Worse, how do you decide what it is a mobile and what is a satnav?
Modern satnav devices are getting embedded mobiles so they can get map updates and other stuff.
So what happens if a satnav device allows the user to be used as phone?
What if you deactivate the mobile part? Does it need to be removed physically? What if you start using your laptop for navigation?
What about Maemo devices that are basically Internet panels, but which in their newest iteration (the N900) have got an mobile part embedded?
It's funny how people are trying to divide a field that is strongly converging. Plus my G1, has clearly a more userfriendly and easier to use interface than say the satnav embedded in my Audi. But nobody is writting explicit laws forbidding the use of these, right?
No, but argueing that doing illegal stuff is fine, as long we all get our cut (the taxes are paid).
Btw, I did work in the bank industry too, and while most the people in there are not criminals, it's not exactly my favorite industry to work in.
Actually, many of the people who caused the current mess, did things that are illegal or at least a grey area.
But because the banking industry claims to be to important for the economy (perhaps. perhaps not), they managed to avoid the normal legal procedure for people (be they natural or companies) that cannot pay their bills. It's called bankruptcy, and every country do call it slightly differently, and the rules slightly change. But the rules often include a mandatory review for criminal behaviour. Guess it's more important for our politicians that certain people can get their bonuses, at the communities cost?
So what exactly makes bankers so special that their bonuses have to be paid by the public? Does that mean that if my private grocery shop promises 10 million $ bonuses for next year for the management, and I cannot pay them, I'll ask capitol hill to pay them for me?
To bad, these banks that claim that these are past bonuses that need payment. Well you cannot pay them, then you fill chapter XX, and that's it.
Sorry, that religious dogma that the free market will solve it all is BS.
Free market works when there is competition. For competition you need a low barrier of entry into the market. (Here you are right, warrenties, enviromental laws, patents,... do make the entry a little bit harder and they are government mandated.)
Car manufacturing is not a low entry market. You need quite a bit of capital before even the first sellable unit leaves your factory.
As an example for the need of regulations see the finance industry, although it's also an example how to much lobbying can destroy oversight:(
Well, actually the big chunk of Austria are thinly populated mountains.
According to the CIA factbook, ~15% of the land is arable (which probably includes also the mountain farmers that are basically surviving on EU subsidies).
Same source: urban population: 67% of total population (2008)
Now all GSM/UMTS licenses include a rule that forces the mobile carriers to offer service to over 90% (not sure about the exact values, they might even vary depending upon the license) of the population, so not offering the mountain population service is not an option.
That's probably more painful to some than others, e.g. 3 (drei.at) has no GSM license, so they have to fulfill their service requirements via UMTS that tend to need more base stations.
Ok, the problem is that nothing stops a judge from ordering an impossible.
And impossible is quite a gray area.
It starts from the legal problems (judge in country A orders company to commit crimes in country B, that could lead to fines or even jail times for the employees should the company comply, the US has this tendency to believe their law rules the world, privacy and data protection laws in other countries, who cares),
to the provable (mathematically) impossible, e.g. Mr MarkvW, hand over the decrypted content of/etc/shadow on your server? What that's impossible? Don't believe you. Guess I'll have to find you in contempt.
Yes the hard part for MS is to explain to their customer why they should upgrade to Win7 and not a non-MS solution.
For generic use, there are alternatives.
For many enterprise "grassroot" Office applications, even an upgrade to a new Office (XP => 2003) is a very hard thing with significant overhead.
So MS has to decide how much "pressure" to apply, so that people feel that they need to upgrade, but not in a way that they start to think about this periodic upgrade cycle.
Well, they have no legal necessity to support WinXP by default.
And I guess they won't be doing new support contracts (or only at prices that are not economical for the customer).
(One wonders about all these cool articles that the Navy is using Windows based systems => the one project I worked at with comparable systems implied that the vendor has to keep these running for 30 years. One wonders what's the plan for these, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that either the customer changed the contracts, or the vendors have sold something that they have not much chance to deliver.)
OTOH, there is this purely psychological aspect. If you try to force your customers, they might discover on what tight leash they are. If you yank to strongly, they might discover that any core IT system that is single-sourced has a builtin huge upgrade cost at the end-of-life of the product.
So basically MS is in a bad situation:
-) They can basically send very strong signals that customer have to abandon their WinXP world. -) But they have no way to make sure that their customer will go where they want them to go (see Vista).
