...So long as they provide a good service across the board. For a while I had digital TV, cable modem, and phone all from NTL at a really good price. The line rental on the phone was very reasonable and included unmetered dialup internet as part of the package.
Also the guys on the cable modem helpdesk were very clued up and a couple even knew a little linux:)
The phone and TV/internet line both came in together and were terminated on the same box on the wall.
My only complaint would be that it sometimes takes a while to get through to the right department when you need to call them...
Channel 4 is available via free-to-air DVB on the Astra satellite at 28.2 degrees east, transponder 24, EPG number 4. You'll need a suitably aligned satellite dish and DVB reciever to tune in.
In fact, with the co-operation of someone in the UK, you can sign up to the entire Sky Digital service and get a free decoder and installation. Then get your friend to ship the decoder to you. Arrange your own satellite dish installation (you'll need a pretty big dish to pick it up down in Italy though) - but it should work.
I don't think it would be such an insane idea to release the source code to new materials.
As his plan file says, the actual game data, the maps - in other words, what really makes the game Quake 2, you still need to buy them.
Imagine if Return To Castle Wolfenstein had been released under the GPL, with the source either available on the website or on the CD. Would it have decreased sales? No. It might even increase them. It's not like you can get yourself a free copy of the game by downloading the source code. If I am right, it won't be in an easy, ready-to-compile format like your average GNU utility! It takes brains and knowledge of programming to make use of it.
Anyone who's determined not to pay for the game has plenty other options. Borrow a friend's CD and burn a copy. Search "warez" sites. Go to the shopping mall and nick one!
You could argue that someone who decides to create a derivative game with free maps and then release it over the internet could reduce sales, but, then again, it's the official game that gets all the hype and marketing, and that appears on the shelves in the shopping centres. And when you hand over your money you aren't just paying for the engine. You're paying for the whole game experience, something which is completely absent without the game data. ID don't just make great game engines, they make, and I'm sure many will agree, involving and exciting games.
People buy games. They don't buy game engines. Anyone determined to get a free copy has far easier options than using the source code.
I don't like using filters in my mail programs. Blocking "from" addresses doesn't work cos they're always faked and never the same twice. Blocking domains in the "from" addresses blocks out legit emails (they're all from hotmail and yahoo and stuff, millions of potentially genuine emails from there) - basically I don't like letting the system decide what I see and what I don't, because there's always a possibility that it'll keep back a "real" bit of mail.
My favorite techniques, and these have kept me virtually spam-free for years, are:
* Don't post with a valid email address on usenet - be sure to spam-trap it, and never put your real email address in the body of the post either, the spambots look everywhere. This cuts out about 90% of spam.
* Don't give your real email address to websites whose intentions are dubious
* Spamtrap your email address on web pages you publish yourself
* When you do get spammed, take a few minutes to trace it's source and email the ISP. Usually they'll "take steps". i.e. close the account of the customer responsible. Or if it's an open relay, to secure it. Do this often enough, and when the next edition of the Spammer's Special SuperDooperMega Mailing List CD comes out, your email address will be on the blacklist - under "don't spam this address or you'll be shut down"!
This year I must have got about 10 spams in total, that's all...
Sending large amounts of individual messages wouldn't be an issue. A lot of the time, spammers don't use open relays, they run spamming programs on their own computers which contact the target MX directly. So let's say the person to recieve spam had an account @hotmail.com for example it would do a DNS lookup on hotmail.com and see what that domain's mail exchanger is. Then it would open a TCP connection to the MX on port 25 (SMTP) and send it the message and the mailbox it is destined for (this is what SMTP relays do for you, when you go through one).
You can tell when you've been sent direct-to-MX spam, because there will only be one header that's been inserted by an SMTP server (each server that the mail goes through adds a message to say who it is, the time it got the message, and from where). That header will be the one your mailbox provider adds, for example
recieved from host-44-772-9.dialup.spammersisp.com by mail.spam-recipients-isp.com at 13:40 GMT 2/12/2001
Therefore... it would not be hard to set up a program to send as many individual messages as needed, using a mail-merge style where you have a basic template for a message and swap in the individual data each time. I'm sure programs exist to do this. I could do it in Perl in an hour or two at most! (Not that I'm going to):P
If this system relies on spams being absolutely identical to work, then it won't, because each message is quite often different. If it took into account and compared the date, time, and originating IP address of the message, it might make it more reliable, perhaps...
