The worth of the data on the computer may be much higher than the computer itself, and by the time they talk about charging that have got the victim to download their software. They could easily have written that to lock an uneducated user out unless payment is received. Though in reality they are more likely not to do this (it would attract more legal attention as that is outright threatening behaviour) but instead to have included a keylogger in the software that will pick out the credit card details soon enough anyway.
Maybe an etiquette endorsement in there somewhere.
That should be rolled into both the email and website tests you mention. It should not be an "extra". Even having it as a pre-requisite for those two would not work as some of the nuances of etiquette are specific to each area and sometimes you need to know a little about the area to fully comprehend have bad doing things wrong could be for those who get hit by the results.
Such scams are at least tried. I've had two calls to my house in the last year telling me that my car's warranty is due to expire and if I want to continue it I have to renew before the expiry date or it will cost more then twice as much to renew after that date. Would I like to renew now by card over the phone? I do not own a car and have never owned a car.
On both occasions I asked played concerned for a moment and asked "which of the cars?" at which point they hung up - obviously anyone asking any questions just makes them run as they don't have any real data other than name and phone number. Once you ask a questions about something they should know if they were who they hope the intended victim thinks they are their "cover" is blown, but they only need a few people who are not cynical/careful enough to check details in order for the operation to be profitable and said victim is no wiser until they try claim on the warranty by which time the scammers have long gone and covered their tracks.
"Stupidity" is correct. Isn't 185 pounds equal to $350?
More like $280 at current exchange rates according to Google, though that may need to be adjusted to account for cost-of-living factors to be properly representative of the equivalent cost. Not an amount to be unconcerned about in any case though.
Not everyone wants to whore themselves out for money.
I really wouldn't want to myself, but if I were propelled in that position common sense says "take advantage while you can, then fade back into blissful obscurity when it all passes", rather than "spend piles on an expensive set of legal arguments that might leave you even more publicly exposed and will almost definitely leave you less financially well-off".
Am I the only one who isn't surprised? I would expect porn sites to be less infected than regular sites.
Admins and designers who work on such sites are more likely, than those that work in more "innocent" areas, to be exposed to the lower end of human behaviour through using spammers and ropey affiliate schemes to draw in traffic. If you are aware of what nefarious things you do (or could do) and more importantly what your competition do or could do then you are going to be more clued up on how careful you need to be with site security.
Ignoring the lower end of human behaviour (there must be at least one or two porn sites out amongst the millions that don't spam/crack/what-ever to make an extra few $), to be successful financially a porn site need to be secure, otherwise people would just hack in and take the content for nothing. It is simply good business for them to be security concious, especially the smaller outfits/franchises that are run by a small team (where the designers/programmers/admins are more likely to be directly affected in the wage-slip if the site is hacked). Designers, programmers and admins working on a small and possible not very sensitive part or a much larger organisations output (like the vodafone example mentioned) may not be as directly aware of such issues. The "smartphones section" of their site, assuming this is a phone/contract sales area, is not likely to have cracking types trying to steal content. Now a site (or part there of) that is offering paid-for downloadable content I would expect to be "safer" than other areas for the same reason as a porn site: the content needs to be protected more than the content of a brochure page.
Not sure what happened there, managed to post without a chunk of the comment... That should have been:
"If you think McDonald's undercuts your parental authority then you had no parental authority to start with, and as much as I dislike McD's I must say I'm pretty sure your fat kid isn't their fault."
Depends what they mean by "traditional media" - I'd trust that Nigerian fellow that keeps emailing me to manage my finances before I trusted any output from the Murdoch empire.
It seems that they're dropping their only feature, adopting the early failures of Apple (cut & paste), and heading towards what most people dislike about the iPhone (single marketplace).
Perhaps they are not making enough profit for their liking from following the open route, and would like to try nickel-and-dime a new revenue stream out of phone users and the developers.
SMP will only bring you so far - i'll bet 8 VCPU VMs on Atoms will be beat by a 2 VCPU VM on a Core 2 Duo.
Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice. If your task is CPU intensive and can be easily separated into distinct tasks not overly chatty (i.e. cross VM latency is not going to be a major issue) and the host has gobs of RAM available, you are often better off having several VMs with one cVPU each than one VM with several vCPUs. This may be much less of a problem on a many-CPU monster like the 512 core unit being discussed than it is on 2/4/8-core boxes, but I expect the balance to still be in favour of multiple single-vCPU VMs in cases where the task can be efficiently split between them.
