Just reading through the thread and seeing that deja no longer has older archives available (whether they choose to reinstate them in future or not) leads me to the worrying question of who is the guardian and maintainer of this huge mass of cultural history? Who will make sure that in the future, people will be able to see the furore surrounding the first spam from Canter and Siegel (I was there) or the post where Linus Torvalds laid down the spec for what was to become Tux (I saw that too)?
In a world where technology companies companies can sink overnight, are we to leave this to Deja and others? Is there no public repository where these Usenet articles are archived for all time? Is this publicly generated mass of information not available directly to the public?
No, the question is not whether we need access to a better search engine for Usenet but that we should have access to Usenet itself. I should be able to order a 100(or whatever) DVD set of Usenet posts to have in my own home. This is too important to leave to the whim of the market, this needs to be preserved for humanity for all time.
Maybe some of the people who have copyright on Usenet posts could bring some pressure to bear on the archive companies to make something like this available.
I used to find Altavista really useful for searching Usenet messages (one of the premier sources for bug information and workarounds) but now they've replaced the functional engine with a new one. When you do a search, you can only retrieve articles from the first page. If you go to the next page, if you try and retrieve any articles, it claims they're not available even though if you restructure your search phrase to get the article in question listed on the first page, you can retrieve it just fine.
But even for web searches, I'm coming to the conclusion that Altavista is just sucky. Firstly, it's way out of date, half the links are broken and it's still indexing my homepage as having content that was changed over two months ago. But mostly I get annoyed that the search page refreshes itself every 5 minutes. Presumably this is done in an effort to fake ad impressions but it is annoying to have a search page disappear while you're trying to read it (especially since at work, I frequently have to disable the proxy for development purposes so it refreshes to an unavailable page) but it doubly sucks at home where I have a dialup connection and leaving Altavista on screen means my phone line is always busy.
Sorry for the rant, I just had to say it. Suffice it to say that I'm looking around for a decent alternative (I'm starting to use Google from Monday I think)
But Microsoft were guilty as much as a man that you'd just seen pull a gun and shoot down several people on the street.
Microsoft's tactics had been well known and complained about by many people (including myself) for a very long time. It was frustrating to see a company behaving so badly and getting away with it time after time. Moreso since they were not operating in my country so I had no representative I could write to to complain about it.
That said, there's a difference between guilty in fact and guilty in law (not according *to* the law of course) and the press should at least attempt the pretence of impatiality. However, the press has sucked for a long time now.
As for Apple, they may have a pretty bad attitude themselves but with Microsoft around, they've been pretty irrelevant to most people.
You really took a mildly humorous and loose metaphor and ran with it, constructing a dozen straw-man arguments along the way.
The borg metaphor is about Microsoft's tendencies to assimilate software companies and standards and make them their own in the quest for every machine to run Microsoft software, not that their employees are drone-like zombies with implants in their heads and nanobots running through their bloodstream (in fact, I suspect that's something most Slashdotters aspire to;) )
As to employees not being responsible for the actions of their companies? Well, I believe the excuse "I was only following orders" went out of fashion in 1945. Also, there is a quote which goes something like "For evil to succeed, all that is required is for no good man to stand against it". I think that applies. If you are working for a company which comits evil deeds, you *are* supporting it. Your work generates profits which allow that company to continue operating in the way that it does.
To mis-quote a famous dead guy, "If you are not against it, you are for it"
My home TV is setup fine for viewing stuff going in the RF port, DVDs look fine on my computer monitor yet when I run S-VHS to the TV from TV-out (ATI Rage Fury), it's far to bright and I have to knock the brightness down several notches.
I've tried fiddling with the settings in the card driver but even when I knock the brightness down as far as it can go, it's still too bright. I can adjust the brightness in the DVD player but it makes it too dark for the monitor and the excessive brightness causes a pale patch down the left side of the screen anyway.
In the end, I'm not sure if it's the video card screwing up or the video signal calibration on the TV. I amy have to do some other testing to find out.
Don't know why I posted this here, just felt it was something I had to say. On the other hand, this could be a common experience and the reason people are getting this phenomena. I noticed it partiularly bad in "Blade" in the shadows and in the lens-flare scenes. I guess if brightness is off normally, you tend to compensate and ignore it but when it starts showing up artifacts, you tend to take more notice.
Perhaps a DNS solution is in order. I don't know exactly how DNS mail lookups work but you could do something like this...
Set up a domain with a DNS server for example spamecho.com (apologies if anyone already owns this domain). When the spammer's mail software looks up where it needs to connect to to deliver the mail, the DNS software returns the IP address of the calling machine. If it were clever, the DNS server could even do a reverse DNS lookup and change the domain (for example, the spammer might be using the machine spam1.spammer.com, the DNS server could return the address of mail.spammer.com or smtp.spammer.com). This way, spam is pretty likely to end up back at the address of the spammer.
A simpler and less obtrusive use of something like this would be to log the originating ip of any DNS lookups to make it simpler to track down the ISPs of those sending the spam where they fake the originating address.
You'll need to send me your address first, and promise to take lots of pictures of the dunking. And it would be a lot cooler
if you could throw it from the sealand platform, which may be trickier.
Actually, I was thinking more of taking it to the beach and dropping it in. You talk about the North Sea as if it's some mysterious place but it actually borders quite a large bit of coast on this little old island of ours. If you wanted, I could probably throw it at Sealand. I'd probably need a compass to work out the direction however. It might qualify as the first technological attack on the island though:)
[Tim's Christmas wishlist snipped]
Personally, I just want something I can carry around and write stories and knock up some code on.
that the time I spent reading this article was so wasted. I haven't seen such an example of woolly thinking in a long long time. I would try explaining why anyone with an IQ approaching their body temperature would think straight through these transparent, straw man arguments but I feel it would be as hopeless as trying to explain the intricacies of object oriented programming to someone who can't get their head around left-clicking the mouse.
The GPL may have its flaws but they're not exposed by trying to come up with weird definitions of "distribution"
Plastic coke bottles. Screw the lid on tight and move away quickly. Wait, wait some more. When you're sure that it isn't going to explode, wait some more!.
BIG BANG
Really cool. Goes quicker if you throw it in a pond too. Put it on a leaf covered piece of ground and you get a blast radius. Ideal for getting unsuspecting passers-by to call you f**king a***holes. Don't forget to look nonchalant when the campus security guard walks unawares past your creaking, lightly steaming coke bottle while you pray it doesn't go off *just* yet.
But seriously, I worked in an NMR lab and played with (and occasionally worked with;) ) this stuff all the time. Yes, we carried it about in dewars (basically thermos flasks without the neck) and I did actually transport it around in real thermos flasks for some of my stunts. No glass ever broke or shattered.
BTW, chocolate at -100C is pretty cool (no pun intended)
From what I read, these mobos are most likely to be used for developing embeded systems.
If custom hardware is needed, it is much easier to prototype something to the ISA bus than PCI. I made an ISA a/d converter for my third year project at university, I wouldn't have had a clue where to start with PCI and even if I did, I suspect the extra cost involved would have far exceeded the budget allocated (which I had to stretch a bit anyway)
I think that most laws need to be reviewed periodically or expire so that they get updated to reflect the current state of reality.
News just in. US lawmakers were left with egg on their face today when it was revealed that a week ago, due to an oversight, they allowed the law prohibiting murder to expire.
"Most of us were on holiday, er I mean "fact finding missions" at the time and just thought somebody else would get around to it. I mean, it's so obvious" claims one legislator.
Justice was only preserved thanks to Slashdot reader Mike Chaney who, after the law expired at 12 midnight, called up the central law registry at 2am and renewed the law by paying the $200 continuation fee.
"I knew the law was coming up for expiry so I kept an eye on it. But I really didn't expect it to expire and was surprised when it did. The delay between expiry and me renewing? Er, I mislaid my credit card or something, er, yes, that's it" he said
The president of the US has sent Mr Chaney a cheque for two-fifty as thanks. He says he plans to spend it on cookies.
In unrelated news, the police have still found no leads in the seven day old homicide case in which technology billionaire Bill Gates was brutally murdered. Critics are claiming that the police are behaving as if they "don't give a damn".
Falling down was a movie that ticked me off. Not because it was bad particularly but because it was being trailered as a funny movie but actually wasn't. The same goes for "Serial Mom" which was trailered as a comedy but had nothing funny in it at all, except that it *was* bad as well.
Ever wonder why traffic is always stopped when there's ONE LANE closed? Cause there are those who think that just letting the traffic carry on through is too slow for their too-important selves, so they ying down the free lane right up to the big red arrow sign, and cut in to whoever is hapless enough to be there at the time. If it's Boston, then they'll have the audacity to point and swerve in without stopping or swerving. And someone in a Suzuki Samurai or SUV will see this, decide that's a great idea, and try and cut across three lanes of stopped traffic to do the same
I've pondered this situation and the conclusion that I've come to is that noone should get into the right lane, everyone should fill all the lanes right up to the restriction. It wouldn't help traffic flow any faster, things would still get blocked off but at least it would be an equitable slow down and wouldn't benefit those arrogant arseholes who think their time is somehow more important than other peoples. Better that they cause incovenience to everyone rather than everyone else
And just for the record, even when I used to drive fast like a madman, I used to get in the correct lane since it seemed clear to me that if everyone just did the same, everyone could sail through at a decent cruising speed. My, how naive I was. Mind you, it's the people that let these pricks in that are as much to blame. It would be nice if the cops would do something about it too. There's rules about "due care and attention" in this country.
Mr Garbus seems to be unaware that the decrypted version of the DVD file can be deleted.
Not only that but I suspect he is labouring under the popular misaprehension that the hard-drive =PC-(keyboard+monitor+mouse), i.e. the case and the bits inside. I think it would be quite amusing if the witness turned up with the little black/silver box, 3.5"x6"x1" with the Western Digital label on and the lawyer guy spent ten minutes trying to find the VGA port.
4 MR. GARBUS: It occurs to me, 5 Mr. Gold, that you just might have an 6 objection if I ask for that file. 7 MR. GOLD: I think I would. 8 Although you might have been so amazingly 9 clever I wouldn't have recognized it. I 10 gave him a compliment and I think it 11 deserves to be on the record.
Man, I think that has to be the worst attempt at Haiku I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Someone should create an encryption routine called "Position", then someone can crack it and create a program called "DePosition". Then the lawsuits can fly and we can have a "DePosition deposition"
In a press release today, the American Automobile Association announced that it would be launching a lawsuit against large numbers of internet users "as soon as we can find something to litigate about". A spokesperson for the organisation said "With the recent lawsuits instigated by other companies with acronyms ending with 'AA' such as the MPAA and RIAA, we felt we were in danger of falling behind in terms of publicity and dilution of the brand. Our members need to be reassured that the triple-A will always be doing its upmost to be first, whether it be ensuring its members get from A to B or initiation spurious lawsuits"
When asked if "Alcoholics Anonymous" would be jumping on the litigation bandwagon, their spokesman said "Our lawyers are looking into whether is is sufficient to simply have an acronym ending in 'AA' or whether the actual name must also include the words 'American' and 'Association'"
Slashdot Mirror
In a world where technology companies companies can sink overnight, are we to leave this to Deja and others? Is there no public repository where these Usenet articles are archived for all time? Is this publicly generated mass of information not available directly to the public?
No, the question is not whether we need access to a better search engine for Usenet but that we should have access to Usenet itself. I should be able to order a 100(or whatever) DVD set of Usenet posts to have in my own home. This is too important to leave to the whim of the market, this needs to be preserved for humanity for all time.
Maybe some of the people who have copyright on Usenet posts could bring some pressure to bear on the archive companies to make something like this available.
Rich
But even for web searches, I'm coming to the conclusion that Altavista is just sucky. Firstly, it's way out of date, half the links are broken and it's still indexing my homepage as having content that was changed over two months ago. But mostly I get annoyed that the search page refreshes itself every 5 minutes. Presumably this is done in an effort to fake ad impressions but it is annoying to have a search page disappear while you're trying to read it (especially since at work, I frequently have to disable the proxy for development purposes so it refreshes to an unavailable page) but it doubly sucks at home where I have a dialup connection and leaving Altavista on screen means my phone line is always busy.
Sorry for the rant, I just had to say it. Suffice it to say that I'm looking around for a decent alternative (I'm starting to use Google from Monday I think)
Rich
Microsoft's tactics had been well known and complained about by many people (including myself) for a very long time. It was frustrating to see a company behaving so badly and getting away with it time after time. Moreso since they were not operating in my country so I had no representative I could write to to complain about it.
That said, there's a difference between guilty in fact and guilty in law (not according *to* the law of course) and the press should at least attempt the pretence of impatiality. However, the press has sucked for a long time now.
As for Apple, they may have a pretty bad attitude themselves but with Microsoft around, they've been pretty irrelevant to most people.
Rich
The borg metaphor is about Microsoft's tendencies to assimilate software companies and standards and make them their own in the quest for every machine to run Microsoft software, not that their employees are drone-like zombies with implants in their heads and nanobots running through their bloodstream (in fact, I suspect that's something most Slashdotters aspire to ;) )
As to employees not being responsible for the actions of their companies? Well, I believe the excuse "I was only following orders" went out of fashion in 1945. Also, there is a quote which goes something like "For evil to succeed, all that is required is for no good man to stand against it". I think that applies. If you are working for a company which comits evil deeds, you *are* supporting it. Your work generates profits which allow that company to continue operating in the way that it does.
To mis-quote a famous dead guy, "If you are not against it, you are for it"
Rich
I've tried fiddling with the settings in the card driver but even when I knock the brightness down as far as it can go, it's still too bright. I can adjust the brightness in the DVD player but it makes it too dark for the monitor and the excessive brightness causes a pale patch down the left side of the screen anyway.
In the end, I'm not sure if it's the video card screwing up or the video signal calibration on the TV. I amy have to do some other testing to find out.
Don't know why I posted this here, just felt it was something I had to say. On the other hand, this could be a common experience and the reason people are getting this phenomena. I noticed it partiularly bad in "Blade" in the shadows and in the lens-flare scenes. I guess if brightness is off normally, you tend to compensate and ignore it but when it starts showing up artifacts, you tend to take more notice.
Rich
Set up a domain with a DNS server for example spamecho.com (apologies if anyone already owns this domain). When the spammer's mail software looks up where it needs to connect to to deliver the mail, the DNS software returns the IP address of the calling machine. If it were clever, the DNS server could even do a reverse DNS lookup and change the domain (for example, the spammer might be using the machine spam1.spammer.com, the DNS server could return the address of mail.spammer.com or smtp.spammer.com). This way, spam is pretty likely to end up back at the address of the spammer.
A simpler and less obtrusive use of something like this would be to log the originating ip of any DNS lookups to make it simpler to track down the ISPs of those sending the spam where they fake the originating address.
Rich
Rich
Actually, I was thinking more of taking it to the beach and dropping it in. You talk about the North Sea as if it's some mysterious place but it actually borders quite a large bit of coast on this little old island of ours. If you wanted, I could probably throw it at Sealand. I'd probably need a compass to work out the direction however. It might qualify as the first technological attack on the island though :)
[Tim's Christmas wishlist snipped]
Personally, I just want something I can carry around and write stories and knock up some code on.
Rich
Rich
The GPL may have its flaws but they're not exposed by trying to come up with weird definitions of "distribution"
Rich
BIG BANG
Really cool. Goes quicker if you throw it in a pond too. Put it on a leaf covered piece of ground and you get a blast radius. Ideal for getting unsuspecting passers-by to call you f**king a***holes. Don't forget to look nonchalant when the campus security guard walks unawares past your creaking, lightly steaming coke bottle while you pray it doesn't go off *just* yet.
But seriously, I worked in an NMR lab and played with (and occasionally worked with ;) ) this stuff all the time. Yes, we carried it about in dewars (basically thermos flasks without the neck) and I did actually transport it around in real thermos flasks for some of my stunts. No glass ever broke or shattered.
BTW, chocolate at -100C is pretty cool (no pun intended)
Rich
Rich
From what I read, these mobos are most likely to be used for developing embeded systems.
If custom hardware is needed, it is much easier to prototype something to the ISA bus than PCI. I made an ISA a/d converter for my third year project at university, I wouldn't have had a clue where to start with PCI and even if I did, I suspect the extra cost involved would have far exceeded the budget allocated (which I had to stretch a bit anyway)
Rich
Not necessarily true in non-Euclidian space (such as we are in sitting in the gravity wells of the Earth and the Sun as we do).
Pi is a constant and is the same across all space. The simplest definition is that
e^(i*pi)=-1
where i^2=-1
and e=1+1+1/2!+1/3!+1/4!+... (I may have got this incorrect from memory)
Rich
If you buy a bottle of phosphoric acid and brush your teeth with that once a week, your yellow teeth will go away.
Rich
News just in. US lawmakers were left with egg on their face today when it was revealed that a week ago, due to an oversight, they allowed the law prohibiting murder to expire.
"Most of us were on holiday, er I mean "fact finding missions" at the time and just thought somebody else would get around to it. I mean, it's so obvious" claims one legislator.
Justice was only preserved thanks to Slashdot reader Mike Chaney who, after the law expired at 12 midnight, called up the central law registry at 2am and renewed the law by paying the $200 continuation fee.
"I knew the law was coming up for expiry so I kept an eye on it. But I really didn't expect it to expire and was surprised when it did. The delay between expiry and me renewing? Er, I mislaid my credit card or something, er, yes, that's it" he said
The president of the US has sent Mr Chaney a cheque for two-fifty as thanks. He says he plans to spend it on cookies.
In unrelated news, the police have still found no leads in the seven day old homicide case in which technology billionaire Bill Gates was brutally murdered. Critics are claiming that the police are behaving as if they "don't give a damn".
Rich
No, I think you are mistaken. Clearly there is no r in both and no b in neither but the converse is true.
Rich
Well, in my dictionary (Collins), it says "Aeroplanes" ;)
Rich
I've pondered this situation and the conclusion that I've come to is that noone should get into the right lane, everyone should fill all the lanes right up to the restriction. It wouldn't help traffic flow any faster, things would still get blocked off but at least it would be an equitable slow down and wouldn't benefit those arrogant arseholes who think their time is somehow more important than other peoples. Better that they cause incovenience to everyone rather than everyone else
And just for the record, even when I used to drive fast like a madman, I used to get in the correct lane since it seemed clear to me that if everyone just did the same, everyone could sail through at a decent cruising speed. My, how naive I was. Mind you, it's the people that let these pricks in that are as much to blame. It would be nice if the cops would do something about it too. There's rules about "due care and attention" in this country.
Rich
Not only that but I suspect he is labouring under the popular misaprehension that the hard-drive =PC-(keyboard+monitor+mouse), i.e. the case and the bits inside. I think it would be quite amusing if the witness turned up with the little black/silver box, 3.5"x6"x1" with the Western Digital label on and the lawyer guy spent ten minutes trying to find the VGA port.
Rich
5 Mr. Gold, that you just might have an
6 objection if I ask for that file.
7 MR. GOLD: I think I would.
8 Although you might have been so amazingly
9 clever I wouldn't have recognized it. I
10 gave him a compliment and I think it
11 deserves to be on the record.
Man, I think that has to be the worst attempt at Haiku I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Rich
Rich
When asked if "Alcoholics Anonymous" would be jumping on the litigation bandwagon, their spokesman said "Our lawyers are looking into whether is is sufficient to simply have an acronym ending in 'AA' or whether the actual name must also include the words 'American' and 'Association'"
Rich
Rich