Jeez, why do you hang out at Slashdot? You obviously don't have any technical skills, or else you'd be making a decent wage. Plus you're always expressing your contempt for the opinions of other Slashdotters. Don't get enough flagellation at home?
Technology companies are always looking at their bland-but-profitable product lines and saying, "Hey, these aren't sexy! No wonder the investors hate us!" So they move into some new market that the consultants tell them is real hot — usually with disasterous results. The old business is either sold off or de-emphasized, to avoid "tarnishing" the company's image.
Borland did this once before, when they acquired a bunch of middleware and database companies and announced that they were no longer the tools maker Borland — they were the Enterprise Software company, Inprise. The Enterprise stuff went nowhere, the IDEs continued to make enough money to keep the company afloat, and Inprise eventually admitted defeat and changed its name back.
Here's what will happen this time: the IDE business will be sold to some smart investor who knows that these tools have a loyal customer base. Borland will keep the name this time, and the spinoff will be called Delphiware or something. Without its reliable income stream from the IDEs, Borland with go bankrupt (or maybe just get dissolved, since they have a lot of cash), and Delphiware will buy the name back. And we'll be right back where we started — again.
So if you build a chair that's supposed to be safe for a 400-pound person, you should design it so it will stand up to being run over by a 2-ton truck? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I won't give you a hard time for not RingTFA, since I'm pretty sloppy too. But stop and think for a second: how could anybody sue NTP? They're an IP company with no actual products!
Trying to protect a keyboard design is hardly "crushing with litigation". Nor is trying to grab a few million bucks in exchange for some old patents, which is what NTP originally tried to do.
Slashdotters see evil conspiracies every time somebody sues somebody else over IP. I'm no fan of IP laws, which now seem designed to stifle the innovation they were originally meant to promote. But as long as these laws are in place, dealing with them is just a part of doing business. Companies that enforce their patent "rights" are doing so because that's how they survive — not because Satan is whispering in their ears.
Ok...so...basically as pointed out in any number of the previous RIM/NTP stories, RIM started as a bunch of patent litigating bastards.
Oh gee, it must be true than.
RIM has a real product which they have carefully designed, successfully marketed, and valued by millions of consumers. How does that make them "litigating bastards"? NTP sued them. RIM probably should have just thrown NTP a few million bucks and settled the case early on. The fact that they were too self-righteous to do so is a symptom of stupidity, not love of litigation. It's the Randal Schwartz at Intel syndrome, where some dweeb is so obsessed with convincing people that he's done nothing wrong, he just digs himself in deeper.
As for NTP: Sure, they exist now purely to enforce some absurd patents. But these are not you usual brain-dead "submarine" patents. They're the legacy of a serious inventor who spent his entire life trying to create better ways for people to communicate. No bad guy there.
The one bad thing here is that various people let their egos get ahead of their judgment. Which is something I see on Slashdot every day.
You're kind of missing the point. Of course support for WOL has to be in the LAN card. But that support isn't much use if the LAN card isn't getting power. So using WOL expends a small amount of power even when the system is off, just as the instant-on feature of TV sets does.
Why is Paypal responsible for a pseudo-Paypal site? That's like holding you responsible for an identity thief who's using your social security number. The only people who can shut down a phishing site is their hosting provider.
Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of providers who just ignore their abuse emails. Phishing scammers seem to use small, poorly managed providers that just don't have it together to respond to abuse complaints.
After being ignored about a fake MSN site, I did contact MSN support — not because it's their responsibility, but because the provider might pay more attention to Microsoft's lawyers than to me. The boilerplate response didn't fill me with optimism.
I tried to find a contact at the FTC or the Secret Service, which are supposed to be fighting electronic fraud. After all, they have the power to walk in and seize the offending server. But they seem to be in hiding. Probably already have more complaints than they can hope to respond to.
Anyway, what's the point? Even if we could shut down all the domestic phishing sites, the scammers would just move their hosting offshore.
Sure, Microsoft adds security holes as quickly as they patch the old ones — often in the process of patching the old ones. But no matter how many times they screw up, they will always insist that they are working very hard to fix things. As indeed they are!
I do object to the comparison with Tony Soprano. That dude has never engaged in the protection racket. Just relatively honest loan sharking, illicit gambling, fraud, armed robbery, and embezzlement. He'd never make it as a TV antihero if he were shown bullying honest shopkeepers out their hard-earned profits!
What is the point of reviewing 5 different programs if they all get essentially the same score?
There's no point if you don't read the reviews and just pick the product that gets the highest rating. Which no person of reasonable intelligence does.
What you're really complaining about is that the reviewer doesn't validate your belief that Azereus is grossly superior in every way. You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but you'll notice that many people in this discussion disagree with you.
You might get that impression, because SGI was the best-known maker of graphics workstations, and for a long time they used MIPS chips exclusively. But I don't recall any other GWS company using MIPS at all. I think HP's PA-RISC was as big as MIPS for a while. Plus POWER and SPARC had significant market shares.
