Any chance we'll get some of the reasoning behind the settlement? I understand that taking these thugs to court is a heavy burden, but after fighting it so long, why give up now?
A case of art imitating life, or life imitating art?
Did Miyamoto mentioning his love of puzzles spur developers to make puzzle games, or did it take that discussion to prod the public into saying "Hey, where's the puzzle games?", which spurred developers to make said puzzle games...
Did Miyamoto take a sudden interest in fitness because he really cares about his health, or did he wake up one morning and say "Hey, I know, there's nobody trying to make people exercise to their consoles since the Track and Field pad on NES, why don't we do something about that?!"
I may have oversimplified a bit in my comment above, but you sir are doing a disservice to the argument with one bit of misinformation. Were we allowed to just "split equally" the values owed to all stakeholders, payment of current royalties would be beyond simple. However, this has been tossed as an option, due to inaccurate records-keeping of previous generations. We take pride in at least _TRYING_ to sort this out, however, it is a monumental task, which thankfully for me I'm only IT support, not involved in records whatsoever.
Here's a nice little exercise for you if you really think this is so simple. take the plot of land that you live on, and that of one of your neighbors. Now try tracing back the ownership of said plots through 1849. Then multiply the amount of time it took you to trace those lineages by 12Million/#Acres you researched. I tried this for the eighth of an acre that I live on, and it took me about 70 hours of research to find and trace proper records to find out how much I paid for my land compared to the original owner. Multiply that by 96 Million, and you've got 6.72BILLION man-hours, and that's in a place where reliable records are actually available (if somewhat hard to grep)
On to the security. You guessed correctly, I do work for MMS. In the 6 years I've been here, we've gone from a D+ to a B+. This is in spite of infighting over control, as well as conflicting security mandates from OMB, OIG, NIST, etc etc etc... but feel free to continue bashing, I don't stoop to insulting people in an attempt to censor their opinion.
And to further compound this issue, these monies are owed to the great-great-great-great-(repeat as necessary)grandchildren of the original owners of the land. Now take as an example, original owner of 10000 acres in Utah and Colorado had 7 children, land splits equally among them when he/she dies, and each of those children had a varying number of children, to whom their share of land splits equally when generation two dies off, and so on ad infinitum. Unfortunately, only some 1000 acres in Utah are being leased for mineral deposit extraction. Since the land splitting equally never had property lines documented, who gets the proceeds of said lease(s)? And yes, I do work for DoI, and have been trying to help answer questions like this. Thankfully, I do not work for BIA, but another bureau in charge of handling payments. If you'd like to go one step further beyond the above cluster, add in the fact that some royalties were paid as RiK (Royalty in Kind), where instead of large sums of cash, the owner of the land was paid at least in part with whatever minerals were mined, at some value above the cash value of the royalty.
Glad to get that little introduction out of the way. Having worked here for 6 years, I got to experience the wrath of Judge Lamberth first-hand, when he ordered the bureau I work for disconnected from the internet in the middle of the busiest part of our fiscal year. We are the only bureau besides the IRS who brings in money back to the General Fund (to the tune of ~$10Bn/year), and we're the only ones who do it without jacking money from yours and my paychecks, and our numbers went into the red that year due to the money-making aspect of our bureau being offline during the one critical part of the year it was absolutely needed. So I don't really agree that this order was an overstep of the bounds of the judge, as those are legal issues to be decided by lawyers (I am definitely NOT a lawyer), but it's general consensus that costing the US Government ~$10Bn in royalties (not to mention about ~$30Bn that would have gone to the individual states that year), was one enormous overstep of authority used to spite my bureau by Lamberth & Cobell, Inc.
So they're buying these laptops from Lockheed Martin??? Those come with the radar-stealth paint? That certainly would justify the (materials) cost, that stuff is expensive...
Typical. Not to pry, but are they still around / you still on good terms with them? It's stories like this that I hate to hear, and nobody bothered reporting the folks who pull this stuff. Hefty fines and loss of 8a status await people who use that kind of loophole.
They were probably Dell D6X0 series laptops with encrypted hard drives. Getting a basic one right now (1GB RAM, 1.73GHz Dual-Core Processor, Encrypted Hard Drive) _would_ cost me about $1,100 if I could buy direct from Dell, but thanks to 8(a) contract purchasing obligation, it'd run me over $2,500 from the reseller (who adds zero benefit). Aren't you glad we're supporting small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned businesses at the cost of your (and my) tax dollars?
I think what he means is a piece of software that will compare his current.ogg files against a database of artists/albums/songs and let him know which ones are indie, which ones are RIAA-backed, without him having to punch in each and every artist/album/song one at a time...
It's just that $30 billion is still a lot of money Quoted for posterity and perspective. $30Bn is roughly a month's budget overrun (IE Money spent beyond what is actually budgeted) for the entire US Government. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
And don't worry, I'm sure your earlier comment only seems trollish to those who have worked in purchasing/contracting for the government.
One further point I'd like to make, however. We the gub'mint'ers are bound by a certain set of laws, when making purchases.
If Company A, the fine upstanding manufacturer of Widget X offers to sell us 1,000 units of Widget X at $50 apiece and install them for free, while Company B, who resells Widget X, offers to sell us 1,000 units of Widget X at $125 apiece, and charge us an unknown number of hours of labor at $190/hour, the choice would seem pretty easy, right?
It is, unless Company B happens to be a "Small, disadvantaged, woman- and/or minority- owned" business (there are some legal requirements, burdens of proof, etc... but it's easy enough to adopt a girl from China to register said Company in her name for 10 years at a time), We are legally obligated to purchase from Company B.
Dollars to donuts this initiative is being tossed to 8(a) companies (as mentioned above), or someone has written a long and convincing argument as to why the contracts should be going to the company he/she (a) has stock in, (b) has family/friends who would directly benefit from this work, or (c) has received the most bribes from. Corruption is a terrible thing, especially when it comes to your (and my!) tax money being wasted, but it happens so often it doesn't even make the front page of the Washington Post anymore.
Are they really itemizing hammers for $300, toilet seats for $1000? Are government contractors just taking us to the cleaners? *sigh* Thou shalt not feed the trolls
No. The whole myth of $300 hammers and $1000 toilet seats came from a model of contract purchasing that's been out of use since the 1980s. That contract may have 300 hammers ($5 apiece) and one jet engine ($150,000), but the total cost of the contract ($151,500) gets spread across each item on the contract, so it shows up as (Quantity: 300, Hammer, $505 ea., Quantity: 1, Jet Engine, $505 ea.)
Wait a second, here... This is funded? Why the hell has money been taken from my (shrinking) budget to subsidize this program for my Cabinet-level Department???
IANAL, so obviously don't take my word as legal advice, but I was under the impression that discovery rules only pertained to criminal cases, not civil cases? Any lawyerly types care to chime in on this, maybe shed a bit of light on the subject?
So, after all the corporate tax breaks and loopholes and charitable donations, this saved MS all of what, 3 or 4 dollars in taxes last year? Give me a break.
A bit late for commenting, more of a follow-up for you. The device in question is made specifically to be an extended battery for heavy-duty laptops. It weighs in at nearly 12 pounds, and just doing the quick napkin math, holds a charge around 400 watt-hours. I am in contact with the manufacturer, but have not received any reply yet. Here's to hoping I can fly with it, because I get cranky if I can't do _something_. ADHD for the lose...
Does this mean I can't bring the external 4-hour battery I bought for my laptop? My laptop's battery lasts ~2 hours, and I bought the external with the sole purpose of USING IT ON THE FREAKING PLANE for the additional four hours it takes to get from East Coast to West Coast...
Since I've seen this plenty of times, I'll address it.
Write Cycles: Even at the lowest estimate, 100,000 write cycles to failure
Meaning on a 32GB Drive, before you start seeing failures, you would have to (thanks to wear-leveling) write 32*100,000 GB, or 3.2Petabytes
at 60MB/sec write speed of the Samsung drives, you would need to write (and never, ever read) for 3,200,000,000/60, or ~53Million seconds straight.
53Million divided by 86,400 means you would need to be writing (and never ever reading) for ~617 Days straight (That's roughly 20 months of just writing, no reading, no downtime, etc...
So... the sky is not falling, these drives are slated to last longer than I've ever gotten a traditional drive to last in my laptop(s)
Almost forgot to mention, standard NAND of late has been more in the 500k-1M write cycle between failures range. 100k was earlier technology, so multiply numbers accordingly.
Getting there was half the fun. Boston. January. 44 inches of snow.
Then once I got there it was a week of "If you encrypt your traffic," (thusly losing the ability to QoS that traffic), "you only need to firewall your management boxes and vlan off all of your VoIP endpoints!" Cue the rest of the class firewalling off their management boxes from everyone else (including themselves) *sigh*
I'll comment that the federal agency I work for has our points of presence on the internet IPv6-compatible. Don't lump us together with the folks who aren't ready.
Or you could try a couple of system performance tweaks such as (but not limited to):
Registry hacks to disable NTFS Last Access Time
ZERO System Page on HDD
WinXP Instead of Vista
Speaking from experience, Vista will take forever to install apps / write files on your laptop whether you have an SSD or HDD. I had this same pissy comment for my coworkers a month ago, but since switching back to XP, I looooove my D630 with 32GB SSD. Boots from dead cold stop to ready for login in ~13 seconds, shutdown in ~6, and hasn't hiccuped on a large file since the switch (think 500+MB AutoCAD blueprints, Multiple Gigabyte email archives, etc...)
Can data be recovered from an SSD after it has been overwritten once? i.e If I'm disposing of an SSD with sensitive data on it do I have to run secure erasing software to make multiple/random writes to every sector? Glad you asked. Actually, you can do even better. Remember that big electromagnetic degausser you use to destroy data from mechanical hard drives and backup tapes before they go off for slagging? One pass over that, and you're golden. Plus, you can still use the SSD afterwards (unlike a mechanical drive, which would have destroyed heads from the magnetic field slinging them around). I will back that with one caveat - don't let the drive itself bang against the degausser plate (or walls, in a cavity degausser, as the case may be)
Total time to wipe and be ready to slap back into another PC - 12 seconds
Slashdot Mirror
I believe she _really_ meant to say "RIAA-Approved Vinyl Album Protective Cases"
Any chance we'll get some of the reasoning behind the settlement? I understand that taking these thugs to court is a heavy burden, but after fighting it so long, why give up now?
A case of art imitating life, or life imitating art?
Did Miyamoto mentioning his love of puzzles spur developers to make puzzle games, or did it take that discussion to prod the public into saying "Hey, where's the puzzle games?", which spurred developers to make said puzzle games...
Did Miyamoto take a sudden interest in fitness because he really cares about his health, or did he wake up one morning and say "Hey, I know, there's nobody trying to make people exercise to their consoles since the Track and Field pad on NES, why don't we do something about that?!"
Here's a nice little exercise for you if you really think this is so simple. take the plot of land that you live on, and that of one of your neighbors. Now try tracing back the ownership of said plots through 1849. Then multiply the amount of time it took you to trace those lineages by 12Million/#Acres you researched. I tried this for the eighth of an acre that I live on, and it took me about 70 hours of research to find and trace proper records to find out how much I paid for my land compared to the original owner. Multiply that by 96 Million, and you've got 6.72BILLION man-hours, and that's in a place where reliable records are actually available (if somewhat hard to grep)
On to the security. You guessed correctly, I do work for MMS. In the 6 years I've been here, we've gone from a D+ to a B+. This is in spite of infighting over control, as well as conflicting security mandates from OMB, OIG, NIST, etc etc etc... but feel free to continue bashing, I don't stoop to insulting people in an attempt to censor their opinion.
Glad to get that little introduction out of the way. Having worked here for 6 years, I got to experience the wrath of Judge Lamberth first-hand, when he ordered the bureau I work for disconnected from the internet in the middle of the busiest part of our fiscal year. We are the only bureau besides the IRS who brings in money back to the General Fund (to the tune of ~$10Bn/year), and we're the only ones who do it without jacking money from yours and my paychecks, and our numbers went into the red that year due to the money-making aspect of our bureau being offline during the one critical part of the year it was absolutely needed. So I don't really agree that this order was an overstep of the bounds of the judge, as those are legal issues to be decided by lawyers (I am definitely NOT a lawyer), but it's general consensus that costing the US Government ~$10Bn in royalties (not to mention about ~$30Bn that would have gone to the individual states that year), was one enormous overstep of authority used to spite my bureau by Lamberth & Cobell, Inc.
So they're buying these laptops from Lockheed Martin??? Those come with the radar-stealth paint? That certainly would justify the (materials) cost, that stuff is expensive...
Typical. Not to pry, but are they still around / you still on good terms with them? It's stories like this that I hate to hear, and nobody bothered reporting the folks who pull this stuff. Hefty fines and loss of 8a status await people who use that kind of loophole.
They were probably Dell D6X0 series laptops with encrypted hard drives. Getting a basic one right now (1GB RAM, 1.73GHz Dual-Core Processor, Encrypted Hard Drive) _would_ cost me about $1,100 if I could buy direct from Dell, but thanks to 8(a) contract purchasing obligation, it'd run me over $2,500 from the reseller (who adds zero benefit). Aren't you glad we're supporting small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned businesses at the cost of your (and my) tax dollars?
I think what he means is a piece of software that will compare his current .ogg files against a database of artists/albums/songs and let him know which ones are indie, which ones are RIAA-backed, without him having to punch in each and every artist/album/song one at a time...
And don't worry, I'm sure your earlier comment only seems trollish to those who have worked in purchasing/contracting for the government.
One further point I'd like to make, however. We the gub'mint'ers are bound by a certain set of laws, when making purchases.
If Company A, the fine upstanding manufacturer of Widget X offers to sell us 1,000 units of Widget X at $50 apiece and install them for free, while Company B, who resells Widget X, offers to sell us 1,000 units of Widget X at $125 apiece, and charge us an unknown number of hours of labor at $190/hour, the choice would seem pretty easy, right?
It is, unless Company B happens to be a "Small, disadvantaged, woman- and/or minority- owned" business (there are some legal requirements, burdens of proof, etc... but it's easy enough to adopt a girl from China to register said Company in her name for 10 years at a time), We are legally obligated to purchase from Company B.
Dollars to donuts this initiative is being tossed to 8(a) companies (as mentioned above), or someone has written a long and convincing argument as to why the contracts should be going to the company he/she (a) has stock in, (b) has family/friends who would directly benefit from this work, or (c) has received the most bribes from. Corruption is a terrible thing, especially when it comes to your (and my!) tax money being wasted, but it happens so often it doesn't even make the front page of the Washington Post anymore.
Wait a second, here... This is funded? Why the hell has money been taken from my (shrinking) budget to subsidize this program for my Cabinet-level Department???
If ever a story more deserved a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag, I've never seen it =oD
IANAL, so obviously don't take my word as legal advice, but I was under the impression that discovery rules only pertained to criminal cases, not civil cases? Any lawyerly types care to chime in on this, maybe shed a bit of light on the subject?
Thanks
So, after all the corporate tax breaks and loopholes and charitable donations, this saved MS all of what, 3 or 4 dollars in taxes last year? Give me a break.
A bit late for commenting, more of a follow-up for you. The device in question is made specifically to be an extended battery for heavy-duty laptops. It weighs in at nearly 12 pounds, and just doing the quick napkin math, holds a charge around 400 watt-hours. I am in contact with the manufacturer, but have not received any reply yet. Here's to hoping I can fly with it, because I get cranky if I can't do _something_. ADHD for the lose...
Does this mean I can't bring the external 4-hour battery I bought for my laptop? My laptop's battery lasts ~2 hours, and I bought the external with the sole purpose of USING IT ON THE FREAKING PLANE for the additional four hours it takes to get from East Coast to West Coast...
Write Cycles: Even at the lowest estimate, 100,000 write cycles to failure
Meaning on a 32GB Drive, before you start seeing failures, you would have to (thanks to wear-leveling) write 32*100,000 GB, or 3.2Petabytes
at 60MB/sec write speed of the Samsung drives, you would need to write (and never, ever read) for 3,200,000,000/60, or ~53Million seconds straight.
53Million divided by 86,400 means you would need to be writing (and never ever reading) for ~617 Days straight (That's roughly 20 months of just writing, no reading, no downtime, etc...
So... the sky is not falling, these drives are slated to last longer than I've ever gotten a traditional drive to last in my laptop(s)
Almost forgot to mention, standard NAND of late has been more in the 500k-1M write cycle between failures range. 100k was earlier technology, so multiply numbers accordingly.
The ones I see because I help a different site that happens to use intellitxt ads to pay their hosting bills.
American Society of Professional Education. I refuse to link to them through the intellitxt ads here, so I'm not going to put up the acronym.
Then once I got there it was a week of "If you encrypt your traffic," (thusly losing the ability to QoS that traffic), "you only need to firewall your management boxes and vlan off all of your VoIP endpoints!" Cue the rest of the class firewalling off their management boxes from everyone else (including themselves) *sigh*
Fixed for ya
I'll comment that the federal agency I work for has our points of presence on the internet IPv6-compatible. Don't lump us together with the folks who aren't ready.
Registry hacks to disable NTFS Last Access Time
ZERO System Page on HDD
WinXP Instead of Vista
Speaking from experience, Vista will take forever to install apps / write files on your laptop whether you have an SSD or HDD. I had this same pissy comment for my coworkers a month ago, but since switching back to XP, I looooove my D630 with 32GB SSD. Boots from dead cold stop to ready for login in ~13 seconds, shutdown in ~6, and hasn't hiccuped on a large file since the switch (think 500+MB AutoCAD blueprints, Multiple Gigabyte email archives, etc...)
Total time to wipe and be ready to slap back into another PC - 12 seconds