Anyone else remember a building set called Riveton or Rivetron, from the late 70s? It had a bunch of plastic panels, tubes, and corner joints, all with holes in them, as well as special parts like wheels. You used a special gun to connect the parts together by means of little rubber rivets that were stretched into the holes. Very cool - I made some neat little racing carts and vehicles for my action figures with these. As I recall, the tech was taken off the market after some little kid choked on one of the rubber rivets.
My other favorite building toy (apart from Lego), was my "Girder & Panel" set that could be used to throw down some very cool-looking high rises and similar neubauten. I ended up using this stuff many years later to construct some very cool-looking scenery for SF miniatures gaming (the scale was different, but it still looked great).
I only had a brief run-in with erector sets, and I think I was too young to really appreciate it -- probably about 4-6 -- but from what I remember, I concur with others, that erector sets really do emphasize real-world mechanical skills more than other toys...
1. Because existing online payment systems generally suck. Because I'm the lazy american consumer, and if you want my money, it is the onus of you, the content provider, to make the transaction all nice and convenient.
2. Because I'm enough of a privacy freak that I'll use a CC only when utterly necessary, and pay cash whenever possible. Existing net payment systems are all keyed off of CC or checking account data, none of which offer a lot of privacy. This is very unlikely to change, as anti-money-laundering-laws are a large obstacle in the way of any potential anonymous e-cash system.
3. Because I'm not a great fan of banks and big corporations, and don't like to give them money. If 20% of my donation to xyz.org is a hidden transaction fee to some e-cash broker or bank (who may then resell the data to marketers or other banks), then I'd just as soon forget the whole thing, throw out the middleperson, and snail-mail cash or a money order directly to xyz.org.
4. Because I put a great deal of time and energy into creating my own content (music), which I do out of personal enjoyment, and because I have a big enough ego to therefore not feel quite so bad if I'm freeloading somebody else's content.
Because when I allocate resources towards arts/entertainment/creativity, I like to feel like it means something. I almost never buy new books or music anymore (though I do buy a lot of used books/CDs), but I'm more than happy to support local bands, go to local small theater, give fat tips to street performers, etc. Because I like to get involved in creativity in a way more personal and meaningful than "CLICK HERE TO DONATE".
All that said, I'm admittedly writing from a perspective where I've never had to deal with $1000-a-month server bills, or worry about going broke from rampant popularity. And that's a real issue for some people, and I agree that people who create good content deserve to be rewarded and supported in their efforts, in a way that doesn't compromise their creativity.
But I don't see a magic solution to these issues emerging anytime soon - if ever. Because there really are a lot of intertangled issues involved, and it's taken this long (*ages* in internet time) just to get people to start asking the right questions, and thinking about the whole issue in a suitably nuanced manner.
I'll also mention that, from where I sit, the most useful thing people can do is get involved somehow on a personal level -- create your own content, write a substantive fan letter to the creator of your favorite semi-obscure site, talk about the issues with your less-techie friends and family. I completely agree that a good, popular site can't happen without money, but I also think that untangling these dilemmas is at least as much a cultural issue as an economic one.
1. As someone who has done very little gambling, but read a fair bit about the social and mathematical aspects of gambling & casinos, I have to agree with everyone who has pointed out that you really can't make money with "systems". The casinos are there to make money, not to provide a fair game. Even "fair" purely mathematical systems like card counting will get you thrown out and your picture sent to every other casino in town, thus ending your gambling holiday. It might have been possible to have been a professional gambler 20-30 years ago, but things have changed. (I'd also like to take a moment to spark one in memory of Ken Uston, who got me interested in lots of cool applied mathematics at such a young age).
2. As much as I'm generally passionate about privacy issues and pay cash whenever possible, I can't say I'm bothered by what the casinos are doing here. If you are that bothered by the evil voracious nature of capitalism, WTF are you doing going to a casino??
3. Kim Rice, who wrote the CNN article, "shouldn't not" be publically shamed and humiliated, and his/her editors and proofreaders "shouldn't not" be tarred and feathered, for allowing such ugly mangled sentences like "These aren't things that supermarkets, banks or retailers don't do" to be seen by public eyes.
