Frankly that is going a little overboard, especially if you don't have any proof that its a bug. Sure it'll work most times but so will killing a rabid dog with an air strike, kinda overkill for most cases LOL!
I keep several tools on a CD and give them a quick run before choosing a plan of action, malwarebytes, a couple of rootkit scanners (which BTW show the kernel DRM hooks nicely) and Trend Micro Housecall. You see if you don't do something like that first you may just be covering up a hardware error that will bite you in the ass down the road. I've seen plenty of cases where a hardware problem, bad RAM cell, dying channel on a board, flaky PSU, will be covered up by a classic "boot and nuke" for a little while as it takes a little while before enough errors end up back on the HDD to start making the OS shit the bed again.
Another good tool which I'm sure you know of is Ultimate Boot CD, its got scanners for just about every hardware problem you can name, RAM, CPU, HDD, if I do a scan and find no bugs and no error listings in event viewer to narrow the cause (which is telling in and of itself, as most bugs will trigger an event while many hardware glitches won't) I'll go to UBCD and give it a quick run to see if it finds something flaky. You'd be surprised how many times its a bad RAM cell or a HDD with sectors going bad.
Sure it takes a little longer but since the tools don't need babysat it isn't like you have to be sitting there and I've found its better to find out WHAT is causing the problem before simply nuking from orbit. Sure if its got more bugs than a Bangkok whore on coupon night nuke the sucker, but its not a good move to do so without at least having some sort of confirmation. Hell even in Aliens they made sure there were bugs on the ground before talking nuking it LOL.
I have to wonder if what the rumors say is true and the lockout expiration is about to be up if it isn't some insider trying to pump the stock before they cash out.
As I'm sure you know if you are an insider at a company and get stock before an IPO there is a "lockout period" where the ones that get stock before an IPO can't sell to keep them from doing a pump and dump by building a lot of buzz, letting the initial wave get high right after the stock hits the market and dumping their stocks for a big cashout. If true the expiration day is coming up that would give someone on the inside a pretty good reason to try to show FB "revenue' is climbing thus getting the stock to climb right before cashing out. A lot more people besides Zuckerberg got stock before the IPO ya know.
In any case frankly a neutral third party needs to be investigating this to see how truly widespread this really is. As I said if Joe Nobody is finding that 80% of their clicks are bots, how many of the bigger customers are seeing the same or worse? Someone needs to pick 15 of the top 100 advertisers on FB and look at their clicks and where they are coming from as that should show if this is truly a widespread pattern or just a single company being targeted.
That is pretty much the problem with WMD tech, isn't it? Once even the idea is out there others WILL figure out a way to implement it, you can't "undo" this anymore than you can unmake the atom bomb.
Personally I'm less worried about this, because frankly building a bomb does at least require a nation state, than I am about biological weapons. There is a HELL of a lot of really fucking nasty bugs out there, plague, anthrax, ebola, that killer flu of 1917, the "scarlet death" that wiped out a dozen cities in Europe in the middle ages and could have wiped the whole thing out if it hadn't been so fucking deadly it wiped out whole towns before the people could flee to the next village, etc. It would probably take a lot less work to get a sample of something nasty and start screwing with it than it would be to get tons of uranium, enrich it, build a working compression explosive, test it, and put the whole thing together. Think about how easy it would be with international air travel for some nut willing to die for his cause to pull a "12 monkeys" and spread something truly vicious halfway around the world?
In any case its a nasty world folks and as we've seen time and time again no matter how much we try to bottle it up all these countries like NK end up being able to get their hands on it. Not saying we shouldn't try but fuck people, if we couldn't stop NK when they were being obvious as hell and using the old tech that could be seen on sats what makes us think we'll have better luck with this?
How so? This is about mobile and Microsoft were beating the patent drum long before they were doing much in mobile.
The bitch? I have NO doubt Linux DOES violate MSFT patents, as MSFT violates Samsung, Intel violates AMD, that is why all these corps sign these cross licensing agreements in the first place ya know. That's the real bitch with Linux when it comes to patents as these corps have been filing so damned many patents and the patents are so vague they could just bullet spam you with patents until they stick.
But this is why we can't have nice things like the cool new MIPS chips from Loongson that has hardware assisted X86 virtualization, because all these corps cross license up the ass to make a hell of a barrier to entry for new players. It stinks but since insuring that those at the top stay on top seems to be the USA motto its really not surprising, nor will it be surprising when China and India start coming out with the cool new ideas because they won't have to deal with patent minefields.
Hell how many years would it take a highly expensive patent lawyer just to go through the mobile patents here just to see if your new idea is gonna be buried by patents? I bet the number would be just insane. Kinda hard to come up with cool new tech while tapdancing through a minefield that can destroy your company with a single misstep.
Because if little Joe Nobody's ads are seeing 80% fraud how good are the odds that YOUR ads are seeing high levels of fraud? Companies don't mind paying for ads that work but very much do mind paying for nothing, which is what click fraud is, paying for nothing. Considering pretty much all FB revenue last I checked came from ad sales if companies start looking and finding high levels of fraud you could see a big pullout and there goes their revenue stream.
If its true the lockout period is getting ready to end I'd have to wonder if its some insider sitting on a pile of stock hoping to give it a boost before cashing out. With all the strange shit we've seen over the years since the dotbomb? Frankly wouldn't surprise me, after all a hell of a lot more people than Zuckerberg got stock before the IPO ya know.
Dude I wish you luck but that's an awful teeny tiny itsy bitsy niche you are aiming for. The problem with MP only games is it HAS to reach a critical mass for it to be worth playing and one downturn in players can quickly cause the whole thing to become a ghost town damned quick.
But in a way you post validates exactly what my point was, as you had to buy artwork that would automatically put you on the RMS "enemy of freedom!" list for using. You simply can't make a top notch AAA game using nothing but the GPL, you just can't make enough ROI to even pay the light bill.
