If you are a history channel or comedy channel fanatic, cable is worth it. But a lot of people end up getting cable just to get decent reception of network programming.
I don't know anyone who would get cable for things like the history or comedy channels, which are usually included even in the most basic channel packages as filler. I don't think you understand why people actually get cable. 'Better reception' is not even statistically close to what people put down as their primary reason. The reason people get cable is for the programming on channels like HBO, FX, SKY, STAR and misc. movie and music channels.
And a lot of the good cable stuff shows up on DVD pretty quickly, anyway.
Sure, at 30-40 USD for a single series of a given show (that they may never have seen a single episode of), that tends to put people off though.
To compare costs:
Let's say you have a somewhat generous cable package, at 40 USD a month (so you can include HBO and a few extra packages), that's going to cost you 480 USD a year. That may seem like a lot, right?
Your average American says they watch about 4 hours a day, the same as most western Europeans. That's an average that includes people who don't have any cable or satellite TV at all (and those who don't own a TV, or who almost never watch it). Obviously amoung people who care enough to get cable, it's going to be higher than average.
Most people who have something like HBO/FX/SKY tend to watch them primarily, but just assuming even only some of that is cable and only half of that is stuff they'd actually care to watch (the rest being adverts or 'junk' they are only watching 'because it's on'), that's still 2 hours a day, or 730 hours of TV a year worth of decent TV. Two, maybe three, decent shows a night is probably about an accurate figure for that I'd say (less on some weekdays maybe, but then more at weekends or on specific nights).
Given a show run length of 45 minutes (even though in reality most have episodes of only 30 minutes) and a standard 24 episodes per season at the average cost of 30-40 USD per season box set, your looking at 1400 USD or more in series DVD's a year for a similar amount of programmin (and that's being reasonably generous to the DVD model).
Of course if you watch an hour or less of TV a day, because like most/.'ers you spend more time on the computer, or if through some bizzare fluke of nature you actually have a family, and so watch about 75% less TV than the national average, then DVD's could well be more cost effective and more convenient. It's scary how much TV most people watch though (and that's without a PVR...).
I totally agree with you that broadcast television is ultimately doomed. On demand is the future. The question is how will we get on demand. Will it be streamed? Or will we download it and view it at our convenience.
Actually broadcast is not doomed, not for at least the next 20 years or so while people adjust to having more 'on demand' content and while bandwith at the local loop level is still an issue. Think of trying to stream different - non multicasted - HD quality streams to millions of households at the same time or even just a few thousand at a single exchange point - ouch, that's some serious bandwith (and at 1-1 contention as users won't put up with anything less for TV). Sure you can store copes of the movies at the local POP to reduce load on the core network, but even then your still going to get quite a few users pulling down unique content you don't have cached.
The answer to your question is a mixture of both.
People will love being able to not be tied so closely to TV schedules just to see shows they like (and just stream them when they get home), but they will also want to be able to just sit back and relax and be entertained when they turn on the TV - and of course still be able to catch their favourite shows as soon as they air (and so still providing a valuable revenue stream to the media companies - and a great way to promote new shows, as they do now). Certainly rolling specialist channels - such as news, music, cartoon, comedy, history (etc.) - are likely to remain popular, and if they exist it's likely that premier channels that exist today will also remain - though lesser channels may well disappear, unless they find that operating costs drop sufficently to allow them to stay viable.
A lot of content (for popular shows, movies) is likley to be preloaded locally on your PVR - providers like Sky (prop. J. Murdoch) already reserve a large portion of HD space on their Sky+ TiVo-esque Satellite units in order to allow 'instant on' activation of pay-per-view movies. They have also been publically discussing their plans to cache and save hit shows automatically, not unlike TiVo suggestions. Their HD units (which are demoing now, and are expected to start shipping Q1/Q2 next year) have Ethernet ports too, and there are no prizes for guessing why that might be (and in fact, the High Definition capable X-Box 360 is already download movies and games, including HD movies, and can do on demand delivery and billing via your X-Box Live account).
I know at least my Kiss Player, Digitial TV unit and DVD player all crash if they overheat (that is, if you try stacking them, blocking the vents - even simply by putting a DVD case on the top of the unit - or just let the ambiant temperature get too hot). They are not designed to be stacked, and it's explicitly inadvisable to stack them (as this obstructs the vents, causing them to fail).
Oh, and I've never noticed a generic handle to take name brand blades. Being that I have bought maybe 1/2 a dozen handles in my life, and I go through a blade about once a week, I would guess anyone could figure out where the money is in that.
Actually I've seen lots of generic handles that take blades from multiple vendors. I find them handy as I've got 5 handles in my bathroom (a mix of Gillette and Wilkinson Sword and a generic one) and I still have problems locating compatible blades - so I almost always end up getting a bag of whatever disposable ones are in easy reach (unless they look really nasty like they might slice a chunk of my neck off, then I'll just look for pack of BIC's).
To avoid frustration, I usually buy a razor and a bunch of compatible blade packs at the same time, and just throw the razor away at if it's turns out to be one I've already got (or if I never end up seeing blades for it again because it's been 'discontinued' in favour of a newer design).
I expect that the idea that they lose money on the razor is now an urban legend (though it may have been true at one time). Personally I don't think I've never looked at the price of a razor (I assume it's about 5-10 UKP given the materials?), I've never assumed it would be expensive so I've just chucked it in the trolley/basket without a second thought.
I wouldn't care if one was 15 UKP rather than 5 UKP, maybe most other people do, but if not then it seems a bit pointless for them to compete really aggressively on price. I would have though that for them to deliberately sell them at a loss would actually be illegal in quite a few places, due to such behaviour being deemed as anti-competative.
Cell phones are marketed as though they are sold at a loss. It costs you some money up front and a 12 month or more contract AND a cancelation fee if you break the contract that is probably the real cost of the phone. I don't pay for my cell service, but I bought my phone. The phone was $140. Most people I know pay at least $50 a month for cell service.
Perhaps things are different in the US but I'm not aware of any phone that's marketed as though it's sold at a loss per se, just that you can them at a discount (or for free) if you agree to buy a service of a given value from a given provider, and the connection between the two is made very clear (with service A is say 100 UKP, with service B the phone is say 50 UKP and with service C the phone might be free).
I think your right in that people prefer not to see the actual cost of the phone (even if that means paying for it via higher monthly subsciption fees). I can understand people doing that with really expensive phones because they want to spread the cost, but people seem to prefer that approach even when buying basic low end phones I'm sure they could easily afford to buy up front (and so they spend 100-200 USD, or more each year than they actually need to for a given level of service).
I expect that to change and for pricing plans to keep falling as the market matures though (and people start to care more about their monthly subsciption costs, rather than just about getting a phone in the first place). This will probably happen a lot later in the US than in Europe due to differing market penetration rates (with that in mind I'm curious to know how the market is in Asia with regard to pricing though I expect, as with their broadband fix line service provision, it's much lower than on this side of the world).
I think Pay As You Go is typically a far better option for most people at the moment (except really heavy users - or people who want specialist services not avalible on PAYG such as GPRS/3G), even given the much higher per-minute rates for calls I expect most people's monthly outgoing for their mobile service would go down from 30-50 UKP to about 5-15 UKP, if they only bought a phone up front (and bear in mind most people go for pretty modest phones) they could save loads.
Actually there is completely no point whatsoever in setting up MySQL as multiuser in a simple web hosting environment. You may as well just tell everyone to use "root" and no password.
Yes, you think that's insecure, but the truth of the matter is that giving individual users their own MySQL username and password does not make it any less insecure. I am of the opinion that it's better not to lull people into a false sense of security: if they can see how sharp the blade is, they will be more careful when using a powerful tool.
That's a really bad idea IMO.
Fact: it's trivial for any user with an account on a box to read any other user's files, even in their cgi-bin, since they must necessarily all be visible to the Apache daemon user {www-data on Debian systems}.
That's not a fact, but it is the sign the server hasn't been configured very well.
The only way around this is for every user to run their own instance of the Apache server as themself, on a different non-privileged port; and to have a transparent proxy on port 80 that redirects requests to the appropriate port based on the host name.
