From what I could find, it's mostly a localized Debian with a few tweaks for ease-of-use and some educational apps and such. Review linked by distrowatch.
What you are saying is that, unles I put a tarp up around my garden, everyone has a right to use it.
No, actually we're saying that if your garden pelts us with carrots and peas as we walk past on the public street, we're at liberty to catch them and consume them. Only if you place anti-vegetable-flight netting around your garden (or stop planting vegetables that lend themselves to comparison to an unsecured WAP) does it become incumbent upon us to behave as good citizens.
Hey! Analogies are fun! Somebody compare Internet privacy law to hunting and fishing licenses!
I've actually had someone call me for tech support who had used the disk that came with a newer Powerbook to upgrade one about two or three revisions back. It seems that it doesn't check to see if you're using the wrong video card for the included drivers. I didn't have much luck explaining that he wasn't entitled to do that whenever he wanted, but when I rattled off the components that were different between the two machines ("Yes, sir, I know they're both 17" Powerbooks but...") and explained that he was lucky he could just wipe it off and start over ("You see sir, there's something called firmware, which we often bundle with system software...") he got the hint.
And then there were the people who asked me point blank what was to stop them from using the single-user copy of the Tiger OS disc to install it on every Mac they had instead of springing for the 50% more for the five-user license. "Um, the law?"
I would call it a scheme that inherently involves an amount of scamming. There was a rebate that I got refused because they say I didn't include everything I was supposed to. I was a Medical Laboratory Technician at the time and keeping up with the flow of paperwork when they puncture your spine to test your CSF, I promise you I didn't overlook anything simple.
Why would a company go through the hassle of rebates? They pay postage on a check when you get your money instead of the clerk hitting a key on the register. They pay people to open envelopes, check dates, figure out whether enclosed receipts are originals or photocopies, put names and addresses in a database (which means they're paying a database administrator), they pay to print checks, they're spending money all over the place. They do all that and they still come out ahead of where they would be if you just paid at the register what they told you it was going to cost.
and it already gives a cheap (or is it still free?) option to consumers
I believe that it offers the full retail package at a discount that comes out to really close to the OEM price. Probably slightly more than you could find it for in some places.
So, wait a second. We've got some guy on some site that has pictures of a DVD in a drive, and this is somehow proof that Sony faked the whole thing? Aren't there just a few holes here?
Come on, to prove he was on the level, he enlarged the photos!What more do you want?
But seriously, I could go either way on this one. You raise good points, but let me play devil's advocate point by point:
1) The whole idea was that working tech or not, there are so few Blu-ray discs to be had that it's hard to get one, even for an official demo.
2) Even the biggest corporations come down to a couple of guys low on the totem pole sooner or later. When the job is "Take this cake and a couple laptops to a night club" there's no telling who they're going to send. A couple of guys with a deadline, an iso file, and blank media laying around isn't that big of a stretch.
3) Again, it's a couple of guys. Maybe a couple of guys who heard Verbatim's don't make as many coasters.
4) I doubt they'd want to do that. Can you really tell the difference on a notebook screen? And if both machines had the discs they were officially supposed to, I'd expect a standard commercial DVD. A DVD+R of a commercial movie is generally not legal.
5) Okay, you got me. I might make a comparison to "How do you know it's not a government conspiracy" but anti-Sony sentiments are too widespread and getting faked photos onto a blog "expose" are too in vogue not to give that a pass.
6) Like who? The mainstream press? They barely covered the rootkit, and that allowed undetectable arbitrary code on your home PC. Besides, the CIA director just left on bad terms, Bush is proposing to throw out the tradition of civilian leadership in replacing him, the NSA knows who calls your house (thanks in part to the new proposed CIA director), we're militarizing the Mexican border but cutting existing illegal aliens a yet-to-be determined amount of slack, and nobody knows how close Iran is to getting the bomb, and Britney Spears is pregnant again. It's not an easy time to break into the news cycle when there are no celebrities involved.