What amazes me though is how many still listen to RMS and treat his word as law. i used to think he was communistic, but then someone pointed out to me he doesn't seem to have a problem with doctors or lawyers or plumbers of the CEOs of companies like Intel that pay the FSF making money, ONLY programmers. hell the nasty part is when people actually try to follow him and heed his advice? He'll turn around and screw you. for example he once said that programmers should make money on documentation and not code, so what happened when some started charging for their documentation and not releasing it under GPL? Why he rallied against those that would "lock up documentation against the users!" LOL!
Again you simply can't make money selling software under GPL which means programmers can't pay their bills, simple as that. the only models that have EVER worked are the services model, which has only worked in the enterprise space because home users don't buy support, and the hardware model.
So unless you are planning to build that game into a flight stick? Good luck getting enough money to even break even under GPL, sorry.
80%? you are gonna honestly claim that 80% of the visitors to a single site had that exact highly unlikely set of circumstances? I'm sorry but that just don't jive, I don't care how damned geeky the FB page was. Hell ask/. how many of their users have JavaScript disabled, this site is geek city and I seriously doubt you'd get even 45% with no JavaScript at all.
And don't forget they were being charged for AD clicks which most folks that are running some kind of blocker are running ABP and aren't whitelisting shit, hence why you have sites that say "Please, we need the money, please whitelist us" because the default behavior (which all here know most users stick with defaults) is block everything and you have to actually go out of your way to change that.
No something smells here folks, and I only hope that company makes the software they developed to find this out free and available for others to use so we can see how widespread this really is on FB. Be a nasty bit of new to FB stockholders if it turned out 80% of their "revenues" were just clickjacking bots.
Uhhh...how would you click on a javaScript ad if you were a human with no JavaScript on (aka NoScript) in the first place? Answer, you can't hence its bots.
So then it becomes WHO is controlling the bots? As far as i see it there can only be one of two choices: 1.-It is a rival to the company wanting to hurt them financially, or 2.-Its FB themselves trying to drum up revenue and keep the stock from tanking.
If its #1 it shouldn't be too hard to simply ask the company in question, as those that have rivals that would go to THIS much trouble have some serious bad blood and would be known to the company, but #2 will be harder to prove but frankly should be looked into.
Thanks for agreeing with me, but the poster I was responding to say the reason things WERE CRAP was because people only buy the cheapest crap and therefor only crap gets made. You point is exactly what i was talking about, that $3000 scanner today is just as flimsy, made with crappy thin boards and lousy parts, no different than the $200 scanner. Today they instead focus on adding more features or a better branding but NOT on quality.
I know plenty of people that will buy the more expensive unit, be it laptops or TVs or office gear or whatever, in the belief that like the old days the more expensive units will last longer, only to see first hand as they end up with the same results I told them they'd get. They get a little more speed, or more features, or a fancier label but they don't get a single day longer life out of those units they paid out the ass for.
Frankly for most electronics it doesn't matter how much you pay, its all "designed for the dump" cheapo Chinese crap.
So you are actually saying you are FOR always on DRM like Ubisoft uses? because that is frankly the only way your "plan" would work with SP games, to make it "phone home" constantly or else the pirates would just play the SP and ignore MP.
Or maybe....juuuust maybe, it would be wiser to accept that in some places the GPL just doesn't work while proprietary does, what about that? You see that is the problem with religious zealotry, and yes it IS religious as RMS and his hardcore followers make just as many hoop jumps to remain "pure" as does any ultra orthodox believer, in that you can't see that some times your way works better, other times somebody else's way may work better.
There is a reason why you've never had a FOSS Bioshock, or Half Life 2, or frankly any major award winning AAA game come from the FOSS mantra, because it simply doesn't work in that situation. As you yourself noted people will just enjoy it "free as in beer" which is why all we seem to ever game from FOSS game devs is yet another Q3 Arena MP only clone, because you can make those for practically nothing and hope to get bought out, ala Nexuiz.
Well that means NO HTML V5 apps, no map sites, most forums and video sites won't work...hell you might as well say 'If the site won't run on my Pentium 100 I'm not coming back!" for all the good it'll do.
That is why I've been saying for years instead of pushing HTML V5 the geeks of the world need to be pushing for the death of JavaScript. Just like ActiveX it was never designed for security, and its had so much shit bolted on over the years good luck trying to tack on any security at this late date.
We need a NEW website language, designed from the ground up with security in mind, where everything is locked in a low rights "penalty box" and the website owners will have to run content strictly on site if they want it to be seen. if they want to get that content from somewhere else? Fine but they should be required to load it to their own site and scan it BEFORE shoveling it along to the user!
JavaScript was cooked up in the days of dialup, when the web was frankly a safer place. its not like that anymore and just as we wouldn't trust an AV from the Win95 era to stop modern threats so too should we not expect a language designed during that time to have a security model useful in today's world.
Welllll...not that I'm gonna argue that point but I think what they are talking about is traditional homebrew, where since you could hack your way to bare metal you could squeeze a little more out of it, kinda like how we all PEEKed and POKEd our way around the C64 back in the day. Also a big part of homebrew was emulators and ports, so you could play just about anything anybody could manage to get to run on the chips.
Now THOSE days are well and truly over, I mean good look getting a Win 3.x or Genesis emulator allowed through the appstores, even if the hardware could run it, because everything goes in the sandboxes. That is the big difference between then and today, as then once you hacked the system the ENTIRE system could do what you wanted, now its all sandboxes. I do think its kinda depressing if only for the fact that the homebrw hackers could give us cool uses for gear after the publishers had walked away. Remember how nicely those cheap Xbox 1 units were for being media boxes? How once hacked you could play damned near anything on them as long as it was in SD? That was nice. Imagine what they could do with the X360 or PS3 once MSFT and Sony moved on, instead they'll probably just end up junked or in somebody's closet like all those Gamecubes and N64s.
