Last I check (IANALBMWIAPL) Judges only have to excuse themselves if they a personal bias or personal involvement in the case. Professional involvement isn't necessarily a "conflict of interest" if they feel that their professional involvement isn't going to factor in.
But the P value when I do the regression in R-Project shows that the US population has a P value of.00321 (signifcant) and removing it as a regressor totatlly fubars my 52 week forecast of the amount of bullshit news articles get posted. Now I admit I am using and ARIMA model but I really thing that I have just lost interest in writing anything further...
Again reinforcing the need to return to the "Open Air Policy" that any secret or top secret network must have a "nothing but open air" between the secure system and unsecure system. Prior to the 90s many secure networks had a single cable, usually with a manual breaker, that would be enable only as a specific scheduled time, and the end point on the unsecure side was a single terminal (2 NICs, 1 to unsecure network on one subnet, then the secure network on another) where both network cards were phsyically impossible to operate at the same time (the reason for 2 NICs is the secure NIC is an encrypted card)
Seriously, you should never be able to tget from A -> B -> C where A is a public network and C is a secret or top secret network.
Hell last weekend I was at a shop where the DEV network was self contained and the only way they got code builds was compiled on the DEV network (12th floor) then sneaker-net'ed to the testing environment via optical disk (8th floor).
P.S.F.F The office on the 9th floor still has token ring... WTF who still uses Token Ring? Seriously? I mean it's friggin Token Ring... I remember working on Norwest Mortgage's (bought by Wells Fargo) token ring to ethernet conversion, what 12 years ago now... Jebus Rice that was a long time ago now it seems...
Section 5A - Photographs... When doing flirty boob shots, nipples are not to be in view. In addition when acting like a complete whore in front of the camera refrain from taking shots in the bathroom. This is especially important if you are an absent minded bimbo who forgets to flush...
The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots: Man vs Man Man vs Nature Man vs Self
and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.
At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them. Thus it becomes an exercise in look at the decorations of a plot that makes the story enjoyable. The only thing remotely well written was the Dunwich building, the Wasteland Guide, and the android quests. The rest was damn near disposable but I'll give kudos to the Nuka-Cola Challenge walkthrough. The fake history was well written. The main quest was terrible....
There are plenty of companies out there that provide contracted service for open source projects. I personally for 12 years have provided paid, per-incident support for Apache, Nagios, Cacti, Amanda, Sendmail, Postfix, Spam Assasin, and Snort\IPTABLES (IDS) firewalls. I have since retired from geek work (I work at a bank now) but I had no problem meeting ITIL severity SLAs including 15 min response, 2 hour fix windows for most production issues.
On top of that in 12 years I've only had 3 sev 1 calls come in on linux\bsd systems I built and all 3 were hardware failures ultimately. There are plenty out there, just, well... Google them:)
... they have also experiemented in implanting a digital tattoo in the palm of a persons hand flashing it red when they are sub-optimal in age...... they have also done extensive research into selective breeding where an additional digital tattoo on the chest (Just below the neck) indicates which individuals are in your required breeding program...
I fear his death would set us back decades. With the LHC going online his loss would potentially leave a a vaccume in the world of physics, astronomy, astrophysics, and mathmatics.
Black Holes research among other astronomical phenomena (high energy) could gain a wealth of information from the LHC's test results. Without him for those early few years guiding the new generation through the initial results, I fear they may flounder and miss important initial indicators on WHERE to look setting us back decades. I have learned over the years that experience is crucial in research. Fresh minds innovate and take risks, experience guides those innovators on where to start looking rather then randomly sifting through data, while effective, is time wasted.
"Better to walk the path for a life time then to spend a lifetime looking for the path. Even when wrong at least you went somewhere. Where is the path you ask? Ask someone walking it." - Me.
After reading through this I can no longer tolerate a sanctioned policy of genocide against an indiginous life form. Thus all bacteria and viruses must be protected like any other form of life. In our own personal ecosystem the use of weapons of mass destruction against said bacteria and viruses must stop! Save the bacteria, whales, dolphins, etc.) As delicate as the ecosystem is we must prevent mass extinction and stop polluting the ecosystem with toxic medication and antibiotics!
Oh man the Earth worshippers are gonna run with this one... Gaia has a disease...
