The real issue is tha CNN is protecting its staff from getting arrested the second any of them touchdown on thai soil. I dont see why CNN should put its people at risk from a dictator, which is what a king really is. Why should CNN or the west be the ones who stand up to the king? Thai men should be taking arms against the monarchy. Until that happens, its decrees from the throne as usual. You cant force people into the 21st century (well, 18th century really). They must want it themselves first.
>Retail takes some 50% cut. Other middlemen, another 30%. The actual cost of production is like 5-10% of the retail price.
Yeah, thats not true. Retail is a 50% markup but another mysterious 30% middle-man (who?) and then another 10 to 15% missing? Hell, wholesale markup is usually only 20%. The cost of goods with profit to pay salaries, R&D, etc is usually 50% of the retail price. Shave off salaries, r&d, and you can perhaps pull out another 20-30%. You aint getting down to 5% of retail cost. Youre crazy if you think Dell is selling $500 computers with 19" LCDs and it only costs them $25 dollars to make. The CPU alone costs that much.
Look at the OLPC. If the eeepc is 350 then it should cost 17 dollars each. Obviously it doesnt.
That said, there are high-margin items out there that have a low cost of production like soda, but its rare for electronics to ever be a high-margin item.
Im sure a 10 dollar computer or glorified PDA is possible, but only with qualifiers like "with enough government subsidies" and "enough sales" and "enough donations" and "enough large scale production." The project hasnt even stared at they are claiming a minimum of 20 dollars per computer (times of india Jan 30). I wouldnt be surprised to see that rise again.
The bugs arent driver related. The bugs people complain about have to do with missions getting stuck and critical NPCs falling into the abyss (gaps in the 3d world) and dying. There's no logic in the game to verify that missions move properly or that NPCs stay alive when needed.
I experienced one stuck mission and used a work-around I found on the fallout3 wiki to fix it. I have two missions which are stuck with no fix. I have finished a few missions that were buggy the whole time but by screwing around and guessing I found a way to finish them. That's on top of the seriously bad edge detection. Why are my bullets constantly bouncing off shit when there's clearly enough room to get by?
I understand game design is difficult, but a little more care to make sure that missions are moving would have helped a whole lot. The only patched they released was to fix control-tab and minimization issues, not game logic issues.
>It is all moot anyway, as in 20 years time, the people who grew up pirating music will be in Government.
That makes no sense. The people in government now grew up in the wild 60s yet theyre the fiercest drug warriors and culture warriors around.
I doubt those who take oaths to enforce the law are going to promote copyright infringement especially now that its brain-dead simple to visit amazon or itunes and buy digital music legitimately.
The idea that youre part of some "movement" is laughable really. Youre just cheap.
Not really. They join existing torrents and simply log all the IPs attempting to download from their seeders. The transport may be encrypted but youre talking to them asking them "Hello there sir, can I have piece 5949 of 'Metallica-Discography.rar.'" Blammo your ISP sends you a letter.
I doubt everyone will move to private trackers. In fact, I doubt they mind private trackers very much. Its impossible to stop the motivated and technically informed, but the harder it is for Joe Average to get music the better.
Now, if ISPs could use this technology to detect and take botnet members offline, we might have something good going on here.
Why doesnt the government just mandate a salesman come into my home every night for an hour to pitch products at me? If its "for the jobs" then why not?
In reality, we draw the line on various types of marketing and advertising. People dont like it and it turns them off. The marketers then just become more aggressive and dishonest. They target seniors and english-second language people. They get them to sign contracts and repeat billings on credit cards, because people who understand english better or business better would never sign for this.
They are predators preying on the weak because their business method has failed. Let them die out. Especially now where many people dont even have land-lines anymore and one minute with a telemarketer costs them out of out pocket because of how cell phone pricing is done. Push advertising like a phone call is silly when you can find anything on the web, including reviews, competitive pricing, and Better Business Bureau complaints.
Now we have to go after the "text blah-blah to 5893" only to find out youve automatically been signed up for a 12 month contract of 40 dollars a month for a "joke of the day" service.
At the end of the day we either believe in consumer rights or we dont. I say we do.
> Go ahead, turn them all into movies, you know the fans will reward you for it with piles of cash. It's better than Legally Blonde: Supreme Court Captain!
The solution to crap isnt more crap in the genre you like, its actually less crap overall. Thanks for playing "lets stop stupidity with more stupidity!"
>you know the fans will reward you for it with piles of cash.
This says a lot about science fiction fans. They'll give cash not if the product is quality, but if it involves robots or sexy aliens. The idea that sci-fi fans are any smarter or more discriminating than Legally Blonde fans is laughable.
The symantec corporate AV product is pretty solid. Ghost is pretty solid, but certainly has been badly hurt by Acronis. They own Veritas now which is a solid backup solution.
No. We privatize the profits and socialize the loss. The AynRandBots here would never turn down a government handout, tax cut, DTV converter box, or bailout, but they'll preach unlimited laiseez-faire till they are blue in the face or until its their asses on the line. There's a real moral hazard here and its not going away anytime soon.
The Geode was not meant to compete with the Atom. It competed with xscale, arm, and other embedded processors. Its a pretty competitive market. I dont think it was ever meant to be a laptop processor either. Atom on the other hand was supposed to be in laptops and is a much newer design.
AMD tried to play catch up with the Geode MX but that was based on the very old 2002 'Thoroughbred' design. Even that only lasted for a short while. Atom pretty much ate their lunch. AMD is just cutting an old product they cant make money off anymore. Its a miracle its lasted this long.
People suffering from real PTSD dont hold jobs and they certainly dont sit around writing botnet code. If you really have PTSD or mental trauma from abuse youre not very functional. This guy is pissing in the eye of people with real mental health issues for a lame sympathy vote for the jury.
>substance abuse problem
Ditto for this. Ive known a couple real addicts. People who deserve some sympathy for their mindless actions. None of them were as remotely functional as this guy.
This guy is just an old fashioned criminal and deserves to serve time.
Aspirin isnt Tylenol, Ibuprofen, Advil, etc. Only real Aspirin is disallowed during pregnancy. Lots of drugs are disallowed during pregnancy. The idea that this would lead to a complete ban is ridiculous.
>This is social engineering at its finest - an untrusted source, launching executable code (via user action
Thats what a trojan is. Its a program claiming to be one thing but is another.
That exactly how all the Windows botnets have been built. People downloading fake codecs, fake flash installers, fake AVs, torrented malware, etc. Granted, there are more viruses and worms for windows, but most, if not 90%, of windows infections come from the same exact method that happened here. A windows user installing malware. I cant remember the last time I had to real with a real virus. Everything is a trojan horse now.
Still no viruses on OS X though, beyond that proof of concept thing a while back
OSX is 100% as vulernable as Windows in this regard. Now that OSX machines have large numbers expect more of this. Innocence is over. If this keeps up you will be running an AV. It will be irresponsible of you not to.
Also, don't steal software. You're just asking for trouble.
Hahaahahaha. Thats what we've been telling windows users for years. They still visit mininova and install "Nero8-cracked" and wonder why their machine is a mess.
I dont think 99% of iphone buyers even understand the difference between closed and open development. The iphone is popular for its form factor, UI, and Apple branding. For most of these people its their first smartphone. The idea that users are clamoring for a closed app store is borderline ridiculous.
>"well if Microsoft did this, everyone would moan!" and you're right - they have tried, and very few people bought smartphones (compared to the prevalence of the iPhone).
There's two things wrong with that statement. The sales of blackberries, palm, and WM smartphones was huge before the iphone and still is.
MS never tried to lock down apps. Youve always been able to develop for WM or palm. Theres no WM app store.
>What has been done over the past 5 years to prevent spam from being sent?
SPF, domain keys, new and better RBLs.
>And you can forget about filters.
We have already forgotten about filters. Now we just weigh the sending IP against a series of RBL. If they score high enough then its spam and we drop the TCP connection. We dont even receive the entire message. No content filtering at all. Works great. RBLs arent perfect but they are good enough.
Its also worth mentioning that you'll see disk errors in the event log. The source will be 'disk.' Is the disk working hard. Use filemon to see whats going on.
The asker should also look in the event log for any warnings or errors that started at the time of the slowness.
He should also do a netstat -a to see what active internet connections are working. If youre seeing lots of connects to port 25 someplace then you are running a mass mailing trojan. Investigate any suspicious connections. You can use tcpview for more info.
He should also boot up with a linux live disc or a PE disc like UBCD4WIN. If the slowness is still there then its most likely a hardware issue. UBCD4win also has a bunch of utilities with easy to use GUIs like HDTune. He can run an antivirus or spybot from the PE environment too for a second opinion.
Lastly, when you fix the issue you should remove your wife from the administrators group and just make her a user or power user. When she needs to install software or whatever just have her log in as admin.
Yeah real "liberal" media. You mean the New York Times and Judith Miller's breathless front page exposes on all that WMD in Iraq before the war? Or MSNBC's "Iraq Lowdown" with Lester Holt which was just shameless Bush cheerleading running up to the war?
Come on, just because one media outlet isnt Fox News, it doesnt make them liberal.
Focus on the bullshit? Now that Bush and his cronies are out of power, its time to prosecute them for whatever laws they broke. Letting them go just gives the message that the office of president is a consequence free temporary dictatorship.
What level encryption? Enough to guarantee that all future attacks will fail on it and that current server farms in China, UK, Germany, Spain, France, Israel, Russia, etc will not be able to crack the key at will?
RIM has shown itself to not exactly be responsible stewards with the keys it controls. Google "Indian government keys and blackberry." Im sure Obama will be using the keys from his own BES, but all that traffic is going through Waterloo and Im sure at the very least the CIA and the Canadians are sniffing it all.
>It's not that simple. A lot of those visas do in fact go to workers for jobs that an employer can't fill locally.
Yeah right. Im sure thats true a certain percentage of the time but the scenario "why pay someone 80k when we can get a slave for 24k" plays itself out too.
But...but..Jorge's overpaid hip web designers and marketing committees said that flash is in and everyone loves it. His no-nonsense MBAs claim that teaser summaries will increase sales, but to never give a whole article away for free.
Some companies deserve to fold. This is your classic "we wont adopt to the new web-based market, we'll just keep doing what we've always done and use the web purely as a sales and marketing platform."
Shame really. If they would get re-do their annoying site and give more content for free (say a 60 or 90 day trial for free with no obligations/cc numbers) it might be interesting. Its incredible to me that the trial is 7 days and that its just a way to give you the hard sell for a $1,000 set of books.
I dont think thats fair. Apple coule make a stand or put in an adults-only section of the store. There are lots of solutions here except for censorship. Blocking and censoring is the dumb way out.
In the US, using Sprint, I buy my own phones and when I try to replace my existing phone I get told "Sir, activating that phone will require a 2 year agreement." What? What the hell? I paid for this thing. Why should I sign a contract? I have no choice so I say yes.
The problem in the US is that you have no rights with cell phone carriers. I havent gotten a subsidized phone in ages, but Im still locked into contracts. I guess there's always the option of some pay per month crap phone, but I need a smartphone with a unlimited data plan.
Lots of us are willing to pay full price or buy used phones, but the system is gamed for contract lock-in.
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The real issue is tha CNN is protecting its staff from getting arrested the second any of them touchdown on thai soil. I dont see why CNN should put its people at risk from a dictator, which is what a king really is. Why should CNN or the west be the ones who stand up to the king? Thai men should be taking arms against the monarchy. Until that happens, its decrees from the throne as usual. You cant force people into the 21st century (well, 18th century really). They must want it themselves first.
>Retail takes some 50% cut. Other middlemen, another 30%. The actual cost of production is like 5-10% of the retail price.
Yeah, thats not true. Retail is a 50% markup but another mysterious 30% middle-man (who?) and then another 10 to 15% missing? Hell, wholesale markup is usually only 20%. The cost of goods with profit to pay salaries, R&D, etc is usually 50% of the retail price. Shave off salaries, r&d, and you can perhaps pull out another 20-30%. You aint getting down to 5% of retail cost. Youre crazy if you think Dell is selling $500 computers with 19" LCDs and it only costs them $25 dollars to make. The CPU alone costs that much.
Look at the OLPC. If the eeepc is 350 then it should cost 17 dollars each. Obviously it doesnt.
That said, there are high-margin items out there that have a low cost of production like soda, but its rare for electronics to ever be a high-margin item.
Im sure a 10 dollar computer or glorified PDA is possible, but only with qualifiers like "with enough government subsidies" and "enough sales" and "enough donations" and "enough large scale production." The project hasnt even stared at they are claiming a minimum of 20 dollars per computer (times of india Jan 30). I wouldnt be surprised to see that rise again.
The bugs arent driver related. The bugs people complain about have to do with missions getting stuck and critical NPCs falling into the abyss (gaps in the 3d world) and dying. There's no logic in the game to verify that missions move properly or that NPCs stay alive when needed.
I experienced one stuck mission and used a work-around I found on the fallout3 wiki to fix it. I have two missions which are stuck with no fix. I have finished a few missions that were buggy the whole time but by screwing around and guessing I found a way to finish them. That's on top of the seriously bad edge detection. Why are my bullets constantly bouncing off shit when there's clearly enough room to get by?
I understand game design is difficult, but a little more care to make sure that missions are moving would have helped a whole lot. The only patched they released was to fix control-tab and minimization issues, not game logic issues.
>It is all moot anyway, as in 20 years time, the people who grew up pirating music will be in Government.
