well, back when i first got my ipod, i only had the original 400Mhz TiBook with the 10Gig hard drive. i quickly got in the habit of separately managing tracks that went on my iPod to save hard drive space: i'd rip stuff local, then would drag music to the ipod, and erase from local library. That's kinda been my modus operandi since then. Now that I have an AlBook with 80G HD... yeah i could go back to the "normal" way, though i'm already at 61% full.
I'll be holding off on that iTunes upgrade. While i'm typically a staunch Apple advocate, the fact that they're actively blocking apps from interacting with the library is deeply troubling to me.
It's simple. iPod has struck the ultimate balance of features, portability and usability. All the other guys are trying hard to match this balance, but they infallibly run into the next problem:
Brand. Apple was first to market with the best player, worked very hard on developing a killer brand. This brand nearly touts the iPod as fashion statement, for cool, hip people. All the kids want it:
Friday night my Girlfriend and I were eating at Taiko, a Japanese restaurant right by our favorite cineplex. A lady and her daughter sat by us. At some point in their conversation, the mom asked the daughter what she wanted for christmas. She almost right-away blurted "an iPod!". The ensuing dialog had quotes such as "all the other kids have it or want one".
The other interesting thing is that on one hand you have the iPod, and on the other hand you have "everything else that's trying to beat it". That pretty-much gives everything else an aura of "second-rate items". Kids KNOW THIS. For that one time of the year where parents seek to buy that special thing for their rotten little brats, you can bet your ass they ain't guna go for "second-rate".
iPod dollars aren't going anywhere. Sorry to burst yet another sensationalist-headline-seeking online mag's bubble.
Yeah I'm also a Mac user and i posted pretty much what you said on my blog this morning.
Check out what i wrote under the "update" section: where i'm getting at is that the google desktop search can also be used as a primary web search tool, but, as the last screen shot shows you, they'll embed desktop results right above the web search results, if any were found. Which is a frickin' cool feature and brilliant marketeering as this would very fast cement their app as the ultimate "search anything anywhere" app. I think they've struck an interesting UI balance.
Mac OS X 10.1 shipped with all the features that WinXP had, except for fast-user switching.
10.2 and 10.3 were genuinely new operating systems with lots of useful features, that windows isn't even beginning to touch. You can't diss Apple for having kept-on innovating and producing operating systems that'd let users do more, while Windows has stagnated.
Security updates are sent out to both 10.2 and 10.3 users, when appropriate.
well the RIAA may own and produce a lot of crappy music of "today". The only problem is that they own really, REALLY *REALLY* good music from "back in the day". I'm sorry but show me one independent artist who's nearly as good as Ella Fitzgerald.
Hey that's how it's been for decades. If you're really good, people like your shit, the big guys go after you, and you succumb to the big buck, or at least prospects of it.
The thing is, if you want to become really famous, and make the big bucks, you have to be part of the whole media food chain. Start with ClearChannel worldwide, to all the Broadcast and Cable moguls. They're all in bed with the RIAA, this is all one big family that dictates what we, consumers, get to listen to.
Because in the end we're all veggies. Actually, I'm not. I rarely watch TV and only listen to very odd radio stations.
But we go back to the basic challenge: You're an artist with talent, everyone in your town loves your shit, how do you make it to the big times?
Answer: you plug into the iTunes Music Store, and distribute your music online.
okay from some cursory googling around for Brian Wanger, you appear to be referring to gossip that's about 10 years old. As I've said in other posts, could we like, move on? All that gossip even predates earthlink being a publicly traded company. If any of this ever was true you'd bet your @ss this all woulda been cleaned-up real fast prior to going public.
You do realize that netcom was acquired a long long time ago by mindspring, which merged with earthlink in like, 2000 or something? This kinda makes your whole netcom point rather irrelevant, doesn't it?
Your whole "pink contract" rant is pure conjecture based on rumors of such practices by pretty-much all ISPs. Would you care to back-up your claims with some substance?
