Now if it was just for something a little newer then IE4, and did a good enough job to be able to be used with the applications that they listed as using the API's.
It is not a trival task, I know that. But you would have to support at least IE6 by now (it is how old?) in order for many programs to make use of it.
But yes, this is what the browser's need to provide for applications to use them instead of IE. In my application I ask the OS for something that implements IWebBrowser interface and as long as it implements all of the public interfaces I need I don't care if it uses IE to render or Opera or JoeBlow's engine.
But sadly most have not even tried, or gave up like this seems to have.
>> Sure, a lot of things are tied to the rendering engine
>> Now, imaging if you could uninstall IE's rendering engine and replace it with the Gecko or KHTML engine
It's not the rendering engine that things are tied to. It is the interfaces that the rendering engine exposes, all the API's that let me control the rendering engine from my application.
If other browsers and rendering engines provided the same API's, then they could be dropped in as a replacement. But until then all the applications that display HTML content in a window by using the exposed API still require IE to be there.
>> If some government official has a hard-on against you or your company, they will find SOMETHING they can charge you with.
I view monitoring logs, and other tracking data, as going to make it much harder for some official with a hard-on against me to make up false charges against me.
My argument to this (and any other surveillance methods) is that if they are out to get me I want all the technical evidence I can get. I don't want it to be a he said/she said argument. Yes they can doctor the evidence, but it is much easier for them to just lie about me.
>>If my app works testably *correctly* on XP but not on Vista This is probably a bad assumption. A better statement would be "I get the results I want and I don't care if they are doing it right." My favorite example is a program that is supposed to multiply two number, super-simple calc. The program takes the two numbers and adds them together instead of multiplying them. But since you only ever put in 2 and 2, you always got 4. Then you upgrade your OS/hardware/something. And because of this you now need to put in 2 and 3. But the program gives you 5 not 6. The common thing to do is blame the upgrade for it. Hard for the end user to know the difference.
As far as your video cards, just turn off the Areo or what ever it is called. Your cards will probably work, just not able to give all the eye candy. You won't loose anything, you just don't get the extras. No reason to not upgrade.
I run Vista on a pretty limited laptop, several years old without official Vista support. It works, not a speed deamon, but the machine hasn't been for a while. I didn't 'feel' a slow down when I first loaded it, but it was not a measured test. Could have been a lot of the slowness was hidden by me trying to find where things were at.
It is strange how it is always the Mission Critical applications seem to be the ones that won't run on upgrades, yet hundreds of other programs we use do work. I don't have any reason for this, but it does seem to be how it goes. And it does make an upgrade impossible.
If you don't have security issues then it means you are not on the internet with the computer. Any computer that browses the internet or accesses email has security issues. You might have AV and a firewall, but sooner or later something is going to get by your AV, and it is going to be good enough to either fool the user or exploit some problem. Vista just raises the bar a little higher for it, still not 100% but adds a little more protection.
Same with stability. XP is pretty stable, not many real problems. Vista just raises the bar a little more. Same as we hope for in any upgrade (OS or APP), few things we want and a lot we don't. A note on what Microsoft says/means. Each version is better then the last. It might not be a lot, it might not be noticable, but they are claiming each one is better then what was there. They don't claim (or shouldn't be) that it is perfect. Some people had no stability issues with 95/98/ME. But we all think XP is better now.
So I think you should look at your Apps that are causing problems and decide if you really need that app. Is it as stable as the OS? If you do upgrade do you get anything you already wanted? If there is no upgrade yet, why not? What are they doing? If you need to keep the app, and keep it at the current version, then you can't upgrade. It wouldn't matter what the OS is, it could be smaller/faster/better and that app is going to stop you.
For hardware, I would keep what you have and turn off eye-candy. My gut says it will work (I am running some real old video cards and they all work).
And the final thing to keep in mind, sooner or later you will end up upgrading/changing OS's. Pick the time that will work the best for you, knowing that if you put it off too long it will eventually be forced on you when you can't afford to do it. (Like when you have to get the upgraded version of that mission critical app and it only runs on the new OS, I have one of those).
You don't write apps for 'Windows', you are always targetting a specific version of Windows. Normally your application will run under that version of Windows and later versions. Assuming that you have written your application following ALL of the correct procedures and rules.
This is why most applications do run on newer versions of Windows without updates. They need updates to take advantage of newer features provided, but will work without them.
