However, if EA's history with such purchases is any indication, most often EA buys the company, and then one year later announces they are reorganizing. By reorganizing, they mean closing the purchased company's doors, and laying off all the employees by 'moving' their jobs to HQ, or making them redundant. Of course, the excuse will be that they are 'underperforming' or somesuch nonsense.
No, the real nasty stuff hooks into Windows as a service, so you can't kill it, and also as a COM plugin for Explorer, so that even by the off chance you do erase the service, next boot-up it gets to reinstall itself. There are FAR TOO MANY ways to ensure your program runs on start-up in Windows, and a large number of those methods are extremely difficult to remove.
Note to spyware authors: no one considers your software 'permission-based' when it goes to such lengths to avoid being uninstalled, or has to hide itself in things like alternate data streams. If you can write programs to detect this tampering, and 'correct' it, you ought to be able to code a working uninstall routine, too.
1) Windows 2000 had firewall capabilities, but it wasn't a simple on/off switch.
2) Windows XP encouraged people to finally write NT drivers, however, most XP drivers are perfectly compatible with Windows 2000
3) This is debatable. In most cases, the stability of Windows XP is identical to Windows 2000.
4) Most of the improved boot times are cosmetic, like showing your desktop even if it's not ready to be used. (How many people have ended up opening something two or three times because despite the fact that Windows was showing your desktop with a regular arrow pointer, clicking on anything did nothing for several seconds/minutes)
5) I have no idea what you mean by this.
6) Debatable. I would argue that certain things have become far more difficult with WinXP. "Simple File Sharing" hides a lot of stuff that can be the cause of several SMB sharing problems. You can't enable guest account with the automated wizard without also going creating the "Shared Documents", which you may not want.
On the other hand, Windows XP has brought with it a bunch of junk that some people don't want. Have you ever tried to get rid of.NET Messenger on XP, without it coming back? Have you tried deleting the Shared Documents directory after the Home Network setup wizard has created it? Have you ever tried to find the User Rights Assignment on XP Home so that a Limited Account will work with some particular program? Ever want to use the new XP group policies on a Windows 2000-based active directory (it's a mess)? What about the auto-grouping taskbar that frightens people the first time it happens because they think their programs have been closed, or the intellimenu on the start menu that makes people think that their less frequently used programs may have been uninstalled? And what about System Restore which gobbles up 12% of every drive by default, regardless of the drive size (add to that the 10% per user that Internet Explorer wants to use, plus an unrestricted dllcache growth, and a modest system partition can become quite cramped quickly)? Then there's the bubble windows. Some are click to dismiss, others are click for more info.
And if you're very, very lucky, all your programs/games/utilities will work as a non-Administrator user. Very few apps are designed to run as non-Administrator even today (what do you mean, I can't write arbitrary values to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE?), and if you're constantly using "Run As..." you're not that much more protected than those who run as Administrator all the time.
Microsoft's file sharing uses NETBIOS for naming, etc, but there are other elements to it, too. Microsoft published a draft to the IETF for CIFS (formerly SMB). It's only a subset of the functionality that Windows actually supports, and it was chock full of errors and omissions. There were also several books written about SMB. The earliest I can find is Protocols for X/Open PC Interworking: SMB, Version 2, published October 1992. The first version may have been published more than two years earlier, in January 1990, but I'm having difficulty finding that information. The Samba site says that the first version, developed in 1992, was based on reverse engineering the wire protocol of the MS-DOS SMB client. The later versions may have made use of this other documentation.
Not just journalists, either. Anyone with an agenda loves to forget these things, too. If you look at their handy graph, it looks like fairly linear growth both before and after CAN-SPAM, so blaming the law may be a little out of order.
I wouldn't call $400-$500 obscene for a color laser. I'd avoid the Samsung CLP-500 printer, though. The colors look pretty bland, even compared to a rather old HP LaserJet 4500. It's probably just some sort of dithering issue with either the drivers or the printer firmware, but it doesn't make photos look very good.
1) optimizing virtual machines compile to native ops
At the time, the fastest Java VM was still much slower than even Visual Basic compiled code.
2) COM/ActiveX means writing (and rewriting) everything yourself (yes, the power to innovate)
Please try to keep in mind when the decision was made. There was no huge Java library at the time. Microsoft took the easy way out, and integrated OLE (a.k.a. COM, ActiveX) into Internet Explorer letting all the current OLE controls (with a few modifications to support the new features) plug into IE.
