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dyndns.org has been accepting PayPal as our main source of income for quite some time now - we've had probably over $200,000 pass through PayPal without a single problem. In fact, yesterday they called to tell me that we've been assigned a dedicated account manager, with a secret VIP phone number and direct e-mail address and everything. So it seems that, at least to their larger customers, they're at least TRYING to improve the customer service.

All of these lawsuits and threats from states are sure making us nervous, though, and due to various other things we were probably dropping PayPal soon - that timeline's just been moved up now. But I agree with what someone said or at least alluded to earlier; even if 10,000 people have had problems like this, that's only a tiny fraction of PayPal's actual userbase, and that's pretty impressive to me.

if you want to grab the files while you can, grab it from sourceforge here or here or here while they last. That should cover all the flavors.

if you want to grab the files while you can, grab it from sourceforge here or here or here while they last. That should cover all the flavors.

Whoa, could you tell me more? You are just about to sell me a TiVo.

Acutally, I got email today from someone who saw my page on ripping TiVo video that suggests newer, easier-to-use software than what I described (plus I've been using different methods for my own rips lately)...but the page will give you some idea of what's involved and what you need.

Lately, I've been using ExtractStream and netcat to dump the audio and video streams to my Win2K box, as it's the one with the fastest processor and most storage. The webpage mentions using netmplex to combine the audio and video streams into an MPEG-2 program stream; this isn't necessary for my purposes and isn't even desirable as separate programs are needed to decode audio and video.

What quality does the TiVo capture at?

Best quality is 2/3 D1 (480x480) at 5.8 Mbps CBR MPEG-2 for video and 32 kHz stereo at 192 kbps MPEG-1 Layer 2 for audio. Lower-bitrate modes are available, but you don't really want to use them if you're interested in editing & archiving video. Note that the resolution is the same as SVCD, though you'd need to reduce the video bitrate and adjust the audio sample rate to burn an SVCD. To burn a VCD or DVD, some additional conversions would be necessary.

Absolutely, these HTML mails are dangerous with their 1x1 gifs with a custom URL so "they" know you've read the message.

I check the source and add the urls to junkbuster's list. If the filters don't get the mail, then the images still don't get requested.

If anyone's interested, I have the scripts up on my website. filter-html is an awk script that strips HTML out of a message. You can use it by itself as a filter for procmail. If you want to send a warning to lamers who send you HTML mail, you'll also want to get filter-html-mail, a shell script called by procmail to feed the message to filter-html and generate the warning message (note that it also assumes that you use qmail as your MTA).

Absolutely, these HTML mails are dangerous with their 1x1 gifs with a custom URL so "they" know you've read the message.

I check the source and add the urls to junkbuster's list. If the filters don't get the mail, then the images still don't get requested.

If anyone's interested, I have the scripts up on my website. filter-html is an awk script that strips HTML out of a message. You can use it by itself as a filter for procmail. If you want to send a warning to lamers who send you HTML mail, you'll also want to get filter-html-mail, a shell script called by procmail to feed the message to filter-html and generate the warning message (note that it also assumes that you use qmail as your MTA).

All of the images from the above site are mirrored here: http://mattcasey.dyndns.org/hd If only the could make spinning lights when the disk spins...

And in case you managed to miss the Britney Superbowl ad, or don't have a Tivo to lovingly watch it over and over again, you can just go read the Yahoo article about Tivo and the Pepsi ads and watch a fucking dancing Britney/Pepsi ad right there.

What ad? I didn't see any ad. (Ad filtering proxies are your friends. :-) )

Yes - LILO version 22.1 is what's in Debian testing, and it's the freshest available from the LILO distribution site - except for the beta, and there's nothing relevant in the changelog for that.

I'm beginning to prefer Yahoo! webmail over using local clients. I can access it whereever there is a web browswer and it's always in one place.

