Your location on the globe (what your countries laws are) and what type of material you are dealing with (print, versus audio, versus other artwork) play into the length of copyright.
Just because Disney has fucked up your country doesn't mean those rules apply to anyone else.
Part of the point of SharePoint is actually getting the documents back out of SharePoint, it works pretty much the exact same way people put documents into SharePoint.
There is no mass export, sure, but show me the OSS alternative that exports things en masse to SharePoint...
The argument that you can get at the data because the source is there is fucking retarded. To 99.999% of the people in the world having the source doesn't mean a thing so you're going to need a new battle cry if you expect people to give a shit.
This type of article is just a copy of the crap that MS does, you won't when people over that way.
And how many users do you know that actually DO that outside of the geek circle? Go ahead, you can count them on one hand, probably can count them on one hand without any fingers.
So you appearently think its impossible for someone to sneak in and do something bad in the period of time between when you leave your PC and when the auto-lock kicks in.
You haven't been using PCs for long have you? I can't count the number of times I've pranked someone by taking advantage of a 5 minute delay till the screensaver kicks in, and 5 minutes is annoyingly short.
Fortunately, people don't come to you for security insight, they go to Schenier...
I moved from Florida to North Carolina, so I go to get a NC drivers license and I have to take the written and vision tests. While I'm taking the written test, which is done on a touch screen, next to me is a Mexican and a 'translator' to help him.
The translator is about a 70 year old white woman who couldn't speak a word of mexican if her life and her childrens lives depended on it.
So they get to the sign test, on the screen is a stop sign. The lady says 'what kind of sign is this?' waits a second, the guy has a dumb look on his face, then she says 'Is this a stop sign?' as she shakes her head yes to him. Kind dumbly the guy shakes his head yes back at her, she then proceeds to touch the proper button and he passes the test. WHAT THE FUCK?!
For reference, if you've never driven in Mexico, the stops signs there are identical to those in the US. Red octagons with a white border. The only difference is in Mexico they say 'Alto' instead of 'Stop'. Its not like the guy said 'Alto', he really did not have a freaking clue what the sign was for... a freaking STOP sign...
Whats worse... I'd wager that 75% of the population is the same way for signs that don't actually have something written on them, regardless of where they were born.
I do what you do pretty much, however... most people are too slow to do that. Cell phones won't change that fact, but to exaggerate the problem.
The problem is simply slow reaction times. As previously stated, talking on the phone IS a diversion of mental resources. If you're already barely capable of driving without getting yourself and someone else killed than a cell phone could easily be the bit that puts you over the edge in a bad situation.
Of course, its those same people that need anti-lock brakes because they don't react to a skid and let off the brakes, and day time running lights on other cars to know that the car on the road is in fact moving.
You and I may be able to handle most of these situations, but the fact that any moron can get a drivers license in America without really being a competent driver means that we have to place some general restrictions to ensure everyone is safer.
I'm all for banning cell phones while driving, its not like you can tell when I'm talking via hands free, which having just switched to a manual transmission a few years ago, is almost a must if you drive in traffic. Too much of a pain in the butt to shift and talk with a phone too your ear, look to change lanes and all that, just switch on hands free and you're basically the same as having a passenger in the car.
Of course, I have no problem ignoring the person on the phone when the situation requires more of my attention, just like what happens when you have someone in the car with you.
These studies are generally bogus, but as most IT people know, occasionally you have to flat out lie about the way things work/happen because otherwise the morons your dealing with will screw it up when they think they know better than you do.
Example: 'Is there any way to make one user not be bound by the required password change rules?' of course you say 'No' as there is no reason to exempt anyone, regardless of how lazy/bitchy they are.
The fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs is irrefutable.
And the Earth is irrefutably flat.
Science doesn't make retarded assumptions like that, we keep looking until we CAN prove it. If we just made assumptions based on what we know currently, we'd not only get a lot of stuff wrong, we'd get many many more things wrong in the future and get more confused as things got more and more out of touch with reality based on using old, incorrect assumptions as if they were fact.
