Microsoft machines will tell you their MAC when you do a NBTSTAT on them. At least one ISP I know of blocks NetBIOS traffic because of uncontrolled file sharing, but I don't know how common that is.
Personal firewall software should capture the request or block it too, so there are a few ways to thwart the method.
Of course you still need the IP address, but that's a little easier to find. You could even do a little social engineering to get it... "Hey check out my website dedicated to your demise!"
As for changing your MAC, what if the third party program doesn't read the MAC from the network stack, but pulls it from the driver? i.e. using the same calls the Network stack uses to get it in the first place?
I found Mozilla fastest and most responsive on Win98. There it is only a pig, not a sloth.
Mozilla has terrible performance though. In my circles it's even been the butt of a few jokes.
It's good enough for my purposes, but coworkers still laugh at me for using it when it is faster for them to walk back to their desks and launch IE than to wait for Mozilla to come back from swap on my machine. That's Win2k though.
I would argue that the software author gains from the piracy, since the inferior albeit adequate $50 product looses mindshare. With the mindshare and the $50, that inferior product could grow to be a competitor. That won't happen precisely because the 'victim' isn't enforcing their own business model. They should be prosecuting every teenage kid in their basement, and suffer all the negative publicity that comes with it... rather than just going after what is profitable at the moment.
Software companies are profiting from a ridiculous business model which only works because taxpayers are paying law enforcement to enforce it. Just imagine if law enforcement was 100% effective at combating piracy. What would happen to the industry?
I wonder if you could view a soft stance towards piracy as "dumping" in the marketplace. It is, after all, exactly what you're doing -- saturating the market with product, under cost, knowing that it is hurting your competitors.
IMHO, shareware fits into this, bennefiting from the network effect and hurt competition, while crying that only a small fraction of their customers are paying.
Of course, it still kicks Mozilla's ass in speed and memory usage. If IE had to be cross platform, it'd be slower/use more memory too.
I couldn't agree more. Although IE does do some cross platform stuff, but from what I hear, it was the way Netscape used to do it. They have separate codebases. There's an IE for Unix out there somewhere, and of course there's MacOS.
So you're saying that my machine is fast enough for Lotus Notes, Internet Explorer, Windows 2000, and MS Office, but Mozilla is the only app which woefully underperforms on the system because I don't have enough RAM?
I guess that's evidence of Mozilla's light weight and small footprint.
This is such a lame argument. Windows swaps out inactive applications. It just does. That's the way it works. When something is not being used, it gets swapped out to the HDD and more room is made for the drive cache. If IE uses libraries which never get swapped out because MS has crafted the OS not to swap the stuff out, that's a good conspiracy theory, but it doesn't explain Windows 3.1.
Internet Explorer 5 runs on Windows 3.1 with 8 megs of RAM. Yes, Windows 3.1 with 8 megs of RAM. They recommend 16, but I've run it fine on 8. You can't practially use more than one window, but it is usable. You certainly can't load up Mozilla in that. My point is not that it is a practical configuration for modern websites, my point is that it has a FAR smaller footprint, no matter how many people claim that it's just the libraries and the quick launch tool. (It's hard to find downloads of it these days... but here's a German version just to prove it.)
When I don't use Mozilla, it gets swapped out to my HDD. It doesn't matter how much RAM I have, it just will. Unless of course, I disable swap altogether, or tweak the registry. But then I would have an app sucking back 40MB of RAM.
My machine is an 800MHz PIII with 256M of RAM. I use more than just Mozilla on the machine. I should not have to upgrade for Mozilla when the machine is overpowered for everything else.
Posted using Mozilla 1.1 on Linux. My last post was using Mozilla 1.1 on Windows 2000. I use Mozilla because IE abuses standards, and now Mozilla has some great features like ad blocking.
I can leisurely launch IE and visit a webpage before Mozilla launches. I mean, I can hit start, run, type in "iexplore", load the default page, click on the location bar, type in my page and load it -- all before Mozilla launches.
