Surely you just get mobile broadband via a USB modem stick? I can get one which runs at upto 7.2Mb/sec for $15/month (equivalent USD cost after rebates), with a 5Gb usage limit. Not sure if that kind of service has reached much of the US yet.
Dunno. I've since moved on and have a crappy residential cable ISP. I've got a work-provided cell phone that doesn't get Internet at all. I'm sure such things are available, though I have no idea what they cost or how well they work.
>>>a music student trying to download something from a P2P network for the sole purpose of writing a report?
Why can't you just go BUY the music like everybody else? Yeah I know. Shocking concept. But the people behind the music deserve to get paid; not stolen. A music student should understand that concept better than anyone else, since he/she will soon be relying on sales for income too.
Unless the song is something released on-line only.
I'm not suggesting that my scenario is likely, I was simply throwing out examples of why it may be difficult to filter out academic use from personal use.
I said earlier that a simple solution is just to limit connections to 128 kbit/s. It would still allow students to access email, online radio, or class websites, but the slow speed would discourage them from downloading an illegal 50 gigabyte Bluray rip (~40 day transfer time). The imposed speed limit would make the need for university policing very minimal, since P2P theft would be next-to-impossible.
Fair enough. And that's actually what my school did at the time. The dorms had a very small amount of bandwidth available to them. You could surf the web ok, do email ok, play some games ok... But big download basically didn't happen.
Of course that caused some trouble for the Computer Science department... New software releases took an awful long time to download.
Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
I'd honestly like to hear how that is supposed to work when you're living in a dorm room.
When I went to college everything had to go through the school. We paid the school for our cable TV, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms. We paid the school for our landline phones, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms. And we paid the school for our Internet, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms.
I suppose that these days you could probably get a cell phone with a data plan and plug your computer into that... But I doubt it would work very well, either from a cost or performance standpoint.
Additionally you've got a question of where you draw the line between academic purposes and everything else. Is sending an email home to the folks ok? How about emailing your professor? How about emailing another student? What if you're a music student and trying to download something from a P2P network for the sole purpose of writing a report about it?
Colleges are put in the very uncomfortable position of ISP for their residential students. On one side you've got the academic leanings towards free speech and open access... On the other side you've got the same issues ISPs have with providing adequate bandwidth to all their customers...
Not wanting to start anything but I'm just curious who should be paying for the rape exams if not the people who are actually using them?
If my car gets stolen, who pays the police officers to investigate? Who pays for whatever tools they use to gather evidence? Who pays for the phone calls, the gasoline in their vehicles? Who pays for their training? Who pays the judge to hear the case? Who pays the jury? Who pays to maintain the jail, the police station, the court house?
Why should rape be treated any differently from murder, theft, arson, or any other crime? Why should the victim of one crime have to foot the bill to investigate the case, and not the victim of a different crime?
You want to tell the parents of a kid who just died in a drunk driving accident that you can't investigate any further unless they buy you a breathalyzer? You want to tell some shopkeeper that it'll be $20/hr for the police to investigate the robbery? You want to tell the family of a murder victim that the Coroner still owes $50,000 on his student loan?
My main complaint with UAC is the lack of granularity. You have to either approve or disapprove fairly broad strokes.
Try right clicking on computer, then selecting 'manage'. That should bring up UAC every time, unless it is turned off.
Yeah, see, if I do that, I'm pretty sure I'm going to know what the damn UAC prompt is for.
Fair enough. Trying to run Computer Management is what brought up UAC. But what exactly are you authorizing? Just running the Computer Management screen, or anything and everything you can do in there? Why do I need to authorize it if I just want to look to see if a service is running - not make any changes at all?
For a more annoying example start up a command prompt without administrative credentials... Then try to do an IPCONFIG/RELEASE... It'll tell you that you can't. And you can't just SUDO it like you would on a Linux box. You have to create a new command prompt with administrative credentials...but now everything you do in that command prompt has administrative credentials, so you've got no added security at all.
For Politick, I go to Faux-News for my daily News(R) and CNN for my other News(D).
You're kidding, right? CNN for "News(D)"? I assume that you're implying a left-leaning bias on CNN? I haven't seen any evidence of that in years.
I always find it amusing when politicians complain about the "Liberal Media" because I would actually enjoy some liberal media, but I can never find it. Countdown, on MSNBC, is fun... As is the new Maddows show... But those are a couple specific shows, neither of them on CNN, and I'm not sure if I'd really call them "news" programs any more than The Daily Show.
If I'm actually looking for some real news I have to go with either NPR or an assortment of non-US sources.
Maybe, instead of worrying about rumors on these socnet "news" sites, these "journalistic watchdogs" might want to spend a little time thinking about the way mainstream journalism let down a country of more than 300 million by completely missing the fact that a presidential administration started a fucking war based upon nothing but lies and misdirection. Instead of jumping on the wagon and cheerleading this horrible rush to war, they might have checked a few facts themselves before going to print, day after day, week after week, month after month for more than two years.
What ever happened to investigative journalism? The kind of stuff that shut down McCarthy and broke Watergate? These days it seems that "journalists" are afraid to make waves.
No one with any sense (and who doesn't work for Microsoft) claims Vista is a "must-have" upgrade, though. It's basically a replacement for XP with a few extra bells and whistles... not worth upgrading if you have XP, but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.
I like that 64-bit support is more mainstream in Vista. XP Professional 64 always felt like an afterthought.
Beyond that, however, you are exactly right. There is no compelling reason to switch to Vista. And in many cases there are plenty of reasons (older hardware/software) not to.
By july 2009 Windows XP will be 8 years old! Because they extend it till then, both Microsoft and the market agree that this 8 year old operating system is still relevant and not hopelessly outdated despite its age.
In those 8 years, Windows has hardly evolved. Honestly, Windows Vista doesn't add too much groundbreaking stuff to Windows XP, the only real technological novelty is the graphics.
Eight years is a lot in computer history, and if you look at what it was 8 years before Windows XP, that was 1993. So Windows 3.11 is to Windows XP, what Windows XP is to Windows Vista, but the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller than the difference between 3.11 and XP!
