In all fairness, you can export EPS as a number of other formats (such as PostScript). It has, as far as I know, no inherent value as a file format. SVG is widely compatible with browsers and software, however.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar
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Welcome To Planet Pixar
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· Score: 4, Insightful
1: A handful of already-out-on-DVD movies. w00t.
2: Again, two. Two.
3: At least according to some, past performance is a good indicator of future success. Those movies may net a few mil--I think a few billion might be pushing it, but I don't know the numbers in Hollywood all that well (the existing five Pixar movies have gotten about $2.5billion so far, for some comparison)--but if they continue to be popular, it'll be because there's a market for this stuff. Guess what? That's what Pixar churns out!
4: Probably true, but if the existing franchises continue to be profitable, it seems a safe bet that so will future movies, no?
My impression was that Disney truly wanted Pixar back. But Pixar themselves would have to be nuts to sign on to another exploitative deal with a man like Michael Eisner. Sure, it makes sense when you're an upstart nobody has heard of, and you need Disney's distribution network just to get heard, but now Pixar is the big name and Disney, as this article points out, is the one getting schooled.
At least according to AST, ``If the file system runs inside the kernel, it is NOT a microkernel.''.
According to your link, the filesystem, networking, and complete I/O all run within the kernel. In a true microkernel, the filesystem and networking, as well as, concievably (but not necessarily) a portion of the I/O code, would each run as a user-space server process, handling calls for each service through the microkernel. The only thing the microkernel really has to do in such a system is arbitrate calls between client processes and server processes and handle the actual mechanics of I/O.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. But I've also got AST's book Modern Operating Systems in front of me (just started reading it, though). ``The picture painted above of a kernel that handles only the transport of messages from clients to servers and back is not completely realistic. Some operating system functions (such as loading commands into the physical I/O device registers) are difficult, if not impossible, to do from user-space programs.'' Nonetheless, the kernel should do little more than this; while OS X may indeed take a microkernel approach to design--this I don't know--it has not followed through in implementation.
OS X might be called a hybrid; it has the microkernel messaging, but doesn't really use it. Check out kernelthread for some neat info.
Er, I totally replied to the wrong one of my own posts. Ignore that.
Re: microkernels the best approach
on
More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Incidentally--not to reply to my own post--Amit Singh has a great bit on kernelthreat about XNU, the kernel in OS X. Read it here. Basically, XNU does inherit a microkernel design from Mach, but it isn't used as such.
To back you up, according to AST's book Modern Operating Systems, at least some versions of Windows had GUI API functions running in kernel space (he touches on the Windows API, in contrast to POSIX syscalls, in Chapter 1--I just started reading, so I don't know if he goes any farther). He didn't mention in the book that Windows ever claimed to be a microkernel, though perhaps he'll get to that later, when he gets more in-depth, but such a claim would be completely lunatic if even parts of the GUI are running in kernel space.
However, I don't believe the browser or media player ever ran in kernel space; for one thing, it's probably possible to replace the browser without a reboot. The things that ran in kernel space were presumably Win32 API calls, but the important point is that many of them--like graphics calls--had no need for being in the kernel, but were simply because.
That's exactly where I was going. Guess I didn't make it real clear; thanks for clearing it up for me:)
I used to do the disposable hotmail thing, too, but having multiple accounts is a real hassle. Multiple logins, passwords...it's irritating. Here, they all go straight to my real address, but as soon as one starts sending spam, I terminate it. And I can still recieve the legit mail from the others, something the hotmail method doesn't really allow for (you either use the same address for all spam--meaning to get the legit messages from the mix you still have to sort through spam, making it little better than a box for urgent personal messages and a box for the rest--or you have to create a new address each time you give it out).
Spamgourmet rules. You should give it a shot (in all honesty, though, I don't get much spam from the people I do give my spamgourmet addresses to. I rarely have to terminate an address. Most if it really is legit opt-out kinda stuff, which leads me to think spammers get our addresses less from sleazy companies and more from web harvesting, mailing lists, etc, something I'm careful to keep my address off of).
