It would also be great if there was a higher demand for girl nerds (outside of Slashdot, that is.)
By posting your username and the dating site that has your profile on Slashdot, you have now guaranteed that your inbox will be overflowing with tens of thousands of desperate emails from other nerds on Slashdot...
Imagine how dissapointed you'll be when you find out that they all live in their mom's basement, like furry porn, and look like Richard Stallman!;-)
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Comcast fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig on a Comcast cable connection (6 mbps down/1 up) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to download a 17 Meg file from a web server. 20 minutes. At home, on my DSL connection (1 mbps down/256kbps up), which by all standards should be a lot slower than Comcast, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even telnet is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Comcast connections, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Comcast connection that has run faster than its DSL counterpart, despite the Comcast's faster network architecture. My DSL connection with it's 1 mbps down runs faster than this cable modem at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Comcast is a superior network.
Comcast addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Comcast over other faster, cheaper, more stable ISPs.
To have the "Internet" (open access, bidirectional services and bandwidth, all-you-can eat buffet style bandwidth, unicast (or multicast)) with "Video" (continuous, "large" bandwidth streams), you have a problem.
OC-192's are the defacto standard in the Telecom industry. Even if you run multiple bonded OC-192, or have a faster standard, or any of the currently available technologies, you simply can't architect a network that could do what you suggest is so easy to do. Well, telepathy might work, but a workable implementation of mind-to-mind communications hasn't been demonstrated yet.
You do know that backbone internet providers (tier 1) have more than one OC-192 each, right? In fact, most have multiple OC-192s leading to each major city in the US, from multiple paths for greater redundancy. They balance and reroute traffic all day long depending on whether or not there's a router down in one city or a line down in another.
The video over the internet problem has already been solved by companies like Akamai (edge cache servers close to the end users) and swarm technology (BitTorrent).
All that it would take to have HDTV streaming to every house in the US would be a cable or DSL connection, utilizing swarm technology like BitTorrent and local seeding at each major ISP's NOC in each major city. Akamai already has servers geographically dispersed all over the US (and many foreign countries). Put a BitTorrent client on every AppleTV and let them swarm with other users on the same ISP. Problem solved.
The whole net neutrality debate exists because the big ISPs don't want us to actually use the unlimited bandwidth we paid for. Sure they might have to upgrade a few of their systems to handle video over the internet, but I can assure you, those that don't upgrade their systems and start throttling video (ala Comcast) will go the way of the dinosaur, while those ISPs that provide decent bandwidth and don't interfere will flourish.
The free market will eventually win, even if it's local wifi coops bypassing the incumbent monopoly carriers (in areas where there is no competition).
I know! I had to pass through four armed checkpoints on my way to work today. Two of them searched my trunk... and I don't mean the hatch-back of my car, if you catch my drift. Don't even get me started about the "secret police" that searched my house this morning at 3:00am looking for Obama literature. Thank God I got rid of that! Oh, and I expect I'll get to meet you in the reeducation camp later this week. We all know that you are not allowed to post stuff like that in a police state./sarc off
You really shouldn't make "police state" claims like that. If you think this is a police state, you obviously have no idea what a true police state is. Displaying such an obscene level of ignorance is probably not in your best interest.
I've seen police states. I've had to pass through checkpoints and answer questions about where I was going, why I was going there and when I plan on being back. The US is not a police state.
No, you obviously have no idea what a true police state is. We don't need to search your car or stop you at checkpoints any more because people telecommute to work and all of our data is being sniffed directly from the internet backbone.
Who needs to do a physical search any more when our lives are increasingly digital, and all of our personal data is online?
If you're not totally pissed off then you're just not paying attention to what is really going on.
Where's the Sarbox excuse? Apple adds new features and doesn't charge for the update? It sucks that my girlfriend has to pay 20 bucks to unlock those new features on the iPod touch she got for Christmas.
10.5.2 is an update that fixes bugs and problems. It doesn't add new features so there's no need to charge for it.
Given those ratios, you would think staying off the the USA's short list would start being a priority for certain countries, as it's clearly an achievable goal.
You make the US sound like a drunk, abusive husband telling his wife he's sorry she made him hit her.
Better still would be to just not invade countries that never fucking attacked us in the first place, but I wouldn't expect a warmongering hawk like yourself to understand that concept.
Let's establish the ground rules before coming up with a process to test against those ground rules.
