I don't think it's as sinister a plot as the WP editors trying to get online encryption banned - it's probably just an innocent "lets prints a great human interest STORY and sell lots of papers" - as in the old saw, "Dog bites man is not news, but man bites dog is" - to publish a piece about PZ defending our rights to online privacy isn't news - he's been doing that for many years, but to paint an image of "Oh! Encryption author and advocate feels great guilt over career" - now that's an interesting STORY (albeit false as can be). In short, the WP editors should be working for the National Inquiror or writing for daytime TV. It's not a commie plot - just attract attention, boost circulation, sell advertising, facts be damned. You know the corporate mindset drill.
The stories printed in this newspaper (or any media for that matter) are for entertainment purposes ONLY, and are not to be construed as a truthful representation of reality in any way.
On second thought, a well informed public being essential for the success of a DEMOCRACY, maybe it IS a commie plot.
Actually, I would love to see some key terrorist intelligence dug up by an independant netizen who turns it into the feds and get recognition for it - just to show that 'hackers' can be part of the solution too, not just 'a problem'.
to get on the National US ID Card database bandwagon with Oracle... It'll only need to store about 300 million records with DNA, fingerprint, picture for facial recognition software, key escrow, etc...
Msft typically doesn't handle overloads gracefully - like my Outlook97 once refused to move a message to a folder with a terse message like "unable to complete task" or something. It wasn't untill I noticed there were 16,383 messages in the folder (2^14 - 1) that I'd hit an internal limit and had to clean up. It's almost like Msft is embarassed to report a limit (a simple "this folder is full" would have saved me hours) has been reached and they'd rather just ungracefully crap out and hope you'll blame someone else. The constant need of rebooting is a sympton of their code getting into weird states they don't know how to handle, and it's simpler (read: "more profitable") to just force the user to start all over.
That right. Then Linux waits untill someone incorporates GPL'd code into their closed project w/o reading the license, and when they're too far along to change it, Linux leaps out and shouts, "Ah Ha, Gotcha! All your code now belong to me! Muhahahahahaha!!"
(Unlike, say, business owners who've invested heavily in Msft infrastructure now dealing with the new licensing designed to punish those who don't voluntarily buy every upgrade that comes out whether they need it or not).
So when are the authorities going to not only FIRE people for purching Msft products, but ARREST & PROSECUTE them for not patching and keeping them worm free and in general from pissing in the public pool? That's what I'd like to see since Msft wants to both 1) publish buggy and patch later 2) market their shiny baubles to the vast computer ignorant laity.
Similarly, there's a certain division of responsibility when someone buys a car - if there are defective parts that might threaten the safety of other drivers (such as tire blowouts), it's the mfg's responsibility to send out recall notices and fix it; but it's also the owners responsbility to operate the vehicle in a safe manner. What happens in the software licensing world is the mfg assumes *NO* responsibility, even for defects that might endanger data or other people's PC's via a network (info 'superhighway').
It gets really bizzare when you consider that software and all rights remains the property
of the authors & publishers, but responsibility for it's misdeeds & FU's are the poor suckers who fell for the slick ads, don't read or understand EULA's, pirate the stuff, etc. That's like GM leasing cars with defective brakes, and holding the operator responsible for all damages that occur when they fail after pulling onto an off ramp and crashing into a child care facility.
as your ability to hire lawyers to send out nastygrams, litigate a few high profile examples and enforce it is. Even well funded firms like Msft still end up with over 1/4 violation rate, so you can imagine that licenses used by Joe Blow Software running from a dorm room will be next to meaningless.
Someday that statement will be right up there with "There might be a world market for maybe 5 or 6 computers", "640K should be enough for anyone", "Who would ever want a home computer??" and other famous d'oh's from eons ago.
I'm sure mainframe mavens were just as smug in their invulnerability, untill....
Microsoft may be the only company in the world with the skill and clout to pull it off..
...translation: We have the brand name recognition, advertising budget and best legal defense in the industry, plus we can easily foist it on consumers by leveraging our patented OSMonopoly®, whether they want it or not.
with someone the other day about how our products obey the laws of physics, but software, GEEZUS! Software obey's no laws whatsoever! Neither natural nor social.
I walk by a phone company microwave tower nearly everyday, it's right next to the street, and there's always pigeon parts laying around (decaying wings, decapitated heads, claws, etc) - Don't know what causes it, probably not being radiated by microwave energy - maybe old birds are attracted to high places to kick off. Dunno.
