If I gave them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was strategic: price it high enough to limit the strain on their wireless network, but then similarly not so high that those who would actually use it and need it to be reliable are screwed over. Then sod off anyone who didn't like it. Not that I'd expect them to actually come out and say something like that.
But, let's keep going and try to make it look better for them.
If we assume they sprung for high-end enterprise grade access points that won't drop dead under the load of several hundred clients in the area given, then a dozen access points might be at least a five-figure deal right off the bat. If the requirements for "separate network" also indicate complete physical isolation then additional equipment would likely be required. In addition to some decent switching equipment, they might need a good firewall to withstand the abuse. Maybe additional expense if they extended isolation to where they sourced their Internet connection from, as well. Several media outlets might have requirements for uplink bandwidth necessary to stream their event if they aren't doing satellite uplink or something like that. Perhaps in that scenario it'd require someone getting an impromptu fiber run to the site of the event.
If the "tuning" they indicated was figuring out what propagation looked like post-setup and making adjustments to the placement of their access points that'd entail at a minimum a few more intern hours or at worst a few more access points.
I sincerely doubt that even given the above figuring they lost their shirt over this wireless network. But I'm sure at the same time if everyone and their grandmother took out portable MiFi units or turned on the hot spot feature for their phone the service would have been absolute shit and littered with clients and ad-hoc wireless devices operating on cross channels.
The forced upgrade cycle gave the usual OEM's ample time to roll out Windows 10 devices and most consumers will simply move to Windows 10 by way of failed or slow computer forcing their hand to upgrade that way. By that momentum alone Windows 10 adoption will continue to rise steadily.
Windows 7 will continue on as the new Windows XP in the professional space and we'll all repeat the painful process of resisting unwanted change for the next ten years.
Because when all the businesses in rural nowhere: population 'me' catch whiff of that I'm either going to be relegated to burger flipper salary equivalent wage to compensate, layoffs will force more small businesses into the hands of contract IT vendors (of which there are maybe two that matter around here), or forced to move again.
I suppose I'm in the minority considering $15/hr flipping burgers in California by comparison would be middle class here, but a sweeping adjustment like that will certainly do more harm than good around here where median income for nearly everyone is far below that 50k/year threshold.
I think the price point is $50 due to it competing with the establishment (e.g. brick and mortar movie theaters). If they charge too much, nobody will use the service. If they charge too little, they are competing with existing streaming services like Netflix and Hulu which would otherwise be declined such early access agreements which could result in lots of lawyers having a very merry Christmas this year.
I wonder how it would affect their gross revenue on these movies at the lower price point. Apart from the fact it could disrupt food and merch sales for the theaters, it would be cutting into the high price point ticket sales which would mean Michael Bay would have to wait at least an extra 2 years for his tenth private jet purchase. Can't have that now, can we?
Microsoft could continue to turn a profit on licensing like they do now with open source clauses. Hypothetically, there isn't a problem with that if they carried some BSD-like license for their OS. But, could you imagine the turmoil that would ensue? I can see it now: Dell PC's no longer ship with Windows, but Dell Workstation Foundation. Its like Windows, but with all the things they don't want you to have stripped out and replaced with their own proprietary spin. Who needs services when you have Dell work units? Or explorer when you have Dell clicky experience? OEM's do it with their phones all the time so what's stopping them from going full retard on the PC market, too?
Or worse, the OEM's void your warranty if you try to install vanilla Windows to avoid it to lock you into their solutions. I realize there are implications to some of the above that would break software, but we see the same things across Linux distributions all the time. Why would open sourcing Windows be any different?
Windows could never be open sourced anyway. There is code for libraries and other components licensed out from other vendors and all kinds of patent mess that would make it extraordinarily difficult for them to do it anyway. Its a cool thought, but its also a can of worms I hope they don't open.
Oh aye, they did a good job of trying to sweep this one under the rug. If you rebooted any computer afflicted with this before the fix was deployed, you had a solid chance of rendering your system unbootable. With Panda broken, Windows often will not start. And even if it does start, Panda would swallow up several core system files, leaving you with a rather unusable system. We had several customers with dozens of workstations running Panda, and the first thing they thought to do was of course a reboot.
