Require ISP to specify caps and fees for being allowed to exceed them. That's probably the most practical approach, and certainly one most users could live with. But as I said, geeks have always resisted this model.
Maybe for American geeks, but Australian geeks havehadquotasystems for years and it works perfectly well. The last unlimited account I had was a dialup account in the early 2000's (iiNet Explorer), but even unlimited dialup is something of a rarity these days. There are a handful of providers offering unlimited downloads on low-speed ADSL connections (usually 256kbit), but the vast majority of ADSL plans give you a fixed amount of downloads per month at a fixed price. For home accounts, exceeding your quota typically results in you being shaped for the remainder of the month (to 64 to 128kbit depending on the ISP) so you can still access the internet but it's not much fun. On business-oriented accounts they'll normally charge a per-megabyte fee for excess usage. Some ISPs also let you buy blocks of additional quota on an ad-hoc basis for a premium, to encourage people to keep within their monthly quota (presumably this makes it easier for the ISP to anticipate demand on their network).
While I would of course prefer to be able to download an unlimited amount of data each month, obviously that's not realistic and a quota system like this makes it clear what the actual costs are and keeps demand in check. This system works perfectly well, but the trick is actually getting ISPs to switch to it -- if all your competitors advertise "unlimited downloads*" and you advertise "100 GB per month" you're going to look much worse, even if your "unlimited" competitor throttle particular types of traffic. Here it happened when they started rolling out ADSL, because having unlimited downloads at 10x the speed of dialup was utterly untenable. Bandwidth costs are a lot lower in the US so they've been able to keep offering "unlimited" for a lot longer knowing that the majority of users would subsidise the few who actually do use a lot of bandwidth, but the increasing speeds of consumer internet connections coupled with the increasing amount of high-bandwidth content available means the camel's back has to break, eventually.
If the extra resources used are such a problem for them, why don't they just do the sensible thing and have a tiered pricing structure? If bots really use a lot more time than real players do, then it should be pretty easy for them to pick a number of hours per month which is sufficient for 99% of their actual players, and then charge anyone who uses more time a higher fee. It's a bit like all the ISPs crying foul over P2P users using "too much" data on their "unlimited" plans. If their pricing structure is untenable, then they should fix the pricing structure.
Also, if the bot doesn't do anything a player couldn't do anyway (if they were sufficiently skilled) then what does it matter? If it does do things the client doesn't allow, then it's reasonable to pursue him over that, but it seems like it'd be more straightforward to fix their server to not allow it.
The game already has to deal with a large range of players, from casual gamers who maybe get in a few hours a week to the obsessive teens who spend their every waking moment in the game levelling their character. A bot that does the tedious work gives casual players a chance to experience the game as a high level character that they probably wouldn't get otherwise. If Blizzard doesn't want people doing this, maybe they should make the game less tedious.
On the other hand, if Blizzard is successful at pursuing anyone using bots to make the game less of a chore, hopefully it'll result in a few less WoW addicts. Possibly they don't want people to experience the "end game", as then they might realise how boring and pointless the whole thing is and stop paying the monthly subscription fee.
On the whole, it does seem that they don't have a very strong case against the program's author, only against its users as they're the ones violating the ToS and so on. Possibly they could get him for reverse engineering the game code, which I presume he would've needed to do in order to write the program; but proving that could be difficult.
Akamai don't generally host the data, they just mirror it. Although they are the public face of your site and therefore you need to trust them, if you do start to get nervous about them you can just adjust your DNS so nobody uses their servers -- you're still in control of the first link in the chain, and you're still the original source of the content.
Having your data on Amazon's servers is more like having your email in a Gmail account. The best you can do is frequently back it up so you have a local copy, but since it's the live data you're always going to be slightly behind, and if the company hosting it decides to deny you access to it for some reason (legal, technical, bullying, incompetence) you're pretty much screwed until you can get the courts to force them to give you access to your data.
Another difference is that Akamai are caching data which is intended to be public (or at least semi-public), which may not be the case with a hosted database app. If you've got private data you won't be putting it on your website for Akamai to cache in the first place, and if you have a secure "members only" area there's a good chance that content will only be on your own servers, and not served by Akamai. But if all of your data (both public and private) is on someone else's servers, then you're trusting them to a) keep it secure and b) respect your privacy.
Many of your arguments seem to be based on the "broken windows" fallacy.
While companies do make money from litigating patents, that money has to come from somewhere else: and that somewhere else is other companies. It's not creating wealth, it's simply redistributing it. In some cases this may be a good thing, e.g. a small company getting a chunk of cash from a big company that already has more money than it's able to inject into the economy; however, this comes at a cost in innovation and competition.
Software patents are particularly harmful, because software development is one of the few fields with relatively low barriers to entry. A handful of innovative developers can put together something pretty impressive for a few million dollars, but if they do they're almost certainly going to get sued by someone else who isn't pushing the envelope. The best they can hope is to get bought out by a larger company. The US has been the world leader because of constant innovation, but the threat posed by software patents threatens to curtail that.
anything "open source" (gpl, etc) is anti-business
Since you claim to be serious, you really need to remember that very little software is written to be sold. The majority of software is used internally at businesses who have no intention (and often no method) of directly profiting from it. The software is used to improve business efficiency, which in turn allows greater production, hiring of more employees, and therefore leads to infinite sales and profits.
