While in High School I was always coding various things in BASIC on it and one day when I demonstrating how to map 3D objects by placing the sonic sensor on an overhead cart and rolling it under light fixtures, this kid in my calc class goes "you expect that thing to act like a Pentium." I used TI-BASIC to learn how to do 2D translation and rotation and touched on some 3D. I made the first and possibly only graphical adventure game for it complete with text entry and a cursor to click on objects.
A few years ago I gave it to a friend who needed a TI but I'm pretty sure the Intel Inside Pentium MMX sticker is still on the back of it.
I suppose we could blame Slashdot for not taking the initiative to do a little fact checking before letting this one in but then again the members are the fact checkers, spell checkers, dupe dectors, etc.
Whoever submitted this should remain anonymous. But, unless they were just seeing if they could slide one past the editors, we educated at least one person today.
Debunking bogus articles every once in awhile isn't a bad thing. Chances are, quite a few people, although they would never try it, probably thought it was a valid concept.
What you would need to do is find a way to attract those particles back. You have the light "magnet" along with the source behind a mirror in the grip so that the particles reach zero velocity at a reasonable distance and accelerate back at the mirror, reflect back to the maximum, repeat.
By having the laser particles move in such a fashion it would basically be a chainsaw with a infinite number of blades moving in two directions.
Due to the speed of light it would go back and forth at such a rate that you wouldn't have to worry about moving the saber around leaking very fast and dangerous particles as you went. You couldn't move the handle fast enough to get any significant number of particles to hit the mirror at such an angle they bolted from the system or miss the mirror entirely.
the problem with regular CDRs is that if you bang them around enough the silver stuff (what the data is burned to) flakes off because it's not encased in the plastic. Those glue on labels help to weaken it. If you try to take a label off, chances are the data goes with it.
Presumably this new method has the label part manufactured on and not attached to the part of the CD the data is written to. Or it's a second layer that more painted on than glued on. However it's done, it's probably much more sound manufacturing than putting a sticker on a CD.
I worked in the college of education computer lab and did the same thing. Smile and they'd often wave and smile back.
A couple years before that I worked at a pizza and arcade place. I came in one night just to hang out for a bit and all the guys were checking out this girl so I go up and they tell me to give her some lame line about how my friend thinks she's cute. I have no shame so I walk over and go "My friend over there thinks your cute." She looks straight at me and goes "I think you're the cutest one here." She ended up writting her number on a dry erase board for me and after she left I erased it because I'm a moron. But it was okay because she was pretty flaky and ended up dating the guy who usually works the prize counter. I guess she flashed him once while we were open in plain view of a bunch of kids. That got his attention.
4-5 years later, which would be last week when I went to see The Passion I walked into the theater to wait for a couple friends and I see her standing there. She starts walking over and goes "I know you." She gives me a hug and after a exchanging two lines of dialog to get caught up a bit she's gone.
Now I'm a programmer and sit behind a desk. Sure I have less opportunities to make a complete ass of myself but those are some good stories. I actually took a second job at Mervyn's for awhile to meet girls. Worked too. Though I didn't stick around long enough for anything to happen. My weekends are worth more than $30.
PayPal is pretty much the standard for handling on-line transactions. I've seen a few other sites for handling transactions but the sites look cheap and the finance charges aren't. Or they have this phoney Disney Dollars thing going. Give us real money and you get to call it "eGold" or some crap that like.
PayPal also has the sense to offer Instant Payment Notifications and prewritten scripts all ready to go for site owners to plug in to recieve them in a variety of languages. I use PHP. Previously I just modified it to generate an e-mail to myself with the account info in an easy to cut and paste format for final manual processing. Now it also handles updating the htpasswd files which are in a subdirectory of the unadvertised IPN processing directory with a DENY ALL. And since the script calls home to PayPal to verify the payment good luck spoofing your way through.
I don't know of any other on-line payment companies that offer the absurd level of ease of use, low fees and the great features like IPN that allow subcription sites like mine to offer instant access. And PayPal has the user base. Lots of people have PayPal accounts and it's no pain in the butt to establish one if you don't.
I don't care to establish a dozen different on-line payment accounts and a dozen different scripts to instantly and securly process payments just to appease a minority of people who think PayPal is the spawn of Satan. NewEgg seriously screwed up with me and 4 months later finally refunded the entire cost of the server case ($145) after getting the BBB on their back which put them back in purgatory. Before that there was no way I was ever going to shop with them again and recommended against them quite a few times to friends. Every company has a fraction of customers that hate their guts. You can't seriously expect everyone is going to stop using their services just because the company screwed up with you.
I've actually had a couple dollar bills snail mailed to me. One from France and one from New York. I post the address for that reason. When I sell a Content CD I usually get a check in the mail. If people can't stand PayPal there are quite a few ways to get money from person A to person B. I just use and recommend PayPal because it's the easiest and cheapest.
I happily paid $128 or so for Win2K Professional at a store that was going out of business.
I have 98,ME,2K and XP. The only one that wasn't worth what I paid for it was ME and that was $50. Although it useful as it bridges the upgrade path. The upgrade version of ME will install with an upgrade version of 98 and then I can install 2K on top of that.
XP I got free from the university.
