Okay, doesn't look like this is being applied to the right entertainment market. I don't have a problem with game prices at all. There is generally a lot of creativity and work that goes into them, and the prices do fall after the item has been on the market for a while, even if it's still popular. That doesn't seem to happen with music or movies (or Microsoft software).
Still, it's backwards. High prices encourage "piracy". And lowering the prices enough will make casual users of illegally copied material say, "hey, it's more convenient to just buy it." Of course, there still has to be some enforcement of copyright for this to work. I see hints of this happening in the music biz, but I've yet to see real price competition between labels. Thank heavens we are seeing a real-world example of this, and hopefully it will give the anti-entertainment-cartel crowd some ammunition.
Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.
Google's having a pretty hard time with having their ranking system gamed right now. It's not unusual for me to get 5 pages worth of results, with about about 75 per cent of those hits pointing back to the same domain. I really don't think it matters there.
I pretty much agree with the rest of your examples. Of course, those are things that commercial software couldn't do either, since anyone could buy their own copy and reverse engineer it. It'd pretty much have to be all done in-house.
Around here, the expectation is that it would be a bad ruling, regardless of how the ruling adheres to the written law. In my book, that ruling would be a good ruling.
How about when a new law is in conflict with established laws, and it sits on the books until it becomes such a nuisance that complaints push it to the highest levels of the judicial system? By then it may have done real economic damage, and has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in review or has cost millions in private attorney's fees. And even then, the issue may not be settled, because the judges hearing the case may not all agree.
It isn't as black and white as you're suggesting. It's not like every court says, "hey, let's get a list of all the new legislation just passed, and rule on it with no case." It's not like judges aren't human beings with ideals and opinions, that see one aspect of a law as more important that another. There are plenty of laws seemingly in conflict other laws. There apparently is no legislative litmus test involving contradiction to be applied before a bill is voted upon.
So, when you say a ruling adheres to written law, I can ask: Which law?
No, and I won't bother to, because I never said Microsoft did so. What I was pointing out was that if you are on a subscription-based service, i.e. a maintenance license, you have to remove the software if you let your license expire from not paying the license maintenance fees. This is how Microsoft maintenance licensing works now.
Perhaps if people in America actually bothered to vote you would see the politicians taking more notice of the people than the corporates.
...And the lobbyists. Not only vote, but speak up in numbers, and in your own words. Although I am a 'Republican republican republican', I want to send a shout out to registered Dems and Independants that don't vote. Come on guys, it's not that hard to do. It's shameful when a national election doesn't even get 50 per cent of the registered voters off their arses. You guys could have had a Dem in the white house by a wide margin!
I see the same thing in my town. Registered Dems outnumber Republicans, but they don't vote. There are a lot of Republicans that I don't want in power right now, but I can't really influence elections in other states. Please, for the love of all that is good, vote this year. Take a day off from work if you have to!!
BTW, am I the only one that sees something wrong with campaign contributions from outside a elected officials territory? No really. Why can Orrin Hatch be persuaded to vote a certain way by a lobbyist group out of California? Can I donate funds to senators or representitives from other states? It seems to me that lobbyists are exercising political power which the people do not even have.
So far this week our government has passed laws legalizing spam and giving huge kickbacks to insurance companies. They have a majority on a bill indemnifying oil companies for MTBE pollution.
As far as the junk e-mail legislation is concerned, I think it's pretty clear that the reason spam is so common is that it works as an advertising medium. I notice that big names are now using junk-pumps (HP for example) to get their word out. I could see that one coming. There is no lobbying group representing line subscribers that actually foot the bill for this "free" advertising, so it's going to get much worse (until, of course, a better version of e-mail is made standard). It wasn't Big Oil's idea to put MTBE into petrol, so I can understand them seeking indemnification. However, MTBE became a problem because of shoddy maintenance procedures for storing the fuel, so those distributors that let their tanks leak and rust should feel the wrath of the lawyers. If those faulty storage tanks were owned by Big Oil companies, well that's a different story.
They declared intent to ban gay marriages in the US.
