Bizzarrely enough, when I read this story, I started thinking 'Hey maybe they could make spaceships out of this if its so tough'.. I guess I need to stop reading Larry Niven and get out there in the big blue room....
Giving money to the EFF *is* real activism - it empowers those who are properly qualified to act on our behalf. Lets make money doing what we do best and give it to an organisation who will represent our views using skills they have honed. Getting out there with banners may seem more like you are doing something but leaving to the experts is more likely to get results in the long run.
I havent studied the design, but a casual glance suggests the actual decode is done by a chip, the pic is merely controlling it and the user interface.
I think the best quote on the page has to be: Why are you accepting packages for crappy OSes??? An open-sourced package for a crappy OS is just an open-sourced package for a good OS that hasn't been ported yet...
Re:Oh that poor Atari 800 :(
on
Quickielanche
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· Score: 1
Star raiders - Yep still got my copy on cartridge *S* About twice a year I blow the dust off the Atari 400 or 800xl and play a game or two... Shame I never got much better than "Garbage Scow Captain"..... I tried getting it to work in a PC emulator but never had much luck. Maybe I should persevere.
Oh and another thing. If there is a perceived shortage and the IT industry can get the government to buy into that theory, they are given a larger number of aliens they are allowed to bring into this country on work VISAs. But, we all know that they never work for less than we do so it shouldn't be a problem! "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" Actually there are minimum salary levels for foreign workers who are brought into the US on H1B visas to work. I think it is $60,000 at the moment - not a fortune but high enough to discourage exploitation when you consider the cost of the visa application and relocation costs. How do I know this? I am a 37 yr old UK resident who is just about to move to the USA to start a job with a consultancy in Pennsylvania. I spoke to one of the VP's of the company and they said they had real problems finding people with significant business experience who knew how to program. So go figure...
I used MPlayer voice chat about 6 months ago and it was a bit flakey. Rumour has it that they improved it but all my friends gave up on it.
Excite voice chat is pretty cool - it works well, although currently only on Windoze platforms.
I think you can use CUSeeMe as a voice chat, although I have no experience of that... I wonder if there are any Linux voice chat apps?
Strangely I find the voice chat less compelling than text-based ones, the talk is more banal. Maybe people are intimidated by the need to wait till others have stopped talking...
With the greatest of respect, I dont think that FallLine can have spent a lot of time in chatrooms. Although it is true there is no explicit mechanism for emotional exchange, I have discovered that it is possible to sense how someone is, after you have got to know them and spent time with them. At times I have been upset or depressed and have tried not to show it, because I tend to keep my feelings to myself, but my friends online can sense when something is wrong, by the way I write, how long it takes me to respond, how I respond... The mechanisms for nonverbal communication are different, but they are not absent. And these friendships are not shallow, they are deep. Maybe not as deep as they might be if I met the people every day but they are significant. Over the last 2-3 years I have spent an average of 2 hours a day in chat, on ICQ or wherever, and I would say it has enhanced both my life and the lives of the people I talk to. Yes there are wierdos and fools on the net, but there are a lot of other people with whom I find a lot in common. My knowledge of the world around me has improved, my communication skills have improved, my 'empathy' for others has improved. A close friend of mine was deeply upset because due to illness she wasnt able to buy presents for her children this christmas; her ex was making great capital of this as was going to humiliate her on christmas morning in front of her children - so I bought them some presents from Amazon and had them delivered, so she was able to give her children a surprise. This would never have happened if I had not got to meet her on the net; I have not met her in real life, in fact I may never meet her, but our lives touched and we have enriched each others lives both materially and emotionally. I have met some of the others I talked to online - in one case I dated one lady, a relationship I doubt would have happened if we had not met online first. I feel my online life has actually helped me to improve my communications with people in real life - I have an active social life in the BBR so I dont feel in any way that damage to ones real-life interactions is a necessary consequence of a significant online life. Perhaps the people who become addicted to the net are the people who otherwise get addicted to football, sex, stamp collecting, trainspotting.... It is seductive I will admit, but my experience is that the level of interest rises and falls in time depending on what other activities arise to take its place. If you dont want to chat online, or you feel that it isnt wise for you, then by all means stay away, but please dont try to present your personal choices as moral imperitives.
Windows 98 DOES speed up the net.. Imagine if all those millions of 98 users were on the net surfing pr0n sites or doing 3 hour live updates instead of rebooting or trying to get DUN to work.... Just a thought..
Dont geeks do electronics these days???? Dont splice the wires together because you'll blow up the soundcards.. just use resistors:
pc1 --------/\/\/\/---\ pc2 --------/\/\/\/---*----/\/\/\---- out to spkr pc3 --------\/\/\/\---/
This scheme should work for as many pcs as you like - the resistors should all be 100 - 1000 ohms. You'll need 2 of these (left and right channels). At a pinch you could use one of those screw-connector blocks to connect the wires to the resistors and wrap the lot in insulation tape to protect it - no soldering burns!!
Ahh but you can use e.g. solar energy to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen. Its a whole lot easier to load liquid gases onto a spaceship than a bunch of sunlight.....
Get a grip. Classical music is just the earlier centuries radical music. Beethoven was just as reviled by his preceding generation as yesterdays rock generations and todays techno/dance generation. Everyone thinks the music they listened to when they were young is the one true genre and that this "new stuff is crap" - its just a side-affect of ageing:o)
Well that would explain my experiences.. I installed SOCKS5 and ICQ worked worse than without it. I did find a kernel module ip_masq_icq (just search on alta-vista theres only a couple of hits) but I managed to trash my router by recompiling the kernel (I needed to upgrade it to 2.0.36) and putting it after cylinder 1024 on the disk *embarressed smile* so I had to restore it. I'll have another go doing this when I have time *S* or swap in a motherboard that will boot it...
Hmmm and you'll have to get your ISP and everyone up the chain to do the same.... IPv6 will only come online properly when everyone has it. Perhapes IANA should set a date by which all ISPs (and their customers) should be IPv6-Ready and then switch it on overnight....
I think the point was that if we use crypto on ALL our mail then the nosey bastards monitoring our mail will be kept busy decoding messages about fridays pub-night until they get bored with the whole endevour. If people are going to snoop lets make it as painful as possible...
Hmmm.. Because Netscape develop their browser for a wide range of platforms, There extentions have (mostly) been usable by most of the internet users. Microsoft have put a lot of effort into "extending" HTML seem to have been focussed at locking people into Windows platforms (E.g. Active-X) or furthering their agenda of using HTML as a page-layout-and-universal-document language, which is not what it is for. Not that netscrape is blameless, of course. But on the whole netscape extensions seem to answer percieved needs of users, where Microsofts extensions seem to scratch the itch of Microsoft, and its desire to make Windows the only web platform. But then again I might just be a delusional bigot...:o)
Correct use of the RFC process is to propose changes for comments before implementing them.. Making changes, implementing it and rolling it out to millions of people and THEN writing an RFC is the wrong way. In this respect I beleive both Netscape and Microsoft are guilty as hell.
Re:Is there any reason to stay with the 2.0.x seri
on
Linux 2.0.37 Released
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· Score: 1
To be real here it is only worth the effort of upgrading the kernel when it gives you something you need... I am going to upgrade my workstation because I need the improved soundcard support, but my firewall running 2.0.37 I will leave as it is because its working and I have no problems with it. Also the 2.0.x kernels work better with machines with less than 16Mb I am told and my firewall is a 486DX2/66 with 16Mb ram. From what I read 2.2.x is perfectly OK for most users.. there are some issues with it but that has always been true (thats why the 2.0 series went up to release 36!!). Generally though dont waste time upgrading kernels unless you need something it has got in it....
Well hell I bought a faster modem - a 56k - and I only ever connect at 45333... Even then I'm lucky to get download rates in excess of 3kb/s due to net congestion. What other options? ISDN? costs about $450 to get connected - no thanks. No ADSL/SDSL here, no cable modems, There is Tele2 radio connection at 128kbps but your limited to 200Mb/Month transfer...(!) So for now I will stay with my modem. But better backbone tech will let me actually use all my 45333 bps (hopefully)....
Sorry, but no process however badly written should be able to kill a system so bad it needs to be power-cycled. Yes, a runaway process might consume too many resources and slow the thing to a crawl, but it should still be possible to reboot it!
This kind of fault is a kernel issue, but since it is so replicateable (?) i can't see it will be long before Apple have a patch out for it. BTW anything that can be done in a benchmark test could be used by crackers in an attack, so it is worth treating seriously even if it is not "in the real world".
Heh Heh... Now that I would love to see! Maybe it would get some interest from politicians in IP if we could show how stupid the situation has become... Any lawyers out there want to try?
I have an All-for-One IR wireless keyboard, and it doesn't have to be in a straight line... It even seems to work pointing AWAY from the computer (Although seeing the monitor is a problem!). It only seems to fail if the IR transmitter is covered or obscured by a LARGE object, or if the kbd is pointed directly away from the computer at some absorbant surface (like curtains etc). It seems to reflect off walls quite happily.
The only problem I had was it locking up If I touched the mouse in text-mode terminal with GPM *NOT* running. In X-Windows I had no problems at all.
I just need to get a graphics card with TV output and I can surf the web from the setee in the lounge! (Sad, or what??!)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if you photo'd it and stuck it on the web, we could! I'd be interested in seeing it, anyhow.
Just goes to show that chicks dig guys with mussels....
