Say wing-ding looping and sorting method 'B' is patented and, not knowing anything about it, I create it myself. Should I check my code and all code I write to ensure that it is not already patented?
Yes, that's exactly what you should do if you intend to release publically. To not do so opens you up to attacks from dingbats like SCO.
Can someone answer a question about patents in general? Is there any sort of "personal" or "fair use" provisions?
That is, if I built my own mousetrap, using a well-known patented design, and used it only to catch mice in my basement, and never tried to sell or otherwise distribute it for profit, am I still in violation? Can I be sued? If so, how would damages be assessed?
I see that as a parallel to the guy who writes a piece of code for his own use, to "scratch an itch" as it were..
Why? So you can be bled for consultancy fees and feasibility studies every year? So every new government can piss away millions converting the whole city to their favorite software package?
Cities routinely seek out multi-year contracts. We have client sites that've been using our software for 20 years or more.
You don't sign a 10 year contract with someone you don't think will be around in 10 years. Maybe thats what this is about.
Maybe some people can see the writing on the wall. That the "OSS community" will be assimilated by IBM. RedHat and other linux vendors will become IBM affiliates or subsidiaries. One thing's for certain; the fragmented linux server market will consolidate. And IBM will be right there to make sure it consolidates into something it can profit from.
Maybe a definate MS lock-in was preferential to the mere idea of another IBM lock-in. Maybe governments and businesses have dealt with IBM as sole source vendor before, and it left a bad taste in their mouth.
Hell, I know how much money and effort went into getting out from under IBM's thumb at the last company I worked at. All that System/36 shit. IBM's forced migration path to an AS/400. That company chose MS over IBM too. We rewrote all the old code, moved all the data to SQL Server, etc..
Having "linux" associated with "IBM" is a very, very, very bad thing. To almost anyone who's been in the industry more than 10 years or so, IBM is the "big evil corporation" that you all think MicroSoft is. They still see MS as the upstart company that broke IBM's stranglehold on business computing.
Yeah, they might sell some sort of "unlimited" On Demand viewing package one day.
Of course, it'll be "unlimited" just like my "unlimited" cablemodem, that is, arbitrarily limited.
How long until they send me some threatening legalese letter because I streamed all the ATHF shows back-to-back, and they assume its because I'm recording them all for my personal library. Maybe that's what I'm doing, maybe I'm having a marathon ATHF party with my friends.
Hell, OD uses up bandwidth. How long till my service is disconnected mid-month because I'm "abusing" it by letting my family watch too much TV. Apparently I let them use too much internet and had to call and apologize to my corporate masters at Comcast for the transgression.
The old-world media empires will never "get it" and will try to shoehorn technology into their business model, rather than try to come up with newer business models based around technology.
Most people wouldnt send back a free device, just to spend 300 bucks on another device that does the same thing, plus an additional monthly fee. Most people dont give a shit about the "thumbs up" button. They just dont want to miss Outback Jack.
Tivo has a lot of work to do if they want to sell one to me, for instance. I just dont see "let our cheesy 'switch(genre){};' algorithm tell you what shows you like to watch" thing as the killer app.
Why do we have to "save" TiVo? Why do we give a shit if TiVo is "saved"? What's with these pet companies that slashbots love so much. Really. Just because they used linux in the device?
What's so great about paying a monthly fee to have a device phone home and upload marketting data based on my viewing habits?
I say, if other people can make a cheaper device, one that just records and plays back TV, that doesn't phone home, and doesn't have any service fees to just use it - they deserve my business.
I just want to record and watch TV. I dont want to rate shows, or have a device pretend to tell me what I want to watch. I know what I want to watch, and I know what time it's on.
For On Demand to work, they have to eliminate the pay-per-view model. Comcast is unlikely to ever let that go, which is a shame.
Forget first run movies, forget the hundreds of specialty channels. Give me the regular gammut of channels, put all the specialty stuff on On Demand. No need for 5 "home improvement" channels, if I wanted to watch some episodes of "this old House" where they tackled a project like my own, I could.
But I never paid to watch it on PBS, and if I was going to pay to watch it, I'd order the DVD collection. I (like many others) don't like spending money on stuff I don't get to keep. There's probably some human nature psychology crap to explain that.
Thing is, their business model isnt based on giving customers what they want. It's based on bundling a dozen useless channels with one good one, and making you pay for all of them.
Digital cable - to them - is nothing about picture quality or cool new features, it's all about requiring me to pay for each TV in my home.
On Demand isn't about cool technology, it's about making me pay every time I watch a show.
Meh. TV is dying, the cable industry is killing it. I was reading an article about how book sales are climbing, and it was alluding to the fact that corporations are killing other forms of popular entertainment (TV, movies, radio, video games), and more people are turning back to books. Which, ultimately is a good thing, I suppose.
I didn't know "genious" on slashdot was equated to "how much frivolous IP you claim". That Darl McBride guy must be the greatest mind ever to walk the earth!
MSFT is on a much talked about patent-filing binge. With each new application, they become "smarter".
Now run out and buy a new and improved TiVo, with all the old "phone home and spy on you in the middle of the night" functionality you remember, but now augmented with Hyper-X-Treme advertisement redirection!
That device was stupid for so many reasons. First of all, most TVs dont have a line level audio out. And the ones that do, when you connect to it, disables the TVs internal speakers. So now you can't hear TV unless you redirect it through those cheapass lil speakers on your computer desk.
All so you can put ads for the same products being advertised on TV on the screen...
What was the thing where they'd broadcast URLs with the programming? I remember WebTV for windows could snag those URLs, and I thought it was a cool idea (some documentary on Discovery Channel could give me a bunch of links to good sites on ancient egypt). Or if there was a link to relevant subject matter for every Jeapordy! question (answer). That'd be cool too.
Only time I ever saw it used was when a Ford commercial came on, I got a link to ford.com.
TiVo has a shitload of patents on it's interface and phone-home methods and whatnot.
You cant patent "device for recording TV digitally", since those devices have existed since the 50s. You can only patent the method. Someone else can come up with a different method (different looking interface and remote, maybe even a less invasive phone-home spying scheme).
Build in a delay? You mean in all the open source mail software thats used?
Surely noone would be smart enough to open the sendmail sourcecode and comment out the wait() lines.
All these schemes that rely on your computer "wasting time" to stop spam are silly.
I know, we can stop the spread of warez by making all file serving protocols automagically cap themselves at 2kbit or so. HTTP, FTP, P2P apps.. It's an awesome plan!
Wait I got a better one! We all go back to 300 baud dial-up modems. The ones you hand-dial on an old-timey rotary phone and then stick the handset onto the acoustic coupler. That's the ticket! What an awesome anti-spam plan. If you make the internet utterly fucking useless, all the spammers and bad guys will stop using it!
All ethernet technologies will be banned, computers will be networked with multiplexed RS-232 cards, with a hardware limit of 19,200 baud. Think about it, if a machine got infected on your "network", it wouldnt be a big deal, since your network couldn't possible contain more than a dozen nodes anyways. And it would take 20 minutes to "spread" to the next machine.
Actually all my sarcastic schmes are more pallatable to me than letting IBM jam their "trusted" hardware into my case. I dont want TCPA, not from Microsoft, and not from "our benevolent friends" at Apple or IBM.
So you want industry controlled crypto hardware in your machine that you have no conrol over? That is TCPA/Palladium?
Because thats exactly what that IBM board in the box is.
Guess that's how you sell Palladium to the slashdot crowd. Tell them it will "stop spam" by having your computer to a whole lot of calculatin'.
This doesn't even solve the real spam problem, all that wasted bandwidth. This is just another method of filtering, one that wastes a lot of electricity computing the hell out of things that dont need to be computed. The spam still clogs up my pipe.
Except that spammers have legions of pwned windows machines that can do the sums for 'em, or under this system, collect RPOW tokens for the spammers use.
Frankly, few companies would be willing to piss away the cash on the extra hardware for this system, and the idea of wasting all that power on all these computations, just for the sake of doing the computations, makes me cringe a bit.
So spammers spam each other (or themselves from a different host) and have an endless supply of RPOW tokens. No problems solved.
Noone's going to install dedicated IBM crypto hardware in their mailservers. No company is going to invest big bucks in a mailserver just so it can run 100% CPU utilization all the time for no good reason. That costs actual real world money, and continues to cost in power usage.
Besides, I thought we didn't want that kind of "secure" hardware in our machines. We don't want it when it's called Palladium or TCPA, at least.
The only use the article gives that makes sense to me is that of "play money for internet games". That'd work. An imaginary solution to an imaginary problem.
So basically, this serves up encrypted blobs of crap that have no meaning other than you can assume the server spent a little time encrypting up the blobs of crap..
And a few mentions of what it "could" be used for, but of course it wont be.
So basically we have another neat solution out in search of a problem. That explains the lack of any "what the fuck is it?" verbage in the article summary. It really isn't anything.
The link to the email? Ok, he has a box with some fancy IBM crypto co-proc in it. That clears things up.
Or his actual server, the one that's completely inaccessable?
20 bucks says the article submitter doesn't even know what this is. He just came across it and figured "bet thats tech sounding enough to get me some slashdot karma".
What problem does this solve? Spam? Hacking? Windows vulnerabilities? Will this put Linux on the desktop? Does this even have anything to do with linux?/. editors don't even know what this is. That's why the story has regular/. colors and wasn't crammed into one of the "sections". Is it a game? Something to do with IT? Anything about how much MSFT sucks and how awesome Apple is in the article? This the new dual screen gameboy from Nintendo? Will I get faster Doom 3 frame rates?
I know there were tons of software descramblers for Nargavision, or whatever that was called.
Can a digital cable signal be decrypted? How strong is the encryption? As old as it is, I'd imagine the first digital set top boxes couldn't have had too much horsepower, so the scheme must be relatively simple to decode that much data on-the-fly..
Could "decoders" (password hashes?) be bought and downloaded from the cable company?
Why can't this happen, linux "adopts" or "implements" Windows driver model, so that Windows drivers for devices like this can be installed and used?
I know some of this exists for the wireless networking stuff, and nVidia and ATi's linux efforts are pretty much recompiles of the windows drivers..
Hell, even forget Windows driver model.. Come up with a new, universal model. Hardware companies only need to write and test one driver which you go ahead and use under Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/X, whatever..
Thats my idea anyways. Something to take the world one step closer to my dream where the OS installed on your machine doesn't mean shit, since they all implement the same API's, run the same binaries, and use the same drivers. Less glory for the kernel hackers, perhaps.
This is what bothers me about linux' monolithic approach. It's like NIH syndrome to the extreme. Every driver for every piece of hardware has to be rewritten by scratch and approved by Linus to make it into the kernel. It's a longer process than submitting your drivers to MSFT to be "digitally signed" and stuck on Windows Update.
As for this card, there's likely proprietary trade secrets and bullshit in there and the specs will never be released. They're probably under contract to enforce the "no copy" bit and macrovision output and all that BS. That stuff could be changed in an OSS driver, so that driver can't exist. That's why no TV out from ATi for linux - legally they have to ensure that anytime a DVD is played, macrovision on the TV out is enabled..
I thought you said he used a UNIX program?
on
Word Up
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· Score: 2, Funny
Quoth the article: I responded with GEY for 33 to go ahead 371-353. I have no idea what GEY means, in case you are wondering.
Re:It's not just the shady companies
on
The Spyware Inferno
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Thats fine for a service thats started/stopped like all other services in the services panel.
The parent poster (and me too) are sick of every application in the world thinking it needs to stick another icon in my task bar. Another point of failure to bring down my entire desktop.
If you're starting your process in my task bar, it starts when I log in, and has my priveliges, nothing to do with Administrative stuff.. That would be a service, not a task bar "helper app".
Right now I've got them down there for Quicktime (what the hell do I need that for? What could I possibly need it for? Apple just wants some free advertising space on my screen), the HotSync software for my smartphone is there too. Again, why? Don't need it, just need a service in the background. ATI stuck one there just in case I needed another way to switch desktop resolutions or color depths. I dont.
The only useful ones in my task bar are the volume one (actually, not so useful since my keyboard has volume controls..) and the Cisco VPN one that tells me that I'm currently not connected.
WinZip puts one there, hell everything puts one there. And they don't belong there. The only reason people jam an icon there is the "advertising" value. WinZip wants everybody who sees my screen to know I have WinZip.
Re:Makes Open Source More Attractive
on
The Spyware Inferno
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And these windows users downloaded the source for 7-zip and firefox and compiled them themselves?
If they didn't, what makes these precompiled exe's any more trustworthy than the originals?
Anonymous OSS coders are more trustworthy than WinZip Computing or Microsoft?
Why is firefox.exe any "safer" than iexplore.exe from a "someone might have compiled in some bad shit" point of view?
Frankly, common sense would have me lean the other way. At least if WinZip or MSFT compiled in malware, I'd have someone to hold accountable (by which I mean sue/boycott/call and hangup on).
Slashdot Mirror
Say wing-ding looping and sorting method 'B' is patented and, not knowing anything about it, I create it myself. Should I check my code and all code I write to ensure that it is not already patented?
