This might be a LONG shot, but maybe John will notice this question and find some way to respond...
We average between 200-500 intrusion attempts against one of our systems AN HOUR, and every time I piss another segment of the cyber-population off, that number skyrockets. We probably have one of the most targeted networks on the internet today, and we take full advantage of that.
So, for an actual question that might be worthwhile, what kind of system are you running that can take that kind of heat? Would you care about actually explaining how you can piss people off and yet still build a large enough shield to keep them off your backs?
Through some freak incidents, one lone, single man in the country of Turkey suddenly is becomming known throughout the world!
Doesn't anyone understand what in the world is going on? I mean, it's like someone just started spinning a globe, and stopped it with his finger, and that finger landed on TURKEY, of all countries!!!
...and the rest, they say, is history. Bada bing, bada bang, bada boom, this guy's famous. All because someone decided to "tinker" with his web page.
And what next? Well, let's use the all-popular dancing baby AVI as an example. A cute little AVI file, distribued by E-Mail, suddenly became a symbol of the ever growing internet and is received fame as far as appearing on T-Shirts and dancing with Calista Flockhart on Ally McBeal!
So, what's in store for this guy? I'm thinking something along the lines of his own TV show titled "Me Kiss!" and receiving a place in the Oxford dictionary with his picture next to the phrase "Me Kiss," meaning "A kind greeting, originating from Turkey."
...like it's a return to McCarthyism! Just listen to what he has to say:
"Any "identification" between the values of the open-source community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a vicious and cynical fraud..."
"I am certain that even that minority would not care to be associated with the totalitarian and murderous government of Communist China..."
"But the prospect of being "identified" with the bloody-handed gerontocrats behind the Tianamen Squaremassacre would be, I believe, genuinely revolting and insulting to all of us."
Apparently, he's not blowing steam at all at Linux here, but rather, as he put it, "Open-Source Communism." Truth be told, he looks like just another Communist hater, caught "Red Handed."
Here's the annoying thing about Microsoft appealing (and the annoying thing about our judicial system in general):
The ruling took place in a Federal District Court. If Microsoft were to appeal (which is pretty much guaranteed at this point), it would go to the District Appellate court, who then decides if the case has enough power to be appealed to the next level court. I forget what it's called, but there is one other, higher-level federal court before the Supreme Court that Microsoft could appeal to.
But the pain of the matter is this: Microsft (and their billion-dollar lawyers) could drag this case on for AT LEAST another eight months. Minimum. Truthfully, I wouldn't be suprised if it takes at least another year. The time it takes for preparation for an appealate hearing takes months. If the Appellate court allows them to appeal, that's another year, and who knows how long from there.
Of course, by that time, the case would become meaningless, since Linux would take over the desktop world by then!:)
First of all, I am employed by Coca Cola, so hopefully, that will add a little bit of credibility (that and I'm not posting this as Anonymous Coward)...
We get 20 oz. drinks for $.35 in the plant. Cheap? Of course. Why? Cause the plant only has to consider cost of production rather than cost of production, cost of sales, cost of advertising, cost of hiring guys to move the stuff around in the warehouse, and cost of guys to put the pop out in the store shelves (or in pop machines).
Now, of course, the price varies throughout the nation, a store pays between $.65 and $.70 per 20oz. bottle of pop from the plant. That's why the prices climb.
And the other reason why prices climb? It's because of SUPPLY AND DEMAND. WELCOME TO THE ECONOMY PEOPLE! We've been living in a world like this for HOW MANY YEARS? I mean, come on! We just saw memory prices shoot up this last quarter. Why? Take a wild guess (either that, or read the archives of/.).
No, it's not going to cost an arm and a leg for a bottle of Coke on a 100+ degree day. If the average cost for the machine is $.85 per 20oz, it's more like $.75 if it was less than 55 degrees, and about $1.00 if it was over 90 degrees.
Oh, and now for my personal opinion, yes, I think it's annoying, although this also means you could go out on a cool night to your nearest Coke machine and actually buy Coke CHEAPER than Pepsi!
Happen to be short on cash? Has your country, once thriving with entrepreneurs coming in to take out your one and only resource, now been stripped bare of it's past glory?
Then come join the thriving business of MONEY LAUNDERING, or, as we like to call it, Helping out the less fortunate! Come join the hundreds of other third-world countries as they too pick up on what the "economy" is REALLY about! Within months you too will be lying in mountains of money, smoking your Cuban Cigars, surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis!
What's that? You say the rest of the country is angry that you're holding on to all the profits while they're still poor? Well, if you respond to this add within the next 30 minutes, we'll throw in, ABSOLUTELY FREE, a pair of genuine, bona-fide mafia hitmen, voilin cases and all! Now, you too can sit back and relax to endeavor in your mounds of cash while you hear sounds of bones breaking and screams of pain from the next room!
Supplies are limited, order today!
Is this going to be the wave of the future? Once we've sucked the Earth dry of it's resources, we'll move toward starting other business practices that aren't so "legal?"
Linux still would have existed even if didn't exist as open source, but would it receive the praise that we give it today? Hardly. It would only be bought and sold by companies who truely found a use for bringing back a dinky 386 to serve as a DNS server or some other light-server duty.
Remember, Linus, when he developed Linux, actually distributed the source code to MIT and a few other places for them to aid in the developement, and it existed that way for a little more than a year before they released the first stable kernel. Rather than paying people to sit in a room and do something for the rest of their life which bored them to death, he utilized people who sat in a room and did nothing but program all day who would undergo a project like this for FREE (although paying them would have greatly helped improve Finland's unemployment rate)! The reason why Linux is so popular in the first place is because anyone and everyone who knew what an 'if...fi' statement was was either writing the source code of Linux or improving the programs which came with Linux.
If it wasn't for Joe Schmoe in some part of the world, I wouldn't be able to utilize my SB16 to play MP3s, and I'd have to plead to the company to use their time to create a driver for me! That's the true beauty of Linux and the reason why so many people love it, is because so many people created it. And if someone doesn't like it, they can make the changes theirself rather than e-mail the company (one in a million) to ask if they could change something in their next version!
If this would be fully developed, we would be able to control system administration through playing a souped up game of DOOM! Do you know what this means?
An eight year old could become the next system administrator of a company!
CEO: "Johnny, my computer locked up again, what do I do?"
Administrator: "Hold on a sec...gotta whip out my BFG for this one...DIE YOU ALIEN SCUM!!!"
There's a very simple phrase I was told by someone when I tried to pursuade them to go with Linux:
KISS
(Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Although I took the time to learn Linux through setting it up to do all the things my personal computer could do (connect to the internet, word processing, playing sound and MP3s, etc), the one thing I learned is that even if you set up a simple KDE desktop with what's needed, you'll REALLY intimidate someone if you set up something as complicated as Linux (that is, compared to Win9x).
Win9x would do the trick, but in all honesty, I would have gotten him a Mac. Simple, reliable, and not the least bit intimidating for older aged people.
They're right...it doesn't require any difficult math skills, except for counting.
I wouldn't have gotten this myself, but seeing how the rest of./ has developed it this far, I might as well carry out the explination...
Taking a look at the first two lines: 038-097-34-64-242-335-51-377-183-168 038-097-34-64-380-330-115-289-273-189-56
Notice, first of all, the first four numbers repeat themselves. Second of all, see how only the first number is a three digit number with only two significant digits (a zero before two digits), while the other numbers don't begin with a 0. I was suspicious about this, and with the./ users recognizing these digits as asin numbers, the rest of it falls into place.
There's a famous cryptogrophy code out there, I forget the name of it, but the story is this: someone discovered it (it came in three pieces), and supposedly cracked the second piece, which explained the first and third pieces of the code would tell him where some rich treasure was. The second piece of the code was coded by using numerical values standing for the number of letters into a document, in this case the document (he claimed he discovered) was the US Constitution (so, the 10th letter in "We the people of the United States..." would be 'l').
Since no numberical values repeat outside of the ASIN values, I believe it's logical to conclude that it's not a letter assigned to a number (this being emphasized by the clue Amazon left us saying that it requires no difficult math skills).
