HP ripped off their customers. They lied to them. I'm surprised this wasn't leaked earlier - there must have been quite a few HP employees/contractors who worked on the Jornada in development, manufacturing, marketing, and sales and knew about this little discrepancy.
If a customer likes their Jornada, they won't return it over this - they'll want to keep using it! HP chose the cheapest way out, banking on the fact that their customers are probably pissed, but not pissed enough to return their Jornada and then have to go out and buy a different product.
A reduction in MSRP and a partial refund of the purchase price is the right thing to do.
Sun makes great hardware with fast IO systems. But at $15,000 a CPU (400MHz w/ 8MB cache in the EX500s) it isn't always a clear choice, considering a $400 PIII is much faster at CPU-intensive tasks.
It all depends on what you're doing. Oracle on Intel? I don't think so. Lots of cryptography (if there isn't much IO) - an Intel CPU is 3-4 times faster for straight number crunching.
The original idea behind RISC was to do fewer instructions than CISC, but at a much higher clock frequency. Well, now the CISC processors are the ones running faster.
Of course, I love Suns for their hardware reliability, and their serial console. Low-bandwidth remote administration, and you can even fix boot problems (try that remotely on your x86 linux box). With the lom lights-out-management) that they're putting in their new boxes, you can even power the box off and then on again - all through the serial ports. (I don't mean `init 6`. I mean power it off. Once it's off, you can power it back on.)
RMS was paid to write software (EMACS) but thought he had the -right- to release it for free, even though it was written on someone else's time. This right was granted to him by MIT.
RMS then resigned when MIT was charging people for the software that other MIT employees wrote - employees that MIT -paid- to write that software.
Free software has it's place, but commercial software does, too. It takes a lot of time and effort to write good, useful software. If that time isn't volunteered (for free) by private citizens, then someone is paying for it.
If you pay for something, shouldn't you be able to expect something (tangible) in return, if that's what your business is about? Not many businesses survive if they don't have income.
Gnu Bug Tracking System (Gnat) has a billion (or so) user interfaces you can use with it - Tk, web, command-line, etc.
Even the high-end call-tracking systems like remedy can be (and often are) configured to email you when you get a new case assigned to you, but these are hugely expensive and it doesn't sound like you wanted to spend a lot of money.
like... i.am.your.god, my.god.beat.up.your.god, etc. etc.
I'd estimate the number of slanderous, hate, or humor sites will outnumber legitimate religion sites by a factor of 10.
I'm still bitter that someone registered whatthef**k.com before me back when some registrar said they'd allow registering of F*** word domains... but I check now and it's been retaken by the "Core Internet Council Of Registrars":(
It will be very interesting to see how they answer about publicly distributed trade secrets. The whole idea behind that is pretty absurd, and their lawyers must've been pretty brave that day.
I'd also like to see them get smacked down for abusing open protocols. Maybe this can get used against them if they appeal their anti-trust lawsuit?
I hope this goes to court. It would be a huge victory to open standards.
Unless NetPD was wrong and they -really didn't- upload or download Metallica MP3s, these users are taking a big risk.
The hope is that "if enough of us appeal, Metallica won't be willing to sue each of us individually". But what if they choose to just sue the first 1000? Or even 1? What if that's you? Do these people not realize that they really were violating copyright laws, whether the laws are "fair" in their minds or not? "But the CD costed too much!" isn't going to win a lot of points with a judge.
Of course this whole thing is ridiculous. As I and many others have said before, if artists just find a better distribution model so they can sell their music at reasonable prices - less than $5/album - then these blatant copyright abuses will mostly subside. And we can all sleep better because the Big Bad Record Companies will be going out of business.
I'm sorry, but Napster was created to get music without paying for it. Sure there are independent artists out there, but that's not what the users are sharing and downloading. If people wanted independent music, they could just go to mp3.com
How can a company be allowed to exist when it's sole purpose is violating copyright laws? This isn't about the freedom of information, it's about getting music people are too cheap to pay for.
