When I search for something I want the end results to reflect the whole net, not just the parts that Google has a vested financial interest in.
So feel free to pay someone to write you a search engine that meets your personal requirements. But as long as you're taking advantage of a free-to-use service provided by a profit-making business, don't whinge that they in turn take advantage of the side-effects of that service to make money.
Oh, come now. Work's not so far from your average D&D RPG. Most of your work colleagues will already have been slowed, with a duration of several days, and some may have been blinded or deafened as well. Your office will be under the effects of an ice storm for the first morning back. Your boss will still be an ogre several levels higher than you. But on the bright side, launching a fireball into his office will still be fun!
Yes, I wondered about this as well. As far as I can see, the only way to make the claims about not using wireless that are given in paragraph 5 (e.g., "It is not difficult to determine whether a computer was connected to the Internet via a wireless router. This computer was not.") based on the evidence listed would be by examination of the configuration files on the hard drive. I don't see how you could determine this reliably from the other side of the connection. You could have wired or wireless routers, and wired or wireless modems, and whether the TCP/IP ports seen from the outside were the standard P2P ones or random numbers would depend on whether you were using something like a router or NAT, not on whether the system was wired or not. I assume that in court, they can simply ask whether the network was wireless or not to find out; the point here is the credibility of the expert witness in general if he doesn't concede that his claims in paragraph 5 rely on use of the hard drive data.
Then, in paragraph 6, the evidence given is that the hard drive is not the one from the original computer. So is he trying to mislead the court in paragraph 5 (great admission), does he think he can identify the use or otherwise of wireless from the outside of the wireless router (challenge him on how to do this, in detail, in an attempt to undermine his personal credibility as an expert), or is the claim in paragraph 6 that the hard drive isn't the real one unreliable (great admission)?
Credit where it's due: this is just borrowing the idea mentioned by Chris Snook in an earlier post. It seems to me that this "expert" is leaving himself wide open to the "When did you stop beating your wife?" type of question.
Nice idea. I'm not sure it's quite as water-tight as you make out, though. Ask yourself this: what would you answer honestly to such a question in the lawyer's position if you were using a good bit of software? If you challenge him on this one and he produces a detailed list of high quality testing processes used by the developers of MediaSentry and shows that their bug database holds no relevant bugs, you'll probably strengthen that aspect of their case in the eyes of a non-technical court. You'd probably want a way to circumvent that possible outcome (tell me the media lawyers aren't reading this too) before going ahead with this approach.
That's like a lawyer walking into a courtroom and saying, "Yes, you have video of my client robbing the bank, but how do you know that someone else didn't create a mask that looks exactly like my client?"
I take your point, but it seems to me that it's more like making that claim when there's a shop two doors down that sells made-to-order face masks prepared while-you-wait, and there has been a recent spate of crime committed by people wearing masks. After all, making a close enough replica of a face mask takes time, effort and probably some money. As the media industry are at pains to remind us, it is much easier to work with data on a computer.
If you have significant doubt about the reliability of enough of the evidence, at what point does that become reasonable doubt about the validity of the entire case? If the plaintiffs here have any sort of "form" for presenting this sort of evidence and it's turned out to be incorrect or even outright falsified, that would help to undermine their credibility. I don't know whether this is the case, but I'm betting Ray and his colleagues have done their homework here.
Still one of the scariest films I've ever seen. Silly software glitch causes complete failure of safety system with tragic consequences? That's too real.
I didn't claim that Calc doesn't have basic graphing facilities. What I said was that it lacked some basic graphing facilities, and it does (though admittedly some of the more heinous problem areas were at least improved in OO 2). You claim to "just use the software". Have you ever tried working with spreadsheets where you have lots of data points on a graph, or several graphs with a non-trivial number of points each? The recalculation times can be measured in minutes, every time you change any data in your spreadsheet. We've finally got the ability to add a decent range of regression lines, but the UI for manipulating them afterwards is cumbersome to say the least. Others have made other more specific criticisms in the past.
