Why do I get the feeling that this story is caused by a lot of people who don't know how to configure automatic updates properly, and a lot of FUD because of the PR cock-up a few weeks ago? You can argue about how they classified the update, but certainly nothing has been "forced" onto my PC today as a result of the update going out.
That tingly feeling (no, the other one) is due to you being an end user and not an administrator and thus having absolutely no clue what the entire article is actually talking about. Nobody cares if the update is pushed down onto a home user's machine (and yes, it isn't forced or stealthed like the previous update to windows update itself was.)
The issue is that Microsoft released this as an update revision, but had really changed the scope of the package to include an installer.
The way that WSUS works, the administrator approves updates for his network. Once approved, revisions to an update don't require additional approval. These updates will only apply themselves to machines that already have the program in question installed. So, for example, I could approve the updates for Office 2007 for my entire network, but only the machines that have Office 2007 installed will actually download and install them. I don't need to worry about what software each machine has installed on it. The system handles that by itself.
Since this package was flagged as a revision, it passed through WSUS with approval if the previous update had approval. However, since it was actually an installer, it loaded the program onto every machine whether it already had Desktop Search installed or not.
Makes me glad that I was forced to take WSUS offline on a network that I'm responsible for. I didn't need to be there all day today.
I'm amazed they didn't tazer the girl and turn a piece of artwork into a real exploding device! That's the best way that I can think of to deal with someone that you suspect of having an explosive device that will be triggered by an electric current.:)
Oh geez...I can't be expected to remember where I was two years ago. On that particular day, I could have been on as many as 4 different companies' networks from several different possible locations. There's absolutely no way to tell which particular computers I would have touched or even if they are still in service. You'd have to supeona every drive those companies own and that is no small order. You'd also have to supeona every machine that my company physically had in town on that day. Again, half of those machines are no longer in service.
Likewise, I could have visited any number of friends on that day. Even at home, I probably have a dozen or two drives either in use or in a bin someplace. All but one or two of them has probably been wiped in the past two years.
And names of everyone who might have used my computers in the past three years??? Impossible. I'd even go the step further and point out that since I have a wireless access point with WEP encryption running, I have no control over who accesses the net over my connection, nor any real way to identify those people.
There are legitimate uses for mod chips beyond making legal backups. The console makers want us all to beleve that these uses are also illegal, but they aren't.
1) Playing import games. Playing imports has been popular for quite a while. The console makers hate it because it ruins their ability to control prices (even though the import scene has no effect on pricing) but it is perfectly legal.
2) Homebrew games. Many platforms have a decent homebrew game scene (going back to the begining of consoles.) It requires a mod chip to play these games on newer platforms.
3) General experimentation. People like throwing Linux on anything with a CPU. Consoles have some unique features that could be exploited for certain non-gaming applications.
They're an an enviable position of having valuable IP that's *hard to reproduce*. But they still end up being dicks over it. I dunno...I thought that Blizzard did an excellent job of reproducing the Warhammer IP with all of the Warcraft games.
Okaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy. So the guy from the 'pirate party' is now trying to defend a website full of copyrighted material because "to attack our freedom to share copies of spiderman 3, is to encourage paedophiles". You completely missed what he did say in your efforts to rush forward with what you wanted him to say.
What he said is that forcing file sharing to go underground is going to accelerate the development of tools that make said file sharing harder to trace. If child porn is the government's larger concern as they claim it is, then they should recognize that those same tools will be used by those priority targets which will make catching them tougher. It is true, but not a good argument.
As far as your misconceptions about freedoms...the fact that some people abuse something is by no means a legitimate argument against freedom of speech. That is about the dumbest thing that I've ever heard. Not that any of it matters in this case since no one country owns the internet. TPB doesn't break any laws in their country and you don't have any more right to try and push your laws on them than they have to push their laws on you. You don't have to like it, but you should respect it.
I think that you have the right idea Rick! Piracy should get much more attention. The problem is that people are wasting too much of law enforcement's time by calling in these minor crimes and distracting them from the important stuff. Maybe you guys could start a campaign to educate the masses so they don't call in every bank robbery or theft. Then there'd be more resources available for catching the real criminals.
You are still going on that golf trip to europe next month and leaving the house empty, yes?
Also interesting is that the Gamecube was their only system that didn't include anything really new on the controller (analog shoulder buttons was about it) and was also their least-successful system. The analog shoulder buttons came from the Dreamcast's analog triggers.
Why else do you think the military makes people practice shooting targets over and over again? Because targets don't run off screaming or fall over after you shoot them the first time?
