Well, I can't get all the resolution I should for X out of "Express Graphics", but otherwise things are solid. MS junk works and so does Red Hat. I've got two of them loaded up in old boxes for next to no dollars. Most of the money was spent on getting 64MB of RAM (OK two years ago) and hard drives for each.
Microsoft stuff has given me problems, but that seems to be what Microsoft does to all machines. 95 blew up one box, but 98 fixed it, thanks M$. The other 95 box, I never added much software too still runs just fine. Other machines where I work had similar problems with 95 regardless of manufacturer, and a decent tech recomended 98 as a fix.
I've put Red Hat on both and have no complaints further than the poor video support mentioned earlier. I can't really remember, but I think that the sound works too.
The short story is that MediaGX has worked just fine for routine stuff. They used to run my FORTRAN, and gave me better performance than shared time elsewhere, despite the "poor" floating performance. Web browsing, word processing, and all that junk is OK. This was a big step up from my beloved 66MHz 486. Games, well I never tried out much of that but gammers generally demand more than routine.
Other people have written their praise of the MII, but that's not something I know about.
By the way,
Cyrix has a habit of over-hyping products
You mean those dancing dudes in aqua clean suits who prommise to deliver the whole infromation super something on a convor belt? Oh yeah, that's another company. He who fails to hype, fails. Caveat emptor.
According to the NYT article, the basis of their discovery was an elevated count from NaI detectors in the summer. Well, down at LSU's Nuclear Science center we've seen this too. Durring the summer the temperature of the sixty year old building goes up and so does the count rate from all of the scintilation equipment. Carefull correlation showed that most of the differnce was temperature related. It might be the phototubes. The article also says that the good folks outside of Rome have ruled this out, but I'd like to see some independent confirmation.
I'd also like to see their report, but their server did not respond. The average NaI detectors is the equivalent of a 486 in the computer world. I wonder if that's what their web server is. Must be slashdoted.
The modern feminist movement is bassed on the idea that all women should be indepenent of men. They talk of carreers as empowerment and freedom. Deconstructionist go as far as to say that all laws, mores and traditions that have ever existed were designed to maintian the superior position of men in society, and should be replaced by female created laws! Such notions are obviously based on distrust and hatred. They are also silly. No person is ever or ever has been independent.
Anita Borg has tried to influence the world by writing her article, just as I am. She also has some taint of man hate to argue that there are not enough women in technical fields and that the world is somehow unfair because of it. There must be some kind of male created barrier here! Little girls get shoved off the computer, that explains everything, she says. Right. Both her argument and goal are wrong.
Women should not be encouraged to enter demanding proffesions in equal numbers as men. Women have a much more important job, raising children, and most are beter suited to it than most men. Those women capable of other high achievments are just the women who should be reproduced. Raising kids and work are incompatible persuits. Hell, pregnancy and demanding jobs don't even mix well. But you could read about that in my other post if you follow the link in the first article.
Well, I don't think govenment was invented to protect me from corporations, or even snake oil vendors. Govenments are supposed to provide a civil and criminal law system, military defense, regulation of natural monopolies in the public interest, and maybe some good public works.
As it is the federal govenment is getting into much more, and the potential for abuse exists. Protectionism is a good example. This is where my tax dollars go toward keeping cheaper forgein goods from me so that my neigbor can make a profit. Corperations will abuse govenment power just like anyone else if it can. Still, govenments have a unique position to abuse. Ford does not demand 28% of my income, and GM won't send a goon squad to bust down my front door and haul me off to jail if I tell people not to buy their cars. The IRS will put me in jail if I tell people not to pay their income taxes. Their power is predicated on my not being able to fend for myself. I can, and so can you.
Other people have noted this, and so have I. People make good choices for themselves, and the world just won't work like these man hating feminsits want. THANKS for the coat tails!
Boys are wilder and more aggressive. So when there is computer time available, they will push the girls off. If teachers and parents don't do something about that, the girls won't fight back.
Citing the differences between the sexes is not a very good way to promote equality. Most women have life figured out, I wish these pundits would. Pushing women into high powered careers is a mistake.
Thomas Jefferson casually observed that savages put their women to the plow. How true! "Women's Lib" has enslaved a whole generation. Sure, it's nice in an abstract sense that a woman can now persue anything she might please, but it has not worked that way. The increased supply of labor has simply decreased it's worth, and now it's difficult for people to support themselves with a single income. Choice has become force, and we are all worse off for it.
