Also a good point. Try moving every few months, it'll amaze you how much stuff you suddenly don't need. I'm down to the most valuable thing I have is my laptop, which isn't really my laptop (it belongs to the university I work for), and generally gets dragged everywhere with me. To the point that it feels creepy when I'm not carrying it.
(That may be a bad sign, but makes it damn hard to steal)
My flat physically shares a wall with the police station. While it may not actually help, I think most criminals are unlikely to bother with the effort of creeping past the police station door to break into our place...
On the subject of which, everyone seems to be jumping on the "How dare they stop them using wireless" bandwagon, and completely missing that maybe they're causing for real problems for other students.
Is it really such a hassle for these students to use cables instead? More hassle than they're causing for students trying to connect to their university network, for example?
That would be the former, then. Well, not literally, but almost in the Highlands. I'm intruiged from which ISP they're getting 2Mbit/s at a reasonable price from, though?
I've been meaning to answer, and meaning to answer, and things have been chaotic, and they're not going to lighten up soon, and I'm unlikely to get around to it. So, quick "Thanks, the advice is actually appreciated, really", and I'll write more if I have time next week.
Okay, can we discuss the difference between cable and ADSL. While it's great you live in an area with cable, I don't. That means my broadband access is limited to, ooh, ADSL!
Now, I'm unaware of anywhere in the UK where you can get ADSL over 2mbit/s. For home users, it pretty much caps out at 1mbit/s; Plus Net do a 2mbit/s service for a little over 40 UKP/month, but that's the only one I've heard of anywhere near that price range (most roll in at around 90 UKP/month).
A lot of the ADSL ISPs now call 128kbit/s broadband, including but not limited to Demon, Pipex, Plus Net and Tiscali. I'm about to upgrade my ADSL all the way to 1mbit/s, which will cost me about $60/month (33.99 UKP/month to be precise). Would any of the Americans care to tell me what speed they get for that?
I think this is the problem they're going to face. There was a giant untapped market of people who wanted to buy movies/TV shows on a permant media, but the sound/image quality and physical size of video tapes didn't make it worth it for them.
While BD-ROM will appeal to the home cinema fanatics, who will have the kit to really appreciate the HD images and ungodly number of sound channels that can be put on these disks. For most people though, the jump in image and sound quality is trivial compared to that when going from cassette to DVD.
Which is why I make a policy of paying by cash are restaurants. Now, I do buy things on the Internet, but I try to research companies before I buy from them. Just Googling for a companies name can frequently tell you a lot, not to mention the customer review sites out there. I also try to avoid companies who store my credit card details between transactions.
Oh, also, I'd suggest having two credit cards, of different types (one Visa, one Mastercard, for example). I've had one refused for random reasons (thier reader won't read it, some part of the network is down, etc.), and having a backup card is reassuring.
Re:What stops these from replacing laptops?
on
Handtop Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Odd, I buy laptops because I like being able to sensibly have several windows open (IM, couple of xterms, brower window, IRC) on screen, and being able to use 9 fingers at once to type.
I can't see any advantage to these. The only time I could use one, that a laptop wouldn't work for, is standing up. This pretty much means situations where a PDA would seem perfectly suitable, such as note taking or making calendar entries. Carrying a laptop isn't a big problem for me, weight wise, and I walk everywhere - for people with a car, I find it hard to believe it is that much problem?
Y'see, I'm not convinced about the whole BitTorrent thing. That would make sense, but when they talk about bandwidth, there's no mention of swarmcasting:
Wow, I leave to go watch a film (I, Robot - wasn't great), and there's answers to my life, along with detailed analysis of myself!
Not sure what to say. The problem is distinctly multi-layered. On the face of things, everything should be going fine - I have large numbers of female friends, with who I am comfortable, at points my social life has been so chaotic my flatmates didn't see me for a week (I only came home to sleep).