In some cases, Panda even requested a reboot to complete its hari kari.
Systems that were not rebooted were unusable while Panda held everything up.
Of course, Panda later released a tool to fix that if you rebooted your system. But it only really works if you can boot into, at a minimum, safe mode. But I still find it very hard to believe that if they were testing these updates that this would have happened. I have a feeling a chain of technicians got complacent about this, and a string of managerial staff is probably going to get fired as a result.
I know they're not the only company to screw up an update like this, but this really is quite nonsensical.
I've been running with the open source radeon driver with my 7870 for at least a year now. It's 2D performance is pretty smooth and vdpau decoding pretty much eliminates CPU bottlenecks on Linux for me. Don't really have any experience with the latter question in your post, though.
Because hosting your own instance of the old pirate bay (sort of) sounds more impressive and rebellious and has a better chance of getting mass adaptation in the moment than Tribler.
This still needs to pass the senate, and if enough commotion can be stewed up among the masses it'll make that whole process a bigger pain in the ass for them. And it should, because this is blatantly unconstitutional and they know it. Now would be the time to make it a point to your representatives that this is not what you want, and certainly doesn't represent the intents and demands of their constituents.
Just like the LimeWire lawsuit ended music piracy, right? Its so much easier to cling to a bad marketing model for dear life and sue anyone who gets in your way. Of course, contrary to their beliefs most of my own clients didn't even know what adblock was until I recommended it. I suppose while they're at it they should sue Microsoft, too, for introducing their own content blocker and opt-out do-not-track requests which uses the same lists as adblock.
IMO, win or lose they won't survive any longer for it.
The only board this kind of thing could really matter on is/b/. Any of the others slow enough to persist threads for days (3DCG, oh no someone might post a 3D model of a cone) are benign and thus this policy amendment won't accomplish anything.
Until a proposed system to make automated vehicles feasible on public roads in mass is proposed, developed, protocols and legal procedures released related to this come about, this is nothing but a scare topic making vague assumptions about things that aren't even a topic for development yet.
While its just a YouTube comment, it seems a Pixar representative made some comments of his own. Amongst them was one which explicitly stated that Blender can implement OpenSubdiv if they wanted to.
Of course the comment holds no legal weight whatsoever, but its an encouraging sign.
A snip from that comment (emphasis mine):
OpenSubdiv is a free open-source API : any software vendor can implement our code in their application, including Maya, 3DS Max, Mudbox, Mari or Blender. The implementation is based on a joint research effort between Pixar and Microsoft Research.
Indeed. Why just the other day I was able to successfully listen to Holy Diver while downloading Firefox. Then when I double clicked the Firefox installer, ReactOS went straight to a BSOD.
Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.
It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.
I agree entirely. I'm not sure about Alien Arena, but I have noticed with a few of these open source FPS games, particularly AssaultCube (I used to love playing AssaultCube), a certain social phenomena will occur where only a handful of the "elite" developers, contributors, and players will be recognized and their ideas accepted as okay to be part of the game. Anything which conflicts with their interests is deemed bad for the game, even if the larger portion of their user base prefers these "bad" ideas.
So, slowly but surely, the large, interested communities who enjoyed what the elites did not will fade away and find other games. The end result being something like a few weeks ago when I tried to get on one of these games again just to see if things calmed down, and all I saw was a bunch of empty servers.
I understand that people would be protective of their work and after a while, sensitive to ideas of change. I also understand OSS permits people the option of splitting from a community and making modifications to a game they feel make it better. But when it comes down to banning players and servers alike from a master server for playing certain maps and modes too much, then you have a problem.
Trolling aside, I'm just glad those who did buy one are doing cool things with them.
I had put myself on the waiting list a month or so ago and just today I got invited to purchase one. But they claimed delivery would take 12 weeks at least. Since I am likely moving downstate, and since I've already waited this long for one, I figure I can hold off at this point.
Besides, for what I want to use it for I need to pick up some more hardware and finish my software for the cause. I intend to set up an amateur radio repeater using the Pi as the controller.
