For whatever the reason, people who don't mind using Linux to "rescue" a dump-bound 486 will frequently have qualms about wiping Windows from their shiny new Dells.
I use Linux (debian, to be precise) on my shiny new Dell laptop, and have absolutely no problems with it. You'll find that the hardware argument between Linux and Windows is different than it was 2 years ago. Linux development has progressed to the point where one seems to be more likely to find solid Linux support for a piece of hardware than to find support for your particular version of Windows.
For hardware support, Windows is fragmented in a negative way. There are several versions of Windows in active use now, ME, 2k, XP, and even win98 boxes out there yet. Drivers are frequently not interchangeable between these, and often there are platforms left out to dry.
Linux, however, despite its various distribution choices, has one central kernel tree developing hardware support. Because of this you can guarantee that you can always plug the latest bug-fixed driver into any Linux distribution without disturbing the rest of the machine.
Before you ever get emails, do you call people and say "hey, would you mind emailing me?"
Actually, yes!!! It's called "giving a person your email address". This is not a novel concept, nor a particularly difficult concept. Communication with friends via email is entirely opt-in. I get emails from friends who I have given my email address to. Similarly, I get emails from a very few number of businesses that I have given my email address to and chose to receive email from because _I_ already decided that I want their product.
Every company in the world hopes that I want their product. Do I? No! If every company in the world sends me an email tomorrow with the hope that I'll buy their product, how am I supposed to find the emails from the people I actually wanted to receive emails from? It becomes an impossible task, they drown in the clutter.
You talk about "freedom to make a post" as equal to "freedom to send an email". But you're missing the difference between push-media and pull-media. A website, like Slashdot, is a pull-medium. I read this post of yours because I chose to. Your post might have been informative or might have been crap, but it doesn't matter because I chose to read it. Receiving an email is nothing at all like viewing a web page. Email is a push-medium, the control is entirely in the hands of the sender, which requires that senders exhibit a higher degree of responsibility to send only when receipt is desired.
You seem to have completely missed this rule of etiquette, and you seem to have completely missed the self-evident reasons for its existence.
Try thinking about the lives of those 80 million recipients next time, and thinking about whether or not they want to receive 80 million emails.
But my.mp3.com transmitting a song to the user, was found to be copyright infringement.
I thought it was mp3.com's database of songs which was found to be infringement.
It would be a completely different scenario if I put up a website, password it with the password "mymp3s", and put my legitamitely created-from-cd mp3s there for personal use. That's really no different from putting a really long speaker cable on my cd player. It's still personal use and still protected by copyright law.
Where this gets sketchy, is when someone else gets ahold of the password "mymp3s" and starts downloading the mp3s I had for my own personal use. Is that my fault? We seem to have a lot of existing mindset that it's not the fault of the one cracked if their machine is cracked, but only the fault of the one doing the cracking. In other words, computer security does not seem to be a responsibility in the eyes of the law.
But there ARE real-time actual 3D holographic worlds used in research and development, that a person can walk through as if it were a real world. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has a fascinating demonstration of this called the CAVE.
The marshmallows balloon up to at least 4 times the size.
Did you ever try eating it then? I've made micromarshmallows as snacks for my friends. It's a lot quicker than a campfire for making smores, and potentially more fun. Try filling an entire bowl with marshmallows.:)
Don't overestimate the/. crowd. Describing working with a microwave to 12 year olds is irresponsible!
Actually, I would say it's a lot more irresponsible to HIDE how a microwave works from 12 year olds. Yes, the microwave is a high voltage device, yes, microwaves can cook flesh, all the more reason to explain how a microwave works and under what conditions they're perfectly safe. (Namely when you leave the door closed, never mess with the insides, and just push the buttons.)
If you leave people sufficiently curious they might take it upon themself to investigate before they know what they're getting themselves into.
Because I don't want them contacting me. If I go to a news site, I go there for the news. I don't have to type my phone number into a newspaper dispensing machine to get a newspaper, and if they asked me to, you can bet it wouldn't be the right number. As a consumer, _I_ choose when to initiate a business transaction.
Those are the reasons I refuse to register with acurate information. When I go to a site to try to read a news article, and they ask for me to register before doing so, I find this extremely annoying because it can take up to 3 times longer to register (either with real or fake information) than it would take to simply read the article. Those are the reasons why I consider registration to be bad.
