The summary suggests this is a push to cement the OOXML standard and ultimately lock-in for MS Office. I don't really see why they need a free cloud-based offering to do that, MS Office has done extremely well at locking-in their standards in the past. TFA that it refers to also clearly argues this is MS having to compete with Google Docs, a much more evident profit motive. MS is also quoted that they see this as an opportunity to get at least a little income from people who, for various reasons, aren't currently paying for MS Office.
Whether it remains free indefinitely depends on how it works out, i.e. whether they think it is making more money (directly and indirectly) than doing something else. Stating the obvious but it's a silly question. Even Openoffice is freely supported by Sun for a profit motive: breaking the MS standards lock-in.
The Google quotes are on the money though. It's standard practice now for businesses to install Office on every machine while all the documents are saved to a network drive. This is a bit of a kludge really, people hunting through directories trying to find files is very cumbersome, especially since lots of people insist on saving works-in-progress to their desktop and only copying over when they're finished - and very often forgetting or not getting around to it.
To complete they should add subscription fees and a facility whereby inventors who do not wish to patent their inventions can for a very cheap fee file their "prior art" (without any kind of inspection).
Very quickly you only have patents being filed that people genuinely and seriously plan to exploit and require protection. Nobody would file any old crap because it might just enable them to sue a competitor for unwittingly copying their "invention" by basically having implemented the natural solution to a task. There would not be a huge proportion of patents sitting there preventing society putting the idea to use, when the patent holder has decided not to exploit it but there is no reason for them to invalidate it. Patent trolling would start requiring serious investment.
The first thing to ask if why society offers patent protection. Is society really benefiting by protecting things so unimportant that the author would not ask for that protection if it cost just $164 more?
Sigh. The movie publishers are well aware their customers want a download service and are willing to pay for it. They are just not willing to supply it because it threatens their business plan. Publishers are their own worst enemy because they are totally focused on themselves and not the consumer. They do not have the mentality for change unless it clearly involves more money and more control for them than the old system. Old system dying? Well that's because of pirates and therefore the only course of action is to stop piracy in a way that does not change the system. Counter piracy with service? Don't be outrageous.
I pay around £15/m (~$22) for a monthly DVD rental for which there are 2 DVD's allocated to me at any one time - I make a list and the quicker I return DVDs the quicker I get the next batch. I get through say 10 per month.
To cut a long story short (yes, I had it typed up and everything), I just know that despite cutting out the major bottleneck (the mailman has the DVDs twice as long as me), internet distribution will result in at best me getting through say 10 per month for around £15/m.
Even if a publisher did agree to a internet distribution system, they would change the licensing to a per-view royalty, or increase the licensing fees for the "new platform", or some other method for countering any benefit anybody else might achieve. My rental service won't make any more money, the publishers wont make any more money, I wont get a better service.
Much more likely the service would be a lot worse. Royalties would be too high so it'd cost £20/m for 10 views, the publishers would be doing exclusivity farces so I'd need 5 different subscriptions to get the full range...
Security, tracking and recording is one of these things that many people have a base assumption that more is always better. That's not true at all.
There's the inevitable escalation. As the new system settles in, those charged with security look for new measures to improve monitoring and the new system makes still more measures practical. As the new system becomes normalised, there is less resistance to the next step (when a few years ago the measure would have been widely considered draconian). For example, continually tracking students as they move around campus. They already know what lecture room you're in so who cares right?
The more automated monitoring there is, the less non-automated monitoring there is. You're now just relying on one thing instead of something else. Something that once you may have reported as suspicious you now feel excused from reporting since probably the automated security would have picked it up, right?
This can become much worse when other controls start relying on the automated systems. For example, with the RFID system there's no need to do a headcount anymore, right? So what happens when the log shows 50 people entering the hall and there's only 45 at the assembly point after the fire alarm goes off? True, 50 are recorded as leaving the hall, but oopsie we're recording who's in the hall not who's in the building. Now you're fucked, because there's either a student needing rescuing or a janitor/fireman risking his life unnecessarily. Shit, the best case scenario is actually that students are needing to be rescued and you are able to find them fast - no other possibility allows you certainty.
On the more educational issues of "voluntary" attendance, university is good for people because it teaches responsibility. Taking care of yourself, living on a budget, dealing with the social environment, taking responsibility for your studies, these are all part of the university experience and arguably the most important and valuable part of the whole thing. Secondly, why is a degree valuable to employers? It suggests a base knowledge of the topic, true. But why is it so common for people to be able to do completely unrelated jobs off the back of "a degree"? Because it also implies you have at least the minimum level of intelligence and that you were sufficiently self-motivated. Start mandating and enforcing attendance and degrees actually tell employers less about what they want to know.
Barely had the netbook started hitting the mainstream that they were getting bigger screens, bigger drives, more weight, less battery life, bigger price tag. Most of them very quickly became just crap laptops.
Most of them are seem terrible value. For around 10%-15% more you can get something that at least holds itself to the standard of a low-end laptop, with a much more powerful type of "1.6ghz cpu" and other components yet after a few months the battery life is practically the same. The weight is for all intents and purposes very similar.
Netbooks were good because they were less than two-thirds the price of a laptop, were far more portable (could be forgotten about in a basic satchel), had long batteries. While the spec looked low, general use was actually snappy because it was using SSD and a light OS. You only noticed the performance loss when doing things that actually required decent horsepower (though choppy flash video was a bit of a weakness), which wasn't something you'd want a netbook for anyway.
The summary suggests laptops became cheaper to bridge the gap between them and netbooks. I think it was much more than netbooks turned into laptops.
Instead ARM may limit its options to the print and storage server market.
THG may well be on the money there. I don't do much IT but I do know small business (working as an accountant). Loads of small businesses require one performance server to run their main productivity server and everything else is printing and storage. It's the same at our practice: we have 3 big servers, one of which is choked for performance in every way while for the others the CPU is almost idle while the bottleneck is something else.
