The scary thing is one Windows Phone 7 botnet could accidently bring down a carrier's nationwide data network when commanded to do a DDOS on some big website - that is, if Windows Phone 7 ever sells more than 500 units total. Of course we're all sure that Microsoft did some good security work on Windows Phone 7, right? Because they have such a long reliable tradition of network and app security, and this platform wasn't rushed out the door missing any features or anything.
Really I do. I'm typing this on it. Downoaded the full version of Angry Birds app for free today. Best ultraportable pc I've ever had, and the calls sound great too.
3g wireless internet is a little slow. 4g is much better but coverage is spotty and it kills your battery. Still, I would want that if I used the hotspot feature.
wifi rocks though. Watched a 2 hour hd movie on youtube last night. Not a glitch the whole time.
Ellison won't just settle for money. He'll also want leverage with patent licensing - all he can get his arms around. The man is greed personified. Cutting a deal with him is almost as certain death as partnering with Microsoft. It's an asymetric suicide pact.
SUN had fabulous engineering, incredible innovation, impossibly creative thinking. It was a beautiful company that could have become the next Microsoft and the next Intel combined. But they were so focused on what they were creating that they blundered into a recession while overleveraged on debt. They steered their ship onto the shoals where they wrecked, and Ellison bought it at salvage rates.
I think your issue is that SUN's captain survived. Yes, sometimes that happens. It has nothing to do with the fact that the ship was wrecked already. Your issue is more about the finer points of salvage law. These days it's uncommon for the captain to go down with the ship. I'm not fond of that but what is, is.
The problem with throwaway accounts, usernames and passwords is you really never know when an account will become important later. Let's have a thought experiment. You create an online mail account "wigli547sancho" at Yahoo.com from your home PC (with of course, your IP address logged and traceable to your home address). You use that email address to register for an online webinar on iSCSI SAN storage from Dell you need to watch from work, because it's a throwaway address and you're worried Dell will send you spam. The webinar makes your userid visible when you make a comment, or as general practice. You register with the same user ID and password on a discussion board you googled immediately after the webinar to follow amplifying discussion, so you can post a comment. In the registration you gave the same throwaway userid, password and email address. The discussion board operator, by creatively feeding Google with keywords and presenting a credible forum to respond to this webinar opportunity now sees an upswing of several hundred users, many of whom will have exploitable account info. The process for him is automated, so the extent of his effort is to subscribe to these events from all vendors and build keyword lists that people might search for following such events - AI hasn't gotten so far that such things can be totally automated yet (though I hear the work is in progress and the suggestions are becoming very good).
Now we get to the automation. Blackhat account harvesting engines definitely include bulletproof hosting options that feature blogging engines with SEO features. Given advance notice of the event they seed thousands of blogs with keywords likely to be searched for after such an event on a time cycle that peaks on the actual event. Dell iSCSI blogs are scarce, so becoming the definitive reference is low-hanging fruit. The AI definitely has gotten good enough to take "Dell iSCSI" and search the web, harvest comments and appropriate them to simulate a real discussion blog about that topic with grammatical, synonym, and/or spelling permutations - and to permute across those variables to take ownership of the googlespace for that micromeme. You've probably stumbled across several of these semi-incoherent pseudoblogs already and considered them some misfired auto-translation effort, but that's not what they are. Since they become trending topics thereby, they reach the top of Google's search results for a few hours and become the results you click on after the event. Given the basic login information they can try permutations of owning the email account. Some email account providers limit or rate-limit attempts to login and lockout and alert on multiple failures but most don't. The cracking scripts are online account provider login attempt rule aware, so they won't attempt logins that result in notifications. They don't have to compromise every account - only the least diligent, and that's you because for you this is a "throwaway" account.
Once they have access they'll change the recovery email address and password so they own it utterly. If the change engine requires a captcha they include features that farm the same captcha image out to a different blog where a human will helpfully enter the required text in order to gain access to a completely unrelated feature and topic. That answer is then automatically forwarded to the site that demanded a captcha of the bot. The account is owned mere seconds after creating the account on the blackhat blog - no human intervention is required. You lose access to your throwaway account, and figure you've forgotten the throwaway password that went with it. You forget it and move on.
