This is no time to get complacent. I have seen security issues with Linux as well as all the other alternatives. Beating Windows is not exactly difficult, but it is also not nearly enough. If a few slanted articles is what it takes to motivate the community to make Linux more secure, so be it.
At $2/disc, would you really bother with P2P? If you factor in the value of your time, is it worth spending half an hour to save $2? That's less than minimum wage. Do you have a giant funnel in your front yard to catch rain water instead of paying the water bill? If tap water was priced at $18.99/gallon, we all would. At $0.05/gallon, there is no need. At a price of $0.00/gallon, there is no water company and therefore no external supply.
In the long run, the Kazaa price of $0 is as unmaintainable as the RIAA price of $18.99.
A price of $0 is not realistic. At that price, nothing will be produced. Everyone agrees that music is worth something although hardly anyone agrees with the current pricing. However, given the choice of paying $18.99/disc or paying nothing, the $0 option looks pretty good in the short run.
By the way, all of the commercial online services include unacceptable DRM, so it really is $18.99/disc or $0. And RIAA wonders why they have a problem with piracy. Amazing.
Anyone have an idea of the best way to boost the range of a handheld cell phone? The signal at my house is a little weak, so replacing the landline depends on getting a decent RF signal through to the phone. Perhaps some of the EE geeks have an economical idea for this.
As you correctly point out, there is a problem in that current pricing has no link to the cost of production (which has dropped dramatically). Piracy happens when the product pricing motivates pirates.
Sony can either try and add value to justify the pricing, or they can fight a losing DRM battle. Unfortunately, most of the "value added" is just a workaound to the losing DRM battle. I see no need to pay them just to work around a problem they created in the first place. I can solve the technical problem without Sony's help.
At a price of $1/song or $2/disc, piracy would be a waste of time, and the product could still be profitable. At some price higher than that, piracy would be tolerable and the product would be more profitable. Then we have today's prices -- the pirates are in the driver's seat.
Blocking the latest banner technology is just fine. Unsolicited flash, oversized banners, ads in the middle of text or on the right side of the screen -- it can all go.
Nobody clicks on the banners because of all the funky javascript and other BS that certain people use to lock visitors into the advertiser's website and prevent an expedient return to the original website. When people are new to the web, all it takes is a few clicks on a few banners before they realize it is better to ignore (and possibly block them). Excessive marketing nonsense has essentially killed the banner ad, just as telemarketing and spam threaten the technology upon which they operate.
There are plenty of ways to block ads; I would rather see the antivirus companies to concentrate on blocking spyware/adware/malware. There is simply no excuse for letting this garbage through unless the customer explicitly allows it.
If the FBI really investigates and prosecutes copyright infringement, as described in the warning message in front of any rented movie. Isn't there some sort of whopper fine for copyright infringement?
"Postal Inspectors investigate any crime in which the U.S. Mail is used to further a scheme, whether it originated in the mail, by telephone or on the Internet. The use of the U.S. Mail is what makes it a mail fraud issue. "
Of course, this is not a quote or an interpretation of federal law, but to me it looks like the SCO scheme would fit the USPS description of fraud. No matter what communications method they used (internet, phone, mail), there is some corresponding fraud issue for them to worry about. I seriously doubt that anything short of criminal prosecution would convince SCO to hold back on the invoices.
As others have suggested, the "license" would have to be worded more like insurance, so as to dance around the GPL copyright infringement issue. The invoices could be interpreted as a "protection" scam, especially if SCO loses (meaning they had nothing to sell all along).
Before Alpha, the DEC VAX line was beating IBM big iron for price/performance. When Alpha came out, it was priced to beat VAX on price/performance. But DEC had a problem -- the VAX revenue stream would disappear overnight if all the VAXes were replaced with Alphas. They HAD to keep the prices artificially high, because they had VAX customers perfectly willing to pay a little more for alot more power. Unfortunately, that limited the market and gave Intel a chance to survive in the low-end server and desktop market.
People forget that in the first year or two, Alphas were constrained by the price of memory. Proprietary DEC memory was the priciest of all. If you have all that raw CPU speed, you sure can't waste it on page faults! At the time, Microsoft was just starting to break the 1MB memory barrier.
It would have been a very risky move, but DEC could have decided to push VMS software at giveaway prices and commoditize Alpha. They would have destroyed both Intel and MS, leaving DEC as the industry leader. By the time they got around to doing these things, DEC was facing a huge installed base of Intel/MS low-end desktops.