Most 3rd party applications that have troubles on a new version of Windows did not follow all of the procedures and rules. And I think you will find that those same applications tend to have more errors/problems then other applications. They took shortcuts (intentionally or not) to get their product to do something or even just to ship.
My guess is that the apps with problems are from the same companies each time there is a new Windows upgrade. They don't learn their lessons and keep taking short cuts and then blame Microsoft when the shortcuts no longer work.
Now this is not always the case, there are times when the developer had to do something and a change in Windows breaks what he was doing. For example I work on an application that works with IE. IE7 changed how they display drop down lists and that caused me to break. It wasn't so much that I was outside what I was supposed to be doing as I was doing something that there were no procedures or rules on. Some apps are just broken by updates.
But if you look, there are a LOT more old programs that run on the new version of Windows then are broke. So you will have a hard time convincing me that Windows is breaking a correctly and properly written application. The few (but often important) programs that get broken are generally (not always) the ones that took shortcuts or just have sloppy programming and Windows is now enforcing the rules more.
As to your question as to why you should upgrade. There are 2 basic reasons. 1. It is more secure. 2. It is more stable.
Now if you don't want to believe those then there isn't any reason to upgrade. If your hardware can't deliver a stable driver under one OS, why are you trusting them to supply it under a different one? If your apps won't work under a newer version of Windows I would question if you really want to trust that app. I normally prune several apps when I upgrade because I assume they are poorly written unless I can see how the OS upgrade was expected to break them. Hardware upgrades, if Vista doesn't support your hardware it is time to look at upgrading. It is probably really old. Of course if it is just that the hardware vendor doesn't support it anymore then you have to decide if they are worth supporting. Now for things like the fancy video, just turn it off. You didn't have it before so you won't miss it. Vista does support a lot of hardware but cannot use the newest features with it.
>>Just because a record is a protected work doesn't mean to say it shouldn't be distributed freely.
No, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be, but since it is a protected work it means the owner of the work decides if it is or not.
If you own a car it doesn't mean you have to sell it for book value, you can give it away for free if you want. And if I think you should give your valuables away for free it doesn't mean you have to, the choice is up to the owner.
I would probably worry more about explaining to your boss why you were upgrading the video drivers on a server that supports critical operations. That's not something I normally do on a critical server. I play the games on another machine.
How does someone in your company talking to a random Microsoft employee make them legal? How does Microsoft knowing about them make them legal?
I am not a lawyer, but I think I know when one is needed. And I think if that is their claim on being legal they really need to talk to one.
I have no idea if they are legal or not. My point is just talking to someone in a company and having them say they know about you doesn't make what you are doing legal.
It doesn't really matter who is in control of the verification process. And you would want the spammers to be verified, not prevent it. Knowing that an email is coming from someone I have blacklisted is better then getting an email and saying I don't know who this is really from, guess I have to check it out. So a major function needs to be to accurately say who sent an email, including spammers.
The process would not stop people from sending me email, wanted or not. It would let me know who sent the email so I can base part of my processing on who sent the email. Part of the problem now is that we don't have a feasable way of telling who actually sent an email.
There is one 'easy' solution, but it is not practical. Replace the entire email system with a new one. I will agree that there isn't an easy solution that anyone has found that is practical. But part of what we need to do is look for fixes and bandaids to our current system so we can hopefully evolve into a better system. Because at the current rate things are going it won't be long before email is as useful as nntp/newsgroups.
SPF could be part of the solution in the future, but it will need to be a 'required' feature of email to be useful. It's part of the practicality problem, until we can get everyone using it we are stuck with most of our email being from an unknown source.
But what if you get an email saying a family member sent you an online ecard?
I have received those from family members around my birthday, and I have recieve Storm Worm generated ones. What is the difference? How do you tell them apart? How would a spam or anti-virus filters tell them apart?
What makes Storm Worm so difficult is that without inspecting who actually sent the email, or the page it links to, you cannot block the emails without also blocking legit emails.
I don't want someone blocking me downloading another email program that will send out emails. That is not a bad thing, I might not like Outlook Express. So getting a program that does what Storm Worm does (sends email) is not really a bad thing.
I don't want someone blocking me downloading a program that runs under the control of a master program, and keeps reporting results back to it. Think the Seti type programs, or the other distributed applications that share our computing power to solve some problem.
