It wasn't so much that they failed, they were bought out (Sony I think?) and the product itself worked well. I was part of the beta, continuing with them when they went live, and bought a handful of games through them. Fortunately, they were running various promos and I never paid full price (though admittedly, I did lose all that content when they closed). I understood the risks with the service, and the only problem I ever found with their service was in the racing games, in those cases the latency and input lag did not work well enough for the responsiveness required for racing. The shooters all responded really well and since everyone was faced with same or similar lag, it worked really well. Strategy or the few tower defense games, played very well.
Personally, I'm sold on the tech, but I won't get involved with a service like this again unless I can transfer my purchases out. I might (though I didn't previously) subscribe to a $10/mo service for the entire library of whatever's offered, but unlikely.
Coinbase is not in the business of lending money though. They are selling a product (bitcoin) and providing a service that you're not required to actually use (you can buy and then transfer out your bitcoin to your own wallet).
In the 'buyers' defense, he felt he was doing nothing wrong and more than likely wanted to be honest about his usage. The issue here is honesty in this case got his account closed. The larger issue (IMO) is that once Coinbase has made a decision, there is no path to mediation that would allow the closed account holder to plead his case.
This is not the first time Coinbase has chosen to close an account and most definitely will not be the last. What sucks is that there is no recourse for individuals with closed accounts to have them re-opened.
The issue is really about purchasing bitcoin (especially at significant volumes). Coinbase is more of a retail outlet, while GDAX is the exchange. And yes, you can use Local Bitcoin at about a 17% markup (depending on location) but if he's trying to run a business having a mark-up that high sucks.
Really the issue is Coinbase and they super paranoia for risk avoidance. On the one hand, you can't blame them for protecting their business from auditors/regulators and the power they weild. On the other hand, they're really the only reputable place you can buy bitcoin in the US without paying ridiculous fees. Sure, you can setup accounts at Cex.IO, or Bitfinex (the latter of which is not currently accepting US deposits) but international wires are kind of a pain to deal with.
What really needs to happen, IMO, is Coinbase needs to be clearer on activity they will and will not tolerate/accept risk for and there should be more of a discussion on how that risk is evaluated. Risk/Compliance departments aren't always so harsh on what they don't accept, Coinbase is definitely taking the extreme position in many of these cases making it more and more difficult for reputable purchasers to make legitimate buys.
I think this is more about the IRS looking for people who have used the exchange of bitcoin (really, the sell) of either mined cones (in which case they would likely be responsible for income tax) or profit earned on the buy/sell similar to that of stock purchases, in which case they would likely be responsible for capital gains tax.
While I hope Coinbase is able to fight this, it's really not that much different than say Fidelity reporting your exchange activity. What is different, at least IMO, Coinbase (in this example) is acting more like a forex platform, exchanging USD for BTC, regardless of whether or not the BTC was recognized as currency at that time.
We'll see where this goes, but I think most of saw this coming as an eventuality once Coinbase started allowing people to cash-out in USD, the IRS had a tangible target to start collecting data from in order to start collecting taxes from the individuals.
I thought the 'punishment' was an interesting take to show a loss of trust, after a certain date and the ability to regain it after a period of time. I found it slightly more interesting that Mozilla would also choose to no longer accept audits conducted by Ernst & Young. That could potentially be huge as it shows (at least in some manner) that their auditors were not conducting a thorough audit or did not have the technical prowess to fully audit a CA.
Your comment only confirms that you didn't read the well written paper from Mozilla, which clearly explained that WoSign purchased StartCom, an Israel based company.
Not just knowing how to negotiate, but a better understanding of the comparable salary for that position and geographic location. It's difficult some times to appreciate what you're worth when starting out (or restarting) and granted - early on you may or may not be worth that much.
Case in point - I relocated years ago and the salary that I negotiated was comparable to the salary that I'd left in a previous locale. What I didn't grasp at the time, was the increase in cost of living for the new location. In reality, while I had negotiated an increase in pay for the new job, I'd actually taken about a 10% cut in pay based on cost of living.
Granted, people have to learn from their mistakes. And true, it may not be very common to relocate as part of your first job. But, with all of that said, I would say early on in your career, understanding what you're worth, and how that is compared to where you'll be working/residing is important. It's definitely something I'll have to help teach my children as they come of age.