So while I'm glad the indie game devs can get some cred and get paid for what they cook up they weren't the only part of the homebrew scene and its just a shame that all these locked down devices will probably be headed for the dump when the companies that control them move on instead of finding new uses thanks to homebrew. Take the DC for instance, I've still got one of those, its great for playing all my old Genesis and NES favorites when I want to just kick back on the couch. We won't be seeing anything like that once the companies move on, and that's kinda sad.
A better video if you want to show what kind of mess that rocket kicks up is Apollo 15 because while 17 stayed focused on the ascent with 15 they stayed focused on the lander and you get to see what a mess is left after they fired that engine up, with debris splattered all over the place.
I don't kn ow about the other McGrew but I haven't bought a single Ubisoft title since they started including extra DRM crap and always online garbage instead of just using Steam. In fact I came THIS close to buying a good $75 worth of games on the Steam sale...until I saw it was Ubisoft and their extra bullshit and instead gave it to other companies.
I'll buy Steam, i'll buy games that have GFWL (although I won't buy from GFWL, MSFT still can't design a UI for games for shit and I hate the way it keeps trying to sell me Xbox games) but I won't be buying from any company that piles on the DRM and that goes for my friends and family. Just talking to them on Steam chat there was a good couple of grand that would have been spent on game packs that would have went to Ubisoft that instead went to other companies. Its not much in the grand scheme of things but at least our systems run stable and doesn't have backdoors you could drive a truck through.
BTW OT but for all those that have recently switched to X64 or haven't ran into this problem yet? A little word of warning...avoid older games that have DRM like Starforce and SecuROM on them! The older DRM didn't recognize 64 bit and would try to jam a 32bit kernel hook into a 64 bit kernel with disastrous results and the uninstaller they host on their website? DOES NOT WORK ON X64. So if you don't dual boot so you have an uninfected OS to work from its a royal bitch getting it cleaned up and will make your system as unstable as Win9x which is why I ended up going Steam.
I'd love to hear from those with exp with Ubisoft DRM as I've found those that jam in deep level hooks like that tend to make things more than a little unstable. If you've installed a Ubi game and are experiencing hangs, lock ups, BSODs, weird errors, you might want to remove the DRM and see if that clears it up, because you'd be surprised how many times I've seen machines at the shop that were "infected/broken/crashing" that turned out to be a shittily written DRM hosing the system. The only "nice" thing I can say about the non Steam DRMs is they don't seem to burn out drives like the old Starforce did, but that's like saying "well at least it just shat on the bed instead of the floor".
If EULAs were able to allow you to agree to something like this frankly there wouldn't be any malware nor would there be any antivirus, because malware writers would just wrap their "freeware" in a EULA and sue the AV companies under DMCA if they tried to detect or remove their "product".
Now since the only time I've ever heard of a malware writer trying that kind of BS they got laughed out of court I seriously doubt such a defense is gonna work this time. Then there is the fact that the feds got laws up the ying yang against hacking into other people's computers and I think Ubisoft will most likely be pulling a Sony and doing a shitload of backtracking and apologizing, the only question being how much this fuckup is gonna cost 'em.
That said maybe this bullshit will finally get Ubisoft to just use Steam and call it a day. I know there were several times on the Steam sale when I was ready to hand my money over to Ubisoft and then saw that "This product requires" followed by a huge list and said "Fuck that noise" and gave my money to someone else. I doubt they'd agree to give us the figures (because it would piss off publishers like Ubisoft) but what I wouldn't give for the sales figures for games that just used Steam VS games that piled on the BS during the last sale. I know all my friends were doing the same thing and like me they were spending like crazy on the sale so maybe this will finally get them to drop the horseshit.
While your arguments are sound I'd point out a few things. One that article is frankly worthless, they tested Vista at RTM and never bothered to go back. I can tell you that with Win 7 I have on average 3Gb in Readyboost at any time and I can tell a pretty big difference in load times, it can easily cut a good 30% off, more if you have something like XFast USB which I do.
Second it sounds like your gameplay is predictable...mine isn't. I get bored easy and switch around a lot, hence I have a lot of games installed. hunting down those discs are a royal PITA, especially since the last time I moved and have some stuff still in storage.
While I like that Steam Mover thing, thanks for the link BTW, the problem I see right now with SSDs is just to get my OS and apps installed, NOT my games, just the OS and programs, I'm gonna need probably a 256Gb as my C: drive is already at 124Gb. I already keep my games and music and docs on a separate 2Tb drive but I have a lot of AV software I use and between that and my other programs it'd be a damned tight fit onto a 128Gb. I haven't been able to find out what the failure rate on an SSD filled to the brim is anywhere but I know it needs space to move things around so I doubt filling it to within a couple of Gb of full would be the smartest move.
Until the 256Gb SSDs come down to where the 128Gb SSDs are now its simply too hard to justify that purchase, not when I could get a new GPU to replace my HD4850 and see a hell of a lot more real world difference. I simply don't boot my computer anymore, with 8Gb of RAM I just don't see the point in not putting it to sleep. I use hibernate on my netbook but it does have a flush SD card slot (sorry to hear yours don't) so I just leave a class 10 8Gb in there so I have Readyboost all the time. Wake from hibernate is a little slow but once loaded with 8Gb of RAM all my programs are preloaded so its all instant access.
Frankly I just don't have the time at the shop but this would be a MOST excellent way to troll those anti-BSD types while giving the rest of/. a valuable lesson..
1.-Find several pro *.A.A posts on several websites
2.-Change the few words around required to make it an Anti-BSD post
3.-Let it get modded up to +5 and let tons join in on the groupthink
4.-Post links to the original *.A.A post and then LYAO at all the anti-BSD crowd coming up with logic hoops to jump through to explain how they agree with the *.A.A!
Frankly considering how many of the Anti-BSD crowd come out of the woodwork anytime anyone posts the word BSD it'd be funny as hell to keep slapping them with their own words. Maybe if things slow down here I might try it, but the web is so full of pro *.A.A posts it ought to be easy to do for someone with a little time and it'd sure as hell be funny!
Thank you for proving my point! In classic MPAA logic if you are not with me you are "one of them". You are a troll, a shill, must work for the corps, why you can't just be someone with a difference of opinion, or else you'd see I'm right!
Again change a few words and any Anti-BSD post and a pro MPAA post are perfectly interchangeable. hell if I wanted to troll I'd just take a pro MPAA post and change the few words, let it get modded up to +5 and THEN post the links to the MPAA post and LMAO at all those that lined up to agree with it. Now THAT would be a good troll!
But who in the hell actually NEEDS Windows support? the ugly truth, the one the Linux guys will NEVER admit, is that there ain't a single thing stable in Linux land, not one. Everything from the kernel on up is like the shifting sand and thus its a LOT more likely to break.
With Windows its one kernel per decade, one set of internals, things just don't change there. Win2K drivers work on XP, Vista drivers work on 7, that's 14 fricking years of driver support right there!
I sell computers 6 days a week, to actual normal folks, so I know about support and the simple fact is once Vista got rid of the braindead "must run as admin herpa derp" problem Windows runs solid as a damned rock. I have plenty of customers that have been running Win 7 since RTM and frankly the only calls i get from them are on the order of "Can you recommend a printer? What's a good software to do X? I need more room for videos, can you get me a bigger hard drive?" because with a decent AV a fully updated Windows is frankly so simple it takes care of itself.
I'll bet my last dollar the reason the guy couldn't keep Linux running was every 6 months here comes "the forum dance". You all know this one, updates come out, take a giant dump on one or more drivers, so you get to spend a couple of days looking for "fixes". That is if what broke didn't leave you in single user mode or with no Wifi when that's all you have to hook up with and then you be boned.
There is a good reason why one of the Red Hats devs says we are paying for mistakes made 25 years ago and that is because the Linux system? Doesn't scale. When it was designed we are talking a few dozen drivers, a few dozen software packages, it was manageable by a team of less than 20 guys...it just isn't that way anymore. Now you are talking billions of lines of code, thousands of drivers, tens of thousands of software packages...you just can't have ANY kind of quality with that much code with a top down dev team approach friend, you just can't.
In the end if you want to be a viable competitor to Windows and OSX (and if you don't then don't bother replying, just be happy to be a niche like BeOS and go on) then you have to learn from your competition. Windows does it by only changing internals once every 5 or 6 years and having a decade of support, Apple does it by locking everything down and making sure they control the hardware so they only have to support a MUCH more limited hardware set, the current system where you try to have Windows levels of hardware while having the guts constantly changing? It just don't work friend. it works on servers where the hardware is ancient and limited, it works in embedded where the hardware never changes at all, it just doesn't work when you are talking tens of thousands of hardware drivers friend, it just don't.
Actually its better for the government that way as its not bound by the constitution and thus makes it easy for them to get data without any of those "pesky" rights getting in the way. We've seen for years that FISA is a "rubber stamp" court and by simply using someone like Google to collect the data they aren't subject to freedom of information requests.
Frankly if groups like the NSA aren't so chummy with Google they have a "Google liaison" just to keep it nice and friendly I'd be amazed. Just the amount of data they gather on an average day would make J. Edgar green with envy, no way in hell the government just lets that amount of data slide without getting a peek, no way.
Right you can sell software...exactly one copy LOL!
There is a reason why the ONLY models that has EVER worked when it came to making money on Linux is 1.-Services, or 2.-Hardware. Because it is impossible to make money selling software when the source is available thanks to the Internet. RMS could back in the day because at dialup speed frankly it was cheaper to have him send you a copy than wait a month for the thing to download, now you could download the average game in an hour, maybe 2 tops.
So i'm sorry but you can "newspeak" it all you want, reality is littered with the companies that have tried it, it just doesn't work.
And YOU sir are why the vast majority avoid Linux like the clap. did you even read what you wrote? You might as well have said "Sure we'll let Steam onto Linux we'll just make sure its hard to find and a PITA but hey, that's freedom, right?" because what is it Linux users ALWAYS fucking push? the damned repos. yet here you are saying "Nope, not gonna allow them in, no sir".
So why in the hell would a normal person WANT your OS, if you're just gonna act like self righteous assholes and make it difficult to get the software THEY WANT on their own systems, hmm?
In the end old Gabe better get on one knee and pucker up, ready to kiss some MSFT booty. because if THAT is the attitude he is gonna face on Linux he might as well be pissing in the wind.
Your "Linux" can be locked down trivially because Google makes damned sure NO GPL V3 is allowed and with the latest release brings appstore DRM to the table so...you were saying?
you might as well crow about how every switch runs "Linux" for all the good it does, in both cases its a locked down thing the public never touches directly (all they get is the pretty GUI and appstore, no different than iOS) and frankly you could switch out the "Linux" portion for anything else tomorrow and as long as Angry Birds works nobody will give a crap.
Yeah...$400 a year...hmmm...kinda sad that the only thing you can come up with for "stable Linux" actually costs more to have by nearly 300% over Windows and that is just for a single year? Or that just 3 years of RHEL and you could have just bought a Mac which will have a higher resale value?
How about "I don't trust the way RMS keeps finding new enemies" as a reason? forget how he targeted a single company in GPL V3, aka TiVoization? To quote the head of Red Hat "RMS treats his friends as his enemies" and frankly if I were running a company that needed code i sure as hell wouldn't want to use code where the license is written by someone petty enough to target a single company for villainization with a license change.
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Frankly that is going a little overboard, especially if you don't have any proof that its a bug. Sure it'll work most times but so will killing a rabid dog with an air strike, kinda overkill for most cases LOL!
I keep several tools on a CD and give them a quick run before choosing a plan of action, malwarebytes, a couple of rootkit scanners (which BTW show the kernel DRM hooks nicely) and Trend Micro Housecall. You see if you don't do something like that first you may just be covering up a hardware error that will bite you in the ass down the road. I've seen plenty of cases where a hardware problem, bad RAM cell, dying channel on a board, flaky PSU, will be covered up by a classic "boot and nuke" for a little while as it takes a little while before enough errors end up back on the HDD to start making the OS shit the bed again.
Another good tool which I'm sure you know of is Ultimate Boot CD, its got scanners for just about every hardware problem you can name, RAM, CPU, HDD, if I do a scan and find no bugs and no error listings in event viewer to narrow the cause (which is telling in and of itself, as most bugs will trigger an event while many hardware glitches won't) I'll go to UBCD and give it a quick run to see if it finds something flaky. You'd be surprised how many times its a bad RAM cell or a HDD with sectors going bad.
Sure it takes a little longer but since the tools don't need babysat it isn't like you have to be sitting there and I've found its better to find out WHAT is causing the problem before simply nuking from orbit. Sure if its got more bugs than a Bangkok whore on coupon night nuke the sucker, but its not a good move to do so without at least having some sort of confirmation. Hell even in Aliens they made sure there were bugs on the ground before talking nuking it LOL.
I have to wonder if what the rumors say is true and the lockout expiration is about to be up if it isn't some insider trying to pump the stock before they cash out.
As I'm sure you know if you are an insider at a company and get stock before an IPO there is a "lockout period" where the ones that get stock before an IPO can't sell to keep them from doing a pump and dump by building a lot of buzz, letting the initial wave get high right after the stock hits the market and dumping their stocks for a big cashout. If true the expiration day is coming up that would give someone on the inside a pretty good reason to try to show FB "revenue' is climbing thus getting the stock to climb right before cashing out. A lot more people besides Zuckerberg got stock before the IPO ya know.
In any case frankly a neutral third party needs to be investigating this to see how truly widespread this really is. As I said if Joe Nobody is finding that 80% of their clicks are bots, how many of the bigger customers are seeing the same or worse? Someone needs to pick 15 of the top 100 advertisers on FB and look at their clicks and where they are coming from as that should show if this is truly a widespread pattern or just a single company being targeted.
That is pretty much the problem with WMD tech, isn't it? Once even the idea is out there others WILL figure out a way to implement it, you can't "undo" this anymore than you can unmake the atom bomb.
Personally I'm less worried about this, because frankly building a bomb does at least require a nation state, than I am about biological weapons. There is a HELL of a lot of really fucking nasty bugs out there, plague, anthrax, ebola, that killer flu of 1917, the "scarlet death" that wiped out a dozen cities in Europe in the middle ages and could have wiped the whole thing out if it hadn't been so fucking deadly it wiped out whole towns before the people could flee to the next village, etc. It would probably take a lot less work to get a sample of something nasty and start screwing with it than it would be to get tons of uranium, enrich it, build a working compression explosive, test it, and put the whole thing together. Think about how easy it would be with international air travel for some nut willing to die for his cause to pull a "12 monkeys" and spread something truly vicious halfway around the world?
In any case its a nasty world folks and as we've seen time and time again no matter how much we try to bottle it up all these countries like NK end up being able to get their hands on it. Not saying we shouldn't try but fuck people, if we couldn't stop NK when they were being obvious as hell and using the old tech that could be seen on sats what makes us think we'll have better luck with this?
How so? This is about mobile and Microsoft were beating the patent drum long before they were doing much in mobile.
The bitch? I have NO doubt Linux DOES violate MSFT patents, as MSFT violates Samsung, Intel violates AMD, that is why all these corps sign these cross licensing agreements in the first place ya know. That's the real bitch with Linux when it comes to patents as these corps have been filing so damned many patents and the patents are so vague they could just bullet spam you with patents until they stick.
But this is why we can't have nice things like the cool new MIPS chips from Loongson that has hardware assisted X86 virtualization, because all these corps cross license up the ass to make a hell of a barrier to entry for new players. It stinks but since insuring that those at the top stay on top seems to be the USA motto its really not surprising, nor will it be surprising when China and India start coming out with the cool new ideas because they won't have to deal with patent minefields.
Hell how many years would it take a highly expensive patent lawyer just to go through the mobile patents here just to see if your new idea is gonna be buried by patents? I bet the number would be just insane. Kinda hard to come up with cool new tech while tapdancing through a minefield that can destroy your company with a single misstep.
Because if little Joe Nobody's ads are seeing 80% fraud how good are the odds that YOUR ads are seeing high levels of fraud? Companies don't mind paying for ads that work but very much do mind paying for nothing, which is what click fraud is, paying for nothing. Considering pretty much all FB revenue last I checked came from ad sales if companies start looking and finding high levels of fraud you could see a big pullout and there goes their revenue stream.
If its true the lockout period is getting ready to end I'd have to wonder if its some insider sitting on a pile of stock hoping to give it a boost before cashing out. With all the strange shit we've seen over the years since the dotbomb? Frankly wouldn't surprise me, after all a hell of a lot more people than Zuckerberg got stock before the IPO ya know.
Dude I wish you luck but that's an awful teeny tiny itsy bitsy niche you are aiming for. The problem with MP only games is it HAS to reach a critical mass for it to be worth playing and one downturn in players can quickly cause the whole thing to become a ghost town damned quick.
But in a way you post validates exactly what my point was, as you had to buy artwork that would automatically put you on the RMS "enemy of freedom!" list for using. You simply can't make a top notch AAA game using nothing but the GPL, you just can't make enough ROI to even pay the light bill.
