Of particular interest is the part on the Skateway. Of even more particular interest is that it has yet to freeze over this year. More than that, I went rollerblading last weekend. Right. Global warming is a myth. That green stuff on my lawn is called "snow".
At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous old fart (which is wrong, I'm 25, a cantankerous young fart), I can distinctly remember having snowball fights on Hallowe'en with my brother. This year, we haven't had a snowfall that lasted more than a day or so, and the Rideau Canal is still flowing. With liquid water. In January. It's unlikely that it will freeze at all this year. The first snowfall didn't even come until Boxing Day, and that was gone by the 27th.
I cant for my life understand why all the computer manufacturers insist on having the CPU inside the box. Its the worst possible place to cool it. Not only is it hot in the box, its also very hard to get a good airflow going. By placing the CPU on the backside of the motherboard and let it protrude out from the case it would be very feasable to use passive cooling. One 10x20 cm cooling plate with fins is more than enough to cool away 120w if there is a free flow of air.
You've never owned a desktop form-factor computer, have you? Or a MediaPC, for that matter.
Before there were towers, there were desktops. And a lot of people tend to prefer desktops, for aesthetic reasons. I'm one of them. I haven't owned a tower case since 2 computers ago, and putting the CPU on the "backside" of the motherboard would make that impossible. No thanks.
*sigh* that's not a troll, mods. That's paraphrasing the original blurb.
The submitter really is griping because Yahoo is taking measures to make sure that their ads (the only source of revenue to support their free mail, at that) are getting displayed. And the complaint that when all the ads are being blocked, the page will start loading, freeze for 15s, and then finish loading? That's probably JavaScript, or whatever they're using to make sure the ads are displayed, running through its myriad adservers for the maximum execution time.
However to those saying Sony is going to die, I just want to know... why did Nintendo not die last round when they were "arguably" #3, when Sony will "arguably" be #3 this round?
Two reasons why Nintendo didn't die last round... the first is that they were selling GameCubes at a profit. They were making money with every console being sold, and despite their poor sales and relatively small penetration in the last generation of consoles, they were still operating in the black.
The second reason is that the GameBoy series remains the dominant handheld, and will probably remain so for a long time. They've got the penetration, the feature set, and most importantly the price range to maintain their dominance in that market.
By contrast... the PSP is a great platform. It's got great graphics, the sound is pretty good, it's got tons of extra features. It's also really expensive. Like three times the cost of a GBA, and easily twice the cost of a DS. Because of this, it's really not doing as well in sales as the GameBoy line is, and Sony probably isn't making enough money off it to keep their consoles afloat. Which brings to bear the other thing... Sony is selling the PS3 at a loss. They're selling 'em for $650, and they cost about $1100 to make. Sony was banking on selling enough of them that they could make the money back selling dev kits to allow other vendors to make games for the console. But if they don't reach critical mass, developpers aren't going to spend their time/energy making games that won't sell enough to make a profit. You might actually see a world where games are developped for the Wii, and then ported to the PS3, instead of the past, where titles were being developped for the PS2 and being ported to the XBoX and GameCube.
Now, I doubt Sony will just sink. Sony Online Entertainment is the only wholly independant subsidiary that bears the "Sony" name, and they're still making lots of money off their laptops, stereos, tv's, and music. But it's quite possible that the console/handheld division of the company will be pissing money away this time around.
Um... I think what he was trying to say was that that was how the fanboys would try to rationalize the poor sales of the PS3, not that he actually believed that. I'm pretty sure we all know that Nintendo is making out like bandits, as they are selling the console at a profit, and are also making money on dev kits, while Sony is selling the PS3 at a loss and hoping to recoup the money through dev kit sales.
In theory, this means a malicious merchant can modify their PIN pad to capture the PINs and account numbers, and can then use the information to drain the accounts through the ATM network. In practice, this form of fraud hasn't happened, and it would be fairly easy to track unless the fraudster didn't steal very much -- a pattern of fraud on accounts whose cards have all been used at a particular merchant would be pretty easy to detect.
Yes it does. It happened to my brother and to his wife. The experiences with the banks were something else, too....
My brother, who banks with CS Alterna Bank here in Canada, simply had to see the manager, and explain to her what had happened. She looked at the records, and confirmed that about 45 minutes after he used the card at a store in Ottawa, the "card" was used at an ATM in Montreal to drain his account. At his request, she immediately cancelled his card and issued a new one. As the amount stolen was less than the $60,000 for which you're covered automatically, she refunded his money and put in a claim with the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation. This is how it's supposed to happen.
My sister-in-law, who at the time banked with the Bank of Nova Scotia, went into the bank expecting the same sort of treatment. Instead, she was outright told by the manager that she was lying, and that it was possible for her to get from Ottawa to Montreal in the time allotted. (well yeah, I guess, if you have a helicopter waiting in the parking lot of the store). Her manager outright refused to deal with her, and it wasn't until her mother came in and told the manager that if he didn't treat her daughter with the respect that was due, she would close out her account and take her business elsewhere. As her mom's account had a cash holding more than 6 figures, the manager was interested in retaining business, and reluctantly obliged to help my sister-in-law. Of course, they both closed their accounts a month later anyway, but that's beside the point.
The kind of fraud you describe has happened. And it's probably still happening. It's the Superman 3 plan... if I steal 5 bucks from your bank account, you'll probably never notice. If I steal 5 bucks from your neighbour's account, he'll probably never notice. If I steal 5 bucks from the account of everybody in a city the size of, say, Toronto, I've just walked off with $15million. Except they aren't stealing $5 here and there, they're taking as much as they think they can get away with.
An RFC is a Request For Comments. It's a suggestion that may or may not become standard practice. It's in no way "law". It's up to software writers and administrators whether or not to implement them. Now, you have some choices... my own sendmail server ignores connections from hosts that don't have full compliance with RFC 821, for example. That's basic greylisting. But his suggested RFC has not passed into canon by any stretch.
to mention XFCE. Time to done a flame retardant vest....
I tried Gnome, and hated it. As others have said, it's designed to be simple, but I found it aggravating. Haven't used it in years, and have no intention of ever trying it again. KDE was alright, but it was slow as molasses. I still haven't figured out why the default is to dump debug information to console... if I'm running in X, I don't need to see that, and every call to stdout() slows down the system. It's a lot faster if you go into the source and comment out all of those calls before recompiling, but you shouldn't have to do that. Ultimately, I switched to XFCE and have never looked back. It's lightweight, it's fast, and the eye candy is easily there. Especially if you turn on the compositor (I leave it off, because it affects my performance in Cedega, but Linux-native games aren't affected by it).
KDE is all well and good, but I find that neither it nor Gnome are viable options. I like the idea that you will be able to run KDE on a Windows platform, though. It means that I can install KDE as a replacement for explorer as the first step in migrating somebody away from Windows. Show them the desktop, and let them get used to it early in the shift. Change them over to KDE before you start changing them over to Abiword, or OpenOffice.org, that way by the time you're actually ready to change them over to Linux, you can do it without them noticing any change at all. It's a good thing. But I'm going to stick with XFCE on my system. Call me when they port that to Windows, and I'll be beside myself.
Just because I like to repeat myself every time an OLPC story is posted, I'll ask again: Where are the apps for this platform? Can anybody name one app, accessible to end users (e.g., no recompiling required), that is compatible with the Sugar UI, mesh networking, low-end specs, and other unique features?
It's Linux. It's running on a 500MHz Geode processor, which is 32-bit x86 compatible, and 128MB of DDR266. If you replaced the 512MB Flash drive with a suitable hard drive, you could run Windows XP on it. The machine isn't *that* anemic, and since it's running a heavily customized version of Fedora Core (and by customized, it's most likely in the form of stripping comments from libraries, and taking the Zen approach to OS design in having one app per task, and by picking apps that are generally lightweight), I sincerely doubt that there's going to be any trouble finding apps for it. It supports USB removable storage, so you could probably run apps like Firefox, OpenOffice.org, or GIMP on it, too. And the display is reasonably high res, too, at 1200x900.
A platform exists only to run the apps, not visa-versa. BeOS was a great platform, too. Many excellent gaming platforms have failed, because they lacked apps (i.e., games). Linux desktop is getting nowhere, despite it's technical excellence, because it lacks key apps (i.e., Office). Pull a few key apps from MacOS X (e.g., Office, Photoshop, etc.) and see what happens to adoption.
Hmm. It lacks MS Office, yes. But there's ways to run it if you really need it, through systems like Crossover and Wine. There's also counterparts to everything you mention. I prefer GIMP to Photoshop, both in feature set and interface. There's alternatives to MS Office that are far superior from a technical standpoint, too. There's a reason that an increasing number of organizations are migrating away from MS software.
You can't even throw gaming in its face, actually, because the laptop in question doesn't have the juice to run any modern games, regardless of what OS it's running. Quite aside from the fact that gaming is quite possible under Linux. Just this afternoon, I was playing GuildWars, and I played some Oblivion yesterday on my Linux-based gaming rig.
And all those platforms have far, far more apps available than OLPC (just look at sf.net, download.com or cdw.com). I know OLPC runs a flavor of Linux, but no known Linux apps are compatible with the specs above (Sugar, mesh networking, etc.). Go into a shopping mall and give a random person an OLPC -- what would they do with it? Sure, it has some included apps, but that can't be sufficient to meet the needs of millions of kids with every need and in every environment imaginable.
I hope OLPC works out great, but I can't imagine anyone who has ever designed systems looks at this and thinks anything else but -- great platform, but for what applications?
It's Linux. There's no shortage of apps for Linux. Besides which, I'm willing to bet that an overwhelming number of computer owners only use them as glorified typewriters. They do e-mail, they surf the 'net, they do some basic word processing, and that's about it. Gamers make up a pretty small portion of the computer market by comparison, and that's even a non-issue, since the OLPC doesn't have the power to run most modern games. All the OLPC needs to be successful is to fill those niches, and from what I've read, it's going to do that.
Polygraphs are only effective if you believe they're effective. If you believe that they're a load of bunk, they won't catch shit. I have successfully convinced a polygraph that I was Cleopatra in a past life. That possibility notwithstanding, it really isn't hard to fool a polygraph. I work with cops from time to time with my work, and usually they only use a polygraph to decide whether you are worth investigating: if you agree to the polygraph and act like you have nothing to hide, then there's no point in administering the test.
