Don't forget they fired their award winning composer who'd been with them since Marathon (?) days & treated him bad while doing so - made me wonder what was going on over there at the executive level (and add a bit of apprehension for this game's release - which turned out to be warranted).

The problem is Activision. That's the problem with Activision - they are all about the money, and even Kottick's admitted to it. And they've already forced Bungie's hand - it's presumed Activision put pressure on Bungie's board to fire Marty. He's been there since the beginning I believe - one of the founding members.

Unfortunately, Marty had the last laugh. First, the courts awarded him unpaid overtime and vacation accrued ($30K, plus another $30K for being idiots for not just giving it to him, and $40k in attorney's cost). And in the past couple of weeks, the courts also re-awarded him Bungie Founder's Shares, that Bungie tried to illegal take from him.

Well, the courts ruled that according to the terms of issuance, yes, Marty is due all his shares (even ones that weren't issued yet), undiluted. The argument that he left was invalid since the only way the shares could get cancelled was if he voluntarily left. Since he was forced out, he's still due all shares. And Bungie even protested saying Marty would use his shares to screw up the business because he holds powerful shares as an ex-employee forced out. The judge disregarded that reason basically stating that Bungie made the bed.

So $100K and powerful shares because Activision didn't want him. (Probably because he cost a lot of money and with Paul McCartney's special track). And Marty's not obliged to sell those shares, either. So he technically still has a say.

Bungie's following the path of Blizzard - from great gaming company to hollowed out shell coasting on a name.

Hell, Bungie/Activision made a super classic mistake - they didn't let game reviewers have a go in advance. The cynical response (and history has shown it to be true) is that it's because the game is so bad, they can at least count on a few early sales before reviews basically end up killing sales. They tried to couch it in terms of "we want everyone to evaluate it on the full content with real players" but that rings hollow - the easiest way to do that is to recruit a bunch of beta players for a special play session for reviewers.

Ars Technica wasn't kind to it either. Their same-day early review showed a lack of content (though they were kind in saying "the servers worked". Their later review calls it "Rent it" saying there's not enough content for whatever-kind-of-game-it-is.

Somehow, after taking 4 years to do it (2010 - Halo Reach), to release this disappointment means that Bungie probably had a few ideas for a Halo MMO like game in the background, then used that. And tons of committee meetings later, well, you have this as everyone tried to get their say in the game. Resulting in something no one is quite sure what it is.

Hell, I suppose the final insult is when Activision reported "shipped" numbers. Well, at least they got a bunch of money from Sony for exclusives.

No, you don't get a free version, you don't get the media. You wipe it you've lost it. Not too mention the OEM version runs about $100. So no it's not free. Moron.

Except it is almost free because software vendors pay computer vendors money to bundle in their software. Basically a company like Dell or HP go to Symantec and McAfee and ask them how much do they want in on their new PC. Highest bidder gets installed. repeat this several times and the cost of Windows is recovered.

Windows OEM to you and me may be $100, but Dell/Sony/Acer/HP/etc are not paying that - they're paying far less. Add in the bundled crapware subsidy and it can pay for the hardware too.

The only real feature of note was Apple Pay, which might finally make NFC payments take off in the US. It's been a technology that should have hit it big a couple of years ago, but has never seen much consumer buy-in for some reason.

Because no one unified around it. You have credit cards and phones and all that, and the phones were all fragmented into using Google Wallet or other custom thing so it was impossible to actually use.

Effectively, Google thought "If you build it, they will come" and everyone basically gave a collective "meh" and promptly did their own thing.

What Apple did was try to be a de-facto standard. Apple made deals with Visa, MasterCard and American Express (which probably covers the vast majority of credit card charges out there). Apple made deals with big retailers people used. So in the end, Apple has, upon launch, the support of the vast majority of credit card payment companies, and big companies that most people shop at.

Plus, Apple has money on their side - the people who buy Apple products tend to be ones who have money, and are the kind of people who do spend it. Android users tend to be more tight-asses (given the vast majority of them are free phones that their carrier gave away), so are in generaly seen as a "lesser valued" market.

So you have companies agreeing to Apple because they know Apple customers generally have money. As a side effect, it means the technology being promoted gets widely distributed so everyone else benefits as well.

What does MS sell their OEM OS for anyway? Probably not that much. No one will likely bother.

Roughly $10-50 or so. It's hard to pinpoint an exact figure because the bundled software often pays for that stuff. So the refund you get is often far less because they have to take out the software that subsidized the cost of the PC. It's one reason why Linux PCs often cost more.

Anyhow, you can still bundle in Windows on the hard drive and all that, and separate out the software as a line item. If you choose to pay for Windows, you get a card with a unlock key on it. You boot the PC, enter the key, and it boots up with everything.

If you choose to not pay for software, you just click "I did not buy software" and it erases the hard drive.

You'd think people wouldn't get taken in by those Nigerian 419 scams as well, but they keep falling for requests to send money to make money.

You would think they'd stop before they'd send away $25,000 or more, but...

I can understand elderly folks falling for the "Hi I'm your grandson stuck in the middle of nowhere" scams, but the people who traditionally fall for the 419s know they don't have grandkids, and typically middle-aged people.

I guess greed blinds.

The writers of the US Constitution has the foundational documents of Sparta available to them. They deliberately chose to go in the other direction. This point seems to be one that is conveniently ignored by self-styled originalists.

I think the militaristic jingoism is a result of how the US came into existence - through war.

I mean, most countries only have one day to remember their war dead (Nov 11), while the US does the same (Memorial Day), as well as those in service (Veterans Day). Interestingly, while most of the world celebrates those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, it's when the US celebrates those in service, preferring to be different and celebrate its war dead separate from everyone else.

That's not the issue. The issue is that the low-cost asthma medications that poor people bought for their kids used the CFC propellants. The FDA would not let them switch to a new propellant without spending something like $200M on a new approval study, which was not cost effective in their OTC market, so they pulled the product. Poor kids don't suddenly get expensive inhalers because their cheap ones went away.

And the real issue is that people ignored the deadline which was issued by the Montreal protocol to address exactly that.

Inhalers were the last source of CFCs and the people who got together to limit CFC usage knew it would take time to approve new propellants. So they allocated over 20 years to do just that - enough time to find a new propellant, get it approved and phase the old one out well ahead of the deadline.

What did people do? Screw it - profits profits profits. The long deadlines was to deal with all this, not to simply ignore the problem until it was too late.

And let's just remember that planes don't actually fly themselves:

A growing problem with a LOT of airline pilots is they lack the basic skills to fly. And this is, unfortunate a product of the environment in which they fly - most countries either prohibit or massively regulate general aviation flight, resulting in the only flying most airline pilots get are from the simulators and the jetliner cockpits.

It's better in North America as many jet pilots do actually fly little light aviation aircraft (like ye olde Cessna 172s and 182s and Pipers, etc). These pilots usually exercise basic flying skills because the most automation they have is a single axis autopilot typically. And are subsequently able to land in fairly normal conditions.

A lot of airline pilots get horrendously scared if the ILS is down, or they have to circle and land, or the VASI is off or a bunch of other things that most commercial airports have. It causes undue stress and if you really challenge them, give them perfect VFR conditions and they still can't land without automation's help. Yes, your basic VFR landing - something every student pilot has to do - can give the willies the most seasoned jetliner pilot simply because the skill has rotted away.

Oh yeah, there are also a few fundamentals to every plane that are always true for that plane. Stuff like Attitude + Power = Performance. Give it a set attitude, a set power level, and you know what to expect - climb rate, airspeed, descent rate, etc. It stays the same for the plane, and is true from your tiniest light sports to your Airbus A380s. It would've saved many lives when the airspeed indicators are off (mean flying instructors love to cover up instruments during landing - but it teaches the student that if they can hold a certain attitude and power setting, the airplane's performance is predictable and yes, you can even land without stalling. And landings can be oddly far better this way when the student is concentrating on the outside rather than inside on the instruments).

by alvinrod (889928) Alter Relationship on Thursday September 11, 2014 @10:26AM (#47882185)

You would think that with all the noise they made about their fingerprint reader that they would have an optional two-factor authentication method that uses in in addition to a password. Sure, someone could still get around that too more likely than not, but it makes it hell of a lot more difficult than just attacking a password or being able to guess it.

Except Apple knows fingerprint readers are ineffective for security.

I mean, the PIN code locks your phone tighter - the fingerprint reader merely unlocks it after the user enters their PIN. Reboot the phone, you need the PIN. Fail fingerprint reader 3 times, you need the PIN.

And Apple was right - they cracked the TouchID reader within days using common fingerprint reader hacks. (And in the end, the fingerprint reader doesn't add too much - it's about the same strength as the PIN).

Fingerprint readers are far from foolproof. In fact, they're pretty lousy devices. Apple just used it because it lets people lock their phones with a PIN or a complex password and still have the convenience of being able to quickly glance at information without having to type your PIN or password a thousand times a day. (A lot of people don't use locks because of the inconvenience, so Apple figures that by making it easier to unlock, they can get some security

It's not really a MITM attack, it's spoofing credentials. It's copying the credential token from machine X, installing it on machine Y, then telling machine Y to connect to iCloud pretending to be machine X, and then downloading all the ancient backups in hopes they contained undeleted and unprotected juicy information.

You know, if you have access to their PC, doing all that to access their phone seems kinda silly. I mean, you have access to their PC. Just accessing THAT ought to get you juicy information!

It's sort of like installing a rootkit on a PC ... when there's a nice root shell right there on the screen.