If Sony decides to shelf the release indefinitely, then I think they should just release it publicly for free and let the world have at it. I'd honestly rather give to Sony directly than to let any shit hacking group decide what I can and can't watch.
Hey Sony, if you want to setup a torrent, I'll be a seeder. Otherwise, let me know where I can send *cryptocurrency of the day* for a nice clean DRM free copy of the movie.
I don't know if you're a current gamer/customer of OnLive's, but let me tell you they've done a fantastic job at solving latency issues. In fact, the only time it's noticeable is for driving games (unplayable quite honestly).
For other twitch type games, first person shooters Onlive works surprinsgly well. I've played through Red Faction, Home Front, and a few others and they all play very well. Some of the slower games, Patrician for example, play very well on OnLive.
I won't sit here and tell you that latency is of no importance, it most definitely is. And true they need more data centers to be more responsive. But as a gamer in the midwest (Milwaukee), I can tell you OnLive's game service is quite responsive and a decent alternative to constant workstation upgrades.
I'm really surprised at all the fear behind administering an Exchange server. We started with SBS 2003 quite some time ago, and only just transitioned off it this past year. The original setup was a breeze, and only rudimentary skills are needed to setup connectors. Using powershell is most definitely NOT required. Configuring the remote connector can easily be created within all things GUI. As for DNS, yes - you'll need to setup a dns server. But DNS isn't rocket science. Admittedly we use bind on one of our linux boxes, but finding the required special names and adding them to your dns server wasn't terrible.
Maybe our internal IT staff is the shit, maybe I'm taking for granted how easy/difficult it was. But as someone who's worked these boxes for years, it's really not as terrible as people make it out to be...
Have you ever setup SBS Exchange, it's stupid simple. Bridgeheads? connectors? while you will need to setup a connector, it's really not complicated. Anyone who sugest it is is trying to sell you consultant services. Domain forest prep, again SBS takes care of all of this. You are correct though about the certificate. It's not the easiest thing in the world, though far from overly complicated.
Yea, hosting email and 'docs' inside Google isn't a bad idea. We toyed with the idea as well. The problem is that Google has zero responsibility to the customer in the event of a subpoena. You really don't want your data outside of your control. While you might be compelled to provide data to a third party, at least you would know it's been provided. Google has zero reason to tell you, and no obligation to do so. Keep your data out of the cloud, it's far from secure.
If you've already purchased and using (albeit only barely) Microsoft SBS, take advantage of Exchange before you spend any more money on a new system, otherwise you're just wasting money. Exchange works quite well, obvious straight-forward connectivity with the Outlook client. Administering Exchange isn't the end of the world, and is actually quite easy in an SBS environment. I would suggest setting up an alternate internal smart-host (smart-relay) so that you don't have to expose the Exchange server directly to the internet. Courier MTA works VERY well (and is the exact setup we have internet->courier->exchange).
Setting up a Jabber IM server internally is easy as well, otherwise use Google Apps and have your email domain hosted there and just use Google Talk with the various AV plugins.
Setting up Switchvox (Asterisk) is a purchase, but I 2nd the comment by others to find you a local phone service retailer and let them deal with phone integration. If you do decide on a hosted solution for email and voice (voip) then make sure you don't skimp on the internet connectivity. I worked at a place previously convinced VOIP was the way to go, but management would cringe every time you talked about capacity of the external connection and the need to upgrade.
It's funny, everything you wrote I was thinking as I was getting ready to reply to thread...
Our Sun/Solaris (F! U! Oracle...) are all supported with top-notch onsite support as well as being able to use the iLOM systems is fantastic. We also have Dell's and HP that almost all have their respective integrated systems. But I really think you hit the nail on the head with your reference to VMware. It has made so much more sense for many of the systems I admin at work. While our core database servers are all on bare metal, nearly every other 'service' is virtualized either in vmware or in solaris zones.
mod me redundant - just wanted to chime in and agree with the parent.
While you make the point of the model, you didn't specify your stance on the topic.
I for one am against the capping. I can understand the business need as additional content becomes available, it requires additional bandwidth available on the part of the ISP.
I currently subscribe to a 'premium' tier from TW here in Milwaukee, mostly for the additional upstream bandwidth. I did a quick review of my usage as tracked through Cacti, and found that on average, I use about 40GB/mo. An occasional torrent for a distro, plus some updates to windows boxes, and a couple of Gentoo boxes. I also have begun using Netflix's online video more.
