As a brit who occasionally has to travel abroad, it is damn-near impossible to get a good cup of tea in the US because tea really needs to be made with boiling water. Boiling. Not "very hot". Boiling.
Seriously, has concept of a kettle (meaning a jug which holds about 3 pints of water and has a heating element built in which will boil the water and cut-out when there's sufficient steam to operate a cutout switch) not made it over there?
Except that Apple have removed DRM from more-or-less all the music in the iTunes store, and there are now plenty of companies selling plain unencumbered MP3s.
So quite who they're going to sell this DRM product to I'm not sure.
this could actually be a good thing if it happens.
This is mostly speculation so take with as much salt as you think it needs.
Historically, there's not been an obvious connection in the mind of a user whose PC has been hacked with there being a serious problem with this. After all, most home users are probably unaware that their computer is participating in a huge DDOS attack in the first place, and ISPs have been very reluctant to police their customers.
I don't think credit card fraud through keyloggers is anywhere near prevalent enough to make people take notice either. Let's face it, a trojan which installs a keylogger and reports anything which looks like credit card details back to a known location is going to produce more valid credit card details in the space of a couple of weeks than most people could hope to use in a lifetime of fraud so even if your card details are stolen this way, I'm not sure there's a huge chance they'll ever be used.
But if the trojan hoses the host PC along with all the family photographs and all the music they've paid good money for - ah, now that might actually make people realise that there's a problem.
The problem with shred (and indeed any such utility) is that it doesn't account for application behaviour. What if some application that uses the file re-writes it - eg. because of some change to the file - to a different filehandle than the one the file was originally read from?
What if at some point the file was read into memory and that memory was swapped out by the OS? There are lots of quite reasonable scenarios where there are fragments of the file sitting around indefinitely.
Reminds me of some one I knew from college. He was running linux and had mixed up two IP addresses. Apparently most of the mail of the campus was running through his dorm computer. The dorm manager, the campus cops and the campus IT folks all got involved. It wasn't that violent though and I believe that he got his computer back shortly.
What was disturbing was that could have been cleared up by campus IT folks alone. They could have just locked down his port made a phone call and told him to his port wouldn't be unlocked until his machine was correctly configured.
Heck, knows what they'll be thinking of these dangerous netbooks running around.
Curious. I was told about exactly the same thing happening at the place where I went to university, but the tone of your post makes me think you may be American and there weren't very many Americans on my course in the UK.
Now I've graduated and know a bit more about networking, part of me wonders if this kind of thing is an urban legend banded around by lecturers to make sure students think before blindly configuring things they may not understand.
You know what, I've spent the last week searching for free games that run under OS X and aren't half-assed screwups, crippleware or otherwise about as entertaining as a bodged vasectomy.
I should have just come on here and announced that there was no such thing.
If it was that quick, we wouldn't hear of the people who've invested their life savings and borrowed money to invest in a GUARANTEED 100% RISK FREE OPPORTUNITY IN NIGERIA!!111oneoneone.
Purely out of morbid curiosity, where do you stand if, 3 years from now, your PC gives up the ghost and you can't find a PC with XP drivers for all the important aspects of the hardware?
I believe this is why Microsoft wanted to move to a subscription model (and probably still does).
They already have, and they did it some years ago.
Seriously, go read the EULA of an OEM version of Windows.
Note how only the OEM is allowed to image workstations based on it. No such restriction exists on corporate editions of Windows, but corporate editions are only an "upgrade" license so you still need to pay the OEM Windows tax.
Not an issue if you're a small enough business that imaging your PCs is needless overkill, but if you're large enough that this is necessary...
OK, you're an AC but most commercial imaging packages allow you to separate OS and application images and install them separately - that way you can have a single base OS image and different application images based on who's going to get the PC.
If a law is supposed to have a specific intention, then it should be written just for that.
Don't count on that happening any time soon. I've made similar points with my local MP about badly-drafted laws a couple of times - the response is inevitably a "soothing" "I'm sure they won't use it for that".
There have been cases recently where I have been proved correct. I wonder if I should write to my MP and say "Further to my letter of 1999, I told you so".
I doubt the modern languages can't handle the data properly. With enough money I'm sure you could resolve that problem.
If, however, you were to say that the existing system has been refined over the course of the last 30 years to reach the point it has today where it sits quietly in the corner doing everything it needs to with little or no fuss but nobody can point to a full set of documentation describing it simply because such documentation does not exist - that I can believe.
It would undoubtedly cost a fortune to replace - you'd have to completely re-engineer an entire new system covering every little aspect of what the current one does, gathering user requirements from scratch (and then discovering that nobody really understands the requirements in full, which makes gathering them an interesting exercise), And at the end of it all, you'd wind up with... er... a system which does exactly the same thing as the current system, albeit with a possibly slightly prettier user interface.
Unless you could point to a lot of serious problems with the existing system that can't be fixed without replacing it in its entirety, you'd have to be nuts to want to propose replacing the lot.