I wouldn't pay for it since I have 2K. If I didn't have 2K then I'd be willing to pay for it.
I'm pretty sure we have an old Epson lying around somewhere that we used with the Apple ][c. I remember needing/wanting to print something out but not being able to because the rest of the house was sleeping. The last time I used one of those things was when I was working as a manager for Haggar Clothing and the print quality is only tolerable. If you're not looking for nice printouts for reports or whatever (and not printing graphics), dot matrix is fine.
I have a Canon BJC-1000 which has black catridges that cost about $25 bucks a pop. I've had the latest catridge for much more than three months and it hasn't dried out. I'm not sure how many hundreds of pages I get out of it but it's up there. At 500 pages it works out to 5 cents a page which isn't terrible. I paid maybe $50 for the printer and I've had it for 5 years or more.
"At least they should do something to keep all those printer cartridges out of land fills."
There's a cartridge refilling shop at my university. You don't have to throw them away. You just need to be proactive in finding a place that will refill them.
...isn't so bad if you're learning by example with the intent to escape being a follower. A script kiddie in the best sense is analogous to being an apprentice. In the worst sense it's a term for annoying no talent hacks with nothing better to do.
I don't think there are many programmers who weren't at one time or another "script kiddies" who simply cut and pasted code and then tweaked it a bit to see what happens.
There isn't really any problem with this as it's a good way to learn how to code quickly depending on your learning style.
The problem comes in when you cut and paste code and mistake yourself for having some kind of talent. Those are the annoying ASL types.
Anybody can cut and paste code. It takes talent to take the code and make it your own or even just apply it to something it hasn't been applied to before. I took a pretty standard and quite buggy A* implementation and turned it into a blazingly fast scalable path finding class suitable for doing real time path finding over massive (miles of 10m data) distances by land or air.
And I still only have a vague idea of how A* works.
...to force people to run pay per e-mail servers. Just because MS is running a pay per e-mail server doesn't mean I have to. Mailing lists will simply start running their own servers and giving/selling members e-mail accounts if needed so they can communicate with the list.
I'm not sure what kind of legal grounds anyone could possibly find that would force me to not use Mercury Mail. Best case scenario for MS is that competing e-mail protocols emerge just like there are quite a few IM protocols.
MS can charge all they want. I just won't be sending e-mails to anyone using a service that requires I pay. And I'll continue running my mail server where I charge $2 a year for an e-mail address with unlimited messages and up to 15MB attachments and POP3 access. Which beats the pants off of anything MS has to offer.
...if you can't be bothered to post the specs of the machine you're trying to run it on. It's completely meaningless.
"The pistol is gone; it was highly accurate"
Pistols aren't supposed to be accurate. You cannot snipe people with pistols. If a game allows you to do such a thing it's rediculous even for a fantasy world.
If you like unlimited firepower with "can't miss" weapons, feel free to use cheat codes in single player or continue playing the original. It's not like there's a shortage of maps or players.
I run Mercury Mail and McAfee does a fine job keeping virus infected e-mails (or any file for that matter) from staying on the server to be downloaded by a user. In the off chance it can clean an e-mail I sometimes get a previously infected message with a zero byte attachment. When MyDoom came through McAfee reported 10,000+ deleted/cleaned files.
There is Open Source anti-virus software out there and there's really no reason to not run it on the server. Your server may not be succeptible to Windows viruses but your users are.
This new batch of viruses being zipped up seem to be getting past the anti-virus software. Most likely because they're zipped up and (supposedly) password protected which changes their signiture until you decompress it.
It may just be that software hasn't updated yet. It does that automatically on Fridays.
I expect my car to have natural wear and tear which requires the ability to replace those parts designed to eventually fail.
Software doesn't have parts that are designed to eventually fail that need to be replaced. For loops don't degrade over time. It either works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't work, it's the company's sole responsibility to make it work. Whether or not it works can be established as soon as the software is loaded or by reading reviews.
When software is Open Source it can sometimes be close enough. I've modified source code to fit my needs before (I added an IP whitelist to WinVNC for example). Linux can't be "close enough." An operating system is far too complicated for anyone but the truely dedicated to care if they can "get under the hood" or not. With big apps I get what fits my needs. Closed source or not. Most people buy only the software that fits their needs. Nobody is going to buy (or even accept for free) tax software that almost can do their taxes.
A valid analogy has nothing to do with software. Would I buy a computer who's case is sealed shut? No. For the same reason I wouldn't buy a car with the hood sealed shut. Some people don't care to replace those parts of a computer designed to eventually fail (or go obsolete) just like some people don't care to ever get under the hood of their car. Macs and laptops are such computers. That's what keeps me from buying them.
For developers it's not having to pay thousands in licensing costs. That's an easy sell. There's no reason for a developer to say "no" to Ogg. I have a plug and play DSound 8 class that plays Ogg. It's available at IcarusIndie.com
But, until MP3 becomes annoying Joe User isn't going to care. There's really no way that companies are going to make it cost effective for the user to choose a more open format.
What companies fail to realize (or think the DMCA protects them) is that if you can see or listen to it, you can rip it to any format you want. And unless you're silly and start flaunting your rips for the whole world to see, there's nothing they can do about it. Who's to say that sound blasting from your stereo is comming from an "unauthorized" rip?
I say let them do their thing. The sooner they get going DRMing everything to death the sooner they go out of business under the weight of their own stupidity.
They should just stick to frying the big fish and not worry about how many fish are in the sea. If Joe User can rip a CD, oh well.
to just automatically move an account over to a spam IP if port 25 traffic gets too much than to pull the account entirely. Cox Communications supposedly already has an automated system to redistribute IPs (mine's never changed). So it's not something drastic that would need to be implemented.
As other people have mentioned, relays are a big part of the problem. It's better to "punish" ignorant customers by moving them to a restricted port 25 IP than to cut them off entirely. By moving them there's no harm no foul since they weren't the ones directly spamming anyway and probably won't notice they were moved.
If they do notice and call then the ISP can tell them to do something about their excessive e-mail sending and point them at the AUP. It's all very quick and painless to resolve the issue since it's the customer that has to take action to speak with people and not the company making the calls. People who have to call when they know they broke the rules are far less likely to do anything.
Cox recently cut off incomming port 25. Probably because of myDoom. I'm not about to call and complain because I was trying to run a spam can on my home system. Outgoing port 25 has been blocked since I got the service. And it would be a waste of time and money for them to call me and yell at me. They quietly cut off my server and I just shut my mouth about it.
By having a no harm no foul automated system you can punish a spammer as soon as say X MB of e-mails get sent in Y amount of time. Versus finding out about it later after it's too late and gigs of e-mails have been sent.
Automatically kicking customers entirely is just asking for trouble because the ignorant (those who unknowingly relay) will be kicked which will result in bad PR where there should be none.
You can still kick the spammer entirely. It's just a matter of starting with a little punishment and then escelating only as nesseccary.
Kicking a customer should be the last resort when just limiting port 25 traffic is sufficient.
nearly all spams contain a link to somewhere. I just filter out the domains those links go to since no legitimate e-mail will contain a link to those domains. You also can't hide the destination of a link if you don't leave the harvesting solely up to an automated system.
Takes care of most of the spam. And it costs spammers money every time they get a new domain so I can deal with what little spam gets through before the filter is updated. I've put hundreds of domains in my Mercury Mail filter which equals thousands of dollars worth of domains that are now useless for sending spam through my mail server. And it doesn't matter how distorted the header or body is. The domain can't be distorted or it won't work as a link.
UUNet should give known spammers on their network their own IP range. If you spam, you get moved into that range. Those who don't want their crap can then easily filter it out by blocking those allocated spammer IPs. And the ISP still gets paid.
Customers who are running legitimate mail servers can stay out of that range as long as they don't break the AUP. The ISP doesn't even have to kill port 25 on the spammer IPs. They could simply limit the amount of bandwidth that can be used to something like 10MB per day on port 25. Which is reasonable. There's no incentive to out and out ban those IPs if no massive amount of junk can come out of them. The spammer is just forcibly restricted until they can behave themselves. At which time they can go back to a less restricted IP range.
I don't think there's any law that says ISPs can't selectivly put people in certain IP ranges. I don't think spammers have any way to fight it under current anti-discrimination laws. If you can even call it discrimination since it's would be based solely on the actions of the person and not who they are.
Apple may be giving MS some cuts on the cost of their processors but it'd be really silly to actually pay MS to take their processors.
Apple has nothing to lose by "entering" the console market this way. Companies pay them for the hardware and they just put the money in the bank. If the console their processor was in fails, they still got paid.
Unless something drastic happens there's also no way that bad press about the console would make it's way into Apple's PR department. When's the last time you heard that a system's processor was the cause of the demise of the system?
There's still a market for the simpler games. Cell phone games are big. The Game Boy Advance is big and anyone can code for it. Distribution is another matter but there's nothing stopping developers from creating a product to get their feet wet. Worst case you make it a pay per download or give it away free as an ad for your PC games.
2D used to be the best choice simply because you could do infinitly better looking graphics. 3D is now getting up to par but there's really no reason not to still use 2D. The latest Wario game just took a tile based game and made it a cube based game in 3D. Not a programming challenge at all. Instead of DrawTile you just use DrawCube, increase the dimensions of your map and voila! 3D platformer. I whipped up the basic components in all of a few days (running, jumping, standing on and above things, collision).
The market is so saturated with 3D first person shooter crap that there's a huge market for games that are simply fun to play. You are not going to get rich from a 3D game so why bother making a crappy 3D game in a lame attempt to milk the 3D scene? Make the best of what you can do, even in 2D and it may not make you rich but at least it won't be half-assed crap.
Stop worrying about the million dollar budgets and just worry about making a fun product.
The best application of 2D is in puzzle games which are ginormous. The hardest part is comming up with the new puzzle concept. Programming them is rediculously easy and they're cheap. Which makes it more likely people will buy them as time killers at work to replace solitaire and minesweeper.
"And as soon as the return from buycheapviagra.com drops off, all the spammer has to do is switch to buycheapv1agra.com and getcheapviagra.com and reallycheapviagra.com and he's slipped right through your filters."
Which costs the spammer real money and it only works until the filter is updated. The more he pushes the new domains the faster they get blocked and he's out tens or hundreds of dollars.
And all he has to do with the brain dead SPEWS method is get a new IP which is free.
"In my own experience, SPEWS is an excellent way of reducing the amount of spam I get."
And nuking villages is an excellent way to kill mosquitoes. It's stupid and ineffectual. And there are blantently obvious and more effective means of dealing with spam without doing more damage than the spammers as SPEWS does.
Just filter out the domains they use to host their images and the domains they use for the "click here" link.
Stop worrying about who's spamming you. It's irrelavent. Dozens or even hundreds of spammers use the same domain. Filter one domain and you block anyone, regardless of who they are, from selling you something using that domain.
"and thanks to the fucked-up CAN-SPAM act some spammers are being given the green-light to annoy the hell out of us legally"
Nothing has changed. There's nothing stopping you from filtering their junk. Legitimate spam is required to follow rules. Rules which can be programmed into a filter. Following the CAN-SPAM act results in the effectivness of filters going UP. Why do you think spam hasn't changed? It's still the same garbled junk like always.
The only thing that can't be garbled is the links.
You don't need technology fixes and you don't need laws.
The technology is there and sufficient.
There's just too many people who'd rather bitch about irrelavent things than rethink how they're going about combating spam. I can't believe how many people think think you need to know who a spammer is to stop them.
Spammers are like terrorists. If your battle plan consists of learning who they are to block them, you're going to be playing wack-a-mole your whole life as new spammers are born every day. Blocking a *spammer* may get you one *spammer.* Blocking domains will get rid of *spam* and that's the goal. There will always be spammers. You can't make THEM go away. But you can make their messages go away.
for perpetuating this myth that blocking IPs is an intelligent way of dealing with spam.
I block domains. I have a list of hundreds of domain names that were used in spams. I now filter out any e-mail that contains any of those domains. I now get spam at a trickle and only feel compelled to update the list of blocked domains every few days. A process which is mostly automated.
You block one IP you completely miss the target. You block one domain and you've 100% nailed dozens or hundreds of spammers who are hawking crap using that domain.
Most domains when used with a spam have a junk subdomain in this vain hope that filters will be stupid enough to include it in the rule. And not surprisingly, most filters are so stupid because they're fully automated. Or they have "?affid=" in some form. That gets removed as well. So all I have left is the main domain name and the dot whatever. By leaving the dot whatever you can include random letter domains that otherwise may happen to fit a base-64 pattern for a legitimate attachment. base-64 doesn't include a period.
And since these are spam domains, there's exactly 0% collateral damage.
Where with blocking IPs there's close to 100% collateral damage since IPs are shared and good luck finding an IP that a spammer actually owns that nobody else will ever use.
Even if you think you're clever and block the IP of the domain thinking many domains go to the same IP, it's a very trivial thing to point the domain to a new IP. Which results in the same problem SPEWs has. They're so retarded and ineffectual they have to block entire ranges of IPs to claim any amount of effectivness.
It's no wonder they remain anonymous. They'd have their brains bashed in with a clue stick by thousands of angry legitimate businesses and mail server owners.
There's nothing wrong with the SMTP protocol. Blocking domains doens't require knowing who the message came from. It's irrelavent. Nearly all spams have links. And the HTML standards don't allow for obfuscated URLs. Those spams that don't have links are very few and managable with the delete button.
With closed source the responsibility lies solely with the company to solve the problems.
With open souce, problems are just an excuse to try to force people who find problems to "join the cause" or you can just ignore any problems they find.
Here's a crazy idea members of the Open Source community such as yourself need to get through your thick skull: take responsibility for the crap you write. If you write the code, it's YOUR responsibility to fix the problems. No one else is obligated to fix a line of code and is more than free to point out the flaws.
He didn't write CUPS so why should he feel obligated to fix it? He's a USER. He didn't write the code. He didn't design the interface. As a USER he's in a position to criticize. It's what users do.
Whinning he doesn't treat you like a king and kiss your feet for blessing him with what he sees as crap, is not going to do anything to win support for the project.
This is why I choose what Open Source projects I use very carefully and rarely recommend them and never because they are Open Source.
"It ignores the fact that there is a community of hackers out there actively looking for the holes."
The point being made in the article is that the "community of hackers" has never actually found an exploit until MS told them where it was by issuing a patch for it. At which point, all the hackers are then doing is taking advantage of people's laziness.
I wasn't up to date when the SoBig virus hit. But the patch was available a month before it came out which further proves the point of the article. However, no computers on the home network were touched because I run a $40 hardware NAT that's properly configured. The College of Education was the least affected college at ASU because the people who do the tech support make sure all the virus scan and windows updates happen automatically. The faculty affected where the ones that went out of their way to stop windows from updating.
Keep up with the free patches and you're fine because all (most of) the hackers working on Windows are just a bunch of no talent script kiddies. SoBig didn't happen because of some genius. It happened because MS told them what the exploit was and a month later they finally got it to work and the real problem was lazy Windows users.
It's very rare that a Windows virus doesn't require user assistance.
Slashdot Mirror
While in High School I was always coding various things in BASIC on it and one day when I demonstrating how to map 3D objects by placing the sonic sensor on an overhead cart and rolling it under light fixtures, this kid in my calc class goes "you expect that thing to act like a Pentium." I used TI-BASIC to learn how to do 2D translation and rotation and touched on some 3D. I made the first and possibly only graphical adventure game for it complete with text entry and a cursor to click on objects.
A few years ago I gave it to a friend who needed a TI but I'm pretty sure the Intel Inside Pentium MMX sticker is still on the back of it.
Ben
I suppose we could blame Slashdot for not taking the initiative to do a little fact checking before letting this one in but then again the members are the fact checkers, spell checkers, dupe dectors, etc.
Whoever submitted this should remain anonymous. But, unless they were just seeing if they could slide one past the editors, we educated at least one person today.
Debunking bogus articles every once in awhile isn't a bad thing. Chances are, quite a few people, although they would never try it, probably thought it was a valid concept.
Ben
The problem with lasers is that they don't stop.
What you would need to do is find a way to attract those particles back. You have the light "magnet" along with the source behind a mirror in the grip so that the particles reach zero velocity at a reasonable distance and accelerate back at the mirror, reflect back to the maximum, repeat.
By having the laser particles move in such a fashion it would basically be a chainsaw with a infinite number of blades moving in two directions.
Due to the speed of light it would go back and forth at such a rate that you wouldn't have to worry about moving the saber around leaking very fast and dangerous particles as you went. You couldn't move the handle fast enough to get any significant number of particles to hit the mirror at such an angle they bolted from the system or miss the mirror entirely.
Ben
the problem with regular CDRs is that if you bang them around enough the silver stuff (what the data is burned to) flakes off because it's not encased in the plastic. Those glue on labels help to weaken it. If you try to take a label off, chances are the data goes with it.
Presumably this new method has the label part manufactured on and not attached to the part of the CD the data is written to. Or it's a second layer that more painted on than glued on. However it's done, it's probably much more sound manufacturing than putting a sticker on a CD.
Ben
I worked in the college of education computer lab and did the same thing. Smile and they'd often wave and smile back.
A couple years before that I worked at a pizza and arcade place. I came in one night just to hang out for a bit and all the guys were checking out this girl so I go up and they tell me to give her some lame line about how my friend thinks she's cute. I have no shame so I walk over and go "My friend over there thinks your cute." She looks straight at me and goes "I think you're the cutest one here." She ended up writting her number on a dry erase board for me and after she left I erased it because I'm a moron. But it was okay because she was pretty flaky and ended up dating the guy who usually works the prize counter. I guess she flashed him once while we were open in plain view of a bunch of kids. That got his attention.
4-5 years later, which would be last week when I went to see The Passion I walked into the theater to wait for a couple friends and I see her standing there. She starts walking over and goes "I know you." She gives me a hug and after a exchanging two lines of dialog to get caught up a bit she's gone.
Now I'm a programmer and sit behind a desk. Sure I have less opportunities to make a complete ass of myself but those are some good stories. I actually took a second job at Mervyn's for awhile to meet girls. Worked too. Though I didn't stick around long enough for anything to happen. My weekends are worth more than $30.
Ben
PayPal is pretty much the standard for handling on-line transactions. I've seen a few other sites for handling transactions but the sites look cheap and the finance charges aren't. Or they have this phoney Disney Dollars thing going. Give us real money and you get to call it "eGold" or some crap that like.
PayPal also has the sense to offer Instant Payment Notifications and prewritten scripts all ready to go for site owners to plug in to recieve them in a variety of languages. I use PHP. Previously I just modified it to generate an e-mail to myself with the account info in an easy to cut and paste format for final manual processing. Now it also handles updating the htpasswd files which are in a subdirectory of the unadvertised IPN processing directory with a DENY ALL. And since the script calls home to PayPal to verify the payment good luck spoofing your way through.
I don't know of any other on-line payment companies that offer the absurd level of ease of use, low fees and the great features like IPN that allow subcription sites like mine to offer instant access. And PayPal has the user base. Lots of people have PayPal accounts and it's no pain in the butt to establish one if you don't.
I don't care to establish a dozen different on-line payment accounts and a dozen different scripts to instantly and securly process payments just to appease a minority of people who think PayPal is the spawn of Satan. NewEgg seriously screwed up with me and 4 months later finally refunded the entire cost of the server case ($145) after getting the BBB on their back which put them back in purgatory. Before that there was no way I was ever going to shop with them again and recommended against them quite a few times to friends. Every company has a fraction of customers that hate their guts. You can't seriously expect everyone is going to stop using their services just because the company screwed up with you.
I've actually had a couple dollar bills snail mailed to me. One from France and one from New York. I post the address for that reason. When I sell a Content CD I usually get a check in the mail. If people can't stand PayPal there are quite a few ways to get money from person A to person B. I just use and recommend PayPal because it's the easiest and cheapest.
Ben
I happily paid $128 or so for Win2K Professional at a store that was going out of business.
I have 98,ME,2K and XP. The only one that wasn't worth what I paid for it was ME and that was $50. Although it useful as it bridges the upgrade path. The upgrade version of ME will install with an upgrade version of 98 and then I can install 2K on top of that.
XP I got free from the university.
I wouldn't pay for it since I have 2K. If I didn't have 2K then I'd be willing to pay for it.
Ben
I'm pretty sure we have an old Epson lying around somewhere that we used with the Apple ][c. I remember needing/wanting to print something out but not being able to because the rest of the house was sleeping. The last time I used one of those things was when I was working as a manager for Haggar Clothing and the print quality is only tolerable. If you're not looking for nice printouts for reports or whatever (and not printing graphics), dot matrix is fine.
I have a Canon BJC-1000 which has black catridges that cost about $25 bucks a pop. I've had the latest catridge for much more than three months and it hasn't dried out. I'm not sure how many hundreds of pages I get out of it but it's up there. At 500 pages it works out to 5 cents a page which isn't terrible. I paid maybe $50 for the printer and I've had it for 5 years or more.
"At least they should do something to keep all those printer cartridges out of land fills."
There's a cartridge refilling shop at my university. You don't have to throw them away. You just need to be proactive in finding a place that will refill them.
Ben
...isn't so bad if you're learning by example with the intent to escape being a follower. A script kiddie in the best sense is analogous to being an apprentice. In the worst sense it's a term for annoying no talent hacks with nothing better to do.
I don't think there are many programmers who weren't at one time or another "script kiddies" who simply cut and pasted code and then tweaked it a bit to see what happens.
There isn't really any problem with this as it's a good way to learn how to code quickly depending on your learning style.
The problem comes in when you cut and paste code and mistake yourself for having some kind of talent. Those are the annoying ASL types.
Anybody can cut and paste code. It takes talent to take the code and make it your own or even just apply it to something it hasn't been applied to before. I took a pretty standard and quite buggy A* implementation and turned it into a blazingly fast scalable path finding class suitable for doing real time path finding over massive (miles of 10m data) distances by land or air.
And I still only have a vague idea of how A* works.
Ben
...to force people to run pay per e-mail servers. Just because MS is running a pay per e-mail server doesn't mean I have to. Mailing lists will simply start running their own servers and giving/selling members e-mail accounts if needed so they can communicate with the list.
I'm not sure what kind of legal grounds anyone could possibly find that would force me to not use Mercury Mail. Best case scenario for MS is that competing e-mail protocols emerge just like there are quite a few IM protocols.
MS can charge all they want. I just won't be sending e-mails to anyone using a service that requires I pay. And I'll continue running my mail server where I charge $2 a year for an e-mail address with unlimited messages and up to 15MB attachments and POP3 access. Which beats the pants off of anything MS has to offer.
Ben
...if you can't be bothered to post the specs of the machine you're trying to run it on. It's completely meaningless.
"The pistol is gone; it was highly accurate"
Pistols aren't supposed to be accurate. You cannot snipe people with pistols. If a game allows you to do such a thing it's rediculous even for a fantasy world.
If you like unlimited firepower with "can't miss" weapons, feel free to use cheat codes in single player or continue playing the original. It's not like there's a shortage of maps or players.
Ben
I run Mercury Mail and McAfee does a fine job keeping virus infected e-mails (or any file for that matter) from staying on the server to be downloaded by a user. In the off chance it can clean an e-mail I sometimes get a previously infected message with a zero byte attachment. When MyDoom came through McAfee reported 10,000+ deleted/cleaned files.
There is Open Source anti-virus software out there and there's really no reason to not run it on the server. Your server may not be succeptible to Windows viruses but your users are.
This new batch of viruses being zipped up seem to be getting past the anti-virus software. Most likely because they're zipped up and (supposedly) password protected which changes their signiture until you decompress it.
It may just be that software hasn't updated yet. It does that automatically on Fridays.
Ben
I expect my car to have natural wear and tear which requires the ability to replace those parts designed to eventually fail.
Software doesn't have parts that are designed to eventually fail that need to be replaced. For loops don't degrade over time. It either works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't work, it's the company's sole responsibility to make it work. Whether or not it works can be established as soon as the software is loaded or by reading reviews.
When software is Open Source it can sometimes be close enough. I've modified source code to fit my needs before (I added an IP whitelist to WinVNC for example). Linux can't be "close enough." An operating system is far too complicated for anyone but the truely dedicated to care if they can "get under the hood" or not. With big apps I get what fits my needs. Closed source or not. Most people buy only the software that fits their needs. Nobody is going to buy (or even accept for free) tax software that almost can do their taxes.
A valid analogy has nothing to do with software. Would I buy a computer who's case is sealed shut? No. For the same reason I wouldn't buy a car with the hood sealed shut. Some people don't care to replace those parts of a computer designed to eventually fail (or go obsolete) just like some people don't care to ever get under the hood of their car. Macs and laptops are such computers. That's what keeps me from buying them.
Ben
For developers it's not having to pay thousands in licensing costs. That's an easy sell. There's no reason for a developer to say "no" to Ogg. I have a plug and play DSound 8 class that plays Ogg. It's available at IcarusIndie.com
But, until MP3 becomes annoying Joe User isn't going to care. There's really no way that companies are going to make it cost effective for the user to choose a more open format.
What companies fail to realize (or think the DMCA protects them) is that if you can see or listen to it, you can rip it to any format you want. And unless you're silly and start flaunting your rips for the whole world to see, there's nothing they can do about it. Who's to say that sound blasting from your stereo is comming from an "unauthorized" rip?
I say let them do their thing. The sooner they get going DRMing everything to death the sooner they go out of business under the weight of their own stupidity.
They should just stick to frying the big fish and not worry about how many fish are in the sea. If Joe User can rip a CD, oh well.
Ben
to just automatically move an account over to a spam IP if port 25 traffic gets too much than to pull the account entirely. Cox Communications supposedly already has an automated system to redistribute IPs (mine's never changed). So it's not something drastic that would need to be implemented.
As other people have mentioned, relays are a big part of the problem. It's better to "punish" ignorant customers by moving them to a restricted port 25 IP than to cut them off entirely. By moving them there's no harm no foul since they weren't the ones directly spamming anyway and probably won't notice they were moved.
If they do notice and call then the ISP can tell them to do something about their excessive e-mail sending and point them at the AUP. It's all very quick and painless to resolve the issue since it's the customer that has to take action to speak with people and not the company making the calls. People who have to call when they know they broke the rules are far less likely to do anything.
Cox recently cut off incomming port 25. Probably because of myDoom. I'm not about to call and complain because I was trying to run a spam can on my home system. Outgoing port 25 has been blocked since I got the service. And it would be a waste of time and money for them to call me and yell at me. They quietly cut off my server and I just shut my mouth about it.
By having a no harm no foul automated system you can punish a spammer as soon as say X MB of e-mails get sent in Y amount of time. Versus finding out about it later after it's too late and gigs of e-mails have been sent.
Automatically kicking customers entirely is just asking for trouble because the ignorant (those who unknowingly relay) will be kicked which will result in bad PR where there should be none.
You can still kick the spammer entirely. It's just a matter of starting with a little punishment and then escelating only as nesseccary.
Kicking a customer should be the last resort when just limiting port 25 traffic is sufficient.
Ben
nearly all spams contain a link to somewhere. I just filter out the domains those links go to since no legitimate e-mail will contain a link to those domains. You also can't hide the destination of a link if you don't leave the harvesting solely up to an automated system.
Takes care of most of the spam. And it costs spammers money every time they get a new domain so I can deal with what little spam gets through before the filter is updated. I've put hundreds of domains in my Mercury Mail filter which equals thousands of dollars worth of domains that are now useless for sending spam through my mail server. And it doesn't matter how distorted the header or body is. The domain can't be distorted or it won't work as a link.
Ben
UUNet should give known spammers on their network their own IP range. If you spam, you get moved into that range. Those who don't want their crap can then easily filter it out by blocking those allocated spammer IPs. And the ISP still gets paid.
Customers who are running legitimate mail servers can stay out of that range as long as they don't break the AUP. The ISP doesn't even have to kill port 25 on the spammer IPs. They could simply limit the amount of bandwidth that can be used to something like 10MB per day on port 25. Which is reasonable. There's no incentive to out and out ban those IPs if no massive amount of junk can come out of them. The spammer is just forcibly restricted until they can behave themselves. At which time they can go back to a less restricted IP range.
I don't think there's any law that says ISPs can't selectivly put people in certain IP ranges. I don't think spammers have any way to fight it under current anti-discrimination laws. If you can even call it discrimination since it's would be based solely on the actions of the person and not who they are.
Ben
Apple may be giving MS some cuts on the cost of their processors but it'd be really silly to actually pay MS to take their processors.
Apple has nothing to lose by "entering" the console market this way. Companies pay them for the hardware and they just put the money in the bank. If the console their processor was in fails, they still got paid.
Unless something drastic happens there's also no way that bad press about the console would make it's way into Apple's PR department. When's the last time you heard that a system's processor was the cause of the demise of the system?
It's free advertising, free money and zero risk.
Ben
There's still a market for the simpler games. Cell phone games are big. The Game Boy Advance is big and anyone can code for it. Distribution is another matter but there's nothing stopping developers from creating a product to get their feet wet. Worst case you make it a pay per download or give it away free as an ad for your PC games.
2D used to be the best choice simply because you could do infinitly better looking graphics. 3D is now getting up to par but there's really no reason not to still use 2D. The latest Wario game just took a tile based game and made it a cube based game in 3D. Not a programming challenge at all. Instead of DrawTile you just use DrawCube, increase the dimensions of your map and voila! 3D platformer. I whipped up the basic components in all of a few days (running, jumping, standing on and above things, collision).
The market is so saturated with 3D first person shooter crap that there's a huge market for games that are simply fun to play. You are not going to get rich from a 3D game so why bother making a crappy 3D game in a lame attempt to milk the 3D scene? Make the best of what you can do, even in 2D and it may not make you rich but at least it won't be half-assed crap.
Stop worrying about the million dollar budgets and just worry about making a fun product.
The best application of 2D is in puzzle games which are ginormous. The hardest part is comming up with the new puzzle concept. Programming them is rediculously easy and they're cheap. Which makes it more likely people will buy them as time killers at work to replace solitaire and minesweeper.
Ben
which explain why we have so many laws and lawyers.
Seriously. How is that in any way shape or form "interesting" or "insightful?"
Do you also have to be told not to touch fire, coals, lava, etc instead of being simply told not to touch things that are hot?
"I didn't run him over?"
Holy crap.
Ben
"And as soon as the return from buycheapviagra.com drops off, all the spammer has to do is switch to buycheapv1agra.com and getcheapviagra.com and reallycheapviagra.com and he's slipped right through your filters."
Which costs the spammer real money and it only works until the filter is updated. The more he pushes the new domains the faster they get blocked and he's out tens or hundreds of dollars.
And all he has to do with the brain dead SPEWS method is get a new IP which is free.
"In my own experience, SPEWS is an excellent way of reducing the amount of spam I get."
And nuking villages is an excellent way to kill mosquitoes. It's stupid and ineffectual. And there are blantently obvious and more effective means of dealing with spam without doing more damage than the spammers as SPEWS does.
Ben
You don't need to know who they are.
Just filter out the domains they use to host their images and the domains they use for the "click here" link.
Stop worrying about who's spamming you. It's irrelavent. Dozens or even hundreds of spammers use the same domain. Filter one domain and you block anyone, regardless of who they are, from selling you something using that domain.
"and thanks to the fucked-up CAN-SPAM act some spammers are being given the green-light to annoy the hell out of us legally"
Nothing has changed. There's nothing stopping you from filtering their junk. Legitimate spam is required to follow rules. Rules which can be programmed into a filter. Following the CAN-SPAM act results in the effectivness of filters going UP. Why do you think spam hasn't changed? It's still the same garbled junk like always.
The only thing that can't be garbled is the links.
You don't need technology fixes and you don't need laws.
The technology is there and sufficient.
There's just too many people who'd rather bitch about irrelavent things than rethink how they're going about combating spam. I can't believe how many people think think you need to know who a spammer is to stop them.
Spammers are like terrorists. If your battle plan consists of learning who they are to block them, you're going to be playing wack-a-mole your whole life as new spammers are born every day. Blocking a *spammer* may get you one *spammer.* Blocking domains will get rid of *spam* and that's the goal. There will always be spammers. You can't make THEM go away. But you can make their messages go away.
Ben
for perpetuating this myth that blocking IPs is an intelligent way of dealing with spam.
I block domains. I have a list of hundreds of domain names that were used in spams. I now filter out any e-mail that contains any of those domains. I now get spam at a trickle and only feel compelled to update the list of blocked domains every few days. A process which is mostly automated.
You block one IP you completely miss the target. You block one domain and you've 100% nailed dozens or hundreds of spammers who are hawking crap using that domain.
Most domains when used with a spam have a junk subdomain in this vain hope that filters will be stupid enough to include it in the rule. And not surprisingly, most filters are so stupid because they're fully automated. Or they have "?affid=" in some form. That gets removed as well. So all I have left is the main domain name and the dot whatever. By leaving the dot whatever you can include random letter domains that otherwise may happen to fit a base-64 pattern for a legitimate attachment. base-64 doesn't include a period.
And since these are spam domains, there's exactly 0% collateral damage.
Where with blocking IPs there's close to 100% collateral damage since IPs are shared and good luck finding an IP that a spammer actually owns that nobody else will ever use.
Even if you think you're clever and block the IP of the domain thinking many domains go to the same IP, it's a very trivial thing to point the domain to a new IP. Which results in the same problem SPEWs has. They're so retarded and ineffectual they have to block entire ranges of IPs to claim any amount of effectivness.
It's no wonder they remain anonymous. They'd have their brains bashed in with a clue stick by thousands of angry legitimate businesses and mail server owners.
There's nothing wrong with the SMTP protocol. Blocking domains doens't require knowing who the message came from. It's irrelavent. Nearly all spams have links. And the HTML standards don't allow for obfuscated URLs. Those spams that don't have links are very few and managable with the delete button.
Ben
With closed source the responsibility lies solely with the company to solve the problems.
With open souce, problems are just an excuse to try to force people who find problems to "join the cause" or you can just ignore any problems they find.
Here's a crazy idea members of the Open Source community such as yourself need to get through your thick skull: take responsibility for the crap you write. If you write the code, it's YOUR responsibility to fix the problems. No one else is obligated to fix a line of code and is more than free to point out the flaws.
He didn't write CUPS so why should he feel obligated to fix it? He's a USER. He didn't write the code. He didn't design the interface. As a USER he's in a position to criticize. It's what users do.
Whinning he doesn't treat you like a king and kiss your feet for blessing him with what he sees as crap, is not going to do anything to win support for the project.
This is why I choose what Open Source projects I use very carefully and rarely recommend them and never because they are Open Source.
Ben
"It ignores the fact that there is a community of hackers out there actively looking for the holes."
The point being made in the article is that the "community of hackers" has never actually found an exploit until MS told them where it was by issuing a patch for it. At which point, all the hackers are then doing is taking advantage of people's laziness.
I wasn't up to date when the SoBig virus hit. But the patch was available a month before it came out which further proves the point of the article. However, no computers on the home network were touched because I run a $40 hardware NAT that's properly configured. The College of Education was the least affected college at ASU because the people who do the tech support make sure all the virus scan and windows updates happen automatically. The faculty affected where the ones that went out of their way to stop windows from updating.
Keep up with the free patches and you're fine because all (most of) the hackers working on Windows are just a bunch of no talent script kiddies. SoBig didn't happen because of some genius. It happened because MS told them what the exploit was and a month later they finally got it to work and the real problem was lazy Windows users.
It's very rare that a Windows virus doesn't require user assistance.
Ben