Softroad, as far as I can tell, is completely dead. The group I'm working with is UFO Chicago (Users of Free Operating systems) and I've taken to calling our community networking project the Wireless Working Group (UFO-WWG). UFO-WWG doesn't have it's own web page.
About my user info... No, that's not my email, and I like it that way. Thanks for the heads up on the web page, that link's been dead for some time now.
If the movie industry begins seeing Linux as an asset and not a threat...
I think Hollywood's current overlords are too far gone to see Linux as a "safe" platform for them to release to. The MPAA is in a take-take-take mindset right now that will allow them to use Linux in the backend and threaten the people who produce software for Linux that goes against their wishes. The MPAA's current world view is that its copyrighted work is its exclusive and absolute property in all it's forms and where ever it may be found. I think Valenti genuinely believes in what he is saying.
It never hurt anyone to hope, did it?
No, it certainly doesn't, but one must be cautious. I think we're going to have to wait for the current crop of executives to all die off, and perhaps the next as well. Sooner or later the mood will change because free software and the philosophy behind it are not going away. The MPAA's current position, however, is self-defeating, and will eventually fade into the past.
Licensed ones, you mean. Unlicensed players that were written for the purpose of interoperability with the format and by way of reverse engineering are just as legal as the licensed players. Calling the licensed players "legal players" implies otherwise.
Other than that one nit, I agree completely, the market for licensed players on Linux no longer exists.
An, ahem, acquaintence of mine once attached an extra mailbox for a nonexistent unit to an apartment building and received 'materials' there for a while.
Interesting, I'll have to try that sometime. Anyway, it still removes the node operator by one layer from whatever activity the end user might be doing. "But your honor, I personally delivered the connection information to this individual. That is my policy, so that I can verify that the person and the address exist."
isn't the zombie threat largely neutralised if you setup your router rules correctly?
That and a good dose of administrative policy... i.e. "If you want to connect to my node, send me your snail mailing address and I will hand-deliver your IP address and routing information in a sealed envelope."...and other such quirky verification processes. There's very little a cracker could do about a policy like that. Oh, and have your router configured to let specific IPs (the ones you've assigned) get to the Internet. Then, once it becomes possible to put "client" hardware in IBSS mode with routing hooks for the driver, you can even prevent a rogue IP from talking to the rest of the subnet.
The whole boogeyman aspect of community wireless just kind of disappears with the right combination of policy and configuration.
There are motley crews beaming no-cost broadband in several dozen cities around the world. Unless they've managed to slather the entire Lower East Side with access points and get a fair number of end-user type participants, what the hell is so special about New York's version of this idea?
I'm doing this in Chicago (things are moving slowly). My personal favorites in the community wireless world are Seattle Wireless and Green Bay Professional Packet Radio (GBPPR has some great tech and a very experimental bent, but they won't give you the time of day unless you can convert mw to dBm in your head... fine with me).
The way DSL is going, I can't wait for stuff like this to pick up some momentum.
Try to imagine yourself as that developer. You've written some software, either because you needed it for something and it didn't exist, or you thought it would be cool to do, or you were just bored and anxious to write *anything*. You're not interested in selling it for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's because it's only a hobby for you, maybe it's because you have philosophical issues with selling software, maybe it's this, that, or another thing... whatever. At any rate, you wrote, you gave it away, and now you get lots of people writing you bug reports of varying degrees of helpfullness, people sending you patches that sometimes fix things or add features, and sometimes just waste your time, and there have been more than a few people who said they'd take care of something, like creating RPMs and debs on an ongoing basis and then failed to do it, and occassionally someone who has nothing better to say than, "This sucks, it doesn't work. You're the guy who wrote it, so you must suck, too."
What could you possibly receive from a pleased user that would make you ignore all of the bad parts and think, "I'm gonna keep this thing going"?
Microsoft software is very cheap for schools, we are talking about $20-30 per seat (os+office), compare that to the hardware they run it on.
How often are those systems down? With a stable version of a free OS installed, you can start it up in the morning and shut down at night and never have a problem with the OS. Stable Windows platforms are not unheard of, but the people who operate those systems have spent as much time diving into the guts of the system as any free OS guru.
How much work is lost to GPFs and BSoDs? See above.
Are lost work and downtime figured into the $20-$30 per seat? I'll bet you were talking about licenses.
