I recall hearing that MS has enough cash reserves to go another seven years without making another dime.
That might be so, but the stock price will fall right through the floor after the very first quarter with such "results". The management will be all fired next morning after that.
I was trying to decide which distro to install for a friend's wife who, and I quote, wants "Linux on my computer because I'm sick of Windows crashing!"
Try to upgrade her box from Windows 95 first. Any of Win2k and later OS doesn't crash without a good reason (such as h/w failure.)
Security-wise there may be reasons to give her a Linux box, but in general if you want minimum headache then Windows will work for her just fine. Just make a c: partition image on a spare, unmounted partition and restore it automatically every week:-) Everything else she needs must be on a USB Flash disk.
Does it mean that USPS has a right to open all your mail, and then copy and use the contents as it wishes?
AOL is not any different from a mail carrier service because they do the same thing - deliver messages from one person to another.
You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using it.
Why not? Many people abuse telephone network by tying up lines for hours at a time, so what? It does not allow the phone company to record and sell conversations.
Yes, but only if you buy them at OfficeMax. However anyone working in electronic industry can tell you that there are hundreds of types of antistatic labels, tapes, bags and markers that are designed to conduct current. This is a non-problem. Besides, most of the instrument is likely to be a flat, smooth metal, and you can stick anything you want to it.
In fact, compliance with basic ISO 9000 (9002, for one) requirements simply mandates that every single part is marked to death and when it travels from one bench to another it has to be accompanied by a product identification tag which should make it obvious what the part is and where it gets installed.
In other words, as many people suggested, this is a mistake that could have been serious. If you accidentally discharge a firearm and almost kill someone it is a big deal even if nobody was hurt. Same thing here. They could have swapped power supplies, for example, and burned out the instruments because of some subtle differences between the two.
Without logical thought how do you connect the events or statements in a literary peice?
You were supposed to refer to your feelings, your own thoughts as you read the story. But I was not able to associate myself with any of these characters; their actions and their thoughts were alien to me; well, more than alien:-)
How do you analyse why the story is as it is?
Supposedly a story is written to illustrate something, such as a conflict between someone and someone/something else. Otherwise there is no story. But to understand these conflicts you need to get into the mind of the protagonist. For example, a story tells about a mother who protects her child. Let's say, I am supposed to tell what she would do if her child drowns and she can't swim. I don't know, I have no children even now, and surely I had none back then, even assuming I am physically capable of being a mother:-) Logically she should seek help, and if none is available then she should walk away and arrange for a replacement child because if she jumps into the water she will drown as well, with no gain to any of the two. But I doubt this is the correct answer:-)
But when I read books that interest me then there is no problem. I can easily imagine myself in place of a protagonist, and I can easily tell you what I would do then. It's just the books that I was force-fed in school talk about silly things that I had no experience with, or interest, at that time.
English class should be teaching me Grammar, styles, poetry, but not how to extract senseless unintended meanings of random ramblings
Sadly, I was forced to do exactly this and nothing else. Read an ancient book about some societal ills that don't exist any more, and then ruminate upon it on page after page after page... Questions like "What the protagonist $Foo thought when he was looking at the wall?" always infuriated me - he was not thinking anything, he didn't exist! But maybe I was just thinking logically, which is clearly a foolish thing to do in literature classes:-)
That's not a new problem. Even today different rips/encodes of the same source are completely different. It doesn't stop anyone from downloading the same rip from as many sources as possible.
if the spammer is able to obtain a traffic sample coming to/from this ficticious corporate mail server, could the spammer then obtain the subaddresses directly?
Often there is no need to do even that - just grab the address book from a compromised computer, or even better go through all the emails there.
The foam decelerated because of both the gravity (things usually don't fall upward) and because of air resistance.
With regard to the latter, the foam's terminal velocity is far less than 700 mph. Throw a piece of foam from the roof and count how many seconds it takes to hit the ground. I think that the speed would be something like 10 m/s, or 20 mph - far, far less than the speed of the Shuttle.
What happened is probably this. After the foam got detached from the tank its speed dropped very fast (since it lost propulsion and instead got two factors pulling it back;) given the speed of the Shuttle, you can say that the foam got briefly stuck in the air, and Shuttle hit it as if it were really a static object. It doesn't even matter if the foam was still flying 100 mph up or was already doing 10 mph down.
BTW, NASA people know the speed of the foam for a fact, because they have the video of it falling and they know how many frames per second the camera takes. So they didn't have to guess or to simulate anything, all they needed is a calculator and some basic dimensions of the Shuttle.
As the GP indicated, learning of the code is of no use because the code changes all the time. As I understand, the shared secrets are in the car and in the key, and they are never transmitted at all.
You are right, actually. The foam virtually stands still in the atmosphere... but the Shuttle rams it at 700 mph (since it has an engine.) The end result is the same.
About the price: I know because we use them at work, in small qty's.
The reason for this price is... lack of competition. There are only 2-3 major players (eAladdin, WIBU-Key and Rainbow Sentinel off the top of my head.) They don't need to drive the price down.
Besides, they are in the right price range. The s/w they protect (how well is another question) usually costs far more than $30, so the expense on dongles is not a problem. If they drop the price to maybe get more clients they surely lose revenue from existing customers.
Finally, they have certain expenses too. First, they have to manufacture the dongle, and it is more complex than a Flash. Some dongles have batteries and clock, but even ignoring those, these dongles got to have some EEPROM in them (128 bytes at least) and to talk over USB, and to implement some half-decent crypto (HASP4 for example.) Secondly, the dongle maker has to develop a bunch of custom s/w libraries and apps for developers and users, and support them on every platform imaginable. This ain't free.
And with regard to why Valve decided to go with Steam - obviously because Steam promised more bang for a buck, such as reporting of usage, distribution of updates, etc. etc. Basically Steam allowed them to have the whole thing under control, as opposed to traditional s/w which is out of your hands as soon as you sold a copy. This is the subscription model at its finest, except that there is no monthly fee (yet?)
This could have worked quite well, except that Steam and the apps that use it were not designed with these failure modes in mind. And so when things went wrong the whole cardhouse collapsed. This is not something unfixable, so they can improve the s/w and then the failures won't be so spectacular.
The parent I replied to, and the whole discussion here is about DRM - so I didn't have to mention the obvious. AFAIK, the gameplay is not bad at all.
Re:So the shit's finally hit the fan, has it?
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 1
They don't guarantee 100% uptime. A lawsuit would lose.
Neither me nor, I suspect, you are lawyers, so probably we shouldn't debate the merits of a lawsuit here. One obvious fact is, though, that Valve can be sued regardless, and they would be insane to go to trial over such a thing.
Property and service are equally valuable, that's why I mentioned that in my original comment. If you take a day off to go to a dentist's appointment and then the dentist sends you away you have monetary loss and on top of that you are still in pain.
In this case you paid for the service, and you expect the service to be provided when you need it, not when the company feels to it. When businesses buy services the contracts clearly say what happens when the service provider fails to provide. For example, many small businesses outsource paycheck management; imagine what would you do if such a company fails to pay you your salary?
In this case we also talk about damaging someone's posessions, which are represented here with a Steam account. Many people said already that all you buy is the account, and once you lose it you have nothing. Well, a whole lot of accounts are lost - hopefully only temporarily, but nevertheless their property has been damaged already.
And finally with regard to being unable to use the product, that's literally true here - people paid for something and they can't use it.
When steam doesn't work for a little while, it's just annoying that I have to wait until the server is back up.
Similarly, if someone takes your car for a joyride and then [police] returns it a week later - no big deal, you just have to wait until your property (or the service that you paid for) is back. Right?
One possible explanation is that the hardware is dead and there is no replacement. Even if the HDDs are OK there is no box to shove them in (or to restore from a backup tape, for example.)
Last time I checked, flyers are sent to everyone. The reason is probably that it is cheaper to send 3rd class mail (or whatever it is) than a personally addressed 1st class.
In fact, thinking of this, I never received a personally addressed flyer from any grocer, or any store in general. To a store we are mere statistic.
Why then to ask for personal info? Just give a shopper a card with a unique bar code, and she will be using it from now on. Again, why does the store need to know who the shopper is? Your explanation doesn't cut it.
Thieves go for a most profitable target, such as a new, expensive car. The fact that it has an RFID key is a minor annoyance.
Besides, "stealing" the code is not something the thief can be really arrested for. So the code can be gotten easily and without any risk. The mechanical key is not a deterrent, and likely in an RFID combo it is not as secure as it would be in a purely mechanical lock.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be so, but the stock price will fall right through the floor after the very first quarter with such "results". The management will be all fired next morning after that.
It's Killobyte actually. And it's not bad at all. Possibly one of the best role-playing systems ever described.
Try to upgrade her box from Windows 95 first. Any of Win2k and later OS doesn't crash without a good reason (such as h/w failure.)
Security-wise there may be reasons to give her a Linux box, but in general if you want minimum headache then Windows will work for her just fine. Just make a c: partition image on a spare, unmounted partition and restore it automatically every week :-) Everything else she needs must be on a USB Flash disk.
AOL is not any different from a mail carrier service because they do the same thing - deliver messages from one person to another.
You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using it.
Why not? Many people abuse telephone network by tying up lines for hours at a time, so what? It does not allow the phone company to record and sell conversations.
Yes, but only if you buy them at OfficeMax. However anyone working in electronic industry can tell you that there are hundreds of types of antistatic labels, tapes, bags and markers that are designed to conduct current. This is a non-problem. Besides, most of the instrument is likely to be a flat, smooth metal, and you can stick anything you want to it.
In fact, compliance with basic ISO 9000 (9002, for one) requirements simply mandates that every single part is marked to death and when it travels from one bench to another it has to be accompanied by a product identification tag which should make it obvious what the part is and where it gets installed.
In other words, as many people suggested, this is a mistake that could have been serious. If you accidentally discharge a firearm and almost kill someone it is a big deal even if nobody was hurt. Same thing here. They could have swapped power supplies, for example, and burned out the instruments because of some subtle differences between the two.
You were supposed to refer to your feelings, your own thoughts as you read the story. But I was not able to associate myself with any of these characters; their actions and their thoughts were alien to me; well, more than alien :-)
How do you analyse why the story is as it is?
Supposedly a story is written to illustrate something, such as a conflict between someone and someone/something else. Otherwise there is no story. But to understand these conflicts you need to get into the mind of the protagonist. For example, a story tells about a mother who protects her child. Let's say, I am supposed to tell what she would do if her child drowns and she can't swim. I don't know, I have no children even now, and surely I had none back then, even assuming I am physically capable of being a mother :-) Logically she should seek help, and if none is available then she should walk away and arrange for a replacement child because if she jumps into the water she will drown as well, with no gain to any of the two. But I doubt this is the correct answer :-)
But when I read books that interest me then there is no problem. I can easily imagine myself in place of a protagonist, and I can easily tell you what I would do then. It's just the books that I was force-fed in school talk about silly things that I had no experience with, or interest, at that time.
Sadly, I was forced to do exactly this and nothing else. Read an ancient book about some societal ills that don't exist any more, and then ruminate upon it on page after page after page... Questions like "What the protagonist $Foo thought when he was looking at the wall?" always infuriated me - he was not thinking anything, he didn't exist! But maybe I was just thinking logically, which is clearly a foolish thing to do in literature classes :-)
That's not a new problem. Even today different rips/encodes of the same source are completely different. It doesn't stop anyone from downloading the same rip from as many sources as possible.
Often there is no need to do even that - just grab the address book from a compromised computer, or even better go through all the emails there.
The foam decelerated because of both the gravity (things usually don't fall upward) and because of air resistance.
With regard to the latter, the foam's terminal velocity is far less than 700 mph. Throw a piece of foam from the roof and count how many seconds it takes to hit the ground. I think that the speed would be something like 10 m/s, or 20 mph - far, far less than the speed of the Shuttle.
What happened is probably this. After the foam got detached from the tank its speed dropped very fast (since it lost propulsion and instead got two factors pulling it back;) given the speed of the Shuttle, you can say that the foam got briefly stuck in the air, and Shuttle hit it as if it were really a static object. It doesn't even matter if the foam was still flying 100 mph up or was already doing 10 mph down.
BTW, NASA people know the speed of the foam for a fact, because they have the video of it falling and they know how many frames per second the camera takes. So they didn't have to guess or to simulate anything, all they needed is a calculator and some basic dimensions of the Shuttle.
As the GP indicated, learning of the code is of no use because the code changes all the time. As I understand, the shared secrets are in the car and in the key, and they are never transmitted at all.
Not if they duplicated one of their own keys.
You are right, actually. The foam virtually stands still in the atmosphere... but the Shuttle rams it at 700 mph (since it has an engine.) The end result is the same.
The reason for this price is... lack of competition. There are only 2-3 major players (eAladdin, WIBU-Key and Rainbow Sentinel off the top of my head.) They don't need to drive the price down.
Besides, they are in the right price range. The s/w they protect (how well is another question) usually costs far more than $30, so the expense on dongles is not a problem. If they drop the price to maybe get more clients they surely lose revenue from existing customers.
Finally, they have certain expenses too. First, they have to manufacture the dongle, and it is more complex than a Flash. Some dongles have batteries and clock, but even ignoring those, these dongles got to have some EEPROM in them (128 bytes at least) and to talk over USB, and to implement some half-decent crypto (HASP4 for example.) Secondly, the dongle maker has to develop a bunch of custom s/w libraries and apps for developers and users, and support them on every platform imaginable. This ain't free.
And with regard to why Valve decided to go with Steam - obviously because Steam promised more bang for a buck, such as reporting of usage, distribution of updates, etc. etc. Basically Steam allowed them to have the whole thing under control, as opposed to traditional s/w which is out of your hands as soon as you sold a copy. This is the subscription model at its finest, except that there is no monthly fee (yet?)
This could have worked quite well, except that Steam and the apps that use it were not designed with these failure modes in mind. And so when things went wrong the whole cardhouse collapsed. This is not something unfixable, so they can improve the s/w and then the failures won't be so spectacular.
The parent I replied to, and the whole discussion here is about DRM - so I didn't have to mention the obvious. AFAIK, the gameplay is not bad at all.
Neither me nor, I suspect, you are lawyers, so probably we shouldn't debate the merits of a lawsuit here. One obvious fact is, though, that Valve can be sued regardless, and they would be insane to go to trial over such a thing.
In this case you paid for the service, and you expect the service to be provided when you need it, not when the company feels to it. When businesses buy services the contracts clearly say what happens when the service provider fails to provide. For example, many small businesses outsource paycheck management; imagine what would you do if such a company fails to pay you your salary?
In this case we also talk about damaging someone's posessions, which are represented here with a Steam account. Many people said already that all you buy is the account, and once you lose it you have nothing. Well, a whole lot of accounts are lost - hopefully only temporarily, but nevertheless their property has been damaged already.
And finally with regard to being unable to use the product, that's literally true here - people paid for something and they can't use it.
It's a wrong argument in this debate because the cracked HL2 is better than the legitimate one.
Similarly, if someone takes your car for a joyride and then [police] returns it a week later - no big deal, you just have to wait until your property (or the service that you paid for) is back. Right?
The dongles cost about $20 if you buy a whole bunch of them, and $30 for a few. Such a dongle would make a serious impact on the price of the game.
One possible explanation is that the hardware is dead and there is no replacement. Even if the HDDs are OK there is no box to shove them in (or to restore from a backup tape, for example.)
In fact, thinking of this, I never received a personally addressed flyer from any grocer, or any store in general. To a store we are mere statistic.
That's where the loyalty card comes into play.
Why then to ask for personal info? Just give a shopper a card with a unique bar code, and she will be using it from now on. Again, why does the store need to know who the shopper is? Your explanation doesn't cut it.
Besides, "stealing" the code is not something the thief can be really arrested for. So the code can be gotten easily and without any risk. The mechanical key is not a deterrent, and likely in an RFID combo it is not as secure as it would be in a purely mechanical lock.