Don't quote me on this as I'm surely getting some pointless facts wrong, but I heard Telus is getting sued for selling cell phone porn. Now I have to wonder why someone would want porn on their cell phone, especially at telco prices, but I fail to see why this gives a religious activism group any reason or valid basis for a lawsuit.
So they're half-brained bible-thumping attention whores, and they don't like porn... ok! Just don't buy the porn! Porn isn't destroying the world (of organized criminal religion), porn freaks are (ministers)!
Hell I don't like Honda Civics because everyone driving them in my neighborhood is either a goddamned wigger or a short-haired office-power psycho bitch with so many paint smears on the bumpers she'd make Van Gogh blush. Should I sue Honda ? Noooo! I should sue the bitch that scratched my car. Simple logic.
Maybe there's something I'm missing about extremist catholic groups... oh right, they're still pissed off because the jews control everything. ah well!
I was just looking into that the other day, I want to replace CMD with Bash for my own uses, but while retaining Batch file functionality, and ideally avoiding Cygwin ports because, well, they're Cygwin ports nuff said. It's not as easy as one would expect.
My problem is I'm tied to Windows whether I like it or not. Wine compatibility just isn't quite there yet, so why not do the reverse and bring some of the best parts of Linux over to my Windows desktop... at least for now!
My main interest lies in the Bash shell's scripting abilities. I do kinky stuff with batch files, but they're so cruelly limited in their abilities and so I run into brick walls quite often. Perl is a viable tool for some things, but most of my challenges lie in the limbo zone, beyond CMD's abilities but still deemed too simple to bother with full-on Perl. For example I've got one batch file that quickly converts Zip/Rar files to 7zip; all it does is extract to a temp folder, then recompress, but all it can do is test whether a step completed or not by checking the ERRORLEVEL result, and abort. It also can't iterate over files easily, because the For loop can only execute a single command, so I have a wrapper script that looks like "for %1 in (blah) call dosomething.bat". Actually I have a ton of those wrapper scripts, one for each worker script. The same type of thing is trivial (and clean) in Bash thanks to code blocks, competent If-Then logic and of course the intrinsic philosophy that you can build great tools out of a dozen simple operations all piped together. I end up doing "somecommand > tempfile.txt" then kinky SED/AWK to batchify the tempfile, assigning each line/token to an environment variable, then launching a third process to act upon the partially digested data. It would be so much easier to do something like "MYPORN=$(locate somefile)".
Hell, even the space oddity named OS/2 had Rexx, which was far more usable than "Dos with command extensions". What the hell is Microsoft doing out there ? Oh I know, drawing pretty graphics for Vista to make it look new.
I think they're right. I think the virus is humanity. We must be doing something the bees don't like. Maybe it's the part about destroying natural habitats and squeezing them into little wooden boxes where a creepy smelly redneck dude comes over every day to blow smoke in their eyes. Or maybe all this crap we're doing to the planet with commercial GMOs and all these bombs exploding might be doing nasty things to the little insects' genetic makeup, and it's not like they have hospitals in those wooden boxes either.
I guess we'll just have to invent a robotic bee thing, because we certainly can't stop reproducing and blowing shit up, that would be inhumane.
Come on, this is too obvious. Why do you have any regular installs if you have the VLK ? Just call Microsoft and get those strays rolled up in the VLK, and verbally belittle the smartass who bought rogue copies of Windows without telling the sysadmin.
What about add-on licenses ? If you have four machines, they could make it so you buy one physical box at retail price, then pay a small add-on charge for every additional license. Make it something stupid like $25 and people would be likely to buy it, just for the sake of being legit.
The way it is now, $200 for Windows XP Pro, times 4 machines = $800. Or $200 for one, crack the others and save $600 bucks while still having the one good license if you ever need support, and for downloading updates and whatnot. Or do it my way and pay $275 total for four totally legit installs, because let's face it: if you have four PC's in your home, you're probably not going to be calling Microsoft's home support (India) for help, so really they're making an extra $75 for free.
PC hardware has become a cheap commodity.. back in the days of $5000 crap computers, spending another hundred on DOS and Windows was peanuts. These days the useless OS costs more then the machine it runs on. And by useless I mean it's basically colorized DOS with a web browser. The OS is a filesystem layer, a network stack, a dozen apps nobody uses and an extra 4 gigs of unsafe bytecode doing mysterious things while you wait; everything else you have to buy/download separately to actually use the computer. Nothing special there, certainly nothing worth the crazy money they're asking. For Windows Server, I can justify the hefty price tag because you're got a bit more functionality built-in, notably Active Directory, file/print servers and a few other handy things for a small/medium office, not to mention better qualified techs on the phone who can do a bit more than the indian kid reading idiot-proofed decision trees to you like you're retarded.
A crazy idea just buzzed through my head: Give the OS away for free, but charge for applications. Really! Give Windows away to anyone, free of charge. They need it to run Word, Excel and Powerpoint, which most people are happy to pay for because those apps actually do things the end-user can appreciate like typing a letter, working with numbers or making it look like you've done any work this past quarter during the staff meeting... things that lead to a paycheck. People don't get paid for "operating their PC", they get paid for actual work that makes profits, or helps someone who helps someone who makes the profits. Do you think the mailman gets paid because he can drive that little mail van ? No, he gets paid because he uses the van to do his job: delivering mail.
Hey hey hey, don't give them any ideas. Next thing you'll know they will be selling a $50 add-on to get rid of activation forever, and call it "Windows Enthusiast Edition", a.k.a. WEE.
The add-on will consist of a batch file and WPAKILL.EXE, neatly wrapped in an MSI installation package.
And then they will sue everyone else distributing WPAKILL under the premise that it is Microsoft property. Hell, they've reverse-filed patents before. It's even easier when the real IP owner is a software pirate, whose choice is to step up and fight the patent, then go to jail for piracy, or keep quiet and let Microsoft fuck the world over once more.