What amazes me though is how many still listen to RMS and treat his word as law. i used to think he was communistic, but then someone pointed out to me he doesn't seem to have a problem with doctors or lawyers or plumbers of the CEOs of companies like Intel that pay the FSF making money, ONLY programmers. hell the nasty part is when people actually try to follow him and heed his advice? He'll turn around and screw you. for example he once said that programmers should make money on documentation and not code, so what happened when some started charging for their documentation and not releasing it under GPL? Why he rallied against those that would "lock up documentation against the users!" LOL!
Again you simply can't make money selling software under GPL which means programmers can't pay their bills, simple as that. the only models that have EVER worked are the services model, which has only worked in the enterprise space because home users don't buy support, and the hardware model.
So unless you are planning to build that game into a flight stick? Good luck getting enough money to even break even under GPL, sorry.
80%? you are gonna honestly claim that 80% of the visitors to a single site had that exact highly unlikely set of circumstances? I'm sorry but that just don't jive, I don't care how damned geeky the FB page was. Hell ask /. how many of their users have JavaScript disabled, this site is geek city and I seriously doubt you'd get even 45% with no JavaScript at all.
And don't forget they were being charged for AD clicks which most folks that are running some kind of blocker are running ABP and aren't whitelisting shit, hence why you have sites that say "Please, we need the money, please whitelist us" because the default behavior (which all here know most users stick with defaults) is block everything and you have to actually go out of your way to change that.
No something smells here folks, and I only hope that company makes the software they developed to find this out free and available for others to use so we can see how widespread this really is on FB. Be a nasty bit of new to FB stockholders if it turned out 80% of their "revenues" were just clickjacking bots.
Uhhh...how would you click on a javaScript ad if you were a human with no JavaScript on (aka NoScript) in the first place? Answer, you can't hence its bots.
So then it becomes WHO is controlling the bots? As far as i see it there can only be one of two choices: 1.-It is a rival to the company wanting to hurt them financially, or 2.-Its FB themselves trying to drum up revenue and keep the stock from tanking.
If its #1 it shouldn't be too hard to simply ask the company in question, as those that have rivals that would go to THIS much trouble have some serious bad blood and would be known to the company, but #2 will be harder to prove but frankly should be looked into.
Thanks for agreeing with me, but the poster I was responding to say the reason things WERE CRAP was because people only buy the cheapest crap and therefor only crap gets made. You point is exactly what i was talking about, that $3000 scanner today is just as flimsy, made with crappy thin boards and lousy parts, no different than the $200 scanner. Today they instead focus on adding more features or a better branding but NOT on quality.
I know plenty of people that will buy the more expensive unit, be it laptops or TVs or office gear or whatever, in the belief that like the old days the more expensive units will last longer, only to see first hand as they end up with the same results I told them they'd get. They get a little more speed, or more features, or a fancier label but they don't get a single day longer life out of those units they paid out the ass for.
Frankly for most electronics it doesn't matter how much you pay, its all "designed for the dump" cheapo Chinese crap.
So you are actually saying you are FOR always on DRM like Ubisoft uses? because that is frankly the only way your "plan" would work with SP games, to make it "phone home" constantly or else the pirates would just play the SP and ignore MP.
Or maybe....juuuust maybe, it would be wiser to accept that in some places the GPL just doesn't work while proprietary does, what about that? You see that is the problem with religious zealotry, and yes it IS religious as RMS and his hardcore followers make just as many hoop jumps to remain "pure" as does any ultra orthodox believer, in that you can't see that some times your way works better, other times somebody else's way may work better.
There is a reason why you've never had a FOSS Bioshock, or Half Life 2, or frankly any major award winning AAA game come from the FOSS mantra, because it simply doesn't work in that situation. As you yourself noted people will just enjoy it "free as in beer" which is why all we seem to ever game from FOSS game devs is yet another Q3 Arena MP only clone, because you can make those for practically nothing and hope to get bought out, ala Nexuiz.
Well that means NO HTML V5 apps, no map sites, most forums and video sites won't work...hell you might as well say 'If the site won't run on my Pentium 100 I'm not coming back!" for all the good it'll do.
That is why I've been saying for years instead of pushing HTML V5 the geeks of the world need to be pushing for the death of JavaScript. Just like ActiveX it was never designed for security, and its had so much shit bolted on over the years good luck trying to tack on any security at this late date.
We need a NEW website language, designed from the ground up with security in mind, where everything is locked in a low rights "penalty box" and the website owners will have to run content strictly on site if they want it to be seen. if they want to get that content from somewhere else? Fine but they should be required to load it to their own site and scan it BEFORE shoveling it along to the user!
JavaScript was cooked up in the days of dialup, when the web was frankly a safer place. its not like that anymore and just as we wouldn't trust an AV from the Win95 era to stop modern threats so too should we not expect a language designed during that time to have a security model useful in today's world.
Welllll...not that I'm gonna argue that point but I think what they are talking about is traditional homebrew, where since you could hack your way to bare metal you could squeeze a little more out of it, kinda like how we all PEEKed and POKEd our way around the C64 back in the day. Also a big part of homebrew was emulators and ports, so you could play just about anything anybody could manage to get to run on the chips.
Now THOSE days are well and truly over, I mean good look getting a Win 3.x or Genesis emulator allowed through the appstores, even if the hardware could run it, because everything goes in the sandboxes. That is the big difference between then and today, as then once you hacked the system the ENTIRE system could do what you wanted, now its all sandboxes. I do think its kinda depressing if only for the fact that the homebrw hackers could give us cool uses for gear after the publishers had walked away. Remember how nicely those cheap Xbox 1 units were for being media boxes? How once hacked you could play damned near anything on them as long as it was in SD? That was nice. Imagine what they could do with the X360 or PS3 once MSFT and Sony moved on, instead they'll probably just end up junked or in somebody's closet like all those Gamecubes and N64s.
