You obviously don't have kids. I do, as do colleagues of mine at work. Sonic is bigger than Santa Claus right now to the 4-8 year old set. He's got games, comics, a TV show, arcade ticket machines, pajamas, a cola, sponsored a Formula 1 car, etc. Hell, one of my colleages has a son who is so wrapped up on Sonic that his most feared punishment is a no-Sonic day. Meaning this kid fears not being able to play or talk about Sonic more than being grounded to his room for the whole day.
Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily mean much either as staying power goes. I'd venture to say Sonic the Hedgehog is almost as popular as Mario. Didn't help Sega too much.
Also I used to get a huge kick out of the old modem sales ads in the early to mid 90s where "Hayes command sets" and "Hayes communication standards" were prominent in the ads as the Gold Standard of good modems. Y'see because while all that was happening, Hayes was busy going bankrupt. All the brand recognition and mindshare in the world couldn't save them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying brand recognition or 'mindshare' is a bad thing to have, far from it! Just that it shouldn't really be used as a bellwether of a company's survival.
You seem to be woefully unaware of how broken the patent system really is. General ideas dressed up in patent lawyerese allows companies to sue everyone in sight. Whether successful or not is another matter, but it still costs money defending it. Witness Sega's patent to sue anyone who makes something like Crazy Taxi, which was used in a lawsuit against the makers of Simpsons: Road Rage. Other companies have patented programming techniques as simple as side scrolling (no Moon Patrol for YOU! Come back 20 years!), page flipping (90% of the games written in the 80s), etc.
Hell, in the physical world it's just as bad. I was just talking about this the other day. Our company bought a George Foreman grill for the lunchroom. Right on the box, it announces their patent. Apparently they were able to get a patent on the incredibly hard to figure out idea that if you put the grill on a slight incline, the fat drippings will run off it. Those people should be working for NASA designing space habitats with insight like that!
I think you missed the part about this being a smaller company where the people there probably wouldn't know how to pronounce DNS, let alone know what it does...
For you and me, this isn't a problem. Too bad 99.9999% of the world doesn't have the technical skills of you and me, yet it's a direct result of them not having these skills at least in part that the mail system is in this mess to begin with. And to think we don't let people drive cars before they can pass 2 tests...
Here's Bob. Bob is your boss at a small to mid sized company. He's not what you'd call "technical". You're the company's "tech" guy. You also do other things, but when the computers don't work, you're the go-to guy. Your company isn't that large, or that technical itself, so you host your mail with your company's ISP, PhoneCo. When Bob goes home, however, his ISP at home is CableCo. Bob is perpetually calling you either at home, or into his office because he "damn well can't send that email!" Invariably, the reason is because his account is configured to the wrong SMTP server, depending on where he his located.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just set up his account to use the company's ISP for SMTP all the time? You used to be able to do that, until the spineless CableCo decided they were just going to blanket-block port 25, no exceptions, instead of doing traffic analysis and chopping off the offenders. But that would take work, and effort, and nobody wants to do that, so just block 25 and call it a day!
Note: Some elements of this story might be based on real experiences, which may explain the negative bias towards blanket policies of any type as bandaids.
Try that argument with something other than software. Say, a car, a house, a boat. Nobody would be supporting a company that says if you lost one of those keys "tough shit, buy another car and be more careful next time".
Keys get lost, that's one of the reasons that there are as many locksmiths in business. The company are being assholes, and the very first thing the poster should do is go get a crack for the software to start migrating all of their data out of that package, then go find someone who sells similarily capable software who doesn't have a stick up their ass when it comes to customer service.
Has anyone actually done it? I was under the impression that the Xbox didn't have the horsepower. It's only a 700 MHz chip, and 64 MB of RAM. My Myth box wasn't happy until I threw at least 256 MB of RAM and a 1 GHz chip at it.
Xboxes have been used for frontends just fine. I can't imagine it'd be any good for a back end. Plus you'd need to upgrade the hard drive anyway, 10 GB would give you maybe 2 hours of recording space after the OS and Myth install.
It's not flamebait, but it's dead wrong. They spent most of that article doing MythTV. How exactly are you going to get a tuner card into an Xbox? Unless of course you use the Xbox as a frontend. But then you'd still need a PC configured as a Myth back end.
ah! Good to know. I never deal with this crap on my box, so I am somewhat a fish out of water when others call with this problem and I have to bail them out.