As far as the proactive steps you started your post with, "blocking outgoing port 25" depends largely on cooperation from the local telco and cable monopolies that own the broadband networks earthlink has to rent from them. it's a crappy issue anyway because then you'll have certain end-users getting all-up in arms against "censorship". It's a damned if you-do damned if you don't situation. I've however recently seen some level of blocking of outgoing port 25 traffic on my home earthlink dsl connection. I didn't dig too deep, I might try it again tonight and report back. But again, it's a very fine line to walk if they do, and i'm not sure i would be too happy about that as a user. I like to connect to certain mail servers outside of verizon/earthlink's networks for troubleshooting purposes.
As far as monitoring spikes in SMTP traffic, you clearly didn't read the article, as Rush mentioned they do exactly that.
Blocking inbound SMB/139 should be the responsibility of the user. Again, if you start indiscriminately blocking ports, your usual nerds will get all up in arms. And that's the only technologically realistic way of doing this. earthlink offers a lot of tools to detect spyware and viruses, and discounted deals on integrated AV software, and all their broadband modems come with transparent NAT support for added protection, *and* their site offers comprehensive education to users.
And again, since I've shown your netcom bit to be irrelevant, you fail to show me ISPs out there who handle these issues better. I'm standing-by with my credit card.
And again, as I've said in my previous post, we're in agreement about the password issue as I've read about it before, the real question, which you don't seem to have any authority to answer (so please, don't try with yet another "i have no reason to believe that they did" answer), is whether or not they've improved their practices. I've been on the phone with their (very courteous) tech support a couple of times this year, for various account-related issues, and I don't remember ever having to blurt out my account password. I may have been lucky. I don't know.
BuzzMachine covers many topics from journalism, to every day life, to politics. Jeff started blogging after living through 9/11 first-hand. His political views tend to really be near the center. What I like about his political blogging is that he strives to stay away from the simplistic polarized political rants, and "gotcha" politics that plague so many other blogs i've seen, as well as mainstream media. He recently started spurring very intelligent and useful debate about various specific 2004 election issues. Jeff welcomes disagreement and all forms of thought-provoking debate, which is precisely what he has been yearning for, for years. To me, Jeff Jarvis' blog embodies that the Internet should be all about: less about mudslinging, more about exchange of thoughts. If he ever was to run for President, he'd get my vote.
i've got karma to burn and I'm not guna sit idly by while watching clueless pundits get on their soapboxes and get modded as "insightful".
Do you have any fscking idea of what you're talking about? Would you care to enlighten me and give us a detailed list of "pro-active" steps they should be taking to prevent spammers from getting accounts in the first place? Did you read the article? Spammers have for years used stolen credit card accounts, fake business fronts to sign-up for connectivity and mail accounts from all pure-play ISPs out there and even, *gasp*, AOL. There's no way an ISP can have any idea of who opened the account and what they're guna do with it, until they start sending spam.
All ISPs have had their share of trouble with usenet. If you're big, if you're popular, if you're on-top of the flagpole, well yeah, you attract losers and get flack for it, not much you can do about that as an ISP. As a user, you can vote with your feet and go to a smaller ISP. I don't because I need the nationwide dial-up, I travel, and move around. However, the flip-side of being such a con-artist magnet is that you're in a great position to catch the fsckers red-handed, prosecute them and/or stick'em behind bars. Show me one another ISP who's had a better track record at doing this than earthlink. I'm all ears.
I'm amazed by all the slashdot pundits out there who are so outspoken against [insert whatever name of ISP who's trying to do something different], and seem to know so much about running an ISP. Why don't they offer links to their own ISPs and show us how they do things differently? I'm hardly being sarcastic, if you have the secret to making the internet a better place, then either let's hear it, or show me where to sign-up for an account.
I've looked at your other posts and I remember hearing about those cleartext password issues in the past. I really hope they've addressed them, thankfully, I don't use those account passwords for anything else. i'm not saying earthlink doesn't have issues they need to deal with. But if you're guna repeatedly get on your soapbox to bash them, try at least to stick to what you YOU KNOW. Who knows, maybe things have changed since they laid you off.
okay first, yes they make money on dial-up, that's *the* profitable aspect of their business. Look at their 10K reports and you'll see that their DSL margins are very very low. Haven't looked-up satellite in a while, but it's a small fraction of their user base.
second, i'm sick and tired of those wet-behind-the-ears idealists-wannabe who've likely never worked a single day in their lives, getting all up in arms at anything that tries to make money. I've got news for you fscktard, if there weren't some companies out there to make a buck, and, god forbid, a fscking profit, your parents wouldn't have a house or a basement out of which you could troll slashdot.
if you wanna live in a society where money and wealth are issues to no-one, then move to the African continent and find yourself a peaceful tribe. Or apply for a role in one of the many Gene Roddenberry spin-offs.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will wallow in and try to make the best out of this silly thing we call REALITY, at home. In our world, we look at what various companies do, where their interests lie, and attempt to do business with companies whose interests intersect with our own.
