Well, I hope Sony's happy. I hope they saved themselves a fortune with this software. Because you can add me to the list of people who will never buy another Sony product.
Considering that the company I work for is about to do an upgrade to a lot of our AV equipment (all consumer-line stuff), and it's my job to recommnd the equipment we buy, I can safely say that we're not getting Sony stuff. We were actually looking at getting some Sony stuff before (about $10 grand worth), but there's no way I'm letting that happen now (I was somewhat hesitant before given that Sony quality has dropped significantly over the last decade).
I know that this is Sony BMG that did this, and it's a whole different division of Sony that makes their televisions and stereos and junk, but there's no way I'm gonna shake the right hand while the left hand tries to stab me in the face.
Amatuer. You keep the beancounter's "backups" on that rack. Your blackmail and porn tapes are kept with your fine liquors in the fireproof vault , which your boss *thinks* he has the combination to (when he, in fact, has the emergency code that when punched in immediately triggers the halon release with the 60-second delay disabled).
Part of his complaint to the provincial labour board (Canadian) is that he was a regular employee, when he was a contractor. The labour board here is notoriously anti-employer, so that will hurt us.
As for the supervision, yeah, he was poorly supervised. At the time, I was the only person in the company with a functional grasp of html/php/etc (but I know dick all about flash, and I'm artistically devoid of all talent). As the sole tech/sysadmin for 90+ machines in 3 locations, I had plenty of other things to do than check his work. So yeah, he was poorly supervised.
As for payment, he was supposed to have been paid on completion. He said the site was done, but the whole thing was half-baked at best. So he was offered a check for less than half of the bill he handed us and he was pissed. Since the arrangement was "we'll pay you $x if we like what you've done", and he left half the site unfinished, he was lucky to get what he was offered. He refused the check and went to the labour board.
What it came down to was my boss, the guy who hired him, didn't do the background check he should have. He trusted this web dev when he shouldn't have. We got burned because of it, we learned a valuable lesson, and we might get burned again if the labour board finds against us.
I recently had an oddly similar experience. The rather small company I work for contracted a web-dev. Guy was a total mess. Wasted time trying to convince me to switch the LAMP server I set up to an IIS-based one, trying to convince me to buy him a $4000 server manager package (can't remember what it was called, but it was meant for large hosting companies, not single-server rigs like ours), etc. For weeks, I kept telling him to make sure he's building to standards (as well as pleading with him to test in firefox). He kept saying that it was 'unimportant'. Eventually he relented and said he'd start testing in firefox as well as IE.
A few weeks into the project, I get my hands on a copy of his experimental beta site. I try to load it up in firefox, and nothing. Nada. The flash he spent so much time on that comprised almost all of our site wouldn't load - it was a broken link. Worked fine in IE, so it wasn't that the file was missing. I didn't have time to look at it anymore, so I told him about the error and let him stew on it for a bit (he tried to blame it on the version of the flash plugin I was running). A few days later, I check again. Still the same problem. I talk to him about it, and he says he'll work on it. He spends 8 freaking hours on it, then tells me that "firefox can't support transparancies, so the site won't work in firefox ever".
This doesn't sound right to me, AT ALL. So I check his html code. Well, there it is. In his EMBED tag, he ref's 2 different file names - one exists, the other doesn't. IE picks one, firefox seems to have picked the other. I'm honestly surprised that it even loads. I fix his mistake, save the file, and load it up in firefox. The site looks like ass (and as I later found out, is mostly running stolen copyrighted code and code from tutorials he read, but that's a story for another time), but it works. Time taken: litterally, without exaggeration, less than 5 minutes. Probably less time than it took to come up with that lame-assed excuse about why he couldn't do it. To this day, I'm still too scared to check the site against the w3c standards.
Offtopic, I know, but I just had to rant (he's lodged a complaint over non-payment of wages against us recently, so I'm kinda cheesed off). Sorry, all.
