I had thieves cut my convertible top in 3 places - it took three tries for them to get a hole they could reach the lock from, they were that stupid. So it is perhaps unsuprising that they only made off with a couple of very old used cassette tapes (with Christian rock on them, so maybe they needed them more than me). Since that time, I do not routinely lock the doors, and with the convertible, I have gone so far as to leave the top down when parking in San Franciso tourist areas. Nothing ever got molested. The seagulls worried me more.
I've only ever lost stuff from locked cars.
I can second that, on all accounts. Especially the concern about the seagulls. I usually throw towels over the seat, but I've come back to bombs dropped in the cupholders, and once on the shifter. Never had anything taken out of a car left with its windows down or the top down.
I have bolded the relevant bit that the biased summary failed to include. It is exactly the same as the Microsoft term above.
Wait, so you're saying that "solely to the extent necessary to provide the service" is exactly the same as "limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones"?
I'm not sure "exactly" means what you think it means.
Personally, I don't want anyone using my private files to promote their service or as sample data to improve or develop new ones.
I've personally been exposed to risky meat more than that.
I am not an epidemiologist, though, and I'd wager that your and GP aren't, either.
You've been exposed to meat that is dramatically riskier for reasons other than BSE far more often, though. You're far more likely to die from biologically contaminated meat than prion contaminated meat. Enormously higher. I don't know about you, but I still order my burgers medium rare. Life is a terminal disease, and you only get to do it once. Personally, I'd rather worry about what I want to do with that time, and the risks from things that might actually impact that time. BSE is not one of them.
SkyDrive offers 25GB (max size per file is 100MB) for free. This allows almost all of my files to be stored on the SkyDrive. All of the large files and sensitive documents go in my TC container and synced with Dropbox, which, with all the incentives, is up to 3GB of free space.
What I really wish i could find would be a program that would split a truecrypt container into multiple files of a set size. Then the whole thing would fit on the SkyDrive.
I believe the update to SkyDrive that went live this week now allows 2GB files. And still appears to work via WebDAV, plus has an offline mode.
Don't forget SkyDrive. Even MS, who knows Windows inside and out, install a special client and just sync files back and forth like everyone else does.
If you were to use a virtual filesystem driver or a filesystem filter and stream it directly, you need admin rights to install and you have a very different security profile (because the driver would need to be able to sync from multiple Live accounts across all the profiles on the workstation).
Is it possible to do direct streaming/caching as a mounted drive/directory? Absolutely. I wrote one a few years ago that would attach a WebDAV share onto the system. That's basically how all the various app streaming products work. But its a lousy model for a light-weight consumer system.
IT' is NOT too risky for NASA. IT's too politically risky for congress.
Its not politically risky, its just simply not possible. The timespans are out too long to fit into a single term of office. The moon happened for one reason, and one reason only -- a pissing match with the USSR. The space shuttle and ISS only survived 30 years for one reason -- it was strategically important to the US to keep a broad set of aerospace contractors in business and developing new technology, even if the waning years of the cold war wouldn't support them on their own.
The government has *never* been about space exploration for exploration's sake. Why do you think large-scale robotic exploration missions keep getting cut? If you take too much longer than a single term in office, you risk being cut, especially if you can't burn enough money fast enough to make it appear cheaper to finish than to stop. The missions that "work" these days are strategic to someone's congressional district, cheap, and fast to implement, so they avoid the congressional axe when their original supporter leaves office. (And even some, like the Webb, barely sustain on life support...)
Same reason we couldn't finish the SSC, why fusion research is faltering, and a hundred other examples.
Imagine if it had hit just a bit further west at night with clear weather. That would have resulted in a very bright flash at night and the aforementioned "rumbling and shaking" over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
Nuclear missiles don't travel at 33k km/hr. The people who matter would know the difference.
How does a statement that they're doing "more testing" turn into "fixing bugs"?
All the posts on here are all ZOMG, buuuug fixes!
The tweet and article say no such thing. And if you haven't finished your test cycle, best to delay and finish it. That's not rocket science.... or is it?
No, one set of people in power, who manipulate the ignorant for their own personal benefit, has replaced another.
Re:Two Party Democracies are Bad
on
In Nothing We Trust
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No, uneducated democracies are bad. The assumption that one persons' opinion is automatically granted the same validity as another's is the core of the problem. The world has gotten complicated vastly faster than the population's aggregate understanding of it. People generally no longer have the education to be able to have a legitimate opinion, so they have to blindly follow the opinions that are given to them. And *that* is the source of the problem with the two party system.
