Just because he was a man with explosives does not make him a terrorist. He intended to blow up the House of Lords, a very specific political target. He would have been a political assassin, not unlike Lee Harvey Oswald.
Terrorists, as the title suggests, spread terror by attacking random citizens. The whole point of terrorism is to instill wide-spread panic by implying that anyone could be the next target, man/woman/child of any status.
I can relate to the idea of challenging/attacking a nation's leaders. We entrust those people with the power to run the country on our behalf, and if they abuse that power and turn it against us, they should expect retribution. In that sense, I think Guy Fawkes is the ideal mascot for the Anonymous movement.
All this is, is rflow for dummies... dummies who are smart enough to get a DD-WRT compatible router and flash it. That said, I just picked up a cheap Buffalo 802.11N router, and it came with DD-WRT preinstalled, so this may be more accessible than it once was.
Yep, the only thing that's "new" is how cheaply they can be made today. Back in the 90s I worked with a 10ft by 40ft optical sensor array, which drove a synthesizer as a big performance-art techno theremin.
It had multitouch, though certain combinations would not fire due to line of sight limitations. It was certainly good enough to amaze our druggy audience:)
Nice headline, but an install goal is little more than an off-the-cuff, baseless fantasy.
If they want 200 million users, they'd better stop making that Microsoft Bob clone as the default WM. Yes I mean Unity.
The idea of a user-friendly desktop Linux distro is a bit zany to me, unless someone puts out a comprehensive set of libraries that ensure a consistent UI experience. None of this bleeding-edge broken KDE crap, nor Gnome 3 acid-tripping. Desktop Linux needs its Cocoa equivalent, something really easy to implement so software developers will WANT to use it, and it needs to be applied EVERYWHERE. None of this QT vs wxWidgets vs Gnome-whatever... One rock-solid set of skinnable widgets so users can feel at home in any application.
Until we see that sort of cooperation, people (who are not sysadmins) will continue to find easy reasons to avoid Linux. Why do you think so many FOSS and web developers have switched to Macs ? It's a Unix with a decent GUI. I'm certainly not fond of OSX, but those turtleneck-wearing cultists have succeeded where thousands of volunteer developers continue to fail. If anyone over at Canonical believes Unity is any different, they need to step out of their little bubble and take a look at their true competitors: Windows and Mac.
The way to look at Groupon, or any other kind of coupon/discount deal, is as a form of promotion/advertising.
If you take out a magazine or billboard ad, you're paying up-front for something that may or may not generate new business.
If you set up a Groupon promo, the only cost is to provide your service or product at next-to-no-profit. This is a very small price to pay and you're only paying it for actual clients. If a client winds up not using it within the allowed time frame, you end up pocketing your half of the Groupon sale price.
For many small businesses this winds up being a better deal than traditional advertising.
That's kind of the point though. Anonymous is not a specific group. You could say they draw upon some kind of meta-community, but it is really just a label like Alan Smithee is to movie credits.
I see them as two main entities. One is a still-faceless but perhaps consistent core group, who lead most events. The other is random nobodies who choose not to claim ownership of their actions, because the important thing is the action itself, not the person performing it. Both tend to act in a concerted effort favoring the individual over the corporation.
Of course, any troublemaker can claim they are "Anonymous", but then I can also go into a bar and tell people I'm the Queen of France. Does anyone really care ? No.
Not true at all. Programming is about logic, and logic is what you need when you're troubleshooting a tangled mess of gear and wiring. Then you write the scripts that monitor and maintain everything, that's pure programming.
Routing can be a headfull, but again, if you've already nurtured a critical, information-heavy thought process, it should be easy to pick up.
As someone who made the same transition over a decade ago, I can't quite remember how I did it, and it certainly had its moments, but I always had the tools and problem-solving skills to work my way through problems. Can't quite nail a concept ? Write a program that tests your assumptions. I learned more things that way than from any books or teachers.
Small businesses tend to have rapidly-changing needs and few staff. If they have less development work coming in, and a pressing need to replace a sysadmin, it's perfectly sane to ask the developer if he can switch hats, given sufficient resources and support. For the employee, it keeps him in a job. For the company, it saves them from having to hire a new guy, which is neither cheap nor enjoyable, and they'd have to train the new guy anyway, which is freakin' hard when the senior sysadmin is already long gone.