Since we have concluded that the first four numbers correspond to the ASIN values of books, it's logical to conclude that each line corresponds to something from that book, and this is supported by Amazon repeating the digits "038-097-34-64" in the first and second line, rather than just sticking in a whole string of numbers after it calls the ASIN value. Also, it's fair to believe (but might be false) that each line corresponds to a word rather than looking for an ending or spacing character.
And from here on, I believe the solution lies in grabbing the books from the shelf. So, whoever is the fastest and most determined at this can do one of two things:
1) Count characters into the book from the beginning corresponding to the numbers in the code after the ASIN value, but I think this is unrealistic because of all the prologues, copyrights, etc. and the annoyance of counting in the first place, or
2) Think the characters correspond to specific pages, and try and figure out what common character to use on each page (first character, last, etc.)
I know this is quite lengthy, but for anyone who's less lazy than I am and doesn't mind running histerically through Barnes and Noble or some library searching for these books, I think this is the sollution for a bunch of free books.
Hasn't anyone ever been looking upon what Microsoft has been doing ever since it started as a company?
Juln hit it on the dot: they don't create new and wonderful things! They steal ideas!
As Juln said, DOS was bought for a steal. It was never created by Microsoft.
The interent? Back four years ago, Microsoft NEVER REGUARDED the internet as a growing innovation! In fact, they were focusing on the technology of CD-ROM drives! It wasn't until three years ago that they reguarded the internet as a valuable commodity in the growing computer world! What did they do then? They put out a browser and drilled it into their operating system so that everyone in the world who used Windows used the Windows browser (doesn't sound like innovation to me...rather, shrewd business practices)!
Even Windows itself was just a program stolen from Apple (which in fact, stole it from Xerox, but that's beside the point)! The point is, Microsoft doesn't create, it seeks, finds, and conquers.
Oh, and one other thing...
"What we do is create tools like a word processor that lets people express their ideas and we're not at all involved in how they choose to use it."
That'll go right next to my "640K of memory aught to be enough for everybody." quote!
Slashdot Mirror
This might be a LONG shot, but maybe John will notice this question and find some way to respond...
We average between 200-500 intrusion attempts against one of our systems AN HOUR, and every time I piss another segment of the cyber-population off, that number skyrockets. We probably have one of the most targeted networks on the internet today, and we take full advantage of that.
So, for an actual question that might be worthwhile, what kind of system are you running that can take that kind of heat? Would you care about actually explaining how you can piss people off and yet still build a large enough shield to keep them off your backs?
Through some freak incidents, one lone, single man in the country of Turkey suddenly is becomming known throughout the world!
Doesn't anyone understand what in the world is going on? I mean, it's like someone just started spinning a globe, and stopped it with his finger, and that finger landed on TURKEY, of all countries!!!
...and the rest, they say, is history. Bada bing, bada bang, bada boom, this guy's famous. All because someone decided to "tinker" with his web page.
And what next? Well, let's use the all-popular dancing baby AVI as an example. A cute little AVI file, distribued by E-Mail, suddenly became a symbol of the ever growing internet and is received fame as far as appearing on T-Shirts and dancing with Calista Flockhart on Ally McBeal!
So, what's in store for this guy? I'm thinking something along the lines of his own TV show titled "Me Kiss!" and receiving a place in the Oxford dictionary with his picture next to the phrase "Me Kiss," meaning "A kind greeting, originating from Turkey."
...like it's a return to McCarthyism! Just listen to what he has to say:
"Any "identification" between the values of the open-source community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a vicious and cynical fraud..."
"I am certain that even that minority would
not care to be associated with the totalitarian and murderous government of Communist China..."
"But the prospect of being "identified" with the bloody-handed gerontocrats behind the Tianamen Squaremassacre would be, I believe, genuinely revolting and insulting to all of us."
Apparently, he's not blowing steam at all at Linux here, but rather, as he put it, "Open-Source Communism." Truth be told, he looks like just another Communist hater, caught "Red Handed."
Here's the annoying thing about Microsoft appealing (and the annoying thing about our judicial system in general):
:)
The ruling took place in a Federal District Court. If Microsoft were to appeal (which is pretty much guaranteed at this point), it would go to the District Appellate court, who then decides if the case has enough power to be appealed to the next level court. I forget what it's called, but there is one other, higher-level federal court before the Supreme Court that Microsoft could appeal to.
But the pain of the matter is this: Microsft (and their billion-dollar lawyers) could drag this case on for AT LEAST another eight months. Minimum. Truthfully, I wouldn't be suprised if it takes at least another year. The time it takes for preparation for an appealate hearing takes months. If the Appellate court allows them to appeal, that's another year, and who knows how long from there.
Of course, by that time, the case would become meaningless, since Linux would take over the desktop world by then!
First of all, I am employed by Coca Cola, so hopefully, that will add a little bit of credibility (that and I'm not posting this as Anonymous Coward)...
/.).
We get 20 oz. drinks for $.35 in the plant. Cheap? Of course. Why? Cause the plant only has to consider cost of production rather than cost of production, cost of sales, cost of advertising, cost of hiring guys to move the stuff around in the warehouse, and cost of guys to put the pop out in the store shelves (or in pop machines).
Now, of course, the price varies throughout the nation, a store pays between $.65 and $.70 per 20oz. bottle of pop from the plant. That's why the prices climb.
And the other reason why prices climb? It's because of SUPPLY AND DEMAND. WELCOME TO THE ECONOMY PEOPLE! We've been living in a world like this for HOW MANY YEARS? I mean, come on! We just saw memory prices shoot up this last quarter. Why? Take a wild guess (either that, or read the archives of
No, it's not going to cost an arm and a leg for a bottle of Coke on a 100+ degree day. If the average cost for the machine is $.85 per 20oz, it's more like $.75 if it was less than 55 degrees, and about $1.00 if it was over 90 degrees.
Oh, and now for my personal opinion, yes, I think it's annoying, although this also means you could go out on a cool night to your nearest Coke machine and actually buy Coke CHEAPER than Pepsi!
Happen to be short on cash? Has your country, once thriving with entrepreneurs coming in to take out your one and only resource, now been stripped bare of it's past glory?
Then come join the thriving business of MONEY LAUNDERING, or, as we like to call it, Helping out the less fortunate! Come join the hundreds of other third-world countries as they too pick up on what the "economy" is REALLY about! Within months you too will be lying in mountains of money, smoking your Cuban Cigars, surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis!
What's that? You say the rest of the country is angry that you're holding on to all the profits while they're still poor? Well, if you respond to this add within the next 30 minutes, we'll throw in, ABSOLUTELY FREE, a pair of genuine, bona-fide mafia hitmen, voilin cases and all! Now, you too can sit back and relax to endeavor in your mounds of cash while you hear sounds of bones breaking and screams of pain from the next room!
Supplies are limited, order today!
Is this going to be the wave of the future? Once we've sucked the Earth dry of it's resources, we'll move toward starting other business practices that aren't so "legal?"
Linux still would have existed even if didn't exist as open source, but would it receive the praise that we give it today? Hardly. It would only be bought and sold by companies who truely found a use for bringing back a dinky 386 to serve as a DNS server or some other light-server duty.
Remember, Linus, when he developed Linux, actually distributed the source code to MIT and a few other places for them to aid in the developement, and it existed that way for a little more than a year before they released the first stable kernel. Rather than paying people to sit in a room and do something for the rest of their life which bored them to death, he utilized people who sat in a room and did nothing but program all day who would undergo a project like this for FREE (although paying them would have greatly helped improve Finland's unemployment rate)! The reason why Linux is so popular in the first place is because anyone and everyone who knew what an 'if...fi' statement was was either writing the source code of Linux or improving the programs which came with Linux.
If it wasn't for Joe Schmoe in some part of the world, I wouldn't be able to utilize my SB16 to play MP3s, and I'd have to plead to the company to use their time to create a driver for me! That's the true beauty of Linux and the reason why so many people love it, is because so many people created it. And if someone doesn't like it, they can make the changes theirself rather than e-mail the company (one in a million) to ask if they could change something in their next version!
So let me get this straight...
If this would be fully developed, we would be able to control system administration through playing a souped up game of DOOM! Do you know what this means?
An eight year old could become the next system administrator of a company!
CEO: "Johnny, my computer locked up again, what do I do?"
Administrator: "Hold on a sec...gotta whip out my BFG for this one...DIE YOU ALIEN SCUM!!!"
There's a very simple phrase I was told by someone when I tried to pursuade them to go with Linux:
KISS
(Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Although I took the time to learn Linux through setting it up to do all the things my personal computer could do (connect to the internet, word processing, playing sound and MP3s, etc), the one thing I learned is that even if you set up a simple KDE desktop with what's needed, you'll REALLY intimidate someone if you set up something as complicated as Linux (that is, compared to Win9x).
Win9x would do the trick, but in all honesty, I would have gotten him a Mac. Simple, reliable, and not the least bit intimidating for older aged people.
...but darn, I'm just too lazy to act upon it.
./ has developed it this far, I might as well carry out the explination...
./ users recognizing these digits as asin numbers, the rest of it falls into place.
They're right...it doesn't require any difficult math skills, except for counting.
I wouldn't have gotten this myself, but seeing how the rest of
Taking a look at the first two lines:
038-097-34-64-242-335-51-377-183-168
038-097-34-64-380-330-115-289-273-189-56
Notice, first of all, the first four numbers repeat themselves. Second of all, see how only the first number is a three digit number with only two significant digits (a zero before two digits), while the other numbers don't begin with a 0. I was suspicious about this, and with the
There's a famous cryptogrophy code out there, I forget the name of it, but the story is this: someone discovered it (it came in three pieces), and supposedly cracked the second piece, which explained the first and third pieces of the code would tell him where some rich treasure was. The second piece of the code was coded by using numerical values standing for the number of letters into a document, in this case the document (he claimed he discovered) was the US Constitution (so, the 10th letter in "We the people of the United States..." would be 'l').
Since no numberical values repeat outside of the ASIN values, I believe it's logical to conclude that it's not a letter assigned to a number (this being emphasized by the clue Amazon left us saying that it requires no difficult math skills).
Since we have concluded that the first four numbers correspond to the ASIN values of books, it's logical to conclude that each line corresponds to something from that book, and this is supported by Amazon repeating the digits "038-097-34-64" in the first and second line, rather than just sticking in a whole string of numbers after it calls the ASIN value. Also, it's fair to believe (but might be false) that each line corresponds to a word rather than looking for an ending or spacing character.
And from here on, I believe the solution lies in grabbing the books from the shelf. So, whoever is the fastest and most determined at this can do one of two things:
1) Count characters into the book from the beginning corresponding to the numbers in the code after the ASIN value, but I think this is unrealistic because of all the prologues, copyrights, etc. and the annoyance of counting in the first place, or
2) Think the characters correspond to specific pages, and try and figure out what common character to use on each page (first character, last, etc.)
I know this is quite lengthy, but for anyone who's less lazy than I am and doesn't mind running histerically through Barnes and Noble or some library searching for these books, I think this is the sollution for a bunch of free books.
Hasn't anyone ever been looking upon what Microsoft has been doing ever since it started as a company?
Juln hit it on the dot: they don't create new and wonderful things! They steal ideas!
As Juln said, DOS was bought for a steal. It was never created by Microsoft.
The interent? Back four years ago, Microsoft NEVER REGUARDED the internet as a growing innovation! In fact, they were focusing on the technology of CD-ROM drives! It wasn't until three years ago that they reguarded the internet as a valuable commodity in the growing computer world! What did they do then? They put out a browser and drilled it into their operating system so that everyone in the world who used Windows used the Windows browser (doesn't sound like innovation to me...rather, shrewd business practices)!
Even Windows itself was just a program stolen from Apple (which in fact, stole it from Xerox, but that's beside the point)! The point is, Microsoft doesn't create, it seeks, finds, and conquers.
Oh, and one other thing...
"What we do is create tools like a word processor that lets people express their ideas and we're not at all involved in how they choose to use it."
That'll go right next to my "640K of memory aught to be enough for everybody." quote!