Might not have been his intention, but the author has basically proven that MMOs, in terms of the game fee itself, are incredibly cheap entertainment.
He also demonstrates that stupid people will spend stupid amounts of money on MMO-related bits and pieces. That's not the cost of playing the game.
And surely paying the 1-month-at-a-time fee of $15 is fine when you're trying it out, but surely at some point in the 4 year 8 month saga you realise you're going to stick with it for a while, and take one of the cheaper/longer sub options. Even if he takes 8 months of "eval" to arrive at that conclusion, using 6 month subs saves him $100 over the next 4 years.
I was in my last "real job" for 7 years, and spent the last 3 negotiating an equity position. They offered 10% for "effort to date" and our only point of debate was how to develop a schedule to grow that 10% to the upper limit they were comfortable with (20%) over the next 3-5 years. They would get the certainty they needed, and I would get the increasing reward (and commitment) that I needed.
We never reached an agreement, so I eventually resigned and never got the original 10% - it wasn't worth the legal effort to fight for. But throughout the last 2 years, because the negotiation had dragged out so badly, I had accepted a revenue-share of 5% (on gross, not profit). Obviously it was never intended for this 5% to actually leave the business as cash, it was meant to be "converted" as we travelled from 10 to 20% equity. But as we never resolved the issue, I took it monthly as cash. This certainly made it worthwhile (overall) for me to hang around, but it can only have hurt their own position.
Fast-forward 2 years and they were bought by a public company in a 50% cash, 50% shares deal. I thought the price (based on our revenue at the time) was crazy, and could only be motivated by confidence the parent company's shares were on their way up, and/or the opportunity to leverage themselves into well-paid upper management slots in the parent company.
Sure enough, the shares of the parent gradually headed to zero over the next year or so, making them next to worthless.
In the wash-up, the 10% I "lost" by walking away ended up being worth very little. Obviously I'm somewhat relieved they didn't end up selling for a squillion dollars in any real currency.
There's also the problem of whether or not Mr 10% would actually get what he's owed, in a private company, when Mr 90% sells up.
I've been gainfully self-employed for the 6 years since. I can't recommend 100% equity highly enough, but will certainly tackle this equity problem as I grow my own business and take other people onboard. Revenue-sharing deals will definitely be based on profit though, not gross.
And whether such a problem is related to malware or not, what steps would you take next?
In some fantasy/virtual reality utopia where we are afforded the time to "scratch" our technical itches by delving deep enough to find the actual cause of the problem, there are lots of options for where to look next, and most of them are already in this thread.
But in the real world where our time comes at an hourly rate, your best course of option is simple: spend the 3 hours it takes to re-install your OS, patch it up, re-install your apps, patch them up, configure your apps, restore your data, and away you go.
Because that's the real world.
Yes, you've caught something (which you may or may not find if you go looking), or something else has gone wrong/become corrupt. Just re-install and move on.
And there are two bonuses:
1. your system will magically improve in performance to the level it was at the first day you turned it on, before you started down the inevitable path of bloat/crapware and steadily degrading performance.
2. you'll learn a few things along the way/make better choices about what to install and what not to install, ending up with a leaner, faster, more reliable system.
Bestbuy sucks, compusa sucks, circuit city sucks.. all of them suck. They are staffed with minimum wage idiots that misinform more than they inform and their store policies treat you like you are more trouble than you are worth.
All true. But Darwin's theory of natural selection applies to these corporate giants just as it does to biology. We (the consumer) get the level of service we're willing to pay for. Trashy electronics retailers prosper because we buy what they're selling. Saving a dollar wins over customer service every time. So who's to blame? That would be us.
At least not in the manner the OP requires. If you're the only person ever editing these files, then there are lots of software solutions that do this just fine, that other people have already suggested, including the creaking Briefcase from Windows 95.
But if you want to allow for the possibility that other users in the office have changed those very same files, which you had "offline" over the weekend, then forget about it.
For a genuinely multi-user, genuinely collaborative approach to a problem like this, you need to shift to a completely different document management paradigm - for example: using a web-based document or spreadsheet application where multi-user editing and online availability has been built-in from the start (Google?). Of course this only works for specific types of data, not all data, and only when you're connected (for now).
