This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments
And we all know how much time slashdotters take to thoroughly research background material needed to create an informed and well-thought-out post.
"Hey 3l33td00d, check out this post! ClearChannel just patented short-range FM Radio!" "Wait a second, hax0rd00d, acording to this Morning Post article I read from the UK 19th century news, there was this guy back in the UK who made an FM radio from a coconut back in 1894!" "Dude! You're so gonna get mod points on that one!" "Yea, took three hours to find the thing, but +5 is so worth it!"
Everything was mechanical (excluding battery / ignition system). So, you took your car to a garage, the person who worked on the viechle was a mechanic. These guys were skilled at knowing how moving parts all worked together to make your car go.
After ~1990: cars have: engine, auto transmission, radiator, automatic distribution system, fuel injection, anti-lock breaking system, power steering...there's a lot more things that are electronically controled and regulated. But guess what? These things still break. We still have mechanics, because there are still a lot of things that are mechanical, but there are also "technicians" (and most mechanics have to be technicians as well) that know how to fix electronics. Even if the "systems" are more reliable than before, they still break. But at the same time, my radiator worked exactly like radiators 50 years ago.
Add more "systems" to computers, it's just more "systems" that admins have to administer to when they break.
that person wil be solely held responsible for all damages Sasser has caused, is causing and will cause in the future.
That kinda got me thinking...
Let's use good ol' Diebold for an example. Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Diebold makes a voting machine which just happens to have a flaw in the way it tallies the votes. Say someone actually goes to the voting booth and exploits that bug, someone wins by a landslide, and the exploit was found.
Sure, the guy would be found guilty of vote tampering and probably would be given jail time, but Diebold would hang as well for not producing a reliable voting machine which, in effect, ended up costing the state hundreds of thousands of dollars and plenty of man-hours finding out how to fix the bug or find another way to replace the Diebold machines.
But in this case, is Microsoft going to be held reliable for even a split-second? No. This kid's gonna fry, and everybody'll blame him. Why doesn't anyone every blame the product which allowed the virus to spread?
Doesn't anybody ever find it interesting that Windows has basically forced the world to accept its view of security, defined as "wait now, act later"?
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Poor tech staff. Let's see here, I've tried to reload the page three times, so that's four emails from me alone...multiply that by maybe 100,000 slashdot users...
Man, I know that the web server takes a bad enough beating, but I never knew we could slashdot the mailserver also!
So reverse engineering is not a problem in this case. In fact, it's not unlikely that AMD simply handed them the documentation.
But reverse engineering isn't "Handing them the document," as you put it. They have the right to produce a chip which uses the same instruction set (x86-64) within their chip, but they have to find a way to build it themselves...unless they reverse engineer the design of the chip itself...happens all the time...Z80 ring a bell? AMD did the exact same thing with the Intel 286, 386, and 486...took Intel's chip and reversed the design...until they finally came out with their own design of the 5x86 architecture, the K5. The K5 still used the x86 instruction set, but executed it with their own engineered design. So, maybe this is a good sign of Intel now being the follower instead of the leader.
Gurry also declined to say whether Microsoft's music store would be bundled into Windows or featured on its Windows Media playback software.
Well duh, he doesn't have to say it. Of course they're gonna advertise it for all it's worth.
If I was a dumb joe sixpak who just bought a new computer, and there's an icon on the desktop saying "Click here to receive free music from Microsoft MSTunes," then of course I'm gonna click on it.
You're going to open the next version of Media Player and find out that there will be a button to download music from MSTunes, sign up for a free trial of MSTunes, hear the latest and greatest hits, exclusively released on MSTunes, watch a pop concert live, exclusively for MSTunes customers, open up IE and find advertisements litering the MSN homepage advertising free music if you sign up for MSTunes, open up MSWord and have a chance to insert sound files into your documents (for whatever reason), exclusively from MSTunes...
They did it with MSN. They did it with IE. They did it with Media Player. Why ask if they're going to do it with their Tunes site?
Yes, IANAL, but I swear, I've read enough court documents, done a little legal research, and even know enough lawyers, how much research and writing they have to do, and how literate they really are to know that this sentence would NEVER be written by a lawyer:
13...."Rather than reporting both sides, you chose simply to report what you knew were false facts."
First, freedom of the press grants that ANY publication has the absolute freedom to be as one-sided as they wish to be. There's nothing illegal about that.
Second, if this is to be a legal report, you have to use legal wording. "Report what you knew were false facts" is too many words for "libel." You can use as many words as you like to describe the situation (all lawyers do...well, at least the expensive ones do), but you still have to include the legal word which all of this points to. Statement 13 does not.
Third, and this is the big one..."false facts." Either this lawyer didn't pass the fifth grade, or he's not a laywer. "False accusations" or "false statements" or "false claims" ALWAYS. "False facts" is a contradiction which legally would not pass through a court because no judge would understand it's meaning. Sure, it's implied that "false facts" means false claim, but a fact cannot be false in and of itself. No real lawyer would ever use that wording in a written document.
Raw Thrills' first volley is the upcoming counterterrorism two-player shooter "Target: Terror." "Target: Terror" asks players to save the Golden Gate Bridge, defend the Los Alamos Laboratory, and, somewhat controversially, prevent a hijacked airliner from crashing into the White House.
I used to be an avid arcade fan. 'Bout six years ago in my high-school prime, I'd always frequent the arcade. Stopped going for a couple reasons:
1) Pay per play was the shits...that was right around the time where they were coming out with the bloody "snowboarding" and "surfing" games that involved you standing on a board and moving it with your feet. Only cost $1.50 a play, and for a beginner to get 15 seconds of play on it not knowing how to get to the first checkpoint fast enough was enough to say bye-bye to those games. So many of them became 15 seconds of failure for too much freakin' money.
2) Games were no longer inventive. I'm sorry, but you can only make too many Street Fighters (I believe Capcom's cranked out 24 to date in the US alone) before it's no longer has flare. Speaking of which...
3) No more flare. There's no game now where you just have people surrounding the thing just begging for a glimpse of the wizard at play, wanting a glimpse at the levels which no human has ever touched before. When I was a kid, my gosh, there'd be 20 people crowded around the TMNT arcade machine just wanting a glimpse of what happened after you defeated Shreddar. There's none of that flare now.
The last game I remember that I loved playing and really got into was Area 51. I could get five minutes minimum of play for 33 cents (3 plays for a buck at my local arcade). I mean, the type of play was simple...but I really felt the desire to get further and further into it...that's what so many games are missing. Everybody thinks its about the big-fat graphics. It's not. You can get graphics now on a home console. It's about gameplay. Why did so many people throw gobs of quarters into Smash T.V. (a game that to this day refuses to let me get past the fifth arena)...it's because there's that inner desire to push deeper into the game, because the gameplay starts you off simple and then just becomes more and more and more challenging, so the point where your nerves themselves actually pulse with the game.
That's why I think his ideas might work. You want a game to be successful, the players want and need to get into it, and I'm sure there's plenty of Americans who would love to defend their country against terrorist badasses, just like before when everybody wanted to defend the world against alien badasses!
First, there was Google. Beautiful searching. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google cache. Beautiful, wonderful idea. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google image searches, and News, and it was all still good.
But adding free mail to it? I'm starting to worry that our at-one-time all-simple, all-powerful, all-effective search engine is becoming (possibly?) another Yahoo? They're already the most widely-used search engine (by far!), but why offer free mail? Leave that to the low-life such as Microsoft and Yahoo.
Don't get me wrong, Google's seemed to manage everything quite smoothly thus far, and is still a wonderful site to use for everything they've made (besides searching, I use image search and the news listings & searches quite often). But free mail is quite a big undertaking...will they be able to manage it and still stay as good as they are?
Owning the number would be more useful for a small-medium business. There is a service company in my area that has xxx-867-5309 and they can put it in their commercials knowing that people will remember it. For a business this is a very valuable thing.
Ya know, this number's gonna be phone-bombed like mad, and for $14,000 (current bid as of this posting)? I can only think of ONE BUSINESS that would want this many calls...
Phone-sex hotline.
"That's right, for a good time, you can FINALLY call Jenny at 867-5309!"
Obviously SCO has a lot of enemies out there right now, but it's always sad to watch someone stoop to this level.
Quick, disable your AV software, and get some Windows boxes on the internet!
You know, this reminds me of one time when an apartment building in our neighborhood was burning. Sure, you felt sorry to see it burn, and you felt sorry to see the people who lived there get hurt, but man, it's really fun to watch a building burn!
Really, there was one guy in the group who came out in a lawn chair with a six pack and watched it all happen. Raised his beer with a "Hell yea!" when the wooden frame structure collapsed.
Now it's time for a little disclaimer: The Saudi Internet filters are easy to defeat. I found at least a dozen anonymous surfing sites that let me view all the porn anyone could want in less than 30 minutes, and I have viewed more online porn while testing the Saudi content filters than I had looked at in my entire life before this experiment.
Dang, must be tough having his job. Now...the average reader might read this and think that Roblimo's lying just for the journalistic effect here, but read his statement again......and I have viewed more online porn while testing the Saudi content filters...
But children, where are other places where people can look at naaaaaaaaaaghty little pictures of fornicators?
Back eight years ago when I was starting my Algebra II class in high school, I went shopping with my parents to get what "I needed" to get...a TI-82. Mom looked at the calculator, looked at the price ($78 at the time) and said, "Pff...these things will probably be worth $20 in five years."
Course, the TI-83 (same one that they sold back when I was in high school, just a slight change in design) is priced now for $89, the same as it was back eight years ago. Or I could get the TI-83 SILVER (which is what the TI sales reps are REALLY trying to push on schools now...I know because I'm a math teacher now), which retails for $114 (just because it has 128k ROM and a bunch of crappy "ecucational" software...though anyone who knows anything about basic programming can muster up the same thing with TI's programming interface).
The point is, you're still getting pretty much the same calculator with almost all of the same abilities. Sure, you can crunch recursive functions, large matricies, and integrals faster, (plus you get more software, which is really not necessary for 95% of customers), but there's really little to justify the need for a SILVER edition when 1) you pay $25 more for 128K ROM and software, and 2) electronic components have gotten a lot cheaper over the last eight years but the prices of TI calculators have not ever gone down.
Reminded me of a NCTM conference I went to last year...there was a calculator dealer trying to sell some old calculators. There was a TI-92 there, brand-spanking new, for $60. Asked them why it was so darned cheap, and the saleswoman said that "TI now has the TI-92 plusses and discontinued the 92s, so there's no support from TI, just a 30-day warranty from us." Difference between the 92 and the 92-PLUS: 128K of ROM for additional software. Well, the 92-PLUSs retail for $189, but I really got almost all the functionality of a $189 calculator for $60!
Anyways, all these "new" calculators that TI puts out, I really just wave my hand at them and say, "Baa." I already have one, and there's absolutely no need to "upgrade"!
Men who drank 6 cups of coffee a day lowered their risk (of Type II Diabetes) by 50%, while womens risk dropped 30%. The release also includes audio discussions about the suprising findings.
Hmm...my doc said if I don't stop drinking pop, I'll develop Type II Diabetes, so I better figure out a way to prevent that from happening. Now, I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but hey! There's caffeine in Mountain Dew as well, and I love Mountain Dew! So, let's see here, five cans have as much caffeine as one cup of coffee......Therefore, it can logically be concluded that to avoid Type II Diabetes, I only need to drink 30 cans of Mountain Dew a day!
Piece of cake...and my doc says I'm drinking too much pop! Pfff...Shows what he says! I'm not drinking enough!
"CNN has an AP article about the next generation of up and coming search tools...One tool, Vivisimo, "is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on shelves in a way that makes sense.
USB "flash memory" sticks will become very popular, and applications will be released that can be stored on them to run on any computer without altering its settings.
These things are hard to part with once you get them. They're so nice to have, being able to carry around documents or what have you, but the only thing that stinks about them is that you can't just "hand them off" to others like you can do with floppy disks or CD-Rs. When something like that costs $40 or $50, it's hard to let it go.
The other disappointing thing is that, unlike Floppys / CDs, if your system goes to hell, the BIOS isn't equipped to automatically boot or mount a USB memory stick, leaving you shit outa luck if Windows is behaving badly (reminds me of the time I thought I could help someone install a service pack on an XP machine by keeping it on my memstick...turns out that he needed the service pack to help fix a problem he had with USB devices (downloaded and installed a USB 2.0 driver fix for his motherboard that needed XP SP1, which he didn't have) and it left us both high and dry until I got back and burned it onto CD...he didn't really want to wait four or five hours to download the 50MB file from his modem).
