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Comment Re:OK, but (Score 3, Interesting) 340

The cracking and warez scene is not done for money, it's done for fame and respect. There are strict rules and levels of vetting done for pirated software as it makes its way through the system to end-users. Including malware in a crack is a death penalty for any group; their stuff will never be accepted again by site operators, and it would make it to a tiny segment of the population even if it weren't noticed.

Just about any other attack vector for malware, specifically rootkits, will have so much better penetration than a game crack that it's essentially a waste of time to a) crack the game so it works without the DRM (and yes, other crackers can figure out what you did to crack it), b) write undetectable malware to include in it, c) build a reputation good enough to allow the release of the crack, d) get your crack done and out the door before anyone else so yours doesn't get nuked, and e) harness the very few people who will receive the crack.

Keep in mind that a, b, c and d can all be undone by a single person in the distribution chain nuking your release because it's suspect or was released five minutes after someone else's working crack.

In other words, you don't know what you're talking about but LET'S ALL HOP ABOARD THE INSIGHTFUL TRAIN HERPA DERPA DERP.

Comment Re:Buy three. What are you afRAID of? (Score 2, Informative) 163

I'm afRAID to tell you that the TRIM command is unavailable in RAID sets, thereby putting you in the same situation you have with Gen1 Intel SSDs, where performance degrades over time.

I bought an Intel SSD in March 09. Fast forward to February 2010 and WEI showed a 5.9 score--the same as a spindle drive. I did a secure erase using hdderase 3.3 and performance shot up to 7.4. HDTune also showed massive improvements (don't have the numbers for that handy, though).

TRIM makes a HUUUUGE difference.

Comment Re:Science Fiction? (Score 2, Informative) 782

Where you saw some kind of magical ritual and spirit living on, I saw a high-speed universal neural interface

And it's a good thing they remembered their A-to-B USB cable to allow the transfer. Kind of like how Jeff Goldblum hacked the alien ships in Independence Day with his Macintosh over a coax connection.

Comment Re:Let's be honest here. (Score 1) 536

That means that console makers are taking 50% of the cost into their pocket, even though they didn't do anything in the development of the game at all.

Yeah, they didn't custom build the hardware, write the API, create the SDK, or write the standard for titles on the system. I definitely agree with you: the console makers had nothing to do with the development of the games.

Comment Re:Imagine. (Score 1) 232

Yes, it has cost you $0 to get SP1, 2 and 3, but there is no way you can compare the changes found between Mac OS X 10.1 (released September 2001) and OS X 10.5 (released October 2007) with the changes found between Windows XP SP0 (released October 2001) and Windows XP SP3 (released May 2008).

Service Packs are collections of hotfixes with some new features added. New revisions of OS X include entire application suite upgrades, in addition to hundreds of new features at each rev.

Comment Re:Technet on August 6th (Score 4, Informative) 341

For those who are interested, a TechNet Plus subscription costs $349, and includes Windows XP (all versions), Windows Vista (all versions), Windows 7 (all versions), Office 2007 (all applications), Windows Server 2008 (all versions), and the license permits installation on multiple computers.

Compare this to the retail cost of Windows 7 Ultimate ($319) and Office 2007 Professional ($499) and it's quite a deal, especially since retail Windows 7 won't be available until October 22nd, whereas TechNet Plus subscribers get it August 6th.

Why would ANYONE pay retail for Windows or Office when TechNet is available?

Comment Re:Software Rental (Score 5, Interesting) 567

Can anyone explain what the FUCK happened to slashdot to make comments unreadable, and how to fix it? There are unremovable grey horizontal and vertical bars and pill icons everywhere. OMGPONIES was supposed to be a joke, and now they've made it reality.

Viz: http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/9974/wtfiswrongwithslashdot.png

Comment Re:Encryption=suspicious? (Score 1) 382

No research == fail. The colonies were not England.

Most of the 1787 delegates were natives of the Thirteen Colonies. Only 9 were born elsewhere: four (Butler, Fitzsimons, McHenry, and Paterson) in Ireland, two (Davie and Robert Morris) in England, two (Wilson and Witherspoon) in Scotland, and one (Hamilton) in the West Indies.

Sourced

Comment Re:Not worried (Score 1) 280

The vast majority of this comment could be complete jibberish (Bigelow/COTS-D/Sundancer/Obama/Falcon 9/BA-330? Come again?). It sounds like the poster knows what s/he's talking about, but the fact is the people who modded this insightful did so without any fucking insight into what was posted.

The same people who mod insightful on Slashdot also cite Wikipedia in school work.
Transportation

Warrantless GPS Tracking Is Legal, Says WI Court 594

PL/SQL Guy writes "A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."

Comment Eight years, one day later (Score 1) 127

This release will come eight years almost to the day after the release of Windows XP. I'm using the beta of 7 at home, just like I used all the betas and RCs of XP at home. Looking at Windows then and Windows now, I see a huge missed opportunity. I am pleased with Windows 7, and I think Microsoft has made a lot of smart decisions in their design, production, and marketing of the OS, but it still feels like more of a mea culpa than a solid, polished OS.

If Microsoft's management had been on top of their shit, this product would have released four years ago and what we're seeing today could be so much more. Unfortunately, their back-to-the-drawing-board idea with Longhorn, though a good thing in the end, lost so many years of work and code that it seriously stunted Microsoft's growth of the OS.

Hence Windows Vista. Hence Windows 7. What I'm going to be most interested in is, once 7 is out and people lower the volume of their trash-talking, what is Microsoft going to do next? What major technologies are they working on? What is their vision for the desktop? Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with two more years of polish. Though a terrific upgrade from Vista, I want to hear more about Microsoft's research projects and what real, major features they're working on for future OSes. I'm tired of hearing about multitouch, because that is quickly becoming genericized among OS makers and will remain out of reach for most users for some time, being hardware-dependent.

Ask anyone what they'd change about Windows and you'll get a litany of complaints. Ask Microsoft and they'll tell you Windows is perfect, you just don't understand it.

Comment Re:Any lawyers here (Score 1) 289

Not at all. HIPAA is all about what security measures can be deemed reasonably sufficient. In this case, the systems may have been provided by a vendor and are certified only to run at a certain patch level. Makers of medical devices can't be expected to fuzz the software every time Microsoft releases a patch to make sure it doesn't kill someone when used; they instead sell a single device certified to work a certain way.

Given that, reasonable security measures would have been to physically isolate the network these devices were on. This often doesn't happen thanks to VLANs and sloppy network administration.

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