Some anonymous criminal now owns your throwaway account. Now what will they do with it? Expand the account to all the free options that Yahoo offers? Send Pharma spam? Use it as storage for the worst imaginable porn? Store prerelease videos and albums? Use it as the base address for Myspace, Facebook and Twitter accounts to resell likes, fans,
Would it really cost less to pay for development rather than just pony up for some licenes?
Ultimately, yes. Oracle's motivation is to charge every penny the market will bear. Google's is to get their software platform on four billion smartphones. For every Android phone that sells, the price Oracle wants to charge will go up - and renewals will go up too because this is rent-seeking behaviour. Developers are expensive. But they're not that expensive, and Google has a lot of very good ones who need the practice anyway.
Remember, Oracle had nothing to do with inventing Java. The vision, the innovation, the forward looking culture that promoted this very good system were antithetical to the way Oracle does business. Ellison just lucked into some cheap IP by saving up his cash when times were good, and taking advantage of others who didn't when times turned sour - which is sound business practice but does not promote progress in any way. In fact, it prevents progress. Nothing good will come of it. We may as well give up on Java, Open Solaris, OpenOffice, and everything else that Sun had anything to do with. The threats of patent litigation will not stop, ever. The best improvements on these platforms will earn the developer nothing more than the happy knowlege he's added more bait to this trap. Let's move on.
First of all, neither of those things is likely to work. By the time they get an 8 released they'll be even further behind the curve than they are now - and we'll be closer to the cloud client, which completely undoes their local client OS leverage. Either of those acquisitions wouldn't get them any more than Danger did: an opportunity to destroy the legacy of a one-popular but declining popular brand. And they can't keep doing that.
I find it interesting that on the day that the Windows Revolution Phone was first shown Microsoft stock traded flat at less than 80% of the price it started the year, and Apple shares climbed to another all-time high at 120% of the price they started. It looks like a lot of people don't see this as news of any kind - bloggerati and commenters like ourselves notwithstanding.
They don't have the luxury of time any more. In the real world nobody gets unlimited Mulligans.
A fine specimen too - noun/verb agreement, excellent sentence structure, near perfect reproduction of the mimicked speech. I hope you all didn't frighten him away. We don't see them much in these parts any more. They weren't able to reproduce during the Vista campaign, and the remainder were hunted to near extinction during the short life of the Kin.
So buy it, scan it, and publish it online as your own work (properly attributed) in the public domain. Then it will live forever in archive.org. The Project Gutenberg folk may be interested in your scans and convert it to text.
If you find a period piece like this that's out of copyright and you don't save it, it's on you. You let it go.
The action is not a direct dialog with the respondent and it has no hope of success with the target. It's an action to elicit motion from an outside audience. They're not trolling Moto here, they're trolling everybody else. If Microsoft gets other licensees for their IP, or some traction with WP7, the bait is took. Maybe "Chumming" is a better word than trolling, but trolling is a better understood symbol.
Microsoft has no hope of successfully suing Motorola over cellular software patents. They have to know that. Motorola invented the cellular phone. Moto has tens of thousands of patents in the field, and emerging technologies Microsoft must have to survive, and billions of dollars. Moto has more engineers who actually invent things than Microsoft has lawyers who patent obvious implementations of others' inventions, but Moto has hundreds of lawyers too. Moto has honest partners who need them to continue to invent things, notably the US Department of Defense and NASA. Microsoft might as well sue Intel for all the good this will do them.
So yeah, it's a troll in that the lawsuit is a direct statement that is intended not to convice the direct counterparty, but in the hope of eliciting a response from the audience - much like a trolling lure isn't to feed a specific fish. It's a simulation of bait to catch all of the fish that might bite. Microsoft's not going to like the response. They've got a great white shark on and they're going to need a bigger boat. But fine, that's part of the game. It's scary only in the implication that Microsoft would dare to do such a thing for short term gains when it's obviously a suicidal move in the longer term. I want to see this play out, but it will be fifteen years before we really know what happened here.
