Politicians will always want to tax anything where there's a movement of money.
Therefore, from now on, I will think about politicians whenever I need to make a movement.
But seriously, simply just destroy *credit card based* E-Commerce, plain and simple... It won't destroy commerce over the web - i.e. Amazon might offer their wares on a COD basis, thus bypassing the fact that any transaction actually "occurred" on the internet. Also, mailed checks may still be applicable: "This check I've mailed you is for SKU#8546294 I saw on your website on 2/14/03..." Long before I had a credit card, this is how I conducted purchased on various homepages.
> Light Up Your Keyboard! > > This is how the finished product looks! > > [Big Black Square (y'know, graphic that didn't > load) that looks like someone snapped a photo in > the dark.] > > This one done by Wolfman at Virtual-Hideout.net > with one of our Kits, with our 5V inverter chip > that ties right into the keyboard and just 4' of > Neon Trim. Check out his review! > > [Another Big Black Square that looks like > someone snapped a photo in the dark.] > > This Dell was done with one of our Kits, with > our 5V inverter chip that ties right into the > keyboard and just 4' of Neon Trim. > (Courtesy of Eric Smith, Carrollton, Texas)
Hmm, first page I've seen that shows you how their product *doesn't* work!
Solomon
Consumer gullbility
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> do they expect content producers and consumers alike to really adopt this?
It's amazing what your average consumer will do. I can't even begin to count the number of machines I've seen with BonziBuddy(tm), Gator(tm), and any number of other spyware/spamming packages... all because the user clicked "yes" when asked if he wanted to install such-and-such. The beautiful (and ugly) thing about the browser plug-in market is the Field Of Dreams approach: "If you write it, they will install."
Real only needs to release a "new version" of their player to suddenly make a bunch of users switch over. Hey, it's been working for Microsoft for years now.
On the content provider side, it takes a little more incentive to make the switch. As programmer for a web development firm, I can attest to unreasonable licensing schemes on Real's part.
Heh, aggressive commission-hunters suck. Recently, I went to Fry's with four friends, and we shared the same shopping cart. I stopped a salesman just long enough to order up a SCSI drive, only to have him start scanning everything in our cart the moment I took my eyes off of him. By the time we got to the cash register, it became a bitch since the cashier was now demanding that everything was paid with a single check - after all, everything was now written up on the same ticket. In order for each of us to pay separately, we had to track down that specific salesman and have him manually remove ticket items. Ooh, I was so pissed. Actually, I'm still pissed... enough to say who - his name was James [can't remember his last name].
> For now, there are no space rocks known to be on > a collision course with Earth. At the same time, > there are tons of them out there that have not > been found.
I think a little math is in order here. Assume that an Extinction-Level-Event asteroid is 8 tons, which is by all means a conservative estimate when you think about it: a full truckload of ceramic iron magnetic cores easily weighs as much, and wouldn't come anywhere near levelling the Eastern Seaboard if dropped from space.
Exactly what is "tons of" these space rocks? Maybe three. Our chances of getting killed in 2003 just tripled to 6 in 150,000,000,000. Better get back to work, digging out those underground shelters, people.
The scary thing about the Andromeda Strain was that it wasn't a bacteria. It wasn't even a virus. It wasn't even organic, moreso a complex molecule that happened to reproduce using heat.
In other words, some journalist is looking at how long life forms we know and love(?) can survive the harsh conditions of outer space and finding an opportunity to use the term "Andromeda Strain"?
Solomon
Human Domination - She's Learning!
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 2
Me: Your logo looks very Illuminati. Alice: You think I am logo looks very illuminati. Me: Yeah, well, my hobby is world domination, too. Alice: Wow! Where did you get your hobby is world domination too? Me: From your logo. Are you Colin Powell's shadow advisor? Alice: I can't say whether or not I am Colin Powell's shadow advisor. Me: Plausible Deniability sucks, doesn't it?
Jack and Hill[ary] proposed a bill, We thought it'd never hold water. Jack broke down A Senate clown, Then bent us over backward.
Original verse by Skevin, 2002 All rights reserved Any unauthorized reproduction of this verse or reverse-engineering of the provided security protocol key (AKA rot13) will result in retaliation by excessive force to the maximum extent of the law (that is, the law of any backwater third world country of our choice).
> I presume you meant teenganger when you misspelled that.
