It takes at least 2 to 3 weeks to bring a new person up to speed. Simply bring more people in won't solve the problem.
Pissing off enough of your employees so they quit, leaving you forced to hire new people and spending 2 to 3 weeks bringing them up to speed certainly won't solve the problem either.
As others have said, the flag isn't visible from earth. Besides, why would you be looking for the flag, anyway? The base of the lunar lander is a hell of a lot bigger, as is the lunar rover that was used on the last missions.
Re:Why can't I get Java working on my RH8 box?
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 1
I'm still without any Java on my Mozilla 1.0.1 install.....
I don't know if the java plugin works with moz 1.0 (though when I say it like that, it sounds like I'm blaming sun when I don't know - perhaps moz 1.0 doesn't work with the java plugin), but I know it works like a charm with some of the later versions. The later versions are better anyway - does 1.0 have tabbed browsing? At any rate, go into your mozilla plugins directory and symlink the java plugin that comes with the JRE/JDK - you can find it in JAVA_HOME/jre/plugin. Enjoy.
The original poster sounded as though he thought that users of all roads in the U.S. were charged a toll (as in drive up to the toll booth, hand them your dollar, and then you're allowed to drive on the road), which is not the case. This was what I was trying to explain. Reading my post, I realize that I did make it sound as if once the road is there, the costs end, which I did not mean to do. My only point is that once the road is there, people may drive on it for free without paying a toll above and beyond what they have already paid in taxes.
An average meter of road in my country costs approx. USD 2500 to build, yet it's free for all to use...
Road construction in the U.S. averages about the same, IIRC. Most roads in the U.S. are not toll roads, and even those that are are generally reasonable (notable exception: the 12 or so miles of I-95 through New Hampshire that charges $1 each way for cars - the Massachusetts tax, as I like to call it). So in that sense, most roads, once constructed, are free for all to use. It's the construction of the road that is obviously not free, and is funded by taxes.
Yep, in the same way they banned speeding and reckless driving on our roads so now nobody does it.
The fact that people still speed, and often get away with it, does not mean that no one gets caught speeding, as you seem to imply. Just because people will still download porn if it's illegal doesn't (a) make it right that it's illegal or (b) mean that some people won't get busted for it. Censorship is bad, even if you can get away with it most of the time (a la speeding - and no this doesn't mean I'm in favor of abolishing speed limits).
Communism didn't work? I'd love to have a discussion about this (everything most people "know" about communism has nothing to with communism and everything to do with the fact that *all* communist countries were also totalitarian
Umm, due to human nature, the communist system itself invariably leads to a totalitarian state. It's not that all the communist systems in the world just happened to be dictatorships, it's that humans cannot exist on a large scale as equals. There will always be a power grab. So yes, communism didn't work.
In the grand-scheme of a life $20 isn't very much money to pay.
Unless of course your grand scheme is taking place in a third world nation, where the per capita GDP of Sierra Leone, for example, is $150. Granted, in purchasing power that's almost $500, but even still I would bet that $20 is a lot of money to pay. (source)
I would say it's a safe bet that since you're posting to this forum, you're making slightly more than $150 a year however:-)
3) CD's are overpriced for what you get.. when Rush used to put out albums, five or six songs were GOOD and the rest were OKAY.. now your pablum barfing force fed musicians are wont to put out one hit, on a record that Im payign 16 dollars for.
CDs are a ripoff, no matter what the RIAA will tell you about them being a good value. I've seen movies on DVD selling for cheaper than that movie's soundtrack IN THE SAME STORE. When I can get the same product, plus the movie itself, for less money, how can anyone think that CDs aren't overpriced?
I'm not talking about generally noisy restaurants, I couldn't care less if someone is shouting away on their cell phone there. I'm talking about these restaurants with the "quieter crowd" that you speak of, which is why I can hear the jackass shouting into his phone. I'm trying to enjoy my (expensive, as you mentioned) meal, and I have to listen to the guy across from me shout about his day at work.
And I'm not adamently opposed to cell phone use as you say, I use one myself all the time. But I try to be polite about it, i.e. turn off the ringer and don't answer if I'm in a place that's supposed to be quiet. Chances are that what I'm doing at the time is far more important to me that what the person that's calling me is planning on saying.