Regrettably when Microsoft agrees to settle the issue we're not going to know how much they paid for this misstep because that's not how such things are done. The settlement is always secret, and Moto has too much class to rub their nose in it.
The thing is, repairing this relationship is going to cost more than money and it won't be over when the settlement is made. The executives may come to a legal settlement, but the people who actually make stuff at Moto are now energized with the idea that Microsoft just called them a bunch of thieving bastards. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that energy. Those guys know stuff. Deep stuff. They know how to invent things, and I think the things that are hurtful to Microsoft will be on their minds for many years no matter what the folks in suits do.
If you wait for all the lights on your journey to turn green before you set out, you'll never leave home.
So what if it's a hundred thousand year journey? Put together a 10,000 crew mission and set them on their way. For certain the fight won't be over who has to go. It will be over who has to stay here.
It's not profit if they don't keep it. They claim to be making billions and billions for the last decade, each year more money than ever before. They're buying back their stock. But on a dividends reinvested basis, shareholders are losing money. That's just not possible. If they had actually spent that much money buying up their stock, their shares would be worth more. If they had kept the money, they'd have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. It doesn't math out. How do you get rid of $100,000,000,000 without anybody noticing?
I remember once when I was a kid seeing the doctor for the second time. I thought I needed something to fix, so I twisted my arm up behind my back until my fingers touched my neck. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
"Son," he said - "pain is your body's way of saying 'don't do that.'"
Actually, it's a binary image of a wavy line, 11 pixels wide and three high... And yet you're right - I've seen the same tattoo on many people as a circle around the arm, wrist or ankle.
Get a kitchen timer and a laptop and a tablet. Set the timer for 30 minutes and bang away at the desk. When the bell rings, move the laptop to the top of the filing cabinet for 30 minutes. When the bell rings again, take it to the couch. Next time the bell rings, move to the other side of the couch and use the tablet. Then take a meeting and lunch. Start back at the desk again after lunch. Get up now and then. Take a walk. Evenings and weekends, pull some weeds play WII Fit for a half hour, then billiards and table tennis or whatever. Get different motions going on. RSI isn't about excess motion. It's about repetitive motion. Different motions help make it go away.
If you want more meaning than this I think you're going to have to go to the next level and ask "Why a wavy line encoded in binary?". To me it could mean navy signal corps, signals intelligence, or some sort of research doing digital analysis of analog trends. What's the guy's background? This is heraldry, so it's supposed to be significant to him or his family history.
I put the answer already in the first sumbission. I don't know why the second sumbmission was picked.
It's a black and white binary image, three rasters of 11 pixels. Combined it makes a scrollwork that can tile horizontally. It's ornamental. It's an italic mirrored N and a/.
The warmer the air gets the more water it can hold. The condensation you're thinking about comes from things like Liquid Nitrogen chillers operating in warm wet air. The air that comes in contact with the cold chiller becomes too cool to hold the water and it precipitates as water or builds up as frost - much like the sides of an older freezer. Cold air actually tends to be very dry. There are other counterintuitive effects too - water vapor is lighter than air at the same temperature, so humid air is less dense. In the Gulf of Mexico warm dry air causes water to evaporate which causes an updraft, which causes more airflow which drives more evaporation. Once coriolis effects organize the flows: hurricane.
And then there's buying all new software. After ten years of XP some of us have quite a collection. In some cases the software investment is several times the cost of replacing the PC, the OS, all the peripherals and so on. Sure, almost all good software vendors have versions compatible with Windows 7, but they work different and they're not giving them away for free.
Slashdot Mirror
The scary thing is one Windows Phone 7 botnet could accidently bring down a carrier's nationwide data network when commanded to do a DDOS on some big website - that is, if Windows Phone 7 ever sells more than 500 units total. Of course we're all sure that Microsoft did some good security work on Windows Phone 7, right? Because they have such a long reliable tradition of network and app security, and this platform wasn't rushed out the door missing any features or anything.