Shared web hosting platforms should really be using some implementation of per-customer compartmentalisation at the OS level if the users are allowed SSH access, or to run CGI's. Solaris 10 supports this natively, there are at least two separate native implementations of something very similar for Linux, Windows 2003 even supports this to some degree I gather (though not to quite the same extent) and then there are tools like VMWare.
Of course, running your MySQL server on an entirely separate hardware from your web server is also a Good Thing(TM), especially when someone manages to (most likely inadvertently) DoS your SQL server.
However, failing that, any web server used by multiple customers to run CGI's should at the very least be configured to use something like suexec, which has been a standard feature of Apache for about 8 years or so.
Using suexec (or gsexec, or cgwrap, or similar tool as appropriate for whatever web server your using) is precisely intended to prevent CGI's running as one user from accessing or modifying files (including other CGI's) that belong to another user.
Yes, but in order for all that to happen, they pretty much have to already know something about the darknet or a member of it, or figure out how to differentiate "darknet traffic" from normal network traffic.
You know we know how to pickout this sort of draffic already, in an entirely automated fashion, right?;-)
If a darknet wants to hide itself further, they can use can use software that will encrypt data, talk on standard ports, even utilize stenography. Then it's going to be nearly impossible to spot darknet traffic without some sort of detailed and expensive analysis.
As I've already mentioned, it's really not all that difficult. All you have to do is have the system note the source and destination and the type of traffic - what port(s) it's on and what type of data is actually being transmitted (and in the case of encrypted data what sort of traffic does it appear to be - e.g. VoIP, HTTPS, etc.). The existance of tools like netflow are what help make this straightforward.
The reason it's fundamentally easy to spot is there is a limit to amount of traffic in, and the length of, any legitimate VoIP/HTTPS/SSH/etc. session (not least to a single destination - especially when it's destined for somewhere that is labelled as being a DSL, cable user or college dorm netblock).
If the data is there, it's always going to be mineable, and there are actually quite a few tools (both hardware and software) designed specifically to help you get at it, primarily to aid network engineering and to allow for Usage Based Billing. Stopping users trying to get away with hogging all the bandwith by stuffing networks full of P2P junk traffic is a big driver for UBB.
Though personally I don't think there is any real hope for UBB, the technology involved is useful for doing for traffic engineering, because once you have the data required for it you can start to identify and manage traffic much more effectively, and ensure that excessively high volume users get special treatment and that the system automatically limits any negative impact they would otherwise have on other users who have to contend with them.
Re:Monitoring traffic by source, destination and t
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Also, bear in mind that as universities are the hold outs of free speech you must make the good or bad decision based on knowledge of or about the user without EVER getting to see the data payload on the packet. Still sound simple? Your method in our environment would take our small security team and turn it into abattalion.
Entirely coincidentally I've actually had to as it happens (that is, doing weird, secret things to high volumes of unobservable traffic, and without knowing the source or type of traffic and without making it obvious) and am in the middle of finishing a requested paper on it, and I think the task pretty straightforward when approached with due consideration. There are actually a whole number of different approaches you can take to monitor traffic by type (independant of what port it's on), and it's possible using both commercial purpose built hardware and software, and using commodity hardware and more flexible FOSS.
'Simple' very much depands on the current network, the staff avalible, their workload and the budget you have to work with. This solution is the sort of thing one or two people can impliment though (two is nice, as then you can have a really good developer and a really good network engineer and have them work together), and it can be easily looked after by one person (not even full time) - even for many thousands of users.
That said it really ought to be simple to spot bad traffic off the bat, as I'd hope that traffic from the likes of dorms and public terminals would be entirely seperate from traffic from departments and sanctioned projects (that is, seperately switched, and with different QoS levels) and that they'd all have their own usage reports & graphs and they'd all have stated requirements for expected usage for the year.
Taking whatever measures you deem fit on systems in facilties used by doms and public terminals (and to a lesser extent in labs) to ensure a generally high level of service should be a no brainer - just as existing ISP's do they ought to be treated as 'low rent' consumers and their service is going to have to be contended and so subject to certain limitations.
All that you have to do then is meet the needs of the formal projects, which really ought to be easy with their agreed SLA's (with max burst limits, bandwith allowances, levels of resiliance, etc.) agreed and previsioned for in advance.
Anyone with 'special needs' or who is unhappy with the level of service in the labs or doms should just make a case as they would with a project. If they demand that all students and public terminals should have unrestricted access (because it's a 'Right!') and as a result someone senior comes to your department and says 'Make it so!' all you have to do is crunch the numbers and say "Sure we can, but to do that, would cost us N $ to ensure we have sufficent capacity and infrastructure in place." and allow those in charge of the budget decide how much they want to spend, dependant upon the contention ratios and service level they want to be able to offer.
Monitoring traffic by source, destination and type
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Try monitoring a campus network where you have several thousand users and an obscenely large amount of bandwidth. Oh, and you have live research data being generated on campus and moved to places like the NCSA etc... Bandwidth consumption may vary by tens of megabytes by the minute. So I ask you, in that situation (which I work in) what is an "increase in bandwidth" a sign of?
Effective monitoring is actually quite achievable with freely avalible software.
On a properly managed network you should be able to tell exactly who is using how much traffic and what type of traffic (and where it's coming in and out from) and to spot suspicious changes in usuage patterns, with historical data avalible in a format appropriate for a quick visual comparison. All of this should be fed in to your monitoring platform with alerts raised once set thresholds are reached.
In practice though, it's usually not cost effective to actually clamp down on misuse of bandwith and it's more prudent to let it slide (and/or go for the low hanging fruit if spot anyone taking the mickey) and just pickup the tab afterwords.
(Disclaimer: The next part of this post drifts away from this specific thread;)
I'm not sure why so many people imagine monitoring traffic by source and type is difficult and that they can't be spotted and rate limited on a per user basis, in an entirely automated fashion.
Using tools like jflow and cflowd (and various other commerical purpose built tools) to do detailed traffic profiling, and to a limited extent shaping, is something a few carriers and large providers do already. Even if your provider doesn't do this, there is a really good chance their transit providers do it.
At the moment, the majority of providers mark P2P traffic as the lowest priority for QoS purposes as it is, because (a) it's so all consuming and disproportionately resource intensive (compared to far more common tasks like legitimate HTTP traffic and FTP data transfer) and (b) it's hard to complain about slow transfer speeds of what is almost certainly Warez between you and an anonymous DSL/Cable subscriber in another state/country. This is partly why P2P transfer rates can be very crummy (the other major reason being of course the limited upstreams of most users).
Once you have profiling data for a given port or IP on your network, all you need to do is send a trigger to the switch/router/DSLAM/etc. to either trottle the traffic for that port on the TCP/UDP ports required (as the hardware permits - ideally on a per-TCP/UPD-port basis), or - if your feeling adventurous (or your hardware is crummy) - dynamically re-route traffic for that destination seperately, though a series of systems that are capeable of enforcing very fine grained QoS controls (on appropriate hardware, the 2.6 kernel with iptables and some appropriate modules is actually capeable of impressive work in this area).
If users start tunneling large amounts of traffic down other ports (and disguising it as as regular HTTP, SSH, HTTPS, etc. traffic) then it's going to be really obvious to spot using automated software, and those those users will find that providers will just impliment systems to nobble that specific type of traffic on their connection while they persist in doing that, and if they want unnobbled connection, they'll have to pay a real premium to compensate. It's also entirely possible providers will start enforcing QoS based on destination too, so that transfers to systems that are common P2P traffic destinations are effectively crippled (and traffic to network ranges used by Cable/DSL/College dorms/etc. could even be rated by default).
If any users imagine they can 'sneak around' by tunneling P2P traffic and making it look like encrypted VoIP traffic (and warzing to their hearts content at the expense of the rest of legitimate users) they are in for a big shock. They are going to find that suddently their VoIP traffic starts having specific (weekly/monthly) transfer limi
Yeah, RE: protecting the image/border I think in order for this to be effective they'd need to hack Quartz to perhaps make it impossible for any application to capture the screen - or that part of the screen - while the dialog was up (that is to say - any application that isn't already running as root or as the 'windowserver' user).
