Maybe we could spend another 23 million on the third film, like they did on the original, and instead of all those flashy bullshit effects ADD SOME FUCKING INTERESTING, COMPELLING, WELL WRITTEN PLOT?!
Agreed.
Pitch Black was a fun, compelling, tense movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Chronicles of Riddick, however, was crap. A few good bits here and there... But they really lost the path. Somehow they went from a reasonably-believable sci-fi setting with space ships and aliens to some kind of pseudo-fantasy setting with invisible floating elementals and undead. WTF?
Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore
You know, I'm really not sure that privacy was ever really the norm...
Sure, for a while there we had a reasonable expectation of privacy. And I think that was probably a good thing. But I also think that was largely an aberration.
Look back a few hundred years... We were living in relatively small, tightly-knit groups. Fine, maybe some guy on the other side of the planet couldn't Google you and come up with your life history... But it wasn't like you were keeping a whole lot of secrets from your neighbors either.
As it is, I think privacy is probably dead and buried at this point. But I'm not sure that it will matter too much to your average human being.
At this point I don't think there's any going back to a time before tracking cookies and data mining and whatever else. The fact that you bought an inflatable sheep is going to be logged somewhere... And some advertising robot somewhere is going to dig up that bit of information... And some night when you're staying at a hotel on a business trip the DVR will helpfully suggest Barnyard Bondage III for your viewing pleasure. And I don't think this is going to go away. It's just far too pervasive, and far too useful. Not just to businesses either... If I'm going to be served ads, I'd rather they're actually relevant.
But I don't think you're going to see a whole lot of social impact from this. I don't think you'll see prospective employers digging through your Amazon purchase history. Largely because that's a double-edged blade. I'm sure there'll be various laws, regulations, and taboos developed to protect your privacy in social situations - because folks aren't going to want you to dig up their skeletons any more than you want them digging up yours.
Government will, of course, abuse anything and everything it can. This information will be used for profiling or something. But it isn't like that isn't happening already.
These proprietary plastic sheets sound a bit like a consumable to me.
Yeah, they're re-usable. But if it's stuck in a filing cabinet then you can't re-use it now can you.
I've got a boss who prints crap out all the time. Just random junk. Instead of forwarding an email to me, he'll print it out and hand it to me. And those random bits of junk get thrown away pretty quickly.
I routinely have to print out documentation for various clients... Take it on-site with me... And after I'm done there, the printout gets shredded.
For non-permanent bits of information that you'd still like to take away from a computer screen, this could be very handy.
They are unwilling to learn because University wasn't really their choice. Students are told, in no uncertain terms, that they will be miserable failures if they don't seek higher education. Since society feels justified in propagating this stupidity, millions of students each year head to universities and colleges in order to grasp that golden vine, and they'll do whatever it takes to grasp it with as little work as possible.
Exactly.
Everyone wants a college degree, but most people don't know why.
To be fair, an absurd number of employers ask for a degree even when one isn't necessary... And you'll have a hard time getting hired if you don't have one...
But the message is very clear from day one - get a degree or you won't go anywhere.
So you get an awful lot of folks going to college just because they're supposed to. They've just turned 18... They have no freaking clue what to do with themselves... Very little grasp of what freedom or independence mean... No direction in life... And college is just the next logical step. It's what they've been told is next. And they're really in no position to say I don't want to go to college.
And so they muddle through a few years of college... Take some classes... Maybe they get lucky and something sparks their interest, maybe not.
And they eventually graduate with a degree and a pile of debt.
And that shiny new degree doesn't do much more than get your foot in the door at your first "real" job... After that nobody really cares whether you've got a degree, they just want to see the professional experience.
Some folks are actually paying their own way... And I think you'll find that they're generally the ones who actually want to learn... But a lot of them aren't paying their own way.
Some of them have parents paying their way. Some of them got a grant or scholarship of some sort. Some of them just got a pile of loans and haven't yet realized they'll have to pay it off eventually.
I wonder what they are looking at getting out it?
If I'm being generous, I'll say that they've been told that they need a college degree to get any kind of job. They probably don't really know why they're there... It's just the next step after high school.