I presume you meant äppleganger when you misspelled that. What's an äppleganger, you ask? Sometimes, parents (especially of Germanic origin) leave their children home alone in front of the PC, only to come home and find some hideously altered travesty (actually a Fey Changeling) sitting in front of a machine that is no longer recognizable as a PC: gone are the beige overtones and sharp corners, only to be replaced with unacceptably nonconformist colors and sweeping, slanting curves. Such an abomination seeks to corrupt all surrounding mortals with ominous mantras such as "Think Different!" or "Switch!". Even the desktop is oft times different (although Gnome users are not as likely the same foreboding disorientation as others). That, my friends, is an äppleganger. Our boy Johansen seems to fit the racial profile of the changeling victim, but his computer... I just don't know. Could it be that the Norweigan Police are in cahoots with the sinister Faerie King S'Teef Chobbs and quickly returned the computer, recoginizing it for the instrument of destruction it truly is? Perhaps we have more to fear from these äpplegangers than we truly realize.
Solomon
Nyarlathotep, a Great Old One?
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 2
Nyarlathotep, now that would be a different story. It is not just a mindless beast like Cthulhu.
That's strange: the last time I checked, Nyarlathotep was an Egyptian scientist/magician/1337 hax0r who simply understood time travel. Sure, people who mocked him in his house paid dearly, given his disdain for people, mysterious toys, and contempt for social norms... hmm, sounds like most uber-geeks I know!
What I love best is the way some people confuse s/Nyarlathotep/programmers with being a Great Old One. Excuse me while I laugh at your^H^H^H^H their insolence - muhahahahaha.
I feel better already.
Hmm, maybe you can sell off some of your/. karma - obviously, you're racking it up by the boatload just by posting alone. I don't think I've seen anyone become such a Mod-Point Magnet before!
I think there's more detail than you give credit for...
Engineers tend to be a lonely bunch. Ahem, a *very* lonely bunch. What rocket scientist would pass up the opportunity to uh, spread a little Seed into outer space, seeing how no female member of _his_own_species_ is interested in him? What better revenge than to have some advanced civilization clone the genetic material and produce legions of beings with my^H^H his sexually undesirable likeness in the centuries to come? (no pun intended)
Okay, maybe I speak a little too much from personal experience, but I'd also like to be quick to point out - that's not *my* spooge on the Viking Lander... my coworkers beat me to the punch (by um, beating other things).
I wish I were present at Dmitri Sklyarov's presentation at Defcon. When the Fed came up to arrest him, we should have come up on stage and said, "If you take him, you'll need to arrest me too," similar to Ghandi's or MLK's passive resistance.
Not to mention at Defcon, you don't have to provide documentation of *who* you are when you register, so if some 300 arrestees don't have any identification (other than going by names like L0pht or Captain Cornholio), Uncle Sam must make a decision on just how much effort He needs to exert to determine the identity and background of a few hundred potentially innocent attendees. If He exerts *too* much pressure, then you get a nice media circus on your hands.
Probably more difficult at OSCon, since we have to give out or names and other personal info to register, but if Bruce makes it through this one, I would encourage him to do it again in two weeks in Vegas (Defcon). If all of us throw ourselves into the arms of an arresting authority during the process of attempting to enforce some idiotic law, they will not be able to suppress it quietly without garnering negative attention of the media.
What's that, you say? A class has only a hundred or so people who can participate in a passive resistance campaign when the shit hits the fan? No problem: the moment the arrest occurs, the person closest to the door zips out of the room, screaming some code phrase (i.e. "The British are coming!") while running down the convention halls of Alexis Park. Even if the Feds prevent him from leaving the room, he can still shout it loud enough that someone *outside* the room will hear it, who will then propagate the message as previously mentioned... Voila! *Several* hundred geeks now flood the room in a passive resistance campaign, willfully subjecting themselves to arrest (which won't happen when there are such large numbers).
Those who don't make it into the room before the FBI temporarily barricades the doors should be speed-dialing their favorite newspaper/news-station/journalist, guaranteeing that *when* the doors open, everyone will be greeted in the warm and loving arms of the media.
Why go through such measures? Because the general public doesn't even know what the DMCA is. Having gone this far in its legislation, the only was to bring attention to this law is to publicly violate it in extremely large numbers (or publicly support a violator in extremely large numbers), and on camera, publicly show that you are willing to be arrested for what you believe in.
Right. Well, it's not a problem for me to put up picts and instructions, but over the years, I've ended up slashdotting my friends' webservers, and Pacbell gets pissed off when I post content on my "personal" webspace that suddenly gets high load, even going as far as to try to charge me for the additional bandwidth! Unfortunately, I'm more of an engineer geek than a network administration geek, so any pointers on avoiding the/. effect (with a large hardware investement) would be helpful.
I'm in the process of converting a WGP Autococker into a CD/DVD Launcher - specially flattened barrel, tightened on one side to impart a spin - to launch Compact Disks with a burst of CO2. Although the CD's needed to be loaded by hand, one at a time (up until recently), I can reliably attain ~550 ft/s. This is enough to cleave thick pieces of styrofoam/cardboard or aluminum cans in half... or embed itself into soft wood like Eucalyptus trees. Against harder targets, such as rocks, the rounds simply undergo fragmentation and splinter into tiny plastic chunks. I don't know the effects against animal matter yet, because the contraption is notoriously inaccurate and squirrels are annoyingly fast.