My Compaq laptop is similar to yours... the old one (pre-merger) had restore CDs that reinstalled everything, complete with the crap that I never wanted like AOL. The new(er) one came with a vanilla XP CD that installed the OEM version of XP Home. No activation required, doesn't even ask for the CD key, though there is a sticker on the bottom of the lappy.
All the drivers are included on a 2nd CD, and there's a 3rd CD with the crap I don't want, like AOL, MSN, MS Works, etc. etc. etc.
I'm in Canada. The previous laptop was an EVO N115, and the current one is an R4035CA.
If it's a "hidden" field, the legit browsers will still see it, though. The user may not see it, but it'll still be loaded by the browser.
As to how to make it compress really well, simple. Save it as a 2-colour bitmap (with all the pixels "on"). Of some obscenely high resolution. Like 168,000x105,000. 17.6 billion pixels. Will compress really small, but will also suck up a huge amount of RAM to display.
Well, I administer a couple of forums, and I can honestly tell you that captcha is mostly useless. That said, so is e-mail validation. The bots are using throwaway e-mail addresses to get around e-mail validation. Sometimes, they're registering their own domains and using a catch-all so that the bot can put in random junk for the e-mail address, sometimes they're using free e-mail providers.
The thing is, it's a losing battle. You can either shrug your shoulders, and let it happen, or you can take up arms. At its peak, an average of 100 bots/day were registering on my forums. I was able to stymie them by blocking websites from their profiles and preventing them from posting links until they'd had 10 posts, but they were still registering.
100/day may not sound like many, until I tell you that there's only about 2,000 legitimate users on the messageboard. You need to employ every weapon at your disposal to prevent bots from registering, and even then, you may not get all of them.
Now, addressing what you said specifically:
I have 20/20 vision and am not color blind. Captchas are becoming so complicated and garbled that I get the code wrong about 40% of the time. Another portion of the time I take to long trying to answer the code question and type in the right characters. I typically get screwed on the number Zero and the letter 'O' and lowercase 'L' and the number 1.
That's the fault of the website designer more than anything. The smart website designer will use a font that puts a slash through the numeral zero, for example, or will remove certain characters from the list of available characters, such as you describe. Most canned captchas actually support that, but it's up to the person using it to tell the script not to use characters like 'l'.
It'b becoming, for me, an entry barrier to signing up and gaining access to websites. It would be much easier to simply use email authentication. What do you do with the people who are color blind? I spent some years dealing with display design and this was a legitimate concern that we addressed at the time for a specialized group of people. In the common population there are a lot more occurrences of people who are color blind.
Provide an alternative method for registration. My e-mail address is provided on my registration page, asking users to send me an e-mail if they have any problems registering and I'll manually create the account. I check my e-mail daily, and at most, you'll have to wait 24 hours.
Again, that's up to the website administrator to make allowances for people who get screwed over by the captcha and other methods.
Are captcha's really worth the effort compared to other more human friendly processes? Is anyone working on what we will be doing next? Considering that there are decades of technology in machine vision technology to pull from I think it will be fairly trivial for the bots to become better at reading captchas than humans.
Yes. While I did say they were mostly useless, I also said that you need to employ every weapon at your disposal to keep the bots from registering. They do block some of the less sophisticated bots, and every little bit helps.
I've been tossing around an idea of an anti-captcha, though. Throw in a captcha, and right below it, have a note that says "now, disregard the above captcha and type 'notabot' in the box". I'll probably implement it to see what happens.
It might be effective to take the email authentication process and apply everything that mail servers do to authenticate the user. What I mean by this is apply all the mail server rules like FQDN requirements for HELO, fully resolvable email domains, valid email addresses, non-open relays. Much of this would eliminate either the bots or the ISP's who are too stupid to properly configure a mail server. Similarly it might be sufficient to code the HTML/HTTP to expect a properly r
The thing with HF is that there's really no way to reliably determine where the signal is coming from, because it's operating at a frequency that can bounce around in the ionosphere indefinitely. That's how they're able to send a signal from distances beyond line of sight... it's not penetrating the Earth, it's bouncing around in the atmosphere.
Given the right atmospheric conditions, you can pick up the signal decades later: one of the coolest things that ever happened to me was picking up battle chatter from Vietnam while on a training exercise with Army Signals. I'm 25. It was eerie people die in a transmission that was sent before I was born.
Experiments have been tried with the idea of "appliance computing", but it hasn't worked out very well. Partly because these attempts have been with dial-up networking and very limited capabilities in terms of both processor, RAM, local storage and display.
Really? What do you call game consoles? I had no idea they were going to die out so soon.
The GP is absolutely right. Users don't care what's running in their computer, they care that it works. Everybody has a different threshhold for how much crap they're willing to put up with, and what kind of hoops they're willing to jump through to get something that works. While you or I may be willing to spend the time configuring Linux to work properly on the computer, the average user may not. For some, they're willing to spend more money for something that "just works". Others, they can't afford to spend money on a computer and want something that's free (as in beer). Some have idealogical reasons to avoid mainstream software, and want something that's free (as in speech). Most people are willing to spend a little money in exchange for better support and fewer headaches.