Really I do. I'm typing this on it. Downoaded the full version of Angry Birds app for free today. Best ultraportable pc I've ever had, and the calls sound great too.
3g wireless internet is a little slow. 4g is much better but coverage is spotty and it kills your battery. Still, I would want that if I used the hotspot feature.
wifi rocks though. Watched a 2 hour hd movie on youtube last night. Not a glitch the whole time.
The times they are a-changing
The courts are not going to make the software secure.
Ellison won't just settle for money. He'll also want leverage with patent licensing - all he can get his arms around. The man is greed personified. Cutting a deal with him is almost as certain death as partnering with Microsoft. It's an asymetric suicide pact.
SUN was sinking. They took any port in a storm.
SUN had fabulous engineering, incredible innovation, impossibly creative thinking. It was a beautiful company that could have become the next Microsoft and the next Intel combined. But they were so focused on what they were creating that they blundered into a recession while overleveraged on debt. They steered their ship onto the shoals where they wrecked, and Ellison bought it at salvage rates.
I think your issue is that SUN's captain survived. Yes, sometimes that happens. It has nothing to do with the fact that the ship was wrecked already. Your issue is more about the finer points of salvage law. These days it's uncommon for the captain to go down with the ship. I'm not fond of that but what is, is.
The problem with throwaway accounts, usernames and passwords is you really never know when an account will become important later. Let's have a thought experiment. You create an online mail account "wigli547sancho" at Yahoo.com from your home PC (with of course, your IP address logged and traceable to your home address). You use that email address to register for an online webinar on iSCSI SAN storage from Dell you need to watch from work, because it's a throwaway address and you're worried Dell will send you spam. The webinar makes your userid visible when you make a comment, or as general practice. You register with the same user ID and password on a discussion board you googled immediately after the webinar to follow amplifying discussion, so you can post a comment. In the registration you gave the same throwaway userid, password and email address. The discussion board operator, by creatively feeding Google with keywords and presenting a credible forum to respond to this webinar opportunity now sees an upswing of several hundred users, many of whom will have exploitable account info. The process for him is automated, so the extent of his effort is to subscribe to these events from all vendors and build keyword lists that people might search for following such events - AI hasn't gotten so far that such things can be totally automated yet (though I hear the work is in progress and the suggestions are becoming very good).
Now we get to the automation. Blackhat account harvesting engines definitely include bulletproof hosting options that feature blogging engines with SEO features. Given advance notice of the event they seed thousands of blogs with keywords likely to be searched for after such an event on a time cycle that peaks on the actual event. Dell iSCSI blogs are scarce, so becoming the definitive reference is low-hanging fruit. The AI definitely has gotten good enough to take "Dell iSCSI" and search the web, harvest comments and appropriate them to simulate a real discussion blog about that topic with grammatical, synonym, and/or spelling permutations - and to permute across those variables to take ownership of the googlespace for that micromeme. You've probably stumbled across several of these semi-incoherent pseudoblogs already and considered them some misfired auto-translation effort, but that's not what they are. Since they become trending topics thereby, they reach the top of Google's search results for a few hours and become the results you click on after the event. Given the basic login information they can try permutations of owning the email account. Some email account providers limit or rate-limit attempts to login and lockout and alert on multiple failures but most don't. The cracking scripts are online account provider login attempt rule aware, so they won't attempt logins that result in notifications. They don't have to compromise every account - only the least diligent, and that's you because for you this is a "throwaway" account.
Once they have access they'll change the recovery email address and password so they own it utterly. If the change engine requires a captcha they include features that farm the same captcha image out to a different blog where a human will helpfully enter the required text in order to gain access to a completely unrelated feature and topic. That answer is then automatically forwarded to the site that demanded a captcha of the bot. The account is owned mere seconds after creating the account on the blackhat blog - no human intervention is required. You lose access to your throwaway account, and figure you've forgotten the throwaway password that went with it. You forget it and move on.
