Who cares where they send spam from! If they are a business that operates in a country where spam is illegal, sending spam to that country's citizens they are breaking the law and they can be tracked down! They have to provide SOME sort of contact information in the spam - otherwise you have no way of ordering their product.
I must be missing something. I installed RH 7.2, I think Mozilla has the same shitty X fonts that Netscape had. Maybe they are a tiny bit better, but this was really my major gripe upon installation. It's downright ugly. I love GNOME using the anti-aliased fonts, but like many other things for X, this isn't universal.
I fired up AbiWord and guess what.. ugly fonts there too. I'm sure there is a way to set up a TrueType font server under X, and get all your programs to use nice fonts, but I'm sure it involves a bunch of steps that I just don't have time to do.
Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
You wouldn't believe the number of people that couldn't tell you who they got their Internet service from (or even what type of service - DSL? Cable? AOL?). Name recognition is what will keep your customer from switching to another service (I'd switch, but I am already with AT&T and I LIKE AT&T - they are a nice company). A nameless provider has to get by on actual technical merit, which of course would never work for AT&T.
When they switched the service brand from Road Runner to @Home (great decision guys) they even provided a utility that would take the stupid bird out of RR's branded internet explorer.
You're one of the lucky ones then. My connection has gone out several times in the past few months. They redid the DHCP server which caused everyone to lose their leases and not be able to get an IP.. also there have been tons of problems with the mail and news servers. I'm in an old Mediaone area by the way.
I am actually surprised PS2 uses standard CD's and DVD's for games. After what happened with PSX, I thought sony would put all games on a completely non-standard disc so you couldn't make copies in your CD-R..
Since you're AC I'm assuming you'll probably never read this comment, but do me a favor. Encode your favorite recording at 320 kbps MP3, hq, full stereo with LAME and see if you can tell me the difference. Here's a hint. You definitely can't.
The music industry quotes outrageous figures of how much money is lost due to unauthorized copying. I was making fun of that, not quoting it as a meaningful statistic (it isn't).
I never said I'm a pirate. I didn't even imply that I copy music I don't own. Can we please get away from that term though? Piracy is when an artist gets paid pennies per CD, not when you download a song from an album you wouldn't even think of buying otherwise.
Even easier, if you have a digital output on your CD player you can just hook it up to a digital input on a soundcard. No loss of quality at all..
The RIAA is counting on the fact that most consumers won't go through this trouble. They are right, of course. However SOMEONE will go to all the trouble to rip the music, put it on P2P, and within 24 hours the whole world is "pirating" your "intellectual property". Don't they learn anything from the software industry? You CAN'T copy protect software for open spec hardware such as the PC. Period.
This won't become the standard. Contrary to popular belief, the music industry does like people using portable players, computers, etc to listen to music. They just want it in a secure format. Once they brainwash everyone into dropping CD and adopting a new format, you'll be able to activate your disc online, make a certain number of copies to devices, etc., before they decide it's time to deactivate your music.
Of course none of this restricts anyone's fair use rights, and consumers won't find this at all annoying. I'll be happy when their carefully thought out scheme is adopted by exactly zero people, like DIVX and SDMI..
Midbar Tech's Noam Zur called copy-protection critics a fringe group that probably are pirates themselves. "Mainly those people have a large number of compilations on their PCs," Zur said.
Oh really Noam? At least you're not making any broad assumptions there. Say, did you know that music piracy actually STEALS billions of dollars from the industry each year?
Maybe he should call the EFF and hear what they have to say about it? After all they criticize copy protection.. therefore they must be a fringe group that supports piracy. I bet they have lots of "compilations" on their PCs, which we can safely assume are illegal (who would want to put songs on their computer if they already own the CD?)
What amuses me is how useless they'll find this to be. It only takes one person who can get a clean digital transfer, to populate file sharing networks with a song. They can't seriously think they'll prevent 100% of the copying. Of course they'll fight any attempts at interoperability (they call it piracy) with the DMCA.
Upgrade disks will by necessity require the entire OS
I'm not a mac guy and I may be wrong, but didn't apple release updaters for OS 8 and 9 that you could download from their site? They certainly didn't contain the whole operating system. Anyway I'm sure Apple had a good reason to include the entire OSX on this upgrade disc, but they have done it the other way in the past.
Remember when companies like AT&T Worldnet and Erols were the first to venture into the $10-20 range for Internet? Everyone said it was a marketing gag, there was no way they could survive when they were charging that little. People said they'd be back to hourly before long.
The article says that 8 years ago, "The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then." Couldn't be further from the truth. In 1993 14.4kbps was almost obsolete, 28.8 was just coming out. The web was being invented, and plenty of people at universities and companies used e-mail, MUDs, IRC, gopher, and FTP.
"no one had fully imagined that regular, everyday consumers would someday own multiple PCs, and would want a way to hook them together." Funny, it was almost exactly 8 years ago that id software released Doom, a game with built in network play.
"NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery." NAT isn't bad, stealing internet is bad. Typical corporate response - MP3 turns out to be bad, because people use it to pirate music. Guns turn out to be bad, because people use them to shoot people.
My cable modem (at&T broadband) sucks anyway.. it's increasingly slow and unreliable. A year ago, games rocked. I pinged 20-60 in Q2 and half-life. Now latency is high, I'm lucky to find a server where I ping 100.
Played with Verizon DSL when I was at my parents' this weekend, and it's much better than cable, at least right now. This kind of crap is all I need to justify the hassle of switching.
What did you say? Are you insulting my Xbox? I admit the launch titles suck but the hardware is there and it is going to kick some PS2 ass! I spent good money on my Xbox! It has no right to suck! Don't insult my console, bitch!
You may have your timeline a little confused there. Voodoo1 was out long before the TNT was released - TNT's main competitor was the Voodoo2. TNT2 was released at the same time as the V3. The cards did have better features and MUCH better quality, but they were slower than their 3dfx counterparts.
As an owner, I take offense at THG's statements regarding Shuttle's AK31 v3.1 board. Clearly when there is a 5 FPS differential between boards running the same configuration, same chipset there is some problem with the test setup.
Shuttle's AK31 v3.1 has a known issue with detecting the proper memory timings, and I think Tom's hardware either forgot, or neglected to compensate for this. All you have to do is go into the BIOS and set the timings yourself. If you leave it on detect, it defaults to the slowest timings. They are using CL2 ram, and I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttle board was running at CL2.5. Yes, this is a problem with the board but it's a known problem and there is a workaround.
Tom's Hardware has cut plenty of corners in the past and this is just another example of their irresponsible reporting and benchmarking. They were one of the first hardware enthusiast sites but they've fallen off.
VIA's stability / ease of setting up has been nothing short of awful in the past. The KT266A is suprisingly reliable, however. With VIA's 4in1 drivers 4.35 on Win 2000, or Windows XP (which includes VIA chipset drivers) users have found it to be pretty stable.
I agree with you they're comparing apples to oranges. When nForce was first announced, I questioned the decision to integrate an underpowered graphics chip, when most power users would want at least a GF3. The answer, as you say, is that this board isn't for power users. Sure our ears perked up when we heard nVidia was making a chipset, after all they revolutionized the 3D world. I'm sure future offerings from them will live up to their name. If you remember, it took them several tries with the Riva128, TNT, and TNT2 before they had a true performance winner in the Geforce256.
I'm not one for putting all of my eggs in one basket. My desktop is behind a firewall, but you can bet the IIS it's running is patched against code red. The SQL Server personal on my machine has a password set. I probably don't need to take these precautions, but I should do it anyway.
It's thinking like yours that keeps people "inside the box." Developers, you say, should shrug off problems in the production environment because they don't have the password, nobody wants them mucking around there anyway. Thinking like yours is what PRODUCES developers who just don't give a shit about the nuts and bolts anymore. Developers get sick of justifying every idea to IT, and they get sick of submitting to unreasonable demands and restrictions. Developers stick with what they know, software engineering, and when it comes to a technical issue they don't know what to do after a while because they don't care any more.
"If you haven't even got a separate pre-production test environment, then pretty much nothing you have to say is of any value at all."
Spoken like a true BOFH. In my experience those who say 'nothing', 'never', 'shouldn't ever' as much as you, really don't have much of value to say either.
Aren't the costs of moving things around in space too much to make anything like this worthwhile? It costs millions of dollars to put a couple tons of junk into orbit. Wouldn't the cost of fuel be more than the value of anything we could get from the moon?
Until we have something like the space elevator, I just don't think this will happen.
SQL 7 and 8 (aka 2000) do ask you for a password, and scold you if you leave it blank. However they do accept connections from anyone by default. I can't find a way to restrict access by IP, though. I guess you just have to set a decent password. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's too bad - if the web server is the only machine that needs to hit the sql server, it really shouldn't accept connections from anyone else. I've heard "but we're behind a firewall" too many times as an excuse for poor security internally. Users punch holes through firewalls, and nothing protects you against a malicious employee.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares where they send spam from! If they are a business that operates in a country where spam is illegal, sending spam to that country's citizens they are breaking the law and they can be tracked down! They have to provide SOME sort of contact information in the spam - otherwise you have no way of ordering their product.
I must be missing something. I installed RH 7.2, I think Mozilla has the same shitty X fonts that Netscape had. Maybe they are a tiny bit better, but this was really my major gripe upon installation. It's downright ugly. I love GNOME using the anti-aliased fonts, but like many other things for X, this isn't universal.
I fired up AbiWord and guess what.. ugly fonts there too. I'm sure there is a way to set up a TrueType font server under X, and get all your programs to use nice fonts, but I'm sure it involves a bunch of steps that I just don't have time to do.
Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
You wouldn't believe the number of people that couldn't tell you who they got their Internet service from (or even what type of service - DSL? Cable? AOL?). Name recognition is what will keep your customer from switching to another service (I'd switch, but I am already with AT&T and I LIKE AT&T - they are a nice company). A nameless provider has to get by on actual technical merit, which of course would never work for AT&T.
When they switched the service brand from Road Runner to @Home (great decision guys) they even provided a utility that would take the stupid bird out of RR's branded internet explorer.
You're one of the lucky ones then. My connection has gone out several times in the past few months. They redid the DHCP server which caused everyone to lose their leases and not be able to get an IP.. also there have been tons of problems with the mail and news servers. I'm in an old Mediaone area by the way.
I am actually surprised PS2 uses standard CD's and DVD's for games. After what happened with PSX, I thought sony would put all games on a completely non-standard disc so you couldn't make copies in your CD-R..
Since you're AC I'm assuming you'll probably never read this comment, but do me a favor. Encode your favorite recording at 320 kbps MP3, hq, full stereo with LAME and see if you can tell me the difference. Here's a hint. You definitely can't.
Scotty my boy, you just don't get it, do ya?
Every last bit of that comment was what you'd call "tongue in cheek". But it takes most of the humor away when I have to explain it..
My sarcasm, apparently, was lost on you.
The music industry quotes outrageous figures of how much money is lost due to unauthorized copying. I was making fun of that, not quoting it as a meaningful statistic (it isn't).
I never said I'm a pirate. I didn't even imply that I copy music I don't own. Can we please get away from that term though? Piracy is when an artist gets paid pennies per CD, not when you download a song from an album you wouldn't even think of buying otherwise.
Even easier, if you have a digital output on your CD player you can just hook it up to a digital input on a soundcard. No loss of quality at all..
The RIAA is counting on the fact that most consumers won't go through this trouble. They are right, of course. However SOMEONE will go to all the trouble to rip the music, put it on P2P, and within 24 hours the whole world is "pirating" your "intellectual property". Don't they learn anything from the software industry? You CAN'T copy protect software for open spec hardware such as the PC. Period.
This won't become the standard. Contrary to popular belief, the music industry does like people using portable players, computers, etc to listen to music. They just want it in a secure format. Once they brainwash everyone into dropping CD and adopting a new format, you'll be able to activate your disc online, make a certain number of copies to devices, etc., before they decide it's time to deactivate your music.
Of course none of this restricts anyone's fair use rights, and consumers won't find this at all annoying. I'll be happy when their carefully thought out scheme is adopted by exactly zero people, like DIVX and SDMI..
From the article:
Midbar Tech's Noam Zur called copy-protection critics a fringe group that probably are pirates themselves. "Mainly those people have a large number of compilations on their PCs," Zur said.
Oh really Noam? At least you're not making any broad assumptions there. Say, did you know that music piracy actually STEALS billions of dollars from the industry each year?
Maybe he should call the EFF and hear what they have to say about it? After all they criticize copy protection.. therefore they must be a fringe group that supports piracy. I bet they have lots of "compilations" on their PCs, which we can safely assume are illegal (who would want to put songs on their computer if they already own the CD?)
What amuses me is how useless they'll find this to be. It only takes one person who can get a clean digital transfer, to populate file sharing networks with a song. They can't seriously think they'll prevent 100% of the copying. Of course they'll fight any attempts at interoperability (they call it piracy) with the DMCA.
Upgrade disks will by necessity require the entire OS
I'm not a mac guy and I may be wrong, but didn't apple release updaters for OS 8 and 9 that you could download from their site? They certainly didn't contain the whole operating system. Anyway I'm sure Apple had a good reason to include the entire OSX on this upgrade disc, but they have done it the other way in the past.
Remember when companies like AT&T Worldnet and Erols were the first to venture into the $10-20 range for Internet? Everyone said it was a marketing gag, there was no way they could survive when they were charging that little. People said they'd be back to hourly before long.
You're lucky. Time Warner has managed to keep Roadrunner from falling into suckage. Another good provider I hear, is Cablevision with Optimum Online.
Bandwidth isn't my biggest problem - file transfers are very speedy.. but I also play games, which just sucks on my conn.
The article says that 8 years ago, "The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then." Couldn't be further from the truth. In 1993 14.4kbps was almost obsolete, 28.8 was just coming out. The web was being invented, and plenty of people at universities and companies used e-mail, MUDs, IRC, gopher, and FTP.
"no one had fully imagined that regular, everyday consumers would someday own multiple PCs, and would want a way to hook them together." Funny, it was almost exactly 8 years ago that id software released Doom, a game with built in network play.
"NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery." NAT isn't bad, stealing internet is bad. Typical corporate response - MP3 turns out to be bad, because people use it to pirate music. Guns turn out to be bad, because people use them to shoot people.
My cable modem (at&T broadband) sucks anyway.. it's increasingly slow and unreliable. A year ago, games rocked. I pinged 20-60 in Q2 and half-life. Now latency is high, I'm lucky to find a server where I ping 100.
Played with Verizon DSL when I was at my parents' this weekend, and it's much better than cable, at least right now. This kind of crap is all I need to justify the hassle of switching.
What did you say? Are you insulting my Xbox? I admit the launch titles suck but the hardware is there and it is going to kick some PS2 ass! I spent good money on my Xbox! It has no right to suck! Don't insult my console, bitch!
You may have your timeline a little confused there. Voodoo1 was out long before the TNT was released - TNT's main competitor was the Voodoo2. TNT2 was released at the same time as the V3. The cards did have better features and MUCH better quality, but they were slower than their 3dfx counterparts.
As an owner, I take offense at THG's statements regarding Shuttle's AK31 v3.1 board. Clearly when there is a 5 FPS differential between boards running the same configuration, same chipset there is some problem with the test setup.
Shuttle's AK31 v3.1 has a known issue with detecting the proper memory timings, and I think Tom's hardware either forgot, or neglected to compensate for this. All you have to do is go into the BIOS and set the timings yourself. If you leave it on detect, it defaults to the slowest timings. They are using CL2 ram, and I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttle board was running at CL2.5. Yes, this is a problem with the board but it's a known problem and there is a workaround.
Tom's Hardware has cut plenty of corners in the past and this is just another example of their irresponsible reporting and benchmarking. They were one of the first hardware enthusiast sites but they've fallen off.
VIA's stability / ease of setting up has been nothing short of awful in the past. The KT266A is suprisingly reliable, however. With VIA's 4in1 drivers 4.35 on Win 2000, or Windows XP (which includes VIA chipset drivers) users have found it to be pretty stable.
I agree with you they're comparing apples to oranges. When nForce was first announced, I questioned the decision to integrate an underpowered graphics chip, when most power users would want at least a GF3. The answer, as you say, is that this board isn't for power users. Sure our ears perked up when we heard nVidia was making a chipset, after all they revolutionized the 3D world. I'm sure future offerings from them will live up to their name. If you remember, it took them several tries with the Riva128, TNT, and TNT2 before they had a true performance winner in the Geforce256.
I'm not one for putting all of my eggs in one basket. My desktop is behind a firewall, but you can bet the IIS it's running is patched against code red. The SQL Server personal on my machine has a password set. I probably don't need to take these precautions, but I should do it anyway.
It's thinking like yours that keeps people "inside the box." Developers, you say, should shrug off problems in the production environment because they don't have the password, nobody wants them mucking around there anyway. Thinking like yours is what PRODUCES developers who just don't give a shit about the nuts and bolts anymore. Developers get sick of justifying every idea to IT, and they get sick of submitting to unreasonable demands and restrictions. Developers stick with what they know, software engineering, and when it comes to a technical issue they don't know what to do after a while because they don't care any more.
"If you haven't even got a separate pre-production test environment, then pretty much nothing you have to say is of any value at all."
Spoken like a true BOFH. In my experience those who say 'nothing', 'never', 'shouldn't ever' as much as you, really don't have much of value to say either.
Aren't the costs of moving things around in space too much to make anything like this worthwhile? It costs millions of dollars to put a couple tons of junk into orbit. Wouldn't the cost of fuel be more than the value of anything we could get from the moon?
Until we have something like the space elevator, I just don't think this will happen.
I hesitated to suggest that because of the performance hit, but it is an option if you can spare the CPU cycles.
SQL 7 and 8 (aka 2000) do ask you for a password, and scold you if you leave it blank. However they do accept connections from anyone by default. I can't find a way to restrict access by IP, though. I guess you just have to set a decent password. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's too bad - if the web server is the only machine that needs to hit the sql server, it really shouldn't accept connections from anyone else. I've heard "but we're behind a firewall" too many times as an excuse for poor security internally. Users punch holes through firewalls, and nothing protects you against a malicious employee.