Of course it is stoppable. I mean, how are these companies getting their phone numbers from which they operate? Why are companies like AT&T selling blocks of phone numbers to people for next to nothing? The phone companies are responsible for this mess and nobody is taking them to task for it.
He was creating an operating system for a microcomputer -- something running on an 8-bit processor like the Intel 8080 or Zilog Z-80. There was a memory limit of 64K, and early on that 64K was expensive. I mean, if you had the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, in today's money, you could buy a Heathkit H-8 kit, and put it together, and you might be able to afford a 116K machine. If you could also afford a diskette drive, it was probably a hard-sectored, single-sided drive and the diskettes held 90K of information. It made sense to limit file name sizes, etc, for the diskette catalogs, so that the space available for data could be maximized. I encourage you to read up on how these old disk systems worked, so that you can understand why someone might limit the size of file names.
Furthermore, the "Mother Of All Demos" was NOT done on a little microcomputer. It was done on an SDS 940 which was a 24-bit machine having 64K of ram and 96MB of storage. The research for that was completed by a large team financed by DARPA and NASA. Kildall had nothing like these resources to work with either in terms of hardware or in terms of financial support. He was creating an inexpensive operating system to run on inexpensive, stand-alone systems.
While I agree he was somewhat myopic, it was only to the extent that he could not see how his product might be expanded. I don't think he deserves to be called "stupid" by any means.
I liked Gary Kildall. He was a pioneer in the business-oriented microcomputer world. The first computer I owned was a Heathkit H-89 and it ran CP/M. It was an operating system geared more towards business, with a number of compilers, and applications like SuperCalc and VisiCalc available for it. In the late 70's to mid 80's it dominated the business microcomputer market and was very nearly a universal operating system among those kinds of machines.
Given the popularity of CP/M and the growing microcomputer market, it is understandable that Kildall would feel confident in how things were going. However, I wonder if he was not a little myopic. I think that IBM could see right away that their customers would not want to use their PCs as merely stand-alone tools, but as a device that would talk to the mainframe and mini computers. It probably did not matter much to IBM where the PC OS came from, so long as it could do the job. Since they had a veritable monopoly in business class machines, they could plop down whatever they wanted on customers' desks and their customers would buy it as long as it worked.
Was Gary screwed by Microsoft? Yes, to some extent, I think so. However, he had ample opportunity to recognize the potential of working with IBM and to capitalize on it. He made a poor choice. I would like to read his memoirs to get an idea if he was as myopic as I suspect him to have been.
The thing I personally dislike about two-factor authentication is that I have to give a bunch of people I don't even know, my phone number. However, it would be tempting to get a cheap feature phone just for this capability.
Ha! 17:1 is truly wise. I not only love 21:19, I lived it, for 19 years.:-)
Remembering lots of passwords is not possible for most people.
Keeping all the passwords the same is not smart.
Using a password vault seems logical, except that any such vault is a huge target for hackers. Certainly any vault in the cloud is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Two-factor authentication is probably the best solution -- unless your phone is at the bottom of the river, or your employer puts you in a spot where phone service is non-existent, like the basement. Of course, for those of you who are doing everything via phone, these two arguments don't apply.
No method is perfect. In the end, each of us are left to work things out as best we can.
Netflix doesn't just show up on your tv, laptop or phone. You must also find some way to factor in the cost of internet access on top of the Netflix cost. That is, if you want to do a better job of comparing apples to apples.
I'm sure this works if you have it packed and boxed and labeled correctly, etc. I don't have a box to ship it in (the original is gone), I don't have any packing tape, and no way to securely seal the lable to the package. Will it really work if I just leave the knife on the porch with the piece of paper with the return label taped to it and a note that says, "Hey UPS guy, take care of this"?
I can totally believe that. That's a product ripe for exploiting. It's expensive, inconvenient to buy, and lot's of people need them.
BTW, not that I'm trying to sell a particular product, but since you mentioned razor blades, I've been using the Dollar Shave Club stuff for four years now and I am totally happy with them. I get five of the higher quality blades for $6 per month. Of course, they just got bought out by Unilever, so that might be the beginning of the end for DSC, but so far their products and service have been great.