Better yet, check out SpamGourmet. I've seen a few other services come close, but this is the only one I know of that allows you the flexibility to create disposable addresses without logging on (e.g. while standing in line at the cellular phone counter) and restrict what addresses can be created to prevent enterprising spammers from just creating new addresses for you.
You go there and register a name (say, august_zero@spamgourmet.com). Then, whenever you have to give out a displosable address, you make it string.n.august_zero@spamgourmet.com, where string is some unique string you'll use to remember this address and n is an integer ST 1
Far easier.
This is just plain vaporware. According to the Gizmodo article, it's a mini-ITX. Gee, the advantages of that over an x86 laptop are what, exactly? The lack of a folding screen?
So let's see...it's a 500MHz x86 with only 128MB of RAM, a fixed LCD that goes only to 640x480, and a case that exists only in the crappy renders of second-rate designers. And it seems like it's meant to be limited only to games, not other Windows applications. Sure beats a standard laptop...
Anybody care to explain why I should think this is more than (exceptionally incompetent) vaporware?
That's true. For a long time I've wanted some degree of liability. I suppose now that the prospect is on my mind, though, I'm just a bit more concerned at the notion of how far it could go (all software has bugs, after all--I hardly would want to be liable for them if I wasn't even alerted, etc). I think the big issue is what to do about EULAs, though. I would say standard negligence is find, since it essentially holds you to an industry standard of sorts--patches for known flaws in a timely manner, reasonable measures taken to find flaws prior to software release, etc--which Microsoft does, in fact, seem to hold to most of the time. After all, we can hardly attach liability to vendors when users won't even click Windows Update (let alone run CVSUP or make world:P).
So while there may not even be that many cases of such negligence, the question is how to get around EULAs. I suppose legislation could indeed be in order, requiring a degree of liability despite EULAs, although you'd think market pressures would alone be enough (certainly, someone who guaranteed his software would be able to sell quite a lot more--``we cover damages caused up to $5000 if you're exploited before we release a patch'', say). After all, if a car maker had you sign a EULA that said he would never be liable, would you still buy the car?
Anyway, it has indeed been an interesting discussion, and it will be interesting to see where all this goes.
No, you missed the ``focus point.'' I never said Microsoft should or shouldn't do this; I said that it would be highly unlikely that they would be considered negligent under U.S. tort law for this practice. You have not changed my mind by arguing that it's morally wrong to do what they are doing, as law and morality do not universaly intersect. If you see one of my other posts in this thread--I forget which--you can see that I outline the four requirements for negligence (again, it's been a while since I took intro Legal Studies, so I might be a little fuzzy--I am not a lawyer, but this is as close as we seem to have in this discussion). Your argument probably fails on two of those points, namely duty of care and direct causation.
For the first, there is no duty of care established between Microsoft and the pirate, and likely not one between Microsoft and a third party that requires patching pirated software (that is, Microsoft may indeed be held to a general standard to behave as the industry as a whole does, releasing patches in a timely matter for known flaws--but this liability likely only extends to legitimate copies).
For the second, while one could argue contributory negligence, the pirate himself is far more negligent, and Microsoft's actions are arguably not even directly causal (i.e. they may or may not pass the ``but for'' test--but for this action, would the worm have spread? Likely so, because many people still do not patch--thus direct causation is difficult. And even passing the but-for test, MS's actions are still not the primary cause.). So I think you have a very difficult argument. Nothing to do with what's morally right or wrong, but rather with what tort law recognizes as negligence.
Point being that jamming is a particularly crude way of doing this, requiring special (bulky and rather hard-to-hide) equipment. It's not something you have to be terribly concerned about punk kids doing. It's also something that is a known risk for all wireless communication, and that law enforcement take seriously in preventing.
This--and the deauthentication packet flood that existed before this, despite the claims of this being the first of its kind, I believe--can be performed by someone with a laptop or PDA. Doesn't stand out much in public. Isn't hard to come by. Isn't easy to trace. There's a far greater chance of a kiddo using this against the public library than of someone jamming it.
