Ok, so background... first, I know what alot of ISPs do (I used to help run the NOC for one), but many still -don't- do enough.
And at least from my perspective I've known my father to twice be unable to run stuff he needed for work (he's not Joe User, either) after a Microsoft patch goofed with it, mostly because he uses stuff that is fairly obscure and so Microsoft doesn't check it. While he is smart enough to use MozMail instead of Outlook, that doesn't change my hesitance to expect people to use auto-updated. In fact, at least one of my employers has forbidden Windows users to auto-update -any- machines that connect to the VPN, preferring instead to tell people what/when to patch. So for this point the blame is shared by the company that manufactures software that is easy to infect without building in enough safeguards around it.
The point about knowing how to operate a computer before using one is elitist at best. Everyone I know who uses a computer knows how to operate it... I know this because they can turn it on, use programs, and type on the keyboard. Can they use it as well as we, the experts? No. But I can't drive a city bus, jet the engines on a harley or even do a wheelie on my Magna, but I certainly can drive my car and I do a good job on my bike. However, I also expect the government to do everything it can to provide safe roads and I expect my auto manufacturers to do what they can to secure my vehicles. If I build a car myself, or if I soup it up, and then go driving, yeah, it is my fault if things go kablooie. But not with a brand new untouched Honda Civic.
The virus author is like that guy in high school who turned, on a country road at night, moved into the oncoming lane when there was traffic, turned off his lights, and then coasted back to his lane to see people freak out (ok, so maybe I did that once or twice myself when I was a kid) -except- he can make EVERYONE ELSE do it too. If cars were that susceptible, would you blame the drivers for driving, or the manufacturer and the government? NOTE: that's meant to be an analogy, the ISP would be the government, I don't want the Bush administration censoring my network.
ISPs are in the business of selling connectivity, but they are selling that bandwidth to unsophisticated users and they know it. They also are selling to businesses and you know what, at least on some level they are incented to =not= stifle this problem. If a business loses their line because of a virus sucking down bandwidth, what do they do? They want to buy more bandwidth and more services. While the smaller ISPs would rather not deal with virus bandwidth headaches and support calls, the larger ISPs use the "we just provide a pipe" shield to ignore the problem and in the end reap more from larger pipes and more services.
Sound jaded? The above comes from experience. I worked at the smaller shop and when visiting with the big boys it was pretty obviously a business strategy. I don't believe the ISPs do anything at all to perpetuate this behavior, and if the virus author is injurious to them (ie, he's on -their- network sucking -their- bandwidth too) they will go after them with gusto, but otherwise it is a hands-off policy.
I bet they wrote that wonderful disk compressor that I used when I was first playing around with my Dad's 8088 machine. It was able to magically shrink all my files to 1% of their normal size and I could still run them at full speed. Strangely, I never got anymore disk space freed when I did this (actually, space decreased by... guess... wait for it... 1%)....
They simply intercepted filesystem calls via a TSR. They moved the original files to a hidden directory and created dummy files of the same name. The TSR swapped the FAT location when it saw one of the replaced files called for....
Ah the good old days when downloading unknown binaries from a BBS was -fun- and not troubling:)
While there are a number of Linux based routers out there, none that I know of are used in the Gigabit realm. Even if they are, they at the -very- least have recompiled the kernel to switch on a number of router/gateway optimizations... and quite possibly contain proprietary network / NIC kernel modules to further gain improvements.
Unless you have a VERY modern bus architecture (alot of people using Linux routers do so on old gear), preferably an AMD with hyperthreading (since I doubt you have a non-x86 system or you'd have mentioned it), you will never get close to maximizing not one but -3- Gb NICs.
Take a look at some of the servers that are out there in the x86 realm. They usually require you to use a 100MHz or 133MHz PCI card to get best results from a Gb ethernet NIC. And if you look at the first generation of x86 servers (say, from 2 years ago) that came with Gb ports by default, looking deep into the benchmarks you often find that they never reached their Gb potential with the built-in ports either. The advantage was that it was still better than 100 Megabit.
With a hyperthreaded high-speed bus and some kernel tweaks, I would be quite happy if I could get all 3 NICs to stress-test simultaneously at 300-500Mb/each. Heck, I'd probably be happy around the 250Mb range.
BTW, even a Gb switch, on the home CPE level, is probably never going to send multi-Gb of data (ie, by trying to switch data amongst multiple Gb ports). Often times you are limited to a max of 1Gb total throughput because of the switched backplane. Heck, even then you may max around 900Mb due to network overhead.
Moral is simply to realize that with all networking products, the real speed is usually significantly less than the rated speed.
At least officially, the open sourcing of Solaris is still a go. However, no firm date has been given and of course full diligence to protect 3rd party code would have to take place. In other words, definitely not tomorrow.
