While everyone is asking why this would be a legal problem, I can only assume that the writers of these articles are taking the view that if Realtek have produced these drivers as part of some future OSX-based netbook then they would probably be protected by some kind of NDA with Apple. Obviously if this rather unlikely scenario is assumed correct then Realtek would potentially be breeching said hypothetical NDA by providing the beta drivers to members of the public.
Unfortunately, the burden of proof in this instance falls on the defendant. You have to convince them that you genuinely do not know the encryption keys, otherwise you can still find yourself doing 2 years in prison for failing to hand them over.
As I said, it's harder than downloading a cracked copy, which is all SecuROM is. Encouraging people to pirate by making it less than trivial to transfer your game to someone else.
I'm not a fan of having additional crap like GFWL & This Rockstar Games Social Club, whatever the hell that is, forced upon me during game installs but the real question for me is whether or not it'll let me run Process Explorer (Which long since replaced Task Manager for me) and play the game at the same time (I'm looking at you, Bioshock, amongst others).
Also, why screw over the customers using Steam by including SecuROM? Steam *is* a copy protection mechanism in that restricts the game to a single user and it's not easy to duplicate a legit copy to another Steam account (Harder than downloading a cracked copy anyway). I had enough bad experiences with StarForce to be wary of anything that installs hard-to-remove driver hooks to control application usage.
I don't know about the US, but for contractors in the UK 18 months to 2 years is about the timeframe that HMRC start looking very closely at whether or not you should be paying "proper" amounts of tax on all your earnings (because they take the approach that you're effectively in a permanent role if you've been on one contract that long - or get any permy benefits like pensions or company cars).
The religious will argue that a soul is something unique to mankind, embued by whichever creator their faith believes in, making it impossible for machines to ever have soul.
The athiests will argue that there's no such thing as a "soul", only sentience and/or self-awareness.
That's just for the disks, what about the SAN enclosures, fibre channel switches, SQL servers, front-end servers, backup devices and media, staffing costs, data mining costs, power, A/C, etc, etc?
Not to mention the implementation costs, which, being provided to the government by a 3rd party contractor would doubtless run into the billions of pounds and take 5-10 years to complete.
The BPI and the various other rights groups in the UK want to have their cake and eat it. They want ISPs to police their users for illegal downloads, send out warnings & then cut them off completely AND they want them to pay for all the costs of doing so in addition to the potential lost income from cutting off the users.
Understandably the ISPs aren't overly happy about this arrangement, which is why I'd be very surprised if this was anything more than vague agreement of "Yes, we should probably do something about all those people paying us large monthly fees to download your music illegally".
There seems to be something of a misconception amongst most Americans that I speak to, that your only options are the current system or some kind of filthy commie healthcare system where government employees carry out open heart surgery with rusty cutlery.
The current system in the UK, for example, offers both private and state healthcare, with the NHS free for all and private healthcare available if you want to pay a bit of money for a TV in your hospital room and a shorter wait for your elective surgery.
If you don't want or can't afford private healthcare then you can use the NHS, which is perfectly adequate for most people and certainly doesn't have huge waiting lists for essential treatment as some people seem to believe. Yes, there are the fringe cases, but for the mostpart the NHS is no worse than any of the private medical services when it comes to patient care.
As a result of this system, the private healthcare providers have to charge reasonable rates, because they know that people will simply abandon them for the NHS if they don't appear to be offering good value for money any more.
Americans seem to be terrfied of any kind of government provided or subsidised healthcare at any level, almost as if they see it as a "gateway drug" to communism - as comical as that appears to the rest of the world.
Disclaimer: I currently contract for the NHS, making me far more cynical about it then I might otherwise be.
Paying for the game entitles you to OWNERSHIP rights over *that copy* of the product. You cannot reproduce it and sell it because that would be a violation of EA's copyrights, but that doesn't change the fact that you own your copy of the fucking game - regardless of how much their EULA tries to claim otherwise.
