"Someday we'll be able to just switch off those retarded SUV drivers on the freeway with the push of a button!"
If more than X people in a certain time period type in your plate number to some little keypad, then your car is alerted that it has recieved a "Time Out". You have 5 minutes to pull over and turn your car off. After giving you a few minutes to think about what a naughty boy you've been (or load an AK), you can start driving again. You could get the system sponsored by "Survivor". It would be huge.
Yes, it was a bad transition. The first sentance was a response to the Linux dishwasher post. The second sentance was my example of a browser and an SUV with the same name. I think the smart folks around here can figure out what I meant.
Nobody could confuse a dishwasher with an operating system. That's why you have Netscape Navigator and Lincoln Navigator, they're completely different. I don't know what Xbox does, but they're definately a tech company. That's too close to the console Xbox for MS to use the same name.
Your recorder at home might be difficult to program. As it is now, the Tivo gets a TV schedule and I select what I want to watch. It knows when everything is on and records for me. Depending on how the upstream feed is set up, you might have to manually instruct the Tivo to record a specific channel for a specific time period. If I wanted to do that, I would use my old VCR.
I don't know about you, but I would rather not pay for two nearly identical services every month. Obviously nobody knows what the pricing on this new upstream stuff will be, but it could get expensive.
I also noticed that the mouse was my main source of discomfort, but I'm not a big fan of trackballs. I went to Best Buy and got a Caselogic jelly wrist rest mouse pad for just a few bucks. My pain is now history.
In my experience, the game that has prompted the most fist fights is Goldeneye for N64. When one drunken frat boy keeps shooting rockets at another drunken frat boy that can't get to a decent weapon, controllers get dropped and punches get thrown.
As another poster mentioned, Super Smash Brothers is a good fight starter. When one person feels like they're being picked on by two or three people, wrestling often ensues.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it will fly. Most geeks make pretty good money ($30k - $100k/year). These people could buy $100 or even $1000 of stock and not have to eat ramen (but might eat ramen anyway). What could make this idea sucessfull are big money investors. The big money geeks can afford to invest $10k or even $100k without the expectations of significant returns. But the number of millionaire geeks has plummeted in the last year (Hi Rob). Without them, I don't think this idea can work.
"Isn't there already a launchpad in some african country near the equator..."
I believe that the French have a launch facility on the north coast of South America, very close to the equator. It's where their old penal colony was. Watch the great Steve McQueen movie Papillon for more details on the prison.
"Logitech had to do something that "works" but gives people zero privacy and no security"
Yes, and they did exactly the right thing. Their "job" is to produce products that do what they claim to do and sell them at a price people will pay. They never claim these products are secure in any way. As the above post says, if you bought this product *assuming* it's secure, you're a dumbass and you deserve whatever you get.
"What Intel definitely understands is that the public thinks Mhz == speed."
Intel understands it because Intel caused it. Intel's adverstising over the past 2+ years has focused on two things. First, they make MHz seem equivalent to horsepower. Second, they make vague claims that Intel processors make "the internet" faster. AMD played Intel's MHz game for a while and did a damn good job beating the big boys at their own game. Now they're not playing anymore. They seem to be focusing now on creating good processors at a reasonable price.
You guys should use the document management system that my last company used- total chaos. Every user creates a directory called "Bob's stuff" or "BSR" or something similar. Then all of the files they work on, no matter who else will need them, should go in the "Bob's Stuff" directory. Each file should be given completely incomprehesible names like "ClientData.xls", "JimQuote.doc", or "CSIQ12001rpg.ppt". That way when you need something, all you need to do is find the person who worked on it first and have them remember what they called the file. The set up and maintnence costs of this system are nearly nill. All you need for it to work are employees with photographic memories who never quit or die.
I think the best way to play that is to set up a meeting with the client who turned you down. Get a couple business people and their best tech guy in a room with a computer. You sit at a table with your hands in front of you. Talk their tech guy through the "crack" and make it clear to the business guys that in place of their tech guy it could have been any 15 year old on the planet. If the competing company gets pissed because they lost business over the incident, you didn't actually do anything. The client company merely viewed their own data using a nonconventional access route. If the competing company tries to go after thier former client for "circumventing security", threaten to send a copy of the court papers to all of the rest of their clients, showing everyone what crappy security they have.
