You mean Segway could not have wrapped the whole dammed scooter in some kind of saran wrap and a stuck a tiny sticker on it saying,
By ripping opening the saran wrap you agree that this product has absolutely no warranty and you give up all rights to be protected by CPSC. You only get a license to use this product, the product is still owned by me. I dont make any claims about fitness of this product for any use. I am not responsible for any damages that happend to you because I made a defective product. Whether I knew about it or not, whether I tell you about it or not, whether I promise to fix it or not, whether I actually fix it or not, the moment you touch the sticker, all bets are off. All your bases are belong to us.
And it would not stand up in court? I am surprised. The software vendors are able to do precisely the same thing.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
Many vendors could easily out-do MSFT in application space. MSFT did not get its marketshare and lead by simple technical superiority of its product or coding skills. It got it by better business tactics.
Infact every flag ship product that is minting money for MSFT started out as a pale copy of some other better program. WordPerfect, QuattroPro/Lotus, Harvard Presentation Graphics, Dbase/Foxbase etc. Then the marketing muscle, clever tricks to prevent interoperability, agreements with vendors to throttle competition and naivity of its user base that confused interoperability with PC-compatibility got MSFT the market share and lead. If the OS advantage is removed and the playing field is leveled by demanding true interoperability and compatibility to standards, (standards not wholly owned and manipulated by MSFT) you will see what other vendors are truly capable of.
The key is Open STANDARDS. Do not confuse it with Linux/Mac/Unix or Open Source or Free Software or Gnu or GPL. If the users demand true portability of their data and their applications the playing field will be leveled. My docment, my macros, my scripts are mine. I want them to work whether I choose to run MSOffice or OpenOffice. Only when owners of the data assert their ownership and refuse to be locked into a particular vendor's format the playing field will be level.
Stupid Segway, it is recalling scooters and trying to fix it. The right thing to do is to encourage everyone to follow "responsible disclosure" which means nobody should disclose anything about it. If and when a fix is ready, post instructions on how to fix it once a month, on a Tuesday. Then people should get the replacement parts mailed to them and they should install the "patches". That is the way to billions folks.
When the do not call lists started it worked for some time. Now a days I get blatant sales calls from (India mainly) and they spoof the caller ID system. I yell at them for violating the law, but they know they cant be caught. One option would be to listen to the pitch patiently and agree to buy whatever they are selling. Then they transfer you to some one in US for verification. When the actual vendor (usually it is DishNetwork or DirecTV in my case) comes on line, lodge a protest and threaten to call FCC. But so far I have not had the patience. So I just yell at them, call them names and hang up.
Spam works for the sender because, it costs them practically nothing to blast out millions of emails and there are always a few who respond to spam. One way to combat spam is to increase the cost to the spammers. I am not suggesting anything on the send side.
Just on the recieve side. We should be able to write some bots with some amount of AI to respond to spam. Suddenly the spammer is getting 990 bogus replies and may be 10 legitimate replies to his 100 million spam emails. We should be able to swamp out those dumbos who respond to spam. If the spammer has to go through 10 or 100 emails to get one chump, well it is that much more expensive to him.
,p>
Would it be illegal to respond in bad faith to spam? IANAL.
Dear Unknown,
I am a spammer convicted of sending unsolicited messages to millions of people and I am ordered by the federal courts to pay every one I sent mail to a sum of 100,000$ each.
So if you have recieved spam from me, please send me your name, your address, your social security number, your bank account number, your mother's maiden name, the first pet you owned, the first car you owned, the name of your high school, your credit card number, expiry date and the card verification number.
Please allow six weeks for your account to be cleaned^H^H^H^H^H^H credited.
The author and the reviewer are blatantly biased in favour of the regular expressions, ignoring the plight of the millions of downtrodden irregular expressions who are not able to get a platform to voice their grievances. All because they are viewed as somehow deviant or deficient. It is time for the irregular expressions to come out of the closet and assume their role as legitimate members of the syntax.