The approach of a dashboard-esq subtle fading out of the desktop, with a custom (animated) dialog approach (though nothing too OTT) could be really effective. Certainly focusing on a custom bordered and high impact dialog and dimming the rest of the screen (perhaps jus when dialog is at the top, an in such a way the user could still select other windows behind it) would really get people to pay attention to the dialog (and could be an easy to impliment and useful feature on it's own).
If desired, it would be possible to make this a user setting in the Preferences... Security pane, with a default of Muppet Alert Mode (complete with screen diming and big flaming window borders) but also with the option of the more subtle existing style of alert if the previous method is too intrusive for 'Power Users'.
In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't possible to do this as a hack (albeit one that would itself require root privilages to install and would take over your password management to some extent, so not necessarily a hack you'd want to trust:-).
iTunes patches seem to bring up the permission box every time:P
Yeah, Mail and Safari patches do the same, I assume it keeps track of the Applications filename / it's location / MD5 of the binary / etc. which is why it requires confirmation the first time you run the new version of the application (so that someone - or some software - can't switch the legitimate application with a trojan copy).
Good Thing(TM), even if the iTunes patches are a little too frequent.;-)
Sorry if I'm wrong about Windows Media Player having an installer, it seems from the microsoft.com site it's not the same drag and drop install model I know Real Player follows.
I have a few Macs (two at home, one at work, and a PowerBook) so it's very possible I just put the.app in a.sit/.zip file myself. I tend to bundle up a lot of apps like Real, WMV, VLC, GIMP, etc. and keep them on a WebDav share for easy access,and for sharing with new mac owning friends and coworkers to get them started (and I don't usually have the origional.sit/disk image/installer so compress them myself) - that or I'm using a really old crummy initial release or a version from some coverdisk.
I've seen a lot of switchers/new adopters in the last year, which is why I started doing that (not least because if I make sure they have everything they need to start with, they bother me less).
I agree the player is horribly broken to the point of being unusable. The framerate is dire and it doesn't support quite a few WMV files that play fine on Windows systems, and IIRC the browser plug-in doesn't work at all.
IME, installers like this are really in the minority though (although I'm aware that some really commonly used software like Adobe packages behave like that - I think because they install shared frameworks).
Still, that'll never solve the problem of the user getting used to it.
Very true, I agree.
That's why I think it's very important for any sort of warning message to be very rare in occurance (as well as being accurately descriptive, but short and to the point).
Where there is a chance that the user might get used to that specific message (such as in the instance of an email attachment warning as you describe) that the application in question (Mail) should have a specific and unique looking appropriately alarmist dialog, so that it doesn't dilute the significance of other alerts, such as those triggered by applications trying to escallate their privilages.
For an ordinary user, the Mac ALWAYS asks for an admin password in order to make any change to the Applications folder.
This somewhat misses the point that if your dragging an Application into the "Applications" folder and your asked for a password, it's absolutely clear why the system (note: not the application) is asking you for a password. A kernel driver or global startup item can't somehow magically install itself when your only dragging a folder.
As already pointed out, having admin privilages on your account in Mac OS X is absolutely not in anyway 'dumb', anymore than being in the wheel group is on a BSD system - in fact, it's exactly the same, only the group happens to be named 'admin' not 'wheel' (see NetInfo Manager application or nituils documentation for details).
Having an 'admin' account in Mac OS X is not like having an 'Admin' account on a Windows sytem, or running as root on Linux.
A regular user can still install some, but not all programs in their own user space. However such installs will only affect that user and not the system or other users.
All programs can exist (and can be run from) in user space. Only drivers and frameworks (which are rare) must be in the admin-only accessible/Library/, rather than in the users own ~/Library/ (though things like plugins, screen savers, etc., can go in either). Obviously this only effects the current user (which is kind of the point), but there is of course the 'Shared' folder on the HD which exists out of the box to allow unprivilaged users to share items convienently if they want to.
It isn't a problem if the people coming over are prepared to assimilate into that culture, speak a common language, share basic cultural values. But when you get large numbers that do not share those values, will not assimilate, will not speak a common language - you end up effectively with two disparate peoples trying to share a single state. If it goes on long enough, you usually see two state solutions offered, and its rarely a peaceful transition to that point.
No, that's not how you end up at all - that's just how things start out.
Once people live side by side for long enough the groups intermingle sufficently and the groups become unified until they are a singular people.
The only significant hurdle to integration appears to be, and I mention it only because it's strictly relevent, large organised religions (Pagan religions tending either to be assimilated or to fade out). Fortunately, it's also true that the process of intergration can eased by careful government management of the populace (and indeed can benifit from co-operation from promient religious leaders).
Governments allowing taxpayer subsidized immigrant ghettos to form unforunately has not helped, and is ultimately counter productive (as has been shown through riots in France and to a lesser extent Britain), serving only to breed division and resentment on both sides.
This is Off Topic and History 101 but take a look at 13th Century Europe and compare it with a map of modern Europe and count the number of different countries in each (as a starter you'll note that mainland Britian alone was still 3 entirely seperate countries).
Europe has certainly had it's ups and downs, with large empires, such as the Roman, German, Austrian and Russian consolidating large regions - predominantly by force (which occationaly, if rarely, works as a long term solution) - for a limited period of time.
Never the less, the overall trend has clearly towards unity and consolidation. This can been seen not just through topology, but also by looking at the culture and the langue of the people in those regions. This is - and must be, if it is to be successful - a gradual process, as can be seen by the general level of enthusiasim of Europeans for unity in Europe, but in the equal desire of most of the inhabitants not to move things along too fast. As slow a process as it is (taking many generations, thus being inperceptible to each of us individually) further integreation is inevitable across the globe as a whole.
Obviously this isn't a phenomenon unique to Europe, as well as happening in Asia (most spectacularly in China) it applies also to what is now known as the United States Of America.
That's the problem. Clueless mac user is probably expecting to be installing software about then. The CD told them they need a player to see the dancing pigs, for example.
You don't need to authenticate to install applications on Mac OS X. Installing applications - like Microsoft Office - involves just dragging the application (or the folder it's in) from the CD into the Applications folder on your hard disk. Even things like Real One Player and Windows Media Player work this way.
When you do actually get a dialog, Mac OS X also tells you what permissions are being requested on the password dialog (e.g. full admin access, or just permission to modify a specific system setting, etc) as well as which application is requesting the permission. In reality, most of the time people see a dialog in Mac OS X which requires authentication, it's because of an interaction with the OS itself (such as changing a system setting) that the user has just performed.
If a users sees an Application (including plugins) requesting this sort of permission that should really ring alarm bells. Only things like new drivers (e.g. for that new camera you just bought) should be asking for things like that.
It's fair to say here is room for some improvement in the dialog in that it should better reflect this (perhaps rasing a more severe looking alert when it's anything other than the OS or bundled Application requesting any sort of privileged access, which explains something along the lines of the previous sentence).
On the subject, it could do with some means of forgery protection (things like an embedded image in the window have been suggested) so that you can better trust it's an authentic authentication dialog. If your paranoid.
Technically Windows allows for roughly this sort of behaviour too (that is, you should never need admin permissions to install a regular application) but the large number of badly written installers - combined with the lack of a K.I.S.S. approach in the OS - seem to have conspired to make admin level access madatory for even the most mundane tasks.
I bet if vendors (and I include both Apple and Microsoft in that) implimented privilage dialogs that were scary and intimidating enough to users (perhaps with a default action of 'deny') 3rd party application developers wouldn't ask for them unless they really needed those permissions.
What on earth are these people talking about? Good gried, "GET OUT THE MIDDLE EAST, WEST!" sounds _very_ political to me! "STOP MESSING IN OUR AFFAIRS", sounds political to me!
That's not what the people carrying out the bombings are actually saying though - they are not just saying 'we want you out of the middle east' they are saying 'we hate you, and we are going to kill you all' - they are extremists, they want to wipe out everyone who does not follow their doctrine, and that includes other Muslims.