Sorry, but this sort of denial is exactly why things like OO lack credibility in the corporate world. We've debunked the OO zealotry around here often enough that I can't be bothered repeating it. Many objective deficiencies in OO have been identified relative to MS Office; go read the past threads if you actually care about being informed on the subject, instead of pretending that Calc's only problem is not being able to deal with "monsters" as opposed to, say, lacking some basic graphing facilities.
What you say is true, of course: many places do not take advantage of features of Word that could be useful to them, as much due to ignorance as anything else. My point is that to get businesses with established IT infrastructure to shift to Linux, there has to be a compelling advantage. Being the same as what you've already got but different isn't good enough.
Yep, that's exactly what I meant about growing up and setting aside the ethical issues. If Linux is going to be a serious option for the business desktop, it has to drop all this crap about not using the best tool for the job because that tool happens to be proprietary and closed-source.
Hmm... That's two replies making some sort of joke about my post. Is this a UK vs. US thing or something? The words are correctly spelt according to my dictionary...
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. The point of my comments in the thread the other day was that Word sucks in several ways, but the current approach taken by OO is not going to lead to anything qualitatively better. This is relevant to the current discussion, because in order to get businesses to move to Linux, there must be compelling business advantages to doing so.
(And yes, those features mostly exist in recent versions of Word. However, the implementation is underpowered, unreliable, overcomplicated and generally poor for the reasons I described in detail in later posts.)
I'm certainly not saying that OO is never an appropriate or sufficient choice. I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
However, my experiences are very different to yours. I've seen people try OO, and reject it outright after fighting this or that irritation for an hour. It's stuffed the formatting of every moderately complex.doc I've ever opened in it to some degree, often in a not-even-close kind of way. It has fundamental bugs in things like PDF export that make it unreliable for production use if you haven't got things planned and tried out ahead of time.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing the people you've worked with successfully using OO are mostly fairly small businesses. These can overcome this sort of difficulty with some ingenuity, but it's really an unacceptable liability if you're working in an environment where the "local geek" doesn't sit on the desk next to you or you're sending out documents to big business or media contacts who will be using Word even if you're not. Larger businesses also tend to be the ones to benefit most from things like reviewing and team-working features, which are things OO barely has but MS Office has done for years. Similar arguments apply to using Outlook with Exchange Server, which is something small businesses rarely do, but large organisations sometimes base their whole infrastructure around.
The problem with 'something better than MS Office' is that developers get distracted into trying to things the MS Office way. Microsoft is great with providing rich feature sets, but poor in terms of simplicity. They provide what users think they want, not what users actually need (which is fair enough, as MS want to sell software, not improve productivity).
You're absolutely right, on all counts. Of course, that doesn't mean that the OSS world can't do something that is what users actually need, unconstrained by the need for short term profit-making and shareholder-friendly PR. The benefits of using such an application will become apparent (and become a competitive advantage) to those companies that adopt the OSS alternative. This is why, IMHO, a more effective office suite is the killer app for Linux in the business world.
That sort of plan is a 10 year plan at the very least, and requires educating people at school about basic computer security, and the dangers of being a computer idiot.
You don't think schools have enough to teach people already? (Clue: Look at the literacy levels and mathematical skills of the average school leaver.)
You can never make a computer 100% secure, because there will always be people who tell others their password. Every time you raise the game, there will still be someone at the bottom who's an easy target. But you certainly can write software that doesn't allow the kind of attacks that plague us today, without any user education at all.
If you want a user security model that works relatively well, you need look no further than banking and credit cards. Everyone knows how to swipe a card and type a four-digit number, and that you aren't supposed to write the number down anywhere it's recognisable, and that if your card is stolen you call the bank and cancel it. This system is simple enough for the average guy/girl in the street to handle, yet works pretty well and requires very little training.
I agree about the home software range, but it is simply not true that there is no answer to MS Office.
Sorry, but for many, many businesses, that really is true. OpenOffice is nowhere near up to the job. If all you do is fairly trivial documents, sure, Writer is OK. But OO has numerous weaknesses. What we need is something better than MS Office, a "killer app" for Linux. A close-approximation with a somewhat lower price tag isn't worth much in this game.
