PC#1 complete. PC#54 (still infected) re-infects PC#1. Even if you turn them all off and only put them back on the network after they are wiped: are you sure you found *every* PC with the infection? Are you sure they won't get reinfected again (is your baseline immune to the infection vector?)
Being completely naive and giving them the benefit of the doubt: someone suggested they planned a replacement cycle anyway (so had a budget approved) with w7 machines already - this expensive fix may have bought them a year more on one-foot-in-the-grave hardware. We're also assuming they had the staff/skill to do the work (unlikely) or to oversee the contractors and have the skill to verify the contractors did the job 100% correctly (unlikely). Plus everyone has to sign up to the risk of "we should spend heaps and if this happens again or something similar happens we all look like morons.."
W7 may not have been immune to the infection but given everything I've read in this thread, I'm leaning more towards speeding up replacement as the simplest approach here. But looks terrible as a news headline.
In Canada, I've read that doctors who are retiring often 'sell' the records they've kept over the years to the new doctor who takes over the practice - no wonder they'd prefer not to give patience full access. Years ago the values I'd heard mentioned was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for these records.. in a way not too different from estimating the value for intangible 'goodwill' when selling a business.
Arguing on the "positive" side of preventing access: personally, I document things differently if it's customer facing vs. internal notes. Selling the records does give the older doctors a little more financial security in their retirement. Giving people full access will probably cause a few headaches for the doctors - imagine if someone wrote "5th visit, all tests came back negative, issue may be psychosomatic.. patient however became almost when this was listed as a possibility."
While transparency doesn't fix all problems, I'd prefer if the records were open: if we're avoiding the hard talks/arguments because 4% flip out when a reference is made to a mental condition or unpopular diagnosis is made, if doctors are relying on selling records to supplement retirement income because they don't have enough (really??)... I think these are problems to try and fix; not sweep under the rug. These medical records are literally life and death: I'd say open them up. Maybe if everyone had more access, we could possibly find the level of care improving in different ways. It's certainly worth a trial somewhere.
I'm no expert, but I have to call bullshit on this.
We've deployed an internet-facing Sharepoint (not MOSS, v3) server that can be used on any random PC. You do need domain credentials for access though, if you've restricted access. It does take more work to set it up this way.
And the search feature in v3 is currently the quickest search we have. With a few hundred documents, we get search results in around a second - it takes longer to render the page - Google / Windows Desktop Search are a bit slower on searches.
I'm not a Sharepoint pro, but I support a few v2 sites and use a couple v3 ones.
$31M seems a little low but a) they plead guilty and b) they assisted in building the case against the other companies. Still, for a $70B (2006) market, even if they were a small player they seemed to have gotten off a bit easier than I'd expect.
I haven't posted to Slashdot in ages... but wow. This is one of the best analogies I've seen on here (despite the lack of cars). It moved me.
Roland engaged with the world and you're exactly right, he added colour to it. People who tore him down (IMHO rightfully when he lifted large amounts of text, less so when he cleaned up his act) never contributed in that way. The Roland-haters actually bothered me far more than he did and made slashdot less enjoyable to read.
A few years back, I did some reading from a semi-reliable source (maybe Reader's Digest) about two people in the world who can't sleep for more than a few minutes.
One was a guy in his twenties who lived in Israel. An explosion left some shrapnel in his brain and could no longer sleep. When I read the story, he was just finishing a Law degree.
Another story was about an older man in Germany who hadn't been able to sleep at least since his teens. He was 50ish and could sleep for up to 5 minutes at best. He lived a relatively normal life.
Obviously in some cases, the body can adjust to getting by without sleep - I wonder if their bodies learned how to overproduce this chemical?
I completed my teaching qualifications (Math and IT, high school) in 2005 and did a little bit of research into this. I'm sorry I don't have time to find links but here's what I found:
* When small groups or individual students were given wireless voting devices and some of the lesson was interactive (i.e. "So, what does everyone think will happen when I drop this metal into water?") the students enjoyed and recalled the lesson better.
* When *anonymous* brainstorming software was used, student participation is significantly improved. (Improved participation in general has been linked to better learning for decades)
Check out the ERIC database, I think some articles are available with full-text and you can get some pretty cool ideas just from the abstracts.
The last time I read this in a child developmental text, a child tends to learn object permanence (disappearing from view != no longer existing) at 6 months. A 2-3 year old is interacting with the world pretty significantly and they would have learned this long ago.
