Easiest way to stop it is MAC address filtering. Then WEP.
Of course the best method (if you have Cisco gear) is LEAP...not only tough as hell to crack, but it requires cisco hardware to use it. This is how I plan to go in a few months, LEAP over 802.11a. Different frequency spectrum, so the snot-nosed brat next door won't be able to boot my connection anymore, and it will be pretty much intruder free.
I have no problem opening up an 802.11b connection for someone that needs it, but they need to knock on my door and introduce first...I dislike anonymous people using a line that I could be held liable for if they do something illegal on it.
True...I wish these contests were more practical...such as modifying a compact car, and operating it on a 1/2mi oval track between 35 and 65mph.
The car should have a 2+2 seating (+2 refers to those seats with no leg room, which many compacts and sports cars are infamous for).
What this will do is actually push for aerodynamic innovation, as well as actual mechanical advances in the drivetrains.
I'm willing to bet if your 400HP escalade did not have that stupid "displacement on demand", and instead had a round cyndrilical shape, it would get gas mileage that would actually be reasonable.
bad part...it would look like a turd........Either way, taking a street-lugeboard an aeroshield, and a crappy motor is NOT a viable vehicle.
Go look at EVE online....that game requires both precision and speed at times to target whay you are trying to attack. And most of the time in cobat, you are targeting new targets, switching between current queued targets to distribute firepower as needed, moving (click based, this game has minimal keyboard useage), and manipulating things nearby, all at the same time. It's literally as bad as the clickfest^10 known as Total Annihilation.
Then you have various RTSs....while precision does not matter to the casual gamer...to the competitive gamers (ladder matches, etc) it does matter.
On the downside, the lack of buttons on this mouse makes me sad in the pants. My MX518 has those buttons.
As far as I'm concerned the MX518 is the ultimate gamer mouse. Yes it's corded, but a simple hook I put on the side of my TFT display fixes and cord snagging issues. It has on the fly DPI changing (400/800/1600 DPI), even in the middle of the game, and has plenty of buttons to play around with.
This exploit is the one that disturbs me....all it takes to "tap" a computer is to plug in a USB drive at the right moment.
Sometimes you wonder why you haven't taken a gluegun to your entire case sometimes......now if I found a USB drive...I have a non-networked, generic machine I can hook it up to. About all they would get off of it is a rather nice desktop wallpaper of mountain biking babe Marla Streb...that's about it.
Of course the pirates aren't stealing it from the DVI outputs. That's too slow to be profitable. Pirates move far faster than your average home user copying a Netflix rental. they get hold of their stuff often faster than you would believe.
Heck, DaVinci Code is already availible on the streets of Shanghai...has been for a while, according to my friend who was there on a business trip. He actually said there was dust all over the disc cases, and some claimed to be subtitled...so they sure as heck aren't taking them from discs. I personally think they are being leaked. Every last one of them.
If Hollywood cares aobut piracy, go after the professionals first, not the average joe. And the only way to go after the pros is to stop "screencams" (where someone slips a videocamera into a theater), and stop industry professionals from leaking the films, either as publicity demos or whatnot.
How to stop cams....well the technology already exists, and has been implemented in some theaters. I think they need to implement this universally...since honestly, nobody would care about some security cameras that use special technology to spot pirates.
However, we should care that we are being forced to buy certain hardware just to meet some "rights management" requirement. As far as I'm concerned they should be offering free upgrades to DRM-equipped models if the consumer already owned a non-DRM model. That would be the only fair answer.
The only problem I see with my proposal is that it still does not even put a scratch into piracy...since we now have things like Netflix that allows us to have massive movie libraries practically at our fingertips. The problem is DRM does not slow down the professional pirates...those who actually make livings off of this.
By not using it until 2010 makes it more attractive to consumers, therefore these DRM crap-piles will sell. I highly doubt they will turn it off, since their DRM attempts look good to investors, and cow-towing to investors at the expense of actual progress is the new trend in business management....do what looks good to the investor, regardless of what it does to your company's performance, else you get sued by said investors.
Fun times.
I say to still boycott both of these techs, until they prove they will not use DRM on at least one of them, ever...embrace that one. Either that or go to Asia and get a DRM-bypassed player, but to me doing something like that is just bandaging the problem, let alone the legality issues.
From now on, I shall include a DVD-R in all of my shipped packages. In a paper sleeve, so it is therefore usable.