When sites are like slashdot, and permit either anonymous or registered access with value added (such as configurability), I have no problem, and will remain anonymous unless I regularly visit the site. When sites require registration before I can access the information, those sites are likely to lose my eyes going to their site, and the companies that run them are less likely to receive any purchases from me in the future because my first thought of them will be "Oh yes, they were annoying."
One of these days, someone is going to do a study and discover that corporations that make potential customers happy make a bigger profit. Until then, we will continue to see such things.
"War" on terrorism
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think anyone is denying the events that occurred. The problem is when we treat our response to terrorism as a war. Declaring a war on terrorism is as effective as declaring a war on murder. In fact, it's a lot like that. How do you declare war on murder? Find all people who are associated with murderers and plow tanks into them? That doesn't really solve the problem, all it does is make people think the problem is being dealt with. That difference is where the dog is being wagged.
Re:GCC 2.x and 3.x compiler
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
It sounds a lot like you are overflowing a buffer on the stack with something you had in your complex function call. If you'll note the only difference between these two:
dummy(a);
printf("", a);
Is that printf("", a); places an extra byte on the stack for the blank string, and this could shield your variable a. A good way to test for whether you're doing something like this is to try:
int a=4; int space_filler; complex_expression(....
Then it becomes very clear that you're simply clobbering the stack. I've seen this bug many times before, it's the great "insert printf and the damn thing works, take it out and it doesn't" bug that can easily make you prematurely bald.:)
This has been a test, of the emergency conspiracy-death system. If this had been an actual conspiracy-death, this post would have been followed by lots of random looking crap that would actually be encrypted porn. BRZRZRZRZRZR. BRZRZRZRZRZR.
if a Verizon class action suit is filed on a national level
One recently was regarding their wireless service for anyone who was a wireless customer prior to April 2002. And if the class action suit wins? Every customer gets a $15 rebate on their next contract renewal (or $15 rebate on their next hardware purchase), and the lawyer teams who initiated the suit take home $7 million.
Regardless of the outcome, there's only going to be one winner and it won't be the consumer. That $7 million Verizon would have to pay would just come out of their future rates.
No politician will spend the money on this until it's already too late.
This is one of those things that's impossible to know for sure, but they're probably making the right decision in this case. Consider this: The odds are rather low that in the next 100 years a large meteorite would cause a loss of life that would in any way compare to the more certain threats to life that we currently spend our money on.
Also consider that in 100 years, constructing a meteorite defense system would probably be a trivial task well within our means and budget. Why waste all our resources struggling to do it wrong now, when we can wait until we're advanced enough to deal with the problem?
Well, I meant more my version of the system. You have a piece of software on your computer/notebook/handheld, and simply fill out the fields like a check... Then write down, or show the screen with the one-time number to the cashier. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems straight-forward to me.
Have you considered how it's going to authenticate and communicate this information with the credit card company?
1. You can put annoying pop-up in-your-face advertisements for unrelated products like Viagra and penis enlargements all over.
2. You can integrate advertising with content such that you increase sales for a particular company while still providing meaningful content that your users want to read.
We will dispense with the concept that advertising shouldn't be necessary, because we are all aware that for the present time, bandwidth and hardware require money, and it has to come from somewhere.
I for one, prefer the second method. Google is a perfect example of this. You search for particular topics, and sponsored sites are placed above your search. They aren't annoying banners, simply sponsored suggestions of "If you're looking for that, you might want to buy this." That's as close to everybody-wins advertising as advertising can get.
I do appreciate when people doing this form of advertising mark their advertising as such, just like google makes a small note to the side that labels it a sponsored link. I notice the links in this article to amazon have a referral number, which means someone is making a 15% referral fee on any purchase from those links. That makes it advertising, which is perfectly fine, but there should be a small note at the end of the article saying this.
Re:Credit Card system most braindead thing ever
on
Ethical Obligations
·
· Score: 2
This is why you should ALWAYS ask for a discount if you are paying cash. Most stores will give it to you.
Where exactly do you shop that you get to haggle over prices?
What I'm surprised about, is that this process isn't more wide-spread.
I use one-time numbers with MBNA, but the process is somewhat annoying to go through each time I want to use my credit card. Let's just say, the average grandmother wouldn't be able to do it, and those that could, wouldn't see the need to go through all the extra effort. It's an excellent idea, it just needs to be made a little less cumbersome.
I thought that the Boeing plane should have won the competition, mostly because it fulfilled the specification better; while being smaller, lighter, and immeasurably simpler.
