...compared to $13-15+ at the mall, yes? (yes, I know you get physical media w/ a purchase in meatspace, but CD + jewel case + inserts can't be worth $4, let alone $7).
On a serious note though - some albums are damned well worth $20 and up, depending on what the songs are, who sang them, etc. The rest of them are either not worth the electrons burned to send it to you, or somewhere in-between. Value, like Beauty and Pornography, are strictly measured in the eyes of the beholder.
Why can't they charge much less and make up the profits on volume?
Hell, I'm just happy to see 'em (the music industry) finally shift to a decent business model... now if only they can learn to not screw-over their singers so much and stop manufacturing crap music, maybe I'd start listening to (and buying stuff from) them, as opposed to sending my money solely to independent labels and artists/bands.
(then again, you know? In retrospect, I'm kinda glad the RIAA and their members are a pack of jackasses - I've discovered some hella excellent music ever since they'd pissed me off enough to seek indie singers and bands).
thats what i was going to ask...
he got us so interested in his story but he didnt tell us how it ended properly...:(
Sorry 'bout that; here's (roughly) how he did it:
He got to the Windows NT Server through his student account, shook out a copy of the local SAM, then spent the next few days brute-forcing it on a different machine. I was handed a printed list of every user account and its password on that machine (including the one I used for that box) as evidence. It was cool and scary at the same time; IIRC it took MSFT about six months from that point (which I had submitted to them) to patch the vuln that allowed him to grab it.
This is potentially good for Linux and potentially bad for Internet banking.
Let's teach all the russian kids how to hack. This is what we should be doing in the USA.
Back when I was teaching, I did exactly that.
I had a standing challenge that any kid who managed to pop any of my servers, and show/prove exactly how he or she did it, got a their overall grade bumped by one letter for that semester. The ground rules were simple: they could only break into a server that I controlled. I did it because 1) kids try for it out of curiousity anyway, and 2) they may as well be challenged to study than admonished into ignorance. I went out of my way to include security into the curricula whenever and wherever I could.
Out of six years of teaching, only one student had managed it... he organized the local (Salt Lake City) 2600 chapter. Last I heard he was running his own security consulting firm.
...the first to admit then that all other operating systems and vendors have said the same thing time and time again, including yours truly "Linux".
...except that in Linux, OSX, and *BSD's case, it has been (at various points in time) demonstrably true.
While I certainly wouldn't say that the three have perfect security (and certainly not WRT dumb admin/user mistakes), I can say with confidence that they can rightfully be claimed as being among the most secure out there. Windows cannot, not has ever been, able to credibly claim that. Whether it can do so in the future remains to be seen.
apathetic people are allowing these battle to occur in the first place, if everyone fought, victory would be assured
"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."
-Sun Tsu
Not so sure... GP phrased it wrong, but the point is still there: most folks figured that SCO was wrong a long, long time before Lyons gave up defending them. They also refrained from belittling those who sought the truth, such as Groklaw.
If someone changes their mind, cool - esp. if someone changes it after careful consideration. But after their pet theory/ideology/etc gets squashed like a SCO's bug on IBM's windshield, and after so vehemently defending the likes of McBride & co.? Sure, he hedged his bets after awhile - all pros do that.
IMHO, I can understand what the guy is feeling. His call was bad, his credibility on the matter is toast, and he probably didn't enjoy having to write that. I will further give him at least the props for loyalty to his ideas and prognostications (then again, it isn't like he could magically change them and think no one would notice, either).
That said, his behavior was quite crass, somewhat elitist, and quite frankly, he gets what he gives, y'know?
IMHO, Lyons is a lot like a passenger on Titanic who loudly denies to his fellows that they're any mortal danger about the whole iceberg thing...
...until the ship's nose goes under and he realizes that there aren't that many open seats left in the lifeboats, that is.
I give him props for saying something about being wrong, but I still have reservations as to why he did it (to save his rep is what I'm thinking. Sucks to have that kind of prognostication on your resume'...)
...after all, the mountain of Pro-MSFT shilling you've done all this time certainly doesn't help your case either.
'fessing up to being wrong? but how much of that is just to save your reputation, and how much is true 'oh, man, I messed up...' sentiment?
