"If hardware takes the same status among college students as software, one can imagine all sorts of interesting stuff."
I would be more interested in the reverse. This means transferring matter into energy. Using something like that, our landfills would instead be raw fuel. Problems with lack of cheap power could be more easily addressed. Poroblems with overflowing landfills could also be more easily addressed.
" If manage a domain, you will get one to your contact address (usually hostmaster@your.domain) and also sales@, webmaster@, and a few other garbage addresses.
Having said that, I get ~10 spams a day to these bogus accounts per domain name -- not 100."
Interesting. I do manage two domains, one is almost 1 year old and one is 2 months old. At both of them I have admin@, abuse@, postmaster@, webmaster@, etc I never get spam in any of them. Am I somehow blessed?
Man, what do you do to get all this? I haven't gotten that many in my life to my main account.
Really, all you need to do is manage your address properly from the beginning, don't do obvious spam-lure tactics with it, use sneakemail/other aliasing and you're set.
Seriously... in the last year, maybe 3 total spams have come to my main address. (They're all the same spam too. Something about skin care. Weird.)
Also, the "Superdrive" refers to an older "foppy-replacement technology" where the drive would read normal 1.44 HD floppies plus special 120 MB "superdiscs" too. I have no idea why this good idea didn't replace the floppy disk.
"1) Staying online on dialup services for long periods of time is discouraged, as it ties up a 64k circuit in the local exchange and a modem at the ISP's modem bank. Indeed, BTinternet's 'unmetered' service limits you to 150 hours per month. Then again, BTinternet is crap.
2) Staying online with dialup ties up your phone line. Staying online with broadband doesn't.
I would assume that both of these apply in Canada as much as they do in Britain."
1) The first one applies only depending on your ISP. Mine really does allow you to stay online all the time but after something like 8 hours, the idling threshold gets smaller before they cut you off. My ISP is actually pretty cool because we have a multilink account so you can use two modems and can dial in and get 2 X 28.8 K for better speed at night, and as well they officially support linux.
If you have dialup from Symcraptico (provided by Bell Canada) you can expect to get cut off after being online for a while, as their service is probably as crapy as BTInternet.
2) Of course dialup takes up a phone line but when you have 2 lines, it's usually not an issue.
"hmmm, 10 minutes away? sounds like you could establish some kind of link to them. Microwave or radio?"
Unfortunately the geography is very messy for that. Lots of trees, hills, etc to block the signal. There is one service that does something like this but they're quoting very large figures to extend themselves out to our area.
" I dunno about most of the world populous, but I had dialup (all the way back to the GEnie/CompuServe/Prodigy era), then cable for about 6 months as soon as it was available, then I moved to an area with no broadband available. Trust me, it was horrible. No one could call me because I took 3 hours downloading OS updates, I couldn't do much of what I used to like to do - idle on IRC, listen to streamed audio (legal matters aside), download new Linux distros, et cetera. After 2 years of this madness cable finally became available and life has been good again. It's just not good enough for a geek to have dial-up anymore - even with a dedicated phone line."
Thank you for summing that up so succinctly.
And it's worse when a family is involved. I am typing this on a home network where a 28.8k dialup is shared over 5 machines. My brother and sister are Kazaa (lite) leechers and all is terrible like you described.
The worst part is that decent broadband (satellite is not decent) or even 56K will never be available out here in the forseable future in rural Ontario, Canada because the population density is very low. And only 10 minutes away my friends living in the city are all on @Home enjoying fast cable.
"It's not aboot caring aboot speed, it's aboot worring about being hit by per minute fees while online. Those that switched to broadband from dial-up didn't care before or after aboot the speed."
That would apply for Europe only. (I do believe that this study examines areas in the UK.)
I'm in Canada and people here buy broadband for the speed and lower latency since you'd be dialing a local number for dialup ISPs, meaning that there is no phone toll charge, no matter how long or when you go online.
People get broadband because they have a family and they are tired of kids fighting over the computer and slow as hell networked dialup.
"The problem is it's often not done properly. There are spyware apps like aureate [cexx.org] that operate in stealth mode by passing themselves off as Windows system processes and making sure that they don't even show up the task list or binding themselves to winsock so that you delete or uninstall them your Internet connection stops working."
I saw one that was masquerading as an atomic clock time synchronisation app. "Precisiontime.exe" - It turns out that it's related to Gator!
"Several hours? I don't know what distribution you run, but remind me to avoid it! I've run both Debian and RedHat - neither require several hours of daily patching."
Note to you:
Don't ever live in an area without broadband. I have no choice but to get 28.8 and there are some of us who are worse off. Because of this, it is impossible to keep any operating system up to date because it takes so freaking long to download the patches and you have to wait until the middle of the night because your 28.8 is shared across a 5 machine LAN and other people can't get anything done of you're saturating the connection with the latest patch.
Because of this you have to spend several hours every day downloading patches, no matter what OS you have.
" The bit about the 2 romanian programmers writing something that will pop up messages on your screen. How will that work exactly?"
This is real and it does not exploit a windows 'bug' so to speak. There is a messaging service built into win2k/xp that is automatically enabled that can be used by network admins to send messages to clients. Unfortunately it will receive messages from any sender, not just a designated admin, and display them on the screen.
There was a previous article about this on/. describing it and how to turn it off.
"Now if they'd only start selling cables for a reasonable price. Can anywone explain to me why a six foot audio costs $10 while the twenty foot cable costs $13. who needs 20 feet of cable for headphone extension anyway?"
I actually have two 20 footers in series piping a signal from the output of the amp in the stereo down through the central vaccum tube, above the ceiling panels in the basement and down to my computer. It's ugly, but it works.
"Since RS employess get a comission. (Do they still?) They were always quick to try to keep me from leaving. Most of the time I could see that they would type their own or dummy information into the computer when I refused to give them mine."
Really? The first time I was looking for a cell phone (about 1.5 years ago) the guy at the Shack warned me away from every phone in the store because he claimed they were too expensive!
"I think you want the XUL Preference Toolbar [xulplanet.com]... You can turn off popups, javascript, images, all sorts of nastiness as well as change your UA from a small toolbar that sits under the address bar"
You can also do this with multizilla and get some powerful tabbing features as part of the deal as well.
I think that one of the major things that online advertisers don't realise is that more annoying and intrusive popups don't mean more clickthroughs.
Forcing a person to notice an ad through a really annoying method causes the person to terminate the ad with extreme prejudice. The more annoying the method, the more likely the person will see the ad, but it is less likely that they will ever click through (and not be worried about bandwidth since it's just text.)
If advertisers would just take a page from google and provide relevant, non-obtrusive ads, people would click them. Google has one of the highest clickthrough rates in the industry. Heck, I practically never click ads except google's ads.
One day I hope the industry at large will realise that a more intrusive way of getting someone's attention also gets their wrath.
"On the pages that you want
to protect you only need to insert a few lines of HTML code to your
website. This will present the below button that will test the visitors to
see if the use any sort of blocking software."
I wonder if this special code can be cleaned before it reaches the browser by The Proxomitron or your favourite page-scrubber proxy. It might be a little annoying to disable javascript every time I run into one of these. (Perhaps the mozilla crew will make a nice interface for per-site javascript blocking.)
"-A paper planner that is big enough for me is too damn big to carry around all day. Been there, done that.
- I hate cellphones, and even if I didn't, couldn't afford the "service" "plan". At least you only pay for a PDA once."
When you're an engineering student and you have several dozen pounds of textbooks, a paper planner, even my 1 inch thick one, is nothing.
And cellphone service is cheaper outside the US, and sometimes you actually find a fairly good provider. I pay the equivalent of about US$7.25 per month for my (pretty basic) cellphone service.
Slashdot Mirror
Score: -1, Redundant
I would be more interested in the reverse. This means transferring matter into energy. Using something like that, our landfills would instead be raw fuel. Problems with lack of cheap power could be more easily addressed. Poroblems with overflowing landfills could also be more easily addressed.
Interesting. I do manage two domains, one is almost 1 year old and one is 2 months old. At both of them I have admin@, abuse@, postmaster@, webmaster@, etc I never get spam in any of them. Am I somehow blessed?
Really, all you need to do is manage your address properly from the beginning, don't do obvious spam-lure tactics with it, use sneakemail/other aliasing and you're set.
Seriously ... in the last year, maybe 3 total spams have come to my main address. (They're all the same spam too. Something about skin care. Weird.)
Wait a sec...
Oh sorry, I guess I was developing a reflex action.
</humour>
Thanksgiving? Oh yes, I forgot that it was US Thanksgiving today. (It was 6 weeks ago in Canada.)
Damn it, the signal to noise ratios in the discussions are low enough. Is this infesting the front page now?
The original is still on the homepage! http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/28/123820 9&mode=flat&tid=95
Nothing is fun like sharing one of these across a home network! (I am on 28.8k / 5 machine network right now.)
Clearly, there's nobody at OSDN owns one of these or we wouldn't have such slip-ups on slashdot :-)
Also, the "Superdrive" refers to an older "foppy-replacement technology" where the drive would read normal 1.44 HD floppies plus special 120 MB "superdiscs" too. I have no idea why this good idea didn't replace the floppy disk.
2) Staying online with dialup ties up your phone line. Staying online with broadband doesn't.
I would assume that both of these apply in Canada as much as they do in Britain."
1) The first one applies only depending on your ISP. Mine really does allow you to stay online all the time but after something like 8 hours, the idling threshold gets smaller before they cut you off. My ISP is actually pretty cool because we have a multilink account so you can use two modems and can dial in and get 2 X 28.8 K for better speed at night, and as well they officially support linux.
If you have dialup from Symcraptico (provided by Bell Canada) you can expect to get cut off after being online for a while, as their service is probably as crapy as BTInternet.
2) Of course dialup takes up a phone line but when you have 2 lines, it's usually not an issue.
Unfortunately the geography is very messy for that. Lots of trees, hills, etc to block the signal. There is one service that does something like this but they're quoting very large figures to extend themselves out to our area.
Thank you for summing that up so succinctly.
And it's worse when a family is involved. I am typing this on a home network where a 28.8k dialup is shared over 5 machines. My brother and sister are Kazaa (lite) leechers and all is terrible like you described.
The worst part is that decent broadband (satellite is not decent) or even 56K will never be available out here in the forseable future in rural Ontario, Canada because the population density is very low. And only 10 minutes away my friends living in the city are all on @Home enjoying fast cable.
*sob*
That would apply for Europe only. (I do believe that this study examines areas in the UK.)
I'm in Canada and people here buy broadband for the speed and lower latency since you'd be dialing a local number for dialup ISPs, meaning that there is no phone toll charge, no matter how long or when you go online.
People get broadband because they have a family and they are tired of kids fighting over the computer and slow as hell networked dialup.
I saw one that was masquerading as an atomic clock time synchronisation app. "Precisiontime.exe" - It turns out that it's related to Gator!
Note to you:
Don't ever live in an area without broadband. I have no choice but to get 28.8 and there are some of us who are worse off. Because of this, it is impossible to keep any operating system up to date because it takes so freaking long to download the patches and you have to wait until the middle of the night because your 28.8 is shared across a 5 machine LAN and other people can't get anything done of you're saturating the connection with the latest patch.
Because of this you have to spend several hours every day downloading patches, no matter what OS you have.
This is real and it does not exploit a windows 'bug' so to speak. There is a messaging service built into win2k/xp that is automatically enabled that can be used by network admins to send messages to clients. Unfortunately it will receive messages from any sender, not just a designated admin, and display them on the screen.
There was a previous article about this on /. describing it and how to turn it off.
I actually have two 20 footers in series piping a signal from the output of the amp in the stereo down through the central vaccum tube, above the ceiling panels in the basement and down to my computer. It's ugly, but it works.
Really? The first time I was looking for a cell phone (about 1.5 years ago) the guy at the Shack warned me away from every phone in the store because he claimed they were too expensive!
Because you can't resell them afterwards. And not all texts are available in etext.
You can also do this with multizilla and get some powerful tabbing features as part of the deal as well.
Forcing a person to notice an ad through a really annoying method causes the person to terminate the ad with extreme prejudice. The more annoying the method, the more likely the person will see the ad, but it is less likely that they will ever click through (and not be worried about bandwidth since it's just text.)
If advertisers would just take a page from google and provide relevant, non-obtrusive ads, people would click them. Google has one of the highest clickthrough rates in the industry. Heck, I practically never click ads except google's ads.
One day I hope the industry at large will realise that a more intrusive way of getting someone's attention also gets their wrath.
I wonder if this special code can be cleaned before it reaches the browser by The Proxomitron or your favourite page-scrubber proxy. It might be a little annoying to disable javascript every time I run into one of these. (Perhaps the mozilla crew will make a nice interface for per-site javascript blocking.)
- I hate cellphones, and even if I didn't, couldn't afford the "service" "plan". At least you only pay for a PDA once."
When you're an engineering student and you have several dozen pounds of textbooks, a paper planner, even my 1 inch thick one, is nothing.
And cellphone service is cheaper outside the US, and sometimes you actually find a fairly good provider. I pay the equivalent of about US$7.25 per month for my (pretty basic) cellphone service.