Well lets say that you bot for ten hours that the college kid is playing, then he plays for ten hours and bots for ten hours while he is in class doing homework. At that point he's up to 20 and you're at 10. So what's your answer? Bot for 20 also? At that stage what is the point of even playing the game? They could just rename it World of BotCraft and nobody would actually play it.
If you don't have the free time to play the game then don't play the game. I'm thirty years old. I have a job, a girlfriend/fiance and a hobby (martial arts). I have about 10 hours a week to play WoW, maybe 15 hours at the outside. I'm not trying to compete with the 14 year old kids who play all summer long, or the college kids who play in their ample spare time. The game is setup so that you don't have to compete. It caters to players of all stripes, from casual players to those who want to live out a second life in Azeroth.
You're obviously pretty lax with your morals and don't care much about the community that you want to take a part of. I will look down on you for it and so will a lot of other people. In fact when it comes to WoW, the majority of the community says that we don't want people like you in it and we're going to support Blizzard doing what they can do to exclude you from it. You can take your pragmatism and intellectual gymnastics somewhere else.
Here's a pragmatic example for you. You have a wife and kids, family and probably a home. You worked hard for it and probably feel pretty entitled to it. Well, pragmatically speaking here, lets say someone moves in next door and they are a big time drug dealer. They don't really work per se, but they live in your neighborhood. While you're busy at work, your neighbor is showing your wife how to enjoy a more fun life. He starts showing your kids the attention they aren't getting from you because you're busy working. The guy doesn't really have any morals and he hangs out with people like himself. He has so much extra cash laying around that it doesn't phase him to buy up other houses around you for his friends. Maybe your wife doesn't like him, but perhaps she likes one of his friends. Maybe you want your kids to appreciate hard work, but they see that their dad is a sucker for actually working when he could be selling a profitable product and taking it easy. Does it really matter that your neighbor is taking shortcuts and impacting the quality of life in your neighborhood? I mean, pragmatically speaking he's just spending less effort to make just as much as you do. Where's the harm in that? Before you know it, your neighborhood is full of people with shitty attitudes who tell you what a sucker you are for doing things the legit way. But that doesn't matter right? I mean, they have just as much right to fuck with your program as you do to go fuck with everyone who plays WoW, right?
Thanks for the tip. I have that software running now. Have you found any software that allows temperature dependent fan control? I've done a couple of searches and only come up with some software written by a guy in Italy. It seems that he wrote it for use with the old Powerbooks. It's only $8 so I might just buy it and see if it works with the new MBP. It would be nice if there was some free software out there that will allow for threshold values to be set.
I just recently (within the last two weeks) bought a Macbook Pro. I noticed that the damn thing is running so hot that I can't touch it after a little while. I bought one of those silly Targus USB cooling platforms to rest it on and that thing doesn't make much difference. The laptop is nice. The OS is stable. It runs WoW at 150+fps. Having read this article I'm thinking about taking it back and waiting another six months for them to build a unit that doesn't have such insane heat problems. Seriously, for two grand I'm not excited about the prospect of the thing melting down.
HP's Proliant server hardware and corporate workstations are still decent pieces of hardware. I wouldn't go anywhere near their consumer line of anything though. I agree with you about their laser printers. The color laserjets are some of the biggest pieces of crap on the market. We just replaced the Laserjet 4plus in my office because my whiny co-worker wanted to print in color. That thing had over a million pages through it and it was still going, albeit slowly.
Some friends used to live at the end of Private Road and the USPS would not deliver to the door. They had a mailbox (along with everyone else on the private road), that was at the junction of the private road and the public road. USPS would only deliver to that point.
My grand parents had the exact same situation at their place in Portland Oregon. They were the first to live on top of a particular little hill and so they had to build their own private road up to the house. The mailbox was down at the end of the road where it met the city street. Another interesting situation about their property is that there is a half acre lot "above" their property. The person who owns the lot doesn't have any access to the lot without an easement. My grandparents liked the trees and greenery so they never granted the guy an easement. He tried to sue them in court and the judge basically told him that he was stupid for buying a property with the intention of developing a house on it without making sure that he could get to his property.