How long till the last shread of reason is lost? Humans are machines, nothing more made up of lots of parts. You are just as worthless as a laser printer because you are no different. There is no free will, just complex biochemical reactions guided by DNA and environment. No love, just an interaction of mating protocols, chemistry, and complex algorithms running in your advanced CPU. YOu illusion of conciousness is noting more then a product of random sequences of programs surviving the evolutionary tread mill.
Scifi got it wrong, the machines do take over, we mearly give up and turn into machines... No wonder the more "advanced" we get, the cheaper life becomes and the more we treat one another like machines...
Email has become a victim of its (or is it it's) own success. Now we are moving to invite only systems like IM. What we really need is a replacement electronic messaging platform with some form of "postage". I for one suggest teaming up with Stanford and get folding@home a form of postage. Sender must complete 1 work unit for every message sent to a non-registered recipient (a.k.a 1 WU = 1 unsolicited message.)
In addition the government should provide each citizen an official goverment mailbox for non-critical information [INFO] level messages that are from goverment to citizens. Attached to that mailbox is your current legal residence location for automatic filtering and routing Senator and House member email, never forgetting who your represenatives are!
Depends is the a user operating the system? If so I'd put my money on the Linux system going down first.
The number one reason an OS is unsecure is the users, not the OS.
Every idiot and his cousin use MS products but MS doesn't give them enough rope to hang themselves. Every idiot geek tries to run linux without knowing what the hell they are doing with more then enough rope to hang themselves.
I've seen Linux get dropped just as often as XP in my career. 9/10 times it is the result of user activity, nothing intrinsic in the OS itself.
All it takes is some damn fool to install crap on their machine for the system to become compromised. Linux, Mac, Solaris, etc. Remember that no all malware\viruses\etc need admin\root privledged access to get the job done. A simple shell script that FTPs and file matching a regular expression/resume/ can give identity thieves more then enough info. Throw it in the middle of a functional PERL script obfuscated and you are good to go.
"Those that are willing to trade security for freedom deservers neither..."
Face it: we get the government we deserve. We keep electing the same two parties who's sole mission is to control our lives, one through business and one through government, and in the end both take away our freedoms.
We have entered a new age of feudalism, with Goverment as King, Businesses as the Fiefs, the inbred executive kabal as the Lords, the lawyers have replaced the knights, and we now have become the new pesantry.
I keep tabs on district 622 (Here in MN) and 916. The high school students are just as good now at good ol' fashion HTML coding (including now Javascript and PHP) then some of these 4 year career coders now.
Web coding is quickly become base line, just like knowing Word and Excel. That is why it's getting harder to define some job roles because the skills are quickly becoming a default set of technical skills.
Hell my 9 year old nephew is already coding in BASIC in grade school. I can only imagine where these students will be by the time they get to highschool. Programming is becoming as basic as grammar in school.
I started with Logo, BASIC, and courtesy of Computer User writing assembly via DEBUG. (Remember all those cool type blah blah blah.txt > debug.com to get neat tools?)
* I am sick of your shit. * I am tired of your bullshit shennanigans. * I am tired of having to maintain a 3 language proficency to call your tech support. * I live in America. * We like to be self sufficent. * I am Linux and if I fuck shit up, I have only myself to blame and only myself and the good nature of other to save me. * I want shit to work. * I need to know what the fuck I am doing. * Linux forces me to know what the fuck I am doing. * If I am not smart enough to figure linux out then I really do need a babysitting OS like Vista. * I like chrome on my car and I like smoking, drinking, $)(%&#)$ing, and Bruce Campbell movies! * Jar Jar is a tool. * I want shit to work MY WAY, NOT YOUR WAY, HIS WAY, OR THEIR WAY. * GET OFF MY LAWN! * I AM GOING TO SNEAK INTO YOUR HOUSE AT NIGHT AND CUT OFF YOU BALLS IF YOU TELL ME TO REBOOT ONE MORE TIME! * I spend my monkey on hookers, strippers, booze, and smokes and GOD DAMN IT I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO SPEND $200 ON THE SOME BS PRETTY LOOKING OS! * NO ONE GETS LAID FOR RUNNING A MAC OR A PC BUT LINUX CHICKS DIG LINUX GUYS! You don't hear about the Vista hook ups do ya?
