It's supposed to crash your machine. Anytime Windows 95 and 98 (First Edition) tried to access a directory with two device names in it (\con\con, \nul\nul, etc), it supposedly crashes the OS. I've never seen it happen, but I've seen the postings on many security lists.
Apparently, it can be used to crash a system remotely too, if they're running an FTP daemon (I know the security bulletins speicifically mentioned Serv-U FTP was vulnerable.)
I think that this problem has been fixed in Win98 SE, because my Winblows machine doensn't do anything when accessing those types of files/directories either. Of course, none of my Linux machines have this "feature".:)
"It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting."
Hmmm.... Now we can see "Enlarge your penis naturally!" posts -- with GRAPHICS!!! Oh, I can't wait!
IMHO, one of the nicest things about USENET, as for Gopher, is that pages / posts load FAST, 'cuz there's no extra crap in the file. If you really need HTML formatting to convey an idea, MAKE A WEBPAGE and provide a URL to it!:)
USENET already has enough traffic on it without adding HTML crap to it (cuz you just know that 90% of the people are NOT going to write nice, clean code by hand... they're going to use FrontPage, which of course generates 3x more formatting tags than you really need.)
"If IBM ever decides to sell their own Linux distribution, it's bye-bye RedHat."
How exactly do you figure? Sure, maybe IBM will have more marketing to attract the newbies, but true geeks (who are, basically, the only ones using Linux at this point anyways) will continue to use their distro of choice (RHAT, Slack, whatever). I can't really see IBM blowing Red Hat out of the water *unless* they do something REALLY revolutionary that would make it worth switching.
A "6 month contract" is only valid if both parties uphold their part of the contract.
If CommuniTech.net breaks the letter of the contract (ie. if it actually says in the contract "The Company will do its utmost to ensure that Your servers are secure"), then the other party can technically declare the contract void and can actually sue for damages (if there was any). At least, this works in Canada.... I'd imagine it's the same in the States.
At my high school (actually these policies are in effect for the whole school board), we're not allowed to check email - HoTMaiL, Yahoo!, POP3 accounts, nothing. We also aren't allowed to use forums (Slashdot is one exception that I've seen.) And chat lines, are definitely out. However, teachers have their own POP3 accounts (I believe they are hosted on our school board's servers) and I have seen MANY teachers checking their accounts at school.
Our comp. sci. teacher allows us to check mail, etc (and he even made a Yahoo! group for our class... there are loopholes that we've found that allow such access), but only during class... if we're caught by the network admins while in the computer labs, it's a warning, then an account suspension... anywhere from 3 days to indefinitely.
My question is this: Do you think students SHOULD have access to tools such as these? For example, the Yahoo! groups have so far been a tremendous boon to the class, as I can log on and share information at 3:30am if I wish. I realize that the possibility for abuse exists, but would the benefits outweigh the possible abuse? Do you see any form of electronic communication (forums, email, whatever) as a viable teaching and education tool for use in schools? I have heard of some high schools providing email access for their students, but said students must sign a form allowing the school's administration to regularly review their email (and other) messages... what are your views on this type of moderation / restriction?
I look forward to your reply!
- Peter
I've had similar problems with mail-ins. I once bought a joystick that had a $15US rebate, filled it out, sent it in, and waited... and waited... and waited. Finally after about 2 1/2 months I wrote a semi-nasty letter to the company, and lo and behold, my rebate check arrived a week later.
I'm beginning to think that companies offer these rebates to drive up sales, hoping that you either won't send them in, or won't bitch about it when you don't receive your rebate. It's a shame that to get something you *should*, you have to kick and scream and roll over for these companies.
I recall reading a post on/. a while back, something about "What a sad state of affairs it is when 'government' is replaced with 'corporation', and 'citizen' is replaced with 'consumer'." That observation seems to hold very true here. (BTW, kudos to the original author/poster of that statement.)
- Jester
"For some reason the girls still don't like me."
OMG, that is so true that it's depressing. Oh well... I have that kernel source to keep me happy!:)
Cheers!
- Jester
I can't wait for this to come out... I remember when my friend got his shiny new 486/66 and invited me over.... I went over, and we started playing the original MOO, and we didn't stop for about 16 hours... then 16 hours the next day, and so on....;)
MOO is definitely one of the best games of all time... right up there with X-COM.;)
No. If I'm not mistaken, M$ made the original (or at least most-widely-used) AVI file format (? Please correct me if I'm wrong...) and why would THEY follow conventions?;)
"He'd get excited, tell me it was cool, and stay out of my way."
