If the poster wanted to do something constructive, it would be along the lines of making the modem on the old box dial his number. Caller ID would then snag the crook's phone number (something along the lines of... cat ATDT5551234 >> dev/ttyS3 would be simple enough, and there must be a mac equivalent to that).
Then, you head over to Infospace.com, do a reverse lookup on the phone number you received, and get over there to, uh, politely request the box back:-)
Try Googling for two wonderful gentlemen - Dennis Lee, and Joseph Newman.
Both run highly profitable businesses, marketing a, um, nearly-complete free energy machine.
Dennis Lee has been to prison a couple of times, Joseph Newman has married his secretary and her 8 year old. (Google for it, you'll find it). Yet, to this day, they both run multi million dollar businesses on this free energy idea. Why? Because people WANT to believe. And you can be 100% confident that Mr Anonymous Irish Inventor will be sitting on a nice cash pile any minute now...
I am ignorant about Afghan culture, absolutely. Admitted (though I do read the in-depth media, like the Economist and so forth, so I flatter myself that I have an edge on some people).
Still JK's article comes across as asynchronous with what I do know about the current state in those parts. This has been thrashed out elsewhere.
Your career-killer point is valid, but then, how much of a current career has JK actually got? He may think that the risk of fabrication is worth it, in order to obtain a career boost.
Anyhow! I've started enough nonsense already (and my karma damage is enormous:-) so I'll leave it there. Time will perhaps tell us more about Katz.
I'm assuming your reply is not a deliberate troll, purely because of your low userid, not your comments. Perhaps this is foolish of me.
All I can say is read the Message from Kabul (see link in parent), and the comments, and try telling me that his article is genuine. I won't discount the possibility that JK was duped, but the fact of his continued silence and refusal to respond weighs in heavily against him.
1. Five years ago you could still have a computer in Afghanistan
Sure. Not a powerful enough one to play DIVX's on. Just think - One DIVX over 9.6kbps modem = one week and a day at maximum transfer rate. Then he's going to play it on his 486?
2. It's a country with many smart people, educated there and abroad
I never intimated that this wasn't the case.
3. People with chicken coops aren't necessarily poor peasants
Ibid.
4. Borders are porous and different people have different reasons for living in a particular place; this guy may well have lived half his life in New York for all you know.
I recommend you read the article again.
"Junis"' attitude, as imparted to JonKatz, implies heavy Ameri-centrism, (Baywatch, Microsoft, Independence Day, porn, etc) almost as if it were written by an American with little knowedge of any genuine Asian mindset or culture. Don't humiliate yourself further by professing complete belief in what is obviously, at best, a very stupid journalist being laughed at by some hoaxer.
Like all the best teen movies, this one is obsessively self-referential.
So it refers to itself all the time? I think he just means referential.
You just have to love the well thought out and witty prose of JonKatz. The same JonKatz who has not yet apologised for his made up message from Kabul.
I like to convince myself that Slashdot posters actually read the responses to their articles, so here it is Jon: Would you please reply to all those posters (including myself) who asked you directly in your Kabul article - did you make it up?
This much should be obvious - you can't use any modern soundcards, because they all feature AGC - Automatic Gain Control - which means that across certain decibel ranges, you'll be able to tell the difference, but across others, you won't.
For example, 30db might be louder than 25db, but might "look" to the sampler to be the same as 60. (Or whatever... it's logarithmic, I can't be bothered with real examples:-)
Only 30 countries have ratified it. There are circa 200 floating around, and a hell of a lot of them, including Russia and China, don't pay any attention whatsoever to copyright at the moment. I can believe that they might, as countries, receive more income from the pirate business than they would if they forced people to only buy legitimate versions.
Mobile operators have been kicked in the head by the amazing takeoff of SMS messages. Globally, about 750 million messages get sent a day (that's no typo, check out http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_28.html for the scoop. Operators have had to revamp their pricing structure a bit - for instance, they're all now negotiating a "pay me to deliver" (dunno what it's really called) structure, whereby operators charge other operators to receive SMS from their network. Currently, it's screwed up international SMSing (Vodafone won't let me use Excell anymore, for instance). But at this SCALE of messaging, it was bound to come. We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer - I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.
London status symbols undoubtably contributed to the popularity of mobile phones (that's what we call 'em;-) but far more important is the pricing model used in the UK (and throughout most of Europe, I imagine).
We use "callING party pays", and the US uses "callED party pays".
So we don't ever pay for incoming calls (unless we go to another country) because the person calling you takes the cost hit (we have different number ranges to distinguish landlines from mobiles from porn from freephone, etc).
This encourages uptake because for the user, the initial cost to run is very little - that's the incentive to buy.
Once you have the phone, mind you, they run rings around you with all sorts of odd pricing - I, for example, can call the USA and Australia for the same price as a UK landline. In the evening, this costs me 3 cents, in the daytime, 50. Madness:-)
I don't deny everyone's error prone. But to run a business, and to consistently make the same very basic error is really terrible. Admit it, if we can spot it, then the posters/editors, who, let's not forget it, have Slashdot as their LIFE, should see it. Enough commas.
Anyway, you're right - I'm getting too vehement about it - I can quite easily just go somewhere else, and perhaps I will one day! I'll keep the pitchfork in the cupboard for today though.
That's not an excuse. It's pathetic - we just read the site from time to time - THEY (the editors, story posters) actually run it.
Every day.
As a full time, PAID job.
Surely they have the memory span to remember an IDENTICAL article from TWO days ago. Sure, if it was posted 4000 articles ago, maybe I'd cut them some slack, but this ongoing, unceasing, uncaring duplicate and triplicate posting is lazy editing, no matter how you look at it.
If they're trying to run an interesting and informative news source, they're failing, and they're not winning over any readers by showing their blatant disinterest in slashdot's actual community (read: SOURCE OF CASH).
On a side note - notice there was absolutely no apology, explanation, or even reply, when 800 odd slashdot readers questioned JonKatz' ability to tell the truth in his "Message from Kabul" posting (couple of days ago, search for it if search is working).
The fact remains that although slashdot is a brilliant concept, fairly brilliantly executed, with a brilliant readership, it seems that the higher-ups have lost interest in maintaining that brilliant status.
You watch - they will get their come-uppance if they don't heed these problems.
What's actually wrong about eating dogs? The only difference between a cow and a dog is in your upbringing (and mine, incidentally - I don't like the idea, but I can see that it's only my nurture, not nature, which has produced that feeling).
Way back in the ollllld days, Netscape extended tags and standards too. People complained, just like now, saying that it left Mosaic users and all those Amiga folks out in the dark. But mostly, they turned out to be useful and people implemented them...(isn't the CENTER tag a Netscape creation?).
In Europe, providers say they will have to quintuple (x5) the density of antennas to support 3G... local community planners are very unhappy!
By the way, the phone's price will be less - networks subsidise the handset manufacturer's prices, based on the idea that you will spend craploads of cash when you actually use the phone.
They're talking about removing the internal CPU clock, which in effect, isn't really a clock at all. It's just something which ticks at regular intervals, and lets you do a number of things, such as synchronize instructions, pipeline, cache read/writes, and all the other stuff I forgot from CS 101.
A computer's clock (as in date, time, etc) is on another part of the motherboard, and runs (correct me if I'm wrong) off the CMOS battery. That'll always be a "clock" in the sense we understand.
Re:Censored Photos or Video?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
censoring could have a place.
the reason they aren't showing any pics of the PA crash, is almost without doubt because the casualties are very very graphically and plainly visible. it would be in shocking taste to show these pictures - even the footage of people jumping is almost beyond belief.
once the situation cools, *then* there is a place for these images. to see them now would be too shocking, too disturbing, and just bloody irrelevant. these images are for calm review, not for hotblooded perusal.
Lost productivity includes time spent by system users and support and helpdesk staff on virus issues that takes them away from their regular responsibilities
This sentence should read "arbitrary figure made up to inflate costs of viruses". What the hell are "regular responsibilities" if they don't include helping users get rid of viruses. We all know that viruses are annoying, cost a little bit of money, etc etc - but even if each and every computer ever affected by a virus this year was attended by a tech charging 50 bucks an hour (and who needs an hour to get rid of sircam?!), we're looking at a 3 billion dollar bill. Not 10 billion.
It's yet another hype article. Bring in a story queue which we can moderate, like Kuro5hin, because the newsworthy to nonsense ratio is worsening all the time.
btw, the plural of viruses is... well, I just wrote it. Look at the latin root of "virus" and you'll understand. Or just google for "virii" (34k hits) vs "viruses" (1.4m hits). Nuff said.
I love the way there's a reserved word "imaginary" heh...