I don't agree with your second point about them losing their savings. In most cases the people were getting financed for 100 or even 120% of the market price of the property. In other words, they didn't put anything down on the home. That was one of the many problems with what was going on. If people had been able to make a 20% down payment they wouldn't have been stuck with an ARM. People with the good sense to save up for a down payment are usually financially savvy enough to either understand what they are signing, or take someone with them who understands and can explain to them what they are about to sign.
The people need to be paying a hefty price for a long time. They need to learn that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. I had the option to get into a home and I didn't because I knew that there had to be a catch and there was... the mortgage was going to adjust in a couple of years. I watched home prices inflate over 100% in the neighborhoods near where I lived. I'm only 30 years old but I saw that something was way out of wack and I stayed the fuck away from the whole situation. The thing that pisses me off is that now Congress wants to bail out the banks. Fuck that. I avoided the problem, I shouldn't have to pay increased taxes because other people were stupid.
I see what you are saying and I understand the distinction that you are drawing between owner and user. I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about how ethereal "ownership" of anything is in todays corporate and legal climate, but it wouldn't serve much purpose. I am interested in how many people really care about ownership of their computer hardware and software. Among the/. crowd it is obviously a hot button issue. What about the general population? To use an automobile analogy, look at how many people lease a vehicle. They don't care about ownership.
If ownership of the software is important, there are alternatives. You can use Linux. One of the "most successful" companies these days is Apple. Do you think that Apple owners own their hardware and software? They seem pretty content living in their iBox and doing things the iWay. Apple has proven that they can target their offering to a specific subset of the overall population and find success. They have done it in the consumer space. I think that Microsoft is doing something similar, albeit with a larger subset, in the corporate space. If the Apple slogan is, "It is just works." the Microsoft slogan is, "It's good enough." That's a pretty powerful slogan. Look at the number of Toyota Camry's on the road, versus the number of Mercedes Benz E430s. Sure, lots of people driving a Toyota would probably prefer a Benz, but at the end of the day "good enough" is generally acceptable. And just to go in a circle and turn the analogies upside down, would you lease a Microsoft Camry if you could own a Linux Benz that you have to put together yourself? If it's free, do you really even own it in the sense of having purchased it? What is money? Do we have free will? Why do we post on/.?...... . ...
Just for the record: companies don't usually invest money in IT systems to make the IT sysadmin's life easier; they do it to make the company more productive.
What is the point you are trying to make? An IT sysadmin whose life is easier is more productive. Therefore a CEO would see the value of investing in systems that increase productivity in IT, or sales, or manufacturing or where ever the investment generates the maximum return in terms of productivity. I get what you're trying to say, but you're not saying it very well.
Just don't expect that attitude to help you up the corporate ladder.
Oh noes!!! What ever will I do with my life if I don't make it to top?!;)
Just like most other Microsoft/Windows topics on Slashdot, people seem to miss a huge portion of the picture. Maybe most of you guys are geeks living in your basements, or consultants running small businesses on your own hardware. If that is the case then this isn't directed at you because you don't have the perspective for it to be on your radar.
Software like Vista Ultimate with BitLocker is aimed at the corporate environment. If I'm a network admin, I don't want some jack hole dual-booting anything on my network. He doesn't need a Linux partition on his workstation. I might want laptops with TPM and BitLocker for the sales staff so that when they get drunk and lose their laptops with the customer list on it, I can rest relatively soundly knowing that the data is secure.
It is obvious that Microsoft does not care about the individual end user who wants complete control over their computer. That is okay with me. Maybe I've been drinking too much of the Kool Aid but I'm happy with HP hardware running a Microsoft OS. I like the fact that they make it a complete PITA for the end user to do anything to their workstation. It makes my job easier. 95% of the corporate computing world can get by with an office suite, a web browser and access to a couple of custom apps (financial, inventory, manufacturing, and what not). They don't need to be playing stolen mp3s that they got from Pirate Bay, watching DVDs on their lunch breaks, or dual-booting their damn desktops.
Where are all the gripes about how Server 2003 sucks? How about the gripes about IIS6 getting owned all over the place? They aren't there because Microsoft is focusing their attention where they need to focus it... on the administrators responsible for hundreds and thousands of workstations and servers. Does anyone really think that the folks at Microsoft stay up late at night wringing their hands over corporation versions of their workstation software not dual-booting a third party OS? Seriously guys... what portion of the Vista Ultimate/Enterprise user base do you think is negatively impacted by the change? 1%? 3%? I'm not talking about the developers who need ten thousand OSes on their machines "for development purposes." I'm talking about the cubicle drones who work 8-5 running a couple of applications.