And here's what I'm finding so-far: earthlink is not tied to big telcos. In fact, given proper regulations, earthlink could be yet another alternative to big telcos. Covad has started laying the roadmap in the DSL world. So has Speakeasy. Both offer very compelling pure-play VoIP packages. Hopefully earthlink will follow in their footsteps. What does that mean? more alternatives for me to choose from. A roadmap for other smaller companies to follow. But earthlink can easily go beyond DSL because they're not tied to any single connectivity technology. They've got significant forays into wireless in various forms (wifi, wimax, satellite), broadband over powerline, cable. This should ideally put more competitive pressure on all current media and telco monopolies.
Okay what part of "earthlink is not putting this out as a product" do people not get??? There are no legal issues to dodge here. This is not a product. This is not meant for average consumers. This is a research project. A science project. They're trying to show that "SIP is cool" and "can achieve cool things".
people are interpreting this as earthlink supporting p2p file sharing development when in fact, file sharing is a completely irrelevant use case for this technology. Even if you can share files with someone, that's not the cool thing of this particular application of P2P/SIP. it's the fact that you can communicate with a remote machine that sits behind some opaque NATed network.
On the other hand, the appeal of "controversial P2P applications" was the fact that each participant listed their presence and files available to share on a centralized network. The combination of 1) a P2P client application *AND* 2) a centralized network putting people in relation is what created a medium highly conducive to file swapping.
In this case, earthlink is merely pointing out the fact that SIP enables two computers to talk to one-another behind across opaque networks. The relevant applications of this revolve around VoIP, Video Conferencing, and yes, 1-to-1 data exchange based on a priorly established relationship.
Yeah there had to be the obligatory earthlink and scientology post. Okay could we like, move on? This is old and utterly irrelevant gossip that takes away from talking about what's more important, such as the future of the internet, the future killer applications of the internet and how earthlink just might be the last big player to keep the other big players and regulators in check.
on one hand you have the major telcos who are lobbying like mad motherfsckers to keep their stronghold on the pipes, while stifling competition and preventing prices from going down and bandwidth to go up. European countries and even Korea are zooming way ahead of us. Why? because regulations have allowed companies such as free.fr to share the lines at competitive costs. Imagine that. People in Korea are watching their fave soap operas, on-demand, over their TCP/IP broadband connectivity.
on the other hand you have all the cable operators, AOL, and timewarner, who are also lobbying like mad motherfsckers to limit the amount of competitive pipe sharing. Oh and they control content too.
Then you have companies such as earthlink, covad, speakeasy who would love nothing more than to offer faster connections and more competitive prices but are prevented from doing so by the FCC's shitty policies.
Finally someone like earthlink is speaking out FOR THE CONSUMER, and offering a really cool proof-of-concept, source code and all to the masses, as a basis for the internet killer-apps of the future.
And you wanna talk about scientology?
oh and for all the trolls whining about outsourcing of customer service, if you wanna blame someone, blame dumb users who can't use a computer, download every piece of crapware they can get their hands on to their computer, then call-up their ISPs tech support FOR FREE FOR HOURS to fscking bail them out of their own stupidity. Every single one of earthlink's competitor had already been outsourcing FOR YEARS. earthlink held up as long as a publicly-traded company could, but when your stock tops at $5, you've gotta make tough choices. I've heard stories of tech support reps spending an hour on the phone helping some clueless sap rebuild their entire OS. This type of task belongs to a computer consultant who will charge no less than $100/hour. That's the cold hard fact. And then you have 99.9% of all problems that can be resolved from reading a simple script. That's what outsourced service is best for. The remaining 0.1% of legitimate technical issues can get escalated back in the U.S., that's typically what ISPs and OEM vendors do. I guess they did something right because earthlink still managed to rank #1 in satisfaction from JD Powers i both narrow and broadband.