Yes, that's exactly what you should do if you intend to release publically. To not do so opens you up to attacks from dingbats like SCO.
Can someone answer a question about patents in general? Is there any sort of "personal" or "fair use" provisions?
That is, if I built my own mousetrap, using a well-known patented design, and used it only to catch mice in my basement, and never tried to sell or otherwise distribute it for profit, am I still in violation? Can I be sued? If so, how would damages be assessed?
I see that as a parallel to the guy who writes a piece of code for his own use, to "scratch an itch" as it were..
Why? So you can be bled for consultancy fees and feasibility studies every year? So every new government can piss away millions converting the whole city to their favorite software package?
Cities routinely seek out multi-year contracts. We have client sites that've been using our software for 20 years or more.
You don't sign a 10 year contract with someone you don't think will be around in 10 years. Maybe thats what this is about.
Maybe some people can see the writing on the wall. That the "OSS community" will be assimilated by IBM. RedHat and other linux vendors will become IBM affiliates or subsidiaries. One thing's for certain; the fragmented linux server market will consolidate. And IBM will be right there to make sure it consolidates into something it can profit from.
Maybe a definate MS lock-in was preferential to the mere idea of another IBM lock-in. Maybe governments and businesses have dealt with IBM as sole source vendor before, and it left a bad taste in their mouth.
Hell, I know how much money and effort went into getting out from under IBM's thumb at the last company I worked at. All that System/36 shit. IBM's forced migration path to an AS/400. That company chose MS over IBM too. We rewrote all the old code, moved all the data to SQL Server, etc..
Having "linux" associated with "IBM" is a very, very, very bad thing. To almost anyone who's been in the industry more than 10 years or so, IBM is the "big evil corporation" that you all think MicroSoft is. They still see MS as the upstart company that broke IBM's stranglehold on business computing.
Yeah, they might sell some sort of "unlimited" On Demand viewing package one day.
Of course, it'll be "unlimited" just like my "unlimited" cablemodem, that is, arbitrarily limited.
How long until they send me some threatening legalese letter because I streamed all the ATHF shows back-to-back, and they assume its because I'm recording them all for my personal library. Maybe that's what I'm doing, maybe I'm having a marathon ATHF party with my friends.
Hell, OD uses up bandwidth. How long till my service is disconnected mid-month because I'm "abusing" it by letting my family watch too much TV. Apparently I let them use too much internet and had to call and apologize to my corporate masters at Comcast for the transgression.
The old-world media empires will never "get it" and will try to shoehorn technology into their business model, rather than try to come up with newer business models based around technology.
Java is a compiled language. Oh wait, I see what you're saying... A compiled program can be just as slow (or slower) than an interpreted one.
Yeah, Java really drove that point home.
Thats fine for you.
Most people wouldnt send back a free device, just to spend 300 bucks on another device that does the same thing, plus an additional monthly fee. Most people dont give a shit about the "thumbs up" button. They just dont want to miss Outback Jack.
Tivo has a lot of work to do if they want to sell one to me, for instance. I just dont see "let our cheesy 'switch(genre){};' algorithm tell you what shows you like to watch" thing as the killer app.
Why do we have to "save" TiVo? Why do we give a shit if TiVo is "saved"? What's with these pet companies that slashbots love so much. Really. Just because they used linux in the device?
What's so great about paying a monthly fee to have a device phone home and upload marketting data based on my viewing habits?
I say, if other people can make a cheaper device, one that just records and plays back TV, that doesn't phone home, and doesn't have any service fees to just use it - they deserve my business.
I just want to record and watch TV. I dont want to rate shows, or have a device pretend to tell me what I want to watch. I know what I want to watch, and I know what time it's on.
For On Demand to work, they have to eliminate the pay-per-view model. Comcast is unlikely to ever let that go, which is a shame.
Forget first run movies, forget the hundreds of specialty channels. Give me the regular gammut of channels, put all the specialty stuff on On Demand. No need for 5 "home improvement" channels, if I wanted to watch some episodes of "this old House" where they tackled a project like my own, I could.
But I never paid to watch it on PBS, and if I was going to pay to watch it, I'd order the DVD collection. I (like many others) don't like spending money on stuff I don't get to keep. There's probably some human nature psychology crap to explain that.
Thing is, their business model isnt based on giving customers what they want. It's based on bundling a dozen useless channels with one good one, and making you pay for all of them.
Digital cable - to them - is nothing about picture quality or cool new features, it's all about requiring me to pay for each TV in my home.
