Yup - a number of years ago I had my ISP screw up my billing and instead of withdrawing $29.95, they took out $350. I was a poor student then and their mistake caused me to bounce a bunch of checks and nearly miss my rent payment.
The bank said they could do nothing because I had granted the ISP EFT access to my account, and there was no way they could distinguish a valid transaction from an invalid one, so I'd have to talk to the ISP.
ISP said "Yup, sorry, our bad - we can fix it in 2-4 weeks". After a lot of complaining and going to supervisors I finally got someone to cut me a check for the refund and I picked it up in person.
Lesson learned. NOBODY gets direct access to my bank accounts. EVER.
They could, but a whole lot of soldiers use consumer GPS units instead of the military units. Enable SA again and the troops wouldn't know which way to go...
The military GPS units I've seen are a joke - sure they can probably stand-up to being run over by a tank, but for user interface and ease of use, they're pitiful.
DRM is actually not about stopping it or making it "unhackable". It's about making it difficult enough that "most" people won't want to take the time and effort and will be driven to an easier path instead (ie: buying the product). Any product can be hacked eventually, but for example, if I can buy an original copy of a DVD movie I want for $10, or spend $0.60 for a blank DVD-R and spend an hour copying it, I'll take the $10 DVD. My time is worth more than the $9.40 I've "given up" by not pirating.
So that's really the idea here. For example, sure X-Box systems could be modchipped, but out of the millions of units they sold, what percentage of people actually did that? Less than 1%? Sure it's a loss of revenue, but in the big scheme of things, it's not too bad and the DRM had the desired effect of getting people to buy the software.
I think you're thinking of private lots (where this has been available for years). This is the first roll-out that covers all of the coin-meters on the sides of the street.
It seems like a good idea, however the cynical side of me also wonders that if in addition text messaging the owner of the vehicle when the payment is about to expire, it might also be text messaging the parking enforcement officer for the area to keep an eye out in areas with lots of meters that are expiring at the same time so they know where to concentrate their "efforts"...
It would also be nice if they could do this as a straight text message by phone instead of by voice. Could be a lot faster...
The method I used for the groundhog version was to assign a numeric value to each seperate groundhog "pose", then writing the total at the bottom of each square. Then it's just a matter of checking the totals and seeing if squares that equal the same value are identical. Works pretty well - you can also immediately cross-off the tiles that are obviously not similar with only a few figures and such.
Site seems to be down - perhaps due to slashdotting?
At any rate, I'm impressed - it doesn't have the usual unpolished feel of a 3rd-party map. You obviously put a lot of time and effort into it (is it just me, or do the enemies seem much harder than regular HL, even in "normal" mode?).
Anyways, I'm just getting underground in the power area - looks good so far!
Maybe a solution here is to give the students an alternative:
"As an instructor, I'll provide either downloadable audio and/or video version of my lectures so you can review them at a later time - in return, no laptops used during my lecturing"
On one hand, I agree that students who are paying for class should have some discretion to use tools that allow them to learn best, but I also know from experience that many students are browsing the web, IM'ing, and even gaming in some cases.
But you can use your phone internationally when travelling - you just have to pay incredibly high roaming charges rather than using a local SIM for whatever country you travel to (at least for GSM phones).
Why would providers want to give up all that nice roaming revenue?
So they don't downsample "for now" to get their format established and to get their "foot in the door". There's nothing stopping them from changing their minds later-on once the format is established and the players are commonplace. Flip a bit on the media and it's re-enabled. No HD for you (on old HD sets).
Say they were to release a new HD format and have absolutely no protection enabled on it whatsoever (at least for Sony titles). You do that for a few years and just eat the resulting (probably small) loss in piracy and such while your player crushes competing formats and puts them out of business. Once you've established yourself as the sole format out there, then you can re-enable the protection. What are people going to do? They already have players in their house, and there's no other format to migrate to even if they're pissed-off...
Write the couple years of "no DRM" off to "marketing", and enjoy the heavily DRM'ed future...
I think it depends on how often you try and activate with the same serial. If you changed your motherboard 3 times in one day (or maybe one week), the reactivation would likely have had problems. If you swapped MBs once a month or so, it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
I don't know exactly what the timeframe is, but it makes sense that they'd only deny you if your install was getting repeatedly re-activated within a short period of time.
If it's just the phone system over the internet - fine, I have no problems with the result of any naturally occuring lag or delay.
IF however, it's because the ISP is degrading the traffic, or putting it at a lower priority than other types of data, then they deserve to be fined and/or regulated. It's not up to an ISP to determine the priority of data that users transfer any more than a phone company should be determining what topics people talk about during their phone calls. I'm paying for my raw data to be moved over their network. If they choose to launch a competing service, they need to make their service perform better than their competition (without degrading someone else's connection or charging more to put their competition at a disadvantage).
VOIP data is pretty low bandwidth - shouldn't be any problem for a normal ISP to carry at relatively low latency rates (well under 200ms for north america). Vonage, Skype and others should start making tools available to test ISPs and see if they're "playing" with the data in comparison with non-VOIP data.
Incidentally, any technical details on how this is happening yet? Are they actually degrading the service over ports/IPs that vonage uses, or are they simply detecting traffic and automatically adding an extra charge?
All of which is beside the point - while I may have been interested in Shaw's offering before, you can bet I wouldn't touch them now.
It's amusing to me that some gung-ho moderator's on Skype's forum are trying in vain to suppress the link to the patch. Not only are they stirring up the shit (seems to be a mod-fight going on about it) so everyone knows about it, they're obviously not going to have any luck at trying to stop the information from getting out there what with slashdot and digg linking the page.
Software companies are on the upgrade gravy train.
Indeed they are - and I absolutely refuse to support any company that tries to pull "maintenance contract" style systems for minor releases. I used to use a FTP package called "Serv-U" for many years, but as soon as they started doing "support licenses" for routine maintenance releases, I dropped their product and never have looked at them again.
They may have changed their licensing again at some point, but it doesn't matter any more - they lost a customer and I'll never use their product again.
"Most people I know aren't going to go out and buy new HDCP compliant HD-DVD player's, stereo reciever, and TV's just to play a new super-DRM'd movie format."
Ah yes, but once this new "super DRM'ed" format comes out, the movie industry is going to do everything they can in order to kill-off DVDs so you have no choice. As soon as they can get the price of the hardware down to $200-300, you can bet they're going to start working on strategies to eliminate easily-copyable DVDs...
As far as the video cards go, I wouldn't be at-all surprised if by "HDCP compatible", they mean "able to display content with HDCP-no restriction encoding".
Before you spout-off about things you don't have the full details on, you might actually want to read the story.
Solitare was up on his screen, he wasn't actively playing it. For all anyone knows, he could've been playing over lunch or on a coffee break.
So before you make snap judgements about "stealing from his employer", maybe you should get some actual information.
Yes, the guy should've been more aware of his surroundings when VIPs showed up
No, the mayor shouldn't have been such a total dick. You don't encourage loyalty and hard work from employees by being an asshole. It's situations like these where one appreciates unions and their power to moderate management's knee-jerk over-reactions.
I think it's more about betting long-term for Google. I suspect they're pretty confident that the current political system in China will collapse in the next decade or so - too many people just know too much about the outside world and how much they're being repressed. Eventually they're going to decide that they've had it with the current ruling class and overthrow them.
Google is likely betting that getting in first is better than not getting in at all - when the government finally collapses, they'll already be extremely well-established and able to fend off competitors. If they tried waiting until after the political collapse, then they'll be starting-off at the same point as any other company who wants to try and make inroads.
Now this isn't to let Google off the hook, I think they've made a fundamentally poor decision that really puts their ethics in-doubt with many people who use their systems. They no longer have the "clean, untarnished, do-gooder" image that they've spent years cultivating. They've lost a lot of face with a lot of people, and that's kind of sad...
Just goes to show that anyone can be bought if enough money is to be made... Having morals are such a slippery slope in business...
Shame they didn't include some sort of failsafe - a lot of Asus PC MBs have a hardwired "BIOS restore" function that will allow a reload of the BIOS after a bad flash.
Of course, Apple really doesn't want people poking around inside their computers anyway, so...
And if you don't buy CDs (or ITMS, or whatever), you're included in the "calculation of how much pirating is costing the music industry" the next time they decide to release one of their completely pulled-out-of-their-ass press releases on how much the music industry is hurting financially.
It goes something like this (in the mind of a record exec, and their beancounters):
#1. Assume everyone in the world is a potential customer #2. Subtract those people who have actually bought an album in a store #3. Assuming everyone else are thieves who are going to steal the music #4. Release statistic on how much money you're losing due to #3
I'll throw my agreement in here. Tried ghost on a video editing machine at work, and it was contantly blue-screening XP with whatever it installed in the background. As soon as ghost was removed, the problem stopped.
I've since also moved to Acronis and been very happy with the results.
No more Symantec software on any of my machines.
Re:really?
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I suppose the amount of spam that I get on my home email account seems to have gone down a bit, but there is still plenty coming in on Gmail - most of it gets caught in the filter, but the occasional one gets through, but even that gets filtered because I usually have my home email client check Gmail through POP3.
For my home system, I use POPFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/), which has a nearly perfect (99.34%) accuracy rating after using it for almost three years now.
Slashdot Mirror
You gotta be careful with Timbits... they can kill m00se you know...
Yup - a number of years ago I had my ISP screw up my billing and instead of withdrawing $29.95, they took out $350. I was a poor student then and their mistake caused me to bounce a bunch of checks and nearly miss my rent payment.
The bank said they could do nothing because I had granted the ISP EFT access to my account, and there was no way they could distinguish a valid transaction from an invalid one, so I'd have to talk to the ISP.
ISP said "Yup, sorry, our bad - we can fix it in 2-4 weeks". After a lot of complaining and going to supervisors I finally got someone to cut me a check for the refund and I picked it up in person.
Lesson learned. NOBODY gets direct access to my bank accounts. EVER.
How many of these rootkits and viruses could actually install themselves if people wouldn't run under administrative accounts though?
N.
They could, but a whole lot of soldiers use consumer GPS units instead of the military units. Enable SA again and the troops wouldn't know which way to go...
The military GPS units I've seen are a joke - sure they can probably stand-up to being run over by a tank, but for user interface and ease of use, they're pitiful.
N.
DRM is actually not about stopping it or making it "unhackable". It's about making it difficult enough that "most" people won't want to take the time and effort and will be driven to an easier path instead (ie: buying the product). Any product can be hacked eventually, but for example, if I can buy an original copy of a DVD movie I want for $10, or spend $0.60 for a blank DVD-R and spend an hour copying it, I'll take the $10 DVD. My time is worth more than the $9.40 I've "given up" by not pirating.
So that's really the idea here. For example, sure X-Box systems could be modchipped, but out of the millions of units they sold, what percentage of people actually did that? Less than 1%? Sure it's a loss of revenue, but in the big scheme of things, it's not too bad and the DRM had the desired effect of getting people to buy the software.
N.
I think you're thinking of private lots (where this has been available for years). This is the first roll-out that covers all of the coin-meters on the sides of the street.
It seems like a good idea, however the cynical side of me also wonders that if in addition text messaging the owner of the vehicle when the payment is about to expire, it might also be text messaging the parking enforcement officer for the area to keep an eye out in areas with lots of meters that are expiring at the same time so they know where to concentrate their "efforts"...
It would also be nice if they could do this as a straight text message by phone instead of by voice. Could be a lot faster...
N.
The method I used for the groundhog version was to assign a numeric value to each seperate groundhog "pose", then writing the total at the bottom of each square. Then it's just a matter of checking the totals and seeing if squares that equal the same value are identical. Works pretty well - you can also immediately cross-off the tiles that are obviously not similar with only a few figures and such.
N.
Site seems to be down - perhaps due to slashdotting?
At any rate, I'm impressed - it doesn't have the usual unpolished feel of a 3rd-party map. You obviously put a lot of time and effort into it (is it just me, or do the enemies seem much harder than regular HL, even in "normal" mode?).
Anyways, I'm just getting underground in the power area - looks good so far!
I suspect that because ticketmaster prints the tickets themselves, they just print the "face value" for whatever it was auctioned for.
N.
That $100 really frosts me... The exchange rate is $0.90 Cdn to $1 US right now, so the actual price should be $275 Cdn.
If I want that kit, I'll pop across the border and pick it up - not buy from Canadian retailers...
N.
Maybe a solution here is to give the students an alternative:
"As an instructor, I'll provide either downloadable audio and/or video version of my lectures so you can review them at a later time - in return, no laptops used during my lecturing"
On one hand, I agree that students who are paying for class should have some discretion to use tools that allow them to learn best, but I also know from experience that many students are browsing the web, IM'ing, and even gaming in some cases.
But you can use your phone internationally when travelling - you just have to pay incredibly high roaming charges rather than using a local SIM for whatever country you travel to (at least for GSM phones).
Why would providers want to give up all that nice roaming revenue?
N.
Exactly.
So they don't downsample "for now" to get their format established and to get their "foot in the door". There's nothing stopping them from changing their minds later-on once the format is established and the players are commonplace. Flip a bit on the media and it's re-enabled. No HD for you (on old HD sets).
Say they were to release a new HD format and have absolutely no protection enabled on it whatsoever (at least for Sony titles). You do that for a few years and just eat the resulting (probably small) loss in piracy and such while your player crushes competing formats and puts them out of business. Once you've established yourself as the sole format out there, then you can re-enable the protection. What are people going to do? They already have players in their house, and there's no other format to migrate to even if they're pissed-off...
Write the couple years of "no DRM" off to "marketing", and enjoy the heavily DRM'ed future...
N.
I think it depends on how often you try and activate with the same serial. If you changed your motherboard 3 times in one day (or maybe one week), the reactivation would likely have had problems. If you swapped MBs once a month or so, it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
I don't know exactly what the timeframe is, but it makes sense that they'd only deny you if your install was getting repeatedly re-activated within a short period of time.
If it's just the phone system over the internet - fine, I have no problems with the result of any naturally occuring lag or delay.
IF however, it's because the ISP is degrading the traffic, or putting it at a lower priority than other types of data, then they deserve to be fined and/or regulated. It's not up to an ISP to determine the priority of data that users transfer any more than a phone company should be determining what topics people talk about during their phone calls. I'm paying for my raw data to be moved over their network. If they choose to launch a competing service, they need to make their service perform better than their competition (without degrading someone else's connection or charging more to put their competition at a disadvantage).
VOIP data is pretty low bandwidth - shouldn't be any problem for a normal ISP to carry at relatively low latency rates (well under 200ms for north america). Vonage, Skype and others should start making tools available to test ISPs and see if they're "playing" with the data in comparison with non-VOIP data.
Incidentally, any technical details on how this is happening yet? Are they actually degrading the service over ports/IPs that vonage uses, or are they simply detecting traffic and automatically adding an extra charge?
All of which is beside the point - while I may have been interested in Shaw's offering before, you can bet I wouldn't touch them now.
N.
It's amusing to me that some gung-ho moderator's on Skype's forum are trying in vain to suppress the link to the patch. Not only are they stirring up the shit (seems to be a mod-fight going on about it) so everyone knows about it, they're obviously not going to have any luck at trying to stop the information from getting out there what with slashdot and digg linking the page.
