The problem with loosing the activations with MS Office were with Office 2007 and 2010 when you used a licensing server. We had some issues with Windows 7, but were mostly able to cheat our way around that problem. The first problem was that the activation server wouldn't work with VLANs that took Microsoft years to fix, then that was still a problem with laptops that were rarely connected to the LAN as VPN and wi-fi connections were more restricted than hardwire connections. Microsoft's "answer" to this problem was to use their single activation licensces but, since we routinely re-imaged PCs, we burned through those like toilet paper.
So, for TL;DR, this problem is a current issue as these software versions are still in use.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft:
"n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale)."
To be the legal definition of theft, you must remove the item from the person's possession. That is why legally, it is called copyright infringement instead of "petty theft" or "grand theft" which would be the charges if it met that legal definition. So, for the hard of understanding, if I come and take your physical copy of your software without your permission, depriving you of its use, then it is theft; if I make a copy of your software, with or without your permission, but, do not deprive you of its use, then it is copyright infringement. Many companies have tried to make a case that copyright infringement is theft to the courts and they have failed to convince even one court that it is theft. Which is why they cannot use the term theft when talking about pirates because that is libel or slander (depending on the medium) as they would be accusing them of a crime they did not commit.
As far as the lost sales, the RIAA and MPAA's own studies showed that piracy does not typically hurt profits. Often the most pirated titles are also the highest grossing titles and the most prolific pirates are also their highest paying customers. There are exceptions such as bad movies, music and software. Once people realize how horrible something is, they're not going to pay money for it. Thanks to the internet, it is much harder to pedal garbage and make a profit. Between the internet and Germany changing their tax laws, it broke Ewe Bowl's business model. He couldn't make a profit on crap movies anymore so he went into the lawsuit business (extortion) instead.
I have troubles understanding why most game/software devs can't get this through their thick skulls. These days a lot of piracy is do to the crap DRM that publishers put on titles. I've known several people that download and run pirate version of software even though they have a legal copy because they actually fucking work! I've even done it myself with multiple version of MS Office, even though I had legal copies as it didn't start giving me activation errors every 26 or so days. (Enterprise licences.) The other pirates that don't have a legal copy aren't going to miraculously go to the store a pay retail price for something because the DRM is tough. They'll either wait for the crack, sneak through a licensing hole or go without. They aren't going to buy your fucking product, period.
Software devs, get this through your thick skulls!
It's rather funny and sad that some Windows rootkits provide better antivirus protection than using any of the available commercial versions. I remember one from a long time ago that also solved a critical Windows bug and increased system performance. I remember the question of fix Windows and know I may get used as part of a botnet or deal with the issues. It took Microsoft months to fix the bug and they never did solve whatever performance issue that the virus took care of.
Sadly, if you use hardware or software that requires Windows and the internet, you're hosed at this point. WinXP is no longer really internet safe and most of the privacy screwing aspects of Windows 10 have been back-ported to Windows 7/8 through updates.
Well, he's trying to find a way to reduce costs of space launches. That means testing the limits of what corners he can cut on equipment and still have the rockets complete their goals reliably. Except for the rocket that exploded on takeoff, all of the launch missions have been a success, it's just the after completion recovery tests were failures until now. Now they are taking apart the safely landed booster to see what damage it sustained during the round trip so they can see what they need to refurbish or replace to keep the cycle going in the future. If they can keep the cycle going and don't have to build new boosters each time, it will reduce the costs even further. By how much will be determined by how much they have to refurbish the booster each time.
I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of SpaceX's problems have been trying to get suppliers to actually supply equipment at contracted specifications. Given how quick and sloppy that most manufacturers have gotten over the years, trying to get this level of precision must be a nightmare.
Except that, unless Microsoft has made vast strides in x86 hardware with a hardware division we don't know about, current low power x86 chips have no business in a smartphone chassis. They are too large, consume too much power and generate too much heat. Even trying to keep them in a tablet format has been troublesome for Microsoft and they had to accept compromises to make it work. So an x86 smartphone is just unrealistic at this time. They've tried a few times and it never worked so they've been forced to work with a crappy ARM port of Windows that no previous generation software works with or anything current built around win32s (which is almost all Windows software). The only reason Windows is still a market force is because of their backwards-compatability model and resulting market lock-in. Without this compatibility, any "Windows" product is a non-starter. I think Microsoft knows this but, tries anyway because the smartphone market is so important to future revenue and they refuse to simplify cede this important market to Apple and Google. I think they are hoping to hang on by their fingernails in the market until it is viable to run an x86 chipset in a smartphone.
