While it's almost certainly a hoax
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What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
The articles clearly indicate that it's a transportation device. The speculation is that the civil structures would have to be changed because currently everything is designed around cars : Roads, parking lots, etc. The mentions towards old economy forces obviously implicates the car manufacturers and the gigantic economic partners of those car companies.
Jobs is quoted as saying: "...If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."
Cities are currently entirely engineered around cars and the need to get those cars around. If it weren't for cars our social structure would be quite a bit different.
Kemper says the invention will "sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking."
Implication there is hovering, flying, etc. Sweeping over seems to be a hint of something that don't ride on the ground.
D-VHS seems to be really a new, improved version of S-VHS (apart from the obvious technological differences - I'm talking purely in regards to its placement in the consumer marketplace) and we all saw where that went : Nowhere. Despite having a much greater resolution and quality of signal no one was willing to pony up the extra for the player and the media which was far more expensive.
Mass consumers only ever buy anything because it has convenience features. While lip service is paid to quality, the reality is that quality means very little to the majority of people. If people were willing to stick with the inconveniences of VHS they would LITERALLY stick with VHS : DVHS offers nothing that the average consumer wants apart from recording, and even then some of the settop boxes are far more convenient and are filling that marketplace. DVD on the other hand offers lots of extras, a cute menuing system, and most importantly instant access.
Expect to start hearing a lot more whispering about DVD-2 as it is definitely in the planning stages right now. DVD-2 will primarily represent a very large increase in capacity, hence resolution. Of course they would never market it as just that as it'd never sell, but instead DVD-2 players with DVD-1 capabilities will just flood the market to the point where the new content is viable.
How can the war be stopped?
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"Traffic"
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One thing that I've often been curious about is how the WoD could effectively be stopped. For instance I'm a Canadian and generally feel a very liberal attitude among most Canadians that the WOD is absurd and should be abolished. Marijuana is pretty much decriminalized and while you'll be arrested if you sit in front of police headquarters smoking up, generally it is an ignored "crime". There are still images of beatnick police officers standing in front of grossly overstated confiscated "Crops" but these are less frequent and received with much more scorn and derision than every before.
However what if Canada took the initiative and decided to legalize a wide variety of drugs through a national production and distribution chain (for example cocaine, LSD, etc.). Aren't there worldwide conventions and agreements dictating the general drug laws of most countries? What if Canada decided to ignore these (if they do exist) : Could you imagine the treatment Canada would get? Firstly traveling to another country would pretty much guarantee a strip cavity search, and trade over the border would likely grind to a halt as every truck were searched, etc. Every day on the news overpaid, underskilled, entrenched US politicians would be filling the airwaves about the evil emnating from the neighbour to the North, blah blah blah.
"Satan on Earth! The next Hitler! Eroding American values and threatening our way of life!"
So where does it start? Realistically I can't see any 1st World nation starting it seriously without the US doing it first due to fear of reprisal from the US (Do I think it would be beyond the US to invade another sovereign nation because they don't follow laws that the US agrees with? Not in the slightest. To see US politicians throwing monkey shit at South American countries because said countries provide what is requested by supposedly free US citizens just blows me away. The extent with which many Americans [obviously not all thankfully!] are willing to throw away their freedoms in the name of freedom is frightening). The likelihood of something like this taking hold in the US seems incredibly unlikely : While the intelligent sector of society has long realized the absolute absurdity of the WoD, there is a large lemming majority that will believe anything they're told by the propagandaists, and there is a large hierarchy that wants things to stay just the way they are : Police have a public enemy to ask for more funds, military can come in and do some trivial action every now and then, the Coast Guard gets lots of dough, and politicians have a public enemy that they can continually declare war on and get good ratings despite metrics that are absolutely abysmal. There is an entrenched and brutally corrupt political structure in the states with everyone having their stake and their frontman pushing their ideas. It just seems very unlikely.
Wow. If you're going to try to use those fancy-dancy HTML tags please learn how to do it. It's quite interesting trying to follow your attempts at quoting.
However the fact that you totally missed the point of the post proves your knowledge and intelligence regarding this. Move along little doggy.
Thank you for the follow-up. I have taken your advice into consideration, however given that I neither need to "settle down", and that it absolutely has to do with the quality of the X-Box, I'd have to qualify your pathetic reply as a troll.
Quota has been reached here. Please begin trolling elsewhere.
A stray application should never, never never have priviledge to take a machine down, period.
No, it shouldn't. Who doesn't agree with that? However if that "stray application" interacts with a system `feature' in a way that exploits a flaw that exists in system code then it can take the system down JUST LIKE IT CAN IN ANY MAINSTREAM OPERATING SYSTEM. A lot of the video driver runs in ring 0 in NT & 2000, just like the drivers do in Linux, and if an application twiddles the bits just right yes it can bring the system down, though it's the system bringing the system down, not an application. Your moronic perspective that this simply shouldn't be possible is absurd (i.e. you're saying that all system calls have to be 100% stable under any situation and condition which is ridiculously naive) and the only OS that should satisfy you is QNX. I certainly hope you're not a Linux fan because an errant driver called can certainly take the system down. As far as me blaming third party applications I did in two ways:
There are a lot of numbnuts dumbfucks that don't understand the difference between a system failure and an application failure. My point was that if a game APP fails on the X-Box there will be countless drones clamoring over how unstable the X-Box is. On Windows 2000 in some configurations Explorer.exe crashes on occasion. The knowledgable user restarts Explorer.exe. The dumbfuck runs to Slashdot to yabber over how their machine "BSOD"d.
