You don't get a magic increase in kinetic energy just by picking a different reference frame. A car going 60mph dissipates the same kinetic energy whether it hits a wall (where the push-back force is exerted by the anchors of the wall) or another car going 60mph in the opposite direction (the push-back force was inherent). Either way you get the same dissipation of kinetic energy whether your frame is standing still or moving.
Another problem is that destroying the missile's guidance system alone won't cut it. If it's already locked in the terminal phase chances are it will be blind, but still hit the target.
Ships don't tend to be too good at evasive action. Even "fast" ships. Also destroying the warhead may not be sufficient either. The missile which destroyed HMS Sheffield was apparently a "dud" as far as the warhead was concerned.
I'm talking about the news. Whenever a terrorist act is committed anywhere on the globe news immediately seeks to attribute it to "Al-Qaeda." The multitude of viewpoints and reasons for all the terrorists are lumped under a single umbrella.
If it isn't possible to do this then the "mainstream" media will try very hard to avoid calling it "terrorism". e.g. the recent car bombings in Northern Ireland. Or how Mel Broughton is always described as an "Animal Rights Activist/Fanatic".
All terrorism has been reduced to "Al-Qaeda" and since it is all that name there is no reason to think about the name.
Or about who Al-Qaeda might actually be. Not well known is that first group of suspects arrested on the day of the 9/11 attacks were connected with an Asian government. Or that in 2002 an Al-Qaeda cell turned out to be working for the same government agency. There's also strange situation that notable "terrorist" arrests in the US such as "The JFK Terrorist plot" involve informants/agents provocateurs.
For example, instead of requiring real names off the bat, Blizzard could have started off mandating a valid credit card before being able to log into the forums.
Is using a credit card in such a way strictly "legal" either to the holder or the "merchant"?
Also I have not yet been to a hotel (and I travel alot for work) that required any identification to get online
But presumably you prebook the room. Would the same apply if you turned up unannounced and paid cash for the room?
That said, apparently to sign up for a new phone contract with most providers in the US you are required to give your SSN (there is a way around it for some by paying a hefty deposit). How were they allowed to do this without so much as a whimper? Now I'm stuck with my current provider unless I'd like my telco to have my SSN.
Which is several ways daft. Especially since SSNs arn't remotly secret and already so highly (and long term) abused in the US that trying to pretend that they should be treated as any form of "authenticator" has no placed out of fiction.
Am I the only one who sees the weirdness in how people are reacting to the Chinese removing anonymity when western countries have been doing this for years now without so much as a "WTF!!".
Forcing people to use their "real name" (whatever that actually means) may make they more anonymous if that is a common name or they usually go by a different name. I'm reminded of a sketch from the 1970's involving a car maker called Roberts where everyone was called "Bob".
For example in Italy you cant even walk into a cafe now and go on the internet without some type of ID.
If they just have to show the ID to someone then there is little point anyway.
Here in Australia if one buys a mobile phone sim card you have to contact the telco and confirm your name and address before they will even let you make calls.
Because nobody ever buys a phone as a gift and nobody in Hobart could possibly known/be related to someone in Darwin. How does this work when the "person" buying is a business?
So, I'm willing to learn social skills and yet, I've failed at it pretty consistently over the years. I've known a few people smarter than me who fail pretty spectacularly too. I've found that talking about learning social skills with non-nerds gets you mocked at the very least.
Whereas there is often plenty of help available for illiterate and innumerate people of all ages. Even those without either dyslexia or dyscalculia. Both of which are fairly common.
Learning social skills might be easy for you, but I've not found it easy. So kindly stop beating people like me up (metaphorically) and shut up until you've got some useful advice.
Because sooner or later someone's going to find out something that they find easy, but the original poster finds very hard.
Insurance is a really fucking good idea if you drive and could face effectively unlimited liability if you kill or, worse, injure someone.
In many places it's the law:) i.e. if you don't have third party insurance then it's illegal to drive on public roads.
It sounds more like this guy wants to catch the criminal than that he wants reimbursement for his $1000 laptop.
The person who currently has the laptop may not even be the person who stole it. Even if they are then assuming they can come up with an innocent explanation for having acquired it then all they be charged with is "unknowingly handling stolen goods".
I'm not sure where you're getting your legal theories from but it isn't right.
If I steal a car in Minnesota, the state doesn't lose jurisdiction because I go to Wisconsin.