Maybe, but did you take note of its intended purpose? It was supposed to replace the F-16 as a strike fighter. I don't see any mention on these pages about the maneuverability comparisons between the Boeing and Lockheed designs, but from the apparent aerodynamics of the Boeing design, I have trouble believing that it is any more maneuverable than a rock.
Maneuverability happens to be a crucial element of strike fighter design. If a pilot ever has to get out of the way of a missile, or turn to aim at an enemy (which strike fighters will find themselves doing), then maneuverability can be his best friend and life saver.
By the same logic that supports this, your phone conversations are not and never will be secure, because they transmit along wires hanging around in public areas, and they are accessible by any number of employees at various different companies.
But here's a news flash for you, people WANT to be able to communicate securely with others. This is necessary for business, this is necessary for personal comfort (you don't want a security guard to know details of your intimate life, do you?), and most importantly, this is necessary for political freedom. You cannot have a free political society when the government removes the right for its people to communicate without its knowledge.
So flash around the technical details about the security weaknesses in the design of the smtp protocol all you wish, the fact remains that there is a social need for commonly usable secure email communication, and until that need is filled, governments need to keep their fingers out of email so that free societies can continue to exist.
Also anyone looking into buying MSLinux is even more likely to consider buying Redhat/debian/etc.
They could always try the ancient tactic of making a better product. If MSLinux were superior to the other distributions, gpl'd, and supported by Microsoft, I bet they'd have a market. They wouldn't have a stranglehold on it, but they would certainly have a market.
My only complaint with Red Hat about this is that they haven't made it binding in perpetuity.
They're trying to achieve an open environment by using laws that have been designed to enforce a closed environment. Of course they can't make it binding in perpetuity, because the laws they're referring to are moving targets, and if patent laws change, or court interpretations of them change, Redhat may have to change its patent policy just to maintain the same good intention that it had before.
Yes, there's a potential for future abuse, but this is unavoidable. Better that Redhat not lock itself into a promise that could potentially defeat the purpose of the promise.
Slashdot Mirror
For whatever the reason, people who don't mind using Linux to "rescue" a dump-bound 486 will frequently have qualms about wiping Windows from their shiny new Dells.
I use Linux (debian, to be precise) on my shiny new Dell laptop, and have absolutely no problems with it. You'll find that the hardware argument between Linux and Windows is different than it was 2 years ago. Linux development has progressed to the point where one seems to be more likely to find solid Linux support for a piece of hardware than to find support for your particular version of Windows.
For hardware support, Windows is fragmented in a negative way. There are several versions of Windows in active use now, ME, 2k, XP, and even win98 boxes out there yet. Drivers are frequently not interchangeable between these, and often there are platforms left out to dry.
Linux, however, despite its various distribution choices, has one central kernel tree developing hardware support. Because of this you can guarantee that you can always plug the latest bug-fixed driver into any Linux distribution without disturbing the rest of the machine.
and most of the time the meat isn't spoiled.
But if it's closed-source meat, how do you ever really know??
Before you ever get emails, do you call people and say "hey, would you mind emailing me?"
Actually, yes!!! It's called "giving a person your email address". This is not a novel concept, nor a particularly difficult concept. Communication with friends via email is entirely opt-in. I get emails from friends who I have given my email address to. Similarly, I get emails from a very few number of businesses that I have given my email address to and chose to receive email from because _I_ already decided that I want their product.
Every company in the world hopes that I want their product. Do I? No! If every company in the world sends me an email tomorrow with the hope that I'll buy their product, how am I supposed to find the emails from the people I actually wanted to receive emails from? It becomes an impossible task, they drown in the clutter.
You talk about "freedom to make a post" as equal to "freedom to send an email". But you're missing the difference between push-media and pull-media. A website, like Slashdot, is a pull-medium. I read this post of yours because I chose to. Your post might have been informative or might have been crap, but it doesn't matter because I chose to read it. Receiving an email is nothing at all like viewing a web page. Email is a push-medium, the control is entirely in the hands of the sender, which requires that senders exhibit a higher degree of responsibility to send only when receipt is desired.
You seem to have completely missed this rule of etiquette, and you seem to have completely missed the self-evident reasons for its existence.
Try thinking about the lives of those 80 million recipients next time, and thinking about whether or not they want to receive 80 million emails.
You're worried about hurricanes? They ported Quake to that thing!!
But my.mp3.com transmitting a song to the user, was found to be copyright infringement.