When DEC produced Alpha, they failed to realize that it was an all-or-nothing proposition. They had to either go head-to-head with the entire industry all at once, or get eaten alive by the low-end competitors. The prices that were too high to increase or maintain market share were not high enough to keep DEC profitable, hence the death spiral.
Now that will have the hackers really quivering in their boots!
The last time I had a "password recovery" issue with Access, I found everything I needed to hack it with just a few clicks on Google. I spent about an hour searching for snippets of code to throw into VBA.
Cable has technological advantages in the "last mile" getting into the subscribers home. DSL would never have been deployed if cable really delivered all that was technically possible.
The cable providers around here care WAY TOO MUCH about what is being transmitted, and WAY TOO LITTLE about uptime, congestion, and end-to-end performance. These guys have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. DSL is not always so great either, but there is less BS and the bandwidth is more reliable.
"Question: what effect would that have on the investors in SCO?"
You really have to wonder just what would register with SCO investors. That said, DMCA is surely an option. To me, it's mostly a one-shot weapon, to be used at a strategically chosen moment. Perhaps IBM would like to join BSA and launch a raid on SCO headquarters!
The stock antennas on 802.11 access points are nothing to cheer about; probably on a par with the theoretical "isotropic radiator". I doubt the gain figures would be much different either way.
Why bother with the Primestar dish for $50 on Ebay when you can get a real 802.11b/g antenna with 24dB gain for about $65? If memory serves, every 3dB is double, so 24dB is 2^8 or 256 times the signal strength.
I think it would be cool if SBC was to copyright the user logon data, burn it to CD (adding DRM that wastes 95% of the space), price each one at $100,000 each. After all, this is valuable marketing data, and royalties should be paid to the "artists" who created it, right?
When RIAA tries to invoke their subpoena power, SBC responds with DMCA protection -- accusing RIAA of using a subpoena as a "circumvention method" to avoid paying the true market value for SBC's "intellectual property". The fact that it's mostly junk and wildly overpriced is a mere coincidence. After all, it's worth whatever SBC says it is, right? SBC could reasonably claim that they are doing precisely what RIAA does.
If such a thing happened, I would think of them more as "freedom fighters" than "terrorists". Seriously, I do not advocate violence. We can make sure Darl's employement opportunities are limited to the retail and fast-food sectors -- that should be punishment enough.
Not that I think SCO will win, but the "pumped up" stock puts their market cap at a little over $200 million. IBM could probably do a hostile takeover for a lot less than a billion dollars.
Never try to extort more than it costs to have you killed.
I remember seeing some videos of protesters at SCO headquarters. When the inevitable countersuits kick into high gear, we will need similar crowds at whatever courthouse is handling the case.
Back in the 80's there was a baseball player named Darryl Strawberry. Fans became aware that Darryl was sensitive to criticism, so in many stadiums the opposing fans would go on and on with a taunting chant: "DAR-RYL, DAR-RYL..." This tactic reached a creshendo in the 1986 World Series, as the Boston fans relentlessly chanted whenever Darryl was at the plate, in the field, or visible in any way. It was so loud and persistent, the TV commentators could speak of little else. Boston lost the series, but the fans set a new standard for derrogatory chanting. To this day, ANY player named Darryl (in ANY sport) runs the risk of the dreaded "Darryl" chant.
Fast-forward to 2003: Many people are angry. Sooner or later, this case goes to a public building. SCO's case is a joke and their CEO just happens to be named Daryl. I see some opportunites here.
I had one of those DEC mice. As you say, they were nice to use and reliable too. I was the only person in an office full of DEC-heads who figured out that the middle button was for "instantaneous paste". To this day, I prefer a 3-button mouse for precisely that reason.
By modern standards, they were fairly large. I have big hands, so it was more comfortable than what was available on PCs at the time. Until the no-ball optical mice came out, those old DEC mice were the benchmark of reliability -- nothing to clean.
The mice were just part of the bigger picture. Our VAXstations were not exactly God's gift to desktop productivity, but they were stable as all hell -- you could leave them powered up for 6 months, no reboots, no funny business.
When our office switched from VAXstations to high-end (Pentium 90!) PCs, I remember our programmers would visit my office and say, "My PC just crashed! I have a Dr. Watson dump! Can you have one of the systems guys take a look at it and diagnose the problem?" In those days, we took VMS crash dumps very seriously, because it was almost always a hardware problem. Little did they know that the PC dumps were useless, the crashes were caused by memory leaks, leaving the machine on overnight made things worse, and Microsoft would never produce a stable desktop OS.
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This is no time to get complacent. I have seen security issues with Linux as well as all the other alternatives. Beating Windows is not exactly difficult, but it is also not nearly enough. If a few slanted articles is what it takes to motivate the community to make Linux more secure, so be it.
At $2/disc, would you really bother with P2P? If you factor in the value of your time, is it worth spending half an hour to save $2? That's less than minimum wage. Do you have a giant funnel in your front yard to catch rain water instead of paying the water bill? If tap water was priced at $18.99/gallon, we all would. At $0.05/gallon, there is no need. At a price of $0.00/gallon, there is no water company and therefore no external supply.
In the long run, the Kazaa price of $0 is as unmaintainable as the RIAA price of $18.99.
A price of $0 is not realistic. At that price, nothing will be produced. Everyone agrees that music is worth something although hardly anyone agrees with the current pricing. However, given the choice of paying $18.99/disc or paying nothing, the $0 option looks pretty good in the short run.
By the way, all of the commercial online services include unacceptable DRM, so it really is $18.99/disc or $0. And RIAA wonders why they have a problem with piracy. Amazing.
Well, Sony isn't testing the full formula either.
As you correctly point out, there is a problem in that current pricing has no link to the cost of production (which has dropped dramatically). Piracy happens when the product pricing motivates pirates.
Sony can either try and add value to justify the pricing, or they can fight a losing DRM battle. Unfortunately, most of the "value added" is just a workaound to the losing DRM battle. I see no need to pay them just to work around a problem they created in the first place. I can solve the technical problem without Sony's help.
At a price of $1/song or $2/disc, piracy would be a waste of time, and the product could still be profitable. At some price higher than that, piracy would be tolerable and the product would be more profitable. Then we have today's prices -- the pirates are in the driver's seat.
Nobody clicks on the banners because of all the funky javascript and other BS that certain people use to lock visitors into the advertiser's website and prevent an expedient return to the original website. When people are new to the web, all it takes is a few clicks on a few banners before they realize it is better to ignore (and possibly block them). Excessive marketing nonsense has essentially killed the banner ad, just as telemarketing and spam threaten the technology upon which they operate.
There are plenty of ways to block ads; I would rather see the antivirus companies to concentrate on blocking spyware/adware/malware. There is simply no excuse for letting this garbage through unless the customer explicitly allows it.
If the FBI really investigates and prosecutes copyright infringement, as described in the warning message in front of any rented movie. Isn't there some sort of whopper fine for copyright infringement?
"It's only mail fraud if you bill someone for something that you're not allowed to bill them for/never sent."
Maybe not. According to the US Postal Inspection Service:
"Postal Inspectors investigate any crime in which the U.S. Mail is used to further a scheme, whether it originated in the mail, by telephone or on the Internet. The use of the U.S. Mail is what makes it a mail fraud issue. "
Of course, this is not a quote or an interpretation of federal law, but to me it looks like the SCO scheme would fit the USPS description of fraud. No matter what communications method they used (internet, phone, mail), there is some corresponding fraud issue for them to worry about. I seriously doubt that anything short of criminal prosecution would convince SCO to hold back on the invoices.
As others have suggested, the "license" would have to be worded more like insurance, so as to dance around the GPL copyright infringement issue. The invoices could be interpreted as a "protection" scam, especially if SCO loses (meaning they had nothing to sell all along).
"Linux has no place on Server. Period."
Everywhere you see low-end servers (especially Windows) -- those are opportunities for Linux. Hell, even the desktop is up for grabs.
Before Alpha, the DEC VAX line was beating IBM big iron for price/performance. When Alpha came out, it was priced to beat VAX on price/performance. But DEC had a problem -- the VAX revenue stream would disappear overnight if all the VAXes were replaced with Alphas. They HAD to keep the prices artificially high, because they had VAX customers perfectly willing to pay a little more for alot more power. Unfortunately, that limited the market and gave Intel a chance to survive in the low-end server and desktop market.
People forget that in the first year or two, Alphas were constrained by the price of memory. Proprietary DEC memory was the priciest of all. If you have all that raw CPU speed, you sure can't waste it on page faults! At the time, Microsoft was just starting to break the 1MB memory barrier.
It would have been a very risky move, but DEC could have decided to push VMS software at giveaway prices and commoditize Alpha. They would have destroyed both Intel and MS, leaving DEC as the industry leader. By the time they got around to doing these things, DEC was facing a huge installed base of Intel/MS low-end desktops.
