In this case, the seller had a forged power of attorney and claimed to be the owner's grandson. There are millions of elderly & disabled people who do this legitimately. It can be difficult to confirm with an elderly/disabled person that the power of attorney is legitimate.
In cases like this, where the document might or might not be genuine, I guess it would be not asking too much from the bank to contact the attorney and double-check. If I was on that jury, I might judge the bank negligent. And even if they were NOT negligent (think unusually clever forgery), I'd say the risk should be on the buyer or bank rather than on the cheated homeowner. Both from a) the priciple that the criminal should not be able to create valid contracts in your name and b) the pragmatic point of view that it incites the buyer to double-check dubious offers.
German law does BTW follow this principle, and sometimes you read about an unhappy buyer who has to return the stolen car he bought from the thief. Tough luck, but overall I think it is the right decision.
EVD is similar to DVD, the main difference is that the Chinese did not want to license CSS. Thus the format is incompatible to the DVD's DRM system. And I don't think it will make a big difference in the west. Even with the license fee for CSS, DVD burners can be bought for 50 euros these days. Last time I checked, EVD players were more expensive. So EVD will not magically take over as cheap backup medium. On the content side, the movie studios can simply refuse to release on EVD. Not that it much will help to protect their films, as CSS has ben cracked long ago;-)
If the PS3 fails to ignite blu-ray sales (and HD-TV does somewhat better), other manufactures might not bother with blu-ray anymore. Because at that point, it would be obvious that blu-ray is losing the format war. Why pay license fees for a loser format??
The problem with arranging lots of hits is that you will get caught sooner or later. Unless you are the government and can squash the investigations - and I guess not even Microsoft has that kind of clout.
I think Heinlein was a libertarian first and right-wing second. So the idea that unusual sexulal relations between consenting adults are OK is not surprising from him. Besides, some libertarian ideas (like personal responsibility rather than a nanny state) are often associated with "conservative", correctly or not. That may make Heinlein look more right-wing than he really was.
While I really liked Heinlein's older novels, his more recent output failed to impress me. The depth and suspense were simply not there anymore, at least not in the degree I was used from Heinlein. Same for Tom Clancy BTW, and for similar reasons. Now Spider Robinson is at least reasonably good at storytelling, and his version may actually be better than what Heinlein might have written in his old days.
So your company paid for a Asus Nvidia 7900GTX ?? You have either a quite generous or a quite clueless boss. Business workstations usually don't require high end graphics gards, unless you do CAD.
This is complete BS. Microsoft would love nothing more than to have Windows be a modular snap-together, snap-to-upgrade, easily patched model like this. But to do it properly will require a good decade of work, and a complete redesign of Windows.
It seems they have gone the other way for political reasons. During the antitrust ligitation in the 90s, they claimed Internet Explorer was an unseparable part of Windows. Only to have this refuted by Shane Brooks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Brooks
In the next major version of Windows(2000) Internet Explorer was also used for browsing the local filesystem, and completely removing IE would indeed break the system. Conspiration theory: I strongly suspect this design decision was made to support Microsofts claims in court, so they would not suffer the same embarassment with Windows 2000. Of course, making big systems un-modular is a bad idea, and some of the current Vista troubles may be late fallout from that policy.
Congratulations, you have just created a game that no one would want to play! There are games that exist that require skill to play...they are called FPS. We are talking MMORPG...
I'm looking for a new MMORPG/FPS hybrid after I gave up on Neocron due to too many unfixed bugs (years after release). Might try Planetside... anyway, the reason is that I find Click&Wait combat boring. Since fighting is a large part of most MMORPGs, I want combat to be fun and challenging by itself. Can only be done by requiring some skill, and when you control only one avatar, the obvious way is to add some FPS-like twitch skill to the mix. A MMORTS game might also be OK, but that is off-topic here in another way;-)
Some games allow a "respec" with less work than re-leveling all the way. Examples:
-Neocron has "LOM pills" you can use to delete some skills and then re-spend the skill points. You will have to re-level a small part of the skill points, and LOMing it takes time. But it is way easier than starting a new character. -In Tabula Rasa, a backup of your character will be saved at each major fork in the skill tree. You can then replay from that point.
