Oh lord, LA,T is back. Time to feed the trolls . ..
it is not nearly as creative as other nations were at their peaks, like Britain, Spain, France and Greece. What has America done that compare?
Jazz. Rock n' roll. The Internet. The A-bomb. The moon. The skyscraper. Abstract expressionism. All within just over 200 years. I don't deny that much came before, and much more is to come, but America is doing pretty well.
As a woman, I am attacked because of my gender far more here than anywhere else I have been. As a Catholic, I have been attacked.
How many countries have you been to where women are not allowed to leave the house alone, or own property, or vote, or work? How many countries have you been to where people are routinely bombed/shot/imprisoned for being Catholic? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "attacked", but Americans have it pretty easy, compared to much of the world.
I would like to see america and the males of america adopt a position of humility, and allow the dispossessed and discriminated against, such as Russians and women, to breathe free and stake their claim in society.
This comment doesn't even make sense. That's the whole point of this country.
I can't think of an example of a product that was seriously crappy that won out simply because it was in Windows.
I've got one example. Notepad. Notepad unequivocally sucks ass compared to any other text editor, but it has just enough features (searching/replacing, no size limit at least in NT, word wrap, that's about it) to make it useful.
If I'm using a machine for any serious coding, I'll install a better editor. But for simple editing of configuration files, it's just not worth the effort. Notepad gets the golden good enough award. It's always there, and always just barely good enough.
The Reuters article seems to blow things out of proportion a bit. Here is an article from C|NET explaining the technical details of the new Windows Media Player copy protection scheme . . . it's pretty scary, but doesn't affect MP3's at all.
The only new information in this Reuter's article is that the audio recorder built in to XP will only allow the recording of low-quality MP3s. You can still use whatever you want to rip your CDs.
True, Microsoft is trying to guide users away from the MP3 format, which is despicable, but this isn't some heavy-handed move to ban MP3s from XP altogether.
By the way, here's another story from StreamingMedia.com that reports things very differently . . . according to this one, Microsoft has not yet decided (as of March 28) whether to include MP3 encoding abilities in Media Player.
The fact that this got "+5, Insightful" is glaring proof that (some?) moderators do not follow the guidelines, and moderate according to personal agenda.
Regardless of whether you agree with New Republic's politics, this comment makes some extreme leaps in logic, such as extending one person to equate to "liberals" in general. The author then goes on to attack liberals in a completely childish and sensational manner ("cowardly and snakelike"? "screwing up our country"? "sodomy"?).
Moderators, regardless of whether this comment makes you want to go shoot off your gun for the Republic, it ain't insightful.
True, the P2P concepts have been around for years. What makes this new wave special is the methods used to access the system. Yes, you've always been able to FTP files from somewhere, then serve them to someone else, but what's new about Gnutella, etc. is that it's organized and designed specifically for that type of sharing.
Of the protocols you mentioned, FidoNet is the closest thing to what we have today. IRC is not P2P except for the DCC aspect of it, which is an explicitly created one-to-one connection. The new P2P systems allow a series of one-to-one connections to appear as a mesh to the end user.
So, yes, the actual file transfer methods have been around for a long time, but the methods to find those files are relatively new.
Funny that all the albums you talk about buying were released before the advent of Napster. So you haven't felt the need to buy any more since you discovered that you can steal any music that strikes your fancy, eh?
Steal away; most of us do. Just don't try to moralize it.
I've noticed one of the most popular ideas here is to build a server that will MD5 aim.exe on the fly. If you're going to the trouble to do that, why the HELL not just build a fully open IM system?!?!?
This would avoid any future conflict with AOL, as well as clearing the conscience of those who are using the AIM system in an unauthorized manner.
Open-source client users: "Oh no, we can't steal processor time and bandwidth from AOL's privately owned servers while bypassing the ads that fund the service anymore! It's so unfair!"
So, be creative...culture jam. I've got a card for my local grocery store that's registered to "Bozo T. Clown". Yeah, they're collecting demographics for that user, but there's no way that any of it's useful....