I don't think it's such a stretch, the two roles tend to complement each other quite well. A good programmer-analyst already possesses 2/3rds of the knowledge required to be a competent sysadmin. You know the shell scripts will be a work of art:) I don't know why you think it's at the bottom of the ladder, because I see it the other way around. Programmers are a dime a dozen (see China). Good sysadmins are damn hard to find, which is why I have no shortage of contracts coming in from past employers and acquaintances. Trust is a big factor, because really, the sysadmin controls access to every resource, and thus by necessity has unlimited access to all your data and equipment. Who would you trust more, some kid walking in off the street with the price tag still hanging off his jacket, or an employee you've known for years ?
The first thing I noticed upon loading the page, was that fuzzy turd thing that I can only guess is the Waterbear logo.
All in all, this looks interesting but the UI needs a serious makeover. I flipped through the element library and it was not quite obvious how things worked. Yeah, I get the puzzle piece concept, but it needs more visual feedback if this is truly to become an idiot-friendly scripting tool. If I'm dragging an object, show me right away which targets would be valid to plug it, instead of waiting until I'm hovering right over it. I don't really see myself using this for any serious work, but as a learning tool I think it could have tremendous value, since it shows you the resulting code.
For myself, I'll pass. JQuery is easy enough as it is, I rarely write more than a few lines of JS code per page.
Yep, most Anonymous attacks involve masses of non-technical users joining a LOIC DDOS. It's essentially a human "botnet", just as cheap and effective too!
Well, yes. It is rather lame that in 2011 you still can't map a drive to your iPod and copy files over, but that's Apple for you.
That said, munging file names is not always a bad thing. I do that with my own music collection, rather than fussing with funky characters in file names. I extract the ID3 tags to a database, then rename the file to match the row ID. If, by some disaster, I were to lose that database, I can always batch-rename the files according to their ID3 tags.
The problem with all that automated software is they lack configurability or interoperability. Maybe I like having my folders arranged a certain way. Maybe I store my music on a file server, and I want the parsing/sorting/searching to happen server-side. Or, maybe, just maybe, I like the fact that Winamp does one thing and does it well. It has a compact, functionality-driven interface. It loads up instantly, even with thousands-long playlists. CPU usage is minimal, and its plugin architecture lets me extend it to new formats and sound APIs such as ASIO, taking advantage of my pro audio gear.
Think of it as an application of "the Unix way": simple, single purpose tools strung together to create something that works efficiently while being tailored to each user's tastes. You just can't do that with these giant monolithic media-whoring behemoths.
I'm with you... I can't stand these "modern" media players that insist on bossing your library around, when good old Winamp does its singular job perfectly. I use a spreadsheet-style ID3 tagger on any new acquisitions, which also moves them into directories according to genre/artist/album.
That said, I'm also importing some tags into a MySQL DB, which feeds a simple PHP site where I can search and spit out playlists. Very handy if I'm at a friend's house since I can easily stream tunes from home. I suppose Ampache does something similar, but I just rolled my own.
There are some of us who believe in a resource-based economy, rather than the current money-based system which is broken beyond repair. Within that context, resources expended to compete, are resources wasted outright. Competition is a destructive process.
No amount of dickwaving is worth the money I spent on my 2x2 grid setup. If I wanted to impress random strangers, I'd have bought a cool pimp hat. I don't invite people in to my home just to show off my PC, unless they explicitly ask out of curiosity. I have a few buddies who also favor multi-display setups, but they do a lot of media work so it is well justified.
It's a scary machine, but it's once I put it to use that people get really freaked out. Email here, IM there, skype off to the side, 3-4 text editors full of web/css/javascript, three browsers, half-dozen VMs, excel sheets, 3-4 file managers, two FTP clients, dozen putty windows. It's not that I'm that great a multitasker, I just hate overlapping windows, as I'm typically reading from two or three, and typing into a few others, switching back and forth a lot. I don't want to be flipping through the taskbar items to find that one IM box I need.
And then I'll go and play Mahjong or something... I'm not a huge gamer. League (DOTA clone) is about as gamey as I get these days. I need something to kill the time while running compiles and test suites on virtualized clusters, and I'm too busy/bored to play WoW anymore. I did try triple-wide gaming... meh. It's cool on my buddy's system because he has the space to angle them properly, but for me, I had to flip them into portrait mode, which was like having a 50" TV with bezels in the way. If I played more racing sims, it might be cool, but for shooters, MMOs and strategy games there really is no benefit.
