They say that the drives are certified, but as far as I'm concerned, if they don't last for 20+ years and go 10 times faster (which they don't) then they are not worth that price.
Are you sure that this certification process is all that was being paid for extra? Most enterprise sales, software or hardware, come with long support and maintenance agreements far in excess of anything a consumer product will ever been seen with and strict, harsh penalty carrying, SLAs for those agreements. 4-hour swap-out response times aren't cheap, nor is the staffing levels needed to guarantee short response times to many customers, and neither is insurance to underwrite the SLA's financial punishments if something drastic goes wrong (this essentially ends up being "act of god" cover if you have all the bases covered other how). OK, so the price you quote may still be OTT, but if that was the only price the corporation could get that ensured the "piece of mind" it required then that was the price it had to pay.
If it is a fully automated call, don't hang up - just put down the phone and let the machine keep talking as long as it wants to. It costs them to call me not the other way around.
If it is a real person, or it is one of those automated calls where you can get to a real person by pressing a button, play interested for a few seconds ("what a coincidence, I've my contract is up for renewal soon and I think I'm paying too much!") then ask if they mind you putting the phone down for a few seconds while you go take a pan off the boil in the kitchen. Then put the phone down and go off to do something else. Come back later and check your phone log to see how long the caller sat waiting for you at their cost. My record for this is 11-and-a-bit minutes.
I've actually been getting less nuisance calls since starting to play with them these ways, though that is probably just coincidence rather than causation.
I assume you are a guy with a comment like that. So, go to the department store. Find and buy a pink jacket/shirt and wear it for a month. When someone comments, or asks why you are wearing pink, reply that you like the colour. Then after a month, come back to me and tell me how comfortable you felt about doing it.
Oddly enough pink was once considered a masculine colour, being derived from red which was considered a masculine colour because it is a visually strong colour. What changed thins I don't know, but it makes the point that gender based colour preference is basically just indoctrination by society. Fashion. Nothing more.
The stereotype of women being far more concerned about bright shiny happy colours and such and men not caring seems to me to be one of those recursive attitudes - people behave that way because people think they should because other people behave that way, and the same in reverse (men not thinking that way (or trying to give that impression) because of what it might imply given the stereotype and their own prejudices). Circular thinking works because circular thinking works.
Most of the women I know only behave in a particularly girlie way (oooh pink! and ponies!) deliberately, as they find pandering to the stereotype has uses in certain circles, and the younger girls in my family do so because they are essentially brought up to by the TV, their family, & their friends and haven't developed their own mind on the matter yet.
Personally I don't like pink, wouldn't wear it, and generally think it looks right on other people either (even women, though to a lesser extent which shows I'm not beyond prejudice in that sense). Then again, I dislike teal almost as much. But what do I know, it is rare to see me ware anything other black or deep blue.
For instance if you never delete from a table there's no need to bother trying to vacuum it.
Not quite. Because of the way postgres operates (MVCC) UPDATEs will result in space appearing in table structures too. With an MVCC based DB nothing is updated in-place (actually, in any good DB nothing is updated in-place, but with MVCC this is more obviously implied by any good description of how things work with multiple distinct transactions present). When a row is updated new version is added and the old version is removed when the transaction is complete and no other transactions might refer to the old copy. This has significant advantages for some use cases and loads, and some disadvantages in other
The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control) isn't a great description though there is a bit more relevant information in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation.
I've not used postgres much in anger, so I'm no expert, but personally I thought that being able to manually schedule cleanup was a good idea performance wise.
Their only option is to abandon discs and go to pure digital delivery, to try and force people's consoles online.
Which is why DLC is becoming so common. It is a stop gap - everyone buys the original disc-installed game and those with their consoles hooked up to decent 'net connections can pay for the extra stuff too. As the console-connected-to-the-net becomes the norm full digital distribution (and, as you say, the little bit of IP protection that might come with it) will become the norm too.
The point is, a valid argument can be made to any investor that thinks they know more about the business than the game maker.
Making a valid argument and getting it listened too are two entirely different things though. If said investors have already been indoctrinated with the mantra of certain lobbying groups who need not be named here then they may just see that valid argument as naive or just plain wrong Remember: they probably spend a fair chunk of their work time listening to pitches and cost analyses that sound good but are actually complete hogswash so they'll screen most of it out as a reflex action. If that is the case then they are likely to take any cost analysis you put forward with a massive load of salt as it will disagree with what they've been told elsewhere and with what most other game shops/distributors are currently doing. Yes if you argument is correct, and your figures are water-tight and back it up, the best will see it from a distance, but the best are not the majority as many got where they are today by luck as much as judgement (mentioning no investors I may have met in the past in particular!).
Somebody please correct me, but does GameStop even accept PC-games? Their policy is (at least where I live) to only buy console games used. And can those even have additional DRM (on top of the normal "must have CD to play" one)?
DRM does not only apply to PC games.
It could be applied to consoles just the same now the consoles tend to have online storage (where registration keys and such can be stored) and network connections for the code to contact registration servers over.
(whether any console games do this yet I don't know, I'm not a console owner at all so have no first-hand point of reference, but it certainly could be done)
Yes, trying to kill the second hand market (both the friend handing over a game they no longer play and the selling-on-to-recoup-some-cash parts of that market) is the publisher's primary reason for DRM, there is another factor that many seem to forget about when it comes to piracy/DRM.
That factor is shareholders and other investors. The developers and publishers know that DRM essentially does nothing most of the time and is in fact sometimes a cost (if the time cost of wiring the DRM deep into the game, as some do, is greater than the small or zero amount not lost in sales), but do they want to spend an age explaining that to the mugs who pony up the venture capital.
When an investor asks what you are doing about people copying your games "there is nothing we can do" is not an answer that will go down well.
Excluding cases where the mere fact of the monopoly harms the market to the point of stifling progress because it creates cost-to-market problems that essentially block competition (which is essentially why BT in UK were ordered to open up their exchanges to other companies), which is a massive grey area criss-crossed with fine lines, I would draw the line at companies actively harming the business of their competition instead of just competing on their own merits. This is in fact what Intel were doing here.
