How is it cheating on taxes ? Do you think hardware guys are naturally born with the knowledge of which products are good and which ones suck ? It is no different than any other business expense. Maybe if I weren't selling these products, I would agree with you, but I just so happen to sell servers, high-end gaming rigs and CAD/audio/video workstations, and that's the kind of segment where you have to know your shit because clients are paying a premium for that expertise. That I get a personal enjoyment out of it later is completely irrelevant to the tax issue.
If you attend a training seminar for $TRENDYSOLUTION as part of your career training, do you not claim that as a business expense ? Same thing. Better to consult an accountant before calling people tax cheats...
I would love to see more of this bad news, so the abomination that is RIM can die once and for all. The company is a joke, the products are a joke, and I'm sure all those engineers and developers would be put to better use elsewhere in the industry. Maybe someplace that isn't run by two boneheaded "co-CEOs" with zero ambition and zero vision, and perhaps a few less PHBs ruining the rest.
I don't know how things work in your neck of the woods, but up here in Canadia we call that a plain old chequing account. They come with the token 0.25% interest rate. What we call a savings account will carry a higher interest rate (maybe 1.50% these days), and rather steep per-transaction fees to discourage you from moving too much money around. The chequing account usually has flat fee tiers for 10-20-unltd transactions.
Even after the so-called "triple-play discount", our bill was around $250 here for cable TV, internet and home phone. I hardly watch any TV, and everyone calls my cell. So one day, a much admired DSL ISP expanded into the cable business in my area. We cancelled everything and went for a $55 uncapped internet service, and a $20 VoIP phone for the stupid apartment intercom.
What we really care to watch, we either download or stream from Hulu or the like. I'm quite content to watch the hockey games at the pub or a friend's place.
My point is: it's real easy to get by without cable TV. If they priced it all more reasonably, I think laziness would have won and I'd still be with the other company, and I'd still get my hockey fix twice a week. For the extra $190 though, 15 hours of sports ain't worth it when I can spend less than that, at the pub, on beer and hang out with the lads.
Cable prices need to be slashed or we will start seeing more quitters like myself, when you can get almost any non-live shows on the internet for the terrifying sum of $0 dollars.
Annoyingly stupid minigames built on an unresponsive RPG walkabout engine ? Yep. I hated FFX to death for that dumb chocobo race thing near the Monster Arena... the one where you had to catch balloons or something. I mean, What In The Tentacled Fuck Son ? This isn't a driving game, it's an RPG. Give me a list of actions and I'll choose one. "Action: Skip stupid minigame" *click*
Some people find these Japanese elements cute and quirky. I find them, well, brain-damaged. Japanese culture is just a weird mish-mash of rampant consumerism, OCD, and non-existent self-esteem. It seems every game is about collecting useless things, moping about teenage existential ignorance, and fighting so-called bullies that look like they just got voted off America's Got Talent.
I'm kinda with you. I don't have nearly as much time to play these stupid long games as I once did, and even back in my pre-career years, I still rarely finished any RPG because they were too damned long.
What I do like is the (recent?) trend of a game that you can beat once, and if you feel like it, you can play through it again with all your gear to reach an even higher level, collect doodads you may have missed, or explore alternate questlines. Borderlands comes to mind, as does Mass Effect. You can "beat" the game in a dozen hours or so, or you can continue for 100% completion if you wish to appease your OCD demons.
I've played many a game where I resorted to cheats and save editors, to buff my characters and speed through the rest of the storyline. FF7 was one of them, because for whatever reason, I never got through to the end until a few years ago. I would play to the halfway point, then life would get in the way, or my idiot nephews would overwrite my save file, or when the PC version came along I'd just plain forget to back it up upon formatting... So one day I pulled out the save editor, gave myself a bunch of maxed-out materias and stat points, edited the stupid Knights Of The Round animation down to two seconds, and killed those emo demons once and for all. Closure, at long last. That's what I want out of a game: satisfaction. I want some kind of reward for my effort, not just a longer list of things to grind. If I feel like grinding, fine, but the boring stuff should be optional. If it's not, I'll cheat to bypass it.
They just made themselves very relevant: they're going to drum up so much hatred that even the lazy gamers will be inclined to boycott them.
You have to be pretty fucking moronic, lawyer or not, to go after an indie developer with as much fan support as Mojang. I frankly don't get the whole fad with Minecraft, but obviously a million people absolutely love it and many have DONATED money for Minecraft. Good luck finding a million people to donate for yet another interchangeable Gamebryo "platform for short-lived DLC" shooter.
People aren't hating on Bethesda because it's trendy, they're hating because this is a blatantly ridiculous bullying expedition. Nobody owns the word "scrolls", it's a fucking word. Nobody owns the concept of mountains, they're fucking mountains. You want prior art ? Open a dictionary, look out the window.
And nobody owns the concept of a medieval backdrop involving knights and jesus freaks and tyrannical monarchs. It's called fucking HISTORY.
If Bethesda wins anything in this court case, it will be yet another sign to the world that America is beyond saving from the hypercapitalist godmachine it has created.
There may be no pressing need for you to upgrade every year or two, but there are still quite a few of us who live on the bleeding edge of tech, either as a hobby or business need. For me, it's both. A new toy comes out, and I either want it to scratch an itch, or I need it to acquire the expertise by the time my clients start asking about it, so that when I say "Buy this, not that", I can rely on first-hand experience, not just some shill write-up from a sponsor-driven review site.
Besides, for me product research is a tax write-off:) That right there is like a big fat mail-in rebate once a year. Wouldn't you drop $500 on the latest GPU if you were guaranteed $200 cash back ?
But yeah, fuck this shit. I'm perfectly fluent in english and french, yet (go figure) I'll actually adopt an accept in either language if I feel it will help the other party understand what I'm saying. Make the wife every time we catch a cab home, as I turn my smooth french into "immigrant french" and accent it up, because somehow my drunken habits have decided that's the best way to converse with taxi drivers.
Accents are a product of your first language. The fact that English is essentially a mash-up, a hybrid language, should exclude it from accentism. Even those from the United Kingdom aren't really native English, because English itself is a rehash of old frankish, french, and god-knows-what. Those of you who speak a "real" old-world language know what I mean... English is just cobbled together. It is dominant, but that does not make it an authority.
Okay, for starters you say you're worried about the U.S. gov't seizing your domain, but then you go and mention the MAFIAAFIRE list. Okay, so you want to run a torrent tracker... big surprise.
I see an inherent problem with CCTLDs: you may expect the ones from obscure nations to be "safer", because, well, they're obscure and that government might not give two shits about U.S. laws. But then on the converse, they may give a shit about U.S. money. The poor nations love bribery just as much as the militarized corporatocracy some 300 million people call "home".
The only real way to dodge the MAFIAA is thus:
1. destroy the MAFIAA
No, really. You either take the risk, and best case some ungrateful leech stools your site to the authorities and you lose your domain, worst case you get sued for six quadrillion dollars. The only other option is to launch World War 3, win, become supreme leader of earth, have every last motherfuckin' corporate robber baron drawn and quartered, and then you're pretty much free to post whatever the hell you want on (what's left of) the internet.
Okay, I'm going to be a dick and say that UEFI is a load of crap. It has its own cute little platform-independent bytecode, which I suppose would come in real handy if you're in the business of selling motherboards that support more than one CPU architecture... wait, what ? And then manufacturers love to store a bunch of extensions on the hard drive, like in the Asus screenshot - but let's not call it an operating system okay ? Hell, Gigabyte even ships a few crappy games as EFI extensions on the motherboard CD.
UEFI is an overdesigned solution to a non-problem. Intel has basically given everyone carte-blanche to bloat up the pre-boot experience. We already had gimmicky mouse-driven BIOSes back in the day, I remember one as far back as the 286, where AMI had replicated a Windows 2.0 style GUI. Pointless, slow, but hey it's shiny right ?:P
What the BIOS needed was an update from its 35 year old roots - a little less 16-bit legacy cruft, a little more forward compatibility for the 64-bit era. What we got instead was a reinvention of the wheel that doesn't actually solve much. It simply replaces one simple interface with another. Instead of VESA VBE, we now use GOP, which provides (dun dun dun!) a linear frame buffer. Instead of calling interrupt 13h for disk access, we now call a C++ object. Nothing has really changed, except for the bloat.
There are no "Microsoft contracts" up here in Canada, certainly not with the individual shops as that would be a logistical nightmare to administer, even for MS. What does happen is skeevy shop owners like to sell an overpriced OS with every PC, because it's often the only profitable part of the deal on low-end machines. They make up these ominous sounding "contractual obligations", to which the alternative is to buy the PC unassembled with only a 30-day (in-store) warranty rather than the usual 1-to-3 year deal. A lot of customers don't know any better, so they fork over an extra $150-200 for an OEM license of W7HP.
With the big-box brands it's a bit different, because they love the preloading business. They still get paid to put bloatware on your machine - McAfee and MS Office trials - and of course they get a deep "volume" discount on the OS itself. There's still nothing that can legally force them to shove an OS down your throat, but since they don't list a price for an OEM license of the OS, nor many of the core components in the machine, they can argue that it's included in the base price, so there is no point in asking them to remove it since it's "free". They really could sell you a machine without Windows if they so wanted, and for larger corporate purchases you can specify that (or provide your own ghost image), but for the consumer stuff they would much rather sell you a preloaded PC that's ready for the average casual user. Just the support calls alone, from clueless users who bought a naked machine and don't know what to do with it, would be a PR nightmare and a huge cost sink. I've lost count of the times people bought naked machines from me, claiming they didn't need an OS, then returned a day later to buy the damn disc.
Think back a few years, when Dell briefly offered Linux-ready PCs. They cost more than the Windows-loaded versions of the same machines. Now you can run up and down with your conspiracy theories about MS bribes and whatnot, but the reality is that charging a little bit more for the Linux-ready variant ensured that the average Joe Random would buy the cheaper Windows one, even if the difference was only $30 or so, it's sufficient. This, in turn, probably saved them countless frustrating support calls from irate morons. Then a bit later they started preloading Ubuntu on there, to at least have the machine boot to an internet-ready OS.
I plan on recording a video of myself beating off to said snuff, and sending it back to PETA with a big "Thank You" note for ending 30 years of blue balls.
As many have pointed out, if someone is so strongly partial to the original Zappa recordings, they can find those records. No one is forcing them to destroy their originals and replace them with the new and allegedly inferior mix.
As a (crappy) musician, I've experienced that myself, where I collaborated with a good friend on a track, and after a few more (dozen) listens, decided his contribution sucked, so I created an alternate version that was more in line with my tastes. I didn't delete the old one, in fact I still give it top billing on the album, with my remix as a "b-side". There is no technical, legal or financian reason to withdraw the old release.
Now, if only Lucas could put the crack pipe down and see the light. He could realistically sell two versions side-by-side, same format! The original theatrical release, and his latest rehash. Some will buy the unmarred version, some will prefer the new, and some will buy both just because they drink the goddamned kool-aid. Either way, everyone gets what they want. Why they don't do this is a testament to Lucas' bizarre vanity.
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem - an unfortunate plague in the hardware industry. Really, if that's where we are, then motherboards might as well just give us a thousand socketed general-purpose output pins, and we'll push on whatever connectors we want and turn the whole thing into a glorified FPGA emulator.
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
The problem with Rogers is they throttle everything that looks like P2P. My limited understanding is that they look at the number of simultaneous connections to one host and if you go above their threshold, BOOM connection reset! For things like Xbox Live this means you can't play any team games, like Call of Duty, because your buddies will keep getting disconnected or time out.
For those who can, switching to TekSavvy cable solved all those problems for me. Now I can host game servers, run torrents at line speed (and beyond, thanks to SpeedBoost), and generally enjoy broadband as it was intended. Their cable service is new and limited to a few cities as they have to install their own hardware, unlike DSL which piggybacks off of Bell, but man is it ever worth it just to be rid of Rogers and my huge Rogers bills...
Intel took one of the slowest interpreted languages, though the most popular one, and added parallel data primitives and functions. Then they used a pointless little particle fountain demo to show off its benefits.
So rather than try to make Javascript execute faster, they spread its disease to all 8 cores. How is this an improvement ? The last thing I want is for a web page to sap my CPU and battery life, doing things web pages should not be doing in the first place. Save that Javascript for friendly client-side form validation and UI animation. Everything else is a hack. 3D graphics in the Javascript is a hack. Heavy number crunching in Javascript is a hack. Fuck off with your hacks! If I want fancy graphics and high framerates, I'll run native code.