If I had to take a guess, he probably used a plugin that supports straight up OpenGL, an audio backend with support for OpenAL, and for input used XInput2.
Congratulations, Pirate Pay. You repurposed the same technology Low Orbit Ion Cannon offers so that it could target BitTorrent clients. Its a bit early to assume anyone will jump on this software, though. Fighting fire with fire and then complaining when down the road your network hosting this software is inevitably being DDoS'd by the clients it aggravated would come off as a bit hypocritical.
Although, I wonder if this targets specific torrents, or just any torrent downloading it detects on a network. I'd be rather ticked if I was in the middle of downloading a Debian DVD ISO and my download speeds dropped substantially because my system was being DDoS'd for using my download protocol of choice.
That ship has sailed and its never coming back. Save for the hobbyist minority, most other users don't care about any of the selling points of a Linux Desktop Operating System.
Tell them its free, and they will tell you they didn't "pay" for Windows and that it came with their PC. Even if this is a load of crap, they don't know the difference. Some of them will even ask you what Windows is, or what an operating system is. I hear this lots from all age groups since many people just don't care how it works.
Tell them they can customize it and there's many choices, and they'll tell you they just want to check their email and write up their reports.
Tell them there is games, and they'll argue they can't play Skyrim. Tell them they can play Skyrim with Wine, and they'll tell you its too complicated.
Your average PC user wants consistency, and that's either going to be Windows or Mac. This is especially notable in the area of people who know just enough about computers for work purposes. The only people who I have ever convinced to try Linux are those with dated hardware that don't want to run XP but can't run Vista or Windows 7.
Unless Linode decides to cough up $15k in a private deal, there will likely be no compensation. IANAL, but since the United States government doesn't recognize bitcoins as a legal form of currency anyway, taking this to court would probably be fruitless and a waste of time. Unless I'm missing details, of course.
If they were to be compensated, though, there is some potential to have this incident set a major precedent in regards to the legitimacy of bitcoins in the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
If I gave them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was strategic: price it high enough to limit the strain on their wireless network, but then similarly not so high that those who would actually use it and need it to be reliable are screwed over. Then sod off anyone who didn't like it. Not that I'd expect them to actually come out and say something like that.
But, let's keep going and try to make it look better for them.
If we assume they sprung for high-end enterprise grade access points that won't drop dead under the load of several hundred clients in the area given, then a dozen access points might be at least a five-figure deal right off the bat. If the requirements for "separate network" also indicate complete physical isolation then additional equipment would likely be required. In addition to some decent switching equipment, they might need a good firewall to withstand the abuse. Maybe additional expense if they extended isolation to where they sourced their Internet connection from, as well. Several media outlets might have requirements for uplink bandwidth necessary to stream their event if they aren't doing satellite uplink or something like that. Perhaps in that scenario it'd require someone getting an impromptu fiber run to the site of the event.
If the "tuning" they indicated was figuring out what propagation looked like post-setup and making adjustments to the placement of their access points that'd entail at a minimum a few more intern hours or at worst a few more access points.
I sincerely doubt that even given the above figuring they lost their shirt over this wireless network. But I'm sure at the same time if everyone and their grandmother took out portable MiFi units or turned on the hot spot feature for their phone the service would have been absolute shit and littered with clients and ad-hoc wireless devices operating on cross channels.
The forced upgrade cycle gave the usual OEM's ample time to roll out Windows 10 devices and most consumers will simply move to Windows 10 by way of failed or slow computer forcing their hand to upgrade that way. By that momentum alone Windows 10 adoption will continue to rise steadily.
Windows 7 will continue on as the new Windows XP in the professional space and we'll all repeat the painful process of resisting unwanted change for the next ten years.
Because when all the businesses in rural nowhere: population 'me' catch whiff of that I'm either going to be relegated to burger flipper salary equivalent wage to compensate, layoffs will force more small businesses into the hands of contract IT vendors (of which there are maybe two that matter around here), or forced to move again.