Anyway, while we're talking about denial of service, yes, signal jamming denies service, as does a bomb in a datacenter or a SYN flood. But typically, the more nuanced denial of service attacks exploit some vulnerability that allows a relatively small amount of work to take up an inordinate amount of resources. In other words, if I have a million machines, I can certain use them to overwhelm a webserver that has a capacity of a million concurrent requests. That sure will deny service. But this isn't a vulnerability per se; it's pretty much expected behavior. On the other hand, if I know that a specially crafted request will take up 100 times more of the webserver's resources than it's meant to, then I can cause the same effect with only ten thousand machines. Get my drift?
Fair enough--you sound like Nadar, by the way;)--but there is still a distinction between releasing a known danger and releasing software that will inevitably be buggy. You are approaching, in my mind, a responsibility among all software makers for all bugs. While I agree that they should be held responsible (more so than they are now) for unpatched flaws, and perhaps even for particularly silly flaws, I see no way to claim responsibility for every flaw, so long as they behave in an industry-standard, responsible way. So again, the real question becomes Microsoft's duty to the innocent victims, in a case where the product was stolen and they refused to patch a stolen product. In my post here in the same thread, I argue--hopefully vaguely rationally--that this argument fails on duty of care and direct causation. I think.
I do agree that it's a troubling issue, what they should do. But I find it unlikely that they would be legally responsible for withholding patches--if for no other reason, than because surely their counsel discussed this already.
I don't believe you are correct in your interpretation of tort law. I've studied it a very small amount, but here is what I think is wrong with your argument.
Negligence doesn't require a prior relationship. If I slip and fall on an walkway in front of McDonalds, I can sue McDonalds even if I've never eaten there in my life. Neligence means that someone responsible for something was lax in their duties and injury resulted.
Negligence requires a prior relationship or duty of care. The duty can be formed by the relationship, or by some other factor (as in the McDonald's example; there is no prior relationship forming a duty, but the duty is formed by McDonald's ownership of the sidewalk--though I would bet in many places there is a duty formed statutorily between those owning and those walking on sidewalks, which does not exist in common law itself--which requires them to keep the sidewalk well maintained). Incidentally, you would only be able to sue McDonalds if they were lax in their duties (mind you, there is a duty, since it's their sidewalk) of maintaining the sidewalk. The duty or relationship requirement makes perfect sense; why do you think you can sue McDonalds if you fall in front of their store but not if you fall in front of Burger King (given that in both cases, McDonalds fails the ``but for'' test--but for their failure to maintain the sidewalk in front of Burger King, you would not have fallen)? The reason is that relationship/duty of care.
I'm not sure the proper legal term, but basically the party at fault in an issue is the party that had the last opportunity to avoid the problem. If Microsoft has the ability to push out an update that would have corrected a unsafe condition, but doesn't do it, I think the legal case could be that it is negligent.
You aren't quite right about this, either, or at least you are far too vague. In a negligence case, in order for there to be negligence, you must show a duty, a failure to perform that duty, a direct causation between that failure and damages, and the damages themselves.
Duty: there must be some reason that the plaintiff is responsible for your well-being. In the McDonalds example, it is because they own that stretch of sidewalk. In the Microsoft example, I don't see a clear duty owed to the pirates or to other inhabitents of the Internet (the latter is conceivably arguable, but I don't really think so--how do you show that it's my duty to look out for the well being of random other Internet users?). The only duty I see is between MS and their customers.
Failure to perform duty: Given that there is a duty between MS and the pirate, there is certainly a failure. Given that there is a duty between MS and `netizens', there is probably again a failure.
Direct Causation: Actually, I think more tricky than it looks. Depending on statutes, there is often the ability to sort of split responsibility, to say plaintiff A was 40% responsible and plaintiff B was %60 responsible. This is known as ``contributory negligence'' (because A contributed to B's negligence). However, barring that statute, I believe responsibilty can be eclipsed by someone else having greater responsibility, e.g. McDonalds fails to shovel the sidewalk but you decide to wear roller skates. In this case, MS is not nearly as responsible as either the pirate himself or the virus writer. I don't recall exactly how this situation would be handled, if there is no statute for contributory negligence (in which case we might say MS is %20 negligent, for example), but I believe MS gets off. I think.