Even if all you want is a lot of hard drive space for a lot of people to share, you end up having to get a server that has expensive-everything just so you get the fast storage etc. We have basically a server that cost a ton of money to basically be a NAS box. Saving some money on that to spend it on the one that needs everything it can get would be pretty good for productivity. Sure there are options out there, but they're not really available to small businesses who basically have to buy off the shelf gear that their IT contractor can support.
From there ARM can look at moving in on home servers, if they ever get going. I still think there's potential for a "media centre" server that is mostly about connectivity and content storage (rather than pushing actual video about), think a souped-up router with hard drives and some functionality software.
Greed - noun. excessive or rapacious desire, esp. for wealth or possessions. (ref, my emphasis).
First off we have to ask if a fictional entity has the necessary mens rea to be greedy. That's questionable but I think beside the point, because we don't really care if it is "the company" or rather the collective result of it's management that is greedy.
Determining whether something or someone is greedy is a personal judgement. We are all at least a little greedy but it is silly to set the bar so low that everyone qualifies, it renders the term pointless. In my view, a company is not greedy simply because it exists to make money, it depends on the lengths it is willing to go to make money.
Branson's ability to convince himself that his airline is due money, that he can rationalise this perspective into a belief so strong he evidently thinks the general public would support the notion of giving him their money, suggests to me he is greedy. That Virgin engaged in price-fixing provides some backup, particularly since:
Asked if Virgin had considered firing [Virgin Atlantic CEO Steve Ridgway], a spokesman said: "Not at all. The board discussed all this in 2006 and they fully supported him and the business has moved on." Neither did he offer to resign.
It's not necessarily plain maths that is at issue, it may be the specific wording (which is not given in TFA).
It's easy for an article to say the "measure needed a two-thirds vote to pass" and for everybody to have an understanding that the vote requires at least a two thirds majority of the votes (which is the 138 yeas) but that's not necessarily the literal interpretation of what was written. For starters "needed a two-thirds vote to pass" may require 2/3 of the eligible voters to turn out in favour - our 206 does not include anyone abstaining...
It could also say that it needs a third to block the vote, 68.6recurring so 69 (back to our 137 yeas). But most people would still talk about this as what is required to pass the vote, people are inaccurate like that.
If it says "requireth no less than two yeas per one nays", everyone understands that's two out of three, 2/3 right? Wrong. You start with your nays to determine the number of requires yeas and it's 2:1 so if 70 voted nay they would need 140 yea.
One naturally assumes that a vote requiring a 2/3 majority requires a full two-thirds, i.e. rounding the required number of yea's up to the nearest whole. But assumptions should never be confused for facts.
But probably it does require the 2/3 majority, rounded up. The error here could well stem from careless use of technology. An accountant's calculator (the type which prints to a paper roll) round to two decimal places as they are used for currency, a good accountant will habitually utilise this rounding to his client's advantage whenever possible.
Hulu are coming to the UK once they get the agreements sorted out, much of which appears to be the fault of our broadcasters.
Though, personally I think "exclusive content deals" are against the concept of internet distribution anyway. I'm not subscribing to anything unless I can get everything. If anyone has exclusive stuff then they all have exclusive stuff.
Online TV should be about the quality of service in the distribution. Soon as they start with the exclusivity crap they're making the whole industry less appealing for the consumer just so that their individual company can be relatively better than the competition. I can understand Hulu doing this, but for the TV companies it's folly. Their objective is long term, grow the market and do not above all let any distributor like Hulu take control. That means no exclusives.
The problem with British food is not so much in their design but rather the absurdly cheap abomination to be found on supermarket shelves that pretends to be a traditional food. Much of it is pretending when it claims to be food. At university I had friends from far and wide and they were at pains to emphasise that what is to be found on the shelves of British supermarkets is in no way representative of their traditional foods either.
Eating well in most countries I've been to involves a trip to numerous relatively small favoured stores and taking care with your selections. The same applies in Britain, it's just that there's also the option of the the big supermarkets. I'm not sure why people do one thing in other countries and proclaim their food good, then do something else in Britain i.e. take a random selection of crap from a supermarket and then declare it derisory.
If you're repulsed by the notion of a black pudding, it's just a blood sausage. Variants can be found as traditional foods in many European countries. Most traditional foods are designs of peasants making use of the most marginal of foods, their financial pressures required a creativity that over time has led to most of the remarkable foods. You probably do not want to know the reason why so many traditional foods are heavily spiced. Haggis is the usual culprit for shock at traditional foods, but in reality it's very nutritious and everybody I know who has tried a good one has declared it superb.
If you want food that is truly disgusting and without any merit, look at your processed foods. Mechanically recovered, battery-farmed "chicken" injected with chemicals and flavourings, steeped in fat and sugar. The ingredients are far more repulsive and the result is barely food. They exist to temporarily satisfy a self-propagated craving for fat and sugar, not provide nutrition. Shall we start on the beverages?
Fish n' chips? It's just fish in a flour covering and chipped potato.
Most responses have answered the "is it even legal" part quite well. The "should it be" is basically the same though. If you agreed to something when signing up, well you agreed to it. Your pay should reflect your personal costs and time, if it doesn't, well perhaps now should review your decision.
It gets more complicated if it was not part of the contract you agreed to. Realistically, this is just what happens and you're left with the choice of accepting it, moving on or
going to a tribunal or whatever (very risky to your career). If you're lucky you may be in a position to negotiate or help develop proposals whereby staff and management can reach an amicable agreement.
However, in all cases I would expect there to be appropriate compensation for the extra demands being placed upon you and also to reflect your increasing qualifications. I don't necessarily mean wholly financial compensation; it would probably be some combination of the certification being part of the employer's ongoing training programme (i.e. paid for and performed mainly during company time) and you paying and studying in your own time but getting an increased salary. Keep in mind that certainly if an employer paid everything and provided all the time, I would certainly count it part of the remuneration package.
