Man.. why don't people just follow some simple procedures to protect BOTH sides from fraud? Keep records of everything, keep a paper copy of every document, credit card receipt, packing slip. When you talk to them, keep a record of their names, the content of the conversation, and the date.
If they refuse to honor the terms of the warranty - and you've made a good faith effort to prove that you legitimately own the box, they charged your credit card, you received it - you take them to small claims court. Disputing the charge with your CC company is the wrong move if the charge wasn't fraudulent, and you received the merchandise. Look at it from their perspective - you promised to pay for some merchandise by using your credit card, and then you went back on that promise.
In my state there is a very strict process for taking a business to small claims court. Before going to court you have to send a 30-day demand letter, allowing the merchant time to resolve the matter out of court. If you don't settle, you can take them to court. And if you've documented everything well, you will probably win.
I too have benefitted from spam.. I now have 8 diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities, I accept 24 different credit cards, and I've refinanced my morgatge 11 times. I can also find out any secret about anyone using this powerful software I bought.
Why...however are they supposed to send messages if we don't give them your address!
I have no idea. My ISP just forced me to change e-mail addresses.. my new one is @attbi.com. So it's been active for a month or two, I've given it to nobody. And I got my first spam on it the other day. Now, I HOPE that the spammer was clever and just took my username off my old domain (@ne.mediaone.net) and slapped it on the new domain, because it's the same. Because the only other explanation is that they got my address from AT&T broadband somehow.
Please indulge me, and let me try to trap you in your own theory.
If the software isn't commercial, or it's not a bug (see above), or a newer version of your software doesn't have the bug, then you shouldn't be liable.
What if the newer version is not a free upgrade? Are you obliged to provide fixes for every version of the software you have ever released?
What if you discontinued the product line? Are you obliged to continue putting out security fixes?
What if you discontinued the product line and went broke? Are your creditors responsible?
What if you discontinued the product and its functionality was incorporated into another product?
Is free (as in beer) software commercial? Is freeware commercial? How about demoware? Pure (no-nag, no-cripple) shareware?
How about a small, unsupported, free utility by a large software firm? I guess we can kiss those presents good-bye.
How about an incompatibility? Your software works fine, unless vendor xyz's software is running at the same time. After all the finger pointing, is anyone to blame?
Please don't ever apply for a job as a software developer at my company.
I am a software engineer, and I don't need a job. Thanks for the offer though.
There is a constantly growing body of knowledge about proven insecure designs in software; likewise there is a growing body of knowledge about best practices in software development processes. Are they perfect, or failsafe? No. But they represent adequate due care in protecting one's customers. They can and should be applied by anyone building and distributing software. Period.
You haven't explained to me why we need this. Regulations should never be applied unless they are absolutely necessary - i.e. in the case of personal safety. Since customers already vote with their dollars (if you make useless, buggy software then nobody's going to buy it) why do we need artificial restrictions imposed on developers?
If every piece of software adhered to current best practices, we wouldn't have any new innovation would we? New algorithms? They're against the law (they're not certified as secure). Any more flexibility, and you open the door for unforeseen bugs and liabilities. In case you haven't noticed, the law is not a place for ambiguity. You can't just have a law, "thou shalt not code insecure software."
You seem perfectly suited for bottom-line, 'no new idea is a good idea' middle management. On second thought, I really don't want to work at your company. Please tell HR that I like to come up with my own ideas sometimes, which is clearly against your company policy.
Out of curiousity, why do you think the software industry should get a free ride?
I don't think the software industry should be held to the same standards as, say, architects and structural engineers. I'm sure we could create amazing, cheap buildings if we weren't concerned about them crashing occasionally. But, we need buildings that can't crash, even once. However, we tolerate software that crashes occasionally due to quicker development cycles, lower costs, and more innovation.
