Slashdot Mirror


User: homer_ca

homer_ca's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,165
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,165

  1. Re:Outlook Strikes Again. on I Love You "Virus" Hates Everyone · · Score: 1

    Yes the mechanism to mail itself to your entire address book is MS Outlook specific. It's amazing how it spread. Just 5 or 6 people setting off the script made it send thousands of messages company wide (we have a big address list), and corrupt hundreds of files on the file server.

    So for you conspiracy theorists out there, who thinks the release was timed to coincide with the penalty phase of the MS antitrust trial?

  2. Re:Solution for Postfix on I Love You "Virus" Hates Everyone · · Score: 1

    Someone has already renamed the file and subject to "Joke" and started sending it out. A better way would be to filter the attachement by file extension.

    Search for:

    filename=loveletter.txt.vbs

    or for a regexp to match all .vbs files:

    filename=.*.vbs

  3. Re:Time to change Napster User Names. on Metallica Wants To Ban 335,435 Napster Users · · Score: 1
    from here:

    White indentured servants came from all over Great Britain. Men, women, and sometimes children signed a contract with a master to serve a term of 4 to 7 years. In exchange for their service, the indentured servants received their passage paid from England, as well as food, clothing, and shelter once they arrived in the colonies. Some were even paid a salary. When the contract had expired, the servant was paid freedom dues of corn, tools, and clothing, and was allowed to leave the plantation. During the time of his indenture, however, the servant was considered his master's personal property and his contract could be inherited or sold. Prices paid for indentured servants varied depending on skills.

  4. Re:Time to change Napster User Names. on Metallica Wants To Ban 335,435 Napster Users · · Score: 1

    >Whoa... now that's a stretch... making money off of music compared to making money off of slavery.

    Not that big a stretch. Other celebrities like athletes, actors and authors have MUCH more freedom in negotiating contracts and control of their creative content (if applicable). Musicians are very much indentured servants. (indentured servitude was a predecessor of slavery in the early colonial days).

  5. Re:The Athlon was right for me. on Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You? · · Score: 1
    Oh sorry 'bout that. Turns out the VA6 is kinda shitty (see here). So just get a Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X for the same price, or if you want to compare Asus to Asus, get a P3V4X for $99, which isn't really any better. My point still stands. The price and selection of Athlon boards is behind the P2/P3 boards, and that narrows the gap in pricing between the CPUs.

    Just because it's more expensive and brand new doesn't make it better. These boards all support AGP, UDMA66 and PC133 SDRAM. The Apollo Pro 133 is arguably the best chipset for PIII motherboards (The good old BX chipset is still faster at 100 Mhz bus, but you have no upgrade path to 133Mhz bus. see here). The fact that Apollo Pro boards are so cheap is a happy coincidence. Also, for users on a budget, an Apollo Pro 133 board and a PIII-550E is an easy (and reliable) overclock to 733. Athlon overclocking is a little more challenging to say the least.

    As for Pricewatch, are you really naive enough to believe the lowest prices there? The only reason they're so low is because they charge $20 or more for shipping.

  6. Re:The Athlon was right for me. on Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You? · · Score: 1

    >Athlon 700: $189.
    >Pentium III 700: $373.

    It's a little more complicated than that...

    Asus K7V $179
    Abit VA6 $89

    or if you already have a BX motherboard, $0

    The price and selection of Athlon mb's is my only gripe, but the situation now is still much better than 6 months ago.

  7. Re:maybe now they'll stop running those lame ads on Sun no Longer the "dot" in .com · · Score: 1

    He must mean the "Mister D" ads.

    Who could have imagined the day when geek ads go ebonic?

  8. Re:Heh. Good publicity stunt! on PS2 a Weapons Development Platform? · · Score: 1

    >If anything, I would wager Sony paid someone up high to issue this decree with the hope being
    >that it might spawn sales by appealing to those who desire contraband. Look I have the new
    >gaming console so powerful the Japanese government doesn't want me to have it!

    It's more likely they paid off the government to classify it as munitions to put a cap on gray-market exports. When they come out with a US market version, THAT version won't be classified as munitions and it sure as hell won't have a less powerful graphics processor.

  9. Re:I thought on On DDoS, SPAM, Telemarketing And Harrasment? · · Score: 1

    >The post office charges much lower postage for bulk mailers. This has always struck me as
    >completely ass-backwards, they ought to charge them MORE to discourage the crap. That these
    >folks get a rate cut means that the rest of us are subsidising the cost of their garbage.

