It's not quite as simple as that for a number of reasons:
1. A number of countries have a system for dealing with claims with a low monetary value (which this would almost certainly fall under) and generally speaking this system is set up to make it practical for you or I to sue a huge company by limiting the amount of costs (and, for that matter, messing around) either party can incur.
2. "How could any court not view this as false advertising?" : Good question. IANAL, but I can think of three things: I seriously doubt many people genuinely used their PS3 for Linux - and Sony could easily dig up numbers to support that, the fact that the feature was removed in the update was well known and in the release notes and the update may well have shipped with a "regardless of what this does to your console, you can't sue us" disclaimer.
I would add that IMV the only thing worse than Sony doing this is that I haven't yet heard of a single legal case where the judge(s) involved seem to be taking it particularly seriously. I really don't like the idea of living in a world where a manufacturer can release a product with features X, Y and Z only to remove Z - even from items already sold - at a later date. Could be particularly interesting here in the UK where no matter what the manufacturer does, it's the retailer who's on the legal hook if they sell you something which doesn't perform as advertised.
Windows can be very heavily locked down so end-users can literally do nothing more than that which is explicitly made available to them. Heck, with something like SteadyState, it can even roll back any changes with a simple reboot.
But far too many third party developers seem to actively go out of their way to break any security - they seem to have some sort of mental block understanding that the assumptions you make when you're designing an application which will run on a system which you can more or less guarantee will only ever have one person using it (and that person has no realistic hope of screwing it up badly simply because there's so little to screw up) simply do not work on a modern multi-user, multi-tasking networked operating system.
I've lost count of the number of applications - and these aren't crappy things you find on download.com, they're expensive commercial products that are intended to have multiple users - that explicitly expect the end-user to have local admin rights and their first support response is "Does the user have admin rights? No? Go away and come back when they do. I don't care if you can explicitly prove that this isn't the issue here...".
My guess would be that people running large botnets do not tend to contact hosting providers and pay for a years' hosting with a legitimate credit card which they own and is registered to their home address.
I seem to be missing something here. Somebody please remind me what Windows Malicious software remover and all those antivirus programs are supposed to be doing.
If the people whose PCs are spewing out such garbage were aware of the issue, don't you think they'd have taken steps to resolve it years ago?
The problem is a combination of ignorance ("How was I to know that?") and technology not meeting expectations ("It's my computer, it can't run anything I don't tell it to!")
I disagree. I think Powerpoint, like all of Microsoft's products, does an excellent job of making someone who is not very good at a task, look at least competent.
Only to people who don't know what competency looks like.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of such people in the world.
I'm not sure I'd trust that article entirely. From TFA:
But with USB 3.0, even though the plug looks the same, the cable has extra wires. Because of this, it will not work in a 2.0 port.............. On the plus side, you will be able to plug USB 3.0 devices and cables into the USB 2.0 ports on your current computer, but you won’t get the speed advantage.
(my emphasis)
Anyone care to explain this apparent contradiction?
LightPeak is a buzz word. That's it. It's light years away from actually showing up on devices in your local Best Buy. Far from making USB 3.0 obsolete.
Pet peeve: A light year is not a unit of time, it's a unit of distance. You'd be more likely to describe LightPeak as being years away than being miles away, no?
My sister in law, who is japanese born and bred, still has trouble reading some newspapers due to the complexity of the characters. She even needs to use multiple dictionaries (3?) to properly understand what she's reading.
Add that to the fact that, as the article points out, everything now it typed (let alone the Chinese using simplified characters), it's no surprise that they're forgetting it. But, hey, look on the bright side: just like Latin, it'll evolve into easier, more coherent languages.
AFAIK, the Romans had no trouble with Latin. And it's actually not a bad language as they go for coherence - once you get the idea that to change the meaning of (most) words you just change the ending, it's probably more regular than most modern Western languages. For instance:
Infinitive: Amare: To like/love
Amo: I like/love
Amas: You like/love
Amat: He/She/It
Amamus: We like/love
Amatis: You (plural) like/love
Amant: They like/love
There's a whole bunch of verbs which follow the exact same pattern: -are, -o, -as, -at etc etc. And to change the tense - make it "I/you/he loved/will love" - it's another set of endings. Probably the most complicated thing is that there are three other variants on this set of endings depending upon which group the verb falls into, but seeing as the endings are subtly different for all groups it's fairly easy to figure out which group a given verb will fall into.
It's the same with nouns - the ending changes depending on if you're talking about the nominative, accusative, dative, accusative or ablative form of the noun - and there are masculine and feminine nouns which have different endings. It follows that you don't really have much in the way of prepositions because you don't need them - instead you alter the ending of the word. So the "Romanes Eunt Domus" scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was based on pretty accurate latin. Not much of a surprise considering most of the Python team were classically educated.
The only thing you have to look out for is the occasional word that doesn't follow these patterns - the irregular verbs, for instance. Interestingly, the verb "to be" is irregular in virtually all languages.
I'm not sure about that, but historically they've not been well-known as a Free Software company. Indeed, as a vendor of an expensive proprietary DBMS they've got a lot to lose were Postgres or MySQL to reach the point where they'd be taken seriously by the PHBs of this world.
Having said that, I believe that Oracle is taking Free software seriously. What with the acquisition of Berkely DB, MySQL, their own Linux distribution (even if it is essentially rebranded RHEL), their own virtualisation solution based around Xen and the acquisition of Sun, I don't think they're trying to eliminate Free software at all. I think they're trying to put together a business model based around Free software with proprietary bits here and there, or Free software which is either an older version or an unstable development version of the same thing that's being sold as a proprietary product. Aladdin did something similar with Ghostscript, RedHat do that with Fedora and Sun did it with OpenSolaris.
The hotel had a PC without a costly OS, saving them money.
How did it save them money?
I'm serious, while I know Dell are selling PCs with Ubuntu installed, I can't remember the last time I saw a vendor selling PCs without Windows without making you jump through at least some hoops.
IMV, it's far more likely that they called up their friendly local PC support guy and explained they wanted a publicly-usable internet PC set up. This PC support guy, forseeing an ongoing nightmare dealing with that PC being inundated in keyloggers, viruses, spyware and other assorted garbage thought to himself "I've got a better idea....".
Very likely correct, but I work directly opposite a man who was employed by Acorn back in the day.
Take it with as much salt as you think it needs, but from what I understand remarkably few model As made it out of the factory. Most were upgraded to model Bs before shipping.
Acorn never really tried to write a text editor for BASIC for the BBC; the computer had an inbuilt interpreter complete with CLI, so you could edit a line directly from the CLI. And the student's not strictly correct when he says "There's no copy and paste" - you could use the arrow keys to move the cursor up to an arbitrary line on the screen and copy the text from that line directly onto the CLI.
Gas stations work the same way: it's pretty much impossible to accidentally fill a gasoline car with diesel fuel, because the diesel filler tube is too large to fit in an unleaded tank's opening. (Doesn't work the other way around, of course, but diesel users are in the minority, and can be assumed to be paying attention
Bit of a shame, then, that putting diesel in a petrol-engined vehicle is a relatively minor annoyance. The other way around, however, can screw up a diesel engine royally.
Colour blind does not mean the only way I can tell the difference between the red and the green light on a traffic light is because one is above the other. I can clearly see the difference between the two even if they're taken totally out of context.
Colour blind means you probably shouldn't hire me to co-ordinate a room based on 15 different shades of the spectrum which sit around blue and green.
I believe Kodak are trying exactly this (or something very like it) with their current range of colour printers, but I have no idea how good the printers are or how successful they've been.
It says right there that he added code to the C compiler. The backdoor itself did not exist in source code until someone compiled the login command. At that point, the compiler added code to make a backdoor. The original hack (messing with the C compiler) WAS IN SOURCE CODE FROM THE BEGINNING.
Yes, but the compiler was also hacked to make sure any recompiled C compiler did the same thing. Think of it as a compiler-level virus, if you like.
Thompson was taking advantage of one simple thing : once you've bootstrapped yourself a C compiler totally from scratch - without an existing C compiler to start with - you don't generally do it twice. Chances are the source code to the compiler that actually gets used is itself written in C and so requires a working C compiler in order to compile.
So you can safely remove your backdoors once they've been compiled into the system compiler and they'll be all but undetectable.
I'm thinking of retiring my Epson R1800 soon -- any good recommendations for a large format photo quality printer?
I really wouldn't bother. Find a reliable lab and send it there.
You won't have as much control over the finished article but you won't be wasting time tearing your hair out trying to get a half-decent print. Lab machines are built to do one thing and do it well - churn out print after print cost-effectively, reliably and quickly. By and large they're pretty good at it.
Inkjet printers are built to do one thing and do it well. Extract absurd quantities of money from you reliably and quickly. By and large, they're extremely good at it.
Kyocera are pretty good (and every printer in their range supports Postscript), but they're damn expensive.
Having said that, the last large Kyocera I saw was built like a brick outhouse. I've never seen such an over-engineered printer before or since. Once it reaches the end of its useful life you could probably remove the toner cartridge and use it to store nuclear waste.
What amazes me more is that you can patent the business model of making incredibly shitty, slapshod products with pickup rollers that invariably break by the 250th page.
Well, it's not far from patenting a downright shady business model, seeing as they're blatantly using the patent system to block third-party cartridges. One assumes that the actual patent as submitted does not read:
"US Patent 1234567890: Mechanism to con the consumer into spending rather more money than they had hoped by forcing third-party consumable manufacturers out of the market".
Slashdot Mirror
It's not quite as simple as that for a number of reasons:
1. A number of countries have a system for dealing with claims with a low monetary value (which this would almost certainly fall under) and generally speaking this system is set up to make it practical for you or I to sue a huge company by limiting the amount of costs (and, for that matter, messing around) either party can incur.
2. "How could any court not view this as false advertising?" : Good question. IANAL, but I can think of three things: I seriously doubt many people genuinely used their PS3 for Linux - and Sony could easily dig up numbers to support that, the fact that the feature was removed in the update was well known and in the release notes and the update may well have shipped with a "regardless of what this does to your console, you can't sue us" disclaimer.
I would add that IMV the only thing worse than Sony doing this is that I haven't yet heard of a single legal case where the judge(s) involved seem to be taking it particularly seriously. I really don't like the idea of living in a world where a manufacturer can release a product with features X, Y and Z only to remove Z - even from items already sold - at a later date. Could be particularly interesting here in the UK where no matter what the manufacturer does, it's the retailer who's on the legal hook if they sell you something which doesn't perform as advertised.
I think it's simpler than that.
Windows can be very heavily locked down so end-users can literally do nothing more than that which is explicitly made available to them. Heck, with something like SteadyState, it can even roll back any changes with a simple reboot.
But far too many third party developers seem to actively go out of their way to break any security - they seem to have some sort of mental block understanding that the assumptions you make when you're designing an application which will run on a system which you can more or less guarantee will only ever have one person using it (and that person has no realistic hope of screwing it up badly simply because there's so little to screw up) simply do not work on a modern multi-user, multi-tasking networked operating system.
I've lost count of the number of applications - and these aren't crappy things you find on download.com, they're expensive commercial products that are intended to have multiple users - that explicitly expect the end-user to have local admin rights and their first support response is "Does the user have admin rights? No? Go away and come back when they do. I don't care if you can explicitly prove that this isn't the issue here...".
My guess would be that people running large botnets do not tend to contact hosting providers and pay for a years' hosting with a legitimate credit card which they own and is registered to their home address.
I seem to be missing something here. Somebody please remind me what Windows Malicious software remover and all those antivirus programs are supposed to be doing.
If the people whose PCs are spewing out such garbage were aware of the issue, don't you think they'd have taken steps to resolve it years ago?
The problem is a combination of ignorance ("How was I to know that?") and technology not meeting expectations ("It's my computer, it can't run anything I don't tell it to!")
I disagree. I think Powerpoint, like all of Microsoft's products, does an excellent job of making someone who is not very good at a task, look at least competent.
