I seem to recall that was just a myth. Though for a long time Microsoft didn't raise a fuss about pirate copies of their OS because that meant people were running their stuff instead of somebody elses. That did eventually change, but it sure as heck helped them penetrate the market to record levels.
So, when did your data become important to you, before or after you lost it?
If he had anything important and didn't have it backed up, he's an idiot.
There's no way his damages come anywhere near $600 million, unless he's utterly incompetent, in which case, he deserves to lose it. The unreliability of his OEM isn't Microsofts fault.
Most computer OEMs don't provide disks for you for the installed software. Instead they use a legal loophole and when you first run the computer it prompts you to make a set of backup/restore disks. Those will essentially be an image of the drive and can be used to restore the computer if you have to nuke & pave. Guess he neglected to do that, or lost his disks. Whichever case is correct, it's still his fault, and not that of Microsoft or the OEM.
It's not like the increasing persistence about upgrading people wasn't known, and if he still didn't have a backup, he's an incompetent idiot.
Yes, Microsoft shouldn't be forcing people to upgrade, but that's a different lawsuit, and I believe it's a class action as well. (It is.)
The laptop is now "non-functional". How about letting a real tech see about that. You never know, I've "fixed" machines by booting into safemode and disabling the old dos crap they had been forcing to run for ages.
No company is going to support the old stuff forever, not even Microsoft, nor should anyone expect them too. Windows 7 mainstream support ended a couple of years ago, and when it comes to software, life cycles are fast and short compared to other things in the world. The saying is that software ages 10 times faster than the rest of the world.
It's still possible to buy Windows 7. Suing Microsoft for a copy is stupid. It would be cheaper for him to go buy a new copy than to file the lawsuit. It would also seem to be cheaper for Microsoft to capitulate and just send him one, but that would potentially set a bad precedent that could get really expensive and embarrassing for them, so there's no way in hell they'll do that.
That guy is an idiot as he doesn't know the difference between "$6,000,000,000.00" and "six hundred million dollars". Sure, you could claim it's a simple typo, but it's got the correct comma separations for six billion, and if you don't correct mistakes like that before sending it to a judge, you can expect to get slapped down by the judge and forced to either go away, or start over from scratch without the screwups.
We all hate it when our computers go chips up, but it happens, and we have to be prepared for it or it's our fault, like it or not.
Have you forgotten that trump and the repubs have been eliminating or eviscerating regulations that were put in place to stop abuses by various types of companies in the first place? They certainly can't be trusted to institute appropriate regulations when they've been spending their time in power weakening or otherwise destroying those regulations in the first place.
If companies can get away with not spending money on the airports, that's exactly what will happen. Companies intend to make a profit off of any purchase, and they will raise prices to do so, after all, they will have just paid a buttload to get them. Airports are considered an important infrastructure, and as such need to be functional even if they lose money, which isn't something that corporations care about or will agree to. If a corporation can't make a profit on it, they will get rid of it. You can't do that with important infrastructure.
Public infrastructure should never be in private hands. There are entire books on this subject from a historical viewpoint and others. Short version, the country relies on that infrastructure, and when it's in the hands of someone else, it's no longer something that can be counted on, as well as the costs to the country increasing.
If someone buys any public infrastructure, they fully intend to get a lot more cash out of it than what they paid for it. As such, costs will go up for us. Also, unless they are heavily regulated by the government, they will be able to deny or otherwise screw with the usage of that infrastructure. If you want that stuff fixed up, then you sure as hell don't want our companies that are known for thinking short term only to be in charge of it. If they run a calculation that says they can make x3 their investment back in 20 years, while fixing it up would extend that to 30 years, they'll go with the 20 years and not fix anything and plan on either dumping it on someone else, or listing it as a writeoff of a condemned property or something like that. Companies don't give the slightest F about the public, just their bottom line in the short term.
As to states taking care of the infrastructure. The states that could, did, the rest can't and won't. Offering to do 20%, but only for some things is more of an insult than can be imagined for most people. Hell of some of those states can't get a bridge maintained when the government is offering anywhere from 50% to 70%, they sure as F won't do anything if they only get 20%. Of course, only a moron would come up with a plan like that.
Now if for some reason an infrastructure is determined to not be important, then it would be viable to sell it off, or replace it with something useful, otherwise no. Highways, Dams, Airports, and a lot of other things are in fact considered important, even if you don't care or if you fail to understand why.
