I found this [ebay.com] while I was reading NASA Watch [nasawatch.com] (a slashdot like site with space as it's main focus). It seems that they are Ebay auctioning off a trip to the International Space Station. Last I checked it was at $19 mil and hadn't quite met the reserve. Sounds like a market to me...
The auction is probably totally bogus. The current high bidder has previously been mostly buying cell phone cables and faceplates for $5-$60. Doesn't really look a serious buyer to me.
A quick glance over his last 20 stories show an avergae of 370 comments per story, his top three garnering 1021, 713 and 633. This man walks right behind the fury of the anti-MS brigade
There is actually a very simple explanation to this. People do not read anti-MS articles for their content. People do not read Jon Katz articles for their content. In fact, they do not read these articles at all. They read and enjoy the comments that bash either MS or JK. It has always been a part of the human psychology to enjoy attacking a single target with a group (from the crucifixion of Jesus to today's "fat kids of the class"), and Slashdot is just one manifestation of this effect. So it is useful for the editors to provide content that will heat the masses and let them attack someone (sort of like public executions in the past), it generates entertainment and page views. The content, of course, has to suffer because of this every now and then. Of course, not everybody who responds to MS or JK articles falls under this category, it's a statistical thing. Remember, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about your neighbor;)
Are we out of regular Microsoft-bashing topics now or what? It kind of reminds me some evironmentalist demonstrations in Seattle and Redmond last year. The lamp-posts in the city were full of flyers that invited people to march through MS campus because: a) Hi-tech industry pollutes the world. b) It is really immoral to be as rich as billg. c) MS has driven up the cost of real estate in the region, so poor people can't buy houses any more. My point is that maybe people should try to find somewhat better arguments than hey, they are rich, therefore evil.
Microsoft might be the 2,000 pound gorilla... Funny how this gorilla keeps growing and growing. I remember when people used to call MS a 500 pound gorilla, then 600, finally 800... and now we are up to 2000. Never mind that gorillas don't actually grow that big.
On that CNN page, there's a survey asking what you think your knowledge of science is. As of 9.30pm EST, 76% rated themseleves as either very good or excellent
You need to take into account two things: This poll was shown in the "TECH" section of CNN site. People who aren't interested in science do not usually read this section. Those who are interested in something, probably also possess better than average knowledge about the field. Also, there is a link from/. frontpage directly to this page. And given the "geek pride"... enough said:)
If Ford can be sued for making bad cars so can a softeare manufacturer be sued for making buggy software.
Did you read what I wrote at all? Ford has strict guidelines that they must follow (e.g. gas tanks must have a thickness of at least x). If they break these guidelines then they can be sued, otherwise not. it is impossible to create any meaningful rules in software industry.
Allright, lets start making software producers liable. But how exactly are we going to enforce it? There is no such thing as perfect software once you get past certain limits in complexity. Who will say if the software producer has done a reasonable job or not when securing the product? As countless examples in the US legal history tell us, this problem will most probably be solved by creating a set of (rather stupid) arbitrary rules that software makers must follow. Consider this example: US government institutions may only use software that meets certain accessibility standards (e.g. you have to be able to increase the font size, display stuff in high-contrast mode etc.) The only company that has resources to make its software compliant with these rules at the moment is Microsoft, it is just too expensive for others. Now what makes anyone think it would be any different with these security requirements? The rules will probably be something like "all financial transactions must use SSL" or "passwords must be encrypted with 128-bit keys" or something like that. But the reason behind most security holes today is not so much insecure protocols or insufficient key lengths but invalid assumptions between different components in complex software. And no law is ever going to take care of this problem.
Does this mean when they sell our email addresses to spam companies the it becomes our constitutional right to receive spam?
Do you have any evidence that MS has sold your e-mail or any other data to anybody? This sounds totally ridiculous for the following reasons:
1) Spammers use dictionary attacks to spam Hotmail users. It would be fairly pointless if you could just buy the addressbook.