The real problem, which the submitter and author fail to see, is that lobbyists write all of the laws in America. They don't want real public review of the laws, because it would shed light on the shady smoke-filled room negotiations that take place where our politicians sell laws to the highest bidder.
Do you really think a law that ties funding for public colleges to whether or not they stop P2P filesharing has anything to do with the public good? No, that law was bought, paid for, and written by the RIAA.
I just tried to duplicate the above bug (I typed "zooooooooooooooooooooo" into the Start menu search box), and it ran just fine for me. Did you try duplicating the bug yourself? Are you sure your friend wasn't just making stuff up for comedic effect?
You have to turn indexing off on your hard drive to reproduce the bug. Most sane users since Windows 95 have done this, because Windows search has never worked well. Maybe it's better in Vista, but after using Windows for 13 years and realizing that the stupid hard drive indexing process always runs in the background, and kills performance, since it doesn't even check to see if you're trying to do something on the computer before it runs, we've trained ourselves to turn off the stupid indexing.
I think this particular vista bashing is very poorly done. I didn't read past "It turns out the Facebook issue was not really Microsoft's fault -- facebook had a broken IPv6 record, and Vista defaults to using IPv6".
I found the article rather weak as well, but shouldn't Vista be defaulting to IPv4, since that is the standard IP protocol on the internet? IPv6 is a little too new to use as the default right now.
Re:Answers to Some of the Complaints
on
Hostile ta Vista, Baby
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· Score: 2, Interesting
1) If you press "ALT" the File / Edit / View menus show up in IE and Windows Explorer. It actually works well, hiding the bars when they aren't used gives you more screen space.
Except someone that switched to Vista or IE7 would have no frickin' clue why the menus are missing. Doesn't MS have some usability testers that actually figure out if this shit makes sense to an actual user? Like, you know, the kind of person that might buy a computer at Circuit City?
2) Up button is gone, but if you have a side button on your mouse that will take you up one level in Windows Explorer.
Yeah, because everybody in this world has a 4 or 5 button mouse. "See, we like usability so much we require 5 button mice and you must know the (hidden) functionality of every single button..."
3) Telnet is dead, long live SSH. Like he said, it's easy to install telnet if you need it.
The only problem is that Vista doesn't come with SSH! Also, telnet is still useful for the exact purpose he mentioned: Troubleshooting TCP applications at the OS level, by telnetting directly to a port. Hell, I troubleshoot SMTP blockage and issues all the time by telnetting to port 25 on mail servers and doing a little HELO client/server handshaking.
Oh, I'll also include a disk that has nothing but a copy of the Bill of Rights on it, just to see if they are paying attention.
That's awesome... Actually, next time I travel, I should turn my Windows laptop volume up full blast and make the startup WAV file simply me reading the 4th ammendment into a microphone...
Buy.com has 2GB Creative Zen's on sale for $80. It looks like the Zen can use SD cards and those are readily available in 32+GB sizes. Is the iPod really worth all of the hype? Is it really worth $400? Is it really twice as good as the $180 32GB version of the Zen?
Well, when you consider that you're actually getting a fully functional UNIX computer, in a hand-held format, with multi-touch display and 32GB SSD, I'd say it's worth it. The iPod touch isn't really a music player, although it does quite well at playing music. It's really Apple's future computing platform.
Come touch the future... (god I think I just made myself sick... shudder);-)
I find it interesting that you identify these services as critical. Last I checked, none of these were necessary for sustaining life or maintaining a livable environment. I'd put water, sewer and heat down as critical services. Maybe you could stretch it to include telephone service if you considered it a lifeline for emergency situations. I can't really imagine a situation where the lack of television service or internet service would be life threatening or make a dwelling uninhabitable.
You could make that exact same argument about electricity several decades ago, or running water several centuries ago. They are all modern luxuries, but for most sane people, communication with the outside world and entertainment are pretty basic services that it's not unreasonable to have. Maybe we should just all go back to living in caves and mud huts and hauling our own water up from the river?
It's not just that these companies create content, or that they need somebody else to pay for high-bandwidth users, it's that there's no competition in their markets. You have one cable company (usually) that has a cable franchise in the area.
You got that exactly right. My girlfriend's parents live in NYC and have only Time Warner cable to provide their TV, internet, etc. They live in an apartment building that won't let them install a satellite dish, like the majority of new yorkers, so basically they are at the mercy of Time Warner cable. Recently, I had to go in to one of their offices to return a cable modem. You would not believe the horrendous customer service this company gets away with. When I got to the office, I was surprised to find that there were about 100 people waiting there. They had a "take a number" system just like the DMV! The customer service people were extremely rude and hostile to their customers. There were screaming babies that had obviously been waiting there with their mothers for hours on end. We wasted half a day just waiting in line to speak with a customer service representative.
This is what you get when you allow a monopoly to provide a critical service like Internet, TV, or telephone. You get the worst possible service so they can extract the maximum profit from the customer. The DMV has nothing on these guys. I hope they burn in hell.
I am using a MacBook. I have an iPod. The first is a significant improvement over the alternatives in usability, the second an incremental one. The iPhone, in the context of the existing use skills of its market, has an interesting UI. But it is more entertaining and fun, than it is a real usability improvement.
I don't think you understand the iPhone. The iPhone demonstrated that a mobile phone can have a fully functional web browser (Safari+Webkit), using a brand new interface technology (multi-touch), which works almost as well as a desktop browser. This was not evolutionary. It was revolutionary, and will change the way we interact with mobile devices for years to come.
Your Macbook, while it's a great computer, still uses the same old point and click GUI that has been around for decades. The iPhone truly is revolutionary and I'm sorry you can't see that.
Perhaps the IRL zoning laws could be implemented to buying domains, in that it wouldn't be allowed to just set up a page full of ads and keywords and no content at all.
You want to start policing the internet and letting someone like ICANN decide what content is appropriate and what content isn't?
WEP is useless. It can be cracked in less than 60 seconds these days.
Hardly. With 128-bit or 256-bit WEP, you still need to capture a few hundred MB of packets before you'll get the WEP key. This means an attacker needs to leave their laptop on capturing packets for a few hours to a few days, given the average home network's traffic. This is enough of a deterrent for most casual attackers.
Very true, but let's be honest here for a second... Am I the only one who's paranoid of entering my PayPal or CC info on an unencrypted public access point? I don't care if it's an AP ran by some mega-trusted corporation, the signal is still out there and anyone can get it.
You're also an idiot. Even if you're using a public access point, the SSL transaction is still encrypted between both end-points. You do know what end-points are, don't you? That means, they're entirely encrypted between your browser (one end-point) and the remote web server (the other end-point). Even if you snoop your TCP/IP stack on your local computer, you won't get any unencrypted data.
The only time you need to be paranoid using a public access point is if you're using unencrypted port 80 to login, or if you start getting certificate errors/warnings (possible man-in-the-middle attack).
I wouldn't be surprised if this is typical late 90s shenanigans on the part of apple. I know a lot of software companies did this back in the 90s - they print up a jillion boxes of software and ship it to the stores, counting it as sales. This works in the short term, but when the stuff shows up on wooden palettes at the Qwiky Mart all marked down 50%, it travels back up the chain pretty quick, and affects share price. so, i would propose a tag to this article, stuffthechannel.
The only problem with this tactic is that iPhone is only sold in two places: Apple Stores and AT&T Stores. Apple can't stuff their own channel or it wouldn't count as a sale, and do you seriously think AT&T is stupid enough to take inventory of 700,000 phones? That would be bat-shit insane.
That's called channel stuffing, and Microsoft has done it quite a few times with the Zune, XBox, and XBox 360 in order to temporarily inflate the sales numbers. What happens is after you've done that, those stores don't need to order more for a while, so after your "great sales" period, you'll get a "low sales" period as the old units get cleared out.
The only problem is that iPhones are only sold at two places: Apple stores and AT&T stores. Apple can't stuff their own channel because that wouldn't count as a sale. And do you think AT&T is stupid enough to take inventory of 700,000 phones at once? That would be bat-shit insane.
Yeah, I noticed that on MSN Money when I was running at the gym last night.
MSN Money, the unbiased news source about all things MSFT, says Vista sales are strong... Nice one... If you believe that I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.
This anti-iPhone FUD is pretty crazy. It makes me wonder how many MS shills and bloggers they have on the payroll:
"[...] suggesting that they're sitting on store shelves, piling up as unsold inventory. That number suggests at least some gap between perceived demand and actual demand -- while also raising questions about how much effort it will take to eat through that inventory."
If you knew anything about Wall Street, Apple can't announce sales when they're sitting on store shelves. They can only announce sales when they've been sold to an actual customer.
Surely some small percentage of phones are being unlocked, but did you ever stop to think that maybe the numbers are off because AT&T hasn't reported yet how many iPhone subscribers there are for December/January and there were probably tens of thousands of iPhones purchased as Christmas gifts that sat under a tree and just barely got activated in the last couple of weeks?
First of all, the Republican ballots haven't been counted yet. Secondly, Kucinich ran out of money so not all of the ballots on the Democratic side were counted. Not only that, but the chain of custody for the ballots was severely lacking.
Yeah, because they obviously went to so much trouble that they had to manufacture brand new ballots to perfectly match the fraudulent machine count. And they did this all overnight, while the ballots were stored in this warehouse with "post-it notes" sealing the boxes.
You conspiracy nuts really need to just chill out. New Hampshire is one state, with only a few delegates. It's not even worth the time and money it would require to perpetrate vote fraud.
Get over it. Ron Paul lost. He will continue to lose, because his ideas don't appeal to the majority of Americans.
Now I'm going to be modded into oblivion by all of the Ron Paul freaks, but who cares, I speak the truth.
I suspect a lot of Slashdot's audience has played either tabletop D&D or some form of MMO or online RPG. This online web series should instantly appeal to you. It's written, directed, and produced by Felicia Day, who was a slayer in one season of Buffy. Hot red headed actress aside, this series is great and a ton of fun to watch. The jokes are witty, and it seems to capture the funny shenanigans of an online group of friends in a fresh way.
I highly recommend that everyone check out The Guild and support your favorite web-based TV shows. Shows like this have a real possibility of breaking the grip on entertainment that large media companies have. If they succeed they show others that it is possible to go straight to internet and bypass the media cartels.
From what I have seen, the use of multiple accounts by single users is not all that uncommon. Blizzard doesn't seem to actually delete accounts after they've been deactivated. If someone cancels their subscription, their account name, their toons, everything remains (much like AOL's method of fudging their numbers). So of those 10m subscribers, I'd be curious to find out if those are individuals, or simply active subscribers, or in fact accounts created but not currently subscribed counted in that total.
Blizzard has said many times before that the number, 10 million (back then it was 7, 8, and 9 million), represents actual subscriber accounts, that are paying a monthly fee. People that share accounts are not counted twice (how would they even know if you're sharing?), and people that cancelled their accounts are not counted. Trial accounts are not counted either.
I must say, it's rather impressive to hear that they have 10 million. I play WoW currently (got one level 70 shaman at Black Temple raiding level, and a level 61 druid alt), and there are some things I really wish they would do:
1. Update the damn graphics engine already... Sure it runs smooth on older computers, but I hate hate hate playing a game on my 37" LCD HDTV and 768 MB graphics card with 2004 era graphics. The art makes up some of the difference, but would it kill you to come out with a higher quality engine for those of us with the hardware to run it?
2. Let us use pre-made characters in PvP only. I would love to be able to use pre-made level 70 characters to form my own arena teams and run around in battlegrounds. Seriously, if they want to make PvP fair, they need to allow you to make pre-mades with season 3 gladiator gear. There are several really good teams that have enough arena points saved up to buy all of the season 3 gear the moment the season starts, and if you fight them you're pretty much guaranteed to lose due to gear differences. Make PvP fair and by fair I mean let me start a max level toon with decent gear so PvP is based on player skill and not gear.
Anyway, it's a great game, but that's just because nothing else has come along that's better. I think the next generation MMO Blizzard is working on will be awesome, but we probably won't see it until 2012 or so, based on the time they take to release. This is not a bad thing, but I hate waiting...
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine how dissapointed you'll be when you find out that they all live in their mom's basement, like furry porn, and look like Richard Stallman!
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Comcast fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig on a Comcast cable connection (6 mbps down/1 up) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to download a 17 Meg file from a web server. 20 minutes. At home, on my DSL connection (1 mbps down/256kbps up), which by all standards should be a lot slower than Comcast, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even telnet is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Comcast connections, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Comcast connection that has run faster than its DSL counterpart, despite the Comcast's faster network architecture. My DSL connection with it's 1 mbps down runs faster than this cable modem at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Comcast is a superior network.
Comcast addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Comcast over other faster, cheaper, more stable ISPs.
The video over the internet problem has already been solved by companies like Akamai (edge cache servers close to the end users) and swarm technology (BitTorrent).