... Apple will soon release spotlight in Mac OS X tiger that pretty-much covers all the use cases that could be thought out for WinFS and then some.
Here's the thing, instead of reinventing a pretty darn round wheel, Apple has focused on what it is the user wants. Imagine that. They started with use cases in mind. Steve Jobs' demo mentions iTunes live searching of tracks and their metadata and showed how extending this functionality to the entire OS made logical sense. Did they have to rewrite a file system from scratch? No, they extended their existing file system with richer metadata and created an API for developers to plug their own file types into it.
WinFS is already obsolete, old news, borderline vapor-ware.
A default installation of the consumer-version of OS X ships with zero network services turned-on by default. Run nmap at a fresh installation of OS X on the same network, you won't get a single hit.
Windows has FOR YEARS shipped with network services that were turned-on by default that the vast majority of end-users would never need. Start with IIS. samba. xmlrpc. FOR YEARS windows machines have been exploited without the help of their users, for just being "turned-on". The most virulent cases really started with with CodeRed and Nimda back in 2001. 3 years later, you absolutely cannot install a fresh version of Windows XP on a machine with a public unfirewalled internet IP address, without being infected within seconds by Sasser. Which is the exact case of the vast majority of broadband users out there. Windows is also very clumsy when not run in non-administrator mode. Even then, privilege escalation flaws are numerous.
You bet your fucking ass consumers have every rational right to be infuriated at microsoft. Beyond all this open-source vs proprietary software babble, there was one simple thing microsoft could have done since day 1 to prevent the spread of the most virulent worms, and that was to TURN OFF THE FUCKING SERVICES.
Now they're just starting to wake up and scrambling to turn that shit off via SP2. About fucking time.
And then you have ActiveX, and the way microsoft has gone thru great lengths to tie software installation with web browsing. Users are taught to point their browsers to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and to be OKAY with the fact that their browser takes a life of its own while "inspecting their system". Try to teach them to not click "Yes" on ActiveX dialog prompts when they're about to "install this really cool FREE screensaver of nekkid chix". "If it's on the web, it's harmless!". Not to mention the numerous ActiveX-related privilege escalation flaws which many spyware companies have been leveraging to deliver crap to people's machines.
No OS is secure in absolute terms, no sane Mac user has ever nor will ever claim that "OS X is a secure operating system", in absolute terms. But frankly, I like my odds better on OS X. If not for the fact that I can do everything I want in my every day non-admin user while being prompted for administrator account credentials when installing shit, and the whole thing is not a painful user experience. While a default OS X installation is in admin mode, I make sure to get my friends and family in non-admin mode, and they do just fine. The only service I run locally is httpd. But I leverage OS X's built-in firewall to restrict IP ranges, many front-end apps to ipfw are available for free out there. BrickHouse.app rocks. OS X's system and software updates come through a separate application, in a very clear, user-friendly interface that tells me what is going on, this update service is turned-on by default on all fresh installs. It is clear to me that I'm not "browsing the web" to install critical system updates. DUH. System updates always prompt users for administrator credentials. Apple is slowly but surely drilling basic concepts of security into the minds of the clueless masses, and this, to me, is valuable.
Finally, Apple's been extremely quick to plug security holes. As quick as an entity with financial obligations can be, in my opinion. I'll however concede that they've been typically quiet about their addressing the security issues, which has made me nervous a couple of times. In the end though, they came through.
Again, for now, as far as security is concerned, I'm liking my odds better with Apple than with Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
well, back when i first got my ipod, i only had the original 400Mhz TiBook with the 10Gig hard drive. i quickly got in the habit of separately managing tracks that went on my iPod to save hard drive space: i'd rip stuff local, then would drag music to the ipod, and erase from local library. That's kinda been my modus operandi since then. Now that I have an AlBook with 80G HD ... yeah i could go back to the "normal" way, though i'm already at 61% full.
I'll be holding off on that iTunes upgrade. While i'm typically a staunch Apple advocate, the fact that they're actively blocking apps from interacting with the library is deeply troubling to me.
