100 million sold? Or 100 million packaged with laptops, PCs and tablets forced down the throats of unwitting users that definitely would rather have had windows 7 had they any clue?
The most hilarious part of this whole debacle on Microsofts part is that we recently decided to upgrade from WinXP to Win7 finally... and as part of that a few people said "hey, why don't we just go for Win8 while we're at it?" so they put together some focus groups of generally non-tech savvy employees to see how long it would take them to get a grasp on how to do their jobs using the new OS. One of the security guys in charge of the project is a big apple fan and argued we needed a control... and wanted to use OSX... management thought it wasn't such a bad idea, but of course, we're NOT switching to Apple any time soon so instead they used Redhat. Win7 was easiest for them to pick up of course... but Redhat beat Win8 by a country mile. There were many in test that never got Win8 to work for their jobs. I wasn't privy to all of the hurdles they found and what-not. But it's pretty staggering to think MS screwed up their UI so much that a bunch of our least talented salesmen were more capable of using Linux that it.
Underestimating people by thinking that they won't download the next link down, which is the completely free pirated album.
You are somewhat correct... offering more of what you just got for free is dumb as hell. But the rest of the ideas are solid... "Follow us on facebook for the rest of the album" or better yet, Query the users IP, search your Concert ticket database and offer them a chance to pre-order tickets for a show. You could literally book your entire tour based on pre-ordered ticket purchases and then just refund those areas that didn't get enough sales. Most wont give you a dime, but some will... and that's a lot better than nothing.
Underestimating the RIAA's greed that they would actually agree to this.
I think we all know the only place the RIAA is relevant is in the retirement accounts of the congressmen they've bought.
Underestimating the artists themselves as most don't have more than 2-3 good songs an album anyways.
And with this, you've missed one of the most important points of Peer to Peer file sharing. It's the ultimate a-la-carte menu. I no longer am forced to buy crap I don't want. There was a time when a band could purchase a song written by some washed up rockstar that would be so popular that they'd put it on a $17CD and rake in the cash because so many people would buy it for that one song... no more. This is good for music.
I've never had a problem with the activation. I just run this DAZ script and viola! Activated! Who's having trouble? MS support should just mail people the 5kb file and be done with it.
Taxes are always a bad thing. What are they going to use the money for? They could easily remedy this entire situation by just getting rid of sales tax all together and raising income tax... or better yet, just reduce spending.
I always thought a biotech disaster would most likely just kill all or most of us. Technological disasters are more likely to bring about some new form of Fascism, witch is easily remedied via the 2nd amendment or hacking, or some other cool thing that the average slashdotter would love to be involved in even if in reality they'd probably end up just as dead either way.
I couldn't help but notice THE GIANT SPINNING BLADES on the front of that thing which pretty much guarantee I can't take it to walmart or any other public place. Let me know when you come up with something that doesn't have the relatively high risk of decapitating me if I get out of it too quickly.
They don't make them anymore. But they still have support contracts. Those contracts are very lucrative for them. We are changing over to digital soft switches. But that will take a while. For the majority of the country they are just not cost effective. There are still people out there with Party lines for gods sake. I know of a couple of places that still don't have touch tone. If you were to go to a big metropolitain area then yea, the soft switches pay for themselves. But the majority of the country doesn't live in areas like that.
The fact that you're so naive about how modern trunking works and yet you're still commenting is sad. We don't use AT&T (or rarely) They are expensive. Also most phone calls are STILL local. They happen entirely within our own equipment. All long distance calls that go from one of our territories to another, again, all happen within our own equipment... because it's cheaper. Even calls that happen into some of AT&T, SPRINT and others may still happen entirely within our own equipment if the customers CLEC. (though that last mile happens on AT&T stuff)
Modern long distance switches carriers at the point of call. We have several trunks, leading from place to place, rarely with any company you'd have ever heard of. They all compete for our business. When you place a call, the carriers are poled, and the one offering the cheapest rate is picked. Basically they are load balancing, as their bandwidth gets chewed up the price goes up. When phone calls are transferred there is no identifying data sent that could identify the caller. This is why Caller ID spoofing is still a problem. The phone company is billed for the long distance and it's up to them to track their customers calls. So even if the government were recording the call they'd not know who it was from without access to our billing records... and not our customer billing records, our internal financials.
The internet may be different. It's hard to avoid the large carriers in that regard. But again, remember, all they have at that point is your IP witch is almost useless in any real sense. So they'd need access to our DHCP records. I would directly know about that, I've maintained those records in the past. Not only would I know about external access to those records, they are maintained in such a way that... well basically it's a mess (basically because we don't have a need to log it other than DMCA complaints) So even if the government did have access to them it would a mess for them to decode them into anything meaningful.
