Anyone who complains about Linux problems but does not fill out bug reports is just an asshat as far as I am concerned
Clearly, you have never actually tried practicing what you preach.
Last summer, I decided to start being a Proper Open Source Netizen. Whenever I ran into a problem with open source code, I'd go file a proper bug report, including a fail case whenever possible. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's an infinite regression there; in order to properly troubleshoot a bug in one package, you're going to need a troubleshooting tool. That tool, of course, will have a bug, as will the browser you're using to find the tool, the build script for the tool, the editor you use to edit the build script, the compiler the editor is built upon, and so on.
After a few days of that, I got so frustrated that I decided to start blogging about it. I even registered a domain for that blog: nothingeverworks.com. According to WHOIS, I did that on September 3, 2007.
It is now May 13, 2008, and I have yet to put a web site there. You see, it turns out that there was a bug in the blogging software, and so I tried filing a bug, but then the mail server...
Maybe the problem is that we are thinking of using this new tech for existing and somewhat limited metaphors for a workspace
Bingo. I can think of at least one perfect application for gaze-tracking: Growl notifications. The perfect fade time for a growl notification isn't three seconds, five, or 30; it's "right after I stop looking at it".
Google Reader kinda does this via scrolling; if you scroll past it, you've decided not to read it. That's a brilliant UI metaphor for attention.
If everyone was publishing SPF-records and enforcing them, the problem would go away. The real problem is that most mailadministrators doesnt have a clue.
Actually, I just checked, and the real problem is people who think that a solution can ever be stated in the form "If everyone X, the problem would go away" for any values of "X". *
* other than "in the next 20 years would start Y". See, e.g., Unicode.
I'm confused: All this outrage, but not one "Yeah, so?"
I've lived in both Virginia and Massachusetts - certainly opposite states with respect to economic policy. At the dawn of the Internet, buying things online was a great way to avoid sales tax. But over the years, more and more companies had to collect sales tax from me; I can't remember the last time I bought something online and paid no tax.
I thought I remembered this exact controversy happening, nationwide, a few years back; online retailers were going to have to collect the use tax on behalf of the consumer, in an amount equivalent to the sales tax the consumer would have paid. So I figured that's what has happened.
But no? Is it just that most of these companies have a "substantial presence" in both VA and MA, so I ended up being taxed?
I'm a bit down on Postini lately. A few months ago, they started marking my personal e-mails to Postini customers as spam. Whichiskindaironic. And pretty damned annoying, since my lawyer, my broker, my apartment manager and my chiropractor are all on Postini servers. But hey, that happens. I went over my server with a fine-tooth comb, I set up SPF, DomainKey, DKIM, no luck. I even switched servers. No matter. My e-mail, now digitally signed in triplicate, was still being scored as 90% probable spam.
So I tried to get in touch with their postmaster group. Only they don't have one. And I tried to check their feedback loop. Only they don't have one. As a shareholder, I even wrote to Investor Relations. No response. In the process, I found out that they have a universally awful reputation among the mail delivery community.
In the end, all they could tell me was that their system decided my mail was spam because - I kid you not - their system had, previously, decided my mail was spam. Which, of course, increases my spamminess score. And so on, and so on, until we're all using the same shampoo.
So, to recap: The guy in charge of keeping Google secure, Scott Petry, is the guy who invented a system that bit-buckets your e-mail, with absolutely no accountability, no sanity checks, no industry best practices... because of guilt by association WITH YOURSELF.
That's a really interesting comparison, since neither S/MIME nor PGP were optimal. The theoretical "best" solution was MOSS, but everyone gave that up, because S/MIME and PGP each had a large user base.
Yet, 15 years later, neither of those solutions turned out to be good enough to "win".
[blockquote]'The wisdom of the crowds has peaked,' says Calacanis. 'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'"[/blockquote]
Read: Web 3.0 is making the assumption that if we pick people ourselves and pay them money, we can escape the basic flaws of human nature.
