The average consumer doesnt know how their internet connection is measured. All most people know is that entertainment is moving to ala carte/on-demand in HD. For example, the majority of people I know are Internet-illiterates but they all subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and HBONow and own several streaming devices. Most of my childrens friends have never seen traditional live tv. These people dont know or care about the bandwidth required for these services, and wouldnt know how to size a circuit if they did. ALL of the major ISPs know this because they want to be common carriers AND content providers. Consolodation and local monopolies/duoplolies make caps possible. Data caps are rent extraction plain and simple. Pure greed under the guise of curbing abuse.
Its no wonder you posted AC - you very obviously have no children, no experience with any education system as a parent, an ax to grind, and a horrible agenda.
Along time ago, all of a company's DNS belonged to the admins, and Network handled the bill - which was lumped in with the one for the Internet connection.
These days, external DNS aka "The Brand" is usually managed by either Legal or Marketing. In those organizations, the common 'dnsadmin@company.com' email is redirected to someone who neither knows nor cares what DNS is. Even internally, no one knows whos responsible for external domains. And when the bill comes, it just sits on the department secretary's desk.
This is my 3rd year crossfitting. I'm 50. My resting heart rate is 46bpm. I'm down to 8% body fat from 26%. After physicals/blood work my insurance premiums were reduced by 1/3. I recently won the St. Louis Indoor Rowing Championships. I can ride a bicycle 100 miles in 5 hours. I can run 5 miles in 40 minutes. I can lift a shit-load of weight with form, power, and speed. Yeah, Crossfit is the real deal.
I spent '82-'89 as a radioman on an SSN. Hight of the Cold War stuff. The training was one thing. Getting qualified at sea and surviving was another.
When I got out I went straight to work as an RF tech for a major wireless carrier. The skills I learned (technical and otherwise) marketed well, but it took a long time to readjust to civilian life. Sometimes I still feel that long steel tube.
Let patients pay for their own medical care out of their pocket. If they can't afford it, the hospitals can work with the families to work off the medical bill, or some other arrangements could be made. This is how it used to be done.
No wonder people called you names. Which pre-twentieth century turnip truck did you fall from? Are you serious? You mean indentured servitude for medical bills? Or maybe wage garnishment? How about debtors prison? Or should I take the hospital a few of the chickens from my yard? You obviously have no family to provide for.
It is totally incomprehensible that a trip to the hospital in an ambulance will cost you over 1000USD.
You obviously have no real-world experience either. A modern ambulance isn't just a shiny car, you know. Its a highly specialized machine that's expensive to manufacture. It has to be stocked with very specialized supplies. It has to be manned 24/7 by very specialized staff (who have to train, eat, provide, etc). The ambulance has to be maintained. It has to be insured. And it probably gets horrible mileage; so yeah, it probably costs about $1k or better per ride.
No Obama care....will not fix the problem, it will only make it worse, and legally guarantee a monopoly for the HMOs.
As opposed to the monopoly they already have? The new health care law guarantees at least some coverage for everyone - including you. And expands a very successful care-delivery system thats been around since the '60's. It might even help control some costs. Overall I thought the whole package was a poor compromise slanted towards insurance companies, but they are so invested in the current system its not hard to understand. At least its a step in the right direction, and I'm willing to pony-up a little for it. Health care is a right, not a privledge or a product. Maybe later we can work out something better if we're not all trampled by the completly ignorant.
I've stopped going to my doctor altogether
Good luck to you. You won't be singing that tune for long.
This exactly - specifically the first point. We've tested two DLP solutions including Checkpoints. They are not hard to use, especially if there's little encryption in your environment. Point it to your file servers and away it goes. It identifies everything - and similar to an IDS, you have to tell it what's valuable and what's not, and where those things should be. There's mountains of data that need to be sorted and cleared out, and getting anyone in upper management to decide what's "valuable" is a real trick.
Every ISP on the planet counts bytes, and packets - especially if they meter. The methods are no secret and age-old: they either pull Flows from the user tiers with something like Peakflow or NetScout, or they pull I/O right off the CPE modem. Smaller ISP's probably still SNMP poll the byte count per interface and dump it into a database for the accountants and RRDTool for the ops folks.
And yes, the stats from your edge device should always be within a few kb of your providers (fudge factors for things like uptime, maintenance, billing date range, etc..).
