Just because some fool edited "Andy" in the MyDoom binary, it doesn't mean that the real author is really called "Andy" or something like that. In fact the virus originates in Russia, so it's very unlikely that the author is really called Andy, but rather "Wolja", "Olga", "Oleg" or "Katjusha".
CyberGuys sells the same sort of stuff that your corner-shop PC store does. Big advantage is that their online catalog is pretty well done for a small shop and the prices are quite reasonable. Very little brand-name, but as long as you stick to the commodity stuff, you'll have no problems. (They do now sell some name brand stuff, don't remember if they did before or not.)
I've probably ordered a few hundred dollars worth of bits, cables and misc parts from them over the past few years and I've not had a problem.
Other than screws, I suggest buying some paper washers that go between the screw and the motherboard. Not really necessary, but they insure that there's no electrical short and prevent damage of the motherboard. Well worth the $0.10 each or whatever.
Now there's something that I've always wondered about, whether or not the motherboard is supposed to be mounted on insulated pegs or if the stand-offs and screws are supposed to make electrical contact. (Paper washers *underneath* the motherboard I would imagine would be darn near impossible, but most stand-offs are conductive which leads me to believe it's supposed to be grounded/contact.)
I have yet to see it stated either way in any motherboard manual that I've read, anyone got a definitive link as to which way this is supposed to be? You're saying not, and I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but would prefer hard-copy.
Probably cheaper to go troll the dumpsters, if you can find an old 286/386/486 being tossed you can probably scavange a dozen of each size. Anytime I toss an old system, I take the 15 minutes to strip it of any screws / connectors / etc.
The small screws (usually for mounting CD-ROMs to the side-brackets) are 4mm fine, the 6mm (6x32) screws are for the case / slot covers / hard drive mounting. Don't forget to either get small snack-pack rubbermaid containers (about 2" round, 1.5" deep) to hold the screws/bits, or those yellow plastic stopper tubes (1/2" x 5").
(I really don't understand the fuss about the issue at all... there's pretty much just the 2 types of screws, 4mm fine and 6x32.)
the lack of a standardized layout of ports and such on the back means you have to make like 30 cut outs on each case to get it to work with every mobo on the market
That's a design feature in the ATX spec. It fixes the problem that the old AT-style cases had where you were forced into using expansion slot headers or punch-outs in order to provide access for connectors other then the AT-keyboard cable. If you look at any ATX motherboard on the market today, you'll see that they come with a ~1.5"x4" metal insert that fits into a standard cutout area on the back of the ATX-case and which matches up to whatever ports the vendor decided to put on the motherboard.
Yes, the G5 is probably prettier on the inside... but you get what you pay for, but with lack of options (there's only one maker for motherboard that you put inside a G5). OTOH, with the ATX-spec, you can mix-n-match motherboards and cases to get exactly what you want. The downside is that you have to do cable/wire management yourself (rounded cables and a bit of wire-tie do just fine).
I stopped watching close to 10 years ago... wanna have another contest?
However, now that HDTV is finally rolling out in my area for OTA broadcats (I might get 5 channels), I took the plunge and ordered a MyHD-120 PCI card. With the recording capability, I won't be locked to the chair during the time-slot, and I won't have to fiddle with VCR tapes.
I'll still probably spend more time online then watching TV (I estimate I'll watch maybe 10-12 hours per week). So long as I'm in control of when I get to watch what I want to watch, I'll be content.
You make it sound like every company that is traded publicly doesn't produce good products. I am a shareholder of a number of different companies and the only thing I care about is that they keep producing quality products so customers continue to buy them. Companies that fit your description typically don't last.
The problem is, for the majority of companies, quality is not cost-effective. If they can make higher margins by cutting costs, they will, in fact they're pretty much required to maximize profits at the expense of anything else by the rules of the stock market. Miss your revenue/profit targets, and watch your stock take a beating. Makes for a very myopic focus on quarterly earnings above all other considerations. A public investor has zero interest in the long-term health of the company, they're solely motivated by the stock price and/or dividends. The cost to the investor to pull up stakes and move to another investment is extremely low.
