If the Wii were actually readily available in the UK, it's pretty likely I'd have one, and it's likely that my ex would too, so that's another 2 they'd have sold. Hardly conclusive evidence that they'd have gone like mad, but the very fact that even now it's hard to find them suggests that they may have.
Besides, for the price of a PS3 I could buy a Wii *and* an XBox 360, or a XBox 360 and the HD-DVD addon and some games; I'm not poor, but the PS3 is looking to be too expensive for me at the moment.
Imagine that I am a user with the admin password and a pressing need to download and install CometWeatherBonziCursorBuddyBug. Please explain to me how the OS can prevent me from infecting it with the virus and/or trojan that came along with the installer.
I get a lot of spam - and by "a lot", I mean a couple of thousand items a day. A small proportion have viruses attached. Some of these viruses are.pif files, some are.scr (screensaver, but essentially any old exe), some are zipped. I have even seen *password protected* zip files that contain a virus. Despite this, I still get them, which implies that someone has received an email claiming to have a document for them to read, or a patch for them to install, or whatever, and have run the attached file. Some have even opened a zip file, typed in a password, and run the file within.
Explain to me exactly what the OS can do to protect itself from someone with admin access who is so careless of their actions. (Removing admin access is not an option, they have to be able to install software and apply updates as no-one else is going to do it for them)
But now that we are all used to tabs, and can open links in new tabs just as easily and quickly as in the current tab, does Joe Average really use the back button that much? (Honest question, as I have no idea)
Certainly I almost exclusively open links in new tabs unless I'm sure I'm done with the page I'm currently on, and with the number of comments I read here from people who describe having dozens of tabs open simultaneously, it seems I'm not the only one. I freely admit to not being Joe Average though, but then neither are the Mozilla team; I just wonder if they actually surveyed a group of average users, or thought "Hey, this'll be cool and make traversing the browser history really fast!".
You can't remove any copyright, patent, or atribution notices.
Credit where it's due, surely? If a person has made a contribution to the software, surely it's only fair enough to credit them if they so desire? I do appreciate your point about aesthetics (which I firmly believe matter), but in most cases surely a well-designed credits page/screen/listing output/whatever should be perfectly acceptable. For example, take a look at the credits for Firefox (Help->About->Credits); that's a very long list of people, but still nicely presented.
you can't really call it anti-business when the world's largest software vendor implemented parts of it in their own license
Of course you can. Just because one or more clauses are not anti-business doesn't mean that others, or the licence as a whole, is not. Not that I'm arguing that that is the case (as I'm not), just pointing out an easy rebuttal to your assertion.
1) There's nothing to prevent Flixster from sending employees out to Internet cafés to send the mails, or getting them to do it from home, etc. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but if they're truly determined they could do it. Alternatively, just buy a bunch of modems and get some free dial-up accounts, or use proxies, etc.
2) My company, like probably the vast majority, NATs its LAN. To the outside world, almost every single desktop appears to be behind the same IP address. If Google did prevent a single IP address from accessing more than some small-ish number of accounts, that would inconvenience far more people than just Flixster. I imagine that most other organisations (eg universities, schools, etc) have similar network setups - the days of every desktop having a publicly-routable IP address are long gone.
3) You suggest that Google spends time, money and effort fixing something that almost certainly isn't even a problem for them. The amount of mail this sort of service sends out is going to be a tiny fraction of the total that Google carries; I can't imagine that they even notice it.
The point remains that not only do these sites ask for your email account password, but people actually let them have them. I personally find it utterly incredible that they even ask; this is so open to potential abuse that I can hardly think where to start. Sure, you can always change your password if they do start to abuse it (if they don't change it first!), but by then the damage may already be done.
Perhaps you should re-read my post, in particular the bit where I essentially say that going to trial for something like copyright infringement should be a last resort; then perhaps consider that I make no mention of the case you're talking about or even, in fact, the one that the article is talking about (assuming they're not the same - no time to follow your link).
