This stuff happens more than you think. It's called a uniform job. They joke about it in the movies all the time, but it takes great skill and composure.
Just think about it, in an office if the main printer quits working, someone will call the help desk, who will (after rebooting stuff at random) call HP or Xerox to send over a repairman. The repairman is a stranger to the company, but since he's wearing an HP badge and is dressed like a repairman, he gets in real easy, maybe he just needs to know the name of someone on the inside to let him in. Then he can pretend to check things and a short time later he might conclude that he needs to "bring it in the shop". This stuff happens all the time.
Now if an imposter were to try this, and act his part well enough, he just scored himself a nice big office laser printer worth several thousand dollars. By the time the staff starts worrying about their printer's whereabouts he will be long gone and nobody will remember him.
Dude, just go ahead and play through Halo on the PC with your key+mouse. Then do the same on Xbox. While most console FPS in the past were done so poorly that it was just PURGATORY to play it on a gamepad, Halo actually got it right and it was delicious. Even for a novice, the controls just worked well from the get-go. You didn't have trouble aiming, things got tossed where you expected them to be tossed, and you managed to preserve your virtual buttocks long enough to see the next army of alien foes drop down.
As an aside, importers like Lik-Sang and Blaze have been selling USB adapters for the Xbox controllers for quite some time now. It is only logical that Microsoft has taken notice and wants to sell a 40$ controller for PC, rather than a 10$ adapter. The Xbox has proven its controllers' virtues (both the big and small one), so now they're simply going to adapt a successful product to a new platform. It's like playing the lottery when you already know the winning numbers; sounds like good business to me.
Why is the tech world spending more time doing legal work than tech work ? The guys filing these bullsh!t documents are making more money than the guys whose work is being protected.
This is (traditionally) the job of the distro maintainers. In order to pull this off we need a managed driver repository that will hold all the drivers and serve requests for them. Then you have to deal with differing kernel versions / patches / platforms.
There is a reason why drivers aren't automated and tossed into packaging systems like APT, is that the whole "automated" aspect of it is rather scary. What if the driver is buggy, what if it bombs when paired with some other hardware, what if... just look at Microsoft, who have invested many long hours and dollars into Windows Update, and most of the driver updates still get whacked up (ahem, NForce!). Here's another nasty stab: certain types of hardware are often bundled with utilities/apps to work with them, like a mixer for the sound card, a video chat client for the web cam, or an imaging tool for the scanner. While compiling and loading a kernel module is fairly standardized, the same cannot be said of auxilliary software.
I have been thinking this exact same thing. Now if only the legal bullcrap were lighter, I'd just open my own damn insurance company and insure only myself (and relatives,etc). Invest my own damned money, play the stock market / mutual funds and in the end if I live a long healthy life then I can take my insurance money and buy myself a nice comfy retirement.
The big flaw with insurance is that, no matter what happens, you're gonna die sooner or later. They _have_ to pay, unless they escape it with some screwy fine print clause (like if you live past 75 we won't insure you anymore). So logically if the business model revolves around paying every single client, then they have to be making huge stinking piles of cash along the years in order to turn a profit and not have to worry about the fact that you're not immortal.
I agree, it is not the most constructive or sensible thing to do, but as we all saw this past week with that decapitation, sometimes there is nothing else you can do but shock the hell out of people to get them to see exactly how bad things are and how nasty the truth can be.
To the typical bean counter, destroying cameras only means they get to buy more cameras. To someone with at least half a brain, it means somebody out there really hates those cameras and it might be a good idea to figure out why they are hated. Sure, there is always random vandalism, be it by kids, drunkards or the common self-righteous idiot, but if the powers-that-be aren't listening to our honest opinions and concerns, then we need to remind those meat puppets exactly who's in charge here: nobody and everybody, all at the same time. That is democracy. If one prick things he's better than the rest, that prick needs to be reminded that his blood is the same color as ours.
In its purest form, democracy would be a cooperative form of anarchy.
I guess one could work out a system with #included files and apachectl dancing. I'm just used to changing things in real-time on other servers and seeing the result immediately. Some form of connection monitoring would also be nice (e.g. to see what work is being done on socket X). Logs will tell you what happened, but a live peek inside the brain will let you target that one mofo that keeps chugging all your bandwidth and/or runs a truckload of exploit tests.
This isn't a bad idea, but it already exists. It's called Kudzu and has many other names. You just grab the list of PCI ID's and cross-ref them with your driver signatures. What would be cool is offering a prompt for different versions of the same driver, or alternate drivers for the same hardware (in case one of them bombs on your rig).