I had a teacher EXACTLY like this in Grade 11 programming. I got in the first day, learned the language (Turing... gag) and by day 3 I was working on my independent study project. I ended up with a 5000+ line Turing program that was essentially a clone of Command & Conquer.
I learned more about programming in that semester than I have in the years before (and I wrote my first program when I was 8, on a Commdore 64...)
Now... I have him again next semester... And we're covering Linux. I have an odd feeling that I'm gonna end up as 'root' on the server.;) Let's hope that I can repeat the last experience.
hmm..... Ever think of a digital projector?
I know they're $5000+ but man are they schweet.
I was using one for a presentation in English a while back and I showed up about 45 min early... played Red Alert 2 for a bit, then the 'Hallway Scene' from the Matrix (DivX rip)... The quality was absolutely amazing.
I think that we should start enforcing our "free trade", et cetera, economy and start shooting those who would oppose it. I think that starting off with the CEO of Pillsbury is a good start: He's trying to monopolize the market for the use of these words.
Oh, what a jumbled world we live in...// Jester
This is definitely cool... I've got an Atari platform kicking around here... I *think* it's a 2600, but I don't remember anymore.
It'd be worth picking up two or three of each game just to have a piece of history. These platforms are the things that are the grand-grand-daddies to our modern 3D accelerators (Think about it: If no one had stayed up till 4:00 in the morning trying to beat their previous score in Space Invaders, would there really be a market for games now? Or would anybody even bother devloping them?)
Definitely a treasure trove.
- Jester
Yes, WHILE THEY'RE PAYING YOU being the operative words. Once you're out of their employ, they can't legally (usually! there are a few exceptions) stop you from making a living.
Your explanation is pretty much the same as the rest of Canada, as far as I know... Most of the precendents were set in Supreme Court, so they're valid nationally.
Hrmm... Unfortunately not. All of my studies done for law class were *gasp* hardcopy. You may want to go to your local court and check out the court case periodicals available. They're what lawyers use when they need to cite precedent, so it there's a specific law you need interpreted, that's a good start.
The *best* way, of course, is to consult a lawyer, but at $400+ / hour that's not always feasible.
Hope this helps.
Yeah, that was basically the basis for the discussions and such in my Law class... it interferes with the right to earn a living, etc.
Like you said, it creates an *unreasonable* (that being the key word in laq) burden on the ex-employee.
And like someone else mentioned, the company takes the risk of divulging trade secrets and such.
This type of 'agreement' doesn't always hold up in court (at least here in Canada). During my grade 12 Law class last year I remember studying a few non-competition cases and a lot of them were declared void, largely due to several 'freedom' laws and such we have here. There were other reasons that they were overturned also, but are rather lengthy to explain... and I wanna get back to hacking.;)
Regards,
- Jester
I don't really foresee this as a *major* problem. We're only losing Macs users.;)
Just kidding guys! Seriously, I don't think it's an overpoweringly major problem. The majority of Linux users now are probably x86 based, and as far as I know, OS X isn't being offered on that platform.
As far as Mac users, naturally the TRUE power users will want Linux, but as for the majority of users, they ALREADY use mainstream OS's, so what's the harm in introducing them to the joys of UNIX?;)
I think this will actually HELP the open-source movement in general, but may harm Linux in specific a little.
Not to worry, tho, IMO.
Regards,
- Jester
I wonder if there was some sort of payoff by M$ here...
If the company had gone "out of its way" to ensure that their service ONLY ran on Microjunk, then there's gotta be a reason. No sane ISP would cut off paying users without a good incentive...
One has to wonder, especially in light of some of the things mentioned in 'Halloween Documents' (check out http://www.opensource.org/halloween/ (hyperlink here) if you've never read them...)
Definitely a good idea, but the question posed dealt with neural nets in the "home" environment. Unless, of course, you're saying that you're so stinking rich that you NEED traffic lights in the middle of your (gargantuan) house(mansion? palace?)...;)
Agreed, this is definitely not something funny when it happens in real life, but relating to the Office Space post: I betcha they did this just so she wouldn't take that damn printer....;)
First of all, no I do not want to see anything associated with goatse.cx. I think the next version of SlashCode should have filtering abilities... anybody posting text or a link about goat* should be instead nuked and suffer ping flooding...;)
Maybe work in something to crash a Windows box if anyone is silly enough to be using one...
Slashdot Mirror
It's supposed to crash your machine. Anytime Windows 95 and 98 (First Edition) tried to access a directory with two device names in it (\con\con, \nul\nul, etc), it supposedly crashes the OS. I've never seen it happen, but I've seen the postings on many security lists. :)
Apparently, it can be used to crash a system remotely too, if they're running an FTP daemon (I know the security bulletins speicifically mentioned Serv-U FTP was vulnerable.)