At higher velocities (~700 ft/s) the rounds begin to fragment in the "barrel". I'm currently examining other alternatives to increase the velocity, but I guess now I have to take spin to account.:)
Other notes: I've put together a rudimentary feeder/hopper that now lets me use my CD Launcher in a semiautomatic fashion (and wastes more CO2 per shot)
Solomon
PS: I'm slapping together a solenoid-actuated electric trigger frame (similar to a Sandridge) to convert my paintball^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CD gun to a fully automatic weapon. I don't know if it will work... yet. (I have given thought to converting an Angel, but I'm not willing to futz with $1300 gun, and I've been doing my own custom internals on 'Cockers for years now.)
I estimate a potential ROF of ~13 CDs/second. (maybe *now* I'll be able to hit that pesky squirrel) My anticipation is that it still won't do any damage to brick walls, bronze statues, and masonry of quality craftsmanship, but will absolutely *shred* old wooden fences, thrown-out sofas, and squirrels.
BTW, I once thought of calling it my Assault Ordnance Launcher, or AOL for short... the idea being that people would soon become afraid of my AOL CDs...
HEY! Do you need to setup accounts in 3 or 4 places to get the desired result? (See NT User account, IIS Account, SQL Server account, etc.)
Okay, I don't mean to play Devil's Advocate (no pun intended), but I really feel a need to correct your first point there. IIS does not need a separate account - it automatically assumes that webusers are coming in as iusr_[machine name], an account which is automatically created the moment you install IIS (or PWS, depending on your poison). If you want to force them to use a legitimate Windows login, then use the MMC to disable anonymous connections. Second, SQL Server: you can use Windows authentication instead of SQL Server's own authentication scheme to dole out permissions and roles.
Ein Logon, Ein Kennwort, Ein Betriebssystem... Heil Microsoft, heil der Führer!
HEY! Can Linux do BLUE SCREENS? - We can.Boy HOWDY! The only time I've had Win2K decide to BSOD on me (Hey, I verbed a noun!) was with bad hardware... a condition that oft times caused SuSE and Red Hat to blow up in my face too. Sure, I've had Win Apps announce an Illegal Operation and unexpectedly die, but to be fair, Konquerer died on me four times today with equally cryptic messages: this was not on bad hardware - it was a Thinkpad A Series, one of the most solid notebooks I've ever owned.
HEY! Windows doesn't nave builtin BASH support!
Ah, isn't that what Cygwin is for? Whatcha need it for? Shell scripting? Slap me silly, but I find the Windows Scripting Host (WSH) to be pretty powerful: you can write VB shell scripts that can draw on any COM object with a Registry entry, assuming you have permissions (i.e. createobject("application.excel") blows up in your face on a default security loadout). Hell, you can even effectively shellscript with Perl once you learn Perl's Win32 API calls.
HEY! Windows doesn't have built-in FINGER support either!
Once again, Win2K. I just opened up a command prompt and was able to finger all (three) of my female friends. Seems to work perfectly fine.</rant>
That having been said, I will point out *one* MS initiative I disagree with:.Net - sorry, but changing all your key bindings, just so it can match the Visual C++ IDE, is really lame. Also, ASP.Net seems to have only one "upgrade": server-side controls. This lets you take certain ActiveX objects and drag them into your homepage. Sounds like a life saver for RAD, doesn't it? Also sounds majorly browser-noncompliant? Well, it isn't - they accomplish this by turning all your properties into hidden fields to accompany DHTML's closest equivalents, but if you look at the generated HTML, damn, there's a shitload of a mess in there. I can see ASP.Net fostering a lot of bad habits early on, just like how VB taught me a lot of bad habits...
Actually, I recently ran two webservers on identical machines... the exact same machine in fact, at the same time.
I don't get it - I had them running side by side: IIS with SQL Server 7 on my Windows side; and Apache on my SCO distro out of VMWare from Alpha WINE under SuSE from yet another instance of VMWare on my Win2K destop with data backend consisting of an early Windows MySQL port whose ODBC DSN is traversed across two localhost subnets, thanks to a hacked Samba mod for allowing OLEDB share names over NETBIOS connections.
Guess which setup ran faster? I could hardly believe my eyes! Everyone here on/. keeps touting the speed of Linux, but no one can tell me what I need to buy to make my Linux setup run faster! This OSS hype is obviously BS.
