Sure, it's nice to drag the bottom end along to a higher standard... but the thing you overlook is that, many times, even the top end doesn't need that standard.
In my shop, I've got 50 odd machines, and 43 of them are toasters. The users use exactly 3 applications - internal email (no internet); a custom app that lets them answer the phone and transcribe info from a caller; and a custom app that lets them manage the results of that call. And, oh yeah... 3 of that 43 will occasionally make a spreadsheet, consisting entirely of static cells.
That's it. That's all they do, and that's all they WILL do. We don't want added complexity - literally, people can die if our stuff screws up. And quite frankly, a 486 is overkill for this.
Instead, I'm being force-fed a piece of crap that's so complex, noone can manage it. The first 12 hours of box's life will be me, uninstalling AOL, MSN, OE, Media Player, and all the other crap that is nothing more than an exploit vector if I'm lucky. How I spent my past week? $35k for a rack mounted box, no keyboard or video... and it has Solitare on it. It has IE on it. It has a cute little wizard that'll help me setup MSN as my dialup ISP. This, in a quad-homed box that'll have 3 fractional DS3s on it. Yep, the inclusion of NetMeeting on this thing really made my day, and thank god OE keeps getting reinstalled every time I patch.
So... no, sir... the potential "new development" argument doesn't fly. It is rarely appropriate, and it is pretty much responsible for the bulk of the MS exploits running around today. Unknown, unneeded, and therefore unmanaged features that are not needed by that specific install. Look at the exploits running around, look at who keeps "catching" them and why... it's all caused by these "new developments" being force-fed in an environment where these developments are *not* appropriate, and in fact not needed. I had to patch against a MIDI file exploit, on a rack mounted box with no sound card. Huh??!! Then consider that I had to patch my neighbor's box against Sasser... a box that has only a single NIC connected to a cable modem. No file sharing, etc, is needed by that user... and the user doesn't want it. Yet, we still have to manage it, even though it has no business existing in that install. You'll find that the bulk of the Sasser victims are a similar case, and this case is caused by unwanted, unknown, and therefore unmanaged features.
Consider how irrelevent most firewalls would be if this were NOT the case.
Actually, I'll tell you that they don't have the right.
Assuming the person who put their product on a machine had the right to do so... that person *does not* automatically have any right to allocate network resources. If Adobe has received consent from a company's NOC provisioning, then fine... phone home all day long. In the general case, however, that won't happen - these phone home actions offer no value to the NOC mission, nor the company... it's an expense that has no purpose (e.g. allocation of network would be denied). Imagine you get enough installs of phone-ware... pretty much you'd have to provision an entire T1 to support the "phone home" crap.
So no, being installed on a machine does not imply access or permission to anything else.
*End Users* do not gain any authority by the fact that they can sit at a keyboard.
Doesn't matter if it's a 12 year old kid at your keyboard in your house, and it doesn't matter if it's a secretary in a 500 person company. Neither of these people have the authority to consent to anything, especially binding agreements (and contracts, which is how the s/w industry would like their EULAs treated).
All this crap does is legalize social engineering. Think about it.
Uh, how about approval from the authoritative owner of the freakin MACHINE?
Little Johnny six-pack breaks into your house, shoots you in the head, sits down at your machine... and is now THE USER, and would have authority to consent to such trash.
Think of a corporate layout, for chrissake... end-users have the authority to grant such permission?
BULL$#%. Such garbage language would preclude *any* ability to set policy by the guy who OWNS the machine.
It gets even dumber... pretend there actually *is* a market for this. If your phone is new enough to have a camera, then it's new enough to have a GPS on it. How about call a number that simply geocodes it, and does a TTS read...
Actually, I now have over 8,393,224 different methods of adding 1 to a number, all of them unique and not infringing on other people's rights. In fact, adding 1 to a number is about the only thing I can do anymore, since everything else *is* owned by someone else, since (at some point in time) it's probably already been done, so it'd be an infringement.