When DEC produced Alpha, they failed to realize that it was an all-or-nothing proposition. They had to either go head-to-head with the entire industry all at once, or get eaten alive by the low-end competitors. The prices that were too high to increase or maintain market share were not high enough to keep DEC profitable, hence the death spiral.
Now that will have the hackers really quivering in their boots!
The last time I had a "password recovery" issue with Access, I found everything I needed to hack it with just a few clicks on Google. I spent about an hour searching for snippets of code to throw into VBA.
I guess the people at Diebold never heard about password recovery tools
Would your grenade fit the payload requirements for something like this?
Cable has technological advantages in the "last mile" getting into the subscribers home. DSL would never have been deployed if cable really delivered all that was technically possible.
The cable providers around here care WAY TOO MUCH about what is being transmitted, and WAY TOO LITTLE about uptime, congestion, and end-to-end performance. These guys have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. DSL is not always so great either, but there is less BS and the bandwidth is more reliable.
"Question: what effect would that have on the investors in SCO?"
You really have to wonder just what would register with SCO investors. That said, DMCA is surely an option. To me, it's mostly a one-shot weapon, to be used at a strategically chosen moment. Perhaps IBM would like to join BSA and launch a raid on SCO headquarters!
The stock antennas on 802.11 access points are nothing to cheer about; probably on a par with the theoretical "isotropic radiator". I doubt the gain figures would be much different either way.
Why bother with the Primestar dish for $50 on Ebay when you can get a real 802.11b/g antenna with 24dB gain for about $65? If memory serves, every 3dB is double, so 24dB is 2^8 or 256 times the signal strength.
I think it would be cool if SBC was to copyright the user logon data, burn it to CD (adding DRM that wastes 95% of the space), price each one at $100,000 each. After all, this is valuable marketing data, and royalties should be paid to the "artists" who created it, right?
When RIAA tries to invoke their subpoena power, SBC responds with DMCA protection -- accusing RIAA of using a subpoena as a "circumvention method" to avoid paying the true market value for SBC's "intellectual property". The fact that it's mostly junk and wildly overpriced is a mere coincidence. After all, it's worth whatever SBC says it is, right? SBC could reasonably claim that they are doing precisely what RIAA does.
"...if terrorists did blow up SCO's servers..."
If such a thing happened, I would think of them more as "freedom fighters" than "terrorists". Seriously, I do not advocate violence. We can make sure Darl's employement opportunities are limited to the retail and fast-food sectors -- that should be punishment enough.
Not that I think SCO will win, but the "pumped up" stock puts their market cap at a little over $200 million. IBM could probably do a hostile takeover for a lot less than a billion dollars.
Never try to extort more than it costs to have you killed.
Back in the 80's there was a baseball player named Darryl Strawberry. Fans became aware that Darryl was sensitive to criticism, so in many stadiums the opposing fans would go on and on with a taunting chant: "DAR-RYL, DAR-RYL..." This tactic reached a creshendo in the 1986 World Series, as the Boston fans relentlessly chanted whenever Darryl was at the plate, in the field, or visible in any way. It was so loud and persistent, the TV commentators could speak of little else. Boston lost the series, but the fans set a new standard for derrogatory chanting. To this day, ANY player named Darryl (in ANY sport) runs the risk of the dreaded "Darryl" chant.
Fast-forward to 2003: Many people are angry. Sooner or later, this case goes to a public building. SCO's case is a joke and their CEO just happens to be named Daryl. I see some opportunites here.
By modern standards, they were fairly large. I have big hands, so it was more comfortable than what was available on PCs at the time. Until the no-ball optical mice came out, those old DEC mice were the benchmark of reliability -- nothing to clean.
The mice were just part of the bigger picture. Our VAXstations were not exactly God's gift to desktop productivity, but they were stable as all hell -- you could leave them powered up for 6 months, no reboots, no funny business.
When our office switched from VAXstations to high-end (Pentium 90!) PCs, I remember our programmers would visit my office and say, "My PC just crashed! I have a Dr. Watson dump! Can you have one of the systems guys take a look at it and diagnose the problem?" In those days, we took VMS crash dumps very seriously, because it was almost always a hardware problem. Little did they know that the PC dumps were useless, the crashes were caused by memory leaks, leaving the machine on overnight made things worse, and Microsoft would never produce a stable desktop OS.