I'm not in favor of a free ride.. of course I believe that software used in medical and nuclear plant situations needs to be rigidly tested and certified. Safety is the key - we should regulate industries based on safety, not arbitrarily impose the same restrictions on all industries.
For an open-source advocacy site, I'm puzzled at how many people think that software should be strictly regulated! Don't you realize that this is at odds with the basic philosophy of free software?
Software engineering, as it is today, is pretty much a misnomer. There is not much about software production that resembles engineering, at least in most shops. I would guess that most programming doesn't adhere exactly to engineering principles - rigid design, development and testing cycles. I haven't done a formal 'black-box' test on my code in a while - I don't write the kind of software that needs formal engineering.
And why should it be different? Who's to say that it would be better if we regulated software as much as we regulated buildings, or cars? There's no way of knowing, but I say that additional regulation will only slow innovation. Buildings and cars are regulated solely in the name of safety. Most software is not 'mission-critical,' meaning people's lives are not on the line. There are already certifications for medical software, nuclear plant software, etc. I'm in favor of those, but I don't see the need for regulating standard commercial software.
You could argue that a mail server is 'mission-critical' in another way - maybe it doesn't threaten human lives, but it definitely needs high availability. The important thing to realize, is this is a business concern and not a safety concern. If your business needs high availability mail software, it should be up to YOU to seek out that software and test it yourself. It shouldn't be up to the courts to enforce your right to sue a vendor because they didn't provide what you needed.
Also, in response to: If software companies dedicated 1/10 the effort to testing their products that they do to marketing them, 99.99% of problems would be caught before the products ever shipped.
You can say a lot about software vendors, but there's no way to back up a claim that none of the big vendors do actual software engineering. MS employs some of the best software engineers in the business, tests their software for millions of hours, yet they keep putting out bug-ridden products. Clearly there's some other force at work here, preventing MS from releasing correct software.
That's a perfectly valid reason to USE open source software. You have not described a valid reason to SUE a closed-source vendor. The fact that there's a free alternative doesn't mean that closed-source vendors must match the 'availability' of open source code.
I guess you're right about pure information. Information that is intentionally or negligently wrong, such as a missing warning, should of course be prevented. That's more of a truth in advertising, or libel-type of concern.
self-appointed policeman of the internet
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self-appointed policeman of the internet
I hate that term. Nobody just went and 'appointed' themselves policeman. Everything the blacklists do is completely voluntary - you (or your ISP) do not have to participate if you don't want to. This is in contrast to real police, who keep society in order as part of our social contract. We don't have a choice about that one.
Software is not a car
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Software isn't a car. Software isn't a cigarette. Read your EULA - there is no warranty on software that says it will meet your needs. It's just information, just a bunch of bits. It's not a product that can be regulated, or made 'safely.'
Who is to say what's a bug? Can I be sued because there's a feature a customer wants that I didn't implement? What if I wrote sendmail 10 years ago, and now someone sues me because I wrote an open relay? But there wasn't any spam when I wrote it. There is a grey area between bug, and undesired behavior. Let's say I write a word processor. Do I get sued because my app won't let you print from the print preview screen? Because it doesn't save your default tab stops?
You can't regulate software.. and if customers don't like something, they'll look to another vendor. This is already a self-regulated open market folks, move along..
if common sense prevailed, it would be the mail server vendor in court for producing insecure mail server software, not a third party for happening to send requests that unintentionally crash poorly-written servers
You are so wrong! Think about what you are saying for a second. You are saying that software vendors should be held liable for producing faulty software. What does this apply to? Only Lotus, Microsoft, and the big guys? What about holding Alan Cox and Linus liable for bugs in the Linux kernel? I hope you don't want to hold security programmers liable for demos of exploits. Software is fundamentally different from a product that can be recalled and judged unsafe. The marginal cost of software is zero, and it is not a physical product - it's just information.
