I can say that @home is a pretty mediocre ISP. Their aim seems to be to get more customers to sign up than to split our overcrowded node. Since they raised their rates to $45 up from $39, I've seen service go steadily downhill.
Their 128K upstream cap is very annoying too.
The worst part of it all is that they're the only high-speed option in my neighborhood. I live within 6000 feet of a Qwest DSL station, but for some reason service isn't available here.
But then, what can you expect from a company that posts this slogan on their home page?
"@home - So good, it's like Feng Shui for your computer!"
Because the ESRB has the most screwed-up way of regulating games that I have ever seen.
Here's how it works:
The game publisher/developer sends screens and video clips of potentially objectional scenes to the ESRB. The ESRB picks three people from a pool of "specially trained" people. Mostly, these people are made up of school principals, cops, etc. "Responsible" people that have almost never picked up a controller in their life. Outsiders? You decide.
These three people will never talk to each other, nor even see each other during the game's rating. The people see the potentially objectional clips and script from the game. They do not even PLAY the game to determine its content. They make a recommendation on what they think the game should be rated as, it's sent back to the game developer/publisher, and it's put on the cover box for the game.
The ratings are final. No questioning them, they've already been decided on.
The key element here is that the people who are rating the game do not play it, thus, an accurate judgement is impossible to do. This is why you have games like "Chrono Chross" rated 'T' for "suggestive scenes" (i.e. Kid) and why almost all First Person Shooters are rated "M".
The problem is that retailers such as Circuit City and K-Mart are making these ratings store policy, when the ESRB was formed as a guide for PARENTS to choose what games are acceptable for their kids. However, more and more retailers are accepting this as a sort of "law" and will card anyone under 17 for buying Q3A.
I've had problems with Linux ever since I decided it could be a viable desktop platform.
For web browsing and word processing, Linux is great. Use Opera instead of netscape. Use nedit instead of M$ Word. If you have to open Word documents, use Wordpad under WINE. Great, fine.
The problem is when you have to install and upgrade programs. You can't just double-click on the cute little box-by-a-computer-with-disks, noo... you have to figure out if you have an RPM or DEB or TGZ-based system, you have to go to a command line and type "RPM -i foo*.rpm" and if it bitches about a dependency, you have to go to rpmfind.net and search for some obscure package that should've come preinstalled in the first place. DEB isn't much better - from my experience, it'll b0rk completely if it can't find some mythical lib like libpakistanicalender.so.1.2. RealPlayer and Loki's installer have some semblance of sanity in them.
Games for Linux? A joke. If you want to run anything more complex than Solitaire, then you're in for a long ride. First you have to find out if your card supports DRI or not. If it does, great. If it doesn't, go to dri.sourceforge.net, attempt to comprehend the incredibly bizarre directions, download and compile a library, try to figure out how to install it, etc. Loki's ports are incredibly shoddy; after more than eight hours of troubleshooting, I could not get either Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament to work on my Mandrake 7.2 system with a Voodoo Banshee. I checked Loki's newsgroups.. and the Unreal Tournament group had FOUR THOUSAND support messages on it. When Unreal Tournament SIGSEGV'd on me, I looked up Loki's web page and found out that I had to compile and install my own Mesa libraries. At this point, I just gave up. Linux is not a viable gaming platform.
I wouldn't recommend Linux to a newbie for anything more advanced than word processing or web browsing. In my experience, for productivity, that's pretty much all it's good for.
Mandrake 8.0 hates my machine. After grappling with it for hours trying to get the install to complete without b0rking completely, I had a chance to evaluate Nautilus
I'm quite disappointed, really. To me, Nautilus was all about eye candy and not about functionality, which I think reflects in the Linux community these days. Everyone complains about the Motif widget set in Netscape, but I think Motif looks rather cool, and I like it because it isn't GNOME or KDE dependent.
Nautilus just seemed like the beta version of Windows XP explorer - slow, bloated, swaps incessantly on my 64MB machine. I liked GMC much, much better than I liked Nautilus. Sure, people say GMC is hacked together, but for me, IT WORKS. That's the key difference here.