We discovered new evidence that the Earth wasn't flat, and that changed the way we approached MANY different things. Next thing you know, the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Imagine just what the world would be like if we just continued to assume the world was flat and didn't bother to keep looking for a way to prove or disprove it...
You can't imagine it, it would be so far different from what we have now that it is beyond the comprehension of the mind.
I'd agree, but I think that if you did that, FBSD would arrive as the clear winner when you're talking network IO. FBSD is known for having the absolute fastest IP stack available in a full featured OS. That costs the system in other ways, which means it doesn't cater to the desktop interactivity that an end user would want. This of course is why Ubuntu should beat the crap out of it for desktop related tasks, Ubuntu is most certainly intended to be more desktop usable than FBSD, regardless of how many people try to shoehorn FBSD onto the desktop:) I was one of those people until I could no longer take the insanity of running FBSD 4.0-CURRENT on my desktop. Of course, it was a bleeding edge code base in total upheaval as they were rewriting major chunks to be more multiprocessor friendly, it just made me realize its not a desktop OS, and of course that running -CURRENT is for people who like pain. -CURRENT hasn't been that bad since, thank god.
First off Free-BSD is a sourced based thanks to Ports
I don't know about you, but I stopped using ports a long time ago when pkg_add -r worked for pretty much everything. I only use ports for bleeding edge packages now days, when I want an update that isn't available in ports directly anyway, and requires me to update the ports build with a newer source package from the original authors. If I need to debug or test software I'm developing on, the ports may come into play so I can change some compile options. I don't think gcc has ever been run on any of my production FBSD servers.
Not American? change 'wallop' to 'hit' and you'll get the point I think. Never really thought about it, but I'd say 'wallop' is probably old slang from something else.
Other than the binary-vs-compiled issues, part of my personal love/hate relationship with BSD has been related to IO tools and issues.
What? I have about 10 BSD boxes under my control, I'd guess about half of them have never had a compiler run on them, and the other half probably have never installed a precompiled binary. Some of these machines are for development purposes where I want to tweak things (like enabling debugging in libraries and such) so I compile everything on them myself with my specific settings. The other half are internal servers, of which there is almost never a reason to use anything other than precompiled packages.
'pkg_add -r zsh' works pretty much the same as 'apt-get install zsh'
Managing IO on certain devices in BSD has been much more of a pain though at times. The drivers of certain less-expensive RAID cards (often used in Dell servers) have been a true pain to optimize. They don't actually break, but all seem to have different buffer-depths requiring special config to prevent overruns which lead to poor performance.
Linux and Windows will probably always beat the BSDs here, the BSDs don't go after supporting every POS hardware product on the planet, they focus on supporting the ones that get used in production environments where performance and reliability are far more important than cost. If you want to use some half assed/cheapo/bargin bin hardware product, *BSD isn't what you want, thats not its focus and anyone who uses it will tell you so.
With ZFS now being considered production ready, RAID cards are quickly becoming a whole lot less important. Presenting the raw devices to the OS and specifically the ZFS layer is a far better way to go than having the controller present a logical disk. ZFS NEEDS to know about the physical hardware directly to do its job. RAID cards which present logical drives composed of multiple physical drives to the OS are actually a bad thing.
How often is this important? I can think only of a few situations, such as when fitting a system into a small/cheap flash.
Its important to those of us that know by not including extra stuff on the machine, that extra stuff can not possibly be exploited, cause problems, waste resources or any number of other reasons that don't come to mind right at the moment. Including extra stuff is almost always a bad idea when you're doing a server. Desktops are a little different. Interestingly enough, Ubuntu is desktop focused with some server on the side. FreeBSD is server only, with some people who refuse to give up on making it a desktop OS, which they actually do a reasonably good job at if you're technical enough to deal with some of the quirks along the way.