Many apps have been known to substantially degrade the OS' stability by replacing system DLLs will custom DLLs, old versions, etc. This is the reality of a mainstream system where development tools are easily accessible. This has been fixed in Windows 2000.
As far as your claim that "Microsoft created their own ratsnest when they decided that the operating system should provide everything for everybody instead of clean". Let me give you a little piece of advice : You don't have to run DirectX games on your [mother's] server system(s). Oh, what's that? You're running your machine as a game machine? What's that : You're using shit video drivers from a crap vendor? Oh.... okay. Well gosh in that case yes Microsoft should march right over to your hardware vendor and give them a stern talking to! This is unacceptable! DAMN THAT MICROSOFT!
The subject line is a joke that mirrors many of the posts under this story. The sad thing is that many of these neanderthals are SERIOUS.
The irony is that any Microsoft produced book on code design, code quality testing, management, etc., absolutely FLY off the shelves. I've had Linux anti-MS zealots recomment MS Press books that basically document the internal work activities at Microsoft. Doesn't anyone see the absurdity of this paradox? Any of you people who talk about the "notoriously bad code quality" of Microsoft code please ensure that you get rid of all of those MSPress books that line your bookshelves.
Of course the reality is that Microsoft is a benchmark for code quality in the industry, with some of the lowest failure rates per line of code in the field. Do I wish they did a better job? Absolutely! Most of us would love if the failure rate was 0.0%. I would love if Windows could run on any mixture of a virtually infinite combination of hardware with drivers of astronomically varying quality levels and auto-magically fix code problems in third party applications. I would love if they made their code immune to the meanderings of poorly written third party applications (i.e. DLL hell though it is largely immune to it as of Windows 2000). However we must dream on.
As far as anecdotal evidence there are always reams of people yapping about how they define the standards because on their system Windows 2000 BSODs once a day, and NT 4...it BSODs before you even start it up. Then again there are many people like myself that have run 2000 without a single BSOD...ever (have single applications failed? Absolutely...but never taking down the system). I manage heavily used NT4 SP6a systems that run several months on end perfectly until finally being rebooted to enact a new security fix.
Bah. I don't even know why I'm going down this path. The reality is that Microsoft produces code that is better than average in the industry. With a solid, target platform and minimal services running on the system (i.e. it's pretty damn easy for a PS2 to be stable when the game is _ALL_ that's running on the machine...the propensity for failure is geometrically proportional to the complexity of the system) I have no doubt whatsoever that the system will be rock solid. Of course the day a game by Basement Publications crashes it'll somehow be considered MS' fault.
Fine. Then dissallow portscanning on your computer. BUT - should my provider ban me? or is it your own perrogative to dissallow me locally?
I was about to go on a big analogy of spam but I decided not to as analogies usually just lead to a big straw-man argument. However my point is not necessarily that they auto-ban you as a small percentage of port scans are legit (i.e. checking your mothers PC to see if she has a trojan). My point is that if someone complains or if a peer ISP complains (i.e. @Home could queue up 1000s of numbers of people who scan all of 24) your ISP should kick you.
BTW: You say "what if I portscan a public computer": "Public" computers advertise a particular service and outside of those services it is none of your business what is running on that machine is, what the operating system is, or whether they've patched their server. If you are accessing www.cnn.com then they are advertising a web service on port 80 and beyond that is absolutely not your right to probe.
BTW: Should everyone run firewalls? ABSOLUTELY! Should everyone ensure that there are no holes in their system? ABSOLUTELY! However what if a hole was found in a common service like portmapper on Linux (which happened recently) and Jimbo has been doing his probes and has a nice database of every system that runs portmapper on Linux revision XYZ so he carpet bombs the database with the exploit. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU advocating the righteousness of portscanning should realize that portscanning isn't merely a problem for people with BackOrifice or Netbus on their machines. I get scanned for port 111 all the time because there are still lots of people without the appropriate patches so the script kiddies carpet bomb all of 24.0.0.0/8.
I think an interesting conversation happened in another thread when someone complained that www.walmart.com apparently misidentifies its server attributes, etc., with calls for legal recourse, etc. How absolutely absurd. Personally I think no public service should advertise anything about its configuration, version number, platform, etc. : It's none of anyone's friggin' business! In any case no matter how much people want to talk about security through obfuscation versus open information the simple reality is that when you're talking about thousands of machines : Security through obfuscation works. If you give someone a list of 276 machines he knows are running Apache x.x with mods y.z it makes easy work when someone knows that Apache x.x with mods y.z is vulnerable giving him root access to erase his tracks, etc. Instead give them a list of millions of servers and let them try their exploit : There'll be a shitload of evidence to sue their asses off, and of course what could have been a targetted, efficient hack operation turns into a grossly inefficient sloggery.
If you ask me, it isn't like trying to open doors. All a portscan does is see what services a machine runs. Mail? Web? FTP? SSh?... It's like a house has doors for certain things and you're seeing what each is for.
And in reply I'd say that if you weren't explicitly told it's none of your business and you're not welcome. If a house has many doors it isn't my right to check what they're for unless there's big signs welcoming me in. What about people scanning for backdoors : They're not just checking to see what they're for...they're looking for victims.