Such an MS Office-beater isn't hard to conceive. I was challenged to list 10 major problems with MS Office in a recent discussion here, and listed ten in Word alone off the top of my head, which I then defended in detail when challenged. The thread was only a few days ago if you want to look it up. But OO isn't trying to improve on these areas in any meaningful way, as also discussed in that thread and others.
Meanwhile, reliability problems with import/export of.DOC files, the underpowered Calc that can't keep up with Excel, the lack of anything to compete head-to-head with Outlook, and several other serious concerns will prevent most/all mid- and large-sized businesses moving to OO any time soon. It's just not ready for the big time yet, like so many other OSS applications, and this is exactly my point.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you're perhaps a little too confident here.
As you say, Linux can't be taken over or bought out. It can, however, be crippled and have its credibility destroyed, at which point is no longer matters. It is under threat from patent issues. Ironically, it is also potentially under threat from security issues: governments are going to have to start cracking down on security before the economic damage caused by viruses, spam e-mail and the like gets much worse. You or I might respond, "Use a more secure operating system, like Linux!" Unfortunately, I'm betting the governments will hear the lobbying money, and there is a serious risk that they will start legislating that only approved system software may be used on any computer connected to the Internet. Guess whose software is going to be approved? They would come up with some expensive licensing scheme to deal with all the infrastructure businesses who use Linux, of course, but we're talking about end users here.
OK, stop laughing and thinking I'm a moron. Not so long ago, I made a post to a forum (possibly this one) warning that if people continued to rip songs illegally over the Internet, the music industry would attempt to defend its legal rights by force, to the point of restricting all available hardware so you couldn't copy stuff. People laughed at me and said it couldn't be done. Today we have DRM, getting more restrictive and more legal backing by the month, and people having their lives ruined for getting on the wrong side of the system.
I don't think the real problem of Linux is the difficulty of installation. Windows is not always straightforward to install either, but for most people it's either done before they get the machine or they get a techie friend to help. It's no biggie.
IMHO, the real problem with Linux is simply a shortage of high-quality applications. This is not intended as a slight against any particular application, and it's certainly not a statement that there are no high-quality applications. But let's be fair: Linux has, as yet, no answer to MS Office at work, and no answer to the range of games available for Windows and/or the latest generation of consoles at home. And that's just step one; there are many more specialist business applications, communications and multimedia software for home users, and the like that will have to follow. Until this sort of thing is available, Linux will never go mainstream, no matter how simple to install it is, how good the driver support may be, or how dedicated its users are to Open Source or Free Software ideals.
This appears, at first sight, to be something of a vicious circle: commercial organisations with the resources to put together that kind of software are unlikely to commit them until there's a market, and the market will not materialise without the software base. But there is light at both ends of this tunnel. On one end, there seems an increasing tendency for the more specialised business applications (or "databases", as we used to call them) to have web front-ends, and since Linux does have decent web browsers available, this reduces the problems in this area. At the other end of the tunnel, Linux itself and several other projects demonstrate clearly that the OSS community is capable of building applications on the scale required. It just needs to grow up a bit, spend less time worrying about philosophical and ethical issues, and kick off some heavyweight projects where the management team have the vision and organisational skills necessary. There's no reason that can't happen; it just hasn't (very often) so far.
I sort of wish a consumer interests group would make like the Mozilla guys and place a big, preferably whole-page, ad in a major newspaper to debunk this stuff once and for all. Pointing out to consumers, in clear and simple langauge, the real limitations the coming generation of DRM technology will impose on their everyday activities, and pointing out to business leaders the immense risks incurred by basing your IT infrastructure on systems that another business can turn off on a whim, should be enough to sink Vista before it even gets off the ground.
Hell, if Apple had any sense, they'd see the huge market opportunity here: get into bed with the big name sound and video manufacturers, and then undercut Vista with an indisputable ad run about how Vista deliberately degrades your content but on MacOS it looks so much sharper, and so on. Make a selling point of not having DRM, backed by listing "fair uses" in law that Microsoft is deliberately undermining. Get a couple of soundbites from the CEOs of nVidia and AMD/ATI about how they want to support the best possible products for users, and today that means non-Microsoft. What are Microsoft going to do, revoke every nVidia and ATI driver as being unauthorised? Gimme a break.