Some anonymous criminal now owns your throwaway account. Now what will they do with it? Expand the account to all the free options that Yahoo offers? Send Pharma spam? Use it as storage for the worst imaginable porn? Store prerelease videos and albums? Use it as the base address for Myspace, Facebook and Twitter accounts to resell likes, fans,
Would it really cost less to pay for development rather than just pony up for some licenes?
Ultimately, yes. Oracle's motivation is to charge every penny the market will bear. Google's is to get their software platform on four billion smartphones. For every Android phone that sells, the price Oracle wants to charge will go up - and renewals will go up too because this is rent-seeking behaviour. Developers are expensive. But they're not that expensive, and Google has a lot of very good ones who need the practice anyway.
Remember, Oracle had nothing to do with inventing Java. The vision, the innovation, the forward looking culture that promoted this very good system were antithetical to the way Oracle does business. Ellison just lucked into some cheap IP by saving up his cash when times were good, and taking advantage of others who didn't when times turned sour - which is sound business practice but does not promote progress in any way. In fact, it prevents progress. Nothing good will come of it. We may as well give up on Java, Open Solaris, OpenOffice, and everything else that Sun had anything to do with. The threats of patent litigation will not stop, ever. The best improvements on these platforms will earn the developer nothing more than the happy knowlege he's added more bait to this trap. Let's move on.
MS still controls the desktop, and lots of high end business market.
Hadn't you heard? We're going to the cloud. In the cloud the client OS doesn't matter. The processing, the apps, the data - they're all in the cloud.
First of all, neither of those things is likely to work. By the time they get an 8 released they'll be even further behind the curve than they are now - and we'll be closer to the cloud client, which completely undoes their local client OS leverage. Either of those acquisitions wouldn't get them any more than Danger did: an opportunity to destroy the legacy of a one-popular but declining popular brand. And they can't keep doing that.
I find it interesting that on the day that the Windows Revolution Phone was first shown Microsoft stock traded flat at less than 80% of the price it started the year, and Apple shares climbed to another all-time high at 120% of the price they started. It looks like a lot of people don't see this as news of any kind - bloggerati and commenters like ourselves notwithstanding.
They don't have the luxury of time any more. In the real world nobody gets unlimited Mulligans.
A fine specimen too - noun/verb agreement, excellent sentence structure, near perfect reproduction of the mimicked speech. I hope you all didn't frighten him away. We don't see them much in these parts any more. They weren't able to reproduce during the Vista campaign, and the remainder were hunted to near extinction during the short life of the Kin.
Old art must die so new pap can pop.
So buy it, scan it, and publish it online as your own work (properly attributed) in the public domain. Then it will live forever in archive.org. The Project Gutenberg folk may be interested in your scans and convert it to text.
If you find a period piece like this that's out of copyright and you don't save it, it's on you. You let it go.
The action is not a direct dialog with the respondent and it has no hope of success with the target. It's an action to elicit motion from an outside audience. They're not trolling Moto here, they're trolling everybody else. If Microsoft gets other licensees for their IP, or some traction with WP7, the bait is took. Maybe "Chumming" is a better word than trolling, but trolling is a better understood symbol.
Microsoft has no hope of successfully suing Motorola over cellular software patents. They have to know that. Motorola invented the cellular phone. Moto has tens of thousands of patents in the field, and emerging technologies Microsoft must have to survive, and billions of dollars. Moto has more engineers who actually invent things than Microsoft has lawyers who patent obvious implementations of others' inventions, but Moto has hundreds of lawyers too. Moto has honest partners who need them to continue to invent things, notably the US Department of Defense and NASA. Microsoft might as well sue Intel for all the good this will do them.
So yeah, it's a troll in that the lawsuit is a direct statement that is intended not to convice the direct counterparty, but in the hope of eliciting a response from the audience - much like a trolling lure isn't to feed a specific fish. It's a simulation of bait to catch all of the fish that might bite. Microsoft's not going to like the response. They've got a great white shark on and they're going to need a bigger boat. But fine, that's part of the game. It's scary only in the implication that Microsoft would dare to do such a thing for short term gains when it's obviously a suicidal move in the longer term. I want to see this play out, but it will be fifteen years before we really know what happened here.