Of course these things can be difficult to prove at times, and often get decided by who-ever has the better (or at least better connected) legal team....
Normally I would agree with you there, but I'm in a slightly less cynical mood today so I'll offer a more toned down view...
Standard operating practice is to use your dominant position as much as possible without abusing it to the detriment of the overall market. This from what I can tell is what Oracle (to pick one of the above examples) does - if they were unfairly treating companies who ever recommended/use other databases I'm sure wed know as Microsoft would be very quick to head to the courtroom about it and open source groups would be up in arms too.
Going above and beyond using your position, i.e. abusing it to the detriment to others, should not be seen as encouraged by the markets any more than someone accidentally dropping their wallet should be seen as encouragement to take the cash found there-in before handing it to "lost property". It is abuse of the monopoly that the EU is going after, not just use. MS were suspected of abusing their monopoly so were investigated and called to order (with little effect it would seem, but that is a whole different discussion), now so have Intel.
Of course the above depends greatly on the definition of the very fine (and arguable) line between use and abuse... Intel's behaviour in this case is definitely abuse, I dont' see how else it could be interpreted, but in other cases things are not so clear cut. Are some of Google's plans an abuse of their position or just use of it? What about some behaviour of (to be more general) the large chain supermarkets?
One final complication is that some monopolies, often those that stemmed from a company having spun off from a previously government owned project, being forced to *help* the competition or at least provide services to them at no cost greater then they would cross-share themselves in their internal economy. BT in the UK having to provide access to exchanges for other companies to install equipment, where possible, being one example. I don't see how this would be possible with Intel, but you can see the reasoning in some of the edicts given to Microsoft by the EU about making the installation of alternative browsers easy and obvious to the user.
Uh...this is more of a problem with the industry than just Sony.
Correct, but the discussion here is specifically about an incident regarding Sony who are one of my little pet peeves.
With a game that isn't even some a-list title.
To be honest I'm not all that bothered, though I might buy the game at some point - my inner child is interested.
I'm surprised you'd be so determined to work that hard to try to hurt Sony rather than devote your time towards something that might actually be productive.
I'm not planning to devote any time to it. If I see the game available in a way that bypasses Sony, I might buy it. If not, I probably won't. I'm not going searching.
Either you must really really hate Sony
Not so much hate, as don't trust them enough to let anything with their name on in my house or near any network I am responsible for. The whole rootkit thing, you see. That, and I was in the mood for a quick rant this morning (I find it a good idea to vent a little before going to the supermarket, life is safer for the general public that way...).
and with the amount of fervent hatred you must have, you might be able to get somewhere.
If you think that was hatred, you've not seen me in a proper mood!
I personally don't care enough to do more than have typed the above text, but if someone else cared enough to make the fuss I described then I would be perfectly happy to grab a bag of popcorn, put my feet up, and watch where it goes.
I can see why the developers are pissed off at this one.
People who wanted it on the PC platform in the EU will have two choices now: wait until Sony dictates they can join the party or get a crafty copy from someone state-side over them there h'interwebs.
The PAL/NTSC thing makes bugger all differece to people playing game on a PC so unless there were some local specific changes planned for the game (translations being the only likely one and that isn't a major draw as most of Europe, for instance, can speak English as well as many "natural" English speakers I could mention - at least well enough to enjoy a game in the language).
Even those (the majority I would guess) that do wait may be lost sales. By the time it does come out for the PC their excitement may have diminished either because the game picked up so-so reviews or simply because the next big thing is just around the corner and they are thinking about that instead. There are also people like me - I now won't be buying unless I find a way of not buying it through a route that aids Sony (which means getting a 2nd hand copy later or finding one from another distribution territory without paying extra through delivery/duty fees). Of course Sony will blame these lost sales on piracy, not on the fuckwittery that is last-minute third-party exclusives...
None of this is anything Sony will give a shit about. OK so as the distributor they will lose some money from the lost sales too, not just the developers and publishers, but that will be less important to them than the marketing potential of having an exclusive title for a time.
A quick suggestion for those in affected areas: write a quick letter to you local daily papers about how a foreign company is being allowed to stop people playing a game unless it is on their platform. Over here the Mail and the Sun love this sort of shit. Let us see if we can't get some bad press for Sony out of this if nothing else. Drop a note to your local rabidly right-wing MPs (including, but not limited to ranty idiots like the BNP) too - people bother MPs for far more stupid things than this (and to be frank the right-wing nut-jobs aren't doing anything useful with their time otherwise anyway) and maybe any resulting noise will encourage the competition commission to peruse the situation (OK, the CC do have better things to be doing with their time so maybe not).
You'll need a 64-bit OS to see the extra RAM in your virtual hosts. (I think. As stated, you can run a 64-bit guest on a 32-bit host if you have hardware virtualization acceleration, but I assume you still need a 64-bit OS to have the guests see all the RAM.)
Not quite. You need a 64-bit kernel to use RAM above 4Gb (sometimes above 3.25Gb - it depends on your hardware and OS). Though in Windows this does mean you need a complete 64-bit system, with Linux you can run a 32-bit userspace on a 64-bit kernel. No individual process (so no individual virtual machine in most cases
will be able to use more then 3Gb but over-all you can use the lot (and any not used the host OS will use for cache/buffers as needed).
I run my home server this way, as when I built it the CPU was not 64-bit. A Motherboard+CPU+RAM upgrade later I had 64-bitness and 4Gb RAM of which 3.5Gb was seen - so I moved to a 64-bit kernel to use the other 0.5 (as easy as "aptitude install [name-of-64-bit-kernel-image-package]" under Debian/Etch) but didn't fancy messing around converting my userland setup.
When I next upgrade the OS (to Debian/Lenny, in the next few months) I'm going to do a fresh install full 64-bit, but until then the this arrangement seems to work just fine. The machine now has 6Gb RAM (a recent upgrade as things were getting crowded at times and RAM is cheap), shared between the host and a couple of permanent VMs (currently 32-bit) and occasionally some small other VMs (also 32-bit).
Though to be honest, if you are installing Linux as your base OS, there is no reason to hold yourself at 32-bit - I am only still there due to the history of the rig.
