In this you'll find iiNet had revenue of approx AUD 250M in FY 2008 (July 2007 to June 2008), gross profit of about AUD62M and net profit of ~AUD20M.
Not a financial powerhouse, but I am given to understand Telstra ($4B annual profit) and Optus (can't locate numbers) have been lending a hand. If so, that does give rise to the potential of a prolonged fight, especially as Telstra has more subscribers than anyone else.
3. Malicious Javascript in a web page that gets the browser to download a signed package, executes the installation, executes the local privilege escalation bug, and uses the new root privilege to download and install anything it wants to.
There are at least 2 attack vectors I think I see.
1. User installs an old version of a package with a locally exploitable privilege escalation bug.
2. User installs an app with the same name as a script or program usually used by root (or a sudoer) that is malicious, and appears earlier in the path than the normal copy of that command.
Perhaps you can enlighten us on how to reduce human fallibility? How do you ensure (without using people) that every datum is of the correct type, used in the correct way, at the correct times, using the correct interfaces, and doesn't have bugs caused by a library written by someone else in a different language?
Here's some simple VB.Net code dealing with XML documents. If you can find the bug in less than a minute without Google/Bing/etc, you get to comment on code quality. Otherwise STFU and let the professionals, who really do have pride in their work, do their jobs.
pSmileyList = New SortedDictionary(Of String, String)
Dim Smileys As XDocument = XDocument.Load(Constants.SmileyImages + "index.xml")
Dim Code As String = ""
Dim Image As String = ""
For Each S As XElement In Smileys...
Code = S.@code
Image = S.@image
pSmileyList.Add(Code, Image)
Next
Actually, the laptop ownership is passed to the [child|family]. I know - my daughter was supposed to get one but will end up without due to the timing. Which makes the "you can't do anything but what we say" stance stranger - if the laptop is my daughter's then I want my OS build and domain membership - not theirs!
Well given the article says that they hope to achieve 10W, I guess we all better keep moving. After all, stop for more than 3 or 4 days and you're toast!
I assume they mean MW, though it's not my field of expertise. Last non-toy laser I saw was in 1989.
In Australia, at least, a No Trespassing sign does NOT provide any protection from door to door salesmen, con artists, Jehovah's Witnesses or... wait, I'm repeating myself aren't I? Anyway, they're entitled to come to your door and nag you until you tell them to bugger off. Only then, if they refuse to leave, are they trespassing. Even when you've got a flip up cover over the doorbell that says "No Sales Persons, No Canvassing" they flip up the bloody thing then say two things, in order:
1. I didn't see the sign. But you lifted up the big A6 sized cover, you must have seen it.
2. I don't know what canvassers are and I'm not a sales person, I want you to sign up for X. A canvasser is you and your ilk. You are also currently a sales person. And you obviously just lied about seeing the sign. Piss off.
I'm hoping word gets around that I'm an annoyingly abusive asshole to people who ignore the "DON'T F*@#*$& DISTURB ME" signs. 5 years and counting though...
This is so the Common Files area can have identically named (but functionally different) libraries and files.
For example,
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\$Vendor\$Library\KillMe.DLL (the 32-bit version)
C:\Program Files\Common Files\$Vendor\$Library\KillMe.DLL (the 64-bit version)
An application can be x86 or x64, and the code is effectively the same - it loads KillMe.DLL from it's own "%PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files" folder and just works, without trying to figure which filename to use based on bit lengths / compile time options (Windows sets the environment appropriately for the bit length of the app).
Basically Windows Installer redirects 32-bit only installers to the (x86) folder and an installer or app marked x64-aware gets the normal locations.
Gosh thanks. But why couldn't you respond with one of the other 19 answers? Maybe "As I see it, yes", or "Reply hazy, try again".
Let's face it, Magic 8 Ball is about as useful as that response. Is your other name Wally?