Only a problem if you want to use HDTV/Blueray/HD-DVD. I think Hollywood can keep its crap, especially considering the hardware costs as they are now. While my next monitor might have a resolution that is HDTV compatible, I don't see myself paying $500 for a Blueray or HD-DVD drive.
For trying Linux out, even an older computer will do. Still, you might want the following: -512 MBytes of RAM (GUIs like KDE can be just as memory-hungry as Windows XP) -a CPU at least in the 2 GHz range -Graphics depends on your priorities:
For an unproblematic Linux system, get a chip that has Open Source drivers (integrated Intel graphics, older ATI models up to 9250, don't know about older NVIDIA models offhand)
If it should double as Windows gaming PC, you want something faster. That means later NVIDIA or ATI models, which unfortunately have only closed source Linux drivers. An extra hassle that is said to be bigger with ATI- use NVIDIA.
Actually the next round might be in about 6 months: It is widely assumed that AMD will release its 65 nm parts early next year. That should trigger the next round of price cuts. In the meantime, I expect no major changes. The only reason for waiting another 1-2 months now is if you want a Core 2 Duo board with the next chipset stepping (the current one has a few bugs).
Computer chips, especially the Cell and the PS3 graphics chip that have little to none use outside the PS3 (I know there are a few Cell servers, but the numbers are really low compared to the PS3 needs). AFAIK the manufacturing process of advanced chips takes several weeks if not months. And for the chips that are specific to the PS3, you cannot just buy them elsewhere. So if production of these is not running yet, there may be a problem with getting the PS3 launced this year.
It really sounds to me like they want outside verification, and are willing to pay for it themselves. Shouldn't we let that take place before we fry them in oil?
Yes, it looks like either -a honest attempt at getting their stuff verified -or an outright fake
Considering the stage of development they claim I think there can be no honest mistake like "oops, we accidentylly dropped a zero in our formulas". So I think this one deserves checking out, but if it is a fake I'm for frying the Steorn guys in oil;-)
My sister picked up an old, redundant HP Laserjet at the office. Cost: 0 Euros. Technically it is a bit obsolete, but it is a well known model that should be supported by Windows out of the box. For Linux, I have not checked in this case but older hardware tends to have better support under Linux because the community had time to play with it and write drivers.
If Sony are not making plasma screens anymore, I'm hardly surprised that they are dissing them now. They might simply rely on the short memory of the public, justified or not. I remember similar statements (albeit less clumsily) by Microsoft, regarding their old operating systems they don't sell anymore. When those were new, they were of course described as the best - but now MS starts dropping hints that they might not be quite as secure and an upgrade might be a good idea.
For audio listening experiments with digitizing a signal by the CD norm and converting it back to analog showed that the testers could not hear the difference (Experiment performed the german HiFi magazine Stereoplay). So any remaining weaknesses are not due to the system, but to imperfect implementation. Which a SACD player can equally suffer from. 7.1 may still have its justification for home cinema because of the directional sound, but increasing the sampling rate on stereo is irrelevant. A definite case of twilight zone.
On video the difference from DVD to HDTV is still significant, but the tougher copy protection combined with higher prices is going to slow adaption.
Back to the topic of the thread: A lot of Vista's features have been removed over the years. What remains is some eyecandy and DX10. Both may convince some people to switch, but I don't expect a big wave of upgrades. Instead, I think Vista will slowly creep into households via the sale of new PCs.
Another reason why these tricks don't really scale to more than 2 sockets is that the two Intel CPUs still have to share one memory controller (dual channel of course but still a handicap), while AMD gains a memory controller for each socket. So for applications that need plenty of memory bandwidth, Intel still has a bottleneck in the larger servers. The 4MB cache cannot hide that completely. I suspect that AMD will start to feel the pinch too when they go to 4-core CPUs. For Intel, I guess that two sockets with four cores each will be too much for one memory controller. At that point, Intel might need to adopt HyperTransport.
First, pick the list that matches the desired job skills closest. I suspect you want some people who can operate that 1000+ machine environment, so http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-admin might be the place to go.