That makes no sense. The people in government now grew up in the wild 60s yet theyre the fiercest drug warriors and culture warriors around.
I doubt those who take oaths to enforce the law are going to promote copyright infringement especially now that its brain-dead simple to visit amazon or itunes and buy digital music legitimately.
The idea that youre part of some "movement" is laughable really. Youre just cheap.
Not really. They join existing torrents and simply log all the IPs attempting to download from their seeders. The transport may be encrypted but youre talking to them asking them "Hello there sir, can I have piece 5949 of 'Metallica-Discography.rar.'" Blammo your ISP sends you a letter.
I doubt everyone will move to private trackers. In fact, I doubt they mind private trackers very much. Its impossible to stop the motivated and technically informed, but the harder it is for Joe Average to get music the better.
Now, if ISPs could use this technology to detect and take botnet members offline, we might have something good going on here.
Why doesnt the government just mandate a salesman come into my home every night for an hour to pitch products at me? If its "for the jobs" then why not?
In reality, we draw the line on various types of marketing and advertising. People dont like it and it turns them off. The marketers then just become more aggressive and dishonest. They target seniors and english-second language people. They get them to sign contracts and repeat billings on credit cards, because people who understand english better or business better would never sign for this.
They are predators preying on the weak because their business method has failed. Let them die out. Especially now where many people dont even have land-lines anymore and one minute with a telemarketer costs them out of out pocket because of how cell phone pricing is done. Push advertising like a phone call is silly when you can find anything on the web, including reviews, competitive pricing, and Better Business Bureau complaints.
Now we have to go after the "text blah-blah to 5893" only to find out youve automatically been signed up for a 12 month contract of 40 dollars a month for a "joke of the day" service.
At the end of the day we either believe in consumer rights or we dont. I say we do.
> Go ahead, turn them all into movies, you know the fans will reward you for it with piles of cash. It's better than Legally Blonde: Supreme Court Captain!
The solution to crap isnt more crap in the genre you like, its actually less crap overall. Thanks for playing "lets stop stupidity with more stupidity!"
>you know the fans will reward you for it with piles of cash.
This says a lot about science fiction fans. They'll give cash not if the product is quality, but if it involves robots or sexy aliens. The idea that sci-fi fans are any smarter or more discriminating than Legally Blonde fans is laughable.
The symantec corporate AV product is pretty solid. Ghost is pretty solid, but certainly has been badly hurt by Acronis. They own Veritas now which is a solid backup solution.
Its not all the home market.
No. We privatize the profits and socialize the loss. The AynRandBots here would never turn down a government handout, tax cut, DTV converter box, or bailout, but they'll preach unlimited laiseez-faire till they are blue in the face or until its their asses on the line. There's a real moral hazard here and its not going away anytime soon.
The Geode was not meant to compete with the Atom. It competed with xscale, arm, and other embedded processors. Its a pretty competitive market. I dont think it was ever meant to be a laptop processor either. Atom on the other hand was supposed to be in laptops and is a much newer design.
AMD tried to play catch up with the Geode MX but that was based on the very old 2002 'Thoroughbred' design. Even that only lasted for a short while. Atom pretty much ate their lunch. AMD is just cutting an old product they cant make money off anymore. Its a miracle its lasted this long.
People suffering from real PTSD dont hold jobs and they certainly dont sit around writing botnet code. If you really have PTSD or mental trauma from abuse youre not very functional. This guy is pissing in the eye of people with real mental health issues for a lame sympathy vote for the jury.
>substance abuse problem
Ditto for this. Ive known a couple real addicts. People who deserve some sympathy for their mindless actions. None of them were as remotely functional as this guy.
This guy is just an old fashioned criminal and deserves to serve time.
Aspirin isnt Tylenol, Ibuprofen, Advil, etc. Only real Aspirin is disallowed during pregnancy. Lots of drugs are disallowed during pregnancy. The idea that this would lead to a complete ban is ridiculous.
>This is social engineering at its finest - an untrusted source, launching executable code (via user action
Thats what a trojan is. Its a program claiming to be one thing but is another.
That exactly how all the Windows botnets have been built. People downloading fake codecs, fake flash installers, fake AVs, torrented malware, etc. Granted, there are more viruses and worms for windows, but most, if not 90%, of windows infections come from the same exact method that happened here. A windows user installing malware. I cant remember the last time I had to real with a real virus. Everything is a trojan horse now.
Still no viruses on OS X though, beyond that proof of concept thing a while back
OSX is 100% as vulernable as Windows in this regard. Now that OSX machines have large numbers expect more of this. Innocence is over. If this keeps up you will be running an AV. It will be irresponsible of you not to.