Forgiveness? Heh. Please. Any fool with two neurons would've figured out that SCO was shoveling manure a long, long time ago... and wouldn't have waited until their buddy was on the gallows platform before shouting long and loud about how he'd deceived you.
Where they may get into hot water is that anyone with enough money and/or legal time on tap can sue the crap out of AT&T the first time they get a virus if it can be proven that the thing passed in or out of AT&T's networks. After all, if AT&T is busily filtering those nasty ol' bootleg movies, they should be reasonably expected to filter out the dangerous stuff, spam, and most of all to control any customer machines in their network that might have become zombified.
And... if you make exclusive for-sale content (say, for consignment sale on a website somewhere), you find some AT&T customer passing it around, and AT&T cannot immediately filter out the p2p version of your stuff, they could become just as legally liable as the guy passing it around. After all, if they can filter out copyright violations for the big movie types, then legally the same courtesy should be expected towards small content providers, no?
I'm prolly explaining it all wrong, but basically it boils down to the idea that if AT&T is responsible for any one bit of customer or inbound content that passes through their networks, then they are responsible for all of it, for good or ill.
It should be noted that if vista fails, it is not the first time a windows has more or less failed due to low user adoption and general a "this version blows, lets stik to the last one" attitude. Windows ME anyone?
Only diff is, Windows ME was followed very rapidly by Windows 2000 (something like 12-18 months, IIRC), and world+dog knew it.
In this case, Vista is a dog, but there ain't no new version coming just around the bend.
If anything, it'd be like the huge group die-hards who waited until Windows 2003 Server to even bother migrating from Windows NT 4.0. Hell, I still remember the big grandiose launch they had for Win2k3 in Salt Lake City... they spent nearly the whole time talking up all the tools they built to migrate from NT 4.0 (Not Windows 2000 Server... NT 4.0).
A guaranteed suicide mission would be worthless on a personal level (unless I had, say, terminal cancer or somesuch, then I'd certainly be game), but more importantly, it would be worthless on a political level. You don't send folks up to die, because the whole point of the exercise is two-fold:
1) science / exploration
2) getting ordinary folks to think "hey - that could be me/my kids up there someday! Cool!"
The reason the Space Race was so popular in the '50s and '60s wasn't so much the 'Red Menace', but ordinary folks (kids chief among them) to fantasize about being spacemen and spacewomen. SciFi was a HUGE factor in having folks dream of space as a destination in the first place.
Sure, the odds of, say, terraforming Mars in my lifetime is pretty much nil, but the ideas of adventure and exploration? Especially in a world that pretty much has had human eyes hovering over nearly every square hectare of it by now? It's a pretty damned cool idea.
Why not instead start hiring ironworkers and folks who actually know WTF they're doing in high-up construction techniques? They're still (according to accounts) building the ISS, right?
Well, at least things have begun moving in the right direction (that is, folks can have a shot at going to space without having to be a test pilot or a PhD first).
There's a difference between people doing research, and outright fraud based on "homeopathic cures".
Nope. Not a chance.
...and your evidence for this is...?
I'm not saying that one should immediately fall for every con job out there, but somewhere in there is a bit of honest research, however misguided you think it to be, going on.
They should wake up. SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software. But it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies. And it has a tight circle of friends.
I wonder if someone should ask Mssr. Lyons where those 'friends' are at the present moment? *snicker*
True, but most airlines don't have a judgment hanging over them that basically says Novell owns revenues that exceed the company's current on-hand assets.
I suspect this also means no more stock kiting schemes, if today's reaction by NASDAQ is any indication.
"largely settled matters"... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"
Honestly, as long as it doesn't interfere with other scientific endeavors, I see no problems with such things as homeopathy. They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process. Even in this case, competent MDs certainly don't discount human willpower and mindset, especially in matters such as healing times and recovery from sickness or injury.
Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance (small as it may be) at accidentally discovering something along the way that "real science" may have ignored or discounted, or in asking a question (or posing a challenge) whose answer might lead to something useful in science itself -- if a scientist here or there takes the time to tackle them.
SCO sometimes reminds me of a certain song... many of you may already know it. For those that don't...