You are of the same mentality as MS. Disk space and memory is cheap, who cares if we waste space with unneeded stuff!
Thats fine for a desktop OS where making things work off the bat for the user is more important than being intelligent. Personally, I'd rather you give me a ton of options and sane defaults rather than an installer that basically just copies everything from the cd/dvd/nfs mount to the drive and reboots.
However, its certainly doable with Ubuntu, it just takes more work than with FBSD. The difference is really in the installer. Ubuntu is far more ignorant-user-friendly than FreeBSD, which is perfectly acceptable as its aimed more at being easier to use. I've been using FBSD since 2.2.x and with the exception of a minor change allowing for selection of your X desktop environment the FBSD installer hasn't changed since then and I still made a mistake and wasted an install during an install of an 8 preview. Entirely my fault for not paying attention, but its one of those things that the Ubuntu installer most certainly would have red flagged or just not allowed at all. Different designs for different targets, both are better than the other in the areas they intend to be.
Very little effect. The drivers are generally detached from the kernel if not used. Most things are loadable modules now anyway unless they are core components or so generic that EVERY PC has them.
Deeper would be nice, but being that usability is one of if not the single largest problem in the computing world, its probably good if we focus on the basics for a while, until everyone at least gets that part of it.
Using Salling Clicker, if you unlock without a bluetooth signal, it just doesn't do anything. It has to start talking to a bluetooth device before it will lock for not having one.
You still get the annoying lock when your battery dies, but you just unlock it and move on, without the safety net of auto-lock when you leave next time.
Its good stuff if you need that sort of thing, its been a few years since I was in a position to actually require that level of security so I haven't used it in a while.
Salling Clicker is an app that will auto lock when it loses the Bluetooth signal from a device like your phone. Instant auto lock when you walk off as long as your phone is on you.
It can also unlock when you return, but thats obviously dangerous in a few different ways since it effectively makes your bluetooth device a token for authentication and that is easy enough to clone off.
The problem is you have to have it installed and your phone/device must be paired. This is acceptable for machines you use all the time, but doesn't really help at a kiosk or any other machine you're going to use once in a while.
For Unix there is the simple solution of just using one of the auto logoff deamons to kick you off after some idle time to cover when you forget to do so yourself. Of course, any sort of acceptable idle time that isn't annoyingly short is also long enough to be dangerous as hell.
Thats pretty funny... you think the tax slowed anyone down? The only people it slowed down were the people that weren't really all that interested in the first place.
All a $200 tax on something like a machine gun does is make it more of a dangerous situation because the sale goes underground.
Arms dealers don't pay taxes and they have no problem not reporting anything going on.
The more you go out of your way to 'ban' or 'tax' things like this, the harder it becomes for the government to monitor because they people will ALWAYS take the easiest/safest path for themselves, which won't be the legal one... which instantly means they can no longer be honest.
You can't 'ban' something a significant portion of the population wants, well you can, just won't be very effective.
Even in the citation, half of the cost instead of being consumed in the distribution chain just putting disks on shelves can be put elsewhere
Bullshit. Producing the DVD, the case, the cover art, and shipping it to the stores takes pennies on a large scale. In 1996 it cost approximately $1 via Sony to press 1000 copies of a disk and have them mailed to individual addresses. That was at 1k copies, the highest price tier, lowest volume they would deal with. It goes down drastically from there.
I wouldn't brag about getting ripped off on Steam, it doesn't make you special, just ignorant. Not only are you paying far too much for to exchange some electrons with them, you're also locked into not being able to recoup any of your cost on the game since you can't move it to another account. Way to go, might as well go lease a car while your at it.
You pay more in Australia because they keep raising prices and Australians keep playing it. They stop raising prices when the number of people that no longer will buy it after a price increase means they make less money total. Once you learn to stop buying things for rip off prices, you'll stop getting ripped off.