If I'm being a bit more realistic, I'll say that a lot of folks have this idea that college is a four-year long party. They're just there to have fun and couldn't care much less about the academics.
Plagiarize and copy are obvious, but I never heard of asking for help on homework being cheating. How else does one learn ? If you didn't get the concept in class, you are out of luck, that's it ?
I come from a family that's big on education...
Both my parents have an assortment of degrees. My mother was a college professor. My sister and I have both got our own degrees.
And one of the things they always stressed to me about going to school was not that it taught you any particular bit of information - it taught you how to learn.
The most important thing you can get out of any degree is the ability to learn. The ability to read a book for comprehension... Pick out the relevant bits of a lecture... Put together useful notes... Look up the information that's missing... Realize where the gaps are in your understanding... And ask the necessary questions to fill in those gaps.
It's much easier for people to cheat in group projects than on any particular assignment. Nearing the end of my undergrad I specifically choose courses that didn't involve group projects because I got tired of doing other people's work (while they went to class).
Yup.
Always hated group assignments... There would always be at least one person who didn't pull their own weight.
Just make the punishment for cheating sufficiently harsh. You cheat.. you get kicked out. Simple.
My first year of my CS degree my professor wanted to talk to me after class one day. She explained that I'd been caught cheating on one of the assignments. I denied it. She explained that copying another student's work was plagiarism, and the penalty for that was expulsion. She was going to ignore it this time and give me a 0 on the assignment, but if she caught me again that would be it.
I had the distinct impression that if I insisted on my innocence she would change her mind and not ignore the offense. She seemed absolutely convinced that I had copied somebody else's work.
The fact of the matter is that I hadn't copied anyone's work.
I don't know if somebody grabbed my printout from the bin and copied my code... Or if I just happened to turn in very similar code to someone else... Or what.
Left me absolutely paranoid, didn't trust anyone, was terrified of getting kicked out of school for something I didn't even do.
What would you recommend looking at for virtualization/clustering on Linux these days? XenServer or a particular distro with KVM? Management?
Just curious.
I honestly haven't done much full-server virtualization. I typically use VirtualBox when I need a different environment for a particular bit of software or something... And I've had good luck with Parallels on a workstation at home...
I just mentioned XenServer because we had a client who needed a new server and some VMs, so that's what we ordered. And when my boss sat down in front of it to try out the new hardware, and wasn't greeted with a Windows login screen, he kept shaking the mouse like he was trying to wake it from sleep. He had no idea what to do without that Windows GUI.
As far as XenServer itself goes... It seems to be working pretty well. Haven't had any trouble setting up the VMs or anything. Seems to be functioning correctly.
I was considering upgrading to Win7 to get DirectX 11 & be able to allocate all of the RAM in Windows. Guess I will just get WinXP 64 Pro instead & do without DirectX 11.
The problem with that is XP-64 was never supported very well. I've seen tons of issues with XP-64... Bits of hardware and software that just plain do not work right, even though they should. It's a miserable operating system to support.
The only reason I upgraded to Vista was because it had real 64-bit support. As miserable as Vista was, at least the 64-bit version worked better than my XP-64 install. And Win7-64 is absolutely terrific.
3. Yes, Microsoft does decided to notify/annoy you that you're not using genuine software which is a good thing because most people don't know they are.
Very true.
Occasionally we'll get a call from someone who's become dis-satisfied with their current IT provider... They're shopping around for alternatives, maybe wondering if they've been getting screwed over the years... Maybe wondering if the grass is greener on the other side...
So, we'll go in and take a look around, do a site survey. Sometimes you start seeing a bunch of computers with automatic updates disabled... No service packs installed at all... Home-made systems... And nobody can come up with any licensing information at all...
We'll get permission to install WGA on their systems, and you'll see about 50% of them are non-genuine.
The false positives will turn into real positives. When a machine gets marked as non-genuine, it stops receiving updates. Which means is WILL get 0wned by the next zero-day attack.
They are basically just manufacturing more spambot machines with this strategy.
Unless they've changed their policy very recently, non-genuine Windows machines will still receive security updates.