Yeah, you *can* do anything that Windows can do on a Linux distro. Yeah, if you know what you're doing, you can do it better. And yeah, you can do it without spending a dime on software. Yeah, you're free of the evils of DRM. But you know what? All that freedom doesn't change the fact that for most of us, the desktop computer is a combonation between a typewriter and a gaming console. What matters is that it works, and quite frankly, Linux doesn't. Not for the gaming that I'm doing. A decent driver for the video card in my laptop doesn't exist, and gaming is impossible with Mesa: the framerate simply isn't good enough. I could easily do the web surfing, e-mail writing, document-writing, and video editing on the laptop with Linux. Oh wait... no, I couldn't do the graphical editing, because the memory card reader doesn't work either, and I can't transfer the pictures/video from my camera.... Linux on my laptop simply isn't an option. On the desktop, it's an option, but when I have a legitimate license for XP Professional lying around, why bother configuring Linux when I sacrifice all technical support from the hardware manufacturers and software vendors, and in the process open myself up to needing to buy a subscription to Cedega in order to do what I do most with the machine: play games?
Idealogy is all well and good, but the computer *is* an appliance no matter which way you look at it. It may be an extremely complicated appliance, but it's an appliance nonetheless. What matters is that it works.
I get an average of 1 untagged spam in my inbox every couple of days. The systems I'm using to block the spam are trapping an average of about 5,000 spams a week that's actually addressed to me personally. Exactly one of those messages has been image spam in the last month.
Those systems are: milter-greylist SpamAssassin SpamHaus and other DNS Blacklists
That's it. Just those three systems in place, and I'm trapping better than 99% of the spam that's getting sent to me. That's with out-of-the-box configurations on milter-greylist, and an SA sensitivity of 2.0. Most of it doesn't even reach my server, as my mailserver is refusing connections from anything in the blacklist, and is only accepting the "RCPT TO" line of any message that doesn't come from a whitelisted server. I could probably cut the amount of spam significantly if I changed the greylist error time to something like 4 hours instead of half an hour, but that would come at the cost of usability: I can't be waiting half a day for an e-mail from somebody I've never heard from before. Maybe on personal e-mail, but it's simply not feasible for business purposes.
I'd still say that 95% is utter crap. You should be able to trap a lot more than that, if your sysadmin knows what he/she is doing.
Just pulling numbers out of my ass... but let's say that one in a million people is dumb enough to fall for the crap they're trying to sell, and actually falls for what they're doing. Let's say it's your typical buy/dump scheme where they buy up, say, 50,000 shares of some penny stock. Net cost to them, $500 for the stock, and, let's be really generous and say $100 to send a million e-mails. Realistically, it doesn't cost them nearly that much to do it, but that's beside the point....
The idea is that they'll create a run on the penny stock. Create some demand on a stock that's worth $0.01 a share, even a little, and it might go up to $0.02/share. Not a significant jump, except when you consider that they could have $50,000 invested in the company already. That run would turn into $50,000 profit overnight. And that's assuming a relatively small one in a million people being dumb enough to fall for it. People in general are a hell of a lot stupider than that.
And here's the rub... it's not illegal to create a run on your stock like that. It's not fraud, it's not stock manipulating, it's not deceptive marketing. The company whose stock is being traded usually has absolutely nothing to do with the scheme. And thanks to overly relaxed laws in countries like China and the USA when it comes to bulk e-mailing, it's not illegal to send the spam. They word it in such a way that it looks, to an idiot, like they've received an e-mail they aren't supposed to have received, talking about some sure-fire hot stock, and enough people will fall for it that you're able to turn a profit.
Spam in general is like that. They don't care that 99.999% of the messages they send out get ignored. They care that 0.001% arrive in the inboxes of the criminally stupid.
I draw your attention to the big yellow arrow on rocket launchers that you point at the enemy?
We get some pretty cool toys in the army, but it's all designed so that you can use it when you're being shot at after having had 15 minutes of sleep in the last week. Just because it's designed for idiots doesn't mean that the folks designing it are idiots. Actually, they're pretty brilliant, IMO... why bother developing a super-expensive way to kill somebody that centralizes your killing power in one spot when a 5.56x45 FMJ round costs less than $0.30 and kills them just as dead? When the bad guys develop armour that can safely protect them from everything we use on the battlefield, you'll start seeing new ways of killing people being developed. Until then, it's a waste of money.
Their reasoning may be questionable (or at least their excuses), but the problem is that light on dark simply does not look right. The eye is much better at seeing fine detail in deciding where there isn't light than it is in deciding where there is light.
If you're looking at a black background, the iris will open up a little because you're getting less light. When you try to spot, say, white text on a black background, there's a perceptible glare. At lower resolutions, it's not really that significant. But with display resolutions increasing, the glare becomes more of a problem. Back when I was running a Compaq P1100 display (0.22dp, 21" CRT, 1920x1440@75Hz), half the sites on the Internet were completely unusable because of this effect, and I had to start using an accessibility stylesheet. Even now, I'm running at 1680x1050 on a 21" LCD, and on websites that use white on black I have to increase the font size.