While I am sure that it probably happens that companies do extra runs as you describe, I think it's erroneous to assume that "there is no company that is designing knockoff electric knives". China is famous for selling all kinds of knockoffs of all types -- batteries, chargers, cell phones, automobile parts, and so on. I cannot accept the simple argument that "B&D stuff is crap." I have a couple of friends and family members who have B&D electric knives and they function just fine. I also have a drill, orbital sander, and jigsaw made by B&D that are perfectly adequate. If I were a contractor, they probably would not be up to snuff, but as an occasional handyman they do just fine. No one expects Black and Decker to be the Lexus of the tool world, but they are not the Yugo of the tool world either. For that, you need to go to Harbor Freight.
Nope. Not so in my case. I just checked the instructions I received to make sure. There is nothing that says I can have UPS come pick up the package. In fact, the only place UPS is mentioned in the instructions is where it says, "We recommend returns be made via UPS insured freight or fedex insured only and you keep the tracking number so that you would make sure that we would receive the item."
I was in the Navy for eleven years. I was an AT in a light attack squadron, working on A-7's and F/A-18's, and served on an aircraft carrier. I am well aware how a fucking military base operates, smartass. No, 600K indifvidual installs is NOT easy to believe, not even counting civilians and contractors. I sincerely doubt every squid, civilian, and contractor is walking around with an install of this software. This is not Pokemon Go. This is 3D imaging software from a company no one has ever heard of. A lot of other people have offered better explanations for how that many installs could have occurred, and some of these seem plausible. Your explanation, however, is ridiculous.
When you think of fake products, knock-offs and the like, you think primarily of fashion goods, like the Birkenstock sandals in the article. So, when I bought a Black and Decker electric knife recently, I never dreamed there would be a problem. The knife is a piece of crap. It was haphazardly packaged, and will not cut through anything. True to form, when I complained about it, they offered to take it back if I would return it. But then I thought, "What I bought was an errand." Instead of getting a legitimate product, conveniently delivered to my front door, I got a crappy product, and now I have to print out the return strip, repackage it, and then go down to the UPS store and stand in line to have it shipped off. They say they'll pay for the shipping and refund my money, but isn't my time and effort worth something? Why should I have to waste an hour dealing with something that is obviously a fake product? If they can deliver me a glob of shit, they can goddam well come around and pick it back up. Amazon needs to scrutinize their sellers better.
600,000 computers? How big do they think the U.S. Navy is anyway? That's almost two computers for every active duty service member. That's over 2,000 computers per ship. I'm not saying the Navy didn't steal their software, I have no clue about that. I'm just saying that 600,000 installs is A LOT for such an obscure piece of software.
Yes, that was the article. Thank you. And yes, science as a tool is not broken, but as an institution, yes. That is to say, how we go about doing science, where we are doing it in such a way that we must always have positive results, and that there must be some sort of "return on investment", this is broken. There is a business mentality that is driving science. It's driving almost every endeavor, actually, and it's causing us to stagnate.
Indeed. I don't know where I was reading it this week (it may have been here on/.) there was an interesting article about how science is basically "broken". The gist is that there is a lot of BS floating around as science that is really nothing of the sort. Just as truth has devolved into "truthiness", science has devolved into "scienciness". That is not to say that there are not good scientists out there doing good work, but a lot of them have to come up with plausible, "sciencey" bullshit in order to justify their existence and get funding.
This is so disappointing for an American. We Americans have always been a little insecure about our accents, our education level, etc, and we look at the British, with their smart-sounding accents, and their large vocabularies, and we just intrinsically KNOW that they are smarter than us. And then something like this happens that shatters our illusions, and tells us that British people can be just as dumb as anyone else.
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Of course it is stoppable. I mean, how are these companies getting their phone numbers from which they operate? Why are companies like AT&T selling blocks of phone numbers to people for next to nothing? The phone companies are responsible for this mess and nobody is taking them to task for it.