Technically you are correct. However as we do have groups that are referred to as neo-nazis, who follow the teachings and ideals of the nazis, and even use one of the nazi flags, we have fucking nazis.
If it looks like a nazi, talks like a nazi, and goosesteps like a nazi... I'm sure you get the idea...
The nazi party were not democrats. Most of the eugenicists that people talk about and hate were nazis. You're the one that needs to learn some history, not to mention stop reading breitbart, that shit is sludge from brainrot on a good day. Speaking of that rabid conspiracy rag, did you realize that in german, breitbart literally translates to wide beard...
Face recognition just isn't good enough yet for that kind of risk. They have way too high of a false positive rate, but odds are the higher ups will pull a coverup to hid that and claim great success instead. As to a portable version with much less processing power, it's just begging to be less accurate. Of course there will also be false negatives that will let wanted criminals get away, unless they're caught by the normal methods, but I'm more worried about the innocents that will be jailed.
Since a lot, if not most, countries currencies are no longer backed by any actual material good(s), do any of them have any intrinsic value?
At one time our countries money, and most others, was backed by gold. For a time, some of it was backed by silver. If you ever see one of those dollar bills in someones collection of money that says "Silver Certificate", now you know what that was. However, our country ditched that and basically declared that it's money had value because we say it does, and not because there's some reserve of valuable goods to back it up.
So basically it's not a lot different from those cryptocurrencies, other than the scale of use when it comes to the aspect of intrinsic value.
It's called Parthogenesis, and there are a less than a hundred species known to do this. Of course this is completely different from the microbial Mitosis.
The ones I've heard about are mostly island dwelling lizards, but I've only seen stuff on about a half dozen parthogenic species.
I wonder if their successful invasiveness is boosted by a lack of predators in the case of these crayfish. They might be good for farming, if they are large enough to eat and taste good. Well, at least until a plague strikes. That's the problem with monocultures, very prone to getting wiped out by a single plague.
The entire screen resolution was 160x192 pixels. There were no pixels wasted on fancy fonts. The 7 and the 1 were very distinctly different, so just like the the AC mentioned, nobody was going to mistake those two.
You are talking about the hard core high score video gamer crowd here. You should hope they don't see your post or you may be found in an 'Unlit Dark Alley' strangled to death with a joystick cord.;P
If all you needed was a finished game screen picture, don't assume any specialized hardware, just use one of the available computers at the time, duplicate the finished time screen of the game, heck, the pixels were so big you could count them, then make a pixel perfect fake. It's not as hard as some of you are thinking.
Don't forget that graphics resolutions sucked big time! I hit up some sites to check, and the Atari 2600 had a display rez of 160x192. I can't say that's exactly right, but it does sound in the right neighborhood, so I'll go with it. Just remember, you can have icons on your desktop with more pixels than that these days.
So just fake a screen, take a pic with the Atari 2600 and the cables arranged so it looks like that's what's hooked up, and run with it.
So unless he tells us how he faked it, it's guesswork, but not really important guesswork because it doesn't really matter how, just that it was proven he did.
If you're talking back in the 70s, or even 80s, it definitely had at least one tube, the picture tube, aka CRT which of course means Cathode Ray Tube.:) I rather hate CRTs, I'm so glad they're dead.
Nope. Slashdot has always been for whatever the admins find interesting or noteworthy but was particularly skewed towards tech. It was always "news for nerds", not tech-news. I have no idea why people still complain about what slashdot posts. They've been doing since they first came online, and everyone that reads them knows that, so why the heck do some people even bother questioning them? I know Commander Taco isn't around here officially anymore, but come on, they're always going to post whatever they feel like.
I guess you've never listened to his rambling and nonsensical speeches that can't even stick to one set of related subjects and are just as likely to contradict itself as not.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall that was just a myth. Though for a long time Microsoft didn't raise a fuss about pirate copies of their OS because that meant people were running their stuff instead of somebody elses. That did eventually change, but it sure as heck helped them penetrate the market to record levels.
Or the DRM is screwing with your system so you get the pirate patch to kill the DRM so things go back to normal.