If you have access to your CPE (you should), you can usually pull the stats directly without having to reinvent the wheel. Either poll it, or log on and find the diagnostic screen.
Yeah, Naris in ATT's infrastucture. Who knows what else is out there. Why not put it to better use?
Without posting a lot of citations, utilities in general have a poor record of system maintenance and security and its a real concern. Having a dedicated set of well-trained analysts watching traffic to and from electric grids, water and sewer systems, and traffic control isn't a bad idea.
I wonder how reporting and incident handling would work. Assuming a given company has limited security expertise in-house, or pays a contractor for perimeter monitoring, how quick or effective would the response be if NSA did find something? Would a company be required to investigate and remediate in a given amount of time? Would monitored companies get regular reports?
What about on-going costs for operations and hardware? Costs for remediation? Training? Who pays for what?
> Btw, Computer savvy people may use macs... Check.
> But techies use windows or linux often both. Bold statement. I've been in the techie game for 25 years.
>Why would we spend extra money to have a closed source semi broken non configurable standard hating version of linux? I spend the money because its worth my time to carry a platform that not only runs the odd Windows app, but gives me all my unix goodness in the same package without a load of sourcing/tinkering/forum-combing. Media player, document writer, network troubleshooting platform, development box, fun toy, there's nothing the Mac won't do. Its no less standards-hating and semi-broken than any other proprietary OS.
>Mostly windows/nix are more tweakable and have more tools/toys for us to use which makes them our targets. Says who? Here's a quarter kid. Go buy yourself a good computer.
Do you want to get in shape or just work off a pound or two?
Unless it keeps you motivated or if you really want to geek your workouts, you don't need heart rate monitors, GPS, or the like. Believe me, I've tried it all. You gain nothing.
I crossfit http://www.crossfit.com/. Its pretty simple. If you puke, your heart rate is too high. After a year of it I'm in the best shape of my life.
Cycling is my primary sport. I use a CatEye V2 for cadence. That's all I need. Because of crossfit, I can ride faster and farther than I ever imagined possible.
In the end, I use iPhone apps "As Rx'd" to keep up with crossfit WOD's, and "Zone Buddy" to manage what I eat, but a paper journal works just as well. No graphs, no trends, no geeking. Just health.
Boy, when you miss a point you go for broke, don't you buddy? Apparently you live in the Real America where there are no seedy sides of town. If you're up on your metaphors, you can kind of think of that as a netblock. Paying attention such as you do, you probably have a filter list of them like I do that's taken years to develop. Its part of a layered defence you know.
Lynching? Wow, you are out there. Vigilantism is being a self-appointed dispenser of justice (whatever that may be). But being a networking professional, you don't get involved in any of that, right? I'm sure you can share with us your experiences enforcing your networks AUP and incident responses.
So please, oh wise sage of the internet, show me your blog that documents how the police laughed at your substantial evidence? If you approach them with your attitude, I'm not surprised they laughed at you. I've had pretty good luck with the police because I tend to not try to do other peoples jobs.
...once the folks who sell spam and porn find a hosting provider who turns a blind eye, they tend to stick with it and consolidate their operations. Paying attention to Spamhaus and the more reliable botnet trackers tells me where these operations are located, and helps me write good gateway filters for my employer, my house, and my friends. Cutting off internet access tends only to disperse the nere-do-wells rather than stop them, and I have to start over again tracking and writing new filters. In other words, I like to know where these guys hang out so I can avoid them, the same way I avoid the riff-raff in the physical city where I live.
I think its great that someone is doing something about the problem, but I don't think it should be the ISP. We already have laws against spam and certain porn, and it should be up to the government to enforce those laws. Vigilantism is never the answer.
The tried-and-true way works: if you have evidence, take it to the police. If the police won't do anything, take it to the press. Sure it takes a little longer, but it keeps - in this case your internet connection - safe from the Random Crusader. And the criminals may actually get arrested.
I think he "gets it" just fine. Most of his assessments are right on the money compared to what I see day-to-day.
Who wouldn't want to stop attacks against their site? Half the attacks I see are sourced from Asia. The other half from US-based broadband connections. We buy BIG pipes, and my execs pay a lot of money for our provider to work with regional ISP's to filter attacks at the source.
Like it or not, he's right: attacks are becoming application-based. Mostly browser-based. The other end of that is social engineering. Drive-by downloads and XSS are nightmares. Then there's infected.pdf's and.doc's emailed in, or carried in from home. Don't forget the rooted shareware. And while I see the usual probes and perimeter mapping, I also see some very sophisticated attacks against our website and middleware.
Wake up bro: the name of the game is money. The days of cracking for fun and bragging rights are long gone. The only mischief left is script kiddies nmap'ing my perimeter, or students trying out old ideas with bot kits and worms. The REAL threats are the IP of some very powerful people - probably in Eastern Europe and Asia, and I'd wager their code doesn't circulate. Just wait until you get to do a forensics report on a server that you have no idea how it was compromised. In the meantime, good luck with your security plan.
Risk Management is just another corporate way of asking "how much liability can I accept"? No one knows how to calulate risk beyond questioning the consequences of failure. Case-in-point: corporate managers aren't concerned with the risks to operations if someone circumvents a safeguard. They only want to know how hard their ass will get slung, or how much money they'll lose. They're only after a "procedure", which is an outlined way of Doing Things. What if I choose to ignore the procedure? Risk Management is more Security Theater.
What Bruce is talking about is people who have a certain disregard for the rules. Pranksters, malcontents, and folks in general who don't accept convention. Those are the people who have the security mindset. Timothy Leary had another way of putting it: "think for yourself and question authority" he said.
I can't visit a shop without wondering how I can walk away with credit card numbers. I love to hack my neighbors AP's. Its fun to put files on other machines in coffee shops. I got pushed into network security because I like to break things. Now, twenty years later, I not only write the policy, I spend my time shredding it. I teach my techs and analysts to do the same thing.
Who do you want defending your network? Someone like me? Or the pencilneck with the CISSP and the ISO17799 paperwork?
The best desktop machine I've ever owned is a HP Pavillion a6120n. I bought it at Circuit City during an end-of-model clearance, along with a Samsung 22" LCD, for $700. It has E4400 C2D processor, 2Gb memory, 400Gb storage, 7600gt (128Mb) DVI graphics, and a dual-layer burner.
Once home, I immediately wiped Vista and loaded OSX. The machine just screams. It's very, very stable; and some say, runs faster than an actual Mac.
Compared to an iMac or Mac Pro, I saved between $1000 and $3000.
Not only that, but now that there is an EFI emulator floating around, I was able to load Leopard from a retail distro I bought at the Apple store. I can take Apple updates and everything. Just like having the real thing - only better!!
I think you've hit on it right there. It isn't hard to figure out what OSX will run well on. The specs are on Apple's site.
I run osx86 as my main desktop. Its solid. All I did was research the hardware that Apple sells. I bought a $500 machine at Circuit City that matched the iMac specs right down to the mobo. Downloaded the uphuck distro from the osx86 bunch and Bob's your uncle. I even bought a copy of Fusion (one *slick* app) to preserve the Vista load that came with box.
I love it; my kids love it. The box is almost bullet-proof, app support (kids games, iLife, audio processing, MS Office) is excellent, I have VMWare for the two Windows apps I can't replace. Life is good. If I could have done the same thing with Linux, I would have. If I could have bought OSX, I would have.
As soon as the bugs are worked out with the bootloader I'll move to Leopard. Too bad I have to tinker with it instead of buying a straight-up install, but that's modern computing.
Truth is, Apple has no more respect for its customers than any other technology company; and I really don't care what's in Apple's interest because they don't care about mine. Its all about the bottom line. So EULA-schmula, find what works for you. Same goes for Windows or whatever you run. Regards, t-e
Slashdot Mirror
The average consumer doesnt know how their internet connection is measured. All most people know is that entertainment is moving to ala carte/on-demand in HD. For example, the majority of people I know are Internet-illiterates but they all subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and HBONow and own several streaming devices. Most of my childrens friends have never seen traditional live tv. These people dont know or care about the bandwidth required for these services, and wouldnt know how to size a circuit if they did. ALL of the major ISPs know this because they want to be common carriers AND content providers. Consolodation and local monopolies/duoplolies make caps possible. Data caps are rent extraction plain and simple. Pure greed under the guise of curbing abuse.
I adopted three from Ukraine. I can tell some stories about raising the products of East European orphanages.
Chapeau to you sir. You and your wife are kind people. Good luck on your adventure.
Its no wonder you posted AC - you very obviously have no children, no experience with any education system as a parent, an ax to grind, and a horrible agenda.
And do us all a favor and turn off Dr. Oz.
You're all close.