The fact that I had to listen to 25 friggin cell phones ring during my college graduation was ridiculous. One I could understand. After hearing the one, you'd think everyone else with a phone would check to make sure the ringer on their's was off. I know I did. Apparently, however, that's too much to ask of the general population. Or, what's even better, the people that just sit there while the thing is ringing without muting the ringer, because they're too embarrassed to reach for it because then someone might know it's their phone. So then you have to listen to the damn thing ring for 25 seconds before it shuts up itself. Brilliant.
Would you like it if you were in a restaurant and someone stood up and shouted "I'M GETTING A CALL ON MY PHONE... I'M GETTING A CALL ON MY PHONE"? Or how about if they did that at your graduation? Or while watching a play? Would you find that rude? I would, and that's exactly what a cell phone ringing at one of those times is. So don't make me sound like I'm infringing on people's rights because I just want people to show a little courtesy and respect when it comes to their cell phone.
Seriously, people like you really worry me - any other person talking around you and you call it abuse. I call it "being around other people".
Apparently you haven't been around many other people that are talking on cell phones. THEY TEND TO SHOUT FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. In fact, I've been with many people who were talking at a normal speaking voice until their phone rang, AND THEY IMMEDIATELY BEGAN TO SHOUT INTO THE THING. It's terribly irritating, especially when it takes place in a restaurant.
That is misinformation. The user only got his Telstra ADSL connection because Telstra didn't want him to complain to Australia's Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO).
I don't get that from the article you linked or from the original story's article. The way it reads to me is that he complained to the TIO because Telstra denied him service for iiNet but approved him for Bigpond, so he felt that Telstra was giving an unfair advantage to Bigpond on the line quality check.
However, the original story said that Telstra signed the user up for their own service after denying the user's application to the service that simply resells Telstra's service. I don't see in either of the articles anything that says Bigpond is owned by Telstra. Maybe you could clear that up for us? (Of course, now that I go to bigpond.com it says Telstra BigPond at the top, so apparently that clears it up. I'm surprised WhirlPool didn't explicitly point that out, since it makes the situation that much worse, unless it's just common knowledge down-under)
you state that both CD copies and VHS tape copies are analogous to cassette tape copies. You then proceed to support your VHS claim (and I fully agree with that comparison) while (conveniently?) failing to demonstrate how CD copies are analogous to tape copies (where physical media cost is the only thing I find analogous between the two).
CD media cost (very little nowadays, but still not nothing in most cases) and the limited feasible distribution (see my original comment) when compared with p2p is how they are analogous. I can't mail 10 gigabytes worth of music overseas as cheaply as I can via the internet, going under the assumption that I would be paying for my internet access and computer anyway. Since I owned a computer and paid for internet access for at least a couple years before I even heard of mp3, I believe that this is a fair assumption. Further, unless I knew someone overseas I wouldn't mail them 10GB worth of music, but with p2p a personal relationship isn't a necessity. Obviously, as you pointed out, analog lossiness isn't an issue in the CD case.
Of course, this entire discussion is rather academic given that the entertainment industry has repeatedly failed to prove their losses and history has repeatedly failed to bear out their dire predictions.
I whole-heartedly agree.
Re:The situation's aren't comparable.
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmm... The RIAA seemed to do pretty good with cassettes that let you copy their product and give it to some one else.
There was a lot more effort that went into copying tapes than a file on a hard drive. First, there was the cost of the blank cassette. Sure it wasn't much, but given high enough distribution, it adds up to a lot. With p2p there are no real distribution costs (don't tell me your internet access costs money because that's not a marginal cost, and you'd be paying for your internet anyway). Second, the number of people you could distribute the cassette to was largely limited to the people you knew. Because of the cost of the blank cassette, you certainly weren't going to mass produce copies that you showered on everyone in your neighborhood. With p2p, you can get music from anyone in the world, 99.9999% of the time not knowing who they are. You can argue the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, but making a copy of a copy of a copy eventually results in terrible quality. You may think it's recording industry propaganda, but it ain't.
CD burners have been available longer than P2P and don't seem to have hurt them much. Oh, and the movie industry seems to do allright with video tapes.
These are both analogous to the above. Video tapes suffer from analog copying especially badly, since a standard VHS tape is only half TV resolution to begin with, and who ever paid the money for Super VHS?