Seriously, the content providers have to have channels, and Microsoft has to have the big hardware vendors universally behind it for this to work. If the public turns around and tells them to screw themselves on degraded quality, they aren't going to stop supplying stuff, they're just going to stop supplying degraded quality stuff no-one will pay for. It's not in anyone's interests for Microsoft to control the dominant PC-based media distribution channel alone, and if someone starts standing up and saying (quite truthfully, I suspect) that all this heavyweight copy-protection is counter-productive and they can help content suppliers to make more money by not screwing the users, well... As my father once told me, it's hard to beat an honest man in an argument.
Absolutely. The cost to society of spam e-mail is getting silly: we're all indirectly paying for all that extra infrastructure ISPs are setting up to try and filter it, we're all losing precious time dealing with what gets through, and those of us who are admins spend too much of our working (or volunteered, in my case) time checking for false positives in the junk mail folder rather than doing more useful things.
Since most spammers are engaged in otherwise illegal activities anyway, and they're sending out a gazillion e-mails per surge, and there has to be some way to reach them in order for them to benefit, it really shouldn't be that difficult to find the serious offenders and... deal with them in a reasonable and proportionate way. If they're hiding in foreign countries, perhaps the governments of our countries should "encourage" the foreign governments to take more drastic action to curtail the immense economic damage being done by someone on their soil. Suffixing the phrase "Please be kind enough to get your house in order" with the phrase "...or we'll do it for you" in some suitably diplomatic terms should do the trick.
As another aside, since the vast majority of recent spam is caused by botnets, at what point are we going to wake up and stop pretending that allowing anyone to connect to the Internet using any software with no guarantee about their authenticity or the security of their system is a long-term viable strategy?
I'm not incapable of reading them; I just choose not to. Given that the vast majority of rejection notices I receive are caused by some spammer sending mail forging an address I use as the sender, and not in response to anything I actually sent myself, is it really any surprise that I delete them unread unless I recently sent a genuinely important mail?
I appreciate the importance of sending mail from certain sources using the correct logins or servers. This doesn't just apply to server that won't send mail from unpermitted addresses, it also affects a lot of anti-spam software that looks up MX records to test whether incoming mail is likely to have a forged sender.
My point was really that I have never found any difficulty in setting up my system so that it does emit mail via the appropriate SMTP box for each account. I don't see what all this fuss is about...
Slashdot Mirror
So feel free to pay someone to write you a search engine that meets your personal requirements. But as long as you're taking advantage of a free-to-use service provided by a profit-making business, don't whinge that they in turn take advantage of the side-effects of that service to make money.
Oh, come now. Work's not so far from your average D&D RPG. Most of your work colleagues will already have been slowed, with a duration of several days, and some may have been blinded or deafened as well. Your office will be under the effects of an ice storm for the first morning back. Your boss will still be an ogre several levels higher than you. But on the bright side, launching a fireball into his office will still be fun!
But you've got to admit that a phone that never needs charging would be handy...
Yes, I wondered about this as well. As far as I can see, the only way to make the claims about not using wireless that are given in paragraph 5 (e.g., "It is not difficult to determine whether a computer was connected to the Internet via a wireless router. This computer was not.") based on the evidence listed would be by examination of the configuration files on the hard drive. I don't see how you could determine this reliably from the other side of the connection. You could have wired or wireless routers, and wired or wireless modems, and whether the TCP/IP ports seen from the outside were the standard P2P ones or random numbers would depend on whether you were using something like a router or NAT, not on whether the system was wired or not. I assume that in court, they can simply ask whether the network was wireless or not to find out; the point here is the credibility of the expert witness in general if he doesn't concede that his claims in paragraph 5 rely on use of the hard drive data.
Then, in paragraph 6, the evidence given is that the hard drive is not the one from the original computer. So is he trying to mislead the court in paragraph 5 (great admission), does he think he can identify the use or otherwise of wireless from the outside of the wireless router (challenge him on how to do this, in detail, in an attempt to undermine his personal credibility as an expert), or is the claim in paragraph 6 that the hard drive isn't the real one unreliable (great admission)?