When XP came out, I said, "I'm sticking to Win2K as long as a I can and never going to XP...
Sounds like you've taken a fair, appropriately skeptical approach to new technology. What worries me more about Vista is, well, me.
Because when Win2K came out, and we were still using NT4 desktops at work, I got special dispensation to use Windows 2000, because it was so clearly better and more stable (it was the first OS to combine the Win9x features and interface with the NT kernel). And when Windows XP came out to finish that transition, I was eager to start running it as my home desktop from the very first beta, because again, it ended up being more stable on my desktop than Win2K, especially with some long-needed USB fixes it contained.
And then Vista came out, and I... didn't do a thing. Except, a year later, say: "It's been out for a year? Really?...::crickets:: Hey, that new Mac Pro looks nice."
I'm a classic early adopter, and I'm not even interested enough to read about the thing. And it certainly doesn't sound like there's a younger generation ready to replace me and swarm around Vista; they're all using Macs. Enterprise has turned its back on Vista (and even Office 2007, which I love for its concepts, despite its 1.0-style flaws).
So who's supposed to use Vista? Just people who buy new computers? Sounds like Windows ME all over again.
1. Eric, who graduated law school around 2005, was one of the lawyers who was scammed in a work-from-home scheme on craigslist.
2. He is currently suing the scammer, but apparently without success so far; his motion for discovery was denied.
3. His client successes page consists of, essentially:
(a) we won an anti-spam appeal... after we lost the initial case... in which we were the plaintiffs when we were in law school.
(b) A startup needed some startup forms. We drafted some startup forms.
(c) A journal needed some licensing forms. We drafted some licensing forms.
4. His "Attorneys" page talks about "the people in the organization", and then lists: Eric Menhart. His two "Appellate Advocacy" cases include (a) his own case, from 3(a), and (b) one other case, which appears to be a TCPA junk fax lawsuit.
5. His "Alliances" page starts by pointing out that he's only a few blocks from the White House, and "near" the Supreme Court and other courthouses - including being within 100 miles of other circuit courts. It then addresses the actual issue of alliances: They have "numerous strategic alliances with other lawyers and law firms around the nation." That's it.
6. Among his seven "Practice Areas" pages, the only page actually claiming any experience is the "Litigation" page, which states: "CyberLaw® offers substantial litigation experience. When you retain the firm, your matter will be handled by an attorney with state and federal trial and appellate experience. The firm is also experienced with alternative dispute resolution proceedings, such as before the American Arbitration Association."
We know from #3 that Eric gained "state and federal trial and appellate experience" by... filing a lawsuit on his own behalf as a law student, losing it, appealing it, and winning on appeal. And one other case. We don't know if he has other experience in a courtroom. We don't know what he means by "substantial".
7. His "binary logo" - probably mandatory for any firm calling itself CyberLaw - is "11010101011010100101000". That's 23 bits.
I always found it funny that a company will send away drives with critical information on the to be destroyed. I mean, there is no real proof they were destroyed.
That's because you're thinking like a computer guy - in binary.
It's true; there's no real proof they were destroyed. They provide a letter of destruction; that could be a total lie. They may not be who they say we are; they may even have set up a shredding company as a front to an identity-theft ring. I'm sure all these things happen.
It's also true that, if you're a company, you have no proof that your employees are doing what they say they are. They say they destroyed your hard drives; that, too, could be a total lie. Likewise, they could have gotten themselves hired as a front to an identity-theft ring. I'm sure those things happen too.
This is all, in a sense, the point (as I understand it) of the modern-day Flat Earth Society. It's not that they think the Earth is flat; they think they can't know it's round, because they have not personally observed it to be so. They're arguing that there's a miniscule probability that Occam's razor is, sometimes, dead wrong.
We make huge numbers of assumptions in everything we do. I assume that the web browser that I am running is, in fact, Firefox, that Firefox is made by Mozilla, that Mozilla is open source, that Slashdot is a web site full of geeks, that the "submit" button below sends this message. I could be completely wrong. The entire setup could be a scam.