If it's true at all, my guess is that it's in niche applications which haven't changed much in 30 years but - and here is the big but - process such huge volumes of data that they constitute 80% easily.
In other words, it exists at the common points which most transactions are going to go through one way or another. Banks, for example.
Even the name "Mainframe" has grandfather connotation to it while if people actually looked at the IBM Z Servers, one would see how high tech these systems actually are.
If you want to be picky about it, it would be more accurate to say that everything else is low tech. Many of the latest big things on a boring bog-standard x86 server debuted on mainframes.
It's been a few years since I saw it, but I remember a pre-DS9 Terry Farrell playing Cat, and she had the killer line: "Maybe someday I'll find the right eight or nine guys, then I'll settle down." Classic!
Your numbers would hold up if you assume that every single person on Earth who uses XP (except, presumably, the person who purchased the first copy) had pirated their copy from this first person.
The set of numbers you want is people who:
Planned or attempted to pirate XP but was put off by the anti-piracy measures and instead went and purchased a legitimate copy (including those who were sold an illegal copy in good faith by a dishonest supplier).
Purchased a legitimate copy which was incorrectly marked as pirated and when Microsoft told them to suck it up and buy another copy, they did so
When XP first came out, much the same thing was said. "It's a warmed over version of 2K, why bother?" "It breaks things, why bother?"
Eventually those problems went away and today I'm typing this on an XP system. I have no doubt that the same will happen in future, if not with Windows Vista then with Windows 7 (codename: It doesn't suck this time, honest!)
I don't think we'd see drastically more malware for Windows if it were open sourced, partly because bits of source have been leaked in the past and partly because there is an upper limit to the number of competent malware authors out there.
But the codebase for one Windows version does not stand alone. It includes code licensed from third parties that Microsoft may not have the right to open, it includes large chunks of code which will still exist in more recent versions. You don't honestly think Microsoft started out entirely from scratch when they wrote Vista, do you?
Furthermore, if the codebase can still be maintained by someone else then that someone can simply say "Continue to install XP and we'll support you!". Microsoft are having a hard enough time selling Vista as it is, that would really hurt.
You'd think Carphone Warehouse's own buyers would have had the sense to refuse to buy such an item.... perhaps they weren't expecting an OEM with the brass balls to knock on their door offering a product which "includes wifi and webcam", neither of which actually work.
Slashdot Mirror
To my darling Candy.
All characters contained within this gospel are fictional and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
I wasn't joking.
My employer's office in the US doesn't have a kettle - only a coffee machine - and when I asked about it I was asked "what's a kettle?"
This is the US we're talking about here.
As a brit who occasionally has to travel abroad, it is damn-near impossible to get a good cup of tea in the US because tea really needs to be made with boiling water. Boiling. Not "very hot". Boiling.
Seriously, has concept of a kettle (meaning a jug which holds about 3 pints of water and has a heating element built in which will boil the water and cut-out when there's sufficient steam to operate a cutout switch) not made it over there?
Except that Apple have removed DRM from more-or-less all the music in the iTunes store, and there are now plenty of companies selling plain unencumbered MP3s.
So quite who they're going to sell this DRM product to I'm not sure.
this could actually be a good thing if it happens.
This is mostly speculation so take with as much salt as you think it needs.
Historically, there's not been an obvious connection in the mind of a user whose PC has been hacked with there being a serious problem with this. After all, most home users are probably unaware that their computer is participating in a huge DDOS attack in the first place, and ISPs have been very reluctant to police their customers.
I don't think credit card fraud through keyloggers is anywhere near prevalent enough to make people take notice either. Let's face it, a trojan which installs a keylogger and reports anything which looks like credit card details back to a known location is going to produce more valid credit card details in the space of a couple of weeks than most people could hope to use in a lifetime of fraud so even if your card details are stolen this way, I'm not sure there's a huge chance they'll ever be used.
But if the trojan hoses the host PC along with all the family photographs and all the music they've paid good money for - ah, now that might actually make people realise that there's a problem.
The problem with shred (and indeed any such utility) is that it doesn't account for application behaviour. What if some application that uses the file re-writes it - eg. because of some change to the file - to a different filehandle than the one the file was originally read from?
What if at some point the file was read into memory and that memory was swapped out by the OS? There are lots of quite reasonable scenarios where there are fragments of the file sitting around indefinitely.
Reminds me of some one I knew from college. He was running linux and had mixed up two IP addresses. Apparently most of the mail of the campus was running through his dorm computer. The dorm manager, the campus cops and the campus IT folks all got involved. It wasn't that violent though and I believe that he got his computer back shortly.
What was disturbing was that could have been cleared up by campus IT folks alone. They could have just locked down his port made a phone call and told him to his port wouldn't be unlocked until his machine was correctly configured.
Heck, knows what they'll be thinking of these dangerous netbooks running around.
Curious. I was told about exactly the same thing happening at the place where I went to university, but the tone of your post makes me think you may be American and there weren't very many Americans on my course in the UK.