For our next big event, on signal, lets all simultaneously:
1) flush toilets
2) pick up a telephone handset
3) switch on a large electrical appliance
4) call for Chinese take out delivery
5) withdraw funds from the bank
6) visit the same web site
A lot of people, probably a good 33%, would rather steal a copy of Msft Office than buy an inexpensive workalike that has 95% of the features. Just like Msft turning buggy software to an upgrade incentive, they probably put up with the piracy rate to maintain a huge mindshare and user base.
An unemployed, entry level person was out looking for work and applied for a custodial position at Msft. They liked his clean background and asked him in for an interview, but when it was discovered that he didn't even have an email address they decided he wasn't the type of person to employ at a major technology firm. Later on he found a job with a grocer and thru hard work, a pleasant personality and a shrewd sense of business worked his way up to majority stockholder and a prominent figure in the grocery business. One day a client asked for his email address and our hero replied that he didn't have one. "Wow!", stammered the client. "You took this little grocery and built it into a nationwide chain - just think where you'd be today if you had email!"
They release a security 'upgrade' (Msft insists the Outlook viruses were not a 'security hole' but 'an insufficient level of security') - the Outlook patch goes too far the other way and completely blocks access to 'unsafe attachments' like *.mdb's that could possibly contain a script. I thought the Outlook patch would just make it more difficult to execute an attachment, like you would have to save it somewhere and find it to run it instead of just launching from the preview pane, but NOOOOOO, they make it so you can't access the attachment AT ALL! Then you cannot uninstall this security upgrage w/o uninstalling Office and reinstalling it.
These damage numbers are like the damages claimed in the "Hacker Crackdown" - somebody cracks into the phone company, copies one document, and gets nabbed for 'damages' to the tune of $80,000 - it later turns out that that figure included:
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367. `
4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve- page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document.
So using the same rule, you can see these adjusters running around asking, "Was this PC infected by a virus last year?", "yes", "Ok, that's one $2000 PC and one $100 Outlook License, plus one hour labor, lets see, that comes to $2220 lost productivity, NEXT!".
If you're an average joe/jane user and just wants to 'surf the web' with your new Dell and Cable modem but don't really know what you want, then sure, there are thousands of marketeers and mousekateers ready to take you by the hand and lead you to their store and tell you what to buy and how to be with the 'in' crowd and their fashion leaders.
On the other hand, if you know what you want, say, for example, a spec sheet for a 2N304 dual-gate mosfet UHF mixer transistor, a modern substitute number, and place a web order for 2 to be delivered in 3 days, then you can easily cut thru the crap, pop-ups, and freebies and find them, place your order, and get your parts, Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom.
I never did hear if they ever got that chip off the ground.
Yes - at least one company mktd shboom as a java processor, the PSC1000. (Link is from 1996).
I was just wondering if, and it's a long shot, Chuck knew about the old Republic Picture's serial: "Captain Marvel", which featured the keyword SHAZAM (for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), A....(can't remember), Zeus (something), Atlas (...) and Mercury (speed I guess)), then Firesign Theatre comes along and makes a (really obscure) film "J Men Forever" which includes clips from Captain Marvel, except they changed the magic word to SHBOOM.
First: Great to see you here. I really enjoyed a FORTH like language on my Altair 8800 (written from an old Byte book "Threaded Interpretive Languages" or TIL's) because BASIC was SLOW and assembly tedius.
Only question I have is about the choice of ShBoom for a microprocessor - any story behind that??
I sure wish I could get a uP like an NC4000, RTX2000 or PSC1000 - inexpensively.
The point isn't passionate OS flamewars, the point is that Msft claims that it won it's desktop monopoly by 'consumer choice' in the PR fluff, yet in reality it's 'trade secret' agreement with PC vendors does everything to stifle any possibility of consumers 'test driving' alternatives. I.e., what they are shouting in the courts and astroturf campaigns is, "We have a monopoly because the consumer chose the best product", but to their vendors in the backroom their lawyers are saying, "You load anything but Msft and you're history."
A good test of ethics is to ask, "What if EVERYBODY did it", not just the priviledged few. What if everybody started sending mass mailings of their political views using bogus identities to their congresscritters? Would legislators still have any idea of public sentiment and opinion anymore? If the local authorities proposed building a freeway extension thru a swamp, uh, 'wetlands', and they got bags of snail mail from concerned citizens opposed to the plan, wouldn't the govt. start thinking, "Oh, this is just another one of those fake mail campaigns from a few wackos with access to Internet databases".