ATAPI is SCSI emulation. ATAPI is, essentially, the SCSI protocol over the IDE bus - Windows has the same kind of thing with it's ASPI layer which is used on SCSI and IDE drives. Linux's SCSI emulation is the perfect solution because programs such as cdrecord don't need to worry about whether the drive is SCSI or IDE, because they can speak the same language to any of them. cdrecord should work with your IDE CD burner unless you've got a particularly wierd one... but I always like to check Linux compatibility before buying new kit anyway...
Re:I want slashdot on my mobile phone!
on
New Nokia Phone
·
· Score: 0
There was one. Used to be able to get the stories just by visiting http://slashdot.org/ by WAP - but this little known service quietly disappeared without a trace after the move to Slash 2.0.
He works for an ISP and has access to some serious bandwidth and kit. If you want to do the same it'll cost you... you'll probably need to get a co-located server and lease however many IP addresses you want.
If and when broadband ISPs get that restrictive I think there could be a market for selling people IP addresses and address ranges accessible through IP-over-IP tunnels. A friend of mine has an ADSL connection with one IP address, but has routed a whole class C subnet to his house over a tunnel and all his computers have "real" internet IP addresses with no restrictions at all. This could have been done even if the ISP had blocked all incoming connections...
Telecoms used to be very expensive here but now they aren't. Some price plans have flat rate local calls. And how about the fact that over half the population now owns a mobile phone and 99% of the country has digital coverage? Telecoms in Britain are cheap, fast and easy.
Ahh, this brings back memories of when I was in school... back then, there were only a few computers in the place that had this new "multimedia" stuff, which where in the library, and Sbaitso was installed on one of them... myself and friends used to have lots of silly immature schoolboy fun getting it to say rude words:-) One of the things that intrigued me was it's ability to read out very long numbers. It not only knew million, billion, trillion, etc but also ocarian, heptarian, hextarian...:)
What about an option? Post with a bonus and lose a karma point, but not have a cap (giving you the chance to go above 50 anyway), OR, post at +1 and remain capped...
I see the benefits of privacy as much as the next guy, I just don't see what relevance it has when you're talking about public places which by definition are not private...
What's wrong with knowing where everyone is all the time? Off the top of my head, the benefits of this are:
Tracking down criminals, especially ones trying to make a getaway
Locating people who are missing
Stopping known criminals and terrorists from entering vulnerable areas (e.g. could stop a train station being bombed by the IRA)
And I'm sure there are more, and law-abiding citizens will be all the more safe and secure for it. Such a system would not be controlled by a corporation with financial interest in it, but by the government. What evil intentions do you propose the UK government has? And how would this kind of system help? As I've remarked before, privacy is something you give up when you enter a public area, by definition.
Actually I believe that under the data protection act you have to give your consent for such information to be sold to third parties, and this usually takes the form of a little checkbox at the bottom of the page which you tick if you don't want them to. But since the BBC is a government funded and controlled organisation and not a profit-making one, they aren't in the habit of doing stuff like that.
As for the point about surveillance cameras, they are outdoors. When you go out, everyone can see you anyway. Everyone's free to observe your actions if you're in a public place. When you're in public you don't have any privacy, that's what makes it "public" instead of "private". If there were surveillance cameras in people's homes, Big Brother style, that would be an invasion of privacy. But that's not legal.
And how often do you get calls from telemarketers? I'll bet it's a lot more often than I do. I get calls at the most, once a month. Usually less. Same goes for most people I know. From what I understand it's not uncommon to get two or three telemarketing calls a day in the States!
But linux is hugely reliable and does the job too. And winamp's hardly suitable for an embedded device is it?:P Yeah yeah, what's the point in creating a set-top-box style player when you could do it on your computer... well, cos it's FUN!!:P
Maybe a bit offtopic, but before Slashdot got upgraded to version 2 a while ago I used to be able to get the stories on my phone with WAP, which was pretty cool. But it doesn't work anymore:( Is it coming back?
OK, speech recognition software is cool, but really, is it such a good interface for a computer? Surely a pointing device and a keyboard are the best human interfaces for the traditional GUI. I tried a speech control program once, where you have to say stuff like "up" and "down" to control the mouse pointer. Or you say "mail" to check your email. And I must say, i found it quite infuriating and slow and completely counterintuitive. A mouse is a much better interface.
The only real practical use I can see for speech recognition is for word processing - believe it or not some people still like to dictate their letters into tapes and give them to a typist, they don't like working with a keyboard. But, controlling your PC with grunts and moans? Come off it! As well as being a really backwards idea for an interface, I know I'd feel damn stupid grunting and moaning at my PC. Especially in public. Wouldn't you?;P
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft
...So long as they provide a good service across the board. For a while I had digital TV, cable modem, and phone all from NTL at a really good price. The line rental on the phone was very reasonable and included unmetered dialup internet as part of the package.
