I'd say that leaving children completely unprepared for violence is worse than the video games these parents are complaining about. I am not terribly for violence, would never thing to even hit a person in real life, and I frag all the time.
Moreover I look at a real life killing in war or from natural tragedy and I am pained. I remember my cousins were from a heavily "christian" family and were made to avoid all things evil for thier entire childhood, when they got to college they went apeshit and wreaked havoc. I on the other hand was taught that there is shit in the world and how to deal with it, and though I was probably not the most wonderful college person, I never got in any sort of trouble.
So what I say to these parents is "Yes the games are violent, so teach your kids about violence and its downsides, and then let them take out thier agression by fragging little sqeaky aliens in halo."
I've heard that there are technology issues with it as well. I agree that all your above points are correct, but I think that until household fiber connecting is very standard (and I haven't seen that it is) it would be best to avoid running it currently but to prepare for it in the future by laying the correct conduit.
Also it would be good (as other people have indicated) to put a nice piece of line in that unused conduit in order to pull new runs, and remember when you pull the new runs with it to include another line in those runs for pulling more wire in case you want to add in the future.
This just means "don't store your money at paypal".
IANAL but from what I've read the paypal agreement of service would pretty much tie them in to giving your money to the person you specify it goes to (by e-mail address). I am not sure what it would take to prove paypal messed that up but I think if you did they would have to return your money. At this point I trust paypal with my credit card numbers and bank info far more than I'd trust the people I buy auction titles from. At least there is a contract with paypal where they agree to a level of service. I can't see how they could give less than that level of service and not run into legal issues.
This does not mean that I haven't missed some clause in thier contract that screws me. It also doesn't mean that I'm protected from fraud by the people I ultimately send money to or recieve money from. Thats why I have credit card insurance for online transactions and paypal is a level of abstraction from the other customer. Those are good things and thats why I use paypal (not to mention it takes me no energy compared to buying a money order or writing a personal check).
No if you study much Geography Illinois is definitely in the region that is commonly called the "mid-west". Montana Idaho are definitely in the "northwest" and Arizona and possibly Utah are in the "southwest".
The wierd naming convention stems from the days when the entirety of the United States lay east of the Mississippi river. I guess I would have to agree with the people, if I had to walk west for weeks to get to a place I'd consider in the far west too.
I would say in addition to this, put some conduit in for the network runs. I cant imagine trying to pull fiber through a run if it wasn't in conduit (I know how hard you have to yank that romex to get it to snake through all those terrible rough holes in studs, I spent far to much of my younger life remodeling with my dad).
I think fiber at this point would be a poor idea because by the time you need it the standard will have changed. I know thats a problem in our current communications industry (the many miles of forever dark fiber).
I do recommend running sound cables and cable tv cables all over, also maybe other sort of video cables.
Also instead of duplicating runs, look into the possibility of switching wall plates. I saw them on some review site not long ago and they look like a great way to fake 4 connections into 1 wire run, though you are limited to always having those puppies on the same segment I guess.
Yes, in our financial and insurance industries. The testing cycle before adding even a single patch to thier OS is nearly a year because everything has to be perfect. This means that changing an OS is totally cost prohibitive. Sometimes this testing is even a legal requirement.
Because of use like this I think MS is required by contract to support those OS's for a very long time.
I don't know about you but the kernel improvements in win98 were well worth spending $80 to upgrade. Not to mention the fact that hardware in my box was supported 100% better and the machine would run for more than 3 months without a major corruption of the system due to some hardware junk taking down the system. There were significant changes, I guess if you can't see it then it wasn't there though.
As far as ME goes there were significant changes to it. MS tried to add some of the stability features of winXP (system restore, health monitor) to the win9x code line and also completely get rid of true real mode in the system. Both of these things caused more trouble than good except when running perfect programs on perfect hardware.
Win 2k of course was the first time the NT code base had anything resembling home user type features though it was definitely oriented at the business consumer based on its price and its features. Win xp is very good but no you aren't going to be able to run all your very old win95 based apps in it.