Luckily, there's a huge market out there where people need something incremented. They hire me because their million dollar project is stalled (due to rights infringement if they steal copywritten techniques like "x++" or "y+=1"). I show up, invent a new, unique, non-infringing method of incrementation, plug it in and walk away with a large check after signing an NDA... and the client's happy, because now they can work on finding a non-infringing solution to their next line of code. Sure, their program takes a small speed hit for my increment routines (it's up to a little over 48,000 clock cycles per increment, after pipelining), and it adds about 4kb of code to the binary for each instance, but each one is unique, and non-infringing. It's also interesting to note that by 2006, at my current rate of generating unique, non-infringing incrementation techniques, the average incrementation will probably take over 2 trilion clock ticks, and add over 1 meg to the binary, per instance. [By the way - If you've ever wondered how MS Word went from fitting on a floppy, and running on a 386 with 1 meg of ram... to now needing 3 CDs, a 2+GHz chip and half a gig of ram... I'm only allowed to say that you can rest in confidence that the routine that increments the cursor position after each keyhit is safe from infringement for at least half a decade:) ]
Some day, I hope to be able to diversify. I've got a line on a kid who thinks he can do the same thing, but with for() loops. Or, simulated for() loops... that'd be safer. The downside is, though, he uses whitespace as a delimiter between keywords, and newlines between instructions. I think that's been down before, so it might be too risky. I've also got some people who need new, non-infringing methods of using printf(), if anyone needs a gig... but you have to be fully bonded, otherwise don't apply.
Grab an old beater box, or a laptop, with NT4 on it. Pretty much every install of that came with an option for NetMon, buried in the network services setup. Cost: $0.
... is that Big Media has demanded an end to innovation on the 'net. Think about what drove most of it (the stuff of merit, at least) up until now... and then consider how much Big Media hates the possibility of innovation by "the great unwashed".
Nothing about "privacy", it's more simple than that. It all comes down to who owns the machine... who is accountable for what it does, and who has authority of what it does.
Spyware is all about authority, without accountability. Period.
In real life, though you cannot have one without the other. Consider the typical business, or household setup - you have...
a) A hardware device, and Dad (or the sysadmin) owns it. He's the one the feds will arrest, first, when his IP address is linked to a pile of kiddy porn.
b) Software licenses, owned by the licensee. Note that this person is *not* usually the same dude as the hardware owner... consider co-locations, or consider the game that Mom bought, to put on Dad's machine, for little 5 year old Billy to play.
c) Users. These are the people who actually use the software, in concert with the hardware. Note that they own neither.
You can see how authority, and especially accountability, come into play. Little Billy has no accountability, therefore he cannot have any authority. Giving him authority means he can bind Dad into any license agreements that come down the pike; despite that Dad may have explicitly forbidden such agreements.
Likewise, Mom only has authority over the software license. She has no implicit rights to any of the hardware... she cannot loan it to a friend, sell it, lease clock time, or whatever. She can do whatever the hell she wants with the license, however, because it's hers... which includes letting Billy take one of her seats. Billy cannot reassign the seat she's given him, however, unless she agrees. After all, come License Violation Time, it'll be enforced against HER, not Billy.
Same goes for the hardware - when all is said and done, Dad (or whoever owns the hardware) is going to be implicated.
The perfect world respects this setup. In fact, it adds another layer - the Network Guy.
The Network Guy owns all the cables, switches, routers that connect the machines to whatever. In the perfect world, he hates everyone... bandwidth is precious, and every packet is metered and paid for in blood. He has the right, since HE OWNS IT, to demand only certain types of traffic occur, and he has the right to demand that noone may deviate from his plan.
The hardware owner pays the blood to the network guy, and he hates him for it. He also hates the software licencees - they're forever encumbering his machines, and he doesn't do it lightly. In fact, he demands (since HE OWNS THEM) that noone has any right to install anything, nor bind him to nor involve his hardware with any EULAs or whatever, period. CPU and drive assets are precious commodities, and those machines exist exactly to fulfill HIS purpose, and noone else's. He also hates the network guy, since the network guy is forever allowing packets to bounce off his NIC - which the machine reacts to, and causes an unauthorized change in state in the machine. The network guy has no right to cause such changes, unless the hardware owner has specifically agreed that those types of changes are allowed. The hardware guy is only allowed to cause specific changes in state of specific pieces of the network, and the networ guy is only allowed to cause specific changes in state of specific hardware devices.
The software licensee is hated by all, and hates them all back. This person has no home, and has no implicit rights to anything other than, exactly, delegation of the licensed seat(s). This person is free to agree to whatever EULAs, terms restrictions, mortgage payments, or other encumberances... all day long, it matters not. However, they have no right to any of the hardware, nor any of the network - both of those resources must be negotiated for, separately. Both the hardware owner and the network guy will refuse to be bound by any terms in the license, since they have no interest in it, and both refuse to delegate any of their authority to the licensee. After all, she's a Typhoid Mary.
F
So, to sum up most of the replies in this thread..
on
Real's Reality
·
· Score: 4, Funny
and also to assert why I hate RealNetworks,
The product sucks because it's heavily emcumbered.
I recall when RealPlayer 1.0 came out. I found it, and started downloading it immediately.
Then the next version came out, about... oh, about 12 minutes after my modem finished sucking down the first one. Err...
So, pull that one down, because they changed the format and nothing works with the old one. That one's good for a week, and they have a "cool" version for sale as well.
I'm deciding if I'm going to buy this "cool" version and show my support, only to discover that a "new" version is now out, and the current one is useless. I'm starting to see a pattern, here.
I start to download that one, only to discover that 2 more version have been released before my modem can finish. I start to download those, and Real responds by publishing 12 more upgrades, all of which force the obsolence of their predecessor.
About that time, cablemodems are invented, so I get one. I begin to download that week's RealAudio version... at a whopping 3mbs. But, it's no use. In the 25 seconds needed to pull it, those fucks have released 18 more incompatable versions, all of which make the prior ones useless.
So, screw Real, they're little more than an upgrade scam. THAT is why they're a failure.
> Who needs support for long-distance phone service?
I'm not talking about the LD service in your house. I'm talking about trouble reporting and feature management. You know, you need to change the DNIS on one of your groups. Or, one of your voice Ts goes spotty, and you want to frog it with one of your internet Ts... since TCP is a little more forgiving to spotty outages. Or, your center blows up, and you need to re-route all inbound traffic to another location. Dumb things like these need people with a clue, and they are time-sensitive.
> And how many "infrastructure improvements" did the Telcos make back when they were charging us 26 cents a minute?
Well, I know at the AT&T bunker to the south of us, they used to fly their cable routes every other day, to help make sure their stuff wouldn't get backhoed. Little things like that, which are now gone, do cost money.
OTOH, if you're talking about feature creep... that's a whole different matter.
We are getting *exactly* what we wanted...
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... cheap rates.
Our annual telephony costs are over 7 digits per year, easy... and getting any form of tech support, despite being a rather large account, is damned near impossible. The reason?
Everyone wanted 10 cents per minute. Then 9. Then 8. Then 5. Then 4. If a telco doesn't offer it, everybody dumps them.
Think they can offer any support at those rates? They can't - anyone with any experience costs too much, and is retired out. We get left with "script kiddie" tech supports, who don't understand what an T3 is, let alone know what the loss of one means. At this point, our tech support for AT&T now consists of a call to our sales rep, followed by a call to a VP - and let them deal with it, because it's the best they can do.
So, don't bitch - we're all getting *exactly* what we asked for.
Yep, harkens back to the failures of the old Apple ][ era.
Self modifying code did little more than provide an extra 30 minutes of amusement.
It didn't stop any of us back then, it sure as hell won't stop anyone now. Apparently, these idiots have never heard of things like Soft-ICE.
Reverse engineering isn't hard, it's just tedious without the source. OTOH, we've been doing it for decades without source... it's only recently that we've had the luxury of (sometimes) having it. Regardless, these boneheads seem to confuse "reverse engineering" with "decompiling" - the two have nothing to do with each other.
You've absolutely hit the nail on the head... how many people cannot even change a tire on a car anymore?
It's pretty much our own fault, though. Back in the old days, we'd show off our efforts in an attempt to hook new people into the hobby. Our attempts at "helping them understand how simple it is" typically came off as being "way over my head", and the precedent was born.
Apple then capitalized on it, with their "Computers for the rest of us" campaign. Think about that... what moron would buy such a machine based on that slogan? Why, a person who considers themself a moron, of course! The merits of the Mac were irrelevent, the selling point was purely based on a stupid person being able to use it, and buying into that pitch means you forego any hope of comprehension.
Combine that with an "immediate gratification" mentality, and you've got today's society. Don't know, don't care, don't need to. Just give it to me.
Sadly, we're suffering from it the hardest in the fire service. I'm one of six "new guys" that have joined our (medium sized) department in the *past decade*. I'm told there used to be a waiting list of several years to get in, now we get about... oh, three recruits per year. Maybe one per year will actually stick, every other year. Of the six of us "new guys", I'm the only one who's ever used a chainsaw, or an axe... never mind a K12 saw or something hydraulic. I must confess, helping to teach some of them how to correctly use a chainsaw was (so far) one of the scariest points in my career.
But I still ask various people to join, and they always say "No." The typical reasons? "I don't know how", "It's too hard", "It's way over my head." I explain that it's about as blue-collar as you can get, which makes it fun! Besides, we've got tons of training available from ourselves, the county, the state, whatever. All of this goes to no avail. They continue to make excuses, and intend to remain incompetent.
Why? Well, we should start by blaming ourselves. We tried to show them how cool things were, without them having enough foundation to understand it. We alienated them in the process.
Then we can also blame the market. It's in the market's best interest to enslave the consumers, to convince them that they're helpless, and that only that market can provide for their needs. "Computers for the rest of us." Thanks a lot, guys.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we don't. Not all of us, anyway.
Sure, it's nice to drag the bottom end along to a higher standard... but the thing you overlook is that, many times, even the top end doesn't need that standard.
In my shop, I've got 50 odd machines, and 43 of them are toasters. The users use exactly 3 applications - internal email (no internet); a custom app that lets them answer the phone and transcribe info from a caller; and a custom app that lets them manage the results of that call. And, oh yeah... 3 of that 43 will occasionally make a spreadsheet, consisting entirely of static cells.
That's it. That's all they do, and that's all they WILL do. We don't want added complexity - literally, people can die if our stuff screws up. And quite frankly, a 486 is overkill for this.
Instead, I'm being force-fed a piece of crap that's so complex, noone can manage it. The first 12 hours of box's life will be me, uninstalling AOL, MSN, OE, Media Player, and all the other crap that is nothing more than an exploit vector if I'm lucky. How I spent my past week? $35k for a rack mounted box, no keyboard or video... and it has Solitare on it. It has IE on it. It has a cute little wizard that'll help me setup MSN as my dialup ISP. This, in a quad-homed box that'll have 3 fractional DS3s on it. Yep, the inclusion of NetMeeting on this thing really made my day, and thank god OE keeps getting reinstalled every time I patch.
So... no, sir... the potential "new development" argument doesn't fly. It is rarely appropriate, and it is pretty much responsible for the bulk of the MS exploits running around today. Unknown, unneeded, and therefore unmanaged features that are not needed by that specific install. Look at the exploits running around, look at who keeps "catching" them and why... it's all caused by these "new developments" being force-fed in an environment where these developments are *not* appropriate, and in fact not needed. I had to patch against a MIDI file exploit, on a rack mounted box with no sound card. Huh??!! Then consider that I had to patch my neighbor's box against Sasser... a box that has only a single NIC connected to a cable modem. No file sharing, etc, is needed by that user... and the user doesn't want it. Yet, we still have to manage it, even though it has no business existing in that install. You'll find that the bulk of the Sasser victims are a similar case, and this case is caused by unwanted, unknown, and therefore unmanaged features.
Consider how irrelevent most firewalls would be if this were NOT the case.
Actually, I'll tell you that they don't have the right.
Assuming the person who put their product on a machine had the right to do so... that person *does not* automatically have any right to allocate network resources. If Adobe has received consent from a company's NOC provisioning, then fine... phone home all day long. In the general case, however, that won't happen - these phone home actions offer no value to the NOC mission, nor the company... it's an expense that has no purpose (e.g. allocation of network would be denied). Imagine you get enough installs of phone-ware... pretty much you'd have to provision an entire T1 to support the "phone home" crap.
So no, being installed on a machine does not imply access or permission to anything else.
*End Users* do not gain any authority by the fact that they can sit at a keyboard.
Doesn't matter if it's a 12 year old kid at your keyboard in your house, and it doesn't matter if it's a secretary in a 500 person company. Neither of these people have the authority to consent to anything, especially binding agreements (and contracts, which is how the s/w industry would like their EULAs treated).
All this crap does is legalize social engineering. Think about it.
Microsoft Winxx Service pack yy
H otfix
Hotfix
Hotfix
Patch
Patch
Hotfix
Patch
Patch
Patch
I usually get around to installing userland stuff after... hmmm... the 6th reboot.
Lol, nice. I was just using a case where the user clearly didn't have your interests in mind :)
Uh, how about approval from the authoritative owner of the freakin MACHINE?
Little Johnny six-pack breaks into your house, shoots you in the head, sits down at your machine... and is now THE USER, and would have authority to consent to such trash.
Think of a corporate layout, for chrissake... end-users have the authority to grant such permission?
BULL$#%. Such garbage language would preclude *any* ability to set policy by the guy who OWNS the machine.
Som what to do, you ask?
Why, follow the terror-cell model... which p2p does not currently do. It won't be quite as fast, but it'd be a pure hairball to unravel.
... NOT new.
Must be nothing important happened at Yahoo, today.
It gets even dumber... pretend there actually *is* a market for this. If your phone is new enough to have a camera, then it's new enough to have a GPS on it. How about call a number that simply geocodes it, and does a TTS read...
Actually, I now have over 8,393,224 different methods of adding 1 to a number, all of them unique and not infringing on other people's rights. In fact, adding 1 to a number is about the only thing I can do anymore, since everything else *is* owned by someone else, since (at some point in time) it's probably already been done, so it'd be an infringement.
Luckily, there's a huge market out there where people need something incremented. They hire me because their million dollar project is stalled (due to rights infringement if they steal copywritten techniques like "x++" or "y+=1"). I show up, invent a new, unique, non-infringing method of incrementation, plug it in and walk away with a large check after signing an NDA... and the client's happy, because now they can work on finding a non-infringing solution to their next line of code. Sure, their program takes a small speed hit for my increment routines (it's up to a little over 48,000 clock cycles per increment, after pipelining), and it adds about 4kb of code to the binary for each instance, but each one is unique, and non-infringing. It's also interesting to note that by 2006, at my current rate of generating unique, non-infringing incrementation techniques, the average incrementation will probably take over 2 trilion clock ticks, and add over 1 meg to the binary, per instance. [By the way - If you've ever wondered how MS Word went from fitting on a floppy, and running on a 386 with 1 meg of ram... to now needing 3 CDs, a 2+GHz chip and half a gig of ram... I'm only allowed to say that you can rest in confidence that the routine that increments the cursor position after each keyhit is safe from infringement for at least half a decade :) ]
Some day, I hope to be able to diversify. I've got a line on a kid who thinks he can do the same thing, but with for() loops. Or, simulated for() loops... that'd be safer. The downside is, though, he uses whitespace as a delimiter between keywords, and newlines between instructions. I think that's been down before, so it might be too risky. I've also got some people who need new, non-infringing methods of using printf(), if anyone needs a gig... but you have to be fully bonded, otherwise don't apply.
</sarcasm>
... to our last breeding pair of idiots, then we'll worry about protecting them.
Grab an old beater box, or a laptop, with NT4 on it. Pretty much every install of that came with an option for NetMon, buried in the network services setup. Cost: $0.
... in response that RFC.
Lemme get my super-omniscient-archive up and running... oh yes, here it is. Comment #1, in reply to RFC1. Dated 11 seconds after RFC1 was issued:
"It'll never work."
Oddly, Comment #2, which was received within seconds of comment #1, was a cryptic
"Woot! First Comment!"
And th rest, as they say, is history.
No, no no... you've got it all wrong.
Step 1: Collect porn makers.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
... is that Big Media has demanded an end to innovation on the 'net. Think about what drove most of it (the stuff of merit, at least) up until now... and then consider how much Big Media hates the possibility of innovation by "the great unwashed".
... is curtilage.
Nothing about "privacy", it's more simple than that. It all comes down to who owns the machine... who is accountable for what it does, and who has authority of what it does.
Spyware is all about authority, without accountability. Period.
In real life, though you cannot have one without the other. Consider the typical business, or household setup - you have...
a) A hardware device, and Dad (or the sysadmin) owns it. He's the one the feds will arrest, first, when his IP address is linked to a pile of kiddy porn.
b) Software licenses, owned by the licensee. Note that this person is *not* usually the same dude as the hardware owner... consider co-locations, or consider the game that Mom bought, to put on Dad's machine, for little 5 year old Billy to play.
c) Users. These are the people who actually use the software, in concert with the hardware. Note that they own neither.
You can see how authority, and especially accountability, come into play. Little Billy has no accountability, therefore he cannot have any authority. Giving him authority means he can bind Dad into any license agreements that come down the pike; despite that Dad may have explicitly forbidden such agreements.
Likewise, Mom only has authority over the software license. She has no implicit rights to any of the hardware... she cannot loan it to a friend, sell it, lease clock time, or whatever. She can do whatever the hell she wants with the license, however, because it's hers... which includes letting Billy take one of her seats. Billy cannot reassign the seat she's given him, however, unless she agrees. After all, come License Violation Time, it'll be enforced against HER, not Billy.
Same goes for the hardware - when all is said and done, Dad (or whoever owns the hardware) is going to be implicated.
The perfect world respects this setup. In fact, it adds another layer - the Network Guy.
The Network Guy owns all the cables, switches, routers that connect the machines to whatever. In the perfect world, he hates everyone... bandwidth is precious, and every packet is metered and paid for in blood. He has the right, since HE OWNS IT, to demand only certain types of traffic occur, and he has the right to demand that noone may deviate from his plan.
The hardware owner pays the blood to the network guy, and he hates him for it. He also hates the software licencees - they're forever encumbering his machines, and he doesn't do it lightly. In fact, he demands (since HE OWNS THEM) that noone has any right to install anything, nor bind him to nor involve his hardware with any EULAs or whatever, period. CPU and drive assets are precious commodities, and those machines exist exactly to fulfill HIS purpose, and noone else's. He also hates the network guy, since the network guy is forever allowing packets to bounce off his NIC - which the machine reacts to, and causes an unauthorized change in state in the machine. The network guy has no right to cause such changes, unless the hardware owner has specifically agreed that those types of changes are allowed. The hardware guy is only allowed to cause specific changes in state of specific pieces of the network, and the networ guy is only allowed to cause specific changes in state of specific hardware devices.
The software licensee is hated by all, and hates them all back. This person has no home, and has no implicit rights to anything other than, exactly, delegation of the licensed seat(s). This person is free to agree to whatever EULAs, terms restrictions, mortgage payments, or other encumberances... all day long, it matters not. However, they have no right to any of the hardware, nor any of the network - both of those resources must be negotiated for, separately. Both the hardware owner and the network guy will refuse to be bound by any terms in the license, since they have no interest in it, and both refuse to delegate any of their authority to the licensee. After all, she's a Typhoid Mary.
F
and also to assert why I hate RealNetworks,
The product sucks because it's heavily emcumbered.
I recall when RealPlayer 1.0 came out. I found it, and started downloading it immediately.
Then the next version came out, about... oh, about 12 minutes after my modem finished sucking down the first one. Err...
So, pull that one down, because they changed the format and nothing works with the old one. That one's good for a week, and they have a "cool" version for sale as well.
I'm deciding if I'm going to buy this "cool" version and show my support, only to discover that a "new" version is now out, and the current one is useless. I'm starting to see a pattern, here.
I start to download that one, only to discover that 2 more version have been released before my modem can finish. I start to download those, and Real responds by publishing 12 more upgrades, all of which force the obsolence of their predecessor.
About that time, cablemodems are invented, so I get one. I begin to download that week's RealAudio version... at a whopping 3mbs. But, it's no use. In the 25 seconds needed to pull it, those fucks have released 18 more incompatable versions, all of which make the prior ones useless.
So, screw Real, they're little more than an upgrade scam. THAT is why they're a failure.
> Who needs support for long-distance phone service?
I'm not talking about the LD service in your house. I'm talking about trouble reporting and feature management. You know, you need to change the DNIS on one of your groups. Or, one of your voice Ts goes spotty, and you want to frog it with one of your internet Ts... since TCP is a little more forgiving to spotty outages. Or, your center blows up, and you need to re-route all inbound traffic to another location. Dumb things like these need people with a clue, and they are time-sensitive.
> And how many "infrastructure improvements" did the Telcos make back when they were charging us 26 cents a minute?
Well, I know at the AT&T bunker to the south of us, they used to fly their cable routes every other day, to help make sure their stuff wouldn't get backhoed. Little things like that, which are now gone, do cost money.
OTOH, if you're talking about feature creep... that's a whole different matter.
Uh huh, my neighbor washes toilets for a company that makes rockets. That doesn't make him an rocket scientist. You either, for that matter.
LD Tech Support and circuit inventory management. Eat me.Our annual telephony costs are over 7 digits per year, easy... and getting any form of tech support, despite being a rather large account, is damned near impossible. The reason?
Everyone wanted 10 cents per minute. Then 9. Then 8. Then 5. Then 4. If a telco doesn't offer it, everybody dumps them.
Think they can offer any support at those rates? They can't - anyone with any experience costs too much, and is retired out. We get left with "script kiddie" tech supports, who don't understand what an T3 is, let alone know what the loss of one means. At this point, our tech support for AT&T now consists of a call to our sales rep, followed by a call to a VP - and let them deal with it, because it's the best they can do.
So, don't bitch - we're all getting *exactly* what we asked for.
Yep, harkens back to the failures of the old Apple ][ era.
Self modifying code did little more than provide an extra 30 minutes of amusement.
It didn't stop any of us back then, it sure as hell won't stop anyone now. Apparently, these idiots have never heard of things like Soft-ICE.
Reverse engineering isn't hard, it's just tedious without the source. OTOH, we've been doing it for decades without source... it's only recently that we've had the luxury of (sometimes) having it. Regardless, these boneheads seem to confuse "reverse engineering" with "decompiling" - the two have nothing to do with each other.
"Changes variable names"... rofl, that's really gonna screw up DEBUG, isn't it...
Think of the health hazards of putting your mouth on a tube that's been slobbered all over, over a period of years.
I can see it now... DRM encumbered, un-deleteable, non-bypassable Viagra spam, featuring Mickey.
You've absolutely hit the nail on the head... how many people cannot even change a tire on a car anymore?
It's pretty much our own fault, though. Back in the old days, we'd show off our efforts in an attempt to hook new people into the hobby. Our attempts at "helping them understand how simple it is" typically came off as being "way over my head", and the precedent was born.
Apple then capitalized on it, with their "Computers for the rest of us" campaign. Think about that... what moron would buy such a machine based on that slogan? Why, a person who considers themself a moron, of course! The merits of the Mac were irrelevent, the selling point was purely based on a stupid person being able to use it, and buying into that pitch means you forego any hope of comprehension.
Combine that with an "immediate gratification" mentality, and you've got today's society. Don't know, don't care, don't need to. Just give it to me.
Sadly, we're suffering from it the hardest in the fire service. I'm one of six "new guys" that have joined our (medium sized) department in the *past decade*. I'm told there used to be a waiting list of several years to get in, now we get about... oh, three recruits per year. Maybe one per year will actually stick, every other year. Of the six of us "new guys", I'm the only one who's ever used a chainsaw, or an axe... never mind a K12 saw or something hydraulic. I must confess, helping to teach some of them how to correctly use a chainsaw was (so far) one of the scariest points in my career.
But I still ask various people to join, and they always say "No." The typical reasons? "I don't know how", "It's too hard", "It's way over my head." I explain that it's about as blue-collar as you can get, which makes it fun! Besides, we've got tons of training available from ourselves, the county, the state, whatever. All of this goes to no avail. They continue to make excuses, and intend to remain incompetent.
Why? Well, we should start by blaming ourselves. We tried to show them how cool things were, without them having enough foundation to understand it. We alienated them in the process.
Then we can also blame the market. It's in the market's best interest to enslave the consumers, to convince them that they're helpless, and that only that market can provide for their needs. "Computers for the rest of us." Thanks a lot, guys.
So, now we've got an official font to use... but they can't decide what language to write with it. English? Spanish? Spanglish?
Personally, I think the official government language should be Engrish. It'd make that crap more fun to read, at least...