What is interesting though, is that I haven't read anything mentioning the HBO on Broadband service that is bundled with HBO package I currently have. Will I be charged for bandwidth that is used for a service I'm already paying for (to the same vendor?)
Just some thoughts. I hope this whole tiered thing falls through...
I don't know about SSO in it's truest form, I assume you mean that after the user logs into the workstation, that they don't have to also login to the IM client. I never worked with that at all.
As for using the same user account to log in to both the workstation (XP I assume?) as well as the IM client, I had that working in about 5 minutes.
If it's not working, it's probably more to do with your ldap authentication than with either server.
Are you able to perform lookups from the CLI on the Jabber server? I would check that. Assuming that you can, the OpenFire server has a couple of tests that it can perform to help troubleshoot.
The OpenFire Jabber server is rock solid and integrates with LDAP, has the ability to log conversations and generally speaking is very elegant and easy to maintain.
We also use the Spark client, which is made available by the same group.
I'd have to 2nd this one. We are using Openfire with Spark as well and I have found it very usable. It can also integrate with an Active Directory tree (and OpenLDAP I'm sure)
I like the ease of use at the administrator side as well.
In much the same way it's not cool to kick over wheel chairs or trip the blind it's also not cool to troll mad people or laugh at their ravings in public.
I'm sure you're aware of mac address spoofing. If I were really in the need of this type of bandwidth (and a comcast customer... I'm not).. I'd write a script that changed the reported MAC address released/renewed the IP and started on the next file.
Personally, I'd rather pay up front for a consistent higher speed. I do. I pay an extra $5 (or something cheap, I don't remember exactly) and I get an additional 8mbit down, and an additional 640Kbps up, for a total bandwidth of 15Mbit down / 1Mbit up.
I'm happy, and I think that if this is really a feature that Comcast is selling, another nice feature would be allowing a user to the opportunity to turn it off, maybe from a user's account owner page?
Slashdot Mirror
He was one of the reasons I read Slashdot, My prayers are with you and your family.
RIP,
harryk
It wasn't so much that they failed, they were bought out (Sony I think?) and the product itself worked well. I was part of the beta, continuing with them when they went live, and bought a handful of games through them. Fortunately, they were running various promos and I never paid full price (though admittedly, I did lose all that content when they closed). I understood the risks with the service, and the only problem I ever found with their service was in the racing games, in those cases the latency and input lag did not work well enough for the responsiveness required for racing. The shooters all responded really well and since everyone was faced with same or similar lag, it worked really well. Strategy or the few tower defense games, played very well.
Personally, I'm sold on the tech, but I won't get involved with a service like this again unless I can transfer my purchases out. I might (though I didn't previously) subscribe to a $10/mo service for the entire library of whatever's offered, but unlikely.
my 2 cents...
harryk
Coinbase is not in the business of lending money though. They are selling a product (bitcoin) and providing a service that you're not required to actually use (you can buy and then transfer out your bitcoin to your own wallet).
In the 'buyers' defense, he felt he was doing nothing wrong and more than likely wanted to be honest about his usage. The issue here is honesty in this case got his account closed. The larger issue (IMO) is that once Coinbase has made a decision, there is no path to mediation that would allow the closed account holder to plead his case.
This is not the first time Coinbase has chosen to close an account and most definitely will not be the last. What sucks is that there is no recourse for individuals with closed accounts to have them re-opened.
The issue is really about purchasing bitcoin (especially at significant volumes). Coinbase is more of a retail outlet, while GDAX is the exchange. And yes, you can use Local Bitcoin at about a 17% markup (depending on location) but if he's trying to run a business having a mark-up that high sucks.
Really the issue is Coinbase and they super paranoia for risk avoidance. On the one hand, you can't blame them for protecting their business from auditors/regulators and the power they weild. On the other hand, they're really the only reputable place you can buy bitcoin in the US without paying ridiculous fees. Sure, you can setup accounts at Cex.IO, or Bitfinex (the latter of which is not currently accepting US deposits) but international wires are kind of a pain to deal with.
What really needs to happen, IMO, is Coinbase needs to be clearer on activity they will and will not tolerate/accept risk for and there should be more of a discussion on how that risk is evaluated. Risk/Compliance departments aren't always so harsh on what they don't accept, Coinbase is definitely taking the extreme position in many of these cases making it more and more difficult for reputable purchasers to make legitimate buys.