You know what, Scott ? I'll take you up on that. It is only fair that I take another look and see what's changed over the past 12 months. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong and reverse my negative stance, because I do believe this country has a pressing need to be informed and sensitized on the many topics largely ignored by blue, red, and orange.
I have this weird thing where I sometimes enjoy bad movies... you know, when they're so unbelievably bad your brain gets an underflow error and thinks it's supremely good.
Tron Legacy was not such. It was not cheesy enough, didn't have any random epic quotables, and no over-the-top ridiculous scenes to reenact in drunken moments.
Or maybe this is just a continuation of the bullshit factory, so they can use this made-up "intelligence" to further violate human rights.
- Sir, you're being shipped off to Gitmo. We, uh, "found" your name on Bin Laden's iPad. - B-B-BUT I'M CMDRTACO!?!?! - That's right, "Commander Taco". It's on the iPad. The one we so conveniently found next to that totally not photoshopped picture of the dead terrorist. The one we totally didn't invent just to generate trillions in profits for the military-industrial complex. - B-B-BUT I'M A FUCKING I.T. GUY - Sure you are, but it says right here on the iPad: "I, Osama Bin Laden, think Commander Taco is the most awesomest terrorist evar." And that's, like, totally admissible evidence, you know, because, like, we have the guns.
A real VOIP engineer would have rented a cheap SIP line from the Ukraine and fired off forged packets with his wife's caller ID.
Or he could have used a trusty old USR Sportster plugged into the landline. You know, like we did in the 80s and 90s.
I'd say the big problem with techies murdering their wives is they fail to plan for the social ramifications. Sure, you can launch the body into outer space, never to be recovered, but how solid is your alibi story ? Do you have the acting chops to lie right to her family and friends' faces ?
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorist ?
Just because he was a man with explosives does not make him a terrorist. He intended to blow up the House of Lords, a very specific political target. He would have been a political assassin, not unlike Lee Harvey Oswald.
Terrorists, as the title suggests, spread terror by attacking random citizens. The whole point of terrorism is to instill wide-spread panic by implying that anyone could be the next target, man/woman/child of any status.
I can relate to the idea of challenging/attacking a nation's leaders. We entrust those people with the power to run the country on our behalf, and if they abuse that power and turn it against us, they should expect retribution. In that sense, I think Guy Fawkes is the ideal mascot for the Anonymous movement.
All this is, is rflow for dummies... dummies who are smart enough to get a DD-WRT compatible router and flash it. That said, I just picked up a cheap Buffalo 802.11N router, and it came with DD-WRT preinstalled, so this may be more accessible than it once was.
Yep, the only thing that's "new" is how cheaply they can be made today. Back in the 90s I worked with a 10ft by 40ft optical sensor array, which drove a synthesizer as a big performance-art techno theremin.
It had multitouch, though certain combinations would not fire due to line of sight limitations. It was certainly good enough to amaze our druggy audience :)
Nice headline, but an install goal is little more than an off-the-cuff, baseless fantasy.
If they want 200 million users, they'd better stop making that Microsoft Bob clone as the default WM. Yes I mean Unity.
The idea of a user-friendly desktop Linux distro is a bit zany to me, unless someone puts out a comprehensive set of libraries that ensure a consistent UI experience. None of this bleeding-edge broken KDE crap, nor Gnome 3 acid-tripping. Desktop Linux needs its Cocoa equivalent, something really easy to implement so software developers will WANT to use it, and it needs to be applied EVERYWHERE. None of this QT vs wxWidgets vs Gnome-whatever... One rock-solid set of skinnable widgets so users can feel at home in any application.
Until we see that sort of cooperation, people (who are not sysadmins) will continue to find easy reasons to avoid Linux. Why do you think so many FOSS and web developers have switched to Macs ? It's a Unix with a decent GUI. I'm certainly not fond of OSX, but those turtleneck-wearing cultists have succeeded where thousands of volunteer developers continue to fail. If anyone over at Canonical believes Unity is any different, they need to step out of their little bubble and take a look at their true competitors: Windows and Mac.
The way to look at Groupon, or any other kind of coupon/discount deal, is as a form of promotion/advertising.
If you take out a magazine or billboard ad, you're paying up-front for something that may or may not generate new business.