Why would one bother using Linux if OS X offers all the features
I've got a Linux box (PII - 300Mhz) on my LAN that handles all the BitTorrent traffic so that my main machine never has to have any ports open, and it has an FTP server that runs exactly when I want it to. I don't think installing on a $20 thrift store PC and doing anything useful is an OS X feature. The retail OS CD's are dual-layer DVD's! And that doesn't include iLife! And I haven't run across an ad for web hosting that offered an OS X server. Sometimes the right tool for the right job means something else, even if what you've got going is really good.
Ah, good. The dissenting April Fool's curmudgeon. Now that someone's broken the irritating, predictable, off-topic, humor-derailing, cliche seal, I can let loose.
In Soviet Russia, your incessant April Fool's Post Overlords welcome you!
I don't get it with you April Fool's story zealots. I've been sitting here looking at Commander Taco's cats for twenty minutes trying to get three chuckles...
Great! Now all I need is a Wi-Fi antenna that gets me on a network at 200 miles. (unless they're not still operating it in New York, in which case I need about 3,000)
Whats to stop them connecting the two, and giving everyone free wireless via their OWN google web.
Yes, actually I do. I trusted them implicitly before. Maybe a year isn't quite far enough to go back but two, three, sure. They were a neutral, common-carrier kind of utility that didn't care what you did or what you found. Sure, they had ads that would display alongside what you actually searched for but it wasn't hard to buy an innocuous explanation when that was as far as it went. When people posted a way to steal credit cards using the service, they started filtering the results, but it was the exception that proved the rule.
But then there was Gmail. Yahoo! Mail would display completely random ads in their email to avoid even the appearance of intrusion, but Gmail has links to get-rich-quick schemes while I'm trying to write to the guy at the staffing agency who reviewed my resume. Google Desktop search was less of a security threat than the paranoid imagination of the technically illiterate might imagine, but less secure than billed. They went to China, and we're supposed to believe they said "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it" when it came to actively participating in censorship and repression - as if they didn't know how that was going to play out. And then there's cowtowing to the Church of Scientology of all people when they get a DMCA complaint.
I more or less trust Google. I still use them every day, and probably will unless I see some compelling reason to trust them any less than anybody else. I used to able to trust Google more because I was able to talk about them in absolutes. I don't see all the air-clearing in the world putting the genie back in that bottle.
I think you are missing the really obvious point here -
I think you're stopping short of the non-obvious point. (Not a criticism.:D ) The Mac OS has exploits that don't require SSH access. Scriptable, remote exploits. http://www.sans.org/top20/#u2 Apple's reasonable level of default security, and reasonably secure and stable code base is starting to sound more and more like a Maginot line. When arbitrary code is executed on your machine, you don't stand back and say, "Well, there were very few ways they could have done that."
It took them a year to do a million websites. They're taking the software downloads the sites offer and scanning them. With the shell game of staying ahead of the malware definitions, the period of time in which a site's evaluation is out of date, etc. you're going to have some obsolete data. Not that that in and of itself is vastly different from any other security measure, but really try to put yourself in j6p's shoes:
You go to a site. Ten minutes ago, the site you were on was issued a green checkmark, five minutes ago the bad guys running the site swapped out the good files for the bad, and you get an Active X popup (I said you're j6p!!). You can't trust the green checkmark. You go to a site that has a message board where some a-hole posted a link to malware, triggering a red X. They've caught it, banned him, pulled the link, and gotten the green checkmark back. But you saw the red X; and the person who's going to rip you a new one if he has to spend his weekend de-fouling your PC again told you that the red X should be a skull and crossbones and to stay the hell away from any site where you ever saw one. Now you don't know what to make of the red X.
What about a site that hasn't been scanned yet? Or whose updates have been detected but not audited? A question mark? Nothing? How long until it's just another thing the average user doesn't pay attention to? You can't have an up-to-the-millisecond read on the entire web, and you don't have any margin of error where your security mechanism is the end user knowing what to think.