From what others have said, this well is storing processed methane with the oderant added in already. So, it would smell worse than dead people's farts.
Hey, I've been staying analytical and being honest when I'm outside my skill set. The personal attack is uncalled for.
You don't need to take my word on it for benchmark cheating. A Google search will do. Here's an older one but, it went all the way to a class-action suit that Intel had to settle: Intel lawsuit. The most recent article about CPU cheating was 2009 though GPU cheating is still rampant in the news. On the CPU side they have either cleaned up their act enough to stay out of the news or just haven't been caught. I can't say for sure which.
Though none of this will be detailed enough for you as your knowledge is more specialized and most news is not going to go to that level. I can't fix that.
I found the fix....and it sucks. Apparently, Slashdot now carries over your desktop posting preferences to the mobile site. This didn't used to happen. My desktop was set to HTML codes posts. There is no way I'm imputing proper HTML code using a smartphone touchscreen keyboard!
So, to the fix. You can only do this on the desktop version of the site. There is no mobile accessible setting for this. Login to the desktop site, open any story, then reply to any post. Select options from the post window (not the main Slashdot title bar) then go to the Formatting drop down box in the pop-up window and select "Plain Text" then click the save button at the bottom of the window (you may have to scroll to see it). You will still be able to put in HTML tags but, you don't need to post proper code anymore.
Elon Musk and company have been making huge achievements and seems one of the few people in industry to take the long view of things and it's likely to pay off in the end even though the MBAs hate him at the moment.
First link didn't work but, the second one did. Thank you, that was informative. Sadly, I don't have the background to follow some of it. It's helpful to have this now assuming the manufacturers don't try to game it too much.
Of I hadn't already posted, I would mod you up.
When it comes down to names of CPU calls, I'm in over my head. My former father in law is the engineer, not me. He said the specifics, I just couldn't retain them. But, the short was, when it came to internal performance marks, CPUs lie. Whether that specific function call does (or even can) lie and which CPUs do it, I'm unable to say due to being out of my area of skill.
Sorry about the graphics kludge in my statement. I was mixing apples and oranges. I was meaning that both types lie, in their own way, to fool performance benchmarks, not that they had the same type of internal metric. I've followed this nightmare more from the side of the benchmark suites, not from the engineering side.
There's always someone that invested in a technology and refuses to invest in a new one. My mom still goes to thrift stores and buys VHS tapes and now has a huge library of them. Trying to find her a replacement VHS/DVD player this year was a challenge, teaching her how to use the new one, even more so. I've managed to sell my dad on digital movies and once he got over the learning curve, he now prefers it to DVDs. But, my mom, you'll have to pry the VHS player out of her cold dead fingers.
The uncle clarification was to make sure that you and others knew I wasn't just trying to be a troll. When I get marked as troll, I want to earn it.
As far as the counters, it's not that their random, it's that they are optimized to give inflated tallies for benchmarks. So, in some areas, they're going to vastly overstate their performance (and thus, the "fish story" analogy) but, when you actually call on that level of performance, it isn't there. Which areas that do this will vary by manufacturer and model. The companies that try to offer serious and fair benchmarks have had a nightmare time trying to resolve this. They often have to reverse-engineer where each processor is lying, figure out an estimate of percentage it is lying on that particular test and modify the final results by that percentage. Of course, the company that made the chip will say the adjustment is unfair, then they rebuttal, etc. If that alone wasn't bad enough, chips (though this is more common on graphics chips) that are labeled as mid-range are, in fact, higher-end chips that have been stepped down by firmware, that remove the firmware imposed speed limiter for benchmarks only.
These are just the examples I know of; I have no doubt there are more.
After rereading my post, I realized I needed to post a clarification for the easily offended: "your alcoholic uncle" is used as a generic example and not referring to the AC's uncle.
I read this a they're worth whatever they say it's worth (at the moment) and you're going to whine and complain about it but, not do anything about it. Until they start loosing a large dollar value of customers over it, they're not going to fix it.
There's no point to trying to answer someone like this with facts. Why? Because they simply don't care. They have made up their mind and no amount of facts are going to change it. It's the same about people who claim that vaccines cause autism, military training exercises in Texas was an excuse for invasion, the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, etc. I could go on forever about conspiracy theories and the people behind them. But, there is simply no point.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with loosing the activations with MS Office were with Office 2007 and 2010 when you used a licensing server. We had some issues with Windows 7, but were mostly able to cheat our way around that problem. The first problem was that the activation server wouldn't work with VLANs that took Microsoft years to fix, then that was still a problem with laptops that were rarely connected to the LAN as VPN and wi-fi connections were more restricted than hardwire connections. Microsoft's "answer" to this problem was to use their single activation licensces but, since we routinely re-imaged PCs, we burned through those like toilet paper.
So, for TL;DR, this problem is a current issue as these software versions are still in use.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft:
"n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale)."
To be the legal definition of theft, you must remove the item from the person's possession. That is why legally, it is called copyright infringement instead of "petty theft" or "grand theft" which would be the charges if it met that legal definition. So, for the hard of understanding, if I come and take your physical copy of your software without your permission, depriving you of its use, then it is theft; if I make a copy of your software, with or without your permission, but, do not deprive you of its use, then it is copyright infringement. Many companies have tried to make a case that copyright infringement is theft to the courts and they have failed to convince even one court that it is theft. Which is why they cannot use the term theft when talking about pirates because that is libel or slander (depending on the medium) as they would be accusing them of a crime they did not commit.
As far as the lost sales, the RIAA and MPAA's own studies showed that piracy does not typically hurt profits. Often the most pirated titles are also the highest grossing titles and the most prolific pirates are also their highest paying customers. There are exceptions such as bad movies, music and software. Once people realize how horrible something is, they're not going to pay money for it. Thanks to the internet, it is much harder to pedal garbage and make a profit. Between the internet and Germany changing their tax laws, it broke Ewe Bowl's business model. He couldn't make a profit on crap movies anymore so he went into the lawsuit business (extortion) instead.
^^^ THIS! ^^^
I have troubles understanding why most game/software devs can't get this through their thick skulls. These days a lot of piracy is do to the crap DRM that publishers put on titles. I've known several people that download and run pirate version of software even though they have a legal copy because they actually fucking work! I've even done it myself with multiple version of MS Office, even though I had legal copies as it didn't start giving me activation errors every 26 or so days. (Enterprise licences.) The other pirates that don't have a legal copy aren't going to miraculously go to the store a pay retail price for something because the DRM is tough. They'll either wait for the crack, sneak through a licensing hole or go without. They aren't going to buy your fucking product, period.
Software devs, get this through your thick skulls!
It's rather funny and sad that some Windows rootkits provide better antivirus protection than using any of the available commercial versions. I remember one from a long time ago that also solved a critical Windows bug and increased system performance. I remember the question of fix Windows and know I may get used as part of a botnet or deal with the issues. It took Microsoft months to fix the bug and they never did solve whatever performance issue that the virus took care of.
Sadly, if you use hardware or software that requires Windows and the internet, you're hosed at this point. WinXP is no longer really internet safe and most of the privacy screwing aspects of Windows 10 have been back-ported to Windows 7/8 through updates.
Well, he's trying to find a way to reduce costs of space launches. That means testing the limits of what corners he can cut on equipment and still have the rockets complete their goals reliably. Except for the rocket that exploded on takeoff, all of the launch missions have been a success, it's just the after completion recovery tests were failures until now. Now they are taking apart the safely landed booster to see what damage it sustained during the round trip so they can see what they need to refurbish or replace to keep the cycle going in the future. If they can keep the cycle going and don't have to build new boosters each time, it will reduce the costs even further. By how much will be determined by how much they have to refurbish the booster each time.
I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of SpaceX's problems have been trying to get suppliers to actually supply equipment at contracted specifications. Given how quick and sloppy that most manufacturers have gotten over the years, trying to get this level of precision must be a nightmare.
Except that, unless Microsoft has made vast strides in x86 hardware with a hardware division we don't know about, current low power x86 chips have no business in a smartphone chassis. They are too large, consume too much power and generate too much heat. Even trying to keep them in a tablet format has been troublesome for Microsoft and they had to accept compromises to make it work. So an x86 smartphone is just unrealistic at this time. They've tried a few times and it never worked so they've been forced to work with a crappy ARM port of Windows that no previous generation software works with or anything current built around win32s (which is almost all Windows software). The only reason Windows is still a market force is because of their backwards-compatability model and resulting market lock-in. Without this compatibility, any "Windows" product is a non-starter. I think Microsoft knows this but, tries anyway because the smartphone market is so important to future revenue and they refuse to simplify cede this important market to Apple and Google. I think they are hoping to hang on by their fingernails in the market until it is viable to run an x86 chipset in a smartphone.
You want to post? Papers please.
From what others have said, this well is storing processed methane with the oderant added in already. So, it would smell worse than dead people's farts.
Sorry. That's the hard part of having a long conversation with an AC.
Today's complexity creates a lot of the trouble in getting reliable performance data. That makes perfect sense to me.
Hey, I've been staying analytical and being honest when I'm outside my skill set. The personal attack is uncalled for.
You don't need to take my word on it for benchmark cheating. A Google search will do. Here's an older one but, it went all the way to a class-action suit that Intel had to settle: Intel lawsuit. The most recent article about CPU cheating was 2009 though GPU cheating is still rampant in the news. On the CPU side they have either cleaned up their act enough to stay out of the news or just haven't been caught. I can't say for sure which.
Though none of this will be detailed enough for you as your knowledge is more specialized and most news is not going to go to that level. I can't fix that.
I found the fix. ...and it sucks. Apparently, Slashdot now carries over your desktop posting preferences to the mobile site. This didn't used to happen. My desktop was set to HTML codes posts. There is no way I'm imputing proper HTML code using a smartphone touchscreen keyboard!
So, to the fix. You can only do this on the desktop version of the site. There is no mobile accessible setting for this. Login to the desktop site, open any story, then reply to any post. Select options from the post window (not the main Slashdot title bar) then go to the Formatting drop down box in the pop-up window and select "Plain Text" then click the save button at the bottom of the window (you may have to scroll to see it). You will still be able to put in HTML tags but, you don't need to post proper code anymore.
Elon Musk and company have been making huge achievements and seems one of the few people in industry to take the long view of things and it's likely to pay off in the end even though the MBAs hate him at the moment.
I, for one, welcome our new Martian overloard!
First link didn't work but, the second one did. Thank you, that was informative. Sadly, I don't have the background to follow some of it. It's helpful to have this now assuming the manufacturers don't try to game it too much. Of I hadn't already posted, I would mod you up.
OK, you win the internet for me today.
Unrelated side comment: Where the hell are all my line breaks going?
When it comes down to names of CPU calls, I'm in over my head. My former father in law is the engineer, not me. He said the specifics, I just couldn't retain them. But, the short was, when it came to internal performance marks, CPUs lie. Whether that specific function call does (or even can) lie and which CPUs do it, I'm unable to say due to being out of my area of skill. Sorry about the graphics kludge in my statement. I was mixing apples and oranges. I was meaning that both types lie, in their own way, to fool performance benchmarks, not that they had the same type of internal metric. I've followed this nightmare more from the side of the benchmark suites, not from the engineering side.
There's always someone that invested in a technology and refuses to invest in a new one. My mom still goes to thrift stores and buys VHS tapes and now has a huge library of them. Trying to find her a replacement VHS/DVD player this year was a challenge, teaching her how to use the new one, even more so. I've managed to sell my dad on digital movies and once he got over the learning curve, he now prefers it to DVDs. But, my mom, you'll have to pry the VHS player out of her cold dead fingers.
The uncle clarification was to make sure that you and others knew I wasn't just trying to be a troll. When I get marked as troll, I want to earn it. As far as the counters, it's not that their random, it's that they are optimized to give inflated tallies for benchmarks. So, in some areas, they're going to vastly overstate their performance (and thus, the "fish story" analogy) but, when you actually call on that level of performance, it isn't there. Which areas that do this will vary by manufacturer and model. The companies that try to offer serious and fair benchmarks have had a nightmare time trying to resolve this. They often have to reverse-engineer where each processor is lying, figure out an estimate of percentage it is lying on that particular test and modify the final results by that percentage. Of course, the company that made the chip will say the adjustment is unfair, then they rebuttal, etc. If that alone wasn't bad enough, chips (though this is more common on graphics chips) that are labeled as mid-range are, in fact, higher-end chips that have been stepped down by firmware, that remove the firmware imposed speed limiter for benchmarks only. These are just the examples I know of; I have no doubt there are more.
After rereading my post, I realized I needed to post a clarification for the easily offended: "your alcoholic uncle" is used as a generic example and not referring to the AC's uncle.
CPU built-in performance counters are as reliable as the size of the fish catch described by your alcoholic uncle.
I read this a they're worth whatever they say it's worth (at the moment) and you're going to whine and complain about it but, not do anything about it. Until they start loosing a large dollar value of customers over it, they're not going to fix it.
There's no point to trying to answer someone like this with facts. Why? Because they simply don't care. They have made up their mind and no amount of facts are going to change it. It's the same about people who claim that vaccines cause autism, military training exercises in Texas was an excuse for invasion, the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, etc. I could go on forever about conspiracy theories and the people behind them. But, there is simply no point.