I don't get this phrase. I thought yellow people ate rice.
er... for those of you who haven't heard this, its not some weird racial slur; it simply refers to the whiteness of rice itself. (Obviously there is wild rice/brown rice/etc but that's beside the point.)
So instead of trying out the OS on hardware I already own, I can spend the money on extra hardware I don't want that will potentially require me to swap around cables and/or get a KVM.
At least it will be genuine apple supported hardware rather than something you cobbled together yourself; meaning it will work properly.
The cheapest "official" refurbished mac from apple that a person could be reasonably assured of the hardware's condition is over $1000
1) I guess you didn't see the MacBook for $949. 2) there aren't any Mini's on that page; primarily because they sell fast.
Hardware choice is a convenience. Convenience is a benefit people are often willing to pay for.
You are sooo right. The irony is that hardware choice is something you GIVE UP to use OSX. If you are into hardware choice, Apple isn't the direction you should be looking.
Using prebuilt systems to compete with that segment is practically impossible because you have to charge for the labor the customer is willing to do themselves, so Apple isn't ever going to try.
If Apple sold the a bare "Apple blessed" desktop motherboard with a copy of OSX for $260 the enthusiast DIY crowd would be all over it like white on rice.
2) he said he spent X, that doesn't mean he didn't already have half the parts.
For example, I have a spare 500GB sata hard drive (RMA replacement, but I bought a new one right away because I couldn't wait for the RMA to ship), DVDRW, video card (6600GT), 1GB DDR2 RAM, case and power supply all just sitting in my office. I'd JUST need a suitable mobo and cpu. So it would cost me $192 + OSX ($103.99 at amazon) so my cost for a hackintosh would be $296 give or take.
someone who doesn't want to take the plunge and invest in a $3000 machine could use this dongle to try out the OS before they commit to a full Apple setup.
The price of the dongle plus the price of OSX is more than enough to buy a slightly used Mac Mini.
assuming that any hackintosh users must be pirating OS X is a rather condescending attitude towards PC users, and particular PC users who are interested in OS X.
Your right its wrong to assume. But he's right, most hackintoshes are built using pirated software. Deal with it.
helping people set up their hackintoshes would be a great way to expose some PC users to the benefits or advantages of OS X.
Presumably these PC users are already sold on trying OSX given they are working on a hackintosh. And again, if these PC users are willing to shell out a few hundred bucks on dongles and a copy of the OS to try it out, they can buy a slighly used mac mini, or an older ibook. Or shell out just a little bit more and get an new mini.
And to be honest, even if I was legally-bound to the NDA, I'd still disclose the whys and wherefores of my application rejection. From time-to-time, liberty must be protected with a little civil disobedience in order to protect one's rights, privileges, and freedoms.
Its not even civil disobedience to "violate" a contract. Its just breaking a contract that might expose you to being sued for damages or other remedies specified in the contract.
There's nothing ILLEGAL about breaking a contract.
Citizens really need to learn this.
So if someone decides to break the NDA and publish their rejection letters, Apple will probably terminate their membership and that's about it. Apple's going to have a hell of a time showing that they were materially damaged by someone saying that their app got rejected.
You have obviously never heard of an external monitor port.
Of course I have. So I can attach a 2nd monitor to an imac? big deal. Why would I want a good screen and a bad screen? With a PC I could (and do) have two good screens, that match.
Wow! You state the current scene for the entire PC market space and act as if Apple is an anomally.
Apple is an anomally.
The ENTIRE PC market space lets you buy an inexpensive core 2 duo tower and attach whatever monitor you want to it. Sure there are all-in-ones in PC land, but not one vendor forces you to choose to buy a xeon based system just to get into a tower.
There are also a number of options out there in PC land if you don't want a TN based laptop.
I suspect you're being sarcastic but in case you're not; I run a 24" iMac with a 32" 720p TV connected to it, the colors are obviously different since the TV isn't quite as good as the iMac at color reproduction but this is actually a good thing when doing anything that's supposed to end up on a TV since you can see a lot more accurately what it will look like.
I'd say that's something of a special case, given that you are actually targeting TV.
Your example reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, albeit one which is seldom explained and which the ISPs don't like to clarify.
My example was an abstract description of how a "subsidy" like this works. It wasn't meant to reflect Comcast's costs.
Using six times as much bandwidth does not cost the ISP six times as much money, because shared bandwidth represents only a small fraction of the cost.
Correct. In reality, I would only have to charge everyone an extra quarter instead of a whole dollar to cover the bandwidth hogs. (provided there are just a few of them).
Routers are cheap; the big expenses are installing and maintaining the last mile (wiring to your house), advertising, and staff. Short of deliberate sabotage, there is no way you could cause your ISP $120 worth of expenses, because maxing out your connection 24/7 only costs them a few dollars more.
This however is only a half truth . It only costs them a few bucks more as long as only a few people are doing it. They don't have the infrastructure in place for everyone to max out their connection 24x7. Its just not there. The total bandwidth supply to any given residential neighborhood is fixed AND limited, and expanding the supply is very expensive.
If everyone in a neighborhood maxed out their connection, it would slow to a crawl. For the ISP to "fix it", they'd have to light up, or even lay more wire, more fibre, deploy more hardware, rent space for it, pay to power it, maintain it. This would cost tons and likely never repay itself if they only charge the regular ~$40/mo.
The iMac has a DVI port, so this doesn't have to be a dealbreaker
Why would I buy a 20" iMac to put a 20"+ screen in front of it? Or do you mean I could use both? Dear god, no, the two screens could NEVER be properly color matched, and it would completely suck to have the color visibly shift as I dragged an image around the expanded desktop. No thank you.
It would be a criminal waste of resources to discard such a talent simply because he can no longer meet the physical demands the geek would impose on him.
The guy has claimed in numerous interviews that he's not motivated by money. I'm quite certain that Lightfoot would be making music regardless of the copyright royalty regime, even if he had to work a 2nd job on the side to cover his rent.
Then shouldn't the people who use 10 or 15 a year pay considerably less than they are now?
Perhaps a bit less, but not necessarily considerably less. (After all, there is considerable fixed overhead to a DSL line on top of the bandwidth, those 5% bandwidth users consume telephone support, need their "modems" fixed, have line trouble, etc at the same rate as the 100% users.)
After all, the only reason pricing is at this point is because they reasoned that the people using the service at only 5% capacity would effectively subsidized the others who use it at 100% capacity.
That's true to a point, but its a gross oversimplification.
If you're now making those who would use it at 100% capacity pay more for service, shouldn't those who are only using a fraction of the network capacity get a major discount to their connectivity?
Let me give you an example to illustrate my point.
Lets say we have a service that costs $20 for the average person. But instead we charge $21. So if 1000 people pay 21$ instead of 20$ for a service, that subsidizes the 1% of people who uses $120 worth of service. Are you with me?
So costs are: 990 people use $20 worth of service ($19800) plus 10 people use $120 worth of service ($1200) = $21000. While revenue is: 1000 people * $21 = $21000.
So the low end users are subsidizing the high end users, and we 'break even'. That's more or less how the subsidy works in reality.
So if we start charging those 10 people $120 directly. We can afford to knock a whole dollar off everyone else's plan? Big flipping deal. That gets lost in the noise.
(The "noise" being price increases due to inflation, cost decreases due to modern technology, it gets used to cover some new 'feature' like anti-spam on the server, or free antivirus for subscribers, etc, etc).
Do you fucking work for Comcast? That's exactly what they'll tell him. "Oh, off site backups are considered a business function. You'll have to upgrade to our business service to eliminate the interruptions."
It has nothing to do with what "function" off site backups are. It has to do with raw bandwidth and resource usage.
And forget whether its called 'home' or 'business' that's just marketing and branding. Think of home as 'small' and 'business' as medium and 'enterprise' as large if it makes you feel better. If you are moving 100's of GB per month then you aren't 'small' anymore, get over it.
The higher end iMacs, the Mac Pros, and the MacBook Pros all have real graphic cards.
But do they have real SCREENS?
I mean a proper 8-bit color space, instead of 6-bit dithering? I mean the ability choose matt vs glossy.
Obviously the Mac Pro lets you attach whatever you want to it, but the imacs and macbook pros stick you with the choice of exactly the one LCD screen apple chooses. (although the mbp used to let you choose between matte and glossy; i don't know if it still does; but that's just the finish not the technology.)
As far as i know, all Apple laptops use 6-bit TN screens. And there is a fair bit of information out there that iMacs have switched to 6-bit TN screens too, at least for 20" models. The 24" model is apparently an 8-bit S-IPS... but its not like apple makes this info readily available and the specs are subject to change, so you've got to pay constant attention.
If you have no data about the next frame, you cannot draw that frame - period.
If you are buffering 1 seconds worth of video and you miss data about a part of a frame, but have the data for nearby parts either in space or time, you can fill in the missing data with a best guess. It won't be 'right' and the less information you have to work with the more 'not right' it will be, but it will be FAR more watchable than what we have now.
A human being watching the show can easily deduce something reasonable to fill the blanks when a bit of signal is lost. (note I said reasonable, not necessarily right). Suitable algorithms could come up with something reasonable too.
You could always upgrade to a class of service that doesn't have the caps, or has caps in line with what you require.
A system in which people like you who use 100s or thousands of gigabytes per month pay more than people who use 10 or 15 a year seems entirely fair to me.
That's fine if you are Gordon Lightfoot and still have the stamina and the talent to fill the 3000+ seat Shea's Buffalo at age 69.
A tile setter won't have the stamina at age 69 either. That trade is deservedly considered to be 'back breaking'. Do the users of bathrooms he tiled in his prime pay him a royalty?
Maybe not so fine if your burn out from the rigors of a full concert tour at a much younger age.
Maybe they'll need to find new jobs when they age? Its how the rest of society copes with the fact that they can't do the jobs they did when they were younger.
--- or you know that you are never in your professional career going to see a booking at a first, second or even third tier concert venue.
And?
Most models passing through expensive modelling schools never even earn enough at modelling jobs to pay back what it cost to go through 'school' and keep their portfolio maintained. The VAST majority never do better than a department store catalog job. And as they age and become less marketable... long before that, in most cases, they find another job.
So most musicians won't be successful enough to live off concert revenue, so what? They can get jobs like everyone else, and can join the ranks of: most poets, most authors, most fencers, most basketball players, most playwrights, most actors, most open source contributors...
This implies an amount of brainpower, manpower, and wealth is distributed heavily in the poorer industry.
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say, but if you are suggesting that the farmers aren't bright enough to outmatch the game developers because they are poor and uneducated... the reality is that yes, the actual gold farmers are poor and exploited souls.
However the people running the show, calling the shots, and giving the farmers their marching orders, their instructions, their accounts, their scripts, etc, are all highly organized, and don't lack for intelligence or wealth or manpower.
Doesn't make sense to me, come on you stockmarket guys, explain the rationale.
It reduces the number outstanding shares. This good on several points:
1) It counters stock dilution caused from issuing stock options, and previous financings, by reducing the shares outstanding adds shareholder value. (The remaining shares each represent more of the company than they did before.)
2) It improves certain financial markers like 'earnings per share' (and others) because with fewer shares, the EPS and other figures look better. (One can argue this is just a sleight-of-hand to make earnings look better than it is, but the counter argument is that the lower EPS isn't representative of the companies actual strength, because it doesn't account for the 40 billion just sitting there...)
3) A buyback is also an indirect way of distributing value to shareholders. (The direct option is dividends); a buyback by creating a demand and reducing the supply for the shares tends to bolster the prices, providing value to shareholders. 4) MS is sitting on pile of cash and not doing anything with it, that's not in the shareholders best interests, so they should do -something- with it. If the shares are depressed, due to, for example, an unrelated global credit crisis, then a buyback may represent best investment of that money for the shareholders.
I've done thousands of port scans as part of my job. I've done four today, and I'm not even a networking guy any more. Most reasonably capable computer professionals will do hundreds if not thousands of non-malicious port scans during their careers.
How many of these port scans did you perform on ips you otherwise had no control over or relationship to?
I see port scans come at my servers all day. Are you seriously trying to suggest that thousands upon thousands of "network professioals", and "top-notch app programmers" around the world are doing them on my servers for some non-malicious purpose? Sure my ISP is behind a couple as part of their legitimate network monitoring, and I've run a few myself, but the 99.99% majority hitting my servers are malicious.
In this case, you want to stop the illicit transfer of gold. So you carefully record all gold transfers in the game (auctions, mail, whatever), and then sort the list in a few different reports: size of individual transfer, number of transfers per account (send and receive), sum of all transfers by account (send and receive).
Then I spin up an account for several months, accumulate gold with it but make no transfers, and am invisible to your system, then one day I unload the account of all its gold to fulfill orders, and trip your logs, but I've already abandoned the account, or set it up as an advertising bot until you terminate it, meanwhile I've spun up a new account. Of course, its not 'me', its a whole army of people I've got doing this at pennies an hour.
Each working as isolated cells using multiple different strategies and carefully logging the results, so that I can discern and adapt to and evade your deception strategies. I'm also actively seeking to pay employees for information on your detection techniques, or any other insider info to stay ahead of you.
Meanwhile you spend all your time investing innocent guild bankers, traders, and tradeskillers.
And captchas are simultaneously becoming a problem for legitimate users, and becoming ineffective at stopping illegitimate users.
There is criteria to flag a player as a gold farmer.
If the criteria is simple, it will be easy for an organized farmer to make sure the satisfy the conditions for not being flagged.
There is the pattern by which most gold farmers operate, which is how regular players consciously determine who is a gold farmer.
And when you've got an AI that can pass the turing test you'll be able to reliably automate detecting gold farmers... of course, at that point, they'll be using the same AI to ensure you can't.
The "pattern by which most gold farmers operate" is a function of efficiency within the constraints of the system. If the system is modified to root them out, they will choose a new pattern. If continually running the same instances and never talking to anyone is your heuristic, they will start rotating instances and running chat macros to simulate conversations.
Slashdot Mirror
"would be all over it like white on rice."
I don't get this phrase. I thought yellow people ate rice.
er... for those of you who haven't heard this, its not some weird racial slur; it simply refers to the whiteness of rice itself. (Obviously there is wild rice /brown rice/etc but that's beside the point.)
So instead of trying out the OS on hardware I already own, I can spend the money on extra hardware I don't want that will potentially require me to swap around cables and/or get a KVM.
At least it will be genuine apple supported hardware rather than something you cobbled together yourself; meaning it will work properly.
The cheapest "official" refurbished mac from apple that a person could be reasonably assured of the hardware's condition is over $1000
1) I guess you didn't see the MacBook for $949.
2) there aren't any Mini's on that page; primarily because they sell fast.
Hardware choice is a convenience. Convenience is a benefit people are often willing to pay for.
You are sooo right. The irony is that hardware choice is something you GIVE UP to use OSX. If you are into hardware choice, Apple isn't the direction you should be looking.
Using prebuilt systems to compete with that segment is practically impossible because you have to charge for the labor the customer is willing to do themselves, so Apple isn't ever going to try.
If Apple sold the a bare "Apple blessed" desktop motherboard with a copy of OSX for $260 the enthusiast DIY crowd would be all over it like white on rice.
1) the dongle isn't required
2) he said he spent X, that doesn't mean he didn't already have half the parts.
For example, I have a spare 500GB sata hard drive (RMA replacement, but I bought a new one right away because I couldn't wait for the RMA to ship), DVDRW, video card (6600GT), 1GB DDR2 RAM, case and power supply all just sitting in my office. I'd JUST need a suitable mobo and cpu. So it would cost me $192 + OSX ($103.99 at amazon) so my cost for a hackintosh would be $296 give or take.
someone who doesn't want to take the plunge and invest in a $3000 machine could use this dongle to try out the OS before they commit to a full Apple setup.
The price of the dongle plus the price of OSX is more than enough to buy a slightly used Mac Mini.
assuming that any hackintosh users must be pirating OS X is a rather condescending attitude towards PC users, and particular PC users who are interested in OS X.
Your right its wrong to assume. But he's right, most hackintoshes are built using pirated software. Deal with it.
helping people set up their hackintoshes would be a great way to expose some PC users to the benefits or advantages of OS X.
Presumably these PC users are already sold on trying OSX given they are working on a hackintosh. And again, if these PC users are willing to shell out a few hundred bucks on dongles and a copy of the OS to try it out, they can buy a slighly used mac mini, or an older ibook. Or shell out just a little bit more and get an new mini.
And to be honest, even if I was legally-bound to the NDA, I'd still disclose the whys and wherefores of my application rejection. From time-to-time, liberty must be protected with a little civil disobedience in order to protect one's rights, privileges, and freedoms.
Its not even civil disobedience to "violate" a contract. Its just breaking a contract that might expose you to being sued for damages or other remedies specified in the contract.
There's nothing ILLEGAL about breaking a contract.
Citizens really need to learn this.
So if someone decides to break the NDA and publish their rejection letters, Apple will probably terminate their membership and that's about it. Apple's going to have a hell of a time showing that they were materially damaged by someone saying that their app got rejected.
You have obviously never heard of an external monitor port.
Of course I have. So I can attach a 2nd monitor to an imac? big deal. Why would I want a good screen and a bad screen? With a PC I could (and do) have two good screens, that match.
Wow! You state the current scene for the entire PC market space and act as if Apple is an anomally.
Apple is an anomally.
The ENTIRE PC market space lets you buy an inexpensive core 2 duo tower and attach whatever monitor you want to it. Sure there are all-in-ones in PC land, but not one vendor forces you to choose to buy a xeon based system just to get into a tower.
There are also a number of options out there in PC land if you don't want a TN based laptop.
I suspect you're being sarcastic but in case you're not; I run a 24" iMac with a 32" 720p TV connected to it, the colors are obviously different since the TV isn't quite as good as the iMac at color reproduction but this is actually a good thing when doing anything that's supposed to end up on a TV since you can see a lot more accurately what it will look like.
I'd say that's something of a special case, given that you are actually targeting TV.
Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux."
No, Apple looks pretty much like Apple, and Android looks as much like Microsoft as it does Linux.
Your example reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, albeit one which is seldom explained and which the ISPs don't like to clarify.
My example was an abstract description of how a "subsidy" like this works. It wasn't meant to reflect Comcast's costs.
Using six times as much bandwidth does not cost the ISP six times as much money, because shared bandwidth represents only a small fraction of the cost.
Correct. In reality, I would only have to charge everyone an extra quarter instead of a whole dollar to cover the bandwidth hogs. (provided there are just a few of them).
Routers are cheap; the big expenses are installing and maintaining the last mile (wiring to your house), advertising, and staff. Short of deliberate sabotage, there is no way you could cause your ISP $120 worth of expenses, because maxing out your connection 24/7 only costs them a few dollars more.
This however is only a half truth . It only costs them a few bucks more as long as only a few people are doing it. They don't have the infrastructure in place for everyone to max out their connection 24x7. Its just not there. The total bandwidth supply to any given residential neighborhood is fixed AND limited, and expanding the supply is very expensive.
If everyone in a neighborhood maxed out their connection, it would slow to a crawl. For the ISP to "fix it", they'd have to light up, or even lay more wire, more fibre, deploy more hardware, rent space for it, pay to power it, maintain it. This would cost tons and likely never repay itself if they only charge the regular ~$40/mo.
The iMac has a DVI port, so this doesn't have to be a dealbreaker
Why would I buy a 20" iMac to put a 20"+ screen in front of it? Or do you mean I could use both? Dear god, no, the two screens could NEVER be properly color matched, and it would completely suck to have the color visibly shift as I dragged an image around the expanded desktop. No thank you.
Something tells me you don't do anything involving graphics and these details don't concern you, as you can't spell matte correctly.
"matt" is the UK spelling.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=49278&dict=CALD
Gordon Lightfoot is a national treasure.
I'm decidedly not a fan, but I don't dispute you.
It would be a criminal waste of resources to discard such a talent simply because he can no longer meet the physical demands the geek would impose on him.
The guy has claimed in numerous interviews that he's not motivated by money. I'm quite certain that Lightfoot would be making music regardless of the copyright royalty regime, even if he had to work a 2nd job on the side to cover his rent.
Then shouldn't the people who use 10 or 15 a year pay considerably less than they are now?
Perhaps a bit less, but not necessarily considerably less. (After all, there is considerable fixed overhead to a DSL line on top of the bandwidth, those 5% bandwidth users consume telephone support, need their "modems" fixed, have line trouble, etc at the same rate as the 100% users.)
After all, the only reason pricing is at this point is because they reasoned that the people using the service at only 5% capacity would effectively subsidized the others who use it at 100% capacity.
That's true to a point, but its a gross oversimplification.
If you're now making those who would use it at 100% capacity pay more for service, shouldn't those who are only using a fraction of the network capacity get a major discount to their connectivity?
Let me give you an example to illustrate my point.
Lets say we have a service that costs $20 for the average person. But instead we charge $21. So if 1000 people pay 21$ instead of 20$ for a service, that subsidizes the 1% of people who uses $120 worth of service. Are you with me?
So costs are: 990 people use $20 worth of service ($19800) plus 10 people use $120 worth of service ($1200) = $21000.
While revenue is: 1000 people * $21 = $21000.
So the low end users are subsidizing the high end users, and we 'break even'.
That's more or less how the subsidy works in reality.
So if we start charging those 10 people $120 directly. We can afford to knock a whole dollar off everyone else's plan? Big flipping deal. That gets lost in the noise.
(The "noise" being price increases due to inflation, cost decreases due to modern technology, it gets used to cover some new 'feature' like anti-spam on the server, or free antivirus for subscribers, etc, etc).
Do you fucking work for Comcast? That's exactly what they'll tell him. "Oh, off site backups are considered a business function. You'll have to upgrade to our business service to eliminate the interruptions."
It has nothing to do with what "function" off site backups are. It has to do with raw bandwidth and resource usage.
And forget whether its called 'home' or 'business' that's just marketing and branding. Think of home as 'small' and 'business' as medium and 'enterprise' as large if it makes you feel better. If you are moving 100's of GB per month then you aren't 'small' anymore, get over it.
The higher end iMacs, the Mac Pros, and the MacBook Pros all have real graphic cards.
But do they have real SCREENS?
I mean a proper 8-bit color space, instead of 6-bit dithering? I mean the ability choose matt vs glossy.
Obviously the Mac Pro lets you attach whatever you want to it, but the imacs and macbook pros stick you with the choice of exactly the one LCD screen apple chooses. (although the mbp used to let you choose between matte and glossy; i don't know if it still does; but that's just the finish not the technology.)
As far as i know, all Apple laptops use 6-bit TN screens. And there is a fair bit of information out there that iMacs have switched to 6-bit TN screens too, at least for 20" models. The 24" model is apparently an 8-bit S-IPS... but its not like apple makes this info readily available and the specs are subject to change, so you've got to pay constant attention.
That is 100% not possible.
Not quite.
If you have no data about the next frame, you cannot draw that frame - period.
If you are buffering 1 seconds worth of video and you miss data about a part of a frame, but have the data for nearby parts either in space or time, you can fill in the missing data with a best guess. It won't be 'right' and the less information you have to work with the more 'not right' it will be, but it will be FAR more watchable than what we have now.
A human being watching the show can easily deduce something reasonable to fill the blanks when a bit of signal is lost. (note I said reasonable, not necessarily right). Suitable algorithms could come up with something reasonable too.
You could always upgrade to a class of service that doesn't have the caps, or has caps in line with what you require.
A system in which people like you who use 100s or thousands of gigabytes per month pay more than people who use 10 or 15 a year seems entirely fair to me.
That's fine if you are Gordon Lightfoot and still have the stamina and the talent to fill the 3000+ seat Shea's Buffalo at age 69.
A tile setter won't have the stamina at age 69 either. That trade is deservedly considered to be 'back breaking'. Do the users of bathrooms he tiled in his prime pay him a royalty?
Maybe not so fine if your burn out from the rigors of a full concert tour at a much younger age.
Maybe they'll need to find new jobs when they age? Its how the rest of society copes with the fact that they can't do the jobs they did when they were younger.
--- or you know that you are never in your professional career going to see a booking at a first, second or even third tier concert venue.
And?
Most models passing through expensive modelling schools never even earn enough at modelling jobs to pay back what it cost to go through 'school' and keep their portfolio maintained. The VAST majority never do better than a department store catalog job. And as they age and become less marketable... long before that, in most cases, they find another job.
So most musicians won't be successful enough to live off concert revenue, so what? They can get jobs like everyone else, and can join the ranks of: most poets, most authors, most fencers, most basketball players, most playwrights, most actors, most open source contributors...
This implies an amount of brainpower, manpower, and wealth is distributed heavily in the poorer industry.
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say, but if you are suggesting that the farmers aren't bright enough to outmatch the game developers because they are poor and uneducated... the reality is that yes, the actual gold farmers are poor and exploited souls.
However the people running the show, calling the shots, and giving the farmers their marching orders, their instructions, their accounts, their scripts, etc, are all highly organized, and don't lack for intelligence or wealth or manpower.
Doesn't make sense to me, come on you stockmarket guys, explain the rationale.
It reduces the number outstanding shares. This good on several points:
1) It counters stock dilution caused from issuing stock options, and previous financings, by reducing the shares outstanding adds shareholder value. (The remaining shares each represent more of the company than they did before.)
2) It improves certain financial markers like 'earnings per share' (and others) because with fewer shares, the EPS and other figures look better. (One can argue this is just a sleight-of-hand to make earnings look better than it is, but the counter argument is that the lower EPS isn't representative of the companies actual strength, because it doesn't account for the 40 billion just sitting there...)
3) A buyback is also an indirect way of distributing value to shareholders. (The direct option is dividends); a buyback by creating a demand and reducing the supply for the shares tends to bolster the prices, providing value to shareholders.
4) MS is sitting on pile of cash and not doing anything with it, that's not in the shareholders best interests, so they should do -something- with it. If the shares are depressed, due to, for example, an unrelated global credit crisis, then a buyback may represent best investment of that money for the shareholders.
I've done thousands of port scans as part of my job. I've done four today, and I'm not even a networking guy any more. Most reasonably capable computer professionals will do hundreds if not thousands of non-malicious port scans during their careers.
How many of these port scans did you perform on ips you otherwise had no control over or relationship to?
I see port scans come at my servers all day. Are you seriously trying to suggest that thousands upon thousands of "network professioals", and "top-notch app programmers" around the world are doing them on my servers for some non-malicious purpose? Sure my ISP is behind a couple as part of their legitimate network monitoring, and I've run a few myself, but the 99.99% majority hitting my servers are malicious.
The parent poster was correct.
In this case, you want to stop the illicit transfer of gold. So you carefully record all gold transfers in the game (auctions, mail, whatever), and then sort the list in a few different reports: size of individual transfer, number of transfers per account (send and receive), sum of all transfers by account (send and receive).
Then I spin up an account for several months, accumulate gold with it but make no transfers, and am invisible to your system, then one day I unload the account of all its gold to fulfill orders, and trip your logs, but I've already abandoned the account, or set it up as an advertising bot until you terminate it, meanwhile I've spun up a new account. Of course, its not 'me', its a whole army of people I've got doing this at pennies an hour.
Each working as isolated cells using multiple different strategies and carefully logging the results, so that I can discern and adapt to and evade your deception strategies. I'm also actively seeking to pay employees for information on your detection techniques, or any other insider info to stay ahead of you.
Meanwhile you spend all your time investing innocent guild bankers, traders, and tradeskillers.
Captchas are automated.
And captchas are simultaneously becoming a problem for legitimate users, and becoming ineffective at stopping illegitimate users.
There is criteria to flag a player as a gold farmer.
If the criteria is simple, it will be easy for an organized farmer to make sure the satisfy the conditions for not being flagged.
There is the pattern by which most gold farmers operate, which is how regular players consciously determine who is a gold farmer.
And when you've got an AI that can pass the turing test you'll be able to reliably automate detecting gold farmers... of course, at that point, they'll be using the same AI to ensure you can't.
The "pattern by which most gold farmers operate" is a function of efficiency within the constraints of the system. If the system is modified to root them out, they will choose a new pattern. If continually running the same instances and never talking to anyone is your heuristic, they will start rotating instances and running chat macros to simulate conversations.