You certainly couldn't - I worked in another school in Essex that does exactly the same. I assure you it is not only real, but *nobody* in the school understands the problem with it except the bad teachers who accept it but get tetchy that their bad teaching is being recorded... not the fact that they are bad teachers, or that they/the staff/the students are being recorded - but the fact that they might have thier gravy-train ended.
I was asked to design and build systems to do just this too, because I could CCTV up a room cheaper than their suppliers. I built one to cover the ICT office which *we* turned on and off overnight or during the holidays to help spot where our laptops were disappearing to, and had no further part in anything else. Not only does it exist - it is happening, it is accepted and it's not being questioned by ANYONE, staff, students, parents, heads, local authorities, etc. even when they are made aware of it. That's more scary than merely "it's possible" or "it exists".
However, that system is undoubtedly NOT under the control of the IT department, or only minimally via their contractors, when it should be - nobody else really deals with the policy regarding DPA issues except for the IT department and possibly a Data Manager in the larger schools. Unfortunately, it will also tie into their IT registration systems. In doing so, they've given no thought to maintenance or integration costs, whether it satisfies the requirements of such a system, potential interactions (how quickly do "expelled" students get removed from the database, or new students get added?), etc. It's based heavily on similar IT that I have supported (card-swipe registration) where the same problems came up and nobody cared - you even had kids stealing staff cards in order to get into the school at lunchtime because it could take a week to get them cancelled. Each card cost a LOT of money to print and it's a certainty that this system is only slightly undercutting their nearest rival systems (cardswipe reg system) in order to make most profit - for a job that takes FIVE MINUTES for a good teacher and is actually quicker done on a bit of paper. Yes, even some modern schools with thousands of pupils are still using "old-fashioned" registers. And bloody right, as well.
And I have to second the comments made by others on school procurement processes in the UK... I have to say that I *have* worked in places in the past where things were bought purely on the basis that the head was sweet-talked without consulting staff, or where the head was actually a family member / golf buddy / old army colleague of the supplier, as were all the governors (or they were suitably ejected, or otherwise not part of the decision-making process). I've seen IT companies, just like this, with "new" products which were set up entirely on the basis of selling to a handful of schools under the control of a single person, only to disappear shortly after delivery of shoddy, inadequate products with falsely-stated claims and zero other previous clients. Some of them even get as far as BETT...
Alright... on the same topic... what happens if THE SYSTEM is the cause of the fire? Hence, you have no records and can't gather any? Not likely, but there are things such as *power cuts* when fires occur (even enforced by the fire brigade etc.), LOTS OF WATER from sprinklers, etc. How is the system going to "print off" a nice piece of paper when it's in six inches of water and the paper is soaked?
I work in schools, in the UK, in IT. This is just incredibly stupid.
You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency. That automated system is NO GOOD for that purpose - and you're relying on it with little to no manual backup. You WILL get students with photocopies of their friend's faces (and/or other similarly low-tech solutions to allow the automated system to recognise and register them) in order to get out of lessons, lectures, etc. that they are made to attend. Then when you have a fire, and they are actually somewhere else (or vice versa, logged out of the system but actually still on the premises) you are going to put people's lives at risk. Seriously, give me a week, and I could probably find a way around it that a sixth-former could manage.
Not only that, you are opening yourself up to enormous DPA issues, because this is a irrevocable biometric - much like the UK government and education in general currently condemns and advises against fingerprint recognition systems in schools. It's also completely unnecessary, extremely expensive, probably quite unreliable (any identical twins go to that college, or even just two people who look alike?), potentially discriminatory (What if someone's face isn't recognised? What if they have disfigurement? What if they deliberately obscure their face or object to the system? Do you allow a bypass to that system for them?). The cost of implementing and *maintaining* and *renewing* that system probably far outweighs an hour or so a day at minimum wage for a member of admin/support staff who has some free time, before you even consider the future problems you've opened yourself up to.
Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.
What did it use to create those previews? Adobe Acrobat Reader (the associated program for that particular user on that particular system) or a program that has been specified specifically for that purpose? Or even it's own internal renderer? I don't think it's sitting there loading up Acrobat Reader for Linux for every thumbnail, somehow, which is apparently what Windows does. I think you might find that konqueror internally decides to use libpoppler, no matter what file is associated with PDF mimetypes (but I could be wrong there - google can be misleading). Thus, it's konqueror itself and it's built-in libraries that are doing the preview, not some random associated executable. Thus, new and "interesting" mimetypes don't execute even more external programs for no reason when you view them, they just don't have previews.
Actually, I'll think your find that *this* vulnerability affects only Adobe products but I haven't seen any mention of anything saying that non-Windows platforms are vulnerable... I just checked CVE, secunia, etc. and the only disassembly I can find of it is for Windows. I'm not saying that bug doesn't exist on other platforms, but that's not my point... my point is that it's executing a program with (at least) user privileges to draw an icon, or a tooltip. WHY?
I haven't seen another platform where Adobe Reader is executed to show a thumbnail of a PDF.
A graphics file format that basically relied on calling Windows primitive functions to draw itself and (for a long time) allowed arbitrary binary code inside them to be executed whenever they were displayed?
So when I click once on a file, executable code is run from the program associated with that file? When I view a file in Thumbnail mode, executable code is run from the program associated with that file? When I hover to get a filename, executable code is run from the program associated with that file? How many other daft, unnecessary executions of programs are there?
Not surprising because this is Windows we are talking about but holy crap - what a way to design a file browser / operating system. The problem here is NOT Adobe, or PDF or anything else, the problem is terminally-shit operating system and file browser design - executing entire programs to perform unnecessary tasks (e.g. add a column to explorer, generate a small bitmap, provide some hover-text). My next question is: in which user context is that code run? Please tell me that it is AT MOST the current user and not SYSTEM or some other built-in account. This sort of stuff should be found by a series of regexp's (which the program supplies) on the file data, NOT letting the program run just to tell you that Fred wrote this particular file. Then you can execute those to your heart's content in a secured area that benefits from global security upgrades if anyone finds a way to compromise the regexp. A bit like using "file" on *nix... just supply it with a regexp for a particular file extension and let the regexp extract the date, time, author, etc. in a safe environment.
No. Not MS. Every bit of freeware, every crappy game, anything that associates itself with a filename (which is almost impossible to stop on a home PC, only possible to detect/undo if you know how) is constantly run everything you view explorer in Thumbnail mode, or hover, or click on a file.
It reminds me of a little bit of trickery I did back in school... given the task to "hack the school network" on a computer course, we managed it within minutes by running exploit programs. Being the brightest IT student back then, I was asked to help prevent a repeat... my solution was to misuse the Windows 3.1 file associations in the global WIN.INI so that.exe,.com,.bat,.pif were associated with a tiny program that everyone had network access to. Anytime anyone ran a program, it was sent as a command-line parameter to this "security program" instead.
From there, the *program* would decide if the requested executable was actually valid and allowed (i.e. correct path, correct hash, put there by the network staff etc.) and if so, it executed it. If not, it popped up a message to deny access. It was surprisingly secure, given the state of multi-user networked Windows 3.1 back then, and even from an Administrator account we found it virtually impossible to get around provided other, more ordinary security was in place on WIN.INI (we even had to reset the admin account once because it managed to lock us out when we misconfigured it... fortunately, we had spare, unaffected accounts because we couldn't find any practical way around it!). Back then, though, you had to double-click, or File... Run... or whatever to make a program execute from the Windows shell... it even caught program execution from within Word macros that the network manager had been fighting for months ("A=Shell("Z:\game.exe")")... though not from a DOS shell, IIRC but we already had DOS Shells disabled by preventing the command.com from running except in specific contexts!
How easy it would be to write a piece of malicious code that associated itself with all executable file types and executed BEFORE the executable... so even when you try to run Remove_Sasser.exe or Install_Antivirus.exe, it would be intercepting and denying those requests. Obviously this has always been possible to do when somebody double-clicked on a executable, but now the associated program gets run just by LOOKING at any file with the right filetype. Make that executable a self-replicating virus and it's basically unstoppable (Yes, if you're
Heh, so assuming things scale linearly (which I would find surprising), you could run at least 1 million visitors per day on 3.5 servers. And this guy wants six servers for 1000/day (or a little over). And I don't think that his needs would run anywhere near as complex as the example posted.:-)
1000 users a day? So what? That's less than one user a minute. Even if you assume they stay on the website for 20 or so minutes each, you're never looking at more than about 20 users at a time browsing content (there will be peaks and troughs, obviously). Now picture a computer that can only send out, say, 20 x 20 pages a minute (assuming you're visitors can visit a full page every 3 seconds) - we're talking "out of the Ark". Unless they are downloading about half a gig of video each, this is hardly a problem for a modern machine.
I do the technical side for a large website which sees nearly ten times that (as far as you can trust web stats) and it runs off an ordinary shared host in an ordinary mom-n-pop webhosting facility and doesn't cost anywhere near the Earth to run. We often ask for more disk space, we've never had to ask for more bandwidth, or more CPU, or got told off for killing their systems. Admittedly, we don't do a lot of dynamic or flashy content but this is an ordinary shared server which we pay for out of our own pockets (and it costs less than our ISP subscriptions for the year, and the Google ad's make more than enough to cover that even at 0.3% clickthrough). We don't have any other servers helping us keep that site online (we have cold-spares at other hosting facilities should something go wrong, but that's because we're highly pedantic, not because we need them or that our users would miss us) - one shared server does the PHP, MySQL, serves dozens of Gigabytes per month of content for the entire site, generates the statistics etc. and doesn't even take a hit. I could probably serve that website off my old Linux router over ADSL and I doubt many people would notice except at peak times because of the bandwidth.
