Now as I understand it the government blacks out certain time-sensitive coverage (especially political campaigns). Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to get around with a satellite dish (not to mention IRC and the WWW would shoot any sort of Homolka-style censorship to shit anyway, but that's another conversation).
Didn't Estonia rely rather heavily on Finnish newsfeeds during Soviet domination for the real news? I know Finnish and Estonian are about as close linguistically as Spanish and Portuguese, so the story is entirely believable.
Believe it or not, from what I've heard about Al Jazeera it's a lot less biased than most of the media in the Middle East. In fact, despite its image in this country of a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden and the like Al Jazeera has been sufficiently dangerous to various dictators' propaganda campaigns that the government of Qatar has been asked to shut it down on numerous occasions.
Looked at another way: it's the closest thing to objective news that exists over there. Whether it's objective enough is another story, but it's all they've got.
And yes, I would love to get an English feed of Al Jazeera myself.
On a related note, President Bush today signed legislation barring the makers of tinfoil hats from blocking mind control signals from outside the local district.
(6) Browser authors will figure out how to/dev/null the stuff on command and bitch and whine at the idiots who created the technology for making them make their code base that much more complex.
I can pretty honestly say, though, that this will probably go nowhere -- can't remember the last site I ran across that changed my cursor, but the technology is there.
Just a sidebar: anyone ever read a book called Building Really Annoying Web Pages?
This page is a clear illustration of how to make your web page too pretentious for anyone to want to care about. Inspired by some kind of television computer display, methinks; maybe the epilepsy-inducing monitors of early Bab5?
I think a lot of companies think it is; that's why the ex-SSSCA is rewritten to have something to do with the whole thing about broadband content yada yada yada. In any case a lot of people want to jam consumption down your throat; if you don't believe me, give me one good reason why you need the latest and greatest Pentium 4 or Athlon. Hint: if it doesn't involve gaming, Fortran, or video production, you don't.
To anyone who hasn't read this, go to your nearest bookstore (or just order it from Amazon) and get a copy of Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. There is a whole chapter on the subject of albums called "I Cannot Be Played On Record Player X". Rather funny in its frustrating repetitiveness.
I don't know how much they could give away, but they could definitely put the NT and Win9x source code out, along with.NET and their developer tools. All of those technologies have functionality that is and has been easily duplicated; I might suggest the same thing for SQL Server and Exchange (IIS should just be thrown out).
Internet Explorer SHOULD be, but something tells me there's still Spyglass crap in there that would make for some licensing headaches.
That still leaves a lot of territory uncovered -- MSOffice, the games, and all of Microsoft's vertical market apps for which an open source implementation would be sort of pointless. But they'd still have to get into services, I think...
P2/333. Pretty good machine (though it could use a 100MHz bus). I've no intention of upgrading (though I'm contemplating getting a Celeron just to have one of them around just to toy with).
I'm pretty happy with it (though I need to add another parenthetical comment here starting with "though" just for completeness).
As another poster said, you've obviously never seen it up close. It's not just about people you're comfortable with; I can't even really get comfortable with my closest friends. I can't get a date because the idea of asking out a woman and being rejected is so overwhelmingly painful that I need to be absolutely sure to even take the chance. You're damn right I have serious problems; that's the whole point of what I was trying to say.
Pat Pulling died a few years back of cancer, from what I've heard. Mercifully, BADD preceded her by quite a stretch; I don't think it ever made it into the world of the net. On the other hand, the Stackpole piece has gone around the world more times than MAKE_MONEY_FAST, so that's a good thing.
That's the frustrating thing here: that a well-meaning parent can do more damage through total cluelessness.
As someone who suffers from pretty severe depression, I might be able to shed a bit of light on the matter.
This woman is seeking blame for something where there is nobody to blame. This man's head was thoroughly fucked up, and the game does not qualify as a cause.
The problem with people like me (and I assume him) is that we *can't* take responsibility because the depression destroys initiative as well as creating massive social anxiety. Social interaction is often an exercise on a par with going bungee jumping without inspecting the rope. We want to do something about our condition, but the fear that any attempt to get better will fail and leave us worse off than we started makes it not seem worthwhile to bother.