But you know, I'd LOVE to see a bootable pendrive option...it would be so sweet and easy to help someone fix their computer by just plugging your handy-dandy USB memstick right into a USB port and have everything right there at your fingertips, rather than carry around bulky CD-R media.
...and I'll be happy to give to you some kinda fish story. Yea, there was that time back in '83 where some buddies and I were sitting 'round our dorm room and thought, "Hey, how long's it been since someone's busted into Langley's database?" And so, we all tossed five bucks in a pot for the first to break in and find the SS# of the Director of the CIA...
Really, how are you gonna know that these stories are actually real?
Hey, it should be everyone's right to have a file server, workstation computer or three, television, dvd player, vcr, and don't forget that 30,000 watt stereo system, all runnin' 24-7! That's what we're paying the college for, right? I mean, if they can't handle the drain on their grid, that ain't my fault, cause I already them what they asked for, and that includes the electric bill, gosh darn it!
I've known them all, and honor students, giften musicians and (in Canada) Air/Army/Sea Cadets or Boy/Girl scouts get just as drunk and have just as much sex as every other teenager.
Then I guess you don't know me yet. Honest to goodness Eagle Scout, musician, and now I can add teacher to the list.
and you have to accept the fact that they WILL try drinking,
Tried it. Age 19. Didn't like it. Tried it again. Age 21. Liked it only for social occasions. Still haven't ever been drunk.
they WILL have sex
Nope. In a relationship right now, and I'm waiting. One of the things I learned from my family was to let love grow rather than just make it.
and chances are they will try drugs
Got me there. Cafeene, all the way.
These are just things kids do in high school, and your restrictivness and controlling attitude may actually encourage these things to happen.
Yea, and look where it got me now. Professional teacher in a foreign country. What a waste of a life, huh?
It looks like the weather will cooperate and we will have clear skies for most of the country.
You don't know what the weather here in Cairo's like! Forget lunar eclipses! The smog's always so thick, it takes the rain two days to seep through all of it before it finally hits the ground!
Maybe this is why Warner Brothers wanted a worldwide simultaneous release. They effectively mitigated their risk that the opinions of audiences in one country would adversely affect sales revenues in other countries.
Yea, well, I live in Egypt. Don't worry...they won't have a chance of getting my money.
Transmission & Serpentine Belt -- Operating System (I would argue that the Engine relates to the processor, since both do the work for the machine, but the transmission transfers the energy to the spinning of the wheels, as does the serpentine belt deliver the work to operate the AC, alternator, etc.)
Dashboard -- GUI
I would expect no one except specific embedded-device programmers to know what kind of firmware an air-intake computers run on. That's like expecting computer techs to know x86 hexadecimal op codes.
But even so, what scares me the most are everyday joes who are so afraid of asking for help that they automatically assume that they can figure out how to operate a computer on their own. It's like sticking a twelve-year-old in the drivers seat and thinking that driving a car is that simple. How do you know that your kid's not going to mistake your spedometer for the odometer or the tachometer? Or perhaps they think that the turning signal is supposed to turn the wheels, since it looks so much like a joystick...
You'd be amazed at how many people I've seen understand how to operate a touch-screen, but are clueless when it comes to what the little arrow on the desktop is supposed to do. I expect, when I sit down to help people, that they know how to operate their machine. I don't expect them to know what goes on inside the white box, but I expect them to be able to use the controls & understand the layout of the GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments
And we all know how much time slashdotters take to thoroughly research background material needed to create an informed and well-thought-out post.
"Hey 3l33td00d, check out this post! ClearChannel just patented short-range FM Radio!"
"Wait a second, hax0rd00d, acording to this Morning Post article I read from the UK 19th century news, there was this guy back in the UK who made an FM radio from a coconut back in 1894!"
"Dude! You're so gonna get mod points on that one!"
"Yea, took three hours to find the thing, but +5 is so worth it!"
With automated upgrade tools and self-updating software, will sysadmins be in such high demand that they enjoy today"
Oh brother. Alright, let's look at the history of cars:
Before ~1970: cars had: engine, manual transmission, radiator, distributor, carborator, master cylinder.
Everything was mechanical (excluding battery / ignition system). So, you took your car to a garage, the person who worked on the viechle was a mechanic. These guys were skilled at knowing how moving parts all worked together to make your car go.
After ~1990: cars have: engine, auto transmission, radiator, automatic distribution system, fuel injection, anti-lock breaking system, power steering...there's a lot more things that are electronically controled and regulated. But guess what? These things still break. We still have mechanics, because there are still a lot of things that are mechanical, but there are also "technicians" (and most mechanics have to be technicians as well) that know how to fix electronics. Even if the "systems" are more reliable than before, they still break. But at the same time, my radiator worked exactly like radiators 50 years ago.
Add more "systems" to computers, it's just more "systems" that admins have to administer to when they break.
that person wil be solely held responsible for all damages Sasser has caused, is causing and will cause in the future.
That kinda got me thinking...
Let's use good ol' Diebold for an example. Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Diebold makes a voting machine which just happens to have a flaw in the way it tallies the votes. Say someone actually goes to the voting booth and exploits that bug, someone wins by a landslide, and the exploit was found.
Sure, the guy would be found guilty of vote tampering and probably would be given jail time, but Diebold would hang as well for not producing a reliable voting machine which, in effect, ended up costing the state hundreds of thousands of dollars and plenty of man-hours finding out how to fix the bug or find another way to replace the Diebold machines.
But in this case, is Microsoft going to be held reliable for even a split-second? No. This kid's gonna fry, and everybody'll blame him. Why doesn't anyone every blame the product which allowed the virus to spread?
Doesn't anybody ever find it interesting that Windows has basically forced the world to accept its view of security, defined as "wait now, act later"?
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Poor tech staff. Let's see here, I've tried to reload the page three times, so that's four emails from me alone...multiply that by maybe 100,000 slashdot users...
Man, I know that the web server takes a bad enough beating, but I never knew we could slashdot the mailserver also!
Intel pulled an AMD.
So reverse engineering is not a problem in this case. In fact, it's not unlikely that AMD simply handed them the documentation.
But reverse engineering isn't "Handing them the document," as you put it. They have the right to produce a chip which uses the same instruction set (x86-64) within their chip, but they have to find a way to build it themselves...unless they reverse engineer the design of the chip itself...happens all the time...Z80 ring a bell? AMD did the exact same thing with the Intel 286, 386, and 486...took Intel's chip and reversed the design...until they finally came out with their own design of the 5x86 architecture, the K5. The K5 still used the x86 instruction set, but executed it with their own engineered design. So, maybe this is a good sign of Intel now being the follower instead of the leader.
Earth has acquired a so called quasi-moon, an asteroid: 2003 YN1, which will encircle us for the next couple of ears .
And exactly whose ears are we going to sacrifice to the asteroid god in order to have it here in our presence?
Gurry also declined to say whether Microsoft's music store would be bundled into Windows or featured on its Windows Media playback software.
Well duh, he doesn't have to say it. Of course they're gonna advertise it for all it's worth.
If I was a dumb joe sixpak who just bought a new computer, and there's an icon on the desktop saying "Click here to receive free music from Microsoft MSTunes," then of course I'm gonna click on it.
You're going to open the next version of Media Player and find out that there will be a button to download music from MSTunes, sign up for a free trial of MSTunes, hear the latest and greatest hits, exclusively released on MSTunes, watch a pop concert live, exclusively for MSTunes customers, open up IE and find advertisements litering the MSN homepage advertising free music if you sign up for MSTunes, open up MSWord and have a chance to insert sound files into your documents (for whatever reason), exclusively from MSTunes...
They did it with MSN. They did it with IE. They did it with Media Player. Why ask if they're going to do it with their Tunes site?
Yes, IANAL, but I swear, I've read enough court documents, done a little legal research, and even know enough lawyers, how much research and writing they have to do, and how literate they really are to know that this sentence would NEVER be written by a lawyer:
..."Rather than reporting both sides, you chose simply to report what you knew were false facts."
13.
First, freedom of the press grants that ANY publication has the absolute freedom to be as one-sided as they wish to be. There's nothing illegal about that.
Second, if this is to be a legal report, you have to use legal wording. "Report what you knew were false facts" is too many words for "libel." You can use as many words as you like to describe the situation (all lawyers do...well, at least the expensive ones do), but you still have to include the legal word which all of this points to. Statement 13 does not.
Third, and this is the big one..."false facts." Either this lawyer didn't pass the fifth grade, or he's not a laywer. "False accusations" or "false statements" or "false claims" ALWAYS. "False facts" is a contradiction which legally would not pass through a court because no judge would understand it's meaning. Sure, it's implied that "false facts" means false claim, but a fact cannot be false in and of itself. No real lawyer would ever use that wording in a written document.
This seems completely bogus.
Raw Thrills' first volley is the upcoming counterterrorism two-player shooter "Target: Terror." "Target: Terror" asks players to save the Golden Gate Bridge, defend the Los Alamos Laboratory, and, somewhat controversially, prevent a hijacked airliner from crashing into the White House.
I used to be an avid arcade fan. 'Bout six years ago in my high-school prime, I'd always frequent the arcade. Stopped going for a couple reasons:
1) Pay per play was the shits...that was right around the time where they were coming out with the bloody "snowboarding" and "surfing" games that involved you standing on a board and moving it with your feet. Only cost $1.50 a play, and for a beginner to get 15 seconds of play on it not knowing how to get to the first checkpoint fast enough was enough to say bye-bye to those games. So many of them became 15 seconds of failure for too much freakin' money.
2) Games were no longer inventive. I'm sorry, but you can only make too many Street Fighters (I believe Capcom's cranked out 24 to date in the US alone) before it's no longer has flare. Speaking of which...
3) No more flare. There's no game now where you just have people surrounding the thing just begging for a glimpse of the wizard at play, wanting a glimpse at the levels which no human has ever touched before. When I was a kid, my gosh, there'd be 20 people crowded around the TMNT arcade machine just wanting a glimpse of what happened after you defeated Shreddar. There's none of that flare now.
The last game I remember that I loved playing and really got into was Area 51. I could get five minutes minimum of play for 33 cents (3 plays for a buck at my local arcade). I mean, the type of play was simple...but I really felt the desire to get further and further into it...that's what so many games are missing. Everybody thinks its about the big-fat graphics. It's not. You can get graphics now on a home console. It's about gameplay. Why did so many people throw gobs of quarters into Smash T.V. (a game that to this day refuses to let me get past the fifth arena)...it's because there's that inner desire to push deeper into the game, because the gameplay starts you off simple and then just becomes more and more and more challenging, so the point where your nerves themselves actually pulse with the game.
That's why I think his ideas might work. You want a game to be successful, the players want and need to get into it, and I'm sure there's plenty of Americans who would love to defend their country against terrorist badasses, just like before when everybody wanted to defend the world against alien badasses!
It's a good read, even if you have to watch a ten second ad to get access.
You watch the ad. I'll post a comment about how I let it run in the background while I posted this comment.
Oh wait...darnit. It's a click-through. Oh well, still didn't read it though. Don't I feel like the consumers' hero.
Let's look at the facts:
First, there was Google. Beautiful searching. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google cache. Beautiful, wonderful idea. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google image searches, and News, and it was all still good.
But adding free mail to it? I'm starting to worry that our at-one-time all-simple, all-powerful, all-effective search engine is becoming (possibly?) another Yahoo? They're already the most widely-used search engine (by far!), but why offer free mail? Leave that to the low-life such as Microsoft and Yahoo.
Don't get me wrong, Google's seemed to manage everything quite smoothly thus far, and is still a wonderful site to use for everything they've made (besides searching, I use image search and the news listings & searches quite often). But free mail is quite a big undertaking...will they be able to manage it and still stay as good as they are?
Owning the number would be more useful for a small-medium business. There is a service company in my area that has xxx-867-5309 and they can put it in their commercials knowing that people will remember it. For a business this is a very valuable thing.
Ya know, this number's gonna be phone-bombed like mad, and for $14,000 (current bid as of this posting)? I can only think of ONE BUSINESS that would want this many calls...
Phone-sex hotline.
"That's right, for a good time, you can FINALLY call Jenny at 867-5309!"
Obviously SCO has a lot of enemies out there right now, but it's always sad to watch someone stoop to this level.
Quick, disable your AV software, and get some Windows boxes on the internet!
You know, this reminds me of one time when an apartment building in our neighborhood was burning. Sure, you felt sorry to see it burn, and you felt sorry to see the people who lived there get hurt, but man, it's really fun to watch a building burn!
Really, there was one guy in the group who came out in a lawn chair with a six pack and watched it all happen. Raised his beer with a "Hell yea!" when the wooden frame structure collapsed.
Now it's time for a little disclaimer: The Saudi Internet filters are easy to defeat. I found at least a dozen anonymous surfing sites that let me view all the porn anyone could want in less than 30 minutes, and I have viewed more online porn while testing the Saudi content filters than I had looked at in my entire life before this experiment.
...and I have viewed more online porn while testing the Saudi content filters...
Dang, must be tough having his job. Now...the average reader might read this and think that Roblimo's lying just for the journalistic effect here, but read his statement again...
But children, where are other places where people can look at naaaaaaaaaaghty little pictures of fornicators?
Back eight years ago when I was starting my Algebra II class in high school, I went shopping with my parents to get what "I needed" to get...a TI-82. Mom looked at the calculator, looked at the price ($78 at the time) and said, "Pff...these things will probably be worth $20 in five years."
Course, the TI-83 (same one that they sold back when I was in high school, just a slight change in design) is priced now for $89, the same as it was back eight years ago. Or I could get the TI-83 SILVER (which is what the TI sales reps are REALLY trying to push on schools now...I know because I'm a math teacher now), which retails for $114 (just because it has 128k ROM and a bunch of crappy "ecucational" software...though anyone who knows anything about basic programming can muster up the same thing with TI's programming interface).
The point is, you're still getting pretty much the same calculator with almost all of the same abilities. Sure, you can crunch recursive functions, large matricies, and integrals faster, (plus you get more software, which is really not necessary for 95% of customers), but there's really little to justify the need for a SILVER edition when 1) you pay $25 more for 128K ROM and software, and 2) electronic components have gotten a lot cheaper over the last eight years but the prices of TI calculators have not ever gone down.
Reminded me of a NCTM conference I went to last year...there was a calculator dealer trying to sell some old calculators. There was a TI-92 there, brand-spanking new, for $60. Asked them why it was so darned cheap, and the saleswoman said that "TI now has the TI-92 plusses and discontinued the 92s, so there's no support from TI, just a 30-day warranty from us." Difference between the 92 and the 92-PLUS: 128K of ROM for additional software. Well, the 92-PLUSs retail for $189, but I really got almost all the functionality of a $189 calculator for $60!
Anyways, all these "new" calculators that TI puts out, I really just wave my hand at them and say, "Baa." I already have one, and there's absolutely no need to "upgrade"!
Men who drank 6 cups of coffee a day lowered their risk (of Type II Diabetes) by 50%, while womens risk dropped 30%. The release also includes audio discussions about the suprising findings.
...Therefore, it can logically be concluded that to avoid Type II Diabetes, I only need to drink 30 cans of Mountain Dew a day!
Hmm...my doc said if I don't stop drinking pop, I'll develop Type II Diabetes, so I better figure out a way to prevent that from happening. Now, I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but hey! There's caffeine in Mountain Dew as well, and I love Mountain Dew! So, let's see here, five cans have as much caffeine as one cup of coffee...
Piece of cake...and my doc says I'm drinking too much pop! Pfff...Shows what he says! I'm not drinking enough!
"CNN has an AP article about the next generation of up and coming search tools...One tool, Vivisimo, "is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on shelves in a way that makes sense.
Hmm...faster search engine...leads to...
More and faster Pr0n!!!
Why else would anybody bother to make it better?
USB "flash memory" sticks will become very popular, and applications will be released that can be stored on them to run on any computer without altering its settings.
These things are hard to part with once you get them. They're so nice to have, being able to carry around documents or what have you, but the only thing that stinks about them is that you can't just "hand them off" to others like you can do with floppy disks or CD-Rs. When something like that costs $40 or $50, it's hard to let it go.
The other disappointing thing is that, unlike Floppys / CDs, if your system goes to hell, the BIOS isn't equipped to automatically boot or mount a USB memory stick, leaving you shit outa luck if Windows is behaving badly (reminds me of the time I thought I could help someone install a service pack on an XP machine by keeping it on my memstick...turns out that he needed the service pack to help fix a problem he had with USB devices (downloaded and installed a USB 2.0 driver fix for his motherboard that needed XP SP1, which he didn't have) and it left us both high and dry until I got back and burned it onto CD...he didn't really want to wait four or five hours to download the 50MB file from his modem).
But you know, I'd LOVE to see a bootable pendrive option...it would be so sweet and easy to help someone fix their computer by just plugging your handy-dandy USB memstick right into a USB port and have everything right there at your fingertips, rather than carry around bulky CD-R media.
...and I'll be happy to give to you some kinda fish story. Yea, there was that time back in '83 where some buddies and I were sitting 'round our dorm room and thought, "Hey, how long's it been since someone's busted into Langley's database?" And so, we all tossed five bucks in a pot for the first to break in and find the SS# of the Director of the CIA...
Really, how are you gonna know that these stories are actually real?
If he could choose, who would Saddam really wish he was captured by?
a. Americans
b. British
c. Iraqi police
d. Russians
e. Canadians
f. the French
g. CowboyNeal
Hey, it should be everyone's right to have a file server, workstation computer or three, television, dvd player, vcr, and don't forget that 30,000 watt stereo system, all runnin' 24-7! That's what we're paying the college for, right? I mean, if they can't handle the drain on their grid, that ain't my fault, cause I already them what they asked for, and that includes the electric bill, gosh darn it!
I've known them all, and honor students, giften musicians and (in Canada) Air/Army/Sea Cadets or Boy/Girl scouts get just as drunk and have just as much sex as every other teenager.
Then I guess you don't know me yet. Honest to goodness Eagle Scout, musician, and now I can add teacher to the list.
and you have to accept the fact that they WILL try drinking,
Tried it. Age 19. Didn't like it.
Tried it again. Age 21. Liked it only for social occasions.
Still haven't ever been drunk.
they WILL have sex
Nope. In a relationship right now, and I'm waiting. One of the things I learned from my family was to let love grow rather than just make it.
and chances are they will try drugs
Got me there. Cafeene, all the way.
These are just things kids do in high school, and your restrictivness and controlling attitude may actually encourage these things to happen.
Yea, and look where it got me now. Professional teacher in a foreign country. What a waste of a life, huh?
It looks like the weather will cooperate and we will have clear skies for most of the country.
You don't know what the weather here in Cairo's like! Forget lunar eclipses! The smog's always so thick, it takes the rain two days to seep through all of it before it finally hits the ground!
Maybe this is why Warner Brothers wanted a worldwide simultaneous release. They effectively mitigated their risk that the opinions of audiences in one country would adversely affect sales revenues in other countries.
Yea, well, I live in Egypt. Don't worry...they won't have a chance of getting my money.
How many drivers know what OS runs their engine control computer? Even tho' they spent their money buying the machine.
If you want to relate a car to a computer, the best analogy is this:
Steering Wheel, Accelerator, & Brake -- Keyboard & Mouse
Transmission & Serpentine Belt -- Operating System
(I would argue that the Engine relates to the processor, since both do the work for the machine, but the transmission transfers the energy to the spinning of the wheels, as does the serpentine belt deliver the work to operate the AC, alternator, etc.)
Dashboard -- GUI
I would expect no one except specific embedded-device programmers to know what kind of firmware an air-intake computers run on. That's like expecting computer techs to know x86 hexadecimal op codes.
But even so, what scares me the most are everyday joes who are so afraid of asking for help that they automatically assume that they can figure out how to operate a computer on their own. It's like sticking a twelve-year-old in the drivers seat and thinking that driving a car is that simple. How do you know that your kid's not going to mistake your spedometer for the odometer or the tachometer? Or perhaps they think that the turning signal is supposed to turn the wheels, since it looks so much like a joystick...
You'd be amazed at how many people I've seen understand how to operate a touch-screen, but are clueless when it comes to what the little arrow on the desktop is supposed to do. I expect, when I sit down to help people, that they know how to operate their machine. I don't expect them to know what goes on inside the white box, but I expect them to be able to use the controls & understand the layout of the GUI.