Define "massive" too... this site I'm talking about does multiple dozens of Gigabytes of data transfer every month, and contains about 10Gb of data on the disk (our backup is now *three* DVD-R's...:-) ). That's *tiny* in terms of a lot of websites, but equally puts 99% of the websites out there to shame.
Clustering is for when you have more than two or three servers already and primitive load-balancing (i.e. databases on one machine, video/images on another, or even just encoding half the URL's with "server2.domain.com" etc.) can't cope. In your case, I'd just have a hot-spare at a host somewhere, if I thought I needed it, with the data rsync'd every half-hour or so. For such a tiny thing, I probably wouldn't worry about the "switchover" between systems (because it would be rare and the users probably don't give a damn) and would just use DNS updates if it came to it. If I was being *really* pedantic, I might colo a server or two in a rack somewhere with the capability for one to steal the other's IP address if necessary, or have DNS with two A records, but I'd have to have a damn good reason for spending that amount of money regularly. If I was hosting in-house and the bandwidth was "free", I'd do the same.
Seriously - this isn't cluster territory, unless you see those servers struggling heavily on their load. And if I saw that, I'd be more inclined to think the computers were just crap, the website was unnecessarily dynamic, or I had dozens-of-Gigabytes databases and tens or hundreds of thousands of daily visitors.
You're in "basic hosting" territory. I doubt you'd hit 1Gb/month traffic unless the data you're serving is large.
Shout as much as you want, mate, those stats mean *nothing*. Two lines vaguely in inverse "correlation" for only half the graph (and correlation for the other half, because you "took the sales numbers (like 191.1 mill) and multiplied each of them by 1000 so the line graph would start out somewhat even.", so the actual correlation is between one line and one THOUSANDTH of the other line, which means that the "curve" on sales is barely a blip and perfectly within the error margin of such pathetically collected data) without some sort of context do NOT mean they are linked, in any way, shape or form.
This is why we have professors of mathematics and statistics and why *they* are the ones who are tested in court and found to be reliable and accurate, because they *can* pick out a million faults with your data collection, plotting, analysis, etc. without even having to think about it, prove why you're wrong, and show you the *real* figure. Unfortunately, even most lawyers have no concept of mathematics which is why there are such things as case-law describing how DNA "matches" MUST be worded, tested, analysed and interpreted, because depending on what you measure and how you word the answer you can go from a "one in a billion" match to a "90%" match with the same two sets of DNA data. Look into things like the birthday problem (how many people do you need in a room for there to be a 50% chance of two having the same birthday?) to see how utterly careful you have to be and how atrociously bad humans are at judging probability and statistics.
Your figures (if I *were* to take them as accurate, and replotted them as they should be plotted without arbitrary fiddling) actually show me that there is probably NO correlation at all. I don't know if I believe whether there is a correlation in real life or not, I've not analysed it and I'd be a fool to say I definitely believe either possible outcome in advance, but this man has stood up to a court's test without the opposition managing to debunk his statistics - that holds more than enough water with me.
I read through this list the other day and the only thing that I thought was:
Still nothing more than a Service Pack.
Seriously, #1 concerns Alt-Tab, ffs. #2 is a shortcut key. #3 is about taskbar windows flashes. #4 is about a shortcut to Open With. #5 is an adjustment to the size of icons. #6 is something to do with thumbnails. #7 is about showing "newly installed programs" in a different way. #8 is about the maximum number of items shown by default in a list. #9 is about file associations. #10 is a GUI change to seperate two types of things.
#11 is about a new gesture. #12 is allowing multi-touch devices to perform... well.. multitouch. #13 is the same. #14 is about text selection. #15 is a GUI change to the way networks are displayed. #16 is about making UAC even more annoying with a tiny (probably one-line) fix. #17 is allowing a machine to be locked without a screensaver specified (woopie-do!). #18 is a GUI change to the way power schemes are displayed. #19 is some tweaks to the way themes are displayed. #20 is an ACTUAL FIX to do with playing Internet radio (because such a task REALLY taxes a modern computer).
#21 is about adding long-established things like SEEKING and playing certain MOV files to media player. #22 is a UI change to "Now Playing" in media player. #23 is a GUI change to the way Media Player shows files that are corrupt/unplayable. #24 is about resuming from sleep properly while playing an audio CD. #25 is about cutting out dialog-overload when you plug in an MP3 player. #26 is about moving some settings/menus around. #27 is a GUI change to "JumpList". #28 is an internal change to the API for providing extra device driver functionality automatically. #29 is about plugging headphones in. #30 is a change to Windows Logo Testing to stop sound drivers being so crap.
#31 is GUI changes to explorer. #32 is the REMOVAL of an ability to drag/drop files into Libraries. #33 is about looking like XP when you see My Computer. #34 is about FAT32 still being supported as a filesystem. #35 is a GUI change. #36 says they actually profiled the users and their OS and "improved Start Menu opening times".
There is still *nothing* on that list worth the price of Windows 7. There is also nothing on that list that a single person with access to the source code couldn't do in a handful of days, except possibly the last one. You are seriously trying to tell me that out of the many thousands of people who tested the Beta, these were the only real problems that they encountered that MS has bothered to fix for the RC? That's the *most* affecting stuff that they needed to fix and shout about on a blog post? You're telling me that all the feedback from testers was about minor GUI changes, shortcut keys and unlikely/rare/pathetic hardware scenarios (like multitouch input devices and resuming a playing Audio CD from sleep?).
No... it isn't a *problem*. You want / need computers. That's not a *problem*. Now, if my computers explode, crash or otherwise don't work... that's a *problem* which is in need of a solution. Computers make some things more efficient... unless that efficiency is a *problem*, a computer is not the *solution* - and even then what you're selling me is a computer, not a "solution". What if your solution doesn't work? Are you then going to find me a non-computer solution? No. You'll do nothing more than is necessary to sell me your product, so you're selling products and/or services, not solutions.
You can't sell "solutions" without the presumption that somehow, without your solution, a problem exists. It doesn't. I want to buy ten PC's. That's not a "problem"... I can get the PC's anywhere and if I was in that great a need of them, I'd have support contracts and/or be holding spare stock. Even then, not having the PC's isn't a "problem", because I have spare. Thus you can't have a solution (The method or process of solving a problem, the answer to or disposition of a problem.) because there isn't a "problem", just a desire/need to have some computers.
Now if the company is crap and doesn't supply on time, then I might have a *problem* which would need a *solution* (which would probably consist of going elsewhere). Thus, mentally, I tie the word "solution" into that which a company does to correct a failure. Not a good association, no matter where the failure comes from. Also, a solution suggests that somehow you're fixing the whole underlying problem for me, instead of just selling me a tool which with I *might* be able to find a solution to a particular problem that I have.
So when your company comes to me and says they are going to sell me a "solution", I cringe. No. You might have come to try and sell me some computers, or possibly a support contract (I could ramble on about the word "support" too!) but you're not solving anything. You can try and sound like some magic entity that will fix all my IT but the truth is I just want the computers and then for you to go away. In fact, if you're a salesman, I probably never wanted to see you in the first place.
It's an overused, under-defined buzzword. It's also *extremely* presumptive, often on the basis of no evidence. When their "solution" fails to fix the problem, see what happens... by rights, they should no longer refer to things as solutions unless they actually fixed the problem - and you can't call something a "solution" until you have actually implemented it against the "problem" and it worked... otherwise it's just a "potential solution". Just putting a bunch of commonly-tied products/services in a bundle does not make a "solution". Refer to it as that and watch me filter you out. Just because you and your marketing friends think it sounds good, it makes me *know* that your marketing department have too heavy an influence when a salesman drops some buzzwords into the conversation. I'd much rather you just called them computers, or contracts, or whatever.
Just in the summary: "platform" (twice), "oriented toward industrial use", "expand ESP to other verticals", "my company used it for a solution". I didn't even get into the articles because I lost interest.
All management-speak, as far as I'm concerned, and I've never heard of the thing, and it's in a highly-specialist area. I don't think I could really care less, unless it were made by Microsoft... oh... whooops.
(Is it just me, or is making a "solution" a negative thing as it suggests you had a *problem* in the first place, rather than, say, a need, or a requirement?)
MMmmmmmeeeeehhhh! Wrong. (In the UK at least, I haven't seen the statistics for anywhere else)
For a start, most cameras are positioned incorrectly and, depending on which law you read, illegally (e.g. overlooking public property like alleyways, streets and roads) and don't display Data Protection Act warnings. Without these, evidence collected from them can easily fall down in court - guess who has the incentive to find problems with the positioning or legality of a CCTV camera? The criminals who get caught by them (convictions are normally given on the basis of other evidence with the CCTV footage only used to display the "extent" of the crime). CCTV is a *deterrent* (not a good one), not an enforcer, a *threat* to be used with an amateur criminal, a joke to anybody else.
Gathered statistics across the UK show that CCTV cameras DO NOT affect crime levels in any way. People still commit the crimes. They still get caught. They still escape justice, too, in the same proportions as they did pre-CCTV. They do *not* act as a good deterrent. Crime levels in heavily-CCTV'd areas are *not* reduced. All that happens is that *sometimes* the crime shifts elsewhere - that might be 20 yards down the road. Why do you think those same shows have enough footage to show? Because the idiots still commit crimes in known-CCTV'd locations.
If you don't believe me, look it up... it's been in the papers, in data collected from the Office for National Statistics etc. The problem is that you need a degree in maths to understand the statistics and what they actually *mean* because they are always presented in a biased fashion (I've just given two entities that publish the same statistics to reflect different opinions).
