So, you didn't test the update on a non-production server? Just install any old patch and let it take your network down? Who do you work for again? I have to make sure not to do business with that.
No kidding. The only "schoolboy error" as the submitter put it, was not testing the patch on a non-production server before deploying it on a production DNS server.
$4M might be a tax dodge. I might even be willing to consider $40M to be a tax dodge. But when you start talking tens of *billions*, I somehow doubt that taxes are even on Bill's mental radar.
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Having billions in taxable income is a very HUGE incentive to dodge taxes. Don't you think most billionaires got that way by dodging a few taxes every now and then? If a man wanted to become a billionaire and thought like you do (what's a few million, here or there?) he would never become rich.
again only to the rich. Call me when you have a $15,000 Commuter vehicle. as 90% of the population in the United states can barely afford that price. $30,000? Hell most people cant even think of paying that much for a new car. It's why Hybrids are only in the hands of the rich people and not the poor. I dont see the bulk of the population driving the priuses and other hybrids. Maybe it's because Most people make less than $45,000 a year. and the payment on a $30,000 car is more than they pay for their rent.
It depends on where you live. Sure, if you live in the midwest where salaries are low, a $30,000 car means you must be rich to afford it. On the other hand, if you live on the east or west coast, a $30,000 car is available to the lower middle-class. Here on the east coast, a $500 car payment won't even pay 25% of your rent in a 2 bedroom apartment for the month, so the cost is negligible compared to the other costs of living. $30,000 cars are driven by the middle class.
Yes, it's all relative. If you live in the midwest, or somewhere where your rent is under $1000 a month for a house, a $500 car payment seems really high. On the other hand, if you live somewhere that has rent $2000 and up, and mortgage payments somewhere around $3,000-$5,000, a $500 car payment is a drop in the bucket.
Apple's lame excuses aside, the reason there is no "background processing" or notification capability in the official SDK is so as not to harm AT&T's SMS cash cow.
Again, this is totally incorrect. You're the second person that has been modded up in this thread with false information.
There is a push API that Apple exposes to all 3rd party application developers. You can send a message to Apple's servers, a popup will be shown to the user (vibrate and audible alert) in whatever application is currently in the foreground. It will be a standard iPhone popup and the user can either cancel it or click a button to launch your 3rd party app and handle the message.
The reason why Apple doesn't allow background apps has nothing to do with money or AT&T. It has everything to do with wanting their phone to run snappy with only a limited amount of memory and CPU, and to not have the user need to run a Task Manager to kill background processes that are running amok. Windows Mobile is a terrible idea for a mobile OS. Background processes can run for days and eat up a huge chunk of CPU, memory, and battery life. Plus, Apple is all about usability. Having to start task manager and begin killing arbitrary processes just to make my phone usable again is not usability, it's fucking insanity.
So yes, anyone can write to the Apple push API. Anyone can send messages to their servers which deliver the push popup notification right to the users cellphone, even if it's sitting in their pocket in sleep mode.
I've worked with the iPhone SDK and 3rd-party apps cannot push to the UI unless they are selected and running.
That's completely incorrect. Steve Jobs even made a big deal about the Push API that they let any 3rd party app use. The push technology shows a standard iPhone popup window in whatever application is in the foreground. The developer encodes a URL into the push message that allows the user to select a button that will launch the app into the foreground and handle the pushed message. How else do you think AOL IM client even works on the iPhone?
Basically, it's a way to handle 3rd party apps that need to receive information from the network, without having them running in the background 24/7. So you can thank good designers that thought ahead that you don't have to run a Task Manager like on Windows mobile and kill background processes that are running amok. Persistently connected apps can stay persistently connected without running 24/7, and eating up CPU, memory, and battery.
So yes, 3rd party app messages are pushed to the UI. Any 3rd party developer can use it. It's not an Apple proprietary API that only their own apps can use.
I mean seriously, you buy a phone and then you need to go home and activate it through some software?
What if I don't run Windows nor Mac?
An iPod also requires a Windows or Mac computer and that hasn't stopped Apple from becoming the #1 consumer device making company in the world by selling them. If you don't already have a Windows or Mac computer, you probably don't need a smartphone or an iPod.
