I didn't see any evidence that you'd be able to burn these programs to the Blu-Ray device, just store them on the PS3's hard drive. Are Blu-Ray burners godawful expensive, or is this just an aversion to letting people make hard copies of copyrighted materials?
It's amusing to see how Sony has jumped the fence since the Betamax days. Now that it's big into music and movies, it suddenly doesn't seem quite so aggressive about marketing devices that can duplicate copyrighted materials.
Ah ha! So the truth is that you don't like it because it makes MS's products too familure to the student and at the same time say that if the student can't adapt to a new OS/app then they've been taught poorly? Can't you see how this flies in the face of your own logic?
No, not really. A lot of "instruction" in the use of computers assumes, like you, that everyone is/should be using Windows and Office. This assumed uniformity often reduces the level of instruction to "find option X in menu Y." That kind of instruction is useless once menu Y doesn't exist or has new options or is replaced by a ribbon.
My daughter is fifteen and has already used at least three or four versions of Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu. She's happy with Ubuntu. I'd bet she's a lot more capable of adapting to an uncertain computing future than someone who's been taught only how to work with Microsoft products. I know lots of teens who've been using computers since they were little and demonstrate no real fear with trying new software or new ways of thinking about computing. Some of them grew up with Windows, some with Macs, few if any with Linux. Yet I doubt any of them would be unable to use gaim or kopete to keep up with their friends on IM networks. I wonder if their teachers have the same flexibility....
As I have already said; it's the most likely OS they're going to run in their professional careers. I want kids taught on the tools of the times, not what's cheap or what's speculative.
I want kids to be taught about functionality, not about a specific OS or set of programs. Honestly if someone who was taught how to format a paragraph in OpenOffice is incapable of doing the same thing in MS Office then the original instruction was poor. You may be right that everyone will still be looking at Windows and Office in ten more years, but by then Windows and Office may look only somewhat like what they do now. (Office 2007 already looks a lot different than previous incarnations.) Too many people's training in computing is pure rote learning -- highlight this, click that, etc. That sort of hideous instructional approach just helps to cement Microsoft's position in the computing infrastructure.
I want kids today to know that powerful software can cost nothing at all and be infinitely redistributable. I don't want kids today to think that every computing solution requires spending money when we all know that's just no longer true. Schools that continue to "train" kids in how to use Microsoft software rather than "teaching" them how to use a computer do their students a disservice.
There's obviously no such thing as "Fedora Red Hat," but I don't think this particular designation is all that suspicious either. Many more people have heard something about "that Linux company" named "Red Hat" than have heard anything about "Fedora." And since Fedora's roots lay in Red Hat Linux 9, and given Red Hat's continuing sponsorship of the Fedora Project, it's not really a misrepresentation to link the two names in a piece of marketing literature.
By the way, I've run Fedora every day for the past few years and like it very much. However it's way too much of a moving target to support on personal laptops. I wonder how well Infocare Sweden's "KundCenter - InfoCare Workshop" will do at handling the support calls. The destination of the support address on Medison's site, kc@infocare.se, is described here (in Swedish; an online translator provided little help).
Denmark and Canada have parliamentary democracies where ballots often contain only one race, that for the national legislature. In the United States, most elections includes half-a-dozen or more races at a time, not to mention ballot measures. In most presidential years, voters are choosing in at least a presidential and a legislative election (the House of Representatives) and sometimes a third election for Senate. In "off"-years, there won't be a presidential election, but there could easily be races for a dozen or more different state and local officials. On top of this there could be half-a-dozen or more ballot "questions" (referenda) to tabulate as well. Hand-tabulating results for all these races takes time.
The evidence on voting machines I've read (projects at CalTech, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford, for instance) usually find that traditional paper ballots and optical-scan ballots are among the most reliable technologies. Both offer post-election physical ballots for recounting, and optical scanning addresses the problem of tabulating multiple offices quickly.
OK, that's three. We've only got 197 to go. If the point of this exercise is trying to determine how many applications are being used, then from that perspective they're all instances of Firefox.
Your approach answers one particular question, how many different versions of how many different applications are we using? That obviously matters in some cases like license management, but if the question is more along the lines of "how many open-sourced applications are we running," then I don't think versioning is all that relevant.