Privately held companies, OTOH, have a smaller group of investors to please, investors that are probably still actively involved in the day-to-day business and who understand (and have patience) for a long-term outlook. Private companies can make 5-10 year plans without worrying about whether they might miss a single quarter's targets. Private investors have a higher hurdle to jump if they want to pull up stakes and move to another investment (which gives a bit of stability).
Yes, there are public companies who produce good products, usually because the company is run by a visionary/founder instead of the bean counters (or there's a healthy balance).
It is quite an interesting social characteristic that we have the clarity now more than ever of seeing. I find that our culture is more than willing to throw lives at a problem - whether it be the war on terrorism, drugs, or even war - but not able to comprehend the lose of a few truly brave souls who died for just as worthy a cause.
I peg that as being either (a) jealousy of some form, where the critics are not comfortable comparing their inner motivations to those of the ones that died bravely. They measure themselves and find that they lack the inner strength to do such a thing, and becoming aware of that lack seek to drag down the other person to their level in the eyes of others.
Or (b) critics who will take advantage of any situation to push their own private agendas.
Or (c) people who won't rock a boat if they're benefitting from the situation. Thus, they'll downplay any even that would negatively affect them if it changed and upplay any event where they would benefit by resulting change.
Re:"Good enough" is not an option
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
I'm old enough to feel satisfied with a mobile phone that can be used only to place and receive calls, but my kids certainly aren't.
Wait until they get older. With age usually comes wisdom and the realization that wasted time due to interface design is simply wasted time. Five years ago, I typically wanted every possible bell-n-whistle on any device that I bought. Some of that was "status", which as you get older means less and less. Nowadays I want elegant design without useless "toy" features.
Having unknowledgeable sales people with a combination of mislabeled advertising at the retail level, does anyone here let his or her tech challenged family members buy electronics?
Mis-labeling has been going on for at least a few decades.
What you're seeing is that there was a few years of "quiet" between when things like VHS / CD was new and now when new products are coming into the market to replace them. TV sets hadn't really changed in around 20 years, but between DTV and HDTV and HD monitors, what people used to know may no longer apply.
The closest similar period would probably be back when mono/stereo/hi-fi vs 2-head / 4-head / 6-head VCRs were all in the market at the same time.
AOL used to get hammered on this issue back when they were spewing millions of junk floppies and CDs.
Have you seen the latest mailouts from AOL? Metal cases with the CD inside instead of the old paper/cardboard cases. Or they send them out in a DVD-case sized clear plastic unit.
I'm still trying to find a use for the metal ones, maybe stick 4 or 5 DVD-Rs in them and then vacuum seal it.
Obviously people who wrote this article advising to type in urls have NO IDEA how bad things are right now. I had a job in phone support for an ISP recently, and it's impossible to get the average user to type a url in the adress bar, because most don't even HAVE an adress bar anymore!
Start, Run... then enter the URL in the nice little box that shows up. Dunno if it works on Win98 off-hand, but Win2k and WinXP support it. No need to go hunting for an address bar.
I used LHArc for at least a few years straight during the BBS days, back prior to Info-Zip's Zip/UnZip programs.
I imagine that someone still has a working version of it, although I've long since convered everything to ZIP for doing archives. (Might switch to BZip2, might not...)
Frankly, the "secure archive" in PkZip/WinZip is usless to me because I'd rather use an open-source tool like GPG to encrypt.
I'd bet he's running a game server (e.g. Call of Duty, MoHAA, other FPS). The newer games are probably less sleek then the older stuff because they make the assumption that a person will have a broadband line if they're going to do server-duty. Probably the only programming constraint they follow is trying to fit it into a 33.6 kbps pipe for each individual player.