Don't buy based on 'what value you get out of it', you'll lose because they'll convince you its valuable to you. Buy based on paying a fair price for the effort put into what you are buying. Everyone will still get their fair share, and you won't be padding the pockets of some exec in an office somewhere that doesn't actually contribute anything to society.
At $50, 10k is only 200 copies. $100k is only 2,000 copies. I've never released a piece of software that didn't sell 2k units and my software sucks.
Its not a justified price in the least. At $50/unit, HalfLife 2 would need ~800k copies to break even...
Obviously they did FAR better than break even on that alone. Then couple in all the other games that will use that same code base and some of the same assets developed for it.
If you think $60 is fair for a game like HL2 then you've been warped into getting ripped off and liking it.
All you are doing is padding the pockets of presidents, officers and VPs of companies like Valve and EA.
Do yourself, and everyone else a favor next time, do the math on your numbers then come back and tell us about how its justified that they have made several times their cost back in the first few months of hitting the shelves. A game with the press and notoriety behind it like HL2 can pay for its entire development cycle in pre-orders.
But, really, Google have gone through fairly considerable pain and implemented quite strict sandboxing techniques for Chrome, to contain any problems in the renderer.
Yea, they've put a lot of effort in over the last 2 or 3 years. Of course, IE has 13 years of learning the hard way from it. Don't think Chrome/WebKit won't see numerous exploits, see the problem is, adding code to prevent exploits is likely to add an exploit itself. Its pretty much an accepted fact that its going to add a bug of some sort. IE has had 13 years to deal with fixing silly bugs (and adding new ones in the process of course), so don't think that Chrome is really any safer than IE for a while. Well, I mean it is, because no one is really targeting it and probably won't until we see a little share of the browser market and a stream of Chrome or WebKit exploits.
Not saying IE is safe, just that age does come with some benefits to help offset the weaknesses to some extent.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh common ignornace.
Your location on the globe (what your countries laws are) and what type of material you are dealing with (print, versus audio, versus other artwork) play into the length of copyright.
Just because Disney has fucked up your country doesn't mean those rules apply to anyone else.
FUD much?
Part of the point of SharePoint is actually getting the documents back out of SharePoint, it works pretty much the exact same way people put documents into SharePoint.
There is no mass export, sure, but show me the OSS alternative that exports things en masse to SharePoint ...
The argument that you can get at the data because the source is there is fucking retarded. To 99.999% of the people in the world having the source doesn't mean a thing so you're going to need a new battle cry if you expect people to give a shit.
This type of article is just a copy of the crap that MS does, you won't when people over that way.
And how many users do you know that actually DO that outside of the geek circle? Go ahead, you can count them on one hand, probably can count them on one hand without any fingers.
'Advising' doesn't make it happen.
Really? Doing it wrong eh?
So you appearently think its impossible for someone to sneak in and do something bad in the period of time between when you leave your PC and when the auto-lock kicks in.
You haven't been using PCs for long have you? I can't count the number of times I've pranked someone by taking advantage of a 5 minute delay till the screensaver kicks in, and 5 minutes is annoyingly short.
Fortunately, people don't come to you for security insight, they go to Schenier ...
Use screen.
Start screen
Run long running app
Ctrl-a then d to detach
ctrl-d to logout
Alternatively, just lock screen with ctrl-a x (I think its x, I don't use it myself, only run into it by accident due to fat fingers occasionally.)
You could also due 'longrunningapp ; exit' before exiting screen as well to have your screen session go away at the end.
Or ...
nohup $cmdThatWillTakeAWhileToComplete & ; exit
True story:
I moved from Florida to North Carolina, so I go to get a NC drivers license and I have to take the written and vision tests. While I'm taking the written test, which is done on a touch screen, next to me is a Mexican and a 'translator' to help him.
The translator is about a 70 year old white woman who couldn't speak a word of mexican if her life and her childrens lives depended on it.