It's simple. iPod has struck the ultimate balance of features, portability and usability. All the other guys are trying hard to match this balance, but they infallibly run into the next problem:
Brand. Apple was first to market with the best player, worked very hard on developing a killer brand. This brand nearly touts the iPod as fashion statement, for cool, hip people. All the kids want it:
Friday night my Girlfriend and I were eating at Taiko, a Japanese restaurant right by our favorite cineplex. A lady and her daughter sat by us. At some point in their conversation, the mom asked the daughter what she wanted for christmas. She almost right-away blurted "an iPod!". The ensuing dialog had quotes such as "all the other kids have it or want one".
The other interesting thing is that on one hand you have the iPod, and on the other hand you have "everything else that's trying to beat it". That pretty-much gives everything else an aura of "second-rate items". Kids KNOW THIS. For that one time of the year where parents seek to buy that special thing for their rotten little brats, you can bet your ass they ain't guna go for "second-rate".
iPod dollars aren't going anywhere. Sorry to burst yet another sensationalist-headline-seeking online mag's bubble.
Yeah I'm also a Mac user and i posted pretty much what you said on my blog this morning.
Check out what i wrote under the "update" section: where i'm getting at is that the google desktop search can also be used as a primary web search tool, but, as the last screen shot shows you, they'll embed desktop results right above the web search results, if any were found. Which is a frickin' cool feature and brilliant marketeering as this would very fast cement their app as the ultimate "search anything anywhere" app. I think they've struck an interesting UI balance.
Q: What do you get when you merge BeOS and NachOS ?
A: Beeeeoootch.
err. it's late.
Mac OS X 10.1 shipped with all the features that WinXP had, except for fast-user switching.
10.2 and 10.3 were genuinely new operating systems with lots of useful features, that windows isn't even beginning to touch. You can't diss Apple for having kept-on innovating and producing operating systems that'd let users do more, while Windows has stagnated.
Security updates are sent out to both 10.2 and 10.3 users, when appropriate.
Unleash the Fox and keep microsoft on its toes. Or something.
well the RIAA may own and produce a lot of crappy music of "today". The only problem is that they own really, REALLY *REALLY* good music from "back in the day". I'm sorry but show me one independent artist who's nearly as good as Ella Fitzgerald.
Hey that's how it's been for decades. If you're really good, people like your shit, the big guys go after you, and you succumb to the big buck, or at least prospects of it.
The thing is, if you want to become really famous, and make the big bucks, you have to be part of the whole media food chain. Start with ClearChannel worldwide, to all the Broadcast and Cable moguls. They're all in bed with the RIAA, this is all one big family that dictates what we, consumers, get to listen to.
Because in the end we're all veggies. Actually, I'm not. I rarely watch TV and only listen to very odd radio stations.
But we go back to the basic challenge: You're an artist with talent, everyone in your town loves your shit, how do you make it to the big times?
Answer: you plug into the iTunes Music Store, and distribute your music online.
the city i live in has been unwired since this summer.
okay from some cursory googling around for Brian Wanger, you appear to be referring to gossip that's about 10 years old. As I've said in other posts, could we like, move on? All that gossip even predates earthlink being a publicly traded company. If any of this ever was true you'd bet your @ss this all woulda been cleaned-up real fast prior to going public.
You do realize that netcom was acquired a long long time ago by mindspring, which merged with earthlink in like, 2000 or something? This kinda makes your whole netcom point rather irrelevant, doesn't it?
Your whole "pink contract" rant is pure conjecture based on rumors of such practices by pretty-much all ISPs. Would you care to back-up your claims with some substance?
As far as the proactive steps you started your post with, "blocking outgoing port 25" depends largely on cooperation from the local telco and cable monopolies that own the broadband networks earthlink has to rent from them. it's a crappy issue anyway because then you'll have certain end-users getting all-up in arms against "censorship". It's a damned if you-do damned if you don't situation. I've however recently seen some level of blocking of outgoing port 25 traffic on my home earthlink dsl connection. I didn't dig too deep, I might try it again tonight and report back. But again, it's a very fine line to walk if they do, and i'm not sure i would be too happy about that as a user. I like to connect to certain mail servers outside of verizon/earthlink's networks for troubleshooting purposes.