Apparently, no one bothered to check for a long time, though.
Or perhaps the people that did check just assumed that the genuine uploaders forgot to include/update the hashes so that the difference was due to the hash being for the previous (or earlier) version. Though in that case you'd expect the sort of person who would check official hashes would be the sort who would report the discrepancy upstream (or at least ask about it on an official forum).
I can't disagree with you on the "entitlement generation" part (I'm only a little older than the age range that you state, an I can see it in people just a few years my junior).
But in this particular case the "blame" lies less squarely with the impetuous youth. They expect unlimited data for 30/month because the advertising for the service strongly implies that this is what they can/will get. I know that the contract states "unlimited" refers to there being no limit to online time (unlike some old dial-up ISPs which imposed X hours/month due to having a limited number of lines to share around their customer base) and the adverts are very careful not to state otherwise, but they deliberately give the impression of unlimited data as strongly as they can without falling foul of relevant laws regarding false advertising.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html can be fun to try if you have some time to waste.
A trick I've used with "success" is to be very interested but need to nip out for a second. Something like "ooh yes, I've been looking for a new mobile phone deal, could you hold while I go turn the pans off in the kitchen?". Don't be too eager or they'll smell a rat. Once you have them waiting, nip off and do something else for a while. I've had cold callers wait for my return (according to my phone's call log) for ten minutes or more before now.
Want to get rid of them a little more quickly? Try answering with something like "Hello, you are through to the North Yorkshire Emergency Response Centre, what is your current location?" and role-play from there as much as is needed. They usually appologise and ring off in short order. If tey don't ramp it up with "this is an emergency number, you could be endangering lives by holding it open". Obviously don't do this on a line you get business calls on as you have to jump in before knowing who is calling for it to be convincing - my home landline only exists so I can get ADSL based internet down the line, so I know that any call I get down there is a junk call (everyone else calls my mobile).
So, Intel or ARM is still not decided, but that it will run Windows is? Guess that must be WinCE? But why not put Android on it?
Because Asus sold access to their soul to MS, probably in exchange for preferential pricing or safety from a patent or few, would be my guess. Hence "its better with Windows" being plastered on the promo sites for certain eee models last year.
I've just tried this with the latest NoScript in an otherwise default configuration, and it seems stop facebook itself from operating (which depending on your opinion of such things, may or may not be a bad result!).
And the backup feature works well if you have enough blank media handy or, as I've done twice (once as replacing my main desktop with a complete new build, and once just because something had seriously upset chunks of Windows for which a rebuild was the only long term fix) a spare chunk of drive on another machine on the network. Backup to a location that isn't about to be wiped, do your OS rebuild, then reinstall everything from that backup. You still need to separately backup your game saves and other status for most games though, so careful there if there is any progress you care about.
I've come to consider high ink costs as an environmental benefit. I know a number of people who are printing less and less as they've worked out what it is costing them, even in more reputable alternative inks (I say "more reputable" there as printer ink is definitely something you shouldn't buy the cheapest knock-offs of - they will knacker precision parts of the printer if you get a bad batch which will be particularly annoying if you have a model with a fixed multi-use head instead of one with a new head per cart).
Personally I long since switched completely to a laser (having for a short while used a B/W laser alongside a colour 'jet). You still pay too much for consumables on consumer grade models but get far better value for money than with ink, you don't waste many pages worth of toner/ink if you left the printer unused for three weeks so need several head-clean runs to get all the nozzles ungummed, output on paper that doesn't cost an arm and a leg is much much better for any output type from text to photos (particularly text), and for those few occasions where my laser doesn't quite cut it as I want a particularly vibrant photo I just use the local supermarket's photo printing machines which work out cheaper then running your own inkjet and produce better results too.
Um what the hell is "standard resolution gaming" if not HD?
A lot of people consider "SD" gaming to be the last generation or few of console games: 640*480 or there abouts (maybe up to maximum DVD frame-buffer size of 720*576 (PAL) or 720*480 (NTSC)).
