My biggest hope here is that they have provided a
REAL upgrade path from earlier versions. If anyone knows whether this is the case, please let me know. I'll gladly renew my club membership and then upgrade both my production servers from 8.2 to 9.1.
>> Do you have your real email address up on a web page w/o obfuscation?
Really good point here. web spidering email collectors will gather email addresses from webpages and add you to their lists. Usually, you can fix this by not putting your own address on your own pages. Where it gets painful is that if you subscribe to any email lists, sometimes people will archive these lists on their websites and any message you posted to the list will contain your full email address out in the open on the website.
I once did a search for my email address on google and the ONLY place it appeared was on SuSE's mailing list archive. I wrote to the administrator on several occaisions asking him to regsub the html to change the @ symbol for something like '[a]'. He never got around to it and said it would be unlikely for my address to be comprimised by a web spider.
I got laid off about two months ago. Haven't really started looking for a job yet. Hoping the jobs will just come back and find me.
One indicator you're referencing doesn't convince me, though. The aquisitions are usually a sign of failing companies selling themselves in a fire-sale. That's what got me axed. Redundancies after an aquisition.
Sounds like a lot of slacking off was going on within the company. Lying about trying to call you to verify the charges and saying your phone is disconnected is reprehensible. I hope you wrote a letter to the bank to draw their attention to the problem and the effect it had (your account moved to a competitor). Letters like that can get people fired, believe you me.
Many films are written and shot to contain deeper meanings than what is overtly stated within the story. Sometimes this is due to the subtle craftmanship of the director and other times it is to avoid the censorship of unpopular ideas.
Sometimes the Academy recognizes and appreciates the deeper films over the successful films (Unforgiven, American Beauty) and vice-versa. I haven't seen either of the movies you mentioned, but perhaps the Academy voters saw something deeper in Gangs of New York than Catch Me If You Can.
"Enjoyability" is not always the meter by which they're evaluating these works.
"employing a massive network of trucks, computers, warehouses and neighborhood distributors to provide basic sustenance for every Iraqi."
Obviously they didn't learn that the whole 'webVan' business model is doomed to fail. If only Saddam could drop some of the arrogance and allow his economic advisors to learn from America's mistakes, then he could have saved the bank accounts of thousands of Iraqi Venture Capitalists.
Wow. I guess that whole licensing model really didn't take off until the next generation of consoles. I also speculated on the possibility of it not being licensed by the TCM people, but was in too much of a rush to expound on that in my post.
The texas chainsaw game was NOT banned in the US for 'violence'. The game was just a pac man-type maze game where the power pills were replaced with gas cans to fuel your chainsaw so you could kill the people.
Within the 2600 graphical display environment, this was hardly violent compared to the original movie.
The availability of the game was very limited because it wasn't officially licensed by Atari. It and Custer's Revenge were basically bootleg software for the 2600. I think you could freely order it from places like 47th street photo.
I only chimed in here because I get a little annoyed when people say XYZ piece of entertainment was "banned in the US" because of its violent content. The US government has never banned anything because of violent content.
I'm not aware of what a JDAM is, so I apologize for my lack of knowledge in this area. What I was alluding to was the previous gulf war where Iraq lobbed SCUDs into Israel and the US supposedly shot them down with Patriot missles. I used the term 'nearby' in the sense that you don't need ICBMs to get from Iraq to Israel and it seems feasible (though not probable for a country as under-financed as Iraq) to GPS spoof missles into Israel.
I fully agree that the "law of war" may dictate that the blood belongs on the hands of the person who planted military equipment amongst civilians. But in the greater scheme of popular opinion, which is what wins or loses wars-- not laws, if the US is bombing school busses and hospitals, support for a military conquest dwindles. The same as other posters observed that Israel has had difficulty maintaining support for its efforts where it has bombed dozens of civilians to attack a terrorist leader.