Absolutely ridiculous, especially when considering that no government was granted the power to regulate this, and the people (whom the decision ultimately rests upon) are indifferent toward the issue in general. I feel that the government only really should have power when mediating an agreement for a divorce, and is otherwise much too involved with matters at home.
Now there is a bill that would give all publishers the right to become monopolies? And this actually received sponsorship?
Yeah, pretty sickening, huh? These are the things that happen when congressman becomes a full-time job. You would think that showing a relationship between contributions and voting record would be enough to prove that our elected have no integrity. I guess that's not enough. Maybe Hatch will have to authorize a nuclear strike on Sharman Networks before people say, "uh, yeah, that's going a tad too far."
Isn't our government supposed to behave near elections?
No, election years usually are the worst, because incumbents push through the pork for their special interests in an effort to remain popular. It gets even worse if the polls show the incumbent on the way out.
I have faith that SOMEONE in the government will see the absurdity of this request and will stop it before it gets too far.
Fat chance during an election year. And it would have to be more than a single "someone" to get anything done. It's bunk like this that makes me wish/. collected donations and had its own lobbyist.
Well, I used to read Filthy's reviews, but he is no more.:( For a while there, I only saw some really good movies. Too bad every "professional" critic is a shill.
The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon...
Don't knock it. That cartoon wasn't stylized like a cheap, Korean-made, Saturday morning toy advertisement cartoon. I would have preferred live action, but special effects being what they were in the 1960s, I can see why they tried the animated approach. The "cartoon" still managed to incorporate more of the elements and the spirit of the books than Jackson could ever do with any amount of run-time. The difference is that Peter Jackson completed his adaptation, and for that I applaud him.
So mod me offtopic/flamebait, I'm going to do a little MS-bashing.
I don't think a whole lot of people "got it" during the trial. The browser was just one single example of MS using it's monopoly power to make competitors' products irrelevant. This is yet another example. Right now it seems like there's only room enough for once SVG format, but wait until MS throws it's weight around (like with WMP audio) and support for this format appears out of nowhere.
Examples of technology that MS copied and used in conjunction with their monopoly (and distribution) power to cripple competitors:
DR-DOS --> hardcoded Windows incompatibilities Netscape --> IE Groupwise/Notes --> Outlook Sun Java --> MS Java --> MS dotNet RealPlayer --> WMV MPEG Layer 3 --> WMA CD burning software --> Functionality included in XP WinZip --> Functionality included in XP Any lightweight editor --> MS Movie Maker Flash SVG --> WVG
This isn't innovation. Microsoft isn't selling these things as separate items; They ship with Windows. Bringing up browser integration during the trial, but ignoring all the rest of the examples is just silly. It's still going on, and no one cares. I don't understand how someone, especially a hardline Republican, can stand for both economic growth and support Microsoft at the same time. MS is bad for business. Even if Microsoft licensed some of the technologies, it's still bad, because no competitors can get their foot in the door when MS has already included the technology in a way that it cannot be removed or replaced in the operating system. It'll never occur to end-users that there are other options.
Okay, here's my question: These ATMs were in some way linked to external machines that have Internet access, and if not directly, then through a route to those machines that did.
Question: Why?
Question: Why weren't the routers configured to block everything but the required ports to the ATMs?
Also note that according to the article, Diebold neglected to apply the DCOM vulnerability patches even though it had been a month since Blaster disabled thousands of machines.
Question: Why do we continue to trust this company? That's two strikes if you include the electronic voting machines (I've yet to hear an explanation of why those e-voting machines in certain areas of my state were crashing on election night).
"This explanation was condensed in the finished article by copy editors, which is beyond my control."
Yeah, blame it on the editors. What a weak excuse. Let's face it, there's no defense for using a nearly one-year-old release of SA and comparing it to recent products. Example: Pop just bought a commercial "spam" filter in a shrink-wrapped box. He couldn't even get the installer to run without a patch and assistance from tech support (assistance which took a couple days of haggling to receive). How well would this product do in the magazine's review? Would the reviewer say something like this: "We attempted to install the out-of-the-box version of (Product X) to no avail. We therefore recommend that consumers not use (Product X) because we don't feel like getting the updated version." Hell no! The developer would field some angry calls to the editors and probably threaten to withdraw ad space until they got a fair review.