For all I personally know and have verified (all the way down to the source code of the compiler and, these days, the CPU), IE6 was actually the most secure browser on the planet. The scammers created this "Firefox" thing, then paid millions of people to spread enough FUD about IE to get us all to download Firefox. Firefox, in turn, could contain a trojan that transmits all my personal data, but only activates when I press the "Submit" button on a comment on Slashdot. No wonder everybody is always trumpeting Firefox on Slashdot; it's in their economic interest! Likewise with the provocative comments; they want me to respond. Yes, yes, it all makes sense now.
But back in the real world, we trust that other companies will do what we have contracted with them to do - in this case, shred a hard drive. We trust that, if they don't, evidence or rumors will leak out somehow, and that they will be punished by the legal system, or by the free market. We do some research to see if there already is such evidence or rumor. We make an economic decision based on all that, and decide if the total cost (including risks) of shipping a hard drive to be shredded into quarter-inch pieces is lower than the total cost (including risk) of doing it themselves.
For me, since it turns out my memory was way off, and these places shred drives for seven bucks a drive, and I have about a dozen... yeah, it's worth it.
There are companies that will let you FedEx them a box of hard drives and shred them for some not-free-but-not-high price (I think I remember it being $25 a drive). They'll provide you back a letter of destruction. Most are set up to deal with large corporate customers, but I recall at least two that would let you set up an account on their web site.
I've been meaning to do this, but I always seem to have at least one computer that's "about to" get its drives replaced, so I keep waiting on it.
Oh yeah, don't forget to pack your hard drives very poorly with no good protection when you ship them!:)
When you're a public company, and you release an annual report, you are required to list just about every possible risk to your company that you can think of. That way, potential shareholders who read the report and buy stock based on your good news are also exposed to the bad news at the same time.
If your CEO is brilliant, you have to point out that he could die. If you have a gigantic data center, you have to point out that it could get hit by a missile. If you have obvious competitors, you have to point out that they could stomp you. If you don't, you have to point out that new ones could form at any moment. You have to put these in the strongest possible terms; it's the "don't say we didn't warn you" principle.
So, yes: to the extent that McAfee relies on license terms that have not yet been tested in court, they are at risk. Not necessarily a big risk, not even a worrisome risk, but a risk.
To the extent that they use proprietary software, they are ALSO at risk - of undiscovered bugs and reverse engineering. I imagine that's in there somewhere too.
The Risk Factors section is about 24 pages long, and includes things like "Failure of our products to work properly or misuse of our products could impact sales, increase costs, and create risks of potential negative publicity and legal liability."
When you're suing the bad guys, you sue the most obvious ones first. And if you're lucky, they appeal and you win. Then it's binding predecent, not just influential.
THEN you go sue the less-obvious bad guys, because you've laid the groundwork.
It doesn't often happen in the reverse, but it sure could be helpful...
Is the OP claiming that *developers* on open source projects, in general, have a better record of teamwork, interpersonal skills, and understanding end-user needs than *developers* on Microsoft projects? Man, I hate to be the one to stick up for Microsoft on Slashdot, but...
Much as Microsoft churns out a lot of junk, whenever I read their developer blogs, I'm always impressed by the amount of thought that goes into their design. Now, a lot of times their product teams go in the wrong direction, focus on the wrong things, get told not to fix something, or simply get hamstrung by their own legacy code. But to the extent that that reflects on the developers at all, it reflects on their design skills, not personal skills. And, frankly, most of the problem at Microsoft seems to be a management issue in the first place.
Meanwhile, a surprising number of open-source projects are led by one brilliant-but-eccentric guy who everyone tolerates because he invented the thing and he writes a lot of good code. Then, someday, another brilliant-but-eccentric guy joins the project, and a year later it forks, and they spend eternity sniping at each other on USENET, which nobody else reads anymore, while each claims to have plonked the other.
