Posts by Donn Bly
61 posts • joined Thursday 10th January 2008 23:21 GMT
Lets get this straight
The study looks at 11,944 papers. Of those, only 3894 endorsed anthropogenic global warming. Still, the study is used by some to say that there is a 97% consensus amongst scientists. No, there isn't. If we were going to count papers, we would have to say that the consensus is that there ISN'T a consensus. However, that wouldn't be an accurate statement. One would have to tabulate the AUTHORS of ALL of the papers (not just the ones that expressed an opinion) and discard any duplicates, and use those numbers to compute a consensus. All we really have is a study that says that 100% of the people who have published papers concluding that AGW exists believe that AGW exists, that 100% of the people who have published papers concluding that AGW doesn't exist believe that AGW doesn't exists, and that the vast majority of papers published do not draw a conclusion on AGW.
I'm not going to say whether AGW exists or not - I'm old enough to remember when climate scientists were using the same historical data to say that we were entering into another ice age, and enough of a realist to know that politicians and businessmen will spin any facts to achieve and support whatever their near-term goal happens to be at the moment.
Is the earth warming? Probably, and it probably has since the end of the last ice age - but decade by decade numbers may significantly vary from the historical average. Are glacier's shrinking? Well, as they are the product of an ice age, I would have expected them to start shrinking 10's of thousands of years ago. Did humans cause it? Probably not, since there weren't enough of us back then to initiate the process - about 4 million worldwide (less than half of the current population of London today) by most estimates. Are we accelerating it? It is certainly possible, though it seems that cattle introduce more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any human-built machinery - but since humans are the ones raising the cattle we can probably include those in the human-originated counts.
The reality is that there are more large non-human mammals and other animals on the planet today than there were 1000 years ago, just as there are more humans. We consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. Even if we turned off all machinery that introduces carbon into the atmosphere, and stopped building fires for heat and cooking, the reduction of CO2 being introduced would not be enough to turn the tide against the projections made based on the current "accepted" models. Even if we decided that euthanize half of the human populations "for the good of future generations" it wouldn't be enough - we would have to kill off non-human populations too and even then it may not be enough.
So, it comes down to whether you choose to believe the models or not. I choose to believe that the models are wrong, that they don't take into account enough of the negative feedbacks to produce an accurate picture - and because NOBODY is saying what the optimum temperature of the earth is, or whether we are above or below it. If we are above it, we are screwed, if we are below it, then why are we trying to stop it?
That does not mean that I choose to ignore climate change - I think that it should be studied, but that the emphasis should probably be on figuring out the best ways to help the human population of the planet adapt to the inevitable if the models are proven right, because there is NO WAY that you are going to get the human population to give up all of their modern energy-guzzling appliances.
Go ahead and flame me, downvote me, or whatever - but it still won't change anything. The study of climate change today has moved from an ecological movement of socially conscious people into a money and power grab by the corrupt. Go ahead and fine the companies that emit carbon - but then ask where the money goes, and where it comes from. In the end, it comes from our pockets, and into theirs, with "they" being a diverse mixture of businessmen and politicians who really don't care about the climate as much as they care about their bank statements.
re: possessing-a-gun-makes-you-less-safe-not-more-safe
The biggest problem with that article is that, in the vernacular popular in the UK, "pure and utter bollocks".
Unfortunately, on multiple occasions I have had to use a firearm to defend myself or those with whom I live. I will never forget how scared I was the first time - but even though I was injured I was able to defend my roommate and prevent a murder while I waited for police to arrive. There are many problems with the statistics that they chose to use, but one of the problems is that no statistics are kept on how often a firearm in the hands of a law abiding citizen are used to diffuse or deescalate a situation. You have to realize that most of the time no weapon is even fired. The mere display of a weapon is often enough to stop an aggressor in their tracks and turn tail and run, and in those cases the counts are not considered when tabulating gun violence.
Is someone more likely to be shot in a home that has a firearm? Perhaps, just as someone who rides in a car is more likely to die in an auto accident than someone who doesn't. It just isn't an accurate measure of safety.
Now, as to the plans being forced offline... it is unfortunate that our senators and congressmen are so out of touch with the "common man" and reality that they don't know that someone can walk into a home improvement store or well-stocked hardware store and for less money than the cost of plastic to print the "liberator" they can walk out with everything that they need to build a reloadable single-shot firearm, including the necessary explosive charges, propellant, and suitable projectiles - and that such a weapon would be smaller and easier to conceal than the "liberator". Instead, some of them actually believe that if you take a bullet and wrap it in a metal case that it will be able to pass through a metal detector undetected (I'm not kidding -- I wasn't sure to laugh or cry when New York Senator Schumer gave a radio interview about it today)
Re: "And it certainly didn't negatively impact DVD sales." YES IT DID
"Yes it did?" No, even in your case it did not negatively impact DVD sales - because you would not have gone out and bought the DVD of the movies anyway.