The author then goes on to take potshots at the support for SA. The free support for SA. He also mentions that there is no guarantee of support. Excuse me, but, there is no guarantee of free support for some commercial retail software, either (probably harder to find as well). Included "free" support is usually limited, and good luck placing dozens of tech support calls a month on a retail product purchase; The developer will likely say "yeah, uhhhh, we're gonna have to ask you to go ahead and buy a corporate network package to get this kind of support." In other words, good support costs money. This is the case in the open source world, too. But at least you have the option of the free support channels in the open source world.
I'm looking forward to this, but how about equipment portability? Carriers refuse to move your ESN over from an older carrier. Since the device is "activated" with a particular carrier from the start, what's to stop it from being re-activated with a new carrier? This is costly to me, and forces me to discard an otherwise perfectly functioning mobile phone. I know there are charities that take this old equipment as a donation, but I'd have a lot more cash to donate directly if I didn't have to pay an extra $40 to $100 USD every time I switched carriers.
I'm going to set-up a new MP3-checking site. It inspects the MP3s you upload and tells you whether or not they are protected by copyright. If the MP3s contain copyrighted material, the server informs the user, then saves a copy of the file for, uh, ahem, closer long-term inspection by the site administrator. Contacting the RIAA won't be necessary since it's already been established that the content is copyrighted, and the user warned. It's like RIAA copyright infringer amnesty, but without the legal gotchas!
Why take chances? Do a batch upload of all your MP3s and save yourself from a lot of legal hassles!
p.s. Please upload only MP3s encoded at 160Kbps/high quality or better. Quality is very important to the copyright determination process.
Not to mention that no one really has the funds to build the super-probes of yesteryear, so this is unfortunately going to happen with greater frequency. Even looking back at the historic Mars missions where the US sent those super-probes, two out of eight failed before reaching Mars. This shows us that it really has nothing to do with Mars, it's a difficult feat to send probes to Mars even with gobs of cash to spend, and it is no less difficult now than it was decades ago.
I like to propose feel-good legislation just like the next guy, but I'm wondering if anti-spam legislation is going to make any difference at all, other than raising my taxes.
First, you'd have actually identify the original sender of the garbage messages in order for justice to be served. Good luck! I've yet to reach a valid abuse/admin contact (the junk goes one way it seems), or even turn up valid contact information about a junk-pump's registered domain (junk-pump being a junk-mail relayer's collection of misconfigured MTA boxes). Upstream providers just don't want to get involved either.
Second, solicited advertisements are getting just as bad, and or worse in my case. Companies that I do business with are using some of the big junk-mail relays to get out their unwanted messages. There is such a thing as abusing the privilege of using my e-mail account as a free billboard. My vendors send me garbage on a daily basis now, regardless of the fact that either a) I specifically stated I don't want to receive it, and b) I uncheck those "receive e-mail offers" boxes whenever I see them. I don't really have a choice, because I need to receive quotes through e-mail, and they interpret that to mean "you have unrestricted access to my inbox, please deluge me with unwanted ads."
Third, info-spam is getting to be a problem, too. It's not a straight ad per se, but more like a mailing list that I've never signed up for. I get countless "tech tips", product reviews and security advice from companies that I've never heard of. The combination of these adds up to a lot of server wasted space, network bandwidth and time for me and my users, and I have to wade through a whole "screen" full of garbage to get to the important messages of the morning.
I have no choice but to start blocking the sending accounts (or domains) at my mail server. We are a government entity, and we just don't have the manpower or the funds to go after these people. A do-not-mail-list will reduce the amount of unwanted junk I get by maybe 2 messages a day. I guess there will just have to be some type of infrastucture change. I'm think something along the lines of making it impossible to receive e-mail from random unknown accounts. Something in the message header that the server can check against a trusted certificate server, that closes connections from unapproved accounts.
"We were using Linux as a desktop at the same time. It was more stable than Windows NT at the time. And NT as a server was a joke. But NetWare was so dominant they were almost killed by their own success. NetWare was so successful that they could never move on."