How much does it cost if you're not a school? The Free Software community doesn't care who you are or what you use the software for, it's all the same to them.
How can you compare the price of hardware to the price of an operating system?!? That's like comparing the price of a car to the price of gas!
Support costs, assuming you yourself are not a guru:
For average problems (99% of them):
1) Twenty minutes to call your free OS guru buddy up on the phone and get advice.
2) Twenty minutes RingTFM.
3) Whatever you feel like paying for "professional support" from one of many support vendors.
For common tricky problems:
1) Up to couple hours with your local guru tweaking.
2) A day or two RingTFM.
3) Whatever you feel like paying for "professional support" from one of many support vendors.
For rare problems/one-of-a-kinds:
1) A few days with your local guru, maybe two gurus.
2) A week RingTFM.
3) More money than you have for "professional support" from one of many support vendors.
Compare this to support from a commercial vendor which is whatever they feel like charging you. In all honesty, you could get Win2K support from your local Win2K guru, but when you think about how much a Win2K guru is able to learn about Win2K and compare to what a free OS guru is able to learn about their free OS, is becomes clear that a free OS guru has access to far more details of the system.
add on the fact no users will know how to use it
Basically what your saying is no one should you use it because no one understands it because no one uses it. That's awefully circular. How about this... Try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use Windows. Did they know what word processor they wanted, or did they have to ask you to explain what a word processor is? None of this is intuitive, and assuming that Windows is intuitive just because the market is saturated with it is asinine.
add on the fact no one will use it when they leave school
This is below the belt. Let me ask you this: when this year's college freshmen graduate and have to get an apartment and start paying rent, do you really think they'll just play along and rent their software, too, when more than a few of their classmates were making some noises about free software? I expect that most of them will rent their software, but that a significant fraction will use a free OS over renting, and that will erode the sand that supports your second point. That year's college freshmen will be all the more likely to use a free OS.
ahh well... maybe if some of you tried doing what you suggest your'll understand.
I convinced my company to switch its dev platform to Linux. Price was a major consideration, as it's a very small company and the MS tools cost a shitload of money. Support was not a consideration because I support the systems. The fact that no one knew Linux was moot, because most of the people on the dev side had some experience with UNIX within the last ten years. Wow! Imagine that! Transferable skills! When was the last time you used your mad batch file skills instead of VB?
the judge can overrule the jury nullification and in most cases they do.
In most cases, there's nothing wrong with the law, since most laws are okay. Unless you mean most cases of jury nullification, in which case I really couldn't say.
The part most people have a problem with is Title 17, section 1201. That's the section that contains the circumvention and reverse engineering verbiage. Also take a look at section 1204. That's where the criminal provisions are.
Indeed. I don't know all of the details in the case, but there are some Americans in jail in China right now for violating Chinese law on China's turf... and the US Gov. is protesting it. It had a few headlines while protests were going on in the US over Sklyarov's arrest. I didn't bother reading the articles, mostly because I found the irony - and hipocrisy - so sickening.
Wow. I leave a thread for a day and look what happens. Everybody starts calling everybody else names.
There was a good link posted in another part of this thread... this one. I read it, I learned, I found out I didn't know what I thought I knew, and no one had to call me an imbecile or a moron or a stupid fuck to do it. You should all take a lesson from phase3000.
BTW, he was right... I've never had a formal lesson in Latin in my life. Everything I learned I learned from Slashdot.
If you really want to learn about Linux and how it works and all that, here are some useful footnotes:
Mandrake is the Mac of Linux
Redhat is the MS of Linux
You could do it with either of them, but with these two distributions, everything is supposed to fit into a framework that is predetermined by the respective vendor. All the hacks I did on Red Hat systems to get them to do what I wanted were just that... hacks. Mandrake is quite similar and my former roommate had the same sort of problems making his system learn new tricks.
Slackware is the UNIX of Linux
For learning, this is the system to do it on. I haven't actually used Slackware in a long time, and I've heard it has some kind of auto-tool thingy similar in kind to up2date or apt-get, but I don't recall its name. Installing Slackware is a learning experience. Maintaining Slackware is a learning experience (if you don't use the auto-tool). Anyone who took a Slack 96 system through either an a.out to ELF upgrade or a kernel 1.2 to kernel 2.0 upgrade knows this. I had fun with Slack and it gave me a good foundation, but it got tiring.
Debian is the Linux of Linux.