I've got a 2003 Excel that has all the modern emissions crap, air conditioning, not that small of a car, and I still see an average of 40 mpg. People don't need to drop tons of money to get an efficient car. I paid $15000 CDN for mine brand new, no money down and 0% financing. It costs me $50 CDN a month in gas when my neighbors are paying more than double that. It's a problem of perception, and yes, everyone wants a Canyonero to drive around and run over everyone else with.
Great! Now just get your sister, and parents, and random associates to do all of that, and you'll never get calls at 10 at night begging for help with this. If you'll read most of the comments, it's usually not POSTERS with the problem, but rather relatives/friends/associates/coworkers. Since I myself don't have a spyware problem, I usually find myself less than entirely equipped to deal with others' problems out of the gate due to lack of first hand experience. Which is, you'll note, the impetus for this Ask Slashdot. Unless the poster means themselves when they say their "friend"
I ran into something nasty like this last night on an aquintance's computer. I was sure after using Spybot, Ad-Aware, msconfig, etc. that I had gotten everything, but still weird pop ups were appearing even when I started the browsers, both IE and Firefox (home page was set to be Google). Then I noticed that the search results I was getting from Google were a little... off. Also, I noticed Google and Yahoo and a few other sites were running a little slow. No idea why I looked, but I decided to have a boo at the HOSTS file on the machine, and lo and behold, it's stuffed with 7K of redirects. Every search engine, most well known portals, the lot, all going to these bastards instead of where they're supposed to be. Which explained the popups and the slowness. They were taking the query you enter and then firing it off at the real thing and scraping the result. I blanked the HOSTS file, and all is good now.
At least in my experience. Fedora Core is what I normally use, and FC3 finds all of the Nforce-based LAN and audio devices no problem. Even before FC 3, all you needed to do was install a Nvidia provided tarball, run make, and reboot. A lot of the SiS and VIA stuff is supported well too. As long as you stick with mainstream mobo makers, it doesn't seem to be that big of an issue. Economies of scale have driven a lot of standardization in the LAN and sound chips used. For example, on a lot of the boards, the onboard LAN chip is usually either Intel or Realtek based.
Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM
Sure. Microsoft also told everyone that Windows 95 would run on a 486-66 with 4MB of RAM just fine too. And it did. If by running you meant lurching like a drunken backpacker with a cast and crutches.
Hearing that as the "just fine" spec makes me very concerned for what the real just fine spec is. Probably 1 gig of RAM and a 3GHz processor, I am guessing.
So who cares? Dell is synonymous with low-end crap to a lot of people anyway. It's hard to maintain an image of your servers being the upper end of Tier One quality when you're selling Dimension 6whateverthousand desktops with Genuine Intel leftovers on TV spots for $449...
I mean, nobody would ever dream that KIA would make a dependable, bulletproof car after watching one of their ads where they practically beg you to find one of their cars worthy of spitting on.
Dell seems to be content to shoot for the lowest denominator while sucking up to Intel. If that keeps them happy, great. I just won't be buying their crap.
So you go out to the tanker, get your stuff, cruise around for a couple of days fishing and getting blasted. Once you're out of "supplies", you head home. So what if they search you?
Fair enough. However, perhaps he should have picked up some writing skills to go with his comprehension skills.
I tell you as a 13 year old I learned more about the economics and marketing tricks of consumer electronics by waiting and waiting for my Super Famicom - uhm I mean SNES (North American release), Just watching all the consoles that never were (err the Play Station was, though Nintendo bailed) showed me how committed to product schedules Nintendo was.
First, that's one hell of a run-on sentence. Secondly, either of the following would have helped first-glance comprehension considerably:
- "I tell you, when I was 13 years old I learned more...." - "Back when I was a thirteen year old I learned more...."
Hell, even a comma:
"I tell you, as a 13 year old I learned more...."
So yes, my bad for not reading the thing and letting it sink in before replying. Still doesn't mean he should go around writing like that....
I still think the idea of a post-Federation show could be something pretty interesting
Yeah, but Roddenberry already did that. It's called Andromeda. He originally wanted what became TNG to be a story about a lone Starfleet ship being thrust into a time where the Federation had ceased to be, but there wasn't much support for the idea as it was too bleak. Sometime before he died, the idea got repurposed a bit to be not Star Trek, and then after his death, his wife took the idea and ran with it, and voila! Andromeda.
So they can't do that, because a lot of people would just think they were ripping off Andromeda, not getting the irony at all.
It is. They film Atlantis, Battlestar and SG-1 about a kilometer from my house in Burnaby, on the Vancouver city border. I see the trucks and the lot direction signs (Arrows with a three letter abbreviation for the show in question that tell the crews where to go) in my neighborhood all the time.
Technically park isn't a gear, it's an absence of one with a lock engaged in the transmission. And most modern automatic transmissions require a bare minimum of 3 forward gears to make for a marginally useful car. So picking 3 gears you can either have a car that doesn't go in reverse or can only cruise at 35MPH or less comfortably. Neither sounds that useful to me...
Duh. They take a bigger loss on every console not sold.
Think, idiots.
No, they take a loss on the console they sold, then they take ANOTHER loss on the console that replaces the one that was sold. If they sell more consoles, they BUILD more consoles to replace the sold ones in retail stores, and look to the game licensing points to make up the loss. Why do you think M$ was/is terrified of the idea that someone might eventually break their 2048 bit encryption signature and be able to sign a Linux boot disk for the console that doesn't need a mod chip? Oh look! $200 web servers that we'll actually lose money on every time someone buys one...
I'd say that even life + 10 is probably excessive in most cases, and in some may have the reverse effect. Look at Cobain, if he was a solo performer. By that yardstick all his stuff would be PD now.
But the original 1710 copyright definition of 28 years should, in my opinion, be sufficient. If you can't make a buck off something in the first 3 decades, chances are you're not going to, unless you're a painter, in which case it'll be worthless until you die. How many movies or albums that were released 28 years ago are selling like hotcakes these days? Not many... and most that are selling at all are doing so second-hand. Not much financial loss there to the original rightsholders. Unless your name is Disney and you're "Putting X back into the vault" to create an arificial shortage....
because works whose copyright would have expired by now are not typically works that people commit copyright infringement with.
Really? The original copyright duration was for 28 years from the work's creation. Subesequent interests have tacked on more and more time until the current scheme in the US which is 95 years after the creator's death. If the original schema was still in effect today, all the music and tv/movies from this day in 1977 would be public domain. I'd say a fair percentage of the items being pirated today would fall into that date range.
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You obviously don't have kids. I do, as do colleagues of mine at work. Sonic is bigger than Santa Claus right now to the 4-8 year old set. He's got games, comics, a TV show, arcade ticket machines, pajamas, a cola, sponsored a Formula 1 car, etc. Hell, one of my colleages has a son who is so wrapped up on Sonic that his most feared punishment is a no-Sonic day. Meaning this kid fears not being able to play or talk about Sonic more than being grounded to his room for the whole day.
Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily mean much either as staying power goes. I'd venture to say Sonic the Hedgehog is almost as popular as Mario. Didn't help Sega too much.
Also I used to get a huge kick out of the old modem sales ads in the early to mid 90s where "Hayes command sets" and "Hayes communication standards" were prominent in the ads as the Gold Standard of good modems. Y'see because while all that was happening, Hayes was busy going bankrupt. All the brand recognition and mindshare in the world couldn't save them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying brand recognition or 'mindshare' is a bad thing to have, far from it! Just that it shouldn't really be used as a bellwether of a company's survival.
You can't patent general ideas.
You seem to be woefully unaware of how broken the patent system really is. General ideas dressed up in patent lawyerese allows companies to sue everyone in sight. Whether successful or not is another matter, but it still costs money defending it. Witness Sega's patent to sue anyone who makes something like Crazy Taxi, which was used in a lawsuit against the makers of Simpsons: Road Rage. Other companies have patented programming techniques as simple as side scrolling (no Moon Patrol for YOU! Come back 20 years!), page flipping (90% of the games written in the 80s), etc.
Hell, in the physical world it's just as bad. I was just talking about this the other day. Our company bought a George Foreman grill for the lunchroom. Right on the box, it announces their patent. Apparently they were able to get a patent on the incredibly hard to figure out idea that if you put the grill on a slight incline, the fat drippings will run off it. Those people should be working for NASA designing space habitats with insight like that!
I think you missed the part about this being a smaller company where the people there probably wouldn't know how to pronounce DNS, let alone know what it does...
For you and me, this isn't a problem. Too bad 99.9999% of the world doesn't have the technical skills of you and me, yet it's a direct result of them not having these skills at least in part that the mail system is in this mess to begin with. And to think we don't let people drive cars before they can pass 2 tests...
Here's Bob. Bob is your boss at a small to mid sized company. He's not what you'd call "technical". You're the company's "tech" guy. You also do other things, but when the computers don't work, you're the go-to guy. Your company isn't that large, or that technical itself, so you host your mail with your company's ISP, PhoneCo. When Bob goes home, however, his ISP at home is CableCo. Bob is perpetually calling you either at home, or into his office because he "damn well can't send that email!" Invariably, the reason is because his account is configured to the wrong SMTP server, depending on where he his located.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just set up his account to use the company's ISP for SMTP all the time? You used to be able to do that, until the spineless CableCo decided they were just going to blanket-block port 25, no exceptions, instead of doing traffic analysis and chopping off the offenders. But that would take work, and effort, and nobody wants to do that, so just block 25 and call it a day!
Note: Some elements of this story might be based on real experiences, which may explain the negative bias towards blanket policies of any type as bandaids.
Try that argument with something other than software. Say, a car, a house, a boat. Nobody would be supporting a company that says if you lost one of those keys "tough shit, buy another car and be more careful next time".
Keys get lost, that's one of the reasons that there are as many locksmiths in business. The company are being assholes, and the very first thing the poster should do is go get a crack for the software to start migrating all of their data out of that package, then go find someone who sells similarily capable software who doesn't have a stick up their ass when it comes to customer service.
Has anyone actually done it? I was under the impression that the Xbox didn't have the horsepower. It's only a 700 MHz chip, and 64 MB of RAM. My Myth box wasn't happy until I threw at least 256 MB of RAM and a 1 GHz chip at it.
Xboxes have been used for frontends just fine. I can't imagine it'd be any good for a back end. Plus you'd need to upgrade the hard drive anyway, 10 GB would give you maybe 2 hours of recording space after the OS and Myth install.
It's not flamebait, but it's dead wrong. They spent most of that article doing MythTV. How exactly are you going to get a tuner card into an Xbox? Unless of course you use the Xbox as a frontend. But then you'd still need a PC configured as a Myth back end.
ah! Good to know. I never deal with this crap on my box, so I am somewhat a fish out of water when others call with this problem and I have to bail them out.
I've got a 2003 Excel that has all the modern emissions crap, air conditioning, not that small of a car, and I still see an average of 40 mpg. People don't need to drop tons of money to get an efficient car. I paid $15000 CDN for mine brand new, no money down and 0% financing. It costs me $50 CDN a month in gas when my neighbors are paying more than double that. It's a problem of perception, and yes, everyone wants a Canyonero to drive around and run over everyone else with.
Great! Now just get your sister, and parents, and random associates to do all of that, and you'll never get calls at 10 at night begging for help with this.
If you'll read most of the comments, it's usually not POSTERS with the problem, but rather relatives/friends/associates/coworkers. Since I myself don't have a spyware problem, I usually find myself less than entirely equipped to deal with others' problems out of the gate due to lack of first hand experience.
Which is, you'll note, the impetus for this Ask Slashdot. Unless the poster means themselves when they say their "friend"
I ran into something nasty like this last night on an aquintance's computer. I was sure after using Spybot, Ad-Aware, msconfig, etc. that I had gotten everything, but still weird pop ups were appearing even when I started the browsers, both IE and Firefox (home page was set to be Google). Then I noticed that the search results I was getting from Google were a little... off. Also, I noticed Google and Yahoo and a few other sites were running a little slow. No idea why I looked, but I decided to have a boo at the HOSTS file on the machine, and lo and behold, it's stuffed with 7K of redirects. Every search engine, most well known portals, the lot, all going to these bastards instead of where they're supposed to be. Which explained the popups and the slowness. They were taking the query you enter and then firing it off at the real thing and scraping the result.
I blanked the HOSTS file, and all is good now.
At least in my experience. Fedora Core is what I normally use, and FC3 finds all of the Nforce-based LAN and audio devices no problem. Even before FC 3, all you needed to do was install a Nvidia provided tarball, run make, and reboot. A lot of the SiS and VIA stuff is supported well too. As long as you stick with mainstream mobo makers, it doesn't seem to be that big of an issue. Economies of scale have driven a lot of standardization in the LAN and sound chips used. For example, on a lot of the boards, the onboard LAN chip is usually either Intel or Realtek based.
Go to 9th century Europe and tell the nobility you want the feudal system abolished. They say "My God!"
Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM
Sure. Microsoft also told everyone that Windows 95 would run on a 486-66 with 4MB of RAM just fine too. And it did. If by running you meant lurching like a drunken backpacker with a cast and crutches.