So figure 16 gamers connected up, all sending/receiving enough to fill a 32 kilobit/sec connection is roughly 168 megabytes/hour or 4 gigabytes per day. Even if you assume only 8 players and 14 kilobits/sec, that adds up to 40 megabytes/hour or just under 1 gigabyte/day. IIRC, Call of Duty allows 32 or 64 players per server, which is a good chunk of bandwidth.
At a rough guess, it probably costs around $1000-$5000 per km to run cable/fiberoptic. Connecting from the pole to the house probably costs $100, most of which is covered by the install fee.
In short, there's a large capital outlay that has to be recouped over the next X years. In a highly-regulated market, X might be as long as 10-20 years because the company can count on a set amount of revenue for that period with little/no competition. In a deregulated market, companies need a shorter payoff (2-3 years).
Despite what Windows pundits would have you belive, Linux and Mac OS alike dont' get fewer virii because of lower market share (lower market share?!? I smell a pissing contest), but because they have no mechnasisms in place out of the box where a user can recieve e-mail with an executable file which can be activated with a single click. Not a double click, mind you; a single click and Outlook will launch a.exe attachment. (Oops, I meant to hit "Delete" or "Reply" -- There goes the corporate network)
There's more too it then that.
1) Market share merely makes the problem more widespread with a larger impact, by targeting the most popular platform, your creation makes a bigger splash. Infecting a thousand Mac/Linux machines would rate a yawn by the main stream press, but infect a few million Windows machines and you might get covered (and mad propz from your fellow losers).
2) I would bet that virus authors usually write to the the platform that they're familiar with, unless their goals dictate that they write to an alternative platform (e.g. wanting to make a particular O/S look bad, or to get widespread damage). Just about everyone has used Windows, so it's natural that crackers probably take their first steps on that platform.
3) Windows installations are typically insecure out of the box, with users/admins who don't know enough to lock them down (if they can even be locked down).
Combine 1+2+3 in combination with Outlook's insecure design (that you've pointed out) and gullible users, mix in a pinch of hubris by the software maker, and you get our current situation, a.k.a. "worm of the month". Plus, now you have to add in the ones who are doing it for financial motivation (creating an army of zombie hosts to spam or to carry out "protection" rackets).
You left out a possibility. He's a moron who thinks Applebee's is classy.
Given the circumstances of his arrest. ..
What? It's not? Gee, that'll be news to the local residents around these parts... but then, that's what I get for living in a town where a $10/head meal is considered expensive.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell... some more objections:
- fitting rooms are *cheap*, cameras / computers / displays to do all this is *expensive*; therefore it will only be used for high-end clothing - and folks that buy high-end clothing probably don't use fitting rooms anyway
- not every piece of clothing is cut identically, less common now depending on the supplier (or even 20 years ago)
- as Capt'n Hector put it, you try something on to see how it fits, how it hangs/drapes, whether or not it binds if you move limbs a certain way - definitely not replicatable via a computer interface
It is a moral dilemma, on the one hand you can toss it off with "seller beware", on the other hand you are likely taking advantage of them.
Not unlike attempting to buy the land rights from underneath a little old lady for pennies when you know there's millions of dollars worth of gold/oil there.
However, that analogy stretches credibility a lot, because on the net/ebay, everyone has the same resources to determine fair market value. If a seller fails to use the tools provided to check spelling (or check against how other people spell/list an item), then it's their own fault. A seller with a modicum of common sense will follow other auctions for a small amount of time prior to attempting to sell something.
Of course, there's no accounting for what a fool will manage to do...
While I was never in the Navy, all I have to say is "gads yes!" to the concept of repeating back instructions.
Whenever I'm helping out a co-worker over the phone with something, it drives me up the wall when they don't give feedback like that. I have to continually sprinkle in "what are you doing? what did you just do?" in order to make any headway (or find out that they're 10 steps down the wrong path). One of these days I'll get them all trained and then I imagine we'll hire a whole new lot.
