Would you suggest that a product which is garbage but has a good advertising campaign is actually a better product?
Depends on who I am.
If I'm the seller of the product, the better product is the one that produces the best profit.
If I'm the one that buys the product, the better product is the one that meets my needs the best with the most affordable price.
If I could sell you slashdot moderation points for $10 / point, you bet yo sorry behind I'd think that particular product was the best product I'd ever cooked up. A whole lot of people would probably think otherwise.
I wish Drobo came with a real NAS
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
I'm liking the feature set on the Drobo external drive, but the price with their NAS "dongle" is not very competitive.
I've got a ReadyNAS NV+. It was (is?) the best bang for buck when I bought it about 18 months ago.
There's a new 6-bay ReadyNAS coming out any day now I'm very tempted to get. I think they named it ReadyNAS Pro, if I'm not mistaken. No word on the street price on the diskless version as of yet. It'll be expensive though, me thinks.
Couple of things about ReadyNAS NV+. It performs poorly on file operations involving lots of files. It also has very poor network failure recovery. I've got mine on a wireless connection (can't use wired connection where it's at for now), and whenever the wireless connection to the router drops, it's a 50/50 whether the ReadyNAS goes into some horrible unrecoverable freeze up state. The file system will be fine, it's just that the unit doesn't know how to recover from the network drop. Sometimes it gets the connection back, but then the filesystem is unavailable. Or the whole box just doesn't answer to requests (even though the connection is fine). I've had to hard reboot that box so many times it's not funny.
These problems may or may not have been fixed with the latest firmware upgrades. I haven't upgraded mine yet.
Tower Records died because of online music sales, not because of piracy. They couldn't compete with the lower prices on online stores like Amazon.com and died.
Their demise had NOTHING to do with music piracy.
One of the main reasons why artists are struggling is, IMHO, because of the music industry itself. It's built on the mega hit model, where nobody but the mega stars make it rich. The record companies are raking artists and the margins for small time artists are negative because of that. Meanwhile, in addition of the raking they also take away the artists rights to their own creations, so not only does the artist pay for everything, but they also get robbed of their IP.
Artists continue supporting this, because all of them hope and believe to become the Next Big Thing (tm), and they feel like they have no other choice. It's a dream machine. Obviously the large majority of them never make it.
The conspiracy theorist in me is convinced jail times for intellectual property related crimes have more to do with distribution of wealth from tax payers to the private prison industry than the justice system as such.
"as I understand the article, any communications that hit Sweden are subject to monitoring"
What do you think happened in that secret NSA room at AT&T's San Francisco facility?
Do you think they only snooped on Internet traffic originating or terminating at AT&T considering that the room was hooked up to the backbone network as I understand it?
"Ah, while we're at it, let's not forget that the Russians disbanded the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for Homeland Security) in '95"
You did know that the country is (and has been for quite some time) run by KGB these days though, right?
The organization might've been disbanded, but the operatives are very much still in control.
Can't seem to remember OSS being used by any other presidential candidate in the past, ever.
So, in a community championing OSS, yes, I would say that's kinda of a big deal.
If you take this to its logical conclusion, there's a good chance, if elected as President of the United States, he (or rather his technology people) might be advocating for more OSS within the Government. THAT would be a Very Big Deal (tm).
I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (run by Bookspan) for quite a few years.
The introductory book offer (five "free" books) is a really good deal, but once you're done that I found that even the club member prices for their books are higher than in any online bookstore.
So I reluctantly fulfilled my membership "obligation" (I think four books at regular price) and called it a day after a few months of not buying anything. Overall I think I still came ahead, but not by much and it wasn't worth the hassle of answering "no, I do not want the monthly selection" every month.
"The petition filed by the Church listed twenty-six individuals allegedly affiliated with Anonymous, but "accidentally" included others who merely work near the location of the first protests held in February and did not participate in them, such as a Starbucks employee. Furthermore, the Church failed to show that any of those listed actually committed any wrongdoing.""
What percentage of the identity theft cases were done by conning the customer to give their account information to the thief, either by phishing or keyloggers.
What percentage of the identity theft cases were done by social engineering the banks.