2) e-mail lists used by spammers have been in circulation for ages; they are being sold and re-sold all the time. They are relatively cheap, less than hundred bucks for millions of e-mails. Selling all Hotmail addresses to everybody would generate a maximum revenue of perhaps couple of hundred thousand dollars. Now compare it to MS's annual total revenue of 20+ billion.
3) MS's stated goal is to have everybody in the world use their services. Hence it would be totally stupid of them to do something that drives people away from their services. And believe me, MS isn't _that_ stupid.
4) Doubleclick and friends have collected more of your personal data about you than anybody could ever possibly give to Passport. Still I don't see them having any astronomic revenues. And it just isn't Microsoft's habit to do anything for less than astronomic revenues (see 2)).
Couple of people have mentioned it here, commenting how incredibly dumb someone must be to do something like that.. You should know that the dancing incident took place in the MS 25th anniversary company meeting, which was essentially a *party*. Now, as far as I know, people are *supposed* to do silly things when partying, that's the idea, isn't it? Or do you guys all sit around the table, dead serious, during the birthday of your company? C'mon, get a life. Btw, most people at MS love steveb and his tricks, it adds lotsa color and fun to everyday life and raises people's morale. So I would say that it was actually a rather useful thing for the company, not dumb. So, flame me if you want to, but you don't really get to lead a big software company by being dumb, u know?
Targo, saw the monkey dance with his own eye.
Why not do it the the other way around
on
Iris Indigo Case Mod
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Well.. putting a regular machine into a fancy machine's box is kind of like cheating. Of course, your guests are going to be impressed for a second but the disappointment will be bigger. I've seen a Sun Ultra being put in an old XT case. Now pointing to this XT case and saying 'well, this is our server' was much cooler IMHO:-)
Nice theory. Too bad it runs afoul of one inconvenient fact: the copies of WinXP in use in most companies do not have WPA in them at all. Only the retail versions get the activation, OEM and Enterprise-license copies are essentially pre-activated or don't require activation.
But in bigger companies the Windows boxes don't sit on bookshelves either (at least they shouldn't be) because software gets installed over the network or at least in some sort of centralized manner, so people couldn't bring the boxes home. But there are plenty of small (4-10 people) companies where software boxes are just on the secretary's bookshelf, everybody can borrow them and do whatever they want. WPA was created to discourage this behavior.
Many people here don't perhaps understand what WPA is about. WPA is NOT about making it "impossible" to copy Windows. WPA is NOT about making Windows registration "unhackable". These have NEVER been the design goals of WPA. There are other tools for these goals, they are harder and costlier to implement than the current implementation of WPA and probably more inconvenient for the user. MS was aware of the other possibilities but decided that they were not worth the extra money and effort.
Why? Because the goal of WPA is to keep office workers from bringing home copies of WinXP, installing them on their home machines and giving them to their friends. That was the ONLY goal. This kind of behavior makes up 90% of revenue lost by everyday piracy and MS is pretty happy to get this 90% back by not spending much effort in the process. As about the the guys who use key generators and other ways of getting around the registration process - I'm very sorry to disappoint you but Microsoft doesn't even notice you guys.
And of course, MS has known about this since december:-P
Yes, and there has been a patch for this problem. So what did you expect MS to do? Spam all the IM users to install the patch? C'mon.
Btw, WindowsUpdate prompts you to install this patch, I don't see what else should have been done about it ("this bug should not have been there" rants don't count as a solution).
M$ is not changing its tune on whit. This is NOT a gift to the developer community. It is NOTHING but a means of continuing lockin (and conversely, lockout) and moola into Gates pocket. Nothing more, nothing less. It may be a nice way to build stuff at some future time for linux but it is NOT a means of being able to run some.NET windoze binary on linux (never happen except accidentally because the code was simple enough not to include "broken" M$-only freakishness). You will find that most of the important stuff will not run. Developers will STILL not make linux-friendly stuff because the bulk of the market is in M$-doze-land and they can run the broken/perverted.NET M$_VM-only stuff.
