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User: mattventura

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  1. Re:Me go pee pee in your coke on AMI Firmware Source Code, Private Key Leaked · · Score: 1

    What some hardware does (not just motherboards) is it has a physical jumper which has to be closed in order to allow the firmware to be changed. No chance of malicious flashing of the firmware (unless someone has physical access, but then you've got bigger problems) but without having to ship firmware on chips.

  2. Re:Fuel costs money on Samoa Air Rolling Out "Pay As You Weigh" Fares · · Score: 1

    I don't have a better time when I've got some 300 pound guy next to me and his fat is rolling into my seat. However, the point about wanting to receive more for paying more is perfectly valid. The current system sort of makes sense for this: if you take up more than a seat worth of space, you have to buy 2 seats. You get more space, and the guy who would have been next to you doesn't have to deal with only getting half a seat worth of space.

  3. Re:Maybe I'm not reading this right, but on SkyDrive 3.0: Microsoft Gave Up Fighting Apple's 30% Cut · · Score: 1

    It might get more people to use Apple's services, but what about apps which do not actually compete with any of Apple's offerings? Apple gets nothing from it since devs can bypass them by having purchases go through the web. Developers and users suffer because it is less convenient for people to make in-app purchases. Everyone loses with Apple's policy.

  4. No need to go overboard on Ask Slashdot: What Is a Reasonable Way To Deter Piracy? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can divide people into 3 categories: those that WILL buy it, even if they could pirate it, those that might pirate it or might buy it, and those that will not use it at all if they can't pirate it. The second group of people is going to be the only ones that you might convert from pirates to customers by imposing DRM and that group might be quite small. Don't screw over the first group with overintrusive DRM.

  5. Re:$24 on Jammie Thomas Denied Supreme Court Appeal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here's the problem. There ARE supposed to be punishments are are strong enough to deter people from committing the crime, but those are punishments, not reimbursement. If I steal money from someone, I would generally be expected to pay back what I stole and then serve jail time as a punishment. Does the victim benefit from me being in jail? No (apart from the fact that there's one less thief on the streets). If you let media corporations sue for such huge amounts of money that it becomes beneficial to them for people to commit crimes against them, they have no motivation to actually prevent the crime in the first place. You know something's wrong when the victim of the crime comes out significantly better off than they were before.

  6. Re:NO. on Is Daylight Saving Time Worth Saving? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lots of things are a pain in the ass. US measurement system, silly date notation systems, IPv4, the two party system, etc. Unfortunately none of those are going anywhere anytime soon.

  7. Re:What of violence against men? on EU To Vote On Proposal That Could Ban All Online Pornography · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Religious freedom is not bullshit.

    Using it as justification to perform a not-easily-reversed medical procedure on someone else who may not actually want it is bullshit.

  8. Re:North Korea on The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was a Prank · · Score: 1

    Have you ever had North Korean food?

    Neither have they.

  9. Re:Not true on SimCity 5: How Not To Design a Single Player Game · · Score: 1

    The problem is that the people who actually care about those things already won't be buying from EA. The people who would be buying games from EA in the first place don't give two shits about how much DRM it has or how bad of a company EA is. Really only #4 is the only option that will make a difference but that requires the most work of all the options.

  10. Re:It must work.. on Can Valve's 'Bossless' Company Model Work Elsewhere? · · Score: 1

    They've done a lot right, but this system isn't one of them. It's nice that people can work on whatever they want, as it gives you much more job enjoyment. The problem is that people end up doing less important things with their time (like random model recoloring that nobody asked for) while the dirty (but important) work like fixing hundreds of outstanding bugs ends up not getting done.

  11. Re:Doesn't work on Cliff Bleszinski: Vote With Your Dollars · · Score: 2

    No, they're buying a product or service. That would be like saying "I vote to support lawyers because I had to hire one" or "I vote to support the food industry because I need to buy food". Sure, video games aren't a necessity, but it's the same principle.

  12. Re:Less piracy then? on Xbox 720 Could Require Always-On Connection, Lock Out Used Games · · Score: 1

    This has nothing to do with piracy. If DRM gets cracked, DRM gets cracked. This is simply a blow to used games.

  13. Re:I love the SimCity series on Feedback On Simcity Gets User Banned From EA Forums · · Score: 1

    The bean counters would investigate, and would conclude that because of the high piracy, the DRM wasn't strict enough.

  14. Re:Was it EA..... on Feedback On Simcity Gets User Banned From EA Forums · · Score: 1

    beta doesn't seem to mean anything anymore.

    Half the time, "Beta" nowadays means "Software we aren't anywhere close to done with but still want to make public in order to generate publicity and/or revenue" (looking at you Valve).

  15. Re:SSH + TCP port forwarding on Ask Slashdot: Open Source Remote Application Access? · · Score: 1

    Might be a little bit more complicated than this. Some of the remote application systems I've seen allow seamless access to files on the client machine. Some of the systems don't run the app on the server, but rather on the client with some fancy encapsulation, so you don't have to worry about latency and the application can even be used offline if it's cached. The submitter wasn't very specific on how they want it to be implemented, but just keep in mind that there are many different ways of doing this and each one provides its own features. If a solution where the application is run remotely is used (like ssh+x forwarding) then you may have to figure out how to solve the issue of local file access.

  16. Re:WTB Cisco Switch on Cisco Exits the Consumer Market, Sells Linksys To Belkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They just try to cut costs way too much on their home products. They know that home users are likely to just buy whatever looks best on the store shelf/whatever the salesman tries to push on them.

  17. Re:so how do you ping them? on UK ISPs Respond To the Dangers of Using Carrier Grade NAT Instead of IPv6 · · Score: 1

    They work fine for me using BIND and WIDE or ISC DHCPv6 (can't remember which I used). I can ping6 machines by name

  18. Re:Didn't PICMG standardize this already? on Open Compute 'Group Hug' Board Allows Swappable CPUs In Servers · · Score: 1

    Haven't read it, but I assume that it's not a passive backplane but rather an active one.

  19. Re:US Metric System on Petition For Metric In US Halfway To Requiring Response From the White House · · Score: 1

    While very unconventional, there's no reason you can't say "1/32 of a meter".

  20. Re:Good on Brazil and Peru Dispute .Amazon TLD · · Score: 1, Troll

    The blame for this is on certain browser developers (*cough* MS *cough*). There is no technical reason why "amazon" couldn't be a host, but IE stupidly assumes that when you enter a single word, you want to search for it. It won't even resolve local domains. When I use IE I can't type in just "sharepoint" like I should be able to. Instead I have to type "sharepoint.company.com".

  21. Re:Pay more for less... on Microsoft Releases Windows 8 · · Score: 1

    I'm talking about the Metro UI itself. It's meant to be an intuitive UI yet is exactly the opposite and requires knowledge of hidden buttons and gestures. Take Metro IE for example. Normally, it's pretty easy to navigate to an arbitrary URL. You can press Ctrl+L or click in the address bar, then type the URL. Now go try to do that on Metro IE.

  22. Re:Pay more for less... on Microsoft Releases Windows 8 · · Score: 2

    I'm not sure how much this is true in the release version, but MS seems to have not separated the normal UI and the Metro UI so it's not always possible to get away with only one or the other.

  23. Re:Pay more for less... on Microsoft Releases Windows 8 · · Score: 4, Informative

    My assessment of the dev preview is pretty bad. I was doing some consulting for a company, and we had installed windows 8 on a PC there. Me, the IT admin, and another guy who was fairly tech-literate couldn't figure it out due to the unintuititve UI that ends up getting in the way. They have plenty of good ideas that are just poorly implemented.

  24. Re:Just ship with a low-draw driver on Will EU Regulations Effectively Ban High-End Video Cards? · · Score: 1

    It's fairly standard on laptops with the newer Intel graphics (the ones built in to the CPU).

  25. Re:Can't they just... on How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco · · Score: 1

    The controller board for the drive just has a USB port.