Do you have any idea how it would cripple the software industry if they operated under the constant threat of product liability suits? What about old software? Really old versions of Sendmail were set to open relay by default. Certainly it's not the fault of the programmers that they didn't protect against spam, BEFORE SPAM EXISTED. Now think about a software industry where a pack of lawyers has to review every design document, every line of code in the name of 'product safety.'
This is clearly a case where the free market already solves these problems, and your foolish solution would only serve to artificially disable an industry. If companies are upset with Domino, they will eventually switch to a better software package. If Lotus cared about their customers, they would have patched their software. I can't believe it when people like you say these things without thinking of the consequences.
You did hit on one correct point - intent. It's unfortunate that ORBZ was in danger of being sued. They shouldn't be in danger, due to intent. They have no intent to DOS random Lotus Domino servers.. but it seems like they just can't risk it. If I intentionally exploited the Domino bug to crash servers, well that's another story. It's not Domino's problem, it's mine, and I should be carted to jail for that.
Even putting aside the question of whether ANY clickwrap EULA license is valid, I don't think users should be afraid of enforcement of this.
We already know that there are whole clauses in licenses that are unenforcable - there are certain rights you can't give up in a contract, certain types of liability that a manufacturer can't disclaim. If I make an unsafe product I can still be held accountable even though the license disclaimed all liability. How is this different? The contract can't dictate whether you can use it with other people's software.. that's your own decision.
Imagine if the BSA was allowed to raid your office and enforce 'interoperability!' MS ends up suing you because you ran VNC on XP desktops, Oracle sues you because there was an SQL Server on the same machine as Oracle, and Netscape sues you because they're angry at the world!
Oh my god.. something about that video just freaks me out.. he keeps saying "WOOOOOO DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS", and there's the blasting techno music. I can't watch it for too long, or I have the urge to jam an icepick into the face of a baby seal.
You're thinking of one of the hacked versions. There were ones where you could shoot fireballs while you were jumping, throw people while you were over their head, etc. In contrast, SF2 Turbo: Hyper fighting was as close to perfect as they get.
I'm afraid that seeing the Ep1 trailer so many times ruined my enjoyment of the movie before I even got to the theater. Trailers do reveal a lot of plot that some people want to be surprised with - including me. I mean, the Ep1 trailer basically reveals that Qui-Gon dies! What else could Obi-Wan be screeching "Noooooooo!" about? We know Anakin doesn't get turned to the dark side yet, we know Jar Jar doesn't die, so of course he has to be bitching about Qui Gon dying.
So, I'm going to make an effort not to see the Ep2 trailer AT ALL. I know it'll be hard.. I don't know what I'll do when I go to movies. I don't watch live TV anyway, so I'll tivo through any tv commercials. Well it'll be tough. I'll see if I can just MINIMIZE exposure to the trailer.
It's a cool service, but consumers aren't going to pay for it. It's just a program that crawls a site and downloads it to your Palm.. it is possible to write software that will sync a webpage to your palm without ever going through a "service provider" like AvantGo.
Microsoft doesn't charge people for the priviledge of using IE to crawl a website.. it's no different here. AvantGo can boast one thing - a well-written cross platform browser for handhelds. they are not a service provider, they're a software company.
Piracy has seriously undermined the software industry for years:
Blah.. when people make this argument they don't seem to back it up. This is because there's no way to prove how much copying software affects companies' profits. There's no way to prove how much Napster affects the music industry's profits. There's no way to prove how much 'unsecured' computer hardware takes away from Disney's profits.
I will guess, and it's only a guess, that by far those who pirate software would not buy that software if it weren't available for free. You'll see a lot of commercial software supporters chanting, "every copy is a lost sale".. but they don't back up the claim! The software industry seems to be doing fine, by the way. Maybe nobody buys shareware, but maybe the reason is that 99% of shareware is crap.
Do these software guys blame free software as well? "Every copy of gnucash is a lost Quicken sale.." Really, what's the difference between addressing a need with gnucash or with Quicken, when the marginal cost of software is zero?