Foolish of them...
Software companies are on the upgrade gravy train.
Indeed they are - and I absolutely refuse to support any company that tries to pull "maintenance contract" style systems for minor releases. I used to use a FTP package called "Serv-U" for many years, but as soon as they started doing "support licenses" for routine maintenance releases, I dropped their product and never have looked at them again.
They may have changed their licensing again at some point, but it doesn't matter any more - they lost a customer and I'll never use their product again.
N.
I would've said they're one step below a rent-a-cop actually... Homeland security my ass - try wannabe vigilante...
N.
"Most people I know aren't going to go out and buy new HDCP compliant HD-DVD player's, stereo reciever, and TV's just to play a new super-DRM'd movie format."
Ah yes, but once this new "super DRM'ed" format comes out, the movie industry is going to do everything they can in order to kill-off DVDs so you have no choice. As soon as they can get the price of the hardware down to $200-300, you can bet they're going to start working on strategies to eliminate easily-copyable DVDs...
As far as the video cards go, I wouldn't be at-all surprised if by "HDCP compatible", they mean "able to display content with HDCP-no restriction encoding".
N.
Before you spout-off about things you don't have the full details on, you might actually want to read the story.
Solitare was up on his screen, he wasn't actively playing it. For all anyone knows, he could've been playing over lunch or on a coffee break.
So before you make snap judgements about "stealing from his employer", maybe you should get some actual information.
Yes, the guy should've been more aware of his surroundings when VIPs showed up
No, the mayor shouldn't have been such a total dick. You don't encourage loyalty and hard work from employees by being an asshole. It's situations like these where one appreciates unions and their power to moderate management's knee-jerk over-reactions.
N.
I think it's more about betting long-term for Google. I suspect they're pretty confident that the current political system in China will collapse in the next decade or so - too many people just know too much about the outside world and how much they're being repressed. Eventually they're going to decide that they've had it with the current ruling class and overthrow them.
Google is likely betting that getting in first is better than not getting in at all - when the government finally collapses, they'll already be extremely well-established and able to fend off competitors. If they tried waiting until after the political collapse, then they'll be starting-off at the same point as any other company who wants to try and make inroads.
Now this isn't to let Google off the hook, I think they've made a fundamentally poor decision that really puts their ethics in-doubt with many people who use their systems. They no longer have the "clean, untarnished, do-gooder" image that they've spent years cultivating. They've lost a lot of face with a lot of people, and that's kind of sad...
Just goes to show that anyone can be bought if enough money is to be made... Having morals are such a slippery slope in business...
N.
Shame they didn't include some sort of failsafe - a lot of Asus PC MBs have a hardwired "BIOS restore" function that will allow a reload of the BIOS after a bad flash.
Of course, Apple really doesn't want people poking around inside their computers anyway, so...
And if you don't buy CDs (or ITMS, or whatever), you're included in the "calculation of how much pirating is costing the music industry" the next time they decide to release one of their completely pulled-out-of-their-ass press releases on how much the music industry is hurting financially.
It goes something like this (in the mind of a record exec, and their beancounters):
#1. Assume everyone in the world is a potential customer
#2. Subtract those people who have actually bought an album in a store
#3. Assuming everyone else are thieves who are going to steal the music
#4. Release statistic on how much money you're losing due to #3
N.
I'll throw my agreement in here. Tried ghost on a video editing machine at work, and it was contantly blue-screening XP with whatever it installed in the background. As soon as ghost was removed, the problem stopped.
I've since also moved to Acronis and been very happy with the results.
No more Symantec software on any of my machines.
I suppose the amount of spam that I get on my home email account seems to have gone down a bit, but there is still plenty coming in on Gmail - most of it gets caught in the filter, but the occasional one gets through, but even that gets filtered because I usually have my home email client check Gmail through POP3.
For my home system, I use POPFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/), which has a nearly perfect (99.34%) accuracy rating after using it for almost three years now.
N.