What does this mean for the customer? AT&T customer's rates will likely go down.
You'd think that, but what they'll probably do is trump up some crap about how combining the two services was expensive (even though they were probably a single entity all along), and jack up the monthly rates for everyone by a few bucks to recoup the costs of the 'merger.'
...then the first thing they should do is help Ford, GM, et al put nuclear reactors into Explorers and the rest. Then if people wanted to keep buying their blessed SUVs, they'd HAVE to accept the risks that go hand in hand with the advantages of nuclear power.
For a pretty decent what-if concerning a nuclear powered space vehicle, check out Voyage, by Stephen Baxter. That is but a small part of the book, which is BTW quite a good read, IMHO.
...put "protecting" their blessed trademarks above absolutely all else.
When my dispute last year with American Express reached the point where I was pissed off enough to register "amexblew.com" and put up an entire website (now archived elsewhere) flaming them, the FIRST thing they did, BEFORE completely rectifying the problem that angered me so much in the first place, was to sic their fucking trademark lawyers on me. Even though you'd have to be damned near illiterate to spell "blue" as "blew" and even though my site was laden with disclaimers and only an ineducable moron incapable of operating a web browser in the first place would ever mistake it for an official AMEX one, they still laid that 'confusingly similar' bullshit on me in the C&D letter.
AOL's case is of similarly nebulous merit, and I hope the GAIM guys stick to their guns. America needs a landmark case where common sense takes on rich corporate stupidity and wins.
I read a good while back that E-Z Pass users on the NY Thruway are getting tagged with speeding tickets in the mail for beating the "legal" time between their entry and exit points. Which is one reason why I keep my car's ashtray full of change and will never get an E-Z Pass.
...is some damned old man in front of me on the Information Superhighway, doing 25mph and with his left blinker on for miles!
Homer: "Marge, please, old people don't need to get on the Internet. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use."
"Of course, there's no way to see into the Simpson home without some kind of infrared heat-sensitive camera. So, let's turn it on."
[screen shows blue house, orange Simpsons watching TV]
"Now, this technology is new to me, but...I'm pretty sure that's Homer Simpson in the oven, rotating slowly."
[close-up of turkey]
"His body temperature has risen to over 400 degrees -- he's literally stewing in his own juices."
(Thanks to snpp.com, because I couldn't remember the lines verbatim without looking them up!)
Actually, there was a segment on old US missile silos run recently on (IIRC) the Discovery Channel. They did the obligatory interview with a family who owns one. Another has been converted into a school (I guess they don't really need to do 'duck and cover' drills, heh).
But the coolest one was one that had filled with groundwater, bought by a guy who's into scuba diving. So now you can scuba dive in the middle of America's heartland. Well, as long as you're not claustrophobic, I guess.
MS-DOS came first, and DR-DOS was built and marketed by Digital Research as a "better DOS".
And MS-DOS was originally called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products who wrote it and sold it to Microsoft for the [as it turned out] ridiculously paltry sum of $50,000.
QDOS was more or less a feature-for-feature copy of CP/M, which as we all know was created by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. I can only assume that DR-DOS was the final name of CP/M-86, the version of CP/M that had been in the works for the 8086 processor.
So, the original poster's assertion is technically correct-- MS-DOS, which became the cornerstone of Microsoft's empire, was copied from a competitor's product. It was only in the interest of saving time that they bought it from someone who had already done it, rather than create their own knockoff version. It's important to save time when you sell a product for which you haven't written one line of code.:-)
God, I hope not. I'd hate to have to stay in quarters that had Old Man Stink lingering from their previous occupant.
The only place old people have in space is to provide food for the rest of us... courtesy of the Soylent Corporation, of course! Otherwise they can move to Florida to die, like they do now.
Waiting for Gibson to point out how useful a spoofed IP would be to them?
I dunno, according to him, they not only already know about this, they are vigorously licking their collective chops at the prospect:
"While I was conducting research into the hacker world following these DoS attacks, I encountered evidence -- in attack-tool source code -- that malicious hackers are already fully aware of the massive malicious power of the new versions of Windows and are waiting impatiently for the "home version" of Windows XP to arrive in the homes of millions of less clueful end users."
All it takes is one compitent programmer in the cracker community or elsewhere to write a modified TCP stack for Windoze which can spoof the source IP and all the zombies can bring it with them. what Microcruft supplies for free only speeds things up very slightly.