He was creating an operating system for a microcomputer -- something running on an 8-bit processor like the Intel 8080 or Zilog Z-80. There was a memory limit of 64K, and early on that 64K was expensive. I mean, if you had the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, in today's money, you could buy a Heathkit H-8 kit, and put it together, and you might be able to afford a 116K machine. If you could also afford a diskette drive, it was probably a hard-sectored, single-sided drive and the diskettes held 90K of information. It made sense to limit file name sizes, etc, for the diskette catalogs, so that the space available for data could be maximized. I encourage you to read up on how these old disk systems worked, so that you can understand why someone might limit the size of file names.
Furthermore, the "Mother Of All Demos" was NOT done on a little microcomputer. It was done on an SDS 940 which was a 24-bit machine having 64K of ram and 96MB of storage. The research for that was completed by a large team financed by DARPA and NASA. Kildall had nothing like these resources to work with either in terms of hardware or in terms of financial support. He was creating an inexpensive operating system to run on inexpensive, stand-alone systems.
While I agree he was somewhat myopic, it was only to the extent that he could not see how his product might be expanded. I don't think he deserves to be called "stupid" by any means.
I liked Gary Kildall. He was a pioneer in the business-oriented microcomputer world. The first computer I owned was a Heathkit H-89 and it ran CP/M. It was an operating system geared more towards business, with a number of compilers, and applications like SuperCalc and VisiCalc available for it. In the late 70's to mid 80's it dominated the business microcomputer market and was very nearly a universal operating system among those kinds of machines.
Given the popularity of CP/M and the growing microcomputer market, it is understandable that Kildall would feel confident in how things were going. However, I wonder if he was not a little myopic. I think that IBM could see right away that their customers would not want to use their PCs as merely stand-alone tools, but as a device that would talk to the mainframe and mini computers. It probably did not matter much to IBM where the PC OS came from, so long as it could do the job. Since they had a veritable monopoly in business class machines, they could plop down whatever they wanted on customers' desks and their customers would buy it as long as it worked.
Was Gary screwed by Microsoft? Yes, to some extent, I think so. However, he had ample opportunity to recognize the potential of working with IBM and to capitalize on it. He made a poor choice. I would like to read his memoirs to get an idea if he was as myopic as I suspect him to have been.
I'm sure all the booze, broads, and general partying that surrounded these astronaut heroes for years had nothing to do with it.
Thousands of crimes? THOUSANDS? What crimes are these that you can only solve if you are able to look at people's phones?
That was informative. Thank you.
Yes, getting a cheap feature phone just for this purpose is very tempting. That's a good idea.
The thing I personally dislike about two-factor authentication is that I have to give a bunch of people I don't even know, my phone number. However, it would be tempting to get a cheap feature phone just for this capability.
Ha! 17:1 is truly wise. I not only love 21:19, I lived it, for 19 years. :-)
Remembering lots of passwords is not possible for most people.
Keeping all the passwords the same is not smart.
Using a password vault seems logical, except that any such vault is a huge target for hackers. Certainly any vault in the cloud is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Two-factor authentication is probably the best solution -- unless your phone is at the bottom of the river, or your employer puts you in a spot where phone service is non-existent, like the basement. Of course, for those of you who are doing everything via phone, these two arguments don't apply.
No method is perfect. In the end, each of us are left to work things out as best we can.
Netflix doesn't just show up on your tv, laptop or phone. You must also find some way to factor in the cost of internet access on top of the Netflix cost. That is, if you want to do a better job of comparing apples to apples.
Good source? My Vizio is without a doubt the worst tv I have ever owned.
That was exactly my thought.
Best humorous/cynical description.
I'm sure this works if you have it packed and boxed and labeled correctly, etc. I don't have a box to ship it in (the original is gone), I don't have any packing tape, and no way to securely seal the lable to the package. Will it really work if I just leave the knife on the porch with the piece of paper with the return label taped to it and a note that says, "Hey UPS guy, take care of this"?
I can totally believe that. That's a product ripe for exploiting. It's expensive, inconvenient to buy, and lot's of people need them.