Basically, the things that keep people incapable of moving to say Linux, also make it hard to move to Vista. Or Windows 7, which is mostly compatible with Vista, but incompatible in all these tiny things with WinXP.
(And I'm thinking about all these billions lines of source VBA written with one Office version that do not work reliably in a newer office version. That is really helped that developers cannot reliably install multiple versions of Office on one PC.)
It does not require an iframe. It's just that this way it's easier to hide any visual clues.
The basic hack works simple. It sets a different style for visited links. (As such it will only match exact URLs). And one of the cool things your style for visited links specifies is a background URL that works as a webbug.
Well, IPv6 is not necessarily a benefit, most VPNs require no configuration after initial setup, how does DHCP come into play for VPNs?
Cannot see how Direct Access or whatever can (or why it should) autoconfigure the underlying transport.
E.g. does Direct Access probe WLANs => guess this might be a rather illegal in some surisdictions.
How does Direct Access decide which path to use? (I've got depending upon the location and other details upstream via WLAN, via UMTS dongle, via tethering [Bluetooth, WLAN or USB]. Depending upon the situation multiple paths might be able to ping www.google.com, but some of the paths can be rather inacceptable, e.g. data roaming SIMs, and so on.)
Check the signature of your Linux image before installing it on the netbook.
While in theory the current crop of netbooks is capable of running Windows XP, Windows XP is all but optimized for this weak hardware.
Linux distributions, OTOH, do take the User Interface limitations seriously.
Plus, netbooks are not capable to do gaming. Here goes the #1 reason why people still run Windows. Netbooks are not used, usually yet, in Enterprises. Here goes the #2 reason (legacy WinXP software).
And for the intended use "surfing, mailing, chatting, perhaps a little text processing", modern Linux distributions bring all tools on board.
Some considerations, car cost include: -) value amortization. Any given car has a maximum lifetime in years and miles. -) maintenance costs. -) repair costs. -) insurance costs. -) parking costs. -) tolls, fees, taxes. -) gas costs.
Usually, it naturally depends upon what car you drive, your circumstances, local price levels and so on, gas costs are rather a small part of the total cost.
That are now European (Austrian/German which differ somewhat again) costs, but for typical new cars, gas costs where less than 20% of the total even last year where even Diesel was costing near two USD per liter (not gallon).
Another indication is how much the tax authorities pay per km: 0.30EUR per km. Now on my Passat station wagon, I'm needing at most 0,06EUR for the gasoline per km. So the tax office are accepting that 4 times the gas costs as other costs, and it's commonly known that you can operate at best a really small, really cheap car on the costs the tax office reinburses.
So assuming German costs: 15000miles are 24000km => 7200EUR ~ 9.6USD, and that's a minimum for a really small frugal car based on the tax authority rate. A Passat station wagon would be more than double this.
So public commuting is cheaper, and you gain (at least for long distance commuting) time to sleep/read/work on the train. You loose the time with your family.
The crux of this is, that in many places (and in almost the whole of North America I guess from my small sample of examples), it's not really feasible to commute by public transportation: direct connections (what's the point of commuting 2 hours by train for a 20 minute drive), around the hour sensible intervals (it might be ok to have to plan to get a specific train say between midnight and 5am. But all the other times I should expect that I can get to the station and hop on the next train without much delay), and so on.
Because they allowed (by default setting up admin accounts) for decades users to ignore the security model.
Furthermore, the security model is quite different, just because of the APIs involved.
E.g. things that come to mind even with my minimal Win32 knowledge:
EventLoop/PostMessage => you can make do other programs, no matter what user is running the program do things. (Consider the fact that most Linux systems allow way more innocent messages via X11 still do not run elevated root X11 apps)
RemoteThread creation. While not a direct security problem, read the MSDN description of TerminateThread, think a moment about it, and weep. That's the mentality of many Win32 APIs.
Combine that with the "undocumented" behaviour part, and you are in a world of pain. (Linux programs tend to rely on POSIX semantics, or at least defined and documented Linux extensions, not on app developer trying around till they get it to work.)
Well, you stupidly assume that going too www.sitea.com involves only sitea.com. You do not only rely on your browser sandbox, you do rely on sitea.com not to try something bad. Now guess, that implies that the owner of sitea.com does not get an unexpected new technical management (does not get hacked).