:)
Also the guys on the cable modem helpdesk were very clued up and a couple even knew a little linux
The phone and TV/internet line both came in together and were terminated on the same box on the wall.
My only complaint would be that it sometimes takes a while to get through to the right department when you need to call them...
The screen on my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop does 1600x1200 very nicely :) - check Dell's website if you don't believe me.
Is the car already taxed?
Obviously you don't actually run the code on the live system until you're satisfied that there ARE no exploits anymore.
;P
Publishing code to a mission critical system that you know to have exploits is dumb, yes.
Using code that you know to have exploits in it, in a mission critical system at all, is even dumber
Channel 4 is available via free-to-air DVB on the Astra satellite at 28.2 degrees east, transponder 24, EPG number 4. You'll need a suitably aligned satellite dish and DVB reciever to tune in.
In fact, with the co-operation of someone in the UK, you can sign up to the entire Sky Digital service and get a free decoder and installation. Then get your friend to ship the decoder to you. Arrange your own satellite dish installation (you'll need a pretty big dish to pick it up down in Italy though) - but it should work.
I don't think it would be such an insane idea to release the source code to new materials.
As his plan file says, the actual game data, the maps - in other words, what really makes the game Quake 2, you still need to buy them.
Imagine if Return To Castle Wolfenstein had been released under the GPL, with the source either available on the website or on the CD. Would it have decreased sales? No. It might even increase them. It's not like you can get yourself a free copy of the game by downloading the source code. If I am right, it won't be in an easy, ready-to-compile format like your average GNU utility! It takes brains and knowledge of programming to make use of it.
Anyone who's determined not to pay for the game has plenty other options. Borrow a friend's CD and burn a copy. Search "warez" sites. Go to the shopping mall and nick one!
You could argue that someone who decides to create a derivative game with free maps and then release it over the internet could reduce sales, but, then again, it's the official game that gets all the hype and marketing, and that appears on the shelves in the shopping centres. And when you hand over your money you aren't just paying for the engine. You're paying for the whole game experience, something which is completely absent without the game data. ID don't just make great game engines, they make, and I'm sure many will agree, involving and exciting games.
People buy games. They don't buy game engines. Anyone determined to get a free copy has far easier options than using the source code.
I don't like using filters in my mail programs. Blocking "from" addresses doesn't work cos they're always faked and never the same twice. Blocking domains in the "from" addresses blocks out legit emails (they're all from hotmail and yahoo and stuff, millions of potentially genuine emails from there) - basically I don't like letting the system decide what I see and what I don't, because there's always a possibility that it'll keep back a "real" bit of mail.
My favorite techniques, and these have kept me virtually spam-free for years, are:
* Don't post with a valid email address on usenet - be sure to spam-trap it, and never put your real email address in the body of the post either, the spambots look everywhere. This cuts out about 90% of spam.
* Don't give your real email address to websites whose intentions are dubious
* Spamtrap your email address on web pages you publish yourself
* When you do get spammed, take a few minutes to trace it's source and email the ISP. Usually they'll "take steps". i.e. close the account of the customer responsible. Or if it's an open relay, to secure it. Do this often enough, and when the next edition of the Spammer's Special SuperDooperMega Mailing List CD comes out, your email address will be on the blacklist - under "don't spam this address or you'll be shut down"!
This year I must have got about 10 spams in total, that's all...
Sending large amounts of individual messages wouldn't be an issue. A lot of the time, spammers don't use open relays, they run spamming programs on their own computers which contact the target MX directly. So let's say the person to recieve spam had an account @hotmail.com for example it would do a DNS lookup on hotmail.com and see what that domain's mail exchanger is. Then it would open a TCP connection to the MX on port 25 (SMTP) and send it the message and the mailbox it is destined for (this is what SMTP relays do for you, when you go through one).
:P
You can tell when you've been sent direct-to-MX spam, because there will only be one header that's been inserted by an SMTP server (each server that the mail goes through adds a message to say who it is, the time it got the message, and from where). That header will be the one your mailbox provider adds, for example
recieved from host-44-772-9.dialup.spammersisp.com by mail.spam-recipients-isp.com at 13:40 GMT 2/12/2001
Therefore... it would not be hard to set up a program to send as many individual messages as needed, using a mail-merge style where you have a basic template for a message and swap in the individual data each time. I'm sure programs exist to do this. I could do it in Perl in an hour or two at most! (Not that I'm going to)
If this system relies on spams being absolutely identical to work, then it won't, because each message is quite often different. If it took into account and compared the date, time, and originating IP address of the message, it might make it more reliable, perhaps...