"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned." (Attributed to Bruce Ediger)
I've done warranties for nearly all the major manuafacturers with no complaints. Maxtor's advanced replacement program came in handy (that replacement drive was installed 5 years ago and still works), no problems with WD's drives (again, installed years ago and still working).
Get on the phone and start complaining - ideally, write a letter first (registered ideally). So few people do this that this puts you in a very small group of customers, and these customers are often the ones that know how to cause problems for the copmany. Having a paper trail also makes it a little harder for companies to shrug you off like a random complainer that just dials in every now and then.
But before blaming the company, give them one last try. Inform them of your previous trouble with replacement drives (use dates and serial numbers). The odds of a drive dying are low, the replacement drive being DOA are low too. Then again, people win the lottery - sounds like you've just won the back luck kind. As another poster mentioned, look into the Lemon Laws in your state/province.
Great start! Now where is a *working* java applet?
on
Firefox VoIP Client
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· Score: 1
This is a great step but I've been dying to find a relatively cheap java VOIP Applet.
My parents are technophobes - replacing IE is possible but having them download an extension is a bit much.
Show me a working java VOIP applet I can put on my webpage (I don't care if I need to pay to sign it) and I'm definitely willing to shell out some cash.
In most cases, you're right - overclocking isn't useful. The edge cases where it would help tend to *require* better accuracy/stability, which you risk when you overclock. Manufacturers have expensive equipment to benchmark their own products so they can sell them at the highest speed, I really hope people don't think burn-in testing comes close to what manufacturers do. About the only time you could really luck out is if a manufacturer decides to under-clock a bunch of chips because they can't tolerate an inventory shortage at that pricepoint/speed in the market.
The CPU, RAM, or GPU-speed limited programs I can think of would be video/audio rendering, gaming, heavy math/scientific work, etc. The only one people would "allow" errors in would be games.
Even if you overclocked everything 25% (a *very* nice overclock for the majority of equipment, but enthusiast/high-end stuff tends to overclock better) you normally won't see a 25% performance increase. Memory performance up by 20%? Great - in most cases, you'll see around a 5% general improvement. CPU performance is largely irrelevant these days, 25% won't get you much. GPU overclocking is the only thing that makes much sense - 25% overclocking will get you approximately a speed bump of the same size.
Big-spenders and media companies are the only ones who are thoroughly concerned with overclocking. Everyone else just gets by with their 5-second Word startup instead of 4.6s. Jocks are picky about their equipment, musicians even more so, and many computer users like tweaking what they've got.
Seems to be a pretty "basic" psychological condition, to tweak, experiment, etc. No one cares about the speed, they care about the bragging, the learning, and the process of doing it themselves.
This would only give you partial protection unless you have security software/gateway that could perform miracles. Your gateway is almost guaranteed to miss viruses/malware/trojans/etc in:
* Torrent downloads (unless the gateway downloaded it for you and didn't send it to your computer until it had finished, scanned it, and approved it) * Any downloaded archive (it might catch a ZIP file you downloaded from a website, but a password protected one?) * non-standard traffic (encrypted IM messages, etc)
You'd be partially protected though but for thorough protection the gateway would have to be all-seeing, understand all protocols, block (or hold?) password protected/encrypted info, read all file formats, catch multi-platform viruses/malware/trojans, etc.
Most companies with a strict IT policy that disallows the above could (and probably should) look into doing all protection on a firewall. Maybe incorporating a application-level router as well. Interesting idea.
My first thought was that this makes perfect sense - now that MS is a competitor of Symantec, they're going to discredit them as much as they can.
But Symantec has known for ages that MS is pushing into their space. Maybe they had a Netscape-esque agreement with Symantec and maybe Symantec found new evidence that convinced them partnering with MS isn't the best way to go?
It *could* be as simple as an upper-management type listening to the feedback the last report got, but I haven't seen an icy weather forecast for Hell today.
(For those who missed the MS Anti-trust days: it was 'alleged' that when MS decided that the 'net was not just a fad and MS needed to throw all their resources into making IE the dominant browser, MS offered not to compete in Mac-space if they left the Windows market quietly. Netscape refused, MS bundled IE with windows, and the rest is history)
You could get 56k, (FCC limit of 53k in the US) one direction only. Here's a better article on how skipping 1 analog/digital gets you a speed boost. (ie: ISP data to you at 56k, but data to ISP at 33.6k) http://www.99main.com/support/how56kworks.shtml
While drastic change isn't a bad idea sometimes, this is *really* too much.
