On Monday, 8/14, we were due to hook up a T1 line with our new ISP. We hadn't had any severe problems with the old one, but our contract with them was up and they seemed apathetic when looking at negotiating a new one. So, we were going to cut over the lines, run the services concurrently for 2 weeks, and then terminate the old one on 8/28. On Saturday morning, our line went down at 1:01 AM. I was in the office at 6 AM Saturday, and I was NOT HAPPY to say the least. Tech support, however, seemed happier beating off than trying to help. They told me they'd give me a call back. The line was down all weekend. Monday was an exercise in frustration; instead of taking 2 weeks to do a changeover to avoid any interruption, we did the whole damn thing at once. We were up and running, completely changed over, DNS and all, by 4 PM.
You may think: hey, that's not bad. You only lost one day - really less than a full work day. Oh, but that's where the pain comes in. I run all our services in house: Goodlink (a Blackberry-like system), Exchange 2003, DNS, everything. Plus, while the lines were down, anyone who called our office heard five rings and was then disconnected. The loss in customer service is irreparable to one major client, and three unbelievably important emails were lost forever - the kind where the intended recipients weren't really in a position to say "Hey, can you resend that for me?" We'll never know exactly how many emails were lost. In a world that works 24/7, business never stops, and an important email that comes in at 3 AM is just as critical as the important email that comes in at 9 AM sharp.
Direct answer to your question: Our T1 line is beyond essential to the daily operation of the organization. It's absolutely mission critical that we're connected at all times, without interruption or major packet loss.
I remember losing my Prince of Persia manual and having to guess the first letter of the last word on page 30. That was annoying enough. But it's perhaps frightening commentary on the current state of DRM that I can't tell if the scratch and sniff card is or ever was real. Honestly. Was it? I can actually see a proprietary happy company like Sony coming up with something like that...
Longest battle I was in was 10 hours, but there were several that went for multiple days (on the largest three servers). Mine, blackhand, is in the top ten, but it still didn't have the population to sustain a 40-on-40 battle for 72+ hours at a time.
We run an Axis 207 at work. Pair it up with Zoneminder and you've got yourself a montion capture system, albeit in the form of home security system software.
Good to see you read TFA before opening your mouth and solidly inserting your foot in it. He's sold a few thousand saws equipped with his technology, and of them he has 52 "saves," most people walking away with little more than papercut type scratches. From contacting a 4000 RPM saw.
200M won is about 207k USD. According to this article, the cost of living in Seoul is around 90% higher than the average cost of living in the US. So, what these guys are making is tantamount to getting paid $108k or so in the US. That's a pretty damn good chunk of change for playing video games!
I can't speak for Brother, though from the recommendations here it looks like I might be buying one soon.
On your HP comment: I can say that the consumer HP printers are - at least the models I have here in my office - just fine. (I have two DeskJet 3650s, a 3845, a 5440, and a 5600.) I'm not WOW!ed by anything their lower end models do, but they're fairly inexspensive, very effective, and highly reliable.
As for making a name for themselves in the market, Sullivan feels that some of the biggest competition comes from MMOs, not because they are competitors in the genre, but because people simply enjoy playing them so much.
His entire argument is that any game that's more popular than his, especially MMOs, takes away from his game....Really, that isn't an argument, it's stating the obvious.
Gamers are an educated demographic, for the most part, and have fantastically high standards. When something that comes out is so good that it shakes up the entire industry, complaining about it will get you nowhere. It's kinda like he's making an "I'm hardcore and therefore better!" argument, but applying it to the big kid on the block (yes, WoW is a "casual" game in many respects, but he's not addressing that aspect).
And even at all that, aspiring to understand why it's so wildly popular so that he may make better games seems to have escaped him.
Though I'm not addressing TFA directly, let me comment on the DC thing. Yes. We have been utterly hammerered unto oblivion with rain in the last 5 days. But even at that, the power grid in DC is remarkably stable.