Online social interaction is a godsend to people in this situation because we (not so much me as others, but I'm not immune) can be ourselves without the difficulties of trying to adapt ourselves to social situations that we are unable to understand. The impersonal online world allows us to be the kind of person we are deep down without the crushing fear that prevents us from being ourselves in real life. Honestly? Everything I am typing now I can only say because I'm typing it. If I were to tell this to someone face-to-face I'd never be able to get it out coherently.
The fact is that people in this situation (at least speaking for myself) can never feel fully accepted; barring some miracle we always feel as if we are on the outside looking in, no matter how accepted we are outside of our own heads, and the hope has been sapped from our lives. It's hard for people who have never experienced this to understand (and I do realize that a rather large number of/.ers are reading this and getting the impression of me as a whiner with a martyr complex). But it's very much a case of being, more than anything else, hopelessly lost in the world. Think the Endurance without Shackleton. Think Donner Party... of one.
So I feel for this guy. I think I know where he was, and I think his mother is a fool for trying to pin blame. This guy needed to be outright hospitalized. As far as he knew, there was no way out.
Read this, any of you who buy the RPG/MUD/Everquest-leads-to-suicide line. This is as clear-cut a case of scapegoating as I've ever seen.
I've now done my duty as a Good Little Karma Whore (tm), I hope:-)
Er... I think the fact that you couldn't get dmesg working was kind of a giveaway:-)
What exactly was in the ISO, or was it just a dead link? I'd have been deeply amused to find out someone had burned a CD only to find out its sole contents were a text file saying "YHBT. YHL. HAN(AF)D."
iMac RAM (at least on the Kihei case, which is what I have) is pretty easy to get to. The real problem is if your hard drive blows.
Apple is sorta-kinda easy-access on most of their systems. I've gotten the sense that it's quite a bit easier on the first-generation iMacs than it is on the second-gen.
BTW, I strongly suspect a modern Mac, or at least one a lot more recent than this, would do better than most PCs being foamed like this. The PowerPC line as a whole is pretty stingy with power compared to the overwhelming majority of x86 chips (though Crusoe is probably better).
More to the point, Visual Studio is garbage. I did some VB programming a while back and the truth was I found it painful. I'm more of a Mac user than anything else (though I regularly use Linux as well), and I did a bit of work on my own in Hypercard. Now admittedly Hypercard is limited in a few rather obvious ways, but I challenge Average Joe VB programmer to go out, pick up a cheap Quadra for $30 and a copy of Hypercard 2.2, and take a hack at it. HyperTalk as a programming language isn't that great, but the interface will bring tears to your eyes (in a good way:-) ).
If you stop listening to the military and think about it a moment, you'd realize that you'd need
a) intelligent (as in near-sentient) discriminator systems b) long-range sensor technology (like, for example, a geiger counter that works from ten klicks away) c) an enemy that plays along by making warheads look like warheads
Missile defense is a boondoggle. There hasn't been one test yet that convinced me otherwise, and there won't be until we arrange for another country to shoot dummy warheads at us to give as close to a real world test as can be managed without killing anybody (as if anyone would bother shooting a missile in these days of suitcase bombs).
Well, hey... do cows tend to fight back if cornered?
I submit that if Gateway wants to capitalize on goodwill generated from this operation, though, they might want to start by ending their abuse of the ATX spec and go back to making hardware that can actually be upgraded. I've noticed that a lot of their most recent systems are very cheaply made systems using cases that seem to be designed specifically for Intel motherboards (i.e. no cutout around the rear ports and no way to add a new mobo without a pair of metal snips). That's just one thing they could do...
Slashdot Mirror
Now as I understand it the government blacks out certain time-sensitive coverage (especially political campaigns). Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to get around with a satellite dish (not to mention IRC and the WWW would shoot any sort of Homolka-style censorship to shit anyway, but that's another conversation).
/Brian
Didn't Estonia rely rather heavily on Finnish newsfeeds during Soviet domination for the real news? I know Finnish and Estonian are about as close linguistically as Spanish and Portuguese, so the story is entirely believable.