While I think they've gone a bit too far (though it seems to be primarily written to legally cover their own ass for instances where countries like France try to shoot the messenger) most of it seems pretty reasonable and it seems like they're giving themselves a clear legal mandate to boot abusive users off the service. Personally I'd love if providers started kicking port scanners off their system as it is irritating, and a complete waste of bandwidth, for thousands of little script kiddies to sit there doing nmap -p 1-55000 24.0.0.0/32 all day. Argue all you want about your right to port scan but the reality is that you have no such right to probe other people's computers for vulnerabilities like that. Go out at 2 in the morning and try all the door knobs in your neighbourhood and see what sort of treatment it gets you. "But I was only trying to improve security!".
As far as the limitations on hosting it sounds very similar to most @Home TOS agreements which basically say you can't run servers for anything. Of course they're not really trying to prohibit that (and indeed they can easily block incoming port 80, etc., but they don't), they're just giving themself legal recourse. The prices that people are paying is based upon average, amateur fair use and when someone sets up a 24/7 Napster server alongside their FTP server, website, IRC server, etc., they begin unfairly consuming an inordinate and completely financially unjustified amount of bandwidth. Compare the price of an unmetered T1 which technically has less bandwidth than my cable modem. Is someone stupid to pay that much more? Not at all. One is meant to be saturated with services, the other is financially created as a burst service for the Average Joe.
Many people don't WANT to "play the corporate game", because it's dirty
I understand generally where you're coming from but let me give it a slightly different spin:
They aren't "corporate game"s, they're the same games that have gone on since the beginning of mankind and will go on until the end of humanity. From the English monarchy, to Rome, back through the Incas, the exact same activities of syncophants and backstabbers have been played. There is nothing intrinsic about corporations that will change that. Build a power structure and those games will be played.
Acting too innocent to play power games and dismissing it with the wave of the hand is one of the classic signs of someone fervently playing power games. It's basically saying "I'm not winning at the current rules so I'll dispel them as unethical/immoral/etc...okay am I winning now? No? Okay anyone who's in a position of power is a shill suit that knows nothing! Am I winning yet?"
I'm talking more about simply social skills, and that isn't corporate games (my previous points were just for the hell of it.;-]). Being able to understand when you're horribly boring your victims with mindless blabbler is a simple social skill that has to do with respecting the feelings of others, and it isn't a corporate game. Looking professional is actually showing respect for your coworkers and company by saying "I look professional for you". Someone famous said something about "Manners are showing respect for your guests" and that's exactly it : Manners aren't haughtiness or pretentiousness, they're showing respect for your guests : i.e. You're worth me showing good manners.
ABSOLUTELY TRUE! In the software engineering field I've noticed exactly what you have mentioned, which is that people naturally buy into the myth that anyone who is poorly dressed, and of an unkempt look, preferably talks about Linux and anything else "counter-culture", naturally simply must be some sort of genius hacker. It's the paradigm of the glass ceiling in software development : So long as you have non-ascending traits you are a god among your co-workers, but as you learn critical business skills such as how to interoperate with other people without offending you appear to be of lesser talent.
Of course one can overcome the `detriment' of dressing well and having good mannerisms by constantly proving themselves, but nonetheless it's annoying having a incompetent co-worker perceived as a contender because they cut their own hair, have constantly bad breath and can't talk to anyone without putting them in a mindless stupor of boredom.
Pop music isn't bad. It's worse than that. It is horrible. I say, down with pop...I really like independent bands...I really like bands like cannibal corpse, cryptopsy, NiN, orgy, the offspring, NoFX, rage against the machine
Good day to you! Excellent replies though I do take issue with the evaluation of music. Firstly NiN, Offspring, RATM : That IS Pop. No matter how you slice it that's no less pop that Britney Spears. I'm not saying that devalues their musical capabilities or contribution in any way (because I don't think that way), but just as an FYI. It's like back in the mid 90s when "Alternative" music comprised the vast majority of radio play. Alternative? Uh...
Secondly what does the independent bands moniker contribute to the music? Seriously this reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend some time back. We both were fans of a certain band and he then revealed to me that he was becoming less of a fan because the band was "becoming too popular". Huh? Too popular? How does that affect if you like the music or if it strikes a chord or you can empathize with it? Not liking something because it's popular is just as bad as liking it because it's popular. The throngs of weenies screaming for Boys to Men are no worse than the "counter-culture" lackeys in the shadows dissing all those pop mavens. There was an excellent suck.com article on this but I don't have the link handy: Anyone have it by chance?
Additionally the moment someone thinks "Music today is all noise and boom boom boom" is the moment their ego has gotten ahead of rationale. Yes you define good music. Your tastes define all and are the final say. The world should stop and solidify at your tastes.
Whenever you think about anything that involves taste, always realize that everyone knows what is best for themselves, and there is no way to question someones personal taste. If someone likes listening to a beeping door chime 24 hours a day then that's what turns their crank. Critical evaluations of music, art, etc. are just foolish and narcisstic : Let ME tell you what _I_ like because obviously what YOU like is shit and you just haven't seen the light.
I guess the problem is that ATI's shoddy work shouldn't be in a position to be crashing the machines. That would be a design decision if I'm not mistaken..