The thing that amazes me is when users boast about their passwords just out of the blue. One time I was helping a user who couldn't log in, and it took me about three seconds to spot the caps lock key that had been accidentally engaged.
"Thanks so much for fixing that," the user told me gratefully. "I couldn't understand why it wouldn't work. I typed in password just like I always do. You know, my niece's name -- 'brittani', spelled with an 'I'..."
I'm amazed on a daily basis at how differently some people's minds work.
- HH (proudly using 'lovesexgod' as a password since 1993).
Also in the game are these other highly creative enemies: knights, dogs, zombie dogs, zombie x-creatures, zombie knights (with red arm band), and the truly innovative SS Officer Who Turns Into A Zombie Before Your Very Eyes.
Don't forget the red raccoon zombie dogs, the teleporting SS officer, the teleporting SS officer with missles, and the truly innovative teleporting SS officer that fires missles in eight directions at once!
All this from iD, the "we spent five minutes making up this cheezy sci-fi plot so that parent groups and the media won't crucify us for making another realistically violent game" people.
My experience of the original CW and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was on the Atari 800 - I don't think I ever played the Apple version - but it was a *great* game with much more depth than Wolfenstein 3D.
Don't get me wrong, the graphics and controls were clunky, the speech was barely recognizable, but it still had loads more strategy than Wolf 3D. The emphasis in the original Wolfenstein was on stealth -- in order to avoid detection you could sneak up on guards, stab them silently, steal their uniforms, and hide the bodies. If another guard saw you, he'd raise the alarm and chances were you were soon toast.
Wolf3D was a fun game, and very visually spectacular for the time, but I even playing it for the first time, it seemed shallow and repetetive compared to the tense cat & mouse play of the original game.
Well said. And I can't help but have a feeling of dis-ease over the prospect of Google IPO-ing. Because, remember, when it's publically held, Google's emphasis will invariably shift from being the best search engine around to being the most profitable search engine around -- because that's the only reason most investors are going to buy the stock.
By which I'm sure you mean 'X' or 'The X Windowing System'.
Any app that deals with text or numbers could run over a 56K modem no sweat. I know this is possible....
Of course its possible; its called xterm (or other telnet client). Anything that can't run in an xterm obviously isn't dealing entirely with text and numbers.
The reason an application like Quake can run so smoothly across a dial-up is because it's performing a very specific, limited task, and the messages being sent are all very simple - shoot, jump, turn left 15 units. The reason the X protocol is so flexible is because its so generalized and non-specific. It doesn't even know what operating system or window manager you are running at the other end of the connection. This means an X client has to send a lot of information to the server at the other end of the connection to describe what it looks like, how it works, what kinds of input it's listening for, etc. This boils down to enough bandwidth use that app sharing with X is "usually" useable on a LAN, but too unwieldy for broad internet use. (I'm reminded of the time at my first Unix job when I innocently ran a full-screen mpeg video player remotely via X and brought down the whole 10-megabit network).
I agree with you that it would be a Good Thing to have a lightweight protocol to run sophisticated apps across a network connection. I like to think that's where XML is headed. But X, while it has its uses, has been around for years and years and plagued by problems of varying implementations, bandwidth use, and general non-acceptance among the MS-Windows crowd. (It also doesn't help that even the commercial X servers I've seen for MS-Windows - like Hummingbird Exceed - are of pretty unexceptional quality.) I suspect that X has been around long enough that if it *were* a magic bullet waiting to be discovered, somebody would've done so by now.
In a way, I'm not really all that sad about the demise of Suck. I was a regular reader of the site from its inception, and one of the key points of the Suck philosophy back then was this: know when to cash in. Nothing on the internet lasts forever, so make the best of it when you can. The fact that they were saying this in 1995-1996 is proof of their insight and wisdom. The guys who started Suck made quite a name for themselves, and I'm sure they'll have little problem keeping gainfully employed for the rest of their careers. More power to them.
On the other hand, I do want to see high quality independent journalism and commentary survive on the net - I think that independent/grassroots journalism is one of the greatest things to come out of the internet, and I want to see it survive and propogate. But I don't have any answers as to how to pay for all the bandwidth that a popular site involves -- with any luck, bandwidth will become less of an issue in time, and this will make it easier for people to self-publish in any kind of significant way.