What percentage of the identity theft cases were done by stealing the date from a 3rd party.
Without that information the data is pretty much meaningless and usable only for trending analysis by just looking at the number of total cases.
With your experience in cyber warfare, I'm sure you've developed some opinions about cybercrime that apply to the world outside the military. How would you go about getting rid of cybercrime on the Internet?
There was an interesting interview on PBS by Bill Moyers the other night. He was interviewing Susan Jacoby who was hawking her newest book "The Age of American Unreason".
She, also, blamed, partly (among other things she was discussing in the interview), the media for this sort of stupidity. She said the media has gone too far with its equal treatment of different sides of each issue. She said that sometimes one side is right and the other wrong, and giving the wrong side equal weight is not really serving the public well. The creationism vs. evolution "debate" was the example she used.
XBox 360 didn't use to have DRM. It was introduced as a dashboard upgrade in October 2006, 11 months after the launch of the system.
So if you bought downloadable content from the Microsoft XBox Marketplace before the DRM upgrade, you did actually buy DRM-free content. The DRM was applied on it after-the-fact.
I'm fully aware nothing that I propose is ever going to happen (unless the Russians do something REALLY stupid). We will continue bleeding money to Russian criminals, who give some of that corrupt Russian politicians, who in term protect them from prosecution from the victims. I suppose everyone's just gonna be happy about us feeding the Russians.
However, I'm just gonna pick a few things to comment on from your response where I disagree.
I understand your points about the difficulty (impossibility) of cutting Russians of the net. The proxy solution with deals with rogue networks can not be stopped 100%, but as SpamHaus has shown it can GREATLY reduce the effectiveness of the criminals. The point is to make it more expensive for the criminals to operate. The collateral damage from blocking regular Russians access to the net would be added pressure. You don't have to be 100% successful with cutting them off the net. Just enough so that it's going to be very inconvenient for Russians to access anything outside of Russia.
As for putting diplomatic pressure on the Russians over an issue like this. At what point do we stop accepting their harboring of their criminals? There's gotta be a line somewhere. The line probably hasn't been crossed yet, but what do we do when the line is crossed? Ask them nicely, if they would please stop being dicks and stop leeching on us?
I've said this before, so excuse me for sounding like a broken record.
What needs to happen is cutting Russia completely off the net. Cut them off at every peering point they have, and if someone (China) still continues routing Russian network traffic, block the Russian network traffic where it's being passed onto the responsible part of the Internet.
The reason why I'm advocating this is because what the Russian cybercriminals are doing is not just criminal, but more importantly threatening the Internet infrastructure itself. There just has to be a better way of protecting the network from bad actors who are hellbent on destroying it.
Since that's unlikely to happen unless the Russian criminals do something extraordinarily stupid (like successfully attacking several Western states directly), the next alternative is diplomatic isolation. They don't do something to curb the fastest growing criminal activity in the world, well, gee, Vladimir, you don't get to sit on the Security Council, ballrooms in Geneva and you can most certainly kiss that EU membership you so want goodbye forever. And don't even think of vacationing on those nice ski resorts on the Alps Russians are so fond of. Visa denied.
The state sponsored welfare program for the benefit of Russian mafia gotta stop. Every year billions and billions of dollars of OUR money is being transferred with the silent blessing of Russian Government to the Russian mafia and other criminal elements in Russia. I don't know what else to call that but a global welfare program.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you suggest that a product which is garbage but has a good advertising campaign is actually a better product?
Depends on who I am.
If I'm the seller of the product, the better product is the one that produces the best profit.
If I'm the one that buys the product, the better product is the one that meets my needs the best with the most affordable price.
If I could sell you slashdot moderation points for $10 / point, you bet yo sorry behind I'd think that particular product was the best product I'd ever cooked up. A whole lot of people would probably think otherwise.
I just got a newsletter about a sale at Bookpool.com for APress books. APress books are 45% off until 8/31.
This particular book is $5 cheaper at Bookpool.com than Amazon right now.
"GTech dragging the RI government into the 90's"
Fits the pattern. It is 2008, after all. :)
It seems though GTech is dragging RI to Italy rather than into the 90s.
In Soviet Web 2.0, facts check you.
