These problems are no different than when you go to Radio Shack and buy some of their radio controlled toys. The toys are plainly marked what frequency they run on. If you get two cars that are on the same frequency and try to run them at the same time, of course they are gonna go wacky!
We are going to see more and more devices up at 2.4 GHz. What is the solution? Quit it! It is that simple.
These same problems everyone is gritching about is how it was with the early 49 MHz phones. Someone would get one then their neighbor would get one and they would inevitably take them back to the store because "they were broken". Well, sorry, but they are not broken, it is just that someone else is on that frequency also.
Look around your house and check out how many wireless devices you have. Do you need 3 cordless phones? Do you need wireless TV transmitters and ethernet cards too? Yeah, they are nice, but when you start getting interference between them, well, I hate to say it, but there is only one person you can blame for it.
I tell ya, the guy has some wonderful company in his induction class. It just makes me respect him that much more.
Something that really got me about him was last year when that Pirates of Silicon Valley show was on (or whatever it was called), I sent him an email asking some off the wall question about the Apple I. I figured he would answer it in his FAQ thingy, or one of his assistants would answer it. But no.
To my surprise, within a few hours Woz himself emailed me with a personal answer. That just blew me away. I mean, here is a guy who has a lot better things to do with his time than answer the email of some stupid guy in Missouri, and he spent the five minutes or so to type in a reply. That was cool.
The only other person who has done that was Stephen Fry (of Fry and Laurie).
It is reasons like this I refuse to take drug tests - not that I have anything to hide, I just think it is uber-creepy.
The only drugs I take are caffine and nicotine. Coffee and smokes. Can't beat them when it comes to staying awake. I also have like one beer ever six months if I am lucky. Hell, I don't even take aspirin unless I have one hell of a killer headache.
So, why should I put up with these types of games that future employers want me to play? I just tell them no. If they don't want to hire me because I refuse, then that is their tough luck. Sure, I might not be getting a high paying job, but nothing is worse to me than knowing I sold out just to get a job where my employer does not trust me right off the bat. That is *not* the type of place I want to be associated with.
I think it was Wednesday, Hillary Rosen and the guy from Gnutella were on Talk of the Nation. Maybe I am just partial, but the guy from Gnutella was very cool, and Hillary was, well, a total bitch. She played the part of Dragon Lady very well.
She was sitting there absolutely lying to all the NPR listeners every time she opened her mouth. Finally, near the end of the show, she said that "Napster was bad because Metallica had to tell them who to remove," or something like that. The Gnutella dude spoke up and said, "But that is what the DMCA - which the music industry pushed so hard for - says they have to do!" Then Hillary had the gall to poo poo his comment.
I really wish that comment had happened near the beginning of the show.
The more I hear the RIAA and their ilk spout off, the more I want to punch something. Preferably Hillary Rosen's nose.
Back in the mid to late 1980s use of ham radio and CB transmitters aboard airliners was specifically prohibited by the FCC/FAA (they did this jointly). If memory serves correctly, they had found that transmitters could cause the hatches on doors to unlock and other things that would result cabin depresurization. NOT a good thing at all.:)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a sign on the wall. >read sign
"Pepsi. The choice of a new generation." >n
You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a sign on the wall. Your sword has begun glowing. >read sign
"Nike. Just do it." >n
Your have entered the lair of a troll who, besides smelling really bad, has impeccable fashion sense. He is wearing Bugle Boy jeans and an Old Navy performance fleece shirt. >quit
Seriously, unless you are very careful, microwaves are extremely dangerous.
I don't know how many of you have been shocked by 110v, but I can attest to the fact that I would rather spend an hour with 110 going through my body than even spending a single second getting a burn from RF.
So, please know what you are doing before you attempt to build something like this. Even standing in the wrong place with relation to the feedhorn is enough to make you sterile in nothing flat, if not cook you from the inside out.
I tend to think it is someone they know also. As much as I like to think it was a BO attack, there is another perfectly acceptable hack... gaining physical access to the machine!
Notice that the author only shows ICQ stuff from a few machines. That ain't a lot. In fact, two of the machines were prolly sitting next to one another. Simply email/ftp all the icq message files/.jpegs/.txt files and ya got lots of ammo. Getting near three machines is pretty easy. Hell, look at how Kevin got all his passwords - he just called people on the phone and said "what is your password?" They gave it to him.
However the site author did it, it is pretty damned wicked.
I never said I don't like convienence. I said I can't expect the average Joe User to do what Carmack mentioned. Hell, I know a lot of Linux folk who are scared to death to compile a kernal for themselves. I know even more who don't have sound on their machines because they did not know about the sndconfig program in RH. And these guys are anything but clueless.
I myself can't wait for the day when USB works perfectly. Right now I have a bunch of USB devices sitting here not being used. Why? Cause I have not been able to get the blasted USB backport to work. I will rejoice and dance around my back yard naked singing "Linus and Alan are Gods!" the day it works.
Why? Cause I hate doing "mundane things". That's why I use pico and not vi.
I read the MTV thing which says Napster and Offspring have come to an agreement, but this whole thing bugs me.
First, I am a huge fan of Offspring, and I am sticking behind Napster, even though I don't use their program (I like gnutella). But both Offspring and Napster were being a bit dumb, imho.
First, Napster should have contacted them and worked something out instead of getting the lawyers into this. They just ended up looking really stupid in my book - much like Dr. Dre looks like an idiot for going after Napster when he himself is getting blasted by Lucasfilm for the THX sound.
But what the hell are Dexter and Noodles thinking when they start bootlegging stuff and selling it? These guys are not a bunch of uneducated boneheads. I gotta admit though, that did take some balls!
On second thought, I am starting to get the joke now...:) Heh!
True. And I found the same with Civ:CTP. I think, however, that they are talking about the stuff that Carmack mentioned: getting a 3D card up and running. That is NOT a simple thing... well, it probably is for you and me and most of the others on/., but your average man on the street? Forget it.
Usually on Windows games you don't even have to do what you showed. You drop the disc in and it starts going. Any 4 year old can do that. Granted, that makes for some really nasty security under Linux if you need to install something as root, but it would help matters a bit if you could do this. Hell, the Atari 2600, Sony Playstation, and all the other consoles do it. It just makes life easier for the folks who have no friggin' clue.
Case in point - yesterday I went and got a new machine for my mom after her P100 I built for her finally gave up the ghost. We got it back to her house, I hooked it up, started it up. Everything was running great.
Then I needed to get her HP 722c printer running. Win98 has not a clue about that printer. Mom was really worried that it would not run. Then there was her scanner (also no Win98 support) and again she was worried it would not run.
Being the brilliant son I am, I simply went and got the drivers and everything worked slick.
I actually considered NOT putting Win98 on that machine and putting SuSE on instead. I may still do that - build a small machine with Linux only and see what happens when I give it to her.
The point of my story - had I not been there that computer would still be sitting in the box while she read over the instructions. Updating drivers is one of the easiest things to do - ya download it, run it, and wait - and if you are in Windows you get to reboot (hehe) - but it is still simple!
Want more proof? Go to your local bookstore and take a look at the books in the computer section. How many copies of things like "Windows Notepad for Dummies" do you see? I am willing to bet you are gonna find quite a few of those types of books. Okay, maybe not something for notepad.exe, but you are going to find lots of really big time "idiotic user" books. Why? Because they sell.
NOW tell me Windows is easier to use than Linux....
everyone and his brother should know by now NOT to launch attachments?
I got to deal with the ILOVEYOU virus. It was not the secretary that launched it. It was not the big boss that launched it. It was one of the other programmers that launched it. Trust me, after humiliating him I don't think he would be stupid enough to do something like this again, but one never knows.
Also, a friend of mine works for a large company. IS sent around a message saying "Do not under any circumstances launch this app." 15 minutes later someone did because they "wanted to see what it would do." This also happened at one of the local hospitals.
Couldn't one argue that in all three of the cases I mentioned that it WAS intentional in every case? Just because you are stupid does not under any circumstance give you the right to do stupid things.
