That's cool... They should try to make export easier and faster though, the extra shipping round trip is sure to add latency; they should have the drive, and just load it with data, and send it to you, rather than involving you shipping the drive to receive data..
Rather than having to send them a device, they ought to sell an "AWS Data loading carrier" and
"AWS Import/Export" hard drive module. Amazon sells all sorts of things, they should be able to handle this.
In other words, I'm saying they should sell specific hardware for use with import/export, and no other hardware can be used, without paying a big extra fee for a "custom import/export job".
So to do the export.. you simply agree to buy/rent a SAS or SATA hard drive from Amazon the drive's attached to a mobile dock carrier to perform the export, and they ship it to you with data preloaded.
If you bought the AWS import/export mobile dock and have one in your workstation/server, you just plug the drive straight into the front of your PC.
To do imports, you just buy AWS modules, plug it in, copy data to it, prepare it per their directions, and send to Amazon.
And they just plug the drive in, same day, and execute the import instructions.. No need to fiddle with external drives, cables, or PSUs. Dealing with actual drives is a lot faster.
Once the load is confirmed, they'll test the drive drive, and it's theirs afterwards, don't waste extra shipping round trips, it's expensive to ship things additional times, and can cause damage.
Don't worry, in this future, if your post gets modded to -1 troll, you turn into a real-life troll, and your reduced size brain is no longer capable of any coherent thought, thus you can't post.
And if you get modded down to -1 Offtopic, you spontaneously disintegrate, you cease to exist in this universe.
Downside, is if you get +5 Funny, your clothing suddenly changes into jester clothing..
How about mental slashdot comment submission.
You hear voices of other commenters in your mind, and you think what you want to say, it automatically appears in the site, and echoes in other commenters' minds.
Yes... but suppose you could transmit a long string of these bits... maybe you could enter data into someone's subconcious memory, that they'd be unaware of?
You could then smuggle them overseas, say send them back to the US, and send them to a specialist to have the information "extracted" from their subconscious mind through hypnosis, or some other high-tech technique.
All without the person themselves having any clue what databits were stored in their brain
Seems like an ideal way of transferring things like intelligence, encryption keys, missile launch codes, securely.
It's not free. Customers pay for the service, so they're using it... imagine that?
They're already paying overly inflated prices.
How would you feel if your cable provider decided you get to download 100 Megabytes of files per month, and every additional 100 Mb doubles your monthly price?
The iPhone data plan is quite expensive.
You pay more for it than you do for land based broadband services, even though land based broadband requires the larger capital outlay.
The real problem is ATT does not invest in their network infrastructure.
Just compare ATT's 3G coverage map to Verizon's, and you'll see what I mean.
Also, compare to Europe, where Tethering is commonplace, and they laugh at the US cell companies' puny networks.
How do you explain this phenomenon, other than greedy US cell companies, practically colluding to keep wireless services artificially scarce, avoid upgrading their network, so they can avoid getting into a price war and actually giving people a good price for decent service?
Why would I give you a falsifiable definition? To make it easier for you to trash Apple?
No. I'll stick with true definitions.
The iPhone has more market share and mindshare than other smart phones. Market share means more smartphone users are utilizing the iPhone than any other smart phone.
Mind share deals with brand recognition: it means that a larger number of people who recognize any smart phones recognize the iPhone than any other smartphone.
A smartphone refers to a device that has PC-like functionality, specifically smart phones:
Can be extended by installing add-on applications much like PCs can have add-on apps, these extend additional features to the phone.
Have a Calculator function.
Have an extended alphanumeric keyboard, either physical or on-screen (e.g. You don't press number keys multiple times to type a letter)
Have a web browser
Have an e-mail client; you can send e-mail, and sync your Exchange and ISP mailboxes to the phone for mobile reading
Allow you to download files
Provider calendar, appointment tracking, complete personal organizer functions.
Provide contact/address book management; allow you to store large numbers of contacts, sync contacts with PCs
Provide media software, to allow audio files to be listened to
Provide viewers for documents, such as.PDF files and.DOC files
Recent smart phones have mapping or navigational software and (typically) GPS capabilities.
How about remove the constraint on uniqueness for non-published apps.
Once an app has been published with a certain name and reaches a certain number of purchases, the name becomes protected.
I'd say once 10,000 different people download a certain app, no new submissions should be allowed for that app name.
This offers some minimal protection against new developers naming their app the same as a popular one to try to trick people searching by app name into installing the wrong one.
. They can't be squatting for the sake of profit because there's no way to tell who wants the name you're squatting on, and therefore no way to extort money out of them for it.
Sure they can.. they can start a web site selling the use of "iPhone App names", or
iPhone app branding/development services.
And list on the web site, the names they have squatted.
Their model could be a front.. where developers build their app and pay the squatter to get the app through Apple's approval process, and published.
In exchange, the squatter sets the retail price and gets 90% commission from each sale of the app, and the developer gets the 10% left over.
It says very clearly: The licensing business models may include, but not be limited to, a non-renewable evaluation license, a renewable trial license, a one-time promotion license, and a subscription license. In some embodiments, a configurable parameter may indicate an amount of time for a grace period after a time-based license would have normally expired.
Of course all this has been done before.
e.g. Antivirus products are commonly sold with annual renewal, or renewal every X months.
Which is distinct from annual maintenance.
Heck.. clarified gets sold as a cookie jar.
Where, e.g. you buy a "10 cookie bundle"
One cookie gives a single user access to activate and use the program for 24 hours.
Correction: Windows 3.1 is like OS X today: you didn't type any key at all, you just installed from floppies.
Entering a key to install appeared in Windows '95.
Maybe some day MS will go back to a no CD-key required, no "genuineness authentication" product, which is more convenient for IT and corporate installs, but I won't hold my breath.
The "CD KEY" requirement for Home use of Windows is understandable, given the tendency of some
small PC retailers/custom PC builders to cheat, copy media, and re-use keys.
They've been getting more anal with every new release of Windows. In Windows 3.1, you typed in a key and you were done. For corporate VL installs, you just used a master image for all machines, no keys, no activation..
Then XP came around.. activation for home/small business; no activation for enterprise VL.
WGA introduced later for everyone as an optional addon.
Then Vista.. activation for everyone (either activation of the copy, or activation of an Enterprise KMS). WGA built-in.
In the future, expect KMS to be more like terminal services licensing where limits are enforced.
installations using a license server disable themselves if they can't access the license server for some short period of time (I think it's about 15 minuites for altium)
Typically, because the license server releases licenses a short time after the client last checked in...
These product vendors are draconian from the start, because they have an extremely small market, and their products are highly expensive.
License abuses would be widely committed if they weren't so draconian.
Windows licenses are cheap by comparison, and their market is massive: Windows is practically a commodity.
Also, there's no such thing as releasing a Windows license... generally these tools are permanently associated with the computer they are used on, and use so common, a license server just introduces unacceptable latency.
Some license error doesn't hurt MS much at all, for an Enterprise Windows user to be using a dozen more copies than they had paid for, accidentally as otherwise...
Enterprises that are large enough run KMS servers generally have to be pretty vigilant about software licensing, for regulatory compliance and internal accounting reasons, already.
On the other hand, if a MATLAB user with a license server gets 20 more concurrent users at a time than allowed, that's over $30,000...
If an org activates 20 more Vista installs on a KMS than they're supposed to, that's what... $1000?
And more likely than not, all the new PCs the corporations buy most likely come with Vista anyways.. but surely their IT dept. will re-image with the corporate install.
M$ thus normally getting the price of Vista twice... once when they bought the PC with the OEM Vista.. then a second license when IT imag'ed the unit with the corporate VL.
Actually, more likely MS is getting recurring profit from the "Software Assurance" subscription payments, whether they release new versions of software or not.
