"The open relays that are most commonly abused are overseas. Hong Kong, South Korea, China, India.
What's the FTC going to do to them, lock them up in Guantamino bay??"
Maybe it could help translate the mail server documentation into Korean, Chinese and Hindi.
" just out of curosity, why would any mail admin want to have an open relay? it must cost the isp time and money as well as make them look bad to the community in general. even those who do support spammers for profit, even they must have some sort of authentication?"
Maybe the documentation for their mail server is only in English and they only know some other language(s) so they can't find out about how to properly use the server. Supposedly this is part of the problem with open relays in Asia.
Maybe this iLoo was created with the genuine intention of building such a product. But when it started to get press, the MSFT brass realised it was a 'stinky' idea. Why would MSFT UK just release something outrageous like this as a hoax? I think they didn't want to fess up and admit that they had a terrible idea so they just said it was a hoax.
Re:I used to follow mozilla
on
Mozilla 1.4b Loosed
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Definitely! I love tabbed browsing, and the popup and cookie features are far superior to IE."
Agreed! And there is a great improvement in these features that I have just noticed in 1.4b and I never saw in 1.4a. There is a little icon in the corner next to the 'lock' that appears if the site uses cookies or popups. Obviously I have popups disabled, so when I see the little popup icon, I get this lovely warm feeling inside knowing that at least 1 pop-up was annihilated. It's so much more gratifying than seeing nothing at all.
Furthermore, you can click on that little icon and change the cookie or popup blocking customisations for that particular site. This way, if a useful popup was identified as 'unrequested' then you know it was killed and you can easily re-enable it.
Here's a short list of some other things to avoid:
-Any Dazzle products. Especially the DVC-80. The price is right but this piece of trash is so terrible that it does not even belong in the trash. The FireWire DV Bridge is decent, but it has severe problems with slightly unregulated power source. And the only thing worse than dazzle products is dazzle tech support.
-Pinnacle Products. Sometimes they work with excellent results. But they are very unpredictable, with often buggy software and whacked out compatibility problems. If you are starting out and don't have an existing video conversion infrastructure, avoid these things!
-Adaptec VideOh. It looks good in the surface but I have heard reports of these things acting in a very whacked out fashion.
So what do you get? Check out the card list at www.vcdhelp.com which has a huge list of products with many user ratings which tend to be quite reliable. The best products for converting your VHS to digital format in the lower price range that actually work tend to be the Matrox devices as well as the Canopus ADVC-100. From personal experience, I can say that the canopus (~US$300) kicks serious ass, and I have converted several VHS tapes to VCD with its help. The output from these into the computer can be sent to VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc.
Also check out rec.video.desktop which is a low-spam, well populated newsgroup with people who deal with this kind of stuff a lot. I read it regularly.
"However, 3ivx does have one thing that the others do not have whatsoever... it was built from scratch for QuickTime compatability."
The guy doing the test used poor settings for 3ivx. He set minimum quality at QP12 which is embarassingly low. I generally use at least QP5. No wonder the images turned out badly. This was not helped by the fact that Happy Machines (the maker of 3ivx) did not respond to the reviewer's request for config info.
If 3ivx had been set up with optimised settings, it would have faired much better.
"This is one of the things I truly hate about windows : control, control, control !
They drive it so far that a parent (me) has to control how kids use the computer."
Um, so you would give the kids root access to a linux box? That's what user accounts are for. They let you control your own box. Yes, linux/unix/osx/etc FORCES you to control users by creating accounts for them.
Re:Why do "next gen" OSs have such GIANT interface
on
Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: 1
"Apart from this image the new trend of making next generation operating systems which have giant interfaces really worries me. I always felt the advantage of running 1600x1200 (or 3200x1200 in my case) was to have more workspace, not a higher resolution interface."
It's because they want the OS to work with tablet computers that use a stylus type interface. Oversized buttons are a lot easier to interact with when using a stylus.