Well I'm back from the local AT&T store empty-handed. Apparently they only had 30 phones to sell, and with the broken activation servers it took them hours to distribute them.
Yeah, Apple has officially jumped the shark because customer demand for their new product is so high they can't even produce enough to meet it... Uh huh... Right... And people are willing to stand in line in the hot summer heat for hours for a product they've never even seen or used before because Apple is such a terrible company. LOL. You really ought to read your comment and try not to laugh.
Because it's fucking expensive when you compare it to other handsets and networks. The original iPhone was a *really* bad deal. This one is better value than the original, but still a shitty deal.
It's the exact same price as any other 3G data plan that AT&T offers, ala Crackberry or Treo, but don't let that stop you from bashing Apple.
I'm not saying it's a good deal. I think all the 3G data plans are overpriced right now, regardless of carrier, but that's what you have to pay if you want to be an early adopter. Me? I'm happy with my 1 year old iPhone that works just as well on wifi as the brand new 3G model.
I haven't heard that WotLK was bumped. It was supposed to be out in November for Christmas release. I imagine that's also the push here. Get it in stores in time for Christmas. If WotLK isn't out yet, all the better for them. They will be the hot new MMO.
WotLK technically doesn't have a release date. Blizzard games never do... "When it's ready" is usually the way they operate. The open beta hasn't started yet though so I'm pretty sure it won't be ready by fall. Most likely early next year sometime.
Even though they say that EA is NOT behind this deal, I have to believe it is. This sounds too much like something EA would pressure them into doing. They were fine pressing back release dates BEFORE EA came on scene.
It's not just EA that is behind this, its the basic reality of the market. Wrath of the Lich King (the WoW expansion) is coming out next spring most likely, and if they try to release around the same time as that, they're pretty much guaranteed to fail at capturing any significant marketshare.
They pretty much have to release it this Fall or they're screwed.
BTW, I've been playing the closed beta, and I predict this game will be epic fail. The graphics are similar to 2004 era WoW graphics. Bugs and lack of content are everywhere. I love the Warhammer universe, since I grew up playing the tabletop games, and I had high hopes for this franchise, but the game simply fails to deliver. It might have been good if it came out 4 years ago, but people expect a game to have the same polished content upon release that WoW has taken 4 years to add. The market expects an unrealistically high level of polish and content, so pretty much any new challenger is guaranteed to fail unless it's made by Blizzard.
I've been having a lot of fun playing Age of Conan lately. Don't let the haters tell you it sucks. It really is a pretty good game, even though it has bugs. What MMO doesn't?
One solution would be per-user bandwidth allocation - as it has been on the proposed list for ages now... Then all you have to do, is you yourself decide not to run BT when you are making a VoIP call... How hard is that? Yours is the responsibility and yours is the power to decide what is important for you, and not the ISP, which has no business whatsoever, deciding your preferences for you...
While that would work, I think a better solution to encourage responsible network use and make things better for both customers and ISPs would be to sell tiered service. Let me give you an example:
Monthly Cable internet package: $49 - 50GB of priority 1 traffic (high priority, such as VoIP, gaming, realtime apps) - 100GB of priority 2 traffic (medium priority, such as web, email) - unlimited priority 3 bulk traffic (BitTorrent, P2P, large downloads)
Now, the user purchases this package, and they have 2 options:
Option 1: If they are an unsophisticated user don't know how to properly "tag" their packets with a priority, the first 50GB of traffic a month are automatically high priority, then the next 100GB of traffic get medium priority. After they've used up all their high and medium priority quota, the rest of the month their packets are sent bulk, which is basically a "best effort" delivery. Any leftover bandwidth after all the other customers priority 1 and 2 traffic went through, is given to them. This way, people that abuse the system by using more than their fair share of bandwidth aren't going to impact the network adversely, because they'll be relegated to bulk status after they exceeded their quota.
Note: Billing cycles are staggered based on account activation time, to avoid having too much priority 1 BitTorrent traffic killing the network on the first few billing days of the month.