Now I've graduated and know a bit more about networking, part of me wonders if this kind of thing is an urban legend banded around by lecturers to make sure students think before blindly configuring things they may not understand.
You know what, I've spent the last week searching for free games that run under OS X and aren't half-assed screwups, crippleware or otherwise about as entertaining as a bodged vasectomy.
I should have just come on here and announced that there was no such thing.
If it was that quick, we wouldn't hear of the people who've invested their life savings and borrowed money to invest in a GUARANTEED 100% RISK FREE OPPORTUNITY IN NIGERIA!!111oneoneone.
Purely out of morbid curiosity, where do you stand if, 3 years from now, your PC gives up the ghost and you can't find a PC with XP drivers for all the important aspects of the hardware?
I believe this is why Microsoft wanted to move to a subscription model (and probably still does).
They already have, and they did it some years ago.
Seriously, go read the EULA of an OEM version of Windows.
Note how only the OEM is allowed to image workstations based on it. No such restriction exists on corporate editions of Windows, but corporate editions are only an "upgrade" license so you still need to pay the OEM Windows tax.
Not an issue if you're a small enough business that imaging your PCs is needless overkill, but if you're large enough that this is necessary...
OK, you're an AC but most commercial imaging packages allow you to separate OS and application images and install them separately - that way you can have a single base OS image and different application images based on who's going to get the PC.
Maybe the OP doesn't want to be in the software trade.
But that's not usually how small businesses do it, and there are lots of them.
If they're that small, there's a strong chance that an OS upgrade only happens when the old PC is chucked out and a new one purchased.
If a law is supposed to have a specific intention, then it should be written just for that.
Don't count on that happening any time soon. I've made similar points with my local MP about badly-drafted laws a couple of times - the response is inevitably a "soothing" "I'm sure they won't use it for that".
There have been cases recently where I have been proved correct. I wonder if I should write to my MP and say "Further to my letter of 1999, I told you so".
I doubt the modern languages can't handle the data properly. With enough money I'm sure you could resolve that problem.
If, however, you were to say that the existing system has been refined over the course of the last 30 years to reach the point it has today where it sits quietly in the corner doing everything it needs to with little or no fuss but nobody can point to a full set of documentation describing it simply because such documentation does not exist - that I can believe.
It would undoubtedly cost a fortune to replace - you'd have to completely re-engineer an entire new system covering every little aspect of what the current one does, gathering user requirements from scratch (and then discovering that nobody really understands the requirements in full, which makes gathering them an interesting exercise), And at the end of it all, you'd wind up with... er... a system which does exactly the same thing as the current system, albeit with a possibly slightly prettier user interface.
Unless you could point to a lot of serious problems with the existing system that can't be fixed without replacing it in its entirety, you'd have to be nuts to want to propose replacing the lot.
If it's true at all, my guess is that it's in niche applications which haven't changed much in 30 years but - and here is the big but - process such huge volumes of data that they constitute 80% easily.
In other words, it exists at the common points which most transactions are going to go through one way or another. Banks, for example.
Even the name "Mainframe" has grandfather connotation to it while if people actually looked at the IBM Z Servers, one would see how high tech these systems actually are.
If you want to be picky about it, it would be more accurate to say that everything else is low tech. Many of the latest big things on a boring bog-standard x86 server debuted on mainframes.
It's been a few years since I saw it, but I remember a pre-DS9 Terry Farrell playing Cat, and she had the killer line: "Maybe someday I'll find the right eight or nine guys, then I'll settle down." Classic!
Original bit from the UK series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpI2t_qwlbI
Around 2:40 in.
You're mis-counting.
Your numbers would hold up if you assume that every single person on Earth who uses XP (except, presumably, the person who purchased the first copy) had pirated their copy from this first person.
The set of numbers you want is people who:
Let's be fair though, when they were originally programmed AJAX was something you used to clean the bathroom with.
When XP first came out, much the same thing was said. "It's a warmed over version of 2K, why bother?" "It breaks things, why bother?"
Eventually those problems went away and today I'm typing this on an XP system. I have no doubt that the same will happen in future, if not with Windows Vista then with Windows 7 (codename: It doesn't suck this time, honest!)
I don't think we'd see drastically more malware for Windows if it were open sourced, partly because bits of source have been leaked in the past and partly because there is an upper limit to the number of competent malware authors out there.
But the codebase for one Windows version does not stand alone. It includes code licensed from third parties that Microsoft may not have the right to open, it includes large chunks of code which will still exist in more recent versions. You don't honestly think Microsoft started out entirely from scratch when they wrote Vista, do you?
Furthermore, if the codebase can still be maintained by someone else then that someone can simply say "Continue to install XP and we'll support you!". Microsoft are having a hard enough time selling Vista as it is, that would really hurt.
You'd think Carphone Warehouse's own buyers would have had the sense to refuse to buy such an item.... perhaps they weren't expecting an OEM with the brass balls to knock on their door offering a product which "includes wifi and webcam", neither of which actually work.
I imagine you'd monitor what happens on the backend rather than the HTTP traffic - which may well still be POP or IMAP.