So while I'm glad the indie game devs can get some cred and get paid for what they cook up they weren't the only part of the homebrew scene and its just a shame that all these locked down devices will probably be headed for the dump when the companies that control them move on instead of finding new uses thanks to homebrew. Take the DC for instance, I've still got one of those, its great for playing all my old Genesis and NES favorites when I want to just kick back on the couch. We won't be seeing anything like that once the companies move on, and that's kinda sad.
A better video if you want to show what kind of mess that rocket kicks up is Apollo 15 because while 17 stayed focused on the ascent with 15 they stayed focused on the lander and you get to see what a mess is left after they fired that engine up, with debris splattered all over the place.
I don't kn ow about the other McGrew but I haven't bought a single Ubisoft title since they started including extra DRM crap and always online garbage instead of just using Steam. In fact I came THIS close to buying a good $75 worth of games on the Steam sale...until I saw it was Ubisoft and their extra bullshit and instead gave it to other companies.
I'll buy Steam, i'll buy games that have GFWL (although I won't buy from GFWL, MSFT still can't design a UI for games for shit and I hate the way it keeps trying to sell me Xbox games) but I won't be buying from any company that piles on the DRM and that goes for my friends and family. Just talking to them on Steam chat there was a good couple of grand that would have been spent on game packs that would have went to Ubisoft that instead went to other companies. Its not much in the grand scheme of things but at least our systems run stable and doesn't have backdoors you could drive a truck through.
BTW OT but for all those that have recently switched to X64 or haven't ran into this problem yet? A little word of warning...avoid older games that have DRM like Starforce and SecuROM on them! The older DRM didn't recognize 64 bit and would try to jam a 32bit kernel hook into a 64 bit kernel with disastrous results and the uninstaller they host on their website? DOES NOT WORK ON X64. So if you don't dual boot so you have an uninfected OS to work from its a royal bitch getting it cleaned up and will make your system as unstable as Win9x which is why I ended up going Steam.
I'd love to hear from those with exp with Ubisoft DRM as I've found those that jam in deep level hooks like that tend to make things more than a little unstable. If you've installed a Ubi game and are experiencing hangs, lock ups, BSODs, weird errors, you might want to remove the DRM and see if that clears it up, because you'd be surprised how many times I've seen machines at the shop that were "infected/broken/crashing" that turned out to be a shittily written DRM hosing the system. The only "nice" thing I can say about the non Steam DRMs is they don't seem to burn out drives like the old Starforce did, but that's like saying "well at least it just shat on the bed instead of the floor".
If EULAs were able to allow you to agree to something like this frankly there wouldn't be any malware nor would there be any antivirus, because malware writers would just wrap their "freeware" in a EULA and sue the AV companies under DMCA if they tried to detect or remove their "product".
Now since the only time I've ever heard of a malware writer trying that kind of BS they got laughed out of court I seriously doubt such a defense is gonna work this time. Then there is the fact that the feds got laws up the ying yang against hacking into other people's computers and I think Ubisoft will most likely be pulling a Sony and doing a shitload of backtracking and apologizing, the only question being how much this fuckup is gonna cost 'em.
That said maybe this bullshit will finally get Ubisoft to just use Steam and call it a day. I know there were several times on the Steam sale when I was ready to hand my money over to Ubisoft and then saw that "This product requires" followed by a huge list and said "Fuck that noise" and gave my money to someone else. I doubt they'd agree to give us the figures (because it would piss off publishers like Ubisoft) but what I wouldn't give for the sales figures for games that just used Steam VS games that piled on the BS during the last sale. I know all my friends were doing the same thing and like me they were spending like crazy on the sale so maybe this will finally get them to drop the horseshit.
While your arguments are sound I'd point out a few things. One that article is frankly worthless, they tested Vista at RTM and never bothered to go back. I can tell you that with Win 7 I have on average 3Gb in Readyboost at any time and I can tell a pretty big difference in load times, it can easily cut a good 30% off, more if you have something like XFast USB which I do.
Second it sounds like your gameplay is predictable...mine isn't. I get bored easy and switch around a lot, hence I have a lot of games installed. hunting down those discs are a royal PITA, especially since the last time I moved and have some stuff still in storage.
While I like that Steam Mover thing, thanks for the link BTW, the problem I see right now with SSDs is just to get my OS and apps installed, NOT my games, just the OS and programs, I'm gonna need probably a 256Gb as my C: drive is already at 124Gb. I already keep my games and music and docs on a separate 2Tb drive but I have a lot of AV software I use and between that and my other programs it'd be a damned tight fit onto a 128Gb. I haven't been able to find out what the failure rate on an SSD filled to the brim is anywhere but I know it needs space to move things around so I doubt filling it to within a couple of Gb of full would be the smartest move.
Until the 256Gb SSDs come down to where the 128Gb SSDs are now its simply too hard to justify that purchase, not when I could get a new GPU to replace my HD4850 and see a hell of a lot more real world difference. I simply don't boot my computer anymore, with 8Gb of RAM I just don't see the point in not putting it to sleep. I use hibernate on my netbook but it does have a flush SD card slot (sorry to hear yours don't) so I just leave a class 10 8Gb in there so I have Readyboost all the time. Wake from hibernate is a little slow but once loaded with 8Gb of RAM all my programs are preloaded so its all instant access.
Frankly I just don't have the time at the shop but this would be a MOST excellent way to troll those anti-BSD types while giving the rest of /. a valuable lesson..
1.-Find several pro *.A.A posts on several websites
2.-Change the few words around required to make it an Anti-BSD post
3.-Let it get modded up to +5 and let tons join in on the groupthink
4.-Post links to the original *.A.A post and then LYAO at all the anti-BSD crowd coming up with logic hoops to jump through to explain how they agree with the *.A.A!