3) powerful means what in this context? the power to do everything yourself? the ability to tie directly into the OS? or to exclude those fringe platforms (na na)? Assuming you mean power to tie into the OS, you can do that in Java too using JNI/DLLs/Signed Applets and gosh - there is event a security infrastructure around doing that.
Again, remember when this happened. Java was young, and signed applets were unheard of. Most people were (and some still are) under the impression that Java limited what you're allowed to access from the underlying platform to ensure platform independance, and Sun's marketing of Java did nothing to change that perception because it was in their favor to have that perception. Today, with Firefox gaining popularity, I am starting to see signed Java applets appear on websites.
I like bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but Java was a tactical threat to Microsoft's platform, and that's why they did all they could to sabotage it. It's nothing personal, it's just business.
You know, considering that case was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to quote a lower court's opinion. Try this one instead. Schmeiser didn't exactly win his appeal, but he didn't exactly lose, either. The court ruled that because he did not profit from the infusion of roundup-ready canola in his field, there were no damages to Monsanto, and that each party should pay their own legal fees. It wasn't a unanimous decision either. It was decided 5-4 in favour of Monsanto's interests, with the other four judges dissenting and siding with Schmeiser.
The parent's post was intended to mean that the Red Cross does not have a patent on their logo. On the other hand, they may have a trademark on it. Patents are limited to inventions not art and logos. In addition, patents expire after 21 years, which would make them rather useless for company logos and names. Considering the American Red Cross was created in May 21, 1881, any patent would've long since expired. Trademarks don't expire unless you fail to defend it. A copyright on the logo is also possible, but it would've likely expired by now.
It has nothing to do with the fact that HP printers just feel flimsy these days? Even the supposedly 'high-end' LaserJet 4250 feels cheap and flimsy compared to it's older brother, the LaserJet 4000/4050. HP used to brag about the drop tests they did on their network servers, but today just opening an HP (Compaq) server is a pain because the case is so easily warped and the panel that should be easy to remove binds and gets stuck. The quality of HP has taken a back seat to the cheapness of Compaq.
Alarming regularity.... I think you're exaggerating. Why do you think foreign countries fear losing their companies to large US firms? There are a couple reasons I can think of off the top of my head.
Competition - France has a population of about 60M people. The United States has a population of 300M. Economies of scale kick in and can make the costs of the US company less than the France only one. Now, this alone isn't the bad part. The problem is that this means the newly merged company can undercut all the other native companies, eventually reducing competition.
Culture - This may seem quaint to most Americans, but most countries don't want to import US culture, and go to great lengths to try and protect it. The French language silliness you sometimes hear about is one incarnation of this. The Canadian cancon laws are another. Take the slight discomfort some parents expressed when some Japanese animation (Pokemon) became popular in the US, and multiply it to the point where there is little else on the market and you're getting close.
Sovereignty - There is an overstated,but potentially real, fear that by allowing these companies to take over the business landscape in the country that it gives foreign countries say over the local government. For a sufficiently large company, "Pass this law, or we pull out of your country" can become a real threat.
The US is unique in that it doesn't have the same fear of these as most other countries do. For example, the US entertainment industry (movies, television, music and games) is the biggest in the world. Of the 100 largest companies in the world, 37 are based in the US (the next highest being 22 in Japan and 10 in Germany), so foreign competition is fairly limited, and when it does happen, it's usually competition between equals (in size) rather than a large foreign company against a small local one.
Charter may be afraid that by not siding with their customers they may end up encouraging additional government regulation into their monopoly. While I'm sure they're grateful for the regulations that keep their monopoly safe in those areas, most companies would do nearly anything to avoid more because they usually just end up raising the price to do business.
Another option is that they're looking to protect their customers from entities other than the RIAA/MPAA. If it becomes too easy to get customer records from an ISP without judicial oversight, it will be abused by others. The quintessential, "Won't you think of the children?", example is that of a prowler using this provision to get the addresses of potential victims. Just one incident of this extreme example would be enough to do a lot of damage to the company (the public will not blame the lawmakers as much as they will blame the company). Litigating this to the end is one way of establishing precident that they can use later, if needed.
Charter isn't saying "stay out of our records" as much as they're saying "go through proper channels". I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see these companies that are championing their customers rights now turn around once the trial is all over and announce voluntary compliance with RIAA/MPAA requests in the future.
