These so called ticket brokers are actually worse than most people think. I actually had a long conversation with one of these scums. First of all, these guys don't operate small. He claimed that his operation spent over a million dollar a year just on Google AdWords advertisement campaign. That tells you the scale of his operation. He uses a network of machines with bot software to buy up as much tickets as he possibly can for sports events and concerts. The markup on those tickets are astronomical. He deals mostly with movie and sports star agents mostly to unload these tickets at shockingly high prices but those agents don't care because they are out to make their clients happy at all cost. What's sad is how he sometimes end up with bunch of unsold tickets. This creates artificial demand thus increases ticket price for everyone as well as depriving fans who want to go see these events. Whenever you see bunch of empty seats in a sold out baseball game, it's not because the fan had a change of plans or got sick. It's because these scummy ticket brokers couldn't unload them for huge profit. One of the reason why ticketmaster won't do anything about the situation is because these brokers ensure that events are sold out which works out in their favor. They don't care about actual fans getting hold of the tickets. They simply want the tickets sold.
Google knows that they cannot thwart enough of the click frauders and therefore the collapse of AdWords is inevitable. Advertisers are slowly moving away from content AdWords campaigns due to these frauds. Of course when AdWords collapse s then AdSense will also collapse as well. This is a next generation of advertisement model that makes click frauds completely ineffective since advertisers feel that money they are spending are worth it. There is one thing that Google still doesn't have an answer for which is so called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that's nothing more than creating bunch of garbage websites with links to jack up the Google Page Ranks. Currently Google search results are slowly being erroded by these garbage sites and if Google can't find an answer for them, things are going to go south pretty quick.
Well.. Let see... I will NOT be buying the following:
1. Sony music CD's 2. Sony HD TV 3. Sony Playstation 3 and games 4. Sony Bluray DVD player 5. Sony Ericson phones 6. Sony VAIO laptop 7. Sony DVD burner 8. Sony digital camera 9. Sony video recorder
The only way Sony will regain my trust is if they were to:
1. publically admit that what they did was wrong 2. put a link on sony.com to a page explaining what exactly happened and provide software to uninstall the rootkit 3. recall all CD's on the shelf containing rootkit DRM 4. offer replacement CD's to all customers
Massachusetts's decision is based on idealogical choice and less about technical one. It makes perfect sense for citizen of the state to be able to view government documents without having to require an expensive software purchase. Even if OpenDocument format was inferior to Word's format technically, it still makes sense for them to go with OpenDocument due to idealogical reasons. I just think it's so obvious that government should strieve to be platform agnostic as much as possible. Also it isn't fair for a government which runs off of tax payer's money to endorse one particular proprietary software over another. Imagine if government adopted WordPerfect document format as the standard. Microsoft would have gone nuts over that. I do believe that this is a start of something bigger over time. The idea that government should use open standards is as obvious as reason for the separation for church and state.
I do think it's Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument is just making their problems even bigger. Let say f the state government sends some document to school system. Now receiver has to install OpenOffice to open that document instead of just using Word. Having said that I have a feeling Microsoft isn't going to just go away without a whimper. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft sues the state over something like this in attempt to intimidate or delay the migration. Perhaps Microsoft may threatens to audit every government desktop computers for license violation. They already pulled this sort of stunt with Oregon public education and I don't see this sort of tatics as being outside of their usual playbook.
You might be interested in http://magnatune.com/ as well. It's also DRM free and half the money goes directly to the artist. Also there is no subscription fee.
Oh yes they are! Microsoft chose to store the "executable flag" metadata right into the filename. In *nix world, you can't simply execute foreign binary by double clicking because this metadata is not transmitted via email attachment or simple file transfer.
Hmm... Thanks for the info. I would be interested in gathering this information and presenting them in a clear and concise manner to expedite the migration away from SCO products. Any information regarding companies that do this sort of migration service would be nice too.
I'm not suggesting any sort of FUD campaign. We just have to expose the truth and the rest should take care of itself.