Amazing. "some people in the Linux community said... you may have some copyright issues there..." Um, who, exactly, said this? And he leaps from that to "Linux is tainted, even by their own admission."
Going from my own poor short-term memory - the code that they showed (in Vegas?), which they said was owned by SCO, was in fact, BSD code where the copyright notices had been stripped. Therefore, the Linux community looked at the code, and basically said "yep, you may have some copyright issues there".
So, while it's a true statement, it's being spun that the "issue" is on the heads of the Linux folks, when in fact it's SCO that could be in hot water for removing copyright notices.
Much like many newspapers. And we know how poor they are at displaying information.
Just like newspapers eh?
Except that newspapers have a resolution of 200-300 dpi (at 320x240 and 5" diagonal, this device is probably only 72-80 dpi). So, not only is the screen a tad tiny (debatable), it really needs to get up to around 200dpi resolution.
Probably monitoring RFC-recommended or standard e-mail addresses like webmaster@, abuse@, postmaster@, root@.
I get around 100-150 spams per day because we need to monitor those e-mail addresses. (Which sometimes makes the visual check before bit-bucket fast... 4 copies of "subj: no money down" is probably a spam.)
- Mail admins have control over whether or not they publish SPF information and how restrictive they choose to make said SPF records. They can choose to maintain the status quo and risk being joe-jobbed, or make changes to their systems to make it more difficult.
- Mail admins have control over how strict they wish to be about checking inbound e-mail against SPF information. Ultimately, less work for mail admins because they don't have to maintain a list of authorized outbound IPs for every domain that they talk to.
No central authority, no long pages of legal forms to fill out and sign, no heavy-weight implementation details, doesn't require every last SMTP server on the planet to implement it to be effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because some fool edited "Andy" in the MyDoom binary, it doesn't mean that the real author is really called "Andy" or something like that. In fact the virus originates in Russia, so it's very unlikely that the author is really called Andy, but rather "Wolja", "Olga", "Oleg" or "Katjusha".
I vote for Dick...
CyberGuys sells the same sort of stuff that your corner-shop PC store does. Big advantage is that their online catalog is pretty well done for a small shop and the prices are quite reasonable. Very little brand-name, but as long as you stick to the commodity stuff, you'll have no problems. (They do now sell some name brand stuff, don't remember if they did before or not.)
I've probably ordered a few hundred dollars worth of bits, cables and misc parts from them over the past few years and I've not had a problem.
(Yes, I realize now that you were being funny...)
Other than screws, I suggest buying some paper washers that go between the screw and the motherboard. Not really necessary, but they insure that there's no electrical short and prevent damage of the motherboard. Well worth the $0.10 each or whatever.
Now there's something that I've always wondered about, whether or not the motherboard is supposed to be mounted on insulated pegs or if the stand-offs and screws are supposed to make electrical contact. (Paper washers *underneath* the motherboard I would imagine would be darn near impossible, but most stand-offs are conductive which leads me to believe it's supposed to be grounded/contact.)
I have yet to see it stated either way in any motherboard manual that I've read, anyone got a definitive link as to which way this is supposed to be? You're saying not, and I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but would prefer hard-copy.
CyberGuys (Small Hardware)
Probably cheaper to go troll the dumpsters, if you can find an old 286/386/486 being tossed you can probably scavange a dozen of each size. Anytime I toss an old system, I take the 15 minutes to strip it of any screws / connectors / etc.
The small screws (usually for mounting CD-ROMs to the side-brackets) are 4mm fine, the 6mm (6x32) screws are for the case / slot covers / hard drive mounting. Don't forget to either get small snack-pack rubbermaid containers (about 2" round, 1.5" deep) to hold the screws/bits, or those yellow plastic stopper tubes (1/2" x 5").
