Well, if you're running any other os and someone has root equivalent access, they could easily upload a minimal linux distro, configure your bootloader to silently start it at the next boot and then install the rootkit, followed by rebooting into whatever normal os you have... In short, if someone has root level access to your machine, you are screwed whatever os you run.
No, it's not... Your available resources control how much you can run. An arbitrary limit on number of apps is stupid, what if you want to run 4 very small programs that don't use many resources?
You would need a multi protocol IM client like pidgin tho, unless you only planned to use a single network... I dont think there's anyone these days that doesn't talk to people on multiple networks.
And yes, it is incredibly stupid to have multiple incompatible walled off IM networks..
Sites like TPB will simply move out of the EU countries... These sites buy a lot of bandwidth so they will make good customers for ISPs in china, russia and other such places.
How do you determine that an artist is shit? By listening to their work... The big media producers would have you buy it, so that even tho it's shit you've already paid them and they have got one over on you. Piracy enables you to sample for free, meaning that if something is shit you will find out and never consider purchasing it.
So by your logic, if you had some advanced skills that you had perfected or trained for over time, e.g. you were an expert UNIX sysadmin, you should be paid the same as bar staff for your hourly rate. So by your logic, Paul McCartney who wrote the most popular song yet written ("Yesterday" is the most played song on radio worldwide) which he says came to him in a morning and was pretty much finished by the end of the day, should have been paid a flat daily rate for the time, perhaps about US$20. Something that has been covered 3,000 times and sold tens of millions of copies, right?
Absolutely, a days work is worthy of a days pay. If he wants to make more from that song he is free to perform it. I certainly don't believe he should be continually earning millions for a single day of effort.
As a UNIX sysadmin, i have configured countless systems many of which are still working to this day. Should i still be receiving money for those systems? A doctor will have cured many people of illnesses, should these doctors be entitled to royalties on their work for the duration that their patients live? Many people would not be alive were it not for the hard work of doctors...
As was pointed out earlier, the music industry is extremely unfairly balanced, you have struggling artists who work very hard performing every night for a pittance, and then you have lazy fat cats like paul mccartney who haven't done any work in years and yet are still raking in millions.
That's another reason big media hates the internet...
The try before you buy aspect of piracy works both ways, if you download it and find it to be shit you delete it and don't buy it. Otherwise you might have bought it, then realized it was shit and that you just wasted your money.
Similarly, in the past even a lousy movie would make big money on the opening weekend before people realized it was shit... Now the first people who watch it will go on sites like twitter and tell all their friends how crap it was, and word soon spreads.
The internet makes it harder for big media producers to sell crap.
His points make a lot of sense... With no ability to try before you buy, people will play it safe rather than risk losing their money, so they are highly unlikely to buy from a small producer they have not heard of. By contrast, if they are able to obtain media for free there is no risk and people can learn to like an artist they previously wouldn't have considered.
And record profits are bad when they're unreasonably high... Noone should make millions from doing a small amount of work, payment should be proportional to the level of effort required to do the work and should cease when someone stops working. In most other industries this is already the case.
So don't care about pirate copies, change the distribution model. Release the game for free and let torrents distribute it for you... Charge money for people wanting an account, when someone signs up give them a user/pass or some other form of unique authentication which they use to access the service. One payment, one account, simple. If you get more people sign up than your servers can handle, then you better use some of that cash to buy more powerful servers.
How? The game was only available legitimately at Gamestop, not everyone knew that and not everyone even has access to a gamestop store. Would you suggest people wait? 1 week is a long time for an online game like this, coming along a week late puts you at a significant disadvantage.
You are also potentially in violation of the computer misuse act, for obtaining unauthorized access to a computer system. Give the game away for free, sell accounts.
5 circulating copies for every purchased copy... Purchased copies could only be obtained from a single retailer which only operates in a limited number of areas... Now what level of marketshare does this retailer have? And how many of those users with downloaded copies were located in areas not serviced by this retailer? I don't have a gamestop store anywhere near me, i don't even think they operate any stores whatsoever in this country, my only way to play this game would have been by downloading it. (and no, i didn't download it, i didn't even know it existed until i read this story).
Only the game was not released yet, so unless you happen to live near one of the stores that released it early and know that it was released there early, the only way for you to play it was to download it.
Demos are often quite poor indications of a game... As an example, i played the lion king game many years ago... The demo was the first level, and the first level was pretty good. The full game had subsequent levels which were seriously lacking, plus there was no way to save your progress so you had to do the early levels over again each time.