Teach them COBOL first. Then threaten them with a lifetime of doing that, if they don't learn Java/C++ well enough.
MESSAGE BODY DIVISION.
The only problem with that is that I don't think you can really appreciate the clunkiness of COBOL unless you've already got some experience in a good language. Someone who has zero programming experience just might not have the gut-level aversion to COBOL that comes with time and experience.
Personally, I'm glad that I spent that semester studying COBOL. It's pretty interesting as a historical relic, it let me learn a lot about punch cards, and it taught me to steer clear of the stuff in the real world.
My local best buy had a spindle of 50 regular 650MB CD-WORM's for only $19.95. [... CD-ROM, read only memory; CD-WORM, write once read many; quit calling them CD-R's]
In my opinion AOL is not a robust enough e-mail client due to it's instability, but it does have key advantages. AOL mail allows you to unsend. AOL mail tells you when a user has sent their mail, and when it has been read. You can't do that with pop/imap.
True, but that's a function of the pop/imap protcols, not the client. Pretty much every workgroup/business-oriented email system I've ever seen (Exchange, Groupwise, Banyan Mail) has supported the features you list for ages.
It would be nice to have a common, open mail protocol that supported these features, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd like it for large-scale internet mail. All that extra messaging going back and forth generates additional network traffic, uses more resources on the server, and generally creates the oppurtunity for a lot of stupid exploits, security holes, and general flakiness.
Additional hardware including a hard-disk drive, liquid-crystal display (LCD), keyboard and mouse will be offered to help customers access the new features.
Note that the monitor being discussed is a special LCD monitor, and not a standard VGA hookup. Why? Because the PS2 is a DVD player, and the DVD Consortium has apparently dictated that DVD players aren't allowed to output an RGB signal, because Macrovision only works along a composite signal path.
You sissies and your monitors...why don't you program like real men, using flashing LEDs to let you know what's going on.
Ahh, you too have no idea how coddled and pampered you really are. When I learned to code, LEDs weren't yet in widespread use, and all of the computers used HEDs (heat emitting diodes) for status displays. The only way to tell if a bit was set was to touch a HED and see if your fingers got burned. It was no fun at all coming off of an all-night hacking binge with my fingers covered in tiny pinpoint-sized burns from a particularly gruelling debugging session, only to go to work for twelve hours manufacturing watch springs in a dangerous sweatshop just so I could afford the computer time and a bit of coal to fuel young Timmy's iron lung.
I'm just glad I wasn't there the night that some fool decided to mess around with the system clock multiplier, causing all the HEDs to set fire to the console, burning down not only the data center but also two adjacent nursing homes and a Salvation Army warehouse used to store surplus 72oz cans of bean w/bacon soup.
I'll have to give some thought as to whether I want to adopt the Open Audio license for my own music, but it's always nice to hear of such iniatives, even if they don't prove revolutionary in and of themselves -- they are still indicators of a refreshing trend. It also would certainly help if the EFF were able to get a few big-name musicians behind the Open Audio License, to raise awareness.
I'll also mention that people interested in open/copylefted music should check out my website -- there's a good selection of mp3 ranging in styles from house/drum & bass to hip-hop and psychedelic punk.
couldn't you just rebuild your kernel with just the security patches, but not patch the top-level makefile so that the module version number remains the same? You wouldn't want to pick up every change from a new kernel version, just the security stuff. I've never tried this, I'm just curious as to whether there
would be problems with this approach or not. It would probably be a huge pain to get this to work right, though.
I think the key phrase is "it would be a huge pain to get it to work"... and the idea of doing that kind of experimental kernal patching (around a binary-only RAID driver no less) on a production system doesn't strike me as wise. Even if you could "probably" get it to work with enough time, that's not the sort of black box I like to go messing around with unnecessarily.
America Online announced today that, in keeping with its recent instant messaging policy, it will no longer allow outside users to send email to any address within the @aol.com domain. A corporate spokesperson said, "We run these mail servers. It costs us money to do so. Why should we allow outsiders, non-customers, to send mail to our servers?"
I noticed that, a couple of months ago, AOL mail servers stopped accepting mail from servers located on a dynamic IP. In other words, if you are running your own mail server and are on a dialup or DSL (both assuming non-static-IP), you won't be able to send mail to AOL -- you have to route it through your ISP's central mail server.
