All you people whining about how you can't disable the paperclip: just don't install it. At least in Office 2000, you can deselect the "Office Assistant" option and it won't copy the files for it.
I love nature. I love taking hikes, in mountains, on the sea shore, in the hills near my house, wherever. It just makes me happy to see the natural beauty around me.
Anything inside my computer or on the Internet, or any human made building, pales in comparison to what I can see by just walking or driving a few miles away from where I live. This is really something you can't get on the Internet.
Mod the parent up, someone. Even though I don't agree with many of the points, this is still so much better than most +3 comments.
Basically, I think that the revolution the way you describe it will never happen. The US society (and other developed countries') has enough checks and balances to prevent this. Consider this: The general uprising isn't necessary. If the student populations of 50 of the US' major colleges start to riot over issues like this (and that will happen much sooner than the classes you describe start getting angry) there will suddenly appear a tremendous pressure to scale the corporate/IP control down.
On the other hand, corporations appear to be highly efficient in economical sense, because of many factors. Therefore, in the future the corporations will remain an integral part of the US society, but will not manage to exert the effects you describe because they will be stopped.
As for the TV and your other decadence arguments, I don't think this really matters. Raising intelligent children doesn't just mean banning the TV, and you're badly mistaken when you think that the advances in graphics accelerators are a useless waste of resources (although I'm all for diverting capital from some other agreeably bullshit uses to NASA and various research). Highly intelligent people avoid TV, and highly intelligent people don't become consumer drones. And they are always the minority, by definition. I don't see any decadence in that.
As for DMCA and free speech: same as above. There are enough checks and balances in place to strike this down before it reaches anywhere near critical mass. I predict the DMCA will be struck down within 1 or 2 years. Copyright laws will remain though... necessary evil.
Ultimately, we could see a spaceborne Internet that could revolutionize how people work in outer space, just as the Internet is changing our more prosaic Earth-bound life.
I'm sorry, but having 4 or 5 probes on an extremely high-latency link, probably not directly connected to the Internet, does not qualify to be part of the Internet. It will be decades before anything beyond low earth orbit will attain enough connectivity to really become connected to the Internet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated by NASA's Deep Space Network and everything, but we're not there yet. Hell, even the combined bandwidth of all low earth orbit satellites is miniscule compared to ground links.
Frankly, I'm interested in how they built such a big bunker 2 km underground. Is this facility used for other experiments, or was it just built for this? How did they assemble it this far underground? How do they do air conditioning, life support, etc. there?
Over the past two years, I've seen some very impressive games that, in my opinion, push the envelope so much farther.
Really, playing UT (and soon Unreal 2 and Doom 3) is just ages more immersive than Wolf 3D or any console game of that time. The content is there, in my opinion, even in FPSs where level designers produce some amazing maps.
The new RPGs like BG2 and NWN are more exciting and more interesting than the older ones. Again, the content is there.
I don't really play that many console games because I don't have one. Regardless, I think the gaming industry has only gotten better.
Re:Think mean-time-to-failure, not just availabili
on
Juno And Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Windows 95 and successors, yes.
Windows NT4/2000, no.
A mostly idle win2k system on any halfway decent piece of hardware will run for months, unless by "idle" you mean "constantly running some memory-leaking and/or kernel-driver-loading buggy app". Yes, if you routinely launch and close tens of different complex windows consumer apps/games, like I do, it can eventually get hogged by weird bugs that don't release memory or cause errors in driver code, but that hardly qualifies for idle.
I wonder if there's actually a way to just simply forbid their connection app do do any of this. Like run it from under a different user who doesn't have any permissions whatsoever except to dial a modem (and what's bad about the fact that it can dial anytime? either you keep it on 24/7, or you can just unplug the wire). Despite the fact that you'll be "legally" breaking the agreement, it would be amusing to tell their software to fuck off and just keep it in a cage like this.