The PC game industry seems to have done pretty good against people copying games and giving them away.
Again, analogous to the above. But in this case, I think you're wrong. It's not as totally widespread as music swapping, but go onto any p2p service and you can probably find whatever game you're looking for. I know when I lived in the dorms in college there weren't more than a couple people on my floor that owned a game, but everyone had a copy. The game industry just doesn't publicize it as much as the RIAA or Microsoft. And even though everyone hates MS and the B$A, Windows piracy is really a huge problem. I used to work at a mom & pop computer store around the time of Win95 and Win98, and every time the computer show rolled around, someone would bring their system in for service and along with it came an (obviously) faked Win95 disc.
In the English language, "should" can be synonymous with "must". This is the unfortunate problem with specifications - English isn't rigid enough that interpretation cannot introduce errors. What you read as "ought to" I read as "obliged to"
Many of the DOD specifications I've worked with define up front what they mean by should, must, may, etc. This is about the only good thing about DOD specs...
And here is a big ole RTFC[omment] and your own personal RTFA! When you type in just "slashdot", Mozilla and IE first try slashdot.com. They may try slashdot.net, slashdot.org, and slashdot.edu, if slashdot.com fails, but I can't tell right now because I don't know a domain name off the top of my head that doesn't have a corresponding.com registration. However, Lynx most certainly checks.com,.edu,.net, and.org of the name you give. From the Register article, this would violate the patent. However, Lynx has been doing this for as long as I can remember, which is prior than 1998 (the year the patent was applied for). Prior art, anyone?
Really? I'll take it! My friend had a chance to buy some swampland in Florida 10 or 15 years ago and he passed it up. Last time he was down there his swampland had been turned into a development with condo upon condo. He could've been rich.
And by the way, fellow Slashdotters, enough with the "my friends said" stories.
Yes, I even got the obligatory "my friend said" story in there, just for good measure:-)
I'm kind of curious how you make that statement, in each of the above definitions you provide, the ESR definition is prefered to your definition.
First off, you completely misunderstand my post. I am NOT suggesting that the term "hacker" shouldn't be used to describe a computer expert. I am merely saying that the term hacker MAY ALSO be used to describe someone who engages in malicious activities, a use which ESR claims is "deprecated" in preference of "cracker."
Second, I disagree that the ordering in which definitions are given in a dictionary implies preference. Let's look at the definition of radio from merriamwebster.com:
1 : of, relating to, or operated by radiant energy
2 : of or relating to electric currents or phenomena (as electromagnetic radiation ) of frequencies between about 15,000 and 1011 hertz
3 a : of, relating to, or used in radio or a radio set b : specializing in radio or associated with the radio industry c (1) : transmitted by radio (2) : making or participating in radio broadcasts d : controlled or directed by radio
All three definitions are equally valid, just as the multiple definitions of hacker are equally valid. By your statement, we should come up with a new term for the thing in our car we use to listen to music because other definitions of the word radio are "preferred."
If a population insists being called something else then its popular name then do it.
We still call someone who is proficient at computers a hacker. My non-computer friends call me a hacker, knowing full well that I don't break into computer systems. So, the proficient computer users that wish to be called hackers are still called hackers.
Similarly, the mainstream population calls someone who breaks into a computer system a hacker. As far as I know, the e7eet hax0r d00dz don't wish to be called cracker, they wish to be called hacker (hence hax0r d00dz). So, the "bad" hackers that wish to be called hackers are called hackers.
It seems that everyone who wants to be called a hacker is called a hacker. Where's the problem?
If the majority of the population that considers themselves a hacker take the definition of "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer", the popular defintion is wrong and should be changed.
Well, first off we can toss out the definition from the Jargon File, because I (and probably most right-minded people) wouldn't consider that a definitive source regarding the English language. Likewise, we can toss out the Dictionary of Computing, since its entry is just copied from the jargon file.
So, that leaves your WordNet entry, which gives may enjoy the challenge of breaking into other computers as a definition. The Merriam Webster citation doesn't mention computers at all. So, what did you prove?