Solomon
PS: But is all seriousness, my reluctance to make my move is based on the apparent lack of Sequencing software and hardware support for my music equipment (MIDI interfaces, multitracking recorder cards, etc.). What *does* exist out there only seems to be able to recognize a (*cough* *cough*) Sound Blaster MIDI port. Any suggestions?
I didn't know there was such a law.
I'm in the process of converting a WGP Autococker into a CD/DVD Launcher - specially flattened barrel, tightened on one side to impart a spin - to launch Compact Disks with a burst of CO2. Although the CD's need to be loaded by hand, one at a time (up until recently), I can reliably attain ~550 ft/s. This is enough to cleave thick pieces of styrofoam/cardboard or aluminum cans in half... or embed itself into soft wood like Eucalyptus trees. Against harder targets, such as rocks, the rounds simply undergo fragmentation and splinter into tiny plastic chunks. I don't know the effects against animal matter yet, because the contraption is notoriously inaccurate and squirrels are annoyingly fast.
At higher velocities (~700 ft/s) the rounds begin to fragment in the "barrel".
Now, here's my question: I've put together a rudimentary feeder/hopper that now lets me use my CD Launcher in a semiautomatic fashion, and believe me, having played paintball for four years straight, I can pull that trigger pretty fast. Is it a gun? Does it need special attention from the ATF?
Let's thicken the plot: I'm slapping together a solenoid-actuated electric trigger frame (similar to a Sandridge) to convert my paintball^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CD gun to a fully automatic weapon. I estimate a ROF of ~13 CDs/second. (maybe *now* I'll be able to hit that pesky squirrel) My anticipation is that it still won't do any damage to brick walls, bronze statues, and masonry of quality craftsmanship, but will absolutely *shred* old wooden fences, thrown-out sofas, and squirrels. Will it need to be registered with the ATF then?
BTW, I once thought of calling it my Assault Ordnance Launcher, or AOL for short... the idea being that people would soon become afraid of my AOL CDs...
I bought my sister an FXA47 for her birthday, with WinXP pre-installed. WinXP on a Vaio doesn't seem to like DirectX 8.1, so I reimaged it with Win2K. The only things it didn't recognize immediately were the sound card and the modem (which was a WinModem anyway). I used the XP drivers that came with the machine, even though it warned me that the drivers were not signed/trusted; I got both working just fine.
The only problem was getting the original applications back onto the machine, complete with registry settings. The Application Restoration Disk keeps telling me that the installer can only run on Sony Vaios... Hah! (Along these lines, I'm trying to actually write a program/script to analyze a Registry Image for such settings... a Key Copier, if you will).
Anyway, I just want you all to know that OpenGL and Direct3D run *much* faster under Win2k than the default OS crap called XP that came installed on the system.
LMAO, the Radeon Mobility 7500 is not exactly famous for its power-saving ability, even when it's sitting around in 2D mode. Combine that with the backlight for the extra-large surface area (as well as potentially bigger speakers), is it reasonable to think anyone is going attempt to take advantage of "Advanced Power Management"?
Sure, such a gamer^H^H^H^H^H user might have his quiet moments where he just wants to compose poetry or manage his shopping list in a coffeehouse somewhere, but IMHO, a "laptop" with a 16" screen is going to a little big to live up to its namesake.
I can see only one primary purpose for this machine: LAN Party. (...Oh yeah, and getting work done onsite, when your clients try to set you up with a "Development Station" that's too damn slow to mirror their live database backend.)
> Resorting to violence a PR blunder? > Not if you belong to the Al-Quaeda.
Al-Quaeda has good PR? Was it the donations to Charity? The Homeless Shelters? Their ground breaking research on Global Warming? Their spin doctors must suck because most news sites portray them in a bad light.
> If this island ever became critical enough, > it would become a major target of terrorism
Yeah, they could covertly plant a bomb while blending in as a tourist-... excuse me, *the* tourist, and not single one of the four residents of Sealand would find out until it was too late! Otherwise, I guess they could sneak up on HavenCo just like they did on the USS Cole, and all four HavenCo employees would never see the rowboat coming, never mind the fact that the rowboat must have been launched from the nearest shore 12 miles away. ["Abdul, I can't set the charge - my arms are too tired!"] However, the effort would be worth it: imagine the shock of horror in our hearts when we discover that the attack upon the second smallest country in the world has resulted in a whopping 4 casualties!
Slashdot Mirror
What's in Chapter 11?
Solomon
> It's so powerful, no wonder it's #1.
And speaking of #1, I was reading the article out to my business partners, who heard me say "Joint Urine Review".
They began wondering exactly when programmers were getting drug-tested?
Solomon
Politicians will always want to tax anything where there's a movement of money.
Therefore, from now on, I will think about politicians whenever I need to make a movement.