Option 2: Sophisticated users can tag their own packets with a priority 1, 2, or 3 so that they don't end up exceeding their high priority quota by using too much P2P. That way, sophisticated users are encouraged to be responsible network citizens by not abusing infrastructure. If they really, really need to get that World of Warcraft patch right away, they can tag it as priority 1, but for most uses, they can leave their BitTorrent client hammering away at priority 3 all day long, and be confident that it won't interfere with their important VoIP and gaming traffic that's priority 1.
I think this system would work very well, because users would be encouraged to become responsible network citizens on their own. It also doesn't rely on end users being computer savvy and knowing how to properly tag packets. If they are, that's great and they can take advantage of the quality of service and prioritization benefits of tagging their packets, but if they aren't, the quotas still apply. Also, most users that just use web and email would never exceed their priority 1 quota for the month, so they wouldn't notice a difference, other than a faster network because the bandwidth abusers are relegated to bulk status.
Ok, no. As of June 25, they stopped supporting AVG Free 7 in order to get their free users on the Updated AVG Free 8. Incidentally, AVG 8 is the version with the problem this story is describing if you installed the IE toolbar. Anyway, 0.32 seconds for a Google search would show you the latest free version.
Ok, I should clarify. I've been running 7.5 free version for a few months now. In the last 30 days before June 25th, I would get daily popups saying "7.5 is being discontinued, upgrade to 8.0 (pay version) to stay protected. If this isn't slimey, I don't know what is.
To be honest, I'll probably just uninstall AVG completely and never touch another one of their products again. I only use Windows to play games so there's really not much risk to me of getting a virus.
I agree. AVG used to be a very good product. Their free virus scanner worked reasonably well, updated itself automatically, and the price was right. Lately they must have gotten new management because they've gotten really evil.
They started doing the following things that I noticed:
1. Hiding their free product and making it almost impossible to find. When you tried to download the free product, you would repeatedly be "upselled" to their pay version, and had to find the really tiny 6 pt. font at the bottom of the page to actually get the free version.
2. The free product now pops up continuously with banner ads asking you to purchase their pay product.
3. As of June 25th, 2008, it seems that they no longer even offer a free product. This is strange to me because it seems like my free versions are still downloading updates. Can anyone please clarify for me whether the free product still exists or not?
In short, they turned from cool, free AV provider, to spammy, pop-up spewing marketing company in the space of a couple years.
Can anyone recommend another free AV product for those of us stuck on Windows (due to gaming, or for other applications)? Is Avast pretty good?
There is nothing more dangerous than the mouth of a technical person during a product sale. The job "Sales Engineer" was literally invented for techies who know when to shut up and when to answer a technical question without verbosity, negativity or (stupid) honesty.
To give you a counter-example:
I used to work for a small, regional ISP as lead sysadmin. We were attempting to sell a multiple-T1 internet connection to a large local business in the area that had over 400 desktops and a few class C's of public address space, along with a smattering of web servers and publicly facing sites. The salesmen decided to bring me along on the sales call to answer any technical questions.
After the salesmen gave them their "speech" about how fast we were, how we could speed up their business, yada yada, all of the "marketing" type information, their CTO had some questions for me: Where do you get your bandwidth from, and more importantly, "how can we transition our 4 class C's worth of publicly facing services without interrupting our business?"
I proceeded to tell him about our connectivity to tier 1 backbones, then went right into a transition plan. "First, in preparation, we want to set the TTL on your DNS records down to a lower value, so that when we make the final cutover to your new address space, old DNS records for your domain names won't be cached on the internet for days and cause your servers to appear unreachable." I proceeded to walk him through a transition plan.
The CTO was so impressed by the preparation that he bought our service. They also paid some consulting time for me to come in and personally assist with their implementation. He told me later on "If you hadn't come by that day, and it was just the salesman giving his marketing presentation, we would have never bought your service. I needed to talk to a technical guy that knew what he was doing to get confidence that our needs would be handled."
So, you see, it does pay to bring knowledgeable technical people with you. I know in my job now as an architect, I make a lot of purchasing decisions. If I get a boring marketing only presentation, I'm more likely to kick the vendor out and never buy anything from them again. Don't give me the marketing presentation. Let me talk to one of your geeks and I'll pick his brain and figure out for myself if your product really does what all of the marketing literature says it does. Vendors lie. Geeks tend not to. Every geek is worth 100 salesdroids blowing smoke up your ass.