All I'm doing is refuting the claim that a child should never stand trial, as (as I have demonstrated) sometimes they leave us no choice. I say nothing about whether that is the case in this instance.
It was obvious what you were talking about, but for a lot of us a console simply isn't an attractive option for gaming; the sort of games that I like generally just don't work that well (or don't exist) on a console. (Not to mention that right now, I have a reasonably high-end PC with a 19" monitor, but (due to a long story) only a 14" portable TV and no chairs in my front room, so for me, a console is definitely out of the question.)
when someone isn't old enough to vote, drive a car, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette or have sex with their girl-/boyfriend, why should they be old enough to be put on trial?
For things like copyright infringement or petty theft, I mostly agree (although if it continues even after being told that it's wrong, formal legal punishment would seem the only remaining recourse). But if the crime is serious enough, what choice is there?
For Java (1.)6, follow the above but click "Settings" instead of "View...", and uncheck "Keep temporary files on my computer". Not tested, but that's the closest equivalent I could find to the above, and disables the "View..." button.
If you haven't activated Vista yet, I assume that it will no longer be possible to do so (and so the most you could use it for is about 120 days with registry hacking). If you have activated it, I imagine that WGA (or similar) will kill it soon enough.
I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.
You're thinking long-term though. Setting up the automated process costs a damn sight more to do now than even a large number of refunds processed through customer services costs; you'll never make management with that kind of thinking!
On a more serious note, though, if the cost to set up the automated process is great enough, you won't save any money anyway, as only a tiny minority of customers are going to be claiming a refund. It may well be cheaper in the long run to do it manually for those (relatively) few that do claim.
That has to be one of the worst ideas I've ever seen on slashdot. This is the guy's *job* you're talking about - ignoring allegations (especially ones that are correct!) and filing spurious counter-suits is extremely unprofessional.
The bottom line here is that he fucked up, and has been caught out. His only real option now is to handle the situation as professionally as possible; anything else risks real and lasting damage to his reputation, especially as first contact in this situation was made via the client who's site it was that was infringing. In fact, it's not just his reputation, but that of his friend and her firm.
Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, the question is how you go about recovering from them. Something like this you simply cannot afford to ignore.
I fail to understand why we DON'T have.xxx domain names. If we did, we could lump all the porn sites together, making them both easier to find and easier to block.
All of them? Even the ones that aren't hosted in the US and don't use one of the international tlds? In short, what makes you think that anyone in any country other than the US is going to take a blind bit of notice of the.xxx domain?
The way I see it, it's a large amount of effort for little or no real benefit; the only ones who would benefit would be the registrars and the companies set up to monitor it all.
Where do abuse reports get sent when someone starts sending spam using your domain name?
What precisely do you expect me to do about that? My domain name is in use in forged From: headers in spam, and has been for a year or two now. There is nothing that I can do about it. Believe me, I'd love to shut the low life scum down, I'm sick to death of the 2000+ spams, errors, bounces and abusive replies I get every single day because of it. Send me all the abuse complaints you want, but the emails aren't from me or any machine under my control.
What about take-down notices when someone posts copyrighted material on a website with your domain name?
To the contact details that the registrar can supply on receipt of a formal request (or if they get difficult, a subpoena). This does not require that those details are available via a whois request.
The Internet is already too anonymous without domain owners being willing to take responsibility for their own domain.
I absolutely take responsibility for my domain, and it absolutely does not require that my home address and telephone number be available to anyone who cares to run a whois query on it. Now to be honest I'm personally not that fussed, as I don't have a web presence on it, I just use it for email. However I really don't see that you make a persuasive case for disallowing proxy registrations.
The real problem, as I see it, is that the vast majority of computer users have absolutely no understanding whatsoever of even the most basic of good practices when it comes to using and securing a computer. Most infections are entirely avoidable, if only people would stop downloading and running executables from untrusted sources, or from trusted sources when they're not expecting them (eg an unexpected mail from a friend).