Meetings with your boss must be a hoot. "Elvis, please investigate attaching the frood to the bligblang, with the goal of ensuring the quodloober speed is increased." "Ooh, the answer according to my 20-sided die is 'Not available in Georgia'."
I went and looked at the source, and it directly contradicts your statement (GP) that it was only committed in June. The last commits I see on the client were 11 days ago. The newest version on iTunes was submitted 11 or so days ago - 2009.07.22 on that page - and published 2-3 days ago. That seems eminently reasonable.
Not that I could find the source easily... Sean - you might want to link to the source on the Links page of the site, or from the XPilot page.
I'm interested in getting clarification on some of the points you've raised.
On the other hand, SM are trying to unfairly profit from the man-years of development work that went into XPilot, and that just rubs me (and the other developers that I asked) the wrong way.
How is this significantly different from Red Hat selling RHEL? RH are also trying to profit from the man-years of development work that went into the Linux kernel, associated binaries, tools, environments and configuration efforts.
FREE AS IN BEER
Why is XPilot not free? "Covering distribution costs" is a joke. They are negligible ($99 per year amortized across all their projects) and I (and I'm sure tons of other people too) is willing to put the game up for free. This wouldn't be very nice to SM, so I was hoping to avoid that.
I see only the XPilot game on the site linked in the summary, but I did find other sites publicising XPilot for the iPhone so I'm not sure whether they have 1 project or many. Regardless, are you suggesting that all GPL projects on the iPhone must have their registration costs and time paid for by an original non-GPL application? They have to purchase bandwidth and computing resources, maintain the web site - why can they not continue to recover those costs too?
Is the source is freely available? Well...
1) They haven't checked in any of their source since June (more than a month), though the latest release is from a few days ago.
2) The availability of the source code isn't clearly (or at all) advertised in the game, and until I complained about it, wasn't even advertised on the app store page.
It's pretty clear to me that they did this port wanting to make money from their development time, which is no different from a commercial venture, but quite different from the expectations of every other contributor of XPilot (and other open source projects). I would even say it's against the spirit of the GPL.
I agree the offer of the source needs to be prominent - I see this has been fixed. But charging for the software is not, and has never been, against the spirit of the GPL. Witness RMS himself charging for EMACS on tape, before online distribution was viable. The GPL itself says you can charge for the act of transferring a copy (what else would you characterise the App Store installation as doing?) What if the charge represents only their own contributions?
As for the source being older than the binary - I'd raise two points.
By definition the source is older than the object code it generates, merely by virtue of needing to write before compilation.
Perhaps it was recompiled with an updated compiler? Against an updated library for the new 3.01 iPhone core? And/or the updated version took weeks to be reviewed and published?
There are a number of other issues with selling open source software:
Fair compensation - Even if you could sell it, there's just no way to fairly price the development contributions of everyone in open source projects, and SM probably wouldn't be the right arbiters.
No sustainable competitive advantage - Though they drag their feet advertising and releasing it, the source is free, so there's unfortunately no way to sustain this as a business. It doesn't make sense to try to sell it.
Alienation of contributors - Charging for the game will severely restrict the number of developers that are willing to contribute. It just doesn't feel as altruistic anymore.
Limited user base - Making it free would probably increase the user base 10-100 fold, so if they cared about seeing the user base grow, that's what they would do.
The only thing that might make sense charging for, as far as I can see, is the running of the servers, as that is a per-user cost some
Oh bulldust (yes, I'm an Aussie (too?)). You need only look at the namby-pamby approach our government and the ACCC have had towards Telstra for the past decade or so, first under the Liberals, and then under Labor. The ACCC seem to be too weak to do jack and the Government keeps saying it's up to the ACCC, that their hands are tied. Great flick passing there, and certainly no "ripping to shreds".
The thing is, they (Secunia) have a point. Why are Adobe offering the old version, and requiring updates post-installation, for a version that is known to have serious issues.
Let's face it, people install it because they want to view the PDF file they've just received, or downloaded. They're not going to be conscientious about updates because they just downloaded it and they expect it to be up to date. Let's not forget that plugins have pretty much always worked that way (eg Flash).
Yes, yes it is. And a lot of vocal people whinge about how removing IE doesn't remove Trident, which shouldn't be part of the OS, because god dammit, people MUST BE ABLE TO CHOOSE, and now you're not letting me choose not to have WebKit, because my 2 user fork of Gecko is better because it lets me do X, Y and Z.
Sounds like a double standard to me. Either integrating the HTML engine with the window manager is bad (Trident/Windows) or it's good (WebKit/Mutter). It's not both at the same time because you want to be an individual and hate Microsoft, just like everyone else does.
I must be missing something. I went to the Loki website and told it to find me - to do so, the site wants to download and install stuff (lokiplugin93586120938561098512093.exe), using a Java applet whose certificate has expired, and which runs outside the sandbox.
And this is supposed to "just work" on public websites? Are they seriously expecting people visiting random websites to download and install (with admin rights, no less) unexpected software, because that site is offering local advertising?
You might be surprised. I have had 6 VMs running on a Hyper-V server with 8GB of RAM; the disks were 500G SATA 7200rpm on the Intel ICH9R RAID controller, RAID 10 (4 disks). Performance is great, even when snapshotting and so forth, or running 8 VMs at full memory commit.
I have another Hyper-V box with 8GB of RAM and the nVidia RAID controller; running 2 VMs on a RAID 1 set was atrocious.
I've run both on comparable hardware. Hyper-V was way, way better, performance-wise if you had >3 or 4 running VMs simply because it didn't have the extra scheduling overhead.
In either case though, if your disks are slow the VMs will be too.
I should clarify that when I say "I guess", what I mean is that it's in the damn article as well as being good old common sense. I suppose if you didn't read before posting (9 paragraphs is too long?) and you don't have common sense...
Slashdot Mirror
No need to be curious. iiNet is a public company, with publicly accessible annual reports like this "Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statements of Changes in Equity and Cash flow Statement".
In this you'll find iiNet had revenue of approx AUD 250M in FY 2008 (July 2007 to June 2008), gross profit of about AUD62M and net profit of ~AUD20M.
Not a financial powerhouse, but I am given to understand Telstra ($4B annual profit) and Optus (can't locate numbers) have been lending a hand. If so, that does give rise to the potential of a prolonged fight, especially as Telstra has more subscribers than anyone else.
And here's a third.
3. Malicious Javascript in a web page that gets the browser to download a signed package, executes the installation, executes the local privilege escalation bug, and uses the new root privilege to download and install anything it wants to.
There are at least 2 attack vectors I think I see.
1. User installs an old version of a package with a locally exploitable privilege escalation bug.
2. User installs an app with the same name as a script or program usually used by root (or a sudoer) that is malicious, and appears earlier in the path than the normal copy of that command.
Perhaps you can enlighten us on how to reduce human fallibility? How do you ensure (without using people) that every datum is of the correct type, used in the correct way, at the correct times, using the correct interfaces, and doesn't have bugs caused by a library written by someone else in a different language?
Here's some simple VB.Net code dealing with XML documents. If you can find the bug in less than a minute without Google/Bing/etc, you get to comment on code quality. Otherwise STFU and let the professionals, who really do have pride in their work, do their jobs.
pSmileyList = New SortedDictionary(Of String, String)
Dim Smileys As XDocument = XDocument.Load(Constants.SmileyImages + "index.xml")
Dim Code As String = ""
Dim Image As String = ""
For Each S As XElement In Smileys...
Code = S.@code
Image = S.@image
pSmileyList.Add(Code, Image)
Next
Actually, the laptop ownership is passed to the [child|family]. I know - my daughter was supposed to get one but will end up without due to the timing. Which makes the "you can't do anything but what we say" stance stranger - if the laptop is my daughter's then I want my OS build and domain membership - not theirs!
I thought they were just relying on their spill chuckers and it was about Bazaars in Australia.
Atually, New Zealand is the country with "spill chuckers" ...
Well given the article says that they hope to achieve 10W, I guess we all better keep moving. After all, stop for more than 3 or 4 days and you're toast!
I assume they mean MW, though it's not my field of expertise. Last non-toy laser I saw was in 1989.
In Australia, at least, a No Trespassing sign does NOT provide any protection from door to door salesmen, con artists, Jehovah's Witnesses or ... wait, I'm repeating myself aren't I? Anyway, they're entitled to come to your door and nag you until you tell them to bugger off. Only then, if they refuse to leave, are they trespassing. Even when you've got a flip up cover over the doorbell that says "No Sales Persons, No Canvassing" they flip up the bloody thing then say two things, in order:
1. I didn't see the sign. But you lifted up the big A6 sized cover, you must have seen it.
2. I don't know what canvassers are and I'm not a sales person, I want you to sign up for X. A canvasser is you and your ilk. You are also currently a sales person. And you obviously just lied about seeing the sign. Piss off.
I'm hoping word gets around that I'm an annoyingly abusive asshole to people who ignore the "DON'T F*@#*$& DISTURB ME" signs. 5 years and counting though ...
This is so the Common Files area can have identically named (but functionally different) libraries and files.
For example,
An application can be x86 or x64, and the code is effectively the same - it loads KillMe.DLL from it's own "%PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files" folder and just works, without trying to figure which filename to use based on bit lengths / compile time options (Windows sets the environment appropriately for the bit length of the app).
Basically Windows Installer redirects 32-bit only installers to the (x86) folder and an installer or app marked x64-aware gets the normal locations.
Gosh thanks. But why couldn't you respond with one of the other 19 answers? Maybe "As I see it, yes", or "Reply hazy, try again".
Let's face it, Magic 8 Ball is about as useful as that response. Is your other name Wally?
Meetings with your boss must be a hoot. "Elvis, please investigate attaching the frood to the bligblang, with the goal of ensuring the quodloober speed is increased." "Ooh, the answer according to my 20-sided die is 'Not available in Georgia'."
Now I'm even more confused.
I went and looked at the source, and it directly contradicts your statement (GP) that it was only committed in June. The last commits I see on the client were 11 days ago. The newest version on iTunes was submitted 11 or so days ago - 2009.07.22 on that page - and published 2-3 days ago. That seems eminently reasonable.
Not that I could find the source easily ... Sean - you might want to link to the source on the Links page of the site, or from the XPilot page.
Hi Bjorn
I'm interested in getting clarification on some of the points you've raised.
On the other hand, SM are trying to unfairly profit from the man-years of development work that went into XPilot, and that just rubs me (and the other developers that I asked) the wrong way.
How is this significantly different from Red Hat selling RHEL? RH are also trying to profit from the man-years of development work that went into the Linux kernel, associated binaries, tools, environments and configuration efforts.
I see only the XPilot game on the site linked in the summary, but I did find other sites publicising XPilot for the iPhone so I'm not sure whether they have 1 project or many. Regardless, are you suggesting that all GPL projects on the iPhone must have their registration costs and time paid for by an original non-GPL application? They have to purchase bandwidth and computing resources, maintain the web site - why can they not continue to recover those costs too?
Is the source is freely available? Well...
1) They haven't checked in any of their source since June (more than a month), though the latest release is from a few days ago.
2) The availability of the source code isn't clearly (or at all) advertised in the game, and until I complained about it, wasn't even advertised on the app store page.
It's pretty clear to me that they did this port wanting to make money from their development time, which is no different from a commercial venture, but quite different from the expectations of every other contributor of XPilot (and other open source projects). I would even say it's against the spirit of the GPL.
I agree the offer of the source needs to be prominent - I see this has been fixed. But charging for the software is not, and has never been, against the spirit of the GPL. Witness RMS himself charging for EMACS on tape, before online distribution was viable. The GPL itself says you can charge for the act of transferring a copy (what else would you characterise the App Store installation as doing?) What if the charge represents only their own contributions?