I think you're making some fundamental mistakes here.
First, when you say that Linux would not be able to run Windows binaries - guess what, there will be no Windows in 5 years. There won't be such thing as a Windows binary. There will only be.Net framework running on your PC or whatever appliance and.Net binaries..Net is a very longterm project, it has been in works for about three years now. It did get started because Microsoft realized that PC is not forever and the original goal was to carry Microsoft's influence to the post-PC era. It is up to you if you want to play the game or not but.Net is going to be big, bigger than Windows or anything else you've seen from MS so far. Hence the question of Windows binaries is largely irrelevant.
Second, the #1 goal of.Net Framework has always been portability. Again, this is because of the realization that PC is not forever..Net is going to be everywhere, server, desktop, tablet PC, PDA, cellphone, you name it. Given this assumption, this multitude of platforms and apps, I find it hard to believe that MS would be able to somehow break this compatibility without seriously hurting itself.
It really depends on your platform and available tools. I'm a windows guy, so I used Microsoft Network Monitor (there are probably all sorts of other sniffers available for other platforms) to sniff the network (start monitor, click on this 300kb link on the site, wait until the movie starts playing, stop monitor). You will see a bunch of HTTP GET requests in the sniff, among these is one that downloads a.rm file, this is your guy.
Then I wrote a small C# program using the.Net framework HttpWebRequest class to send a fake user agent and other headers that I found in the sniff, sent the request and wrote the resulting data into a file. Again, you may want to do it with other tools (should be easy in perl), I just used what I had. But this is the principle, from here on it's just RTFM;)
I'll love to see this 'hacker-proof' format of theirs. I bet a hundered dollars it's already creacked
I just downloaded a movie from them. Do I get your hundred bucks now or what was your idea? It wasn't hard, sniff the network, figure out the real URL (surprise-surprise, it's just a regular.rm file), throw together a small program to fake the user agent and save the response to a file and voila, here we go.
Once you've got the.RAM file, it contains a URL inside it (probably a pnm:// or rtsp://), and you will need a program that's
Actually, in this case it is easier, it's just a simple.rm file that you can download. Have to fake the user agent though, because you will get a 403 forbidden when trying to access it with just a browser. Just downloaded their sample free movie this way.
I would probably have given MS more credit for this initiative if they didn't have a burning need to broadcast it to the entire world, as if to say "See? We're doing a good thing! LOVE US!"
I don't see any huge broadcasting effort anywhere. It is actually amazing that Slashdot hasn't reported this earlier, and the sites that the current article is referring to don't really look like a massive PR campaign to me. This move was actually announced inside MS weeks ago and people are already working on it. Any publicity is just a weak shadow of the real thing.
I understand that your intention is to be humorous but I can't help saying that you sound kinda naive.
You know, there is something called source control. And it can be locked if necessary. And there is something called peer review, which can be used as a basis for letting people check in their code.
And before you ask, yes, MS does use both of them.
Many people don't probably realize it but this would be the best thing that could happen to Microsoft. To illustrate the point, consider the fact that US government institutions use almost exclusively Microsoft products but many people don't know that this is actually enforced by law.
There is a law that states that government may only use software, which has certain accessibility features (usable by vision impaired, for example). There is a big bunch of standard requirements that the software products must follow to be in compliance with this law. Now Microsoft is one of the very few companies that can afford compliance with this law.
Now consider what would happen with this proposal when it gets passed. Most probably it will be transformed into an arbitrary set of rather stupid standards and guidelines by our legislative bodies, and again, Microsoft would be the only one able to follow these standards.
Slashdot Mirror
I found this [ebay.com] while I was reading NASA Watch [nasawatch.com] (a slashdot like site with space as it's main focus). It seems that they are Ebay auctioning off a trip to the International Space Station. Last I checked it was at $19 mil and hadn't quite met the reserve. Sounds like a market to me...