I am Linux and Quite frankly you can shut the fuck up!
Modern day espionage as far as I can see it is bargaining chip, much like nuclear weapons. It's about what leverage you have. It's not so much the use of it, but rather a demonstration of what can be done.
We now are now entering the age of Digital Mutually Assured Destruction and Economic Mutually Assured Destruction. For you wee tikes out there that was what kept the USA and Soviet Union (hell do the kids even know what a soviet is anymore?) from turning the world into the game Fallout 3...
Actually they are faster, considerable. A typical Nike shoe is put together in under 8 minutes. A Redwing shoe, last I heard, for example was about 30 minutes at the low end. If there is a demand for 2 million shoes a year globally 30 minutes a shoe is unacceptable. Assuming you have to ship 100,000 units at a time to cover shipping costs alone in a cargo container means that an order put in Monday wouldn't ship (at 30 minutes) for several days. At 8 minutes a shoe you are likely to get your 100,000 units done in the same day the order comes in which means less stored inventory and safer supply\demand ratio of inventory. Shoes are a fickle business especially for urban consumers.
As an investor the company with the largest margin will usually have the best return on dividens and more then likely better stock performance. Yeah I can go buy a nice $200 made in the USA shoe but it doesn't do them any good when they go out of business because they can't get captial from investors. Nobody wants to invest in a company who's dividen returns can't clear inflation. If inflation is 3% a year, just to break even, the stock value needs to go up 3%. That means that either margin or sales volume must increase every year, year after year, to not only clear inflation but meet shareholder and investor expectations.
It isn't as simple an argument as cost vs quality. That is a consumer perspective and a naive view at that. What about your mutual fund that depends on the stock perfomrance of companies? How about all those investments that fund managers have to keep tabs on so your pensions survive? Take a good hard look at what happened to the Automotive Pension funds that tied up a fair amount of thier money in the delusion of "Made In America" funds. You have to compete economically and ever since that nonsense minimum wage we've been burning through debt ever since.
Actually 99% of programs you do not have to reinstall. Games especially. Only if things are registering DLLS of their own and those are not very often. Most desktop apps are pretty self contained now days.
We were in a 7 rack server room about 20 feet by 12 feet. The AC unit had failed and the room was pushing 92 degrees. That wasn't the bad part. I was scripting some audit crap and my buddy was writing a web front end for the script about 2 weeks before Y2k. The AC guys needed parts and were waiting in there also. The DBA for some GODLESS reason decided to go get Taco Bell and a Dairy Queen dipped Cone. He ate the Taco Bell and the icecream. The SOB was lactose intolerant or something because between the TB and DQ the room smelled with a rotting stench that anyone "who has sat through an autopsy (twice here) on a dead guy who's refigeration unit was about 10 degrees too warm" could appreciate. Now any saine individual would have bolted for the door but as the DBA was cracking wind the AC guys had a ladder in front of the door while working in the dropdown ceiling. The room was boderline 100 degrees now and the worse possible thing happened. My buddy who was coding the web front end, couldn't take the smell anymore and threw up in the trash. Now at 100 degrees, Taco Bell stench, vomit stench, and the heat, I was starting to get dizzy.
After about an hour they (the AC guys) finally got the ladder out of the way and we hauled ass out of there. Took about an hour to get the room back to normal temp but I swear the DBA did that on purpose... the entire time that fat sob was laughing his stench ridden ass off...
First off Gold Farming is really what we call "Foreign Trade". What you have in an MMO is a system where people manufacture goods and services at various costs.
You have an intrinsic value on your time. Looking at the US lets say your game time is worth $5 an hour (e.g. Given a choice of making $4.50 an hour working a second job you would instead play a game but given the opportunity to make $6 an hour you would work the second job.)
So lets say you can make 100 GP in an hour. Your manufactured good is $5 for 100 GPs. Now the gold farmer comes in and his time is $0.35 and hour and can make the 100 GPs.
Right off the bat we can see you can go work the $6 an hour job AND get the 100 GP you normally would have, coming out ahead. This is the basis for what the real problem is, a system of Foreign Exchange Inport\Export.