It's important to remember that the thief and the stolen goods can be in different locations. Thieves frequently sell whatever they have stolen to other criminals. Some of the latter are very good at "laundering" stolen property.
This was the first time I had a chance to see any of their "evidence". How exactly did this make it all the way to court?
Especially given that "original" files appear to have been altered to contain comments to the effect that a USL copyright statement somehow proves that the information is "UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE" together with a meaningless statement about the existance of a copyright statement not implying publication. It looks as though they have "mailmerged" part of their claims into their supposed evidence. Shouldn't this have resulted in the judge throwing this out as null and void?
(Although I am terribly disappointed that I will never hear from yet another person with an Indian accent, who has a western name (Mary was the last one) and is "calling from Melbourne"...)
I've never understood why Indian call centres do this kind of thing. If they can't get the accent at least sounding half way possible then the fake name/location claims just come over as daft. They may as well start their script with "I am calling you from India..."
This is not a "trick". That word describes something that plays upon you gullibility or lack of attention, like a shortchange con. This is a complicated money management technique that you need a forensic accountant to sort out.
IIRC the term "trick" was applied to Enron's accounting practices. Even though you need a PhD in accountancy to work out what was actually going on in that situation too!
Trouble is that worldwide, politicians are relatively old people who know absolutely nothing about computers, the internet and whatever. They are often too old to have grown up with it.
The issue isn't about "age" plenty of "old" people use all sorts of technology. I suspect the real issue is that too many politicians lack (current) experience of the world outside politics.
Most people don't know about that. (liquid gas by itself is NOT explosive, it's merely flammable
Actually the liquid isn't especially flammable. What burns is the vapor (gas) which also provides plenty of radiant heat to boil a large quantity of liquid.
gas vapor OTOH is highly explosive, which is why we use it for fuel)
In order to explode it needs to be mixed in the right ratio with air (or something else which will oxidise the fuel). This rarely happens inside a fuel tank.
I remember having to wait 10 minutes for a fill once, in the dead of winter on a road trip. I waited inside, and when I got outside it had JUST finished... AND had just started gushing fuel all over the ground because the full-shutoff failed.
In most places fuel pumps have a spring loaded "trigger" those which can be locked on only appear to be found in the US, where the "feature" is actually intended to enable an employee to service several vehicles at once. When it's someone from each vehicle doing the filling such an an arrangement will result in both fuel spills and fires.
(probably the pump and the shutoff were both having issues with the cold, it was well below zero, and it was diesel fuel)
It's funny how we keep ignoring the people who actually KNOW about this stuff.
Bruce Schneier would call your entire post factually incorrect, this is roughly a summary of his blogposts over the past few years:
The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is far, far lower than the risk of dying from one too many cheeseburgers. Heck you have a much higher risk of breaking your neck from slipping in the shower !
But we don't DEMAND slip-free mats in every shower by law do we ?
An even simpler summary would be "If you see it on the news don't worry about it." By definition news covers the unusual.
The reality is that terrorism is in fact an incredibly rare and unlikely event even at the worst of times an ANY money spent on preventative measures is a guaranteed waste anyway
It's rare even if you were to count all terrorists. (Including those considerably more dangerous than the typical "Al Quada" idiot.)
Terrorists don't do movie plot threats.
The idea of terrorists photographic targets isn't even a movie plot. It's more of a movie making technique to let the audience find out what the "terrorists" plans are. A novel, play, audio drama, etc with a similar plot would use a different technique.
but don't do anything beyond that because your predictions are guaranteed to be wrong and all those excessive measures actually make you LESS safe as they encourage people not to care and to skip steps.
Even if you initially guess right the "bad guys" can easily go with "plan B, C, D or E".
What CAN we do to reduce the risk ? Only this: effective after-the-fact law enforcement with open trials and proper punishment... same thing as for any other crime. Effectively catching the perpetrators, bringing them to justice (with fair trials) and then punishing them is a very good deterrent - just as much so for terrorism, and the only one that has any chance of working.
There's also regular detective work. Which is hard and potentially dangerous.
"Or your bug will simply get market as "WONT FIX" and disappear into the bug tracker history"
Exactly as it can and do happen on software distributed under closed source licenses.
There's a difference betwene "disappear into the bug tracker history" and "disappear completly". How many proprietary bug trackers can be searched by members of the public? Also with OSS you not reliant on any specific developer/vendor to get any changes made.