If you set up a Groupon promo, the only cost is to provide your service or product at next-to-no-profit. This is a very small price to pay and you're only paying it for actual clients. If a client winds up not using it within the allowed time frame, you end up pocketing your half of the Groupon sale price.
For many small businesses this winds up being a better deal than traditional advertising.
Well then, I'd say Cisco needs to tighten their hiring practices. That's some serious lack of creativity and forethought...
That's kind of the point though. Anonymous is not a specific group. You could say they draw upon some kind of meta-community, but it is really just a label like Alan Smithee is to movie credits.
I see them as two main entities. One is a still-faceless but perhaps consistent core group, who lead most events. The other is random nobodies who choose not to claim ownership of their actions, because the important thing is the action itself, not the person performing it. Both tend to act in a concerted effort favoring the individual over the corporation.
Of course, any troublemaker can claim they are "Anonymous", but then I can also go into a bar and tell people I'm the Queen of France. Does anyone really care ? No.
If it behaved exactly like Winamp, I'd still keep using Winamp, because it's an order of magnitude faster than iTunes.
Not true at all. Programming is about logic, and logic is what you need when you're troubleshooting a tangled mess of gear and wiring. Then you write the scripts that monitor and maintain everything, that's pure programming.
Routing can be a headfull, but again, if you've already nurtured a critical, information-heavy thought process, it should be easy to pick up.
As someone who made the same transition over a decade ago, I can't quite remember how I did it, and it certainly had its moments, but I always had the tools and problem-solving skills to work my way through problems. Can't quite nail a concept ? Write a program that tests your assumptions. I learned more things that way than from any books or teachers.
Small businesses tend to have rapidly-changing needs and few staff. If they have less development work coming in, and a pressing need to replace a sysadmin, it's perfectly sane to ask the developer if he can switch hats, given sufficient resources and support. For the employee, it keeps him in a job. For the company, it saves them from having to hire a new guy, which is neither cheap nor enjoyable, and they'd have to train the new guy anyway, which is freakin' hard when the senior sysadmin is already long gone.
I don't think it's such a stretch, the two roles tend to complement each other quite well. A good programmer-analyst already possesses 2/3rds of the knowledge required to be a competent sysadmin. You know the shell scripts will be a work of art :) I don't know why you think it's at the bottom of the ladder, because I see it the other way around. Programmers are a dime a dozen (see China). Good sysadmins are damn hard to find, which is why I have no shortage of contracts coming in from past employers and acquaintances. Trust is a big factor, because really, the sysadmin controls access to every resource, and thus by necessity has unlimited access to all your data and equipment. Who would you trust more, some kid walking in off the street with the price tag still hanging off his jacket, or an employee you've known for years ?
The first thing I noticed upon loading the page, was that fuzzy turd thing that I can only guess is the Waterbear logo.
All in all, this looks interesting but the UI needs a serious makeover. I flipped through the element library and it was not quite obvious how things worked. Yeah, I get the puzzle piece concept, but it needs more visual feedback if this is truly to become an idiot-friendly scripting tool. If I'm dragging an object, show me right away which targets would be valid to plug it, instead of waiting until I'm hovering right over it. I don't really see myself using this for any serious work, but as a learning tool I think it could have tremendous value, since it shows you the resulting code.
For myself, I'll pass. JQuery is easy enough as it is, I rarely write more than a few lines of JS code per page.
Yep, most Anonymous attacks involve masses of non-technical users joining a LOIC DDOS. It's essentially a human "botnet", just as cheap and effective too!
Well, yes. It is rather lame that in 2011 you still can't map a drive to your iPod and copy files over, but that's Apple for you.
That said, munging file names is not always a bad thing. I do that with my own music collection, rather than fussing with funky characters in file names. I extract the ID3 tags to a database, then rename the file to match the row ID. If, by some disaster, I were to lose that database, I can always batch-rename the files according to their ID3 tags.
The problem with all that automated software is they lack configurability or interoperability. Maybe I like having my folders arranged a certain way. Maybe I store my music on a file server, and I want the parsing/sorting/searching to happen server-side. Or, maybe, just maybe, I like the fact that Winamp does one thing and does it well. It has a compact, functionality-driven interface. It loads up instantly, even with thousands-long playlists. CPU usage is minimal, and its plugin architecture lets me extend it to new formats and sound APIs such as ASIO, taking advantage of my pro audio gear.