The same design decisions are taken with Linux where any number of device drivers are fully capable of taking the ship down with them. While it would be nice to have a fully microkernel architecture ala QNX where nothing but a tiny segment of core code can take down the machine and things like video drivers can be killed an restarted, the performance hit was unwanted so Microsoft made what I'd consider a pretty reasonable compromise and decided that as of NT 4 they'd integrate several outer ring drivers in ring 0. The idea is that the vendors would be expected to pursue a microkernel type system in their drivers (i.e. not sticking everything in the DD), and what they do put in there is super-ultra-mondo checked. I have found that Matrox, for example, does an awesome job and they have excellent video drivers. ATI on the other hand has single handedly, IMHO, given Windows NT/2000 a bad reputation. I like ATI however they need a serious shit kicking for the crappy, unstable drivers that they put out. This is all anecdotal and is IMHO.
I haven't had to pay for my @Home cable modem since getting the service 2 years ago. Right at the start they offered the cable modem with a "free rental" and every bill stated "Cable modem : Limited free rental ($10 reg)" yet this continues to go on.
Win2k isn't all that much better. It's an order of magnitude more stable and scalable than NT but installation is still a major pain, and despite what the M$ flacks will tell you there are still blue screens galore.
What a complete pile of bullshit. It is remotely possible that you're running 2000 on a complete POS PC in which case perhaps it's possible that either faulty hardware or crap drivers (for example ATI still hasn't figured out how to make stable video drivers), however BSOD's are incredibly rare on 2000, and on any variant of NT 4 as of SP4. While my job is software architecture, incidentally I run several NT4 machines that are heavily loaded with web, file, and database services and they are only ever rebooted when serious security fixes come out (in which case it isn't a big deal to install and reboot in off hours. If it was a 24/7 machine I'd have it clustered and it still wouldn't be an issue). My development machine has never BSOD'd in 2000. EVER. And I guarantee I beat my machine as hard or harder than anyone out there. Again if you run POS hardware well...
Is Windows 2000 perfect? Hardly. explorer.exe crashes on me every now and then. Actually on a GeForce MX equipped machine it crashes at a frequency that I would term "often" : Maybe once a day. Ctrl-Alt-Del...find explorer.exe...kill process....Run "explorer.exe". Only harm is that ICQ no longer has the cute little system tray icon.
P.S. Before writing me off as a "socialist... little fuck",
Wasn't what came to mind actually.
Your post is amazing : Spend the time and the money to put up a site and fill it with content, but don't waste my time.
There is no contract on the part of either party.
Actually there is a very real implicit contract : Don't watch the ads and they'll go out of business. There is a standard model for all behaviour and it is the rule by which everything can be considered : What if everyone did what I'm doing? What if everyone pirated games? There would be no games. What if everyone drove on the median of highways when there's a slowdown : The highway would turn into a nightmare, emergency crews wouldn't be able to get by. What if everyone used ad blocking/filtering software to stop those damn sites (which they're voluntarily visiting!) from wasting their time? The sites wouldn't exist. Sure in a dream land where people can pick and choose among the commercial sites they can proclaim that they don't care for commercial sites and that it should be all.edu (supported by our tax dollars), but that is absurdity.
You know when I was a bit younger I was a huge socialist. Here in Ontario I was a major fan of the NDP (a socialist party) and decried anything that "the man" did. I'm not saying that the perspective was juvenile, but rather that I'm not giving my perspective having grown up with the silver spoon because I most definitely didn't. (hehe...I have pictures of me having my bath in a big black barrell in my back yard when I was a kid)
Having said that most proposed systems that people advocate couple their perfectly envisioned,hypothetical system versus capitalism with all of its warts and scabs. It should be obvious which is going to appear superior. If anyone brings up examples of applied socialism (BTW: Capitalistic greed is responsible for most of the technical advances that you're talking about) then they will immediately be decried by the socialists as poor examples that didn't work because XYZ and XYZ...but if the world followed THEIR example...
It's a big world with nations all over the globe with varying systems and standards...yet where is the #1 area on the planet to live?
Granted and I apologize if I conveyed that. I think it's more a thought process that some people have. It's like rolling paper : Lots of people use it for legitimate purposes, but that doesn't mean it isn't assumed that you're rolling a big joint.
So what if someone thought your post wasn't worth the high mod, get over it. Calling names at anyone who thinks differently just makes *you* look like a kid.
Like I said it's a humor thing (i.e. Slashdot should cache mods for 30 minutes or something and then apply them) watching the social effect like that. I'm not karma whoring otherwise I wouldn't have posted my followup (which you replied to), however it's just fascinating!
Well, for your information, amazon.com uses pop-up ads. And I believe amazon.com is supposed to have their income from customers (although they haven't had any net income yet).
Amazon is a special case : They're doing everything they can to try to keep investors believing that they're going to be profitable one day and that it's worth $7.1 billion dollars (wow not too long ago Amazon was worth $40 billion...amazing). It's sort of like the capitulations Deja went through trying to discover itself and in the process forgot who it was.
Expect anything from Amazon. It reminds me a lot of Sears actually : Sears is one of those places where when I was a kid I associated their name with quality clothing and home products. Now after seeing just about every type of shady IMHO) service with the Sears name emblazoned on it their name is more of a liability. I always wonder what these people are thinking when they spread themselves so thin.
Wow it's been a while since I've seen such a grossly inappropriate analogy. However even going with your misappropriated situation, every time I walk into a Canadian Tire here someone asks me if I'd like a Canadian Tire card. When I check out of Staples they ask me if I'd like one of their "feature items" (like pens and gum and crap). However lets ignore that.
The overwhelming majority of advertising is done on sites that themselves have no direct line of revenue. Your comparison to an entity where you actually are their direct line of revenue is a poor comparison. Slashdot doesn't get my money but by looking at the top I can see that ThinkGeek does hope they will, and under the pretense of perhaps getting some they're paying Andover/Slashdot. Pretty simple and straightforward. If they're not getting returns on their dollar they turn up the volume. It isn't surprizing.
The moderation system here at Slashdot is remarkably good but it's still funny seeing certain things when you push some people's buttons the right way. I've watched my post go up and down several times over the past couple of minutes. Someone likes it and mods it up then some pimple popping geek espousing his great new paradigm of an everything for nothing free world, between asking mommy for his allowance, mods it down. Society is a fascinating thing.
Homer said it best : "When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!"
Slashdot Mirror
The articles clearly indicate that it's a transportation device. The speculation is that the civil structures would have to be changed because currently everything is designed around cars : Roads, parking lots, etc. The mentions towards old economy forces obviously implicates the car manufacturers and the gigantic economic partners of those car companies.
Jobs is quoted as saying: "...If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."
Cities are currently entirely engineered around cars and the need to get those cars around. If it weren't for cars our social structure would be quite a bit different.
Kemper says the invention will "sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking."
Implication there is hovering, flying, etc. Sweeping over seems to be a hint of something that don't ride on the ground.
D-VHS seems to be really a new, improved version of S-VHS (apart from the obvious technological differences - I'm talking purely in regards to its placement in the consumer marketplace) and we all saw where that went : Nowhere. Despite having a much greater resolution and quality of signal no one was willing to pony up the extra for the player and the media which was far more expensive.
Mass consumers only ever buy anything because it has convenience features. While lip service is paid to quality, the reality is that quality means very little to the majority of people. If people were willing to stick with the inconveniences of VHS they would LITERALLY stick with VHS : DVHS offers nothing that the average consumer wants apart from recording, and even then some of the settop boxes are far more convenient and are filling that marketplace. DVD on the other hand offers lots of extras, a cute menuing system, and most importantly instant access.
Expect to start hearing a lot more whispering about DVD-2 as it is definitely in the planning stages right now. DVD-2 will primarily represent a very large increase in capacity, hence resolution. Of course they would never market it as just that as it'd never sell, but instead DVD-2 players with DVD-1 capabilities will just flood the market to the point where the new content is viable.
One thing that I've often been curious about is how the WoD could effectively be stopped. For instance I'm a Canadian and generally feel a very liberal attitude among most Canadians that the WOD is absurd and should be abolished. Marijuana is pretty much decriminalized and while you'll be arrested if you sit in front of police headquarters smoking up, generally it is an ignored "crime". There are still images of beatnick police officers standing in front of grossly overstated confiscated "Crops" but these are less frequent and received with much more scorn and derision than every before.
However what if Canada took the initiative and decided to legalize a wide variety of drugs through a national production and distribution chain (for example cocaine, LSD, etc.). Aren't there worldwide conventions and agreements dictating the general drug laws of most countries? What if Canada decided to ignore these (if they do exist) : Could you imagine the treatment Canada would get? Firstly traveling to another country would pretty much guarantee a strip cavity search, and trade over the border would likely grind to a halt as every truck were searched, etc. Every day on the news overpaid, underskilled, entrenched US politicians would be filling the airwaves about the evil emnating from the neighbour to the North, blah blah blah. "Satan on Earth! The next Hitler! Eroding American values and threatening our way of life!"
So where does it start? Realistically I can't see any 1st World nation starting it seriously without the US doing it first due to fear of reprisal from the US (Do I think it would be beyond the US to invade another sovereign nation because they don't follow laws that the US agrees with? Not in the slightest. To see US politicians throwing monkey shit at South American countries because said countries provide what is requested by supposedly free US citizens just blows me away. The extent with which many Americans [obviously not all thankfully!] are willing to throw away their freedoms in the name of freedom is frightening). The likelihood of something like this taking hold in the US seems incredibly unlikely : While the intelligent sector of society has long realized the absolute absurdity of the WoD, there is a large lemming majority that will believe anything they're told by the propagandaists, and there is a large hierarchy that wants things to stay just the way they are : Police have a public enemy to ask for more funds, military can come in and do some trivial action every now and then, the Coast Guard gets lots of dough, and politicians have a public enemy that they can continually declare war on and get good ratings despite metrics that are absolutely abysmal. There is an entrenched and brutally corrupt political structure in the states with everyone having their stake and their frontman pushing their ideas. It just seems very unlikely.
Wow. If you're going to try to use those fancy-dancy HTML tags please learn how to do it. It's quite interesting trying to follow your attempts at quoting.
However the fact that you totally missed the point of the post proves your knowledge and intelligence regarding this. Move along little doggy.
Thank you for the follow-up. I have taken your advice into consideration, however given that I neither need to "settle down", and that it absolutely has to do with the quality of the X-Box, I'd have to qualify your pathetic reply as a troll.
Quota has been reached here. Please begin trolling elsewhere.
A stray application should never, never never have priviledge to take a machine down, period.