Hearing that as the "just fine" spec makes me very concerned for what the real just fine spec is. Probably 1 gig of RAM and a 3GHz processor, I am guessing.
But IBM will...
So who cares? Dell is synonymous with low-end crap to a lot of people anyway. It's hard to maintain an image of your servers being the upper end of Tier One quality when you're selling Dimension 6whateverthousand desktops with Genuine Intel leftovers on TV spots for $449...
I mean, nobody would ever dream that KIA would make a dependable, bulletproof car after watching one of their ads where they practically beg you to find one of their cars worthy of spitting on.
Dell seems to be content to shoot for the lowest denominator while sucking up to Intel. If that keeps them happy, great. I just won't be buying their crap.
So you go out to the tanker, get your stuff, cruise around for a couple of days fishing and getting blasted. Once you're out of "supplies", you head home. So what if they search you?
Fair enough. However, perhaps he should have picked up some writing skills to go with his comprehension skills.
I tell you as a 13 year old I learned more about the economics and marketing tricks of consumer electronics by waiting and waiting for my Super Famicom - uhm I mean SNES (North American release), Just watching all the consoles that never were (err the Play Station was, though Nintendo bailed) showed me how committed to product schedules Nintendo was.
First, that's one hell of a run-on sentence. Secondly, either of the following would have helped first-glance comprehension considerably:
- "I tell you, when I was 13 years old I learned more...."
- "Back when I was a thirteen year old I learned more...."
Hell, even a comma:
"I tell you, as a 13 year old I learned more...."
So yes, my bad for not reading the thing and letting it sink in before replying. Still doesn't mean he should go around writing like that....
You're 13 with a user number 45,000 lower than mine, and I registered in 1999? I'm thinking not...
I still think the idea of a post-Federation show could be something pretty interesting
Yeah, but Roddenberry already did that. It's called Andromeda. He originally wanted what became TNG to be a story about a lone Starfleet ship being thrust into a time where the Federation had ceased to be, but there wasn't much support for the idea as it was too bleak. Sometime before he died, the idea got repurposed a bit to be not Star Trek, and then after his death, his wife took the idea and ran with it, and voila! Andromeda.
So they can't do that, because a lot of people would just think they were ripping off Andromeda, not getting the irony at all.
It is. They film Atlantis, Battlestar and SG-1 about a kilometer from my house in Burnaby, on the Vancouver city border. I see the trucks and the lot direction signs (Arrows with a three letter abbreviation for the show in question that tell the crews where to go) in my neighborhood all the time.
Technically park isn't a gear, it's an absence of one with a lock engaged in the transmission. And most modern automatic transmissions require a bare minimum of 3 forward gears to make for a marginally useful car. So picking 3 gears you can either have a car that doesn't go in reverse or can only cruise at 35MPH or less comfortably. Neither sounds that useful to me...
Duh. They take a bigger loss on every console not sold.
Think, idiots.
No, they take a loss on the console they sold, then they take ANOTHER loss on the console that replaces the one that was sold. If they sell more consoles, they BUILD more consoles to replace the sold ones in retail stores, and look to the game licensing points to make up the loss. Why do you think M$ was/is terrified of the idea that someone might eventually break their 2048 bit encryption signature and be able to sign a Linux boot disk for the console that doesn't need a mod chip? Oh look! $200 web servers that we'll actually lose money on every time someone buys one...
I'd say that even life + 10 is probably excessive in most cases, and in some may have the reverse effect. Look at Cobain, if he was a solo performer. By that yardstick all his stuff would be PD now.
But the original 1710 copyright definition of 28 years should, in my opinion, be sufficient. If you can't make a buck off something in the first 3 decades, chances are you're not going to, unless you're a painter, in which case it'll be worthless until you die.
How many movies or albums that were released 28 years ago are selling like hotcakes these days? Not many... and most that are selling at all are doing so second-hand. Not much financial loss there to the original rightsholders. Unless your name is Disney and you're "Putting X back into the vault" to create an arificial shortage....
because works whose copyright would have expired by now are not typically works that people commit copyright infringement with.
Really? The original copyright duration was for 28 years from the work's creation. Subesequent interests have tacked on more and more time until the current scheme in the US which is 95 years after the creator's death. If the original schema was still in effect today, all the music and tv/movies from this day in 1977 would be public domain. I'd say a fair percentage of the items being pirated today would fall into that date range.