Also, don't steal software. You're just asking for trouble.
Hahaahahaha. Thats what we've been telling windows users for years. They still visit mininova and install "Nero8-cracked" and wonder why their machine is a mess.
I dont think 99% of iphone buyers even understand the difference between closed and open development. The iphone is popular for its form factor, UI, and Apple branding. For most of these people its their first smartphone. The idea that users are clamoring for a closed app store is borderline ridiculous.
>"well if Microsoft did this, everyone would moan!" and you're right - they have tried, and very few people bought smartphones (compared to the prevalence of the iPhone).
There's two things wrong with that statement. The sales of blackberries, palm, and WM smartphones was huge before the iphone and still is.
MS never tried to lock down apps. Youve always been able to develop for WM or palm. Theres no WM app store.
>What has been done over the past 5 years to prevent spam from being sent?
SPF, domain keys, new and better RBLs.
>And you can forget about filters.
We have already forgotten about filters. Now we just weigh the sending IP against a series of RBL. If they score high enough then its spam and we drop the TCP connection. We dont even receive the entire message. No content filtering at all. Works great. RBLs arent perfect but they are good enough.
I advise all xp users to run as user/power user. Tim, the prejudice you are seeing here is your own.
Its also worth mentioning that you'll see disk errors in the event log. The source will be 'disk.' Is the disk working hard. Use filemon to see whats going on.
The asker should also look in the event log for any warnings or errors that started at the time of the slowness.
He should also do a netstat -a to see what active internet connections are working. If youre seeing lots of connects to port 25 someplace then you are running a mass mailing trojan. Investigate any suspicious connections. You can use tcpview for more info.
He should also boot up with a linux live disc or a PE disc like UBCD4WIN. If the slowness is still there then its most likely a hardware issue. UBCD4win also has a bunch of utilities with easy to use GUIs like HDTune. He can run an antivirus or spybot from the PE environment too for a second opinion.
Lastly, when you fix the issue you should remove your wife from the administrators group and just make her a user or power user. When she needs to install software or whatever just have her log in as admin.
Yeah real "liberal" media. You mean the New York Times and Judith Miller's breathless front page exposes on all that WMD in Iraq before the war? Or MSNBC's "Iraq Lowdown" with Lester Holt which was just shameless Bush cheerleading running up to the war?
Come on, just because one media outlet isnt Fox News, it doesnt make them liberal.
Focus on the bullshit? Now that Bush and his cronies are out of power, its time to prosecute them for whatever laws they broke. Letting them go just gives the message that the office of president is a consequence free temporary dictatorship.
What level encryption? Enough to guarantee that all future attacks will fail on it and that current server farms in China, UK, Germany, Spain, France, Israel, Russia, etc will not be able to crack the key at will?
RIM has shown itself to not exactly be responsible stewards with the keys it controls. Google "Indian government keys and blackberry." Im sure Obama will be using the keys from his own BES, but all that traffic is going through Waterloo and Im sure at the very least the CIA and the Canadians are sniffing it all.
>It's not that simple. A lot of those visas do in fact go to workers for jobs that an employer can't fill locally.
Yeah right. Im sure thats true a certain percentage of the time but the scenario "why pay someone 80k when we can get a slave for 24k" plays itself out too.
But...but..Jorge's overpaid hip web designers and marketing committees said that flash is in and everyone loves it. His no-nonsense MBAs claim that teaser summaries will increase sales, but to never give a whole article away for free.
Some companies deserve to fold. This is your classic "we wont adopt to the new web-based market, we'll just keep doing what we've always done and use the web purely as a sales and marketing platform."
Shame really. If they would get re-do their annoying site and give more content for free (say a 60 or 90 day trial for free with no obligations/cc numbers) it might be interesting. Its incredible to me that the trial is 7 days and that its just a way to give you the hard sell for a $1,000 set of books.
These guys just dont get it.
I dont think thats fair. Apple coule make a stand or put in an adults-only section of the store. There are lots of solutions here except for censorship. Blocking and censoring is the dumb way out.
In the US, using Sprint, I buy my own phones and when I try to replace my existing phone I get told "Sir, activating that phone will require a 2 year agreement." What? What the hell? I paid for this thing. Why should I sign a contract? I have no choice so I say yes.
The problem in the US is that you have no rights with cell phone carriers. I havent gotten a subsidized phone in ages, but Im still locked into contracts. I guess there's always the option of some pay per month crap phone, but I need a smartphone with a unlimited data plan.
Lots of us are willing to pay full price or buy used phones, but the system is gamed for contract lock-in.