    The reason the post office charges less for bulk mail is because it costs less. It's presorted by zip code and it's delivered at a lower priority than first class.

    How do I know all this? I knew some friends at a non-profit that used it to send newsletters out to its members. Not all bulk (snail)mail is junk.

  10. Re:Metallica and payback. on Napster, Gnutella, Bans, Lawsuits And More · · Score: 1

    >I keep hearing that Metallica are sellouts. Could someone please prove this to me?

    What more proof do you need than all the music they've put out in the last 10 years? It sucks big goat nads.

    Yes, your music has to mature. You can't keep putting out the same-sounding music year after year, but the evolution of metal has nothing to evolution of Metallica (there's still good metal out there with a fresh sound that's not stuck in the 80's- try Static-X or Coal Chamber or POD).

    I still listen to the 80's Metallica (and the black album) because it was powerful music that sounds as good today as the day you first heard it. 90's Metallica is forgettable alterative pop that you download and delete because it's a waste of disk space.

  11. Re:I don't plan on replying. on Copyright Comments Redux · · Score: 1

    OK, so people work hard to make their intellectual property and deserve to be paid. But your comments about the Mattel Cyberpatrol blocklist are completely clueless.

    The people who decrypted the Cyberpatrol blocklist are ANTI-CENSORSHIP ACTIVISTS, not pirates who want to steal the list to make a competing product. With an encrypted blocklist, there is no accountability for what material is blocked. By exposing the list, people can see exactly how well or how badly the software performs. CP wants people to believe they sell effective software that blocks porn and allows other content. The truth is human screeners can't possibly keep up with all the new porn sites popping up on the net. A lot of legitimate educational content is blocked. And many non-offensive anti-censorship sites that are critical of CP are deliberately and specifically blocked. That, my friend, is false advertising.

  12. Re:"coke" is a generic word on Is "coke.ch" A Violation of Coca-Cola's (tm)? · · Score: 1

    Not only is it slang for cocaine, it's a generic word for a type of coal. It's use in this way probably predates even coca-cola. Just try and sue me for not CapItaLIzing!!!!

    coke, n.

    The solid residue of impure carbon obtained from bituminous coal and other carbonaceous materials after removal of volatile material by destructive distillation. It is used as a fuel and in making steel.

  13. Re:What arguments can we make? Suggestions Welcome on Copyright Office Needs Comments On DMCA By March 31 · · Score: 1

    After reading through the EFF's well written comments, I doubt I could put it any better or come up with anything new. So my question is....

    If a lot of people wrote in and reiterated the points made in the EFF's comments to express their support for the pro-freedom side, would it be better than a few people writing in with new comments?

  14. Re:You're shooting at the wrong target.. on Can Linux Beat Microsoft in Education? · · Score: 1

    Apple has had this strategy of "seeding" the educational market for a long time (going way back to the Apple II days), but personally I think the whole idea is very overrated. When the schoolchilren grow up into adults, they still buy what they want. The only way to significantly influence these "impressionable young minds" is to manipulate the upper level CS curriculum to include or exclude certain OS's. For the rest it doesn't matter. Lower level CS classes are very theoretical and more or less OS-neutral. For everyone else, nobody cares what OS they type their term papers on as long as it works.

    It's simple economics. If Apple gives big discounts to the edu market, of course they'll sell more. They may have a bigger share of the edu market than the overall market. They may even have a bigger installed base than any single PC vendor (Compaq, Dell, HP), but you are smoking crack if you think they have a bigger market share in the edu world than all the x86 PC hardware combined.

  15. Re: which AV? on Symantec Tries to Censor Criticism · · Score: 1

    >It's mostly a non-problem because viruses just aren't that common and are, for the most part,
    >easily avoided by simply not being stupid. I haven't run an anti-virus package on any of my
    >computers since I left the Norton AntiVirus development team in 1993, and have never been hit
    >by a virus in the almost seven years since then.

    This strategy may work for you, but for the vast majority of users out there it's not an option. Sure, you can disable MS Office macros and that's 90% of the problem. And you could run only shrink-wrapped software to avoid executable viruses. Most people tend to be more "promiscuous" about sharing files. Even if you are careful, as a Windows users you will always be running untrusted binaries on your computer (don't forget about data-mining trojanware like Realjukebox and the Win98 Registration wizard).