Related to compressed long URLs? Wasn't there a report about some compressed folders with sizes near multiples of 4K gets last chunk padded with 0xD? or something like that? At what point code reuse becomes bug reuse?
Let us NOT confuse Open Software with Free Software with Open Standards. What the industry needed then and what it needs now are Open Standards. If the industry kept its eye on the ball, on switching costs, and said "I will buy Word/WordPerfect/WordStar/ today. But I want my docs saved in such way that I can switch to another product next year." there would not be a mono culture today. But that is difficult for the industry to do. MSFT would offer deep discounts. Managers having to meet quarterly number quarter after quarter will take the discount on a difficult quarter and be locked in for ever. They would not even admit that they knowingly signed the agreement-to-be-enslaved knowingly. They will invent reasons and justify the decision.
The MSFT monoculture and monoply was willingly created by the big name corporations. They all clamoured for IBM-PC compatibility over everything else. The corporations have always known and valued interoperability and compatibility. The myopia was choosing as a standard for interoperability a closed system owned by one company. If they had chosen an OPEN standard, defined by independant third parties that allow free competition things would have been better. But they did not. The result was that while hardware costs have been shrinking by orders of magnitude, the software costs have not. When the industry annointed MSFT as the "King of the Hill" MSWord/WordPerfect QuttroPro/Excel were 50$ products running on 2500$ PCs. Now MSWord and WinXP are 100$ [*1] products running on 300$ PCs.
But MSFT revenues are 11 billion $ a year, which is chump change compared to money spent by the top 1000 corporations counting everything from travel, rent and raw materials. Down to earth reality is that the compatibility and interoperability (or just the perception of them) between MSFT products is still delivering better value to the companies than switching to Open Standards defined by third parties. MSFT will always price its products just a shade under the switching cost. As years go by and the switching costs keep increasing, it will be able to raise the price. If corporations bite the bullet, pay for the switching costs today, they stand to gain a lot in the future. But since corporations are driven by quarterly numbers, there is not much incentive in taking that kind of risk for long term benefit.
All this means the MSFT monopoly and monoculture will persist for a long time.
[*1] The list price of 400$ for MSOffice and 130$ for WinXP is largely fiction. No one pays that much for it in the real world.
My pure guess based on/. comments:
How can this happen? Loop counting error. Probably from integer division of the file size/ 4K chunks.
Allocator did it right, loop missed the last chunk. Very common. Typically a novice error. But can blindside even experienced ones. QA should have nailed it.
Looks like these two researchers are still using lessons learnt in the marketplace for actual physical objects and applying it to non-physical, intellectual products. The entire article introduces a term demand-side learning . But does not mention the words "vendor lock" or "switching costs".
If you are selling garden hoses, the cost of switching to a competing brand is just the replacement cost of a garden hose. If a company is switching software from one vendor to another, the switching cost is considerably more than just plain cost of new software. Like changing the garden hose requiring you change all the plumbing fitting and pressure valves in your home! The first mover advantage is directly proportional to the switching cost. Where are Lycos and Hotbot now? All vendors know that and they strive hard to increase the switching costs, from AutoCAD, Ansys, Fluent, Cadence, to Oracle, MSFT every dominant vendor in the market tries as hard as possible to make it inpossible to switch.
The reason why garden hoses, light bulbs and tires have low switching cost is because of standardization. Standards defined by independant third parties, not by the manufacturers themselves. People, consumers and corporations are beginning to understand the issue, as seen the recent moves by Massassuchetts to mandate ODF as the archival format for its documents. It is inevitable that people will see the advantages of interoperability and standardization. The first mover advantage will diminish as consumers level the playing field by demanding interoperability and standardization. At that time the "second mover" into these fields will be OSS with value added services.
What kind of conclusion is that, "Linux will remain second as long as MSFT has the first mover advantage"?
It is like saying Tiger Woods will remain number one as long as no one comes along who is better. Or this guy will live as long as he does not die.