I completely agree. In fact, I confess that I chose Yahoo as my, um, "portal" for the exact reasons above. Most of my real world news come from Yahoo's Reuters/AP feed, and I glance at the other sections of my.yahoo from time to time too.
I'm about ready to ditch it though, and set my home page to my own computer's web server (with the potential webcam, monitor-something-or-other, google search, and custom links) but as long as yahoo stays independent there will definitely still be a link to it on my server and I'll visit it from time to time.
And in fact, I'm not sure (correct me if I'm wrong), but I think Yahoo was the first to offer a coherent portal and web-based email for it. In any case, I've been using it for what? like 3.5 years now? and I think among "portals" it definitely sucks the least.
20 Celsius, or 70 F, is lower than or equal to ambient room temperature. Unless your friend is running an active cooling system, there is no way the processor can run at lower temp than the ambient, and even if it's active, I seriously doubt that this figure is correct...
It really costs little for MS to put up with occasional whining from people who upgraded their mobo (and I bet it will read some signature from the BIOS) compared to a ~$200 license for each OS. Besides, the said cost dwindles dramatically when the fact that unlicensed installs will also decrease dramatically. I know, the way this copy protection scheme will work in the final product there will be easy ways to circumvent it, but it will make it A LOT harder for the average semi-computer-literate person to install the OS from the same CD on 2+ different computers.
It has nothing to do with the hard drive. If it did, that would be even more stupid than what they did.
What it does is it reads some information from the BIOS (dunno what, checksum, signature, or other, but something). If the BIOS is found to be the authentic vendor BIOS, it proceeds. Otherwise, it says that it can't install on this computer.
Of course, this rules out or severely limits mobo upgrades, but I agree that for the given purpose this is the least of evils (not that I agree with pursuing that purpose).
As a sidenote, it's extremely difficult to slashdot Netscape's servers. They have immense capacity compared to most sites Slashdot links to. My connection speed to Komodo is twice as fast as to any other site and six times faster than to an average server (600 KBps opposed to 100 for most sites).
After the easy gains, easy-to-use and secure are mutually exclusive, because easy-to-use implies that there are fewer steps and checks being made, and that implies there are fewer steps and checks to bypass/fake if you are trying to breach security.
From a systems design standpoint, this is not fully true. Yes, there exists a balance between real usability and real security. However, a well-designed system can shift this tradeoff into the "it's not usable"-"system takes care of it" plane. A properly implemented system, with excellent design decisions, can greatly gain security while not compromising usability. As design of machines that directly interact with people improves, more and more features that were previously considered necessary hindrances or even okay-designed features will be replaced by user-transparent, "intelligent" features. For example, some recognition system based on some combinaton of biological analyses will sooner or later replace the current scheme of entering a user name and a password to gain access or sticking a key in the lock to unlock it.
I installed ICQ 2000b and deleted half of its DLLs based on the descriptions included in them. Most importantly, I deleted ALAgent.dll and the http client dlls, which are responsible for relaying any ad information. Now it shows blank spaces instead of ads and uses less memory. It is actually less bloated than most ICQ versions (~10 MB on disk without user data, ~10 MB in memory).
I'm disgusted by ads. I can live with ads on webpages, but no program that I use is allowed to show me ads by itself. I guess it's the "uncomfortable because it's out of your control" thing.
If we should follow your story up to the part where the circuit board gets broken, the hard drive heads wouldn't survive the shock if the circuit board broke.
More to the topic, this is a poor example. Using encryption on various devices including ones like this might still be beneficial, and putting in a new circuit board might not work even on today's hard drives.
Exactly! Also, please make Unreal 2 (when it comes out) run at 1800x1600 at 60 FPS with high-detail textures, and make things like Mozilla compile in a reasonable amount of time (although that has more to do with memory and hard disks). There are plenty of uses for faster processors, it's just that most of developers who work with processor-hungry applications shy away from making them so complex they will run like turtles on today's machines.