Take this statement from the group apparently responsible for the bombing in Jordan this week:
"Let the tyrant of Jordan know that the protection walls for the Jews and the camp for the Crusader army are now in the range of fire of our holy warriors"
The retoric used in this recent statement, and others like it, makes it clear these groups are driven by religious conviction and they are not trying to achieve a singular political goal.
They want to establish Islamic states, much like Iran (though less 'liberal' that it was allowed to become under the previous administration - something they are working hard to undo) in the middle east and in the rest of the world. Unlike moderate Muslims - and like extremists of other religions - they don't want to live side by side (in any sense of the term) with others such as Christians and Jews. They even dislike other branches of the same religion enough to murder them en mass too.
There goals can only be described as 'political' in the sense they want to establish Islamic government and have states run under Sharia law (that is, law based on the strict teachings of the Koran), but clearly the driver for this is religious conviction.
While both groups are'terrorists (having kidnapped, tortured and murdered innocent civilians) there is a disctinction between the terrorists reponsible for the bombings in Iraq, New York, Spain, London and Jordan (etc) and groups that are politically (rather than purely religiously) motivated such as Hezbollah (incidentally, they are the ones shouting "GET OUT THE MIDDLE EAST, WEST!" and "STOP MESSING IN OUR AFFAIRS").
The poster should definitely go with QuickTime Broadcaster IMO, and encode the movies with QuickTime Pro (for the ~30 USD it will cost). It's far better quality (by a long way) and it's a more efficient in delivering good quality video (so streams are ultimately more reliable for end users).
With QuickTime Pro, you can even encode files for streaming that will work well on a regular web server, by pre-encoding them in a number of different sizes/quality, all hinted appropriately is ideal. QuickTime Broadcaster is great for encoding on the fly though - and it won't cost you anything (though requires a Mac).
However, I'd strongly suggest encoding in straight MPEG4 (rather than as a.MOV) which, as a standard that has wide industry support, doesn't require the QuickTime Player and will merrily play in whatever suitable software the user has available - including Windows Media Player.
I can understand why someone might want to encode in way that requires the QuickTime Player if they were are trying to improve the quality and efficiency of the stream, but really the only sensible reason to use the.WMV format is if you want to distribute DRM'd video.
Indeed! The slavish devotion to Nintendo is strong here.
While 'we' hated them when they were being fined millions for uncompetative price fixing, 'we' like them now they are the underdog, and any deviation from the official party line is not tolerated. In the same vein, posters are apparently expected to remember at all times that Microsoft are inherently evil and there is no way they can make a superior console (and that even Sony are better than Microsoft).
For your amusement, you might want to check out the moderation on this post as an example of how offenders will be punished.
This is actually one reason I don't have Zonk posts appearing on my front page now, as they seem to attract this sort of lunacy from people who are apparently so afraid they might be proven wrong or their position on something undermined that they would try to stifle anything that is contrary to what they believe.
First, 10,000 xp isn't that much.Second, re-rolling makes exactly zero sense, since you would need to get MORE then the tens of thousands XP you lost to get where you where before the 'bug' happened.
I didn't just lose 10,000 XP though - I wish. That's a lot of mobs to grind, but still that would have been bearable if still very grating.
As you later acknowledged - but chose to ignore here - I lost _tens of thousands_ of XP, to the point where my character actually de-levelled (and subsequently lost skills I'd spent several gold on, presumably because after de-levelling I no longer qualified for them).
As you don't get it:
Re-rolling was an option worthy of consideration because at least doing quests is more fun - and can be considerably quicker - that purely grinding on mobs (which give comparably poorer XP in WoW) in order to rebuild my character. If I wanted to grind the same mobs for several days to level up, I'd play Lineage 2.
Third, Penny-Arcade did have a situation that involved GM's and they said it was a pleasant experience.
Not that your point is in any way relevant, but yes, I'm aware of that. I also remember how much they bitched about the system when they couldn't get on either.
The point, which you somehow missed entirely, is that if the service was as shitty in the US as it is in Europe (particularly for customers with characters on the newer servers, which are hosted separately to the rest) then you'd be hearing a lot more about it.
Forth, Unless you can get tens of thousands of experience in under 30 minutes, you character has been submitted and updated to the server. If it had not, the quest would not be marked completed.
I can confirm I didn't magically get tens of thousands of experience in under 30 minutes (oh look - you noted it was plural now) and yes I'm sure the server had indeed kept track of it.
As I pointed out to Blizzard support at the time (repeatedly), my character had more XP _5 days ago_ than it had after WoW decided to act randomly and get busy with the XP nerf bat, and they could have checked the backups.
In fact, if I really had done all the quests marked as complete in my quest log (including all the recent ones I'd done over the last few days) it would frankly have been bloody hard for me to be still only have as much XP as my character was reduced to.
Fifth, If this was possible, the exploitation community would have abused it beyond all recognition. Sixth, character data is not really kept locally. If it was, there would be a bevy of injection exploits that would have stopped the game.
Obviously it's not just a client side fault (more like dubious transaction handling I strongly suspect), so I don't know why you'd think it would be exploitable remotely.
Sadly this comes as no surprise to me. Due to a bug I was kicked from the server (while my net connection was fine), on immediately reconnecting I found my my WoW character lost tens of thousands of XP (de levelled!), lost gold and had the quests I'd done still marked as completed (so I couldn't repeat them to get back the XP).
I very politely contacted support 4 times over next week and a bit about this issue, including contacting GM's in game and via the site, pointing to there AUP/EULA agreement which explicitly says they will try to reinstate character data, items and gold in such an event (which was clearly due to a software fault) [ unless, it states, the rollback was part of a forced server roll back, which it was not. ].
Eventually, each time the GM responded with a poorly written reply which made no sense (as if he didn't speak English particularly well and / or hadn't read my ticket at all) saying they 'Don't reinstate characters when there has been a server roll back'. Though I got no response back from interim support query I had made via the web site. I indicated they hadn't done a server roll back at all of course, but they kept replying with the same old canned response.
Faced with the choice of grinding mobs for XP to re-level, re-rolling or quitting, I quit.
Bizzard, like SOE, employ some (not all, I'm sure) very poor quality support staff and GM's, that act seemingly randomly (enforcing rules on a whim, merrily ignoring some blatant abuse - even if it's reported multiple times by different players) and abuse customers in a way that, if they behaved like that in any other industry they'd be fined by watchdogs and/or have legal action taken against them by consumers and consumer groups.
Some of the customers are rude, abusive punk kids I'm sure (and I have very little sympathy for them should they get kicked off - which sadly they rarely seem to) but if you treat customers like scum by default, they will abandon you for the competition the first chance they get.
You'd think, given what we've seen happen to SOE, Blizzard would have noticed that (and how much gamers distrust and dislike SOE - the antics of some of the support staff there are legendary, with repeated tales of abuse by GM's and players calling for them to be sacked following repeated abuse).
You'd think, at the very least, they could employ support staff who can actually read and write English.
Of course the network performance (particularly for some of the servers, the ones in a separate data server in Paris) really, really sucks here in Europe - after ~6 months away I just rejoined so I could play with people I knew recently as that's what every one is playing and it's poor for everyone on our server (to the extent you just can't play sometimes - not helped by the fact that if it goes south on Friday afternoon, you're screwed till Monday morning). That's assuming you can log in (not due to server queues - due to the unreliable login system we seem to have).
I'm sure if the Penny Arcade or GU guys had a problem like this on the US servers there would be a huge stink about it, but the media don't cover it and we don't really have any gaming community representatives of our own to draw attention to it.
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If you are a history channel or comedy channel fanatic, cable is worth it. But a lot of people end up getting cable just to get decent reception of network programming.
/.'ers you spend more time on the computer, or if through some bizzare fluke of nature you actually have a family, and so watch about 75% less TV than the national average, then DVD's could well be more cost effective and more convenient. It's scary how much TV most people watch though (and that's without a PVR...).