I was being intentionally vague in my original post hoping that people consider how this strategy could be applied in more than this current Iraq scenario. It could really be applied in the US or elsewhere to achieve the same effect. How about if fighting breaks out with North Korea and somebody plants GPS scramblers all over South Korea? Are we going to 'fox hunt' with missles hitting our pals in South Korea? Or say somebody starts a GPS spoofer in Iraq that inspires our missles to hit nearby Israel? These are the kinds of things that makes war a lot less popular.
So you gonna shoot a missle at a jamming station?! Fine. A real problem causer would then put it on schoolbusses filled with children. Or maybe in hospitals. Perhaps the trash can next to your military barracks. Fire away, tough guy.
The type of countermeasure you are talking about is so 1991. We're in the new age of warfare. This is where the enemy uses our strengths against us. For five grand, a real asshole could build a hundred of these things and drop them all over a city. This would disrupt all kinds of systems from basic infrastructure like the city busses (they frequently use GPS for scheduling) to who knows what. In order to make them harder to "fox hunt", they could all be set to strobe. Hopefully none of this will happen as a result of this article in Phrack.
I went expecting that it would be a demonstration of common cracking techniques and defenses. Unfortunately, everything was left to our imagination as to what was going on. Here's how they could have improved on this:
1. Interview the attackers and ask them about the techniques they're applying.
2. Have all the defending teams prepare their fucking boxes ahead of time. After the event starts, they can't touch them. That way information divulged by suggestion 1 can't be used to protect the boxes.
3. Let people attack all the boxes at the same time.
4. Improve the visualization using snort.
5. Have web apps running on the server. Let them be simple and of the defending team's design (whatever apps they want), but they have to accomplish a specific task such as threaded discussion board, etc. Just a "hello world" web page is unrealistic for real-world comparisons.
This was a fantastic disappointment for myself and the several hundred other people in attendance. I think the event was intended to provide the security company sponsoring it with research about current cracking techniques. I don't think they were so much interested in the educational opportunities that could have been made available to the attendees.
It's one thing to criticize something that has already been done and say that it is such a horrible thing that it should not exist. I'm all for that. We all exercise this right when we decide to watch a particular tv show or repeatedly visit a given restaurant. If the food at a restaurant makes you sick, I'm not advocating that you support their effort because 'at least they tried to mix fugu with spinach.. what an interesting concept!'.
I'm saying that if someone has an idea for something, they should never let their fear of failure put the kaibosh on executing on that idea. Sure, they should examine their idea for flaws, etc. but fear of failure is not only an awful reason not to do something, but it's also the reason why many people never do anything.
These people who made this star trek show have something that they can be proud of for the rest of their lives. For that, I salute them.
That's cool. Tell that guy to add more stuff to the site regarding the display. I'd like to see how he organized all the info. I mean, since he used Director, he could have done all kinds of crazy stuff so it would look like a damn FOX Sports coverage of a football game or something. I'm just curious.
I fully agree with you here. Those people who go around poo-pooing other people's projects as being a waste of time, etc. never have anything clever or interesting to show of their own. These star trek movie people went out there and did something. Which is a lot more than most people can say. If everyone listened to the naysayers, we'd still not have airplanes, rock-and-roll, or computers in our homes.
As for the criticisms that these people aren't going to get laid, I can tell you that this is a huge misconception. This is the real deal from someone who has seen this situation play itself out... If you think it takes a rock band to get four guys laid, then you haven't filmed a movie before. No matter how silly of a movie you have made... if it is screened in public and people know about it, you will have a line of people (male and female) begging to be in your next movie. The difference being that a rock band may attract groupies, but the members of a band can only offer the groupies a brush with celebrity. A movie director can create celebrity. Do you know what some people will do to achieve celebrity status? That guy on Jackass ate a snowcone made from his own urine. Use your imagination.