So I don't think we want to claim any program that sends email or is part of a distributed system is a virus to be blocked. Storm Worm does the good/right/advanced things we want our connected computers to do, it is just doing it for an undesirable purpose. Stopping/preventing things like this are going to be a big problem because we don't really want to stop what it does. We want to stop how it is being used, but not prevent the functionality.
So I think it is a spam/email problem. One possible solution to this might be some sort of verification/validation of who actually sent the emails. The forging of the addresses in an email help social engineered emails work.
This isn't really a problem of the washing machine not working, it is more an untrained user washing their white clothes with the red clothes and then complaining that they didn't come out white but are now pink. Yes you could take the washer back, but it isn't the washer or manufacture's fault.
Not that I totally disagree with the idea, but do we really want ISP's to start disconnecting computers because someone doesn't like what the computer is sending out?
I don't like what you are saying, or those nasty Linux programs you distribute, so I go to your ISP and say disconnect them they are spreading nasty programs.
It's only a small step from saying disconnect someone infected with the Storm Worm and saying diconnect someone infected with Linux.
I get tens of thousands of Storm emails a day, so I am open to a solution. But I don't want the solution being someone says what we can or cannot have on our computers without some very careful thought given to how it could be used.
You want to say disconnect the botnet, but can someone claim that any p2p or sharing system is a botnet? It is a lot like pron, if I don't like it then it is bad. Trouble is not everyone has the same idea of what they don't like.
>> In this case, instead of simply making a better desktop search for Windows to compete with Google, Microsoft created a desktop search that interferes with the performance of Google's offering.
Hmm... I might be mistaken, but I don't think Microsoft created a desktop search to interfere with Googles. I think they had one a LONG time ago, and Google is trying to make them take it out so they can replace it.
There might be some features that have changed but Windows (and Office) has shipped with a local indexing engine for quite a while now.
Google saying that Microsoft has to make it replacable just because they want to provide one seems like a bad idea to me. Is this starting down the path that any feature in any system that we want to replace we can use the courts to force the company to disable? Does the replacement have to conform to ALL the API's that the original was providing?
If Google replaces the Microsoft engine, and I was using the Microsoft engine in my application do they break me?
>> However, people designing control systems for airplanes, hospital medical equipment used in lifesaving situations, and so forth, actually do a fair job of delivering software which has zero security issues.
I think that is probably inaccurate.
They are not worried about secruity issues, they are worried about reliability issues.
They don't worry about the doctor getting a virus browsing a porn site, they worry about counting each and every heart beat.
They don't worry about opening an email with a bad attachment, they worry about displaying an image from a MRI.
They don't worry about hiding personal information, they make sure the information is displayed to make sure it is the correct patient.
Yes, you can say that removing the browser and email from a computer will make it more secure. But just unhooking your home machine from the internet will do just as well. So the same enviroment Windows 95 is probably just as secure (but not as reliable).
>> So his ritual of parking in a certain spot regularly warrants suspicion?
That is often the case. Has nothing to do with terror targets, has to do with making it more difficult to watch a place for planning a break in, a robbery, or who knows what. There are places you can park and sit in your car, and there are places where it is not expected.
And if the police don't check on people who are doing the unusual they are not doing their jobs.
Allow the xxx domains, but don't require that it is porn. If someone wants to put their site they can, if not the rules are the same for all the other domains. I think a lot of adult content sites would move there for the promotional value.
After seeing what sex.com sold for, I would want to have it just to sell sex.xxx, or maybe se.xxx would be worth more. Either way, whoever gets it would make a killing.
If all you want is pre-recorded content that would work. If you are spending hours on the road and wanting to listen to a sporting event as it happens, then you have a problem. That was why I wanted radio, live events.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is possible.
Leave the truck running, climb out, hit the power lock button on the door while you close it.
Or maybe it was just the door slamming shut that triggered the lock button.
But anyway, been there, done that. Probably took about an hour to get the spare key to get back into it.
Now when I get out of the truck with the engine running I hit the button to roll the window down.
That is exactly what is needed.
Now if it was just for something a little newer then IE4, and did a good enough job to be able to be used with the applications that they listed as using the API's.
It is not a trival task, I know that. But you would have to support at least IE6 by now (it is how old?) in order for many programs to make use of it.