I think this is more about the IRS looking for people who have used the exchange of bitcoin (really, the sell) of either mined cones (in which case they would likely be responsible for income tax) or profit earned on the buy/sell similar to that of stock purchases, in which case they would likely be responsible for capital gains tax.
While I hope Coinbase is able to fight this, it's really not that much different than say Fidelity reporting your exchange activity. What is different, at least IMO, Coinbase (in this example) is acting more like a forex platform, exchanging USD for BTC, regardless of whether or not the BTC was recognized as currency at that time.
We'll see where this goes, but I think most of saw this coming as an eventuality once Coinbase started allowing people to cash-out in USD, the IRS had a tangible target to start collecting data from in order to start collecting taxes from the individuals.
-harryk
I thought the 'punishment' was an interesting take to show a loss of trust, after a certain date and the ability to regain it after a period of time. I found it slightly more interesting that Mozilla would also choose to no longer accept audits conducted by Ernst & Young. That could potentially be huge as it shows (at least in some manner) that their auditors were not conducting a thorough audit or did not have the technical prowess to fully audit a CA.
Your comment only confirms that you didn't read the well written paper from Mozilla, which clearly explained that WoSign purchased StartCom, an Israel based company.
This kind of sentencing is extraordinary especially in light of other recent verdicts and sentencing.
Not just knowing how to negotiate, but a better understanding of the comparable salary for that position and geographic location. It's difficult some times to appreciate what you're worth when starting out (or restarting) and granted - early on you may or may not be worth that much.
Case in point - I relocated years ago and the salary that I negotiated was comparable to the salary that I'd left in a previous locale. What I didn't grasp at the time, was the increase in cost of living for the new location. In reality, while I had negotiated an increase in pay for the new job, I'd actually taken about a 10% cut in pay based on cost of living.
Granted, people have to learn from their mistakes. And true, it may not be very common to relocate as part of your first job. But, with all of that said, I would say early on in your career, understanding what you're worth, and how that is compared to where you'll be working/residing is important. It's definitely something I'll have to help teach my children as they come of age.
If Sony decides to shelf the release indefinitely, then I think they should just release it publicly for free and let the world have at it. I'd honestly rather give to Sony directly than to let any shit hacking group decide what I can and can't watch.
Hey Sony, if you want to setup a torrent, I'll be a seeder. Otherwise, let me know where I can send *cryptocurrency of the day* for a nice clean DRM free copy of the movie.
Individual CC's per transaction have already been here and gone. One example is here: https://www.bankofamerica.com/...
I don't know if you're a current gamer/customer of OnLive's, but let me tell you they've done a fantastic job at solving latency issues. In fact, the only time it's noticeable is for driving games (unplayable quite honestly).
For other twitch type games, first person shooters Onlive works surprinsgly well. I've played through Red Faction, Home Front, and a few others and they all play very well. Some of the slower games, Patrician for example, play very well on OnLive.
I won't sit here and tell you that latency is of no importance, it most definitely is. And true they need more data centers to be more responsive. But as a gamer in the midwest (Milwaukee), I can tell you OnLive's game service is quite responsive and a decent alternative to constant workstation upgrades.
I'm really surprised at all the fear behind administering an Exchange server. We started with SBS 2003 quite some time ago, and only just transitioned off it this past year. The original setup was a breeze, and only rudimentary skills are needed to setup connectors. Using powershell is most definitely NOT required. Configuring the remote connector can easily be created within all things GUI. As for DNS, yes - you'll need to setup a dns server. But DNS isn't rocket science. Admittedly we use bind on one of our linux boxes, but finding the required special names and adding them to your dns server wasn't terrible.
Maybe our internal IT staff is the shit, maybe I'm taking for granted how easy/difficult it was. But as someone who's worked these boxes for years, it's really not as terrible as people make it out to be...
Seriously?
Have you ever setup SBS Exchange, it's stupid simple. Bridgeheads? connectors? while you will need to setup a connector, it's really not complicated. Anyone who sugest it is is trying to sell you consultant services. Domain forest prep, again SBS takes care of all of this. You are correct though about the certificate. It's not the easiest thing in the world, though far from overly complicated.
Yea, hosting email and 'docs' inside Google isn't a bad idea. We toyed with the idea as well. The problem is that Google has zero responsibility to the customer in the event of a subpoena. You really don't want your data outside of your control. While you might be compelled to provide data to a third party, at least you would know it's been provided. Google has zero reason to tell you, and no obligation to do so. Keep your data out of the cloud, it's far from secure.