As opposed to the numerous other species you've known that make weighty moral decisions as they ponder their place in the world? Animals kept by humans experience a huge range of living conditions from the luxurious to the truly dreadful. Animals that people use for military purposes throughout histor have been by and large kept very, very well for a time than thrown into chaotic situations where they face dismemberment and death. The big change from living in the wild is the first part of that equation, not the second. I'll grant you that taking animals and vivisecting them because you need to look busy when you're grant's up for renewal is sick and wrong, but don't talk about how humans compare to animals as if turning the world over to the hyenas would bring about a Utopia.
They still charge per installation on the desktop and CPU on the server not by the core. And there weren't dual core desktop machines when XP came out, there's no reason they won't be behind the curve by more than their usual margin when it comes to quad-core aware Vista versions. But hey, it's not like I've never said anything without thinking, I'd be posting at 1;)
So, the natural response is therefore to double the number of cores, which will require additional licensing for Windows, and won't even be used by any (end-user) programs.
So how is it that WinXP users buy a single-license copy, install it on a dual-core machine and find that the Task Manager includes the ability to limit a process to one core or the other? And how is it that people are actually using it to troubleshoot an end-user app?
Considering how protective they are of their IP and their EULAs, it suprises the hell out of me they would violate other company's EULAs (adware companies) among other things.
Actually, it's been discused for a while that the stock Microsoft places in things like EULA's compromises the integrity of their anti-spyware app. (It was also suggested that their interest in eventually merging with everybody wasn't so helpful either.)
What's the difference between Google and Microsoft censorship in China and the sweatshops established by almost every major industrial company in the U.S.?
In any rational, objective sense Google and Microsoft come out ahead. (Though by how much is a worthy subject for debate.) The problem is that giving MFN status was supposed to bring capitalism to China, and that capitalism is supposed to be the heart and soul of Democracy and a democratizing force unto itself. If factory work didn't do it, then getting onto The Information Superhighway (you and I know what a hackneyed cliche that is, but we're talking politics) was definitely supposed to. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are being made the scapegoats for reality not bearing out the rationalizations thrown out to justify US foreign policy.
Publicly traded corporations have one duty -- to make profit.
Too true.
US foreign policy is written by people who won't begin to admit what is so apparent to you and I. The modern corporation is exactly the kind of amoral wealth-accumulating machine driven by pure naked greed that you describe. Any appearance to the contrary is the result of a combination of operating in a society like the US or Western Europe where they are forced to coexist with Democratic institutions, PR exercises needed to placate a populous with higher expectations, and companies like Google where well-meaning founders stick to the high road as long as they can. Capitalism's proponents like to cite philosophers like Adam Smith and Max Weber and say that capitalism has this moral component built in, and that we just need to let it run loose all over the world.
The whole justification for treating China like our best friend as we impose sanctions on other nations for similar behavior (and claim that that's how you get them to change in both cases) is the supposed "democratizing influence" of capitalism. The accomplishments of labor unions, progressive political activists, et al., even if you think they go too far, even if you think they go much too far, are the social forces responsible for getting pre-teens out of factories and coal mines in the US where they were getting fingers and limbs amputated or even dying. Decades later, capitalism looks like such a benevolent force that its proponents say to send in the corporations to bring prosperity and equality to all. If they're going to do anything of the kind, maximizing shareholder value can't be the only item on the agenda.
Members of the Michigan National Guard will be at the Super Bowl on Sunday to deploy 'sensor fusion', a real-time, IP-based wireless technology that combines readings from portable and fixed devices that can potentially detect terrorist threats.
Those bastards! Burning my tax money left and right to turn my country into a police state with the military watching my every move in the name of "protecting me"...
The software uses open standards and is open-source,
Hurray! At last our government shows good judgement in throwing it's resources behind FOSS... [Snap!] Ow!!! Whiplash!
Slashdot Mirror
From what I could find, it's mostly a localized Debian with a few tweaks for ease-of-use and some educational apps and such. Review linked by distrowatch.
Something like this?
What you are saying is that, unles I put a tarp up around my garden, everyone has a right to use it.