Damages: Showing monetary damages is not that hard for a business, where professionals have to spend man-hours on some infection.
Anyway, I figured you were joking around, initially. As for MS settling, I seriously doubt it. This might be embarassing, but imagine how much worse it'd be if they set a precedent (even a non-binding one) on this sort of issue.
I don't think you're right in your analogy. You're claiming that when someone pirates a copy of Windows, they're stealing from a legitimate Microsoft customer. That is not the case; with intellectual property, they are stealing from Microsoft only. So in your analogy, the car thief stole the car off the lot. He then contacted the dealer asking for warranty repairs, but in such a way that he could not be caught (obviously this analogy is being stretched a bit thin;). The dealer, angry at the clear audacity of the thief, refuses.
Granted, the morally right thing to do in this case may be for the dealer to repair anyway--assume the repairs are trivial and cost very little--knowing that not repairing poses a potential risk. Nonetheless, within the realm of tort law, there is no pre-existing relationship or duty of care between the dealer and the thief, nor is there a duty of care between the dealer and the pedestrian. There is a duty of care--formed by the customer/seller relationship--between the dealer and the legitimate customer, but there does not, in my mind, seem to be one between the dealer and the thief.
Bear in mind that I am not a lawyer, but I have studied tort law a very small amount, and I do know that there must be a duty of care or preexisting relationship for one to be negligent. I don't see that duty of care here.
It wouldn't be contributory negligence because negligence relies on a duty or prior existing relationship of some sort between the plaintiff and defendent. In other words, you'd have to argue that Microsoft has a duty to pirates to provide them with updates, if you are trying to show they were negligent to the pirates, or, even harder (I think) that they owe a duty to other users of the Internet to maintain pirated copies of their code.
Equivalent would be holding you responsible because someone stole your well-secured (i.e. Microsoft is hardly negligent for their software being stolen, as they spent a lot of time on anti-piracy stuff) car, failed to change the break fluid, and you didn't provide him with a fluid change so he ends up hitting a pedestrian. Get my drift?
More likely is a suit alleging negligence when a Microsoft product suffers a vulnerability that's exploited before a patch becomes available, though click-throughs are designed to prevent this liability.
I don't see how you come to that conclusion. By that logic, pretty much the only jobs safe from outsourcing are manual labor and customer service type jobs that require a physical presence. Yet many argue that there are still things that must be done domestically to be done right, and that among these things are jobs require innovation, cultural familiarity, etc. These jobs include research and development (of which at least a portion could be done at home), software engineering (of which at least a portion can be done at home), hell, even lawering, of which a portion can be done at home.
Perhaps I'm way off base here, but my impression is that the jobs being outsourced are more rote jobs, like data entry, or basic coding. I don't see a lot of R&D or software engineers being replaced with offshore counterparts--though there are cutbacks in these areas simply because of hard financial times. So it seems like if what we are left with is a notion of jobs that generate some form of intellectual capital--I don't be raw code, but more in the line of innovation and higher-level stuff--these are the jobs requiring intellectual interaction, but not physical presence. So I don't think your point necessarily holds true.
Point is that while the man may not be Rob Enderle, some of his comments are pretty damn inane. As are those in the Wired article (since when was Star Office even open source, let alone an open source darling?).
Or to paraphrase Gizmodo, he sure as hell must've given somebody a blowjob for that article.
No, I think the point really does hold true. For one thing, is it even a given that Microsoft is at the epitome of the market? Certainly they are the wealthiest in town, but I'd wager that Google has higher profit margins (I don't really feel like looking this up). Apple has a customer loyalty that Microsoft does not. Point is, there are at least a couple different ways to measure success; income may not be the only one, any more than proliferation are a good measure of evolutionary success.