I don't know anyone who would get cable for things like the history or comedy channels, which are usually included even in the most basic channel packages as filler. I don't think you understand why people actually get cable. 'Better reception' is not even statistically close to what people put down as their primary reason. The reason people get cable is for the programming on channels like HBO, FX, SKY, STAR and misc. movie and music channels.
And a lot of the good cable stuff shows up on DVD pretty quickly, anyway.
Sure, at 30-40 USD for a single series of a given show (that they may never have seen a single episode of), that tends to put people off though.
To compare costs:
Let's say you have a somewhat generous cable package, at 40 USD a month (so you can include HBO and a few extra packages), that's going to cost you 480 USD a year. That may seem like a lot, right?
Your average American says they watch about 4 hours a day, the same as most western Europeans. That's an average that includes people who don't have any cable or satellite TV at all (and those who don't own a TV, or who almost never watch it). Obviously amoung people who care enough to get cable, it's going to be higher than average.
Most people who have something like HBO/FX/SKY tend to watch them primarily, but just assuming even only some of that is cable and only half of that is stuff they'd actually care to watch (the rest being adverts or 'junk' they are only watching 'because it's on'), that's still 2 hours a day, or 730 hours of TV a year worth of decent TV. Two, maybe three, decent shows a night is probably about an accurate figure for that I'd say (less on some weekdays maybe, but then more at weekends or on specific nights).
Given a show run length of 45 minutes (even though in reality most have episodes of only 30 minutes) and a standard 24 episodes per season at the average cost of 30-40 USD per season box set, your looking at 1400 USD or more in series DVD's a year for a similar amount of programmin (and that's being reasonably generous to the DVD model).
Of course if you watch an hour or less of TV a day, because like most
I totally agree with you that broadcast television is ultimately doomed. On demand is the future. The question is how will we get on demand. Will it be streamed? Or will we download it and view it at our convenience.
Actually broadcast is not doomed, not for at least the next 20 years or so while people adjust to having more 'on demand' content and while bandwith at the local loop level is still an issue. Think of trying to stream different - non multicasted - HD quality streams to millions of households at the same time or even just a few thousand at a single exchange point - ouch, that's some serious bandwith (and at 1-1 contention as users won't put up with anything less for TV). Sure you can store copes of the movies at the local POP to reduce load on the core network, but even then your still going to get quite a few users pulling down unique content you don't have cached.
The answer to your question is a mixture of both.
People will love being able to not be tied so closely to TV schedules just to see shows they like (and just stream them when they get home), but they will also want to be able to just sit back and relax and be entertained when they turn on the TV - and of course still be able to catch their favourite shows as soon as they air (and so still providing a valuable revenue stream to the media companies - and a great way to promote new shows, as they do now). Certainly rolling specialist channels - such as news, music, cartoon, comedy, history (etc.) - are likely to remain popular, and if they exist it's likely that premier channels that exist today will also remain - though lesser channels may well disappear, unless they find that operating costs drop sufficently to allow them to stay viable.
A lot of content (for popular shows, movies) is likley to be preloaded locally on your PVR - providers like Sky (prop. J. Murdoch) already reserve a large portion of HD space on their Sky+ TiVo-esque Satellite units in order to allow 'instant on' activation of pay-per-view movies. They have also been publically discussing their plans to cache and save hit shows automatically, not unlike TiVo suggestions. Their HD units (which are demoing now, and are expected to start shipping Q1/Q2 next year) have Ethernet ports too, and there are no prizes for guessing why that might be (and in fact, the High Definition capable X-Box 360 is already download movies and games, including HD movies, and can do on demand delivery and billing via your X-Box Live account).
I've seen to cleverly use the same client/server architecture whether you are playing a single player or multiplayer game.
That's what you get for not being a mac user.
I know at least my Kiss Player, Digitial TV unit and DVD player all crash if they overheat (that is, if you try stacking them, blocking the vents - even simply by putting a DVD case on the top of the unit - or just let the ambiant temperature get too hot). They are not designed to be stacked, and it's explicitly inadvisable to stack them (as this obstructs the vents, causing them to fail).
Oh, and I've never noticed a generic handle to take name brand blades. Being that I have bought maybe 1/2 a dozen handles in my life, and I go through a blade about once a week, I would guess anyone could figure out where the money is in that.
Actually I've seen lots of generic handles that take blades from multiple vendors. I find them handy as I've got 5 handles in my bathroom (a mix of Gillette and Wilkinson Sword and a generic one) and I still have problems locating compatible blades - so I almost always end up getting a bag of whatever disposable ones are in easy reach (unless they look really nasty like they might slice a chunk of my neck off, then I'll just look for pack of BIC's).
To avoid frustration, I usually buy a razor and a bunch of compatible blade packs at the same time, and just throw the razor away at if it's turns out to be one I've already got (or if I never end up seeing blades for it again because it's been 'discontinued' in favour of a newer design).
I expect that the idea that they lose money on the razor is now an urban legend (though it may have been true at one time). Personally I don't think I've never looked at the price of a razor (I assume it's about 5-10 UKP given the materials?), I've never assumed it would be expensive so I've just chucked it in the trolley/basket without a second thought.
I wouldn't care if one was 15 UKP rather than 5 UKP, maybe most other people do, but if not then it seems a bit pointless for them to compete really aggressively on price. I would have though that for them to deliberately sell them at a loss would actually be illegal in quite a few places, due to such behaviour being deemed as anti-competative.
Cell phones are marketed as though they are sold at a loss. It costs you some money up front and a 12 month or more contract AND a cancelation fee if you break the contract that is probably the real cost of the phone. I don't pay for my cell service, but I bought my phone. The phone was $140. Most people I know pay at least $50 a month for cell service.
Perhaps things are different in the US but I'm not aware of any phone that's marketed as though it's sold at a loss per se, just that you can them at a discount (or for free) if you agree to buy a service of a given value from a given provider, and the connection between the two is made very clear (with service A is say 100 UKP, with service B the phone is say 50 UKP and with service C the phone might be free).
I think your right in that people prefer not to see the actual cost of the phone (even if that means paying for it via higher monthly subsciption fees). I can understand people doing that with really expensive phones because they want to spread the cost, but people seem to prefer that approach even when buying basic low end phones I'm sure they could easily afford to buy up front (and so they spend 100-200 USD, or more each year than they actually need to for a given level of service).
I expect that to change and for pricing plans to keep falling as the market matures though (and people start to care more about their monthly subsciption costs, rather than just about getting a phone in the first place). This will probably happen a lot later in the US than in Europe due to differing market penetration rates (with that in mind I'm curious to know how the market is in Asia with regard to pricing though I expect, as with their broadband fix line service provision, it's much lower than on this side of the world).
I think Pay As You Go is typically a far better option for most people at the moment (except really heavy users - or people who want specialist services not avalible on PAYG such as GPRS/3G), even given the much higher per-minute rates for calls I expect most people's monthly outgoing for their mobile service would go down from 30-50 UKP to about 5-15 UKP, if they only bought a phone up front (and bear in mind most people go for pretty modest phones) they could save loads.
Actually there is completely no point whatsoever in setting up MySQL as multiuser in a simple web hosting environment. You may as well just tell everyone to use "root" and no password.
Yes, you think that's insecure, but the truth of the matter is that giving individual users their own MySQL username and password does not make it any less insecure. I am of the opinion that it's better not to lull people into a false sense of security: if they can see how sharp the blade is, they will be more careful when using a powerful tool.
That's a really bad idea IMO.
Fact: it's trivial for any user with an account on a box to read any other user's files, even in their cgi-bin, since they must necessarily all be visible to the Apache daemon user {www-data on Debian systems}.
That's not a fact, but it is the sign the server hasn't been configured very well.
The only way around this is for every user to run their own instance of the Apache server as themself, on a different non-privileged port; and to have a transparent proxy on port 80 that redirects requests to the appropriate port based on the host name.
Shared web hosting platforms should really be using some implementation of per-customer compartmentalisation at the OS level if the users are allowed SSH access, or to run CGI's. Solaris 10 supports this natively, there are at least two separate native implementations of something very similar for Linux, Windows 2003 even supports this to some degree I gather (though not to quite the same extent) and then there are tools like VMWare.