Open source software has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of developing software in-house, which means that more of it can be developed and therefore more benefit can be obtained from it in terms of improved efficiency.
Microsoft Office "Open" XML is a good example of what you don't want, because it means virtually everybody using computers at a business has to pay Microsoft a bunch of money in order to function. This is great for Microsoft and the people they employ and so on; however that's a pretty small part of the entire economy. For the most part, all it does is redirect wealth from a very large chunk of the economy to a very small part. Most people don't in any way benefit from Microsoft's profits.
Alternatively it's a good way to get additional exposure for LWN, as clearly this article is of some value. Maybe 0.0001% of slashdot readers will subscribe because of this.
XP has something similar to the "problem solutions centre" as well. Like the other respondent, it usually doesn't have anything relevant, and just gives you a generic message like "such and such a driver crashed, go to the vendor's site and see if there's a newer one". I think it comes up as an option in the error reporting wizard, if you choose to send the error report.
"waterboarding" does not count, as there is not lasting bodily injury
I don't think "lasting bodily injury" is a requirement for something to be torture.
You seem to advocate, WikiLeaks to become a judge
Actually I think they're advocating the opposite, i.e. they should publish everything they can get hold of and leave the judging to others. If they were to become a judge, then that would require them to pick and choose what they publish based on who it might embarrass or upset.
United States, on contrast, is the leader of the free world and the hope and inspiration of freedom-minded people everywhere
Leader yes, but I live in a country which inevitably follows the US's lead in pretty much everything, and I really don't like the example they're setting at the moment. Everything seems to be a knee-jerk reaction designed to either score quick and easy political points or to erode citizen's rights so the powerful can become slightly more powerful. Hope and inspiration are really overstating most of the world's opinion of the US.
Yes, I'm glad they're our ally and we could be in a much worse situation than we are now without them, but a truly inspirational leader of freedom would be constantly seeking to increase the liberty of its citizens and encouraging other countries to do the same. Instead, at the peak of its power, the US is collapsing on itself in a fit of paranoia and power-grabbing and rapidly becoming a totalitarian democracy.
Publish your public key along with your email address
How exactly will this stop spam? All it means is the bots that crawl sites looking for email addresses also need to snag the associated public key at the same time. If the information can be obtained by Joe User then it can be obtained by Joe Spammer and fed to his network of spambots. At best, they might have difficulty associating the correct key with the correct email address (though to be usable by Joe User the browser will probably need to associate the two easily) but in this case they'd just encrypt every message for every potential public key and mail volumes would skyrocket.
Adding additional hoops to jump through won't stop spammers any more than greylisting stops spammers. Sure it stops some now, but if everyone used it then all the spam engines would be adapted to it. And as others have pointed out, if only a few people use this method to protect their email then most people won't bother emailing them because it's too confusing. This might be okay for your personal email (then again it might not - people don't like to be made to feel stupid) but it's a no-go for businesses.
I still think the "solution" to the spam problem is to solve the zombie PC problem, since if the spammers don't have access to vast numbers of random PCs to send their email from they become much, much easier to block.
"I'm sorry for stealing the iPod, your honour, but I've lost mine so I thought it would be okay..." And yes, I know, downloading a file doesn't deprive a retailer/owner of a physical object. But it still deprives them of the revenue that object represents.
Err, if they're replacing something they've already bought then they're not depriving them from the revenue it represents, are they? They've already made the revenue from a sale of the object. Unless you're one of those people who think they "deserve" to be paid again every time a new format comes out, of course.
Also the stable version of Debian is very stable, as in it doesn't change. Security fixes are almost always backported so you don't wind up with new features or changed behaviours, etc. I don't follow Red Hat so I don't know much they differ in that regard, but when you have a server that's configured how you want it and working fine it's really nice to know that if you install a security update it's not going to change any of the functionality.
In addition, packages go from unstable through testing and sit in testing for quite a long time before a stable release occurs, so they're generally pretty stable, well tested and any bugs / problems etc. are well known by the time they're released.
Fair point, and it's not exactly uncommon for PC game publishers to rush the product to market and fix it later with a patch or five. Console games have generally had a better track record due to not having the ability to get updates to gamers after a product has been released. Hopefully the new "era of connectivity" that's now arrived for the consoles won't cause the same slipping of standards, but I strongly suspect that if the publisher believes that 95% of their audience has the ability to receive patches from the internet, then they'll succumb to the same temptation to "ship now and fix it later (if sales are strong enough to justify it)".
Even conceding this point, buggy games are still largely the exception. I've run my system for weeks on end without rebooting while playing all manner of different games without any problems. Windows simply isn't anywhere near as bad as it used to be in terms of stability.
After-launch patching isn't all bad news though, as quite a few developers (particularly indie developers, but I guess console gamers wouldn't be used to the idea of indie games;) actually improve their game based on player feedback post-launch. Sure it'd be nice if it was perfect out of the gate, but that's not really realistic for anything but really simple games. Not all publishers take advantage of their player's feedback to improve the game, but some do and "after launch support" can be a way to differentiate yourself from others, which means it's a viable thing for profit-making companies to do.
If you're constantly have to repair your PC or if it "crashes all the time", then you're using it wrong. I get home from work, flip on my PC, surf the 'net, check my email, watch a video, play some games, and it just does what it's supposed to. Has done since I built it, and I even swapped out the motherboard to replace my Athlon CPU with an Intel Core Duo a year or two ago and it still works (okay, I admit I was a bit surprised by this).
Yes, every now and then I may replace a component; I got a new video card about 6 months ago for example, and while the cards I had then were pretty good it did give a noticeable boost to performance, and it was worth it. On a console, you get what you're given, and the only way to upgrade it is to buy a new one when it comes out. That has its benefits and its drawbacks; clearly you think it's a benefit and I can understand that, but I do like to be able to make my gaming PC more powerful whenever it suits me and my budget rather than having to wait until a new console is available with games to make it worthwhile. I suspect the XBox 360 will be showing its age compared to PC titles by the time it gets a replacement, but this is the first generation of console games that have actually been comparable to gaming PCs so I could be wrong.
Also, games for the consoles seem to be noticeably more expensive than PC games. It might just be because it's easier to pirate PC games, but it may also be to help make up for the manufacturer's losses in selling you the console hardware in the first place.
Completely agree with the point about companies holding onto personal information far longer than they should. Playing devil's advocate though, they may need to protect themselves from people complaining about misdeeds from the distant past. Or receiving a bill in the mail that was posted 10 years prior. This seems a reasonable excuse to hold on to records. However, I think they should move this data "offline" so that it can be called up as a special measure in case of a dispute, but will be non-existent for day-to-day activities.
As for passwords, well, this is why you should use a different password for every company you do business with, and for every website you have an account on. Yes it's a pain, but the fact is they need to be able to identify you as the real you despite the fact that whoever you're interacting with has no personal knowledge of you whatsoever. A shared password is the easiest way, and having the operator be able to just read the password and compare it to the one you say is much faster than them having to type it in precisely, and doesn't make it your interaction with the operator any more secure. The only potential security gain is if the information is obtained by unauthorised people -- but if you're using a unique password then it won't do them very much good.
There has to be a certain amount of trust between you and the people you're doing business with. If you don't trust them enough to have your name, address, SSN, and so on, then you shouldn't be using their services.
Don't forget the sysadmins that have to implement the new code that tries to deal with DST!
Exchange and SharePoint both seem to have huge issues with daylight savings. I think Microsoft must have gone out of their way to ensure they have as many different places to store timezone information as they could find. You need an update for Windows to get the new definitions; that's cool. Then you need an update for Exchange. Then there's another update for MAPI. I think there were a few more than this as well, but (fortunately) I'm not our Exchange admin. I can't believe how much of a mess it all was, though.
Then there's the brand spankin' new SharePoint 2007, which sits around scratching its balls for an hour during DST because the part that schedules jobs to run and the part that starts them running at the scheduled clearly have different ideas about timezones. What a joke. Why does any of this even HAVE its own timezone database, and not just use the system one? It boggles the mind. Even now after their hotfixes to resolve this issue, the jobs still say they're scheduled to run at some point in the future. But hey, under the hood it works properly, so I can deal with the UI telling lies.
Wandering even further off-topic, the human-readable part of meeting requests sent by Outlook uses the wrong timezone. Here's one I just sent myself to schedule a meeting at 6.30pm:
When: Tuesday, 4 March 2008 6:30 PM-7:00 PM (GMT+08:00) Perth.
Very nice, really - it tells you the exact offset from GMT so there's no question about when exactly this meeting is. Unfortunately, +0800 is our usual non-DST timezone. During DST (which we're in now until the end of March) it's +0900. Apparently the GMT+08:00 is just part of the timezone name, but it's confusing as hell to anyone who receives these messages. This is particularly problematic if you're scheduling conference calls and the like with people in other states (or countries) who can't reasonably be expected to know about WA's DST trial.
I would've thought a problem like that would have been noticed and fixed a long time ago, given that most of the USA do have DST.
I seem to get offered to metamoderate every time I make a post, and once or twice I've tried directly accessing http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl and it's given me stuff to do even without the explicit invite. So if you're bored and want to metamod, give it a try. I think it limits you to once every x hours, where x might be 24.
In addition to helping with abusive mods, I find it's a good way to get a sampling of the comments on slashdot. Often I end up reading a thread or two that I missed when it was current, because the comments I'm metamoderating are interesting.
