It's interesting what they left out of the story. Item duping (done by exploiting bugs in the in game broker system that allows charters to sell items between each other for in game gold) really caught on weekend before last causing an emergency shut down of all servers on 8/7. Since then brokering has been either disabled or enabled for short amounts of time until someone noticed that the bug is still in the game. Also a ton of accounts were banned mainly because they were considered to have 'too much money for their level (lots of guilds lost their guild bank mules in this sweep)
Of course, you leave out the rather important fact that most of these accounts were reactivated by the end of the weekend.
In fact, any account that had received "duped" money (even innocently, by a duper bying one of their items) was locked while they corrected the issues over the weekend.
The speed that they were able to fix this problem, and the fact that they essentially were able to "roll back" the economy without rolling back the game-world is worth kudos in it's own right.
The interesting thing is that people noticed issues in the broker system months ago and mentioned it in the eq2 forums but nothing was done.
Galliente (Scott Hartsman, EQ2 Producer) already answered that one, and it was basically "mea culpa" - they plugged some holes, others they used to hone their tools. He points out they will not be doing that un the future, as the explosion of duping in such a short time proved that *any* amount of time a vulnerability is left "in the wild" can lead to extreme damage in a very short period of time.
I host the rather popular Boing Boing and for the last two months in a row Firefox has beet IE in viewership (as seen here).
Now, of course, Boingboing isn't exactly CNN, but it is arguably the world's #1 blog, so it does count for something.:)
In this case, the issue at hand wasn't even so much that Apple misrepresented the battery life - it's that they did so, and then told users that the only way to fix the problem was to *buy a new iPod*.
they made sure they would not pay for battery replacements, and that you would void your warranty to replace it yourself.
Western Digital (back in the Caviar days) were the WORST drives ever. Back then the only drives I used were Quantum fireballs - fast as hell, and reliable (I still have a 20GB FB Plus LM in use today). But overnight, on a new manufacturing process, Western Digital stole the performance crown, and their "Special Edition" "J" series drives have been rock solid and stable. If I had stuck with my hatred of WD through the "Caviar" drives, I'd have missed out on these great drives, and their even-greater 10K RPM "Raptor" drives as well.
And before Quantum? All I used were Seagate, and Micropolis (remember them?) In every case, something changed, and they weren't the performance leader anymore. I changed, and for the better each time.
When you lose a drive, how do you know its bad manufacturing? And (with the exception of incidents like the IBM Deskstars) - I haven't seen any evidence that a particular modern-day drive is more "prone" to failures than any other - and I can't honestly believe that one person or entity can purchase enough drives to create an empirical sample-set.
But that's just me. YMMV, but I wouldn't blacklist a company because they "used" to make bad drives. I mean, who do you end up hurting but yourself?
Cisco makes its' money selling (mostly) hardware, and support services. They employ hundreds, if not thousands of software developers, but "give" the software away for free, or as part of a service contract.
Though I doubt cisco is likely to "free" their software, for fear of possibly giving away something of value, the fact remains that the development of their software is NOT paid for by selling the software, but hardware.
Same with Sun. Solaris is paid for by hardware sales, and services.
and red hat employs a lot of software developers that write a free OS - they make their money by offering legitimate QA and support services, all of which employ MORE devs.
Hell, the company *I* work for is only 50 people large, and of that, more than a quarter are software devs - and we don't sell software! We sell services.
The suggestion that the only way a software developer can be employed is if the software costs money is crap, for anyone but *pure* software companies. And even they can make money! Look at Jboss, or Mysql, or Jcorporate - all software companies, giving away the software and selling services.
Quite honestly, I think the creator of a work should be able to indefinitely control his work no matter how long that may be.
There is *NOTHING* in a work of art that is considered a need to humanity. Nothing. Remember -- copyrights protect works of art, not ideas. Patents are for ideas and I think 7 years is more than long enough to protect an idea.
Ah, but think about things like nursery rhymes, or other things in the *public domain*. Imagine a world where everything was copyrighted indefinately.. schools couldn't use old war footage *forever* without contacting the author.. and what if he dies, or tosses their work into a vault, never to return?
The public domain shouldn't be dismissed - there are songs/books/phrases/etc that are a part of common society. Perpetual copyright would mean that 1) people would forever have to pay royalties/get permission, even for 200-year old nursery rhymes, and 2) without items entering the public domain, the works stand a good choice of either being "lost", or in the hands of some massive mediaCo.
It's not closed. He's providing the source as per the GPL.
Free = freedom, not price. I can charge you "1 meeeelion!" dollars for a copy of X-Chat, right now, as long as in my installer, I include the GPL, and a notice that the source is available at the X-Chat site (oh, and of course, any modifications I've made to said code as well, if any).
He hasn't changed the license. He's changed the method of distribution. He's still 100% GPL-compliant.