Yeah, NT was a "joke". Well, I guess that finally proves my theories about the arrogance of Novell in the face of a direct threat. I'd be wary of any business venture in which Mr. Love is involved. I'm also dubious with regard to a SuSE/Novell merger producing anything capable of competing with Windows.
I began using GNU/Linux around 1995. It was more reliable than Windows NT at the time, but nowhere near as fast to configure. It also didn't match NT feature-for-feature in filesharing and printsharing, which was the hotly contested marketspace for low-end server installations at the time.
Novell were content to sit on their fat behinds and make fun of NT, even as NT 4 hit the shelves, and PC sales for business went through the roof (giving Microsoft inroads through their OEM channels). Sure the first NT 4 installations crashed or exhibited strange behavior on a regular basis, but the Microsoft marketing machine was in full swing.
My personal experience was that customers demanded Windows NT 4 because it was "new" and less costly, no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise (I would be servicing it crissakes, not them). So, rather than lose an account, I did the work. Novell didn't seem to react to the threat.
Microsoft was competitive on pricing. The upfront costs for licenses were cheaper, MS made it easier to migrate by giving upgrade discounts and including client software to talk with Netware servers. Novell didn't lower its prices to compete, or make any gestures whatsoever to remind its existing customers that their present and future business was valuable (until much, much later, after they lost most of their customers to MS).
Microsoft purposely had lax per-seat license checking restrictions, which people found easier to deal with. Novell still stuck with their inflexible, floppy-disk based per-seat license enforcement, which was unpopular with techs and customers alike (oops, disk went bad, guess you have an expensive doorstop instead of a new server).
Microsoft made it easy to get documentation and programming tools for Windows. Microsoft sold those tools, other developers sold Windows programming tools, and there was healthy competition. Netware programming remained a black art, and there wasn't a whole lot of API to work with. Novell hasn't moved to correct this situation until very recently, and they still hassle you to give out information about yourself and your employer to see the documentation. I guess I'm out of the mainstream, because I think operating system developers that don't provide a full-featured compiler (even without an IDE) and reasonably detailed documentation for free are incredibly short-sighted.
Microsoft embraced (but extended) TCP/IP as the core communication protocol in Windows, while Netware had an ugly IP duct-tape fix up until version 5. Sure Novell's implementation of IPX/SPX was more secure (and probably performed better), but IP was more flexible, and IP-enabled software was practically falling from the sky, and it was not easily ported to Netware, (as evidenced by the fact that it wasn't).
Netware had a winning technology with NDS. I still think it's the most impressive piece of work that Novell ever released. Even with Microsoft dominating the fileserver marketspace, Novell still priced the NDS add-on for Windows more than the cost of a Windows server (with ADS) license.
***
Where do Novell's profits come from these days? They must have an awful lot of funds in reserve, because they are one of the slowest-moving tech companies I've ever seen. They still can't make up their mind about what to do, and Windows has steadily become better over the past decade. I've pretty much written off Novell. Does Netware even stack up to Windows 2000/2003 now? Does it scale as well? Does it's TCP/IP stack perform as well? Is it less expensive?
I find it very discomforting that the most obvious targets for this type of weapon would be western countries that heavily depend on electronics, especially in warfare.
My point is this. Linux is not the be all end all of existence. Its a great OS, with problems just like anything else. Lets keep this in its proper perspective and try to ignore the hysterical ranting of the Debian wackos.
What does this have to do with the "quality" of Debian? AFAIK, the vulnerability that lead to the compromising hasn't been revealed yet. I could have been something as simple as a guessed password.
Thank heavens you guys were smart enough to host your signatures/checksums on a different machine, unlike some other projects I could mention. I know it's early, but do you know anything yet regarding how the machines became compromised? It'd be nice to have an early warning in case I'm running the same software at work.
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Okay, doesn't look like this is being applied to the right entertainment market. I don't have a problem with game prices at all. There is generally a lot of creativity and work that goes into them, and the prices do fall after the item has been on the market for a while, even if it's still popular. That doesn't seem to happen with music or movies (or Microsoft software).