Remote exploits are actually comparatively rare; the problem would be a hell of a lot less severe if people would only take the time and effort to educate themselves and apply a little more caution and common sense.
Making a software producer liable for remote exploits in their products I can just about see, although open source would not be immune to that, so it's a can of worms you may not actually want to have opened. Making them liable for a user running a virus or trojan and rooting their own box in the process simply isn't going to work though.
There's an old saying, nine women can't have a baby in one month.
Just because you throw more resources at a problem doesn't necessarily mean that it gets solved any quicker (in many cases, past a certain point it actually gets slower).
SAP is a name, not an acronym. As for CRM and ERP, it's because take it from me, pitch documents and functional and requirements specs are already quite long enough without spelling absolutely everything out in full the whole time. (The response document for the pitch I was part of earlier today was 95 pages long; a report I helped produce a couple of weeks ago was 60 pages long, and so on)
Dark Messiah has a Direct 7 codepath; I know because I had huge problems getting the damn thing to run at all at first, and set it to DX7 mode via a command line switch as part of my attempts to get it to work.
Direct X provides APIs for graphics, sound, network, (controller/joystick/keyboard/mouse) input, etc.
OpenGL is a graphics API.
I can't comment on how Direct3D's functionality compares with OpenGL's, but the OP's first assertion at least is entirely correct; OGL is not a direct replacement for DX in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Wii were actually readily available in the UK, it's pretty likely I'd have one, and it's likely that my ex would too, so that's another 2 they'd have sold. Hardly conclusive evidence that they'd have gone like mad, but the very fact that even now it's hard to find them suggests that they may have.
Besides, for the price of a PS3 I could buy a Wii *and* an XBox 360, or a XBox 360 and the HD-DVD addon and some games; I'm not poor, but the PS3 is looking to be too expensive for me at the moment.
focus on making the OS stronger and hackproof
.pif files, some are .scr (screensaver, but essentially any old exe), some are zipped. I have even seen *password protected* zip files that contain a virus. Despite this, I still get them, which implies that someone has received an email claiming to have a document for them to read, or a patch for them to install, or whatever, and have run the attached file. Some have even opened a zip file, typed in a password, and run the file within.
Imagine that I am a user with the admin password and a pressing need to download and install CometWeatherBonziCursorBuddyBug. Please explain to me how the OS can prevent me from infecting it with the virus and/or trojan that came along with the installer.
I get a lot of spam - and by "a lot", I mean a couple of thousand items a day. A small proportion have viruses attached. Some of these viruses are
Explain to me exactly what the OS can do to protect itself from someone with admin access who is so careless of their actions. (Removing admin access is not an option, they have to be able to install software and apply updates as no-one else is going to do it for them)
Surely you've just agreed with the OP? It's an alpha release of Firefox 3.0 (which uses Gecko 1.9), not a release of Gecko 1.9 itself.
But now that we are all used to tabs, and can open links in new tabs just as easily and quickly as in the current tab, does Joe Average really use the back button that much? (Honest question, as I have no idea)
Certainly I almost exclusively open links in new tabs unless I'm sure I'm done with the page I'm currently on, and with the number of comments I read here from people who describe having dozens of tabs open simultaneously, it seems I'm not the only one. I freely admit to not being Joe Average though, but then neither are the Mozilla team; I just wonder if they actually surveyed a group of average users, or thought "Hey, this'll be cool and make traversing the browser history really fast!".
A friend of my ex bought his mother an XBox 360 a couple of months ago; last I heard, she was hooked on first person shooters.
She's 65.
You can't remove any copyright, patent, or atribution notices.