I wrote him a letter already, but I plan on paying him (or his constit office, anyway) a visit in the next few days. My main pet peeve with this ammendment is the whole "circumventing protections" part. If you've ever been to The Matrix (and seeing as how Ralphie Boy is your MP and you're a slashdotter, you probably have), the only reason we manage to keep the rates as low as we do is that in Canada, we don't have to pay any obcene lisencing fees to game distributors to stay legal. Up here, the law says we're legal as long as we don't have more copies in use than we own. In the US, to stay legal, Lan centers are expected to pay thousands each year in licensing fees on top of the game purchase prices. We couldn't survive if we had to do that.
I suggest you pay his office a visit as well, if you can spare the time.
Ralph Goodale, M.P. Wascana
310 University Park Drive
Regina, Saskatchewan
S4V 0Y8 (no postage required)
Office Hours: Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Ask to be woken up when the money in your account has accumulated enough interest to be higher than the cost of the hibernation and wakeup procedure.
Be woken up 100 years later when the bank takes possesion of your body due to 100 years of overdue service charges, overdraft interests and late-payment penalties
Have your organs removed so that the bank manager can have them transplanted into his own body so that he may live another 100 years
the only people that end up losing 10 years of appeals are the ones that are truly guilty
Perhaps you should look into the story of David Milgaard - he lost over 20 years worth of appeals in a rape/murder case before DNA evidence exonerated him. Had he been in a jurisdiction that had the death penalty, he would have been executed years before the DNA evidence came to light. I'm sure you could find numerous examples of people caught in similar situations. A quick google for "wrongful conviction" brought up dozens of cases for me.
Oh, I agree completely - if a non-IT employee is using Knoppix (and isn't authorized), give 'em the boot. Keyword being "non-IT". Call me some sort of elitist if you must, but I feel that the average user shouldn't be allowed to change their screen-saver (changing mice and keyboards should be okay, since that's a comfort thing*). Seriously, a user that's allowed to install anything is a dangerous user. I wouldn't trust most users with anything more dangerous than nail clippers.
I'm talking about IT people using Knoppix. If a sysadmin is trying to recover data that a user stupidly didn't back up, a LiveCD is the best way to do that. The OP made it sound like ANY employee that used Knoppix got the boot, IT staff included.
Incidentally, if any company allows users to save sensitive data to their own hard drive, they're asking for problems. Sensitive files should be on a secure server, locked-down and access-restiricted. Disabling the USB ports treats the symptom, not the problem. And before anyone says boo about it, there ARE ways to prevent users from saving anything to their hard drive, even in XP.
* - I once worked for a company that, for some reason, let employees have admin rights on their NT machines. This led to massive problems (the usual stuff). But heaven forbid I want to change my mouse! I've got very large hands, and I couldn't comfortably use the standard-issue mouse. I asked if I could bring in my own, since the Employee Health Dept couldn't provide a mouse that I liked (the only alternatives were either the same size or those stupid-ass joystick style ones). IT said I wasn't allowed to use a non-standard mouse because it might cause the computers to crash.
Sweet merciful Zeus, what company do you work for that is so paranoid that it will fire employees for posessing a KNOPPIX disk?!? LiveCDs are by far the handiest trouble-shooting tools I've got for fixing borked XP installs. I'd hate to be in an IT dept that told me I wasn't allowed to use Knoppix simply because "hackers also use it".
If you don't wanna say, you could always post it as Anonymous and say something like "Well, I dunno who the GP works for, but MY company [company name] is like that":)
Slightly OT, any./'ers out there work for companies that have similar buttheaded rules? I don't want to work for or do any business with such companies. That level of paranoia makes corp cultures unbearable for employees, and I don't want to support that kind of behaviour.
How about this - with the inclusion of UnionFS (gawdDAMN is that cool), have it so that, on boot-up, apt-get update & upgrade from a trusted source (possibly one the bank has provided). Display a message saying "Please wait, we're just getting any security updates needed to keep your account safe" with a progress bar during the process.
That should solve that problem, I would imagine (unless the trusted apt repository gets compromised).
when you snag someone off the field in Afganistan, and they are carrying an AK-47, and are not in the Northern Alliance or a US Special Forces soldier using native weapons for practical reasons, then it is safe to assume they are a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer.
Or they could just be a farmer who picked up an AK-47 so he could defend his home from some Taliban scum trying to rape his family. He might not have any political affiliation at all.