I've never encountered any entity that paid "what it could afford" unless it was for a religion or organized crime. You either pirate Windows or you don't. If I'm running a shop where I have 100 boxen, but only 10 of them are licensed, I am a certified idiot because getting busted will put me in as much trouble as if I had ZERO licenses. Might as well go all out.
A more accurate statement is: companies that buy what they absolutely have to, and pirate what they can get away with. I live in a big capital city, and of the hundred computer shops around here, I'd say about 80 of those will take a good look at you and based on how dumb you look, they'll just preload a cracked OS but still charge you the $200 or so for the software you don't legally own. They do it because 1. they're crooks and 2. you're the kind of person who will bring the PC to the shop if/when the WGA starts complaining, at which point they will quickly re-patch it and send you on your way. They're also the kind of shop who will conveniently make any cash payments "disappear" from their tax reports, claim losses for products that were RMA'ed (thus refunded/replaced), or conveniently declare bankruptcy after a particularly successful year.
Heck, if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness, you suddenly wouldn't be afraid of having unprotected sex or any other unsafe activity, because you're dying no matter what. Same thing applies to crooks.. whether it's the tax evasion, or piracy, welfare fraud, skipping alimony, hell even immigration affairs.. who cares, if you don't get busted for one, you will for the other, or you just might get away with all of it. Black or white. Good techie, bad techie. There's no such thing as a half-bad techie.
Digital distribution still requires a bootstrap system, which means popping in a CD or USB key to launch the installer/downloader. Release a fake or patched installer that points to a counterfeit source and it's the same problem all over again.
Hell you could subvert that system at the network level, just redirect the traffic to a spoofed host. For something as popular and pricey as Windows, that sort of security scheme would be defeated within days of release.
The root problem is that all this is too easy. It's trivial to get patched copies of Windows produced at a shady disc pressing facility. It's trivial to circumvent software copy protection, and even hardware protection thanks to the many brilliant hardware hackers out there.
There needs to be a non-technical way to beat the counterfeiters. One way is to remove the profit incentive; make it so cheap it's not worth copying, at least from a commercial pirate's perspective. That's pretty hard because pirated software sells for about 5 bucks in China.
Another solution could be to offer the WGA check as a voluntary tool, that you can run if you want to find out for yourself. Confront your dealer/OEM if you want to, but let's not have this WGA crap become a part of the OS. Microsoft's site already requires you to pass the piracy check before it will yield any updates or optional downloads like Media Player. How is that punishing the big pirates ? A real pirate will simply patch the WGA and go on with their life. A legit customer who is not well versed in cracking tools and methods will panic and make an angry call to someone, maybe Microsoft, maybe their sales guy, maybe a news outlet if their penis is small enough (or inexistent).
This has all been said before, but WGA and product activation hurts mostly the innocent. People who knowingly pirate software, they don't need WGA to tell them their copy is not genuine, and it actually amuses them greatly when the WGA messes up and says their FCKGW license is legit. If someone accidentally bought a bum copy of Windows, well it sucks but as a good multi-billion dollar company Microsoft should treat the customer with respect and help them out. Give them advice on how to fix the problem, work with the customer to track the crooked source and seek legal action, something you would end up doing anyway if you're at all serious about fighting piracy. Then give the customer a freebie and a warm thank you, because they just helped you protect your business.
Software piracy is hard to fight, but we're talking about the world's largest software company. They have the means and resources to make it happen. Me, an independent developer, I can't afford to sue everyone who illegally uses my software, so I have little choice but to let it go. If I had a billion bucks up my ass, I'd hire the goddamned government to drop a bomb on every shady CD factory in the world. Isn't that how politics work ?
You know what would be interesting as a battlefield weapon ? Something that destroys the user upon firing!
Why the fuck do we need a death ray ? Have we already reached the point where we have nothing better to do than destroy everything in sight ? How about a laser that has practical uses in construction (etching/molding/carving etc) or high-tech, or anything that actually adds value to the world rather than vaporizing it.
Laser weapons are for Star Wars, all I ever asked for was pussy and beer!
The thing that amuses me the most with DVD, HD, BluRay etc, is the physicality. It's 2007, physical medium is so last century! I could probably download just about any movie in less time that it would take me to walk down to the video club and rent it, plus I don't have to worry about getting a scratched disc. My ISP is nothing special, since I'm stuck with a retarded mega-corp cable company that's always 10 years behind for everything (on purpose!)
The dumbest thing about DRM is that it's trying to "protect" something in your physical possession. There's DRM on every DVD disc I own, but they're idly collecting dust in a box because I ripped them all to my media server, because I much prefer browsing a list of all my movies onscreen, jukebox-style with a live link to the IMDB, than having to juggle hundreds of jewel cases, fussing with the flimsy retention rings, cleaning/scratching/dropping/misplacing yadda yadda. Instead, I just sit my ass down, twiddle my remote for 5 seconds and my selection starts playing immediately. Hell, it takes longer than that for the stupid DVD drive to recognize a disc.
The best part of this story is that I will wait until there is reliable decryption available for High-Def content, just so I can incorporate it into my current media center setup. Eight years ago, I was the kind of guy who drove around with a computer in the car, because skippy scratchy fumbly CDs were obsolete to me, versus a hassle-free sortable searchable MP3 collection. These days kids slap an FM transmitter to their iPod to do the same thing. How sad is it that the average no-job no-life no-future teenager is more technically advanced in their entertainment than the entertainment industry itself with its billions of dollars in annual income ? These billion-dollar imbeciles need to get with the times, hate them as we may, but they could actually make MORE money.
Exactly. When Canada pisses the world off, it's usually because our Premier's said something stupid or ignorant but nothing malicious. When the US pisses the world off, it's personal!
This leads to the funny notion (well, _I_ think it's funny) that while Canada isn't a big target for terrorists, on the converse it is a great HOME to them. Well that's what the americans say anyway:P
Man it wasn't so long ago, the only ID you needed to cross the border was your canadian license plate.