That's not Open Source, that's shareware. Getting the source code for an application when you buy it doesn't make it Open Source. Like the Free Software definition, the Open Source definition specificly mentions that free redistribution must be allowed (it's in section 1).
Seems that way, doesn't it. Why wait for the courts and laws to come into effect when we can be judge, jury, and executioner? Then again, the submitter of this story wrote to me, "There never seem to be any real cases cited, only hand-wringing by people who have not been joe-jobbed but who seem more concerned with hypothetical joe-jobbing of unnamed, unknown others that no one can point to". When I did name some specific joe jobs (such as the SpamCop and Spamhaus joe jobs), there was no reply, predictably.
But, I give up. I cannot convince someone who can't see beyond their own nose. Instead, I'll make this perfectly clear. I don't send spam, but if I ever get DDoSed by any of these holier-than-thou anti-spam vigilantes, I will do all I can to see the full force of the law fall upon them. You'd be no better than a script kiddie, and subject to the same punishment as far as I'm concerned.
Vigilante justice soils the good name of the anti-spam groups out there that are working hard to help the world control the spam problem. Attacking spammers with DDoS only changes them from being a criminal into being a victim, and we do not want that.
This actually depends more on the X server, video driver and your hardware. If you're doing double buffering off screen, you may actually be able to write to that memory faster than onscreen memory, and be able to offload the copy operation to the graphics processor rather than doing a looped REP MOVSx operation. On a dumb framebuffer, you'll probably see a large decrease in performance. On a modern video card, things are not so clear cut, especially in the case were double buffering allows you to avoid sending too much data over a slow bus.
Two words. Authentication and authorization. For the first, most commercial IM systems have very limited authentication systems. Most are open for registration from anyone in the world, and give you little assurance that you're talking to who you think you're talking to. The other concern is authorization. Are you allowed to use the service, and to whom are you allowed to communicate with? I doubt many IM systems offer any controls for these types of restrictions.
It doesn't matter if the state is only changed through library calls or not. A giant lock around each call prevents the most obvious crashes of a non-threadsafe library, but there are plenty of other non-obvious problems that could (and likely do) exist. Any library that changes C 'static' variables, or variables stored within the image of the library will be unsafe. Imagine this scenario.
Thread A calls SetMode(2)
Thread B calls SetMode(10)
Thread A attempts operation that requires Mode 2.
The only fixes would be for thread A to block any access to the library until the script exits (good bye performance), or to try and load the library multiple times (which has problems of it's own, especially for the non-PIC cases). Frankly, there's no good solution to this problem.
Backlights have improved substancially in the past two or three years. On my 2yr old laptop (Toshiba Satellite), I can see obvious bright patches at the corners of the screen when looking at a black screen. On my 1yr old LCD (NEC LCD1760NX) for my desktop PC, I can't percieve any backlight inconsistancies. One problem with LCDs you didn't mention is that most LCD panels are still unable to properly display more than 262144 colours (e.g. 18bpp), and the ones that advertise more than this are typically using a form of dithering to achieve it (although this too will become less and less of an issue as the LCD panels get faster and faster or better and better).
To be honest, I think too many people make too big of a deal over this. Unless you are in the market for a high end CRT, the fact that an LCD may have inaccurate colour output will not affect you. Low end CRTs can be just as bad, as well as being blury and flickery. 16ms LCDs are fast enough for games and motion video (unless 60fps isn't enough for you), and the colour output should be good enough for anyone who isn't trying to do color matching with a printer. When deciding between a cheap LCD and a cheap CRT, I'd get the LCD every time (as long as it was 20ms or better).
Canada has a peculiar position in this. Most of the problem is rooted in the CanCon or Canadian Content rules. Basically, it boils down to the government trying to promote Canadian television and music. Living next to the United States means we're deluged by US culture, like it or not, and if it weren't for this law, things like Degrassi probably would never be made because the Canadian market is too small, and the available US programming is too large.
Now, while the broadcasters must fill 60% of the airtime with Canadian produced shows, that still leaves the remaining 40%. This is typically filled with US shows because they tend to be cheap, and get good ratings. This creates some interesting situations. For example, CTV (who produce Degrassi) license The Sopranos from HBO. When an application to the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to allow cable and satellite providers to provide HBO to Canadians, it was rejected because it would put it in direct competition with CTV because of The Sopranos licensing. The refusal to carry CTV by US cable and satellite providers is likely the same, except for the reversed situation. Or maybe they're afraid of pissing off people who believe Ann Coulter's claims that Canadians hate Americans because we don't agree with every US policy (just to clarify, most of us don't like Bush, and we've NEVER agreed with ALL US policies).
