It turns out that the expiration date on a drug does stand for something, but probably not what you think it does. Since a law was passed in 1979, drug manufacturers are required to stamp an expiration date on their products. This is the date at which the manufacturer can still guarantee the full potency and safety of the drug.
Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.
It's the "logical next step" in all the "break this sticker with a screw hidden underneath and void your warranty" crap.
And of course, it's got 90% of the consumer population so fucking scared that they won't break that sticker even when they need to repair a device that's 5 years old and 4 years, 9 months out of the stupidly short 90-day warranty.
Pop Sci still runs a great "void your warranty" column. I recommend reading it on a regular basis and learning to say "fuck it, void the warranty, I'm going to improve/repair my own fucking property" whenever possible!
Verizon runs their network service over public airwaves if you have a phone.
They run their network "land line" setups on owned/purchased lines but under grants of local monopoly that put them under the purview of the FCC as government-licensed and government-controlled.
The FCC's authority also covers "interstate telecommunications"; this covers fax, data transmission, and voice phone, whether ip-phone (which is what FiOS is tied to) or old-style landline.
Have they always been perfect? Of course not. Are they on the correct side in the case of net neutrality? Hell Fucking Yes.
We, as consumers, wholeheartedly support the FCC and net neutrality.
We pay for our bandwidth. We are tired of the shyster games that the ISP's play.
We are tired of being told that it's "in our interest" that 90% or more of us can get only one ISP because decades ago our county or city sold the area off to one fucking cable company as a monopoly.
We are tired of being told that this is "the free market at work" when there is no fucking competition for service.
We are tired of the content cartels playing stupid fucking games like wanting to block or reduce speeds to competing services (youtube, hulu, etc) and then telling us "but it's ok, you can pay $EXTORTION each month for our shitty-quality, pixelated as hell 'on-demand video' service if you also buy our cable package at $MONOPOLYEXTORTION/month prices."
And we heartily invite Verizon, and the rest of the companies like them, to GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
I've been there, I've seen the way administrators treat people. "WP:BEAR" and "WP:BITE" are so frequently abused that it makes for a comedy routine.
Standard wikipedia experience for a new user: 1-user makes spelling fix or other minor edit to improve page. 1a- loser running "twinkle" or "huggle" or whatever the automated-semi-bot-tool-of-the-month is reverts just to up their edit count.
2-user undoes the change, because they're improving the encyclopedia 2a - loser running "twinkle" reverts and adds a nastygram on edit summary and talk page about "take it to talkpage if you want to make this change blah blah insult insult"
3-user ignores tinkle-loser and reverts again. 3a - twinkle-loser goes to his friend the admin crying "waaah WP:3RR he's being a meanie". Friend the admin issues day-long block to new user, ignoring asshatted behavior of twinkle-loser.
4-twinkle-loser or admin friend, or both, writes something gloating and insulting on new user's talk page. 4a-user either (a) gets PO'ed and leaves or (b) files an unblock request calling out twinkle-loser and friend-admin 4b- other "friend admins", assholes like "Beeblebrox" (the current abusive dickhole in the dickhole-of-the-month club last I checked) begin reverting new-user's talkpage, either claiming "request is not correctly formatted", "request isn't a proper request showing you learned the rules", blah blah... essentially, "kneel harder and open wide, bitch."
5 - new user, now justifiably outraged, writes something nasty back to asshat like Beeblebrox or other "patrol admin." 5a - abusive dickholes that constitute core of "unblock request patrol" ban user indef, lock talkpage, and go their merry way announcing "hey look we killed another troll", when they themselves are the ass-hat trolls du jour.
Funny. Every time I compare Jason Scott's observations with former Wikipedia admins and other analyses, I find out that he's on the money, and your ad hominem attacks without basis.
I've done my own background looking, and found that Jason Scott's analysis is right on the money. Wikipedia admins throw "wikispeak" at new writers, troll them, and generally expect them to somehow pick up on random acronyms, and the few who do pick up quickly or go to writing well and quote back guidelines or policy pages are instantly labeled "trolls", "sockpuppets" and worse and actively hounded off the project.
Apparently the old IRC/Usenet advice of "lurk first, post sparingly" is unheard of within the halls of trollship that count for the admin clique today on Wikipedia.
There's nobody left on the project trying to help new people get better at writing and integrate to the project - hasn't been since 2005. Today there's just a bunch of entrenched ass-hats with admin powers actively working to keep people out, and a bunch of wannabe-admins tirelessly clicking "revert revert revert" on tools like "twinkle" to bump up their edit count.
Journal of a former wikipedia admin - great stuff here documenting how "gaming the system" by non-admins and admins alike works, including how organized groups work very hard to ensure that they pick off or drive off those of differing opinions "one by one" to ensure that "consensus" can never change (see the "Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia" section).
Cites and Insights carries a long history of articles on the subject.
The underlying flaw with Wikipedia is exactly as Jason Scott posited, your ungrounded ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. It is comprised primarily of, and run by, people who have created an alternate language, an alternate political scheme, and an insular and closed circle into which "breaking in" is a matter of proving that you can waste hours upon hours upon hours of time chasing "edit count", learning to speak the acronym-code, sucking up to the most abusive of people when they do something that anyone else objects to and calling for the objectors to be banned.
Once upon a time, Wikipedia had a bunch of "guilds." Most of them have been cleansed, but ancillary "subpages" remain and are still indexed. Shi'a Guild, Sunni Guild, Israeli Guild, Muslim Guild, Deletionist Guild, Preservationist Guild, Guild of Copy Editors, and on and on. You'll notice most of them have vanished, along with membership pages.
Do you think they actually vanished? No. But as per "WP:CANVAS", which forbids "organized" editing, they vanished from Wikipedia. Which is to say, nothing changed except that they now organize in private e-mail lists and IRC channels rather than out in the open. You can still see the same behavior to this day; hit an article one of them is "protecting", and you'll have the rest of the "guild" swarming you in minutes.
The same's true for Wikipedia admins - the more corrupt, the worse. The old Durova hit list affair hasn't slowed them down, because there are at least a dozen (probably more than 25) email lists just like it where administrators "coordinate" their actions behind the scenes. Page 2 of the article does a great job analyzing the paranoid-delusional aspects of a "committed" wikipedia-admin's personality and actions.
Wikipedia is problematic beyond problematic. Want to know why? Here's a transcript of a Jason Scott presentation that goes over a lot of it.
The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.
Once you get to be an "admin", basically anything goes. That's when you start entertaining offers to be the protecting force for groups of people who create politics, that's when you start being verbally obtuse if not outright abusive towards any new editors, and that's where the whole system falls apart. Want to try to repair an article, add links? Ok, but now you have to speak 18 categories of acronyms, you have to be online 24/7 to instantly respond to "questions" that can be posed in a dozen or more possible places ranging from your talk page, other editors talk pages, article talkpage, "related" article talkpages, various "admin" forums, two or three email forums, and on and on. You have to master an entire subset of "how to write a citation" code rather than sticking a link at the end of the line, because otherwise some ass-hat will revert you and claim you're spamming.
It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."
Government by the people, for the people? Sorry. We threw that out sometime in the 80s. Now it's government by the corporations, for the corporations, and fuck the people.
Motorola is doing the logical next step after the last gasp of consumer rights made it legal to jailbreak your phone: they made the phone fucking selfdestruct if you try it. Broken by design, but there you go. The next iPhone will probably be the same way, phones from other carriers will follow suit.
And don't forget the same crap we have with Xbox360's randomly failing after dashboard updates merely because they used the SAME FUCKING TECH - update, the dashboard installer blows the wrong fucking microfuse, and there you go, fucking RROD. You get to ship your console back to Micro$haft, they laugh at you as they demand a repair payment because you are "out of warranty" even though it's a fucking design flaw of their crapass update procedure, and you're just fucked.
For me, the key was getting far enough into the story where I was actually exploring the game without having to "level grind." In my first playthrough, I made some (in retrospect poor) decisions about how to set up my characters when I had only a tiny number of gambits to work with that made it so I was constantly "managing" the characters even in levels that hardly gave any experience.
On my second playthrough, I tried an alternate way of arranging the gambits, held my way most of the time on one character to dole out healing, and all of a sudden I was handling the level-appropriate areas enough that I didn't have to go constantly replaying or "grinding" unless I was just smacking stuff down on the way to a legendary-monster hunt.
Now that's not saying that FF12 was perfect. God no, the lack of a Game+ function and the fact that so many items were the "Ok set all three characters to steal, and if you don't steal the rare item run away and try again on the boss till you manage the 1% steal chance" type royally pissed me off. But I still got through FF12 and enjoyed the storyline, and was having fun after about 6 hours in on my second playthrough, as opposed to being in 40 hours deep on FF13 and wanting to snap the fucking disc in half.
The problem for IT folks is, they are stuck in a no-win scenario of trying to handle a series of completely contradictory orders.
Order #1: "Make our systems bulletproof-secure." Ok, fine. Minimal level of needed access; if you need to read the files in that network location, you can have read permission. If you need to create/edit in there, we'll grant you those permissions when the time comes. If you need software installed, see an admin.
Order #2: "Stop getting in our users' way! Marcy says she can't install software!" Ok, fine. So now Marcy has local install-software rights. Next week, we're going to be rebuilding Marcy's system for the 80th time because Marcy the Clueless Bitch has yet again installed a thousand and one stupid little crap-apps with more malware, scamware, and virus tagalongs than anyone knows what to do with. Oh, and we're also now dealing with all the other crap that happened since some of what Marcy the Clueless Bitch set loose on the network is causing other problems.
Repeat ad nauseum. "Filter the web, some jerkass clicked on a link in a spam email from his Yahoo email and got his computer infected!!!" followed a few days later by "Turn off that filtering the CEO can't get to his porn sites to jerk off in his corner office."
"Software Audits" and keeping in compliance sound fine, right up until the moment when some CEO/CTO decides it's fine to "cheat" a little bit and orders you, the IT guy, to install twice as many copies of something as they paid for licenses to install. If you DO do it, your ass is the one on the line when the BSA comes knocking, and if you DON'T do it, your ass is on the curb in a market with over 20% Real Unemployment and outsourcing and "free trade" fucking over the job market worse every day.
I got about 40 hours in. Set it aside for a month and then tried again to see if it would fare any better (took me a second try to get the hang of, and start enjoying, FF12).
The fact that they are making a sequel to the world's crappiest corridor simulator is just stupid. Someone needs to fly over to Japan, smack Sqeenix's executives upside the head and shout "STOP MAKING CRAP" in their ears.
They just assume every hack is instantly for piracy. Which is a little silly.
Is there piracy out there? Sure. On the other hand, I was using a couple of old Xboxes (original not 360) I'd gotten at a flea market, softmodded and loaded with XBMC, as nice little network video frontends for a good long while. Can't remember when the last time I ever played an "official" game on them, though I did have some fun with xDuke and xDescent for a while (and yes, I bought original copies of both years ago) - and the hard drives were tiny as fuck, so there was no point "ripping" a game to hard drive anyways.
Mostly, MS catches people on "hacked" Xbox360's by catching them playing games that they shouldn't have yet (like when a certain Call of Duty game got leaked early).
There have been rumors that they also managed to code a check in for "modified drive firmware", and checks for various cheat-hacks on certain games. And of course there was the famous standbying cheat...
PS3's require a 9.5mm height drive. All the new 1TB's, as you point out, use the 12.5mm height that won't fit in anything but very specific Macs (not even an HP or Dell laptop's drive caddy will accommodate them).
the largest drive you can fit into a PS3 is currently 750GB. Which, let's face it, is PLENTY of space to load a library of games to.