I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw a lead Microsoft developer:
* Give a presentation featuring a "Fuck You" slide, * Get indicted for killing his wife, * Call his rivals idiots, * Boot someone off a mailing list or forum, etc. etc.
Let's face it - with a few notable exceptions, FOSS tends to attract zealous, dogmatic, fiercely independent people whose idea of good interpersonal communication usually involves a die with more than six sides and some Monty Python quotes.
Of course they do. I'd go so far to say that most predators should show similar tendencies
Yes, completely obvious! Evolution has spent millions of years rewarding animals who are able to identify photographs of other animals - and specifically non-life-sized photographs of their predators. After all, if a gazelle couldn't distinguish a 6x9" photo of a mouse from a 6x9" photo of... um... a gazelleeater, she'd be constantly fleeing harmless Polaroids (the native habitat of the gazelle, which is, um, GazelleLand, is filled with them).
I'm actually pretty surprised by the study, myself. I'm more familiar with cats than dogs, and their perception differs in important ways (for instance, cats can't follow gaze, while dogs can). And my cats have certainly spent hours entranced by Video Catnip - but it's hard to say that they actually thought they were watching real animals.
I have a small, furry, stuffed animal that is, at first glance, absolutely indistinguishable from a sleeping cat. Everyone, and I mean everyone who sees this thing assumes at first that it's just sleeping. I had a friend eat his entire dinner in front of it, and at the end, he remarked, "That is one mellow cat you have". I took my spoon and whacked it as hard as I could against the "cat" as he jumped up and screamed "No!". It's that realistic.
When I got it, I assumed the cats would go crazy over it. But they didn't even notice it. I kept moving it in front of them, and they just walked around it - didn't even give it a sniff. They were not fooled in the least - nor even interested in this odd cat-like non-cat creature. Cuz it wasn't alive.
So dogs recognizing still photos? Yeah, I'm impressed.
I suspect the grandparent post's assumption - that "same" is based on "sender IP" - is wrong. It's true that, many years ago, spammers sent a bunch of messages in a row from the same IP. These days, with fast-flux botnets being readily available, that's just not the case.
In general, determining whether two messages are "the same" is an orthogonal problem to determining whether they're spam. There are many, many ways to decide if two messages are the same. Almost a decade ago, I was working with two PhDs from Colorado who had invented ridiculously advanced ways to group messages by similarity, involving n-dimensional spaces, distance measures, clustering, neural nets, classification algorithms, and all sorts of fancy doctorate-level math that I had no hope of understanding at the time, let alone explaining now. But it worked astonishingly well at the time, and I can only assume the state of the art has advanced significantly since then.
Here's the old home page of one of those guys. I can't even understand the abstracts. A sample:
Similarities between bootstrap aggregation (bagging) and N-tuple sampling are explored to propose a retina-free data-driven version of the N-tuple network...
A bunch of publishing organizations have gathered together and are attempting to create an Internet standard for restricting searchable content.
They haven't involved Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft in the process. In fact, the only search company they mention in their FAQ is Exalead, who I didn't even think I've heard of (though now I think I may have once downloaded their desktop trial product).
This is going to be implemented how?
In related news, I have issued a new policy for how I (and anyone who joins my club) am to be treated in airport security lines. I will be publishing this policy on my home page, and I am certain it will win widespread adoption among travelers.
Q:Have you discussed this with security administrators?
A:In addition to the many travelers who have co-signed the new policy, we have an agreement-in-principle from Madge, the security and commissary chief at the fourth-largest regional airport in greater Bozeman.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who complains about Linux problems but does not fill out bug reports is just an asshat as far as I am concerned
Clearly, you have never actually tried practicing what you preach.
Last summer, I decided to start being a Proper Open Source Netizen. Whenever I ran into a problem with open source code, I'd go file a proper bug report, including a fail case whenever possible. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's an infinite regression there; in order to properly troubleshoot a bug in one package, you're going to need a troubleshooting tool. That tool, of course, will have a bug, as will the browser you're using to find the tool, the build script for the tool, the editor you use to edit the build script, the compiler the editor is built upon, and so on.