1. Detailed migration plan and tools to ease transition from SCO UnixWare to Linux. This includes researching companies that will do his service. A paper showing hard numbers on the cost savings and benefit of migrating away from SCO Unixware.
2. Create a collection of testimonials from former SCO customers who has successfully migrated away from SCO products.
3. Extensive benchmark showing inferiority of SCO Unixware.
4. Feature comparison between SCO Unixware and Linux.
5. Create a list of things Linux can do that SCO products cannot do.
6. List of hardware that Linux supports which SCO products do not.
7. Create a list of companies using SCO product and educate these companies about findings from 1 - 4.
8. Urge Free Software and Open Source developers to drop support for SCO Unixware across all softwares being developed. GNU Software (GCC, Emacs, libraries, autotools, base utils), Samba, Apache, OpenSSL, OpenOffice, XFree86, Gnome, KDE, etc.
9. Dissemination of information regarding insider trading of SCOX stock. Collection of detailed information on who is selling how much shares and when.
10. Analysis of all SEC filings by SCO especially that part about disclosure of all SCO's competitors and it's liability with investing money in SCO.
11. Create a collection documents debunking every single press releases, interviews and official statement made by SCO officials. Dissection of every sentence ever came out of Darl McBride's mouth clearly citing fallacies, misinformation, and contradictions.
12. Create a list of all patents held by SCO and then systematically try to disprove the validity of those patents by citing prior art.
13. Start a letter writing campaign to Wall Street analysts of all the findings from above. (There has to be Linux users who has connection to Wall Street folks.)
... might be something that can be used to catch the spammer. Set up a box on some dialup disguised as a compromised box and study the behavior of the spammer and then track down the slimebag.
It's not about details of GPL that says what's allowed and what's not allowed. It's about how far Red Hat is willing to go to protect their trademark and what effect it has on people who doesn't know about GPL. I think most slashdotters are well versed in GPL but there are plenty of people out there that don't. Lot of people who are new to Linux believe that believe Red Hat Linux is really The Linux. When they are told by eBay that Red Hat CD's they just bought is illegal, that really translates in their mind as "Copying Linux is illegal". It seems like Red Hat is going out of their way to protect their bottom line disregarding consequences of their actions. Who knows, they might be doing this purposely. If they get one more person to believe that it's "bad" to copy Red Hat CD's it's one more sales for them. This sort of "copying is bad" mentality hinders the spread of GPL software.
I wonder if there is any chance that IBM can perhaps open source OS/2 or at least part. I thought OS/2 had a great object oriented multithreaded GUI considering it ran on a pidly 486. I know open sourcing it won't bring it back from the dead but I think it could be interesting if some of that code can be adopted to Linux. It's very unlikely IBM lawyers would let such a thing happen but it's something to daydream about just for fun.
According to a friend of mine, about 40% of the internet traffic in Austraria goes through WorldCom's subsidiary ISP. All the small service companies that work for ISP want cash up front before work begins because the credit is no good anymore. Of course the WorldCom's money is in limbo now so they can't cut a check out to them. As a result routine maintenance or repair work doesn't get done. The infrastructure situation is a complete fubar over there because of the WorldCom mess.
For those of you still longing for good old days of Napster, try WinMX. The interface is somewhat similar to Napster client but has more features. I especially like the bandwidth throttle and auto complete. You may be surprised to know that it doesn't come with any spyware. Only downside is that it is only available for Windows. Does anyone knows if it runs on Wine or VMWare?
Regarding the problem of spy ware uninstalling another program, perhaps it is a technical problem which there is a solution. Not an easy one but a system can be made to prevent such a thing.
1. First, software installation should be passive. On Windows (as well as other OS), you download some binary executable and run them. This foreign binary essentially has full reign over your system. Instead it should be a compressed package file with instruction embedded in it that describes what and where the package manifest should be installed. This package should be signed by the originator so that the package is tamper resistant and has some privilege to modify package that was originated from same source. This way the OS and user is in control rather than untrusted binary running amok on your system.
