Seriously. "clerics in 4th Edition occupy the "leader" role (sometimes also known as the "healer" or "party buffer" role). Their damage output is decent, but far behind that of the wizard or rogue, and they don't have the defenses or melee-control abilities of the fighter."
I swear I had flashbacks to SOE message boards filled with whining Monks. Folks, is this really the hill you want to die on?
There are a great many (hundreds) of role playing games out there. There are many times more tabletop games than that.
My advice to you is that you set down the WotC torch and pick up another game for a while. The worst that can happen is that you'll come back to D&D with a better understanding of why you like it. The best that could happen? You may realize you're paying for an over-designed, over-priced, over-hyped, over-played soulless shell of a role playing game - one that really doesn't do anything badly, but doesn't do anything well, either.
Repeat after me: The system is part of the setting. The system is part of the charm. The system is the soul of the game. Learning new systems is fun. After learning D&D, learning new systems is a friggin' cakewalk.
Try something different. On a budget? Check out CheapAss Games. Want more role playing and less dice rolling, maybe some more flavor in a gaming system? Try out Continuum (time travel/any), Deadlands (western), Earthdawn (swords/sorcery), Unknown Armies (occult/underworld), Paranoia (psychotic and fun), Big Eyes Small Mouth (anime), Ironpaw (yes, furry has an RPG). Want miniatures and grand tabletop battles and strategy? Try Warhammer. That's just a short list of the ones I've enjoyed off the top of my head. Wikipedia has a list, RPGNet has reviews, you know what to do.
Heck, try something like Universalis if you want real innovation - they are designing the GM/DM right out. It didn't quite succeed, but the idea has a hell of a lot of merit. Enough that I think it'll shape the future of interactive storytelling in role playing games. I'll admit, I've been out of the loop for some time. There's plenty more out there I've never heard of.
If you bought 40 D&D 3.5 books, you could have spent that money instead on 50 different RPGs. WotC tends to be expensive. There's more to RPGs than D&D. If you've only ever played D&D then I suggest you really don't know what you are missing, and you should take a few others for a spin - and don't overlook card games, board games, and trivia games either. Those genres aren't standing still. They can make for a great two or three session break in between various campaigns - or a good gaming night for most of your group if too few people show up to play your current campaign.
Yes, and at this rate he'll probably be a Libertarian running as a Libertarian if he doesn't do well on Super Tuesday.
Win or lose, Ron wants to get his message out, and he's already come farther than anyone including Ron and his most ardent supporters would have ever dreamed possible. He's got nothing to lose since his political career was winding down anyway.
Of course there is. Liberty is popular, even among vastly different groups that would love to destroy each other (blacks and white supremacists, for example). Are you upset that Ron's support ignores all common political boundaries? To me that seems like the mark of a savvy politician who gives people what they all want (rather than what a minority of them want to enforce on others).
Read the stormfront threads, they are hysterical. A lot of community HATES Ron but figures him for the lesser evil and for the only candidate that will get government off of their backs, so they consider him a concession vote. Your idiotic statements make it sound like Ron is an out and out racist who has their full support and shows up to the local KKK meetings. You're not doing yourself any favors with baseless slander. (Yes, I know about the letter, and that's been debunked to my satisfaction as well.)
I can find fifty problems worse than those (even if they were true!) with every other candidate. Scandals, gross abuses of taxpayer money, double talk and flip flopping on any politically convenient issue, highly questionable morals, utterly ridiculous religious stances, total intolerance to individual liberty and freedom, and a colorful history of lawbreaking sums up damn near every candidate running and certainly sums up all popular mainstream candidates in both parties. Ron is a saint compared to any of them. I'd take Dennis in a heartbeat as well. If that looks like a contradiction to you, then you haven't the faintest idea what a lot of us are looking for in a politician.
But please, just ignore Ron Paul. He's not your problem. Those of us who give a damn are taking care of him already.
Ron wants to legalize competition among US currency. The market will decide which currencies are needed and where they best fit. I can't see any disadvantages to having a fiat system AND a gold-standard currency of some kind for long term savings. Best of both worlds, makes the entire argument moot.
There is no proof that any of our votes are any longer "by the people" now. I'll settle for a receipt with a number on it that is in no way associated with a name. If you're so terrified of someone breaking your kneecaps you can opt to have no receipt. Some of us want the confirmation and you've no right to deny us that confirmation, just as we've got no right to force one upon you. Voter's choice, problem solved.
I don't really care of the voting machines are mechanical or digital, as long as their designs and any code on them is a matter of public record. I also really don't care how they collect the vote.
What I do care about is that after I vote, I get a printed receipt with a confirmation number. I can then either call a phone line or log in to the internet and verify that confirmation number with the government and CONFIRM ABSOLUTELY the details of my vote by having the system display it back to me.
This confirmation number is used to trace all aspects of the vote in the system. It changes with every vote and every election and is never linked to a person's name or identity in any way. This is the ONLY way we will ever be able to catch voting fraud.
Give us that check and balance, and then give us Condorcet voting, and our election woes will be put to rest forever.
I'll second that. I've been up to my eyeballs in computer hardware for nearly twenty years now as a tech, but I rarely put any more effort in than identifying the bad part and replacing it. We had a rash of motherboard failures recently (all the same brand, same batch) and I just happened to notice one leaking capacitor. I did some googling, hit that badcaps site, and felt like a moron for not knowing about that particular class of problem all along. Why the hell wasn't this taught in any of my computer-related classes? I learned how to flash an eeprom manually but never how to spot and replace bad capacitors.
In particular, the symptoms of random, senseless errors, strangely hot CPUs, and being unable to reboot a system without powering it down first are direct symptoms of bad capacitors that I had no previous explanation for. I never realized that the tiny bulge at the top of a capacitor was an indication of a problem. Fact is, if it's not flat, it's fucked.
They are so easy to replace. The solder points for most caps are huge. A few bucks and a half hour can resurrect a motherboard or video card that otherwise would be weeks in replacement - and if you re-cap it yourself you can buy good parts. The capacitors tend to be the most failure prone part by an order of magnitude, living far shorter lives than the rest of the board's components.
You can make a mint on eBay just buying old hardware that has a cap problem, fixing it yourself, and reselling it.
# The initial February 2007 release had to be purposely checked/approved by WSUS admin s sfor distribution, because it was an Optional update. # All subsequent metadata-only revisions to that WSUS admin approved February 2007 release would then also be automatically approved for distribution. # The initial February approval is retained throughout the life of the update, regardless of revision.
I definitely did NOT approve the Feb 07 release, however we were running WSUS 2.0 at that time (the 3.0 upgrade was two months ago). So, yeah, probably some kind of upgrade nonsense.