Timeline is a generic term
I am surprised that this has gone as far as it has, but in a way I am not. There is no way that you can argue that timeline is not a generic term. It has been used to describe the order of chronological events since well before I was born. TimeLines Inc. own filing uses "timeline" as a generic term,
It is also clear that TimeLines Inc. changed their website after filing the case, but their "explanation" that they had initially used the word "timeline" in titles for Search Engine Optimization, and then later removed it after filing the case because it wasn't beneficial any longer - is laughable. It isn't even thinly veiled deceit, it is transparent. Even if taken at their word, they are admitting that "timeline" was a generic term that people were searching for and that they were trying to capture that traffic - which shoots the basis of their legal case in the foot.
They are trying to say that web-based software and stand-alone software are a different class, and that "Timeline" in one does not infringe upon the other (so that they can explain away the multitude of other companies that have dynamic, software-based timeline products) - but if that were the case then I could create "word.com" and sell online word processing and not be in conflict with Microsoft's trademark on Word the software product - I don't think that would fly very far, and rightfully so.
So, as much as Facebook probably needs one of those "punches in the face", in this case timeline, with their $87K of ad revenue over 5 years, needs to realize that Facebook ISN'T going to be their large payday and exit strategy.
Re: It's not stealing in the first place
No, it isn't like them having a zoom lens pointed to the second floor, it is like your daughter running naked down the street and the neighbor kids caught it on their cell phones - and they didn't even show it to their friends or upload it to facebook, but just deleted it instead.
The real problem here is that no CRIME has been committed, and most police cars these days are equipped with equipment just as capable - heck, most SMARTPHONES are just as capable of sniffing and recording the traffic. There are plenty of reasons to hate google - this isn't one of them.
Re: Bing Maps are Nokia/Navteq Maps
TomTom Hate? No, more like TomTom disgust. I don't have an iPhone and have no inclination to get one, but I am the unfortunate owner of a TomTom. I have found their maps to be so inaccurate, and their update service so pathetic, that a few months ago I walked into a store and bought a competing product. When talking to the sales girl, I told her that my first and foremost requirement would be that it not be a TomTom, because I am tired of driving down U.S. Highways that have been around for years and have it yelling at me to get out of the cornfield.
Posted in GoDaddy stopped by massive DDoS attack
Re: Soon to do the Perp Walk
> BTW, does GoDaddy really have "millions" of websites? I'd like to see the real numbers.
ns08.domaincontrol.com, one of the GoDaddy name servers taken down by the attack that I monitored because it had several of my client's domains on it, runs the authoritative DNS for over 33.9 million domain names. Actually, since you want "real" numbers, the count is 33,919,902 as of today.... of course, I expect that number to fall a little as people switch away.
Posted in GoDaddy stopped by massive DDoS attack
Re: Stop playing the blame game, and consider what has happened
@Lewis R
> Even sites registered with GD but using off-site DNS would have been impacted,
> as without access to the point of delegation (registrar), eventually, the DNS
> cache would have expired and nobody would know *who* the authoritative
> nameservers *were* for such sites.
Sorry, DNS doesn't work that way. Once your nameserver change has been submitted it goes to the root, and it never comes back to the submitting registrar. You are confusing DNS with WHOIS. In DNS, the root zone file contains EVERY domain, the name servers assigned, and even glue records which contain the IP addresses of those servers if the servers are under your own domain and are set up properly.
Re: one rule...
The first question that should be asked is if Thompson has ever claimed to have a degree in computer science. Right now all we have is that SOMEONE at one point said that he had the degree, but I have never seen any evidence that Thompson himself said it.
After all, just because someone puts it in Wikipedia, or on some bio page somewhere, doesn't mean that it is true or that Thompson had anything to do with it.
Re: When delete actually means delete.
Lets be honest here - the Government WANTS Facebook to track information, in fact it FORCES Facebook and other providers to track identifying information, presumably so that it could be turned over to the government upon request and/or subpoena. Even if Facebook wanted to (and I'm sure that they don't, as with the absence of the information they wouldn't be able to provide any positive defense if taken to court) they wouldn't be allowed.
The public has to realize that Government privacy watchdogs are talking out of both sides of their mouths. That as much as they pretend to be on the side of the consumer, their job is really to make sure that the Government has access to whatever information they want, on anybody they want, whenever and wherever they want - because it is through that information that they preserve and extend their hold on power - and if they can prevent someone else to have access to that information (the public themselves, advertising companies, etc.) so much the better because it gives them a monopoly.
I don't like it either, and I would love to be able to selectively remove things from an audit log, comments made in the heat of the moment, etc. - but it's just not going to happen.