I can download and run PuTTY through the computer's browser or (if the computer supports it) I can plug in my DiskOnKey and run PuTTY off of that. With that going, I can then log into my computer and use mutt to read my mail. With GPG installed, I can sign and/or encrypt outgoing mail and validate and/or decrypt incoming mail. Mailing lists are automatically dumped into their own directories, while other classes of mail (HTML mail and mail from known spammers, mainly) gets bounced. Try doing that with Hotmail or other webmail services.

I'm beginning to prefer Yahoo! webmail over using local clients. I can access it whereever there is a web browswer and it's always in one place.

I can download and run PuTTY through the computer's browser or (if the computer supports it) I can plug in my DiskOnKey and run PuTTY off of that. With that going, I can then log into my computer and use mutt to read my mail. With GPG installed, I can sign and/or encrypt outgoing mail and validate and/or decrypt incoming mail. Mailing lists are automatically dumped into their own directories, while other classes of mail (HTML mail and mail from known spammers, mainly) gets bounced. Try doing that with Hotmail or other webmail services.

I'd ditch the landline completely, but I have two TiVos that depend on it. :(

TiVoNET takes care of that problem, and gets you some added capabilities as well.

Ask this question again and again. Ask it to yourself everytime somebody says "Linux on the desktop".

Linux can make it on the desktop, as long as they don't try to be a "me-too" Windowsalike.

Free top-of-the-head ideas for a Linux-based focus:

• A disk-image distribution for a web/email computer
• GameOS--an OS with built-in APIs/libraries for network 3D games (that are downloadable from the Internet
• Home server: install-and-forget firewall, family server, mail/web server with an arrangement with DynDNS for a family-based domain name resolving to their cable modem.

Linux needs to find its niche (small/medium servers is a good start) and excel there. I can predict that Lindows will soon join Loki on the bench.

Non-exhaustive list:

Adelaide

Brisbane

Gold Coast

Melbourne

Mudgee

Perth

Sydney

Western Sydney

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

My check is on the way too.

To save you some searching, here's the info from the dyndns.org pages:

Donations can be sent to:

Dynamic DNS Network Services
210 Park Ave. #267
Worcester, MA, 01609 USA

Please make any checks payable to:

Dynamic DNS Network Services, LLC

They also accept PayPal and Kagi.

I suppose this means that my spiffy old .ne.mediaone.net (I have fought many times to keep it from changing to one of those ugly hXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses) will get changed into some ugly attbi.com address.

There's no way to 'block' flash ads in Mozilla yet, and Yahoo keeps throwing up this damn huge Oracle/IBM ad on the my.yahoo.com page I have.

squid-redir lets you block anything from anywhere, based on the URL. This rule, for instance, blocks all Flash at the Motley Fool:

//.*.fool.com/.*.swf BLANK

It substitutes a 1x1 transparent GIF for the Flash. Something similar would work elsewhere...if you want to cut off all Flash from all sites, you can do that:

//.*.swf BLANK

It works on any system that can run Squid and Perl, and it'll work with any browser (I usually use IE, though I also have Lynx, Konqueror, and iCab available). More info and the block list I'm currently using are available here. Here are the Yahoo-related rules I'm currently using:

//.*yimg.com/.*/main.*.gif $1
//.*yimg.com/.*/yahoo.gif $1
//.*yimg.com/i/.* $1
//.*yahoo.com/serv.* BLANK
//.*yimg.com/.*.js NULLJS
//.*yimg.com/.*/adv/.*.gif BLANK
//.*yahoo.com/adv/.* BLANK
//images.yahoo.com/promotions/.* BLANK
//.*yimg.com/.*\.(gif|jpg) BLANK
//java.yahoo.com/.* BLANK
//promotions.yahoo.com/promotions/.*gif BLANK
//.*.geo.yahoo.com/toto NULLJS

Dyanmic IPs? That would stop people from running servers (unless theyve heard of DynDNS), but how would it stop people from trading on filesharing programs? Portblocking is the next-best-answer (best being in their opinion), but even that can be thwarted by a lot of filesharing programs.

Its true that Morpheus doesn't have the click till you win garbage, but it has quite a problem with its ads. I get an error popup about 20 times a day saying it couldn't connect to some goddamn ad site that it was trying to popup on me.

The darn thing got my location right within a 15 kilometers range

No distances were given (latitude and longitude, but they're in a weird format...longitude was given as "-115.17" when something like 1156'48" W would be the usual method), but it nailed both IPs I fed it as being in Las Vegas. (When you consider that reverse-mapping one address gets you lasvegas.net and the other gets you lvcm.com, that probably shouldn't be too surprising.)

Given how easy it would be to fool a geolocation system (especially given nearly everybody else in this thread), I don't see how this is really supposed to be effective...or is it really supposed to be more like CSS, which only thwarts fair use and small-scale copying while doing nothing to stop mass production of "counterfeit" DVDs? There's no reason (other than the bandwidth on my cable-modem connection) why I couldn't open my Squid proxy up to the world. In addition to getting almost no ads, you would appear to be browsing from Vegas instead of wherever you are really located. (How's that for MLP? :-) ) What's to stop someone from doing this elsewhere, either as a free service or for profit, and enable people to bypass whatever geographic restrictions are placed on a website?

of slashdotting:
Winners
Losers

Don't kill me tho, I'm on crappy cable.

of slashdotting:
Winners
Losers

Don't kill me tho, I'm on crappy cable.

Because I'm trying to avoid CSS line the bubonic plague.

Why?

There are still a LOT of web browsers who don't render CSS properly -- my goal is to have the page look good in IE, Netscape, OmniWeb, Mozilla, iCab, Lynx, etc.

The only browsers I've run across that have problems with the CSS I've used are iCab (the versions I've tried are betas, so some problems are expected) and Nutscrape 4.x. IE, Mozilla, and Opera work OK, and Lynx simply ignores it (make sure your HTML is put together in an order that will make sense when Lynx renders it; CSS will determine placement in browsers that grok it). There's no excuse for continuing to use Nutscrape 4 when alternatives have been available for months/years already.

Good to hear...
Better to feel...
hm... best to actually do something!

Hope they're not slashdotted with mails now, but a certain amount of SMTP-type response can't be bad. i did my part.

You're aware that there are services that will do dynamic domains for you, right?
www.dyndns.org

Hitbox does nothing of the kind. It uses JavaScript included on the site pages. Every time the page is opened in a browser, information about the visitor is returned to Hitbox.

Not only Wired, but CNet/ZDNet as well. The difference is that their ads are limited in time (a few seconds) and "fold" back into a banner quickly as not to be intrusive.

I agree, the Wired one is highly annoying. They will hopefully get the point when people start spending less than 2 seconds on their site.

Ad filters are your friends, especially if crap like this is set to take off.

this is a commercial venture. There are community based wireless LANs such as Airnet and Melbourne Wireless

"And Many great and notable trolls were sunk..."

It just confirms my belief in the truth of the Book of Slashdot further. For more info. on the church also check out http://www.moron.org

My cable had gone down Saturday morning, and I was prepared to spend a couple weeks suffering through dialup access. But I woke up Monday morning to find my cable modem back in business. I had to fire up a DHCP client to get a valid address. No more static IP address for now, it looks like; I think I'll give AT&T a couple weeks to finish moving everyone else over, then get in touch with them about a static address. Or maybe not. Once I realized my static address was gone, I went and signed up with DynDNS.org and changed my DNS records so that my home machine has a CNAME pointing to its name on dyndns.org rather than an A with its old static address. Then I downloaded a dynamic DNS client (lots available for Linux and Windows and others) and set it to send an update to dyndns.org's servers whenever my address changes. My assumption is that this will allow me to keep serving up my Web pages with no more than an occasional brief glitch if my IP address changes. And the lease times are pretty long (5 days), so even those glitches should be vanishingly rare, assuming they happen at all; I'm betting I'll be able to just keep renewing my initial address indefinitely. So the only real downside to being on AT&T's network is that my downloads appear to be capped at 1.5Mbps. Boo hoo, $50/month for T1-speed downloads, don't everyone offer me a hankie at once. Still a fantastic deal, even if it's not as sweet as it was a week ago. Way to go AT&T. One mostly-satisfied customer here. (No downtime would have been better, but I had longer outages than this on my old DSL line even without the provider going bankrupt, so it'd be churlish to complain.)