True. Just knowing it's there makes that computer a lot more vulnerable to getting nailed
Nope. :D
The best one has to be "No Time To Explain"
If it's a "pirate" copy, everyone is wearing pirate hats
You've obviously never met a cop or a lawyer. ;)
Or you forgot to use your sarcasm tag.
Rule 1: Backup
Rule 2: BACKUP
Rule 3: See Rules 1 & 2
So, when did your data become important to you, before or after you lost it?
If he had anything important and didn't have it backed up, he's an idiot.
There's no way his damages come anywhere near $600 million, unless he's utterly incompetent, in which case, he deserves to lose it.
The unreliability of his OEM isn't Microsofts fault.
Most computer OEMs don't provide disks for you for the installed software. Instead they use a legal loophole and when you first run the computer it prompts you to make a set of backup/restore disks. Those will essentially be an image of the drive and can be used to restore the computer if you have to nuke & pave. Guess he neglected to do that, or lost his disks. Whichever case is correct, it's still his fault, and not that of Microsoft or the OEM.
It's not like the increasing persistence about upgrading people wasn't known, and if he still didn't have a backup, he's an incompetent idiot.
Yes, Microsoft shouldn't be forcing people to upgrade, but that's a different lawsuit, and I believe it's a class action as well. (It is.)
The laptop is now "non-functional". How about letting a real tech see about that. You never know, I've "fixed" machines by booting into safemode and disabling the old dos crap they had been forcing to run for ages.
No company is going to support the old stuff forever, not even Microsoft, nor should anyone expect them too. Windows 7 mainstream support ended a couple of years ago, and when it comes to software, life cycles are fast and short compared to other things in the world. The saying is that software ages 10 times faster than the rest of the world.
It's still possible to buy Windows 7. Suing Microsoft for a copy is stupid. It would be cheaper for him to go buy a new copy than to file the lawsuit. It would also seem to be cheaper for Microsoft to capitulate and just send him one, but that would potentially set a bad precedent that could get really expensive and embarrassing for them, so there's no way in hell they'll do that.
That guy is an idiot as he doesn't know the difference between "$6,000,000,000.00" and "six hundred million dollars". Sure, you could claim it's a simple typo, but it's got the correct comma separations for six billion, and if you don't correct mistakes like that before sending it to a judge, you can expect to get slapped down by the judge and forced to either go away, or start over from scratch without the screwups.
We all hate it when our computers go chips up, but it happens, and we have to be prepared for it or it's our fault, like it or not.
This is about as effective as using a wet newspaper to try and stop a bullet.
Have you forgotten that trump and the repubs have been eliminating or eviscerating regulations that were put in place to stop abuses by various types of companies in the first place? They certainly can't be trusted to institute appropriate regulations when they've been spending their time in power weakening or otherwise destroying those regulations in the first place.
If companies can get away with not spending money on the airports, that's exactly what will happen.
Companies intend to make a profit off of any purchase, and they will raise prices to do so, after all, they will have just paid a buttload to get them.
Airports are considered an important infrastructure, and as such need to be functional even if they lose money, which isn't something that corporations care about or will agree to. If a corporation can't make a profit on it, they will get rid of it. You can't do that with important infrastructure.
Public infrastructure should never be in private hands. There are entire books on this subject from a historical viewpoint and others.
Short version, the country relies on that infrastructure, and when it's in the hands of someone else, it's no longer something that can be counted on, as well as the costs to the country increasing.
If someone buys any public infrastructure, they fully intend to get a lot more cash out of it than what they paid for it. As such, costs will go up for us. Also, unless they are heavily regulated by the government, they will be able to deny or otherwise screw with the usage of that infrastructure.
If you want that stuff fixed up, then you sure as hell don't want our companies that are known for thinking short term only to be in charge of it. If they run a calculation that says they can make x3 their investment back in 20 years, while fixing it up would extend that to 30 years, they'll go with the 20 years and not fix anything and plan on either dumping it on someone else, or listing it as a writeoff of a condemned property or something like that. Companies don't give the slightest F about the public, just their bottom line in the short term.
As to states taking care of the infrastructure. The states that could, did, the rest can't and won't. Offering to do 20%, but only for some things is more of an insult than can be imagined for most people. Hell of some of those states can't get a bridge maintained when the government is offering anywhere from 50% to 70%, they sure as F won't do anything if they only get 20%. Of course, only a moron would come up with a plan like that.