You can fiddle with the style of voting, or try to set up new parties, or twiddle with how the electoral system works, but its all band aiding the core problem -- letting people vote on issues they don't understand.
Things have been getting worse in the US because the people in power in the parties *know* they can manipulate voters that way.
The problem is not Earth's stability, it's Mercury's. Mercury is close to a so-called secular resonance, and it's eccentricity varies more chaotically than Earth or Venus. So yes, Earth would remain bounded indefinitely as long as Mercury never attains a high enough eccentricity that it begins crossing into Venus's orbit. Once close encounters take place with Mercury, the whole inner solar system can rapidly destabilize.
Oh, I hope Michael Bay doesn't read/. or an even worse disaster could happen:
Skydrive has a 100MB limitation per file. Dealbreaker.
Well, thankfully for most people, the files they need to store aren't that big, and that isn't a limitation. Its not a good option for your bookleg movies or porn collection, but 100MB is plenty for photos, documents, etc. A search on my laptop shows basically nothing above that size that isn't an installer, a ZIP containing a bunch of smaller files, or videos that came from either my digital cameras or my HDV video camera.
Personally, I'd like the ability to store my entire media library up on Skydrive or a similar service, but I've been averaging 250GB of new stuff a year, so... its not really an option. And I can't but a terabyte and a half of cloud storage from a reputable place at a reasonable price... yet. So 100MB file sizes are fine for me. I suspect that's probably true of the vast majority of users. (I suspect the size is picked to straddle the line between common legitimate file sizes and file sizes that are more typically found on the various warez-plagued file sharing services.)
But in Apple's defense, the permissions structure of Macs are inherently different than on a Windows machine.
Yes, they're coarse-grained user permissions, not fine grained ACLs like Windows has.
Most mac users run at normal user level, a la Linux/Unix. When the computer needs to do something at the priveleged level, it asks for a password.
Most Windows users usually run as administrator by default.
Perhaps people on a nine year old OS. Not a problem for Apple, because people on Jaguar would've thrown their hardware away a half decade ago when you stopped being able to get software for them. Of course anyone using Vista or later is running without an admin token, unless they deliberately disabled their account security by turning off UAC. You can do that in OSX, too.
No, that would be impossible on modern computers (unless you would only run the demo on one gfx card - and maybe even only on one specific firmware version at that).
Admittedly its been a while, but the VGA interfaces are still on those cards. If you needed higher rez, the VESA interfaces were pretty broadly supported ten years ago. I assume they're still buried down deep on those cards. But I grant you that utilizing more than just the framebuffer, you need to code to specific cards. But during the mid 90's, that was pretty common -- you saw lots of demos coding to specific cards like the early ATI Rage or (much more commonly) the 3DFX VooDoo cards. Same with audio hardware.
So you *can* do it on modern hardware, you just have to want to take on that challenge.
So yes, third party libraries are available but that does not make the outcomes any less impressive.
Yes, it does. I don't mean to shit on their hard work, but if that is what kids today consider a 64K demo, I hope the previous generation of demo coders over there are appropriately mocking them.
I'm sure there are still copies of the 64k demos from 20 years ago kicking around online -- 64k of bytes, loaded into memory from DOS, with absolutely nothing else being used. No 3D hardware, no DirectX libraries, no.NET runtimes. That's tens of millions of lines of supporting code. So, what, they're using some procedural code to generate some textures and 3D objects, storing some sequence information, camera path splines, and pumping everything else to the OS?
I watched those videos, and they're definitely cool, but they are dramatically less impressive than what people were doing in 64k 20 years ago.
/. is really making me feel old these days -- I was writing demos in the early 90's. I don't know if its my overall grumpy old-man mentality or not, but as impressive as these are, they're powered by a crap-ton of software running behind them. There's not 64k of assembly pumping bytes into a framebuffer and twiddling the PC speaker port to synthesize digital audio.
One thing I couldn't find in there (and I've been out of the scene for a LONG time, so I don't know how this works on new-fangled fancy computers...) -- do these write directly to the video hardware? Or do they use OS services like DirectX11, etc? When they say 64k, is it a 64k executable using up another dozen meg of OS DLLs?
I have to give it to them, they are very impressive. But are people still getting down and counting clock cycles?
How is your war on users going? Is that working out for you the way you expected? Perhaps, just perhaps, your customers are not your enemies? Think about this please, you could be such a great company if not for a small handful of policies.
/. rants aside, the parts of the business that are related, even slightly, to what you're talking about are still doing just fine at Sony.
While I suspect the reasons listed here are all reasons Cameron decided to take on this task -- the profit of re-releasing a film, the development of technology that can be used to provide similar services to other studios for a profit in the future, etc -- are valid, I think they're *not* the reason James Cameron took on this task. Two years of effort, looking at 300,000 frames one by one? For maybe $100-200m in ticket sales? He's not an idiot, and he's not a masochist. That's the kind of money one of his movies makes on an opening weekend.
I think he did it because he absolutely loves what he produced with the movie and wants people to see it with that same view. Case in point -- the movie was made in 70mm. That's a HUGE added expense, and less than two dozen prints were made in 70mm. Very few theaters around the world ever showed it in 70mm. But if you were lucky enough to see it, it really was spectacular. The same punch-in-the-eyes wow that seeing something like Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in 70mm brought. The detail is incredible in what they made, and totally lost on a normal print, much less even a Blu-Ray.
A few years after Titanic, Cameron made an IMAX 3-D movie using ROVs on the ship, that blended CGI, shots from the movie and real 3D IMAX and was quite an experience. I have no doubt that he was wishing he could've done the original movie with that sort of immersive experience, and I suspect that is the real source of why he'd do this. As compared to all his other efforts, its a little silly to claim it was profit driven.
They are given away or sold very cheaply by people that don't know how to fix them to people that do, a simple fix is done on them and they are sold.
And you can get into the right IRC channel and buy a bunch of zero-day card dumps for the same cost... and then you'll have a number you might actually be able to use. If you get numbers from the XBox, you'll have a number that may or may not be old. (The last time I entered a CC into my console was probably four or five years ago, and definitely expired!) You'll maybe have enough data to be able to run a CNP transaction with a site online. For durable good sites, that means shipping something somewhere and having a secure drop that can't be traced to you. For most shadier places, you'll trip the fraud detection and the bank will call the card owner, and you'll get nowhere.
And what's the risk to the owner, even if this was true? If you sold your XBox, it happened to have a valid number on it, and that number was expired and you happened to sell it to someone who was hunting for those sort of things and got your number, and somehow found your address and everything else needed to use the card your bank cancels the card, you have no liability and you have to maybe update your number for a few automated payments.
I'd be more concerned about being murdered or something by a bad guy. That's only 1/18,000.
IIRC, Sony said something very similar at the beginning of the PSN breach--something along the lines of "This was a minor incident. It was probably only a few accounts. Nothing to see here."
If someone was claiming they hacked the Xbox/Live network and got access to credit cards, the comparison might be accurate. In this case, they're claiming they got credit card information from a device that doesn't have it.
And even if it did have it, I think there's better ways for bad guys to get credit card numbers then buying an Xbox one at a time, using a modding tool, grepping the filesystem and pulling out numbers.
It also sounds like there's no evidence from the article that the numbers were actually credit card numbers. I know every Discover card starts with 6011, but not all 16 digit numbers that start with 6011 are Discover cards, as an example. You also can't assume that any 16 digit number that starts with a 3, 4, or 5 and ends with a valid check digit is a credit card number.
Until someone enters *their* credit card number on an XBox, and finds *that* number saved on it, I don't think this is credible. And, really, it needs to have the CID, expiration, address verification digits AND the user's name to really be a risk.
And even then, its really not a risk, given how easy it is to get valid cards in bulk from more nefarious sources.
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
That may be the view if you've spent most of your time in software and are looking at the rest of the markets with rose colored glasses, but corporate bloat, political fiefdoms and massive human resource structure are not an invention of software companies. There's hundreds of years of business experience behind the decisions people make like that. You shouldn't assume they're morons or don't understand business just because you don't or you believe you can intuit your way to a greater understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
I had thieves cut my convertible top in 3 places - it took three tries for them to get a hole they could reach the lock from, they were that stupid. So it is perhaps unsuprising that they only made off with a couple of very old used cassette tapes (with Christian rock on them, so maybe they needed them more than me). Since that time, I do not routinely lock the doors, and with the convertible, I have gone so far as to leave the top down when parking in San Franciso tourist areas. Nothing ever got molested. The seagulls worried me more.
I've only ever lost stuff from locked cars.
I can second that, on all accounts. Especially the concern about the seagulls. I usually throw towels over the seat, but I've come back to bombs dropped in the cupholders, and once on the shifter. Never had anything taken out of a car left with its windows down or the top down.
I have bolded the relevant bit that the biased summary failed to include. It is exactly the same as the Microsoft term above.
Wait, so you're saying that "solely to the extent necessary to provide the service" is exactly the same as "limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones"?
I'm not sure "exactly" means what you think it means.
Personally, I don't want anyone using my private files to promote their service or as sample data to improve or develop new ones.
This guy is saying the sort of things that have been getting me downmodded here on slashdot for years.
Well, unfortunately he can't be downmodded. But I suspect your credentials related to climatology are equal or greater than his.
Lovelock has always been the radical fringe of environmentalism. His beliefs are as based on fact now as they've ever been.
I've personally been exposed to risky meat more than that.
I am not an epidemiologist, though, and I'd wager that your and GP aren't, either.
You've been exposed to meat that is dramatically riskier for reasons other than BSE far more often, though. You're far more likely to die from biologically contaminated meat than prion contaminated meat. Enormously higher. I don't know about you, but I still order my burgers medium rare. Life is a terminal disease, and you only get to do it once. Personally, I'd rather worry about what I want to do with that time, and the risks from things that might actually impact that time. BSE is not one of them.
If you wait a few months, you'll probably have a capacitor die in the power supply and it'll stop rebooting.
SkyDrive offers 25GB (max size per file is 100MB) for free. This allows almost all of my files to be stored on the SkyDrive. All of the large files and sensitive documents go in my TC container and synced with Dropbox, which, with all the incentives, is up to 3GB of free space.
What I really wish i could find would be a program that would split a truecrypt container into multiple files of a set size. Then the whole thing would fit on the SkyDrive.
I believe the update to SkyDrive that went live this week now allows 2GB files. And still appears to work via WebDAV, plus has an offline mode.
Don't forget SkyDrive. Even MS, who knows Windows inside and out, install a special client and just sync files back and forth like everyone else does.
If you were to use a virtual filesystem driver or a filesystem filter and stream it directly, you need admin rights to install and you have a very different security profile (because the driver would need to be able to sync from multiple Live accounts across all the profiles on the workstation).
Is it possible to do direct streaming/caching as a mounted drive/directory? Absolutely. I wrote one a few years ago that would attach a WebDAV share onto the system. That's basically how all the various app streaming products work. But its a lousy model for a light-weight consumer system.
IT' is NOT too risky for NASA. IT's too politically risky for congress.
Its not politically risky, its just simply not possible. The timespans are out too long to fit into a single term of office. The moon happened for one reason, and one reason only -- a pissing match with the USSR. The space shuttle and ISS only survived 30 years for one reason -- it was strategically important to the US to keep a broad set of aerospace contractors in business and developing new technology, even if the waning years of the cold war wouldn't support them on their own.
The government has *never* been about space exploration for exploration's sake. Why do you think large-scale robotic exploration missions keep getting cut? If you take too much longer than a single term in office, you risk being cut, especially if you can't burn enough money fast enough to make it appear cheaper to finish than to stop. The missions that "work" these days are strategic to someone's congressional district, cheap, and fast to implement, so they avoid the congressional axe when their original supporter leaves office. (And even some, like the Webb, barely sustain on life support...)
Same reason we couldn't finish the SSC, why fusion research is faltering, and a hundred other examples.
It hit in daylight over Reno-Tahoe.
Imagine if it had hit just a bit further west at night with clear weather. That would have resulted in a very bright flash at night and the aforementioned "rumbling and shaking" over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
Nuclear missiles don't travel at 33k km/hr. The people who matter would know the difference.
I suspect the 3.8 kilotons of TNT estimate was arrived at by doing that exact math in reverse. So it makes sense that your numbers match.
They estimated its size, declared it a minivan, guessed its composition (iron), and did the rest of the math.
How does a statement that they're doing "more testing" turn into "fixing bugs"?
All the posts on here are all ZOMG, buuuug fixes!
The tweet and article say no such thing. And if you haven't finished your test cycle, best to delay and finish it. That's not rocket science.... or is it?
Money has replaced God
No, one set of people in power, who manipulate the ignorant for their own personal benefit, has replaced another.
No, uneducated democracies are bad. The assumption that one persons' opinion is automatically granted the same validity as another's is the core of the problem. The world has gotten complicated vastly faster than the population's aggregate understanding of it. People generally no longer have the education to be able to have a legitimate opinion, so they have to blindly follow the opinions that are given to them. And *that* is the source of the problem with the two party system.
You can fiddle with the style of voting, or try to set up new parties, or twiddle with how the electoral system works, but its all band aiding the core problem -- letting people vote on issues they don't understand.
Things have been getting worse in the US because the people in power in the parties *know* they can manipulate voters that way.
The problem is not Earth's stability, it's Mercury's. Mercury is close to a so-called secular resonance, and it's eccentricity varies more chaotically than Earth or Venus. So yes, Earth would remain bounded indefinitely as long as Mercury never attains a high enough eccentricity that it begins crossing into Venus's orbit. Once close encounters take place with Mercury, the whole inner solar system can rapidly destabilize.
Oh, I hope Michael Bay doesn't read /. or an even worse disaster could happen:
Armageddon II: Mercury's Rampage
Coming Christmas 2013
Skydrive has a 100MB limitation per file. Dealbreaker.
Well, thankfully for most people, the files they need to store aren't that big, and that isn't a limitation. Its not a good option for your bookleg movies or porn collection, but 100MB is plenty for photos, documents, etc. A search on my laptop shows basically nothing above that size that isn't an installer, a ZIP containing a bunch of smaller files, or videos that came from either my digital cameras or my HDV video camera.
Personally, I'd like the ability to store my entire media library up on Skydrive or a similar service, but I've been averaging 250GB of new stuff a year, so... its not really an option. And I can't but a terabyte and a half of cloud storage from a reputable place at a reasonable price... yet. So 100MB file sizes are fine for me. I suspect that's probably true of the vast majority of users. (I suspect the size is picked to straddle the line between common legitimate file sizes and file sizes that are more typically found on the various warez-plagued file sharing services.)
But in Apple's defense, the permissions structure of Macs are inherently different than on a Windows machine.
Yes, they're coarse-grained user permissions, not fine grained ACLs like Windows has.
Most mac users run at normal user level, a la Linux/Unix. When the computer needs to do something at the priveleged level, it asks for a password.
Most Windows users usually run as administrator by default.
Perhaps people on a nine year old OS. Not a problem for Apple, because people on Jaguar would've thrown their hardware away a half decade ago when you stopped being able to get software for them. Of course anyone using Vista or later is running without an admin token, unless they deliberately disabled their account security by turning off UAC. You can do that in OSX, too.
I can appreciate the skill but it is like seeing someone make a nice statue with a flint... nice... now here is a steel chisel. Enjoy!
That skill is the point of demos, in the demoscene sense of the word.
do these write directly to the video hardware?
No, that would be impossible on modern computers (unless you would only run the demo on one gfx card - and maybe even only on one specific firmware version at that).
Admittedly its been a while, but the VGA interfaces are still on those cards. If you needed higher rez, the VESA interfaces were pretty broadly supported ten years ago. I assume they're still buried down deep on those cards. But I grant you that utilizing more than just the framebuffer, you need to code to specific cards. But during the mid 90's, that was pretty common -- you saw lots of demos coding to specific cards like the early ATI Rage or (much more commonly) the 3DFX VooDoo cards. Same with audio hardware.
So you *can* do it on modern hardware, you just have to want to take on that challenge.
So yes, third party libraries are available but that does not make the outcomes any less impressive.
Yes, it does. I don't mean to shit on their hard work, but if that is what kids today consider a 64K demo, I hope the previous generation of demo coders over there are appropriately mocking them.
I'm sure there are still copies of the 64k demos from 20 years ago kicking around online -- 64k of bytes, loaded into memory from DOS, with absolutely nothing else being used. No 3D hardware, no DirectX libraries, no .NET runtimes. That's tens of millions of lines of supporting code. So, what, they're using some procedural code to generate some textures and 3D objects, storing some sequence information, camera path splines, and pumping everything else to the OS?
I watched those videos, and they're definitely cool, but they are dramatically less impressive than what people were doing in 64k 20 years ago.
/. is really making me feel old these days -- I was writing demos in the early 90's. I don't know if its my overall grumpy old-man mentality or not, but as impressive as these are, they're powered by a crap-ton of software running behind them. There's not 64k of assembly pumping bytes into a framebuffer and twiddling the PC speaker port to synthesize digital audio.