Of course, running your MySQL server on an entirely separate hardware from your web server is also a Good Thing(TM), especially when someone manages to (most likely inadvertently) DoS your SQL server.
However, failing that, any web server used by multiple customers to run CGI's should at the very least be configured to use something like suexec, which has been a standard feature of Apache for about 8 years or so.
Using suexec (or gsexec, or cgwrap, or similar tool as appropriate for whatever web server your using) is precisely intended to prevent CGI's running as one user from accessing or modifying files (including other CGI's) that belong to another user.
I wouldn't work for any company that tried to tell me what "coding style" to use.
Yeah! Bollocks to co-operation! What would anyone else know about how to code properly anyway?
If they aren't man enough to deal with what ever random crack fuelled code you dream up, they are wimps right?
I'm a retired programmer with 35+ years of experience BTW.
My word, 35 years and you've never worked on a well run large collaborative project, or been able to adapt your own style?
You know, I really wouldn't brag about that.
That might be due to not using the proper installer ;-D
Ah, yes. Indeed. *ahem*
Yes, but in order for all that to happen, they pretty much have to already know something about the darknet or a member of it, or figure out how to differentiate "darknet traffic" from normal network traffic.
;-)
You know we know how to pickout this sort of draffic already, in an entirely automated fashion, right?
If a darknet wants to hide itself further, they can use can use software that will encrypt data, talk on standard ports, even utilize stenography. Then it's going to be nearly impossible to spot darknet traffic without some sort of detailed and expensive analysis.
As I've already mentioned, it's really not all that difficult. All you have to do is have the system note the source and destination and the type of traffic - what port(s) it's on and what type of data is actually being transmitted (and in the case of encrypted data what sort of traffic does it appear to be - e.g. VoIP, HTTPS, etc.). The existance of tools like netflow are what help make this straightforward.
The reason it's fundamentally easy to spot is there is a limit to amount of traffic in, and the length of, any legitimate VoIP/HTTPS/SSH/etc. session (not least to a single destination - especially when it's destined for somewhere that is labelled as being a DSL, cable user or college dorm netblock).
If the data is there, it's always going to be mineable, and there are actually quite a few tools (both hardware and software) designed specifically to help you get at it, primarily to aid network engineering and to allow for Usage Based Billing. Stopping users trying to get away with hogging all the bandwith by stuffing networks full of P2P junk traffic is a big driver for UBB.
Though personally I don't think there is any real hope for UBB, the technology involved is useful for doing for traffic engineering, because once you have the data required for it you can start to identify and manage traffic much more effectively, and ensure that excessively high volume users get special treatment and that the system automatically limits any negative impact they would otherwise have on other users who have to contend with them.
Also, bear in mind that as universities are the hold outs of free speech you must make the good or bad decision based on knowledge of or about the user without EVER getting to see the data payload on the packet. Still sound simple? Your method in our environment would take our small security team and turn it into abattalion.
Entirely coincidentally I've actually had to as it happens (that is, doing weird, secret things to high volumes of unobservable traffic, and without knowing the source or type of traffic and without making it obvious) and am in the middle of finishing a requested paper on it, and I think the task pretty straightforward when approached with due consideration. There are actually a whole number of different approaches you can take to monitor traffic by type (independant of what port it's on), and it's possible using both commercial purpose built hardware and software, and using commodity hardware and more flexible FOSS.
'Simple' very much depands on the current network, the staff avalible, their workload and the budget you have to work with. This solution is the sort of thing one or two people can impliment though (two is nice, as then you can have a really good developer and a really good network engineer and have them work together), and it can be easily looked after by one person (not even full time) - even for many thousands of users.
That said it really ought to be simple to spot bad traffic off the bat, as I'd hope that traffic from the likes of dorms and public terminals would be entirely seperate from traffic from departments and sanctioned projects (that is, seperately switched, and with different QoS levels) and that they'd all have their own usage reports & graphs and they'd all have stated requirements for expected usage for the year.
Taking whatever measures you deem fit on systems in facilties used by doms and public terminals (and to a lesser extent in labs) to ensure a generally high level of service should be a no brainer - just as existing ISP's do they ought to be treated as 'low rent' consumers and their service is going to have to be contended and so subject to certain limitations.
All that you have to do then is meet the needs of the formal projects, which really ought to be easy with their agreed SLA's (with max burst limits, bandwith allowances, levels of resiliance, etc.) agreed and previsioned for in advance.
Anyone with 'special needs' or who is unhappy with the level of service in the labs or doms should just make a case as they would with a project. If they demand that all students and public terminals should have unrestricted access (because it's a 'Right!') and as a result someone senior comes to your department and says 'Make it so!' all you have to do is crunch the numbers and say "Sure we can, but to do that, would cost us N $ to ensure we have sufficent capacity and infrastructure in place." and allow those in charge of the budget decide how much they want to spend, dependant upon the contention ratios and service level they want to be able to offer.
Try monitoring a campus network where you have several thousand users and an obscenely large amount of bandwidth. Oh, and you have live research data being generated on campus and moved to places like the NCSA etc... Bandwidth consumption may vary by tens of megabytes by the minute. So I ask you, in that situation (which I work in) what is an "increase in bandwidth" a sign of?
;)
Effective monitoring is actually quite achievable with freely avalible software.
On a properly managed network you should be able to tell exactly who is using how much traffic and what type of traffic (and where it's coming in and out from) and to spot suspicious changes in usuage patterns, with historical data avalible in a format appropriate for a quick visual comparison. All of this should be fed in to your monitoring platform with alerts raised once set thresholds are reached.
In practice though, it's usually not cost effective to actually clamp down on misuse of bandwith and it's more prudent to let it slide (and/or go for the low hanging fruit if spot anyone taking the mickey) and just pickup the tab afterwords.
(Disclaimer: The next part of this post drifts away from this specific thread
I'm not sure why so many people imagine monitoring traffic by source and type is difficult and that they can't be spotted and rate limited on a per user basis, in an entirely automated fashion.
Using tools like jflow and cflowd (and various other commerical purpose built tools) to do detailed traffic profiling, and to a limited extent shaping, is something a few carriers and large providers do already. Even if your provider doesn't do this, there is a really good chance their transit providers do it.
At the moment, the majority of providers mark P2P traffic as the lowest priority for QoS purposes as it is, because (a) it's so all consuming and disproportionately resource intensive (compared to far more common tasks like legitimate HTTP traffic and FTP data transfer) and (b) it's hard to complain about slow transfer speeds of what is almost certainly Warez between you and an anonymous DSL/Cable subscriber in another state/country. This is partly why P2P transfer rates can be very crummy (the other major reason being of course the limited upstreams of most users).
Once you have profiling data for a given port or IP on your network, all you need to do is send a trigger to the switch/router/DSLAM/etc. to either trottle the traffic for that port on the TCP/UDP ports required (as the hardware permits - ideally on a per-TCP/UPD-port basis), or - if your feeling adventurous (or your hardware is crummy) - dynamically re-route traffic for that destination seperately, though a series of systems that are capeable of enforcing very fine grained QoS controls (on appropriate hardware, the 2.6 kernel with iptables and some appropriate modules is actually capeable of impressive work in this area).
If users start tunneling large amounts of traffic down other ports (and disguising it as as regular HTTP, SSH, HTTPS, etc. traffic) then it's going to be really obvious to spot using automated software, and those those users will find that providers will just impliment systems to nobble that specific type of traffic on their connection while they persist in doing that, and if they want unnobbled connection, they'll have to pay a real premium to compensate. It's also entirely possible providers will start enforcing QoS based on destination too, so that transfers to systems that are common P2P traffic destinations are effectively crippled (and traffic to network ranges used by Cable/DSL/College dorms/etc. could even be rated by default).