What I'd rather see effort pumped into is NOTEBOOK DRIVERS. Please people I have this shiny screaming Dell hotness but I can't get anything to run on it because I'm lacking an Ethernet driver/sound/whatever. Notebooks have become modular things just like desktops, with many models sharing the same chipsets. Maybe an easy X setup that deals with non-standard screen resolutions and dimensions (1680x1050 anyone?).
Make it work on more machines, and more people will be able/want to use it.
Buy whatever they're selling, put it on your Visa (not MC or Amex... well ok, maybe Amex). Buy as many of them as you can fit on your credit, wait a few days then file a fraud complaint about the transaction.
No, better, buy them all in seperate orders, then have them all charged back. When the spammer has racked up a good chunk of chargebacks and complaints, they will either quit (unlikely) or eventually their merchant account will be revoked and they will be SOL.
As a bonus it causes the evil Visa to spend their ass-dollars on support clerks and fraud investigations, rather than investing in the total monopolisation of online billing.
Falling rates are a fallacious concept. Insurance, Government and other organised criminal associations are already screwing us silly, and there is little we can do against it. They will rise and rise until the common citizen decides it is no longer affordable to play by the rules, and that will result in civil disobedience and/or a really nasty war against The Man.
Or we might just move to Mexico and give everyone the finger.
Apache rocks the shiznit all right, but to me this means 8 years of being forked halfway-to-hell because the core Apache group is so adamant about dismissing user-submitted patches. Don't get me wrong, I love Apache. I just hate having to custom-tweak it to get it working in a logical way (for me). Stuff like easily-refreshed configs for hosting providers, and non-broken child spawning logic (because I'm still on 1.3x), and a few other ridiculous nags that have been ignored for the sake of "purity".
This is going to end up something like Mozilla, where the 3rd-party forks are more popular than the original.
I want to register as a sex offender too, sounds like a great way to meet similar-minded freaks =)
Seriously this sounds like something out of The Onion gone un-funny. You'd think this person could sue someone to death over such a frivolous accusation. The whole taboo over sex in the northwest is just sickening, and is most likely the cause of all this chaos in the first place. Stop parading sex as the evil of all evils, and people will quickly lose interest in rape because it's no longer "cool" in an "evil" sense.
I personally don't care all that much about fuel conservation. Yeah yeah I hear you whining about pollution and stuff.. well then let's make a cleaner-burning fuel/engine combination. The main reason I don't want an electric car is because it would require half a hydro-dam to power the ridiculous acceleration I get out of my tricked-out Focus RS:) And the other half of the dam to power my stereo.
The Prius/Insight and other hybrids seems like damn cool tech to me, stuff that is just brushing the surface for the cars of the next 5-10 years, but those cars just aren't for me. If I could drop a 426 Hemi in my little hatchback I'd plop 30$ of gas a day with a big shit-eating grin for all the enjoyment I'd squeeze out of it. But then, I drive for work AND play.
Me, I got out of DDR because of the community. At first it was fun, we had this little 'clique', everyone knew each other by nickname and there were perhaps a dozen of 'us'. Then the teenies got into it and brought along all the trouble that hormonally-confused teens represent. The whole scene turned into a sex-politics mess, people getting excluded from events because they had dumped so-and-so, or were fscking a non-DDR'er. It got really fricking WEIRD.
And then the arcade moved to a new location that's 10 miles farther and I just don't feel like driving 45 minutes to play a game. So I started playing occasionally at the local cinema, where there is no 'scene' and it's just a bunch of passers-by and amateurish kids drooling to death as they admire my lee+ s+epp!ng sk!LLz and ask in amazement "how can a fat fsck like you pull a max combo on that ?"
And then I kick the living poo out of them and sell their internals on ebay. Hence the absence of a 'scene'.
Thank you for blowing my mind with that video. And for removing any shred of interest in me for PNM or Beatmania ever again. I thought I sucked only moderately, now I know there is no hope for this bemani enthusiast.
I've been longing for the opposite: a complete replacement. Give me fake teeth that will never break or stain. Teeth that I can just roll down the window at the automated car wash and smile at the colored wax jets:) Teeth that can handle the abuse.
There is nothing more annoying for me than to be constantly reminded to brush and floss and visit the wallet-raping dentist twice a year. Heck, make them snap-on so I can take them out, toss them in a polishing machine for 30 seconds and be good for the day.
But don't go reinventing what's been broke since the dawn of time.