BTW, not that I'm trying to sell a particular product, but since you mentioned razor blades, I've been using the Dollar Shave Club stuff for four years now and I am totally happy with them. I get five of the higher quality blades for $6 per month. Of course, they just got bought out by Unilever, so that might be the beginning of the end for DSC, but so far their products and service have been great.
While I am sure that it probably happens that companies do extra runs as you describe, I think it's erroneous to assume that "there is no company that is designing knockoff electric knives". China is famous for selling all kinds of knockoffs of all types -- batteries, chargers, cell phones, automobile parts, and so on. I cannot accept the simple argument that "B&D stuff is crap." I have a couple of friends and family members who have B&D electric knives and they function just fine. I also have a drill, orbital sander, and jigsaw made by B&D that are perfectly adequate. If I were a contractor, they probably would not be up to snuff, but as an occasional handyman they do just fine. No one expects Black and Decker to be the Lexus of the tool world, but they are not the Yugo of the tool world either. For that, you need to go to Harbor Freight.
Nope. Not so in my case. I just checked the instructions I received to make sure. There is nothing that says I can have UPS come pick up the package. In fact, the only place UPS is mentioned in the instructions is where it says, "We recommend returns be made via UPS insured freight or fedex insured only and you keep the tracking number so that you would make sure that we would receive the item."
This is a very thorough, and the best explanation I've read so far. Thank you. I think this is what's really going on.
I was in the Navy for eleven years. I was an AT in a light attack squadron, working on A-7's and F/A-18's, and served on an aircraft carrier. I am well aware how a fucking military base operates, smartass. No, 600K indifvidual installs is NOT easy to believe, not even counting civilians and contractors. I sincerely doubt every squid, civilian, and contractor is walking around with an install of this software. This is not Pokemon Go. This is 3D imaging software from a company no one has ever heard of. A lot of other people have offered better explanations for how that many installs could have occurred, and some of these seem plausible. Your explanation, however, is ridiculous.
When you think of fake products, knock-offs and the like, you think primarily of fashion goods, like the Birkenstock sandals in the article. So, when I bought a Black and Decker electric knife recently, I never dreamed there would be a problem. The knife is a piece of crap. It was haphazardly packaged, and will not cut through anything. True to form, when I complained about it, they offered to take it back if I would return it. But then I thought, "What I bought was an errand." Instead of getting a legitimate product, conveniently delivered to my front door, I got a crappy product, and now I have to print out the return strip, repackage it, and then go down to the UPS store and stand in line to have it shipped off. They say they'll pay for the shipping and refund my money, but isn't my time and effort worth something? Why should I have to waste an hour dealing with something that is obviously a fake product? If they can deliver me a glob of shit, they can goddam well come around and pick it back up. Amazon needs to scrutinize their sellers better.
600,000 computers? How big do they think the U.S. Navy is anyway? That's almost two computers for every active duty service member. That's over 2,000 computers per ship. I'm not saying the Navy didn't steal their software, I have no clue about that. I'm just saying that 600,000 installs is A LOT for such an obscure piece of software.
Yes, that was the article. Thank you. And yes, science as a tool is not broken, but as an institution, yes. That is to say, how we go about doing science, where we are doing it in such a way that we must always have positive results, and that there must be some sort of "return on investment", this is broken. There is a business mentality that is driving science. It's driving almost every endeavor, actually, and it's causing us to stagnate.
Indeed. I don't know where I was reading it this week (it may have been here on /.) there was an interesting article about how science is basically "broken". The gist is that there is a lot of BS floating around as science that is really nothing of the sort. Just as truth has devolved into "truthiness", science has devolved into "scienciness". That is not to say that there are not good scientists out there doing good work, but a lot of them have to come up with plausible, "sciencey" bullshit in order to justify their existence and get funding.
No, I don't know how to fix it.
Ha! I had no idea. I don't watch John Oliver. That's funny. :-)
This is so disappointing for an American. We Americans have always been a little insecure about our accents, our education level, etc, and we look at the British, with their smart-sounding accents, and their large vocabularies, and we just intrinsically KNOW that they are smarter than us. And then something like this happens that shatters our illusions, and tells us that British people can be just as dumb as anyone else.