Actually no, it wasn't, I think I'd give WebTV that title.. or even the Commodore CDTV (or hell, ANY Amiga) both which predate by a wide margin.
Then again, perhaps you believe that all those researchers and folk at Microsoft waking up one day and going "Gee.. if only people could put their PC's in the *living room!*" as/innovation/..
The Promise controller on the Tyan Opteron motherboards works perfectly in both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (with Update 2), and Fedora Core 1/2 for AMD64.. That same chipset (PDC20378) is available on Athlon64/AthlonFX motherboards as well.
It would stop even faster if all email servers simply had a rule that ignored any transfer requests from any machine that DID NOT have a Fully Qualified Domain entry and the top lever is not mail. or mail2. or mail3.
By extension, then, you figure if only ISP email servers could send mail, spam would be greatly reduced.
Congratulations! You just explained why SPF is a good idea! The whole point of SPF is to point out which servers for a given domain are allowed to send email.
if you are a roaming road warrior then you are forced to use webmail or VPN into the network.
Not heard of SMTP AUTH? Have your ISP setup AUTH on both ports 25 and 587 (MSA, to get around port 25 filters) and you can now relay your mail, via your ISP server, from anywhere.
I swear, some of the posts here surprise the hell out of me.
So because Apple is a "nice" company we should just let them restrict free use?
People have purchased this music. Think about that.. to use playfair you already need the legit key and the music you *already bought*. People have a right to do with it as *they* want to, and playfair lets them do that.
Any restriction on fair use is too much! You want to go after those who redistribute, then by all means go after them.. but one should not give up ones rights to fair use of your own purchases just because Apple is "nice".
Re:Note to self...
on
Borg Cube Case
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I host both Cory Doctorow's personal webpages, as well as BoingBoing.net. Suffice it to say both BoingBoing and Cory get Slashdotted on a regular basis, especially of late with his most recent book release.
The machine is a 900Mhz Duron with 512MB RAM Running RHL. Nothing fancy, in fact most people have better desktops now.
The key seems to be a carefully configured Apache using in-memory caching where possible, generous "Expires" headers for caches, long keepalives, and having the server thrash as little as possible starting and stopping children. Even under the most extreme load the box tends to be responsive, and has impressed the hell out of me for doing so.
With cory moving from SSI-based pages to the DB-driven MT, it will be interesting to see exactly what happens to performance as his next/.-ing:)
Because it's from an author who, for the second time, is releasing his book under a "some rights reserved" license, for free, and this hasn't hurt past book sales.
Because it's a statement that DRM is *not* required in book sales.
And because it strikes at the heart of so many things/.-ers have been saying forever.. people will buy what they like, people will still be successful in selling a product even while giving away their product for free elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
software developers take note. :)
I host the rather popular Boing Boing and for the last two months in a row Firefox has beet IE in viewership (as seen here). Now, of course, Boingboing isn't exactly CNN, but it is arguably the world's #1 blog, so it does count for something. :)
A proprietary memory slot that you can buy a reader for for $3, you mean? Or, even better, that you can write to VIA the PSP?
Compared to, oh, say, the memory cards of a PS1/PS2, I'd say that's pretty darned accessible!
Not bloody likely. You know how much the @MB version of that processor costs?
A really neat method I've used in the past:
:)
record the last five characters of each password on a card. Even indicate which box is which.
Then, memorize the first three characters, and use them in all locations.
Works great.
Uh uh.
In this case, the issue at hand wasn't even so much that Apple misrepresented the battery life - it's that they did so, and then told users that the only way to fix the problem was to *buy a new iPod*.
they made sure they would not pay for battery replacements, and that you would void your warranty to replace it yourself.
That's the problem.
Western Digital (back in the Caviar days) were the WORST drives ever. Back then the only drives I used were Quantum fireballs - fast as hell, and reliable (I still have a 20GB FB Plus LM in use today). But overnight, on a new manufacturing process, Western Digital stole the performance crown, and their "Special Edition" "J" series drives have been rock solid and stable. If I had stuck with my hatred of WD through the "Caviar" drives, I'd have missed out on these great drives, and their even-greater 10K RPM "Raptor" drives as well.
And before Quantum? All I used were Seagate, and Micropolis (remember them?) In every case, something changed, and they weren't the performance leader anymore. I changed, and for the better each time.
When you lose a drive, how do you know its bad manufacturing? And (with the exception of incidents like the IBM Deskstars) - I haven't seen any evidence that a particular modern-day drive is more "prone" to failures than any other - and I can't honestly believe that one person or entity can purchase enough drives to create an empirical sample-set.
But that's just me. YMMV, but I wouldn't blacklist a company because they "used" to make bad drives. I mean, who do you end up hurting but yourself?
Silly rabbit.
Cisco makes its' money selling (mostly) hardware, and support services. They employ hundreds, if not thousands of software developers, but "give" the software away for free, or as part of a service contract.