Oh, I forgot, I have BEEN to just about every gov't branch in the Ottawa area. My assignment was to the Passport Office but word quickly spread of my fresh skills and people were asking for my advice all around. My 'home' department would lend me to other organisations for days/weeks to adapt some of my HR apps and offer my input on internet-related strategies. Heck the CEO didn't even call the help desk anymore, he'd just walk over and ask me to fix his workstation, or have a crack at an uncooperative spreadsheet macro.
And now to get back on topic: Lindows/Linspire isn't what I can transitioning to Linux. I honestly don't care what they run on the desktop, as long as it works for whoever is sitting at that desk. Blowing half a mil on Oracle server just to store employee lists and job positions however, is extreme overkill like only the Gov't can afford. Even more so when the OSS alternatives are compatible with Windows and thus can be transitioned gradually without having to replace servers (yet).
The worst, absolute worst part of all this is that many organisations are already using commercial UNIX of some sort, be it HP-UX or Tru64 or whatever else came with their top-dollar server arrays. Why couldn't they wake up and use BSD or Linux instead, rather than have several flavors of closed Unices and have to send server admins to hundreds of hours of training (at substantial cost).. it just baffles me.
I remember getting my ass flamed to hell for suggesting Apache as an alternative to IIS (which was then getting the beating of a thousand DOS attacks).
Then I suggested PHP and even built most of the Intranet's dynamic content with it. Worked great! Then they hired someone to translate all the PHP back to ASP with identical functionality, because nobody in the organisation "knew" PHP, to which I replied that none of their developers really "knew" ASP either, judging from the quality and reliability of their code. But by that time I was already a fiery demon in their eyes so I took all the low stabs I could swing.
The research branches are open to OSS because they tend to gather the brightest minds they can find. NRC is a great place to work in I.T. because most of the staff is working on new stuff, since the department itself doesn't have a business-like mandate of producing legal documents, handling money, or other traditional governmental functions.
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This stuff happens more than you think. It's called a uniform job. They joke about it in the movies all the time, but it takes great skill and composure.
Just think about it, in an office if the main printer quits working, someone will call the help desk, who will (after rebooting stuff at random) call HP or Xerox to send over a repairman. The repairman is a stranger to the company, but since he's wearing an HP badge and is dressed like a repairman, he gets in real easy, maybe he just needs to know the name of someone on the inside to let him in. Then he can pretend to check things and a short time later he might conclude that he needs to "bring it in the shop". This stuff happens all the time.
Now if an imposter were to try this, and act his part well enough, he just scored himself a nice big office laser printer worth several thousand dollars. By the time the staff starts worrying about their printer's whereabouts he will be long gone and nobody will remember him.
Dude, just go ahead and play through Halo on the PC with your key+mouse. Then do the same on Xbox. While most console FPS in the past were done so poorly that it was just PURGATORY to play it on a gamepad, Halo actually got it right and it was delicious. Even for a novice, the controls just worked well from the get-go. You didn't have trouble aiming, things got tossed where you expected them to be tossed, and you managed to preserve your virtual buttocks long enough to see the next army of alien foes drop down.
As an aside, importers like Lik-Sang and Blaze have been selling USB adapters for the Xbox controllers for quite some time now. It is only logical that Microsoft has taken notice and wants to sell a 40$ controller for PC, rather than a 10$ adapter. The Xbox has proven its controllers' virtues (both the big and small one), so now they're simply going to adapt a successful product to a new platform. It's like playing the lottery when you already know the winning numbers; sounds like good business to me.
All I seem to hear is flame stories about the apache devs totally blasting some poor little hacker and his clever tweak. Luddites, I tell you!
Why is the tech world spending more time doing legal work than tech work ? The guys filing these bullsh!t documents are making more money than the guys whose work is being protected.
This is (traditionally) the job of the distro maintainers. In order to pull this off we need a managed driver repository that will hold all the drivers and serve requests for them. Then you have to deal with differing kernel versions / patches / platforms.
There is a reason why drivers aren't automated and tossed into packaging systems like APT, is that the whole "automated" aspect of it is rather scary. What if the driver is buggy, what if it bombs when paired with some other hardware, what if... just look at Microsoft, who have invested many long hours and dollars into Windows Update, and most of the driver updates still get whacked up (ahem, NForce!). Here's another nasty stab: certain types of hardware are often bundled with utilities/apps to work with them, like a mixer for the sound card, a video chat client for the web cam, or an imaging tool for the scanner. While compiling and loading a kernel module is fairly standardized, the same cannot be said of auxilliary software.