Furthermore there are nowadays quite a number of things a malicious site can do to your computer, starting with a DoS (by running some bad Javascript), going over installing stuff on your computer (usually by relying on some kind of embedded media [especially flash allows sick things]), or do sick 3rd party site attacks (e.g. many sites that use cookies for authentication, which was state of the art some years ago, are attackable this way),....
So your premise that the "browser is adequately sandboxed" is naive. Especially if you include attacks like tracking my behaviour (I do consider that an attack. Guess ad networks are IMHO attackers:-P).
E.g. ways to track an user:
-) cookies => can be dealt with builtin Firefox tools, allowing or disallowing cookies from sitea.com
-) non-expiring script URLs (only NoScript protects against that in most cases.)
-) flash cookies (again, NoScript protects against that in most cases.)
So dream on about how secure your sandbox is. *lol*
Well, you will find it funny, but the USA has a number of laws on the books that regulate stuff abroad.
E.g. US companies are forbidden to do business with Cuban citizens. Now the US applies this to subsidaries abroad.
Now many countries, e.g. the EU have anti-discrimination laws, that make it illegal to reject business based on the nationality of the customer.
Plus the EU have laws that makes it illegal to follow such "foreign" laws over the "local" ones.
As an example, when the BAWAG was acquired by Cerberus, they wanted to cancel all Cuban accounts, and where nearly fined for this, till the US authorities granted Cerberus the exemption so they could satisfy US and EU law.
yacc
"Free" netbooks (with mobile broadband contracts) have been around for months herearound (Austria to be specific, in Germany I've seen notebooks with lowered prices if combined with mobile contracts).
This might be news in the US, but probably only there.
Sorry, getting most out of my purchase is not increasing processing speed by a one-digit percentage (at best).
Getting most out of my purchase is being able to use it for 3 years with minimal maintenance.
(Considering the cost (directly in time, indirectly in lost revenue) of making a new box "mine", I tend to clone hdd content from an old disc to a newer one to keep the installation.)
I'm having a Azureus running all the time, and I do make SIP calls from my mobile, over the same WLAN that my laptop uses.
Hint: QoS on the router, and/or, you know even the first bittorrent client had a way to limit the upload rate.
Hint2: Manage your output queue. If you let bittorrent max out the output queue of your DSL/cable modem, well, bad luck.
To summarize, the author should get clue.
Some special gems:
> Now it is possible to solve this problem on the network level by prioritizing VoIP and gaming packets in the home DSL modem upload queue. > Unfortunately, I don't have administrative access to the modem and implementing VoIP or gaming prioritization on my home router seemed to have no > effect because there is nothing in the transmit queue of the home router since it connect to the DSL modem at 100 Mbps. Packets in the home > router get forwarded as soon as they arrive and there is nothing to reorder in the queue because there is nothing in the queue. More advanced > business-class routers like those from Cisco will allow you to configure the speed of the FastEthernet connection to match your DSL throughput so > that the queue will migrate from the DSL modem to the router but this isn't very practical for most people. So it would make sense for > application writers to try and make their application work as well as possible on the majority of home networks and broadband networks without > QoS.
Guess my Asus router is a business class router then. Hmmm, well, the upgraded Linux firmware then. Obviously, it's better to rewrite every network application that sends data to do a distributed QoS, than to do it on the router. Hmmm, did the author check how well Microsoft FTP client blocks the connection? Wouldn't that be an peachy subject line for your next article? "Microsoft FTP needs to be rewritten". Better yet, you know MS has these WEBDAV support? "MS Windows needs to be rewritten to not disturb my VoIP calls!"
Other cool subjects like "MS Networking needs to be rewritten because the author is to stupid to buy the right router and/or configure his router" come to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Worse, how do you decide what it is a mobile and what is a satnav?
Modern satnav devices are getting embedded mobiles so they can get map updates and other stuff.
So what happens if a satnav device allows the user to be used as phone?
What if you deactivate the mobile part? Does it need to be removed physically? What if you start using your laptop for navigation?
What about Maemo devices that are basically Internet panels, but which in their newest iteration (the N900) have got an mobile part embedded?
It's funny how people are trying to divide a field that is strongly converging. Plus my G1, has clearly a more userfriendly and easier to use interface than say the satnav embedded in my Audi. But nobody is writting explicit laws forbidding the use of these, right?