You also have to keep in mind that there are many detainees in Gitmo who were picked up by the Northern Alliance or its sympathisers. The NA were getting something like $10k/head for every 'Taliban' member they picked up. Do you honestly believe that there wasn't a single innocent person rounded up, for example, because they owed some NA goon a goat from some bet they never settled 10 years ago?
What you are suggesting is the wholesale execution of people who were arrested under an assumption. Do you have any idea how scary that is?
Actually, US constitutional protections are supposed to apply to all peoples under its jurisdiction. Ditto with the Bill of Rights. If you read both documents carefully, you'll find that any right granted to the people are granted to just that - people (or as is frequently used, 'persons'). There are no rights (such as speedy trial, 'life, liberty and the purisuit of happiness', etc) that are granted specifically to citizens. Check out the 14th amendment for a good point of reference:
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Emphasis mine. There's also the 5th amendment that guarantees no rights shall denied without due process. Essentially, if non-citizens didn't have rights in the US, then the police could round up tourists from Canada and execute them in the streets. If you look into the case of Paul and Cherie Pilipow, it will reveal a lot. Paul and Cherie Pilipow are Canadian citizens who were charged with 1st degree murder in Arizona. They had a full trial and everything. It made pretty big news around these parts (I live in the same province the Pilipows are from). Basically, they were guaranteed all the rights and protections of any American citizen when they were charged.
The only exception I can think of is the natural-born eligibility requirement to be President (sorry Arnold).
I have seen this posted on a few sites the past few days. This has been talked about all over their (Blizzard's) forums since the game was released. I even sent a 'letter to the editor' for IGN talking about this on the release day.
I don't even want to know why it took this long for the gaming news industry to get ahold of this.
Placing a monetary value on the loss of a potential sale is dangerous. For instance, if you assume a value of 1% of the retail sale of the item, then that means when I buy a TV, Sony can say I cost them 1% of the value of one of their TVs if I buy a Toshiba instead. If a reviewer writes a negative review of a car causing people to not want to BUY that car, can the manufacuter sue the reviewer for causing the loss of potential sales? Maybe, if they could prove that a person who may have otherwise bought that car decided not to as a result of the review. But can you REALLY prove that they would have bought the car anyway? Not really, not without some time machine. Assuming an actual monetary value for a lost "potential sale" could have legal ramifications way beyond IP infringement issues.
Re:For Christ's Sake, a Little Frickin' Perspectiv
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 1
You're right, a little perspective is in order. I'll toss some of my perspective your way.
My line of business IS video games. I operate a lan center. I pay through the nose every month to Valve to participate in their Cyber Cafe program. This allows me to charge people money to play Valve games without running afoul of some insidious EULA (that only Valve seems to have a problem with - every other company is fine with us). Friday and Saturday are my 2 busiest days of the week, wherein I pull in over a grand and a half each day in admission fees alone. With these Steam problems, my customers couldn't play CS:S, DoD, HL2:DM, etc. Much to my annoyance (I'm not a CS fan, but many of my customers are), I had customers walking out because they couldn't play their favorite game and demanding refunds as they walked out the door. I counted over 50 customers who had paid for a package pass that costs $13 who left early and demanded refunds because of Steam. That means the business lost over $650 because of today. Will we be demanding a credit from Valve? You bet. Will we get it? Not bloody likely.
So there's some perspective for ya. My business lost actual, real money because of Steam problems. Because of the license management software we have to use as a part of this cyber-cafe program, we can't use offline mode, EVER. That's just the way it works.
Our center didn't even have it the worst - I've heard from other centers that had tournaments planned for today that lost thousands in entry fees, prizes, etc. The ones that are really hard off are the ones who have competition nearby that run cracked copies of everything - they NEVER have problems with Steam. Lan games only, but that's what people come to us to play.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I would have thought that winXP64 would have included SATA drivers, but nope, they aren't included. It would have been nice if they had of at least made it possible to grab them of a usb keyfob/thumbdrive/whatever you wanna call 'em. I mean, c'mon, I can boot a full Linux distro off one of those things. I expect windows could have at least been able to grab some drivers off 'em.
The 64 bit drivers can be a real bitch, too. For instance, if you have an all-in-wonder card, it turns out that there are beta versions of the catalyst drivers available, but that's it. None of the capture drivers are available yet.