That should teach your competitors to bid against you.
"There are always stories of files being kept of old papers," Bloomfield said, "but I had never heard of it being made real."
Apparently Mr. Bloomfield never saw the upstairs closet of any fraternity. Our "files" were crappy and we still had hundreds of papers and class notes going back a decade. Some houses have huge libraries organized by class and professor.
That's the key word, "unskilled". The movie Matewan has been discussed many times on Slashdot. Anyone who is completely opposed to unions should watch the film. Basically, it shows that without unions, companies will do anything and everything to make an extra buck. You don't like a pay cut? Fine, you're fired and someone else more desperate will be in your spot tomorrow. The tactic only works if management can replace you quickly and easily. That disqualifies most of the jobs Slashdotters have. But I think that as IT becomes larger and larger, more jobs will fall into the "replacable" category and unions may become needed.
I don't have links, but I know Amazon is at the front of the IT unionization battle. There is a guy named Mike Daisey who is behind most of the organizing. I'll leave the Google searching to the reader.
"Why not let people adjust their screen settings from anywhere in the world over the web?"
Second paragraph. This is the sentance that I thought was DAMN funny. It should also be a sign to anyone smart enought to consider themselves a geek that this is a fake story. Think about it for a second. Why would you need to adjust your screen settings remotely? If someone else is there looking at it, then they can adjust it. If nobody is looking at the screen, then why adjust it? How are you going to adjust a screen that you can't see? It's completely absurd.
Yeah, there are some absurd dot com business plans out there, but not this absurd.
-B
Taco and Co. - Check your lameness filter code. It's jacked up.
Of course it makes sense to you. You, like myself and a vast majority of the people reading this, are a geek. We work, live, and think in a world full of 1's, 0's, TRUEs, and FALSEs. Most of us can't even fathom that other people don't think like us. So people like us design and build a switch with a single verticle line on one side and a circle on the other. Those symbols have no intuitive meaning whatsoever. Sure, most people figure it out pretty quickly, but that doesn't make it intuitive. If one side had an empty outline of a lightbulb and the other side had a lightbulb filled in with lines radiating from it, that would be intuitive.
I was thinking about that too. The FBI was investigating crimes against American companies and the cracked computers are on US soil. The CIA doesn't investigate crimes, just commits them. The military is not in the investigating business either. That leaves the FBI, probably with some involvment from the state department.
What is reverse hacking? Ugly solutions to non-existent problems? White hat...black hat...grey hat...whatever illegal shit the FBI does in the name of law and order...it's just hacking.
Mainstream society (in this case public school) did give Sean a shove. That doesn't mean that he has to give up and resort to being home schooled. Shove back. Talk to some people at private schools. There are a ton of scholarships out there for smart kids.
High school isn't really about learning trig and reading Hamlet. It's about learning how to deal with a bunch of people who are different than you. Sure, high school is full of assholes. And every year a million of them graduate and become "real world" assholes. You still have to deal with them.
Sorry if I'm anti-home schooling. I went to a high school with 4000 kids and it was a great experience.
I almost choked on my gum when I read that. Go rent the movie Matewan. It should be available at any video store.
For those of you who aren't going to go rent it, I'll give you the short version. It's about a West Virgina town in the 20s just as mine workers are starting to unionize. The corporation they work for, with its innocent and noble aim of making money, beats the crap out of people.
Slashdot Mirror
"Someday we'll be able to just switch off those retarded SUV drivers on the freeway with the push of a button!"
If more than X people in a certain time period type in your plate number to some little keypad, then your car is alerted that it has recieved a "Time Out". You have 5 minutes to pull over and turn your car off. After giving you a few minutes to think about what a naughty boy you've been (or load an AK), you can start driving again. You could get the system sponsored by "Survivor". It would be huge.