If you've already purchased and using (albeit only barely) Microsoft SBS, take advantage of Exchange before you spend any more money on a new system, otherwise you're just wasting money. Exchange works quite well, obvious straight-forward connectivity with the Outlook client. Administering Exchange isn't the end of the world, and is actually quite easy in an SBS environment. I would suggest setting up an alternate internal smart-host (smart-relay) so that you don't have to expose the Exchange server directly to the internet. Courier MTA works VERY well (and is the exact setup we have internet->courier->exchange).
Setting up a Jabber IM server internally is easy as well, otherwise use Google Apps and have your email domain hosted there and just use Google Talk with the various AV plugins.
Setting up Switchvox (Asterisk) is a purchase, but I 2nd the comment by others to find you a local phone service retailer and let them deal with phone integration. If you do decide on a hosted solution for email and voice (voip) then make sure you don't skimp on the internet connectivity. I worked at a place previously convinced VOIP was the way to go, but management would cringe every time you talked about capacity of the external connection and the need to upgrade.
Just my 2cents...
and yet, with nothing to hide, you posted as anonymous...
It's funny, everything you wrote I was thinking as I was getting ready to reply to thread...
Our Sun/Solaris (F! U! Oracle...) are all supported with top-notch onsite support as well as being able to use the iLOM systems is fantastic. We also have Dell's and HP that almost all have their respective integrated systems. But I really think you hit the nail on the head with your reference to VMware. It has made so much more sense for many of the systems I admin at work. While our core database servers are all on bare metal, nearly every other 'service' is virtualized either in vmware or in solaris zones.
mod me redundant - just wanted to chime in and agree with the parent.
harryk
While you make the point of the model, you didn't specify your stance on the topic.
I for one am against the capping. I can understand the business need as additional content becomes available, it requires additional bandwidth available on the part of the ISP.
I currently subscribe to a 'premium' tier from TW here in Milwaukee, mostly for the additional upstream bandwidth. I did a quick review of my usage as tracked through Cacti, and found that on average, I use about 40GB/mo. An occasional torrent for a distro, plus some updates to windows boxes, and a couple of Gentoo boxes. I also have begun using Netflix's online video more.
What is interesting though, is that I haven't read anything mentioning the HBO on Broadband service that is bundled with HBO package I currently have. Will I be charged for bandwidth that is used for a service I'm already paying for (to the same vendor?)
Just some thoughts. I hope this whole tiered thing falls through...
harryk
I don't know about SSO in it's truest form, I assume you mean that after the user logs into the workstation, that they don't have to also login to the IM client. I never worked with that at all.
As for using the same user account to log in to both the workstation (XP I assume?) as well as the IM client, I had that working in about 5 minutes.
If it's not working, it's probably more to do with your ldap authentication than with either server.
Are you able to perform lookups from the CLI on the Jabber server? I would check that. Assuming that you can, the OpenFire server has a couple of tests that it can perform to help troubleshoot.
BTW - is this an OpenLDAP server or AD?
I agree.
The OpenFire Jabber server is rock solid and integrates with LDAP, has the ability to log conversations and generally speaking is very elegant and easy to maintain.
We also use the Spark client, which is made available by the same group.
Very solid setup if you ask me.
I'd have to 2nd this one. We are using Openfire with Spark as well and I have found it very usable. It can also integrate with an Active Directory tree (and OpenLDAP I'm sure)
I like the ease of use at the administrator side as well.
2 thumbs up for this set!
harryk
laugh ...
He was obviously attempting to quote the original post, not attempt to disclaim that he was posting AC.
Wow ...
I'm sure you're aware of mac address spoofing. If I were really in the need of this type of bandwidth (and a comcast customer ... I'm not) .. I'd write a script that changed the reported MAC address released/renewed the IP and started on the next file.
Personally, I'd rather pay up front for a consistent higher speed. I do. I pay an extra $5 (or something cheap, I don't remember exactly) and I get an additional 8mbit down, and an additional 640Kbps up, for a total bandwidth of 15Mbit down / 1Mbit up.
I'm happy, and I think that if this is really a feature that Comcast is selling, another nice feature would be allowing a user to the opportunity to turn it off, maybe from a user's account owner page?
Just a thought.. I'm rambling...
harryk