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Format them however you want, but don't start adding extra crap to the players *now*. I really don't want to find out that the DVD drive I bought last month doesn't have the extra laser it needs to view all the "new DVD's"...

I also don't want the media to control the format, but people tend to naturally shy away from the proprietary solutions that cost them. And I know if it did, I'd hear about it on Slashdot first. I hope this whole stupid DeCSS thing blows over so I can watch The Matrix on my new computer. :)

...and look into ORB drives. I don't have one, but that's what I'd get, at the moment. At the moment, they're 2.2GB removable media, and I'm eagerly awaiting whatever the next generation of this technology will bring. Anyone who does have one want to share their experiences? I've heard it can be set up under Linux, maybe I'll buy one in a few months, or wait for something bigger. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Damn, I was gonna say that! :)
Oh well. I'll try for something else.

"Screw throwing flowers, I've got a grenade launcher!"

Wedding gifts: Chainsaw? (Doom II style, baby!)

Oh well, it's an appropriate Valentine's Day topic, I guess. If "Valentine's Day" makes you think of "Valentine's Day Massacre", that is.

...and it's kinda sad that FPS (first person shooters) are the best VR (virtual reality) environments we have, here in the year 2000. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The last thing we need is another "standard".

In any case, this had all better be over by the time I get my DVD drive in 6 months. (I wanna use it under Linux so bad...)

Oh well, this will suck. The same thing happened with CD-ROMs, except the media pushers weren't this scared before. Even then, it took us forever to get ATAPI...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, and I don't think my post was *completely* off-topic. It's probably about as on-topic as a question like that will ever get on slashdot. Besides, I didn't find that narrow little topic to be too terribly interesting. :)

I'm not trying to be pro/con Gore, he's probably my favorite out of a whole bunch of rotten choices. But I still probably won't vote. If I did vote, it would be because he answered those questions correctly.

The only thing more dangerous than a technologically clueless president is a president who only thinks he has a clue...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What was Mr. Gore's involvement with ARPANet and MILNet? Also, does Bob Metcalfe know about this?

(for those who don't know, Bob Metcalfe also invented ethernet. Although lately, I think he might have really invented ether...)

Okay, okay, serious question. What is Mr. Gore's stance on cryptography now that the US has lessened their regulations on it? Does he consider the Clipper chip to be a mistake, and is he still in favor of that ridiculous key-escrow idea?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's true. But there's nothing that says "If you patent it, you must make money off of it hand-over-fist". You could license your patents BSD or even GPL-style, or make them "free for free software use"...

LinuxOne will give you 50% of their holdings, which constitutes half a soapbox and 5,000 flames. And a t-shirt, if you're lucky. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Now that there's an OpenLaw project, you can just look there for the plethora of patent issues and other legal crap that currently finds its way to slashdot. News for Lawyers, Stuff that makes you wanna say "IANAL"...

Then maybe we can get back to our roots. Microsoft VS DOJ is a good topic, a feature on DVD-DeCSS is okay once in a while. But "Is xxx patent good?" is about as much Slashdot as "xxx Kewl Game Now On Dreamcast!". I've actually been pretty happy with the resurgence of Linux/NT stories, and Transmeta articles.

In short, if you wanna see every "xxx patent" story ever, find a legal site. If you wanna see all the "Dreamcast r00lz" crap, find a gamer site. I like the First Amendment and Gauntlet:Legends as much as the next hacker ("Tan Patent-Lawyer needs fees badly!"), but enough is enough, people.

Maybe if Slashdot posted 20-30 stories, each with a story rating (based on the sheer number of "Is this really news" comments :), and I set my threshold higher, it'd be okay...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I'm sure once they started using it they found other advantages.

It's nice that Linux supports so many platforms, just like NT was supposed to do.

...and I'm sure being able to easily modify the OS is essential to some of the work they were doing.

But I bet if they could just throw money at the problem instead, they wouldn't have necessarily looked at Linux. I bet you could customize a version of NT or BSDI or something into oblivion if you had the money.

But this is all just speculation on my part, of course. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I actually found more info (of the sort *I* was looking for :) on their press releases page.

They expect production to start in the first quarter of 2001. Hey, if we've got cheap 140GB removable storage by 2002, I'll be pretty happy. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Linux has already been in space, but it's nice to see NASA using it this much.

I just wish it wasn't just because their budget was cut so harshly... Poor NASA. However, now we can say that Linux is truely "Space-Age Technology"... :)

(Isn't that term getting old? Or am I just starting to believe that "Information Age" bulls**t? ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This technology sounds fascinating, and I firmly believe that we'll keep being able to store more information more cheaply for a long time.

But when can we expect this to happen? I didn't see a timeline or anything. Could someone who knows more about this technology speek up?

Sure, it'd be great if some new technology obviated the need for all this DVD madness, and it'd be wonderful if we didn't have to worry about commercial interests messing it all up. But how likely is that?

I was interested in buying an ORB drive, since they hold more than ZIP drives and are supposed to be pretty speedy. But I didn't, because I had a ZIP drive, and I didn't really need an ORB drive. I'll probably upgrade to a 30-40GB hard drive, and if I'm not storing full-motion video on it, I can't really conceive of needing much more right now. I'm sure the future will find a way to prove me wrong, though. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

An there be any moderators left, moderate this up.

...and moderate all that Jesus / Satan crap down, dammit.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This isn't a problem with the merger, it makes sense. Now that AOL has what they wanted--open access to a cable company--their problems are solved.

What scares me more is that without AOL's support, the representatives don't care about the issue. Do we need someone to push a bill nowadays, or do politicians still have their own opinions?

I didn't think it had gotten this bad. Feel free to wail about how evil AOL is, but first wail about how evil lobbyists are, and wail more that politicians these days think they need them. I don't want the lobbyists telling the politicians what to think, I want the *people* telling them what to think. Are those days over?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree, that was really funny.

But all the moderators are dead. I don't get it, he posted it at "2", the moderators should be able to see it. Oops, it wasn't part of the first 50 posts.

Is that in the moderator guidelines yet?

Oh well.

If you can read this, moderate the parent comment up! Sure, read it first, verify that it's really funny. But just do it, you freaks!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

60 hours of no sleep, 6 hours of sleep, and another 60 hours of no sleep...

I was trying to stay awake for the whole week, and failed. But I had a lot of fun, anyhow...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, but you think you're doing a great job too, when in fact you're probably not doing as well as you thought.

But yeah, that would scare the hell out of me. Four days on and three days off? Geez, how long can someone's body take punishment like that?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sleep deprivation also causes hallucinations.

Severe sleep deprivation resembles an acid trip.

More brain activity is not always a good thing, unless you like having your neurons cross-linked.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I want it, I want it, I want it!

Even if I don't need that much bandwidth, maybe prices will drop because of this. I'd love it if we had a link like that to my dorm, but it's not going to happen, I'm sure. :|

Oh, and... you reallly could build a beowulf cluster with this. Faster links help out much more than faster processors for many classes of problems. Sorry, but it's true! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, people who are comfortable with Windows will try to install something that looks like Windows, that's what they know, it makes sense.

But Microsoft was attempting to break into the enterprise market with NT. I'm sure a lot of people who try to use NT and are dissatisfied with it *might* try using Windows 2000, whereas before they would have switched to Linux.

However, the same problems apply. Windows 2000 is automatically in the "enterprise" market just because the real minimum-decent system is so beefy. And anyone who knows what they're doing will wait for the reviews of the first service pack to do any serious work. Buying the first release of anything Microsoft puts out is generally a waste of time and money, wait for a known stable version.

(the closest they have gotten to that is probably either Windows 3.1, or Windows '95 OSR2 ("the B version"), or Windows NT 3.1/3.51 (not NT4), depending on which Windows you like. Personally I think DOS 3.31 and DOS 5-6.22 were pretty good too, but that's about it.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It seems to me that it was originally about preventing piracy, but now it's about CYA...

Now that the major manufacturers know that the "protection scheme" is completely useless, and only impedes the legitimate users of their products, (the other ones have other, better ways to copy / rip DVD's) they have two options.

1) Rail against the MPAA, admit their wrongdoing, and create a new, open spec.
2) Trust the MPAA to protect their interests, and not make them all look like fools.

Which one do you think they'll pick?

If this came to court, and the issue was presented correctly, I'm sure the MPAA would lose, as a free-speech and reverse engineering issue. But when "dangerous hackers" are concerned, the US Legal System turns into a kangaroo court.

I've believed this ever since RTM was unfairly convicted, and I'll believe it until I hear clueful presentation of the issues without that "dangerous hacker" crap tossed around.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Windows 2000 is not a "formidable challenge" to Unix, just as Windows NT is not a Unix-alternative.

Linux is an alternative Unix, though. :)

Windows 2000 might have fixed some things that were originally broken in Windows. ...and the Start Menu fades in.

All of the big advances consist of reinventing Unix, and attempting to implement open standards.

We'll see how long this takes. Let me know when they really implement libraries, symlinks, file systems, and namespaces decently. (or even the Unix way. :)

Not a flame. Technical replies welcome. Your rights may be different in some states. Offer expires while you wait. Bah Weep Grah Na Weep Ni Ni Bong.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah. I think I saw it a while back on slashdot, actually, but I guess you get more points if you post your Trolls on the right story. Then it gets moderated up, and then the luser moderators notice it when they're browsing at 1 or whatever...

Thanks for the link... I'm just full of useless pop-culture references. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Rivest, um... Shamir? and... yeah, I'd have to look it up too. :)

Anyhow, they're big names in the field, and it's impressive stuff. I took enough number theory, and learned the basics of public key cryptography. At least, enough to know that I'd rather be coding than doing math proofs.

I say, let them use the system. I don't like it, and I don't think it should be legal, because if the math is published and you can use it, then the code should be equivalent. But the USA doesn't agree with me, so let them have their patent if they want it. Once speech == math == code, (like so) then it'll be all good, baby, and you can contest patents like that on legal grounds.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's APL. It looks like line noise, with lots of functions implemented with letters that aren't on your keyboard. Sounds greek to you? It could be APL.

PL/1 worked really hard to try to get you to make a valid program. Apparently some variants would try to autocorrect your code to a valid program, usually failing or generating weird code in the process of doing so.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You know, it's somewhat ironic that IE 3.0 crashed right after I posted that. But I'm not laughing.

Now I'm posting with mozilla. Which renders webpages in a pretty similar fashion, but with different quirks...

Here's the dump, guys. It was mildly amusing.

Backtrace:
=>0 0x0828f2b4 (USER32.DLL.CallWindowProcW+0x6394) (ebp=bfffefd8)
1 0x0467:0x95ed (MSHTML16.IWENGRELOADHOTLIST+0x23c3) (bp=f194)
2 0x047f:0xd553 (MSHTML16.GDOC_WNDPROC+0x1d3f) (bp=f1ee, far call assumed)
3 0x0467:0xd907 (MSHTML16.IWENGRELOADHOTLIST+0x66dd) (bp=f318, far call assume
d)
4 0x047f:0x44a4 (MSHTML16.WEP+0x1c72) (bp=f358, far call assumed)
5 0x047f:0x44f7 (MSHTML16.WEP+0x1cc5) (bp=f390)
6 0x047f:0xba5d (MSHTML16.GDOC_WNDPROC+0x249) (bp=f3a2)
7 0x013f:0x0000 (bp=f3dc, far call assumed)
8 0x082855a7 (USER32.DLL.GetTaskmanWindow+0x2eb) (ebp=4093fd74)
9 0x08288d96 (USER32.DLL.GetTaskmanWindow+0x3ada) (ebp=4093fda0)
10 0x0826dfa6 (USER32.DLL.TranslateMessage+0xda) (ebp=4093fde0)
11 0x081d006d (OLE32.DLL.CoFileTimeToDosDateTime+0x3b76d) (ebp=4093fdec)
12 0x081d37ff (OLE32.DLL.CoFileTimeToDosDateTime+0x3eeff) (ebp=4093fe1c)
13 0x026f:0x1574 (IEXPLORE.GWC_SUBCLASS_EDIT_WNDPROC+0x656) (bp=f3fa)
14 0x026f:0x21fb (IEXPLORE.GWC_SUBCLASS_EDIT_WNDPROC+0x12dd) (bp=f534)
15 0x027f:0x9261 (IEXPLORE.SIZABLEWNDPROC+0x847) (bp=f546, far call assumed)
16 0x027f:0x922e (IEXPLORE.SIZABLEWNDPROC+0x814) (bp=0000)

0x0828f2b4 (USER32.DLL.CallWindowProcW+0x6394): movzbl 0x0(%esi),%eax


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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah. I had to take a break, but that was just a day or two... Hey, maybe that's why they don't give us mod points. We'd moderate down the trolls we've already seen, not allowing the rest of the slashdot crowd to see them and think they're "Funny". ;)

Hey, we're following the thread, *and* all the moderators are gone... Heh heh heh.

I'm actually posting this in IE 3.0 for Win 3.1 under Wine. Why? 'cause netscape crashed too much in the last 5 minutes when I was trying to look at Slashdot...

Oh well. Time to check out Mozilla again...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Good one, Wah! Spending too much time on slashdot like the rest of us, I see.

The last news I heard about Episode ][ was...

"...even though he's nine and she's 14, and he's prob'ly gonna marry her some day-e-a-eay-ee..."

(for those who don't know, that's Weird Al's parody of Miss American Pie, from his album Running With Scissors... ("My, my, this here Anakin guy, maybe Vader someday later right now he's a small fry...") It's good stuff, almost as good as "It's All About the Pentiums, Baby"...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, *this* is the article in a nutshell:

"Help, help, I'm in a nutshell!" -- Jar Jar Binks?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, no hard feelings.

It's a completely different world here in the University. It's bad enough setting this stuff up for Unix, but it's *really* not meant for NT.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Cool, thanks for the info!

I want to get a new system by July or so, since I'll be working over the summer. I try to get a system that's twice as nice as my old system every two years or so.

I hope to get: ~600Mhz (or greater) Athlon, 128MB RAM, >20GB HD, a 3D-card, and hopefully a DVD-ROM drive that I can use under Linux. (and all the usual stuff, sound card, decent video card, etc., I'll keep my 17" monitor for now.)

The reasons I'm waiting are:

1) for the money. :)
2) my goal is to pay $1,100 or less. It should be doable, maybe I'll get a nicer computer out of the deal if I'm lucky!

(I could buy a 40GB HD for $250, much cooler than my then-huge 40MB HD on my old 386... :)

I'm still really curious about what Transmeta will have done by then. If another chip comes out that's superior to the Athlon at least in Price/Performance and Coolness, I might end up getting that. But I bet it won't be from Intel...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What do you mean, "It was funny once"? The same poster has posted that same image all of yesterday! (has anyone *else* on slashdot with mod points noticed this, or am I just special since I don't get them?)

I even got pissed off somewhere in there and posted a Penguin in response. I guess my only question is, who told the moderators there were posts below threshold +1?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Who moderated *this* up?

I was wondering about moderation for a while, but now I understand: trolling with ASCII art is good for your karma, yeah! Forget intelligent or controversial posting, that just gets moderated down lately.

Go AMD, I want an Athlon, yay!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
.H!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
..MH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
..M!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
...M!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!X!
...MMMMMHHHHHX!!!!!M!
...."?????????!!!!!?!
...:.....~!!!!!!!
..:M.....!!!!!!!
..:!M:.....!!!!!!!
.:!!M~.....!!!!!!!
.:!!MM~.....!!!!!!!
:!!!MM~.....!!!!!!!
:!!!!MM~.....!!!!!!!
!!!!!!M~.....!!!!!!!
!!!!!!M~.....!!!!!H!
!!!!!!M!.........!!!!!M!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!X..!!!!M!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!M!~..H!!M!
!!!!!!!!!!!!M?~...M!M!
!!!!!!!!!!!M?~....MM!
!!!!!!!!!HM?~.....M!
HMMMMMMMMM?~......!
.~~~~~~~~~.......


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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Just that everything isn't slow, but only the links right before the actual servers. Just more information, to combat rampant speculation.

They all look pretty suspicious though, not just like the net is "slow", like it looked earlier, and not like a DoS attack, which should be far more focused.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Can I answer one post with another?

You need to set your filter to -1 to see the funny stuff and the non-Slashdot party-line opinions. Moderation does suck.

(rather, I set my filter to +1 sometimes, but if I see ..."nn replies below your current threshold", I check it out. And if I have time, or I'm in a fast browser, I'll browse at -1...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First it was the new story posters,
and the content started suffering,
and then it was the nasty colors,
and now we have all the Trolls,
and the new cheesy icons...

When do we get bought by ZD-Net? ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I would have to agree, the quality of Slashdot has declined over time, as the average user of Slashdot has changed. ...and we're probably just "old fogies" too. (in my day, we didn't have stories about "JonKatz" and "World Domination" and "Social Issues"... :)

And wasn't it TCWWW? (The Cursed WWW...)

Oh well. I still miss Meept. Some of the trolls today are funny, but there's nothing that's both as silly, insightful, funny and controversial anymore.

(petrified pancake ninjas with hot grits down Natalie Portman's Open-Source pants get old after a while, believe it or not, d00Dz...)

Also, is it me, or has there been a lot more "down" moderating and less "up" moderating? I'd try to change this, but I don't get mod points, since I'm not a "typical Slashdot user". Heaven forfend, I guess I *have* been here too long!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

We're running NT with all kinds of fun third-party add-ons. The NT people are somewhat competent, much better than most of the students. :)

I'm sure Vanilla NT is pretty stable if you don't do much to it. Next time, make sure you also install NT versions of AFS and Kerberos, get it on the realm, use NDS to get all your applications, attempt to replicate people's NT profiles onto the local machine from a (minimum) 400k registry file in AFS, and have fun debugging the custom login application that was written to do it... I'm probably simplifying things a bit.

What we have leaks memory constantly. Some machines bluescreen, some machines have mice that don't click. And depending on where you're autosaving, either you'll have a lot of lag when writing the file to AFS, or you'll have no lag writing it to some scratch space that won't be there when your computer dies.

I'm glad *your* NT configuration doesn't crash. I hope you realize that it wouldn't work for us. *Our* needs are different. These machines are still more stable than your average '95 box, but far *less* stable than the Solaris boxes they attempted to replace. And that's a problem.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I do tend to think about what I'm saying. Maybe I didn't provide enough information, so I'll give you some background.

The machines I'm talking about *are* CS/Engineering machines. We have a lot of Solaris boxes, we've pretty much gotten rid of the old HP boxes. EOS is the computing system for Engineers here.

Some of the regular NT machines might end up dual-booting NT and Linux. There are also lots of NT machines for business majors, etc.

The original reason for the NT machines in the first place *was* so we could have popular applications like Office. Unfortunately, they don't have many apps that people really need, including the standard ones we've been using forever here (WordPerfect, gcc, Zephyrs...), and they aren't reliable. (who cares if I have Office? When the machine dies on me / reboots, the temp dirs are cleared, and I can't get my paper back!)

So now we also have a Citrix server (four clustered machines, together with 1GB RAM, 2GB Swap, runs Office over the network, but it's *FAST*!) that works just fine if for some reason you want to use Office in Linux, and WordPerfect / StarOffice / Pico / whatever just isn't enough for you. :)

Also, they might have been considering a VMware solution for the NT machines as well--I hope not. A lot of this is just rumor. And I'm perfectly happy with Linux/Citrix/Napster/Everybuddy... I'm not saying everybody should do that, it's just nice to have a choice.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hmm. Maybe the config files and custom hacks would be somewhat different, but it sounds like CMU, UMich, MIT, NCSU, and anyone else using "Andrew Linux" or any "Athena Project" offshoots and basing a Linux distribution off of RedHat Linux would have the same basic packages for a given RedHat version.

The "University Distribution" idea might not be that far off after all.
...except when we have to patch the source.

But maybe the other Universities do the same with some of the packages, and maybe we could get some generic interfaces for that, or not add those into the "base packages"...

At least, I'm pretty sure the basic Kerberos, AFS, Zephyr stuff isn't that different... depending on what version you're using...

(I'm pretty sure we're using Krb4 and Krb5 (using Krb4 emulation mode?) in different places, in an attempt not to murder compatibility, I guess)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, one of my friends is involved in this project, he just had a four-hour meeting about it today. (poor guy!)

I don't know how much they want me to say, or even how much they told me, but...

- Our network uses Kerberos, zephyrs, AFS, etc., pretty much taken from MIT's Athena Project. They're making RPM's of that stuff. I think they'll end up using ARLA instead of AFS under Linux, we'll see. Universities tend to have a lot of specific stuff too, though, maybe one university distribution is unlikely.

- MIT has RPM's up for Project Athena too, it's still a good base for a "university distribution". :)

- Hopefully the next release will be based on RH 6.2, I'm running somewhere between 6.0 and 6.1, and 6.2 beta should be up now.

- I sure hope it doesn't end up getting called "EOS/Linux", 'cause that makes about as much sense as "GNU/Linux". ;)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The same thing is starting to happen at here at NCSU, and hopefully we'll see Linux replace those darn NT machines yet. The LUG here is great about providing packages for Red Hat + NCSU-specific stuff. (well, we're sort of nearby, and whatnot. ;)

If that isn't an option at your school, at least convince them to get some interoperability. Linux plays well with others. NT can be forced to do better if you buy the right packages. So far I'm pretty happy with what they have bought, but NT is still not that reliable (it leaks memory here, the mouse dies, etc. Solaris boxes are much better).

However, at least X-Win32 and Tera Term Secure Shell are making life easier on NT. Still not as easy as it is on my Linux box, though. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yay, DeCSS! Boo, MPAA! Salon mentions slashdot, so we'd better post this! Free Mitnick... oh wait.

But yes, our basic freedoms are important, and it's perhaps more important to see that they get enforced on our computers and over the internet, since that's becoming more important every day.

As the outrage over what was probably a simple router problem illustrates, people are getting as sensitive about the internet as they do over their phone service. I hope the internet does not go the way of the phone company.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Have any of you entertained the possibility that this might *not* be a Denial of Service attack?

Think about it. A DoS attack generally takes down a site, not a segment of the internet. The "it's a backbone problem" idea posted on the Yahoo story sounded much more reasonable.

If you don't believe me, look at the Internet Traffic Report, and say to yourself: does this look more like a DoS attack, or something more like what, say, a backhoe could do instead? ;)

Anyhow, all of this stupid mass-conspiracy bullshit is getting old, and all of the posts that claim to list "all" of the possibilities forget to question the basic assumptions. Why believe the media when they can't give you any details? Why not just assume they can't give you details because they don't know what's going on?

Who should know what's going on on the internet, the media, or the people who run the internet? Check your facts for yourself, people.

There's definitely some funky stuff going on. But check it out before you start screaming "DAMN SCRIPT KIDDIES!", okay? I don't think script kiddies are this good. They're less organized than a bunch of slashdot posters. :)

Example: Here's some current internet topology, from NCSU. The internet traffic report is much better.

traceroute to av.com (204.152.190.62), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
[...]
10 sjo-core-02.inet.qwest.net (205.171.5.147) 69.289 ms 68.743 ms 69.749 ms
11 sjo-core-03.inet.qwest.net (205.171.22.6) 68.943 ms 69.323 ms 69.328 ms
12 sjo-edge-05.inet.qwest.net (205.171.22.50) 69.216 ms 70.223 ms 69.426 ms
13 205.171.22.114 (205.171.22.114) 70.555 ms 69.931 ms 70.480 ms
14 * * *
15 pla1b.head5.pla.mibh.net (204.152.184.215) 77.901 ms 77.757 ms 77.883 ms
16 head3.sv3.mibh.net (128.177.255.24) 78.868 ms 79.166 ms 79.172 ms
17 www.altavista.com (204.152.190.62) 79.960 ms 79.532 ms 79.970 ms

traceroute to www.excite.com (199.172.146.99), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
[...]
10 sjo-core-02.inet.qwest.net (205.171.5.147) 69.459 ms 69.261 ms 69.065 ms
11 sjo-core-03.inet.qwest.net (205.171.22.6) 68.877 ms 69.290 ms 69.095 ms
12 sjo-edge-05.inet.qwest.net (205.171.22.50) 69.143 ms 68.974 ms 69.093 ms
13 205.171.48.166 (205.171.48.166) 80.047 ms 80.501 ms 79.168 ms
14 192.168.1.106 (192.168.1.106) 78.975 ms 79.416 ms 78.899 ms
15 192.168.251.202 (192.168.251.202) 80.144 ms 79.893 ms 80.310 ms
16 199.172.146.50 (199.172.146.50) 80.167 ms !H 79.776 ms !H 80.235 ms !H

traceroute to www.adobe.com (192.150.12.103), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
[...]
10 294.ATM10-0-0.GW2.SCL1.ALTER.NET (152.63.48.169) 88.579 ms 88.479 ms 88.481 ms
11 192.150.13.1 (192.150.13.1) 88.696 ms 88.874 ms 89.055 ms
12 * www3.adobe.com (192.150.12.103) 89.099 ms *

traceroute to yahoo.com (204.71.200.243), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
[...]
10 pos2-1-155M.cr2.WDC1.gblx.net (206.132.113.137) 19.207 ms 18.574 ms 18.555 ms
11 pos6-0-622M.cr2.SNV.gblx.net (206.132.151.14) 97.879 ms 98.952 ms 98.487 ms
12 pos1-0-2488M.hr8.SNV.gblx.net (206.132.254.41) 97.636 ms 97.963 ms 98.090 ms
13 208.178.22.58 (208.178.22.58) 98.406 ms 98.156 ms 98.439 ms
14 img3.yahoo.com (204.71.200.243) 97.649 ms 98.487 ms 98.591 ms

traceroute to microsoft.com (207.46.131.30), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
[...]
10 205.171.23.46 (205.171.23.46) 31.347 ms 31.690 ms 31.454 ms
11 a3-0-6.crtntx1-ba2.bbnplanet.net (4.24.147.21) 42.531 ms 42.394 ms 42.312
ms
12 p1-0.crtntx1-ba1.bbnplanet.net (4.24.4.241) 43.972 ms 42.399 ms 43.194 ms
13 p1-0.lsanca1-br1.bbnplanet.net (4.0.6.138) 92.677 ms 92.489 ms 92.437 ms
14 p4-0.evrtwa1-ba1.bbnplanet.net (4.0.6.38) 118.103 ms 119.676 ms 118.746 m
s
15 p1-0.evrtwa1-cr1.bbnplanet.net (4.24.5.102) 118.770 ms 118.355 ms 117.894
ms
16 p2-0.mscanyonpark.bbnplanet.net (4.24.125.66) 89.012 ms 89.812 ms 88.745
ms
17 icpmscomc7501-a1-00-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.129.131) 89.483 ms 88.641 ms 89
.417 ms
18 icpmscomc7501-a1-00-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.129.131) 88.670 ms 89.818 ms 90
.195 ms
[looks like Microsoft doesn't handle pings right. Big surprise.]

traceroute to www.hotmail.com (216.32.243.7), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
[...]
10 core1-core2-oc3-1.iad.above.net (209.249.0.21) 18.983 ms 19.101 ms 18.463 ms
11 pao-iad-oc3.pao.above.net (207.126.96.145) 88.196 ms 88.122 ms 87.902 ms
12 hotmail-above-oc12.pao.above.net (216.200.0.154) 93.290 ms 93.283 ms 95.424 ms
13 10.1.6.1 (10.1.6.1) 93.207 ms 99.115 ms 93.810 ms
14 law5-rsp-d.hotmail.com (216.32.183.15) 248.894 ms 96.250 ms 94.903 ms
15 lc4.law5.hotmail.com (216.32.243.7) 94.157 ms 94.379 ms 94.217 ms

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The net has been pretty slow for me, and these "attacks" are either very widespread and very undetectable, or they aren't attacks at all.

Remembering The Hacker Crackdown once again, what started the whole nasty thing were widespread phone service outages that were blamed on hackers. The problem was eventually traced to a cascading phone switch bug, but the damage was done even then, and many hackers and crackers had their equipment (unlawfully?) seized by the government. After the DeCSS fiasco and now this, I don't want to see a world-wide repeat of this travesty.

So what can we do to check this out, guys?

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hi, Spot!

Wow, we have an Electronics Bo... We have a mall? Wow, I *do* need to get out more! :)

Oh man, after I get my new computer next summer, maybe I'll worry about real cool hardcore linux gaming. But not yet...

later,

Peter

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, I've heard good things about Electronics Boutique, although I haven't been to one in a while.

CompUSA has gotten better though, and I've even started to see Linux in some Babbage's/Software Etc.'s...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, it sounds interesting. The interview doesn't actually say that much, but it's good to see another company trying this. I guess Loki is really the first game-porting success story, from which all others will be judged for a while.

I too, would love to see FF8 for Linux. Or Ultima 9, for that matter. (anyone played it? I know the system requirements are insane...)

Hopefully, as more shrink-wrapped games and apps for Linux come out, the (often non-existent) Linux section in the local software stores will grow and swell and make people say "What's that penguin?"

Linux: it's not just for bookstores anymore...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm not a Christian, and I can tell you that the bigotry that I experience is alive and well.

Therefore, the US is still predominately Christian. :)

For good examples of how the US is still Christian, try to explain to random people how it is that you can not believe in "God", and still not worship "the Devil". I'm not kidding, it isn't always that easy.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Slashdot does that every day. Hmm...

There are lots of methods that are supposed to bring servers to their knees, but Yahoo is kinda big. Of course, it was kinda slow too, when I tried to use it, but...

Well, it took a while to ping the first time, but I see it now. I don't see anything about it on Yahoo News, though. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

How did you misinterpret my post as adoration for GCC? I just use it a lot.

GCC actually optimizes things decently on Intel, and your problems did not concern optimization, but rather scale. And I've seen worse C++ compilers, but GCC definitely does better as a C compiler. It also has a lot of unique flags to tune its behavior in both C and C++, which is a really good thing to investigate.

Also, last I checked, GCC optimization sucks on Solaris, and probably a few other platforms. But again, that wasn't even what you were talking about. (I think) Also, it's nice that GCC supports so many platforms, and allows its users to extend it. That's really its strength, and also why we have Linux in the first place.

But when I wrote some classes that used templates, I had to #include my .cc files to get it to work. Bleh.

Also, I agree, RHIDE for Linux is pretty buggy. But the original, RHIDE for DOS is much better. (and it runs in DOSEmu. Go figure) Also, I *love* its info browser. That is a wonderful idea, making it just like the Borland Help.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.