On the other hand, word is you can load any game without a file in excess of 4GB (filesize limit of FAT32, for some strange reason the PS3 will only accept FAT32-formatted external storage) directly to an external hard drive and just play it from there.
Wrong. There are multiple writes/reads as it swaps parts of the game in and out of the "reserved playspace" of the NAND. Then there's the added wear and tear of swapping savegame blocks back and forth.
Then there's the fact that Big N used shitty-cheap NAND chips especially in the earlier runs... ever actually taken a tool analysis of an early Wii and seen the "factory bad blocks" like fucking polka-dots all over the NAND?
Only partially - the Wii's kludge to allow "launching games from the SD card" massively increases wear and tear on the system's internal flash storage. Expect to see a rash of Wii's dying from internal flash failure next year from certain heavy users doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottle had its own expiration date
Didn't you know we're sending out edible bottles now? That was the shelf life where the bottle itself was still safe to eat ;)
First, that link requires registration. Yuck.
I prescribe Bugmenot to solve that.
Second, IIRC from Pharm School, expiration dates are legally mandated by the FDA to be when the active ingredient(s) degrade to 90% efficacy?
You're completely wrong.
Alternate link to harvard:
It turns out that the expiration date on a drug does stand for something, but probably not what you think it does. Since a law was passed in 1979, drug manufacturers are required to stamp an expiration date on their products. This is the date at which the manufacturer can still guarantee the full potency and safety of the drug.
Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.
It's the "logical next step" in all the "break this sticker with a screw hidden underneath and void your warranty" crap.
And of course, it's got 90% of the consumer population so fucking scared that they won't break that sticker even when they need to repair a device that's 5 years old and 4 years, 9 months out of the stupidly short 90-day warranty.
It's the same kind of brainwashing crap you get with expiration dates on bottled water (also found on non-expiring foods/spices such as honey and salt) and stupidly short expiration dates on medicines.
Pop Sci still runs a great "void your warranty" column. I recommend reading it on a regular basis and learning to say "fuck it, void the warranty, I'm going to improve/repair my own fucking property" whenever possible!
Verizon runs their network service over public airwaves if you have a phone.
They run their network "land line" setups on owned/purchased lines but under grants of local monopoly that put them under the purview of the FCC as government-licensed and government-controlled.
The FCC's authority also covers "interstate telecommunications"; this covers fax, data transmission, and voice phone, whether ip-phone (which is what FiOS is tied to) or old-style landline.
Have they always been perfect? Of course not. Are they on the correct side in the case of net neutrality? Hell Fucking Yes.
We, as consumers, wholeheartedly support the FCC and net neutrality.
We pay for our bandwidth. We are tired of the shyster games that the ISP's play.
We are tired of being told that it's "in our interest" that 90% or more of us can get only one ISP because decades ago our county or city sold the area off to one fucking cable company as a monopoly.
We are tired of being told that this is "the free market at work" when there is no fucking competition for service.
We are tired of the content cartels playing stupid fucking games like wanting to block or reduce speeds to competing services (youtube, hulu, etc) and then telling us "but it's ok, you can pay $EXTORTION each month for our shitty-quality, pixelated as hell 'on-demand video' service if you also buy our cable package at $MONOPOLYEXTORTION/month prices."
And we heartily invite Verizon, and the rest of the companies like them, to GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
If you can't get the hit - look at what goes on in Wikipedia these days.
This kind of crap was going on even back in 2005. Whether you participated or just turned a blind eye, you're as much to blame.
Sorry, but no.
I've been there, I've seen the way administrators treat people. "WP:BEAR" and "WP:BITE" are so frequently abused that it makes for a comedy routine.
Standard wikipedia experience for a new user:
1-user makes spelling fix or other minor edit to improve page.
1a- loser running "twinkle" or "huggle" or whatever the automated-semi-bot-tool-of-the-month is reverts just to up their edit count.
2-user undoes the change, because they're improving the encyclopedia
2a - loser running "twinkle" reverts and adds a nastygram on edit summary and talk page about "take it to talkpage if you want to make this change blah blah insult insult"
3-user ignores tinkle-loser and reverts again.
3a - twinkle-loser goes to his friend the admin crying "waaah WP:3RR he's being a meanie". Friend the admin issues day-long block to new user, ignoring asshatted behavior of twinkle-loser.
4-twinkle-loser or admin friend, or both, writes something gloating and insulting on new user's talk page.
4a-user either (a) gets PO'ed and leaves or (b) files an unblock request calling out twinkle-loser and friend-admin
4b- other "friend admins", assholes like "Beeblebrox" (the current abusive dickhole in the dickhole-of-the-month club last I checked) begin reverting new-user's talkpage, either claiming "request is not correctly formatted", "request isn't a proper request showing you learned the rules", blah blah... essentially, "kneel harder and open wide, bitch."
5 - new user, now justifiably outraged, writes something nasty back to asshat like Beeblebrox or other "patrol admin."
5a - abusive dickholes that constitute core of "unblock request patrol" ban user indef, lock talkpage, and go their merry way announcing "hey look we killed another troll", when they themselves are the ass-hat trolls du jour.
Funny. Every time I compare Jason Scott's observations with former Wikipedia admins and other analyses, I find out that he's on the money, and your ad hominem attacks without basis.
I've done my own background looking, and found that Jason Scott's analysis is right on the money. Wikipedia admins throw "wikispeak" at new writers, troll them, and generally expect them to somehow pick up on random acronyms, and the few who do pick up quickly or go to writing well and quote back guidelines or policy pages are instantly labeled "trolls", "sockpuppets" and worse and actively hounded off the project.
Apparently the old IRC/Usenet advice of "lurk first, post sparingly" is unheard of within the halls of trollship that count for the admin clique today on Wikipedia.
There's nobody left on the project trying to help new people get better at writing and integrate to the project - hasn't been since 2005. Today there's just a bunch of entrenched ass-hats with admin powers actively working to keep people out, and a bunch of wannabe-admins tirelessly clicking "revert revert revert" on tools like "twinkle" to bump up their edit count.
I see a lot of ad hominem in your post and zero worthwhile discussion.
Here, I'll give you some more to think about in return:
Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's anti-expert bias and culture via Kuro5hin.
Confession of a former wikipedia gamer (via Archive.org because his website no longer exists).
Journal of a former wikipedia admin - great stuff here documenting how "gaming the system" by non-admins and admins alike works, including how organized groups work very hard to ensure that they pick off or drive off those of differing opinions "one by one" to ensure that "consensus" can never change (see the "Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia" section).
Cites and Insights carries a long history of articles on the subject.
The underlying flaw with Wikipedia is exactly as Jason Scott posited, your ungrounded ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. It is comprised primarily of, and run by, people who have created an alternate language, an alternate political scheme, and an insular and closed circle into which "breaking in" is a matter of proving that you can waste hours upon hours upon hours of time chasing "edit count", learning to speak the acronym-code, sucking up to the most abusive of people when they do something that anyone else objects to and calling for the objectors to be banned.
Once upon a time, Wikipedia had a bunch of "guilds." Most of them have been cleansed, but ancillary "subpages" remain and are still indexed. Shi'a Guild, Sunni Guild, Israeli Guild, Muslim Guild, Deletionist Guild, Preservationist Guild, Guild of Copy Editors, and on and on. You'll notice most of them have vanished, along with membership pages.
Do you think they actually vanished? No. But as per "WP:CANVAS", which forbids "organized" editing, they vanished from Wikipedia. Which is to say, nothing changed except that they now organize in private e-mail lists and IRC channels rather than out in the open. You can still see the same behavior to this day; hit an article one of them is "protecting", and you'll have the rest of the "guild" swarming you in minutes.
The same's true for Wikipedia admins - the more corrupt, the worse. The old Durova hit list affair hasn't slowed them down, because there are at least a dozen (probably more than 25) email lists just like it where administrators "coordinate" their actions behind the scenes. Page 2 of the article does a great job analyzing the paranoid-delusional aspects of a "committed" wikipedia-admin's personality and actions.
Plenty of former wikipedia admins have seen the light.
Here we go again.
Wikipedia is problematic beyond problematic. Want to know why? Here's a transcript of a Jason Scott presentation that goes over a lot of it.
The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.
Once you get to be an "admin", basically anything goes. That's when you start entertaining offers to be the protecting force for groups of people who create politics, that's when you start being verbally obtuse if not outright abusive towards any new editors, and that's where the whole system falls apart. Want to try to repair an article, add links? Ok, but now you have to speak 18 categories of acronyms, you have to be online 24/7 to instantly respond to "questions" that can be posed in a dozen or more possible places ranging from your talk page, other editors talk pages, article talkpage, "related" article talkpages, various "admin" forums, two or three email forums, and on and on. You have to master an entire subset of "how to write a citation" code rather than sticking a link at the end of the line, because otherwise some ass-hat will revert you and claim you're spamming.
It's a mess. It's a mess because Wikipedia is not, and never will be, an accurate encyclopedia. Wikipedia is just the latest in the MUD/MMORPG line of games where a bunch of assholes grind time, gain "XP" (aka "edit count"), and once they get powerful enough and get the "admin" hat, spend most of their day griefing incoming players and claiming it's "thinning the herd", "fun", or "protecting the encyclopedia."
Welcome to the United States of Corporations.
Government by the people, for the people? Sorry. We threw that out sometime in the 80s. Now it's government by the corporations, for the corporations, and fuck the people.
Motorola is doing the logical next step after the last gasp of consumer rights made it legal to jailbreak your phone: they made the phone fucking selfdestruct if you try it. Broken by design, but there you go. The next iPhone will probably be the same way, phones from other carriers will follow suit.
And don't forget the same crap we have with Xbox360's randomly failing after dashboard updates merely because they used the SAME FUCKING TECH - update, the dashboard installer blows the wrong fucking microfuse, and there you go, fucking RROD. You get to ship your console back to Micro$haft, they laugh at you as they demand a repair payment because you are "out of warranty" even though it's a fucking design flaw of their crapass update procedure, and you're just fucked.
For me, the key was getting far enough into the story where I was actually exploring the game without having to "level grind." In my first playthrough, I made some (in retrospect poor) decisions about how to set up my characters when I had only a tiny number of gambits to work with that made it so I was constantly "managing" the characters even in levels that hardly gave any experience.
On my second playthrough, I tried an alternate way of arranging the gambits, held my way most of the time on one character to dole out healing, and all of a sudden I was handling the level-appropriate areas enough that I didn't have to go constantly replaying or "grinding" unless I was just smacking stuff down on the way to a legendary-monster hunt.
Now that's not saying that FF12 was perfect. God no, the lack of a Game+ function and the fact that so many items were the "Ok set all three characters to steal, and if you don't steal the rare item run away and try again on the boss till you manage the 1% steal chance" type royally pissed me off. But I still got through FF12 and enjoyed the storyline, and was having fun after about 6 hours in on my second playthrough, as opposed to being in 40 hours deep on FF13 and wanting to snap the fucking disc in half.
Funny thing: in the US, it is STILL LEGAL to tape (or digitally record) from the radio.
And to space-shift and archive your personal tapings.
Calling this "piracy" is more proof the MafiAA are just a bunch of assholes who think they are the law.
The problem for IT folks is, they are stuck in a no-win scenario of trying to handle a series of completely contradictory orders.
Order #1: "Make our systems bulletproof-secure."
Ok, fine. Minimal level of needed access; if you need to read the files in that network location, you can have read permission. If you need to create/edit in there, we'll grant you those permissions when the time comes. If you need software installed, see an admin.
Order #2: "Stop getting in our users' way! Marcy says she can't install software!"
Ok, fine. So now Marcy has local install-software rights. Next week, we're going to be rebuilding Marcy's system for the 80th time because Marcy the Clueless Bitch has yet again installed a thousand and one stupid little crap-apps with more malware, scamware, and virus tagalongs than anyone knows what to do with. Oh, and we're also now dealing with all the other crap that happened since some of what Marcy the Clueless Bitch set loose on the network is causing other problems.
Repeat ad nauseum. "Filter the web, some jerkass clicked on a link in a spam email from his Yahoo email and got his computer infected!!!" followed a few days later by "Turn off that filtering the CEO can't get to his porn sites to jerk off in his corner office."
"Software Audits" and keeping in compliance sound fine, right up until the moment when some CEO/CTO decides it's fine to "cheat" a little bit and orders you, the IT guy, to install twice as many copies of something as they paid for licenses to install. If you DO do it, your ass is the one on the line when the BSA comes knocking, and if you DON'T do it, your ass is on the curb in a market with over 20% Real Unemployment and outsourcing and "free trade" fucking over the job market worse every day.
I got about 40 hours in. Set it aside for a month and then tried again to see if it would fare any better (took me a second try to get the hang of, and start enjoying, FF12).
The fact that they are making a sequel to the world's crappiest corridor simulator is just stupid. Someone needs to fly over to Japan, smack Sqeenix's executives upside the head and shout "STOP MAKING CRAP" in their ears.
Never heard what came of it..
Your answer is staring you in the face.
They just assume every hack is instantly for piracy. Which is a little silly.
Is there piracy out there? Sure. On the other hand, I was using a couple of old Xboxes (original not 360) I'd gotten at a flea market, softmodded and loaded with XBMC, as nice little network video frontends for a good long while. Can't remember when the last time I ever played an "official" game on them, though I did have some fun with xDuke and xDescent for a while (and yes, I bought original copies of both years ago) - and the hard drives were tiny as fuck, so there was no point "ripping" a game to hard drive anyways.
I disagree, PSN requires a certain firmware version.
Actually, no.
PSN requires that the firmware report back a certain version number, and maybe a couple of other "right answers."
There's a world of difference there, as the custom firmware setups for the PSP have proven time and again.
Mostly, MS catches people on "hacked" Xbox360's by catching them playing games that they shouldn't have yet (like when a certain Call of Duty game got leaked early).
There have been rumors that they also managed to code a check in for "modified drive firmware", and checks for various cheat-hacks on certain games. And of course there was the famous standbying cheat...
Just FYI,
the one you linked to won't fit either.
PS3's require a 9.5mm height drive. All the new 1TB's, as you point out, use the 12.5mm height that won't fit in anything but very specific Macs (not even an HP or Dell laptop's drive caddy will accommodate them).
the largest drive you can fit into a PS3 is currently 750GB. Which, let's face it, is PLENTY of space to load a library of games to.
On the other hand, word is you can load any game without a file in excess of 4GB (filesize limit of FAT32, for some strange reason the PS3 will only accept FAT32-formatted external storage) directly to an external hard drive and just play it from there.
On a screen the size of the PSP's, games originally coded for the PS1 looked as good.
Everything looks better when you scale it down - pixelation vanishes, lack of curves on small polygons doesn't matter as much.
Welcome to the United States of Corporations.
Once upon a time, we busted up monopolies. Now we have a fake republic where the Republicans and Democrats are both OWNED by the monopolies.
Wrong. There are multiple writes/reads as it swaps parts of the game in and out of the "reserved playspace" of the NAND. Then there's the added wear and tear of swapping savegame blocks back and forth.
Then there's the fact that Big N used shitty-cheap NAND chips especially in the earlier runs... ever actually taken a tool analysis of an early Wii and seen the "factory bad blocks" like fucking polka-dots all over the NAND?
Explain how you think that they are "clones."
Android has multiple buttons (thank god).
Spacing icons out on a screen and having multiple "pages" on a screen is not unique to Apple. If anything, Apple ripped off RIM for that.
Only partially - the Wii's kludge to allow "launching games from the SD card" massively increases wear and tear on the system's internal flash storage. Expect to see a rash of Wii's dying from internal flash failure next year from certain heavy users doing this.