Mozilla is the only application I have ever known under Windows to regularly produce the "This application has stopped responding.." window just because it is taking so long to shut a window.
Once it is up and running it is fine. Windows will swap it out, and it takes a good half-minute to pull out of swap, but otherwise it is fine.
Despite this pitiful performance on every Windows 2000 (or NT) platform I have tried(it doesn't do this to me on Linux, and doesn't do it nearly as badly on Win98.), I still use it as my primary browser.
Trust me, it is not my machine, nor is it the dozens of other machines I have tried it on. My Win2k system is the fastest machine I have.
Microsoft has always pumped money into a technology until it eventually becomes successful (Internet Explorer and Windows CE to name two), but has anyone else noticed that they let everyone else bet their bank on MS technology first, then they learn from their competitor/customer's mistakes?
E.g. The Sega dreamcast. Odd how Microsoft didn't use WinCE for the Xbox isn't it?
Isn't Corel jumping on.Net before MS Office?
The IBM/Microsoft OS/2 partnership and the subsequent WinNT?
I don't agree that it is a "moronic, pig ignorant" analogy. Although pig-ignorant might apply, since it doesn't consider or involve pigs in any fashion.
The analogy sucks, as most analogies suck, because photocopying books at a copier is to pirating software what burning CDs alone is to piracy.
IMHO the analogy would hold a little better if the guy on the library started a ratio-based club to exchange photocopied books.
Even that analogy is not quite right, it would still have a cost and volume aspect which wouldn't quite hold in the piracy analogy. You could trim it down by saying that it was done online with scanners, but then the costs aspect invisibly sways people's opinions...
If high-volume bulk sheet-fed scanners with colour laser printers and binding machines cost under $100, then forming a club where books are scanned and distributed all over the world would fit the analogy a little better.
Of course then people would still say "How is that different from a guy with a photocopier?"
Passengers are easily silenced with non-verbal communication, like making a left turn through a busy intersection.
A cell-phone conversation in the same situation doesn't skip a beat... well the driver may not respond as fast, but their mind is focused on what the other person is saying.
Yep, rather than branding and controlling existing culture, they're contributing to the world in which we all live.
IMHO, the moment censors first started to consider the opinions of advertisers, the advertising model of revenue failed society.
It's a shame that the profits are so good that few people have an interest in letting people know that our culture has been castrated in the best interests of big-business.
The post did not compare university courses with college courses, it was comparing small private colleges with community colleges and large universities.
Re-read (or read) the last two paragraphs where community colleges and large universities are mentioned.
A payola-free system is inherently unstable, it relies on the record companies to simply never offer payola to a radio station. A payola-free system is better for the whole music industry. So why don't we have this better payola-free system?
The incentive is huge to be the first to start offering payola to radio stations in a payola-free system.
That is where legislation might not be a bad thing, it can stabilize a payola-free system by creating strong disincentives to offering payola.
An alternative however might be for labels to forbid stations from playing their music if the station accepts payola... but that takes guts. Still, the labels are not as powerless as the article indicates.
(I don't think the above is a troll, I don't know why it got modded down)
There's a hell of a difference between a PLC and a modern PC operating system. PCs would not exist either at home or in the office if they had to be held to strict requirements for quality of programming.
I'm going along with the predicitons of the original post. Think of the number of technical support calls to various software companies which will end with "Oh my god!, you're running Lindows! I can't begin to tell you how unsupported you are!", along with small local shops being completely unable to provide support for software, ISPs trying to add new hardware like PCI DSL modems, and think of all the USB accessories these people are going to be screaming about. Printing alone should be hell.
"I bought my Kodak camera/MP3 player/Scanner/Winprinter, plugged it in, and it didn't ask me for the CD. When I tried to install the drivers, the application crashed"
Wow is this going to flop. It will be huge for the techies, but that's all.
