This is a perfect article for all the tin-foil-hat-wearers and the completely deranged to start yelling "D00d the Man is out to get us! Aiii corporate evil people microsoft crypto Linux BSD Monopoly yammer yammer yammer!"
BULLSHIT. Many people on here, including me, are saying, "WTF? The only 'news' thing on there that's really an advertisement is clearly marked. It's obvious that it's not news."
Look before you leap, people. This is a hairy, evil, and obnoxious TROLL.
Roll, roll, roll your own, script the night away, Thought it had some Unix tools, but now you have to pay
I'm going through the very same thing on a Sun platform...I can assure you that it sucks. I recommend writing your own. I saw some people mention UIs, but that's no good if you want to automate things.
(BTW, if you're using a proxy account to authenticate, can you allow groups of users to access some systems and not others, or does the use of the proxy preclude all that?) Anyone who knows, feel free to email me and answer a violent argument here....the manual I've got says nothing useful concerning it;) )
I would go so far as to say that the explosion of distributed networks is a backlash against the slow stratification of the Internet into commercial, government, and educational....and NOTHING ELSE.
Look what happens to P2P networks if they step on any non-corporate toes. The Bad Guys go after them, and shut 'em down.
I think commercialism is great as long as there's a lot of it. Once you get a small group of high-powered, expensive contenders, it limits the power of supply and demand. Capitalism works best when there's lots of competition.
Don't forget, though, that most nerds, myself included, don't care about capitalism and economics. The main problem with the scenario of the Internet being controlled by a few companies is that do-it-yourselfers cannot readily rig up something that feeds into the Internet without a lot of money, or without being rigorously controlled by vast, completely soulless entities.:)
If you sell normal items with PayPal, I can say that I've never had a problem with it. I know a few people on here have horror stories to tell, but I really can't.
If you are selling anything where the sender is most likely going to specify a different address (i.e. gift sales), DON'T USE PAYPAL UNLESS YOU'RE DESPERATE. PayPal insists that the two addresses agree. I did a payment system for a Chicago popcorn business, whose main revenue comes in at Christmas when everyone's buying those big cans of caramel corn to send to their relatives. At that time, PayPal allowed different shipping addresses.
As Christmas season started, they changed their policy and stopped allowing it, basically axe-murdering my neat little scripts.:\ I wrote a work-around so they could specify their shipping address on our site, then buy the popcorn using PayPal...but it's ugly and I don't recommend it.
So if you're a gift company...be smart...keep in mind the constraints you have to work within if you're going to do a front-end to PayPal. PayPal doesn't work for everyone, although it can be really useful sometimes.
Suppose you do get a better Windows machine. Then the user is happy with what he's got, and the stuff he did need from Linux were opensourced. So what are we complaining about?!
I think all too many of us start thinking politics to answer a question that should be technical for us and economic for the users. This should not be a case of "Let's wean the poor dumb users off Windows, they know not what they do", it should be, "How can we port this operating system to that operating system...just for the hell of it?" Remember what the hacker mindset is about. It's NOT about saving the world from the likes of Bill, although I'd be happy if we did that. That is only a secondary objective for some; the primary objective of a hacker (and for myself) is to hack.
Letting politics get in the way of doing something new and fun is an old trap that many have fallen into. I don't recommend it.
When I was eight years old, I decided that the "war on drugs" that Bush 1.0 was continuing at the time was too dangerous for people to fight. I mean, what if someone got shot? So I went to my dad's office, sat down at his computer (286 running WordPerfect for DOS), and wrote a one-page essay to him. In it, I suggested that we use robots to capture drug-runners instead of the police.
I was thorough. I sent blueprints with the letter. In crayon.
And he replied. His letter was on-topic, probably written by an aide, but it referred to my letter several times and wasn't a generic piece of crap. It came with an 8.5x11" picture of him, which, when one thinks about it, is probably one of the most ridiculous pieces of memorabilia I have. I was thrilled that he'd reply.
OK, thirteen years later I recognize that he wasn't the world's greatest president (I'd rate Reagan and Bush 2.0 higher), but it's still neat that he responded.
MORAL OF THE STORY: If an 8-year-old using substandard computer equipment and a crayon can write to the "Leader of the Free World" and get a halfway intelligent reply, so can you. What the hell is this article's question even posted for?! Every time this is mentioned, people on Slashdot, beside you, around you, and on top of you are screaming the answer in your ear...let me say it, write, write, Write, WRITE, WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE A NORMAL LETTER!