But if it only takes one, as you say, to "fix" the TCP/IP implementation for older flavors of Windows, where has he been for the last couple of years? One of Gibson's major points in the article is that the vast, vast majority of the young'uns behind these attacks are completely ignorant of how to create their own hax0r tools, and very likely don't even know the exact origin of the very tools they're using to do their dirty work. He used the very apt analogy of a kid not knowing how a gun works, but being able to pull the trigger.
Once XP is out there among the Great Unclued Masses, those malicious bastard young'uns will forget all about handguns and rejoice in their newfound nuclear capability. And that without needing that Messiah to deliver unto them a compliant TCP stack.
What disturbs me more than that, however, is the apathy on the part of the big ISPs. It seems that despite their heavy-handed, do-this-and-the-stormtroopers-will-be-kicking-down -your-door Acceptable Use Policies, they don't really give a shit what is perpetrated from their networks as long as the account from which it is perpetrated is paid up, and that they can't be successfully sued for it.
I can't wait to see if Visioneer sues Compaq for this. How funny is it that even when the PC makers try to be different, their name for the process of being different is already the name of another company! Apparently the Compaq R&D guy who stumbled across a site with photos of Apple prototypes should have gone that extra mile and tried www.visioneer.com before naming their Apple-copying effort.
Hey, I love the 'police chase' and 'bad drivers' shows... they provide me with endless laughter.
How can you not enjoy the ones where the criminal fleeing on a motorcycle broadsides a bus at 60mph, or the one where the criminal fleeing in a muscle car takes what looks to be an off-ramp from the elevated freeway, only to fly into the air, Dukes of Hazzard style, before crashing to earth? I also heartily enjoy the rare ones that end with some incorrigible, teenaged punk car thief removing himself from the gene pool when he plays chicken with an overpass support column or some such.
Admittedly, I do also like the more educational shows they run, but the police chase shows have their place.
Of course, Sony thought it was suicidal to invest in an unsecure market that already went for Zip drives and CD-R's.
IIRC, I saw my first MiniDisc data drive as an external SCSI device in a MacWarehouse catalog in 1995-- right when the Zip first came out, and CD-R was too expensive to be more than a fantasy for the average computer user. What I'm trying to say it, the de-facto successor to the 1.4MB floppy disk was nowhere near being decided by market forces.
The MD-Data drive was horrifically expensive, which is what doomed it, IMHO. The Zip, on the other hand, was priced much more reasonably and was something that would be so useful to me, the first time I happened upon it in a catalog, I ordered it before turning to the next page.
Or you can replace the stock handles on the G4 case with hardware from Marathon Computer, who has an actual photo of their product on their site, I might add.
Sure, it takes up 2U additional of rack space, but it's a lot less hassle than transplanting the guts into someone else's case.
``If people don't find those features compelling enough to upgrade,'' Cullinan said, ``they can keep whatever the heck they want. They're not forced to upgrade.''
Not forced to upgrade, that is, until the non-perpetual licensing crap is in place for business and Microsoft decides to start foisting it on consumers as well.
Then the rapid end-of-lifing of license renewals on older versions of Windows starts. Then the next thing you know, Microsoft is essentially dictating to you when you buy your next Windows PC because you can't renew the license on your existing version of Windows, and your existing PC lacks the horsepower to run the latest version of Windows.
I'm sure in a parallel universe somewhere, that checkbox was not placed on the page. The page was then encountered by that same idiot woman who spilled McDonald's coffee on herself. She was offended that her computer said "ass" to her after she typed it in, and promptly sued Lucent/Bell Labs out of existence. And probably whoever made her computer, too.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised I haven't heard from her attorneys yet since I still rip her publicly for being a litigious moron every chance I get.
Slashdot Mirror
What does this mean for the customer? AT&T customer's rates will likely go down.
You'd think that, but what they'll probably do is trump up some crap about how combining the two services was expensive (even though they were probably a single entity all along), and jack up the monthly rates for everyone by a few bucks to recoup the costs of the 'merger.'
~Philly
...then the first thing they should do is help Ford, GM, et al put nuclear reactors into Explorers and the rest. Then if people wanted to keep buying their blessed SUVs, they'd HAVE to accept the risks that go hand in hand with the advantages of nuclear power.
For a pretty decent what-if concerning a nuclear powered space vehicle, check out Voyage, by Stephen Baxter. That is but a small part of the book, which is BTW quite a good read, IMHO.