Honestly, I find this search utterly retarded. Pretty much the MPAA is finding ways to waste money, and then claim that it was "lost" due to pirates.
And I hate the word "lost" now....if you never had it, you never lost it, MPAA STFU and grow some testes. Piracy is NOT theft, it's a crime in a category of it's own. Pretty much their entire misleading campaign offends me, since it's got a good point, but there are so many falsifications.
Yeah, when I first heard of chipping the speakers, I couldn't help but think of how retarded some of these people are who come up with this stuff.
A speaker is an analog device, powered by AC power....the amplifier is what makes the small (line level) AC signal from the components and preamp into something strong enough the speakers can use.
In effect what they are doing is trying in that concept is force everyone into using powered speakers. Problem is this won't work, since there is still an analog signal, from the amp stage to the speaker.
The other method is to blackbox the entire speaker, but even then it's easily cracked. For years there have been devices that take speaker-level outputs and convert them back to line-level outs (with added distortion of course). These devices are commonly found in car audio amplifiers and in some home audio subwoofers. I've also seen them availible as individual modules. So how are they going to solve anything?
I really hope the person who came up with this isn't an EE, or I would like to find him and pimpslap him for being so dense.
On the other side of the coin, I like my Linux untainted with closed source applications. I want to see what's under my hood!
There's no real answer to the chair off to the side, but for a couch, the end result even on the ends of it are better than just leaving everything at default.
Thing is even with matched speaker sets, unless all 5 speakers are exactly identical, then they will more than likely have differing sensitivity levels, thus won't be the same loudness wise. The sound meter is to balance all of that out.
As for the chair on the side...I have no clue. In a small room it is going to be one heck of a challenge. Anything to make it sound right there will foul up the couch, and vice versa. This is even harder if the chair is oriented 90 degrees as most living rooms are (so the person in the chair can converse with the folks on the couch).
The secret to any surround setup from the Dolby Digital age or later is a good SPL meter.
Go to Rat Shack, and buy a digital sound meter (about $60...$65 if you buy a pack of 9v batteries while you are there). Using a camera tripod, set it up at the main listening location....in my case the center of the couch, approximately ear level.
Then I fired up the test tones that are built into my receiver, and adjusted the center, and surround channels to match the mains in volume output. This is very important to have them match, so do this about 6 or 7 times.
Why this works so well is that we percieve even 1dB of loudness at a subconscious level...so when the speakers are approx the same loudness, we percieve them to "mesh" together better. Even when you have a mic of great, mediocre, and outright crap speakers like I have in my setup. the other reason is speaker distance. SPL at listening point is affected by the distance from the loudspeaker, as well as the timing that the signal reaches your ears is affected as well...this is why some high-end recievers have both volume and delay adjustments for the various channels. I won't go into adjusting delay...that can get tricky.:)...Funny part of this is, how everyone comes in and talks about how great my system is...when I have less in my Home Theater than many people have invested in their couch. Given i run a cheap TV...but it's a good image quality cheap non-HD TV:) All I did was volume match my channels.
That's the secret...proper calibration can make any 5.1 system sound fantastic...and for well under $100, you can have one hell of an upgrade. Try to find anyhing else in HT that can offer so much for so little!
And yes, 5.1 is as far as you need to go. NEVER use matrix channels unless there is no way around it. Matrix channels are just that, a guess...when you desire fidelity, why play with such tomfoolery?
I think this "hobbyist" term can be switch with "OSS Dev".
Either way, they are pulling what us old-schoolers call "Pulling an Apple"...if you remember the old days when Apple was the standard, and PCs were just "Hobbyist toys".
Either way, we shall see how this pans out. I know one thing for sure...ignoring hobbyists makes for a closed platform, and closed platforms are not favored by the majority of the populace.
Glop.org is considered "porn" by websense....after getting home and checking out the site, I see why.......seriously guys...sometimes a simple cut/paste into another site (with link to the original and due credit of course) may be the better answer...or just put a "site NSFW" on it.
Back to the topic......Yes, it's truly amazing the stupid measures publishers are using to try to "protect" their assets. I say it's about time to think about processes to help curb piracy instead of bogging down people's computers with crapware.
I'm glad I don't posess any of those titles...but I swear everytime I see things like this, it makes me wonder if the Amish had it right in the first place...
True, but I wouldn't write off McAfee as snake water...given my opinion that it's far from the best tool for the job, and I feel there are free AVs that can do better...but at the least it offers some degree of protection.
I think there needs to be better education of the masses in regards to viruses, spayware, and malware. Namely how various AVs and ware-removers are the computer equal to our medicine. By that I mean sometimes you need one program to cure one ailment, and a different one for another ailment.
A person wouldn't use Antacid to treat a headache, or at least I hope so...So why trust just one program (cure) for every single virus/`ware issue?
ALL cases this perticular attorney has dealt with should be overturned, allowing the "defendant" to be freed of all charges and debts resulting from it. This will make a very strong point.
Pretty much the RIAA has amazed me time and time again....right when I think their lawyers managed to get the bar to be literally at absolute ground level...they find a way to get that bar even lower. What's next? Suing six year olds? Somebody with a terminal disease?
As much as I love music...it's things like this which really get me depressed, since if I do buy the music I would like to have, I'm supporting jerks like this "lawyer"...
Yes, Sony will see him as a threat. However, with how many states it seems are jumping in on the rootkit, he may not be the only one.
As for the budget, if he really wants to get Sony, he will find ways to stretch the budget to get it. If they shave on his budget too hard, it could be political suicide for the ones that made that decision if something high profile has to be let go due to an empty budget.
Really, I think Sony's only move is to get him voted out of office. Either that or pull a SCO and delay infinitely.
Given, I am not a bargain PC shopper, but this can be applied there as well.
Motherboard: This is where I make little compromise. It MUST have the best chipset, and have that chipset implemented properly. The chipset is usually the one point where you can lose most of your performance anymore, so be picky...you can cut corners elsewhere. Remember to pick your CPU make first (P4/Athlon), so keep that in mind. Also note AGP is going away, so now may be a good time to embrace PCI-Express
RAM: generic will do, so long as it can run at the speeds you intend to run it at. I reccomend two 512mb modules myself.
CPU: you can cut corners here if you wish, by buying a slower CPU, or a value end chip like a celeron...for desktop apps, it's hard to not have enough power anymore...for games, most of them still only require 2ghz chips to play.
vidcard: buy based on what you do on your PC...for non-3d applications, look for a fast RAMDAC on your videocard. AGP is on the downturn, so don't expect any new AGP cards showing up for very much longer, PCI-express is replacing it. I'd say get a PCI-e videocard since they cost about the same, and in some cases are actually cheaper. For gaming apps, either a single 6800GT or if your motherboard has SLI, dual 6600GTs (actually faster than the single 6800, at around the same price).
Power supply: very few actually put out what they claim in actual usage, so if buying a cheap PSU, buy it "big". It's only going to eat as much power as you need to run your rig, so no harm in getting a larger PSU than needed.
Case: Think airflow....modern components require large amounts of cool air to run well. Don't go for 80bajillion fans unless you really like the looks or sounds of a giant fan-box, instead look for well-placed large fans, which are usually quieter than having tons of 80mm fans.
For what it's worth: my baby...soon to be upgraded to an athlon 64 PCI-e SLI setup (whenever I get the freaking money...):
athlon xp 3200+ 400fsb DFI NF-II Ultra 400a "lan-party" motherboard (rev a) 2 x 1gb "super flower" ddr 400 memory Sapphire Radeon X800XTpe Antec Neopower 480w PSU Samsung 200GB PATA hard disk Toshiba 4x DVD+-RW Lian-li PC-7x case (why mess with what already works;) )
It's pretty much a overall solid rig, with exception to the hdd, psu, and vidcard, is pretty outdated for high-end gaming though.
a CF to IDE adaptor, along with a IDE to notebook adaptor.
win98/ME disc
flash drive
Vacuum sealer
What you do is you take that laptop, and using the CF card, and adaptors, install the CF card into the laptop in place of the hard drive...this will ensure a maximum shock resiliency. MAKE SURE TO INSTALL YOUR ENCRYPTION SUITE!
Once that is done, take the laptop, and power supply, and put it into a bag and use the vacuum sealer to render it waterproof. Do not open this until the apocalypse, or 5 years, just to verify it's still funcitonal.
Next, take your flash drive, and use it for your backups as normal.
Keep the vacuum sealer with appropriate sized bag ready. When the time comes, vaccum that puppy, and shove it in the napsack you will put the laptop into, and get your butt outta dodge!
I actually have done this myself, since I live in a hurricane prone area...I'm ready for the worst.
Any decent quality audio system, with poperly shielded analog out cables can be used for ripping of audio, ANY audio...and on good gear, can be extremely close to CD quality...closer than MP3 can ever get.
Now, for PC ripping, it's as simple as not having the DRM garbage load and install. I found this out with one album that did install that weird filter driver...it screws up the audio data for the "protected" CD while it's in that computer....the answer to that was easy: disable autorun. Now keep in mind that messes with some games.
Keep in mind my soundcard is one of those "24-bit" models, but it's onboard 16->24bit conversion is crap, so I have to use a software converter to do the job properly...this means I use a media player other than WMP, since the end result is something I can hear. I cannot use this player if I end up having that disc install it's filter driver, forcing me to hear the disc at a reduced sound quality (since the hardware upsampler pretty much butchers the audio). I just refuse to replace an $80 soundcard over a $15 CD....now with a system as broken as current DRM is, as well as the negative effects on a system, why would anyone pay for it?
As for Apple...they have always been prety arrogant, even if for a good purpose. That's been their nature since the dawn of their existance....it's a company found in ideals, and that has reared it's head in many occaisions. I actually applaud them for once, as this might be the kind of kick in the pants the RIAA needs to understand how their DRM attempts have been alienating their own customer base.
What's really sad....since I found that one DRMed disc that I had to disable autoplay for, I bought a nice turntable and went back to LPs for major label groups. Major Label CDs are dead to me now.....analog owns....
well what happened on my end was I just finished installing win2k on a production system. Plugged it in the lan...less than 5 seconds later I coulnt even use windows explorer to check out my hard drive contents. Turns out he not only had blaster but some other malwares as well. Jerk costed me nearly 4 hours to remove all the crap that got on there, then the time to manually DL each file and move it to the other machine by non-network means to install it.
My dream that day was a lit roman candle, his eye.
fastest I've ever seen was some idiot in the company brought his personal laptop to work and plugged it in and left it....blaster was lagging the entire network up. Sadly the guy was an exec so IT couldnt do anything without putting their necks on the line (small company, and he was the CEO's personal friend)....well a few weeks later they managed to get porn traffic in his cube...jackpot. Funny part...they werent looking for porn traffic, just sniffing out the IP that was sending out all this blaster traffic.
Sometimes the greatest stories are the ones where those who know better get nipped in the butt.
Get a 512mb pen drive, put all your important OS updates on it. There you go, one stop shop for win2k/xp. Plug and play at it's finest./uses pen drives like they are going out of style.
Sorry, but you must have never worked in a software company before.
It's called licensing...each license sold has to be inventorized for revenue purposes. Sometimes a paper kit goes with each, and that is inventory too. You can't just MT what you want in a company once you have a proper materials structure. there are plenty of side to this...also software does come on printed media, does it not?
I'm sorry you are as confused as you are. Actualyl in my job right now, we have a little bit of hell with software inventory. My statements go in line with capitalism, for if it could not be in inventory, it could not be sold.
I could rant about evey detail, but it's not worth it's time, your post was merely flamebait, and I'll leave it at that.
Even in lage hardware corporations, like the one I work, you see the dev teams or other teams "buy" hardware, usually at market value, beacuse if it was cheap, then everyone would be trying to buy hardware...and comapnies want marketshare, not jsut ahving a rumpload of capital rotting away somehwere.
So ID prolly bought the engine since the engine ahs a part number in their database, just to keep their books stright.
If you have the time and know-how to build your own speakers, you can do well within budget. For about $350 you can make a monitor set that has a very smooth response curve, about 50hz-23khz, 150-18khz +-1Db. Nice enough...my set isn't near that nice, but I spent only $150 to make a set comparable to $400 pairs.
As far as buying it all off the shelf, Athena makes a $200USD set of monitors that sound better than any $200 pair of speakers have a right to, add those in with a yamaha RX-496 reciever, and a Yamaha 5-CD changer, and for about $650 with cables, you have a very good base level hi-fi. I use that reciever and CD-player combo with my homebuilt speakers, and they sound fantastic. Modern mid-end solid-state stereo recievers seem to have many "gems in the rough" lately.
Oh, and add in that you can buy nearly 50 375ml bottles of Jagermeister for $700. Now..THAT might just get the point across;P
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding piggybacking:
Easiest way to stop it is MAC address filtering. Then WEP.
Of course the best method (if you have Cisco gear) is LEAP...not only tough as hell to crack, but it requires cisco hardware to use it. This is how I plan to go in a few months, LEAP over 802.11a. Different frequency spectrum, so the snot-nosed brat next door won't be able to boot my connection anymore, and it will be pretty much intruder free.
I have no problem opening up an 802.11b connection for someone that needs it, but they need to knock on my door and introduce first...I dislike anonymous people using a line that I could be held liable for if they do something illegal on it.
True...I wish these contests were more practical...such as modifying a compact car, and operating it on a 1/2mi oval track between 35 and 65mph.
....Either way, taking a street-lugeboard an aeroshield, and a crappy motor is NOT a viable vehicle.
The car should have a 2+2 seating (+2 refers to those seats with no leg room, which many compacts and sports cars are infamous for).
What this will do is actually push for aerodynamic innovation, as well as actual mechanical advances in the drivetrains.
I'm willing to bet if your 400HP escalade did not have that stupid "displacement on demand", and instead had a round cyndrilical shape, it would get gas mileage that would actually be reasonable.
bad part...it would look like a turd....
Some MMOs and RTSs are outright clickfests.
Go look at EVE online....that game requires both precision and speed at times to target whay you are trying to attack. And most of the time in cobat, you are targeting new targets, switching between current queued targets to distribute firepower as needed, moving (click based, this game has minimal keyboard useage), and manipulating things nearby, all at the same time. It's literally as bad as the clickfest^10 known as Total Annihilation.
Then you have various RTSs....while precision does not matter to the casual gamer...to the competitive gamers (ladder matches, etc) it does matter.
On the downside, the lack of buttons on this mouse makes me sad in the pants. My MX518 has those buttons.
As far as I'm concerned the MX518 is the ultimate gamer mouse. Yes it's corded, but a simple hook I put on the side of my TFT display fixes and cord snagging issues. It has on the fly DPI changing (400/800/1600 DPI), even in the middle of the game, and has plenty of buttons to play around with.
This exploit is the one that disturbs me....all it takes to "tap" a computer is to plug in a USB drive at the right moment.
...now if I found a USB drive...I have a non-networked, generic machine I can hook it up to. About all they would get off of it is a rather nice desktop wallpaper of mountain biking babe Marla Streb...that's about it.
Sometimes you wonder why you haven't taken a gluegun to your entire case sometimes...
Of course the pirates aren't stealing it from the DVI outputs. That's too slow to be profitable. Pirates move far faster than your average home user copying a Netflix rental. they get hold of their stuff often faster than you would believe.
..so they sure as heck aren't taking them from discs. I personally think they are being leaked. Every last one of them.
Heck, DaVinci Code is already availible on the streets of Shanghai...has been for a while, according to my friend who was there on a business trip. He actually said there was dust all over the disc cases, and some claimed to be subtitled.
If Hollywood cares aobut piracy, go after the professionals first, not the average joe. And the only way to go after the pros is to stop "screencams" (where someone slips a videocamera into a theater), and stop industry professionals from leaking the films, either as publicity demos or whatnot.
How to stop cams....well the technology already exists, and has been implemented in some theaters. I think they need to implement this universally...since honestly, nobody would care about some security cameras that use special technology to spot pirates.
However, we should care that we are being forced to buy certain hardware just to meet some "rights management" requirement. As far as I'm concerned they should be offering free upgrades to DRM-equipped models if the consumer already owned a non-DRM model. That would be the only fair answer.
The only problem I see with my proposal is that it still does not even put a scratch into piracy...since we now have things like Netflix that allows us to have massive movie libraries practically at our fingertips. The problem is DRM does not slow down the professional pirates...those who actually make livings off of this.
By not using it until 2010 makes it more attractive to consumers, therefore these DRM crap-piles will sell. I highly doubt they will turn it off, since their DRM attempts look good to investors, and cow-towing to investors at the expense of actual progress is the new trend in business management....do what looks good to the investor, regardless of what it does to your company's performance, else you get sued by said investors.
Fun times.
I say to still boycott both of these techs, until they prove they will not use DRM on at least one of them, ever...embrace that one. Either that or go to Asia and get a DRM-bypassed player, but to me doing something like that is just bandaging the problem, let alone the legality issues.
God idea!
From now on, I shall include a DVD-R in all of my shipped packages. In a paper sleeve, so it is therefore usable.
Honestly, I find this search utterly retarded. Pretty much the MPAA is finding ways to waste money, and then claim that it was "lost" due to pirates.
And I hate the word "lost" now....if you never had it, you never lost it, MPAA STFU and grow some testes. Piracy is NOT theft, it's a crime in a category of it's own. Pretty much their entire misleading campaign offends me, since it's got a good point, but there are so many falsifications.
Yeah, when I first heard of chipping the speakers, I couldn't help but think of how retarded some of these people are who come up with this stuff.
A speaker is an analog device, powered by AC power....the amplifier is what makes the small (line level) AC signal from the components and preamp into something strong enough the speakers can use.
In effect what they are doing is trying in that concept is force everyone into using powered speakers. Problem is this won't work, since there is still an analog signal, from the amp stage to the speaker.
The other method is to blackbox the entire speaker, but even then it's easily cracked. For years there have been devices that take speaker-level outputs and convert them back to line-level outs (with added distortion of course). These devices are commonly found in car audio amplifiers and in some home audio subwoofers. I've also seen them availible as individual modules. So how are they going to solve anything?
I really hope the person who came up with this isn't an EE, or I would like to find him and pimpslap him for being so dense.
On the other side of the coin, I like my Linux untainted with closed source applications. I want to see what's under my hood!
There's no real answer to the chair off to the side, but for a couch, the end result even on the ends of it are better than just leaving everything at default.
Thing is even with matched speaker sets, unless all 5 speakers are exactly identical, then they will more than likely have differing sensitivity levels, thus won't be the same loudness wise. The sound meter is to balance all of that out.
As for the chair on the side...I have no clue. In a small room it is going to be one heck of a challenge. Anything to make it sound right there will foul up the couch, and vice versa. This is even harder if the chair is oriented 90 degrees as most living rooms are (so the person in the chair can converse with the folks on the couch).
The secret to any surround setup from the Dolby Digital age or later is a good SPL meter.
:) ...Funny part of this is, how everyone comes in and talks about how great my system is...when I have less in my Home Theater than many people have invested in their couch. Given i run a cheap TV...but it's a good image quality cheap non-HD TV :) All I did was volume match my channels.
Go to Rat Shack, and buy a digital sound meter (about $60...$65 if you buy a pack of 9v batteries while you are there). Using a camera tripod, set it up at the main listening location....in my case the center of the couch, approximately ear level.
Then I fired up the test tones that are built into my receiver, and adjusted the center, and surround channels to match the mains in volume output. This is very important to have them match, so do this about 6 or 7 times.
Why this works so well is that we percieve even 1dB of loudness at a subconscious level...so when the speakers are approx the same loudness, we percieve them to "mesh" together better. Even when you have a mic of great, mediocre, and outright crap speakers like I have in my setup. the other reason is speaker distance. SPL at listening point is affected by the distance from the loudspeaker, as well as the timing that the signal reaches your ears is affected as well...this is why some high-end recievers have both volume and delay adjustments for the various channels. I won't go into adjusting delay...that can get tricky.
That's the secret...proper calibration can make any 5.1 system sound fantastic...and for well under $100, you can have one hell of an upgrade. Try to find anyhing else in HT that can offer so much for so little!
And yes, 5.1 is as far as you need to go. NEVER use matrix channels unless there is no way around it. Matrix channels are just that, a guess...when you desire fidelity, why play with such tomfoolery?
Oh shut the hell up!
You just want to get into the hive queen's "honey cave", and nothing more!
Exactly.
I think this "hobbyist" term can be switch with "OSS Dev".
Either way, they are pulling what us old-schoolers call "Pulling an Apple"...if you remember the old days when Apple was the standard, and PCs were just "Hobbyist toys".
Either way, we shall see how this pans out. I know one thing for sure...ignoring hobbyists makes for a closed platform, and closed platforms are not favored by the majority of the populace.
Glop.org is considered "porn" by websense....after getting home and checking out the site, I see why... ....seriously guys...sometimes a simple cut/paste into another site (with link to the original and due credit of course) may be the better answer...or just put a "site NSFW" on it.
...Yes, it's truly amazing the stupid measures publishers are using to try to "protect" their assets. I say it's about time to think about processes to help curb piracy instead of bogging down people's computers with crapware.
Back to the topic...
I'm glad I don't posess any of those titles...but I swear everytime I see things like this, it makes me wonder if the Amish had it right in the first place...
True, but I wouldn't write off McAfee as snake water...given my opinion that it's far from the best tool for the job, and I feel there are free AVs that can do better...but at the least it offers some degree of protection.
I think there needs to be better education of the masses in regards to viruses, spayware, and malware. Namely how various AVs and ware-removers are the computer equal to our medicine. By that I mean sometimes you need one program to cure one ailment, and a different one for another ailment.