Customs: What's the nature of your visit, sir ? Canajun: SHOPPING! W00T! American money is teh ghey! Customs: Schweet! Bring me back a Game Boy!
Hard drives die often because the manufacturers build them cheaply, the same as every other component in a PC. Why would they ever make a bulletproof hard drive ? They'd go out of business!
Sure, some of them end up being replaced under warranty, but a lot of them don't, and so Maxtor/IBM/Hitachi make another buck off your sorry ass. There isn't a sane server admin that doesn't keep a set of spares in his desk drawer, because it's not a question of "if" it dies but WHEN. Hell, most decently-geared techies have a whole box of hard drives, pre-mounted in hotswap bays ready to rock. And if it weren't for the fact that I was just laid off a month ago, I'd be buying a couple spare SATA drives myself, I just have a funny feeling something's going to go tits up in my media server. I haven't had any warnings or hiccups, but I just know the Seagate devil's planning his move, waiting for 2 drives to start straying so he can kill my Raid-5 nice and fast. Hard drives are little more than Murphy's Law in a box.
Well then those hosting companies should quit selling $1.99/mo hosting plans to idiots.
I'm sick of this anti-darwinian modernism where you have to kiss ass to the dumbest man on the planet or get sued into oblivion. It used to be, if you wanted to write code, you had to be a programmer. I don't care how easy they make coding, if you're not a programmer then you're gonna have to find one and pay them to do it right. It's not the hosting company's fault if you're trying to do something that's way above your head.
I'm still waiting for the next big thing from AMD. I really don't have a need to upgrade at this point, my gaming rig is a 2.4ghz X2 and as far as I can tell, it does everything I throw at it fast and smooth. Would I like a faster CPU ? Of course! But I don't think a 20-25% clock speed boost would excite me enough to justify the expense. I have high hopes for the quad-core Barcelona coming later this year, which will be a native quad unlike the Intel Kentsfield which is just two dual-core dies smushed together on a package. I can only hope it will be as satisfying of a step forward as the Athlon64 -> X2 hop was when it came out.
Why do I resist Intel ? Mainly cost. I've always preferred the chipset panorama available to AMD platforms. Maybe that's because I've seen too many pricey Intel boards catch fire on my test bench, but those were old P4 setups. I haven't laid hands on a Core 2 board yet, I can only hope they're less tempermental than their ancestors. The price premium still remains, as you can get a perfectly decent AMD board for about $90 canadian ($75-80 USD), but Intel boards under $99 tend to suck hard, if you can find them at all. The mean price for an enthusiast Intel board seems to be $200 and up, double what a like-featured AMD board would be.
Add in the CPU price differences and you can easily build up a 20-25% price premium for the Intel system, versus a $1200 mid-range AMD rig. Sure, the Intel is faster now but a lot of people would rather put that extra $200-300 toward a video card, more RAM or a pair of Raptors. It's all too easy to forget that we're building a System, of which the CPU is just one part.
I remember this kid came to me, a few years ago. He had cobbled together a crapwagon of a PC, with a bunch of hard drives spanning an entire decade.. 3.2 gb all the way up to 250gb, extra IDE controllers to run them all. Then he had this 420-watt no-name power supply, PCI video card because he already fried the AGP slot! But then he had an overclocked P4 with watercooling and the works. Well that day I had just received a batch of new cpus and sure enough, he dropped $600 on the fastest one I had. I wanted so bad to give him the next one down and have him spend the $200 or so difference to replace the other garbage in his case, but his only priority was achieving the highest clock speed. He didn't even do anything intensive with his PC, all he cared was to have the fastest benching CPU for screenshots and bragging rights. The fact that it could do high-speed fuckall didn't matter one bit to this teen.
Attending law school doesn't automatically mean you want to help people. It can mean a few things, sorted from most common to least:
1. You like money, or are a controlling asshole
2. Your father is a lawyer (and a controlling asshole)
3. You're really smart and think you can use the law to make a difference in the world. Oh by the way, you could dedicate your whole life to a single cause and maybe get the wheels turning. Then some guy with a bomb strapped to his chest will cause a bigger change overnight.
The fundamental problem with humanity is we're a bunch of selfish lazy assholes. Most people think of their career in terms of income, and vice versa. If janitors earned 150k a year and doctors earned only 20k, then everyone would want to be a janitor.. then someone would invent Janitor University, and govenrment would pass a law forcing people to get their 7 years of reeducation before being issued a license to wave a mop. And you'd see a lot more doctors robbing liquor stores.
I live in the government capital of Canada, lots of office jobs here. Some people grow up and they want to become doctors, psychologists, engineers... that's great, but for everyone else the common attitude is "I'm gonna get a cushy office job." What the hell kind of life goal is that ? They don't care what they actually do, as long as it's done in an office, with a disproportionate salary and nice benefits. Sure, some of them are highly skilled and would be useful if they weren't suffocated by the sheer number of imbeciles standing in their way. They do it for a few years, start to lose their mind then go on stress leave (paid, of course) because they hate their job and have no sense of self-worth. Some stronger types might choose to travel up the career ladder, until they're under so much pressure they just crack. What's worse is that most people go in with at least some qualities, but the homogenous nature of the office setting quickly breaks them into conformant drones.
Well what do you do when you're unhappy in your job ? You make changes to be happier, right ? What if all the jobs suck ass... what then ? You go get more money, to try and compensate for your misery. Eventually this cycle leads to fraudulent behavior, and that is why governments are corrupt. A perfectly happy public servant wouldn't dare consider any illegal activity that could jeopardize their career, but those people are greatly outnumbered by bitter wage slaves.
I want to know when they'll be in my neighborhood so I can plan rough loud anal sex on the front porch with the wife. That'll surely increase the value of my property.