The difference is that in a commercial piece of software it is not the developer making the decisions. If the boss says the users demand X, then the programmers will have to implement it in one form or another.
Just becasue someone says that something id demanded by users does not mean that it actually is. It could easily be code for "the marketing department thinks that if it does X we can sell more (even if it means losing existing customers.)"
With non-commercial Free Software the developer is making the decisions and requests by users are either ignored or even actively blocked.
Even if they do you can "fix it" yourself. An option which isn't available with proprietary software (even if you can locate the actual developer)...
When I was an unexperienced driver at 18 years-old, and had never owned a car, I bought one with the first manual transmission I'd ever touched. The first day was nearly a disaster, stalling repeatedly, lurching and shaking about, and requiring multiple attempts get moving from stops on hills. Simply driving was inefficient and slow (despite the car being a pretty nice old sports car), and required all of my attention. But I got used to it -- so much so that the next four cars I bought also had manual transmissions, and one was a newer, nicer version of that same car. Like the free and open source software mentioned here, manual transmissions take a bit of practice, but they are cheaper and can be at least as efficient (more mpg than older automatics, less maintenance), and being more in control is nice.
In the case of older automatics you typically have 3 forward gear ratios as opposed to 4 or 5 in a similar manual car. In some places passing a driving test in an automatic means that you can only drive an automatic. Whereas someone who passes a test in a manual can drive either a manual or automatic.
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.
Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
How long does it typically take people to become competent with the regular software? Days, weeks, months.
Certainly some software might lacks polish, but the conclusion that if they didn't adapt in ONE day the software isn't as efficient.. that's really quite flawed uh.
A more meaningful comparision might be between two "teams" who were unfamiliar with either set of software. Or even people who were familiar with the OSS software being asked to use the proprietary software?
DEP is data execution prevention. It marks certain areas of address space as being "data only", so the processor won't execute them. While this is generally a good idea, as it prevents a hacker from constructing a NOP sled and then using an access violation bug somewhere to execute code they've stuck in memory, it also has the side effect of making self-modifying code more difficult to write.
Given how hard self-modifying code can be to debug and formally verify making it hard to write is typically a very good thing.
ASLR (address space layout randomization) is similar, as it breaks certain sorts of odd programming techniques like arithmetic variable addressing.
Is using such techniques generally a good or bad idea? Are there other situations in which such code can break, including in ways which appear random?
While DEP does prevent stack overflow types of attacks, it also complicates writing high security software. The inability to execute data means:
1. You can't run self-decrypting programs.
2. You can't alter instructions at runtime to fool debuggers.
3. You can't place keys in executable code sections at runtime, making it much easier for someone to stop your program and dump the keys out of the memory image.
DEP actually makes attacks against cryptographic software *easier* to implement.
How often does regular cryptographic software need to do any of these? Points 1 and 2 involve self modifying code. Self modifying code is a good way to create a complete lack of any secuity. If order for software to actually be secure it needs to be verifiable that it operates according to the algorithm, this means avoiding both obfuscated and self modifying code. Even then small details matter, e.g. the Debian "bugfix" to SSL which reduced effective keyspace by orders of magnitude. All of the points only really apply to situations where programmers don't understand the basics of encryption (which predate electronic computers by several hundred years) especially well or where encryption is being used (hacked) for a task it isn't especially suited to in the first place. e.g. DRM (Where "Bob" and "Eve" are the same person...)
1. How Dell handled the issue as a whole. According to TFA, they tried to hush it up. Anyone with half a brain in the IT industry at the time could see exactly what was going on, quite how anyone at Dell concluded that they could succeed in a cover-up is beyond me.
That would be the case in any industry. Selling faulty goods and trying go cover it up will result in irate customers.
2. How every major vendor handled dealing with individual customers. At the time, more than one company had a very strict policy that their helpdesk staff wouldn't deal with issues concerning more than one system in a call. It's one thing to have to put the phone down and call again when you've got two or three systems to get a tech sent out for and once they're done they're done,
In this case the vendor isn't supplying "enterprise level" support. They are expecting their enterprise customers to use "SOHO level" support...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get a magic increase in kinetic energy just by picking a different reference frame. A car going 60mph dissipates the same kinetic energy whether it hits a wall (where the push-back force is exerted by the anchors of the wall) or another car going 60mph in the opposite direction (the push-back force was inherent). Either way you get the same dissipation of kinetic energy whether your frame is standing still or moving.