*rim-shot*
Oh well, I'm known for my awful puns, so I guess this just adds to my rep!
Bizzarrely enough, when I read this story, I started thinking 'Hey maybe they could make spaceships out of this if its so tough'.. I guess I need to stop reading Larry Niven and get out there in the big blue room....
Giving money to the EFF *is* real activism - it empowers those who are properly qualified to act on our behalf. Lets make money doing what we do best and give it to an organisation who will represent our views using skills they have honed. Getting out there with banners may seem more like you are doing something but leaving to the experts is more likely to get results in the long run.
I havent studied the design, but a casual glance suggests the actual decode is done by a chip, the pic is merely controlling it and the user interface.
I think the best quote on the page has to be:
Why are you accepting packages for crappy OSes???
An open-sourced package for a crappy OS is just an open-sourced package for a good OS that hasn't been ported yet...
Star raiders - Yep still got my copy on cartridge *S* About twice a year I blow the dust off the Atari 400 or 800xl and play a game or two... Shame I never got much better than "Garbage Scow Captain"..... I tried getting it to work in a PC emulator but never had much luck. Maybe I should persevere.
Oh and another thing. If there is a perceived shortage and the IT industry can get the government to buy into that theory, they are given a larger number of aliens they are allowed to bring into this country on work VISAs. But, we all know that they never work for less than we do so it shouldn't be a problem! "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink"
Actually there are minimum salary levels for foreign workers who are brought into the US on H1B visas to work. I think it is $60,000 at the moment - not a fortune but high enough to discourage exploitation when you consider the cost of the visa application and relocation costs. How do I know this? I am a 37 yr old UK resident who is just about to move to the USA to start a job with a consultancy in Pennsylvania. I spoke to one of the VP's of the company and they said they had real problems finding people with significant business experience who knew how to program. So go figure...
Excite voice chat is pretty cool - it works well, although currently only on Windoze platforms.
I think you can use CUSeeMe as a voice chat, although I have no experience of that... I wonder if there are any Linux voice chat apps?
Strangely I find the voice chat less compelling than text-based ones, the talk is more banal. Maybe people are intimidated by the need to wait till others have stopped talking...
With the greatest of respect, I dont think that FallLine can have spent a lot of time in chatrooms. Although it is true there is no explicit mechanism for emotional exchange, I have discovered that it is possible to sense how someone is, after you have got to know them and spent time with them. At times I have been upset or depressed and have tried not to show it, because I tend to keep my feelings to myself, but my friends online can sense when something is wrong, by the way I write, how long it takes me to respond, how I respond... The mechanisms for nonverbal communication are different, but they are not absent. And these friendships are not shallow, they are deep. Maybe not as deep as they might be if I met the people every day but they are significant. Over the last 2-3 years I have spent an average of 2 hours a day in chat, on ICQ or wherever, and I would say it has enhanced both my life and the lives of the people I talk to. Yes there are wierdos and fools on the net, but there are a lot of other people with whom I find a lot in common. My knowledge of the world around me has improved, my communication skills have improved, my 'empathy' for others has improved. A close friend of mine was deeply upset because due to illness she wasnt able to buy presents for her children this christmas; her ex was making great capital of this as was going to humiliate her on christmas morning in front of her children - so I bought them some presents from Amazon and had them delivered, so she was able to give her children a surprise. This would never have happened if I had not got to meet her on the net; I have not met her in real life, in fact I may never meet her, but our lives touched and we have enriched each others lives both materially and emotionally. I have met some of the others I talked to online - in one case I dated one lady, a relationship I doubt would have happened if we had not met online first. I feel my online life has actually helped me to improve my communications with people in real life - I have an active social life in the BBR so I dont feel in any way that damage to ones real-life interactions is a necessary consequence of a significant online life. Perhaps the people who become addicted to the net are the people who otherwise get addicted to football, sex, stamp collecting, trainspotting.... It is seductive I will admit, but my experience is that the level of interest rises and falls in time depending on what other activities arise to take its place. If you dont want to chat online, or you feel that it isnt wise for you, then by all means stay away, but please dont try to present your personal choices as moral imperitives.
Windows 98 DOES speed up the net.. Imagine if all those millions of 98 users were on the net surfing pr0n sites or doing 3 hour live updates instead of rebooting or trying to get DUN to work....
Just a thought..
Dont geeks do electronics these days????
Dont splice the wires together because you'll blow up the soundcards.. just use resistors:
pc1 --------/\/\/\/---\
pc2 --------/\/\/\/---*----/\/\/\---- out to spkr
pc3 --------\/\/\/\---/
This scheme should work for as many pcs as you like - the resistors should all be 100 - 1000 ohms. You'll need 2 of these (left and right channels). At a pinch you could use one of those screw-connector blocks to connect the wires to the resistors and wrap the lot in insulation tape to protect it - no soldering burns!!