Where are the corresponding crimes? If a third of the used hard drives on the market really contain such detailed personal or business information, wouldn't you think that at least one group of criminals would be buying as many of these drives as possible?
My gues is that the value of data on an average drive sourced that way is too low to be worth the average outlay and effort, mainly because the information is out of date (you can have all my bank details from a couple of years ago if you like, it'll get you nowhere as I've changed banks for *everything* since then) or incomplete (i.e. you need some info the user noted on paper and not on the drive as well as the info on the drive).
Now if the criminals knew with any certainty that the drives being bought were from a certain source and/or had been used up to a particular time, then it might be worth their time and expense to get and scan them. Otherwise they would get better RoI on time spent creating worms/trojans/viruses to collect the data remotely somehow than buying and analysing second hand drives.
Because there is nothing that Linux CAN do that Windows can't do.
In general, I might agree there. In a small amount of RAM I wouldn't. But leaving that aside: there is a cost difference. If the two OSs can both do the same on the same hardware then why pay for one when you can have the other gratis? And if they can't do the same on lower end hardware and you don't want to buy higher-end hardware then, well, that is the whole point of this discussion...
Photo editing, music editing, web surfing, reading email... that's what people buy a simple netbook for.
I'll not disagree there, though I'd suggest that photo and music editing are minority uses. Mail, web and basic office documents is what I would pick out as the most common use cases.
If you think that the average user gives a flying fuck about hardened kernels, the ability to restart GUIs, or anything like that -- you're an idiot.
I do not expect man-in-the-street users to care about such things. If you reread my post you'll notice a distinct lack of any mention of any such things, so I really don't know why you chose to bring them up (other than to rant pointlessly).
People want to be able to turn on their computer, find some neat applications (of which there are PLENTY in the Windows space) and do the aforementioned tasks.
I would disagree that this is the case - it certainly isn't how netbooks are marketed or how people I know find them useful. Most people just want a decent browser and acceptable office suit (the definition of "acceptable" varying significantly between users) and, if they don't exclusively use web based mail, an email client. Most "great new neat applications" that people are likely to find are probably web based and therefor (bad site design issues aside) equally applicable to both operating systems.
Ubuntu which is the 'prettiest' is still not as pretty or easy to use as Windows 7
I woudl say Ubuntu is more than pretty enough for the task, but is that really relevant anyway? On a small screen I don't want bars full of pretty taking up screen space that my browser or word processor could make better use of. On a netbook screen, with any OS, you'll want your apps to have as much of the limited screen space as they can get without prettiness getting in the way or flashy animations drawing extra battery power.
Any time you tell a user that a company needs to "write a driver" or "drop to the terminal" to do XYZ
A user can browse/mail/office on Ubuntu (or many other distros, but Ubuntu is the best geared up for it at the moment) on a netbook quite happily, connecting to available wired or wireless networks, transferring documents by mail or using USB drives, editing graphics, text files, and such if they need to too, all without touching a terminal or even knowing that such a thing exists. I've not tried printing from mine so maybe there are driver issues there, but I've not spotted potential hassle elsewhere so far.
Your view of Linux seems as biased (in reverse) as the "Linux fanboys" of which you speak, and your views on netbook use imply to me that what you need/want is a desktop replacement notebook, not a netbook.
I know I'm feeding a troll here but... Your comparison back at you: if Windows 7 can do the things I (and people like me) want as well as the other solution can, but costs more and needs a more powerful netbook than I would otherwise need, why would you chose Windows?
Your comments on Windows and AV pricing are valid but with respect to just using OO.o instead of MSOffice on Windows: why bother paying for Windows if you are just going to use OO.o anyway?
Unless, of course, you are locked to Windows by other applications that you need professionally or personally, but I would wager that many things that lock people to Windows aren't suitable for a NetBook use anyway (photoshop and many games are the two examples that spring to mind) so you'll be disappointed trying to run them on any OS on such a machine. The only two things I can think of that would be suitable on a netbook and might lock you to Windows are some finance/tax software and web-based apps that are not sufficiently browser agnostic for use in a non-Windows environment.
You've got it a little off there. Many people won't need 2GB RAM. My AA1 came with 512MB RAM and an 8Gb SSD (I went SSD mainly for the no-moving-parts thing, and this particular model was keenly priced at the time (and almost ideal for my intended uses)). Before installing UNR I voided my warranty by putting an extra 1Gb RAM in (taking it to the maximum on these models, 1.5Gb).
Using OO.o with small documents or running Firefox with a few tabs open, it doesn't use more then the 512Mb is came with. Even with a couple of docs open in OO.o AND firefox running with a few windows and tabs (one of which browsing the reasonably heavy Zimbra web client) it doesn't use much more than 512Mb if you discount buffers/cache. I was pleasantly surprised by this having not used Linux in a "desktop" environment for some time - I even considered, for a few seconds, taking the extra RAM back out.
So for what a netbook is intended for, 512Mb is actually enough if you run Ubuntu and have a bit of swap space just-in-case. 1Gb should be enough for most people even with no swap (it would be enough for me at the moment).
Extra RAM is handy though if, like me, you use your netbook as a mini-laptop - so really you need to know what you will be using the machine for before you decide how much RAM to chuck in. It avoids swapping outside of basic use cases and can be made use of in other ways: I keep/tmp and my browser cache in there (I very rarely shut down instead of suspending, so losing the cache on reboot is not an issue).
One thing that many people ignore when adding RAM, which will affect some users significantly (though some not so), is that the extra DIMM will consume battery power, reducing measurably the amount of useful time you have between battery charges. This is mitigated somewhat in use if you would otherwise be using swap space, but not entirely unless you'd be swapping lots. The RAM will draw extra juice even when in a suspended state (as the RAM needs to be kept refreshed in this state using power from the battery).
So you're saying that the people who are most likely to be infected will click it? I see the problem clearly now!
Yes, but their machines are so full of shite that removing this one chunk bot code will not really help the overall issue at all - something will immediately replace it. So your removal code gets rid of this bit of malware, or the user downloads a fixer and runs it, but they aren't going to do anything more than that (such as rebuild the whole machine and make sure it remains properly protected, and change their behaviour/education so they know how to reduce future infection risks) so their machine is still free to be infected by something else in the next few minutes.