Hmm what do you know, a marginal level of "firewalling".
Given most msgs in this thread have mentioned small networks running 2003, they'll be talking about SBS2003. Given even most small businesses need SQL, they'll be talking about SBS2003 Premium.
With prefetching enabled, you may end up with cookies and web pages in your web browser's cache from web sites that you did not click on since prefetching happens automatically when you view Google search results pages. You can delete these files by clearing your browser's cache and cookies.
Google's own words. So they know its a bad idea but they're doing it anyway.
I don't want my browser running around going to sites that I don't intened to visit. And certainly, not because Google tells my browser to do so.
Agreed. In the age of broadband, this is just a bad idea. Latency is low enough that we can get that page quick if we want it, so why pre-download it. Waste of bits if we don't want it. And from a web site operator's POV, do I want my logs filled with these hits, which DON'T turn out to be real users?
It's obvious why ATM's and 4 digit PINS "work"
on
Password Security Panned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Somehow, the world's ATM banking systems have managed to get by with a bare minimum of fraud for more than 20 years by relying upon only four-digit codes.
... because ATM's have long provided what most security companies are trotting out as the next big thing: two-factor authentication. Your pathetically short 4-digit (and likely numeric-only) PIN is "what you know" and the card itself "what you have". You need both to get in, unlike your desktop computer.
There's also the fact that the banks are paying attention to your transactions and will likely act on unusual behaviour - this is close to the "suspicion engine" he describes.
- Between 100%-75% health, Dragon will fight as normal.
How about... Blizzard fills a room with 50 paid and/or volunteer Human NPC players - let's call them LuckySOBs.
Most of the time when a band of players are fighting your NPC Dragon, they're fighting the normal game AI. But occasionally, control of the Dragon is given to the console of one of the LuckySOBs. It might be triggered by the number of players banding together to fight this monster, or some other trigger, or it could be totally random.
"Hey, I didn't know the dragon could do THAT"
Maybe the LuckySOBs are just normal in-game players, who are randomly selected, with the appropriate controls in place to abuse the system by letting your friends beat up on the monster you're controlling.
I realise 50 LuckySOBs doesn't sound like it would handle 200,000 players. But maybe supplementing traditional game AI with a little human intervention can spice things up.
If you only have the low-quality WMVs to encode from, there is no point in re-encoding them because the quality will be crap.
No kidding.
The fact is that re-encoding already compressed files is pointless, might as well leave them as WMV. DivX is actually better than WMV, if you encode from the same source.
The source files I use for each attempt are (massive) MPEGs ripped from a DVD which was created from a VHS .
keep your.WMV files for the windows users, in a prominent position, since 93% of your visitors should be clicking this. but add a *secondary* link, with a basic.MPG for your 7% non-windows users, in a not-so-prominent position.
This is along the lines of what I was trying to achieve - but my 5MB WMV file turns into a 26MB MPEG(1) file. 7% or not - who's going to bother downloading a 1 minute video that's 26MB in size.
I thought he was sticking with WMV and wanted an additional format for non-windows people, so it shouldn't matter if it isn't an optimal format for windows surfers, it's just the alternative source.
Exactly. Very happy with.WMV for the Windows users, despite the performance concerns others here have expressed.
I was wanting to offer each video in both.WMV + format, but now that I realise.WMV isn't so impossible on Linux or *BSD I'll probably just stick with.WMV.
For the benefit of all of your suggesting the sports star is in fact a porn star, I will conceed that this sport does involve a (very) long and hard, somewhat pointy object. But not the one you think.
First of all, thanks to everyone who responded thoughtfully. I've read maybe 200 of the first 600 replies, and skimmed another 100 or so.
I'm very surprised to see how many people want to fix the problem I don't have: the Windows users of this site are quite happy with the video quality of.WMV, and so am I. I'm not only happy with the video quality (these are sporting videos - lots of motion) but very happy with the file sizes.
Everytime I've tried MPEG, the file becomes 2-3 times larger and I simply cannot put that online.
I will certainly look into QT and Real, as these seem to be credible options albeit at a cost.