That's also the problem though - I'm so used to dealing with women as friends, it's hard to act in any other way. I'm seen as comfortable, safe, and ironically enough a good source of dating advice.
Then we hit the second layer. I freeze when flirted with. I don't mean, I stammer, or look a little nervous, I mean my first reaction is to hold completely still. I am at least mostly over the looking confused phase.
And then we hit the third layer. I'm just plain nervous. Even when I feel comfortable, my body language screams "I'M NERVOUS". Trying to look relaxed just means I look like a really nervous guy trying to look relaxed.
Finally, we have the situational problems. While I'm no longer drowning in lesbians, there was a distinct tendancy for women I met to hook up together, for a while. Additionally, I'm living in a small town (pop circa 20,000), which means that anyone I meet, and make a complete mess up of trying to date, I'm likely to bump into. Frequently.
How about some positive stuff at this point? Well, I'm planning on moving once my current contract at work runs out, which should help with the situational problems. There was some promising stuff with the whole dating thing, earlier in the year, even if in the end she, drumroll please, ended up with another of my female friends.
Was talking to one of my flatmates (female), about this post and clothes, and apparently actually there's more wrong with my choice of clothing than I thought. Fortunately, I think she can be persuaded to go clothes shopping with me at some point...
Now if I'm really lucky you won't notice I haven't mentioned anything about the gym... seriously though, you're right. Used to do badmington regularly, really ought to start doing it again. Walk 4-5 miles a day (no car), which really helps though.
Oh, while I'm at it - to the poster that suggested the problem was attracting the right kind of women - that's probably a problem I'll have to deal with, but am not at that stage yet. As to a therapist - maybe; certainly, I have dramatic nervousness and self confidence issues which I'm trying to deal with.
Not sure if this post really went anywhere. Am trying to sum up large parts of my life in a neat, consise form. It's not easy. Did it all make sense? Just hit preview - yikes I typed a lot!
I have to say, I'm catastrophically single (25, never dated, - things could only be worse if I lived in my parents basement), and I think this is a bad idea. This should tell you something.
Actually, it's not that comparable. Method calling time is much much lower, which is where the stats claiming it's as fast/faster than C++ came from, but that's about it. For example, by the Fibonacci benchmark that was used. for which their results claimed similar times in C++ and Java - I managed to get an approx. 3000 time speed increase for the C++ version be making it non-recursive.
Having said that, for enterprise applications, better/faster hardware is frequently an option. For in-house applications, better hardware may even be drastically cheaper, compared to developer time. This is certainly the case for Java applications I work on - my time is expensive, and a $1500 server doesn't ever noticably slow down while running our application.
...would be to give out more original essay questions? Rather than telling students to do the same paper every other student at every other university is doing, have a little more creativity. Ask about more modern, ideally relatively recently released books. In the case of "classics", ask obscure questions.
I did a degree in Computer Science, the only essays we had were on topics that were either relevant to that point in time, or were on lectures we had attended. Getting anything close online would have been next to impossible...
Well, sign me up anyway. I don't have a car, and one of the reasons I'm avoiding it is the incredible insurance costs for a first time driver, esp. given I'd basically be using it once or twice a month. They can tell I drove from my house, to the next city over? Well, yes, I care, deeply...
Errr, hangon, you're telling me that I'm subsidising companies posting me junk mail? 'cos without some statistics to back this up, I'd suggest that actually their postage costs are paid entirely by them. I believe actually my postgage costs are subsidised by the bulk mailers...
You're right though, the real problem is the standards. What we really need is sender validation, and enforced AUPs You send spam, you get cut off. If your ISP doesn't cut you off, their upstream provider does. At the moment, tracking down whose fault e-mail is, is somewhat time consuming.
Being able to work out where e-mail actually originated from would help, too. For example, e-mails to any of my support addresses (for students at the university where I work), from homes in America, can be assumed to be spam:) I need to talk to work about not allowing inbound e-mail that claims to be from our domain - if I can pre-sort anything from @ into a non-spam folder, it would make things a lot quicker, too.
IM 2000 would be another good way of solving this. It would at least cut down on the impact of spam to non-existant addresses, as each takes up less bandwidth, and should help with the zombie problem, as users with infected machines are likely to notice their send-queue full of spam (especially when they run out of quota for e-mail storage).
... about spam, is it just doesn't apply to me. You see, I have a degree in computer science. This means:
1. I don't want a degree from a prestigious non-accredited university. 2. My sex life is well beyond being helped by Viagra, or anything else in pill form. 3. Outsourcing means I can't afford a mortgage (okay, actually I'm employed, but work with my joke).
Here's the thing. I don't like paying to receive adverts, which is the current situation. Sending cost is a fraction of the delivery cost, which is mostly handled by the receiver.
Secondly, the scale of this is a massive problem. I get approximately 400 e-mails/day to my work account. About 250 of those are from two high-volume mailing lists, which get auto-sorted into folders, and I scan-read the subjects before deleting most of them.
About 5-10 of those are from people who are contacting me directly, and have a valid reason to do so...
The remaining 140 or so are spam. No, I'm not exageratting the numbers, I've got 6 more while I typed this, mostly trying to sell me Viagra, but with a couple for OEM software.
Marking what my spam filter (Thunderbird's built in one) misses is a significant effort. Then having to go through the spam folder and make sure all of these e-mails isn't actually from work is even more effort. Especially the ones that say "Meeting at 14:00 on thursday" or something.
Probably what gets to me most of that almost none of these apply to me. I don't want (or need) Viagra, I can't afford a house here, and the mortgage offers are for the USA only, I already have a university degree, I have reputable sources for OEM software, etc. etc. etc.
What's even worse is what doesn't get to me. I've had to two e-mail sacrifice accounts because they were getting too much spam (at around 200/day extra, each, for rarely used accounts). Of course, spammers will keep e-mailing those accounts - it's not like the bounces will ever get to them.
Another spam just arrived. Something about being 19 again.
One of those accounts was only ever given out to people on a face to face basis - but it was of the form @. The only way spammers could have found it would be by pouring thousands of e-mails into my work's domain, hoping that one of them would find a matching e-mail address. While I may not receive that e-mail, it's still pouring into work's servers. clogging them up and occupying our bandwidth.
Many other forms of advertising mean I get something for free (several TV channels here) or cheaper (magagzines/newspapers), and never cost me more, anyway (billboards, etc.).
In comparison, spam costs me money, and time, and adds a significant risk of e-mail loss. That is why I don't like spam.
1. Any good suggestions on what you'd like to see done better? Do you actually buy games which focus on elements that interest you? These companies will make more games in the same style of whatever sells well. Magazine or website reviews are a very good way of finding out if you'll like a game, before you buy it...
2. I hear this one a lot. I don't have any statistics on cost of making a game to hand, so I'll have to put my point another way. If you go out and buy a film on DVD, you'll watch it what, 3-4 times? Consider an average film at 90 minutes, that's 6 hours of entertainment for your $20 or so.
A lot of people (on forums) said they could complete Doom 3 in about 15 hours. Amazon.com lists Doom 3 at $40.99. So, for about twice the cost, you have two and a half times the entertainment, assuming you're good enough to play through it that fast (I'm sure not), and don't replay it.
Seems like good value to me. There have been simpler games which cost less (Serious Sam), but I don't think we're actually likely to see any serious price change any time soon.
3. I can't remember a game that has come without a manual, except for budget re-releases. As to a poster - I dunno, tended to just lose these myself, but can't really argue for or against.
4. Ah, like Valve are doing with Steam? I really don't see how that's better than making the disk uncopyable (I don't want to _have_ to be connected to the Internet to play multiplayer games across my LAN).
5. Yup, good plan there. Much better CD-key generation algorithms would also be a good plan - Doom 3's was cracked before it was even officially out, for example.