So, letting you see what they have on you - permissible. Letting you permanently delete it? Big Brother wouldn't allow that.
Actually, the police were called because some students WEREN'T offended by the word fuck, but WERE offended by the mis-application of the the computer use policy which led to the expulsion of a student who had engaged in a legal activity while at home using his own equipment.
Re: To far
This is a story that hits close to home - Literally, as the school is a only a few miles from here and I've been following the story for over a week.. He posted the tweet from his home computer at 3 am, not from a school computer. When he had later logged into his twitter account at school the filtering software did a grab of what had been previously posted. This principle of the school already admitted that their software does this.
A controversy being whipped up by misrepresenting the facts? No. Someone who has NO knowledge of the facts, falsely calling someone a lier? Most definitely.
There is much more to the story, such as the principle using automated dialing equipment to call EVERY STUDENT, and EVERY PARENT to inform them that ANY student who does anything to support or protest the expelled student, even so much as sponsoring a facebook page to discuss the issue, was grounds for expulsion. Oh, and he called them all TWICE just to make sure that they got the message.
Re: Not writting it off....
WiFi, Mobile Data, and Smartmeters have a much lower transmit power than Satellites (which have half a kilowatt ERP), but you don't sleep next to the Satellites (or, at least, I don't - I can't vouch for Giles) and by the time they reach your roof you are looking at an RSSI of around -155 dBW - barely above noise floor.
I haven't heard or read anything about what frequencies and transmit power the smart meters are using - but I also haven't been looking. I have read that many of the manufacturers of Smart Meters have already exited the market because they foresee it as being unprofitable.
In WiFi, the maximum output power is less than the amount of allowable leakage around the seal of of a Microwave Oven (which is why your WiFi drops out every time you fire it up).
Personally, I am of a mindset that the power company should not be able to tell me what I can and cannot do with the power that I purchase from them. It is their responsibility to project estimated peak loads and be able to handle them. If they can't, certainly don't want them to be able to remotely shut down the air conditioning and have my servers fry because they overheat. I would rather that the grid goes dark and have everything go to backup generator.
Circular? I don't think so
It's been awhile since I did any serious wireless engineering, but the purpose of a parabolic reflector is to concentrate the signal, and to me it looks like the only thing that they accomplished was to detune the reflector and disperse the signal.
@Ian Yates
I was just on a US domestic flight last weekend between two "international" airports, checked two bags, both with identical TSA-approved locks. Only one bag still had a lock on it when I picked them up at baggage claim.
The locks are a joke.
Posted in US shoots down key Rambus patent
@Giles Jones
Actually, if all patents were destroyed, the people that would loose the most money are the people and companies who INVENTED things. While often misused, the misused patents form only a very small percentage of the total patent group, much less than 1% of the total - and those are primarily "software patents" (which, In my opinion, as a class probably should be eliminated, as they aren't products or true business processes).
Patents do have a valid purpose - unless you feel that you should be able to use someone else's idea and work without compensation, and that you should be able to take a product that someone else spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop, duplicate it, and sell it as your own. If that is the case, you have other problems that are unrelated to patents.
Posted in Yahoo! cofounder! Jerry! Yang! quits!
@Shannon Jacobs
Really? I can think of a lot of things in which I could find fault at Yahoo, but I still have a yahoo account and I can't remember the last time that a spam message made it through the filters and ended up in my inbox. Probably less than 5 messages total in the last 3 years. I have found their anti-spam to be significantly BETTER than Gmail's.
Posted in Worm spreads via RDP
@martin 62
Not to rain a good rant, but RDP is NOT enabled by default.
While turning off unnecessary services is always a good idea to reduce your exposure to attack, and I certainly encourage anybody who doesn't need it to turn it off, another way to prevent your machines from being infected by this worm is to be current in your patches. This particular hole was patched in MS11-065, which was released weeks ago.
re: Opening themselves up a bit
While anybody can sue anybody for anything, they are probably pretty safe. The plug-in isn't installed or enabled by default, and theoretically the only people using it are those with technical knowledge who know the repercussions of using it - and who agree to the hold-harmless agreement when they install it.
It's much LESS a case of libel then the false positives from an antivirus vendors for websites and applications that aren't malicious. Vendors like AVG are notorious for flagging simple javascript such as that which obscures email addresses from spammers scraping for addresses as viruses, and don't respond to those who report it.
Posted in Hot bodies get super-slippery when wet
Would it really work for a floating vessel?
Not that this is my area of expertise, but wouldn't creating a gas layer under a floating vessel cause the vessel to fall into that void, eliminating its buoyancy?
Posted in Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!
@sisk re: Officials don't raise waning levels in response to public fear
you said: "#1) Officials don't raise warning levels in response to public fear. Doing so would be counter productive. Nor do they do so because they're being 'badgered'."