"Form follows function" is a philosophy that I think that the Linux community should adopt.
It happens to me all too often. Our school's computers are all Gateways running Windows 98 and Netscape. When Netscape freezes up and borks all too often, I fire up IE, because it's the only way to continue my web browsing.
One day, Mr. Fatass decides to come over and see what I'm doing. He sees me firing up IE and immediantly accuses me of hacking into the system. I calmly tell him that IE is no different from Netscape; it is a web browser. He gets the librarian, I get kicked out of the library
Our other sysadmin runs the Novell network, and he's a pretty nice guy, but he can get extremely angry for no reason at all. When I asked him why the workstations didn't run Linux if all they're used for is web browsing and word processing, he got extremely angry and asked me if I wanted to start a fight.
I haven't hax0red into the network because I really have no reason to.
Am I THE single user who has no problems with Netscape 4.7x whatsoever?
It loads as fast as the Win32 version, loads and renders pages with blinding speed, its email and news clients kick ass, and there's Composer thrown in to boot. In my opinion, it's one of the best web browsers out there. The ONLY time it crashes is when a page has Flash, and THAT's because I'm too lazy to install the Flash plugin.
I used to think that Netscape was a bloated piece of garbage, like the majority of the./ community here. That all changed one day - when I made the transition from GNOME to IceWM. It turned out that GNOME was a system resource hog, not Netscape. (This was on a 64MB RAM machine). Suddenly, Netscape just started doing everything better - loading, rendering pages, cache, everything. It's GNOME and KDE-independent, using the lovely Motif widgets.
My local CompUSA had a sale I couldn't resist - 100 CD-Rs for the low, low price of $14.95. I snapped up two of them with the cash I had on me, and it looks like I had good foresight now that I hear about this.
As I was checking out, the clerk mentioned to me an interesting fact: The pallet that had the CD-Rs on them was stacked 6' high. When I got there, there was nothing left except the sign advertising the $14.95 sale. The shelves were crammed full of bulk CD-Rs matching the sale.
Now I have 200 CD-Rs. I don't back up porn, warez, or MP3z, I hardly have 5 GB of my 20 GB drive filled, so what do I do with these CD-Rs?
Sell them for an enormous profit when the time comes that CD-Rs are ridiculously expensive, of course.
IDSA - Evil company that shuts down ROM sites harboring blatantly illegal Atari 2600 ROMs, and, on occasion, Cease and Desists' popular emulation sites like Snes9x.
MPAA - Evil company that hired Judge Kaplan to lay the smackdown on 2600 by issuing his, IMO, incredibly narrowminded ruling on DeCSS.
RIAA - No description need be written about this horrible spawn of Cthulthu (sp?)
NSPA - New kid on the block, wants to stomp out the horrendous evil of publishing songs
I've tried it before, but I've just found out the following.
a) the 2.4.x kernel barfs if there's no initrd to go with it and the ramdisk image
b) if the kernel DOES work, it is extremely unstable, booting me back to the login prompt or just locking up altogether with a kernel panic. What's the advantage of modularlizing vs. putting it in the kernel? Which is faster?
c) If I get rid of all of the ridiculous shit that Mandrake decides to include (1000Mbit Ethernet card suppor built-in? Why?) and compile it, it still barfs.
d) ReiserFS support is non-existent in make menuconfig, unless I do some magic ritual of checking certain checkboxes
e) I keep getting write_intr errors at around sector 3500 of my hard drive. Is it a bad hard drive, or is it just Linux?
Quake III may be no harder to install than the Windows client, but getting it to run is a headache beyond proportions.
On my Mandrake 7.2-based system, I could not get Quake III to run AT ALL. As soon as it would start up, it would segfault. This is on an AMD K6/2 500 with a 16MB Voodoo Banshee that worked perfectly fine on a Windows machine. Tracing the problem back further, I discovered that it needed DRI to run, and bus-mastering had to be enabled for DRI to work. I tried using the bus-mastering enable script over at dri.sourceforge.net.