I'm not trying to argue about what's "fair," I'm just wondering how we get to 200. Let's suppose that your company has three or four different versions of every open-sourced application running. That still works out to something like 50-70 different applications which seems to me to be pretty high number. Particularly when most anecdotal evidence suggests that open-sourced applications are a rarity in many companies. It's taken me quite a while to convince my (small business/nonprofit) clients to adopt one or two of the most commonly-used open-sourced applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.
The only way I see getting to a number like 200 is if you count *nix servers. And, then, 200 is probably too small a number especially in Linux shops.
BTW, their list of discoverable software (XLS) doesn't include any versions of Firefox before 2.0.0 and doesn't list Thunderbird at all. On the other hand, they do list a number of different versions of server software like Apache (8 versions) and MySQL (17). This tends to confirm my original conjecture that a lot of the software counted toward this 200 figure is running on servers, and yes, they're probably counting different versions as different instances. There are also a lot of packages that are likely to be relevant only to development shops. Just going through the A's and B's required me to look up some things like activemq (about 80 versions), berkano (about 100 versions), and bouncycastle (about a dozen).
So I guess I'd conclude that this product might be highly relevant to development shops and server managers, but much less relevant for determining what's running on the desktops of firms outside the IT industry.
Unless they're scanning their *nix servers with this thing, or they're all running Linux on the desktop, I find it hard to fathom that there are companies running 200 or more open source applications on their Windows desktops or Windows servers.
Now perhaps they have 200 copies of Firefox installed, or 200 copies of OpenOffice. But 200 different open source applications? If that's really true, then FOSS has become a lot more acceptable in corporate environments than we've been led to believe. It would be nice if true, but this sounds like marketing hype to me.
It might be more plausible to discover a lot of different FOSS applications running in a modern Mac shop, but the tool doesn't scan Macs.
From TFA, this study was released by "the NPD Group, a research group that has monitored the behavior of 12,000 Americans with software on their computers."
I'd bet the DVD copying rate is even lower among those Americans who do not have software on their computers.
Wow, an entire thread on the multiverse hypothesis, and no one's mentioned Noein yet? By far one of the best anime programs of the past couple of years, Noein depicts a conflict between alternative universes that comes to involve a group of middle-school kids in Japan. The producers actually try to explain some of the science involved, including a cute scene with Schrodinger's cat. One of the most experimental animes I've ever watched, and I've watched quite a few. The style of animation is rather unusual; for a sample, see this Youtube clip which shows the opening sequence in the first episode.
It's currently showing on the SciFi channel in the US; most of the series has been released on DVDs in Region 1; there's one more left to go.
Classical music is even more reasonably priced, I've discovered. I'd been holding off buying classical CDs in hopes I'd get my act together, buy a new cartridge, and transfer my LPs to my hard drive. Then I went into a local record store (a regional chain here in New England) and wandered into the classical area. I bought a complete set of Beethoven symphonies (6 discs) by Sir Georg Solti and Chicago Symphony for under $50! A complete set of all Mozart's piano concerti (12 discs) by Alfred Brendel, Neville Marriner, and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields cost about $60.
Granted all this music dates back to the 80's and 90's, but who cares? It's not like this year's performance of Beethoven is going to be light-years ahead of Solti's.
Some of this also stemmed, I believe, from the combination of the "first-sale" doctrine and the proliferation of mom-and-pop video rental stores that followed the arrival of VHS. Studios priced tapes at or near $100 because they knew that video retailers would be buying them and then renting them out many times over. I actually conducted some research on video purchasing/renting habits at the time, and only about a quarter of our sample expressed an interest in buying movies versus renting. In that type of market, pricing the movies very high made sense since it was the only way the studios would realize sufficient income to justify allowing retailers to rent them out.
The consolidation of the rental marketplace into a few big chains like Blockbuster changed the pricing model substantially. Now the studios had a retailer they could deal with directly, so they could negotiate prices that enabled them to collect some of the downstream rental income. Not to mention that the reproduction costs for DVDs is radically lower than that for VHS tapes. Tape duplicators in the mid-80's bought dozens of consumer-quality VCRs and simply dubbed one master onto a hundred slave machines. This method of duplication was very costly since it all happened in real time. Later on, VCR manufacturers made high-speed duplication systems that reduced the cost of VHS tapes.
Yes, but, is your router connected directly to the FiOS with an external IP address? How often does it change? I'm less concerned about speed (my Comcast is 6 mbit up/1 mbit down) than I am about being able to use the connection for something other than normal residential purposes.