No, but argueing that doing illegal stuff is fine, as long we all get our cut (the taxes are paid).
Btw, I did work in the bank industry too, and while most the people in there are not criminals, it's not exactly my favorite industry to work in.
Actually, many of the people who caused the current mess, did things that are illegal or at least a grey area.
But because the banking industry claims to be to important for the economy (perhaps. perhaps not), they managed to avoid the normal legal procedure for people (be they natural or companies) that cannot pay their bills. It's called bankruptcy, and every country do call it slightly differently, and the rules slightly change. But the rules often include a mandatory review for criminal behaviour. Guess it's more important for our politicians that certain people can get their bonuses, at the communities cost?
So what exactly makes bankers so special that their bonuses have to be paid by the public? Does that mean that if my private grocery shop promises 10 million $ bonuses for next year for the management, and I cannot pay them, I'll ask capitol hill to pay them for me?
To bad, these banks that claim that these are past bonuses that need payment. Well you cannot pay them, then you fill chapter XX, and that's it.
So by this measure it would be okay to steal, as long the thief pays income tax on what he takes?
Sorry, that religious dogma that the free market will solve it all is BS.
Free market works when there is competition. For competition you need a low barrier of entry into the market. (Here you are right, warrenties, enviromental laws, patents, ... do make the entry a little bit harder and they are government mandated.)
Car manufacturing is not a low entry market. You need quite a bit of capital before even the first sellable unit leaves your factory.
As an example for the need of regulations see the finance industry, although it's also an example how to much lobbying can destroy oversight :(
Well, actually the big chunk of Austria are thinly populated mountains.
According to the CIA factbook, ~15% of the land is arable (which probably includes also the mountain farmers that are basically surviving on EU subsidies).
Same source: urban population: 67% of total population (2008)
Now all GSM/UMTS licenses include a rule that forces the mobile carriers to offer service to over 90% (not sure about the exact values, they might even vary depending upon the license) of the population, so not offering the mountain population service is not an option.
That's probably more painful to some than others, e.g. 3 (drei.at) has no GSM license, so they have to fulfill their service requirements via UMTS that tend to need more base stations.
yacc
Ok, the problem is that nothing stops a judge from ordering an impossible.
And impossible is quite a gray area.
It starts from the legal problems (judge in country A orders company to commit crimes in country B, that could lead to fines or even jail times for the employees should the company comply, the US has this tendency to believe their law rules the world, privacy and data protection laws in other countries, who cares),
to the provable (mathematically) impossible, e.g. Mr MarkvW, hand over the decrypted content of /etc/shadow on your server? What that's impossible? Don't believe you. Guess I'll have to find you in contempt.
Yes the hard part for MS is to explain to their customer why they should upgrade to Win7 and not a non-MS solution.
For generic use, there are alternatives.
For many enterprise "grassroot" Office applications, even an upgrade to a new Office (XP => 2003) is a very hard thing with significant overhead.
So MS has to decide how much "pressure" to apply, so that people feel that they need to upgrade, but not in a way that they start to think about this periodic upgrade cycle.
yacc
Well, they have no legal necessity to support WinXP by default.
And I guess they won't be doing new support contracts (or only at prices that are not economical for the customer).
(One wonders about all these cool articles that the Navy is using Windows based systems => the one project I worked at with comparable systems implied that the vendor has to keep these running for 30 years. One wonders what's the plan for these, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that either the customer changed the contracts, or the vendors have sold something that they have not much chance to deliver.)
OTOH, there is this purely psychological aspect. If you try to force your customers, they might discover on what tight leash they are. If you yank to strongly, they might discover that any core IT system that is single-sourced has a builtin huge upgrade cost at the end-of-life of the product.
So basically MS is in a bad situation:
-) They can basically send very strong signals that customer have to abandon their WinXP world.
-) But they have no way to make sure that their customer will go where they want them to go (see Vista).
Basically, the things that keep people incapable of moving to say Linux, also make it hard to move to Vista. Or Windows 7, which is mostly compatible with Vista, but incompatible in all these tiny things with WinXP.
(And I'm thinking about all these billions lines of source VBA written with one Office version that do not work reliably in a newer office version. That is really helped that developers cannot reliably install multiple versions of Office on one PC.)
yacc
Well, hidden might well turn off the complete processing.