Guess what?
It didn't do a thing.
I don't want this kind of bullshit on linux. I should not have to enable bus-mastering just to get a single damned game to work. Hell, I shouldn't even have to screw with Mesa. I should be able to double click on the icon AND HAVE IT LAUNCH AND RUN PROPERLY.
I'm sitting in my office, it's 100F out, but I'm chilling with my nice Web-enabled conditioner.
Then all of a sudden, it gets very stuffy in the room. Someone has cracked my air conditioner and set it at the hottest setting possible. It catches on fire. I've been 0wn3d by some lame skript kiddie controlling my air conditioner.
I would be damn happy if people pirated my software, because that would mean that more people are using my product, thus equating increased revenues when they go and buy the real thing.
Nintendo's been milking the Game Boy for about what, 10 years now? They were all the rage when I was in first grade, and now they're all the rage now in tenth grade.
Really, though, does this new GB have a backlit display finally? Does it slurp up batteries like the Game Gear did?
Oh, there are victims alright. How about the ISPS that have to pay for the bandwidth, CPU, and storage? As this spam problem gets worse, this equates higher prices or the ISP going out of business.
I've heard of ISPs crushed by spam because some spammer decided to forge headers and route e-mail through them.
In my experience, you get spam mail if you do any of the above:
1) Post to Usenet with your real e-mail address.
2) Post to Slashdot with your e-mail address
3) Post to any message board with your real e-mail address
4) Make a webpage that has your e-mail address on it.
Who decides what is and what is not spam?
It's very easy. If you get an e-mail that
a) is written by someone you have never heard of before
b) you have not asked for this e-mail
c) contains some phony get-rich-quick scheme or something like that
As it is, KDE is extremely hard to install and maintain. I don't know about you, but I sure do not feel like typing 'rpm -Uvh or -Ivh' at a prompt only to be informed that my version of Qt is out of date, forcing a trek to TrollTech's page to go and download it, only to be told I'm missing yet another obscure library.
I tried upgrading to KDE 2.0 from a Mandrake 7.1-based install, and it wreaked hell with the login manager (which was based on KDE). Whenever I tried to quit X, it booted me back to the broken graphical login screen. It was more bug-infested than Ultima IX, so bad I couldn't even launch the file manager without it crashing. I followed the exact instructions on the KDE web page, and a small note (buried in the ftp folders) told me that I needed the latest version of menu and deskdrake
menu? What's 'menu'? Does it mean menudrake? I'm confused.
I tried to get help on the #linux channel on EFnet, but of course I was rebounded to linuxdoc.org, which made no mention of the problems I was having.
I ended up having to do a complete reformat and reinstall of Mandrake 7.1. Very user _unfriendly_. Helix Gnome's installer, on the other hand, was terrific. I haven't had a problem with Gnome since.
Slashdot Mirror
I can say that @home is a pretty mediocre ISP. Their aim seems to be to get more customers to sign up than to split our overcrowded node. Since they raised their rates to $45 up from $39, I've seen service go steadily downhill.
Their 128K upstream cap is very annoying too.
The worst part of it all is that they're the only high-speed option in my neighborhood. I live within 6000 feet of a Qwest DSL station, but for some reason service isn't available here.
But then, what can you expect from a company that posts this slogan on their home page?
"@home - So good, it's like Feng Shui for your computer!"
[root@allevil]$
Yes, my machine is named 'allevil' and I am the root of it.
Because the ESRB has the most screwed-up way of regulating games that I have ever seen.
Here's how it works:
The game publisher/developer sends screens and video clips of potentially objectional scenes to the ESRB. The ESRB picks three people from a pool of "specially trained" people. Mostly, these people are made up of school principals, cops, etc. "Responsible" people that have almost never picked up a controller in their life. Outsiders? You decide.
These three people will never talk to each other, nor even see each other during the game's rating. The people see the potentially objectional clips and script from the game. They do not even PLAY the game to determine its content. They make a recommendation on what they think the game should be rated as, it's sent back to the game developer/publisher, and it's put on the cover box for the game.
The ratings are final. No questioning them, they've already been decided on.
The key element here is that the people who are rating the game do not play it, thus, an accurate judgement is impossible to do. This is why you have games like "Chrono Chross" rated 'T' for "suggestive scenes" (i.e. Kid) and why almost all First Person Shooters are rated "M".
The problem is that retailers such as Circuit City and K-Mart are making these ratings store policy, when the ESRB was formed as a guide for PARENTS to choose what games are acceptable for their kids. However, more and more retailers are accepting this as a sort of "law" and will card anyone under 17 for buying Q3A.
Scary indeed.
..on what exactly this is?
This is all new to me.
Perfect source of material for Echelon, not Carnivore. Carnivore belongs to the FBI.
With that being said, if they're really tapping underwater transmissions, here are some words that should trip Echelon:
SOMEONE SET UP US THE <BOMB>1!1!
GUN BOMB TERRORIST EVIL KILL ASSASSINATE MORE DEATH METALLICA RIAA MPAA H4x0r 31337 LINUX UNIX RMS OPEN SOURCE
I've had problems with Linux ever since I decided it could be a viable desktop platform.
For web browsing and word processing, Linux is great. Use Opera instead of netscape. Use nedit instead of M$ Word. If you have to open Word documents, use Wordpad under WINE. Great, fine.
The problem is when you have to install and upgrade programs. You can't just double-click on the cute little box-by-a-computer-with-disks, noo... you have to figure out if you have an RPM or DEB or TGZ-based system, you have to go to a command line and type "RPM -i foo*.rpm" and if it bitches about a dependency, you have to go to rpmfind.net and search for some obscure package that should've come preinstalled in the first place. DEB isn't much better - from my experience, it'll b0rk completely if it can't find some mythical lib like libpakistanicalender.so.1.2. RealPlayer and Loki's installer have some semblance of sanity in them.
Games for Linux? A joke. If you want to run anything more complex than Solitaire, then you're in for a long ride. First you have to find out if your card supports DRI or not. If it does, great. If it doesn't, go to dri.sourceforge.net, attempt to comprehend the incredibly bizarre directions, download and compile a library, try to figure out how to install it, etc. Loki's ports are incredibly shoddy; after more than eight hours of troubleshooting, I could not get either Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament to work on my Mandrake 7.2 system with a Voodoo Banshee. I checked Loki's newsgroups.. and the Unreal Tournament group had FOUR THOUSAND support messages on it. When Unreal Tournament SIGSEGV'd on me, I looked up Loki's web page and found out that I had to compile and install my own Mesa libraries. At this point, I just gave up. Linux is not a viable gaming platform.
I wouldn't recommend Linux to a newbie for anything more advanced than word processing or web browsing. In my experience, for productivity, that's pretty much all it's good for.
I guess all girls named Aimee should fear for their lives ... they're infringing on AOL's ownage of the word 'AIM'
Mandrake 8.0 hates my machine. After grappling with it for hours trying to get the install to complete without b0rking completely, I had a chance to evaluate Nautilus
I'm quite disappointed, really. To me, Nautilus was all about eye candy and not about functionality, which I think reflects in the Linux community these days. Everyone complains about the Motif widget set in Netscape, but I think Motif looks rather cool, and I like it because it isn't GNOME or KDE dependent.
Nautilus just seemed like the beta version of Windows XP explorer - slow, bloated, swaps incessantly on my 64MB machine. I liked GMC much, much better than I liked Nautilus. Sure, people say GMC is hacked together, but for me, IT WORKS. That's the key difference here.
"Form follows function" is a philosophy that I think that the Linux community should adopt.
That's why I use IceWM.
It happens to me all too often. Our school's computers are all Gateways running Windows 98 and Netscape. When Netscape freezes up and borks all too often, I fire up IE, because it's the only way to continue my web browsing.
One day, Mr. Fatass decides to come over and see what I'm doing. He sees me firing up IE and immediantly accuses me of hacking into the system. I calmly tell him that IE is no different from Netscape; it is a web browser. He gets the librarian, I get kicked out of the library
Our other sysadmin runs the Novell network, and he's a pretty nice guy, but he can get extremely angry for no reason at all. When I asked him why the workstations didn't run Linux if all they're used for is web browsing and word processing, he got extremely angry and asked me if I wanted to start a fight.
I haven't hax0red into the network because I really have no reason to.
I've always wondered:
./ community here. That all changed one day - when I made the transition from GNOME to IceWM. It turned out that GNOME was a system resource hog, not Netscape. (This was on a 64MB RAM machine). Suddenly, Netscape just started doing everything better - loading, rendering pages, cache, everything. It's GNOME and KDE-independent, using the lovely Motif widgets.
Am I THE single user who has no problems with Netscape 4.7x whatsoever?
It loads as fast as the Win32 version, loads and renders pages with blinding speed, its email and news clients kick ass, and there's Composer thrown in to boot. In my opinion, it's one of the best web browsers out there. The ONLY time it crashes is when a page has Flash, and THAT's because I'm too lazy to install the Flash plugin.
I used to think that Netscape was a bloated piece of garbage, like the majority of the
So give Netscape a try under IceWM.
My local CompUSA had a sale I couldn't resist - 100 CD-Rs for the low, low price of $14.95. I snapped up two of them with the cash I had on me, and it looks like I had good foresight now that I hear about this.
As I was checking out, the clerk mentioned to me an interesting fact: The pallet that had the CD-Rs on them was stacked 6' high. When I got there, there was nothing left except the sign advertising the $14.95 sale. The shelves were crammed full of bulk CD-Rs matching the sale.
Now I have 200 CD-Rs. I don't back up porn, warez, or MP3z, I hardly have 5 GB of my 20 GB drive filled, so what do I do with these CD-Rs?
Sell them for an enormous profit when the time comes that CD-Rs are ridiculously expensive, of course.
IDSA - Evil company that shuts down ROM sites harboring blatantly illegal Atari 2600 ROMs, and, on occasion, Cease and Desists' popular emulation sites like Snes9x.
MPAA - Evil company that hired Judge Kaplan to lay the smackdown on 2600 by issuing his, IMO, incredibly narrowminded ruling on DeCSS.
RIAA - No description need be written about this horrible spawn of Cthulthu (sp?)
NSPA - New kid on the block, wants to stomp out the horrendous evil of publishing songs
I've tried it before, but I've just found out the following.
a) the 2.4.x kernel barfs if there's no initrd to go with it and the ramdisk image
b) if the kernel DOES work, it is extremely unstable, booting me back to the login prompt or just locking up altogether with a kernel panic. What's the advantage of modularlizing vs. putting it in the kernel? Which is faster?
c) If I get rid of all of the ridiculous shit that Mandrake decides to include (1000Mbit Ethernet card suppor built-in? Why?) and compile it, it still barfs.
d) ReiserFS support is non-existent in make menuconfig, unless I do some magic ritual of checking certain checkboxes
e) I keep getting write_intr errors at around sector 3500 of my hard drive. Is it a bad hard drive, or is it just Linux?
Buy the best stuff so that when the vandals come by they can pick up some nice hardware at cheap prices.
And have a gourmet shellfish dinner with it, too!
Quake III may be no harder to install than the Windows client, but getting it to run is a headache beyond proportions.
On my Mandrake 7.2-based system, I could not get Quake III to run AT ALL. As soon as it would start up, it would segfault. This is on an AMD K6/2 500 with a 16MB Voodoo Banshee that worked perfectly fine on a Windows machine. Tracing the problem back further, I discovered that it needed DRI to run, and bus-mastering had to be enabled for DRI to work. I tried using the bus-mastering enable script over at dri.sourceforge.net.
Guess what?
It didn't do a thing.
I don't want this kind of bullshit on linux. I should not have to enable bus-mastering just to get a single damned game to work. Hell, I shouldn't even have to screw with Mesa. I should be able to double click on the icon AND HAVE IT LAUNCH AND RUN PROPERLY.