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I don't think it's as sinister a plot as the WP editors trying to get online encryption banned - it's probably just an innocent "lets prints a great human interest STORY and sell lots of papers" - as in the old saw, "Dog bites man is not news, but man bites dog is" - to publish a piece about PZ defending our rights to online privacy isn't news - he's been doing that for many years, but to paint an image of "Oh! Encryption author and advocate feels great guilt over career" - now that's an interesting STORY (albeit false as can be). In short, the WP editors should be working for the National Inquiror or writing for daytime TV. It's not a commie plot - just attract attention, boost circulation, sell advertising, facts be damned. You know the corporate mindset drill.
The stories printed in this newspaper (or any media for that matter) are for entertainment purposes ONLY, and are not to be construed as a truthful representation of reality in any way.
On second thought, a well informed public being essential for the success of a DEMOCRACY, maybe it IS a commie plot.
Actually, I would love to see some key terrorist intelligence dug up by an independant netizen who turns it into the feds and get recognition for it - just to show that 'hackers' can be part of the solution too, not just 'a problem'.
to get on the National US ID Card database bandwagon with Oracle... It'll only need to store about 300 million records with DNA, fingerprint, picture for facial recognition software, key escrow, etc...
Desperate parents will probably be able to pick up one up for their whining spawn off eBay for $25,000.
Msft typically doesn't handle overloads gracefully - like my Outlook97 once refused to move a message to a folder with a terse message like "unable to complete task" or something. It wasn't untill I noticed there were 16,383 messages in the folder (2^14 - 1) that I'd hit an internal limit and had to clean up. It's almost like Msft is embarassed to report a limit (a simple "this folder is full" would have saved me hours) has been reached and they'd rather just ungracefully crap out and hope you'll blame someone else. The constant need of rebooting is a sympton of their code getting into weird states they don't know how to handle, and it's simpler (read: "more profitable") to just force the user to start all over.
That right. Then Linux waits untill someone incorporates GPL'd code into their closed project w/o reading the license, and when they're too far along to change it, Linux leaps out and shouts, "Ah Ha, Gotcha! All your code now belong to me! Muhahahahahaha!!"
(Unlike, say, business owners who've invested heavily in Msft infrastructure now dealing with the new licensing designed to punish those who don't voluntarily buy every upgrade that comes out whether they need it or not).
So when are the authorities going to not only FIRE people for purching Msft products, but ARREST & PROSECUTE them for not patching and keeping them worm free and in general from pissing in the public pool? That's what I'd like to see since Msft wants to both 1) publish buggy and patch later 2) market their shiny baubles to the vast computer ignorant laity.
Similarly, there's a certain division of responsibility when someone buys a car - if there are defective parts that might threaten the safety of other drivers (such as tire blowouts), it's the mfg's responsibility to send out recall notices and fix it; but it's also the owners responsbility to operate the vehicle in a safe manner. What happens in the software licensing world is the mfg assumes *NO* responsibility, even for defects that might endanger data or other people's PC's via a network (info 'superhighway').
It gets really bizzare when you consider that software and all rights remains the property
of the authors & publishers, but responsibility for it's misdeeds & FU's are the poor suckers who fell for the slick ads, don't read or understand EULA's, pirate the stuff, etc. That's like GM leasing cars with defective brakes, and holding the operator responsible for all damages that occur when they fail after pulling onto an off ramp and crashing into a child care facility.
as your ability to hire lawyers to send out nastygrams, litigate a few high profile examples and enforce it is. Even well funded firms like Msft still end up with over 1/4 violation rate, so you can imagine that licenses used by Joe Blow Software running from a dorm room will be next to meaningless.
Someday that statement will be right up there with "There might be a world market for maybe 5 or 6 computers", "640K should be enough for anyone", "Who would ever want a home computer??" and other famous d'oh's from eons ago.
I'm sure mainframe mavens were just as smug in their invulnerability, untill....
Microsoft may be the only company in the world with the skill and clout to pull it off..
...translation: We have the brand name recognition, advertising budget and best legal defense in the industry, plus we can easily foist it on consumers by leveraging our patented OSMonopoly®, whether they want it or not.
with someone the other day about how our products obey the laws of physics, but software, GEEZUS! Software obey's no laws whatsoever! Neither natural nor social.
they can reverse power flow and use them as big fans to keep city dwellers cool.
I walk by a phone company microwave tower nearly everyday, it's right next to the street, and there's always pigeon parts laying around (decaying wings, decapitated heads, claws, etc) - Don't know what causes it, probably not being radiated by microwave energy - maybe old birds are attracted to high places to kick off. Dunno.
Ewwwww!
