Or ego, combined with a side-order of sociopathy. That seems to be a big motivation for usenet spammers who do "pee in the pool" spams (hipcrime, etc.), with no financial or other direct benefit to the spammer, not even a basic "visit my crappy webshite" benefit. Getting money to inflate your ego by spamming is a bonus.
Back in the late '80s, I knew someone who had two of them. At one point they were both broken, so I opened 'em up, found out it was the fuse, cursed at having to find pigtail fuses, put them back together (more difficult than it should have been), then they worked again.
I have three of them myself. One I found at a flea market a few months after having found a controller and half a dozen games at the same stall, another I traded for an Intellivision music keyboard (I found three of them together), a Sean Kelly multicart which was a trade for a near-mint brand new in box Arcadia 2001, and a "stress tester" coin-op of which no other units are known to exist.
As for the often broken identify everything by a three letter description hack that remains from QDOS
CP/M was doing 8.3 before QDOS/MSDOS. (that's where they got it from!) And probably a PDP-11 operating system was doing it before that.
As for pre-formatting for NTFS, I would suspect one reason would be Windows' annoying habit of reading every sector on the drive to check for errors (which is pointless on a brand new modern drive because of spare sectors) before finishing the format. The larger the drive, the longer it takes. Yes, this is only the default and you can tell it not to, but you have to know that you can first, and most Windows users won't know that.
It wasn't condensation that felled all three computers, it was a single corroded connector
Maybe if they had used fiber optic connectors instead? With multiplexed serial connections on a single fiber pair with a standardized connector, you not only don't have to worry about corroding pins, but you reduce the spaghetti problem too. And the lack of non-power wires means that many less wires to short out.
Of course any big project like this is limited to the technology from when it was designed, and that was quite a while ago... and in Russia, too. (In Soviet Russia, connector corrodes YOU!) And it doesn't help much with inter-board connections within the same chassis, which usually need a lot of wiring.
Actually, real parallel printer ports can do things that USB printer ports can't, and that's to be used as a generic bit-banger I/O interface. For instance, there's a lot of EPROM programmers out there that will only work with a standard ISA-style printer port; not even a PCI printer port card will work.
But as far as I'm concerned, ISA serial ports (and floppies, and PS/2 ports) can go screw themselves. The Mac has done quite well without them for years, and Keyspan makes some damn nice USB serial adapters.
Why would they? They are only doing FIOS in areas where they are the ILEC. Which in Texas basically means Denton, College Station, and maybe a few small cities out in the middle of nowhere, where they are surely going to wait as long as they can. Admittedly I hear they are breaking past their ILEC borders in the Denton area, but that is because Charter cable is so crappy.
Meanwhile, five miles south of you, I have a Uverse box 500 feet away that was installed last March and is still dark because they can't get enough bandwidth off of the last mile of copper to everybody after all, and (as I've heard) because the MS-run set-top boxes are junk. Maybe they'd have had better luck with Xbox 360s for set-top boxes?
I don't see any age distribution in TFA (just "over 3"), but I have a sneaking suspicion that 2/3 of those are over the age of 50. In other words, granny discovered e-mail and how to order knitting needles online.
I saw a submission about this yesterday in Firehose, and after going three links deep, I still couldn't figure out WTF was really going on. So I voted it down.
My best guess is that something (maybe even a bug in Toshiba's build of his BIOS) caused a password to be set, then the guy went all Chicken Little about "Teh Evel Micro$ofts" and "Darth Gate$". Nowhere could I find any hard evidence that it was something intentional in the design of the BIOS.
For a while I thought it might have had something to do with someone stupidly installing an EFI BIOS, but it didn't even seem to be that.
Later models of Dreamcast don't boot the special multisession disks at all
That was the "common wisdom" in the past, however, when people tried to confirm exactly which models couldn't boot multisession CDs, they couldn't actually find any that wouldn't boot. The information is somewhere on dcemulation.com, and I just tried looking for that page, but I couldn't find it. In any case, there are so many of the older units available used that this is not much of an issue.
Because they:
- are 3x-10x the cost of an ordinary light bulb
The per-bulb cost difference is much less these days, but the important savings is in time. Back in the Bad Old Days, it seemed like I was having to replace a bulb a month. In addition to the inconvienence of the lack of light, the time it takes to get a new bulb from the stash (or go shopping if the stash is empty), find a stepladder, take the light cover off, remove the old bulb, put in the new bulb, replace the light cover, get down, flip the switch and see if it works, mark the old bulb with an "X" so that it doesn't get mixed with the good ones (further delaying a later bulb change), and put away the stepladder... well, that's a lot of work that I'm glad I don't have to do any more.
