Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.
What was so disappointing about that?
If you didn't already have better copies of the Beatles music before it was available in the iTunes store, and wanted a few obscure tracks that weren't available on any of the "hits" collections, then maybe that was an exciting announcement.
But, based on the sales figures, it looks like converting your own CDs to MP3 for your music player isn't as easy as I thought it was, as millions of people in the US wanted Beatles music but had been waiting 20+ years for somebody to convert the files for them.
An attack that is attempted but fails costs more than money.
Please note that there have been no failed terrorist attacks in the past 10 years.
Every attack achieved at least one of the objectives. Agreed, most have only achieved one of the objectives, but all have achieved the objective of having various nations make life worse for their own citizens.
Now someone get these damn whippersnappers off my lawn...
The sad part is that you could be less than 35 years old. That's how fast things have changed.
I suspect much of it is just like the TSA security theater...it's all about the government wanting more control. Sure, that sounds like tinfoil hat talk, but think about the current "problems" with kids bringing weapons to school, and how thirty years ago, there weren't any problems. Maybe the kids brought them, but there weren't many problems with it.
Regardless of whether that advice wasted court time or not, the USCG doesn't have a right to money from that lawyer.
Actually, I think there's a strong case that they do.
Again, any "advice" Syfert gave in the form of the package he sold is something that the defendant needs to decide for themselves about. If the steps are wrong in some way, the only possible flows of compensation are from Syfert to the court (in the form of some sort of sanction, if they feel it was a willful attempt to cause more work for the court), from Syfert to the purchaser (as something like malpractice), or from the purchaser to USCG (for "intentionally" causing them to spend money answering the motion, which is a huge stretch).
If you allow any recompense from Syfert to USCG, then anyone in any way who is remotely related to causing a lawyer more "work" will have precedent for having to "pay" for that. For example, an expert witness for the other side, or anyone who files an amicus brief could be sent a bill.
You'll also note that the USCG wants to have their cake and eat it too, in that they want the motions filed by defendants to be discussed with them first, but intentionally set up their system so they can avoid notifying the defendants for as much as possible until it is too late.
So, wait - he is "another lawyer oppos[ing] them"? But here, his whole defense was that he was unrelated third party. Which is it?
If I am a lawyer, any other lawyer who disagrees with me is "opposing me". It doesn't matter if it's specifically in my case. For example, if some lawyer used an argument in matters unrelated to me, but that argument can be used to hurt my current case (e.g., some precedent), I should not be able to sue them successfully, yet this case could set the precedent for that.
You seem to forget that it's not the downloading that people are being sued for. It's the "making available" to others, which is exactly what happens when one torrents.
The RIAA lawsuits specifically list "downloading", and it's generally the only one that is being pushed, because they absolutely do not want a ruling about "making available" to go against them.
We don't know that, having not seen the complaint. Additionally, it's unlikely to actually be in the complaint, since it's going to be real tough filing a lawsuit that says "we're losing money because people were successfully opposing our claims," Slashdot's wishes notwithstanding.
I know that no one RTFA here, but the complaint is embedded on this page, so if you haven't read it, it's your own fault.
But, basically, the complaint does say pretty much what people here think. In essence, USCG wants money because people took another lawyer's advice that was not illegal. Regardless of whether that advice wasted court time or not, the USCG doesn't have a right to money from that lawyer. From his client, maybe, but once you allow lawyers to sue other lawyers who oppose them, the whole system breaks down.
Now with that out of the way, let's not forget that most, if not all, of the people being sued are, in fact, breaking the law.
First off, the "evidence" is pretty thin, and even the lawyers involved have admitted that they know that many of the people sent the settlement letters had not infringed copyright. So, no, you can't say "most" of those getting letters are infringing copyright.
Second, there are many possibilities where downloading a movie is not copyright infringement. As an example, I downloaded a copy of a movie because my just-purchased DVD was defective, and was the last one in the store. Sure, I could have dealt with trying to return an opened movie for store credit (which, I must note, is caused by the fact that the MPAA does not in any way stand behind the products they sell), but instead I just downloaded. Technically infringing, sure, but I'd love to see cases like it go to court. Heck, if you want to bankrupt the MPAA and RIAA, everyone should set up a torrent client and download every movie and music track they have already paid for.