So they get to the sign test, on the screen is a stop sign. The lady says 'what kind of sign is this?' waits a second, the guy has a dumb look on his face, then she says 'Is this a stop sign?' as she shakes her head yes to him. Kind dumbly the guy shakes his head yes back at her, she then proceeds to touch the proper button and he passes the test. WHAT THE FUCK?!
For reference, if you've never driven in Mexico, the stops signs there are identical to those in the US. Red octagons with a white border. The only difference is in Mexico they say 'Alto' instead of 'Stop'. Its not like the guy said 'Alto', he really did not have a freaking clue what the sign was for ... a freaking STOP sign ...
Whats worse ... I'd wager that 75% of the population is the same way for signs that don't actually have something written on them, regardless of where they were born.
I do what you do pretty much, however ... most people are too slow to do that. Cell phones won't change that fact, but to exaggerate the problem.
The problem is simply slow reaction times. As previously stated, talking on the phone IS a diversion of mental resources. If you're already barely capable of driving without getting yourself and someone else killed than a cell phone could easily be the bit that puts you over the edge in a bad situation.
Of course, its those same people that need anti-lock brakes because they don't react to a skid and let off the brakes, and day time running lights on other cars to know that the car on the road is in fact moving.
You and I may be able to handle most of these situations, but the fact that any moron can get a drivers license in America without really being a competent driver means that we have to place some general restrictions to ensure everyone is safer.
I'm all for banning cell phones while driving, its not like you can tell when I'm talking via hands free, which having just switched to a manual transmission a few years ago, is almost a must if you drive in traffic. Too much of a pain in the butt to shift and talk with a phone too your ear, look to change lanes and all that, just switch on hands free and you're basically the same as having a passenger in the car.
Of course, I have no problem ignoring the person on the phone when the situation requires more of my attention, just like what happens when you have someone in the car with you.
These studies are generally bogus, but as most IT people know, occasionally you have to flat out lie about the way things work/happen because otherwise the morons your dealing with will screw it up when they think they know better than you do.
Example: 'Is there any way to make one user not be bound by the required password change rules?' of course you say 'No' as there is no reason to exempt anyone, regardless of how lazy/bitchy they are.
And the Earth is irrefutably flat.
Science doesn't make retarded assumptions like that, we keep looking until we CAN prove it. If we just made assumptions based on what we know currently, we'd not only get a lot of stuff wrong, we'd get many many more things wrong in the future and get more confused as things got more and more out of touch with reality based on using old, incorrect assumptions as if they were fact.
We discovered new evidence that the Earth wasn't flat, and that changed the way we approached MANY different things. Next thing you know, the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Imagine just what the world would be like if we just continued to assume the world was flat and didn't bother to keep looking for a way to prove or disprove it ...
You can't imagine it, it would be so far different from what we have now that it is beyond the comprehension of the mind.
I'd agree, but I think that if you did that, FBSD would arrive as the clear winner when you're talking network IO. FBSD is known for having the absolute fastest IP stack available in a full featured OS. That costs the system in other ways, which means it doesn't cater to the desktop interactivity that an end user would want. This of course is why Ubuntu should beat the crap out of it for desktop related tasks, Ubuntu is most certainly intended to be more desktop usable than FBSD, regardless of how many people try to shoehorn FBSD onto the desktop :) I was one of those people until I could no longer take the insanity of running FBSD 4.0-CURRENT on my desktop. Of course, it was a bleeding edge code base in total upheaval as they were rewriting major chunks to be more multiprocessor friendly, it just made me realize its not a desktop OS, and of course that running -CURRENT is for people who like pain. -CURRENT hasn't been that bad since, thank god.
I don't know about you, but I stopped using ports a long time ago when pkg_add -r worked for pretty much everything. I only use ports for bleeding edge packages now days, when I want an update that isn't available in ports directly anyway, and requires me to update the ports build with a newer source package from the original authors. If I need to debug or test software I'm developing on, the ports may come into play so I can change some compile options. I don't think gcc has ever been run on any of my production FBSD servers.
UFS2 also does journaling, although using soft updates which generally does make it faster than the original non-journaling variant.
Cool, now what about all the system libraries (which are more important in some cases than the kernel itself) that still have debugging turned on.
Debugging enabled in libc is a killer for EVERYTHING on the system, regardless of the kernel specific options.
Not American? change 'wallop' to 'hit' and you'll get the point I think. Never really thought about it, but I'd say 'wallop' is probably old slang from something else.
What? I have about 10 BSD boxes under my control, I'd guess about half of them have never had a compiler run on them, and the other half probably have never installed a precompiled binary. Some of these machines are for development purposes where I want to tweak things (like enabling debugging in libraries and such) so I compile everything on them myself with my specific settings. The other half are internal servers, of which there is almost never a reason to use anything other than precompiled packages.
'pkg_add -r zsh' works pretty much the same as 'apt-get install zsh'
Linux and Windows will probably always beat the BSDs here, the BSDs don't go after supporting every POS hardware product on the planet, they focus on supporting the ones that get used in production environments where performance and reliability are far more important than cost. If you want to use some half assed/cheapo/bargin bin hardware product, *BSD isn't what you want, thats not its focus and anyone who uses it will tell you so.
With ZFS now being considered production ready, RAID cards are quickly becoming a whole lot less important. Presenting the raw devices to the OS and specifically the ZFS layer is a far better way to go than having the controller present a logical disk. ZFS NEEDS to know about the physical hardware directly to do its job. RAID cards which present logical drives composed of multiple physical drives to the OS are actually a bad thing.
Its important to those of us that know by not including extra stuff on the machine, that extra stuff can not possibly be exploited, cause problems, waste resources or any number of other reasons that don't come to mind right at the moment. Including extra stuff is almost always a bad idea when you're doing a server. Desktops are a little different. Interestingly enough, Ubuntu is desktop focused with some server on the side. FreeBSD is server only, with some people who refuse to give up on making it a desktop OS, which they actually do a reasonably good job at if you're technical enough to deal with some of the quirks along the way.
You are of the same mentality as MS. Disk space and memory is cheap, who cares if we waste space with unneeded stuff!
Thats fine for a desktop OS where making things work off the bat for the user is more important than being intelligent. Personally, I'd rather you give me a ton of options and sane defaults rather than an installer that basically just copies everything from the cd/dvd/nfs mount to the drive and reboots.
However, its certainly doable with Ubuntu, it just takes more work than with FBSD. The difference is really in the installer. Ubuntu is far more ignorant-user-friendly than FreeBSD, which is perfectly acceptable as its aimed more at being easier to use. I've been using FBSD since 2.2.x and with the exception of a minor change allowing for selection of your X desktop environment the FBSD installer hasn't changed since then and I still made a mistake and wasted an install during an install of an 8 preview. Entirely my fault for not paying attention, but its one of those things that the Ubuntu installer most certainly would have red flagged or just not allowed at all. Different designs for different targets, both are better than the other in the areas they intend to be.
Very little effect. The drivers are generally detached from the kernel if not used. Most things are loadable modules now anyway unless they are core components or so generic that EVERY PC has them.
Deeper would be nice, but being that usability is one of if not the single largest problem in the computing world, its probably good if we focus on the basics for a while, until everyone at least gets that part of it.
Using Salling Clicker, if you unlock without a bluetooth signal, it just doesn't do anything. It has to start talking to a bluetooth device before it will lock for not having one.
You still get the annoying lock when your battery dies, but you just unlock it and move on, without the safety net of auto-lock when you leave next time.
Its good stuff if you need that sort of thing, its been a few years since I was in a position to actually require that level of security so I haven't used it in a while.
http://www.salling.com/clicker/
Salling Clicker is an app that will auto lock when it loses the Bluetooth signal from a device like your phone. Instant auto lock when you walk off as long as your phone is on you.