I worked for a large secondary school in "special measures" (i.e. low income families, high truancy, high rates of crime, low levels of academic achievement etc.) - they installed CCTV in *every* classroom, *every* corridor, 24-hour digital recording, 30-day complete history, at enormous cost. It made *no* dent whatsoever in the kids who were caught smashing things up, even after-hours - in fact, if anything, we only *detected* more crime, not actually manage to do anything about it. We had a contact policeman who did nothing all day but deal with that school. We provided footage after footage from the CCTV systems. 99% of the time it was inconclusive, worthless or just unusable in a court (we had footage of a gang of kids kicking down a door for 30 minutes... not once were we able to positively identify a single student even though we "knew" who the kids were - the kids knew it, as did their parents) and the only thing that happened is that the officer in question would try to intimidate the suspected perpertrators with the *threat* of looking up CCTV, even when he'd already seen it was useless (even in cases that went to court, etc.). In fact, the only thing we ever managed to do with the CCTV was get a supply teacher sacked because he pushed a violent child against a wall to restrain him (which, yes, technically *is* assault).
CCTV isn't a magic button that convicts people. Most of the time it is an absolute waste of money. People who don't care about committing crime in public places don't care about the cameras at all, or at worst wear a hoodie, cap or similar which obscures their face 99% of the time. People who commit crime in private properties know that the cameras probably aren't recording anyway or, if they are, that the quality is so crap and the footage so unverifiable that they wouldn't get caught or, if they did, they could easily challenge it. If they get caught, the CCTV doesn't "help" convictions for the vast majority of the time - they've been caught because the police or whoever *knew* they were there and doing something illegal, the CCTV may provide some unauthenticated verification of exactly what. The myth that policemen go through every second of footage and get an image of someone they recognised is just that... a myth. There have even been complaints
CCTV cameras don't bother me. The people *watching* them do, but then it's been proven that the CCTV cameras make zero difference to crime even in the big cities (there was an analysis published a while back on the UK systems, in particular London). Therefore, there's zero chance that they will ever affect me in my lifetime, because of factors like the UK not being able to do anything with any flashy technology that it decides to buy.
Along with that, the majority of those cameras are in private hands, so nothing anyone can do to stop that, and working within places that have had CCTV installed, I tell you that the Data Protection Acts *really* get in your way of doing anything useful with them. As far as I'm concerned 4 million cameras in a populous of about 65 million people doesn't affect my life in any way, shape or form - I own five myself. However, loss of my medical records, wanting to introduce poor electronic voting, police database corruption meaning innocent people are turned down for jobs - that's serious in my eyes and I'll do what I can to avoid it.
Spin... tell me when a viable open-source project actually makes a big *official* splash into anything approaching a UK government system. Various schools have been trying it for years on their own and never got anywhere because it's always seen as "nice" but then nothing ever happens further and money is still poured into Microsoft's wallet every day. The other IT projects run the UK government are a farce - starting with the NHS computerisation, through to the systems used for the police national computer and similar systems.
I *want* to see it. I am so pleased when I hear of countries trying it, but I know that in my own country this is nothing but spin. I would seriously consider emigrating to a country that treated its IT systems correctly and did things like this when they were needed. I haven't seen it happen yet, though.
Please read up on monopoly law cases, and you'll see why.
"But the fact is that EU is acting against MS for no good reason. Opera is clearly one force behind this move and EU courts are stupidly playing their game."
No, the courts didn't do anything until Opera complained. Then the courts investigated. Then they find the company in question guilty or not and impose sanctions if necessary. If the EU just "had it in" for MS, they could have started the case themselves. And Opera is *nowhere* near being a powerful enough force to motivate the EU... they are a small Norwegian technology company with almost zero market share (and I'm an Opera user!). Opera has nothing to do with it but the fact that they decided to pursue an illegal use of monopoly, which LOTS of others then jumped on and the EU decided was correct. The EU didn't initiate anything here, and Opera isn't going to take down MS just through political power.
"What about Google then? They don't get the same treatment, nor do Apple or any other of the large firms. Google has an incredible monopoly in online advertisement (not the same as search engine market share) and they get away with it."
A monopoly does not mean "largest percent of the market", necessarily. To be convicted under monopoly laws, you have to show malintent and that the monopoly is hindering the market. Google's "monopoly" is just because, when consumers have a free choice, they have heard of Google Ad's and thus use it first. It's most popular. It's like saying that 3M have a monopoly on sticky notes, or that Ford has a monopoly on cars in the UK, or that Hoover had a monopoly on vacuum cleaners. They don't... they just have/had a majority market share which they handle fairly.
In fact, I've heard large advertisers argue that there IS no viable alternative that can pull in anywhere near the traffic that a simple Google campaign can. They are *free* to choose who they deal with (i.e. it's not chosen for them) but the only service they can use, after trying all the others, is Google. The point is that they CAN try all the others, easily, no matter what their website is running, and Google do not *exploit* this monopoly to their advantage... they don't go making PC manufacturers sell computers which are supplied by default with software that replaces everyone else's ads with Google ad's (there might even be a PC manufacturer that *does* do that, but they are not *forced* to, is the point). Neither do Apple compete unfairly. It's competing unfairly that's the problem, not that you have a greater proportion of the market. Even Opera could "compete unfairly" if it really wanted to, but it doesn't.
"Why should Apple, Sun or RedHat get away with it?"
None of whom compete unfairly. In fact, it's hard to find companies that *have* been convicted under anti-monopoly laws... most of them just aren't that stupid or evil.
"I don't see any justice in acting against MS in this stupid way. I don't see the point either."
The point is to return the market to a fair competition. It would *still* be the case that MS software is installed on more computers than anything else, but the point is that people are *free to choose*. If it were an election - it's not about the Republican's winning every year for a decade (or whatever), it's about them doing that BY FORCING PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR THEM. We don't care if people *really* want to vote for them, so long as it's a free, fair decision on their part (and not "If you don't vote for us, we'll make the last year we're in power have 5000% tax rates...")
"First of all - do you really think that a normal user knows anything about browsers?"
No. Which is why they need to have the market regulated on their behalf, so that they don't end up with a heap of crap just because "it's Microsoft".
"Second, playing with courts have nothing to do with justice - no matter how you "play" in court the laws should be the same for everyone which clearly is not the case."
"Honestly, I'd say MS should simply refuse and say "Don't want Windows in the EU? Fine.""
Oh, please, please, please. Then maybe we could move on to somewhere interesting instead of spending decades of man hours just fixing stupid problems. However, MS gets over 50% of its revenue from the EU countries, so I don't think they can *afford* to be stroppy.
The problem is that MS wants to play games and mess about in court. It doesn't *want* to play ball, it just wants people to get bored and give up trying to sue them. The EU can't let that stand, no matter what the problem is. When you're fined 400m Euros... pay it. Especially when your company accounts say that you've got ten times that money just lying about. If you start messing about and coming up with excuses (although, by all means, pay it and THEN appeal) for years after you've been told by a court to pay, then you will get tons of problems like this.
MS have brought it on themselves - the monopolistic practices are one thing, but playing with the courts because they believe they are powerless is not a bright idea either. I can easily foresee MS playing the same games... and the EU will find something else wrong, and bring it to court quicker, and fine heavier until MS has such a bad reputation that the EU *does* give up on it, or starts shutting it down or breaking it up. The fact is that MS trading EU is entirely at the mercy of an EU court - they can seize assets, shut the business down, force them to do just about anything. It's only because MS USA actually "owns" the courts over there that you don't see the same problems come up more often, or think that they are invincible.
Once you get past one server (if not before), you need to start backing up. Once you start offering a service to people who are giving you money by visiting (whether through ad revenue or otherwise), you need to start backing up. The number of servers is an indicator to the amount of work you're putting into something and the popularity of it. Even if you consider your user's data unimportant, the work that's gone into the servers and their various configurations by that point makes it worth backing up the WHOLE thing. Once you start maxing out a server, you REALLY need to look closely at what happens if it all goes wrong. This is especially true if you're going to start doing replication or load-balancing because in the first case you get the problem of your mistakes replicating across every one of your servers, and in the latter case you have the problem of what happens if one half of your load-balance cuts out (because, presumably, your remaining server won't be able to cope for long on it's own).
My brother runs a very popular website for a specific niche... The only money it makes is Google Ad revenue (enough to pay for hosting plus a bit more). There aren't millions of users who would cry foul if the site was down for a few days. But even I have a backup of the content that he gives me to store on my "offsite location" (back bedroom) on a regular basis, we have a seperate domain on a seperate host that isn't advertised and which mirrors all the content, there are local copies on not just one computer but every computer we own, there are copies of most stuff on several, seperate FTP hosts, plus we burn off DVD's of the content on a regular basis to provide a historical record.
We *have* had to restore the backup several times (which isn't fun when you have Gb's of data to be uploaded from a broadband connection over FTP, and even better when the new configuration doesn't run PHP or have the same paths and Unix permissions, etc.) because of mistakes at the hosting company... but we don't buy backup from them, so it's fair enough. We've never yet lost a byte of anything important - a few forums entries at most, but even the MySQL databases were safely backed up. We don't have RAID, we don't have fancy rsync'ing, scheduled backups or anything else. It's just slapping some stuff on a different computer / different media every now and then.
Now, this is 500Gb of other people's data... that alone tells you that you should be backing it up... the schools I work for don't have that much total storage if I add every server's data together (including Ghost images of client machines) but we still back it up on a regular basis (disk, tape, offsite, etc.). I've *never* had to restore a server in that case but I know that all the backups work just fine.
Don't be an idiot... if it takes you until you lose data before you consider backups, then you're a fool. Just do it for yourself - turn off your machine and pretend the hard drive is corrupt - how much of that data do you have stored elsewhere? How much of it would you be sad to lose? Don't forget to include configurations (thank God, Linux configurations are so easy to back up, being mostly plaintext), PHP scripts, passwords stored on it, login emails, scripts, serial numbers, text files of instructions on how to do certain things, before you even get to your actual data (photographs, personal emails, documents, etc.).
Yes, and *sales* are on a completely different scale to back then, too.
Virtually every household has at least one games console now, and at least one PC. Back then, a computer was a specialist item that not everybody had. Hell, even my mother has a Wii and a laptop now.
Additionally, the cost of creating a game isn't necessarily representative of the time/effort put into it (have you seen the iterations that Counterstrike:Condition Zero went through and then ended up being nothing more than a CS texture pack with a few rehashed maps and a bot?), nor of the end-result. "Peggle" by PopCap has probably sold thousands, tens of, or hundreds of thousands of copies. It was made by a handful of people listed on the credits screen in no time at all. Not all games are large level, 500-mission, FMV, cutscenes, etc. In fact, the majority of them are nothing more than WiiSports - a few simple games rehashed with a new idea.
I don't deny that teams are *generally* larger and games *generally* more complex, but the scale of development means that this just makes things cheaper - in the Spectrum days, a lot of the small "software houses" were nothing more than a set of teenagers with a bunch of tape recorders. That was a recurring time+money cost that isn't present any more, especially not with digital downloads.
Plus, this enormous modern cost is a *one-off* which means that BUDGET games are not funding it... they have been recompensated by the time the game comes out on budget, usually MANY times over. Even comparing to games of more than 10 years ago (e.g. Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Red Alert etc.), the price increase is still present and huge - and for its time the cutscenes, FMV, etc. in those games were unprecedented. Now, of course, there are libraries, commodity hardware, high-level languages, graphics drivers, etc. which save the time and money that would previously have been spent recreating their work, and that money is now spent on artistry instead.
It's not that modern games are suddenly more expensive or harder to make... how hard must Quake have been to make in its day? It needed hardware that didn't really exist just to create the game on a development machine that could run fast enough, it needed extreme optimisation, it needed to cater for new hardware, it needed to do a lot - and that was 1996. I don't suppose that Doom was any different (1993). The work that goes into a game, if indeed that makes up for any of the significant increase in price, is being wasted because today's games really AREN'T worth that amount of input, just to create Yet Another FPS. And now consider - how hard was it to actually write, say, Left4Dead once you had the source engine and a bunch load of programmers and artists who have already earned their salary that year? Did it cost $50 multiplied by the number of sales? Not even close, I should imagine orders of magnitude out.
A lot of people say that this price increase is due to inflation etc. and that the prices we all remember are impossible today.
I can only think of the games that come out for Spectrum - 1980's, £10 for a "full-price" game, 99p for a budget game (rising to £1.99 and then £2.99 before the end of the 80's). Let's ignore the high-end stuff for a while, because people buy stuff just because it's full price and just came out - they are the people who are stupid.
Even taking into account inflation, etc. that is a hell of a markup. And these people formed teams like Codemasters etc. (Two brothers started out programming Spectrum and C64 games under the name Codemasters and soon built a company out of it before the Speccy era had ended.) so it's not like they didn't profit from it.
Now, let's look at the Wii... not the newest console but a good seller. The cheapest "new" (not used) game I can find in an average shop is £10 and it's an unpopular title. The average "budget" game (i.e. a popular game that has had it's run and needs to sell more units) is around £20-30. The "good" games can cost up to £60, not including other hardware bundled with them, and stay at that price for YEARS.
The 99p - £1.99 - £2.99 was a fast expansion of price - 300% inflation within 10 years. But since then, we've seen nearly 1000% inflation in 20 years (£2.99 in 1989 -> £20-30 in 2009), just for budget titles. That's exponential growth. Real inflation in developed countries hangs way under the 5% a year mark, so even with the best maths in the world (you can't really necessarily just "add up" the year-on-year inflation for the last ten years), it's not anywhere near 300% and certainly not 1000% inflation over 10 or 20 years.
Prices will be set to whatever people will pay. Unfortunately, people are stupid and a lot of parents spend this ridiculous sort of money because they think they have to. But for, say, half a dozen new (but been out for a while) games to cost a week's wages for the average person, that's just stupid.
However, the prices of the hardware are relatively static. The Spectrum cost £100-200 when it came out, the same price bracket as the Wii. The hardware has inflated a little but not anywhere near as much. Considering that is bound by real-world economics like availability of parts, bulk-orders, raw material prices, I expect it to model inflation quite well and it does. But the software seem to be nothing but pure profiteering - probably based mostly on the fact that once you've bought the hardware, you "have to" buy games for it.
Steam's sales are great. I haven't bought myself anything on Steam in years (I bought my brother a birthday present of Half-Life 2 when it first came out, and nothing before that at all) but I went on there the other month and ended up getting about 12 games for about £25. That's perfect for me, and they were all games I wanted, all big names, two Half-life 2 episodes, the entire GTA and UFO series, (but not GTA4) etc. I could easily have bought another 12 games for around the same price. But when I look at the "normal" prices of some of that stuff, I shriek in horror. £30-50 for a game? Come on, that's *4* DVD's even at "brand-new" pricing, and there's no way that a Rainbox Six game costs as much to make, even taking into account the difference in the amount of final sales, as four Hollywood movies. £50 is a LOT of money. That was once-a-year birthday-treat kind of money back when I was a kid and I could make that run to games, films, books, magazines, etc. for ages. Now that's the price of one game (which isn't guaranteed to be a blockbuster). Inflation hasn't grown that fast.
The scales aren't right - software is far too expensive, especially for the effort that goes into updating and supporting most of it. Multiplayer games are left to die after a few years, patches dry up a matter of months after the initial release, support is non-existent fo
Although I have a different viewpoint, your last point is simply erroneous.
"Because those responses are evidence against them. They show an attitude of not caring about whether the rights-holders' copyright is infringed. Those responses could be bad for them in front of a jury."
They are not "evidence" at all. They are expressions of opinion, which is an entirely different thing. You don't have to agree with a law to abide by it. You don't have to even be polite about that law outside of court. In the absolute extreme, it could be viewed as potential for displaying their intentions absent other evidence but you're still on boggy ground because they can just claim it's satire etc.
Additionally, if you genuinely believe that you have broken no law, then it doesn't matter at all. Most (if not ALL) of those letters referred to US law, which DOES NOT APPLY in Sweden - and the majority of rebuttals from TPB (although immature) say this quite plainly - they don't believe they have broken any *Swedish* law, and they are on *Swedish* soil. That *is* cause to be mocking. Even a lawyer writing a reply to such a request would be mocking, although they would probably be more articulate.
Just because someone is rude, obnoxious or beligerent, doesn't mean they aren't perfectly correct and within their legal rights to be so. If they behaved like that IN COURT, then you have another matter entirely - the one of contempt - which would be stamped out and prejudice their case heavily. By the looks of it, they have MUCH more sense than that. I'm not sure I'd go for the publicity shenanigans leading up to the court case - I'd want the judge to see that I was taking the whole thing very seriously - but the letters mean absolutely nothing, legally speaking. I'll be very surprised if the court entertains any claims on the basis of what's in the letters without a TON of other, real evidence too.
Imagine a nutter writes to you claiming you stole his magic bear's porridge. He is forceful, quotes US law at you (even though you live in a country not subject to it), threatens to sue, etc. You decide to post it online and write a mocking letter in reply. Now, if that nutter happens to be very rich and takes you to court, do you really think that the court would take your reply seriously and hold it as evidence that you did in fact steal his magic bear's porridge? You could even SAY SO in the letter ("Yes, it was me that stole your magic bear's porridge, and tasty it was too!"). It wouldn't matter. The courts recognise that not everyone is mature when they are outside the courtroom and that the reply is not serious, because the claim was ridiculous. TPB case is a similar thing. The replies to UNENFORCEABLE legal requests which were obviously fabricated and incorrect don't really matter, until someone brings it before a Swedish court. That's when the game stops and you have to watch what you say.
Oh, and "you could play the levels in random order to little ill-effect"...
That's a comment I could apply to 99% of FPS shooters out there, starting with the classics like Quake (four episodes, play them in any order, every X level is a boss level, little melding of scenery, story etc. between levels), Doom (linear levels, pretty much randomly made), even back to Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny. Admittedly, the more modern ones are more story-based (why people think that's so important, I don't know) like Half Life 2, etc. But even the original Half Life you could quite easily switch levels here and there and nobody would really have noticed.
Storylines: Half Life 2 and its various episodes had a good story. But to be honest, I spent most of the cutscenes where I still had control jumping around bored to tears because I either wanted to get on and kill the scum, or I wanted the lift/door to activate so I could move on. And every "surprise" where you suddenly come under attack, I'm sitting there from the start of the cutscene poised in a nice safe position waiting while the character reel through thirty seconds of plot before the action starts... I *know* that those tunnels are going to fill up with a bunch of aliens at any moment, but they kept on yabbering. The fun of swinging a crane to take out the baddies, or the fear of seeing those stalkers come over the tops of the trees did ten times more than all the plot elements put together for me. Gameplay over story, wins every time.
Is it just me or does it just look like a fairly standard shooter, with a TF-style multiplayer? Graphics? Good. Sound? Good. Gameplay? Standard FPS fare. Controls? Dunno because I don't have a PS3, but I imagine that keyboard/mouse players would be thrashing anybody who's trying to play it with any other controller (ala every other FPS out there). Whoever shot that multiplayer video certainly wasn't using a proper mouse.
I don't see anything astounding here. It might be a good technical achievement (getting this to run on PS3) but then, to be honest, I'm not even that impressed at that given the PS3's hardware. Could someone enlighten me: What's the big fuss?
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You certainly couldn't - I worked in another school in Essex that does exactly the same. I assure you it is not only real, but *nobody* in the school understands the problem with it except the bad teachers who accept it but get tetchy that their bad teaching is being recorded... not the fact that they are bad teachers, or that they/the staff/the students are being recorded - but the fact that they might have thier gravy-train ended.
I was asked to design and build systems to do just this too, because I could CCTV up a room cheaper than their suppliers. I built one to cover the ICT office which *we* turned on and off overnight or during the holidays to help spot where our laptops were disappearing to, and had no further part in anything else. Not only does it exist - it is happening, it is accepted and it's not being questioned by ANYONE, staff, students, parents, heads, local authorities, etc. even when they are made aware of it. That's more scary than merely "it's possible" or "it exists".
Agreed, in part. It's just a dumb idea.
However, that system is undoubtedly NOT under the control of the IT department, or only minimally via their contractors, when it should be - nobody else really deals with the policy regarding DPA issues except for the IT department and possibly a Data Manager in the larger schools. Unfortunately, it will also tie into their IT registration systems. In doing so, they've given no thought to maintenance or integration costs, whether it satisfies the requirements of such a system, potential interactions (how quickly do "expelled" students get removed from the database, or new students get added?), etc. It's based heavily on similar IT that I have supported (card-swipe registration) where the same problems came up and nobody cared - you even had kids stealing staff cards in order to get into the school at lunchtime because it could take a week to get them cancelled. Each card cost a LOT of money to print and it's a certainty that this system is only slightly undercutting their nearest rival systems (cardswipe reg system) in order to make most profit - for a job that takes FIVE MINUTES for a good teacher and is actually quicker done on a bit of paper. Yes, even some modern schools with thousands of pupils are still using "old-fashioned" registers. And bloody right, as well.
And I have to second the comments made by others on school procurement processes in the UK... I have to say that I *have* worked in places in the past where things were bought purely on the basis that the head was sweet-talked without consulting staff, or where the head was actually a family member / golf buddy / old army colleague of the supplier, as were all the governors (or they were suitably ejected, or otherwise not part of the decision-making process). I've seen IT companies, just like this, with "new" products which were set up entirely on the basis of selling to a handful of schools under the control of a single person, only to disappear shortly after delivery of shoddy, inadequate products with falsely-stated claims and zero other previous clients. Some of them even get as far as BETT...
Alright... on the same topic... what happens if THE SYSTEM is the cause of the fire? Hence, you have no records and can't gather any? Not likely, but there are things such as *power cuts* when fires occur (even enforced by the fire brigade etc.), LOTS OF WATER from sprinklers, etc. How is the system going to "print off" a nice piece of paper when it's in six inches of water and the paper is soaked?
I work in schools, in the UK, in IT. This is just incredibly stupid.
You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency. That automated system is NO GOOD for that purpose - and you're relying on it with little to no manual backup. You WILL get students with photocopies of their friend's faces (and/or other similarly low-tech solutions to allow the automated system to recognise and register them) in order to get out of lessons, lectures, etc. that they are made to attend. Then when you have a fire, and they are actually somewhere else (or vice versa, logged out of the system but actually still on the premises) you are going to put people's lives at risk. Seriously, give me a week, and I could probably find a way around it that a sixth-former could manage.
Not only that, you are opening yourself up to enormous DPA issues, because this is a irrevocable biometric - much like the UK government and education in general currently condemns and advises against fingerprint recognition systems in schools. It's also completely unnecessary, extremely expensive, probably quite unreliable (any identical twins go to that college, or even just two people who look alike?), potentially discriminatory (What if someone's face isn't recognised? What if they have disfigurement? What if they deliberately obscure their face or object to the system? Do you allow a bypass to that system for them?). The cost of implementing and *maintaining* and *renewing* that system probably far outweighs an hour or so a day at minimum wage for a member of admin/support staff who has some free time, before you even consider the future problems you've opened yourself up to.
Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.
What did it use to create those previews? Adobe Acrobat Reader (the associated program for that particular user on that particular system) or a program that has been specified specifically for that purpose? Or even it's own internal renderer? I don't think it's sitting there loading up Acrobat Reader for Linux for every thumbnail, somehow, which is apparently what Windows does. I think you might find that konqueror internally decides to use libpoppler, no matter what file is associated with PDF mimetypes (but I could be wrong there - google can be misleading). Thus, it's konqueror itself and it's built-in libraries that are doing the preview, not some random associated executable. Thus, new and "interesting" mimetypes don't execute even more external programs for no reason when you view them, they just don't have previews.
Other file managers may differ.
Actually, I'll think your find that *this* vulnerability affects only Adobe products but I haven't seen any mention of anything saying that non-Windows platforms are vulnerable... I just checked CVE, secunia, etc. and the only disassembly I can find of it is for Windows. I'm not saying that bug doesn't exist on other platforms, but that's not my point... my point is that it's executing a program with (at least) user privileges to draw an icon, or a tooltip. WHY?
I haven't seen another platform where Adobe Reader is executed to show a thumbnail of a PDF.
Remember WMF?
A graphics file format that basically relied on calling Windows primitive functions to draw itself and (for a long time) allowed arbitrary binary code inside them to be executed whenever they were displayed?
So when I click once on a file, executable code is run from the program associated with that file?
When I view a file in Thumbnail mode, executable code is run from the program associated with that file?
When I hover to get a filename, executable code is run from the program associated with that file?
How many other daft, unnecessary executions of programs are there?
Not surprising because this is Windows we are talking about but holy crap - what a way to design a file browser / operating system. The problem here is NOT Adobe, or PDF or anything else, the problem is terminally-shit operating system and file browser design - executing entire programs to perform unnecessary tasks (e.g. add a column to explorer, generate a small bitmap, provide some hover-text). My next question is: in which user context is that code run? Please tell me that it is AT MOST the current user and not SYSTEM or some other built-in account. This sort of stuff should be found by a series of regexp's (which the program supplies) on the file data, NOT letting the program run just to tell you that Fred wrote this particular file. Then you can execute those to your heart's content in a secured area that benefits from global security upgrades if anyone finds a way to compromise the regexp. A bit like using "file" on *nix... just supply it with a regexp for a particular file extension and let the regexp extract the date, time, author, etc. in a safe environment.
No. Not MS. Every bit of freeware, every crappy game, anything that associates itself with a filename (which is almost impossible to stop on a home PC, only possible to detect/undo if you know how) is constantly run everything you view explorer in Thumbnail mode, or hover, or click on a file.
It reminds me of a little bit of trickery I did back in school... given the task to "hack the school network" on a computer course, we managed it within minutes by running exploit programs. Being the brightest IT student back then, I was asked to help prevent a repeat... my solution was to misuse the Windows 3.1 file associations in the global WIN.INI so that .exe, .com, .bat, .pif were associated with a tiny program that everyone had network access to. Anytime anyone ran a program, it was sent as a command-line parameter to this "security program" instead.
From there, the *program* would decide if the requested executable was actually valid and allowed (i.e. correct path, correct hash, put there by the network staff etc.) and if so, it executed it. If not, it popped up a message to deny access. It was surprisingly secure, given the state of multi-user networked Windows 3.1 back then, and even from an Administrator account we found it virtually impossible to get around provided other, more ordinary security was in place on WIN.INI (we even had to reset the admin account once because it managed to lock us out when we misconfigured it... fortunately, we had spare, unaffected accounts because we couldn't find any practical way around it!). Back then, though, you had to double-click, or File... Run... or whatever to make a program execute from the Windows shell... it even caught program execution from within Word macros that the network manager had been fighting for months ("A=Shell("Z:\game.exe")")... though not from a DOS shell, IIRC but we already had DOS Shells disabled by preventing the command.com from running except in specific contexts!
How easy it would be to write a piece of malicious code that associated itself with all executable file types and executed BEFORE the executable... so even when you try to run Remove_Sasser.exe or Install_Antivirus.exe, it would be intercepting and denying those requests. Obviously this has always been possible to do when somebody double-clicked on a executable, but now the associated program gets run just by LOOKING at any file with the right filetype. Make that executable a self-replicating virus and it's basically unstoppable (Yes, if you're
Heh, so assuming things scale linearly (which I would find surprising), you could run at least 1 million visitors per day on 3.5 servers. And this guy wants six servers for 1000/day (or a little over). And I don't think that his needs would run anywhere near as complex as the example posted. :-)
1000 users a day? So what? That's less than one user a minute. Even if you assume they stay on the website for 20 or so minutes each, you're never looking at more than about 20 users at a time browsing content (there will be peaks and troughs, obviously). Now picture a computer that can only send out, say, 20 x 20 pages a minute (assuming you're visitors can visit a full page every 3 seconds) - we're talking "out of the Ark". Unless they are downloading about half a gig of video each, this is hardly a problem for a modern machine.
I do the technical side for a large website which sees nearly ten times that (as far as you can trust web stats) and it runs off an ordinary shared host in an ordinary mom-n-pop webhosting facility and doesn't cost anywhere near the Earth to run. We often ask for more disk space, we've never had to ask for more bandwidth, or more CPU, or got told off for killing their systems. Admittedly, we don't do a lot of dynamic or flashy content but this is an ordinary shared server which we pay for out of our own pockets (and it costs less than our ISP subscriptions for the year, and the Google ad's make more than enough to cover that even at 0.3% clickthrough). We don't have any other servers helping us keep that site online (we have cold-spares at other hosting facilities should something go wrong, but that's because we're highly pedantic, not because we need them or that our users would miss us) - one shared server does the PHP, MySQL, serves dozens of Gigabytes per month of content for the entire site, generates the statistics etc. and doesn't even take a hit. I could probably serve that website off my old Linux router over ADSL and I doubt many people would notice except at peak times because of the bandwidth.
Define "massive" too... this site I'm talking about does multiple dozens of Gigabytes of data transfer every month, and contains about 10Gb of data on the disk (our backup is now *three* DVD-R's... :-) ). That's *tiny* in terms of a lot of websites, but equally puts 99% of the websites out there to shame.
Clustering is for when you have more than two or three servers already and primitive load-balancing (i.e. databases on one machine, video/images on another, or even just encoding half the URL's with "server2.domain.com" etc.) can't cope. In your case, I'd just have a hot-spare at a host somewhere, if I thought I needed it, with the data rsync'd every half-hour or so. For such a tiny thing, I probably wouldn't worry about the "switchover" between systems (because it would be rare and the users probably don't give a damn) and would just use DNS updates if it came to it. If I was being *really* pedantic, I might colo a server or two in a rack somewhere with the capability for one to steal the other's IP address if necessary, or have DNS with two A records, but I'd have to have a damn good reason for spending that amount of money regularly. If I was hosting in-house and the bandwidth was "free", I'd do the same.
Seriously - this isn't cluster territory, unless you see those servers struggling heavily on their load. And if I saw that, I'd be more inclined to think the computers were just crap, the website was unnecessarily dynamic, or I had dozens-of-Gigabytes databases and tens or hundreds of thousands of daily visitors.
You're in "basic hosting" territory. I doubt you'd hit 1Gb/month traffic unless the data you're serving is large.
Shout as much as you want, mate, those stats mean *nothing*. Two lines vaguely in inverse "correlation" for only half the graph (and correlation for the other half, because you "took the sales numbers (like 191.1 mill) and multiplied each of them by 1000 so the line graph would start out somewhat even.", so the actual correlation is between one line and one THOUSANDTH of the other line, which means that the "curve" on sales is barely a blip and perfectly within the error margin of such pathetically collected data) without some sort of context do NOT mean they are linked, in any way, shape or form.
This is why we have professors of mathematics and statistics and why *they* are the ones who are tested in court and found to be reliable and accurate, because they *can* pick out a million faults with your data collection, plotting, analysis, etc. without even having to think about it, prove why you're wrong, and show you the *real* figure. Unfortunately, even most lawyers have no concept of mathematics which is why there are such things as case-law describing how DNA "matches" MUST be worded, tested, analysed and interpreted, because depending on what you measure and how you word the answer you can go from a "one in a billion" match to a "90%" match with the same two sets of DNA data. Look into things like the birthday problem (how many people do you need in a room for there to be a 50% chance of two having the same birthday?) to see how utterly careful you have to be and how atrociously bad humans are at judging probability and statistics.
Your figures (if I *were* to take them as accurate, and replotted them as they should be plotted without arbitrary fiddling) actually show me that there is probably NO correlation at all. I don't know if I believe whether there is a correlation in real life or not, I've not analysed it and I'd be a fool to say I definitely believe either possible outcome in advance, but this man has stood up to a court's test without the opposition managing to debunk his statistics - that holds more than enough water with me.
I read through this list the other day and the only thing that I thought was:
Still nothing more than a Service Pack.
Seriously, #1 concerns Alt-Tab, ffs. #2 is a shortcut key. #3 is about taskbar windows flashes. #4 is about a shortcut to Open With. #5 is an adjustment to the size of icons. #6 is something to do with thumbnails. #7 is about showing "newly installed programs" in a different way. #8 is about the maximum number of items shown by default in a list. #9 is about file associations. #10 is a GUI change to seperate two types of things.
#11 is about a new gesture. #12 is allowing multi-touch devices to perform... well.. multitouch. #13 is the same. #14 is about text selection. #15 is a GUI change to the way networks are displayed. #16 is about making UAC even more annoying with a tiny (probably one-line) fix. #17 is allowing a machine to be locked without a screensaver specified (woopie-do!). #18 is a GUI change to the way power schemes are displayed. #19 is some tweaks to the way themes are displayed. #20 is an ACTUAL FIX to do with playing Internet radio (because such a task REALLY taxes a modern computer).
#21 is about adding long-established things like SEEKING and playing certain MOV files to media player. #22 is a UI change to "Now Playing" in media player. #23 is a GUI change to the way Media Player shows files that are corrupt/unplayable. #24 is about resuming from sleep properly while playing an audio CD. #25 is about cutting out dialog-overload when you plug in an MP3 player. #26 is about moving some settings/menus around. #27 is a GUI change to "JumpList". #28 is an internal change to the API for providing extra device driver functionality automatically. #29 is about plugging headphones in. #30 is a change to Windows Logo Testing to stop sound drivers being so crap.
#31 is GUI changes to explorer. #32 is the REMOVAL of an ability to drag/drop files into Libraries. #33 is about looking like XP when you see My Computer. #34 is about FAT32 still being supported as a filesystem. #35 is a GUI change. #36 says they actually profiled the users and their OS and "improved Start Menu opening times".
There is still *nothing* on that list worth the price of Windows 7. There is also nothing on that list that a single person with access to the source code couldn't do in a handful of days, except possibly the last one. You are seriously trying to tell me that out of the many thousands of people who tested the Beta, these were the only real problems that they encountered that MS has bothered to fix for the RC? That's the *most* affecting stuff that they needed to fix and shout about on a blog post? You're telling me that all the feedback from testers was about minor GUI changes, shortcut keys and unlikely/rare/pathetic hardware scenarios (like multitouch input devices and resuming a playing Audio CD from sleep?).
And MS wonder why people laugh at them.
No... it isn't a *problem*. You want / need computers. That's not a *problem*. Now, if my computers explode, crash or otherwise don't work... that's a *problem* which is in need of a solution. Computers make some things more efficient... unless that efficiency is a *problem*, a computer is not the *solution* - and even then what you're selling me is a computer, not a "solution". What if your solution doesn't work? Are you then going to find me a non-computer solution? No. You'll do nothing more than is necessary to sell me your product, so you're selling products and/or services, not solutions.
You can't sell "solutions" without the presumption that somehow, without your solution, a problem exists. It doesn't. I want to buy ten PC's. That's not a "problem"... I can get the PC's anywhere and if I was in that great a need of them, I'd have support contracts and/or be holding spare stock. Even then, not having the PC's isn't a "problem", because I have spare. Thus you can't have a solution (The method or process of solving a problem, the answer to or disposition of a problem.) because there isn't a "problem", just a desire/need to have some computers.
Now if the company is crap and doesn't supply on time, then I might have a *problem* which would need a *solution* (which would probably consist of going elsewhere). Thus, mentally, I tie the word "solution" into that which a company does to correct a failure. Not a good association, no matter where the failure comes from. Also, a solution suggests that somehow you're fixing the whole underlying problem for me, instead of just selling me a tool which with I *might* be able to find a solution to a particular problem that I have.
So when your company comes to me and says they are going to sell me a "solution", I cringe. No. You might have come to try and sell me some computers, or possibly a support contract (I could ramble on about the word "support" too!) but you're not solving anything. You can try and sound like some magic entity that will fix all my IT but the truth is I just want the computers and then for you to go away. In fact, if you're a salesman, I probably never wanted to see you in the first place.
It's an overused, under-defined buzzword. It's also *extremely* presumptive, often on the basis of no evidence. When their "solution" fails to fix the problem, see what happens... by rights, they should no longer refer to things as solutions unless they actually fixed the problem - and you can't call something a "solution" until you have actually implemented it against the "problem" and it worked... otherwise it's just a "potential solution". Just putting a bunch of commonly-tied products/services in a bundle does not make a "solution". Refer to it as that and watch me filter you out. Just because you and your marketing friends think it sounds good, it makes me *know* that your marketing department have too heavy an influence when a salesman drops some buzzwords into the conversation. I'd much rather you just called them computers, or contracts, or whatever.
I don't think you're far wrong...
Just in the summary: "platform" (twice), "oriented toward industrial use", "expand ESP to other verticals", "my company used it for a solution". I didn't even get into the articles because I lost interest.
All management-speak, as far as I'm concerned, and I've never heard of the thing, and it's in a highly-specialist area. I don't think I could really care less, unless it were made by Microsoft... oh... whooops.
(Is it just me, or is making a "solution" a negative thing as it suggests you had a *problem* in the first place, rather than, say, a need, or a requirement?)
MMmmmmmeeeeehhhh! Wrong. (In the UK at least, I haven't seen the statistics for anywhere else)
For a start, most cameras are positioned incorrectly and, depending on which law you read, illegally (e.g. overlooking public property like alleyways, streets and roads) and don't display Data Protection Act warnings. Without these, evidence collected from them can easily fall down in court - guess who has the incentive to find problems with the positioning or legality of a CCTV camera? The criminals who get caught by them (convictions are normally given on the basis of other evidence with the CCTV footage only used to display the "extent" of the crime). CCTV is a *deterrent* (not a good one), not an enforcer, a *threat* to be used with an amateur criminal, a joke to anybody else.
Gathered statistics across the UK show that CCTV cameras DO NOT affect crime levels in any way. People still commit the crimes. They still get caught. They still escape justice, too, in the same proportions as they did pre-CCTV. They do *not* act as a good deterrent. Crime levels in heavily-CCTV'd areas are *not* reduced. All that happens is that *sometimes* the crime shifts elsewhere - that might be 20 yards down the road. Why do you think those same shows have enough footage to show? Because the idiots still commit crimes in known-CCTV'd locations.
If you don't believe me, look it up... it's been in the papers, in data collected from the Office for National Statistics etc. The problem is that you need a degree in maths to understand the statistics and what they actually *mean* because they are always presented in a biased fashion (I've just given two entities that publish the same statistics to reflect different opinions).