Still, it's backwards. High prices encourage "piracy". And lowering the prices enough will make casual users of illegally copied material say, "hey, it's more convenient to just buy it." Of course, there still has to be some enforcement of copyright for this to work. I see hints of this happening in the music biz, but I've yet to see real price competition between labels. Thank heavens we are seeing a real-world example of this, and hopefully it will give the anti-entertainment-cartel crowd some ammunition.
You'd think that there wouldn't be any point in posting further MS-bashing comments after your post. But hey...
Thank you! And while we're on the topic, I'd like to add:
* Multiple Intel chips would be "CPUs", not "CPU's".
* There is no "e" in "ridiculous".
Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.
Google's having a pretty hard time with having their ranking system gamed right now. It's not unusual for me to get 5 pages worth of results, with about about 75 per cent of those hits pointing back to the same domain. I really don't think it matters there.
I pretty much agree with the rest of your examples. Of course, those are things that commercial software couldn't do either, since anyone could buy their own copy and reverse engineer it. It'd pretty much have to be all done in-house.
Around here, the expectation is that it would be a bad ruling, regardless of how the ruling adheres to the written law. In my book, that ruling would be a good ruling.
How about when a new law is in conflict with established laws, and it sits on the books until it becomes such a nuisance that complaints push it to the highest levels of the judicial system? By then it may have done real economic damage, and has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in review or has cost millions in private attorney's fees. And even then, the issue may not be settled, because the judges hearing the case may not all agree.
It isn't as black and white as you're suggesting. It's not like every court says, "hey, let's get a list of all the new legislation just passed, and rule on it with no case." It's not like judges aren't human beings with ideals and opinions, that see one aspect of a law as more important that another. There are plenty of laws seemingly in conflict other laws. There apparently is no legislative litmus test involving contradiction to be applied before a bill is voted upon.
So, when you say a ruling adheres to written law, I can ask: Which law?
To be pedantic, if the license says you must remove the software at the end of the license then it isn't a maintenance license, it's a usage license.
Please forward that to Microsoft. It's their naming convention, not mine.
No, and I won't bother to, because I never said Microsoft did so. What I was pointing out was that if you are on a subscription-based service, i.e. a maintenance license, you have to remove the software if you let your license expire from not paying the license maintenance fees. This is how Microsoft maintenance licensing works now.
Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?
Some differences:
* RedHat is not a near-monopoly that charges almost $300 for just a license on their latest desktop OS.
* RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your machine.
* A RedHat subscription includes support. Microsoft's license fees only include software updates.
Perhaps if people in America actually bothered to vote you would see the politicians taking more notice of the people than the corporates.
...And the lobbyists. Not only vote, but speak up in numbers, and in your own words. Although I am a 'Republican republican republican', I want to send a shout out to registered Dems and Independants that don't vote. Come on guys, it's not that hard to do. It's shameful when a national election doesn't even get 50 per cent of the registered voters off their arses. You guys could have had a Dem in the white house by a wide margin!
I see the same thing in my town. Registered Dems outnumber Republicans, but they don't vote. There are a lot of Republicans that I don't want in power right now, but I can't really influence elections in other states. Please, for the love of all that is good, vote this year. Take a day off from work if you have to!!
BTW, am I the only one that sees something wrong with campaign contributions from outside a elected officials territory? No really. Why can Orrin Hatch be persuaded to vote a certain way by a lobbyist group out of California? Can I donate funds to senators or representitives from other states? It seems to me that lobbyists are exercising political power which the people do not even have.
So far this week our government has passed laws legalizing spam and giving huge kickbacks to insurance companies. They have a majority on a bill indemnifying oil companies for MTBE pollution.
As far as the junk e-mail legislation is concerned, I think it's pretty clear that the reason spam is so common is that it works as an advertising medium. I notice that big names are now using junk-pumps (HP for example) to get their word out. I could see that one coming. There is no lobbying group representing line subscribers that actually foot the bill for this "free" advertising, so it's going to get much worse (until, of course, a better version of e-mail is made standard). It wasn't Big Oil's idea to put MTBE into petrol, so I can understand them seeking indemnification. However, MTBE became a problem because of shoddy maintenance procedures for storing the fuel, so those distributors that let their tanks leak and rust should feel the wrath of the lawyers. If those faulty storage tanks were owned by Big Oil companies, well that's a different story.