Weird. I guess someone really likes Microsoft. This one was a real beauty: Also Office 2007 use XML and that opens new possibilities. Maybe it's some manager type who doesn't know anything about the actual tech, and believes that "XML" is some magical standard that automatically makes everything interoperable. There's a guy at work who seems to think that storing data in "XML format" (not even MS Office XML in particular, just "XML" in general) is great for archiving because it'll be readable forever.
Aside from that digression, the other main point seems to be laptop hardware compatibility. Even this seems a bit confused, because first we have:
Linux on laptop sucks, let's be honest about it
We all know that hardware manufacturers write drivers for Windows and most of the Linux ones are reverse engineered, and that laptop hardware tends to be particularly hit and miss. The various reasons for this don't matter to people who just want to buy a laptop and use it, so it's a fair point. So after dissing Linux for not supporting the various incompatible and buggy implementations of certain features on certain laptops, it goes on to say:
Microsoft is far from being perfect but it is a really successful software company that enforces some hardware standard on which linux rides
Which is pretty much the opposite of reality. I seriously want to know if the author of the parent post is aware of how many more hardware architectures Linux runs on than Windows does? If so, how can you claim with a straight face that Microsoft "enforces" hardware standards on which Linux rides, especially while simultaneously disparaging Linux because vendors don't write drivers for their proprietary hardware?
Windows still supports a very limited set of hardware itself, and is almost entirely dependent on manufacturers to specifically create software for the sole purpose of allowing a user to make use of the hardware. Case in point: we installed Server 2008 on a PC at work to have a play with it, and of course it comes up in a low-res video mode because it has no idea what to do with the cheap and common nVidia graphics cards in the PC. Off to nVidia's site to get the drivers... hmm, no Server 2008 drivers listed, I guess this particular vendor hasn't gotten around to writing drivers for this particular operating system yet. So we try the Vista ones. Download and install, seems to be okay, have a reboot, get 3 of the 4 monitors working at their native resolution. Okay, 75% success rate, not too bad for an OS which isn't supported yet.
Or so we think. A few minutes later, the screens all go blank and declare they're not receiving a signal. Weird. We were using the damned thing! Cold reboot, bootup splash screen, then... blank. Huh. I guess those drivers don't really work, after all. Boot in "safe mode" (does that mean the OS normally runs in "unsafe mode"?!) and remove the drivers. This is what you call "hardware standards"? We can't even use the displays until (and unless) the device manufacturer decides it's worth its time to create drivers for the new OS.
Please show some respect for the achievement even if this is an achievement of the opponent.
The only achievement here is that they gained a large enough market share to ensure that most hardware manufacturers don't have a financial incentive to provide either good drivers for platforms other than Windows or enough information to allow other people to write good drivers. This is definitely an impressive business achievement, and if you want to crow about Microsoft then that's definitely the tact to take. Nobody can deny that Microsoft is hugely successful from a business / financial point of view.
Fine and good, but I'm one of those guys who's happy to just to live a comfortable life doing things I like, or at the very least not doing things I dislike. Linux is something I like, and Windows is something I'm currently pretty neutral about. Year afte
...and looking at their store, 50 gold DVD-Rs will set you back $152 US. That's around 215 GB of storage, which works out to about 70c per gig. Granted that's a better PPG than current Blu-Ray discs (~ $25 au for a 25GB disc) but it's still on the expensive side. Then there's the speed. At the moment BD is still painfully slow though, and it seems they always will be: according to their FAQ, 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). So in the future they'll be almost as fast as a slow hard drive.
Meanwhile, you can pick LTO 4 Ultrium cartridges for about $150 au, and write 800 GB of data to them (about US 17.5c / GB) at up to 120 MB/sec - today! Sure, they won't last 100+ years, but I seriously doubt BD readers will be available in 100 years. You should get 20+ years out of a tape cartridge though, and by then it'd be well and truly time to upgrade to newer media anyway.
I guess I can see expensive long-life optical media working for people with very small sets of data, where a spindle of 50 discs will last at least a couple of months. I'm just not sure who these people are... which might go some way toward explaining why the discs cost so much.
Actually it's about the methods the RIAA is using. It's very important to do everything possible to prevent this sort of thing being seen as okay, or even normal, "so long as they're catching the bad guys". Just like it's not generally considered okay for the police to break the law in order to make an arrest, no matter how bad the guy they're arresting is, because it sets precedents of "acceptable behaviour" that are ultimately far more detrimental to society than the acts of even lots of individual bad guys.
Same deal here. If the RIAA can use these sorts of tactics with impunity, then so can everyone else with enough money. Even though some - indeed, probably almost all - of the people being sued did infringe on someone's copyrights, the harm they did pales in comparison to the harm these kind of abuses of the law would do to society if they became (even more) widespread.
It's not just the RIAA, but the fact that it's hard to show actual harm or even deprivation of income from copyright infringement seems to make this a more morally appealing battlefront than others.