Instead of whining about how expensive and unfair CD prices are, why don't you let artists and record companies know you're willing to buy CDs at $5/CD instead of $15-18/CD? Hell, last night I bought 12 CDs for $126.xx. If you know where to shop, you can get them at much less than full price. (Although I'd much rather cut out the record companies and pay the artists directly.)
"That car is too expensive, and that's unfair, I think I'll steal it!" This is no different.
People need to grow up and start telling artists to find a better distribution model. If you downloaded an album, it could let you listen to it a few times, and then pop up with a dialog box, "Send $2 to the artist?" I know I'd be happy to pay 20% of what I normally spend on an album.
Hopefully this'll go straight to the top, so it isn't stuck in another five years of appeals.
What appalls me is Microsoft and others saying a break-up will hurt innovation and create more security vulnerabilities. Microsoft OS should concentrate on drivers, things like DirectX, improved networking support, making a better OS that crashes less. How would they do that? Seperate the applications from the kernel - just like all the unices.
What if someone Bcc:'s you on something? You won't see the email, as you're not in the To: or Cc: lines, and your email client will reject it.
Procmail is one way to go about doing what you asked for (a client side spam-block). A lot of the programs spammers use have signatures that procmail can catch. But spammers can start to use new programs. Or spammers can start to send email with your email address in the To: field (happens, although rarely, to me)
An adequate solution (lacking any better solution) is to maintain seperate email addresses for friends, work, mailing lists, and "companies" - whether it be for account information (you bought something) or whatever. Then you can "white-list" the work, friends, and mailing list email addresses, meaning the person sending you email has to be on the approved email sender list - any mail that isn't from an address in your white-list gets bounced or dropped.
Unfortunately, you can never tell what email account amazon or petstore.com or whomever you do business on the web with is going to send from, so you are still stuck with one email address that can potentially get spam.
Another solution is to get a domain and set up an individual email address for every company you do business with. So if you never want to get email from microsoft@yourdomain.tld again, just forward it to/dev/null:)
All spam has some sort of contact information in it, right? Either a phone number to call, or an address to send money to, or a (p0rn) url to go to. Easy way to track down the perp and sue them for lots of money!
Let's pretend I'm p0rn site www.slashporn.net and www.slashporn.com is getting more business than me... I'll just put them out of business - send a few hundred thousand emails stating "Visit slashporn.com! p0rn for nerds!"
Soon enough, slashporn.com gets sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars and is out of business. My business goes up and life is peachy.
Wonderful.
Of course, this ties in to DDoS - how do you track down the spammers if they're spoofing their return address? The current state of the internet makes this difficult if not impossible (if done well). Yes, I know there are differences between spoofed IP packets and spoofed SMTP headers, but there are similarities as well.
I'm not trying to give SlashAndover a hard time for making a poor choice, but my opinion of Exodus went down quite a few notches right after I installed my stuff there. Did you guys do your research?
Let's see, what kind of problems have I had? -Routing - routes not set up when EXDS said they were 'Good to go!' -Firewalls (managed) - installed with no rules. -Power - missing a circuit in our cage
I could go on.
And I will.
-HVAC - we've had some of our Suns turn themselves off because it got too hot it our cage -Backups - they installed the client on one of our boxes, didn't put it in startup scripts, and after a month of the client not getting backed up, took it out of the backup rotation because "it wasn't responding" (without bothering to call us!) (never mind they only installed the client on one of the six boxes they were supposed to) -More HVAC "it's 84 degrees in here, you're supposed to notify me at SEVENTY TWO" "oh, well the alarm kept going off so we set the threshold higher" (you'd think i'm kidding - i'm not.) >:(
So the question I usually ask myself when the conversation turns to Exodus is, "How many times would I rather pound my testicles with a wooden mallet than do business with Exodus again?"