I think you may be remembering that right after the Solaris open source announcement was made, someone else (without approval) said Java would also be open sourced. That statement was retracted with a statement that this option (for Java) is still under consideration but nothing firm has been decided yet.
Very true. But you don't have to do anything to copyright a creation. Copyright is automatically extended to an original work.
Proof and enforcement aren't automatic (and if you don't have proof or don't enforce it, the copyright is essentially void), so you do have some work to do (at the least, get a copy digitally signed or get a hardcopy notarized), but that is reasonably simple and affordable.
It wouldn't hurt to have it registered, but unless I'm remembering incorrectly it is not necessary.
I definitely like the idea of getting the concept published / reviewed / etc. Preferably in a printed media, though I think getting it onto a fairly major site would work.
Heck, maybe/. should have a category for something like this./. is a reasonably well known site and we could post alternate variations in a thread. Then either/. or the submitter could get the entire thread digitally signed as prior art.
Seriously, they're not the ones getting the moolah, the EFF is. Therefore they obviously want the EFF to do well.
Move to your theory... sure, the EFF gets $1000... but hereafter no one will ever participate in such a fund raiser since the first one was a burn. Which means in the end the EFF probably suffers more damage than good.
Unless this were perpetrated by people who -want- to hurt the EFF or the TiVo community, there is just no reason for them to bother.
So yes, in the end the contributors are doing this on the assumption of good faith, but it seems a fair assumption (especially since you can set your own donation level).
Remember, they are only trying to avoid modifying the hardware... they can do all the low-level changes, hex editing and other tricks they want. And the BASH binary is already there with working IO interfaces. It is not as much of a trick as it would seem. Similar things have been done on earlier TiVos since the TiVo first came out.
Wait, you're saying it is the initial victim's fault that the virus authors wrote malicious code -and- released it publicly?
I think if you're going to lay the responsibility chain, it lies primarily with the virus author.
Subsequently, the responsibility lies on the DSL service provider who KNOWS they are selling to often uninformed users and yet fail to provide adequate first (NOC) or second level (CPE) protection for these users.
Next responsility lands in the laps of those people who wrote software that was prone to infection.
Last, reponsibility makes it to Joe User at that point and then recycles to the beginning for any systems that his infection spreads to.
So I, as the end user, have -final- responsibility, but not primary responsibility nor -blame- for the infections.... Think of it in terms of vandalism...
The primary person responsible for vandalism is... the vandal.
Subsquent responsibility (for prevention) is law enforcement. Is law enforcement to blame for the vandalism? Only if they do less than is required to reasonably address the situation (I don't expect them to spend all day hunting down the tagger 3 blocks over, but I -do- expect them to patrol all the blocks as much as they can without hampering other worthy law enforcement activities).
Making the assumption that I know that I live in an area where people are vandalizing property, I will probably buy paint and materials that are durable enough to be washed/repaired (if I don't, we hit the next level)... it is now the responsibility of that company to make materials that are up to the job. It won't stop the vandals, that is the job of the police, but it should make their vandalism as hard as possible to have a permanent effect.
Last, I am responsible for -using- the materials above, I am responsible for calling law enforcement if there is an infraction so that they can address it. However, if I fail to do the above all that happens is the 2nd and 3rd levels of responsibility are void. I am still not responsible for the unknown vandal having decided to unleash their frustrations on my neighborhood.
They definitely were in the past... and they definitely still have plenty of Unix expertise. So -traditionally- (ie, pre '95) they were a Unix vendor. Recently no, but traditions include the past.
As an ex-citizen of Alabama, I can tell you that while there are a ton of good people there, the majority of the Government is corrupt and/or lazy and/or fanatically religious (usually a combination of 2 of those 3). I'd be surprised if you could find a decade since the civil war where this wasn't the case (not saying the civil war caused it, only that I haven't read up on their history from before that).
I've lived from Colorado to Georgia in various places since reaching voting age (and have a significant interest in California... BOY I wish you could vote for the state government of the state in which your -employer- resides), and while I think that the governments in Mississippi and Louisana are probable more corrupt, Alabama's government (including city/county levels) has the worst -combination- of traits.
Go to Mississippi and you're pretty well limited to a very religious government workforce. Go to Louisiana and corruption is rampant. Go to Georgia and you'll see alot of laziness. Apparently Alabama is the "melting pot of the South" since if you end up there you will never know WHAT to expect, only that you probably won't like it.
It's too bad, I enjoyed my time there and have friends there, but I'll not live there again. I feel bad for those who have to deal with it, especially the more moderate northern Alabama areas that have to constantly deal with being in too much of a minority to vote out the dipsticks.