How about a cell-phone style plan where you pay a monthly fee, and you get X minutes per month, whether you use them or not.
Also, any minutes you don't use, you lose.
If you go over your minutes, the charge for overage is 100X as much per minute.
Also, previewing documents counts against your minutes.
E-mailing a.DOCX file incurs an extra charge (ala SMS messages)
Printing a.DOCX file incurs 10X the SMS charge (aka extra charges for MMS messages over SMS)
So does receiving an e-mailed.DOCX file... the software can tell, since it stamps a unique ID on each document tied to you and your Office install.
Also, the fee is double to read a.DOCX that you received not using the 'send as e-mail' feature.
Working with documents on a shared drive even more so.
Moreover, for your computer to participate in the 'Office Network', certain features have to get disabled.
Mainly, your ability to run third-party document software like OOo.
And the copy & paste feature and file upload abilities of third-party instant messenger software will be disabled.
Redhat Linux has more different patches in 6 months, than Microsoft has a in a few years.
That doesn't make it less secure. In fact, most critical Redhat patches fix local privilege escalation issues. Redhat and most Linux distros, even with ample software installed: rarely have remote security issues that might possibly be exploitable by an unauthenticated user.
Usually, Linux is at risk, primarily due to weak choices of passwords, third party applications (web apps), and admin misconfiguration (e.g. making a directory under a web document root world-writable, or writable to the Apache user).
With Windows on the other hand... there are frequent remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in core system components and network services enabled by default (such as the kernel, RPC services).
Microsoft doesn't even generally treat local privilege escalation issues as critical, sometimes they even ignore them..
e.g. "not a security boundary we defend.".
There are ample examples of security vulns MS has treated as important that later turned out to be major problems.
In fact... it's quite the opposite.. Windows is so insecure, not because there are many patches, but because the OS needs so many patches to be secure against remote exploits, and because it doesn't get all the patches it needs, because MS cannot seem to ever catch up with the reported security vulnerabilities.
Windows would be more secure if more patches were available to fix the bugs, and Windows users installed them reliably.
A fully patched Windows would be more secure if patches were released for a larger percentage of vulnerabilities.
If Microsoft only decided to acknowledge 1 report of a vulnerability per year, and release only allow 1 security bulletin per year to be released, it would not make Windows more secure.
In fact, Microsoft doesn't release enough patches for Windows frequently, and that's part of what makes Windows insecure, because a fully patched system almost always has unpatched flaws that are known to the public, but MS dismisses or delayed the patch for one reason or another (e.g. the NUL Prefix SSL Certificate bug reported by Kaminsky and Marlinspike in July, 2009).
Not necessarily. The employee who received the letter may have dropped the ball, and failed to forward it to the right person or tell them what to do in any reasonable amount of time.
One person's failure doesn't indicate intent, unless corporate management was aware of the issue for months, and deliberately chose to do nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's cool... They should try to make export easier and faster though, the extra shipping round trip is sure to add latency; they should have the drive, and just load it with data, and send it to you, rather than involving you shipping the drive to receive data..
Rather than having to send them a device, they ought to sell an "AWS Data loading carrier" and "AWS Import/Export" hard drive module. Amazon sells all sorts of things, they should be able to handle this.
In other words, I'm saying they should sell specific hardware for use with import/export, and no other hardware can be used, without paying a big extra fee for a "custom import/export job".
So to do the export.. you simply agree to buy/rent a SAS or SATA hard drive from Amazon the drive's attached to a mobile dock carrier to perform the export, and they ship it to you with data preloaded.
If you bought the AWS import/export mobile dock and have one in your workstation/server, you just plug the drive straight into the front of your PC.
To do imports, you just buy AWS modules, plug it in, copy data to it, prepare it per their directions, and send to Amazon.
And they just plug the drive in, same day, and execute the import instructions.. No need to fiddle with external drives, cables, or PSUs. Dealing with actual drives is a lot faster.