Installing Debian is a learning experience, but after that a trained monkey could maintain it. In fact, cron can be trained to do most of your maintainence - to the point that all you have to do is replace failed or full hard disks.
Seymour Cray is dead. Dr. Cray was one of those genius-nutcase types, he wanted to build a private tunnel from his home outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin to his cottage on Lake Superior, for one thing. I know for certain that he insisted on at least two things. He believed that if you pay a million dollars are more for something, you should 1) be able to sit on it and 2) have your choice of any color. For that reason, you can get your Cray supercomputer in any color you like, and all the older "C-shaped" models that you refer to had padded seats somewhere on the case.
Ye olde 8086 is much like the cannonical 1 cycle = 1 instruction CPU that you described. Since the minimum number of trasistors needed to execute an instruction is pretty much fixed (but occaisionally somebody somewhere figures out a way to reduce the number by a few), and the amount of time it takes for the signals to pass through a sequence of transistors is basically fixed (although better materials and smaller transistors can improve this), a 1 cycle = 1 instruction really just isn't capable of running at a high clock speed (Mhz).
There are several ways to improve speed. The direction Intel went with their chips (and many other vendors as well) is pipelining. Pipelining is when you take that fixed number of transistors and break it into groups based on when they do their work. A 2-stage pipeline is one where the instruction logic is separated into two steps. A 3-stage pipeline is three steps, and so on. A sequence of four instructions in a 3-stage pipeline executes like this:
1) The instruction is loaded and the first stage is executed in one clock cycle
2) The next instruction is loaded and it is executed in the first stage while the the first instruction is executed in the second stage (one clock cycle)
3) The third instruction executes in the first stage, the second instruction executes in the second stage, and the first instruction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
4) The fourth instruction executes in the first stage, the third instruction executes in the second stage, and the second instruction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
5) The fourth instruction executes in the second stage and the third instruction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
6) The fourth instrction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
So, as you can see, once the pipeline is filled, one instruction completes every clock cycle, but each instruction takes three cycles to complete. Neat trick, eh? There are a lot of hairy details to take care of between stages, and pipelined processors can get very complicated very fast, particularly if you're trying to implement an instruction set that wasn't designed for pipelined architechture (i.e. x86 instruction set).
Cray went a different way. A Cray process is uses vector instructions to process a lot of data in one instruction. Compare this to the pipeline where multiple instructions are in progess during any single clock cycle. A vector processor, on the other hand, has large sets of registers which are referenced as a vector and has instructions that can fill an entire vector from a particular chunk of memory, add two vectors and store the results in a third, multiply, divide, negate, whatever, a vector at a time. And then of course there is an instruction to store the contents of a vector into a particular chunk of memory.
Pipelining has the marketing advantage that if you make your pipeline long enough (the Pentium 4 is a 20-stage pipeline) then the stages take less time to execute and you can bump up the clock speed.
Vector architechture does not have this marketing advantage, but they are historically superior for certain applications and data sets (like weather modeling meteorological data).
Virus is a Latin word meaning poison. Virii is therefore the correct plural forms, although using a variety of forms is sometimes considered amusing among certain groups.
His point is that the patch was avaialble and public BEFORE code red.
I understand what his point was. And yes, I understand commercial software schedules and the need to ship code (I am a corporate cog by day). I understand that under the circumstances, Microsoft has done all they can. However, the statement that "Microsoft fixed the problem before it was a problem" is still wrong. The statement "Microsoft fixed the problem before it showed any symptoms" is accurate.
You people
I hope you're not trying to make a generalization about any particular group, because it would be just as easy to make generalizations about the complement to that group. And I certainly hope you're not trying to fit me into a pidgeonhole on account of a single comment on a particular website.
Microsoft fixed the problem before there was a problem.
I disagree. Code Red is not the problem, it is the symptom. If Microsoft had fixed the problem before there was a problem, then the buggy version of IIS never would have shipped.
Slashdot Mirror
the DMCA outlaws unauthorised attempts to bypass copy prevention mechanisms, regardless of intent of use.
Read this: Title 17, section 1201... it'll do you a world of good. In short: you're wrong.
Softroad, as far as I can tell, is completely dead. The group I'm working with is UFO Chicago (Users of Free Operating systems) and I've taken to calling our community networking project the Wireless Working Group (UFO-WWG). UFO-WWG doesn't have it's own web page.