After a few days of that, I got so frustrated that I decided to start blogging about it. I even registered a domain for that blog: nothingeverworks.com. According to WHOIS, I did that on September 3, 2007.
It is now May 13, 2008, and I have yet to put a web site there. You see, it turns out that there was a bug in the blogging software, and so I tried filing a bug, but then the mail server...
Maybe the problem is that we are thinking of using this new tech for existing and somewhat limited metaphors for a workspace
Bingo. I can think of at least one perfect application for gaze-tracking: Growl notifications. The perfect fade time for a growl notification isn't three seconds, five, or 30; it's "right after I stop looking at it".
Google Reader kinda does this via scrolling; if you scroll past it, you've decided not to read it. That's a brilliant UI metaphor for attention.
If everyone was publishing SPF-records and enforcing them, the problem would go away. The real problem is that most mailadministrators doesnt have a clue.
Actually, I just checked, and the real problem is people who think that a solution can ever be stated in the form "If everyone X, the problem would go away" for any values of "X". *
* other than "in the next 20 years would start Y". See, e.g., Unicode.
They have to work all the bugs in first.
Thankyouenjoytheveal!
Feel free to e-mail me if you want the gory details. It's not BS. It's just sad. They don't *mean* to be evil.
I'm confused: All this outrage, but not one "Yeah, so?"
I've lived in both Virginia and Massachusetts - certainly opposite states with respect to economic policy. At the dawn of the Internet, buying things online was a great way to avoid sales tax. But over the years, more and more companies had to collect sales tax from me; I can't remember the last time I bought something online and paid no tax.
I thought I remembered this exact controversy happening, nationwide, a few years back; online retailers were going to have to collect the use tax on behalf of the consumer, in an amount equivalent to the sales tax the consumer would have paid. So I figured that's what has happened.
But no? Is it just that most of these companies have a "substantial presence" in both VA and MA, so I ended up being taxed?
I'm a bit down on Postini lately. A few months ago, they started marking my personal e-mails to Postini customers as spam. Which is kinda ironic. And pretty damned annoying, since my lawyer, my broker, my apartment manager and my chiropractor are all on Postini servers. But hey, that happens. I went over my server with a fine-tooth comb, I set up SPF, DomainKey, DKIM, no luck. I even switched servers. No matter. My e-mail, now digitally signed in triplicate, was still being scored as 90% probable spam.
So I tried to get in touch with their postmaster group. Only they don't have one. And I tried to check their feedback loop. Only they don't have one. As a shareholder, I even wrote to Investor Relations. No response. In the process, I found out that they have a universally awful reputation among the mail delivery community.
In the end, all they could tell me was that their system decided my mail was spam because - I kid you not - their system had, previously, decided my mail was spam. Which, of course, increases my spamminess score. And so on, and so on, until we're all using the same shampoo.
So, to recap: The guy in charge of keeping Google secure, Scott Petry, is the guy who invented a system that bit-buckets your e-mail, with absolutely no accountability, no sanity checks, no industry best practices... because of guilt by association WITH YOURSELF.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
That's a really interesting comparison, since neither S/MIME nor PGP were optimal. The theoretical "best" solution was MOSS, but everyone gave that up, because S/MIME and PGP each had a large user base.
Yet, 15 years later, neither of those solutions turned out to be good enough to "win".
Where's the MOSS of the ODF/OOXML debate?
Tell me more about these "patent applications" of yours. Lots more. I've been a naughty inventor.
Amen, amen, amen!
[blockquote]'The wisdom of the crowds has peaked,' says Calacanis. 'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'"[/blockquote]
Read: Web 3.0 is making the assumption that if we pick people ourselves and pay them money, we can escape the basic flaws of human nature.
When XP came out, I said, "I'm sticking to Win2K as long as a I can and never going to XP...
... ::crickets:: Hey, that new Mac Pro looks nice."
Sounds like you've taken a fair, appropriately skeptical approach to new technology. What worries me more about Vista is, well, me.