...Please show me an Alpha or another RISC processor that is as fast as a Duron 900 and sells for $150 like the mentioned Duron. If you can find one for me, I'll gladly switch to 2.4 running on that. Otherwise, I'll keep my Athlon 800 that I got for $150 3 months ago. I don't have any more money to spend than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot should have anchor auto-closing, like if a link is longer than 20 words or something it would insert a in it...
All you people whining about how you can't disable the paperclip: just don't install it. At least in Office 2000, you can deselect the "Office Assistant" option and it won't copy the files for it.
I love nature. I love taking hikes, in mountains, on the sea shore, in the hills near my house, wherever. It just makes me happy to see the natural beauty around me.
Anything inside my computer or on the Internet, or any human made building, pales in comparison to what I can see by just walking or driving a few miles away from where I live. This is really something you can't get on the Internet.
ew, sorry for no line breaks, I thought I was posting in plain text.
Mod the parent up, someone. Even though I don't agree with many of the points, this is still so much better than most +3 comments. Basically, I think that the revolution the way you describe it will never happen. The US society (and other developed countries') has enough checks and balances to prevent this. Consider this: The general uprising isn't necessary. If the student populations of 50 of the US' major colleges start to riot over issues like this (and that will happen much sooner than the classes you describe start getting angry) there will suddenly appear a tremendous pressure to scale the corporate/IP control down. On the other hand, corporations appear to be highly efficient in economical sense, because of many factors. Therefore, in the future the corporations will remain an integral part of the US society, but will not manage to exert the effects you describe because they will be stopped. As for the TV and your other decadence arguments, I don't think this really matters. Raising intelligent children doesn't just mean banning the TV, and you're badly mistaken when you think that the advances in graphics accelerators are a useless waste of resources (although I'm all for diverting capital from some other agreeably bullshit uses to NASA and various research). Highly intelligent people avoid TV, and highly intelligent people don't become consumer drones. And they are always the minority, by definition. I don't see any decadence in that. As for DMCA and free speech: same as above. There are enough checks and balances in place to strike this down before it reaches anywhere near critical mass. I predict the DMCA will be struck down within 1 or 2 years. Copyright laws will remain though... necessary evil.
I'm sorry, but having 4 or 5 probes on an extremely high-latency link, probably not directly connected to the Internet, does not qualify to be part of the Internet. It will be decades before anything beyond low earth orbit will attain enough connectivity to really become connected to the Internet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated by NASA's Deep Space Network and everything, but we're not there yet. Hell, even the combined bandwidth of all low earth orbit satellites is miniscule compared to ground links.
Frankly, I'm interested in how they built such a big bunker 2 km underground. Is this facility used for other experiments, or was it just built for this? How did they assemble it this far underground? How do they do air conditioning, life support, etc. there?
Over the past two years, I've seen some very impressive games that, in my opinion, push the envelope so much farther.
Really, playing UT (and soon Unreal 2 and Doom 3) is just ages more immersive than Wolf 3D or any console game of that time. The content is there, in my opinion, even in FPSs where level designers produce some amazing maps.
The new RPGs like BG2 and NWN are more exciting and more interesting than the older ones. Again, the content is there.
I don't really play that many console games because I don't have one. Regardless, I think the gaming industry has only gotten better.
Windows NT4/2000, no.
A mostly idle win2k system on any halfway decent piece of hardware will run for months, unless by "idle" you mean "constantly running some memory-leaking and/or kernel-driver-loading buggy app". Yes, if you routinely launch and close tens of different complex windows consumer apps/games, like I do, it can eventually get hogged by weird bugs that don't release memory or cause errors in driver code, but that hardly qualifies for idle.
Win2k is pretty stable.
I wonder if there's actually a way to just simply forbid their connection app do do any of this. Like run it from under a different user who doesn't have any permissions whatsoever except to dial a modem (and what's bad about the fact that it can dial anytime? either you keep it on 24/7, or you can just unplug the wire). Despite the fact that you'll be "legally" breaking the agreement, it would be amusing to tell their software to fuck off and just keep it in a cage like this.