>I am not an economist, but the game developer in me says there is a flaw in the system when the players are not willing to take risks. Your solution is to grant a monopoly (i.e. reduce risk). My solution as a developer would be to increase the risk of doing nothing by creating more sinks, reducing player hoard/storage space and making safe areas less safe.
While this sounds good, who would be penalized? The all businesses in operation for not being risky enough? But we're trying to penalize everyone for NOT doing something - so we'd have to penalize people who had the thought to start a business and didn't. Sounds difficult. Also, the stock market already is doing the job of penalizing companies who sit on their money and do nothing.
Companies with extra money tend to invest it and (for example) get 6% back. They don't get rewarded for this at all, their share price would nearly immediately reflect the fact that investors expect 6% back guaranteed, so the company "earned" nothing. A company that takes a reasonable risk starts the marketing machine and their stock goes up - they just increased their value, whereas the investing company didn't earn or lose.
>Translating my game solution to the real world might involve outlawing day trading (e.g. minimum ownership period of 2 years for stock), drastically raising inflation, gradually raise minimum wage by 10x relative to inflation over 30 years, and zapping down the prime lending rate so that "old money" loses its value faster and people are encouraged to take risks. (Again, disclaimer: I'm not an economist and I don't pretend to be.)
Point by point:
*2 year ownership of stock: So Enron employees and others have to wait 2 years to cash out when a company makes a big fuckup? And when Google needs money to create the next BIG thing, you have to really think hard about investing since you might lose it all when they go bankrupt next year?
*Inflation: Can't be directly "raised" - it's an observed effect. You can only change it by making people spend more/less, or making goods cost more/less. Lots of side effects to this. You could decrease interest rates (pro: more spending, con: overheating economies tend to crash very badly), or increase the cost of goods (pro: taxing oil higher reduces consumption, con: businesses and people make less money), etc. Very dangerous to play with inflation: the 80s were a very bad time for homeowners (20% interest rates) but the recovery in the 90s was a nice time to be in business. Businesses see wild inflation as risk and raise their prices even higher than needed, "just in case".
*Minimum wage: Raising minimum wage by 20-30% per year for 30 years would bankrupt a lot of companies - this could be a good thing or a bad thing. It would definitely increase unemployment, at a minimum. Could have some positive benefits for the few minimum wage earners left. Illegal employment ala Walmart would skyrocket.
*Zapping the prime: Not sure what this means. Making money worth less is an effect of inflation though, so I'll assume you want to keep inflation higher and stable. This is why governments already act as they do - 0% inflation sounds great but I seem to recall that economists recommend a low (1-3%) but stable amount of inflation to keep things "healthy". As long as inflation is *very stable* and businesses make decisions on that fact, I really don't care what the rate is.
Encouraging businesses to take risks in general is fairly simple: give them money, give them a hand (legislation-wise), or give them cheaper interest rates. Just don't do these things when the economy is already doing very well or that year of extra boom could give you a hangover for a decade.
>Now suppose inflation was 5%, and you could make 5% in a CD or 7% in stocks, but you could make 10% actually investing in new product. That would look a lot better than the current situation where
Just a random thought. (I agree with you completely however)
If your purchase doesn't make you a "true" convert, how many windows users are "true" windows users?
If say 100,000 aren't "true" converts, then maybe a few million of the 90 million Windows PC users are false as well. Maybe the Windows numbers are off by a few million - which makes a small difference for Windows marketshare, but potentially doubling the "true" Linux/MacOS marketshare.
Wish there was a cheap and accurate way to measure this correctly.
I didn't read the quote that way. The community is far larger than the group of developers. If they had said developers were the key to financial success, your point would be correct.
But the community - developers, testers, document writers, bug submitters, evangelists, etc has a *very* large role in a product's success. The developers aren't the only heroes.
You can't "upgrade" Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. You can upgrade 2000 to XP Pro, or 98/Me/2000 to XP Home.
Now I realize that'll rattle your chains even more ("WHAT! I spent $100 for Win 3.1 about 8 years ago, I *deserve* a $100 discount for XP!) but give me a break. Microsoft isn't required to praise your kindness just because you bought something nearly a decade ago.
No other vendor I'm aware of does this - and if you're tempted to go find a couple examples, I'm going to throw the phone book at you for 1 million counter-examples.
That being said, their price for the OS is absurd. If normal competition took place over the past 10 years, prices would be lower. Microsoft had an unfair advantage (that they gained somewhat fairly; for much of their history they weren't a monopoly) and they've abused it.