Your line of thinking is precisely what terrorism strives to achieve. Once you understand that terrorists are not actually homicidal maniacs, you can start to fight back. Sure, they kill lots of people so it's easy to see them as glorified pyros, but blowing shit up and killing people is not a terrorist's goal, it is the means to an end. It's pretty obvious that if there were a more efficient method for them to mass-produce fear, they'd trade in their bombs and bio-weapons for the next big thing.
What if we didn't give the terrorists what they want ? What if we didn't let fear govern our lives ? What if we didn't let our police forces make huge asses of themselves in the media over harmless cartoon ads ? The fact that it cost Turnet 2M doesn't matter. What does matter is that we've now shown the world exactly how ignorant we collectively are. Now anyone could conceivably assemble a crude LED display, stick it somewhere obvious and create fear by preying on people's paranoia.
Should we start assuming that every single object in the world is a potential bomb ? If someone really wanted to mess with us, they could truly make invisible bombs. Any idiot with a few basic shop machines could build, for example, a fake Playstation 3 shell, stuff it with a flashy explosive of choice, print out a legit-looking cardboard box and plant it in a shopping mall. Are you now going to assume every PS3 is a bomb until proven otherwise ? Don't be ridiculous. Sure it can potentially be done, and quite cheaply too, but should we sacrifice our sanity over the imaginary belief that someone's out to get us ?
You know what would make a really good bomb ? Soda cans! They're small, opaque, dense, people hold them near their face and pull the tab. What if a can held a small quantity of explosive material and a sprinkle of shrapnel for good measure. Hold it to your face, and in pulling the tab you trigger a small detonator. BOOM! Russian soda roulette. Are we all going to stop drinking cola now ? Are we going to scan all our pop cans with a fancy detector before having a sip ? Hell no! The day we start thinking like that, is the day we stop living.
Indeed that happened all too often. They were so pricey back then too, so it was ridiculously profitable for scammers, and hardly anyone knew about overclocking back then. People blindly believed whatever the BIOS reported.
I've seen far more elaborate schemes where the BIOS reported completely bogus information. A few years ago when the old Athlon XP was hot stuff, there was one guy in the area who had hex-edited the BIOS to show an Athlon XP 2500, but the CPU was really a Duron 1200. A really clever scam, the best part being that if the customer flashed their BIOS, they'd bring the system back to the shop complaining that it wasn't detecting the CPU properly... something the crook was all too happy to "fix". If they complained about poor performance, he'd sell them memory and video upgrades and stealthily overclock the CPU. The story goes that one eventful day, a customer found out about his ruse and showed up at the store with a few leather-clad friends to help redecorate. He closed down the business and was never heard of again.
Regardless, it doesn't matter how the data is policed, bits are bits. If there's a maximum packet size, then people will just lower their MTU, take a small performance hit but still better than being completely filtered out.
And layer7 is great for some things, but we're not talking about filtering P2P on a small network, we're talking ISP pipes running at full switch speed. They have specialized appliances that can pull it off, but they're awfully expensive.
I don't claim to have any information about anything regarding this debacle, but it seems to me like it's just another example of whiney little twits trying to extort money/fame/god-knows-what from NVidia. The truth is that most "false advertising" claims are really "ignorant customer" claims, and are promptly quashed. The fact that someone can whip out their 9 dollars and set up a web site does not in any way prove that they are the poor innocent victim they claim to be.
So your shiny new video card doesn't have fully-accelerated drivers for Vista, boo hoo. The reality is, when you bought the card, you were running Windows XP, and the thing worked just fine. No one held a gun to your head, forcing you to upgrade to Vista at 8:01 a.m. on release day. In fact, if you're a gamer at all, you're probably holding back for a while because you know Vista breaks compatibility with lots of software right now, especially the kind of half-assed twitchy hackjob code cesspools that litter the world of game development.
So it might take another week before decent Vista drivers are ready for primetime, big deal. You wanna sue NVidia ? On what grounds, "False advertising" you say ? Well not quite, you see, the product is functioning as advertised. They offer no warranty, express or implied, regarding the performance of the product, beyond the fact that it will display computer graphics. That's something it can do just fine with the naked SVGA driver.
What, you didn't read the EULA when you installed the product ? And yet you claim to know the letter of the law so well that you are convinced you have a solid case against a company who sold you a perfectly good product, and whose functionality has been negatively impacted solely by your foolish actions ? Go ahead, knock yourself out. And let me know when your case airs on Judge Judy, I don't wanna miss it.
Sadly that's how it has always worked. Bad press is good press, as long as people are talking about you or your product, in good or bad light, you're farther ahead than if they silently ignored you.
Apple is a now household name, everyone including your grandmother knows what an iPod is, at least what it looks like, even down to the crappy little white earbuds that everyone else copied. Capitalizing on that popularity, now we have the iPhone which has the whole world abuzz. Cisco, on the other hand, is a niche company. Even I don't know the full extent of their business endeavours and I've been a techie since software came on ROM chips. Network engineers know Cisco, probably a fair portion of the technician/developer "geek" crowd know Cisco, but Joe Random and Bettie Smith never heard of it. You don't walk into Best Buy and see a big banner saying "Cisco thingawadoodits, half off!" and a retarded sales guy with Cisco bling on his lanyard.
Well now everyone's hearing about this stupid legal miff between the two, so Cisco gets "free" exposure to Apple's mindshare. The fact that Cisco doesn't have anything like the Apple iPhone is the dumbest part, however, since they can't even compete. At least if they were suing Netgear or Aopen, they would potentially steal customers away from their adversary, but there's no such thing as a Cisco cell phone, and there probably never will be after this fiasco is over and Cisco has made a giant ass of itself to the telecomms world.
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Don't quote me on this as I'm surely getting some pointless facts wrong, but I heard Telus is getting sued for selling cell phone porn. Now I have to wonder why someone would want porn on their cell phone, especially at telco prices, but I fail to see why this gives a religious activism group any reason or valid basis for a lawsuit.
So they're half-brained bible-thumping attention whores, and they don't like porn... ok! Just don't buy the porn! Porn isn't destroying the world (of organized criminal religion), porn freaks are (ministers)!
Hell I don't like Honda Civics because everyone driving them in my neighborhood is either a goddamned wigger or a short-haired office-power psycho bitch with so many paint smears on the bumpers she'd make Van Gogh blush. Should I sue Honda ? Noooo! I should sue the bitch that scratched my car. Simple logic.
Maybe there's something I'm missing about extremist catholic groups... oh right, they're still pissed off because the jews control everything. ah well!
Can it detect suspicious tachyon emissions coming out of my PC ?
I was just looking into that the other day, I want to replace CMD with Bash for my own uses, but while retaining Batch file functionality, and ideally avoiding Cygwin ports because, well, they're Cygwin ports nuff said. It's not as easy as one would expect.
My problem is I'm tied to Windows whether I like it or not. Wine compatibility just isn't quite there yet, so why not do the reverse and bring some of the best parts of Linux over to my Windows desktop... at least for now!
My main interest lies in the Bash shell's scripting abilities. I do kinky stuff with batch files, but they're so cruelly limited in their abilities and so I run into brick walls quite often. Perl is a viable tool for some things, but most of my challenges lie in the limbo zone, beyond CMD's abilities but still deemed too simple to bother with full-on Perl. For example I've got one batch file that quickly converts Zip/Rar files to 7zip; all it does is extract to a temp folder, then recompress, but all it can do is test whether a step completed or not by checking the ERRORLEVEL result, and abort. It also can't iterate over files easily, because the For loop can only execute a single command, so I have a wrapper script that looks like "for %1 in (blah) call dosomething.bat". Actually I have a ton of those wrapper scripts, one for each worker script. The same type of thing is trivial (and clean) in Bash thanks to code blocks, competent If-Then logic and of course the intrinsic philosophy that you can build great tools out of a dozen simple operations all piped together. I end up doing "somecommand > tempfile.txt" then kinky SED/AWK to batchify the tempfile, assigning each line/token to an environment variable, then launching a third process to act upon the partially digested data. It would be so much easier to do something like "MYPORN=$(locate somefile)".
Hell, even the space oddity named OS/2 had Rexx, which was far more usable than "Dos with command extensions". What the hell is Microsoft doing out there ? Oh I know, drawing pretty graphics for Vista to make it look new.
I think they're right. I think the virus is humanity. We must be doing something the bees don't like. Maybe it's the part about destroying natural habitats and squeezing them into little wooden boxes where a creepy smelly redneck dude comes over every day to blow smoke in their eyes. Or maybe all this crap we're doing to the planet with commercial GMOs and all these bombs exploding might be doing nasty things to the little insects' genetic makeup, and it's not like they have hospitals in those wooden boxes either.
I guess we'll just have to invent a robotic bee thing, because we certainly can't stop reproducing and blowing shit up, that would be inhumane.
Come on, this is too obvious. Why do you have any regular installs if you have the VLK ? Just call Microsoft and get those strays rolled up in the VLK, and verbally belittle the smartass who bought rogue copies of Windows without telling the sysadmin.
Great movie. And by great I don't mean "Wow that was artful and deep", I mean it was a riot to watch because the real world isn't that far off.
What about add-on licenses ? If you have four machines, they could make it so you buy one physical box at retail price, then pay a small add-on charge for every additional license. Make it something stupid like $25 and people would be likely to buy it, just for the sake of being legit.
The way it is now, $200 for Windows XP Pro, times 4 machines = $800. Or $200 for one, crack the others and save $600 bucks while still having the one good license if you ever need support, and for downloading updates and whatnot. Or do it my way and pay $275 total for four totally legit installs, because let's face it: if you have four PC's in your home, you're probably not going to be calling Microsoft's home support (India) for help, so really they're making an extra $75 for free.
PC hardware has become a cheap commodity.. back in the days of $5000 crap computers, spending another hundred on DOS and Windows was peanuts. These days the useless OS costs more then the machine it runs on. And by useless I mean it's basically colorized DOS with a web browser. The OS is a filesystem layer, a network stack, a dozen apps nobody uses and an extra 4 gigs of unsafe bytecode doing mysterious things while you wait; everything else you have to buy/download separately to actually use the computer. Nothing special there, certainly nothing worth the crazy money they're asking. For Windows Server, I can justify the hefty price tag because you're got a bit more functionality built-in, notably Active Directory, file/print servers and a few other handy things for a small/medium office, not to mention better qualified techs on the phone who can do a bit more than the indian kid reading idiot-proofed decision trees to you like you're retarded.
A crazy idea just buzzed through my head: Give the OS away for free, but charge for applications. Really! Give Windows away to anyone, free of charge. They need it to run Word, Excel and Powerpoint, which most people are happy to pay for because those apps actually do things the end-user can appreciate like typing a letter, working with numbers or making it look like you've done any work this past quarter during the staff meeting... things that lead to a paycheck. People don't get paid for "operating their PC", they get paid for actual work that makes profits, or helps someone who helps someone who makes the profits. Do you think the mailman gets paid because he can drive that little mail van ? No, he gets paid because he uses the van to do his job: delivering mail.
Hey hey hey, don't give them any ideas. Next thing you'll know they will be selling a $50 add-on to get rid of activation forever, and call it "Windows Enthusiast Edition", a.k.a. WEE.
The add-on will consist of a batch file and WPAKILL.EXE, neatly wrapped in an MSI installation package.
And then they will sue everyone else distributing WPAKILL under the premise that it is Microsoft property. Hell, they've reverse-filed patents before. It's even easier when the real IP owner is a software pirate, whose choice is to step up and fight the patent, then go to jail for piracy, or keep quiet and let Microsoft fuck the world over once more.