If the information is important enough to keep around after six months then it should be documented either as a policy or white paper. It seems that what your organization is attempting to do is to limit email to functioning as a communications medium. They don't want your Exchange servers to be an information repository. I can see the logic in what they are doing. In all seriousness if you haven't acted on information in an email in six months it either wasn't that important, or you're not staying on top of your responsibility. If it is information that needs to be kept because it is integral to the functioning of your department then there are better places than email to keep that information.
If you're making it look like a murder suicide, you'd do the kid too. However the summary says something about an infant and a teenager left behind. That pretty much rules out a professional hit setup to look like a murder-suicide.
The article asks, "What originally got you interested in programming." In my case I picked up x86 assembler so that I could crack copy protection. With regards to the son of the guy who asked the question, I think that the answer should present itself. The kid is obviously interested in computers and programming. There has to be something about programming that speaks to him. I personally hate programming. I think it is one the most tedious things in the world. I definitely enjoyed learning assembly though because to me, it represented the actual working of the computer in terms of directly manipulating what is in memory and being able to step through the lowest level of the code as it executes. That was cool for me. Actually writing a high level program doesn't interest me in the least.
You make a good point. Either we decide to be the kind of people who help those around us, or we hold ourselves above the rest of the world and gripe about how everyone else seems incompetent.
I do have to ask though -- I have social worker friends, and they are telling me that sex between 12-year olds is increasingly common.
When you see behavior like that it is usually the children modelling their adult role models. In this day and age of "babies having babies", it isn't unusual for young children to see mom and the man of the week doing "adult" things with each other.
If all they are doing is refusing to cache the alt. hierarchy then how has that changed? I haven't been on Usenet in a couple of years because it was my experience that with my provider (Verizon), I could get complete feeds. There were always SOME parts of the download missing. When you're trying to get a 60+ part RAR file, even one missing chunk is enough to prevent a successful transfer. I subscribed to SuperNews for a little while, but now I just get everything with bitTorrent. Is Usenet still even useful for file transfers? It seems like with file sizes these days the limitations of NNTP make it about the most inefficient mechanism out there.
I agree with the first two points you made. If you are using real martial arts, you are doing so because you're in a situation that there wasn't any other way out of, and by defending yourself with what you were taught, you are going to be facing assault/battery charges, and maybe even manslaughter if you are too effective with your techniques.
As for martial arts being worthless for defending yourself, that's a load of crap. So much of self defense and maintaining your personal safety has to do with your awareness of the world around you and how you carry yourself. Martial arts will train that if you are training with a real teacher. I train kung fu and tai chi with someone who is a 32nd generation Shao-Lin disciple and who can trace his lineage all the way back. He passes along more than just the physical art. He passes along the philosophy as well. Being a martial artist is a way of life and it involves a lot more than fighting. It is all about strengthing the body, mind and spirit and pushing the boundries of what you are capable of as a human being.
...lost state and local tax revenue from piracy would have been enough to 'hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.'
In other words, get on board with the anti-piracy program and you will have more revenue to trample peoples rights outside of cyberspace.
Keep in mind that part of the target audience of the report is the law enforcement community who at some point has to see some benefit for themselves if they are going to enforce anti-piracy laws. Notice that they don't talk about it in terms of after school programs, or more teachers. Nope, not here in Amerika. We need more cops damn it! The people are getting too uppity.
There are very few people who make it all the way to jail without being deserving of it. There is a huge system that has been established to maintain a sembelence of order in society. I will be the first to tell you that the drug laws which have deemed possession of a controlled substance to be a felony and punishable by time in prison are overly harsh. However having spent a lot of time doing community service in some of the poorest and most innercity parts of southern California I can tell you that something does need to be done to prevent drug addicts from wandering the streets and hassling the rest of the people who are just trying to get through their days without drama.
Why the hell would I turn myself in? I knew what I was doing was wrong I stopped doing it. I'm not a Catholic.