As far as monitoring spikes in SMTP traffic, you clearly didn't read the article, as Rush mentioned they do exactly that.
Blocking inbound SMB/139 should be the responsibility of the user. Again, if you start indiscriminately blocking ports, your usual nerds will get all up in arms. And that's the only technologically realistic way of doing this. earthlink offers a lot of tools to detect spyware and viruses, and discounted deals on integrated AV software, and all their broadband modems come with transparent NAT support for added protection, *and* their site offers comprehensive education to users.
And again, since I've shown your netcom bit to be irrelevant, you fail to show me ISPs out there who handle these issues better. I'm standing-by with my credit card.
And again, as I've said in my previous post, we're in agreement about the password issue as I've read about it before, the real question, which you don't seem to have any authority to answer (so please, don't try with yet another "i have no reason to believe that they did" answer), is whether or not they've improved their practices. I've been on the phone with their (very courteous) tech support a couple of times this year, for various account-related issues, and I don't remember ever having to blurt out my account password. I may have been lucky. I don't know.
BuzzMachine covers many topics from journalism, to every day life, to politics. Jeff started blogging after living through 9/11 first-hand. His political views tend to really be near the center. What I like about his political blogging is that he strives to stay away from the simplistic polarized political rants, and "gotcha" politics that plague so many other blogs i've seen, as well as mainstream media. He recently started spurring very intelligent and useful debate about various specific 2004 election issues. Jeff welcomes disagreement and all forms of thought-provoking debate, which is precisely what he has been yearning for, for years. To me, Jeff Jarvis' blog embodies that the Internet should be all about: less about mudslinging, more about exchange of thoughts. If he ever was to run for President, he'd get my vote.
i've got karma to burn and I'm not guna sit idly by while watching clueless pundits get on their soapboxes and get modded as "insightful".
Do you have any fscking idea of what you're talking about? Would you care to enlighten me and give us a detailed list of "pro-active" steps they should be taking to prevent spammers from getting accounts in the first place? Did you read the article? Spammers have for years used stolen credit card accounts, fake business fronts to sign-up for connectivity and mail accounts from all pure-play ISPs out there and even, *gasp*, AOL. There's no way an ISP can have any idea of who opened the account and what they're guna do with it, until they start sending spam.
All ISPs have had their share of trouble with usenet. If you're big, if you're popular, if you're on-top of the flagpole, well yeah, you attract losers and get flack for it, not much you can do about that as an ISP. As a user, you can vote with your feet and go to a smaller ISP. I don't because I need the nationwide dial-up, I travel, and move around. However, the flip-side of being such a con-artist magnet is that you're in a great position to catch the fsckers red-handed, prosecute them and/or stick'em behind bars. Show me one another ISP who's had a better track record at doing this than earthlink. I'm all ears.
I'm amazed by all the slashdot pundits out there who are so outspoken against [insert whatever name of ISP who's trying to do something different], and seem to know so much about running an ISP. Why don't they offer links to their own ISPs and show us how they do things differently? I'm hardly being sarcastic, if you have the secret to making the internet a better place, then either let's hear it, or show me where to sign-up for an account.
I've looked at your other posts and I remember hearing about those cleartext password issues in the past. I really hope they've addressed them, thankfully, I don't use those account passwords for anything else. i'm not saying earthlink doesn't have issues they need to deal with. But if you're guna repeatedly get on your soapbox to bash them, try at least to stick to what you YOU KNOW. Who knows, maybe things have changed since they laid you off.
okay first, yes they make money on dial-up, that's *the* profitable aspect of their business. Look at their 10K reports and you'll see that their DSL margins are very very low. Haven't looked-up satellite in a while, but it's a small fraction of their user base.
second, i'm sick and tired of those wet-behind-the-ears idealists-wannabe who've likely never worked a single day in their lives, getting all up in arms at anything that tries to make money. I've got news for you fscktard, if there weren't some companies out there to make a buck, and, god forbid, a fscking profit, your parents wouldn't have a house or a basement out of which you could troll slashdot.
if you wanna live in a society where money and wealth are issues to no-one, then move to the African continent and find yourself a peaceful tribe. Or apply for a role in one of the many Gene Roddenberry spin-offs.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will wallow in and try to make the best out of this silly thing we call REALITY, at home. In our world, we look at what various companies do, where their interests lie, and attempt to do business with companies whose interests intersect with our own.