Once the load is confirmed, they'll test the drive drive, and it's theirs afterwards, don't waste extra shipping round trips, it's expensive to ship things additional times, and can cause damage.
One of the reasons you backup files is to protect against local disaster.
An example would be the building burning down. Your USB thumbdrives won't protect against that, unless you have a remote place to stash them.
Transporting physical storage devices around is risky: there is a cost of transportation, plus they could get damaged, lost, or stolen in transport.
If the physical location isn't far enough, one disaster could effect both locations.
E.g. an earthquake could effect both places in your area you might want to store the backups.
Don't worry, in this future, if your post gets modded to -1 troll, you turn into a real-life troll, and your reduced size brain is no longer capable of any coherent thought, thus you can't post.
And if you get modded down to -1 Offtopic, you spontaneously disintegrate, you cease to exist in this universe.
Downside, is if you get +5 Funny, your clothing suddenly changes into jester clothing..
How about mental slashdot comment submission. You hear voices of other commenters in your mind, and you think what you want to say, it automatically appears in the site, and echoes in other commenters' minds.
Just be careful not to think "first post"
Slashdotters tend to frown on that sort of thing.
Yes... but suppose you could transmit a long string of these bits... maybe you could enter data into someone's subconcious memory, that they'd be unaware of?
You could then smuggle them overseas, say send them back to the US, and send them to a specialist to have the information "extracted" from their subconscious mind through hypnosis, or some other high-tech technique.
All without the person themselves having any clue what databits were stored in their brain
Seems like an ideal way of transferring things like intelligence, encryption keys, missile launch codes, securely.
What more secure place than a guard's brain?
In other news.. the temperature has reached a record low.
Formerly, the lowest temperature was 6000 degrees fahrenheit
But today, the temperature has dropped to 3500 Kelvins, and shows no signs of increasing any time soon.
Also, forecasters indicate a 0.000 000 01% chance of snow this year, a substantial increase from the normal 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 0000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 0000 000 000 000 12% chance in previous years.
It's not free. Customers pay for the service, so they're using it... imagine that? They're already paying overly inflated prices.
How would you feel if your cable provider decided you get to download 100 Megabytes of files per month, and every additional 100 Mb doubles your monthly price?
The iPhone data plan is quite expensive. You pay more for it than you do for land based broadband services, even though land based broadband requires the larger capital outlay.
The real problem is ATT does not invest in their network infrastructure.
Just compare ATT's 3G coverage map to Verizon's, and you'll see what I mean.
Also, compare to Europe, where Tethering is commonplace, and they laugh at the US cell companies' puny networks.
How do you explain this phenomenon, other than greedy US cell companies, practically colluding to keep wireless services artificially scarce, avoid upgrading their network, so they can avoid getting into a price war and actually giving people a good price for decent service?
Perhaps you wind up paying more for the product due to their inefficiency?
Try saying the same when you run the company that sells the reasonably priced product.
Or you work for the company that rejects the reasonably-priced option...
Or when you're a shareholder...
Why would I give you a falsifiable definition? To make it easier for you to trash Apple? No. I'll stick with true definitions.
The iPhone has more market share and mindshare than other smart phones. Market share means more smartphone users are utilizing the iPhone than any other smart phone.
Mind share deals with brand recognition: it means that a larger number of people who recognize any smart phones recognize the iPhone than any other smartphone.
A smartphone refers to a device that has PC-like functionality, specifically smart phones:
How about remove the constraint on uniqueness for non-published apps.
Once an app has been published with a certain name and reaches a certain number of purchases, the name becomes protected.
I'd say once 10,000 different people download a certain app, no new submissions should be allowed for that app name.
This offers some minimal protection against new developers naming their app the same as a popular one to try to trick people searching by app name into installing the wrong one.
. They can't be squatting for the sake of profit because there's no way to tell who wants the name you're squatting on, and therefore no way to extort money out of them for it.
Sure they can.. they can start a web site selling the use of "iPhone App names", or iPhone app branding/development services.