(I really don't understand the fuss about the issue at all... there's pretty much just the 2 types of screws, 4mm fine and 6x32.)
the lack of a standardized layout of ports and such on the back means you have to make like 30 cut outs on each case to get it to work with every mobo on the market
That's a design feature in the ATX spec. It fixes the problem that the old AT-style cases had where you were forced into using expansion slot headers or punch-outs in order to provide access for connectors other then the AT-keyboard cable. If you look at any ATX motherboard on the market today, you'll see that they come with a ~1.5"x4" metal insert that fits into a standard cutout area on the back of the ATX-case and which matches up to whatever ports the vendor decided to put on the motherboard.
Yes, the G5 is probably prettier on the inside... but you get what you pay for, but with lack of options (there's only one maker for motherboard that you put inside a G5). OTOH, with the ATX-spec, you can mix-n-match motherboards and cases to get exactly what you want. The downside is that you have to do cable/wire management yourself (rounded cables and a bit of wire-tie do just fine).
I stopped watching close to 10 years ago... wanna have another contest?
However, now that HDTV is finally rolling out in my area for OTA broadcats (I might get 5 channels), I took the plunge and ordered a MyHD-120 PCI card. With the recording capability, I won't be locked to the chair during the time-slot, and I won't have to fiddle with VCR tapes.
I'll still probably spend more time online then watching TV (I estimate I'll watch maybe 10-12 hours per week). So long as I'm in control of when I get to watch what I want to watch, I'll be content.
You make it sound like every company that is traded publicly doesn't produce good products. I am a shareholder of a number of different companies and the only thing I care about is that they keep producing quality products so customers continue to buy them. Companies that fit your description typically don't last.
The problem is, for the majority of companies, quality is not cost-effective. If they can make higher margins by cutting costs, they will, in fact they're pretty much required to maximize profits at the expense of anything else by the rules of the stock market. Miss your revenue/profit targets, and watch your stock take a beating. Makes for a very myopic focus on quarterly earnings above all other considerations. A public investor has zero interest in the long-term health of the company, they're solely motivated by the stock price and/or dividends. The cost to the investor to pull up stakes and move to another investment is extremely low.
Privately held companies, OTOH, have a smaller group of investors to please, investors that are probably still actively involved in the day-to-day business and who understand (and have patience) for a long-term outlook. Private companies can make 5-10 year plans without worrying about whether they might miss a single quarter's targets. Private investors have a higher hurdle to jump if they want to pull up stakes and move to another investment (which gives a bit of stability).
Yes, there are public companies who produce good products, usually because the company is run by a visionary/founder instead of the bean counters (or there's a healthy balance).
It is quite an interesting social characteristic that we have the clarity now more than ever of seeing. I find that our culture is more than willing to throw lives at a problem - whether it be the war on terrorism, drugs, or even war - but not able to comprehend the lose of a few truly brave souls who died for just as worthy a cause.
I peg that as being either (a) jealousy of some form, where the critics are not comfortable comparing their inner motivations to those of the ones that died bravely. They measure themselves and find that they lack the inner strength to do such a thing, and becoming aware of that lack seek to drag down the other person to their level in the eyes of others.
Or (b) critics who will take advantage of any situation to push their own private agendas.
Or (c) people who won't rock a boat if they're benefitting from the situation. Thus, they'll downplay any even that would negatively affect them if it changed and upplay any event where they would benefit by resulting change.
I'm old enough to feel satisfied with a mobile phone that can be used only to place and receive calls, but my kids certainly aren't.
Wait until they get older. With age usually comes wisdom and the realization that wasted time due to interface design is simply wasted time. Five years ago, I typically wanted every possible bell-n-whistle on any device that I bought. Some of that was "status", which as you get older means less and less. Nowadays I want elegant design without useless "toy" features.
Having unknowledgeable sales people with a combination of mislabeled advertising at the retail level, does anyone here let his or her tech challenged family members buy electronics?
Mis-labeling has been going on for at least a few decades.