Credit where it's due, surely? If a person has made a contribution to the software, surely it's only fair enough to credit them if they so desire? I do appreciate your point about aesthetics (which I firmly believe matter), but in most cases surely a well-designed credits page/screen/listing output/whatever should be perfectly acceptable. For example, take a look at the credits for Firefox (Help->About->Credits); that's a very long list of people, but still nicely presented.
you can't really call it anti-business when the world's largest software vendor implemented parts of it in their own license
Of course you can. Just because one or more clauses are not anti-business doesn't mean that others, or the licence as a whole, is not. Not that I'm arguing that that is the case (as I'm not), just pointing out an easy rebuttal to your assertion.
There are three issues with this idea:
1) There's nothing to prevent Flixster from sending employees out to Internet cafés to send the mails, or getting them to do it from home, etc. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but if they're truly determined they could do it. Alternatively, just buy a bunch of modems and get some free dial-up accounts, or use proxies, etc.
2) My company, like probably the vast majority, NATs its LAN. To the outside world, almost every single desktop appears to be behind the same IP address. If Google did prevent a single IP address from accessing more than some small-ish number of accounts, that would inconvenience far more people than just Flixster. I imagine that most other organisations (eg universities, schools, etc) have similar network setups - the days of every desktop having a publicly-routable IP address are long gone.
3) You suggest that Google spends time, money and effort fixing something that almost certainly isn't even a problem for them. The amount of mail this sort of service sends out is going to be a tiny fraction of the total that Google carries; I can't imagine that they even notice it.
The point remains that not only do these sites ask for your email account password, but people actually let them have them. I personally find it utterly incredible that they even ask; this is so open to potential abuse that I can hardly think where to start. Sure, you can always change your password if they do start to abuse it (if they don't change it first!), but by then the damage may already be done.
Perhaps you should re-read my post, in particular the bit where I essentially say that going to trial for something like copyright infringement should be a last resort; then perhaps consider that I make no mention of the case you're talking about or even, in fact, the one that the article is talking about (assuming they're not the same - no time to follow your link).
All I'm doing is refuting the claim that a child should never stand trial, as (as I have demonstrated) sometimes they leave us no choice. I say nothing about whether that is the case in this instance.
It was obvious what you were talking about, but for a lot of us a console simply isn't an attractive option for gaming; the sort of games that I like generally just don't work that well (or don't exist) on a console. (Not to mention that right now, I have a reasonably high-end PC with a 19" monitor, but (due to a long story) only a 14" portable TV and no chairs in my front room, so for me, a console is definitely out of the question.)
Each individual copy of Vista is cheap to produce, but that first copy from which all the rest are made, that was incredibly expensive.
Software costs more than duplication and distribution; you have to recoup the initial production costs (plus profit) spread across every sale.
when someone isn't old enough to vote, drive a car, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette or have sex with their girl-/boyfriend, why should they be old enough to be put on trial?
Because sometimes, even little kids do terrible things. (Extreme cases I admit)
For things like copyright infringement or petty theft, I mostly agree (although if it continues even after being told that it's wrong, formal legal punishment would seem the only remaining recourse). But if the crime is serious enough, what choice is there?
For Java (1.)6, follow the above but click "Settings" instead of "View...", and uncheck "Keep temporary files on my computer". Not tested, but that's the closest equivalent I could find to the above, and disables the "View..." button.
If you haven't activated Vista yet, I assume that it will no longer be possible to do so (and so the most you could use it for is about 120 days with registry hacking). If you have activated it, I imagine that WGA (or similar) will kill it soon enough.
(Oh, and it was €77, so more like $100 or so)
I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.
You're thinking long-term though. Setting up the automated process costs a damn sight more to do now than even a large number of refunds processed through customer services costs; you'll never make management with that kind of thinking!
On a more serious note, though, if the cost to set up the automated process is great enough, you won't save any money anyway, as only a tiny minority of customers are going to be claiming a refund. It may well be cheaper in the long run to do it manually for those (relatively) few that do claim.