Sure, maybe one in ten ends up buzzing (especially in multi-light fixtures where there are more bulbs to begin with), in which case you just stick it in a place that doesn't matter (like the attic), and put a new bulb in its place. I think the only incandescent bulb I still haven't replaced is the one over the sink in the kitchen.
And evil, wasteful me, since it's only 14 watts (equivalent to two incandescent nite-lights), I just leave the living room light on as a night light when I'm out, because it's too dark when I enter through the garage, and the kitchen light switch is on the far end of the kitchen. I guess the proper solution would be a 3-way switch for the kitchen, but I really don't want to do 110VAC wiring if I can help it.
Apparently this is NYT's way of saying that if you're smart enough to be using Linux, and diligent enough to go beyond the front page, then New York Times isn't meant for you! It could be their strategy to cater to only the dumber sections of the poulace, perhaps?
Hell, I'm surprised to hear that they even have video content. They are a newspaper, after all.
And I don't care because I don't want to waste my time with video news content even where I expect it, like cnn.com.
Uh, HUH. Because spamming random people at the NYT is going to get you even one quantum more attention than MAKE UR LOVER LONGER FAST spams. The replier in TFA had it right: Rob (not just some random joe with random sign-in data or some Linux fanboy who doesn't even go to the site) should send SNAIL MAIL to some of these people about his problem, and give them an opportunity to respond to his video thingy.
Notably absent are any specs on the unit at all. I was interested in the dimensions of the actual unit. The closest thing I could come up with were some figures in the user guide that appear to indicate that the device is about twice as thick as an iPod Nano. Hardly an iPod rival. Apple will be bumping up the Nano line any time now.
Is there anyone out there who isn't expecting an 8GB Nano in the next two months or so?
It seems pretty ridiculous to say "We guarantee our OS is secure [unless you use hardware that wasn't made by us]." Well, then the OS isn't secure. If 3rd-party drivers can break your security, it wasn't really there to begin with, now was it?
That's a pretty weak argument. That implies that the OS would even have to protect against a 3rd-party driver that intentionally opens a root shell on a random TCP port.
A flaw in a 3rd-party driver is the fault of the driver vendor, not the OS vendor. Or we could go with the "signed code or NO DRIVER FOR YOU!" model that Microsoft wants.
...and now we've got some guy claiming to be Jon Benet's murderer when there are big holes in his story (claimed he took her home from school, but it was Christmas vacation, and there is little evidence that he was even in Boulder at the time)
What we seem to have here is an epidemic of Attention-Whore-Itis.
Okay, here's a crazy idea. If they're stealing things OUT of luggage, how about using your laptop's locking cable (not the kind with the worthless round-key locks) to lock the laptop to the actual luggage itself? That would at least make them have to put more effort into stealing your stuff. And since it's only locking it TO the baggage, there is no need for a "TSA Approved" lock, because you're not blocking access to inspect the luggage.
For smaller items like PDAs, get a small cable lock designed to have a long cable strung through it.
Of course the best thing is to simply not check such baggage (duh), but if you have to check something, this could help.
Many laptop models can take an extra battery by replacing the CD/DVD/floppy drive.
My old Powerbook G3 Firewire (aka Pismo) was designed to do this. It even came with an empty battery module designed to fit in the hole if you didn't want the extra weight of the optical drive. It was hollow, with only a thick plastic label on top, which could be pried open with a fingernail. It would have made a great smuggler's compartment.
Our campaign mission is simple: to send a message to the computer industry to force it (by any means necessary) to retire the CAPS key.
So tell me, Brainiac, what are you going to put there instead? A nice black hole burned into the keyboard by a Sony laptop battery?
I usually end up hitting it by accident when trying to hit the shift or tab key, so I would be happier to see both of those keys made slightly larger (like the ENTER key on a Euro or Japanese keyboard), then banish the stupid caps lock key up there with the other useless keys like Scroll Lock.
I know some of you emacs weenies want the control key in that location, but that wouldn't be balanced now that most full-size keyboards have two control keys. I'd rather be ignoring two control keys in symmetrical locations than ignoring a control key left of the A.
Slashdot Mirror
Or ego, combined with a side-order of sociopathy. That seems to be a big motivation for usenet spammers who do "pee in the pool" spams (hipcrime, etc.), with no financial or other direct benefit to the spammer, not even a basic "visit my crappy webshite" benefit. Getting money to inflate your ego by spamming is a bonus.
I forgot to mention, the buzzing sound can be fixed by rerouting and shielding the speaker wire, but there are some who would consider that heresy.
Back in the late '80s, I knew someone who had two of them. At one point they were both broken, so I opened 'em up, found out it was the fuse, cursed at having to find pigtail fuses, put them back together (more difficult than it should have been), then they worked again.