I've gotta agree that System Shock 2 really affects you. Just don't do something foolish like playing this in a bright living room in the day time with kids running in and out. You've gotta turn off all the lights, get some good head phones or a 4.1 or higher speaker system because this game makes absolutely incredible use of Audio.
This one time, I was going up a ramp and turned a corner, and this huge rumbler (a big muscle-bound beast, kind of like the big pink creatures in DOOM) was right there charging at me. I yelled out loud "Shit!!" and I turned the character and sprinted back down that ramp, frantically trying to load up anti-personnel bullets. If I had had a lesser keyboard, it would probably have been killed because I pressed that run key so hard. It was only after the rumbler killed me that I realised that my heart was pounding at 120+ bpm and the desk was covered with sweat from my arms.
Whenver I install that game and see the intro video for the first time again, I always get this sinking feeling in my stomach... "Oh shit... why the hell did I install this again?!?"
Yes, SS2 actually delivers on the promise of being immersive. Too bad Looking Glass Studios went out of business due to a lack of short term cash. Probably because Eidos couldn't front them the short term cash because they sent millions to John Romero & Ion Storm, developers of Daikatana.
" How much do you value convenience? There are many people quite capable of paying through the tooth for convenience. For instance, a bus token costs (at least where I live) CAN$2.25 and can get you as far as you need to within Toronto. But I continue to see more and more cars being sold. Despite some of the restrictions a car places on these people over using the transit system, they find a car much more convenient and are willing to pay orders of magnitudes more for the convenience it brings."
Absolutely. I also live in toronto (well, for 2 more days... alas my job is ending.) By car, it takes me 9 minutes to get to work. No more, no less. If I take TTC, it takes me between 18 and 33 minutes to get to work. Yes, I have timed it.
Convenience is only part of it. I am willing to pay more for the certainty of knowing things will turn out how I want them.
This could explain how people would be willing to pay a small fee to get the song they want NOW with certainty that it is not cut off, the wrong thing, poor quality, a fake, etc.
There is some quotation from a famous writer or something that says, "It seems to me that the only truly modern convenience is speed" or something to that effect. Who said that? (And no, a google did not instantly turn up the answer for me.
" no seriously - like the subject says - until they develop a digital technology that invades my ass without my permission - then they best lay off prepending "Ultra" to that shit."
If they ever do manage to develop anything like that, I'll just tell them that they can feel free to man my_ass.
"What printer manufacturers don't use this business model? I would be perfectly willing to purchase from a manufacturer from the light side, if I knew who they were."
It's more about the intended market than the manufacturer. If you're willing to shell out the money, HP's business laser printers don't have any of these stupidities.
"Buy before May 1st (law is know since Jan 1st) : Who doesn't have a few hundred CD-R's at home?"
In theory this works. But just before the same thing was implemented in Canada, all the stores went and put away all their non-levy CD-Rs, lied to their customers saying they were sold out, and the after the date, they put all the discs back and sold them at the levied price, pocketing the extra margin.
Right here, of course! Ogg and Linux support are confirmed, and FLAC support is a possibility.
Re:Ripping from the source a disadvantage? Huh?
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 1
"I'm sure most Slashdot readers will be familiar with the Nyquist limit and understand the complete inability to represent information above the limit, but how many are familiar with the degradations that occur near the Nyquist limit when you have non-infinite signal lengths?"
You're expecting too much;-) I think that most slashdot readers have not taken a signal processing course. I've taken one (so far) and I do know about the nyquist limit, the sinc function, but I have not heard about the degradations near the limit!
"
So again, I re-pose the rhetorical question: given the task of creating a new codec rather than rewriting an old one, wouldn't you want to use the least-filtered signal possible as a source, especially when the extant filtering is non-linear, and be able to select by design which parts to encode and which parts to ignore? I sure would."
Yes, (in principle) I would want to use the least filtered signal, but I'd be more interested in having commonly available digital formats that sample at 100+ KHz before I started worrying about lossy compression codecs. Does digital studio equipment even sample that high?
LOL, I did not think it was possible for a response that funny to be crafted to attach to my post! (Btw, something's up with that company. My friend was supposed to be interviewed for that job too but it didn't happen today for either of us.)
Has anyone seen those TV ads where the american advertising foundation is poking at intel?
Firstly, I saw this Dell ad where at the end, it had the 'intel inside' logo animation, with the standard 'intel inside music' and light streaks emanating from it.
And ad immediately after it was something like this:
It showed a black screen, and the following words appeard with typing sounds: "What makes one computer more powerful than another?"
Then it showed that same intel inside clip except that it read 'advertising inside' .
It ended with "Advertising. The way great brands get to be great brands."
Why doesn't intel sick the lawyers on these fellas?
(Btw, I was recording the TV signal to DV at the time so I saved the clip as a 1.8 MB mpeg-4.mov file. E-mail me if you want to see it.)
Slashdot Mirror
What makes it 'our' genetic code? I expect that lettuce has been around for a lot longer than humans.
Actually his first name is 'hello' and his last name is 'jpg' .
Maybe it could help translate the mail server documentation into Korean, Chinese and Hindi.
Maybe the documentation for their mail server is only in English and they only know some other language(s) so they can't find out about how to properly use the server. Supposedly this is part of the problem with open relays in Asia.
Maybe this iLoo was created with the genuine intention of building such a product. But when it started to get press, the MSFT brass realised it was a 'stinky' idea. Why would MSFT UK just release something outrageous like this as a hoax? I think they didn't want to fess up and admit that they had a terrible idea so they just said it was a hoax.
Agreed! And there is a great improvement in these features that I have just noticed in 1.4b and I never saw in 1.4a. There is a little icon in the corner next to the 'lock' that appears if the site uses cookies or popups. Obviously I have popups disabled, so when I see the little popup icon, I get this lovely warm feeling inside knowing that at least 1 pop-up was annihilated. It's so much more gratifying than seeing nothing at all.
Furthermore, you can click on that little icon and change the cookie or popup blocking customisations for that particular site. This way, if a useful popup was identified as 'unrequested' then you know it was killed and you can easily re-enable it.
-Any Dazzle products. Especially the DVC-80. The price is right but this piece of trash is so terrible that it does not even belong in the trash. The FireWire DV Bridge is decent, but it has severe problems with slightly unregulated power source. And the only thing worse than dazzle products is dazzle tech support.
-Pinnacle Products. Sometimes they work with excellent results. But they are very unpredictable, with often buggy software and whacked out compatibility problems. If you are starting out and don't have an existing video conversion infrastructure, avoid these things!
-Adaptec VideOh. It looks good in the surface but I have heard reports of these things acting in a very whacked out fashion.
So what do you get? Check out the card list at www.vcdhelp.com which has a huge list of products with many user ratings which tend to be quite reliable. The best products for converting your VHS to digital format in the lower price range that actually work tend to be the Matrox devices as well as the Canopus ADVC-100. From personal experience, I can say that the canopus (~US$300) kicks serious ass, and I have converted several VHS tapes to VCD with its help. The output from these into the computer can be sent to VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc.
Also check out rec.video.desktop which is a low-spam, well populated newsgroup with people who deal with this kind of stuff a lot. I read it regularly.
Um, the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than any other country, except maybe Mexico. It varies from month to month.
The guy doing the test used poor settings for 3ivx. He set minimum quality at QP12 which is embarassingly low. I generally use at least QP5. No wonder the images turned out badly. This was not helped by the fact that Happy Machines (the maker of 3ivx) did not respond to the reviewer's request for config info.
If 3ivx had been set up with optimised settings, it would have faired much better.
Um, so you would give the kids root access to a linux box? That's what user accounts are for. They let you control your own box. Yes, linux/unix/osx/etc FORCES you to control users by creating accounts for them.
It's because they want the OS to work with tablet computers that use a stylus type interface. Oversized buttons are a lot easier to interact with when using a stylus.
This one time, I was going up a ramp and turned a corner, and this huge rumbler (a big muscle-bound beast, kind of like the big pink creatures in DOOM) was right there charging at me. I yelled out loud "Shit!!" and I turned the character and sprinted back down that ramp, frantically trying to load up anti-personnel bullets. If I had had a lesser keyboard, it would probably have been killed because I pressed that run key so hard. It was only after the rumbler killed me that I realised that my heart was pounding at 120+ bpm and the desk was covered with sweat from my arms.
Whenver I install that game and see the intro video for the first time again, I always get this sinking feeling in my stomach ... "Oh shit ... why the hell did I install this again?!?"
Yes, SS2 actually delivers on the promise of being immersive. Too bad Looking Glass Studios went out of business due to a lack of short term cash. Probably because Eidos couldn't front them the short term cash because they sent millions to John Romero & Ion Storm, developers of Daikatana.
WTF do you need a pr0n magazine in a bathroom for when you have a broadband connection right there?
(And, uh, why did the checkbox for anonymous posting disappear?)
I mean, you could video conference via WiFi with other people in iLoos all over the world.
Absolutely. I also live in toronto (well, for 2 more days ... alas my job is ending.) By car, it takes me 9 minutes to get to work. No more, no less. If I take TTC, it takes me between 18 and 33 minutes to get to work. Yes, I have timed it.
Convenience is only part of it. I am willing to pay more for the certainty of knowing things will turn out how I want them.
This could explain how people would be willing to pay a small fee to get the song they want NOW with certainty that it is not cut off, the wrong thing, poor quality, a fake, etc.
There is some quotation from a famous writer or something that says, "It seems to me that the only truly modern convenience is speed" or something to that effect. Who said that? (And no, a google did not instantly turn up the answer for me.
If they ever do manage to develop anything like that, I'll just tell them that they can feel free to man my_ass.
It's more about the intended market than the manufacturer. If you're willing to shell out the money, HP's business laser printers don't have any of these stupidities.
In theory this works. But just before the same thing was implemented in Canada, all the stores went and put away all their non-levy CD-Rs, lied to their customers saying they were sold out, and the after the date, they put all the discs back and sold them at the levied price, pocketing the extra margin.
Right here, of course! Ogg and Linux support are confirmed, and FLAC support is a possibility.
You're expecting too much ;-) I think that most slashdot readers have not taken a signal processing course. I've taken one (so far) and I do know about the nyquist limit, the sinc function, but I have not heard about the degradations near the limit!
" So again, I re-pose the rhetorical question: given the task of creating a new codec rather than rewriting an old one, wouldn't you want to use the least-filtered signal possible as a source, especially when the extant filtering is non-linear, and be able to select by design which parts to encode and which parts to ignore? I sure would."
Yes, (in principle) I would want to use the least filtered signal, but I'd be more interested in having commonly available digital formats that sample at 100+ KHz before I started worrying about lossy compression codecs. Does digital studio equipment even sample that high?
LOL, I did not think it was possible for a response that funny to be crafted to attach to my post! (Btw, something's up with that company. My friend was supposed to be interviewed for that job too but it didn't happen today for either of us.)
Doesn't your sign "No, it's "Unagi-chan" !" mean "eel-little" ? Maybe I am spending too much time reading those menus at sushi places.
Wish me luck!
Firstly, I saw this Dell ad where at the end, it had the 'intel inside' logo animation, with the standard 'intel inside music' and light streaks emanating from it.
And ad immediately after it was something like this:
It showed a black screen, and the following words appeard with typing sounds: "What makes one computer more powerful than another?"
Then it showed that same intel inside clip except that it read 'advertising inside' .
It ended with "Advertising. The way great brands get to be great brands."
Why doesn't intel sick the lawyers on these fellas?
(Btw, I was recording the TV signal to DV at the time so I saved the clip as a 1.8 MB mpeg-4 .mov file. E-mail me if you want to see it.)
What? You haven't seen Austin Powers?