Congrats. You're a computer geek like myself. Now I hope you'd reserve at least a few drives for redundancy and spares in that 45-bay JBOD chassis, and maybe a head unit to actually link it to a network, but I know what you're saying. The cost of the hardware is only a small portion of the sale price.
Let's talk again when you've built an actual business around it, with warranties, onsite support and enough of a profit margin to sustain yourself through all that.
Preface: I know a thing or two about BIOS hacking.
Given the very limited space available in the average PC Flash BIOS chip, how fancy can this possibly be, ? Many of them only have 2MB, already close to capacity with just the stock BIOS. This doesn't leave a whole lot of space for adding an attack module, and it would have to do some fancy footwork to survive past the protected-mode switch. Modern operating systems don't use the BIOS at all past the bootloader, once the native device drivers take over. It might be possible to punt out some other chunk of the BIOS to make room, but that's playing with fire. If the machine becomes unbootable, the rootkit won't get very far.
CIH was a very trivial virus. All it did was blindly clobber things with zeroes. It had no way of "rooting" a box. It would simply toast your OS, and if your BIOS chip supported the one flash command CIH knew, it would blank that out as well, rendering your machine unbootable. That's what we get for outsourcing even our virus writing ot China:P
The sensation of "feeling sick" is (in layman's terms) your body shunting all resources to the immune system. You get sick to get better. This is partly why people who claim to never get sick have a tendency to suddenly drop dead. Their body is still full of garbage, they just never noticed because the fight was subtle. The more responsive your immune system, the more it beats the crap out of you. I'm dumbing it down to extremes here, so don't go and write this in your Med school entry exam:P
It can, and does, happen that said "shunting" gets so extreme that you die anyway, but that's what the ICU is for. If these researchers can coax the body into waging a full-scare biowar on cancer, and keep you alive through it, that's HUGE!
Slashdot Mirror
SHH! Don't tell me to RTFA, this is fucking Slashdot. We never read.
So they baked a netinstall image into the EFI flash. Not rocket science. We've had LinuxBIOS for how many years now ? It can do that too.
How is it cheating on taxes ? Do you think hardware guys are naturally born with the knowledge of which products are good and which ones suck ? It is no different than any other business expense. Maybe if I weren't selling these products, I would agree with you, but I just so happen to sell servers, high-end gaming rigs and CAD/audio/video workstations, and that's the kind of segment where you have to know your shit because clients are paying a premium for that expertise. That I get a personal enjoyment out of it later is completely irrelevant to the tax issue.
If you attend a training seminar for $TRENDYSOLUTION as part of your career training, do you not claim that as a business expense ? Same thing. Better to consult an accountant before calling people tax cheats...
I would love to see more of this bad news, so the abomination that is RIM can die once and for all. The company is a joke, the products are a joke, and I'm sure all those engineers and developers would be put to better use elsewhere in the industry. Maybe someplace that isn't run by two boneheaded "co-CEOs" with zero ambition and zero vision, and perhaps a few less PHBs ruining the rest.
useless 0.25% annual interest rate
I don't know how things work in your neck of the woods, but up here in Canadia we call that a plain old chequing account. They come with the token 0.25% interest rate. What we call a savings account will carry a higher interest rate (maybe 1.50% these days), and rather steep per-transaction fees to discourage you from moving too much money around. The chequing account usually has flat fee tiers for 10-20-unltd transactions.
Even after the so-called "triple-play discount", our bill was around $250 here for cable TV, internet and home phone. I hardly watch any TV, and everyone calls my cell. So one day, a much admired DSL ISP expanded into the cable business in my area. We cancelled everything and went for a $55 uncapped internet service, and a $20 VoIP phone for the stupid apartment intercom.
What we really care to watch, we either download or stream from Hulu or the like. I'm quite content to watch the hockey games at the pub or a friend's place.
My point is: it's real easy to get by without cable TV. If they priced it all more reasonably, I think laziness would have won and I'd still be with the other company, and I'd still get my hockey fix twice a week. For the extra $190 though, 15 hours of sports ain't worth it when I can spend less than that, at the pub, on beer and hang out with the lads.
Cable prices need to be slashed or we will start seeing more quitters like myself, when you can get almost any non-live shows on the internet for the terrifying sum of $0 dollars.
Annoyingly stupid minigames built on an unresponsive RPG walkabout engine ? Yep. I hated FFX to death for that dumb chocobo race thing near the Monster Arena... the one where you had to catch balloons or something. I mean, What In The Tentacled Fuck Son ? This isn't a driving game, it's an RPG. Give me a list of actions and I'll choose one. "Action: Skip stupid minigame" *click*
Some people find these Japanese elements cute and quirky. I find them, well, brain-damaged. Japanese culture is just a weird mish-mash of rampant consumerism, OCD, and non-existent self-esteem. It seems every game is about collecting useless things, moping about teenage existential ignorance, and fighting so-called bullies that look like they just got voted off America's Got Talent.
I'm kinda with you. I don't have nearly as much time to play these stupid long games as I once did, and even back in my pre-career years, I still rarely finished any RPG because they were too damned long.
What I do like is the (recent?) trend of a game that you can beat once, and if you feel like it, you can play through it again with all your gear to reach an even higher level, collect doodads you may have missed, or explore alternate questlines. Borderlands comes to mind, as does Mass Effect. You can "beat" the game in a dozen hours or so, or you can continue for 100% completion if you wish to appease your OCD demons.
I've played many a game where I resorted to cheats and save editors, to buff my characters and speed through the rest of the storyline. FF7 was one of them, because for whatever reason, I never got through to the end until a few years ago. I would play to the halfway point, then life would get in the way, or my idiot nephews would overwrite my save file, or when the PC version came along I'd just plain forget to back it up upon formatting... So one day I pulled out the save editor, gave myself a bunch of maxed-out materias and stat points, edited the stupid Knights Of The Round animation down to two seconds, and killed those emo demons once and for all. Closure, at long last. That's what I want out of a game: satisfaction. I want some kind of reward for my effort, not just a longer list of things to grind. If I feel like grinding, fine, but the boring stuff should be optional. If it's not, I'll cheat to bypass it.
They just made themselves very relevant: they're going to drum up so much hatred that even the lazy gamers will be inclined to boycott them.
You have to be pretty fucking moronic, lawyer or not, to go after an indie developer with as much fan support as Mojang. I frankly don't get the whole fad with Minecraft, but obviously a million people absolutely love it and many have DONATED money for Minecraft. Good luck finding a million people to donate for yet another interchangeable Gamebryo "platform for short-lived DLC" shooter.
People aren't hating on Bethesda because it's trendy, they're hating because this is a blatantly ridiculous bullying expedition. Nobody owns the word "scrolls", it's a fucking word. Nobody owns the concept of mountains, they're fucking mountains. You want prior art ? Open a dictionary, look out the window.
And nobody owns the concept of a medieval backdrop involving knights and jesus freaks and tyrannical monarchs. It's called fucking HISTORY.
If Bethesda wins anything in this court case, it will be yet another sign to the world that America is beyond saving from the hypercapitalist godmachine it has created.
You mean, competitors like Amazon that have less selection, zero expertise and no first-party warranties ?
Yeah. I don't think Newegg has anything to fear right now.
There may be no pressing need for you to upgrade every year or two, but there are still quite a few of us who live on the bleeding edge of tech, either as a hobby or business need. For me, it's both. A new toy comes out, and I either want it to scratch an itch, or I need it to acquire the expertise by the time my clients start asking about it, so that when I say "Buy this, not that", I can rely on first-hand experience, not just some shill write-up from a sponsor-driven review site.
Besides, for me product research is a tax write-off :) That right there is like a big fat mail-in rebate once a year. Wouldn't you drop $500 on the latest GPU if you were guaranteed $200 cash back ?
All I'm going to say is:
"HUE HUE HUE HUE HUE HUE"
But yeah, fuck this shit. I'm perfectly fluent in english and french, yet (go figure) I'll actually adopt an accept in either language if I feel it will help the other party understand what I'm saying. Make the wife every time we catch a cab home, as I turn my smooth french into "immigrant french" and accent it up, because somehow my drunken habits have decided that's the best way to converse with taxi drivers.
Accents are a product of your first language. The fact that English is essentially a mash-up, a hybrid language, should exclude it from accentism. Even those from the United Kingdom aren't really native English, because English itself is a rehash of old frankish, french, and god-knows-what. Those of you who speak a "real" old-world language know what I mean... English is just cobbled together. It is dominant, but that does not make it an authority.