I find LOTRO to be nearly flawless when compared to other MMOs. LOTRO had about as smooth a launch as one could hope for and put other MMOs to shame in this regard. Also, allowing characters to transfer from Beta to Live, and discounted pricing for pre-orders, is a welcome "innovation." This is Turbine's 4th MMORPG release, so you would think that they'd be able to manage a launch by now. Allowing preorders to get into the game early (which is not really allowing beta characters to transfer over to live) and pre order discounts is hardly innovative as that has been done for quite a while now.
As far as flaws go, it certainly isn't flawless. Don't get me wrong, the game has great stories and is awesome in a lot of ways. It's obvious that they let DDO flounder in order to devote more resources to making this game as deep and rich as it is. That said, the combat system leaves a lot to be desired and is a step backwards from most other MMORPGs IMHO. It's come a long way since alpha, but it still annoys me too much for me to actually play post release. The crafting stuff obviously still needs work as does the economy, but they are tweaking those and should have them balanced out a lot better pretty quickly.
Overall the game is pretty good, but certainly not anywhere near flawless.
There is a ton of money to be made in service contracts. More than there even is in ink. They base it on pages printed rather than ink used because all of the mechanical parts wear equally no matter how much ink coverage there is per page.
Companies like these agreements because they don't have to worry about things like warranties running out or maintaining seperate service agreements with someone to come fix their printers when things inevitably break. It also works out nicely for tax purposes since the money spent is a straight cost rather than a purchase. The company also avoids being stuck with old equipment. Pretty much the same reasons that leasing computer assets is so popular.
And what do you think would have happened if these things had been bombs, disguised as creepy little advertisements, and the police ignored them? To be bombs, they'd have to contain explosives, correct? Even looking at those things from a distance, you can see that they aren't large enough to contain enough explosives to do more than blow your finger off. Certainly not enough to damage a bridge.
Unlike in movie world, in real life you can't blow up a bridge with a ping pong ball sized explosive charge. Cratering and/or rendering a bridge designed to carry vehicle traffic ineffective (not neccesarily dropping the entire thing) requires over a hundred pounds of well placed explosives on the light end. A Lightbright just isn't going to do it.
I'm not saying that reports shouldn't be looked into, but the amount of fear mongering coming out of Boston over this is way out of proportion for the situation.
Anyone who has worked with a decent wireless scanning tool has probably seen this. We saw it while using Airmagnet Surveyor to baseline a site. We kept seeing an SSID being broadcast even though we were in a location where nothing could have been in range and there weren't any detectable wireless devices on site. It turned out to be our own laptops broadcasting the SSID from the hotel we were staying at.
Having a hot spare available for your critical equipment is definately the way to go. If it makes you feel better about the expense, you can use it as a test bed when it isn't torn apart. The issue that you can run into is that most manufacturers want their warranty techs (or warranty techs from a partner) to do the work.
Failing that, you should go with a service contract with a reputable company.
We get parts for our customers overnight the majority of the time (I work for an IT services company.) Sometimes things get back ordered or take an extra day because of the manufacturer, but next day is the norm.
For critical situations, like the server systemboard I put in on Monday, I can get the part drop shipped to me within four hours (it came to PA from Texas.) I'm sure the expense is pretty high, however.
I dunno if it is still the case, but the US federal government used to sell off scrap systems by the palette via a warehouse. We purchased some stuff through a junkyard that bought truckloads of them and the systems still had everything on them.
Even worse, this junkyard sold off a palette of laptops that previously belonged to the US Army to a guy who was shipping them back to china. I'd guess that they weren't all wiped either though I didn't get an opportunity to look for myself.
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That tingly feeling (no, the other one) is due to you being an end user and not an administrator and thus having absolutely no clue what the entire article is actually talking about. Nobody cares if the update is pushed down onto a home user's machine (and yes, it isn't forced or stealthed like the previous update to windows update itself was.)
The issue is that Microsoft released this as an update revision, but had really changed the scope of the package to include an installer.
The way that WSUS works, the administrator approves updates for his network. Once approved, revisions to an update don't require additional approval. These updates will only apply themselves to machines that already have the program in question installed. So, for example, I could approve the updates for Office 2007 for my entire network, but only the machines that have Office 2007 installed will actually download and install them. I don't need to worry about what software each machine has installed on it. The system handles that by itself.
Since this package was flagged as a revision, it passed through WSUS with approval if the previous update had approval. However, since it was actually an installer, it loaded the program onto every machine whether it already had Desktop Search installed or not.
Makes me glad that I was forced to take WSUS offline on a network that I'm responsible for. I didn't need to be there all day today.
Why would they want criminals to be able to search their servers faster?
Yes, FASA Interactive was originally a part of FASA and then was spun off into its own company before the troubles started mounting.