B^)
Ahh but you can use e.g. solar energy to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen. Its a whole lot easier to load liquid gases onto a spaceship than a bunch of sunlight.....
Get a grip. Classical music is just the earlier centuries radical music. Beethoven was just as reviled by his preceding generation as yesterdays rock generations and todays techno/dance generation. Everyone thinks the music they listened to when they were young is the one true genre and that this "new stuff is crap" - its just a side-affect of ageing :o)
Well that would explain my experiences.. I installed SOCKS5 and ICQ worked worse than without it. I did find a kernel module ip_masq_icq (just search on alta-vista theres only a couple of hits) but I managed to trash my router by recompiling the kernel (I needed to upgrade it to 2.0.36) and putting it after cylinder 1024 on the disk *embarressed smile* so I had to restore it. I'll have another go doing this when I have time *S* or swap in a motherboard that will boot it...
Well the WWW is the internet if you forget news, ICQ, IRC, FTP, Telnet, whois........
Admittedly all those have various web portals but with only a few rare exceptions they all suck bigtime.
Just my £0.02 + V.A.T
Didn't you just say your milk is running Linux - No worries !!
Hmmm and you'll have to get your ISP and everyone up the chain to do the same....
IPv6 will only come online properly when everyone has it. Perhapes IANA should set a date by which all ISPs (and their customers) should be IPv6-Ready and then switch it on overnight....
I think the point was that if we use crypto on ALL our mail then the nosey bastards monitoring our mail will be kept busy decoding messages about fridays pub-night until they get bored with the whole endevour. If people are going to snoop lets make it as painful as possible...
Hack the system!!!! (lol)
Hmmm.. Because Netscape develop their browser for a wide range of platforms, There extentions have (mostly) been usable by most of the internet users. Microsoft have put a lot of effort into "extending" HTML seem to have been focussed at locking people into Windows platforms (E.g. Active-X) or furthering their agenda of using HTML as a page-layout-and-universal-document language, which is not what it is for. :o)
Not that netscrape is blameless, of course. But on the whole netscape extensions seem to answer percieved needs of users, where Microsofts extensions seem to scratch the itch of Microsoft, and its desire to make Windows the only web platform. But then again I might just be a delusional bigot...
Correct use of the RFC process is to propose changes for comments before implementing them.. Making changes, implementing it and rolling it out to millions of people and THEN writing an RFC is the wrong way. In this respect I beleive both Netscape and Microsoft are guilty as hell.
To be real here it is only worth the effort of upgrading the kernel when it gives you something you need... I am going to upgrade my workstation because I need the improved soundcard support, but my firewall running 2.0.37 I will leave as it is because its working and I have no problems with it. Also the 2.0.x kernels work better with machines with less than 16Mb I am told and my firewall is a 486DX2/66 with 16Mb ram.
From what I read 2.2.x is perfectly OK for most users.. there are some issues with it but that has always been true (thats why the 2.0 series went up to release 36!!). Generally though dont waste time upgrading kernels unless you need something it has got in it....
Well hell I bought a faster modem - a 56k - and I only ever connect at 45333... Even then I'm lucky to get download rates in excess of 3kb/s due to net congestion.
What other options? ISDN? costs about $450 to get connected - no thanks.
No ADSL/SDSL here, no cable modems,
There is Tele2 radio connection at 128kbps but your limited to 200Mb/Month transfer...(!)
So for now I will stay with my modem. But better backbone tech will let me actually use all my 45333 bps (hopefully)....
Sorry, but no process however badly written should be able to kill a system so bad it needs to be power-cycled. Yes, a runaway process might consume too many resources and slow the thing to a crawl, but it should still be possible to reboot it!
This kind of fault is a kernel issue, but since it is so replicateable (?) i can't see it will be long before Apple have a patch out for it.
BTW anything that can be done in a benchmark test could be used by crackers in an attack, so it is worth treating seriously even if it is not "in the real world".
Heh Heh... Now that I would love to see! Maybe it would get some interest from politicians in IP if we could show how stupid the situation has become...
Any lawyers out there want to try?
I have an All-for-One IR wireless keyboard, and it doesn't have to be in a straight line... It even seems to work pointing AWAY from the computer (Although seeing the monitor is a problem!). It only seems to fail if the IR transmitter is covered or obscured by a LARGE object, or if the kbd is pointed directly away from the computer at some absorbant surface (like curtains etc). It seems to reflect off walls quite happily.
The only problem I had was it locking up If I touched the mouse in text-mode terminal with GPM *NOT* running. In X-Windows I had no problems at all.
I just need to get a graphics card with TV output and I can surf the web from the setee in the lounge! (Sad, or what??!)