I'm a Comcast subscriber, and there are many aspects of my service I'm happy with. However FiOS is now available recently, and I'm curious whether it would benefit me to switch.
I started as a subscriber to Continental Cablevision (with Internet service), which was bought by (the old) AT&T, then bought by Comcast. Over the decade I've had pretty reliable service from all three providers.
Things I like about Comcast: 1) I get a public IP address, and it's essentially static. I use a Linux box as a firewall, and my address only ever changes if Comcast renumbers its network, something that's happened maybe twice in my Comcast period. Since I maintain a number of OpenVPN tunnels to remote hosts, having a static address makes that much easier.
2) They don't seem to notice, or care, that my firewall is also the backup MX host for my commercial email server.
3) They don't seem to care that I run torrents. At one time it was 24x7, now I tend to run them overnight.
4) Other than watching the Red Sox and The Golf Channel, most of the reason I keep their cable service is to watch the excellent collection of On-Demand free movies they offer. (Most of my viewing these days consists of DVDs and downloaded anime.) It's rare that we ever pay for an on-demand film. I've introduced my daughter to a number of excellent older films that we would never have seen otherwise except through rentals. While rentals are good, our viewing tends to be more haphazard, so being able to dial up an On-Demand feature is a substantial benefit.
My only experience with Verizon FiOS is observing what's happened with a friend who signed up for it recently. He's already had two outages; I only have outages when I forget to pay the bill. When Verizon installed his service, they also installed a firewall router which has his public IP. The rest of his machines are on a private IP network behind the firewall. Is this the only option available, or will I still be able to have my own router with a public IP? How stable is the public IP? Another acquaintance who has FiOS says you don't need their router unless you also want television service. Since I'm looking for a single provider, that sounds a bit ominous.
Competition from FiOS has led to Comcast sweetening the deal here. The other day I was speaking with a customer rep while paying my bill, and she told me that I could add phone service, and get HBO and Starz thrown in, for another $15/month (right now I pay about $115). My guess is that a similar FiOS package would cost about the same.
Being faced with choosing between Comcast and Verizon is something of a Hobson's choice for me.
Even more pertinent, why is the mail system set up to deliver executable files to users in the first place?
Every system I've ever installed for clients blocks executables at the server and puts them into quarantine. Occasionally some doofus, sadly usually some IT consultancy, wants to send an.exe file with patches, updates, etc. (I'm always amazed how often these people say that we're the only ones who don't accept executables by default. What kind of consultants are they?) Usually the IT manager has whitelisted permissions to receive executables; everyone else, forget it.
Not too long ago one of our clients was unable to receive mail from some fellow attorneys in the IRS. Turns out that their outbound server not only doesn't have an SPF record, it didn't even have reverse DNS resolution configured! So all the mail from the attorney at the IRS was blocked by our irs.gov rule. I now have a special whitelisting rule for the subnet in which that server resides.
I was impressed by the level of incompetence displayed here. Hell, some major email services like AOL won't usually accept anything from a server without reverse-resolution configured. Here a server without reverse-DNS gets a goodly number of SpamAssassin points right off the top. Any other spammy features will usually lead to such messages being tagged as spams here.
In our case, we instituted these rules for fbi.gov and irs.gov long before SPF came into being, but yes, SPF would help alleviate this problem nowadays.
The problem is, there'll probably be too many jurisdictions involved. What happens when the controlling computer is in China, Russia, etc.
Did you read the article? The three people cited as running massive botnets all lived in the United States.
From the FBI press release cited above:
"To date, the following subjects have been charged or arrested in this operation with computer fraud and abuse in violation of Title 18 USC 1030, including:
James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, is alleged to have operated a botnet that infected Chicago area hospitals. This botnet infected tens of thousands of computers worldwide. (FBI Chicago);
Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, is charged with an Information [sic] with using botnets to send a high volume of traffic to intended recipients to cause damage by impairing the availability of such systems. (FBI Detroit); and
Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle, Washington, is alleged to have used a large botnet network and spammed tens of millions of unsolicited email messages to advertise his website from which he offered services and products. (FBI Seattle)"
I don't disagree that the global nature of the Internet makes investigation and prosecution of such actions difficult. But there are probably enough botnet operators here in the States to keep the FBI busy for some time to come.
It wouldn't get too far in our mail system. We don't accept mail with From addresses in fbi.gov or irs.gov unless they originate on those agencies own servers. Mail coming from a server in rr.com claiming to be "From: fixyourcomputer@fbi.gov" is going to be dropped on the floor.
There have already been tons of viral messages from these two domains over the past few years. One of the big Windows worms ("Slammer," if I recall correctly) was often mailed out with an fbi.gov From address. Forging irs.gov messages is common among phishers.
people don't want to have to count or manage their usage, which is why they do things such as buying cell phone packages that offer more minutes than they really need just so they don't need to feel like they're "counting."
That, and the fact that if you go over your monthly allotment, it costs a heck of a lot more for those extra minutes than it does if you pay another $10/month for more base usage. Not to mention that, on a service like Cingular, minutes roll over. We've accrued so many minutes now that we'll never pay a per-minute usage charge on our family account ever again.
I have over a hundred movies a month on On Demand that cost nothing at all. Over the past couple of years my daughter has been exposed to a wide variety of excellent movies from directors like Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, etc., that has expanded her experience with film. It's one of our most-viewed services on Comcast (along with Red Sox baseball, of course!).
I bought the Monster-branded one of these a couple months back, and it seems to work fine with my Cowon A2. You have to be careful to keep the output of the player at a reasonable level or you'll over-modulate the tape input; for additional amplification, you turn up the radio itself. Before I bought this I read a number of reviews of media player -> car radio adapters, and they all recommended cassette adapters over FM transmitters. I never have to worry about finding an empty frequency or interference from neighboring transmitters or interfering with neighboring radios.
I think it's an open question as to whether it's legal even to download something like libdvdcss into the United States. The anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA reads:
"(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that-- (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;"
Under a strict reading of this provision, I would argue that downloading a codec from a server outside the US constitutes "importing" that software. There's no exemption for personal use that I can see. However, I don't know of any case law yet which subjects this clause to further interpretation. You could also read this provision as forbidding only the "traffic" in these prohibited items, which would be consistent with your interpretation. Regardless, I'd guess that if Dell provided information to its US customers on how to install such items, it would quickly face a lawsuit as a contributory infringer. Such instructions might even constitute an "offering to the public" in violation of this provision as well.
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I didn't see any evidence that you'd be able to burn these programs to the Blu-Ray device, just store them on the PS3's hard drive. Are Blu-Ray burners godawful expensive, or is this just an aversion to letting people make hard copies of copyrighted materials?
It's amusing to see how Sony has jumped the fence since the Betamax days. Now that it's big into music and movies, it suddenly doesn't seem quite so aggressive about marketing devices that can duplicate copyrighted materials.
Ah ha! So the truth is that you don't like it because it makes MS's products too familure to the student and at the same time say that if the student can't adapt to a new OS/app then they've been taught poorly? Can't you see how this flies in the face of your own logic?
No, not really. A lot of "instruction" in the use of computers assumes, like you, that everyone is/should be using Windows and Office. This assumed uniformity often reduces the level of instruction to "find option X in menu Y." That kind of instruction is useless once menu Y doesn't exist or has new options or is replaced by a ribbon.
My daughter is fifteen and has already used at least three or four versions of Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu. She's happy with Ubuntu. I'd bet she's a lot more capable of adapting to an uncertain computing future than someone who's been taught only how to work with Microsoft products. I know lots of teens who've been using computers since they were little and demonstrate no real fear with trying new software or new ways of thinking about computing. Some of them grew up with Windows, some with Macs, few if any with Linux. Yet I doubt any of them would be unable to use gaim or kopete to keep up with their friends on IM networks. I wonder if their teachers have the same flexibility....
As I have already said; it's the most likely OS they're going to run in their professional careers. I want kids taught on the tools of the times, not what's cheap or what's speculative.
I want kids to be taught about functionality, not about a specific OS or set of programs. Honestly if someone who was taught how to format a paragraph in OpenOffice is incapable of doing the same thing in MS Office then the original instruction was poor. You may be right that everyone will still be looking at Windows and Office in ten more years, but by then Windows and Office may look only somewhat like what they do now. (Office 2007 already looks a lot different than previous incarnations.) Too many people's training in computing is pure rote learning -- highlight this, click that, etc. That sort of hideous instructional approach just helps to cement Microsoft's position in the computing infrastructure.
I want kids today to know that powerful software can cost nothing at all and be infinitely redistributable. I don't want kids today to think that every computing solution requires spending money when we all know that's just no longer true. Schools that continue to "train" kids in how to use Microsoft software rather than "teaching" them how to use a computer do their students a disservice.
There's obviously no such thing as "Fedora Red Hat," but I don't think this particular designation is all that suspicious either. Many more people have heard something about "that Linux company" named "Red Hat" than have heard anything about "Fedora." And since Fedora's roots lay in Red Hat Linux 9, and given Red Hat's continuing sponsorship of the Fedora Project, it's not really a misrepresentation to link the two names in a piece of marketing literature.
By the way, I've run Fedora every day for the past few years and like it very much. However it's way too much of a moving target to support on personal laptops. I wonder how well Infocare Sweden's "KundCenter - InfoCare Workshop" will do at handling the support calls. The destination of the support address on Medison's site, kc@infocare.se, is described here (in Swedish; an online translator provided little help).
Denmark and Canada have parliamentary democracies where ballots often contain only one race, that for the national legislature. In the United States, most elections includes half-a-dozen or more races at a time, not to mention ballot measures. In most presidential years, voters are choosing in at least a presidential and a legislative election (the House of Representatives) and sometimes a third election for Senate. In "off"-years, there won't be a presidential election, but there could easily be races for a dozen or more different state and local officials. On top of this there could be half-a-dozen or more ballot "questions" (referenda) to tabulate as well. Hand-tabulating results for all these races takes time.
The evidence on voting machines I've read (projects at CalTech, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford, for instance) usually find that traditional paper ballots and optical-scan ballots are among the most reliable technologies. Both offer post-election physical ballots for recounting, and optical scanning addresses the problem of tabulating multiple offices quickly.
Buy a used phone on eBay and move the SIM chip. Done. I replaced my daughter's phone on Cingular (now ATT) this way.
OK, that's three. We've only got 197 to go. If the point of this exercise is trying to determine how many applications are being used, then from that perspective they're all instances of Firefox.
Your approach answers one particular question, how many different versions of how many different applications are we using? That obviously matters in some cases like license management, but if the question is more along the lines of "how many open-sourced applications are we running," then I don't think versioning is all that relevant.
I'm not trying to argue about what's "fair," I'm just wondering how we get to 200. Let's suppose that your company has three or four different versions of every open-sourced application running. That still works out to something like 50-70 different applications which seems to me to be pretty high number. Particularly when most anecdotal evidence suggests that open-sourced applications are a rarity in many companies. It's taken me quite a while to convince my (small business/nonprofit) clients to adopt one or two of the most commonly-used open-sourced applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.
The only way I see getting to a number like 200 is if you count *nix servers. And, then, 200 is probably too small a number especially in Linux shops.
BTW, their list of discoverable software (XLS) doesn't include any versions of Firefox before 2.0.0 and doesn't list Thunderbird at all. On the other hand, they do list a number of different versions of server software like Apache (8 versions) and MySQL (17). This tends to confirm my original conjecture that a lot of the software counted toward this 200 figure is running on servers, and yes, they're probably counting different versions as different instances. There are also a lot of packages that are likely to be relevant only to development shops. Just going through the A's and B's required me to look up some things like activemq (about 80 versions), berkano (about 100 versions), and bouncycastle (about a dozen).
So I guess I'd conclude that this product might be highly relevant to development shops and server managers, but much less relevant for determining what's running on the desktops of firms outside the IT industry.
Unless they're scanning their *nix servers with this thing, or they're all running Linux on the desktop, I find it hard to fathom that there are companies running 200 or more open source applications on their Windows desktops or Windows servers.
Now perhaps they have 200 copies of Firefox installed, or 200 copies of OpenOffice. But 200 different open source applications? If that's really true, then FOSS has become a lot more acceptable in corporate environments than we've been led to believe. It would be nice if true, but this sounds like marketing hype to me.
It might be more plausible to discover a lot of different FOSS applications running in a modern Mac shop, but the tool doesn't scan Macs.
From TFA, this study was released by "the NPD Group, a research group that has monitored the behavior of 12,000 Americans with software on their computers."
I'd bet the DVD copying rate is even lower among those Americans who do not have software on their computers.
Wow, an entire thread on the multiverse hypothesis, and no one's mentioned Noein yet? By far one of the best anime programs of the past couple of years, Noein depicts a conflict between alternative universes that comes to involve a group of middle-school kids in Japan. The producers actually try to explain some of the science involved, including a cute scene with Schrodinger's cat. One of the most experimental animes I've ever watched, and I've watched quite a few. The style of animation is rather unusual; for a sample, see this Youtube clip which shows the opening sequence in the first episode.
It's currently showing on the SciFi channel in the US; most of the series has been released on DVDs in Region 1; there's one more left to go.
Classical music is even more reasonably priced, I've discovered. I'd been holding off buying classical CDs in hopes I'd get my act together, buy a new cartridge, and transfer my LPs to my hard drive. Then I went into a local record store (a regional chain here in New England) and wandered into the classical area. I bought a complete set of Beethoven symphonies (6 discs) by Sir Georg Solti and Chicago Symphony for under $50! A complete set of all Mozart's piano concerti (12 discs) by Alfred Brendel, Neville Marriner, and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields cost about $60.
Granted all this music dates back to the 80's and 90's, but who cares? It's not like this year's performance of Beethoven is going to be light-years ahead of Solti's.
Some of this also stemmed, I believe, from the combination of the "first-sale" doctrine and the proliferation of mom-and-pop video rental stores that followed the arrival of VHS. Studios priced tapes at or near $100 because they knew that video retailers would be buying them and then renting them out many times over. I actually conducted some research on video purchasing/renting habits at the time, and only about a quarter of our sample expressed an interest in buying movies versus renting. In that type of market, pricing the movies very high made sense since it was the only way the studios would realize sufficient income to justify allowing retailers to rent them out.
The consolidation of the rental marketplace into a few big chains like Blockbuster changed the pricing model substantially. Now the studios had a retailer they could deal with directly, so they could negotiate prices that enabled them to collect some of the downstream rental income. Not to mention that the reproduction costs for DVDs is radically lower than that for VHS tapes. Tape duplicators in the mid-80's bought dozens of consumer-quality VCRs and simply dubbed one master onto a hundred slave machines. This method of duplication was very costly since it all happened in real time. Later on, VCR manufacturers made high-speed duplication systems that reduced the cost of VHS tapes.
Yes, but, is your router connected directly to the FiOS with an external IP address? How often does it change? I'm less concerned about speed (my Comcast is 6 mbit up/1 mbit down) than I am about being able to use the connection for something other than normal residential purposes.
I'm a Comcast subscriber, and there are many aspects of my service I'm happy with. However FiOS is now available recently, and I'm curious whether it would benefit me to switch.
I started as a subscriber to Continental Cablevision (with Internet service), which was bought by (the old) AT&T, then bought by Comcast. Over the decade I've had pretty reliable service from all three providers.
Things I like about Comcast:
1) I get a public IP address, and it's essentially static. I use a Linux box as a firewall, and my address only ever changes if Comcast renumbers its network, something that's happened maybe twice in my Comcast period. Since I maintain a number of OpenVPN tunnels to remote hosts, having a static address makes that much easier.
2) They don't seem to notice, or care, that my firewall is also the backup MX host for my commercial email server.
3) They don't seem to care that I run torrents. At one time it was 24x7, now I tend to run them overnight.
4) Other than watching the Red Sox and The Golf Channel, most of the reason I keep their cable service is to watch the excellent collection of On-Demand free movies they offer. (Most of my viewing these days consists of DVDs and downloaded anime.) It's rare that we ever pay for an on-demand film. I've introduced my daughter to a number of excellent older films that we would never have seen otherwise except through rentals. While rentals are good, our viewing tends to be more haphazard, so being able to dial up an On-Demand feature is a substantial benefit.
My only experience with Verizon FiOS is observing what's happened with a friend who signed up for it recently. He's already had two outages; I only have outages when I forget to pay the bill. When Verizon installed his service, they also installed a firewall router which has his public IP. The rest of his machines are on a private IP network behind the firewall. Is this the only option available, or will I still be able to have my own router with a public IP? How stable is the public IP? Another acquaintance who has FiOS says you don't need their router unless you also want television service. Since I'm looking for a single provider, that sounds a bit ominous.
Competition from FiOS has led to Comcast sweetening the deal here. The other day I was speaking with a customer rep while paying my bill, and she told me that I could add phone service, and get HBO and Starz thrown in, for another $15/month (right now I pay about $115). My guess is that a similar FiOS package would cost about the same.