Some stores used to let you play games in store before you bought them, but that's rare these days, they will typically only let you play one or two "showcase games"...
Similarly for me... I started off buying games based on reviews in magazines, i would get maybe 1 new game every couple of months... Some of those games i bought turned out to be lousy and a complete waste of money (they all had positive reviews), while some kept me entertained for weeks. After a while i realized i could copy games, so i started doing that, trading games with friends, buying copied games off a guy on a local market stall. I still spent most of what limited cash i had on computers, but now i bought less games (only the ones which would actually provide me weeks of entertainment), more blank disks and was able to upgrade my hardware.
So yes, some game companies lost out, the ones producing lousy games and paying off reviewers... But because of that, the only games i ever bought were ones i knew to be good, so those publishers making good games actually got more sales from me because my available funds weren't being conned out of me by publishers of crap games.
Or better yet, give the game away for free and charge for an account. The idea of a cd-key is stupid, people will brute force or copy them resulting in legit buyers having a non working key and tons of hassle trying to play the game they actually bought.
Plus if you charge a subscription, people know they're paying for a service and won't expect to continue receiving that service when they stop. If you buy a game and it comes with access to a service, what happens when the publisher arbitrarily decides to shut that service down?
The larger RIAA/MPAA groups would still be forcing out the smaller producers regardless of the level of piracy, infact if piracy were zero then they would be concentrating on killing the smaller producers as it would be the only way to increase their profits.
Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.. And the more draconian it gets the more people will fight against it. Current rules are extremely detrimental to our culture, a work can remain copyrighted long enough that the original customers of the work are dead before the term expires, and for things like software that rapidly becomes obsolete the terms are just insane - many applications completely vanish long before their copyright terms would expire. If copyright terms were more sensible, then the people standing up against them would be fewer in number and less credible in their message.
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Oh yes, i still have that Linux Unleashed book somewhere...
Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch)... Even Gentoo is fairly automated these days.
You could use a trojan flash bios too, or trojanise any piece of hardware that has upgradeable firmware...
Well, if you're running any other os and someone has root equivalent access, they could easily upload a minimal linux distro, configure your bootloader to silently start it at the next boot and then install the rootkit, followed by rebooting into whatever normal os you have...
In short, if someone has root level access to your machine, you are screwed whatever os you run.
No, it's not...
Your available resources control how much you can run. An arbitrary limit on number of apps is stupid, what if you want to run 4 very small programs that don't use many resources?
You would need a multi protocol IM client like pidgin tho, unless you only planned to use a single network... I dont think there's anyone these days that doesn't talk to people on multiple networks.
And yes, it is incredibly stupid to have multiple incompatible walled off IM networks..
This is fairly common, most of their group policies are restricted in this way too, only by the user facing programs and not by the back end APIs...
1, AV
2, Anti spyware
3, Firewall
Now you can't be owned, because the OS won't run the malware...
So you're saying you would rather people in Britain pirate your work than buy it? Or do you have some kind of racist agenda against the brits?
Sites like TPB will simply move out of the EU countries... These sites buy a lot of bandwidth so they will make good customers for ISPs in china, russia and other such places.
How do you determine that an artist is shit?
By listening to their work...
The big media producers would have you buy it, so that even tho it's shit you've already paid them and they have got one over on you.
Piracy enables you to sample for free, meaning that if something is shit you will find out and never consider purchasing it.
So by your logic, if you had some advanced skills that you had perfected or trained for over time, e.g. you were an expert UNIX sysadmin, you should be paid the same as bar staff for your hourly rate. So by your logic, Paul McCartney who wrote the most popular song yet written ("Yesterday" is the most played song on radio worldwide) which he says came to him in a morning and was pretty much finished by the end of the day, should have been paid a flat daily rate for the time, perhaps about US$20. Something that has been covered 3,000 times and sold tens of millions of copies, right?
Absolutely, a days work is worthy of a days pay. If he wants to make more from that song he is free to perform it. I certainly don't believe he should be continually earning millions for a single day of effort.
As a UNIX sysadmin, i have configured countless systems many of which are still working to this day. Should i still be receiving money for those systems?
A doctor will have cured many people of illnesses, should these doctors be entitled to royalties on their work for the duration that their patients live? Many people would not be alive were it not for the hard work of doctors...
As was pointed out earlier, the music industry is extremely unfairly balanced, you have struggling artists who work very hard performing every night for a pittance, and then you have lazy fat cats like paul mccartney who haven't done any work in years and yet are still raking in millions.