Frankly considering how many of the Anti-BSD crowd come out of the woodwork anytime anyone posts the word BSD it'd be funny as hell to keep slapping them with their own words. Maybe if things slow down here I might try it, but the web is so full of pro *.A.A posts it ought to be easy to do for someone with a little time and it'd sure as hell be funny!
Thank you for proving my point! In classic MPAA logic if you are not with me you are "one of them". You are a troll, a shill, must work for the corps, why you can't just be someone with a difference of opinion, or else you'd see I'm right!
Again change a few words and any Anti-BSD post and a pro MPAA post are perfectly interchangeable. hell if I wanted to troll I'd just take a pro MPAA post and change the few words, let it get modded up to +5 and THEN post the links to the MPAA post and LMAO at all those that lined up to agree with it. Now THAT would be a good troll!
But who in the hell actually NEEDS Windows support? the ugly truth, the one the Linux guys will NEVER admit, is that there ain't a single thing stable in Linux land, not one. Everything from the kernel on up is like the shifting sand and thus its a LOT more likely to break.
With Windows its one kernel per decade, one set of internals, things just don't change there. Win2K drivers work on XP, Vista drivers work on 7, that's 14 fricking years of driver support right there!
I sell computers 6 days a week, to actual normal folks, so I know about support and the simple fact is once Vista got rid of the braindead "must run as admin herpa derp" problem Windows runs solid as a damned rock. I have plenty of customers that have been running Win 7 since RTM and frankly the only calls i get from them are on the order of "Can you recommend a printer? What's a good software to do X? I need more room for videos, can you get me a bigger hard drive?" because with a decent AV a fully updated Windows is frankly so simple it takes care of itself.
I'll bet my last dollar the reason the guy couldn't keep Linux running was every 6 months here comes "the forum dance". You all know this one, updates come out, take a giant dump on one or more drivers, so you get to spend a couple of days looking for "fixes". That is if what broke didn't leave you in single user mode or with no Wifi when that's all you have to hook up with and then you be boned.
There is a good reason why one of the Red Hats devs says we are paying for mistakes made 25 years ago and that is because the Linux system? Doesn't scale. When it was designed we are talking a few dozen drivers, a few dozen software packages, it was manageable by a team of less than 20 guys...it just isn't that way anymore. Now you are talking billions of lines of code, thousands of drivers, tens of thousands of software packages...you just can't have ANY kind of quality with that much code with a top down dev team approach friend, you just can't.
In the end if you want to be a viable competitor to Windows and OSX (and if you don't then don't bother replying, just be happy to be a niche like BeOS and go on) then you have to learn from your competition. Windows does it by only changing internals once every 5 or 6 years and having a decade of support, Apple does it by locking everything down and making sure they control the hardware so they only have to support a MUCH more limited hardware set, the current system where you try to have Windows levels of hardware while having the guts constantly changing? It just don't work friend. it works on servers where the hardware is ancient and limited, it works in embedded where the hardware never changes at all, it just doesn't work when you are talking tens of thousands of hardware drivers friend, it just don't.
Actually its better for the government that way as its not bound by the constitution and thus makes it easy for them to get data without any of those "pesky" rights getting in the way. We've seen for years that FISA is a "rubber stamp" court and by simply using someone like Google to collect the data they aren't subject to freedom of information requests.
Frankly if groups like the NSA aren't so chummy with Google they have a "Google liaison" just to keep it nice and friendly I'd be amazed. Just the amount of data they gather on an average day would make J. Edgar green with envy, no way in hell the government just lets that amount of data slide without getting a peek, no way.
Right you can sell software...exactly one copy LOL!
There is a reason why the ONLY models that has EVER worked when it came to making money on Linux is 1.-Services, or 2.-Hardware. Because it is impossible to make money selling software when the source is available thanks to the Internet. RMS could back in the day because at dialup speed frankly it was cheaper to have him send you a copy than wait a month for the thing to download, now you could download the average game in an hour, maybe 2 tops.
So i'm sorry but you can "newspeak" it all you want, reality is littered with the companies that have tried it, it just doesn't work.
And YOU sir are why the vast majority avoid Linux like the clap. did you even read what you wrote? You might as well have said "Sure we'll let Steam onto Linux we'll just make sure its hard to find and a PITA but hey, that's freedom, right?" because what is it Linux users ALWAYS fucking push? the damned repos. yet here you are saying "Nope, not gonna allow them in, no sir".
So why in the hell would a normal person WANT your OS, if you're just gonna act like self righteous assholes and make it difficult to get the software THEY WANT on their own systems, hmm?
In the end old Gabe better get on one knee and pucker up, ready to kiss some MSFT booty. because if THAT is the attitude he is gonna face on Linux he might as well be pissing in the wind.
Your "Linux" can be locked down trivially because Google makes damned sure NO GPL V3 is allowed and with the latest release brings appstore DRM to the table so...you were saying?
you might as well crow about how every switch runs "Linux" for all the good it does, in both cases its a locked down thing the public never touches directly (all they get is the pretty GUI and appstore, no different than iOS) and frankly you could switch out the "Linux" portion for anything else tomorrow and as long as Angry Birds works nobody will give a crap.
Yeah...$400 a year...hmmm...kinda sad that the only thing you can come up with for "stable Linux" actually costs more to have by nearly 300% over Windows and that is just for a single year? Or that just 3 years of RHEL and you could have just bought a Mac which will have a higher resale value?
How about "I don't trust the way RMS keeps finding new enemies" as a reason? forget how he targeted a single company in GPL V3, aka TiVoization? To quote the head of Red Hat "RMS treats his friends as his enemies" and frankly if I were running a company that needed code i sure as hell wouldn't want to use code where the license is written by someone petty enough to target a single company for villainization with a license change.