I'd guess that if both browsers are doing ass-y things, there's a good reason for it. Apple seem to work pretty hard to make Safari as performant as they can, so it seems unlikely they'd come up with some trick to let it waste cycles doing useless drawing rather than simply making it draw less often.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe for American geeks, but Australian geeks have had quota systems for years and it works perfectly well. The last unlimited account I had was a dialup account in the early 2000's (iiNet Explorer), but even unlimited dialup is something of a rarity these days. There are a handful of providers offering unlimited downloads on low-speed ADSL connections (usually 256kbit), but the vast majority of ADSL plans give you a fixed amount of downloads per month at a fixed price. For home accounts, exceeding your quota typically results in you being shaped for the remainder of the month (to 64 to 128kbit depending on the ISP) so you can still access the internet but it's not much fun. On business-oriented accounts they'll normally charge a per-megabyte fee for excess usage. Some ISPs also let you buy blocks of additional quota on an ad-hoc basis for a premium, to encourage people to keep within their monthly quota (presumably this makes it easier for the ISP to anticipate demand on their network).
While I would of course prefer to be able to download an unlimited amount of data each month, obviously that's not realistic and a quota system like this makes it clear what the actual costs are and keeps demand in check. This system works perfectly well, but the trick is actually getting ISPs to switch to it -- if all your competitors advertise "unlimited downloads*" and you advertise "100 GB per month" you're going to look much worse, even if your "unlimited" competitor throttle particular types of traffic. Here it happened when they started rolling out ADSL, because having unlimited downloads at 10x the speed of dialup was utterly untenable. Bandwidth costs are a lot lower in the US so they've been able to keep offering "unlimited" for a lot longer knowing that the majority of users would subsidise the few who actually do use a lot of bandwidth, but the increasing speeds of consumer internet connections coupled with the increasing amount of high-bandwidth content available means the camel's back has to break, eventually.
Pretty much every HTML mail client on the planet does this by default.
If the extra resources used are such a problem for them, why don't they just do the sensible thing and have a tiered pricing structure? If bots really use a lot more time than real players do, then it should be pretty easy for them to pick a number of hours per month which is sufficient for 99% of their actual players, and then charge anyone who uses more time a higher fee. It's a bit like all the ISPs crying foul over P2P users using "too much" data on their "unlimited" plans. If their pricing structure is untenable, then they should fix the pricing structure.
Also, if the bot doesn't do anything a player couldn't do anyway (if they were sufficiently skilled) then what does it matter? If it does do things the client doesn't allow, then it's reasonable to pursue him over that, but it seems like it'd be more straightforward to fix their server to not allow it.
The game already has to deal with a large range of players, from casual gamers who maybe get in a few hours a week to the obsessive teens who spend their every waking moment in the game levelling their character. A bot that does the tedious work gives casual players a chance to experience the game as a high level character that they probably wouldn't get otherwise. If Blizzard doesn't want people doing this, maybe they should make the game less tedious.
On the other hand, if Blizzard is successful at pursuing anyone using bots to make the game less of a chore, hopefully it'll result in a few less WoW addicts. Possibly they don't want people to experience the "end game", as then they might realise how boring and pointless the whole thing is and stop paying the monthly subscription fee.
On the whole, it does seem that they don't have a very strong case against the program's author, only against its users as they're the ones violating the ToS and so on. Possibly they could get him for reverse engineering the game code, which I presume he would've needed to do in order to write the program; but proving that could be difficult.
Akamai don't generally host the data, they just mirror it. Although they are the public face of your site and therefore you need to trust them, if you do start to get nervous about them you can just adjust your DNS so nobody uses their servers -- you're still in control of the first link in the chain, and you're still the original source of the content.
Having your data on Amazon's servers is more like having your email in a Gmail account. The best you can do is frequently back it up so you have a local copy, but since it's the live data you're always going to be slightly behind, and if the company hosting it decides to deny you access to it for some reason (legal, technical, bullying, incompetence) you're pretty much screwed until you can get the courts to force them to give you access to your data.
Another difference is that Akamai are caching data which is intended to be public (or at least semi-public), which may not be the case with a hosted database app. If you've got private data you won't be putting it on your website for Akamai to cache in the first place, and if you have a secure "members only" area there's a good chance that content will only be on your own servers, and not served by Akamai. But if all of your data (both public and private) is on someone else's servers, then you're trusting them to a) keep it secure and b) respect your privacy.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.FAQ.html#item1.1
PostgreSQL is pronounced Post-Gres-Q-L. (For those curious about how to say "PostgreSQL", an audio file is available.)Many of your arguments seem to be based on the "broken windows" fallacy.
While companies do make money from litigating patents, that money has to come from somewhere else: and that somewhere else is other companies. It's not creating wealth, it's simply redistributing it. In some cases this may be a good thing, e.g. a small company getting a chunk of cash from a big company that already has more money than it's able to inject into the economy; however, this comes at a cost in innovation and competition.
Software patents are particularly harmful, because software development is one of the few fields with relatively low barriers to entry. A handful of innovative developers can put together something pretty impressive for a few million dollars, but if they do they're almost certainly going to get sued by someone else who isn't pushing the envelope. The best they can hope is to get bought out by a larger company. The US has been the world leader because of constant innovation, but the threat posed by software patents threatens to curtail that.
anything "open source" (gpl, etc) is anti-businessSince you claim to be serious, you really need to remember that very little software is written to be sold. The majority of software is used internally at businesses who have no intention (and often no method) of directly profiting from it. The software is used to improve business efficiency, which in turn allows greater production, hiring of more employees, and therefore leads to infinite sales and profits.