But seriously, simply just destroy *credit card based* E-Commerce, plain and simple... It won't destroy commerce over the web - i.e. Amazon might offer their wares on a COD basis, thus bypassing the fact that any transaction actually "occurred" on the internet. Also, mailed checks may still be applicable: "This check I've mailed you is for SKU#8546294 I saw on your website on 2/14/03..." Long before I had a credit card, this is how I conducted purchased on various homepages.
[Blows off dust from his paper checks]
Solomon
From the article:
> Light Up Your Keyboard!
>
> This is how the finished product looks!
>
> [Big Black Square (y'know, graphic that didn't
> load) that looks like someone snapped a photo in
> the dark.]
>
> This one done by Wolfman at Virtual-Hideout.net
> with one of our Kits, with our 5V inverter chip
> that ties right into the keyboard and just 4' of
> Neon Trim. Check out his review!
>
> [Another Big Black Square that looks like
> someone snapped a photo in the dark.]
>
> This Dell was done with one of our Kits, with
> our 5V inverter chip that ties right into the
> keyboard and just 4' of Neon Trim.
> (Courtesy of Eric Smith, Carrollton, Texas)
Hmm, first page I've seen that shows you how their product *doesn't* work!
Solomon
> do they expect content producers and consumers alike to really adopt this? It's amazing what your average consumer will do. I can't even begin to count the number of machines I've seen with BonziBuddy(tm), Gator(tm), and any number of other spyware/spamming packages... all because the user clicked "yes" when asked if he wanted to install such-and-such. The beautiful (and ugly) thing about the browser plug-in market is the Field Of Dreams approach: "If you write it, they will install." Real only needs to release a "new version" of their player to suddenly make a bunch of users switch over. Hey, it's been working for Microsoft for years now. On the content provider side, it takes a little more incentive to make the switch. As programmer for a web development firm, I can attest to unreasonable licensing schemes on Real's part.
Heh, aggressive commission-hunters suck. Recently, I went to Fry's with four friends, and we shared the same shopping cart. I stopped a salesman just long enough to order up a SCSI drive, only to have him start scanning everything in our cart the moment I took my eyes off of him. By the time we got to the cash register, it became a bitch since the cashier was now demanding that everything was paid with a single check - after all, everything was now written up on the same ticket. In order for each of us to pay separately, we had to track down that specific salesman and have him manually remove ticket items.
Ooh, I was so pissed. Actually, I'm still pissed... enough to say who - his name was James [can't remember his last name].
Solomon
From the article:
> For now, there are no space rocks known to be on
> a collision course with Earth. At the same time,
> there are tons of them out there that have not
> been found.
I think a little math is in order here. Assume that an Extinction-Level-Event asteroid is 8 tons, which is by all means a conservative estimate when you think about it: a full truckload of ceramic iron magnetic cores easily weighs as much, and wouldn't come anywhere near levelling the Eastern Seaboard if dropped from space.
Exactly what is "tons of" these space rocks? Maybe three. Our chances of getting killed in 2003 just tripled to 6 in 150,000,000,000. Better get back to work, digging out those underground shelters, people.
Solomon
The scary thing about the Andromeda Strain was that it wasn't a bacteria. It wasn't even a virus. It wasn't even organic, moreso a complex molecule that happened to reproduce using heat.
In other words, some journalist is looking at how long life forms we know and love(?) can survive the harsh conditions of outer space and finding an opportunity to use the term "Andromeda Strain"?
Solomon
Me: Your logo looks very Illuminati.
Alice: You think I am logo looks very illuminati.
Me: Yeah, well, my hobby is world domination, too.
Alice: Wow! Where did you get your hobby is world domination too?
Me: From your logo. Are you Colin Powell's shadow advisor?
Alice: I can't say whether or not I am Colin Powell's shadow advisor.
Me: Plausible Deniability sucks, doesn't it?
Jack and Hill[ary]
proposed a bill,
We thought it'd never hold water.
Jack broke down
A Senate clown,
Then bent us over backward.
Original verse by Skevin, 2002
All rights reserved
Any unauthorized reproduction of this verse or reverse-engineering of the provided security protocol key (AKA rot13) will result in retaliation by excessive force to the maximum extent of the law (that is, the law of any backwater third world country of our choice).
Skevin
> I presume you meant teenganger when you misspelled that.
I presume you meant äppleganger when you misspelled that. What's an äppleganger, you ask? Sometimes, parents (especially of Germanic origin) leave their children home alone in front of the PC, only to come home and find some hideously altered travesty (actually a Fey Changeling) sitting in front of a machine that is no longer recognizable as a PC: gone are the beige overtones and sharp corners, only to be replaced with unacceptably nonconformist colors and sweeping, slanting curves. Such an abomination seeks to corrupt all surrounding mortals with ominous mantras such as "Think Different!" or "Switch!". Even the desktop is oft times different (although Gnome users are not as likely the same foreboding disorientation as others). That, my friends, is an äppleganger.
Our boy Johansen seems to fit the racial profile of the changeling victim, but his computer... I just don't know. Could it be that the Norweigan Police are in cahoots with the sinister Faerie King S'Teef Chobbs and quickly returned the computer, recoginizing it for the instrument of destruction it truly is? Perhaps we have more to fear from these äpplegangers than we truly realize.
Solomon
Nyarlathotep, now that would be a different story. It is not just a mindless beast like Cthulhu.
That's strange: the last time I checked, Nyarlathotep was an Egyptian scientist/magician/1337 hax0r who simply understood time travel. Sure, people who mocked him in his house paid dearly, given his disdain for people, mysterious toys, and contempt for social norms... hmm, sounds like most uber-geeks I know!
What I love best is the way some people confuse s/Nyarlathotep/programmers with being a Great Old One. Excuse me while I laugh at your^H^H^H^H their insolence - muhahahahaha.
I feel better already.
Solomon
Cult Leader of Great Old Ones reGurgitating Little Excerpts
Well, since the statute of limitations says $50 of value or less, the burden is upon them to prove that your life wasn't worth squat.
Then again, seeing how they treat their artists, this probably isn't too hard.
Solomon
> I am not rich, sorry.
/. karma - obviously, you're racking it up by the boatload just by posting alone. I don't think I've seen anyone become such a Mod-Point Magnet before!
Hmm, maybe you can sell off some of your
Solomon
I think there's more detail than you give credit for...
Engineers tend to be a lonely bunch. Ahem, a *very* lonely bunch. What rocket scientist would pass up the opportunity to uh, spread a little Seed into outer space, seeing how no female member of _his_own_species_ is interested in him? What better revenge than to have some advanced civilization clone the genetic material and produce legions of beings with my^H^H his sexually undesirable likeness in the centuries to come? (no pun intended)
Okay, maybe I speak a little too much from personal experience, but I'd also like to be quick to point out - that's not *my* spooge on the Viking Lander... my coworkers beat me to the punch (by um, beating other things).
Solomon
I wish I were present at Dmitri Sklyarov's presentation at Defcon. When the Fed came up to arrest him, we should have come up on stage and said, "If you take him, you'll need to arrest me too," similar to Ghandi's or MLK's passive resistance.
Not to mention at Defcon, you don't have to provide documentation of *who* you are when you register, so if some 300 arrestees don't have any identification (other than going by names like L0pht or Captain Cornholio), Uncle Sam must make a decision on just how much effort He needs to exert to determine the identity and background of a few hundred potentially innocent attendees. If He exerts *too* much pressure, then you get a nice media circus on your hands.
Probably more difficult at OSCon, since we have to give out or names and other personal info to register, but if Bruce makes it through this one, I would encourage him to do it again in two weeks in Vegas (Defcon). If all of us throw ourselves into the arms of an arresting authority during the process of attempting to enforce some idiotic law, they will not be able to suppress it quietly without garnering negative attention of the media.
What's that, you say? A class has only a hundred or so people who can participate in a passive resistance campaign when the shit hits the fan? No problem: the moment the arrest occurs, the person closest to the door zips out of the room, screaming some code phrase (i.e. "The British are coming!") while running down the convention halls of Alexis Park. Even if the Feds prevent him from leaving the room, he can still shout it loud enough that someone *outside* the room will hear it, who will then propagate the message as previously mentioned... Voila! *Several* hundred geeks now flood the room in a passive resistance campaign, willfully subjecting themselves to arrest (which won't happen when there are such large numbers).
Those who don't make it into the room before the FBI temporarily barricades the doors should be speed-dialing their favorite newspaper/news-station/journalist, guaranteeing that *when* the doors open, everyone will be greeted in the warm and loving arms of the media.
Why go through such measures? Because the general public doesn't even know what the DMCA is. Having gone this far in its legislation, the only was to bring attention to this law is to publicly violate it in extremely large numbers (or publicly support a violator in extremely large numbers), and on camera, publicly show that you are willing to be arrested for what you believe in.
Solomon
Who has a pacemaker with an IP address???
Heh heh, perhaps the people who want this clothing line to actually be more functional?
Solomon
Right. Well, it's not a problem for me to put up picts and instructions, but over the years, I've ended up slashdotting my friends' webservers, and Pacbell gets pissed off when I post content on my "personal" webspace that suddenly gets high load, even going as far as to try to charge me for the additional bandwidth! /. effect (with a large hardware investement) would be helpful.