Yes, because all of the world's scientific and economic resources have been taken off of all those important projects in order to dedicate them to building the gaming history section of the National Media Museum.
I'm glad to see you have your priorities sorted; Cure for cancer? Cure for aids? Clean energy? Nope, trolling Slashdot.
Initially. There's a lot of stuff that isn't linked directly off the TOC, which is a pain, but it can be found with a bit of digging (or download the PDF and search it).
The FAQs (http://www.nagios.org/faqs/) also have a fair amount of useful info (Such as why the bloody thing won't use GD2 without a lot of arsing around).
I'd also recommend the forums here: http://nagios.meulie.net/ (Though they seem to be down at the moment).
Not really; deCSS and Region Free players are so ubiquitous these days that I don't remember the last time I even had to think "Will I be able to play/copy this DVD?".
Unfortunately I think you'll find that most of us started out in junior positions where we had an opportunity to learn from someone more experienced than ourselves in addition to our own learning.
Without that benefit the best thing you can do is to get a test environment (as you've already done), set up some form of virtualization (as has already been suggested) and jump in head-first with Google open nearby.
It's crucial that you're not afraid of breaking things - and, in fact, I'd recommend going out of your way to do so in a test environment - because one of the most important skill sets you'll need to learn is how to fix all the stuff you (or somebody else) has broken.
Books and Tutorials are all very well in their way, but I find that it's much harder to learn these things when I'm not actually doing the work along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I speak for everyone here when I say: "Good luck with that".
While everyone is asking why this would be a legal problem, I can only assume that the writers of these articles are taking the view that if Realtek have produced these drivers as part of some future OSX-based netbook then they would probably be protected by some kind of NDA with Apple. Obviously if this rather unlikely scenario is assumed correct then Realtek would potentially be breeching said hypothetical NDA by providing the beta drivers to members of the public.
Or something like that anyway.
Clear your saved passwords *for their site*:
Part 1: Delete all saved passwords for www.info-svc.com
I thought *everyone* knew who Chapin Information Services was - you must be really out of the loop.
Unfortunately, the burden of proof in this instance falls on the defendant. You have to convince them that you genuinely do not know the encryption keys, otherwise you can still find yourself doing 2 years in prison for failing to hand them over.
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
DisablePagingExecutive
0 = Drivers and system code can be paged to disk as needed.
1 = Drivers and system code must remain in physical memory.
As I said, it's harder than downloading a cracked copy, which is all SecuROM is. Encouraging people to pirate by making it less than trivial to transfer your game to someone else.
I'm not a fan of having additional crap like GFWL & This Rockstar Games Social Club, whatever the hell that is, forced upon me during game installs but the real question for me is whether or not it'll let me run Process Explorer (Which long since replaced Task Manager for me) and play the game at the same time (I'm looking at you, Bioshock, amongst others).
Also, why screw over the customers using Steam by including SecuROM? Steam *is* a copy protection mechanism in that restricts the game to a single user and it's not easy to duplicate a legit copy to another Steam account (Harder than downloading a cracked copy anyway). I had enough bad experiences with StarForce to be wary of anything that installs hard-to-remove driver hooks to control application usage.
I don't know about the US, but for contractors in the UK 18 months to 2 years is about the timeframe that HMRC start looking very closely at whether or not you should be paying "proper" amounts of tax on all your earnings (because they take the approach that you're effectively in a permanent role if you've been on one contract that long - or get any permy benefits like pensions or company cars).
The religious will argue that a soul is something unique to mankind, embued by whichever creator their faith believes in, making it impossible for machines to ever have soul.
The athiests will argue that there's no such thing as a "soul", only sentience and/or self-awareness.
Others will meander aimlessly between the two.
That's just for the disks, what about the SAN enclosures, fibre channel switches, SQL servers, front-end servers, backup devices and media, staffing costs, data mining costs, power, A/C, etc, etc?