No, actually we're saying that if your garden pelts us with carrots and peas as we walk past on the public street, we're at liberty to catch them and consume them. Only if you place anti-vegetable-flight netting around your garden (or stop planting vegetables that lend themselves to comparison to an unsecured WAP) does it become incumbent upon us to behave as good citizens.
Hey! Analogies are fun! Somebody compare Internet privacy law to hunting and fishing licenses!
I've actually had someone call me for tech support who had used the disk that came with a newer Powerbook to upgrade one about two or three revisions back. It seems that it doesn't check to see if you're using the wrong video card for the included drivers. I didn't have much luck explaining that he wasn't entitled to do that whenever he wanted, but when I rattled off the components that were different between the two machines ("Yes, sir, I know they're both 17" Powerbooks but...") and explained that he was lucky he could just wipe it off and start over ("You see sir, there's something called firmware, which we often bundle with system software...") he got the hint.
And then there were the people who asked me point blank what was to stop them from using the single-user copy of the Tiger OS disc to install it on every Mac they had instead of springing for the 50% more for the five-user license. "Um, the law?"
I would call it a scheme that inherently involves an amount of scamming. There was a rebate that I got refused because they say I didn't include everything I was supposed to. I was a Medical Laboratory Technician at the time and keeping up with the flow of paperwork when they puncture your spine to test your CSF, I promise you I didn't overlook anything simple.
Why would a company go through the hassle of rebates? They pay postage on a check when you get your money instead of the clerk hitting a key on the register. They pay people to open envelopes, check dates, figure out whether enclosed receipts are originals or photocopies, put names and addresses in a database (which means they're paying a database administrator), they pay to print checks, they're spending money all over the place. They do all that and they still come out ahead of where they would be if you just paid at the register what they told you it was going to cost.
Maybe not exactly a scam, but not exactly my idea of an honest business practice. Especially when it really is a scam.
and it already gives a cheap (or is it still free?) option to consumers
I believe that it offers the full retail package at a discount that comes out to really close to the OEM price. Probably slightly more than you could find it for in some places.
You think it's non-sensical this way? On my first reading I thought it said "Dick Cheney's new Linux Box".
That was when the government was run by people who could tell the difference. You know, before the "CEO President".
So, wait a second. We've got some guy on some site that has pictures of a DVD in a drive, and this is somehow proof that Sony faked the whole thing? Aren't there just a few holes here?
Come on, to prove he was on the level, he enlarged the photos!What more do you want?
But seriously, I could go either way on this one. You raise good points, but let me play devil's advocate point by point:
1) The whole idea was that working tech or not, there are so few Blu-ray discs to be had that it's hard to get one, even for an official demo.
2) Even the biggest corporations come down to a couple of guys low on the totem pole sooner or later. When the job is "Take this cake and a couple laptops to a night club" there's no telling who they're going to send. A couple of guys with a deadline, an iso file, and blank media laying around isn't that big of a stretch.
3) Again, it's a couple of guys. Maybe a couple of guys who heard Verbatim's don't make as many coasters.
4) I doubt they'd want to do that. Can you really tell the difference on a notebook screen? And if both machines had the discs they were officially supposed to, I'd expect a standard commercial DVD. A DVD+R of a commercial movie is generally not legal.
5) Okay, you got me. I might make a comparison to "How do you know it's not a government conspiracy" but anti-Sony sentiments are too widespread and getting faked photos onto a blog "expose" are too in vogue not to give that a pass.
6) Like who? The mainstream press? They barely covered the rootkit, and that allowed undetectable arbitrary code on your home PC. Besides, the CIA director just left on bad terms, Bush is proposing to throw out the tradition of civilian leadership in replacing him, the NSA knows who calls your house (thanks in part to the new proposed CIA director), we're militarizing the Mexican border but cutting existing illegal aliens a yet-to-be determined amount of slack, and nobody knows how close Iran is to getting the bomb, and Britney Spears is pregnant again. It's not an easy time to break into the news cycle when there are no celebrities involved.
