Obviously there are certain conditions that must be present for life as we know it to exist, but I find it very surprising that so many people look for only this.
Complex organisms are a product of their environment, literally. You know... evolution? By seeking for life only on planets with conditions similar to ours, are we not merely trying to find a puzzle that fits our pieces? We need water, we need certain temperatures, etc, because we evolved to fit into that environment. Life on another planet would evolve to fit conditions on that planet, it would not try to evolve to fit conditions suitable for earth organisms.:)
I believe that if we find life beyond earth, it will very likely exist in a different environment and function on different chemical principles using different biological mechanisms than we have ever encountered.
Now if you're looking for a planet to move to... that's different.
First of all, I've been amazed (and disgusted) by the onslaught of whining about our impending loss of privacy ever since this disaster happened. We've seen the destruction of a national landmark in our greatest city and you people are worried about our very own government reading your email. I think you all take a great many things for granted.
What exactly do you fear? Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government? Is it just the principle of the thing? Having my email filtered or my phone calls monitored seems like a trivial price to pay if it means I can get on a plane this christmas and fly home without worrying about smashing into a skyscraper or having my throat slit with a box cutter. It's YOUR government listening and YOUR security and life being protected. Why oppose these things?
You're probably going to reply to me and say "but the Constitution says...!". Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation? That is suicidal and not realistic in the least. When the Constitution was written, there were no planes, no internet, no skyscrapers, no phones, and there were no terrorist groups committing mass murder. Committing an atrocity on a scale equal to what we witnessed was perhaps impossible. Hell, there werent even Arabs crashing horses into barns!
Certainly the creators of the Constitution never could have forseen the kind of cowardly attacks we faced recently. Do you people even grasp the severity of what happened? The "impenetrable" United States was attacked on its own soil! I believe the Constitution says that our privacy is guaranteed not to be violated "without reason", or something to that affect. Clearly this attack was well beyond reason. In fact, for many of us, it is beyond comprehension.
For those of you claiming that we are "violating" the US Constitution, I propose that it is YOU who wish to violate it. One of our government's greatest strengths is that it is NOT rigid. It must constantly evolve to maintain the balance of liberty while giving due powers to those who must protect us and our way of life. Obviously, when an unseen enemy turns our own modes of communication and transportation into terrible weapons, it is time for an adjustment.
I value my right to privacy, but I value my way of life, my security, and that of my country more.
For those of you who wonder if we are actually at war or not, consider the following definition of war: "A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious". If this is indeed how war is defined, then I sincerely hope that we are very much at war.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one glued to the news lately. I can't stay away from the TV. I just keep watching and waiting for the next development, no matter how minor it may be, that brings us closer to justice or resolve in any way. Since I am 2000 miles away from my family, following this situation closely makes it easier to cope.
Re:The World is going to change
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I entirely agree. We need to do something proactive, and fast. Count how many times in our past encounters with terrorists and affiliated states that we've actually "finished the job". These acts demand consequence.
To those claiming you can't defeat terrorist groups, I say bullshit. As we've heard again and again, terrorist attacks such as yesterday's happenings took significant money and planning. Eliminate the people and resources at behind these activities and anyone giving them any form of aid. If a country harbors a known terrorist, then they are also an enemy of the free world, and should be attacked.
You think retaliation is not in order? Then you make me sick, and I think you take alot of things for granted. Fighting does not make us terrorists. America was founded by fighters, and we have every right to defend our interests at any cost. Bomb the hell out of these people, whomever they are. If you don't like that, then maybe you need to spend some time in one of these countries instead of sitting on your queen-sized bed eating doritos and preaching pacificism on an internet forum.
Go ahead and mark this as flamebait, its just karma.
Airport Security... Is that enough?
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I'm glad to hear that airport security for passenger flights will be increased. I haven't seen mention, though, of non-passenger flights. There are other planes in the air, such as Fedex and UPS. Surely these planes make cross-continental flights and carry alot of fuel, making them dangerous weapons should terrorists be at the controls. Has anyone seen this point raised yet?
I use plain text for just about everything. I'm the only Linux user in my 150-person company, so I'm the only person not using Office.
Personally, I just do not understand why there is a need for a complex document format as Word's in most corporations. Every single Word document I've seen produced within my company could easily be formatted in flat text, or a very simple text format with light formatting such as bold and color, like RTF.