All that it would take to have HDTV streaming to every house in the US would be a cable or DSL connection, utilizing swarm technology like BitTorrent and local seeding at each major ISP's NOC in each major city. Akamai already has servers geographically dispersed all over the US (and many foreign countries). Put a BitTorrent client on every AppleTV and let them swarm with other users on the same ISP. Problem solved.
The whole net neutrality debate exists because the big ISPs don't want us to actually use the unlimited bandwidth we paid for. Sure they might have to upgrade a few of their systems to handle video over the internet, but I can assure you, those that don't upgrade their systems and start throttling video (ala Comcast) will go the way of the dinosaur, while those ISPs that provide decent bandwidth and don't interfere will flourish.
The free market will eventually win, even if it's local wifi coops bypassing the incumbent monopoly carriers (in areas where there is no competition).
Who needs to do a physical search any more when our lives are increasingly digital, and all of our personal data is online?
If you're not totally pissed off then you're just not paying attention to what is really going on.
Better still would be to just not invade countries that never fucking attacked us in the first place, but I wouldn't expect a warmongering hawk like yourself to understand that concept.
Do you really think a law that ties funding for public colleges to whether or not they stop P2P filesharing has anything to do with the public good? No, that law was bought, paid for, and written by the RIAA.
(We have to use Windows on our work laptops)
I just have a question for any legal scholars or experts in this field:
Does the 5th ammendment apply if I have strong encryption on my laptop? Can I simply refuse to give them the passphrase, or will I end up in Gitmo?
Come touch the future... (god I think I just made myself sick... shudder)
This is what you get when you allow a monopoly to provide a critical service like Internet, TV, or telephone. You get the worst possible service so they can extract the maximum profit from the customer. The DMV has nothing on these guys. I hope they burn in hell.
Your Macbook, while it's a great computer, still uses the same old point and click GUI that has been around for decades. The iPhone truly is revolutionary and I'm sorry you can't see that.
Good luck with that!
The only time you need to be paranoid using a public access point is if you're using unencrypted port 80 to login, or if you start getting certificate errors/warnings (possible man-in-the-middle attack).
Surely some small percentage of phones are being unlocked, but did you ever stop to think that maybe the numbers are off because AT&T hasn't reported yet how many iPhone subscribers there are for December/January and there were probably tens of thousands of iPhones purchased as Christmas gifts that sat under a tree and just barely got activated in the last couple of weeks?
You conspiracy nuts really need to just chill out. New Hampshire is one state, with only a few delegates. It's not even worth the time and money it would require to perpetrate vote fraud.
Get over it. Ron Paul lost. He will continue to lose, because his ideas don't appeal to the majority of Americans.
Now I'm going to be modded into oblivion by all of the Ron Paul freaks, but who cares, I speak the truth.
I suspect a lot of Slashdot's audience has played either tabletop D&D or some form of MMO or online RPG. This online web series should instantly appeal to you. It's written, directed, and produced by Felicia Day, who was a slayer in one season of Buffy. Hot red headed actress aside, this series is great and a ton of fun to watch. The jokes are witty, and it seems to capture the funny shenanigans of an online group of friends in a fresh way.
I highly recommend that everyone check out The Guild and support your favorite web-based TV shows. Shows like this have a real possibility of breaking the grip on entertainment that large media companies have. If they succeed they show others that it is possible to go straight to internet and bypass the media cartels.
I must say, it's rather impressive to hear that they have 10 million. I play WoW currently (got one level 70 shaman at Black Temple raiding level, and a level 61 druid alt), and there are some things I really wish they would do:
1. Update the damn graphics engine already... Sure it runs smooth on older computers, but I hate hate hate playing a game on my 37" LCD HDTV and 768 MB graphics card with 2004 era graphics. The art makes up some of the difference, but would it kill you to come out with a higher quality engine for those of us with the hardware to run it?
2. Let us use pre-made characters in PvP only. I would love to be able to use pre-made level 70 characters to form my own arena teams and run around in battlegrounds. Seriously, if they want to make PvP fair, they need to allow you to make pre-mades with season 3 gladiator gear. There are several really good teams that have enough arena points saved up to buy all of the season 3 gear the moment the season starts, and if you fight them you're pretty much guaranteed to lose due to gear differences. Make PvP fair and by fair I mean let me start a max level toon with decent gear so PvP is based on player skill and not gear.
Anyway, it's a great game, but that's just because nothing else has come along that's better. I think the next generation MMO Blizzard is working on will be awesome, but we probably won't see it until 2012 or so, based on the time they take to release. This is not a bad thing, but I hate waiting...