What you really need to watch out for however is when the employer is bringing you up to a level that would normally require promotion, but simultaneously raising the bar for promotion. You're doing more, higher level work but getting paid the same. Employers can be very bad for exerting pressure on staff to make it appear that they need to do more just to maintain their current position when in fact they are continually increasing their responsibilities without recognition.
A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don’t have in other industries such as film
I watch movies, I watch movie trailers. I play games, I play demos. Films are also guaranteed to work on my player, games aren't. Films cost $15, games cost $60. Films are usually 90-120m, I expect a much bigger time commitment to a game (minimum 15x as much). I've seen very few films where I thought it was 90mins of my life lost, whereas I have played many utterly worthless games.
it becomes prohibitively expensive. [...] Also, given the time pressures in making a demo – in fact given the time pressure of making a quality demo – I think it all becomes really difficult to work with
A valid argument against making any demo. How is this in favour of making paid demos?
people instantly think this is only some money-hungry ploy.
Instead of being annoyed with your customers, consider that this is a result of publisher's past behaviour resulting in a loss of trust from their customers. This may or may not be due, it doesn't matter. The phrase "the customer is always right" is often misunderstood. It does not mean a person whom is a customer is thereby always accurate with facts. It means a person is always right in their capacity as a customer: he has the money you want, and no reason to give it to you unless you do what he wants. A lot of people seem to get this confused when they are distanced from the customer, they get to thinking that what matters is what they want to offer to sell them.
I think the whole issue needs to be explained in a better way
Well you had your chance to do so in this interview yet explained nothing.
I dunno, they could probably so something sensible like sell the first chapter for 1/3 the price and then the rest for the other 2/3. But we all know that's not how it is going to happen, because that is not "making things more commercially viable". All the wording I've read, including Yuri's, is you pay for the first section then pay full price for the whole thing. Even if they packaged up as an extra chapter in the "demo" and a full game afterwards (i.e. "yes you pay more but you get more"), it's doomed because publishers do not have the trust of their customers, it will automatically be assumed that the "full game" has reduced content. Publishers only have their past behaviour to blame for this.
I don't see why there is different treatment for mail, phone calls, email, SMS, online messengers, and so on. Never mind why there is differences depending on whether or not it has previously been read, or whether I'm using a pay phone.
It's all communications and I (should) have an expectation of privacy. What's the fundamental difference between a letter that is transported using a network of mail-men and one transported by a network of computers?
I don't care where it is "held". If I use a postbox I rent that postbox and it is for all intents and purposes an extension of my home. Saving emails online is the same as saving them on my home computer, it makes no odds that I am renting the mail space elsewhere in the same way that it does not matter if I rent a second home or storage space for my papers.
I suppose there is an argument that I should expect a postcard to be read by anyone coming into contact with it, and therefore the same could be said to apply to an email. But there must be a distinction between a mail man happening to come across information during the course of his duties that I have contracted him for, and where the authorities specifically monitor your communications in the hope of finding something? Surely an envelope cannot be argued to afford greater expectation of privacy than even the most basic encryption, since a child could defeat the envelope but at least some skill would be required for the encryption?
Sometimes I think rights are considered something to be given away when it would be inconvenient for the authorities to violate them anyway. Somehow there seems to be a correlation between how cheap it would be to snoop and the ease at which they are allowed to do so.
A pure monopoly has the characteristic of one seller many buyers. However, the overriding concern is actually about the extent of control, i.e. market power. Market share can be a useful indicator, a warning flag, but is not in itself relevant.
For an extreme example, a privatised utility company may have a 100% market share but if there is a strong regulator enforcing complete control over pricing then the company can hardly be said to wield monopoly power. On the other extreme, a company may have a modest market share yet still hold massive influence in the market. This is most likely to occur where there its "competitors" are very numerous each with much smaller market share. Alternately, one company may hold essential patents or licences through which it is able to dictate terms normally set by the market, such as minimum product pricing.
Furthermore there is the issue of how "market" is defined. I'm not really convinced that many people buying an iPhone took much time to consider the alternatives on offer. Certainly, most people I know whom own one make very little use of the impressive functionality they paid so much for, suggesting their purchase was less than economically rational.
I'm not really wanting to accuse Apple of being a monopoly, at least in the classic sense. But consider that most industries that you can name a brand in are very likely to be at least in monopolistic competition.
TechRepublic covered this almost a month ago, though it still gets sidetracked (like the Boston article) in a way that exemplifies the bigger issue.
Particularly, the point is not about password ageing, which is merely one example of how controls are often ineffective at achieving the security objectives. The bigger problem is that the usual IT security industry mantra has total disregard for all the other IT objectives. The goal (the ultimate, parent objective) of IT is to assist the organisation in achieving its objectives. IT security is just one objective for achieving that goal, but all of them are important.
When evaluating implementing security controls do not simply consider security. You also have to consider things like productivity, expense, risk, or how it might make it harder for the company to respond to customer requirements. Failing to do this is why users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective: they are pursuing objectives and IT security appears little more than an obstacle.
Get a decent router and you can setup the firewall and outright block internet access easily. It is the norm that the above would be controlled via a web interface. My last 3 (cheap and basic) routers also had an option for emailing logs and alarms. It will also have site filters but this is somewhat pointless as they'll either find a way around them, or find an alternative source that in all probability would be even less desirable than the ones you knew about in order to block.
The router should also show who is connected so this can effectively monitor who is on, though they could fake it. However, every single time I've read an article about children using computers the golden rule has been to keep the computer in a public area, not in bedrooms. On the other hand the non-hardcore gamers will very probably prefer a laptop, and to be honest an internet connection and some privacy is likely to result in some hormones being saited and more relaxed teenage boy. If they're girls, do not let them have webcams...
I'm yet to try any AV software that does not come with a scheduler, they usually pester you to set this upon installation.
Whilst you can find free software through google for high temp / fan speed low etc monitoring, IMHO this specification emphasises that you've overthought this project and practical common sense has got left behind somewhere. I don't think you can buy a computer now that doesn't protect itself from overheating, the rest will sort itself out.
Scheduling the time usage of computer is a job to do in person. Don't try to abdicate that responsibility onto a computer. Regardless, such reliance is an unwise strategy since they are very likely to figure out how to completely override all your automated controls.
In short, just get a router, puts the computers in a public place and do the rest with a little trust and parenting. Kids gradually turn into adults as the increasingly gain experience with how to deal with trust, responsibility and risk. The more you coddle them the more vulnerable they will be when they inevitably find themselves in a risky situation.
I hope they find out who leaked this and put them in a locked cell. Releasing classified material puts all of our American soldiers in danger -- not to mention our country.
Flamebait or no, there's an important response to this.
Releasing this video did not put American soldiers or your country in danger. It's what is being done in the video doing that. Maybe, hopefully, the outrage in the US over this video will convince them this is not a reflection of America, that the wanton murder of Iraqis is not considered acceptable. Just maybe the release of this video is enough to prevent them deciding America is the enemy, because you can be sure that is what they were thinking when they saw this through their home window, or heard about it on the street. This video brings news to Americans, it is not news to Iraqis. What is news to Iraqis is that Americans are upset about it.
TFA argues that more money should be spent on security than compliance because security is worth more. This makes a big assumption that each $ spending is equally effective wherever it is spent: it may simply be more expensive to provide an acceptable level of assurance over compliance. Cost vs. benefit.
Secondly, their concept of "valuable" seems to refer to their value as assets, but compliance is more about reducing the risk of potential liability. Compliance is required. Maybe it's with good reason, maybe it's red tape, either way doing it probably appears to add no value but the consequences of not doing it may be ultimate. If a plausable consequence of non-compliance is the total failure of the company, say through legal action or customers deserting, it is therefore not possible for anything to be more valuable to the company than compliance.
Embracing the opportunity to show the impact of illegal chemicals on driving is FAR different than cops emailing out the photograph as a Halloween joke.
Having trawled through the Decision, the above isn't so far off the conclusion here. The fact that these pictures were made by cops carrying out their duties while their dissemination was out-with the purposes of those duties was pervasive - see the conclusion on the final page.
There is an inevitable tendency to take the basic information from the summary and to draw a conclusion from it; namely that you're not allowed to put pictures of dead people on the internet any more. Read the decision, which wasn't quite as much of an ordeal as expected, albeit complicated by the numerous separate claims, at least from "A. General Observations" on P51 and the reality is more complex. Freedom of speech is also explicitly discussed further up. As is the norm, the court's decision is well explained and supported by existing cases. There is actually little new law here but rather a clarification; "while until today no California case had yet recognised a familial right to privacy in autopsy or similar photographs, I conclude it is no great leap to do so".
By the way the Australian grand prix was a very good race. Lots of ballsy overtaking and constantly something to watch. Contrast that to Bahrain two weeks ago, two hours of utter tedium with maybe half a dozen overtakes once you take out car failure.
What changed? The weather. It blew all the calculations out the window so people were reacting on the fly. Button won thanks in large part to personally making the call to risk pitting early to swap to slicks on a damp circuit, sending him off the track on the first corner but more than compensated for later. Bahrain was sunny and everything went to plan.
Sure Vettel retiring with car failure was a bummer but reliability is the motoring equivalent to injury, fitness and fatigue. Limited number of engines etc could be considered broadly similar to the restricted transfer season windows in some sports.
The simple answer is that 95% of the PC gaming market** can use DX9 while only 56% can use DX10.
* That 39% for DX9 includes 22% people with DX10 hardware using DX9 Win XP.
** Assuming Steam account holders who allow the HW survey are indicative of the relevant PC gaming market. Personally I'm inclined to assume it's not far off, at least not so far that it matters.
I'm confused, why is it physically possible for anyone to remotely turn power on and off? That doesn't have anything to do with "help deliver electricity more efficiently and to measure power consumption in real time". Surely the entire software and circuity surrounding those features should be able to fail completely with the core system (supply of electricity) completely unaffected and oblivious? I'm tempted to assume someone has other, less marketable objectives for the smart meters such as being able to cheaply disconnect people who aren't paying the bill, and therefore the root of the problem is those inherently risky objectives.
People use the net different then a newspaper. When you take a newspaper subscription, you read it like a book. But when you browse the net, you go here you go there. Take in a page here, an article there. The problem isn't paying 1 subscription fee, it is paying dozens.
Spot on. I subscribed to The Economist a while back and considered it a good read. It'd fall onto the doormat and I'd sit it aside until I had a decent amount of spare time to sit down and read it, thoroughly. It was high quality content where time and care had been put into it's creation and I gave it time and care to read. Even where I disagreed with their positions I could see how they had arrived to that point - arguments were usually informative, interesting and above all insightful (it was also occasionally funny). Most importantly, they were presented as an argument and rarely as fact.
Newspapers however are increasingly following the lead set by the internet. News is short, lacking in detail or analysis yet waffles on trivialities, opinions are asserted rather than debated and the overall impression is that someone (and I don't know or care who) is trying to convince you of something they do not really know much about. It does not help that I might read a story on digg or wherever and the next day the same story is in the newspaper with next to no value added. Aside from their own major investigations (which can still be pretty good), there is nothing there that makes any newspaper's print any more valuable than the newswire most of it came from.
The focus seems to be on quantity and immediacy, in total ignorance of what gives a news source value in the eyes of the consumer: quality. When I read a news paper or whatever online source I rarely care where it is coming from because regardless of who that is I place no reliance on them whatsoever.
Unless you're hooked on a certain plan or whatever try other providers. I can get a solid reception on one carrier and extremely poor on all the others (but if I cross the street they're all full strength). Choice of phone does not seem to matter very much (regardless of the fibbing some do with the bars they show).
OK so I'm from the UK and don't know how the US system works. Here there are several providers and they have their own towers (though some share some towers). Here it's also easy to get a free "pay as you go" sim card that you can use to try them out, though just asking friends around can be a more entertaining approach.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary suggests this is a push to cement the OOXML standard and ultimately lock-in for MS Office. I don't really see why they need a free cloud-based offering to do that, MS Office has done extremely well at locking-in their standards in the past. TFA that it refers to also clearly argues this is MS having to compete with Google Docs, a much more evident profit motive. MS is also quoted that they see this as an opportunity to get at least a little income from people who, for various reasons, aren't currently paying for MS Office.
Whether it remains free indefinitely depends on how it works out, i.e. whether they think it is making more money (directly and indirectly) than doing something else. Stating the obvious but it's a silly question. Even Openoffice is freely supported by Sun for a profit motive: breaking the MS standards lock-in.
The Google quotes are on the money though. It's standard practice now for businesses to install Office on every machine while all the documents are saved to a network drive. This is a bit of a kludge really, people hunting through directories trying to find files is very cumbersome, especially since lots of people insist on saving works-in-progress to their desktop and only copying over when they're finished - and very often forgetting or not getting around to it.
To complete they should add subscription fees and a facility whereby inventors who do not wish to patent their inventions can for a very cheap fee file their "prior art" (without any kind of inspection).
Very quickly you only have patents being filed that people genuinely and seriously plan to exploit and require protection. Nobody would file any old crap because it might just enable them to sue a competitor for unwittingly copying their "invention" by basically having implemented the natural solution to a task. There would not be a huge proportion of patents sitting there preventing society putting the idea to use, when the patent holder has decided not to exploit it but there is no reason for them to invalidate it. Patent trolling would start requiring serious investment.
The first thing to ask if why society offers patent protection. Is society really benefiting by protecting things so unimportant that the author would not ask for that protection if it cost just $164 more?
Sigh. The movie publishers are well aware their customers want a download service and are willing to pay for it. They are just not willing to supply it because it threatens their business plan. Publishers are their own worst enemy because they are totally focused on themselves and not the consumer. They do not have the mentality for change unless it clearly involves more money and more control for them than the old system. Old system dying? Well that's because of pirates and therefore the only course of action is to stop piracy in a way that does not change the system. Counter piracy with service? Don't be outrageous.
I pay around £15/m (~$22) for a monthly DVD rental for which there are 2 DVD's allocated to me at any one time - I make a list and the quicker I return DVDs the quicker I get the next batch. I get through say 10 per month.
To cut a long story short (yes, I had it typed up and everything), I just know that despite cutting out the major bottleneck (the mailman has the DVDs twice as long as me), internet distribution will result in at best me getting through say 10 per month for around £15/m.
Even if a publisher did agree to a internet distribution system, they would change the licensing to a per-view royalty, or increase the licensing fees for the "new platform", or some other method for countering any benefit anybody else might achieve. My rental service won't make any more money, the publishers wont make any more money, I wont get a better service.
Much more likely the service would be a lot worse. Royalties would be too high so it'd cost £20/m for 10 views, the publishers would be doing exclusivity farces so I'd need 5 different subscriptions to get the full range...
Security, tracking and recording is one of these things that many people have a base assumption that more is always better. That's not true at all.
There's the inevitable escalation. As the new system settles in, those charged with security look for new measures to improve monitoring and the new system makes still more measures practical. As the new system becomes normalised, there is less resistance to the next step (when a few years ago the measure would have been widely considered draconian). For example, continually tracking students as they move around campus. They already know what lecture room you're in so who cares right?
The more automated monitoring there is, the less non-automated monitoring there is. You're now just relying on one thing instead of something else. Something that once you may have reported as suspicious you now feel excused from reporting since probably the automated security would have picked it up, right?
This can become much worse when other controls start relying on the automated systems. For example, with the RFID system there's no need to do a headcount anymore, right? So what happens when the log shows 50 people entering the hall and there's only 45 at the assembly point after the fire alarm goes off? True, 50 are recorded as leaving the hall, but oopsie we're recording who's in the hall not who's in the building. Now you're fucked, because there's either a student needing rescuing or a janitor/fireman risking his life unnecessarily. Shit, the best case scenario is actually that students are needing to be rescued and you are able to find them fast - no other possibility allows you certainty.
On the more educational issues of "voluntary" attendance, university is good for people because it teaches responsibility. Taking care of yourself, living on a budget, dealing with the social environment, taking responsibility for your studies, these are all part of the university experience and arguably the most important and valuable part of the whole thing. Secondly, why is a degree valuable to employers? It suggests a base knowledge of the topic, true. But why is it so common for people to be able to do completely unrelated jobs off the back of "a degree"? Because it also implies you have at least the minimum level of intelligence and that you were sufficiently self-motivated. Start mandating and enforcing attendance and degrees actually tell employers less about what they want to know.
Barely had the netbook started hitting the mainstream that they were getting bigger screens, bigger drives, more weight, less battery life, bigger price tag. Most of them very quickly became just crap laptops.
Most of them are seem terrible value. For around 10%-15% more you can get something that at least holds itself to the standard of a low-end laptop, with a much more powerful type of "1.6ghz cpu" and other components yet after a few months the battery life is practically the same. The weight is for all intents and purposes very similar.
Netbooks were good because they were less than two-thirds the price of a laptop, were far more portable (could be forgotten about in a basic satchel), had long batteries. While the spec looked low, general use was actually snappy because it was using SSD and a light OS. You only noticed the performance loss when doing things that actually required decent horsepower (though choppy flash video was a bit of a weakness), which wasn't something you'd want a netbook for anyway.