Sure it's useful . . . they still know what one particular purchaser (you) is buying, in what quantities and when. When the marketing analyst runs his "product category sales by date and ZIP code" report, your purchases are on it, accurately helping out the marketing effort.
So your "culture jam" (?!) is not only paranoid and stupid, it doesn't even help "bring down the man", or whatever it is you think you're trying to accomplish. Not to mention the environmental impact of the wasted junk mail being sent to Bozo.
The numbers from Earthlink don't cover the entire string. Obviously they're using the remaining bits in a sinister plot to compromise user security.
If they encode a piece of user information into the remaining bits, they could use as little as 1 bit per request (or less!) to steal vital information from your computer, such as:
credit card numbers
your favorite pr0n sites
that business proposal for "world-of-spatulas.com" you've been working on
your Earthlink email address (just imagine the potential damage!)
your amihotornot.com user ID
This is worse than the Prodigy "we cache private files" scandal of the early 90s. Earthlink must be stopped.
I think the people the author is responding to were suggesting the Linux field will be narrowed for business. Sure, there will always be 500 separate distibutions out there, but businesses really like standards. Two or three distributions will prevail in a big way for business, and the other 497 will still be around.
First, the main part of the headline (Perl) is not that big of a deal. The administrators saw a vague mention of loading shotguns into bags, and responded with alarm. This is not suprising given recent events, and the administration was entirely justified in doing this. Not to mention it's FUD to suggest the student has a "police record" because he was interrogated.
Second, the case about the students being suspended for Web content . . . the story is missing the critical point, which is the content. This is a private organization we're talking about here; libel laws do apply. Tell me what the page said about the school, and then I'll make judgement.
I guess I'm supposed to be outraged by this story, but I just have to assume the school was in the right until shown otherwise . . . they certainly were on the first point.
Buildings don't crash to the ground a lot. For some reason, programs do, and we don't understand why.
The laws of statics don't change over time; technology does. If gravity's pull doubled every 18 months, you'd have a lot of "legacy" buildings crashing to the ground.
Asked whether he was disappointed that the world has yet to see a real HAL, the menacing yet highly intelligent computer in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," Ballmer made an unlikely confession.
"In the spirit of frankness and directness of the 21st Century, I never saw the movie," he said. "To most people at Microsoft, HAL stands for hardware application layer."
Yeah, that's ridiculous. Makes me wonder if they were actually having "technical difficulties" (virus, DoS, cut fiber, etc.) and used this as a convenient excuse to cover it up . . .
Another striking thing is how racially segregated life is. Black people are mostly confined to ghettos or fast food counters, you hardly ever meet any socially. It's hard to quantify, but CA *feels* more racist to me, it seems like race is just less of an issue here.
When you've only got five black people in the entire country, yes, racism is low.
Racism is the price of diversity. It can be improved to a degree through education, but I refuse to believe that any area is significantly "more racist" than any other. If the cause (diversity) is not there, the symptom won't be either.
This makes me happy. This may not have much of a market other than those who played the games "back in the day", but there are quite a few of us around . . . [cue dreamy flashback music]
My first Sierra game was Leisure Suit Larry I (for those of you who haven't played this, it starts with an "age verification" quiz, where you have to answer questions like "Who was Spiro Agnew?"), followed by King's Quest IV. Then Space Quest III (Astro Chicken!). Then back to Space Quest I. Hero's Quest (later called Quest For Glory, for some reason) came next. Fun fun. Leisure Suit Larry III next; much racier than the first. Police Quest I . . . the best part was the overhead view of driving the car. Then Space Quest IV came out (to my knowledge, the first of the VGA series). This one was fun, but it marks the switch from EGA command-line to VGA point-n-click for Sierra. That title had some particurly funny parts, . . . like the throwback to EGA Space Quest I in the middle of all the 256-color beauty, and the parody software you could buy at the mall. But, all downhill from there for Sierra.
What the hell happened to them, anyway? Those were some brilliant game writers . . .
This is a great story . . . and suprisingly, all too familiar to many people here in the Washington DC area.
