Matter of fact, I'm betting that if a single one of the labels broke ranks and started doing this, they'd propel their artists into such fame and success that the rest of the labels would abandon their current whiny bully tactics.
Maybe, but then they would lose whatever benefits they currently enjoy from being able to act as a cartel and occasionally pay damages in the form of 'valuable products' (i.e. CDs or DVDs that they couldn't sell even in the 3-pack bundle for $7.99) to public libraries, valued at full 'retail value' of $30+ each for the purposes of settlement, as 'punishment' for fixing prices.
I plugged in my USB drive and started up BD-Live, only to find out it's literally just trailers for other movies. Why is this a feature?
Does anyone else remember the scene from A Christmas Story where the protagonist goes to great lengths and effort to get a ROT13 decoder wheel from the cereal box company so that he can decode the "secret message" at the end of his favorite radio program only to find out that the "secret message" is actually just another advertisement?
BTW: Why buy your blue ray player from Sony, the same company that spits on your rights and installs root kits on your PC? I wouldn't buy anything from Sony, even if they were the only vendor left, after the crap they pulled with those root kits.
It probably depends upon the cooling strategy. An external skin (i.e. case) can act as a sort of fan shroud to direct air over certain components within the chassis or force a general flow of air through the enclosed space that might not be as efficient or effective without the shrouding provided by the enclosing case.
I think they're wisely saving the "technician searches your PC" decision for a case with less 'radioactive' content.
Then they may be left waiting for a very long time indeed since most cases that I can remember where the "technician searches your PC" involve the 'radioactive' content in question.
Honestly, I'll never understand who goes through our governments minds... they do nothing but waste time, thus waste money... and people wonder why this nation is on the verge of collapse
A problem which the socialists here on Slashdot always attempt to solve with, drum roll please, more government! They will be disappointed of course, but not before even more damage has been done. Perhaps then you will agree with me that it is time now for all of us, including those in government, to live within our means.
One of their versions was powered by a small generator that ran on jet fuel.
Jet exhaust is extremely hot. It would be the perfect target for a cheap heat seeking rocket or missile. We spend billions to build an exoskeleton that can be knocked out by portable heat seeking missile probably costing less than $250,000...wonderful.
Another strike that Mecha or humanoid like combat robots have against them is that with all available current power sources they are going to give of a lot of heat except, as the parent points out, they are not as heavily armored or fast as conventional wheeled or tracked land vehicles. Your relatively slow moving and under-armored mecha is going to show up like the Sun to any heat seeking anti-tank type missle. Some helicopter or light infantry team is going to put a missile right up the hot tail pipe of the mecha (up yours...literally). The main reasons mecha have not been done yet or even seriously attempted in real life is because with current technologies and costs they do not offer any serious advantages over existing vehicles while at the same time being almost as vulnerable and many times more expensive than properly equipped infantry.
Seems it would be so much better if these patches were applied over night when no one is using the system.
Have you suggested that? How about patch Tuesday evenings? If a flaw is critical enough then the IT admins can temporarily block ports on the firewall until the patches have been applied that evening or take other actions to filter out the attack vectors on their servers. If the devs are on their own subnet then the policy could be tuned to make exception just for them, while everyone else gets the usual immediate updates with 15 minute warning and reboot. This is really an essential IT skill anyway because there is often lag time between when an attack is "in the wild" and when a patch is finally issued. It seems like the devs and IT could work this out instead of letting the issue fester and contribute to poor morale.
Perhaps we have simply had different experiences. Have you worked mostly for larger corporations with many developers or smaller ones with fewer? Also, the jerks (like your dev who wanted to basically dynamite the firewall) in any office always tend to stand out in our minds even though they may represent only a vocal minority. I have always taken the view that my development workstation is my responsibility and I will fix any problems that might come up (I used to build and fix computers and still do for private clients on the side). As a result, the IT departments I have worked with are usually happy to allow me some leeway when it comes to configuring and maintaining my development workstations. I am generally less concerned about the servers and happy to let IT manage them as they like. If I had specific configuration needs then they were usually able to get around to them eventually which was fine and even this is now less and less of an issue with virtualization and abstract virtual machine languages like Java and.NET.
Do you know why it's illegal to collect rainwater in a barrel in Utah and Colorado?
And in the City of Denver it is illegal for a horseless carriage (i.e. an automobile) to enter the town after dark unless a man walks twenty paces in front of it swinging a lantern to warn others of its approach. Seriously, there are many anachronistic laws on the state books which are rarely if ever enforced. I doubt that they are going to bust individual citizens for collecting and storing rainwater for personal use, that would be silly and make Colorado and Utah the laughing stock of other states.