See Mythbusters Episode 143.
Another problem is that destroying the missile's guidance system alone won't cut it. If it's already locked in the terminal phase chances are it will be blind, but still hit the target.
Ships don't tend to be too good at evasive action. Even "fast" ships. Also destroying the warhead may not be sufficient either. The missile which destroyed HMS Sheffield was apparently a "dud" as far as the warhead was concerned.
I'm talking about the news. Whenever a terrorist act is committed anywhere on the globe news immediately seeks to attribute it to "Al-Qaeda." The multitude of viewpoints and reasons for all the terrorists are lumped under a single umbrella.
If it isn't possible to do this then the "mainstream" media will try very hard to avoid calling it "terrorism". e.g. the recent car bombings in Northern Ireland. Or how Mel Broughton is always described as an "Animal Rights Activist/Fanatic".
All terrorism has been reduced to "Al-Qaeda" and since it is all that name there is no reason to think about the name.
Or about who Al-Qaeda might actually be. Not well known is that first group of suspects arrested on the day of the 9/11 attacks were connected with an Asian government. Or that in 2002 an Al-Qaeda cell turned out to be working for the same government agency. There's also strange situation that notable "terrorist" arrests in the US such as "The JFK Terrorist plot" involve informants/agents provocateurs.
A good terrorist just has to join Mineral Resources and do nothing than look the other way or stamp approved on everything.
Drugs, hookers and porn surfing at "work" if the rumours are true...
For example, instead of requiring real names off the bat, Blizzard could have started off mandating a valid credit card before being able to log into the forums.
Is using a credit card in such a way strictly "legal" either to the holder or the "merchant"?
Also I have not yet been to a hotel (and I travel alot for work) that required any identification to get online
But presumably you prebook the room. Would the same apply if you turned up unannounced and paid cash for the room?
That said, apparently to sign up for a new phone contract with most providers in the US you are required to give your SSN (there is a way around it for some by paying a hefty deposit). How were they allowed to do this without so much as a whimper? Now I'm stuck with my current provider unless I'd like my telco to have my SSN.
Which is several ways daft. Especially since SSNs arn't remotly secret and already so highly (and long term) abused in the US that trying to pretend that they should be treated as any form of "authenticator" has no placed out of fiction.
Am I the only one who sees the weirdness in how people are reacting to the Chinese removing anonymity when western countries have been doing this for years now without so much as a "WTF!!".
Forcing people to use their "real name" (whatever that actually means) may make they more anonymous if that is a common name or they usually go by a different name. I'm reminded of a sketch from the 1970's involving a car maker called Roberts where everyone was called "Bob".
For example in Italy you cant even walk into a cafe now and go on the internet without some type of ID.
If they just have to show the ID to someone then there is little point anyway.
Here in Australia if one buys a mobile phone sim card you have to contact the telco and confirm your name and address before they will even let you make calls.
Because nobody ever buys a phone as a gift and nobody in Hobart could possibly known/be related to someone in Darwin. How does this work when the "person" buying is a business?
So, I'm willing to learn social skills and yet, I've failed at it pretty consistently over the years. I've known a few people smarter than me who fail pretty spectacularly too. I've found that talking about learning social skills with non-nerds gets you mocked at the very least.
Whereas there is often plenty of help available for illiterate and innumerate people of all ages. Even those without either dyslexia or dyscalculia. Both of which are fairly common.
Learning social skills might be easy for you, but I've not found it easy. So kindly stop beating people like me up (metaphorically) and shut up until you've got some useful advice.
Because sooner or later someone's going to find out something that they find easy, but the original poster finds very hard.
Insurance is a really fucking good idea if you drive and could face effectively unlimited liability if you kill or, worse, injure someone.
:) i.e. if you don't have third party insurance then it's illegal to drive on public roads.
In many places it's the law
It sounds more like this guy wants to catch the criminal than that he wants reimbursement for his $1000 laptop.
The person who currently has the laptop may not even be the person who stole it. Even if they are then assuming they can come up with an innocent explanation for having acquired it then all they be charged with is "unknowingly handling stolen goods".
I'm not sure where you're getting your legal theories from but it isn't right.
If I steal a car in Minnesota, the state doesn't lose jurisdiction because I go to Wisconsin.
It's important to remember that the thief and the stolen goods can be in different locations. Thieves frequently sell whatever they have stolen to other criminals. Some of the latter are very good at "laundering" stolen property.
This was the first time I had a chance to see any of their "evidence". How exactly did this make it all the way to court?
Especially given that "original" files appear to have been altered to contain comments to the effect that a USL copyright statement somehow proves that the information is "UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE" together with a meaningless statement about the existance of a copyright statement not implying publication.
It looks as though they have "mailmerged" part of their claims into their supposed evidence. Shouldn't this have resulted in the judge throwing this out as null and void?
(Although I am terribly disappointed that I will never hear from yet another person with an Indian accent, who has a western name (Mary was the last one) and is "calling from Melbourne"...)
I've never understood why Indian call centres do this kind of thing. If they can't get the accent at least sounding half way possible then the fake name/location claims just come over as daft. They may as well start their script with "I am calling you from India..."
This is not a "trick". That word describes something that plays upon you gullibility or lack of attention, like a shortchange con. This is a complicated money management technique that you need a forensic accountant to sort out.
IIRC the term "trick" was applied to Enron's accounting practices. Even though you need a PhD in accountancy to work out what was actually going on in that situation too!
Trouble is that worldwide, politicians are relatively old people who know absolutely nothing about computers, the internet and whatever. They are often too old to have grown up with it.
The issue isn't about "age" plenty of "old" people use all sorts of technology. I suspect the real issue is that too many politicians lack (current) experience of the world outside politics.
Most people don't know about that. (liquid gas by itself is NOT explosive, it's merely flammable
Actually the liquid isn't especially flammable. What burns is the vapor (gas) which also provides plenty of radiant heat to boil a large quantity of liquid.
gas vapor OTOH is highly explosive, which is why we use it for fuel)
In order to explode it needs to be mixed in the right ratio with air (or something else which will oxidise the fuel). This rarely happens inside a fuel tank.
I remember having to wait 10 minutes for a fill once, in the dead of winter on a road trip. I waited inside, and when I got outside it had JUST finished... AND had just started gushing fuel all over the ground because the full-shutoff failed.
In most places fuel pumps have a spring loaded "trigger" those which can be locked on only appear to be found in the US, where the "feature" is actually intended to enable an employee to service several vehicles at once. When it's someone from each vehicle doing the filling such an an arrangement will result in both fuel spills and fires.
(probably the pump and the shutoff were both having issues with the cold, it was well below zero, and it was diesel fuel)
Diesel won't even burn in liquid form...
It's funny how we keep ignoring the people who actually KNOW about this stuff.
Bruce Schneier would call your entire post factually incorrect, this is roughly a summary of his blogposts over the past few years:
The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is far, far lower than the risk of dying from one too many cheeseburgers. Heck you have a much higher risk of breaking your neck from slipping in the shower ! But we don't DEMAND slip-free mats in every shower by law do we ?
An even simpler summary would be "If you see it on the news don't worry about it." By definition news covers the unusual.
The reality is that terrorism is in fact an incredibly rare and unlikely event even at the worst of times an ANY money spent on preventative measures is a guaranteed waste anyway
It's rare even if you were to count all terrorists. (Including those considerably more dangerous than the typical "Al Quada" idiot.)
Terrorists don't do movie plot threats.
The idea of terrorists photographic targets isn't even a movie plot. It's more of a movie making technique to let the audience find out what the "terrorists" plans are. A novel, play, audio drama, etc with a similar plot would use a different technique.
but don't do anything beyond that because your predictions are guaranteed to be wrong and all those excessive measures actually make you LESS safe as they encourage people not to care and to skip steps.
Even if you initially guess right the "bad guys" can easily go with "plan B, C, D or E".
What CAN we do to reduce the risk ? Only this: effective after-the-fact law enforcement with open trials and proper punishment... same thing as for any other crime. Effectively catching the perpetrators, bringing them to justice (with fair trials) and then punishing them is a very good deterrent - just as much so for terrorism, and the only one that has any chance of working.
There's also regular detective work. Which is hard and potentially dangerous.
"Or your bug will simply get market as "WONT FIX" and disappear into the bug tracker history"
Exactly as it can and do happen on software distributed under closed source licenses.
There's a difference betwene "disappear into the bug tracker history" and "disappear completly". How many proprietary bug trackers can be searched by members of the public?
Also with OSS you not reliant on any specific developer/vendor to get any changes made.
The difference is that in a commercial piece of software it is not the developer making the decisions. If the boss says the users demand X, then the programmers will have to implement it in one form or another.
Just becasue someone says that something id demanded by users does not mean that it actually is. It could easily be code for "the marketing department thinks that if it does X we can sell more (even if it means losing existing customers.)"
With non-commercial Free Software the developer is making the decisions and requests by users are either ignored or even actively blocked.
Even if they do you can "fix it" yourself. An option which isn't available with proprietary software (even if you can locate the actual developer)...
When I was an unexperienced driver at 18 years-old, and had never owned a car, I bought one with the first manual transmission I'd ever touched. The first day was nearly a disaster, stalling repeatedly, lurching and shaking about, and requiring multiple attempts get moving from stops on hills. Simply driving was inefficient and slow (despite the car being a pretty nice old sports car), and required all of my attention. But I got used to it -- so much so that the next four cars I bought also had manual transmissions, and one was a newer, nicer version of that same car. Like the free and open source software mentioned here, manual transmissions take a bit of practice, but they are cheaper and can be at least as efficient (more mpg than older automatics, less maintenance), and being more in control is nice.
In the case of older automatics you typically have 3 forward gear ratios as opposed to 4 or 5 in a similar manual car.
In some places passing a driving test in an automatic means that you can only drive an automatic. Whereas someone who passes a test in a manual can drive either a manual or automatic.
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button. Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
How long does it typically take people to become competent with the regular software? Days, weeks, months.
Certainly some software might lacks polish, but the conclusion that if they didn't adapt in ONE day the software isn't as efficient.. that's really quite flawed uh.
A more meaningful comparision might be between two "teams" who were unfamiliar with either set of software. Or even people who were familiar with the OSS software being asked to use the proprietary software?
DEP is data execution prevention. It marks certain areas of address space as being "data only", so the processor won't execute them. While this is generally a good idea, as it prevents a hacker from constructing a NOP sled and then using an access violation bug somewhere to execute code they've stuck in memory, it also has the side effect of making self-modifying code more difficult to write.
Given how hard self-modifying code can be to debug and formally verify making it hard to write is typically a very good thing.
ASLR (address space layout randomization) is similar, as it breaks certain sorts of odd programming techniques like arithmetic variable addressing.
Is using such techniques generally a good or bad idea? Are there other situations in which such code can break, including in ways which appear random?
While DEP does prevent stack overflow types of attacks, it also complicates writing high security software. The inability to execute data means:
1. You can't run self-decrypting programs.
2. You can't alter instructions at runtime to fool debuggers.
3. You can't place keys in executable code sections at runtime, making it much easier for someone to stop your program and dump the keys out of the memory image.
DEP actually makes attacks against cryptographic software *easier* to implement.
How often does regular cryptographic software need to do any of these? Points 1 and 2 involve self modifying code. Self modifying code is a good way to create a complete lack of any secuity. If order for software to actually be secure it needs to be verifiable that it operates according to the algorithm, this means avoiding both obfuscated and self modifying code. Even then small details matter, e.g. the Debian "bugfix" to SSL which reduced effective keyspace by orders of magnitude.
All of the points only really apply to situations where programmers don't understand the basics of encryption (which predate electronic computers by several hundred years) especially well or where encryption is being used (hacked) for a task it isn't especially suited to in the first place. e.g. DRM (Where "Bob" and "Eve" are the same person...)
Bank robbers usually escape in cars so maybe we should ban automobiles to cut down on the number of bank robberies! Its' the same logic.
:)
Prior to the invention of the car they tended to use horses
1. How Dell handled the issue as a whole. According to TFA, they tried to hush it up. Anyone with half a brain in the IT industry at the time could see exactly what was going on, quite how anyone at Dell concluded that they could succeed in a cover-up is beyond me.
That would be the case in any industry. Selling faulty goods and trying go cover it up will result in irate customers.
2. How every major vendor handled dealing with individual customers. At the time, more than one company had a very strict policy that their helpdesk staff wouldn't deal with issues concerning more than one system in a call. It's one thing to have to put the phone down and call again when you've got two or three systems to get a tech sent out for and once they're done they're done,
In this case the vendor isn't supplying "enterprise level" support. They are expecting their enterprise customers to use "SOHO level" support...