Its akin to sending out anti-war pamplets or condoms with your Christmas cards. It is such a strong non-holiday message.
Oh for chrissakes, it's not even in the same league! On one hand, with the antiwar pamphlet you're making a very pointed political statement, on the other, you're saying "here's some free shit, have fun!". Next you'll tell me that someone including a $1 scratch and win with their Christmas cards is forcefeeding people gambling...
Somebody's been taking too many marketing classes Never has anyone accused me of that before. You insensitive clod;).
What I don't get is people going off on the idea this guy's motive is to somehow "forcefeed" people Linux. Is the guy going to their house with a rifle later on to check up on them and see how much they've been worshipping at the Altar of the Penguin? I doubt it.
He's not "adding value" by giving people something they can get themselves just as easily
The "value add" here in MarketSpeak(TM) is that rather than someone getting just a Christmas card, you also get something you can try out on your computer. Or not. The choice is yours. Regarding the "just as easily" bit, that's rather in the eye of the beholder, don't you think? Out of my potential Christmas card list of 40 odd people, I can count on one hand the number of people on that list who would know:
- How to download and burn an ISO - are on a broadband connection to make it possible - and even know what a Linux LiveCD is, what it's for, and how it might be interesting to try.
Just because it's easy for you and me, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone.
As an aside, last Christmas when I went to visit relatives in the interior, I brought my laptop with me and some disks, including the latest rev of Knoppix at the time. My sister's computer went tits up at her place on Boxing day, and the whole crowd was amazed to see me put a CD into the drive and boot into a fully functional machine on a CD, recovering all her data before we redid the box. They were even more amazed by the idea that this was a free to give away CD and they could each have one too in case something happens to their machines so they can still get on the web, etc. I probably burned and gave away a dozen copies of Knoppix. Based on that experience alone, just for giving to relatives "just in case", I think it's a great idea.
Did you even READ the sumitter's question? "This year I am including a bootable Live Linux CD in many of my Christmas cards.", He's giving it out in his Xmas cards which generally are just a card and a signature, perhaps a "Seasons' Greetings" or something scrawled in there as well. This is added value over and above a simple card. At no point was the submitter suggesting that this was in lieu of "real" presents. This instead seems to be an added bonus for his acquaintances that would otherwise just be getting the $0.25 card mailed to them. Sounds fine to me.
Slightly different If by different, you mean craptacular, then yes I have...;)
When I was a kid watching it during its original airing, I thought it was awesome. Seeing it again a couple of years ago I realized it didn't age very well, and a lot of it just didn't make sense to begin with. I vastly prefer the remake, myself.
Anyone else notice that all the outside scenes in the Miami offshoot are seen through a slightly orangeish filter, and the New York ones pass through a light bluish one?
He doesn't know how to spell "Paralyzer" either...
Re:Duality of l337ness versus Stupidity
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 1
It's all in perception. But you're right. It's much better for "hacking" to be thought of as the computer equivelant of armed robbery instead. Face it: What we used to think the word "hacking" meant has long been depracated by the world at large. At least a series like this might bring the meaning of the word a bit away from the dark side. Maybe.
So plan ahead for it. To take your own example above, why do you have a car and insurance if it only costs $12 to take a cab to work? I mean sure you have to pay for the cab more often and it costs more in the long run, but every day it's not $300 out of your pocket, right?
NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being shitty at the time.
Not up on your computer history, are you? You *must* have meant to say:
"NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being NON EXISTANT at the time."
Novell Netware predates ANY Microsoft networking. For most of the late 80's/early 90's until Windows for Workgroups came out, Netware and Banyan Vines were the only way to get a bunch of PCs to form a network. I am presuming you didn't actually work with computers and networks during this time frame, because if you did, there's no way you could have made such an erroneous statement.
And Novell has innovated quite a bit. Or were you just being ironic? Where do you think Microsoft got the "inspiration" for Active Directory, among other things?