I don't know the hard figures, but I think SGI never really dominated the GWS market. They just got most of the press because a ton of Hollywood SFX were generated on their MIPS workstations.
The fact that Apple considered SPARC and settled on POWER has a certain pathetic fan-boy air to it. The Mac is supposed to be the ultimate end-user system, "the computer for the rest of us", a system that's really easy to use. Such a system is (in theory) mostly purchased by technically naive people who don't need all that extra processing power. But Apple always had to have the coolest hardware, engineering it themselves when they could, and buying the fanciest stuff when they had to buy off-the-shelf. Which is why their manufacturing costs used to be out of control, and it took them so long to get prices down where they could compete seriously with PCs.
Then again, the Coolness Factor has probably done more to sell Macs then any supposed superiority in usability.
The truth be told, I've never played Half Life. My hand-eye coordination is impaired, so I suck at real-time games. Though I've often meant to try HL anyway, because the story intrigues me. And drsquare's childish complaint about the tedium of the first part makes me all the more interested.
What I'm actually doing is harassing drsquare. Immature, I know, but I get tired of the way he whines at everybody he disagrees with (which is pretty much everybody) usually without getting his facts straight or even properly reading the post he's responding to. So I constantly read his posts, and point out all the flaws in his arguments. Whenever I do this, he throws a snit and goes offline, thus raising the overall quality of discussions a tiny increment for a few weeks.
That all assumes the intruder knows in advance what exploit he's going to use. Most intruders are script kiddies who just try every exploit that's written into their scripts. That takes time and bandwidth. Also, if you're not online all the time, you're less likely to get a script kiddy's attention.
Which is not to say that a poorly protected dialup user won't roll snake eyes eventually. But it'll definitely take a lot longer.
Lately, we've seen a lot of people employing catch phrases and jargon incorrectly, and I'm convinced that these people base their misunderstanding on muddled explanations in Wikipedia. The article you point to is technically correct, but it's full of convoluted arguments and trivia. No wonder you got the concept wrong.
(The one I'm getting pretty tired of is "ad hominem", which many people seem to think is Latin for "You hurt my feelings!")
Briefly put, Security Through Obscurity is the assumption that your security holes will not be found because they're in a place few people will think to look. That strategy was never a good one, but it used to be more effective than it is now. Back in the 50s, when few computers were online the effectiveness of STO was merely unacceptable. Nowadays, the effectiveness of STO is pretty much non-existant — as long as the computer is online.
Now a computer using dialup is less hackable than one using DSL, because it's not always available, and because it's harder to probe when it is. The difference has nothing to do with "obscurity" — there's just less bandwidth for a hacker to play with.
Of course, a dialup connection when no security measures is still pretty fucking dangerous. But you're wrong to claim that there's no difference at all.
Gawd, that article has more speculation and second-hand information than any Wikipedia article I've seen. The problem with Wikipedia is not the gross inaccuracies (those get corrected pretty quickly — most of the time). It's the poorly researched and hard-to-disprove "facts" that are left in in the name of NPOV.
The OED, ooh! Wish I could afford access to it. But my M-W says the same thing. And I did mention there was nothing special about putting the two words together.
What makes you think the public doesn't take privacy seriously? Try getting caught peeking in somebody's bedroom window, and you'll find out how serious most people are about their privacy. It's just that for most people don't need the level of privacy that the Tor Network provides. Someobdy goes to that much trouble to obfuscate their internet traffic definitely deserves to be called a "geek".
Slashdot Mirror
Learn to read, dude. Didn't say "there is no America". Said, "there is no continent named America." And there isn't.
Jeez, why do you hang out at Slashdot? You obviously don't have any technical skills, or else you'd be making a decent wage. Plus you're always expressing your contempt for the opinions of other Slashdotters. Don't get enough flagellation at home?
As I recall, you couldn't edit any source module that couldn't fit in a 64K segment! I guess that's one way to eliminate code bloat...
Borland did this once before, when they acquired a bunch of middleware and database companies and announced that they were no longer the tools maker Borland — they were the Enterprise Software company, Inprise. The Enterprise stuff went nowhere, the IDEs continued to make enough money to keep the company afloat, and Inprise eventually admitted defeat and changed its name back.
Here's what will happen this time: the IDE business will be sold to some smart investor who knows that these tools have a loyal customer base. Borland will keep the name this time, and the spinoff will be called Delphiware or something. Without its reliable income stream from the IDEs, Borland with go bankrupt (or maybe just get dissolved, since they have a lot of cash), and Delphiware will buy the name back. And we'll be right back where we started — again.
So if you build a chair that's supposed to be safe for a 400-pound person, you should design it so it will stand up to being run over by a 2-ton truck? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I zoomed in all the way, but I still don't see them!
Does anybody know where I left my keys?
People keep telling me I hate George Bush. But I don't even know the dude. WTF?
I won't give you a hard time for not RingTFA, since I'm pretty sloppy too. But stop and think for a second: how could anybody sue NTP? They're an IP company with no actual products!