Credit where it's due: this is just borrowing the idea mentioned by Chris Snook in an earlier post. It seems to me that this "expert" is leaving himself wide open to the "When did you stop beating your wife?" type of question.
Nice idea. I'm not sure it's quite as water-tight as you make out, though. Ask yourself this: what would you answer honestly to such a question in the lawyer's position if you were using a good bit of software? If you challenge him on this one and he produces a detailed list of high quality testing processes used by the developers of MediaSentry and shows that their bug database holds no relevant bugs, you'll probably strengthen that aspect of their case in the eyes of a non-technical court. You'd probably want a way to circumvent that possible outcome (tell me the media lawyers aren't reading this too) before going ahead with this approach.
I take your point, but it seems to me that it's more like making that claim when there's a shop two doors down that sells made-to-order face masks prepared while-you-wait, and there has been a recent spate of crime committed by people wearing masks. After all, making a close enough replica of a face mask takes time, effort and probably some money. As the media industry are at pains to remind us, it is much easier to work with data on a computer.
If you have significant doubt about the reliability of enough of the evidence, at what point does that become reasonable doubt about the validity of the entire case? If the plaintiffs here have any sort of "form" for presenting this sort of evidence and it's turned out to be incorrect or even outright falsified, that would help to undermine their credibility. I don't know whether this is the case, but I'm betting Ray and his colleagues have done their homework here.
Still one of the scariest films I've ever seen. Silly software glitch causes complete failure of safety system with tragic consequences? That's too real.
Yes there is, but it isn't usually in the consequences of the loss.
I didn't claim that Calc doesn't have basic graphing facilities. What I said was that it lacked some basic graphing facilities, and it does (though admittedly some of the more heinous problem areas were at least improved in OO 2). You claim to "just use the software". Have you ever tried working with spreadsheets where you have lots of data points on a graph, or several graphs with a non-trivial number of points each? The recalculation times can be measured in minutes, every time you change any data in your spreadsheet. We've finally got the ability to add a decent range of regression lines, but the UI for manipulating them afterwards is cumbersome to say the least. Others have made other more specific criticisms in the past.
Sorry, but this sort of denial is exactly why things like OO lack credibility in the corporate world. We've debunked the OO zealotry around here often enough that I can't be bothered repeating it. Many objective deficiencies in OO have been identified relative to MS Office; go read the past threads if you actually care about being informed on the subject, instead of pretending that Calc's only problem is not being able to deal with "monsters" as opposed to, say, lacking some basic graphing facilities.
What you say is true, of course: many places do not take advantage of features of Word that could be useful to them, as much due to ignorance as anything else. My point is that to get businesses with established IT infrastructure to shift to Linux, there has to be a compelling advantage. Being the same as what you've already got but different isn't good enough.
Yep, that's exactly what I meant about growing up and setting aside the ethical issues. If Linux is going to be a serious option for the business desktop, it has to drop all this crap about not using the best tool for the job because that tool happens to be proprietary and closed-source.
Hmm... That's two replies making some sort of joke about my post. Is this a UK vs. US thing or something? The words are correctly spelt according to my dictionary...
Erm... Sorry, I think I missed your point.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. The point of my comments in the thread the other day was that Word sucks in several ways, but the current approach taken by OO is not going to lead to anything qualitatively better. This is relevant to the current discussion, because in order to get businesses to move to Linux, there must be compelling business advantages to doing so.
(And yes, those features mostly exist in recent versions of Word. However, the implementation is underpowered, unreliable, overcomplicated and generally poor for the reasons I described in detail in later posts.)
I'm certainly not saying that OO is never an appropriate or sufficient choice. I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
However, my experiences are very different to yours. I've seen people try OO, and reject it outright after fighting this or that irritation for an hour. It's stuffed the formatting of every moderately complex .doc I've ever opened in it to some degree, often in a not-even-close kind of way. It has fundamental bugs in things like PDF export that make it unreliable for production use if you haven't got things planned and tried out ahead of time.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing the people you've worked with successfully using OO are mostly fairly small businesses. These can overcome this sort of difficulty with some ingenuity, but it's really an unacceptable liability if you're working in an environment where the "local geek" doesn't sit on the desk next to you or you're sending out documents to big business or media contacts who will be using Word even if you're not. Larger businesses also tend to be the ones to benefit most from things like reviewing and team-working features, which are things OO barely has but MS Office has done for years. Similar arguments apply to using Outlook with Exchange Server, which is something small businesses rarely do, but large organisations sometimes base their whole infrastructure around.