I've talked about this with various people in the company, and they all agree. So why do we license it? Because the corporations we work with use it, and we need to be able to view their files.
In my opinion, you can get by with minimal formatting and features such as spell check, but to abandon office, you must have a way to convert other people's Word files into a usable format.
Our intranet is written in PHP and runs on Linux. We wanted to be able to cache contents of files posted to the intranet in a search engine. I use the strings command or wvWare for this, depending on the case. I can get what I need out of it.
The only thing I need on my Linux desktop now is Photoshop, or an equivalent (GIMP is not there yet), and life is complete.
I remember I started getting angry with LEGO back around 1990 or so. They started introducing alot of specialized pieces like barrels, palm tree trunks, ship hulls, etc. The pirate ship sets are a good example. They had so many special pieces, that you really couldnt build much else with them.
To me, most sets available in the last decade or so dont come with enough basic blocks. You can only make so many things by combining a pirate ship hull with a barrel and a palm tree.
The castle sets probably started this trend, with their preformed walls and ornate decor. They looked good on the box, so they sold well. The original castle sets were alot of fun though, and took a while to put together.
I wonder if the choice of their name matters to the Daniel Stenberg and company, the folks developing the open-source curl and libcurl software. It's a utility similar to wget.
Anyway, this other new curl plugin brings to mind those several kernels of popcorn in the bottom of the bag that will never pop. The internet has many such kernels.
Multitasking is useful when you can accomplish a task while waiting for another to finish (ie, replying to email while you parse a 4GB web log on another box). If you use it to swap back and forth sporadically, then, yes, obviously it will be counter-productive.
I catch myself doing this ALOT at work. I'll code a bit, get distracted by an ICQ message, then go back to a web browser rather than my vi session, and then its all downhill for the next half hour. It's a wonder I get anything done.
I have Pacbell DSL, and was given a client called Enternet I was told I would have to use to connect. Of course no such thing should be required for a goofy DSL connection. The client is Windows only (maybe mac too). All the Enternet client is, is a stupid PPPoe frontend. Lucky for me, my cheapy Netgear router is capable of PPPoe connections, so I let the router connect.
This isn't really a good analogy. Highway systems are not meant to turn a profit, they serve public as well as military interest. Good highway systems encourage growth in an area. (Didn't you play SimCity?)
1) No matter what I set my default search to, I always get that annoying netscape site when using "? keywords" in the address box.
2) <input type="file"> objects still have rendering problems when applying a style to it.
Still, I'm going to make a couple of tweaks to our Intranet in order to support this build, and try to get people at work to try it out.
Unfortunately, everyone I've talked to so far wouldn't even give it a try. They have no problems with using IE. I don't really either, but if me using it somehow supports their effort, then Im more than happy to.
Here is my preferred solution for Internet security. We could implement a secure user identity system precisely like telephone Caller ID. It would be essentially an Internet ID. All Internet transactions could be based on it. Anyone who sends me e-mail can be identified.
This seems like a nice idea, but I'm not for it, and I'm not sure if it even feasible. An IP address is already like caller ID.
Lets say you were assigned this new unique ID. Who's responsible for ensuring the identity of the payload remains unaltered? The software maker? That sounds familiar! Today, when you send mail, your message might sit at several relays. Is it up to the mail server to implement tracking of this ID? Could you not simply make a mail server that ignored this precedent and spoofed whatever it wanted? This seems the same as someone getting a shell on a box and running some kind of custom relay meant for delivering spam mail anonymously.
I also can't imagine a business deciding to ignore mail based on the lack of this identification. If you have to favor security over a new customer, you have other problems.
The funny thing about this article is that a PC implementing his ideas for security could easily exist now, but the fact is Microsoft isnt going to do that. If they can't follow measures to implement good security now, why would they under this new system?
Personally, I hope the answer to all this DOS'ing does not involve me losing what anonymity I do have (which doesnt seem like much at this point anyway).
Running my company's web presence grants me the distinction of being the sole user of Linux in my otherwise MS-oriented company. I have a great platform for comparison here.
Simply put, I save the company a bundle. I watch my colleagues bumble about, patching things, writing out alot of purchase order requests, and scratching their heads inquisitively as blue text and white letters shine on their forehead.
In comparison, my company has had to buy me absolutely nothing. I don't even know how to write purchase orders, as I have no need for them. I download the operating system, run Apache, PHP, MySQL, and various other open source utilities that make our website and intranet tick.
I also have alot of time to relax and observe nature's most bothered creature: the NT admin.
I think you're referring to raw recording, in which you can read/write 2336 bytes per sector rather than 2048. Its used as a copyright measure pretty often, since very few drives now handle raw sectors as you'd expect. I remember reading that this ability was dropped in order to gain faster speeds for rewritable drives. Yeah yeah yeah...
I have a Ricoh MP6200S which I bought several years ago. It's 6X read, 2X write/rewrite, but I won't trade it for anything in the world. The only CD I havent been able to duplicate on it thus far was Black & White (not worth copying anyway).
Most new cd ripping software typically does not support this drive since its so old. I'm still using a dos-based copy of DAO (precursor to CDRWIN). I originally got this setup in order to copy my PSX disks (which require raw reads) so I had all my games at home and at college.
Anyhow, if you want a powerful (albeit slow) drive, look up older models on eBay.
What I'm trying to figure out is why I would run this module instead of just using mod_include for straight markup, or include() or virtual() in PHP docs. And in the latter case, you can use PHP cache and save some disk hits. This is what I've done for years... it works great and requires no httpd.conf modification.
Personally, I strip my Apache config down to the bare essential modules I need. This seems neat, but covers ground already tread upon long ago. Am I missing something?
Try IRC. Get on Undernet, join #mp3jazzcentral. Download a couple scripts like Autoget and SPR and you essentially have Napster. I serve in this channel, with over 30GB of jazz available.
I honestly don't believe that artists would starve because of free music. I think record labels would starve. Good musicians don't always need record sales to put food on the table. I know of lots of jazz musicians that make good livings playing restaurants and small venues nightly, teaching on the side, but never recording a thing. Are they going to live in mansions? No probably not, but they live for the music and not the money, and that is WAY more than I think anyone would say for Britney Spears or Puff Daddy.
If you want an example of music without the taint of big record labels, take a close look at jazz. Jazz is a flexible musical community dedicated to innovation and improvisation. The head and chords of good tunes become standards, played for decades to come. Musicians use each other's work, playing it with their own spin, building on what they learn from each other, and always trying to push the envelope a little further.
I saw Shelly Berg (a jazz pianist) last week at a show. I talked to him after the first set about his playing. Have you ever talked to Britney Spears?
To put it simply, in jazz, you don't do well unless you're a good musician. Nobody cares what you or the cover of your record looks like. Good jazz musicians stick around, they arent one-hit-wonders like in other genres. Dave Brubeck is playing near here next month, and he's over 80 years old. Now that's what music is all about.
Anyways, I also think that article has a strange slant on this situation. Of course Napster et al has had an impact on the turnout for the convention, but the real reason is that this is the first year people realize that the internet isn't a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end. Take away all the people at a convention like that looking to get rich, and you're left with revolutionaries and those that are still struggling to hang on to what they have.
Also let me say that free music is certainly not dead. Free music has been available online years and years before napster and is still going strong. I remember the first CD I was prompted to buy because of online music was a SoundGarden album, and theyve been gone for years. Honestly, if you can't find free music online, you just don't want to look or don't know where to start.
Although the readers here may be savvy enough to pay for content in some form, most people feel that they "already pay for the internet" when they send their check to their access provider. People don't want to pay $20 a month for a means to access content that requires further payment.
Payment methods are definitely another major obstacle. Electronic payment is convenient at times, but as I went over my bank statement the other day, I realized what a tangled mess it actually makes. Of course its my own fault, but there's just too much recurring electronic activity on my card at this point. I tend to like paying with physical money and receiving physical goods in exchange.
Payment has to be reliable and easy. If the payment system is intrusive, I won't put up with it. Part of the problem with charging for web content is your constantly reminded that youre paying for it. Login boxes impede normal web surfing habits.
Although this is somewhat intangible and I havent seen mention of it, the web is flakey by nature. HTTP is stateless and connectionless. HTML, javascript and other client-side languages are interpreted differently by each browser. You really don't know what to expect from one site to the next. One site may have a great payment and access system, easy to use and well designed, but the next site might not. Most sites have terrible layouts and aren't designed optimally. Since you don't know what you'll get up front, most people aren't willing to give it a try.