But as for social Darwinism, in a sense that is the goal of corporations. I for a long time have found most, if not all talk about corporate morality or being ``good corporate citizens'' to be completely full of shit. Good corporations do it to avoid corporate criminal liability; bad corporations do it because they really care. Perhaps I sound like I have that backwards, but the goal of a corporation is not to make a good product, not to help the community, and not, really, even to be loyal to its employees (at the expense of profit, at least). A corporation should profit. If I were a shareholder in a corporation that didn't offshore when others were, I wouldn't be proud that it was a good corporate citizen; I'd be angry that it didn't do whats most profitable.
But I think we're fundamentally in agreement. If users decide security matters, Microsoft will lose their gamble. But I don't think Microsoft is stupid or incompetent--and I think they may even be right about the market.
Depends on what you mean by best. I don't see it as a given that McDonalds' is not the best food, or that Windows is not the best OS. Capitalist markets are a little like evolution. Humans may very well be the epitome of evolution--or so we like to think--but cockroaches will probably be around a hell of a lot longer. So it is with markets; any number of OSes may be technically superior to Windows, but you have to admit, it does just what needs to be done to be successful (anti-competitive practices aside).
For example, I may argue that Microsoft has a terrible security record and therefore must clearly have their heads up their collective asses (so I have argued before). But one would be justified in pointing out that most consumers don't really consider security as much as they consider new features, so Microsoft made a wise choice in deciding to implement OneNote or voice chat in MSN Messenger when they could have been conducting code reviews. I might argue that Apache is far better than IIS (and I don't see much of a counter argument), but those who use IIS will say that without a decent graphical configurator, they just find Apache too difficult to use. Same goes for VB; I sure as hell wouldn't use it for what I do, but for basic desktop application stuff, there's no real problem with it.
haha, sometimes. Not at the moment--broke it recently while dicking around and haven't bothered to fix it. GNOME is actually a lot nicer than when I had last used it.
I just think it's kind of a funny name (though few others seem to agree). You know, like Kris Kringle? Old Saint Nick? Only, you know, lightly roasted. Or something.;)
Sure did. She can't do at all. Full of quotes of her saying, ``well, I'm not a coder, but 2.6 has a lot of improvements to asynchronous IO.'' Yeah, thanks for telling us.
Maybe I'm a little jaded because Rob Enderle sucks (yes, I know I have too much free time).
It's interesting to see how Daniel Robbins went and, on his own, built Enoch, and how he went from there to a distro as popular as Gentoo. It's also encouraging for many of us--when he started with Linux, he was just an NT sysadmin; this sure encourages me that I don't need to be a guru with assembly and C to make contributions.
I suppose the other valuable lesson, though, is that he did make it that far not just because of enthusiasm or hard work, but because he had a good idea (ebuilds). I see a lot of knock-off distros--yet another CD-based router, for example--that just don't have any great ideas behind them. Sure, that's the point of Linux--I've got no complaints with people doing what they want, but it strikes me that the valuable lesson here is that a good idea can go far--but without that idea, you've got nothing.
(That's the best I can come up with--just trying to focus the freakin' discussion on something other than ``I like Gentoo'' ``I don't!'')
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In all fairness, you can export EPS as a number of other formats (such as PostScript). It has, as far as I know, no inherent value as a file format. SVG is widely compatible with browsers and software, however.
2: Again, two. Two.
3: At least according to some, past performance is a good indicator of future success. Those movies may net a few mil--I think a few billion might be pushing it, but I don't know the numbers in Hollywood all that well (the existing five Pixar movies have gotten about $2.5billion so far, for some comparison)--but if they continue to be popular, it'll be because there's a market for this stuff. Guess what? That's what Pixar churns out!
4: Probably true, but if the existing franchises continue to be profitable, it seems a safe bet that so will future movies, no?
My impression was that Disney truly wanted Pixar back. But Pixar themselves would have to be nuts to sign on to another exploitative deal with a man like Michael Eisner. Sure, it makes sense when you're an upstart nobody has heard of, and you need Disney's distribution network just to get heard, but now Pixar is the big name and Disney, as this article points out, is the one getting schooled.
Can't say I'm sad, though.