To most Americans, the cancon laws seem quaint, and pretty silly. But, in a country that still measures the relative success of a musical band by if they managed to hit it off in the United States, these laws have probably helped more than they've hurt. Besides, we still consume lots of US movies, music and television programming (among other things).
"Oh, well, if you don't want to sign this now, I have another band coming in in fifteen minutes who is going to sign. Sorry, but I can only take one of you." Such a simple pressure tactic usually attributed to used car salesmen, but when you've worked so hard to just get to this point, this pressure can be overwhelming. After all, if you refuse, there's probably another two or three that make music very similar to you that will be willing to sign on the spot. What is forgotten by these bands often is that this is no longer music at this point. Now it's business, and business will try to squeeze out every penny they can possibly get regardless of your wishes.
I've never dealt with a recording contract either, but there's an interesting article on it and the contract tricks. Now, I have no idea if this is accurate, but I have no reason not to believe it is. It is on par with other record industry tricks in recent history (like changing music into a work-for-hire by getting lawmakers to sneak it in an unrelated bill). The story that is told over and over again is convincing the musician to sign a contract on the spot without getting legal council and being promised things that are not in the contract, and getting screwed over because of it as none of the promised things will ever materialize, and the record company will hold them to the contract mercilessly.
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However, if EA's history with such purchases is any indication, most often EA buys the company, and then one year later announces they are reorganizing. By reorganizing, they mean closing the purchased company's doors, and laying off all the employees by 'moving' their jobs to HQ, or making them redundant. Of course, the excuse will be that they are 'underperforming' or somesuch nonsense.
Note to spyware authors: no one considers your software 'permission-based' when it goes to such lengths to avoid being uninstalled, or has to hide itself in things like alternate data streams. If you can write programs to detect this tampering, and 'correct' it, you ought to be able to code a working uninstall routine, too.
2) Windows XP encouraged people to finally write NT drivers, however, most XP drivers are perfectly compatible with Windows 2000
3) This is debatable. In most cases, the stability of Windows XP is identical to Windows 2000.
4) Most of the improved boot times are cosmetic, like showing your desktop even if it's not ready to be used. (How many people have ended up opening something two or three times because despite the fact that Windows was showing your desktop with a regular arrow pointer, clicking on anything did nothing for several seconds/minutes)
5) I have no idea what you mean by this.
6) Debatable. I would argue that certain things have become far more difficult with WinXP. "Simple File Sharing" hides a lot of stuff that can be the cause of several SMB sharing problems. You can't enable guest account with the automated wizard without also going creating the "Shared Documents", which you may not want.
On the other hand, Windows XP has brought with it a bunch of junk that some people don't want. Have you ever tried to get rid of .NET Messenger on XP, without it coming back? Have you tried deleting the Shared Documents directory after the Home Network setup wizard has created it? Have you ever tried to find the User Rights Assignment on XP Home so that a Limited Account will work with some particular program? Ever want to use the new XP group policies on a Windows 2000-based active directory (it's a mess)? What about the auto-grouping taskbar that frightens people the first time it happens because they think their programs have been closed, or the intellimenu on the start menu that makes people think that their less frequently used programs may have been uninstalled? And what about System Restore which gobbles up 12% of every drive by default, regardless of the drive size (add to that the 10% per user that Internet Explorer wants to use, plus an unrestricted dllcache growth, and a modest system partition can become quite cramped quickly)? Then there's the bubble windows. Some are click to dismiss, others are click for more info.
And if you're very, very lucky, all your programs/games/utilities will work as a non-Administrator user. Very few apps are designed to run as non-Administrator even today (what do you mean, I can't write arbitrary values to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE?), and if you're constantly using "Run As..." you're not that much more protected than those who run as Administrator all the time.
Microsoft's file sharing uses NETBIOS for naming, etc, but there are other elements to it, too. Microsoft published a draft to the IETF for CIFS (formerly SMB). It's only a subset of the functionality that Windows actually supports, and it was chock full of errors and omissions. There were also several books written about SMB. The earliest I can find is Protocols for X/Open PC Interworking: SMB, Version 2, published October 1992. The first version may have been published more than two years earlier, in January 1990, but I'm having difficulty finding that information. The Samba site says that the first version, developed in 1992, was based on reverse engineering the wire protocol of the MS-DOS SMB client. The later versions may have made use of this other documentation.
Not just journalists, either. Anyone with an agenda loves to forget these things, too. If you look at their handy graph, it looks like fairly linear growth both before and after CAN-SPAM, so blaming the law may be a little out of order.
I wouldn't call $400-$500 obscene for a color laser. I'd avoid the Samsung CLP-500 printer, though. The colors look pretty bland, even compared to a rather old HP LaserJet 4500. It's probably just some sort of dithering issue with either the drivers or the printer firmware, but it doesn't make photos look very good.
I like bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but Java was a tactical threat to Microsoft's platform, and that's why they did all they could to sabotage it. It's nothing personal, it's just business.
You know, considering that case was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to quote a lower court's opinion. Try this one instead. Schmeiser didn't exactly win his appeal, but he didn't exactly lose, either. The court ruled that because he did not profit from the infusion of roundup-ready canola in his field, there were no damages to Monsanto, and that each party should pay their own legal fees. It wasn't a unanimous decision either. It was decided 5-4 in favour of Monsanto's interests, with the other four judges dissenting and siding with Schmeiser.
The parent's post was intended to mean that the Red Cross does not have a patent on their logo. On the other hand, they may have a trademark on it. Patents are limited to inventions not art and logos. In addition, patents expire after 21 years, which would make them rather useless for company logos and names. Considering the American Red Cross was created in May 21, 1881, any patent would've long since expired. Trademarks don't expire unless you fail to defend it. A copyright on the logo is also possible, but it would've likely expired by now.
It has nothing to do with the fact that HP printers just feel flimsy these days? Even the supposedly 'high-end' LaserJet 4250 feels cheap and flimsy compared to it's older brother, the LaserJet 4000/4050. HP used to brag about the drop tests they did on their network servers, but today just opening an HP (Compaq) server is a pain because the case is so easily warped and the panel that should be easy to remove binds and gets stuck. The quality of HP has taken a back seat to the cheapness of Compaq.
- Competition - France has a population of about 60M people. The United States has a population of 300M. Economies of scale kick in and can make the costs of the US company less than the France only one. Now, this alone isn't the bad part. The problem is that this means the newly merged company can undercut all the other native companies, eventually reducing competition.
- Culture - This may seem quaint to most Americans, but most countries don't want to import US culture, and go to great lengths to try and protect it. The French language silliness you sometimes hear about is one incarnation of this. The Canadian cancon laws are another. Take the slight discomfort some parents expressed when some Japanese animation (Pokemon) became popular in the US, and multiply it to the point where there is little else on the market and you're getting close.
- Sovereignty - There is an overstated
,but potentially real, fear that by allowing these companies to take over the business landscape in the country that it gives foreign countries say over the local government. For a sufficiently large company, "Pass this law, or we pull out of your country" can become a real threat.
The US is unique in that it doesn't have the same fear of these as most other countries do. For example, the US entertainment industry (movies, television, music and games) is the biggest in the world. Of the 100 largest companies in the world, 37 are based in the US (the next highest being 22 in Japan and 10 in Germany), so foreign competition is fairly limited, and when it does happen, it's usually competition between equals (in size) rather than a large foreign company against a small local one.Charter may be afraid that by not siding with their customers they may end up encouraging additional government regulation into their monopoly. While I'm sure they're grateful for the regulations that keep their monopoly safe in those areas, most companies would do nearly anything to avoid more because they usually just end up raising the price to do business.
Another option is that they're looking to protect their customers from entities other than the RIAA/MPAA. If it becomes too easy to get customer records from an ISP without judicial oversight, it will be abused by others. The quintessential, "Won't you think of the children?", example is that of a prowler using this provision to get the addresses of potential victims. Just one incident of this extreme example would be enough to do a lot of damage to the company (the public will not blame the lawmakers as much as they will blame the company). Litigating this to the end is one way of establishing precident that they can use later, if needed.
Charter isn't saying "stay out of our records" as much as they're saying "go through proper channels". I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see these companies that are championing their customers rights now turn around once the trial is all over and announce voluntary compliance with RIAA/MPAA requests in the future.
Ubi's also got the Rainbow Six team... And they've got guns.... lots of them.