~Philly
Staying in a gymnasium, eh?
"Good night, Gilbert."
"Good night, Louis."
"Good night, Takashi."
"Good night, Lamar."
"Good night, Wormser."
"Good night, Poindexter."
"Good night, Booger."
"BUUUUUURRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!"
...put "protecting" their blessed trademarks above absolutely all else. When my dispute last year with American Express reached the point where I was pissed off enough to register "amexblew.com" and put up an entire website (now archived elsewhere) flaming them, the FIRST thing they did, BEFORE completely rectifying the problem that angered me so much in the first place, was to sic their fucking trademark lawyers on me. Even though you'd have to be damned near illiterate to spell "blue" as "blew" and even though my site was laden with disclaimers and only an ineducable moron incapable of operating a web browser in the first place would ever mistake it for an official AMEX one, they still laid that 'confusingly similar' bullshit on me in the C&D letter.
AOL's case is of similarly nebulous merit, and I hope the GAIM guys stick to their guns. America needs a landmark case where common sense takes on rich corporate stupidity and wins.
~Philly
I read a good while back that E-Z Pass users on the NY Thruway are getting tagged with speeding tickets in the mail for beating the "legal" time between their entry and exit points. Which is one reason why I keep my car's ashtray full of change and will never get an E-Z Pass.
~Philly
Anyone else remember "DOS isn't done, until Lotus won't run!"?
"'Okay, okay, I'll taste the soup! Where's the spoon?'"
"Aha!"
...is some damned old man in front of me on the Information Superhighway, doing 25mph and with his left blinker on for miles!
Homer: "Marge, please, old people don't need to get on the Internet. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use."
~Philly
"Of course, there's no way to see into the Simpson home without some kind of infrared heat-sensitive camera. So, let's turn it on."
[screen shows blue house, orange Simpsons watching TV]
"Now, this technology is new to me, but...I'm pretty sure that's Homer Simpson in the oven, rotating slowly."
[close-up of turkey]
"His body temperature has risen to over 400 degrees -- he's literally stewing in his own juices."
(Thanks to snpp.com, because I couldn't remember the lines verbatim without looking them up!)
~Philly
Actually, there was a segment on old US missile silos run recently on (IIRC) the Discovery Channel. They did the obligatory interview with a family who owns one. Another has been converted into a school (I guess they don't really need to do 'duck and cover' drills, heh).
But the coolest one was one that had filled with groundwater, bought by a guy who's into scuba diving. So now you can scuba dive in the middle of America's heartland. Well, as long as you're not claustrophobic, I guess.
MS-DOS came first, and DR-DOS was built and marketed by Digital Research as a "better DOS".
:-)
/. you've already done at least one of those. :-)
And MS-DOS was originally called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products who wrote it and sold it to Microsoft for the [as it turned out] ridiculously paltry sum of $50,000.
QDOS was more or less a feature-for-feature copy of CP/M, which as we all know was created by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. I can only assume that DR-DOS was the final name of CP/M-86, the version of CP/M that had been in the works for the 8086 processor.
So, the original poster's assertion is technically correct-- MS-DOS, which became the cornerstone of Microsoft's empire, was copied from a competitor's product. It was only in the interest of saving time that they bought it from someone who had already done it, rather than create their own knockoff version. It's important to save time when you sell a product for which you haven't written one line of code.
Watch "Triumph of the Nerds" or read Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire for more on this.
Chances are, if you're reading
~Philly
Don't forget Tupac, who I think at this point has released more albums since he got capped than he did when he was still among the living.
God, I hope not. I'd hate to have to stay in quarters that had Old Man Stink lingering from their previous occupant.
The only place old people have in space is to provide food for the rest of us... courtesy of the Soylent Corporation, of course! Otherwise they can move to Florida to die, like they do now.
~Philly
Waiting for Gibson to point out how useful a spoofed IP would be to them?
I dunno, according to him, they not only already know about this, they are vigorously licking their collective chops at the prospect:
"While I was conducting research into the hacker world following these DoS attacks, I encountered evidence -- in attack-tool source code -- that malicious hackers are already fully aware of the massive malicious power of the new versions of Windows and are waiting impatiently for the "home version" of Windows XP to arrive in the homes of millions of less clueful end users."