But yes, this is what the browser's need to provide for applications to use them instead of IE. In my application I ask the OS for something that implements IWebBrowser interface and as long as it implements all of the public interfaces I need I don't care if it uses IE to render or Opera or JoeBlow's engine.
But sadly most have not even tried, or gave up like this seems to have.
>> Sure, a lot of things are tied to the rendering engine
>> Now, imaging if you could uninstall IE's rendering engine and replace it with the Gecko or KHTML engine
It's not the rendering engine that things are tied to. It is the interfaces that the rendering engine exposes, all the API's that let me control the rendering engine from my application.
If other browsers and rendering engines provided the same API's, then they could be dropped in as a replacement. But until then all the applications that display HTML content in a window by using the exposed API still require IE to be there.
>> If some government official has a hard-on against you or your company, they will find SOMETHING they can charge you with.
I view monitoring logs, and other tracking data, as going to make it much harder for some official with a hard-on against me to make up false charges against me.
My argument to this (and any other surveillance methods) is that if they are out to get me I want all the technical evidence I can get. I don't want it to be a he said/she said argument. Yes they can doctor the evidence, but it is much easier for them to just lie about me.
And I have been smoking for over 30 years, without getting cancer.
That must also prove the smoking studies wrong too.
>>If my app works testably *correctly* on XP but not on Vista
This is probably a bad assumption. A better statement would be "I get the results I want and I don't care if they are doing it right." My favorite example is a program that is supposed to multiply two number, super-simple calc. The program takes the two numbers and adds them together instead of multiplying them. But since you only ever put in 2 and 2, you always got 4. Then you upgrade your OS/hardware/something. And because of this you now need to put in 2 and 3. But the program gives you 5 not 6. The common thing to do is blame the upgrade for it. Hard for the end user to know the difference.
As far as your video cards, just turn off the Areo or what ever it is called. Your cards will probably work, just not able to give all the eye candy. You won't loose anything, you just don't get the extras. No reason to not upgrade.
I run Vista on a pretty limited laptop, several years old without official Vista support. It works, not a speed deamon, but the machine hasn't been for a while. I didn't 'feel' a slow down when I first loaded it, but it was not a measured test. Could have been a lot of the slowness was hidden by me trying to find where things were at.
It is strange how it is always the Mission Critical applications seem to be the ones that won't run on upgrades, yet hundreds of other programs we use do work. I don't have any reason for this, but it does seem to be how it goes. And it does make an upgrade impossible.
If you don't have security issues then it means you are not on the internet with the computer. Any computer that browses the internet or accesses email has security issues. You might have AV and a firewall, but sooner or later something is going to get by your AV, and it is going to be good enough to either fool the user or exploit some problem. Vista just raises the bar a little higher for it, still not 100% but adds a little more protection.
Same with stability. XP is pretty stable, not many real problems. Vista just raises the bar a little more. Same as we hope for in any upgrade (OS or APP), few things we want and a lot we don't. A note on what Microsoft says/means. Each version is better then the last. It might not be a lot, it might not be noticable, but they are claiming each one is better then what was there. They don't claim (or shouldn't be) that it is perfect. Some people had no stability issues with 95/98/ME. But we all think XP is better now.
So I think you should look at your Apps that are causing problems and decide if you really need that app. Is it as stable as the OS? If you do upgrade do you get anything you already wanted? If there is no upgrade yet, why not? What are they doing? If you need to keep the app, and keep it at the current version, then you can't upgrade. It wouldn't matter what the OS is, it could be smaller/faster/better and that app is going to stop you.
For hardware, I would keep what you have and turn off eye-candy. My gut says it will work (I am running some real old video cards and they all work).
And the final thing to keep in mind, sooner or later you will end up upgrading/changing OS's. Pick the time that will work the best for you, knowing that if you put it off too long it will eventually be forced on you when you can't afford to do it. (Like when you have to get the upgraded version of that mission critical app and it only runs on the new OS, I have one of those).
You are not a Windows developer, that is clear.
You don't write apps for 'Windows', you are always targetting a specific version of Windows. Normally your application will run under that version of Windows and later versions. Assuming that you have written your application following ALL of the correct procedures and rules.
This is why most applications do run on newer versions of Windows without updates. They need updates to take advantage of newer features provided, but will work without them.
Most 3rd party applications that have troubles on a new version of Windows did not follow all of the procedures and rules. And I think you will find that those same applications tend to have more errors/problems then other applications. They took shortcuts (intentionally or not) to get their product to do something or even just to ship.