-B
Isn't celluloid very flammable? If your building burns down, your CDRs are probably toast, but at least they won't *cause* your building to burn down.
-B
Yes, it was a bad transition. The first sentance was a response to the Linux dishwasher post. The second sentance was my example of a browser and an SUV with the same name. I think the smart folks around here can figure out what I meant.
-B
Nobody could confuse a dishwasher with an operating system. That's why you have Netscape Navigator and Lincoln Navigator, they're completely different. I don't know what Xbox does, but they're definately a tech company. That's too close to the console Xbox for MS to use the same name.
-B
"But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed?"
Now that is a damn good troll. You really should have picked better or at least existent shows. Pee Wee's BIG Adventure is what you were trying for.
-B
Two problems:
Your recorder at home might be difficult to program. As it is now, the Tivo gets a TV schedule and I select what I want to watch. It knows when everything is on and records for me. Depending on how the upstream feed is set up, you might have to manually instruct the Tivo to record a specific channel for a specific time period. If I wanted to do that, I would use my old VCR.
I don't know about you, but I would rather not pay for two nearly identical services every month. Obviously nobody knows what the pricing on this new upstream stuff will be, but it could get expensive.
-B
I also noticed that the mouse was my main source of discomfort, but I'm not a big fan of trackballs. I went to Best Buy and got a Caselogic jelly wrist rest mouse pad for just a few bucks. My pain is now history.
-B
In my experience, the game that has prompted the most fist fights is Goldeneye for N64. When one drunken frat boy keeps shooting rockets at another drunken frat boy that can't get to a decent weapon, controllers get dropped and punches get thrown.
As another poster mentioned, Super Smash Brothers is a good fight starter. When one person feels like they're being picked on by two or three people, wrestling often ensues.
-B
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it will fly. Most geeks make pretty good money ($30k - $100k/year). These people could buy $100 or even $1000 of stock and not have to eat ramen (but might eat ramen anyway). What could make this idea sucessfull are big money investors. The big money geeks can afford to invest $10k or even $100k without the expectations of significant returns. But the number of millionaire geeks has plummeted in the last year (Hi Rob). Without them, I don't think this idea can work.
-B
"Isn't there already a launchpad in some african country near the equator..."
I believe that the French have a launch facility on the north coast of South America, very close to the equator. It's where their old penal colony was. Watch the great Steve McQueen movie Papillon for more details on the prison.
-B
"Logitech had to do something that "works" but gives people zero privacy and no security"
Yes, and they did exactly the right thing. Their "job" is to produce products that do what they claim to do and sell them at a price people will pay. They never claim these products are secure in any way. As the above post says, if you bought this product *assuming* it's secure, you're a dumbass and you deserve whatever you get.
-B
Then this would probably have given you an aneurism.
(It's amazing etch-a-sketch art, not Mr. Goatsex)
-B
Forget grapes. Version 2.0 should grow Twinkies as its fruit. Imagine acres and acres of free weed and Twinkies. Mmmmm....
-B
"What Intel definitely understands is that the public thinks Mhz == speed."
Intel understands it because Intel caused it. Intel's adverstising over the past 2+ years has focused on two things. First, they make MHz seem equivalent to horsepower. Second, they make vague claims that Intel processors make "the internet" faster. AMD played Intel's MHz game for a while and did a damn good job beating the big boys at their own game. Now they're not playing anymore. They seem to be focusing now on creating good processors at a reasonable price.
-B
You guys should use the document management system that my last company used- total chaos. Every user creates a directory called "Bob's stuff" or "BSR" or something similar. Then all of the files they work on, no matter who else will need them, should go in the "Bob's Stuff" directory. Each file should be given completely incomprehesible names like "ClientData.xls", "JimQuote.doc", or "CSIQ12001rpg.ppt". That way when you need something, all you need to do is find the person who worked on it first and have them remember what they called the file. The set up and maintnence costs of this system are nearly nill. All you need for it to work are employees with photographic memories who never quit or die.