Only to people who don't know what competency looks like.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of such people in the world.
I'm not sure I'd trust that article entirely. From TFA:
But with USB 3.0, even though the plug looks the same, the cable has extra wires. Because of this, it will not work in a 2.0 port..............
On the plus side, you will be able to plug USB 3.0 devices and cables into the USB 2.0 ports on your current computer, but you won’t get the speed advantage.
(my emphasis)
Anyone care to explain this apparent contradiction?
LightPeak is a buzz word. That's it. It's light years away from actually showing up on devices in your local Best Buy. Far from making USB 3.0 obsolete.
Pet peeve: A light year is not a unit of time, it's a unit of distance. You'd be more likely to describe LightPeak as being years away than being miles away, no?
My sister in law, who is japanese born and bred, still has trouble reading some newspapers due to the complexity of the characters. She even needs to use multiple dictionaries (3?) to properly understand what she's reading.
Add that to the fact that, as the article points out, everything now it typed (let alone the Chinese using simplified characters), it's no surprise that they're forgetting it. But, hey, look on the bright side: just like Latin, it'll evolve into easier, more coherent languages.
AFAIK, the Romans had no trouble with Latin. And it's actually not a bad language as they go for coherence - once you get the idea that to change the meaning of (most) words you just change the ending, it's probably more regular than most modern Western languages. For instance:
There's a whole bunch of verbs which follow the exact same pattern: -are, -o, -as, -at etc etc. And to change the tense - make it "I/you/he loved/will love" - it's another set of endings. Probably the most complicated thing is that there are three other variants on this set of endings depending upon which group the verb falls into, but seeing as the endings are subtly different for all groups it's fairly easy to figure out which group a given verb will fall into.
It's the same with nouns - the ending changes depending on if you're talking about the nominative, accusative, dative, accusative or ablative form of the noun - and there are masculine and feminine nouns which have different endings. It follows that you don't really have much in the way of prepositions because you don't need them - instead you alter the ending of the word. So the "Romanes Eunt Domus" scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was based on pretty accurate latin. Not much of a surprise considering most of the Python team were classically educated.
The only thing you have to look out for is the occasional word that doesn't follow these patterns - the irregular verbs, for instance. Interestingly, the verb "to be" is irregular in virtually all languages.
Why the dig at Oracle?
Are they the new target for the slashdot crowd?
I'm not sure about that, but historically they've not been well-known as a Free Software company. Indeed, as a vendor of an expensive proprietary DBMS they've got a lot to lose were Postgres or MySQL to reach the point where they'd be taken seriously by the PHBs of this world.
Having said that, I believe that Oracle is taking Free software seriously. What with the acquisition of Berkely DB, MySQL, their own Linux distribution (even if it is essentially rebranded RHEL), their own virtualisation solution based around Xen and the acquisition of Sun, I don't think they're trying to eliminate Free software at all. I think they're trying to put together a business model based around Free software with proprietary bits here and there, or Free software which is either an older version or an unstable development version of the same thing that's being sold as a proprietary product. Aladdin did something similar with Ghostscript, RedHat do that with Fedora and Sun did it with OpenSolaris.
The hotel had a PC without a costly OS, saving them money.
How did it save them money?
I'm serious, while I know Dell are selling PCs with Ubuntu installed, I can't remember the last time I saw a vendor selling PCs without Windows without making you jump through at least some hoops.
IMV, it's far more likely that they called up their friendly local PC support guy and explained they wanted a publicly-usable internet PC set up. This PC support guy, forseeing an ongoing nightmare dealing with that PC being inundated in keyloggers, viruses, spyware and other assorted garbage thought to himself "I've got a better idea....".
Very likely correct, but I work directly opposite a man who was employed by Acorn back in the day.
Take it with as much salt as you think it needs, but from what I understand remarkably few model As made it out of the factory. Most were upgraded to model Bs before shipping.
The Basic was more structuured and it could use microcassettes or 5 1/4 flopies with its own DOS.