/Brian
Believe it or not, from what I've heard about Al Jazeera it's a lot less biased than most of the media in the Middle East. In fact, despite its image in this country of a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden and the like Al Jazeera has been sufficiently dangerous to various dictators' propaganda campaigns that the government of Qatar has been asked to shut it down on numerous occasions.
Looked at another way: it's the closest thing to objective news that exists over there. Whether it's objective enough is another story, but it's all they've got.
And yes, I would love to get an English feed of Al Jazeera myself.
/Brian
On a related note, President Bush today signed legislation barring the makers of tinfoil hats from blocking mind control signals from outside the local district.
/Brian
Wonder if these guys got their business plan from "Internet Marketing for Dummies" by Laurence Cantor and J. Jovan Philyaw...
/brian
(6) Browser authors will figure out how to /dev/null the stuff on command and bitch and whine at the idiots who created the technology for making them make their code base that much more complex.
I can pretty honestly say, though, that this will probably go nowhere -- can't remember the last site I ran across that changed my cursor, but the technology is there.
Just a sidebar: anyone ever read a book called Building Really Annoying Web Pages?
/Brian
Works fine for me... unfortunately.
This page is a clear illustration of how to make your web page too pretentious for anyone to want to care about. Inspired by some kind of television computer display, methinks; maybe the epilepsy-inducing monitors of early Bab5?
/Brian
I think a lot of companies think it is; that's why the ex-SSSCA is rewritten to have something to do with the whole thing about broadband content yada yada yada. In any case a lot of people want to jam consumption down your throat; if you don't believe me, give me one good reason why you need the latest and greatest Pentium 4 or Athlon. Hint: if it doesn't involve gaming, Fortran, or video production, you don't.
/Brian
To anyone who hasn't read this, go to your nearest bookstore (or just order it from Amazon) and get a copy of Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. There is a whole chapter on the subject of albums called "I Cannot Be Played On Record Player X". Rather funny in its frustrating repetitiveness.
/Brian
PostgreSQL and MySQL (especially MySQL, which for some reason seems to be everywhere). And then you have SQL Server and Oracle.
/Brian
I'm just saying that it's something that *should* be open sourced, not that anyone would actually want it.
:-)
It is rather strange how two of the four most important database servers are open source, though, isn't it
/brian
Okay...
.NET and their developer tools. All of those technologies have functionality that is and has been easily duplicated; I might suggest the same thing for SQL Server and Exchange (IIS should just be thrown out).
I don't know how much they could give away, but they could definitely put the NT and Win9x source code out, along with
Internet Explorer SHOULD be, but something tells me there's still Spyglass crap in there that would make for some licensing headaches.
That still leaves a lot of territory uncovered -- MSOffice, the games, and all of Microsoft's vertical market apps for which an open source implementation would be sort of pointless. But they'd still have to get into services, I think...
/Brian
P2/333. Pretty good machine (though it could use a 100MHz bus). I've no intention of upgrading (though I'm contemplating getting a Celeron just to have one of them around just to toy with).
I'm pretty happy with it (though I need to add another parenthetical comment here starting with "though" just for completeness).
/Brian
Yep. Basically. But at least it's something.
/brian
As another poster said, you've obviously never seen it up close. It's not just about people you're comfortable with; I can't even really get comfortable with my closest friends. I can't get a date because the idea of asking out a woman and being rejected is so overwhelmingly painful that I need to be absolutely sure to even take the chance. You're damn right I have serious problems; that's the whole point of what I was trying to say.
/Brian
Well, one can only hope so...
Pat Pulling died a few years back of cancer, from what I've heard. Mercifully, BADD preceded her by quite a stretch; I don't think it ever made it into the world of the net. On the other hand, the Stackpole piece has gone around the world more times than MAKE_MONEY_FAST, so that's a good thing.
That's the frustrating thing here: that a well-meaning parent can do more damage through total cluelessness.
/Brian
As someone who suffers from pretty severe depression, I might be able to shed a bit of light on the matter.
/.ers are reading this and getting the impression of me as a whiner with a martyr complex). But it's very much a case of being, more than anything else, hopelessly lost in the world. Think the Endurance without Shackleton. Think Donner Party... of one.
This woman is seeking blame for something where there is nobody to blame. This man's head was thoroughly fucked up, and the game does not qualify as a cause.
