I had fun playing Extreme Beach Volleyball. I thought it was funny - it's all about the T&A - digital as it might be. The game itself (playing volleyball) was fun, especially with four players.
It wasn't an especially difficult game, but I don't need to be mentally challenged everywhere I go. Sometimes you just like to sit back and play a fun, easy game for awhile.
And no, I didn't know you could play with one hand you sick bastard. =P
I agree with you - 25 isn't an old gamer. Not anymore.
Shit. We grew up on video games. I owned an original (woodgrain) Atari 2600, and I was very young. I was never spoiled with video games, but I do remember playing them as far back as I can remember. Just because I'm in my mid-20's now doesn't mean I'll suddenly lose interest - and it doesn't mean I need different games.
MMORPG's are a pretty new thing, really. They're not for everyone - you have to have a lot of free time to do anything meaningful in the game. If they try to dumb it down to where you don't have to put in a lot of time, it ceases to be a worthwhile MMORPG. Fortunately, for every MMORPG, there's about two hundred non-MMORPG games released; pleny for us people with full time jobs.
I think I'll always enjoy FPS games, especially team-based ones. I've always enjoyed an (offline) RPG, although nothing's been able to add up to Ultima in my eyes. So if they start trying to make new games that tailor to us "old gamers of 25 years of age" thinking that we want something different, they won't sell us any of those games.
"When you perform miracle after miracle to save their asses time after time, they get lazy and start believing that that is the natural order of things."
Yes! I enjoy my job and I'm always very helpful to everyone around me, including the dev team, end-users, and other MIS folks. I get it done fast because I know that's how I like it when I ask for something, too. Unfortunately, it does bite you in the ass. You do need to eventually push back a little bit, or else you'll end up in your scenerio. It sucks.
When someone asks me to do something for a third time, I'll give them some tongue. One of the help desk guys is now into getting user profiles re-created to fix just about EVERYTHING. Since only myself and a couple others have access to do it, I've had to fuck with roaming profiles all day instead of doing my project work. So yesterday, I bitched him out about it. I said "What's the problem?" and I fixed it in four minutes without touching the user profile. I then proceeded to lecture him on how it should now be considered a last resort.
I usually tell my manager about such things, in the event that someone complains that I'm not doing my job, even though I've done it better then the last three admins in this place. Unfortunately, if it's management porking you, you can't do anything about it. Then, you have to decide whether or not to find a new job. Fortunately, in IT, one of the only ways to advance your career is to change jobs, so it's not like finding a new job is anything new to most of us =)
I don't necessarily agree that DRM is even necessary at all, but if you must have some protection, it must be reasonable. It must allow us to make backups. It must not allow, in any way shape or form, the media companies to control what you have purchased. In the end, it's not about stopping copyright infringement to these companies however - new DRM is as much about setting things up to control your media and get more money from you.
Let's not forget here that almost all DVDs and almost all music CDs are distributed through only a handful of companies. These companies could easily force DRM down on us however they want, and what are people going to do - stop buying music completely? Stop buying movies completely? People love buying these things. No company wants public outcry against them, but it's not altogether crazy to imagine us getting there with small steps. You know, like how the government takes away our freedom one small little law at a time. Because, you know. Terrorists. Or something.
DRM itself is a power-play to make lots of money. If folks were truly serious about the security of the media, and not using DRM to lock people in or out, it would be open source technology.
I do tend to be somewhat alarmist about DRM, but I feel it's necessary. We shouldn't just roll-over and eat whatever shit they feed us. I want people to understand what we're getting into here, and what could easily become if we don't pay attention. I can't accept "the market will decide" positions when it comes to my freedom to do what is is legally acceptable.
The whole concept of keeping personal backups didn't happen recently, and it only became an issue once we were actually able to do so. Back in the days of the old 78RPM ceramic records and until recordable tapes became available you simply couldn't make copies. There was no way to do it.
So it's fair to say that ever since the dawn of personal recording devices has DRM been an issue. DRM doesn't have to be technical - it can be legal. That's why there were court cases back when the personal computer was an Apple II and everyone was buying dubbing cassette decks. Those court cases have established strong precedents to allow for personal copies.
Now that we have the *ability* to copy our own media, you don't think we should be able to protect our investments? After all, we're not buying the media, we're buying what's on it. What DRM does is artificially stop people from doing something that is not illegal.