Along time ago, all of a company's DNS belonged to the admins, and Network handled the bill - which was lumped in with the one for the Internet connection.
These days, external DNS aka "The Brand" is usually managed by either Legal or Marketing. In those organizations, the common 'dnsadmin@company.com' email is redirected to someone who neither knows nor cares what DNS is. Even internally, no one knows whos responsible for external domains. And when the bill comes, it just sits on the department secretary's desk.
Every. Single. Time.
Find a crossfit gym:
http://www.crossfit.com/
Learn how to move properly:
http://www.mobilitywod.com/
swim/bike/run:
http://www.crossfitendurance.com/
change your diet:
http://whole9life.com/start/
measure your fitness by competing against the entire world:
http://games.crossfit.com/
This is my 3rd year crossfitting. I'm 50. My resting heart rate is 46bpm. I'm down to 8% body fat from 26%. After physicals/blood work my insurance premiums were reduced by 1/3. I recently won the St. Louis Indoor Rowing Championships. I can ride a bicycle 100 miles in 5 hours. I can run 5 miles in 40 minutes. I can lift a shit-load of weight with form, power, and speed. Yeah, Crossfit is the real deal.
Thank you, sir!
I spent '82-'89 as a radioman on an SSN. Hight of the Cold War stuff. The training was one thing. Getting qualified at sea and surviving was another.
When I got out I went straight to work as an RF tech for a major wireless carrier. The skills I learned (technical and otherwise) marketed well, but it took a long time to readjust to civilian life. Sometimes I still feel that long steel tube.
Let patients pay for their own medical care out of their pocket. If they can't afford it, the hospitals can work with the families to work off the medical bill, or some other arrangements could be made. This is how it used to be done.
No wonder people called you names. Which pre-twentieth century turnip truck did you fall from? Are you serious? You mean indentured servitude for medical bills? Or maybe wage garnishment? How about debtors prison? Or should I take the hospital a few of the chickens from my yard? You obviously have no family to provide for.
It is totally incomprehensible that a trip to the hospital in an ambulance will cost you over 1000USD.
You obviously have no real-world experience either. A modern ambulance isn't just a shiny car, you know. Its a highly specialized machine that's expensive to manufacture. It has to be stocked with very specialized supplies. It has to be manned 24/7 by very specialized staff (who have to train, eat, provide, etc). The ambulance has to be maintained. It has to be insured. And it probably gets horrible mileage; so yeah, it probably costs about $1k or better per ride.
No Obama care....will not fix the problem, it will only make it worse, and legally guarantee a monopoly for the HMOs.
As opposed to the monopoly they already have? The new health care law guarantees at least some coverage for everyone - including you. And expands a very successful care-delivery system thats been around since the '60's. It might even help control some costs. Overall I thought the whole package was a poor compromise slanted towards insurance companies, but they are so invested in the current system its not hard to understand. At least its a step in the right direction, and I'm willing to pony-up a little for it. Health care is a right, not a privledge or a product. Maybe later we can work out something better if we're not all trampled by the completly ignorant.
I've stopped going to my doctor altogether
Good luck to you. You won't be singing that tune for long.
This exactly - specifically the first point. We've tested two DLP solutions including Checkpoints. They are not hard to use, especially if there's little encryption in your environment. Point it to your file servers and away it goes. It identifies everything - and similar to an IDS, you have to tell it what's valuable and what's not, and where those things should be. There's mountains of data that need to be sorted and cleared out, and getting anyone in upper management to decide what's "valuable" is a real trick.
Oh please.
Every ISP on the planet counts bytes, and packets - especially if they meter. The methods are no secret and age-old: they either pull Flows from the user tiers with something like Peakflow or NetScout, or they pull I/O right off the CPE modem. Smaller ISP's probably still SNMP poll the byte count per interface and dump it into a database for the accountants and RRDTool for the ops folks.
And yes, the stats from your edge device should always be within a few kb of your providers (fudge factors for things like uptime, maintenance, billing date range, etc..).
If you have access to your CPE (you should), you can usually pull the stats directly without having to reinvent the wheel. Either poll it, or log on and find the diagnostic screen.
Yeah, Naris in ATT's infrastucture. Who knows what else is out there. Why not put it to better use?
Without posting a lot of citations, utilities in general have a poor record of system maintenance and security and its a real concern. Having a dedicated set of well-trained analysts watching traffic to and from electric grids, water and sewer systems, and traffic control isn't a bad idea.
I wonder how reporting and incident handling would work. Assuming a given company has limited security expertise in-house, or pays a contractor for perimeter monitoring, how quick or effective would the response be if NSA did find something? Would a company be required to investigate and remediate in a given amount of time? Would monitored companies get regular reports?
What about on-going costs for operations and hardware? Costs for remediation? Training? Who pays for what?
This: http://www.zonediet.com/
Plus this: http://www.crossfit.com/
Equal this: http://www.crossfit.com/mt-archive2/Jeremy-Wann.html
In one year. Guaranteed. No bullshit.
> I really love any kind of good guitar driven, bluesy, riff-laden rock. Guitar blues...etc.
Widespread Panic!
(Also Gov't Mule, Galactic, Phish (early '90's), Umphry's McGee, String Cheese Incident, Disco Biscuits...)
> Btw, Computer savvy people may use macs...
Check.
> But techies use windows or linux often both.
Bold statement. I've been in the techie game for 25 years.
>Why would we spend extra money to have a closed source semi broken non configurable standard hating version of linux?
I spend the money because its worth my time to carry a platform that not only runs the odd Windows app, but gives me all my unix goodness in the same package without a load of sourcing/tinkering/forum-combing. Media player, document writer, network troubleshooting platform, development box, fun toy, there's nothing the Mac won't do. Its no less standards-hating and semi-broken than any other proprietary OS.
>Mostly windows/nix are more tweakable and have more tools/toys for us to use which makes them our targets.
Says who? Here's a quarter kid. Go buy yourself a good computer.
Do you want to get in shape or just work off a pound or two?
Unless it keeps you motivated or if you really want to geek your workouts, you don't need heart rate monitors, GPS, or the like. Believe me, I've tried it all. You gain nothing.
I crossfit http://www.crossfit.com/. Its pretty simple. If you puke, your heart rate is too high. After a year of it I'm in the best shape of my life.
Cycling is my primary sport. I use a CatEye V2 for cadence. That's all I need. Because of crossfit, I can ride faster and farther than I ever imagined possible.
In the end, I use iPhone apps "As Rx'd" to keep up with crossfit WOD's, and "Zone Buddy" to manage what I eat, but a paper journal works just as well. No graphs, no trends, no geeking. Just health.
Good luck!
The first time I heard about Twitter I thought, yeah, a public version of Slashdot sigs. It was only a matter of time...
Speak of the devil, its the Random Crusader!
Boy, when you miss a point you go for broke, don't you buddy? Apparently you live in the Real America where there are no seedy sides of town. If you're up on your metaphors, you can kind of think of that as a netblock. Paying attention such as you do, you probably have a filter list of them like I do that's taken years to develop. Its part of a layered defence you know.
Lynching? Wow, you are out there. Vigilantism is being a self-appointed dispenser of justice (whatever that may be). But being a networking professional, you don't get involved in any of that, right? I'm sure you can share with us your experiences enforcing your networks AUP and incident responses.
So please, oh wise sage of the internet, show me your blog that documents how the police laughed at your substantial evidence? If you approach them with your attitude, I'm not surprised they laughed at you. I've had pretty good luck with the police because I tend to not try to do other peoples jobs.
...once the folks who sell spam and porn find a hosting provider who turns a blind eye, they tend to stick with it and consolidate their operations. Paying attention to Spamhaus and the more reliable botnet trackers tells me where these operations are located, and helps me write good gateway filters for my employer, my house, and my friends. Cutting off internet access tends only to disperse the nere-do-wells rather than stop them, and I have to start over again tracking and writing new filters. In other words, I like to know where these guys hang out so I can avoid them, the same way I avoid the riff-raff in the physical city where I live.
I think its great that someone is doing something about the problem, but I don't think it should be the ISP. We already have laws against spam and certain porn, and it should be up to the government to enforce those laws. Vigilantism is never the answer.
The tried-and-true way works: if you have evidence, take it to the police. If the police won't do anything, take it to the press. Sure it takes a little longer, but it keeps - in this case your internet connection - safe from the Random Crusader. And the criminals may actually get arrested.
> Don't even think about trying to put OS X on your PC without first purchasing a legitimate copy of Mac OS Leopard.
Fine. I bought a copy and a $500 PC. Here's how to install it:
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=74964
Easy to maintain, super stable, and better app support than my old Linux install...