I've never encountered any entity that paid "what it could afford" unless it was for a religion or organized crime. You either pirate Windows or you don't. If I'm running a shop where I have 100 boxen, but only 10 of them are licensed, I am a certified idiot because getting busted will put me in as much trouble as if I had ZERO licenses. Might as well go all out.
A more accurate statement is: companies that buy what they absolutely have to, and pirate what they can get away with. I live in a big capital city, and of the hundred computer shops around here, I'd say about 80 of those will take a good look at you and based on how dumb you look, they'll just preload a cracked OS but still charge you the $200 or so for the software you don't legally own. They do it because 1. they're crooks and 2. you're the kind of person who will bring the PC to the shop if/when the WGA starts complaining, at which point they will quickly re-patch it and send you on your way. They're also the kind of shop who will conveniently make any cash payments "disappear" from their tax reports, claim losses for products that were RMA'ed (thus refunded/replaced), or conveniently declare bankruptcy after a particularly successful year.
Heck, if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness, you suddenly wouldn't be afraid of having unprotected sex or any other unsafe activity, because you're dying no matter what. Same thing applies to crooks.. whether it's the tax evasion, or piracy, welfare fraud, skipping alimony, hell even immigration affairs.. who cares, if you don't get busted for one, you will for the other, or you just might get away with all of it. Black or white. Good techie, bad techie. There's no such thing as a half-bad techie.
Digital distribution still requires a bootstrap system, which means popping in a CD or USB key to launch the installer/downloader. Release a fake or patched installer that points to a counterfeit source and it's the same problem all over again.
Hell you could subvert that system at the network level, just redirect the traffic to a spoofed host. For something as popular and pricey as Windows, that sort of security scheme would be defeated within days of release.
The root problem is that all this is too easy. It's trivial to get patched copies of Windows produced at a shady disc pressing facility. It's trivial to circumvent software copy protection, and even hardware protection thanks to the many brilliant hardware hackers out there.
There needs to be a non-technical way to beat the counterfeiters. One way is to remove the profit incentive; make it so cheap it's not worth copying, at least from a commercial pirate's perspective. That's pretty hard because pirated software sells for about 5 bucks in China.
Another solution could be to offer the WGA check as a voluntary tool, that you can run if you want to find out for yourself. Confront your dealer/OEM if you want to, but let's not have this WGA crap become a part of the OS. Microsoft's site already requires you to pass the piracy check before it will yield any updates or optional downloads like Media Player. How is that punishing the big pirates ? A real pirate will simply patch the WGA and go on with their life. A legit customer who is not well versed in cracking tools and methods will panic and make an angry call to someone, maybe Microsoft, maybe their sales guy, maybe a news outlet if their penis is small enough (or inexistent).
This has all been said before, but WGA and product activation hurts mostly the innocent. People who knowingly pirate software, they don't need WGA to tell them their copy is not genuine, and it actually amuses them greatly when the WGA messes up and says their FCKGW license is legit. If someone accidentally bought a bum copy of Windows, well it sucks but as a good multi-billion dollar company Microsoft should treat the customer with respect and help them out. Give them advice on how to fix the problem, work with the customer to track the crooked source and seek legal action, something you would end up doing anyway if you're at all serious about fighting piracy. Then give the customer a freebie and a warm thank you, because they just helped you protect your business.
Software piracy is hard to fight, but we're talking about the world's largest software company. They have the means and resources to make it happen. Me, an independent developer, I can't afford to sue everyone who illegally uses my software, so I have little choice but to let it go. If I had a billion bucks up my ass, I'd hire the goddamned government to drop a bomb on every shady CD factory in the world. Isn't that how politics work ?
How the hell do you double-bag a PC ?
:)
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I wouldn't even compute that with someone else's PC!
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Was that as good for you as it was for me ? Now get out of my office!
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I put a brown paper bag over the box and hit it from behind.
Okay that's enough for one post
You know what would be interesting as a battlefield weapon ? Something that destroys the user upon firing!
Why the fuck do we need a death ray ? Have we already reached the point where we have nothing better to do than destroy everything in sight ? How about a laser that has practical uses in construction (etching/molding/carving etc) or high-tech, or anything that actually adds value to the world rather than vaporizing it.
Laser weapons are for Star Wars, all I ever asked for was pussy and beer!
The thing that amuses me the most with DVD, HD, BluRay etc, is the physicality. It's 2007, physical medium is so last century! I could probably download just about any movie in less time that it would take me to walk down to the video club and rent it, plus I don't have to worry about getting a scratched disc. My ISP is nothing special, since I'm stuck with a retarded mega-corp cable company that's always 10 years behind for everything (on purpose!)
The dumbest thing about DRM is that it's trying to "protect" something in your physical possession. There's DRM on every DVD disc I own, but they're idly collecting dust in a box because I ripped them all to my media server, because I much prefer browsing a list of all my movies onscreen, jukebox-style with a live link to the IMDB, than having to juggle hundreds of jewel cases, fussing with the flimsy retention rings, cleaning/scratching/dropping/misplacing yadda yadda. Instead, I just sit my ass down, twiddle my remote for 5 seconds and my selection starts playing immediately. Hell, it takes longer than that for the stupid DVD drive to recognize a disc.
The best part of this story is that I will wait until there is reliable decryption available for High-Def content, just so I can incorporate it into my current media center setup. Eight years ago, I was the kind of guy who drove around with a computer in the car, because skippy scratchy fumbly CDs were obsolete to me, versus a hassle-free sortable searchable MP3 collection. These days kids slap an FM transmitter to their iPod to do the same thing. How sad is it that the average no-job no-life no-future teenager is more technically advanced in their entertainment than the entertainment industry itself with its billions of dollars in annual income ? These billion-dollar imbeciles need to get with the times, hate them as we may, but they could actually make MORE money.
Exactly. When Canada pisses the world off, it's usually because our Premier's said something stupid or ignorant but nothing malicious. When the US pisses the world off, it's personal!