What a normal letter is:
Its style corresponds to that of a normal business letter. Capitalized properly, spelled properly, signed properly, etc...yes those high school English classes were not just in order to waste the time you could have spent recompiling your kernel. If you don't remember (and I forget that stuff really easily), many dictionaries have templates and examples of business letters.
No legalese. You don't like reading that sh330t, why is a guy who they call "Duh-bya" going to?
Polite. This is not a freaking Slashdot posting. Some people who read Slashdot have yet to learn the definition of politeness. Don't be condescending, and keep in mind that silly references to an "unelected president", such as in Richard Stallman's letter, or anything like that would remove all the letter's credibility for me even if I was just a man on the street, let alone a lawmaker or an aide of a lawmaker.
Remember that these guys think a file is something you put in a cabinet. They avoid the Internet, which may be one of the smartest decisions in the history of American politics. So don't use obscure references. Think about it the way you'd write a normal news article (not a nerd-news article).
OK, I'm done bitching, you can come out now.:)
Oh yeah, and buy a roll of stamps and some envelopes before you do anything else. The reason why email is so easy is that we can send it fast...and it's a lot easier to say, "I think I'll write a letter" when you have the equipment for sending it right beside you. It's too easy to make an excuse if you don't have the stuff nearby...hehehe...not I'm talking from experience or anything.
It occurs to me that there will probably be a lot of "me too" posts that will be asking for info on posts in their area. Why don't we make a central site to inform geeks of all varieties of events like this? A simple CGI script...select your area, and you get a listing of upcoming computer-trade events. I'm sure someone would be willing to donate bandwidth and space for a site like this...hell, I'd even do it if people were interested. If enough people email me, I'd set one up.
Of course, there'd have to be some safety rules. Posters would have to include their address and phone number, so it could be checked up on in case of a hoax. Perhaps it would only be to the admin of the site, or perhaps it would be posted; the details would need to get worked out. But it strikes me as a good idea, and a great way for everyone to stay on the same page. I am sure that there are swapmeets and events going on in my area (Oregon) that I'll never hear about...
It really depends on what you want. If power is what you want, you might sacrifice battery life and portability. If you want portability, you may have to sacrifice power, or might have to pay a premium. Cost also factors in. Who wants to buy a computer that has as much power as their desktop at double the price, even if it is portable?
There are plenty of special designs in the notebook world that are made only for one purpose. There was a guy showing one at work the other day...it was an unbreakable laptop. He hurled it against the marble floor in the hall to test it...it wouldn't break....it blew my mind. Some of the subminis (Vaios and the latest Librettos) have digital cameras built right in... that's always a plus.
I use a Toshiba Libretto 70CT. It's possibly the smallest full-featured computer ever built; P120, 32Mb RAM, no 3D, no CDROM, no floppy, but dual-booting Linux and Windows on a 10GB HD. You can get one off eBay for about $300-$500 (of course, it's an older model; the new ones are far more powerful and cost $2500 last I checked). It's not powerful considering this day and age, but don't think of it as a small computer. Think of it as a big palmtop.;)
As you can see, I favor portability. In addition, I am hooked for life on Toshiba because they use a standard laptop HD. You know, the kind that you can plug into an adapter to connect to your desktop's IDE cable if you so prefer. Other than that, the only computer-to-computer I/O is done through a cheap PCMCIA card.
Oh yeah, and all the chicks dig the Libretto because it's SOOOO CUTE!:)
When I was going to IIT, CNS (their network administrators) would throw out all kinds of stuff. They'd just leave it in piles in the corridors in the basement; it would get picked up later by whatever junk disposal service they had.
Talk about geek-friendly. There were at least thirty of us down there every night, looking through the piles of sliced coax, battered 386s, and 70s-era printers for something that others might have overlooked. I scored some sw33t terminals off there...;)
State schools, on the other hand...:(...I go to Portland State now, and they don't throw anything away. Since they're a state agency, it goes to a warehouse somewhere in Salem for "re-apportionment" to other agencies unlucky enough to be last in line for funding. Like they're going to use even half of that stuff!
I also thought I could do some dumpster-diving here at work, but this is a FEDERAL agency, so no can do! I asked my boss where it all gets put. Her answer: "Remember that scene at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', where the ark's getting put away in that huge warehouse?" So sad...think of all the electronics that only a geek could put to good use...rusting in the warehouse for two decades, until some droid decides to sell them...