I think that this problem has been fixed in Win98 SE, because my Winblows machine doensn't do anything when accessing those types of files/directories either. Of course, none of my Linux machines have this "feature".
"It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting." :)
Hmmm.... Now we can see "Enlarge your penis naturally!" posts -- with GRAPHICS!!! Oh, I can't wait!
IMHO, one of the nicest things about USENET, as for Gopher, is that pages / posts load FAST, 'cuz there's no extra crap in the file. If you really need HTML formatting to convey an idea, MAKE A WEBPAGE and provide a URL to it!
USENET already has enough traffic on it without adding HTML crap to it (cuz you just know that 90% of the people are NOT going to write nice, clean code by hand... they're going to use FrontPage, which of course generates 3x more formatting tags than you really need.)
"If IBM ever decides to sell their own Linux distribution, it's bye-bye RedHat." How exactly do you figure? Sure, maybe IBM will have more marketing to attract the newbies, but true geeks (who are, basically, the only ones using Linux at this point anyways) will continue to use their distro of choice (RHAT, Slack, whatever). I can't really see IBM blowing Red Hat out of the water *unless* they do something REALLY revolutionary that would make it worth switching.
A "6 month contract" is only valid if both parties uphold their part of the contract. If CommuniTech.net breaks the letter of the contract (ie. if it actually says in the contract "The Company will do its utmost to ensure that Your servers are secure"), then the other party can technically declare the contract void and can actually sue for damages (if there was any). At least, this works in Canada.... I'd imagine it's the same in the States.
2001-03-17 17:26:04
That's my best guess... I'm also sick of all the delays in bringing that beast down...
At my high school (actually these policies are in effect for the whole school board), we're not allowed to check email - HoTMaiL, Yahoo!, POP3 accounts, nothing. We also aren't allowed to use forums (Slashdot is one exception that I've seen.) And chat lines, are definitely out. However, teachers have their own POP3 accounts (I believe they are hosted on our school board's servers) and I have seen MANY teachers checking their accounts at school.
Our comp. sci. teacher allows us to check mail, etc (and he even made a Yahoo! group for our class... there are loopholes that we've found that allow such access), but only during class... if we're caught by the network admins while in the computer labs, it's a warning, then an account suspension... anywhere from 3 days to indefinitely.
My question is this: Do you think students SHOULD have access to tools such as these? For example, the Yahoo! groups have so far been a tremendous boon to the class, as I can log on and share information at 3:30am if I wish. I realize that the possibility for abuse exists, but would the benefits outweigh the possible abuse? Do you see any form of electronic communication (forums, email, whatever) as a viable teaching and education tool for use in schools? I have heard of some high schools providing email access for their students, but said students must sign a form allowing the school's administration to regularly review their email (and other) messages... what are your views on this type of moderation / restriction? I look forward to your reply! - Peter
I've had similar problems with mail-ins. I once bought a joystick that had a $15US rebate, filled it out, sent it in, and waited... and waited... and waited. Finally after about 2 1/2 months I wrote a semi-nasty letter to the company, and lo and behold, my rebate check arrived a week later. /. a while back, something about "What a sad state of affairs it is when 'government' is replaced with 'corporation', and 'citizen' is replaced with 'consumer'." That observation seems to hold very true here. (BTW, kudos to the original author/poster of that statement.)
I'm beginning to think that companies offer these rebates to drive up sales, hoping that you either won't send them in, or won't bitch about it when you don't receive your rebate. It's a shame that to get something you *should*, you have to kick and scream and roll over for these companies.
I recall reading a post on
- Jester
I just checked Quantum's site, and FYI, it's not 50 nanosecond access... it's 50 microsecond... 3 orders of magnitude is quite a lot... ;)
Pish. Four-dimensional? Wow. Retro. ;)
Oops... wasn't supposed to tell you about that quantum computer sitting in my garage....
"For some reason the girls still don't like me." :)
Cheers!
- Jester
OMG, that is so true that it's depressing. Oh well... I have that kernel source to keep me happy!