I don't think the killer app exists anymore. A Killer app, is an application which forces you to buy the computer and operating system in order to run it.
Windows original killer app was Excel. It wasn't as good as 1-2-3, but it didn't have the memory issues which 1-2-3 had in the DOS environment. After that, why bother with WordPerfect, when you already have that Windows machine to run Excel, and MS Word will run better in your environment.
Now when the "average user" wants a computer, they don't even have an application in mind. They have a list of things they want to do. Certainly you've heard this conversation before:
user: "I need a computer"
tech: "what do you need a computer for"
user: "my son/daughter needs it for school"
tech: "what are they taking?"
user: "computer engineering"
tech: "shouldn't they be researching this themselves?"
user: "They don't really know all that much about computers. They got really good marks in programming though"
tech: (shudder) "well then just about anything will do fine. A low-end PC with Windows will be compatible with all the popular document formats out there, and will run MS Office and IE without any problems."
user: "What about a Mac?"
tech: "They're good, they have a strong following, but it won't be what they're using at the school, and their friends won't be able to help them with technical problems. Despite what anyone says they're more expensive too, but the hardware is technically superior."
user: "oh, I also want them to be able to play a few games too..."
tech: "the faster and more expensive the better, but the low end PC would be good for most games."
When the cheapest computer is "what everyone else is using", people will buy the cheapest computer. The killer app isn't what a computer can do anymore, it is what a computer can't do. Why buy anything other than a Windows PC when a Windows PC is the cheapest and does everything?
(Of course if the student were going into some multimedia program and asked this question to a faculty member, they would probably buy a Mac... because in that field, it is "what everyone else is using".. they might not though... mistakenly thinking that a low end PC whcih can run all the necessary software will perform as well as a low end Mac.)
I personally like the idea of a computer-generated backdrop. This stuff is too complex, and it is a pain to make it all consistent. It can stop players from noticing things like "Why is there a blacksmith making armour and weapons in this inland farming community when there is no access to any major waterways and the nearest oar body is a week away."
Of course the blacksmith is only really there because the DM was under pressure to pull a town out of his hat when the players took a wrong turn. So who is this blacksmith? why is he in the town? who is the nearest blacksmith, did he study under him?, is he a competitor? What do they do? How old is the blacksmith? does he have children? who is is wife? What's his wife's name? Is there anyone studying under the blacksmith?
Whoops, it turns out the players went next door, to the cobbler. Quick! flesh out that shop.
What other shops are in town?
It is trivial to write plots onto a backdrop, it is very tedious to do everything ad-hoc.
Admittedly there are some storytellers who can walk through this stuff with nothing but pure charisma, but they also have a tendency to lead player actions and bend rules when players step out of line.
I would rather run games where a blacksmith making armour in a remote inland farming community would stick out so sorely that he could only be part of some plot... rather than being part of some empty game where the blacksmith is only there to answer the question "how many gold pieces for this?"... ugh.
I'm skeptical that a computer generator can do a good job of this stuff. It is tough. The demographics are also shifted by magic, and you want magic to be included in the demographics.
I guess it doesn't really matter, AD&D has been screwed up since they started making all those stupid player supplements in the second edition. Game balance was thrown out the window and my games degenerated into arguments as to why particular spells and 'kits' could not be allowed.
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Off the top of my head, when a band sinks, they usually put out one of those albums. Metallica's black album, REM's "Monster", U2's Zooropa.
Bait and switch... maybe. But don't attribute to conspiracy anything which can be more easily explained through simple blunders.
The only way to avoid the top-40 these days is to visit small local bars.
Because people would just sit in the lavoratories throughout the flight chatting about nothing.
Microsoft machines will tell you their MAC when you do a NBTSTAT on them. At least one ISP I know of blocks NetBIOS traffic because of uncontrolled file sharing, but I don't know how common that is.