Uh, I hate to burst your bubble, but yes, they do. A "warning level" - is often a political device used by governments to get people to do things that they wouldn't normally do, or to fund things that they wouldn't normally fund.
It goes along with the old adage about "How do you know a politician is lying? Because his lips are moving."
If "conventional wisdom" says that there is a threat, government officials must react to the perceived threat whether it exists or not, otherwise they face being replaced in the next election.
This judge is an idiot
Any privileged information that I provide under cover of a privacy agreement, such as my email address, telephone number, or credit card info - is PRIVATE information. For a judge to claim that because I voluntarily provided this information freely to a service provider such as twitter for the purpose of creating or maintaining an account that I can no longer have an expectation of privacy is JUST PLAIN WRONG.
Carried to its logical conclusion, this judge is now saying that all privacy agreements are now contractually worthless and without basis.
Posted in EC parades common phone charger
@mccp re: Lucky
You must be (un)lucky indeed - as I have 4 different Hp/Compaq laptops between me and the kids here at the house, ranging in age from 2 months old to 5 years old, and all of them use the same interchangeable wall chargers.
Re Interesting
> Fact: wikileaks.info is on a server known to be infested
Actually, that is a FALSE statement. Just because an ISP has one infected server, or even caters to malware distributors, does not mean that all of the servers housed at that ISP are infected.
There is absolutely no indication that the web site there is any more dangerous to visit than any other website - NONE WHATSOEVER - thus the real purpose of the announcement from Spamhaus was for Spamhaus to get some free publicity on the coattails of the WikiLeaks scandal.
@Ralph 5
It appears that you never do any shopping at a supermarket. I walk into my local supermarket and purchase the newspaper, which includes all sorts of advertising and coupons for the competitors of that supermarket. That, friend, is business as usual.
Now, if that supermarket told the local newspaper publisher that they would have to print and distribute special versions of the newspaper that didn't contain any mention or advertising of the market's competitors, then it would be different -- and newsworthy -- just as it is newsworthy that Apple has apparently decided that an iPad application (Note: PAD not PHONE) that discusses a platform that competes with their other products cannot be installed on ANY of their devices.
For most people, iTunes is the only way they have of installing apps - and Apple goes out of their way to keep it that way even so far as to unsuccessfully trying to make it a CRIMINAL offense to install something that doesn't go through iTunes. For Apple to say that on a device that they market and sell as an e-book reader that the user may not read a publication that discusses Apple's competition... well, it would seem to me as an abuse of their monopoly powers, censorship, and perhaps even false advertising.
Posted in US may disable all in-car mobile phones
Just another politition trying to self-justify his position
Just another politician trying to self-justify his position, and in the process proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is incompetent.
In the same time period when cellular phones, especially small, hand-held versions, have been increasing at an almost exponential level in the United States, and the number of miles driven has increased, the number of fatal accidents during the same time has actually DECREASED. As such, if there is a cause/effect relation to be obtained, it is that the cellular phones aren't a significant factor.
At the same time, there have been numerous studies and anecdotal reports from emergency services how the extra phones in civilian hand have saved lives time and time again by people able to report accidents faster getting emergency services there faster, being able to provide emergency communications on-scene, etc.
In short, Ray LaHood is an just another incompetent idiot trying to fatten himself on the public dole.
@Giles Jones
You are right in that most people (geeks and non-geeks alike) just want to be able to pick up a device and use it -- but it is pretty far reaching to say that they don't want their phone to be radically different than their tablet.
That's like saying that they don't want their microwave oven to be different than their phone.
I think that I'm like most people that if I'm using a portable computer that I want it to be a computer -- not a phone with all of its inherent limitations.. If I want a phone, I pick up the phone, not a tablet.
Inexpensive Alternative
Immersing the item in a bowl of dry, uncooked rice would seem like a less expensive and equally effective alternative.
Shocker?
Why is is a "Shocker" that a web application would have the username and password of the database into which it is inserting data?
It isn't shill bidding
Shill Bidding is when someone bids on an auction to drive up the price, with no intention to pay, for the purpose of making someone else pay more. That is not what is happening here. The situation would be closer to having a reserve on an auction item, saying that I've got 5 items, putting a reserve price on one of them and not telling you the reserve price before or after the auction.
Does Google have inside information on how their system works? Of course, that fact should be obvious to anyone.
Is it in any way a conflict of interest to advertise on your own network? No. It is stupid to ignore your own network and place ads on your competitors networks.
If there are 5 ads, and even if google bids so high on their own auction that they are first, that still leaves 4 remaining slots for other advertisers, and their placement within those four or the amount spent is not affected.
All that happens with the taking one of the slots is that a scarcity of resources situation can develop, where the demand exceeds supply. What happens in those cases? In a free market, the costs rise.