According to your link, the filesystem, networking, and complete I/O all run within the kernel. In a true microkernel, the filesystem and networking, as well as, concievably (but not necessarily) a portion of the I/O code, would each run as a user-space server process, handling calls for each service through the microkernel. The only thing the microkernel really has to do in such a system is arbitrate calls between client processes and server processes and handle the actual mechanics of I/O.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. But I've also got AST's book Modern Operating Systems in front of me (just started reading it, though). ``The picture painted above of a kernel that handles only the transport of messages from clients to servers and back is not completely realistic. Some operating system functions (such as loading commands into the physical I/O device registers) are difficult, if not impossible, to do from user-space programs.'' Nonetheless, the kernel should do little more than this; while OS X may indeed take a microkernel approach to design--this I don't know--it has not followed through in implementation.
OS X might be called a hybrid; it has the microkernel messaging, but doesn't really use it. Check out kernelthread for some neat info.
Er, I totally replied to the wrong one of my own posts. Ignore that.
Incidentally--not to reply to my own post--Amit Singh has a great bit on kernelthreat about XNU, the kernel in OS X. Read it here. Basically, XNU does inherit a microkernel design from Mach, but it isn't used as such.
However, I don't believe the browser or media player ever ran in kernel space; for one thing, it's probably possible to replace the browser without a reboot. The things that ran in kernel space were presumably Win32 API calls, but the important point is that many of them--like graphics calls--had no need for being in the kernel, but were simply because.
I used to do the disposable hotmail thing, too, but having multiple accounts is a real hassle. Multiple logins, passwords...it's irritating. Here, they all go straight to my real address, but as soon as one starts sending spam, I terminate it. And I can still recieve the legit mail from the others, something the hotmail method doesn't really allow for (you either use the same address for all spam--meaning to get the legit messages from the mix you still have to sort through spam, making it little better than a box for urgent personal messages and a box for the rest--or you have to create a new address each time you give it out).
Spamgourmet rules. You should give it a shot (in all honesty, though, I don't get much spam from the people I do give my spamgourmet addresses to. I rarely have to terminate an address. Most if it really is legit opt-out kinda stuff, which leads me to think spammers get our addresses less from sleazy companies and more from web harvesting, mailing lists, etc, something I'm careful to keep my address off of).
You go there and register a name (say, august_zero@spamgourmet.com). Then, whenever you have to give out a displosable address, you make it string.n.august_zero@spamgourmet.com, where string is some unique string you'll use to remember this address and n is an integer ST 1 Far easier.
So let's see...it's a 500MHz x86 with only 128MB of RAM, a fixed LCD that goes only to 640x480, and a case that exists only in the crappy renders of second-rate designers. And it seems like it's meant to be limited only to games, not other Windows applications. Sure beats a standard laptop...
Anybody care to explain why I should think this is more than (exceptionally incompetent) vaporware?
So while there may not even be that many cases of such negligence, the question is how to get around EULAs. I suppose legislation could indeed be in order, requiring a degree of liability despite EULAs, although you'd think market pressures would alone be enough (certainly, someone who guaranteed his software would be able to sell quite a lot more--``we cover damages caused up to $5000 if you're exploited before we release a patch'', say). After all, if a car maker had you sign a EULA that said he would never be liable, would you still buy the car?
Anyway, it has indeed been an interesting discussion, and it will be interesting to see where all this goes.
For the first, there is no duty of care established between Microsoft and the pirate, and likely not one between Microsoft and a third party that requires patching pirated software (that is, Microsoft may indeed be held to a general standard to behave as the industry as a whole does, releasing patches in a timely matter for known flaws--but this liability likely only extends to legitimate copies).
For the second, while one could argue contributory negligence, the pirate himself is far more negligent, and Microsoft's actions are arguably not even directly causal (i.e. they may or may not pass the ``but for'' test--but for this action, would the worm have spread? Likely so, because many people still do not patch--thus direct causation is difficult. And even passing the but-for test, MS's actions are still not the primary cause.). So I think you have a very difficult argument. Nothing to do with what's morally right or wrong, but rather with what tort law recognizes as negligence.