What about people who use cannabis medicinally or otherwise? I used it as an example of how silly the drug laws are. There are differences between those who smoke weed in the privacy of their home and those who grow pounds of it to sell for profit. I've never seen the former unfairly dealt with. On the other hand the later need to understand the fire that they are playing with. Here in California cannabis possession is a misdemeanor. You pay a fine and that's pretty much that, no big deal. The governemnt exists by taxing the hard work of the people. In the case of cannabis, since they aren't taxing the sale they will tax the distribution channels. It's wrong, but it is what it is until people stand up and change it. Getting hemp legalized as an agricultural product would be a good place to start. How are you coming on that?
I know as much as anyone else looking at the case who might rightly think, "Really good criminals get paid." That is what it comes down to. There will be others out there who are working on refining their hacking skills and they will think, "If I'm good enough, no matter what I do, even if I defraud people for MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, it will just be a gold star on my resume." I don't think the guy needs to be punished anymore if he has already paid fines. Actually, that's not true. He needs to be severely punished. He messed with peoples livelyhoods. He took money from them. Have you ever had to deal with identity theft? Do you know what a fucking pain in the ass it is to get the credit card companies and other official entities to actually clear your name? The kid is an asshole. A skilled asshole, but an asshole. HE SHOULD NOT BE REWARDED for what he did. It is as simple as that. Maybe he got some sort of plea bargain from the DA so he didn't have to do jail time in order for helping them prosecute the people he wrote the software for. If that's the case, alright, good for him and he did the right thing.
Since the word naive was brought up, I think it's pretty naive to believe that rewarding bad behavior will in any way disuade or otherwise discourage others from doing the exact same thing. There are two ways to have order in society. You can either raise your children right so that they have morals. For the children of parents who don't do that, you can make the consiquences of misbehaving so severe that they get with the program, or not... depending how much they like spending time in prison.
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. My only experience with a Macintosh recently has been OSX running on a Macbook. From the replies I've seen in this thread it seems like the standard desktops come with a keyboard that includes something akin to the delete key. The laptops don't. Other than the ridiculous problems with fonts, OSX seems to be a decent OS. It doesn't do anything for me that Windows XP doesn't, but there isn't anything particularly wrong with it.
As for what the other 82% of the market "know", did you ever realize that the Windows label is lying to you? Backspace actually means go back a space, it's what the left arrow key does. It's a uniquely Windows convention that it also deletes content as you go, not a normal English description of the word "backspace".
Why is it when I use the backspace key in a *nix terminal it takes out text? Why is it when I backspace in a text document in OSX that it takes out text? It doesn't seem to be as Windows centric as you imply. The only place I've ever experienced backspace moving the "cursor" back a space and not deleting text was a typewriter, before they equipped typewriters with built in correction ribbons that... yes, deleted characters when you used the backspace key.
This is so utterly wrong. Not sure what bizarro world you live in, but the Delete key works just fine on my Mac. If you need proof I'll even take the time to make a video for you.
Please do make a video. I just went to check it out on my co-workers MacBook Pro but his keyboard doesn't even have a delete key. It has a key in the location of the Backspace key labelled Delete, but no delete key. If you can show me OSX deleting text like a PC does when you press Delete on a standard 101/102 key keyboard then I will believe you.
I'm glad that some people have chimed in with a shortcut for deleting files with the keyboard. Command plus Delete. Not quite as efficient as just pressing Delete but it does get the job done.
And for all the people postulating that somehow MacOS' increased market share will lead to an "increased awareness of cross-platform portability," don't hold your breath. What you will be far more likely to see is that more software vendors will port their major products to Mac OS, and stop there.
The example that I like to use is Adobe with their Creative Suite products. They offer both OSX and Windows version of the software. Yet even they have problems getting files created on a PC to display properly on a Mac and vice versa. They wrote the entire application and the file format standards and they can't implement it consistently cross platform... and they've been working on it for over a decade at this point.
It doesn't work that way. I'll be blunt: learning OSX is a pain. There's a ton of non-obvious stuff that is completely different from the Windows world (I'll just point to tabbing between firefox windows when other apps are open as one of my initial pain points), and which have to be re-learned.
And then there are things that OSX simply won't do. In Windows if I want to delete something I can click on the file, icon, object or whatever and press the Delete button my keyboard. In OSX I have to drag it to the Trash Can. Ya... that's a really efficient "workflow". I have another gripe with the way OSX doesn't properly utilize the Delete key. I will use the example of typing in a web address. I want to go to www.google.com. So I type it out but accidently type www.boogle.com. Now if I want to delete the B, I have to put the cursor after the B and press backspace. I can't put the cursor in front of the B and press Delete. WTF is up with that? Everyone knows... Backspace moves the cursor to the left and deletes text to the left of the cursor. Delete keeps the cursor in place and deletes text to the right of the cursor. What is so hard about that?
Is there a solution to that? Every OSX geek I've talked to just brushes me off like I'm stupid for wanting to use the Delete key. That gives me the sense that there really isn't a solution to it and the GUI Gods at Apple do suck, but they suck differently from the guys at Microsoft. Or maybe there is a special key on an Apple keyboard that acts like the Delete key on the computers that hold onto the other... what, 82% of the market share?
You can find shades of gray if you want to argumentative. For the most part the people who get locked up for crimes are the ones who deserve it. If you commit a felony then you deserve to do the time. Statistically speaking if you get arrested for something, you have been doing what you got arrested for, for a long time. If your own moral compass and good sense aren't there to help you self correct, then society will step in and do it for you. That is the way the system works. Some of the laws on the books don't make much sense (like marijuana being Schedule I), but they are what they are. If you don't like them then work to change them.
When I was in high school I did all sorts of blatantly illegal phone fraud kind of stuff. It was the kind of stuff that had AT&T security calling my house to talk to my parents (I owned a good chunk of their commercial Audix systems). When I turned 18 I knocked it off. I was never quite good enough to go work for the government but I knew enough to get myself into a lot of trouble. AT&T didn't offer me a job securing their System 75s either. What is the lesson that I'm supposed to take away from the situation in New Zealand? I failed because I stopped too early and didn't commit enough fraud? Maybe I should have sold the system access to the code kiddies instead of just giving my friends free 800 voice mail boxes?
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If you don't have the free time to play the game then don't play the game. I'm thirty years old. I have a job, a girlfriend/fiance and a hobby (martial arts). I have about 10 hours a week to play WoW, maybe 15 hours at the outside. I'm not trying to compete with the 14 year old kids who play all summer long, or the college kids who play in their ample spare time. The game is setup so that you don't have to compete. It caters to players of all stripes, from casual players to those who want to live out a second life in Azeroth.
You're obviously pretty lax with your morals and don't care much about the community that you want to take a part of. I will look down on you for it and so will a lot of other people. In fact when it comes to WoW, the majority of the community says that we don't want people like you in it and we're going to support Blizzard doing what they can do to exclude you from it. You can take your pragmatism and intellectual gymnastics somewhere else.
Here's a pragmatic example for you. You have a wife and kids, family and probably a home. You worked hard for it and probably feel pretty entitled to it. Well, pragmatically speaking here, lets say someone moves in next door and they are a big time drug dealer. They don't really work per se, but they live in your neighborhood. While you're busy at work, your neighbor is showing your wife how to enjoy a more fun life. He starts showing your kids the attention they aren't getting from you because you're busy working. The guy doesn't really have any morals and he hangs out with people like himself. He has so much extra cash laying around that it doesn't phase him to buy up other houses around you for his friends. Maybe your wife doesn't like him, but perhaps she likes one of his friends. Maybe you want your kids to appreciate hard work, but they see that their dad is a sucker for actually working when he could be selling a profitable product and taking it easy. Does it really matter that your neighbor is taking shortcuts and impacting the quality of life in your neighborhood? I mean, pragmatically speaking he's just spending less effort to make just as much as you do. Where's the harm in that? Before you know it, your neighborhood is full of people with shitty attitudes who tell you what a sucker you are for doing things the legit way. But that doesn't matter right? I mean, they have just as much right to fuck with your program as you do to go fuck with everyone who plays WoW, right?
Thanks for the tip. I have that software running now. Have you found any software that allows temperature dependent fan control? I've done a couple of searches and only come up with some software written by a guy in Italy. It seems that he wrote it for use with the old Powerbooks. It's only $8 so I might just buy it and see if it works with the new MBP. It would be nice if there was some free software out there that will allow for threshold values to be set.
I just recently (within the last two weeks) bought a Macbook Pro. I noticed that the damn thing is running so hot that I can't touch it after a little while. I bought one of those silly Targus USB cooling platforms to rest it on and that thing doesn't make much difference. The laptop is nice. The OS is stable. It runs WoW at 150+fps. Having read this article I'm thinking about taking it back and waiting another six months for them to build a unit that doesn't have such insane heat problems. Seriously, for two grand I'm not excited about the prospect of the thing melting down.
HP's Proliant server hardware and corporate workstations are still decent pieces of hardware. I wouldn't go anywhere near their consumer line of anything though. I agree with you about their laser printers. The color laserjets are some of the biggest pieces of crap on the market. We just replaced the Laserjet 4plus in my office because my whiny co-worker wanted to print in color. That thing had over a million pages through it and it was still going, albeit slowly.
My grand parents had the exact same situation at their place in Portland Oregon. They were the first to live on top of a particular little hill and so they had to build their own private road up to the house. The mailbox was down at the end of the road where it met the city street. Another interesting situation about their property is that there is a half acre lot "above" their property. The person who owns the lot doesn't have any access to the lot without an easement. My grandparents liked the trees and greenery so they never granted the guy an easement. He tried to sue them in court and the judge basically told him that he was stupid for buying a property with the intention of developing a house on it without making sure that he could get to his property.
The people need to be paying a hefty price for a long time. They need to learn that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. I had the option to get into a home and I didn't because I knew that there had to be a catch and there was... the mortgage was going to adjust in a couple of years. I watched home prices inflate over 100% in the neighborhoods near where I lived. I'm only 30 years old but I saw that something was way out of wack and I stayed the fuck away from the whole situation. The thing that pisses me off is that now Congress wants to bail out the banks. Fuck that. I avoided the problem, I shouldn't have to pay increased taxes because other people were stupid.
If ownership of the software is important, there are alternatives. You can use Linux. One of the "most successful" companies these days is Apple. Do you think that Apple owners own their hardware and software? They seem pretty content living in their iBox and doing things the iWay. Apple has proven that they can target their offering to a specific subset of the overall population and find success. They have done it in the consumer space. I think that Microsoft is doing something similar, albeit with a larger subset, in the corporate space. If the Apple slogan is, "It is just works." the Microsoft slogan is, "It's good enough." That's a pretty powerful slogan. Look at the number of Toyota Camry's on the road, versus the number of Mercedes Benz E430s. Sure, lots of people driving a Toyota would probably prefer a Benz, but at the end of the day "good enough" is generally acceptable. And just to go in a circle and turn the analogies upside down, would you lease a Microsoft Camry if you could own a Linux Benz that you have to put together yourself? If it's free, do you really even own it in the sense of having purchased it? What is money? Do we have free will? Why do we post on /.? ... ... . . ..
Take a look at second to last sentence of my post. Here, I'll quote it for you.
I'm not talking about the developers who need ten thousand OSes on their machines "for development purposes."
What is the point you are trying to make? An IT sysadmin whose life is easier is more productive. Therefore a CEO would see the value of investing in systems that increase productivity in IT, or sales, or manufacturing or where ever the investment generates the maximum return in terms of productivity. I get what you're trying to say, but you're not saying it very well.
Just don't expect that attitude to help you up the corporate ladder.
Oh noes!!! What ever will I do with my life if I don't make it to top?! ;)
Software like Vista Ultimate with BitLocker is aimed at the corporate environment. If I'm a network admin, I don't want some jack hole dual-booting anything on my network. He doesn't need a Linux partition on his workstation. I might want laptops with TPM and BitLocker for the sales staff so that when they get drunk and lose their laptops with the customer list on it, I can rest relatively soundly knowing that the data is secure.
It is obvious that Microsoft does not care about the individual end user who wants complete control over their computer. That is okay with me. Maybe I've been drinking too much of the Kool Aid but I'm happy with HP hardware running a Microsoft OS. I like the fact that they make it a complete PITA for the end user to do anything to their workstation. It makes my job easier. 95% of the corporate computing world can get by with an office suite, a web browser and access to a couple of custom apps (financial, inventory, manufacturing, and what not). They don't need to be playing stolen mp3s that they got from Pirate Bay, watching DVDs on their lunch breaks, or dual-booting their damn desktops.
Where are all the gripes about how Server 2003 sucks? How about the gripes about IIS6 getting owned all over the place? They aren't there because Microsoft is focusing their attention where they need to focus it... on the administrators responsible for hundreds and thousands of workstations and servers. Does anyone really think that the folks at Microsoft stay up late at night wringing their hands over corporation versions of their workstation software not dual-booting a third party OS? Seriously guys... what portion of the Vista Ultimate/Enterprise user base do you think is negatively impacted by the change? 1%? 3%? I'm not talking about the developers who need ten thousand OSes on their machines "for development purposes." I'm talking about the cubicle drones who work 8-5 running a couple of applications.
If the information is important enough to keep around after six months then it should be documented either as a policy or white paper. It seems that what your organization is attempting to do is to limit email to functioning as a communications medium. They don't want your Exchange servers to be an information repository. I can see the logic in what they are doing. In all seriousness if you haven't acted on information in an email in six months it either wasn't that important, or you're not staying on top of your responsibility. If it is information that needs to be kept because it is integral to the functioning of your department then there are better places than email to keep that information.
If you're making it look like a murder suicide, you'd do the kid too. However the summary says something about an infant and a teenager left behind. That pretty much rules out a professional hit setup to look like a murder-suicide.
The article asks, "What originally got you interested in programming." In my case I picked up x86 assembler so that I could crack copy protection. With regards to the son of the guy who asked the question, I think that the answer should present itself. The kid is obviously interested in computers and programming. There has to be something about programming that speaks to him. I personally hate programming. I think it is one the most tedious things in the world. I definitely enjoyed learning assembly though because to me, it represented the actual working of the computer in terms of directly manipulating what is in memory and being able to step through the lowest level of the code as it executes. That was cool for me. Actually writing a high level program doesn't interest me in the least.
You make a good point. Either we decide to be the kind of people who help those around us, or we hold ourselves above the rest of the world and gripe about how everyone else seems incompetent.
When you see behavior like that it is usually the children modelling their adult role models. In this day and age of "babies having babies", it isn't unusual for young children to see mom and the man of the week doing "adult" things with each other.
If all they are doing is refusing to cache the alt. hierarchy then how has that changed? I haven't been on Usenet in a couple of years because it was my experience that with my provider (Verizon), I could get complete feeds. There were always SOME parts of the download missing. When you're trying to get a 60+ part RAR file, even one missing chunk is enough to prevent a successful transfer. I subscribed to SuperNews for a little while, but now I just get everything with bitTorrent. Is Usenet still even useful for file transfers? It seems like with file sizes these days the limitations of NNTP make it about the most inefficient mechanism out there.
As for martial arts being worthless for defending yourself, that's a load of crap. So much of self defense and maintaining your personal safety has to do with your awareness of the world around you and how you carry yourself. Martial arts will train that if you are training with a real teacher. I train kung fu and tai chi with someone who is a 32nd generation Shao-Lin disciple and who can trace his lineage all the way back. He passes along more than just the physical art. He passes along the philosophy as well. Being a martial artist is a way of life and it involves a lot more than fighting. It is all about strengthing the body, mind and spirit and pushing the boundries of what you are capable of as a human being.
In other words, get on board with the anti-piracy program and you will have more revenue to trample peoples rights outside of cyberspace.
Keep in mind that part of the target audience of the report is the law enforcement community who at some point has to see some benefit for themselves if they are going to enforce anti-piracy laws. Notice that they don't talk about it in terms of after school programs, or more teachers. Nope, not here in Amerika. We need more cops damn it! The people are getting too uppity.
Why the hell would I turn myself in? I knew what I was doing was wrong I stopped doing it. I'm not a Catholic.
What about people who use cannabis medicinally or otherwise? I used it as an example of how silly the drug laws are. There are differences between those who smoke weed in the privacy of their home and those who grow pounds of it to sell for profit. I've never seen the former unfairly dealt with. On the other hand the later need to understand the fire that they are playing with. Here in California cannabis possession is a misdemeanor. You pay a fine and that's pretty much that, no big deal. The governemnt exists by taxing the hard work of the people. In the case of cannabis, since they aren't taxing the sale they will tax the distribution channels. It's wrong, but it is what it is until people stand up and change it. Getting hemp legalized as an agricultural product would be a good place to start. How are you coming on that?
I know as much as anyone else looking at the case who might rightly think, "Really good criminals get paid." That is what it comes down to. There will be others out there who are working on refining their hacking skills and they will think, "If I'm good enough, no matter what I do, even if I defraud people for MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, it will just be a gold star on my resume." I don't think the guy needs to be punished anymore if he has already paid fines. Actually, that's not true. He needs to be severely punished. He messed with peoples livelyhoods. He took money from them. Have you ever had to deal with identity theft? Do you know what a fucking pain in the ass it is to get the credit card companies and other official entities to actually clear your name? The kid is an asshole. A skilled asshole, but an asshole. HE SHOULD NOT BE REWARDED for what he did. It is as simple as that. Maybe he got some sort of plea bargain from the DA so he didn't have to do jail time in order for helping them prosecute the people he wrote the software for. If that's the case, alright, good for him and he did the right thing.
Since the word naive was brought up, I think it's pretty naive to believe that rewarding bad behavior will in any way disuade or otherwise discourage others from doing the exact same thing. There are two ways to have order in society. You can either raise your children right so that they have morals. For the children of parents who don't do that, you can make the consiquences of misbehaving so severe that they get with the program, or not... depending how much they like spending time in prison.
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. My only experience with a Macintosh recently has been OSX running on a Macbook. From the replies I've seen in this thread it seems like the standard desktops come with a keyboard that includes something akin to the delete key. The laptops don't. Other than the ridiculous problems with fonts, OSX seems to be a decent OS. It doesn't do anything for me that Windows XP doesn't, but there isn't anything particularly wrong with it.
Why is it when I use the backspace key in a *nix terminal it takes out text? Why is it when I backspace in a text document in OSX that it takes out text? It doesn't seem to be as Windows centric as you imply. The only place I've ever experienced backspace moving the "cursor" back a space and not deleting text was a typewriter, before they equipped typewriters with built in correction ribbons that ... yes, deleted characters when you used the backspace key.
Please do make a video. I just went to check it out on my co-workers MacBook Pro but his keyboard doesn't even have a delete key. It has a key in the location of the Backspace key labelled Delete, but no delete key. If you can show me OSX deleting text like a PC does when you press Delete on a standard 101/102 key keyboard then I will believe you.
I'm glad that some people have chimed in with a shortcut for deleting files with the keyboard. Command plus Delete. Not quite as efficient as just pressing Delete but it does get the job done.
The example that I like to use is Adobe with their Creative Suite products. They offer both OSX and Windows version of the software. Yet even they have problems getting files created on a PC to display properly on a Mac and vice versa. They wrote the entire application and the file format standards and they can't implement it consistently cross platform... and they've been working on it for over a decade at this point.
And then there are things that OSX simply won't do. In Windows if I want to delete something I can click on the file, icon, object or whatever and press the Delete button my keyboard. In OSX I have to drag it to the Trash Can. Ya... that's a really efficient "workflow". I have another gripe with the way OSX doesn't properly utilize the Delete key. I will use the example of typing in a web address. I want to go to www.google.com. So I type it out but accidently type www.boogle.com. Now if I want to delete the B, I have to put the cursor after the B and press backspace. I can't put the cursor in front of the B and press Delete. WTF is up with that? Everyone knows... Backspace moves the cursor to the left and deletes text to the left of the cursor. Delete keeps the cursor in place and deletes text to the right of the cursor. What is so hard about that?
Is there a solution to that? Every OSX geek I've talked to just brushes me off like I'm stupid for wanting to use the Delete key. That gives me the sense that there really isn't a solution to it and the GUI Gods at Apple do suck, but they suck differently from the guys at Microsoft. Or maybe there is a special key on an Apple keyboard that acts like the Delete key on the computers that hold onto the other ... what, 82% of the market share?
When I was in high school I did all sorts of blatantly illegal phone fraud kind of stuff. It was the kind of stuff that had AT&T security calling my house to talk to my parents (I owned a good chunk of their commercial Audix systems). When I turned 18 I knocked it off. I was never quite good enough to go work for the government but I knew enough to get myself into a lot of trouble. AT&T didn't offer me a job securing their System 75s either. What is the lesson that I'm supposed to take away from the situation in New Zealand? I failed because I stopped too early and didn't commit enough fraud? Maybe I should have sold the system access to the code kiddies instead of just giving my friends free 800 voice mail boxes?