Which, you know, mentions nothing about quality. Different encoders, different settings, different [etc]...
All of which make no difference to the actual point, which is that some material is extremely hard to accurately compress to a low bitrate using any DCT-based, motion-estimating compression. And, it's trivially easy to find source material that fits this profile.
It's also quite unlikely that anyone at Netflix is optimizing encodes any better than what has been tweaked by thousands of video rippers out there. In particular, H.264 has literally millions of combinations of settings, but not every decoder implementation can support every combination, and the embedded ones (like those used in the boxes that stream Netflix) are some of the most limited.
I've got one or two high-bitrate 1080p Blu-Ray movies that look like shit.
If these truly contain encoding issues and not source material issues (there's nothing an encoder can do about a source with poor colors, overly edge-enhanced, etc.), I suspect that if you run them through a bitrate profiler you'll find that despite having a high average bitrate, they don't have the peaks that they need for the tougher scenes.
The real question would be: Given your 3.6Mbps video, and the same video encoded by Netflix, which one looks better?
I can pretty much guarantee that any 720p24 source that is encoded with a limitation for smooth streaming without a large buffer (i.e., no severe bitrate peaks) will look far worse on fast motion than my unconstrained profile encodes.
If you haven't done a lot of encoding of a wide variety of source material, you owe it to yourself to try, and see just what you can do in comparison to what Netflix streams. I think you'll be complaining a lot more about Netflix after that sort of experiment.
Some attorneys I've talked to about it the say quite the opposite, that given the way their scheme worked, the probably turned a profit.
I can't imagine how a few hundred people settling for less than $10K each could possibly offset the legal costs on even one of the high-profile lawsuits (none of which have resulted in any money actually being paid to the RIAA).
First, the places I have worked that had bulk licensing with Microsoft paid a yearly fee, not lifetime licenses. And those fees were high. Although less than buying the programs individually.
There are several classes of MS volume licensing. The "software assurance" is a fairly expensive yearly cost, but allows you to get licenses for upgrades for no extra fee.
Regular volume licensing just requires you to sign up with Microsoft and guarantee at least N total licenses (where N changes depending on the phase of the moon when you sign up). You do pay a fee to be in the volume licensing program, but this also opens up license models that are otherwise unavailable (like true volume licensing using a single license key for every machine).
For a company with 20 or so desktops (OS, other software) plus a few servers (OS, e-mail server, etc.), it's probably a wash on whether volume licensing is worth it, when $450 or so gets you MS Office from a brick and mortar.
What specific features do you like in Outlook/Exchange, and Word/Excel/Sharepoint, that you don't feel you can easily get elsewhere?
Scheduling, mailbox delegation, shared calendars, etc., are all much uglier with FOSS, as there is no client/server built by the same developers. Pretty much all of Sharepoint (easy end-user content creation and management, download/upload from the Office apps, etc.) is hard to find done as well in anything FOSS.
I honestly cant believe that people bitch about paying $200.00 a month for PROMISED speeds comparable to an OC3, with throttling and bandwidth caps as well as a raft full of conditions that are NOT on a OC3.
I see this sorts of statements a lot, but this comes from people who haven't ever used FiOS.
The only problem that FiOS with a dynamic IP has is port blocking. This problem goes away if you have a static IP. Otherwise, both have full speed available 24/7, with no throttling or bandwidth caps. I do agree that this 150/35 service won't give you 150Mbps upstream, but, then, it doesn't claim to.
I don't keep my FiOS saturated 24/7 because I want to leave room for everyday use. I do average about 50% utilization of my 25/15 line over the past year, with peaks over 100%.
If you compare apples to apples (i.e., business FiOS to an OC3), then you're wrong.
Business FiOS is guaranteed speed (both directions), with an SLA. Now, like every other ISP, they'll only guarantee the speed to the edge of their network. Once off their network, they obviously don't have any responsibility.
In my personal experience, though, the limit that Verizon claims as your fastest possible speed for your FiOS line is lower than the actual peak speed you will see.
I recently encoded some 720p24 material, and although the average bitrate was only around 3.6Mbps, there were peaks as high as 50Mbps, some for as long as 5 seconds. Note that this doesn't include the audio, which was 1.5Mbps by itself, but that's not a problem for Netflix, as I don't think their streams have more than 2 audio channels.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing
Nothing you said disproves the saying. All you said was, "a gun can be dangerous", which is absolutely true.
But, if people who already have guns (generally acquired through not legal means) are thinking about doing something bad, knowing that the majority of people around them are carrying weapons that they have been trained (at least somewhat) to use will likely convince them to move on to another target. This is the basis of the phrase "an armed society is a polite society".
Granted, it won't stop all the crimes, but it should stop some, and criminals getting shot and killed will stop recidivism.
And that doesn't even cover things like a couple of snipers just shooting people in DC.
Having been not just in the region but literally across the street from one of the shootings as it happened, I can tell you that many people were paralyzed around here. Sure, there were many that continued on normally, but a lot that did not, and this lasted for weeks in literally hundreds of square miles.
Imagine what 5-10 teams of snipers could do around the country.
I think you have been working with above average people for too long.
As an example, there are "programmers" and there are "code monkeys". Programmers understand programming, and having to learn a new programming language in a couple of weeks is no big deal. Code monkeys, on the other hand, generally will know one programming language and be able to take very detailed specs and turn them into code.
In the same way, there are people who will spend weeks learning the basics of some new thing (computer program, camera, etc.) while others can be a the same level of functionality in hours (or less).
It's my observation that the slow learners by far outweigh the fast ones in most companies.
Employers love determination. That's what gets projects done on time.
An untalented but determined person is likely to take a lot more time to complete a project, since they will take so much extra time on false starts, making mistakes. I'd much rather have a person who either already has necessary skills (or is able to acquire them quickly), since even if they can't see the project through due to lack of "determination", they might have done so much towards completing it that others can step in and finish.
The reality, though is that the more skilled people don't need "determination" to complete a project, because they don't spend so much time on it that it becomes a chore that requires them to "fight through it". On the other hand, if your organization is Dilbertian and there are many people who are working to stop projects, you might require determined people, because you sure as hell won't have the skilled ones...they'll all leave for better jobs.
The car would have a software limiter in it that limited it to say 200HP/75MPH
Pretty much every car these days has that kind of limiter (although not with those numbers).
The engine in my car is rated at 355hp and 350 lb-ft of torque, but the exact same engine with different programming on the ECM results in 365hp and 420 lb-ft in a different vehicle. The other vehicle has a more robust transmission that can handle the extra torque, but there are mods for my car that increase to over 400hp with no damage to any systems.
I use StartSSL for tens of certificates on all manner of internet and intranet sites.
I had to install their root certificate on Windows 2000, but any computer that gets regular windows updates should have had it since last year.
I'll jump on the StartSSL praise train, too. For $50/year, you get unlimited SSL certs for any domain you control, or personal authentication certs (i.e., e-mail) for any e-mail address you control. The certs can include wildcarding, multiple domains per cert, and lots of other features that other CAs charge an arm and a leg for.
I noticed that I had to install their CA cert when I was using their completely free certs, but their class 2 certs were issued by a different CA that was already in IE and Firefox. Perhaps everything is there now by default, but I can't say for sure.
Most internal soundcards don't do Dolby Digital Live or DTS Interactive meaning only 2.0 sound out via S/PDIF.
Preetty much all of the recent Realtek chipsets hande DD Live (now called Dolby Home Theater)...it's just a matter of whether the motherboard manufacturer pays for the license. DTS licensing is a lot more, so they probably won't widely support that any time in the near future.
In amount of actual deaths per amount of effort, I suspect bombing a plane is still the most efficient.
If you don't care about getting caught, the most effective method would be to have a few dozen terrorists walk into malls all around the country carrying automatic weapons, shoot a few people, yell some obviously terrorist slogans, and leave. Rinse and repeat over the course of a few weeks.
It may only result in a few hundred deaths, but it would definitely "change the way we live", and might destroy the economy, especially if you do this starting November 1.
Note that like almost every truly effective and unstoppable terror scheme, this idea came from a book that was written years before September 2001.
Why would training for OO (or Linux) cost much at all? A modern install of Ubuntu is very user-friendly, and your typical Windows user can find their way around it in just a few minutes
You must work with people who are much brighter than average, because around here, if you change somebody's theme, they'll wonder why "everything has changed", even though it's just cosmetic.
I do a lot of support for people who use a web-based Java applet. So, it runs in a browser, and does work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. But, it requires some tweaks to the Java control panel, and some changes to the core Java install (all supported stuff you can download from Sun^WOracle). It's tough enough to get many people to do it right on Windows, and I can't imagine what a user familiar with Windows would do when trying to navigate the Unix filesystem ("where's the C: drive?") to get to the Java install directory.
Let's say $300, although I know for the full version it's more.
No, $300 is about right for Office with MS volume licensing. And, since it's a lifetime license, it's not a bad deal, especially if you have to do any training at all for some other product.
Just 4 hours of training would cost about $100 per employee (figuring around $20/hour salary plus trainer costs...either to develop in house or pay for somebody to come in), and the training cost would be for pretty much every employee, while a MS Office license is tied to the computer, so no extra cost when you hire a replacement employee. Also, I really wouldn't want to work for a company who feel that a one-time cost of $100-200 per computer is "too much to spend". It's likely they would be cheap in other areas too, like salary.
And, despite what FOSS people may believe, MS Office really does give you a better setup for workgroup collaboration than and FOSS product. I dearly wish I could find an equivalently functional FOSS replacement for the Outlook/Exchange combination, not to mention Word/Excel/Sharepoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing. What was so disappointing about that?
If you didn't already have better copies of the Beatles music before it was available in the iTunes store, and wanted a few obscure tracks that weren't available on any of the "hits" collections, then maybe that was an exciting announcement.
But, based on the sales figures, it looks like converting your own CDs to MP3 for your music player isn't as easy as I thought it was, as millions of people in the US wanted Beatles music but had been waiting 20+ years for somebody to convert the files for them.
Frigidaire doesn't make airplanes or ancient temples, so you're safe.
Anybody know why it seems like we've responded with a much greater response this time round?
Because there is a lot of money to be made in providing "security".
An attack that is attempted but fails costs more than money.
Please note that there have been no failed terrorist attacks in the past 10 years.
Every attack achieved at least one of the objectives. Agreed, most have only achieved one of the objectives, but all have achieved the objective of having various nations make life worse for their own citizens.
Now someone get these damn whippersnappers off my lawn...
The sad part is that you could be less than 35 years old. That's how fast things have changed.
I suspect much of it is just like the TSA security theater...it's all about the government wanting more control. Sure, that sounds like tinfoil hat talk, but think about the current "problems" with kids bringing weapons to school, and how thirty years ago, there weren't any problems. Maybe the kids brought them, but there weren't many problems with it.
Regardless of whether that advice wasted court time or not, the USCG doesn't have a right to money from that lawyer.
Actually, I think there's a strong case that they do.
Again, any "advice" Syfert gave in the form of the package he sold is something that the defendant needs to decide for themselves about. If the steps are wrong in some way, the only possible flows of compensation are from Syfert to the court (in the form of some sort of sanction, if they feel it was a willful attempt to cause more work for the court), from Syfert to the purchaser (as something like malpractice), or from the purchaser to USCG (for "intentionally" causing them to spend money answering the motion, which is a huge stretch).
If you allow any recompense from Syfert to USCG, then anyone in any way who is remotely related to causing a lawyer more "work" will have precedent for having to "pay" for that. For example, an expert witness for the other side, or anyone who files an amicus brief could be sent a bill.
You'll also note that the USCG wants to have their cake and eat it too, in that they want the motions filed by defendants to be discussed with them first, but intentionally set up their system so they can avoid notifying the defendants for as much as possible until it is too late.
So, wait - he is "another lawyer oppos[ing] them"? But here, his whole defense was that he was unrelated third party. Which is it?
If I am a lawyer, any other lawyer who disagrees with me is "opposing me". It doesn't matter if it's specifically in my case. For example, if some lawyer used an argument in matters unrelated to me, but that argument can be used to hurt my current case (e.g., some precedent), I should not be able to sue them successfully, yet this case could set the precedent for that.
You seem to forget that it's not the downloading that people are being sued for. It's the "making available" to others, which is exactly what happens when one torrents.
The RIAA lawsuits specifically list "downloading", and it's generally the only one that is being pushed, because they absolutely do not want a ruling about "making available" to go against them.
We don't know that, having not seen the complaint. Additionally, it's unlikely to actually be in the complaint, since it's going to be real tough filing a lawsuit that says "we're losing money because people were successfully opposing our claims," Slashdot's wishes notwithstanding.
I know that no one RTFA here, but the complaint is embedded on this page, so if you haven't read it, it's your own fault.
But, basically, the complaint does say pretty much what people here think. In essence, USCG wants money because people took another lawyer's advice that was not illegal. Regardless of whether that advice wasted court time or not, the USCG doesn't have a right to money from that lawyer. From his client, maybe, but once you allow lawyers to sue other lawyers who oppose them, the whole system breaks down.
Now with that out of the way, let's not forget that most, if not all, of the people being sued are, in fact, breaking the law.
First off, the "evidence" is pretty thin, and even the lawyers involved have admitted that they know that many of the people sent the settlement letters had not infringed copyright. So, no, you can't say "most" of those getting letters are infringing copyright.
Second, there are many possibilities where downloading a movie is not copyright infringement. As an example, I downloaded a copy of a movie because my just-purchased DVD was defective, and was the last one in the store. Sure, I could have dealt with trying to return an opened movie for store credit (which, I must note, is caused by the fact that the MPAA does not in any way stand behind the products they sell), but instead I just downloaded. Technically infringing, sure, but I'd love to see cases like it go to court. Heck, if you want to bankrupt the MPAA and RIAA, everyone should set up a torrent client and download every movie and music track they have already paid for.
Which, you know, mentions nothing about quality. Different encoders, different settings, different [etc]...
All of which make no difference to the actual point, which is that some material is extremely hard to accurately compress to a low bitrate using any DCT-based, motion-estimating compression. And, it's trivially easy to find source material that fits this profile.
It's also quite unlikely that anyone at Netflix is optimizing encodes any better than what has been tweaked by thousands of video rippers out there. In particular, H.264 has literally millions of combinations of settings, but not every decoder implementation can support every combination, and the embedded ones (like those used in the boxes that stream Netflix) are some of the most limited.
I've got one or two high-bitrate 1080p Blu-Ray movies that look like shit.
If these truly contain encoding issues and not source material issues (there's nothing an encoder can do about a source with poor colors, overly edge-enhanced, etc.), I suspect that if you run them through a bitrate profiler you'll find that despite having a high average bitrate, they don't have the peaks that they need for the tougher scenes.
The real question would be: Given your 3.6Mbps video, and the same video encoded by Netflix, which one looks better?
I can pretty much guarantee that any 720p24 source that is encoded with a limitation for smooth streaming without a large buffer (i.e., no severe bitrate peaks) will look far worse on fast motion than my unconstrained profile encodes.
If you haven't done a lot of encoding of a wide variety of source material, you owe it to yourself to try, and see just what you can do in comparison to what Netflix streams. I think you'll be complaining a lot more about Netflix after that sort of experiment.
Some attorneys I've talked to about it the say quite the opposite, that given the way their scheme worked, the probably turned a profit.
I can't imagine how a few hundred people settling for less than $10K each could possibly offset the legal costs on even one of the high-profile lawsuits (none of which have resulted in any money actually being paid to the RIAA).
First, the places I have worked that had bulk licensing with Microsoft paid a yearly fee, not lifetime licenses. And those fees were high. Although less than buying the programs individually.
There are several classes of MS volume licensing. The "software assurance" is a fairly expensive yearly cost, but allows you to get licenses for upgrades for no extra fee.
Regular volume licensing just requires you to sign up with Microsoft and guarantee at least N total licenses (where N changes depending on the phase of the moon when you sign up). You do pay a fee to be in the volume licensing program, but this also opens up license models that are otherwise unavailable (like true volume licensing using a single license key for every machine).
For a company with 20 or so desktops (OS, other software) plus a few servers (OS, e-mail server, etc.), it's probably a wash on whether volume licensing is worth it, when $450 or so gets you MS Office from a brick and mortar.
What specific features do you like in Outlook/Exchange, and Word/Excel/Sharepoint, that you don't feel you can easily get elsewhere?
Scheduling, mailbox delegation, shared calendars, etc., are all much uglier with FOSS, as there is no client/server built by the same developers. Pretty much all of Sharepoint (easy end-user content creation and management, download/upload from the Office apps, etc.) is hard to find done as well in anything FOSS.
I honestly cant believe that people bitch about paying $200.00 a month for PROMISED speeds comparable to an OC3, with throttling and bandwidth caps as well as a raft full of conditions that are NOT on a OC3.
I see this sorts of statements a lot, but this comes from people who haven't ever used FiOS.
The only problem that FiOS with a dynamic IP has is port blocking. This problem goes away if you have a static IP. Otherwise, both have full speed available 24/7, with no throttling or bandwidth caps. I do agree that this 150/35 service won't give you 150Mbps upstream, but, then, it doesn't claim to.
I don't keep my FiOS saturated 24/7 because I want to leave room for everyday use. I do average about 50% utilization of my 25/15 line over the past year, with peaks over 100%.
If you compare apples to apples (i.e., business FiOS to an OC3), then you're wrong.
Business FiOS is guaranteed speed (both directions), with an SLA. Now, like every other ISP, they'll only guarantee the speed to the edge of their network. Once off their network, they obviously don't have any responsibility.
In my personal experience, though, the limit that Verizon claims as your fastest possible speed for your FiOS line is lower than the actual peak speed you will see.
Netflix HD works great on a 3Mbit DSL connection.
That would be because it's not very good HD.
I recently encoded some 720p24 material, and although the average bitrate was only around 3.6Mbps, there were peaks as high as 50Mbps, some for as long as 5 seconds. Note that this doesn't include the audio, which was 1.5Mbps by itself, but that's not a problem for Netflix, as I don't think their streams have more than 2 audio channels.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing
Nothing you said disproves the saying. All you said was, "a gun can be dangerous", which is absolutely true.
But, if people who already have guns (generally acquired through not legal means) are thinking about doing something bad, knowing that the majority of people around them are carrying weapons that they have been trained (at least somewhat) to use will likely convince them to move on to another target. This is the basis of the phrase "an armed society is a polite society".
Granted, it won't stop all the crimes, but it should stop some, and criminals getting shot and killed will stop recidivism.
And that doesn't even cover things like a couple of snipers just shooting people in DC.
Having been not just in the region but literally across the street from one of the shootings as it happened, I can tell you that many people were paralyzed around here. Sure, there were many that continued on normally, but a lot that did not, and this lasted for weeks in literally hundreds of square miles.
Imagine what 5-10 teams of snipers could do around the country.
People do learn surprisingly fast on the job
I think you have been working with above average people for too long.
As an example, there are "programmers" and there are "code monkeys". Programmers understand programming, and having to learn a new programming language in a couple of weeks is no big deal. Code monkeys, on the other hand, generally will know one programming language and be able to take very detailed specs and turn them into code.
In the same way, there are people who will spend weeks learning the basics of some new thing (computer program, camera, etc.) while others can be a the same level of functionality in hours (or less).
It's my observation that the slow learners by far outweigh the fast ones in most companies.
Employers love determination. That's what gets projects done on time.
An untalented but determined person is likely to take a lot more time to complete a project, since they will take so much extra time on false starts, making mistakes. I'd much rather have a person who either already has necessary skills (or is able to acquire them quickly), since even if they can't see the project through due to lack of "determination", they might have done so much towards completing it that others can step in and finish.
The reality, though is that the more skilled people don't need "determination" to complete a project, because they don't spend so much time on it that it becomes a chore that requires them to "fight through it". On the other hand, if your organization is Dilbertian and there are many people who are working to stop projects, you might require determined people, because you sure as hell won't have the skilled ones...they'll all leave for better jobs.
The car would have a software limiter in it that limited it to say 200HP/75MPH
Pretty much every car these days has that kind of limiter (although not with those numbers).
The engine in my car is rated at 355hp and 350 lb-ft of torque, but the exact same engine with different programming on the ECM results in 365hp and 420 lb-ft in a different vehicle. The other vehicle has a more robust transmission that can handle the extra torque, but there are mods for my car that increase to over 400hp with no damage to any systems.
I use StartSSL for tens of certificates on all manner of internet and intranet sites. I had to install their root certificate on Windows 2000, but any computer that gets regular windows updates should have had it since last year.
I'll jump on the StartSSL praise train, too. For $50/year, you get unlimited SSL certs for any domain you control, or personal authentication certs (i.e., e-mail) for any e-mail address you control. The certs can include wildcarding, multiple domains per cert, and lots of other features that other CAs charge an arm and a leg for.
I noticed that I had to install their CA cert when I was using their completely free certs, but their class 2 certs were issued by a different CA that was already in IE and Firefox. Perhaps everything is there now by default, but I can't say for sure.
Most internal soundcards don't do Dolby Digital Live or DTS Interactive meaning only 2.0 sound out via S/PDIF.
Preetty much all of the recent Realtek chipsets hande DD Live (now called Dolby Home Theater)...it's just a matter of whether the motherboard manufacturer pays for the license. DTS licensing is a lot more, so they probably won't widely support that any time in the near future.
In amount of actual deaths per amount of effort, I suspect bombing a plane is still the most efficient.
If you don't care about getting caught, the most effective method would be to have a few dozen terrorists walk into malls all around the country carrying automatic weapons, shoot a few people, yell some obviously terrorist slogans, and leave. Rinse and repeat over the course of a few weeks.
It may only result in a few hundred deaths, but it would definitely "change the way we live", and might destroy the economy, especially if you do this starting November 1.
Note that like almost every truly effective and unstoppable terror scheme, this idea came from a book that was written years before September 2001.
Why would training for OO (or Linux) cost much at all? A modern install of Ubuntu is very user-friendly, and your typical Windows user can find their way around it in just a few minutes
You must work with people who are much brighter than average, because around here, if you change somebody's theme, they'll wonder why "everything has changed", even though it's just cosmetic.
I do a lot of support for people who use a web-based Java applet. So, it runs in a browser, and does work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. But, it requires some tweaks to the Java control panel, and some changes to the core Java install (all supported stuff you can download from Sun^WOracle). It's tough enough to get many people to do it right on Windows, and I can't imagine what a user familiar with Windows would do when trying to navigate the Unix filesystem ("where's the C: drive?") to get to the Java install directory.
Let's say $300, although I know for the full version it's more.
No, $300 is about right for Office with MS volume licensing. And, since it's a lifetime license, it's not a bad deal, especially if you have to do any training at all for some other product.
Just 4 hours of training would cost about $100 per employee (figuring around $20/hour salary plus trainer costs...either to develop in house or pay for somebody to come in), and the training cost would be for pretty much every employee, while a MS Office license is tied to the computer, so no extra cost when you hire a replacement employee. Also, I really wouldn't want to work for a company who feel that a one-time cost of $100-200 per computer is "too much to spend". It's likely they would be cheap in other areas too, like salary.
And, despite what FOSS people may believe, MS Office really does give you a better setup for workgroup collaboration than and FOSS product. I dearly wish I could find an equivalently functional FOSS replacement for the Outlook/Exchange combination, not to mention Word/Excel/Sharepoint.