Let's look at some of the costs of shipping the wife off to work. Childbirth among decent people has been put off and greatly reduced. Children recieve less attention, neighbors do not know each other, people eat junk food, and no one has time for anything including church. Weekends and nights are reserved for chores that ordinarilly would be done durring the day. Hell, single people have a hard time just meeting! They might have the time, but nothing is going on...not even church. This list can go on and on, the world is a complicated place and changes often bring about unentended consequenses.
The only winner has been the tax base, Married People are taxed higher than single pleople! How cool it was to be renting a 2 bedroom apartment, driving a 30 year old car but taxed at 28%, like a Kendedy or something. But, I digress with more personal gripes.
OK, flame me up for the exceptions. Sure, my sister makes two to three thimes what her husband makes. Does he want to be Mr. Mom? No! Is my sister happy slaving away in the persuit of other peoples proffit? I'm not sure. But it comes down to that difference that Borg was good enough to point out. Civilized people recognize such differences and specialization. Ignoring such things is folly.
Most women figure out that the best thing for them to do is get married and raise kids. Who wants to grow old childless? Raising children is not exactly a low energy solution, and it's the most important thing society does. The responsiblilities of parenting conflict in a major way with "real" carrers. It's nice that women who fail to marry and concieve or adopt have the ability to support themselves in the career of their choice. Who's supprised that most women's first choice of career affects their choice of fallbacks? Why study rocket science, medicine, law or some other all consuming proffesion when something much fluffier will pay the bills? Who is supprised to learn that women who do not have to work for others might not? Oh, well people will learn.
Your faith in the supreem court is touching, but misguided. Do you really want to be governed by an apointed board? The power of the federal government, which controls more than 25% of the US GDP, is too great already. Concentrating more power in the hands of the already too powerful Judiciary will only increse the power of the already too powerful federal govenment.
Judicial legislation can be just as oppresive as any other kind of legislation, but it is always improper. Your rights are supposed to be protected by the constitution and bill of rights, which were created by the legislature! The interpretation of new laws against these documents by the supreme court is supposed to keep legislatures from oversteping their bounds. This is their proper role, and we should beware of expanding it.
That said, I'm not too worried about this. First, the courts can reasonbly frag the more sinister implications. Second, I'm moving away from comercial software as fast as I can, because certian (MICROSOFT) comercial software makers, already break their softare regularly.
Virginia does not intend for their personal computers to be searched and disabled at will by software manufacturers! Such things will never stand up.
People are not as stupid or evil as you think they are. If their box won't work, they will find another way to get things done. Microsoft will really kill itself if it goes around doing this.
Uniform rules for internet sales...That would be great if applied to vinyards.
Just wait, there are plenty of examples of Billy Blithe and friends acting vindictive. Kathleen Weilly being dissmised as a deluded liar, or Paula Jones being called someone from a trailer park who could be bought for one hundred dollars, or the early retirement of a prominent news caster back in 1996 stand out but there are plenty of smaller incedents. Think about all the ways old BB has used his office to gratify himself and realize this prank may be costly. Our man is not protected by widespread fame, and will be punished in one way or another.
A direct assault is not out of the question. Look at the dissapointing posts even here. Some moron just about quoted a Clinotnism, "just because something is easy, that does not make it right." [gramatical errors TM Billy Blithe Speach Writers INC.] If readers here can be fooled, our friend's case will be a blip that few normal people know about and most will agree with. This poor dude might find himself tried for computer tresspass or something else equally vauge and stupid, but burnt just the same. Good luck to him, the stage is set for him to fry.
Untill I master Debian's deselect by ftp, I get my updates from linuxcentral.com. For about ten bucks (two or three for the CD, the rest is shipping) you can have whatever distro you want delivered to your door. I feel more secure with that CD in the drawer, though it's rare I have to use it.
Red Hat and others like them are not kidding themselves. The service model has real potential. Think about all the money large institutions now spend keeping their networks of incompatible and closed source software interoperating. Think of the services that small businesses want, but could not afford. Much of that work could be done with a free operating system on commodity hardware. The folks at Red Hat will be happy to tell you how. The training their folks recieve will be useful long after Win9x and Win200x are forgoten because everyone owns the source. No one really tollerates a flake for long.
Correct me if I've missed something, but WebMonkey seems to have missed the market model. Open source and free software movement are signs of the maturation of the software proffesion. The odius things that Greenspan suggests would quickly ruin Slashdot and VA. The VA Linux folks are not so clueless.
