The problem might not be the use of the internet for information, so much as how people are going about getting and using that information. Just like one wouldn't trust some random person off the street or even some unknown doctor-like person in a white coat walking down the hall at the hospital, one can't blindly trust information on the internet. Getting a second opinion, (and a third, and a fourth) might help people to get a better idea of what's truly happening. They should still talk to a doctor, rather than relying solely on their internet diagnosis, but they might be able to at least get a general idea of what might be wrong. Using medical information on the web as one's only source is irresponsible; it should be common sense to get a balanced opinion and also to see a real medical professional.
I'm glad you brought up Portal. It is truly a game which is a story. While I love the gameplay, physics and so on in the game, what really takes the cake (sorry, sorry) is the dialogue. With only one spoken character in the game, Portal has many literary elements. Just recently in English class we were actually discussing the literary aspects of Portal. It has a plot (not just random shooting at things), it has characters with developing personalities, foreshadowing (you will be baked, and there will be cake), a motif (the cake is a lie!), beginning middle and end, etc. I wish more games were like this - Portal is fun to play, but the story is what makes it the excellent game that it is.
While it would not be the most secure thing to do, it would be possible to have the computers autologon, then put the command to lock the computer as a startup command, so that when the worker arrived they could just unlock the computer and be logged on. I'm sure there would be many problems with this solution, but it is a possibility which could be developed further.
If my employer *really* wants me to start working as soon as I get in, he can pay someone to go through the office at 8:45am and start turning the computers on before I clock in.
While your suggestion was obviously impractical the way you framed it, most computers have an option in the BIOS to power on automatically at a certain time every day. All of the computers in the office could be set to turn on at 8:45, and then they'd be all ready by the time the workers arrived. Better yet, they could be staggered so that they wouldn't all be swamping the network at once. Groups of computers could turn on at 5 minute intervals. You wouldn't have to leave them on and waste power, you wouldn't have to pay people to turn them on, and the employees would be all set to go when they got to work.
The technology is not there yet to do "social" games...
Sure there is. It's called The Real World. Stunning graphics, no artificial intelligence, but lots of real intelligence. It's awesome!
...those who have free time vs those who don't (disproportionately kids, teens or idiots).
I resent your insinuation that teenagers have free time. I rarely sleep more than 7 hours a night, and it's not because I'm fooling around all the time. When you were a teenager, did you do two sports, take 7 rigorous classes, participate on a robotics team, do science bowl, have many hours of homework every night, and also attempt to have a life? Maybe so, but if you did, you probably wouldn't be saying that teens have lots of free time. I wish. "Oh but you have time to read/.!" you say. Well, yes... for the first time in a few weeks. Perhaps you should ask a teen next time before you compare us to idiots and say we have tons of free time. </rant>
On most routers however, the MAC address of the WAN port is different from that of the LAN ports is often different from that of the WLAN interface. So just by stumbling your network, they won't know your WAN MAC, which I think is what they are referring to in this article. Or maybe I just misinterpreted it.
True. Also, Facebook claims that it will be implementing XMPP eventually. That would bring millions of users an open standard chat protocol. And hopefully make currently-buggy facebook chat actually work.
One reason I like Gtalk over Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc. is that it can talk to others not using Gtalk as long as they have some sort of XMPP-compatible chat client and an XMPP account with someone somewhere.
Portals cannot be placed on moving surfaces. Furthermore, if a surface begins to move, then any portals on it will self-close. For example, in level 18 (iirc), there is a panel that comes out from the wall and sticks out at a 45 degree angle. You need to place a portal on there in order to jump across the water and get one of the cubes. The panel only stays out for about 10 seconds; after that it goes back in and the portal closes as soon as the panel begins to move. If portals could exist on moving objects, then imagine if you put one portal on the floor, and took a piece of plywood just big enough for the other portal, placed the portal on it, and chucked it through the first portal. BOOM! Divide by 0 and the whole world ends.
Better yet, you could donate it to an outfit specifically dedicated to computer and technology recycling and reuse. For example, freegeek has centers in several places in the US. They take in old equipment, fix it up, then donate it to volunteers and non-profit organizations. Stuff that is too old to be saved is recycled. That way, the equipment is put to good use if it can be, and if not, it is dealt with in en environmentally safe manner, and not only that, but along the way people get to learn about computers by working on the donated ones, and people who might not have had computers otherwise get to have their own. (Helping the needy get nerdy is their motto.) See the list on this page for a list of other freegeeks.
A similar solution, which I find works for me, is to have two gmail accounts. I use gmail as my primary email, stupid as that may be. The email address that I use for communicating with friends, business-related contacts, school-related contacts, and other people who already know my name. That email address is firstinitialsecondinitiallastname@gmail.com. Then I have my internet email address which I use for web accounts and people who I don't know/trust/care to give my real name to. It's pretty much random, in the same style as my/. username, and uses a pseudonym. Then I use POP to download the 2nd's email to the 1st's, and set it up so I can send mail from the 2nd's address using the 1st's account. So there I have all my mail in one easy to access location.
As for a broad trail online... between various web forums, blogs, social networking sites, etc, I have a trail. Oh well... I tend to use my pseudonym address though, so my *actual* name doesn't appear all that much.
The 45nm chips are not only on the super-high-end chips. Sure, you don't exactly see celerons with 45nm yet but a core 2 duo e7200 can be had for $130, and that's 45nm. I'm sure that before long, most if not all Intel chips will be of the 45nm variety.
I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about, but I would assume that the "The stupid code built into DELL motherboards" you are referring to is the string in the BIOS that identifies it as a Dell motherboard so that Windows OEMBIOS activation works. Ironically, it is that specific technology that makes it unnecessary to activate Windows on a Dell machine as long as you keep a copy of the OEMBIOS activation files, since regardless of how you change the hardware, it will always activate without even having to contact microsoft because it detects that BIOS string. Not only that, but since it just id's itself as Dell, you can use ANY dell OEM disk on ANY dell computer and it'll activate - meaning that an XP Pro disk will work on a Vista Home-licensed machine with no trouble.
Have you actually used the recovery console? It requires THE administrator password to open it, and you can only log on with that account, not just any admin account. Additionally, if the admin account has been renamed (always a good idea btw) then it's impossible to get in to the recovery console.
The thing is that Windows XP essentially IS windows 2000. Sure, there are many improvements, but they're really quite similar. Remember, Windows 2000 was NT 5.0, Windows XP was NT 5.1. Vista, though it has lots of bits of XP in it is a much larger difference - jumping from NT 5 to NT 6. It has far more new and changed features, settings and behaviors compared to XP than XP did compared to 2000. At the time, there wasn't a pressing need to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP since the benefits were negligible. That said, as XP has matured, it has become a clear winner over Windows 2000, now that most applications support it and not 2000, and it still has mainstream support. Vista though is still brand new, and as a much larger change than that from 2000 to XP, will present many more problems. It is possible that Vista will mature just as XP has, or maybe MS has broken too many things; we'll have to wait and see.
What you say is true, however, keep in mind that (at least for the time being) we still have almost entirely unrestricted access to the internet. That's not to say we haven't been indoctrinated - I'd be the first to admit that, actually. However, fortunately, we still have access to the rest of the net, which allows us to get less biased information if we so choose to. And although it's true that one can't discuss a lot of things with a lot of people, nevertheless, we have discussions about sensitive topics frequently in high school. We discuss controversies in the government. We openly criticize what is happening and we do have discussions about things that maybe doesn't exactly fall under what the government would like to see us indoctrinated with. The fact that we can do this in a public high school in the U.S. and that there's nothing the government is doing or going to do to stop us is why the U.S. is still different. Maybe not for long, but at least for now, we do have some freedoms, even if they are being curtailed as we speak.
They aren't too hard to tell apart when you're specifically looking at it, but casually surfing the web, a link to http://google.com/ looks awfully like http://googIe.com./.'s link-disclosure system alerts you here, but most sites don't have anything like that implemented.
The windows vista fonts are possibly the only good part of vista; they're very readable and they look good, too. Even if you're using 2000 or XP (as in my case), you can get them from MS for free. Other options are anything with serifs - that usually helps. Of course, this is all just personal preference, some might find Arial to be the best font ever.
Exactly. I set up a Linksys WRT54GL just two days ago. There was a big card on top of the router, in the box saying "LOAD SOFTWARE BEFORE USING THIS PRODUCT!", then a CD below that that said "RUN THIS CD BEFORE PLUGGING IN YOUR ROUTER", then the router had a sticker over the ports on the back - including the power jack - that said "DO NOT PLUG IN UNTIL YOU RUN SETUP FROM THE CD" or something like that. You put in the CD and it guides you through the simple process, including a clear, idiot-proof explanation of why a good password and WPA key are necessary, and it warned you strongly against continuing without one. Anyone who still has an unsecured router after going through that setup must be stupid. Oh and it has you configure it over ethernet, not wifi, so you won't get the wrong router.
Slashdot Mirror
Who likes chairs anyway?
Steve Ballmer, that's who.
Somehow I read that as "FOSS Community Can Combat Bat Parents". I was really excited, too. Oh well... been a bad past few days I guess.
I think you mean a big ass-table.
The problem might not be the use of the internet for information, so much as how people are going about getting and using that information. Just like one wouldn't trust some random person off the street or even some unknown doctor-like person in a white coat walking down the hall at the hospital, one can't blindly trust information on the internet. Getting a second opinion, (and a third, and a fourth) might help people to get a better idea of what's truly happening. They should still talk to a doctor, rather than relying solely on their internet diagnosis, but they might be able to at least get a general idea of what might be wrong. Using medical information on the web as one's only source is irresponsible; it should be common sense to get a balanced opinion and also to see a real medical professional.
I'm glad you brought up Portal. It is truly a game which is a story. While I love the gameplay, physics and so on in the game, what really takes the cake (sorry, sorry) is the dialogue. With only one spoken character in the game, Portal has many literary elements. Just recently in English class we were actually discussing the literary aspects of Portal. It has a plot (not just random shooting at things), it has characters with developing personalities, foreshadowing (you will be baked, and there will be cake), a motif (the cake is a lie!), beginning middle and end, etc. I wish more games were like this - Portal is fun to play, but the story is what makes it the excellent game that it is.
While it would not be the most secure thing to do, it would be possible to have the computers autologon, then put the command to lock the computer as a startup command, so that when the worker arrived they could just unlock the computer and be logged on. I'm sure there would be many problems with this solution, but it is a possibility which could be developed further.
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run "0"="rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation"
While your suggestion was obviously impractical the way you framed it, most computers have an option in the BIOS to power on automatically at a certain time every day. All of the computers in the office could be set to turn on at 8:45, and then they'd be all ready by the time the workers arrived. Better yet, they could be staggered so that they wouldn't all be swamping the network at once. Groups of computers could turn on at 5 minute intervals. You wouldn't have to leave them on and waste power, you wouldn't have to pay people to turn them on, and the employees would be all set to go when they got to work.
Sure there is. It's called The Real World. Stunning graphics, no artificial intelligence, but lots of real intelligence. It's awesome!
I resent your insinuation that teenagers have free time. I rarely sleep more than 7 hours a night, and it's not because I'm fooling around all the time. When you were a teenager, did you do two sports, take 7 rigorous classes, participate on a robotics team, do science bowl, have many hours of homework every night, and also attempt to have a life? Maybe so, but if you did, you probably wouldn't be saying that teens have lots of free time. I wish. "Oh but you have time to read /.!" you say. Well, yes... for the first time in a few weeks. Perhaps you should ask a teen next time before you compare us to idiots and say we have tons of free time. </rant>
We would?
On most routers however, the MAC address of the WAN port is different from that of the LAN ports is often different from that of the WLAN interface. So just by stumbling your network, they won't know your WAN MAC, which I think is what they are referring to in this article. Or maybe I just misinterpreted it.
Yes — I originally read about it in the Wikipedia article; it cited a facebook developers blog post as the source.
True. Also, Facebook claims that it will be implementing XMPP eventually. That would bring millions of users an open standard chat protocol. And hopefully make currently-buggy facebook chat actually work.
One reason I like Gtalk over Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc. is that it can talk to others not using Gtalk as long as they have some sort of XMPP-compatible chat client and an XMPP account with someone somewhere.
The OLPC has a hand-crank generator... as far as I can tell, hands will still be able to crank 25 years from now.
Portals cannot be placed on moving surfaces. Furthermore, if a surface begins to move, then any portals on it will self-close. For example, in level 18 (iirc), there is a panel that comes out from the wall and sticks out at a 45 degree angle. You need to place a portal on there in order to jump across the water and get one of the cubes. The panel only stays out for about 10 seconds; after that it goes back in and the portal closes as soon as the panel begins to move. If portals could exist on moving objects, then imagine if you put one portal on the floor, and took a piece of plywood just big enough for the other portal, placed the portal on it, and chucked it through the first portal. BOOM! Divide by 0 and the whole world ends.
Well... that depends on how you look at the matter.
http://xkcd.com/435/
Better yet, you could donate it to an outfit specifically dedicated to computer and technology recycling and reuse. For example, freegeek has centers in several places in the US. They take in old equipment, fix it up, then donate it to volunteers and non-profit organizations. Stuff that is too old to be saved is recycled. That way, the equipment is put to good use if it can be, and if not, it is dealt with in en environmentally safe manner, and not only that, but along the way people get to learn about computers by working on the donated ones, and people who might not have had computers otherwise get to have their own. (Helping the needy get nerdy is their motto.) See the list on this page for a list of other freegeeks.
A similar solution, which I find works for me, is to have two gmail accounts. I use gmail as my primary email, stupid as that may be. The email address that I use for communicating with friends, business-related contacts, school-related contacts, and other people who already know my name. That email address is firstinitialsecondinitiallastname@gmail.com. Then I have my internet email address which I use for web accounts and people who I don't know/trust/care to give my real name to. It's pretty much random, in the same style as my /. username, and uses a pseudonym. Then I use POP to download the 2nd's email to the 1st's, and set it up so I can send mail from the 2nd's address using the 1st's account. So there I have all my mail in one easy to access location.
As for a broad trail online... between various web forums, blogs, social networking sites, etc, I have a trail. Oh well... I tend to use my pseudonym address though, so my *actual* name doesn't appear all that much.
The 45nm chips are not only on the super-high-end chips. Sure, you don't exactly see celerons with 45nm yet but a core 2 duo e7200 can be had for $130, and that's 45nm. I'm sure that before long, most if not all Intel chips will be of the 45nm variety.
I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about, but I would assume that the "The stupid code built into DELL motherboards" you are referring to is the string in the BIOS that identifies it as a Dell motherboard so that Windows OEMBIOS activation works. Ironically, it is that specific technology that makes it unnecessary to activate Windows on a Dell machine as long as you keep a copy of the OEMBIOS activation files, since regardless of how you change the hardware, it will always activate without even having to contact microsoft because it detects that BIOS string. Not only that, but since it just id's itself as Dell, you can use ANY dell OEM disk on ANY dell computer and it'll activate - meaning that an XP Pro disk will work on a Vista Home-licensed machine with no trouble.
Have you actually used the recovery console? It requires THE administrator password to open it, and you can only log on with that account, not just any admin account. Additionally, if the admin account has been renamed (always a good idea btw) then it's impossible to get in to the recovery console.
The thing is that Windows XP essentially IS windows 2000. Sure, there are many improvements, but they're really quite similar. Remember, Windows 2000 was NT 5.0, Windows XP was NT 5.1. Vista, though it has lots of bits of XP in it is a much larger difference - jumping from NT 5 to NT 6. It has far more new and changed features, settings and behaviors compared to XP than XP did compared to 2000. At the time, there wasn't a pressing need to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP since the benefits were negligible. That said, as XP has matured, it has become a clear winner over Windows 2000, now that most applications support it and not 2000, and it still has mainstream support. Vista though is still brand new, and as a much larger change than that from 2000 to XP, will present many more problems. It is possible that Vista will mature just as XP has, or maybe MS has broken too many things; we'll have to wait and see.
Support is not provided by Microsoft, support is provided by the OEM.
What you say is true, however, keep in mind that (at least for the time being) we still have almost entirely unrestricted access to the internet. That's not to say we haven't been indoctrinated - I'd be the first to admit that, actually. However, fortunately, we still have access to the rest of the net, which allows us to get less biased information if we so choose to. And although it's true that one can't discuss a lot of things with a lot of people, nevertheless, we have discussions about sensitive topics frequently in high school. We discuss controversies in the government. We openly criticize what is happening and we do have discussions about things that maybe doesn't exactly fall under what the government would like to see us indoctrinated with. The fact that we can do this in a public high school in the U.S. and that there's nothing the government is doing or going to do to stop us is why the U.S. is still different. Maybe not for long, but at least for now, we do have some freedoms, even if they are being curtailed as we speak.
They aren't too hard to tell apart when you're specifically looking at it, but casually surfing the web, a link to http://google.com/ looks awfully like http://googIe.com. /.'s link-disclosure system alerts you here, but most sites don't have anything like that implemented.
The windows vista fonts are possibly the only good part of vista; they're very readable and they look good, too. Even if you're using 2000 or XP (as in my case), you can get them from MS for free. Other options are anything with serifs - that usually helps. Of course, this is all just personal preference, some might find Arial to be the best font ever.
Exactly. I set up a Linksys WRT54GL just two days ago. There was a big card on top of the router, in the box saying "LOAD SOFTWARE BEFORE USING THIS PRODUCT!", then a CD below that that said "RUN THIS CD BEFORE PLUGGING IN YOUR ROUTER", then the router had a sticker over the ports on the back - including the power jack - that said "DO NOT PLUG IN UNTIL YOU RUN SETUP FROM THE CD" or something like that. You put in the CD and it guides you through the simple process, including a clear, idiot-proof explanation of why a good password and WPA key are necessary, and it warned you strongly against continuing without one. Anyone who still has an unsecured router after going through that setup must be stupid. Oh and it has you configure it over ethernet, not wifi, so you won't get the wrong router.