If they don't want people to use their bandwidth to the fullest extent, they should charge per gb, not simply per month.
The only broadband provider in my area just raised their rates by $10/month. I was nice about bandwidth usage before, but now I feel cheated if I don't use it all. I was already paying double what many of my out of state friends pay.
Lucky for them, all versions of the drivers for the cable modem they gave me crash Windows XP if my usage is near the max for several hours.
But they'll soon get what they deserve. Their stock dropped to less 1/20th of last year's price and they're being investigated by the SEC.
There are many ways to look at this. The idea is to install the client, set Opera to use the same useragent string, visit some of those sites, then blame it on Grub if the FBI comes busting through your door.
If you're a criminal, installing the Grub client might be a great idea.
Yes, they are very strong. We failed to pass a 0.5% income tax increase, and they struck back by tripling road construction and taking 100% of the deficit, and then some, out of schools. I'm not voting Replublican ever again.
The place I work for used to have no passwords, meaning that any time an employee was asked to login, they just had to type their login name and hit enter. Not only that, but they were all running windows 2000 with administrative shares enabled, and every user was a member of the "domain admins" group. Anyone sitting at any computer in the company had full read/write access to every computer in the office, with no need to break any logins. In addition, none of them ever installed patches on their systems. Any time they opened an infected email attachment, which happened really quite often, especially at the CEO level, the virus would often spread to all the computers, and the network admin, who was actually just a shipping manager who had some computer experience, would have to clean all the computers again and sometimes restore them from previous backups.
They're doing much better now, but they still have a long way to go. Many of them still don't use passwords, and the rest use very predictable ones, but enforcing sound security practices is not in my job description.
At least there's the double firewalls, one in the office and one at the isp. There's also the frequent backups. They keep tape backups for the last 5 days and 1 tape goes to offsite storage every week. In addition, I took the liberty of writing a program to backup all the changes to the databases 3 times a day, so that they can be restored to any point in the last 8 months. If I can't force them to be secure, at least I can protect their data and patch any really major holes, like disabling the administrative shares.
It's pretty sad the lengths that people go to protect software from piracy. I've know of a company that spent $7000 on a piece of software, then downloaded a pirated copy of that exact software that they've already purchased, same version and everything, because the anti-piracy measures were too much of a pain to deal with. They weren't trying to do anything that would violate their license, there were just a lot of annoying circumstances where it mistakenly thought that they were, and dozens of hours of lost work as a result.
I myself have been annoyed a lot with anti-piracy measures in products I've legitimately purchased for use on my own computer, such as Office XP.
As for pirating software, I see it as disrespectful, selfish, and dishonest. If it's not worth the price, you don't need the software. If you need the software, maybe it's worth the price. If you pirate, it's unfair to the people who pay, and you're benefitting from someone else's work without giving them the compensation they ask in return. Sure, their work is done only once and then costs nothing to copy, but you're still making it unfair for others and getting something for free without completing your part of the bargain. Piracy is to blame for all the stupid, annoying, and/or scary anti-piracy laws and measures we're seeing today. If you don't want to pay someone's prices, you can decide to just not deal with them.
It's annoying to see all these kiddies who say "f**k micro$oft", but would rather use cracked microsoft products than one of the cheap or free alternatives, admitting that they think microsoft products are better, but they would rather insult them than compensate them for the benefit they derive from the software which they seem to secretly love so much.
Hey, Microsoft's paying a dividend. I should have read more before posting. So just substitute the name of some other company in the place of "Microsoft".
It looks like a pyramid scheme to me as well, at least for the stocks that don't pay out dividends.
You buy these little sheets of paper (read: shares) that say "Microsoft" on them so that you can sell them for a profit to someone who plans to do the same, even though they're really nothing more than little sheets of paper. Their only connection to Microsoft is that they have the name Microsoft on them and if you own enough of them, you can help decide the future of the company, but unless you're a billionaire to begin with, they have absolutely zero value unless you resell them to someone who plans to resell them for a little more.
I started with Basic when I was 9, and I turned out fine. But my mother encouraged me to master as many languages as I could as they became available to me, so I did.
Pascal seems like a very nice, but powerful starting language as well.
If you pay $20 for a CD, usually only about 60 cents of that will actually make it into the hands of the artist. So my $150 in Weird Al related purchases might have only earned him $5, though I suspect about $10-$15 because he's been around a while. That still isn't a lot.
I'd really like to see most of those record labels go bankrupt. Customers hate their fixed prices, and the artists see very little of that money, but they have no other choice if they want their music to appear on store shelves.
I don't see copy protection as a solution problem. One day there may be a law requiring all new cd players to disallow playing unsigned content, or signed content that where the public key hasn't also been signed by a trusted authority. This will only serve to create a monopoly, and hurt the people who actually create the content by limiting their abilities to choose alternate means of distribution. But hey, it sure would reduce casual piracy, at least after all the old cd players exceed their warranties and spontaneously catch fire.
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If they don't want people to use their bandwidth to the fullest extent, they should charge per gb, not simply per month.