If all of this were done in secret, there might be a story. However, every advertiser that competed with Google on their own network knew exactly what they were doing. They voluntarily entered into agreements with Google knowing that there would be competition.
There is no story here.
@Nick Pettefar - I call your bluff
I have an E71 in my hands - and no matter how I hold it, in either hand, gripping it lightly or with a death grip, I can't make it lower it's signal strength. I don't know what you are doing, but I can't duplicate it.
And you hate your E71 as compared to your iPod touch? One is a phone with a 2-year-old design, the other is an media player and game platform. The E71 does what it was designed to do, is VERY durable, and does it reasonably well. Your iPod also does what it was designed to do reasonably well -- but they do two different things and are aimed at two totally different markets. At least the E71 can play MP3's, can the iPod make calls on a cellular network?
Posted in Scotland Yard mulls Google Wi-Fi slurp
re: VMax
You mean to tell us that you have never created a subset of a database table for testing and never copied more fields than you needed? or that you have never accidentally written data to the wrong output stream? or that you have ever written the WRONG data to the output stream? Nobody who has done any meaningful data manipulation or extraction can truthfully claim that.
It is common practice when dissecting a packet or record to break it into all known fields or pieces, even if not all fields are needed at the end. Usually this is done because at the time that piece of code is written it is not known which fields are going to be needed, or because a canned routine has already been written which breaks the packet or record apart and it is just being re-used. To include more data than what is needed is usually considered better than including less data - because you can always drop the extra, unneeded data from the collection later if you don't need it - whereas you would have to completely start over if you don't extract enough in the beginning.
It is really no different than doing a "SELECT * FROM" in a SQL table instead of specifying the fields. Sure, it is a shortcut and it may not be the most efficient use of computing resources, but it may be a more efficient use of HUMAN resources. In the real world there are many times when efficiency of code is irrelevant. Example: who cares if an optimized routine can process 10,000 packets a second instead of 9,000 from an unoptimized routine, if the data is only being collected at 5 packets per second and is being analyzed in real-time?
Posted in Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up
People will always find a reason to complain
The software works for the intended market - home users with a "small" amount of data -- with "small" of course being a relative term -- but considering the largest hard drives just a few years ago were less than 250 gig it doesn't seem like an unreasonable trade-off for a "free" backup option.
Are people going to complain next that notepad doesn't do bold and underlining? Come on folks, use the right application for the job. If you are a computer enthusiast with a large amount of data then the native backup utility probably isn't for you and there are lots of alternatives -- (but then, if you are a computer enthusiast with a large amount of data you probably wouldn't be storing it on a single, internal hard drive on a windows machine either....)
Has anybody else read the patents?
I started reading - and stopped after the first one when I realized that they "patented" any form of dynamic HTML that is used for navigation, if that dynamic HTML provides (1) more than one navigation option (2) the navigation is displayed on a hover and (3) the dynamic HTML was created by using a java class - which pretty much covers most of the drop-down navigation menus on the web**
I'm not an anti-Microsoft bigot - I often come down on the side of Microsoft in these spats, but this patent is pure and utter crap. Basically they are saying that any website created with any kind of WYSIWYG editor is infringing.
** personally, I prefer to deploy my dropdown menus using CSS, but there are some advanced things that you just have to use JavaScript to do efficiently.
Re: Shadows
The shadows are consistent.
The light source (Sun) is in roughly the 4 o'clock position in relation to the photograph, thus the lander, being higher than the surrounding area, casts a shadow points towards the 10 o'clock position. Most of the other shadows are being created by craters, which are LOWER than the surrounding area, so their shadows are being created by the crater rims and are cast in the same direction as the lunar lander's.
On the other side of the coin...
.. now all of the ISP's that block port 25 outgoing traffic to prevent the spread of spam from their residential, dynamic IP customers can now do so legally without fear of government retribution. Prior to this ruling, blocking such traffic was a technical violation of the net neutrality edict, and while every sane person agrees that it is justified, it is still a violation of "net neutrality"
Posted in VMware opens up Workstation 7.1 beta
@Frozen Ghost
Why limit? Well, at the very least because the overhead of the extra address space would reduce performance for most people who wouldn't need it. Quite honestly, If you need more than 32 GB of RAM in a DESKTOP you probably aren't in the market for virtualized machines, and if you need more than 2TB of disk in a single partition then you should be looking at a SAN before being concerned about whether your desktop virtualization platform could handle it internally.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out
From what I have been able to gather, this guy isn't your normal run-of-the-mill wacko. He apparently owns multiple companies, is involved in venture funding, and may even be a former employee of New York Life.
He made an investment with New York Life that didn't live up to promises - like most investments over the last couple of years he probably lost money. He demands that they return the money that he invested. They refuse. He then says that he will say unflattering things about them in a very public way and that millions of people will hear about it unless they return his money (with triple damages, down to the penny).