Isn't the whole point of these new companies was to sell a service, not shrink wraped crapware? That is, they should be staffed by people competent at utilizing and modifying freely available software to get work done. The product was not supposed to be a shiny binary, but the knowledge to serve corporate needs.
Under this new model, there is every reason for Slashdot to continue unbiased. When you sell knowledge, you had better be impartial. When you open up your publishing for anyone in the world to slam you, you had better know what you are talking about. If VA starts to pull Microsoft type tricks, it will end up in Microsoft shape. Bad smells move at the speed of light here. Slashdot and VA could dissapear in a flicker if they act up.
Traditional engineering consultants have operated under this kind of model forever. The knowledge that is their product if freely available, some just have a better grasp of it than others. Mostly, they brag about what they do, rather than hinder others or mess with trade magazine contents to make themselves look better than they are.
There's no difference in any case. If Slashdot starts to blow, away we go. There will always be someplace to learn and share information, especially since the Slashdot source is available. If VA bites, I've got Debbian, Red Hat, Suse, and what have you.
This crap is just so much psycho babble from people with limited imaginations! Reject drug use? You bet! Self control is good. I'm sick to death of people trying to construct reasonable arguments to reject reason and promote self destruction.
True visions don't come from a pill, they come from life's experiences interpreted by an active and well functioning brain. Drugs can't do anything more than confuse, scramble, and destroy. Psychosis is not creativity. A psychotic dimwit is just a dimwit. A psychotic genius is a tragedy. Sure, it's good to oppose seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas. Creative people do this naturally, and intelligent creative people can recognize what they see when it happens.
Drug use is a wreckless and stupid thing. How many of you geniuses are neuro chemistry experts? Right. How many illegal drugs come with an assay from a reputable and well known firm? So, in general, you don't know what your using and you would not know what it is really doing to you even if you did know. All you do know is that you might have a nice time with your malfuntioning head. Great. This is not a casual recreation!
Society seeks to protect itself from intoxicated individuals. People who are out of their heads have a tendency to do vile things to themselves and others. It's generally against the law to intoxicated, and some substances are so intoxicating that they have been outlawed. People who break the law are criminals. Make a nuisance of yourself, and you will find yourself in the drunk tank. No one minds people who behave. Let's have a look at Plant thoughts:
For Plant, "the scrambling of perceptions" is itself the revelation -- the discovery that reality is "just a deeply contingent effect of the interaction between your environment and one of many possible neurochemical brain-states," that the bandwith and processing-speed of your cranial computer can be drastically expanded.
The Blue Screen of Death is just one of many possible states your Microsoft Operating System may have. In this state, your computer deeply thinks that it's flying. Sure it is. They world exists and most things can be proved with the help of reason. Get over it!
Free? That's a nice word, Hobbex. My mind is open but so are my eyes. There's plenty of wasted tallent out there, dancing with garbage bags on the side of the road. Heroin has directly killed several people I know. Other drugs have indirectlly killed a few more frinds, and left others chasing cars in the rain like dogs. They all thought they were so smart and most were. In the end, they'll take anything. They did not become Carl Segans, or even Bill Blithes. They became wastes. One friend of mine managed to get out of it. I'm proud of him and the people who encouraged him and never gave up. The rest, I miss. It all starts with bull shit notions of freedom and reality, and a little "harmless" this or that.
Wood is a wonderful material, but you can't have it. It's against the law to import nice woods to the US. Something about conserving the rainforests, promoting slash and burn agriculture instead of crafts and industry, it's all very confusing and reeks of protectionism. You will be happy with plastic, ha ha ha!
He imagined a society that decided to round up all the "usless" people so that only the creative and productive ones were left. The usless people incluced hair dressers, telephone sanitizers, etc. The creative people were wiped out by a virus spread by dirty telephones.
It's always good to try and understand an opposing viewpoint, but reasoning like this will never make sense to me.
Perhapse this will help. It's part belief, part practicality, and all perception and politics.
Higher Education is not a right, and states have the right and responsibility to determine who attends their University. Character and conduct are valid criteria for admision and continuance. When you live off the public, you have to please them. States are also legally responsible for the students they house, and co-ed dorms are a place where women can get raped. Think you've heard all of this before? Let me say it another way:
People who attend State Universities are as finacially independent as welfare momas, and the working world can get upset thinking that their money is funding one big party for their future boss. Really! Think truck drivers pay fuel taxes so that you can fuck off your homework with porn, pot, skirt chasing, and other nefarious activity? Nope! Don't srew the pooch!