Second, make it clear what your post is about, so people who are NOT looking for a job can simply ignore it. Use a topic like "Job Offer: Startup looking for Linux admins".
Actually, Microsoft had the freedom to make a separate contract that would have barred the dealer from un-bundling the OEM software. The court explicitly stressed that point.
But under German law, this requires a contract that is signed before the sale, or at least "standard business conditions" that are clearly visible to the customer before buying. An EULA that is only visible when installing the software does not cut it, as it fails the standard of "visible before buying". Most EULAS for off-the-shelf software are of that type and thus unenforcable. I have never seen one that was printed out on the box, which might make it enforcable.
Another complication is if the software goes through several hands. Even if the EULA is binding for the original buyer, it is doubtful if it can be enforced against the new owner, since he was not party to the original contract. In our example, the original buyer might be the wholesaler and the new owner might be some small software shop that likes to unbundle OEM software. At that point, it becomes quite difficult for the software manufacturer to ensure all dealers are under a contract not to ignore the EULA. I guess Microsoft did not want to deal with that and simply gave up.
I would mod your post up, but since it is already at +5, I'll confirm it instead:
There have been cases among my acquaintances and relatives where the insurance companies refused to pay with the most threadbare excuses. My conclusion is to have only the most essential insurance and to be ready to sue the insurance company if necessary.
A few years ago, a dealer in germany did exactly that - sold OEM copies of Windows separately from hardware. Microsoft sued him and the lawsuit went all the way to the Bundesgerichtshof (Germany's highest court for non-constitutional issues). In that court, Microsoft lost. The court found that the EULA was not binding, and Microsoft did not have a separate contract with that dealer that explicitly barred him from selling the OEM versions without hardware (that way, they could have made their OEM rules binding even in Germany).
Since that time, Microsoft has given up selling "OEM" software in Germany. What you can buy instead are "System Builder" versions. Those come without documentation and support, but Microsoft does not try to legally bind them to a certain hardware.
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In this case, the notar claimed to know the seller. Makes you wonder if he was an accomplice rather than just a bit careless.
In this case, the seller had a forged power of attorney and claimed to be the owner's grandson. There are millions of elderly & disabled people who do this legitimately. It can be difficult to confirm with an elderly/disabled person that the power of attorney is legitimate.
In cases like this, where the document might or might not be genuine, I guess it would be not asking too much from the bank to contact the attorney and double-check. If I was on that jury, I might judge the bank negligent.
And even if they were NOT negligent (think unusually clever forgery), I'd say the risk should be on the buyer or bank rather than on the cheated homeowner. Both from
a) the priciple that the criminal should not be able to create valid contracts in your name and
b) the pragmatic point of view that it incites the buyer to double-check dubious offers.
German law does BTW follow this principle, and sometimes you read about an unhappy buyer who has to return the stolen car he bought from the thief. Tough luck, but overall I think it is the right decision.
EVD is similar to DVD, the main difference is that the Chinese did not want to license CSS. Thus the format is incompatible to the DVD's DRM system. ;-)
And I don't think it will make a big difference in the west. Even with the license fee for CSS, DVD burners can be bought for 50 euros these days. Last time I checked, EVD players were more expensive. So EVD will not magically take over as cheap backup medium.
On the content side, the movie studios can simply refuse to release on EVD. Not that it much will help to protect their films, as CSS has ben cracked long ago
If the PS3 fails to ignite blu-ray sales (and HD-TV does somewhat better), other manufactures might not bother with blu-ray anymore. Because at that point, it would be obvious that blu-ray is losing the format war. Why pay license fees for a loser format??
The problem with arranging lots of hits is that you will get caught sooner or later.
Unless you are the government and can squash the investigations - and I guess not even Microsoft has that kind of clout.
Since I am not hearing complaints about the PS2 dying en masse (yes I live in Germany), I guess most of those are actually new customers.
I think Heinlein was a libertarian first and right-wing second. So the idea that unusual sexulal relations between consenting adults are OK is not surprising from him.
Besides, some libertarian ideas (like personal responsibility rather than a nanny state) are often associated with "conservative", correctly or not. That may make Heinlein look more right-wing than he really was.