And list on the web site, the names they have squatted.
Their model could be a front.. where developers build their app and pay the squatter to get the app through Apple's approval process, and published.
In exchange, the squatter sets the retail price and gets 90% commission from each sale of the app, and the developer gets the 10% left over.
Give a developer an option to cancel/delete their hold on the name at any time after a rejection, or in lieu of submitting for approval, for a refund.
That is, as soon as the name is no longer reserved for them, they get the $5 back, minus the credit card processing fees.
A $5 deposit that will be refunded upon acceptance of the application.
Also, apps that aren't approved within a sufficient period should be expunged... binaries or no.
Apparently you didn't bother to actually read it.
It says very clearly: The licensing business models may include, but not be limited to, a non-renewable evaluation license, a renewable trial license, a one-time promotion license, and a subscription license. In some embodiments, a configurable parameter may indicate an amount of time for a grace period after a time-based license would have normally expired.
Of course all this has been done before.
e.g. Antivirus products are commonly sold with annual renewal, or renewal every X months.
Which is distinct from annual maintenance.
Heck.. clarified gets sold as a cookie jar. Where, e.g. you buy a "10 cookie bundle"
One cookie gives a single user access to activate and use the program for 24 hours.
They're the dominant smartphone manufacturer today, their product has more mind share than any of their competitors' latest products in that market.
Correction: Windows 3.1 is like OS X today: you didn't type any key at all, you just installed from floppies.
Entering a key to install appeared in Windows '95.
Maybe some day MS will go back to a no CD-key required, no "genuineness authentication" product, which is more convenient for IT and corporate installs, but I won't hold my breath.
The "CD KEY" requirement for Home use of Windows is understandable, given the tendency of some small PC retailers/custom PC builders to cheat, copy media, and re-use keys.
They've been getting more anal with every new release of Windows. In Windows 3.1, you typed in a key and you were done. For corporate VL installs, you just used a master image for all machines, no keys, no activation..
Then XP came around.. activation for home/small business; no activation for enterprise VL. WGA introduced later for everyone as an optional addon.
Then Vista.. activation for everyone (either activation of the copy, or activation of an Enterprise KMS). WGA built-in.
In the future, expect KMS to be more like terminal services licensing where limits are enforced.
installations using a license server disable themselves if they can't access the license server for some short period of time (I think it's about 15 minuites for altium)
Typically, because the license server releases licenses a short time after the client last checked in...
These product vendors are draconian from the start, because they have an extremely small market, and their products are highly expensive.
License abuses would be widely committed if they weren't so draconian.
Windows licenses are cheap by comparison, and their market is massive: Windows is practically a commodity.
Also, there's no such thing as releasing a Windows license... generally these tools are permanently associated with the computer they are used on, and use so common, a license server just introduces unacceptable latency.
Some license error doesn't hurt MS much at all, for an Enterprise Windows user to be using a dozen more copies than they had paid for, accidentally as otherwise...
Enterprises that are large enough run KMS servers generally have to be pretty vigilant about software licensing, for regulatory compliance and internal accounting reasons, already.
On the other hand, if a MATLAB user with a license server gets 20 more concurrent users at a time than allowed, that's over $30,000...
If an org activates 20 more Vista installs on a KMS than they're supposed to, that's what... $1000?
And more likely than not, all the new PCs the corporations buy most likely come with Vista anyways.. but surely their IT dept. will re-image with the corporate install.
M$ thus normally getting the price of Vista twice... once when they bought the PC with the OEM Vista.. then a second license when IT imag'ed the unit with the corporate VL.
Actually, more likely MS is getting recurring profit from the "Software Assurance" subscription payments, whether they release new versions of software or not.
Just about every shareware application has either a nag-screen or a 30 day countdown....
You get licensed to try the software for 30 days.
There are old DOS programs that were like this.
There were Windows 3.1 applications that were licensed like this.
There is absolutely nothing novel about time-based licensing.