In the meantime, I'm thinking of checking out some other universities...in my experience, it's the private schools that usually just send the stuff away. Public schools usually have a program in place to see that it doesn't get "wasted".
20 years old; played Adventure when I was twelve. Or, should I say, "ADVENTUR" on the CP/M system I was running then. But I think I may have been the last in the line...I don't recall many people my age telling me how they finally figured out to get past the plover's-egg room.;)
Because I often get on my local library's system to check my account or place holds on books, I use my library card number for my password. 9 digits long.
But wait, you say, isn't that insecure? I could lose your card, or an evil librarian could get into all my accounts. AND it's a number so it could possibly be brute-forced.
Not exactly. First of all, I substitute letters for some of the numbers. Another fun thing to do is to hold down shift while typing some of the numbers (maybe the first three). I'm pretty secure by that point.
Also, I don't use my current card. I use the one I got at age 8 or something and lost about ten years ago...but not before the number was burned onto my consciousness.;)
People are always horrified when they say, "type in your password" and I sit down and type a nine-character password. Or when, due to some system stupidity, it echos my password to me and someone's looking over my shoulder, they see a big fatty wad of gibberish that's almost impossible to read at a glance, and even harder to remember (you could remember "five-six-seven-nine", maybe, but how about "percent-china_hat-ampersand-left-paren"?).:)
The only thing that sucks is having to quote a password to someone. And sometimes poorly written (i.e. non-Unix) programs won't take non-alphanumeric characters. But other than that, it takes the best of both worlds; an easy-to-remember number and an extremely difficult password. Understandably, this approach might not please the ultra-paranoid, or people who change their passwords often (I alternate between different card numbers), but it's pretty decent when you want a secure password to memorize.
In my opinion, the fact that the universities are all using OOP is not necessarily good. The problem is that some professors now actually grade projects based on HOW MANY CLASSES ARE USED! Grrr.
I recall several professors I've had adding in the requirements for a project..."must use at least four classes", or something like that. Ridiculous. In one of them, I wrote the whole thing using two classes, then added the other two, which were completely unnecessary. The addition of the extra classes made the code uglier and harder to understand, while doing nothing for the program. What a waste of time.
Of course, plenty of students who are good programmers will realize that this is a load of crap and wind up writing stuff more efficiently later, but I'm worried about what could possibly be a majority of students doing things by the book and then getting used to writing every little thing as another class. Old habits are hard to break.
-Andy Schmitt
Slashdot Mirror
...and HOW is this news nerd-related?
How Are You Gentlemen!?
This is a perfect article for all the tin-foil-hat-wearers and the completely deranged to start yelling "D00d the Man is out to get us! Aiii corporate evil people microsoft crypto Linux BSD Monopoly yammer yammer yammer!"
BULLSHIT. Many people on here, including me, are saying, "WTF? The only 'news' thing on there that's really an advertisement is clearly marked. It's obvious that it's not news."
Look before you leap, people. This is a hairy, evil, and obnoxious TROLL.
(to the tune of "Row Row Row Your Boat"
Roll, roll, roll your own, script the night away,
Thought it had some Unix tools, but now you have to pay
I'm going through the very same thing on a Sun platform...I can assure you that it sucks. I recommend writing your own. I saw some people mention UIs, but that's no good if you want to automate things.
(BTW, if you're using a proxy account to authenticate, can you allow groups of users to access some systems and not others, or does the use of the proxy preclude all that?) Anyone who knows, feel free to email me and answer a violent argument here....the manual I've got says nothing useful concerning it ;) )
I would go so far as to say that the explosion of distributed networks is a backlash against the slow stratification of the Internet into commercial, government, and educational....and NOTHING ELSE.
Look what happens to P2P networks if they step on any non-corporate toes. The Bad Guys go after them, and shut 'em down.
I think commercialism is great as long as there's a lot of it. Once you get a small group of high-powered, expensive contenders, it limits the power of supply and demand. Capitalism works best when there's lots of competition.
Don't forget, though, that most nerds, myself included, don't care about capitalism and economics. The main problem with the scenario of the Internet being controlled by a few companies is that do-it-yourselfers cannot readily rig up something that feeds into the Internet without a lot of money, or without being rigorously controlled by vast, completely soulless entities. :)
(Hint - look at the dinner tables of the artists throwing this concert... )
Ozzy's: Ultra-fresh dove, with a garnish of live bat.