There was a movie with this 20-something years ago. Albert Finney... Looker... but don't watch it, it is pretty darned bad (unless you wanna see a young Susan Dey:)
A basic lesson in economics. Call me jaded, but isn't convergence what everyone has been -hyping- for a few years? You'd have to be a bit thick to be in the phone or chip business and not seen this coming.
High-end cameras won't go away anymore than my Canon 35mm died when 110 film and later disposable cameras went away.
Non-phone audio players will continue, though maybe not so many portables.
PDAs? Ok, so I can see the phone and PDA market completely converging someday except for government spec'ed devices that can't have a phone.
Maybe some companies just got spoiled by being able to sell us a new latest-greatest-doodad every year or two?
I guess that explains GNOME's lawn-dart trajectory....
(parent posted anonymouse, score:0)
Ok, I'll go for the bait...
Actually, Sun has very little say on the strategic direction of GNOME. And if you're referring to changes from GNOME 1.x to 2.x (I can't tell for sure and if so it sure is an old topic to harp on), Sun did not release any 1.x products and had little to nothing to do with their development.
If anything, Sun wishes they had more influence on GNOME's trajectory. They would -love- to have GNOME look more towards Java than Mono (Java openness debate belongs elsewhere and doesn't change Sun's desire in this direction).
Alot of the work Sun does on GNOME is to fix and or finish things that are left in an almost-done state by the rest of the community. Things like Accessibility and Internationalization. Things that alot of the rest of community either takes for granted or is not overly interested in when there are more fun and new things to do, but which are of key importance to GNOME's use and acceptance in the business world.
I'm not saying that Sun does these things out of pure charity, of course not. If Accessibility was completely up to section 508 and if the applications were fully translated into all the Sun supported languages, then surely Sun would spend time/money on other things. But once done these changes benefit the GNOME community as a whole.
Which hits on one of the headaches for the big companies doing stuff with open source. You have to either be forward thinking and pay someone to take the time to forward port or you have to spend more money to pay someone (in the long-run) to continuously reapply old patches.
Re:Dear Apple haters...
on
Bash 3.0 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Believe it or not, -most- of the large companies that use GPL'ed tools give back to the community.
Apple has done numerous fixes, not just on BASH.
Sun (disclaimer: for whom I work) has done -tons- of work on GNOME, Mozilla and don't forget Open Office (just to name a few).
IBM works on many projects and gives back... plus contributing all new things like JFS.
All the distro makers like Red Hat, Novell, etc give back tons.
Each of those companies pay engineers to fix pieces not done in Open Source projects as well as to extend them for their customers. The patches are covered under GPL just like the main code, and these companies know it and yet knowingly dedicate serious money and hours to these projects. And then they satisfy the GPL by putting them out on source CDs or submitting them back to the main projects.
The big problem for getting submitted code accepted is that these companies are usually fixing and developing on a codebase that is aging. For instance, Sun did numerous I18N fixes for GNOME 2.6, but by the time they were ready the main GNOME organization had moved on to 2.8. That means there is a disconnect between the two and the changes have to be ported forward before they will hit the main code branch. The same problem can happen with kernel patches and just about any other codebase that changes versions so quickly.
Sorry, you were doing the good thing and pointing out Apple's contributions. But so many people think these companies violate the GPL (in spirit if not in law) when they are very large contributors to open source. Sure, some do, and the community usually find out about it and shame them into minimal compliance (Linksys and Sveasoft come to mind after my delving into alternate WRT54G firmwares last night), but generally speaking the big companies have been a good part of the community.
All RIGHT! Now I can finally get a properly designed squirrel call! The one I've got drives em nuts for a minute or two, but they adapt. Johnny Stewart, get me an ultrasonic squirrel call NOW!
BTW, these things can also be made to sound like small monkeys if you close your hand over the opening, waggle the rubber part, and repeatedly allow the opening to open/close:)
Don't they do this already? I don't know anyone who is a Netscape subsriber, so I hadn't heard either way but I had always -assumed- they made sure that Netscape subscribers had a copy of Netscape the browser.
Of course, if I were an ISP today (and not worried about the Netscape/Mozilla legacy) I would probably take any Gecko tech I was using and tell it to emulate IE6 headers so that I didn't get calls about the browser being rejected. I'm not an ISP, so I dislike this process for the reasons you outline, but I can understand why they would. Hopefully Netscape the ISP won't but I could see it.
Intel recently announced that by 2009 their soon-to-be unified socket architecture would be split into sockets and arrays again to satisfy the need of manufacturers to force customer upgrades.
ISPs (which is what Netscape is now... sad as that is) have been rebranding browsers for nearly a decade now. While "Netscape" meant something through the 4.0 generation, the 6.0 and 7.0 series has done nothing but rebrand Mozilla. With the firing of their Mozilla developers they remove the last bit of respect I had for the name "Netscape". Now they are just a rebranded Mozilla.