The auction is probably totally bogus. The current high bidder has previously been mostly buying cell phone cables and faceplates for $5-$60. Doesn't really look a serious buyer to me.
A quick glance over his last 20 stories show an avergae of 370 comments per story, his top three garnering 1021, 713 and 633. This man walks right behind the fury of the anti-MS brigade
;)
There is actually a very simple explanation to this. People do not read anti-MS articles for their content. People do not read Jon Katz articles for their content. In fact, they do not read these articles at all. They read and enjoy the comments that bash either MS or JK. It has always been a part of the human psychology to enjoy attacking a single target with a group (from the crucifixion of Jesus to today's "fat kids of the class"), and Slashdot is just one manifestation of this effect.
So it is useful for the editors to provide content that will heat the masses and let them attack someone (sort of like public executions in the past), it generates entertainment and page views. The content, of course, has to suffer because of this every now and then.
Of course, not everybody who responds to MS or JK articles falls under this category, it's a statistical thing. Remember, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about your neighbor
Are we out of regular Microsoft-bashing topics now or what? It kind of reminds me some evironmentalist demonstrations in Seattle and Redmond last year. The lamp-posts in the city were full of flyers that invited people to march through MS campus because:
a) Hi-tech industry pollutes the world.
b) It is really immoral to be as rich as billg.
c) MS has driven up the cost of real estate in the region, so poor people can't buy houses any more.
My point is that maybe people should try to find somewhat better arguments than hey, they are rich, therefore evil.
Microsoft might be the 2,000 pound gorilla ... ... and now we are up to 2000. Never mind that gorillas don't actually grow that big.
Funny how this gorilla keeps growing and growing. I remember when people used to call MS a 500 pound gorilla, then 600, finally 800
On that CNN page, there's a survey asking what you think your knowledge of science is. As of 9.30pm EST, 76% rated themseleves as either very good or excellent
/. frontpage directly to this page. And given the "geek pride"... enough said :)
You need to take into account two things:
This poll was shown in the "TECH" section of CNN site. People who aren't interested in science do not usually read this section. Those who are interested in something, probably also possess better than average knowledge about the field.
Also, there is a link from
btw, decent compass is not $10 but more like $60 and might be as high as $200 for a high end compass.
If Ford can be sued for making bad cars so can a softeare manufacturer be sued for making buggy software.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
Ford has strict guidelines that they must follow (e.g. gas tanks must have a thickness of at least x). If they break these guidelines then they can be sued, otherwise not. it is impossible to create any meaningful rules in software industry.
Allright, lets start making software producers liable. But how exactly are we going to enforce it? There is no such thing as perfect software once you get past certain limits in complexity. Who will say if the software producer has done a reasonable job or not when securing the product?
As countless examples in the US legal history tell us, this problem will most probably be solved by creating a set of (rather stupid) arbitrary rules that software makers must follow.
Consider this example: US government institutions may only use software that meets certain accessibility standards (e.g. you have to be able to increase the font size, display stuff in high-contrast mode etc.) The only company that has resources to make its software compliant with these rules at the moment is Microsoft, it is just too expensive for others.
Now what makes anyone think it would be any different with these security requirements? The rules will probably be something like "all financial transactions must use SSL" or "passwords must be encrypted with 128-bit keys" or something like that. But the reason behind most security holes today is not so much insecure protocols or insufficient key lengths but invalid assumptions between different components in complex software. And no law is ever going to take care of this problem.
Do you have any evidence that MS has sold your e-mail or any other data to anybody? This sounds totally ridiculous for the following reasons:
1) Spammers use dictionary attacks to spam Hotmail users. It would be fairly pointless if you could just buy the addressbook.
2) e-mail lists used by spammers have been in circulation for ages; they are being sold and re-sold all the time. They are relatively cheap, less than hundred bucks for millions of e-mails. Selling all Hotmail addresses to everybody would generate a maximum revenue of perhaps couple of hundred thousand dollars. Now compare it to MS's annual total revenue of 20+ billion.
3) MS's stated goal is to have everybody in the world use their services. Hence it would be totally stupid of them to do something that drives people away from their services. And believe me, MS isn't _that_ stupid.
4) Doubleclick and friends have collected more of your personal data about you than anybody could ever possibly give to Passport. Still I don't see them having any astronomic revenues. And it just isn't Microsoft's habit to do anything for less than astronomic revenues (see 2)).
Couple of people have mentioned it here, commenting how incredibly dumb someone must be to do something like that..
You should know that the dancing incident took place in the MS 25th anniversary company meeting, which was essentially a *party*. Now, as far as I know, people are *supposed* to do silly things when partying, that's the idea, isn't it? Or do you guys all sit around the table, dead serious, during the birthday of your company? C'mon, get a life.
Btw, most people at MS love steveb and his tricks, it adds lotsa color and fun to everyday life and raises people's morale. So I would say that it was actually a rather useful thing for the company, not dumb.
So, flame me if you want to, but you don't really get to lead a big software company by being dumb, u know?
Targo,
saw the monkey dance with his own eye.
Well.. putting a regular machine into a fancy machine's box is kind of like cheating. Of course, your guests are going to be impressed for a second but the disappointment will be bigger. :-)
I've seen a Sun Ultra being put in an old XT case. Now pointing to this XT case and saying 'well, this is our server' was much cooler IMHO
And just how was Netscape to fund all the developers for improving their product after Microsoft dumped IE on the market?
How about the billions that AOL spent to buy Netscape and then just let it die?
Nice theory. Too bad it runs afoul of one inconvenient fact: the copies of WinXP in use in most companies do not have WPA in them at all. Only the retail versions get the activation, OEM and Enterprise-license copies are essentially pre-activated or don't require activation.
But in bigger companies the Windows boxes don't sit on bookshelves either (at least they shouldn't be) because software gets installed over the network or at least in some sort of centralized manner, so people couldn't bring the boxes home. But there are plenty of small (4-10 people) companies where software boxes are just on the secretary's bookshelf, everybody can borrow them and do whatever they want. WPA was created to discourage this behavior.
Many people here don't perhaps understand what WPA is about. WPA is NOT about making it "impossible" to copy Windows. WPA is NOT about making Windows registration "unhackable". These have NEVER been the design goals of WPA. There are other tools for these goals, they are harder and costlier to implement than the current implementation of WPA and probably more inconvenient for the user. MS was aware of the other possibilities but decided that they were not worth the extra money and effort.
Why? Because the goal of WPA is to keep office workers from bringing home copies of WinXP, installing them on their home machines and giving them to their friends. That was the ONLY goal. This kind of behavior makes up 90% of revenue lost by everyday piracy and MS is pretty happy to get this 90% back by not spending much effort in the process. As about the the guys who use key generators and other ways of getting around the registration process - I'm very sorry to disappoint you but Microsoft doesn't even notice you guys.
And of course, MS has known about this since december :-P
Yes, and there has been a patch for this problem. So what did you expect MS to do? Spam all the IM users to install the patch? C'mon.
Btw, WindowsUpdate prompts you to install this patch, I don't see what else should have been done about it ("this bug should not have been there" rants don't count as a solution).
I've said from day one that The Register cannot be trusted. They are fanatics...
If their fanatism is the key then how exactly is Slashdot any different?
Oh wait, it isn't...
M$ is not changing its tune on whit. This is NOT a gift to the developer community. It is NOTHING but a means of continuing lockin (and conversely, lockout) and moola into Gates pocket. Nothing more, nothing less. It may be a nice way to build stuff at some future time for linux but it is NOT a means of being able to run some .NET windoze binary on linux (never happen except accidentally because the code was simple enough not to include "broken" M$-only freakishness). You will find that most of the important stuff will not run. Developers will STILL not make linux-friendly stuff because the bulk of the market is in M$-doze-land and they can run the broken/perverted .NET M$_VM-only stuff.
.Net framework running on your PC or whatever appliance and .Net binaries. .Net is a very longterm project, it has been in works for about three years now. It did get started because Microsoft realized that PC is not forever and the original goal was to carry Microsoft's influence to the post-PC era. It is up to you if you want to play the game or not but .Net is going to be big, bigger than Windows or anything else you've seen from MS so far. Hence the question of Windows binaries is largely irrelevant.
.Net Framework has always been portability. Again, this is because of the realization that PC is not forever. .Net is going to be everywhere, server, desktop, tablet PC, PDA, cellphone, you name it. Given this assumption, this multitude of platforms and apps, I find it hard to believe that MS would be able to somehow break this compatibility without seriously hurting itself.
I think you're making some fundamental mistakes here.
First, when you say that Linux would not be able to run Windows binaries - guess what, there will be no Windows in 5 years. There won't be such thing as a Windows binary. There will only be
Second, the #1 goal of
A "for dummies" guide would be well appreciated.
.rm file, this is your guy.
.Net framework HttpWebRequest class to send a fake user agent and other headers that I found in the sniff, sent the request and wrote the resulting data into a file. Again, you may want to do it with other tools (should be easy in perl), I just used what I had. But this is the principle, from here on it's just RTFM ;)
It really depends on your platform and available tools. I'm a windows guy, so I used Microsoft Network Monitor (there are probably all sorts of other sniffers available for other platforms) to sniff the network (start monitor, click on this 300kb link on the site, wait until the movie starts playing, stop monitor). You will see a bunch of HTTP GET requests in the sniff, among these is one that downloads a
Then I wrote a small C# program using the
What's the User Agent string to fake a connection by realplayer?
I use RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)
I'll love to see this 'hacker-proof' format of theirs. I bet a hundered dollars it's already creacked
.rm file), throw together a small program to fake the user agent and save the response to a file and voila, here we go.
I just downloaded a movie from them. Do I get your hundred bucks now or what was your idea? It wasn't hard, sniff the network, figure out the real URL (surprise-surprise, it's just a regular
Once you've got the .RAM file, it contains a URL inside it (probably a pnm:// or rtsp://), and you will need a program that's
.rm file that you can download. Have to fake the user agent though, because you will get a 403 forbidden when trying to access it with just a browser. Just downloaded their sample free movie this way.
Actually, in this case it is easier, it's just a simple
I would probably have given MS more credit for this initiative if they didn't have a burning need to broadcast it to the entire world, as if to say "See? We're doing a good thing! LOVE US!"
I don't see any huge broadcasting effort anywhere. It is actually amazing that Slashdot hasn't reported this earlier, and the sites that the current article is referring to don't really look like a massive PR campaign to me. This move was actually announced inside MS weeks ago and people are already working on it. Any publicity is just a weak shadow of the real thing.
I understand that your intention is to be humorous but I can't help saying that you sound kinda naive.
You know, there is something called source control. And it can be locked if necessary. And there is something called peer review, which can be used as a basis for letting people check in their code.
And before you ask, yes, MS does use both of them.
Many people don't probably realize it but this would be the best thing that could happen to Microsoft. To illustrate the point, consider the fact that US government institutions use almost exclusively Microsoft products but many people don't know that this is actually enforced by law.
There is a law that states that government may only use software, which has certain accessibility features (usable by vision impaired, for example). There is a big bunch of standard requirements that the software products must follow to be in compliance with this law. Now Microsoft is one of the very few companies that can afford compliance with this law.
Now consider what would happen with this proposal when it gets passed. Most probably it will be transformed into an arbitrary set of rather stupid standards and guidelines by our legislative bodies, and again, Microsoft would be the only one able to follow these standards.
I don't think a rocket that can barely put payloads into geosync is going to manage that intercept.
Putting something behind the moon is not much more expensive than putting it to geosync since Earth's gravity is significantly weaker.