This--and the deauthentication packet flood that existed before this, despite the claims of this being the first of its kind, I believe--can be performed by someone with a laptop or PDA. Doesn't stand out much in public. Isn't hard to come by. Isn't easy to trace. There's a far greater chance of a kiddo using this against the public library than of someone jamming it.
Anyway, while we're talking about denial of service, yes, signal jamming denies service, as does a bomb in a datacenter or a SYN flood. But typically, the more nuanced denial of service attacks exploit some vulnerability that allows a relatively small amount of work to take up an inordinate amount of resources. In other words, if I have a million machines, I can certain use them to overwhelm a webserver that has a capacity of a million concurrent requests. That sure will deny service. But this isn't a vulnerability per se; it's pretty much expected behavior. On the other hand, if I know that a specially crafted request will take up 100 times more of the webserver's resources than it's meant to, then I can cause the same effect with only ten thousand machines. Get my drift?
I do agree that it's a troubling issue, what they should do. But I find it unlikely that they would be legally responsible for withholding patches--if for no other reason, than because surely their counsel discussed this already.
Cheers.
Negligence doesn't require a prior relationship. If I slip and fall on an walkway in front of McDonalds, I can sue McDonalds even if I've never eaten there in my life. Neligence means that someone responsible for something was lax in their duties and injury resulted.
Negligence requires a prior relationship or duty of care. The duty can be formed by the relationship, or by some other factor (as in the McDonald's example; there is no prior relationship forming a duty, but the duty is formed by McDonald's ownership of the sidewalk--though I would bet in many places there is a duty formed statutorily between those owning and those walking on sidewalks, which does not exist in common law itself--which requires them to keep the sidewalk well maintained). Incidentally, you would only be able to sue McDonalds if they were lax in their duties (mind you, there is a duty, since it's their sidewalk) of maintaining the sidewalk. The duty or relationship requirement makes perfect sense; why do you think you can sue McDonalds if you fall in front of their store but not if you fall in front of Burger King (given that in both cases, McDonalds fails the ``but for'' test--but for their failure to maintain the sidewalk in front of Burger King, you would not have fallen)? The reason is that relationship/duty of care.
I'm not sure the proper legal term, but basically the party at fault in an issue is the party that had the last opportunity to avoid the problem. If Microsoft has the ability to push out an update that would have corrected a unsafe condition, but doesn't do it, I think the legal case could be that it is negligent.
You aren't quite right about this, either, or at least you are far too vague. In a negligence case, in order for there to be negligence, you must show a duty, a failure to perform that duty, a direct causation between that failure and damages, and the damages themselves.
Duty: there must be some reason that the plaintiff is responsible for your well-being. In the McDonalds example, it is because they own that stretch of sidewalk. In the Microsoft example, I don't see a clear duty owed to the pirates or to other inhabitents of the Internet (the latter is conceivably arguable, but I don't really think so--how do you show that it's my duty to look out for the well being of random other Internet users?). The only duty I see is between MS and their customers.
Failure to perform duty: Given that there is a duty between MS and the pirate, there is certainly a failure. Given that there is a duty between MS and `netizens', there is probably again a failure.
Direct Causation: Actually, I think more tricky than it looks. Depending on statutes, there is often the ability to sort of split responsibility, to say plaintiff A was 40% responsible and plaintiff B was %60 responsible. This is known as ``contributory negligence'' (because A contributed to B's negligence). However, barring that statute, I believe responsibilty can be eclipsed by someone else having greater responsibility, e.g. McDonalds fails to shovel the sidewalk but you decide to wear roller skates. In this case, MS is not nearly as responsible as either the pirate himself or the virus writer. I don't recall exactly how this situation would be handled, if there is no statute for contributory negligence (in which case we might say MS is %20 negligent, for example), but I believe MS gets off. I think.
Damages: Showing monetary damages is not that hard for a business, where professionals have to spend man-hours on some infection.
Anyway, I figured you were joking around, initially. As for MS settling, I seriously doubt it. This might be embarassing, but imagine how much worse it'd be if they set a precedent (even a non-binding one) on this sort of issue.