2. This is more difficult one to implement. I think application should have some levels of access on your system and they should be disabled by default. For example, multimedia player should not be allowed to delete files or initiate outgoing network connection. Even file read can be made more granular by restricting the file mime type that an application can read. Multimedia player has no business reading any other files than ones that it knows what to do with. This sort of sandbox could make it harder for application from whacking competitor's application.
Ultimately an implicit trust should be abandoned and implementing mandatory security may be the solution. Unfortunately this is not something that can be easily added easily but rather it must be designed into the underlying system itself.
Disclosure: I'm writing this at 6:00am after staying up all night writing code so I'm sure lot of loopy ideas are leaking from my brain at the moment. This may be one of them. Then again even a broken clock tells right time twice a day.;) --- jk
I think what they mean is slower is application launch speed. It's obvious a chunk of IE code is always preloaded in the system memory during boot sequence. When user double click on that blue e on your desktop it just invokes them. If MS is forced to remove this preloading mechanism it would take a considerable time to launch IE. But what I don't understand is that they can still add this preload feature even if they were to ship IE separate from the rest of the system. MS Office have been doing it for years. Mozilla offers this option during install. It's not that MS can't, they just don't want to. In conclusion MS is flat out lying.
I remember my college physics class when we calculated what would really happen if "protonic reversal" would happen. Let say that you had a chunk of mass equivalent to a human body. If all proton turned to electron (or visa versa) instantaneously, it would release enough energy to wipe out the entire solar system. It would be bad thing indeed.
Here are some of my thoughts on why we have buggy and insecure softwares.
* Human Nature People in general don't like to admit that they are wrong. Companies small and large are not much different. Even when they distribute the patch, there is rarely accurate or complete information about the problem or the severity of the problem being addressed. We think apologizing is a sign of weakness.
* Corporate Image By admitting fault, company loses credibility. Company is always willing to live with few unhappy customers to protect it's overall image. It's one of the reason why software defects, security or otherwise, get hushed up and buried. You all know that the euphemism for this policy when it is applied to security is called "security through obscurity". You also know how well that works. Admitting fault is the last thing company will do. Even when they do admit it publicaly, they will always play down the severity of the problem.
* Monopoly When a company is a monopoly, there is almost no incentive to admit to a problem and fix it. If you know that you can't get fired and you will get paid the same if you work one hour a day or eight hours a day, which would you choose? Lack of incentive is the very reason why communism is bad for progess. Only reason why Microsoft is pretending to care about security recently is because they are having trouble penetrating (from behind) the enterprise market with their tarnished image.
* Money When I say money, I don't mean cost to create or distribute bug fixes. Putting a patch on a website for user to download isn't such an expensive proposition. It's lot different than car manufacturer doing a recall. When I mean money, I mean greed. Companies are using bugs fixes as a ploy to get users to upgrade. Marketing departments have figured out that consumers are willing to pay for bug fixes. Example of this is Windows 98 and ME. Essentially they are selling you a big pile of bug fixes as a full product and charging you for it. Sneaky isn't it? MS is not the only guilty party of this devious practice. Many companies such as Vignette, bea systems have done this sort of thing. It's becoming very common in many places and we all have been brainwashed to accept it as a norm.
Since Free Software/Open Source has only one of the four problems to deal contend with, I think it has a somewhat better chance of producing superior software than from commercial environment.
Slashdot Mirror
These so called ticket brokers are actually worse than most people think. I actually had a long conversation with one of these scums. First of all, these guys don't operate small. He claimed that his operation spent over a million dollar a year just on Google AdWords advertisement campaign. That tells you the scale of his operation. He uses a network of machines with bot software to buy up as much tickets as he possibly can for sports events and concerts. The markup on those tickets are astronomical. He deals mostly with movie and sports star agents mostly to unload these tickets at shockingly high prices but those agents don't care because they are out to make their clients happy at all cost. What's sad is how he sometimes end up with bunch of unsold tickets. This creates artificial demand thus increases ticket price for everyone as well as depriving fans who want to go see these events. Whenever you see bunch of empty seats in a sold out baseball game, it's not because the fan had a change of plans or got sick. It's because these scummy ticket brokers couldn't unload them for huge profit. One of the reason why ticketmaster won't do anything about the situation is because these brokers ensure that events are sold out which works out in their favor. They don't care about actual fans getting hold of the tickets. They simply want the tickets sold.