A person wouldn't use Antacid to treat a headache, or at least I hope so...So why trust just one program (cure) for every single virus/`ware issue?
What I would have loved to see is the following:
ALL cases this perticular attorney has dealt with should be overturned, allowing the "defendant" to be freed of all charges and debts resulting from it. This will make a very strong point.
Pretty much the RIAA has amazed me time and time again....right when I think their lawyers managed to get the bar to be literally at absolute ground level...they find a way to get that bar even lower. What's next? Suing six year olds? Somebody with a terminal disease?
As much as I love music...it's things like this which really get me depressed, since if I do buy the music I would like to have, I'm supporting jerks like this "lawyer"...
Definately good that he is doing this mess.
Yes, Sony will see him as a threat. However, with how many states it seems are jumping in on the rootkit, he may not be the only one.
As for the budget, if he really wants to get Sony, he will find ways to stretch the budget to get it. If they shave on his budget too hard, it could be political suicide for the ones that made that decision if something high profile has to be let go due to an empty budget.
Really, I think Sony's only move is to get him voted out of office. Either that or pull a SCO and delay infinitely.
Given, I am not a bargain PC shopper, but this can be applied there as well.
;) )
Motherboard: This is where I make little compromise. It MUST have the best chipset, and have that chipset implemented properly. The chipset is usually the one point where you can lose most of your performance anymore, so be picky...you can cut corners elsewhere. Remember to pick your CPU make first (P4/Athlon), so keep that in mind. Also note AGP is going away, so now may be a good time to embrace PCI-Express
RAM: generic will do, so long as it can run at the speeds you intend to run it at. I reccomend two 512mb modules myself.
CPU: you can cut corners here if you wish, by buying a slower CPU, or a value end chip like a celeron...for desktop apps, it's hard to not have enough power anymore...for games, most of them still only require 2ghz chips to play.
vidcard: buy based on what you do on your PC...for non-3d applications, look for a fast RAMDAC on your videocard. AGP is on the downturn, so don't expect any new AGP cards showing up for very much longer, PCI-express is replacing it. I'd say get a PCI-e videocard since they cost about the same, and in some cases are actually cheaper. For gaming apps, either a single 6800GT or if your motherboard has SLI, dual 6600GTs (actually faster than the single 6800, at around the same price).
Power supply: very few actually put out what they claim in actual usage, so if buying a cheap PSU, buy it "big". It's only going to eat as much power as you need to run your rig, so no harm in getting a larger PSU than needed.
Case: Think airflow....modern components require large amounts of cool air to run well. Don't go for 80bajillion fans unless you really like the looks or sounds of a giant fan-box, instead look for well-placed large fans, which are usually quieter than having tons of 80mm fans.
For what it's worth: my baby...soon to be upgraded to an athlon 64 PCI-e SLI setup (whenever I get the freaking money...):
athlon xp 3200+ 400fsb
DFI NF-II Ultra 400a "lan-party" motherboard (rev a)
2 x 1gb "super flower" ddr 400 memory
Sapphire Radeon X800XTpe
Antec Neopower 480w PSU
Samsung 200GB PATA hard disk
Toshiba 4x DVD+-RW
Lian-li PC-7x case (why mess with what already works
It's pretty much a overall solid rig, with exception to the hdd, psu, and vidcard, is pretty outdated for high-end gaming though.
It's not elegant but it WILL work.
What you need:
an old laptop with power supply.
a CF to IDE adaptor, along with a IDE to notebook adaptor.
win98/ME disc
flash drive
Vacuum sealer
What you do is you take that laptop, and using the CF card, and adaptors, install the CF card into the laptop in place of the hard drive...this will ensure a maximum shock resiliency. MAKE SURE TO INSTALL YOUR ENCRYPTION SUITE!
Once that is done, take the laptop, and power supply, and put it into a bag and use the vacuum sealer to render it waterproof. Do not open this until the apocalypse, or 5 years, just to verify it's still funcitonal.
Next, take your flash drive, and use it for your backups as normal.
Keep the vacuum sealer with appropriate sized bag ready. When the time comes, vaccum that puppy, and shove it in the napsack you will put the laptop into, and get your butt outta dodge!
I actually have done this myself, since I live in a hurricane prone area...I'm ready for the worst.
Yep, pretty much sums it up.
...now with a system as broken as current DRM is, as well as the negative effects on a system, why would anyone pay for it?