I still have reverence for what Netscape was and did, but today they are no more like that entity than SCO is like the old SCO.
Agreed... micropayments for web services is not going to make people happy.
I was thinking that I would like micropayments for online gaming, but then realized that the online games I pay for already have my credit card information. So no, I don't need micropayments there either. I just need a good MMORPG to come along that is will to charge by the minute instead of the month.
If I found a game that would do this in a fair manner (let's say $.02 for 5 minutes of play, coming out to around $10 for 40 hours) then I could play as little as I wanted and not suffer or I could play as much as I wanted and the service would continue to make money instead of fleecing other players to make up for power gamers.
That situation definitely doesn't require micropayments. If the company is worried about covering their transaction costs, say that the minimum amount charged per month will be $1 (giving you 4 hours time every month that you need to spend) and aggregate all sessions into a single monthly charge.
I wouldn't mind seeing the credit charge system rearchitected to allow micropayments in some form, but overall the current schemes that talk about using it just don't seem feasible to me, either.
Actually there are very good reasons to not want to do this. I happen to have one of the newer units, but folks who have a series 1:
* May have dozens (or over a hundred if they upgraded their drive) of hours of programming on the unit.
* Will have to spend at least a couple of hours adding their old season passes, preferences and such to the system and things like their "thumbs" ratings will be lost forever.
* Could have installed / enabled hacks that are simply not feasible on the series 2 (and in the case of a few things like caller ID on some of the older units, are simply not possible on the newer units)
* Will not see a significant performance boost from the new hardware... series 2 units have more impressive specifications for RAM and CPU but in reality they don't do much to speed things up... so there is no significant need to upgrade.
All of the above combine for some very powerful reasons to not want to upgrade. DirecTV and TiVo could have architected things differently so that season passes and preferences were archived on the dial-up server, which would have alleviate #2 above, but otherwise there is not much that can be done to make this a painless process.
It's not like buying a new TV or a new receiver... in many ways it is more like having to replace a dead hard drive in your PC (or your PC itself but without a significant speed increase) and never having been -able- to back up your data.
The only real advantages I see in going from a Series 1 to a Series 2 box:
* You get a couple of USB ports that, unlike standalone TiVos, DirecTV purposefully does not enable (on standalones you can use them for USB networking, removing the need for a phone line to the system)
* You will continue to get updates after DirecTV stops sending out system updates to Series 1 units... but that is no big deal right now since DirecTV is FAR behind standalone TiVo software versions (as in version 4.0 + HMO, which is now standard and free on standalones, is not available for DirecTV users)
* You get a system with more CPU (but less ways to use it due to a dearth of hacks for the Series 2... yes, I know, alot of the hacks can be done but overall most people find the Series 2 too much of a pain to hack).
So needless to say, there is no burning need to upgrade to the Series 2. To the HD TiVo, yes, but that is MUCH more expensive.
Is this a conspiracy to force people to upgrade as others have suggested? Hell no... DirecTV is not getting anything from such a mess but bad press. But it's also not a benefit to the people affected to get the discounted/free new unit either.
I think 32 is probably the cut-off. Being 33 I have recollections of all but a couple, but most were past their hey-day by the time I was developing formative memories.
Take a look at the past... Cobalt, VA, Red Hat all skyrocketed to this price level after their IPO. The only people who got the opening price were friends of brokers and the companies didn't see anything past the opening price. Yet they still changed hands readily throughout the day at those prices.
I don't think there is any question that all the shares will sell. If they don't change hands after selling, Google isn't going to care as they will still have raked in billions with this price instead of hundreds of millions with a lower price.
Is it actually giving anyone a -break-? No... this price is no more friendly to the casual buyer than those other IPOs (well, not true, a couple of those went far past the $135 mark on first day so it is a boon there). But it is no less friendly to that investor either.
The difference is the brokers and their friends don't get an immediate cash-cow, they're on the same playing field. If I can't get a break, at least I know that the rich dudes didn't either.
We already know that Google has been in spats in the past for indexing protected sites and providing ways to get around them.
I think if I were running such a site I would see about creating a system whereby if I saw Google coming in I would give it 25% of the content (which means the majority of the keywords needed for good indexing will have been sent out) along with a "please click here for more" link.
I personally don't -like- that kind of stuff, but that is not my point... such services are missing out when they completely block Google from indexing them.
Besides, how many -useful- sites protect there content? I'd say that they are in the small minority today.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so background ... first, I know what alot of ISPs do (I used to help run the NOC for one), but many still -don't- do enough.