No, it shouldn't. Who doesn't agree with that? However if that "stray application" interacts with a system `feature' in a way that exploits a flaw that exists in system code then it can take the system down JUST LIKE IT CAN IN ANY MAINSTREAM OPERATING SYSTEM. A lot of the video driver runs in ring 0 in NT & 2000, just like the drivers do in Linux, and if an application twiddles the bits just right yes it can bring the system down, though it's the system bringing the system down, not an application. Your moronic perspective that this simply shouldn't be possible is absurd (i.e. you're saying that all system calls have to be 100% stable under any situation and condition which is ridiculously naive) and the only OS that should satisfy you is QNX. I certainly hope you're not a Linux fan because an errant driver called can certainly take the system down. As far as me blaming third party applications I did in two ways:
As far as your claim that "Microsoft created their own ratsnest when they decided that the operating system should provide everything for everybody instead of clean". Let me give you a little piece of advice : You don't have to run DirectX games on your [mother's] server system(s). Oh, what's that? You're running your machine as a game machine? What's that : You're using shit video drivers from a crap vendor? Oh.... okay. Well gosh in that case yes Microsoft should march right over to your hardware vendor and give them a stern talking to! This is unacceptable! DAMN THAT MICROSOFT!
The subject line is a joke that mirrors many of the posts under this story. The sad thing is that many of these neanderthals are SERIOUS.
The irony is that any Microsoft produced book on code design, code quality testing, management, etc., absolutely FLY off the shelves. I've had Linux anti-MS zealots recomment MS Press books that basically document the internal work activities at Microsoft. Doesn't anyone see the absurdity of this paradox? Any of you people who talk about the "notoriously bad code quality" of Microsoft code please ensure that you get rid of all of those MSPress books that line your bookshelves.
Of course the reality is that Microsoft is a benchmark for code quality in the industry, with some of the lowest failure rates per line of code in the field. Do I wish they did a better job? Absolutely! Most of us would love if the failure rate was 0.0%. I would love if Windows could run on any mixture of a virtually infinite combination of hardware with drivers of astronomically varying quality levels and auto-magically fix code problems in third party applications. I would love if they made their code immune to the meanderings of poorly written third party applications (i.e. DLL hell though it is largely immune to it as of Windows 2000). However we must dream on.
As far as anecdotal evidence there are always reams of people yapping about how they define the standards because on their system Windows 2000 BSODs once a day, and NT 4...it BSODs before you even start it up. Then again there are many people like myself that have run 2000 without a single BSOD...ever (have single applications failed? Absolutely...but never taking down the system). I manage heavily used NT4 SP6a systems that run several months on end perfectly until finally being rebooted to enact a new security fix.
Bah. I don't even know why I'm going down this path. The reality is that Microsoft produces code that is better than average in the industry. With a solid, target platform and minimal services running on the system (i.e. it's pretty damn easy for a PS2 to be stable when the game is _ALL_ that's running on the machine...the propensity for failure is geometrically proportional to the complexity of the system) I have no doubt whatsoever that the system will be rock solid. Of course the day a game by Basement Publications crashes it'll somehow be considered MS' fault.
Fine. Then dissallow portscanning on your computer. BUT - should my provider ban me? or is it your own perrogative to dissallow me locally?
I was about to go on a big analogy of spam but I decided not to as analogies usually just lead to a big straw-man argument. However my point is not necessarily that they auto-ban you as a small percentage of port scans are legit (i.e. checking your mothers PC to see if she has a trojan). My point is that if someone complains or if a peer ISP complains (i.e. @Home could queue up 1000s of numbers of people who scan all of 24) your ISP should kick you.
BTW: You say "what if I portscan a public computer": "Public" computers advertise a particular service and outside of those services it is none of your business what is running on that machine is, what the operating system is, or whether they've patched their server. If you are accessing www.cnn.com then they are advertising a web service on port 80 and beyond that is absolutely not your right to probe.
BTW: Should everyone run firewalls? ABSOLUTELY! Should everyone ensure that there are no holes in their system? ABSOLUTELY! However what if a hole was found in a common service like portmapper on Linux (which happened recently) and Jimbo has been doing his probes and has a nice database of every system that runs portmapper on Linux revision XYZ so he carpet bombs the database with the exploit. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU advocating the righteousness of portscanning should realize that portscanning isn't merely a problem for people with BackOrifice or Netbus on their machines. I get scanned for port 111 all the time because there are still lots of people without the appropriate patches so the script kiddies carpet bomb all of 24.0.0.0/8.
I think an interesting conversation happened in another thread when someone complained that www.walmart.com apparently misidentifies its server attributes, etc., with calls for legal recourse, etc. How absolutely absurd. Personally I think no public service should advertise anything about its configuration, version number, platform, etc. : It's none of anyone's friggin' business! In any case no matter how much people want to talk about security through obfuscation versus open information the simple reality is that when you're talking about thousands of machines : Security through obfuscation works. If you give someone a list of 276 machines he knows are running Apache x.x with mods y.z it makes easy work when someone knows that Apache x.x with mods y.z is vulnerable giving him root access to erase his tracks, etc. Instead give them a list of millions of servers and let them try their exploit : There'll be a shitload of evidence to sue their asses off, and of course what could have been a targetted, efficient hack operation turns into a grossly inefficient sloggery.
Hehe...mea culpa.
If you ask me, it isn't like trying to open doors. All a portscan does is see what services a machine runs. Mail? Web? FTP? SSh?... It's like a house has doors for certain things and you're seeing what each is for.
And in reply I'd say that if you weren't explicitly told it's none of your business and you're not welcome. If a house has many doors it isn't my right to check what they're for unless there's big signs welcoming me in. What about people scanning for backdoors : They're not just checking to see what they're for...they're looking for victims.