I am becomming a fan of Anime, also. I had never seen any until I got my DVD player. Some of my favorites are Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, Venus Wars, Tenchi Muyo, and I have 3x3 Eyes on laserdisc, which is also very cool.
But nothing beats Ranma 1/2. I started watching the thing and thought, "what the hell is this crap?" at the outset. Five minutes later I was on the floor laughing - especially when I started to understand everything that was going on and where all these weird animals were coming from. And the little guy who steals women's underwear (can't remember his name) is a total hoot!
I guess I should have written what I meant to write instead of what I wrote.
What I am thinking is this: if people can't log in, that is not going to have much of an effect. Hell, AOL had their own "shut down the servers day" for how long?:)
But, if they log in and their favorite website greets them with a "Thank you for visiting - our website is participating in 'shut down the servers day' - visit suchandsuch.whatever for more information", there will be some education for people over why servers are shutting down.
We had black page day in 1996 when protesting the CDA, and I personally think it informed a lot of people up to what was going on. Hell, even Microsoft had a black page!
Perhaps we should try something like this and see what happens. The worst that will happen is six web sites will do it and everyone else won't. We all know Microsoft won't be participating. Nor Apogee. But hell, six websites is better than none, isn't it?
Like the gentleman that suggested this said, we gotta do something.
You are right about Apogee talking about "materials", "marks", etc.
But you are just plain wrong about using the logos in trashing articles.
Have you ever seen At The Movies with Roger Ebert? Let's see, he shows clips of films. If the film is really bad he says so.
Have you ever read PC Gamer? They have screen shots of all the games they review. They reviewed Corel's game "Mode" in 1996 and gave it a 10% rating and called it the worst game they had ever seen. There was another game they rated in the same issue that faired just as poorly.
Ever seen a TV review or music review? Usually there is a picture of the cast of the TV show or a picture of the CD cover.
Ever read Home Theater magazine? Mike Nelson (from MST3K) spends each month pointing out the dogs of the film industry. He has stills from the movies, or pictures of whatever actor he is going after.
There is nothing wrong with saying a product is bad and then showing a picture of it. If it is crap, it is crap, pure and simple.
I don't know about taking down the main internal servers... but what about taking down our web servers? I can always say "well, NT is acting goofy, so that is why you can't get to our site" if the big boss says anything.
But if all the people in the US start trying to get to their favorite websites and they are not there, or are replaced with a "This site is participating in National Server Outage Day", the effect will be driven home more than if they can't get on the net at all.
There was a thing around the first of the year in one of the astronomy magazines talking about the gyroscopes this thing will be using. Apparently they are so precise that once they are spinning if you cut the power the things will continue to spin for the next 4000 years.
I posted this stuff a few weeks ago when someone asked about digital cameras.
Over at minidisc.org they have some good information about this camera, along with some external reviews. The thing does look very cool. Just hook it up to the net and you can do your webserving right off of it.
What kind of a house has all the network wires run in the walls? That takes all the fun out of having wire runs along the ceilings and the floors! It totally ruins the nerd look.
Look at all the other "protection methods" that the entertainment industry has - SCMS is a perfect example. With consumer grade equipment, I am not allowed to duplicate MiniDiscs that I personally made. I am not talking about making copies of the latest Metallica album - I am talking about making a MD from a cassette tape of my grandmother from 1980. Yeah, I can make the original, and I can make a copy of the original. But that is it. Why? So the RIAA can collect their "he might copy the spice girls" fee and force me to upgrade to a Prosumer level machine (which the price difference is my paying the "he might copy the spice girls" tax). If I give this MD to my uncle, for instance, he can't make copies of it.
Granted, the SCMS protection is a total joke and can be removed very easily.
I really want to see more people put up or shut up on this issue. It takes like 3 minutes to write your congressperson. It takes a total of 30 minutes to email every one of the senators and house memebers and demand something be done about this lunacy.
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These problems are no different than when you go to Radio Shack and buy some of their radio controlled toys. The toys are plainly marked what frequency they run on. If you get two cars that are on the same frequency and try to run them at the same time, of course they are gonna go wacky!