Very true. Vista has a few changes under the hood that are nice... But the major difference is in the UI. There are some GUI modification tools out there that let you customize your Windows desktop with different themes and visual styles... I've worked on XP machines that were skinned to look like Vista machines, and it is very hard to tell the difference.
Look at KDE, Gnome, or the Linux kernel over the last 8 years... Amazing changes, all sorts of added functionality.
Take a look at the MacOS over the last 8 years - again, huge changes. Not just from a UI standpoint but real changes in how the OS operates.
Vista is a little bit more secure... A little bit less stable... And a lot more shiny... But that's about it.
I can do better than that. I pushed out 37 vista business installs about 4 months ago to all of our workstations here, and I've not had a single problem with it. The bees seems to love it and, for me, it's a heck of a lot easier to manage. I watch all this bashing going on and quite frankly, I don't get it. I understand that YMMV, but it seems like Vista is getting hammered but nobody's really tried it. I've heard a lot of "It won't run on my hardware" and "It won't run our winfax95" but c'mon...It's 2008.
I've had a very mixed experience with it myself...
I've got a tablet running Vista that probably shouldn't be. It was never designed with Vista in mind and the hardware is just barely supported. It runs, but not well. I'll likely go back to XP again with it fairly soon.
At home, I've got several machines running Vista Premium and I've had absolutely no issues with them at all. They're used extensively for gaming and the performance is just fine. No complaints.
I've also got several workstations at work that we're testing out with Vista Business and have had no trouble with so far. A few people are having issues with the GUI changes, but that's about it. They're generally as stable as XP was.
Then we've had a number of clients buying new computers and getting stuck with Vista. Their experiences generally range from bad to just plain horrible. Lots of incompatible hardware and software. Unexpected learning curves. Lots of complaining about strange issues. Repeated service calls.
I think a large part of the problem has been that this is the first major OS change that a number of people have had to deal with. Folks have been using XP for a number of years now, and everything has more or less worked the same. Now you've got folks just ordering a random computer from Dell, or picking something up at Best Buy...assuming that everything will work the way it has been...and suddenly stuff doesn't work. Their printer won't work with the new computer, their old software won't work, the buttons are all moved around.
Most of the issues I've seen are with people who didn't really expect Vista on their machine, or didn't actually research what switching to Vista would mean for them. For the folks that have intentionally upgraded to Vista it has, more or less, worked.
Which certainly doesn't make it a good OS... Or even much of an upgrade in a lot of cases... But I don't think it's as horrible as a lot of people are claiming either.
It's a Microsoft OS - anyone who expected rock-solid stability and bullet-proof security needs to have their head examined.
Which is all fine and good. Except who said blizzard was ENTITLED to that $60 income? Someone found a better/faster way to do something. Shocking.
Entitled? How did entitlement ever enter into the equation? If you subscribe to WoW you pay a monthly fee... If you don't subscribe, you don't pay. I doubt if Blizzard expects to get money from random people who've never played WoW, but I suspect they'd be pretty unhappy if a subscriber stopped paying.
Bliz doesn't like it - so pick up your ball and go home. Tell the kiddies who break the rules they can't play...but noooooooooo. That means $60 gets cut to $0.
Blizzard frequently bans accounts. Sometimes a little too aggressively. You may remember a story from a little while back when they were banning folks running WoW through WINE.
Sure, that income gets cut from $15/month to $0... But that account's usage of Blizzard's resources also goes to 0. We aren't talking about people that get banned, we're talking about people who are using more resources, and using those resources faster than Blizzard expected. Which means Blizzard's costs go up. Which means, ultimately, an increased monthly fee. I'd rather not have my monthly fee raised because of some folks violating the EULA.
What really irks me here is that they're not going after the individuals who are actually 'ruining' the game. They're going after one person/company instead because there's money to be had. A person/company who - themselves - is not accused of actually running the bot and hurting their income (as far as I know).
This is a dangerous road, are we going to start blaming any company that makes something which another company thinks hurts their revenue stream? I'll avoid the over-used gun analogy... because i'd rather people read this than get modded troll or flamebait;)
Blizzard, like pretty much anyone else in the US, is free to sue anyone they want. It's up to the court to decide if there's any merit to it. If the case was completely baseless then Blizzard wouldn't be getting any money, and these folks could actually counter-sue.
Don't blame Blizzard for a legal system that you feel is broken.
As far as whether Blizzard has any grounds or not... This piece of software was designed for the sole purpose of breaking Blizzard's EULA. This isn't some tool that can be used for perfectly legal purposes. It isn't like BitTorrent that can be used to distribute content legally, or DeCSS which can be used to play the DVDs you legally purchased. This is a piece of software designed from the ground up to break Blizzard's EULA...a piece of software that was then repeatedly re-designed to get around the attempts Blizzard made to simply keep that software from working.
I'm curious, as a end user of WoW, how am I to know that CT Raid Assist is "legal" and MMOGlider is not? Or any of the other dozens of mods available out there for that matter.
Is this whole case simply about removing the need for me to figure that out?
Blizzard provides a scripting language and plug-in framework for people to develop mods for the game. Basically anything you can create with their scripting language and plug-in framework is legal. If Blizzard discovers an add-on that is doing something they don't like, they'll find the underlying script element that makes it possible and break it. There have been a number of mods over the years that became very popular because they let you do things that Blizzard never intended, and then Blizzard intentionally broke them.
There have also been a number of mods over the years that became very popular, and were completely legal, and Blizzard rolled that functionality right into the core UI.
In the case of MMOGlider, the application was not developed using those scripting/plug-in libraries. And when Blizzard intentionally broke elements that MMOGlider used, the developers found a new way around them.
And there's your sticky issue, what exactly are the damages. I hate this because if I know it's happening, it ruins WoW for me. But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it? I might be jaded that I had to put in hours of muscle distrophying arthritis inducing clicking to get there... but what's different now? So another player has more gold or resources, it's a tiny leg up in that game as the best items are won in PVP or require meticulous PVE to acquire.