I'd love to see the Justice dept set their price for 1-2 years as a penalty. Guarantee them a level of profits for Office/Windows that matches what other vendors earn and restrict their ability to give discounts to OEMs. I'm not even sure if this would help at this point, I don't think any company is willing to try and make a Windows XP-compatible replacement - the startup cost (and lead time) is phenomenally high. No company would risk it.
Thank god for Linux - even if you can't stand it, the competition has helped.
Initially: If Google threatened to stop offering services for France/German users, they can get around those pesky censorship laws. I doubt people would be arguing there. In a millionth of a second, there'd be dozens of replies: it's not the same, killing someone and evading taxes are both 'crimes' but they aren't equal. Microsoft has been convicted and investgated for antitrust issues in multiple countries - I'm willing to go with "MS is bad".
That being said, MS still has the right to decide "You know what? Not worth it guys - see you when the next friendly government comes in." I have a feeling this would probably hurt MS more than SK though.
Without services in Windows (over a medium/long term), companies will switch to non-MS OSes and apps. South Korea is a fairly decent market with some industry heavyweights - if they switch, the companies that support them will have to offer non-MS support.
While MS could EASILY take the hit in profit, they seem to be deathly afraid of Linux/etc getting any sort of a hold. Anywhere. Thinking about moving an arm of goverment over to Linux? We'll give you a BIG discount this year. Now, it seems standard operating practice for many organizations to threaten a Linux shift to get better pricing.
So will MS leave SK? Not likely. The "we may leave the market" statement is a good scare tactic, but like another poster said, is normal to hear in the beginning. MS is just blowing smoke, like any other company. They'll probably tie the antitrust hearing/penalties up in courts for a while, devote resources into getting a better say in government, and wait till it possibly blows over.
Just giving up and saying "Hey linux, you deal with these guys - they don't like our rules" doesn't seem to happen all that often. Hope the SK government knows this and doesn't prematurely get scared.
I realise that there are many websites that have cracks/etc, some immediately after games are launched but realize that Civ 4 (for example) will have *millions* of users. If thousands download the crack, that's only 0.1%. Even if 100,000 people download the crack (highly unlikely - there'd be billions of websites for cracks), you're still in the extreme minority.
The majority of gamers never look ("I just put the cd in - why do I need a crack?"). A smaller number get slightly peeved at having to grab the CD. And people like us know there is a way (or know a friend) and get it done. I used to think most people grabbed the noCD (or chose not to) but the reality is, most people don't even know the option exists.
The same people don't read/. though - if you're here, you and the people you know are likely in that very small minority.
I completely agree though - I *wish* there was a legit way for legit buyers to beat the protection. But every way I can think to do it also makes it easier for everyone, including non-legit users, to copy the game.
So you make the 1% happier but now have to deal with increased piracy/theft/copyright infringement/whatever.
It's a good idea but the no-cd EXE will leak, they'd have to verify receipts were real, hiring more staff, etc.
Copy protection and theft/copyright infringement (whatever) is a hard thing to crack. I'm just glad I'm technical enough to know how to fix my own problems when they arise; 90% of gamers wouldn't know where to start.
I've have this thought myself but here's where I stand.
TV studios have the right to withhold the show. They don't *have* to let me watch it - they made it, they can choose what to do with it. Making a copy of the show without their permission would still be 'stealing' though (or copyright infringement, or whatever else people are calling it while trying to distract from the main point).
Cost-wise, you are costing the studios some money - as long as people seed torrents of Get Smart, they won't need to buy DVDs. You could definitely argue that with the torrents, more people will see it and more people will buy the DVDs (when they're released) since the torrent will get them interested. Unfortunately, we can't ever know that. Maybe piracy/theft/infringement increases revenue, maybe it decreases.
Morally, are people dying or going without food based on this choice? Not really. It might be wrong but in the grand scheme of things, it barely exists.
Be careful with your assumptions. After I read what you posted (thanks for that by the way), I'd point out:
* If you don't explicitly agree to be bound by the EULA, you aren't bound by it ("explicitly" is bloody hard to fully define though)
* Buying a tightly integrated hardware-software bundle (eg: hardware with preinstalled OS with preinstalled OS) may be different than buying a bundle of "identical" items (eg: MS Office software suite).
Slashdot Mirror
PC#1 complete. PC#54 (still infected) re-infects PC#1. Even if you turn them all off and only put them back on the network after they are wiped: are you sure you found *every* PC with the infection? Are you sure they won't get reinfected again (is your baseline immune to the infection vector?)
Being completely naive and giving them the benefit of the doubt: someone suggested they planned a replacement cycle anyway (so had a budget approved) with w7 machines already - this expensive fix may have bought them a year more on one-foot-in-the-grave hardware. We're also assuming they had the staff/skill to do the work (unlikely) or to oversee the contractors and have the skill to verify the contractors did the job 100% correctly (unlikely). Plus everyone has to sign up to the risk of "we should spend heaps and if this happens again or something similar happens we all look like morons.."
W7 may not have been immune to the infection but given everything I've read in this thread, I'm leaning more towards speeding up replacement as the simplest approach here. But looks terrible as a news headline.
In Canada, I've read that doctors who are retiring often 'sell' the records they've kept over the years to the new doctor who takes over the practice - no wonder they'd prefer not to give patience full access. Years ago the values I'd heard mentioned was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for these records.. in a way not too different from estimating the value for intangible 'goodwill' when selling a business.
Arguing on the "positive" side of preventing access: personally, I document things differently if it's customer facing vs. internal notes. Selling the records does give the older doctors a little more financial security in their retirement. Giving people full access will probably cause a few headaches for the doctors - imagine if someone wrote "5th visit, all tests came back negative, issue may be psychosomatic.. patient however became almost when this was listed as a possibility."
While transparency doesn't fix all problems, I'd prefer if the records were open: if we're avoiding the hard talks/arguments because 4% flip out when a reference is made to a mental condition or unpopular diagnosis is made, if doctors are relying on selling records to supplement retirement income because they don't have enough (really??)... I think these are problems to try and fix; not sweep under the rug. These medical records are literally life and death: I'd say open them up. Maybe if everyone had more access, we could possibly find the level of care improving in different ways. It's certainly worth a trial somewhere.
I'm no expert, but I have to call bullshit on this.
We've deployed an internet-facing Sharepoint (not MOSS, v3) server that can be used on any random PC. You do need domain credentials for access though, if you've restricted access. It does take more work to set it up this way.
And the search feature in v3 is currently the quickest search we have. With a few hundred documents, we get search results in around a second - it takes longer to render the page - Google / Windows Desktop Search are a bit slower on searches.
I'm not a Sharepoint pro, but I support a few v2 sites and use a couple v3 ones.
This seemed a bit high to me, and I think the $585M is the total amount charged to all conspiring companies to date:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41689/118/
$31M seems a little low but a) they plead guilty and b) they assisted in building the case against the other companies. Still, for a $70B (2006) market, even if they were a small player they seemed to have gotten off a bit easier than I'd expect.
Aha - free karma, although pointless, is mine today!
Source: http://xkcd.com/502/
I haven't posted to Slashdot in ages... but wow. This is one of the best analogies I've seen on here (despite the lack of cars). It moved me.
Roland engaged with the world and you're exactly right, he added colour to it. People who tore him down (IMHO rightfully when he lifted large amounts of text, less so when he cleaned up his act) never contributed in that way. The Roland-haters actually bothered me far more than he did and made slashdot less enjoyable to read.
RIP Roland.
A few years back, I did some reading from a semi-reliable source (maybe Reader's Digest) about two people in the world who can't sleep for more than a few minutes.
One was a guy in his twenties who lived in Israel. An explosion left some shrapnel in his brain and could no longer sleep. When I read the story, he was just finishing a Law degree.
Another story was about an older man in Germany who hadn't been able to sleep at least since his teens. He was 50ish and could sleep for up to 5 minutes at best. He lived a relatively normal life.
Obviously in some cases, the body can adjust to getting by without sleep - I wonder if their bodies learned how to overproduce this chemical?
I completed my teaching qualifications (Math and IT, high school) in 2005 and did a little bit of research into this. I'm sorry I don't have time to find links but here's what I found:
* When small groups or individual students were given wireless voting devices and some of the lesson was interactive (i.e. "So, what does everyone think will happen when I drop this metal into water?") the students enjoyed and recalled the lesson better.
* When *anonymous* brainstorming software was used, student participation is significantly improved. (Improved participation in general has been linked to better learning for decades)
Check out the ERIC database, I think some articles are available with full-text and you can get some pretty cool ideas just from the abstracts.
The last time I read this in a child developmental text, a child tends to learn object permanence (disappearing from view != no longer existing) at 6 months. A 2-3 year old is interacting with the world pretty significantly and they would have learned this long ago.
"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned." (Attributed to Bruce Ediger)
I've done warranties for nearly all the major manuafacturers with no complaints. Maxtor's advanced replacement program came in handy (that replacement drive was installed 5 years ago and still works), no problems with WD's drives (again, installed years ago and still working).
Get on the phone and start complaining - ideally, write a letter first (registered ideally). So few people do this that this puts you in a very small group of customers, and these customers are often the ones that know how to cause problems for the copmany. Having a paper trail also makes it a little harder for companies to shrug you off like a random complainer that just dials in every now and then.
But before blaming the company, give them one last try. Inform them of your previous trouble with replacement drives (use dates and serial numbers). The odds of a drive dying are low, the replacement drive being DOA are low too. Then again, people win the lottery - sounds like you've just won the back luck kind. As another poster mentioned, look into the Lemon Laws in your state/province.
This is a great step but I've been dying to find a relatively cheap java VOIP Applet.
My parents are technophobes - replacing IE is possible but having them download an extension is a bit much.
Show me a working java VOIP applet I can put on my webpage (I don't care if I need to pay to sign it) and I'm definitely willing to shell out some cash.
Well, Obsessive Math Freak's reply was a waste.
In most cases, you're right - overclocking isn't useful. The edge cases where it would help tend to *require* better accuracy/stability, which you risk when you overclock. Manufacturers have expensive equipment to benchmark their own products so they can sell them at the highest speed, I really hope people don't think burn-in testing comes close to what manufacturers do. About the only time you could really luck out is if a manufacturer decides to under-clock a bunch of chips because they can't tolerate an inventory shortage at that pricepoint/speed in the market.
The CPU, RAM, or GPU-speed limited programs I can think of would be video/audio rendering, gaming, heavy math/scientific work, etc. The only one people would "allow" errors in would be games.
Even if you overclocked everything 25% (a *very* nice overclock for the majority of equipment, but enthusiast/high-end stuff tends to overclock better) you normally won't see a 25% performance increase. Memory performance up by 20%? Great - in most cases, you'll see around a 5% general improvement. CPU performance is largely irrelevant these days, 25% won't get you much. GPU overclocking is the only thing that makes much sense - 25% overclocking will get you approximately a speed bump of the same size.
Big-spenders and media companies are the only ones who are thoroughly concerned with overclocking. Everyone else just gets by with their 5-second Word startup instead of 4.6s. Jocks are picky about their equipment, musicians even more so, and many computer users like tweaking what they've got.
Seems to be a pretty "basic" psychological condition, to tweak, experiment, etc. No one cares about the speed, they care about the bragging, the learning, and the process of doing it themselves.
This would only give you partial protection unless you have security software/gateway that could perform miracles. Your gateway is almost guaranteed to miss viruses/malware/trojans/etc in:
* Torrent downloads (unless the gateway downloaded it for you and didn't send it to your computer until it had finished, scanned it, and approved it)
* Any downloaded archive (it might catch a ZIP file you downloaded from a website, but a password protected one?)
* non-standard traffic (encrypted IM messages, etc)
You'd be partially protected though but for thorough protection the gateway would have to be all-seeing, understand all protocols, block (or hold?) password protected/encrypted info, read all file formats, catch multi-platform viruses/malware/trojans, etc.
Most companies with a strict IT policy that disallows the above could (and probably should) look into doing all protection on a firewall. Maybe incorporating a application-level router as well. Interesting idea.
My first thought was that this makes perfect sense - now that MS is a competitor of Symantec, they're going to discredit them as much as they can.
But Symantec has known for ages that MS is pushing into their space. Maybe they had a Netscape-esque agreement with Symantec and maybe Symantec found new evidence that convinced them partnering with MS isn't the best way to go?
It *could* be as simple as an upper-management type listening to the feedback the last report got, but I haven't seen an icy weather forecast for Hell today.
(For those who missed the MS Anti-trust days: it was 'alleged' that when MS decided that the 'net was not just a fad and MS needed to throw all their resources into making IE the dominant browser, MS offered not to compete in Mac-space if they left the Windows market quietly. Netscape refused, MS bundled IE with windows, and the rest is history)
Afraid not - 56k modem to modem would mean there's more than one analog to digital conversion, which wasn't possible with v.90.
Can't find a recent article on this but here's a start: http://www.wt.net/56k.shtml
You could get 56k, (FCC limit of 53k in the US) one direction only. Here's a better article on how skipping 1 analog/digital gets you a speed boost. (ie: ISP data to you at 56k, but data to ISP at 33.6k) http://www.99main.com/support/how56kworks.shtml
While drastic change isn't a bad idea sometimes, this is *really* too much.
>I am not an economist, but the game developer in me says there is a flaw in the system when the players are not willing to take risks. Your solution is to grant a monopoly (i.e. reduce risk). My solution as a developer would be to increase the risk of doing nothing by creating more sinks, reducing player hoard/storage space and making safe areas less safe.
While this sounds good, who would be penalized? The all businesses in operation for not being risky enough? But we're trying to penalize everyone for NOT doing something - so we'd have to penalize people who had the thought to start a business and didn't. Sounds difficult. Also, the stock market already is doing the job of penalizing companies who sit on their money and do nothing.
Companies with extra money tend to invest it and (for example) get 6% back. They don't get rewarded for this at all, their share price would nearly immediately reflect the fact that investors expect 6% back guaranteed, so the company "earned" nothing. A company that takes a reasonable risk starts the marketing machine and their stock goes up - they just increased their value, whereas the investing company didn't earn or lose.
>Translating my game solution to the real world might involve outlawing day trading (e.g. minimum ownership period of 2 years for stock), drastically raising inflation, gradually raise minimum wage by 10x relative to inflation over 30 years, and zapping down the prime lending rate so that "old money" loses its value faster and people are encouraged to take risks. (Again, disclaimer: I'm not an economist and I don't pretend to be.)
Point by point:
*2 year ownership of stock: So Enron employees and others have to wait 2 years to cash out when a company makes a big fuckup? And when Google needs money to create the next BIG thing, you have to really think hard about investing since you might lose it all when they go bankrupt next year?
*Inflation: Can't be directly "raised" - it's an observed effect. You can only change it by making people spend more/less, or making goods cost more/less. Lots of side effects to this. You could decrease interest rates (pro: more spending, con: overheating economies tend to crash very badly), or increase the cost of goods (pro: taxing oil higher reduces consumption, con: businesses and people make less money), etc. Very dangerous to play with inflation: the 80s were a very bad time for homeowners (20% interest rates) but the recovery in the 90s was a nice time to be in business. Businesses see wild inflation as risk and raise their prices even higher than needed, "just in case".
*Minimum wage: Raising minimum wage by 20-30% per year for 30 years would bankrupt a lot of companies - this could be a good thing or a bad thing. It would definitely increase unemployment, at a minimum. Could have some positive benefits for the few minimum wage earners left. Illegal employment ala Walmart would skyrocket.
*Zapping the prime: Not sure what this means. Making money worth less is an effect of inflation though, so I'll assume you want to keep inflation higher and stable. This is why governments already act as they do - 0% inflation sounds great but I seem to recall that economists recommend a low (1-3%) but stable amount of inflation to keep things "healthy". As long as inflation is *very stable* and businesses make decisions on that fact, I really don't care what the rate is.
Encouraging businesses to take risks in general is fairly simple: give them money, give them a hand (legislation-wise), or give them cheaper interest rates. Just don't do these things when the economy is already doing very well or that year of extra boom could give you a hangover for a decade.
>Now suppose inflation was 5%, and you could make 5% in a CD or 7% in stocks, but you could make 10% actually investing in new product. That would look a lot better than the current situation where
Just a random thought. (I agree with you completely however)
If your purchase doesn't make you a "true" convert, how many windows users are "true" windows users?
If say 100,000 aren't "true" converts, then maybe a few million of the 90 million Windows PC users are false as well. Maybe the Windows numbers are off by a few million - which makes a small difference for Windows marketshare, but potentially doubling the "true" Linux/MacOS marketshare.
Wish there was a cheap and accurate way to measure this correctly.
I didn't read the quote that way. The community is far larger than the group of developers. If they had said developers were the key to financial success, your point would be correct.
But the community - developers, testers, document writers, bug submitters, evangelists, etc has a *very* large role in a product's success. The developers aren't the only heroes.
No, you'd be wrong.
You can't "upgrade" Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. You can upgrade 2000 to XP Pro, or 98/Me/2000 to XP Home.
Now I realize that'll rattle your chains even more ("WHAT! I spent $100 for Win 3.1 about 8 years ago, I *deserve* a $100 discount for XP!) but give me a break. Microsoft isn't required to praise your kindness just because you bought something nearly a decade ago.
No other vendor I'm aware of does this - and if you're tempted to go find a couple examples, I'm going to throw the phone book at you for 1 million counter-examples.
That being said, their price for the OS is absurd. If normal competition took place over the past 10 years, prices would be lower. Microsoft had an unfair advantage (that they gained somewhat fairly; for much of their history they weren't a monopoly) and they've abused it.
I'd love to see the Justice dept set their price for 1-2 years as a penalty. Guarantee them a level of profits for Office/Windows that matches what other vendors earn and restrict their ability to give discounts to OEMs. I'm not even sure if this would help at this point, I don't think any company is willing to try and make a Windows XP-compatible replacement - the startup cost (and lead time) is phenomenally high. No company would risk it.
Thank god for Linux - even if you can't stand it, the competition has helped.
My thoughts on this:
Initially: If Google threatened to stop offering services for France/German users, they can get around those pesky censorship laws. I doubt people would be arguing there. In a millionth of a second, there'd be dozens of replies: it's not the same, killing someone and evading taxes are both 'crimes' but they aren't equal. Microsoft has been convicted and investgated for antitrust issues in multiple countries - I'm willing to go with "MS is bad".
That being said, MS still has the right to decide "You know what? Not worth it guys - see you when the next friendly government comes in." I have a feeling this would probably hurt MS more than SK though.
Without services in Windows (over a medium/long term), companies will switch to non-MS OSes and apps. South Korea is a fairly decent market with some industry heavyweights - if they switch, the companies that support them will have to offer non-MS support.
While MS could EASILY take the hit in profit, they seem to be deathly afraid of Linux/etc getting any sort of a hold. Anywhere. Thinking about moving an arm of goverment over to Linux? We'll give you a BIG discount this year. Now, it seems standard operating practice for many organizations to threaten a Linux shift to get better pricing.
So will MS leave SK? Not likely. The "we may leave the market" statement is a good scare tactic, but like another poster said, is normal to hear in the beginning. MS is just blowing smoke, like any other company. They'll probably tie the antitrust hearing/penalties up in courts for a while, devote resources into getting a better say in government, and wait till it possibly blows over.
Just giving up and saying "Hey linux, you deal with these guys - they don't like our rules" doesn't seem to happen all that often. Hope the SK government knows this and doesn't prematurely get scared.
I realise that there are many websites that have cracks/etc, some immediately after games are launched but realize that Civ 4 (for example) will have *millions* of users. If thousands download the crack, that's only 0.1%. Even if 100,000 people download the crack (highly unlikely - there'd be billions of websites for cracks), you're still in the extreme minority.
/. though - if you're here, you and the people you know are likely in that very small minority.
The majority of gamers never look ("I just put the cd in - why do I need a crack?"). A smaller number get slightly peeved at having to grab the CD. And people like us know there is a way (or know a friend) and get it done. I used to think most people grabbed the noCD (or chose not to) but the reality is, most people don't even know the option exists.
The same people don't read
I completely agree though - I *wish* there was a legit way for legit buyers to beat the protection. But every way I can think to do it also makes it easier for everyone, including non-legit users, to copy the game.
So you make the 1% happier but now have to deal with increased piracy/theft/copyright infringement/whatever.
It's a good idea but the no-cd EXE will leak, they'd have to verify receipts were real, hiring more staff, etc.
Copy protection and theft/copyright infringement (whatever) is a hard thing to crack. I'm just glad I'm technical enough to know how to fix my own problems when they arise; 90% of gamers wouldn't know where to start.
I've have this thought myself but here's where I stand.
TV studios have the right to withhold the show. They don't *have* to let me watch it - they made it, they can choose what to do with it. Making a copy of the show without their permission would still be 'stealing' though (or copyright infringement, or whatever else people are calling it while trying to distract from the main point).
Cost-wise, you are costing the studios some money - as long as people seed torrents of Get Smart, they won't need to buy DVDs. You could definitely argue that with the torrents, more people will see it and more people will buy the DVDs (when they're released) since the torrent will get them interested. Unfortunately, we can't ever know that. Maybe piracy/theft/infringement increases revenue, maybe it decreases.
Morally, are people dying or going without food based on this choice? Not really. It might be wrong but in the grand scheme of things, it barely exists.
/. already posted this story http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/31/ 1346224&tid=190&tid=3 a few months ago. In their defense, the old article was hosted at Braeburn.ath.cx (but looks like they've redone their website and braeburn resolves to lowendmac.com).
Be careful with your assumptions. After I read what you posted (thanks for that by the way), I'd point out:
* If you don't explicitly agree to be bound by the EULA, you aren't bound by it ("explicitly" is bloody hard to fully define though)
* Buying a tightly integrated hardware-software bundle (eg: hardware with preinstalled OS with preinstalled OS) may be different than buying a bundle of "identical" items (eg: MS Office software suite).
Interesting case though.