Open source software has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of developing software in-house, which means that more of it can be developed and therefore more benefit can be obtained from it in terms of improved efficiency.
Microsoft Office "Open" XML is a good example of what you don't want, because it means virtually everybody using computers at a business has to pay Microsoft a bunch of money in order to function. This is great for Microsoft and the people they employ and so on; however that's a pretty small part of the entire economy. For the most part, all it does is redirect wealth from a very large chunk of the economy to a very small part. Most people don't in any way benefit from Microsoft's profits.
Alternatively it's a good way to get additional exposure for LWN, as clearly this article is of some value. Maybe 0.0001% of slashdot readers will subscribe because of this.
Besides, we're all friends here, aren't we?
You selfish git!
XP has something similar to the "problem solutions centre" as well. Like the other respondent, it usually doesn't have anything relevant, and just gives you a generic message like "such and such a driver crashed, go to the vendor's site and see if there's a newer one". I think it comes up as an option in the error reporting wizard, if you choose to send the error report.
I don't think "lasting bodily injury" is a requirement for something to be torture.
You seem to advocate, WikiLeaks to become a judgeActually I think they're advocating the opposite, i.e. they should publish everything they can get hold of and leave the judging to others. If they were to become a judge, then that would require them to pick and choose what they publish based on who it might embarrass or upset.
United States, on contrast, is the leader of the free world and the hope and inspiration of freedom-minded people everywhereLeader yes, but I live in a country which inevitably follows the US's lead in pretty much everything, and I really don't like the example they're setting at the moment. Everything seems to be a knee-jerk reaction designed to either score quick and easy political points or to erode citizen's rights so the powerful can become slightly more powerful. Hope and inspiration are really overstating most of the world's opinion of the US.
Yes, I'm glad they're our ally and we could be in a much worse situation than we are now without them, but a truly inspirational leader of freedom would be constantly seeking to increase the liberty of its citizens and encouraging other countries to do the same. Instead, at the peak of its power, the US is collapsing on itself in a fit of paranoia and power-grabbing and rapidly becoming a totalitarian democracy.
How exactly will this stop spam? All it means is the bots that crawl sites looking for email addresses also need to snag the associated public key at the same time. If the information can be obtained by Joe User then it can be obtained by Joe Spammer and fed to his network of spambots. At best, they might have difficulty associating the correct key with the correct email address (though to be usable by Joe User the browser will probably need to associate the two easily) but in this case they'd just encrypt every message for every potential public key and mail volumes would skyrocket.
Adding additional hoops to jump through won't stop spammers any more than greylisting stops spammers. Sure it stops some now, but if everyone used it then all the spam engines would be adapted to it. And as others have pointed out, if only a few people use this method to protect their email then most people won't bother emailing them because it's too confusing. This might be okay for your personal email (then again it might not - people don't like to be made to feel stupid) but it's a no-go for businesses.
I still think the "solution" to the spam problem is to solve the zombie PC problem, since if the spammers don't have access to vast numbers of random PCs to send their email from they become much, much easier to block.
Err, if they're replacing something they've already bought then they're not depriving them from the revenue it represents, are they? They've already made the revenue from a sale of the object. Unless you're one of those people who think they "deserve" to be paid again every time a new format comes out, of course.
Also the stable version of Debian is very stable, as in it doesn't change. Security fixes are almost always backported so you don't wind up with new features or changed behaviours, etc. I don't follow Red Hat so I don't know much they differ in that regard, but when you have a server that's configured how you want it and working fine it's really nice to know that if you install a security update it's not going to change any of the functionality.
In addition, packages go from unstable through testing and sit in testing for quite a long time before a stable release occurs, so they're generally pretty stable, well tested and any bugs / problems etc. are well known by the time they're released.
Fair point, and it's not exactly uncommon for PC game publishers to rush the product to market and fix it later with a patch or five. Console games have generally had a better track record due to not having the ability to get updates to gamers after a product has been released. Hopefully the new "era of connectivity" that's now arrived for the consoles won't cause the same slipping of standards, but I strongly suspect that if the publisher believes that 95% of their audience has the ability to receive patches from the internet, then they'll succumb to the same temptation to "ship now and fix it later (if sales are strong enough to justify it)".
Even conceding this point, buggy games are still largely the exception. I've run my system for weeks on end without rebooting while playing all manner of different games without any problems. Windows simply isn't anywhere near as bad as it used to be in terms of stability.
After-launch patching isn't all bad news though, as quite a few developers (particularly indie developers, but I guess console gamers wouldn't be used to the idea of indie games ;) actually improve their game based on player feedback post-launch. Sure it'd be nice if it was perfect out of the gate, but that's not really realistic for anything but really simple games. Not all publishers take advantage of their player's feedback to improve the game, but some do and "after launch support" can be a way to differentiate yourself from others, which means it's a viable thing for profit-making companies to do.
If you're constantly have to repair your PC or if it "crashes all the time", then you're using it wrong. I get home from work, flip on my PC, surf the 'net, check my email, watch a video, play some games, and it just does what it's supposed to. Has done since I built it, and I even swapped out the motherboard to replace my Athlon CPU with an Intel Core Duo a year or two ago and it still works (okay, I admit I was a bit surprised by this).
Yes, every now and then I may replace a component; I got a new video card about 6 months ago for example, and while the cards I had then were pretty good it did give a noticeable boost to performance, and it was worth it. On a console, you get what you're given, and the only way to upgrade it is to buy a new one when it comes out. That has its benefits and its drawbacks; clearly you think it's a benefit and I can understand that, but I do like to be able to make my gaming PC more powerful whenever it suits me and my budget rather than having to wait until a new console is available with games to make it worthwhile. I suspect the XBox 360 will be showing its age compared to PC titles by the time it gets a replacement, but this is the first generation of console games that have actually been comparable to gaming PCs so I could be wrong.
Also, games for the consoles seem to be noticeably more expensive than PC games. It might just be because it's easier to pirate PC games, but it may also be to help make up for the manufacturer's losses in selling you the console hardware in the first place.
Maybe if it was spelt correctly it would've been funnier.
(and I'm not even a star wars nerd!)
But then we couldn't have fun watching images load from the bottom up! It looks so cool and is totally worth a few extra (mega)bytes!
Completely agree with the point about companies holding onto personal information far longer than they should. Playing devil's advocate though, they may need to protect themselves from people complaining about misdeeds from the distant past. Or receiving a bill in the mail that was posted 10 years prior. This seems a reasonable excuse to hold on to records. However, I think they should move this data "offline" so that it can be called up as a special measure in case of a dispute, but will be non-existent for day-to-day activities.
As for passwords, well, this is why you should use a different password for every company you do business with, and for every website you have an account on. Yes it's a pain, but the fact is they need to be able to identify you as the real you despite the fact that whoever you're interacting with has no personal knowledge of you whatsoever. A shared password is the easiest way, and having the operator be able to just read the password and compare it to the one you say is much faster than them having to type it in precisely, and doesn't make it your interaction with the operator any more secure. The only potential security gain is if the information is obtained by unauthorised people -- but if you're using a unique password then it won't do them very much good.
There has to be a certain amount of trust between you and the people you're doing business with. If you don't trust them enough to have your name, address, SSN, and so on, then you shouldn't be using their services.
Don't forget the sysadmins that have to implement the new code that tries to deal with DST!
Exchange and SharePoint both seem to have huge issues with daylight savings. I think Microsoft must have gone out of their way to ensure they have as many different places to store timezone information as they could find. You need an update for Windows to get the new definitions; that's cool. Then you need an update for Exchange. Then there's another update for MAPI. I think there were a few more than this as well, but (fortunately) I'm not our Exchange admin. I can't believe how much of a mess it all was, though.
Then there's the brand spankin' new SharePoint 2007, which sits around scratching its balls for an hour during DST because the part that schedules jobs to run and the part that starts them running at the scheduled clearly have different ideas about timezones. What a joke. Why does any of this even HAVE its own timezone database, and not just use the system one? It boggles the mind. Even now after their hotfixes to resolve this issue, the jobs still say they're scheduled to run at some point in the future. But hey, under the hood it works properly, so I can deal with the UI telling lies.
Wandering even further off-topic, the human-readable part of meeting requests sent by Outlook uses the wrong timezone. Here's one I just sent myself to schedule a meeting at 6.30pm:
When: Tuesday, 4 March 2008 6:30 PM-7:00 PM (GMT+08:00) Perth.Very nice, really - it tells you the exact offset from GMT so there's no question about when exactly this meeting is. Unfortunately, +0800 is our usual non-DST timezone. During DST (which we're in now until the end of March) it's +0900. Apparently the GMT+08:00 is just part of the timezone name, but it's confusing as hell to anyone who receives these messages. This is particularly problematic if you're scheduling conference calls and the like with people in other states (or countries) who can't reasonably be expected to know about WA's DST trial.
I would've thought a problem like that would have been noticed and fixed a long time ago, given that most of the USA do have DST.
I seem to get offered to metamoderate every time I make a post, and once or twice I've tried directly accessing http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl and it's given me stuff to do even without the explicit invite. So if you're bored and want to metamod, give it a try. I think it limits you to once every x hours, where x might be 24.
In addition to helping with abusive mods, I find it's a good way to get a sampling of the comments on slashdot. Often I end up reading a thread or two that I missed when it was current, because the comments I'm metamoderating are interesting.
Weird. I guess someone really likes Microsoft. This one was a real beauty: Also Office 2007 use XML and that opens new possibilities. Maybe it's some manager type who doesn't know anything about the actual tech, and believes that "XML" is some magical standard that automatically makes everything interoperable. There's a guy at work who seems to think that storing data in "XML format" (not even MS Office XML in particular, just "XML" in general) is great for archiving because it'll be readable forever.