Obviously in my original posting I laid out some worst-case scenarios that weren't meant to be taken for reality - I believe that the next generation of DRM will be a small bit less far out. But if you look at the specifications for the new HD-DVD/Blu-Ray DRM, and if you see what's happening with HDCP and "secure path" audio and video, it's pretty scary./Sidebar: DRM also has the potential to lock-out any number of small businesses, software, or devices from the market. Because the fact that almost all DRM is proprietary closed-source software and/or hardware which generally incurs steep licensing fees to use, you're locking out the entire free software community from accessing any of the data, you're stopping all but the biggest bank-rolls from producing anything on said media, and you will suddenly lose the ability to choose which device suits your needs since you can only use sanctioned hardware to use the media. This is a very bad thing for Linux or *BSD, but a very good thing for Microsoft and Apple./
I don't want to rent. I make purchases to own. Everything is a monthly fee these days and it gets out of hand. People do get sick of it, and that's why (I believe) strict copy protection and "limited use" items have never really taken off in the US. Yet. But I only think it's a matter of time. The RIAA isn't stupid, and I think the lawsuits are just one part of a larger campaign to get people comfortable with the idea of hard content protection. "It's because of all the pirates." But like someone else on this thread pointed out, it's probably not copyright infringement that these companies are trying to stop - it's just a vehicle to a system that will potentially allow the content providers power to charge make a lot more money without providing anything above what we currently have.
I do agree that there will likely be a way to move media from one player to another. I'm guessing a player's ID would expire after time if left unused.
I've had some great jobs and some not-so great jobs. The one I'm at now is in the middle. I have the opportunity to learn some stuff that's not too easy to get a lot of hands-on with while not being a specialist. I trust myself not to f*ck anything, because I am careful, I document, and I have a lot of experience in the field. Unfortunately, a lot of my time is taken up doing "lesser" work because I can't trust the other guys to do things right. I know that in the place I work, I'll get the shaft if something critical (such as a backup) can't be restored, even though the backup system is in place, documented, and easy to maintain. I end up doing a lot of it just to make sure I don't eat the shit for a failure.
I usually prefer to keep my data at home on-line in RAID sets. It's cheap enough for big ass SATA disks, quickly accessable, and I know the moment one of the disks degrades. Hard drives offline sitting in a safe or something could degrade and you'd never know it. You having multiple copies definately helps, however, as well as making PARs or other recovery data available. I ship LTO tapes off to my sister's house once in awhile Just In Case.
I just don't trust DVD/CD recordable media for long term storage. Maybe if I get a dual layer HD-DVD or Blu-Ray recorder for my PC, I'll use it more since I'd have to use a lot fewer discs. As it stands right now, it would take me well over a hundred dual-layer DVD recordables to back everything up.
Of course, at work, the whole data protection system is completely different because of the shear volume of data and (more importantly) data changes every day.
While yes, you could go out and sue everyone all the time, it's just not something the average consumer is able to do. Time out from work, money, effort - to go up against a big corporation that indeed put into the "EULA" that they could revoke the license at any time for any reason - which you magically agree to when you insert your disc into the player.
I am a firm believer that EULA's are often not enforcable - at least parts of them. Just because a company says so, doesn't mean it's so. Or legal. In reality, unfortunately, it takes so much effort to go up against these big companies that it's just not worth it. And they know it.
In response to a few of your comments specifically: You purchase carpets with the full knowledge that they are something that WILL wear out. You use carpets every day. They are priced accordingly. And I see no reason why the media companies would want you to be able to sell your discs or players to other people, since someone (gasp!) might be able to play a disc that they didn't buy - it was given to them!
It's more then simply not liking it.
on
A Look at Google DRM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The evil part is that you don't have control over what you purchased, they do. Copy protection is one thing, but modern DRM, in general, is taking it a quite a step further.
It's easy to see how the future of DRM will screw you:
Say you buy 100 Blu-Ray movies over the course of a few years. They aren't cheap.
- Then, when you want to watch one, the disc authentication servers are down - Or your network connection is down - Or, the company goes out of business or "end of lifes" your movies -now half your collection is unplayable. - You put in a scratched disc, and the player's broken firmware reports you're a pirate. The server disables your player. - You've had a flood, fire, and one of your players was stolen. Whoops, that's too many player units for your "consumer discs." All your discs won't play anymore. - You have no way to protect your investment against disasters - no way to backup the data you paid for. Do no underestimate this! Especially if you have your collection in an area with lots of guests or kids. - Disney wants to release another "lion king" in Super Remastered Ultra Uncut editions. They disable all their old discs, so you can't show your kid the Lion King when he asks you to unless you go out and buy the new one. - Sony decides it's costing them too much money to run the DRM authentication servers. They decide to charge all users $15/mo. If you don't you can't play any of your discs.
DVD's DRM is often cited as a DRM that was universally accepted but it doesn't really count because DVD's CSS was so easy to break the discs are pratically unencrypted.
It's worse then "sucks." It's severely punishing the honest consumer at large for the crimes of the few. They spend so much money on developing and enforcing the DRM that it would be cheaper to simple do *nothing.* But you can't make that case, the big corps don't hear it.
If you use it at work, you musn't do much administration?
- BackupExec console won't install - Exchange System Manager won't install - Wyse Rapport won't install - SolarWinds tools have issues - GPMC has issues - VMWare Virtual Center client won't install - Extreme Epicenter won't run correctly - SQL Enterprise Manager has issues - SMS Console wouldn't install - Many games don't like running properly in x64
I gave up after that.
I didn't say security issues were worse, I said it had the same. And while I've not been personally attacked by a virus/whatever in quite some time, that still doesn't mean I can leave machines unpatched.
I forgot to mention an important point here - you can get a NEW linux installation on old hardware, with NEW applications. Complete with security patches and features. None of this "Well, Windows 95 runs great on a 486" nonsense. I tend to remember that Windows 95 is end of life, with no support, no security updates, and practically no new software will run on it. The hardware that Microsoft has long since put behind them is still viable in some environments running Linux.
Exactly, and that's what makes the whole thing stupid.
Microsoft doesn't know how to attack Linux, since it comes in so many shapes and sizes. So, they pick a specific point where they know the results will be favorable - or at least not negative in their direction.
It's a dumb argument. The point of Linux is that you can do whatever you want with it, anyone can. And I can get a distribution (or make my own!) that will run happily on a 486 with limited memory, complete with a GUI and some software such as a web browser, less full-featured word processors/etc (over OpenOffice), great mail clients, etc. If you have a new PC, you'll want a prettier desktop with lots of bling, and apps that take advantage of your hardware. I tend to remember doing just this with Linux, with my 486, when I still used one as my primary PC. It wasn't as long ago as it seems.
If they say CE will run on old hardware, well, good for them. But it doesn't mean anything (we can't get it) and it proves as much as this 'test'. Nothing.
Actually, his whole post was wrong. Windows x64 runs more like a nightmare. Half the stuff is broken, a lot of 32 bit apps don't run correctly, drivers are not exactly easy to come by, and it's got just as much issues with security as the other versions of Windows.
Maybe Vista will make Windows 64-bit more seamless but I somehow doubt it.
Some reviews are good. The ones done by journalists that have some experience in the general field of journalism. They know how to write something interesting and meaningful.
The problem with "Internet Journalism" is that for the most part, you don't need any of those qualifications. You can pretty much just pick up a keyboard and write and article. I'm surprised at the loads of junk you find on the "big" game review sites to tell you the truth - you'd think they would want people that can write well. But I guess they don't really care, as long as people come to the sites.
I believe that most game reviews are childish, boring, redundant, and seemingly written by high school kids. While a review is, by it's very nature, an opinion piece of sorts - many of these game reviews are simply too opinionated and biased to be considered anything but a weblog. Unfortunately, they're not presented as such.
Even the hardware review sites like C|Net are really horrible at accurately reviewing anything. They'll get facts wrong, they won't figure out a feature so they say it's not there, etc.
Just like anything else, you just need to understand the source and know that anything published online should be viewed with a level of skepticism.
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I'm glad you made the comment on Internet porn. There's so much more stuff on the Internet that's NOT porn. While it might be easy enough to find porn sites, the number of non-porn sites easily outnumbers them. It's a bunk argument that's always used as a point against the Internet.
Yes that does say it all. Don't back up to DVD's using an old LiteOn DVD.
Disks do cost a lot of money to spin. Unless you're talking USB backup drives, which I'm not, spinning fifty 10K RPM disks in SCSI enclosures isn't cheap. Disks can fail quite often when you have a bunch of them, and yes, power isn't free. The several thousand dollars a year it could cost you on power should be onto the list of expenses here. It's not something that would tip the scale usually, but it's cost.
Backup to Disk is a great thing that's only been recently a big deal because the costs have come down enough to make it feasable. It's still expensive, but it's not as unbearable as it has been in the past. All along I've said that I agree that backup to disk is a great thing. I do believe we'll see more and more of it. It can and does replace tape systems as a complete solution - but you still need tapes to store more then a few weeks or a couple months of backups, unless you were able to procure a huge amount of backup disks. And you still need tapes to take off site. My stance on this hasn't changed at all on these points.
The thing is, you just don't "get it." So I can't really continue a discussion with someone that absolutely will not see my point of view at all. On my end, I understand your concerns about compression, and "Archiving" as you call it - (what do you mean by that anyways? Wait, I really don't care) but I feel as though there's not going to be any difference in the way you perform your backup whether you compress or not. You either do it the right way to ensure that any corruption won't kill you, compressed or not, or you don't. It doesn't matter what you're backing up - if you get corruption it's a junk backup. To disk, tape, whatever. It can and will occur and you shouldn't be more relaxed with your backups just because you believe you should be able to reconstruct corrupted uncompressed files.
You put up these hypothetical situations where you didn't perform the right steps to ensure your backup was good, and somehow not using compression saved you. These situations don't matter in (any) business. If you'd have tested your backup, you wouldn't have been in the position of having to muddle through a corrupt restore. If you'd have had two copies of your backup (disk and tape, or tape and tape, or whatever) you'd have not had to deal with it. If you had a previous backup from the night before, you'd have not had to deal with it. It's not about saving money, it's about doing the right thing. If you have a good backup plan, it doesn't even matter if compression caused the entire backup to be no good (although I don't agree that it would.) Don't you see?
Maybe it's a difference in IT experience. When I talk about cost savings, I'm talking for a medium to large enterprise system. The difference between two cost factors could be $350,000. In your place, if you're dealing with small data sets, the ratio of cost might be the same but the values wouldn't be. $400 is only $400 no matter the size of the company.
Oh well, thanks for the discussions. It's been fun. Happy new year.
"14 100GB drives at $800 apiece - nice, ignore the 300GB drives out now. Cut the cost by a factor of three, doesn't it? That's simple math, too."
Obviously it was a typo - if you read the post instead of trying to think of what to say next, you'd have seen that the total was 4200MB, which meant I quoted the 300GB drives you said were about $800 each. Jackass.
I thought about posting a small "I meant 300GB" but I didn't think you were that dim.
Hey if you look in the paragraph that you quoted, from that very satisfied user, you'd see the comment "we tape out during the day."
Meaning, they STILL USE TAPES. Like I said, backup to disk is a great thing that compliments backup to tape. I believe I did mention that I do backup to disk in my data center. It's not appropriate in every environment, in every situation, however. Disks are very expensive to run 24 hours a day, every day, and they have a high cost per MB over tapes. And realistically, you can't take them off site.
The only way to elimite tapes is to transfer your data out once it's been backed up via some other method, such as replication. This is NOT feasable in many environments. First of all, you need an off-site. Second, you need enough bandwidth to that site to handle the load, which will likely be extremely expensive. Third, it might not fit into your companies IT systems. It's potentially great for large companies with enough capital and huge IT budgets. I'm willing to bet that the survey you quoted was of medium-large companies.
Perhaps they ship less tapes out to Iron Mountain then they used to, which is a benefit. If they can afford a big enough disk system to hold data online for three months, good for them. It makes data retrieval easier, definitely. But it's expensive spinning all those disks 24 hours a day, and if they have a large volume of data, it's extremely expensive. And it doesn't replace tapes - they still need to ship tapes off site in the event that there's a flood or something that destroys the array or building. And it's NOT a reliability thing, it's an ease of use thing.
Notice that they aren't shipping hard disks off-site? And where does it say they don't use compression? I'll bet a week's salary that they DO do compression to those disks. And that the backup sets sit in large files on that array, much like a big archive that you're so afraid of.
The whole quote simply rehashes what I said, not what you've been saying.
You speak of cost like it doesn't matter. There's a difference between spending your money on a solid solution and spending far too much money with no benefit. Shit, it would be geat if we could have fifty redundant data centers with geospan clusters. I mean, cost is moot, right? What's a few million?
At least I didn't cut'n'paste some random marketing materials to hold my argument. You did that for me.
I see - and I don't really disagree with anything you've said. But I do believe that the user should be notified in some way - be it e-mails (read or not) phone calls, or whatever. If they're going to reduce the advertised speed on an individual basis based on observed network activity, they really should be required to make a "best effort" attempt to contact the user. Especially since many services have multiple tiers of service, which you pay accordingly for. If that means redirecting web traffic to gain attention, so be it.
They've done things like this in the past; comcast has blocked certian service for users because of Code Red and other worms. It happened to a friend of mine, and he recieved a phone call - they left a message. He called them, told them he fixed the problem, and port 80 blocking was removed. In this case, they contacted the user *and* diabled some of the service - which I don't necessarily agree with but it's quite a bit better then just turning him off and saying nothing like Cox did with it's users.
Let's just hope things like this really do stick to the malware issues. I already have about a dozen ports blocked with Cox, and I'd rather they not block all incoming services.
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I had fun playing Extreme Beach Volleyball. I thought it was funny - it's all about the T&A - digital as it might be. The game itself (playing volleyball) was fun, especially with four players.
It wasn't an especially difficult game, but I don't need to be mentally challenged everywhere I go. Sometimes you just like to sit back and play a fun, easy game for awhile.
And no, I didn't know you could play with one hand you sick bastard. =P
I agree with you - 25 isn't an old gamer. Not anymore.
Shit. We grew up on video games. I owned an original (woodgrain) Atari 2600, and I was very young. I was never spoiled with video games, but I do remember playing them as far back as I can remember. Just because I'm in my mid-20's now doesn't mean I'll suddenly lose interest - and it doesn't mean I need different games.
MMORPG's are a pretty new thing, really. They're not for everyone - you have to have a lot of free time to do anything meaningful in the game. If they try to dumb it down to where you don't have to put in a lot of time, it ceases to be a worthwhile MMORPG. Fortunately, for every MMORPG, there's about two hundred non-MMORPG games released; pleny for us people with full time jobs.
I think I'll always enjoy FPS games, especially team-based ones. I've always enjoyed an (offline) RPG, although nothing's been able to add up to Ultima in my eyes. So if they start trying to make new games that tailor to us "old gamers of 25 years of age" thinking that we want something different, they won't sell us any of those games.
83? I guess WoW isn't as much of a time-sink as EQ1 was. 83 ain't shit.
"When you perform miracle after miracle to save their asses time after time, they get lazy and start believing that that is the natural order of things."
Yes! I enjoy my job and I'm always very helpful to everyone around me, including the dev team, end-users, and other MIS folks. I get it done fast because I know that's how I like it when I ask for something, too. Unfortunately, it does bite you in the ass. You do need to eventually push back a little bit, or else you'll end up in your scenerio. It sucks.
When someone asks me to do something for a third time, I'll give them some tongue. One of the help desk guys is now into getting user profiles re-created to fix just about EVERYTHING. Since only myself and a couple others have access to do it, I've had to fuck with roaming profiles all day instead of doing my project work. So yesterday, I bitched him out about it. I said "What's the problem?" and I fixed it in four minutes without touching the user profile. I then proceeded to lecture him on how it should now be considered a last resort.
I usually tell my manager about such things, in the event that someone complains that I'm not doing my job, even though I've done it better then the last three admins in this place. Unfortunately, if it's management porking you, you can't do anything about it. Then, you have to decide whether or not to find a new job. Fortunately, in IT, one of the only ways to advance your career is to change jobs, so it's not like finding a new job is anything new to most of us =)
I don't necessarily agree that DRM is even necessary at all, but if you must have some protection, it must be reasonable. It must allow us to make backups. It must not allow, in any way shape or form, the media companies to control what you have purchased. In the end, it's not about stopping copyright infringement to these companies however - new DRM is as much about setting things up to control your media and get more money from you.
Let's not forget here that almost all DVDs and almost all music CDs are distributed through only a handful of companies. These companies could easily force DRM down on us however they want, and what are people going to do - stop buying music completely? Stop buying movies completely? People love buying these things. No company wants public outcry against them, but it's not altogether crazy to imagine us getting there with small steps. You know, like how the government takes away our freedom one small little law at a time. Because, you know. Terrorists. Or something.
DRM itself is a power-play to make lots of money. If folks were truly serious about the security of the media, and not using DRM to lock people in or out, it would be open source technology.
I do tend to be somewhat alarmist about DRM, but I feel it's necessary. We shouldn't just roll-over and eat whatever shit they feed us. I want people to understand what we're getting into here, and what could easily become if we don't pay attention. I can't accept "the market will decide" positions when it comes to my freedom to do what is is legally acceptable.
The whole concept of keeping personal backups didn't happen recently, and it only became an issue once we were actually able to do so. Back in the days of the old 78RPM ceramic records and until recordable tapes became available you simply couldn't make copies. There was no way to do it.
/Sidebar: DRM also has the potential to lock-out any number of small businesses, software, or devices from the market. Because the fact that almost all DRM is proprietary closed-source software and/or hardware which generally incurs steep licensing fees to use, you're locking out the entire free software community from accessing any of the data, you're stopping all but the biggest bank-rolls from producing anything on said media, and you will suddenly lose the ability to choose which device suits your needs since you can only use sanctioned hardware to use the media. This is a very bad thing for Linux or *BSD, but a very good thing for Microsoft and Apple./
So it's fair to say that ever since the dawn of personal recording devices has DRM been an issue. DRM doesn't have to be technical - it can be legal. That's why there were court cases back when the personal computer was an Apple II and everyone was buying dubbing cassette decks. Those court cases have established strong precedents to allow for personal copies.
Now that we have the *ability* to copy our own media, you don't think we should be able to protect our investments? After all, we're not buying the media, we're buying what's on it. What DRM does is artificially stop people from doing something that is not illegal.
Obviously in my original posting I laid out some worst-case scenarios that weren't meant to be taken for reality - I believe that the next generation of DRM will be a small bit less far out. But if you look at the specifications for the new HD-DVD/Blu-Ray DRM, and if you see what's happening with HDCP and "secure path" audio and video, it's pretty scary.
I don't want to rent. I make purchases to own. Everything is a monthly fee these days and it gets out of hand. People do get sick of it, and that's why (I believe) strict copy protection and "limited use" items have never really taken off in the US. Yet. But I only think it's a matter of time. The RIAA isn't stupid, and I think the lawsuits are just one part of a larger campaign to get people comfortable with the idea of hard content protection. "It's because of all the pirates." But like someone else on this thread pointed out, it's probably not copyright infringement that these companies are trying to stop - it's just a vehicle to a system that will potentially allow the content providers power to charge make a lot more money without providing anything above what we currently have.
I do agree that there will likely be a way to move media from one player to another. I'm guessing a player's ID would expire after time if left unused.
At least you didn't get nailed for it.
I've had some great jobs and some not-so great jobs. The one I'm at now is in the middle. I have the opportunity to learn some stuff that's not too easy to get a lot of hands-on with while not being a specialist. I trust myself not to f*ck anything, because I am careful, I document, and I have a lot of experience in the field. Unfortunately, a lot of my time is taken up doing "lesser" work because I can't trust the other guys to do things right. I know that in the place I work, I'll get the shaft if something critical (such as a backup) can't be restored, even though the backup system is in place, documented, and easy to maintain. I end up doing a lot of it just to make sure I don't eat the shit for a failure.
I usually prefer to keep my data at home on-line in RAID sets. It's cheap enough for big ass SATA disks, quickly accessable, and I know the moment one of the disks degrades. Hard drives offline sitting in a safe or something could degrade and you'd never know it. You having multiple copies definately helps, however, as well as making PARs or other recovery data available. I ship LTO tapes off to my sister's house once in awhile Just In Case.
I just don't trust DVD/CD recordable media for long term storage. Maybe if I get a dual layer HD-DVD or Blu-Ray recorder for my PC, I'll use it more since I'd have to use a lot fewer discs. As it stands right now, it would take me well over a hundred dual-layer DVD recordables to back everything up.
Of course, at work, the whole data protection system is completely different because of the shear volume of data and (more importantly) data changes every day.
While yes, you could go out and sue everyone all the time, it's just not something the average consumer is able to do. Time out from work, money, effort - to go up against a big corporation that indeed put into the "EULA" that they could revoke the license at any time for any reason - which you magically agree to when you insert your disc into the player.
I am a firm believer that EULA's are often not enforcable - at least parts of them. Just because a company says so, doesn't mean it's so. Or legal. In reality, unfortunately, it takes so much effort to go up against these big companies that it's just not worth it. And they know it.
In response to a few of your comments specifically: You purchase carpets with the full knowledge that they are something that WILL wear out. You use carpets every day. They are priced accordingly. And I see no reason why the media companies would want you to be able to sell your discs or players to other people, since someone (gasp!) might be able to play a disc that they didn't buy - it was given to them!
Well, I'd have my discs in a fire-proof safe that's water tight because you can't make any fucking backups =)
Wow, nothing gets past you.
The evil part is that you don't have control over what you purchased, they do. Copy protection is one thing, but modern DRM, in general, is taking it a quite a step further.
It's easy to see how the future of DRM will screw you:
Say you buy 100 Blu-Ray movies over the course of a few years. They aren't cheap.
- Then, when you want to watch one, the disc authentication servers are down
- Or your network connection is down
- Or, the company goes out of business or "end of lifes" your movies -now half your collection is unplayable.
- You put in a scratched disc, and the player's broken firmware reports you're a pirate. The server disables your player.
- You've had a flood, fire, and one of your players was stolen. Whoops, that's too many player units for your "consumer discs." All your discs won't play anymore.
- You have no way to protect your investment against disasters - no way to backup the data you paid for. Do no underestimate this! Especially if you have your collection in an area with lots of guests or kids.
- Disney wants to release another "lion king" in Super Remastered Ultra Uncut editions. They disable all their old discs, so you can't show your kid the Lion King when he asks you to unless you go out and buy the new one.
- Sony decides it's costing them too much money to run the DRM authentication servers. They decide to charge all users $15/mo. If you don't you can't play any of your discs.
DVD's DRM is often cited as a DRM that was universally accepted but it doesn't really count because DVD's CSS was so easy to break the discs are pratically unencrypted.
It's worse then "sucks." It's severely punishing the honest consumer at large for the crimes of the few. They spend so much money on developing and enforcing the DRM that it would be cheaper to simple do *nothing.* But you can't make that case, the big corps don't hear it.
Creative: Hey Mr. Fatal1ty, can we pay you $20,000 to put your name on this average mouse?
Fatal1ty: You betcha.
Okay AC, thanks.
o ld=-1&commentsort=0&tid=109&mode=thread&pid=144202 02#14422948
I'll refer you to my other post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173302&thresh
If you do more then Microsoft Office and Quake 4, you're going to run into problems.
If you use it at work, you musn't do much administration?
- BackupExec console won't install
- Exchange System Manager won't install
- Wyse Rapport won't install
- SolarWinds tools have issues
- GPMC has issues
- VMWare Virtual Center client won't install
- Extreme Epicenter won't run correctly
- SQL Enterprise Manager has issues
- SMS Console wouldn't install
- Many games don't like running properly in x64
I gave up after that.
I didn't say security issues were worse, I said it had the same. And while I've not been personally attacked by a virus/whatever in quite some time, that still doesn't mean I can leave machines unpatched.
I forgot to mention an important point here - you can get a NEW linux installation on old hardware, with NEW applications. Complete with security patches and features. None of this "Well, Windows 95 runs great on a 486" nonsense. I tend to remember that Windows 95 is end of life, with no support, no security updates, and practically no new software will run on it. The hardware that Microsoft has long since put behind them is still viable in some environments running Linux.
Exactly, and that's what makes the whole thing stupid.
Microsoft doesn't know how to attack Linux, since it comes in so many shapes and sizes. So, they pick a specific point where they know the results will be favorable - or at least not negative in their direction.
It's a dumb argument. The point of Linux is that you can do whatever you want with it, anyone can. And I can get a distribution (or make my own!) that will run happily on a 486 with limited memory, complete with a GUI and some software such as a web browser, less full-featured word processors/etc (over OpenOffice), great mail clients, etc. If you have a new PC, you'll want a prettier desktop with lots of bling, and apps that take advantage of your hardware. I tend to remember doing just this with Linux, with my 486, when I still used one as my primary PC. It wasn't as long ago as it seems.
If they say CE will run on old hardware, well, good for them. But it doesn't mean anything (we can't get it) and it proves as much as this 'test'. Nothing.
Actually, his whole post was wrong. Windows x64 runs more like a nightmare. Half the stuff is broken, a lot of 32 bit apps don't run correctly, drivers are not exactly easy to come by, and it's got just as much issues with security as the other versions of Windows.
Maybe Vista will make Windows 64-bit more seamless but I somehow doubt it.
Some reviews are good. The ones done by journalists that have some experience in the general field of journalism. They know how to write something interesting and meaningful.
The problem with "Internet Journalism" is that for the most part, you don't need any of those qualifications. You can pretty much just pick up a keyboard and write and article. I'm surprised at the loads of junk you find on the "big" game review sites to tell you the truth - you'd think they would want people that can write well. But I guess they don't really care, as long as people come to the sites.
I believe that most game reviews are childish, boring, redundant, and seemingly written by high school kids. While a review is, by it's very nature, an opinion piece of sorts - many of these game reviews are simply too opinionated and biased to be considered anything but a weblog. Unfortunately, they're not presented as such.
Even the hardware review sites like C|Net are really horrible at accurately reviewing anything. They'll get facts wrong, they won't figure out a feature so they say it's not there, etc.
Just like anything else, you just need to understand the source and know that anything published online should be viewed with a level of skepticism.
Call the FBI.
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I'm glad you made the comment on Internet porn. There's so much more stuff on the Internet that's NOT porn. While it might be easy enough to find porn sites, the number of non-porn sites easily outnumbers them. It's a bunk argument that's always used as a point against the Internet.
Yes that does say it all. Don't back up to DVD's using an old LiteOn DVD.
Disks do cost a lot of money to spin. Unless you're talking USB backup drives, which I'm not, spinning fifty 10K RPM disks in SCSI enclosures isn't cheap. Disks can fail quite often when you have a bunch of them, and yes, power isn't free. The several thousand dollars a year it could cost you on power should be onto the list of expenses here. It's not something that would tip the scale usually, but it's cost.
Backup to Disk is a great thing that's only been recently a big deal because the costs have come down enough to make it feasable. It's still expensive, but it's not as unbearable as it has been in the past. All along I've said that I agree that backup to disk is a great thing. I do believe we'll see more and more of it. It can and does replace tape systems as a complete solution - but you still need tapes to store more then a few weeks or a couple months of backups, unless you were able to procure a huge amount of backup disks. And you still need tapes to take off site. My stance on this hasn't changed at all on these points.
The thing is, you just don't "get it." So I can't really continue a discussion with someone that absolutely will not see my point of view at all. On my end, I understand your concerns about compression, and "Archiving" as you call it - (what do you mean by that anyways? Wait, I really don't care) but I feel as though there's not going to be any difference in the way you perform your backup whether you compress or not. You either do it the right way to ensure that any corruption won't kill you, compressed or not, or you don't. It doesn't matter what you're backing up - if you get corruption it's a junk backup. To disk, tape, whatever. It can and will occur and you shouldn't be more relaxed with your backups just because you believe you should be able to reconstruct corrupted uncompressed files.
You put up these hypothetical situations where you didn't perform the right steps to ensure your backup was good, and somehow not using compression saved you. These situations don't matter in (any) business. If you'd have tested your backup, you wouldn't have been in the position of having to muddle through a corrupt restore. If you'd have had two copies of your backup (disk and tape, or tape and tape, or whatever) you'd have not had to deal with it. If you had a previous backup from the night before, you'd have not had to deal with it. It's not about saving money, it's about doing the right thing. If you have a good backup plan, it doesn't even matter if compression caused the entire backup to be no good (although I don't agree that it would.) Don't you see?
Maybe it's a difference in IT experience. When I talk about cost savings, I'm talking for a medium to large enterprise system. The difference between two cost factors could be $350,000. In your place, if you're dealing with small data sets, the ratio of cost might be the same but the values wouldn't be. $400 is only $400 no matter the size of the company.
Oh well, thanks for the discussions. It's been fun. Happy new year.
Sorry, but I need to point something out:
"14 100GB drives at $800 apiece - nice, ignore the 300GB drives out now. Cut the cost by a factor of three, doesn't it? That's simple math, too."
Obviously it was a typo - if you read the post instead of trying to think of what to say next, you'd have seen that the total was 4200MB, which meant I quoted the 300GB drives you said were about $800 each. Jackass.
I thought about posting a small "I meant 300GB" but I didn't think you were that dim.
Hey if you look in the paragraph that you quoted, from that very satisfied user, you'd see the comment "we tape out during the day."
Meaning, they STILL USE TAPES. Like I said, backup to disk is a great thing that compliments backup to tape. I believe I did mention that I do backup to disk in my data center. It's not appropriate in every environment, in every situation, however. Disks are very expensive to run 24 hours a day, every day, and they have a high cost per MB over tapes. And realistically, you can't take them off site.
The only way to elimite tapes is to transfer your data out once it's been backed up via some other method, such as replication. This is NOT feasable in many environments. First of all, you need an off-site. Second, you need enough bandwidth to that site to handle the load, which will likely be extremely expensive. Third, it might not fit into your companies IT systems. It's potentially great for large companies with enough capital and huge IT budgets. I'm willing to bet that the survey you quoted was of medium-large companies.
Perhaps they ship less tapes out to Iron Mountain then they used to, which is a benefit. If they can afford a big enough disk system to hold data online for three months, good for them. It makes data retrieval easier, definitely. But it's expensive spinning all those disks 24 hours a day, and if they have a large volume of data, it's extremely expensive. And it doesn't replace tapes - they still need to ship tapes off site in the event that there's a flood or something that destroys the array or building. And it's NOT a reliability thing, it's an ease of use thing.
Notice that they aren't shipping hard disks off-site? And where does it say they don't use compression? I'll bet a week's salary that they DO do compression to those disks. And that the backup sets sit in large files on that array, much like a big archive that you're so afraid of.
The whole quote simply rehashes what I said, not what you've been saying.
You speak of cost like it doesn't matter. There's a difference between spending your money on a solid solution and spending far too much money with no benefit. Shit, it would be geat if we could have fifty redundant data centers with geospan clusters. I mean, cost is moot, right? What's a few million?
At least I didn't cut'n'paste some random marketing materials to hold my argument. You did that for me.
Good day.
Time to rename random number generators, since I can't explain why they're random. God must have designed them. It's /dev/god for me from now on.
I see - and I don't really disagree with anything you've said. But I do believe that the user should be notified in some way - be it e-mails (read or not) phone calls, or whatever. If they're going to reduce the advertised speed on an individual basis based on observed network activity, they really should be required to make a "best effort" attempt to contact the user. Especially since many services have multiple tiers of service, which you pay accordingly for. If that means redirecting web traffic to gain attention, so be it.
They've done things like this in the past; comcast has blocked certian service for users because of Code Red and other worms. It happened to a friend of mine, and he recieved a phone call - they left a message. He called them, told them he fixed the problem, and port 80 blocking was removed. In this case, they contacted the user *and* diabled some of the service - which I don't necessarily agree with but it's quite a bit better then just turning him off and saying nothing like Cox did with it's users.
Let's just hope things like this really do stick to the malware issues. I already have about a dozen ports blocked with Cox, and I'd rather they not block all incoming services.