The problem with people like me (and I assume him) is that we *can't* take responsibility because the depression destroys initiative as well as creating massive social anxiety. Social interaction is often an exercise on a par with going bungee jumping without inspecting the rope. We want to do something about our condition, but the fear that any attempt to get better will fail and leave us worse off than we started makes it not seem worthwhile to bother.
Online social interaction is a godsend to people in this situation because we (not so much me as others, but I'm not immune) can be ourselves without the difficulties of trying to adapt ourselves to social situations that we are unable to understand. The impersonal online world allows us to be the kind of person we are deep down without the crushing fear that prevents us from being ourselves in real life. Honestly? Everything I am typing now I can only say because I'm typing it. If I were to tell this to someone face-to-face I'd never be able to get it out coherently.
The fact is that people in this situation (at least speaking for myself) can never feel fully accepted; barring some miracle we always feel as if we are on the outside looking in, no matter how accepted we are outside of our own heads, and the hope has been sapped from our lives. It's hard for people who have never experienced this to understand (and I do realize that a rather large number of
So I feel for this guy. I think I know where he was, and I think his mother is a fool for trying to pin blame. This guy needed to be outright hospitalized. As far as he knew, there was no way out.
/Brian
Was his mother as much of a self-righteous slime as the report makes her out to be? Or was she merely totally oblivious?
/Brian
Read this, any of you who buy the RPG/MUD/Everquest-leads-to-suicide line. This is as clear-cut a case of scapegoating as I've ever seen. I've now done my duty as a Good Little Karma Whore (tm), I hope :-)
Er... I think the fact that you couldn't get dmesg working was kind of a giveaway :-)
What exactly was in the ISO, or was it just a dead link? I'd have been deeply amused to find out someone had burned a CD only to find out its sole contents were a text file saying "YHBT. YHL. HAN(AF)D."
/Brian
iMac RAM (at least on the Kihei case, which is what I have) is pretty easy to get to. The real problem is if your hard drive blows.
Apple is sorta-kinda easy-access on most of their systems. I've gotten the sense that it's quite a bit easier on the first-generation iMacs than it is on the second-gen.
BTW, I strongly suspect a modern Mac, or at least one a lot more recent than this, would do better than most PCs being foamed like this. The PowerPC line as a whole is pretty stingy with power compared to the overwhelming majority of x86 chips (though Crusoe is probably better).
/Brian
The thing is a piece of junk anyway; of course it's all old parts.
I do agree, however, with the person who suggested it might be more aesthetically pleasing to use a form for the foam...
/Brian
More to the point, Visual Studio is garbage. I did some VB programming a while back and the truth was I found it painful. I'm more of a Mac user than anything else (though I regularly use Linux as well), and I did a bit of work on my own in Hypercard. Now admittedly Hypercard is limited in a few rather obvious ways, but I challenge Average Joe VB programmer to go out, pick up a cheap Quadra for $30 and a copy of Hypercard 2.2, and take a hack at it. HyperTalk as a programming language isn't that great, but the interface will bring tears to your eyes (in a good way :-) ).
/Brian
*ahem* Rigged demo?
If you stop listening to the military and think about it a moment, you'd realize that you'd need
a) intelligent (as in near-sentient) discriminator systems
b) long-range sensor technology (like, for example, a geiger counter that works from ten klicks away)
c) an enemy that plays along by making warheads look like warheads
Missile defense is a boondoggle. There hasn't been one test yet that convinced me otherwise, and there won't be until we arrange for another country to shoot dummy warheads at us to give as close to a real world test as can be managed without killing anybody (as if anyone would bother shooting a missile in these days of suitcase bombs).
/brian
Well, hey... do cows tend to fight back if cornered?
I submit that if Gateway wants to capitalize on goodwill generated from this operation, though, they might want to start by ending their abuse of the ATX spec and go back to making hardware that can actually be upgraded. I've noticed that a lot of their most recent systems are very cheaply made systems using cases that seem to be designed specifically for Intel motherboards (i.e. no cutout around the rear ports and no way to add a new mobo without a pair of metal snips). That's just one thing they could do...
/Brian