... I know this because they can turn it on, use programs, and type on the keyboard. Can they use it as well as we, the experts? No. But I can't drive a city bus, jet the engines on a harley or even do a wheelie on my Magna, but I certainly can drive my car and I do a good job on my bike. However, I also expect the government to do everything it can to provide safe roads and I expect my auto manufacturers to do what they can to secure my vehicles. If I build a car myself, or if I soup it up, and then go driving, yeah, it is my fault if things go kablooie. But not with a brand new untouched Honda Civic.
And at least from my perspective I've known my father to twice be unable to run stuff he needed for work (he's not Joe User, either) after a Microsoft patch goofed with it, mostly because he uses stuff that is fairly obscure and so Microsoft doesn't check it. While he is smart enough to use MozMail instead of Outlook, that doesn't change my hesitance to expect people to use auto-updated. In fact, at least one of my employers has forbidden Windows users to auto-update -any- machines that connect to the VPN, preferring instead to tell people what/when to patch. So for this point the blame is shared by the company that manufactures software that is easy to infect without building in enough safeguards around it.
The point about knowing how to operate a computer before using one is elitist at best. Everyone I know who uses a computer knows how to operate it
The virus author is like that guy in high school who turned, on a country road at night, moved into the oncoming lane when there was traffic, turned off his lights, and then coasted back to his lane to see people freak out (ok, so maybe I did that once or twice myself when I was a kid) -except- he can make EVERYONE ELSE do it too. If cars were that susceptible, would you blame the drivers for driving, or the manufacturer and the government? NOTE: that's meant to be an analogy, the ISP would be the government, I don't want the Bush administration censoring my network.
ISPs are in the business of selling connectivity, but they are selling that bandwidth to unsophisticated users and they know it. They also are selling to businesses and you know what, at least on some level they are incented to =not= stifle this problem. If a business loses their line because of a virus sucking down bandwidth, what do they do? They want to buy more bandwidth and more services. While the smaller ISPs would rather not deal with virus bandwidth headaches and support calls, the larger ISPs use the "we just provide a pipe" shield to ignore the problem and in the end reap more from larger pipes and more services.
Sound jaded? The above comes from experience. I worked at the smaller shop and when visiting with the big boys it was pretty obviously a business strategy. I don't believe the ISPs do anything at all to perpetuate this behavior, and if the virus author is injurious to them (ie, he's on -their- network sucking -their- bandwidth too) they will go after them with gusto, but otherwise it is a hands-off policy.
You must be new here. Welcome to /. We can take down pretty much any non-commercially-backed page.
I bet they wrote that wonderful disk compressor that I used when I was first playing around with my Dad's 8088 machine. It was able to magically shrink all my files to 1% of their normal size and I could still run them at full speed. Strangely, I never got anymore disk space freed when I did this (actually, space decreased by ... guess ... wait for it ... 1%). ...
...
:)
They simply intercepted filesystem calls via a TSR. They moved the original files to a hidden directory and created dummy files of the same name. The TSR swapped the FAT location when it saw one of the replaced files called for.
Ah the good old days when downloading unknown binaries from a BBS was -fun- and not troubling
Agreed.
... and quite possibly contain proprietary network / NIC kernel modules to further gain improvements.
While there are a number of Linux based routers out there, none that I know of are used in the Gigabit realm. Even if they are, they at the -very- least have recompiled the kernel to switch on a number of router/gateway optimizations
Unless you have a VERY modern bus architecture (alot of people using Linux routers do so on old gear), preferably an AMD with hyperthreading (since I doubt you have a non-x86 system or you'd have mentioned it), you will never get close to maximizing not one but -3- Gb NICs.
Take a look at some of the servers that are out there in the x86 realm. They usually require you to use a 100MHz or 133MHz PCI card to get best results from a Gb ethernet NIC. And if you look at the first generation of x86 servers (say, from 2 years ago) that came with Gb ports by default, looking deep into the benchmarks you often find that they never reached their Gb potential with the built-in ports either. The advantage was that it was still better than 100 Megabit.
With a hyperthreaded high-speed bus and some kernel tweaks, I would be quite happy if I could get all 3 NICs to stress-test simultaneously at 300-500Mb/each. Heck, I'd probably be happy around the 250Mb range.
BTW, even a Gb switch, on the home CPE level, is probably never going to send multi-Gb of data (ie, by trying to switch data amongst multiple Gb ports). Often times you are limited to a max of 1Gb total throughput because of the switched backplane. Heck, even then you may max around 900Mb due to network overhead.
Moral is simply to realize that with all networking products, the real speed is usually significantly less than the rated speed.
At least officially, the open sourcing of Solaris is still a go. However, no firm date has been given and of course full diligence to protect 3rd party code would have to take place. In other words, definitely not tomorrow.