:P
This leads to the funny notion (well, _I_ think it's funny) that while Canada isn't a big target for terrorists, on the converse it is a great HOME to them. Well that's what the americans say anyway
Man it wasn't so long ago, the only ID you needed to cross the border was your canadian license plate.
Customs: What's the nature of your visit, sir ?
Canajun: SHOPPING! W00T! American money is teh ghey!
Customs: Schweet! Bring me back a Game Boy!
Ahhh.. the 80's. God I miss them!
Hard drives die often because the manufacturers build them cheaply, the same as every other component in a PC. Why would they ever make a bulletproof hard drive ? They'd go out of business!
Sure, some of them end up being replaced under warranty, but a lot of them don't, and so Maxtor/IBM/Hitachi make another buck off your sorry ass. There isn't a sane server admin that doesn't keep a set of spares in his desk drawer, because it's not a question of "if" it dies but WHEN. Hell, most decently-geared techies have a whole box of hard drives, pre-mounted in hotswap bays ready to rock. And if it weren't for the fact that I was just laid off a month ago, I'd be buying a couple spare SATA drives myself, I just have a funny feeling something's going to go tits up in my media server. I haven't had any warnings or hiccups, but I just know the Seagate devil's planning his move, waiting for 2 drives to start straying so he can kill my Raid-5 nice and fast. Hard drives are little more than Murphy's Law in a box.
Well then those hosting companies should quit selling $1.99/mo hosting plans to idiots.
I'm sick of this anti-darwinian modernism where you have to kiss ass to the dumbest man on the planet or get sued into oblivion. It used to be, if you wanted to write code, you had to be a programmer. I don't care how easy they make coding, if you're not a programmer then you're gonna have to find one and pay them to do it right. It's not the hosting company's fault if you're trying to do something that's way above your head.
I'm still waiting for the next big thing from AMD. I really don't have a need to upgrade at this point, my gaming rig is a 2.4ghz X2 and as far as I can tell, it does everything I throw at it fast and smooth. Would I like a faster CPU ? Of course! But I don't think a 20-25% clock speed boost would excite me enough to justify the expense. I have high hopes for the quad-core Barcelona coming later this year, which will be a native quad unlike the Intel Kentsfield which is just two dual-core dies smushed together on a package. I can only hope it will be as satisfying of a step forward as the Athlon64 -> X2 hop was when it came out.
Why do I resist Intel ? Mainly cost. I've always preferred the chipset panorama available to AMD platforms. Maybe that's because I've seen too many pricey Intel boards catch fire on my test bench, but those were old P4 setups. I haven't laid hands on a Core 2 board yet, I can only hope they're less tempermental than their ancestors. The price premium still remains, as you can get a perfectly decent AMD board for about $90 canadian ($75-80 USD), but Intel boards under $99 tend to suck hard, if you can find them at all. The mean price for an enthusiast Intel board seems to be $200 and up, double what a like-featured AMD board would be.
Add in the CPU price differences and you can easily build up a 20-25% price premium for the Intel system, versus a $1200 mid-range AMD rig. Sure, the Intel is faster now but a lot of people would rather put that extra $200-300 toward a video card, more RAM or a pair of Raptors. It's all too easy to forget that we're building a System, of which the CPU is just one part.
I remember this kid came to me, a few years ago. He had cobbled together a crapwagon of a PC, with a bunch of hard drives spanning an entire decade.. 3.2 gb all the way up to 250gb, extra IDE controllers to run them all. Then he had this 420-watt no-name power supply, PCI video card because he already fried the AGP slot! But then he had an overclocked P4 with watercooling and the works. Well that day I had just received a batch of new cpus and sure enough, he dropped $600 on the fastest one I had. I wanted so bad to give him the next one down and have him spend the $200 or so difference to replace the other garbage in his case, but his only priority was achieving the highest clock speed. He didn't even do anything intensive with his PC, all he cared was to have the fastest benching CPU for screenshots and bragging rights. The fact that it could do high-speed fuckall didn't matter one bit to this teen.
Attending law school doesn't automatically mean you want to help people. It can mean a few things, sorted from most common to least:
1. You like money, or are a controlling asshole
2. Your father is a lawyer (and a controlling asshole)
3. You're really smart and think you can use the law to make a difference in the world. Oh by the way, you could dedicate your whole life to a single cause and maybe get the wheels turning. Then some guy with a bomb strapped to his chest will cause a bigger change overnight.
The fundamental problem with humanity is we're a bunch of selfish lazy assholes. Most people think of their career in terms of income, and vice versa. If janitors earned 150k a year and doctors earned only 20k, then everyone would want to be a janitor.. then someone would invent Janitor University, and govenrment would pass a law forcing people to get their 7 years of reeducation before being issued a license to wave a mop. And you'd see a lot more doctors robbing liquor stores.
I live in the government capital of Canada, lots of office jobs here. Some people grow up and they want to become doctors, psychologists, engineers... that's great, but for everyone else the common attitude is "I'm gonna get a cushy office job." What the hell kind of life goal is that ? They don't care what they actually do, as long as it's done in an office, with a disproportionate salary and nice benefits. Sure, some of them are highly skilled and would be useful if they weren't suffocated by the sheer number of imbeciles standing in their way. They do it for a few years, start to lose their mind then go on stress leave (paid, of course) because they hate their job and have no sense of self-worth. Some stronger types might choose to travel up the career ladder, until they're under so much pressure they just crack. What's worse is that most people go in with at least some qualities, but the homogenous nature of the office setting quickly breaks them into conformant drones.
Well what do you do when you're unhappy in your job ? You make changes to be happier, right ? What if all the jobs suck ass... what then ? You go get more money, to try and compensate for your misery. Eventually this cycle leads to fraudulent behavior, and that is why governments are corrupt. A perfectly happy public servant wouldn't dare consider any illegal activity that could jeopardize their career, but those people are greatly outnumbered by bitter wage slaves.