However, when I hear the term ricer it is usually directed at a young asian kid in a souped up automobile
Must be where you live. In my neck of the woods, there's a ton of "rice" on the streets, and almost NONE of it is driven by an asian. The cars are generally Asian, but most of it is stupid rich white kids with more money than brains. Nothing like seeing one of them go buy a brand new pickup and then lower it to an inch off the pavement, destroying its ability to "pick" things "up" any more.
I have yet to have the pleasure of being there physically, but I have worked for Asians. At one start up I worked for in the 90's, as one of the few white people there I got quite a kick out of being the "white Devil" or "ghost man". It was all in good fun of course. The file share my boss had on his workstation labelled "Die white people" got attention, I can tell you....
As a final aside, if the Japanese were adding rice wine into their fuel to increase methanol content, I would be very concerned about them. Methanol is extremely toxic to humans and "rice wine" sounds like something (sake?) that people might actually want to drink. Perhaps you meant "ethanol"? I'm not a modder so this is an honest question.
No, initially the source for the alcohol was distilling it from rice wine. That, obviously was ethanol. These days the alcohol is pre-added to the racing fuel, and methanol is used. Sorry if I was a little unclear on that.
White americans have been modding American cars since the days of Henry Ford but we don't call them "potatoers" or whatever the staple white american food is.
According to american culture, at least, those whiteys would be referred to as "greasemonkeys", "gearheads", "rodders", etc. And, again according to American culture, it's becoming known as "pimping out" the car. Which is of course, very politically correct itself. Selling women as a commondity == improving a car.
Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice?
Hey, did you know that the vast majority of Asian cars aren't from China? What the hell does that really have to do with anything? Do you even know where the motorsport slang term "rice" comes from?
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh?
From the way you're flaming on, I am guessing you don't.
It came from some performance bike racers in Japan mixing their standard fuel with alcohol to help boost power in the small engines at high RPM. Some of them used alcohol distilled from rice wine, and thus caught the nickname of "rice burners". Because that's literally what they were doing. This was way more common 15 -20 years ago, these days it's fallen out of vogue as modern racing fuel mixtures either have methanol in them already, or are formulated to not need it.
Man I love ignorance.
To each their own. You certainly do seem to indulge in it, so...
For a little more (well, maybe more than a little) than the amount of coin a lot of RAM will cost you, go get a 3Ware 8 port RAID card instead. I run one, and it kicks ass. I see the one we got (Escalade 7506-8) on Pricewatch for $366. The RAID is fast, fault tolerant, and has a little web interface to let me know its status. I've currently got the drives configured as 7 in a RAID 5 with the 8th as a hot standby. I am very pleased with it.
Information is free, and as soon as it's out there, the cat's out of the bag
Ahh, and therein lies the rub. Sure the information is free, but if it's based on faulty testing/data, it isn't worth the price you paid for it.
I mean, I have a magic rock on my desk that empirical testing says it keeps tigers away. I've never been attacked by a tiger, or seen one in my office, so it must work, right?
Tom's is taking the stance that bullshit testing on buggy drivers, or on beta cards, or drivers optimized to cheat on certain benchmarks doesn't reflect the final experience a consumer will have after buying a card in the store and taking it home. How many times have we seen manufacturers ship crap that is said to do X, and in testing for 2-4 hours on handpicked reviewer samples performs like that, but the final version shipped to the stores is clocked slower because their average yields couldn't keep pace?
You seem to be missing the point. The reason people, myself included, were paying Rogers for cable is that we wanted cable. This includes my cable modem. And they are the only game in town. Actually they've traded sides of the country with Shaw in a strange deal, but the same still applies with Shaw, they are the only game in town. So your logic is that if I have a dispute with them over 10 bucks, I should:
- Cancel my account - lose both the cable TV I watch and my cable modem - go buy a 56K modem - Sign up for a dial-up ISP - Do my work at a painful pace and be 1/10 as productive as I used to be
And then once the dispute is resolved, I'll pay how much to have all my calbe services hooked back up again?