On Demand isn't about cool technology, it's about making me pay every time I watch a show.
Meh. TV is dying, the cable industry is killing it. I was reading an article about how book sales are climbing, and it was alluding to the fact that corporations are killing other forms of popular entertainment (TV, movies, radio, video games), and more people are turning back to books. Which, ultimately is a good thing, I suppose.
Ya but look at how many patents that guy has!
I didn't know "genious" on slashdot was equated to "how much frivolous IP you claim". That Darl McBride guy must be the greatest mind ever to walk the earth!
MSFT is on a much talked about patent-filing binge. With each new application, they become "smarter".
Not for TiVo or Apple.
Now run out and buy a new and improved TiVo, with all the old "phone home and spy on you in the middle of the night" functionality you remember, but now augmented with Hyper-X-Treme advertisement redirection!
That device was stupid for so many reasons. First of all, most TVs dont have a line level audio out. And the ones that do, when you connect to it, disables the TVs internal speakers. So now you can't hear TV unless you redirect it through those cheapass lil speakers on your computer desk.
All so you can put ads for the same products being advertised on TV on the screen...
What was the thing where they'd broadcast URLs with the programming? I remember WebTV for windows could snag those URLs, and I thought it was a cool idea (some documentary on Discovery Channel could give me a bunch of links to good sites on ancient egypt). Or if there was a link to relevant subject matter for every Jeapordy! question (answer). That'd be cool too.
Only time I ever saw it used was when a Ford commercial came on, I got a link to ford.com.
TiVo has a shitload of patents on it's interface and phone-home methods and whatnot.
You cant patent "device for recording TV digitally", since those devices have existed since the 50s. You can only patent the method. Someone else can come up with a different method (different looking interface and remote, maybe even a less invasive phone-home spying scheme).
Build in a delay? You mean in all the open source mail software thats used?
Surely noone would be smart enough to open the sendmail sourcecode and comment out the wait() lines.
All these schemes that rely on your computer "wasting time" to stop spam are silly.
I know, we can stop the spread of warez by making all file serving protocols automagically cap themselves at 2kbit or so. HTTP, FTP, P2P apps.. It's an awesome plan!
Wait I got a better one! We all go back to 300 baud dial-up modems. The ones you hand-dial on an old-timey rotary phone and then stick the handset onto the acoustic coupler. That's the ticket! What an awesome anti-spam plan. If you make the internet utterly fucking useless, all the spammers and bad guys will stop using it!
All ethernet technologies will be banned, computers will be networked with multiplexed RS-232 cards, with a hardware limit of 19,200 baud. Think about it, if a machine got infected on your "network", it wouldnt be a big deal, since your network couldn't possible contain more than a dozen nodes anyways. And it would take 20 minutes to "spread" to the next machine.
Actually all my sarcastic schmes are more pallatable to me than letting IBM jam their "trusted" hardware into my case. I dont want TCPA, not from Microsoft, and not from "our benevolent friends" at Apple or IBM.
So you want industry controlled crypto hardware in your machine that you have no conrol over? That is TCPA/Palladium?
Because thats exactly what that IBM board in the box is.
Guess that's how you sell Palladium to the slashdot crowd. Tell them it will "stop spam" by having your computer to a whole lot of calculatin'.
This doesn't even solve the real spam problem, all that wasted bandwidth. This is just another method of filtering, one that wastes a lot of electricity computing the hell out of things that dont need to be computed. The spam still clogs up my pipe.
Except that spammers have legions of pwned windows machines that can do the sums for 'em, or under this system, collect RPOW tokens for the spammers use.
Frankly, few companies would be willing to piss away the cash on the extra hardware for this system, and the idea of wasting all that power on all these computations, just for the sake of doing the computations, makes me cringe a bit.
So spammers spam each other (or themselves from a different host) and have an endless supply of RPOW tokens. No problems solved.
Noone's going to install dedicated IBM crypto hardware in their mailservers. No company is going to invest big bucks in a mailserver just so it can run 100% CPU utilization all the time for no good reason. That costs actual real world money, and continues to cost in power usage.
Besides, I thought we didn't want that kind of "secure" hardware in our machines. We don't want it when it's called Palladium or TCPA, at least.
The only use the article gives that makes sense to me is that of "play money for internet games". That'd work. An imaginary solution to an imaginary problem.
So basically, this serves up encrypted blobs of crap that have no meaning other than you can assume the server spent a little time encrypting up the blobs of crap..