As a sort of example, surely Slashdot could benefit from interface improvements itself. No offense, but this site's design is outdated and cumbersome (reminds me of the oversized, boxy look of X with its obscure icons). To be honest, its probably my least favorite of the sites I visit. I'm not so certain I would trust this site to implement a seamless payment/access system in a way I would be willing to put up with. That being said, its still my favorite site and I still visit every day. Hmm...
And then, there are so many sites! Even if you only want to subscripe to half a dozen, imagine what a pain it would be. More logins and passwords to remember! And you probably would not get printed statements, so you'd have to track spending on your own somehow.
Then you have to wonder, how will pay-sites solicit new traffic. Pay for advertising? Offer crippled free content? Rely on word of mouth? None of these seem practical for most sites. The web is open by nature, and when you post a guard at gates of your site, youre differentiating yourself from the rest of the web. I dont know of anyone who's found a really solid way to charge for content and still grow their userbase.
And of course, simply making your site a "pay site" doesnt mean youre out of the woods financially. Can you really make enough money off the people willing to pay? Maybe not. On top of what you WERE doing, you also have some new areas you'll need to spend significant amounts of money. You have to police accounts, you have to find ways to get more paying users, you have to worry about security, you have to keep content at a level of quality people will continue paying for, your service must be reliable and fast (now that people are paying for it), etc...
I'm very curious to see if people will establish a reliable standard business plan that monetizes the web, but obviously right now such a thing doesnt exist. Eventually some entity will probably emerge as a standard way people use to pay for content (similar to paypal's dominance in its own field). Hopefully when that happens, payment really is made painless. At any rate, I think I'll wait another few years before going to work for a company with a.com at the end.
I never did understand the appeal of online radio. The quality is subpar (or worse), it requires significant bandwidth, and radio (the non-online version) is already so accessible. Why not just listen to the real radio?! Arent people past this "do it online because you can" phase yet?
I suppose to be fair, online radio is useful if you follow a certain station for some reason or live somewhere totally isolated, but for the masses, it seems like extra baggage.
I have no problem with advertising as long as it is not intrusive. I understand advertising is vital for some internet companies, as it is for television and radio broadcasting.
However, television and radio broadcasts are passive media, and the internet is an interactive medium. You can change the channel or turn up the volume, but other than that, TV and radio require no input from you. When you see an ad, it simply appears, does its thing, and goes away.
When I come across an ad on the internet, very different things happen:
1) What I was doing is interrupted. I searched, I clicked, and now this ad has intruded into whatever action I was performing. I was not expecting an ad.
2) Resources are used. I have to request your ad (time), download your ad (bandwidth), store your ad in my cache (storage). TV inflicts no such overhead.
3) I am forced to act. Your ad popped up, and now I have to close it. I have to stop what I was doing to get rid of your ad.
You watch TV, but you use a computer. Ads can appear anywhere on your screen, be any size, be any shape, they may play sound, play video, or worse. A TV ad is always the same dimensions and you know what to expect.
PC-like consoles are apparently the future of console developers' attacks on PC gaming, and hardware like this PS2 disk are a big part of it.
Consoles slipped into the background somewhere during and after the PlayStation's reign, and heads turned towards the PC. Personally, I hope this trend finally ends, and consoles come back to the forefront as the must-have systems for gaming.
Face it, PC gaming has gone down the tubes. When I think of PC games, I think of games developed in the first half of the 90's. Games like Quake, Doom2, Master of Orion, XCom, Master of Magic, Tie Fighter, Monkey Island, Civ, Warcraft II, etc. Games today don't match up, in terms of playability and commitment to gameplay over all else.
Games published today are typically very buggy (Anarchy Online), overly focused on graphics and glitz, very reliant on marketing, and very often disappointing despite long waits (Black and White?) or promising themes (Emperor: Battle for Dune?).
So, I honestly hope that the PC gaming industry experiences some sort of wrathful purge. Put the PC games back at the rear of the software store, just the way it was in the pre-doom days. Maybe then PC developers will think "oh no, if we want to actually sell our game, it needs to be playable and relatively bug-free!". Yes, what a revelation...
I bought a GameBoy Advance recently, and believe it or not, its the most fun I've had since I was hooked on Half-Life/TFC and running the radium map sites. Its cheap, the batteries last long, the games are good, and the console is just weak enough that developers have to make sure games are FUN, because the graphics alone won't sell the game.
So, some reasons I'm all for consoles at this point:
1) Hassle-free - Put the disk/cart in and play. No installation, no patches, easy controls, etc.
2) Stability - Wow, NO BUGS. I sure do miss that. Pay for a game and know it will run.
3) Cheap - Yes, far cheaper. My PC is still an overclocked Celeron 300A with a TNT2. I'm sick of having to pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year just to keep my machine in a state suitable to run a game off the shelf well. Its ridiculous. Does a game really need to make my computer sweat blood to be fun? Hell no.
What in the world would Ximian build their own.NET-compatible version of.NET for? If there is a need for a.NET-like service, then so be it, but dammit, dont copy Microsoft's implementation, grow something native for the unix world.
I think it behooves the Linux community as a whole to stop longing for compatibility with Microsoft (they obviously dont want it anyway) and build products that outclass theirs instead. Do you honestly think a non-bloated word processor couldnt be made that would beat out Word? Stop trying to support word's format and build your own wp app. (or maybe a better one already exists, I don't use wp apps, hooray for vi)
Exchange seems like another product that could be bested. Exchange is a total mess! Don't try to make your mail server work with Exchange, make your mail server work better than Exchange. Most Exchange features aren't used anyway, and just add to the bloat.
Why break your backs trying to play nice with.NET? I don't mean to invalidate compatibility for existing standards, but don't help usher in their new MS-centric efforts.
Would you rather support their way... or have your own way?
Slashdot Mirror
What about microwave ovens.
Complex organisms are a product of their environment, literally. You know... evolution? By seeking for life only on planets with conditions similar to ours, are we not merely trying to find a puzzle that fits our pieces? We need water, we need certain temperatures, etc, because we evolved to fit into that environment. Life on another planet would evolve to fit conditions on that planet, it would not try to evolve to fit conditions suitable for earth organisms. :)
I believe that if we find life beyond earth, it will very likely exist in a different environment and function on different chemical principles using different biological mechanisms than we have ever encountered.
Now if you're looking for a planet to move to... that's different.
First of all, I've been amazed (and disgusted) by the onslaught of whining about our impending loss of privacy ever since this disaster happened. We've seen the destruction of a national landmark in our greatest city and you people are worried about our very own government reading your email. I think you all take a great many things for granted.
What exactly do you fear? Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government? Is it just the principle of the thing? Having my email filtered or my phone calls monitored seems like a trivial price to pay if it means I can get on a plane this christmas and fly home without worrying about smashing into a skyscraper or having my throat slit with a box cutter. It's YOUR government listening and YOUR security and life being protected. Why oppose these things?
You're probably going to reply to me and say "but the Constitution says...!". Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation? That is suicidal and not realistic in the least. When the Constitution was written, there were no planes, no internet, no skyscrapers, no phones, and there were no terrorist groups committing mass murder. Committing an atrocity on a scale equal to what we witnessed was perhaps impossible. Hell, there werent even Arabs crashing horses into barns!
Certainly the creators of the Constitution never could have forseen the kind of cowardly attacks we faced recently. Do you people even grasp the severity of what happened? The "impenetrable" United States was attacked on its own soil! I believe the Constitution says that our privacy is guaranteed not to be violated "without reason", or something to that affect. Clearly this attack was well beyond reason. In fact, for many of us, it is beyond comprehension.
For those of you claiming that we are "violating" the US Constitution, I propose that it is YOU who wish to violate it. One of our government's greatest strengths is that it is NOT rigid. It must constantly evolve to maintain the balance of liberty while giving due powers to those who must protect us and our way of life. Obviously, when an unseen enemy turns our own modes of communication and transportation into terrible weapons, it is time for an adjustment.
I value my right to privacy, but I value my way of life, my security, and that of my country more.
For those of you who wonder if we are actually at war or not, consider the following definition of war: "A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious". If this is indeed how war is defined, then I sincerely hope that we are very much at war.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one glued to the news lately. I can't stay away from the TV. I just keep watching and waiting for the next development, no matter how minor it may be, that brings us closer to justice or resolve in any way. Since I am 2000 miles away from my family, following this situation closely makes it easier to cope.
I entirely agree. We need to do something proactive, and fast. Count how many times in our past encounters with terrorists and affiliated states that we've actually "finished the job". These acts demand consequence.
To those claiming you can't defeat terrorist groups, I say bullshit. As we've heard again and again, terrorist attacks such as yesterday's happenings took significant money and planning. Eliminate the people and resources at behind these activities and anyone giving them any form of aid. If a country harbors a known terrorist, then they are also an enemy of the free world, and should be attacked.
You think retaliation is not in order? Then you make me sick, and I think you take alot of things for granted. Fighting does not make us terrorists. America was founded by fighters, and we have every right to defend our interests at any cost. Bomb the hell out of these people, whomever they are. If you don't like that, then maybe you need to spend some time in one of these countries instead of sitting on your queen-sized bed eating doritos and preaching pacificism on an internet forum.
Go ahead and mark this as flamebait, its just karma.
I'm glad to hear that airport security for passenger flights will be increased. I haven't seen mention, though, of non-passenger flights. There are other planes in the air, such as Fedex and UPS. Surely these planes make cross-continental flights and carry alot of fuel, making them dangerous weapons should terrorists be at the controls. Has anyone seen this point raised yet?
Personally, I just do not understand why there is a need for a complex document format as Word's in most corporations. Every single Word document I've seen produced within my company could easily be formatted in flat text, or a very simple text format with light formatting such as bold and color, like RTF.
I've talked about this with various people in the company, and they all agree. So why do we license it? Because the corporations we work with use it, and we need to be able to view their files.
In my opinion, you can get by with minimal formatting and features such as spell check, but to abandon office, you must have a way to convert other people's Word files into a usable format.
Our intranet is written in PHP and runs on Linux. We wanted to be able to cache contents of files posted to the intranet in a search engine. I use the strings command or wvWare for this, depending on the case. I can get what I need out of it.
The only thing I need on my Linux desktop now is Photoshop, or an equivalent (GIMP is not there yet), and life is complete.
To me, most sets available in the last decade or so dont come with enough basic blocks. You can only make so many things by combining a pirate ship hull with a barrel and a palm tree.
The castle sets probably started this trend, with their preformed walls and ornate decor. They looked good on the box, so they sold well. The original castle sets were alot of fun though, and took a while to put together.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/curl//
http://freshmeat.net/redir/curl/1612/url_homepage
Anyway, this other new curl plugin brings to mind those several kernels of popcorn in the bottom of the bag that will never pop. The internet has many such kernels.
I catch myself doing this ALOT at work. I'll code a bit, get distracted by an ICQ message, then go back to a web browser rather than my vi session, and then its all downhill for the next half hour. It's a wonder I get anything done.
I have Pacbell DSL, and was given a client called Enternet I was told I would have to use to connect. Of course no such thing should be required for a goofy DSL connection. The client is Windows only (maybe mac too). All the Enternet client is, is a stupid PPPoe frontend. Lucky for me, my cheapy Netgear router is capable of PPPoe connections, so I let the router connect.
This isn't really a good analogy. Highway systems are not meant to turn a profit, they serve public as well as military interest. Good highway systems encourage growth in an area. (Didn't you play SimCity?)
1) No matter what I set my default search to, I always get that annoying netscape site when using "? keywords" in the address box.
2) <input type="file"> objects still have rendering problems when applying a style to it.
Still, I'm going to make a couple of tweaks to our Intranet in order to support this build, and try to get people at work to try it out.
Unfortunately, everyone I've talked to so far wouldn't even give it a try. They have no problems with using IE. I don't really either, but if me using it somehow supports their effort, then Im more than happy to.
This seems like a nice idea, but I'm not for it, and I'm not sure if it even feasible. An IP address is already like caller ID.
Lets say you were assigned this new unique ID. Who's responsible for ensuring the identity of the payload remains unaltered? The software maker? That sounds familiar! Today, when you send mail, your message might sit at several relays. Is it up to the mail server to implement tracking of this ID? Could you not simply make a mail server that ignored this precedent and spoofed whatever it wanted? This seems the same as someone getting a shell on a box and running some kind of custom relay meant for delivering spam mail anonymously.
I also can't imagine a business deciding to ignore mail based on the lack of this identification. If you have to favor security over a new customer, you have other problems.
The funny thing about this article is that a PC implementing his ideas for security could easily exist now, but the fact is Microsoft isnt going to do that. If they can't follow measures to implement good security now, why would they under this new system?
Personally, I hope the answer to all this DOS'ing does not involve me losing what anonymity I do have (which doesnt seem like much at this point anyway).
Simply put, I save the company a bundle. I watch my colleagues bumble about, patching things, writing out alot of purchase order requests, and scratching their heads inquisitively as blue text and white letters shine on their forehead.
In comparison, my company has had to buy me absolutely nothing. I don't even know how to write purchase orders, as I have no need for them. I download the operating system, run Apache, PHP, MySQL, and various other open source utilities that make our website and intranet tick.
I also have alot of time to relax and observe nature's most bothered creature: the NT admin.
I have a Ricoh MP6200S which I bought several years ago. It's 6X read, 2X write/rewrite, but I won't trade it for anything in the world. The only CD I havent been able to duplicate on it thus far was Black & White (not worth copying anyway).
Most new cd ripping software typically does not support this drive since its so old. I'm still using a dos-based copy of DAO (precursor to CDRWIN). I originally got this setup in order to copy my PSX disks (which require raw reads) so I had all my games at home and at college.
Anyhow, if you want a powerful (albeit slow) drive, look up older models on eBay.
Personally, I strip my Apache config down to the bare essential modules I need. This seems neat, but covers ground already tread upon long ago. Am I missing something?
Try IRC. Get on Undernet, join #mp3jazzcentral. Download a couple scripts like Autoget and SPR and you essentially have Napster. I serve in this channel, with over 30GB of jazz available.
If you want an example of music without the taint of big record labels, take a close look at jazz. Jazz is a flexible musical community dedicated to innovation and improvisation. The head and chords of good tunes become standards, played for decades to come. Musicians use each other's work, playing it with their own spin, building on what they learn from each other, and always trying to push the envelope a little further.
I saw Shelly Berg (a jazz pianist) last week at a show. I talked to him after the first set about his playing. Have you ever talked to Britney Spears?
To put it simply, in jazz, you don't do well unless you're a good musician. Nobody cares what you or the cover of your record looks like. Good jazz musicians stick around, they arent one-hit-wonders like in other genres. Dave Brubeck is playing near here next month, and he's over 80 years old. Now that's what music is all about.
Anyways, I also think that article has a strange slant on this situation. Of course Napster et al has had an impact on the turnout for the convention, but the real reason is that this is the first year people realize that the internet isn't a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end. Take away all the people at a convention like that looking to get rich, and you're left with revolutionaries and those that are still struggling to hang on to what they have.
Also let me say that free music is certainly not dead. Free music has been available online years and years before napster and is still going strong. I remember the first CD I was prompted to buy because of online music was a SoundGarden album, and theyve been gone for years. Honestly, if you can't find free music online, you just don't want to look or don't know where to start.
Payment methods are definitely another major obstacle. Electronic payment is convenient at times, but as I went over my bank statement the other day, I realized what a tangled mess it actually makes. Of course its my own fault, but there's just too much recurring electronic activity on my card at this point. I tend to like paying with physical money and receiving physical goods in exchange.
Payment has to be reliable and easy. If the payment system is intrusive, I won't put up with it. Part of the problem with charging for web content is your constantly reminded that youre paying for it. Login boxes impede normal web surfing habits.
Although this is somewhat intangible and I havent seen mention of it, the web is flakey by nature. HTTP is stateless and connectionless. HTML, javascript and other client-side languages are interpreted differently by each browser. You really don't know what to expect from one site to the next. One site may have a great payment and access system, easy to use and well designed, but the next site might not. Most sites have terrible layouts and aren't designed optimally. Since you don't know what you'll get up front, most people aren't willing to give it a try.
As a sort of example, surely Slashdot could benefit from interface improvements itself. No offense, but this site's design is outdated and cumbersome (reminds me of the oversized, boxy look of X with its obscure icons). To be honest, its probably my least favorite of the sites I visit. I'm not so certain I would trust this site to implement a seamless payment/access system in a way I would be willing to put up with. That being said, its still my favorite site and I still visit every day. Hmm...
And then, there are so many sites! Even if you only want to subscripe to half a dozen, imagine what a pain it would be. More logins and passwords to remember! And you probably would not get printed statements, so you'd have to track spending on your own somehow.
Then you have to wonder, how will pay-sites solicit new traffic. Pay for advertising? Offer crippled free content? Rely on word of mouth? None of these seem practical for most sites. The web is open by nature, and when you post a guard at gates of your site, youre differentiating yourself from the rest of the web. I dont know of anyone who's found a really solid way to charge for content and still grow their userbase.