About my user info... No, that's not my email, and I like it that way. Thanks for the heads up on the web page, that link's been dead for some time now.
If the movie industry begins seeing Linux as an asset and not a threat...
I think Hollywood's current overlords are too far gone to see Linux as a "safe" platform for them to release to. The MPAA is in a take-take-take mindset right now that will allow them to use Linux in the backend and threaten the people who produce software for Linux that goes against their wishes. The MPAA's current world view is that its copyrighted work is its exclusive and absolute property in all it's forms and where ever it may be found. I think Valenti genuinely believes in what he is saying.
It never hurt anyone to hope, did it?
No, it certainly doesn't, but one must be cautious. I think we're going to have to wait for the current crop of executives to all die off, and perhaps the next as well. Sooner or later the mood will change because free software and the philosophy behind it are not going away. The MPAA's current position, however, is self-defeating, and will eventually fade into the past.
legal ones
Licensed ones, you mean. Unlicensed players that were written for the purpose of interoperability with the format and by way of reverse engineering are just as legal as the licensed players. Calling the licensed players "legal players" implies otherwise.
Other than that one nit, I agree completely, the market for licensed players on Linux no longer exists.
An, ahem, acquaintence of mine once attached an extra mailbox for a nonexistent unit to an apartment building and received 'materials' there for a while.
Interesting, I'll have to try that sometime. Anyway, it still removes the node operator by one layer from whatever activity the end user might be doing. "But your honor, I personally delivered the connection information to this individual. That is my policy, so that I can verify that the person and the address exist."
isn't the zombie threat largely neutralised if you setup your router rules correctly?
...and other such quirky verification processes. There's very little a cracker could do about a policy like that. Oh, and have your router configured to let specific IPs (the ones you've assigned) get to the Internet. Then, once it becomes possible to put "client" hardware in IBSS mode with routing hooks for the driver, you can even prevent a rogue IP from talking to the rest of the subnet.
That and a good dose of administrative policy... i.e. "If you want to connect to my node, send me your snail mailing address and I will hand-deliver your IP address and routing information in a sealed envelope."
The whole boogeyman aspect of community wireless just kind of disappears with the right combination of policy and configuration.
There are motley crews beaming no-cost broadband in several dozen cities around the world. Unless they've managed to slather the entire Lower East Side with access points and get a fair number of end-user type participants, what the hell is so special about New York's version of this idea?
I'm doing this in Chicago (things are moving slowly). My personal favorites in the community wireless world are Seattle Wireless and Green Bay Professional Packet Radio (GBPPR has some great tech and a very experimental bent, but they won't give you the time of day unless you can convert mw to dBm in your head... fine with me).
The way DSL is going, I can't wait for stuff like this to pick up some momentum.
Orangejello (pronounced "orahn-jzello" -- I SWEAR this is REAL!!)
Did you know he's actually a twin? The other one is Lemonjello (le-MAHN-zhe-low).
Yeah, but could you imagine what FedEx would charge for a crate of naked slave girls?
How much do they weigh?
Try to imagine yourself as that developer. You've written some software, either because you needed it for something and it didn't exist, or you thought it would be cool to do, or you were just bored and anxious to write *anything*. You're not interested in selling it for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's because it's only a hobby for you, maybe it's because you have philosophical issues with selling software, maybe it's this, that, or another thing... whatever. At any rate, you wrote, you gave it away, and now you get lots of people writing you bug reports of varying degrees of helpfullness, people sending you patches that sometimes fix things or add features, and sometimes just waste your time, and there have been more than a few people who said they'd take care of something, like creating RPMs and debs on an ongoing basis and then failed to do it, and occassionally someone who has nothing better to say than, "This sucks, it doesn't work. You're the guy who wrote it, so you must suck, too."
What could you possibly receive from a pleased user that would make you ignore all of the bad parts and think, "I'm gonna keep this thing going"?
Send that.
Microsoft software is very cheap for schools, we are talking about $20-30 per seat (os+office), compare that to the hardware they run it on.
How often are those systems down? With a stable version of a free OS installed, you can start it up in the morning and shut down at night and never have a problem with the OS. Stable Windows platforms are not unheard of, but the people who operate those systems have spent as much time diving into the guts of the system as any free OS guru.
How much work is lost to GPFs and BSoDs? See above.
Are lost work and downtime figured into the $20-$30 per seat? I'll bet you were talking about licenses.