(shamelessly ripped off from The Dead Milkmen's "Stuart", from the album "Beelzebubba".)
You know what, Laura DiDio? I LIKE YOU! You're not like the other people, here, in the Lindon trailer park!
Oh, nonono, don't go get me wrong. They're fine people, they're good Americans. But they're content to sit back, fire up their Windows XP boxes and surf a little Internet on AOL, maybe chat a little on MSN. They're good, fine people, Stuart. But they don't know... what the penguins are doing to our code!
[...]
You know that Johnny Werzner kid - the kid who ports apps in the neighborhood? He's a fine kid. Some of the neighbors say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it. Anyway, for his 10th birthday, all he wanted was a Sourceforge page. "Dad, get me a Sourceforge account. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live". So the guy
breaks down and set him up with a Sourceforge page.
Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go over next door, and there's the Werzner kid, looking up something on the 'net. I say, "What are you looking for?" He says "I'm looking for the source code to add to this new app."
I said, "Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick! Everybody knows
the source code is proprietary! Under NDA! In a vault! Why the hell do you think they call it 'source code' anyway!?"
Now Laura, do you think a kid like that is going to know what the penguins are doing to the code!?
I first became aware of this about ten years ago, the summer my oldest boy, Darl Jr. died. You know that trade show comes into town every year? Well this year IBM came through with a Demo called The Parser. The man said, "Keep your links, and dependencies, inside The Parser at all times!" But not Darl Jr - he was a DAAAREDEVIL, just like his old man! He was banging out code, saying "Hey everybody, Look at me! Look at me!" POW! He was decapitated! They found his head over by the Microsoft.NET concession!
A few days after that, I open up the mail - and there's a pamphlet in there - from Pueblo, Colorado ! And it's addressed to Darl Jr. And it's entitled: "Do you know what the penguins are doing to our code!?"
Now, Laura! If you look at the soil around any large US city where there's a large underground kernel hacker population. Portland, Oregon - perfect example. Look at the soil around Portland, Stuart... You can't build on it; you can't grow anything in it. The government says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on, Laura. I know it's the penguins! They're in it with the aliens! They're building landing strips for code-stealing Martians! I swear to God!
You know what, Laura DiDio? I like you! You're not like the other people, here in the Lindon trailer park...
Slashdot Mirror
# echo "10 17 * * 5 root (ifconfig eth0 down ; ifconfig eth1 down ; wall "Your computer is broken, please call $NERD at $PHONE immediately")" > /etc/crontab
(I swear, it's like the mere mention of meeting a chick turns off the whole BOFH part of the brain with you people...)
$8-$9 is too much for an album.
On a serious note though - some albums are damned well worth $20 and up, depending on what the songs are, who sang them, etc. The rest of them are either not worth the electrons burned to send it to you, or somewhere in-between. Value, like Beauty and Pornography, are strictly measured in the eyes of the beholder.
Why can't they charge much less and make up the profits on volume?Hell, I'm just happy to see 'em (the music industry) finally shift to a decent business model... now if only they can learn to not screw-over their singers so much and stop manufacturing crap music, maybe I'd start listening to (and buying stuff from) them, as opposed to sending my money solely to independent labels and artists/bands.
(then again, you know? In retrospect, I'm kinda glad the RIAA and their members are a pack of jackasses - I've discovered some hella excellent music ever since they'd pissed me off enough to seek indie singers and bands).
he got us so interested in his story but he didnt tell us how it ended properly...
Sorry 'bout that; here's (roughly) how he did it:
He got to the Windows NT Server through his student account, shook out a copy of the local SAM, then spent the next few days brute-forcing it on a different machine. I was handed a printed list of every user account and its password on that machine (including the one I used for that box) as evidence. It was cool and scary at the same time; IIRC it took MSFT about six months from that point (which I had submitted to them) to patch the vuln that allowed him to grab it.
Let's teach all the russian kids how to hack. This is what we should be doing in the USA.
Back when I was teaching, I did exactly that.