Yes I know, I was just being troll'ish. This is slashdot after all =)
I have been thinking this exact same thing. Now if only the legal bullcrap were lighter, I'd just open my own damn insurance company and insure only myself (and relatives,etc). Invest my own damned money, play the stock market / mutual funds and in the end if I live a long healthy life then I can take my insurance money and buy myself a nice comfy retirement.
The big flaw with insurance is that, no matter what happens, you're gonna die sooner or later. They _have_ to pay, unless they escape it with some screwy fine print clause (like if you live past 75 we won't insure you anymore). So logically if the business model revolves around paying every single client, then they have to be making huge stinking piles of cash along the years in order to turn a profit and not have to worry about the fact that you're not immortal.
My head hurts.
I agree, it is not the most constructive or sensible thing to do, but as we all saw this past week with that decapitation, sometimes there is nothing else you can do but shock the hell out of people to get them to see exactly how bad things are and how nasty the truth can be.
To the typical bean counter, destroying cameras only means they get to buy more cameras. To someone with at least half a brain, it means somebody out there really hates those cameras and it might be a good idea to figure out why they are hated. Sure, there is always random vandalism, be it by kids, drunkards or the common self-righteous idiot, but if the powers-that-be aren't listening to our honest opinions and concerns, then we need to remind those meat puppets exactly who's in charge here: nobody and everybody, all at the same time. That is democracy. If one prick things he's better than the rest, that prick needs to be reminded that his blood is the same color as ours.
In its purest form, democracy would be a cooperative form of anarchy.
I guess one could work out a system with #included files and apachectl dancing. I'm just used to changing things in real-time on other servers and seeing the result immediately. Some form of connection monitoring would also be nice (e.g. to see what work is being done on socket X). Logs will tell you what happened, but a live peek inside the brain will let you target that one mofo that keeps chugging all your bandwidth and/or runs a truckload of exploit tests.
This isn't a bad idea, but it already exists. It's called Kudzu and has many other names. You just grab the list of PCI ID's and cross-ref them with your driver signatures. What would be cool is offering a prompt for different versions of the same driver, or alternate drivers for the same hardware (in case one of them bombs on your rig).
What I'd rather see effort pumped into is NOTEBOOK DRIVERS. Please people I have this shiny screaming Dell hotness but I can't get anything to run on it because I'm lacking an Ethernet driver/sound/whatever. Notebooks have become modular things just like desktops, with many models sharing the same chipsets. Maybe an easy X setup that deals with non-standard screen resolutions and dimensions (1680x1050 anyone?).
Make it work on more machines, and more people will be able/want to use it.
Buy whatever they're selling, put it on your Visa (not MC or Amex... well ok, maybe Amex). Buy as many of them as you can fit on your credit, wait a few days then file a fraud complaint about the transaction.
No, better, buy them all in seperate orders, then have them all charged back. When the spammer has racked up a good chunk of chargebacks and complaints, they will either quit (unlikely) or eventually their merchant account will be revoked and they will be SOL.
As a bonus it causes the evil Visa to spend their ass-dollars on support clerks and fraud investigations, rather than investing in the total monopolisation of online billing.
Falling rates are a fallacious concept. Insurance, Government and other organised criminal associations are already screwing us silly, and there is little we can do against it. They will rise and rise until the common citizen decides it is no longer affordable to play by the rules, and that will result in civil disobedience and/or a really nasty war against The Man.
Or we might just move to Mexico and give everyone the finger.
We should vote for a tax on stupid governors. There's your complete medical budget right there.
Apache rocks the shiznit all right, but to me this means 8 years of being forked halfway-to-hell because the core Apache group is so adamant about dismissing user-submitted patches. Don't get me wrong, I love Apache. I just hate having to custom-tweak it to get it working in a logical way (for me). Stuff like easily-refreshed configs for hosting providers, and non-broken child spawning logic (because I'm still on 1.3x), and a few other ridiculous nags that have been ignored for the sake of "purity".
This is going to end up something like Mozilla, where the 3rd-party forks are more popular than the original.
I want to register as a sex offender too, sounds like a great way to meet similar-minded freaks =)
Seriously this sounds like something out of The Onion gone un-funny. You'd think this person could sue someone to death over such a frivolous accusation. The whole taboo over sex in the northwest is just sickening, and is most likely the cause of all this chaos in the first place. Stop parading sex as the evil of all evils, and people will quickly lose interest in rape because it's no longer "cool" in an "evil" sense.