Over $10, that's a little like cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It would hurt ME more than them. That's what they rely on.
You probably don't have only a single cable/highspeed provider where you live, so undoubtedly your mileage varies. To experience the same fun, do this for me. When your power company screws you on your bill, cancel your service in protest and see how long that lasts.
If they're the only cable company in town, who else are you gonna go to? If Steam is the only way to get whatever Steam offers and you want it, what are you gonna do?
It's a carefully balanced act. And from the cable episode, all of us in Vancouver learned that even a thousand people cancelling service isn't enough to get Rogers Cable to give out refunds for services delivered. Only the government threating 7 figures in fines can loosen their wallet.
If everyone DOESN'T get used to subscription based services, they won't be offered. Simple as that. If 90% of Valve's customer base doesn't go for Steam because of the subscription-based system for what has traditionally been a one-time purchase transaction, they will:
1) Change what they're doing to mae Steam more appealing to those 90% so that they can keep their company running or 2) Lay off 95% of their staff and run the company out of a mobile home somewhere in the Cascades.
It's up to the customer to send a message. Let's send it.
Thankfully my sibling would not complain about beep beep beep.
The real problem isnt what you're doing, its what you're thinking.
Actually, no. Here's the thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand, including yourself. It's not that I don't think someone can break in to my home system, it's that if they can get past the moat, and the automated motion tracking machine guns, and the pet dragon, I don't CARE. Good on 'em. They've obviously gone to a lot of effort for little or no tangible gain. I will find them there probably almost immediately, kick them out, and use it as an excuse to wipe everything and try something else. I have had a LOT of experience repairing other peoples' systems after they've been broken into, so I would wager that these person or persons of questionable parentage would not go undetected long.
I spend my life doing hard-ass computer security among other things in my professional capacity. The boxes I am paid to look after ARE locked down like you wouldn't believe, and I do apply the latest patches ASAP.
But when I get home, my home systems have nothing important on them, so I am not completely anal about security patching the minute something comes out. I do make more of an effort to secure them than anyone else within a 20 mile radius of my house, I would be willing to wager, and that seems to be sufficient. Again, the low hanging fruit gets picked first, and there's a shitload of low hanging fruit in my city, and on my cable modem's subnet. Who gets broken into on a given block? The guy with the yard screened off with cyclone fence and razor wire, iron bars on the first floor windows and a solid steel door, or his neighbors? So what if he didn't bother to lock one of his third floor windows for a couple of days? Do you think a potential thief is going to go after that third floor window, or perhaps they'll go after another window in another house that doesn't involve crossing the razor wire fence, the motion detector alarms, and somehow getting up to that window.
So they sniff it first, find a mac address thats being sent into the air
Again, this doesn't really concern me. I've checked out my own neighborhood for other WAPs or wireless activity. Know what I found? Exactly 1 other WAP in the whole neighborhood, and it's unsecured. My neighborhood is a small cluster of about 20 houses that are out of the way of anything else within range of even a yagi-based sniffer. I know all of my neighbors at least casually. They're nice people, and regarding computers, they're all pretty much dumb as a bag of rocks. I have no fears that any of these people are going to be sniffing my MAC addresses anytime soon. We're far enough away from everyone else that someone wardriving would stick out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood as well.
No matter how secure your system is, there IS a way to break in
That's true of everything, and the crux of my argument. I understand what you're saying, and I again will say that in my professional capacity on workstations and servers that are used in my company, security is job 1. But at home, it's a bit of a different story. At home is where I relax. I don't 1) spend that much time at home to begin with due to the amount of work I put in at my company. 2) When I am home, I don't spend that much time on my computers. So 3) I don't want to spend a significant percentage of that small amount of time resecuring holes that maybe.001% of the people out there could take advantage of, if they somehow magically knew that my home workstation that's on 2-4 hours a day inside a hardass firewall is vulnerable to it, if they could somehow get to it. I just make sure that my box is better than 99.999% of all the others out there and I'm content.
denying that just makes you more attackable
I don't deny it, I know it completely. But there's such a thing as a reasonable effort, and I already make far more than
I think the main thrust of the fear by the article's submitter was the whole "negative billing" aspect, and the subscription based thing.