ATAPI is SCSI emulation. ATAPI is, essentially, the SCSI protocol over the IDE bus - Windows has the same kind of thing with it's ASPI layer which is used on SCSI and IDE drives. Linux's SCSI emulation is the perfect solution because programs such as cdrecord don't need to worry about whether the drive is SCSI or IDE, because they can speak the same language to any of them. cdrecord should work with your IDE CD burner unless you've got a particularly wierd one... but I always like to check Linux compatibility before buying new kit anyway...
You included? ;)
There was one. Used to be able to get the stories just by visiting http://slashdot.org/ by WAP - but this little known service quietly disappeared without a trace after the move to Slash 2.0.
When's it coming back?
He works for an ISP and has access to some serious bandwidth and kit. If you want to do the same it'll cost you... you'll probably need to get a co-located server and lease however many IP addresses you want.
If and when broadband ISPs get that restrictive I think there could be a market for selling people IP addresses and address ranges accessible through IP-over-IP tunnels. A friend of mine has an ADSL connection with one IP address, but has routed a whole class C subnet to his house over a tunnel and all his computers have "real" internet IP addresses with no restrictions at all. This could have been done even if the ISP had blocked all incoming connections...
Even better... satellite dish connected to DVB card - lets you record the MPEG2 directly, no analog stage
Telecoms used to be very expensive here but now they aren't. Some price plans have flat rate local calls. And how about the fact that over half the population now owns a mobile phone and 99% of the country has digital coverage? Telecoms in Britain are cheap, fast and easy.
It doesn't matter how many women execs there are... as long as they do their job well, it doesn't matter if they're male or female. Does it?
Ahh, this brings back memories of when I was in school ... back then, there were only a few computers in the place that had this new "multimedia" stuff, which where in the library, and Sbaitso was installed on one of them... myself and friends used to have lots of silly immature schoolboy fun getting it to say rude words :-) One of the things that intrigued me was it's ability to read out very long numbers. It not only knew million, billion, trillion, etc but also ocarian, heptarian, hextarian... :)
What about an option? Post with a bonus and lose a karma point, but not have a cap (giving you the chance to go above 50 anyway), OR, post at +1 and remain capped...
I see the benefits of privacy as much as the next guy, I just don't see what relevance it has when you're talking about public places which by definition are not private...
And I'm sure there are more, and law-abiding citizens will be all the more safe and secure for it. Such a system would not be controlled by a corporation with financial interest in it, but by the government. What evil intentions do you propose the UK government has? And how would this kind of system help? As I've remarked before, privacy is something you give up when you enter a public area, by definition.
Caesium is even more impressive :)
Actually I believe that under the data protection act you have to give your consent for such information to be sold to third parties, and this usually takes the form of a little checkbox at the bottom of the page which you tick if you don't want them to. But since the BBC is a government funded and controlled organisation and not a profit-making one, they aren't in the habit of doing stuff like that.
As for the point about surveillance cameras, they are outdoors. When you go out, everyone can see you anyway. Everyone's free to observe your actions if you're in a public place. When you're in public you don't have any privacy, that's what makes it "public" instead of "private". If there were surveillance cameras in people's homes, Big Brother style, that would be an invasion of privacy. But that's not legal.
And how often do you get calls from telemarketers? I'll bet it's a lot more often than I do. I get calls at the most, once a month. Usually less. Same goes for most people I know. From what I understand it's not uncommon to get two or three telemarketing calls a day in the States!
But linux is hugely reliable and does the job too. And winamp's hardly suitable for an embedded device is it? :P Yeah yeah, what's the point in creating a set-top-box style player when you could do it on your computer... well, cos it's FUN!! :P
Maybe a bit offtopic, but before Slashdot got upgraded to version 2 a while ago I used to be able to get the stories on my phone with WAP, which was pretty cool. But it doesn't work anymore :( Is it coming back?
OK, speech recognition software is cool, but really, is it such a good interface for a computer? Surely a pointing device and a keyboard are the best human interfaces for the traditional GUI. I tried a speech control program once, where you have to say stuff like "up" and "down" to control the mouse pointer. Or you say "mail" to check your email. And I must say, i found it quite infuriating and slow and completely counterintuitive. A mouse is a much better interface.
;P
The only real practical use I can see for speech recognition is for word processing - believe it or not some people still like to dictate their letters into tapes and give them to a typist, they don't like working with a keyboard. But, controlling your PC with grunts and moans? Come off it! As well as being a really backwards idea for an interface, I know I'd feel damn stupid grunting and moaning at my PC. Especially in public. Wouldn't you?