Whatever their official explanations, reading black on light is a lot easier on the eye at small point sizes. If you find there's too much light, may I suggest lowering the brightness on your display? Or possibly spending more time outside and less time in the basement? Or failing that, invest in some brighter lightbulbs for your office. My own eyes are so sensitive to light that my optometrist wrote a prescription that says I have to wear sunglasses when driving, and I'm able to deal with it. There's no earthly reason that a brightly coloured background should hurt your eyes if there's enough ambient light where you're working.
If you don't have Office compatibility, nobody's going to install your program. The sad fact is that MS Office and its variants are on a huge number of PCs out there, and as long as you have any kind of need to interoperate with other people, you absolutely need to have that ability.
Being compatible with MS Office does *not* mean that you're defaulting to its file format. It means that you have the option of reading documents that people send you in.DOC format, and that if you absolutely need to, you can export it to.DOC for those same people (or any of the other formats Office uses). Until applications like AbiWord and suites like OpenOffice and the one discussed here find greater market penetration, the de facto standard will remain MS Office, and dropping compatibility is not an option.
What you're proposing will marginalize yourself, and that's exactly what the FOSS movement does *not* need.
How the hell does this get modded troll? Not trolling at all.:(
And I agree with you. I'd have a hard time breathing if either of the other shows you're referencing were to make it back to the air. Sadly, I don't think that the one in your.sig will get done, since they killed off two of my favourite characters in the movie. I still think that Jaynestown was the best episode.;)
As for Farscape... well, they could. I dunno... it'd be really cool if they did, though. Dying in each others' arms would be hard to explain away, though, and Farscape wouldn't be Farscape without Claudia and Ben.
Slashdot Mirror
50 years from now? Hah!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rideau_Canal
Of particular interest is the part on the Skateway. Of even more particular interest is that it has yet to freeze over this year. More than that, I went rollerblading last weekend. Right. Global warming is a myth. That green stuff on my lawn is called "snow".
At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous old fart (which is wrong, I'm 25, a cantankerous young fart), I can distinctly remember having snowball fights on Hallowe'en with my brother. This year, we haven't had a snowfall that lasted more than a day or so, and the Rideau Canal is still flowing. With liquid water. In January. It's unlikely that it will freeze at all this year. The first snowfall didn't even come until Boxing Day, and that was gone by the 27th.
Oh, but Global Warming is a Myth (tm).
You've never owned a desktop form-factor computer, have you? Or a MediaPC, for that matter.
Before there were towers, there were desktops. And a lot of people tend to prefer desktops, for aesthetic reasons. I'm one of them. I haven't owned a tower case since 2 computers ago, and putting the CPU on the "backside" of the motherboard would make that impossible. No thanks.
*sigh* that's not a troll, mods. That's paraphrasing the original blurb.
The submitter really is griping because Yahoo is taking measures to make sure that their ads (the only source of revenue to support their free mail, at that) are getting displayed. And the complaint that when all the ads are being blocked, the page will start loading, freeze for 15s, and then finish loading? That's probably JavaScript, or whatever they're using to make sure the ads are displayed, running through its myriad adservers for the maximum execution time.
if they're gonna make a nod to Star Trek, why not just call it the iConn?
Just saying, is all....
Two reasons why Nintendo didn't die last round... the first is that they were selling GameCubes at a profit. They were making money with every console being sold, and despite their poor sales and relatively small penetration in the last generation of consoles, they were still operating in the black.
The second reason is that the GameBoy series remains the dominant handheld, and will probably remain so for a long time. They've got the penetration, the feature set, and most importantly the price range to maintain their dominance in that market.
By contrast... the PSP is a great platform. It's got great graphics, the sound is pretty good, it's got tons of extra features. It's also really expensive. Like three times the cost of a GBA, and easily twice the cost of a DS. Because of this, it's really not doing as well in sales as the GameBoy line is, and Sony probably isn't making enough money off it to keep their consoles afloat. Which brings to bear the other thing... Sony is selling the PS3 at a loss. They're selling 'em for $650, and they cost about $1100 to make. Sony was banking on selling enough of them that they could make the money back selling dev kits to allow other vendors to make games for the console. But if they don't reach critical mass, developpers aren't going to spend their time/energy making games that won't sell enough to make a profit. You might actually see a world where games are developped for the Wii, and then ported to the PS3, instead of the past, where titles were being developped for the PS2 and being ported to the XBoX and GameCube.
Now, I doubt Sony will just sink. Sony Online Entertainment is the only wholly independant subsidiary that bears the "Sony" name, and they're still making lots of money off their laptops, stereos, tv's, and music. But it's quite possible that the console/handheld division of the company will be pissing money away this time around.
Um... I think what he was trying to say was that that was how the fanboys would try to rationalize the poor sales of the PS3, not that he actually believed that. I'm pretty sure we all know that Nintendo is making out like bandits, as they are selling the console at a profit, and are also making money on dev kits, while Sony is selling the PS3 at a loss and hoping to recoup the money through dev kit sales.
Yes it does. It happened to my brother and to his wife. The experiences with the banks were something else, too....
