Sometimes, you're hired to do a job, and not given the priveledges necessary to do it, but you must do it anyway.
I expect a normal person would have simply shouted insults at their superiors and walked away from the job if they were put in this sort of stupid hopeless situation, rather than commit a number of serious felonies like this guy did.
They were told years ago there would be fines if they didn't comply by December 2004. To wait until 2006 to even begin to work on it is procrastination at its best/worst.
That's GTK2, with the default, ugly theme. It supports other themes, but it's been a while since I've installed one by hand. I bet it'll change before there's an official release.
Evolution wasn't an easy port by the looks of it. There were lots and lots of Gnome dependencies that had to be ported to win32 before they could even think about porting Evolution. It really wasn't made to run on anything but Gnome on Linux/Unix, but there's been a lot of demand, and the Evolution porting effort will open the door for porting other GTK2/Gnome applications to Windows.
Thunderbird looks like a native Windows application because they gave it a theme that looked like Windows. In reality it's all XUL, rendered by the same Gecko engine that renders the web pages in Firefox.
After 6 years of Ballmer, Gates has been looking like a pretty nice guy. Gates had vision. Ballmer just spread a lot of crap about Linux being a cancer and such. And most of Microsoft's products have seen no significant improvement since 2000, just constant retheming, buggy product activation, increased requirements, reduced features to sell higher end editions, and decreased performance (server software aside). The anticompetitive tactics we criticized them for before have grown to become their sole strategy. Making a better (for consumers) product isn't even on the map, because they have faith that they have more to gain than lose by these non-productive short-sighted anti-customer get-richer-quick schemes.
People won't brute force your 96 bit passwords, but that doesn't make you secure. I'm betting you have plenty of bigger security problems that have been ignored/overlooked.
Aware of what it was capable of, I installed the Notifications update on my work PC (I run Linux at home), assuming (though not entirely believing) that there should be no risk because I'm a legitimate customer. My install validates as genuine, both through Microsoft's web validation and using their downloadable WGA diagnostics tool. It validated before and it still validates. But that didn't stop the annoying WGA notifications from harrassing me at bootup, at login, in the system tray, and at shutdown.
I plan to do nothing to manually disable it but will instead continue to bug Microsoft support and piss and moan on various message boards until it's fixed. That way I'll stay legal (lets not violate the DMCA), create more work for Microsoft (to fix the problem they created, which I can't _legally_ fix myself), and to spread the word to customers with similar problems to tell them that Microsoft's notification software is merely trying to illegaly con them into buying a second license for their already legitimately licensed copy of Windows XP.
I doubt that was Microsoft's intent, to accuse legitimate users of piracy in order to sell double licenses, but they've allowed it to happen and have so far neglected to fix it, which (if such neglect continues) would make them no better than if it was their original intent. And their support has been unhelpful so far, as though I'm talking to an autoresponder with a human name assigned to it, which probably isn't far from the truth.
Same here. Restored from the bundled eMachines restore CD and now it fails WGA. Microsoft is delusional if they really believe WGA is accurate. They have actually publicly stated that they have not discovered a single false positive, which is complete bullshit. I'm concerned that people with legit copies will give in to the pressure and pay those assholes for falsely accusing them of pirating Windows XP HOME EDITION.
I have an emachine at work (purchased from CostCo) which I was later forced to reinstall using the eMachines restore CD that came with it. WGA _sometimes_ thinks it's invalid now. Online WGA validation usually succeeds, but it failed once last year, and yesterday I started getting WGA notifications, but they're gone today. Odd, and infuriating. I read a page on their site where they claim there were zero (0, as in not a single one) WGA false positives during the first half of 2005. I guess they chose to ignore the one I reported. If they redefine "legitimate" to mean "passes WGA", then and only then could they have honestly made such a bullshit claim.
I also have a legit Office XP installation on an older system that spontaneously decided to demand reactivation, even though there had been no hardware changes in over a year. It reactivated fine, without requiring me to call in. It had demanded reactivation by phone a couple years before as well, but that was after replacing the video card.
Normally that's true, and courts have upheld that profit maximization is expected, but "Don't be evil" and "Making the world a better place" are both clearly stated in Google's IPO prospectus. Stockholders shouldn't be surprised if they do what they said they were going to do when they went public. It might be different if they made no mention of it.
I think I see your problem, or part of it. You sell CD's online, and ship them in the mail. People want instant gratification. Discreetness is a concern as well. They want to play X-Change 2 right now and they don't want anyone to know about it. Irrational fears about sharing their payment info with an online porn retailer is also a factor, but there's no getting around that. You definitely have no trouble marketing the stuff: http://www.somethingawful.com/hentai/
I've gotten flame emails from people who think my shareware should be freeware, and some have even released partial cracks, back when all my programs were $5. Some people will never pay for software. I basically gave up on shareware years ago though.
As for the disappearance the thepiratebay.org, there will always be another site to take their place. As long as it's possible to communicate over the internet, there will be massive piracy over the internet.
VB was the best Windows RAD tool of its era, apart from perhaps Delphi. If you wanted to develop large applications in a very short amount of time, you used VB. It was the perfect tool for custom software, tailored to the needs of a very small customer base (small-medium enterprises). The company I work for uses an ERP system that's a mix of COBOL and VB6, the result of 30 years of development. The very thought of it gave me nightmares, but I got over them after a few months.
VB6 does real compilation, producing executables that are probably 1/3 as fast as C++, which isn't bad.
On the other hand, VB6 seems to get sluggish when you have more than 100,000 or so strings in memory. Nearing that boundary, I've gotten performance increases by storing strings in a file and just remembering their addresses, even when there's plenty of free ram, which is crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
"sellers may not request payment through online payment methods not specifically permitted in this policy"
And they give some examples. Not that they needed to.
Sometimes, you're hired to do a job, and not given the priveledges necessary to do it, but you must do it anyway.
I expect a normal person would have simply shouted insults at their superiors and walked away from the job if they were put in this sort of stupid hopeless situation, rather than commit a number of serious felonies like this guy did.
They were told years ago there would be fines if they didn't comply by December 2004. To wait until 2006 to even begin to work on it is procrastination at its best/worst.
I'm pretty sure object-relational mapping has been around since long before 2000 though, if that's what the patent is about.
If you haven't installed WGA, how would they disable your system?
This link made front page on digg yesterday:
AOL Wants to Sell "Internet" to the Dead
They refused to cancel the account of her dead mother. Didn't make a big difference since all her credit cards were cancelled, but crazy nonetheless.
That's GTK2, with the default, ugly theme. It supports other themes, but it's been a while since I've installed one by hand. I bet it'll change before there's an official release.
Evolution wasn't an easy port by the looks of it. There were lots and lots of Gnome dependencies that had to be ported to win32 before they could even think about porting Evolution. It really wasn't made to run on anything but Gnome on Linux/Unix, but there's been a lot of demand, and the Evolution porting effort will open the door for porting other GTK2/Gnome applications to Windows.
Thunderbird looks like a native Windows application because they gave it a theme that looked like Windows. In reality it's all XUL, rendered by the same Gecko engine that renders the web pages in Firefox.
After 6 years of Ballmer, Gates has been looking like a pretty nice guy. Gates had vision. Ballmer just spread a lot of crap about Linux being a cancer and such. And most of Microsoft's products have seen no significant improvement since 2000, just constant retheming, buggy product activation, increased requirements, reduced features to sell higher end editions, and decreased performance (server software aside). The anticompetitive tactics we criticized them for before have grown to become their sole strategy. Making a better (for consumers) product isn't even on the map, because they have faith that they have more to gain than lose by these non-productive short-sighted anti-customer get-richer-quick schemes.
Way way back when they had more competition, they were pretty cheap, or rather the competition was extremely expensive.
Don't forget the exception where if your song is popular enough, he'll sing it polka style.
Call me when they find an ethanol cloud.
Doing some price checking, I came up with a 45tb Coraid setup with sixty 750gb drives for slightly over $45k. Not bad.
People won't brute force your 96 bit passwords, but that doesn't make you secure. I'm betting you have plenty of bigger security problems that have been ignored/overlooked.
I think you forgot the "crack the WGA server's SSL certificate" step, unless Microsoft forgot to use one in the first place.
Aware of what it was capable of, I installed the Notifications update on my work PC (I run Linux at home), assuming (though not entirely believing) that there should be no risk because I'm a legitimate customer. My install validates as genuine, both through Microsoft's web validation and using their downloadable WGA diagnostics tool. It validated before and it still validates. But that didn't stop the annoying WGA notifications from harrassing me at bootup, at login, in the system tray, and at shutdown.
I plan to do nothing to manually disable it but will instead continue to bug Microsoft support and piss and moan on various message boards until it's fixed. That way I'll stay legal (lets not violate the DMCA), create more work for Microsoft (to fix the problem they created, which I can't _legally_ fix myself), and to spread the word to customers with similar problems to tell them that Microsoft's notification software is merely trying to illegaly con them into buying a second license for their already legitimately licensed copy of Windows XP.
I doubt that was Microsoft's intent, to accuse legitimate users of piracy in order to sell double licenses, but they've allowed it to happen and have so far neglected to fix it, which (if such neglect continues) would make them no better than if it was their original intent. And their support has been unhelpful so far, as though I'm talking to an autoresponder with a human name assigned to it, which probably isn't far from the truth.
Our servers run CentOS.
Same here. Restored from the bundled eMachines restore CD and now it fails WGA. Microsoft is delusional if they really believe WGA is accurate. They have actually publicly stated that they have not discovered a single false positive, which is complete bullshit. I'm concerned that people with legit copies will give in to the pressure and pay those assholes for falsely accusing them of pirating Windows XP HOME EDITION.
And Google Toolbar with pagerank checking enabled tells Google every url you ever visit.
I have an emachine at work (purchased from CostCo) which I was later forced to reinstall using the eMachines restore CD that came with it. WGA _sometimes_ thinks it's invalid now. Online WGA validation usually succeeds, but it failed once last year, and yesterday I started getting WGA notifications, but they're gone today. Odd, and infuriating. I read a page on their site where they claim there were zero (0, as in not a single one) WGA false positives during the first half of 2005. I guess they chose to ignore the one I reported. If they redefine "legitimate" to mean "passes WGA", then and only then could they have honestly made such a bullshit claim.
I also have a legit Office XP installation on an older system that spontaneously decided to demand reactivation, even though there had been no hardware changes in over a year. It reactivated fine, without requiring me to call in. It had demanded reactivation by phone a couple years before as well, but that was after replacing the video card.
I run Linux at home, since 2003.
Normally that's true, and courts have upheld that profit maximization is expected, but "Don't be evil" and "Making the world a better place" are both clearly stated in Google's IPO prospectus. Stockholders shouldn't be surprised if they do what they said they were going to do when they went public. It might be different if they made no mention of it.
You reboot when there's a kernel fix for something that actually applies to your use of the server.
I think I see your problem, or part of it. You sell CD's online, and ship them in the mail. People want instant gratification. Discreetness is a concern as well. They want to play X-Change 2 right now and they don't want anyone to know about it. Irrational fears about sharing their payment info with an online porn retailer is also a factor, but there's no getting around that. You definitely have no trouble marketing the stuff: http://www.somethingawful.com/hentai/
I've gotten flame emails from people who think my shareware should be freeware, and some have even released partial cracks, back when all my programs were $5. Some people will never pay for software. I basically gave up on shareware years ago though.
As for the disappearance the thepiratebay.org, there will always be another site to take their place. As long as it's possible to communicate over the internet, there will be massive piracy over the internet.
VB was the best Windows RAD tool of its era, apart from perhaps Delphi. If you wanted to develop large applications in a very short amount of time, you used VB. It was the perfect tool for custom software, tailored to the needs of a very small customer base (small-medium enterprises). The company I work for uses an ERP system that's a mix of COBOL and VB6, the result of 30 years of development. The very thought of it gave me nightmares, but I got over them after a few months.
Starting with VB5, VB performed real native compilation, but still required a runtime.
VB6 does real compilation, producing executables that are probably 1/3 as fast as C++, which isn't bad.
On the other hand, VB6 seems to get sluggish when you have more than 100,000 or so strings in memory. Nearing that boundary, I've gotten performance increases by storing strings in a file and just remembering their addresses, even when there's plenty of free ram, which is crazy.