Who in their right mind would use Windows on a server any more?
Folks who've spent their entire lives working on a Windows GUI and can't imagine a computer without a Start menu or a C: drive.
We're a Microsoft shop... That's generally what we sell and install, including servers. Myself, I don't much care what we run. I'm familiar with various flavors of *nix and support them as well. My boss, on the other hand, can't deal with anything non-Windows.
You should have seen his face the first time he sat down in front of a machine running XenServer. He had no freaking clue what to do with it. He kept shaking the mouse around and looking puzzled.
Looks like the Win7 upgrade is off the table for me. Dual-booting XP & Kubuntu for the foreseeable future!
Sure it is...
And I bet you were genuinely considering upgrading to Win7 to replace your dual-boot setup... And were all set to go ahead with it... And this bit of news just broke the deal, right?
XP has had WGA for years now, which does similar things. No, not identical, which is why WAT is being rolled out. But if WAT is such a horrific deal-breaker I can't imagine you're happy with WGA either. And if you've managed to deal with WGA for all these years, you could deal with WAT as well.
it's a lot less trivial for folks who never bought it (and thus pirated) by just disabling this WAT. Nice to know MS is treating their paying customers almost as well as it treats the ones that don't pay.
Yup.
Once again, the assorted DRM measures only affect paying customers.
Anyone who is actually pirating the software has already cracked or bypassed the activation process in some way. They'll probably never have to deal with this WAT stuff.
And some poor soul who actually purchased a legitimate copy of Windows (either retail, or with an OEM box) is going to get their software de-authorized because of a false positive.
I wonder how many false positives this will generate? The thing is, for every person who pirates Windows 7, there is a fairly decent chance that they will be doing so with an activation code which a genuine user may have purchased. I wonder if MS has figured out some way to deal with this issue? I wouldn't bet on it.
If I recall correctly, there was a similar issue with Windows XP. Some OEM disc/key combination made it into the wild and became popular amongst pirates. When Microsoft eventually invalidated that disc/key combination, it invalidated a number of Windows XP installs.
Either that, or I'm completely mis-remembering something else...
The question is, what counts as counterfeit hardware? Is he taking, say "genuine" Cisco hardware (as in, made in the same factory just not with the Cisco name on it) and selling it as real Cisco hardware, is he taking inferior components to make his hardware, is the hardware functional?
To a very large degree, it doesn't much matter whether he's using the same components as are found in the official Cisco hardware.
Even if the hardware he's selling is 100% identical to Cisco hardware, it isn't Cisco. This means that if I buy something thinking that it's Cisco, and have a problem, I'm going to call up Cisco and complain about it. And then they're going to tell me that I don't have their hardware. I'm wasting their time (and money)... And I've got a product that nobody is going to support. I won't be able to to download new software for the thing, or purchase new licenses, or anything.
One of the big reasons that we sell Cisco hardware to our clients is the technical support. I know that if we sell them a Cisco (with a support contract) and something goes wrong, we can get it fixed in a timely manner. It doesn't matter if it's a fubared config or a fried bit of hardware... I can call up Cisco, get in touch with a technician, and get the problem fixed.
If I found a great deal on Cisco hardware and sold them to my clients... Then later found out that it was counterfeit hardware and Cisco wouldn't support it... I'd be in a bit of a fix.
I'm no longer in class... So I'm not taking notes from a professor's lecture... But when we're having a meeting with clients or going over a new installation I'll usually take notes with my netbook.
'[While taking notes on a laptop] every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.'
That's where the built-in camera on my netbook comes in handy. It's pointed in the wrong direction, so I have to turn the netbook around or hold the page up in front of the camera or something... But it's great for grabbing diagrams that I can't easily type in.
Anybody who wants to pirate the game, can. There'll be a cracked copy available for download within days. DRM is not going to force anybody to pay for a game if they would rather have it free.
So the pirates are all playing their games without DRM. They don't have to make sure there's a disc in the drive... They don't have to wait while it phones home... They don't have to worry about how many times they've re-installed the software... They don't have to install extra security software to protect the publisher's revenue stream... They don't have to worry about the DRM servers shutting down, or their account getting banned, or somebody else stealing their key and being unable to play their game...
And the paying customers, who shelled out $50+ of their hard-earned cash, have to deal with all the DRM crap.
The marginal cost of producing an ebook isn't zero.
You're going to have licensing costs on whatever DRM you use... Server storage... Bandwidth... Maybe it's less than the marginal costs of producing a paper book, but it isn't going to be zero.
But, marginal costs aren't what drives the price of a book to start with.
The whole idea of buying e-books is because they are easy to carry and store and is less expensive.
Says who?
Sure, it's nice to get things for less... But I didn't pay $400 for an ebook reader because I was too cheap to buy paper books. I bought it largely for the convenience of being able to carry my whole library around with me, and being able to purchase/download new titles without having to find a bookstore.
So an increase in price is not going to help the publishing industry in the right way.
First of all, what is the right way? Perhaps the publishing industry thinks the right way is to kill off ebooks so they can keep using paper?
Further, I don't think we've been told precisely how this price increase is going to work out... I somehow doubt that they're going to charge $15 for an ebook that's available as a $5 paperback. I assume we're talking about the larger volumes... Things that would normally cost $15+ in stores.
Expensive books are also encouraging people to acquire books by piracy as common man is unable to pay the high cost of getting books.
I don't know about this common man... But the average US citizen doesn't really buy books. Most folks don't read any more than they have to.
And $15 certainly isn't a lot for a book... Maybe it's a bit high for a trade paperback... But $15 is nothing compared to a lot of the books out there.
And keep in mind we're talking about ebooks, which require a certain amount of infrastructure. You really aren't going to see somebody with a computer, iPad, or Kindle absolutely unable to purchase an ebook because it costs $15 instead of $10.
Nobody writes while adhering to grammatical rules well enough for their sentences to compile.
No, they don't. It's a very good thing that the human mind is more flexible than the average compiler.
Returning to the subject at hand, you appear to be claiming that when KJV was written, writers were still refining the grammatical rules of English and shortly after this they settled on some rules which are now set in stone.
That isn't the claim I was trying to make.
I was attempting to point out that we had words for why the KJV reads oddly - namely that it was written in Early Modern English. Just as something written in German is going to look a bit odd to an English speaker.
I also pointed out that spelling had not been completely settled at the time... Spelling, these days, has largely settled down. I pointed out the preference for idoms even older than the KJV itself... And I pointed out that there were issues translating from Latin to English. I never said anything about grammar.
English, including written English, is a _natural_ language, meaning it evolves.
Yes, it does.
The syntax that defined English last year will not precisely define it this year and with the advent of faster and cheaper means of publishing (e.g. SMS, Twitter) it is to be expected that the rate of change will increase.
Agreed.
I accept that it is the case and the grammar rules written a hundred years ago (or even last year) are little more than approximations of how people write.
Agreed.
When a sentence is written in violation of those rules (such as "My bad."), you can argue that the sentence has incorrect syntax, but when many sentences sharing the same grammatical structure are written then the only reasonable conclusion is that the rules are incorrect representations of English.
Maybe.
Again, we're not talking about how people communicate face-to-face... Or with a txt message... Or on a Facebook post... We're talking about something fairly specific - college-level writing for exams and essays.
German, French, and English are all perfectly valid languages. There's nothing wrong with any of them. But if you're going to a school in America, taking a class in English, and turn in a paper written in German you can't expect a very good grade.
You need to use the appropriate language for the task at hand.
"My bad" might be perfectly acceptable in a quick memo to your co-worker explaining that your patch killed the server... It's probably not so acceptable in an email to a client who wants to know why their server was down and they couldn't collect money for several hours.
The problem here is not that the language is evolving... The problem is that these students do not know the proper language to use when writing for a college exam or essay.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we could spend another 23 million on the third film, like they did on the original, and instead of all those flashy bullshit effects ADD SOME FUCKING INTERESTING, COMPELLING, WELL WRITTEN PLOT?!
Agreed.
Pitch Black was a fun, compelling, tense movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Chronicles of Riddick, however, was crap. A few good bits here and there... But they really lost the path. Somehow they went from a reasonably-believable sci-fi setting with space ships and aliens to some kind of pseudo-fantasy setting with invisible floating elementals and undead. WTF?
Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore
You know, I'm really not sure that privacy was ever really the norm...
Sure, for a while there we had a reasonable expectation of privacy. And I think that was probably a good thing. But I also think that was largely an aberration.
Look back a few hundred years... We were living in relatively small, tightly-knit groups. Fine, maybe some guy on the other side of the planet couldn't Google you and come up with your life history... But it wasn't like you were keeping a whole lot of secrets from your neighbors either.
As it is, I think privacy is probably dead and buried at this point. But I'm not sure that it will matter too much to your average human being.
At this point I don't think there's any going back to a time before tracking cookies and data mining and whatever else. The fact that you bought an inflatable sheep is going to be logged somewhere... And some advertising robot somewhere is going to dig up that bit of information... And some night when you're staying at a hotel on a business trip the DVR will helpfully suggest Barnyard Bondage III for your viewing pleasure. And I don't think this is going to go away. It's just far too pervasive, and far too useful. Not just to businesses either... If I'm going to be served ads, I'd rather they're actually relevant.
But I don't think you're going to see a whole lot of social impact from this. I don't think you'll see prospective employers digging through your Amazon purchase history. Largely because that's a double-edged blade. I'm sure there'll be various laws, regulations, and taboos developed to protect your privacy in social situations - because folks aren't going to want you to dig up their skeletons any more than you want them digging up yours.
Government will, of course, abuse anything and everything it can. This information will be used for profiling or something. But it isn't like that isn't happening already.
More like a Mi-Go
That was my first thought as well...
Instead of forwarding an email to me, he'll print it out and hand it to me.
You're obviously one of the lucky ones, who doesn't have to deal with their boss forwarding emails to them.
The emails he forwards to me are the stupid ones I don't need - chain letters and whatnot.
The ones that I actually need, with useful links and product specs and whatnot, he prints out.
These proprietary plastic sheets sound a bit like a consumable to me.
Yeah, they're re-usable. But if it's stuck in a filing cabinet then you can't re-use it now can you.
I've got a boss who prints crap out all the time. Just random junk. Instead of forwarding an email to me, he'll print it out and hand it to me. And those random bits of junk get thrown away pretty quickly.
I routinely have to print out documentation for various clients... Take it on-site with me... And after I'm done there, the printout gets shredded.
For non-permanent bits of information that you'd still like to take away from a computer screen, this could be very handy.
They are unwilling to learn because University wasn't really their choice. Students are told, in no uncertain terms, that they will be miserable failures if they don't seek higher education. Since society feels justified in propagating this stupidity, millions of students each year head to universities and colleges in order to grasp that golden vine, and they'll do whatever it takes to grasp it with as little work as possible.
Exactly.
Everyone wants a college degree, but most people don't know why.
To be fair, an absurd number of employers ask for a degree even when one isn't necessary... And you'll have a hard time getting hired if you don't have one...
But the message is very clear from day one - get a degree or you won't go anywhere.
So you get an awful lot of folks going to college just because they're supposed to. They've just turned 18... They have no freaking clue what to do with themselves... Very little grasp of what freedom or independence mean... No direction in life... And college is just the next logical step. It's what they've been told is next. And they're really in no position to say I don't want to go to college.
And so they muddle through a few years of college... Take some classes... Maybe they get lucky and something sparks their interest, maybe not.
And they eventually graduate with a degree and a pile of debt.
And that shiny new degree doesn't do much more than get your foot in the door at your first "real" job... After that nobody really cares whether you've got a degree, they just want to see the professional experience.
This is university, they are paying to learn.
Not necessarily.
Some folks are actually paying their own way... And I think you'll find that they're generally the ones who actually want to learn... But a lot of them aren't paying their own way.
Some of them have parents paying their way. Some of them got a grant or scholarship of some sort. Some of them just got a pile of loans and haven't yet realized they'll have to pay it off eventually.
I wonder what they are looking at getting out it?
If I'm being generous, I'll say that they've been told that they need a college degree to get any kind of job. They probably don't really know why they're there... It's just the next step after high school.
If I'm being a bit more realistic, I'll say that a lot of folks have this idea that college is a four-year long party. They're just there to have fun and couldn't care much less about the academics.
Plagiarize and copy are obvious, but I never heard of asking for help on homework being cheating. How else does one learn ?
If you didn't get the concept in class, you are out of luck, that's it ?
I come from a family that's big on education...
Both my parents have an assortment of degrees. My mother was a college professor. My sister and I have both got our own degrees.
And one of the things they always stressed to me about going to school was not that it taught you any particular bit of information - it taught you how to learn.
The most important thing you can get out of any degree is the ability to learn. The ability to read a book for comprehension... Pick out the relevant bits of a lecture... Put together useful notes... Look up the information that's missing... Realize where the gaps are in your understanding... And ask the necessary questions to fill in those gaps.
It's much easier for people to cheat in group projects than on any particular assignment. Nearing the end of my undergrad I specifically choose courses that didn't involve group projects because I got tired of doing other people's work (while they went to class).
Yup.
Always hated group assignments... There would always be at least one person who didn't pull their own weight.
Just make the punishment for cheating sufficiently harsh. You cheat.. you get kicked out. Simple.
My first year of my CS degree my professor wanted to talk to me after class one day. She explained that I'd been caught cheating on one of the assignments. I denied it. She explained that copying another student's work was plagiarism, and the penalty for that was expulsion. She was going to ignore it this time and give me a 0 on the assignment, but if she caught me again that would be it.
I had the distinct impression that if I insisted on my innocence she would change her mind and not ignore the offense. She seemed absolutely convinced that I had copied somebody else's work.
The fact of the matter is that I hadn't copied anyone's work.
I don't know if somebody grabbed my printout from the bin and copied my code... Or if I just happened to turn in very similar code to someone else... Or what.
Left me absolutely paranoid, didn't trust anyone, was terrified of getting kicked out of school for something I didn't even do.
What would you recommend looking at for virtualization/clustering on Linux these days? XenServer or a particular distro with KVM? Management?
Just curious.
I honestly haven't done much full-server virtualization. I typically use VirtualBox when I need a different environment for a particular bit of software or something... And I've had good luck with Parallels on a workstation at home...
I just mentioned XenServer because we had a client who needed a new server and some VMs, so that's what we ordered. And when my boss sat down in front of it to try out the new hardware, and wasn't greeted with a Windows login screen, he kept shaking the mouse like he was trying to wake it from sleep. He had no idea what to do without that Windows GUI.
As far as XenServer itself goes... It seems to be working pretty well. Haven't had any trouble setting up the VMs or anything. Seems to be functioning correctly.
I was considering upgrading to Win7 to get DirectX 11 & be able to allocate all of the RAM in Windows. Guess I will just get WinXP 64 Pro instead & do without DirectX 11.
The problem with that is XP-64 was never supported very well. I've seen tons of issues with XP-64... Bits of hardware and software that just plain do not work right, even though they should. It's a miserable operating system to support.
The only reason I upgraded to Vista was because it had real 64-bit support. As miserable as Vista was, at least the 64-bit version worked better than my XP-64 install. And Win7-64 is absolutely terrific.
3. Yes, Microsoft does decided to notify/annoy you that you're not using genuine software which is a good thing because most people don't know they are.
Very true.
Occasionally we'll get a call from someone who's become dis-satisfied with their current IT provider... They're shopping around for alternatives, maybe wondering if they've been getting screwed over the years... Maybe wondering if the grass is greener on the other side...
So, we'll go in and take a look around, do a site survey. Sometimes you start seeing a bunch of computers with automatic updates disabled... No service packs installed at all... Home-made systems... And nobody can come up with any licensing information at all...
We'll get permission to install WGA on their systems, and you'll see about 50% of them are non-genuine.
The false positives will turn into real positives. When a machine gets marked as non-genuine, it stops receiving updates. Which means is WILL get 0wned by the next zero-day attack.
They are basically just manufacturing more spambot machines with this strategy.
Unless they've changed their policy very recently, non-genuine Windows machines will still receive security updates.
Who in their right mind would use Windows on a server any more?
Folks who've spent their entire lives working on a Windows GUI and can't imagine a computer without a Start menu or a C: drive.
We're a Microsoft shop... That's generally what we sell and install, including servers. Myself, I don't much care what we run. I'm familiar with various flavors of *nix and support them as well. My boss, on the other hand, can't deal with anything non-Windows.
You should have seen his face the first time he sat down in front of a machine running XenServer. He had no freaking clue what to do with it. He kept shaking the mouse around and looking puzzled.
Looks like the Win7 upgrade is off the table for me. Dual-booting XP & Kubuntu for the foreseeable future!
Sure it is...
And I bet you were genuinely considering upgrading to Win7 to replace your dual-boot setup... And were all set to go ahead with it... And this bit of news just broke the deal, right?
XP has had WGA for years now, which does similar things. No, not identical, which is why WAT is being rolled out. But if WAT is such a horrific deal-breaker I can't imagine you're happy with WGA either. And if you've managed to deal with WGA for all these years, you could deal with WAT as well.
it's a lot less trivial for folks who never bought it (and thus pirated) by just disabling this WAT. Nice to know MS is treating their paying customers almost as well as it treats the ones that don't pay.
Yup.
Once again, the assorted DRM measures only affect paying customers.
Anyone who is actually pirating the software has already cracked or bypassed the activation process in some way. They'll probably never have to deal with this WAT stuff.
And some poor soul who actually purchased a legitimate copy of Windows (either retail, or with an OEM box) is going to get their software de-authorized because of a false positive.
I wonder how many false positives this will generate? The thing is, for every person who pirates Windows 7, there is a fairly decent chance that they will be doing so with an activation code which a genuine user may have purchased. I wonder if MS has figured out some way to deal with this issue? I wouldn't bet on it.
If I recall correctly, there was a similar issue with Windows XP. Some OEM disc/key combination made it into the wild and became popular amongst pirates. When Microsoft eventually invalidated that disc/key combination, it invalidated a number of Windows XP installs.
Either that, or I'm completely mis-remembering something else...
The question is, what counts as counterfeit hardware? Is he taking, say "genuine" Cisco hardware (as in, made in the same factory just not with the Cisco name on it) and selling it as real Cisco hardware, is he taking inferior components to make his hardware, is the hardware functional?
To a very large degree, it doesn't much matter whether he's using the same components as are found in the official Cisco hardware.
Even if the hardware he's selling is 100% identical to Cisco hardware, it isn't Cisco. This means that if I buy something thinking that it's Cisco, and have a problem, I'm going to call up Cisco and complain about it. And then they're going to tell me that I don't have their hardware. I'm wasting their time (and money)... And I've got a product that nobody is going to support. I won't be able to to download new software for the thing, or purchase new licenses, or anything.
One of the big reasons that we sell Cisco hardware to our clients is the technical support. I know that if we sell them a Cisco (with a support contract) and something goes wrong, we can get it fixed in a timely manner. It doesn't matter if it's a fubared config or a fried bit of hardware... I can call up Cisco, get in touch with a technician, and get the problem fixed.
If I found a great deal on Cisco hardware and sold them to my clients... Then later found out that it was counterfeit hardware and Cisco wouldn't support it... I'd be in a bit of a fix.
I'm no longer in class... So I'm not taking notes from a professor's lecture... But when we're having a meeting with clients or going over a new installation I'll usually take notes with my netbook.
'[While taking notes on a laptop] every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.'
That's where the built-in camera on my netbook comes in handy. It's pointed in the wrong direction, so I have to turn the netbook around or hold the page up in front of the camera or something... But it's great for grabbing diagrams that I can't easily type in.
We can't sit around and hope that everything will be maintained for ever...
Well, if the games had been designed differently, it wouldn't be necessary for them to be maintained forever.
What ever happened to a good ol' dedicated server running on your LAN?
Anybody who wants to pirate the game, can. There'll be a cracked copy available for download within days. DRM is not going to force anybody to pay for a game if they would rather have it free.
So the pirates are all playing their games without DRM. They don't have to make sure there's a disc in the drive... They don't have to wait while it phones home... They don't have to worry about how many times they've re-installed the software... They don't have to install extra security software to protect the publisher's revenue stream... They don't have to worry about the DRM servers shutting down, or their account getting banned, or somebody else stealing their key and being unable to play their game...
And the paying customers, who shelled out $50+ of their hard-earned cash, have to deal with all the DRM crap.
Oh that's right, zero.
The marginal cost of producing an ebook isn't zero.
You're going to have licensing costs on whatever DRM you use... Server storage... Bandwidth... Maybe it's less than the marginal costs of producing a paper book, but it isn't going to be zero.
But, marginal costs aren't what drives the price of a book to start with.
The whole idea of buying e-books is because they are easy to carry and store and is less expensive.
Says who?
Sure, it's nice to get things for less... But I didn't pay $400 for an ebook reader because I was too cheap to buy paper books. I bought it largely for the convenience of being able to carry my whole library around with me, and being able to purchase/download new titles without having to find a bookstore.
So an increase in price is not going to help the publishing industry in the right way.
First of all, what is the right way? Perhaps the publishing industry thinks the right way is to kill off ebooks so they can keep using paper?
Further, I don't think we've been told precisely how this price increase is going to work out... I somehow doubt that they're going to charge $15 for an ebook that's available as a $5 paperback. I assume we're talking about the larger volumes... Things that would normally cost $15+ in stores.
Expensive books are also encouraging people to acquire books by piracy as common man is unable to pay the high cost of getting books.
I don't know about this common man... But the average US citizen doesn't really buy books. Most folks don't read any more than they have to.
And $15 certainly isn't a lot for a book... Maybe it's a bit high for a trade paperback... But $15 is nothing compared to a lot of the books out there.
And keep in mind we're talking about ebooks, which require a certain amount of infrastructure. You really aren't going to see somebody with a computer, iPad, or Kindle absolutely unable to purchase an ebook because it costs $15 instead of $10.
Nobody writes while adhering to grammatical rules well enough for their sentences to compile.
No, they don't. It's a very good thing that the human mind is more flexible than the average compiler.
Returning to the subject at hand, you appear to be claiming that when KJV was written, writers were still refining the grammatical rules of English and shortly after this they settled on some rules which are now set in stone.
That isn't the claim I was trying to make.
I was attempting to point out that we had words for why the KJV reads oddly - namely that it was written in Early Modern English. Just as something written in German is going to look a bit odd to an English speaker.
I also pointed out that spelling had not been completely settled at the time... Spelling, these days, has largely settled down. I pointed out the preference for idoms even older than the KJV itself... And I pointed out that there were issues translating from Latin to English. I never said anything about grammar.
English, including written English, is a _natural_ language, meaning it evolves.
Yes, it does.
The syntax that defined English last year will not precisely define it this year and with the advent of faster and cheaper means of publishing (e.g. SMS, Twitter) it is to be expected that the rate of change will increase.
Agreed.
I accept that it is the case and the grammar rules written a hundred years ago (or even last year) are little more than approximations of how people write.
Agreed.
When a sentence is written in violation of those rules (such as "My bad."), you can argue that the sentence has incorrect syntax, but when many sentences sharing the same grammatical structure are written then the only reasonable conclusion is that the rules are incorrect representations of English.
Maybe.
Again, we're not talking about how people communicate face-to-face... Or with a txt message... Or on a Facebook post... We're talking about something fairly specific - college-level writing for exams and essays.
German, French, and English are all perfectly valid languages. There's nothing wrong with any of them. But if you're going to a school in America, taking a class in English, and turn in a paper written in German you can't expect a very good grade.
You need to use the appropriate language for the task at hand.
"My bad" might be perfectly acceptable in a quick memo to your co-worker explaining that your patch killed the server... It's probably not so acceptable in an email to a client who wants to know why their server was down and they couldn't collect money for several hours.
The problem here is not that the language is evolving... The problem is that these students do not know the proper language to use when writing for a college exam or essay.