My brother, who banks with CS Alterna Bank here in Canada, simply had to see the manager, and explain to her what had happened. She looked at the records, and confirmed that about 45 minutes after he used the card at a store in Ottawa, the "card" was used at an ATM in Montreal to drain his account. At his request, she immediately cancelled his card and issued a new one. As the amount stolen was less than the $60,000 for which you're covered automatically, she refunded his money and put in a claim with the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation. This is how it's supposed to happen.
My sister-in-law, who at the time banked with the Bank of Nova Scotia, went into the bank expecting the same sort of treatment. Instead, she was outright told by the manager that she was lying, and that it was possible for her to get from Ottawa to Montreal in the time allotted. (well yeah, I guess, if you have a helicopter waiting in the parking lot of the store). Her manager outright refused to deal with her, and it wasn't until her mother came in and told the manager that if he didn't treat her daughter with the respect that was due, she would close out her account and take her business elsewhere. As her mom's account had a cash holding more than 6 figures, the manager was interested in retaining business, and reluctantly obliged to help my sister-in-law. Of course, they both closed their accounts a month later anyway, but that's beside the point.
The kind of fraud you describe has happened. And it's probably still happening. It's the Superman 3 plan... if I steal 5 bucks from your bank account, you'll probably never notice. If I steal 5 bucks from your neighbour's account, he'll probably never notice. If I steal 5 bucks from the account of everybody in a city the size of, say, Toronto, I've just walked off with $15million. Except they aren't stealing $5 here and there, they're taking as much as they think they can get away with.
I'm just waiting for one of those doors to be opened at 120km/h on the highway... they don't call 'em suicide doors for nothing. :)
Nah, the Slashdot way is to mod him down as flamebait.
Is that so?
An RFC is a Request For Comments. It's a suggestion that may or may not become standard practice. It's in no way "law". It's up to software writers and administrators whether or not to implement them. Now, you have some choices... my own sendmail server ignores connections from hosts that don't have full compliance with RFC 821, for example. That's basic greylisting. But his suggested RFC has not passed into canon by any stretch.
to mention XFCE. Time to done a flame retardant vest....
I tried Gnome, and hated it. As others have said, it's designed to be simple, but I found it aggravating. Haven't used it in years, and have no intention of ever trying it again. KDE was alright, but it was slow as molasses. I still haven't figured out why the default is to dump debug information to console... if I'm running in X, I don't need to see that, and every call to stdout() slows down the system. It's a lot faster if you go into the source and comment out all of those calls before recompiling, but you shouldn't have to do that. Ultimately, I switched to XFCE and have never looked back. It's lightweight, it's fast, and the eye candy is easily there. Especially if you turn on the compositor (I leave it off, because it affects my performance in Cedega, but Linux-native games aren't affected by it).
KDE is all well and good, but I find that neither it nor Gnome are viable options. I like the idea that you will be able to run KDE on a Windows platform, though. It means that I can install KDE as a replacement for explorer as the first step in migrating somebody away from Windows. Show them the desktop, and let them get used to it early in the shift. Change them over to KDE before you start changing them over to Abiword, or OpenOffice.org, that way by the time you're actually ready to change them over to Linux, you can do it without them noticing any change at all. It's a good thing. But I'm going to stick with XFCE on my system. Call me when they port that to Windows, and I'll be beside myself.
It's Linux. It's running on a 500MHz Geode processor, which is 32-bit x86 compatible, and 128MB of DDR266. If you replaced the 512MB Flash drive with a suitable hard drive, you could run Windows XP on it. The machine isn't *that* anemic, and since it's running a heavily customized version of Fedora Core (and by customized, it's most likely in the form of stripping comments from libraries, and taking the Zen approach to OS design in having one app per task, and by picking apps that are generally lightweight), I sincerely doubt that there's going to be any trouble finding apps for it. It supports USB removable storage, so you could probably run apps like Firefox, OpenOffice.org, or GIMP on it, too. And the display is reasonably high res, too, at 1200x900.
Hmm. It lacks MS Office, yes. But there's ways to run it if you really need it, through systems like Crossover and Wine. There's also counterparts to everything you mention. I prefer GIMP to Photoshop, both in feature set and interface. There's alternatives to MS Office that are far superior from a technical standpoint, too. There's a reason that an increasing number of organizations are migrating away from MS software.
You can't even throw gaming in its face, actually, because the laptop in question doesn't have the juice to run any modern games, regardless of what OS it's running. Quite aside from the fact that gaming is quite possible under Linux. Just this afternoon, I was playing GuildWars, and I played some Oblivion yesterday on my Linux-based gaming rig.
It's Linux. There's no shortage of apps for Linux. Besides which, I'm willing to bet that an overwhelming number of computer owners only use them as glorified typewriters. They do e-mail, they surf the 'net, they do some basic word processing, and that's about it. Gamers make up a pretty small portion of the computer market by comparison, and that's even a non-issue, since the OLPC doesn't have the power to run most modern games. All the OLPC needs to be successful is to fill those niches, and from what I've read, it's going to do that.
You'd do well to read this: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components
Polygraphs are only effective if you believe they're effective. If you believe that they're a load of bunk, they won't catch shit. I have successfully convinced a polygraph that I was Cleopatra in a past life. That possibility notwithstanding, it really isn't hard to fool a polygraph. I work with cops from time to time with my work, and usually they only use a polygraph to decide whether you are worth investigating: if you agree to the polygraph and act like you have nothing to hide, then there's no point in administering the test.
My Compaq laptop is similar to yours... the old one (pre-merger) had restore CDs that reinstalled everything, complete with the crap that I never wanted like AOL. The new(er) one came with a vanilla XP CD that installed the OEM version of XP Home. No activation required, doesn't even ask for the CD key, though there is a sticker on the bottom of the lappy.
All the drivers are included on a 2nd CD, and there's a 3rd CD with the crap I don't want, like AOL, MSN, MS Works, etc. etc. etc.
I'm in Canada. The previous laptop was an EVO N115, and the current one is an R4035CA.
If it's a "hidden" field, the legit browsers will still see it, though. The user may not see it, but it'll still be loaded by the browser.
As to how to make it compress really well, simple. Save it as a 2-colour bitmap (with all the pixels "on"). Of some obscenely high resolution. Like 168,000x105,000. 17.6 billion pixels. Will compress really small, but will also suck up a huge amount of RAM to display.
The thing is, it's a losing battle. You can either shrug your shoulders, and let it happen, or you can take up arms. At its peak, an average of 100 bots/day were registering on my forums. I was able to stymie them by blocking websites from their profiles and preventing them from posting links until they'd had 10 posts, but they were still registering.
100/day may not sound like many, until I tell you that there's only about 2,000 legitimate users on the messageboard. You need to employ every weapon at your disposal to prevent bots from registering, and even then, you may not get all of them.
Now, addressing what you said specifically:
That's the fault of the website designer more than anything. The smart website designer will use a font that puts a slash through the numeral zero, for example, or will remove certain characters from the list of available characters, such as you describe. Most canned captchas actually support that, but it's up to the person using it to tell the script not to use characters like 'l'.
Provide an alternative method for registration. My e-mail address is provided on my registration page, asking users to send me an e-mail if they have any problems registering and I'll manually create the account. I check my e-mail daily, and at most, you'll have to wait 24 hours.
Again, that's up to the website administrator to make allowances for people who get screwed over by the captcha and other methods.
Yes. While I did say they were mostly useless, I also said that you need to employ every weapon at your disposal to keep the bots from registering. They do block some of the less sophisticated bots, and every little bit helps.
I've been tossing around an idea of an anti-captcha, though. Throw in a captcha, and right below it, have a note that says "now, disregard the above captcha and type 'notabot' in the box". I'll probably implement it to see what happens.
The thing with HF is that there's really no way to reliably determine where the signal is coming from, because it's operating at a frequency that can bounce around in the ionosphere indefinitely. That's how they're able to send a signal from distances beyond line of sight... it's not penetrating the Earth, it's bouncing around in the atmosphere.
Given the right atmospheric conditions, you can pick up the signal decades later: one of the coolest things that ever happened to me was picking up battle chatter from Vietnam while on a training exercise with Army Signals. I'm 25. It was eerie people die in a transmission that was sent before I was born.
In Soviet Russia, website hacks you?
Oh wait. They do....
Really? What do you call game consoles? I had no idea they were going to die out so soon.
The GP is absolutely right. Users don't care what's running in their computer, they care that it works. Everybody has a different threshhold for how much crap they're willing to put up with, and what kind of hoops they're willing to jump through to get something that works. While you or I may be willing to spend the time configuring Linux to work properly on the computer, the average user may not. For some, they're willing to spend more money for something that "just works". Others, they can't afford to spend money on a computer and want something that's free (as in beer). Some have idealogical reasons to avoid mainstream software, and want something that's free (as in speech). Most people are willing to spend a little money in exchange for better support and fewer headaches.
Yeah, you *can* do anything that Windows can do on a Linux distro. Yeah, if you know what you're doing, you can do it better. And yeah, you can do it without spending a dime on software. Yeah, you're free of the evils of DRM. But you know what? All that freedom doesn't change the fact that for most of us, the desktop computer is a combonation between a typewriter and a gaming console. What matters is that it works, and quite frankly, Linux doesn't. Not for the gaming that I'm doing. A decent driver for the video card in my laptop doesn't exist, and gaming is impossible with Mesa: the framerate simply isn't good enough. I could easily do the web surfing, e-mail writing, document-writing, and video editing on the laptop with Linux. Oh wait... no, I couldn't do the graphical editing, because the memory card reader doesn't work either, and I can't transfer the pictures/video from my camera.... Linux on my laptop simply isn't an option. On the desktop, it's an option, but when I have a legitimate license for XP Professional lying around, why bother configuring Linux when I sacrifice all technical support from the hardware manufacturers and software vendors, and in the process open myself up to needing to buy a subscription to Cedega in order to do what I do most with the machine: play games?
Idealogy is all well and good, but the computer *is* an appliance no matter which way you look at it. It may be an extremely complicated appliance, but it's an appliance nonetheless. What matters is that it works.
I get an average of 1 untagged spam in my inbox every couple of days. The systems I'm using to block the spam are trapping an average of about 5,000 spams a week that's actually addressed to me personally. Exactly one of those messages has been image spam in the last month.
Those systems are:
milter-greylist
SpamAssassin
SpamHaus and other DNS Blacklists
That's it. Just those three systems in place, and I'm trapping better than 99% of the spam that's getting sent to me. That's with out-of-the-box configurations on milter-greylist, and an SA sensitivity of 2.0. Most of it doesn't even reach my server, as my mailserver is refusing connections from anything in the blacklist, and is only accepting the "RCPT TO" line of any message that doesn't come from a whitelisted server. I could probably cut the amount of spam significantly if I changed the greylist error time to something like 4 hours instead of half an hour, but that would come at the cost of usability: I can't be waiting half a day for an e-mail from somebody I've never heard from before. Maybe on personal e-mail, but it's simply not feasible for business purposes.
I'd still say that 95% is utter crap. You should be able to trap a lot more than that, if your sysadmin knows what he/she is doing.
Just pulling numbers out of my ass... but let's say that one in a million people is dumb enough to fall for the crap they're trying to sell, and actually falls for what they're doing. Let's say it's your typical buy/dump scheme where they buy up, say, 50,000 shares of some penny stock. Net cost to them, $500 for the stock, and, let's be really generous and say $100 to send a million e-mails. Realistically, it doesn't cost them nearly that much to do it, but that's beside the point....
The idea is that they'll create a run on the penny stock. Create some demand on a stock that's worth $0.01 a share, even a little, and it might go up to $0.02/share. Not a significant jump, except when you consider that they could have $50,000 invested in the company already. That run would turn into $50,000 profit overnight. And that's assuming a relatively small one in a million people being dumb enough to fall for it. People in general are a hell of a lot stupider than that.
And here's the rub... it's not illegal to create a run on your stock like that. It's not fraud, it's not stock manipulating, it's not deceptive marketing. The company whose stock is being traded usually has absolutely nothing to do with the scheme. And thanks to overly relaxed laws in countries like China and the USA when it comes to bulk e-mailing, it's not illegal to send the spam. They word it in such a way that it looks, to an idiot, like they've received an e-mail they aren't supposed to have received, talking about some sure-fire hot stock, and enough people will fall for it that you're able to turn a profit.
Spam in general is like that. They don't care that 99.999% of the messages they send out get ignored. They care that 0.001% arrive in the inboxes of the criminally stupid.
I draw your attention to the big yellow arrow on rocket launchers that you point at the enemy?
We get some pretty cool toys in the army, but it's all designed so that you can use it when you're being shot at after having had 15 minutes of sleep in the last week. Just because it's designed for idiots doesn't mean that the folks designing it are idiots. Actually, they're pretty brilliant, IMO... why bother developing a super-expensive way to kill somebody that centralizes your killing power in one spot when a 5.56x45 FMJ round costs less than $0.30 and kills them just as dead? When the bad guys develop armour that can safely protect them from everything we use on the battlefield, you'll start seeing new ways of killing people being developed. Until then, it's a waste of money.
Their reasoning may be questionable (or at least their excuses), but the problem is that light on dark simply does not look right. The eye is much better at seeing fine detail in deciding where there isn't light than it is in deciding where there is light.
If you're looking at a black background, the iris will open up a little because you're getting less light. When you try to spot, say, white text on a black background, there's a perceptible glare. At lower resolutions, it's not really that significant. But with display resolutions increasing, the glare becomes more of a problem. Back when I was running a Compaq P1100 display (0.22dp, 21" CRT, 1920x1440@75Hz), half the sites on the Internet were completely unusable because of this effect, and I had to start using an accessibility stylesheet. Even now, I'm running at 1680x1050 on a 21" LCD, and on websites that use white on black I have to increase the font size.
Whatever their official explanations, reading black on light is a lot easier on the eye at small point sizes. If you find there's too much light, may I suggest lowering the brightness on your display? Or possibly spending more time outside and less time in the basement? Or failing that, invest in some brighter lightbulbs for your office. My own eyes are so sensitive to light that my optometrist wrote a prescription that says I have to wear sunglasses when driving, and I'm able to deal with it. There's no earthly reason that a brightly coloured background should hurt your eyes if there's enough ambient light where you're working.
If you don't have Office compatibility, nobody's going to install your program. The sad fact is that MS Office and its variants are on a huge number of PCs out there, and as long as you have any kind of need to interoperate with other people, you absolutely need to have that ability.
.DOC format, and that if you absolutely need to, you can export it to .DOC for those same people (or any of the other formats Office uses). Until applications like AbiWord and suites like OpenOffice and the one discussed here find greater market penetration, the de facto standard will remain MS Office, and dropping compatibility is not an option.
Being compatible with MS Office does *not* mean that you're defaulting to its file format. It means that you have the option of reading documents that people send you in
What you're proposing will marginalize yourself, and that's exactly what the FOSS movement does *not* need.
How the hell does this get modded troll? Not trolling at all. :(
.sig will get done, since they killed off two of my favourite characters in the movie. I still think that Jaynestown was the best episode. ;)
And I agree with you. I'd have a hard time breathing if either of the other shows you're referencing were to make it back to the air. Sadly, I don't think that the one in your
As for Farscape... well, they could. I dunno... it'd be really cool if they did, though. Dying in each others' arms would be hard to explain away, though, and Farscape wouldn't be Farscape without Claudia and Ben.