I think the issue you are getting at isn't a MS based problem but a computer industry problem in general though. Win 95 was good enough, what more do people really want? If you just add stability people say "whoa that isn't any different than what I have" and if you and tons of fancy features people either go "I don't like those features I don't want to pay for them (even though the os price is the same as win95 as best I can tell) or those features add a crapload of bugs (or both).
That $150 loss figure was back before the celeron and the hard drive and the cdrom drive all dropped a HUGE bunch in price. The last loss figure I heard was $60 and on the 2nd run of boxes that will be even less.
All in all its not the console thats going to make money for either company, its still the game licences that do it.
I mean its a good deal for the company to give you a $200 console for free if they know they can get you to buy enough games to give them even $201 in profit on those games. Its a gamble but one that has yet to play itself out.
Actually one of the big benifits with MS using commodity hardware in thier console is that by the time the 2nd run of consoles comes off the line and the new contracts for parts is made, the hardware cost will be less than the price on the box. MS was not planning for this (not sure how they missed it) so thats at least an upside to the story. That coupled with the fact that 99% of xboxes sold were part of a bundle with 3 software titles, I think that MS is doing much better than even they planned initially.
I think Microsoft actually wanted to produce more systems but couldn't actually do it with the factories they contracted for the work.
As far as the consoles go, I think that Nintendo much be working themselves into a deep hole with the pricing of the system. Its not all that cheaper to produce than the XBox (has twice as many custom chips in it) so they lose even more money per system than MS does which means they have to sell more software to make up the difference.
We will see what happens in the end, there are tons of things that need to play out before we can know who will win this years console wars.
Because the price is not based on the hardware costs alone, its also based on MS not wanting to sell you a system that you don't buy games for.
They want at least the profit of a game if you are going to use it as a movie player especially since game makers today are not only making no profit on the hardware but infact losing money on every console sold.
If you like a system buy more 1st party software for it, thats how the parent company will survive.
They probably are sold out in montana as well (at least a couple stores I saw when I was through last week had bare shelves) so that spoils your first minor misconception.
And for the second, Montana means mountain and there is a reason they picked the name.
My big question right now is, why do you feel its a "right" to be able to screw Apple when they made a mistake. The honest truth is that every time you screw them we get another bad law. Just pay for the software and quit trying to exploit the companies and not pay. IF YOU DON'T THINK THE SOFTWARE IS WORTH ITS PRICE, DON'T BUY IT AND DON'T USE IT.
I mean really, leaving your keys in the ignition and the door unlocked on your car is stupid, but it doesn't make it any less illegal for someone to steal the car.
As a further addition, the "locks" are a way to reduce cost to AMD from stupid people that overclock unwisely and fry thier chip.
With the lock on AMD can say, "You aren't supposed to connect those leads, yes we know you fry your chip when you do that, thats why they are disconnected." Car companies do the same thing by saying, "Oh you took the heads off? It wasn't a certified dealer? Well that voids your warrenty, sorry we can't help you."
I think we are lucky that the ability to over clock them is allowed at all.
And how often does the normal user paruse microsoft.com? About as often as the looked at microsoft.com/security.
Anyway, thats not the real issue here. The question is whether you should post an exploit before there is a patch. I don't know what to think on this. On the one hand everybody will be warned and such, and MS will have a hot poker up thier ass and maybe get a patch. On the other hand it could make the problem more public and cause more damage. I'm not sure which way to go, but I kind of lean to the keep it quiet and hurry your ass to patch the problem.
Interestingly enough this would not be a severe problem if websites used cookies correctly:) In my opinion they should be used to carry an encrypted session or user id. Timeouts, machinecode and other replay attack protections should be used so that even if someone hijacks your cookie it doesn't matter because its useless except to the person that is supposed to have it. This is a general bug in the use of cookies more than a fatal flaw of IE. Automatically assume that if you write to a cookie, the data in the cookie is public. Only the data you hold in your very own secure little hands is truely secure.
Yes he does have a claim to having the same thought of a computer on everyone's desktop but he didn't develop software and was actually of the mindset initially that software should come free with the system, which is sort of anti open-source in that its highly anti-choice.
His point is that open source exists as it does today because nearly everyone has a computer. MS does have at least some right to claim that it helped put computers on everyones desktop because they were one of the very first companies to think that every person could use a computer and so wrote software to be used by every person. Before that software was mostly custom for a single business or acedemic project.
Basically MS is claiming that they broke the academic elitism of computing and well they very likely did.
Shouldn't matter, I mean short of price discrimination, what bad things happen from a company knowing what things my aunt likes? Maybe her junk mail will start advertising things she likes to buy, god could only hope.
I guess you can say win95 is faster but when you count all the extra work you have to do to reboot it, and reinstall it, and all the features you are missing (yes I happen to like WMP and the built in cd burning and the built in scanning features of XP) you probably end up way behind when you use win95.
Heck including the browser with the OS was such an incredible leap in usefulness of the OS that it threatened to shake the very foundations of the computer software world.
That said there are things that DON'T need to be changed and I'm not sure that office XP works any better for me than office 2000 or office 97. I'm not sure it works anyworse either though.
BTW if software companies didn't abuse the hell out of moore's law and the gullibility of people to upgrade when they say to, many many programmers would be without jobs in the computer industry and that just sux.
Do what you want to one way or another, but I'm going to stick with winXP at this point with its ability to keep my computer going for 60 days (and counting) without reboots and still let me use all my windows tool and windows games and let me burn a cd as easily as copying files from one hd to another.
I must say that the 60 day uptime I have with the os so far (that is 60 days with heavy use) is much better than the 20 day max I got with win2k. Kudos to MS for fixing thier os for athlon and via hardware.
You can easily turn off the animated search. I think that the extra slowdowns came from enforcing abstraction rules in the drivers. I think we gave up some speed for some reliability.
That said, everything I do seems just as fast to me as it did before. I mean the web pages load just as fast as I can possibly read them and the typing keeps up with my fingers so what more do you want?
I guess if I was calculating huge spreadsheets or running some big simulation or something it would matter. Honestly all my games run as fast as I could ever want as well on my 1.2ghz athlon and Geforce 2 GTS.
Then turn your damn cookies off. I don't know a browser that doesn't allow this by default.
I for one like being able to sign in to slashdot once per session and post without typing username and pword. I also like going to websites that remember who I am and what I like to look at. Maybe the price I have to pay is that they know that I, as the personality named by the login "malfunct", watch certain things. With my static IP they could track me anyways so who cares.
I know that most of the/. types will cringe at this suggestion, but thats why you have a shitty box running win98 sitting around. All that is on it is a base install and the client software given to you by the DSL company (or cable or whatever). Then when you have a problem you plug in this "reference" machine and see what it does. If the problem is with the service the machine won't connect and Tech support will have no choice but to help you. Its what I do and I run all sorts of wierd OS's at home that my DSL company doesn't support and moreover says won't work on thier service.
There is very little data stored in a Passport account. A passport account is simple, it is an id number, your name, e-mail, zip code, age and like one or two other things. Thats it. All the data is stored elsewhere by other people. MS actually has next to nothing useful in thier own DB.
The real problem is making sure that someone can't fake that they are authenticated to passport and access the data in the other sites. I can't comment on the security in that way at all. I just don't want people thinking that MS has this huge database of all the info about you, because they just don't have it. ALL passport data except for the bare identification essentials, is stored by the sites you go to and not by passport.
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Moreover I look at a real life killing in war or from natural tragedy and I am pained. I remember my cousins were from a heavily "christian" family and were made to avoid all things evil for thier entire childhood, when they got to college they went apeshit and wreaked havoc. I on the other hand was taught that there is shit in the world and how to deal with it, and though I was probably not the most wonderful college person, I never got in any sort of trouble.
So what I say to these parents is "Yes the games are violent, so teach your kids about violence and its downsides, and then let them take out thier agression by fragging little sqeaky aliens in halo."
Also it would be good (as other people have indicated) to put a nice piece of line in that unused conduit in order to pull new runs, and remember when you pull the new runs with it to include another line in those runs for pulling more wire in case you want to add in the future.
IANAL but from what I've read the paypal agreement of service would pretty much tie them in to giving your money to the person you specify it goes to (by e-mail address). I am not sure what it would take to prove paypal messed that up but I think if you did they would have to return your money. At this point I trust paypal with my credit card numbers and bank info far more than I'd trust the people I buy auction titles from. At least there is a contract with paypal where they agree to a level of service. I can't see how they could give less than that level of service and not run into legal issues.
This does not mean that I haven't missed some clause in thier contract that screws me. It also doesn't mean that I'm protected from fraud by the people I ultimately send money to or recieve money from. Thats why I have credit card insurance for online transactions and paypal is a level of abstraction from the other customer. Those are good things and thats why I use paypal (not to mention it takes me no energy compared to buying a money order or writing a personal check).
The wierd naming convention stems from the days when the entirety of the United States lay east of the Mississippi river. I guess I would have to agree with the people, if I had to walk west for weeks to get to a place I'd consider in the far west too.
I think fiber at this point would be a poor idea because by the time you need it the standard will have changed. I know thats a problem in our current communications industry (the many miles of forever dark fiber).
I do recommend running sound cables and cable tv cables all over, also maybe other sort of video cables.
Also instead of duplicating runs, look into the possibility of switching wall plates. I saw them on some review site not long ago and they look like a great way to fake 4 connections into 1 wire run, though you are limited to always having those puppies on the same segment I guess.
Because of use like this I think MS is required by contract to support those OS's for a very long time.
As far as ME goes there were significant changes to it. MS tried to add some of the stability features of winXP (system restore, health monitor) to the win9x code line and also completely get rid of true real mode in the system. Both of these things caused more trouble than good except when running perfect programs on perfect hardware.
Win 2k of course was the first time the NT code base had anything resembling home user type features though it was definitely oriented at the business consumer based on its price and its features. Win xp is very good but no you aren't going to be able to run all your very old win95 based apps in it.
I think the issue you are getting at isn't a MS based problem but a computer industry problem in general though. Win 95 was good enough, what more do people really want? If you just add stability people say "whoa that isn't any different than what I have" and if you and tons of fancy features people either go "I don't like those features I don't want to pay for them (even though the os price is the same as win95 as best I can tell) or those features add a crapload of bugs (or both).
Its great I guess, would be better if they were making profit off the hardware.
All in all its not the console thats going to make money for either company, its still the game licences that do it.
I mean its a good deal for the company to give you a $200 console for free if they know they can get you to buy enough games to give them even $201 in profit on those games. Its a gamble but one that has yet to play itself out.
Actually one of the big benifits with MS using commodity hardware in thier console is that by the time the 2nd run of consoles comes off the line and the new contracts for parts is made, the hardware cost will be less than the price on the box. MS was not planning for this (not sure how they missed it) so thats at least an upside to the story. That coupled with the fact that 99% of xboxes sold were part of a bundle with 3 software titles, I think that MS is doing much better than even they planned initially.
As far as the consoles go, I think that Nintendo much be working themselves into a deep hole with the pricing of the system. Its not all that cheaper to produce than the XBox (has twice as many custom chips in it) so they lose even more money per system than MS does which means they have to sell more software to make up the difference.
We will see what happens in the end, there are tons of things that need to play out before we can know who will win this years console wars.
They want at least the profit of a game if you are going to use it as a movie player especially since game makers today are not only making no profit on the hardware but infact losing money on every console sold.
If you like a system buy more 1st party software for it, thats how the parent company will survive.
And for the second, Montana means mountain and there is a reason they picked the name.
I mean really, leaving your keys in the ignition and the door unlocked on your car is stupid, but it doesn't make it any less illegal for someone to steal the car.
With the lock on AMD can say, "You aren't supposed to connect those leads, yes we know you fry your chip when you do that, thats why they are disconnected." Car companies do the same thing by saying, "Oh you took the heads off? It wasn't a certified dealer? Well that voids your warrenty, sorry we can't help you."
I think we are lucky that the ability to over clock them is allowed at all.
Anyway, thats not the real issue here. The question is whether you should post an exploit before there is a patch. I don't know what to think on this. On the one hand everybody will be warned and such, and MS will have a hot poker up thier ass and maybe get a patch. On the other hand it could make the problem more public and cause more damage. I'm not sure which way to go, but I kind of lean to the keep it quiet and hurry your ass to patch the problem.
Interestingly enough this would not be a severe problem if websites used cookies correctly :) In my opinion they should be used to carry an encrypted session or user id. Timeouts, machinecode and other replay attack protections should be used so that even if someone hijacks your cookie it doesn't matter because its useless except to the person that is supposed to have it. This is a general bug in the use of cookies more than a fatal flaw of IE. Automatically assume that if you write to a cookie, the data in the cookie is public. Only the data you hold in your very own secure little hands is truely secure.
Yes he does have a claim to having the same thought of a computer on everyone's desktop but he didn't develop software and was actually of the mindset initially that software should come free with the system, which is sort of anti open-source in that its highly anti-choice.
Basically MS is claiming that they broke the academic elitism of computing and well they very likely did.
Shouldn't matter, I mean short of price discrimination, what bad things happen from a company knowing what things my aunt likes? Maybe her junk mail will start advertising things she likes to buy, god could only hope.
Heck including the browser with the OS was such an incredible leap in usefulness of the OS that it threatened to shake the very foundations of the computer software world.
That said there are things that DON'T need to be changed and I'm not sure that office XP works any better for me than office 2000 or office 97. I'm not sure it works anyworse either though.
BTW if software companies didn't abuse the hell out of moore's law and the gullibility of people to upgrade when they say to, many many programmers would be without jobs in the computer industry and that just sux.
Do what you want to one way or another, but I'm going to stick with winXP at this point with its ability to keep my computer going for 60 days (and counting) without reboots and still let me use all my windows tool and windows games and let me burn a cd as easily as copying files from one hd to another.
I must say that the 60 day uptime I have with the os so far (that is 60 days with heavy use) is much better than the 20 day max I got with win2k. Kudos to MS for fixing thier os for athlon and via hardware.
That said, everything I do seems just as fast to me as it did before. I mean the web pages load just as fast as I can possibly read them and the typing keeps up with my fingers so what more do you want?
I guess if I was calculating huge spreadsheets or running some big simulation or something it would matter. Honestly all my games run as fast as I could ever want as well on my 1.2ghz athlon and Geforce 2 GTS.
I for one like being able to sign in to slashdot once per session and post without typing username and pword. I also like going to websites that remember who I am and what I like to look at. Maybe the price I have to pay is that they know that I, as the personality named by the login "malfunct", watch certain things. With my static IP they could track me anyways so who cares.
I know that most of the /. types will cringe at this suggestion, but thats why you have a shitty box running win98 sitting around. All that is on it is a base install and the client software given to you by the DSL company (or cable or whatever). Then when you have a problem you plug in this "reference" machine and see what it does. If the problem is with the service the machine won't connect and Tech support will have no choice but to help you. Its what I do and I run all sorts of wierd OS's at home that my DSL company doesn't support and moreover says won't work on thier service.
The real problem is making sure that someone can't fake that they are authenticated to passport and access the data in the other sites. I can't comment on the security in that way at all. I just don't want people thinking that MS has this huge database of all the info about you, because they just don't have it. ALL passport data except for the bare identification essentials, is stored by the sites you go to and not by passport.