M$ "me-too" entry in the console market
continues in last place, sixth out of six as of August 2009:
01 Nintendo Wii - 95,357
02 Nintendo DS - 85,737
03 PlayStation Portable - 33,049
04 PlayStation 3 - 8760
05 PlayStation 2 - 3617
06 Xbox 360 - 3552
PS2, PSP, and PS3 fluctuate a bit, but Wii keeps climbing albeit not steadily.
The Red Ring o Death we all passed in the stores whenever Xbox was on display is only minor compared to the quality and duration of the eipc failure. The M$ console hardware failures have been around forever, on about as long as the unit has been on the market. It's not just bricked units and years of scotched discs. It's been four or five years of property damage and even occasional injury and death, with fires in many countries.
But, hey, if defective M$ hardware burns down your family, it's your fautlt. To be fair M$ is right about that: The buyers were warned in prior to purchase by the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. C'mon, M$ hardware is as poor as M$ software. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3.
Games are optional. Other activities are not.
At some point families will ask the courts to ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C#-based gewgaws or for-novelty-purposes-only systems like XP on the desktop or server instead of functinal Java- or Python-based applications or systems actually designed for a networked environemnt, such as Solaris and Linux. The Microsofot brand is a warning, those who ignore that warning and deploy the product anyway are in the wrong. Multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter. Who goes to the gas chamber, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense for any politically motivated group, even one with heavy marketing and lobbying.
Seeing as how heat is the predominate cause of these machines giving up the ghost (whether it be heat killing components, heat changes warping solder, or cheap solder being affected by predictable heat), it would be interesting to compare the failure rate of small form factor computers, laptops, or pre-built gaming computers.
We've all known for a long time what happens when you let a computer run for 3 years and let the case fans get caked up...
To be fair, the buyers were warned: The boxes did have the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3. It's a can of worms to be sure, just wait till courts ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C# or XP on the desktop or server instead of Solaris / Linux or Java / Python. Who goes to the gas chamber for multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense.
the energy-intensive electrolysis that produces the hydrogen will need to use a carbon-neutral energy source; and the complex multi-step process will always consume significantly more energy than the fuel it produces could yield. '
But it's easy to put a nuclear reactor in a ship, and not so easy to put one in a fighter jet.
Brett
Depends on how long you want the pilots and maintenance crews to live.;)
I do remember the excitement we all felt when Salsa was officially the fastest-growing condiment in North America. Heady days, those.
Salsa tastings were trendy events then. It's slowed down.
The
HotHotHot web shop has been offline for a long time and hopefully will be up and running again.
Sounds like you're a liar, alternately a shill. Based on several hundred first and second hand contacts, not counting schools, tech support calls go away after upgrading parents or non-technical users to Ubuntu or OS X. Really. If you failed to give a quick orientation, then you'll get a few days of 'how do I' calls. After that it's smooth sailing. Maintenance is a major savings once you leave M$ products behind.
A hidden savings is found with the end users. The end users are more productive as well, once you leave M$ products behind. Interestingly, even crusty, old KDE 3.5 is easier to use than XP, even for those with a Windows legacy.
YMMV, but I find the above based on several hundred first and second hand contacts, not counting schools.
The FCC has no interest in protecting individual rights or promoting a competitive market. They are there to sell off public assets to private corporations, and enforce rules and fines to ensure societal conformity to the morals of politically important voting blocs...
The FCC's action or inaction on this will play out as to what role and relation Comcast is having with M$ and if M$ executives consider Comcast a problem.
There's more where that came from: Microsoft revenue declines 17% in fiscal Q4. Notice that the spinmeisters are talking about revenue declining. Profit, if there is any, is hit even harder especially if that profit is based on pump-n-dump of MSFT stock.
Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use Internet Explorer.
Har! That's a joke, right?
Nope. It's a troll, a distraction, from the old troll Bonch.
The illegal part in the EU and the US comes in by MS illegal bundling MSIE with its desktop OS monopoly. MS executives have been illegally leveraging the desktop monopoly to cause problems in the audio/video markets, then productivity software markets and the browser markets. Adding a second, third or fourth browser to the mix does nothing to address the bundling or illegal tying. Only removing MSIE from the OEM distributions of desktop systems will do that. And that's something Bill's astroturfers try to distract from.