Not to mention the implementation costs, which, being provided to the government by a 3rd party contractor would doubtless run into the billions of pounds and take 5-10 years to complete.
The BPI and the various other rights groups in the UK want to have their cake and eat it. They want ISPs to police their users for illegal downloads, send out warnings & then cut them off completely AND they want them to pay for all the costs of doing so in addition to the potential lost income from cutting off the users.
Understandably the ISPs aren't overly happy about this arrangement, which is why I'd be very surprised if this was anything more than vague agreement of "Yes, we should probably do something about all those people paying us large monthly fees to download your music illegally".
Until something happens to you totally outside of your control that requires long and expensive medical treatment that you can't afford.
There seems to be something of a misconception amongst most Americans that I speak to, that your only options are the current system or some kind of filthy commie healthcare system where government employees carry out open heart surgery with rusty cutlery.
The current system in the UK, for example, offers both private and state healthcare, with the NHS free for all and private healthcare available if you want to pay a bit of money for a TV in your hospital room and a shorter wait for your elective surgery.
If you don't want or can't afford private healthcare then you can use the NHS, which is perfectly adequate for most people and certainly doesn't have huge waiting lists for essential treatment as some people seem to believe. Yes, there are the fringe cases, but for the mostpart the NHS is no worse than any of the private medical services when it comes to patient care.
As a result of this system, the private healthcare providers have to charge reasonable rates, because they know that people will simply abandon them for the NHS if they don't appear to be offering good value for money any more.
Americans seem to be terrfied of any kind of government provided or subsidised healthcare at any level, almost as if they see it as a "gateway drug" to communism - as comical as that appears to the rest of the world.
Disclaimer: I currently contract for the NHS, making me far more cynical about it then I might otherwise be.
Which seems to distill to "We can't risk helping people in case we accidentally help some people we don't like."
Paying for the game entitles you to OWNERSHIP rights over *that copy* of the product. You cannot reproduce it and sell it because that would be a violation of EA's copyrights, but that doesn't change the fact that you own your copy of the fucking game - regardless of how much their EULA tries to claim otherwise.
Yes, because all of the world's scientific and economic resources have been taken off of all those important projects in order to dedicate them to building the gaming history section of the National Media Museum.
I'm glad to see you have your priorities sorted; Cure for cancer? Cure for aids? Clean energy? Nope, trolling Slashdot.
You'll be wanting:
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/configmain.html
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/objectdefinitions.html
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/configcgi.html
Initially. There's a lot of stuff that isn't linked directly off the TOC, which is a pain, but it can be found with a bit of digging (or download the PDF and search it).
The FAQs (http://www.nagios.org/faqs/) also have a fair amount of useful info (Such as why the bloody thing won't use GD2 without a lot of arsing around).
I'd also recommend the forums here: http://nagios.meulie.net/ (Though they seem to be down at the moment).
Several remote access apps have an option to notify via email when your IP address changes.
Oh, how conveniant, a theory about the universe that doesn't involve explaining dark energy. Get back to work!
I think you mean "A method of generating light and heat via the friction-induced combustion of a flammable material"
Not really; deCSS and Region Free players are so ubiquitous these days that I don't remember the last time I even had to think "Will I be able to play/copy this DVD?".
Unfortunately I think you'll find that most of us started out in junior positions where we had an opportunity to learn from someone more experienced than ourselves in addition to our own learning.
Without that benefit the best thing you can do is to get a test environment (as you've already done), set up some form of virtualization (as has already been suggested) and jump in head-first with Google open nearby.
It's crucial that you're not afraid of breaking things - and, in fact, I'd recommend going out of your way to do so in a test environment - because one of the most important skill sets you'll need to learn is how to fix all the stuff you (or somebody else) has broken.
Books and Tutorials are all very well in their way, but I find that it's much harder to learn these things when I'm not actually doing the work along with it.
Up to 440,000 laptops now.
you'd think Google would have a crack legal team banging one out before Chrome's release
Sounds like a fun job...