I thought it was mp3.com's database of songs which was found to be infringement.
It would be a completely different scenario if I put up a website, password it with the password "mymp3s", and put my legitamitely created-from-cd mp3s there for personal use. That's really no different from putting a really long speaker cable on my cd player. It's still personal use and still protected by copyright law.
Where this gets sketchy, is when someone else gets ahold of the password "mymp3s" and starts downloading the mp3s I had for my own personal use. Is that my fault? We seem to have a lot of existing mindset that it's not the fault of the one cracked if their machine is cracked, but only the fault of the one doing the cracking. In other words, computer security does not seem to be a responsibility in the eyes of the law.
there's no real-time anything involved here.
But there ARE real-time actual 3D holographic worlds used in research and development, that a person can walk through as if it were a real world. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has a fascinating demonstration of this called the CAVE.
The marshmallows balloon up to at least 4 times the size.
:)
Did you ever try eating it then? I've made micromarshmallows as snacks for my friends. It's a lot quicker than a campfire for making smores, and potentially more fun. Try filling an entire bowl with marshmallows.
Don't overestimate the /. crowd. Describing working with a microwave to 12 year olds is irresponsible!
Actually, I would say it's a lot more irresponsible to HIDE how a microwave works from 12 year olds. Yes, the microwave is a high voltage device, yes, microwaves can cook flesh, all the more reason to explain how a microwave works and under what conditions they're perfectly safe. (Namely when you leave the door closed, never mess with the insides, and just push the buttons.)
If you leave people sufficiently curious they might take it upon themself to investigate before they know what they're getting themselves into.
Because I don't want them contacting me. If I go to a news site, I go there for the news. I don't have to type my phone number into a newspaper dispensing machine to get a newspaper, and if they asked me to, you can bet it wouldn't be the right number. As a consumer, _I_ choose when to initiate a business transaction.
Those are the reasons I refuse to register with acurate information. When I go to a site to try to read a news article, and they ask for me to register before doing so, I find this extremely annoying because it can take up to 3 times longer to register (either with real or fake information) than it would take to simply read the article. Those are the reasons why I consider registration to be bad.
When sites are like slashdot, and permit either anonymous or registered access with value added (such as configurability), I have no problem, and will remain anonymous unless I regularly visit the site. When sites require registration before I can access the information, those sites are likely to lose my eyes going to their site, and the companies that run them are less likely to receive any purchases from me in the future because my first thought of them will be "Oh yes, they were annoying."
One of these days, someone is going to do a study and discover that corporations that make potential customers happy make a bigger profit. Until then, we will continue to see such things.
I don't think anyone is denying the events that occurred. The problem is when we treat our response to terrorism as a war. Declaring a war on terrorism is as effective as declaring a war on murder. In fact, it's a lot like that. How do you declare war on murder? Find all people who are associated with murderers and plow tanks into them? That doesn't really solve the problem, all it does is make people think the problem is being dealt with. That difference is where the dog is being wagged.
It sounds a lot like you are overflowing a buffer on the stack with something you had in your complex function call. If you'll note the only difference between these two:
:)
dummy(a);
printf("", a);
Is that printf("", a); places an extra byte on the stack for the blank string, and this could shield your variable a. A good way to test for whether you're doing something like this is to try:
int a=4;
int space_filler;
complex_expression(....
Then it becomes very clear that you're simply clobbering the stack. I've seen this bug many times before, it's the great "insert printf and the damn thing works, take it out and it doesn't" bug that can easily make you prematurely bald.
This has been a test, of the emergency conspiracy-death system. If this had been an actual conspiracy-death, this post would have been followed by lots of random looking crap that would actually be encrypted porn. BRZRZRZRZRZR. BRZRZRZRZRZR.
if a Verizon class action suit is filed on a national level
One recently was regarding their wireless service for anyone who was a wireless customer prior to April 2002. And if the class action suit wins? Every customer gets a $15 rebate on their next contract renewal (or $15 rebate on their next hardware purchase), and the lawyer teams who initiated the suit take home $7 million.
Regardless of the outcome, there's only going to be one winner and it won't be the consumer. That $7 million Verizon would have to pay would just come out of their future rates.
No politician will spend the money on this until it's already too late.
This is one of those things that's impossible to know for sure, but they're probably making the right decision in this case. Consider this: The odds are rather low that in the next 100 years a large meteorite would cause a loss of life that would in any way compare to the more certain threats to life that we currently spend our money on.