I suppose I'm in the minority considering $15/hr flipping burgers in California by comparison would be middle class here, but a sweeping adjustment like that will certainly do more harm than good around here where median income for nearly everyone is far below that 50k/year threshold.
I think the price point is $50 due to it competing with the establishment (e.g. brick and mortar movie theaters). If they charge too much, nobody will use the service. If they charge too little, they are competing with existing streaming services like Netflix and Hulu which would otherwise be declined such early access agreements which could result in lots of lawyers having a very merry Christmas this year.
I wonder how it would affect their gross revenue on these movies at the lower price point. Apart from the fact it could disrupt food and merch sales for the theaters, it would be cutting into the high price point ticket sales which would mean Michael Bay would have to wait at least an extra 2 years for his tenth private jet purchase. Can't have that now, can we?
Microsoft could continue to turn a profit on licensing like they do now with open source clauses. Hypothetically, there isn't a problem with that if they carried some BSD-like license for their OS. But, could you imagine the turmoil that would ensue? I can see it now: Dell PC's no longer ship with Windows, but Dell Workstation Foundation. Its like Windows, but with all the things they don't want you to have stripped out and replaced with their own proprietary spin. Who needs services when you have Dell work units? Or explorer when you have Dell clicky experience? OEM's do it with their phones all the time so what's stopping them from going full retard on the PC market, too?
Or worse, the OEM's void your warranty if you try to install vanilla Windows to avoid it to lock you into their solutions. I realize there are implications to some of the above that would break software, but we see the same things across Linux distributions all the time. Why would open sourcing Windows be any different?
Windows could never be open sourced anyway. There is code for libraries and other components licensed out from other vendors and all kinds of patent mess that would make it extraordinarily difficult for them to do it anyway. Its a cool thought, but its also a can of worms I hope they don't open.
Oh aye, they did a good job of trying to sweep this one under the rug. If you rebooted any computer afflicted with this before the fix was deployed, you had a solid chance of rendering your system unbootable. With Panda broken, Windows often will not start. And even if it does start, Panda would swallow up several core system files, leaving you with a rather unusable system. We had several customers with dozens of workstations running Panda, and the first thing they thought to do was of course a reboot.
In some cases, Panda even requested a reboot to complete its hari kari.
Systems that were not rebooted were unusable while Panda held everything up.
Of course, Panda later released a tool to fix that if you rebooted your system. But it only really works if you can boot into, at a minimum, safe mode. But I still find it very hard to believe that if they were testing these updates that this would have happened. I have a feeling a chain of technicians got complacent about this, and a string of managerial staff is probably going to get fired as a result. I know they're not the only company to screw up an update like this, but this really is quite nonsensical.
I've been running with the open source radeon driver with my 7870 for at least a year now. It's 2D performance is pretty smooth and vdpau decoding pretty much eliminates CPU bottlenecks on Linux for me. Don't really have any experience with the latter question in your post, though.
I'd be fairly thrilled if I could get my aircraft carrier spayed for $0.01, too.
Because hosting your own instance of the old pirate bay (sort of) sounds more impressive and rebellious and has a better chance of getting mass adaptation in the moment than Tribler.
This still needs to pass the senate, and if enough commotion can be stewed up among the masses it'll make that whole process a bigger pain in the ass for them. And it should, because this is blatantly unconstitutional and they know it. Now would be the time to make it a point to your representatives that this is not what you want, and certainly doesn't represent the intents and demands of their constituents.
Just like the LimeWire lawsuit ended music piracy, right? Its so much easier to cling to a bad marketing model for dear life and sue anyone who gets in your way. Of course, contrary to their beliefs most of my own clients didn't even know what adblock was until I recommended it. I suppose while they're at it they should sue Microsoft, too, for introducing their own content blocker and opt-out do-not-track requests which uses the same lists as adblock.
IMO, win or lose they won't survive any longer for it.
The only board this kind of thing could really matter on is /b/. Any of the others slow enough to persist threads for days (3DCG, oh no someone might post a 3D model of a cone) are benign and thus this policy amendment won't accomplish anything.