He was right. Now instead of a drop-in-the-bucket spam campaign, thousands of news websites around the world have picked up the story. My guess is that he was rather careful with his comments and didn't publish anything that wasn't true.
All that has to happen now is for a pre-arrest copy of his website be "leaked" to Wikileaks or similar and every news agency in the world will be linking to it and distributing it further. Since someone has probably cached or copied it, he doesn't even have to do it himself.
According to the FBI, the reason they moved forward is that the amount of money that he demanded was larger than the alleged grievance - not that he had threatened to send a bunch of spam. After all, they couldn't charge him with violating the can-spam act if he hadn't gotten around to sending anything.
It almost seems like he planned it this way, taunting them and daring them to take the bait. Now we will see if they can swallow it, or whether he has caught himself in his own trap.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I personally have multiple investments with New York Life. My NYL adviser was very clear on the risks involved when I signed up, and I had to sign statements showing that I had read the disclosures. I'm sure that he signed similar paperwork, whether he remembers it or not. He probably doesn't have a leg to stand on as far as getting his money back -- unless he has some incriminating document promising something that should never have been promised.
@Fred Mbogo
Of course I realize that OEM’s buy the majority of the licenses – but do you realize that when the OEM buys the OEM license they also agree to provide all end-user support for the operating system? THAT is why Microsoft's “idiotic script jockeys” told the users to call you – because your employer had contractually accepted that responsibility when they bought the license at the discounted rate, as a condition of getting that discounted rate.
If your employer had followed the System Builder deployment instructions, instead of trying to take shortcuts, then there wouldn’t have been problems. Instead, your employer took shortcuts, sold machines with poor or broken windows installs, and when the machines broke the customers were hurt.
Of course, Microsoft shouldn’t have told people that you would issue new keys, and It doesn’t surprise me that you and the rest of the techs over there laid the blame at the feet of Microsoft -- after all, your employer isn’t going to give you the full story and let you admit to customers that they are at fault.
Microsoft certainly has their faults, but having looked at the bigger picture for so many years and been involved in so many root-cause investigations I have found that most of the time when people blame Microsoft they do it not because Microsoft is truly at fault, it is just that they don’t know who else to blame and Microsoft is a convenient scapegoat.
A good analogy here is paint. Let’s say you take your car to a body shop for a paint job. When the paint starts to flake off of your car prematurely and it starts to rust, who is at fault? Most (customers and body shops) would blame the company that made the paint. But if the body shop who sprayed it onto the car decided to take shortcuts and didn’t use the recommended primer, didn’t mix the paint properly, or didn’t leave the parts in the dryer long enough, then it doesn’t matter how good the paint was when it left the manufacturer – the application is going to fail. If the same batch of paint went to multiple body shops, and it only fails at some of them, you have to realize that it might not be the paint.
In this case, the same OS went to multiple vendors, and not all vendors had problems. Just something to consider...
@Dana W, Old Fart
@Dana W
Thank you for proving one of my points - that you don't HAVE to run windows - however you are delusional if you think that most of the readers here don't run Windows. We are mostly professionals, so while we may have and prefer other platforms that also means that we have to know and use the same software and platforms as the users that we support - and that means that most of us have to run Windows in order to run at least some of those applications.
@Old Fart
You are mistaking the poorly-constructed OEM system loads with a real windows installation. I too sold "name brand" systems - but unlike the box stores we had to SUPPORT the equipment. Until a few years ago I owned a warranty service center for HP, Compaq, IBM, Lenovo, and a few other brands - so in addition to the stuff we sold we also had to service and support a lot of the stuff that the box stores sold. For the most part, those initial loads were crap filled with lots of poorly-written and non-Microsoft products. HP was exceptionally bad, sending out AMD-based machines with Intel power-management drivers, which of course caused failures when SP3 tried to update the installed driver base. Was this a Microsoft failure? No, it was a failure of the OEM who built the unit.
If WGA failed on those system when the hit the sales floor, then chances are those systems were hosed before you ever got them.
Those who complain
The biggest complainers about license authentication, whether it is WG, the new WAT, or any of other methods used by third party applications - are from people who are using stolen software because it makes it harder for them to “uSe tH3iR WaReZ”. Microsoft could care less, they aren’t paying customers. If it causes one of them to pay up it is money in the bank. If a causes computer store to stop loading pirated copies on the machines that they sell it’s even better.
The second biggest block are people who haven’t had a personal experience with it causing problems, but have read online the horror stories and are afraid of it. That includes EVERYONE here who complains about WAT.
The third biggest block is people who have valid licenses, but have installed something dodgy on their system which breaks the updates. Is it Microsoft’s fault that you had to click on that popup and download that software to your computer which installed itself in such a way that it breaks the Microsoft Installer? Is it Microsoft’s fault that your company decided to load up one machine and clone the hard drive hundreds of times without properly resetting the SIDs?
