all. I feel for you, but mail admins are fed up with this shit and we are taking drastic steps to reduce the impact of spam. Expect it to get MUCH worse before it gets better.
I haven't blocked
The experts say that RS232 actually doesn't like twisted pair cable, RS-485 however Does. This is why Cisco equipment ships with flat ribbon cable for the console cable. Saying that, I worked at a company MANY years ago where we used cat3 and cat5 cable to run hundreds of serial terminals hundreds of feet away from the terminal servers. We didn't have any problems at 38K.
When you think of multi-room audio, think "background music". The levels are low enough that multi-pathing isn't an issue. With multiple speakers, you don't NEED the volume cranked. Better on your ears too! :-)
The modern residential standard is 2 RG6U quad shield, and 2 cat-5e cables to each room. Some rooms you may want 2 sets of jacks for flexability in placement. When you think of all the issues with fiber and expense of termination, it just isn't worth it. Cat 6 is much harder to work with as the tolerances are much smaller. The gain over cat 5e is minimal.
Careful about using 3" conduit, not to mention that you can't run it horizontally in a standard 4" wall. You are better off with multiple runs rather than one big one. Flexible PVC conduit is really nice because you don't use elbows, there are no splices, etc. Nothing to snag on and no sharp turns. Some code may require firestop putty at the ends of your condiut. Check your local building code.
Second, keep your low-voltage cable at least 4 inches away from AC wires. Code says 2" minimum, but it's better to be safe. When you need to cross an AC wire, do so at a 90 degree angle to minimize interfearance and keep far away from flourescent fixtures.
Use electricians pull string and Not standard string. It lasts longer, is very strong, and resists shreading.
Wireties are nice, but don't cinch it tight. Velcro is better.
Try and do all your runs on interior walls - it makes things easier when you don't have to deal with insulation and you don't puncture the vapor barrier. Use low-voltage boxes - these generally don't have backs to allow room for wires to get pushed back into the walls without kinking and to maintain a minimum bend radius. Leave about 18" of extra cable at each jack as a "service loop" - this is where not dealing with insulation Really helps.
Take Pictures of your walls with all the cables / wiring / plumbing before the wallboard goes up! It makes changes MUCH easier later...
Finally, check out Leviton's web site - while you don't have to use all their stuff, they have some products that make residential structured wiring easier.
Except that the viruses and trojans violate the AUP and are damaging others. It's not legit usage.
Second, telling people how to setup their software to use the internet is a far cry from offering patches and troublshooting worm infestations.
Finally, the excess bandwidth used and problems caused by infected machines far outweighs the money received. It's a no brainer. You actually may get MORE users if the service isn't as worm and spam infested.
Your logic just doesn't make sense.
... Or you maintain a pool of loaners and send one out same / next day. Down time even less. Then you pop-out the HD, stick in as a second into your analysis machine, scan it or what ever. Or just image the thing back to a known state.
Laptops are Very prone to problems by nature, and your users need to know that they need to backup their documents to a CD, zip, network, etc. on a very regular basis. Any IT department that isn't totally clueless knows this, and maintains stock images that they can just blast out with ease.
You can also provide users with a "rescue" cd that can boot the machine into a known state where you can remotely troubleshoot.
All things that Good IT people know about and can do.
You can buy business service (like I do) for a residence just fine. It costs more, but comes with an SLA, great support, no restrictions on servers in the AUP, etc. Hell, you can probably find an ISP willing to sell you an OC3 line if you are willing to pay for it.
If comcast are going to cut people off they need to offer people a CD with the fixes on it. Informing someone they have a virus and then cutting them off from the means of downloading a new signature file is irresponsible.
It's not comcast's responsibility to provide patches. Are they going to support OSX, Debian, RH, Win98, win2K, winxP, os/2, Xbox, etc.? How often do they need to release this CD, every day? No. That's insane. You are not thinking this through.
If you get your machine compromised because you are too lazy to keep it updated, run AV or a firewall, it's YOUR problem. Not Comcast's. If they cut you off, you are going to have to get off your ass and visit a computer store, friend, or get dialup somewhere to get patches. After all, how long should they wait for you to get your machine fixed before cutting you off? 24 hours? 48? a week? Your system can inflict massive damage on others in just a few minutes. They need to cut you off ASAP.
Comcast is selling INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, not OS support. If you need OS support, you need to go elsewhere. I don't want MY rates to go up to pay for support personel troubleshooting clueless people's virus problems.
I think you and the parent are missing the point entirely. These compromised machines are a HUGE problem on the net, stealing bandwidth away from other users, attacking other users / servers, spreading malware and spam, etc. ISP's that don't enforce their AUP's are as much of a problem as the users with compromised machines. In fact, maybe ISP's need to go one step further - start charging users a fee - like $200 for dealing with the issue - reconnection charge or something.
ISP's also need to start taking more responsibility though. They should be shipping their modems with a built-in firewall pre-configured to block all inbound connections (and allow the customer to manage it via a decent web-based interface or something,) and running AV on their email servers. VERY few ISP's do either.