I'm liking the feature set on the Drobo external drive, but the price with their NAS "dongle" is not very competitive.
I've got a ReadyNAS NV+. It was (is?) the best bang for buck when I bought it about 18 months ago.
There's a new 6-bay ReadyNAS coming out any day now I'm very tempted to get. I think they named it ReadyNAS Pro, if I'm not mistaken. No word on the street price on the diskless version as of yet. It'll be expensive though, me thinks.
Couple of things about ReadyNAS NV+. It performs poorly on file operations involving lots of files. It also has very poor network failure recovery. I've got mine on a wireless connection (can't use wired connection where it's at for now), and whenever the wireless connection to the router drops, it's a 50/50 whether the ReadyNAS goes into some horrible unrecoverable freeze up state. The file system will be fine, it's just that the unit doesn't know how to recover from the network drop. Sometimes it gets the connection back, but then the filesystem is unavailable. Or the whole box just doesn't answer to requests (even though the connection is fine). I've had to hard reboot that box so many times it's not funny.
These problems may or may not have been fixed with the latest firmware upgrades. I haven't upgraded mine yet.
Tower Records died because of online music sales, not because of piracy. They couldn't compete with the lower prices on online stores like Amazon.com and died.
Their demise had NOTHING to do with music piracy.
One of the main reasons why artists are struggling is, IMHO, because of the music industry itself. It's built on the mega hit model, where nobody but the mega stars make it rich. The record companies are raking artists and the margins for small time artists are negative because of that. Meanwhile, in addition of the raking they also take away the artists rights to their own creations, so not only does the artist pay for everything, but they also get robbed of their IP.
Artists continue supporting this, because all of them hope and believe to become the Next Big Thing (tm), and they feel like they have no other choice. It's a dream machine. Obviously the large majority of them never make it.
The conspiracy theorist in me is convinced jail times for intellectual property related crimes have more to do with distribution of wealth from tax payers to the private prison industry than the justice system as such.
"as I understand the article, any communications that hit Sweden are subject to monitoring"
What do you think happened in that secret NSA room at AT&T's San Francisco facility?
Do you think they only snooped on Internet traffic originating or terminating at AT&T considering that the room was hooked up to the backbone network as I understand it?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/18/finnish_policy_censor_activist/
They tried this in Finland. It was an utter failure for multiple reasons. The Register article states many of them.
Well, technically, they're still trying it in Finland. It's still failing.
"Ah, while we're at it, let's not forget that the Russians disbanded the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for Homeland Security) in '95"
You did know that the country is (and has been for quite some time) run by KGB these days though, right?
The organization might've been disbanded, but the operatives are very much still in control.
"In fact, isn't it a crime to try to fool the police into thinking you're committing a crime?"
But they're not fooling the police. They're fooling MAFIAA. They're not the police.
Yet.
Can't seem to remember OSS being used by any other presidential candidate in the past, ever.
So, in a community championing OSS, yes, I would say that's kinda of a big deal.
If you take this to its logical conclusion, there's a good chance, if elected as President of the United States, he (or rather his technology people) might be advocating for more OSS within the Government. THAT would be a Very Big Deal (tm).
I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (run by Bookspan) for quite a few years.
The introductory book offer (five "free" books) is a really good deal, but once you're done that I found that even the club member prices for their books are higher than in any online bookstore.
So I reluctantly fulfilled my membership "obligation" (I think four books at regular price) and called it a day after a few months of not buying anything. Overall I think I still came ahead, but not by much and it wasn't worth the hassle of answering "no, I do not want the monthly selection" every month.
"Er, how about this: people who run websites need to be competent at it."
So kinda like how women should never wear provocative clothing to avoid being raped.
Yea. Makes sense.
"The petition filed by the Church listed twenty-six individuals allegedly affiliated with Anonymous, but "accidentally" included others who merely work near the location of the first protests held in February and did not participate in them, such as a Starbucks employee. Furthermore, the Church failed to show that any of those listed actually committed any wrongdoing.""
OMG! I think I get it now!
RIAA is run by the church of scientology!
That explains everything!
What percentage of the identity theft cases were done by conning the customer to give their account information to the thief, either by phishing or keyloggers.