My guess is that the apps with problems are from the same companies each time there is a new Windows upgrade. They don't learn their lessons and keep taking short cuts and then blame Microsoft when the shortcuts no longer work.
Now this is not always the case, there are times when the developer had to do something and a change in Windows breaks what he was doing. For example I work on an application that works with IE. IE7 changed how they display drop down lists and that caused me to break. It wasn't so much that I was outside what I was supposed to be doing as I was doing something that there were no procedures or rules on. Some apps are just broken by updates.
But if you look, there are a LOT more old programs that run on the new version of Windows then are broke. So you will have a hard time convincing me that Windows is breaking a correctly and properly written application. The few (but often important) programs that get broken are generally (not always) the ones that took shortcuts or just have sloppy programming and Windows is now enforcing the rules more.
As to your question as to why you should upgrade.
There are 2 basic reasons.
1. It is more secure.
2. It is more stable.
Now if you don't want to believe those then there isn't any reason to upgrade.
If your hardware can't deliver a stable driver under one OS, why are you trusting them to supply it under a different one?
If your apps won't work under a newer version of Windows I would question if you really want to trust that app. I normally prune several apps when I upgrade because I assume they are poorly written unless I can see how the OS upgrade was expected to break them.
Hardware upgrades, if Vista doesn't support your hardware it is time to look at upgrading. It is probably really old. Of course if it is just that the hardware vendor doesn't support it anymore then you have to decide if they are worth supporting. Now for things like the fancy video, just turn it off. You didn't have it before so you won't miss it. Vista does support a lot of hardware but cannot use the newest features with it.
>>Just because a record is a protected work doesn't mean to say it shouldn't be distributed freely.
No, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be, but since it is a protected work it means the owner of the work decides if it is or not.
If you own a car it doesn't mean you have to sell it for book value, you can give it away for free if you want. And if I think you should give your valuables away for free it doesn't mean you have to, the choice is up to the owner.
Are you saying all a kidnapper could get is virtually nothing? I thought most kidnappers could get life, some places even death.
Shouldn't you compare what kidnapper could get to what these punks could get? And then compare what a kidnapper does get to what these punks do get?
Just trying to keep the red things away from the orange things.
I would probably worry more about explaining to your boss why you were upgrading the video drivers on a server that supports critical operations. That's not something I normally do on a critical server. I play the games on another machine.
And I am sure when you explain just why you are disconnecting the service the customer rep sitting there will know exactly what you are talking about.
They will probably fill in the reason for disconnect as 'unknown - that the person rambles on without speaking english'.
How does someone in your company talking to a random Microsoft employee make them legal? How does Microsoft knowing about them make them legal?
I am not a lawyer, but I think I know when one is needed. And I think if that is their claim on being legal they really need to talk to one.
I have no idea if they are legal or not. My point is just talking to someone in a company and having them say they know about you doesn't make what you are doing legal.
It doesn't really matter who is in control of the verification process. And you would want the spammers to be verified, not prevent it. Knowing that an email is coming from someone I have blacklisted is better then getting an email and saying I don't know who this is really from, guess I have to check it out. So a major function needs to be to accurately say who sent an email, including spammers.
The process would not stop people from sending me email, wanted or not. It would let me know who sent the email so I can base part of my processing on who sent the email. Part of the problem now is that we don't have a feasable way of telling who actually sent an email.
There is one 'easy' solution, but it is not practical. Replace the entire email system with a new one. I will agree that there isn't an easy solution that anyone has found that is practical. But part of what we need to do is look for fixes and bandaids to our current system so we can hopefully evolve into a better system. Because at the current rate things are going it won't be long before email is as useful as nntp/newsgroups.
SPF could be part of the solution in the future, but it will need to be a 'required' feature of email to be useful. It's part of the practicality problem, until we can get everyone using it we are stuck with most of our email being from an unknown source.
But what if you get an email saying a family member sent you an online ecard?
I have received those from family members around my birthday, and I have recieve Storm Worm generated ones. What is the difference? How do you tell them apart? How would a spam or anti-virus filters tell them apart?
What makes Storm Worm so difficult is that without inspecting who actually sent the email, or the page it links to, you cannot block the emails without also blocking legit emails.
I think this is very much a spam problem.