~Philly
All it takes is one compitent programmer in the cracker community or elsewhere to write a modified TCP stack for Windoze which can spoof the source IP and all the zombies can bring it with them. what Microcruft supplies for free only speeds things up very slightly.
n -your-door Acceptable Use Policies, they don't really give a shit what is perpetrated from their networks as long as the account from which it is perpetrated is paid up, and that they can't be successfully sued for it.
But if it only takes one, as you say, to "fix" the TCP/IP implementation for older flavors of Windows, where has he been for the last couple of years? One of Gibson's major points in the article is that the vast, vast majority of the young'uns behind these attacks are completely ignorant of how to create their own hax0r tools, and very likely don't even know the exact origin of the very tools they're using to do their dirty work. He used the very apt analogy of a kid not knowing how a gun works, but being able to pull the trigger.
Once XP is out there among the Great Unclued Masses, those malicious bastard young'uns will forget all about handguns and rejoice in their newfound nuclear capability. And that without needing that Messiah to deliver unto them a compliant TCP stack.
What disturbs me more than that, however, is the apathy on the part of the big ISPs. It seems that despite their heavy-handed, do-this-and-the-stormtroopers-will-be-kicking-dow
~Philly
Deja vu!
I can't wait to see if Visioneer sues Compaq for this. How funny is it that even when the PC makers try to be different, their name for the process of being different is already the name of another company! Apparently the Compaq R&D guy who stumbled across a site with photos of Apple prototypes should have gone that extra mile and tried www.visioneer.com before naming their Apple-copying effort.
~Philly
Hey, I love the 'police chase' and 'bad drivers' shows... they provide me with endless laughter.
How can you not enjoy the ones where the criminal fleeing on a motorcycle broadsides a bus at 60mph, or the one where the criminal fleeing in a muscle car takes what looks to be an off-ramp from the elevated freeway, only to fly into the air, Dukes of Hazzard style, before crashing to earth? I also heartily enjoy the rare ones that end with some incorrigible, teenaged punk car thief removing himself from the gene pool when he plays chicken with an overpass support column or some such.
Admittedly, I do also like the more educational shows they run, but the police chase shows have their place.
...yawns...
That joke is older than your average script kiddie, and I've always heard it demean Windows users, not Mac users.
Try to come up with something original, kneebiter.
Of course, Sony thought it was suicidal to invest in an unsecure market that already went for Zip drives and CD-R's.
IIRC, I saw my first MiniDisc data drive as an external SCSI device in a MacWarehouse catalog in 1995-- right when the Zip first came out, and CD-R was too expensive to be more than a fantasy for the average computer user. What I'm trying to say it, the de-facto successor to the 1.4MB floppy disk was nowhere near being decided by market forces.
The MD-Data drive was horrifically expensive, which is what doomed it, IMHO. The Zip, on the other hand, was priced much more reasonably and was something that would be so useful to me, the first time I happened upon it in a catalog, I ordered it before turning to the next page.
~Philly
Or you can replace the stock handles on the G4 case with hardware from Marathon Computer, who has an actual photo of their product on their site, I might add.
Sure, it takes up 2U additional of rack space, but it's a lot less hassle than transplanting the guts into someone else's case.
~Philly
OpenDoc died because Apple didn't fucking encourage people to use it, kind of like their half-assed Sprockets.
OpenDoc is (to an extent) alive and well. Don't believe me? Try running an AppleShare IP server with OpenDoc disabled.
~Philly
``If people don't find those features compelling enough to upgrade,'' Cullinan said, ``they can keep whatever the heck they want. They're not forced to upgrade.''
Not forced to upgrade, that is, until the non-perpetual licensing crap is in place for business and Microsoft decides to start foisting it on consumers as well.
Then the rapid end-of-lifing of license renewals on older versions of Windows starts. Then the next thing you know, Microsoft is essentially dictating to you when you buy your next Windows PC because you can't renew the license on your existing version of Windows, and your existing PC lacks the horsepower to run the latest version of Windows.
~Philly
The soul of Douglas Adams coasted away into the inky starry void.
:'-(
~Philly
I'm sure in a parallel universe somewhere, that checkbox was not placed on the page. The page was then encountered by that same idiot woman who spilled McDonald's coffee on herself. She was offended that her computer said "ass" to her after she typed it in, and promptly sued Lucent/Bell Labs out of existence. And probably whoever made her computer, too.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised I haven't heard from her attorneys yet since I still rip her publicly for being a litigious moron every chance I get.
~Philly