I have three of them myself. One I found at a flea market a few months after having found a controller and half a dozen games at the same stall, another I traded for an Intellivision music keyboard (I found three of them together), a Sean Kelly multicart which was a trade for a near-mint brand new in box Arcadia 2001, and a "stress tester" coin-op of which no other units are known to exist.
aaa, akogare Kousokusen, naa?
CP/M was doing 8.3 before QDOS/MSDOS. (that's where they got it from!) And probably a PDP-11 operating system was doing it before that.
As for pre-formatting for NTFS, I would suspect one reason would be Windows' annoying habit of reading every sector on the drive to check for errors (which is pointless on a brand new modern drive because of spare sectors) before finishing the format. The larger the drive, the longer it takes. Yes, this is only the default and you can tell it not to, but you have to know that you can first, and most Windows users won't know that.
No. It's just barely amusing copypasta. And he even got the "All your [singular noun] belong to us." meme wrong.
Important nitpick: You don't have FIOS [tm], you have Fiber. FIOS is a trademark that specifically refers to Verizon's fiber offering.
Maybe if they had used fiber optic connectors instead? With multiplexed serial connections on a single fiber pair with a standardized connector, you not only don't have to worry about corroding pins, but you reduce the spaghetti problem too. And the lack of non-power wires means that many less wires to short out.
Of course any big project like this is limited to the technology from when it was designed, and that was quite a while ago... and in Russia, too. (In Soviet Russia, connector corrodes YOU!) And it doesn't help much with inter-board connections within the same chassis, which usually need a lot of wiring.
Actually, real parallel printer ports can do things that USB printer ports can't, and that's to be used as a generic bit-banger I/O interface. For instance, there's a lot of EPROM programmers out there that will only work with a standard ISA-style printer port; not even a PCI printer port card will work.
But as far as I'm concerned, ISA serial ports (and floppies, and PS/2 ports) can go screw themselves. The Mac has done quite well without them for years, and Keyspan makes some damn nice USB serial adapters.
Why would they? They are only doing FIOS in areas where they are the ILEC. Which in Texas basically means Denton, College Station, and maybe a few small cities out in the middle of nowhere, where they are surely going to wait as long as they can. Admittedly I hear they are breaking past their ILEC borders in the Denton area, but that is because Charter cable is so crappy.
Meanwhile, five miles south of you, I have a Uverse box 500 feet away that was installed last March and is still dark because they can't get enough bandwidth off of the last mile of copper to everybody after all, and (as I've heard) because the MS-run set-top boxes are junk. Maybe they'd have had better luck with Xbox 360s for set-top boxes?
I don't see any age distribution in TFA (just "over 3"), but I have a sneaking suspicion that 2/3 of those are over the age of 50. In other words, granny discovered e-mail and how to order knitting needles online.
I saw a submission about this yesterday in Firehose, and after going three links deep, I still couldn't figure out WTF was really going on. So I voted it down.
My best guess is that something (maybe even a bug in Toshiba's build of his BIOS) caused a password to be set, then the guy went all Chicken Little about "Teh Evel Micro$ofts" and "Darth Gate$". Nowhere could I find any hard evidence that it was something intentional in the design of the BIOS.
For a while I thought it might have had something to do with someone stupidly installing an EFI BIOS, but it didn't even seem to be that.
CDs are read from the inside out too.
That was the "common wisdom" in the past, however, when people tried to confirm exactly which models couldn't boot multisession CDs, they couldn't actually find any that wouldn't boot. The information is somewhere on dcemulation.com, and I just tried looking for that page, but I couldn't find it. In any case, there are so many of the older units available used that this is not much of an issue.
Once again HP shows its technological leadership by being ahead of the curve in warrantless surveillance.
Because they: - are 3x-10x the cost of an ordinary light bulb
The per-bulb cost difference is much less these days, but the important savings is in time. Back in the Bad Old Days, it seemed like I was having to replace a bulb a month. In addition to the inconvienence of the lack of light, the time it takes to get a new bulb from the stash (or go shopping if the stash is empty), find a stepladder, take the light cover off, remove the old bulb, put in the new bulb, replace the light cover, get down, flip the switch and see if it works, mark the old bulb with an "X" so that it doesn't get mixed with the good ones (further delaying a later bulb change), and put away the stepladder... well, that's a lot of work that I'm glad I don't have to do any more.
Sure, maybe one in ten ends up buzzing (especially in multi-light fixtures where there are more bulbs to begin with), in which case you just stick it in a place that doesn't matter (like the attic), and put a new bulb in its place. I think the only incandescent bulb I still haven't replaced is the one over the sink in the kitchen.