And here's what I'm finding so-far: earthlink is not tied to big telcos. In fact, given proper regulations, earthlink could be yet another alternative to big telcos. Covad has started laying the roadmap in the DSL world. So has Speakeasy. Both offer very compelling pure-play VoIP packages. Hopefully earthlink will follow in their footsteps. What does that mean? more alternatives for me to choose from. A roadmap for other smaller companies to follow. But earthlink can easily go beyond DSL because they're not tied to any single connectivity technology. They've got significant forays into wireless in various forms (wifi, wimax, satellite), broadband over powerline, cable. This should ideally put more competitive pressure on all current media and telco monopolies.
in the end, i, the consumer, win.
Okay what part of "earthlink is not putting this out as a product" do people not get??? There are no legal issues to dodge here. This is not a product. This is not meant for average consumers. This is a research project. A science project. They're trying to show that "SIP is cool" and "can achieve cool things".
people are interpreting this as earthlink supporting p2p file sharing development when in fact, file sharing is a completely irrelevant use case for this technology. Even if you can share files with someone, that's not the cool thing of this particular application of P2P/SIP. it's the fact that you can communicate with a remote machine that sits behind some opaque NATed network.
On the other hand, the appeal of "controversial P2P applications" was the fact that each participant listed their presence and files available to share on a centralized network. The combination of 1) a P2P client application *AND* 2) a centralized network putting people in relation is what created a medium highly conducive to file swapping.
In this case, earthlink is merely pointing out the fact that SIP enables two computers to talk to one-another behind across opaque networks. The relevant applications of this revolve around VoIP, Video Conferencing, and yes, 1-to-1 data exchange based on a priorly established relationship.
Yeah there had to be the obligatory earthlink and scientology post. Okay could we like, move on? This is old and utterly irrelevant gossip that takes away from talking about what's more important, such as the future of the internet, the future killer applications of the internet and how earthlink just might be the last big player to keep the other big players and regulators in check.
on one hand you have the major telcos who are lobbying like mad motherfsckers to keep their stronghold on the pipes, while stifling competition and preventing prices from going down and bandwidth to go up. European countries and even Korea are zooming way ahead of us. Why? because regulations have allowed companies such as free.fr to share the lines at competitive costs. Imagine that. People in Korea are watching their fave soap operas, on-demand, over their TCP/IP broadband connectivity.
on the other hand you have all the cable operators, AOL, and timewarner, who are also lobbying like mad motherfsckers to limit the amount of competitive pipe sharing. Oh and they control content too.
Then you have companies such as earthlink, covad, speakeasy who would love nothing more than to offer faster connections and more competitive prices but are prevented from doing so by the FCC's shitty policies.
Finally someone like earthlink is speaking out FOR THE CONSUMER, and offering a really cool proof-of-concept, source code and all to the masses, as a basis for the internet killer-apps of the future.
And you wanna talk about scientology?
oh and for all the trolls whining about outsourcing of customer service, if you wanna blame someone, blame dumb users who can't use a computer, download every piece of crapware they can get their hands on to their computer, then call-up their ISPs tech support FOR FREE FOR HOURS to fscking bail them out of their own stupidity. Every single one of earthlink's competitor had already been outsourcing FOR YEARS. earthlink held up as long as a publicly-traded company could, but when your stock tops at $5, you've gotta make tough choices. I've heard stories of tech support reps spending an hour on the phone helping some clueless sap rebuild their entire OS. This type of task belongs to a computer consultant who will charge no less than $100/hour. That's the cold hard fact. And then you have 99.9% of all problems that can be resolved from reading a simple script. That's what outsourced service is best for. The remaining 0.1% of legitimate technical issues can get escalated back in the U.S., that's typically what ISPs and OEM vendors do. I guess they did something right because earthlink still managed to rank #1 in satisfaction from JD Powers i both narrow and broadband.