Personal firewall software should capture the request or block it too, so there are a few ways to thwart the method.
Of course you still need the IP address, but that's a little easier to find. You could even do a little social engineering to get it... "Hey check out my website dedicated to your demise!"
As for changing your MAC, what if the third party program doesn't read the MAC from the network stack, but pulls it from the driver? i.e. using the same calls the Network stack uses to get it in the first place?
I found Mozilla fastest and most responsive on Win98. There it is only a pig, not a sloth.
Mozilla has terrible performance though. In my circles it's even been the butt of a few jokes.
It's good enough for my purposes, but coworkers still laugh at me for using it when it is faster for them to walk back to their desks and launch IE than to wait for Mozilla to come back from swap on my machine. That's Win2k though.
I would argue that the software author gains from the piracy, since the inferior albeit adequate $50 product looses mindshare. With the mindshare and the $50, that inferior product could grow to be a competitor. That won't happen precisely because the 'victim' isn't enforcing their own business model. They should be prosecuting every teenage kid in their basement, and suffer all the negative publicity that comes with it... rather than just going after what is profitable at the moment.
Software companies are profiting from a ridiculous business model which only works because taxpayers are paying law enforcement to enforce it. Just imagine if law enforcement was 100% effective at combating piracy. What would happen to the industry?
I wonder if you could view a soft stance towards piracy as "dumping" in the marketplace. It is, after all, exactly what you're doing -- saturating the market with product, under cost, knowing that it is hurting your competitors.
IMHO, shareware fits into this, bennefiting from the network effect and hurt competition, while crying that only a small fraction of their customers are paying.
Yeah, I know, it is a stretch.
I couldn't agree more. Although IE does do some cross platform stuff, but from what I hear, it was the way Netscape used to do it. They have separate codebases. There's an IE for Unix out there somewhere, and of course there's MacOS.
So you're saying that my machine is fast enough for Lotus Notes, Internet Explorer, Windows 2000, and MS Office, but Mozilla is the only app which woefully underperforms on the system because I don't have enough RAM?
I guess that's evidence of Mozilla's light weight and small footprint.
This is such a lame argument. Windows swaps out inactive applications. It just does. That's the way it works. When something is not being used, it gets swapped out to the HDD and more room is made for the drive cache. If IE uses libraries which never get swapped out because MS has crafted the OS not to swap the stuff out, that's a good conspiracy theory, but it doesn't explain Windows 3.1.
Internet Explorer 5 runs on Windows 3.1 with 8 megs of RAM. Yes, Windows 3.1 with 8 megs of RAM. They recommend 16, but I've run it fine on 8. You can't practially use more than one window, but it is usable. You certainly can't load up Mozilla in that. My point is not that it is a practical configuration for modern websites, my point is that it has a FAR smaller footprint, no matter how many people claim that it's just the libraries and the quick launch tool. (It's hard to find downloads of it these days... but here's a German version just to prove it.)
When I don't use Mozilla, it gets swapped out to my HDD. It doesn't matter how much RAM I have, it just will. Unless of course, I disable swap altogether, or tweak the registry. But then I would have an app sucking back 40MB of RAM.
My machine is an 800MHz PIII with 256M of RAM. I use more than just Mozilla on the machine. I should not have to upgrade for Mozilla when the machine is overpowered for everything else.
Posted using Mozilla 1.1 on Linux. My last post was using Mozilla 1.1 on Windows 2000. I use Mozilla because IE abuses standards, and now Mozilla has some great features like ad blocking.
I can leisurely launch IE and visit a webpage before Mozilla launches. I mean, I can hit start, run, type in "iexplore", load the default page, click on the location bar, type in my page and load it -- all before Mozilla launches.
Mozilla is the only application I have ever known under Windows to regularly produce the "This application has stopped responding.." window just because it is taking so long to shut a window.