Then there's Alcohol 120/Deamon tools - the CD emulation drivers aren't available in 64 bit yet (and are apparantly really low on the TODO list).
Plus, windowsupdate.microsoft.com doesn't work either. It comes up with a warning that it has to run in IE32, launches IE32, and then windowsupdate complains about an unknown error. Granted, they may have fixed this since last week, but I'm not holding my breath.
Personally, I'm hoping for shit like that. Imagine the fun you can have with RFID tags you've programmed yourself.
Just think of the conversations that will happen at EvilInfoGatherCorp - "Sir, I think our readers are defective again. According to today's reading, the same man entered Sears 475 times, carrying $778,000 in diamond bracelets, 43 industrial sized barrels of petroleum jelly, 2 live squids, and a Buick."
Yeah, I've called them. They blame my router, my connection settings (it's DHCP, how many ways can that mess up?), my computer, etc. Never mind that the DSL light on the box is out - it's my fault somehow. Their favorite by far is the router, though. It's the most common.
I've talked to my neighbour, and he has the same problem, so it's not just me. Of course, Access has problems as well (such as "unlimited" internet that cuts your speed at about 70 gig). Don't get me started on the Access commercials, either:) "USB!FIREWIRE!LCD!CRT!" Ugh.
Same next door. The article is from april of 2004, but it's been going on here in Sask for at least 2 years. You're right not to trust them - if MTS service is the same as Max, then it sucks hard. Think about the cheapest cable converter you've ever used. Remember how long it took to change channels? TV-over-DSL is worse. Changing channels takes apx 3-4 seconds from button push to channel change. Annoying as hell.
Don't forget the artifacting. At times, it's like watching a poorly done divx video - really blocky. Try an action movie like that, you'll be wondering what is so great about digital TV very soon.
Reliability is also a factor - when your DSL goes down, so does your TV. In my neighbourhood, Sasktel can't seem to keep DSL running for a 24 hour strech. At one point, my connection would drop for about 30 mins or so every day around 7pm. It wasn't like clockwork, but it was common enough for about a month for it to drive me nuts.
I trust phone companies about as much as I trust your average serial killer.
Okay, I'm going to break my personal rule of never using analogies (too much experience with people stretching them beyond absurdity because they don't understand the concept of an imperfect analogy, but I digress).
You move into an apartment. Everything checks out fine. But that winter, you realize that your apartment doesn't have central heating, just a fireplace. Now, you bug your landlord that your apartment needs central heating, as the fireplace is not only a fire hazard, but it only heats up your living room effectively. You make do with the fireplace for the winter.
The next winter, your landlord pulls out the fireplace and puts in central heating. But there's a new problem. The heater not only doesn't work, it belches carbon monoxide into your apartment. You complain to your landlord, and he replies "Oh give it a rest. The only reason you have central heating is because you threw a hissy fit of hysterics last winter and DEMANDED it, screaming apocalyptic cries about freezing to death if you didn't get it."
You see the problem? Yeah, people like him demanded e-voting, but giving the people an e-voting system that is so fundamentally flawed as to not even allow a manual recount is worse than what they had before. Maybe they were a little naive in assuming that any e-voting system would conform with the concepts of good UI design for mission-critical applications (eg: ABMs), but you can't blame the public for the sorry state of voting machines by saying "you asked for this!"
For the record, I'm in Canada, and I'm happy with our paper voting system.
It's always nice to talk to a coleague outside of iGames. I run the comps at the Matrix Gaming Center up in Regina, Canada. When I saw this article, I thought "godDAMN these guys are gonna learn the hard way". I'm still trying to understand the Alienware desicion. I'm not gonna lie, I LOVE Alienware. But was it a smart financial desicion to go with a computer where you will pay extra for the brand? We were temped to go that route, but decided to build our own. Plus their center has a lot of the flaws that our second store did - namely, it looses the "cool place to hang out" feel. Out most popular center has leather couches right by the front door, and it has almost a basement like feel to it. When you walk in, it feels like a place where you want to just sit and chill out with your friends. Our least popular store, we went for a modern cutting edge look. It cost extra, and it looks REALLY cool, but it just doesn't feel like a place where you'd want to spend a lot of time. And 300 rigs? Damn, they're gonna be hurting for the rent. A space that size can't be cheap.
As for iGames, do you feel you get value for your membership fees? Aside from the showcases (which are nice, but the games always show up no more than 2 days before the event - in some cases, not until after), are there any of their services that you feel are worth it? Please don't tell me that their leagues/tournaments are something you enjoy:). The last one we had any intention of participating in was the BFV league over the summer. That was a HUGE mess - the winning team still hasn't got their x800s.
Really, what I'm starting to wonder if iGames is doing as good a job as it should be. It seems they're trying to be everything at once (server hosting, discount software, tournament organizers, etc) and not doing any of it terribly well. BTW, do you actually use the Steam cybercafe licence program? I just can't imagine the cost being justified.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I hope Sony's happy. I hope they saved themselves a fortune with this software. Because you can add me to the list of people who will never buy another Sony product. Considering that the company I work for is about to do an upgrade to a lot of our AV equipment (all consumer-line stuff), and it's my job to recommnd the equipment we buy, I can safely say that we're not getting Sony stuff. We were actually looking at getting some Sony stuff before (about $10 grand worth), but there's no way I'm letting that happen now (I was somewhat hesitant before given that Sony quality has dropped significantly over the last decade). I know that this is Sony BMG that did this, and it's a whole different division of Sony that makes their televisions and stereos and junk, but there's no way I'm gonna shake the right hand while the left hand tries to stab me in the face.
Amatuer. You keep the beancounter's "backups" on that rack. Your blackmail and porn tapes are kept with your fine liquors in the fireproof vault , which your boss *thinks* he has the combination to (when he, in fact, has the emergency code that when punched in immediately triggers the halon release with the 60-second delay disabled).
Wouldn't that violate Space Corps Directive #495?
As for the supervision, yeah, he was poorly supervised. At the time, I was the only person in the company with a functional grasp of html/php/etc (but I know dick all about flash, and I'm artistically devoid of all talent). As the sole tech/sysadmin for 90+ machines in 3 locations, I had plenty of other things to do than check his work. So yeah, he was poorly supervised.
As for payment, he was supposed to have been paid on completion. He said the site was done, but the whole thing was half-baked at best. So he was offered a check for less than half of the bill he handed us and he was pissed. Since the arrangement was "we'll pay you $x if we like what you've done", and he left half the site unfinished, he was lucky to get what he was offered. He refused the check and went to the labour board.
What it came down to was my boss, the guy who hired him, didn't do the background check he should have. He trusted this web dev when he shouldn't have. We got burned because of it, we learned a valuable lesson, and we might get burned again if the labour board finds against us.
A few weeks into the project, I get my hands on a copy of his experimental beta site. I try to load it up in firefox, and nothing. Nada. The flash he spent so much time on that comprised almost all of our site wouldn't load - it was a broken link. Worked fine in IE, so it wasn't that the file was missing. I didn't have time to look at it anymore, so I told him about the error and let him stew on it for a bit (he tried to blame it on the version of the flash plugin I was running). A few days later, I check again. Still the same problem. I talk to him about it, and he says he'll work on it. He spends 8 freaking hours on it, then tells me that "firefox can't support transparancies, so the site won't work in firefox ever".
This doesn't sound right to me, AT ALL. So I check his html code. Well, there it is. In his EMBED tag, he ref's 2 different file names - one exists, the other doesn't. IE picks one, firefox seems to have picked the other. I'm honestly surprised that it even loads. I fix his mistake, save the file, and load it up in firefox. The site looks like ass (and as I later found out, is mostly running stolen copyrighted code and code from tutorials he read, but that's a story for another time), but it works. Time taken: litterally, without exaggeration, less than 5 minutes. Probably less time than it took to come up with that lame-assed excuse about why he couldn't do it. To this day, I'm still too scared to check the site against the w3c standards.
Offtopic, I know, but I just had to rant (he's lodged a complaint over non-payment of wages against us recently, so I'm kinda cheesed off). Sorry, all.
(sorry Bill)
I suggest you pay his office a visit as well, if you can spare the time.
