Nope!
Two of the minor characters of "Halting State" appear in "Rule 34", but it's not an actual sequel as such -- it's just set in the same continuity, five years later.
]]>Round, bright and green as the hill of the King of Elfland, beyond those fields we know at the other side of the twilight, perhaps?
]]>Where to start?
Dave Bell mentioned the infamous rootkit exploit. But that's only part of it.
Their after-sales customer service can only be described as shitty. Not regular shit, but liquishits with a side-order of cholera. (I speak from sad experience.) IBM, Apple, Toshiba, even Dell, all know how to deal with a laptop with a buggered keyboard: you either send the user a user-replaceable part and a box to return the old one, or you send the user to a service centre who'll do the swap for them, or for a fee you send them an engineer, or you uplift the laptop and return it by courier within 48 hours. Sony took eight weeks, shipped it around three different european repair centres, and charged me £160 -- for a broken key, within the statutory hardware warranty period (which is illegal, but when they're holding your laptop to ransom, are you going to argue?).
Never ever buy a piece of Sony computer hardware that you intend to use for business. They look pretty, but if anything goes wrong it's easier to buy a new machine than to get them to fix it.
(That's without going into the shitty shareware they lard their machines with, by the way.)
Sony are no better in other areas. They've got an unhealthy addiction to DRM, with which they cripple any media they sell -- not just CDs, but DVDs, Blu-Ray, and the other formats they tried to push, from mini-Disc through DAT and the funky little disks they use in PSPs. And they sue people who attempt to work around the DRM.
Finally, on the "utter contempt for the customer" side there's the insane stupidity of their approach to securing customer information -- stuff sufficiently useful to make identity theft possible, never mind credit card fraud -- on the Playstation Network. They got their come-uppance for that last month, in a crack so huge that it's been said to have depressed the market for stolen credit cards world-wide. But the point is, that hack wouldn't have been possible if they hadn't been so arrogant as to believe that (a) they could rely on the security of machines in the hands of the general public (PS3s), and (b) all they needed to do to ensure that security was to sue anyone who proposed to crack it.
Fuckwits. Utter, utter, fuckwits. A toxic combination of negligence, arrogance towards consumer rights protection legislation, and short-sighted stupidity.
]]>(It's a shame, really, as they have produced some nice hardware over the years.)
]]>Please note that Charlie has now posted a new article on this, so replies should be over there.
]]>It's the difference between your cleaner leaving your windows open, and a burglar actually breaking in through them. The former is negligence, the latter criminal, and both ethically and legally, the latter is considered much worse.
]]>Whereas Sony have wandered up and are trying to slide a credit card in through the door jamb to release the Yale lock before coming in and rifling your clothing drawers, when you just wanted them to deliver a letter.
(Writing software to have no bugs in is hard. Perhaps not impossible, but I know of no cases where it's been achieved.)
]]>No, not even close. Even if I leave my front door open, repeatedly, that gives you no right to walk in without permission.
]]>2 errors detected.
(And yes, I should have qualified it as 'software of any reasonable complexity'.)
]]>What you can do instead is: get yourself a new gmail account. Use the new gmail account to register a new account with amazon.com. Do not give it a credit card. Instead, use your existing amazon account (the UK one) to log onto amazon.com and buy a gift voucher. Apply the gift voucher to your other amazon.com account (the new one). Tell Amazon you live at [insert street address of US publishing company here]. At this point, you should be able to authorize a kindle device (say, Kindle.app running on an old iPod Touch or something) and buy American Kindle store ebooks yourself using the gift vouchers. Then you can, if so inclined, break the DRM and shovel them onto your regular Kindle as unencrypted mobipocket files.
The reason Amazon try not to let you buy ebooks from amazon.com if you're in the UK is down to the transatlantic rights split and a bunch of contractual boilerplate that's propagated down to the etailers from the publishers who are required to (a) abide by it and (b) diligently try to prevent violation of the rights split, for example by customers making end-runs around someone else's store. It's silly; a much better approach would be for the publishers to figure out how to mutually cross-license sales in each others' territories and get the rights restriction out of the customers' faces.
The other reason, of course, is that ebooks in the UK are liable for VAT at 20%. And if amazon.com ship electronic goods (or VATable goods) to the EU, they're supposed to collect and pay VAT. This is also why you can't buy software or non-book items from amazon.com for despatch to the UK (although some amazon affiliates in the US take a different view of things or are set up to handle VAT).
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