Unfortunately, I'm more of an engineer geek than a network administration geek, so any pointers on avoiding the
Solomon
I'm in the process of converting a WGP Autococker into a CD/DVD Launcher - specially flattened barrel, tightened on one side to impart a spin - to launch Compact Disks with a burst of CO2. Although the CD's needed to be loaded by hand, one at a time (up until recently), I can reliably attain ~550 ft/s. This is enough to cleave thick pieces of styrofoam/cardboard or aluminum cans in half... or embed itself into soft wood like Eucalyptus trees. Against harder targets, such as rocks, the rounds simply undergo fragmentation and splinter into tiny plastic chunks. I don't know the effects against animal matter yet, because the contraption is notoriously inaccurate and squirrels are annoyingly fast. :)
At higher velocities (~700 ft/s) the rounds begin to fragment in the "barrel". I'm currently examining other alternatives to increase the velocity, but I guess now I have to take spin to account.
Other notes: I've put together a rudimentary feeder/hopper that now lets me use my CD Launcher in a semiautomatic fashion (and wastes more CO2 per shot)
Solomon
PS: I'm slapping together a solenoid-actuated electric trigger frame (similar to a Sandridge) to convert my paintball^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CD gun to a fully automatic weapon. I don't know if it will work... yet. (I have given thought to converting an Angel, but I'm not willing to futz with $1300 gun, and I've been doing my own custom internals on 'Cockers for years now.)
I estimate a potential ROF of ~13 CDs/second. (maybe *now* I'll be able to hit that pesky squirrel) My anticipation is that it still won't do any damage to brick walls, bronze statues, and masonry of quality craftsmanship, but will absolutely *shred* old wooden fences, thrown-out sofas, and squirrels.
BTW, I once thought of calling it my Assault Ordnance Launcher, or AOL for short... the idea being that people would soon become afraid of my AOL CDs...
HEY! Do you need to setup accounts in 3 or 4 places to get the desired result? (See NT User account, IIS Account, SQL Server account, etc.)
.Net - sorry, but changing all your key bindings, just so it can match the Visual C++ IDE, is really lame. Also, ASP.Net seems to have only one "upgrade": server-side controls. This lets you take certain ActiveX objects and drag them into your homepage. Sounds like a life saver for RAD, doesn't it? Also sounds majorly browser-noncompliant? Well, it isn't - they accomplish this by turning all your properties into hidden fields to accompany DHTML's closest equivalents, but if you look at the generated HTML, damn, there's a shitload of a mess in there. I can see ASP.Net fostering a lot of bad habits early on, just like how VB taught me a lot of bad habits...
Okay, I don't mean to play Devil's Advocate (no pun intended), but I really feel a need to correct your first point there. IIS does not need a separate account - it automatically assumes that webusers are coming in as iusr_[machine name], an account which is automatically created the moment you install IIS (or PWS, depending on your poison). If you want to force them to use a legitimate Windows login, then use the MMC to disable anonymous connections. Second, SQL Server: you can use Windows authentication instead of SQL Server's own authentication scheme to dole out permissions and roles.
Ein Logon, Ein Kennwort, Ein Betriebssystem... Heil Microsoft, heil der Führer!
HEY! Can Linux do BLUE SCREENS? - We can.Boy HOWDY!
The only time I've had Win2K decide to BSOD on me (Hey, I verbed a noun!) was with bad hardware... a condition that oft times caused SuSE and Red Hat to blow up in my face too. Sure, I've had Win Apps announce an Illegal Operation and unexpectedly die, but to be fair, Konquerer died on me four times today with equally cryptic messages: this was not on bad hardware - it was a Thinkpad A Series, one of the most solid notebooks I've ever owned.
HEY! Windows doesn't nave builtin BASH support!
Ah, isn't that what Cygwin is for? Whatcha need it for? Shell scripting? Slap me silly, but I find the Windows Scripting Host (WSH) to be pretty powerful: you can write VB shell scripts that can draw on any COM object with a Registry entry, assuming you have permissions (i.e. createobject("application.excel") blows up in your face on a default security loadout). Hell, you can even effectively shellscript with Perl once you learn Perl's Win32 API calls.
HEY! Windows doesn't have built-in FINGER support either!
Once again, Win2K. I just opened up a command prompt and was able to finger all (three) of my female friends. Seems to work perfectly fine.</rant>
That having been said, I will point out *one* MS initiative I disagree with:
Solomon
Actually, I recently ran two webservers on identical machines... the exact same machine in fact, at the same time. /. keeps touting the speed of Linux, but no one can tell me what I need to buy to make my Linux setup run faster! This OSS hype is obviously BS.
I don't get it - I had them running side by side: IIS with SQL Server 7 on my Windows side; and Apache on my SCO distro out of VMWare from Alpha WINE under SuSE from yet another instance of VMWare on my Win2K destop with data backend consisting of an early Windows MySQL port whose ODBC DSN is traversed across two localhost subnets, thanks to a hacked Samba mod for allowing OLEDB share names over NETBIOS connections.
