I distinctly remember the original meaning of 'spam' in a computer context: to fill an inbox or newsgroup with a flood of identical messages. That's how the infamous Monty Python Flying Circus sketch was able to lend its name to the practice.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, the term was applied to unsolicited commercial email, and the original meaning was more or less forgotten. Besides, the practice of flooding peoples' inboxes doesn't really happen that way very much anymore.
Well, you realize, don't you, that when you have a combined monitor/scanner/speaker with sufficient low end response, and given all the folks here talking about ass scans, that a real ass kicking is entirely possible!
Well, the first time you call it, edlin needs to figure out whether or not the user is an idiot.
After that, it already knows.
Re:Fred has always been a bit of a PHB...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
I may possibly be unenlightened, so here's your chance.
Why is OpenProm not a BIOS? BIOS refers to the firmware layer - the code on the chip. Whereas PROM is the hardware layer, the physical chip the firmware resides on.
Just because your bootstrap code is accessable on a PROM of some type rather than being proprietary code on a Write-once ROM doesn't mean it's not BIOS. Your system still needs a BIOS to boot, and to buffer input from your keyboard, etc. etc.
What part am I misunderstanding?
Re:Why is legacy a bad thing?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
The reason legacy is "bad" is that if you are running legacy hardware, and it works...
... then you won't be spending money on new hardware.
Think about it. The profit margin for legacy components is pretty slim. There's competition for almost every element under the hood of your PC, and competition has driven the prices down, leaving very little margin. Worse yet, the market is nearly saturated such that the primary market for legacy components is replacement and incremental upgrade. In fact, even the incremental upgrade game is old hat - consumers wised up to that when the modem manufacturers strung us along from 2400-56.6k baud.
But that game is not generating the cash that it used to, and so component and system manufacturers are looking for a way to return to the glory days. The answer: "Your PC is bad because it has PCI slots and serial ports. You are a square if you don't use USB and Firewire for everything from disk access to your FUFMe adapter."
What we really need to get away from is bloat. Bloated microprocessor architecture. Bloated operating systems. Bloated BIOS and device drivers. Even with all these bloated elements burdening modern PCs, gamers are still getting 70fps on their FPSes, and PCs are rendering in days animation and models that took crays months to churn through.
"Legacy" means "we can't sell you all new stuff." That's why it's "bad." If you haven't learned that much about capitalism, then you are destined to be its victim.
Don't say that name! They made us write assembly code using that evil line editor on HP PCs when I was a sophomore in college, waaaay back in 1985.
It was brutal, I tell ya. Brutal! The seniors had a network of HP64000 development workstations but we had to develop intel architecture on PCs. Hell, we even had access to emacs on the VAXxen, but could we write code there? Nooooooo....
That experience is what convinced me I'd rather design microprocessors than program them.
Googlewhacking, Googlewashing, Googling, what else are there?
How about these?
Googlingering - wasting time, usu. at work, performing Google searches on random or unimportant subjects unrelated to one's occupation.
Googlewanking - One-handed Googling, usu. when performing Google searches for pr0n or special interest advocacy.
Googlevision - a type of retinopathy caused by excessive Googlewanking.
Googlehacking - manipulating the process by which Pagerank(TM) is assigned in order to move your listing to the top of Google search results.
Googooling - using the influence of your weblog circle to increase the Pagerank(TM) of infantile web pages and opinions.
Googlesmacking - similar to Googlehacking but done with the intent of overwhelming the target server to the point of incapacitation. See also "slashdotting."
Googolplexing - successfully receiving a Google search link as the top result of a Google search.
This is what MS refers to as "innovation." It's not creating new products, and therefore new markets. It's identifying an existing market and taking it over. Kinda like when MacDonalds sees a successful mom and pop burger joint, and then decides to open a new franchise right across the street.
That just happened in my neighborhood. The mom and pop joint has far better burgers, and real milkshakes, but when the zombie masses see the golden arches they act as if their decision has been made for them and go for the Big Macs.
Result: Mom and Pop are now losing money and will soon close their burger joint, one that's been there for almost 30 years. So Sad.
Well, then there's also the stereotype that Greek men enjoy buggery and all[1], but then maybe there were a bit more of you who didn't catch that part.
[1] As in Wilson and Shea's Schrodinger's Cat trilogy, wherein the giant Rehnquist was named Ulysses, because when attached to its original owner, it had "Greek proclivities."
Unfortunately, you can do a lot to minimize spam, but there's very little you can do to eliminate it completely. I've had my earthlink account for 8 years now, and it is becoming overwhelmed by spam. Even with Earthlink's spam filter, and my spam filter, there's still a couple of dozen emails per day that are unsolicited and include my address in the mailto header.
Yes, I've posted to usenet, and with only a couple of instances excepted, I've munged my address both in the from header and in the sig.
Yes, I've used the address when shopping online, registering shareware, signing up for other services, etc. Some of these actions have been followed by noticeable increases in spam.
One of the things that really bugs me is web services who solicit email addresses for their service (such as a greeting card or "e*kiss"), and then sell those addresses to spammers.
My ex-girlfriend once sent me an e-greeting using some unknown service, and addressed it to my earthlink account. I strictly use the ".net" tld when I give out that address, but for some reason, my ex used the.com tld for this greeting card. Before I even viewed the card, my inbox was flooded with spam addressed to me "@earthlink.com"
Needless to say, I was pissed. I sure wish I could remember which e-card website she used. Bastards.
Agreed. I watched people pump quarters into it but could never understand why... it was just as fun to stand there and watch someone else play.
Now the real landmark game IMO, was Mach III. With laserdisc backgrounds and computer generated targets, it was slightly more challenging than Battlezone, and much more visually stunning. I was a starving college student when it came out, but I pumped at least $20 a week into that machine just to get my daily adrenaline fix.
That and Centaur. Man, those were the days when pinball machines rocked.
My caller ID would be filled with dozens of 'NO ID' on a daily basis.
Sounds familiar. I'm a Pac Bell customer in Southern CA. Two years ago a similar plague of automated calls started filling my answering machine memory with messages that were nothing but sequences of beeps, each lasting more than 3 minutes. Every day, a dozen or more times a day, these calls arrived exactly every seven minutes apart, with caller ID giving an "UNAVAILABLE" origin. It rendered my answering machine useless, and I was in the middle of an employment search!
I finally got fed up and called my local PD, who set up a trap and trace with Pac Bell. Although it successfully identified the caller, the PD wouldn't identify them for me - something about potential for retaliation. The detective promised me that he sent the caller a warning, but since they were out of state there was little I could do. The calls continued. Month after month.
Every month I set up another trap and trace, and eventually told the PD that I wanted recourse to civil court, and that I required the ID of the offensive caller in order to file suit. At this point the PD got the FBI involved, and finally, after more than a year, I got a call from a detective and found out the story:
The calls were originating from Dallas. The caller was a SBC Long Distance telemarketer using an autodialer. That's right, SBC.
My own phone company was jamming my answering machine with dozens of nuisance calls a day!
Why it just beeped, no one could explain. My theory is that it was my 1970's era Radio Shack answering machine with a continuous loop outgoing message cassette. The beep is a metal splice strip. The beep tone must have triggered something in the autodialer.
Anyway, the FBI got results. The calls stopped. They briefly resumed again, but this time there was an 800 number on my caller ID. I called it and it was SBC LD customer service. They denied calling me at all, but I spoke to a supervisor and made it clear that I did not want them calling me at all and if they did, they would be subject to fine and criminal prosecution for harassment, due to the frequency and duration of their PITA calls.
I finally got peace.
To this day I am still confounded by the irony - it was SBC, my own phone company. And I can't sit thru a SBC long distance ad on television without shuddering in revulsion.
Usually not. Complete combustion resulted in white smoke that was mostly CO, CO2, H2O, etc.
But during engine development, acoustic instabilities would cause the hybrid motor to spit out flaming chunks of rubber, and they smouldered and stank something fierce.
Actually, though, hybrid engines can be relatively clean, and are especially safe. While we were testing at Edwards, some Rocketdyne guys died when they dropped a section of solid rocket motor and it exploded. Our motor would have just bounced.
Slashdot Mirror
Be more clear, man.
We're hosed.
So did that make him a "hamsterbater"?
Hey, don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
Bow bow bow!
(what da ya want for nothin?)
Somehow, somewhere along the way, the term was applied to unsolicited commercial email, and the original meaning was more or less forgotten. Besides, the practice of flooding peoples' inboxes doesn't really happen that way very much anymore.
Well, you realize, don't you, that when you have a combined monitor/scanner/speaker with sufficient low end response, and given all the folks here talking about ass scans, that a real ass kicking is entirely possible!
THUMP!
Actually, this is more relevant.
After that, it already knows.
Why is OpenProm not a BIOS? BIOS refers to the firmware layer - the code on the chip. Whereas PROM is the hardware layer, the physical chip the firmware resides on.
Just because your bootstrap code is accessable on a PROM of some type rather than being proprietary code on a Write-once ROM doesn't mean it's not BIOS. Your system still needs a BIOS to boot, and to buffer input from your keyboard, etc. etc.
What part am I misunderstanding?
Think about it. The profit margin for legacy components is pretty slim. There's competition for almost every element under the hood of your PC, and competition has driven the prices down, leaving very little margin. Worse yet, the market is nearly saturated such that the primary market for legacy components is replacement and incremental upgrade. In fact, even the incremental upgrade game is old hat - consumers wised up to that when the modem manufacturers strung us along from 2400-56.6k baud.
But that game is not generating the cash that it used to, and so component and system manufacturers are looking for a way to return to the glory days. The answer: "Your PC is bad because it has PCI slots and serial ports. You are a square if you don't use USB and Firewire for everything from disk access to your FUFMe adapter."
What we really need to get away from is bloat. Bloated microprocessor architecture. Bloated operating systems. Bloated BIOS and device drivers. Even with all these bloated elements burdening modern PCs, gamers are still getting 70fps on their FPSes, and PCs are rendering in days animation and models that took crays months to churn through.
"Legacy" means "we can't sell you all new stuff." That's why it's "bad." If you haven't learned that much about capitalism, then you are destined to be its victim.
Don't say that name! They made us write assembly code using that evil line editor on HP PCs when I was a sophomore in college, waaaay back in 1985.
It was brutal, I tell ya. Brutal! The seniors had a network of HP64000 development workstations but we had to develop intel architecture on PCs. Hell, we even had access to emacs on the VAXxen, but could we write code there? Nooooooo....
That experience is what convinced me I'd rather design microprocessors than program them.
How about these?
Googlingering - wasting time, usu. at work, performing Google searches on random or unimportant subjects unrelated to one's occupation.
Googlewanking - One-handed Googling, usu. when performing Google searches for pr0n or special interest advocacy.
Googlevision - a type of retinopathy caused by excessive Googlewanking.
Googlehacking - manipulating the process by which Pagerank(TM) is assigned in order to move your listing to the top of Google search results.
Googooling - using the influence of your weblog circle to increase the Pagerank(TM) of infantile web pages and opinions.
Googlesmacking - similar to Googlehacking but done with the intent of overwhelming the target server to the point of incapacitation. See also "slashdotting."
Googolplexing - successfully receiving a Google search link as the top result of a Google search.
Umm... I think that Google fulfills number four, too. Umm, yea.
That just happened in my neighborhood. The mom and pop joint has far better burgers, and real milkshakes, but when the zombie masses see the golden arches they act as if their decision has been made for them and go for the Big Macs.
Result: Mom and Pop are now losing money and will soon close their burger joint, one that's been there for almost 30 years. So Sad.
I also noticed that those Oswald photos were "taken" exactly 40 years to the day before the altered photos ran in the LA Times.
Eh... wrong again!
[1] As in Wilson and Shea's Schrodinger's Cat trilogy, wherein the giant Rehnquist was named Ulysses, because when attached to its original owner, it had "Greek proclivities."
ZOT!
Yes, I've posted to usenet, and with only a couple of instances excepted, I've munged my address both in the from header and in the sig.
Yes, I've used the address when shopping online, registering shareware, signing up for other services, etc. Some of these actions have been followed by noticeable increases in spam.
One of the things that really bugs me is web services who solicit email addresses for their service (such as a greeting card or "e*kiss"), and then sell those addresses to spammers.
My ex-girlfriend once sent me an e-greeting using some unknown service, and addressed it to my earthlink account. I strictly use the ".net" tld when I give out that address, but for some reason, my ex used the .com tld for this greeting card. Before I even viewed the card, my inbox was flooded with spam addressed to me "@earthlink.com"
Needless to say, I was pissed. I sure wish I could remember which e-card website she used. Bastards.
Now the real landmark game IMO, was Mach III. With laserdisc backgrounds and computer generated targets, it was slightly more challenging than Battlezone, and much more visually stunning. I was a starving college student when it came out, but I pumped at least $20 a week into that machine just to get my daily adrenaline fix.
That and Centaur. Man, those were the days when pinball machines rocked.
At which point the network becomes self-aware.
Fortunately for us humans, its self-image will be that of a benevolent Englishman with a monocle and waxed moustache.
Either that or a finite series of savory hyperbolic surface segments. In which case we're screwed.
Sounds familiar. I'm a Pac Bell customer in Southern CA. Two years ago a similar plague of automated calls started filling my answering machine memory with messages that were nothing but sequences of beeps, each lasting more than 3 minutes. Every day, a dozen or more times a day, these calls arrived exactly every seven minutes apart, with caller ID giving an "UNAVAILABLE" origin. It rendered my answering machine useless, and I was in the middle of an employment search!
I finally got fed up and called my local PD, who set up a trap and trace with Pac Bell. Although it successfully identified the caller, the PD wouldn't identify them for me - something about potential for retaliation. The detective promised me that he sent the caller a warning, but since they were out of state there was little I could do. The calls continued. Month after month.
Every month I set up another trap and trace, and eventually told the PD that I wanted recourse to civil court, and that I required the ID of the offensive caller in order to file suit. At this point the PD got the FBI involved, and finally, after more than a year, I got a call from a detective and found out the story:
The calls were originating from Dallas. The caller was a SBC Long Distance telemarketer using an autodialer. That's right, SBC.
My own phone company was jamming my answering machine with dozens of nuisance calls a day!
Why it just beeped, no one could explain. My theory is that it was my 1970's era Radio Shack answering machine with a continuous loop outgoing message cassette. The beep is a metal splice strip. The beep tone must have triggered something in the autodialer. Anyway, the FBI got results. The calls stopped. They briefly resumed again, but this time there was an 800 number on my caller ID. I called it and it was SBC LD customer service. They denied calling me at all, but I spoke to a supervisor and made it clear that I did not want them calling me at all and if they did, they would be subject to fine and criminal prosecution for harassment, due to the frequency and duration of their PITA calls.
I finally got peace.
To this day I am still confounded by the irony - it was SBC, my own phone company. And I can't sit thru a SBC long distance ad on television without shuddering in revulsion.
But during engine development, acoustic instabilities would cause the hybrid motor to spit out flaming chunks of rubber, and they smouldered and stank something fierce.
Actually, though, hybrid engines can be relatively clean, and are especially safe. While we were testing at Edwards, some Rocketdyne guys died when they dropped a section of solid rocket motor and it exploded. Our motor would have just bounced.
We used gasoline.