6. I used to see a lot of games that let you post in the old disks, and they'd send you new ones, but there was an admin charge of almost half the cost of the game. If they'd do it actually at cost (I mean, how much does it really cost to put a few CDs in the post), that would be much better.
7. I dunno, PDF on the CD just makes it easier for the pirates to read the manual, IMHO...
I'd like to mention before I continue, the next section is not specifically aimed at you, jonwil. I have no idea if you pirate games or not, and am not assuming either way.
What we really need is to get over this culture of "it's more expensive than I'd like, so it's okay to copy it". I see a lot of people complain that if they didn't pirate games, they wouldn't have so many games - y'know, computer games are not a right!
If companies see a game sell badly, but pirated a lot, they assume it's the pirates fault. If they see a game sell badly, but not pirated, they know it's something they've done, be it pricing or gameplay...
Oh, one last rant. I've known people who thought it was legal to copy a game and give it to their friends, as long as they didn't charge for it. I don't have the time to dig up a reference to the copyright laws, but trust me, it's not legal to do that!
Oh, certainly. My point was, the systems I maintain have much weaker security elsewhere, and contain little to nothing of value (they're mostly development or live servers for GPLed software). Someone interested in breaking in would probably have better success exploiting a flaw in, say, Apache, before I patched the software (there's usually a 24-hour window).
The only real concern for my system's security is script kiddies, who seem unlikely to organise themselves enough to break the security on a low-value system.
This is not to say I won't be happier when SHA-1 and MD5 are confirmed unbroken, or a replacement is found, just that I'm not overly stressed about this information...
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Also a good point. Try moving every few months, it'll amaze you how much stuff you suddenly don't need. I'm down to the most valuable thing I have is my laptop, which isn't really my laptop (it belongs to the university I work for), and generally gets dragged everywhere with me. To the point that it feels creepy when I'm not carrying it.
(That may be a bad sign, but makes it damn hard to steal)
My flat physically shares a wall with the police station. While it may not actually help, I think most criminals are unlikely to bother with the effort of creeping past the police station door to break into our place...
On the subject of which, everyone seems to be jumping on the "How dare they stop them using wireless" bandwagon, and completely missing that maybe they're causing for real problems for other students.
Is it really such a hassle for these students to use cables instead? More hassle than they're causing for students trying to connect to their university network, for example?
That would be the former, then. Well, not literally, but almost in the Highlands. I'm intruiged from which ISP they're getting 2Mbit/s at a reasonable price from, though?
I've been meaning to answer, and meaning to answer, and things have been chaotic, and they're not going to lighten up soon, and I'm unlikely to get around to it. So, quick "Thanks, the advice is actually appreciated, really", and I'll write more if I have time next week.
Oh, and a list of places without ADSL:
. asp?order=trig
http://www.adslguide.org.uk/availability/btprereg
Okay, can we discuss the difference between cable and ADSL. While it's great you live in an area with cable, I don't. That means my broadband access is limited to, ooh, ADSL!
Now, I'm unaware of anywhere in the UK where you can get ADSL over 2mbit/s. For home users, it pretty much caps out at 1mbit/s; Plus Net do a 2mbit/s service for a little over 40 UKP/month, but that's the only one I've heard of anywhere near that price range (most roll in at around 90 UKP/month).
A lot of the ADSL ISPs now call 128kbit/s broadband, including but not limited to Demon, Pipex, Plus Net and Tiscali. I'm about to upgrade my ADSL all the way to 1mbit/s, which will cost me about $60/month (33.99 UKP/month to be precise). Would any of the Americans care to tell me what speed they get for that?
I think this is the problem they're going to face. There was a giant untapped market of people who wanted to buy movies/TV shows on a permant media, but the sound/image quality and physical size of video tapes didn't make it worth it for them.
While BD-ROM will appeal to the home cinema fanatics, who will have the kit to really appreciate the HD images and ungodly number of sound channels that can be put on these disks. For most people though, the jump in image and sound quality is trivial compared to that when going from cassette to DVD.
Which is why I make a policy of paying by cash are restaurants. Now, I do buy things on the Internet, but I try to research companies before I buy from them. Just Googling for a companies name can frequently tell you a lot, not to mention the customer review sites out there. I also try to avoid companies who store my credit card details between transactions.
Oh, also, I'd suggest having two credit cards, of different types (one Visa, one Mastercard, for example). I've had one refused for random reasons (thier reader won't read it, some part of the network is down, etc.), and having a backup card is reassuring.
Odd, I buy laptops because I like being able to sensibly have several windows open (IM, couple of xterms, brower window, IRC) on screen, and being able to use 9 fingers at once to type.
I can't see any advantage to these. The only time I could use one, that a laptop wouldn't work for, is standing up. This pretty much means situations where a PDA would seem perfectly suitable, such as note taking or making calendar entries. Carrying a laptop isn't a big problem for me, weight wise, and I walk everywhere - for people with a car, I find it hard to believe it is that much problem?
So what is the advantage?
Y'see, I'm not convinced about the whole BitTorrent thing. That would make sense, but when they talk about bandwidth, there's no mention of swarmcasting:
p ic=2594&hl=
http://www.hl2fallout.com/forums/index.php?showto
Do you have any links mentioning LAN Cafe uploads?
Wow, I leave to go watch a film (I, Robot - wasn't great), and there's answers to my life, along with detailed analysis of myself!
Not sure what to say. The problem is distinctly multi-layered. On the face of things, everything should be going fine - I have large numbers of female friends, with who I am comfortable, at points my social life has been so chaotic my flatmates didn't see me for a week (I only came home to sleep).
That's also the problem though - I'm so used to dealing with women as friends, it's hard to act in any other way. I'm seen as comfortable, safe, and ironically enough a good source of dating advice.
Then we hit the second layer. I freeze when flirted with. I don't mean, I stammer, or look a little nervous, I mean my first reaction is to hold completely still. I am at least mostly over the looking confused phase.
And then we hit the third layer. I'm just plain nervous. Even when I feel comfortable, my body language screams "I'M NERVOUS". Trying to look relaxed just means I look like a really nervous guy trying to look relaxed.
Finally, we have the situational problems. While I'm no longer drowning in lesbians, there was a distinct tendancy for women I met to hook up together, for a while. Additionally, I'm living in a small town (pop circa 20,000), which means that anyone I meet, and make a complete mess up of trying to date, I'm likely to bump into. Frequently.
How about some positive stuff at this point? Well, I'm planning on moving once my current contract at work runs out, which should help with the situational problems. There was some promising stuff with the whole dating thing, earlier in the year, even if in the end she, drumroll please, ended up with another of my female friends.
Was talking to one of my flatmates (female), about this post and clothes, and apparently actually there's more wrong with my choice of clothing than I thought. Fortunately, I think she can be persuaded to go clothes shopping with me at some point...
Now if I'm really lucky you won't notice I haven't mentioned anything about the gym... seriously though, you're right. Used to do badmington regularly, really ought to start doing it again. Walk 4-5 miles a day (no car), which really helps though.
Oh, while I'm at it - to the poster that suggested the problem was attracting the right kind of women - that's probably a problem I'll have to deal with, but am not at that stage yet. As to a therapist - maybe; certainly, I have dramatic nervousness and self confidence issues which I'm trying to deal with.
Not sure if this post really went anywhere. Am trying to sum up large parts of my life in a neat, consise form. It's not easy. Did it all make sense? Just hit preview - yikes I typed a lot!
I have to say, I'm catastrophically single (25, never dated, - things could only be worse if I lived in my parents basement), and I think this is a bad idea. This should tell you something.
Drat, knew someone would ask that. No, never got around to it. Will try to remember to later tonight, and will post the results...