It's unfortunate that you blame ACPI and AMD.. in all likelihood, these problems are due to old PCI devices that can't play nice with shared IRQ's. If you have one of these unfortunate cards, you may have to disable ACPI just so you can get it onto its own IRQ line.
You may also be blaming VIA for AMD's problems.. their earlier AMD chipsets were much more unstable than the kt266a, their current one, and kt333, the upcoming chipset. It used to be a necessity to put their 4in1 chipset drivers on a new OS install ASAP. You still need the drivers for Win2000 and below, but Windows XP has native VIA drivers that are WHQL certified and are very stable.
I'm a happy AMD/VIA user. I have a Shuttle AK31A (KT266A) board with an AthlonXP, running WinXP. I have had my problems with AMD/VIA however.. my first AMD/VIA was an Abit KT7 which had the KT133 chipset. It was much more unstable and it had major issues with some of my older PCI cards.
It's been a WHQL requirement for years. I don't know about this motherboard, but on ABIT and Shuttle boards you can re-enable the ACPI option by flashing a modified BIOS. Yeah it's a little risky, but the program that edits the BIOS file is made by Award - it's the same program the MB manufacturers use to enable and disable other options.
Read here. Personally I don't think you should boycott SOYO, Abit, or any other manufacturer because they wanted to get WHQL..
Now I really, truly, mean no offense to your operating system when I say this. I don't write OS'es, and yes I have no idea how hard it is to write the low level code. But, the PCI spec has been around for close to ten years, and shared IRQ's have always been a (optional) capability for PCI devices. Initial devices had problems with shared IRQ's. But today with no ISA, and card manufacturers learning to play nice, shared IRQ's are a reality. Shouldn't your OS support them by now? I have 2 network cards, SCSI, and sound on the same IRQ right now, and it works fine in Red Hat 7.2 and Windows XP.
The proof: FastTrack doesn't allow people to share MP3's encoded above 128kbps. How ? Because the restriction is encoded in their library, which is used by the clients they control.
Actually the restriction is in the registry, and it's simple to change. More importantly, the restriction isn't imposed by any other computer on the network - it's imposed by the software on your computer, not a central server. They could have their software to ignore files that begin with the letter b, but this is hardly control over the network.
No. The newest versions of Outlook won't let you run a dangerous attachment such as a.EXE,.PIF, etc. It doesn't block incoming viruses, it just won't let you run them. Isn't that what the Linux zealots wanted? ('Well our OS doesn't run viruses automatically')
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If they refuse to honor the terms of the warranty - and you've made a good faith effort to prove that you legitimately own the box, they charged your credit card, you received it - you take them to small claims court. Disputing the charge with your CC company is the wrong move if the charge wasn't fraudulent, and you received the merchandise. Look at it from their perspective - you promised to pay for some merchandise by using your credit card, and then you went back on that promise.
In my state there is a very strict process for taking a business to small claims court. Before going to court you have to send a 30-day demand letter, allowing the merchant time to resolve the matter out of court. If you don't settle, you can take them to court. And if you've documented everything well, you will probably win.
It seems that if an OEM does not ship Windows on every PC they ship that they are severely penalized
In another remarkable turn of events, bears have been seen defecating in the woods!
I too have benefitted from spam.. I now have 8 diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities, I accept 24 different credit cards, and I've refinanced my morgatge 11 times. I can also find out any secret about anyone using this powerful software I bought.
Why are you buying IBM storage products? Don't you know their drives suck? :)
I have no idea. My ISP just forced me to change e-mail addresses.. my new one is @attbi.com. So it's been active for a month or two, I've given it to nobody. And I got my first spam on it the other day. Now, I HOPE that the spammer was clever and just took my username off my old domain (@ne.mediaone.net) and slapped it on the new domain, because it's the same. Because the only other explanation is that they got my address from AT&T broadband somehow.