Once it is up and running it is fine. Windows will swap it out, and it takes a good half-minute to pull out of swap, but otherwise it is fine.
Despite this pitiful performance on every Windows 2000 (or NT) platform I have tried(it doesn't do this to me on Linux, and doesn't do it nearly as badly on Win98.), I still use it as my primary browser.
Trust me, it is not my machine, nor is it the dozens of other machines I have tried it on. My Win2k system is the fastest machine I have.
Microsoft has always pumped money into a technology until it eventually becomes successful (Internet Explorer and Windows CE to name two), but has anyone else noticed that they let everyone else bet their bank on MS technology first, then they learn from their competitor/customer's mistakes?
E.g. The Sega dreamcast. Odd how Microsoft didn't use WinCE for the Xbox isn't it?
Isn't Corel jumping on .Net before MS Office?
The IBM/Microsoft OS/2 partnership and the subsequent WinNT?
I'm sure there are other examples.
I don't agree that it is a "moronic, pig ignorant" analogy. Although pig-ignorant might apply, since it doesn't consider or involve pigs in any fashion.
The analogy sucks, as most analogies suck, because photocopying books at a copier is to pirating software what burning CDs alone is to piracy.
IMHO the analogy would hold a little better if the guy on the library started a ratio-based club to exchange photocopied books.
Even that analogy is not quite right, it would still have a cost and volume aspect which wouldn't quite hold in the piracy analogy. You could trim it down by saying that it was done online with scanners, but then the costs aspect invisibly sways people's opinions...
If high-volume bulk sheet-fed scanners with colour laser printers and binding machines cost under $100, then forming a club where books are scanned and distributed all over the world would fit the analogy a little better.
Of course then people would still say "How is that different from a guy with a photocopier?"
Passengers are easily silenced with non-verbal communication, like making a left turn through a busy intersection.
A cell-phone conversation in the same situation doesn't skip a beat... well the driver may not respond as fast, but their mind is focused on what the other person is saying.
Yep, rather than branding and controlling existing culture, they're contributing to the world in which we all live.
IMHO, the moment censors first started to consider the opinions of advertisers, the advertising model of revenue failed society.
It's a shame that the profits are so good that few people have an interest in letting people know that our culture has been castrated in the best interests of big-business.
This may actually work the other way around. Those creatures which are sensitive to it have a greater chance of survival -- they won't be swatted.
I suppose the real question is whether or not the evolutionary advantage goes to the creatures which risk being swatted to suck blood from humans.
The questions cited scenes, applied a spin to them, then set out accusations. Piers addressed the spin rather than the accusations.
To badly mix metaphors, he dodged the loaded questions.
Don't you mean "half" your reaction time?
I guess these things happen when your beta-wave activity slows :-)
The post did not compare university courses with college courses, it was comparing small private colleges with community colleges and large universities.
Re-read (or read) the last two paragraphs where community colleges and large universities are mentioned.
A payola-free system is inherently unstable, it relies on the record companies to simply never offer payola to a radio station. A payola-free system is better for the whole music industry. So why don't we have this better payola-free system?
The incentive is huge to be the first to start offering payola to radio stations in a payola-free system.
That is where legislation might not be a bad thing, it can stabilize a payola-free system by creating strong disincentives to offering payola.
An alternative however might be for labels to forbid stations from playing their music if the station accepts payola... but that takes guts. Still, the labels are not as powerless as the article indicates.
(I don't think the above is a troll, I don't know why it got modded down)
There's a hell of a difference between a PLC and a modern PC operating system. PCs would not exist either at home or in the office if they had to be held to strict requirements for quality of programming.
Just try plugging in that hardware to get those pictures to Grandma.
I'm going along with the predicitons of the original post. Think of the number of technical support calls to various software companies which will end with "Oh my god!, you're running Lindows! I can't begin to tell you how unsupported you are!", along with small local shops being completely unable to provide support for software, ISPs trying to add new hardware like PCI DSL modems, and think of all the USB accessories these people are going to be screaming about. Printing alone should be hell.