You need to go to Harvard to come to lame conclusions like this? Nah, you need to go to Harvard to write escape clauses like this. If Linux become dominant you just declare, "MSFT no longer has the first mover advantage, so I am right". If Linux fades to obscurity, you can go "See, I told ya, Linux will never become numero uno"
Just last year people were talking about "compassion fatigue" in the aftermath of Katrina. If over used it wont be long before we have an "indignation fatigue".
Of course there is no reason not to be upset about HP. But if the ire is directed with the attitude, "How many other hidden survelience programs have gone on? How many more entities are doing this?" it would be better than, "bad HP! bad dog! Everyone else is pure as driven snow, just punish HP alone, and it will be all hunky dory".
Sometime in the near future you can see a listing like this on EBay:
Judgement against spammers Sergey Popovich, Kiev, Georgia and Chi Xiangjung, Nanking, PRC. For 1,000,000,000 $.
Awarded by Virginia Commonwealth Supreme Court. Buy-now price 5$. Opening bid 1 cent.
Also you will get emails like this:
Allow me to please introduce myself. I am Michael Dewy of Dewy, Chetham and Howe, attorneys at law, Richmond, VA. I have recently won a judgement for 1 billion dollars against two spammers in Taiwan. This is my proposal to you. Please advance me the money needed to finance an expedition collect the said sum from Taiwan and we can share the proceeds 25% to me and 75% to you.
You mean there were 2.5 billion cell phone calls last year? That number is too small [*]. 2.5 billion active cell phones all over the world, seems to be a high number. 2.5 billion cell phone calls per year seems to be a low number. Hope someone has the time, energy and the inclination to dig the definition of the GSM Assoc's "connections" and the correctness of the numbers reported.
[*] Quick estimate: {1 in 4 in USA+Europe+Aus+NZ with cell phone & 1 in 10 in India+China with cell phone}
= 450 million phones. 2.5 billion calls per year= 1 phone call every two months.
Please slashdotters, dont sit there just posting to earn Karma points. Write a bot to fill Jigsaw with tons and tons of bogus information. Write a bot to collect info from Jigsaw, randomly mutate the data by breeding one business card with another and resubmit. N sets of genuine data can be used to breed N^2 corrupt data and reduce the signal/noise ratio. If you corrupt the data enough before the advertising takes off, may be you can nip it in the bud.
Wait, there was this link to people willing to solve Captchas for 50 cents an hour. Hire them to fill it with bogus info.
I am really shocked that almost everyone assumes only HP did it. To me it looks like only HP fessed up to it.
Folks, there are hundreds of countries and thousands of foreign companies operating in the United States of America. Not all of them are as contrained by American laws as most American corps are. They conduct espionage with covert or overt state sponsorship.
With politics beign such a high stakes game and digging the dirt on the opponant and negative attack campaigns being so effective, are we really sure such tactics are not being used by the candidates? How many campaign managers say to their investigators "Do whatever it takes to find the dirt. Just make sure it cant be traced back to me." Neither the parties nor the candidates will explicitly authorize such operations, preserving the deniability. But tacit understanding is that, those underlings who took the risk and delivered the goods will move up in the good books of the parties.
It is almost certain underlings of parties (both Democrats and Republicans) do it. Foreign govts do it. Foreign corps do it. Private companies do it. So dont spend all your indignation on HP. Reserve some for future use.
Take the number with a very large pinch of salt. Even accounting for multiple cell phone owning road warriars, the number 2.5 billion connection seems too large. I suspect GSM assoc is counting every SIM cards that were manufactured as a "connection". It must be including all the expired accounts, expired prepaid cards etc.
It introduced gmail. Ramped it up to serve millions of users. Long back when I checked netcraft's tool bar, gmail.com had a site rank of 20, when mail.yahoo.com was at 60. (Dont have recent numbers, sorry). They hammered it till they understand the bugs and all the issues. Then they are rolling out a product to do email. Outlook, its address book, calender integration are extremely important to millions of MS users and one of the main pillars of the vendor lock. Though the product is intended for paid corporate customers, they are rolling it out as an ad supported "free" service to lure in beta testers. Many/.ers mention the need for corporations to have complete control over their data. I am sure Google knows that issue and eventually when it rolls out paid service, it will done with boxes owned and operated by the corporations themselves.