I've so far viewed the trailer. If you think that was easy or cheap to make, guess again. Props, costumes, and sets all add up real quick. These people spent a lot of money on this project. Perhaps the only area they are lacking on that keeps this thing from being mistakeable for one of the original episodes is the lighting. Lighting is what usually seperates amateur from professional looking movies. If you go back and look at the lighting on the old star trek shows, you'll see it's pretty dynamic. For simplicity's sake, these people used overhead lights like you see in soap operas. Dead easy to arrange, but gives shadows on eyes unless you have fill-lights.
While you were "
pissing in the wind" it appears that you took great care not to piss into the wind, but neglected to shake off before re-trousering.
The fact that you're talking about SCSI technology in terms of connecting devices indicates that you're grasping at legacy weaknesses to make the iMac look bad. SCSI is a moot point since firewire has effectively replaced it with a higher-performance industry standard.
Soundblaster Live audio and speakers? No advantage there for the P4 Dell.
The only disadvantage I'll grant you with the iMac is the LCD display. Just like laptops, the resolution suffers in LCD. 1024 X 768 is suitable for some, but not for me. That's why I don't have an iMac.
While I haven't been infected with the rusty needle known as WinXP, I have used Win2k and found it to be a very capable OS. More so than Mandrake 9. But in terms of stability (which I'll substitute for your description of 'robust'), I would have to say my 500mhz G3 laptop has crashed far less frequently than my 1800mhz AMD tower running Win2k. And in desperate situations, it's far handier to open a terminal in OS X and kill an errant process than to right-click on a menu bar to bring up the process viewer in Win2k. To each his own, however. BTW: has the person you 'switched' come back to thank you for introducing them to a better computer or has the excitement of saving $1300 worn off yet?
This is doubtful. Lets say you got them a P4 Dell with a monitor. How much was that? Your victim at work could have bought an iMac with a DVD-R drive for $1700. With it would come iDVD. You're encouraging them to shell out the bucks for a seperate DVD-R purchase and the DVD authoring software (which I doubt will be as slick as iDVD). And is this person planning to run a Unix-based OS like Mac OS X? If not, then there goes robustness. If they are, then there goes native DVD authoring capabilities. With this Dell bundle you dropped on this poor sap's head, is there an LCD monitor? Does the thing make a lot of racket with its cooling fan? Yeah, that person saved some money. Kind of like when I save money by pushing my car around town rather than filling it with gas.
I only ask because there are no screenshots of the stats or score or anything like that. He's got a few pictures of some stuff in a tupperware box and a foosball table on its side. There isn't really a picture that proves this is anything more than an idea the guy had.
If consumers know that a new computer is about to be released with compelling features, it will be harder for retailers to sell the current inventory at the current retail price. Usually, in advance of a product introduction, Apple will curtail availability of products to retailers if the products are to be replaced. This helps prevent them from getting loaded down with the last model when the new model is released.
Blowing the secrecy of a new product release corrupts this process because consumers can make a tangible comparison of what waiting X days will get them vs. the mystery of knowing that a potentially-cool new product might be available soon. Retailers are then less-able to move the product that's currently on the shelves and they have to offer discounts on the leftover stock after the new product is out.
Slashdot Mirror
--end of rant--
Good example, but not the right point.
It's one thing to criticize something that has already been done and say that it is such a horrible thing that it should not exist. I'm all for that. We all exercise this right when we decide to watch a particular tv show or repeatedly visit a given restaurant. If the food at a restaurant makes you sick, I'm not advocating that you support their effort because 'at least they tried to mix fugu with spinach.. what an interesting concept!'.
I'm saying that if someone has an idea for something, they should never let their fear of failure put the kaibosh on executing on that idea. Sure, they should examine their idea for flaws, etc. but fear of failure is not only an awful reason not to do something, but it's also the reason why many people never do anything.
These people who made this star trek show have something that they can be proud of for the rest of their lives. For that, I salute them.
That's cool. Tell that guy to add more stuff to the site regarding the display. I'd like to see how he organized all the info. I mean, since he used Director, he could have done all kinds of crazy stuff so it would look like a damn FOX Sports coverage of a football game or something. I'm just curious.