-B
I think the best way to play that is to set up a meeting with the client who turned you down. Get a couple business people and their best tech guy in a room with a computer. You sit at a table with your hands in front of you. Talk their tech guy through the "crack" and make it clear to the business guys that in place of their tech guy it could have been any 15 year old on the planet. If the competing company gets pissed because they lost business over the incident, you didn't actually do anything. The client company merely viewed their own data using a nonconventional access route. If the competing company tries to go after thier former client for "circumventing security", threaten to send a copy of the court papers to all of the rest of their clients, showing everyone what crappy security they have.
That should teach your competitors to bid against you.
-B
"There are always stories of files being kept of old papers," Bloomfield said, "but I had never heard of it being made real."
Apparently Mr. Bloomfield never saw the upstairs closet of any fraternity. Our "files" were crappy and we still had hundreds of papers and class notes going back a decade. Some houses have huge libraries organized by class and professor.
-B
That's the key word, "unskilled". The movie Matewan has been discussed many times on Slashdot. Anyone who is completely opposed to unions should watch the film. Basically, it shows that without unions, companies will do anything and everything to make an extra buck. You don't like a pay cut? Fine, you're fired and someone else more desperate will be in your spot tomorrow. The tactic only works if management can replace you quickly and easily. That disqualifies most of the jobs Slashdotters have. But I think that as IT becomes larger and larger, more jobs will fall into the "replacable" category and unions may become needed.
I don't have links, but I know Amazon is at the front of the IT unionization battle. There is a guy named Mike Daisey who is behind most of the organizing. I'll leave the Google searching to the reader.
-B
"Why not let people adjust their screen settings from anywhere in the world over the web?"
Second paragraph. This is the sentance that I thought was DAMN funny. It should also be a sign to anyone smart enought to consider themselves a geek that this is a fake story. Think about it for a second. Why would you need to adjust your screen settings remotely? If someone else is there looking at it, then they can adjust it. If nobody is looking at the screen, then why adjust it? How are you going to adjust a screen that you can't see? It's completely absurd.
Yeah, there are some absurd dot com business plans out there, but not this absurd.
-B
Taco and Co. - Check your lameness filter code. It's jacked up.
Of course it makes sense to you. You, like myself and a vast majority of the people reading this, are a geek. We work, live, and think in a world full of 1's, 0's, TRUEs, and FALSEs. Most of us can't even fathom that other people don't think like us. So people like us design and build a switch with a single verticle line on one side and a circle on the other. Those symbols have no intuitive meaning whatsoever. Sure, most people figure it out pretty quickly, but that doesn't make it intuitive. If one side had an empty outline of a lightbulb and the other side had a lightbulb filled in with lines radiating from it, that would be intuitive.
-B
"I hope no one was deluded into thinking the businss cycle had gone away"
The only people that stupid were day traders and the staff of Wired magazine.
-B
I was thinking about that too. The FBI was investigating crimes against American companies and the cracked computers are on US soil. The CIA doesn't investigate crimes, just commits them. The military is not in the investigating business either. That leaves the FBI, probably with some involvment from the state department.
-B
What is reverse hacking? Ugly solutions to non-existent problems? White hat...black hat...grey hat...whatever illegal shit the FBI does in the name of law and order...it's just hacking.
-B
Mainstream society (in this case public school) did give Sean a shove. That doesn't mean that he has to give up and resort to being home schooled. Shove back. Talk to some people at private schools. There are a ton of scholarships out there for smart kids.
High school isn't really about learning trig and reading Hamlet. It's about learning how to deal with a bunch of people who are different than you. Sure, high school is full of assholes. And every year a million of them graduate and become "real world" assholes. You still have to deal with them.
Sorry if I'm anti-home schooling. I went to a high school with 4000 kids and it was a great experience.
-B
"Corporations have a record of non-abuse"
I almost choked on my gum when I read that. Go rent the movie Matewan. It should be available at any video store.
For those of you who aren't going to go rent it, I'll give you the short version. It's about a West Virgina town in the 20s just as mine workers are starting to unionize. The corporation they work for, with its innocent and noble aim of making money, beats the crap out of people.
-B