No. There's no such thing as an opt-in mailing list. No reputable marketer will sell an e-mail address, ever.
If the software isn't commercial, or it's not a bug (see above), or a newer version of your software doesn't have the bug, then you shouldn't be liable.
What if the newer version is not a free upgrade? Are you obliged to provide fixes for every version of the software you have ever released?
What if you discontinued the product line? Are you obliged to continue putting out security fixes?
What if you discontinued the product line and went broke? Are your creditors responsible?
What if you discontinued the product and its functionality was incorporated into another product?
Is free (as in beer) software commercial? Is freeware commercial? How about demoware? Pure (no-nag, no-cripple) shareware? How about a small, unsupported, free utility by a large software firm? I guess we can kiss those presents good-bye.
How about an incompatibility? Your software works fine, unless vendor xyz's software is running at the same time. After all the finger pointing, is anyone to blame?
I am a software engineer, and I don't need a job. Thanks for the offer though.
There is a constantly growing body of knowledge about proven insecure designs in software; likewise there is a growing body of knowledge about best practices in software development processes. Are they perfect, or failsafe? No. But they represent adequate due care in protecting one's customers. They can and should be applied by anyone building and distributing software. Period.
You haven't explained to me why we need this. Regulations should never be applied unless they are absolutely necessary - i.e. in the case of personal safety. Since customers already vote with their dollars (if you make useless, buggy software then nobody's going to buy it) why do we need artificial restrictions imposed on developers?
If every piece of software adhered to current best practices, we wouldn't have any new innovation would we? New algorithms? They're against the law (they're not certified as secure). Any more flexibility, and you open the door for unforeseen bugs and liabilities. In case you haven't noticed, the law is not a place for ambiguity. You can't just have a law, "thou shalt not code insecure software."
You seem perfectly suited for bottom-line, 'no new idea is a good idea' middle management. On second thought, I really don't want to work at your company. Please tell HR that I like to come up with my own ideas sometimes, which is clearly against your company policy.
I don't think the software industry should be held to the same standards as, say, architects and structural engineers. I'm sure we could create amazing, cheap buildings if we weren't concerned about them crashing occasionally. But, we need buildings that can't crash, even once. However, we tolerate software that crashes occasionally due to quicker development cycles, lower costs, and more innovation.
I'm not in favor of a free ride.. of course I believe that software used in medical and nuclear plant situations needs to be rigidly tested and certified. Safety is the key - we should regulate industries based on safety, not arbitrarily impose the same restrictions on all industries.
For an open-source advocacy site, I'm puzzled at how many people think that software should be strictly regulated! Don't you realize that this is at odds with the basic philosophy of free software?
And why should it be different? Who's to say that it would be better if we regulated software as much as we regulated buildings, or cars? There's no way of knowing, but I say that additional regulation will only slow innovation. Buildings and cars are regulated solely in the name of safety. Most software is not 'mission-critical,' meaning people's lives are not on the line. There are already certifications for medical software, nuclear plant software, etc. I'm in favor of those, but I don't see the need for regulating standard commercial software.
You could argue that a mail server is 'mission-critical' in another way - maybe it doesn't threaten human lives, but it definitely needs high availability. The important thing to realize, is this is a business concern and not a safety concern. If your business needs high availability mail software, it should be up to YOU to seek out that software and test it yourself. It shouldn't be up to the courts to enforce your right to sue a vendor because they didn't provide what you needed.
Also, in response to: If software companies dedicated 1/10 the effort to testing their products that they do to marketing them, 99.99% of problems would be caught before the products ever shipped.
You can say a lot about software vendors, but there's no way to back up a claim that none of the big vendors do actual software engineering. MS employs some of the best software engineers in the business, tests their software for millions of hours, yet they keep putting out bug-ridden products. Clearly there's some other force at work here, preventing MS from releasing correct software.