Why would one bother using Linux if OS X offers all the features
I've got a Linux box (PII - 300Mhz) on my LAN that handles all the BitTorrent traffic so that my main machine never has to have any ports open, and it has an FTP server that runs exactly when I want it to. I don't think installing on a $20 thrift store PC and doing anything useful is an OS X feature. The retail OS CD's are dual-layer DVD's! And that doesn't include iLife! And I haven't run across an ad for web hosting that offered an OS X server. Sometimes the right tool for the right job means something else, even if what you've got going is really good.
In Soviet Russia, your incessant April Fool's Post Overlords welcome you!
I don't get it with you April Fool's story zealots. I've been sitting here looking at Commander Taco's cats for twenty minutes trying to get three chuckles...
Great! Now all I need is a Wi-Fi antenna that gets me on a network at 200 miles. (unless they're not still operating it in New York, in which case I need about 3,000)
Whats to stop them connecting the two, and giving everyone free wireless via their OWN google web.
That would be the "everyone" part.
Yes, actually I do. I trusted them implicitly before. Maybe a year isn't quite far enough to go back but two, three, sure. They were a neutral, common-carrier kind of utility that didn't care what you did or what you found. Sure, they had ads that would display alongside what you actually searched for but it wasn't hard to buy an innocuous explanation when that was as far as it went. When people posted a way to steal credit cards using the service, they started filtering the results, but it was the exception that proved the rule.
But then there was Gmail. Yahoo! Mail would display completely random ads in their email to avoid even the appearance of intrusion, but Gmail has links to get-rich-quick schemes while I'm trying to write to the guy at the staffing agency who reviewed my resume. Google Desktop search was less of a security threat than the paranoid imagination of the technically illiterate might imagine, but less secure than billed. They went to China, and we're supposed to believe they said "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it" when it came to actively participating in censorship and repression - as if they didn't know how that was going to play out. And then there's cowtowing to the Church of Scientology of all people when they get a DMCA complaint.
I more or less trust Google. I still use them every day, and probably will unless I see some compelling reason to trust them any less than anybody else. I used to able to trust Google more because I was able to talk about them in absolutes. I don't see all the air-clearing in the world putting the genie back in that bottle.
last i checked, physics hasn't changed too much
Maybe you need to check more often then every 350 years. Fortunately, the Journal of Applied Physics has some RSS feeds.
I think you are missing the really obvious point here -
:D ) The Mac OS has exploits that don't require SSH access. Scriptable, remote exploits. http://www.sans.org/top20/#u2 Apple's reasonable level of default security, and reasonably secure and stable code base is starting to sound more and more like a Maginot line. When arbitrary code is executed on your machine, you don't stand back and say, "Well, there were very few ways they could have done that."
I think you're stopping short of the non-obvious point. (Not a criticism.
It took them a year to do a million websites. They're taking the software downloads the sites offer and scanning them. With the shell game of staying ahead of the malware definitions, the period of time in which a site's evaluation is out of date, etc. you're going to have some obsolete data. Not that that in and of itself is vastly different from any other security measure, but really try to put yourself in j6p's shoes:
You go to a site. Ten minutes ago, the site you were on was issued a green checkmark, five minutes ago the bad guys running the site swapped out the good files for the bad, and you get an Active X popup (I said you're j6p!!). You can't trust the green checkmark. You go to a site that has a message board where some a-hole posted a link to malware, triggering a red X. They've caught it, banned him, pulled the link, and gotten the green checkmark back. But you saw the red X; and the person who's going to rip you a new one if he has to spend his weekend de-fouling your PC again told you that the red X should be a skull and crossbones and to stay the hell away from any site where you ever saw one. Now you don't know what to make of the red X.
What about a site that hasn't been scanned yet? Or whose updates have been detected but not audited? A question mark? Nothing? How long until it's just another thing the average user doesn't pay attention to? You can't have an up-to-the-millisecond read on the entire web, and you don't have any margin of error where your security mechanism is the end user knowing what to think.