Because when Win2K came out, and we were still using NT4 desktops at work, I got special dispensation to use Windows 2000, because it was so clearly better and more stable (it was the first OS to combine the Win9x features and interface with the NT kernel). And when Windows XP came out to finish that transition, I was eager to start running it as my home desktop from the very first beta, because again, it ended up being more stable on my desktop than Win2K, especially with some long-needed USB fixes it contained.
And then Vista came out, and I... didn't do a thing. Except, a year later, say: "It's been out for a year? Really?
I'm a classic early adopter, and I'm not even interested enough to read about the thing. And it certainly doesn't sound like there's a younger generation ready to replace me and swarm around Vista; they're all using Macs. Enterprise has turned its back on Vista (and even Office 2007, which I love for its concepts, despite its 1.0-style flaws).
So who's supposed to use Vista? Just people who buy new computers? Sounds like Windows ME all over again.
1. Eric, who graduated law school around 2005, was one of the lawyers who was scammed in a work-from-home scheme on craigslist.
2. He is currently suing the scammer, but apparently without success so far; his motion for discovery was denied.
3. His client successes page consists of, essentially:
(a) we won an anti-spam appeal... after we lost the initial case... in which we were the plaintiffs when we were in law school.
(b) A startup needed some startup forms. We drafted some startup forms.
(c) A journal needed some licensing forms. We drafted some licensing forms.
4. His "Attorneys" page talks about "the people in the organization", and then lists: Eric Menhart. His two "Appellate Advocacy" cases include (a) his own case, from 3(a), and (b) one other case, which appears to be a TCPA junk fax lawsuit.
5. His "Alliances" page starts by pointing out that he's only a few blocks from the White House, and "near" the Supreme Court and other courthouses - including being within 100 miles of other circuit courts. It then addresses the actual issue of alliances: They have "numerous strategic alliances with other lawyers and law firms around the nation." That's it.
6. Among his seven "Practice Areas" pages, the only page actually claiming any experience is the "Litigation" page, which states: "CyberLaw® offers substantial litigation experience. When you retain the firm, your matter will be handled by an attorney with state and federal trial and appellate experience. The firm is also experienced with alternative dispute resolution proceedings, such as before the American Arbitration Association."
We know from #3 that Eric gained "state and federal trial and appellate experience" by... filing a lawsuit on his own behalf as a law student, losing it, appealing it, and winning on appeal. And one other case. We don't know if he has other experience in a courtroom. We don't know what he means by "substantial".
7. His "binary logo" - probably mandatory for any firm calling itself CyberLaw - is "11010101011010100101000". That's 23 bits.
1. Valdosta State is in Georgia.
2. Georgia borders both Alabama and Florida.
This should help to explain things a little better.
Aw, dammit, I totally forgot to close with my great line about using Occam's Razor to shred the hard drive. Pretend I did.
I always found it funny that a company will send away drives with critical information on the to be destroyed. I mean, there is no real proof they were destroyed.
That's because you're thinking like a computer guy - in binary.
It's true; there's no real proof they were destroyed. They provide a letter of destruction; that could be a total lie. They may not be who they say we are; they may even have set up a shredding company as a front to an identity-theft ring. I'm sure all these things happen.
It's also true that, if you're a company, you have no proof that your employees are doing what they say they are. They say they destroyed your hard drives; that, too, could be a total lie. Likewise, they could have gotten themselves hired as a front to an identity-theft ring. I'm sure those things happen too.
This is all, in a sense, the point (as I understand it) of the modern-day Flat Earth Society. It's not that they think the Earth is flat; they think they can't know it's round, because they have not personally observed it to be so. They're arguing that there's a miniscule probability that Occam's razor is, sometimes, dead wrong.
We make huge numbers of assumptions in everything we do. I assume that the web browser that I am running is, in fact, Firefox, that Firefox is made by Mozilla, that Mozilla is open source, that Slashdot is a web site full of geeks, that the "submit" button below sends this message. I could be completely wrong. The entire setup could be a scam.
