You never picked or specified a price when purchasing stock in this game. You simply placed an order for a number of shares of symbol xyz, and if the order was placed before 4pm, you got the stock at the closing price on that day. If you submitted the form at 4:01pm the order was supposed to get queued up and not processed until closing on the next day (IE you'd get the stock for the next day's closing price). Apparently, through a cookie or something, if you started the order process before 4pm, you could then wait until after 4pm (leaving your session open in the browser) and when you saw good news, you could submit those orders and still get the 4pm price. Pretty elementary bug if you ask me, and I can't believe they didn't test for this.
1) According to netcraft there are many more apache installs (almost 2 to 1) than IIS installs on the internet.
2) Most malware distribution occurs from hacked sites. If you build your own web server and host malware on it, it is much easier for someone to find you and prosecute you. If you hack thousands of computers and let them distribute your malware, there is at least 1 level of indirection that someone must follow to find you. I doubt very many malware distributors set stuff up on their own servers, and if they do, they are either using pirated windows copies (as stated in the article) or a free unix variant, malware distributors don't have million dollar IT budgets.
As for your last point, what has MS created? EVER? Windows 3.1 cheap, crappy Mac OS clone, Office cheap crappy word perfect clone, Windows 95, another try to clone Mac OS. IE? netscape clone.
MS should go down in history not for being a monopoly, not for making good software, but as the largest company ever to be so completely incompetent at R&D and innovation. Even AT&T at its height was creating new things, useful things that people still use today. IBM, same thing. These huge monopolies of yore at least lived up to what monopolies are supposed to do. In an economic sense, monopolies charge higher prices, but they are supposed to take that added profit and plow it into R&D to maintain their dominant position and continually keep would be entrants at a disadvantage. Most of the huge monopolies of the 1900's (including AT&T and IBM) lived up to this. MS fails this test miserably. They take their excess profits and give a one time 30 billion dollar dividend? What kind of crap is that, hire 10,000 programmers for 5 years and see what they come up with. That move right there says either MS thinks there is absolutely nothing in computing that needs to be solved or figured out (completely impossible), or b that they admit they are completely incompetent at R&D and give up on trying to make something new and innovative.
If he's in a corporate environment I wouldn't be suprised. I know in 2002 (the last time I was in a "big" company) the internal target was to deploy windows XP in the 2005-2006 timeframe, they had just upgraded everything from NT4 to 2000 in 2002 after more than 1 year of testing the deployment strategy. This is normal procedure in big companies, they are always 3-5 years behind the technology curve, doing anything less is imprudent.
If you are a student or a hobbyist, unit testing is not for you. Don't use it, don't learn it.
What is really baffling is the student part of that. VS Express is the system that students use, it is the system that MS has put in place for people who are LEARNING to program. And at the same time they are saying "Don't learn unit testing, unless you want to fork over some money".
Unit testing is one of the core best practices of programming. It's so fundamental, when I interview programmers, I ask to see their unit tests before I ask to see application code (If I'm looking at a portfolio of work). When I ask someone how they would implement feature XYZ if their first response isn't "develop test cases" they are disqualified immediately. It's funny how many MS only programmers fail that one...
The problem is, the license doesn't forbid extension, it forbids "working around technical limitations" which is so vague as to be completely un-enforcable. VS Express doesn't run on a Mac. If I install parallels, and windows, to run VS on my mac, have I "worked around a technical limitation" I think I have. It didn't work, I changed the parameters (worked around) the problem, and now it works.
Further, as stated many times he used publicly available APIs which are openly documented on MSDN. He didn't hack, he didn't reverse engineer, he simply said "I want to do x (run vs on my mac), lets see if there are any APIs I can use, oh what do you know, here's one called x (parallels), lets try it and see, yup works! sweet!"
Now, if MS wants to implement a "technical limitation" such that you have to cause a buffer overflow to install an add-in to VS Express, then they should do that, and then they would have grounds. As it stands, the license terms are so broad they would prevent any and all functional work arounds, and there are other add-ins which are available for VS Express, so its not a rule that you can't extend it, they are just attacking/singling out this guy, probably because they only want "enterprise" features in their pay for products, and for whatever reason they see unit testing as an enterprise feature, and don't think students or hobbyists should be able to have that functionality
Sorry to reply to self, another benefit of the "not upgrade" path is now I have 3 "old" computers that run linux just fine, even the p3 933 makes a great little family mail server (extended family). I have a little closet in the basement with my 3 "servers" and they crank along just fine. so, for the extra $200 I get a new computer, and the old computer is still functional, not all cannabalized for parts.
Yes, things have changed a bit in the last couple years... but you are talking across generations, I haven't had a 5400RPM HD since 2000. And that old p3 933 w/pc133 RAM, and an AGP 2x video card, when I went to "upgrade" it in 2002 (I already had 1GB of 133 RAM and the mobo was maxed out at that). Now, to upgrade need pentium 4, this means new mobo. new mobo only supports DDR266 RAM, new ram, new mobo is AGP 4x, need new video card, and my 20GB HD is full, might as well buy a new one... new HD. Oh, and then for good measure had to replace the power supply.
Now, I didn't actually do that upgrade, because I looked at the costs of the upgrade, and said "hmm... for $200 I get brand new computer, lets take that choice"
Then, in 2004 when the 2002 computer was getting slow (p4 1.6, 1GB DDR266 RAM, 40gb hd, 4X agp), I go and look again, exact same story, new processor (2.6 p4) means new mobo, new mobo (with 8X AGP) means new video card, new mobo also means new ram (ddr400 instead of 266), new mobo supports SATA, might as well get the 80GB sata... bought another new computer, not worth the headache.
It might be better now, but I don't know, instead of buying a new PC this time (in 2006) I bought an apple. I didn't look at upgrade costs, because up until then it had been prohibitively expensive in time and money to do a real upgrade. And yes, I am somewhat CPU bound (I'm a developer, my machine is compiling ~ 3 hours/day, also RAM intensive..), but any gamer is in the same boat.
At my company we have been going back and forth for the last 2 months trying to pick a platform for our next gen product. It is already decided it is going to be a total re-write, the old code is just too crufty. I've been advocating either Python or Java (preferrably python, but we've got a couple guys with more java experience, so that gets me a couple votes). Basically its a 50/50 split right now between python and.net (I showed off some django love, created something in 2 hours that took the.NET boys 4 days to create). But the microsofties have their love of... crashing? less speed? I dunno... Anyway, with this argument in hand I am 100% sure I can get the COO to sign off on Python, and I can get at least one of the Microsofties who is on the fence to convert over, and I'll take the day:)
Of course, we're a pretty small shop, but MS just lost at least 10 licenses of the highest end VS. Plus licenses for 15-20 MS SQL server licenses, plus server licenses, plus cals.... All in all, about $450,000. If you can't even be a MS VIP and not get sued, and not be allowed to extend or improve products, how are we going to get away with writing code and integrating with their APIs?
Yeah, I'm spreading a little FUD here (there really isn't anything we are doing technically that could get us in the same boat as this guy, but who knows, maybe next year there will be, and by then its too late), but alls fair in love and war... and this is love
In fact in the comments on that very blog posting there are at least 3 or 4 other add-ins for the Express version which are mentioned, specifically they are mentioned in questions like "What about XYZ it is an extension it runs in Expresss, how does it not violate the EULA?"
I've been working in IT/Programming for 12 years now, while I was growing up we always had multiple computers at home...
I use a Mac now (6 months or so, ditched the dell for the macbook pro), now some of his points are somewhat valid, there are a lot of commercial utilities for macs which in the windows world, you can probably find and inferior replacement as shareware or freeware. However, you can compile and run a lot of open source software on OS X, more than in windows I think. Also, the cost of utilities and even full blown powerful software seems to be much lower on the mac. For example Parallels, what is it $80? Virtual PC from Microsoft is $300. Apple Works (which is a nice little office suite) is like $99, MS Office, $500. For what I need and do, Apple Works does everything I need.
As for the "buy a new computer" line, how is this any different? If you have a PC for > 2 years and now its "slow" yeah, you can upgrade the PC maybe a little easier than the Mac, but I've never seriously done it. After 2 years, its a whole new CPU generation, with a different socket. You're buying a new motherboard to upgrade the CPU, now you need new RAM, and unless you're terribly lucky a new video card. The video card problem might be getting better now, with PCI Express, but from 1998-2005 with all the different revisions of AGP it was nearly impossible to reuse your video card. Now, you probably replaced your sound card with the motherboard, and if you're lucky your power supply has enough juice for the new mobo, CPU, RAM. You can probably reuse your hard drive, but you might not want to, while you were in the store you saw a 500GB drive for $140, you might as well replace your 80GB drive. Besides, since you changed so much stuff, you're reinstalling windows anyway, might as well start fresh.
So in the end, you get to keep the same cdrom drive, and maybe the case. You just replaced everything else (except maybe the power supply). And you get the added bonus of spending hours in the computer store picking out replacement parts, making sure the RAM is compatible with the Mobo, and you get to bring it all home and go through the tedious chore of putting it all together and reinstalling windows. Good job saving $50 on the case.
That's great until you raid card dies in 4 years, and you can't get the exact same model with the exact same firmware, and now you lost all your data because you can't read the volume anymore. After being burned by this twice in the last 5 years, I will never use hardware raid again.
We're in agreement, it doesn't matter, if the states want to do it the long inefficient way, they will. My numbers for amazon are right, but I really don't know how big the raw numbers of all online sales are. Also, I don't know how much of that is already charged sales tax. It could be my numbers are way off, but I'd be willing to pay 5-10% more in property tax to avoid any internet taxes, granted, I've got a smaller base that I'm off. Utah has pretty reasonable property taxes, I'm sure someone in Washington state or California would scream at a 10% increase, for me its an extra $12/mo or so to do a 10% increase.
but you're right too, it is hard to see through all the crazy taxes to say "Oh, this is actually the same as that" and that makes any of this really a moot point. There shouldn't be new taxes, and I'm fine with a state saying "Hey we lost this revenue, we need to recoup it" but, it seems to me they are going about it in a really stupid way with this.
I'll give you that last statement. I'm blaming the democrats because they are being open to it and posturing that they will get rid of the net access tax ban. If these calls for new taxation started to come up to a republican led congress (as they have for at least the last 10 years) the majority would say "No, we aren't letting you tax anyone, go away" as they have for the last 14 years.
The democrats say "Oh, you want more money for schools, ok, here lets pass a new tax".
The states then proceed to fund whatever they want, and keep the schools at more than 40 students per classroom, and nothing changes, except I'm paying more in taxes for the exact same services I used to get.
I agree with you there, and that is why I went the whole way and said they should get rid of all the rest of the taxes. If it is just sales tax from online sales that they are trying to recoup, there is the potential for people to end up paying more in taxes than they otherwise would.
I would argue as well though, most online purchases already come with sales tax, its only the small merchants who don't, and maybe Amazon (although I rarely purchase from there) I don't know what their "physical" presence looks like. Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, HP, Dell, IBM, Apple all the huge retailers that have online stores already have a physical presence in most states, and therefore are already paying sales taxes. I really question how much revenue these states are losing to online sales. Amazon only has about 10 billion/yr in total sales, spread that out over all the states, then figure in the usually small percentage that is sales tax... 10 billion *.08 (higher than my state, but lower than others I'm sure) / 50, that is 16 million/state. Of course it won't be evenly distributed between the states, California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois will probably get much more than that. But here in Utah, our state budget is like 1.5 billion. 16 million is 1.06% of the budget, its almost nothing, if they raised my property tax 1%, that would be an extra $13/yr. Now obviously that only replaces amazons sales, but the law already has an exclusion for merchants selling 5 million/yr, I'd argue that accounts for probably 99% of online sales. Ebay sellers would almost all fall under that umbrella. And amazon.com is as far as I know about the only pure online store that is huge. I'm sure there are others that are bigger than 5 million/yr, but I bet all of them combined don't add up to amazon.com's sales.
So, maybe double my earlier projections, and my property tax would go up $26/yr, certainly a lot easier for the state than trying to enforce tax collection on hundreds or thousands of companies outside of the state. Just think of the enforcement costs. And, not an undo burden in my opinion.
As an aside, do you pay taxes on mail order catalog purchases? I don't know, I've never bought anything that way, but I know my mom does ALL the time, and I'd imagine that market is still bigger than online sales. Also, what about "As seen on TV"? I know I've bought a couple things that way (my wife loves her magic bullet), but I don't remember if I paid sales tax on that either. If they're going after online sales, why aren't they going after these other "out of area" purchase mechanisms?
Personally I disagree with you. If I'm buying things online, and not paying sales tax, well I've "saved" that money. I'd be just fine with my property tax going up to compensate. It is a zero sum game. In fact, if my state got rid of sales tax, income tax, gas tax, food tax, and every other type of tax, and put it all in property tax, I'd be happy.
Sure, the property tax would go through the roof, but it would all be in one place, it would normalize the budget, take out tons of variables in the state budget, it would let people actually see how much they are paying in taxes (the number one reason taxes always go up and never come down is because the gov't is so good at hiding taxes in every bill we pay, that no one can add it up and actually see their tax burden).
I'd be more than happy to centralize it all so you can see and say "I pay $12,000/yr in taxes to my state/local". Then you'll get people pissed off, and they might start holding their local politicians accountable.
It would also really decrease the cost and complexity of doing business, it would reduce the amount of paperwork the state has to deal with, it would simplify tons of stuff.
the only drawback would be that rent would increase. However, the renter would be saving so much money in other taxes, again they would be able to pay more for their housing. It would be a zero sum game, except for the huge savings in productivity that the simplification of the taxes would cause for businesses.
For all of you people complaining that they are only raising these taxes to pay for the war, or XYZ national spending, they aren't. This is strictly (at this point) a state issue. The states want to raise taxes, the states are lobbying to increase their local revenue. Granted, once the net access moratorium expires, the feds will probably be the 1st or second ones (behind california) to start taxing net access, but the sales tax issues are strictly the states. The federal government doesn't levy sales taxes, and that is part of the problem with sales tax, you have thousands of tax bodies, and amazon, ebay, et al would have to understand and compute sales tax based on these thousands if not hundreds of thousands of rules.
Now, I'm as much against having internet taxes as any respectable slashdotter, but don't blame the Feds, this is the states lobbying (and the democrats love of taxation), but it isn't going to pay for the war. BTW, this issue is the #1 reason I always vote republican. The Democrats haven't even been in power 1 year, and they're already going to screw the internet. Seriously, since the internet started to get big in 93-94, the Republicans have been in power in congress. It only takes the democrats 6 months in power to totally ruin it?!
If this goes through Amazon would have to have a moratorium on hiring programmers, and they'd have to halt any new features they are working on. They'd have to hire as many accountants as they would normally programmers, and put all their coders to work implementing the new tax collection system on behalf of all the state and local governments. At least in the state I live in, depending on where you sell a product, you could be responsible to collect state, county, and municipality sales taxes all individually. You then have to file a tax return with all 3 of the collecting bodies.
If Amazon is forced to do this, they will have to file > 10,000 tax returns every quarter, lots of fun! And you get the added bonus that most state and local tax collection bodies have no electronic filing for sales tax, no way to automate the process. It is manually printing out a form and mailing it, or maybe if you're lucky faxing it, but either way, its 10,000 tax returns that a person has to physically handle.
Except the article specifically states the democrats are going to let the net access moratorium expire in Nov. When that happens, the internet bill will get littered overnight with hundreds of surcharges, fees, and taxes. It will look just like a telephone bill.
Internet Access Universal Access Fee: $3.54 High Speed Usage Fee @ 3.6% of connection speed of 6mbps: $2.16 Local Connection Usage Fee: $5.00 Street Access Fee: $2.50 Pole Access Fee: $1.50 Total Taxes: $14.70
If you think those aren't new taxes you are high as a kite. And this will effect 100% of internet users. Personally, I buy stuff online maybe once or twice a year, I like to go to stores, look at the physical product I'm going to buy, touch it, see it, pick it up... And I'm an immediate gratification junky as well, it takes all the fun out of something if you can't pay for it and then have it at home and be playing with it 20 minutes later. So, my state loses very little on me to sales tax. However, letting the states charge taxes on access will increase their revenue way more than the silly sales tax problem. They will levy that tax 100% across the board whether you use the internet for commerce or not.
You're proposal is insane! Taxing on a curve based on usage?! Proposals like this are why the tax code today is so byzantine you have to pay someone 3-4k/yr just to figure it out for you if you have a couple of businesses and some side income.
If they are going to put in a tax, they should just say 5% of your internet access fee. Flat, no weird math, nothing hard.
I'm opposed to taxing the internet, but if they have to, don't make it some 20 level deep if/else statement.
If they "do it right" as you recommend, it will be the access providers who have to pay the overhead. The state just makes the rules, then all of the broadband providers have to go spend millions (if not billions) updating their billing systems to calculate the tax. The providers are the ones that would be punished (sure the tax just gets passed through, they don't "lose" money, but implementing the system to collect the taxes will be very hard). The end result of your proposal would be the providers would say "Oh, its taxed in tiers, the more options we offer, the more expensive, convoluted, and painful our billing will be". Ok, we only offer 256k/256k because that is taxed at the lower residential rate, and we don't have to track bandwidth usage on it to levy the tax.
You are saying that DRM cannot be implemented in an "open source" product because the GPL stops you. That isn't true. You can implement all the DRM you want, but if you do it on a GPLv3 code base, you can't sue under the DMCA.
Further, DRM is simply an encryption scheme with a couple bells and whistles on top (like counting how many times a thing is decrypted)... Some of the most secure and best encryption/security systems that are available are open source systems. It is entirely possible to implement a DRM system using open source code. You will argue that "the key will be available to anyone, and it won't be secure". Well, as hackers have proven, any system that is dependent on a single (or a small number) of keys is extremely susceptible. Use some PKI, give everyone their own key, don't store the keys in the software or in the system. Alternatively, letting open source guys hack on your code will probably make it the most secure DRM system in the world. Don't tell them its for DRM, just tell them you want a really secure encryption/security scheme.
Ok, you are a complete moron. I don't care what you say, if you were my boss you would be fired, and I would take your job.
In my dev shop there are 2 components, a legacy thick client app which is managed in source safe (file locking, no branching, no merging), 5 devs. This project is in full maintenance mode, no new features. We have recently rolled out a web based replacement which is managed in Monotone. 2 devs. There are branches and merges constantly.
Recently we found a bug which effected multiple areas of the code. It had to be fixed in both projects, it was a design assumption from the original legacy code which turned out to be false. It took the 2 devs on the web project less than 1 day to fix it, they were both working the whole day writing code, merging it together, testing, coding, merging, testing.
The sourcesafe guys, well, it took almost 2 weeks. 1 dev would spend a day with a bunch of files locked, the other 4 are now stuck, they can't work on anything that touches what the first guy checked out. Since this particular bug went to the core design of the app, the core of the app was locked while the first dev implemented the "design" changes (function definitions, mostly.h stuff). He checks his work in, now nothing works, because all the old function calls don't work anymore, you can't test his checkin yet. Now the other 4 devs split up the files they want to work on and lock them, and they go through fixing things, but no one can check anything in and get a working system, everything is broken. This delays testing which is always a bad thing to do. They are forced to commit large changesets, they can't do incremental development, well, they could, but the more incremental the development, the more blocked everyone is by anyone else making changes. When changes are effecting large amounts of the code base, this basically means if you have a staff of more than 2 you are screwed. During the 2 weeks while I was sitting back (being 1 of the 2 web project coders) adding features to the product, I can't remember how many hundreds of times I heard the sourcesafe users scream "Unlock that damn file I need it" or "Why did you lock THAT file?! You aren't using it!" across the office.
In short I don't care that you're such a great salesman that you've managed to sell yourself for > $400/hr. You suck at managing coders, and you understand so little about the process that you are ripping off everyone who ever paid you a dime.
As to your home valuation, after the recent bubble, who's home isn't worth 1.2 million? Seriously though, you probably live in California (the only pricks I've known as big as you are all from that horrid state) where the average is probably > 1 million anymore, so you're not that special, you're slightly above average.
You are correct and I mis-spoke, it was the first red alert that was the last straw for westwood studios proper. After they were purchased by EA in 1998, the rules probably changed. Red alert 2 was released in 2000, after the purchase, so EA would have been calling the shots at that point. It hasn't been 10 years since the release of red alert 2 though.
We all know this, I just think its funny that these media execs can't figure it out. I will never forget a story I heard from Westwood Studios back before they were bought out by EA (96-97 timeframe). On Red Alert 2, they spent a large fraction of the budget of the game, had 4 PhD contractors come in, trying to build a DRM system that would keep people from copying the game. It was cracked within 10 minutes of release.
After that they vowed never to try to put DRM on a game ever again, it cost way too much, and it didn't do anything. Besides that they got people all the time filling out their registration cards saying "I bought this game after I played the hacked version and I liked it".
DRM hurts sales, it hurts acceptance of a system, and it is expensive and pointless to deploy.
When DVD John hacked CSS wasn't it by taking apart a physical player? I thought he pulled apart an actual DVD player to do it, but maybe I heard wrong.
I'm just happy we aren't the only ones living in a country controlled by corporate interests and lobbies.
Its kind of a sad statement, but I've been feeling very lonely living in the worst country in the world for the last few years. Welcome to the basement Japan! At least we have some company down here now.
Slashdot Mirror
You never picked or specified a price when purchasing stock in this game. You simply placed an order for a number of shares of symbol xyz, and if the order was placed before 4pm, you got the stock at the closing price on that day. If you submitted the form at 4:01pm the order was supposed to get queued up and not processed until closing on the next day (IE you'd get the stock for the next day's closing price). Apparently, through a cookie or something, if you started the order process before 4pm, you could then wait until after 4pm (leaving your session open in the browser) and when you saw good news, you could submit those orders and still get the 4pm price. Pretty elementary bug if you ask me, and I can't believe they didn't test for this.
1) According to netcraft there are many more apache installs (almost 2 to 1) than IIS installs on the internet.
2) Most malware distribution occurs from hacked sites. If you build your own web server and host malware on it, it is much easier for someone to find you and prosecute you. If you hack thousands of computers and let them distribute your malware, there is at least 1 level of indirection that someone must follow to find you. I doubt very many malware distributors set stuff up on their own servers, and if they do, they are either using pirated windows copies (as stated in the article) or a free unix variant, malware distributors don't have million dollar IT budgets.
As for your last point, what has MS created? EVER? Windows 3.1 cheap, crappy Mac OS clone, Office cheap crappy word perfect clone, Windows 95, another try to clone Mac OS. IE? netscape clone.
MS should go down in history not for being a monopoly, not for making good software, but as the largest company ever to be so completely incompetent at R&D and innovation. Even AT&T at its height was creating new things, useful things that people still use today. IBM, same thing. These huge monopolies of yore at least lived up to what monopolies are supposed to do. In an economic sense, monopolies charge higher prices, but they are supposed to take that added profit and plow it into R&D to maintain their dominant position and continually keep would be entrants at a disadvantage. Most of the huge monopolies of the 1900's (including AT&T and IBM) lived up to this. MS fails this test miserably. They take their excess profits and give a one time 30 billion dollar dividend? What kind of crap is that, hire 10,000 programmers for 5 years and see what they come up with. That move right there says either MS thinks there is absolutely nothing in computing that needs to be solved or figured out (completely impossible), or b that they admit they are completely incompetent at R&D and give up on trying to make something new and innovative.
If he's in a corporate environment I wouldn't be suprised. I know in 2002 (the last time I was in a "big" company) the internal target was to deploy windows XP in the 2005-2006 timeframe, they had just upgraded everything from NT4 to 2000 in 2002 after more than 1 year of testing the deployment strategy. This is normal procedure in big companies, they are always 3-5 years behind the technology curve, doing anything less is imprudent.
So, in short, MS's official stance is:
If you are a student or a hobbyist, unit testing is not for you. Don't use it, don't learn it.
What is really baffling is the student part of that. VS Express is the system that students use, it is the system that MS has put in place for people who are LEARNING to program. And at the same time they are saying "Don't learn unit testing, unless you want to fork over some money".
Unit testing is one of the core best practices of programming. It's so fundamental, when I interview programmers, I ask to see their unit tests before I ask to see application code (If I'm looking at a portfolio of work). When I ask someone how they would implement feature XYZ if their first response isn't "develop test cases" they are disqualified immediately. It's funny how many MS only programmers fail that one...
The problem is, the license doesn't forbid extension, it forbids "working around technical limitations" which is so vague as to be completely un-enforcable. VS Express doesn't run on a Mac. If I install parallels, and windows, to run VS on my mac, have I "worked around a technical limitation" I think I have. It didn't work, I changed the parameters (worked around) the problem, and now it works.
Further, as stated many times he used publicly available APIs which are openly documented on MSDN. He didn't hack, he didn't reverse engineer, he simply said "I want to do x (run vs on my mac), lets see if there are any APIs I can use, oh what do you know, here's one called x (parallels), lets try it and see, yup works! sweet!"
Now, if MS wants to implement a "technical limitation" such that you have to cause a buffer overflow to install an add-in to VS Express, then they should do that, and then they would have grounds. As it stands, the license terms are so broad they would prevent any and all functional work arounds, and there are other add-ins which are available for VS Express, so its not a rule that you can't extend it, they are just attacking/singling out this guy, probably because they only want "enterprise" features in their pay for products, and for whatever reason they see unit testing as an enterprise feature, and don't think students or hobbyists should be able to have that functionality
Sorry to reply to self, another benefit of the "not upgrade" path is now I have 3 "old" computers that run linux just fine, even the p3 933 makes a great little family mail server (extended family). I have a little closet in the basement with my 3 "servers" and they crank along just fine. so, for the extra $200 I get a new computer, and the old computer is still functional, not all cannabalized for parts.
Yes, things have changed a bit in the last couple years... but you are talking across generations, I haven't had a 5400RPM HD since 2000. And that old p3 933 w/pc133 RAM, and an AGP 2x video card, when I went to "upgrade" it in 2002 (I already had 1GB of 133 RAM and the mobo was maxed out at that). Now, to upgrade need pentium 4, this means new mobo. new mobo only supports DDR266 RAM, new ram, new mobo is AGP 4x, need new video card, and my 20GB HD is full, might as well buy a new one... new HD. Oh, and then for good measure had to replace the power supply.
Now, I didn't actually do that upgrade, because I looked at the costs of the upgrade, and said "hmm... for $200 I get brand new computer, lets take that choice"
Then, in 2004 when the 2002 computer was getting slow (p4 1.6, 1GB DDR266 RAM, 40gb hd, 4X agp), I go and look again, exact same story, new processor (2.6 p4) means new mobo, new mobo (with 8X AGP) means new video card, new mobo also means new ram (ddr400 instead of 266), new mobo supports SATA, might as well get the 80GB sata... bought another new computer, not worth the headache.
It might be better now, but I don't know, instead of buying a new PC this time (in 2006) I bought an apple. I didn't look at upgrade costs, because up until then it had been prohibitively expensive in time and money to do a real upgrade. And yes, I am somewhat CPU bound (I'm a developer, my machine is compiling ~ 3 hours/day, also RAM intensive..), but any gamer is in the same boat.
At my company we have been going back and forth for the last 2 months trying to pick a platform for our next gen product. It is already decided it is going to be a total re-write, the old code is just too crufty. I've been advocating either Python or Java (preferrably python, but we've got a couple guys with more java experience, so that gets me a couple votes). Basically its a 50/50 split right now between python and .net (I showed off some django love, created something in 2 hours that took the .NET boys 4 days to create). But the microsofties have their love of... crashing? less speed? I dunno... Anyway, with this argument in hand I am 100% sure I can get the COO to sign off on Python, and I can get at least one of the Microsofties who is on the fence to convert over, and I'll take the day :)
Of course, we're a pretty small shop, but MS just lost at least 10 licenses of the highest end VS. Plus licenses for 15-20 MS SQL server licenses, plus server licenses, plus cals.... All in all, about $450,000. If you can't even be a MS VIP and not get sued, and not be allowed to extend or improve products, how are we going to get away with writing code and integrating with their APIs?
Yeah, I'm spreading a little FUD here (there really isn't anything we are doing technically that could get us in the same boat as this guy, but who knows, maybe next year there will be, and by then its too late), but alls fair in love and war... and this is love
In fact in the comments on that very blog posting there are at least 3 or 4 other add-ins for the Express version which are mentioned, specifically they are mentioned in questions like "What about XYZ it is an extension it runs in Expresss, how does it not violate the EULA?"
I've been working in IT/Programming for 12 years now, while I was growing up we always had multiple computers at home...
I use a Mac now (6 months or so, ditched the dell for the macbook pro), now some of his points are somewhat valid, there are a lot of commercial utilities for macs which in the windows world, you can probably find and inferior replacement as shareware or freeware. However, you can compile and run a lot of open source software on OS X, more than in windows I think. Also, the cost of utilities and even full blown powerful software seems to be much lower on the mac. For example Parallels, what is it $80? Virtual PC from Microsoft is $300. Apple Works (which is a nice little office suite) is like $99, MS Office, $500. For what I need and do, Apple Works does everything I need.
As for the "buy a new computer" line, how is this any different? If you have a PC for > 2 years and now its "slow" yeah, you can upgrade the PC maybe a little easier than the Mac, but I've never seriously done it. After 2 years, its a whole new CPU generation, with a different socket. You're buying a new motherboard to upgrade the CPU, now you need new RAM, and unless you're terribly lucky a new video card. The video card problem might be getting better now, with PCI Express, but from 1998-2005 with all the different revisions of AGP it was nearly impossible to reuse your video card. Now, you probably replaced your sound card with the motherboard, and if you're lucky your power supply has enough juice for the new mobo, CPU, RAM. You can probably reuse your hard drive, but you might not want to, while you were in the store you saw a 500GB drive for $140, you might as well replace your 80GB drive. Besides, since you changed so much stuff, you're reinstalling windows anyway, might as well start fresh.
So in the end, you get to keep the same cdrom drive, and maybe the case. You just replaced everything else (except maybe the power supply). And you get the added bonus of spending hours in the computer store picking out replacement parts, making sure the RAM is compatible with the Mobo, and you get to bring it all home and go through the tedious chore of putting it all together and reinstalling windows. Good job saving $50 on the case.
That's great until you raid card dies in 4 years, and you can't get the exact same model with the exact same firmware, and now you lost all your data because you can't read the volume anymore. After being burned by this twice in the last 5 years, I will never use hardware raid again.
We're in agreement, it doesn't matter, if the states want to do it the long inefficient way, they will. My numbers for amazon are right, but I really don't know how big the raw numbers of all online sales are. Also, I don't know how much of that is already charged sales tax. It could be my numbers are way off, but I'd be willing to pay 5-10% more in property tax to avoid any internet taxes, granted, I've got a smaller base that I'm off. Utah has pretty reasonable property taxes, I'm sure someone in Washington state or California would scream at a 10% increase, for me its an extra $12/mo or so to do a 10% increase.
but you're right too, it is hard to see through all the crazy taxes to say "Oh, this is actually the same as that" and that makes any of this really a moot point. There shouldn't be new taxes, and I'm fine with a state saying "Hey we lost this revenue, we need to recoup it" but, it seems to me they are going about it in a really stupid way with this.
I'll give you that last statement. I'm blaming the democrats because they are being open to it and posturing that they will get rid of the net access tax ban. If these calls for new taxation started to come up to a republican led congress (as they have for at least the last 10 years) the majority would say "No, we aren't letting you tax anyone, go away" as they have for the last 14 years.
The democrats say "Oh, you want more money for schools, ok, here lets pass a new tax".
The states then proceed to fund whatever they want, and keep the schools at more than 40 students per classroom, and nothing changes, except I'm paying more in taxes for the exact same services I used to get.
I agree with you there, and that is why I went the whole way and said they should get rid of all the rest of the taxes. If it is just sales tax from online sales that they are trying to recoup, there is the potential for people to end up paying more in taxes than they otherwise would.
.08 (higher than my state, but lower than others I'm sure) / 50, that is 16 million/state. Of course it won't be evenly distributed between the states, California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois will probably get much more than that. But here in Utah, our state budget is like 1.5 billion. 16 million is 1.06% of the budget, its almost nothing, if they raised my property tax 1%, that would be an extra $13/yr. Now obviously that only replaces amazons sales, but the law already has an exclusion for merchants selling 5 million/yr, I'd argue that accounts for probably 99% of online sales. Ebay sellers would almost all fall under that umbrella. And amazon.com is as far as I know about the only pure online store that is huge. I'm sure there are others that are bigger than 5 million/yr, but I bet all of them combined don't add up to amazon.com's sales.
I would argue as well though, most online purchases already come with sales tax, its only the small merchants who don't, and maybe Amazon (although I rarely purchase from there) I don't know what their "physical" presence looks like. Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, HP, Dell, IBM, Apple all the huge retailers that have online stores already have a physical presence in most states, and therefore are already paying sales taxes. I really question how much revenue these states are losing to online sales. Amazon only has about 10 billion/yr in total sales, spread that out over all the states, then figure in the usually small percentage that is sales tax... 10 billion *
So, maybe double my earlier projections, and my property tax would go up $26/yr, certainly a lot easier for the state than trying to enforce tax collection on hundreds or thousands of companies outside of the state. Just think of the enforcement costs. And, not an undo burden in my opinion.
As an aside, do you pay taxes on mail order catalog purchases? I don't know, I've never bought anything that way, but I know my mom does ALL the time, and I'd imagine that market is still bigger than online sales. Also, what about "As seen on TV"? I know I've bought a couple things that way (my wife loves her magic bullet), but I don't remember if I paid sales tax on that either. If they're going after online sales, why aren't they going after these other "out of area" purchase mechanisms?
Personally I disagree with you. If I'm buying things online, and not paying sales tax, well I've "saved" that money. I'd be just fine with my property tax going up to compensate. It is a zero sum game. In fact, if my state got rid of sales tax, income tax, gas tax, food tax, and every other type of tax, and put it all in property tax, I'd be happy.
Sure, the property tax would go through the roof, but it would all be in one place, it would normalize the budget, take out tons of variables in the state budget, it would let people actually see how much they are paying in taxes (the number one reason taxes always go up and never come down is because the gov't is so good at hiding taxes in every bill we pay, that no one can add it up and actually see their tax burden).
I'd be more than happy to centralize it all so you can see and say "I pay $12,000/yr in taxes to my state/local". Then you'll get people pissed off, and they might start holding their local politicians accountable.
It would also really decrease the cost and complexity of doing business, it would reduce the amount of paperwork the state has to deal with, it would simplify tons of stuff.
the only drawback would be that rent would increase. However, the renter would be saving so much money in other taxes, again they would be able to pay more for their housing. It would be a zero sum game, except for the huge savings in productivity that the simplification of the taxes would cause for businesses.
For all of you people complaining that they are only raising these taxes to pay for the war, or XYZ national spending, they aren't. This is strictly (at this point) a state issue. The states want to raise taxes, the states are lobbying to increase their local revenue. Granted, once the net access moratorium expires, the feds will probably be the 1st or second ones (behind california) to start taxing net access, but the sales tax issues are strictly the states. The federal government doesn't levy sales taxes, and that is part of the problem with sales tax, you have thousands of tax bodies, and amazon, ebay, et al would have to understand and compute sales tax based on these thousands if not hundreds of thousands of rules.
Now, I'm as much against having internet taxes as any respectable slashdotter, but don't blame the Feds, this is the states lobbying (and the democrats love of taxation), but it isn't going to pay for the war. BTW, this issue is the #1 reason I always vote republican. The Democrats haven't even been in power 1 year, and they're already going to screw the internet. Seriously, since the internet started to get big in 93-94, the Republicans have been in power in congress. It only takes the democrats 6 months in power to totally ruin it?!
If this goes through Amazon would have to have a moratorium on hiring programmers, and they'd have to halt any new features they are working on. They'd have to hire as many accountants as they would normally programmers, and put all their coders to work implementing the new tax collection system on behalf of all the state and local governments. At least in the state I live in, depending on where you sell a product, you could be responsible to collect state, county, and municipality sales taxes all individually. You then have to file a tax return with all 3 of the collecting bodies.
If Amazon is forced to do this, they will have to file > 10,000 tax returns every quarter, lots of fun! And you get the added bonus that most state and local tax collection bodies have no electronic filing for sales tax, no way to automate the process. It is manually printing out a form and mailing it, or maybe if you're lucky faxing it, but either way, its 10,000 tax returns that a person has to physically handle.
Except the article specifically states the democrats are going to let the net access moratorium expire in Nov. When that happens, the internet bill will get littered overnight with hundreds of surcharges, fees, and taxes. It will look just like a telephone bill.
Internet Access Universal Access Fee: $3.54
High Speed Usage Fee @ 3.6% of connection speed of 6mbps: $2.16
Local Connection Usage Fee: $5.00
Street Access Fee: $2.50
Pole Access Fee: $1.50
Total Taxes: $14.70
If you think those aren't new taxes you are high as a kite. And this will effect 100% of internet users. Personally, I buy stuff online maybe once or twice a year, I like to go to stores, look at the physical product I'm going to buy, touch it, see it, pick it up... And I'm an immediate gratification junky as well, it takes all the fun out of something if you can't pay for it and then have it at home and be playing with it 20 minutes later. So, my state loses very little on me to sales tax. However, letting the states charge taxes on access will increase their revenue way more than the silly sales tax problem. They will levy that tax 100% across the board whether you use the internet for commerce or not.
You're proposal is insane! Taxing on a curve based on usage?! Proposals like this are why the tax code today is so byzantine you have to pay someone 3-4k/yr just to figure it out for you if you have a couple of businesses and some side income.
If they are going to put in a tax, they should just say 5% of your internet access fee. Flat, no weird math, nothing hard.
I'm opposed to taxing the internet, but if they have to, don't make it some 20 level deep if/else statement.
If they "do it right" as you recommend, it will be the access providers who have to pay the overhead. The state just makes the rules, then all of the broadband providers have to go spend millions (if not billions) updating their billing systems to calculate the tax. The providers are the ones that would be punished (sure the tax just gets passed through, they don't "lose" money, but implementing the system to collect the taxes will be very hard). The end result of your proposal would be the providers would say "Oh, its taxed in tiers, the more options we offer, the more expensive, convoluted, and painful our billing will be". Ok, we only offer 256k/256k because that is taxed at the lower residential rate, and we don't have to track bandwidth usage on it to levy the tax.
I really don't understand your argument, but ok.
You are saying that DRM cannot be implemented in an "open source" product because the GPL stops you. That isn't true. You can implement all the DRM you want, but if you do it on a GPLv3 code base, you can't sue under the DMCA.
Further, DRM is simply an encryption scheme with a couple bells and whistles on top (like counting how many times a thing is decrypted)... Some of the most secure and best encryption/security systems that are available are open source systems. It is entirely possible to implement a DRM system using open source code. You will argue that "the key will be available to anyone, and it won't be secure". Well, as hackers have proven, any system that is dependent on a single (or a small number) of keys is extremely susceptible. Use some PKI, give everyone their own key, don't store the keys in the software or in the system. Alternatively, letting open source guys hack on your code will probably make it the most secure DRM system in the world. Don't tell them its for DRM, just tell them you want a really secure encryption/security scheme.
Ok, you are a complete moron. I don't care what you say, if you were my boss you would be fired, and I would take your job.
.h stuff). He checks his work in, now nothing works, because all the old function calls don't work anymore, you can't test his checkin yet. Now the other 4 devs split up the files they want to work on and lock them, and they go through fixing things, but no one can check anything in and get a working system, everything is broken. This delays testing which is always a bad thing to do. They are forced to commit large changesets, they can't do incremental development, well, they could, but the more incremental the development, the more blocked everyone is by anyone else making changes. When changes are effecting large amounts of the code base, this basically means if you have a staff of more than 2 you are screwed. During the 2 weeks while I was sitting back (being 1 of the 2 web project coders) adding features to the product, I can't remember how many hundreds of times I heard the sourcesafe users scream "Unlock that damn file I need it" or "Why did you lock THAT file?! You aren't using it!" across the office.
In my dev shop there are 2 components, a legacy thick client app which is managed in source safe (file locking, no branching, no merging), 5 devs. This project is in full maintenance mode, no new features. We have recently rolled out a web based replacement which is managed in Monotone. 2 devs. There are branches and merges constantly.
Recently we found a bug which effected multiple areas of the code. It had to be fixed in both projects, it was a design assumption from the original legacy code which turned out to be false. It took the 2 devs on the web project less than 1 day to fix it, they were both working the whole day writing code, merging it together, testing, coding, merging, testing.
The sourcesafe guys, well, it took almost 2 weeks. 1 dev would spend a day with a bunch of files locked, the other 4 are now stuck, they can't work on anything that touches what the first guy checked out. Since this particular bug went to the core design of the app, the core of the app was locked while the first dev implemented the "design" changes (function definitions, mostly
In short I don't care that you're such a great salesman that you've managed to sell yourself for > $400/hr. You suck at managing coders, and you understand so little about the process that you are ripping off everyone who ever paid you a dime.
As to your home valuation, after the recent bubble, who's home isn't worth 1.2 million? Seriously though, you probably live in California (the only pricks I've known as big as you are all from that horrid state) where the average is probably > 1 million anymore, so you're not that special, you're slightly above average.
You are correct and I mis-spoke, it was the first red alert that was the last straw for westwood studios proper. After they were purchased by EA in 1998, the rules probably changed. Red alert 2 was released in 2000, after the purchase, so EA would have been calling the shots at that point. It hasn't been 10 years since the release of red alert 2 though.
We all know this, I just think its funny that these media execs can't figure it out. I will never forget a story I heard from Westwood Studios back before they were bought out by EA (96-97 timeframe). On Red Alert 2, they spent a large fraction of the budget of the game, had 4 PhD contractors come in, trying to build a DRM system that would keep people from copying the game. It was cracked within 10 minutes of release.
After that they vowed never to try to put DRM on a game ever again, it cost way too much, and it didn't do anything. Besides that they got people all the time filling out their registration cards saying "I bought this game after I played the hacked version and I liked it".
DRM hurts sales, it hurts acceptance of a system, and it is expensive and pointless to deploy.
When DVD John hacked CSS wasn't it by taking apart a physical player? I thought he pulled apart an actual DVD player to do it, but maybe I heard wrong.
I'm just happy we aren't the only ones living in a country controlled by corporate interests and lobbies.
Its kind of a sad statement, but I've been feeling very lonely living in the worst country in the world for the last few years. Welcome to the basement Japan! At least we have some company down here now.
That the US isn't the only country with a totally screwed legal system and idiots for judges!