And a few mentions of what it "could" be used for, but of course it wont be.
So basically we have another neat solution out in search of a problem. That explains the lack of any "what the fuck is it?" verbage in the article summary. It really isn't anything.
What FA?
/. editors don't even know what this is. That's why the story has regular /. colors and wasn't crammed into one of the "sections". Is it a game? Something to do with IT? Anything about how much MSFT sucks and how awesome Apple is in the article? This the new dual screen gameboy from Nintendo? Will I get faster Doom 3 frame rates?
The link to the email? Ok, he has a box with some fancy IBM crypto co-proc in it. That clears things up.
Or his actual server, the one that's completely inaccessable?
20 bucks says the article submitter doesn't even know what this is. He just came across it and figured "bet thats tech sounding enough to get me some slashdot karma".
What problem does this solve? Spam? Hacking? Windows vulnerabilities? Will this put Linux on the desktop? Does this even have anything to do with linux?
A hashcach POW token?
What does this server "serve" exactly?
I'm not sure submitters know quite what "article summary" means.
What about decrypting it in software?
I know there were tons of software descramblers for Nargavision, or whatever that was called.
Can a digital cable signal be decrypted? How strong is the encryption? As old as it is, I'd imagine the first digital set top boxes couldn't have had too much horsepower, so the scheme must be relatively simple to decode that much data on-the-fly..
Could "decoders" (password hashes?) be bought and downloaded from the cable company?
You aren't going to get HD picture with composite out anyways.. Or are you talking about component cables?
Presumably, if you had a decent HDTV, it'd accept the SVGA from your videocard..
Why can't this happen, linux "adopts" or "implements" Windows driver model, so that Windows drivers for devices like this can be installed and used?
I know some of this exists for the wireless networking stuff, and nVidia and ATi's linux efforts are pretty much recompiles of the windows drivers..
Hell, even forget Windows driver model.. Come up with a new, universal model. Hardware companies only need to write and test one driver which you go ahead and use under Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/X, whatever..
Thats my idea anyways. Something to take the world one step closer to my dream where the OS installed on your machine doesn't mean shit, since they all implement the same API's, run the same binaries, and use the same drivers. Less glory for the kernel hackers, perhaps.
This is what bothers me about linux' monolithic approach. It's like NIH syndrome to the extreme. Every driver for every piece of hardware has to be rewritten by scratch and approved by Linus to make it into the kernel. It's a longer process than submitting your drivers to MSFT to be "digitally signed" and stuck on Windows Update.
As for this card, there's likely proprietary trade secrets and bullshit in there and the specs will never be released. They're probably under contract to enforce the "no copy" bit and macrovision output and all that BS. That stuff could be changed in an OSS driver, so that driver can't exist. That's why no TV out from ATi for linux - legally they have to ensure that anytime a DVD is played, macrovision on the TV out is enabled..
Quoth the article:
I responded with GEY for 33 to go ahead 371-353. I have no idea what GEY means, in case you are wondering.
Thats fine for a service thats started/stopped like all other services in the services panel.
The parent poster (and me too) are sick of every application in the world thinking it needs to stick another icon in my task bar. Another point of failure to bring down my entire desktop.
If you're starting your process in my task bar, it starts when I log in, and has my priveliges, nothing to do with Administrative stuff.. That would be a service, not a task bar "helper app".
Right now I've got them down there for Quicktime (what the hell do I need that for? What could I possibly need it for? Apple just wants some free advertising space on my screen), the HotSync software for my smartphone is there too. Again, why? Don't need it, just need a service in the background. ATI stuck one there just in case I needed another way to switch desktop resolutions or color depths. I dont.
The only useful ones in my task bar are the volume one (actually, not so useful since my keyboard has volume controls..) and the Cisco VPN one that tells me that I'm currently not connected.
WinZip puts one there, hell everything puts one there. And they don't belong there. The only reason people jam an icon there is the "advertising" value. WinZip wants everybody who sees my screen to know I have WinZip.
And these windows users downloaded the source for 7-zip and firefox and compiled them themselves?
If they didn't, what makes these precompiled exe's any more trustworthy than the originals?
Anonymous OSS coders are more trustworthy than WinZip Computing or Microsoft?
Why is firefox.exe any "safer" than iexplore.exe from a "someone might have compiled in some bad shit" point of view?
Frankly, common sense would have me lean the other way. At least if WinZip or MSFT compiled in malware, I'd have someone to hold accountable (by which I mean sue/boycott/call and hangup on).