Let's get real people, there was once a time when you could expect college graduates to be ladies and gentelmen. Full of balls, sure but not stupid or common. Looking around here, I see plenty of whining about rights to stuff that would even embarass Bill Clinton. Too big to be told what to do? Fine, go make your own way and do it on your own property! It's a free world, and you don't need higher education to live. The choice is always yours, live by the rules or by your own means.
Now for the rape bit. My wife spent her 4 years in a women's dorm and told me why she liked it. At first, she just liked the privacy during non visitation hours. Later she came to like the fact that no men were alowed to walk around unescorted by their date. Reputable men did not hang around the women's dorm anyway, and the rules made sure that she would not be bothered by anyone less than reputable. It was safe, and she felt secure and unpressured there. I'm tired of writing now, flame away!
Why, eyeball, are you one of the only people here to see that streaming video is a waste? I suppose that normal people have not bothered to read this story and it's comments.
It'd be nice to see some more people question clogging the net with TV. Adverts are so prevalent that I have not even bothered to plug the cable I got for my modem into my TV. Daytime TV is good at keeping convicted fellons calm in their cells. Who wants all of those gigabytes streaming around their email, or some other usefull resource?
Want to watch a movie? Go to the theater, or rent it.
Want a life? Save yourself, go outside, play with your friends, do something! Damn this snow! Damn it to hell, I say! Oh yeah sorry, I live in Louisiana and there is no snow.
My logs look cool, and I like the idea of very restricted connections. I've seen some config files that look like this, host accept I think, and I'll be looking into it.
It's great to see positive constructive comments, thanks AC!
I'd like some constructive pointers. OK, I installed Red Hat to serve as a gateway to my static IP cable modem. It may not have been the most elegant solution, but it was not very difficult. I thought that I was doing things right. Here's my ignorant little defense followed by two important questions.
The terms of my contract with ATT prohibit servers of any kind, so no servers of any kind were installed other than IPChains. It refuses telnet and ftp.
I'm tempted to put up a mail server and ftp. ATT can't keep their NT box up, so DNS and mail never work. I use a box on campus for those things, and could live without the mail. I have other workarounds for sharing files withmyself as well, but gee I kind of wanted those things when I signed up for a cable modem. Yuck! I'm waiting for things to change to where I could put up a web server too. If it gets as many hits as any of my other web pages, no one has anything to worry about. The crappy flashing adds here do more damage than I could do any other way.
I read man pages, books, slashdot, and insecure.org, but never thought someone would want to hack my little 486. The uplink is limited to something about as fast as an ordinary modem by the modem box itself.
Is it true? Other posters have repeated @home's claim that the problem is comming from the Windows world.
How can I tell? I've never seen too much utilization on the hub despite the constantlly flickering lights of the COM21 modem box. There seems to be much less activity under linux than there ever was under Windoze.
Actually, this kind of information can be very valuable to convinience food makers. Sure, your eating habits are not all that interesting, but profiles can be built that are usefull. Producers can learn not just how much of which of their products are selling, but they can also learn what people really enjoy, or what they can push. Such data, multiplied to national distribution frozen food size, can eliminate millions of dollars of waste. More information can also give a company a competitive advantage in a particular region, and this might force national producers to vary their wretchedlly homogenious products.
Mean times between purchase and consumption do really mean something. People eat food they like quickly, but stuff that disapoints will sit until the pantry is bare, or get thrown out. This kind of feed back is exactly what food companies want. It can be used to instantlly gauge formula changes, addvert effectiveness, and a whole host of other stuff perceptible only by grocers and retailers.
All of this has very little to do with me. I try to avoid convinience foods myself. My wife's cooking is much better than a frozen burrito. My cooking is not too bad either. One day, my wife will not have to work anymore and she will be able to cook even beter food. Oh yeah, my microwave has two knobs. One switches between cook and defrost. The other is a mechanical timer. It was the cheapest box on the shelf, and it has yet to disapoint me.
After some consideration, I've decided that I prefer the fake image. How many of those tits that I oggle are already silicone? Who needs sugury when you have the other silicon working for you. I think you like it beter too.
This is just the begining. In the end, people will be able to program their TV to give them the answers they want individually. OJ can be innocent. OJ can be in jail. Will you are I really know?
There are reasonable sources of information still out there, but TV has not been one of them for a while. TV news had degenerated into a chain of shallow reports that draw ratings, repeated until they are accepted as truth. But this seems to be what the people want. You are free to seek the truth, will you spend more than the average 15 minutes a day doing it?
Your right! Double speak is here and it's about as honest as Billy Blithe, aka William Jefferson Clinton. Here's another nice example:
The state constitution of Louisiana not only prohibits gambling, it calls for the state to actively seek and destroy it. Not even murder gets as much attention. Just the same, "Gameing" has been legalized. All sorts of cheap casinos have been opened, and the lottery is inescapable. In a democracy, people get the govenment that they deserve.
Remember that the public broadcasters are granted their liscence bassed on the great public service that they provide. I suppose that we will now get the TV we deserve.
Double vision is here too. Oh well, I don't watch much TV anyway.
Wait a minute! This could be used to make all the hot babes on TV NAKED! I might like this, give me the blue pill please.
Good question, bad punctuation. Good, bad, and ugly people asside, you might start to find an answer to this by reading Heroditus's account of this war. There are plenty of good translations around. It's difficult to see western culture through itself, and this is a very western document, but it's forgien enough to modern people to be instructive.
Greek concepts of citezenship, law, and philosopy in general were different, and their reapearance as a whole is questionable. It can be argued that the greeks invented proof and applied it to more than geometry. The Athenians compared the various forms of govenment they knew of and debated their merits in an open forum. They published their ideas for the sake of it. Criticism, reason, proof, publication, and the whole world view that promotes these things can all be found in ancient Greek literature. That literature would not exist if the Persians had accomplished their goal. Though the core of these thing can be found in most western cultures (languages that attribute responsibilty for actions unequivically, loose rule by weak monarchs, and constant energetic strugle) the world would be much poorer without the early flowering of the Greeks.
Heroditus has one interesting story that would not seem very forgien here. The Persian king heard about the Olympic games. When he learned to his suprise that there was no monetary prize and that the athletes were only competing for honor and recognition, he decided that his invasion would never work. This story seems far to western to have been true. Go read it for yourself!
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft stuff has given me problems, but that seems to be what Microsoft does to all machines. 95 blew up one box, but 98 fixed it, thanks M$. The other 95 box, I never added much software too still runs just fine. Other machines where I work had similar problems with 95 regardless of manufacturer, and a decent tech recomended 98 as a fix.
I've put Red Hat on both and have no complaints further than the poor video support mentioned earlier. I can't really remember, but I think that the sound works too.
The short story is that MediaGX has worked just fine for routine stuff. They used to run my FORTRAN, and gave me better performance than shared time elsewhere, despite the "poor" floating performance. Web browsing, word processing, and all that junk is OK. This was a big step up from my beloved 66MHz 486. Games, well I never tried out much of that but gammers generally demand more than routine.
Other people have written their praise of the MII, but that's not something I know about.
By the way,
Cyrix has a habit of over-hyping products
You mean those dancing dudes in aqua clean suits who prommise to deliver the whole infromation super something on a convor belt? Oh yeah, that's another company. He who fails to hype, fails. Caveat emptor.
I'd also like to see their report, but their server did not respond. The average NaI detectors is the equivalent of a 486 in the computer world. I wonder if that's what their web server is. Must be slashdoted.
Good luck to them.
Anita Borg has tried to influence the world by writing her article, just as I am. She also has some taint of man hate to argue that there are not enough women in technical fields and that the world is somehow unfair because of it. There must be some kind of male created barrier here! Little girls get shoved off the computer, that explains everything, she says. Right. Both her argument and goal are wrong.
Women should not be encouraged to enter demanding proffesions in equal numbers as men. Women have a much more important job, raising children, and most are beter suited to it than most men. Those women capable of other high achievments are just the women who should be reproduced. Raising kids and work are incompatible persuits. Hell, pregnancy and demanding jobs don't even mix well. But you could read about that in my other post if you follow the link in the first article.
As it is the federal govenment is getting into much more, and the potential for abuse exists. Protectionism is a good example. This is where my tax dollars go toward keeping cheaper forgein goods from me so that my neigbor can make a profit. Corperations will abuse govenment power just like anyone else if it can. Still, govenments have a unique position to abuse. Ford does not demand 28% of my income, and GM won't send a goon squad to bust down my front door and haul me off to jail if I tell people not to buy their cars. The IRS will put me in jail if I tell people not to pay their income taxes. Their power is predicated on my not being able to fend for myself. I can, and so can you.
REALITY
Boys are wilder and more aggressive. So when there is computer time available, they will push the girls off. If teachers and parents don't do something about that, the girls won't fight back.
Citing the differences between the sexes is not a very good way to promote equality. Most women have life figured out, I wish these pundits would. Pushing women into high powered careers is a mistake.
Thomas Jefferson casually observed that savages put their women to the plow. How true! "Women's Lib" has enslaved a whole generation. Sure, it's nice in an abstract sense that a woman can now persue anything she might please, but it has not worked that way. The increased supply of labor has simply decreased it's worth, and now it's difficult for people to support themselves with a single income. Choice has become force, and we are all worse off for it.
Let's look at some of the costs of shipping the wife off to work. Childbirth among decent people has been put off and greatly reduced. Children recieve less attention, neighbors do not know each other, people eat junk food, and no one has time for anything including church. Weekends and nights are reserved for chores that ordinarilly would be done durring the day. Hell, single people have a hard time just meeting! They might have the time, but nothing is going on...not even church. This list can go on and on, the world is a complicated place and changes often bring about unentended consequenses.
The only winner has been the tax base, Married People are taxed higher than single pleople! How cool it was to be renting a 2 bedroom apartment, driving a 30 year old car but taxed at 28%, like a Kendedy or something. But, I digress with more personal gripes.
OK, flame me up for the exceptions. Sure, my sister makes two to three thimes what her husband makes. Does he want to be Mr. Mom? No! Is my sister happy slaving away in the persuit of other peoples proffit? I'm not sure. But it comes down to that difference that Borg was good enough to point out. Civilized people recognize such differences and specialization. Ignoring such things is folly.
Most women figure out that the best thing for them to do is get married and raise kids. Who wants to grow old childless? Raising children is not exactly a low energy solution, and it's the most important thing society does. The responsiblilities of parenting conflict in a major way with "real" carrers. It's nice that women who fail to marry and concieve or adopt have the ability to support themselves in the career of their choice. Who's supprised that most women's first choice of career affects their choice of fallbacks? Why study rocket science, medicine, law or some other all consuming proffesion when something much fluffier will pay the bills? Who is supprised to learn that women who do not have to work for others might not? Oh, well people will learn.
Judicial legislation can be just as oppresive as any other kind of legislation, but it is always improper. Your rights are supposed to be protected by the constitution and bill of rights, which were created by the legislature! The interpretation of new laws against these documents by the supreme court is supposed to keep legislatures from oversteping their bounds. This is their proper role, and we should beware of expanding it.
That said, I'm not too worried about this. First, the courts can reasonbly frag the more sinister implications. Second, I'm moving away from comercial software as fast as I can, because certian (MICROSOFT) comercial software makers, already break their softare regularly.
Virginia does not intend for their personal computers to be searched and disabled at will by software manufacturers! Such things will never stand up.
People are not as stupid or evil as you think they are. If their box won't work, they will find another way to get things done. Microsoft will really kill itself if it goes around doing this.
Uniform rules for internet sales...That would be great if applied to vinyards.
A direct assault is not out of the question. Look at the dissapointing posts even here. Some moron just about quoted a Clinotnism, "just because something is easy, that does not make it right." [gramatical errors TM Billy Blithe Speach Writers INC.] If readers here can be fooled, our friend's case will be a blip that few normal people know about and most will agree with. This poor dude might find himself tried for computer tresspass or something else equally vauge and stupid, but burnt just the same. Good luck to him, the stage is set for him to fry.
Red Hat and others like them are not kidding themselves. The service model has real potential. Think about all the money large institutions now spend keeping their networks of incompatible and closed source software interoperating. Think of the services that small businesses want, but could not afford. Much of that work could be done with a free operating system on commodity hardware. The folks at Red Hat will be happy to tell you how. The training their folks recieve will be useful long after Win9x and Win200x are forgoten because everyone owns the source. No one really tollerates a flake for long.
Isn't the whole point of these new companies was to sell a service, not shrink wraped crapware? That is, they should be staffed by people competent at utilizing and modifying freely available software to get work done. The product was not supposed to be a shiny binary, but the knowledge to serve corporate needs.
Under this new model, there is every reason for Slashdot to continue unbiased. When you sell knowledge, you had better be impartial. When you open up your publishing for anyone in the world to slam you, you had better know what you are talking about. If VA starts to pull Microsoft type tricks, it will end up in Microsoft shape. Bad smells move at the speed of light here. Slashdot and VA could dissapear in a flicker if they act up.
Traditional engineering consultants have operated under this kind of model forever. The knowledge that is their product if freely available, some just have a better grasp of it than others. Mostly, they brag about what they do, rather than hinder others or mess with trade magazine contents to make themselves look better than they are.
There's no difference in any case. If Slashdot starts to blow, away we go. There will always be someplace to learn and share information, especially since the Slashdot source is available. If VA bites, I've got Debbian, Red Hat, Suse, and what have you.
Sounds like a nice idea.
This crap is just so much psycho babble from people with limited imaginations! Reject drug use? You bet! Self control is good. I'm sick to death of people trying to construct reasonable arguments to reject reason and promote self destruction.
True visions don't come from a pill, they come from life's experiences interpreted by an active and well functioning brain. Drugs can't do anything more than confuse, scramble, and destroy. Psychosis is not creativity. A psychotic dimwit is just a dimwit. A psychotic genius is a tragedy. Sure, it's good to oppose seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas. Creative people do this naturally, and intelligent creative people can recognize what they see when it happens.
Drug use is a wreckless and stupid thing. How many of you geniuses are neuro chemistry experts? Right. How many illegal drugs come with an assay from a reputable and well known firm? So, in general, you don't know what your using and you would not know what it is really doing to you even if you did know. All you do know is that you might have a nice time with your malfuntioning head. Great. This is not a casual recreation!
Society seeks to protect itself from intoxicated individuals. People who are out of their heads have a tendency to do vile things to themselves and others. It's generally against the law to intoxicated, and some substances are so intoxicating that they have been outlawed. People who break the law are criminals. Make a nuisance of yourself, and you will find yourself in the drunk tank. No one minds people who behave. Let's have a look at Plant thoughts:
For Plant, "the scrambling of perceptions" is itself the revelation -- the discovery that reality is "just a deeply contingent effect of the interaction between your environment and one of many possible neurochemical brain-states," that the bandwith and processing-speed of your cranial computer can be drastically expanded.
The Blue Screen of Death is just one of many possible states your Microsoft Operating System may have. In this state, your computer deeply thinks that it's flying. Sure it is. They world exists and most things can be proved with the help of reason. Get over it!
Free? That's a nice word, Hobbex. My mind is open but so are my eyes. There's plenty of wasted tallent out there, dancing with garbage bags on the side of the road. Heroin has directly killed several people I know. Other drugs have indirectlly killed a few more frinds, and left others chasing cars in the rain like dogs. They all thought they were so smart and most were. In the end, they'll take anything. They did not become Carl Segans, or even Bill Blithes. They became wastes. One friend of mine managed to get out of it. I'm proud of him and the people who encouraged him and never gave up. The rest, I miss. It all starts with bull shit notions of freedom and reality, and a little "harmless" this or that.
Get out while you still can. Go do something!
As a bed time story. He loved it.
see this American University Page as a start
He imagined a society that decided to round up all the "usless" people so that only the creative and productive ones were left. The usless people incluced hair dressers, telephone sanitizers, etc. The creative people were wiped out by a virus spread by dirty telephones.
Perhapse this will help. It's part belief, part practicality, and all perception and politics.
Higher Education is not a right, and states have the right and responsibility to determine who attends their University. Character and conduct are valid criteria for admision and continuance. When you live off the public, you have to please them. States are also legally responsible for the students they house, and co-ed dorms are a place where women can get raped. Think you've heard all of this before? Let me say it another way:
People who attend State Universities are as finacially independent as welfare momas, and the working world can get upset thinking that their money is funding one big party for their future boss. Really! Think truck drivers pay fuel taxes so that you can fuck off your homework with porn, pot, skirt chasing, and other nefarious activity? Nope! Don't srew the pooch!
Let's get real people, there was once a time when you could expect college graduates to be ladies and gentelmen. Full of balls, sure but not stupid or common. Looking around here, I see plenty of whining about rights to stuff that would even embarass Bill Clinton. Too big to be told what to do? Fine, go make your own way and do it on your own property! It's a free world, and you don't need higher education to live. The choice is always yours, live by the rules or by your own means.
Now for the rape bit. My wife spent her 4 years in a women's dorm and told me why she liked it. At first, she just liked the privacy during non visitation hours. Later she came to like the fact that no men were alowed to walk around unescorted by their date. Reputable men did not hang around the women's dorm anyway, and the rules made sure that she would not be bothered by anyone less than reputable. It was safe, and she felt secure and unpressured there. I'm tired of writing now, flame away!
It'd be nice to see some more people question clogging the net with TV. Adverts are so prevalent that I have not even bothered to plug the cable I got for my modem into my TV. Daytime TV is good at keeping convicted fellons calm in their cells. Who wants all of those gigabytes streaming around their email, or some other usefull resource?
Want to watch a movie? Go to the theater, or rent it.
Want a life? Save yourself, go outside, play with your friends, do something! Damn this snow! Damn it to hell, I say! Oh yeah sorry, I live in Louisiana and there is no snow.
It's great to see positive constructive comments, thanks AC!
The terms of my contract with ATT prohibit servers of any kind, so no servers of any kind were installed other than IPChains. It refuses telnet and ftp.
I'm tempted to put up a mail server and ftp. ATT can't keep their NT box up, so DNS and mail never work. I use a box on campus for those things, and could live without the mail. I have other workarounds for sharing files withmyself as well, but gee I kind of wanted those things when I signed up for a cable modem. Yuck! I'm waiting for things to change to where I could put up a web server too. If it gets as many hits as any of my other web pages, no one has anything to worry about. The crappy flashing adds here do more damage than I could do any other way.
I read man pages, books, slashdot, and insecure.org, but never thought someone would want to hack my little 486. The uplink is limited to something about as fast as an ordinary modem by the modem box itself.
Is it true? Other posters have repeated @home's claim that the problem is comming from the Windows world.
How can I tell? I've never seen too much utilization on the hub despite the constantlly flickering lights of the COM21 modem box. There seems to be much less activity under linux than there ever was under Windoze.
Mean times between purchase and consumption do really mean something. People eat food they like quickly, but stuff that disapoints will sit until the pantry is bare, or get thrown out. This kind of feed back is exactly what food companies want. It can be used to instantlly gauge formula changes, addvert effectiveness, and a whole host of other stuff perceptible only by grocers and retailers.
All of this has very little to do with me. I try to avoid convinience foods myself. My wife's cooking is much better than a frozen burrito. My cooking is not too bad either. One day, my wife will not have to work anymore and she will be able to cook even beter food. Oh yeah, my microwave has two knobs. One switches between cook and defrost. The other is a mechanical timer. It was the cheapest box on the shelf, and it has yet to disapoint me.
This is just the begining. In the end, people will be able to program their TV to give them the answers they want individually. OJ can be innocent. OJ can be in jail. Will you are I really know?
There are reasonable sources of information still out there, but TV has not been one of them for a while. TV news had degenerated into a chain of shallow reports that draw ratings, repeated until they are accepted as truth. But this seems to be what the people want. You are free to seek the truth, will you spend more than the average 15 minutes a day doing it?
The state constitution of Louisiana not only prohibits gambling, it calls for the state to actively seek and destroy it. Not even murder gets as much attention. Just the same, "Gameing" has been legalized. All sorts of cheap casinos have been opened, and the lottery is inescapable. In a democracy, people get the govenment that they deserve.
Remember that the public broadcasters are granted their liscence bassed on the great public service that they provide. I suppose that we will now get the TV we deserve.
Double vision is here too. Oh well, I don't watch much TV anyway.
Wait a minute! This could be used to make all the hot babes on TV NAKED! I might like this, give me the blue pill please.
Code that is freely available and constantly auditied or,
Code that is only available to two groups, the company selling it to you, and the bad guys who hacked the company selling it to you.
Grammer Nazi, fuck off!
Greek concepts of citezenship, law, and philosopy in general were different, and their reapearance as a whole is questionable. It can be argued that the greeks invented proof and applied it to more than geometry. The Athenians compared the various forms of govenment they knew of and debated their merits in an open forum. They published their ideas for the sake of it. Criticism, reason, proof, publication, and the whole world view that promotes these things can all be found in ancient Greek literature. That literature would not exist if the Persians had accomplished their goal. Though the core of these thing can be found in most western cultures (languages that attribute responsibilty for actions unequivically, loose rule by weak monarchs, and constant energetic strugle) the world would be much poorer without the early flowering of the Greeks.
Heroditus has one interesting story that would not seem very forgien here. The Persian king heard about the Olympic games. When he learned to his suprise that there was no monetary prize and that the athletes were only competing for honor and recognition, he decided that his invasion would never work. This story seems far to western to have been true. Go read it for yourself!
Without any glorious pictures to the contrary, I imagine something went wrong.