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Comment You will never win... try a new tactic (Score 0, Offtopic) 309

You cannot beat those who wish to share. You cannot win against the vast numbers. Take one down and 10 sprout to replace the fallen one. The harder you hunt them the more difficult it will be to find them. Stop fighting a battle you cannot win concerning control.

Instead, change your pricing structure, change your delivery methods, stop wasting money on DRM people like me bypass in mere seconds.

This is the future and you are merely in denial. Learn, adapt, and you'll be amazed at the success you will have.

Comment This is EXTREMELY common today (Score 1) 693

Especially among fraternities and sororities. While originally these groups would keep older tests, which is NOT against the student code, access to test banks... that's all of the possible questions AND correct answers... is not only unethical... but illegal as they were obtained under false pretenses.

When I was in college I knew of two frats who had access to almost all of the test banks from the college of textiles at NC State. At the time I really didn't understand what it meant as I wasn't part of those frats. I thought that just meant they had access to older tests etc. There were several professors who didn't really care about this... because they didn't use multiple choice tests. Everything was short answer and they changed their questions every time. Sometimes they would have similar questions but different values etc.

That's the problem today with courses like this... too many people and multiple choice does equal to quality education. Students are pushed hard to memorize, not learn, information in 101 classes like these because noone wants to take the time to read answers. It's very frustrating.

I have never used a test bank to "cheat" from... but I have used older tests which some professors think was the same as cheating.

Comment WHOA WHOA... what?!? (Score 1) 224

QUOTE from Article: "Ray Ozzie first appeared on my radar screen when I heard about this amazing guy who designed Lotus Notes. If you never used Notes, count yourself lucky."

Lotus notes was and still is one of the worst pieces of software to work with. From a user AND IT perspective it is utter TRASH. It's internal browser, it's internal only rules.... my god... I stopped reading at this point. Let's be clear... it's ALMOST as bad as groupwise.

Comment You can't fail what you don't try to do (Score 2, Insightful) 1348

My name is Chad and I hate using linux... however....

Linux has never tried to replace windows for the common user. It's focused on being a useful, security minded, light weight alternative for power users, IT professionals etc...

Linux has never marketed itself as a gaming platform, or multimedia home system etc. There are flavors of linux USED that way, but never advertised like windows. Linux has only recently (past 5 years) reached a point where it is user friendly to new users. Fedora Core or Unbuntu really took off with the whole user experience.

"But there's no content!"... what are you smoking? Sure... your mom can't install "Couponfriend" on a linux machine but that's not what Linux as a whole is focusing on. Linux is a business grade utility. It's a solid alternative to windows that allows you to do almost everything windows can do. The limitations you encounter are what programs you use.

A company I work with recently made the push to move to linux distros instead of windows. Dear lord the users hated it at first until productivity went up, and IT costs went down after 6 months.

There were 567 LESS tickets concerning hacked machines, malware and crashes. The centralized management software they use controls what can be installed on the machine... and pushing installs works just like windows except the machine doesn't have to restart. This solved a lot of issues for the small business as they just couldn't afford the windows equivalents.

The difficulty comes in what programs are being used. Users navigate just like they used to to find files. Hell they even created "My Document" folders... except those are hosted on a SAN, but the user doesn't know.

Linux is NOT dead as a desktop OS. It just might not be at the point of a typical user who thinks Best Buy is a smart place to go for a computer.

Comment The game ended at 10 (Score 1) 401

Whoever did 10-2 should be shot... and from that point it just tanked. I'm not taking into account the MMORPG... but the normal serious completely tanked. The story was confusing, if not completely lost... and the target audience changed vastly. It's not Final Fantasy anymore... it's a Uwe Boll made movie now.

Get back to original storylines and release a game that's worth playing. Not just for cash.

Comment Yet another reason religion is bad for government (Score 2) 354

It troubles me to no end the lengths people will go today in the name of religion. It's actually becoming common place for someone to have an extreme view and use the blanket of religion to protect them.

I have no problem with someone having beliefs, I too have them, but I base them off common sense, not because some book says I should do things. Questioning the institution is essential for growth. The middle east seems stuck in eternal infancy.

Comment I've never understood why they fight this... (Score 4, Interesting) 315

If I was a business who KNEW I'm fighting a world full of hackers I wouldn't fight them... I would help them. Most people wouldn't care, but those that I said "Hey, we've made it easy for you to do stuff... show me what you can do better and I'll pay you for it!

Apple instead wants to completely control how the users use their devices... and that just won't fly in today's world. That's like slapping a bull and kicking him in the balls. He's gonna ram you

Comment The question depends on the website and bad admins (Score 1) 402

While it would be lovely to have a perfect sys admin they don't exist. I would say about 1 in 10 problems in production are due to the admins not doing their part. I test like crazy but often times I find the following

- Crazy rules in production but not staging
- Mapped folders on production but not in staging or development
- Databases or Database permissions incorrectly configured
- Caching doing wierd things one does not see in staging

This only gets worse if you have load balanced servers etc.

I believe as a rule no developer should "develop" in production but having access to the production environment depends on your work environment and who would know best. Sys admins NEVER KNOW BEST when it comes to websites. They know their hardware but rarely do they know how to troubleshoot issues and almost always blame your app. However, at the same time developers often don't know enough about the technology their applications are running on so they instantly blame the sys admin.

Ideally, in a large scale deployment you have someone with the knowledge of both (that's me) who can identify and troubleshoot common issues. That individual would have access to production. Additionally, in smaller development shops not having access to production is just stupid. It doesn't make sense.

- Source Control is a great idea, but rarely used due to difficulty of use. Sometimes its not an option because someone has to support that.
- Financial limitations can reduce the ability to have shared development/staging areas. Working on your own machine is useless when testing. It does NOT test working in a production environment and thus... sometimes production is the test field.

We can play the blame game but in reality who has access to production should be limited to those trusted enough to not do stupid things without backing themselves up. Sysadmins should keep a backup of the production site at all times, developers should not mess with production unless it's urgent.

Comment There will ALWAYS be a market for PC's (Score 1) 447

To me there is no comparison between consoles and PC's when it comes to gaming. PC gaming will ALWAYS win out to me from a performance and control standpoint.

I am a gamer... a well off gamer who likes the full gambit of experience but most importantly be able to set the controls the way I like. Halo was an excellent example for this. PC gamers wiped the floor with the xbox counterparts when xbox live allowed PC gamers to play against Xbox'ers. There wasn't a single Xboxer in the top 100 players.

PC gaming will never die. If labels leave, new competition will take up the market. Xbox's and PS3's ARE computers at this point. That's what they are. Hell both of them can run linux or windows. In fact, gaming today is heading TOWARD PC gaming, just in a controlled manner they call "consoles".

This is just like the RIAA and their fight toward controlling the environment. Focus on your customers, focus on the experience and you won't have to worry about Pirating! The people who steal generally cannot afford it, or wouldn't have bought it anyway. Stop focusing on these people as you'll NEVER beat them. It's a challenge, a game... to them to break your scheme. Every single DRM has been broken within two weeks, the only exception being BlueRay which took a little bit longer. Stop wasting resources on this.

The publishers that use DRM made the mistake of declaring war on people who love the sport of breaking DRM. It's gotten to the point they create executables that let you break the DRM so anyone can do it without any tech knowledge at all.

SHOW me a single reputable study (REPUTABLE) that shows piracy is hurting publishers. This would be a study that connects pirates who would have bought it if it had DRM. Any study that it's entire source set is that of a college campus is going to have skewed results.

Comment That's not the point... it's that it can be easily (Score 2, Insightful) 338

The point that's being made about RFID is that the encryption method is not good enough for most uses when it comes to private information. If it becomes mainstream someone could EASILY begin to collect this information using a remote reader and collect it later without every touching the device again.

Imagine someone takes a small box about the size of sandwich. It could hold enough battery power to collect every single RFID scan for quite some time and then come by perhaps the next day with a laptop and receive it remotely as to never touch the device again in case it was found and being watched.

RFID tags are GREAT to identify you by an ID #... not hold SS # or other private information. Keep that stuff in a more secure manner. I'm no alarmist, and not even a hacker. But this is something someone with almost no tech experience could do... and make bank.

Science

Zombie Ants and Killer Fungus 125

nibbles2004 writes "An article in the Guardian newspaper shows how parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control ants they infect, ultimately leading the ant to its death. The fungus controls the ant's movements to a suitable leaf and causes the ant to grip onto the leaf's central stem, allowing the fungus to spore, which will allow more ants to become infected."

Comment Additional details (Score 2, Informative) 420

This is just storage space, not web pages/applications, or software etc. We're talking digital assets of the company such as documents, images, videos... etc. Basic, run of the mill file storage is being priced at $30 per gig, per month. It's basically just a giant network share. It doesn't need to be co-located just your typical raid array with some method of disaster recovery.

I'm interested in what other companies charge internally for file storage.

Data Storage

Submission + - Internal Costs per Gigabyte, what do you pay?

CodePwned writes: I recently took over a position at a rather large company where I discovered my group was paying $30 per gigabyte per month! That's $360 per year per gigabyte to our own IT department. While I understand costs are different depending on the scale, redundancy, backup and support methods, there doesn't seem to be any good papers on what range you should expect your costs to be. So far, my research shows an average of $1 per gigabyte or less for internally hosted space. What do you pay?

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