What I have learned from your feedback, is that viewing.WMV on a non-Windows platform is actually less of a problem than I thought it was. Clearly there are.WMV viewers for other platforms out there I wasn't aware of. As these users are inclined to fiddle and install new stuff anyway, leaving.WMV as my standard might be the best approach.
I had already tried (as Admin) adding the Admin account to the list of recovery agents - no dice.
I did also try simply unchecking the "encrypted" checkbox under properties - no dice.
When you think about what a rogue Admin could do, it makes sense that it works that way.
Something I didn't mention - I had MS on the phone discussing my problem and their answer was (paraphrased): "you're out of luck, only that user can access those files, but you might find a utility out there to help". In other words, they couldn't say outright their EFS was a house of cards, but they at least pointed me in the right direction.
Client ran his business (3 years worth of data) from a Windows XP Pro desktop. Was concerned about some specific folders (financials mostly) so used the Encrypting File System available in XP (and 2000) to encrypt those folders to a key only available to his user profile.
What happens to your typical XP desktop after 3 years of registry bloat and spyware infection? His profile became corrupt, and Windows would not let him login. It could offer a "temporary" replacement profile for his username, or he could login as Administrator. Neither option gave him access to his encrypted folders, because the key was only available to the now corrupt user profile.
No problem - he religiously takes backups of all pertinent data using XP's Ntbackup. Guess what. Unlike copying data from an encrypted folder to a floppy disk or other non-NTFS partition, which will decrypt the data on the fly and store in plaintext - NTBACKUP stores the data on the tape in encrypted form. We restored from various backups - but they were all encrypted.
So: (a) don't go thinking the Admin login will have access to your files in the event of your main profile borking, and (b) don't go thinking those tape backups are in plaintext. And (c): consider keeping a plaintext copy SOMEWHERE secure anyway.
Hindsight: yes he should have exported the encryption key and stored it securely ahead of time, or made the Admin account a data recovery user for those folders.
Eventual solution was a $100 software utility which searches the hard drive including registry for all traces of the encryption scheme, and (then having been given the corrupt user profile's password) is able to decrypt all the encrypted folders. Without the password, it might have taken 100 years.
My partner and I have watched LCD prices plummet over the years and would desperately love to liberate the vast swaths of desk space that our CRTs currently waste. Not to mention putting a dent in the electricity bill (2 people, 7 monitors).
But while the better LCDs are becoming acceptable for gaming in terms of refresh rate, the rest of our time is spent developing web sites. We haven't yet seen an LCD that's anywhere near the quality of our CRTs in terms of colour depth and range. When you need black to = black and white to = white and a huge range inbetween, LCDs just aren't there yet. So we wait.
Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, [...] We started in 1989, before the advent of the Internet, and we're still going strong.
Aside from the obvious chicken-and-egg problem of claiming to have been an ISP before the "I" was even invented - 1989 may pre-date the web but it's a long way short of pre-dating the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Might not have been his intention, but the author has basically proven that MMOs, in terms of the game fee itself, are incredibly cheap entertainment.
He also demonstrates that stupid people will spend stupid amounts of money on MMO-related bits and pieces. That's not the cost of playing the game.
And surely paying the 1-month-at-a-time fee of $15 is fine when you're trying it out, but surely at some point in the 4 year 8 month saga you realise you're going to stick with it for a while, and take one of the cheaper/longer sub options. Even if he takes 8 months of "eval" to arrive at that conclusion, using 6 month subs saves him $100 over the next 4 years.
We never reached an agreement, so I eventually resigned and never got the original 10% - it wasn't worth the legal effort to fight for. But throughout the last 2 years, because the negotiation had dragged out so badly, I had accepted a revenue-share of 5% (on gross, not profit). Obviously it was never intended for this 5% to actually leave the business as cash, it was meant to be "converted" as we travelled from 10 to 20% equity. But as we never resolved the issue, I took it monthly as cash. This certainly made it worthwhile (overall) for me to hang around, but it can only have hurt their own position.
Fast-forward 2 years and they were bought by a public company in a 50% cash, 50% shares deal. I thought the price (based on our revenue at the time) was crazy, and could only be motivated by confidence the parent company's shares were on their way up, and/or the opportunity to leverage themselves into well-paid upper management slots in the parent company.
Sure enough, the shares of the parent gradually headed to zero over the next year or so, making them next to worthless.
In the wash-up, the 10% I "lost" by walking away ended up being worth very little. Obviously I'm somewhat relieved they didn't end up selling for a squillion dollars in any real currency.
There's also the problem of whether or not Mr 10% would actually get what he's owed, in a private company, when Mr 90% sells up.
I've been gainfully self-employed for the 6 years since. I can't recommend 100% equity highly enough, but will certainly tackle this equity problem as I grow my own business and take other people onboard. Revenue-sharing deals will definitely be based on profit though, not gross.
In some fantasy/virtual reality utopia where we are afforded the time to "scratch" our technical itches by delving deep enough to find the actual cause of the problem, there are lots of options for where to look next, and most of them are already in this thread.
But in the real world where our time comes at an hourly rate, your best course of option is simple: spend the 3 hours it takes to re-install your OS, patch it up, re-install your apps, patch them up, configure your apps, restore your data, and away you go.
Because that's the real world.
Yes, you've caught something (which you may or may not find if you go looking), or something else has gone wrong/become corrupt. Just re-install and move on.
And there are two bonuses:
1. your system will magically improve in performance to the level it was at the first day you turned it on, before you started down the inevitable path of bloat/crapware and steadily degrading performance.
2. you'll learn a few things along the way/make better choices about what to install and what not to install, ending up with a leaner, faster, more reliable system.
All true. But Darwin's theory of natural selection applies to these corporate giants just as it does to biology. We (the consumer) get the level of service we're willing to pay for. Trashy electronics retailers prosper because we buy what they're selling. Saving a dollar wins over customer service every time. So who's to blame? That would be us.
At least not in the manner the OP requires. If you're the only person ever editing these files, then there are lots of software solutions that do this just fine, that other people have already suggested, including the creaking Briefcase from Windows 95.
But if you want to allow for the possibility that other users in the office have changed those very same files, which you had "offline" over the weekend, then forget about it.
For a genuinely multi-user, genuinely collaborative approach to a problem like this, you need to shift to a completely different document management paradigm - for example: using a web-based document or spreadsheet application where multi-user editing and online availability has been built-in from the start (Google?). Of course this only works for specific types of data, not all data, and only when you're connected (for now).
Well there's primitive, and then there's really, really primitive.
So who's got a non-WEP, non-WPA wireless network we can test this on? Oh, no-one on the planet.
1. Finally!
2. Over-priced by 30%
You firewall the external one.
Given most msgs in this thread have mentioned small networks running 2003, they'll be talking about SBS2003. Given even most small businesses need SQL, they'll be talking about SBS2003 Premium.
So they have ISA. Internet Securi......
Google's own words. So they know its a bad idea but they're doing it anyway.
Agreed. In the age of broadband, this is just a bad idea. Latency is low enough that we can get that page quick if we want it, so why pre-download it. Waste of bits if we don't want it. And from a web site operator's POV, do I want my logs filled with these hits, which DON'T turn out to be real users?
There's also the fact that the banks are paying attention to your transactions and will likely act on unusual behaviour - this is close to the "suspicion engine" he describes.
How about... Blizzard fills a room with 50 paid and/or volunteer Human NPC players - let's call them LuckySOBs.
Most of the time when a band of players are fighting your NPC Dragon, they're fighting the normal game AI. But occasionally, control of the Dragon is given to the console of one of the LuckySOBs. It might be triggered by the number of players banding together to fight this monster, or some other trigger, or it could be totally random.
"Hey, I didn't know the dragon could do THAT"
Maybe the LuckySOBs are just normal in-game players, who are randomly selected, with the appropriate controls in place to abuse the system by letting your friends beat up on the monster you're controlling.
I realise 50 LuckySOBs doesn't sound like it would handle 200,000 players. But maybe supplementing traditional game AI with a little human intervention can spice things up.
No kidding.
The fact is that re-encoding already compressed files is pointless, might as well leave them as WMV. DivX is actually better than WMV, if you encode from the same source.
The source files I use for each attempt are (massive) MPEGs ripped from a DVD which was created from a VHS .
This is along the lines of what I was trying to achieve - but my 5MB WMV file turns into a 26MB MPEG(1) file. 7% or not - who's going to bother downloading a 1 minute video that's 26MB in size.
Exactly. Very happy with .WMV for the Windows users, despite the performance concerns others here have expressed.
I was wanting to offer each video in both .WMV + format, but now that I realise .WMV isn't so impossible on Linux or *BSD I'll probably just stick with .WMV.
That's why I haven't specified the URL.
For the benefit of all of your suggesting the sports star is in fact a porn star, I will conceed that this sport does involve a (very) long and hard, somewhat pointy object. But not the one you think.
I'm very surprised to see how many people want to fix the problem I don't have: the Windows users of this site are quite happy with the video quality of .WMV, and so am I. I'm not only happy with the video quality (these are sporting videos - lots of motion) but very happy with the file sizes.
Everytime I've tried MPEG, the file becomes 2-3 times larger and I simply cannot put that online.
I will certainly look into QT and Real, as these seem to be credible options albeit at a cost.
What I have learned from your feedback, is that viewing .WMV on a non-Windows platform is actually less of a problem than I thought it was. Clearly there are .WMV viewers for other platforms out there I wasn't aware of. As these users are inclined to fiddle and install new stuff anyway, leaving .WMV as my standard might be the best approach.
This user was a stand-alone XP Pro desktop - not part of a domain.
I bet when you join a domain, the domain administrator account does become a recovery agent.
I did also try simply unchecking the "encrypted" checkbox under properties - no dice.
When you think about what a rogue Admin could do, it makes sense that it works that way.
Something I didn't mention - I had MS on the phone discussing my problem and their answer was (paraphrased): "you're out of luck, only that user can access those files, but you might find a utility out there to help". In other words, they couldn't say outright their EFS was a house of cards, but they at least pointed me in the right direction.
Client ran his business (3 years worth of data) from a Windows XP Pro desktop. Was concerned about some specific folders (financials mostly) so used the Encrypting File System available in XP (and 2000) to encrypt those folders to a key only available to his user profile.
What happens to your typical XP desktop after 3 years of registry bloat and spyware infection? His profile became corrupt, and Windows would not let him login. It could offer a "temporary" replacement profile for his username, or he could login as Administrator. Neither option gave him access to his encrypted folders, because the key was only available to the now corrupt user profile.
No problem - he religiously takes backups of all pertinent data using XP's Ntbackup. Guess what. Unlike copying data from an encrypted folder to a floppy disk or other non-NTFS partition, which will decrypt the data on the fly and store in plaintext - NTBACKUP stores the data on the tape in encrypted form. We restored from various backups - but they were all encrypted.
So: (a) don't go thinking the Admin login will have access to your files in the event of your main profile borking, and (b) don't go thinking those tape backups are in plaintext. And (c): consider keeping a plaintext copy SOMEWHERE secure anyway.
Hindsight: yes he should have exported the encryption key and stored it securely ahead of time, or made the Admin account a data recovery user for those folders.
Eventual solution was a $100 software utility which searches the hard drive including registry for all traces of the encryption scheme, and (then having been given the corrupt user profile's password) is able to decrypt all the encrypted folders. Without the password, it might have taken 100 years.
Without that tool, his business was finished.
Super-charge that old HPLJ2 compatible laser printer you're still using - turn it into a 36MB beast!
But while the better LCDs are becoming acceptable for gaming in terms of refresh rate, the rest of our time is spent developing web sites. We haven't yet seen an LCD that's anywhere near the quality of our CRTs in terms of colour depth and range. When you need black to = black and white to = white and a huge range inbetween, LCDs just aren't there yet. So we wait.
Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, [...] We started in 1989, before the advent of the Internet, and we're still going strong.
Aside from the obvious chicken-and-egg problem of claiming to have been an ISP before the "I" was even invented - 1989 may pre-date the web but it's a long way short of pre-dating the Internet.