We allow program updates. Most apps check for new versions and install internal updates. It's the ones that collect your outlook contacts and 'store' them on a 3rd party website that get banned. A good way to find out if something is up is to just take a look at your firewall logs. If more data was uploaded than was downloaded for any given connection, it's probably worth looking in to, especially if there's a high upload volume.
The custom MSIs are built with Wise Package Studio. Microsoft provides free tools for it but frankly they suck to the point of useless. A copy of Wise Administrator edition is a couple grand but well worth every penny. Set up a VM in VMWare, get it to your vanilla company-default configuration of windows, and install Wise. Have Wise run its first diff/analysis of the system. Shut it down, take a snapshot with VMWare. Boot it up, make any changes to the system you want turned into an MSI (install apps, add files, etc), then let Wise capture them and make a project out of it. Tweak to your needs, and compile into an MSI. Copy to a file server somewhere. Revert to your VM snapshot, rinse and repeat.
Wise will also create transforms for existing MSI packages that make Microsoft's Office Customization Tools look tame by comparison. With that package you can tweak the hell out of anything. Frankly I'm not even that good at it compared to a lot of the Wise veterans I've seen. Our business needs are a lot more simple than those of someone trying to manage 50,000 computers.
Doing this in a VM avoids tons of driver-related problems since everything is the same vanilla VM hardware (which translates very well out to a dozen brands of whitebox systems). I've converted everything from Adobe Acrobat to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 into an MSI that way. There's a bit of a learning curve, of course, but Wise has excellent documentation, and there are forums and communities out there dedicated to re-bundling software like this for large company deployments, so there's plenty of help. In the worst case you can create an MSI to drive the setup options of the original executable as well. Generally anything that doesn't touch the hardware directly (drivers, printer ports etc) is no problem.
We create a "Nobody" account with no privs for the net apps and set the paths for their directories to key on the machine name variable. We name the machine after the user (jsmith). That way Nobody keys into the correct username/path through the machine name variable and we can just make it part of our base image (we change machine names to match the user's name during setup). Nobody has full read/write to certain specific users directories but no access to anything else. We do use the runas command for the netapps, but we create little visual basic apps (to get.exe instead of.bat and users can't edit the.exe as easily) to launch the runas command. We name them the same as the apps they are supposed to re-launch (firefox.exe etc) and just pass the command line right through to the real app prefixed with "runas/user:nobody". It's really simple. All of those.exe go into a directory in the user's path.
The only hard part is making sure the shortcuts with absolute paths that programs install by default get deleted and replaced with ones that just call the app by name. I usually do that in the.msi bundle I compile since Wise lets you edit and enforce shortcuts (with MSI self-healing you can have windows auto-replace it if it is deleted or changed). If someone does manage to run firefox without runas, well, they suddenly find themselves missing all of their add-ons and extensions since that's in Nobody's firefox profile, not jsmith's. I usually get a call at that point and someone will fix it for them. The users know how/why we do things this way and don't try to do things differently. They are used to our solutions making their lives easier, not harder, so we get no static unlike some other IT departments I know.:p
To avoid making this into a lot of work with dozens of apps I try to get firefox extensions for everything touching the net (fireftp for example, and IETab of course). Firefox then becomes the default net tool. Most people are really only after web, ftp, and ssh/scp (we use WinSCP for that one with no restrictions).
If something does run an exploit, the only parts of the disk it ca
Download the MSI for Windows Desktop Search. Publish it with your normal workstation policy (in the computer tree as an "assigned app"). This sets it to auto-install everywhere when users log in. Let that sit about five minutes. Then, reopen the GPO, and UN-publish it and choose "uninstall this application wherever it is installed and prevent new installations" from the options when unpublishing it. That will simultaneously remove it from all systems when users log in, and prevent it from being installed again by anyone.
It's based on the MSI product code, so that solution will only work with the existing version. If MS releases a 3.02 version for example with a new product code (or upgrade code) that one won't be blocked.
It's the best my sleep-addled coffee-deprived brain could come up with at 6AM on an idle Tuesday, anyway.
I'm not sure. If I had to guess, I'd guess that it has something to do with the age of our WSUS servers. We started on 1.0 early on, upgraded to 2.0, then to 3.0 recently along with SP2 for 2003. The server itself started life as a Windows 2000 system so that upgrade process was run as well. The server has also had a complete hardware change three times over the last seven years. Microsoft's products are never so buggy on a fresh build as they are when part of a lengthy upgrade tree where the potential to fall down a rabbit hole of untested codepaths is much greater. Unfortunately we can't afford to just scrub every Microsoft service when we move to a new version. I also have a script running once a week to run the recommended cleanup using wsusutil on the WSUS database (and yes I've fixed it to run with the latest version).;)
Other than this strange auto-approval, we've had no problems whatsoever with WSUS 3.0. It's been great actually. The improved reporting and granularity is a welcome addition that we have yet to truly take advantage of. WDS3 was successfully retracted from the approved list after I revoked it, and I've backed out the GPO changes without any trouble. It's no longer showing up on the clients. Also, BDD2007 and our repository of published software (both in a DFS root) resides on the same WSUS server. I've also grafted Linux PXE and Solaris Jumpstart into RIS/BDD2007 so it's something of a custom build. I don't really think those apps should be interacting with WSUS3 in any way though. Totally different services and disk partitions. There are some user home directories there as well.
As to some of the other posters, I don't know that WDS phones home, yet. I haven't taken the time to do a thorough analysis, but I tend to err on the side of paranoia (after all, security is part of my job). I get very suspicious of any programs collecting data about a computer or user activities in the name of making the user experience better. I also don't see the use of an indexing system that kills the performance of one's operating system. I don't trust MS as far as I can shot-put the planet either.
Our GPO already disables all file indexing, NTFS short filename creation, system restore, unnecessary services like UPnP and messenger, and sets sane, non-annoying defaults for apps like MSN messenger, the language toolbar, media center, etc. It even restores the XP search to the better, more basic 2000 version (it's amazing what you can do with a.reg push in a GPO). Essentially I took my 10+ years of experience un-fucking windows default configurations and turned it into a GPO so I didn't have to keep doing it the hard way. I've got custom MSI files assigned to workstations to install apps like the entire sysinternals suite, VLC media player (beats having users install real/quicktime/divx), and so forth. It's a rather mature, customized environment aimed at getting Windows out of the user's way so they can get work done. (And play - we don't ban games.)
And yes, my users have local admin on their desktops. Windows isn't really designed to operate any other way (and I don't have a Fortune 500 budget to fix it like some others do). Our solution to the constant risk of IE was to recommend people use firefox whenever possible (with noscript, adblock, etc) and to get IE, firefox, and other internet-touching apps to run under an unprivileged, local user account that was created to share the exact same desktop/docs/favorites etc as the real user. We also took some time to educate them on safe surfing habits.