You're absolutely right, on all counts. Of course, that doesn't mean that the OSS world can't do something that is what users actually need, unconstrained by the need for short term profit-making and shareholder-friendly PR. The benefits of using such an application will become apparent (and become a competitive advantage) to those companies that adopt the OSS alternative. This is why, IMHO, a more effective office suite is the killer app for Linux in the business world.
You don't think schools have enough to teach people already? (Clue: Look at the literacy levels and mathematical skills of the average school leaver.)
You can never make a computer 100% secure, because there will always be people who tell others their password. Every time you raise the game, there will still be someone at the bottom who's an easy target. But you certainly can write software that doesn't allow the kind of attacks that plague us today, without any user education at all.
If you want a user security model that works relatively well, you need look no further than banking and credit cards. Everyone knows how to swipe a card and type a four-digit number, and that you aren't supposed to write the number down anywhere it's recognisable, and that if your card is stolen you call the bank and cancel it. This system is simple enough for the average guy/girl in the street to handle, yet works pretty well and requires very little training.
Sorry, but for many, many businesses, that really is true. OpenOffice is nowhere near up to the job. If all you do is fairly trivial documents, sure, Writer is OK. But OO has numerous weaknesses. What we need is something better than MS Office, a "killer app" for Linux. A close-approximation with a somewhat lower price tag isn't worth much in this game.
Such an MS Office-beater isn't hard to conceive. I was challenged to list 10 major problems with MS Office in a recent discussion here, and listed ten in Word alone off the top of my head, which I then defended in detail when challenged. The thread was only a few days ago if you want to look it up. But OO isn't trying to improve on these areas in any meaningful way, as also discussed in that thread and others.
Meanwhile, reliability problems with import/export of .DOC files, the underpowered Calc that can't keep up with Excel, the lack of anything to compete head-to-head with Outlook, and several other serious concerns will prevent most/all mid- and large-sized businesses moving to OO any time soon. It's just not ready for the big time yet, like so many other OSS applications, and this is exactly my point.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you're perhaps a little too confident here.
As you say, Linux can't be taken over or bought out. It can, however, be crippled and have its credibility destroyed, at which point is no longer matters. It is under threat from patent issues. Ironically, it is also potentially under threat from security issues: governments are going to have to start cracking down on security before the economic damage caused by viruses, spam e-mail and the like gets much worse. You or I might respond, "Use a more secure operating system, like Linux!" Unfortunately, I'm betting the governments will hear the lobbying money, and there is a serious risk that they will start legislating that only approved system software may be used on any computer connected to the Internet. Guess whose software is going to be approved? They would come up with some expensive licensing scheme to deal with all the infrastructure businesses who use Linux, of course, but we're talking about end users here.
OK, stop laughing and thinking I'm a moron. Not so long ago, I made a post to a forum (possibly this one) warning that if people continued to rip songs illegally over the Internet, the music industry would attempt to defend its legal rights by force, to the point of restricting all available hardware so you couldn't copy stuff. People laughed at me and said it couldn't be done. Today we have DRM, getting more restrictive and more legal backing by the month, and people having their lives ruined for getting on the wrong side of the system.
I don't think the real problem of Linux is the difficulty of installation. Windows is not always straightforward to install either, but for most people it's either done before they get the machine or they get a techie friend to help. It's no biggie.
IMHO, the real problem with Linux is simply a shortage of high-quality applications. This is not intended as a slight against any particular application, and it's certainly not a statement that there are no high-quality applications. But let's be fair: Linux has, as yet, no answer to MS Office at work, and no answer to the range of games available for Windows and/or the latest generation of consoles at home. And that's just step one; there are many more specialist business applications, communications and multimedia software for home users, and the like that will have to follow. Until this sort of thing is available, Linux will never go mainstream, no matter how simple to install it is, how good the driver support may be, or how dedicated its users are to Open Source or Free Software ideals.