That's not Open Source, that's shareware. Getting the source code for an application when you buy it doesn't make it Open Source. Like the Free Software definition, the Open Source definition specificly mentions that free redistribution must be allowed (it's in section 1).
But, I give up. I cannot convince someone who can't see beyond their own nose. Instead, I'll make this perfectly clear. I don't send spam, but if I ever get DDoSed by any of these holier-than-thou anti-spam vigilantes, I will do all I can to see the full force of the law fall upon them. You'd be no better than a script kiddie, and subject to the same punishment as far as I'm concerned.
Vigilante justice soils the good name of the anti-spam groups out there that are working hard to help the world control the spam problem. Attacking spammers with DDoS only changes them from being a criminal into being a victim, and we do not want that.
This actually depends more on the X server, video driver and your hardware. If you're doing double buffering off screen, you may actually be able to write to that memory faster than onscreen memory, and be able to offload the copy operation to the graphics processor rather than doing a looped REP MOVSx operation. On a dumb framebuffer, you'll probably see a large decrease in performance. On a modern video card, things are not so clear cut, especially in the case were double buffering allows you to avoid sending too much data over a slow bus.
You haven't read enough BOFH.
Two words. Authentication and authorization. For the first, most commercial IM systems have very limited authentication systems. Most are open for registration from anyone in the world, and give you little assurance that you're talking to who you think you're talking to. The other concern is authorization. Are you allowed to use the service, and to whom are you allowed to communicate with? I doubt many IM systems offer any controls for these types of restrictions.
- Thread A calls SetMode(2)
- Thread B calls SetMode(10)
- Thread A attempts operation that requires Mode 2.
The only fixes would be for thread A to block any access to the library until the script exits (good bye performance), or to try and load the library multiple times (which has problems of it's own, especially for the non-PIC cases). Frankly, there's no good solution to this problem.We call 'Canadian bacon', back bacon.
To be honest, I think too many people make too big of a deal over this. Unless you are in the market for a high end CRT, the fact that an LCD may have inaccurate colour output will not affect you. Low end CRTs can be just as bad, as well as being blury and flickery. 16ms LCDs are fast enough for games and motion video (unless 60fps isn't enough for you), and the colour output should be good enough for anyone who isn't trying to do color matching with a printer. When deciding between a cheap LCD and a cheap CRT, I'd get the LCD every time (as long as it was 20ms or better).
Now, while the broadcasters must fill 60% of the airtime with Canadian produced shows, that still leaves the remaining 40%. This is typically filled with US shows because they tend to be cheap, and get good ratings. This creates some interesting situations. For example, CTV (who produce Degrassi) license The Sopranos from HBO. When an application to the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to allow cable and satellite providers to provide HBO to Canadians, it was rejected because it would put it in direct competition with CTV because of The Sopranos licensing. The refusal to carry CTV by US cable and satellite providers is likely the same, except for the reversed situation. Or maybe they're afraid of pissing off people who believe Ann Coulter's claims that Canadians hate Americans because we don't agree with every US policy (just to clarify, most of us don't like Bush, and we've NEVER agreed with ALL US policies).
To most Americans, the cancon laws seem quaint, and pretty silly. But, in a country that still measures the relative success of a musical band by if they managed to hit it off in the United States, these laws have probably helped more than they've hurt. Besides, we still consume lots of US movies, music and television programming (among other things).
"Oh, well, if you don't want to sign this now, I have another band coming in in fifteen minutes who is going to sign. Sorry, but I can only take one of you." Such a simple pressure tactic usually attributed to used car salesmen, but when you've worked so hard to just get to this point, this pressure can be overwhelming. After all, if you refuse, there's probably another two or three that make music very similar to you that will be willing to sign on the spot. What is forgotten by these bands often is that this is no longer music at this point. Now it's business, and business will try to squeeze out every penny they can possibly get regardless of your wishes.
I've never dealt with a recording contract either, but there's an interesting article on it and the contract tricks. Now, I have no idea if this is accurate, but I have no reason not to believe it is. It is on par with other record industry tricks in recent history (like changing music into a work-for-hire by getting lawmakers to sneak it in an unrelated bill). The story that is told over and over again is convincing the musician to sign a contract on the spot without getting legal council and being promised things that are not in the contract, and getting screwed over because of it as none of the promised things will ever materialize, and the record company will hold them to the contract mercilessly.