Another way that I believe that spammers collect addresses are from URLs. I had one friend that sufficiently spam-proofed his email in usenet postings, and on his URL page (thru a common ISP) had used a gif of his email address instead of typing into HTML (and no simple 'alt' text). But this address still got spammed. How? I'm about 95% sure that they looked at the "www.bigisp.com/~username/" and quickly arrived at "username@bigisp.com". And this is rather easy to do through Altavista searching...
Just like when Geocities added the ubiquitious logo to each page
Just like when Geocities and Xoom added the pop up windows to each page
Just like how hotmail/deja/excite/yahoo.com mail always includes the ubiquitious plug for their service with each mail you send out.
These are all free to the user services, and thus, they have to make money to break even somehow, and this is best done with the ads that they do, whether for themselves or for others. And as with this yahoo deal, these all used methods that are considered unethical or innappopriate for the medium.
Geocities-cum-Yahoo is in a weird boat; Geocities, without being owned by Yahoo, was merely providing free webspace with some minor content of their own.
On the other hand, Yahoo *IS* a content provider, given yahoo.com, my.yahoo.com, and Yahoo Magazine. They are in the unique position that if they happen to see content they wish to adsorb from pages that are using their free service, they will do it.
Re:We need an open source/community dns solution
on
NSI and ICANN Bicker
·
· Score: 2
We need a neutral organization that honors the 'first come, first served' principle when it comes to trademark disputes (as we all know that a domain name != trademark).
Where have you been? It's always been a first come first served basis. Trademark disputes go through court we don't ban anyone from registering www.whatever-they-want.com
Then why did that person lose aolsearch.com to AOL, with *no* court action and no volentary arrangements? (Yes, there's more to it than just this, but...). NSI effectively broke first-come, first-served.
And just because everyone else in ICANN is not NSI, this doesn't mean it can't happen again as long as the company is for-profit. Or, least, as long as we are limited to .com and.net names as well.
(And am I mistaken that 'way back when', domain names were supposed to be ubiquious when the HTML/WWW basics were founded, such that the average Joe would not need to know site addresses or such, just go through bookmarks and links? Or is my memory failing here?)
We need an open source/community dns solution
on
NSI and ICANN Bicker
·
· Score: 2
It's apparent that any solution that puts the core of DNS into the hands of for-profit companies is going to fail. Furthermore, situations where DNS naming gets in the way of corporate goals (see 'aolsearch.com') is going to be screwed up by any for-profit company, because they can be bought out.
We need more than.com and.net.
We need a neutral organization that honors the 'first come, first served' principle when it comes to trademark disputes (as we all know that a domain name != trademark).
We need cheaper domain registation fees.
We need the main database to be behind a highly secure and highly private wall so that info cannot be accessed or sold.
None of these are going to happen with NSI or ICANN aboard, but there's no way to break that system up unless an open source or open community solution was found. Unfortunately, as the net becomes more and more commercialized, the ability of such a solution to be viable drops less and less.
Well, Al generally parodies sufficiently entrenched music. (His latest off this album is probably One Week, months old.). If the NIN rumor is true, I'd expect it to be from Pretty Hate Machine (the most easily recognizable of the NIN albums).
(Not that I'm bitter that I've been submitting this to/. for the last week & a half >:-).
The new album, "Running with Scissors" will be out this Tuesday. No track list, but the parodies that have been mentioned include "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi", "It's All About the Pentiums", and parodies of "One Week" by BNL and "Zoot Suit Riot". Also, rumor of a NIN parody (!!! They haven't done anything for years !!!).
Those mac people here probably remember the first doom-clone for the Mac called "Marathon" which became a trilogy of games (Marathon 2 was released for Win95 as a sort of experiment, but didn't do so well, partially because it overlapped with Quake's release).
One of the features that it boasted (and that I would believe I experienced) was an adaptable AI, where as you continue to play, the behavior of the aliens would vary to match your style. For example, if you liked to hide around a corner, then peak into a room to shoot the aliens, then go back, you'd find the aliens later in the game would be more agressive about charging you. If you were more agressive, and charged into a horde, you'd be faced later with more long range attacks and mobile aliens. (This was better implemented in the final 2 games of the series).
Again, there's still some rules base here for the AI to develop from, but it was a refreshing change from Doom/Quake (and of late, Unreal) where the monster behavior was constant through the game, and made the latter parts of the game boring. Half-life, as mentioned above, still suffers from this somewhat, but this is partially aided by the numerous types of terrain/locale that the player experiences before the game is over that it becomes hard to tell if the monsters are behavior the same throughout, or are responding to the changes in the environment.
(BTW, the folks that made Marathon, Bungie, have continued to pump out games, including the popular Myth (and Myth 2 which is reported an excellent AI), and the soon to be delieved Oni, another FPS from leaked info.)
Also, another aspect that doesn't seem to have been addressed here is how well bots for Quake or Half-Life or Unreal have been programmed. I know that I've found the learning potentials of several Quake bots to be outstanding, although it only lasts for that single DM play. Surprisingly, these are mostly written by the 3rd-party players, and not any game companies themselves. Maybe they ought to have a chat and improve the AIs in current games....?
First, I think that the frequent problems with viruses are due to places that rely strongly on WinNT/9x, rather than Unixes. (I know there are Unix viruses, but if you are a script kiddie, who are you going to have more fun putting out of commission - a thousand or a billion users?) Worksites that, in general, are unix-run tend to be more secure to virus and other hacks than NT places, only because that unix admin are that much more diligent.
You wonder how people can run unauthorized code without having the source. Again, we're talking Windows-run shops, not unix. Additionally, when I buy Office or Quake from the vendor, I don't have the source, can I trust this code? There *is* a certain degree of trust that vendor-supplied software is virus-free, but....
About pgp-trusted mail: I'm only speaking when it comes to the attachments. Additionally, I'd expect, *especially* in the gov't, that the email is for work-purposes only (even though I know this is naive), and thus, I should only be trusting of attachments that come from my PGP-identified coworkers. The key thing is that unless you've stupidly enabled such an option, the end user *HAS* to initiate the program that launches the virus; just getting does nothing.
About the sysadmin: Yes, more than likely, a virus will go unnoticed until it's too late. However, with both Melissa and Zip.Explorer, *BOTH* were warned about on news.com, here, and other sites that specilize in such info. Yet, the *NEXT* day, the problems got worse. Understandable, there is some lag in the news, but this can be measured in hours with a diligent sysop. If this was truely the case, these problems would not have been as severe. If 100% realiablity and functionality of your systems are required, and your sysadmins are pushed to the bone above and beyond such that virus warnings cannot be monitored, then it would make sense to just hire another sysop for this security, and spend the extra $100k a year compared to the millions lost by the system failure.
About backups: Yes, the backup might be infected, but who doesn't, when restoring from a wipe or crash, doesn't rerun a virus scan on just recovered backup files ? (Again, a virus cannot launch itself by itself). Then, of course, backup again with the clean system.
However, I strongly stand by education at the key way to defeat these viruses. Neither Melissa or Zip.Explorer would have done as much harm if the users were smart enough not to initialize them.
I can tell that this 34% is going to get a very strong slam here today, so instead, let's actually look at the *REAL* solutions: - Teach users what email is (including basics of email, including POP, IMAP, MIME, and sendmail & friends at a very basic level so they known how their mail gets routed. Teach users that opening an attachment on an insecure OS is asking for trouble, and should never be done unless the source is absolutely trustworthy... which leads to... - Using PGP/GPG or other secure identification methods to be able to trust the validity of the mail. Just because it's from a co-worker doesn't necessarily mean it's legit. (These two stand out only because the latest big virii have been email ones, not that this is the only route)... - Make sure all installations that require it have a quality and up-to-date virus program. - Have the sysadmin be diligent about reading the various virii advisory lists and visiting the web sites of the makers of the virii programs on a daily basis. I've yet to see any major virii come out (at least in the states) and not have a virus eliminator or such within a 24hr day. - Um, backup frequently and often. A virus may just eventually get through, but a virii can't do damage to tape backup, only possibly reside on there. The situation with virii today is that we have a bunch of lusers running around thinking they know everything but end up in these situations, *and* because we have lazy sysops in many places. Fixing both these problems would cost *much* less than reequipping gov't offices with up to 66% in new computers, as opposed to just simple training and effective sysopping.
I got that quote from www.duh-2000.com, which claims the original quote came from a Vanity Fair interview, so it sounds like a serious statement that probably came out wrong in the brevity of the interview.
I don't think Redhat's *bad* per se, but I think articles that have appeared over the last few days here and elsewhere, both positive and and negative, seem to point that RedHat is pushing the limits of what it can do under it's current model, and must make major changes to the way it does things if they wish to continue, either as a packager of a quality distribution, or as a supplier of Linux to businesses. (IMO, with the convoluted process of Linux install, you can't provide both in the same package).
In this case, RH is definitely heading down the road of business attraction (IPO, anyone) and moving away from general Linux support, even though they are continuing to push their RHAD stuff. This is making the distribution less interesting to those that prefer to hack someone on the system or do more non-standard setups.
Mind you, RH aiming to provide a strong linux distrubtion to businesses is a *GOOD* thing to break the NT juggernaut, but they need to decide to truly go down this road, rather than trying to supply a tool that inadequetely does both the business and the hacker support. Myself, I'm strongly considering going to debian when I next need to upgrade, only because it has more of a hackers-to-hackers feel to it.
From my understanding of what Unified does, it is *NOT* Yet Another Glide Library, but instead merely maps the calls that a game would send to Glide into calls to Direct3d. This type of interface can be derived from the docs of the sdk without having the sdk itself, which implies a cleanroom implementation and absolutely no modification to the Glide SDK itself. (The Unified FAQ is located at http://www.soundblaster.co m/hotgraphics/unified/faq.html for those interested.)
If you go back to the link on the end of the URL given, he's got the overclocking info: according to him, a AMD K6 300Mhz overclocked to 500Mhz and working fine based on the one shot with the computer on and the cooling bath going full.
Yes, the Matrix did embody a lot of what geeks are involved with today, but I definitely would not go as far as saying that all geeks like the Matrix, or that anyone that likes the Matrix is a geek.
I'd even suggest that there is yet to be what one can call the defining geek movie, because, as pointed out before, geeks are not the same as techno-nerds. It's nearly impossible to isolate the single aspect that defines geekdom.
However, in terms of movies, geeks tend to rave more about movies that *aren't* blockbusters or award winning, but instead movies that are unique and different and break from the acceptible norm (just like geeks themselves). While none of the movies I list below I'd consider to be *the* geek movie, these are the types of films that you hear mentioned in their circles often.
- Any Stalney Kubrick film, specifically clockwork Orange, 2001, and Dr. Stangelove. Kubrick broke the mold of movie making with these films, *and* incorporated a number of mind-opening ideas into them. He will be sorely missed.
- Bladerunner. A very very grim vision of the future, and if this was enough to scare William Gibson, it's enough to scare me. (*still waiting for the rumors of a Neuromancer film with much more Gibson control over the final output*)
- Heathers, or Clerks. Both were sleepers, and both were very very dark comedy. For some reason, these movies seem to be popular with geeks, maybe because we are sufficient away from the norm of sensitizing to be able to avoid the typical feelings associated with death or other morbid topics.
- Army of Darkness, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Clue, and others - Written to be campy but with humor, these movies knew how to make fun for themselves. Something about how geeks know how to make fun of themselves as well. (And what probably makes MST3K a prime canditate for *the* geek show).
Also note that geeks do love the very popular films (Pulp Fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc etc), but these truely don't belong to the geek; they are directed towards the audience at large, and lack the elements that some of the films above have.
The general trend of a younger workforce that is not necessarily tied down to a spounce or particular area is common in all the engineering and scientific fields (I know that chemical engineers are looking at the lack of family time due to extended hours; however, this is being snipped in the bud as it goes along here; IT still has it tough.
One possible suggestion: in this article, it claims that e-commerce is 24/7, which I don't argue with. However, most chemical plants also run 24/7, and if something fails, it's usually more than just money that can be lost. So why is there a difference between this and IT? Mainly, it's because there are shifts, with 3 people that are sufficiently familiar with the equipment to monitor it and watch for problems, while one or more people up the chain are well-skilled in the plant design that can be called it when things are beyond control. The shift workers need to know various details, but don't need to be able to design and debug a plant as well.
The same concept can be used towards IT, I think. You still need the webmaster/server/whatever expert that can do all the design and such, but his time should not be spent monitoring the system from day-to-day. Instead, hiring some proficient IT workers that can monitor the status of the server, and know how to restart the web server process or shut it down, or various other details, and can then contact the higher-up in case of a major problem. Then, you'd just need to put the 3 workers on a shift rotation. (Mind you, this scheme's not perfect, but I think it might be something to consider).
Warning: I am not trying to slam Star Wars here, as I do enjoy the original 3 movies, and I am looking forward to the next 3. However, there comes a time that reality does need to step it.
This weekend at that special preview of SW:TMP, many of the critics that were invited came out with somewhat negative reviews of the movie, somewhere between 2 and 3.5 stars out of 4 overall. (This including magazines likle Variety, Rolling Stone, and the NY Times). The reviews give TPM the same treatment as they would the batch of summer blockbusters in the last few years, saying it's technical merits are outstanding, but without plot and character. I've heard that Lucas has responded to this by saying that Star Wars was and always meant for kids.
Pause a moment. While I certainy think that Lucas is truthful in that statement, given my own childhood enjoyment of the movies, and seeing the next generation of children with big smiles on their faces after seeing the Special Editions in theaters, there is just a bit of hypocritism to that as well. I find it very hard to justify spending well over $100mill to make a movie that is aimed at kids. Yes, the kids will see it, the kids will buy the toys, and in general will provide a large chunk of the expected $500 mill in worldwide profits that this movie will make. *BUT* that certainly is not a majority of the money that will be made.
Look at the number of restrictions Lucas has put on the sale of tickets to TPM. Look at the sales of TPM action figures and other stuff that started at midnight last week (*midnight*! How many kids are up then?) Look at the number of people expected to call in sick next week for the opening day. Look at the sales of one-day airtrips to the US from Europe just to see this movie.
There are more than just kids that will fall to the TPM spell come May 19th. People will be shelling out big bucks for anything Star Wars after that, and I very much doubt kids are providing those funds.
Surprisingly, I think that TPM mania is just the same as the mania before any Trek movie, but at a very larger magnitude. The difference in size is due to the less-scientific nature of SW (where you don't care how a lightsabre works, you just enjoy the action) which allows a large crosssection of the population to enjoy the movie, and the media buildup. The latter makes me wonder if this was delibrate on LA's part, or if the media/hollywood built it themselves.
What would have been the reaction to the movie if it was only annouced to be in theaters last week (as with most other movies, notably The Matrix)? Would the hype be there? I doubt that it would disappear, but it certainly would not have been as large as it is now. If anything, it would have been as much as a Trek movie opening under the same conditions.
So this all begs the question of Lucas' motive. Is he truly making the most expensive children's entertainment in history, or has LA manipulated the market to make it as big as it is? I certainly hope it's only the former, as Lucas is a great storyteller, but the amount of hype for this one movie is beyond belief.
I'll reiterate the statements of others; there is no substitute for a good web page editing program than a normal text editor (cavaet: anything that would add syntax highlighting, ala emacs and numerous other programs is much better, if only to catch the tags). Most of the so-called WYSIWYG editors out there export too much excess code that is needed, some of which make or break the page on certain browsers.
Also, there is no such thing as WYSIWYG in editing HTML; the fact that the end user has the ability to modify how the final page rendering works means that want you've see is not what the end user sees.
As iterated on many HTML newsgroups, you should aim to write HTML that validates well, and check it's appearence under as many browser situations that you can do; this will generally guarentee that the page will be visible and readible in *all* situations.
Now, the other unstated half of your question is "What is a good web site management program?" which *is* something you want to look for in a commercial solution. I can't suggest anything, but one feature I'd look for is the ability to use any editor to edit the web pages.
Seriously, the fact that people are paying an arm and a leg for a bunch of bits and bytes in a *game* is disturbing in the sense of "a sucker is born every minute". It's understandable that as we do go towards paying for virtual 'items', such as domain names, web page hosting, ads, MP3 & other media, and such, that it's important to question how much will people shell out for this. However, in all the cases I've mentioned, there is some definite value that those virtual items represent, whether it be a better reputation, or some entertainment value that can be used at a number of places. But with the Ultima Online characters, it seems to be something that can only provide entertainment at one place (the server).
Everyone probably has a value on what they would pay for various forms of entertainment; some people refuse to see movies that cost more than $5 to see, some people will be hoping the trans-Atlantic flights come May 18 to see a certain other movie. So I guess in the end, those people that are spending $2000 of their own real world money to buy a character in a virtual world are getting their own jollies, or cannot stand the rather tedious task of building up a character for so long to get that character to a point where it becomes fun... but this is how it is with almost any well designed game. The beginning is enjoyable, the middle stages boring, and the end exciting -- that's how you draw in players, and promise to keep them hooked.
In any case, this seems very reminisant of MUDs and varients, and I cannot remember anything like this happening. It must be something to do with the 'ease' of ecommerce -- it's *very* easy to spend money when you don't see or feel it.
There was a patch for Win95 for Y2K compliance that could be gotten at download.com. Odd that no one in this article seemed to check for the availability of this patch when written.
Sometimes the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing....
Remember the recent brewhaha over Grateful Dead and MP3? It was discovered (last I heard) that the band had no knowledge that the legal arm was doing this.
First, Lucas himself probably has very little to do with this (he's reportedly going to make a cool billion based off his initial contract with 20CF and the movie sales (he's getting 90% of the profits)). If anything, this is most likely Lucasfilms in general, and if more specific, the lawfirm hired.
Also, read the story: LucasArts is trying to warn the ISPs that if they (the ISPs) let SW:TPM electronic media through their lines, LA will follow up with lawsuits. This is against the nature of the law recently passed by the US Gov't that says that ISPs are not responsible for media served by their customers. Many analaysts are saying that this letter is a bullying tactic, and that ISPs do not need to heed it's warning, because LA does not have a leg to stand on.
My expectation is that the larger ISPs (AOL, Earthlink, etc) will seek legal help, then release a press release or a rebuttal against the letter, stating their freedom from prosecution by this law. There will be a bit of word battles to resolve this, but in the end, LA will back off (I hope). However, I suspect that LA will launch (if not already in progress) a large campaign to block the distrubution of electronic media of SW:TPM related stuff, and this will be rather strong if the ISP route fails.
Mind you, I disagree that piracy and bootlegging are answers to Evil Corporate Clones. LA has every right to protect their IP on the net. On the other hand, a smart Hollywood company would think that releasing offical snippets and singles in electronic form to satisfy the pallete of fans out there is a Good Move; this is basically free advertizing for them. If you feel you must protest this action by LA, write letters instead of pirating the (expected) MPEG movie from someone's camcorder used on May 19th.
If the standard wasn't it place (even though various versions of it were available), why did MS try to implement into IE3 -- because as it is, the IE3 CSS support is broken to the point of hiding valid content with valid CSS even if the CSS code wasn't meant to do that.
An adage used in CIWAH suggests that Lynx is really the best browser because it *doesn't* support all the netscape-isms and such. I think this also applies to CSS -- unless the implementation is nearly 100% (such as IE4 & 5, or Opera), it should be ignore so that the content isn't affected at all. This is why NS4.x is a bane of many page developers, because while it's CSS support is there for fonts, colors, etc, it does so many wrong things when it comes to the layout that it's almost necessary to develop a CSS for NS alone, in addition to the IE3 and the generic CSS sheet. (Or tell the users to disable CSS by disabling JavaScript, but that's another can of worms).
The same with HTML4.0 -- there's a lot of features in that that can be used to the web designer's advantage (OBJECT), but even with the spec finallized, IE5 still came out without full compliant support, so designers still have to struggle to make pages work. But, oh yes, IE5 supports XML! I think moves like this are again only aimed at PHBs to get the product supported, but do little for the web developer or end consumer.
CSS is supported to some extent on all but one browser, that one being IE3 which has so much broken CSS support, it's not funny. And browsers that don't know anything about CSS support it, generally, because they will render the page without it (aka lynx), so using CSS on a non-CSS browser will get you graceful degragation.
And as pointed out, you probably use sites every day that use CSS, and don't know it, because it's supposed to be invisible to the end user.
It's not that CSS is dying out now, but it's been slow to catch on, as people find table layout a terrible approach to web design and accessibility comes into play.
I don't think so. First, here's a quote from w3's page:
Will XSL replace CSS?
No. They are likely to co-exist since they meet different needs. XSL is intended for complex formatting where the content of the document might be displayed in multiple places; for example the text of a heading might also appear in a dynamically generated table of contents. CSS is intended for dynamic formatting of online documents for multiple media; its strictly declarative nature limits its capabilities but also makes it efficient and easy to generate and modify in the content-generation workflow. So they are two different tools; for some tasks, CSS is the appropriate choice and for some tasks, XSL. They can also be used together - use XSL on the server to condense or customize some XML data into a simpler XML document, then use CSS to style it on the client.
Secondly, most average web authors will for the next 2 to 3 years will still be using HTML for most pages, and CSS is the only way to format these types of pages.
However, the apparent problem with CSS is that it has been standardized by the W3 group for several years, and only *now* are we seeing fully compatible browsers, mostly due to the trail ends of the browser wars. It's a shame that there is all this tech in web content delievery that an author cannot take advantage of because of incomplete browsers.
Note that the original complaint came up because the person that had trademarked "moviebuff" wanted to get the "moviebuff.com" domain that the West Coast company had already. The trademark owner took this to court, and as the end result, the West Coast company is prohibited from using the word "moviebuff" as applicable to e-commerce.. namely, they had to give up the moviebuff.com domain, and they could not use the word in META tags that are used by search engines to place their site higher up on the lists.
This, IMO, is a very isolated case that might have some precident when there is a problem with a gross trademark violation (read: domain name.com) The end result of the above case would make sense as to distance the violating company from the trademarked word.
But in the case of general web usage, where a window-frame making company might use "windows" in their META tags, but at no other time violates MS's trademark, I don't think this case applies. If anything, if such a case should come up, I would think that the search engine that put the window-maker's site up above MS's site would be the one at fault.
Slashdot Mirror
Another way that I believe that spammers collect addresses are from URLs. I had one friend that
sufficiently spam-proofed his email in usenet
postings, and on his URL page (thru a common
ISP) had used a gif of his email address instead
of typing into HTML (and no simple 'alt' text).
But this address still got spammed. How?
I'm about 95% sure that they looked at
the "www.bigisp.com/~username/" and quickly
arrived at "username@bigisp.com". And this is
rather easy to do through Altavista searching...
Just like when Geocities added the ubiquitious logo to each page
Just like when Geocities and Xoom added the pop up
windows to each page
Just like how hotmail/deja/excite/yahoo.com mail
always includes the ubiquitious plug for their service with each mail you send out.
These are all free to the user services, and thus,
they have to make money to break even somehow, and
this is best done with the ads that they do,
whether for themselves or for others. And
as with this yahoo deal, these all used methods
that are considered unethical or innappopriate
for the medium.
Geocities-cum-Yahoo is in a weird boat; Geocities,
without being owned by Yahoo, was merely providing
free webspace with some minor content of their own.
On the other hand, Yahoo *IS* a content provider,
given yahoo.com, my.yahoo.com, and Yahoo Magazine.
They are in the unique position that if they happen to see content they wish to adsorb from pages
that are using their free service, they will do
it.
'first come, first served' principle when it
comes to trademark disputes (as we all know
that a domain name != trademark).
Where have you been? It's always been a first come first served basis. Trademark disputes go through court we don't ban anyone from registering www.whatever-they-want.com
Then why did that person lose aolsearch.com
to AOL, with *no* court action and no
volentary arrangements? (Yes, there's
more to it than just this, but...). NSI
effectively broke first-come, first-served.
And just because everyone else in ICANN is
not NSI, this doesn't mean it can't happen
again as long as the company is for-profit.
Or, least, as long as we are limited to
.com and
(And am I mistaken that 'way back when',
domain names were supposed to be ubiquious
when the HTML/WWW basics were founded, such
that the average Joe would not need to know
site addresses or such, just go through bookmarks
and links? Or is my memory failing here?)
core of DNS into the hands of for-profit
companies is going to fail. Furthermore,
situations where DNS naming gets in the way of
corporate goals (see 'aolsearch.com') is
going to be screwed up by any for-profit company,
because they can be bought out.
We need more than
We need a neutral organization that honors the
'first come, first served' principle when it
comes to trademark disputes (as we all know
that a domain name != trademark).
We need cheaper domain registation fees.
We need the main database to be behind a
highly secure and highly private wall so that
info cannot be accessed or sold.
None of these are going to happen with NSI or
ICANN aboard, but there's no way to break
that system up unless an open source or
open community solution was found.
Unfortunately, as the net becomes more and
more commercialized, the ability of such a
solution to be viable drops less and less.
Well, Al generally parodies sufficiently entrenched music. (His latest off this album
is probably One Week, months old.). If
the NIN rumor is true, I'd expect it to be from
Pretty Hate Machine (the most easily recognizable
of the NIN albums).
(Not that I'm bitter that I've been submitting this to /. for the last week & a half >:-).
The new album, "Running with Scissors" will be
out this Tuesday. No track list, but the
parodies that have been mentioned include
"Pretty Fly for a Rabbi", "It's All About the
Pentiums", and parodies of "One Week" by BNL
and "Zoot Suit Riot". Also, rumor of a NIN
parody (!!! They haven't done anything for
years !!!).
One of the features that it boasted (and that I would believe I experienced) was an adaptable AI, where as you continue to play, the behavior of the aliens would vary to match your style. For example, if you liked to hide around a corner, then peak into a room to shoot the aliens, then go back, you'd find the aliens later in the game would be more agressive about charging you. If you were more agressive, and charged into a horde, you'd be faced later with more long range attacks and mobile aliens. (This was better implemented in the final 2 games of the series).
Again, there's still some rules base here for the AI to develop from, but it was a refreshing change from Doom/Quake (and of late, Unreal) where the monster behavior was constant through the game, and made the latter parts of the game boring. Half-life, as mentioned above, still suffers from this somewhat, but this is partially aided by the numerous types of terrain/locale that the player experiences before the game is over that it becomes hard to tell if the monsters are behavior the same throughout, or are responding to the changes in the environment.
(BTW, the folks that made Marathon, Bungie, have continued to pump out games, including the popular Myth (and Myth 2 which is reported an excellent AI), and the soon to be delieved Oni, another FPS from leaked info.)
Also, another aspect that doesn't seem to have been addressed here is how well bots for Quake or Half-Life or Unreal have been programmed. I know that I've found the learning potentials of several Quake bots to be outstanding, although it only lasts for that single DM play. Surprisingly, these are mostly written by the 3rd-party players, and not any game companies themselves. Maybe they ought to have a chat and improve the AIs in current games....?
First, I think that the frequent problems with viruses are due to places that rely strongly on WinNT/9x, rather than Unixes. (I know there are Unix viruses, but if you are a script kiddie, who are you going to have more fun putting out of commission - a thousand or a billion users?) Worksites that, in general, are unix-run tend to be more secure to virus and other hacks than NT places, only because that unix admin are that much more diligent.
You wonder how people can run unauthorized code without having the source. Again, we're talking Windows-run shops, not unix. Additionally, when I buy Office or Quake from the vendor, I don't have the source, can I trust this code? There *is* a certain degree of trust that vendor-supplied software is virus-free, but....
About pgp-trusted mail: I'm only speaking when it comes to the attachments. Additionally, I'd expect, *especially* in the gov't, that the email is for work-purposes only (even though I know this is naive), and thus, I should only be trusting of attachments that come from my PGP-identified coworkers. The key thing is that unless you've stupidly enabled such an option, the end user *HAS* to initiate the program that launches the virus; just getting does nothing.
About the sysadmin: Yes, more than likely, a virus will go unnoticed until it's too late. However, with both Melissa and Zip.Explorer, *BOTH* were warned about on news.com, here, and other sites that specilize in such info. Yet, the *NEXT* day, the problems got worse. Understandable, there is some lag in the news, but this can be measured in hours with a diligent sysop. If this was truely the case, these problems would not have been as severe. If 100% realiablity and functionality of your systems are required, and your sysadmins are pushed to the bone above and beyond such that virus warnings cannot be monitored, then it would make sense to just hire another sysop for this security, and spend the extra $100k a year compared to the millions lost by the system failure.
About backups: Yes, the backup might be infected, but who doesn't, when restoring from a wipe or crash, doesn't rerun a virus scan on just recovered backup files ? (Again, a virus cannot launch itself by itself). Then, of course, backup again with the clean system.
However, I strongly stand by education at the key way to defeat these viruses. Neither Melissa or Zip.Explorer would have done as much harm if the users were smart enough not to initialize them.
I can tell that this 34% is going to get a very
strong slam here today, so instead, let's actually
look at the *REAL* solutions:
- Teach users what email is (including basics of email, including POP, IMAP, MIME, and sendmail & friends at a very basic level so they known how their mail gets routed. Teach users that opening an attachment on an insecure OS is asking for trouble, and should never be done unless the source is absolutely trustworthy... which leads to...
- Using PGP/GPG or other secure identification methods to be able to trust the validity of the mail. Just because it's from a co-worker doesn't necessarily mean it's legit.
(These two stand out only because the latest big virii have been email ones, not that this is the only route)...
- Make sure all installations that require it have a quality and up-to-date virus program.
- Have the sysadmin be diligent about reading the various virii advisory lists and visiting the web sites of the makers of the virii programs on a daily basis. I've yet to see any major virii come out (at least in the states) and not have a virus eliminator or such within a 24hr day.
- Um, backup frequently and often. A virus may just eventually get through, but a virii can't do damage to tape backup, only possibly reside on there.
The situation with virii today is that we have a bunch of lusers running around thinking they know everything but end up in these situations, *and* because we have lazy sysops in many places. Fixing both these problems would cost *much* less than reequipping gov't offices with up to 66% in new computers, as opposed to just simple training and effective sysopping.
I got that quote from www.duh-2000.com, which
claims the original quote came from a Vanity
Fair interview, so it sounds like a serious
statement that probably came out wrong in
the brevity of the interview.
articles that have appeared over the last few
days here and elsewhere, both positive and
and negative, seem to point that RedHat is
pushing the limits of what it can do under it's
current model, and must make major changes to
the way it does things if they wish to continue,
either as a packager of a quality distribution,
or as a supplier of Linux to businesses. (IMO,
with the convoluted process of Linux install,
you can't provide both in the same package).
In this case, RH is definitely heading down the
road of business attraction (IPO, anyone) and
moving away from general Linux support, even
though they are continuing to push their RHAD
stuff. This is making the distribution less
interesting to those that prefer to hack
someone on the system or do more non-standard
setups.
Mind you, RH aiming to provide a strong linux
distrubtion to businesses is a *GOOD* thing
to break the NT juggernaut, but they need to
decide to truly go down this road, rather than
trying to supply a tool that inadequetely does
both the business and the hacker support.
Myself, I'm strongly considering going to
debian when I next need to upgrade, only because
it has more of a hackers-to-hackers feel to
it.
From my understanding of what Unified does, it is *NOT* Yet Another Glide Library, but instead merely maps the calls that a game would send to Glide into calls to Direct3d. This type of interface can be derived from the docs of the sdk without having the sdk itself, which implies a cleanroom implementation and absolutely no modification to the Glide SDK itself. (The Unified FAQ is located at http://www.soundblaster.co m/hotgraphics/unified/faq.html for those interested.)
If you go back to the link on the end of the URL
given, he's got the overclocking info: according
to him, a AMD K6 300Mhz overclocked to 500Mhz
and working fine based on the one shot with
the computer on and the cooling bath going full.
are involved with today, but I definitely would
not go as far as saying that all geeks like
the Matrix, or that anyone that likes the
Matrix is a geek.
I'd even suggest that there is yet to be what
one can call the defining geek movie, because,
as pointed out before, geeks are not the same
as techno-nerds. It's nearly impossible to
isolate the single aspect that defines geekdom.
However, in terms of movies, geeks tend to rave
more about movies that *aren't* blockbusters
or award winning, but instead movies that are
unique and different and break from the acceptible
norm (just like geeks themselves). While none
of the movies I list below I'd consider to be
*the* geek movie, these are the types of films
that you hear mentioned in their circles often.
- Any Stalney Kubrick film, specifically
clockwork Orange, 2001, and Dr. Stangelove.
Kubrick broke the mold of movie making with these
films, *and* incorporated a number of mind-opening
ideas into them. He will be sorely missed.
- Bladerunner. A very very grim vision of the
future, and if this was enough to scare William
Gibson, it's enough to scare me. (*still waiting
for the rumors of a Neuromancer film with much
more Gibson control over the final output*)
- Heathers, or Clerks. Both were sleepers, and
both were very very dark comedy. For some
reason, these movies seem to be popular with
geeks, maybe because we are sufficient away
from the norm of sensitizing to be able to avoid
the typical feelings associated with death or
other morbid topics.
- Army of Darkness, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Clue, and others - Written to be
campy but with humor, these movies knew how to
make fun for themselves. Something about how
geeks know how to make fun of themselves as well.
(And what probably makes MST3K a prime canditate
for *the* geek show).
Also note that geeks do love the very popular
films (Pulp Fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc
etc), but these truely don't belong to the geek;
they are directed towards the audience at large,
and lack the elements that some of the films
above have.
The general trend of a younger workforce that
is not necessarily tied down to a spounce
or particular area is common in all the engineering and scientific fields (I know
that chemical engineers are looking at the
lack of family time due to extended hours;
however, this is being snipped in the bud as
it goes along here; IT still has it tough.
One possible suggestion: in this article,
it claims that e-commerce is 24/7, which I
don't argue with. However, most chemical
plants also run 24/7, and if something
fails, it's usually more than just money that
can be lost. So why is there a difference
between this and IT? Mainly, it's because
there are shifts, with 3 people that are
sufficiently familiar with the equipment
to monitor it and watch for problems, while
one or more people up the chain are well-skilled
in the plant design that can be called it
when things are beyond control. The
shift workers need to know various details,
but don't need to be able to design and debug
a plant as well.
The same concept can be used towards IT, I think.
You still need the webmaster/server/whatever
expert that can do all the design and such, but
his time should not be spent monitoring the
system from day-to-day. Instead, hiring
some proficient IT workers that can monitor
the status of the server, and know how to
restart the web server process or shut it
down, or various other details, and can then
contact the higher-up in case of a major problem.
Then, you'd just need to put the 3 workers on
a shift rotation. (Mind you, this scheme's not
perfect, but I think it might be something to consider).
Warning: I am not trying to slam Star Wars here,
as I do enjoy the original 3 movies, and I am
looking forward to the next 3. However, there
comes a time that reality does need to step it.
This weekend at that special preview of SW:TMP,
many of the critics that were invited came out
with somewhat negative reviews of the movie,
somewhere between 2 and 3.5 stars out of
4 overall. (This including magazines likle
Variety, Rolling Stone, and the NY Times).
The reviews give TPM the same treatment as they
would the batch of summer blockbusters in the
last few years, saying it's technical merits
are outstanding, but without plot and character.
I've heard that Lucas has responded to this
by saying that Star Wars was and always meant
for kids.
Pause a moment. While I certainy think that
Lucas is truthful in that statement, given
my own childhood enjoyment of the movies,
and seeing the next generation of children
with big smiles on their faces after seeing
the Special Editions in theaters, there is
just a bit of hypocritism to that as well.
I find it very hard to justify spending
well over $100mill to make a movie that
is aimed at kids. Yes, the kids will see it,
the kids will buy the toys, and in general
will provide a large chunk of the expected
$500 mill in worldwide profits that this movie
will make. *BUT* that certainly is not a
majority of the money that will be made.
Look at the number of restrictions Lucas has
put on the sale of tickets to TPM. Look at
the sales of TPM action figures and other
stuff that started at midnight last week
(*midnight*! How many kids are up then?)
Look at the number of people expected to
call in sick next week for the opening
day. Look at the sales of one-day airtrips
to the US from Europe just to see this movie.
There are more than just kids that will
fall to the TPM spell come May 19th. People
will be shelling out big bucks for anything
Star Wars after that, and I very much doubt
kids are providing those funds.
Surprisingly, I think that TPM mania is just
the same as the mania before any Trek movie,
but at a very larger magnitude. The difference
in size is due to the less-scientific nature
of SW (where you don't care how a lightsabre
works, you just enjoy the action) which allows
a large crosssection of the population to
enjoy the movie, and the media buildup. The
latter makes me wonder if this was delibrate
on LA's part, or if the media/hollywood
built it themselves.
What would have been the reaction to the movie
if it was only annouced to be in theaters last
week (as with most other movies, notably
The Matrix)? Would the hype be there? I doubt
that it would disappear, but it certainly
would not have been as large as it is now.
If anything, it would have been as much
as a Trek movie opening under the same
conditions.
So this all begs the question of Lucas' motive.
Is he truly making the most expensive children's
entertainment in history, or has LA manipulated
the market to make it as big as it is? I
certainly hope it's only the former, as Lucas
is a great storyteller, but the amount of
hype for this one movie is beyond belief.
I'll reiterate the statements of others; there
is no substitute for a good web page editing
program than a normal text editor (cavaet:
anything that would add syntax highlighting,
ala emacs and numerous other programs is much
better, if only to catch the tags). Most of
the so-called WYSIWYG editors out there export
too much excess code that is needed, some of
which make or break the page on certain browsers.
Also, there is no such thing as WYSIWYG in
editing HTML; the fact that the end user has
the ability to modify how the final page
rendering works means that want you've see
is not what the end user sees.
As iterated on many HTML newsgroups, you should
aim to write HTML that validates well, and
check it's appearence under as many browser
situations that you can do; this will generally
guarentee that the page will be visible and
readible in *all* situations.
Now, the other unstated half of your question
is "What is a good web site management program?"
which *is* something you want to look for
in a commercial solution. I can't suggest
anything, but one feature I'd look for is
the ability to use any editor to edit the
web pages.
"GET A LIFE!"
... but this is how it is with almost any
Seriously, the fact that people are paying an
arm and a leg for a bunch of bits and bytes
in a *game* is disturbing in the sense of
"a sucker is born every minute". It's
understandable that as we do go towards
paying for virtual 'items', such as domain
names, web page hosting, ads, MP3 & other
media, and such, that it's important to
question how much will people shell out for
this. However, in all the cases I've mentioned,
there is some definite value that those virtual
items represent, whether it be a better
reputation, or some entertainment value that
can be used at a number of places. But
with the Ultima Online characters, it seems
to be something that can only provide
entertainment at one place (the server).
Everyone probably has a value on what they
would pay for various forms of entertainment;
some people refuse to see movies that cost
more than $5 to see, some people will be hoping
the trans-Atlantic flights come May 18 to see
a certain other movie. So I guess in the end,
those people that are spending $2000 of
their own real world money to buy a character
in a virtual world are getting their own
jollies, or cannot stand the rather tedious
task of building up a character for so long
to get that character to a point where it becomes
fun
well designed game. The beginning is enjoyable,
the middle stages boring, and the end exciting --
that's how you draw in players, and promise
to keep them hooked.
In any case, this seems very reminisant of MUDs
and varients, and I cannot remember anything
like this happening. It must be something to
do with the 'ease' of ecommerce -- it's *very*
easy to spend money when you don't see or
feel it.
There was a patch for Win95 for Y2K compliance
that could be gotten at download.com. Odd
that no one in this article seemed to check
for the availability of this patch when written.
Sometimes the right hand does not know what the
left hand is doing....
Remember the recent brewhaha over Grateful Dead
and MP3? It was discovered (last I heard) that
the band had no knowledge that the legal arm
was doing this.
First, Lucas himself probably has very little to
do with this (he's reportedly going to make
a cool billion based off his initial contract
with 20CF and the movie sales (he's getting 90%
of the profits)). If anything, this is most
likely Lucasfilms in general, and if more specific,
the lawfirm hired.
Also, read the story: LucasArts is trying to warn
the ISPs that if they (the ISPs) let SW:TPM
electronic media through their lines, LA will
follow up with lawsuits. This is against the
nature of the law recently passed by the US
Gov't that says that ISPs are not responsible
for media served by their customers. Many
analaysts are saying that this letter is
a bullying tactic, and that ISPs do not need
to heed it's warning, because LA does not
have a leg to stand on.
My expectation is that the larger ISPs (AOL,
Earthlink, etc) will seek legal help, then
release a press release or a rebuttal against
the letter, stating their freedom from
prosecution by this law. There will be a bit
of word battles to resolve this, but in the end,
LA will back off (I hope). However, I suspect
that LA will launch (if not already in progress)
a large campaign to block the distrubution of
electronic media of SW:TPM related stuff, and
this will be rather strong if the ISP route
fails.
Mind you, I disagree that piracy and bootlegging
are answers to Evil Corporate Clones. LA has
every right to protect their IP on the net.
On the other hand, a smart Hollywood company
would think that releasing offical snippets and singles in electronic form to satisfy the pallete of fans out there is a Good Move; this is
basically free advertizing for them. If you
feel you must protest this action by LA, write
letters instead of pirating the (expected)
MPEG movie from someone's camcorder used on
May 19th.
If the standard wasn't it place (even though
various versions of it were available), why
did MS try to implement into IE3 -- because
as it is, the IE3 CSS support is broken to the
point of hiding valid content with
valid CSS even if the CSS code wasn't
meant to do that.
An adage used in CIWAH suggests that Lynx is
really the best browser because it *doesn't*
support all the netscape-isms and such. I
think this also applies to CSS -- unless
the implementation is nearly 100% (such as
IE4 & 5, or Opera), it should be ignore so
that the content isn't affected at all.
This is why NS4.x is a bane of many page
developers, because while it's CSS support is
there for fonts, colors, etc, it does
so many wrong things when it comes to the
layout that it's almost necessary to develop
a CSS for NS alone, in addition to the IE3 and
the generic CSS sheet. (Or tell the users
to disable CSS by disabling JavaScript, but
that's another can of worms).
The same with HTML4.0 -- there's a lot of
features in that that can be used to the web
designer's advantage (OBJECT), but even with
the spec finallized, IE5 still came out without
full compliant support, so designers still have
to struggle to make pages work. But, oh yes,
IE5 supports XML! I think moves like this are
again only aimed at PHBs to get the product
supported, but do little for the web developer
or end consumer.
CSS is supported to some extent on all but
one browser, that one being IE3 which has so
much broken CSS support, it's not funny. And
browsers that don't know anything about CSS
support it, generally, because they will render
the page without it (aka lynx), so using CSS
on a non-CSS browser will get you graceful
degragation.
And as pointed out, you probably use sites every
day that use CSS, and don't know it, because
it's supposed to be invisible to the end user.
It's not that CSS is dying out now, but it's
been slow to catch on, as people find table layout
a terrible approach to web design and accessibility
comes into play.
I don't think so. First, here's a quote from
w3's page:
Will XSL replace CSS?
No. They are likely to co-exist since they meet different needs. XSL is intended for complex
formatting where the content of the document might be displayed in multiple places; for
example the text of a heading might also appear in a dynamically generated table of contents.
CSS is intended for dynamic formatting of online documents for multiple media; its strictly
declarative nature limits its capabilities but also makes it efficient and easy to generate and
modify in the content-generation workflow. So they are two different tools; for some tasks,
CSS is the appropriate choice and for some tasks, XSL. They can also be used together - use
XSL on the server to condense or customize some XML data into a simpler XML document, then
use CSS to style it on the client.
Secondly, most average web authors will for the next 2 to 3 years will still be using HTML for
most pages, and CSS is the only way to format
these types of pages.
However, the apparent problem with CSS is that it
has been standardized by the W3 group for several
years, and only *now* are we seeing fully compatible browsers, mostly due to the trail ends
of the browser wars. It's a shame that there
is all this tech in web content delievery that
an author cannot take advantage of because
of incomplete browsers.
Note that the original complaint came up because ..
the person that had trademarked "moviebuff" wanted
to get the "moviebuff.com" domain that the West
Coast company had already. The trademark owner
took this to court, and as the end result,
the West Coast company is prohibited from using
the word "moviebuff" as applicable to e-commerce
namely, they had to give up the moviebuff.com
domain, and they could not use the word in META tags that are used by search engines to place
their site higher up on the lists.
This, IMO, is a very isolated case that might have
some precident when there is a problem with
a gross trademark violation (read: domain name.com)
The end result of the above case would make
sense as to distance the violating company
from the trademarked word.
But in the case of general web usage, where
a window-frame making company might use "windows"
in their META tags, but at no other time
violates MS's trademark, I don't think this
case applies. If anything, if such a case should
come up, I would think that the search engine that
put the window-maker's site up above MS's site
would be the one at fault.
But, as always, IANAL.