I can't wait for this to come out... I remember when my friend got his shiny new 486/66 and invited me over.... I went over, and we started playing the original MOO, and we didn't stop for about 16 hours... then 16 hours the next day, and so on.... ;)
MOO is definitely one of the best games of all time... right up there with X-COM. ;)
No. If I'm not mistaken, M$ made the original (or at least most-widely-used) AVI file format (? Please correct me if I'm wrong...) and why would THEY follow conventions? ;)
"He'd get excited, tell me it was cool, and stay out of my way." I had a teacher EXACTLY like this in Grade 11 programming. I got in the first day, learned the language (Turing... gag) and by day 3 I was working on my independent study project. I ended up with a 5000+ line Turing program that was essentially a clone of Command & Conquer. I learned more about programming in that semester than I have in the years before (and I wrote my first program when I was 8, on a Commdore 64...) ;) Let's hope that I can repeat the last experience.
Now... I have him again next semester... And we're covering Linux. I have an odd feeling that I'm gonna end up as 'root' on the server.
'if I just had a 40 inch "monitor"'
hmm..... Ever think of a digital projector?
I know they're $5000+ but man are they schweet. I was using one for a presentation in English a while back and I showed up about 45 min early... played Red Alert 2 for a bit, then the 'Hallway Scene' from the Matrix (DivX rip)... The quality was absolutely amazing.
I think that we should start enforcing our "free trade", et cetera, economy and start shooting those who would oppose it. I think that starting off with the CEO of Pillsbury is a good start: He's trying to monopolize the market for the use of these words. Oh, what a jumbled world we live in... // Jester
This is definitely cool... I've got an Atari platform kicking around here... I *think* it's a 2600, but I don't remember anymore. It'd be worth picking up two or three of each game just to have a piece of history. These platforms are the things that are the grand-grand-daddies to our modern 3D accelerators (Think about it: If no one had stayed up till 4:00 in the morning trying to beat their previous score in Space Invaders, would there really be a market for games now? Or would anybody even bother devloping them?) Definitely a treasure trove. - Jester
Yes, WHILE THEY'RE PAYING YOU being the operative words. Once you're out of their employ, they can't legally (usually! there are a few exceptions) stop you from making a living. Your explanation is pretty much the same as the rest of Canada, as far as I know... Most of the precendents were set in Supreme Court, so they're valid nationally.
Hrmm... Unfortunately not. All of my studies done for law class were *gasp* hardcopy. You may want to go to your local court and check out the court case periodicals available. They're what lawyers use when they need to cite precedent, so it there's a specific law you need interpreted, that's a good start. The *best* way, of course, is to consult a lawyer, but at $400+ / hour that's not always feasible. Hope this helps.
Yeah, that was basically the basis for the discussions and such in my Law class... it interferes with the right to earn a living, etc. Like you said, it creates an *unreasonable* (that being the key word in laq) burden on the ex-employee. And like someone else mentioned, the company takes the risk of divulging trade secrets and such.
This type of 'agreement' doesn't always hold up in court (at least here in Canada). During my grade 12 Law class last year I remember studying a few non-competition cases and a lot of them were declared void, largely due to several 'freedom' laws and such we have here. There were other reasons that they were overturned also, but are rather lengthy to explain... and I wanna get back to hacking. ;)
Regards,
- Jester
I don't really foresee this as a *major* problem. We're only losing Macs users. ;)
Just kidding guys! Seriously, I don't think it's an overpoweringly major problem. The majority of Linux users now are probably x86 based, and as far as I know, OS X isn't being offered on that platform.
As far as Mac users, naturally the TRUE power users will want Linux, but as for the majority of users, they ALREADY use mainstream OS's, so what's the harm in introducing them to the joys of UNIX? ;)
I think this will actually HELP the open-source movement in general, but may harm Linux in specific a little.
Not to worry, tho, IMO.
Regards,
- Jester
I wonder if there was some sort of payoff by M$ here... If the company had gone "out of its way" to ensure that their service ONLY ran on Microjunk, then there's gotta be a reason. No sane ISP would cut off paying users without a good incentive... One has to wonder, especially in light of some of the things mentioned in 'Halloween Documents' (check out http://www.opensource.org/halloween/ (hyperlink here) if you've never read them...)
Definitely a good idea, but the question posed dealt with neural nets in the "home" environment. Unless, of course, you're saying that you're so stinking rich that you NEED traffic lights in the middle of your (gargantuan) house(mansion? palace?)... ;)
Agreed, this is definitely not something funny when it happens in real life, but relating to the Office Space post: I betcha they did this just so she wouldn't take that damn printer.... ;)
First of all, no I do not want to see anything associated with goatse.cx. I think the next version of SlashCode should have filtering abilities... anybody posting text or a link about goat* should be instead nuked and suffer ping flooding... ;)
Maybe work in something to crash a Windows box if anyone is silly enough to be using one...