By the same token, Google will not introduce Writely as paid service to corporations till the service is really ready. All Google has to do is to show the corporations that the browser is a platform powerful enough to do email, calender, word processing and spread sheets. That would be enough to give the corporations a pause. When MS comes around dunning for a round of money to upgrade all apps to Vista and force the entire company to upgrade, they will think twice before automatically signing whatever contract MS is pushing. Along with it if, corporations follow the Massassuchetts (sp?) example and migrate to a portable open documents standards, there is some real possibility for competition to return to computers arena. That would be a good thing. If it just degenerates from a monopoly to a duopoly, it would be bad.
Hope Google really means it when it says, "First, do no evil".
Slashdot Mirror
If all your files are Office97 format created by Office97, you can very easily migrate to OpenOffice.
By ripping opening the saran wrap you agree that this product has absolutely no warranty and you give up all rights to be protected by CPSC. You only get a license to use this product, the product is still owned by me. I dont make any claims about fitness of this product for any use. I am not responsible for any damages that happend to you because I made a defective product. Whether I knew about it or not, whether I tell you about it or not, whether I promise to fix it or not, whether I actually fix it or not, the moment you touch the sticker, all bets are off. All your bases are belong to us.
And it would not stand up in court? I am surprised. The software vendors are able to do precisely the same thing.
Many vendors could easily out-do MSFT in application space. MSFT did not get its marketshare and lead by simple technical superiority of its product or coding skills. It got it by better business tactics. Infact every flag ship product that is minting money for MSFT started out as a pale copy of some other better program. WordPerfect, QuattroPro/Lotus, Harvard Presentation Graphics, Dbase/Foxbase etc. Then the marketing muscle, clever tricks to prevent interoperability, agreements with vendors to throttle competition and naivity of its user base that confused interoperability with PC-compatibility got MSFT the market share and lead. If the OS advantage is removed and the playing field is leveled by demanding true interoperability and compatibility to standards, (standards not wholly owned and manipulated by MSFT) you will see what other vendors are truly capable of.
The key is Open STANDARDS. Do not confuse it with Linux/Mac/Unix or Open Source or Free Software or Gnu or GPL. If the users demand true portability of their data and their applications the playing field will be leveled. My docment, my macros, my scripts are mine. I want them to work whether I choose to run MSOffice or OpenOffice. Only when owners of the data assert their ownership and refuse to be locked into a particular vendor's format the playing field will be level.
Stupid Segway, it is recalling scooters and trying to fix it. The right thing to do is to encourage everyone to follow "responsible disclosure" which means nobody should disclose anything about it. If and when a fix is ready, post instructions on how to fix it once a month, on a Tuesday. Then people should get the replacement parts mailed to them and they should install the "patches". That is the way to billions folks.
When the do not call lists started it worked for some time. Now a days I get blatant sales calls from (India mainly) and they spoof the caller ID system. I yell at them for violating the law, but they know they cant be caught. One option would be to listen to the pitch patiently and agree to buy whatever they are selling. Then they transfer you to some one in US for verification. When the actual vendor (usually it is DishNetwork or DirecTV in my case) comes on line, lodge a protest and threaten to call FCC. But so far I have not had the patience. So I just yell at them, call them names and hang up.
Just on the recieve side. We should be able to write some bots with some amount of AI to respond to spam. Suddenly the spammer is getting 990 bogus replies and may be 10 legitimate replies to his 100 million spam emails. We should be able to swamp out those dumbos who respond to spam. If the spammer has to go through 10 or 100 emails to get one chump, well it is that much more expensive to him.
,p> Would it be illegal to respond in bad faith to spam? IANAL.
So if you have recieved spam from me, please send me your name, your address, your social security number, your bank account number, your mother's maiden name, the first pet you owned, the first car you owned, the name of your high school, your credit card number, expiry date and the card verification number.