If you have installed something on the computer that doesn’t conform to the published installation methodology, then it is YOUR fault, not theirs when an OS upgrade or enhancement breaks the system.
Nobody is forcing you to use Windows. You use Windows because you want to, or because the application that you want to use requires it. If you use Windows, nobody forces you to run the updates. Sure, if you don’t your system will be pwned by some script kiddie - but it is your choice and your fault for going to those kids of sites….
Have I seen WGA cause problems on computers? Sure, just about everyone in the industry has. Have I ever seen it cause a problem on with a legitimate licensed copy? Yes – but every one of those systems had been otherwise compromised before WGA ever got to it and needed to be disinfected and reloaded anyway.
As for those who say that they won’t go to Windows 7 because of it – you are delusional. People don’t run operating systems, they run applications. Your operating system is chosen by your choice of applications. Either you have applications that require it and you will run it, or you don’t.
re: AC @ 16:53 - Real World
If the real world analogy is illegal product dumping, then the same case can be made for EVERY website on the internet that does not charge you to access it.
The Reg doesn't charge you to access it's articles, and host a paper rag does. Since it and it obviously costs something to produce and host the content , it follows that The Reg is "Dumping" their product, and is engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior - at least according to the definition that you are applying to Google.
Any other website that provides content for free (most of the internet) would run afoul of the same problems.
The reality is that giving stuff away for free or below cost in the brick and mortar world is called "Loss Leading". It is a well-established, consumer-friendly way for a company to gain prospective clients or increase market share.
If Loss Leading didn't exist and wasn't accepted, your "free" cell phone would have cost you $600+ at signup. Instead, by selling the phones at a loss or giving them away the cell carriers were able to increase market penetration with the intention of making up the loss on the back end of the contract.
Google wasn't the first to provide online Mapping, and they are not the best ones in the marketplace, but they provide the service as a loss leader to get you into trying their other services. If you run a mapping service and don't like it, well, you can either throw a tantrum or produce a product that gives the consumer a better value. We can see what the competition did here.
I'm not trying to support Google here - I am trying to support a free Internet, where people can provide or share their content for free if they so desire. If you want to post your vacation pictures online and let others use them, then you shouldn't be sued by stock photography companies because your free picture of an empty beach competes with their ability to sell someone a picture of the same beach.
Botnets don't push physical products
One needs to realize that botnets don't push physical products. While there are a few "legit" online pharmacies out there (in that they ship you a product, not that they are actually legal) the vast and overwhelming majority of them that are advertised via spam don't ship products - they make their money from phishing your personal information and credit card numbers and reselling it. Identity Theft is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Of the ones that do ship products, they are shutting those down too. If they sell the drugs without a prescription they get shut down for violating those laws, and if they try to get around it by having "company doctors" write the prescription, the DOCTORS are getting busted, losing their licenses and some even seeing jail time.
Posted in MS dismisses IIS zero-day bug reports
re: AC @ 16:17
I don’t think that MS is being disingenuous, and I think that it is you that are missing the point.
In order for this bug to be exploited, a wannabe-webmaster must create a folder, give web users read, write, and EXECUTE permissions, create an upload facility (MS doesn’t provide one), allow web users to upload files into that folder, AND give the web user the ability to name the file that goes into the folder.
None of these are default conditions, each of them must be explicitly set by a developer or server administrator.
The reality is that if a web admin creates that set of conditions, they are just asking for their server to be compromised, and it doesn’t matter what operating system or web server is used.
If the same thing is done on Linux, where a webmaster gives 777 rights to a folder, then creates a php app that allows users to upload files into that folder, then they are in the same situation.
If this is a seatbelt/airbag analogy, then the analogy is that the web admin has removed the doors and airbag, disconnected the brakes, and turned a teenager loose with the car in a demolition derby with only the seatbelt to protect them.
This is really a non-issue
First, ASP in and of itself, as supplied by microsoft, doesn't even HAVE a file upload capability. As such, any such file upload module would have be be supplied by the web developer. If the developer doesn't sanity-check input fields even do a simple regex to strip invalid characters, then they aren't much of a developer. If they are writing files to directories where the IIS Anonymous user has execute permissions, then they aren't much of a developer. In either case, the security problem is not Microsoft's but in fact the developer's - just as most LAMP sites that are hacked are because the DEVELOPER left holes, not in the framework itself.
From what I can see from the reports (and I will be testing this week to confirm) is that the parsing mechanism that IIS uses to determine what ISAPI filters may be broken. If so, that is the extent of the bug in IIS, and it isn't a security issue but a fitness-for-purpose issue.