I worked for a large secondary school in "special measures" (i.e. low income families, high truancy, high rates of crime, low levels of academic achievement etc.) - they installed CCTV in *every* classroom, *every* corridor, 24-hour digital recording, 30-day complete history, at enormous cost. It made *no* dent whatsoever in the kids who were caught smashing things up, even after-hours - in fact, if anything, we only *detected* more crime, not actually manage to do anything about it. We had a contact policeman who did nothing all day but deal with that school. We provided footage after footage from the CCTV systems. 99% of the time it was inconclusive, worthless or just unusable in a court (we had footage of a gang of kids kicking down a door for 30 minutes... not once were we able to positively identify a single student even though we "knew" who the kids were - the kids knew it, as did their parents) and the only thing that happened is that the officer in question would try to intimidate the suspected perpertrators with the *threat* of looking up CCTV, even when he'd already seen it was useless (even in cases that went to court, etc.). In fact, the only thing we ever managed to do with the CCTV was get a supply teacher sacked because he pushed a violent child against a wall to restrain him (which, yes, technically *is* assault).
CCTV isn't a magic button that convicts people. Most of the time it is an absolute waste of money. People who don't care about committing crime in public places don't care about the cameras at all, or at worst wear a hoodie, cap or similar which obscures their face 99% of the time. People who commit crime in private properties know that the cameras probably aren't recording anyway or, if they are, that the quality is so crap and the footage so unverifiable that they wouldn't get caught or, if they did, they could easily challenge it. If they get caught, the CCTV doesn't "help" convictions for the vast majority of the time - they've been caught because the police or whoever *knew* they were there and doing something illegal, the CCTV may provide some unauthenticated verification of exactly what. The myth that policemen go through every second of footage and get an image of someone they recognised is just that... a myth. There have even been complaints
CCTV cameras don't bother me. The people *watching* them do, but then it's been proven that the CCTV cameras make zero difference to crime even in the big cities (there was an analysis published a while back on the UK systems, in particular London). Therefore, there's zero chance that they will ever affect me in my lifetime, because of factors like the UK not being able to do anything with any flashy technology that it decides to buy.
Along with that, the majority of those cameras are in private hands, so nothing anyone can do to stop that, and working within places that have had CCTV installed, I tell you that the Data Protection Acts *really* get in your way of doing anything useful with them. As far as I'm concerned 4 million cameras in a populous of about 65 million people doesn't affect my life in any way, shape or form - I own five myself. However, loss of my medical records, wanting to introduce poor electronic voting, police database corruption meaning innocent people are turned down for jobs - that's serious in my eyes and I'll do what I can to avoid it.
Spin... tell me when a viable open-source project actually makes a big *official* splash into anything approaching a UK government system. Various schools have been trying it for years on their own and never got anywhere because it's always seen as "nice" but then nothing ever happens further and money is still poured into Microsoft's wallet every day. The other IT projects run the UK government are a farce - starting with the NHS computerisation, through to the systems used for the police national computer and similar systems.
I *want* to see it. I am so pleased when I hear of countries trying it, but I know that in my own country this is nothing but spin. I would seriously consider emigrating to a country that treated its IT systems correctly and did things like this when they were needed. I haven't seen it happen yet, though.
Please read up on monopoly law cases, and you'll see why.
"But the fact is that EU is acting against MS for no good reason. Opera is clearly one force behind this move and EU courts are stupidly playing their game."
No, the courts didn't do anything until Opera complained. Then the courts investigated. Then they find the company in question guilty or not and impose sanctions if necessary. If the EU just "had it in" for MS, they could have started the case themselves. And Opera is *nowhere* near being a powerful enough force to motivate the EU... they are a small Norwegian technology company with almost zero market share (and I'm an Opera user!). Opera has nothing to do with it but the fact that they decided to pursue an illegal use of monopoly, which LOTS of others then jumped on and the EU decided was correct. The EU didn't initiate anything here, and Opera isn't going to take down MS just through political power.
"What about Google then? They don't get the same treatment, nor do Apple or any other of the large firms. Google has an incredible monopoly in online advertisement (not the same as search engine market share) and they get away with it."
A monopoly does not mean "largest percent of the market", necessarily. To be convicted under monopoly laws, you have to show malintent and that the monopoly is hindering the market. Google's "monopoly" is just because, when consumers have a free choice, they have heard of Google Ad's and thus use it first. It's most popular. It's like saying that 3M have a monopoly on sticky notes, or that Ford has a monopoly on cars in the UK, or that Hoover had a monopoly on vacuum cleaners. They don't... they just have/had a majority market share which they handle fairly.
In fact, I've heard large advertisers argue that there IS no viable alternative that can pull in anywhere near the traffic that a simple Google campaign can. They are *free* to choose who they deal with (i.e. it's not chosen for them) but the only service they can use, after trying all the others, is Google. The point is that they CAN try all the others, easily, no matter what their website is running, and Google do not *exploit* this monopoly to their advantage... they don't go making PC manufacturers sell computers which are supplied by default with software that replaces everyone else's ads with Google ad's (there might even be a PC manufacturer that *does* do that, but they are not *forced* to, is the point). Neither do Apple compete unfairly. It's competing unfairly that's the problem, not that you have a greater proportion of the market. Even Opera could "compete unfairly" if it really wanted to, but it doesn't.
"Why should Apple, Sun or RedHat get away with it?"
None of whom compete unfairly. In fact, it's hard to find companies that *have* been convicted under anti-monopoly laws... most of them just aren't that stupid or evil.
"I don't see any justice in acting against MS in this stupid way. I don't see the point either."
The point is to return the market to a fair competition. It would *still* be the case that MS software is installed on more computers than anything else, but the point is that people are *free to choose*. If it were an election - it's not about the Republican's winning every year for a decade (or whatever), it's about them doing that BY FORCING PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR THEM. We don't care if people *really* want to vote for them, so long as it's a free, fair decision on their part (and not "If you don't vote for us, we'll make the last year we're in power have 5000% tax rates...")
"First of all - do you really think that a normal user knows anything about browsers?"
No. Which is why they need to have the market regulated on their behalf, so that they don't end up with a heap of crap just because "it's Microsoft".
"Second, playing with courts have nothing to do with justice - no matter how you "play" in court the laws should be the same for everyone which clearly is not the case."
They are. Find anothe
"Honestly, I'd say MS should simply refuse and say "Don't want Windows in the EU? Fine.""
Oh, please, please, please. Then maybe we could move on to somewhere interesting instead of spending decades of man hours just fixing stupid problems. However, MS gets over 50% of its revenue from the EU countries, so I don't think they can *afford* to be stroppy.
The problem is that MS wants to play games and mess about in court. It doesn't *want* to play ball, it just wants people to get bored and give up trying to sue them. The EU can't let that stand, no matter what the problem is. When you're fined 400m Euros... pay it. Especially when your company accounts say that you've got ten times that money just lying about. If you start messing about and coming up with excuses (although, by all means, pay it and THEN appeal) for years after you've been told by a court to pay, then you will get tons of problems like this.
MS have brought it on themselves - the monopolistic practices are one thing, but playing with the courts because they believe they are powerless is not a bright idea either. I can easily foresee MS playing the same games... and the EU will find something else wrong, and bring it to court quicker, and fine heavier until MS has such a bad reputation that the EU *does* give up on it, or starts shutting it down or breaking it up. The fact is that MS trading EU is entirely at the mercy of an EU court - they can seize assets, shut the business down, force them to do just about anything. It's only because MS USA actually "owns" the courts over there that you don't see the same problems come up more often, or think that they are invincible.
Pillock.
Once you get past one server (if not before), you need to start backing up. Once you start offering a service to people who are giving you money by visiting (whether through ad revenue or otherwise), you need to start backing up. The number of servers is an indicator to the amount of work you're putting into something and the popularity of it. Even if you consider your user's data unimportant, the work that's gone into the servers and their various configurations by that point makes it worth backing up the WHOLE thing. Once you start maxing out a server, you REALLY need to look closely at what happens if it all goes wrong. This is especially true if you're going to start doing replication or load-balancing because in the first case you get the problem of your mistakes replicating across every one of your servers, and in the latter case you have the problem of what happens if one half of your load-balance cuts out (because, presumably, your remaining server won't be able to cope for long on it's own).
My brother runs a very popular website for a specific niche... The only money it makes is Google Ad revenue (enough to pay for hosting plus a bit more). There aren't millions of users who would cry foul if the site was down for a few days. But even I have a backup of the content that he gives me to store on my "offsite location" (back bedroom) on a regular basis, we have a seperate domain on a seperate host that isn't advertised and which mirrors all the content, there are local copies on not just one computer but every computer we own, there are copies of most stuff on several, seperate FTP hosts, plus we burn off DVD's of the content on a regular basis to provide a historical record.
We *have* had to restore the backup several times (which isn't fun when you have Gb's of data to be uploaded from a broadband connection over FTP, and even better when the new configuration doesn't run PHP or have the same paths and Unix permissions, etc.) because of mistakes at the hosting company... but we don't buy backup from them, so it's fair enough. We've never yet lost a byte of anything important - a few forums entries at most, but even the MySQL databases were safely backed up. We don't have RAID, we don't have fancy rsync'ing, scheduled backups or anything else. It's just slapping some stuff on a different computer / different media every now and then.
Now, this is 500Gb of other people's data... that alone tells you that you should be backing it up... the schools I work for don't have that much total storage if I add every server's data together (including Ghost images of client machines) but we still back it up on a regular basis (disk, tape, offsite, etc.). I've *never* had to restore a server in that case but I know that all the backups work just fine.
Don't be an idiot... if it takes you until you lose data before you consider backups, then you're a fool. Just do it for yourself - turn off your machine and pretend the hard drive is corrupt - how much of that data do you have stored elsewhere? How much of it would you be sad to lose? Don't forget to include configurations (thank God, Linux configurations are so easy to back up, being mostly plaintext), PHP scripts, passwords stored on it, login emails, scripts, serial numbers, text files of instructions on how to do certain things, before you even get to your actual data (photographs, personal emails, documents, etc.).
Yes, and *sales* are on a completely different scale to back then, too.
Virtually every household has at least one games console now, and at least one PC. Back then, a computer was a specialist item that not everybody had. Hell, even my mother has a Wii and a laptop now.
Additionally, the cost of creating a game isn't necessarily representative of the time/effort put into it (have you seen the iterations that Counterstrike:Condition Zero went through and then ended up being nothing more than a CS texture pack with a few rehashed maps and a bot?), nor of the end-result. "Peggle" by PopCap has probably sold thousands, tens of, or hundreds of thousands of copies. It was made by a handful of people listed on the credits screen in no time at all. Not all games are large level, 500-mission, FMV, cutscenes, etc. In fact, the majority of them are nothing more than WiiSports - a few simple games rehashed with a new idea.
I don't deny that teams are *generally* larger and games *generally* more complex, but the scale of development means that this just makes things cheaper - in the Spectrum days, a lot of the small "software houses" were nothing more than a set of teenagers with a bunch of tape recorders. That was a recurring time+money cost that isn't present any more, especially not with digital downloads.
Plus, this enormous modern cost is a *one-off* which means that BUDGET games are not funding it... they have been recompensated by the time the game comes out on budget, usually MANY times over. Even comparing to games of more than 10 years ago (e.g. Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Red Alert etc.), the price increase is still present and huge - and for its time the cutscenes, FMV, etc. in those games were unprecedented. Now, of course, there are libraries, commodity hardware, high-level languages, graphics drivers, etc. which save the time and money that would previously have been spent recreating their work, and that money is now spent on artistry instead.
It's not that modern games are suddenly more expensive or harder to make... how hard must Quake have been to make in its day? It needed hardware that didn't really exist just to create the game on a development machine that could run fast enough, it needed extreme optimisation, it needed to cater for new hardware, it needed to do a lot - and that was 1996. I don't suppose that Doom was any different (1993). The work that goes into a game, if indeed that makes up for any of the significant increase in price, is being wasted because today's games really AREN'T worth that amount of input, just to create Yet Another FPS. And now consider - how hard was it to actually write, say, Left4Dead once you had the source engine and a bunch load of programmers and artists who have already earned their salary that year? Did it cost $50 multiplied by the number of sales? Not even close, I should imagine orders of magnitude out.
A lot of people say that this price increase is due to inflation etc. and that the prices we all remember are impossible today.
I can only think of the games that come out for Spectrum - 1980's, £10 for a "full-price" game, 99p for a budget game (rising to £1.99 and then £2.99 before the end of the 80's). Let's ignore the high-end stuff for a while, because people buy stuff just because it's full price and just came out - they are the people who are stupid.
Even taking into account inflation, etc. that is a hell of a markup. And these people formed teams like Codemasters etc. (Two brothers started out programming Spectrum and C64 games under the name Codemasters and soon built a company out of it before the Speccy era had ended.) so it's not like they didn't profit from it.
Now, let's look at the Wii... not the newest console but a good seller. The cheapest "new" (not used) game I can find in an average shop is £10 and it's an unpopular title. The average "budget" game (i.e. a popular game that has had it's run and needs to sell more units) is around £20-30. The "good" games can cost up to £60, not including other hardware bundled with them, and stay at that price for YEARS.
The 99p - £1.99 - £2.99 was a fast expansion of price - 300% inflation within 10 years. But since then, we've seen nearly 1000% inflation in 20 years (£2.99 in 1989 -> £20-30 in 2009), just for budget titles. That's exponential growth. Real inflation in developed countries hangs way under the 5% a year mark, so even with the best maths in the world (you can't really necessarily just "add up" the year-on-year inflation for the last ten years), it's not anywhere near 300% and certainly not 1000% inflation over 10 or 20 years.
Prices will be set to whatever people will pay. Unfortunately, people are stupid and a lot of parents spend this ridiculous sort of money because they think they have to. But for, say, half a dozen new (but been out for a while) games to cost a week's wages for the average person, that's just stupid.
However, the prices of the hardware are relatively static. The Spectrum cost £100-200 when it came out, the same price bracket as the Wii. The hardware has inflated a little but not anywhere near as much. Considering that is bound by real-world economics like availability of parts, bulk-orders, raw material prices, I expect it to model inflation quite well and it does. But the software seem to be nothing but pure profiteering - probably based mostly on the fact that once you've bought the hardware, you "have to" buy games for it.
Steam's sales are great. I haven't bought myself anything on Steam in years (I bought my brother a birthday present of Half-Life 2 when it first came out, and nothing before that at all) but I went on there the other month and ended up getting about 12 games for about £25. That's perfect for me, and they were all games I wanted, all big names, two Half-life 2 episodes, the entire GTA and UFO series, (but not GTA4) etc. I could easily have bought another 12 games for around the same price. But when I look at the "normal" prices of some of that stuff, I shriek in horror. £30-50 for a game? Come on, that's *4* DVD's even at "brand-new" pricing, and there's no way that a Rainbox Six game costs as much to make, even taking into account the difference in the amount of final sales, as four Hollywood movies. £50 is a LOT of money. That was once-a-year birthday-treat kind of money back when I was a kid and I could make that run to games, films, books, magazines, etc. for ages. Now that's the price of one game (which isn't guaranteed to be a blockbuster). Inflation hasn't grown that fast.
The scales aren't right - software is far too expensive, especially for the effort that goes into updating and supporting most of it. Multiplayer games are left to die after a few years, patches dry up a matter of months after the initial release, support is non-existent fo
Although I have a different viewpoint, your last point is simply erroneous.
"Because those responses are evidence against them. They show an attitude of not caring about whether the rights-holders' copyright is infringed. Those responses could be bad for them in front of a jury."
They are not "evidence" at all. They are expressions of opinion, which is an entirely different thing. You don't have to agree with a law to abide by it. You don't have to even be polite about that law outside of court. In the absolute extreme, it could be viewed as potential for displaying their intentions absent other evidence but you're still on boggy ground because they can just claim it's satire etc.
Additionally, if you genuinely believe that you have broken no law, then it doesn't matter at all. Most (if not ALL) of those letters referred to US law, which DOES NOT APPLY in Sweden - and the majority of rebuttals from TPB (although immature) say this quite plainly - they don't believe they have broken any *Swedish* law, and they are on *Swedish* soil. That *is* cause to be mocking. Even a lawyer writing a reply to such a request would be mocking, although they would probably be more articulate.
Just because someone is rude, obnoxious or beligerent, doesn't mean they aren't perfectly correct and within their legal rights to be so. If they behaved like that IN COURT, then you have another matter entirely - the one of contempt - which would be stamped out and prejudice their case heavily. By the looks of it, they have MUCH more sense than that. I'm not sure I'd go for the publicity shenanigans leading up to the court case - I'd want the judge to see that I was taking the whole thing very seriously - but the letters mean absolutely nothing, legally speaking. I'll be very surprised if the court entertains any claims on the basis of what's in the letters without a TON of other, real evidence too.
Imagine a nutter writes to you claiming you stole his magic bear's porridge. He is forceful, quotes US law at you (even though you live in a country not subject to it), threatens to sue, etc. You decide to post it online and write a mocking letter in reply. Now, if that nutter happens to be very rich and takes you to court, do you really think that the court would take your reply seriously and hold it as evidence that you did in fact steal his magic bear's porridge? You could even SAY SO in the letter ("Yes, it was me that stole your magic bear's porridge, and tasty it was too!"). It wouldn't matter. The courts recognise that not everyone is mature when they are outside the courtroom and that the reply is not serious, because the claim was ridiculous. TPB case is a similar thing. The replies to UNENFORCEABLE legal requests which were obviously fabricated and incorrect don't really matter, until someone brings it before a Swedish court. That's when the game stops and you have to watch what you say.
Oh, and "you could play the levels in random order to little ill-effect"...
That's a comment I could apply to 99% of FPS shooters out there, starting with the classics like Quake (four episodes, play them in any order, every X level is a boss level, little melding of scenery, story etc. between levels), Doom (linear levels, pretty much randomly made), even back to Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny. Admittedly, the more modern ones are more story-based (why people think that's so important, I don't know) like Half Life 2, etc. But even the original Half Life you could quite easily switch levels here and there and nobody would really have noticed.
Storylines: Half Life 2 and its various episodes had a good story. But to be honest, I spent most of the cutscenes where I still had control jumping around bored to tears because I either wanted to get on and kill the scum, or I wanted the lift/door to activate so I could move on. And every "surprise" where you suddenly come under attack, I'm sitting there from the start of the cutscene poised in a nice safe position waiting while the character reel through thirty seconds of plot before the action starts... I *know* that those tunnels are going to fill up with a bunch of aliens at any moment, but they kept on yabbering. The fun of swinging a crane to take out the baddies, or the fear of seeing those stalkers come over the tops of the trees did ten times more than all the plot elements put together for me. Gameplay over story, wins every time.
Is it just me or does it just look like a fairly standard shooter, with a TF-style multiplayer? Graphics? Good. Sound? Good. Gameplay? Standard FPS fare. Controls? Dunno because I don't have a PS3, but I imagine that keyboard/mouse players would be thrashing anybody who's trying to play it with any other controller (ala every other FPS out there). Whoever shot that multiplayer video certainly wasn't using a proper mouse.
I don't see anything astounding here. It might be a good technical achievement (getting this to run on PS3) but then, to be honest, I'm not even that impressed at that given the PS3's hardware. Could someone enlighten me: What's the big fuss?