M$ boosters and users are causing harm to your nation, your economy. Where is your national defense? How many have to lose their jobs first?
Because usually, this gets you shot. And I think you can be as cool a l33t h4x0r as you want. If you are a stain on the walls, it does not matter, does it? ^^
I say, if the government would sign something, stating that they would get away with it, with some UN guarantee backing it... *Then* you could see people attempting this.
Oh, and back when they said it, the security of the internet was a complete joke compared to now. One botnet trojan/virus from today could wipe the whole net from back then without problems.:)
Not if you add "with a computer" to the activity. Look at a group we see injecting code known to be unsafe into airports, hospitals, schools and military sites. Not even an eyebrow is being raised, let alone a rifle scope. The military has been sitting on its hands while this group brings the infrastructure and parts of the economy to its knees. MSFT racketeering causes billions of dollars of damage each quarter.
Cue the elves / orcs analogies. MSFTers appear to hate innovation so much that they cannot even tolerate it in other companies. That could make MSFT eligiable to be classified as hate-group and its minions thus guilty of hate-crimes for their activities.
Micro$haft marketeers saw Wolfram Alpha and revved up the astroturfers to all but drown out discussion of it. It's amazing that a johnny-come-lately can issue a few press releases and scores of minions bury every trace of the original. Wolfram Alpha works from a pool of vetted resources and that is a major difference from Yahoo and Google.
Oracle and MySQL are two different markets, anyway.
It always bothers me when people make this comment, because it assumes things always will be that way. Oracle and mysql are different markets, but does it always have to be? Well, now that oracle owns mysql, yes. But if it wasn't so, mysql could have evolved into an oracle competitor with time. And that is so with a lot of products and markets. They are in two different markets now, and oracle might not kill it off, but we know that oracle is unlikely to develop it to rival their proprietary product, whereas before, any outcome of mysql's future would have been possilbe.
Oracle and Berkeley DB were in different markets, too. Look what happened.
Work on Berkeley DB may still be going on, but the tool is far less visible in the community.
Two errors with that claim. First, as others have posted, Bing is a re-branding of MSN Live or whatever it was called. Second, it is a response to Wolfram Alpha which, unlike the marketing initiative from MS, is something new. MS has a pattern of re-naming failed products like Live to hide bad reviews or avoid the downside to brand recognition.
Apply the lessons learned elsewhere. When you see a product or service from MS spewed in a media blitz, especially one touted as being new, look around for the target of MS' copying and if that copy is a re-tread of an earlier, failed product. In this case, the original being copied is Wolfram's Alpha.
(damn that web 2.0 intertface. hit the wrong option on keybounce)
I switched back down to it because my early-2007 Intel iMac Core 2 Duo runs like shit on Leopard. There was nothing on 10.5's features list that I really cared about all that much, nothing I've missed since switching, and Tiger runs pretty much everything I use anyway. Oh, and it's not a slow piece of shit. That helps.
I didn't notice anything worth the upgrade either. Some of the upgrades actually did improve performance, but not this last one. We'll see about 10.6. There are probably a lot of 10.4 users out there.
ClamWin, ClamAV are fine for remedial action. The best remedy, as in all things, is prevention and that can be accomplished by moving to systems that are resistant to malware. Here even the consumer unions fall flat on their faces and fail to mention the Linux distros. Most mainstream distros are years ahead of Windows as far as ease of use, maintenance and speed. The main weakness of real systems (non-M$) is that Web 2.0 script crap.
Here you sound like a troll. There are no sources for any of your claims and they are false.
What? W^X doesn't have anything to do with partitions. And W^X is a software way of doing what is done in windows now with NX bit in hardware. It's not 2006 anymore.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing. M$ must be running out of money for real trolls.
The correct answer was: partition mount options include a choice of read-only or read-write, and exec or noexec. So, you can make a partion with executables that is read-only. Or you can make a data partition that is read-write but disallows execution of programs. nodev is another useful option to be aware of.
On the other hand, I know plenty of people running active commercial anti-virus software that's been plagued with virii.
The reason?
1. No Awareness.
2. No Patching.
3. No Prudence. 4. Running Windows
There. Fixed that for you.
Worm/Virus are spread so fast these days, the AV software just can't catch up in time to prevent the infection and in quite a few cases, the Worm/Virus disables the AV software, making it more difficult (in some cases impossible) to remove the infection without booting to another OS (Live OS from a CD/USB Drive).
Except that spreading fast is nothing new. Most worms hit peak a few hours sooner than the average time it takes for the AV makers to create and push out a new profile.
That's why I use ClamWin for occasional scanning.
ClamWin, ClamAV are fine for remedial action. The best remedy, as in all things, is prevention and that can be accomplished by moving to systems that are resistant to malware. Here even the consumer unions fall flat on their faces and fail to mention the Linux distros. Most mainstream distros are years ahead of Windows as far as ease of use, maintenance and speed. The main weakness of real systems (non-M$) is that Web 2.0 script crap.
If someone wanted to make a really hardened desktop or netbook appliance, the following steps can be taken:
Split up the file system hierarchy and partitions W^X
Don't run the regular user with any admin privileges or the ability to escalate to admin.
I wrote the word appliance above, because with extreme settings like that, you are not going to want to try to add, remove or radically reconfigure any packages.
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
Several European banks had their asses handed back to them, too, last spring for trying to shove their Windows-uberalles ideology into their core activities. For several months it was (maybe still is) practically impossible to do basic banking. People could go into others accounts, money from their own accounts could not be transfered, money could not be paid into their accounts. It was a hardship for many small businesses that were stupid enough to put their business accounts at a bank where ideology trumps technology. When your own customers can't pay you, money becomes a problem. There, too, the problem lay squarely on the attempt to use MS.NET instead of something workable. It's just a half-assed copy of Java locked into one vendor. After the banks getting bad press for weeks, there was a vague statement made about the company that takes care of the network, but not tying that statement to the ongoing outages.
It's not important to laugh at MS for making crap products, it's important to not use them. The problem with MS products has been around as long as the company itself so it's not like so-called technical 'experts' can claim ignorance or any other excuse. Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products.
Technology might be a matter of choice, but as the late US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, has said, the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, that choice does not include the right to screw things up beyond belief for everyone else. It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here? The damage is easy to add up and it's even easier to remove the cause. A side benefit from the cleanup would be a restoration of the freemarket and the usual subsequent boom of economic activity.
When I read this my first impression, though admittedly not an informed one, was "you mean people pay to use FAT?"
No they don't. At least, nobody I've ever heard of. Also, do US patents apply to imported software? Say, I download OpenBSD from [insert patent-free country here], then I use that to build my own product, am I infringing?
Yes. Because patents do not have anything to do with distribution. That is governed by copyright. So it does not matter if you buy it, download it or write it your self. If it does what is described in the patent, you are infringing.
As far as 'little people' paying to use FAT? Not directly. Its not worth the time or the bad PR to hunt up every end-user and shake them down for some FAT money. Their money is aggregated by device manufacturers. Cameras, video players, mobile phones, etc all use FAT. It's easier to shake down a few dozen manufacturers with deep pockets than a few hundreds of thousands of end users.
MS is not the one perpetuating the attacks, or causing the damage...
Re-read the post: those who promote and profit from known defective technology are at fault. That spreads out the blame to include all those Certified Gold Partners and M$ monkeys who go around posing as IT experts. In fact, the licensing partially takes M$ off the hook by stating that it is made available "as-is" and without claims to suitability for any particular task. They know their products can't cut it.
The fault also lies on all those Certified Gold Partners and M$ monkeys who go around posing as IT experts who end up promoting M$ products in place of suitable technologies. In some ways, more of the fault is on them because of the licensing. It is these "experts" that were supposed to choose between competing technologies and choose safe, low-maintenance, low-cost options to boost productivity. What happens then once they start knowingly and consitently doing the opposite?
Look at melamine. It's safe and legal to make, distribute and put into product. Melamine is not safe or legal in food. M$ products might be fine for some home gaming, if one has thousands to put into good hardware and is willing to do just about anything to avoid getting a real gaming console. However, replacing working, mission critical systems with ones known not to work does call into question what kind of legal action needs to be taken against the actors.