For all I personally know and have verified (all the way down to the source code of the compiler and, these days, the CPU), IE6 was actually the most secure browser on the planet. The scammers created this "Firefox" thing, then paid millions of people to spread enough FUD about IE to get us all to download Firefox. Firefox, in turn, could contain a trojan that transmits all my personal data, but only activates when I press the "Submit" button on a comment on Slashdot. No wonder everybody is always trumpeting Firefox on Slashdot; it's in their economic interest! Likewise with the provocative comments; they want me to respond. Yes, yes, it all makes sense now.
But back in the real world, we trust that other companies will do what we have contracted with them to do - in this case, shred a hard drive. We trust that, if they don't, evidence or rumors will leak out somehow, and that they will be punished by the legal system, or by the free market. We do some research to see if there already is such evidence or rumor. We make an economic decision based on all that, and decide if the total cost (including risks) of shipping a hard drive to be shredded into quarter-inch pieces is lower than the total cost (including risk) of doing it themselves.
For me, since it turns out my memory was way off, and these places shred drives for seven bucks a drive, and I have about a dozen... yeah, it's worth it.
There are companies that will let you FedEx them a box of hard drives and shred them for some not-free-but-not-high price (I think I remember it being $25 a drive). They'll provide you back a letter of destruction. Most are set up to deal with large corporate customers, but I recall at least two that would let you set up an account on their web site.
:)
I've been meaning to do this, but I always seem to have at least one computer that's "about to" get its drives replaced, so I keep waiting on it.
Oh yeah, don't forget to pack your hard drives very poorly with no good protection when you ship them!
When you're a public company, and you release an annual report, you are required to list just about every possible risk to your company that you can think of. That way, potential shareholders who read the report and buy stock based on your good news are also exposed to the bad news at the same time.
If your CEO is brilliant, you have to point out that he could die. If you have a gigantic data center, you have to point out that it could get hit by a missile. If you have obvious competitors, you have to point out that they could stomp you. If you don't, you have to point out that new ones could form at any moment. You have to put these in the strongest possible terms; it's the "don't say we didn't warn you" principle.
So, yes: to the extent that McAfee relies on license terms that have not yet been tested in court, they are at risk. Not necessarily a big risk, not even a worrisome risk, but a risk.
To the extent that they use proprietary software, they are ALSO at risk - of undiscovered bugs and reverse engineering. I imagine that's in there somewhere too.
In fact, here is the annual report in question.
The Risk Factors section is about 24 pages long, and includes things like "Failure of our products to work properly or misuse of our products could impact sales, increase costs, and create risks of potential negative publicity and legal liability."
I think you're right (IANAL though).
When you're suing the bad guys, you sue the most obvious ones first. And if you're lucky, they appeal and you win. Then it's binding predecent, not just influential.
THEN you go sue the less-obvious bad guys, because you've laid the groundwork.
It doesn't often happen in the reverse, but it sure could be helpful...
Mod parent up! I have been appropriately humbled.
Sooo......Linux is the Ron Paul of the OS world?
Well, more of a Jonathon Sharkey...
Is the OP claiming that *developers* on open source projects, in general, have a better record of teamwork, interpersonal skills, and understanding end-user needs than *developers* on Microsoft projects? Man, I hate to be the one to stick up for Microsoft on Slashdot, but...
Much as Microsoft churns out a lot of junk, whenever I read their developer blogs, I'm always impressed by the amount of thought that goes into their design. Now, a lot of times their product teams go in the wrong direction, focus on the wrong things, get told not to fix something, or simply get hamstrung by their own legacy code. But to the extent that that reflects on the developers at all, it reflects on their design skills, not personal skills. And, frankly, most of the problem at Microsoft seems to be a management issue in the first place.
Meanwhile, a surprising number of open-source projects are led by one brilliant-but-eccentric guy who everyone tolerates because he invented the thing and he writes a lot of good code. Then, someday, another brilliant-but-eccentric guy joins the project, and a year later it forks, and they spend eternity sniping at each other on USENET, which nobody else reads anymore, while each claims to have plonked the other.
I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw a lead Microsoft developer:
* Give a presentation featuring a "Fuck You" slide,
* Get indicted for killing his wife,
* Call his rivals idiots,
* Boot someone off a mailing list or forum,
etc. etc.
Let's face it - with a few notable exceptions, FOSS tends to attract zealous, dogmatic, fiercely independent people whose idea of good interpersonal communication usually involves a die with more than six sides and some Monty Python quotes.
Of course they do. I'd go so far to say that most predators should show similar tendencies
Yes, completely obvious! Evolution has spent millions of years rewarding animals who are able to identify photographs of other animals - and specifically non-life-sized photographs of their predators. After all, if a gazelle couldn't distinguish a 6x9" photo of a mouse from a 6x9" photo of... um... a gazelleeater, she'd be constantly fleeing harmless Polaroids (the native habitat of the gazelle, which is, um, GazelleLand, is filled with them).
I'm actually pretty surprised by the study, myself. I'm more familiar with cats than dogs, and their perception differs in important ways (for instance, cats can't follow gaze, while dogs can). And my cats have certainly spent hours entranced by Video Catnip - but it's hard to say that they actually thought they were watching real animals.
I have a small, furry, stuffed animal that is, at first glance, absolutely indistinguishable from a sleeping cat. Everyone, and I mean everyone who sees this thing assumes at first that it's just sleeping. I had a friend eat his entire dinner in front of it, and at the end, he remarked, "That is one mellow cat you have". I took my spoon and whacked it as hard as I could against the "cat" as he jumped up and screamed "No!". It's that realistic.
When I got it, I assumed the cats would go crazy over it. But they didn't even notice it. I kept moving it in front of them, and they just walked around it - didn't even give it a sniff. They were not fooled in the least - nor even interested in this odd cat-like non-cat creature. Cuz it wasn't alive.
So dogs recognizing still photos? Yeah, I'm impressed.
When questioned further, Gates claimed that "When I said we'd be more transparent, I just meant we'd use more alpha-blending. You know, like Vista."
I suspect the grandparent post's assumption - that "same" is based on "sender IP" - is wrong. It's true that, many years ago, spammers sent a bunch of messages in a row from the same IP. These days, with fast-flux botnets being readily available, that's just not the case.
In general, determining whether two messages are "the same" is an orthogonal problem to determining whether they're spam. There are many, many ways to decide if two messages are the same. Almost a decade ago, I was working with two PhDs from Colorado who had invented ridiculously advanced ways to group messages by similarity, involving n-dimensional spaces, distance measures, clustering, neural nets, classification algorithms, and all sorts of fancy doctorate-level math that I had no hope of understanding at the time, let alone explaining now. But it worked astonishingly well at the time, and I can only assume the state of the art has advanced significantly since then.
Here's the old home page of one of those guys. I can't even understand the abstracts. A sample:
Similarities between bootstrap aggregation (bagging) and N-tuple sampling are explored to propose a retina-free data-driven version of the N-tuple network...
http://ir.iit.edu/~alek/publications.html
So it's a lot more than just "from the same IP with the same text at the same time".
A bunch of publishing organizations have gathered together and are attempting to create an Internet standard for restricting searchable content.
They haven't involved Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft in the process. In fact, the only search company they mention in their FAQ is Exalead, who I didn't even think I've heard of (though now I think I may have once downloaded their desktop trial product).
This is going to be implemented how?
In related news, I have issued a new policy for how I (and anyone who joins my club) am to be treated in airport security lines. I will be publishing this policy on my home page, and I am certain it will win widespread adoption among travelers.
Q:Have you discussed this with security administrators?
A:In addition to the many travelers who have co-signed the new policy, we have an agreement-in-principle from Madge, the security and commissary chief at the fourth-largest regional airport in greater Bozeman.