I'm about ready to ditch it though, and set my home page to my own computer's web server (with the potential webcam, monitor-something-or-other, google search, and custom links) but as long as yahoo stays independent there will definitely still be a link to it on my server and I'll visit it from time to time.
And in fact, I'm not sure (correct me if I'm wrong), but I think Yahoo was the first to offer a coherent portal and web-based email for it. In any case, I've been using it for what? like 3.5 years now? and I think among "portals" it definitely sucks the least.
Whoever moderated the parent offtopic better get their shit together...
20 Celsius, or 70 F, is lower than or equal to ambient room temperature. Unless your friend is running an active cooling system, there is no way the processor can run at lower temp than the ambient, and even if it's active, I seriously doubt that this figure is correct...
It really costs little for MS to put up with occasional whining from people who upgraded their mobo (and I bet it will read some signature from the BIOS) compared to a ~$200 license for each OS. Besides, the said cost dwindles dramatically when the fact that unlicensed installs will also decrease dramatically. I know, the way this copy protection scheme will work in the final product there will be easy ways to circumvent it, but it will make it A LOT harder for the average semi-computer-literate person to install the OS from the same CD on 2+ different computers.
It has nothing to do with the hard drive. If it did, that would be even more stupid than what they did.
What it does is it reads some information from the BIOS (dunno what, checksum, signature, or other, but something). If the BIOS is found to be the authentic vendor BIOS, it proceeds. Otherwise, it says that it can't install on this computer. Of course, this rules out or severely limits mobo upgrades, but I agree that for the given purpose this is the least of evils (not that I agree with pursuing that purpose).
As a sidenote, it's extremely difficult to slashdot Netscape's servers. They have immense capacity compared to most sites Slashdot links to. My connection speed to Komodo is twice as fast as to any other site and six times faster than to an average server (600 KBps opposed to 100 for most sites).
From a systems design standpoint, this is not fully true. Yes, there exists a balance between real usability and real security. However, a well-designed system can shift this tradeoff into the "it's not usable"-"system takes care of it" plane. A properly implemented system, with excellent design decisions, can greatly gain security while not compromising usability. As design of machines that directly interact with people improves, more and more features that were previously considered necessary hindrances or even okay-designed features will be replaced by user-transparent, "intelligent" features. For example, some recognition system based on some combinaton of biological analyses will sooner or later replace the current scheme of entering a user name and a password to gain access or sticking a key in the lock to unlock it.
What do you think I do every day?
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
(C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.
C:\>grep
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `grep --help' for more information.
C:\>winnt\system32\find
FIND: Parameter format not correct
C:\>progra~1\cygwin\bin\find --help
Usage: progra~1/cygwin/bin/find [path...] [expression]
default path is the current directory; default expression is -print
expression may consist of:
operators (decreasing precedence; -and is implicit where no others are given):
( EXPR ) ! EXPR -not EXPR EXPR1 -a EXPR2 EXPR1 -and EXPR2
EXPR1 -o EXPR2 EXPR1 -or EXPR2 EXPR1 , EXPR2
options (always true): -daystart -depth -follow --help
-maxdepth LEVELS -mindepth LEVELS -mount -noleaf --version -xdev
tests (N can be +N or -N or N): -amin N -anewer FILE -atime N -cmin N
-cnewer FILE -ctime N -empty -false -fstype TYPE -gid N -group NAME
-ilname PATTERN -iname PATTERN -inum N -ipath PATTERN -iregex PATTERN
-links N -lname PATTERN -mmin N -mtime N -name PATTERN -newer FILE
-nouser -nogroup -path PATTERN -perm [+-]MODE -regex PATTERN
-size N[bckw] -true -type [bcdpfls] -uid N -used N -user NAME
-xtype [bcdpfls]
actions: -exec COMMAND ; -fprint FILE -fprint0 FILE -fprintf FILE FORMAT
-ok COMMAND ; -print -print0 -printf FORMAT -prune -ls
C:\>
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths