...seeing as I already own a GameCube and a PS2, and the only way I'll ever own an Xbox is if someone gives it to me, I'd say no, this won't get me to buy one of these consoles. (However, if the price drop happens on PSOnes as well, I very well may pick one of those and the Sony screen up. Good way to chop away at those insanely long RPGs I've collected when I'd otherwise be tossing and turning trying to get to sleep.)
Though this _will_ likely spur the entire console gaming industry to get far bigger. With a price point of $99 for a console, and quality preowned titles going for $25 or less on the Cube, it's going to be much easier for mom and dad to not ignore the cries of their children over the winter for the new digital nanny. The only real danger I can see is that the market actually becomes saturated quickly...every house where someone wants a console has a console.
Then I guess it becomes the car industry... "Ma'am, are you aware of the wonderful things an Xbox can do for your life?" "We offer great trade-in values...trade in your Xbox or PS2 and your old game library, and we'll give you a GameCube with 1 title for every two of the competing console!" "Does your household need a second console?"
If you'd actually played the game instead of watching someone play it, you'd probably realize that it does actually have a plot, and a good one at that.
What most people see when they watch people play GTA3 is people running around doing all the extra things that are NOT part of the main game. The jumps. Weapon cheats giving anyone a sniper rifle, stinger, with basically unlimited ammo. Health cheats. Getting the army out after you then reducing your wanted level with a cheat, then stealing the FBI cars/tanks and going on a rampage for no reason.
The actual game itself is neither easy, nor plotless. Your ignorance of this is proof you haven't played it, and your "viewing" was pretty incomplete. I certainly recommend you rent it yourself before you give another uninformed opinion and make yourself look dumber than you likely are.
Preferring RPGs and strategy games is all fine and dandy. Making snap judgements when you haven't played the game...isn't.
...but the E-Reader still just doesn't look like anything but a complete gimmick to me. I can understand kids going gaga for it, 'cause it's like trading cards and what not, but I haven't seen anything actually interesting and usable come out of it. Putting old NES games out in E-Reader format is pretty cool, but in practice it's horrendously tiresome. That, and the E-Reader is a bulky, ugly looking thing hanging off the top of the GBA.
Now, the Game Boy Player...that I'm waiting for. If Metroid, Mario Sunshine, and Zelda didn't get me to get a GameCube already, that certainly would've tipped the balance. Can't wait to play Golden Sun and Circle of the Moon with a real controller.
I don't know whether you're a troll or are actually serious about this idiocy.
For the moment, I'll assume you're actually serious. Unless you're some kind of mutant life form, you do not need music to survive. The studios aren't stopping you from getting food, they're stopping you from hearing music. You will survive if you just stop listening to the music. Trust me on this. Hell, go over to a friend's house and listen to some. I've survived quite long neither paying for or downloading shit off of Kazaa. It does a body good.
Yeah, the studios are rat bastards, but the answer to that is not purchasing their product. Not stealing their product.
3) $0.99 for a song is not unreasonable, if you're only going to buy a couple of songs off an album. $9.99 for an album is probably more than it could be.
The $9.99/album is an average. Some are more (like, for example, The Wall, which is $25 and change, basically a dollar a song added up) and some with fewer tracks are less. Some things you can't just buy the whole album outright (Run DMC's Greatest Hits for example, you've got to do song by song...which I imagine makes some sense) and some things are still only purchasable by the album, no individual songs. However, the few that I saw which were whole-album-only were $10 or less. I expect that each individual artist/label/ was given a choice as to how they're going to want to make their music available.
4) There isn't enough content. I couldn't find even half of what I was looking for. There ought to be a way for small labels and independents to get in on the action. Allowing them to host their own music and samples through the iTunes music store interface would be the most reasonable way.
I imagine that this is, for all they reality of it, a test bed for Apple's music distribution system and for the viability of the service in general. Apple had to get the Big Five on board if the thing was going to fly at all. If it works for the Big Five, and they can get the Windows rollout done without melting the Internet, they'll be wanting every label they can get in the door. For right now, though, I imagine they see enough hurdles with what they're doing right now, that they're not going to bite off more than they're sure they can chew.
5) There are way too many partial albums. I have no idea why you would only put up some songs off an album - did they not have all the source recordings for the entire album?
Probably at least two reasons:
1), this service allows you to buy songs individually. Who cares if the album as a whole isn't up if the song you're looking for is up there? I thought that was the whole point? At least for the majority of people.
2), this is a MASSIVE undertaking. They cannot just grab all the MP3s people have already done off of Kazaa and turn them into AAC files, and post them. If what ol' Stevie was saying was true, they're going to the original masters of as much of this stuff as they can find it for. They have to get whatever format that's in, turn that into digital audio if it isn't, rip it to AAC, ACTUALLY LISTEN TO IT to make sure the rip didn't screw up, and then after it's encoded to make sure that didn't screw up. Try to fix it if it did. Create 30 second sample tracks at an appropriate time (like for an entire joke on the comedy albums) so people can get a feel for what the track is like. Get the album art scanned, and make sure of that. THEN you can put it up on the service. I'm sure I'm not thinking of several steps that Apple is using in this process. Thankfully, they didn't ask me for advice when designing it, and I'm sure I missed something very important. The point being, it takes a whole lot of time to do this all right. They can't just pop a CD in, access CDDB, let it rip, rinse, repeat.
3), which relates to 2. They probably stuffed the service with as many of the completed tracks as they could lay hands on by 10:00 AM PDT, and probably were adding more as the day went on. Marketing, so you could throw out the largest number possible on your website, and in ol' Stevie's speech.
Secrets and Lies wasn't exactly a manual for information security. It was much more of a (sorely needed at the time, and still to a certain extent) book to evangelize the need for information security, and to try to explain to people not in the field why exactly it was so important. Personally, I didn't learn anything new about information security, but I did learn a lot of good ways to explain why it's so important to people who have no basis for understanding why. And I've loaned it out a lot, and it's helped change a lot of people's thinking about security, and why having "password" as your password is a real bad idea.
You bring up points, and while they're valid on their face, they don't actually apply to AOL.
AOL is doing this precisely because of customer demand. Not demand of the high end user, but the demand from parents and other ease-of-use types. The people that own most of the companies I do consulting for also will have me set up their home networks, and almost all of them subscribe to AOL, because they're the best of a bad bunch in effectively filtering porn spam before it gets to the e-mail box of their little kids' AOL screen name. That's the single biggest request I get, is looking for software that will stop their kids from getting porn spam e-mail.
They don't care about Kazaa (their kids probably do, but they're not paying for the connection). They don't care if AOL owns the Internet. They just want some kind of relatively safe way for their kids to have an e-mail address they can give to their friends and have grandma and the family e-mail without having to delete all the porn spam themselves, by hand, before letting their kids sit in front of the computer.
These are not luddites. They may be technophobes themselves, but they want their kids to learn this stuff. However, they realize that the Internet is NOT a happy go lucky friendly place. Smart parents don't let their kids play in the street, and letting your kids play on an unmonitored, unfiltered cable/DSL connection is pretty much the equivalent. Parents want a nice neighborhood. They WANT AOL to work right. Yeah, it sucks a lot, but in most of their minds, it's a lot better than the alternative, and they're probably right. These people don't have the time to learn all the technology and skills needed to filter the raw Internet on their own. Most of the time AOL does the job well enough for their needs, and that's why I tend to recommend it for them.
Whitelisting is the ONLY way AOL and anyone else, for that matter, is ever going to get a handle on the spam problem without chucking SMTP altogether. It may make things harder, and may mean I have to start moving my clients away from AOL if they can't e-mail their kids from work if AOL just permablocks their work mail servers for the gods know what reason, but the practice of whitelisting is a GOOD THING. I can only hope more and more people start following AOL's example. Trust is the ONLY commodity in information security, whether in encryption, perimeter defenses, or spam prevention. Allowing people whom you do not trust to message you with the same freedom as those you do trust means you're going to be getting a lot of crap you don't want.
No, you missed the point...
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Linus on DRM
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...if someone wants to write a kernel module that doesn't allow any media files to be played unless they are encrypted with your public key (forcing you to give your private key out to anyone you want to be able to play that media file), and alters their system so that no other software can access the memory space the player and media files are being run through, so you can't obtain a non-encrypted copy, and alters the player, so it only runs on a signed kernel, THE GPL DOESN'T ENTER INTO IT, so therefore THERE AIN'T SHIT YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT.
That said, you could exercise the brain bendingly easy task of NOT BUYING whatever gets produced like this. If it's that important to you, why do you care if it means you can't see The Matrix Reloaded, or whatever? You're preserving your principles. I don't buy music or download music at all, because I find the RIAA, it's member organizations, and the music business in general, to be revolting. I have no illusions that my "boycott" will change a damn thing, but I'm not contributing to their crap, and that's enough for me.
Is there anything I didn't like about the book? Frankly, no. Some might complain that it is priced too high (it lists at USD50 for the softcover, and USD70 for the hardcover), but it is printed on acid-free paper, and the density of useful advice is such that it outstrips in value many works which cost half the price or less.
Taking a look at my paperback copy of Applied Cryptography, it's listed at $55, so I hardly consider that any more expensive. And I paid full cover price for this bugger, as opposed to getting it online for a song, like I should have.
I don't think Applied Cryptography had a hardcover edition available, at least of the Second Edition. I certainly may consider picking that thing up. Hopefully it'll be able to stick together for awhile.
And on another note, what isn't printed on acid-free paper these days? Aside from little paperback novels, etc. I thought that was all done away with.
OK, first off, you're an idiot. They can't just make it against the DMCA to encrypt packets. As a matter of fact, the DMCA makes it illegal for the government to mess with your packets (as they could be argued to be copyrightable IP of yours and since you're generating through a technological means designed to keep the contents secret...someone other than the intended reciever decrypting them would be a clear DMCA violation). Actually read the damn laws before you start spouting off like a crackpot, unless you really are one.
Second off, you're an idiot consipracy crazy. The government would have to seperately outlaw encryption in certain cases (which basically means all cases unless you have the money to fight it) to stop me from encrypting packets. And if encryption is the only thing that gets a government's goat enough to snoop, anyone who's ever bought something a t a secure online store is under FBI surveillance. Somehow I doubt it. Now the USA Patriot Act gives the government basically carte blanche to do this, but the scale of monitoring every packet internal and entering/leaving US corporate/citizen networks is staggering. We're a far more wired nation than China is, and they have trouble locking everything down, never mind monitoring it all. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's trying, but there's no way that it's happened yet. Even then, the Patriot Act, and it's god forsaken proposed offspring, Patriot Act II don't outlaw encryption. Get a clue, unless you really are an ignoramus.
And third off, everyone who modded this guy up is an idiot. Feel free to take all the helpful advice I gave this guy and apply it to yourselves as well.
Intellectual property protection by not allowing someone to sell a paper book or metal miniatures online? Bwah?
Complete and total lunacy. Howling at the moon. I know Game Workshop has been setting their lawyers loose on people posting PDFs of their books online, and I can certainly understand that, but this is just plain crazy. Saying no one but you can sell on the Internet is a sure way to drive the people who sell your products into the grave. If Games Workshop gets hurt by this (stores just stopping selling GW products) maybe it won't get too far, but I doubt it. If I ran a hobby shop selling Games Workshop material, I'd probably just start closing down, selling off all my stock cheap, and get into a stable, sane industry. Once Games Workshop gets away with it, Wizards, Wizkids, and White Wolf will too, and then no hobby store worth patronizing will be able to have any kind of Internet presence other than "we are located here" with a poorly drawn dragon on their logo. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope GW gets slapped hard, but I doubt it. Their stuff is too popular.
Way to try and turn back the clock on an entire industry.
Your ISP shouldn't be using SMTP-Auth on thier own network.
They should accept mail to relay from all hosts on the network they own.
Excuse me? SMTP-Auth shouldn't be used on their own network? Can we say, blatant ignorance of the quality of the neighborhood on any random DSL/Cable residential network? I can. You should too. DSL/Cable networks are the slums of the Internet. Most residential boxes have the gods know what running on them, the doors wide open. I deal with a lot of regular people who have high speed Internet access for their kids, and the stuff I've found running on their is just unbelievable. It is a trivial matter to find a machine with pitiful security, that you can install a proxy on remotely, and route your SMTP traffic through that network provider's "main" mail server that doesn't require SMTP-Auth.
End result? Your precious "correct" solution ends up not doing a damn bit of good, and well meaning, clueless people get their access revoked all because for some idiot reason you thought SMTP-Auth is "incorrect".
EVERY ISP SMTP SERVER SHOULD HAVE SMTP AUTHENTICATION ENABLED INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY.
Anything less is playing with fire. If you have it enabled, you may get burned anyways, but at least you're not juggling torches.
I have several customers who have Verizon DSL, but have domains hosted elsewhere, with mail hosted elsewhere, without authenticated SMTP relay. I would imagine, while certianly doing this to decrease their spam problem, that there's some sort of collusion (spoken or unspoken) industry wide to try and force ISP customers to use their bandwidth provider's services, hence making them more money.
For a long while I've seen several stories in the ongoing war against the spammers, and the more draconian the measures get (blocking all of East Asia as many in these discussions proudly claim to have done) the Internet e-mail system appears to be in it's death throes already.
When you start blocking such a significant percentage of the world in a blanket measure, wouldn't it be simpler and more effective to screw tortuous blacklists and just implement a whitelisting procedure? I mean, if over half of all the e-mails businesses get aren't legitimate, why in the world are these businesses throwing money down the drain by continuing to pay for something that doesn't work over half the time?
IP+address whitelisting is really the only way to go if you want a useful messaging system based on SMTP anymore. That, or completely revert to instant messaging/private web boards. I'm sure some kind of system could be worked out to allow for simple temporary whitelisting which would let a user allow mail to himself from a certain address for 2 hours, or whatever the local admin defined as the maximum allowable time. Then, at the end of the day, if a user checked the box asking for this addresss/mail server IP combination to be put on the permanent whitelist, it gets sent with all the other such requests to an administrator who vets the list, then adds whatever addresses pass muster onto the permanent whitelist. You could add functionality that has tripwires if you start getting spam from that person...so many peices allowed before a warning, so many before removal from the whitelist for a week, then forever, etc... Yes, it places a demand on the mail administrator, but certainly no more of a demand than the running battle currently takes up.
Personally I have very little use for regular Internet e-mail. I use it occasionally, because you still need an official e-mail address for various registrations, and for reciepts for buying stuff online. For actually talking to people, I use AIM of whatever instant messaging system they may use. I've considered creating a new AIM identity just for clients to get in touch with me through, but there isn't much nuance in logging and most don't deliver messages recieved when you're not logged on.
I wish there was a way I could relegate Internet e-mail to the same status my mailbox has. Namely, flip through to see if there are any bills and dump everything else directly into the trash without bothering any further with it.
What people who actually want to know what's up with a game need to actually do some research. As with the rest of life, you reap what you sow. Unless your taste runs to whatever's "cool" at the moment (and obviously a lot of people have such taste) just picking up a copy of insert gaming magazine here] or browsing to [insert game review site here] isn't going to tell you squat.
You need to look at a range of review sites. It doesn't take long to figure out which magazines and web sites are schills for whatever game publisher gave them the most cash/best junket. You learn how to read them, and what filters you need to deal with. Check gaming fan sites and message boards. Yes, there are going to be fanboys and schills on the a publisher's payroll, but again, don't take one person's word for it, for goodness sake. Common freakin' sense people. Look at the gestalt.
Be patient. Even if the game sells out on the first day, they _will_ make more copies of them. Don't buy a game the first day unless you're willing to throw that $50 in the trash, because no matter what the previews may have said about it, there's an even chance at best that you are going to hate it. I've done my share of camping out in a game store waiting for FedEx to get in with the new shipment of whatever spiffy new "Popular Video Game Concept" is coming in that day. I've had some successes, and my fair share of disasters (in other words, most of them). The most recent and painful experience being Master of Orion 3: How The Hell Do I Do Anything Here?.
The game publishing industry certainly is able to shove crap out the door, but there will always be plenty of other gamers out there without the ethical handicaps that the commercial reviewers have, who are going to be more than willing to give you and anyone else who will listen the straight poop. Also, not all commercial reviewers are alike. Sometimes you'll find one whos taste aligns with yours, and if so go for it. But even then, you owe it to yourself to look at a lot of opinions before you buy.
Personally, I've found sites like MetaCritic and GameFAQs are great places where a lot of different opinions about a game are collected under one roof, and the people who run those sites don't write any of the reviews that appear there. You usually can get the gist of what a game is going to be like, what the bugs are, etc, but it requires waiting until a critical mass of reviews comes in.
Well, according to NPR's Ann Garrols (I know I'm misspelling it...it's radio, her name doesn't scroll by my eyes when she calls in from her hotel in Baghdad) after the first day, the Iraqi information ministry people claimed civilian casualties, but didn't drive them around as they normally do to show proof.
After the second day, they took the reporters to a hospital, where there were a few injured people. Most, according to what they said, were injured by debris from the anti-air fire, and a couple had injuries from the blasts because they were running around during the bombings at night (like idiots, if you want my personal commentary...she didn't make any such comments).
If that's all the Iraqi propagandists can come up with, it's pretty sad. I'm sure that the heavy bombing happening now in Iraq will kill civillians in the area. How many, I don't know, but I'm sure Al Jazeera and such would be plastering the airwaves with pictures of dead Iraqis if they actually had some, right now.
That really sucks. Not like I haven't downloaded and built Enlightenment seperately many many times before (it runs much faster on my 233Mhz iMac than either KDE or Gnome) but one of the things I likes about Slackware was that when you were choosing your default window manager during install, Enlightnement was one of the choices.
Oh well. It will just add a few steps to the process of a new install for me.
Actually, as far as I've heard, the Qassam rockets that Hamas uses to attack Israeli settlements and towns seem to do just that...land...not explode. Either that or they've been very very lucky and those rockets haven't landed anywhere near anyone. I've seen news reports almost daily talking about rockets being shot into Israeli towns (settlements and otherwise) and I don't think I've heard of one casualty actually reported from it, though I'm sure I could be wrong on this.
Because someone using TCP/IP fingerprinting is looking for interesting hosts to attack, for whatever reason.
Something they've never seen before is interesting, and the would be hacker would likely pry a bit deeper. Giving them false information either makes them disinterested ("some idiot put up a Dreamcast on the web, how stupid") or leads them to attack in a way you are expecting, and that you know will be ineffective. Watching for these known false attacks could act as some part of an early warning alarm system, holding the attacker with his interest long enough to track him down. Ala, the Cuckoo's Egg.
...to see the first time some hacker scans my network to see that every server is running off a Dreamcast. Wouldn't that be funny if that became the secure standard? Every TCP/IP fingerprint returns "Sega Dreamcast". Wouldn't be a huge security boost, but it would help slow down the process of choosing a system to try and break. And the stupid kids who think they're hackers would probably just move on.
Didn't these people learn from the myriad projects that have been smashed by Apple for copying just the look and feel, not even making everything look EXACTLY the same as Windows. If Apple would do it, what makes them think Microsoft wouldn't?
That whole project is a silly, stupid waste of time, because the lawyers are going to erase it from the face of the Earth. And they should, just as they should if Apple had copied the Windows 2000 interface for MacOS X and replaced the Windows logo with an Apple, as these people appear to have done. Get with the real world here.
i think XBox Live is one of the largest Gaming communities out there now, and the most advanced.
I'm not arguing one way or the other on this, but do you have any actual facts to back up this hertofore wild and unfounded supposition?
Larger than the millions of people who play Counterstrike daily on 27,000+ servers, never mind the LAN Counterstrike games? Larger than the hundreds of thousands who play Everquest on JUST the PC platform, not to mention those who have it available for their PS2? Larger than the thousands of Chess and Go clubs out there playing with actual boards, never mind those on things like the Internet Go Server? (I assume there's an analog for chess...I just don't play chess so I don't know.. =)
You think a lot of things, but you present ZERO evidence to back up your claims. I don't like the Xbox, I don't want an Xbox, but I don't care if Xbox Live is the super ultra cool thing you and the rest of its fans claim that it is. I just wish you'd stop acting like fools and present some evidence when you rant about how it's "taking over the world" and the like. You're acting like the "Desktop Linux for the Masses is HERE NOW!!" and "BSD is dead!!!" crowds.
Media replacement will probably be a whole lot easier with a system such as this.
No need to remember to save manuals or boxes for whatever proof of purchase information is required, that you're not going to be able to find when you need it in any case. You've got a receipt, which most people do or should save in any case, and that's your proof of purchase right there. Walk into CompUSA. Say the dog ate your disc. You already have the CD Key (it's right there on your reciept, or distributed seperately). They say "You bet sir!" (or more likely, grunt and shuffle over to the CD replicator...this is CompUSA we're talking about here), possibly charge you $.50 to $1 for media, and a minute or two later you've got a fresh CD.
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...seeing as I already own a GameCube and a PS2, and the only way I'll ever own an Xbox is if someone gives it to me, I'd say no, this won't get me to buy one of these consoles. (However, if the price drop happens on PSOnes as well, I very well may pick one of those and the Sony screen up. Good way to chop away at those insanely long RPGs I've collected when I'd otherwise be tossing and turning trying to get to sleep.)
Though this _will_ likely spur the entire console gaming industry to get far bigger. With a price point of $99 for a console, and quality preowned titles going for $25 or less on the Cube, it's going to be much easier for mom and dad to not ignore the cries of their children over the winter for the new digital nanny. The only real danger I can see is that the market actually becomes saturated quickly...every house where someone wants a console has a console.
Then I guess it becomes the car industry... "Ma'am, are you aware of the wonderful things an Xbox can do for your life?" "We offer great trade-in values...trade in your Xbox or PS2 and your old game library, and we'll give you a GameCube with 1 title for every two of the competing console!" "Does your household need a second console?"
If you'd actually played the game instead of watching someone play it, you'd probably realize that it does actually have a plot, and a good one at that.
What most people see when they watch people play GTA3 is people running around doing all the extra things that are NOT part of the main game. The jumps. Weapon cheats giving anyone a sniper rifle, stinger, with basically unlimited ammo. Health cheats. Getting the army out after you then reducing your wanted level with a cheat, then stealing the FBI cars/tanks and going on a rampage for no reason.
The actual game itself is neither easy, nor plotless. Your ignorance of this is proof you haven't played it, and your "viewing" was pretty incomplete. I certainly recommend you rent it yourself before you give another uninformed opinion and make yourself look dumber than you likely are.
Preferring RPGs and strategy games is all fine and dandy. Making snap judgements when you haven't played the game...isn't.
...but the E-Reader still just doesn't look like anything but a complete gimmick to me. I can understand kids going gaga for it, 'cause it's like trading cards and what not, but I haven't seen anything actually interesting and usable come out of it. Putting old NES games out in E-Reader format is pretty cool, but in practice it's horrendously tiresome. That, and the E-Reader is a bulky, ugly looking thing hanging off the top of the GBA.
Now, the Game Boy Player...that I'm waiting for. If Metroid, Mario Sunshine, and Zelda didn't get me to get a GameCube already, that certainly would've tipped the balance. Can't wait to play Golden Sun and Circle of the Moon with a real controller.
I don't know whether you're a troll or are actually serious about this idiocy.
For the moment, I'll assume you're actually serious. Unless you're some kind of mutant life form, you do not need music to survive. The studios aren't stopping you from getting food, they're stopping you from hearing music. You will survive if you just stop listening to the music. Trust me on this. Hell, go over to a friend's house and listen to some. I've survived quite long neither paying for or downloading shit off of Kazaa. It does a body good.
Yeah, the studios are rat bastards, but the answer to that is not purchasing their product. Not stealing their product.
3) $0.99 for a song is not unreasonable, if you're only going to buy a couple of songs off an album. $9.99 for an album is probably more than it could be.
The $9.99/album is an average. Some are more (like, for example, The Wall, which is $25 and change, basically a dollar a song added up) and some with fewer tracks are less. Some things you can't just buy the whole album outright (Run DMC's Greatest Hits for example, you've got to do song by song...which I imagine makes some sense) and some things are still only purchasable by the album, no individual songs. However, the few that I saw which were whole-album-only were $10 or less. I expect that each individual artist/label/ was given a choice as to how they're going to want to make their music available.
4) There isn't enough content. I couldn't find even half of what I was looking for. There ought to be a way for small labels and independents to get in on the action. Allowing them to host their own music and samples through the iTunes music store interface would be the most reasonable way.
I imagine that this is, for all they reality of it, a test bed for Apple's music distribution system and for the viability of the service in general. Apple had to get the Big Five on board if the thing was going to fly at all. If it works for the Big Five, and they can get the Windows rollout done without melting the Internet, they'll be wanting every label they can get in the door. For right now, though, I imagine they see enough hurdles with what they're doing right now, that they're not going to bite off more than they're sure they can chew.
5) There are way too many partial albums. I have no idea why you would only put up some songs off an album - did they not have all the source recordings for the entire album?
Probably at least two reasons:
1), this service allows you to buy songs individually. Who cares if the album as a whole isn't up if the song you're looking for is up there? I thought that was the whole point? At least for the majority of people.
2), this is a MASSIVE undertaking. They cannot just grab all the MP3s people have already done off of Kazaa and turn them into AAC files, and post them. If what ol' Stevie was saying was true, they're going to the original masters of as much of this stuff as they can find it for. They have to get whatever format that's in, turn that into digital audio if it isn't, rip it to AAC, ACTUALLY LISTEN TO IT to make sure the rip didn't screw up, and then after it's encoded to make sure that didn't screw up. Try to fix it if it did. Create 30 second sample tracks at an appropriate time (like for an entire joke on the comedy albums) so people can get a feel for what the track is like. Get the album art scanned, and make sure of that. THEN you can put it up on the service. I'm sure I'm not thinking of several steps that Apple is using in this process. Thankfully, they didn't ask me for advice when designing it, and I'm sure I missed something very important. The point being, it takes a whole lot of time to do this all right. They can't just pop a CD in, access CDDB, let it rip, rinse, repeat.
3), which relates to 2. They probably stuffed the service with as many of the completed tracks as they could lay hands on by 10:00 AM PDT, and probably were adding more as the day went on. Marketing, so you could throw out the largest number possible on your website, and in ol' Stevie's speech.
Secrets and Lies wasn't exactly a manual for information security. It was much more of a (sorely needed at the time, and still to a certain extent) book to evangelize the need for information security, and to try to explain to people not in the field why exactly it was so important. Personally, I didn't learn anything new about information security, but I did learn a lot of good ways to explain why it's so important to people who have no basis for understanding why. And I've loaned it out a lot, and it's helped change a lot of people's thinking about security, and why having "password" as your password is a real bad idea.
You bring up points, and while they're valid on their face, they don't actually apply to AOL.
AOL is doing this precisely because of customer demand. Not demand of the high end user, but the demand from parents and other ease-of-use types. The people that own most of the companies I do consulting for also will have me set up their home networks, and almost all of them subscribe to AOL, because they're the best of a bad bunch in effectively filtering porn spam before it gets to the e-mail box of their little kids' AOL screen name. That's the single biggest request I get, is looking for software that will stop their kids from getting porn spam e-mail.
They don't care about Kazaa (their kids probably do, but they're not paying for the connection). They don't care if AOL owns the Internet. They just want some kind of relatively safe way for their kids to have an e-mail address they can give to their friends and have grandma and the family e-mail without having to delete all the porn spam themselves, by hand, before letting their kids sit in front of the computer.
These are not luddites. They may be technophobes themselves, but they want their kids to learn this stuff. However, they realize that the Internet is NOT a happy go lucky friendly place. Smart parents don't let their kids play in the street, and letting your kids play on an unmonitored, unfiltered cable/DSL connection is pretty much the equivalent. Parents want a nice neighborhood. They WANT AOL to work right. Yeah, it sucks a lot, but in most of their minds, it's a lot better than the alternative, and they're probably right. These people don't have the time to learn all the technology and skills needed to filter the raw Internet on their own. Most of the time AOL does the job well enough for their needs, and that's why I tend to recommend it for them.
Whitelisting is the ONLY way AOL and anyone else, for that matter, is ever going to get a handle on the spam problem without chucking SMTP altogether. It may make things harder, and may mean I have to start moving my clients away from AOL if they can't e-mail their kids from work if AOL just permablocks their work mail servers for the gods know what reason, but the practice of whitelisting is a GOOD THING. I can only hope more and more people start following AOL's example. Trust is the ONLY commodity in information security, whether in encryption, perimeter defenses, or spam prevention. Allowing people whom you do not trust to message you with the same freedom as those you do trust means you're going to be getting a lot of crap you don't want.
...if someone wants to write a kernel module that doesn't allow any media files to be played unless they are encrypted with your public key (forcing you to give your private key out to anyone you want to be able to play that media file), and alters their system so that no other software can access the memory space the player and media files are being run through, so you can't obtain a non-encrypted copy, and alters the player, so it only runs on a signed kernel, THE GPL DOESN'T ENTER INTO IT, so therefore THERE AIN'T SHIT YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT.
That said, you could exercise the brain bendingly easy task of NOT BUYING whatever gets produced like this. If it's that important to you, why do you care if it means you can't see The Matrix Reloaded, or whatever? You're preserving your principles. I don't buy music or download music at all, because I find the RIAA, it's member organizations, and the music business in general, to be revolting. I have no illusions that my "boycott" will change a damn thing, but I'm not contributing to their crap, and that's enough for me.
Is there anything I didn't like about the book? Frankly, no. Some might complain that it is priced too high (it lists at USD50 for the softcover, and USD70 for the hardcover), but it is printed on acid-free paper, and the density of useful advice is such that it outstrips in value many works which cost half the price or less.
Taking a look at my paperback copy of Applied Cryptography, it's listed at $55, so I hardly consider that any more expensive. And I paid full cover price for this bugger, as opposed to getting it online for a song, like I should have.
I don't think Applied Cryptography had a hardcover edition available, at least of the Second Edition. I certainly may consider picking that thing up. Hopefully it'll be able to stick together for awhile.
And on another note, what isn't printed on acid-free paper these days? Aside from little paperback novels, etc. I thought that was all done away with.
OK, first off, you're an idiot. They can't just make it against the DMCA to encrypt packets. As a matter of fact, the DMCA makes it illegal for the government to mess with your packets (as they could be argued to be copyrightable IP of yours and since you're generating through a technological means designed to keep the contents secret...someone other than the intended reciever decrypting them would be a clear DMCA violation). Actually read the damn laws before you start spouting off like a crackpot, unless you really are one.
Second off, you're an idiot consipracy crazy. The government would have to seperately outlaw encryption in certain cases (which basically means all cases unless you have the money to fight it) to stop me from encrypting packets. And if encryption is the only thing that gets a government's goat enough to snoop, anyone who's ever bought something a t a secure online store is under FBI surveillance. Somehow I doubt it. Now the USA Patriot Act gives the government basically carte blanche to do this, but the scale of monitoring every packet internal and entering/leaving US corporate/citizen networks is staggering. We're a far more wired nation than China is, and they have trouble locking everything down, never mind monitoring it all. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's trying, but there's no way that it's happened yet. Even then, the Patriot Act, and it's god forsaken proposed offspring, Patriot Act II don't outlaw encryption. Get a clue, unless you really are an ignoramus.
And third off, everyone who modded this guy up is an idiot. Feel free to take all the helpful advice I gave this guy and apply it to yourselves as well.
Intellectual property protection by not allowing someone to sell a paper book or metal miniatures online? Bwah?
Complete and total lunacy. Howling at the moon. I know Game Workshop has been setting their lawyers loose on people posting PDFs of their books online, and I can certainly understand that, but this is just plain crazy. Saying no one but you can sell on the Internet is a sure way to drive the people who sell your products into the grave. If Games Workshop gets hurt by this (stores just stopping selling GW products) maybe it won't get too far, but I doubt it. If I ran a hobby shop selling Games Workshop material, I'd probably just start closing down, selling off all my stock cheap, and get into a stable, sane industry. Once Games Workshop gets away with it, Wizards, Wizkids, and White Wolf will too, and then no hobby store worth patronizing will be able to have any kind of Internet presence other than "we are located here" with a poorly drawn dragon on their logo. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope GW gets slapped hard, but I doubt it. Their stuff is too popular.
Way to try and turn back the clock on an entire industry.
Your ISP shouldn't be using SMTP-Auth on thier own network. They should accept mail to relay from all hosts on the network they own.
Excuse me? SMTP-Auth shouldn't be used on their own network? Can we say, blatant ignorance of the quality of the neighborhood on any random DSL/Cable residential network? I can. You should too. DSL/Cable networks are the slums of the Internet. Most residential boxes have the gods know what running on them, the doors wide open. I deal with a lot of regular people who have high speed Internet access for their kids, and the stuff I've found running on their is just unbelievable. It is a trivial matter to find a machine with pitiful security, that you can install a proxy on remotely, and route your SMTP traffic through that network provider's "main" mail server that doesn't require SMTP-Auth.
End result? Your precious "correct" solution ends up not doing a damn bit of good, and well meaning, clueless people get their access revoked all because for some idiot reason you thought SMTP-Auth is "incorrect".
EVERY ISP SMTP SERVER SHOULD HAVE SMTP AUTHENTICATION ENABLED INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY.
Anything less is playing with fire. If you have it enabled, you may get burned anyways, but at least you're not juggling torches.
It isn't worth a whole hell of a lot.
I have several customers who have Verizon DSL, but have domains hosted elsewhere, with mail hosted elsewhere, without authenticated SMTP relay. I would imagine, while certianly doing this to decrease their spam problem, that there's some sort of collusion (spoken or unspoken) industry wide to try and force ISP customers to use their bandwidth provider's services, hence making them more money.
For a long while I've seen several stories in the ongoing war against the spammers, and the more draconian the measures get (blocking all of East Asia as many in these discussions proudly claim to have done) the Internet e-mail system appears to be in it's death throes already.
When you start blocking such a significant percentage of the world in a blanket measure, wouldn't it be simpler and more effective to screw tortuous blacklists and just implement a whitelisting procedure? I mean, if over half of all the e-mails businesses get aren't legitimate, why in the world are these businesses throwing money down the drain by continuing to pay for something that doesn't work over half the time?
IP+address whitelisting is really the only way to go if you want a useful messaging system based on SMTP anymore. That, or completely revert to instant messaging/private web boards. I'm sure some kind of system could be worked out to allow for simple temporary whitelisting which would let a user allow mail to himself from a certain address for 2 hours, or whatever the local admin defined as the maximum allowable time. Then, at the end of the day, if a user checked the box asking for this addresss/mail server IP combination to be put on the permanent whitelist, it gets sent with all the other such requests to an administrator who vets the list, then adds whatever addresses pass muster onto the permanent whitelist. You could add functionality that has tripwires if you start getting spam from that person...so many peices allowed before a warning, so many before removal from the whitelist for a week, then forever, etc... Yes, it places a demand on the mail administrator, but certainly no more of a demand than the running battle currently takes up.
Personally I have very little use for regular Internet e-mail. I use it occasionally, because you still need an official e-mail address for various registrations, and for reciepts for buying stuff online. For actually talking to people, I use AIM of whatever instant messaging system they may use. I've considered creating a new AIM identity just for clients to get in touch with me through, but there isn't much nuance in logging and most don't deliver messages recieved when you're not logged on.
I wish there was a way I could relegate Internet e-mail to the same status my mailbox has. Namely, flip through to see if there are any bills and dump everything else directly into the trash without bothering any further with it.
You obviously didn't read the news.com link. They are doing the same to Comcast/RoadRunner dynamics..
(and I know plenty of extremely nice jews thanks)
That's like "I've got a lot of gay friends" after you've been accused of being homophobic... Get a clue...
What people who actually want to know what's up with a game need to actually do some research. As with the rest of life, you reap what you sow. Unless your taste runs to whatever's "cool" at the moment (and obviously a lot of people have such taste) just picking up a copy of insert gaming magazine here] or browsing to [insert game review site here] isn't going to tell you squat.
You need to look at a range of review sites. It doesn't take long to figure out which magazines and web sites are schills for whatever game publisher gave them the most cash/best junket. You learn how to read them, and what filters you need to deal with. Check gaming fan sites and message boards. Yes, there are going to be fanboys and schills on the a publisher's payroll, but again, don't take one person's word for it, for goodness sake. Common freakin' sense people. Look at the gestalt.
Be patient. Even if the game sells out on the first day, they _will_ make more copies of them. Don't buy a game the first day unless you're willing to throw that $50 in the trash, because no matter what the previews may have said about it, there's an even chance at best that you are going to hate it. I've done my share of camping out in a game store waiting for FedEx to get in with the new shipment of whatever spiffy new "Popular Video Game Concept" is coming in that day. I've had some successes, and my fair share of disasters (in other words, most of them). The most recent and painful experience being Master of Orion 3: How The Hell Do I Do Anything Here?.
The game publishing industry certainly is able to shove crap out the door, but there will always be plenty of other gamers out there without the ethical handicaps that the commercial reviewers have, who are going to be more than willing to give you and anyone else who will listen the straight poop. Also, not all commercial reviewers are alike. Sometimes you'll find one whos taste aligns with yours, and if so go for it. But even then, you owe it to yourself to look at a lot of opinions before you buy.
Personally, I've found sites like MetaCritic and GameFAQs are great places where a lot of different opinions about a game are collected under one roof, and the people who run those sites don't write any of the reviews that appear there. You usually can get the gist of what a game is going to be like, what the bugs are, etc, but it requires waiting until a critical mass of reviews comes in.
Well, according to NPR's Ann Garrols (I know I'm misspelling it...it's radio, her name doesn't scroll by my eyes when she calls in from her hotel in Baghdad) after the first day, the Iraqi information ministry people claimed civilian casualties, but didn't drive them around as they normally do to show proof.
After the second day, they took the reporters to a hospital, where there were a few injured people. Most, according to what they said, were injured by debris from the anti-air fire, and a couple had injuries from the blasts because they were running around during the bombings at night (like idiots, if you want my personal commentary...she didn't make any such comments).
If that's all the Iraqi propagandists can come up with, it's pretty sad. I'm sure that the heavy bombing happening now in Iraq will kill civillians in the area. How many, I don't know, but I'm sure Al Jazeera and such would be plastering the airwaves with pictures of dead Iraqis if they actually had some, right now.
That really sucks. Not like I haven't downloaded and built Enlightenment seperately many many times before (it runs much faster on my 233Mhz iMac than either KDE or Gnome) but one of the things I likes about Slackware was that when you were choosing your default window manager during install, Enlightnement was one of the choices.
Oh well. It will just add a few steps to the process of a new install for me.
Actually, as far as I've heard, the Qassam rockets that Hamas uses to attack Israeli settlements and towns seem to do just that...land...not explode. Either that or they've been very very lucky and those rockets haven't landed anywhere near anyone. I've seen news reports almost daily talking about rockets being shot into Israeli towns (settlements and otherwise) and I don't think I've heard of one casualty actually reported from it, though I'm sure I could be wrong on this.
Because someone using TCP/IP fingerprinting is looking for interesting hosts to attack, for whatever reason.
Something they've never seen before is interesting, and the would be hacker would likely pry a bit deeper. Giving them false information either makes them disinterested ("some idiot put up a Dreamcast on the web, how stupid") or leads them to attack in a way you are expecting, and that you know will be ineffective. Watching for these known false attacks could act as some part of an early warning alarm system, holding the attacker with his interest long enough to track him down. Ala, the Cuckoo's Egg.
...to see the first time some hacker scans my network to see that every server is running off a Dreamcast. Wouldn't that be funny if that became the secure standard? Every TCP/IP fingerprint returns "Sega Dreamcast". Wouldn't be a huge security boost, but it would help slow down the process of choosing a system to try and break. And the stupid kids who think they're hackers would probably just move on.
Didn't these people learn from the myriad projects that have been smashed by Apple for copying just the look and feel, not even making everything look EXACTLY the same as Windows. If Apple would do it, what makes them think Microsoft wouldn't?
That whole project is a silly, stupid waste of time, because the lawyers are going to erase it from the face of the Earth. And they should, just as they should if Apple had copied the Windows 2000 interface for MacOS X and replaced the Windows logo with an Apple, as these people appear to have done. Get with the real world here.
i think XBox Live is one of the largest Gaming communities out there now, and the most advanced.
I'm not arguing one way or the other on this, but do you have any actual facts to back up this hertofore wild and unfounded supposition?
Larger than the millions of people who play Counterstrike daily on 27,000+ servers, never mind the LAN Counterstrike games? Larger than the hundreds of thousands who play Everquest on JUST the PC platform, not to mention those who have it available for their PS2? Larger than the thousands of Chess and Go clubs out there playing with actual boards, never mind those on things like the Internet Go Server? (I assume there's an analog for chess...I just don't play chess so I don't know.. =)
You think a lot of things, but you present ZERO evidence to back up your claims. I don't like the Xbox, I don't want an Xbox, but I don't care if Xbox Live is the super ultra cool thing you and the rest of its fans claim that it is. I just wish you'd stop acting like fools and present some evidence when you rant about how it's "taking over the world" and the like. You're acting like the "Desktop Linux for the Masses is HERE NOW!!" and "BSD is dead!!!" crowds.
Media replacement will probably be a whole lot easier with a system such as this.
No need to remember to save manuals or boxes for whatever proof of purchase information is required, that you're not going to be able to find when you need it in any case. You've got a receipt, which most people do or should save in any case, and that's your proof of purchase right there. Walk into CompUSA. Say the dog ate your disc. You already have the CD Key (it's right there on your reciept, or distributed seperately). They say "You bet sir!" (or more likely, grunt and shuffle over to the CD replicator...this is CompUSA we're talking about here), possibly charge you $.50 to $1 for media, and a minute or two later you've got a fresh CD.