I guess you're right about pure information. Information that is intentionally or negligently wrong, such as a missing warning, should of course be prevented. That's more of a truth in advertising, or libel-type of concern.
self-appointed policeman of the internet
I hate that term. Nobody just went and 'appointed' themselves policeman. Everything the blacklists do is completely voluntary - you (or your ISP) do not have to participate if you don't want to. This is in contrast to real police, who keep society in order as part of our social contract. We don't have a choice about that one.
Who is to say what's a bug? Can I be sued because there's a feature a customer wants that I didn't implement? What if I wrote sendmail 10 years ago, and now someone sues me because I wrote an open relay? But there wasn't any spam when I wrote it. There is a grey area between bug, and undesired behavior. Let's say I write a word processor. Do I get sued because my app won't let you print from the print preview screen? Because it doesn't save your default tab stops?
You can't regulate software.. and if customers don't like something, they'll look to another vendor. This is already a self-regulated open market folks, move along..
You are so wrong! Think about what you are saying for a second. You are saying that software vendors should be held liable for producing faulty software. What does this apply to? Only Lotus, Microsoft, and the big guys? What about holding Alan Cox and Linus liable for bugs in the Linux kernel? I hope you don't want to hold security programmers liable for demos of exploits. Software is fundamentally different from a product that can be recalled and judged unsafe. The marginal cost of software is zero, and it is not a physical product - it's just information.
Do you have any idea how it would cripple the software industry if they operated under the constant threat of product liability suits? What about old software? Really old versions of Sendmail were set to open relay by default. Certainly it's not the fault of the programmers that they didn't protect against spam, BEFORE SPAM EXISTED. Now think about a software industry where a pack of lawyers has to review every design document, every line of code in the name of 'product safety.'
This is clearly a case where the free market already solves these problems, and your foolish solution would only serve to artificially disable an industry. If companies are upset with Domino, they will eventually switch to a better software package. If Lotus cared about their customers, they would have patched their software. I can't believe it when people like you say these things without thinking of the consequences.
You did hit on one correct point - intent. It's unfortunate that ORBZ was in danger of being sued. They shouldn't be in danger, due to intent. They have no intent to DOS random Lotus Domino servers.. but it seems like they just can't risk it. If I intentionally exploited the Domino bug to crash servers, well that's another story. It's not Domino's problem, it's mine, and I should be carted to jail for that.
We already know that there are whole clauses in licenses that are unenforcable - there are certain rights you can't give up in a contract, certain types of liability that a manufacturer can't disclaim. If I make an unsafe product I can still be held accountable even though the license disclaimed all liability. How is this different? The contract can't dictate whether you can use it with other people's software.. that's your own decision.
Imagine if the BSA was allowed to raid your office and enforce 'interoperability!' MS ends up suing you because you ran VNC on XP desktops, Oracle sues you because there was an SQL Server on the same machine as Oracle, and Netscape sues you because they're angry at the world!
Oh my god.. something about that video just freaks me out.. he keeps saying "WOOOOOO DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS", and there's the blasting techno music. I can't watch it for too long, or I have the urge to jam an icepick into the face of a baby seal.
You're thinking of one of the hacked versions. There were ones where you could shoot fireballs while you were jumping, throw people while you were over their head, etc. In contrast, SF2 Turbo: Hyper fighting was as close to perfect as they get.
Geez.. a little spoiler alert would be nice. I guess I shouldn't even be reading this article.
I'm afraid that seeing the Ep1 trailer so many times ruined my enjoyment of the movie before I even got to the theater. Trailers do reveal a lot of plot that some people want to be surprised with - including me. I mean, the Ep1 trailer basically reveals that Qui-Gon dies! What else could Obi-Wan be screeching "Noooooooo!" about? We know Anakin doesn't get turned to the dark side yet, we know Jar Jar doesn't die, so of course he has to be bitching about Qui Gon dying.