One thing I couldn't find in there (and I've been out of the scene for a LONG time, so I don't know how this works on new-fangled fancy computers...) -- do these write directly to the video hardware? Or do they use OS services like DirectX11, etc? When they say 64k, is it a 64k executable using up another dozen meg of OS DLLs?
I have to give it to them, they are very impressive. But are people still getting down and counting clock cycles?
Anyway, for you youngins, this might explain the demoscene a bit better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU
How is your war on users going? Is that working out for you the way you expected? Perhaps, just perhaps, your customers are not your enemies? Think about this please, you could be such a great company if not for a small handful of policies.
/. rants aside, the parts of the business that are related, even slightly, to what you're talking about are still doing just fine at Sony.
While I suspect the reasons listed here are all reasons Cameron decided to take on this task -- the profit of re-releasing a film, the development of technology that can be used to provide similar services to other studios for a profit in the future, etc -- are valid, I think they're *not* the reason James Cameron took on this task. Two years of effort, looking at 300,000 frames one by one? For maybe $100-200m in ticket sales? He's not an idiot, and he's not a masochist. That's the kind of money one of his movies makes on an opening weekend.
I think he did it because he absolutely loves what he produced with the movie and wants people to see it with that same view. Case in point -- the movie was made in 70mm. That's a HUGE added expense, and less than two dozen prints were made in 70mm. Very few theaters around the world ever showed it in 70mm. But if you were lucky enough to see it, it really was spectacular. The same punch-in-the-eyes wow that seeing something like Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in 70mm brought. The detail is incredible in what they made, and totally lost on a normal print, much less even a Blu-Ray.
A few years after Titanic, Cameron made an IMAX 3-D movie using ROVs on the ship, that blended CGI, shots from the movie and real 3D IMAX and was quite an experience. I have no doubt that he was wishing he could've done the original movie with that sort of immersive experience, and I suspect that is the real source of why he'd do this. As compared to all his other efforts, its a little silly to claim it was profit driven.
IMHO.
They are given away or sold very cheaply by people that don't know how to fix them to people that do, a simple fix is done on them and they are sold.
And you can get into the right IRC channel and buy a bunch of zero-day card dumps for the same cost... and then you'll have a number you might actually be able to use. If you get numbers from the XBox, you'll have a number that may or may not be old. (The last time I entered a CC into my console was probably four or five years ago, and definitely expired!) You'll maybe have enough data to be able to run a CNP transaction with a site online. For durable good sites, that means shipping something somewhere and having a secure drop that can't be traced to you. For most shadier places, you'll trip the fraud detection and the bank will call the card owner, and you'll get nowhere.
And what's the risk to the owner, even if this was true? If you sold your XBox, it happened to have a valid number on it, and that number was expired and you happened to sell it to someone who was hunting for those sort of things and got your number, and somehow found your address and everything else needed to use the card your bank cancels the card, you have no liability and you have to maybe update your number for a few automated payments.
I'd be more concerned about being murdered or something by a bad guy. That's only 1/18,000.
IIRC, Sony said something very similar at the beginning of the PSN breach--something along the lines of "This was a minor incident. It was probably only a few accounts. Nothing to see here."
If someone was claiming they hacked the Xbox/Live network and got access to credit cards, the comparison might be accurate. In this case, they're claiming they got credit card information from a device that doesn't have it.
And even if it did have it, I think there's better ways for bad guys to get credit card numbers then buying an Xbox one at a time, using a modding tool, grepping the filesystem and pulling out numbers.
It also sounds like there's no evidence from the article that the numbers were actually credit card numbers. I know every Discover card starts with 6011, but not all 16 digit numbers that start with 6011 are Discover cards, as an example. You also can't assume that any 16 digit number that starts with a 3, 4, or 5 and ends with a valid check digit is a credit card number.
Until someone enters *their* credit card number on an XBox, and finds *that* number saved on it, I don't think this is credible. And, really, it needs to have the CID, expiration, address verification digits AND the user's name to really be a risk.
And even then, its really not a risk, given how easy it is to get valid cards in bulk from more nefarious sources.
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
That may be the view if you've spent most of your time in software and are looking at the rest of the markets with rose colored glasses, but corporate bloat, political fiefdoms and massive human resource structure are not an invention of software companies. There's hundreds of years of business experience behind the decisions people make like that. You shouldn't assume they're morons or don't understand business just because you don't or you believe you can intuit your way to a greater understanding.