It's also why some of the hacks are so completely silly. Like those that require you to scam the user's password somehow. Well geez, you don't need many fancy tools once you got their iCloud password! (Of course, it's Apple's fault for letting you get phished, I suppose?)

Some of the other ones are interesting only in that they jailbreak the phone. Which means if you have a later model phone without a jailbreak, it's a bit problematic

The overhead is barely there at all. I've measured the performance of the default fletcher4 checksum on a modest 2GHz Core 2 CPU and it comes to around 4GB/s/core. Now given that most CPUs now come with 4 or more cores, in order to get the checksum to be 10% of CPU overhead, you'd have to do be doing around 1.2GB/s of I/O. Needless to say, you're not ever going to get that even for fairly high-performance boxes.

Not really. A SATA3 SSD can push 550MB/sec both ways (limited by SATA3 itself) nowadays - just your standard Samsung EVO or later revision drive. Consumer level PCIe SSDs like what Apple provides already do 750MB/sec (and it isn't the fastest - just consumer level). Stick two of those (and ZFS might not be a bad idea for SSDs) and I'm assuming ZFS can access data on both drives (or more) to achieve high throughput. Two SATA3 drives is 1.1GB/sec full bore, while two PCIe ones full bore are 1.5GB/sec.

I believe the Fusion IO ones (Wozniak) do 1.2GB/sec on a bad day already.

Granted, spinning rust drives will need way more since most can't pull faster than about 200MB/sec off the platters.

GATTACA becomes a little less plausible!

I care less about a SciFi movie. Much better is one more nail in the coffin of the insidious book, The Bell Curve

Well, life imitates art, and what was once a fanciful Sci-Fi movie can turn surprisingly real surprisingly quickly. (E.g., the original Robocop - 30 years ago, it was unusual for police to have body armor and all sorts of military hardware. Then fast forward to today where it's standard issue. Nevermind much of what was supposed to be inane commentary and TV ads becoming real TV and products today. ).

It's good to disprove what is presented as fact, but it's also important to realize that what was fiction yesterday can be truth today. Especially how cheap genetic testing is becoming these days, we're not really that far away when genetic testing becomes an incredibly routine part of one's day where you're tested 10 times a day for ID and other purposes.

Hell, 1984's fiction, too.

Unscrupulous companies will sometimes engage in reverse-astroturfing, where they hire a bunch of folks to post bad reviews of their competitors.

That's called "libel" and it's been illegal forever.

Posting fake positive reviews is immoral, but legal. Posting fake negative reviews can get your ass hauled into court, and paying for every cent of damage your actions did to the target, multiplied by whatever factor the judge likes...

Yeah, have you actually TRIED to do that? Especially since those reviews are most anonymous.

First off, it's hard. Review sites like Yelp and the sort will throw up every roadblock at any attempt by any court to de-anonymize a user. In fact, if you read /. regularly, you see companies trying to do this all the time and almost everyone sides with the "protect my anonymity" sentiment. And they think you're doing it to intimidate the poster.

In short, it's impossible to identify a poster, and for the companies in question, VERY profitable. Don't forget sites like Yelp that make bad reviews automatically rise higher to the top unless you pay for advertising.

It's unfortunate really since a site like Yelp can improve their reviews tremendously if they had a verified customer service like amazon and many other sites have. (It's easy to implement too - either have Yelp give you a list of codes a customer can enter in when reviewing, or having you issue codes and then verifying them against bills).

What's funny is that Apple is pushing for it so gradually that the carriers still haven't realized what's happening. The sooner they wake up and realize we only need data (and a lot more of it), the better.

Carriers have known about it for a LONG time now. Why do you think data rates are so high? Because it's very profitable.

Voice calls used to be expensive because that's all the phone did. But now as people do less of it, they're not only getting cheaper, they're practically unlimited. Including North America wide calling. When texting was using the cell network only, it too was stupidly expensive. But now that people are using IM apps and all that, unlimited texting is super cheap.

And carriers know they can bilk people on data - it makes a LOT of money. And the demand doesn't seem to subside - it just grows. And the plans may grow, but at a slower pace, so when you run out of your "taster" 10MB for free, they'll happily upgrade you to 100MB for $20. Then you'll find you come dangerously close and you'll buy an upgrade to 500MB for $30. and 1GB for $40. And 5GB for $80.

Carriers know what's popular and they know how to milk people for it.

In fact, they know you only need data. They'll just throw in voice and text for free because those are no-profit centers. And it's why carriers like AT&T see you using a smartphone (via IMEI - it encodes the phone manufacturer, model and other data in it so carriers know), they bilk you for a data plan even if you only ever want to use WiFi.

More accurately, the "exciting" choice is the inexpensive choice, and inexpensive means more launches, or more money available for other programs.

If I'm already scheduled, that doesn't impact me unless it puts me on the schedule more often. If it only means OTHER astronauts get to go up too, well, screw them! :-)