That's another reason big media hates the internet...
The try before you buy aspect of piracy works both ways, if you download it and find it to be shit you delete it and don't buy it. Otherwise you might have bought it, then realized it was shit and that you just wasted your money.
Similarly, in the past even a lousy movie would make big money on the opening weekend before people realized it was shit... Now the first people who watch it will go on sites like twitter and tell all their friends how crap it was, and word soon spreads.
The internet makes it harder for big media producers to sell crap.
His points make a lot of sense... With no ability to try before you buy, people will play it safe rather than risk losing their money, so they are highly unlikely to buy from a small producer they have not heard of. By contrast, if they are able to obtain media for free there is no risk and people can learn to like an artist they previously wouldn't have considered.
And record profits are bad when they're unreasonably high... Noone should make millions from doing a small amount of work, payment should be proportional to the level of effort required to do the work and should cease when someone stops working. In most other industries this is already the case.
Many of the mechanisms MS has embedded, like ASLR and non executable pages were actually implemented in linux first...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization
And the sandboxing they use for IE, it's been possible to use chroot on unix for years...
So don't care about pirate copies, change the distribution model.
Release the game for free and let torrents distribute it for you...
Charge money for people wanting an account, when someone signs up give them a user/pass or some other form of unique authentication which they use to access the service.
One payment, one account, simple. If you get more people sign up than your servers can handle, then you better use some of that cash to buy more powerful servers.
How?
The game was only available legitimately at Gamestop, not everyone knew that and not everyone even has access to a gamestop store. Would you suggest people wait? 1 week is a long time for an online game like this, coming along a week late puts you at a significant disadvantage.
You are also potentially in violation of the computer misuse act, for obtaining unauthorized access to a computer system.
Give the game away for free, sell accounts.
Screw that, give the game away and sell accounts, problem solved.
5 circulating copies for every purchased copy...
Purchased copies could only be obtained from a single retailer which only operates in a limited number of areas... Now what level of marketshare does this retailer have? And how many of those users with downloaded copies were located in areas not serviced by this retailer?
I don't have a gamestop store anywhere near me, i don't even think they operate any stores whatsoever in this country, my only way to play this game would have been by downloading it. (and no, i didn't download it, i didn't even know it existed until i read this story).
Only the game was not released yet, so unless you happen to live near one of the stores that released it early and know that it was released there early, the only way for you to play it was to download it.
Demos are often quite poor indications of a game... As an example, i played the lion king game many years ago...
The demo was the first level, and the first level was pretty good. The full game had subsequent levels which were seriously lacking, plus there was no way to save your progress so you had to do the early levels over again each time.
Some stores used to let you play games in store before you bought them, but that's rare these days, they will typically only let you play one or two "showcase games"...
Similarly for me...
I started off buying games based on reviews in magazines, i would get maybe 1 new game every couple of months... Some of those games i bought turned out to be lousy and a complete waste of money (they all had positive reviews), while some kept me entertained for weeks.
After a while i realized i could copy games, so i started doing that, trading games with friends, buying copied games off a guy on a local market stall. I still spent most of what limited cash i had on computers, but now i bought less games (only the ones which would actually provide me weeks of entertainment), more blank disks and was able to upgrade my hardware.
So yes, some game companies lost out, the ones producing lousy games and paying off reviewers... But because of that, the only games i ever bought were ones i knew to be good, so those publishers making good games actually got more sales from me because my available funds weren't being conned out of me by publishers of crap games.
Or better yet, give the game away for free and charge for an account.
The idea of a cd-key is stupid, people will brute force or copy them resulting in legit buyers having a non working key and tons of hassle trying to play the game they actually bought.
Plus if you charge a subscription, people know they're paying for a service and won't expect to continue receiving that service when they stop. If you buy a game and it comes with access to a service, what happens when the publisher arbitrarily decides to shut that service down?
The larger RIAA/MPAA groups would still be forcing out the smaller producers regardless of the level of piracy, infact if piracy were zero then they would be concentrating on killing the smaller producers as it would be the only way to increase their profits.
Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.. And the more draconian it gets the more people will fight against it.
Current rules are extremely detrimental to our culture, a work can remain copyrighted long enough that the original customers of the work are dead before the term expires, and for things like software that rapidly becomes obsolete the terms are just insane - many applications completely vanish long before their copyright terms would expire.
If copyright terms were more sensible, then the people standing up against them would be fewer in number and less credible in their message.