They declared intent to ban gay marriages in the US.
Absolutely ridiculous, especially when considering that no government was granted the power to regulate this, and the people (whom the decision ultimately rests upon) are indifferent toward the issue in general. I feel that the government only really should have power when mediating an agreement for a divorce, and is otherwise much too involved with matters at home.
Now there is a bill that would give all publishers the right to become monopolies? And this actually received sponsorship?
Yeah, pretty sickening, huh? These are the things that happen when congressman becomes a full-time job. You would think that showing a relationship between contributions and voting record would be enough to prove that our elected have no integrity. I guess that's not enough. Maybe Hatch will have to authorize a nuclear strike on Sharman Networks before people say, "uh, yeah, that's going a tad too far."
Isn't our government supposed to behave near elections?
No, election years usually are the worst, because incumbents push through the pork for their special interests in an effort to remain popular. It gets even worse if the polls show the incumbent on the way out.
I have faith that SOMEONE in the government will see the absurdity of this request and will stop it before it gets too far.
/. collected donations and had its own lobbyist.
Fat chance during an election year. And it would have to be more than a single "someone" to get anything done. It's bunk like this that makes me wish
As an American, it didn't even occur to me that this law was constitutional.
Well, I used to read Filthy's reviews, but he is no more. :(
For a while there, I only saw some really good movies. Too bad every "professional" critic is a shill.
The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon...
Don't knock it. That cartoon wasn't stylized like a cheap, Korean-made, Saturday morning toy advertisement cartoon. I would have preferred live action, but special effects being what they were in the 1960s, I can see why they tried the animated approach. The "cartoon" still managed to incorporate more of the elements and the spirit of the books than Jackson could ever do with any amount of run-time. The difference is that Peter Jackson completed his adaptation, and for that I applaud him.
So mod me offtopic/flamebait, I'm going to do a little MS-bashing.
I don't think a whole lot of people "got it" during the trial. The browser was just one single example of MS using it's monopoly power to make competitors' products irrelevant. This is yet another example. Right now it seems like there's only room enough for once SVG format, but wait until MS throws it's weight around (like with WMP audio) and support for this format appears out of nowhere.
Examples of technology that MS copied and used in conjunction with their monopoly (and distribution) power to cripple competitors:
DR-DOS --> hardcoded Windows incompatibilities
Netscape --> IE
Groupwise/Notes --> Outlook
Sun Java --> MS Java --> MS dotNet
RealPlayer --> WMV
MPEG Layer 3 --> WMA
CD burning software --> Functionality included in XP
WinZip --> Functionality included in XP
Any lightweight editor --> MS Movie Maker
Flash SVG --> WVG
This isn't innovation. Microsoft isn't selling these things as separate items; They ship with Windows. Bringing up browser integration during the trial, but ignoring all the rest of the examples is just silly. It's still going on, and no one cares. I don't understand how someone, especially a hardline Republican, can stand for both economic growth and support Microsoft at the same time. MS is bad for business. Even if Microsoft licensed some of the technologies, it's still bad, because no competitors can get their foot in the door when MS has already included the technology in a way that it cannot be removed or replaced in the operating system. It'll never occur to end-users that there are other options.
Okay, here's my question: These ATMs were in some way linked to external machines that have Internet access, and if not directly, then through a route to those machines that did.
Question: Why?
Question: Why weren't the routers configured to block everything but the required ports to the ATMs?
Also note that according to the article, Diebold neglected to apply the DCOM vulnerability patches even though it had been a month since Blaster disabled thousands of machines.
Question: Why do we continue to trust this company? That's two strikes if you include the electronic voting machines (I've yet to hear an explanation of why those e-voting machines in certain areas of my state were crashing on election night).
"This explanation was condensed in the finished article by copy editors, which is beyond my control."
