Maybe this is off-topic but I don't know where else to ask. (Somehow I
don't think it would qualify as an Ask Slashdot article...)
Quite often I see links (on mainstream sites, newsgroups, and
slashdot itself) to slashdot articles. The problem is that most of the
time they also bring over the entire discussion associated with the
article, which is a problem if I'm at home on a 28.8k line. So I have
to wait 5 minutes to download 1/2 megabyte of responses when all I want
to do is glimpse at the main article. Is there a simple trick to
just read the article only, when I encounter a link like this?
(This has nothing to do with reading the main slashdot pages, where
of course I have my preferences set as I want them.)
Looking through the comments on the site, I was amused that the Brazilians' pet name for
Windoze is "Ruindows". (If you know Brazilian Portugese, "Windows" is pronounced roughly "oo-ween-doze" and "Ruindows" would be pronounced "hoo-ween-doze".)
Look up the word on Google; you'll find all kinds of references to "erros de proteçao geral, erros fatais, operações ilegais, etc." (I think you can figure that out without knowing Portuguese.)
One question is, what does "how well they did in the class" mean? Once
you get into college (a preliminary filter) there seem to be at least 3
measures of "success" which are only vaguely correlated, from my
experience. At MIT there were fellow students with extremely high SAT
scores but poor academic performance because of various motivational
issues, as well as the complete opposite. And then there's "how well
you do" later in life which seems to have a poor correlation with
either. And "how well they did in the class" is such a small datum as
to almost be meaningless. So, at a minimum I would ask for SAT scores
and GPA, if that can be done in a confidential blind manner of course.
Also, how are you going to get serious students to waste time
learning a difficult game (you can't eliminate them without skewing the
data)? I'm not familiar with the game but a "fairly steep learning
curve" doesn't sound promising, and if they just spend a small amount of
time learning the basics, it doesn't necessarily indicate how well they
would do as experienced players.
Finally, they may have little interest in the game to begin with,
which can seriously impact how well they do, regardless of their
inherent ability to do well at it.
Overall, you have a tough job ahead, if you want results that have
any real meaning.
Two weeks ago I got a Dell Precision 220 with RedHat 7.0 preinstalled.
It actually cost $300 more than the same hardware with NT (: But I did
it to save dealing with drivers for state-of-art stuff which burned me
in the past; saving a few days on company time is worth it.
The sad thing is that it had only the original obsolete 7.0 without
security patches available 6 months ago. Last week, within hours of
hooking it to the Internet to install security patches, it was wiped out
by the Ramen worm. Chicken and egg problem: how do I get the security
patches without hooking to the Internet, and how do I hook to the
Internet without the security patches? (OK, I could have used another
computer but you see my point...)
Anyway the OS is reinstalled, and it rocks...:)
Moral: If you get a preconfigured Linux, check the security
updates status pronto.
"Secondly, robot.txt is often a server level setup file. If you get some
free space with the likes of AOL/Freeserve/Geocities you have no control
over the indexing of your site. Additionally, some (albeit poor) ISPs
don't offer configuration of this file."
If you can't control your ISP's robots.txt, in the header of each page
put:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE">
I have 70MB of pages on my ISP and robots were costing me a bundle
till I put this in. Now all major robots ignore it and only a few
oddball wiseguys occasionally download the entire site (even though I
offer them a compressed version of the entire site at my ftp site)
For security reasons, the patch is available only as a binary
Sounds like security through obscurity to me. Maybe they didn't
fix it at all but just changed the password. Perhaps comparing the
patched binary to the original would reveal that.
Out of curiosity I typed "Bizaree & Maximum Perversum" in Google and got
10 hits - 10 filter control lists for 10 different companies. So the
site itself is either a myth or no longer exists, but seems to be passed
around from one filter to another.
"Where a computer like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes
and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum
tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, March 1949
"Where a computer like the ASCI White is equipped with 8,192 CPUs
and weighs 106 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 CPUs
and weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
--Cnet News, March 2001
Interesting. Does this i.e.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/39/3009.text.ht ml mean that any
unsolicited software samples or other copyrighted material are therefore
fair game to be re-released by the recipient as public domain material,
since "the recipient... shall have the right to retain, use, discard, or
dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation
whatsoever to the sender"?
According to the RIAA, paragraph 1008
does not apply to sound recordings
stored on a computer.
"The difference between copying to cassette (for instance) as opposed to
a computer hard drive is that audio cassette players (as well as
Minidisc and DAT players) are devices covered by the AHRA and a computer
is not. The specific reasons are technical but boil down to this: The
AHRA covers devices that are designed or marketed for the primary
purpose of making digital musical recordings. Multipurpose devices,
such as a general computer or a CD-R drive, are not covered by the
AHRA."
"Certainly i'm not best pleased with sites like altavista that take ab
out 20 seconds to load on a modem but one banner per page is perfectly
acceptable."
Try
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text
Until recently, it had no ads at all. Now has a single banner, but it
is still much better than the main page.
Actually, MS can introduce all the tags they want, and it's up to web developers to NOT USE THEM.
The problem is that Front Page etc. will almost certainly put these in without the developers' even being aware of it, making the web page unreadable outside of IE. There is no IE for Linux AFAIK.
It is up to us to complain to every webmaster who uses these proprietary extensions. If enough people complain it might make a difference.
I liked it. I see complaints in other comments that it too closely imitates that "Other" product but if the purpose of Eazel is to make the average user more comfortable with Linux, so be it. The fact of life is that the "Other" product is what 95% of people are familiar with, and the closer the better for Linux's acceptance by the general public. If it could be customized away from that appearance for those who don't like it, so much the better, but I think that should be its initial default for mass appeal (that is a goal isn't it?).
The only metaphor I was initially baffled by was the broken pencil. My first reaction was something like "disk file unreadable or corrupted" (i.e. broken), and call me dumb but it took a couple of screens and looking at directory names like/bin in context to realize it means "write protected". Once you get it maybe it's kind of cute, but wouldn't something like a pencil with an X (like the eyeglasses with an X) be more immediately understood?
If Lars admits to having made a single unauthorized copy of music from a friend, which he has, then he is a hypocrite. He even implies it's semi-acceptable, which to me makes his argument invalid. Sure, it's onesies and twosies on an individual level, but you have to multiply that by the number of individuals. (Unless he, as Lars, thinks he's somehow special -- I particularly like the condescending way he puts down his gardener and pool cleaner. I'm sure many a struggling artist has cleaned pools, and talent does not necessarily equal appeal to the masses.) Why is it (kind of) OK for a million individuals to obtain copies from a network of friends but not OK for them to get the same thing from a network of computers? Pot...kettle...black.
When I was in college before the internet it was (almost) as easy to obtain just about any music you wanted from a network of friends, and many students built up taped music collections that way. On the other hand many others (including myself) liked the feeling of having the official physically packaged product and would purchase at least the ones they liked the best, despite their easy availability. I don't see why this would change. The "degradation" argument doesn't hold because these would all be first-generation copies, which were practically indistinguishable (except to a few nitpicky audiophiles) from the original.
Comparing Napster to email spam, as one poster did to argue that it's the scale of things that counts, is not a valid analogy. The first involves a private exchange between two consenting individuals. The second involves an involuntary intrusion into your space.
I don't see that widespread free distribution is doing any more harm than playing the song over the radio. If anything it's helping them IMO. It's free publicity, and the more publicity the higher the likelihood that some individuals will want to purchase the official package, go to concerts, buy souvenirs, etc.
Recording industry profits are at an all-time record level. The only "evidence" of harm I've seen wass a recent survey showing a small decrease in sales of stores near colleges. Well, record stores have also lost most of my business simply because it's so much easier to find and order over the internet, and certainly college students are more internet-savvy than the average person. A valid study would also look at internet purchases by these students.
(Disclaimers: As more of a classical-music type, I do not like Metallica's music and in fact rather dislike it. I just accept it as a fact of life that I'll be around people who do, and do my best to tune out Metallica's noise which for me is a kind of auditory "spam". I also tend to hold the philosophical view that a private transaction between two consenting individuals should be a private matter, a view that is sometimes at odds with copyright - and other - laws.)
Slashdot Mirror
Quite often I see links (on mainstream sites, newsgroups, and slashdot itself) to slashdot articles. The problem is that most of the time they also bring over the entire discussion associated with the article, which is a problem if I'm at home on a 28.8k line. So I have to wait 5 minutes to download 1/2 megabyte of responses when all I want to do is glimpse at the main article. Is there a simple trick to just read the article only, when I encounter a link like this?
(This has nothing to do with reading the main slashdot pages, where of course I have my preferences set as I want them.)
It will be only a matter of time and technology until they encrypt the sound waves and require decoding chips implanted in our brains.
Looking through the comments on the site, I was amused that the Brazilians' pet name for Windoze is "Ruindows". (If you know Brazilian Portugese, "Windows" is pronounced roughly "oo-ween-doze" and "Ruindows" would be pronounced "hoo-ween-doze".) Look up the word on Google; you'll find all kinds of references to "erros de proteçao geral, erros fatais, operações ilegais, etc." (I think you can figure that out without knowing Portuguese.)
Also, how are you going to get serious students to waste time learning a difficult game (you can't eliminate them without skewing the data)? I'm not familiar with the game but a "fairly steep learning curve" doesn't sound promising, and if they just spend a small amount of time learning the basics, it doesn't necessarily indicate how well they would do as experienced players.
Finally, they may have little interest in the game to begin with, which can seriously impact how well they do, regardless of their inherent ability to do well at it.
Overall, you have a tough job ahead, if you want results that have any real meaning.
It actually cost $300 more than the same hardware with NT (: But I did it to save dealing with drivers for state-of-art stuff which burned me in the past; saving a few days on company time is worth it.
The sad thing is that it had only the original obsolete 7.0 without security patches available 6 months ago. Last week, within hours of hooking it to the Internet to install security patches, it was wiped out by the Ramen worm. Chicken and egg problem: how do I get the security patches without hooking to the Internet, and how do I hook to the Internet without the security patches? (OK, I could have used another computer but you see my point...)
Anyway the OS is reinstalled, and it rocks... :)
Moral: If you get a preconfigured Linux, check the security updates status pronto.
I can understand the receive part, but what does it transmit back to the pad? Perhaps an electrical shock if you write a dirty word?
"Secondly, robot.txt is often a server level setup file. If you get some
free space with the likes of AOL/Freeserve/Geocities you have no control
over the indexing of your site. Additionally, some (albeit poor) ISPs
don't offer configuration of this file."
If you can't control your ISP's robots.txt, in the header of each page
put:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE">
I have 70MB of pages on my ISP and robots were costing me a bundle
till I put this in. Now all major robots ignore it and only a few
oddball wiseguys occasionally download the entire site (even though I
offer them a compressed version of the entire site at my ftp site)
Sounds like security through obscurity to me. Maybe they didn't fix it at all but just changed the password. Perhaps comparing the patched binary to the original would reveal that.
here
Out of curiosity I typed "Bizaree & Maximum Perversum" in Google and got 10 hits - 10 filter control lists for 10 different companies. So the site itself is either a myth or no longer exists, but seems to be passed around from one filter to another.
"Where a computer like the ASCI White is equipped with 8,192 CPUs and weighs 106 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 CPUs and weigh only 1 1/2 tons." --Cnet News, March 2001
Interesting. Does this i.e. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/39/3009.text.ht ml mean that any
unsolicited software samples or other copyrighted material are therefore
fair game to be re-released by the recipient as public domain material,
since "the recipient... shall have the right to retain, use, discard, or
dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation
whatsoever to the sender"?
According to the RIAA, paragraph 1008 does not apply to sound recordings stored on a computer. "The difference between copying to cassette (for instance) as opposed to a computer hard drive is that audio cassette players (as well as Minidisc and DAT players) are devices covered by the AHRA and a computer is not. The specific reasons are technical but boil down to this: The AHRA covers devices that are designed or marketed for the primary purpose of making digital musical recordings. Multipurpose devices, such as a general computer or a CD-R drive, are not covered by the AHRA."
Try
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text
Until recently, it had no ads at all. Now has a single banner, but it is still much better than the main page.
The problem is that Front Page etc. will almost certainly put these in without the developers' even being aware of it, making the web page unreadable outside of IE. There is no IE for Linux AFAIK.
It is up to us to complain to every webmaster who uses these proprietary extensions. If enough people complain it might make a difference.
The only metaphor I was initially baffled by was the broken pencil. My first reaction was something like "disk file unreadable or corrupted" (i.e. broken), and call me dumb but it took a couple of screens and looking at directory names like /bin in context to realize it means "write protected". Once you get it maybe it's kind of cute, but wouldn't something like a pencil with an X (like the eyeglasses with an X) be more immediately understood?
If Lars admits to having made a single unauthorized copy of music from a friend, which he has, then he is a hypocrite. He even implies it's semi-acceptable, which to me makes his argument invalid. Sure, it's onesies and twosies on an individual level, but you have to multiply that by the number of individuals. (Unless he, as Lars, thinks he's somehow special -- I particularly like the condescending way he puts down his gardener and pool cleaner. I'm sure many a struggling artist has cleaned pools, and talent does not necessarily equal appeal to the masses.) Why is it (kind of) OK for a million individuals to obtain copies from a network of friends but not OK for them to get the same thing from a network of computers? Pot...kettle...black.
When I was in college before the internet it was (almost) as easy to obtain just about any music you wanted from a network of friends, and many students built up taped music collections that way. On the other hand many others (including myself) liked the feeling of having the official physically packaged product and would purchase at least the ones they liked the best, despite their easy availability. I don't see why this would change. The "degradation" argument doesn't hold because these would all be first-generation copies, which were practically indistinguishable (except to a few nitpicky audiophiles) from the original.
Comparing Napster to email spam, as one poster did to argue that it's the scale of things that counts, is not a valid analogy. The first involves a private exchange between two consenting individuals. The second involves an involuntary intrusion into your space.
I don't see that widespread free distribution is doing any more harm than playing the song over the radio. If anything it's helping them IMO. It's free publicity, and the more publicity the higher the likelihood that some individuals will want to purchase the official package, go to concerts, buy souvenirs, etc.
Recording industry profits are at an all-time record level. The only "evidence" of harm I've seen wass a recent survey showing a small decrease in sales of stores near colleges. Well, record stores have also lost most of my business simply because it's so much easier to find and order over the internet, and certainly college students are more internet-savvy than the average person. A valid study would also look at internet purchases by these students.
(Disclaimers: As more of a classical-music type, I do not like Metallica's music and in fact rather dislike it. I just accept it as a fact of life that I'll be around people who do, and do my best to tune out Metallica's noise which for me is a kind of auditory "spam". I also tend to hold the philosophical view that a private transaction between two consenting individuals should be a private matter, a view that is sometimes at odds with copyright - and other - laws.)