I want to know when they'll be in my neighborhood so I can plan rough loud anal sex on the front porch with the wife. That'll surely increase the value of my property.
Your line of thinking is precisely what terrorism strives to achieve. Once you understand that terrorists are not actually homicidal maniacs, you can start to fight back. Sure, they kill lots of people so it's easy to see them as glorified pyros, but blowing shit up and killing people is not a terrorist's goal, it is the means to an end. It's pretty obvious that if there were a more efficient method for them to mass-produce fear, they'd trade in their bombs and bio-weapons for the next big thing.
What if we didn't give the terrorists what they want ? What if we didn't let fear govern our lives ? What if we didn't let our police forces make huge asses of themselves in the media over harmless cartoon ads ? The fact that it cost Turnet 2M doesn't matter. What does matter is that we've now shown the world exactly how ignorant we collectively are. Now anyone could conceivably assemble a crude LED display, stick it somewhere obvious and create fear by preying on people's paranoia.
Should we start assuming that every single object in the world is a potential bomb ? If someone really wanted to mess with us, they could truly make invisible bombs. Any idiot with a few basic shop machines could build, for example, a fake Playstation 3 shell, stuff it with a flashy explosive of choice, print out a legit-looking cardboard box and plant it in a shopping mall. Are you now going to assume every PS3 is a bomb until proven otherwise ? Don't be ridiculous. Sure it can potentially be done, and quite cheaply too, but should we sacrifice our sanity over the imaginary belief that someone's out to get us ?
You know what would make a really good bomb ? Soda cans! They're small, opaque, dense, people hold them near their face and pull the tab. What if a can held a small quantity of explosive material and a sprinkle of shrapnel for good measure. Hold it to your face, and in pulling the tab you trigger a small detonator. BOOM! Russian soda roulette. Are we all going to stop drinking cola now ? Are we going to scan all our pop cans with a fancy detector before having a sip ? Hell no! The day we start thinking like that, is the day we stop living.
Indeed that happened all too often. They were so pricey back then too, so it was ridiculously profitable for scammers, and hardly anyone knew about overclocking back then. People blindly believed whatever the BIOS reported.
I've seen far more elaborate schemes where the BIOS reported completely bogus information. A few years ago when the old Athlon XP was hot stuff, there was one guy in the area who had hex-edited the BIOS to show an Athlon XP 2500, but the CPU was really a Duron 1200. A really clever scam, the best part being that if the customer flashed their BIOS, they'd bring the system back to the shop complaining that it wasn't detecting the CPU properly... something the crook was all too happy to "fix". If they complained about poor performance, he'd sell them memory and video upgrades and stealthily overclock the CPU. The story goes that one eventful day, a customer found out about his ruse and showed up at the store with a few leather-clad friends to help redecorate. He closed down the business and was never heard of again.
Regardless, it doesn't matter how the data is policed, bits are bits. If there's a maximum packet size, then people will just lower their MTU, take a small performance hit but still better than being completely filtered out.
And layer7 is great for some things, but we're not talking about filtering P2P on a small network, we're talking ISP pipes running at full switch speed. They have specialized appliances that can pull it off, but they're awfully expensive.
I don't claim to have any information about anything regarding this debacle, but it seems to me like it's just another example of whiney little twits trying to extort money/fame/god-knows-what from NVidia. The truth is that most "false advertising" claims are really "ignorant customer" claims, and are promptly quashed. The fact that someone can whip out their 9 dollars and set up a web site does not in any way prove that they are the poor innocent victim they claim to be.
So your shiny new video card doesn't have fully-accelerated drivers for Vista, boo hoo. The reality is, when you bought the card, you were running Windows XP, and the thing worked just fine. No one held a gun to your head, forcing you to upgrade to Vista at 8:01 a.m. on release day. In fact, if you're a gamer at all, you're probably holding back for a while because you know Vista breaks compatibility with lots of software right now, especially the kind of half-assed twitchy hackjob code cesspools that litter the world of game development.
So it might take another week before decent Vista drivers are ready for primetime, big deal. You wanna sue NVidia ? On what grounds, "False advertising" you say ? Well not quite, you see, the product is functioning as advertised. They offer no warranty, express or implied, regarding the performance of the product, beyond the fact that it will display computer graphics. That's something it can do just fine with the naked SVGA driver.
What, you didn't read the EULA when you installed the product ? And yet you claim to know the letter of the law so well that you are convinced you have a solid case against a company who sold you a perfectly good product, and whose functionality has been negatively impacted solely by your foolish actions ? Go ahead, knock yourself out. And let me know when your case airs on Judge Judy, I don't wanna miss it.
I wish I had mod points right now. +1 funny to you, -999 ignorant everyone else :)
Sadly that's how it has always worked. Bad press is good press, as long as people are talking about you or your product, in good or bad light, you're farther ahead than if they silently ignored you.
Apple is a now household name, everyone including your grandmother knows what an iPod is, at least what it looks like, even down to the crappy little white earbuds that everyone else copied. Capitalizing on that popularity, now we have the iPhone which has the whole world abuzz. Cisco, on the other hand, is a niche company. Even I don't know the full extent of their business endeavours and I've been a techie since software came on ROM chips. Network engineers know Cisco, probably a fair portion of the technician/developer "geek" crowd know Cisco, but Joe Random and Bettie Smith never heard of it. You don't walk into Best Buy and see a big banner saying "Cisco thingawadoodits, half off!" and a retarded sales guy with Cisco bling on his lanyard.
Well now everyone's hearing about this stupid legal miff between the two, so Cisco gets "free" exposure to Apple's mindshare. The fact that Cisco doesn't have anything like the Apple iPhone is the dumbest part, however, since they can't even compete. At least if they were suing Netgear or Aopen, they would potentially steal customers away from their adversary, but there's no such thing as a Cisco cell phone, and there probably never will be after this fiasco is over and Cisco has made a giant ass of itself to the telecomms world.