In the grand scheme of things, this is admittedly not a huge whopping deal, but it's still an annoyance. It places more unneccesary load on my ISP's servers, gives me less idea of what's happening with my own outbound mail, and just generally doesn't strike me as a good example of internet citizenship on AOL's part. It's espescially a pain since I only know 3-4 people who use AOL, but I email them regularly enough that it would be annoying to keep switching preferences back and forth...
I am not aware of many people who use linux and want to be dependent upon the hardware vendor to supply kernels and binary-only kernel modules...
Dell does the same thing with the Linux servers they sell with onboard RAID -- the RAID drivers are provided as binary-only kernel modules. (Or at least they were ~6 months ago). This is espescially ugly on a server, where you don't want to get locked into a particular kernel build that might later prove to have security issues.
Firstly, I won't even bother griping about the fact that registration to sign up for the beta test of an expansion pack of a MS-Windows game is considered newsworthy at Slashdot.
Secondly, I have to admit that I spent a good week and a half of my life dedicating most of my waking hours to Diablo 2, ending with my uninstalling the game in disgust and never playing it since. A number of reasons:
The game had the potential to be really cool, and just didn't follow through. I bought the game after spending a couple of hours playing it (offline) at a friend's house. I'm a longtime fan of Roguelikes and classic computer RPGs, and it looked like D2 had a lot to offer - an interesting storyline, NPCs to talk to, a nicely detailed character creation system, and dungeon crawls & combat that required a bit of thought and tactics. Well, that was my initial impression. After actually sitting down and playing the thing for a day or two, I found the illusion of depth was deceptive, and after a while the whole experience reminded me of nothing more than a bigger & badder Gauntlet - which would be fine, if it were done well in other regards.
Blizzard's dedication to being a mass-market success just isn't my style. I DO like the fact that they place a fair bit of emphasis on production value (polished-looking interface, competent voice acting), but I don't like how they design their games to be marketted to the lowest common demoninator -- they remind me a lot of Hasbro in that regard. I prefer games that take me a while to get into, and are still surprising me with interesting nuances months later.
Games with frequent patches and rules revisions are very frustrating, espescially when they affect characters that people have put a lot of time into developing. I can understand that a company may be under pressure to fix certain exploits and bugs that ruin the online experience for everyone, but when it radically changes the way a skill or spell works, it's just annoying, and a sign that the company needs to have a bigger & better beta test, so such wrinkles get caught before they get released to the general public.
D2 was way too short and easy! It took me probably about 30 hours of play to get to the final battle with Diablo, but by that time I had replayed most of the quests MANY times. I'm not a super fanatic game-player, nor am I usually very gung-ho about beating large games, so if a guy like me can see all that an RPG/exploration game has to offer within a week or so, there's not enough game.
D2, technologically speaking, is one of the poorest & sloppiest titles I've ever seen. 640x480 resolution only? WTF? On top of that, the OpenGL drivers wouldn't work at all initially on my system, until one of the patches "fixed" them so they would only crash every 30-60 minutes. The software drivers were much more stable (only crashed once or twice a day), except for a lovely little bug that would cause my system to freeze 100% of the time when I tried to enter the final battle with Diablo in Act IV. I probably could have spent a few more hours troubleshooting it or waited for another patch, but by that point I had seen all the game really had to offer, and pretty much gave up in disgust. (the system in question, by the way, is a PIII500, TNT2 video card, 192MB RAM, major-brand components, so I don't think it was choking on the system requirements...)
Ah well, I'm sure some people will enjoy the D2 expansion, if only the folks at Blizzard whose bank accounts are fattened by it.
As for me, I'll probably log a couple of hours this weekend playing Heroes of Might & Magic III (still haven't gotten tired of it, and haven't even tried any of the expansions), Test Drive Le Mans (Best. Console Racer. Ever. (DC)), and Go (the board game, since it gets me the heck away from the computer, and makes me use my brain).
Skimming around this article, I encountered a decent amount of good common-sense advise in dealing with other people, communicating with one's partner, etc. But then I get to the section on safer sex (all two paragraphs of it!), and whatever respect I have for Eric's sex advice skills goes out the window:
I'm going to buck the current wisdom here
and point out that, statistically, AIDS is a negligible risk for white heterosexuals in the U.S. unless your partner has needle tracks or you have an ulcerating STD like chancroids. Outside those circumstances, people in the U.S. and other developed countries probably get killed by lightning strikes more often than they catch AIDS through unprotected heterosexual intercourse (which is why the disease is now in decline here and has been for years).
The `traditional' STDs (gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, chlamydia) are much more infectious and actually more significant risks, and genital warts are physically harmless but nearly endemic. Condoms can help, but you shouldn't rely on them (if only because genital mucous membranes aren't the only ones you're going to expose to a sex partner). Choosing your partners carefully is smarter.
I agree with Eric's basic point that choosing one's partners sensibly and thoughtfully can be one of the most important parts of living a safer sex lifestyle. I furthermore agree that the odds of HIV/AIDS being transmitted through vaginal intercourse are probably pretty low. But a few things to consider:
Aside from AIDS and 'traditional' STDs (like gonnorhea and syph), there's plenty of other stuff out there that can hurt you. I can't believe Eric didn't even mention hepatitis-C, which is a big problem in the U.S. right now.
Just because the US may have the AIDS epidemic under better control than some of the world doesn't mean it's sensible to write off AIDS as a 21st century common cold. The last I read, there are parts of Africa where the AIDS infection rate is 25% of the entire population. And AIDS patients in the U.S., assuming they've got medical insurance and enough money to pay for the cocktail of experimental drugs they'll be taking every day, still aren't likely to lead a really normal life. And I'd imagine that being HIV-positive makes it a lot harder to get dates.
Condoms are your friend. They're not 100% effective, and don't apply in 100% of cases, but one shouldn't write off their value.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else remember a building set called Riveton or Rivetron, from the late 70s? It had a bunch of plastic panels, tubes, and corner joints, all with holes in them, as well as special parts like wheels. You used a special gun to connect the parts together by means of little rubber rivets that were stretched into the holes. Very cool - I made some neat little racing carts and vehicles for my action figures with these. As I recall, the tech was taken off the market after some little kid choked on one of the rubber rivets.
My other favorite building toy (apart from Lego), was my "Girder & Panel" set that could be used to throw down some very cool-looking high rises and similar neubauten. I ended up using this stuff many years later to construct some very cool-looking scenery for SF miniatures gaming (the scale was different, but it still looked great).
I only had a brief run-in with erector sets, and I think I was too young to really appreciate it -- probably about 4-6 -- but from what I remember, I concur with others, that erector sets really do emphasize real-world mechanical skills more than other toys...
All that said, I'm admittedly writing from a perspective where I've never had to deal with $1000-a-month server bills, or worry about going broke from rampant popularity. And that's a real issue for some people, and I agree that people who create good content deserve to be rewarded and supported in their efforts, in a way that doesn't compromise their creativity.
But I don't see a magic solution to these issues emerging anytime soon - if ever. Because there really are a lot of intertangled issues involved, and it's taken this long (*ages* in internet time) just to get people to start asking the right questions, and thinking about the whole issue in a suitably nuanced manner.
I'll also mention that, from where I sit, the most useful thing people can do is get involved somehow on a personal level -- create your own content, write a substantive fan letter to the creator of your favorite semi-obscure site, talk about the issues with your less-techie friends and family. I completely agree that a good, popular site can't happen without money, but I also think that untangling these dilemmas is at least as much a cultural issue as an economic one.
1. As someone who has done very little gambling, but read a fair bit about the social and mathematical aspects of gambling & casinos, I have to agree with everyone who has pointed out that you really can't make money with "systems". The casinos are there to make money, not to provide a fair game. Even "fair" purely mathematical systems like card counting will get you thrown out and your picture sent to every other casino in town, thus ending your gambling holiday. It might have been possible to have been a professional gambler 20-30 years ago, but things have changed. (I'd also like to take a moment to spark one in memory of Ken Uston, who got me interested in lots of cool applied mathematics at such a young age).
2. As much as I'm generally passionate about privacy issues and pay cash whenever possible, I can't say I'm bothered by what the casinos are doing here. If you are that bothered by the evil voracious nature of capitalism, WTF are you doing going to a casino??