What percentage of the identity theft cases were done by social engineering the banks.
What percentage of the identity theft cases were done by stealing the date from a 3rd party.
Without that information the data is pretty much meaningless and usable only for trending analysis by just looking at the number of total cases.
With your experience in cyber warfare, I'm sure you've developed some opinions about cybercrime that apply to the world outside the military. How would you go about getting rid of cybercrime on the Internet?
There was an interesting interview on PBS by Bill Moyers the other night. He was interviewing Susan Jacoby who was hawking her newest book "The Age of American Unreason".
She, also, blamed, partly (among other things she was discussing in the interview), the media for this sort of stupidity. She said the media has gone too far with its equal treatment of different sides of each issue. She said that sometimes one side is right and the other wrong, and giving the wrong side equal weight is not really serving the public well. The creationism vs. evolution "debate" was the example she used.
XBox 360 didn't use to have DRM. It was introduced as a dashboard upgrade in October 2006, 11 months after the launch of the system.
So if you bought downloadable content from the Microsoft XBox Marketplace before the DRM upgrade, you did actually buy DRM-free content. The DRM was applied on it after-the-fact.
Actually, they don't do this any more.
It's no longer "policy" by Microsoft to give you MS points to cover the DLC you can't use any more.
Apparently, according to comments on the Consumerist article, they stopped doing that sometime in October or November last year.
I think that's reprehensible.
I'm fully aware nothing that I propose is ever going to happen (unless the Russians do something REALLY stupid). We will continue bleeding money to Russian criminals, who give some of that corrupt Russian politicians, who in term protect them from prosecution from the victims. I suppose everyone's just gonna be happy about us feeding the Russians.
However, I'm just gonna pick a few things to comment on from your response where I disagree.
I understand your points about the difficulty (impossibility) of cutting Russians of the net. The proxy solution with deals with rogue networks can not be stopped 100%, but as SpamHaus has shown it can GREATLY reduce the effectiveness of the criminals. The point is to make it more expensive for the criminals to operate. The collateral damage from blocking regular Russians access to the net would be added pressure. You don't have to be 100% successful with cutting them off the net. Just enough so that it's going to be very inconvenient for Russians to access anything outside of Russia.
As for putting diplomatic pressure on the Russians over an issue like this. At what point do we stop accepting their harboring of their criminals? There's gotta be a line somewhere. The line probably hasn't been crossed yet, but what do we do when the line is crossed? Ask them nicely, if they would please stop being dicks and stop leeching on us?
"And they reroute through africa, europe, asia. You're going to cut all of them off? "
Well, no. If you had read what I wrote I said you cut Russian network traffic at those points.
"What billions of dollars?"
*sigh*
I've said this before, so excuse me for sounding like a broken record.
What needs to happen is cutting Russia completely off the net. Cut them off at every peering point they have, and if someone (China) still continues routing Russian network traffic, block the Russian network traffic where it's being passed onto the responsible part of the Internet.
The reason why I'm advocating this is because what the Russian cybercriminals are doing is not just criminal, but more importantly threatening the Internet infrastructure itself. There just has to be a better way of protecting the network from bad actors who are hellbent on destroying it.
Since that's unlikely to happen unless the Russian criminals do something extraordinarily stupid (like successfully attacking several Western states directly), the next alternative is diplomatic isolation. They don't do something to curb the fastest growing criminal activity in the world, well, gee, Vladimir, you don't get to sit on the Security Council, ballrooms in Geneva and you can most certainly kiss that EU membership you so want goodbye forever. And don't even think of vacationing on those nice ski resorts on the Alps Russians are so fond of. Visa denied.
The state sponsored welfare program for the benefit of Russian mafia gotta stop. Every year billions and billions of dollars of OUR money is being transferred with the silent blessing of Russian Government to the Russian mafia and other criminal elements in Russia. I don't know what else to call that but a global welfare program.
Sure thing, customers are important. Whatever, dude. I guess you're gonna claim NSA is a more important customer than your other customers, next, eh?
On what possible grounds is EPA claiming executive privilege? On the "cause we say so" grounds?
This is what happens when political appointees put The Party ahead of the country, btw.