Though I doubt cisco is likely to "free" their software, for fear of possibly giving away something of value, the fact remains that the development of their software is NOT paid for by selling the software, but hardware.
Same with Sun. Solaris is paid for by hardware sales, and services.
and red hat employs a lot of software developers that write a free OS - they make their money by offering legitimate QA and support services, all of which employ MORE devs.
Hell, the company *I* work for is only 50 people large, and of that, more than a quarter are software devs - and we don't sell software! We sell services.
The suggestion that the only way a software developer can be employed is if the software costs money is crap, for anyone but *pure* software companies. And even they can make money! Look at Jboss, or Mysql, or Jcorporate - all software companies, giving away the software and selling services.
Yep, that's exactly what BoingBoing does. I simply configured Apache to gzip .xml as well as .html.
Of course, the readers *themselves* have to support it, too..
Ah, but think about things like nursery rhymes, or other things in the *public domain*. Imagine a world where everything was copyrighted indefinately.. schools couldn't use old war footage *forever* without contacting the author.. and what if he dies, or tosses their work into a vault, never to return?
The public domain shouldn't be dismissed - there are songs/books/phrases/etc that are a part of common society. Perpetual copyright would mean that 1) people would forever have to pay royalties/get permission, even for 200-year old nursery rhymes, and 2) without items entering the public domain, the works stand a good choice of either being "lost", or in the hands of some massive mediaCo.
It's not closed. He's providing the source as per the GPL.
Free = freedom, not price. I can charge you "1 meeeelion!" dollars for a copy of X-Chat, right now, as long as in my installer, I include the GPL, and a notice that the source is available at the X-Chat site (oh, and of course, any modifications I've made to said code as well, if any).
He hasn't changed the license. He's changed the method of distribution. He's still 100% GPL-compliant.
Actually no, it wasn't, I think I'd give WebTV that title.. or even the Commodore CDTV (or hell, ANY Amiga) both which predate by a wide margin.
/innovation/..
Then again, perhaps you believe that all those researchers and folk at Microsoft waking up one day and going "Gee.. if only people could put their PC's in the *living room!*" as
Innovative!?
It's a PC! Where's the innovation?!
"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means" -- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Actually, the license change means no work by XFree86 can be used in X.org.
The driver in the kernel is *not* Written by Promise - bugs with it should be directed to the kernel maintainer, not them. :)
The Promise controller on the Tyan Opteron motherboards works perfectly in both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (with Update 2), and Fedora Core 1/2 for AMD64.. That same chipset (PDC20378) is available on Athlon64/AthlonFX motherboards as well.
By extension, then, you figure if only ISP email servers could send mail, spam would be greatly reduced.
Congratulations! You just explained why SPF is a good idea! The whole point of SPF is to point out which servers for a given domain are allowed to send email.
Not heard of SMTP AUTH? Have your ISP setup AUTH on both ports 25 and 587 (MSA, to get around port 25 filters) and you can now relay your mail, via your ISP server, from anywhere.
CIPE was dropped from Kernel 2.6. not their fault.
BTW, this particular BitTorrent annoyance was fixed in version 3.3.
It's not all doom and gloom.
I swear, some of the posts here surprise the hell out of me.
So because Apple is a "nice" company we should just let them restrict free use?
People have purchased this music. Think about that.. to use playfair you already need the legit key and the music you *already bought*. People have a right to do with it as *they* want to, and playfair lets them do that.
Any restriction on fair use is too much! You want to go after those who redistribute, then by all means go after them.. but one should not give up ones rights to fair use of your own purchases just because Apple is "nice".
The machine is a 900Mhz Duron with 512MB RAM Running RHL. Nothing fancy, in fact most people have better desktops now.
The key seems to be a carefully configured Apache using in-memory caching where possible, generous "Expires" headers for caches, long keepalives, and having the server thrash as little as possible starting and stopping children. Even under the most extreme load the box tends to be responsive, and has impressed the hell out of me for doing so.
With cory moving from SSI-based pages to the DB-driven MT, it will be interesting to see exactly what happens to performance as his next /.-ing :)
Why is this news for /.?
/.-ers have been saying forever.. people will buy what they like, people will still be successful in selling a product even while giving away their product for free elsewhere.
Because it's from an author who, for the second time, is releasing his book under a "some rights reserved" license, for free, and this hasn't hurt past book sales.
Because it's a statement that DRM is *not* required in book sales.
And because it strikes at the heart of so many things
You don't need to abstract it.
That's the point. The chip can execute 32 bit code natively. All you need are appropriate 32-bit libraries (DLL's in windowsspeak).
That's how Linux does it. want a 32 bit app? Install the 32 bit glibc and you're good to go.
Statically compiled apps need *nothing*.
#2 *MUST* be legal. They cannot restrict the source. If you get the source RPM's, they're all yours to use.
They *can* restrict binary distribution (Binaries aren't covered by the GPL, *source* is).