If you sell normal items with PayPal, I can say that I've never had a problem with it. I know a few people on here have horror stories to tell, but I really can't.
If you are selling anything where the sender is most likely going to specify a different address (i.e. gift sales), DON'T USE PAYPAL UNLESS YOU'RE DESPERATE. PayPal insists that the two addresses agree. I did a payment system for a Chicago popcorn business, whose main revenue comes in at Christmas when everyone's buying those big cans of caramel corn to send to their relatives. At that time, PayPal allowed different shipping addresses.
As Christmas season started, they changed their policy and stopped allowing it, basically axe-murdering my neat little scripts. :\ I wrote a work-around so they could specify their shipping address on our site, then buy the popcorn using PayPal...but it's ugly and I don't recommend it.
So if you're a gift company...be smart...keep in mind the constraints you have to work within if you're going to do a front-end to PayPal. PayPal doesn't work for everyone, although it can be really useful sometimes.
Suppose you do get a better Windows machine. Then the user is happy with what he's got, and the stuff he did need from Linux were opensourced. So what are we complaining about?!
I think all too many of us start thinking politics to answer a question that should be technical for us and economic for the users. This should not be a case of "Let's wean the poor dumb users off Windows, they know not what they do", it should be, "How can we port this operating system to that operating system...just for the hell of it?" Remember what the hacker mindset is about. It's NOT about saving the world from the likes of Bill, although I'd be happy if we did that. That is only a secondary objective for some; the primary objective of a hacker (and for myself) is to hack.
Letting politics get in the way of doing something new and fun is an old trap that many have fallen into. I don't recommend it.
When I was eight years old, I decided that the "war on drugs" that Bush 1.0 was continuing at the time was too dangerous for people to fight. I mean, what if someone got shot? So I went to my dad's office, sat down at his computer (286 running WordPerfect for DOS), and wrote a one-page essay to him. In it, I suggested that we use robots to capture drug-runners instead of the police.
I was thorough. I sent blueprints with the letter. In crayon.
And he replied. His letter was on-topic, probably written by an aide, but it referred to my letter several times and wasn't a generic piece of crap. It came with an 8.5x11" picture of him, which, when one thinks about it, is probably one of the most ridiculous pieces of memorabilia I have. I was thrilled that he'd reply.
OK, thirteen years later I recognize that he wasn't the world's greatest president (I'd rate Reagan and Bush 2.0 higher), but it's still neat that he responded.
MORAL OF THE STORY: If an 8-year-old using substandard computer equipment and a crayon can write to the "Leader of the Free World" and get a halfway intelligent reply, so can you. What the hell is this article's question even posted for?! Every time this is mentioned, people on Slashdot, beside you, around you, and on top of you are screaming the answer in your ear...let me say it, write, write, Write, WRITE, WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE A NORMAL LETTER!
What a normal letter is:
OK, I'm done bitching, you can come out now. :)
Oh yeah, and buy a roll of stamps and some envelopes before you do anything else. The reason why email is so easy is that we can send it fast...and it's a lot easier to say, "I think I'll write a letter" when you have the equipment for sending it right beside you. It's too easy to make an excuse if you don't have the stuff nearby...hehehe...not I'm talking from experience or anything.
It occurs to me that there will probably be a lot of "me too" posts that will be asking for info on posts in their area. Why don't we make a central site to inform geeks of all varieties of events like this? A simple CGI script...select your area, and you get a listing of upcoming computer-trade events. I'm sure someone would be willing to donate bandwidth and space for a site like this...hell, I'd even do it if people were interested. If enough people email me, I'd set one up.
Of course, there'd have to be some safety rules. Posters would have to include their address and phone number, so it could be checked up on in case of a hoax. Perhaps it would only be to the admin of the site, or perhaps it would be posted; the details would need to get worked out. But it strikes me as a good idea, and a great way for everyone to stay on the same page. I am sure that there are swapmeets and events going on in my area (Oregon) that I'll never hear about...
It really depends on what you want. If power is what you want, you might sacrifice battery life and portability. If you want portability, you may have to sacrifice power, or might have to pay a premium. Cost also factors in. Who wants to buy a computer that has as much power as their desktop at double the price, even if it is portable?