What worries me is the trend lately for, say, apps like Sun's Java to ask (default is yes) to install apps like Google Desktop during their normal upgrade cycle. Frankly most users have better things on their minds than wondering if the apps they are clicking upgrade for are about to trojan their boxes with 3rd party bundled software. That's why I'm eyeing an app-killing security policy for the more egregious offenders.
Companies that can't afford to send a fleet of tech monkeys running around to all of the desktops (in other words, most of them).
I manage the WSUS at my company. No updates are EVER to be passed through without my direct approval, even new revisions of previously approved updates. We've had far too many updates go through and break things to allow any kind of auto approval. So, imagine my surprise when I sit down to a cup of coffee and my morning log review, and the first thing I see when I log in is the Windows Update icon telling me to install Windows Desktop Search - something I never approved.
It went straight through, completely ignoring all of our security policies in the process. I was a little irritated at the Windows Update self-update passing through but I let that one slide since it was a MUCH needed bugfix and MS got a suitable backlash from it (silly me, thinking it was a one-time thing). Now we have the same behavior again months later. This is not acceptable. Luckily I'm in a bit earlier than most people so I was able to recall it with a few ninja edits to our group policy, and a company wide email apologizing for allowing it to be published, and warning people to avoid installing it if it somehow still got through to their systems.
I made a few changes. Our WSUS servers now no longer have internet access and are not scheduled to download. I must manually turn on their internet access in our firewall and activate the pull interactively. That way I will see the updates as they arrive, and not have to put up with this stealth update bullshit in the future. I clearly cannot trust them to just sit there and acquire updates on their own any longer.
I'm now developing a security policy for our corporate security software that will forcibly kill any applications on a blacklist I am creating. I will be adding Google Desktop, Windows Desktop Search, Plaxo, AIM, and any other programs I find that have a habit of sending data back home to outside companies. I'll happily find people alternatives that don't phone home - it's not the apps that bother me, it's the potential for leakage of our corporate data to third parties. I don't particularly care if the feature can be turned off, since I'm not the one installing it. If a program has potential to phone home, it's banned.
She discusses the Cassini mission in detail, including what we've learned about Titan and this strange behavior on Enceladus. It beats reading dead text.
So, everyone is convinced that a true understanding of life and consciousness is still a very long way away at this point. It certainly looks that way if all you do is look at technology and social trends, however there is one very important thing people seem to be overlooking in this discussion.
Humans have become pretty decent with code. You are reading this through basic addition - that's all computers really do, you know. They aren't even as fundamentally mathematically complex as an abacus, yet we make them perform miracles with something as simple as addition.
Well, we are now reading the source code of life itself, and putting it online for all to see and read and use however they see fit. In some few years you'll find the genetic source code of every living thing stored in an encyclopedia of some sort, and it'll cost you some hundreds (then tens) of dollars to get your entire gene sequence on a CD-ROM. That's you - 100% of everything about you in the physical world. The secret to intelligence lies in that data. We just need to figure out the programming language it is written in. That's how we crack the problem of intelligence.
Even before we crack the code for thinking, the genetic code for every one of mother nature's tricks in every species living on this planet will end up in that database, just waiting for engineers and scientists to take lessons from nature. What will we do when every single trick of evolution is at our fingertips, and we can rewrite the genetic code of any living thing with a simple pill or injection? What will we do to computers when we make a microchip that mimics evolutionary code found in nature? Even the housefly's brain makes a better flying computer than anything we've built to date.
I'll point you in the direction of some of this knowledge so you don't get the impression this is all fanciful thinking.
We're a long way from a science of mind or any true understanding of consciousness right now, but we are certainly at a time when all of its physical properties and mechanisms are about to be understood in detail. With that out of the way, most of the ambiguity preventing mind science from getting a real start will also disappear, and we'll finally have a path to follow from the bottom up into intelligence. That will lead us to our first AIs. We don't need any top-down genius insight into intelligence to get us there (though it'll certainly help).
Directly. Most of the technically proficient packages tend to have garbage for user interfaces, while most of the newer, less technically superior ones have more intuitive GUIs. I want both, but since I can't get that, and in the real world people far less skilled than me must administer these systems from time to time, user friendliness is more important than technical prowess. The most user friendly packages I have seen are Backup Exec and Tivoli Storage Manager Express.
I feel your pain, man. I've tested dozens of backup packages... so many I can't even remember them all... and in the end, Backup Exec, despite it's somewhat buggy behaviour from time to time, beat them all out in the end. That's the first time in a long time I thought I was using crap software, only to find out to my horror it was one of the best (best does not mean good).
I found that by using carefully tailored versions of Samba, I could use Samba to replace BE's useless unix/linux clients (and it would be *perfect* even on Solaris and Linux ppc64 if only Samba could vanish symlinks from shares). I found that by using StorageCraft's ShadowProtect, I could do bare metal restores with ease by using their HIR tool to bring a backup exec full restore of windows back to life on radically different hardware. BE's exchange support has always been great - the one thing that works as advertised. It's relatively cheap, the tape management (and removable disk management) are top notch, it's totally painless to search your entire catalog for a file and restore it with a few mouse clicks, and the damn user interface is fantastic for managing backup jobs with templates. I can add a new server with a few mouse clicks. In an environment where not everyone is a computer guru, having things work with just a few mouse clicks is very important.
It loses its mind every once in a while (Fragmentation was horrific but they just patched that, Synthetic is still totally broken, ADAMM tape catalog failures, knocks over a production server with a client crash once in a great while, etc) but those events are manageable and fairly rare if you know how to avoid their trigger conditions. At this point I'd be surprised if it has any bugs left I haven't seen yet and found a fix or workaround for. It's hard to trade that for an unknown package that says it is awesome, but three months in you find the same kind of annoying bugs and have to do that work all over again. The pain you don't know is worse than the pain you know very well. Anyone who tells you their product works is a damn dirty liar - all of them fail, all of them have headaches. Proper disaster recovery is far too complex for any package to do it without problems.
My other favorites were Bacula and BackupPC, both of which have some killer features, but are utterly lacking in the user friendly department. They are simply too hard to use for most support staff. They are also not very good at backing up Windows systems (particularly 2k server since it has no shadow copy). Tivoli Storage Manager Express wasn't half bad either. Tivoli itself, or NetBackup - for that price I'll write my own. Small businesses with ridiculously large networks can't afford it.
I see that some people don't know much about Burt Rutan and his goals and how he hopes to accomplish them. This talk should clear that up. If you think a government space program has any chance of accomplishing anything, then you should watch this video and get a bit wiser.
This accident is a miserable development. Rutan is working very hard to provide us with that slice of 'west' the world hasn't had since California was settled. I hope this doesn't set back that dream.
What a load of bullshit. It smells exactly the same as the bullshit about BSD.
It's a license. There are a lot of them. Now you have the choice if you want it that allows you to prevent people from locking your code into proprietary hardware, or prevent people from taking over your project with patents. What's the big fucking deal? Is a legal license written in plain English rather than lawyerese really that difficult to understand? Are people really that pissed off that some aging hippie's flowery software philosophy has a new incarnation? I never knew that the idea of "once you buy it, you own it, and may do whatever you want to it" was so controversial. Last time I checked it was the law.
Early commenters usually go with not reading anything, or mocking everything. You'll find browsing with a -6 to 'funny' and 'insightful' usually clears up the problem by removing the idiot remarks and the groupthink (which is sadly dumber than the idiot remarks most of the time).
The best you can say about this company is that they have a plausible argument. Frankly, that's impressive by itself in this particular industry.
Your ownership of the character is debatable. The argument is that you own the time you invest, and all of the economic goods that proceed from that investment - of which the character is one. I'd be no more right to say that you absolutely own the character than you are to say you own absolutely nothing. We've already established that what the contract says is really just a wish list for the companies who wrote them. You are taking the position that just because the company owns the hardware, they own all the virtual property on that hardware. That's like saying a bank owns your money because your money is just a bunch of ones and zeros in their mainframe somewhere. It's ridiculous. Of course, so is saying you 'own' a character.
When both sides of the argument are ridiculous, the question will only be answered in a courtroom, not an online discussion forum.
There are concepts in economics that are much like a 'human right' and are defended as such, regardless of what any contracts signed may stipulate. Typically, the right of resale is one of them, at least in capitalist markets. No one can tell you that you cannot sell a good or service you have, or resell another good or service you bought - such a thing simply won't hold up in court since it defeats the purpose of basic economics. Of course, what do you do when you're technically a lessee of your body and the entire world you live in is a virtual one owned by the same people leasing you the body? It probably comes down to whose rights are more important to the court in that case.
Companies will gladly take any and all rights they can from you. That's their nature - they don't care about you and they don't see the world the way that you do as a consumer. They can't even be expected to know what they are and are not allowed to do - there's so much law on the books these days that Kim Peek couldn't keep it all in his head. If you want to retain rights each time a brand new marketplace opens up (virtual property for example) then you'll need to speak up when the companies inevitably deny you the same basic rights in the virtual marketplace that they provide in the physical one.
This question is about as grey as it gets in a courtroom, by the way. Virtual property law is still uncharted territory. The best the court can do (and what they usually do) is extend real world property law into the virtual world. That's not necessarily a good idea, not without thinking it through.
Perhaps you'd do better to look at the gaming industry as an economic market. They've now created 'virtual worlds' which are themselves economic markets locked down right now and with no way to trade goods between each other. Would it be good for everyone if a mechanism appeared that connected these virtual markets to the real world market and to each other? That's a lot of economic opportunity. People would find ways to use it that none of us can possibly imagine. If all of those markets were connected as well, you could prevent one company from printing infinite money, for example, since their overall value in the mass market would plummet due to inflation.
You may agree to any number of license agreements, business contracts, and terms of service in your time. Chances are damn good that there are plenty of provisions in all of them that won't stand up in a court of law because they violate one precedent or right or another - just ask Microsoft how bitter that pill about the right to resell Windows was to swallow when they lost. The only way to find out is to put it in front of a judge and see what the verdict is. None of it is ever final until the court says it is.
I'll admit that the responses to these questions were far more intelligent and surprising than I was expecting when I clicked on the link. I was expecting gold farmers and got responses worthy of VP capital investment (albeit very risky, but also very exciting). This company has taken the position that these virtual markets must be opened up and connected, and this is by no means a crazy idea. Eventually they'll sit down with the MMO companies, or with their lawyers in front of a judge, and we'll find out which way the virtual property market is going to go. Frankly, I think open is always better than closed.
That's very close to the way IT works at my current company. Most of the company is on one building (with the other remote site literally two blocks down the street). I try to maintain working computers and a good cache of spare parts so that I can fix any problems with hardware in minutes. Our office is sitting in the middle of the building, and the door's always open. People pop in from time to time all day long (and it's not as distracting as you might think). I have spare machines and can do a data move (without disrupting the OS no matter what it is) in less than an hour to new hardware.
I also set up a central RIS repository that publishes all apps in the organization. If a user has permission to use the app, I put him in the right group and it just shows up under add/remove programs. Any user can hit F12 and do a network boot to install any of our selection of operating systems or run a variety of troubleshooting tools. PXELinux is remarkably easy to graft into Microsoft's RIS server, so I can publish a variety of linux distributions and tools the same way, all preconfigured to know where their network repositories are. Updates for all OSes we support (solaris, several linux, windows) are maintained on the same servers in the same way.
This is like a tech stop for software. The users never have to ask us for programs and they can handle many of their IT needs on their own terms, with us always a door down the hall if they need help. Most of our users are developers and are quite capable of managing their OSes and apps and they love having this freedom. This is especially useful for virtual machines which most of our devs use for sandboxing. They can boot the VM off of the network and set it up any way they like.
Sure, we give them admin rights to their systems - how the hell do you get dev work done without? We just configure their web browsers so the browser itself runs under an underprivileged account, which solves most of the security problems.
It works great, and most tech calls you get in that kind of environment tend to be real problems. We had a ticketing system - but we scrapped it because it took more time to open a ticket, describe the problem, and close the ticket later than it took to just get up and go talk to the user and fix the problem.
This model is very laid back and really puts the power of IT into the hands of the users, while freeing up the admins to handle things that are worthwhile instead of trivia like finding media or dealing with obscure permissions problems. All you need to implement it is one reasonably personable technician, a low-cost server to hold the data, and a day or so to get it all up and running. Any network jack has every IT tool you could possibly need, and if that's not enough we have a massively hacked version of XP and tools crammed onto a single USB key that will boot on any ACPI-capable computer (with 1.6GB of drivers - it has them all). Fits in your pocket and it can fix or recover anything.
When I started here the tech group was five people who spent all day running around with CDs and screwdrivers, and we were generally hated. Five years later we have 30% more employees and only two techs who spend most of their time learning new systems and skills rather than supporting infrastructure, and everyone is on a first name basis. It's good enough to make me wince just thinking about going back to a typical corporate IT job. It's going to be fun converting the entire thing to linux.
It happens. A good foam carrying case for an xbox runs about $25 at Toys-R-Us or similar places. It cuts down on the abuse while in your trunk. I never put anything on there I can't afford to lose.
My worst one was formatting my 750GB model as one huge 750GB F drive. The partition table starts looping back on itself at the 256GB mark, so I overwrote everything on the system by copying in new media. I broke the 1TB model up into C/E/F/G at 256GB each and the problem hasn't reappeared. That would be a pain to manage except that XBMC has a mode that hides the locations of files, making one large list from as many library locations as you specify. Kinda handy.
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Seriously. "clerics in 4th Edition occupy the "leader" role (sometimes also known as the "healer" or "party buffer" role). Their damage output is decent, but far behind that of the wizard or rogue, and they don't have the defenses or melee-control abilities of the fighter."