"I bought my Kodak camera/MP3 player/Scanner/Winprinter, plugged it in, and it didn't ask me for the CD. When I tried to install the drivers, the application crashed"
Wow is this going to flop. It will be huge for the techies, but that's all.
I don't think the killer app exists anymore. A Killer app, is an application which forces you to buy the computer and operating system in order to run it.
Windows original killer app was Excel. It wasn't as good as 1-2-3, but it didn't have the memory issues which 1-2-3 had in the DOS environment. After that, why bother with WordPerfect, when you already have that Windows machine to run Excel, and MS Word will run better in your environment.
Now when the "average user" wants a computer, they don't even have an application in mind. They have a list of things they want to do. Certainly you've heard this conversation before:
user: "I need a computer"
tech: "what do you need a computer for"
user: "my son/daughter needs it for school"
tech: "what are they taking?"
user: "computer engineering"
tech: "shouldn't they be researching this themselves?"
user: "They don't really know all that much about computers. They got really good marks in programming though"
tech: (shudder) "well then just about anything will do fine. A low-end PC with Windows will be compatible with all the popular document formats out there, and will run MS Office and IE without any problems."
user: "What about a Mac?"
tech: "They're good, they have a strong following, but it won't be what they're using at the school, and their friends won't be able to help them with technical problems. Despite what anyone says they're more expensive too, but the hardware is technically superior."
user: "oh, I also want them to be able to play a few games too..."
tech: "the faster and more expensive the better, but the low end PC would be good for most games."
When the cheapest computer is "what everyone else is using", people will buy the cheapest computer. The killer app isn't what a computer can do anymore, it is what a computer can't do. Why buy anything other than a Windows PC when a Windows PC is the cheapest and does everything?
(Of course if the student were going into some multimedia program and asked this question to a faculty member, they would probably buy a Mac... because in that field, it is "what everyone else is using".. they might not though... mistakenly thinking that a low end PC whcih can run all the necessary software will perform as well as a low end Mac.)
I personally like the idea of a computer-generated backdrop. This stuff is too complex, and it is a pain to make it all consistent. It can stop players from noticing things like "Why is there a blacksmith making armour and weapons in this inland farming community when there is no access to any major waterways and the nearest oar body is a week away."
Of course the blacksmith is only really there because the DM was under pressure to pull a town out of his hat when the players took a wrong turn. So who is this blacksmith? why is he in the town? who is the nearest blacksmith, did he study under him?, is he a competitor? What do they do? How old is the blacksmith? does he have children? who is is wife? What's his wife's name? Is there anyone studying under the blacksmith?
Whoops, it turns out the players went next door, to the cobbler. Quick! flesh out that shop.
What other shops are in town?
It is trivial to write plots onto a backdrop, it is very tedious to do everything ad-hoc.
Admittedly there are some storytellers who can walk through this stuff with nothing but pure charisma, but they also have a tendency to lead player actions and bend rules when players step out of line.
I would rather run games where a blacksmith making armour in a remote inland farming community would stick out so sorely that he could only be part of some plot... rather than being part of some empty game where the blacksmith is only there to answer the question "how many gold pieces for this?"... ugh.
I'm skeptical that a computer generator can do a good job of this stuff. It is tough. The demographics are also shifted by magic, and you want magic to be included in the demographics.
I guess it doesn't really matter, AD&D has been screwed up since they started making all those stupid player supplements in the second edition. Game balance was thrown out the window and my games degenerated into arguments as to why particular spells and 'kits' could not be allowed.
This is the level of service we have come to expect from MS. Good or bad, it is what you paid for and what you are using.
Microsoft believes it more worthwhile to keep the security vulnerabilities secret until they are fixed. That's their decision.
You make it sound like you have some kind of rights here or something. Re-read your EULA. You have no rights.