Ah, man:
As opposed to the numerous other species you've known that make weighty moral decisions as they ponder their place in the world? Animals kept by humans experience a huge range of living conditions from the luxurious to the truly dreadful. Animals that people use for military purposes throughout histor have been by and large kept very, very well for a time than thrown into chaotic situations where they face dismemberment and death. The big change from living in the wild is the first part of that equation, not the second.
I'll grant you that taking animals and vivisecting them because you need to look busy when you're grant's up for renewal is sick and wrong, but don't talk about how humans compare to animals as if turning the world over to the hyenas would bring about a Utopia.
They still charge per installation on the desktop and CPU on the server not by the core. And there weren't dual core desktop machines when XP came out, there's no reason they won't be behind the curve by more than their usual margin when it comes to quad-core aware Vista versions. But hey, it's not like I've never said anything without thinking, I'd be posting at 1 ;)
So, the natural response is therefore to double the number of cores, which will require additional licensing for Windows, and won't even be used by any (end-user) programs.
So how is it that WinXP users buy a single-license copy, install it on a dual-core machine and find that the Task Manager includes the ability to limit a process to one core or the other? And how is it that people are actually using it to troubleshoot an end-user app?
...a full uninstall of Norton may lead to you needing to reinstall other things.
Indeed.
Considering how protective they are of their IP and their EULAs, it suprises the hell out of me they would violate other company's EULAs (adware companies) among other things.
Actually, it's been discused for a while that the stock Microsoft places in things like EULA's compromises the integrity of their anti-spyware app. (It was also suggested that their interest in eventually merging with everybody wasn't so helpful either.)
What's the difference between Google and Microsoft censorship in China and the sweatshops established by almost every major industrial company in the U.S.?
In any rational, objective sense Google and Microsoft come out ahead. (Though by how much is a worthy subject for debate.) The problem is that giving MFN status was supposed to bring capitalism to China, and that capitalism is supposed to be the heart and soul of Democracy and a democratizing force unto itself. If factory work didn't do it, then getting onto The Information Superhighway (you and I know what a hackneyed cliche that is, but we're talking politics) was definitely supposed to. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are being made the scapegoats for reality not bearing out the rationalizations thrown out to justify US foreign policy.
Publicly traded corporations have one duty -- to make profit.
Too true. US foreign policy is written by people who won't begin to admit what is so apparent to you and I. The modern corporation is exactly the kind of amoral wealth-accumulating machine driven by pure naked greed that you describe. Any appearance to the contrary is the result of a combination of operating in a society like the US or Western Europe where they are forced to coexist with Democratic institutions, PR exercises needed to placate a populous with higher expectations, and companies like Google where well-meaning founders stick to the high road as long as they can. Capitalism's proponents like to cite philosophers like Adam Smith and Max Weber and say that capitalism has this moral component built in, and that we just need to let it run loose all over the world.
The whole justification for treating China like our best friend as we impose sanctions on other nations for similar behavior (and claim that that's how you get them to change in both cases) is the supposed "democratizing influence" of capitalism. The accomplishments of labor unions, progressive political activists, et al., even if you think they go too far, even if you think they go much too far, are the social forces responsible for getting pre-teens out of factories and coal mines in the US where they were getting fingers and limbs amputated or even dying. Decades later, capitalism looks like such a benevolent force that its proponents say to send in the corporations to bring prosperity and equality to all. If they're going to do anything of the kind, maximizing shareholder value can't be the only item on the agenda.
Members of the Michigan National Guard will be at the Super Bowl on Sunday to deploy 'sensor fusion', a real-time, IP-based wireless technology that combines readings from portable and fixed devices that can potentially detect terrorist threats.
Those bastards! Burning my tax money left and right to turn my country into a police state with the military watching my every move in the name of "protecting me"...
The software uses open standards and is open-source,
Hurray! At last our government shows good judgement in throwing it's resources behind FOSS... [Snap!] Ow!!! Whiplash!
Fair 'nough.