That has to be one of the worst ideas I've ever seen on slashdot. This is the guy's *job* you're talking about - ignoring allegations (especially ones that are correct!) and filing spurious counter-suits is extremely unprofessional.
The bottom line here is that he fucked up, and has been caught out. His only real option now is to handle the situation as professionally as possible; anything else risks real and lasting damage to his reputation, especially as first contact in this situation was made via the client who's site it was that was infringing. In fact, it's not just his reputation, but that of his friend and her firm.
Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, the question is how you go about recovering from them. Something like this you simply cannot afford to ignore.
I fail to understand why we DON'T have .xxx domain names. If we did, we could lump all the porn sites together, making them both easier to find and easier to block.
.xxx domain?
All of them? Even the ones that aren't hosted in the US and don't use one of the international tlds? In short, what makes you think that anyone in any country other than the US is going to take a blind bit of notice of the
The way I see it, it's a large amount of effort for little or no real benefit; the only ones who would benefit would be the registrars and the companies set up to monitor it all.
They don't have the choice to not be subject to the EU or its laws.
What, you think I can't leave if I get sick of it? I can choose not to use MS products, I can choose to leave Europe and live elsewhere.
Where do abuse reports get sent when someone starts sending spam using your domain name?
What precisely do you expect me to do about that? My domain name is in use in forged From: headers in spam, and has been for a year or two now. There is nothing that I can do about it. Believe me, I'd love to shut the low life scum down, I'm sick to death of the 2000+ spams, errors, bounces and abusive replies I get every single day because of it. Send me all the abuse complaints you want, but the emails aren't from me or any machine under my control.
What about take-down notices when someone posts copyrighted material on a website with your domain name?
To the contact details that the registrar can supply on receipt of a formal request (or if they get difficult, a subpoena). This does not require that those details are available via a whois request.
The Internet is already too anonymous without domain owners being willing to take responsibility for their own domain.
I absolutely take responsibility for my domain, and it absolutely does not require that my home address and telephone number be available to anyone who cares to run a whois query on it. Now to be honest I'm personally not that fussed, as I don't have a web presence on it, I just use it for email. However I really don't see that you make a persuasive case for disallowing proxy registrations.
The real problem, as I see it, is that the vast majority of computer users have absolutely no understanding whatsoever of even the most basic of good practices when it comes to using and securing a computer. Most infections are entirely avoidable, if only people would stop downloading and running executables from untrusted sources, or from trusted sources when they're not expecting them (eg an unexpected mail from a friend).
Remote exploits are actually comparatively rare; the problem would be a hell of a lot less severe if people would only take the time and effort to educate themselves and apply a little more caution and common sense.
Making a software producer liable for remote exploits in their products I can just about see, although open source would not be immune to that, so it's a can of worms you may not actually want to have opened. Making them liable for a user running a virus or trojan and rooting their own box in the process simply isn't going to work though.
There's an old saying, nine women can't have a baby in one month.
Just because you throw more resources at a problem doesn't necessarily mean that it gets solved any quicker (in many cases, past a certain point it actually gets slower).
SAP is a name, not an acronym. As for CRM and ERP, it's because take it from me, pitch documents and functional and requirements specs are already quite long enough without spelling absolutely everything out in full the whole time. (The response document for the pitch I was part of earlier today was 95 pages long; a report I helped produce a couple of weeks ago was 60 pages long, and so on)
Indeed. I have an Epson Stylus CX6600 (an all in one scanner/printer) which uses separate CMYK cartridges.
Dark Messiah has a Direct 7 codepath; I know because I had huge problems getting the damn thing to run at all at first, and set it to DX7 mode via a command line switch as part of my attempts to get it to work.
Direct X provides APIs for graphics, sound, network, (controller/joystick/keyboard/mouse) input, etc.
OpenGL is a graphics API.
I can't comment on how Direct3D's functionality compares with OpenGL's, but the OP's first assertion at least is entirely correct; OGL is not a direct replacement for DX in any way.