Please allow six weeks for your account to be cleaned^H^H^H^H^H^H credited.
Have a nice day.
The author and the reviewer are blatantly biased in favour of the regular expressions, ignoring the plight of the millions of downtrodden irregular expressions who are not able to get a platform to voice their grievances. All because they are viewed as somehow deviant or deficient. It is time for the irregular expressions to come out of the closet and assume their role as legitimate members of the syntax.
Related to compressed long URLs? Wasn't there a report about some compressed folders with sizes near multiples of 4K gets last chunk padded with 0xD? or something like that? At what point code reuse becomes bug reuse?
Let us NOT confuse Open Software with Free Software with Open Standards. What the industry needed then and what it needs now are Open Standards. If the industry kept its eye on the ball, on switching costs, and said "I will buy Word/WordPerfect/WordStar/ today. But I want my docs saved in such way that I can switch to another product next year." there would not be a mono culture today. But that is difficult for the industry to do. MSFT would offer deep discounts. Managers having to meet quarterly number quarter after quarter will take the discount on a difficult quarter and be locked in for ever. They would not even admit that they knowingly signed the agreement-to-be-enslaved knowingly. They will invent reasons and justify the decision.
But MSFT revenues are 11 billion $ a year, which is chump change compared to money spent by the top 1000 corporations counting everything from travel, rent and raw materials. Down to earth reality is that the compatibility and interoperability (or just the perception of them) between MSFT products is still delivering better value to the companies than switching to Open Standards defined by third parties. MSFT will always price its products just a shade under the switching cost. As years go by and the switching costs keep increasing, it will be able to raise the price. If corporations bite the bullet, pay for the switching costs today, they stand to gain a lot in the future. But since corporations are driven by quarterly numbers, there is not much incentive in taking that kind of risk for long term benefit.
All this means the MSFT monopoly and monoculture will persist for a long time.
[*1] The list price of 400$ for MSOffice and 130$ for WinXP is largely fiction. No one pays that much for it in the real world.
My pure guess based on /. comments:
How can this happen? Loop counting error. Probably from integer division of the file size/ 4K chunks.
Allocator did it right, loop missed the last chunk. Very common. Typically a novice error. But can blindside even experienced ones. QA should have nailed it.
If you are selling garden hoses, the cost of switching to a competing brand is just the replacement cost of a garden hose. If a company is switching software from one vendor to another, the switching cost is considerably more than just plain cost of new software. Like changing the garden hose requiring you change all the plumbing fitting and pressure valves in your home! The first mover advantage is directly proportional to the switching cost. Where are Lycos and Hotbot now? All vendors know that and they strive hard to increase the switching costs, from AutoCAD, Ansys, Fluent, Cadence, to Oracle, MSFT every dominant vendor in the market tries as hard as possible to make it inpossible to switch.
The reason why garden hoses, light bulbs and tires have low switching cost is because of standardization. Standards defined by independant third parties, not by the manufacturers themselves. People, consumers and corporations are beginning to understand the issue, as seen the recent moves by Massassuchetts to mandate ODF as the archival format for its documents. It is inevitable that people will see the advantages of interoperability and standardization. The first mover advantage will diminish as consumers level the playing field by demanding interoperability and standardization. At that time the "second mover" into these fields will be OSS with value added services.
It is like saying Tiger Woods will remain number one as long as no one comes along who is better. Or this guy will live as long as he does not die.
You need to go to Harvard to come to lame conclusions like this? Nah, you need to go to Harvard to write escape clauses like this. If Linux become dominant you just declare, "MSFT no longer has the first mover advantage, so I am right". If Linux fades to obscurity, you can go "See, I told ya, Linux will never become numero uno"
2. All web sites must provide forblind.html (or whatever is chosen as the standard) to comply with ADA.
3. And the forblind.html will read out:
Press or say 1 if you want to listen to the web site
Por Espanol reinterpret_cast[spanish](press 2)
Press 2 if you wish to throttle the person who designed this idiotic phone menu
Press 3 if you wish to throttle Alexander Graham Bell.