Actually programmers tend to be fairly low maintenance for most IT departments. They build and configure their own machines, keep the patches up to date, and generally solve their own computer problems. It is the front desk people who play every flash game around, complete with worms and viruses, on standard issue IE6 and then complain when their computer is "broken" that you have to watch out for.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that a competition sponsored by the NSA which encourages participants to hack together a solution quickly is presented as a test of 'good coders' when, at least historically, the drive to get something to market quickly has been a factor or at least contributed substantially to many security holes and other software quality issues? There is something to be said, IMHO, for quality software that is developed incrementally and carefully without undue time pressure. Speed is sometimes, frequently perhaps, the enemy of the good in software development.
I'm sure there are a great many US coders who would do very well in this contest, but are too busy.
There is some truth in that I think. I know that when I get home at the end of a day of programming the last thing I want to do is sit down in front of an editor and work on a personal project. I would say that another difference between the United States and other countries is more direct state sponsorship of research and development activities so that qualified people have the time and resources to continue their studies and R&D activities after they have completed their degrees instead of diving right into the commercial business software job market which generally involves well known coding areas with less active research and development (although there are exceptions, Google for instance, which allows and encourages employees to spend some time working on personal software development interests).
But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
their response amounted to "we realized this after-the fact, and yes we basically got snookered"
That is generally what happens when the high-ups in an organization make a software purchase decision based upon some snazzy conference sales presentation made in some tropical resort locale without consulting the IT people (who never get to attend the executive conference at the tropical resort) even after they have returned and (hopefully) before they have signed on the dotted line? Also, has anyone else noticed that these conferences are invariably held in places where the attendees are likely to be in the best possible mood and three sheets to the wind with booze? This is one of the main reasons why I hold a special contempt for sales people who, now more than ever, contribute very little useful or meaningful knowledge to a purchase decision and exist mostly to assist the vendors with the separation of fools and their money.
The machine from which I sent the request is connected to a Comcast residential Cable Internet connection
Ahhh, but that is the very problem you see. Comcast is not above forging packets to make them look as if they came from a different host. Recall the forged reset packet bittorent fiasco where Comcast was caught red-handed forging reset packets from hosts outside their network. If the traffic passes through the network of Comcast on an unsecured connection then it is vulnerable to tampering and with advanced packet shaping and inspection devices and software just about anything is possible including interception and impersonation of a complete DNS exchange. Comcast has already shown that they are not above forging packets so they must be regarded with suspicion whenever funny business appears to be going on with traffic traversing their networks.
Are you certain? If they are redirecting the traffic in their network so that one of their DNS servers responds to the query as if it was your DNS server (i.e. forging the response packets so that they appear to come from your server) then the only way to tell would be to place a deliberately wrong IP entry for a well known address on your server (i.e. something that Comcast wouldn't know about) and then run the query again to see if you get the wrong result (no redirection or impersonation) OR if you get the expected result (redirection or impersonation). Also, they might only be forwarding queries that they don't recognize to your server so that any custom or unusual queries hit your server but stuff like google.com is answered by their server(s).
As an ex airline pilot and current software developer
Isn't airline pilot a pretty decent and well paying occupation that requires lots of very expensive training or time spent flying in the military to get? If so, then why give that up to become a software developer? I am a fairly decent software developer, but if I had a commercial aviation license for multi-engine jets then I would probably be (or remain) a pilot instead.
There was an actually an episode of ST:TNG which featured this choice as the central dilemma, whether to turn piloting control over to the computer or shut down everything and pilot the ship full manual to escape from a booby trap (the name of the episode in fact) which drained energy and produced lethal levels of radiation.
Ah, but I phrased the question specifically with reference to New York and London, which do generally have quite good public transportation in the "congestion" areas (Brooklyn and Queens don't have quite as good subway coverage)
That is fair enough (I don't live in New York and I have never been to London) and probably true. However, I live in a rural area where public transportation is sub-par and this describes a large part of the American population who live in rural areas or semi-rural areas and commute into work, particularly here in California where a 45+ minute commute each way by car is not at all unusual. The United States is a large and mostly rural nation, unlike the Europe which is not as large and not nearly as spread out, so what has worked in Europe and some parts of the United States, particularly in heavily urbanized areas such as New York and London, will be of little or no benefit in addressing the transportation problems of the rural populations. However, additional gasoline taxes or other anti-car measures, particularly if enacted at a national level here in the United States, would be very harmful indeed to the large population of rural and semi-rural commuters who make up a substantial portion of the (declining) American middle class. So while I appreciate your urban point of view perhaps you can also appreciate my somewhat different and more rural view on anti-car measures.
Slashdot Mirror
Matter of fact, I'm betting that if a single one of the labels broke ranks and started doing this, they'd propel their artists into such fame and success that the rest of the labels would abandon their current whiny bully tactics.
Maybe, but then they would lose whatever benefits they currently enjoy from being able to act as a cartel and occasionally pay damages in the form of 'valuable products' (i.e. CDs or DVDs that they couldn't sell even in the 3-pack bundle for $7.99) to public libraries, valued at full 'retail value' of $30+ each for the purposes of settlement, as 'punishment' for fixing prices.
I plugged in my USB drive and started up BD-Live, only to find out it's literally just trailers for other movies. Why is this a feature?
Does anyone else remember the scene from A Christmas Story where the protagonist goes to great lengths and effort to get a ROT13 decoder wheel from the cereal box company so that he can decode the "secret message" at the end of his favorite radio program only to find out that the "secret message" is actually just another advertisement?
BTW: Why buy your blue ray player from Sony, the same company that spits on your rights and installs root kits on your PC? I wouldn't buy anything from Sony, even if they were the only vendor left, after the crap they pulled with those root kits.
It probably depends upon the cooling strategy. An external skin (i.e. case) can act as a sort of fan shroud to direct air over certain components within the chassis or force a general flow of air through the enclosed space that might not be as efficient or effective without the shrouding provided by the enclosing case.
so she can still get her damn Judge Judy.
Does she read the Globe or the National Inquirer as well? You have to admit, its pretty funny how well some people fit the typical marketing profiles.
I think they're wisely saving the "technician searches your PC" decision for a case with less 'radioactive' content.
Then they may be left waiting for a very long time indeed since most cases that I can remember where the "technician searches your PC" involve the 'radioactive' content in question.
Nah, that would just be running up the score before we retire in 2050.
Honestly, I'll never understand who goes through our governments minds... they do nothing but waste time, thus waste money... and people wonder why this nation is on the verge of collapse
A problem which the socialists here on Slashdot always attempt to solve with, drum roll please, more government ! They will be disappointed of course, but not before even more damage has been done. Perhaps then you will agree with me that it is time now for all of us, including those in government, to live within our means.
Liberty Prime is Online!
One of their versions was powered by a small generator that ran on jet fuel.
Jet exhaust is extremely hot. It would be the perfect target for a cheap heat seeking rocket or missile. We spend billions to build an exoskeleton that can be knocked out by portable heat seeking missile probably costing less than $250,000...wonderful.
Another strike that Mecha or humanoid like combat robots have against them is that with all available current power sources they are going to give of a lot of heat except, as the parent points out, they are not as heavily armored or fast as conventional wheeled or tracked land vehicles. Your relatively slow moving and under-armored mecha is going to show up like the Sun to any heat seeking anti-tank type missle. Some helicopter or light infantry team is going to put a missile right up the hot tail pipe of the mecha (up yours...literally). The main reasons mecha have not been done yet or even seriously attempted in real life is because with current technologies and costs they do not offer any serious advantages over existing vehicles while at the same time being almost as vulnerable and many times more expensive than properly equipped infantry.
Only the Obamabot can save us!
Don't you mean Obamaptumus Prime?
Seems it would be so much better if these patches were applied over night when no one is using the system.
Have you suggested that? How about patch Tuesday evenings? If a flaw is critical enough then the IT admins can temporarily block ports on the firewall until the patches have been applied that evening or take other actions to filter out the attack vectors on their servers. If the devs are on their own subnet then the policy could be tuned to make exception just for them, while everyone else gets the usual immediate updates with 15 minute warning and reboot. This is really an essential IT skill anyway because there is often lag time between when an attack is "in the wild" and when a patch is finally issued. It seems like the devs and IT could work this out instead of letting the issue fester and contribute to poor morale.
Perhaps we have simply had different experiences. Have you worked mostly for larger corporations with many developers or smaller ones with fewer? Also, the jerks (like your dev who wanted to basically dynamite the firewall) in any office always tend to stand out in our minds even though they may represent only a vocal minority. I have always taken the view that my development workstation is my responsibility and I will fix any problems that might come up (I used to build and fix computers and still do for private clients on the side). As a result, the IT departments I have worked with are usually happy to allow me some leeway when it comes to configuring and maintaining my development workstations. I am generally less concerned about the servers and happy to let IT manage them as they like. If I had specific configuration needs then they were usually able to get around to them eventually which was fine and even this is now less and less of an issue with virtualization and abstract virtual machine languages like Java and .NET.
Do you know why it's illegal to collect rainwater in a barrel in Utah and Colorado?
And in the City of Denver it is illegal for a horseless carriage (i.e. an automobile) to enter the town after dark unless a man walks twenty paces in front of it swinging a lantern to warn others of its approach. Seriously, there are many anachronistic laws on the state books which are rarely if ever enforced. I doubt that they are going to bust individual citizens for collecting and storing rainwater for personal use, that would be silly and make Colorado and Utah the laughing stock of other states.
Actually programmers tend to be fairly low maintenance for most IT departments. They build and configure their own machines, keep the patches up to date, and generally solve their own computer problems. It is the front desk people who play every flash game around, complete with worms and viruses, on standard issue IE6 and then complain when their computer is "broken" that you have to watch out for.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that a competition sponsored by the NSA which encourages participants to hack together a solution quickly is presented as a test of 'good coders' when, at least historically, the drive to get something to market quickly has been a factor or at least contributed substantially to many security holes and other software quality issues? There is something to be said, IMHO, for quality software that is developed incrementally and carefully without undue time pressure. Speed is sometimes, frequently perhaps, the enemy of the good in software development.
I'm sure there are a great many US coders who would do very well in this contest, but are too busy.
There is some truth in that I think. I know that when I get home at the end of a day of programming the last thing I want to do is sit down in front of an editor and work on a personal project. I would say that another difference between the United States and other countries is more direct state sponsorship of research and development activities so that qualified people have the time and resources to continue their studies and R&D activities after they have completed their degrees instead of diving right into the commercial business software job market which generally involves well known coding areas with less active research and development (although there are exceptions, Google for instance, which allows and encourages employees to spend some time working on personal software development interests).
But in the end you still have many copies of documents, and you're always trying to keep changes synced across them. This approach breaks down when you have multiple sources of change... conflict resolution will always jump up to bite you.
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
their response amounted to "we realized this after-the fact, and yes we basically got snookered"
That is generally what happens when the high-ups in an organization make a software purchase decision based upon some snazzy conference sales presentation made in some tropical resort locale without consulting the IT people (who never get to attend the executive conference at the tropical resort) even after they have returned and (hopefully) before they have signed on the dotted line? Also, has anyone else noticed that these conferences are invariably held in places where the attendees are likely to be in the best possible mood and three sheets to the wind with booze? This is one of the main reasons why I hold a special contempt for sales people who, now more than ever, contribute very little useful or meaningful knowledge to a purchase decision and exist mostly to assist the vendors with the separation of fools and their money.
The machine from which I sent the request is connected to a Comcast residential Cable Internet connection
Ahhh, but that is the very problem you see. Comcast is not above forging packets to make them look as if they came from a different host. Recall the forged reset packet bittorent fiasco where Comcast was caught red-handed forging reset packets from hosts outside their network. If the traffic passes through the network of Comcast on an unsecured connection then it is vulnerable to tampering and with advanced packet shaping and inspection devices and software just about anything is possible including interception and impersonation of a complete DNS exchange. Comcast has already shown that they are not above forging packets so they must be regarded with suspicion whenever funny business appears to be going on with traffic traversing their networks.
Are you certain? If they are redirecting the traffic in their network so that one of their DNS servers responds to the query as if it was your DNS server (i.e. forging the response packets so that they appear to come from your server) then the only way to tell would be to place a deliberately wrong IP entry for a well known address on your server (i.e. something that Comcast wouldn't know about) and then run the query again to see if you get the wrong result (no redirection or impersonation) OR if you get the expected result (redirection or impersonation). Also, they might only be forwarding queries that they don't recognize to your server so that any custom or unusual queries hit your server but stuff like google.com is answered by their server(s).
As an ex airline pilot and current software developer
Isn't airline pilot a pretty decent and well paying occupation that requires lots of very expensive training or time spent flying in the military to get? If so, then why give that up to become a software developer? I am a fairly decent software developer, but if I had a commercial aviation license for multi-engine jets then I would probably be (or remain) a pilot instead.
There was an actually an episode of ST:TNG which featured this choice as the central dilemma, whether to turn piloting control over to the computer or shut down everything and pilot the ship full manual to escape from a booby trap (the name of the episode in fact) which drained energy and produced lethal levels of radiation.
The world just doesn't work that way.
As one would expect since the world, or human 'civilized' society anyway, is neither logical nor fair.
Ah, but I phrased the question specifically with reference to New York and London, which do generally have quite good public transportation in the "congestion" areas (Brooklyn and Queens don't have quite as good subway coverage)
That is fair enough (I don't live in New York and I have never been to London) and probably true. However, I live in a rural area where public transportation is sub-par and this describes a large part of the American population who live in rural areas or semi-rural areas and commute into work, particularly here in California where a 45+ minute commute each way by car is not at all unusual. The United States is a large and mostly rural nation, unlike the Europe which is not as large and not nearly as spread out, so what has worked in Europe and some parts of the United States, particularly in heavily urbanized areas such as New York and London, will be of little or no benefit in addressing the transportation problems of the rural populations. However, additional gasoline taxes or other anti-car measures, particularly if enacted at a national level here in the United States, would be very harmful indeed to the large population of rural and semi-rural commuters who make up a substantial portion of the (declining) American middle class. So while I appreciate your urban point of view perhaps you can also appreciate my somewhat different and more rural view on anti-car measures.