Guess which setup ran faster? I could hardly believe my eyes! Everyone here on
Solomon
PS: But is all seriousness, my reluctance to make my move is based on the apparent lack of Sequencing software and hardware support for my music equipment (MIDI interfaces, multitracking recorder cards, etc.). What *does* exist out there only seems to be able to recognize a (*cough* *cough*) Sound Blaster MIDI port. Any suggestions?
I didn't know there was such a law.
I'm in the process of converting a WGP Autococker into a CD/DVD Launcher - specially flattened barrel, tightened on one side to impart a spin - to launch Compact Disks with a burst of CO2. Although the CD's need to be loaded by hand, one at a time (up until recently), I can reliably attain ~550 ft/s. This is enough to cleave thick pieces of styrofoam/cardboard or aluminum cans in half... or embed itself into soft wood like Eucalyptus trees. Against harder targets, such as rocks, the rounds simply undergo fragmentation and splinter into tiny plastic chunks. I don't know the effects against animal matter yet, because the contraption is notoriously inaccurate and squirrels are annoyingly fast.
At higher velocities (~700 ft/s) the rounds begin to fragment in the "barrel".
Now, here's my question: I've put together a rudimentary feeder/hopper that now lets me use my CD Launcher in a semiautomatic fashion, and believe me, having played paintball for four years straight, I can pull that trigger pretty fast. Is it a gun? Does it need special attention from the ATF?
Let's thicken the plot: I'm slapping together a solenoid-actuated electric trigger frame (similar to a Sandridge) to convert my paintball^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CD gun to a fully automatic weapon. I estimate a ROF of ~13 CDs/second. (maybe *now* I'll be able to hit that pesky squirrel) My anticipation is that it still won't do any damage to brick walls, bronze statues, and masonry of quality craftsmanship, but will absolutely *shred* old wooden fences, thrown-out sofas, and squirrels. Will it need to be registered with the ATF then?
BTW, I once thought of calling it my Assault Ordnance Launcher, or AOL for short... the idea being that people would soon become afraid of my AOL CDs...
Solomon
I bought my sister an FXA47 for her birthday, with WinXP pre-installed. WinXP on a Vaio doesn't seem to like DirectX 8.1, so I reimaged it with Win2K. The only things it didn't recognize immediately were the sound card and the modem (which was a WinModem anyway). I used the XP drivers that came with the machine, even though it warned me that the drivers were not signed/trusted; I got both working just fine.
The only problem was getting the original applications back onto the machine, complete with registry settings. The Application Restoration Disk keeps telling me that the installer can only run on Sony Vaios... Hah! (Along these lines, I'm trying to actually write a program/script to analyze a Registry Image for such settings... a Key Copier, if you will).
Anyway, I just want you all to know that OpenGL and Direct3D run *much* faster under Win2k than the default OS crap called XP that came installed on the system.
Solomon
> Also, the BIOS doesn't support APM properly...
LMAO, the Radeon Mobility 7500 is not exactly famous for its power-saving ability, even when it's sitting around in 2D mode. Combine that with the backlight for the extra-large surface area (as well as potentially bigger speakers), is it reasonable to think anyone is going attempt to take advantage of "Advanced Power Management"?
Sure, such a gamer^H^H^H^H^H user might have his quiet moments where he just wants to compose poetry or manage his shopping list in a coffeehouse somewhere, but IMHO, a "laptop" with a 16" screen is going to a little big to live up to its namesake.
I can see only one primary purpose for this machine: LAN Party.
(...Oh yeah, and getting work done onsite, when your clients try to set you up with a "Development Station" that's too damn slow to mirror their live database backend.)
Solomon
> Resorting to violence a PR blunder?
> Not if you belong to the Al-Quaeda.
Al-Quaeda has good PR?
Was it the donations to Charity? The Homeless Shelters? Their ground breaking research on Global Warming?
Their spin doctors must suck because most news sites portray them in a bad light.
> If this island ever became critical enough,
> it would become a major target of terrorism
Yeah, they could covertly plant a bomb while blending in as a tourist-... excuse me, *the* tourist, and not single one of the four residents of Sealand would find out until it was too late!
Otherwise, I guess they could sneak up on HavenCo just like they did on the USS Cole, and all four HavenCo employees would never see the rowboat coming, never mind the fact that the rowboat must have been launched from the nearest shore 12 miles away. ["Abdul, I can't set the charge - my arms are too tired!"]
However, the effort would be worth it: imagine the shock of horror in our hearts when we discover that the attack upon the second smallest country in the world has resulted in a whopping 4 casualties!
I really think you're on to something here.
Solomon