The fact that it has apparently had this bug for over 10 years and nobody has run across it before should tell you something about the level of brain-deadness a developer must have before it can be triggered.
self-regulation scheme a non-starter
While raising awareness is a good thing, Seciliano’s argument that a “self-regulation scheme” is needed is a non-starter. In the USA the backend processors of payment cards can be counted on one hand and they have the clout to enforce standards to those downlevel to them – whereas with ATM’s you have THOUSANDS of banks.
Even at that, the strictest requirements that any self-regulation could put in place would do absolutely nothing to stop criminals from applying their trade. They are already committing federal crimes, why would they have even the slightest concern about following some trade organization’s guidelines?
While the government _COULD_ put in some regulations on ATM’s that have some teeth, previous attempts in congress have been shot down because the lawmakers misunderstand WHY there are so many independent ATMs out there – the answer to which is actually simple: People want convenience and they are more than willing to pay extra for the service, even while they complain about it.
When it comes to independent ATMs you take your chances – I certainly don’t use them.
Attempts to regulate them will drive up the costs, which will be directly passed on to the consumer causing even more grief. When the costs get too high and people stop using them, the independent operators will exit the business and the proliferation of ATM’s across the small stores, gas stations, bars, etc. will cease and people will have to actually go to the bank to transact their banking business again. I don’t see that as a bad thing, but now that many banks even charge “teller fees” if you go to a teller window people are still going to complain about the added costs and inconvenience.
Posted in HP 3015d mono laser
"No Ethernet" is not a serious complaint
Alistair - I think that you have completely missed the boat with the "No Ethernet" complaint. There are three base models in the 3015d series, and you manage to review the ONLY ONE that doesn't have an Ethernet port.
Not every business situation warrants having an Ethernet port in the printer, and I have deployed quite a few workgroup printers in the past couple of years that attached to the network wirelessly (and in HP's case, wirelessly means attaching a EW2400 via the USB port that you also questioned)
While I do admit that the price is a bit on the high side, if the application is on-demand printing of prepared forms and documents it can be less expensive in both dollars and floor space to deploy one of these than a less expensive printer AND a companion computer to hold the forms. It's not a large market - but it is a market that that is addressed with this printer.
@Chris Cartledge on Electricity Consumption
You might want to consider that a company does not spend this much money on a printer with a maximum duty cycle of 100,000 pages per month for it to sit in power save mode all day. Typically, the printer will either be actively printing or in standby waiting for the next print job - and it is going to be less than 30 minutes before the next print job. Given that the average business that uses this type of printer is open more than 15 hours a day, your assumption that the printer will spend the majority of time in sleep mode might need some reconsideration.
Posted in Samsung N110
Don't throw stones until you've used it
Unlike some of the other posters here who complain about the glossy screen and the cost of this unit, I would like to offer a perspective from someone who actually owns and uses one.
I purchased mine from Provantage for US$378 (£233 with current exchange rates) and couldn't be happier with it. I do not have problems with glare, and have used it indoors and outside, in bright light and dim. The battery life is great, and after a full day I still have plenty of charge left.
I have other laptops that I use for heavy computing. My primary use for this unit is for VPN'ing into my office and using RDP for remote maintenance my servers, with email and research being a secondary use. Small and cheap enough that I can leave it in the map pouch in the seat of my truck without worrying about it, and powerful enough to get the job done.
The keyboard on this unit was a huge selling point for me. You don't realize how hard it is to find a netbook with a real keyboard, that puts keys like the / and the ? in the right place, until you actually start looking. The 6 to 8+ hours of battery life that I get out of it is great, and that is with brightness turned up and running a vpn over the wifi. I spent $20 on a car adapter for it, but I've never had the need to use it, even when sitting in the truck tethered to my phone via bluetooth to get out to the internet.
I'm not a big fan of ANY glidepads, so I also toss a small bluetooth mouse in the bag that I dig out if I'm using it for more than a few minutes. I also upgraded the ram (US$32 for 2 gig, there is only one sodimm slot) because (1) is IS running windows and (2) for $32, why not?
Quite honestly, now that I have it I would even admit that I would have even paid more for it.
At first I was planning on upgrading the HD to an SSD, but now that I have it, I've found the HD to be robust enough. If it fails... well, then I'll get the SSD.
Just another group trying to self-justify their position without thinking first
The only way anyone could be "harmed" by this is if they are already corrupted with worldly knowledge**, and if they have enough worldly knowledge to take this as anything other than innocent, then the corruption has already taken place and these ads cause no further damage.
As such, the idea that the ads "harm" children is utterly ridiculous and false.
** Heaven forbid that we actually allow our children to KNOW anything. Next these "Think of the children" types will be claiming that knowledge of biology, even amongst "older children" is harmful because they might get exposed to knowledge of how the natural reproductive cycles work.
