US and THEM? I could just listen to Pink Floyd for that...:)
But yes, I realise that/. is a community. And when I say that I don't know why something is posted, that would be ME saying that. And if other people agree with me, well, that would be US... I'm sure that for every article, some people agree and some people don't. In this one, though, you might find that the numbers are a bit closer than you might like.
...and I think I've already sufficiently explained in my previous posts examples of deaths that would go unquestioned by the/. "US" Collective, so I won't reiterate them. I don't think that this one is that obvious. If you do, well, I guess this article was definitely for you.
Other issues you do not consider are: who is posting this, the fact that a major news franchise already picked up the story and is bombarding the public with it, the fact that when this story was chosen, the other big story was *much* more nerd-relevant, (The Mars Lander, fortunately Roblimo eventually noticed *that* one, it was CNN's top story when he was busy posting this) the fact that this was posted under Film, which traditionally discusses movie reviews, or *occasionally* technology in film, but never obituaries, to my knowledge, and even that Roblimo *said* in the beginning, "perhaps not news for all nerds"... What can I say, the films mentioned were about 4 years before my birth, and I haven't gotten to see them yet. I generally like Mel Brooks movies, and I'd definitely perk up if Mel Brooks died, but apparently this was a long time ago...
So, for many reasons, when this story was posted, a lot of people did not find it relevant. I was also expressing that. Fair enough? I don't usually see obituaries on slashdot, if I do, I generally say "Who died?", and if I don't know who it is, I start to wonder, I guess it wasn't Knuth.
I know this isn't my site exclusively, and all I can say is, if it were, I wouldn't have ever dreamed that this would make it as news. Maybe on a different site, but not slashdot. I remember when Rob had to apologize for even *having* Film as a category. But maybe I've just been here too long, and need to find a different "News For Nerds" site, eh?
Maybe we can finally register
"BackSlashDot News For Disgruntled 31337 Nerds, Stuff That Doesn't Suck",
But I'd rather that never happen.
And that's all. If you have any further, non-rhetorical points, please e-mail them to me, or look at my user bio to see where else you can respond.
Which versions of IE and NT? (and please tell me you don't have ActiveDesktop installed)
We generally have NT either crash or become unusable after a maximum of 30 days or so, due to memory leaks. This would happen a lot faster on my machine, because once I'm using more virtual memory than I have physical memory (and I have 64MB, those machines have at least 128MB) and I'm not doing anything, I'd worry.
These memory leaks *might* be in other applications, but I'd like to know what application can make the *kernel* leak that much memory (and not recover it), because I've seen it bloat up to 50MB before.
We only get the occasional BSOD on NT, but this certainly happens often enough that these machines would never go for even months without a crash, and would need reboots much more frequently. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, *they* call it "for Unix", not me. And for the record, it 'runs' on Solaris and HP/UX. I've only used the Solaris version.
It doesn't work well on either one at least partially because they ported it with Mainwin. Maybe if they'd used (and developed!) Wine it would run about the same under Linux when recompiled, but to run on non-x86 platforms, they had to use some funky, proprietary stuff, and do some extra special Microsoft tweaking so that it would stay broken.
And, when all is said and done, it's IE. If it were a perfect port, it would look and act like the Windows version. And a lot of people on slashdot would apparently like that very much. Your "winix" argument is completely based on personal taste. I agree with you about that a lot of the time, but realize that most people don't, even a lot of people on slashdot. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
But I figured the only way I could intelligently comment on the content would be by listening to it, and commenting on it, since there isn't a transcript.
But, some of my comments weren't just rehashes of the article, and some of their comments were somewhat funny (but not for long:)...
I also hadn't listened to one of these before, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Frankly, if I wanted to hear a bunch of nerds talking about slashdot, I could go to the lab. But of course this is a special bunch.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I wish I were reading a transcript. It wouldn't waste as much time, eh?:)
CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal, and Nate... Talking about stuff posted on slashdot? What nerds!:) Oh well, at least they're warez dudes at heart, eh? Burn your DVD's onto CD-R's, d00d...
Remote control robotic snakes? That's out there too... So they're cheap, but no one will want them, eh? Good improv fake snake charming music and sound effects there...
"The Internet as an Ecosystem"... Ooo, animated internet traffic stuff. Of *course* it has "organic" properties. You're looking at a lot of humans doing stuff. Surprise.
The stupid Amazon patent. Umm... go to technocrat.net, d00d. I'm waiting for no-click shopping. Make them press "Enter".:)
I guess this would be pretty cool if we were all listening to it earlier, eh? It *is* nice to hear the posters yammering about this, for the novelty of it, I guess, but... well, that's about it.
Hmm. I got cut off somewhere around wireless modem/ghosting. And that was actually sounding interesting. Oh well. A waste of 15 minutes, but all in all better than television. (What, I was missing Pokemon? Ahhh!) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I don't think you could have missed it. It was right there along with the Mars Polar Explorer, which might be missing.
I did a little research to see what I missed, and it looks like most of the best stuff she did was 25 years ago. Perhaps the generation gap is at work here.
For what it's worth, I loved Paper Moon. But I don't think I would have recognized her from that. And I still don't think it's enough to warrant a slashdot story, especially when it's already plastered over all the major media.
Also, our "whining" is not off-topic. I think that questioning the validity of a story, especially when there are other more suitable stories available, is always rather ON topic. (I mean, if the story *is* the topic, and it isn't a very good one considering the audience, isn't that an issue?
If Douglas Adams, Weird Al, or Eric Idle (probably in that order) died, I might be surprised if it didn't show up on slashdot. But this? Sorry I didn't watch the Cosby show, or whatever, dude. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I completely agree. This is beyond my simple nerd-movie knowledge. I guess I expect the film category to be the standard "popular film review" that it always has been, which we accept provided it's a film for nerds that we might want to see. (The Matrix Roolz D00d! Something like that.)
I don't think "celebrity obituary" really counts. And I didn't even recognize this one. Even if you had said Gilda Radner, back in the day, I would have said "Oh yeah", and then looked at you, puzzled, saying "Why is this in Byte?":)
So. Note to slashdot. I'll handle the movie stars. Just let me know if DMR, RMS, ESR, or any hacker with a three-letter name dies.
Or Natalie Portman, otherwise grits-boy would freak.;)
(I would be PDB if I ever got famous. But since I'm pb now, thanks to slk, I'll never be famous, but he might be! Oh, the agony!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'm not nearly stupid enough to try to run, say, WIndows, or a web browser in my retina. But I guess some people would be.
And I really wouldn't like it if someone asked me to sort a list of numbers and put them in a table, and I found myself inexplicably saying "Missing VBRUN200.DLL"....;)
Oh man, cute BorgBSD stab. (or is that *Borg? hmm. I can't picture a Demonic borg, but a Penguin borg would be freaky.)
Borger King. We do it our way. Your way is irrelevant. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Netscape hasn't really released anything new. I haven't played with the CSS/XML stuff, because I fear my web programming is still stuck in '94 or '95. (I'm glad tables are standardized now.:)
Microsoft tends to ignore security holes whenever possible. That scares the crap out of me.
Remember that traitor streak, because most of us have it when it comes to free (beer) software. Heck, that's why I switched to Netscape in the first place, it was far cooler than Mosaic.
(stupid title bar and background color flashing tricks, the blink tag, and the invention of background pictures aside, allowing inline JPEGs was a beautiful thing, so I forgive them.:) )
However, when I tried IE... well, it sucked, and it annoyed the crap out of me. But I haven't tried it in a while, and the only new feature I *really* like from it is the fullscreen option. But that's just because Word and PowerPoint annoys the crap out of me more, so I'm happy to write papers and presentations in HTML if I have to.
(at least web browsers support using JPEG files without converting them to binary bitmap-looking crap and wasting 20 times the disk space, and my text editor doesn't highlight random words because it thinks they look funny, and then try to talk to me about it...)
Hmm. Interesting FUD.
I, personally, abandon a company when they break trust. Therefore, on that scale:
Microsoft & Apple: both bad, by betraying their customers and backstabbing their partners.
IBM: generally pretty good. Lumbering and clueless, but not really mean, AFAICT.
RedHat: much better. They flirted with proprietary software until they realized how much it sucked, and now they've done a good job of promoting open source, and not really screwing up (like Caldera did, or now Corel).
Caldera: I don't trust them, and I never have. They seem to have an axe to grind, and I have a feeling that given the chance, they'd try to be another Microsoft. But, we'll see. I've heard good things about their Linux distribution. (except for the commercial (closed source?) add-ons)
Corel: Either they mean well, or their strategy coincides with 'ours' briefly. It's great to see them funnelling development into Wine, I can't believe how much it's advanced lately. I just wish I used Windows enough to test it better.:)
These are, as always, my opinions, and if you have any facts to challenge my assumptions with, present them. I am, especially on this topic, rather interested to hear it. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Its rendering seems pretty snappy, to me. Other stuff is less reliable. But table-intensive stuff in slashdot is a lot sweeter in Mozilla than it is in Netscape.
I'm not sure if I like the new progressive rendering feature, though. I'd like to have more meaningful options in my web browser. Being able to set different levels of HTML standard compliance would be nice, or being able to pick and choose tags (and JavaScript stuff, too, I hate stupid popups, and would love to filter some of them out...) to allow or deny would be way cool. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Ever stop to think that Mozilla is alpha-level software, and therefore should be about as consistent as a bad random number generator, until the beta release?
(which is, by the way, why they can't release it as Netscape 5.0 anytime soon...)
Now let's look through, and see who marks their software correctly:
Wine: alpha level. Yep, lots of stuff doesn't work.
Dosemu: beta level. Ok, it's impressive how much they got to work. About as good as a DOS box in NT, but certainly not perfect.
Windows 3.0,3.1,'95,'98: gold. Not even close! Let me know when you implement *libraries* properly. (waiting for Windows 2000, I suppose)
IE 4.0 or 5.0 for UNIX: gold. Oh god, it's worse than alpha! It doesn't usually load on Solaris, in my experience. Microsoft's web site claims that *Solaris* needs random kernel patches, and that it's not MS's fault. Heh. Heh. Really, we couldn't code around this. Frickin' bad Windows-emulating porting software. IE runs more reliably under SoftWindows--or even Wine, where possible.
Netscape 4.7 for Unix: gold. Not really. It still crashes sometimes, can leak memory, and table rendering needs some work. But it's pretty solid. Definitely better than your average beta.
Anyhow, the point *is* having something that works. That's why they're still working on it, pushed back the date, and don't claim that it's anything it isn't advertised as... It's fast, nifty looking, and not yet stable. But compare this with claiming it has features it lacks, and it looks much nicer. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
All you did was use high-ASCII for A,E,O,S, and Y (and the pipe for I?), but that looks really neet! Mind if I steal that for my lex scripts? --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
A lot of people have missed this, but if you look at the link in the other article, the chip doesn't stay in.
It isn't some kind of artificial vision replacement. Rather, AFAICT, it just stimulates the nerves to the point where they remember how to see again. Then the chip is removed.
Sorry. No Star Trek story here. You can go.
(however, the Star Trek technology might be next. I seem to remember a story about constructing an image by reading the neurons in a cat, or something. It worked, but the picture was lower res.
I think it'd be awesome if I could replace or add, say, a thermal view of my surroundings, or a clock... It'd involve being able to add, replace or superimpose "images" in the stream of data from the eyes to the brain. Of course, goggles would be a *lot* easier.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Re:Biased...yes, but still useful
on
Stopping the FUD
·
· Score: 1
Right, I agree, that is still a useful resource.
However, then another key point to stress is advocacy. And I could repeat that hundreds of times on slashdot, and still not get the message across.:)
I will write things that are anti-MS, (I have a "Microsoft Sucks" page on my web pages:) but I also remember to state my point of view, try to explain *why* I've come to these conclusions, and post comments, if I get them.
It's also pretty funny when MS tries to fight the truth with propaganda. It shows their point of view very clearly. The "Linux Myths" page was a good one, but I think my favorite is probably this one:
"The macro functionality of Microsoft Office applications provides a programming environment that allows customers and developers to extend the functionality of Office. However, malicious hackers have recently taken advantage of this macro functionality to create these harmful viruses. "
Come on! Hardly anyone in the media really has the balls to say how much Microsoft screwed up on this one. There should be a class-action suit against them just for this, for *creating* an entire category of viruses by not providing appropriate security measures. Sun never screwed up this much with Java, and that's a programming language built into a web browser. This is a frickin' word processor! Why can it format my hard drive? It's like if Emacs' E-Lisp had a built-in "root shell" feature in case you needed one, and the solution proposed was "Oh, just turn off E-Lisp if you think it might be dangerous..."
But, enough ranting. Sometimes it seems that Byte was the only magazine that *did* have the balls to say what they thought. It's a shame that we don't even have that anymore. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
This won't help for directly combatting FUD, because those most susceptible to it are also those who don't know the difference. The marketdroids are pretty firmly entrenched in most of the trade rags, although the web news sites have been much more savvy lately (probably because of their readership:) and even the magazines have gotten better. (But I still want Byte back! They are coming back, right?)
However, one should not be too quick to blow the whistle or jump to the wrong conclusions. (c.f. the Mindcraft Fiasco. Sure, the tests were biased and unrealistic, but that doesn't mean that there weren't also limitations in Linux w.r.t. what they were testing.)
Anyhow, it should be interesting to see what they put up here...
Yeah. Lots. And it doesn't translate backwards properly, either.
@ = A 0 = O + = T Z = S
... and many others. And once you start using DOS high ASCII, ASCII art letters, or ANSI, you're really incomprehensible.:) ________________ __ |//_\|\|\ ///\/_ /_\_/|\|//_//_//_
I always use lex and other useful tools to generate my elite speak. Of course, my scripts could use some updating. Get the b1ff filter, and have fun from there. I also do simple character replacement, and random letter capitalization. I'm sure this could all be unified, redone in perl, or whatever your little heart desires as well.
Or, alternatively:
i @lwAYz u5e LEX + OtHuR kool +oolz tO GeNur8 my elI+E zPE@k, Of cOuRzE, MY zKr1P+z CouLD u5e 5uM uPdAtINg! Get tHe B1fF FILtuR, + gOt FuN fruM +hEY'RE. 1 Al5O DO 5iMpLe ch@RAc+uR RepLACument, + r@nDom lettuR CApIt@L1z@zhun. Im 5Hur th15 COuld AL B uNIF1ed, RedONE iN PurL, or wu+EVuR uR Lit+lE hERe+ DEz1Rez Az wEL
Inprise was so bad that Borland *did* change it back, actually. And I'm glad, that was a really dumb idea.
If Borland wasn't floundering, I'm surprised they wouldn't *sue* TurboLinux for diluting their trademark or whatever. The "Turbo" brand of product has traditionally been Borland's, just as "Quick" was Microsoft's. But I guess that went out with the 80's, to be replaced by these new meaningless names.
Heh heh, I hadn't heard about the k-rad k001 fonikz namez yet. That's funny. +He 31337 DooDz gE+ 2 m@KE CoRPor@5Hunz, and stuff.
If you're going to bash all of the meta names, why not Transmeta? (which is actually pretty cool, as "meta" names go...) I think it's funny that if you put meta in your name, it ends up meaning "more vague", as far as I'm concerned.:)
My lamest name: Traf-O-Data, Bill Gates' first company. Definitely worse than the original Micro-Soft. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Now if only I could get Ultima IX, Final Fantasy VIII, anything else with cool roman numerals, or Gauntlet: Legends, along with a kickass box to play them on...
Incidentally, if they keep this up, maybe this will become standard. Loki seems to port games very quickly, and if the games used SDL in the first place, it'd be even quicker...
(of course Quake is the exception, id has always written games with cross-platform support in mind. Amazing, really.) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Hopefully it's been fixed... at least temporarily.
Time to open the (rest of the) source for slash, it's already pretty fast for some things, but it has some weird bugs...
Incidentally, slashdot *does* pump out html at a frighteningly fast rate, that isn't the bottleneck. I don't know what we can do about the image server, though. At least it's somewhat better now. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I allow Ctrl-Alt-Del, 'cause I'm generally the only one here, but it's easily disabled in/etc/inittab.
However, the other flaw you mentioned, the boot disk, is a PC hardware/BIOS issue, not a Linux one:
I do not allow booting from floppies, or anything but the hard drive, and I have a password on my BIOS setup. That is the correct way to secure an x86 machine, configure that in your BIOS.
Do this also with your Windows machines, etc., since you could just as easily reboot a Windows machine and insert a Linux boot disk. (I've done this before, to mount NTFS and stuff...:)
Of course, if you have physical access to any machine for long enough, it's compromised. There are BIOS password cracking/bypassing programs available for some BIOSes (at least there were, for DOS)
Past that you can always take out the hard drive, or insert another one as the first hard drive... This should work, x86 or not! (assuming you can get to the case, and open it. Locked cabinet, anyone?) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Get dadadodo (from jwz's page) and download some Katz stories. I've done just that a couple of times. The results are incomprehensible gibberish, but... well, what else is new?:)
He meant to be built the responses, between white and he said it seems to browse but strangely, it may be young age: of geeks and revealing for some prescient and the level visually and others who spot dangerous movies and the New Era. As I just we expect hope it's the development that. A Tomorrowland to design, and thought, with other: words; I've come. If these parks are destroyed; once government announced it; possible: for the rest Bible. Another nightmare, grisly Columbine legacy; of Berners Lee has identified, and stock options, and Millenial blabber about the Apple unveiled it a in its public or useless debate under the computing trade offs.
Win '98 doesn't really have administrative accounts. Accounts are all wrong. They might have some "Policies and profiles" stuff, but that's pretty flawed too. I routinely get around Windows "security", and even that usually involves continually taking out OS "features", until there isn't anything usable left.
I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone. The effort required to really secure a Win '95/'98 box generally isn't worth it, which is why Microsoft sells NT. (not that that's *so* much better, it has its own problems.:)
Simple exploits:
F5 or F8 to bypass or mess with boot sequence. Good to disable this, and put a BIOS password on your computer.
Ctrl-Esc before you're logged in: can still bring up the Task Manager!
Cancel the log in, if it asks you for one. Often still brings up Windows.
Ctrl-Alt-Del. 'nuff said.
On a "locked-down" Windows box, try to get a command prompt or shell window, so as to execute the commands you want to use. Alt-F3, I think, will often still bring up "Find". See if they disabled "Run", "My Computer", etc.
If you can get to a web browser, set--say--the app for telnet to C:\COMMAND.COM.:)
If you can get Macros running, in Word or Excel, I think SHELL("C:\COMMAND.COM") works in Word Basic, but you can look up the SHELL command in the help.
Originally, you could just shut down Windows '95, and then type in DOS commands--it just dropped you to a prompt, and left you in graphics mode, saying "It is now safe to shutdown your computer"! You could type in, say, "MODE CO80", get back to text mode, and play in DOS from there...
These are just the pretty obvious ones, of course there are more interesting ways to hack Windows, like copying/editing binaries to run other programs, this sometimes gets around that Policies & Profiles crap...
On UNIX:
Login: Password:
Damn damn damn damn damn!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
US and THEM? I could just listen to Pink Floyd for that...
But yes, I realise that
know why something is posted, that would be ME saying that. And if other
people agree with me, well, that would be US... I'm sure that for every
article, some people agree and some people don't. In this one, though,
you might find that the numbers are a bit closer than you might like.
...and I think I've already sufficiently explained in my previous posts
examples of deaths that would go unquestioned by the
so I won't reiterate them. I don't think that this one is that obvious.
If you do, well, I guess this article was definitely for you.