While I really liked Heinlein's older novels, his more recent output failed to impress me. The depth and suspense were simply not there anymore, at least not in the degree I was used from Heinlein.
Same for Tom Clancy BTW, and for similar reasons.
Now Spider Robinson is at least reasonably good at storytelling, and his version may actually be better than what Heinlein might have written in his old days.
So your company paid for a Asus Nvidia 7900GTX ??
You have either a quite generous or a quite clueless boss. Business workstations usually don't require high end graphics gards, unless you do CAD.
This is complete BS. Microsoft would love nothing more than to have Windows be a modular snap-together, snap-to-upgrade, easily patched model like this. But to do it properly will require a good decade of work, and a complete redesign of Windows.
It seems they have gone the other way for political reasons. During the antitrust ligitation in the 90s, they claimed Internet Explorer was an unseparable part of Windows. Only to have this refuted by Shane Brooks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Brooks
In the next major version of Windows(2000) Internet Explorer was also used for browsing the local filesystem, and completely removing IE would indeed break the system. Conspiration theory:
I strongly suspect this design decision was made to support Microsofts claims in court, so they would not suffer the same embarassment with Windows 2000. Of course, making big systems un-modular is a bad idea, and some of the current Vista troubles may be late fallout from that policy.
Congratulations, you have just created a game that no one would want to play! There are games that exist that require skill to play...they are called FPS. We are talking MMORPG...
;-)
I'm looking for a new MMORPG/FPS hybrid after I gave up on Neocron due to too many unfixed bugs (years after release). Might try Planetside...
anyway, the reason is that I find Click&Wait combat boring. Since fighting is a large part of most MMORPGs, I want combat to be fun and challenging by itself. Can only be done by requiring some skill, and when you control only one avatar, the obvious way is to add some FPS-like twitch skill to the mix.
A MMORTS game might also be OK, but that is off-topic here in another way
Some games allow a "respec" with less work than re-leveling all the way. Examples:
-Neocron has "LOM pills" you can use to delete some skills and then re-spend the skill points. You will have to re-level a small part of the skill points, and LOMing it takes time. But it is way easier than starting a new character.
-In Tabula Rasa, a backup of your character will be saved at each major fork in the skill tree. You can then replay from that point.
I think this solves much of the problem.
Only a problem if you want to use HDTV/Blueray/HD-DVD.
I think Hollywood can keep its crap, especially considering the hardware costs as they are now. While my next monitor might have a resolution that is HDTV compatible, I don't see myself paying $500 for a Blueray or HD-DVD drive.
For trying Linux out, even an older computer will do.
Still, you might want the following:
-512 MBytes of RAM (GUIs like KDE can be just as memory-hungry as Windows XP)
-a CPU at least in the 2 GHz range
-Graphics depends on your priorities:
For an unproblematic Linux system, get a chip that has Open Source drivers (integrated Intel graphics, older ATI models up to 9250, don't know about older NVIDIA models offhand)
If it should double as Windows gaming PC, you want something faster. That means later NVIDIA or ATI models, which unfortunately have only closed source Linux drivers. An extra hassle that is said to be bigger with ATI- use NVIDIA.
Actually the next round might be in about 6 months:
It is widely assumed that AMD will release its 65 nm parts early next year. That should trigger the next round of price cuts. In the meantime, I expect no major changes. The only reason for waiting another 1-2 months now is if you want a Core 2 Duo board with the next chipset stepping (the current one has a few bugs).
Computer chips, especially the Cell and the PS3 graphics chip that have little to none use outside the PS3 (I know there are a few Cell servers, but the numbers are really low compared to the PS3 needs).
AFAIK the manufacturing process of advanced chips takes several weeks if not months. And for the chips that are specific to the PS3, you cannot just buy them elsewhere. So if production of these is not running yet, there may be a problem with getting the PS3 launced this year.
It really sounds to me like they want outside verification, and are willing to pay for it themselves. Shouldn't we let that take place before we fry them in oil?
;-)
Yes, it looks like either
-a honest attempt at getting their stuff verified
-or an outright fake
Considering the stage of development they claim I think there can be no honest mistake like "oops, we accidentylly dropped a zero in our formulas". So I think this one deserves checking out, but if it is a fake I'm for frying the Steorn guys in oil
My sister picked up an old, redundant HP Laserjet at the office. Cost: 0 Euros.
Technically it is a bit obsolete, but it is a well known model that should be supported by Windows out of the box. For Linux, I have not checked in this case but older hardware tends to have better support under Linux because the community had time to play with it and write drivers.
If Sony are not making plasma screens anymore, I'm hardly surprised that they are dissing them now. They might simply rely on the short memory of the public, justified or not.
I remember similar statements (albeit less clumsily) by Microsoft, regarding their old operating systems they don't sell anymore. When those were new, they were of course described as the best - but now MS starts dropping hints that they might not be quite as secure and an upgrade might be a good idea.
For audio listening experiments with digitizing a signal by the CD norm and converting it back to analog showed that the testers could not hear the difference (Experiment performed the german HiFi magazine Stereoplay). So any remaining weaknesses are not due to the system, but to imperfect implementation. Which a SACD player can equally suffer from.
7.1 may still have its justification for home cinema because of the directional sound, but increasing the sampling rate on stereo is irrelevant. A definite case of twilight zone.
On video the difference from DVD to HDTV is still significant, but the tougher copy protection combined with higher prices is going to slow adaption.
Back to the topic of the thread:
A lot of Vista's features have been removed over the years. What remains is some eyecandy and DX10. Both may convince some people to switch, but I don't expect a big wave of upgrades. Instead, I think Vista will slowly creep into households via the sale of new PCs.
Another reason why these tricks don't really scale to more than 2 sockets is that the two Intel CPUs still have to share one memory controller (dual channel of course but still a handicap), while AMD gains a memory controller for each socket.
So for applications that need plenty of memory bandwidth, Intel still has a bottleneck in the larger servers. The 4MB cache cannot hide that completely. I suspect that AMD will start to feel the pinch too when they go to 4-core CPUs.
For Intel, I guess that two sockets with four cores each will be too much for one memory controller. At that point, Intel might need to adopt HyperTransport.
First, pick the list that matches the desired job skills closest. I suspect you want some people who can operate that 1000+ machine environment, so http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-admin might be the place to go.
Second, make it clear what your post is about, so people who are NOT looking for a job can simply ignore it. Use a topic like "Job Offer: Startup looking for Linux admins".
Actually, Microsoft had the freedom to make a separate contract that would have barred the dealer from un-bundling the OEM software. The court explicitly stressed that point.
But under German law, this requires a contract that is signed before the sale, or at least "standard business conditions" that are clearly visible to the customer before buying. An EULA that is only visible when installing the software does not cut it, as it fails the standard of "visible before buying".
Most EULAS for off-the-shelf software are of that type and thus unenforcable. I have never seen one that was printed out on the box, which might make it enforcable.
Another complication is if the software goes through several hands. Even if the EULA is binding for the original buyer, it is doubtful if it can be enforced against the new owner, since he was not party to the original contract. In our example, the original buyer might be the wholesaler and the new owner might be some small software shop that likes to unbundle OEM software.
At that point, it becomes quite difficult for the software manufacturer to ensure all dealers are under a contract not to ignore the EULA. I guess Microsoft did not want to deal with that and simply gave up.
I would mod your post up, but since it is already at +5, I'll confirm it instead:
There have been cases among my acquaintances and relatives where the insurance companies refused to pay with the most threadbare excuses. My conclusion is to have only the most essential insurance and to be ready to sue the insurance company if necessary.
A few years ago, a dealer in germany did exactly that - sold OEM copies of Windows separately from hardware. Microsoft sued him and the lawsuit went all the way to the Bundesgerichtshof (Germany's highest court for non-constitutional issues). In that court, Microsoft lost.
The court found that the EULA was not binding, and Microsoft did not have a separate contract with that dealer that explicitly barred him from selling the OEM versions without hardware (that way, they could have made their OEM rules binding even in Germany).
Since that time, Microsoft has given up selling "OEM" software in Germany. What you can buy instead are "System Builder" versions. Those come without documentation and support, but Microsoft does not try to legally bind them to a certain hardware.