While I think they've gone a bit too far (though it seems to be primarily written to legally cover their own ass for instances where countries like France try to shoot the messenger) most of it seems pretty reasonable and it seems like they're giving themselves a clear legal mandate to boot abusive users off the service. Personally I'd love if providers started kicking port scanners off their system as it is irritating, and a complete waste of bandwidth, for thousands of little script kiddies to sit there doing nmap -p 1-55000 24.0.0.0/32 all day. Argue all you want about your right to port scan but the reality is that you have no such right to probe other people's computers for vulnerabilities like that. Go out at 2 in the morning and try all the door knobs in your neighbourhood and see what sort of treatment it gets you. "But I was only trying to improve security!".
As far as the limitations on hosting it sounds very similar to most @Home TOS agreements which basically say you can't run servers for anything. Of course they're not really trying to prohibit that (and indeed they can easily block incoming port 80, etc., but they don't), they're just giving themself legal recourse. The prices that people are paying is based upon average, amateur fair use and when someone sets up a 24/7 Napster server alongside their FTP server, website, IRC server, etc., they begin unfairly consuming an inordinate and completely financially unjustified amount of bandwidth. Compare the price of an unmetered T1 which technically has less bandwidth than my cable modem. Is someone stupid to pay that much more? Not at all. One is meant to be saturated with services, the other is financially created as a burst service for the Average Joe.
Many people don't WANT to "play the corporate game", because it's dirty
I understand generally where you're coming from but let me give it a slightly different spin:
ABSOLUTELY TRUE! In the software engineering field I've noticed exactly what you have mentioned, which is that people naturally buy into the myth that anyone who is poorly dressed, and of an unkempt look, preferably talks about Linux and anything else "counter-culture", naturally simply must be some sort of genius hacker. It's the paradigm of the glass ceiling in software development : So long as you have non-ascending traits you are a god among your co-workers, but as you learn critical business skills such as how to interoperate with other people without offending you appear to be of lesser talent.
Of course one can overcome the `detriment' of dressing well and having good mannerisms by constantly proving themselves, but nonetheless it's annoying having a incompetent co-worker perceived as a contender because they cut their own hair, have constantly bad breath and can't talk to anyone without putting them in a mindless stupor of boredom.
I am Boron!
Pop music isn't bad. It's worse than that. It is horrible. I say, down with pop...I really like independent bands...I really like bands like cannibal corpse, cryptopsy, NiN, orgy, the offspring, NoFX, rage against the machine
Good day to you! Excellent replies though I do take issue with the evaluation of music. Firstly NiN, Offspring, RATM : That IS Pop. No matter how you slice it that's no less pop that Britney Spears. I'm not saying that devalues their musical capabilities or contribution in any way (because I don't think that way), but just as an FYI. It's like back in the mid 90s when "Alternative" music comprised the vast majority of radio play. Alternative? Uh...
Secondly what does the independent bands moniker contribute to the music? Seriously this reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend some time back. We both were fans of a certain band and he then revealed to me that he was becoming less of a fan because the band was "becoming too popular". Huh? Too popular? How does that affect if you like the music or if it strikes a chord or you can empathize with it? Not liking something because it's popular is just as bad as liking it because it's popular. The throngs of weenies screaming for Boys to Men are no worse than the "counter-culture" lackeys in the shadows dissing all those pop mavens. There was an excellent suck.com article on this but I don't have the link handy: Anyone have it by chance?
Additionally the moment someone thinks "Music today is all noise and boom boom boom" is the moment their ego has gotten ahead of rationale. Yes you define good music. Your tastes define all and are the final say. The world should stop and solidify at your tastes.
Whenever you think about anything that involves taste, always realize that everyone knows what is best for themselves, and there is no way to question someones personal taste. If someone likes listening to a beeping door chime 24 hours a day then that's what turns their crank. Critical evaluations of music, art, etc. are just foolish and narcisstic : Let ME tell you what _I_ like because obviously what YOU like is shit and you just haven't seen the light.
I guess the problem is that ATI's shoddy work shouldn't be in a position to be crashing the machines. That would be a design decision if I'm not mistaken..
The same design decisions are taken with Linux where any number of device drivers are fully capable of taking the ship down with them. While it would be nice to have a fully microkernel architecture ala QNX where nothing but a tiny segment of core code can take down the machine and things like video drivers can be killed an restarted, the performance hit was unwanted so Microsoft made what I'd consider a pretty reasonable compromise and decided that as of NT 4 they'd integrate several outer ring drivers in ring 0. The idea is that the vendors would be expected to pursue a microkernel type system in their drivers (i.e. not sticking everything in the DD), and what they do put in there is super-ultra-mondo checked. I have found that Matrox, for example, does an awesome job and they have excellent video drivers. ATI on the other hand has single handedly, IMHO, given Windows NT/2000 a bad reputation. I like ATI however they need a serious shit kicking for the crappy, unstable drivers that they put out. This is all anecdotal and is IMHO.
I haven't had to pay for my @Home cable modem since getting the service 2 years ago. Right at the start they offered the cable modem with a "free rental" and every bill stated "Cable modem : Limited free rental ($10 reg)" yet this continues to go on.
Win2k isn't all that much better. It's an order of magnitude more stable and scalable than NT but installation is still a major pain, and despite what the M$ flacks will tell you there are still blue screens galore.