Site your sources. The government tapping 1 line is trivial. Doing it without a warrant/CALEA request would be as simple as putting some device in the pedestal outside your home. But doing it to EVERY phone? No, it's not possible. I suppose they could have done it at just really large carriers like AT&T... but even then, it would be the biggest project in AT&T's history. Their entire engineering, IT and IS staff would be involved. How could that possibly be kept quiet?
What cases? Site your sources. What port? The switch is not capable of doing this. Period. There wasn't even such a thing as fiber when most switches were built. They have no such hookeup and don't even have a way to convert every call to digital. It's physically possible, but what I'm telling you is that doing such a thing would be such a large undertaking that it would involve the entire company... and every company in the country. How could that not get leaked?
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. If the phone is working off a remote, then yes, it hits a DSLAM, gets converted to digital, is sent up a trunk to the switch then gets down converted back to analog before re-entering the switch. This is not on any network or anything. It's just a point to point data line. The majority of the phone lines coming off the switch however are serviced directly by the switch and never converted to digital. This is because the switch is placed in the most population dense area intentionally. Remotes are expensive. The vast majority of phone calls happen inside the switch... local to local. So they literally go in and out analog, there is no way they could be intercepted unless the government had equipment on the home itself or every number was re-routed in the switch so it would re-send the audio of that call somewhere else. We can do that... but the switch again is old, we can only do it to a few numbers at a time and require a warrant to do so (I used to do switch programming) The number of times we received a request to do such a thing in the 2 years I did that job I could count on 1 hand. Every time it was a domestic dispute where the husband was holding his wife/ex hostage and the police were outside.
Its actually not that bad. Since you know the system, and you know email is not a reliable way to store your data (and honestly never should have been in the first place) you start storing things in proper ways. On an internal wiki or normal folders on the network. It's actually done a lot to improve how well we document things because everyone knows they'll not be able to dig up 3yr old emails to figure it out. Those emails may have been satisfactory for the individual keeping them but they did no good to anyone else. Also, when you're transferring this important information to the wiki or where-ever you've got time to think about it as a public piece of data now. We have a false sense that our email is private and no-one else will likely ever see it... then it ends up in court. When you have to transfer the important bits to public domain you then have time to decide what you actually want to make public and what you just want to let the archive delete.
I work for a moderate sized phone company. Customers in the millions. The government has no link into our systems. WE can't even record all of your calls and monitor all your internet traffic. Think about it this way, your ISP likely doesn't even have enough bandwidth to provide you with the speed you're paying for some of the times... Netflix on a friday night for example. Do you really think they have the extra bandwidth to ship all that data off to the government as well? Phone calls are a whole other animal, and are mostly still analog. Duplicating that would involve upgrading the switch... an at least 30yr old piece of obsolete equipment... It just doesn't make sense. Sure, the government could pay for all this stuff... but it would be a HUGE project. Everyone in the company would know. The equipment in our data center is very obvious... we all know what each piece does. There's no mysterious black box in the corner... and there's no way they could be tracking everything without us knowing. There would be at least 1 piece of weird equipment somewhere. I've neither seen nor heard of any such equipment. On top of that, all that data would be meaningless without access to our databases. Capturing the data or phone calls raw would just give you a mac address or phone number. You wouldn't know who was using those numbers. So you'd have to query our database... a database that changes regularly... new systems come online all of the time. So they'd have to have access from outside of the company, so holes in our firewall, make SOAP requests into our system, Have an active user account, make requests to dozens of different DBs, hundreds of Tables, know how all their joins work, know when system changes go in, and on and on... No such thing could happen without the entire company knowing about it. It's just not possible.
This sort of things already long gone. My company archives all email after 90days and deletes it after 1 year. Then they gave us a "chat client" for the majority of the company and an internal IRC channel for the IS department. So naturally everyone moved to those instead of email. Saving emails locally is punishable by termination and they have scripts that actively search for emails, archives and PST files and delete them.
My guess is, a lot of companies are doing this, and it's bad for Googles business model. So if they can get legal departments to trust that long term email storage isn't just a huge, decades long archive of casual conversations that can be subpenaed, taken out of context and generally used to sink any future case they may have to fight, then maybe they can get business to start using it again. The big problem with email is that courts have seemed to taken it as official correspondence or official policy if it's in an email rather than the casual conversation that it really is. Just because some bottom level manager says X policy is designed to rip people off does not mean that manager has any clue what they're talking about. Yes there are bad companies out there, but there are plenty of decent companies that have gotten caught up in huge legal battles over emails that certainly weren't nearly as big a deal as they were made out to be in court.
There are a LOT of games that have random level generation. Rogue being one of the first. It's random level generation being ones of its most important features. I could see this sort of thing being used in that sort of way.
Yes, but patching the smallest hole in the boat with your marine radio instead of using it to call for help wouldn't be wise either. His point was that you need to think before you act, and he's right.
I know you live in your own little life and have very little appreciation to what it's like in other parts of the country or the world. But to many people, more expensive food is the same as no food at all.
That reminds me of some sitcom or cartoon where the characters are lost in the desert and their only food supply catches fire, so they dump their canteen of water on it to put it out. Knee-Jerk reactions rarely work out for the best.
There are many types of drones. You're thinking of a more radio controlled type. The better ones just have a cellular chip in them and you control them over the internet. Rather than "Fly them" like an RC plane, you give it a target and it goes on its merry way. Once it has its instruction set it doesn't even need the cellular connection anymore, it can just fly back to "home base" once it has done whatever it is it was supposed to do.
This is very common in Japan. Peoples employers/employees are treated like family. Not saying it's always a good family, but just jumping from job to job is not normal there at all. Especially at the executive level.
Sure glad I got the constitution to protect me from people like you:-)
Thanks for the info on the quote. It's pretty clear he believed exactly what the quote says, but I'd rather not quote something that's inaccurate. Also, in the very link you provided it says the quote first arose in 1913, long before the republican party or conservatives (neither of which I belong to) were what they are today.
Here's a new quote from your link: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788
I'll go on to my righting fantasies about Thomas Jefferson thinking Government was the enemy of liberty now. No idea where I came up with such an idea, but I'm sticking to it none the less.
I think you're a bit off. My 11th grade chemistry teacher (this was in the 90s) had everyone in his class build these and we set them off in a field in the back of the school. We tested different cleaners and types of aluminum to see which gave the best boom... we crumpled the aluminum in different ways, used different kinds of bottles. Local news channel covered it, and the teacher setting off a cannon with hydrogen... also dropping eggs from the news helicopter, but that wasn't as exciting.
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100 million sold? Or 100 million packaged with laptops, PCs and tablets forced down the throats of unwitting users that definitely would rather have had windows 7 had they any clue?
The most hilarious part of this whole debacle on Microsofts part is that we recently decided to upgrade from WinXP to Win7 finally... and as part of that a few people said "hey, why don't we just go for Win8 while we're at it?" so they put together some focus groups of generally non-tech savvy employees to see how long it would take them to get a grasp on how to do their jobs using the new OS. One of the security guys in charge of the project is a big apple fan and argued we needed a control... and wanted to use OSX... management thought it wasn't such a bad idea, but of course, we're NOT switching to Apple any time soon so instead they used Redhat. Win7 was easiest for them to pick up of course... but Redhat beat Win8 by a country mile. There were many in test that never got Win8 to work for their jobs. I wasn't privy to all of the hurdles they found and what-not. But it's pretty staggering to think MS screwed up their UI so much that a bunch of our least talented salesmen were more capable of using Linux that it.
Underestimating people by thinking that they won't download the next link down, which is the completely free pirated album.
You are somewhat correct... offering more of what you just got for free is dumb as hell. But the rest of the ideas are solid... "Follow us on facebook for the rest of the album" or better yet, Query the users IP, search your Concert ticket database and offer them a chance to pre-order tickets for a show. You could literally book your entire tour based on pre-ordered ticket purchases and then just refund those areas that didn't get enough sales. Most wont give you a dime, but some will... and that's a lot better than nothing.
Underestimating the RIAA's greed that they would actually agree to this.
I think we all know the only place the RIAA is relevant is in the retirement accounts of the congressmen they've bought.
Underestimating the artists themselves as most don't have more than 2-3 good songs an album anyways.
And with this, you've missed one of the most important points of Peer to Peer file sharing. It's the ultimate a-la-carte menu. I no longer am forced to buy crap I don't want. There was a time when a band could purchase a song written by some washed up rockstar that would be so popular that they'd put it on a $17CD and rake in the cash because so many people would buy it for that one song... no more. This is good for music.
I've never had a problem with the activation. I just run this DAZ script and viola! Activated! Who's having trouble? MS support should just mail people the 5kb file and be done with it.
Taxes are always a bad thing. What are they going to use the money for? They could easily remedy this entire situation by just getting rid of sales tax all together and raising income tax... or better yet, just reduce spending.
I always thought a biotech disaster would most likely just kill all or most of us. Technological disasters are more likely to bring about some new form of Fascism, witch is easily remedied via the 2nd amendment or hacking, or some other cool thing that the average slashdotter would love to be involved in even if in reality they'd probably end up just as dead either way.
I couldn't help but notice THE GIANT SPINNING BLADES on the front of that thing which pretty much guarantee I can't take it to walmart or any other public place. Let me know when you come up with something that doesn't have the relatively high risk of decapitating me if I get out of it too quickly.
They don't make them anymore. But they still have support contracts. Those contracts are very lucrative for them. We are changing over to digital soft switches. But that will take a while. For the majority of the country they are just not cost effective. There are still people out there with Party lines for gods sake. I know of a couple of places that still don't have touch tone. If you were to go to a big metropolitain area then yea, the soft switches pay for themselves. But the majority of the country doesn't live in areas like that.
The fact that you're so naive about how modern trunking works and yet you're still commenting is sad. We don't use AT&T (or rarely) They are expensive. Also most phone calls are STILL local. They happen entirely within our own equipment. All long distance calls that go from one of our territories to another, again, all happen within our own equipment... because it's cheaper. Even calls that happen into some of AT&T, SPRINT and others may still happen entirely within our own equipment if the customers CLEC. (though that last mile happens on AT&T stuff)
Modern long distance switches carriers at the point of call. We have several trunks, leading from place to place, rarely with any company you'd have ever heard of. They all compete for our business. When you place a call, the carriers are poled, and the one offering the cheapest rate is picked. Basically they are load balancing, as their bandwidth gets chewed up the price goes up. When phone calls are transferred there is no identifying data sent that could identify the caller. This is why Caller ID spoofing is still a problem. The phone company is billed for the long distance and it's up to them to track their customers calls. So even if the government were recording the call they'd not know who it was from without access to our billing records... and not our customer billing records, our internal financials.
The internet may be different. It's hard to avoid the large carriers in that regard. But again, remember, all they have at that point is your IP witch is almost useless in any real sense. So they'd need access to our DHCP records. I would directly know about that, I've maintained those records in the past. Not only would I know about external access to those records, they are maintained in such a way that... well basically it's a mess (basically because we don't have a need to log it other than DMCA complaints) So even if the government did have access to them it would a mess for them to decode them into anything meaningful.
Site your sources. The government tapping 1 line is trivial. Doing it without a warrant/CALEA request would be as simple as putting some device in the pedestal outside your home. But doing it to EVERY phone? No, it's not possible. I suppose they could have done it at just really large carriers like AT&T... but even then, it would be the biggest project in AT&T's history. Their entire engineering, IT and IS staff would be involved. How could that possibly be kept quiet?
What cases? Site your sources. What port? The switch is not capable of doing this. Period. There wasn't even such a thing as fiber when most switches were built. They have no such hookeup and don't even have a way to convert every call to digital. It's physically possible, but what I'm telling you is that doing such a thing would be such a large undertaking that it would involve the entire company... and every company in the country. How could that not get leaked?
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. If the phone is working off a remote, then yes, it hits a DSLAM, gets converted to digital, is sent up a trunk to the switch then gets down converted back to analog before re-entering the switch. This is not on any network or anything. It's just a point to point data line. The majority of the phone lines coming off the switch however are serviced directly by the switch and never converted to digital. This is because the switch is placed in the most population dense area intentionally. Remotes are expensive. The vast majority of phone calls happen inside the switch... local to local. So they literally go in and out analog, there is no way they could be intercepted unless the government had equipment on the home itself or every number was re-routed in the switch so it would re-send the audio of that call somewhere else. We can do that... but the switch again is old, we can only do it to a few numbers at a time and require a warrant to do so (I used to do switch programming) The number of times we received a request to do such a thing in the 2 years I did that job I could count on 1 hand. Every time it was a domestic dispute where the husband was holding his wife/ex hostage and the police were outside.
Its actually not that bad. Since you know the system, and you know email is not a reliable way to store your data (and honestly never should have been in the first place) you start storing things in proper ways. On an internal wiki or normal folders on the network. It's actually done a lot to improve how well we document things because everyone knows they'll not be able to dig up 3yr old emails to figure it out. Those emails may have been satisfactory for the individual keeping them but they did no good to anyone else. Also, when you're transferring this important information to the wiki or where-ever you've got time to think about it as a public piece of data now. We have a false sense that our email is private and no-one else will likely ever see it... then it ends up in court. When you have to transfer the important bits to public domain you then have time to decide what you actually want to make public and what you just want to let the archive delete.
I work for a moderate sized phone company. Customers in the millions. The government has no link into our systems. WE can't even record all of your calls and monitor all your internet traffic. Think about it this way, your ISP likely doesn't even have enough bandwidth to provide you with the speed you're paying for some of the times... Netflix on a friday night for example. Do you really think they have the extra bandwidth to ship all that data off to the government as well? Phone calls are a whole other animal, and are mostly still analog. Duplicating that would involve upgrading the switch... an at least 30yr old piece of obsolete equipment... It just doesn't make sense. Sure, the government could pay for all this stuff... but it would be a HUGE project. Everyone in the company would know. The equipment in our data center is very obvious... we all know what each piece does. There's no mysterious black box in the corner... and there's no way they could be tracking everything without us knowing. There would be at least 1 piece of weird equipment somewhere. I've neither seen nor heard of any such equipment. On top of that, all that data would be meaningless without access to our databases. Capturing the data or phone calls raw would just give you a mac address or phone number. You wouldn't know who was using those numbers. So you'd have to query our database... a database that changes regularly... new systems come online all of the time. So they'd have to have access from outside of the company, so holes in our firewall, make SOAP requests into our system, Have an active user account, make requests to dozens of different DBs, hundreds of Tables, know how all their joins work, know when system changes go in, and on and on... No such thing could happen without the entire company knowing about it. It's just not possible.
This sort of things already long gone. My company archives all email after 90days and deletes it after 1 year. Then they gave us a "chat client" for the majority of the company and an internal IRC channel for the IS department. So naturally everyone moved to those instead of email. Saving emails locally is punishable by termination and they have scripts that actively search for emails, archives and PST files and delete them.
My guess is, a lot of companies are doing this, and it's bad for Googles business model. So if they can get legal departments to trust that long term email storage isn't just a huge, decades long archive of casual conversations that can be subpenaed, taken out of context and generally used to sink any future case they may have to fight, then maybe they can get business to start using it again. The big problem with email is that courts have seemed to taken it as official correspondence or official policy if it's in an email rather than the casual conversation that it really is. Just because some bottom level manager says X policy is designed to rip people off does not mean that manager has any clue what they're talking about. Yes there are bad companies out there, but there are plenty of decent companies that have gotten caught up in huge legal battles over emails that certainly weren't nearly as big a deal as they were made out to be in court.
There are a LOT of games that have random level generation. Rogue being one of the first. It's random level generation being ones of its most important features. I could see this sort of thing being used in that sort of way.
Yes, but patching the smallest hole in the boat with your marine radio instead of using it to call for help wouldn't be wise either. His point was that you need to think before you act, and he's right.
I know you live in your own little life and have very little appreciation to what it's like in other parts of the country or the world. But to many people, more expensive food is the same as no food at all.
That reminds me of some sitcom or cartoon where the characters are lost in the desert and their only food supply catches fire, so they dump their canteen of water on it to put it out. Knee-Jerk reactions rarely work out for the best.
and I'll be terrified.
actually, a small plutonium battery might just do it.
There are many types of drones. You're thinking of a more radio controlled type. The better ones just have a cellular chip in them and you control them over the internet. Rather than "Fly them" like an RC plane, you give it a target and it goes on its merry way. Once it has its instruction set it doesn't even need the cellular connection anymore, it can just fly back to "home base" once it has done whatever it is it was supposed to do.
This is very common in Japan. Peoples employers/employees are treated like family. Not saying it's always a good family, but just jumping from job to job is not normal there at all. Especially at the executive level.
Sure glad I got the constitution to protect me from people like you :-)
Thanks for the info on the quote. It's pretty clear he believed exactly what the quote says, but I'd rather not quote something that's inaccurate. Also, in the very link you provided it says the quote first arose in 1913, long before the republican party or conservatives (neither of which I belong to) were what they are today.
Here's a new quote from your link:
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788
I'll go on to my righting fantasies about Thomas Jefferson thinking Government was the enemy of liberty now. No idea where I came up with such an idea, but I'm sticking to it none the less.
I think you're a bit off. My 11th grade chemistry teacher (this was in the 90s) had everyone in his class build these and we set them off in a field in the back of the school. We tested different cleaners and types of aluminum to see which gave the best boom... we crumpled the aluminum in different ways, used different kinds of bottles. Local news channel covered it, and the teacher setting off a cannon with hydrogen... also dropping eggs from the news helicopter, but that wasn't as exciting.
Most bad government has grown out of too much government. - Thomas Jefferson