I swear I had flashbacks to SOE message boards filled with whining Monks. Folks, is this really the hill you want to die on?
There are a great many (hundreds) of role playing games out there. There are many times more tabletop games than that.
My advice to you is that you set down the WotC torch and pick up another game for a while. The worst that can happen is that you'll come back to D&D with a better understanding of why you like it. The best that could happen? You may realize you're paying for an over-designed, over-priced, over-hyped, over-played soulless shell of a role playing game - one that really doesn't do anything badly, but doesn't do anything well, either.
Repeat after me: The system is part of the setting. The system is part of the charm. The system is the soul of the game. Learning new systems is fun. After learning D&D, learning new systems is a friggin' cakewalk.
Try something different. On a budget? Check out CheapAss Games. Want more role playing and less dice rolling, maybe some more flavor in a gaming system? Try out Continuum (time travel/any), Deadlands (western), Earthdawn (swords/sorcery), Unknown Armies (occult/underworld), Paranoia (psychotic and fun), Big Eyes Small Mouth (anime), Ironpaw (yes, furry has an RPG). Want miniatures and grand tabletop battles and strategy? Try Warhammer. That's just a short list of the ones I've enjoyed off the top of my head. Wikipedia has a list, RPGNet has reviews, you know what to do.
Heck, try something like Universalis if you want real innovation - they are designing the GM/DM right out. It didn't quite succeed, but the idea has a hell of a lot of merit. Enough that I think it'll shape the future of interactive storytelling in role playing games. I'll admit, I've been out of the loop for some time. There's plenty more out there I've never heard of.
If you bought 40 D&D 3.5 books, you could have spent that money instead on 50 different RPGs. WotC tends to be expensive. There's more to RPGs than D&D. If you've only ever played D&D then I suggest you really don't know what you are missing, and you should take a few others for a spin - and don't overlook card games, board games, and trivia games either. Those genres aren't standing still. They can make for a great two or three session break in between various campaigns - or a good gaming night for most of your group if too few people show up to play your current campaign.
Yes, and at this rate he'll probably be a Libertarian running as a Libertarian if he doesn't do well on Super Tuesday.
Win or lose, Ron wants to get his message out, and he's already come farther than anyone including Ron and his most ardent supporters would have ever dreamed possible. He's got nothing to lose since his political career was winding down anyway.
Of course there is. Liberty is popular, even among vastly different groups that would love to destroy each other (blacks and white supremacists, for example). Are you upset that Ron's support ignores all common political boundaries? To me that seems like the mark of a savvy politician who gives people what they all want (rather than what a minority of them want to enforce on others).
Read the stormfront threads, they are hysterical. A lot of community HATES Ron but figures him for the lesser evil and for the only candidate that will get government off of their backs, so they consider him a concession vote. Your idiotic statements make it sound like Ron is an out and out racist who has their full support and shows up to the local KKK meetings. You're not doing yourself any favors with baseless slander. (Yes, I know about the letter, and that's been debunked to my satisfaction as well.)
I can find fifty problems worse than those (even if they were true!) with every other candidate. Scandals, gross abuses of taxpayer money, double talk and flip flopping on any politically convenient issue, highly questionable morals, utterly ridiculous religious stances, total intolerance to individual liberty and freedom, and a colorful history of lawbreaking sums up damn near every candidate running and certainly sums up all popular mainstream candidates in both parties. Ron is a saint compared to any of them. I'd take Dennis in a heartbeat as well. If that looks like a contradiction to you, then you haven't the faintest idea what a lot of us are looking for in a politician.
But please, just ignore Ron Paul. He's not your problem. Those of us who give a damn are taking care of him already.
Ron wants to legalize competition among US currency. The market will decide which currencies are needed and where they best fit. I can't see any disadvantages to having a fiat system AND a gold-standard currency of some kind for long term savings. Best of both worlds, makes the entire argument moot.
There is no proof that any of our votes are any longer "by the people" now. I'll settle for a receipt with a number on it that is in no way associated with a name. If you're so terrified of someone breaking your kneecaps you can opt to have no receipt. Some of us want the confirmation and you've no right to deny us that confirmation, just as we've got no right to force one upon you. Voter's choice, problem solved.
I don't really care of the voting machines are mechanical or digital, as long as their designs and any code on them is a matter of public record. I also really don't care how they collect the vote.
What I do care about is that after I vote, I get a printed receipt with a confirmation number. I can then either call a phone line or log in to the internet and verify that confirmation number with the government and CONFIRM ABSOLUTELY the details of my vote by having the system display it back to me.
This confirmation number is used to trace all aspects of the vote in the system. It changes with every vote and every election and is never linked to a person's name or identity in any way. This is the ONLY way we will ever be able to catch voting fraud.
Give us that check and balance, and then give us Condorcet voting, and our election woes will be put to rest forever.
I'll second that. I've been up to my eyeballs in computer hardware for nearly twenty years now as a tech, but I rarely put any more effort in than identifying the bad part and replacing it. We had a rash of motherboard failures recently (all the same brand, same batch) and I just happened to notice one leaking capacitor. I did some googling, hit that badcaps site, and felt like a moron for not knowing about that particular class of problem all along. Why the hell wasn't this taught in any of my computer-related classes? I learned how to flash an eeprom manually but never how to spot and replace bad capacitors.
In particular, the symptoms of random, senseless errors, strangely hot CPUs, and being unable to reboot a system without powering it down first are direct symptoms of bad capacitors that I had no previous explanation for. I never realized that the tiny bulge at the top of a capacitor was an indication of a problem. Fact is, if it's not flat, it's fucked.
They are so easy to replace. The solder points for most caps are huge. A few bucks and a half hour can resurrect a motherboard or video card that otherwise would be weeks in replacement - and if you re-cap it yourself you can buy good parts. The capacitors tend to be the most failure prone part by an order of magnitude, living far shorter lives than the rest of the board's components.
You can make a mint on eBay just buying old hardware that has a cap problem, fixing it yourself, and reselling it.
Microsoft's official explanation is this:
# The initial February 2007 release had to be purposely checked/approved by WSUS admin s sfor distribution, because it was an Optional update.
# All subsequent metadata-only revisions to that WSUS admin approved February 2007 release would then also be automatically approved for distribution.
# The initial February approval is retained throughout the life of the update, regardless of revision.
I definitely did NOT approve the Feb 07 release, however we were running WSUS 2.0 at that time (the 3.0 upgrade was two months ago). So, yeah, probably some kind of upgrade nonsense.
We allow program updates. Most apps check for new versions and install internal updates. It's the ones that collect your outlook contacts and 'store' them on a 3rd party website that get banned. A good way to find out if something is up is to just take a look at your firewall logs. If more data was uploaded than was downloaded for any given connection, it's probably worth looking in to, especially if there's a high upload volume.
The custom MSIs are built with Wise Package Studio. Microsoft provides free tools for it but frankly they suck to the point of useless. A copy of Wise Administrator edition is a couple grand but well worth every penny. Set up a VM in VMWare, get it to your vanilla company-default configuration of windows, and install Wise. Have Wise run its first diff/analysis of the system. Shut it down, take a snapshot with VMWare. Boot it up, make any changes to the system you want turned into an MSI (install apps, add files, etc), then let Wise capture them and make a project out of it. Tweak to your needs, and compile into an MSI. Copy to a file server somewhere. Revert to your VM snapshot, rinse and repeat.
.exe instead of .bat and users can't edit the .exe as easily) to launch the runas command. We name them the same as the apps they are supposed to re-launch (firefox.exe etc) and just pass the command line right through to the real app prefixed with "runas /user:nobody". It's really simple. All of those .exe go into a directory in the user's path.
.msi bundle I compile since Wise lets you edit and enforce shortcuts (with MSI self-healing you can have windows auto-replace it if it is deleted or changed). If someone does manage to run firefox without runas, well, they suddenly find themselves missing all of their add-ons and extensions since that's in Nobody's firefox profile, not jsmith's. I usually get a call at that point and someone will fix it for them. The users know how/why we do things this way and don't try to do things differently. They are used to our solutions making their lives easier, not harder, so we get no static unlike some other IT departments I know. :p
Wise will also create transforms for existing MSI packages that make Microsoft's Office Customization Tools look tame by comparison. With that package you can tweak the hell out of anything. Frankly I'm not even that good at it compared to a lot of the Wise veterans I've seen. Our business needs are a lot more simple than those of someone trying to manage 50,000 computers.
Doing this in a VM avoids tons of driver-related problems since everything is the same vanilla VM hardware (which translates very well out to a dozen brands of whitebox systems). I've converted everything from Adobe Acrobat to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 into an MSI that way. There's a bit of a learning curve, of course, but Wise has excellent documentation, and there are forums and communities out there dedicated to re-bundling software like this for large company deployments, so there's plenty of help. In the worst case you can create an MSI to drive the setup options of the original executable as well. Generally anything that doesn't touch the hardware directly (drivers, printer ports etc) is no problem.
We create a "Nobody" account with no privs for the net apps and set the paths for their directories to key on the machine name variable. We name the machine after the user (jsmith). That way Nobody keys into the correct username/path through the machine name variable and we can just make it part of our base image (we change machine names to match the user's name during setup). Nobody has full read/write to certain specific users directories but no access to anything else. We do use the runas command for the netapps, but we create little visual basic apps (to get
The only hard part is making sure the shortcuts with absolute paths that programs install by default get deleted and replaced with ones that just call the app by name. I usually do that in the
To avoid making this into a lot of work with dozens of apps I try to get firefox extensions for everything touching the net (fireftp for example, and IETab of course). Firefox then becomes the default net tool. Most people are really only after web, ftp, and ssh/scp (we use WinSCP for that one with no restrictions).
If something does run an exploit, the only parts of the disk it ca
I cheat like a bitch. ;)
Download the MSI for Windows Desktop Search. Publish it with your normal workstation policy (in the computer tree as an "assigned app"). This sets it to auto-install everywhere when users log in. Let that sit about five minutes. Then, reopen the GPO, and UN-publish it and choose "uninstall this application wherever it is installed and prevent new installations" from the options when unpublishing it. That will simultaneously remove it from all systems when users log in, and prevent it from being installed again by anyone.
It's based on the MSI product code, so that solution will only work with the existing version. If MS releases a 3.02 version for example with a new product code (or upgrade code) that one won't be blocked.
It's the best my sleep-addled coffee-deprived brain could come up with at 6AM on an idle Tuesday, anyway.
I'm not sure. If I had to guess, I'd guess that it has something to do with the age of our WSUS servers. We started on 1.0 early on, upgraded to 2.0, then to 3.0 recently along with SP2 for 2003. The server itself started life as a Windows 2000 system so that upgrade process was run as well. The server has also had a complete hardware change three times over the last seven years. Microsoft's products are never so buggy on a fresh build as they are when part of a lengthy upgrade tree where the potential to fall down a rabbit hole of untested codepaths is much greater. Unfortunately we can't afford to just scrub every Microsoft service when we move to a new version. I also have a script running once a week to run the recommended cleanup using wsusutil on the WSUS database (and yes I've fixed it to run with the latest version). ;)
.reg push in a GPO). Essentially I took my 10+ years of experience un-fucking windows default configurations and turned it into a GPO so I didn't have to keep doing it the hard way. I've got custom MSI files assigned to workstations to install apps like the entire sysinternals suite, VLC media player (beats having users install real/quicktime/divx), and so forth. It's a rather mature, customized environment aimed at getting Windows out of the user's way so they can get work done. (And play - we don't ban games.)
Other than this strange auto-approval, we've had no problems whatsoever with WSUS 3.0. It's been great actually. The improved reporting and granularity is a welcome addition that we have yet to truly take advantage of. WDS3 was successfully retracted from the approved list after I revoked it, and I've backed out the GPO changes without any trouble. It's no longer showing up on the clients. Also, BDD2007 and our repository of published software (both in a DFS root) resides on the same WSUS server. I've also grafted Linux PXE and Solaris Jumpstart into RIS/BDD2007 so it's something of a custom build. I don't really think those apps should be interacting with WSUS3 in any way though. Totally different services and disk partitions. There are some user home directories there as well.
As to some of the other posters, I don't know that WDS phones home, yet. I haven't taken the time to do a thorough analysis, but I tend to err on the side of paranoia (after all, security is part of my job). I get very suspicious of any programs collecting data about a computer or user activities in the name of making the user experience better. I also don't see the use of an indexing system that kills the performance of one's operating system. I don't trust MS as far as I can shot-put the planet either.
Our GPO already disables all file indexing, NTFS short filename creation, system restore, unnecessary services like UPnP and messenger, and sets sane, non-annoying defaults for apps like MSN messenger, the language toolbar, media center, etc. It even restores the XP search to the better, more basic 2000 version (it's amazing what you can do with a
And yes, my users have local admin on their desktops. Windows isn't really designed to operate any other way (and I don't have a Fortune 500 budget to fix it like some others do). Our solution to the constant risk of IE was to recommend people use firefox whenever possible (with noscript, adblock, etc) and to get IE, firefox, and other internet-touching apps to run under an unprivileged, local user account that was created to share the exact same desktop/docs/favorites etc as the real user. We also took some time to educate them on safe surfing habits.
What worries me is the trend lately for, say, apps like Sun's Java to ask (default is yes) to install apps like Google Desktop during their normal upgrade cycle. Frankly most users have better things on their minds than wondering if the apps they are clicking upgrade for are about to trojan their boxes with 3rd party bundled software. That's why I'm eyeing an app-killing security policy for the more egregious offenders.
Not usually, however, in this particular instance, very nearly so.
Companies that can't afford to send a fleet of tech monkeys running around to all of the desktops (in other words, most of them).
I manage the WSUS at my company. No updates are EVER to be passed through without my direct approval, even new revisions of previously approved updates. We've had far too many updates go through and break things to allow any kind of auto approval. So, imagine my surprise when I sit down to a cup of coffee and my morning log review, and the first thing I see when I log in is the Windows Update icon telling me to install Windows Desktop Search - something I never approved.
It went straight through, completely ignoring all of our security policies in the process. I was a little irritated at the Windows Update self-update passing through but I let that one slide since it was a MUCH needed bugfix and MS got a suitable backlash from it (silly me, thinking it was a one-time thing). Now we have the same behavior again months later. This is not acceptable. Luckily I'm in a bit earlier than most people so I was able to recall it with a few ninja edits to our group policy, and a company wide email apologizing for allowing it to be published, and warning people to avoid installing it if it somehow still got through to their systems.
I made a few changes. Our WSUS servers now no longer have internet access and are not scheduled to download. I must manually turn on their internet access in our firewall and activate the pull interactively. That way I will see the updates as they arrive, and not have to put up with this stealth update bullshit in the future. I clearly cannot trust them to just sit there and acquire updates on their own any longer.
I'm now developing a security policy for our corporate security software that will forcibly kill any applications on a blacklist I am creating. I will be adding Google Desktop, Windows Desktop Search, Plaxo, AIM, and any other programs I find that have a habit of sending data back home to outside companies. I'll happily find people alternatives that don't phone home - it's not the apps that bother me, it's the potential for leakage of our corporate data to third parties. I don't particularly care if the feature can be turned off, since I'm not the one installing it. If a program has potential to phone home, it's banned.
She discusses the Cassini mission in detail, including what we've learned about Titan and this strange behavior on Enceladus. It beats reading dead text.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/178
So, everyone is convinced that a true understanding of life and consciousness is still a very long way away at this point. It certainly looks that way if all you do is look at technology and social trends, however there is one very important thing people seem to be overlooking in this discussion.
Humans have become pretty decent with code. You are reading this through basic addition - that's all computers really do, you know. They aren't even as fundamentally mathematically complex as an abacus, yet we make them perform miracles with something as simple as addition.
Well, we are now reading the source code of life itself, and putting it online for all to see and read and use however they see fit. In some few years you'll find the genetic source code of every living thing stored in an encyclopedia of some sort, and it'll cost you some hundreds (then tens) of dollars to get your entire gene sequence on a CD-ROM. That's you - 100% of everything about you in the physical world. The secret to intelligence lies in that data. We just need to figure out the programming language it is written in. That's how we crack the problem of intelligence.
Even before we crack the code for thinking, the genetic code for every one of mother nature's tricks in every species living on this planet will end up in that database, just waiting for engineers and scientists to take lessons from nature. What will we do when every single trick of evolution is at our fingertips, and we can rewrite the genetic code of any living thing with a simple pill or injection? What will we do to computers when we make a microchip that mimics evolutionary code found in nature? Even the housefly's brain makes a better flying computer than anything we've built to date.
I'll point you in the direction of some of this knowledge so you don't get the impression this is all fanciful thinking.
Juan Enriquez has a great talk about how far we've come at sourcing genetic code here.
Janine Benyus also has a good talk on the kinds of ideas this will produce.
We're a long way from a science of mind or any true understanding of consciousness right now, but we are certainly at a time when all of its physical properties and mechanisms are about to be understood in detail. With that out of the way, most of the ambiguity preventing mind science from getting a real start will also disappear, and we'll finally have a path to follow from the bottom up into intelligence. That will lead us to our first AIs. We don't need any top-down genius insight into intelligence to get us there (though it'll certainly help).
Directly. Most of the technically proficient packages tend to have garbage for user interfaces, while most of the newer, less technically superior ones have more intuitive GUIs. I want both, but since I can't get that, and in the real world people far less skilled than me must administer these systems from time to time, user friendliness is more important than technical prowess. The most user friendly packages I have seen are Backup Exec and Tivoli Storage Manager Express.
I feel your pain, man. I've tested dozens of backup packages... so many I can't even remember them all... and in the end, Backup Exec, despite it's somewhat buggy behaviour from time to time, beat them all out in the end. That's the first time in a long time I thought I was using crap software, only to find out to my horror it was one of the best (best does not mean good).
I found that by using carefully tailored versions of Samba, I could use Samba to replace BE's useless unix/linux clients (and it would be *perfect* even on Solaris and Linux ppc64 if only Samba could vanish symlinks from shares). I found that by using StorageCraft's ShadowProtect, I could do bare metal restores with ease by using their HIR tool to bring a backup exec full restore of windows back to life on radically different hardware. BE's exchange support has always been great - the one thing that works as advertised. It's relatively cheap, the tape management (and removable disk management) are top notch, it's totally painless to search your entire catalog for a file and restore it with a few mouse clicks, and the damn user interface is fantastic for managing backup jobs with templates. I can add a new server with a few mouse clicks. In an environment where not everyone is a computer guru, having things work with just a few mouse clicks is very important.
It loses its mind every once in a while (Fragmentation was horrific but they just patched that, Synthetic is still totally broken, ADAMM tape catalog failures, knocks over a production server with a client crash once in a great while, etc) but those events are manageable and fairly rare if you know how to avoid their trigger conditions. At this point I'd be surprised if it has any bugs left I haven't seen yet and found a fix or workaround for. It's hard to trade that for an unknown package that says it is awesome, but three months in you find the same kind of annoying bugs and have to do that work all over again. The pain you don't know is worse than the pain you know very well. Anyone who tells you their product works is a damn dirty liar - all of them fail, all of them have headaches. Proper disaster recovery is far too complex for any package to do it without problems.
My other favorites were Bacula and BackupPC, both of which have some killer features, but are utterly lacking in the user friendly department. They are simply too hard to use for most support staff. They are also not very good at backing up Windows systems (particularly 2k server since it has no shadow copy). Tivoli Storage Manager Express wasn't half bad either. Tivoli itself, or NetBackup - for that price I'll write my own. Small businesses with ridiculously large networks can't afford it.
I see that some people don't know much about Burt Rutan and his goals and how he hopes to accomplish them. This talk should clear that up. If you think a government space program has any chance of accomplishing anything, then you should watch this video and get a bit wiser.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/4
This accident is a miserable development. Rutan is working very hard to provide us with that slice of 'west' the world hasn't had since California was settled. I hope this doesn't set back that dream.
What a load of bullshit. It smells exactly the same as the bullshit about BSD.
It's a license. There are a lot of them. Now you have the choice if you want it that allows you to prevent people from locking your code into proprietary hardware, or prevent people from taking over your project with patents. What's the big fucking deal? Is a legal license written in plain English rather than lawyerese really that difficult to understand? Are people really that pissed off that some aging hippie's flowery software philosophy has a new incarnation? I never knew that the idea of "once you buy it, you own it, and may do whatever you want to it" was so controversial. Last time I checked it was the law.
Early commenters usually go with not reading anything, or mocking everything. You'll find browsing with a -6 to 'funny' and 'insightful' usually clears up the problem by removing the idiot remarks and the groupthink (which is sadly dumber than the idiot remarks most of the time).
The best you can say about this company is that they have a plausible argument. Frankly, that's impressive by itself in this particular industry.
Your ownership of the character is debatable. The argument is that you own the time you invest, and all of the economic goods that proceed from that investment - of which the character is one. I'd be no more right to say that you absolutely own the character than you are to say you own absolutely nothing. We've already established that what the contract says is really just a wish list for the companies who wrote them. You are taking the position that just because the company owns the hardware, they own all the virtual property on that hardware. That's like saying a bank owns your money because your money is just a bunch of ones and zeros in their mainframe somewhere. It's ridiculous. Of course, so is saying you 'own' a character.
When both sides of the argument are ridiculous, the question will only be answered in a courtroom, not an online discussion forum.
There are concepts in economics that are much like a 'human right' and are defended as such, regardless of what any contracts signed may stipulate. Typically, the right of resale is one of them, at least in capitalist markets. No one can tell you that you cannot sell a good or service you have, or resell another good or service you bought - such a thing simply won't hold up in court since it defeats the purpose of basic economics. Of course, what do you do when you're technically a lessee of your body and the entire world you live in is a virtual one owned by the same people leasing you the body? It probably comes down to whose rights are more important to the court in that case.
Companies will gladly take any and all rights they can from you. That's their nature - they don't care about you and they don't see the world the way that you do as a consumer. They can't even be expected to know what they are and are not allowed to do - there's so much law on the books these days that Kim Peek couldn't keep it all in his head. If you want to retain rights each time a brand new marketplace opens up (virtual property for example) then you'll need to speak up when the companies inevitably deny you the same basic rights in the virtual marketplace that they provide in the physical one.
This question is about as grey as it gets in a courtroom, by the way. Virtual property law is still uncharted territory. The best the court can do (and what they usually do) is extend real world property law into the virtual world. That's not necessarily a good idea, not without thinking it through.
Perhaps you'd do better to look at the gaming industry as an economic market. They've now created 'virtual worlds' which are themselves economic markets locked down right now and with no way to trade goods between each other. Would it be good for everyone if a mechanism appeared that connected these virtual markets to the real world market and to each other? That's a lot of economic opportunity. People would find ways to use it that none of us can possibly imagine. If all of those markets were connected as well, you could prevent one company from printing infinite money, for example, since their overall value in the mass market would plummet due to inflation.
You may agree to any number of license agreements, business contracts, and terms of service in your time. Chances are damn good that there are plenty of provisions in all of them that won't stand up in a court of law because they violate one precedent or right or another - just ask Microsoft how bitter that pill about the right to resell Windows was to swallow when they lost. The only way to find out is to put it in front of a judge and see what the verdict is. None of it is ever final until the court says it is.
I'll admit that the responses to these questions were far more intelligent and surprising than I was expecting when I clicked on the link. I was expecting gold farmers and got responses worthy of VP capital investment (albeit very risky, but also very exciting). This company has taken the position that these virtual markets must be opened up and connected, and this is by no means a crazy idea. Eventually they'll sit down with the MMO companies, or with their lawyers in front of a judge, and we'll find out which way the virtual property market is going to go. Frankly, I think open is always better than closed.
That's very close to the way IT works at my current company. Most of the company is on one building (with the other remote site literally two blocks down the street). I try to maintain working computers and a good cache of spare parts so that I can fix any problems with hardware in minutes. Our office is sitting in the middle of the building, and the door's always open. People pop in from time to time all day long (and it's not as distracting as you might think). I have spare machines and can do a data move (without disrupting the OS no matter what it is) in less than an hour to new hardware.
I also set up a central RIS repository that publishes all apps in the organization. If a user has permission to use the app, I put him in the right group and it just shows up under add/remove programs. Any user can hit F12 and do a network boot to install any of our selection of operating systems or run a variety of troubleshooting tools. PXELinux is remarkably easy to graft into Microsoft's RIS server, so I can publish a variety of linux distributions and tools the same way, all preconfigured to know where their network repositories are. Updates for all OSes we support (solaris, several linux, windows) are maintained on the same servers in the same way.
This is like a tech stop for software. The users never have to ask us for programs and they can handle many of their IT needs on their own terms, with us always a door down the hall if they need help. Most of our users are developers and are quite capable of managing their OSes and apps and they love having this freedom. This is especially useful for virtual machines which most of our devs use for sandboxing. They can boot the VM off of the network and set it up any way they like.
Sure, we give them admin rights to their systems - how the hell do you get dev work done without? We just configure their web browsers so the browser itself runs under an underprivileged account, which solves most of the security problems.
It works great, and most tech calls you get in that kind of environment tend to be real problems. We had a ticketing system - but we scrapped it because it took more time to open a ticket, describe the problem, and close the ticket later than it took to just get up and go talk to the user and fix the problem.
This model is very laid back and really puts the power of IT into the hands of the users, while freeing up the admins to handle things that are worthwhile instead of trivia like finding media or dealing with obscure permissions problems. All you need to implement it is one reasonably personable technician, a low-cost server to hold the data, and a day or so to get it all up and running. Any network jack has every IT tool you could possibly need, and if that's not enough we have a massively hacked version of XP and tools crammed onto a single USB key that will boot on any ACPI-capable computer (with 1.6GB of drivers - it has them all). Fits in your pocket and it can fix or recover anything.
When I started here the tech group was five people who spent all day running around with CDs and screwdrivers, and we were generally hated. Five years later we have 30% more employees and only two techs who spend most of their time learning new systems and skills rather than supporting infrastructure, and everyone is on a first name basis. It's good enough to make me wince just thinking about going back to a typical corporate IT job. It's going to be fun converting the entire thing to linux.
It happens. A good foam carrying case for an xbox runs about $25 at Toys-R-Us or similar places. It cuts down on the abuse while in your trunk. I never put anything on there I can't afford to lose.
My worst one was formatting my 750GB model as one huge 750GB F drive. The partition table starts looping back on itself at the 256GB mark, so I overwrote everything on the system by copying in new media. I broke the 1TB model up into C/E/F/G at 256GB each and the problem hasn't reappeared. That would be a pain to manage except that XBMC has a mode that hides the locations of files, making one large list from as many library locations as you specify. Kinda handy.