I'd have shipped them to a friend in some other country. Let's see them figure that one out. :)
Oh geez...I can't be expected to remember where I was two years ago. On that particular day, I could have been on as many as 4 different companies' networks from several different possible locations. There's absolutely no way to tell which particular computers I would have touched or even if they are still in service. You'd have to supeona every drive those companies own and that is no small order. You'd also have to supeona every machine that my company physically had in town on that day. Again, half of those machines are no longer in service.
Likewise, I could have visited any number of friends on that day. Even at home, I probably have a dozen or two drives either in use or in a bin someplace. All but one or two of them has probably been wiped in the past two years.
And names of everyone who might have used my computers in the past three years??? Impossible. I'd even go the step further and point out that since I have a wireless access point with WEP encryption running, I have no control over who accesses the net over my connection, nor any real way to identify those people.
There are legitimate uses for mod chips beyond making legal backups. The console makers want us all to beleve that these uses are also illegal, but they aren't.
1) Playing import games. Playing imports has been popular for quite a while. The console makers hate it because it ruins their ability to control prices (even though the import scene has no effect on pricing) but it is perfectly legal.
2) Homebrew games. Many platforms have a decent homebrew game scene (going back to the begining of consoles.) It requires a mod chip to play these games on newer platforms.
3) General experimentation. People like throwing Linux on anything with a CPU. Consoles have some unique features that could be exploited for certain non-gaming applications.
Remake of the Sega CD game? That's like calling Social Distortion's cover of Ring of Fire a remake of the Wall of Voodoo song.
What he said is that forcing file sharing to go underground is going to accelerate the development of tools that make said file sharing harder to trace. If child porn is the government's larger concern as they claim it is, then they should recognize that those same tools will be used by those priority targets which will make catching them tougher. It is true, but not a good argument.
As far as your misconceptions about freedoms...the fact that some people abuse something is by no means a legitimate argument against freedom of speech. That is about the dumbest thing that I've ever heard. Not that any of it matters in this case since no one country owns the internet. TPB doesn't break any laws in their country and you don't have any more right to try and push your laws on them than they have to push their laws on you. You don't have to like it, but you should respect it.
I think that you have the right idea Rick! Piracy should get much more attention. The problem is that people are wasting too much of law enforcement's time by calling in these minor crimes and distracting them from the important stuff. Maybe you guys could start a campaign to educate the masses so they don't call in every bank robbery or theft. Then there'd be more resources available for catching the real criminals.
You are still going on that golf trip to europe next month and leaving the house empty, yes?
As far as flaws go, it certainly isn't flawless. Don't get me wrong, the game has great stories and is awesome in a lot of ways. It's obvious that they let DDO flounder in order to devote more resources to making this game as deep and rich as it is. That said, the combat system leaves a lot to be desired and is a step backwards from most other MMORPGs IMHO. It's come a long way since alpha, but it still annoys me too much for me to actually play post release. The crafting stuff obviously still needs work as does the economy, but they are tweaking those and should have them balanced out a lot better pretty quickly.
Overall the game is pretty good, but certainly not anywhere near flawless.
There is a ton of money to be made in service contracts. More than there even is in ink. They base it on pages printed rather than ink used because all of the mechanical parts wear equally no matter how much ink coverage there is per page.
Companies like these agreements because they don't have to worry about things like warranties running out or maintaining seperate service agreements with someone to come fix their printers when things inevitably break. It also works out nicely for tax purposes since the money spent is a straight cost rather than a purchase. The company also avoids being stuck with old equipment. Pretty much the same reasons that leasing computer assets is so popular.
Wizkids owns the property, not a license.
Anyone who has worked with a decent wireless scanning tool has probably seen this. We saw it while using Airmagnet Surveyor to baseline a site. We kept seeing an SSID being broadcast even though we were in a location where nothing could have been in range and there weren't any detectable wireless devices on site. It turned out to be our own laptops broadcasting the SSID from the hotel we were staying at.
Having a hot spare available for your critical equipment is definately the way to go. If it makes you feel better about the expense, you can use it as a test bed when it isn't torn apart. The issue that you can run into is that most manufacturers want their warranty techs (or warranty techs from a partner) to do the work.
Failing that, you should go with a service contract with a reputable company.
We get parts for our customers overnight the majority of the time (I work for an IT services company.) Sometimes things get back ordered or take an extra day because of the manufacturer, but next day is the norm.
For critical situations, like the server systemboard I put in on Monday, I can get the part drop shipped to me within four hours (it came to PA from Texas.) I'm sure the expense is pretty high, however.
I dunno if it is still the case, but the US federal government used to sell off scrap systems by the palette via a warehouse. We purchased some stuff through a junkyard that bought truckloads of them and the systems still had everything on them. Even worse, this junkyard sold off a palette of laptops that previously belonged to the US Army to a guy who was shipping them back to china. I'd guess that they weren't all wiped either though I didn't get an opportunity to look for myself.