Now you can make 100 GP an hour at $5 each hour (production cost) but the gold farmer can do it for $0.35 for 100 gold.) THE ARGUMENT YOU ARE ALL MAKING IS NO DIFFERENT THEN NIKE SHOES BEING MADE FOR.38 A DAY IN THAILAND VERUS MINIMUM WAGE IN THE US!
This is simply a problem (if at all) of cheap labor. The same problem we find in cheap "Made in China" products and the issues with that (Melemine, Lead, etc.) are reflected in the game world (Hacked accounts, bots, etc.). P.S. Accounts were getting hacked and stripped long before gold farmers so that point is moot.
I don't see anyone boycotting cheap "Made in China" goods, the cost is too good to pass up on. The same goes for time. The only people that protest "Made in China" are overpaid union types using a air ratchet putting on a bolt for $45 an hour and we can see how well their fantasy played out in the auto industry can't we?
Whenever you have an economy it will always gravitate towards "Better, Faster, Cheaper" where better usually = Faster and Cheaper. Time and time again we wax over the whole gold farming issue but most of us are hypocrites in this discussion.
If Gold is really nothing more then Time then effectively gold farmers are selling time... cheap. I once hired my neighbor's son to farming gold for me. $10 for $1000 gold. If he was in China you'd be pissed, my neighbor, not an issue.
Gold farming is nothing but a reflection of xenphobic hate and resistance to normal economics. I have bad news, most of us have an inflated view of our worth. A Mc. Donalds clerk isn't worth minimum wage. Period. Nothing more then an unsustainable goverment mandate that created a MASSIVE DEMAND for sub-minimum wage labor across the globe.
The very fact you have cheap gold also means the market is flooded with goods that would normally be scarce. Gold Farming causes inflation but the influx of goods far outpaces the inflation. When WoW first came out there were few purples in the AH. When the farmers came, I've never NOT found a piece of gear I wanted to buy. The inflation is kept in check that no matter how hard they try there are still only 24 hours a day and only X number of people farming. Productivity will platue and create a fixed exchange of time\gold\dollars. The only way to push productivity\better margin is through shady shit but that is a small % of the workforce. DAOC had it right with diminishing returns on camping locations (albiet in exp). If you can script something in a game, your doing something wrong in your game. Period.
Unlike the real world there is not a central bank or governments that can shape the inflation and control deflation of currency. What MMOs need is to legitimize the RMTs and tax them to all hell. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING PER THE IRS: BARTERED TRANSACTIONS ARE TAXABLE. Literally when you buy gold you are trading money for service (some states do not tax services) but if MMO currency is considered an asset with a value then it is a taxable transaction. Keep that in mind when you think about the rights to your digital "assets". I'll trade you the "Sword of Doom" for 400 Gold + 22 GP in tax. The IRS
"Why does it seem that so many people are keeping important data and programs on a beta?"....
Because it's free? You can keep your data on one parition and your OS stuff on another (what I see most often) so you can run beta crap all the time to get to your normal data (pictures, music, etc.) Common with dual booters. I dread when a crappy OS butchers the other partition...
The reason in-place upgrades are important to most non-technical people is:
they don't have the storage to offload say 120 GB of data do not know which data they need to save they don't have original software discs for many of their apps (think a dell pc pre-installed with crap).
They can't for various practical reasons wipe their PC and do a fresh install. We (you and I) are not in a position to quantify a good majority of people's priorities with their computers. Slashdot is a minority in the big picture of the PC consumer marketplace and we make a very poor scientific sample of priorities. We often are akin to car people telling the average person: "What do you mean you don't replace your own brakes, shocks, and struts? You should know how to do that or you are too stupid to own a car..."
We need to be careful a recognize that most of us here on/. are not the average users out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I check (IANALBMWIAPL) Judges only have to excuse themselves if they a personal bias or personal involvement in the case. Professional involvement isn't necessarily a "conflict of interest" if they feel that their professional involvement isn't going to factor in.
NYCL WHERE ARE YOU?
The reason Ballmer was speechless is he forgot Oracle was still around or was suprised Oracle had that kind of money. Take your pick...
But the P value when I do the regression in R-Project shows that the US population has a P value of .00321 (signifcant) and removing it as a regressor totatlly fubars my 52 week forecast of the amount of bullshit news articles get posted. Now I admit I am using and ARIMA model but I really thing that I have just lost interest in writing anything further...
OMOO is a bit easier, we have used it since the BBS days.
OMOO = Of My Own Opinion
Usually in the form of
-=-=- OMOO -=-=-
the quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog. I hate
dogs.
-=-=- OMOO -=-=-
Or for an entire post at the end
Ken P.
OMOO\NLA (of My Own Opinion\Not Legal Advice)
Again reinforcing the need to return to the "Open Air Policy" that any secret or top secret network must have a "nothing but open air" between the secure system and unsecure system. Prior to the 90s many secure networks had a single cable, usually with a manual breaker, that would be enable only as a specific scheduled time, and the end point on the unsecure side was a single terminal (2 NICs, 1 to unsecure network on one subnet, then the secure network on another) where both network cards were phsyically impossible to operate at the same time (the reason for 2 NICs is the secure NIC is an encrypted card)
Seriously, you should never be able to tget from A -> B -> C where A is a public network and C is a secret or top secret network.
Hell last weekend I was at a shop where the DEV network was self contained and the only way they got code builds was compiled on the DEV network (12th floor) then sneaker-net'ed to the testing environment via optical disk (8th floor).
P.S.F.F The office on the 9th floor still has token ring... WTF who still uses Token Ring? Seriously? I mean it's friggin Token Ring... I remember working on Norwest Mortgage's (bought by Wells Fargo) token ring to ethernet conversion, what 12 years ago now... Jebus Rice that was a long time ago now it seems...
... there being the following sentence:
Section 5A - Photographs ... When doing flirty boob shots, nipples are not to be in view. In addition when acting like a complete whore in front of the camera refrain from taking shots in the bathroom. This is especially important if you are an absent minded bimbo who forgets to flush...
The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self
and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.
At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them. Thus it becomes an exercise in look at the decorations of a plot that makes the story enjoyable. The only thing remotely well written was the Dunwich building, the Wasteland Guide, and the android quests. The rest was damn near disposable but I'll give kudos to the Nuka-Cola Challenge walkthrough. The fake history was well written. The main quest was terrible....
There are plenty of companies out there that provide contracted service for open source projects. I personally for 12 years have provided paid, per-incident support for Apache, Nagios, Cacti, Amanda, Sendmail, Postfix, Spam Assasin, and Snort\IPTABLES (IDS) firewalls. I have since retired from geek work (I work at a bank now) but I had no problem meeting ITIL severity SLAs including 15 min response, 2 hour fix windows for most production issues.
On top of that in 12 years I've only had 3 sev 1 calls come in on linux\bsd systems I built and all 3 were hardware failures ultimately. There are plenty out there, just, well ... Google them :)
Here I help:
http://www.nagios.org/support/servicepartners/
Start there for Nagios. ISP and VM hosts can often provide Nagios pager\cell\SMS support for servers you host with them also. Just ask.
... they have also experiemented in implanting a digital tattoo in the palm of a persons hand flashing it red when they are sub-optimal in age... ... they have also done extensive research into selective breeding where an additional digital tattoo on the chest (Just below the neck) indicates which individuals are in your required breeding program...
I fear his death would set us back decades. With the LHC going online his loss would potentially leave a a vaccume in the world of physics, astronomy, astrophysics, and mathmatics.
Black Holes research among other astronomical phenomena (high energy) could gain a wealth of information from the LHC's test results. Without him for those early few years guiding the new generation through the initial results, I fear they may flounder and miss important initial indicators on WHERE to look setting us back decades. I have learned over the years that experience is crucial in research. Fresh minds innovate and take risks, experience guides those innovators on where to start looking rather then randomly sifting through data, while effective, is time wasted.
"Better to walk the path for a life time then to spend a lifetime looking for the path. Even when wrong at least you went somewhere. Where is the path you ask? Ask someone walking it." - Me.
After reading through this I can no longer tolerate a sanctioned policy of genocide against an indiginous life form. Thus all bacteria and viruses must be protected like any other form of life. In our own personal ecosystem the use of weapons of mass destruction against said bacteria and viruses must stop! Save the bacteria, whales, dolphins, etc.) As delicate as the ecosystem is we must prevent mass extinction and stop polluting the ecosystem with toxic medication and antibiotics!
Oh man the Earth worshippers are gonna run with this one... Gaia has a disease...
How long till the last shread of reason is lost? Humans are machines, nothing more made up of lots of parts. You are just as worthless as a laser printer because you are no different. There is no free will, just complex biochemical reactions guided by DNA and environment. No love, just an interaction of mating protocols, chemistry, and complex algorithms running in your advanced CPU. YOu illusion of conciousness is noting more then a product of random sequences of programs surviving the evolutionary tread mill.
Scifi got it wrong, the machines do take over, we mearly give up and turn into machines... No wonder the more "advanced" we get, the cheaper life becomes and the more we treat one another like machines...
Email has become a victim of its (or is it it's) own success. Now we are moving to invite only systems like IM. What we really need is a replacement electronic messaging platform with some form of "postage". I for one suggest teaming up with Stanford and get folding@home a form of postage. Sender must complete 1 work unit for every message sent to a non-registered recipient (a.k.a 1 WU = 1 unsolicited message.)
In addition the government should provide each citizen an official goverment mailbox for non-critical information [INFO] level messages that are from goverment to citizens. Attached to that mailbox is your current legal residence location for automatic filtering and routing Senator and House member email, never forgetting who your represenatives are!
Anyone wanna help put a demo together?
Depends is the a user operating the system? If so I'd put my money on the Linux system going down first.
The number one reason an OS is unsecure is the users, not the OS.
Every idiot and his cousin use MS products but MS doesn't give them enough rope to hang themselves.
Every idiot geek tries to run linux without knowing what the hell they are doing with more then enough rope to hang themselves.
I've seen Linux get dropped just as often as XP in my career. 9/10 times it is the result of user activity, nothing intrinsic in the OS itself.
All it takes is some damn fool to install crap on their machine for the system to become compromised. Linux, Mac, Solaris, etc. Remember that no all malware\viruses\etc need admin\root privledged access to get the job done. A simple shell script that FTPs and file matching a regular expression /resume/ can give identity thieves more then enough info. Throw it in the middle of a functional PERL script obfuscated and you are good to go.
should have been money but I have to say the more I read it the more I think I'd go with a monkey reference:
"I demand my Monkey servant bring be a German Beer rather then some piss water American beer I can read through!"
Wow the Nazi's would be proud...
"Those that are willing to trade security for freedom deservers neither..."
Face it: we get the government we deserve. We keep electing the same two parties who's sole mission is to control our lives, one through business and one through government, and in the end both take away our freedoms.
We have entered a new age of feudalism, with Goverment as King, Businesses as the Fiefs, the inbred executive kabal as the Lords, the lawyers have replaced the knights, and we now have become the new pesantry.
RIP Freedom.
High School Students.
I keep tabs on district 622 (Here in MN) and 916. The high school students are just as good now at good ol' fashion HTML coding (including now Javascript and PHP) then some of these 4 year career coders now.
Web coding is quickly become base line, just like knowing Word and Excel. That is why it's getting harder to define some job roles because the skills are quickly becoming a default set of technical skills.
Hell my 9 year old nephew is already coding in BASIC in grade school. I can only imagine where these students will be by the time they get to highschool. Programming is becoming as basic as grammar in school.
I started with Logo, BASIC, and courtesy of Computer User writing assembly via DEBUG. (Remember all those cool type blah blah blah.txt > debug.com to get neat tools?)
I'm Linux.
* I am sick of your shit.
* I am tired of your bullshit shennanigans.
* I am tired of having to maintain a 3 language proficency to call your tech support.
* I live in America.
* We like to be self sufficent.
* I am Linux and if I fuck shit up, I have only myself to blame and only myself and the good nature of other to save me.
* I want shit to work.
* I need to know what the fuck I am doing.
* Linux forces me to know what the fuck I am doing.
* If I am not smart enough to figure linux out then I really do need a babysitting OS like Vista.
* I like chrome on my car and I like smoking, drinking, $)(%&#)$ing, and Bruce Campbell movies!
* Jar Jar is a tool.
* I want shit to work MY WAY, NOT YOUR WAY, HIS WAY, OR THEIR WAY.
* GET OFF MY LAWN!
* I AM GOING TO SNEAK INTO YOUR HOUSE AT NIGHT AND CUT OFF YOU BALLS IF YOU TELL ME TO REBOOT ONE MORE TIME!
* I spend my monkey on hookers, strippers, booze, and smokes and GOD DAMN IT I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO SPEND $200 ON THE SOME BS PRETTY LOOKING OS!
* NO ONE GETS LAID FOR RUNNING A MAC OR A PC BUT LINUX CHICKS DIG LINUX GUYS! You don't hear about the Vista hook ups do ya?
I am Linux and Quite frankly you can shut the fuck up!
Apparently my entry didn't make it... :)
Modern day espionage as far as I can see it is bargaining chip, much like nuclear weapons. It's about what leverage you have. It's not so much the use of it, but rather a demonstration of what can be done.
We now are now entering the age of Digital Mutually Assured Destruction and Economic Mutually Assured Destruction. For you wee tikes out there that was what kept the USA and Soviet Union (hell do the kids even know what a soviet is anymore?) from turning the world into the game Fallout 3...
N-MAD and now D-MAD and E-MAD.
Actually they are faster, considerable. A typical Nike shoe is put together in under 8 minutes. A Redwing shoe, last I heard, for example was about 30 minutes at the low end. If there is a demand for 2 million shoes a year globally 30 minutes a shoe is unacceptable. Assuming you have to ship 100,000 units at a time to cover shipping costs alone in a cargo container means that an order put in Monday wouldn't ship (at 30 minutes) for several days. At 8 minutes a shoe you are likely to get your 100,000 units done in the same day the order comes in which means less stored inventory and safer supply\demand ratio of inventory. Shoes are a fickle business especially for urban consumers.
As an investor the company with the largest margin will usually have the best return on dividens and more then likely better stock performance. Yeah I can go buy a nice $200 made in the USA shoe but it doesn't do them any good when they go out of business because they can't get captial from investors. Nobody wants to invest in a company who's dividen returns can't clear inflation. If inflation is 3% a year, just to break even, the stock value needs to go up 3%. That means that either margin or sales volume must increase every year, year after year, to not only clear inflation but meet shareholder and investor expectations.
It isn't as simple an argument as cost vs quality. That is a consumer perspective and a naive view at that. What about your mutual fund that depends on the stock perfomrance of companies? How about all those investments that fund managers have to keep tabs on so your pensions survive? Take a good hard look at what happened to the Automotive Pension funds that tied up a fair amount of thier money in the delusion of "Made In America" funds. You have to compete economically and ever since that nonsense minimum wage we've been burning through debt ever since.
Actually 99% of programs you do not have to reinstall. Games especially. Only if things are registering DLLS of their own and those are not very often. Most desktop apps are pretty self contained now days.
We were in a 7 rack server room about 20 feet by 12 feet. The AC unit had failed and the room was pushing 92 degrees. That wasn't the bad part. I was scripting some audit crap and my buddy was writing a web front end for the script about 2 weeks before Y2k. The AC guys needed parts and were waiting in there also. The DBA for some GODLESS reason decided to go get Taco Bell and a Dairy Queen dipped Cone. He ate the Taco Bell and the icecream. The SOB was lactose intolerant or something because between the TB and DQ the room smelled with a rotting stench that anyone "who has sat through an autopsy (twice here) on a dead guy who's refigeration unit was about 10 degrees too warm" could appreciate. Now any saine individual would have bolted for the door but as the DBA was cracking wind the AC guys had a ladder in front of the door while working in the dropdown ceiling. The room was boderline 100 degrees now and the worse possible thing happened. My buddy who was coding the web front end, couldn't take the smell anymore and threw up in the trash. Now at 100 degrees, Taco Bell stench, vomit stench, and the heat, I was starting to get dizzy.
After about an hour they (the AC guys) finally got the ladder out of the way and we hauled ass out of there. Took about an hour to get the room back to normal temp but I swear the DBA did that on purpose... the entire time that fat sob was laughing his stench ridden ass off...
Ok, I work for a bank in full disclousure.
First off Gold Farming is really what we call "Foreign Trade". What you have in an MMO is a system where people manufacture goods and services at various costs.
You have an intrinsic value on your time. Looking at the US lets say your game time is worth $5 an hour (e.g. Given a choice of making $4.50 an hour working a second job you would instead play a game but given the opportunity to make $6 an hour you would work the second job.)