Okay, for starters you say you're worried about the U.S. gov't seizing your domain, but then you go and mention the MAFIAAFIRE list. Okay, so you want to run a torrent tracker... big surprise.
I see an inherent problem with CCTLDs: you may expect the ones from obscure nations to be "safer", because, well, they're obscure and that government might not give two shits about U.S. laws. But then on the converse, they may give a shit about U.S. money. The poor nations love bribery just as much as the militarized corporatocracy some 300 million people call "home".
The only real way to dodge the MAFIAA is thus:
1. destroy the MAFIAA
No, really. You either take the risk, and best case some ungrateful leech stools your site to the authorities and you lose your domain, worst case you get sued for six quadrillion dollars. The only other option is to launch World War 3, win, become supreme leader of earth, have every last motherfuckin' corporate robber baron drawn and quartered, and then you're pretty much free to post whatever the hell you want on (what's left of) the internet.
Okay, I'm going to be a dick and say that UEFI is a load of crap. It has its own cute little platform-independent bytecode, which I suppose would come in real handy if you're in the business of selling motherboards that support more than one CPU architecture... wait, what ? And then manufacturers love to store a bunch of extensions on the hard drive, like in the Asus screenshot - but let's not call it an operating system okay ? Hell, Gigabyte even ships a few crappy games as EFI extensions on the motherboard CD.
UEFI is an overdesigned solution to a non-problem. Intel has basically given everyone carte-blanche to bloat up the pre-boot experience. We already had gimmicky mouse-driven BIOSes back in the day, I remember one as far back as the 286, where AMI had replicated a Windows 2.0 style GUI. Pointless, slow, but hey it's shiny right ? :P
What the BIOS needed was an update from its 35 year old roots - a little less 16-bit legacy cruft, a little more forward compatibility for the 64-bit era. What we got instead was a reinvention of the wheel that doesn't actually solve much. It simply replaces one simple interface with another. Instead of VESA VBE, we now use GOP, which provides (dun dun dun!) a linear frame buffer. Instead of calling interrupt 13h for disk access, we now call a C++ object. Nothing has really changed, except for the bloat.
Disclaimer: I'm in the PC retail business.
There are no "Microsoft contracts" up here in Canada, certainly not with the individual shops as that would be a logistical nightmare to administer, even for MS. What does happen is skeevy shop owners like to sell an overpriced OS with every PC, because it's often the only profitable part of the deal on low-end machines. They make up these ominous sounding "contractual obligations", to which the alternative is to buy the PC unassembled with only a 30-day (in-store) warranty rather than the usual 1-to-3 year deal. A lot of customers don't know any better, so they fork over an extra $150-200 for an OEM license of W7HP.
With the big-box brands it's a bit different, because they love the preloading business. They still get paid to put bloatware on your machine - McAfee and MS Office trials - and of course they get a deep "volume" discount on the OS itself. There's still nothing that can legally force them to shove an OS down your throat, but since they don't list a price for an OEM license of the OS, nor many of the core components in the machine, they can argue that it's included in the base price, so there is no point in asking them to remove it since it's "free". They really could sell you a machine without Windows if they so wanted, and for larger corporate purchases you can specify that (or provide your own ghost image), but for the consumer stuff they would much rather sell you a preloaded PC that's ready for the average casual user. Just the support calls alone, from clueless users who bought a naked machine and don't know what to do with it, would be a PR nightmare and a huge cost sink. I've lost count of the times people bought naked machines from me, claiming they didn't need an OS, then returned a day later to buy the damn disc.
Think back a few years, when Dell briefly offered Linux-ready PCs. They cost more than the Windows-loaded versions of the same machines. Now you can run up and down with your conspiracy theories about MS bribes and whatnot, but the reality is that charging a little bit more for the Linux-ready variant ensured that the average Joe Random would buy the cheaper Windows one, even if the difference was only $30 or so, it's sufficient. This, in turn, probably saved them countless frustrating support calls from irate morons. Then a bit later they started preloading Ubuntu on there, to at least have the machine boot to an internet-ready OS.
I plan on recording a video of myself beating off to said snuff, and sending it back to PETA with a big "Thank You" note for ending 30 years of blue balls.
Simple:
Invent a method to fix the patent system. (Hint: you'll need guns, lots of guns!)