After doing my own dictionary look-ups, I came up with the following definitions:
From the American Heritage Dictionary at bartleby.com: cracker: One who makes unauthorized use of a computer, especially to tamper with data or programs. hacker:Informal 1. One who is proficient at using or programming a computer; a computer buff. 2. One who uses programming skills to gain illegal access to a computer network or file. [em. mine] 3. One who enthusiastically pursues a game or sport: a weekend tennis hacker.
From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary at merriamwebster.com: cracker: No computer-related definition found. hacker: 1 : one that hacks
2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity a tennis hacker
3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system [em. mine]
From AskOxford.com, which claims to use the Oxford English Dictionary without charging me like oed.com does: cracker: No computer-related definition found (though, to be fair, the computer-related definition of cracker appears on their list of words submitted during a 1999 Appeal for New Words, but nevertheless it doesn't appear in the dictionary). hacker:noun colloquial 1. computer enthusiast. 2. person who gains unauthorized access to computer network. [em. mine]
It seems as though you and ESR are fighting an uphill battle.
Finally, regarding your claim that hacker has _always_ been defined as a computer expert, it's amusing that from what I can tell from the above sources, a hacker has always meant someone inept at something.
Actually, according to the whois for emarketersamerica.org (registered through register.com), his email address is mefels@aol.com. I encourage everyone to forward all your spam to Mr. Felstein with the header "You are receiving this because you opted in to receive penis enlargement and viagra offers by connecting to the Internet. This is NOT spam."
Here are their whitepapers. Kinda boring, actually...
My favorite was the ports list. It started out as a nice copy of/etc/services. The good part is the last third, the "Security Backdoor/Trojan Ports." I learned that ports such as 21, 22, 23, 25, and 80 are "hostile ports" that are "mostly used for backdoor or trojan programs." I can just see some management cl00bie saying "oh shit, our webserver is listening on port 80, we must have been hacked!" Though I suppose given sendmail's security history, maybe it should be considered a backdoor;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It takes at least 2 to 3 weeks to bring a new person up to speed. Simply bring more people in won't solve the problem.
Pissing off enough of your employees so they quit, leaving you forced to hire new people and spending 2 to 3 weeks bringing them up to speed certainly won't solve the problem either.
As others have said, the flag isn't visible from earth. Besides, why would you be looking for the flag, anyway? The base of the lunar lander is a hell of a lot bigger, as is the lunar rover that was used on the last missions.
I'm still without any Java on my Mozilla 1.0.1 install.....
I don't know if the java plugin works with moz 1.0 (though when I say it like that, it sounds like I'm blaming sun when I don't know - perhaps moz 1.0 doesn't work with the java plugin), but I know it works like a charm with some of the later versions. The later versions are better anyway - does 1.0 have tabbed browsing? At any rate, go into your mozilla plugins directory and symlink the java plugin that comes with the JRE/JDK - you can find it in JAVA_HOME/jre/plugin. Enjoy.
The original poster sounded as though he thought that users of all roads in the U.S. were charged a toll (as in drive up to the toll booth, hand them your dollar, and then you're allowed to drive on the road), which is not the case. This was what I was trying to explain. Reading my post, I realize that I did make it sound as if once the road is there, the costs end, which I did not mean to do. My only point is that once the road is there, people may drive on it for free without paying a toll above and beyond what they have already paid in taxes.
An average meter of road in my country costs approx. USD 2500 to build, yet it's free for all to use...
Road construction in the U.S. averages about the same, IIRC. Most roads in the U.S. are not toll roads, and even those that are are generally reasonable (notable exception: the 12 or so miles of I-95 through New Hampshire that charges $1 each way for cars - the Massachusetts tax, as I like to call it). So in that sense, most roads, once constructed, are free for all to use. It's the construction of the road that is obviously not free, and is funded by taxes.
Yep, in the same way they banned speeding and reckless driving on our roads so now nobody does it.
The fact that people still speed, and often get away with it, does not mean that no one gets caught speeding, as you seem to imply. Just because people will still download porn if it's illegal doesn't (a) make it right that it's illegal or (b) mean that some people won't get busted for it. Censorship is bad, even if you can get away with it most of the time (a la speeding - and no this doesn't mean I'm in favor of abolishing speed limits).