In short, if you are going to use a dinosaur, it is the best dinosaur to choose
Pedant: Microcassettes were usually used in dictation machines, BBCs usually used plain audio cassettes.
BASIC II did. BASIC I didn't, but I don't know how many copies of that made it into the world.
To be fair, it wasn't as bad as all that.
Acorn never really tried to write a text editor for BASIC for the BBC; the computer had an inbuilt interpreter complete with CLI, so you could edit a line directly from the CLI. And the student's not strictly correct when he says "There's no copy and paste" - you could use the arrow keys to move the cursor up to an arbitrary line on the screen and copy the text from that line directly onto the CLI.
Then the argument will shift from "does the dye interfere with anything?" to "does the glue interfere with anything?"
Gas stations work the same way: it's pretty much impossible to accidentally fill a gasoline car with diesel fuel, because the diesel filler tube is too large to fit in an unleaded tank's opening. (Doesn't work the other way around, of course, but diesel users are in the minority, and can be assumed to be paying attention
Bit of a shame, then, that putting diesel in a petrol-engined vehicle is a relatively minor annoyance. The other way around, however, can screw up a diesel engine royally.
I've met girls with that kind of attitude to something potentially risky - "Just be careful".
Most of those girls are now mothers.
Just to add to what you've said:
Colour blind does not mean the only way I can tell the difference between the red and the green light on a traffic light is because one is above the other. I can clearly see the difference between the two even if they're taken totally out of context.
Colour blind means you probably shouldn't hire me to co-ordinate a room based on 15 different shades of the spectrum which sit around blue and green.
As am I - AIUI there are different severities of colour blindness and being totally unable to distinguish two totally different colours is quite rare.
Being unable to distinguish relatively close shades is rather more common.
I believe Kodak are trying exactly this (or something very like it) with their current range of colour printers, but I have no idea how good the printers are or how successful they've been.
It says right there that he added code to the C compiler. The backdoor itself did not exist in source code until someone compiled the login command. At that point, the compiler added code to make a backdoor. The original hack (messing with the C compiler) WAS IN SOURCE CODE FROM THE BEGINNING.
Yes, but the compiler was also hacked to make sure any recompiled C compiler did the same thing. Think of it as a compiler-level virus, if you like.
Thompson was taking advantage of one simple thing : once you've bootstrapped yourself a C compiler totally from scratch - without an existing C compiler to start with - you don't generally do it twice. Chances are the source code to the compiler that actually gets used is itself written in C and so requires a working C compiler in order to compile.
So you can safely remove your backdoors once they've been compiled into the system compiler and they'll be all but undetectable.
A call to Epson tech support confirmed that the printer essentially is bricked when one tries to use generic cartridges.
I seriously doubt that - the lawyers would be over them like a rash. More likely you just got a Friday afternoon job.
But it's entirely likely that they've decided as a policy matter that anyone using a generic cartridge has voided their warranty.
I'm thinking of retiring my Epson R1800 soon -- any good recommendations for a large format photo quality printer?
I really wouldn't bother. Find a reliable lab and send it there.
You won't have as much control over the finished article but you won't be wasting time tearing your hair out trying to get a half-decent print. Lab machines are built to do one thing and do it well - churn out print after print cost-effectively, reliably and quickly. By and large they're pretty good at it.
Inkjet printers are built to do one thing and do it well. Extract absurd quantities of money from you reliably and quickly. By and large, they're extremely good at it.
Kyocera are pretty good (and every printer in their range supports Postscript), but they're damn expensive.
Having said that, the last large Kyocera I saw was built like a brick outhouse. I've never seen such an over-engineered printer before or since. Once it reaches the end of its useful life you could probably remove the toner cartridge and use it to store nuclear waste.
What amazes me more is that you can patent the business model of making incredibly shitty, slapshod products with pickup rollers that invariably break by the 250th page.
Well, it's not far from patenting a downright shady business model, seeing as they're blatantly using the patent system to block third-party cartridges. One assumes that the actual patent as submitted does not read:
"US Patent 1234567890: Mechanism to con the consumer into spending rather more money than they had hoped by forcing third-party consumable manufacturers out of the market".