Ralph Goodale, M.P. Wascana
310 University Park Drive
Regina, Saskatchewan
S4V 0Y8 (no postage required)
Office Hours: Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Fixed your list, no need to thank me
the only people that end up losing 10 years of appeals are the ones that are truly guilty
Perhaps you should look into the story of David Milgaard - he lost over 20 years worth of appeals in a rape/murder case before DNA evidence exonerated him. Had he been in a jurisdiction that had the death penalty, he would have been executed years before the DNA evidence came to light. I'm sure you could find numerous examples of people caught in similar situations. A quick google for "wrongful conviction" brought up dozens of cases for me.
I'm talking about IT people using Knoppix. If a sysadmin is trying to recover data that a user stupidly didn't back up, a LiveCD is the best way to do that. The OP made it sound like ANY employee that used Knoppix got the boot, IT staff included.
Incidentally, if any company allows users to save sensitive data to their own hard drive, they're asking for problems. Sensitive files should be on a secure server, locked-down and access-restiricted. Disabling the USB ports treats the symptom, not the problem. And before anyone says boo about it, there ARE ways to prevent users from saving anything to their hard drive, even in XP.
* - I once worked for a company that, for some reason, let employees have admin rights on their NT machines. This led to massive problems (the usual stuff). But heaven forbid I want to change my mouse! I've got very large hands, and I couldn't comfortably use the standard-issue mouse. I asked if I could bring in my own, since the Employee Health Dept couldn't provide a mouse that I liked (the only alternatives were either the same size or those stupid-ass joystick style ones). IT said I wasn't allowed to use a non-standard mouse because it might cause the computers to crash.
If you don't wanna say, you could always post it as Anonymous and say something like "Well, I dunno who the GP works for, but MY company [company name] is like that"
Slightly OT, any ./'ers out there work for companies that have similar buttheaded rules? I don't want to work for or do any business with such companies. That level of paranoia makes corp cultures unbearable for employees, and I don't want to support that kind of behaviour.
That should solve that problem, I would imagine (unless the trusted apt repository gets compromised).
You also have to keep in mind that there are many detainees in Gitmo who were picked up by the Northern Alliance or its sympathisers. The NA were getting something like $10k/head for every 'Taliban' member they picked up. Do you honestly believe that there wasn't a single innocent person rounded up, for example, because they owed some NA goon a goat from some bet they never settled 10 years ago?
What you are suggesting is the wholesale execution of people who were arrested under an assumption. Do you have any idea how scary that is?
The only exception I can think of is the natural-born eligibility requirement to be President (sorry Arnold).
If you want to build a BartPE disk, check out The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. It's a massive collection of plugins and drivers for BartPE. Adaware, Hijack this, McAffee, defraggers, etc. Here's a list of apps it comes with.
Hands down, bar none, the best place to start your BartPE plugin collection.
Actually, they probably are looking to have Chevy or Toyota owners buy these things. They just don't mean the CARS...
I have seen this posted on a few sites the past few days. This has been talked about all over their (Blizzard's) forums since the game was released. I even sent a 'letter to the editor' for IGN talking about this on the release day. I don't even want to know why it took this long for the gaming news industry to get ahold of this.
Placing a monetary value on the loss of a potential sale is dangerous. For instance, if you assume a value of 1% of the retail sale of the item, then that means when I buy a TV, Sony can say I cost them 1% of the value of one of their TVs if I buy a Toshiba instead. If a reviewer writes a negative review of a car causing people to not want to BUY that car, can the manufacuter sue the reviewer for causing the loss of potential sales? Maybe, if they could prove that a person who may have otherwise bought that car decided not to as a result of the review. But can you REALLY prove that they would have bought the car anyway? Not really, not without some time machine. Assuming an actual monetary value for a lost "potential sale" could have legal ramifications way beyond IP infringement issues.
My line of business IS video games. I operate a lan center. I pay through the nose every month to Valve to participate in their Cyber Cafe program. This allows me to charge people money to play Valve games without running afoul of some insidious EULA (that only Valve seems to have a problem with - every other company is fine with us). Friday and Saturday are my 2 busiest days of the week, wherein I pull in over a grand and a half each day in admission fees alone. With these Steam problems, my customers couldn't play CS:S, DoD, HL2:DM, etc. Much to my annoyance (I'm not a CS fan, but many of my customers are), I had customers walking out because they couldn't play their favorite game and demanding refunds as they walked out the door. I counted over 50 customers who had paid for a package pass that costs $13 who left early and demanded refunds because of Steam. That means the business lost over $650 because of today. Will we be demanding a credit from Valve? You bet. Will we get it? Not bloody likely.