We are going to see more and more devices up at 2.4 GHz. What is the solution? Quit it! It is that simple.
These same problems everyone is gritching about is how it was with the early 49 MHz phones. Someone would get one then their neighbor would get one and they would inevitably take them back to the store because "they were broken". Well, sorry, but they are not broken, it is just that someone else is on that frequency also.
Look around your house and check out how many wireless devices you have. Do you need 3 cordless phones? Do you need wireless TV transmitters and ethernet cards too? Yeah, they are nice, but when you start getting interference between them, well, I hate to say it, but there is only one person you can blame for it.
I tell ya, the guy has some wonderful company in his induction class. It just makes me respect him that much more.
Something that really got me about him was last year when that Pirates of Silicon Valley show was on (or whatever it was called), I sent him an email asking some off the wall question about the Apple I. I figured he would answer it in his FAQ thingy, or one of his assistants would answer it. But no.
To my surprise, within a few hours Woz himself emailed me with a personal answer. That just blew me away. I mean, here is a guy who has a lot better things to do with his time than answer the email of some stupid guy in Missouri, and he spent the five minutes or so to type in a reply. That was cool.
The only other person who has done that was Stephen Fry (of Fry and Laurie).
Some people are just really cool.
It is reasons like this I refuse to take drug tests - not that I have anything to hide, I just think it is uber-creepy.
The only drugs I take are caffine and nicotine. Coffee and smokes. Can't beat them when it comes to staying awake. I also have like one beer ever six months if I am lucky. Hell, I don't even take aspirin unless I have one hell of a killer headache.
So, why should I put up with these types of games that future employers want me to play? I just tell them no. If they don't want to hire me because I refuse, then that is their tough luck. Sure, I might not be getting a high paying job, but nothing is worse to me than knowing I sold out just to get a job where my employer does not trust me right off the bat. That is *not* the type of place I want to be associated with.
I think it was Wednesday, Hillary Rosen and the guy from Gnutella were on Talk of the Nation. Maybe I am just partial, but the guy from Gnutella was very cool, and Hillary was, well, a total bitch. She played the part of Dragon Lady very well.
She was sitting there absolutely lying to all the NPR listeners every time she opened her mouth. Finally, near the end of the show, she said that "Napster was bad because Metallica had to tell them who to remove," or something like that. The Gnutella dude spoke up and said, "But that is what the DMCA - which the music industry pushed so hard for - says they have to do!" Then Hillary had the gall to poo poo his comment.
I really wish that comment had happened near the beginning of the show.
The more I hear the RIAA and their ilk spout off, the more I want to punch something. Preferably Hillary Rosen's nose.
Back in the mid to late 1980s use of ham radio and CB transmitters aboard airliners was specifically prohibited by the FCC/FAA (they did this jointly). If memory serves correctly, they had found that transmitters could cause the hatches on doors to unlock and other things that would result cabin depresurization. NOT a good thing at all. :)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a sign on the wall.
>read sign
"Pepsi. The choice of a new generation."
>n
You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a sign on the wall. Your sword has begun glowing.
>read sign
"Nike. Just do it."
>n
Your have entered the lair of a troll who, besides smelling really bad, has impeccable fashion sense. He is wearing Bugle Boy jeans and an Old Navy performance fleece shirt.
>quit
Death of the powergrid! Film at 11.
Seriously, unless you are very careful, microwaves are extremely dangerous.
I don't know how many of you have been shocked by 110v, but I can attest to the fact that I would rather spend an hour with 110 going through my body than even spending a single second getting a burn from RF.
So, please know what you are doing before you attempt to build something like this. Even standing in the wrong place with relation to the feedhorn is enough to make you sterile in nothing flat, if not cook you from the inside out.
Not over ham radio...
You are NOT allowed to encrypt any of your data, unless you are controlling a space based transmitter (that is, a satellite).
If you are needing to encrypt, try something like the Apple Airport thingy.
I tend to think it is someone they know also. As much as I like to think it was a BO attack, there is another perfectly acceptable hack... gaining physical access to the machine!
Notice that the author only shows ICQ stuff from a few machines. That ain't a lot. In fact, two of the machines were prolly sitting next to one another. Simply email/ftp all the icq message files/.jpegs/.txt files and ya got lots of ammo. Getting near three machines is pretty easy. Hell, look at how Kevin got all his passwords - he just called people on the phone and said "what is your password?" They gave it to him.
However the site author did it, it is pretty damned wicked.
I never said I don't like convienence. I said I can't expect the average Joe User to do what Carmack mentioned. Hell, I know a lot of Linux folk who are scared to death to compile a kernal for themselves. I know even more who don't have sound on their machines because they did not know about the sndconfig program in RH. And these guys are anything but clueless.
I myself can't wait for the day when USB works perfectly. Right now I have a bunch of USB devices sitting here not being used. Why? Cause I have not been able to get the blasted USB backport to work. I will rejoice and dance around my back yard naked singing "Linus and Alan are Gods!" the day it works.
Why? Cause I hate doing "mundane things". That's why I use pico and not vi.
I read the MTV thing which says Napster and Offspring have come to an agreement, but this whole thing bugs me.
:) Heh!
First, I am a huge fan of Offspring, and I am sticking behind Napster, even though I don't use their program (I like gnutella). But both Offspring and Napster were being a bit dumb, imho.
First, Napster should have contacted them and worked something out instead of getting the lawyers into this. They just ended up looking really stupid in my book - much like Dr. Dre looks like an idiot for going after Napster when he himself is getting blasted by Lucasfilm for the THX sound.
But what the hell are Dexter and Noodles thinking when they start bootlegging stuff and selling it? These guys are not a bunch of uneducated boneheads. I gotta admit though, that did take some balls!
On second thought, I am starting to get the joke now...
True. And I found the same with Civ:CTP. I think, however, that they are talking about the stuff that Carmack mentioned: getting a 3D card up and running. That is NOT a simple thing... well, it probably is for you and me and most of the others on /., but your average man on the street? Forget it.
Usually on Windows games you don't even have to do what you showed. You drop the disc in and it starts going. Any 4 year old can do that. Granted, that makes for some really nasty security under Linux if you need to install something as root, but it would help matters a bit if you could do this. Hell, the Atari 2600, Sony Playstation, and all the other consoles do it. It just makes life easier for the folks who have no friggin' clue.
but they also have no clue how to use Windows!
Case in point - yesterday I went and got a new machine for my mom after her P100 I built for her finally gave up the ghost. We got it back to her house, I hooked it up, started it up. Everything was running great.
Then I needed to get her HP 722c printer running. Win98 has not a clue about that printer. Mom was really worried that it would not run. Then there was her scanner (also no Win98 support) and again she was worried it would not run.
Being the brilliant son I am, I simply went and got the drivers and everything worked slick.
I actually considered NOT putting Win98 on that machine and putting SuSE on instead. I may still do that - build a small machine with Linux only and see what happens when I give it to her.
The point of my story - had I not been there that computer would still be sitting in the box while she read over the instructions. Updating drivers is one of the easiest things to do - ya download it, run it, and wait - and if you are in Windows you get to reboot (hehe) - but it is still simple!
Want more proof? Go to your local bookstore and take a look at the books in the computer section. How many copies of things like "Windows Notepad for Dummies" do you see? I am willing to bet you are gonna find quite a few of those types of books. Okay, maybe not something for notepad.exe, but you are going to find lots of really big time "idiotic user" books. Why? Because they sell.
NOW tell me Windows is easier to use than Linux....
everyone and his brother should know by now NOT to launch attachments?
I got to deal with the ILOVEYOU virus. It was not the secretary that launched it. It was not the big boss that launched it. It was one of the other programmers that launched it. Trust me, after humiliating him I don't think he would be stupid enough to do something like this again, but one never knows.
Also, a friend of mine works for a large company. IS sent around a message saying "Do not under any circumstances launch this app." 15 minutes later someone did because they "wanted to see what it would do." This also happened at one of the local hospitals.
Couldn't one argue that in all three of the cases I mentioned that it WAS intentional in every case? Just because you are stupid does not under any circumstance give you the right to do stupid things.