First to address the negative billing (We add new stuff and you pay for it unless you tell us otherwise), I've been hit by this wonderful "feature" before, the cable company up in my neck of the woods (thanks Rogers! Go burn in hell for me, wouldja?) practiced it until enough customers made a royal stink in the media about it and the provincial government threatened to step in on their behalf. Nothing like opening up your cable bill to find that you've had 10 new channels for the last month that you didn't want, and were charged $7 for the privilege. And it's only easy to get a refund for that *AFTER* the government threatens to kick the cable company between the legs. Somehow with Steam I don't think there'd be anyone stepping in. It took dozens of people picketing for weeks on end to get action with the cable thing, I just don't see that happening over such a decentralized customer base like Steam's. Steam's agreement IS set up to potentially allow negative billing. That's enough for me to never consider using it.
The subscriber aspect is also not so good. If in fact the software you download only works while your account is up to date, what's the point? I spent $180 over a year and a half playing online games with nothing to show for it the second I closed out my account. I'd feel like a real chump paying to use Steam for 6 months, just using Half-Life 2, and then cancelling and having nothing, instead of taking that same money and buying a box from the local software shop. And also, does this mean that each time you fire up the game it has to authenicate against Steam to see if it's allowed to run? Good luck playing it without a net connection then...
Slashdot Mirror
Its akin to sending out anti-war pamplets or condoms with your Christmas cards. It is such a strong non-holiday message.
Oh for chrissakes, it's not even in the same league! On one hand, with the antiwar pamphlet you're making a very pointed political statement, on the other, you're saying "here's some free shit, have fun!". Next you'll tell me that someone including a $1 scratch and win with their Christmas cards is forcefeeding people gambling...
Somebody's been taking too many marketing classes ;).
Never has anyone accused me of that before. You insensitive clod
What I don't get is people going off on the idea this guy's motive is to somehow "forcefeed" people Linux. Is the guy going to their house with a rifle later on to check up on them and see how much they've been worshipping at the Altar of the Penguin? I doubt it.
He's not "adding value" by giving people something they can get themselves just as easily
The "value add" here in MarketSpeak(TM) is that rather than someone getting just a Christmas card, you also get something you can try out on your computer. Or not. The choice is yours. Regarding the "just as easily" bit, that's rather in the eye of the beholder, don't you think? Out of my potential Christmas card list of 40 odd people, I can count on one hand the number of people on that list who would know:
- How to download and burn an ISO
- are on a broadband connection to make it possible
- and even know what a Linux LiveCD is, what it's for, and how it might be interesting to try.
Just because it's easy for you and me, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone.
As an aside, last Christmas when I went to visit relatives in the interior, I brought my laptop with me and some disks, including the latest rev of Knoppix at the time. My sister's computer went tits up at her place on Boxing day, and the whole crowd was amazed to see me put a CD into the drive and boot into a fully functional machine on a CD, recovering all her data before we redid the box. They were even more amazed by the idea that this was a free to give away CD and they could each have one too in case something happens to their machines so they can still get on the web, etc. I probably burned and gave away a dozen copies of Knoppix. Based on that experience alone, just for giving to relatives "just in case", I think it's a great idea.
And you have how many tens of thousands of dollars set aside for your christmas card list this year?
If you're that flush, I could use a "card"...
Did you even READ the sumitter's question? "This year I am including a bootable Live Linux CD in many of my Christmas cards.",
He's giving it out in his Xmas cards which generally are just a card and a signature, perhaps a "Seasons' Greetings" or something scrawled in there as well. This is added value over and above a simple card. At no point was the submitter suggesting that this was in lieu of "real" presents. This instead seems to be an added bonus for his acquaintances that would otherwise just be getting the $0.25 card mailed to them. Sounds fine to me.