For our next big event, on signal, lets all simultaneously:
1) flush toilets
2) pick up a telephone handset
3) switch on a large electrical appliance
4) call for Chinese take out delivery
5) withdraw funds from the bank
6) visit the same web site
A lot of people, probably a good 33%, would rather steal a copy of Msft Office than buy an inexpensive workalike that has 95% of the features. Just like Msft turning buggy software to an upgrade incentive, they probably put up with the piracy rate to maintain a huge mindshare and user base.
Looks like time to post this:
An unemployed, entry level person was out looking for work and applied for a custodial position at Msft. They liked his clean background and asked him in for an interview, but when it was discovered that he didn't even have an email address they decided he wasn't the type of person to employ at a major technology firm. Later on he found a job with a grocer and thru hard work, a pleasant personality and a shrewd sense of business worked his way up to majority stockholder and a prominent figure in the grocery business. One day a client asked for his email address and our hero replied that he didn't have one. "Wow!", stammered the client. "You took this little grocery and built it into a nationwide chain - just think where you'd be today if you had email!"
They release a security 'upgrade' (Msft insists the Outlook viruses were not a 'security hole' but 'an insufficient level of security') - the Outlook patch goes too far the other way and completely blocks access to 'unsafe attachments' like *.mdb's that could possibly contain a script. I thought the Outlook patch would just make it more difficult to execute an attachment, like you would have to save it somewhere and find it to run it instead of just launching from the preview pane, but NOOOOOO, they make it so you can't access the attachment AT ALL! Then you cannot uninstall this security upgrage w/o uninstalling Office and reinstalling it.
These damage numbers are like the damages claimed in the "Hacker Crackdown" - somebody cracks into the phone company, copies one document, and gets nabbed for 'damages' to the tune of $80,000 - it later turns out that that figure included:
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367. `
4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve- page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document.
So using the same rule, you can see these adjusters running around asking, "Was this PC infected by a virus last year?", "yes", "Ok, that's one $2000 PC and one $100 Outlook License, plus one hour labor, lets see, that comes to $2220 lost productivity, NEXT!".
Now CodeRed can scan IP's addys for unpatched IIS machines to infect in half the time.
If you're an average joe/jane user and just wants to 'surf the web' with your new Dell and Cable modem but don't really know what you want, then sure, there are thousands of marketeers and mousekateers ready to take you by the hand and lead you to their store and tell you what to buy and how to be with the 'in' crowd and their fashion leaders.
On the other hand, if you know what you want, say, for example, a spec sheet for a 2N304 dual-gate mosfet UHF mixer transistor, a modern substitute number, and place a web order for 2 to be delivered in 3 days, then you can easily cut thru the crap, pop-ups, and freebies and find them, place your order, and get your parts, Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom.
I never did hear if they ever got that chip off the ground.
Yes - at least one company mktd shboom as a java processor, the PSC1000. (Link is from 1996).
I was just wondering if, and it's a long shot, Chuck knew about the old Republic Picture's serial: "Captain Marvel", which featured the keyword SHAZAM (for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), A....(can't remember), Zeus (something), Atlas (...) and Mercury (speed I guess)), then Firesign Theatre comes along and makes a (really obscure) film "J Men Forever" which includes clips from Captain Marvel, except they changed the magic word to SHBOOM.
First: Great to see you here. I really enjoyed a FORTH like language on my Altair 8800 (written from an old Byte book "Threaded Interpretive Languages" or TIL's) because BASIC was SLOW and assembly tedius.
Only question I have is about the choice of ShBoom for a microprocessor - any story behind that??
I sure wish I could get a uP like an NC4000, RTX2000 or PSC1000 - inexpensively.
The point isn't passionate OS flamewars, the point is that Msft claims that it won it's desktop monopoly by 'consumer choice' in the PR fluff, yet in reality it's 'trade secret' agreement with PC vendors does everything to stifle any possibility of consumers 'test driving' alternatives. I.e., what they are shouting in the courts and astroturf campaigns is, "We have a monopoly because the consumer chose the best product", but to their vendors in the backroom their lawyers are saying, "You load anything but Msft and you're history."
Nothing is a crime - unless you're caught.
A good test of ethics is to ask, "What if EVERYBODY did it", not just the priviledged few. What if everybody started sending mass mailings of their political views using bogus identities to their congresscritters? Would legislators still have any idea of public sentiment and opinion anymore? If the local authorities proposed building a freeway extension thru a swamp, uh, 'wetlands', and they got bags of snail mail from concerned citizens opposed to the plan, wouldn't the govt. start thinking, "Oh, this is just another one of those fake mail campaigns from a few wackos with access to Internet databases".
here's a funny one...