Well, nobody is talking about stuff that was already sold to the consumers, so that point is moot.
Yeah, they might have to pull some boxes back from shops and re-imagine those before selling them. Which is what happens in every product recall that has ever happened on the planet, so I fail to see where the problem is. Unless you're pointing out that Dell has no process nor procedure in place to deal with software-based product recalls, which I'm certain their SOX auditors are happy to learn about.
But should they be held liable for the errors the software company they OEM for makes?
No, and they aren't. Or did I miss the memo that tells Dell to pay penalties?
They just simply lost their license to distribute Word, though not because MS terminated it, but because a court said that MS never had the right to license (this version of) it in the first place.
but for small shops it would be an extra workload, driving up computer prices
Yes. And the argument is what, exactly? Following the law is more expensive than not, so we should give companies some wiggle room? I don't exactly see how that's going to be a convincing argument.
Should the OEM burden that cost completely?
The cost of what, exactly?
The cost that results from their process and procedure in creating the product that they sell? Hell, yes! If it really is so terribly difficult and expensive to remove a program from the image due to the way that Dell creates the images, then yes, it's Dells image, Dells process, Dells decision to create and implement this process, Dells failure to not have other options. I don't see who else should "burden that cost" as you say it. Who would you propose?
Heck, if they have smart lawyers, their contracts with MS will allow them to recoup the extra costs from MS, since the party whose illegal activities have caused them damages is MS. Exactly the preconditions for a liability lawsuit.
They now have a heavy lever to pull on MS if ever there was one.
Are they going to pull it? Not if MS can just up their OEM license costs at the next opportunity. You never have a heavy lever against a monopoly provider, that's one of the reasons we don't want monopolies, you know?
So I got a copy of software, without asking or paying for it. What legal status does it have? A gift? It must be a give, what else could it be?
Since it's already copied over to my machine, copyright law and thus the EULA don't come into play. What's the status of the "loading into memory" part of the copyright argument? What's the status on a netbook, with execute-in-place?
All of this is absurd. There is no "undue" harm or burden on Dell or HP here. I speak as someone that worked in dell's testing lab for more than a year creating these images. It would be TRIVIAL for dell to make new images and put them into production.
Where's your letter to the court pointing that out, with references?
Last I checked, intentionally lying to the court could get you into serious trouble. If what you say is true, you have a duty as a citizen to point this blatant lie out to the judge, with details, and let him rip Dell a new one.
Third parties will be harmed while the patent holder isn't likely to see anyone buying their product instead of Word.
Which is not the point.
As much as I dislike software patents, if there's ever been a clear case regarding them, this is it. MS partnered with i4i, took their technology and included it in their software without an agreement.
The penalty for being caught with the hand in the cookie jar can not simply be that you now have to pay for the cookies. If it were, then trying theft first would be the rational choice. A penalty like "no more cookies for you, not even if you pay, plus penalties and paying for those you took so far" sounds about right.
MS is a company with tons of spare cash, literally. Hitting them with a monetary penalty will make them laugh, and continue on their merry ways. Telling them to actually get their damn dirty fingers out of the cookie jar is what hurts them. Yes, and their partners who sold the cookies on to others. Poor fellows. I almost feel sorry for you. It's not as if anyone would ever think that MS might be a company that's anything but spotlessly clean and nothing like this could ever happen, and contingency plans would be entirely unnecessary.
New Rule: If you put all your eggs in one basket, you don't have a right to cry if it falls.
This has little to do with software patents. If MS had been found guilty of a copyright infringement, for example, the same result could have happened.
'Making such a change would require extensive time- and resource- consuming testing.'
Self-made problem, I'd say. If your procedures can't handle the process of removing a piece of software, or replacing it with a newer version of itself, then your procedures suck. We're not talking about a kernel change here, are we?
Seriously? Car anology? "Dear Sirs, unfortunately, removing the radio is so much work, we'd have to remodel our entire factory."