Here's the thing, instead of reinventing a pretty darn round wheel, Apple has focused on what it is the user wants. Imagine that. They started with use cases in mind. Steve Jobs' demo mentions iTunes live searching of tracks and their metadata and showed how extending this functionality to the entire OS made logical sense. Did they have to rewrite a file system from scratch? No, they extended their existing file system with richer metadata and created an API for developers to plug their own file types into it.
WinFS is already obsolete, old news, borderline vapor-ware.
Spotlight is in my hands.
Not to mention there are a number of 3rd-party solutions out there for the windows world that accomplish what WinFS aims to do.
A default installation of the consumer-version of OS X ships with zero network services turned-on by default. Run nmap at a fresh installation of OS X on the same network, you won't get a single hit.
Windows has FOR YEARS shipped with network services that were turned-on by default that the vast majority of end-users would never need. Start with IIS. samba. xmlrpc. FOR YEARS windows machines have been exploited without the help of their users, for just being "turned-on". The most virulent cases really started with with CodeRed and Nimda back in 2001. 3 years later, you absolutely cannot install a fresh version of Windows XP on a machine with a public unfirewalled internet IP address, without being infected within seconds by Sasser. Which is the exact case of the vast majority of broadband users out there. Windows is also very clumsy when not run in non-administrator mode. Even then, privilege escalation flaws are numerous.
You bet your fucking ass consumers have every rational right to be infuriated at microsoft. Beyond all this open-source vs proprietary software babble, there was one simple thing microsoft could have done since day 1 to prevent the spread of the most virulent worms, and that was to TURN OFF THE FUCKING SERVICES.
Now they're just starting to wake up and scrambling to turn that shit off via SP2. About fucking time.
And then you have ActiveX, and the way microsoft has gone thru great lengths to tie software installation with web browsing. Users are taught to point their browsers to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and to be OKAY with the fact that their browser takes a life of its own while "inspecting their system". Try to teach them to not click "Yes" on ActiveX dialog prompts when they're about to "install this really cool FREE screensaver of nekkid chix". "If it's on the web, it's harmless!". Not to mention the numerous ActiveX-related privilege escalation flaws which many spyware companies have been leveraging to deliver crap to people's machines.
No OS is secure in absolute terms, no sane Mac user has ever nor will ever claim that "OS X is a secure operating system", in absolute terms. But frankly, I like my odds better on OS X. If not for the fact that I can do everything I want in my every day non-admin user while being prompted for administrator account credentials when installing shit, and the whole thing is not a painful user experience. While a default OS X installation is in admin mode, I make sure to get my friends and family in non-admin mode, and they do just fine. The only service I run locally is httpd. But I leverage OS X's built-in firewall to restrict IP ranges, many front-end apps to ipfw are available for free out there. BrickHouse.app rocks. OS X's system and software updates come through a separate application, in a very clear, user-friendly interface that tells me what is going on, this update service is turned-on by default on all fresh installs. It is clear to me that I'm not "browsing the web" to install critical system updates. DUH. System updates always prompt users for administrator credentials. Apple is slowly but surely drilling basic concepts of security into the minds of the clueless masses, and this, to me, is valuable.
Finally, Apple's been extremely quick to plug security holes. As quick as an entity with financial obligations can be, in my opinion. I'll however concede that they've been typically quiet about their addressing the security issues, which has made me nervous a couple of times. In the end though, they came through.
Again, for now, as far as security is concerned, I'm liking my odds better with Apple than with Microsoft.
thank you mr comicbookstoreguy.
worst ... post ... evaaahrh.
in soviet russia ... off-topic mods you! HAW HAW.
post right under here.
... a beowulf cluster of those ... around Fat Bastard's waist.
... crystals grow you in multi-step processes.
... a lighter and more rugged beowulf cluster of those.
The whole "last mile to the user's home" issue is very soon guna become less and less of an issue with WiMAX and WiFi.
The city where i live just deployed free wifi internet access to most residents, with its reach to increase overtime.
IP is insanely powerful. Bandwidth is increasing, and compression algorithms are only getting better.
I'm looking forward to a future where all consumer-telco, cable and satellite companies will be replaced by a large multitude of ISPs.
earthlink has a free toolbar that has their "scamblocker" thing and their pop-up blocker. I reviewed their scamblocker in one of my blog entries.