Communism didn't work? I'd love to have a discussion about this (everything most people "know" about communism has nothing to with communism and everything to do with the fact that *all* communist countries were also totalitarian
Umm, due to human nature, the communist system itself invariably leads to a totalitarian state. It's not that all the communist systems in the world just happened to be dictatorships, it's that humans cannot exist on a large scale as equals. There will always be a power grab. So yes, communism didn't work.
In the grand-scheme of a life $20 isn't very much money to pay.
:-)
Unless of course your grand scheme is taking place in a third world nation, where the per capita GDP of Sierra Leone, for example, is $150. Granted, in purchasing power that's almost $500, but even still I would bet that $20 is a lot of money to pay. (source)
I would say it's a safe bet that since you're posting to this forum, you're making slightly more than $150 a year however
3) CD's are overpriced for what you get.. when Rush used to put out albums, five or six songs were GOOD and the rest were OKAY.. now your pablum barfing force fed musicians are wont to put out one hit, on a record that Im payign 16 dollars for.
CDs are a ripoff, no matter what the RIAA will tell you about them being a good value. I've seen movies on DVD selling for cheaper than that movie's soundtrack IN THE SAME STORE. When I can get the same product, plus the movie itself, for less money, how can anyone think that CDs aren't overpriced?
I'm not talking about generally noisy restaurants, I couldn't care less if someone is shouting away on their cell phone there. I'm talking about these restaurants with the "quieter crowd" that you speak of, which is why I can hear the jackass shouting into his phone. I'm trying to enjoy my (expensive, as you mentioned) meal, and I have to listen to the guy across from me shout about his day at work.
... I'M GETTING A CALL ON MY PHONE"? Or how about if they did that at your graduation? Or while watching a play? Would you find that rude? I would, and that's exactly what a cell phone ringing at one of those times is. So don't make me sound like I'm infringing on people's rights because I just want people to show a little courtesy and respect when it comes to their cell phone.
And I'm not adamently opposed to cell phone use as you say, I use one myself all the time. But I try to be polite about it, i.e. turn off the ringer and don't answer if I'm in a place that's supposed to be quiet. Chances are that what I'm doing at the time is far more important to me that what the person that's calling me is planning on saying.
The fact that I had to listen to 25 friggin cell phones ring during my college graduation was ridiculous. One I could understand. After hearing the one, you'd think everyone else with a phone would check to make sure the ringer on their's was off. I know I did. Apparently, however, that's too much to ask of the general population. Or, what's even better, the people that just sit there while the thing is ringing without muting the ringer, because they're too embarrassed to reach for it because then someone might know it's their phone. So then you have to listen to the damn thing ring for 25 seconds before it shuts up itself. Brilliant.
Would you like it if you were in a restaurant and someone stood up and shouted "I'M GETTING A CALL ON MY PHONE
Seriously, people like you really worry me - any other person talking around you and you call it abuse. I call it "being around other people".
Apparently you haven't been around many other people that are talking on cell phones. THEY TEND TO SHOUT FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. In fact, I've been with many people who were talking at a normal speaking voice until their phone rang, AND THEY IMMEDIATELY BEGAN TO SHOUT INTO THE THING. It's terribly irritating, especially when it takes place in a restaurant.
That is misinformation. The user only got his Telstra ADSL connection because Telstra didn't want him to complain to Australia's Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO).
I don't get that from the article you linked or from the original story's article. The way it reads to me is that he complained to the TIO because Telstra denied him service for iiNet but approved him for Bigpond, so he felt that Telstra was giving an unfair advantage to Bigpond on the line quality check.
However, the original story said that Telstra signed the user up for their own service after denying the user's application to the service that simply resells Telstra's service. I don't see in either of the articles anything that says Bigpond is owned by Telstra. Maybe you could clear that up for us? (Of course, now that I go to bigpond.com it says Telstra BigPond at the top, so apparently that clears it up. I'm surprised WhirlPool didn't explicitly point that out, since it makes the situation that much worse, unless it's just common knowledge down-under)
you state that both CD copies and VHS tape copies are analogous to cassette tape copies. You then proceed to support your VHS claim (and I fully agree with that comparison) while (conveniently?) failing to demonstrate how CD copies are analogous to tape copies (where physical media cost is the only thing I find analogous between the two).