There are plenty of special designs in the notebook world that are made only for one purpose. There was a guy showing one at work the other day...it was an unbreakable laptop. He hurled it against the marble floor in the hall to test it...it wouldn't break....it blew my mind. Some of the subminis (Vaios and the latest Librettos) have digital cameras built right in... that's always a plus.
I use a Toshiba Libretto 70CT. It's possibly the smallest full-featured computer ever built; P120, 32Mb RAM, no 3D, no CDROM, no floppy, but dual-booting Linux and Windows on a 10GB HD. You can get one off eBay for about $300-$500 (of course, it's an older model; the new ones are far more powerful and cost $2500 last I checked). It's not powerful considering this day and age, but don't think of it as a small computer. Think of it as a big palmtop. ;)
As you can see, I favor portability. In addition, I am hooked for life on Toshiba because they use a standard laptop HD. You know, the kind that you can plug into an adapter to connect to your desktop's IDE cable if you so prefer. Other than that, the only computer-to-computer I/O is done through a cheap PCMCIA card.
Oh yeah, and all the chicks dig the Libretto because it's SOOOO CUTE! :)
When I was going to IIT, CNS (their network administrators) would throw out all kinds of stuff. They'd just leave it in piles in the corridors in the basement; it would get picked up later by whatever junk disposal service they had.
Talk about geek-friendly. There were at least thirty of us down there every night, looking through the piles of sliced coax, battered 386s, and 70s-era printers for something that others might have overlooked. I scored some sw33t terminals off there...;)
State schools, on the other hand...:(...I go to Portland State now, and they don't throw anything away. Since they're a state agency, it goes to a warehouse somewhere in Salem for "re-apportionment" to other agencies unlucky enough to be last in line for funding. Like they're going to use even half of that stuff!
I also thought I could do some dumpster-diving here at work, but this is a FEDERAL agency, so no can do! I asked my boss where it all gets put. Her answer: "Remember that scene at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', where the ark's getting put away in that huge warehouse?" So sad...think of all the electronics that only a geek could put to good use...rusting in the warehouse for two decades, until some droid decides to sell them...
In the meantime, I'm thinking of checking out some other universities...in my experience, it's the private schools that usually just send the stuff away. Public schools usually have a program in place to see that it doesn't get "wasted".
20 years old; played Adventure when I was twelve. Or, should I say, "ADVENTUR" on the CP/M system I was running then. But I think I may have been the last in the line...I don't recall many people my age telling me how they finally figured out to get past the plover's-egg room. ;)
-Andy Schmitt
Because I often get on my local library's system to check my account or place holds on books, I use my library card number for my password. 9 digits long.
But wait, you say, isn't that insecure? I could lose your card, or an evil librarian could get into all my accounts. AND it's a number so it could possibly be brute-forced.
Not exactly. First of all, I substitute letters for some of the numbers. Another fun thing to do is to hold down shift while typing some of the numbers (maybe the first three). I'm pretty secure by that point.
Also, I don't use my current card. I use the one I got at age 8 or something and lost about ten years ago...but not before the number was burned onto my consciousness. ;)
People are always horrified when they say, "type in your password" and I sit down and type a nine-character password. Or when, due to some system stupidity, it echos my password to me and someone's looking over my shoulder, they see a big fatty wad of gibberish that's almost impossible to read at a glance, and even harder to remember (you could remember "five-six-seven-nine", maybe, but how about "percent-china_hat-ampersand-left-paren"?). :)
The only thing that sucks is having to quote a password to someone. And sometimes poorly written (i.e. non-Unix) programs won't take non-alphanumeric characters. But other than that, it takes the best of both worlds; an easy-to-remember number and an extremely difficult password. Understandably, this approach might not please the ultra-paranoid, or people who change their passwords often (I alternate between different card numbers), but it's pretty decent when you want a secure password to memorize.
-Andy Schmitt
# cat /etc/free-riaa-approved-songs.txt
#
-Andy Schmitt
I recall several professors I've had adding in the requirements for a project..."must use at least four classes", or something like that. Ridiculous. In one of them, I wrote the whole thing using two classes, then added the other two, which were completely unnecessary. The addition of the extra classes made the code uglier and harder to understand, while doing nothing for the program. What a waste of time.
Of course, plenty of students who are good programmers will realize that this is a load of crap and wind up writing stuff more efficiently later, but I'm worried about what could possibly be a majority of students doing things by the book and then getting used to writing every little thing as another class. Old habits are hard to break.
-Andy Schmitt