What a complete pile of bullshit. It is remotely possible that you're running 2000 on a complete POS PC in which case perhaps it's possible that either faulty hardware or crap drivers (for example ATI still hasn't figured out how to make stable video drivers), however BSOD's are incredibly rare on 2000, and on any variant of NT 4 as of SP4. While my job is software architecture, incidentally I run several NT4 machines that are heavily loaded with web, file, and database services and they are only ever rebooted when serious security fixes come out (in which case it isn't a big deal to install and reboot in off hours. If it was a 24/7 machine I'd have it clustered and it still wouldn't be an issue). My development machine has never BSOD'd in 2000. EVER. And I guarantee I beat my machine as hard or harder than anyone out there. Again if you run POS hardware well...
Is Windows 2000 perfect? Hardly. explorer.exe crashes on me every now and then. Actually on a GeForce MX equipped machine it crashes at a frequency that I would term "often" : Maybe once a day. Ctrl-Alt-Del...find explorer.exe...kill process....Run "explorer.exe". Only harm is that ICQ no longer has the cute little system tray icon.
What if everyone became a computer programmer?
Brilliant! Seriously you've shot a hole right through the whole social interaction thing. Society, obviously, is a complete failure.
P.S. Before writing me off as a "socialist... little fuck",
Wasn't what came to mind actually.
Your post is amazing : Spend the time and the money to put up a site and fill it with content, but don't waste my time.
There is no contract on the part of either party.
Actually there is a very real implicit contract : Don't watch the ads and they'll go out of business. There is a standard model for all behaviour and it is the rule by which everything can be considered : What if everyone did what I'm doing? What if everyone pirated games? There would be no games. What if everyone drove on the median of highways when there's a slowdown : The highway would turn into a nightmare, emergency crews wouldn't be able to get by. What if everyone used ad blocking/filtering software to stop those damn sites (which they're voluntarily visiting!) from wasting their time? The sites wouldn't exist. Sure in a dream land where people can pick and choose among the commercial sites they can proclaim that they don't care for commercial sites and that it should be all .edu (supported by our tax dollars), but that is absurdity.
You know when I was a bit younger I was a huge socialist. Here in Ontario I was a major fan of the NDP (a socialist party) and decried anything that "the man" did. I'm not saying that the perspective was juvenile, but rather that I'm not giving my perspective having grown up with the silver spoon because I most definitely didn't. (hehe...I have pictures of me having my bath in a big black barrell in my back yard when I was a kid)
Having said that most proposed systems that people advocate couple their perfectly envisioned,hypothetical system versus capitalism with all of its warts and scabs. It should be obvious which is going to appear superior. If anyone brings up examples of applied socialism (BTW: Capitalistic greed is responsible for most of the technical advances that you're talking about) then they will immediately be decried by the socialists as poor examples that didn't work because XYZ and XYZ...but if the world followed THEIR example...
It's a big world with nations all over the globe with varying systems and standards...yet where is the #1 area on the planet to live?
Not everyone wants to use it pirate DVD's
Granted and I apologize if I conveyed that. I think it's more a thought process that some people have. It's like rolling paper : Lots of people use it for legitimate purposes, but that doesn't mean it isn't assumed that you're rolling a big joint.
;-)
So what if someone thought your post wasn't worth the high mod, get over it. Calling names at anyone who thinks differently just makes *you* look like a kid.
Like I said it's a humor thing (i.e. Slashdot should cache mods for 30 minutes or something and then apply them) watching the social effect like that. I'm not karma whoring otherwise I wouldn't have posted my followup (which you replied to), however it's just fascinating!
Well, for your information, amazon.com uses pop-up ads. And I believe amazon.com is supposed to have their income from customers (although they haven't had any net income yet).
Amazon is a special case : They're doing everything they can to try to keep investors believing that they're going to be profitable one day and that it's worth $7.1 billion dollars (wow not too long ago Amazon was worth $40 billion...amazing). It's sort of like the capitulations Deja went through trying to discover itself and in the process forgot who it was.
Expect anything from Amazon. It reminds me a lot of Sears actually : Sears is one of those places where when I was a kid I associated their name with quality clothing and home products. Now after seeing just about every type of shady IMHO) service with the Sears name emblazoned on it their name is more of a liability. I always wonder what these people are thinking when they spread themselves so thin.
Wow it's been a while since I've seen such a grossly inappropriate analogy. However even going with your misappropriated situation, every time I walk into a Canadian Tire here someone asks me if I'd like a Canadian Tire card. When I check out of Staples they ask me if I'd like one of their "feature items" (like pens and gum and crap). However lets ignore that.
The overwhelming majority of advertising is done on sites that themselves have no direct line of revenue. Your comparison to an entity where you actually are their direct line of revenue is a poor comparison. Slashdot doesn't get my money but by looking at the top I can see that ThinkGeek does hope they will, and under the pretense of perhaps getting some they're paying Andover/Slashdot. Pretty simple and straightforward. If they're not getting returns on their dollar they turn up the volume. It isn't surprizing.
Yet Another Five Letter Acronym?
The moderation system here at Slashdot is remarkably good but it's still funny seeing certain things when you push some people's buttons the right way. I've watched my post go up and down several times over the past couple of minutes. Someone likes it and mods it up then some pimple popping geek espousing his great new paradigm of an everything for nothing free world, between asking mommy for his allowance, mods it down. Society is a fascinating thing.
Homer said it best : "When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!"
Of course that's tongue in cheek.