Actually, it's not that comparable. Method calling time is much much lower, which is where the stats claiming it's as fast/faster than C++ came from, but that's about it. For example, by the Fibonacci benchmark that was used. for which their results claimed similar times in C++ and Java - I managed to get an approx. 3000 time speed increase for the C++ version be making it non-recursive.
Having said that, for enterprise applications, better/faster hardware is frequently an option. For in-house applications, better hardware may even be drastically cheaper, compared to developer time. This is certainly the case for Java applications I work on - my time is expensive, and a $1500 server doesn't ever noticably slow down while running our application.
Dang, I was going to go for the "free karma by joking about my sex life" option. Too slow, I suppose...
...would be to give out more original essay questions? Rather than telling students to do the same paper every other student at every other university is doing, have a little more creativity. Ask about more modern, ideally relatively recently released books. In the case of "classics", ask obscure questions.
I did a degree in Computer Science, the only essays we had were on topics that were either relevant to that point in time, or were on lectures we had attended. Getting anything close online would have been next to impossible...
Thoughts anyone?
Well, sign me up anyway. I don't have a car, and one of the reasons I'm avoiding it is the incredible insurance costs for a first time driver, esp. given I'd basically be using it once or twice a month. They can tell I drove from my house, to the next city over? Well, yes, I care, deeply...
How about:
3. I don't deal with companies who can't spell, or manage basic punctuation and grammar.
Errr, hangon, you're telling me that I'm subsidising companies posting me junk mail? 'cos without some statistics to back this up, I'd suggest that actually their postage costs are paid entirely by them. I believe actually my postgage costs are subsidised by the bulk mailers...
:) I need to talk to work about not allowing inbound e-mail that claims to be from our domain - if I can pre-sort anything from @ into a non-spam folder, it would make things a lot quicker, too.
You're right though, the real problem is the standards. What we really need is sender validation, and enforced AUPs You send spam, you get cut off. If your ISP doesn't cut you off, their upstream provider does. At the moment, tracking down whose fault e-mail is, is somewhat time consuming.
Being able to work out where e-mail actually originated from would help, too. For example, e-mails to any of my support addresses (for students at the university where I work), from homes in America, can be assumed to be spam
IM 2000 would be another good way of solving this. It would at least cut down on the impact of spam to non-existant addresses, as each takes up less bandwidth, and should help with the zombie problem, as users with infected machines are likely to notice their send-queue full of spam (especially when they run out of quota for e-mail storage).
Anyone else got any good ideas, while I'm at it?
... about spam, is it just doesn't apply to me. You see, I have a degree in computer science. This means:
1. I don't want a degree from a prestigious non-accredited university.
2. My sex life is well beyond being helped by Viagra, or anything else in pill form.
3. Outsourcing means I can't afford a mortgage (okay, actually I'm employed, but work with my joke).
Here's the thing. I don't like paying to receive adverts, which is the current situation. Sending cost is a fraction of the delivery cost, which is mostly handled by the receiver.
Secondly, the scale of this is a massive problem. I get approximately 400 e-mails/day to my work account. About 250 of those are from two high-volume mailing lists, which get auto-sorted into folders, and I scan-read the subjects before deleting most of them.
About 5-10 of those are from people who are contacting me directly, and have a valid reason to do so...
The remaining 140 or so are spam. No, I'm not exageratting the numbers, I've got 6 more while I typed this, mostly trying to sell me Viagra, but with a couple for OEM software.
Marking what my spam filter (Thunderbird's built in one) misses is a significant effort. Then having to go through the spam folder and make sure all of these e-mails isn't actually from work is even more effort. Especially the ones that say "Meeting at 14:00 on thursday" or something.
Probably what gets to me most of that almost none of these apply to me. I don't want (or need) Viagra, I can't afford a house here, and the mortgage offers are for the USA only, I already have a university degree, I have reputable sources for OEM software, etc. etc. etc.
What's even worse is what doesn't get to me. I've had to two e-mail sacrifice accounts because they were getting too much spam (at around 200/day extra, each, for rarely used accounts). Of course, spammers will keep e-mailing those accounts - it's not like the bounces will ever get to them.
Another spam just arrived. Something about being 19 again.
One of those accounts was only ever given out to people on a face to face basis - but it was of the form @. The only way spammers could have found it would be by pouring thousands of e-mails into my work's domain, hoping that one of them would find a matching e-mail address. While I may not receive that e-mail, it's still pouring into work's servers. clogging them up and occupying our bandwidth.
Many other forms of advertising mean I get something for free (several TV channels here) or cheaper (magagzines/newspapers), and never cost me more, anyway (billboards, etc.).
In comparison, spam costs me money, and time, and adds a significant risk of e-mail loss. That is why I don't like spam.
Reminds me of Microsoft:
...
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Okay, that's a little harsh, I'm sorry...
1. Any good suggestions on what you'd like to see done better? Do you actually buy games which focus on elements that interest you? These companies will make more games in the same style of whatever sells well. Magazine or website reviews are a very good way of finding out if you'll like a game, before you buy it...
2. I hear this one a lot. I don't have any statistics on cost of making a game to hand, so I'll have to put my point another way. If you go out and buy a film on DVD, you'll watch it what, 3-4 times? Consider an average film at 90 minutes, that's 6 hours of entertainment for your $20 or so.
A lot of people (on forums) said they could complete Doom 3 in about 15 hours. Amazon.com lists Doom 3 at $40.99. So, for about twice the cost, you have two and a half times the entertainment, assuming you're good enough to play through it that fast (I'm sure not), and don't replay it.
Seems like good value to me. There have been simpler games which cost less (Serious Sam), but I don't think we're actually likely to see any serious price change any time soon.
3. I can't remember a game that has come without a manual, except for budget re-releases. As to a poster - I dunno, tended to just lose these myself, but can't really argue for or against.
4. Ah, like Valve are doing with Steam? I really don't see how that's better than making the disk uncopyable (I don't want to _have_ to be connected to the Internet to play multiplayer games across my LAN).
5. Yup, good plan there. Much better CD-key generation algorithms would also be a good plan - Doom 3's was cracked before it was even officially out, for example.
6. I used to see a lot of games that let you post in the old disks, and they'd send you new ones, but there was an admin charge of almost half the cost of the game. If they'd do it actually at cost (I mean, how much does it really cost to put a few CDs in the post), that would be much better.
7. I dunno, PDF on the CD just makes it easier for the pirates to read the manual, IMHO...
I'd like to mention before I continue, the next section is not specifically aimed at you, jonwil. I have no idea if you pirate games or not, and am not assuming either way.
What we really need is to get over this culture of "it's more expensive than I'd like, so it's okay to copy it". I see a lot of people complain that if they didn't pirate games, they wouldn't have so many games - y'know, computer games are not a right!
If companies see a game sell badly, but pirated a lot, they assume it's the pirates fault. If they see a game sell badly, but not pirated, they know it's something they've done, be it pricing or gameplay...
Oh, one last rant. I've known people who thought it was legal to copy a game and give it to their friends, as long as they didn't charge for it. I don't have the time to dig up a reference to the copyright laws, but trust me, it's not legal to do that!
Oh, certainly. My point was, the systems I maintain have much weaker security elsewhere, and contain little to nothing of value (they're mostly development or live servers for GPLed software). Someone interested in breaking in would probably have better success exploiting a flaw in, say, Apache, before I patched the software (there's usually a 24-hour window).
The only real concern for my system's security is script kiddies, who seem unlikely to organise themselves enough to break the security on a low-value system.
This is not to say I won't be happier when SHA-1 and MD5 are confirmed unbroken, or a replacement is found, just that I'm not overly stressed about this information...