The *only* way to make many of these people to properly pay attention to the problem, is to break their setups to the point where they *have* to do something and that will make you part of the problem. What if you disable the OS of the computer of some litigious fuckwit? - they won't care what was on the machine in the first place, you will be their target. What if you disable a machine in a hospital? Or a school? - for god sake did you not think of the children? Or a machine in some government agency, your country's or some others? - you'd be buggered then.
Vigilante intervention will not help is basically what I'm saying, though I must admit that I'm not sure I know anything that will help. The only thing I can think of is passing on the responsibility (i.e. making ISP cut people off if their machines communicate with known bot C&C points until they give sufficient assurance that they've gained a clue) but that would be nigh on impossible to implement and police in one locality never mind globally.
Many would ignore such a message thinking it is yet another advertising scam. Those that would blindly follow the instructions are the ones who have so much crap on the machine from blindly following messages like this ("you may be infected, install SpamKillaBot now!!!!") in the first place that removing just one worm from their machine.
The only way to make most listen and do something about their PC security is to actually break something, and that definitely would be a moral no-no. Even then, some would just revert their machine back to the rescue image, not bother with the WindowsUpdates just yet because it is going to take ages and all they want to do right now is quickyl check email, and it starts all over again.
"it will be interesting to see how the operating system sells"
That edition won't sell on the main consumer markets, at least not in the richer countries such as the US and EU, and isn't intended to. My guess is that it will mainly be targeted as a cheap option for OEMs to include on low spec devices such as "netbooks" where most non-techie users will run just a web browser most of the time, perhaps a web browser and a basic word processor or maybe a simple game.
I'm guessing that multiple instances of a web browser will count as a single application, rather than each process counting, otherwise Firefox (which always runs a single process for all windows and tabs) would have an advantage over IE which (certainly IE6 and IE7 under XP, though for all I currently know this may differ for IE8 on Windows 7) sometimes starts new processes for new windows depending how it is launched
It will also be targeted at OEMs and end users in poorer countries too no doubt, so they don't have to cut the price of the other editions so much to get legitimate sales. It may be sold for educational uses too (your average kid in a classroom isn't going to be expected to be running many programs at once) and the makers of kiosk-type machines (cash registers, tourist attraction info stations,...) where there is usually only ever one program running.
OK, let's here it: why is user scripting a security hole?
With early versions of GreaseMonkey, the way the user scripts were applied to pages would allow the page to affect easily the GM in ways that could lead to cross-site attack vectors.
That is why GM had a fairly complete redesign around the middle of 2005, remove the issue(s) that affected all scripts, but individual scripts can still be vulnerable depending on their design - hence you should be careful not to let a script apply globally for security reasons as well as efficiency ones. For a decent description of the problems with earlier GM versions and problems that you can still create for yourself in the latest versions, this article does a decent job.
The other major problem with user scripting is using scripts from other sources without performing an exhaustive code review first. How do you know that the script you have just enabled isn't subject to one of the flaws? How do you know it isn't intentionally malicious? There have been several cases of this in the past, hence the warning message before you add a script to GM in recent versions and the warning message that appeared on userscipts.org for some time (as malicious scripts were found in their archive).
Like many things, user scripting isn't a problem if both programmers and users are educated, careful and care. There lies the problem.
I use GM myself, with scripts of my own devising or those from elsewhere that I have sufficiently reviewed, but I would not recommend it (or equivalents) to the general populous as they do not need any further ways to dig themselves into a malware riddled hole.
I don't know how WotC work, but I know that it was said of Games Workshop (in the UK) a number of years ago that if shops continued selling old ranges of books/miniatures/anything from that company after new stuff was released, they would find it very difficult to get hold of new stuff to sell because they would not be on the list of "preferred distributors" who got first pick when availability was limited (artificially or due to physical production issues). I'm told that a local model shop (now long since closed down) stopped stocking any of their stuff for that reason.
Of course this is all hear-say, if it did happen that way it was well over a decade ago and may well have changed now, and doesn't apply to the company in question, but that sort of behaviour does still happen often in retail sectors despite the questionable legality of such "don't sell X and we'll help you with selling Y" inducement in many territories, and would explain the abrupt stock changes you have seen.
Of course a less tin-foil-hat interpretation is that the physical stores don't want to give shelf & warehouse space to the older material because they doubt it will sell well enough and therefore the space would be better used for some other product(s) such as the new editions.
In either case, the old stock would have been flogged to a remaindered stock handler rather than sent back to the manufacturer.
A note to all budding burglers: there is a village full of people who have so much good stuff worth having that they were willing to chase Google out of town to stop it being seen, and it is presumably so brazenly displayed that it can be seen and assessed from the street. Some good easy pickings there...
I'm pretty sure the contracts you sign mention the lack of support for tethering.
They definitely do, and I have made sure that I've read the appropriate parts of my agreement (though parts of that state that they can essentially change it when-ever they like...), but that doesn't make the way things are sold right. They loudly sell "unlimited this" and "unrestricted that" not "unlimited except limits laid down in clause 523 of your contract" or "unrestricted as long as you stick to using the facility in a restricted number of ways".
I guess it's too hard for operators to enable/disable tethering remotely depending on billing plan
They would not need to if things were more honestly sold though. If I pay for XXMb of Internet access via my phone, I expect to be able to use that much Internet access via my phone and connecting laptop to the phone counts (in my mind) as accessing the Internet via my phone. But as I said above, none of them will become more honest because it would be commercial suicide - the unwashed masses will see the less honest as offering a better deal even though it is probably the same deal (or worse) with extra spin added, because the unwashed masses won't even think to look into the small print until they hit a problem by which time the contract is signed and they are stuck.
Google's position is not really in their control on this one though. If they allow a tethering application into the default marketplace then the network operators will never offer Android based phones because they don't want their users to have easy access to the facility.
Slashdot Mirror
They say that the drives are certified, but as far as I'm concerned, if they don't last for 20+ years and go 10 times faster (which they don't) then they are not worth that price.