If any users imagine they can 'sneak around' by tunneling P2P traffic and making it look like encrypted VoIP traffic (and warzing to their hearts content at the expense of the rest of legitimate users) they are in for a big shock. They are going to find that suddently their VoIP traffic starts having specific (weekly/monthly) transfer limi
Yeah, RE: protecting the image/border I think in order for this to be effective they'd need to hack Quartz to perhaps make it impossible for any application to capture the screen - or that part of the screen - while the dialog was up (that is to say - any application that isn't already running as root or as the 'windowserver' user).
:-).
The approach of a dashboard-esq subtle fading out of the desktop, with a custom (animated) dialog approach (though nothing too OTT) could be really effective. Certainly focusing on a custom bordered and high impact dialog and dimming the rest of the screen (perhaps jus when dialog is at the top, an in such a way the user could still select other windows behind it) would really get people to pay attention to the dialog (and could be an easy to impliment and useful feature on it's own).
If desired, it would be possible to make this a user setting in the Preferences... Security pane, with a default of Muppet Alert Mode (complete with screen diming and big flaming window borders) but also with the option of the more subtle existing style of alert if the previous method is too intrusive for 'Power Users'.
In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't possible to do this as a hack (albeit one that would itself require root privilages to install and would take over your password management to some extent, so not necessarily a hack you'd want to trust
iTunes patches seem to bring up the permission box every time :P
;-)
Yeah, Mail and Safari patches do the same, I assume it keeps track of the Applications filename / it's location / MD5 of the binary / etc. which is why it requires confirmation the first time you run the new version of the application (so that someone - or some software - can't switch the legitimate application with a trojan copy).
Good Thing(TM), even if the iTunes patches are a little too frequent.
Sorry if I'm wrong about Windows Media Player having an installer, it seems from the microsoft.com site it's not the same drag and drop install model I know Real Player follows.
.app in a .sit/.zip file myself. I tend to bundle up a lot of apps like Real, WMV, VLC, GIMP, etc. and keep them on a WebDav share for easy access,and for sharing with new mac owning friends and coworkers to get them started (and I don't usually have the origional .sit/disk image/installer so compress them myself) - that or I'm using a really old crummy initial release or a version from some coverdisk.
I have a few Macs (two at home, one at work, and a PowerBook) so it's very possible I just put the
I've seen a lot of switchers/new adopters in the last year, which is why I started doing that (not least because if I make sure they have everything they need to start with, they bother me less).
I agree the player is horribly broken to the point of being unusable. The framerate is dire and it doesn't support quite a few WMV files that play fine on Windows systems, and IIRC the browser plug-in doesn't work at all.
IME, installers like this are really in the minority though (although I'm aware that some really commonly used software like Adobe packages behave like that - I think because they install shared frameworks).
Still, that'll never solve the problem of the user getting used to it.
Very true, I agree.
That's why I think it's very important for any sort of warning message to be very rare in occurance (as well as being accurately descriptive, but short and to the point).
Where there is a chance that the user might get used to that specific message (such as in the instance of an email attachment warning as you describe) that the application in question (Mail) should have a specific and unique looking appropriately alarmist dialog, so that it doesn't dilute the significance of other alerts, such as those triggered by applications trying to escallate their privilages.
For an ordinary user, the Mac ALWAYS asks for an admin password in order to make any change to the Applications folder.
/Library/, rather than in the users own ~/Library/ (though things like plugins, screen savers, etc., can go in either). Obviously this only effects the current user (which is kind of the point), but there is of course the 'Shared' folder on the HD which exists out of the box to allow unprivilaged users to share items convienently if they want to.
This somewhat misses the point that if your dragging an Application into the "Applications" folder and your asked for a password, it's absolutely clear why the system (note: not the application) is asking you for a password. A kernel driver or global startup item can't somehow magically install itself when your only dragging a folder.
As already pointed out, having admin privilages on your account in Mac OS X is absolutely not in anyway 'dumb', anymore than being in the wheel group is on a BSD system - in fact, it's exactly the same, only the group happens to be named 'admin' not 'wheel' (see NetInfo Manager application or nituils documentation for details).
Having an 'admin' account in Mac OS X is not like having an 'Admin' account on a Windows sytem, or running as root on Linux.
A regular user can still install some, but not all programs in their own user space. However such installs will only affect that user and not the system or other users.
All programs can exist (and can be run from) in user space. Only drivers and frameworks (which are rare) must be in the admin-only accessible
It isn't a problem if the people coming over are prepared to assimilate into that culture, speak a common language, share basic cultural values. But when you get large numbers that do not share those values, will not assimilate, will not speak a common language - you end up effectively with two disparate peoples trying to share a single state. If it goes on long enough, you usually see two state solutions offered, and its rarely a peaceful transition to that point.
No, that's not how you end up at all - that's just how things start out.
Once people live side by side for long enough the groups intermingle sufficently and the groups become unified until they are a singular people.
The only significant hurdle to integration appears to be, and I mention it only because it's strictly relevent, large organised religions (Pagan religions tending either to be assimilated or to fade out). Fortunately, it's also true that the process of intergration can eased by careful government management of the populace (and indeed can benifit from co-operation from promient religious leaders).
Governments allowing taxpayer subsidized immigrant ghettos to form unforunately has not helped, and is ultimately counter productive (as has been shown through riots in France and to a lesser extent Britain), serving only to breed division and resentment on both sides.
This is Off Topic and History 101 but take a look at 13th Century Europe and compare it with a map of modern Europe and count the number of different countries in each (as a starter you'll note that mainland Britian alone was still 3 entirely seperate countries).
Europe has certainly had it's ups and downs, with large empires, such as the Roman, German, Austrian and Russian consolidating large regions - predominantly by force (which occationaly, if rarely, works as a long term solution) - for a limited period of time.
Never the less, the overall trend has clearly towards unity and consolidation. This can been seen not just through topology, but also by looking at the culture and the langue of the people in those regions. This is - and must be, if it is to be successful - a gradual process, as can be seen by the general level of enthusiasim of Europeans for unity in Europe, but in the equal desire of most of the inhabitants not to move things along too fast. As slow a process as it is (taking many generations, thus being inperceptible to each of us individually) further integreation is inevitable across the globe as a whole.
Obviously this isn't a phenomenon unique to Europe, as well as happening in Asia (most spectacularly in China) it applies also to what is now known as the United States Of America.
That's the problem. Clueless mac user is probably expecting to be installing software about then. The CD told them they need a player to see the dancing pigs, for example.
You don't need to authenticate to install applications on Mac OS X. Installing applications - like Microsoft Office - involves just dragging the application (or the folder it's in) from the CD into the Applications folder on your hard disk. Even things like Real One Player and Windows Media Player work this way.
When you do actually get a dialog, Mac OS X also tells you what permissions are being requested on the password dialog (e.g. full admin access, or just permission to modify a specific system setting, etc) as well as which application is requesting the permission. In reality, most of the time people see a dialog in Mac OS X which requires authentication, it's because of an interaction with the OS itself (such as changing a system setting) that the user has just performed.
If a users sees an Application (including plugins) requesting this sort of permission that should really ring alarm bells. Only things like new drivers (e.g. for that new camera you just bought) should be asking for things like that.
It's fair to say here is room for some improvement in the dialog in that it should better reflect this (perhaps rasing a more severe looking alert when it's anything other than the OS or bundled Application requesting any sort of privileged access, which explains something along the lines of the previous sentence).
On the subject, it could do with some means of forgery protection (things like an embedded image in the window have been suggested) so that you can better trust it's an authentic authentication dialog. If your paranoid.
Technically Windows allows for roughly this sort of behaviour too (that is, you should never need admin permissions to install a regular application) but the large number of badly written installers - combined with the lack of a K.I.S.S. approach in the OS - seem to have conspired to make admin level access madatory for even the most mundane tasks.
I bet if vendors (and I include both Apple and Microsoft in that) implimented privilage dialogs that were scary and intimidating enough to users (perhaps with a default action of 'deny') 3rd party application developers wouldn't ask for them unless they really needed those permissions.
Come on, I have a few gamer friends with nice racks.
Tell me about it, man I really need to cut down on the cakes.
What I want an answer to is why there are ~1000 hits for a1d0c6e83f027327d8461063f4ac58a6 on Google...
What on earth are these people talking about? Good gried, "GET OUT THE MIDDLE EAST, WEST!" sounds _very_ political to me! "STOP MESSING IN OUR AFFAIRS", sounds political to me!
That's not what the people carrying out the bombings are actually saying though - they are not just saying 'we want you out of the middle east' they are saying 'we hate you, and we are going to kill you all' - they are extremists, they want to wipe out everyone who does not follow their doctrine, and that includes other Muslims.
Take this statement from the group apparently responsible for the bombing in Jordan this week:
"Let the tyrant of Jordan know that the protection walls for the Jews and the camp for the Crusader army are now in the range of fire of our holy warriors"
The retoric used in this recent statement, and others like it, makes it clear these groups are driven by religious conviction and they are not trying to achieve a singular political goal.
They want to establish Islamic states, much like Iran (though less 'liberal' that it was allowed to become under the previous administration - something they are working hard to undo) in the middle east and in the rest of the world. Unlike moderate Muslims - and like extremists of other religions - they don't want to live side by side (in any sense of the term) with others such as Christians and Jews. They even dislike other branches of the same religion enough to murder them en mass too.
There goals can only be described as 'political' in the sense they want to establish Islamic government and have states run under Sharia law (that is, law based on the strict teachings of the Koran), but clearly the driver for this is religious conviction.
While both groups are'terrorists (having kidnapped, tortured and murdered innocent civilians) there is a disctinction between the terrorists reponsible for the bombings in Iraq, New York, Spain, London and Jordan (etc) and groups that are politically (rather than purely religiously) motivated such as Hezbollah (incidentally, they are the ones shouting "GET OUT THE MIDDLE EAST, WEST!" and "STOP MESSING IN OUR AFFAIRS").
The poster should definitely go with QuickTime Broadcaster IMO, and encode the movies with QuickTime Pro (for the ~30 USD it will cost). It's far better quality (by a long way) and it's a more efficient in delivering good quality video (so streams are ultimately more reliable for end users).
.MOV) which, as a standard that has wide industry support, doesn't require the QuickTime Player and will merrily play in whatever suitable software the user has available - including Windows Media Player.
.WMV format is if you want to distribute DRM'd video.
With QuickTime Pro, you can even encode files for streaming that will work well on a regular web server, by pre-encoding them in a number of different sizes/quality, all hinted appropriately is ideal. QuickTime Broadcaster is great for encoding on the fly though - and it won't cost you anything (though requires a Mac).
However, I'd strongly suggest encoding in straight MPEG4 (rather than as a
I can understand why someone might want to encode in way that requires the QuickTime Player if they were are trying to improve the quality and efficiency of the stream, but really the only sensible reason to use the
Indeed! The slavish devotion to Nintendo is strong here.
While 'we' hated them when they were being fined millions for uncompetative price fixing, 'we' like them now they are the underdog, and any deviation from the official party line is not tolerated. In the same vein, posters are apparently expected to remember at all times that Microsoft are inherently evil and there is no way they can make a superior console (and that even Sony are better than Microsoft).
For your amusement, you might want to check out the moderation on this post as an example of how offenders will be punished.
This is actually one reason I don't have Zonk posts appearing on my front page now, as they seem to attract this sort of lunacy from people who are apparently so afraid they might be proven wrong or their position on something undermined that they would try to stifle anything that is contrary to what they believe.
First, 10,000 xp isn't that much.Second, re-rolling makes exactly zero sense, since you would need to get MORE then the tens of thousands XP you lost to get where you where before the 'bug' happened.
I didn't just lose 10,000 XP though - I wish. That's a lot of mobs to grind, but still that would have been bearable if still very grating.
As you later acknowledged - but chose to ignore here - I lost _tens of thousands_ of XP, to the point where my character actually de-levelled (and subsequently lost skills I'd spent several gold on, presumably because after de-levelling I no longer qualified for them).
As you don't get it:
Re-rolling was an option worthy of consideration because at least doing quests is more fun - and can be considerably quicker - that purely grinding on mobs (which give comparably poorer XP in WoW) in order to rebuild my character. If I wanted to grind the same mobs for several days to level up, I'd play Lineage 2.
Third, Penny-Arcade did have a situation that involved GM's and they said it was a pleasant experience.
Not that your point is in any way relevant, but yes, I'm aware of that. I also remember how much they bitched about the system when they couldn't get on either.
The point, which you somehow missed entirely, is that if the service was as shitty in the US as it is in Europe (particularly for customers with characters on the newer servers, which are hosted separately to the rest) then you'd be hearing a lot more about it.
Forth, Unless you can get tens of thousands of experience in under 30 minutes, you character has been submitted and updated to the server. If it had not, the quest would not be marked completed.
I can confirm I didn't magically get tens of thousands of experience in under 30 minutes (oh look - you noted it was plural now) and yes I'm sure the server had indeed kept track of it.
As I pointed out to Blizzard support at the time (repeatedly), my character had more XP _5 days ago_ than it had after WoW decided to act randomly and get busy with the XP nerf bat, and they could have checked the backups.
In fact, if I really had done all the quests marked as complete in my quest log (including all the recent ones I'd done over the last few days) it would frankly have been bloody hard for me to be still only have as much XP as my character was reduced to.
Fifth, If this was possible, the exploitation community would have abused it beyond all recognition.
Sixth, character data is not really kept locally. If it was, there would be a bevy of injection exploits that would have stopped the game.
Obviously it's not just a client side fault (more like dubious transaction handling I strongly suspect), so I don't know why you'd think it would be exploitable remotely.
Sadly this comes as no surprise to me. Due to a bug I was kicked from the server (while my net connection was fine), on immediately reconnecting I found my my WoW character lost tens of thousands of XP (de levelled!), lost gold and had the quests I'd done still marked as completed (so I couldn't repeat them to get back the XP).
I very politely contacted support 4 times over next week and a bit about this issue, including contacting GM's in game and via the site, pointing to there AUP/EULA agreement which explicitly says they will try to reinstate character data, items and gold in such an event (which was clearly due to a software fault) [ unless, it states, the rollback was part of a forced server roll back, which it was not. ].
Eventually, each time the GM responded with a poorly written reply which made no sense (as if he didn't speak English particularly well and / or hadn't read my ticket at all) saying they 'Don't reinstate characters when there has been a server roll back'. Though I got no response back from interim support query I had made via the web site. I indicated they hadn't done a server roll back at all of course, but they kept replying with the same old canned response.
Faced with the choice of grinding mobs for XP to re-level, re-rolling or quitting, I quit.
Bizzard, like SOE, employ some (not all, I'm sure) very poor quality support staff and GM's, that act seemingly randomly (enforcing rules on a whim, merrily ignoring some blatant abuse - even if it's reported multiple times by different players) and abuse customers in a way that, if they behaved like that in any other industry they'd be fined by watchdogs and/or have legal action taken against them by consumers and consumer groups.
Some of the customers are rude, abusive punk kids I'm sure (and I have very little sympathy for them should they get kicked off - which sadly they rarely seem to) but if you treat customers like scum by default, they will abandon you for the competition the first chance they get.
You'd think, given what we've seen happen to SOE, Blizzard would have noticed that (and how much gamers distrust and dislike SOE - the antics of some of the support staff there are legendary, with repeated tales of abuse by GM's and players calling for them to be sacked following repeated abuse).
You'd think, at the very least, they could employ support staff who can actually read and write English.
Of course the network performance (particularly for some of the servers, the ones in a separate data server in Paris) really, really sucks here in Europe - after ~6 months away I just rejoined so I could play with people I knew recently as that's what every one is playing and it's poor for everyone on our server (to the extent you just can't play sometimes - not helped by the fact that if it goes south on Friday afternoon, you're screwed till Monday morning). That's assuming you can log in (not due to server queues - due to the unreliable login system we seem to have).
I'm sure if the Penny Arcade or GU guys had a problem like this on the US servers there would be a huge stink about it, but the media don't cover it and we don't really have any gaming community representatives of our own to draw attention to it.