I think he "gets it" just fine. Most of his assessments are right on the money compared to what I see day-to-day.
.pdf's and .doc's emailed in, or carried in from home. Don't forget the rooted shareware. And while I see the usual probes and perimeter mapping, I also see some very sophisticated attacks against our website and middleware.
Who wouldn't want to stop attacks against their site? Half the attacks I see are sourced from Asia. The other half from US-based broadband connections. We buy BIG pipes, and my execs pay a lot of money for our provider to work with regional ISP's to filter attacks at the source.
Like it or not, he's right: attacks are becoming application-based. Mostly browser-based. The other end of that is social engineering. Drive-by downloads and XSS are nightmares. Then there's infected
Wake up bro: the name of the game is money. The days of cracking for fun and bragging rights are long gone. The only mischief left is script kiddies nmap'ing my perimeter, or students trying out old ideas with bot kits and worms. The REAL threats are the IP of some very powerful people - probably in Eastern Europe and Asia, and I'd wager their code doesn't circulate. Just wait until you get to do a forensics report on a server that you have no idea how it was compromised. In the meantime, good luck with your security plan.
Risk Management is just another corporate way of asking "how much liability can I accept"? No one knows how to calulate risk beyond questioning the consequences of failure. Case-in-point: corporate managers aren't concerned with the risks to operations if someone circumvents a safeguard. They only want to know how hard their ass will get slung, or how much money they'll lose. They're only after a "procedure", which is an outlined way of Doing Things. What if I choose to ignore the procedure? Risk Management is more Security Theater.
What Bruce is talking about is people who have a certain disregard for the rules. Pranksters, malcontents, and folks in general who don't accept convention. Those are the people who have the security mindset. Timothy Leary had another way of putting it: "think for yourself and question authority" he said.
I can't visit a shop without wondering how I can walk away with credit card numbers. I love to hack my neighbors AP's. Its fun to put files on other machines in coffee shops. I got pushed into network security because I like to break things. Now, twenty years later, I not only write the policy, I spend my time shredding it. I teach my techs and analysts to do the same thing.
Who do you want defending your network? Someone like me? Or the pencilneck with the CISSP and the ISO17799 paperwork?
You're safe
"If I bought whole computers instead of building them from spare parts I'd buy a mac."
You can build a mac from spare parts. See here:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
or here:
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showforum=137
or here:
http://forum.osx86scene.com/
Of if you decide to buy a cheap pc for your project, here's the instuctions:
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=74964
The best desktop machine I've ever owned is a HP Pavillion a6120n. I bought it at Circuit City during an end-of-model clearance, along with a Samsung 22" LCD, for $700. It has E4400 C2D processor, 2Gb memory, 400Gb storage, 7600gt (128Mb) DVI graphics, and a dual-layer burner.
Once home, I immediately wiped Vista and loaded OSX. The machine just screams. It's very, very stable; and some say, runs faster than an actual Mac.
Compared to an iMac or Mac Pro, I saved between $1000 and $3000.
Not only that, but now that there is an EFI emulator floating around, I was able to load Leopard from a retail distro I bought at the Apple store. I can take Apple updates and everything. Just like having the real thing - only better!!
Off-topic I know but, any submariners want to sign the topside log?
RM1/ss SSN-595 '82-88
I think you've hit on it right there. It isn't hard to figure out what OSX will run well on. The specs are on Apple's site.
I run osx86 as my main desktop. Its solid. All I did was research the hardware that Apple sells. I bought a $500 machine at Circuit City that matched the iMac specs right down to the mobo. Downloaded the uphuck distro from the osx86 bunch and Bob's your uncle. I even bought a copy of Fusion (one *slick* app) to preserve the Vista load that came with box.
I love it; my kids love it. The box is almost bullet-proof, app support (kids games, iLife, audio processing, MS Office) is excellent, I have VMWare for the two Windows apps I can't replace. Life is good. If I could have done the same thing with Linux, I would have. If I could have bought OSX, I would have.
As soon as the bugs are worked out with the bootloader I'll move to Leopard. Too bad I have to tinker with it instead of buying a straight-up install, but that's modern computing.
Truth is, Apple has no more respect for its customers than any other technology company; and I really don't care what's in Apple's interest because they don't care about mine. Its all about the bottom line. So EULA-schmula, find what works for you. Same goes for Windows or whatever you run.
Regards,
t-e