As for the source being older than the binary - I'd raise two points.
There are a number of other issues with selling open source software:
The only thing that might make sense charging for, as far as I can see, is the running of the servers, as that is a per-user cost some
Oh bulldust (yes, I'm an Aussie (too?)). You need only look at the namby-pamby approach our government and the ACCC have had towards Telstra for the past decade or so, first under the Liberals, and then under Labor. The ACCC seem to be too weak to do jack and the Government keeps saying it's up to the ACCC, that their hands are tied. Great flick passing there, and certainly no "ripping to shreds".
The thing is, they (Secunia) have a point. Why are Adobe offering the old version, and requiring updates post-installation, for a version that is known to have serious issues.
Let's face it, people install it because they want to view the PDF file they've just received, or downloaded. They're not going to be conscientious about updates because they just downloaded it and they expect it to be up to date. Let's not forget that plugins have pretty much always worked that way (eg Flash).
Yes, yes it is. And a lot of vocal people whinge about how removing IE doesn't remove Trident, which shouldn't be part of the OS, because god dammit, people MUST BE ABLE TO CHOOSE, and now you're not letting me choose not to have WebKit, because my 2 user fork of Gecko is better because it lets me do X, Y and Z.
Sounds like a double standard to me. Either integrating the HTML engine with the window manager is bad (Trident/Windows) or it's good (WebKit/Mutter). It's not both at the same time because you want to be an individual and hate Microsoft, just like everyone else does.
I must be missing something. I went to the Loki website and told it to find me - to do so, the site wants to download and install stuff (lokiplugin93586120938561098512093.exe), using a Java applet whose certificate has expired, and which runs outside the sandbox.
And this is supposed to "just work" on public websites? Are they seriously expecting people visiting random websites to download and install (with admin rights, no less) unexpected software, because that site is offering local advertising?
Seriously. W.T.F.?!
Only if you're running the servers in New Zealand.
You might be surprised. I have had 6 VMs running on a Hyper-V server with 8GB of RAM; the disks were 500G SATA 7200rpm on the Intel ICH9R RAID controller, RAID 10 (4 disks). Performance is great, even when snapshotting and so forth, or running 8 VMs at full memory commit.
I have another Hyper-V box with 8GB of RAM and the nVidia RAID controller; running 2 VMs on a RAID 1 set was atrocious.
I've run both on comparable hardware. Hyper-V was way, way better, performance-wise if you had >3 or 4 running VMs simply because it didn't have the extra scheduling overhead. In either case though, if your disks are slow the VMs will be too.
You left off, " in the snow carrying two 10lb sacks of potatoes"
I should clarify that when I say "I guess", what I mean is that it's in the damn article as well as being good old common sense. I suppose if you didn't read before posting (9 paragraphs is too long?) and you don't have common sense ...
... well then you'd be on /., right?
I guess power costs more during the Winter months, especially if you have a billion people using electric heaters.
That'd be because the SATA specs are coming out every 3 years and the networking ones seem to take 7.
For Ethernet: 10Mbps was 1985, 100Mbps was 1995, 1Gbps was 1999 and 10Gbps was 2006 (ref: Wikipedia 802.3).
SATA went from SATA 1 to SATA 3 between 2003 and 2009 (ref: Wikipedia SATA).
Sorry about the references, CBF doing links today.
The part I loved most about the steaming biased crock of crap that is the article is the comment that E85 (15% Ethanol) means a 30% drop in mileage.
So E0 (100% ethanol) would be a drop of 200% in mileage? Does that mean you fuel with Ethanol and your car goes backwards?
As a fellow New South Welshman, I think you got most of it. About the only things I don't see are:
[X] many drivers do not know how to be overtaken
[X] many drivers do not know how roundabouts work
Otherwise, good work!