As a player, I want Blizzard to combat this crap at every step. If something is allowed to become too popular it becomes more-or-less necessary in order to play the game.
A good example is the CT Raid Assist mod. Makes raiding much, much easier. It's legal, doesn't break any of Blizzard's rules. And it has become insanely popular over the years. These days it is generally considered necessary for raiding. Any guild I've raided with recently actually requires you to have CT Raid Assist (or a similar/compatible mod) installed in order to raid with them.
Now, this isn't a problem, because CTRA is free. Just download it, install it, done! But if something like MMOGlider was allowed to grow, flourish, and become popular - it could easily reach the point where it is almost necessary to install MMOGlider in order to remain competitive. Everyone else out there will have their characters autonomously farming cash 24/7 and prices will skyrocket. Mere mortals who cannot farm all day long wouldn't be able to afford anything at all. I don't want to be virtually forced to purchase 3rd-party software just to play a game.
From Blizzard's standpoint, I think it can be evaluated in a more mathematical way.
There's probably some real cap on how much money or xp it is possible to earn in an hour. Say the best possible critter out there drops 10g a kill...and you can kill one a minute...so that gives you roughly 60g (or xp, or whatever) in an hour. So this means that you could theoretically earn 1440g in one day.
But I doubt if Blizzard ever intended for their players to remain logged in 24/7. They probably assumed that the game would be played by human beings who need to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. They probably counted on something more like 12/7. Which means that their calculations have all been thrown out the window. People are achieving things (money, items, levels) in something like half the time they were supposed to. And with a subscription-based game like WoW, time is very literally money.
Let's say that Blizzard figures it'll take the average player a month to get to level 70, then another month to get some halfway-decent gear, then another month to save up for an epic flying mount, then another month of farming reputation. That's four months, at $15 a month, or $60 income for Blizzard. With MMOGlider theoretically cutting that time in half, Blizzard is out $30.
Problem is that boycotts don't really work that well anymore. Sure, I can boycott them... And maybe a couple dozen other people will too... But EA will still make plenty of money from the thousands and thousands of people who'll happily buy their products. And any loss in sales will simply be attributed to piracy.
For a boycott to actually work you need to get enough people participating that it becomes impossible to ignore. And the vast majority of people these days just don't seem to care.
A lawsuit, on the other hand, gets attention. EA will, at the very least, have to throw some money at some lawyers. Maybe they'll wind up settling out of court... Maybe there'll be a real judgement... But either way EA is going to have to at least respond to the accusations.
And if it gets big enough, you might just see something about this on CNN on a slow news day. If EA got enough bad press we might even wind up with an effective boycott.
If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
True enough. I had a class like that in college. I screwed up so royally in the first few weeks of class that there was absolutely no way in hell I could pass it. I kept showing up to class every day though, kept taking notes, kept taking tests. I failed the class, as expected. But when I re-took it the next semester I got an A on just about everything. No, the professor wasn't assigning the same stuff over again, I'd just had twice the instruction as the rest of the class. And it served me very well.
A good analogy would be being under 6 feet of water as opposed to 600. If you don't do something about it, you're still going to drown, but it's possible to swim to the surface.
Nice analogy there... Let's take it a little further.
If the pool/lake/whatever bottoms out at 6 feet, you don't have to worry about sinking down to 600 feet - it is impossible. So folks with a natural advantage don't need to put in any effort at all. If you're 6.5 feet tall, you don't even need to swim - you can just stand there. You are very literally lowering the bar. Sure, it's easier for kids who screw up to fix that... But it is also easier for everyone to pass the class with less effort. So why should anyone try all that hard?
In my high school, there was a kid in the class that graduated the year before my class came in as freshman who only showed up to classes for quizes and tests all four years. He graduated with a B or B- average.
I hate to state the obvious here... But if he managed to graduate with a B/B- average, without actually taking the classes, then there was absolutely no point in him showing up for class. Obviously he knew the material to the satisfaction of the school.
Anyway, the point is, there are kids who'll use something like that to skate by while doing even less work.
Less work than who? That kid learned the material somewhere, he wasn't just born knowing it. He was doing, or did, the work somewhere. Some people have an easier time with academics... Some people are more interested in certain subjects... There will always be someone who is better at math/science/reading/whatever than someone else. And in most schools they'll be given the same tests. So the one who is better at math is going to have an easier time. There's no way around that. Unless you want to make them wear headphones that periodically play horrible noises to distract them...
Those kids shouldn't be skipping school
Why not? They obviously wouldn't be learning anything in school. Sure, there's the social aspect to it... I've known plenty of people who excelled in school, graduated early, and have exactly zero people skills. But I guess that's why so many classes give points for classroom participation, or group projects. In which case your anecdotal student would not have been able to skip everything and get a B/B- average. In which case there would actually be a reason to show up to class.
they should be found out and set aside for advanced studies that can actually push them.
Why? Just because they can? Certainly advanced learning should be available... And it generally is. There's usually nothing preventing someone from persueing education on their own. Lots of colleges allow pretty much anyone to audit their classes... Or you could go buy a book... Or find yourself a decent television/web/distance learning program... My Highschool offered a variety of advanced classes for the folks that wanted to take them. But forcing people into advanced classes just because they're capable sounds a little weird to me... What's next, occupational testing to determine which job you're best suited for, and then forcing you into it?
Otherwise, we're giving up the notion that we're actually trying to teach anything and accepting that all we're looking for is some basic cookie-cutter standards for well-disciplined automotons.
I think we gave up that notion quite some time ago.
With schools teaching Intelligent Design in biology class, sex ed classes that consist entirely of "don't do it", and students being disciplined for pointing out that a teacher has gotten a fact wrong... It's obvious that a real education is not the top priority.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised you've got to ask this question, since there are so many options out there...
First off, there's Google Apps. I know you said that it was never intended for home use, but I don't see why that matters. I've got a personal domain that I registered through GoDaddy a few years back, and have pointed the email service at Google's stuff. It took about 10 minutes to set up. I've only got about 5 email accounts that I'm using. I've got craptons of storage, nice webmail, POP3, IMAP, and all sorts of other stuff I'll never use (GTalk, Sites, whatever). If you're looking for free/cheap email you really ought to look at Google's offerings - all you need is a domain.
If you're looking to register a domain, GoDaddy has them cheap and I've had no trouble with them so far. They also provide email if you want it. They're cheap. I pay about $50/year for some web hosting and the domain name, and I had more email accounts than I would ever use. I switched to the Google Apps largely because I prefer their webmail - the stuff at GoDaddy is pretty crappy. But if all you want is POP3 or IMAP they're certainly an option.
There are also other companies out there that will sell you email service... One that I've heard good things about, but never used, is Fastmail.
Plus, just about any hosting company will sell you email service.
"Look at those Republican assholes, our superhero is guaranteed to win, no matter what!"
Polls suggest a close race. Past decade voting trends suggest a close race. Your optimism just isn't aligned with reality.
Exactly.
I think Bush is an idiot and McCain is more of the same... I can't understand why anyone would vote for him... But that doesn't somehow make me right. There are plenty of people out there who disagree with me. And judging from the polls this is going to be a very close race.
Unless, of course, the Democrats sit back all smug-like and assume their victory is assured...
Who cares about election theft when the average voter isn't capable of making an informed choice in the first place? And no, I don't mean the 50% picking the other party, I do mean that 90% of the people voting hardly have a clue about the issues at stake.
It absolutely horrifies me to think that a good chunk of the people who'll be casting a ballot this fall still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
If you've read any of my posts you know I'm an Obama supporter... But I'm really not so rabid as to suggest that my opinions are the only valid ones. There's plenty of debate over most of the major issues and folks are perfectly free to disagree with me. But I really wish folks would disagree based on actual facts.
We already know in advance that the election is going to be as rigged as the GOP believes they can get away with. Diebold was forced to admit it. Fortunately, Obama's success this November will be too sweeping for even the usual election-stealing shenanigans to saddle us with four more years of war, corruption, lies, and deepening economy woes.
Honestly, folks like you worry me.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same... I'd love to see Obama in office... And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office.
I really don't want to get stuck with McCain just because we all sat on our asses and congratulated ourselves on a job well-done, when it hadn't even been done yet.
When 90-95% of the PCs in homes aren't even SLI capable what deludes people into buying such a niche product and then expecting to be catered to?
None of this is new. Stop throwing $500 into SLI video cards and $300 mainboards, IT ISN'T WORTH IT.
That's been my experience as well. Video games are developed to be played. They're looking to sell lots and lots of them. They want the widest audience possible. Sure, a game may run better or look nicer on a bleeding edge system...but it won't require that kind of hardware. Developers are aiming for decent, not amazing hardware.
Sure, if money is absolutely no object then go right ahead and pour it into SLI and GPUs and whatnot. But generally speaking you can get more for your money if you put it into RAM and CPU.
A friend and I both built custom gaming machines not too long ago... He got a nice SLI motherboard and a couple high-end video cards...wound up spending something like $700 on video cards alone. I built a much cheaper system, single video card, but more RAM and a slightly faster CPU. His machine definitely out-performs mine at absurd resolutions with all the options cranked up... But at 1280x1024 (which is what my LCD monitor likes) there is absolutely no visible difference between the two machines.
You believe you can trust in paper just because it is widespread and been in use for a while. But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc. You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.
Paper can be misused as well... But at least people generally know how paper works. It's a physical medium. You can count actual objects. You can find actual objects that have been stuffed in a waste-basket, or see actual object being stuffed into the ballot-box. We've had a couple hundred years of trying to accurately count paper ballots and have generally worked out the bugs.
The big problem with electronic ballots is not that any given machine was insecure or poorly designed, it's a fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to electronics and computers. Large chunks of the population still don't know what a hard disk drive is, or how software works, or how easy it can be to tamper with an electronic device like a voting machine. People don't understand why it is ok to bring one of the old paper-ballot machines home before an election, but it isn't ok to bring an electronic one home.
Folks here on Slashdot are generally fairly familiar with technology. Folks here typically at least know what source code is and why you might need to be able to read it in order to certify that a machine is or isn't secure. Many, many people out there have absolutely no idea what source code is.
Personally I find that the ability to take a lot of pictures at absolutely no cost has actually done a lot for photography. People aren't worried anymore that they are wasting film, or developing costs, so they just take a bunch of pictures. I know that I have a lot of the really nice pictures I have, simply because I could take 20 pictures without having to worry about the 19 that didn't turn out well. When I look back at my old family albums, there aren't a lot of pictures, and of the pictures that are there, a good number of them are somewhat bad quality. When I look back at the albums I have for my kids, there's a lot of really great photos.
Agreed. We used to go on vacation somewhere and you'd have a finite amount of film. Maybe two or three rolls. Maybe you could stop and buy more...maybe you couldn't. And there was always a thought in the back of your head "is this worth taking a picture?"
I can't count the number of times I wished I had taken a picture, but I didn't, because I didn't want to waste the film. Goofy little things that didn't seem to matter too much at the time, but now I wish I had a picture.
I can't count the number of times I wasn't able to take a picture because I was just plain out of film.
Then there are all the pictures that just don't come out the way you want them to, and you wind up either wishing you hadn't wasted the film, or wishing you had taken more than one picture.
With digital I can take virtually unlimited pictures. Hundreds, thousands of pictures on a tiny little memory card. I routinely carry around far more memory than I'm likely to use over the course of a vacation. And if I do start running out I can easily dump them to my laptop, or email them to myself, or even stuff them into my PDA.
And with digital it is immediately obvious which pictures didn't come out right, so I can re-take them.
These days I find myself with more pictures that I value and want to hang on to...not less.
And as far as the GP complaining about losing pictures... I guess maybe it's easier to lose a memory card than it is a box of photos, simply because it is smaller... But it's also very easy to save your pictures because they're smaller.
All my pictures eventually find their way to a RAID-5 NAS, so a drive failure or two isn't going to lose them. And I routinely back up all my important documents to DVD, which then winds up in a safety deposit box. And I can put a lot of pictures on a DVD or two. And the really nice pictures get printed professionally on photographic paper and put into albums or framed.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you just get mobile broadband via a USB modem stick? I can get one which runs at upto 7.2Mb/sec for $15/month (equivalent USD cost after rebates), with a 5Gb usage limit.
Not sure if that kind of service has reached much of the US yet.
Dunno. I've since moved on and have a crappy residential cable ISP. I've got a work-provided cell phone that doesn't get Internet at all. I'm sure such things are available, though I have no idea what they cost or how well they work.
>>>a music student trying to download something from a P2P network for the sole purpose of writing a report?
Why can't you just go BUY the music like everybody else? Yeah I know. Shocking concept. But the people behind the music deserve to get paid; not stolen. A music student should understand that concept better than anyone else, since he/she will soon be relying on sales for income too.
Unless the song is something released on-line only.
I'm not suggesting that my scenario is likely, I was simply throwing out examples of why it may be difficult to filter out academic use from personal use.
I said earlier that a simple solution is just to limit connections to 128 kbit/s. It would still allow students to access email, online radio, or class websites, but the slow speed would discourage them from downloading an illegal 50 gigabyte Bluray rip (~40 day transfer time). The imposed speed limit would make the need for university policing very minimal, since P2P theft would be next-to-impossible.
Fair enough. And that's actually what my school did at the time. The dorms had a very small amount of bandwidth available to them. You could surf the web ok, do email ok, play some games ok... But big download basically didn't happen.
Of course that caused some trouble for the Computer Science department... New software releases took an awful long time to download.
Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
I'd honestly like to hear how that is supposed to work when you're living in a dorm room.
When I went to college everything had to go through the school. We paid the school for our cable TV, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms. We paid the school for our landline phones, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms. And we paid the school for our Internet, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms.
I suppose that these days you could probably get a cell phone with a data plan and plug your computer into that... But I doubt it would work very well, either from a cost or performance standpoint.
Additionally you've got a question of where you draw the line between academic purposes and everything else. Is sending an email home to the folks ok? How about emailing your professor? How about emailing another student? What if you're a music student and trying to download something from a P2P network for the sole purpose of writing a report about it?
Colleges are put in the very uncomfortable position of ISP for their residential students. On one side you've got the academic leanings towards free speech and open access... On the other side you've got the same issues ISPs have with providing adequate bandwidth to all their customers...
Not wanting to start anything but I'm just curious who should be paying for the rape exams if not the people who are actually using them?
If my car gets stolen, who pays the police officers to investigate? Who pays for whatever tools they use to gather evidence? Who pays for the phone calls, the gasoline in their vehicles? Who pays for their training? Who pays the judge to hear the case? Who pays the jury? Who pays to maintain the jail, the police station, the court house?
Why should rape be treated any differently from murder, theft, arson, or any other crime? Why should the victim of one crime have to foot the bill to investigate the case, and not the victim of a different crime?
You want to tell the parents of a kid who just died in a drunk driving accident that you can't investigate any further unless they buy you a breathalyzer? You want to tell some shopkeeper that it'll be $20/hr for the police to investigate the robbery? You want to tell the family of a murder victim that the Coroner still owes $50,000 on his student loan?
My main complaint with UAC is the lack of granularity. You have to either approve or disapprove fairly broad strokes.
Try right clicking on computer, then selecting 'manage'. That should bring up UAC every time, unless it is turned off.
Yeah, see, if I do that, I'm pretty sure I'm going to know what the damn UAC prompt is for.
Fair enough. Trying to run Computer Management is what brought up UAC. But what exactly are you authorizing? Just running the Computer Management screen, or anything and everything you can do in there? Why do I need to authorize it if I just want to look to see if a service is running - not make any changes at all?
For a more annoying example start up a command prompt without administrative credentials... Then try to do an IPCONFIG /RELEASE... It'll tell you that you can't. And you can't just SUDO it like you would on a Linux box. You have to create a new command prompt with administrative credentials...but now everything you do in that command prompt has administrative credentials, so you've got no added security at all.
For Politick, I go to Faux-News for my daily News(R) and CNN for my other News(D).
You're kidding, right? CNN for "News(D)"? I assume that you're implying a left-leaning bias on CNN? I haven't seen any evidence of that in years.
I always find it amusing when politicians complain about the "Liberal Media" because I would actually enjoy some liberal media, but I can never find it. Countdown, on MSNBC, is fun... As is the new Maddows show... But those are a couple specific shows, neither of them on CNN, and I'm not sure if I'd really call them "news" programs any more than The Daily Show.
If I'm actually looking for some real news I have to go with either NPR or an assortment of non-US sources.
Maybe, instead of worrying about rumors on these socnet "news" sites, these "journalistic watchdogs" might want to spend a little time thinking about the way mainstream journalism let down a country of more than 300 million by completely missing the fact that a presidential administration started a fucking war based upon nothing but lies and misdirection. Instead of jumping on the wagon and cheerleading this horrible rush to war, they might have checked a few facts themselves before going to print, day after day, week after week, month after month for more than two years.
What ever happened to investigative journalism? The kind of stuff that shut down McCarthy and broke Watergate? These days it seems that "journalists" are afraid to make waves.
No one with any sense (and who doesn't work for Microsoft) claims Vista is a "must-have" upgrade, though. It's basically a replacement for XP with a few extra bells and whistles... not worth upgrading if you have XP, but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.
I like that 64-bit support is more mainstream in Vista. XP Professional 64 always felt like an afterthought.
Beyond that, however, you are exactly right. There is no compelling reason to switch to Vista. And in many cases there are plenty of reasons (older hardware/software) not to.
By july 2009 Windows XP will be 8 years old! Because they extend it till then, both Microsoft and the market agree that this 8 year old operating system is still relevant and not hopelessly outdated despite its age.
In those 8 years, Windows has hardly evolved. Honestly, Windows Vista doesn't add too much groundbreaking stuff to Windows XP, the only real technological novelty is the graphics.
Eight years is a lot in computer history, and if you look at what it was 8 years before Windows XP, that was 1993. So Windows 3.11 is to Windows XP, what Windows XP is to Windows Vista, but the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller than the difference between 3.11 and XP!
Very true. Vista has a few changes under the hood that are nice... But the major difference is in the UI. There are some GUI modification tools out there that let you customize your Windows desktop with different themes and visual styles... I've worked on XP machines that were skinned to look like Vista machines, and it is very hard to tell the difference.
Look at KDE, Gnome, or the Linux kernel over the last 8 years... Amazing changes, all sorts of added functionality.
Take a look at the MacOS over the last 8 years - again, huge changes. Not just from a UI standpoint but real changes in how the OS operates.
Vista is a little bit more secure... A little bit less stable... And a lot more shiny... But that's about it.
I can do better than that. I pushed out 37 vista business installs about 4 months ago to all of our workstations here, and I've not had a single problem with it. The bees seems to love it and, for me, it's a heck of a lot easier to manage. I watch all this bashing going on and quite frankly, I don't get it. I understand that YMMV, but it seems like Vista is getting hammered but nobody's really tried it. I've heard a lot of "It won't run on my hardware" and "It won't run our winfax95" but c'mon...It's 2008.
I've had a very mixed experience with it myself...
I've got a tablet running Vista that probably shouldn't be. It was never designed with Vista in mind and the hardware is just barely supported. It runs, but not well. I'll likely go back to XP again with it fairly soon.
At home, I've got several machines running Vista Premium and I've had absolutely no issues with them at all. They're used extensively for gaming and the performance is just fine. No complaints.
I've also got several workstations at work that we're testing out with Vista Business and have had no trouble with so far. A few people are having issues with the GUI changes, but that's about it. They're generally as stable as XP was.
Then we've had a number of clients buying new computers and getting stuck with Vista. Their experiences generally range from bad to just plain horrible. Lots of incompatible hardware and software. Unexpected learning curves. Lots of complaining about strange issues. Repeated service calls.
I think a large part of the problem has been that this is the first major OS change that a number of people have had to deal with. Folks have been using XP for a number of years now, and everything has more or less worked the same. Now you've got folks just ordering a random computer from Dell, or picking something up at Best Buy...assuming that everything will work the way it has been...and suddenly stuff doesn't work. Their printer won't work with the new computer, their old software won't work, the buttons are all moved around.
Most of the issues I've seen are with people who didn't really expect Vista on their machine, or didn't actually research what switching to Vista would mean for them. For the folks that have intentionally upgraded to Vista it has, more or less, worked.
Which certainly doesn't make it a good OS... Or even much of an upgrade in a lot of cases... But I don't think it's as horrible as a lot of people are claiming either.
It's a Microsoft OS - anyone who expected rock-solid stability and bullet-proof security needs to have their head examined.
Which is all fine and good. Except who said blizzard was ENTITLED to that $60 income? Someone found a better/faster way to do something. Shocking.
Entitled? How did entitlement ever enter into the equation? If you subscribe to WoW you pay a monthly fee... If you don't subscribe, you don't pay. I doubt if Blizzard expects to get money from random people who've never played WoW, but I suspect they'd be pretty unhappy if a subscriber stopped paying.
Bliz doesn't like it - so pick up your ball and go home. Tell the kiddies who break the rules they can't play...but noooooooooo. That means $60 gets cut to $0.
Blizzard frequently bans accounts. Sometimes a little too aggressively. You may remember a story from a little while back when they were banning folks running WoW through WINE.
Sure, that income gets cut from $15/month to $0... But that account's usage of Blizzard's resources also goes to 0. We aren't talking about people that get banned, we're talking about people who are using more resources, and using those resources faster than Blizzard expected. Which means Blizzard's costs go up. Which means, ultimately, an increased monthly fee. I'd rather not have my monthly fee raised because of some folks violating the EULA.
What really irks me here is that they're not going after the individuals who are actually 'ruining' the game. They're going after one person/company instead because there's money to be had. A person/company who - themselves - is not accused of actually running the bot and hurting their income (as far as I know).
This is a dangerous road, are we going to start blaming any company that makes something which another company thinks hurts their revenue stream? I'll avoid the over-used gun analogy ... because i'd rather people read this than get modded troll or flamebait ;)
Blizzard, like pretty much anyone else in the US, is free to sue anyone they want. It's up to the court to decide if there's any merit to it. If the case was completely baseless then Blizzard wouldn't be getting any money, and these folks could actually counter-sue.
Don't blame Blizzard for a legal system that you feel is broken.
As far as whether Blizzard has any grounds or not... This piece of software was designed for the sole purpose of breaking Blizzard's EULA. This isn't some tool that can be used for perfectly legal purposes. It isn't like BitTorrent that can be used to distribute content legally, or DeCSS which can be used to play the DVDs you legally purchased. This is a piece of software designed from the ground up to break Blizzard's EULA...a piece of software that was then repeatedly re-designed to get around the attempts Blizzard made to simply keep that software from working.
I'm curious, as a end user of WoW, how am I to know that CT Raid Assist is "legal" and MMOGlider is not? Or any of the other dozens of mods available out there for that matter.
Is this whole case simply about removing the need for me to figure that out?
Blizzard provides a scripting language and plug-in framework for people to develop mods for the game. Basically anything you can create with their scripting language and plug-in framework is legal. If Blizzard discovers an add-on that is doing something they don't like, they'll find the underlying script element that makes it possible and break it. There have been a number of mods over the years that became very popular because they let you do things that Blizzard never intended, and then Blizzard intentionally broke them.
There have also been a number of mods over the years that became very popular, and were completely legal, and Blizzard rolled that functionality right into the core UI.
In the case of MMOGlider, the application was not developed using those scripting/plug-in libraries. And when Blizzard intentionally broke elements that MMOGlider used, the developers found a new way around them.
And there's your sticky issue, what exactly are the damages. I hate this because if I know it's happening, it ruins WoW for me. But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it? I might be jaded that I had to put in hours of muscle distrophying arthritis inducing clicking to get there ... but what's different now? So another player has more gold or resources, it's a tiny leg up in that game as the best items are won in PVP or require meticulous PVE to acquire.
As a player, I want Blizzard to combat this crap at every step. If something is allowed to become too popular it becomes more-or-less necessary in order to play the game.
A good example is the CT Raid Assist mod. Makes raiding much, much easier. It's legal, doesn't break any of Blizzard's rules. And it has become insanely popular over the years. These days it is generally considered necessary for raiding. Any guild I've raided with recently actually requires you to have CT Raid Assist (or a similar/compatible mod) installed in order to raid with them.
Now, this isn't a problem, because CTRA is free. Just download it, install it, done! But if something like MMOGlider was allowed to grow, flourish, and become popular - it could easily reach the point where it is almost necessary to install MMOGlider in order to remain competitive. Everyone else out there will have their characters autonomously farming cash 24/7 and prices will skyrocket. Mere mortals who cannot farm all day long wouldn't be able to afford anything at all. I don't want to be virtually forced to purchase 3rd-party software just to play a game.
From Blizzard's standpoint, I think it can be evaluated in a more mathematical way.
There's probably some real cap on how much money or xp it is possible to earn in an hour. Say the best possible critter out there drops 10g a kill...and you can kill one a minute...so that gives you roughly 60g (or xp, or whatever) in an hour. So this means that you could theoretically earn 1440g in one day.
But I doubt if Blizzard ever intended for their players to remain logged in 24/7. They probably assumed that the game would be played by human beings who need to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. They probably counted on something more like 12/7. Which means that their calculations have all been thrown out the window. People are achieving things (money, items, levels) in something like half the time they were supposed to. And with a subscription-based game like WoW, time is very literally money.
Let's say that Blizzard figures it'll take the average player a month to get to level 70, then another month to get some halfway-decent gear, then another month to save up for an epic flying mount, then another month of farming reputation. That's four months, at $15 a month, or $60 income for Blizzard. With MMOGlider theoretically cutting that time in half, Blizzard is out $30.
Problem is that boycotts don't really work that well anymore. Sure, I can boycott them... And maybe a couple dozen other people will too... But EA will still make plenty of money from the thousands and thousands of people who'll happily buy their products. And any loss in sales will simply be attributed to piracy.
For a boycott to actually work you need to get enough people participating that it becomes impossible to ignore. And the vast majority of people these days just don't seem to care.
A lawsuit, on the other hand, gets attention. EA will, at the very least, have to throw some money at some lawyers. Maybe they'll wind up settling out of court... Maybe there'll be a real judgement... But either way EA is going to have to at least respond to the accusations.
And if it gets big enough, you might just see something about this on CNN on a slow news day. If EA got enough bad press we might even wind up with an effective boycott.
True enough. I had a class like that in college. I screwed up so royally in the first few weeks of class that there was absolutely no way in hell I could pass it. I kept showing up to class every day though, kept taking notes, kept taking tests. I failed the class, as expected. But when I re-took it the next semester I got an A on just about everything. No, the professor wasn't assigning the same stuff over again, I'd just had twice the instruction as the rest of the class. And it served me very well.
Nice analogy there... Let's take it a little further.
If the pool/lake/whatever bottoms out at 6 feet, you don't have to worry about sinking down to 600 feet - it is impossible. So folks with a natural advantage don't need to put in any effort at all. If you're 6.5 feet tall, you don't even need to swim - you can just stand there. You are very literally lowering the bar. Sure, it's easier for kids who screw up to fix that... But it is also easier for everyone to pass the class with less effort. So why should anyone try all that hard?
I hate to state the obvious here... But if he managed to graduate with a B/B- average, without actually taking the classes, then there was absolutely no point in him showing up for class. Obviously he knew the material to the satisfaction of the school.
Less work than who? That kid learned the material somewhere, he wasn't just born knowing it. He was doing, or did, the work somewhere. Some people have an easier time with academics... Some people are more interested in certain subjects... There will always be someone who is better at math/science/reading/whatever than someone else. And in most schools they'll be given the same tests. So the one who is better at math is going to have an easier time. There's no way around that. Unless you want to make them wear headphones that periodically play horrible noises to distract them...
Why not? They obviously wouldn't be learning anything in school. Sure, there's the social aspect to it... I've known plenty of people who excelled in school, graduated early, and have exactly zero people skills. But I guess that's why so many classes give points for classroom participation, or group projects. In which case your anecdotal student would not have been able to skip everything and get a B/B- average. In which case there would actually be a reason to show up to class.
Why? Just because they can? Certainly advanced learning should be available... And it generally is. There's usually nothing preventing someone from persueing education on their own. Lots of colleges allow pretty much anyone to audit their classes... Or you could go buy a book... Or find yourself a decent television/web/distance learning program... My Highschool offered a variety of advanced classes for the folks that wanted to take them. But forcing people into advanced classes just because they're capable sounds a little weird to me... What's next, occupational testing to determine which job you're best suited for, and then forcing you into it?
I think we gave up that notion quite some time ago.
With schools teaching Intelligent Design in biology class, sex ed classes that consist entirely of "don't do it", and students being disciplined for pointing out that a teacher has gotten a fact wrong... It's obvious that a real education is not the top priority.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised you've got to ask this question, since there are so many options out there...
First off, there's Google Apps. I know you said that it was never intended for home use, but I don't see why that matters. I've got a personal domain that I registered through GoDaddy a few years back, and have pointed the email service at Google's stuff. It took about 10 minutes to set up. I've only got about 5 email accounts that I'm using. I've got craptons of storage, nice webmail, POP3, IMAP, and all sorts of other stuff I'll never use (GTalk, Sites, whatever). If you're looking for free/cheap email you really ought to look at Google's offerings - all you need is a domain.
If you're looking to register a domain, GoDaddy has them cheap and I've had no trouble with them so far. They also provide email if you want it. They're cheap. I pay about $50/year for some web hosting and the domain name, and I had more email accounts than I would ever use. I switched to the Google Apps largely because I prefer their webmail - the stuff at GoDaddy is pretty crappy. But if all you want is POP3 or IMAP they're certainly an option.
There are also other companies out there that will sell you email service... One that I've heard good things about, but never used, is Fastmail.
Plus, just about any hosting company will sell you email service.
"Look at those Republican assholes, our superhero is guaranteed to win, no matter what!"
Polls suggest a close race. Past decade voting trends suggest a close race. Your optimism just isn't aligned with reality.
Exactly.
I think Bush is an idiot and McCain is more of the same... I can't understand why anyone would vote for him... But that doesn't somehow make me right. There are plenty of people out there who disagree with me. And judging from the polls this is going to be a very close race.
Unless, of course, the Democrats sit back all smug-like and assume their victory is assured...
Who cares about election theft when the average voter isn't capable of making an informed choice in the first place? And no, I don't mean the 50% picking the other party, I do mean that 90% of the people voting hardly have a clue about the issues at stake.
It absolutely horrifies me to think that a good chunk of the people who'll be casting a ballot this fall still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
If you've read any of my posts you know I'm an Obama supporter... But I'm really not so rabid as to suggest that my opinions are the only valid ones. There's plenty of debate over most of the major issues and folks are perfectly free to disagree with me. But I really wish folks would disagree based on actual facts.
We already know in advance that the election is going to be as rigged as the GOP believes they can get away with. Diebold was forced to admit it. Fortunately, Obama's success this November will be too sweeping for even the usual election-stealing shenanigans to saddle us with four more years of war, corruption, lies, and deepening economy woes.
Honestly, folks like you worry me.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same... I'd love to see Obama in office... And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office.
I really don't want to get stuck with McCain just because we all sat on our asses and congratulated ourselves on a job well-done, when it hadn't even been done yet.
When 90-95% of the PCs in homes aren't even SLI capable what deludes people into buying such a niche product and then expecting to be catered to?
None of this is new. Stop throwing $500 into SLI video cards and $300 mainboards, IT ISN'T WORTH IT.
That's been my experience as well. Video games are developed to be played. They're looking to sell lots and lots of them. They want the widest audience possible. Sure, a game may run better or look nicer on a bleeding edge system...but it won't require that kind of hardware. Developers are aiming for decent, not amazing hardware.
Sure, if money is absolutely no object then go right ahead and pour it into SLI and GPUs and whatnot. But generally speaking you can get more for your money if you put it into RAM and CPU.
A friend and I both built custom gaming machines not too long ago... He got a nice SLI motherboard and a couple high-end video cards...wound up spending something like $700 on video cards alone. I built a much cheaper system, single video card, but more RAM and a slightly faster CPU. His machine definitely out-performs mine at absurd resolutions with all the options cranked up... But at 1280x1024 (which is what my LCD monitor likes) there is absolutely no visible difference between the two machines.
You believe you can trust in paper just because it is widespread and been in use for a while. But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc. You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.
Paper can be misused as well... But at least people generally know how paper works. It's a physical medium. You can count actual objects. You can find actual objects that have been stuffed in a waste-basket, or see actual object being stuffed into the ballot-box. We've had a couple hundred years of trying to accurately count paper ballots and have generally worked out the bugs.
The big problem with electronic ballots is not that any given machine was insecure or poorly designed, it's a fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to electronics and computers. Large chunks of the population still don't know what a hard disk drive is, or how software works, or how easy it can be to tamper with an electronic device like a voting machine. People don't understand why it is ok to bring one of the old paper-ballot machines home before an election, but it isn't ok to bring an electronic one home.
Folks here on Slashdot are generally fairly familiar with technology. Folks here typically at least know what source code is and why you might need to be able to read it in order to certify that a machine is or isn't secure. Many, many people out there have absolutely no idea what source code is.
The damn thing is going to be heart-breakingly bad anyhow from what I've seen & read about it.
That is what I had assumed. I didn't figure there was any way Hollywood could possibly turn out a decent version of Watchmen.
But then I read this, and now I'm vaguely hopeful.
Personally I find that the ability to take a lot of pictures at absolutely no cost has actually done a lot for photography. People aren't worried anymore that they are wasting film, or developing costs, so they just take a bunch of pictures. I know that I have a lot of the really nice pictures I have, simply because I could take 20 pictures without having to worry about the 19 that didn't turn out well. When I look back at my old family albums, there aren't a lot of pictures, and of the pictures that are there, a good number of them are somewhat bad quality. When I look back at the albums I have for my kids, there's a lot of really great photos.
Agreed. We used to go on vacation somewhere and you'd have a finite amount of film. Maybe two or three rolls. Maybe you could stop and buy more...maybe you couldn't. And there was always a thought in the back of your head "is this worth taking a picture?"
I can't count the number of times I wished I had taken a picture, but I didn't, because I didn't want to waste the film. Goofy little things that didn't seem to matter too much at the time, but now I wish I had a picture.
I can't count the number of times I wasn't able to take a picture because I was just plain out of film.
Then there are all the pictures that just don't come out the way you want them to, and you wind up either wishing you hadn't wasted the film, or wishing you had taken more than one picture.
With digital I can take virtually unlimited pictures. Hundreds, thousands of pictures on a tiny little memory card. I routinely carry around far more memory than I'm likely to use over the course of a vacation. And if I do start running out I can easily dump them to my laptop, or email them to myself, or even stuff them into my PDA.
And with digital it is immediately obvious which pictures didn't come out right, so I can re-take them.
These days I find myself with more pictures that I value and want to hang on to...not less.
And as far as the GP complaining about losing pictures... I guess maybe it's easier to lose a memory card than it is a box of photos, simply because it is smaller... But it's also very easy to save your pictures because they're smaller.
All my pictures eventually find their way to a RAID-5 NAS, so a drive failure or two isn't going to lose them. And I routinely back up all my important documents to DVD, which then winds up in a safety deposit box. And I can put a lot of pictures on a DVD or two. And the really nice pictures get printed professionally on photographic paper and put into albums or framed.
Most US Voters aren't informed at all, about anything.
Most folks don't have any idea what is going on in the world, what their government is doing in their name, how the economy works...
I'm constantly horrified at the number of people who vote for their representatives based solely on whether they seem folksy or friendly enough.