Google knows that they cannot thwart enough of the click frauders and therefore the collapse of AdWords is inevitable. Advertisers are slowly moving away from content AdWords campaigns due to these frauds. Of course when AdWords collapse s then AdSense will also collapse as well. This is a next generation of advertisement model that makes click frauds completely ineffective since advertisers feel that money they are spending are worth it. There is one thing that Google still doesn't have an answer for which is so called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that's nothing more than creating bunch of garbage websites with links to jack up the Google Page Ranks. Currently Google search results are slowly being erroded by these garbage sites and if Google can't find an answer for them, things are going to go south pretty quick.
Well.. Let see... I will NOT be buying the following:
1. Sony music CD's
2. Sony HD TV
3. Sony Playstation 3 and games
4. Sony Bluray DVD player
5. Sony Ericson phones
6. Sony VAIO laptop
7. Sony DVD burner
8. Sony digital camera
9. Sony video recorder
The only way Sony will regain my trust is if they were to:
1. publically admit that what they did was wrong
2. put a link on sony.com to a page explaining what exactly happened and provide software to uninstall the rootkit
3. recall all CD's on the shelf containing rootkit DRM
4. offer replacement CD's to all customers
Massachusetts's decision is based on idealogical choice and less about technical one. It makes perfect sense for citizen of the state to be able to view government documents without having to require an expensive software purchase. Even if OpenDocument format was inferior to Word's format technically, it still makes sense for them to go with OpenDocument due to idealogical reasons. I just think it's so obvious that government should strieve to be platform agnostic as much as possible. Also it isn't fair for a government which runs off of tax payer's money to endorse one particular proprietary software over another. Imagine if government adopted WordPerfect document format as the standard. Microsoft would have gone nuts over that. I do believe that this is a start of something bigger over time. The idea that government should use open standards is as obvious as reason for the separation for church and state.
I do think it's Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument is just making their problems even bigger. Let say f the state government sends some document to school system. Now receiver has to install OpenOffice to open that document instead of just using Word. Having said that I have a feeling Microsoft isn't going to just go away without a whimper. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft sues the state over something like this in attempt to intimidate or delay the migration. Perhaps Microsoft may threatens to audit every government desktop computers for license violation. They already pulled this sort of stunt with Oregon public education and I don't see this sort of tatics as being outside of their usual playbook.
Drop Dead
Toms's Hardware has a great article on Pentium M's performance. It's definitely worth a read.
You might be interested in http://magnatune.com/ as well. It's also DRM free and half the money goes directly to the artist. Also there is no subscription fee.
You might be also interested to know that their system has a HUGE security hole (backdoor).
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78
As of this writing US $1 = 1,149.25 South Korean Won. That makes the robot US $1261.69.
Oh yes they are! Microsoft chose to store the "executable flag" metadata right into the filename. In *nix world, you can't simply execute foreign binary by double clicking because this metadata is not transmitted via email attachment or simple file transfer.
Hmm... Thanks for the info. I would be interested in gathering this information and presenting them in a clear and concise manner to expedite the migration away from SCO products. Any information regarding companies that do this sort of migration service would be nice too.
I'm not suggesting any sort of FUD campaign. We just have to expose the truth and the rest should take care of itself.
1. Detailed migration plan and tools to ease transition from SCO UnixWare to Linux. This includes researching companies that will do his service. A paper showing hard numbers on the cost savings and benefit of migrating away from SCO Unixware.
2. Create a collection of testimonials from former SCO customers who has successfully migrated away from SCO products.
3. Extensive benchmark showing inferiority of SCO Unixware.
4. Feature comparison between SCO Unixware and Linux.
5. Create a list of things Linux can do that SCO products cannot do.
6. List of hardware that Linux supports which SCO products do not.
7. Create a list of companies using SCO product and educate these companies about findings from 1 - 4.
8. Urge Free Software and Open Source developers to drop support for SCO Unixware across all softwares being developed. GNU Software (GCC, Emacs, libraries, autotools, base utils), Samba, Apache, OpenSSL, OpenOffice, XFree86, Gnome, KDE, etc.
9. Dissemination of information regarding insider trading of SCOX stock. Collection of detailed information on who is selling how much shares and when.
10. Analysis of all SEC filings by SCO especially that part about disclosure of all SCO's competitors and it's liability with investing money in SCO.
11. Create a collection documents debunking every single press releases, interviews and official statement made by SCO officials. Dissection of every sentence ever came out of Darl McBride's mouth clearly citing fallacies, misinformation, and contradictions.
12. Create a list of all patents held by SCO and then systematically try to disprove the validity of those patents by citing prior art.
13. Start a letter writing campaign to Wall Street analysts of all the findings from above. (There has to be Linux users who has connection to Wall Street folks.)
Any thought?
... might be something that can be used to catch the spammer. Set up a box on some dialup disguised as a compromised box and study the behavior of the spammer and then track down the slimebag.
It's not about details of GPL that says what's allowed and what's not allowed. It's about how far Red Hat is willing to go to protect their trademark and what effect it has on people who doesn't know about GPL. I think most slashdotters are well versed in GPL but there are plenty of people out there that don't. Lot of people who are new to Linux believe that believe Red Hat Linux is really The Linux. When they are told by eBay that Red Hat CD's they just bought is illegal, that really translates in their mind as "Copying Linux is illegal". It seems like Red Hat is going out of their way to protect their bottom line disregarding consequences of their actions. Who knows, they might be doing this purposely. If they get one more person to believe that it's "bad" to copy Red Hat CD's it's one more sales for them. This sort of "copying is bad" mentality hinders the spread of GPL software.
smoking when you guys decided to sue IBM?
I wonder if there is any chance that IBM can perhaps open source OS/2 or at least part. I thought OS/2 had a great object oriented multithreaded GUI considering it ran on a pidly 486. I know open sourcing it won't bring it back from the dead but I think it could be interesting if some of that code can be adopted to Linux. It's very unlikely IBM lawyers would let such a thing happen but it's something to daydream about just for fun.
Opps. I spelled Australia wrong. I guess that's what happens when you pull an all nighter and brain is low on caffein.
According to a friend of mine, about 40% of the internet traffic in Austraria goes through WorldCom's subsidiary ISP. All the small service companies that work for ISP want cash up front before work begins because the credit is no good anymore. Of course the WorldCom's money is in limbo now so they can't cut a check out to them. As a result routine maintenance or repair work doesn't get done. The infrastructure situation is a complete fubar over there because of the WorldCom mess.
For those of you still longing for good old days of Napster, try WinMX. The interface is somewhat similar to Napster client but has more features. I especially like the bandwidth throttle and auto complete. You may be surprised to know that it doesn't come with any spyware. Only downside is that it is only available for Windows. Does anyone knows if it runs on Wine or VMWare?
Regarding the problem of spy ware uninstalling another program, perhaps it is a technical problem which there is a solution. Not an easy one but a system can be made to prevent such a thing.
;)
1. First, software installation should be passive. On Windows (as well as other OS), you download some binary executable and run them. This foreign binary essentially has full reign over your system. Instead it should be a compressed package file with instruction embedded in it that describes what and where the package manifest should be installed. This package should be signed by the originator so that the package is tamper resistant and has some privilege to modify package that was originated from same source. This way the OS and user is in control rather than untrusted binary running amok on your system.
2. This is more difficult one to implement. I think application should have some levels of access on your system and they should be disabled by default. For example, multimedia player should not be allowed to delete files or initiate outgoing network connection. Even file read can be made more granular by restricting the file mime type that an application can read. Multimedia player has no business reading any other files than ones that it knows what to do with. This sort of sandbox could make it harder for application from whacking competitor's application.