And evil, wasteful me, since it's only 14 watts (equivalent to two incandescent nite-lights), I just leave the living room light on as a night light when I'm out, because it's too dark when I enter through the garage, and the kitchen light switch is on the far end of the kitchen. I guess the proper solution would be a 3-way switch for the kitchen, but I really don't want to do 110VAC wiring if I can help it.
Apparently this is NYT's way of saying that if you're smart enough to be using Linux, and diligent enough to go beyond the front page, then New York Times isn't meant for you! It could be their strategy to cater to only the dumber sections of the poulace, perhaps?
Hell, I'm surprised to hear that they even have video content. They are a newspaper, after all.
And I don't care because I don't want to waste my time with video news content even where I expect it, like cnn.com.
resident@nytimes.com; publisher@nytimes.com; public@nytimes.com; feedback@nytimes.com; clarosa@nytimes.com; schools@nytimes.com; wedinfo@nytimes.com; society@nytimes.com; nytnews@nytimes.com; executive-editor@nytimes.com; managing-editor@nytimes.com; news-tips@nytimes.com; the-arts@nytimes.com; bizday@nytimes.com; foreign@nytimes.com; metro@nytimes.com; national@nytimes.com; sports@nytimes.com; washington@nytimes.com; editorial@nytimes.com; oped@nytimes.com; circulation@nytimes.com
Uh, HUH. Because spamming random people at the NYT is going to get you even one quantum more attention than MAKE UR LOVER LONGER FAST spams. The replier in TFA had it right: Rob (not just some random joe with random sign-in data or some Linux fanboy who doesn't even go to the site) should send SNAIL MAIL to some of these people about his problem, and give them an opportunity to respond to his video thingy.
It's so bad.
I have this on laserdisc and didn't realize it had never made it to DVD after all these years.
Now where's my Max Headroom and Reboot season 1+2 DVDs, dammit!
Notably absent are any specs on the unit at all. I was interested in the dimensions of the actual unit. The closest thing I could come up with were some figures in the user guide that appear to indicate that the device is about twice as thick as an iPod Nano. Hardly an iPod rival. Apple will be bumping up the Nano line any time now.
Is there anyone out there who isn't expecting an 8GB Nano in the next two months or so?
Or you could do it yourself.
you not-quite-kids these days :-)
Besides a constellation, and a well known space project from the 70s, Orion is also where those babe-a-licious green slave girls come from.
It seems pretty ridiculous to say "We guarantee our OS is secure [unless you use hardware that wasn't made by us]." Well, then the OS isn't secure. If 3rd-party drivers can break your security, it wasn't really there to begin with, now was it?
That's a pretty weak argument. That implies that the OS would even have to protect against a 3rd-party driver that intentionally opens a root shell on a random TCP port.
A flaw in a 3rd-party driver is the fault of the driver vendor, not the OS vendor. Or we could go with the "signed code or NO DRIVER FOR YOU!" model that Microsoft wants.
In other news, Cisco can't reproduce the security flaw from last month's Black Hat conference.
...and now we've got some guy claiming to be Jon Benet's murderer when there are big holes in his story (claimed he took her home from school, but it was Christmas vacation, and there is little evidence that he was even in Boulder at the time)
What we seem to have here is an epidemic of Attention-Whore-Itis.
Okay, here's a crazy idea. If they're stealing things OUT of luggage, how about using your laptop's locking cable (not the kind with the worthless round-key locks) to lock the laptop to the actual luggage itself? That would at least make them have to put more effort into stealing your stuff. And since it's only locking it TO the baggage, there is no need for a "TSA Approved" lock, because you're not blocking access to inspect the luggage.
For smaller items like PDAs, get a small cable lock designed to have a long cable strung through it.
Of course the best thing is to simply not check such baggage (duh), but if you have to check something, this could help.
Many laptop models can take an extra battery by replacing the CD/DVD/floppy drive.
My old Powerbook G3 Firewire (aka Pismo) was designed to do this. It even came with an empty battery module designed to fit in the hole if you didn't want the extra weight of the optical drive. It was hollow, with only a thick plastic label on top, which could be pried open with a fingernail. It would have made a great smuggler's compartment.
Our campaign mission is simple: to send a message to the computer industry to force it (by any means necessary) to retire the CAPS key.
So tell me, Brainiac, what are you going to put there instead? A nice black hole burned into the keyboard by a Sony laptop battery?
I usually end up hitting it by accident when trying to hit the shift or tab key, so I would be happier to see both of those keys made slightly larger (like the ENTER key on a Euro or Japanese keyboard), then banish the stupid caps lock key up there with the other useless keys like Scroll Lock.
I know some of you emacs weenies want the control key in that location, but that wouldn't be balanced now that most full-size keyboards have two control keys. I'd rather be ignoring two control keys in symmetrical locations than ignoring a control key left of the A.