So, I'm going to make an effort not to see the Ep2 trailer AT ALL. I know it'll be hard.. I don't know what I'll do when I go to movies. I don't watch live TV anyway, so I'll tivo through any tv commercials. Well it'll be tough. I'll see if I can just MINIMIZE exposure to the trailer.
It's a cool service, but consumers aren't going to pay for it. It's just a program that crawls a site and downloads it to your Palm.. it is possible to write software that will sync a webpage to your palm without ever going through a "service provider" like AvantGo.
Microsoft doesn't charge people for the priviledge of using IE to crawl a website.. it's no different here. AvantGo can boast one thing - a well-written cross platform browser for handhelds. they are not a service provider, they're a software company.
Piracy has seriously undermined the software industry for years:
Blah.. when people make this argument they don't seem to back it up. This is because there's no way to prove how much copying software affects companies' profits. There's no way to prove how much Napster affects the music industry's profits. There's no way to prove how much 'unsecured' computer hardware takes away from Disney's profits.
I will guess, and it's only a guess, that by far those who pirate software would not buy that software if it weren't available for free. You'll see a lot of commercial software supporters chanting, "every copy is a lost sale".. but they don't back up the claim! The software industry seems to be doing fine, by the way. Maybe nobody buys shareware, but maybe the reason is that 99% of shareware is crap.
Do these software guys blame free software as well? "Every copy of gnucash is a lost Quicken sale.." Really, what's the difference between addressing a need with gnucash or with Quicken, when the marginal cost of software is zero?
It's unfortunate that you blame ACPI and AMD.. in all likelihood, these problems are due to old PCI devices that can't play nice with shared IRQ's. If you have one of these unfortunate cards, you may have to disable ACPI just so you can get it onto its own IRQ line.
You may also be blaming VIA for AMD's problems.. their earlier AMD chipsets were much more unstable than the kt266a, their current one, and kt333, the upcoming chipset. It used to be a necessity to put their 4in1 chipset drivers on a new OS install ASAP. You still need the drivers for Win2000 and below, but Windows XP has native VIA drivers that are WHQL certified and are very stable.
I'm a happy AMD/VIA user. I have a Shuttle AK31A (KT266A) board with an AthlonXP, running WinXP. I have had my problems with AMD/VIA however.. my first AMD/VIA was an Abit KT7 which had the KT133 chipset. It was much more unstable and it had major issues with some of my older PCI cards.
It's been a WHQL requirement for years. I don't know about this motherboard, but on ABIT and Shuttle boards you can re-enable the ACPI option by flashing a modified BIOS. Yeah it's a little risky, but the program that edits the BIOS file is made by Award - it's the same program the MB manufacturers use to enable and disable other options.
Read here. Personally I don't think you should boycott SOYO, Abit, or any other manufacturer because they wanted to get WHQL..
Now I really, truly, mean no offense to your operating system when I say this. I don't write OS'es, and yes I have no idea how hard it is to write the low level code. But, the PCI spec has been around for close to ten years, and shared IRQ's have always been a (optional) capability for PCI devices. Initial devices had problems with shared IRQ's. But today with no ISA, and card manufacturers learning to play nice, shared IRQ's are a reality. Shouldn't your OS support them by now? I have 2 network cards, SCSI, and sound on the same IRQ right now, and it works fine in Red Hat 7.2 and Windows XP.
The proof: FastTrack doesn't allow people to share MP3's encoded above 128kbps. How ? Because the restriction is encoded in their library, which is used by the clients they control.
Actually the restriction is in the registry, and it's simple to change. More importantly, the restriction isn't imposed by any other computer on the network - it's imposed by the software on your computer, not a central server. They could have their software to ignore files that begin with the letter b, but this is hardly control over the network.
No. The newest versions of Outlook won't let you run a dangerous attachment such as a .EXE, .PIF, etc. It doesn't block incoming viruses, it just won't let you run them. Isn't that what the Linux zealots wanted? ('Well our OS doesn't run viruses automatically')