It can also unlock when you return, but thats obviously dangerous in a few different ways since it effectively makes your bluetooth device a token for authentication and that is easy enough to clone off.
http://www.salling.com/clicker/
The problem is you have to have it installed and your phone/device must be paired. This is acceptable for machines you use all the time, but doesn't really help at a kiosk or any other machine you're going to use once in a while.
For Unix there is the simple solution of just using one of the auto logoff deamons to kick you off after some idle time to cover when you forget to do so yourself. Of course, any sort of acceptable idle time that isn't annoyingly short is also long enough to be dangerous as hell.
Thats pretty funny ... you think the tax slowed anyone down? The only people it slowed down were the people that weren't really all that interested in the first place.
All a $200 tax on something like a machine gun does is make it more of a dangerous situation because the sale goes underground.
Arms dealers don't pay taxes and they have no problem not reporting anything going on.
The more you go out of your way to 'ban' or 'tax' things like this, the harder it becomes for the government to monitor because they people will ALWAYS take the easiest/safest path for themselves, which won't be the legal one ... which instantly means they can no longer be honest.
You can't 'ban' something a significant portion of the population wants, well you can, just won't be very effective.
Bullshit. Producing the DVD, the case, the cover art, and shipping it to the stores takes pennies on a large scale. In 1996 it cost approximately $1 via Sony to press 1000 copies of a disk and have them mailed to individual addresses. That was at 1k copies, the highest price tier, lowest volume they would deal with. It goes down drastically from there.
Way to fall into their bullshit.
www.gamefly.com
$8.95 and you can keep it for as long as you want. No reason to go to some silly place like blockbuster.
I am of course assuming you are in America and can deal with waiting a couple days for the game to ship to you.
I used the two game play for a long time, have on game playing, and one game in transit.
I wouldn't brag about getting ripped off on Steam, it doesn't make you special, just ignorant. Not only are you paying far too much for to exchange some electrons with them, you're also locked into not being able to recoup any of your cost on the game since you can't move it to another account. Way to go, might as well go lease a car while your at it.
You pay more in Australia because they keep raising prices and Australians keep playing it. They stop raising prices when the number of people that no longer will buy it after a price increase means they make less money total. Once you learn to stop buying things for rip off prices, you'll stop getting ripped off.
Don't buy based on 'what value you get out of it', you'll lose because they'll convince you its valuable to you. Buy based on paying a fair price for the effort put into what you are buying. Everyone will still get their fair share, and you won't be padding the pockets of some exec in an office somewhere that doesn't actually contribute anything to society.
At $50, 10k is only 200 copies. $100k is only 2,000 copies. I've never released a piece of software that didn't sell 2k units and my software sucks.
Its not a justified price in the least. At $50/unit, HalfLife 2 would need ~800k copies to break even ...
Obviously they did FAR better than break even on that alone. Then couple in all the other games that will use that same code base and some of the same assets developed for it.
If you think $60 is fair for a game like HL2 then you've been warped into getting ripped off and liking it.
All you are doing is padding the pockets of presidents, officers and VPs of companies like Valve and EA.
Do yourself, and everyone else a favor next time, do the math on your numbers then come back and tell us about how its justified that they have made several times their cost back in the first few months of hitting the shelves. A game with the press and notoriety behind it like HL2 can pay for its entire development cycle in pre-orders.
Yea, they've put a lot of effort in over the last 2 or 3 years. Of course, IE has 13 years of learning the hard way from it. Don't think Chrome/WebKit won't see numerous exploits, see the problem is, adding code to prevent exploits is likely to add an exploit itself. Its pretty much an accepted fact that its going to add a bug of some sort. IE has had 13 years to deal with fixing silly bugs (and adding new ones in the process of course), so don't think that Chrome is really any safer than IE for a while. Well, I mean it is, because no one is really targeting it and probably won't until we see a little share of the browser market and a stream of Chrome or WebKit exploits.
Not saying IE is safe, just that age does come with some benefits to help offset the weaknesses to some extent.