As many have pointed out, if someone is so strongly partial to the original Zappa recordings, they can find those records. No one is forcing them to destroy their originals and replace them with the new and allegedly inferior mix.
As a (crappy) musician, I've experienced that myself, where I collaborated with a good friend on a track, and after a few more (dozen) listens, decided his contribution sucked, so I created an alternate version that was more in line with my tastes. I didn't delete the old one, in fact I still give it top billing on the album, with my remix as a "b-side". There is no technical, legal or financian reason to withdraw the old release.
Now, if only Lucas could put the crack pipe down and see the light. He could realistically sell two versions side-by-side, same format! The original theatrical release, and his latest rehash. Some will buy the unmarred version, some will prefer the new, and some will buy both just because they drink the goddamned kool-aid. Either way, everyone gets what they want. Why they don't do this is a testament to Lucas' bizarre vanity.
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem - an unfortunate plague in the hardware industry. Really, if that's where we are, then motherboards might as well just give us a thousand socketed general-purpose output pins, and we'll push on whatever connectors we want and turn the whole thing into a glorified FPGA emulator.
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
The problem with Rogers is they throttle everything that looks like P2P. My limited understanding is that they look at the number of simultaneous connections to one host and if you go above their threshold, BOOM connection reset! For things like Xbox Live this means you can't play any team games, like Call of Duty, because your buddies will keep getting disconnected or time out.
For those who can, switching to TekSavvy cable solved all those problems for me. Now I can host game servers, run torrents at line speed (and beyond, thanks to SpeedBoost), and generally enjoy broadband as it was intended. Their cable service is new and limited to a few cities as they have to install their own hardware, unlike DSL which piggybacks off of Bell, but man is it ever worth it just to be rid of Rogers and my huge Rogers bills...
I wasn't aware of this law, but I'm guessing it's my favorite assclown Stephen Harper who signed it ? That man had a giant boner for Dubya.
Just to make sure I got this straight:
Intel took one of the slowest interpreted languages, though the most popular one, and added parallel data primitives and functions. Then they used a pointless little particle fountain demo to show off its benefits.
So rather than try to make Javascript execute faster, they spread its disease to all 8 cores. How is this an improvement ? The last thing I want is for a web page to sap my CPU and battery life, doing things web pages should not be doing in the first place. Save that Javascript for friendly client-side form validation and UI animation. Everything else is a hack. 3D graphics in the Javascript is a hack. Heavy number crunching in Javascript is a hack. Fuck off with your hacks! If I want fancy graphics and high framerates, I'll run native code.
Congrats. You're a computer geek like myself. Now I hope you'd reserve at least a few drives for redundancy and spares in that 45-bay JBOD chassis, and maybe a head unit to actually link it to a network, but I know what you're saying. The cost of the hardware is only a small portion of the sale price.
Let's talk again when you've built an actual business around it, with warranties, onsite support and enough of a profit margin to sustain yourself through all that.
Preface: I know a thing or two about BIOS hacking.
Given the very limited space available in the average PC Flash BIOS chip, how fancy can this possibly be, ? Many of them only have 2MB, already close to capacity with just the stock BIOS. This doesn't leave a whole lot of space for adding an attack module, and it would have to do some fancy footwork to survive past the protected-mode switch. Modern operating systems don't use the BIOS at all past the bootloader, once the native device drivers take over. It might be possible to punt out some other chunk of the BIOS to make room, but that's playing with fire. If the machine becomes unbootable, the rootkit won't get very far.
CIH was a very trivial virus. All it did was blindly clobber things with zeroes. It had no way of "rooting" a box. It would simply toast your OS, and if your BIOS chip supported the one flash command CIH knew, it would blank that out as well, rendering your machine unbootable. That's what we get for outsourcing even our virus writing ot China :P
The sensation of "feeling sick" is (in layman's terms) your body shunting all resources to the immune system. You get sick to get better. This is partly why people who claim to never get sick have a tendency to suddenly drop dead. Their body is still full of garbage, they just never noticed because the fight was subtle. The more responsive your immune system, the more it beats the crap out of you. I'm dumbing it down to extremes here, so don't go and write this in your Med school entry exam :P
It can, and does, happen that said "shunting" gets so extreme that you die anyway, but that's what the ICU is for. If these researchers can coax the body into waging a full-scare biowar on cancer, and keep you alive through it, that's HUGE!