Your visit is important to us. For quality improvement purposes (ha, ha, got you there) we might hang up on you any time.
Start elevator music.
4. FireFox will come up with an extension to automagically append forblind.html to all urls.
Just last year people were talking about "compassion fatigue" in the aftermath of Katrina. If over used it wont be long before we have an "indignation fatigue".
Of course there is no reason not to be upset about HP. But if the ire is directed with the attitude, "How many other hidden survelience programs have gone on? How many more entities are doing this?" it would be better than, "bad HP! bad dog! Everyone else is pure as driven snow, just punish HP alone, and it will be all hunky dory".
Judgement against spammers Sergey Popovich, Kiev, Georgia and Chi Xiangjung, Nanking, PRC. For 1,000,000,000 $. Awarded by Virginia Commonwealth Supreme Court. Buy-now price 5$. Opening bid 1 cent.
Also you will get emails like this:
Allow me to please introduce myself. I am Michael Dewy of Dewy, Chetham and Howe, attorneys at law, Richmond, VA. I have recently won a judgement for 1 billion dollars against two spammers in Taiwan. This is my proposal to you. Please advance me the money needed to finance an expedition collect the said sum from Taiwan and we can share the proceeds 25% to me and 75% to you.
[*] Quick estimate: {1 in 4 in USA+Europe+Aus+NZ with cell phone & 1 in 10 in India+China with cell phone} = 450 million phones. 2.5 billion calls per year= 1 phone call every two months.
Wait, there was this link to people willing to solve Captchas for 50 cents an hour. Hire them to fill it with bogus info.
Folks, there are hundreds of countries and thousands of foreign companies operating in the United States of America. Not all of them are as contrained by American laws as most American corps are. They conduct espionage with covert or overt state sponsorship.
With politics beign such a high stakes game and digging the dirt on the opponant and negative attack campaigns being so effective, are we really sure such tactics are not being used by the candidates? How many campaign managers say to their investigators "Do whatever it takes to find the dirt. Just make sure it cant be traced back to me." Neither the parties nor the candidates will explicitly authorize such operations, preserving the deniability. But tacit understanding is that, those underlings who took the risk and delivered the goods will move up in the good books of the parties.
It is almost certain underlings of parties (both Democrats and Republicans) do it. Foreign govts do it. Foreign corps do it. Private companies do it. So dont spend all your indignation on HP. Reserve some for future use.
Take the number with a very large pinch of salt. Even accounting for multiple cell phone owning road warriars, the number 2.5 billion connection seems too large. I suspect GSM assoc is counting every SIM cards that were manufactured as a "connection". It must be including all the expired accounts, expired prepaid cards etc.
... if it was running Ubuntu. [Ducks and runs out before the rotten tomatoes get him]
By the same token, Google will not introduce Writely as paid service to corporations till the service is really ready. All Google has to do is to show the corporations that the browser is a platform powerful enough to do email, calender, word processing and spread sheets. That would be enough to give the corporations a pause. When MS comes around dunning for a round of money to upgrade all apps to Vista and force the entire company to upgrade, they will think twice before automatically signing whatever contract MS is pushing. Along with it if, corporations follow the Massassuchetts (sp?) example and migrate to a portable open documents standards, there is some real possibility for competition to return to computers arena. That would be a good thing. If it just degenerates from a monopoly to a duopoly, it would be bad.
Hope Google really means it when it says, "First, do no evil".
Considering how broadly software patents are worded now a days, I would not be surprised if MIT gets sued by Amazon for patent infringement.
1. Set up some honeypot email ids by posting it in the usenet.
2. Harvest spam
3. Look for the stock being touted
4. Buy those stocks
5. Wait for the price to go up by 5%.
6. Profit!
Oh, wait. I shouldn't post it in /. I should offer the "guaranteed way to make 5%" via spam to millions of people.