I'm sitting in my office, it's 100F out, but I'm chilling with my nice Web-enabled conditioner.
Then all of a sudden, it gets very stuffy in the room. Someone has cracked my air conditioner and set it at the hottest setting possible. It catches on fire. I've been 0wn3d by some lame skript kiddie controlling my air conditioner.
"People get scared when they hear the word Apocalypse"
Some people get scared when they hear the word Perl...
What about domains that have been licensed like .cc and .la (formerly Laos, now for Los Angeles, bastards)?
Who owns them?
I would be damn happy if people pirated my software, because that would mean that more people are using my product, thus equating increased revenues when they go and buy the real thing.
Nintendo's been milking the Game Boy for about what, 10 years now? They were all the rage when I was in first grade, and now they're all the rage now in tenth grade.
Really, though, does this new GB have a backlit display finally? Does it slurp up batteries like the Game Gear did?
"Victimless"?
Oh, there are victims alright. How about the ISPS that have to pay for the bandwidth, CPU, and storage? As this spam problem gets worse, this equates higher prices or the ISP going out of business.
I've heard of ISPs crushed by spam because some spammer decided to forge headers and route e-mail through them.
In my experience, you get spam mail if you do any of the above:
1) Post to Usenet with your real e-mail address.
2) Post to Slashdot with your e-mail address
3) Post to any message board with your real e-mail address
4) Make a webpage that has your e-mail address on it.
Who decides what is and what is not spam?
It's very easy. If you get an e-mail that
a) is written by someone you have never heard of before
b) you have not asked for this e-mail
c) contains some phony get-rich-quick scheme or something like that
then it's spam.
CIPA is also "cunt" in polish, ironically enough.
I'm serious. Look at the earlier Slashdot stories if you don't believe me.
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/technology/ 23CYBERLAW.html
I don't know why they insist on a registration system if there are tons of loopholes.
Log (at September 22, 2012)
Sector 1022 {StarDock, Fedspace, FedSpace Protected}
>Helios warps into the sector
>Helios is powering up weapon systems!
>Helios launches a wave of fighters at you!
>Console reports 1963 points of damage!
>Your ship's shields absorb the brunt of the attack!
>Helios is powering up weapons systems!
>Helios launches a wave of fighters at you!
>Console reports 2015 points of damage!
>Your trusty escape pod is functioning normally.
[This was my sector which he then obliterated with a Photon Missile. The limit was set to 60 seconds.]
>Message from Fighters at 10:25:16 A.M.
>Helios warps into the sector
>Helios is powering up weapons systems!
>Helios destroyed 503 fighters
>Helios warps out of the sector
>Photon Missile detected!
>Helios captures your planet (WHICH HAD A L4 CITADEL ONE DAY AWAY FROM LEVEL 5!!!!)
As it is, KDE is extremely hard to install and maintain. I don't know about you, but I sure do not feel like typing 'rpm -Uvh or -Ivh' at a prompt only to be informed that my version of Qt is out of date, forcing a trek to TrollTech's page to go and download it, only to be told I'm missing yet another obscure library.
I tried upgrading to KDE 2.0 from a Mandrake 7.1-based install, and it wreaked hell with the login manager (which was based on KDE). Whenever I tried to quit X, it booted me back to the broken graphical login screen. It was more bug-infested than Ultima IX, so bad I couldn't even launch the file manager without it crashing. I followed the exact instructions on the KDE web page, and a small note (buried in the ftp folders) told me that I needed the latest version of menu and deskdrake
menu? What's 'menu'? Does it mean menudrake? I'm confused.
I tried to get help on the #linux channel on EFnet, but of course I was rebounded to linuxdoc.org, which made no mention of the problems I was having.
I ended up having to do a complete reformat and reinstall of Mandrake 7.1. Very user _unfriendly_. Helix Gnome's installer, on the other hand, was terrific. I haven't had a problem with Gnome since.