So there's some perspective for ya. My business lost actual, real money because of Steam problems. Because of the license management software we have to use as a part of this cyber-cafe program, we can't use offline mode, EVER. That's just the way it works.
Our center didn't even have it the worst - I've heard from other centers that had tournaments planned for today that lost thousands in entry fees, prizes, etc. The ones that are really hard off are the ones who have competition nearby that run cracked copies of everything - they NEVER have problems with Steam. Lan games only, but that's what people come to us to play.
The 64 bit drivers can be a real bitch, too. For instance, if you have an all-in-wonder card, it turns out that there are beta versions of the catalyst drivers available, but that's it. None of the capture drivers are available yet.
Then there's Alcohol 120/Deamon tools - the CD emulation drivers aren't available in 64 bit yet (and are apparantly really low on the TODO list).
Plus, windowsupdate.microsoft.com doesn't work either. It comes up with a warning that it has to run in IE32, launches IE32, and then windowsupdate complains about an unknown error. Granted, they may have fixed this since last week, but I'm not holding my breath.
Just think of the conversations that will happen at EvilInfoGatherCorp - "Sir, I think our readers are defective again. According to today's reading, the same man entered Sears 475 times, carrying $778,000 in diamond bracelets, 43 industrial sized barrels of petroleum jelly, 2 live squids, and a Buick."
I've talked to my neighbour, and he has the same problem, so it's not just me. Of course, Access has problems as well (such as "unlimited" internet that cuts your speed at about 70 gig). Don't get me started on the Access commercials, either :) "USB!FIREWIRE!LCD!CRT!" Ugh.
Don't forget the artifacting. At times, it's like watching a poorly done divx video - really blocky. Try an action movie like that, you'll be wondering what is so great about digital TV very soon.
Reliability is also a factor - when your DSL goes down, so does your TV. In my neighbourhood, Sasktel can't seem to keep DSL running for a 24 hour strech. At one point, my connection would drop for about 30 mins or so every day around 7pm. It wasn't like clockwork, but it was common enough for about a month for it to drive me nuts.
I trust phone companies about as much as I trust your average serial killer.
You move into an apartment. Everything checks out fine. But that winter, you realize that your apartment doesn't have central heating, just a fireplace. Now, you bug your landlord that your apartment needs central heating, as the fireplace is not only a fire hazard, but it only heats up your living room effectively. You make do with the fireplace for the winter.
The next winter, your landlord pulls out the fireplace and puts in central heating. But there's a new problem. The heater not only doesn't work, it belches carbon monoxide into your apartment. You complain to your landlord, and he replies "Oh give it a rest. The only reason you have central heating is because you threw a hissy fit of hysterics last winter and DEMANDED it, screaming apocalyptic cries about freezing to death if you didn't get it."
You see the problem? Yeah, people like him demanded e-voting, but giving the people an e-voting system that is so fundamentally flawed as to not even allow a manual recount is worse than what they had before. Maybe they were a little naive in assuming that any e-voting system would conform with the concepts of good UI design for mission-critical applications (eg: ABMs), but you can't blame the public for the sorry state of voting machines by saying "you asked for this!"
For the record, I'm in Canada, and I'm happy with our paper voting system.
As for iGames, do you feel you get value for your membership fees? Aside from the showcases (which are nice, but the games always show up no more than 2 days before the event - in some cases, not until after), are there any of their services that you feel are worth it? Please don't tell me that their leagues/tournaments are something you enjoy :). The last one we had any intention of participating in was the BFV league over the summer. That was a HUGE mess - the winning team still hasn't got their x800s.
Really, what I'm starting to wonder if iGames is doing as good a job as it should be. It seems they're trying to be everything at once (server hosting, discount software, tournament organizers, etc) and not doing any of it terribly well. BTW, do you actually use the Steam cybercafe licence program? I just can't imagine the cost being justified.