Yeah, blame it on the editors. What a weak excuse. Let's face it, there's no defense for using a nearly one-year-old release of SA and comparing it to recent products. Example: Pop just bought a commercial "spam" filter in a shrink-wrapped box. He couldn't even get the installer to run without a patch and assistance from tech support (assistance which took a couple days of haggling to receive). How well would this product do in the magazine's review? Would the reviewer say something like this: "We attempted to install the out-of-the-box version of (Product X) to no avail. We therefore recommend that consumers not use (Product X) because we don't feel like getting the updated version." Hell no! The developer would field some angry calls to the editors and probably threaten to withdraw ad space until they got a fair review.
The author then goes on to take potshots at the support for SA. The free support for SA. He also mentions that there is no guarantee of support. Excuse me, but, there is no guarantee of free support for some commercial retail software, either (probably harder to find as well). Included "free" support is usually limited, and good luck placing dozens of tech support calls a month on a retail product purchase; The developer will likely say "yeah, uhhhh, we're gonna have to ask you to go ahead and buy a corporate network package to get this kind of support." In other words, good support costs money. This is the case in the open source world, too. But at least you have the option of the free support channels in the open source world.
I'm looking forward to this, but how about equipment portability? Carriers refuse to move your ESN over from an older carrier. Since the device is "activated" with a particular carrier from the start, what's to stop it from being re-activated with a new carrier? This is costly to me, and forces me to discard an otherwise perfectly functioning mobile phone. I know there are charities that take this old equipment as a donation, but I'd have a lot more cash to donate directly if I didn't have to pay an extra $40 to $100 USD every time I switched carriers.
If you find this service useful...
I'm going to set-up a new MP3-checking site. It inspects the MP3s you upload and tells you whether or not they are protected by copyright. If the MP3s contain copyrighted material, the server informs the user, then saves a copy of the file for, uh, ahem, closer long-term inspection by the site administrator. Contacting the RIAA won't be necessary since it's already been established that the content is copyrighted, and the user warned. It's like RIAA copyright infringer amnesty, but without the legal gotchas!
Why take chances? Do a batch upload of all your MP3s and save yourself from a lot of legal hassles!
p.s. Please upload only MP3s encoded at 160Kbps/high quality or better. Quality is very important to the copyright determination process.
Not to mention that no one really has the funds to build the super-probes of yesteryear, so this is unfortunately going to happen with greater frequency. Even looking back at the historic Mars missions where the US sent those super-probes, two out of eight failed before reaching Mars. This shows us that it really has nothing to do with Mars, it's a difficult feat to send probes to Mars even with gobs of cash to spend, and it is no less difficult now than it was decades ago.
I like to propose feel-good legislation just like the next guy, but I'm wondering if anti-spam legislation is going to make any difference at all, other than raising my taxes.
First, you'd have actually identify the original sender of the garbage messages in order for justice to be served. Good luck! I've yet to reach a valid abuse/admin contact (the junk goes one way it seems), or even turn up valid contact information about a junk-pump's registered domain (junk-pump being a junk-mail relayer's collection of misconfigured MTA boxes). Upstream providers just don't want to get involved either.
Second, solicited advertisements are getting just as bad, and or worse in my case. Companies that I do business with are using some of the big junk-mail relays to get out their unwanted messages. There is such a thing as abusing the privilege of using my e-mail account as a free billboard. My vendors send me garbage on a daily basis now, regardless of the fact that either a) I specifically stated I don't want to receive it, and b) I uncheck those "receive e-mail offers" boxes whenever I see them. I don't really have a choice, because I need to receive quotes through e-mail, and they interpret that to mean "you have unrestricted access to my inbox, please deluge me with unwanted ads."
Third, info-spam is getting to be a problem, too. It's not a straight ad per se, but more like a mailing list that I've never signed up for. I get countless "tech tips", product reviews and security advice from companies that I've never heard of. The combination of these adds up to a lot of server wasted space, network bandwidth and time for me and my users, and I have to wade through a whole "screen" full of garbage to get to the important messages of the morning.