For TV/video "HD" is usually considered (by people in general I'm not talking about technical definitions here, or marketing definitions where something that can receive a signal at that resolution but downscales it to 320*240 can still be called "HD capable") to cover everything from 1280*720 upwards, so I'm guessing the same for games. At that rate you are part way right: most people probably play PC games on screens at resolutions 1280*1024 or higher, but you may well find a lot of them, particularly those who have a cheap GFX card or nothing more than a simple on-board 3D chipset) have the games set to 800*600 and have their monitor up-scale the output because their hardware won't play at higher resolutions without the frame rate dropping too low.
Round trip time for small packets (ICMP Ping) on my connection to the fastest service outside my ISP (latency wise) is between 26 and 29ms, much higher than the 0.07ms delay your "considering the wire only" calculation results in.
Many people see noticeably higher latencies than that simply because of line quality issues (causing the ADSL equipment to use interleaved modes, reducing packet loss at the expense of higher latency), line length from home to exchange in some cases, backbone topology (there are places in Yorkshire where data on BT's backbone goes up to Manchester before heading down to London before being handed off to their actual ISP which may involve another trip of measurable length unless the ISP just resells BT's service rather than having their own equipment and peering operation), or congestion due to bandwidth saturation (believe me, there are many ISPs who are far too oversold to expect any decent latency, even to relatively local sites, in an evening).
My gut feeling is that 30ms of lag would be fine for many players even on relatively fast paced games like most FPSs. Remember: this service isn't aimed at hard-code gamers who are, or claim to be, good enough to notice a small amount of extra lag, and WoW is fine for many people with a higher latency than that. But... if you are trying to play a fast response game (a fast FPS, or a not-too-easy driving game) the latency that many see on their ADSL connections would be at best irritating. Of course, not all the games are going to be those that need fast reactions - I think the success or not of the service will rest with other, slightly more sedate, games.
Slashdot Mirror
The worth of the data on the computer may be much higher than the computer itself, and by the time they talk about charging that have got the victim to download their software. They could easily have written that to lock an uneducated user out unless payment is received. Though in reality they are more likely not to do this (it would attract more legal attention as that is outright threatening behaviour) but instead to have included a keylogger in the software that will pick out the credit card details soon enough anyway.
Or unwavering trust in authority. Which is scarier?
This isn't even just trusting authority though. This is trusting anyone who claims to have some authority which is even worse.
Maybe an etiquette endorsement in there somewhere.
That should be rolled into both the email and website tests you mention. It should not be an "extra". Even having it as a pre-requisite for those two would not work as some of the nuances of etiquette are specific to each area and sometimes you need to know a little about the area to fully comprehend have bad doing things wrong could be for those who get hit by the results.
Such scams are at least tried. I've had two calls to my house in the last year telling me that my car's warranty is due to expire and if I want to continue it I have to renew before the expiry date or it will cost more then twice as much to renew after that date. Would I like to renew now by card over the phone? I do not own a car and have never owned a car.
On both occasions I asked played concerned for a moment and asked "which of the cars?" at which point they hung up - obviously anyone asking any questions just makes them run as they don't have any real data other than name and phone number. Once you ask a questions about something they should know if they were who they hope the intended victim thinks they are their "cover" is blown, but they only need a few people who are not cynical/careful enough to check details in order for the operation to be profitable and said victim is no wiser until they try claim on the warranty by which time the scammers have long gone and covered their tracks.
"Stupidity" is correct. Isn't 185 pounds equal to $350?
More like $280 at current exchange rates according to Google, though that may need to be adjusted to account for cost-of-living factors to be properly representative of the equivalent cost. Not an amount to be unconcerned about in any case though.
Not everyone wants to whore themselves out for money.
I really wouldn't want to myself, but if I were propelled in that position common sense says "take advantage while you can, then fade back into blissful obscurity when it all passes", rather than "spend piles on an expensive set of legal arguments that might leave you even more publicly exposed and will almost definitely leave you less financially well-off".
Am I the only one who isn't surprised? I would expect porn sites to be less infected than regular sites.
Admins and designers who work on such sites are more likely, than those that work in more "innocent" areas, to be exposed to the lower end of human behaviour through using spammers and ropey affiliate schemes to draw in traffic. If you are aware of what nefarious things you do (or could do) and more importantly what your competition do or could do then you are going to be more clued up on how careful you need to be with site security.
Ignoring the lower end of human behaviour (there must be at least one or two porn sites out amongst the millions that don't spam/crack/what-ever to make an extra few $), to be successful financially a porn site need to be secure, otherwise people would just hack in and take the content for nothing. It is simply good business for them to be security concious, especially the smaller outfits/franchises that are run by a small team (where the designers/programmers/admins are more likely to be directly affected in the wage-slip if the site is hacked). Designers, programmers and admins working on a small and possible not very sensitive part or a much larger organisations output (like the vodafone example mentioned) may not be as directly aware of such issues. The "smartphones section" of their site, assuming this is a phone/contract sales area, is not likely to have cracking types trying to steal content. Now a site (or part there of) that is offering paid-for downloadable content I would expect to be "safer" than other areas for the same reason as a porn site: the content needs to be protected more than the content of a brochure page.
Another reddit poster showed the true way to hold an iPhone: http://i.imgur.com/h9UDd.png
Not sure what happened there, managed to post without a chunk of the comment... That should have been:
"If you think McDonald's undercuts your parental authority then you had no parental authority to start with, and as much as I dislike McD's I must say I'm pretty sure your fat kid isn't their fault."
If you think McDonald's undercuts your parental authority then you had no parental authority to start with, and as much .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtwMRnc_oU0&feature=fvsr
Depends what they mean by "traditional media" - I'd trust that Nigerian fellow that keeps emailing me to manage my finances before I trusted any output from the Murdoch empire.
It seems that they're dropping their only feature, adopting the early failures of Apple (cut & paste), and heading towards what most people dislike about the iPhone (single marketplace).
Perhaps they are not making enough profit for their liking from following the open route, and would like to try nickel-and-dime a new revenue stream out of phone users and the developers.
SMP will only bring you so far - i'll bet 8 VCPU VMs on Atoms will be beat by a 2 VCPU VM on a Core 2 Duo.
Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice. If your task is CPU intensive and can be easily separated into distinct tasks not overly chatty (i.e. cross VM latency is not going to be a major issue) and the host has gobs of RAM available, you are often better off having several VMs with one cVPU each than one VM with several vCPUs. This may be much less of a problem on a many-CPU monster like the 512 core unit being discussed than it is on 2/4/8-core boxes, but I expect the balance to still be in favour of multiple single-vCPU VMs in cases where the task can be efficiently split between them.
Apparently, no one bothered to check for a long time, though.
Or perhaps the people that did check just assumed that the genuine uploaders forgot to include/update the hashes so that the difference was due to the hash being for the previous (or earlier) version. Though in that case you'd expect the sort of person who would check official hashes would be the sort who would report the discrepancy upstream (or at least ask about it on an official forum).
I can't disagree with you on the "entitlement generation" part (I'm only a little older than the age range that you state, an I can see it in people just a few years my junior).
But in this particular case the "blame" lies less squarely with the impetuous youth. They expect unlimited data for 30/month because the advertising for the service strongly implies that this is what they can/will get. I know that the contract states "unlimited" refers to there being no limit to online time (unlike some old dial-up ISPs which imposed X hours/month due to having a limited number of lines to share around their customer base) and the adverts are very careful not to state otherwise, but they deliberately give the impression of unlimited data as strongly as they can without falling foul of relevant laws regarding false advertising.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html can be fun to try if you have some time to waste.
A trick I've used with "success" is to be very interested but need to nip out for a second. Something like "ooh yes, I've been looking for a new mobile phone deal, could you hold while I go turn the pans off in the kitchen?". Don't be too eager or they'll smell a rat. Once you have them waiting, nip off and do something else for a while. I've had cold callers wait for my return (according to my phone's call log) for ten minutes or more before now.
Want to get rid of them a little more quickly? Try answering with something like "Hello, you are through to the North Yorkshire Emergency Response Centre, what is your current location?" and role-play from there as much as is needed. They usually appologise and ring off in short order. If tey don't ramp it up with "this is an emergency number, you could be endangering lives by holding it open". Obviously don't do this on a line you get business calls on as you have to jump in before knowing who is calling for it to be convincing - my home landline only exists so I can get ADSL based internet down the line, so I know that any call I get down there is a junk call (everyone else calls my mobile).
It really is Apple's way or the highway...
And has been from the start. My tip: take the highway - you'll be better off in the long run.
Ah, thanks. I did a quick scan for typos but somehow completely missed that one. Your edited version does the trick, thanks.
So, Intel or ARM is still not decided, but that it will run Windows is? Guess that must be WinCE? But why not put Android on it?
Because Asus sold access to their soul to MS, probably in exchange for preferential pricing or safety from a patent or few, would be my guess. Hence "its better with Windows" being plastered on the promo sites for certain eee models last year.
I've just tried this with the latest NoScript in an otherwise default configuration, and it seems stop facebook itself from operating (which depending on your opinion of such things, may or may not be a bad result!).
And the backup feature works well if you have enough blank media handy or, as I've done twice (once as replacing my main desktop with a complete new build, and once just because something had seriously upset chunks of Windows for which a rebuild was the only long term fix) a spare chunk of drive on another machine on the network. Backup to a location that isn't about to be wiped, do your OS rebuild, then reinstall everything from that backup. You still need to separately backup your game saves and other status for most games though, so careful there if there is any progress you care about.
I've come to consider high ink costs as an environmental benefit. I know a number of people who are printing less and less as they've worked out what it is costing them, even in more reputable alternative inks (I say "more reputable" there as printer ink is definitely something you shouldn't buy the cheapest knock-offs of - they will knacker precision parts of the printer if you get a bad batch which will be particularly annoying if you have a model with a fixed multi-use head instead of one with a new head per cart).
Personally I long since switched completely to a laser (having for a short while used a B/W laser alongside a colour 'jet). You still pay too much for consumables on consumer grade models but get far better value for money than with ink, you don't waste many pages worth of toner/ink if you left the printer unused for three weeks so need several head-clean runs to get all the nozzles ungummed, output on paper that doesn't cost an arm and a leg is much much better for any output type from text to photos (particularly text), and for those few occasions where my laser doesn't quite cut it as I want a particularly vibrant photo I just use the local supermarket's photo printing machines which work out cheaper then running your own inkjet and produce better results too.
what do priests usually do?
Violate the bodies of choir boys, rather than those of the long dead.
Flamebait I know, but I have karma to burn.
Um what the hell is "standard resolution gaming" if not HD?
A lot of people consider "SD" gaming to be the last generation or few of console games: 640*480 or there abouts (maybe up to maximum DVD frame-buffer size of 720*576 (PAL) or 720*480 (NTSC)).
For TV/video "HD" is usually considered (by people in general I'm not talking about technical definitions here, or marketing definitions where something that can receive a signal at that resolution but downscales it to 320*240 can still be called "HD capable") to cover everything from 1280*720 upwards, so I'm guessing the same for games. At that rate you are part way right: most people probably play PC games on screens at resolutions 1280*1024 or higher, but you may well find a lot of them, particularly those who have a cheap GFX card or nothing more than a simple on-board 3D chipset) have the games set to 800*600 and have their monitor up-scale the output because their hardware won't play at higher resolutions without the frame rate dropping too low.
Round trip time for small packets (ICMP Ping) on my connection to the fastest service outside my ISP (latency wise) is between 26 and 29ms, much higher than the 0.07ms delay your "considering the wire only" calculation results in.
Many people see noticeably higher latencies than that simply because of line quality issues (causing the ADSL equipment to use interleaved modes, reducing packet loss at the expense of higher latency), line length from home to exchange in some cases, backbone topology (there are places in Yorkshire where data on BT's backbone goes up to Manchester before heading down to London before being handed off to their actual ISP which may involve another trip of measurable length unless the ISP just resells BT's service rather than having their own equipment and peering operation), or congestion due to bandwidth saturation (believe me, there are many ISPs who are far too oversold to expect any decent latency, even to relatively local sites, in an evening).
My gut feeling is that 30ms of lag would be fine for many players even on relatively fast paced games like most FPSs. Remember: this service isn't aimed at hard-code gamers who are, or claim to be, good enough to notice a small amount of extra lag, and WoW is fine for many people with a higher latency than that. But... if you are trying to play a fast response game (a fast FPS, or a not-too-easy driving game) the latency that many see on their ADSL connections would be at best irritating. Of course, not all the games are going to be those that need fast reactions - I think the success or not of the service will rest with other, slightly more sedate, games.