I don't want someone blocking me downloading another email program that will send out emails. That is not a bad thing, I might not like Outlook Express. So getting a program that does what Storm Worm does (sends email) is not really a bad thing.
I don't want someone blocking me downloading a program that runs under the control of a master program, and keeps reporting results back to it. Think the Seti type programs, or the other distributed applications that share our computing power to solve some problem.
So I don't think we want to claim any program that sends email or is part of a distributed system is a virus to be blocked. Storm Worm does the good/right/advanced things we want our connected computers to do, it is just doing it for an undesirable purpose. Stopping/preventing things like this are going to be a big problem because we don't really want to stop what it does. We want to stop how it is being used, but not prevent the functionality.
So I think it is a spam/email problem. One possible solution to this might be some sort of verification/validation of who actually sent the emails. The forging of the addresses in an email help social engineered emails work.
This isn't really a problem of the washing machine not working, it is more an untrained user washing their white clothes with the red clothes and then complaining that they didn't come out white but are now pink. Yes you could take the washer back, but it isn't the washer or manufacture's fault.
Not that I totally disagree with the idea, but do we really want ISP's to start disconnecting computers because someone doesn't like what the computer is sending out?
I don't like what you are saying, or those nasty Linux programs you distribute, so I go to your ISP and say disconnect them they are spreading nasty programs.
It's only a small step from saying disconnect someone infected with the Storm Worm and saying diconnect someone infected with Linux.
I get tens of thousands of Storm emails a day, so I am open to a solution. But I don't want the solution being someone says what we can or cannot have on our computers without some very careful thought given to how it could be used.
You want to say disconnect the botnet, but can someone claim that any p2p or sharing system is a botnet? It is a lot like pron, if I don't like it then it is bad. Trouble is not everyone has the same idea of what they don't like.
>> In this case, instead of simply making a better desktop search for Windows to compete with Google, Microsoft created a desktop search that interferes with the performance of Google's offering.
Hmm... I might be mistaken, but I don't think Microsoft created a desktop search to interfere with Googles. I think they had one a LONG time ago, and Google is trying to make them take it out so they can replace it.
There might be some features that have changed but Windows (and Office) has shipped with a local indexing engine for quite a while now.
Google saying that Microsoft has to make it replacable just because they want to provide one seems like a bad idea to me. Is this starting down the path that any feature in any system that we want to replace we can use the courts to force the company to disable? Does the replacement have to conform to ALL the API's that the original was providing?
If Google replaces the Microsoft engine, and I was using the Microsoft engine in my application do they break me?
>> However, people designing control systems for airplanes, hospital medical equipment used in lifesaving situations, and so forth, actually do a fair job of delivering software which has zero security issues. I think that is probably inaccurate. They are not worried about secruity issues, they are worried about reliability issues. They don't worry about the doctor getting a virus browsing a porn site, they worry about counting each and every heart beat. They don't worry about opening an email with a bad attachment, they worry about displaying an image from a MRI. They don't worry about hiding personal information, they make sure the information is displayed to make sure it is the correct patient. Yes, you can say that removing the browser and email from a computer will make it more secure. But just unhooking your home machine from the internet will do just as well. So the same enviroment Windows 95 is probably just as secure (but not as reliable).
>> So his ritual of parking in a certain spot regularly warrants suspicion?
That is often the case. Has nothing to do with terror targets, has to do with making it more difficult to watch a place for planning a break in, a robbery, or who knows what. There are places you can park and sit in your car, and there are places where it is not expected.
And if the police don't check on people who are doing the unusual they are not doing their jobs.
And the last virus batch I received was a zip file, password protected. This required the user to unzip, enter a password, and then execute.
http://www.dshield.org/diary.html?storyid=2612
They already require the user to go through the steps you suggest, and they ARE DOING IT!
It's not just the OS, it is the USERS.
Allow the xxx domains, but don't require that it is porn. If someone wants to put their site they can, if not the rules are the same for all the other domains. I think a lot of adult content sites would move there for the promotional value.
After seeing what sex.com sold for, I would want to have it just to sell sex.xxx, or maybe se.xxx would be worth more. Either way, whoever gets it would make a killing.
And so why are you worried about your clock being off by an hour?
Unless the RIAA offers to keep the records for them. That might be even worse.
If all you want is pre-recorded content that would work. If you are spending hours on the road and wanting to listen to a sporting event as it happens, then you have a problem. That was why I wanted radio, live events.