Willful negligence, gross negligence and criminal mischief -- if the deeds are with physical product, versus "oops, sorry, nuttinwecuddadonaboddit" for software? Oh, come on and join the 21st century. The "with a computer" clause doesn't magically absolve people of criminal wrong doing.
Look, for the first round of clean up no "cyberwarriors" are needed. We just had yet another article about how single city, for a single Windows worm, lost millions due to clean up.
In that case it lost over $2.5 million, including rewarding the designers of the security flaws to the tune of $1 million.
Knocking down a water tower would probably cost less to repair. So why are not the defense and law enforcement agencies stepping in here?
It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, or our hospitals. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. It could be as simple as organizing a large scale round up under the RICO Act.
From there we can go on to hardening the net with IPv6 and dealing with the usual intelligence / counter-intelligence activities. But the first step, before we can stop the economic bleeding is to deal with the cause of the problem: the people who promote and profit from known defective technology.
I think that's a bit glib. At least a significant portion of the Blackwater people, at least the ones actually on the ground, are just former soldiers who traded up to an employer who would fail at trying to save money by not giving proper armor or support.
There fixed that for you. Bleating the mantra privatized == good may get you karma from various politcal groups astroturfing here, but doesn't match with reality. Reality is that arrangments are better or worse on a case by case basis. In the case of Blackwater, its far, far more expensive for the country to outsource to 'Backwater' mecrenaries than to maintain their own, comparatively competent, comparatively low-cost units:
Blackwater rentacops couldn't handle regular army so they cover all the "safe" zones for
tightwad company with political connections and get their asses handed back to them. That's epic fail all around: less efficient, more expensive, bad press.
In this fraternity we all sit back and mock the ridiculous claims and statement in their FUD and sales - but at the end of the day they are quietly winning the war with one ill educated person swayed towards their cause after another.
Not all of us sit back, but way too many. It's not important to mock the crap, it is important to not use it and, at this late stage, prevent it completely.
Don't sit back. Hit back. The only place that has effect is the wallet and that's fed by both the software and the data formats. Zero tolerance.
Slashdot Mirror
where exactly is the ps3 a top seller? not here: http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/npd-1108-a.png
M$ "me-too" entry in the console market continues in last place, sixth out of six as of August 2009:
PS2, PSP, and PS3 fluctuate a bit, but Wii keeps climbing albeit not steadily.
The Red Ring o Death we all passed in the stores whenever Xbox was on display is only minor compared to the quality and duration of the eipc failure. The M$ console hardware failures have been around forever, on about as long as the unit has been on the market. It's not just bricked units and years of scotched discs. It's been four or five years of property damage and even occasional injury and death, with fires in many countries.
But, hey, if defective M$ hardware burns down your family, it's your fautlt. To be fair M$ is right about that: The buyers were warned in prior to purchase by the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. C'mon, M$ hardware is as poor as M$ software. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3.
Games are optional. Other activities are not. At some point families will ask the courts to ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C#-based gewgaws or for-novelty-purposes-only systems like XP on the desktop or server instead of functinal Java- or Python-based applications or systems actually designed for a networked environemnt, such as Solaris and Linux. The Microsofot brand is a warning, those who ignore that warning and deploy the product anyway are in the wrong. Multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter. Who goes to the gas chamber, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense for any politically motivated group, even one with heavy marketing and lobbying.
Seeing as how heat is the predominate cause of these machines giving up the ghost (whether it be heat killing components, heat changes warping solder, or cheap solder being affected by predictable heat), it would be interesting to compare the failure rate of small form factor computers, laptops, or pre-built gaming computers.
We've all known for a long time what happens when you let a computer run for 3 years and let the case fans get caked up...
It's not just the quantity of the epic failure of the M$ console, it's the quality and duration of the failure. It's been four or five years of property damage and even injury and death.
To be fair, the buyers were warned: The boxes did have the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3. It's a can of worms to be sure, just wait till courts ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C# or XP on the desktop or server instead of Solaris / Linux or Java / Python. Who goes to the gas chamber for multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense.
But it's easy to put a nuclear reactor in a ship, and not so easy to put one in a fighter jet.
Brett
Depends on how long you want the pilots and maintenance crews to live. ;)
I do remember the excitement we all felt when Salsa was officially the fastest-growing condiment in North America. Heady days, those.
Salsa tastings were trendy events then. It's slowed down. The HotHotHot web shop has been offline for a long time and hopefully will be up and running again.
Sounds like you're a liar, alternately a shill. Based on several hundred first and second hand contacts, not counting schools, tech support calls go away after upgrading parents or non-technical users to Ubuntu or OS X. Really. If you failed to give a quick orientation, then you'll get a few days of 'how do I' calls. After that it's smooth sailing. Maintenance is a major savings once you leave M$ products behind.
A hidden savings is found with the end users. The end users are more productive as well, once you leave M$ products behind. Interestingly, even crusty, old KDE 3.5 is easier to use than XP, even for those with a Windows legacy.
YMMV, but I find the above based on several hundred first and second hand contacts, not counting schools.
The FCC has no interest in protecting individual rights or promoting a competitive market. They are there to sell off public assets to private corporations, and enforce rules and fines to ensure societal conformity to the morals of politically important voting blocs...
Weeks after taking on a Microsofter as FCC Managing Director the FCC was used to go after Apple.
The FCC's action or inaction on this will play out as to what role and relation Comcast is having with M$ and if M$ executives consider Comcast a problem.
Confidentiality is maintained if the documents are encrypted prior to upload.
This investigation has been brought to you by Google.
And in unrelated news, Bill Gate's assistant and strategist and MS exec for 13 years has been appointed managing director of the FCC.
There's more where that came from: Microsoft revenue declines 17% in fiscal Q4. Notice that the spinmeisters are talking about revenue declining. Profit, if there is any, is hit even harder especially if that profit is based on pump-n-dump of MSFT stock.
Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use Internet Explorer.
Har! That's a joke, right?
Nope. It's a troll, a distraction, from the old troll Bonch.
The illegal part in the EU and the US comes in by MS illegal bundling MSIE with its desktop OS monopoly. MS executives have been illegally leveraging the desktop monopoly to cause problems in the audio/video markets, then productivity software markets and the browser markets. Adding a second, third or fourth browser to the mix does nothing to address the bundling or illegal tying. Only removing MSIE from the OEM distributions of desktop systems will do that. And that's something Bill's astroturfers try to distract from.
M$ boosters and users are causing harm to your nation, your economy. Where is your national defense? How many have to lose their jobs first?
Because usually, this gets you shot. And I think you can be as cool a l33t h4x0r as you want. If you are a stain on the walls, it does not matter, does it? ^^
I say, if the government would sign something, stating that they would get away with it, with some UN guarantee backing it... *Then* you could see people attempting this.
Oh, and back when they said it, the security of the internet was a complete joke compared to now. One botnet trojan/virus from today could wipe the whole net from back then without problems. :)
Not if you add "with a computer" to the activity. Look at a group we see injecting code known to be unsafe into airports, hospitals, schools and military sites. Not even an eyebrow is being raised, let alone a rifle scope. The military has been sitting on its hands while this group brings the infrastructure and parts of the economy to its knees. MSFT racketeering causes billions of dollars of damage each quarter.
Cue the elves / orcs analogies. MSFTers appear to hate innovation so much that they cannot even tolerate it in other companies. That could make MSFT eligiable to be classified as hate-group and its minions thus guilty of hate-crimes for their activities.
Micro$haft marketeers saw Wolfram Alpha and revved up the astroturfers to all but drown out discussion of it. It's amazing that a johnny-come-lately can issue a few press releases and scores of minions bury every trace of the original. Wolfram Alpha works from a pool of vetted resources and that is a major difference from Yahoo and Google.
Oracle and MySQL are two different markets, anyway.
It always bothers me when people make this comment, because it assumes things always will be that way. Oracle and mysql are different markets, but does it always have to be? Well, now that oracle owns mysql, yes. But if it wasn't so, mysql could have evolved into an oracle competitor with time. And that is so with a lot of products and markets. They are in two different markets now, and oracle might not kill it off, but we know that oracle is unlikely to develop it to rival their proprietary product, whereas before, any outcome of mysql's future would have been possilbe.
Oracle and Berkeley DB were in different markets, too. Look what happened.
Work on Berkeley DB may still be going on, but the tool is far less visible in the community.
Two errors with that claim. First, as others have posted, Bing is a re-branding of MSN Live or whatever it was called. Second, it is a response to Wolfram Alpha which, unlike the marketing initiative from MS, is something new. MS has a pattern of re-naming failed products like Live to hide bad reviews or avoid the downside to brand recognition.
Apply the lessons learned elsewhere. When you see a product or service from MS spewed in a media blitz, especially one touted as being new, look around for the target of MS' copying and if that copy is a re-tread of an earlier, failed product. In this case, the original being copied is Wolfram's Alpha.
(damn that web 2.0 intertface. hit the wrong option on keybounce)
I switched back down to it because my early-2007 Intel iMac Core 2 Duo runs like shit on Leopard. There was nothing on 10.5's features list that I really cared about all that much, nothing I've missed since switching, and Tiger runs pretty much everything I use anyway. Oh, and it's not a slow piece of shit. That helps.
I didn't notice anything worth the upgrade either. Some of the upgrades actually did improve performance, but not this last one. We'll see about 10.6. There are probably a lot of 10.4 users out there.
ClamWin, ClamAV are fine for remedial action. The best remedy, as in all things, is prevention and that can be accomplished by moving to systems that are resistant to malware. Here even the consumer unions fall flat on their faces and fail to mention the Linux distros. Most mainstream distros are years ahead of Windows as far as ease of use, maintenance and speed. The main weakness of real systems (non-M$) is that Web 2.0 script crap.
Here you sound like a troll. There are no sources for any of your claims and they are false.
Here are the sources, try any one of them:
XSS? Search Google.
Note, different than Windows, easier to use and worlds easier to modify and customize. KDE passed XP in usability years ago. It's not 1996 anymore.
What? W^X doesn't have anything to do with partitions. And W^X is a software way of doing what is done in windows now with NX bit in hardware. It's not 2006 anymore.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing. M$ must be running out of money for real trolls.
The correct answer was: partition mount options include a choice of read-only or read-write, and exec or noexec. So, you can make a partion with executables that is read-only. Or you can make a data partition that is read-write but disallows execution of programs. nodev is another useful option to be aware of.
...
On the other hand, I know plenty of people running active commercial anti-virus software that's been plagued with virii.
The reason?
1. No Awareness.
2. No Patching.
3. No Prudence.
4. Running Windows
There. Fixed that for you.
Worm/Virus are spread so fast these days, the AV software just can't catch up in time to prevent the infection and in quite a few cases, the Worm/Virus disables the AV software, making it more difficult (in some cases impossible) to remove the infection without booting to another OS (Live OS from a CD/USB Drive).
Except that spreading fast is nothing new. Most worms hit peak a few hours sooner than the average time it takes for the AV makers to create and push out a new profile.
That's why I use ClamWin for occasional scanning.
ClamWin, ClamAV are fine for remedial action. The best remedy, as in all things, is prevention and that can be accomplished by moving to systems that are resistant to malware. Here even the consumer unions fall flat on their faces and fail to mention the Linux distros. Most mainstream distros are years ahead of Windows as far as ease of use, maintenance and speed. The main weakness of real systems (non-M$) is that Web 2.0 script crap.
If someone wanted to make a really hardened desktop or netbook appliance, the following steps can be taken:
I wrote the word appliance above, because with extreme settings like that, you are not going to want to try to add, remove or radically reconfigure any packages.
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
Several European banks had their asses handed back to them, too, last spring for trying to shove their Windows-uberalles ideology into their core activities. For several months it was (maybe still is) practically impossible to do basic banking. People could go into others accounts, money from their own accounts could not be transfered, money could not be paid into their accounts. It was a hardship for many small businesses that were stupid enough to put their business accounts at a bank where ideology trumps technology. When your own customers can't pay you, money becomes a problem. There, too, the problem lay squarely on the attempt to use MS .NET instead of something workable. It's just a half-assed copy of Java locked into one vendor. After the banks getting bad press for weeks, there was a vague statement made about the company that takes care of the network, but not tying that statement to the ongoing outages.
It's not important to laugh at MS for making crap products, it's important to not use them. The problem with MS products has been around as long as the company itself so it's not like so-called technical 'experts' can claim ignorance or any other excuse. Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products.
Technology might be a matter of choice, but as the late US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, has said, the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, that choice does not include the right to screw things up beyond belief for everyone else. It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here? The damage is easy to add up and it's even easier to remove the cause. A side benefit from the cleanup would be a restoration of the freemarket and the usual subsequent boom of economic activity.
When I read this my first impression, though admittedly not an informed one, was "you mean people pay to use FAT?"
No they don't. At least, nobody I've ever heard of. Also, do US patents apply to imported software? Say, I download OpenBSD from [insert patent-free country here], then I use that to build my own product, am I infringing?
Yes. Because patents do not have anything to do with distribution. That is governed by copyright. So it does not matter if you buy it, download it or write it your self. If it does what is described in the patent, you are infringing.
As far as 'little people' paying to use FAT? Not directly. Its not worth the time or the bad PR to hunt up every end-user and shake them down for some FAT money. Their money is aggregated by device manufacturers. Cameras, video players, mobile phones, etc all use FAT. It's easier to shake down a few dozen manufacturers with deep pockets than a few hundreds of thousands of end users.
MS is not the one perpetuating the attacks, or causing the damage...
Re-read the post: those who promote and profit from known defective technology are at fault. That spreads out the blame to include all those Certified Gold Partners and M$ monkeys who go around posing as IT experts. In fact, the licensing partially takes M$ off the hook by stating that it is made available "as-is" and without claims to suitability for any particular task. They know their products can't cut it.
The fault also lies on all those Certified Gold Partners and M$ monkeys who go around posing as IT experts who end up promoting M$ products in place of suitable technologies. In some ways, more of the fault is on them because of the licensing. It is these "experts" that were supposed to choose between competing technologies and choose safe, low-maintenance, low-cost options to boost productivity. What happens then once they start knowingly and consitently doing the opposite?
Look at melamine. It's safe and legal to make, distribute and put into product. Melamine is not safe or legal in food. M$ products might be fine for some home gaming, if one has thousands to put into good hardware and is willing to do just about anything to avoid getting a real gaming console. However, replacing working, mission critical systems with ones known not to work does call into question what kind of legal action needs to be taken against the actors.
Willful negligence, gross negligence and criminal mischief -- if the deeds are with physical product, versus "oops, sorry, nuttinwecuddadonaboddit" for software? Oh, come on and join the 21st century. The "with a computer" clause doesn't magically absolve people of criminal wrong doing.
Look, for the first round of clean up no "cyberwarriors" are needed. We just had yet another article about how single city, for a single Windows worm, lost millions due to clean up. In that case it lost over $2.5 million, including rewarding the designers of the security flaws to the tune of $1 million. Knocking down a water tower would probably cost less to repair. So why are not the defense and law enforcement agencies stepping in here?
It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, or our hospitals. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. It could be as simple as organizing a large scale round up under the RICO Act.
From there we can go on to hardening the net with IPv6 and dealing with the usual intelligence / counter-intelligence activities. But the first step, before we can stop the economic bleeding is to deal with the cause of the problem: the people who promote and profit from known defective technology.
Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads.
Except you want to get paid for banners especially when you got the most visitors.
Control of the ad server gives economic control over the sites themselves. "Sorry 'bout that."
I think that's a bit glib. At least a significant portion of the Blackwater people, at least the ones actually on the ground, are just former soldiers who traded up to an employer who would fail at trying to save money by not giving proper armor or support.
There fixed that for you. Bleating the mantra privatized == good may get you karma from various politcal groups astroturfing here, but doesn't match with reality. Reality is that arrangments are better or worse on a case by case basis. In the case of Blackwater, its far, far more expensive for the country to outsource to 'Backwater' mecrenaries than to maintain their own, comparatively competent, comparatively low-cost units:
Blackwater rentacops couldn't handle regular army so they cover all the "safe" zones for tightwad company with political connections and get their asses handed back to them. That's epic fail all around: less efficient, more expensive, bad press.
In this fraternity we all sit back and mock the ridiculous claims and statement in their FUD and sales - but at the end of the day they are quietly winning the war with one ill educated person swayed towards their cause after another.
Not all of us sit back, but way too many. It's not important to mock the crap, it is important to not use it and, at this late stage, prevent it completely.
Don't sit back. Hit back. The only place that has effect is the wallet and that's fed by both the software and the data formats. Zero tolerance.