Are you sure that this certification process is all that was being paid for extra? Most enterprise sales, software or hardware, come with long support and maintenance agreements far in excess of anything a consumer product will ever been seen with and strict, harsh penalty carrying, SLAs for those agreements. 4-hour swap-out response times aren't cheap, nor is the staffing levels needed to guarantee short response times to many customers, and neither is insurance to underwrite the SLA's financial punishments if something drastic goes wrong (this essentially ends up being "act of god" cover if you have all the bases covered other how). OK, so the price you quote may still be OTT, but if that was the only price the corporation could get that ensured the "piece of mind" it required then that was the price it had to pay.
Play with them.
If it is a fully automated call, don't hang up - just put down the phone and let the machine keep talking as long as it wants to. It costs them to call me not the other way around.
If it is a real person, or it is one of those automated calls where you can get to a real person by pressing a button, play interested for a few seconds ("what a coincidence, I've my contract is up for renewal soon and I think I'm paying too much!") then ask if they mind you putting the phone down for a few seconds while you go take a pan off the boil in the kitchen. Then put the phone down and go off to do something else. Come back later and check your phone log to see how long the caller sat waiting for you at their cost. My record for this is 11-and-a-bit minutes.
Or for more interactive fun and games, try play them at their own game: http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
I've actually been getting less nuisance calls since starting to play with them these ways, though that is probably just coincidence rather than causation.
I assume you are a guy with a comment like that. So, go to the department store. Find and buy a pink jacket/shirt and wear it for a month. When someone comments, or asks why you are wearing pink, reply that you like the colour. Then after a month, come back to me and tell me how comfortable you felt about doing it.
Oddly enough pink was once considered a masculine colour, being derived from red which was considered a masculine colour because it is a visually strong colour. What changed thins I don't know, but it makes the point that gender based colour preference is basically just indoctrination by society. Fashion. Nothing more.
The stereotype of women being far more concerned about bright shiny happy colours and such and men not caring seems to me to be one of those recursive attitudes - people behave that way because people think they should because other people behave that way, and the same in reverse (men not thinking that way (or trying to give that impression) because of what it might imply given the stereotype and their own prejudices). Circular thinking works because circular thinking works.
Most of the women I know only behave in a particularly girlie way (oooh pink! and ponies!) deliberately, as they find pandering to the stereotype has uses in certain circles, and the younger girls in my family do so because they are essentially brought up to by the TV, their family, & their friends and haven't developed their own mind on the matter yet.
Personally I don't like pink, wouldn't wear it, and generally think it looks right on other people either (even women, though to a lesser extent which shows I'm not beyond prejudice in that sense). Then again, I dislike teal almost as much. But what do I know, it is rare to see me ware anything other black or deep blue.
For instance if you never delete from a table there's no need to bother trying to vacuum it.
Not quite. Because of the way postgres operates (MVCC) UPDATEs will result in space appearing in table structures too. With an MVCC based DB nothing is updated in-place (actually, in any good DB nothing is updated in-place, but with MVCC this is more obviously implied by any good description of how things work with multiple distinct transactions present). When a row is updated new version is added and the old version is removed when the transaction is complete and no other transactions might refer to the old copy. This has significant advantages for some use cases and loads, and some disadvantages in other
The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control) isn't a great description though there is a bit more relevant information in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation.
I've not used postgres much in anger, so I'm no expert, but personally I thought that being able to manually schedule cleanup was a good idea performance wise.
Their only option is to abandon discs and go to pure digital delivery, to try and force people's consoles online.
Which is why DLC is becoming so common. It is a stop gap - everyone buys the original disc-installed game and those with their consoles hooked up to decent 'net connections can pay for the extra stuff too. As the console-connected-to-the-net becomes the norm full digital distribution (and, as you say, the little bit of IP protection that might come with it) will become the norm too.
The point is, a valid argument can be made to any investor that thinks they know more about the business than the game maker.
Making a valid argument and getting it listened too are two entirely different things though. If said investors have already been indoctrinated with the mantra of certain lobbying groups who need not be named here then they may just see that valid argument as naive or just plain wrong Remember: they probably spend a fair chunk of their work time listening to pitches and cost analyses that sound good but are actually complete hogswash so they'll screen most of it out as a reflex action. If that is the case then they are likely to take any cost analysis you put forward with a massive load of salt as it will disagree with what they've been told elsewhere and with what most other game shops/distributors are currently doing. Yes if you argument is correct, and your figures are water-tight and back it up, the best will see it from a distance, but the best are not the majority as many got where they are today by luck as much as judgement (mentioning no investors I may have met in the past in particular!).
Somebody please correct me, but does GameStop even accept PC-games? Their policy is (at least where I live) to only buy console games used. And can those even have additional DRM (on top of the normal "must have CD to play" one)?
DRM does not only apply to PC games.
It could be applied to consoles just the same now the consoles tend to have online storage (where registration keys and such can be stored) and network connections for the code to contact registration servers over.
(whether any console games do this yet I don't know, I'm not a console owner at all so have no first-hand point of reference, but it certainly could be done)
Yes, trying to kill the second hand market (both the friend handing over a game they no longer play and the selling-on-to-recoup-some-cash parts of that market) is the publisher's primary reason for DRM, there is another factor that many seem to forget about when it comes to piracy/DRM.
That factor is shareholders and other investors. The developers and publishers know that DRM essentially does nothing most of the time and is in fact sometimes a cost (if the time cost of wiring the DRM deep into the game, as some do, is greater than the small or zero amount not lost in sales), but do they want to spend an age explaining that to the mugs who pony up the venture capital.
When an investor asks what you are doing about people copying your games "there is nothing we can do" is not an answer that will go down well.
Where is the line?
Excluding cases where the mere fact of the monopoly harms the market to the point of stifling progress because it creates cost-to-market problems that essentially block competition (which is essentially why BT in UK were ordered to open up their exchanges to other companies), which is a massive grey area criss-crossed with fine lines, I would draw the line at companies actively harming the business of their competition instead of just competing on their own merits. This is in fact what Intel were doing here.
Of course these things can be difficult to prove at times, and often get decided by who-ever has the better (or at least better connected) legal team....
Normally I would agree with you there, but I'm in a slightly less cynical mood today so I'll offer a more toned down view...
Standard operating practice is to use your dominant position as much as possible without abusing it to the detriment of the overall market. This from what I can tell is what Oracle (to pick one of the above examples) does - if they were unfairly treating companies who ever recommended/use other databases I'm sure wed know as Microsoft would be very quick to head to the courtroom about it and open source groups would be up in arms too.
Going above and beyond using your position, i.e. abusing it to the detriment to others, should not be seen as encouraged by the markets any more than someone accidentally dropping their wallet should be seen as encouragement to take the cash found there-in before handing it to "lost property". It is abuse of the monopoly that the EU is going after, not just use. MS were suspected of abusing their monopoly so were investigated and called to order (with little effect it would seem, but that is a whole different discussion), now so have Intel.
Of course the above depends greatly on the definition of the very fine (and arguable) line between use and abuse... Intel's behaviour in this case is definitely abuse, I dont' see how else it could be interpreted, but in other cases things are not so clear cut. Are some of Google's plans an abuse of their position or just use of it? What about some behaviour of (to be more general) the large chain supermarkets?
One final complication is that some monopolies, often those that stemmed from a company having spun off from a previously government owned project, being forced to *help* the competition or at least provide services to them at no cost greater then they would cross-share themselves in their internal economy. BT in the UK having to provide access to exchanges for other companies to install equipment, where possible, being one example. I don't see how this would be possible with Intel, but you can see the reasoning in some of the edicts given to Microsoft by the EU about making the installation of alternative browsers easy and obvious to the user.
Uh...this is more of a problem with the industry than just Sony.
Correct, but the discussion here is specifically about an incident regarding Sony who are one of my little pet peeves.
With a game that isn't even some a-list title.
To be honest I'm not all that bothered, though I might buy the game at some point - my inner child is interested.
I'm surprised you'd be so determined to work that hard to try to hurt Sony rather than devote your time towards something that might actually be productive.
I'm not planning to devote any time to it. If I see the game available in a way that bypasses Sony, I might buy it. If not, I probably won't. I'm not going searching.
Either you must really really hate Sony
Not so much hate, as don't trust them enough to let anything with their name on in my house or near any network I am responsible for. The whole rootkit thing, you see. That, and I was in the mood for a quick rant this morning (I find it a good idea to vent a little before going to the supermarket, life is safer for the general public that way...).
and with the amount of fervent hatred you must have, you might be able to get somewhere.
If you think that was hatred, you've not seen me in a proper mood!
I personally don't care enough to do more than have typed the above text, but if someone else cared enough to make the fuss I described then I would be perfectly happy to grab a bag of popcorn, put my feet up, and watch where it goes.
I can see why the developers are pissed off at this one.
People who wanted it on the PC platform in the EU will have two choices now: wait until Sony dictates they can join the party or get a crafty copy from someone state-side over them there h'interwebs.
The PAL/NTSC thing makes bugger all differece to people playing game on a PC so unless there were some local specific changes planned for the game (translations being the only likely one and that isn't a major draw as most of Europe, for instance, can speak English as well as many "natural" English speakers I could mention - at least well enough to enjoy a game in the language).
Even those (the majority I would guess) that do wait may be lost sales. By the time it does come out for the PC their excitement may have diminished either because the game picked up so-so reviews or simply because the next big thing is just around the corner and they are thinking about that instead. There are also people like me - I now won't be buying unless I find a way of not buying it through a route that aids Sony (which means getting a 2nd hand copy later or finding one from another distribution territory without paying extra through delivery/duty fees). Of course Sony will blame these lost sales on piracy, not on the fuckwittery that is last-minute third-party exclusives...
None of this is anything Sony will give a shit about. OK so as the distributor they will lose some money from the lost sales too, not just the developers and publishers, but that will be less important to them than the marketing potential of having an exclusive title for a time.
A quick suggestion for those in affected areas: write a quick letter to you local daily papers about how a foreign company is being allowed to stop people playing a game unless it is on their platform. Over here the Mail and the Sun love this sort of shit. Let us see if we can't get some bad press for Sony out of this if nothing else. Drop a note to your local rabidly right-wing MPs (including, but not limited to ranty idiots like the BNP) too - people bother MPs for far more stupid things than this (and to be frank the right-wing nut-jobs aren't doing anything useful with their time otherwise anyway) and maybe any resulting noise will encourage the competition commission to peruse the situation (OK, the CC do have better things to be doing with their time so maybe not).
You'll need a 64-bit OS to see the extra RAM in your virtual hosts. (I think. As stated, you can run a 64-bit guest on a 32-bit host if you have hardware virtualization acceleration, but I assume you still need a 64-bit OS to have the guests see all the RAM.)
Not quite. You need a 64-bit kernel to use RAM above 4Gb (sometimes above 3.25Gb - it depends on your hardware and OS). Though in Windows this does mean you need a complete 64-bit system, with Linux you can run a 32-bit userspace on a 64-bit kernel. No individual process (so no individual virtual machine in most cases
will be able to use more then 3Gb but over-all you can use the lot (and any not used the host OS will use for cache/buffers as needed).
I run my home server this way, as when I built it the CPU was not 64-bit. A Motherboard+CPU+RAM upgrade later I had 64-bitness and 4Gb RAM of which 3.5Gb was seen - so I moved to a 64-bit kernel to use the other 0.5 (as easy as "aptitude install [name-of-64-bit-kernel-image-package]" under Debian/Etch) but didn't fancy messing around converting my userland setup.
When I next upgrade the OS (to Debian/Lenny, in the next few months) I'm going to do a fresh install full 64-bit, but until then the this arrangement seems to work just fine. The machine now has 6Gb RAM (a recent upgrade as things were getting crowded at times and RAM is cheap), shared between the host and a couple of permanent VMs (currently 32-bit) and occasionally some small other VMs (also 32-bit).
Though to be honest, if you are installing Linux as your base OS, there is no reason to hold yourself at 32-bit - I am only still there due to the history of the rig.
Where are the corresponding crimes? If a third of the used hard drives on the market really contain such detailed personal or business information, wouldn't you think that at least one group of criminals would be buying as many of these drives as possible?
My gues is that the value of data on an average drive sourced that way is too low to be worth the average outlay and effort, mainly because the information is out of date (you can have all my bank details from a couple of years ago if you like, it'll get you nowhere as I've changed banks for *everything* since then) or incomplete (i.e. you need some info the user noted on paper and not on the drive as well as the info on the drive).
Now if the criminals knew with any certainty that the drives being bought were from a certain source and/or had been used up to a particular time, then it might be worth their time and expense to get and scan them. Otherwise they would get better RoI on time spent creating worms/trojans/viruses to collect the data remotely somehow than buying and analysing second hand drives.
Because there is nothing that Linux CAN do that Windows can't do.
In general, I might agree there. In a small amount of RAM I wouldn't. But leaving that aside: there is a cost difference. If the two OSs can both do the same on the same hardware then why pay for one when you can have the other gratis? And if they can't do the same on lower end hardware and you don't want to buy higher-end hardware then, well, that is the whole point of this discussion...
Photo editing, music editing, web surfing, reading email... that's what people buy a simple netbook for.
I'll not disagree there, though I'd suggest that photo and music editing are minority uses. Mail, web and basic office documents is what I would pick out as the most common use cases.
If you think that the average user gives a flying fuck about hardened kernels, the ability to restart GUIs, or anything like that -- you're an idiot.
I do not expect man-in-the-street users to care about such things. If you reread my post you'll notice a distinct lack of any mention of any such things, so I really don't know why you chose to bring them up (other than to rant pointlessly).
People want to be able to turn on their computer, find some neat applications (of which there are PLENTY in the Windows space) and do the aforementioned tasks.
I would disagree that this is the case - it certainly isn't how netbooks are marketed or how people I know find them useful. Most people just want a decent browser and acceptable office suit (the definition of "acceptable" varying significantly between users) and, if they don't exclusively use web based mail, an email client. Most "great new neat applications" that people are likely to find are probably web based and therefor (bad site design issues aside) equally applicable to both operating systems.
Ubuntu which is the 'prettiest' is still not as pretty or easy to use as Windows 7
I woudl say Ubuntu is more than pretty enough for the task, but is that really relevant anyway? On a small screen I don't want bars full of pretty taking up screen space that my browser or word processor could make better use of. On a netbook screen, with any OS, you'll want your apps to have as much of the limited screen space as they can get without prettiness getting in the way or flashy animations drawing extra battery power.
Any time you tell a user that a company needs to "write a driver" or "drop to the terminal" to do XYZ
A user can browse/mail/office on Ubuntu (or many other distros, but Ubuntu is the best geared up for it at the moment) on a netbook quite happily, connecting to available wired or wireless networks, transferring documents by mail or using USB drives, editing graphics, text files, and such if they need to too, all without touching a terminal or even knowing that such a thing exists. I've not tried printing from mine so maybe there are driver issues there, but I've not spotted potential hassle elsewhere so far.
Your view of Linux seems as biased (in reverse) as the "Linux fanboys" of which you speak, and your views on netbook use imply to me that what you need/want is a desktop replacement notebook, not a netbook.
I know I'm feeding a troll here but... Your comparison back at you: if Windows 7 can do the things I (and people like me) want as well as the other solution can, but costs more and needs a more powerful netbook than I would otherwise need, why would you chose Windows?
Your comments on Windows and AV pricing are valid but with respect to just using OO.o instead of MSOffice on Windows: why bother paying for Windows if you are just going to use OO.o anyway?
Unless, of course, you are locked to Windows by other applications that you need professionally or personally, but I would wager that many things that lock people to Windows aren't suitable for a NetBook use anyway (photoshop and many games are the two examples that spring to mind) so you'll be disappointed trying to run them on any OS on such a machine. The only two things I can think of that would be suitable on a netbook and might lock you to Windows are some finance/tax software and web-based apps that are not sufficiently browser agnostic for use in a non-Windows environment.
You've got it a little off there. Many people won't need 2GB RAM. My AA1 came with 512MB RAM and an 8Gb SSD (I went SSD mainly for the no-moving-parts thing, and this particular model was keenly priced at the time (and almost ideal for my intended uses)). Before installing UNR I voided my warranty by putting an extra 1Gb RAM in (taking it to the maximum on these models, 1.5Gb).
Using OO.o with small documents or running Firefox with a few tabs open, it doesn't use more then the 512Mb is came with. Even with a couple of docs open in OO.o AND firefox running with a few windows and tabs (one of which browsing the reasonably heavy Zimbra web client) it doesn't use much more than 512Mb if you discount buffers/cache. I was pleasantly surprised by this having not used Linux in a "desktop" environment for some time - I even considered, for a few seconds, taking the extra RAM back out.
So for what a netbook is intended for, 512Mb is actually enough if you run Ubuntu and have a bit of swap space just-in-case. 1Gb should be enough for most people even with no swap (it would be enough for me at the moment).
Extra RAM is handy though if, like me, you use your netbook as a mini-laptop - so really you need to know what you will be using the machine for before you decide how much RAM to chuck in. It avoids swapping outside of basic use cases and can be made use of in other ways: I keep /tmp and my browser cache in there (I very rarely shut down instead of suspending, so losing the cache on reboot is not an issue).
One thing that many people ignore when adding RAM, which will affect some users significantly (though some not so), is that the extra DIMM will consume battery power, reducing measurably the amount of useful time you have between battery charges. This is mitigated somewhat in use if you would otherwise be using swap space, but not entirely unless you'd be swapping lots. The RAM will draw extra juice even when in a suspended state (as the RAM needs to be kept refreshed in this state using power from the battery).
So you're saying that the people who are most likely to be infected will click it? I see the problem clearly now!
Yes, but their machines are so full of shite that removing this one chunk bot code will not really help the overall issue at all - something will immediately replace it. So your removal code gets rid of this bit of malware, or the user downloads a fixer and runs it, but they aren't going to do anything more than that (such as rebuild the whole machine and make sure it remains properly protected, and change their behaviour/education so they know how to reduce future infection risks) so their machine is still free to be infected by something else in the next few minutes.