The only broadband provider in my area just raised their rates by $10/month. I was nice about bandwidth usage before, but now I feel cheated if I don't use it all. I was already paying double what many of my out of state friends pay.
Lucky for them, all versions of the drivers for the cable modem they gave me crash Windows XP if my usage is near the max for several hours.
But they'll soon get what they deserve. Their stock dropped to less 1/20th of last year's price and they're being investigated by the SEC.
You beat us all to it. I was thinking about that as well.
There are many ways to look at this. The idea is to install the client, set Opera to use the same useragent string, visit some of those sites, then blame it on Grub if the FBI comes busting through your door.
If you're a criminal, installing the Grub client might be a great idea.
I didn't mean to suggest that they should keep using Microsoft products, but that does play a role.
Yes, they are very strong. We failed to pass a 0.5% income tax increase, and they struck back by tripling road construction and taking 100% of the deficit, and then some, out of schools. I'm not voting Replublican ever again.
Microsoft donates a lot to public schools. If government agencies were to start promoting the alternatives, well, you know...
The place I work for used to have no passwords, meaning that any time an employee was asked to login, they just had to type their login name and hit enter. Not only that, but they were all running windows 2000 with administrative shares enabled, and every user was a member of the "domain admins" group. Anyone sitting at any computer in the company had full read/write access to every computer in the office, with no need to break any logins. In addition, none of them ever installed patches on their systems. Any time they opened an infected email attachment, which happened really quite often, especially at the CEO level, the virus would often spread to all the computers, and the network admin, who was actually just a shipping manager who had some computer experience, would have to clean all the computers again and sometimes restore them from previous backups.
They're doing much better now, but they still have a long way to go. Many of them still don't use passwords, and the rest use very predictable ones, but enforcing sound security practices is not in my job description.
At least there's the double firewalls, one in the office and one at the isp. There's also the frequent backups. They keep tape backups for the last 5 days and 1 tape goes to offsite storage every week. In addition, I took the liberty of writing a program to backup all the changes to the databases 3 times a day, so that they can be restored to any point in the last 8 months. If I can't force them to be secure, at least I can protect their data and patch any really major holes, like disabling the administrative shares.
It's pretty sad the lengths that people go to protect software from piracy. I've know of a company that spent $7000 on a piece of software, then downloaded a pirated copy of that exact software that they've already purchased, same version and everything, because the anti-piracy measures were too much of a pain to deal with. They weren't trying to do anything that would violate their license, there were just a lot of annoying circumstances where it mistakenly thought that they were, and dozens of hours of lost work as a result.
I myself have been annoyed a lot with anti-piracy measures in products I've legitimately purchased for use on my own computer, such as Office XP.
As for pirating software, I see it as disrespectful, selfish, and dishonest. If it's not worth the price, you don't need the software. If you need the software, maybe it's worth the price. If you pirate, it's unfair to the people who pay, and you're benefitting from someone else's work without giving them the compensation they ask in return. Sure, their work is done only once and then costs nothing to copy, but you're still making it unfair for others and getting something for free without completing your part of the bargain. Piracy is to blame for all the stupid, annoying, and/or scary anti-piracy laws and measures we're seeing today. If you don't want to pay someone's prices, you can decide to just not deal with them.
It's annoying to see all these kiddies who say "f**k micro$oft", but would rather use cracked microsoft products than one of the cheap or free alternatives, admitting that they think microsoft products are better, but they would rather insult them than compensate them for the benefit they derive from the software which they seem to secretly love so much.
Zophar's Domain (an emulation site) has set up a nice hoax.
Hey, Microsoft's paying a dividend. I should have read more before posting. So just substitute the name of some other company in the place of "Microsoft".
It looks like a pyramid scheme to me as well, at least for the stocks that don't pay out dividends.
You buy these little sheets of paper (read: shares) that say "Microsoft" on them so that you can sell them for a profit to someone who plans to do the same, even though they're really nothing more than little sheets of paper. Their only connection to Microsoft is that they have the name Microsoft on them and if you own enough of them, you can help decide the future of the company, but unless you're a billionaire to begin with, they have absolutely zero value unless you resell them to someone who plans to resell them for a little more.
I started with Basic when I was 9, and I turned out fine. But my mother encouraged me to master as many languages as I could as they became available to me, so I did. Pascal seems like a very nice, but powerful starting language as well.
If you pay $20 for a CD, usually only about 60 cents of that will actually make it into the hands of the artist. So my $150 in Weird Al related purchases might have only earned him $5, though I suspect about $10-$15 because he's been around a while. That still isn't a lot.
I'd really like to see most of those record labels go bankrupt. Customers hate their fixed prices, and the artists see very little of that money, but they have no other choice if they want their music to appear on store shelves.
I don't see copy protection as a solution problem. One day there may be a law requiring all new cd players to disallow playing unsigned content, or signed content that where the public key hasn't also been signed by a trusted authority. This will only serve to create a monopoly, and hurt the people who actually create the content by limiting their abilities to choose alternate means of distribution. But hey, it sure would reduce casual piracy, at least after all the old cd players exceed their warranties and spontaneously catch fire.