Until a proposed system to make automated vehicles feasible on public roads in mass is proposed, developed, protocols and legal procedures released related to this come about, this is nothing but a scare topic making vague assumptions about things that aren't even a topic for development yet.
Of course the comment holds no legal weight whatsoever, but its an encouraging sign.
A snip from that comment (emphasis mine):
Indeed. Why just the other day I was able to successfully listen to Holy Diver while downloading Firefox. Then when I double clicked the Firefox installer, ReactOS went straight to a BSOD.
Honestly, it does Windows better than Windows.
Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.
It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.
Actually, its built atop what once was the quake 2 engine, but has since been modified to extremes to support all these cool new things.
Can't really complain when the price tag for your average end user is "free."
I agree entirely. I'm not sure about Alien Arena, but I have noticed with a few of these open source FPS games, particularly AssaultCube (I used to love playing AssaultCube), a certain social phenomena will occur where only a handful of the "elite" developers, contributors, and players will be recognized and their ideas accepted as okay to be part of the game. Anything which conflicts with their interests is deemed bad for the game, even if the larger portion of their user base prefers these "bad" ideas.
So, slowly but surely, the large, interested communities who enjoyed what the elites did not will fade away and find other games. The end result being something like a few weeks ago when I tried to get on one of these games again just to see if things calmed down, and all I saw was a bunch of empty servers.
I understand that people would be protective of their work and after a while, sensitive to ideas of change. I also understand OSS permits people the option of splitting from a community and making modifications to a game they feel make it better. But when it comes down to banning players and servers alike from a master server for playing certain maps and modes too much, then you have a problem.
Trolling aside, I'm just glad those who did buy one are doing cool things with them.
I had put myself on the waiting list a month or so ago and just today I got invited to purchase one. But they claimed delivery would take 12 weeks at least. Since I am likely moving downstate, and since I've already waited this long for one, I figure I can hold off at this point.
Besides, for what I want to use it for I need to pick up some more hardware and finish my software for the cause. I intend to set up an amateur radio repeater using the Pi as the controller.
If I had to take a guess, he probably used a plugin that supports straight up OpenGL, an audio backend with support for OpenAL, and for input used XInput2.
Congratulations, Pirate Pay. You repurposed the same technology Low Orbit Ion Cannon offers so that it could target BitTorrent clients. Its a bit early to assume anyone will jump on this software, though. Fighting fire with fire and then complaining when down the road your network hosting this software is inevitably being DDoS'd by the clients it aggravated would come off as a bit hypocritical.
Although, I wonder if this targets specific torrents, or just any torrent downloading it detects on a network. I'd be rather ticked if I was in the middle of downloading a Debian DVD ISO and my download speeds dropped substantially because my system was being DDoS'd for using my download protocol of choice.
That ship has sailed and its never coming back. Save for the hobbyist minority, most other users don't care about any of the selling points of a Linux Desktop Operating System.
Tell them its free, and they will tell you they didn't "pay" for Windows and that it came with their PC. Even if this is a load of crap, they don't know the difference. Some of them will even ask you what Windows is, or what an operating system is. I hear this lots from all age groups since many people just don't care how it works.
Tell them they can customize it and there's many choices, and they'll tell you they just want to check their email and write up their reports.
Tell them there is games, and they'll argue they can't play Skyrim. Tell them they can play Skyrim with Wine, and they'll tell you its too complicated.
Your average PC user wants consistency, and that's either going to be Windows or Mac. This is especially notable in the area of people who know just enough about computers for work purposes. The only people who I have ever convinced to try Linux are those with dated hardware that don't want to run XP but can't run Vista or Windows 7.
I knew this extremely large trollface would come to represent something important, someday!
Unless Linode decides to cough up $15k in a private deal, there will likely be no compensation. IANAL, but since the United States government doesn't recognize bitcoins as a legal form of currency anyway, taking this to court would probably be fruitless and a waste of time. Unless I'm missing details, of course.
If they were to be compensated, though, there is some potential to have this incident set a major precedent in regards to the legitimacy of bitcoins in the U.S.
It's not all their fault, really. MSPaint doesn't have JPEG support in Windows 98.