For a while there, a lot of people seemed to be under the impression that working in IT made them bulletproof. The economy was doing well, companies were hiring left and right, hiring bonuses were high, stock options were even higher.
Then came the problems. When the bubble burst, everyone thought "My job is safe. They'll just cut the {new | overpaid | deadwood} employees first. This was mostly true; the problem was, most people could be fit into any of these categories in the eyes of management. People were dropped during the first week, the first day, hell, even just before starting (which doesn't necessarily come with the luxury of severance pay, even though you've just left your old job and relocated). The people who were hit the hardest were the H1-B resident workers . . . you lose your job, you got 30 days to find another sponsor or it's back to your homeland with you. Jobs are still abundant, but it's not quite as easy as the media would have you believe to get rehired in an instant (especially if you just got laid off from your first job on Day 1).
So, everyone learned that the IT industry is, after all, no different from any other, and you should always cover your ass. The end.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean IMHO? On Slashdot (oops, I mean /.) you're supposed to use acronyms whenever possible!
it is not nearly as creative as other nations were at their peaks, like Britain, Spain, France and Greece. What has America done that compare?
Jazz. Rock n' roll. The Internet. The A-bomb. The moon. The skyscraper. Abstract expressionism. All within just over 200 years. I don't deny that much came before, and much more is to come, but America is doing pretty well.
As a woman, I am attacked because of my gender far more here than anywhere else I have been. As a Catholic, I have been attacked.
How many countries have you been to where women are not allowed to leave the house alone, or own property, or vote, or work? How many countries have you been to where people are routinely bombed/shot/imprisoned for being Catholic? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "attacked", but Americans have it pretty easy, compared to much of the world.
I would like to see america and the males of america adopt a position of humility, and allow the dispossessed and discriminated against, such as Russians and women, to breathe free and stake their claim in society.
This comment doesn't even make sense. That's the whole point of this country.
I've got one example. Notepad. Notepad unequivocally sucks ass compared to any other text editor, but it has just enough features (searching/replacing, no size limit at least in NT, word wrap, that's about it) to make it useful.
If I'm using a machine for any serious coding, I'll install a better editor. But for simple editing of configuration files, it's just not worth the effort. Notepad gets the golden good enough award. It's always there, and always just barely good enough.
The only new information in this Reuter's article is that the audio recorder built in to XP will only allow the recording of low-quality MP3s. You can still use whatever you want to rip your CDs.
True, Microsoft is trying to guide users away from the MP3 format, which is despicable, but this isn't some heavy-handed move to ban MP3s from XP altogether.
By the way, here's another story from StreamingMedia.com that reports things very differently . . . according to this one, Microsoft has not yet decided (as of March 28) whether to include MP3 encoding abilities in Media Player.
Are they going to have a guy in a space suit and a cowboy hat, doing that scene from Dr. Strangelove as the asteroid goes down?
Regardless of whether you agree with New Republic's politics, this comment makes some extreme leaps in logic, such as extending one person to equate to "liberals" in general. The author then goes on to attack liberals in a completely childish and sensational manner ("cowardly and snakelike"? "screwing up our country"? "sodomy"?).
Moderators, regardless of whether this comment makes you want to go shoot off your gun for the Republic, it ain't insightful.
Hardware problems can cause network failure! Imagine that.
And you didn't even get first post, you dumb cock.
Of the protocols you mentioned, FidoNet is the closest thing to what we have today. IRC is not P2P except for the DCC aspect of it, which is an explicitly created one-to-one connection. The new P2P systems allow a series of one-to-one connections to appear as a mesh to the end user.
So, yes, the actual file transfer methods have been around for a long time, but the methods to find those files are relatively new.
Steal away; most of us do. Just don't try to moralize it.
YES! About time we had a creation-vs-big-bang flame war in here!
This would avoid any future conflict with AOL, as well as clearing the conscience of those who are using the AIM system in an unauthorized manner.
AOL is right on this one. Sorry.
Sure it's useful . . . they still know what one particular purchaser (you) is buying, in what quantities and when. When the marketing analyst runs his "product category sales by date and ZIP code" report, your purchases are on it, accurately helping out the marketing effort.
So your "culture jam" (?!) is not only paranoid and stupid, it doesn't even help "bring down the man", or whatever it is you think you're trying to accomplish. Not to mention the environmental impact of the wasted junk mail being sent to Bozo.
If they encode a piece of user information into the remaining bits, they could use as little as 1 bit per request (or less!) to steal vital information from your computer, such as:
- credit card numbers
- your favorite pr0n sites
- that business proposal for "world-of-spatulas.com" you've been working on
- your Earthlink email address (just imagine the potential damage!)
- your amihotornot.com user ID
This is worse than the Prodigy "we cache private files" scandal of the early 90s. Earthlink must be stopped.I think the people the author is responding to were suggesting the Linux field will be narrowed for business. Sure, there will always be 500 separate distibutions out there, but businesses really like standards. Two or three distributions will prevail in a big way for business, and the other 497 will still be around.
Second, the case about the students being suspended for Web content . . . the story is missing the critical point, which is the content. This is a private organization we're talking about here; libel laws do apply. Tell me what the page said about the school, and then I'll make judgement.
I guess I'm supposed to be outraged by this story, but I just have to assume the school was in the right until shown otherwise . . . they certainly were on the first point.
The laws of statics don't change over time; technology does. If gravity's pull doubled every 18 months, you'd have a lot of "legacy" buildings crashing to the ground.
Ya mean like Windows XP?
"In the spirit of frankness and directness of the 21st Century, I never saw the movie," he said. "To most people at Microsoft, HAL stands for hardware application layer."
That explains everything.
Yeah, that's ridiculous. Makes me wonder if they were actually having "technical difficulties" (virus, DoS, cut fiber, etc.) and used this as a convenient excuse to cover it up . . .
When you've only got five black people in the entire country, yes, racism is low.
Racism is the price of diversity. It can be improved to a degree through education, but I refuse to believe that any area is significantly "more racist" than any other. If the cause (diversity) is not there, the symptom won't be either.
4.
3.
2.
Have a nice day!
1.
boooooom!
My first Sierra game was Leisure Suit Larry I (for those of you who haven't played this, it starts with an "age verification" quiz, where you have to answer questions like "Who was Spiro Agnew?"), followed by King's Quest IV. Then Space Quest III (Astro Chicken!). Then back to Space Quest I. Hero's Quest (later called Quest For Glory, for some reason) came next. Fun fun. Leisure Suit Larry III next; much racier than the first. Police Quest I . . . the best part was the overhead view of driving the car. Then Space Quest IV came out (to my knowledge, the first of the VGA series). This one was fun, but it marks the switch from EGA command-line to VGA point-n-click for Sierra. That title had some particurly funny parts, . . . like the throwback to EGA Space Quest I in the middle of all the 256-color beauty, and the parody software you could buy at the mall. But, all downhill from there for Sierra.
What the hell happened to them, anyway? Those were some brilliant game writers . . .
For a while there, a lot of people seemed to be under the impression that working in IT made them bulletproof. The economy was doing well, companies were hiring left and right, hiring bonuses were high, stock options were even higher.
Then came the problems. When the bubble burst, everyone thought "My job is safe. They'll just cut the {new | overpaid | deadwood} employees first. This was mostly true; the problem was, most people could be fit into any of these categories in the eyes of management. People were dropped during the first week, the first day, hell, even just before starting (which doesn't necessarily come with the luxury of severance pay, even though you've just left your old job and relocated). The people who were hit the hardest were the H1-B resident workers . . . you lose your job, you got 30 days to find another sponsor or it's back to your homeland with you. Jobs are still abundant, but it's not quite as easy as the media would have you believe to get rehired in an instant (especially if you just got laid off from your first job on Day 1).
So, everyone learned that the IT industry is, after all, no different from any other, and you should always cover your ass. The end.
Well, there goes Visa. You can still use your MasterCard until someone uses 5 . . . aw crap.