Why do I have the feeling this is going to be a 64-way nitrous-cooled Athlon64 beast ? And you can bet it will be running SETI.
Is this like non-alcoholic beer ?
Non-fat lard ?
Non-dairy creamer ?
Let's all miss the non-point of non-food.
Fear me, for I am Andrew Dice Clay.
I personally don't care all that much about fuel conservation. Yeah yeah I hear you whining about pollution and stuff.. well then let's make a cleaner-burning fuel/engine combination. The main reason I don't want an electric car is because it would require half a hydro-dam to power the ridiculous acceleration I get out of my tricked-out Focus RS :) And the other half of the dam to power my stereo.
The Prius/Insight and other hybrids seems like damn cool tech to me, stuff that is just brushing the surface for the cars of the next 5-10 years, but those cars just aren't for me. If I could drop a 426 Hemi in my little hatchback I'd plop 30$ of gas a day with a big shit-eating grin for all the enjoyment I'd squeeze out of it. But then, I drive for work AND play.
Me, I got out of DDR because of the community. At first it was fun, we had this little 'clique', everyone knew each other by nickname and there were perhaps a dozen of 'us'. Then the teenies got into it and brought along all the trouble that hormonally-confused teens represent. The whole scene turned into a sex-politics mess, people getting excluded from events because they had dumped so-and-so, or were fscking a non-DDR'er. It got really fricking WEIRD.
And then the arcade moved to a new location that's 10 miles farther and I just don't feel like driving 45 minutes to play a game. So I started playing occasionally at the local cinema, where there is no 'scene' and it's just a bunch of passers-by and amateurish kids drooling to death as they admire my lee+ s+epp!ng sk!LLz and ask in amazement "how can a fat fsck like you pull a max combo on that ?"
And then I kick the living poo out of them and sell their internals on ebay. Hence the absence of a 'scene'.
Thank you for blowing my mind with that video. And for removing any shred of interest in me for PNM or Beatmania ever again. I thought I sucked only moderately, now I know there is no hope for this bemani enthusiast.
I've been longing for the opposite: a complete replacement. Give me fake teeth that will never break or stain. Teeth that I can just roll down the window at the automated car wash and smile at the colored wax jets :) Teeth that can handle the abuse.
There is nothing more annoying for me than to be constantly reminded to brush and floss and visit the wallet-raping dentist twice a year. Heck, make them snap-on so I can take them out, toss them in a polishing machine for 30 seconds and be good for the day.
But don't go reinventing what's been broke since the dawn of time.
Oh, I forgot, I have BEEN to just about every gov't branch in the Ottawa area. My assignment was to the Passport Office but word quickly spread of my fresh skills and people were asking for my advice all around. My 'home' department would lend me to other organisations for days/weeks to adapt some of my HR apps and offer my input on internet-related strategies. Heck the CEO didn't even call the help desk anymore, he'd just walk over and ask me to fix his workstation, or have a crack at an uncooperative spreadsheet macro.
And now to get back on topic: Lindows/Linspire isn't what I can transitioning to Linux. I honestly don't care what they run on the desktop, as long as it works for whoever is sitting at that desk. Blowing half a mil on Oracle server just to store employee lists and job positions however, is extreme overkill like only the Gov't can afford. Even more so when the OSS alternatives are compatible with Windows and thus can be transitioned gradually without having to replace servers (yet).
The worst, absolute worst part of all this is that many organisations are already using commercial UNIX of some sort, be it HP-UX or Tru64 or whatever else came with their top-dollar server arrays. Why couldn't they wake up and use BSD or Linux instead, rather than have several flavors of closed Unices and have to send server admins to hundreds of hours of training (at substantial cost).. it just baffles me.
Hehe you know exactly what I'm talking about.
I remember getting my ass flamed to hell for suggesting Apache as an alternative to IIS (which was then getting the beating of a thousand DOS attacks).
Then I suggested PHP and even built most of the Intranet's dynamic content with it. Worked great! Then they hired someone to translate all the PHP back to ASP with identical functionality, because nobody in the organisation "knew" PHP, to which I replied that none of their developers really "knew" ASP either, judging from the quality and reliability of their code. But by that time I was already a fiery demon in their eyes so I took all the low stabs I could swing.
The research branches are open to OSS because they tend to gather the brightest minds they can find. NRC is a great place to work in I.T. because most of the staff is working on new stuff, since the department itself doesn't have a business-like mandate of producing legal documents, handling money, or other traditional governmental functions.