The *only* way to make many of these people to properly pay attention to the problem, is to break their setups to the point where they *have* to do something and that will make you part of the problem. What if you disable the OS of the computer of some litigious fuckwit? - they won't care what was on the machine in the first place, you will be their target. What if you disable a machine in a hospital? Or a school? - for god sake did you not think of the children? Or a machine in some government agency, your country's or some others? - you'd be buggered then.
Vigilante intervention will not help is basically what I'm saying, though I must admit that I'm not sure I know anything that will help. The only thing I can think of is passing on the responsibility (i.e. making ISP cut people off if their machines communicate with known bot C&C points until they give sufficient assurance that they've gained a clue) but that would be nigh on impossible to implement and police in one locality never mind globally.
Many would ignore such a message thinking it is yet another advertising scam. Those that would blindly follow the instructions are the ones who have so much crap on the machine from blindly following messages like this ("you may be infected, install SpamKillaBot now!!!!") in the first place that removing just one worm from their machine.
The only way to make most listen and do something about their PC security is to actually break something, and that definitely would be a moral no-no. Even then, some would just revert their machine back to the rescue image, not bother with the WindowsUpdates just yet because it is going to take ages and all they want to do right now is quickyl check email, and it starts all over again.
"it will be interesting to see how the operating system sells"
That edition won't sell on the main consumer markets, at least not in the richer countries such as the US and EU, and isn't intended to. My guess is that it will mainly be targeted as a cheap option for OEMs to include on low spec devices such as "netbooks" where most non-techie users will run just a web browser most of the time, perhaps a web browser and a basic word processor or maybe a simple game.
I'm guessing that multiple instances of a web browser will count as a single application, rather than each process counting, otherwise Firefox (which always runs a single process for all windows and tabs) would have an advantage over IE which (certainly IE6 and IE7 under XP, though for all I currently know this may differ for IE8 on Windows 7) sometimes starts new processes for new windows depending how it is launched
It will also be targeted at OEMs and end users in poorer countries too no doubt, so they don't have to cut the price of the other editions so much to get legitimate sales. It may be sold for educational uses too (your average kid in a classroom isn't going to be expected to be running many programs at once) and the makers of kiosk-type machines (cash registers, tourist attraction info stations, ...) where there is usually only ever one program running.
OK, let's here it: why is user scripting a security hole?
With early versions of GreaseMonkey, the way the user scripts were applied to pages would allow the page to affect easily the GM in ways that could lead to cross-site attack vectors.
That is why GM had a fairly complete redesign around the middle of 2005, remove the issue(s) that affected all scripts, but individual scripts can still be vulnerable depending on their design - hence you should be careful not to let a script apply globally for security reasons as well as efficiency ones. For a decent description of the problems with earlier GM versions and problems that you can still create for yourself in the latest versions, this article does a decent job.
The other major problem with user scripting is using scripts from other sources without performing an exhaustive code review first. How do you know that the script you have just enabled isn't subject to one of the flaws? How do you know it isn't intentionally malicious? There have been several cases of this in the past, hence the warning message before you add a script to GM in recent versions and the warning message that appeared on userscipts.org for some time (as malicious scripts were found in their archive).
Like many things, user scripting isn't a problem if both programmers and users are educated, careful and care. There lies the problem.
I use GM myself, with scripts of my own devising or those from elsewhere that I have sufficiently reviewed, but I would not recommend it (or equivalents) to the general populous as they do not need any further ways to dig themselves into a malware riddled hole.
Note to mods: the above post isn't a troll, it is a reference to the film mentioned in the quoted signature.
-1 off-topic, yes.
-1 troll, no.
Does anyone know if WotC has done a big buyback?
I don't know how WotC work, but I know that it was said of Games Workshop (in the UK) a number of years ago that if shops continued selling old ranges of books/miniatures/anything from that company after new stuff was released, they would find it very difficult to get hold of new stuff to sell because they would not be on the list of "preferred distributors" who got first pick when availability was limited (artificially or due to physical production issues). I'm told that a local model shop (now long since closed down) stopped stocking any of their stuff for that reason.
Of course this is all hear-say, if it did happen that way it was well over a decade ago and may well have changed now, and doesn't apply to the company in question, but that sort of behaviour does still happen often in retail sectors despite the questionable legality of such "don't sell X and we'll help you with selling Y" inducement in many territories, and would explain the abrupt stock changes you have seen.
Of course a less tin-foil-hat interpretation is that the physical stores don't want to give shelf & warehouse space to the older material because they doubt it will sell well enough and therefore the space would be better used for some other product(s) such as the new editions.
In either case, the old stock would have been flogged to a remaindered stock handler rather than sent back to the manufacturer.
A note to all budding burglers: there is a village full of people who have so much good stuff worth having that they were willing to chase Google out of town to stop it being seen, and it is presumably so brazenly displayed that it can be seen and assessed from the street. Some good easy pickings there...
I'm pretty sure the contracts you sign mention the lack of support for tethering.
They definitely do, and I have made sure that I've read the appropriate parts of my agreement (though parts of that state that they can essentially change it when-ever they like...), but that doesn't make the way things are sold right. They loudly sell "unlimited this" and "unrestricted that" not "unlimited except limits laid down in clause 523 of your contract" or "unrestricted as long as you stick to using the facility in a restricted number of ways".
I guess it's too hard for operators to enable/disable tethering remotely depending on billing plan
They would not need to if things were more honestly sold though. If I pay for XXMb of Internet access via my phone, I expect to be able to use that much Internet access via my phone and connecting laptop to the phone counts (in my mind) as accessing the Internet via my phone. But as I said above, none of them will become more honest because it would be commercial suicide - the unwashed masses will see the less honest as offering a better deal even though it is probably the same deal (or worse) with extra spin added, because the unwashed masses won't even think to look into the small print until they hit a problem by which time the contract is signed and they are stuck.
Google's position is not really in their control on this one though. If they allow a tethering application into the default marketplace then the network operators will never offer Android based phones because they don't want their users to have easy access to the facility.