What you're seeing is that there was a few years of "quiet" between when things like VHS / CD was new and now when new products are coming into the market to replace them. TV sets hadn't really changed in around 20 years, but between DTV and HDTV and HD monitors, what people used to know may no longer apply.
The closest similar period would probably be back when mono/stereo/hi-fi vs 2-head / 4-head / 6-head VCRs were all in the market at the same time.
AOL used to get hammered on this issue back when they were spewing millions of junk floppies and CDs.
Have you seen the latest mailouts from AOL? Metal cases with the CD inside instead of the old paper/cardboard cases. Or they send them out in a DVD-case sized clear plastic unit.
I'm still trying to find a use for the metal ones, maybe stick 4 or 5 DVD-Rs in them and then vacuum seal it.
My friend bitches about paying $1 per song on iTunes but spends $1.50 for a stupid ringtone for her phone...and she buys a lot of ringtones...
But ring-tones fall under the "fashion" heading, just like shoes... and goodness knows you can never have too many shoes.
Obviously people who wrote this article advising to type in urls have NO IDEA how bad things are right now. I had a job in phone support for an ISP recently, and it's impossible to get the average user to type a url in the adress bar, because most don't even HAVE an adress bar anymore!
Start, Run... then enter the URL in the nice little box that shows up. Dunno if it works on Win98 off-hand, but Win2k and WinXP support it. No need to go hunting for an address bar.
I used LHArc for at least a few years straight during the BBS days, back prior to Info-Zip's Zip/UnZip programs.
I imagine that someone still has a working version of it, although I've long since convered everything to ZIP for doing archives. (Might switch to BZip2, might not...)
Frankly, the "secure archive" in PkZip/WinZip is usless to me because I'd rather use an open-source tool like GPG to encrypt.
I'd bet he's running a game server (e.g. Call of Duty, MoHAA, other FPS). The newer games are probably less sleek then the older stuff because they make the assumption that a person will have a broadband line if they're going to do server-duty. Probably the only programming constraint they follow is trying to fit it into a 33.6 kbps pipe for each individual player.
So figure 16 gamers connected up, all sending/receiving enough to fill a 32 kilobit/sec connection is roughly 168 megabytes/hour or 4 gigabytes per day. Even if you assume only 8 players and 14 kilobits/sec, that adds up to 40 megabytes/hour or just under 1 gigabyte/day. IIRC, Call of Duty allows 32 or 64 players per server, which is a good chunk of bandwidth.
At a rough guess, it probably costs around $1000-$5000 per km to run cable/fiberoptic. Connecting from the pole to the house probably costs $100, most of which is covered by the install fee.
In short, there's a large capital outlay that has to be recouped over the next X years. In a highly-regulated market, X might be as long as 10-20 years because the company can count on a set amount of revenue for that period with little/no competition. In a deregulated market, companies need a shorter payoff (2-3 years).
It ain't the electricity used.
Despite what Windows pundits would have you belive, Linux and Mac OS alike dont' get fewer virii because of lower market share (lower market share?!? I smell a pissing contest), but because they have no mechnasisms in place out of the box where a user can recieve e-mail with an executable file which can be activated with a single click. Not a double click, mind you; a single click and Outlook will launch a .exe attachment. (Oops, I meant to hit "Delete" or "Reply" -- There goes the corporate network)
There's more too it then that.
1) Market share merely makes the problem more widespread with a larger impact, by targeting the most popular platform, your creation makes a bigger splash. Infecting a thousand Mac/Linux machines would rate a yawn by the main stream press, but infect a few million Windows machines and you might get covered (and mad propz from your fellow losers).
2) I would bet that virus authors usually write to the the platform that they're familiar with, unless their goals dictate that they write to an alternative platform (e.g. wanting to make a particular O/S look bad, or to get widespread damage). Just about everyone has used Windows, so it's natural that crackers probably take their first steps on that platform.
3) Windows installations are typically insecure out of the box, with users/admins who don't know enough to lock them down (if they can even be locked down).