Now if for some reason an infrastructure is determined to not be important, then it would be viable to sell it off, or replace it with something useful, otherwise no.
Highways, Dams, Airports, and a lot of other things are in fact considered important, even if you don't care or if you fail to understand why.
Technically you are correct.
However as we do have groups that are referred to as neo-nazis, who follow the teachings and ideals of the nazis, and even use one of the nazi flags, we have fucking nazis.
If it looks like a nazi, talks like a nazi, and goosesteps like a nazi... I'm sure you get the idea...
The nazi party were not democrats.
Most of the eugenicists that people talk about and hate were nazis.
You're the one that needs to learn some history, not to mention stop reading breitbart, that shit is sludge from brainrot on a good day.
Speaking of that rabid conspiracy rag, did you realize that in german, breitbart literally translates to wide beard...
Face recognition just isn't good enough yet for that kind of risk.
They have way too high of a false positive rate, but odds are the higher ups will pull a coverup to hid that and claim great success instead.
As to a portable version with much less processing power, it's just begging to be less accurate.
Of course there will also be false negatives that will let wanted criminals get away, unless they're caught by the normal methods, but I'm more worried about the innocents that will be jailed.
Since a lot, if not most, countries currencies are no longer backed by any actual material good(s), do any of them have any intrinsic value?
At one time our countries money, and most others, was backed by gold. For a time, some of it was backed by silver. If you ever see one of those dollar bills in someones collection of money that says "Silver Certificate", now you know what that was. However, our country ditched that and basically declared that it's money had value because we say it does, and not because there's some reserve of valuable goods to back it up.
So basically it's not a lot different from those cryptocurrencies, other than the scale of use when it comes to the aspect of intrinsic value.
It's called Parthogenesis, and there are a less than a hundred species known to do this.
Of course this is completely different from the microbial Mitosis.
The ones I've heard about are mostly island dwelling lizards, but I've only seen stuff on about a half dozen parthogenic species.
I wonder if their successful invasiveness is boosted by a lack of predators in the case of these crayfish.
They might be good for farming, if they are large enough to eat and taste good.
Well, at least until a plague strikes. That's the problem with monocultures, very prone to getting wiped out by a single plague.
The entire screen resolution was 160x192 pixels.
There were no pixels wasted on fancy fonts.
The 7 and the 1 were very distinctly different, so just like the the AC mentioned, nobody was going to mistake those two.
The processor was a 6507, and not a 6502.
You are talking about the hard core high score video gamer crowd here. ;P
You should hope they don't see your post or you may be found in an 'Unlit Dark Alley' strangled to death with a joystick cord.
If all you needed was a finished game screen picture, don't assume any specialized hardware, just use one of the available computers at the time, duplicate the finished time screen of the game, heck, the pixels were so big you could count them, then make a pixel perfect fake. It's not as hard as some of you are thinking.
Don't forget that graphics resolutions sucked big time! I hit up some sites to check, and the Atari 2600 had a display rez of 160x192. I can't say that's exactly right, but it does sound in the right neighborhood, so I'll go with it. Just remember, you can have icons on your desktop with more pixels than that these days.
So just fake a screen, take a pic with the Atari 2600 and the cables arranged so it looks like that's what's hooked up, and run with it.
So unless he tells us how he faked it, it's guesswork, but not really important guesswork because it doesn't really matter how, just that it was proven he did.
Yep, the graphics were pretty simple and easy to duplicate and fake.
If you're talking back in the 70s, or even 80s, it definitely had at least one tube, the picture tube, aka CRT which of course means Cathode Ray Tube. :)
I rather hate CRTs, I'm so glad they're dead.
Not really, the software is really small. By todays standards, it's positively microscopic. Heck, your webpage probably has more code.
Nope. Slashdot has always been for whatever the admins find interesting or noteworthy but was particularly skewed towards tech.
It was always "news for nerds", not tech-news.
I have no idea why people still complain about what slashdot posts. They've been doing since they first came online, and everyone that reads them knows that, so why the heck do some people even bother questioning them? I know Commander Taco isn't around here officially anymore, but come on, they're always going to post whatever they feel like.
I guess you've never listened to his rambling and nonsensical speeches that can't even stick to one set of related subjects and are just as likely to contradict itself as not.
That was mostly private industry.