Slightly different ;)
If by different, you mean craptacular, then yes I have...
When I was a kid watching it during its original airing, I thought it was awesome. Seeing it again a couple of years ago I realized it didn't age very well, and a lot of it just didn't make sense to begin with. I vastly prefer the remake, myself.
Anyone else notice that all the outside scenes in the Miami offshoot are seen through a slightly orangeish filter, and the New York ones pass through a light bluish one?
He doesn't know how to spell "Paralyzer" either...
It's all in perception. But you're right. It's much better for "hacking" to be thought of as the computer equivelant of armed robbery instead.
Face it: What we used to think the word "hacking" meant has long been depracated by the world at large. At least a series like this might bring the meaning of the word a bit away from the dark side. Maybe.
So plan ahead for it. To take your own example above, why do you have a car and insurance if it only costs $12 to take a cab to work? I mean sure you have to pay for the cab more often and it costs more in the long run, but every day it's not $300 out of your pocket, right?
I wasn't talking about LDAP. I was more referring to parts of AD that seem inspired by stuff I had seen in Novell Directory Services.
NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being shitty at the time.
Not up on your computer history, are you? You *must* have meant to say:
"NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being NON EXISTANT at the time."
Novell Netware predates ANY Microsoft networking. For most of the late 80's/early 90's until Windows for Workgroups came out, Netware and Banyan Vines were the only way to get a bunch of PCs to form a network. I am presuming you didn't actually work with computers and networks during this time frame, because if you did, there's no way you could have made such an erroneous statement.
And Novell has innovated quite a bit. Or were you just being ironic? Where do you think Microsoft got the "inspiration" for Active Directory, among other things?
However, when I hear the term ricer it is usually directed at a young asian kid in a souped up automobile
Must be where you live. In my neck of the woods, there's a ton of "rice" on the streets, and almost NONE of it is driven by an asian. The cars are generally Asian, but most of it is stupid rich white kids with more money than brains. Nothing like seeing one of them go buy a brand new pickup and then lower it to an inch off the pavement, destroying its ability to "pick" things "up" any more.
Have you ever been white in Asia?
I have yet to have the pleasure of being there physically, but I have worked for Asians. At one start up I worked for in the 90's, as one of the few white people there I got quite a kick out of being the "white Devil" or "ghost man". It was all in good fun of course. The file share my boss had on his workstation labelled "Die white people" got attention, I can tell you....
As a final aside, if the Japanese were adding rice wine into their fuel to increase methanol content, I would be very concerned about them. Methanol is extremely toxic to humans and "rice wine" sounds like something (sake?) that people might actually want to drink. Perhaps you meant "ethanol"? I'm not a modder so this is an honest question.
No, initially the source for the alcohol was distilling it from rice wine. That, obviously was ethanol. These days the alcohol is pre-added to the racing fuel, and methanol is used. Sorry if I was a little unclear on that.
White americans have been modding American cars since the days of Henry Ford but we don't call them "potatoers" or whatever the staple white american food is.
According to american culture, at least, those whiteys would be referred to as "greasemonkeys", "gearheads", "rodders", etc. And, again according to American culture, it's becoming known as "pimping out" the car. Which is of course, very politically correct itself. Selling women as a commondity == improving a car.
Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice?
Hey, did you know that the vast majority of Asian cars aren't from China? What the hell does that really have to do with anything? Do you even know where the motorsport slang term "rice" comes from?
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh?
From the way you're flaming on, I am guessing you don't.
It came from some performance bike racers in Japan mixing their standard fuel with alcohol to help boost power in the small engines at high RPM. Some of them used alcohol distilled from rice wine, and thus caught the nickname of "rice burners". Because that's literally what they were doing. This was way more common 15 -20 years ago, these days it's fallen out of vogue as modern racing fuel mixtures either have methanol in them already, or are formulated to not need it.