3. Kim Rice, who wrote the CNN article, "shouldn't not" be publically shamed and humiliated, and his/her editors and proofreaders "shouldn't not" be tarred and feathered, for allowing such ugly mangled sentences like "These aren't things that supermarkets, banks or retailers don't do" to be seen by public eyes.
The thing that amazes me is when users boast about their passwords just out of the blue. One time I was helping a user who couldn't log in, and it took me about three seconds to spot the caps lock key that had been accidentally engaged.
"Thanks so much for fixing that," the user told me gratefully. "I couldn't understand why it wouldn't work. I typed in password just like I always do. You know, my niece's name -- 'brittani', spelled with an 'I'..."
I'm amazed on a daily basis at how differently some people's minds work.
- HH (proudly using 'lovesexgod' as a password since 1993).
The problem with Usenet is that there is no moderation.
I'm pretty sure this is a troll, but just in case not, it's called a Score File.
See Also: GroupLens.
Also in the game are these other highly creative enemies: knights, dogs, zombie dogs, zombie x-creatures, zombie knights (with red arm band), and the truly innovative SS Officer Who Turns Into A Zombie Before Your Very Eyes.
Don't forget the red raccoon zombie dogs, the teleporting SS officer, the teleporting SS officer with missles, and the truly innovative teleporting SS officer that fires missles in eight directions at once!
All this from iD, the "we spent five minutes making up this cheezy sci-fi plot so that parent groups and the media won't crucify us for making another realistically violent game" people.
My experience of the original CW and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was on the Atari 800 - I don't think I ever played the Apple version - but it was a *great* game with much more depth than Wolfenstein 3D.
Don't get me wrong, the graphics and controls were clunky, the speech was barely recognizable, but it still had loads more strategy than Wolf 3D. The emphasis in the original Wolfenstein was on stealth -- in order to avoid detection you could sneak up on guards, stab them silently, steal their uniforms, and hide the bodies. If another guard saw you, he'd raise the alarm and chances were you were soon toast.
Wolf3D was a fun game, and very visually spectacular for the time, but I even playing it for the first time, it seemed shallow and repetetive compared to the tense cat & mouse play of the original game.
Well said. And I can't help but have a feeling of dis-ease over the prospect of Google IPO-ing. Because, remember, when it's publically held, Google's emphasis will invariably shift from being the best search engine around to being the most profitable search engine around -- because that's the only reason most investors are going to buy the stock.
Guns don't kill people. JAVA kill's people!
Your creative use of the apostrophe kills people. Let Bob set you straight.
When I saw the headline for this piece, I couldn't help but wonder if it was inspired by this recent Onion article.
Xwindows
By which I'm sure you mean 'X' or 'The X Windowing System'.
Any app that deals with text or numbers could run over a 56K modem no sweat. I know this is possible....
Of course its possible; its called xterm (or other telnet client). Anything that can't run in an xterm obviously isn't dealing entirely with text and numbers.
The reason an application like Quake can run so smoothly across a dial-up is because it's performing a very specific, limited task, and the messages being sent are all very simple - shoot, jump, turn left 15 units. The reason the X protocol is so flexible is because its so generalized and non-specific. It doesn't even know what operating system or window manager you are running at the other end of the connection. This means an X client has to send a lot of information to the server at the other end of the connection to describe what it looks like, how it works, what kinds of input it's listening for, etc. This boils down to enough bandwidth use that app sharing with X is "usually" useable on a LAN, but too unwieldy for broad internet use. (I'm reminded of the time at my first Unix job when I innocently ran a full-screen mpeg video player remotely via X and brought down the whole 10-megabit network).
I agree with you that it would be a Good Thing to have a lightweight protocol to run sophisticated apps across a network connection. I like to think that's where XML is headed. But X, while it has its uses, has been around for years and years and plagued by problems of varying implementations, bandwidth use, and general non-acceptance among the MS-Windows crowd. (It also doesn't help that even the commercial X servers I've seen for MS-Windows - like Hummingbird Exceed - are of pretty unexceptional quality.) I suspect that X has been around long enough that if it *were* a magic bullet waiting to be discovered, somebody would've done so by now.