However why would you buy security software from someone who makes such a security hole ridden OS in the first place.
It's the perfect scam, mafia style. First, you send some thugs around to smash up a business storefront. Then, you send a guy by to collect some money for "protection" from said thugs. The poor business owner either pays up, or he gets his store smashed up again. Often, the cops are receiving a cut and look the other way, or don't respond if the business owner decides to call law enforcement to report the thugs.
Update it for the digital age. Microsoft intentionally designs an insecure OS. They could secure it if they wanted to. All they need to do is enforce a UNIX-like security model where processes and services run as a limited-rights user, instead of root, and users aren't root on their own box. Instead, they just take the more profitable solution of leaving it insecure and selling you "protection".
Now tell me why we can't prosecute them the same way we prosecute mafia thugs running a protection racket?
"The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year."
Now that Microsoft makes their OS insecure intentionally by design, and sells you the software to secure it, can we begin to prosecute them the same way we would prosecute a local mafia protection racket?
I picture Steve Ballmer (monkey boy) and Bill Gates (nerdy boy) showing up at your house... Steve is wildly throwing chairs around, smashing them through your front windows, and making grunting noises. Bill is pleading with you to just buy these OneCare bananas... They're the only kind of bananas that will make him stop throwing chairs through your windows!
Bingo. The temporary backbone that our representatives had while they voted against telecom immunity was just a blip on the radar. The "fix" is in now. Somebody forgot to make their regular protection payments (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) and a lesson was made. "Don't pay up and see how difficult we make doing business in the US." The political system works for those that pay to play. Money flowed freely, laws were bought and paid for, and the citizens were fucked in the ass without lube.
Make note of these fucks and vote them out during the next election.
The thing that really sickens me is that it's the Democratic party leadership that is getting the most payoff. Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer are all near the top of the list.
I'm still a democrat, but right now my party can fuck off for all I care.
That's why any software developer/engineer/designer will never describe their role as IT.
Not at all. I'm a highly paid, enterprise systems architect and I would describe what I do as "IT" in a general sense. I love my job. I get to design highly available Oracle database clusters (RAC) distributed across multiple geographic locations with hundreds of terabytes of online capacity and 99.999% availability and uptime. IT is just Information Technology. The technology that allows people to access information. It's a simple way of explaining to a layperson what you do on a daily basis. When someone asks what I do for a living, I tell them "I work in IT." If they want to know more, I could tell them I'm an enterprise architect and I design database servers and clusters for a living, but for a lot of people, just telling them "I work in IT" is enough.
If you're not proud to work in "IT", whether you're a telephone customer support or helpdesk person, all the way up to a senior applications programmer/architect, you probably shouldn't be working in IT. Because no matter what you call it, you either like what you do for a living or you can't stand it. If you can't stand the name of it, you should probably get out.
On the other hand, I could work for the garbage company and call myself a "sanitation engineer", but that doesn't change the fact that I haul people's trash for a living. In fact, I have occasionally called myself a "digital janitor" because sometimes we end up cleaning up other people's data messes, but that's just one way I have fun with my work.
Oh god, you actually link the "deaths of our sons and daughters" to "Buying SUV's". Didn't think I'd see that kinda crap on Slashdot, but maybe I'm wrong. Hyperbole much?
I hate to break it to you, but the entire Iraq war, some 4400+ US deaths and thousands more injured, was done to secure the oil supply.
So yes, driving your big ass SUV does cause the death of US soldiers, although indirectly. Are you so shortsighted that you can't connect the dots?
Moral of the story: You were an idiot to buy the SUV, and now you're STUCK with the negative equity, no matter what you do. Throwing in the extra cost of gas and continuing to drive it will just put you deeper in a hole.
You can non-op it, drop the insurance on it, and HOPE the second-hand SUV market will improve, particularly as all evidence points to gas prices dropping sharply next year. But you're betting against a year of depreciation as well, so it might still be a loss to wait.
I completely agree, but you may have overlooked one other solution:
You can drive it off a cliff, collect the insurance payout, and buy a smaller car!:-)
My '04 Dodge Durango does just fine at all of that stuff, and carries my family of six. With a 5.7L hemi V8, it has a 10,000 lb towing capacity, and I regularly tow a 4000-lb. boat or a 7000-lb. camp trailer. It also does just fine off-road, especially with a little lift and larger-than-stock tires. Of course, it's a little more top-heavy than a pickup truck, so I can't take it across inclines that are quite as steep as I could a truck, but a pickup couldn't seat six people comfortably -- or seven people at all -- while doing all of this stuff.
It also gets 24 mpg on the highway when I'm not towing. I considered buying a minivan a few years ago, but most of them only got 27.
You're full of shit. According to this link, your precious 5.7L hemi V8 only gets 13 mpg city, 18 mpg highway.
Thanks for contributing to global warming by towing your huge boat, water skiing, and generally being a fucking tool that doesn't appreciate the impact your energy (ab)use has on the rest of the world.
Wasn't even a smartphone. Was just a Motorola V195. Generic looking el-cheapo GSM phone that worked well for me.
Asked them about buying a new one without touching my contract. Was told that it would cost $120. Asked if I could buy a prepaid one instead -- exact same model sells for $30 through the prepaid group. Told that it wouldn't work. Bought the prepaid model anyway and put my postpaid SIM card in it -- guess what? Works just fine.
This whole incident begs two questions: 1) Why is the exact same phone $90 cheaper if I buy it through the prepaid group? 2) Why lie to your customers and claim that something won't work when thousands of people (and the GSM specification) say otherwise?
Congratulations, you just gamed the system and made the carrier pay for replacement of your subsidized cellphone. The replacement cost was $120, which is most likely the cost T-Mobile had to actually pay to Motorola for the phone. The prepaid model was only $30 because it's subsidized by T-Mobile, and they're hoping you buy enough minutes through them to pay back their carrier subsidy. Since you just popped your SIM card in it and used it, you forced them to eat the replacement costs of the phone you lost.
The carrier subsidy is a stupid thing in the first place, but you're an even dumber consumer if you can't understand that these cellphones are not free to make. It costs something to churn out all those cheap chinese electronics, the carriers are just good at hiding the cost from you and rolling it into your monthly fees.
The fact that they think they are going to perfectly blend a large number of classes in PvP is pretty much a joke. I have yet to see any company do better at balancing things than Blizzard.
Are you serious? WoW is one of the most unbalanced PvP games out there. You have overpowered classes (lol subtlety stun-lock rogue where their opponent can't take a single action before dying), overpowered racial abilities (lol undead immune to fear) and arena team makeup shows the imbalance. Look at how many Warrior/Druid teams there are in 2v2 at the top levels. You think Warrior/Druid combo might be a little imbalanced? Nah, Blizzard is perfect.[/sarcasm]
If you want to look at a better balanced PvP game, look at Dark Age of Camelot, designed by Mythic before they made this game. They had very balanced PvP and took PvP balance seriously.
Another game that has really good PvP balance is Guild Wars.
WoW is a pathetic joke at balance. The developers made a choice to make the game completely gear-dependent, so it's very possible that if 2 level 70s duel each other, one of them might not be able to win just because his gear isn't good enough. That isn't balance; that's carebear PvP for little kids that need an "I Win" button.
Slashdot Mirror
We use a different term. We say "win the lottery." It sounds a lot better if someone wins the lottery than if they get hit by a bus.
No kidding. The only "schoolboy error" as the submitter put it, was not testing the patch on a non-production server before deploying it on a production DNS server.
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Having billions in taxable income is a very HUGE incentive to dodge taxes. Don't you think most billionaires got that way by dodging a few taxes every now and then? If a man wanted to become a billionaire and thought like you do (what's a few million, here or there?) he would never become rich.
It depends on where you live. Sure, if you live in the midwest where salaries are low, a $30,000 car means you must be rich to afford it. On the other hand, if you live on the east or west coast, a $30,000 car is available to the lower middle-class. Here on the east coast, a $500 car payment won't even pay 25% of your rent in a 2 bedroom apartment for the month, so the cost is negligible compared to the other costs of living. $30,000 cars are driven by the middle class.
Yes, it's all relative. If you live in the midwest, or somewhere where your rent is under $1000 a month for a house, a $500 car payment seems really high. On the other hand, if you live somewhere that has rent $2000 and up, and mortgage payments somewhere around $3,000-$5,000, a $500 car payment is a drop in the bucket.
Again, this is totally incorrect. You're the second person that has been modded up in this thread with false information.
There is a push API that Apple exposes to all 3rd party application developers. You can send a message to Apple's servers, a popup will be shown to the user (vibrate and audible alert) in whatever application is currently in the foreground. It will be a standard iPhone popup and the user can either cancel it or click a button to launch your 3rd party app and handle the message.
The reason why Apple doesn't allow background apps has nothing to do with money or AT&T. It has everything to do with wanting their phone to run snappy with only a limited amount of memory and CPU, and to not have the user need to run a Task Manager to kill background processes that are running amok. Windows Mobile is a terrible idea for a mobile OS. Background processes can run for days and eat up a huge chunk of CPU, memory, and battery life. Plus, Apple is all about usability. Having to start task manager and begin killing arbitrary processes just to make my phone usable again is not usability, it's fucking insanity.
So yes, anyone can write to the Apple push API. Anyone can send messages to their servers which deliver the push popup notification right to the users cellphone, even if it's sitting in their pocket in sleep mode.
That's completely incorrect. Steve Jobs even made a big deal about the Push API that they let any 3rd party app use. The push technology shows a standard iPhone popup window in whatever application is in the foreground. The developer encodes a URL into the push message that allows the user to select a button that will launch the app into the foreground and handle the pushed message. How else do you think AOL IM client even works on the iPhone?
Basically, it's a way to handle 3rd party apps that need to receive information from the network, without having them running in the background 24/7. So you can thank good designers that thought ahead that you don't have to run a Task Manager like on Windows mobile and kill background processes that are running amok. Persistently connected apps can stay persistently connected without running 24/7, and eating up CPU, memory, and battery.
So yes, 3rd party app messages are pushed to the UI. Any 3rd party developer can use it. It's not an Apple proprietary API that only their own apps can use.
An iPod also requires a Windows or Mac computer and that hasn't stopped Apple from becoming the #1 consumer device making company in the world by selling them. If you don't already have a Windows or Mac computer, you probably don't need a smartphone or an iPod.
Yeah, Apple has officially jumped the shark because customer demand for their new product is so high they can't even produce enough to meet it... Uh huh... Right... And people are willing to stand in line in the hot summer heat for hours for a product they've never even seen or used before because Apple is such a terrible company. LOL. You really ought to read your comment and try not to laugh.
It's the exact same price as any other 3G data plan that AT&T offers, ala Crackberry or Treo, but don't let that stop you from bashing Apple.
I'm not saying it's a good deal. I think all the 3G data plans are overpriced right now, regardless of carrier, but that's what you have to pay if you want to be an early adopter. Me? I'm happy with my 1 year old iPhone that works just as well on wifi as the brand new 3G model.
WotLK technically doesn't have a release date. Blizzard games never do... "When it's ready" is usually the way they operate. The open beta hasn't started yet though so I'm pretty sure it won't be ready by fall. Most likely early next year sometime.
It's not just EA that is behind this, its the basic reality of the market. Wrath of the Lich King (the WoW expansion) is coming out next spring most likely, and if they try to release around the same time as that, they're pretty much guaranteed to fail at capturing any significant marketshare.
They pretty much have to release it this Fall or they're screwed.
BTW, I've been playing the closed beta, and I predict this game will be epic fail. The graphics are similar to 2004 era WoW graphics. Bugs and lack of content are everywhere. I love the Warhammer universe, since I grew up playing the tabletop games, and I had high hopes for this franchise, but the game simply fails to deliver. It might have been good if it came out 4 years ago, but people expect a game to have the same polished content upon release that WoW has taken 4 years to add. The market expects an unrealistically high level of polish and content, so pretty much any new challenger is guaranteed to fail unless it's made by Blizzard.
I've been having a lot of fun playing Age of Conan lately. Don't let the haters tell you it sucks. It really is a pretty good game, even though it has bugs. What MMO doesn't?
