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Great article!

Fanboys are a national treasure. Their diligence to spending hours/days/years nurturing and cataloging their obsession provide a useful function for the rest of us. Like a beaver spending its life building and maintaining a dam, or an oyster taking a piece of dirt and slowly making a pearl, we benefit from the years of their hard work for the few short moments when we care.

I'm sure we all go through periods when we run across something cool and it keeps our interest for a few weeks. We develop an interest and we're grateful to find the web site of some guy who has obsessed about our new subject for most of his life. We satisfy our desire for learning about whatever the subject du jour is, and then we go about our lives. I for one appreciate the effort they put into their obsession.

For example, over the years, I've developed or rekindled an interest in random topics: the show "The Prisoner" (from the 1960s), Magic the Gathering (which I hadn't played for 10 years), the musician Donovan, and other oddball things. I thought it was cool that one quick search on the Web revealed information that probably took all of someone's free time for several years (reading biographies, attending fan conventions, and talking to other hardcore fans):

1. I know that from the opening sequence from the Prisoner describes both the desire to get secrets from the spy named Number 6 but was also a pun for conformity: "What do you want?" Was he saying "Information" or "In formation"? Neat.

2. I know that the rules for "banding" were changed three times for MTG. Nifty.

3. I know that Donovan sang on the song "Billion Dollar Babies" by Alice Cooper. And Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin may or may not have played guitar on "Hurdy Gurdy Man", but John Paul Jones (the bassist from Led Zeppelin) did play bass on the song. Neato.

Could I have lived my life having never learned this info? Sure. Am I glad to learn this trivia? Yes. With fanboys, I can do both! Fanboys are like the Cliff Notes for millions of subjects, albeit disproportionately on Hobbits, lightsabers, or even Billy Joel.

I'm not mocking them, of course. I think it's funny because we're all obsessed about something or another -- they're called hobbies. For example, I probably seem to be a fanboy about some topics (I'll let the bored Slashdot reader sift through my previous posts to figure those out).

Anyway, here's to you, fanboys! Keep up the good work!

So, will this not work?

wshShell.RegDelete "HKEY_USERS\.Default\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\.Defau lt\SystemExit\.Default\"
wshShell.RegDelete "HKEY_USERS\.Default\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\.Defau lt\SystemExit\.Current\"
wshShell.RegDelete "HKEY_USERS\.Default\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\.Defau lt\SystemStart\.Default\"
wshShell.RegDelete "HKEY_USERS\.Default\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\.Defau lt\SystemStart\.Current\"

(From Turn Off Tour Windows And Other Annoyances)

Or will we not dare to use it because Robert Fripp took 18 months of his life to give us these sounds?

>>This article presents an alternative to dark matter
>Just as dark as your regular matter, but with only 1/3 the calories!

Heh.

Of course, there's alma matter, which is just plain wet, eh. But, being full of DiHydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) which some want to ban but other defend.

On all of my Windows machines, I keep a copy of CSamp running in the systray at all times. It's a tiny little app that will grab the RGB/Hex values for any pixel on the screen. Great for matching colors in images, or if you like me are too lazy to view source and go digging for a color attribute.

Nah, see what happened was in the 60's, record companies paid cash directly to DJs, under the table, to play songs. "i'll give you $100 if you play $song".

You're missing a few points. First, the original payola was in the 50s, not the 60s. In the original payola scandal, the DJs were implicated for accepting bribes of cash, drugs, hookers, etc directly in return for airplay.

That scandal took down some crooks, but it also took down some good DJs. And it gave a lot more of the decision-making power to the stations and program directors and took it away from the DJs, in order to avoid further scandal.

But since there's a lot more songs than time to play them, the labels needed a new way to make sure that their new 'hit' single got played.

To accomplish this, the majors came up with the independent promotion system -- meaning that a label would contract an independent promoter to get the song on the air. If anything unseemly happened, it was a matter strictly between the promoter and the radio station, not the record label. This allowed the labels to 'outsource' the corruption and at least pretend to be clean.

By the late 70s/early 80s, independent promotion had become institutionalized (and centralized) to the point that paying an independent promoter might not get your song on the air, but not paying would ensure the song stayed off the air, no matter how big the song. IIRC, Pink Floyd was a guinea pig for this -- at a time when The Wall was one of the top selling albums, "Another Brick in the Wall" was one of the top selling singles and the band was promoting a concert tour, they didn't get any radio play in LA. Their label hadn't paid for independent promotion in the LA market.

As the independent promotion system was institutionalized, there were a number of dodgy mafia-connected people getting involved in the RIAA side as well. Tommy Mottola, for example, the former US boss of Sony Music, started as an independent promoter in the 70s, and Frank DiLeo (who played this guy in Goodfellas) was Michael Jackson's manager in the 80s, and was tight with 'our friends in New York and Chicago'.

What bothers the record labels is not that there's corruption or that they have to pay for spins, it's that they have no control over what they're buying -- the label owes whatever the promoter says it owes, and there's no resonable correlation between the number and quality (ie 8.15 am is a better time than 10:00 pm) of spins and the payment rate. If it was up to labels, I imagine they'd rather just buy the time outright.

Forget the fact that all this is illegal, but when Clear Channel bailed out on independent promoters it took away the only leverage the promoters had. With the Justice Department now getting involved and Congressional hearings likely at some point, our RIAA friends will line up and take their wrist-slapping and be glad to be rid of independent promotion.

Although it's almost 15 years old, the book Hit Men is a great look at how the music business got to be the reeking cesspit it is. I only hope that when there are hearings, the record companies get reamed as hard as the mafia middlemen for setting up the system in the first place.

Seriously, you can do everything you've hinted to with VBScript.

I recommend:

• Script Depot
• MSDN Script Reference
• Microsoft ScriptCenter

The Microsoft ScriptCenter has just launched a new monthly column regarding beginning scripting in Windows; it's called Sesame Script. (The scripting guys are a little geeky.)

• Sesame Script

Also, point your favorite nntp client at msnews.microsoft.com and do a search for wsh, script, etc, and subscribe and ask! The newsgroups are full of helpful folks!

Remember the motto: If it has to be done more than once, script it!

PS, to get a script to emulate a monkey pressing ok, have it loop, watching for a dialog box of whatever name it will be, then activate that dialog (WScript.AppActivate) and then send an "Enter" keystroke (WScript.SendKeys). Good example is here:

• WScript.AppActivate Method

any operating system is vulnerable to an exploit if it's security infrastructure is sufficiently loose. if you set your entire filesystem to 777 then you're completely vulnerable on any unix-based os too.

Really? So, if I chmod 777 my, uh, /tmp or /mnt/deleteme directory, you can make a web page that will delete it all from within my Firefox browser? On my Fedora Core 3 laptop?

Are you sure?

See, to do this, you have to get a script or something to run on my system to delete these locations. Show me where even lowly jscript allows for this...

Now, I'm no jscript guru, so I did a google search for jscript delete files and, on at least the first page or two, only came up with stuff having to do with the ".NET framework" or involving ActiveX!

And the point isn't that files can be deleted, the point is that the API for ActiveX allows somebody to do this remotely.

Just what was the significance of that big white ball that followed Number Six?

Who is number one?

The radicals are running the show in the Islamic world. Maybe not in the U.S., but the vast majority of Muslims worldwide support terrorism against non-Islamic countries, whether it's the Great Satan (USA), the U.S. satellite state in the Middle East (Israel; Little Satan), India, Indonesia, and even other radical Islamic countries that aren't radical enough for the ultra-fanatical radical countries. The media won't tell you the truth because they don't want their reporters to be denied access into these countries.

I'd say that the mujahideen are accurately representing Islam as it exists today. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Al Fatah (Mahmoud Abbas' group, hello Colin Powell??!), Al Qa'ida, Palestine Liberation Front, Hizballah, Ansar al-Islam, Asbat al-Ansar, Armed Islamic Group... Are you seeing the pattern? They're all based in Islamic countries. Show me ONE Islamic country that does not support terrorism.

Rover will obviously take you to The Village where you will become A Prisoner and get interrogated by Number 2!

I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! (My life is my own.)

When I came over to Canada in 1994, I was told it was similar. I guess it's got worse recently, but my viewing has decreased in that time.

I didn't find anything that stated how many minutes per hour ITV spends on commercials, but you might find the followng of interest

http://www.netreach.net/~kaufman/ratingsAds.html
http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/usa_can /cult/other.htm#tv/a

When I clicked on the live web cam there wasn't anything interesting. After a few reloads though, someone had strategically placed some attractive women in from of the camera. I wasn't listening to the audio, so I'm not sure who they are. Anyone know? Here are some of the pictures. Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3

When I clicked on the live web cam there wasn't anything interesting. After a few reloads though, someone had strategically placed some attractive women in from of the camera. I wasn't listening to the audio, so I'm not sure who they are. Anyone know? Here are some of the pictures. Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3

When I clicked on the live web cam there wasn't anything interesting. After a few reloads though, someone had strategically placed some attractive women in from of the camera. I wasn't listening to the audio, so I'm not sure who they are. Anyone know? Here are some of the pictures. Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3

A wrinkle in time. by Madeleine L'Engle
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - (Note: get a copy of The AQnnotated Alice by Martin Gardner
The hobbit. by J.R.R. Tolkien
Anything by Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Alan Dean Foster, or Piers Anthony
Darkover (any of the books) by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow by Orsen Scott Card
The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

A decent collection of Science fiction, mostly suitable for children

Also, Please attend the Worldcon, this year it's in Chicago followed by Philadelphia, PA, then San José. We have a lot of things for you and your children.

of course, our little one is only 6 months old. Mostly he's an excuse to reread Harold and the Purple Crayon

I aplogogise for any redundancies. This list took awhile to compile and find the links, especially as the co-author was breastfeeding at the time...

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