I think you may be remembering that right after the Solaris open source announcement was made, someone else (without approval) said Java would also be open sourced. That statement was retracted with a statement that this option (for Java) is still under consideration but nothing firm has been decided yet.
Very true. But you don't have to do anything to copyright a creation. Copyright is automatically extended to an original work.
/. should have a category for something like this. /. is a reasonably well known site and we could post alternate variations in a thread. Then either /. or the submitter could get the entire thread digitally signed as prior art.
Proof and enforcement aren't automatic (and if you don't have proof or don't enforce it, the copyright is essentially void), so you do have some work to do (at the least, get a copy digitally signed or get a hardcopy notarized), but that is reasonably simple and affordable.
It wouldn't hurt to have it registered, but unless I'm remembering incorrectly it is not necessary.
I definitely like the idea of getting the concept published / reviewed / etc. Preferably in a printed media, though I think getting it onto a fairly major site would work.
Heck, maybe
Doubtful ... no incentive except for stupid kicks.
... sure, the EFF gets $1000 ... but hereafter no one will ever participate in such a fund raiser since the first one was a burn. Which means in the end the EFF probably suffers more damage than good.
... they can do all the low-level changes, hex editing and other tricks they want. And the BASH binary is already there with working IO interfaces. It is not as much of a trick as it would seem. Similar things have been done on earlier TiVos since the TiVo first came out.
Seriously, they're not the ones getting the moolah, the EFF is. Therefore they obviously want the EFF to do well.
Move to your theory
Unless this were perpetrated by people who -want- to hurt the EFF or the TiVo community, there is just no reason for them to bother.
So yes, in the end the contributors are doing this on the assumption of good faith, but it seems a fair assumption (especially since you can set your own donation level).
Remember, they are only trying to avoid modifying the hardware
Wait, you're saying it is the initial victim's fault that the virus authors wrote malicious code -and- released it publicly?
... Think of it in terms of vandalism ...
... the vandal.
... it is now the responsibility of that company to make materials that are up to the job. It won't stop the vandals, that is the job of the police, but it should make their vandalism as hard as possible to have a permanent effect.
I think if you're going to lay the responsibility chain, it lies primarily with the virus author.
Subsequently, the responsibility lies on the DSL service provider who KNOWS they are selling to often uninformed users and yet fail to provide adequate first (NOC) or second level (CPE) protection for these users.
Next responsility lands in the laps of those people who wrote software that was prone to infection.
Last, reponsibility makes it to Joe User at that point and then recycles to the beginning for any systems that his infection spreads to.
So I, as the end user, have -final- responsibility, but not primary responsibility nor -blame- for the infections.
The primary person responsible for vandalism is
Subsquent responsibility (for prevention) is law enforcement. Is law enforcement to blame for the vandalism? Only if they do less than is required to reasonably address the situation (I don't expect them to spend all day hunting down the tagger 3 blocks over, but I -do- expect them to patrol all the blocks as much as they can without hampering other worthy law enforcement activities).
Making the assumption that I know that I live in an area where people are vandalizing property, I will probably buy paint and materials that are durable enough to be washed/repaired (if I don't, we hit the next level)
Last, I am responsible for -using- the materials above, I am responsible for calling law enforcement if there is an infraction so that they can address it. However, if I fail to do the above all that happens is the 2nd and 3rd levels of responsibility are void. I am still not responsible for the unknown vandal having decided to unleash their frustrations on my neighborhood.
Nitpick:
... and they definitely still have plenty of Unix expertise. So -traditionally- (ie, pre '95) they were a Unix vendor. Recently no, but traditions include the past.
Novell not traditionally a Unix vendor?
They definitely were in the past
As an ex-citizen of Alabama, I can tell you that while there are a ton of good people there, the majority of the Government is corrupt and/or lazy and/or fanatically religious (usually a combination of 2 of those 3). I'd be surprised if you could find a decade since the civil war where this wasn't the case (not saying the civil war caused it, only that I haven't read up on their history from before that).
... BOY I wish you could vote for the state government of the state in which your -employer- resides), and while I think that the governments in Mississippi and Louisana are probable more corrupt, Alabama's government (including city/county levels) has the worst -combination- of traits.
I've lived from Colorado to Georgia in various places since reaching voting age (and have a significant interest in California
Go to Mississippi and you're pretty well limited to a very religious government workforce. Go to Louisiana and corruption is rampant. Go to Georgia and you'll see alot of laziness. Apparently Alabama is the "melting pot of the South" since if you end up there you will never know WHAT to expect, only that you probably won't like it.
It's too bad, I enjoyed my time there and have friends there, but I'll not live there again. I feel bad for those who have to deal with it, especially the more moderate northern Alabama areas that have to constantly deal with being in too much of a minority to vote out the dipsticks.
I've got one of those ... all you need is a cat and a stretch of industrial grade carpet.
There was a movie with this 20-something years ago. Albert Finney ... Looker ... but don't watch it, it is pretty darned bad (unless you wanna see a young Susan Dey :)
A basic lesson in economics. Call me jaded, but isn't convergence what everyone has been -hyping- for a few years? You'd have to be a bit thick to be in the phone or chip business and not seen this coming.
High-end cameras won't go away anymore than my Canon 35mm died when 110 film and later disposable cameras went away.
Non-phone audio players will continue, though maybe not so many portables.
PDAs? Ok, so I can see the phone and PDA market completely converging someday except for government spec'ed devices that can't have a phone.
Maybe some companies just got spoiled by being able to sell us a new latest-greatest-doodad every year or two?
I guess that explains GNOME's lawn-dart trajectory....
...
(parent posted anonymouse, score:0)
Ok, I'll go for the bait
Actually, Sun has very little say on the strategic direction of GNOME. And if you're referring to changes from GNOME 1.x to 2.x (I can't tell for sure and if so it sure is an old topic to harp on), Sun did not release any 1.x products and had little to nothing to do with their development.
If anything, Sun wishes they had more influence on GNOME's trajectory. They would -love- to have GNOME look more towards Java than Mono (Java openness debate belongs elsewhere and doesn't change Sun's desire in this direction).
Alot of the work Sun does on GNOME is to fix and or finish things that are left in an almost-done state by the rest of the community. Things like Accessibility and Internationalization. Things that alot of the rest of community either takes for granted or is not overly interested in when there are more fun and new things to do, but which are of key importance to GNOME's use and acceptance in the business world.
I'm not saying that Sun does these things out of pure charity, of course not. If Accessibility was completely up to section 508 and if the applications were fully translated into all the Sun supported languages, then surely Sun would spend time/money on other things. But once done these changes benefit the GNOME community as a whole.
Which hits on one of the headaches for the big companies doing stuff with open source. You have to either be forward thinking and pay someone to take the time to forward port or you have to spend more money to pay someone (in the long-run) to continuously reapply old patches.
Believe it or not, -most- of the large companies that use GPL'ed tools give back to the community.
... plus contributing all new things like JFS.
Apple has done numerous fixes, not just on BASH.
Sun (disclaimer: for whom I work) has done -tons- of work on GNOME, Mozilla and don't forget Open Office (just to name a few).
IBM works on many projects and gives back
All the distro makers like Red Hat, Novell, etc give back tons.
Each of those companies pay engineers to fix pieces not done in Open Source projects as well as to extend them for their customers. The patches are covered under GPL just like the main code, and these companies know it and yet knowingly dedicate serious money and hours to these projects. And then they satisfy the GPL by putting them out on source CDs or submitting them back to the main projects.
The big problem for getting submitted code accepted is that these companies are usually fixing and developing on a codebase that is aging. For instance, Sun did numerous I18N fixes for GNOME 2.6, but by the time they were ready the main GNOME organization had moved on to 2.8. That means there is a disconnect between the two and the changes have to be ported forward before they will hit the main code branch. The same problem can happen with kernel patches and just about any other codebase that changes versions so quickly.
Sorry, you were doing the good thing and pointing out Apple's contributions. But so many people think these companies violate the GPL (in spirit if not in law) when they are very large contributors to open source. Sure, some do, and the community usually find out about it and shame them into minimal compliance (Linksys and Sveasoft come to mind after my delving into alternate WRT54G firmwares last night), but generally speaking the big companies have been a good part of the community.
All RIGHT! Now I can finally get a properly designed squirrel call! The one I've got drives em nuts for a minute or two, but they adapt. Johnny Stewart, get me an ultrasonic squirrel call NOW!
:)
BTW, these things can also be made to sound like small monkeys if you close your hand over the opening, waggle the rubber part, and repeatedly allow the opening to open/close
I agree completely.
Don't they do this already? I don't know anyone who is a Netscape subsriber, so I hadn't heard either way but I had always -assumed- they made sure that Netscape subscribers had a copy of Netscape the browser.
Of course, if I were an ISP today (and not worried about the Netscape/Mozilla legacy) I would probably take any Gecko tech I was using and tell it to emulate IE6 headers so that I didn't get calls about the browser being rejected. I'm not an ISP, so I dislike this process for the reasons you outline, but I can understand why they would. Hopefully Netscape the ISP won't but I could see it.
Intel recently announced that by 2009 their soon-to-be unified socket architecture would be split into sockets and arrays again to satisfy the need of manufacturers to force customer upgrades.
ISPs (which is what Netscape is now ... sad as that is) have been rebranding browsers for nearly a decade now. While "Netscape" meant something through the 4.0 generation, the 6.0 and 7.0 series has done nothing but rebrand Mozilla. With the firing of their Mozilla developers they remove the last bit of respect I had for the name "Netscape". Now they are just a rebranded Mozilla.
I still have reverence for what Netscape was and did, but today they are no more like that entity than SCO is like the old SCO.
Agreed ... micropayments for web services is not going to make people happy.
I was thinking that I would like micropayments for online gaming, but then realized that the online games I pay for already have my credit card information. So no, I don't need micropayments there either. I just need a good MMORPG to come along that is will to charge by the minute instead of the month.
If I found a game that would do this in a fair manner (let's say $.02 for 5 minutes of play, coming out to around $10 for 40 hours) then I could play as little as I wanted and not suffer or I could play as much as I wanted and the service would continue to make money instead of fleecing other players to make up for power gamers.
That situation definitely doesn't require micropayments. If the company is worried about covering their transaction costs, say that the minimum amount charged per month will be $1 (giving you 4 hours time every month that you need to spend) and aggregate all sessions into a single monthly charge.
I wouldn't mind seeing the credit charge system rearchitected to allow micropayments in some form, but overall the current schemes that talk about using it just don't seem feasible to me, either.
Actually there are very good reasons to not want to do this. I happen to have one of the newer units, but folks who have a series 1:
... series 2 units have more impressive specifications for RAM and CPU but in reality they don't do much to speed things up ... so there is no significant need to upgrade.
... in many ways it is more like having to replace a dead hard drive in your PC (or your PC itself but without a significant speed increase) and never having been -able- to back up your data.
... but that is no big deal right now since DirecTV is FAR behind standalone TiVo software versions (as in version 4.0 + HMO, which is now standard and free on standalones, is not available for DirecTV users)
... yes, I know, alot of the hacks can be done but overall most people find the Series 2 too much of a pain to hack).
... DirecTV is not getting anything from such a mess but bad press. But it's also not a benefit to the people affected to get the discounted/free new unit either.
* May have dozens (or over a hundred if they upgraded their drive) of hours of programming on the unit.
* Will have to spend at least a couple of hours adding their old season passes, preferences and such to the system and things like their "thumbs" ratings will be lost forever.
* Could have installed / enabled hacks that are simply not feasible on the series 2 (and in the case of a few things like caller ID on some of the older units, are simply not possible on the newer units)
* Will not see a significant performance boost from the new hardware
All of the above combine for some very powerful reasons to not want to upgrade. DirecTV and TiVo could have architected things differently so that season passes and preferences were archived on the dial-up server, which would have alleviate #2 above, but otherwise there is not much that can be done to make this a painless process.
It's not like buying a new TV or a new receiver
The only real advantages I see in going from a Series 1 to a Series 2 box:
* You get a couple of USB ports that, unlike standalone TiVos, DirecTV purposefully does not enable (on standalones you can use them for USB networking, removing the need for a phone line to the system)
* You will continue to get updates after DirecTV stops sending out system updates to Series 1 units
* You get a system with more CPU (but less ways to use it due to a dearth of hacks for the Series 2
So needless to say, there is no burning need to upgrade to the Series 2. To the HD TiVo, yes, but that is MUCH more expensive.
Is this a conspiracy to force people to upgrade as others have suggested? Hell no
I think 32 is probably the cut-off. Being 33 I have recollections of all but a couple, but most were past their hey-day by the time I was developing formative memories.
Take a look at the past ... Cobalt, VA, Red Hat all skyrocketed to this price level after their IPO. The only people who got the opening price were friends of brokers and the companies didn't see anything past the opening price. Yet they still changed hands readily throughout the day at those prices.
... this price is no more friendly to the casual buyer than those other IPOs (well, not true, a couple of those went far past the $135 mark on first day so it is a boon there). But it is no less friendly to that investor either.
I don't think there is any question that all the shares will sell. If they don't change hands after selling, Google isn't going to care as they will still have raked in billions with this price instead of hundreds of millions with a lower price.
Is it actually giving anyone a -break-? No
The difference is the brokers and their friends don't get an immediate cash-cow, they're on the same playing field. If I can't get a break, at least I know that the rich dudes didn't either.
We already know that Google has been in spats in the past for indexing protected sites and providing ways to get around them.
... such services are missing out when they completely block Google from indexing them.
I think if I were running such a site I would see about creating a system whereby if I saw Google coming in I would give it 25% of the content (which means the majority of the keywords needed for good indexing will have been sent out) along with a "please click here for more" link.
I personally don't -like- that kind of stuff, but that is not my point
Besides, how many -useful- sites protect there content? I'd say that they are in the small minority today.