So lets say you can make 100 GP in an hour. Your manufactured good is $5 for 100 GPs.
Now the gold farmer comes in and his time is $0.35 and hour and can make the 100 GPs.
Right off the bat we can see you can go work the $6 an hour job AND get the 100 GP you normally would have, coming out ahead. This is the basis for what the real problem is, a system of Foreign Exchange Inport\Export.
Now you can make 100 GP an hour at $5 each hour (production cost) but the gold farmer can do it for $0.35 for 100 gold.) THE ARGUMENT YOU ARE ALL MAKING IS NO DIFFERENT THEN NIKE SHOES BEING MADE FOR .38 A DAY IN THAILAND VERUS MINIMUM WAGE IN THE US!
This is simply a problem (if at all) of cheap labor. The same problem we find in cheap "Made in China" products and the issues with that (Melemine, Lead, etc.) are reflected in the game world (Hacked accounts, bots, etc.). P.S. Accounts were getting hacked and stripped long before gold farmers so that point is moot.
I don't see anyone boycotting cheap "Made in China" goods, the cost is too good to pass up on. The same goes for time. The only people that protest "Made in China" are overpaid union types using a air ratchet putting on a bolt for $45 an hour and we can see how well their fantasy played out in the auto industry can't we?
Whenever you have an economy it will always gravitate towards "Better, Faster, Cheaper" where better usually = Faster and Cheaper. Time and time again we wax over the whole gold farming issue but most of us are hypocrites in this discussion.
If Gold is really nothing more then Time then effectively gold farmers are selling time... cheap. I once hired my neighbor's son to farming gold for me. $10 for $1000 gold. If he was in China you'd be pissed, my neighbor, not an issue.
Gold farming is nothing but a reflection of xenphobic hate and resistance to normal economics. I have bad news, most of us have an inflated view of our worth. A Mc. Donalds clerk isn't worth minimum wage. Period. Nothing more then an unsustainable goverment mandate that created a MASSIVE DEMAND for sub-minimum wage labor across the globe.
The very fact you have cheap gold also means the market is flooded with goods that would normally be scarce. Gold Farming causes inflation but the influx of goods far outpaces the inflation. When WoW first came out there were few purples in the AH. When the farmers came, I've never NOT found a piece of gear I wanted to buy. The inflation is kept in check that no matter how hard they try there are still only 24 hours a day and only X number of people farming. Productivity will platue and create a fixed exchange of time\gold\dollars. The only way to push productivity\better margin is through shady shit but that is a small % of the workforce. DAOC had it right with diminishing returns on camping locations (albiet in exp). If you can script something in a game, your doing something wrong in your game. Period.
Unlike the real world there is not a central bank or governments that can shape the inflation and control deflation of currency. What MMOs need is to legitimize the RMTs and tax them to all hell. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING PER THE IRS: BARTERED TRANSACTIONS ARE TAXABLE. Literally when you buy gold you are trading money for service (some states do not tax services) but if MMO currency is considered an asset with a value then it is a taxable transaction. Keep that in mind when you think about the rights to your digital "assets". I'll trade you the "Sword of Doom" for 400 Gold + 22 GP in tax. The IRS
"Why does it seem that so many people are keeping important data and programs on a beta?"....
Because it's free? You can keep your data on one parition and your OS stuff on another (what I see most often) so you can run beta crap all the time to get to your normal data (pictures, music, etc.) Common with dual booters. I dread when a crappy OS butchers the other partition...
The reason in-place upgrades are important to most non-technical people is:
they don't have the storage to offload say 120 GB of data
do not know which data they need to save
they don't have original software discs for many of their apps (think a dell pc pre-installed with crap).
They can't for various practical reasons wipe their PC and do a fresh install. We (you and I) are not in a position to quantify a good majority of people's priorities with their computers. Slashdot is a minority in the big picture of the PC consumer marketplace and we make a very poor scientific sample of priorities. We often are akin to car people telling the average person: "What do you mean you don't replace your own brakes, shocks, and struts? You should know how to do that or you are too stupid to own a car..."
We need to be careful a recognize that most of us here on /. are not the average users out there.
Damn kids are stupid. No I mean linking colleges and research labs so they can share information. There was an Internet before you got AOL kiddo.