How about a cell-phone style plan where you pay a monthly fee, and you get X minutes per month, whether you use them or not.
Also, any minutes you don't use, you lose.
If you go over your minutes, the charge for overage is 100X as much per minute.
Also, previewing documents counts against your minutes.
E-mailing a .DOCX file incurs an extra charge (ala SMS messages)
Printing a .DOCX file incurs 10X the SMS charge (aka extra charges for MMS messages over SMS)
So does receiving an e-mailed .DOCX file... the software can tell, since it stamps a unique ID on each document tied to you and your Office install.
Also, the fee is double to read a .DOCX that you received not using the 'send as e-mail' feature.
Working with documents on a shared drive even more so.
Moreover, for your computer to participate in the 'Office Network', certain features have to get disabled. Mainly, your ability to run third-party document software like OOo. And the copy & paste feature and file upload abilities of third-party instant messenger software will be disabled.
"many handset makers are betting their futures on Android, while Apple is just one company."
Lots of companies bet their futures on Linux 5 years ago and are doing just fine, but has Linux surpassed Windows as top desktop OS?
Google is just one company.
Microsoft is just one company.
Just because some handset makers are betting on the future of Android, doesn't mean their bets are panning out.
Oh yeah.. and their bets can pan out without their OS overtaking the iPhone OS.
What can they do? They gotta be able to track down what IP is faking their website, so they can send takedown notices to the ISP..
But if it's being served by a botnet, that's very hard... and fruitless
This penalizes the advertising network for the contents of the vendor's web site.
If something on the vendor's web site makes the customer not complete the sale (or there's a technical issue), that's not the ad network's fault.
Why should the vendor get a free ride, just because they can't manage to make the sale, after the advertiser sent them there?
Ignorance of what the law is, isn't an excuse. Everyone has a duty to follow the law.
However, ignorance of the facts regarding the situation all but guarantees lack of intent.
Negligence != Intent
Ignorance != Intent
Knowledge Of the issue + Willful (as in a conscious decision) to commit Disobedience of the law = Intent
Redhat Linux has more different patches in 6 months, than Microsoft has a in a few years. That doesn't make it less secure. In fact, most critical Redhat patches fix local privilege escalation issues. Redhat and most Linux distros, even with ample software installed: rarely have remote security issues that might possibly be exploitable by an unauthenticated user.
Usually, Linux is at risk, primarily due to weak choices of passwords, third party applications (web apps), and admin misconfiguration (e.g. making a directory under a web document root world-writable, or writable to the Apache user).
With Windows on the other hand... there are frequent remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in core system components and network services enabled by default (such as the kernel, RPC services).
Microsoft doesn't even generally treat local privilege escalation issues as critical, sometimes they even ignore them.. e.g. "not a security boundary we defend.". There are ample examples of security vulns MS has treated as important that later turned out to be major problems.
In fact... it's quite the opposite.. Windows is so insecure, not because there are many patches, but because the OS needs so many patches to be secure against remote exploits, and because it doesn't get all the patches it needs, because MS cannot seem to ever catch up with the reported security vulnerabilities.
Windows would be more secure if more patches were available to fix the bugs, and Windows users installed them reliably.
A fully patched Windows would be more secure if patches were released for a larger percentage of vulnerabilities.
If Microsoft only decided to acknowledge 1 report of a vulnerability per year, and release only allow 1 security bulletin per year to be released, it would not make Windows more secure.
In fact, Microsoft doesn't release enough patches for Windows frequently, and that's part of what makes Windows insecure, because a fully patched system almost always has unpatched flaws that are known to the public, but MS dismisses or delayed the patch for one reason or another (e.g. the NUL Prefix SSL Certificate bug reported by Kaminsky and Marlinspike in July, 2009).
Not necessarily. The employee who received the letter may have dropped the ball, and failed to forward it to the right person or tell them what to do in any reasonable amount of time.
One person's failure doesn't indicate intent, unless corporate management was aware of the issue for months, and deliberately chose to do nothing.