My office, which is about 3 blocks from the White House, has never had a major event that would have an effect on our network. In about 10 months of running monitoring 24/7 on our UPS, I've never seen a major "power event" (outage, surge, something else big). I've never seen a big spike or dip. Hell, I've barely seen any variation at all in the signal. Perhaps it's a function of living in the big city. Perhaps it really is the fact that I'm on the same power grid as the White House. Perhaps it's just a coincidence and some really nice wiring, and me with a little too much tinfoil in my hat. Regardless, I think something is special about the power grids in the DC area.
If you played Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, you know how Valve gets around this. Episode 1's commentary was, quite frankly, one of the most interesting things I've seen in a game in a long time (I didn't play Lost Coast, when they introduced the commentary feature.)
Many ocmmentary points specifically address what's in this article - how to keep the player moving and interested (combat, exploration, puzzles, rewards) while at the same time directing their attention with specific things placed here and there without removing from them the ability to control the character. It's fantastically done, and when it's pulled off right - well, then you get HL2 and 35 Game of the Year awards.
TFA seems to blame iTunes, at least at heart. Wouldn't the actual problem here be the messed up, backwards, hacked way the (MP|RI)AA have decided to handle this newfangled technology called the internet?
Access cannot store pictures or documents. However, you could use its hyperlink field type to link to other office documents, though that's stopgap at best. The Office hyperlinking system is kinda ugly.
Other than that, Access supports everything you just mentioned out of the box. User access, publishing, replication...you can even whip up a small Wscript/VBscript to pull down user names and security rights from Active Directory via LDAP.
Really, it's not as bad as you think - the only major problem is storing images.
a) Not as cheap as a freely available distro, but cheaper than some distros that are sold as services (an OEM copy of Win XP goes for $90 on sale.)
b) Um, no? There's no reason why I would be, and I didn't need it. I won't need to upgrade for Vista, either.
c) Were I to have source code access, I couldn't do anything with it anyway. Unless it was PHP, my specialty language, or perhaps Perl. Same goes for 99.5% of users worldwide. So your question really doesn't make that much of a difference except to the computer elite who can hack source code.
Look, the truth is that Win XP and to a lesser but still significant extent Win 2k are real, solid OSs. They're targets because of their omnipresence, and moreso because they're 'competitors' to Linux, which is so endeared unto a community like this one. So we hear the most about the Windows vulnerabilities, yet I just updated some of the software on my Linux box to fix a few security holes, too. And in all honesty...like any other piece of software, if you keep up with the updates and are conscious of the risks and pitfalls of everyday use, it's a safe, fast, and secure OS. If you tossed a version of your favorite Linux distro released circa 1998 onto a computer you would have some VERY serious problems running it smoothly and/or securely.
Let me second that. I used to use Ultraedit until they triple billed me and wouldn't fix it (I eventually had to do a chargeback). When I went looking for a replacement, I tripped over Notepad++ and have never looked back.
Excellent point, actually. I don't see any corroberation and, alas, the boss calls. Gotta stop looking. You can bet I'm going to be waiting for a followup story.
I'm aware that, in the past, The Inquirer has published questionable articles. However, they've certainly got a revealing picture to back it up here...unless they're outright lying and they photoshopped something, why should we take this story with a grain of salt?
It's an election year. There's really not much else to say; the President is posturing for an anti gay marriage amendment (again) even though there's no chance it will ever pass. He's doing so in order to appeal to the radical right. Democrats are posturing to the moderate center by trying not to look like "the godless party." It's all a bunch of he said she said ape-style beating on your chest.
Strip out NetBIOS and rely on Active Drectory's sane and sensible DNS services (requires an all-Win2k+ environment) and it's like magic. The Win2k computers will still bitch that they have an empty WINS address, though.
Congrats to this article's author. You set out to tear Vista up, and you did it. Golf clap for you. You wanted to write a snarky, snide article with a french word thrown in here and there, and you did. I'll follow your example. The problem is you're picking out things you dislike with 'proof,' yet it's painfully obvious you have no experience actually administrating a Windows environment. A blog about "Windows" doesn't automatically make you an IT admin.
This problem is likely to grow over time, as more business-class PCs are equipped with 128MB or more of video memory.
What, are you rubber stamping computer orders? I order what I need, dude, and if you're with a company that's forcing video RAM on you, leave.
This protected list is extremely long in Vista Beta 2, including Control Panels for Windows Firewall, Scanners and Cameras, Parental Controls, iSCSI Initiator, Device Manager, BitLocker drive encryption and Add Hardware.
So...anything 99% of my users at work won't be doing on a normal basis is protected by the popup boxes you so loathe. In fact, from your quote here, in a normal work day all but one of my users will never see or use any of the items on that list. Yet your claim is that the boxes are so ubiquitous they interfered with the normal operation of the computer. I think no.
Of course, it is possible to turn off User Account Controls. It's what's behind the "Change security settings" option on the opening page of the User Accounts Control Panel. Making it impossible to turn off this feature, without hiding the Administrator log-in, would have been a better choice.
No, it wouldn't. Not even for Beta testers. You are not better than everyone else. Neither am I. Don't run as root. Don't deactivate UAC. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to run as root.
Windows peer networking is still balky.
The peer networking at my office is not balky. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. I've established that you're not a Windows user.
You have no rights in China. I'm not quite sure what this article is about, or what you're talking about. The government can and will freely profit from the IP rights of its citizens, yes, but it can strip those rights whenever and however it pleases for any reason whatsoever.
This isn't some emerging trend, or some candle to hold up so that Western states can rise to it. At least here, when our IP rights are corroded, or IP gets overbearing, we have recourse.
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On Monday, 8/14, we were due to hook up a T1 line with our new ISP. We hadn't had any severe problems with the old one, but our contract with them was up and they seemed apathetic when looking at negotiating a new one. So, we were going to cut over the lines, run the services concurrently for 2 weeks, and then terminate the old one on 8/28. On Saturday morning, our line went down at 1:01 AM. I was in the office at 6 AM Saturday, and I was NOT HAPPY to say the least. Tech support, however, seemed happier beating off than trying to help. They told me they'd give me a call back. The line was down all weekend. Monday was an exercise in frustration; instead of taking 2 weeks to do a changeover to avoid any interruption, we did the whole damn thing at once. We were up and running, completely changed over, DNS and all, by 4 PM.
You may think: hey, that's not bad. You only lost one day - really less than a full work day. Oh, but that's where the pain comes in. I run all our services in house: Goodlink (a Blackberry-like system), Exchange 2003, DNS, everything. Plus, while the lines were down, anyone who called our office heard five rings and was then disconnected. The loss in customer service is irreparable to one major client, and three unbelievably important emails were lost forever - the kind where the intended recipients weren't really in a position to say "Hey, can you resend that for me?" We'll never know exactly how many emails were lost. In a world that works 24/7, business never stops, and an important email that comes in at 3 AM is just as critical as the important email that comes in at 9 AM sharp.
Direct answer to your question: Our T1 line is beyond essential to the daily operation of the organization. It's absolutely mission critical that we're connected at all times, without interruption or major packet loss.
I remember losing my Prince of Persia manual and having to guess the first letter of the last word on page 30. That was annoying enough. But it's perhaps frightening commentary on the current state of DRM that I can't tell if the scratch and sniff card is or ever was real. Honestly. Was it? I can actually see a proprietary happy company like Sony coming up with something like that...
Longest battle I was in was 10 hours, but there were several that went for multiple days (on the largest three servers). Mine, blackhand, is in the top ten, but it still didn't have the population to sustain a 40-on-40 battle for 72+ hours at a time.
We run an Axis 207 at work. Pair it up with Zoneminder and you've got yourself a montion capture system, albeit in the form of home security system software.
Good to see you read TFA before opening your mouth and solidly inserting your foot in it. He's sold a few thousand saws equipped with his technology, and of them he has 52 "saves," most people walking away with little more than papercut type scratches. From contacting a 4000 RPM saw.
200M won is about 207k USD. According to this article, the cost of living in Seoul is around 90% higher than the average cost of living in the US. So, what these guys are making is tantamount to getting paid $108k or so in the US. That's a pretty damn good chunk of change for playing video games!
I can't speak for Brother, though from the recommendations here it looks like I might be buying one soon.
On your HP comment: I can say that the consumer HP printers are - at least the models I have here in my office - just fine. (I have two DeskJet 3650s, a 3845, a 5440, and a 5600.) I'm not WOW!ed by anything their lower end models do, but they're fairly inexspensive, very effective, and highly reliable.
As for making a name for themselves in the market, Sullivan feels that some of the biggest competition comes from MMOs, not because they are competitors in the genre, but because people simply enjoy playing them so much.
...Really, that isn't an argument, it's stating the obvious.
His entire argument is that any game that's more popular than his, especially MMOs, takes away from his game.
Gamers are an educated demographic, for the most part, and have fantastically high standards. When something that comes out is so good that it shakes up the entire industry, complaining about it will get you nowhere. It's kinda like he's making an "I'm hardcore and therefore better!" argument, but applying it to the big kid on the block (yes, WoW is a "casual" game in many respects, but he's not addressing that aspect).
And even at all that, aspiring to understand why it's so wildly popular so that he may make better games seems to have escaped him.
It's the government. There is, unfortunately, no reason needed. Bureaucracy is part of the equation.
Damn. I just got corrected and tossed on my ass. I bow to you, good sir.
Let's look at the simple black and white of the matter. Piracy is theft. Whether you agree with it or not, it's theft.
So, according to the OP, theft is good.
That's certainly a new one for me.
Though I'm not addressing TFA directly, let me comment on the DC thing. Yes. We have been utterly hammerered unto oblivion with rain in the last 5 days. But even at that, the power grid in DC is remarkably stable.
My office, which is about 3 blocks from the White House, has never had a major event that would have an effect on our network. In about 10 months of running monitoring 24/7 on our UPS, I've never seen a major "power event" (outage, surge, something else big). I've never seen a big spike or dip. Hell, I've barely seen any variation at all in the signal.
Perhaps it's a function of living in the big city. Perhaps it really is the fact that I'm on the same power grid as the White House. Perhaps it's just a coincidence and some really nice wiring, and me with a little too much tinfoil in my hat. Regardless, I think something is special about the power grids in the DC area.
If you played Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, you know how Valve gets around this. Episode 1's commentary was, quite frankly, one of the most interesting things I've seen in a game in a long time (I didn't play Lost Coast, when they introduced the commentary feature.)
Many ocmmentary points specifically address what's in this article - how to keep the player moving and interested (combat, exploration, puzzles, rewards) while at the same time directing their attention with specific things placed here and there without removing from them the ability to control the character. It's fantastically done, and when it's pulled off right - well, then you get HL2 and 35 Game of the Year awards.
TFA seems to blame iTunes, at least at heart. Wouldn't the actual problem here be the messed up, backwards, hacked way the (MP|RI)AA have decided to handle this newfangled technology called the internet?
Access cannot store pictures or documents. However, you could use its hyperlink field type to link to other office documents, though that's stopgap at best. The Office hyperlinking system is kinda ugly.
Other than that, Access supports everything you just mentioned out of the box. User access, publishing, replication...you can even whip up a small Wscript/VBscript to pull down user names and security rights from Active Directory via LDAP.
Really, it's not as bad as you think - the only major problem is storing images.
The immediate mental picture I got was Nelson going "Ha ha!"
a) Not as cheap as a freely available distro, but cheaper than some distros that are sold as services (an OEM copy of Win XP goes for $90 on sale.)
b) Um, no? There's no reason why I would be, and I didn't need it. I won't need to upgrade for Vista, either.
c) Were I to have source code access, I couldn't do anything with it anyway. Unless it was PHP, my specialty language, or perhaps Perl. Same goes for 99.5% of users worldwide. So your question really doesn't make that much of a difference except to the computer elite who can hack source code.
No, I'll get modded down, but... ;)
Look, the truth is that Win XP and to a lesser but still significant extent Win 2k are real, solid OSs. They're targets because of their omnipresence, and moreso because they're 'competitors' to Linux, which is so endeared unto a community like this one.
So we hear the most about the Windows vulnerabilities, yet I just updated some of the software on my Linux box to fix a few security holes, too. And in all honesty...like any other piece of software, if you keep up with the updates and are conscious of the risks and pitfalls of everyday use, it's a safe, fast, and secure OS. If you tossed a version of your favorite Linux distro released circa 1998 onto a computer you would have some VERY serious problems running it smoothly and/or securely.
Let me second that. I used to use Ultraedit until they triple billed me and wouldn't fix it (I eventually had to do a chargeback). When I went looking for a replacement, I tripped over Notepad++ and have never looked back.
Excellent point, actually. I don't see any corroberation and, alas, the boss calls. Gotta stop looking. You can bet I'm going to be waiting for a followup story.
I'm aware that, in the past, The Inquirer has published questionable articles. However, they've certainly got a revealing picture to back it up here...unless they're outright lying and they photoshopped something, why should we take this story with a grain of salt?
It's an election year. There's really not much else to say; the President is posturing for an anti gay marriage amendment (again) even though there's no chance it will ever pass. He's doing so in order to appeal to the radical right. Democrats are posturing to the moderate center by trying not to look like "the godless party." It's all a bunch of he said she said ape-style beating on your chest.
God, sometimes I hate this town.
Strip out NetBIOS and rely on Active Drectory's sane and sensible DNS services (requires an all-Win2k+ environment) and it's like magic. The Win2k computers will still bitch that they have an empty WINS address, though.
Congrats to this article's author. You set out to tear Vista up, and you did it. Golf clap for you. You wanted to write a snarky, snide article with a french word thrown in here and there, and you did. I'll follow your example.
The problem is you're picking out things you dislike with 'proof,' yet it's painfully obvious you have no experience actually administrating a Windows environment. A blog about "Windows" doesn't automatically make you an IT admin.
This problem is likely to grow over time, as more business-class PCs are equipped with 128MB or more of video memory.
What, are you rubber stamping computer orders? I order what I need, dude, and if you're with a company that's forcing video RAM on you, leave.
This protected list is extremely long in Vista Beta 2, including Control Panels for Windows Firewall, Scanners and Cameras, Parental Controls, iSCSI Initiator, Device Manager, BitLocker drive encryption and Add Hardware.
So...anything 99% of my users at work won't be doing on a normal basis is protected by the popup boxes you so loathe. In fact, from your quote here, in a normal work day all but one of my users will never see or use any of the items on that list. Yet your claim is that the boxes are so ubiquitous they interfered with the normal operation of the computer.
I think no.
Of course, it is possible to turn off User Account Controls. It's what's behind the "Change security settings" option on the opening page of the User Accounts Control Panel. Making it impossible to turn off this feature, without hiding the Administrator log-in, would have been a better choice.
No, it wouldn't. Not even for Beta testers. You are not better than everyone else. Neither am I. Don't run as root. Don't deactivate UAC. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to run as root.
Windows peer networking is still balky.
The peer networking at my office is not balky. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. I've established that you're not a Windows user.
Bah. More from page 7 on later.
You have no rights in China. I'm not quite sure what this article is about, or what you're talking about. The government can and will freely profit from the IP rights of its citizens, yes, but it can strip those rights whenever and however it pleases for any reason whatsoever.
This isn't some emerging trend, or some candle to hold up so that Western states can rise to it. At least here, when our IP rights are corroded, or IP gets overbearing, we have recourse.