Man I love ignorance.
To each their own. You certainly do seem to indulge in it, so...
For a little more (well, maybe more than a little) than the amount of coin a lot of RAM will cost you, go get a 3Ware 8 port RAID card instead. I run one, and it kicks ass. I see the one we got (Escalade 7506-8) on Pricewatch for $366. The RAID is fast, fault tolerant, and has a little web interface to let me know its status. I've currently got the drives configured as 7 in a RAID 5 with the 8th as a hot standby. I am very pleased with it.
Well! That settles it then.
Thanks for the incisive analysis!
You can't read the link in your browser's status bar to see what it is before you click it?
Next thread down.. (why is this on Slashdot?)
The other "less popular" answer would be because Rob wrote it, and since he is one of the site's Grande Fromages, he can probably post what he likes?
Just sayin'...
Information is free, and as soon as it's out there, the cat's out of the bag
Ahh, and therein lies the rub. Sure the information is free, but if it's based on faulty testing/data, it isn't worth the price you paid for it.
I mean, I have a magic rock on my desk that empirical testing says it keeps tigers away. I've never been attacked by a tiger, or seen one in my office, so it must work, right?
Tom's is taking the stance that bullshit testing on buggy drivers, or on beta cards, or drivers optimized to cheat on certain benchmarks doesn't reflect the final experience a consumer will have after buying a card in the store and taking it home. How many times have we seen manufacturers ship crap that is said to do X, and in testing for 2-4 hours on handpicked reviewer samples performs like that, but the final version shipped to the stores is clocked slower because their average yields couldn't keep pace?
If its the only cable co in town- quit anyway
You seem to be missing the point. The reason people, myself included, were paying Rogers for cable is that we wanted cable. This includes my cable modem. And they are the only game in town. Actually they've traded sides of the country with Shaw in a strange deal, but the same still applies with Shaw, they are the only game in town. So your logic is that if I have a dispute with them over 10 bucks, I should:
- Cancel my account
- lose both the cable TV I watch and my cable modem
- go buy a 56K modem
- Sign up for a dial-up ISP
- Do my work at a painful pace and be 1/10 as productive as I used to be
And then once the dispute is resolved, I'll pay how much to have all my calbe services hooked back up again?
Over $10, that's a little like cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It would hurt ME more than them. That's what they rely on.
You probably don't have only a single cable/highspeed provider where you live, so undoubtedly your mileage varies. To experience the same fun, do this for me. When your power company screws you on your bill, cancel your service in protest and see how long that lasts.
THey always crumble to that.
HA! No, seriously...
If they're the only cable company in town, who else are you gonna go to? If Steam is the only way to get whatever Steam offers and you want it, what are you gonna do?
It's a carefully balanced act. And from the cable episode, all of us in Vancouver learned that even a thousand people cancelling service isn't enough to get Rogers Cable to give out refunds for services delivered. Only the government threating 7 figures in fines can loosen their wallet.
How about "no"?
If everyone DOESN'T get used to subscription based services, they won't be offered. Simple as that. If 90% of Valve's customer base doesn't go for Steam because of the subscription-based system for what has traditionally been a one-time purchase transaction, they will:
1) Change what they're doing to mae Steam more appealing to those 90% so that they can keep their company running
or
2) Lay off 95% of their staff and run the company out of a mobile home somewhere in the Cascades.
It's up to the customer to send a message. Let's send it.
Thankfully my sibling would not complain about beep beep beep.
.001% of the people out there could take advantage of, if they somehow magically knew that my home workstation that's on 2-4 hours a day inside a hardass firewall is vulnerable to it, if they could somehow get to it. I just make sure that my box is better than 99.999% of all the others out there and I'm content.
The real problem isnt what you're doing, its what you're thinking.