CD media cost (very little nowadays, but still not nothing in most cases) and the limited feasible distribution (see my original comment) when compared with p2p is how they are analogous. I can't mail 10 gigabytes worth of music overseas as cheaply as I can via the internet, going under the assumption that I would be paying for my internet access and computer anyway. Since I owned a computer and paid for internet access for at least a couple years before I even heard of mp3, I believe that this is a fair assumption. Further, unless I knew someone overseas I wouldn't mail them 10GB worth of music, but with p2p a personal relationship isn't a necessity. Obviously, as you pointed out, analog lossiness isn't an issue in the CD case.
Of course, this entire discussion is rather academic given that the entertainment industry has repeatedly failed to prove their losses and history has repeatedly failed to bear out their dire predictions.
I whole-heartedly agree.
Hmmm... The RIAA seemed to do pretty good with cassettes that let you copy their product and give it to some one else.
There was a lot more effort that went into copying tapes than a file on a hard drive. First, there was the cost of the blank cassette. Sure it wasn't much, but given high enough distribution, it adds up to a lot. With p2p there are no real distribution costs (don't tell me your internet access costs money because that's not a marginal cost, and you'd be paying for your internet anyway). Second, the number of people you could distribute the cassette to was largely limited to the people you knew. Because of the cost of the blank cassette, you certainly weren't going to mass produce copies that you showered on everyone in your neighborhood. With p2p, you can get music from anyone in the world, 99.9999% of the time not knowing who they are. You can argue the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, but making a copy of a copy of a copy eventually results in terrible quality. You may think it's recording industry propaganda, but it ain't.
CD burners have been available longer than P2P and don't seem to have hurt them much.
Oh, and the movie industry seems to do allright with video tapes.
These are both analogous to the above. Video tapes suffer from analog copying especially badly, since a standard VHS tape is only half TV resolution to begin with, and who ever paid the money for Super VHS?
The PC game industry seems to have done pretty good against people copying games and giving them away.
Again, analogous to the above. But in this case, I think you're wrong. It's not as totally widespread as music swapping, but go onto any p2p service and you can probably find whatever game you're looking for. I know when I lived in the dorms in college there weren't more than a couple people on my floor that owned a game, but everyone had a copy. The game industry just doesn't publicize it as much as the RIAA or Microsoft. And even though everyone hates MS and the B$A, Windows piracy is really a huge problem. I used to work at a mom & pop computer store around the time of Win95 and Win98, and every time the computer show rolled around, someone would bring their system in for service and along with it came an (obviously) faked Win95 disc.
I'm suprised you don't have this already, France does:
Now you've done it... We'll NEVER get anything like that as long as Bush is in office now that you've said that France has one!
Of course, we'd never get anything like that as long as Bush is in office, period.
In the English language, "should" can be synonymous with "must". This is the unfortunate problem with specifications - English isn't rigid enough that interpretation cannot introduce errors. What you read as "ought to" I read as "obliged to"
Many of the DOD specifications I've worked with define up front what they mean by should, must, may, etc. This is about the only good thing about DOD specs...
Here is a big ole RTFA to you!
.com registration. However, Lynx most certainly checks .com, .edu, .net, and .org of the name you give. From the Register article, this would violate the patent. However, Lynx has been doing this for as long as I can remember, which is prior than 1998 (the year the patent was applied for). Prior art, anyone?
And here is a big ole RTFC[omment] and your own personal RTFA! When you type in just "slashdot", Mozilla and IE first try slashdot.com. They may try slashdot.net, slashdot.org, and slashdot.edu, if slashdot.com fails, but I can't tell right now because I don't know a domain name off the top of my head that doesn't have a corresponding
It always is, isn't it?
In a way, yes, it is. Look at the Southern DEMOCRAT party, which ran STROM THURMOND for President in 1948. Need I say more?
Go figure. BOTH PARTIES ARE CORRUPT.
However, I still have to agree with this.
and I have some swamp land in Florida for you.
:-)
Really? I'll take it! My friend had a chance to buy some swampland in Florida 10 or 15 years ago and he passed it up. Last time he was down there his swampland had been turned into a development with condo upon condo. He could've been rich.
And by the way, fellow Slashdotters, enough with the "my friends said" stories.
Yes, I even got the obligatory "my friend said" story in there, just for good measure
The non-criminal meaning was first in all the definitions you cited.