And of course, simply making your site a "pay site" doesnt mean youre out of the woods financially. Can you really make enough money off the people willing to pay? Maybe not. On top of what you WERE doing, you also have some new areas you'll need to spend significant amounts of money. You have to police accounts, you have to find ways to get more paying users, you have to worry about security, you have to keep content at a level of quality people will continue paying for, your service must be reliable and fast (now that people are paying for it), etc...
I'm very curious to see if people will establish a reliable standard business plan that monetizes the web, but obviously right now such a thing doesnt exist. Eventually some entity will probably emerge as a standard way people use to pay for content (similar to paypal's dominance in its own field). Hopefully when that happens, payment really is made painless. At any rate, I think I'll wait another few years before going to work for a company with a .com at the end.
I suppose to be fair, online radio is useful if you follow a certain station for some reason or live somewhere totally isolated, but for the masses, it seems like extra baggage.
However, television and radio broadcasts are passive media, and the internet is an interactive medium. You can change the channel or turn up the volume, but other than that, TV and radio require no input from you. When you see an ad, it simply appears, does its thing, and goes away.
When I come across an ad on the internet, very different things happen:
1) What I was doing is interrupted. I searched, I clicked, and now this ad has intruded into whatever action I was performing. I was not expecting an ad.
2) Resources are used. I have to request your ad (time), download your ad (bandwidth), store your ad in my cache (storage). TV inflicts no such overhead.
3) I am forced to act. Your ad popped up, and now I have to close it. I have to stop what I was doing to get rid of your ad.
You watch TV, but you use a computer. Ads can appear anywhere on your screen, be any size, be any shape, they may play sound, play video, or worse. A TV ad is always the same dimensions and you know what to expect.
Consoles slipped into the background somewhere during and after the PlayStation's reign, and heads turned towards the PC. Personally, I hope this trend finally ends, and consoles come back to the forefront as the must-have systems for gaming.
Face it, PC gaming has gone down the tubes. When I think of PC games, I think of games developed in the first half of the 90's. Games like Quake, Doom2, Master of Orion, XCom, Master of Magic, Tie Fighter, Monkey Island, Civ, Warcraft II, etc. Games today don't match up, in terms of playability and commitment to gameplay over all else.
Games published today are typically very buggy (Anarchy Online), overly focused on graphics and glitz, very reliant on marketing, and very often disappointing despite long waits (Black and White?) or promising themes (Emperor: Battle for Dune?).
So, I honestly hope that the PC gaming industry experiences some sort of wrathful purge. Put the PC games back at the rear of the software store, just the way it was in the pre-doom days. Maybe then PC developers will think "oh no, if we want to actually sell our game, it needs to be playable and relatively bug-free!". Yes, what a revelation...
I bought a GameBoy Advance recently, and believe it or not, its the most fun I've had since I was hooked on Half-Life/TFC and running the radium map sites. Its cheap, the batteries last long, the games are good, and the console is just weak enough that developers have to make sure games are FUN, because the graphics alone won't sell the game.
So, some reasons I'm all for consoles at this point:
1) Hassle-free - Put the disk/cart in and play. No installation, no patches, easy controls, etc.
2) Stability - Wow, NO BUGS. I sure do miss that. Pay for a game and know it will run.
3) Cheap - Yes, far cheaper. My PC is still an overclocked Celeron 300A with a TNT2. I'm sick of having to pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year just to keep my machine in a state suitable to run a game off the shelf well. Its ridiculous. Does a game really need to make my computer sweat blood to be fun? Hell no.
My one and only hope for this movie, should it be made, is that they actually focus on the characters and the script, rather than glittery effects.
I guess SW1 just left a bad taste in my mouth...
I think it behooves the Linux community as a whole to stop longing for compatibility with Microsoft (they obviously dont want it anyway) and build products that outclass theirs instead. Do you honestly think a non-bloated word processor couldnt be made that would beat out Word? Stop trying to support word's format and build your own wp app. (or maybe a better one already exists, I don't use wp apps, hooray for vi)
Exchange seems like another product that could be bested. Exchange is a total mess! Don't try to make your mail server work with Exchange, make your mail server work better than Exchange. Most Exchange features aren't used anyway, and just add to the bloat.
Why break your backs trying to play nice with .NET? I don't mean to invalidate compatibility for existing standards, but don't help usher in their new MS-centric efforts.
Would you rather support their way... or have your own way?