I had a standing challenge that any kid who managed to pop any of my servers, and show/prove exactly how he or she did it, got a their overall grade bumped by one letter for that semester. The ground rules were simple: they could only break into a server that I controlled. I did it because 1) kids try for it out of curiousity anyway, and 2) they may as well be challenged to study than admonished into ignorance. I went out of my way to include security into the curricula whenever and wherever I could.
Out of six years of teaching, only one student had managed it... he organized the local (Salt Lake City) 2600 chapter. Last I heard he was running his own security consulting firm.
...the first to admit then that all other operating systems and vendors have said the same thing time and time again, including yours truly "Linux".While I certainly wouldn't say that the three have perfect security (and certainly not WRT dumb admin/user mistakes), I can say with confidence that they can rightfully be claimed as being among the most secure out there. Windows cannot, not has ever been, able to credibly claim that. Whether it can do so in the future remains to be seen.
apathetic people are allowing these battle to occur in the first place, if everyone fought, victory would be assured
"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."
-Sun Tsu
If someone changes their mind, cool - esp. if someone changes it after careful consideration. But after their pet theory/ideology/etc gets squashed like a SCO's bug on IBM's windshield, and after so vehemently defending the likes of McBride & co.? Sure, he hedged his bets after awhile - all pros do that.
IMHO, I can understand what the guy is feeling. His call was bad, his credibility on the matter is toast, and he probably didn't enjoy having to write that. I will further give him at least the props for loyalty to his ideas and prognostications (then again, it isn't like he could magically change them and think no one would notice, either).
That said, his behavior was quite crass, somewhat elitist, and quite frankly, he gets what he gives, y'know?
IMHO, Lyons is a lot like a passenger on Titanic who loudly denies to his fellows that they're any mortal danger about the whole iceberg thing...
I give him props for saying something about being wrong, but I still have reservations as to why he did it (to save his rep is what I'm thinking. Sucks to have that kind of prognostication on your resume'...)
'fessing up to being wrong? but how much of that is just to save your reputation, and how much is true 'oh, man, I messed up...' sentiment?
Forgiveness? Heh. Please. Any fool with two neurons would've figured out that SCO was shoveling manure a long, long time ago... and wouldn't have waited until their buddy was on the gallows platform before shouting long and loud about how he'd deceived you.
You've made your bed, Mr. Lyons. Now lie in it. /P
Where they may get into hot water is that anyone with enough money and/or legal time on tap can sue the crap out of AT&T the first time they get a virus if it can be proven that the thing passed in or out of AT&T's networks. After all, if AT&T is busily filtering those nasty ol' bootleg movies, they should be reasonably expected to filter out the dangerous stuff, spam, and most of all to control any customer machines in their network that might have become zombified.
And... if you make exclusive for-sale content (say, for consignment sale on a website somewhere), you find some AT&T customer passing it around, and AT&T cannot immediately filter out the p2p version of your stuff, they could become just as legally liable as the guy passing it around. After all, if they can filter out copyright violations for the big movie types, then legally the same courtesy should be expected towards small content providers, no?
I'm prolly explaining it all wrong, but basically it boils down to the idea that if AT&T is responsible for any one bit of customer or inbound content that passes through their networks, then they are responsible for all of it, for good or ill.
How long before something similar could be put to use on a PC, for 3D/CG manipulation?
OfficeSpace
I mean, lookit: the clueless would look and go "oooh, cool name - space to do my docs n' stuff!"
The rest of us will simply giggle when we get asked why the app suite insists on showing a red stapler on the splash screen.
Only diff is, Windows ME was followed very rapidly by Windows 2000 (something like 12-18 months, IIRC), and world+dog knew it.
In this case, Vista is a dog, but there ain't no new version coming just around the bend.
If anything, it'd be like the huge group die-hards who waited until Windows 2003 Server to even bother migrating from Windows NT 4.0. Hell, I still remember the big grandiose launch they had for Win2k3 in Salt Lake City... they spent nearly the whole time talking up all the tools they built to migrate from NT 4.0 (Not Windows 2000 Server... NT 4.0).
1) science / exploration
2) getting ordinary folks to think "hey - that could be me/my kids up there someday! Cool!"
The reason the Space Race was so popular in the '50s and '60s wasn't so much the 'Red Menace', but ordinary folks (kids chief among them) to fantasize about being spacemen and spacewomen. SciFi was a HUGE factor in having folks dream of space as a destination in the first place.