Actually, no. Here's the thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand, including yourself. It's not that I don't think someone can break in to my home system, it's that if they can get past the moat, and the automated motion tracking machine guns, and the pet dragon, I don't CARE. Good on 'em. They've obviously gone to a lot of effort for little or no tangible gain. I will find them there probably almost immediately, kick them out, and use it as an excuse to wipe everything and try something else. I have had a LOT of experience repairing other peoples' systems after they've been broken into, so I would wager that these person or persons of questionable parentage would not go undetected long.
I spend my life doing hard-ass computer security among other things in my professional capacity. The boxes I am paid to look after ARE locked down like you wouldn't believe, and I do apply the latest patches ASAP.
But when I get home, my home systems have nothing important on them, so I am not completely anal about security patching the minute something comes out. I do make more of an effort to secure them than anyone else within a 20 mile radius of my house, I would be willing to wager, and that seems to be sufficient. Again, the low hanging fruit gets picked first, and there's a shitload of low hanging fruit in my city, and on my cable modem's subnet. Who gets broken into on a given block? The guy with the yard screened off with cyclone fence and razor wire, iron bars on the first floor windows and a solid steel door, or his neighbors? So what if he didn't bother to lock one of his third floor windows for a couple of days? Do you think a potential thief is going to go after that third floor window, or perhaps they'll go after another window in another house that doesn't involve crossing the razor wire fence, the motion detector alarms, and somehow getting up to that window.
So they sniff it first, find a mac address thats being sent into the air
Again, this doesn't really concern me. I've checked out my own neighborhood for other WAPs or wireless activity. Know what I found? Exactly 1 other WAP in the whole neighborhood, and it's unsecured. My neighborhood is a small cluster of about 20 houses that are out of the way of anything else within range of even a yagi-based sniffer. I know all of my neighbors at least casually. They're nice people, and regarding computers, they're all pretty much dumb as a bag of rocks. I have no fears that any of these people are going to be sniffing my MAC addresses anytime soon. We're far enough away from everyone else that someone wardriving would stick out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood as well.
No matter how secure your system is, there IS a way to break in
That's true of everything, and the crux of my argument. I understand what you're saying, and I again will say that in my professional capacity on workstations and servers that are used in my company, security is job 1. But at home, it's a bit of a different story. At home is where I relax. I don't 1) spend that much time at home to begin with due to the amount of work I put in at my company. 2) When I am home, I don't spend that much time on my computers. So 3) I don't want to spend a significant percentage of that small amount of time resecuring holes that maybe
denying that just makes you more attackable
I don't deny it, I know it completely. But there's such a thing as a reasonable effort, and I already make far more than
I think the main thrust of the fear by the article's submitter was the whole "negative billing" aspect, and the subscription based thing.
First to address the negative billing (We add new stuff and you pay for it unless you tell us otherwise), I've been hit by this wonderful "feature" before, the cable company up in my neck of the woods (thanks Rogers! Go burn in hell for me, wouldja?) practiced it until enough customers made a royal stink in the media about it and the provincial government threatened to step in on their behalf. Nothing like opening up your cable bill to find that you've had 10 new channels for the last month that you didn't want, and were charged $7 for the privilege. And it's only easy to get a refund for that *AFTER* the government threatens to kick the cable company between the legs. Somehow with Steam I don't think there'd be anyone stepping in. It took dozens of people picketing for weeks on end to get action with the cable thing, I just don't see that happening over such a decentralized customer base like Steam's. Steam's agreement IS set up to potentially allow negative billing. That's enough for me to never consider using it.
The subscriber aspect is also not so good. If in fact the software you download only works while your account is up to date, what's the point? I spent $180 over a year and a half playing online games with nothing to show for it the second I closed out my account. I'd feel like a real chump paying to use Steam for 6 months, just using Half-Life 2, and then cancelling and having nothing, instead of taking that same money and buying a box from the local software shop. And also, does this mean that each time you fire up the game it has to authenicate against Steam to see if it's allowed to run? Good luck playing it without a net connection then...