Ultimately an implicit trust should be abandoned and implementing mandatory security may be the solution. Unfortunately this is not something that can be easily added easily but rather it must be designed into the underlying system itself.
Disclosure: I'm writing this at 6:00am after staying up all night writing code so I'm sure lot of loopy ideas are leaking from my brain at the moment. This may be one of them. Then again even a broken clock tells right time twice a day.
---
jk
get run over by a car while riding on segway.
"overclock" it to do 60 mph.
put a really large tires and ride over other segway crushing it.
dissect it and puts it's pictures of it's guts online and get slashdotted.
have their segway malfunction and end up doing a cartwheel on a steep sidewalk.
do all sort of cool tricks with it like a freestyle bike.
fall off the thing and get hurt and decides to sue Dean Kamen.
ride segway while drunk as a skunk and get charged with DWI.
have their segway run out of battery on the side of the road and have to call AAA to tow it.
hit a pedestrian.
hit a pedestrian and run off.
have their segway tiretracks link them to a crime they committed.
find their segway minus wheels sitting on concrete blocks on the side of the road.
steal it.
get caught trying to steal it.
track down a stolen segway by using hidden GPS.
strap a jet rocket and attempt to break segway land speed record.
----
jk
a slower, much-less user friendly Windows
I think what they mean is slower is application launch speed. It's obvious a chunk of IE code is always preloaded in the system memory during boot sequence. When user double click on that blue e on your desktop it just invokes them. If MS is forced to remove this preloading mechanism it would take a considerable time to launch IE. But what I don't understand is that they can still add this preload feature even if they were to ship IE separate from the rest of the system. MS Office have been doing it for years. Mozilla offers this option during install. It's not that MS can't, they just don't want to. In conclusion MS is flat out lying.
I remember my college physics class when we calculated what would really happen if "protonic reversal" would happen. Let say that you had a chunk of mass equivalent to a human body. If all proton turned to electron (or visa versa) instantaneously, it would release enough energy to wipe out the entire solar system. It would be bad thing indeed.
Here are some of my thoughts on why we have buggy and insecure softwares.
* Human Nature
People in general don't like to admit that they are wrong. Companies small and large are not much different. Even when they distribute the patch, there is rarely accurate or complete information about the problem or the severity of the problem being addressed. We think apologizing is a sign of weakness.
* Corporate Image
By admitting fault, company loses credibility. Company is always willing to live with few unhappy customers to protect it's overall image. It's one of the reason why software defects, security or otherwise, get hushed up and buried. You all know that the euphemism for this policy when it is applied to security is called "security through obscurity". You also know how well that works. Admitting fault is the last thing company will do. Even when they do admit it publicaly, they will always play down the severity of the problem.
* Monopoly
When a company is a monopoly, there is almost no incentive to admit to a problem and fix it. If you know that you can't get fired and you will get paid the same if you work one hour a day or eight hours a day, which would you choose? Lack of incentive is the very reason why communism is bad for progess. Only reason why Microsoft is pretending to care about security recently is because they are having trouble penetrating (from behind) the enterprise market with their tarnished image.
* Money
When I say money, I don't mean cost to create or distribute bug fixes. Putting a patch on a website for user to download isn't such an expensive proposition. It's lot different than car manufacturer doing a recall. When I mean money, I mean greed. Companies are using bugs fixes as a ploy to get users to upgrade. Marketing departments have figured out that consumers are willing to pay for bug fixes. Example of this is Windows 98 and ME. Essentially they are selling you a big pile of bug fixes as a full product and charging you for it. Sneaky isn't it? MS is not the only guilty party of this devious practice. Many companies such as Vignette, bea systems have done this sort of thing. It's becoming very common in many places and we all have been brainwashed to accept it as a norm.
Since Free Software/Open Source has only one of the four problems to deal contend with, I think it has a somewhat better chance of producing superior software than from commercial environment.
Here is link to the serial cable he is referring to. It looks harmless to me... Am I breaking DMCA by linking to it?