See my reply to Doug-W which basically replies to your comment as well.
I'm kind of curious how you make that statement, in each of the above definitions you provide, the ESR definition is prefered to your definition.
First off, you completely misunderstand my post. I am NOT suggesting that the term "hacker" shouldn't be used to describe a computer expert. I am merely saying that the term hacker MAY ALSO be used to describe someone who engages in malicious activities, a use which ESR claims is "deprecated" in preference of "cracker."
Second, I disagree that the ordering in which definitions are given in a dictionary implies preference. Let's look at the definition of radio from merriamwebster.com:
1 : of, relating to, or operated by radiant energy
2 : of or relating to electric currents or phenomena (as electromagnetic radiation ) of frequencies between about 15,000 and 1011 hertz
3 a : of, relating to, or used in radio or a radio set b : specializing in radio or associated with the radio industry c (1) : transmitted by radio (2) : making or participating in radio broadcasts d : controlled or directed by radio
All three definitions are equally valid, just as the multiple definitions of hacker are equally valid. By your statement, we should come up with a new term for the thing in our car we use to listen to music because other definitions of the word radio are "preferred."
Your post doesn't make any sense.
If a population insists being called something else then its popular name then do it.
We still call someone who is proficient at computers a hacker. My non-computer friends call me a hacker, knowing full well that I don't break into computer systems. So, the proficient computer users that wish to be called hackers are still called hackers.
Similarly, the mainstream population calls someone who breaks into a computer system a hacker. As far as I know, the e7eet hax0r d00dz don't wish to be called cracker, they wish to be called hacker (hence hax0r d00dz). So, the "bad" hackers that wish to be called hackers are called hackers.
It seems that everyone who wants to be called a hacker is called a hacker. Where's the problem?
If the majority of the population that considers themselves a hacker take the definition of "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer", the popular defintion is wrong and should be changed.
This is just stupid.
Well, first off we can toss out the definition from the Jargon File, because I (and probably most right-minded people) wouldn't consider that a definitive source regarding the English language. Likewise, we can toss out the Dictionary of Computing, since its entry is just copied from the jargon file.
So, that leaves your WordNet entry, which gives may enjoy the challenge of breaking into other computers as a definition. The Merriam Webster citation doesn't mention computers at all. So, what did you prove?
After doing my own dictionary look-ups, I came up with the following definitions:
From the American Heritage Dictionary at bartleby.com:
cracker: One who makes unauthorized use of a computer, especially to tamper with data or programs.
hacker: Informal 1. One who is proficient at using or programming a computer; a computer buff.
2. One who uses programming skills to gain illegal access to a computer network or file. [em. mine]
3. One who enthusiastically pursues a game or sport: a weekend tennis hacker.
From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary at merriamwebster.com:
cracker: No computer-related definition found.
hacker: 1 : one that hacks
2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity a tennis hacker
3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system [em. mine]
From AskOxford.com, which claims to use the Oxford English Dictionary without charging me like oed.com does:
cracker: No computer-related definition found (though, to be fair, the computer-related definition of cracker appears on their list of words submitted during a 1999 Appeal for New Words, but nevertheless it doesn't appear in the dictionary).
hacker: noun colloquial 1. computer enthusiast.
2. person who gains unauthorized access to computer network. [em. mine]
It seems as though you and ESR are fighting an uphill battle.
Finally, regarding your claim that hacker has _always_ been defined as a computer expert, it's amusing that from what I can tell from the above sources, a hacker has always meant someone inept at something.
Actually, according to the whois for emarketersamerica.org (registered through register.com), his email address is mefels@aol.com. I encourage everyone to forward all your spam to Mr. Felstein with the header "You are receiving this because you opted in to receive penis enlargement and viagra offers by connecting to the Internet. This is NOT spam."
Here are their whitepapers.
/etc/services. The good part is the last third, the "Security Backdoor/Trojan Ports." I learned that ports such as 21, 22, 23, 25, and 80 are "hostile ports" that are "mostly used for backdoor or trojan programs." I can just see some management cl00bie saying "oh shit, our webserver is listening on port 80, we must have been hacked!" Though I suppose given sendmail's security history, maybe it should be considered a backdoor ;-)
Kinda boring, actually...
My favorite was the ports list. It started out as a nice copy of