How much does it cost if you're not a school? The Free Software community doesn't care who you are or what you use the software for, it's all the same to them.
How can you compare the price of hardware to the price of an operating system?!? That's like comparing the price of a car to the price of gas!
add on support...
Support costs, assuming you yourself are not a guru:
For average problems (99% of them):
1) Twenty minutes to call your free OS guru buddy up on the phone and get advice.
2) Twenty minutes RingTFM.
3) Whatever you feel like paying for "professional support" from one of many support vendors.
For common tricky problems:
1) Up to couple hours with your local guru tweaking.
2) A day or two RingTFM.
3) Whatever you feel like paying for "professional support" from one of many support vendors.
For rare problems/one-of-a-kinds:
1) A few days with your local guru, maybe two gurus.
2) A week RingTFM.
3) More money than you have for "professional support" from one of many support vendors.
Compare this to support from a commercial vendor which is whatever they feel like charging you. In all honesty, you could get Win2K support from your local Win2K guru, but when you think about how much a Win2K guru is able to learn about Win2K and compare to what a free OS guru is able to learn about their free OS, is becomes clear that a free OS guru has access to far more details of the system.
add on the fact no users will know how to use it
Basically what your saying is no one should you use it because no one understands it because no one uses it. That's awefully circular. How about this... Try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use Windows. Did they know what word processor they wanted, or did they have to ask you to explain what a word processor is? None of this is intuitive, and assuming that Windows is intuitive just because the market is saturated with it is asinine.
add on the fact no one will use it when they leave school
This is below the belt. Let me ask you this: when this year's college freshmen graduate and have to get an apartment and start paying rent, do you really think they'll just play along and rent their software, too, when more than a few of their classmates were making some noises about free software? I expect that most of them will rent their software, but that a significant fraction will use a free OS over renting, and that will erode the sand that supports your second point. That year's college freshmen will be all the more likely to use a free OS.
ahh well... maybe if some of you tried doing what you suggest your'll understand.
I convinced my company to switch its dev platform to Linux. Price was a major consideration, as it's a very small company and the MS tools cost a shitload of money. Support was not a consideration because I support the systems. The fact that no one knew Linux was moot, because most of the people on the dev side had some experience with UNIX within the last ten years. Wow! Imagine that! Transferable skills! When was the last time you used your mad batch file skills instead of VB?
Etiquette, not Latin.
the judge can overrule the jury nullification and in most cases they do.
In most cases, there's nothing wrong with the law, since most laws are okay. Unless you mean most cases of jury nullification, in which case I really couldn't say.
The part most people have a problem with is Title 17, section 1201. That's the section that contains the circumvention and reverse engineering verbiage. Also take a look at section 1204. That's where the criminal provisions are.
The US seems to have a lot of double standards
Indeed. I don't know all of the details in the case, but there are some Americans in jail in China right now for violating Chinese law on China's turf... and the US Gov. is protesting it. It had a few headlines while protests were going on in the US over Sklyarov's arrest. I didn't bother reading the articles, mostly because I found the irony - and hipocrisy - so sickening.
Wow. I leave a thread for a day and look what happens. Everybody starts calling everybody else names.
There was a good link posted in another part of this thread... this one. I read it, I learned, I found out I didn't know what I thought I knew, and no one had to call me an imbecile or a moron or a stupid fuck to do it. You should all take a lesson from phase3000.
BTW, he was right... I've never had a formal lesson in Latin in my life. Everything I learned I learned from Slashdot.
If you really want to learn about Linux and how it works and all that, here are some useful footnotes:
Mandrake is the Mac of Linux
Redhat is the MS of Linux
You could do it with either of them, but with these two distributions, everything is supposed to fit into a framework that is predetermined by the respective vendor. All the hacks I did on Red Hat systems to get them to do what I wanted were just that... hacks. Mandrake is quite similar and my former roommate had the same sort of problems making his system learn new tricks.
Slackware is the UNIX of Linux
For learning, this is the system to do it on. I haven't actually used Slackware in a long time, and I've heard it has some kind of auto-tool thingy similar in kind to up2date or apt-get, but I don't recall its name. Installing Slackware is a learning experience. Maintaining Slackware is a learning experience (if you don't use the auto-tool). Anyone who took a Slack 96 system through either an a.out to ELF upgrade or a kernel 1.2 to kernel 2.0 upgrade knows this. I had fun with Slack and it gave me a good foundation, but it got tiring.
Debian is the Linux of Linux.
Installing Debian is a learning experience, but after that a trained monkey could maintain it. In fact, cron can be trained to do most of your maintainence - to the point that all you have to do is replace failed or full hard disks.
You never did Latin at school, did you?
Just enough to be dangerous... or so the saying goes. Thanks for the link.
Know why?
Seymour Cray is dead. Dr. Cray was one of those genius-nutcase types, he wanted to build a private tunnel from his home outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin to his cottage on Lake Superior, for one thing. I know for certain that he insisted on at least two things. He believed that if you pay a million dollars are more for something, you should 1) be able to sit on it and 2) have your choice of any color. For that reason, you can get your Cray supercomputer in any color you like, and all the older "C-shaped" models that you refer to had padded seats somewhere on the case.
Ye olde 8086 is much like the cannonical 1 cycle = 1 instruction CPU that you described. Since the minimum number of trasistors needed to execute an instruction is pretty much fixed (but occaisionally somebody somewhere figures out a way to reduce the number by a few), and the amount of time it takes for the signals to pass through a sequence of transistors is basically fixed (although better materials and smaller transistors can improve this), a 1 cycle = 1 instruction really just isn't capable of running at a high clock speed (Mhz).
There are several ways to improve speed. The direction Intel went with their chips (and many other vendors as well) is pipelining. Pipelining is when you take that fixed number of transistors and break it into groups based on when they do their work. A 2-stage pipeline is one where the instruction logic is separated into two steps. A 3-stage pipeline is three steps, and so on. A sequence of four instructions in a 3-stage pipeline executes like this:
1) The instruction is loaded and the first stage is executed in one clock cycle
2) The next instruction is loaded and it is executed in the first stage while the the first instruction is executed in the second stage (one clock cycle)
3) The third instruction executes in the first stage, the second instruction executes in the second stage, and the first instruction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
4) The fourth instruction executes in the first stage, the third instruction executes in the second stage, and the second instruction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
5) The fourth instruction executes in the second stage and the third instruction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
6) The fourth instrction executes in the third stage (one clock cycle)
So, as you can see, once the pipeline is filled, one instruction completes every clock cycle, but each instruction takes three cycles to complete. Neat trick, eh? There are a lot of hairy details to take care of between stages, and pipelined processors can get very complicated very fast, particularly if you're trying to implement an instruction set that wasn't designed for pipelined architechture (i.e. x86 instruction set).
Cray went a different way. A Cray process is uses vector instructions to process a lot of data in one instruction. Compare this to the pipeline where multiple instructions are in progess during any single clock cycle. A vector processor, on the other hand, has large sets of registers which are referenced as a vector and has instructions that can fill an entire vector from a particular chunk of memory, add two vectors and store the results in a third, multiply, divide, negate, whatever, a vector at a time. And then of course there is an instruction to store the contents of a vector into a particular chunk of memory.
Pipelining has the marketing advantage that if you make your pipeline long enough (the Pentium 4 is a 20-stage pipeline) then the stages take less time to execute and you can bump up the clock speed.
Vector architechture does not have this marketing advantage, but they are historically superior for certain applications and data sets (like weather modeling meteorological data).
Virus is a Latin word meaning poison. Virii is therefore the correct plural forms, although using a variety of forms is sometimes considered amusing among certain groups.
Virii
Virusen
Virusim
...
His point is that the patch was avaialble and public BEFORE code red.
I understand what his point was. And yes, I understand commercial software schedules and the need to ship code (I am a corporate cog by day). I understand that under the circumstances, Microsoft has done all they can. However, the statement that "Microsoft fixed the problem before it was a problem" is still wrong. The statement "Microsoft fixed the problem before it showed any symptoms" is accurate.
You people
I hope you're not trying to make a generalization about any particular group, because it would be just as easy to make generalizations about the complement to that group. And I certainly hope you're not trying to fit me into a pidgeonhole on account of a single comment on a particular website.
Microsoft fixed the problem before there was a problem.
I disagree. Code Red is not the problem, it is the symptom. If Microsoft had fixed the problem before there was a problem, then the buggy version of IIS never would have shipped.
You failed to differ.
Yep. I noticed that after the fact. I'm surprised (or maybe not so surprised) that no one else bothered to actually post the relevant part of the GPL.
Brain fart?
Yep.