Slashdotters see evil conspiracies every time somebody sues somebody else over IP. I'm no fan of IP laws, which now seem designed to stifle the innovation they were originally meant to promote. But as long as these laws are in place, dealing with them is just a part of doing business. Companies that enforce their patent "rights" are doing so because that's how they survive — not because Satan is whispering in their ears.
RIM has a real product which they have carefully designed, successfully marketed, and valued by millions of consumers. How does that make them "litigating bastards"? NTP sued them. RIM probably should have just thrown NTP a few million bucks and settled the case early on. The fact that they were too self-righteous to do so is a symptom of stupidity, not love of litigation. It's the Randal Schwartz at Intel syndrome, where some dweeb is so obsessed with convincing people that he's done nothing wrong, he just digs himself in deeper.
As for NTP: Sure, they exist now purely to enforce some absurd patents. But these are not you usual brain-dead "submarine" patents. They're the legacy of a serious inventor who spent his entire life trying to create better ways for people to communicate. No bad guy there.
The one bad thing here is that various people let their egos get ahead of their judgment. Which is something I see on Slashdot every day.
You're kind of missing the point. Of course support for WOL has to be in the LAN card. But that support isn't much use if the LAN card isn't getting power. So using WOL expends a small amount of power even when the system is off, just as the instant-on feature of TV sets does.
Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of providers who just ignore their abuse emails. Phishing scammers seem to use small, poorly managed providers that just don't have it together to respond to abuse complaints.
After being ignored about a fake MSN site, I did contact MSN support — not because it's their responsibility, but because the provider might pay more attention to Microsoft's lawyers than to me. The boilerplate response didn't fill me with optimism.
I tried to find a contact at the FTC or the Secret Service, which are supposed to be fighting electronic fraud. After all, they have the power to walk in and seize the offending server. But they seem to be in hiding. Probably already have more complaints than they can hope to respond to.
Anyway, what's the point? Even if we could shut down all the domestic phishing sites, the scammers would just move their hosting offshore.
I do object to the comparison with Tony Soprano. That dude has never engaged in the protection racket. Just relatively honest loan sharking, illicit gambling, fraud, armed robbery, and embezzlement. He'd never make it as a TV antihero if he were shown bullying honest shopkeepers out their hard-earned profits!
That's true, but the service is still usually called "GPS", even though it doesn't use the satellite system. That probably what he was referring to.
Lots of GPRS accounts are flat rate. In the U.S., it's really the only affordable way to use that protocol.
Why shouldn't all the products get the same ratings if they're the same overall quality?
What you're really complaining about is that the reviewer doesn't validate your belief that Azereus is grossly superior in every way. You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but you'll notice that many people in this discussion disagree with you.
I don't know the hard figures, but I think SGI never really dominated the GWS market. They just got most of the press because a ton of Hollywood SFX were generated on their MIPS workstations.
The fact that Apple considered SPARC and settled on POWER has a certain pathetic fan-boy air to it. The Mac is supposed to be the ultimate end-user system, "the computer for the rest of us", a system that's really easy to use. Such a system is (in theory) mostly purchased by technically naive people who don't need all that extra processing power. But Apple always had to have the coolest hardware, engineering it themselves when they could, and buying the fanciest stuff when they had to buy off-the-shelf. Which is why their manufacturing costs used to be out of control, and it took them so long to get prices down where they could compete seriously with PCs.
Then again, the Coolness Factor has probably done more to sell Macs then any supposed superiority in usability.
What I'm actually doing is harassing drsquare. Immature, I know, but I get tired of the way he whines at everybody he disagrees with (which is pretty much everybody) usually without getting his facts straight or even properly reading the post he's responding to. So I constantly read his posts, and point out all the flaws in his arguments. Whenever I do this, he throws a snit and goes offline, thus raising the overall quality of discussions a tiny increment for a few weeks.
Which is not to say that a poorly protected dialup user won't roll snake eyes eventually. But it'll definitely take a lot longer.
(The one I'm getting pretty tired of is "ad hominem", which many people seem to think is Latin for "You hurt my feelings!")
Briefly put, Security Through Obscurity is the assumption that your security holes will not be found because they're in a place few people will think to look. That strategy was never a good one, but it used to be more effective than it is now. Back in the 50s, when few computers were online the effectiveness of STO was merely unacceptable. Nowadays, the effectiveness of STO is pretty much non-existant — as long as the computer is online.
Now a computer using dialup is less hackable than one using DSL, because it's not always available, and because it's harder to probe when it is. The difference has nothing to do with "obscurity" — there's just less bandwidth for a hacker to play with.
Of course, a dialup connection when no security measures is still pretty fucking dangerous. But you're wrong to claim that there's no difference at all.
Games like HL are generally aimed at people with with more than 5 seconds of attention span.
Anyway, Gremlins only fiddle with airplanes.
What makes you think the public doesn't take privacy seriously? Try getting caught peeking in somebody's bedroom window, and you'll find out how serious most people are about their privacy. It's just that for most people don't need the level of privacy that the Tor Network provides. Someobdy goes to that much trouble to obfuscate their internet traffic definitely deserves to be called a "geek".