Regrettably when Microsoft agrees to settle the issue we're not going to know how much they paid for this misstep because that's not how such things are done. The settlement is always secret, and Moto has too much class to rub their nose in it.
The thing is, repairing this relationship is going to cost more than money and it won't be over when the settlement is made. The executives may come to a legal settlement, but the people who actually make stuff at Moto are now energized with the idea that Microsoft just called them a bunch of thieving bastards. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that energy. Those guys know stuff. Deep stuff. They know how to invent things, and I think the things that are hurtful to Microsoft will be on their minds for many years no matter what the folks in suits do.
Well all those software-based "send ctrl-alt-delete" software buttons on virtual desktops must not work then. Oh, wait. They do.
If you wait for all the lights on your journey to turn green before you set out, you'll never leave home.
So what if it's a hundred thousand year journey? Put together a 10,000 crew mission and set them on their way. For certain the fight won't be over who has to go. It will be over who has to stay here.
It's not profit if they don't keep it. They claim to be making billions and billions for the last decade, each year more money than ever before. They're buying back their stock. But on a dividends reinvested basis, shareholders are losing money. That's just not possible. If they had actually spent that much money buying up their stock, their shares would be worth more. If they had kept the money, they'd have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. It doesn't math out. How do you get rid of $100,000,000,000 without anybody noticing?
I remember once when I was a kid seeing the doctor for the second time. I thought I needed something to fix, so I twisted my arm up behind my back until my fingers touched my neck. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
"Son," he said - "pain is your body's way of saying 'don't do that.'"
Words to live by.
Actually, it's a binary image of a wavy line, 11 pixels wide and three high... And yet you're right - I've seen the same tattoo on many people as a circle around the arm, wrist or ankle.
But random? No, it's not random.
Get a kitchen timer and a laptop and a tablet. Set the timer for 30 minutes and bang away at the desk. When the bell rings, move the laptop to the top of the filing cabinet for 30 minutes. When the bell rings again, take it to the couch. Next time the bell rings, move to the other side of the couch and use the tablet. Then take a meeting and lunch. Start back at the desk again after lunch. Get up now and then. Take a walk. Evenings and weekends, pull some weeds play WII Fit for a half hour, then billiards and table tennis or whatever. Get different motions going on. RSI isn't about excess motion. It's about repetitive motion. Different motions help make it go away.
If you want more meaning than this I think you're going to have to go to the next level and ask "Why a wavy line encoded in binary?". To me it could mean navy signal corps, signals intelligence, or some sort of research doing digital analysis of analog trends. What's the guy's background? This is heraldry, so it's supposed to be significant to him or his family history.
It's not a message. It's an image 11 pixels wide by three high. It tiles horizontally, giving a wavy line.
I tried to post it as ascii art, but couldn't get it past the lameness filter.
I put the answer already in the first sumbission. I don't know why the second sumbmission was picked.
It's a black and white binary image, three rasters of 11 pixels. Combined it makes a scrollwork that can tile horizontally. It's ornamental. It's an italic mirrored N and a /.
The warmer the air gets the more water it can hold. The condensation you're thinking about comes from things like Liquid Nitrogen chillers operating in warm wet air. The air that comes in contact with the cold chiller becomes too cool to hold the water and it precipitates as water or builds up as frost - much like the sides of an older freezer. Cold air actually tends to be very dry. There are other counterintuitive effects too - water vapor is lighter than air at the same temperature, so humid air is less dense. In the Gulf of Mexico warm dry air causes water to evaporate which causes an updraft, which causes more airflow which drives more evaporation. Once coriolis effects organize the flows: hurricane.
And then there's buying all new software. After ten years of XP some of us have quite a collection. In some cases the software investment is several times the cost of replacing the PC, the OS, all the peripherals and so on. Sure, almost all good software vendors have versions compatible with Windows 7, but they work different and they're not giving them away for free.
Unless of course they decide to skip all that nonsense and go mobile instead. For some people it works.