I made the layout simple and efficient, no graphics...

... a simple navigation system to let you know where you are in my site at all times

I haven't touched CSS much at all, I like what it does, so i'll probably have to sit down and learn it one day... It it something that can be coded by hand usually, or is there alot involved with CSS that you really need to have a program generate the code?

Cox@home is staying up, they're just going to be dropping the "@home" part.

Cox@home is staying up, they're just going to be dropping the "@home" part.

• I cannot find any reference to stability, and my experience of Via chipsets, compared to Intel and AMD chipsets, is that they are less stable and more likely to have problems (the last Via based computer I had to set up took two people 5 days to get working correctly, compared to AMD and Intel based computers which have worked perfectly from first boot up).

(That said, the board that replaced it in workstation use was a Biostar M7MIA (AMD 760) running a 1.0-GHz Athlon. The server will be replaced by a new one I'm building up around an Intel N440BX (the chipset should be obvious) and a pair of P!!!-500s. The former was just moving up to a faster processor; the latter is the result of finding something to do with a couple of freebie processors and having never done SMP under Linux before.)

• 
  
  • 
    WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW WW
    
  
  

I knew I'd read that before. It cracked me up the first time, well over a year ago.. (Seemed more like 2 years ago, but I could be wrong.) Anyway.

Some site Google found me

Here on Slashdot

Electrolysis. But wait, you still need to provide electric power. Ok, how about PV? Check out the "Water Battery".

When we at OBU started getting that way
we did this: CSMaster
Don't give up! Life doesn't always suck!

http://spiralx.dyndns.org/texts/troll6.html (Yes, it's a troll, but it really is good for a laugh.)

You can always peruse the user infos of the more prolific trolls in Slashdot's history, such as perdida, sllort, Shoeboy, Signal 11, osm, OOG_THE_CAVEMAN, spiralx, streetlawyer, etc. Since all the old archives were re-imported into the database, their old comments should be listed there. You can also see some of the classics on spiralx's and osm's own sites.

lynx -useragent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)" http://www.msn.com
there's your fix

I'm not sure just how well it's going to work, but I've put up a copy of the zipfile on my own FTP server. My server seems to works some of the time...hope this helps people who can't get through.

Dan Aris

I started using GNOME around 1.0. I picked it because of the eye candy -- it crashed more often and was slower than KDE 1.1, but both were slow enough and crashed enough on my Cyrix 6x86 that I wasn't too concerned with that.

I was really impressed with GNOME 1.2. Along with improvements to enlightenment (I kept using it even after Sawfish became the default -- it is "small and light" only compared to E, and it lacks all the eye candy), it became quite stable and customizable.

1.4 was not a major improvement. I couldn't ever get Nautilus to work on Red Hat 6.x, which I was still using (thanks to Ximian's excellent update system). And gmc was going nowhere. And other than Nautilus little else was changed about 1.4. At the same time, KDE 2 was improving rapidly. I installed the core components of 2.1 in order to use Konqueror as browser, and was quite impressed with the overall feel of it.

When I finally decided to install a new distro (Slackware 8) I went with KDE 2, mainly to get a feel for it. I didn't really look back...of course, it didn't help that I couldn't get the default gnome installation to run Nautilus on startup (even when you can get it to work, it doesn't feel very well integrated with the rest of the desktop). But although I use it, and like it, I really dispute the argument that it has totally supplanted GNOME, and GNOME has no longer any purpose.

Because I basically use KDE as a front end to GNOME and GTK applications. Its true that a few -- XChat, GIMP, GFTP and Abiword -- do not require GNOME, others -- Galeon, Evolution, Pan,to name a few, are completely dependent on GNOME. And visually KDE is still behind, and it doesn't quite have the themability that E/GNOME did. It seems like all the ugly E, Sawmill and GTK themes have been ported to KDE, but I still can't make it look like this.

And no (referring to screenshot), that useful XMMS panel control has no KDE equivalent. Neither does mini-commander, the box next to the clock for entering commands. And that system monitor? Thats Gkrellm, it uses GTK. I hope GNOME 2.0 is much improved...as you can tell, I would like to use it again.

"Søren" would be more correct, as not everybody uses the same character set.

The document character set for HTML 4 is the Universal Character Set, the character set defined by ISO 10646 and by Unicode.

(FWIW, /. doesn't specify a character set. They're using HTML 3.2, which would appear to default to ISO-8859-1. I've seen Japanese characters show up in some people's sigs, though...or was that K5? They're using HTML 4.0 Transitional...)

His site is unreadable to visitors using NS 4.0x...

Dan, please make your website complaint [enough] with standards so that all browsers can at least see the basic text.

A third way would be to detect the browser and send either a standards-compliant page or a "lobotomized-for-Nutscrape" page. I did this in the redesign of this commercial site and refined it a bit further when I redid my personal site. It's not that I personally care if people who continue using outdated, buggy software can access my site...for the dot-com site, accessibility was considered important enough to figure out a work-around.

Here's a test for you: pull up my site in Nutscrape 4.x and in another browser (Mozilla, IE, Lynx, Opera...it doesn't matter). Save the returned HTML (grab the stylesheet, too) to a file somewhere on your webserver and have W3C's validator check both. You'll see that one validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, while the other doesn't validate as anything. Now load the page that validated properly into Nutscrape and tell me what you get. It's a mess, isn't it? It displayed just fine in your other browser, though (unless your other browser was IE 2 or something similarly ancient).

His site is unreadable to visitors using NS 4.0x...

Dan, please make your website complaint [enough] with standards so that all browsers can at least see the basic text.

A third way would be to detect the browser and send either a standards-compliant page or a "lobotomized-for-Nutscrape" page. I did this in the redesign of this commercial site and refined it a bit further when I redid my personal site. It's not that I personally care if people who continue using outdated, buggy software can access my site...for the dot-com site, accessibility was considered important enough to figure out a work-around.

Here's a test for you: pull up my site in Nutscrape 4.x and in another browser (Mozilla, IE, Lynx, Opera...it doesn't matter). Save the returned HTML (grab the stylesheet, too) to a file somewhere on your webserver and have W3C's validator check both. You'll see that one validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, while the other doesn't validate as anything. Now load the page that validated properly into Nutscrape and tell me what you get. It's a mess, isn't it? It displayed just fine in your other browser, though (unless your other browser was IE 2 or something similarly ancient).

His site is unreadable to visitors using NS 4.0x...

Dan, please make your website complaint [enough] with standards so that all browsers can at least see the basic text.

A third way would be to detect the browser and send either a standards-compliant page or a "lobotomized-for-Nutscrape" page. I did this in the redesign of this commercial site and refined it a bit further when I redid my personal site. It's not that I personally care if people who continue using outdated, buggy software can access my site...for the dot-com site, accessibility was considered important enough to figure out a work-around.

Here's a test for you: pull up my site in Nutscrape 4.x and in another browser (Mozilla, IE, Lynx, Opera...it doesn't matter). Save the returned HTML (grab the stylesheet, too) to a file somewhere on your webserver and have W3C's validator check both. You'll see that one validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, while the other doesn't validate as anything. Now load the page that validated properly into Nutscrape and tell me what you get. It's a mess, isn't it? It displayed just fine in your other browser, though (unless your other browser was IE 2 or something similarly ancient).

That's the theory but it isn't all that easy to implement for the small guys, or all that cheap unless you go high volume. It makes Apple's old ADB look simple. To sell a USB device it requires a $2000+ (or something like that) per year membership to get unique manufacterer & device IDs and get compatibility testing in order to use the logo.

(Yes, I know that two large isn't a big deal for an established hardware vendor...but what about someone who just does this stuff as a hobby? Oh, I forgot...the average Joe isn't expected to actually create stuff; he's only expected to consume whatever is made available, and to be grateful for it.)