I am becomming a fan of Anime, also. I had never seen any until I got my DVD player. Some of my favorites are Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, Venus Wars, Tenchi Muyo, and I have 3x3 Eyes on laserdisc, which is also very cool.
But nothing beats Ranma 1/2. I started watching the thing and thought, "what the hell is this crap?" at the outset. Five minutes later I was on the floor laughing - especially when I started to understand everything that was going on and where all these weird animals were coming from. And the little guy who steals women's underwear (can't remember his name) is a total hoot!
I guess I should have written what I meant to write instead of what I wrote.
:)
What I am thinking is this: if people can't log in, that is not going to have much of an effect. Hell, AOL had their own "shut down the servers day" for how long?
But, if they log in and their favorite website greets them with a "Thank you for visiting - our website is participating in 'shut down the servers day' - visit suchandsuch.whatever for more information", there will be some education for people over why servers are shutting down.
We had black page day in 1996 when protesting the CDA, and I personally think it informed a lot of people up to what was going on. Hell, even Microsoft had a black page!
Perhaps we should try something like this and see what happens. The worst that will happen is six web sites will do it and everyone else won't. We all know Microsoft won't be participating. Nor Apogee. But hell, six websites is better than none, isn't it?
Like the gentleman that suggested this said, we gotta do something.
You are right about Apogee talking about "materials", "marks", etc.
But you are just plain wrong about using the logos in trashing articles.
Have you ever seen At The Movies with Roger Ebert? Let's see, he shows clips of films. If the film is really bad he says so.
Have you ever read PC Gamer? They have screen shots of all the games they review. They reviewed Corel's game "Mode" in 1996 and gave it a 10% rating and called it the worst game they had ever seen. There was another game they rated in the same issue that faired just as poorly.
Ever seen a TV review or music review? Usually there is a picture of the cast of the TV show or a picture of the CD cover.
Ever read Home Theater magazine? Mike Nelson (from MST3K) spends each month pointing out the dogs of the film industry. He has stills from the movies, or pictures of whatever actor he is going after.
There is nothing wrong with saying a product is bad and then showing a picture of it. If it is crap, it is crap, pure and simple.
I don't know about taking down the main internal servers... but what about taking down our web servers? I can always say "well, NT is acting goofy, so that is why you can't get to our site" if the big boss says anything.
But if all the people in the US start trying to get to their favorite websites and they are not there, or are replaced with a "This site is participating in National Server Outage Day", the effect will be driven home more than if they can't get on the net at all.
I like this idea!
There was a thing around the first of the year in one of the astronomy magazines talking about the gyroscopes this thing will be using. Apparently they are so precise that once they are spinning if you cut the power the things will continue to spin for the next 4000 years.
To me that is mind blowing....
I posted this stuff a few weeks ago when someone asked about digital cameras.
Over at minidisc.org they have some good information about this camera, along with some external reviews. The thing does look very cool. Just hook it up to the net and you can do your webserving right off of it.
What kind of a house has all the network wires run in the walls? That takes all the fun out of having wire runs along the ceilings and the floors! It totally ruins the nerd look.
Look at all the other "protection methods" that the entertainment industry has - SCMS is a perfect example. With consumer grade equipment, I am not allowed to duplicate MiniDiscs that I personally made. I am not talking about making copies of the latest Metallica album - I am talking about making a MD from a cassette tape of my grandmother from 1980. Yeah, I can make the original, and I can make a copy of the original. But that is it. Why? So the RIAA can collect their "he might copy the spice girls" fee and force me to upgrade to a Prosumer level machine (which the price difference is my paying the "he might copy the spice girls" tax). If I give this MD to my uncle, for instance, he can't make copies of it.
:)
Granted, the SCMS protection is a total joke and can be removed very easily.
I really want to see more people put up or shut up on this issue. It takes like 3 minutes to write your congressperson. It takes a total of 30 minutes to email every one of the senators and house memebers and demand something be done about this lunacy.
So do it!
if they do break MS up into three companies, who is going to get EDLIN?
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