Also consider that in 100 years, constructing a meteorite defense system would probably be a trivial task well within our means and budget. Why waste all our resources struggling to do it wrong now, when we can wait until we're advanced enough to deal with the problem?
And now science routes around damage too.
Well, I meant more my version of the system. You have a piece of software on your computer/notebook/handheld, and simply fill out the fields like a check... Then write down, or show the screen with the one-time number to the cashier. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems straight-forward to me.
Have you considered how it's going to authenticate and communicate this information with the credit card company?
There are two ways to advertise:
1. You can put annoying pop-up in-your-face advertisements for unrelated products like Viagra and penis enlargements all over.
2. You can integrate advertising with content such that you increase sales for a particular company while still providing meaningful content that your users want to read.
We will dispense with the concept that advertising shouldn't be necessary, because we are all aware that for the present time, bandwidth and hardware require money, and it has to come from somewhere.
I for one, prefer the second method. Google is a perfect example of this. You search for particular topics, and sponsored sites are placed above your search. They aren't annoying banners, simply sponsored suggestions of "If you're looking for that, you might want to buy this." That's as close to everybody-wins advertising as advertising can get.
I do appreciate when people doing this form of advertising mark their advertising as such, just like google makes a small note to the side that labels it a sponsored link. I notice the links in this article to amazon have a referral number, which means someone is making a 15% referral fee on any purchase from those links. That makes it advertising, which is perfectly fine, but there should be a small note at the end of the article saying this.
This is why you should ALWAYS ask for a discount if you are paying cash. Most stores will give it to you.
Where exactly do you shop that you get to haggle over prices?
What I'm surprised about, is that this process isn't more wide-spread.
I use one-time numbers with MBNA, but the process is somewhat annoying to go through each time I want to use my credit card. Let's just say, the average grandmother wouldn't be able to do it, and those that could, wouldn't see the need to go through all the extra effort. It's an excellent idea, it just needs to be made a little less cumbersome.
Is this post designed to further confuse the redneck masses, who also buy their wine at Walmart?
Oh my... The frag rates are going to be disasterous once manufacturers start labelling games, "Works with wine."
I thought that the Boeing plane should have won the competition, mostly because it fulfilled the specification better; while being smaller, lighter, and immeasurably simpler.
Maybe, but did you take note of its intended purpose? It was supposed to replace the F-16 as a strike fighter. I don't see any mention on these pages about the maneuverability comparisons between the Boeing and Lockheed designs, but from the apparent aerodynamics of the Boeing design, I have trouble believing that it is any more maneuverable than a rock.
Maneuverability happens to be a crucial element of strike fighter design. If a pilot ever has to get out of the way of a missile, or turn to aim at an enemy (which strike fighters will find themselves doing), then maneuverability can be his best friend and life saver.
Your email is not and never was secure.
By the same logic that supports this, your phone conversations are not and never will be secure, because they transmit along wires hanging around in public areas, and they are accessible by any number of employees at various different companies.
But here's a news flash for you, people WANT to be able to communicate securely with others. This is necessary for business, this is necessary for personal comfort (you don't want a security guard to know details of your intimate life, do you?), and most importantly, this is necessary for political freedom. You cannot have a free political society when the government removes the right for its people to communicate without its knowledge.
So flash around the technical details about the security weaknesses in the design of the smtp protocol all you wish, the fact remains that there is a social need for commonly usable secure email communication, and until that need is filled, governments need to keep their fingers out of email so that free societies can continue to exist.
Also anyone looking into buying MSLinux is even more likely to consider buying Redhat/debian/etc.
They could always try the ancient tactic of making a better product. If MSLinux were superior to the other distributions, gpl'd, and supported by Microsoft, I bet they'd have a market. They wouldn't have a stranglehold on it, but they would certainly have a market.
but kernel mode is ring 0, baby. That's bigger than root
Actually, it's equivalent to root. A process running as root can install arbitrary modules.
My only complaint with Red Hat about this is that they haven't made it binding in perpetuity.
They're trying to achieve an open environment by using laws that have been designed to enforce a closed environment. Of course they can't make it binding in perpetuity, because the laws they're referring to are moving targets, and if patent laws change, or court interpretations of them change, Redhat may have to change its patent policy just to maintain the same good intention that it had before.
Yes, there's a potential for future abuse, but this is unavoidable. Better that Redhat not lock itself into a promise that could potentially defeat the purpose of the promise.