OTOH, yes, I think there are a number of ways to hide the links with CSS (foreground == background comes to mind).
yacc
It does not require an iframe. It's just that this way it's easier to hide any visual clues.
The basic hack works simple. It sets a different style for visited links. (As such it will only match exact URLs). And one of the cool things your style for visited links specifies is a background URL that works as a webbug.
yacc
Deterministic behaviour => use reference counting. E.g. Python has it.
But the situation with C++ is not as rosy as you paint it.
E.g. there are no guarantee that destructors on static object will be called.
Nor are destructors called on longjmp.
Well, IPv6 is not necessarily a benefit, most VPNs require no configuration after initial setup, how does DHCP come into play for VPNs?
Cannot see how Direct Access or whatever can (or why it should) autoconfigure the underlying transport.
E.g. does Direct Access probe WLANs => guess this might be a rather illegal in some surisdictions.
How does Direct Access decide which path to use? (I've got depending upon the location and other details upstream via WLAN, via UMTS dongle, via tethering [Bluetooth, WLAN or USB]. Depending upon the situation multiple paths might be able to ping www.google.com, but some of the paths can be rather inacceptable, e.g. data roaming SIMs, and so on.)
Andreas
Check the signature of your Linux image before installing it on the netbook.
While in theory the current crop of netbooks is capable of running Windows XP,
Windows XP is all but optimized for this weak hardware.
Linux distributions, OTOH, do take the User Interface limitations seriously.
Plus, netbooks are not capable to do gaming. Here goes the #1 reason why people still run Windows.
Netbooks are not used, usually yet, in Enterprises. Here goes the #2 reason (legacy WinXP software).
And for the intended use "surfing, mailing, chatting, perhaps a little text processing", modern Linux distributions bring all tools on board.
Hi!
Some considerations, car cost include:
-) value amortization. Any given car has a maximum lifetime in years and miles.
-) maintenance costs.
-) repair costs.
-) insurance costs.
-) parking costs.
-) tolls, fees, taxes.
-) gas costs.
Usually, it naturally depends upon what car you drive, your circumstances, local price levels and so on, gas costs are rather a small part of the total cost.
That are now European (Austrian/German which differ somewhat again) costs, but for typical new cars, gas costs where less than 20% of the total even last year where even Diesel was costing near two USD per liter (not gallon).
Another indication is how much the tax authorities pay per km: 0.30EUR per km. Now on my Passat station wagon, I'm needing at most 0,06EUR for the gasoline per km. So the tax office are accepting that 4 times the gas costs as other costs, and it's commonly known that you can operate at best a really small, really cheap car on the costs the tax office reinburses.
So assuming German costs: 15000miles are 24000km => 7200EUR ~ 9.6USD, and that's a minimum for a really small frugal car based on the tax authority rate. A Passat station wagon would be more than double this.
So public commuting is cheaper, and you gain (at least for long distance commuting) time to sleep/read/work on the train. You loose the time with your family.
The crux of this is, that in many places (and in almost the whole of North America I guess from my small sample of examples), it's not really feasible to commute by public transportation: direct connections (what's the point of commuting 2 hours by train for a 20 minute drive), around the hour sensible intervals (it might be ok to have to plan to get a specific train say between midnight and 5am. But all the other times I should expect that I can get to the station and hop on the next train without much delay), and so on.
yacc
But in this case it's relative simple, and common, to require a minimum of deputies present.
Seems like the French national assembly does not have rules about minimum presence then ;)
Well, the problem is, that different kinds of creative works should probably have different time spans.
30 years might be okay for a song. 30 years for a Apple II game sounds somewhat inappropiate.
NoScript is not trouble, trivial to use. ;)
Well, the barn has already burnt down, you could manipulate process memory via Edit Controls and posted Messages for a long time.
Add the TIMER message, at voila execute code in the target process. Not as neat as WriteProcessMemory and a remote thread, but workable.
Because they allowed (by default setting up admin accounts) for decades users to ignore the security model.
Furthermore, the security model is quite different, just because of the APIs involved.
E.g. things that come to mind even with my minimal Win32 knowledge:
EventLoop/PostMessage => you can make do other programs, no matter what user is running the program do things. (Consider the fact that most Linux systems allow way more innocent messages via X11 still do not run elevated root X11 apps)
RemoteThread creation. While not a direct security problem, read the MSDN description of TerminateThread, think a moment about it, and weep. That's the mentality of many Win32 APIs.
Combine that with the "undocumented" behaviour part, and you are in a world of pain. (Linux programs tend to rely on POSIX semantics, or at least defined and documented Linux extensions, not on app developer trying around till they get it to work.)
Well, you stupidly assume that going too www.sitea.com involves only sitea.com. You do not only rely on your browser sandbox, you do rely on sitea.com not to try something bad. Now guess, that implies that the owner of sitea.com does not get an unexpected new technical management (does not get hacked). Furthermore there are nowadays quite a number of things a malicious site can do to your computer, starting with a DoS (by running some bad Javascript), going over installing stuff on your computer (usually by relying on some kind of embedded media [especially flash allows sick things]), or do sick 3rd party site attacks (e.g. many sites that use cookies for authentication, which was state of the art some years ago, are attackable this way), ....
So your premise that the "browser is adequately sandboxed" is naive. Especially if you include attacks like tracking my behaviour (I do consider that an attack. Guess ad networks are IMHO attackers :-P).
E.g. ways to track an user:
-) cookies => can be dealt with builtin Firefox tools, allowing or disallowing cookies from sitea.com
-) non-expiring script URLs (only NoScript protects against that in most cases.)
-) flash cookies (again, NoScript protects against that in most cases.)
So dream on about how secure your sandbox is. *lol*
Well, you will find it funny, but the USA has a number of laws on the books that regulate stuff abroad. E.g. US companies are forbidden to do business with Cuban citizens. Now the US applies this to subsidaries abroad. Now many countries, e.g. the EU have anti-discrimination laws, that make it illegal to reject business based on the nationality of the customer. Plus the EU have laws that makes it illegal to follow such "foreign" laws over the "local" ones. As an example, when the BAWAG was acquired by Cerberus, they wanted to cancel all Cuban accounts, and where nearly fined for this, till the US authorities granted Cerberus the exemption so they could satisfy US and EU law. yacc
"Free" netbooks (with mobile broadband contracts) have been around for months herearound (Austria to be specific, in Germany I've seen notebooks with lowered prices if combined with mobile contracts).
This might be news in the US, but probably only there.
yacc
Sorry, getting most out of my purchase is not increasing processing speed by a one-digit percentage (at best). Getting most out of my purchase is being able to use it for 3 years with minimal maintenance. (Considering the cost (directly in time, indirectly in lost revenue) of making a new box "mine", I tend to clone hdd content from an old disc to a newer one to keep the installation.)
Especially considering that skype2 works quite fine crossplatform Linux Vista, even when one side has only UMTS ;)
I'm having a Azureus running all the time, and I do make SIP calls from my mobile, over the same WLAN that my laptop uses.
Hint: QoS on the router, and/or, you know even the first bittorrent client had a way to limit the upload rate.
Hint2: Manage your output queue. If you let bittorrent max out the output queue of your DSL/cable modem, well, bad luck.
To summarize, the author should get clue.
Some special gems:
> Now it is possible to solve this problem on the network level by prioritizing VoIP and gaming packets in the home DSL modem upload queue.
> Unfortunately, I don't have administrative access to the modem and implementing VoIP or gaming prioritization on my home router seemed to have no
> effect because there is nothing in the transmit queue of the home router since it connect to the DSL modem at 100 Mbps. Packets in the home
> router get forwarded as soon as they arrive and there is nothing to reorder in the queue because there is nothing in the queue. More advanced
> business-class routers like those from Cisco will allow you to configure the speed of the FastEthernet connection to match your DSL throughput so
> that the queue will migrate from the DSL modem to the router but this isn't very practical for most people. So it would make sense for
> application writers to try and make their application work as well as possible on the majority of home networks and broadband networks without
> QoS.
Guess my Asus router is a business class router then. Hmmm, well, the upgraded Linux firmware then. Obviously, it's better to rewrite every network application that sends data to do a distributed QoS, than to do it on the router. Hmmm, did the author check how well Microsoft FTP client blocks the connection? Wouldn't that be an peachy subject line for your next article? "Microsoft FTP needs to be rewritten". Better yet, you know MS has these WEBDAV support? "MS Windows needs to be rewritten to not disturb my VoIP calls!"
Other cool subjects like "MS Networking needs to be rewritten because the author is to stupid to buy the right router and/or configure his router"
come to mind.
yacc143