Being faced with choosing between Comcast and Verizon is something of a Hobson's choice for me.
Even more pertinent, why is the mail system set up to deliver executable files to users in the first place?
.exe file with patches, updates, etc. (I'm always amazed how often these people say that we're the only ones who don't accept executables by default. What kind of consultants are they?) Usually the IT manager has whitelisted permissions to receive executables; everyone else, forget it.
Every system I've ever installed for clients blocks executables at the server and puts them into quarantine. Occasionally some doofus, sadly usually some IT consultancy, wants to send an
Not too long ago one of our clients was unable to receive mail from some fellow attorneys in the IRS. Turns out that their outbound server not only doesn't have an SPF record, it didn't even have reverse DNS resolution configured! So all the mail from the attorney at the IRS was blocked by our irs.gov rule. I now have a special whitelisting rule for the subnet in which that server resides.
I was impressed by the level of incompetence displayed here. Hell, some major email services like AOL won't usually accept anything from a server without reverse-resolution configured. Here a server without reverse-DNS gets a goodly number of SpamAssassin points right off the top. Any other spammy features will usually lead to such messages being tagged as spams here.
In our case, we instituted these rules for fbi.gov and irs.gov long before SPF came into being, but yes, SPF would help alleviate this problem nowadays.
The problem is, there'll probably be too many jurisdictions involved. What happens when the controlling computer is in China, Russia, etc.
Did you read the article? The three people cited as running massive botnets all lived in the United States.
From the FBI press release cited above: "To date, the following subjects have been charged or arrested in this operation with computer fraud and abuse in violation of Title 18 USC 1030, including:
I don't disagree that the global nature of the Internet makes investigation and prosecution of such actions difficult. But there are probably enough botnet operators here in the States to keep the FBI busy for some time to come.
It wouldn't get too far in our mail system. We don't accept mail with From addresses in fbi.gov or irs.gov unless they originate on those agencies own servers. Mail coming from a server in rr.com claiming to be "From: fixyourcomputer@fbi.gov" is going to be dropped on the floor.
There have already been tons of viral messages from these two domains over the past few years. One of the big Windows worms ("Slammer," if I recall correctly) was often mailed out with an fbi.gov From address. Forging irs.gov messages is common among phishers.
people don't want to have to count or manage their usage, which is why they do things such as buying cell phone packages that offer more minutes than they really need just so they don't need to feel like they're "counting."
That, and the fact that if you go over your monthly allotment, it costs a heck of a lot more for those extra minutes than it does if you pay another $10/month for more base usage. Not to mention that, on a service like Cingular, minutes roll over. We've accrued so many minutes now that we'll never pay a per-minute usage charge on our family account ever again.
I have over a hundred movies a month on On Demand that cost nothing at all. Over the past couple of years my daughter has been exposed to a wide variety of excellent movies from directors like Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, etc., that has expanded her experience with film. It's one of our most-viewed services on Comcast (along with Red Sox baseball, of course!).
I bought the Monster-branded one of these a couple months back, and it seems to work fine with my Cowon A2. You have to be careful to keep the output of the player at a reasonable level or you'll over-modulate the tape input; for additional amplification, you turn up the radio itself. Before I bought this I read a number of reviews of media player -> car radio adapters, and they all recommended cassette adapters over FM transmitters. I never have to worry about finding an empty frequency or interference from neighboring transmitters or interfering with neighboring radios.
Plus it only cost about $25.
Once I added Livna to my repository list I haven't had any problems with my NVidia card (nor with any licensed codecs, either).
I think it's an open question as to whether it's legal even to download something like libdvdcss into the United States. The anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA reads:
"(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;"
Under a strict reading of this provision, I would argue that downloading a codec from a server outside the US constitutes "importing" that software. There's no exemption for personal use that I can see. However, I don't know of any case law yet which subjects this clause to further interpretation. You could also read this provision as forbidding only the "traffic" in these prohibited items, which would be consistent with your interpretation. Regardless, I'd guess that if Dell provided information to its US customers on how to install such items, it would quickly face a lawsuit as a contributory infringer. Such instructions might even constitute an "offering to the public" in violation of this provision as well.
It's not just the video players. Just picking one at random, the flash-based iAudio T2 supports Ogg and FLAC and sells for about $100.