Think of it as an application of "the Unix way": simple, single purpose tools strung together to create something that works efficiently while being tailored to each user's tastes. You just can't do that with these giant monolithic media-whoring behemoths.
I'm with you... I can't stand these "modern" media players that insist on bossing your library around, when good old Winamp does its singular job perfectly. I use a spreadsheet-style ID3 tagger on any new acquisitions, which also moves them into directories according to genre/artist/album.
That said, I'm also importing some tags into a MySQL DB, which feeds a simple PHP site where I can search and spit out playlists. Very handy if I'm at a friend's house since I can easily stream tunes from home. I suppose Ampache does something similar, but I just rolled my own.
There are some of us who believe in a resource-based economy, rather than the current money-based system which is broken beyond repair. Within that context, resources expended to compete, are resources wasted outright. Competition is a destructive process.
No amount of dickwaving is worth the money I spent on my 2x2 grid setup. If I wanted to impress random strangers, I'd have bought a cool pimp hat. I don't invite people in to my home just to show off my PC, unless they explicitly ask out of curiosity. I have a few buddies who also favor multi-display setups, but they do a lot of media work so it is well justified.
It's a scary machine, but it's once I put it to use that people get really freaked out. Email here, IM there, skype off to the side, 3-4 text editors full of web/css/javascript, three browsers, half-dozen VMs, excel sheets, 3-4 file managers, two FTP clients, dozen putty windows. It's not that I'm that great a multitasker, I just hate overlapping windows, as I'm typically reading from two or three, and typing into a few others, switching back and forth a lot. I don't want to be flipping through the taskbar items to find that one IM box I need.
And then I'll go and play Mahjong or something... I'm not a huge gamer. League (DOTA clone) is about as gamey as I get these days. I need something to kill the time while running compiles and test suites on virtualized clusters, and I'm too busy/bored to play WoW anymore. I did try triple-wide gaming... meh. It's cool on my buddy's system because he has the space to angle them properly, but for me, I had to flip them into portrait mode, which was like having a 50" TV with bezels in the way. If I played more racing sims, it might be cool, but for shooters, MMOs and strategy games there really is no benefit.
You know what, Scott ? I'll take you up on that. It is only fair that I take another look and see what's changed over the past 12 months. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong and reverse my negative stance, because I do believe this country has a pressing need to be informed and sensitized on the many topics largely ignored by blue, red, and orange.
I have this weird thing where I sometimes enjoy bad movies... you know, when they're so unbelievably bad your brain gets an underflow error and thinks it's supremely good.
Tron Legacy was not such. It was not cheesy enough, didn't have any random epic quotables, and no over-the-top ridiculous scenes to reenact in drunken moments.
It was just a 2-hour long WTF.
Or maybe this is just a continuation of the bullshit factory, so they can use this made-up "intelligence" to further violate human rights.
- Sir, you're being shipped off to Gitmo. We, uh, "found" your name on Bin Laden's iPad.
- B-B-BUT I'M CMDRTACO!?!?!
- That's right, "Commander Taco". It's on the iPad. The one we so conveniently found next to that totally not photoshopped picture of the dead terrorist. The one we totally didn't invent just to generate trillions in profits for the military-industrial complex.
- B-B-BUT I'M A FUCKING I.T. GUY
- Sure you are, but it says right here on the iPad: "I, Osama Bin Laden, think Commander Taco is the most awesomest terrorist evar." And that's, like, totally admissible evidence, you know, because, like, we have the guns.
A real VOIP engineer would have rented a cheap SIP line from the Ukraine and fired off forged packets with his wife's caller ID.
Or he could have used a trusty old USR Sportster plugged into the landline. You know, like we did in the 80s and 90s.
I'd say the big problem with techies murdering their wives is they fail to plan for the social ramifications. Sure, you can launch the body into outer space, never to be recovered, but how solid is your alibi story ? Do you have the acting chops to lie right to her family and friends' faces ?
There are still people alive today to remember that quote ? I thought I was the only one who had escaped suicide after paying to see Antitrust.
s/turn/hinge/ and it will make more sense. English being my (close) second language, it took me a moment to parse as well.
Meh. All money is funny money anyway. If you believe otherwise, you need to read up on fractional reserve banking.
Stocks, dollar bills, government bonds... none of these hold any intrinsic value, and thus all of them can become worthless with a stroke of the pen.
Go tell that to the Team Fortress guys...