He doesn't have any post-code gen optimization? I know you can perform elementary optimization onthe intermediate rep, (such as folding, etc), but he'll really need another phase if he wants to optimize for pipelines, which will vary from architecture to architecture? Tut tut. Maybe it's just an omission on his part.
Valid point, but what other metric would you suggest to measure their loss (and I think you would agree, there has been *some* loss along the way.
30% would have bought if they didn't have pirate copies?
45%?
It's not easy to say (I'd venture impossible), and since it's in their interest to hype up their claims, the RIAK & co haven't bothered to establish a rational sounding amount.
Wisenut - seems to work as well as Google. I like it. Doesn't offer alternative spellings, though, and I can't ever spell Skylarov correctly first time:-) The results are harder to parse visually than Google.
Teoma - needs to crawl a lot more before it becomes a viable alternative. Obviously it can find the easy stuff, but most people (I hope) don't use search engines to find the easy stuff. Results are easy to read, and categories meaningful and well placed. Phrase match is kinda cool, because you get to put back in your common words that Google disallows ("and", "the", etc).
Lasoo - lousy spelling looks terrible, even if it was intentional. Aside from that, what makes this different to Mapquest.com plus a Yellow Pages? I know which I'd rather use.
CURE - this search engine has reached its user limit so I'm not allowed to search. Boy, is that going to be popular:-) Hopefully, that's just a beta feature...
Vivisimo - is a metasearch engine, whatever the FAQ begs you to believe. If you like em, then sure, but speaking personally, they are of no particular use to me.
Google still rocks my world, with cacheing, fast fast oh so fast searching, and relevance that beats the crap out of everything ever. Rock on.
Slashdot Mirror
If the poster wanted to do something constructive, it would be along the lines of making the modem on the old box dial his number. Caller ID would then snag the crook's phone number (something along the lines of... cat ATDT5551234 >> dev/ttyS3 would be simple enough, and there must be a mac equivalent to that).
:-)
Then, you head over to Infospace.com, do a reverse lookup on the phone number you received, and get over there to, uh, politely request the box back
Problem solved.
Try Googling for two wonderful gentlemen - Dennis Lee, and Joseph Newman.
Both run highly profitable businesses, marketing a, um, nearly-complete free energy machine.
Dennis Lee has been to prison a couple of times, Joseph Newman has married his secretary and her 8 year old. (Google for it, you'll find it). Yet, to this day, they both run multi million dollar businesses on this free energy idea. Why? Because people WANT to believe. And you can be 100% confident that Mr Anonymous Irish Inventor will be sitting on a nice cash pile any minute now...
I am ignorant about Afghan culture, absolutely. Admitted (though I do read the in-depth media, like the Economist and so forth, so I flatter myself that I have an edge on some people).
:-) so I'll leave it there. Time will perhaps tell us more about Katz.
Still JK's article comes across as asynchronous with what I do know about the current state in those parts. This has been thrashed out elsewhere.
Your career-killer point is valid, but then, how much of a current career has JK actually got? He may think that the risk of fabrication is worth it, in order to obtain a career boost.
Anyhow! I've started enough nonsense already (and my karma damage is enormous
I'm assuming your reply is not a deliberate troll, purely because of your low userid, not your comments. Perhaps this is foolish of me.
All I can say is read the Message from Kabul (see link in parent), and the comments, and try telling me that his article is genuine. I won't discount the possibility that JK was duped, but the fact of his continued silence and refusal to respond weighs in heavily against him.
1. Five years ago you could still have a computer in Afghanistan
Sure. Not a powerful enough one to play DIVX's on. Just think - One DIVX over 9.6kbps modem = one week and a day at maximum transfer rate. Then he's going to play it on his 486?
2. It's a country with many smart people, educated there and abroad
I never intimated that this wasn't the case.
3. People with chicken coops aren't necessarily poor peasants
Ibid.
4. Borders are porous and different people have different reasons for living in a particular place; this guy may well have lived half his life in New York for all you know.
I recommend you read the article again.
"Junis"' attitude, as imparted to JonKatz, implies heavy Ameri-centrism, (Baywatch, Microsoft, Independence Day, porn, etc) almost as if it were written by an American with little knowedge of any genuine Asian mindset or culture. Don't humiliate yourself further by professing complete belief in what is obviously, at best, a very stupid journalist being laughed at by some hoaxer.
Like all the best teen movies, this one is obsessively self-referential.
So it refers to itself all the time? I think he just means referential.
You just have to love the well thought out and witty prose of JonKatz. The same JonKatz who has not yet apologised for his made up message from Kabul.
I like to convince myself that Slashdot posters actually read the responses to their articles, so here it is Jon: Would you please reply to all those posters (including myself) who asked you directly in your Kabul article - did you make it up?
I await your response with eagerness.
This much should be obvious - you can't use any modern soundcards, because they all feature AGC - Automatic Gain Control - which means that across certain decibel ranges, you'll be able to tell the difference, but across others, you won't.
:-)
For example, 30db might be louder than 25db, but might "look" to the sampler to be the same as 60. (Or whatever... it's logarithmic, I can't be bothered with real examples
Only 30 countries have ratified it. There are circa 200 floating around, and a hell of a lot of them, including Russia and China, don't pay any attention whatsoever to copyright at the moment. I can believe that they might, as countries, receive more income from the pirate business than they would if they forced people to only buy legitimate versions.
There'll always be data havens, never fear.
Mobile operators have been kicked in the head by the amazing takeoff of SMS messages. Globally, about 750 million messages get sent a day (that's no typo, check out http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_28.html for the scoop. Operators have had to revamp their pricing structure a bit - for instance, they're all now negotiating a "pay me to deliver" (dunno what it's really called) structure, whereby operators charge other operators to receive SMS from their network. Currently, it's screwed up international SMSing (Vodafone won't let me use Excell anymore, for instance). But at this SCALE of messaging, it was bound to come. We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer - I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.
London status symbols undoubtably contributed to the popularity of mobile phones (that's what we call 'em ;-) but far more important is the pricing model used in the UK (and throughout most of Europe, I imagine).
:-)
We use "callING party pays", and the US uses "callED party pays".
So we don't ever pay for incoming calls (unless we go to another country) because the person calling you takes the cost hit (we have different number ranges to distinguish landlines from mobiles from porn from freephone, etc).
This encourages uptake because for the user, the initial cost to run is very little - that's the incentive to buy.
Once you have the phone, mind you, they run rings around you with all sorts of odd pricing - I, for example, can call the USA and Australia for the same price as a UK landline. In the evening, this costs me 3 cents, in the daytime, 50. Madness
I don't deny everyone's error prone. But to run a business, and to consistently make the same very basic error is really terrible. Admit it, if we can spot it, then the posters/editors, who, let's not forget it, have Slashdot as their LIFE, should see it. Enough commas.
Anyway, you're right - I'm getting too vehement about it - I can quite easily just go somewhere else, and perhaps I will one day! I'll keep the pitchfork in the cupboard for today though.
That's not an excuse. It's pathetic - we just read the site from time to time - THEY (the editors, story posters) actually run it.
Every day.
As a full time, PAID job.
Surely they have the memory span to remember an IDENTICAL article from TWO days ago. Sure, if it was posted 4000 articles ago, maybe I'd cut them some slack, but this ongoing, unceasing, uncaring duplicate and triplicate posting is lazy editing, no matter how you look at it.
If they're trying to run an interesting and informative news source, they're failing, and they're not winning over any readers by showing their blatant disinterest in slashdot's actual community (read: SOURCE OF CASH).
On a side note - notice there was absolutely no apology, explanation, or even reply, when 800 odd slashdot readers questioned JonKatz' ability to tell the truth in his "Message from Kabul" posting (couple of days ago, search for it if search is working).
The fact remains that although slashdot is a brilliant concept, fairly brilliantly executed, with a brilliant readership, it seems that the higher-ups have lost interest in maintaining that brilliant status.
You watch - they will get their come-uppance if they don't heed these problems.
What's actually wrong about eating dogs? The only difference between a cow and a dog is in your upbringing (and mine, incidentally - I don't like the idea, but I can see that it's only my nurture, not nature, which has produced that feeling).
What a brilliant idea - props to you (or whatever they say, these days, these young folk :-)
Question, though - can a spammer really afford to pay nearly $6 per *clickthrough*??
Way back in the ollllld days, Netscape extended tags and standards too. People complained, just like now, saying that it left Mosaic users and all those Amiga folks out in the dark. But mostly, they turned out to be useful and people implemented them...(isn't the CENTER tag a Netscape creation?).
In Europe, providers say they will have to quintuple (x5) the density of antennas to support 3G... local community planners are very unhappy!
By the way, the phone's price will be less - networks subsidise the handset manufacturer's prices, based on the idea that you will spend craploads of cash when you actually use the phone.
They're talking about removing the internal CPU clock, which in effect, isn't really a clock at all. It's just something which ticks at regular intervals, and lets you do a number of things, such as synchronize instructions, pipeline, cache read/writes, and all the other stuff I forgot from CS 101.
A computer's clock (as in date, time, etc) is on another part of the motherboard, and runs (correct me if I'm wrong) off the CMOS battery. That'll always be a "clock" in the sense we understand.
censoring could have a place.
the reason they aren't showing any pics of the PA crash, is almost without doubt because the casualties are very very graphically and plainly visible. it would be in shocking taste to show these pictures - even the footage of people jumping is almost beyond belief.
once the situation cools, *then* there is a place for these images. to see them now would be too shocking, too disturbing, and just bloody irrelevant. these images are for calm review, not for hotblooded perusal.
Lost productivity includes time spent by system users and support and helpdesk staff on virus issues that takes them away from their regular responsibilities
This sentence should read "arbitrary figure made up to inflate costs of viruses". What the hell are "regular responsibilities" if they don't include helping users get rid of viruses. We all know that viruses are annoying, cost a little bit of money, etc etc - but even if each and every computer ever affected by a virus this year was attended by a tech charging 50 bucks an hour (and who needs an hour to get rid of sircam?!), we're looking at a 3 billion dollar bill. Not 10 billion.
It's yet another hype article. Bring in a story queue which we can moderate, like Kuro5hin, because the newsworthy to nonsense ratio is worsening all the time.
btw, the plural of viruses is... well, I just wrote it. Look at the latin root of "virus" and you'll understand. Or just google for "virii" (34k hits) vs "viruses" (1.4m hits). Nuff said.
if that wasn't a troll, would you care to justify that statement?
AOL costs 14.99/mo here (about 20 bucks, you guys pay 23 and some cents).
It costs me 2p (3 cents) / min to call the US from my cellphone. You guys wouldn't even consider that.
We don't pay for incoming cellphone calls.
Actually I'll stop now. I think you were a troll.
Boes someboby alreaby have copyright on the letter [CENSORED]? Bamn. Coulb make it bifficult....
;-) use yer brains, matey
In the UK, we call # "hash".
And bizarrely, the phone company (BT) calls it "square"
Sea Square or Sea Hash. The UK's gonna LOVE MS.
I love the way there's a reserved word "imaginary" heh...
He doesn't have any post-code gen optimization? I know you can perform elementary optimization onthe intermediate rep, (such as folding, etc), but he'll really need another phase if he wants to optimize for pipelines, which will vary from architecture to architecture? Tut tut. Maybe it's just an omission on his part.
Valid point, but what other metric would you suggest to measure their loss (and I think you would agree, there has been *some* loss along the way.
30% would have bought if they didn't have pirate copies?
45%?
It's not easy to say (I'd venture impossible), and since it's in their interest to hype up their claims, the RIAK & co haven't bothered to establish a rational sounding amount.
Wisenut - seems to work as well as Google. I like it. Doesn't offer alternative spellings, though, and I can't ever spell Skylarov correctly first time :-) The results are harder to parse visually than Google.
:-) Hopefully, that's just a beta feature...
Teoma - needs to crawl a lot more before it becomes a viable alternative. Obviously it can find the easy stuff, but most people (I hope) don't use search engines to find the easy stuff. Results are easy to read, and categories meaningful and well placed. Phrase match is kinda cool, because you get to put back in your common words that Google disallows ("and", "the", etc).
Lasoo - lousy spelling looks terrible, even if it was intentional. Aside from that, what makes this different to Mapquest.com plus a Yellow Pages? I know which I'd rather use.
CURE - this search engine has reached its user limit so I'm not allowed to search. Boy, is that going to be popular
Vivisimo - is a metasearch engine, whatever the FAQ begs you to believe. If you like em, then sure, but speaking personally, they are of no particular use to me.
Google still rocks my world, with cacheing, fast fast oh so fast searching, and relevance that beats the crap out of everything ever. Rock on.
Most countries (US and Russia included, I believe) have a mutual incarceration policy. DS would probably serve his sentence in Russia.
:-)
Ahh, the Siberian mines... think about that, next time you run DeCss or the like