Granted, the morally right thing to do in this case may be for the dealer to repair anyway--assume the repairs are trivial and cost very little--knowing that not repairing poses a potential risk. Nonetheless, within the realm of tort law, there is no pre-existing relationship or duty of care between the dealer and the thief, nor is there a duty of care between the dealer and the pedestrian. There is a duty of care--formed by the customer/seller relationship--between the dealer and the legitimate customer, but there does not, in my mind, seem to be one between the dealer and the thief.
Bear in mind that I am not a lawyer, but I have studied tort law a very small amount, and I do know that there must be a duty of care or preexisting relationship for one to be negligent. I don't see that duty of care here.
Equivalent would be holding you responsible because someone stole your well-secured (i.e. Microsoft is hardly negligent for their software being stolen, as they spent a lot of time on anti-piracy stuff) car, failed to change the break fluid, and you didn't provide him with a fluid change so he ends up hitting a pedestrian. Get my drift?
More likely is a suit alleging negligence when a Microsoft product suffers a vulnerability that's exploited before a patch becomes available, though click-throughs are designed to prevent this liability.
Cisco (Linksys subsidiary)
I think you've got that backwards. Cisco owns Linksys.
Unless I'm on crack. Not trying to harp on something stupid.
Perhaps I'm way off base here, but my impression is that the jobs being outsourced are more rote jobs, like data entry, or basic coding. I don't see a lot of R&D or software engineers being replaced with offshore counterparts--though there are cutbacks in these areas simply because of hard financial times. So it seems like if what we are left with is a notion of jobs that generate some form of intellectual capital--I don't be raw code, but more in the line of innovation and higher-level stuff--these are the jobs requiring intellectual interaction, but not physical presence. So I don't think your point necessarily holds true.
Or to paraphrase Gizmodo, he sure as hell must've given somebody a blowjob for that article.
But as for social Darwinism, in a sense that is the goal of corporations. I for a long time have found most, if not all talk about corporate morality or being ``good corporate citizens'' to be completely full of shit. Good corporations do it to avoid corporate criminal liability; bad corporations do it because they really care. Perhaps I sound like I have that backwards, but the goal of a corporation is not to make a good product, not to help the community, and not, really, even to be loyal to its employees (at the expense of profit, at least). A corporation should profit. If I were a shareholder in a corporation that didn't offshore when others were, I wouldn't be proud that it was a good corporate citizen; I'd be angry that it didn't do whats most profitable.
But I think we're fundamentally in agreement. If users decide security matters, Microsoft will lose their gamble. But I don't think Microsoft is stupid or incompetent--and I think they may even be right about the market.
For example, I may argue that Microsoft has a terrible security record and therefore must clearly have their heads up their collective asses (so I have argued before). But one would be justified in pointing out that most consumers don't really consider security as much as they consider new features, so Microsoft made a wise choice in deciding to implement OneNote or voice chat in MSN Messenger when they could have been conducting code reviews. I might argue that Apache is far better than IIS (and I don't see much of a counter argument), but those who use IIS will say that without a decent graphical configurator, they just find Apache too difficult to use. Same goes for VB; I sure as hell wouldn't use it for what I do, but for basic desktop application stuff, there's no real problem with it.
What'd I say? Just like cockroaches.
I just think it's kind of a funny name (though few others seem to agree). You know, like Kris Kringle? Old Saint Nick? Only, you know, lightly roasted. Or something. ;)
Maybe I'm a little jaded because Rob Enderle sucks (yes, I know I have too much free time).
I suppose the other valuable lesson, though, is that he did make it that far not just because of enthusiasm or hard work, but because he had a good idea (ebuilds). I see a lot of knock-off distros--yet another CD-based router, for example--that just don't have any great ideas behind them. Sure, that's the point of Linux--I've got no complaints with people doing what they want, but it strikes me that the valuable lesson here is that a good idea can go far--but without that idea, you've got nothing.
(That's the best I can come up with--just trying to focus the freakin' discussion on something other than ``I like Gentoo'' ``I don't!'')
Those who can, do. Those who can't become industry analysts.