We've talked to SVPs and Directors and other PHBs, and all we can ever get out of them is "we're working on making it better for you". Gee, thanks, that's such a consolation.
Of course, we only pay them $168k/year, so naturally we shouldn't expect much for that paltry sum, right?
-If- Exodus had blocked the RFC1918 traffic like they were supposed to at -their- routers instead of letting it get to the slashdot servers, then the site would've received less traffic. Good, right?
And then the DDOS attacker(s) would've started to use legitimate addresses, and slashdot would have had no idea what was valid traffic and what wasn't.
@home uses 10.x addresses extensively through their networks. Traceroute through them sometime. This is acceptable and encouraged if you want to spare IP addresses that the internet will never get to anyway (do you let the public telnet to your ciscos?) The difference here is that the RFC1918 addresses originate and end within one node of each other - and they never go out or come into the @home networks!
(I don't work there or even have any particular feelings about @home, I just knew one of their netadmins (retired now (bastard)))
It'd probably be safer to do Sun -> Hardware-based FW, since the hardware architecture plays a role in this just as much as the host OS and the FW software itself.
And let's face it, x86 hardware isn't always the most reliable.
Even if you are in wild and wooly peering arangements, it is likely you have interfaces on at least some of your network equipment which have 'closed' networks, so you could determine that any traffic coming out of it that doesn't belong to a certain set of IPs is spoofed.
As long as all other networks you peer with also block spoofed traffic where their customers plug in, the world will be a better place.
Yes, that's a very big "as long as", but it sure would be nice.
I seem to recall a lot of "smart" people downloading the trojaned tcpwrappers source some time back.
That would be an example of technically competent folk using software they thought was okay to run (and in fact, was supposed to -increase- the security of their systems), and getting cracked as a result.
The only ISO images that are interesting (to me) are OS images, because you can boot your new OS from them. (I suppose ISO images of Windows proggies would be useful if I were into w@r3z, but we're talking about real OSs here.)
If you want to burn a bunch of apps to CD, download them in nice happy.tgz format (or whatever) and make your own ISO image with what you actually want/need. It sounds like you already do this. What makes you think that you'll not lose the pre-made ISO images if you keep losing the ones you make yourself?
Sonys are okay, but lack basic controls (aperature, etc.) that are available on the Nikon CoolPix 950/990 and the Olympus C-2000Z and C-2020Z.
It's still a decent camera (I have one), but it takes -a long time- to startup, -a long time- between shots (especially if you're using the flash), the battery only lasts an hour, and the 4MB memory stick is laughable.
I ordered my i-opener from Netpliance the day after the article (03/12). I received it on the 16th. By the 19th or so they'd changed their TOS, and they slammed my credit card. When I called them and told them that I was offended that they started charging me for service I hadn't been using, as my iOpener was still sitting unopened in the box (while I waited for my USB nice to arrive:), they reversed the charge.
Anyway, they can't retroactively change their contracts with their customers. Sure, they're trying to bully the money out of you, so you have to stand up for your rights - but you're used to that.
Ebay was upgrading the Veritas software on the E10000s. The contractors skipped one of the steps in the process, so when they brought the systems back up, the filesystems were corrupted.
I don't know about you, but I'd call this user error, not Sun hardware problems.
The CIA used to (still does?) make different copies of highly classified documents using a computer that would use a thesaurus and other rules to change the texts, but still retain the meaning. If a copy of the document was later found in the wrong hands, they could trace it's origins to the mole based on the wording.
If you did do this, and have it at all documented, then you can send this information to the patent office for their consideration while they ponder giving Google their patent.
Slashdot Mirror
HP ripped off their customers. They lied to them. I'm surprised this wasn't leaked earlier - there must have been quite a few HP employees/contractors who worked on the Jornada in development, manufacturing, marketing, and sales and knew about this little discrepancy.
If a customer likes their Jornada, they won't return it over this - they'll want to keep using it! HP chose the cheapest way out, banking on the fact that their customers are probably pissed, but not pissed enough to return their Jornada and then have to go out and buy a different product.
A reduction in MSRP and a partial refund of the purchase price is the right thing to do.
Slashcode and Slashdot are synched up? Who are you, and what did you do with CmdrTaco?! We demand his release!!
Sun makes great hardware with fast IO systems. But at $15,000 a CPU (400MHz w/ 8MB cache in the EX500s) it isn't always a clear choice, considering a $400 PIII is much faster at CPU-intensive tasks.
It all depends on what you're doing. Oracle on Intel? I don't think so. Lots of cryptography (if there isn't much IO) - an Intel CPU is 3-4 times faster for straight number crunching.
The original idea behind RISC was to do fewer instructions than CISC, but at a much higher clock frequency. Well, now the CISC processors are the ones running faster.
Of course, I love Suns for their hardware reliability, and their serial console. Low-bandwidth remote administration, and you can even fix boot problems (try that remotely on your x86 linux box). With the lom lights-out-management) that they're putting in their new boxes, you can even power the box off and then on again - all through the serial ports. (I don't mean `init 6`. I mean power it off. Once it's off, you can power it back on.)
How the hell did this obvious flame-bait (regardless of it's accuracy) get modded up?
CONSPIRACY!!!!
:)
(...which a quote from the linked essay)
A summary:
RMS was paid to write software (EMACS) but thought he had the -right- to release it for free, even though it was written on someone else's time. This right was granted to him by MIT.
RMS then resigned when MIT was charging people for the software that other MIT employees wrote - employees that MIT -paid- to write that software.
Free software has it's place, but commercial software does, too. It takes a lot of time and effort to write good, useful software. If that time isn't volunteered (for free) by private citizens, then someone is paying for it.
If you pay for something, shouldn't you be able to expect something (tangible) in return, if that's what your business is about? Not many businesses survive if they don't have income.
Take a look at Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux, which has a bunch of these.
Gnu Bug Tracking System (Gnat) has a billion (or so) user interfaces you can use with it - Tk, web, command-line, etc.
Even the high-end call-tracking systems like remedy can be (and often are) configured to email you when you get a new case assigned to you, but these are hugely expensive and it doesn't sound like you wanted to spend a lot of money.
Ah yes, my bad. I'm still used to whois returning useful information. Bastards. :(
like... i.am.your.god, my.god.beat.up.your.god, etc. etc.
:(
I'd estimate the number of slanderous, hate, or humor sites will outnumber legitimate religion sites by a factor of 10.
I'm still bitter that someone registered whatthef**k.com before me back when some registrar said they'd allow registering of F*** word domains... but I check now and it's been retaken by the "Core Internet Council Of Registrars"
It will be very interesting to see how they answer about publicly distributed trade secrets. The whole idea behind that is pretty absurd, and their lawyers must've been pretty brave that day.
I'd also like to see them get smacked down for abusing open protocols. Maybe this can get used against them if they appeal their anti-trust lawsuit?
I hope this goes to court. It would be a huge victory to open standards.
...they must not have any assets.
Unless NetPD was wrong and they -really didn't- upload or download Metallica MP3s, these users are taking a big risk.
The hope is that "if enough of us appeal, Metallica won't be willing to sue each of us individually". But what if they choose to just sue the first 1000? Or even 1? What if that's you? Do these people not realize that they really were violating copyright laws, whether the laws are "fair" in their minds or not? "But the CD costed too much!" isn't going to win a lot of points with a judge.
Of course this whole thing is ridiculous. As I and many others have said before, if artists just find a better distribution model so they can sell their music at reasonable prices - less than $5/album - then these blatant copyright abuses will mostly subside. And we can all sleep better because the Big Bad Record Companies will be going out of business.
I'm sorry, but Napster was created to get music without paying for it. Sure there are independent artists out there, but that's not what the users are sharing and downloading. If people wanted independent music, they could just go to mp3.com
How can a company be allowed to exist when it's sole purpose is violating copyright laws? This isn't about the freedom of information, it's about getting music people are too cheap to pay for.
Instead of whining about how expensive and unfair CD prices are, why don't you let artists and record companies know you're willing to buy CDs at $5/CD instead of $15-18/CD? Hell, last night I bought 12 CDs for $126.xx. If you know where to shop, you can get them at much less than full price. (Although I'd much rather cut out the record companies and pay the artists directly.)
"That car is too expensive, and that's unfair, I think I'll steal it!" This is no different.
People need to grow up and start telling artists to find a better distribution model. If you downloaded an album, it could let you listen to it a few times, and then pop up with a dialog box, "Send $2 to the artist?" I know I'd be happy to pay 20% of what I normally spend on an album.
450 CDs in my collection and growing...
Hopefully this'll go straight to the top, so it isn't stuck in another five years of appeals.
What appalls me is Microsoft and others saying a break-up will hurt innovation and create more security vulnerabilities. Microsoft OS should concentrate on drivers, things like DirectX, improved networking support, making a better OS that crashes less. How would they do that? Seperate the applications from the kernel - just like all the unices.
What if someone Bcc:'s you on something? You won't see the email, as you're not in the To: or Cc: lines, and your email client will reject it.
/dev/null :)
Procmail is one way to go about doing what you asked for (a client side spam-block). A lot of the programs spammers use have signatures that procmail can catch. But spammers can start to use new programs. Or spammers can start to send email with your email address in the To: field (happens, although rarely, to me)
An adequate solution (lacking any better solution) is to maintain seperate email addresses for friends, work, mailing lists, and "companies" - whether it be for account information (you bought something) or whatever. Then you can "white-list" the work, friends, and mailing list email addresses, meaning the person sending you email has to be on the approved email sender list - any mail that isn't from an address in your white-list gets bounced or dropped.
Unfortunately, you can never tell what email account amazon or petstore.com or whomever you do business on the web with is going to send from, so you are still stuck with one email address that can potentially get spam.
Another solution is to get a domain and set up an individual email address for every company you do business with. So if you never want to get email from microsoft@yourdomain.tld again, just forward it to
All spam has some sort of contact information in it, right? Either a phone number to call, or an address to send money to, or a (p0rn) url to go to. Easy way to track down the perp and sue them for lots of money!
Let's pretend I'm p0rn site www.slashporn.net and www.slashporn.com is getting more business than me... I'll just put them out of business - send a few hundred thousand emails stating "Visit slashporn.com! p0rn for nerds!"
Soon enough, slashporn.com gets sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars and is out of business. My business goes up and life is peachy.
Wonderful.
Of course, this ties in to DDoS - how do you track down the spammers if they're spoofing their return address? The current state of the internet makes this difficult if not impossible (if done well). Yes, I know there are differences between spoofed IP packets and spoofed SMTP headers, but there are similarities as well.
I'm not trying to give SlashAndover a hard time for making a poor choice, but my opinion of Exodus went down quite a few notches right after I installed my stuff there. Did you guys do your research?
Let's see, what kind of problems have I had?
-Routing - routes not set up when EXDS said they were 'Good to go!'
-Firewalls (managed) - installed with no rules.
-Power - missing a circuit in our cage
I could go on.
And I will.
-HVAC - we've had some of our Suns turn themselves off because it got too hot it our cage
-Backups - they installed the client on one of our boxes, didn't put it in startup scripts, and after a month of the client not getting backed up, took it out of the backup rotation because "it wasn't responding" (without bothering to call us!) (never mind they only installed the client on one of the six boxes they were supposed to)
-More HVAC "it's 84 degrees in here, you're supposed to notify me at SEVENTY TWO" "oh, well the alarm kept going off so we set the threshold higher" (you'd think i'm kidding - i'm not.) >:(
So the question I usually ask myself when the conversation turns to Exodus is, "How many times would I rather pound my testicles with a wooden mallet than do business with Exodus again?"
We've talked to SVPs and Directors and other PHBs, and all we can ever get out of them is "we're working on making it better for you". Gee, thanks, that's such a consolation.
Of course, we only pay them $168k/year, so naturally we shouldn't expect much for that paltry sum, right?
Well, you're both kinda right.
-If- Exodus had blocked the RFC1918 traffic like they were supposed to at -their- routers instead of letting it get to the slashdot servers, then the site would've received less traffic. Good, right?
And then the DDOS attacker(s) would've started to use legitimate addresses, and slashdot would have had no idea what was valid traffic and what wasn't.
@home uses 10.x addresses extensively through their networks. Traceroute through them sometime. This is acceptable and encouraged if you want to spare IP addresses that the internet will never get to anyway (do you let the public telnet to your ciscos?) The difference here is that the RFC1918 addresses originate and end within one node of each other - and they never go out or come into the @home networks!
(I don't work there or even have any particular feelings about @home, I just knew one of their netadmins (retired now (bastard)))
It'd probably be safer to do Sun -> Hardware-based FW, since the hardware architecture plays a role in this just as much as the host OS and the FW software itself.
And let's face it, x86 hardware isn't always the most reliable.
Even if you are in wild and wooly peering arangements, it is likely you have interfaces on at least some of your network equipment which have 'closed' networks, so you could determine that any traffic coming out of it that doesn't belong to a certain set of IPs is spoofed.
As long as all other networks you peer with also block spoofed traffic where their customers plug in, the world will be a better place.
Yes, that's a very big "as long as", but it sure would be nice.
I seem to recall a lot of "smart" people downloading the trojaned tcpwrappers source some time back.
That would be an example of technically competent folk using software they thought was okay to run (and in fact, was supposed to -increase- the security of their systems), and getting cracked as a result.
The only ISO images that are interesting (to me) are OS images, because you can boot your new OS from them. (I suppose ISO images of Windows proggies would be useful if I were into w@r3z, but we're talking about real OSs here.)
.tgz format (or whatever) and make your own ISO image with what you actually want/need. It sounds like you already do this. What makes you think that you'll not lose the pre-made ISO images if you keep losing the ones you make yourself?
If you want to burn a bunch of apps to CD, download them in nice happy
mkisofs is your friend.
Sonys are okay, but lack basic controls (aperature, etc.) that are available on the Nikon CoolPix 950/990 and the Olympus C-2000Z and C-2020Z.
It's still a decent camera (I have one), but it takes -a long time- to startup, -a long time- between shots (especially if you're using the flash), the battery only lasts an hour, and the 4MB memory stick is laughable.
Fine for web stuff.
Is that really what they did?
:), they reversed the charge.
I ordered my i-opener from Netpliance the day after the article (03/12). I received it on the 16th. By the 19th or so they'd changed their TOS, and they slammed my credit card. When I called them and told them that I was offended that they started charging me for service I hadn't been using, as my iOpener was still sitting unopened in the box (while I waited for my USB nice to arrive
Anyway, they can't retroactively change their contracts with their customers. Sure, they're trying to bully the money out of you, so you have to stand up for your rights - but you're used to that.
D
Ebay was upgrading the Veritas software on the E10000s. The contractors skipped one of the steps in the process, so when they brought the systems back up, the filesystems were corrupted.
I don't know about you, but I'd call this user error, not Sun hardware problems.
The CIA used to (still does?) make different copies of highly classified documents using a computer that would use a thesaurus and other rules to change the texts, but still retain the meaning. If a copy of the document was later found in the wrong hands, they could trace it's origins to the mole based on the wording.
If you did do this, and have it at all documented, then you can send this information to the patent office for their consideration while they ponder giving Google their patent.
Cheers