Sure, the odds of, say, terraforming Mars in my lifetime is pretty much nil, but the ideas of adventure and exploration? Especially in a world that pretty much has had human eyes hovering over nearly every square hectare of it by now? It's a pretty damned cool idea.
Well, at least things have begun moving in the right direction (that is, folks can have a shot at going to space without having to be a test pilot or a PhD first).
There's a difference between people doing research, and outright fraud based on "homeopathic cures".
Nope. Not a chance.I'm not saying that one should immediately fall for every con job out there, but somewhere in there is a bit of honest research, however misguided you think it to be, going on.
They should wake up. SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software. But it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies. And it has a tight circle of friends.
I wonder if someone should ask Mssr. Lyons where those 'friends' are at the present moment? *snicker*
I suspect this also means no more stock kiting schemes, if today's reaction by NASDAQ is any indication.
Honestly, as long as it doesn't interfere with other scientific endeavors, I see no problems with such things as homeopathy. They may even stumble across something that is heretofore unknown, actually contributing to science in the process. Even in this case, competent MDs certainly don't discount human willpower and mindset, especially in matters such as healing times and recovery from sickness or injury.
Sneer all you like folks, but even the fundamentalist creationist types have a chance (small as it may be) at accidentally discovering something along the way that "real science" may have ignored or discounted, or in asking a question (or posing a challenge) whose answer might lead to something useful in science itself -- if a scientist here or there takes the time to tackle them.
It's kind of how we've gotten as far as we have.
...SCO probably claims ownership of a trademark on "FSCK".Dunno ab't the trademark, but the copyright credits say the Linux version came from Ted T'so:
AUTHOR
Theodore Ts'o (tytso@mit.edu)
FILES
/etc/fstab.
SCO sometimes reminds me of a certain song... many of you may already know it. For those that don't...
(shamelessly ripped off from The Dead Milkmen's "Stuart", from the album "Beelzebubba".)
You know what, Laura DiDio? I LIKE YOU! You're not like the other people, here, in the Lindon trailer park! Oh, nonono, don't go get me wrong. They're fine people, they're good Americans. But they're content to sit back, fire up their Windows XP boxes and surf a little Internet on AOL, maybe chat a little on MSN. They're good, fine people, Stuart. But they don't know ... what the penguins are doing to our code!
[...]
You know that Johnny Werzner kid - the kid who ports apps in the neighborhood? He's a fine kid. Some of the neighbors say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it. Anyway, for his 10th birthday, all he wanted was a Sourceforge page. "Dad, get me a Sourceforge account. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live". So the guy breaks down and set him up with a Sourceforge page.
Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go over next door, and there's the Werzner kid, looking up something on the 'net. I say, "What are you looking for?" He says "I'm looking for the source code to add to this new app."
I said, "Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick! Everybody knows the source code is proprietary! Under NDA! In a vault! Why the hell do you think they call it 'source code' anyway!?"
Now Laura, do you think a kid like that is going to know what the penguins are doing to the code!? I first became aware of this about ten years ago, the summer my oldest boy, Darl Jr. died. You know that trade show comes into town every year? Well this year IBM came through with a Demo called The Parser. The man said, "Keep your links, and dependencies, inside The Parser at all times!" But not Darl Jr - he was a DAAAREDEVIL, just like his old man! He was banging out code, saying "Hey everybody, Look at me! Look at me!" POW! He was decapitated! They found his head over by the Microsoft .NET concession!
A few days after that, I open up the mail - and there's a pamphlet in there - from Pueblo, Colorado ! And it's addressed to Darl Jr. And it's entitled: "Do you know what the penguins are doing to our code!?"
Now, Laura! If you look at the soil around any large US city where there's a large underground kernel hacker population. Portland, Oregon - perfect example. Look at the soil around Portland, Stuart... You can't build on it; you can't grow anything in it. The government says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on, Laura. I know it's the penguins! They're in it with the aliens! They're building landing strips for code-stealing Martians! I swear to God!
You know what, Laura DiDio? I like you! You're not like the other people, here in the Lindon trailer park...