....analog owns....
Any decent quality audio system, with poperly shielded analog out cables can be used for ripping of audio, ANY audio...and on good gear, can be extremely close to CD quality...closer than MP3 can ever get.
Now, for PC ripping, it's as simple as not having the DRM garbage load and install. I found this out with one album that did install that weird filter driver...it screws up the audio data for the "protected" CD while it's in that computer....the answer to that was easy: disable autorun. Now keep in mind that messes with some games.
Keep in mind my soundcard is one of those "24-bit" models, but it's onboard 16->24bit conversion is crap, so I have to use a software converter to do the job properly...this means I use a media player other than WMP, since the end result is something I can hear. I cannot use this player if I end up having that disc install it's filter driver, forcing me to hear the disc at a reduced sound quality (since the hardware upsampler pretty much butchers the audio). I just refuse to replace an $80 soundcard over a $15 CD.
As for Apple...they have always been prety arrogant, even if for a good purpose. That's been their nature since the dawn of their existance....it's a company found in ideals, and that has reared it's head in many occaisions. I actually applaud them for once, as this might be the kind of kick in the pants the RIAA needs to understand how their DRM attempts have been alienating their own customer base.
What's really sad....since I found that one DRMed disc that I had to disable autoplay for, I bought a nice turntable and went back to LPs for major label groups. Major Label CDs are dead to me now.
well what happened on my end was I just finished installing win2k on a production system. Plugged it in the lan...less than 5 seconds later I coulnt even use windows explorer to check out my hard drive contents. Turns out he not only had blaster but some other malwares as well. Jerk costed me nearly 4 hours to remove all the crap that got on there, then the time to manually DL each file and move it to the other machine by non-network means to install it.
My dream that day was a lit roman candle, his eye.
fastest I've ever seen was some idiot in the company brought his personal laptop to work and plugged it in and left it....blaster was lagging the entire network up. Sadly the guy was an exec so IT couldnt do anything without putting their necks on the line (small company, and he was the CEO's personal friend)....well a few weeks later they managed to get porn traffic in his cube...jackpot. Funny part...they werent looking for porn traffic, just sniffing out the IP that was sending out all this blaster traffic.
Sometimes the greatest stories are the ones where those who know better get nipped in the butt.
Get a 512mb pen drive, put all your important OS updates on it. There you go, one stop shop for win2k/xp. Plug and play at it's finest. /uses pen drives like they are going out of style.
can't find SP2. Guess they "mistakenly" required folks to use their web-browser to get it....oh wait...automatic updates hasnt got it either....
MS I raise my beer to you, for no other developer could have had such a screwed up method for updating their software. This Spaten's for you!
Sorry, but you must have never worked in a software company before.
It's called licensing...each license sold has to be inventorized for revenue purposes. Sometimes a paper kit goes with each, and that is inventory too. You can't just MT what you want in a company once you have a proper materials structure. there are plenty of side to this...also software does come on printed media, does it not?
I'm sorry you are as confused as you are. Actualyl in my job right now, we have a little bit of hell with software inventory. My statements go in line with capitalism, for if it could not be in inventory, it could not be sold.
I could rant about evey detail, but it's not worth it's time, your post was merely flamebait, and I'll leave it at that.
It's a finance thing.
Even in lage hardware corporations, like the one I work, you see the dev teams or other teams "buy" hardware, usually at market value, beacuse if it was cheap, then everyone would be trying to buy hardware...and comapnies want marketshare, not jsut ahving a rumpload of capital rotting away somehwere.
So ID prolly bought the engine since the engine ahs a part number in their database, just to keep their books stright.
If you have the time and know-how to build your own speakers, you can do well within budget. For about $350 you can make a monitor set that has a very smooth response curve, about 50hz-23khz, 150-18khz +-1Db. Nice enough...my set isn't near that nice, but I spent only $150 to make a set comparable to $400 pairs.
;P
As far as buying it all off the shelf, Athena makes a $200USD set of monitors that sound better than any $200 pair of speakers have a right to, add those in with a yamaha RX-496 reciever, and a Yamaha 5-CD changer, and for about $650 with cables, you have a very good base level hi-fi. I use that reciever and CD-player combo with my homebuilt speakers, and they sound fantastic. Modern mid-end solid-state stereo recievers seem to have many "gems in the rough" lately.
Oh, and add in that you can buy nearly 50 375ml bottles of Jagermeister for $700. Now..THAT might just get the point across