This appears, at first sight, to be something of a vicious circle: commercial organisations with the resources to put together that kind of software are unlikely to commit them until there's a market, and the market will not materialise without the software base. But there is light at both ends of this tunnel. On one end, there seems an increasing tendency for the more specialised business applications (or "databases", as we used to call them) to have web front-ends, and since Linux does have decent web browsers available, this reduces the problems in this area. At the other end of the tunnel, Linux itself and several other projects demonstrate clearly that the OSS community is capable of building applications on the scale required. It just needs to grow up a bit, spend less time worrying about philosophical and ethical issues, and kick off some heavyweight projects where the management team have the vision and organisational skills necessary. There's no reason that can't happen; it just hasn't (very often) so far.
He's trying to put everyone to sleep? ;-)
I sort of wish a consumer interests group would make like the Mozilla guys and place a big, preferably whole-page, ad in a major newspaper to debunk this stuff once and for all. Pointing out to consumers, in clear and simple langauge, the real limitations the coming generation of DRM technology will impose on their everyday activities, and pointing out to business leaders the immense risks incurred by basing your IT infrastructure on systems that another business can turn off on a whim, should be enough to sink Vista before it even gets off the ground.
Hell, if Apple had any sense, they'd see the huge market opportunity here: get into bed with the big name sound and video manufacturers, and then undercut Vista with an indisputable ad run about how Vista deliberately degrades your content but on MacOS it looks so much sharper, and so on. Make a selling point of not having DRM, backed by listing "fair uses" in law that Microsoft is deliberately undermining. Get a couple of soundbites from the CEOs of nVidia and AMD/ATI about how they want to support the best possible products for users, and today that means non-Microsoft. What are Microsoft going to do, revoke every nVidia and ATI driver as being unauthorised? Gimme a break.
Seriously, the content providers have to have channels, and Microsoft has to have the big hardware vendors universally behind it for this to work. If the public turns around and tells them to screw themselves on degraded quality, they aren't going to stop supplying stuff, they're just going to stop supplying degraded quality stuff no-one will pay for. It's not in anyone's interests for Microsoft to control the dominant PC-based media distribution channel alone, and if someone starts standing up and saying (quite truthfully, I suspect) that all this heavyweight copy-protection is counter-productive and they can help content suppliers to make more money by not screwing the users, well... As my father once told me, it's hard to beat an honest man in an argument.
Absolutely. The cost to society of spam e-mail is getting silly: we're all indirectly paying for all that extra infrastructure ISPs are setting up to try and filter it, we're all losing precious time dealing with what gets through, and those of us who are admins spend too much of our working (or volunteered, in my case) time checking for false positives in the junk mail folder rather than doing more useful things.
Since most spammers are engaged in otherwise illegal activities anyway, and they're sending out a gazillion e-mails per surge, and there has to be some way to reach them in order for them to benefit, it really shouldn't be that difficult to find the serious offenders and... deal with them in a reasonable and proportionate way. If they're hiding in foreign countries, perhaps the governments of our countries should "encourage" the foreign governments to take more drastic action to curtail the immense economic damage being done by someone on their soil. Suffixing the phrase "Please be kind enough to get your house in order" with the phrase "...or we'll do it for you" in some suitably diplomatic terms should do the trick.
As another aside, since the vast majority of recent spam is caused by botnets, at what point are we going to wake up and stop pretending that allowing anyone to connect to the Internet using any software with no guarantee about their authenticity or the security of their system is a long-term viable strategy?
I'm not incapable of reading them; I just choose not to. Given that the vast majority of rejection notices I receive are caused by some spammer sending mail forging an address I use as the sender, and not in response to anything I actually sent myself, is it really any surprise that I delete them unread unless I recently sent a genuinely important mail?
I appreciate the importance of sending mail from certain sources using the correct logins or servers. This doesn't just apply to server that won't send mail from unpermitted addresses, it also affects a lot of anti-spam software that looks up MX records to test whether incoming mail is likely to have a forged sender.
My point was really that I have never found any difficulty in setting up my system so that it does emit mail via the appropriate SMTP box for each account. I don't see what all this fuss is about...