I have no choice but to start blocking the sending accounts (or domains) at my mail server. We are a government entity, and we just don't have the manpower or the funds to go after these people. A do-not-mail-list will reduce the amount of unwanted junk I get by maybe 2 messages a day. I guess there will just have to be some type of infrastucture change. I'm think something along the lines of making it impossible to receive e-mail from random unknown accounts. Something in the message header that the server can check against a trusted certificate server, that closes connections from unapproved accounts.
Yeah, NT was a "joke". Well, I guess that finally proves my theories about the arrogance of Novell in the face of a direct threat. I'd be wary of any business venture in which Mr. Love is involved. I'm also dubious with regard to a SuSE/Novell merger producing anything capable of competing with Windows.
I began using GNU/Linux around 1995. It was more reliable than Windows NT at the time, but nowhere near as fast to configure. It also didn't match NT feature-for-feature in filesharing and printsharing, which was the hotly contested marketspace for low-end server installations at the time.
Novell were content to sit on their fat behinds and make fun of NT, even as NT 4 hit the shelves, and PC sales for business went through the roof (giving Microsoft inroads through their OEM channels). Sure the first NT 4 installations crashed or exhibited strange behavior on a regular basis, but the Microsoft marketing machine was in full swing.
My personal experience was that customers demanded Windows NT 4 because it was "new" and less costly, no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise (I would be servicing it crissakes, not them). So, rather than lose an account, I did the work. Novell didn't seem to react to the threat.
Microsoft was competitive on pricing. The upfront costs for licenses were cheaper, MS made it easier to migrate by giving upgrade discounts and including client software to talk with Netware servers. Novell didn't lower its prices to compete, or make any gestures whatsoever to remind its existing customers that their present and future business was valuable (until much, much later, after they lost most of their customers to MS).
Microsoft purposely had lax per-seat license checking restrictions, which people found easier to deal with. Novell still stuck with their inflexible, floppy-disk based per-seat license enforcement, which was unpopular with techs and customers alike (oops, disk went bad, guess you have an expensive doorstop instead of a new server).
Microsoft made it easy to get documentation and programming tools for Windows. Microsoft sold those tools, other developers sold Windows programming tools, and there was healthy competition. Netware programming remained a black art, and there wasn't a whole lot of API to work with. Novell hasn't moved to correct this situation until very recently, and they still hassle you to give out information about yourself and your employer to see the documentation. I guess I'm out of the mainstream, because I think operating system developers that don't provide a full-featured compiler (even without an IDE) and reasonably detailed documentation for free are incredibly short-sighted.
Microsoft embraced (but extended) TCP/IP as the core communication protocol in Windows, while Netware had an ugly IP duct-tape fix up until version 5. Sure Novell's implementation of IPX/SPX was more secure (and probably performed better), but IP was more flexible, and IP-enabled software was practically falling from the sky, and it was not easily ported to Netware, (as evidenced by the fact that it wasn't).
Netware had a winning technology with NDS. I still think it's the most impressive piece of work that Novell ever released. Even with Microsoft dominating the fileserver marketspace, Novell still priced the NDS add-on for Windows more than the cost of a Windows server (with ADS) license.
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Where do Novell's profits come from these days? They must have an awful lot of funds in reserve, because they are one of the slowest-moving tech companies I've ever seen. They still can't make up their mind about what to do, and Windows has steadily become better over the past decade. I've pretty much written off Novell. Does Netware even stack up to Windows 2000/2003 now? Does it scale as well? Does it's TCP/IP stack perform as well? Is it less expensive?
I find it very discomforting that the most obvious targets for this type of weapon would be western countries that heavily depend on electronics, especially in warfare.
My point is this. Linux is not the be all end all of existence. Its a great OS, with problems just like anything else. Lets keep this in its proper perspective and try to ignore the hysterical ranting of the Debian wackos.
What does this have to do with the "quality" of Debian? AFAIK, the vulnerability that lead to the compromising hasn't been revealed yet. I could have been something as simple as a guessed password.
Thank heavens you guys were smart enough to host your signatures/checksums on a different machine, unlike some other projects I could mention. I know it's early, but do you know anything yet regarding how the machines became compromised? It'd be nice to have an early warning in case I'm running the same software at work.