Thank you, but because they matter to me, I prefer to get my news from sources that do not consider either them or me or both as objects of profit.
I realize every news source has some agenda, so I check more than one for the really important stuff. But, you know, the thing about agendas is that they are fairly solid and if you know them, you can compensate for it. The thing about pure for-profit companies is that their agenda will change to whatever marketing says that day.
Journalism is one of the areas where we can witness, live and in colour, that the free-market ideology does not provide the optimum solution for every problem on every axis. Rather, it provides an optimum profit-maximum solution for problems along the financial axis.
These so-called experts are years behind what we know in the field.
Yes, user education matters. A little.
For example, years ago when "Phishing" was the big buzzword of the day, research revealed that computer "dummies" were pretty bad at distinguishing those phishing mails that came through the filters from genuine stuff. But security experts didn't score much better.
We could certainly wish for a beginner's course to teach people some Netiquette, and tell them that it's a big, bad world out there and stop crying if not everyone works the way you want it, and that that's not because of the technology but because there's a lot of humans sitting on the other side.
But from a security POV, it hardly matters. Give the bucks to lawyers so they can write up some software quality requirement laws and software product liability laws. You'll do ten times as much good.
Yeah, all that focus on speed, as if that's the only thing that matters.
If we'd design cars that way, your average family car would go 200 km/h within city limits, 300 km/h outside. We certainly do have the technology. We'd also have millions of traffic deaths every years.
Hm, can't see a similarity to computers there. No, definitely not...
Which is why I said we'll learn the hard way. One of these days, we'll use "billions lost to software bugs" the same way we use "traffic deaths". Then, slowly, a few people will start to realize that that number can come down, if only we want it to and are prepared to pay for it. And then, since business is only in it for the quick buck, laws will be passed.
Today, you can't buy a car without airbags, seat belts and half a dozen other security features that only cost money and do nothing to improve its speed, handling or mpg. But they're there. My hope is that in 10, 20 years you can't buy software without security features, even though they don't improve running speed, download size or graphics. But they'll be there.
Dont underestimate people's abilities to go out of their way to find malware to run. You'll find tha you dont need to exploit any vulnerability other than ignorant on the user's part to root the machine.
That's right. Five years ago, while speaking at a security conference, I offered a bet, that I would take a non-malicious but virus-pattern-matching program, call it "evil.exe" or something, put it up for download with a clearly worded webpage saying "this is malware, do not under any circumstances run it", and I'm sure if I could get the link on/. or something, thousands of people would run it.
Nobody took me up on that bet, everyone nodded in agreement.
Three years later, at the same conference, I told everyone that I've come to the conclusion it's not user stupidity. It's a problem of expectations. From the perspective of your average non-geek computer user, he's being told all the time how great the Internet is, and how easy it is to download and install stuff, and every trustworthy source gives him stuff to download - he really can't see much of a difference between nvidia.com and nudevirgins.com - and quite frankly, why should he? That's just a game of awareness vs. camouflage, another arms race.
But why does the computer give a random program full access to the machine? It shouldn't need it. 90% of available software could run in a sandbox, and communication with other software could go over well-defined APIs that are ACL aware at least, MAC at best.
But - we in the computer industry still believe in the "wiz kid" and the "hero programmer", not in processes and procedures, controls and quality assurance. It "limits our freedom".
Antivirus programs aren't a solution, they're a hack to mitigate the worst.
If you can choose, as in you write the OS, then including antivirus isn't the answer. The answer is writing a virus-proof operating system. There's a lot you can do, like sandboxing, MAC, RBAC, or plain simply not having your damn e-mail tool auto-execute attachments.
I like the flagged revisions expansion and use it myself on parts of a fairly large wiki I run.
However, on Wikipedia, it does carry the danger that it will only make the inbreeding worse. Wikipedia's biggest problem right now is the fact that a fairly small, incesteous group of editors carries too much control and drives people away in droves who have a different vision. The permanent deletionism debate is only the most visible tip of the iceberg.
With flagged revisions, that effect will multiply.
So while it's a great tool, and has a big chance of greatly improving the quality of a wiki, it'll be interesting to watch what its effect will be.
Very few. The dumb criminals don't notice or care, the smart criminals know the numbers as well as we do.
Obviously, another question is how many crimes simply moved to areas without cameras.
That's been researched last year or so, and the result was: Bingo, that exactly is what the cameras do. The amount of crimes has not been reduced, but the places where they happened have shifted a little.
Maintainence is not such a minor amount, and the cameras have to be monitored, which is also a continuous cost. The presence of cameras has been demonstrated to provide much less deterence than the presence of an actual police officer.
All in all, running the numbers on this is vastly overdue.
You should actually read the programs of the various Pirate Parties. You'll find that they list exactly what you're looking for, plus some anti-censorship, patent-reform and other intelligent proposals.
But it certainly is worth it looking into the motives and reasons. They may have just decided that they don't want to bancrupt a student. You know, some people who go to court are still human beings.
Are you ready to pay $15-$20 (or more) for an issue that used to cost you $6, purely for the privilege of not having ads?
Yes
Do you think >90% of consumers are?
No.
But if you want my money, you play by my rules. That other 90% market is pretty much saturated anyways. So why not get a large share of the 10% market, instead of a tiny share of the 90% market? Your overal market share may end up to be higher.
But, of course, in this time of hyper-capitalism, nobody is happy with owning a factory or a shop or selling to a specific audience anymore. It's got to be international corporations, franchises and chains and when it comes to market, the key word is "dominating", not "pleasing".
This is cool, really cool. A full Linux machine in your pocket. Wow.
Though I do wonder how useful it will actually be. Can Linux bypass the desktop and go straight to the next big thing? User interface and good design are important on such small devices (and frankly, most phones fail more or less), and they're not exactly traditional strongholds of the Linux crowd.
Nevertheless, this is certainly something interesting.
The more ads I see, the more I get pissed at advertisement in general.
I have a truly novel idea. Maybe I should patent it. How about we charge for the actual content, save a lot of money on all the staff and equipment that doesn't have to negotiate, draft, implement, print, etc. all the advertisement anymore, and end up with a smaller, more content-dense product? I'll call it "business purpose re-engineering".
You see, when your business has slowly eroded from informing your customers to selling your customers, and your customers have started to notice and are leaving you in droves, it might be time to change back, instead of speeding up.
Sometimes, when you have a problem that bugs and bugs you, and won't go away, you take a step back and realize that it was your initial assumptions that are the problem.
Classes are a dumb shortcut to simplify game mechanics. They were invented for pen-and-paper RPGs, where you need to juggle things in your head so gameplay can continue smoothly, and where you need graspable concepts or you're busy looking things up all the time.
With computers, you don't have to look things up, or crunch numbers, the machine does that for you. Classes are unnecessary.
Fortunately, there's a number of classless (usually skill-based) MMORPGs coming out. They'll probably prove the point, namely that you don't need classes in an MMO. It would certainly help if you have things like professions, just so you can communicate to others what your role in a team is. But humans can do that pretty well. If I think I'm a warrior, then I can say so, whether or not the numbers justify it.
Me, I've always enjoyed breaking class boundaries. I've played tanking magicians and healing warriors. If the class system doesn't limit you too much, it's fun. When it does, the fun is in seing how much you can bend it before it breaks.:-)
in other news, the english Wikipedia is expected to reach 2.5 million articles by friday, when all the deletionists are back from their holidays and are back on track again.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, nobody is talking about stuff that was already sold to the consumers, so that point is moot.
Yeah, they might have to pull some boxes back from shops and re-imagine those before selling them. Which is what happens in every product recall that has ever happened on the planet, so I fail to see where the problem is. Unless you're pointing out that Dell has no process nor procedure in place to deal with software-based product recalls, which I'm certain their SOX auditors are happy to learn about.
But should they be held liable for the errors the software company they OEM for makes?
No, and they aren't. Or did I miss the memo that tells Dell to pay penalties?
They just simply lost their license to distribute Word, though not because MS terminated it, but because a court said that MS never had the right to license (this version of) it in the first place.
but for small shops it would be an extra workload, driving up computer prices
Yes. And the argument is what, exactly? Following the law is more expensive than not, so we should give companies some wiggle room? I don't exactly see how that's going to be a convincing argument.
Should the OEM burden that cost completely?
The cost of what, exactly?
The cost that results from their process and procedure in creating the product that they sell? Hell, yes!
If it really is so terribly difficult and expensive to remove a program from the image due to the way that Dell creates the images, then yes, it's Dells image, Dells process, Dells decision to create and implement this process, Dells failure to not have other options. I don't see who else should "burden that cost" as you say it. Who would you propose?
Heck, if they have smart lawyers, their contracts with MS will allow them to recoup the extra costs from MS, since the party whose illegal activities have caused them damages is MS. Exactly the preconditions for a liability lawsuit.
They now have a heavy lever to pull on MS if ever there was one.
Are they going to pull it? Not if MS can just up their OEM license costs at the next opportunity. You never have a heavy lever against a monopoly provider, that's one of the reasons we don't want monopolies, you know?
That's an interesting legal situation, then.
So I got a copy of software, without asking or paying for it. What legal status does it have? A gift? It must be a give, what else could it be?
Since it's already copied over to my machine, copyright law and thus the EULA don't come into play. What's the status of the "loading into memory" part of the copyright argument? What's the status on a netbook, with execute-in-place?
All of this is absurd. There is no "undue" harm or burden on Dell or HP here. I speak as someone that worked in dell's testing lab for more than a year creating these images. It would be TRIVIAL for dell to make new images and put them into production.
Where's your letter to the court pointing that out, with references?
Last I checked, intentionally lying to the court could get you into serious trouble. If what you say is true, you have a duty as a citizen to point this blatant lie out to the judge, with details, and let him rip Dell a new one.
Third parties will be harmed while the patent holder isn't likely to see anyone buying their product instead of Word.
Which is not the point.
As much as I dislike software patents, if there's ever been a clear case regarding them, this is it. MS partnered with i4i, took their technology and included it in their software without an agreement.
The penalty for being caught with the hand in the cookie jar can not simply be that you now have to pay for the cookies. If it were, then trying theft first would be the rational choice. A penalty like "no more cookies for you, not even if you pay, plus penalties and paying for those you took so far" sounds about right.
MS is a company with tons of spare cash, literally. Hitting them with a monetary penalty will make them laugh, and continue on their merry ways. Telling them to actually get their damn dirty fingers out of the cookie jar is what hurts them.
Yes, and their partners who sold the cookies on to others. Poor fellows. I almost feel sorry for you. It's not as if anyone would ever think that MS might be a company that's anything but spotlessly clean and nothing like this could ever happen, and contingency plans would be entirely unnecessary.
New Rule: If you put all your eggs in one basket, you don't have a right to cry if it falls.
Uh, no?
This has little to do with software patents. If MS had been found guilty of a copyright infringement, for example, the same result could have happened.
'Making such a change would require extensive time- and resource- consuming testing.'
Self-made problem, I'd say. If your procedures can't handle the process of removing a piece of software, or replacing it with a newer version of itself, then your procedures suck. We're not talking about a kernel change here, are we?
Seriously? Car anology? "Dear Sirs, unfortunately, removing the radio is so much work, we'd have to remodel our entire factory."
Thank you, but because they matter to me, I prefer to get my news from sources that do not consider either them or me or both as objects of profit.
I realize every news source has some agenda, so I check more than one for the really important stuff. But, you know, the thing about agendas is that they are fairly solid and if you know them, you can compensate for it. The thing about pure for-profit companies is that their agenda will change to whatever marketing says that day.
Journalism is one of the areas where we can witness, live and in colour, that the free-market ideology does not provide the optimum solution for every problem on every axis. Rather, it provides an optimum profit-maximum solution for problems along the financial axis.
These so-called experts are years behind what we know in the field.
Yes, user education matters. A little.
For example, years ago when "Phishing" was the big buzzword of the day, research revealed that computer "dummies" were pretty bad at distinguishing those phishing mails that came through the filters from genuine stuff. But security experts didn't score much better.
We could certainly wish for a beginner's course to teach people some Netiquette, and tell them that it's a big, bad world out there and stop crying if not everyone works the way you want it, and that that's not because of the technology but because there's a lot of humans sitting on the other side.
But from a security POV, it hardly matters. Give the bucks to lawyers so they can write up some software quality requirement laws and software product liability laws. You'll do ten times as much good.
Yeah, all that focus on speed, as if that's the only thing that matters.
If we'd design cars that way, your average family car would go 200 km/h within city limits, 300 km/h outside. We certainly do have the technology. We'd also have millions of traffic deaths every years.
Hm, can't see a similarity to computers there. No, definitely not...
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more.
Which is why I said we'll learn the hard way. One of these days, we'll use "billions lost to software bugs" the same way we use "traffic deaths". Then, slowly, a few people will start to realize that that number can come down, if only we want it to and are prepared to pay for it. And then, since business is only in it for the quick buck, laws will be passed.
Today, you can't buy a car without airbags, seat belts and half a dozen other security features that only cost money and do nothing to improve its speed, handling or mpg. But they're there. My hope is that in 10, 20 years you can't buy software without security features, even though they don't improve running speed, download size or graphics. But they'll be there.
Dont underestimate people's abilities to go out of their way to find malware to run. You'll find tha you dont need to exploit any vulnerability other than ignorant on the user's part to root the machine.
That's right. Five years ago, while speaking at a security conference, I offered a bet, that I would take a non-malicious but virus-pattern-matching program, call it "evil.exe" or something, put it up for download with a clearly worded webpage saying "this is malware, do not under any circumstances run it", and I'm sure if I could get the link on /. or something, thousands of people would run it.
Nobody took me up on that bet, everyone nodded in agreement.
Three years later, at the same conference, I told everyone that I've come to the conclusion it's not user stupidity. It's a problem of expectations. From the perspective of your average non-geek computer user, he's being told all the time how great the Internet is, and how easy it is to download and install stuff, and every trustworthy source gives him stuff to download - he really can't see much of a difference between nvidia.com and nudevirgins.com - and quite frankly, why should he? That's just a game of awareness vs. camouflage, another arms race.
But why does the computer give a random program full access to the machine? It shouldn't need it. 90% of available software could run in a sandbox, and communication with other software could go over well-defined APIs that are ACL aware at least, MAC at best.
But - we in the computer industry still believe in the "wiz kid" and the "hero programmer", not in processes and procedures, controls and quality assurance. It "limits our freedom".
We'll learn.
Probably the hard way.
Antivirus programs aren't a solution, they're a hack to mitigate the worst.
If you can choose, as in you write the OS, then including antivirus isn't the answer. The answer is writing a virus-proof operating system. There's a lot you can do, like sandboxing, MAC, RBAC, or plain simply not having your damn e-mail tool auto-execute attachments.
As I read it, it wasn't "out of the neighbourhood", it was more "into the side-streets".
I like the flagged revisions expansion and use it myself on parts of a fairly large wiki I run.
However, on Wikipedia, it does carry the danger that it will only make the inbreeding worse. Wikipedia's biggest problem right now is the fact that a fairly small, incesteous group of editors carries too much control and drives people away in droves who have a different vision. The permanent deletionism debate is only the most visible tip of the iceberg.
With flagged revisions, that effect will multiply.
So while it's a great tool, and has a big chance of greatly improving the quality of a wiki, it'll be interesting to watch what its effect will be.
Sure, but how many crimes did it prevent?
Very few. The dumb criminals don't notice or care, the smart criminals know the numbers as well as we do.
Obviously, another question is how many crimes simply moved to areas without cameras.
That's been researched last year or so, and the result was: Bingo, that exactly is what the cameras do. The amount of crimes has not been reduced, but the places where they happened have shifted a little.
Your basic assumption is false.
Maintainence is not such a minor amount, and the cameras have to be monitored, which is also a continuous cost. The presence of cameras has been demonstrated to provide much less deterence than the presence of an actual police officer.
All in all, running the numbers on this is vastly overdue.
You should actually read the programs of the various Pirate Parties. You'll find that they list exactly what you're looking for, plus some anti-censorship, patent-reform and other intelligent proposals.
Any automatic penalty will be abused.
But it certainly is worth it looking into the motives and reasons. They may have just decided that they don't want to bancrupt a student. You know, some people who go to court are still human beings.
Are you ready to pay $15-$20 (or more) for an issue that used to cost you $6, purely for the privilege of not having ads?
Yes
Do you think >90% of consumers are?
No.
But if you want my money, you play by my rules. That other 90% market is pretty much saturated anyways. So why not get a large share of the 10% market, instead of a tiny share of the 90% market? Your overal market share may end up to be higher.
But, of course, in this time of hyper-capitalism, nobody is happy with owning a factory or a shop or selling to a specific audience anymore. It's got to be international corporations, franchises and chains and when it comes to market, the key word is "dominating", not "pleasing".
This is cool, really cool. A full Linux machine in your pocket. Wow.
Though I do wonder how useful it will actually be. Can Linux bypass the desktop and go straight to the next big thing? User interface and good design are important on such small devices (and frankly, most phones fail more or less), and they're not exactly traditional strongholds of the Linux crowd.
Nevertheless, this is certainly something interesting.
The more ads I see, the more I get pissed at advertisement in general.
I have a truly novel idea. Maybe I should patent it. How about we charge for the actual content, save a lot of money on all the staff and equipment that doesn't have to negotiate, draft, implement, print, etc. all the advertisement anymore, and end up with a smaller, more content-dense product? I'll call it "business purpose re-engineering".
You see, when your business has slowly eroded from informing your customers to selling your customers, and your customers have started to notice and are leaving you in droves, it might be time to change back, instead of speeding up.
Sometimes, when you have a problem that bugs and bugs you, and won't go away, you take a step back and realize that it was your initial assumptions that are the problem.
Classes are a dumb shortcut to simplify game mechanics. They were invented for pen-and-paper RPGs, where you need to juggle things in your head so gameplay can continue smoothly, and where you need graspable concepts or you're busy looking things up all the time.
With computers, you don't have to look things up, or crunch numbers, the machine does that for you. Classes are unnecessary.
Fortunately, there's a number of classless (usually skill-based) MMORPGs coming out. They'll probably prove the point, namely that you don't need classes in an MMO. It would certainly help if you have things like professions, just so you can communicate to others what your role in a team is. But humans can do that pretty well. If I think I'm a warrior, then I can say so, whether or not the numbers justify it.
Me, I've always enjoyed breaking class boundaries. I've played tanking magicians and healing warriors. If the class system doesn't limit you too much, it's fun. When it does, the fun is in seing how much you can bend it before it breaks. :-)
in other news, the english Wikipedia is expected to reach 2.5 million articles by friday, when all the deletionists are back from their holidays and are back on track again.
Looks like the purpose isn't so much to block cell phones, but to stop the electromagnetic radiation.
While most studies show it to be harmless, some studies say that kids might be more susceptible to any damages it might cause.