The summary suggests laptops became cheaper to bridge the gap between them and netbooks. I think it was much more than netbooks turned into laptops.
THG may well be on the money there. I don't do much IT but I do know small business (working as an accountant). Loads of small businesses require one performance server to run their main productivity server and everything else is printing and storage. It's the same at our practice: we have 3 big servers, one of which is choked for performance in every way while for the others the CPU is almost idle while the bottleneck is something else.
Even if all you want is a lot of hard drive space for a lot of people to share, you end up having to get a server that has expensive-everything just so you get the fast storage etc. We have basically a server that cost a ton of money to basically be a NAS box. Saving some money on that to spend it on the one that needs everything it can get would be pretty good for productivity. Sure there are options out there, but they're not really available to small businesses who basically have to buy off the shelf gear that their IT contractor can support.
From there ARM can look at moving in on home servers, if they ever get going. I still think there's potential for a "media centre" server that is mostly about connectivity and content storage (rather than pushing actual video about), think a souped-up router with hard drives and some functionality software.
Greed - noun. excessive or rapacious desire, esp. for wealth or possessions. (ref, my emphasis).
First off we have to ask if a fictional entity has the necessary mens rea to be greedy. That's questionable but I think beside the point, because we don't really care if it is "the company" or rather the collective result of it's management that is greedy.
Determining whether something or someone is greedy is a personal judgement. We are all at least a little greedy but it is silly to set the bar so low that everyone qualifies, it renders the term pointless. In my view, a company is not greedy simply because it exists to make money, it depends on the lengths it is willing to go to make money.
Branson's ability to convince himself that his airline is due money, that he can rationalise this perspective into a belief so strong he evidently thinks the general public would support the notion of giving him their money, suggests to me he is greedy. That Virgin engaged in price-fixing provides some backup, particularly since:
It's not necessarily plain maths that is at issue, it may be the specific wording (which is not given in TFA).
It's easy for an article to say the "measure needed a two-thirds vote to pass" and for everybody to have an understanding that the vote requires at least a two thirds majority of the votes (which is the 138 yeas) but that's not necessarily the literal interpretation of what was written. For starters "needed a two-thirds vote to pass" may require 2/3 of the eligible voters to turn out in favour - our 206 does not include anyone abstaining...
It could also say that it needs a third to block the vote, 68.6recurring so 69 (back to our 137 yeas). But most people would still talk about this as what is required to pass the vote, people are inaccurate like that.
If it says "requireth no less than two yeas per one nays", everyone understands that's two out of three, 2/3 right? Wrong. You start with your nays to determine the number of requires yeas and it's 2:1 so if 70 voted nay they would need 140 yea.
One naturally assumes that a vote requiring a 2/3 majority requires a full two-thirds, i.e. rounding the required number of yea's up to the nearest whole. But assumptions should never be confused for facts.
But probably it does require the 2/3 majority, rounded up. The error here could well stem from careless use of technology. An accountant's calculator (the type which prints to a paper roll) round to two decimal places as they are used for currency, a good accountant will habitually utilise this rounding to his client's advantage whenever possible.
Hulu are coming to the UK once they get the agreements sorted out, much of which appears to be the fault of our broadcasters.
Though, personally I think "exclusive content deals" are against the concept of internet distribution anyway. I'm not subscribing to anything unless I can get everything. If anyone has exclusive stuff then they all have exclusive stuff.
Online TV should be about the quality of service in the distribution. Soon as they start with the exclusivity crap they're making the whole industry less appealing for the consumer just so that their individual company can be relatively better than the competition. I can understand Hulu doing this, but for the TV companies it's folly. Their objective is long term, grow the market and do not above all let any distributor like Hulu take control. That means no exclusives.
The problem with British food is not so much in their design but rather the absurdly cheap abomination to be found on supermarket shelves that pretends to be a traditional food. Much of it is pretending when it claims to be food. At university I had friends from far and wide and they were at pains to emphasise that what is to be found on the shelves of British supermarkets is in no way representative of their traditional foods either.
Eating well in most countries I've been to involves a trip to numerous relatively small favoured stores and taking care with your selections. The same applies in Britain, it's just that there's also the option of the the big supermarkets. I'm not sure why people do one thing in other countries and proclaim their food good, then do something else in Britain i.e. take a random selection of crap from a supermarket and then declare it derisory.
If you're repulsed by the notion of a black pudding, it's just a blood sausage. Variants can be found as traditional foods in many European countries. Most traditional foods are designs of peasants making use of the most marginal of foods, their financial pressures required a creativity that over time has led to most of the remarkable foods. You probably do not want to know the reason why so many traditional foods are heavily spiced. Haggis is the usual culprit for shock at traditional foods, but in reality it's very nutritious and everybody I know who has tried a good one has declared it superb.
If you want food that is truly disgusting and without any merit, look at your processed foods. Mechanically recovered, battery-farmed "chicken" injected with chemicals and flavourings, steeped in fat and sugar. The ingredients are far more repulsive and the result is barely food. They exist to temporarily satisfy a self-propagated craving for fat and sugar, not provide nutrition. Shall we start on the beverages?
Fish n' chips? It's just fish in a flour covering and chipped potato.
Most responses have answered the "is it even legal" part quite well. The "should it be" is basically the same though. If you agreed to something when signing up, well you agreed to it. Your pay should reflect your personal costs and time, if it doesn't, well perhaps now should review your decision.
It gets more complicated if it was not part of the contract you agreed to. Realistically, this is just what happens and you're left with the choice of accepting it, moving on or going to a tribunal or whatever (very risky to your career). If you're lucky you may be in a position to negotiate or help develop proposals whereby staff and management can reach an amicable agreement.
However, in all cases I would expect there to be appropriate compensation for the extra demands being placed upon you and also to reflect your increasing qualifications. I don't necessarily mean wholly financial compensation; it would probably be some combination of the certification being part of the employer's ongoing training programme (i.e. paid for and performed mainly during company time) and you paying and studying in your own time but getting an increased salary. Keep in mind that certainly if an employer paid everything and provided all the time, I would certainly count it part of the remuneration package.
What you really need to watch out for however is when the employer is bringing you up to a level that would normally require promotion, but simultaneously raising the bar for promotion. You're doing more, higher level work but getting paid the same. Employers can be very bad for exerting pressure on staff to make it appear that they need to do more just to maintain their current position when in fact they are continually increasing their responsibilities without recognition.
I watch movies, I watch movie trailers. I play games, I play demos. Films are also guaranteed to work on my player, games aren't. Films cost $15, games cost $60. Films are usually 90-120m, I expect a much bigger time commitment to a game (minimum 15x as much). I've seen very few films where I thought it was 90mins of my life lost, whereas I have played many utterly worthless games.
A valid argument against making any demo. How is this in favour of making paid demos?
Instead of being annoyed with your customers, consider that this is a result of publisher's past behaviour resulting in a loss of trust from their customers. This may or may not be due, it doesn't matter. The phrase "the customer is always right" is often misunderstood. It does not mean a person whom is a customer is thereby always accurate with facts. It means a person is always right in their capacity as a customer: he has the money you want, and no reason to give it to you unless you do what he wants. A lot of people seem to get this confused when they are distanced from the customer, they get to thinking that what matters is what they want to offer to sell them.
Well you had your chance to do so in this interview yet explained nothing.
I dunno, they could probably so something sensible like sell the first chapter for 1/3 the price and then the rest for the other 2/3. But we all know that's not how it is going to happen, because that is not "making things more commercially viable". All the wording I've read, including Yuri's, is you pay for the first section then pay full price for the whole thing. Even if they packaged up as an extra chapter in the "demo" and a full game afterwards (i.e. "yes you pay more but you get more"), it's doomed because publishers do not have the trust of their customers, it will automatically be assumed that the "full game" has reduced content. Publishers only have their past behaviour to blame for this.
In the UK the government can now open your postal mail.
I don't see why there is different treatment for mail, phone calls, email, SMS, online messengers, and so on. Never mind why there is differences depending on whether or not it has previously been read, or whether I'm using a pay phone.
It's all communications and I (should) have an expectation of privacy. What's the fundamental difference between a letter that is transported using a network of mail-men and one transported by a network of computers?
I don't care where it is "held". If I use a postbox I rent that postbox and it is for all intents and purposes an extension of my home. Saving emails online is the same as saving them on my home computer, it makes no odds that I am renting the mail space elsewhere in the same way that it does not matter if I rent a second home or storage space for my papers.
I suppose there is an argument that I should expect a postcard to be read by anyone coming into contact with it, and therefore the same could be said to apply to an email. But there must be a distinction between a mail man happening to come across information during the course of his duties that I have contracted him for, and where the authorities specifically monitor your communications in the hope of finding something? Surely an envelope cannot be argued to afford greater expectation of privacy than even the most basic encryption, since a child could defeat the envelope but at least some skill would be required for the encryption?
Sometimes I think rights are considered something to be given away when it would be inconvenient for the authorities to violate them anyway. Somehow there seems to be a correlation between how cheap it would be to snoop and the ease at which they are allowed to do so.
A pure monopoly has the characteristic of one seller many buyers. However, the overriding concern is actually about the extent of control, i.e. market power. Market share can be a useful indicator, a warning flag, but is not in itself relevant.
For an extreme example, a privatised utility company may have a 100% market share but if there is a strong regulator enforcing complete control over pricing then the company can hardly be said to wield monopoly power. On the other extreme, a company may have a modest market share yet still hold massive influence in the market. This is most likely to occur where there its "competitors" are very numerous each with much smaller market share. Alternately, one company may hold essential patents or licences through which it is able to dictate terms normally set by the market, such as minimum product pricing.
Furthermore there is the issue of how "market" is defined. I'm not really convinced that many people buying an iPhone took much time to consider the alternatives on offer. Certainly, most people I know whom own one make very little use of the impressive functionality they paid so much for, suggesting their purchase was less than economically rational.
I'm not really wanting to accuse Apple of being a monopoly, at least in the classic sense. But consider that most industries that you can name a brand in are very likely to be at least in monopolistic competition.
TechRepublic covered this almost a month ago, though it still gets sidetracked (like the Boston article) in a way that exemplifies the bigger issue.
Particularly, the point is not about password ageing, which is merely one example of how controls are often ineffective at achieving the security objectives. The bigger problem is that the usual IT security industry mantra has total disregard for all the other IT objectives. The goal (the ultimate, parent objective) of IT is to assist the organisation in achieving its objectives. IT security is just one objective for achieving that goal, but all of them are important.
When evaluating implementing security controls do not simply consider security. You also have to consider things like productivity, expense, risk, or how it might make it harder for the company to respond to customer requirements. Failing to do this is why users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective: they are pursuing objectives and IT security appears little more than an obstacle.
Get a decent router and you can setup the firewall and outright block internet access easily. It is the norm that the above would be controlled via a web interface. My last 3 (cheap and basic) routers also had an option for emailing logs and alarms. It will also have site filters but this is somewhat pointless as they'll either find a way around them, or find an alternative source that in all probability would be even less desirable than the ones you knew about in order to block.
The router should also show who is connected so this can effectively monitor who is on, though they could fake it. However, every single time I've read an article about children using computers the golden rule has been to keep the computer in a public area, not in bedrooms. On the other hand the non-hardcore gamers will very probably prefer a laptop, and to be honest an internet connection and some privacy is likely to result in some hormones being saited and more relaxed teenage boy. If they're girls, do not let them have webcams...
I'm yet to try any AV software that does not come with a scheduler, they usually pester you to set this upon installation.
Whilst you can find free software through google for high temp / fan speed low etc monitoring, IMHO this specification emphasises that you've overthought this project and practical common sense has got left behind somewhere. I don't think you can buy a computer now that doesn't protect itself from overheating, the rest will sort itself out.
Scheduling the time usage of computer is a job to do in person. Don't try to abdicate that responsibility onto a computer. Regardless, such reliance is an unwise strategy since they are very likely to figure out how to completely override all your automated controls.
In short, just get a router, puts the computers in a public place and do the rest with a little trust and parenting. Kids gradually turn into adults as the increasingly gain experience with how to deal with trust, responsibility and risk. The more you coddle them the more vulnerable they will be when they inevitably find themselves in a risky situation.
Flamebait or no, there's an important response to this.
Releasing this video did not put American soldiers or your country in danger. It's what is being done in the video doing that. Maybe, hopefully, the outrage in the US over this video will convince them this is not a reflection of America, that the wanton murder of Iraqis is not considered acceptable. Just maybe the release of this video is enough to prevent them deciding America is the enemy, because you can be sure that is what they were thinking when they saw this through their home window, or heard about it on the street. This video brings news to Americans, it is not news to Iraqis. What is news to Iraqis is that Americans are upset about it.
TFA argues that more money should be spent on security than compliance because security is worth more. This makes a big assumption that each $ spending is equally effective wherever it is spent: it may simply be more expensive to provide an acceptable level of assurance over compliance. Cost vs. benefit.
Secondly, their concept of "valuable" seems to refer to their value as assets, but compliance is more about reducing the risk of potential liability. Compliance is required. Maybe it's with good reason, maybe it's red tape, either way doing it probably appears to add no value but the consequences of not doing it may be ultimate. If a plausable consequence of non-compliance is the total failure of the company, say through legal action or customers deserting, it is therefore not possible for anything to be more valuable to the company than compliance.
Having trawled through the Decision, the above isn't so far off the conclusion here. The fact that these pictures were made by cops carrying out their duties while their dissemination was out-with the purposes of those duties was pervasive - see the conclusion on the final page.
There is an inevitable tendency to take the basic information from the summary and to draw a conclusion from it; namely that you're not allowed to put pictures of dead people on the internet any more. Read the decision, which wasn't quite as much of an ordeal as expected, albeit complicated by the numerous separate claims, at least from "A. General Observations" on P51 and the reality is more complex. Freedom of speech is also explicitly discussed further up. As is the norm, the court's decision is well explained and supported by existing cases. There is actually little new law here but rather a clarification; "while until today no California case had yet recognised a familial right to privacy in autopsy or similar photographs, I conclude it is no great leap to do so".
By the way the Australian grand prix was a very good race. Lots of ballsy overtaking and constantly something to watch. Contrast that to Bahrain two weeks ago, two hours of utter tedium with maybe half a dozen overtakes once you take out car failure.
What changed? The weather. It blew all the calculations out the window so people were reacting on the fly. Button won thanks in large part to personally making the call to risk pitting early to swap to slicks on a damp circuit, sending him off the track on the first corner but more than compensated for later. Bahrain was sunny and everything went to plan.
Sure Vettel retiring with car failure was a bummer but reliability is the motoring equivalent to injury, fitness and fatigue. Limited number of engines etc could be considered broadly similar to the restricted transfer season windows in some sports.
The simple answer is that 95% of the PC gaming market** can use DX9 while only 56% can use DX10.
* That 39% for DX9 includes 22% people with DX10 hardware using DX9 Win XP.
** Assuming Steam account holders who allow the HW survey are indicative of the relevant PC gaming market. Personally I'm inclined to assume it's not far off, at least not so far that it matters.
I'm confused, why is it physically possible for anyone to remotely turn power on and off? That doesn't have anything to do with "help deliver electricity more efficiently and to measure power consumption in real time". Surely the entire software and circuity surrounding those features should be able to fail completely with the core system (supply of electricity) completely unaffected and oblivious? I'm tempted to assume someone has other, less marketable objectives for the smart meters such as being able to cheaply disconnect people who aren't paying the bill, and therefore the root of the problem is those inherently risky objectives.
Spot on. I subscribed to The Economist a while back and considered it a good read. It'd fall onto the doormat and I'd sit it aside until I had a decent amount of spare time to sit down and read it, thoroughly. It was high quality content where time and care had been put into it's creation and I gave it time and care to read. Even where I disagreed with their positions I could see how they had arrived to that point - arguments were usually informative, interesting and above all insightful (it was also occasionally funny). Most importantly, they were presented as an argument and rarely as fact.
Newspapers however are increasingly following the lead set by the internet. News is short, lacking in detail or analysis yet waffles on trivialities, opinions are asserted rather than debated and the overall impression is that someone (and I don't know or care who) is trying to convince you of something they do not really know much about. It does not help that I might read a story on digg or wherever and the next day the same story is in the newspaper with next to no value added. Aside from their own major investigations (which can still be pretty good), there is nothing there that makes any newspaper's print any more valuable than the newswire most of it came from.
The focus seems to be on quantity and immediacy, in total ignorance of what gives a news source value in the eyes of the consumer: quality. When I read a news paper or whatever online source I rarely care where it is coming from because regardless of who that is I place no reliance on them whatsoever.
Unless you're hooked on a certain plan or whatever try other providers. I can get a solid reception on one carrier and extremely poor on all the others (but if I cross the street they're all full strength). Choice of phone does not seem to matter very much (regardless of the fibbing some do with the bars they show).
OK so I'm from the UK and don't know how the US system works. Here there are several providers and they have their own towers (though some share some towers). Here it's also easy to get a free "pay as you go" sim card that you can use to try them out, though just asking friends around can be a more entertaining approach.