    You do have a point though. The antivirus companies do keep users on an upgrade treadmill of endless virus updates. Very much a dealer/junkie relationship. Under this revenue model there is no incentive to develop "smart" virus protection that doesn't need continuous updates.

    On a side note: vfind is one of the lesser known products, and it claims to detect viruses by actually examining code.

  16. Offshore data havens on The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Part Two · · Score: 1

    Since this is still a US law, what are the chances of a foreign country in the free world setting up a data haven to host Shoutcast and other streaming audio servers? Big internet pipes cost big money, so is this economically viable at all? Shoutcast servers tend to be run more by hobbyists than the big corporate netradio sites, and they tend to play all kinds of illegal things- like 3 songs from the same album in a 3 hour period.

  17. Re:Embedded system? on Embedded OpenBSD Running the Stallion ePipe · · Score: 1

    Exactly, the purpose of the source code audit is to be proactive. If you want to minimize the number of firmware updates for security, OpenBSD is one of your best choices. If you look at the number of security alerts for OpenBSD in the past, it's much less than Linux or the commercial Unix's. The main problem has been all the notoriously buggy (security-wise) open-source software (e.g. sendmail, bind, wu-ftpd), and they shouldn't be running those services on an embedded router anyway.

  18. Re:OpenBSD's security vs. OpenBSD's usability on Embedded OpenBSD Running the Stallion ePipe · · Score: 1

    Actually the base distro already comes with XFree86 and fvwm. Not the most advanced window manager, but its small size helps when they're auditing all the source in the base distro.

    Yes you have to edit all the .conf files by hand (no weak ass linuxconf), but overall the init scripts and config files are very simple, very well organized and very easy to understand. OTOH the "easy-to-use" Linux distros are very complex under the hood. I run Caldera and Redhat on some other machines, and I've given up on admining by editing the conf files for fear of breaking something in the GUI config tools.

  19. Re:Privacy . . on Banner Ads on Your Cell Phone · · Score: 1

    There may not be any laws against 1-4, but the law is very clear on #5. Listening to phone calls is a wiretap, and theoretically wiretaps require a warrant and court order for law enforcement purposes. I know this is widely abused, but the law is so clear every spook, fed and cop will at least pay lip service to the wiretap laws. And forget about wiretaps for marketing purposes. If anyone got caught trying this (assuming they have voice recognition good enough to automate this) they deserve jail time.

  20. ABC will censor it? on Update on 'Blame Canada' and the Oscars · · Score: 1

    They'll probably just mute the vocal track or put in some kazoo sound effect just like the radio edits of all those other songs with the naughty lyrics.

  21. Gameplay is still the same on Men Playing as Women · · Score: 1

    It's not like the environment in most games is rich enough to express your femininity. You walk around and beat up or shoot your opponents. What was the last computer game you played where you nurtured caring relationships or reasoned with opponents? I remember in Fallout you could go the diplomatic route with your character, but still you couldn't negotiate your way through every encounter.

  22. Re:gifs on Netscape Communicator 4.72 Released · · Score: 1

    Same problem here. Netscape 4.7 on NT. Gifs are either all black or if there's an overlapping Netscape window behind, that page bleeds through to the front where the gifs are. Strange.

  23. 90,000,000 users? on Red Hat Teams with Real Networks · · Score: 1

    And how many of those 90,000,000 users are people who formatted and reinstalled windows and entered a new fake name and email into the registration dialog?

    RealNetworks is one of the few companies that is more intrusive than MS at pushing their content/junk, but I'll have to agree, any streaming video player is better than none.

  24. Re:Try this. on Keep It Legal To Embarrass Big Companies · · Score: 2
    For those of you who had problems with the site, take the last "/s/" out of the url. This is a very cool SSL anti-censorship proxy that runs on Apache and mod_ssl, and the best part of it is the author has open-sourced the proxy. There's a download link right on the page.

    That means anybody can set up an anti-censorship proxy. It's easy to block one or two proxies (a lot of filters already block Anonymizer and Rewebber), but when everyone with bandwidth to spare runs a proxy, the censors can't possibly keep up.

  25. Re:Yes, but... on 24-Hour Power Cells for Wearable PCs · · Score: 1

    This would be VERY useful to the military. Think of all the portable electronic devices they use- radios, night vision goggles, GPS receivers. Batteries take hours to recharge, and if some of them use dispoable batteries, that's a lot of spare batteries to carry. Much easier to keep a methanol tank in the HUMMVEE and fill up in seconds.