Other issues you do not consider are: who is posting this, the fact that
a major news franchise already picked up the story and is bombarding
the public with it, the fact that when this story was chosen, the other
big story was *much* more nerd-relevant, (The Mars Lander, fortunately
Roblimo eventually noticed *that* one, it was CNN's top story when he was
busy posting this) the fact that this was posted under Film, which
traditionally discusses movie reviews, or *occasionally* technology in
film, but never obituaries, to my knowledge, and even that Roblimo
*said* in the beginning, "perhaps not news for all nerds"... What can
I say, the films mentioned were about 4 years before my birth, and I
haven't gotten to see them yet. I generally like Mel Brooks movies, and
I'd definitely perk up if Mel Brooks died, but apparently this was a long
time ago...
So, for many reasons, when this story was posted, a lot of people did not
find it relevant. I was also expressing that. Fair enough? I don't
usually see obituaries on slashdot, if I do, I generally say "Who died?",
and if I don't know who it is, I start to wonder, I guess it wasn't Knuth.
I know this isn't my site exclusively, and all I can say is, if it were, I
wouldn't have ever dreamed that this would make it as news. Maybe on a
different site, but not slashdot. I remember when Rob had to apologize
for even *having* Film as a category. But maybe I've just been here too
long, and need to find a different "News For Nerds" site, eh?
Maybe we can finally register
"BackSlashDot
News For Disgruntled 31337 Nerds,
Stuff That Doesn't Suck",
But I'd rather that never happen.
And that's all. If you have any further, non-rhetorical points, please
e-mail them to me, or look at my user bio to see where else you can respond.
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
My god, I'm impressed.
Which versions of IE and NT? (and please tell me you don't have ActiveDesktop installed)
We generally have NT either crash or become unusable after a maximum of 30 days or so, due to memory leaks. This would happen a lot faster on my machine, because once I'm using more virtual memory than I have physical memory (and I have 64MB, those machines have at least 128MB) and I'm not doing anything, I'd worry.
These memory leaks *might* be in other applications, but I'd like to know what application can make the *kernel* leak that much memory (and not recover it), because I've seen it bloat up to 50MB before.
We only get the occasional BSOD on NT, but this certainly happens often enough that these machines would never go for even months without a crash, and would need reboots much more frequently.
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, *they* call it "for Unix", not me. And for the record, it 'runs' on Solaris and HP/UX. I've only used the Solaris version.
It doesn't work well on either one at least partially because they ported it with Mainwin. Maybe if they'd used (and developed!) Wine it would run about the same under Linux when recompiled, but to run on non-x86 platforms, they had to use some funky, proprietary stuff, and do some extra special Microsoft tweaking so that it would stay broken.
And, when all is said and done, it's IE. If it were a perfect port, it would look and act like the Windows version. And a lot of people on slashdot would apparently like that very much. Your "winix" argument is completely based on personal taste. I agree with you about that a lot of the time, but realize that most people don't, even a lot of people on slashdot.
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
:) I agree. I was thinking the same thing.
:)...
:)
But I figured the only way I could intelligently comment on the content would be by listening to it, and commenting on it, since there isn't a transcript.
But, some of my comments weren't just rehashes of the article, and some of their comments were somewhat funny (but not for long
I also hadn't listened to one of these before, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Frankly, if I wanted to hear a bunch of nerds talking about slashdot, I could go to the lab. But of course this is a special bunch.
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I wish I were reading a transcript. It wouldn't waste as much time, eh? :)
:)
:)
CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal, and Nate...
Talking about stuff posted on slashdot? What nerds!
Oh well, at least they're warez dudes at heart, eh? Burn your DVD's onto CD-R's, d00d...
Remote control robotic snakes? That's out there too... So they're cheap, but no one will want them, eh? Good improv fake snake charming music and sound effects there...
"The Internet as an Ecosystem"... Ooo, animated internet traffic stuff. Of *course* it has "organic" properties. You're looking at a lot of humans doing stuff. Surprise.
The stupid Amazon patent. Umm... go to technocrat.net, d00d. I'm waiting for no-click shopping. Make them press "Enter".
I guess this would be pretty cool if we were all listening to it earlier, eh? It *is* nice to hear the posters yammering about this, for the novelty of it, I guess, but... well, that's about it.
Hmm. I got cut off somewhere around wireless modem/ghosting. And that was actually sounding interesting. Oh well. A waste of 15 minutes, but all in all better than television. (What, I was missing Pokemon? Ahhh!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I don't think you could have missed it. It was right there along with the Mars Polar Explorer, which might be missing.
I did a little research to see what I missed, and it looks like most of the best stuff she did was 25 years ago. Perhaps the generation gap is at work here.
For what it's worth, I loved Paper Moon. But I don't think I would have recognized her from that. And I still don't think it's enough to warrant a slashdot story, especially when it's already plastered over all the major media.
Also, our "whining" is not off-topic. I think that questioning the validity of a story, especially when there are other more suitable stories available, is always rather ON topic. (I mean, if the story *is* the topic, and it isn't a very good one considering the audience, isn't that an issue?
If Douglas Adams, Weird Al, or Eric Idle (probably in that order) died, I might be surprised if it didn't show up on slashdot. But this? Sorry I didn't watch the Cosby show, or whatever, dude.
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I completely agree. This is beyond my simple nerd-movie knowledge. I guess I expect the film category to be the standard "popular film review" that it always has been, which we accept provided it's a film for nerds that we might want to see. (The Matrix Roolz D00d! Something like that.)
:)
;)
:)
I don't think "celebrity obituary" really counts. And I didn't even recognize this one. Even if you had said Gilda Radner, back in the day, I would have said "Oh yeah", and then looked at you, puzzled, saying "Why is this in Byte?"
So. Note to slashdot. I'll handle the movie stars. Just let me know if DMR, RMS, ESR, or any hacker with a three-letter name dies.
Or Natalie Portman, otherwise grits-boy would freak.
(I would be PDB if I ever got famous. But since I'm pb now, thanks to slk, I'll never be famous, but he might be! Oh, the agony!
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'll say. HOT PINK? That's unnatural!
;)
I'm not nearly stupid enough to try to run, say, WIndows, or a web browser in my retina. But I guess some people would be.
And I really wouldn't like it if someone asked me to sort a list of numbers and put them in a table, and I found myself inexplicably saying "Missing VBRUN200.DLL"....
Oh man, cute BorgBSD stab. (or is that *Borg? hmm. I can't picture a Demonic borg, but a Penguin borg would be freaky.)
Borger King.
We do it our way.
Your way is irrelevant.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Netscape hasn't really released anything new. I haven't played with the CSS/XML stuff, because I fear my web programming is still stuck in '94 or '95. (I'm glad tables are standardized now. :)
:) )
:)
Microsoft tends to ignore security holes whenever possible. That scares the crap out of me.
Remember that traitor streak, because most of us have it when it comes to free (beer) software. Heck, that's why I switched to Netscape in the first place, it was far cooler than Mosaic.
(stupid title bar and background color flashing tricks, the blink tag, and the invention of background pictures aside, allowing inline JPEGs was a beautiful thing, so I forgive them.
However, when I tried IE... well, it sucked, and it annoyed the crap out of me. But I haven't tried it in a while, and the only new feature I *really* like from it is the fullscreen option. But that's just because Word and PowerPoint annoys the crap out of me more, so I'm happy to write papers and presentations in HTML if I have to.
(at least web browsers support using JPEG files without converting them to binary bitmap-looking crap and wasting 20 times the disk space, and my text editor doesn't highlight random words because it thinks they look funny, and then try to talk to me about it...)
Hmm. Interesting FUD.
I, personally, abandon a company when they break trust. Therefore, on that scale:
Microsoft & Apple: both bad, by betraying their customers and backstabbing their partners.
IBM: generally pretty good. Lumbering and clueless, but not really mean, AFAICT.
RedHat: much better. They flirted with proprietary software until they realized how much it sucked, and now they've done a good job of promoting open source, and not really screwing up (like Caldera did, or now Corel).
Caldera: I don't trust them, and I never have. They seem to have an axe to grind, and I have a feeling that given the chance, they'd try to be another Microsoft. But, we'll see. I've heard good things about their Linux distribution. (except for the commercial (closed source?) add-ons)
Corel: Either they mean well, or their strategy coincides with 'ours' briefly. It's great to see them funnelling development into Wine, I can't believe how much it's advanced lately. I just wish I used Windows enough to test it better.
These are, as always, my opinions, and if you have any facts to challenge my assumptions with, present them. I am, especially on this topic, rather interested to hear it.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
What do you find to be slow about it?
Its rendering seems pretty snappy, to me. Other stuff is less reliable. But table-intensive stuff in slashdot is a lot sweeter in Mozilla than it is in Netscape.
I'm not sure if I like the new progressive rendering feature, though. I'd like to have more meaningful options in my web browser. Being able to set different levels of HTML standard compliance would be nice, or being able to pick and choose tags (and JavaScript stuff, too, I hate stupid popups, and would love to filter some of them out...) to allow or deny would be way cool.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I agree. Ever use IE? Windows?
Ever stop to think that Mozilla is alpha-level software, and therefore should be about as consistent as a bad random number generator, until the beta release?
(which is, by the way, why they can't release it as Netscape 5.0 anytime soon...)
Now let's look through, and see who marks their software correctly:
Wine: alpha level. Yep, lots of stuff doesn't work.
Dosemu: beta level. Ok, it's impressive how much they got to work. About as good as a DOS box in NT, but certainly not perfect.
Windows 3.0,3.1,'95,'98: gold. Not even close! Let me know when you implement *libraries* properly. (waiting for Windows 2000, I suppose)
IE 4.0 or 5.0 for UNIX: gold. Oh god, it's worse than alpha! It doesn't usually load on Solaris, in my experience. Microsoft's web site claims that *Solaris* needs random kernel patches, and that it's not MS's fault. Heh. Heh. Really, we couldn't code around this. Frickin' bad Windows-emulating porting software. IE runs more reliably under SoftWindows--or even Wine, where possible.
Netscape 4.7 for Unix: gold. Not really. It still crashes sometimes, can leak memory, and table rendering needs some work. But it's pretty solid. Definitely better than your average beta.
Anyhow, the point *is* having something that works. That's why they're still working on it, pushed back the date, and don't claim that it's anything it isn't advertised as... It's fast, nifty looking, and not yet stable. But compare this with claiming it has features it lacks, and it looks much nicer.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Excellent! I'm impressed.
All you did was use high-ASCII for A,E,O,S, and Y (and the pipe for I?), but that looks really neet! Mind if I steal that for my lex scripts?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
A lot of people have missed this, but if you look at the link in the other article, the chip doesn't stay in.
:)
It isn't some kind of artificial vision replacement. Rather, AFAICT, it just stimulates the nerves to the point where they remember how to see again. Then the chip is removed.
Sorry. No Star Trek story here. You can go.
(however, the Star Trek technology might be next. I seem to remember a story about constructing an image by reading the neurons in a cat, or something. It worked, but the picture was lower res.
I think it'd be awesome if I could replace or add, say, a thermal view of my surroundings, or a clock... It'd involve being able to add, replace or superimpose "images" in the stream of data from the eyes to the brain. Of course, goggles would be a *lot* easier.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Right, I agree, that is still a useful resource.
:)
:) but I also remember to state my point of view, try to explain *why* I've come to these conclusions, and post comments, if I get them.
However, then another key point to stress is advocacy. And I could repeat that hundreds of times on slashdot, and still not get the message across.
I will write things that are anti-MS, (I have a "Microsoft Sucks" page on my web pages
It's also pretty funny when MS tries to fight the truth with propaganda. It shows their point of view very clearly. The "Linux Myths" page was a good one, but I think my favorite is probably this one:
"The macro functionality of Microsoft Office applications provides a
programming environment that allows customers and developers to extend the functionality of Office. However, malicious hackers have recently taken advantage of this macro functionality to create these harmful viruses. "
Come on! Hardly anyone in the media really has the balls to say how much Microsoft screwed up on this one. There should be a class-action suit against them just for this, for *creating* an entire category of viruses by not providing appropriate security measures. Sun never screwed up this much with Java, and that's a programming language built into a web browser. This is a frickin' word processor! Why can it format my hard drive? It's like if Emacs' E-Lisp had a built-in "root shell" feature in case you needed one, and the solution proposed was "Oh, just turn off E-Lisp if you think it might be dangerous..."
But, enough ranting. Sometimes it seems that Byte was the only magazine that *did* have the balls to say what they thought. It's a shame that we don't even have that anymore.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
At least they're admitting their bias here.
:) and even the magazines have gotten
This won't help for directly combatting FUD, because those most susceptible to it are also those who don't know
the difference. The marketdroids are pretty firmly entrenched in most of the trade rags, although the web news
sites have been much more savvy lately (probably because of their readership
better. (But I still want Byte back! They are coming back, right?)
However, one should not be too quick to blow the whistle or jump to the wrong conclusions. (c.f. the Mindcraft
Fiasco. Sure, the tests were biased and unrealistic, but that doesn't mean that there weren't also limitations
in Linux w.r.t. what they were testing.)
Anyhow, it should be interesting to see what they put up here...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
To the guy who tried to do this down below: /'\ \&'nbsp\;/g
sed s/\ \
------ ----- ---- --- -------
| | | \ / \ |
| | | / \ |
|-- | ---- --- |
| | | \ \ |
| | | \ / |
| ----- - \ \--- -
---- --- --- ------- !!!
| \ / \ / \ | !!!
| / | | \ | !!!
|--- | | --- | !!!
| | | \ | !
| \ / / |
| --- \--- | O
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Yeah. Lots. And it doesn't translate backwards properly, either.
:)
//\ /_
@ = A
0 = O
+ = T
Z = S
... and many others. And once you start using DOS high ASCII, ASCII art letters, or ANSI, you're really incomprehensible.
________________ __
|//_\|\|\ /
/_\_/|\|//_//_//_
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I always use lex and other useful tools to generate my elite speak. Of course, my scripts could use some updating. Get the b1ff filter, and have fun from there. I also do simple character replacement, and random letter capitalization. I'm sure this could all be unified, redone in perl, or whatever your little heart desires as well.
Or, alternatively:
i @lwAYz u5e LEX + OtHuR kool +oolz tO GeNur8 my elI+E zPE@k, Of cOuRzE, MY zKr1P+z CouLD u5e 5uM uPdAtINg! Get tHe B1fF FILtuR, + gOt FuN fruM +hEY'RE. 1 Al5O DO 5iMpLe ch@RAc+uR RepLACument, + r@nDom lettuR CApIt@L1z@zhun. Im 5Hur th15 COuld AL B uNIF1ed, RedONE iN PurL, or wu+EVuR uR Lit+lE hERe+ DEz1Rez Az wEL
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
You're obviously not doing it right. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Yeah, Itanium is pretty stupid.
:)
Inprise was so bad that Borland *did* change it back, actually. And I'm glad, that was a really dumb idea.
If Borland wasn't floundering, I'm surprised they wouldn't *sue* TurboLinux for diluting their trademark or whatever. The "Turbo" brand of product has traditionally been Borland's, just as "Quick" was Microsoft's. But I guess that went out with the 80's, to be replaced by these new meaningless names.
Heh heh, I hadn't heard about the k-rad k001 fonikz namez yet. That's funny. +He 31337 DooDz gE+ 2 m@KE CoRPor@5Hunz, and stuff.
If you're going to bash all of the meta names, why not Transmeta? (which is actually pretty cool, as "meta" names go...) I think it's funny that if you put meta in your name, it ends up meaning "more vague", as far as I'm concerned.
My lamest name: Traf-O-Data, Bill Gates' first company. Definitely worse than the original Micro-Soft.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Civ:CTP, Heroes III, Q3A... Ahh, heaven.
Now if only I could get Ultima IX, Final Fantasy VIII, anything else with cool roman numerals, or Gauntlet: Legends, along with a kickass box to play them on...
Incidentally, if they keep this up, maybe this will become standard. Loki seems to port games very quickly, and if the games used SDL in the first place, it'd be even quicker...
(of course Quake is the exception, id has always written games with cross-platform support in mind. Amazing, really.)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Yeah. I know. There was a bug.
Look at #4, #6, #7, etc.
Hopefully it's been fixed... at least temporarily.
Time to open the (rest of the) source for slash, it's already pretty fast for some things, but it has some weird bugs...
Incidentally, slashdot *does* pump out html at a frighteningly fast rate, that isn't the bottleneck. I don't know what we can do about the image server, though. At least it's somewhat better now.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Yep. My machine is setup like so:
/etc/inittab.
:)
I allow Ctrl-Alt-Del, 'cause I'm generally the only one here, but it's easily disabled in
However, the other flaw you mentioned, the boot disk, is a PC hardware/BIOS issue, not a Linux one:
I do not allow booting from floppies, or anything but the hard drive, and I have a password on my BIOS setup. That is the correct way to secure an x86 machine, configure that in your BIOS.
Do this also with your Windows machines, etc., since you could just as easily reboot a Windows machine and insert a Linux boot disk. (I've done this before, to mount NTFS and stuff...
Of course, if you have physical access to any machine for long enough, it's compromised. There are BIOS password cracking/bypassing programs available for some BIOSes (at least there were, for DOS)
Past that you can always take out the hard drive, or insert another one as the first hard drive... This should work, x86 or not! (assuming you can get to the case, and open it. Locked cabinet, anyone?)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Get dadadodo (from jwz's page) and download some Katz stories. I've done just that a couple of times. The results are incomprehensible gibberish, but... well, what else is new? :)
He meant to be built the responses, between white and he said it seems
to browse but strangely, it may be young age: of geeks and revealing
for some prescient and the level visually and others who spot dangerous
movies and the New Era. As I just we expect hope it's the development
that. A Tomorrowland to design, and thought, with other: words; I've
come. If these parks are destroyed; once government announced it;
possible: for the rest Bible. Another nightmare, grisly Columbine
legacy; of Berners Lee has identified, and stock options, and Millenial
blabber about the Apple unveiled it a in its public or useless debate
under the computing trade offs.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
No, sorry, it's actually much worse.
:)
:)
:)
Win '98 doesn't really have administrative accounts. Accounts are all wrong. They might have some "Policies and profiles" stuff, but that's pretty flawed too. I routinely get around Windows "security", and even that usually involves continually taking out OS "features", until there isn't anything usable left.
I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone. The effort required to really secure a Win '95/'98 box generally isn't worth it, which is why Microsoft sells NT. (not that that's *so* much better, it has its own problems.
Simple exploits:
F5 or F8 to bypass or mess with boot sequence. Good to disable this, and put a BIOS password on your computer.
Ctrl-Esc before you're logged in: can still bring up the Task Manager!
Cancel the log in, if it asks you for one. Often still brings up Windows.
Ctrl-Alt-Del. 'nuff said.
On a "locked-down" Windows box, try to get a command prompt or shell window, so as to execute the commands you want to use. Alt-F3, I think, will often still bring up "Find". See if they disabled "Run", "My Computer", etc.
If you can get to a web browser, set--say--the app for telnet to C:\COMMAND.COM.
If you can get Macros running, in Word or Excel, I think SHELL("C:\COMMAND.COM") works in Word Basic, but you can look up the SHELL command in the help.
Originally, you could just shut down Windows '95, and then type in DOS commands--it just dropped you to a prompt, and left you in graphics mode, saying "It is now safe to shutdown your computer"! You could type in, say, "MODE CO80", get back to text mode, and play in DOS from there...
These are just the pretty obvious ones, of course there are more interesting ways to hack Windows, like copying/editing binaries to run other programs, this sometimes gets around that Policies & Profiles crap...
On UNIX:
Login:
Password:
Damn damn damn damn damn!
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.