Aside from that digression, the other main point seems to be laptop hardware compatibility. Even this seems a bit confused, because first we have:
Linux on laptop sucks, let's be honest about it
We all know that hardware manufacturers write drivers for Windows and most of the Linux ones are reverse engineered, and that laptop hardware tends to be particularly hit and miss. The various reasons for this don't matter to people who just want to buy a laptop and use it, so it's a fair point. So after dissing Linux for not supporting the various incompatible and buggy implementations of certain features on certain laptops, it goes on to say:
Microsoft is far from being perfect but it is a really successful software company that enforces some hardware standard on which linux rides
Which is pretty much the opposite of reality. I seriously want to know if the author of the parent post is aware of how many more hardware architectures Linux runs on than Windows does? If so, how can you claim with a straight face that Microsoft "enforces" hardware standards on which Linux rides, especially while simultaneously disparaging Linux because vendors don't write drivers for their proprietary hardware?
Windows still supports a very limited set of hardware itself, and is almost entirely dependent on manufacturers to specifically create software for the sole purpose of allowing a user to make use of the hardware. Case in point: we installed Server 2008 on a PC at work to have a play with it, and of course it comes up in a low-res video mode because it has no idea what to do with the cheap and common nVidia graphics cards in the PC. Off to nVidia's site to get the drivers... hmm, no Server 2008 drivers listed, I guess this particular vendor hasn't gotten around to writing drivers for this particular operating system yet. So we try the Vista ones. Download and install, seems to be okay, have a reboot, get 3 of the 4 monitors working at their native resolution. Okay, 75% success rate, not too bad for an OS which isn't supported yet.
Or so we think. A few minutes later, the screens all go blank and declare they're not receiving a signal. Weird. We were using the damned thing! Cold reboot, bootup splash screen, then... blank. Huh. I guess those drivers don't really work, after all. Boot in "safe mode" (does that mean the OS normally runs in "unsafe mode"?!) and remove the drivers. This is what you call "hardware standards"? We can't even use the displays until (and unless) the device manufacturer decides it's worth its time to create drivers for the new OS.
Please show some respect for the achievement even if this is an achievement of the opponent.
The only achievement here is that they gained a large enough market share to ensure that most hardware manufacturers don't have a financial incentive to provide either good drivers for platforms other than Windows or enough information to allow other people to write good drivers. This is definitely an impressive business achievement, and if you want to crow about Microsoft then that's definitely the tact to take. Nobody can deny that Microsoft is hugely successful from a business / financial point of view.
Fine and good, but I'm one of those guys who's happy to just to live a comfortable life doing things I like, or at the very least not doing things I dislike. Linux is something I like, and Windows is something I'm currently pretty neutral about. Year afte
If by "sort of" you mean "s/a critique of culture and/the embodiment of/". ;)
...and looking at their store, 50 gold DVD-Rs will set you back $152 US. That's around 215 GB of storage, which works out to about 70c per gig. Granted that's a better PPG than current Blu-Ray discs (~ $25 au for a 25GB disc) but it's still on the expensive side. Then there's the speed. At the moment BD is still painfully slow though, and it seems they always will be: according to their FAQ, 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). So in the future they'll be almost as fast as a slow hard drive.
Meanwhile, you can pick LTO 4 Ultrium cartridges for about $150 au, and write 800 GB of data to them (about US 17.5c / GB) at up to 120 MB/sec - today! Sure, they won't last 100+ years, but I seriously doubt BD readers will be available in 100 years. You should get 20+ years out of a tape cartridge though, and by then it'd be well and truly time to upgrade to newer media anyway.
I guess I can see expensive long-life optical media working for people with very small sets of data, where a spindle of 50 discs will last at least a couple of months. I'm just not sure who these people are... which might go some way toward explaining why the discs cost so much.
Actually it's about the methods the RIAA is using. It's very important to do everything possible to prevent this sort of thing being seen as okay, or even normal, "so long as they're catching the bad guys". Just like it's not generally considered okay for the police to break the law in order to make an arrest, no matter how bad the guy they're arresting is, because it sets precedents of "acceptable behaviour" that are ultimately far more detrimental to society than the acts of even lots of individual bad guys.
Same deal here. If the RIAA can use these sorts of tactics with impunity, then so can everyone else with enough money. Even though some - indeed, probably almost all - of the people being sued did infringe on someone's copyrights, the harm they did pales in comparison to the harm these kind of abuses of the law would do to society if they became (even more) widespread.
It's not just the RIAA, but the fact that it's hard to show actual harm or even deprivation of income from copyright infringement seems to make this a more morally appealing battlefront than others.
I'd guess that if both browsers are doing ass-y things, there's a good reason for it. Apple seem to work pretty hard to make Safari as performant as they can, so it seems unlikely they'd come up with some trick to let it waste cycles doing useless drawing rather than simply making it draw less often.