While that would work, I think a better solution to encourage responsible network use and make things better for both customers and ISPs would be to sell tiered service. Let me give you an example:
Monthly Cable internet package: $49
- 50GB of priority 1 traffic (high priority, such as VoIP, gaming, realtime apps)
- 100GB of priority 2 traffic (medium priority, such as web, email)
- unlimited priority 3 bulk traffic (BitTorrent, P2P, large downloads)
Now, the user purchases this package, and they have 2 options:
Option 1: If they are an unsophisticated user don't know how to properly "tag" their packets with a priority, the first 50GB of traffic a month are automatically high priority, then the next 100GB of traffic get medium priority. After they've used up all their high and medium priority quota, the rest of the month their packets are sent bulk, which is basically a "best effort" delivery. Any leftover bandwidth after all the other customers priority 1 and 2 traffic went through, is given to them. This way, people that abuse the system by using more than their fair share of bandwidth aren't going to impact the network adversely, because they'll be relegated to bulk status after they exceeded their quota.
Note: Billing cycles are staggered based on account activation time, to avoid having too much priority 1 BitTorrent traffic killing the network on the first few billing days of the month.
Option 2: Sophisticated users can tag their own packets with a priority 1, 2, or 3 so that they don't end up exceeding their high priority quota by using too much P2P. That way, sophisticated users are encouraged to be responsible network citizens by not abusing infrastructure. If they really, really need to get that World of Warcraft patch right away, they can tag it as priority 1, but for most uses, they can leave their BitTorrent client hammering away at priority 3 all day long, and be confident that it won't interfere with their important VoIP and gaming traffic that's priority 1.
I think this system would work very well, because users would be encouraged to become responsible network citizens on their own. It also doesn't rely on end users being computer savvy and knowing how to properly tag packets. If they are, that's great and they can take advantage of the quality of service and prioritization benefits of tagging their packets, but if they aren't, the quotas still apply. Also, most users that just use web and email would never exceed their priority 1 quota for the month, so they wouldn't notice a difference, other than a faster network because the bandwidth abusers are relegated to bulk status.
What do you think about this proposal?
Ok, I should clarify. I've been running 7.5 free version for a few months now. In the last 30 days before June 25th, I would get daily popups saying "7.5 is being discontinued, upgrade to 8.0 (pay version) to stay protected. If this isn't slimey, I don't know what is.
To be honest, I'll probably just uninstall AVG completely and never touch another one of their products again. I only use Windows to play games so there's really not much risk to me of getting a virus.
I agree. AVG used to be a very good product. Their free virus scanner worked reasonably well, updated itself automatically, and the price was right. Lately they must have gotten new management because they've gotten really evil.
They started doing the following things that I noticed:
1. Hiding their free product and making it almost impossible to find. When you tried to download the free product, you would repeatedly be "upselled" to their pay version, and had to find the really tiny 6 pt. font at the bottom of the page to actually get the free version.
2. The free product now pops up continuously with banner ads asking you to purchase their pay product.
3. As of June 25th, 2008, it seems that they no longer even offer a free product. This is strange to me because it seems like my free versions are still downloading updates. Can anyone please clarify for me whether the free product still exists or not?
In short, they turned from cool, free AV provider, to spammy, pop-up spewing marketing company in the space of a couple years.
Can anyone recommend another free AV product for those of us stuck on Windows (due to gaming, or for other applications)? Is Avast pretty good?
Thanks in advance.
To give you a counter-example:
I used to work for a small, regional ISP as lead sysadmin. We were attempting to sell a multiple-T1 internet connection to a large local business in the area that had over 400 desktops and a few class C's of public address space, along with a smattering of web servers and publicly facing sites. The salesmen decided to bring me along on the sales call to answer any technical questions.
After the salesmen gave them their "speech" about how fast we were, how we could speed up their business, yada yada, all of the "marketing" type information, their CTO had some questions for me: Where do you get your bandwidth from, and more importantly, "how can we transition our 4 class C's worth of publicly facing services without interrupting our business?"
I proceeded to tell him about our connectivity to tier 1 backbones, then went right into a transition plan. "First, in preparation, we want to set the TTL on your DNS records down to a lower value, so that when we make the final cutover to your new address space, old DNS records for your domain names won't be cached on the internet for days and cause your servers to appear unreachable." I proceeded to walk him through a transition plan.
The CTO was so impressed by the preparation that he bought our service. They also paid some consulting time for me to come in and personally assist with their implementation. He told me later on "If you hadn't come by that day, and it was just the salesman giving his marketing presentation, we would have never bought your service. I needed to talk to a technical guy that knew what he was doing to get confidence that our needs would be handled."
So, you see, it does pay to bring knowledgeable technical people with you. I know in my job now as an architect, I make a lot of purchasing decisions. If I get a boring marketing only presentation, I'm more likely to kick the vendor out and never buy anything from them again. Don't give me the marketing presentation. Let me talk to one of your geeks and I'll pick his brain and figure out for myself if your product really does what all of the marketing literature says it does. Vendors lie. Geeks tend not to. Every geek is worth 100 salesdroids blowing smoke up your ass.
It's the perfect scam, mafia style. First, you send some thugs around to smash up a business storefront. Then, you send a guy by to collect some money for "protection" from said thugs. The poor business owner either pays up, or he gets his store smashed up again. Often, the cops are receiving a cut and look the other way, or don't respond if the business owner decides to call law enforcement to report the thugs.
Update it for the digital age. Microsoft intentionally designs an insecure OS. They could secure it if they wanted to. All they need to do is enforce a UNIX-like security model where processes and services run as a limited-rights user, instead of root, and users aren't root on their own box. Instead, they just take the more profitable solution of leaving it insecure and selling you "protection".
Now tell me why we can't prosecute them the same way we prosecute mafia thugs running a protection racket?
FTFA:
Now that Microsoft makes their OS insecure intentionally by design , and sells you the software to secure it, can we begin to prosecute them the same way we would prosecute a local mafia protection racket?
I picture Steve Ballmer (monkey boy) and Bill Gates (nerdy boy) showing up at your house... Steve is wildly throwing chairs around, smashing them through your front windows, and making grunting noises. Bill is pleading with you to just buy these OneCare bananas... They're the only kind of bananas that will make him stop throwing chairs through your windows!
Bingo. The temporary backbone that our representatives had while they voted against telecom immunity was just a blip on the radar. The "fix" is in now. Somebody forgot to make their regular protection payments (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) and a lesson was made. "Don't pay up and see how difficult we make doing business in the US." The political system works for those that pay to play. Money flowed freely, laws were bought and paid for, and the citizens were fucked in the ass without lube.
Make note of these fucks and vote them out during the next election.
The thing that really sickens me is that it's the Democratic party leadership that is getting the most payoff. Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer are all near the top of the list.
I'm still a democrat, but right now my party can fuck off for all I care.
If you're not proud to work in "IT", whether you're a telephone customer support or helpdesk person, all the way up to a senior applications programmer/architect, you probably shouldn't be working in IT. Because no matter what you call it, you either like what you do for a living or you can't stand it. If you can't stand the name of it, you should probably get out.
On the other hand, I could work for the garbage company and call myself a "sanitation engineer", but that doesn't change the fact that I haul people's trash for a living. In fact, I have occasionally called myself a "digital janitor" because sometimes we end up cleaning up other people's data messes, but that's just one way I have fun with my work.
So yes, driving your big ass SUV does cause the death of US soldiers, although indirectly. Are you so shortsighted that you can't connect the dots?
You can drive it off a cliff, collect the insurance payout, and buy a smaller car!
Thanks for contributing to global warming by towing your huge boat, water skiing, and generally being a fucking tool that doesn't appreciate the impact your energy (ab)use has on the rest of the world.
The carrier subsidy is a stupid thing in the first place, but you're an even dumber consumer if you can't understand that these cellphones are not free to make. It costs something to churn out all those cheap chinese electronics, the carriers are just good at hiding the cost from you and rolling it into your monthly fees.
If you want to look at a better balanced PvP game, look at Dark Age of Camelot, designed by Mythic before they made this game. They had very balanced PvP and took PvP balance seriously.
Another game that has really good PvP balance is Guild Wars.
WoW is a pathetic joke at balance. The developers made a choice to make the game completely gear-dependent, so it's very possible that if 2 level 70s duel each other, one of them might not be able to win just because his gear isn't good enough. That isn't balance; that's carebear PvP for little kids that need an "I Win" button.