Combine 1+2+3 in combination with Outlook's insecure design (that you've pointed out) and gullible users, mix in a pinch of hubris by the software maker, and you get our current situation, a.k.a. "worm of the month". Plus, now you have to add in the ones who are doing it for financial motivation (creating an army of zombie hosts to spam or to carry out "protection" rackets).
You left out a possibility. He's a moron who thinks Applebee's is classy.
.
Given the circumstances of his arrest. .
What? It's not? Gee, that'll be news to the local residents around these parts... but then, that's what I get for living in a town where a $10/head meal is considered expensive.
People try cloths on to see how they fit
That's pretty much it in a nutshell... some more objections:
- fitting rooms are *cheap*, cameras / computers / displays to do all this is *expensive*; therefore it will only be used for high-end clothing - and folks that buy high-end clothing probably don't use fitting rooms anyway
- not every piece of clothing is cut identically, less common now depending on the supplier (or even 20 years ago)
- as Capt'n Hector put it, you try something on to see how it fits, how it hangs/drapes, whether or not it binds if you move limbs a certain way - definitely not replicatable via a computer interface
It is a moral dilemma, on the one hand you can toss it off with "seller beware", on the other hand you are likely taking advantage of them.
Not unlike attempting to buy the land rights from underneath a little old lady for pennies when you know there's millions of dollars worth of gold/oil there.
However, that analogy stretches credibility a lot, because on the net/ebay, everyone has the same resources to determine fair market value. If a seller fails to use the tools provided to check spelling (or check against how other people spell/list an item), then it's their own fault. A seller with a modicum of common sense will follow other auctions for a small amount of time prior to attempting to sell something.
Of course, there's no accounting for what a fool will manage to do...
While I was never in the Navy, all I have to say is "gads yes!" to the concept of repeating back instructions.
Whenever I'm helping out a co-worker over the phone with something, it drives me up the wall when they don't give feedback like that. I have to continually sprinkle in "what are you doing? what did you just do?" in order to make any headway (or find out that they're 10 steps down the wrong path). One of these days I'll get them all trained and then I imagine we'll hire a whole new lot.
Amazing. "some people in the Linux community said... you may have some copyright issues there..." Um, who, exactly, said this? And he leaps from that to "Linux is tainted, even by their own admission."
Going from my own poor short-term memory - the code that they showed (in Vegas?), which they said was owned by SCO, was in fact, BSD code where the copyright notices had been stripped. Therefore, the Linux community looked at the code, and basically said "yep, you may have some copyright issues there".
So, while it's a true statement, it's being spun that the "issue" is on the heads of the Linux folks, when in fact it's SCO that could be in hot water for removing copyright notices.
Much like many newspapers. And we know how poor they are at displaying information.
Just like newspapers eh?
Except that newspapers have a resolution of 200-300 dpi (at 320x240 and 5" diagonal, this device is probably only 72-80 dpi). So, not only is the screen a tad tiny (debatable), it really needs to get up to around 200dpi resolution.
WTF are you doing, using MSN and AOL for email?
Probably monitoring RFC-recommended or standard e-mail addresses like webmaster@, abuse@, postmaster@, root@.
I get around 100-150 spams per day because we need to monitor those e-mail addresses. (Which sometimes makes the visual check before bit-bucket fast... 4 copies of "subj: no money down" is probably a spam.)
Also...
- Mail admins have control over whether or not they publish SPF information and how restrictive they choose to make said SPF records. They can choose to maintain the status quo and risk being joe-jobbed, or make changes to their systems to make it more difficult.
- Mail admins have control over how strict they wish to be about checking inbound e-mail against SPF information. Ultimately, less work for mail admins because they don't have to maintain a list of authorized outbound IPs for every domain that they talk to.
No central authority, no long pages of legal forms to fill out and sign, no heavy-weight implementation details, doesn't require every last SMTP server on the planet to implement it to be effective.