In a way, I'm not really all that sad about the demise of Suck. I was a regular reader of the site from its inception, and one of the key points of the Suck philosophy back then was this: know when to cash in. Nothing on the internet lasts forever, so make the best of it when you can. The fact that they were saying this in 1995-1996 is proof of their insight and wisdom. The guys who started Suck made quite a name for themselves, and I'm sure they'll have little problem keeping gainfully employed for the rest of their careers. More power to them.
On the other hand, I do want to see high quality independent journalism and commentary survive on the net - I think that independent/grassroots journalism is one of the greatest things to come out of the internet, and I want to see it survive and propogate. But I don't have any answers as to how to pay for all the bandwidth that a popular site involves -- with any luck, bandwidth will become less of an issue in time, and this will make it easier for people to self-publish in any kind of significant way.
QUOTATION DIVISION.
Teach them COBOL first. Then threaten them with a lifetime of doing that, if they don't learn Java/C++ well enough.
MESSAGE BODY DIVISION.
The only problem with that is that I don't think you can really appreciate the clunkiness of COBOL unless you've already got some experience in a good language. Someone who has zero programming experience just might not have the gut-level aversion to COBOL that comes with time and experience.
Personally, I'm glad that I spent that semester studying COBOL. It's pretty interesting as a historical relic, it let me learn a lot about punch cards, and it taught me to steer clear of the stuff in the real world.
SIGNATURE DIVISION.
NAVIGATE WEB BROWSER TO http://ishmail.prmsystems.com/hh.html .
Distribute their music themselves on websites that they can build and get hosted for free.
Keep dreaming. Do you really think think this will happen?
My local best buy had a spindle of 50 regular 650MB CD-WORM's for only $19.95. [... CD-ROM, read only memory; CD-WORM, write once read many; quit calling them CD-R's]
(Score: +1, appealingly pedantic)
In my opinion AOL is not a robust enough e-mail client due to it's instability, but it does have key advantages. AOL mail allows you to unsend. AOL mail tells you when a user has sent their mail, and when it has been read. You can't do that with pop/imap.
True, but that's a function of the pop/imap protcols, not the client. Pretty much every workgroup/business-oriented email system I've ever seen (Exchange, Groupwise, Banyan Mail) has supported the features you list for ages.
It would be nice to have a common, open mail protocol that supported these features, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd like it for large-scale internet mail. All that extra messaging going back and forth generates additional network traffic, uses more resources on the server, and generally creates the oppurtunity for a lot of stupid exploits, security holes, and general flakiness.
Additional hardware including a hard-disk drive, liquid-crystal display (LCD), keyboard and mouse will be offered to help customers access the new features.
Note that the monitor being discussed is a special LCD monitor, and not a standard VGA hookup. Why? Because the PS2 is a DVD player, and the DVD Consortium has apparently dictated that DVD players aren't allowed to output an RGB signal, because Macrovision only works along a composite signal path.
Reservoir Zig
You sissies and your monitors...why don't you program like real men, using flashing LEDs to let you know what's going on.
Ahh, you too have no idea how coddled and pampered you really are. When I learned to code, LEDs weren't yet in widespread use, and all of the computers used HEDs (heat emitting diodes) for status displays. The only way to tell if a bit was set was to touch a HED and see if your fingers got burned. It was no fun at all coming off of an all-night hacking binge with my fingers covered in tiny pinpoint-sized burns from a particularly gruelling debugging session, only to go to work for twelve hours manufacturing watch springs in a dangerous sweatshop just so I could afford the computer time and a bit of coal to fuel young Timmy's iron lung.
I'm just glad I wasn't there the night that some fool decided to mess around with the system clock multiplier, causing all the HEDs to set fire to the console, burning down not only the data center but also two adjacent nursing homes and a Salvation Army warehouse used to store surplus 72oz cans of bean w/bacon soup.
Reservoir Zigs
The only thing I can't figure out is why they're called "CD-R", Compact Disc Readable?
Um, "CD Recordable"? You have to admit that "CDW" sounds like you have a mouth full of oatmeal.
Reservoir Zig
I'll have to give some thought as to whether I want to adopt the Open Audio license for my own music, but it's always nice to hear of such iniatives, even if they don't prove revolutionary in and of themselves -- they are still indicators of a refreshing trend. It also would certainly help if the EFF were able to get a few big-name musicians behind the Open Audio License, to raise awareness.
I'll also mention that people interested in open/copylefted music should check out my website -- there's a good selection of mp3 ranging in styles from house/drum & bass to hip-hop and psychedelic punk.
couldn't you just rebuild your kernel with just the security patches, but not patch the top-level makefile so that the module version number remains the same? You wouldn't want to pick up every change from a new kernel version, just the security stuff. I've never tried this, I'm just curious as to whether there would be problems with this approach or not. It would probably be a huge pain to get this to work right, though.
I think the key phrase is "it would be a huge pain to get it to work"... and the idea of doing that kind of experimental kernal patching (around a binary-only RAID driver no less) on a production system doesn't strike me as wise. Even if you could "probably" get it to work with enough time, that's not the sort of black box I like to go messing around with unnecessarily.
America Online announced today that, in keeping with its recent instant messaging policy, it will no longer allow outside users to send email to any address within the @aol.com domain. A corporate spokesperson said, "We run these mail servers. It costs us money to do so. Why should we allow outsiders, non-customers, to send mail to our servers?"
I noticed that, a couple of months ago, AOL mail servers stopped accepting mail from servers located on a dynamic IP. In other words, if you are running your own mail server and are on a dialup or DSL (both assuming non-static-IP), you won't be able to send mail to AOL -- you have to route it through your ISP's central mail server.
In the grand scheme of things, this is admittedly not a huge whopping deal, but it's still an annoyance. It places more unneccesary load on my ISP's servers, gives me less idea of what's happening with my own outbound mail, and just generally doesn't strike me as a good example of internet citizenship on AOL's part. It's espescially a pain since I only know 3-4 people who use AOL, but I email them regularly enough that it would be annoying to keep switching preferences back and forth...
I am not aware of many people who use linux and want to be dependent upon the hardware vendor to supply kernels and binary-only kernel modules...
Dell does the same thing with the Linux servers they sell with onboard RAID -- the RAID drivers are provided as binary-only kernel modules. (Or at least they were ~6 months ago). This is espescially ugly on a server, where you don't want to get locked into a particular kernel build that might later prove to have security issues.
Firstly, I won't even bother griping about the fact that registration to sign up for the beta test of an expansion pack of a MS-Windows game is considered newsworthy at Slashdot.
Secondly, I have to admit that I spent a good week and a half of my life dedicating most of my waking hours to Diablo 2, ending with my uninstalling the game in disgust and never playing it since. A number of reasons:
Ah well, I'm sure some people will enjoy the D2 expansion, if only the folks at Blizzard whose bank accounts are fattened by it.
As for me, I'll probably log a couple of hours this weekend playing Heroes of Might & Magic III (still haven't gotten tired of it, and haven't even tried any of the expansions), Test Drive Le Mans (Best. Console Racer. Ever. (DC)), and Go (the board game, since it gets me the heck away from the computer, and makes me use my brain).
Skimming around this article, I encountered a decent amount of good common-sense advise in dealing with other people, communicating with one's partner, etc. But then I get to the section on safer sex (all two paragraphs of it!), and whatever respect I have for Eric's sex advice skills goes out the window:
I'm going to buck the current wisdom here and point out that, statistically, AIDS is a negligible risk for white heterosexuals in the U.S. unless your partner has needle tracks or you have an ulcerating STD like chancroids. Outside those circumstances, people in the U.S. and other developed countries probably get killed by lightning strikes more often than they catch AIDS through unprotected heterosexual intercourse (which is why the disease is now in decline here and has been for years).
The `traditional' STDs (gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, chlamydia) are much more infectious and actually more significant risks, and genital warts are physically harmless but nearly endemic. Condoms can help, but you shouldn't rely on them (if only because genital mucous membranes aren't the only ones you're going to expose to a sex partner). Choosing your partners carefully is smarter.
I agree with Eric's basic point that choosing one's partners sensibly and thoughtfully can be one of the most important parts of living a safer sex lifestyle. I furthermore agree that the odds of HIV/AIDS being transmitted through vaginal intercourse are probably pretty low. But a few things to consider: