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Comment Re:Shannon would like to have a word with you (Score 1) 295

by rgviza (#37479984) Attached to: Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games
True, however dedicated channels (a la FIOS, Ethernet or DSL) are switched technlogies, so there aren't collisions. As most of you know you hit a critical mass for traffic on shared media segments (like cable internet, hubs) and the usable bandwidth implodes due to collisions and the errors they cause. So the packet:error ratio related to collisions is 1:0 on a switched network (provided duplex is set correctly), no matter how busy it is, which greatly increases _usable_ bandwidth even though total bandwidth is limited at the telco by it's connection to the backbone.

My available bandwidth on dsl never changed, on cable it's variable depending on how many people are using it on my segment. FIOS is also very stable according to the people I know that have it.

Comment Long term... (Score 1) 144

by rgviza (#37423926) Attached to: Did HP Bilk Its Shareholders?
Undoing the damage that Fiorina did is expensive. Why anyone would buy HP right now is beyond me. Once they cut all the crap and pare back down to what they do best (HP UX, printers, pcs, servers, networking, and related software) yea invest. Anything HP is doing beyond this is fat that needs to be trimmed to get the company back in shape.

Long term, they are doing their shareholders a favor. If you are day trading and just lost a bunch of cash, well, that's part of the game.

Comment Re:Why is this still legal? (Score 1) 378

by rgviza (#37423808) Attached to: New Sony PSN ToS: Class Action Waiver Included
Apparently software companies are allowed to change the agreement since each version of software can be subject to a new EULA. If you don't agree you don't have to install the new version.

I think it's corporate control of the law. It's pervasive in the US. Companies can change the deal, much like a mafia don.

Employers, cell providers and basically anyone else is also allowed to change the contract, in practice. What are you going to do, take your company to court because they take away your breaks?

If you have a family, your kid's college savings should (hopefully) be more important than your coffee breaks. Without another job lined up, you have to eat shit for a while til you find another job.

Comment Re:Seriously WTF? (Score 1) 378

by rgviza (#37423614) Attached to: New Sony PSN ToS: Class Action Waiver Included
Yea but by the time you hire a lawyer to explain your case to the judge, and he/she will ask you to explain what you mean and cite case law, what are you really gaining in small claims court unless you have the time to spend doing the research yourself and nothing better to do? If you make half as much as a garden variety lawyer, you will lose double what a lawyer would cost if you put the hours you spend figuring it out into monetary terms based on your own salary.

So unless you get enjoyment out of getting a few dollars out of sony, there's not much to gain, especially if you are a divorced parent on the wrong side of a custody agreement and have to sacrifice time with your kid on weekends to do it. Then you either need to take paid time off (burn a vacation day) or take unpaid leave to go to court.

Sony still wins if you put it into terms of total personal cost for going to court to make them pay you money.

Comment Re:Parent not joking (Score 1) 378

by rgviza (#37423474) Attached to: New Sony PSN ToS: Class Action Waiver Included
Actually sony loses money on console hardware for the first 2 years as it is, if you consider the console as it's own product. Taken together with the software licensing they profit. The software is where they make all their money.

Losing an additional $10 per console isn't cutting into their profit margin, it's increasing their loss on the hardware. Sony loses more than microsoft or nintendo on their console hardware as it is.

This is why games cost so much. They're licensing Sony's development tools and that's expensive because it subsidizes the hardware.

They don't lose money on hardware for PC games so theoretically the PC ports should be cheaper than console games, however PC ports require a LOT more QA.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/127906/sony_losing_big_money_on_ps3_hardware.html

Initially Sony was selling the 20GB consoles for $499 and they cost $806 to build package and ship, before the cost of the controller or controller wire.

In 2010 they're still only recouping $.96 of every dollar they spend to build console hardware.
http://gizmodo.com/5464610/sony-still-loses-money-on-every-ps3-they-sell

Once I learned this from the last generation of consoles I shy away from buying new games. I figure I'm paying for their hardware with my PC games too, so I'm already doing my part.

Comment Re:Still crimes, even on their own (Score 1) 162

by rgviza (#37422830) Attached to: ToS Violations No Longer a Crime (On Their Own)
So if you violate the ToS with a ban-able offense, and get banned, you haven't violated the law until you make a new ID and access their systems again? Since if you have been banned your authorization to use their systems has been yanked.

So a troll that just keeps making new id's on a forum to harass forum members, after being banned permanently, would be breaking the law, however a troll that hasn't been banned yet, who is violating the ToS isn't yet breaking the law?

IANAL and it'd be good to understand the subtleties of these types of laws if you participate in online communities. Ignorance of the law is no excuse and I've witnessed behavior by people in the past that may be illegal now.

Comment Re:Wrong approach (Score 1) 384

by rgviza (#37412796) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Low-Cost Tools To Track Employees' Web Use?
bullshit. a properly implemented white list solution, with good tools takes one click to allow a new item from the admin after they preview it. The web request generates an email, admin clicks it, opens preview and clicks allow or deny. Deny adds it to a blacklist so the admins never get bothered again from that domain. There's a management page to search, add or delete stuff manually to whitelist and blacklist

A well engineered solution will also allow every domain referenced in the request except the blacklisted ones (like doubleclick.net) you can even design your solution to have discrete whitelists assigned to users to limit damage if their supervisor does something stupid.

I know, I wrote one.

It's easier to manage this than to enumerate badness, reinstall comprimised os installs, remove spyware, deal with viruses, patching, blah blah blah, and replace employees that get fired because they got caught p2ping and prosecuted.

Laziness isn't an excuse and you can delegate the approval emails to the user's managers. No extra it guys needed. Automation and delegation for the win.

I'm really tired of hearing the "too much work" excuse. It's a cop-out.

Comment Re:and it's thwarted with...... (Score 2) 384

by rgviza (#37412646) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Low-Cost Tools To Track Employees' Web Use?
" If the first, you're hosed. You can't prevent every possible way of infringing, no matter how hard you try. "

Actually, using a whitelist proxy and firewall rules (deny all, allow email server, proxy server) you can prevent every possible way of infringing. Simply deny all, allow work related domains through proxy. Let them do the rest of their surfing on their smartphones, give them a slight raise and make them pay for their own phones (so if they steal with their phones, it's their own account). Strip all email attachments except pdf and office docs. Limit message body size. Limit attachment size Rate limit incoming email messages and alarm on unusual activity (more than 10 messages from one address, 250k email limit with a file upload script on your web server for larger files, which sends them to quarantine)

Done... This will immediately shutdown all p2p in your network, break pirate bay, warez sites, warez news servers, child porn, and lots of other badness.

Provide three examples of high dollar infringement settlements to your CEO/CIO, offer your solution. Let THEM decide if a week of your time adding domains to a list  and setting up a security model that works is cheaper than getting sued. You'd be killing a lot of birds with one stone.

Simply tell them you can prevent everything with a white list solution,or you can do it some other way and the company will always be one step behind it's employees' p2p efforts.

This will have the added benefit of greatly reducing your attack surface due to web surfing as well. Default deny is the only truly secure way to run your network.

If you have already implemented default deny and defense in depth, you don't need to do anything to comply with this law except clean out the stuff you don't know from the white lists.

This completely eliminates the need to monitor your employees and track their activity. You don't need to monitor known goodness.

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