Actually, yes. It does please me that these problems are becoming widespread.
It's the same as releasing an exploit to crash webservers. If script-kiddies take out a bunch of high-profile sites, like amazon or the whitehouse, it'll force people to beef up security. This prevents someone with a more insidious motive from doing the same thing later. (ie bn.com DoSing amazon (or paying kiddies to do it.))
Similarly, if a large number of people get their identity stolen by small-time crooks, it'll force us to fix the system before someone organizaed gets into it and really fucks us up.
Hmmm. Would be an interesting DoS... Automate identity theft, rack up huge charges to overseas companies for non-refundable products. Because the order was with a valid card, Visa/MC wouldn't be able to reverse the charges to the company. Hit them with a few billion in bad charges all in a month.
You know, we're almost at the point where a skilled hacker could wipe out a good chunk of the western economic world. The benefit is that the hardest hit would be those with the least real value, companies whose holdings are mostly stock, or debts, etc.
Really, for the hour or two every year, you might want to consider building your own system. If you go with decent parts (ie, nothing from a company going bankrupt) you won't have any install issues. These days you can boot off of CD and have an install going in minutes.
But I dislike using an OS I didn't install myself because I've got strong preferences for what gets installed, etc. Well worth the 20m it takes to install Win2k, or 45m for Linux (Takes longer, cause I always install a bunch more stuff.)
If that hour or two is really that hard to come by, or if you never do it and it would take a lot longer, consider making a list of parts and getting a local consultant or small store to do it for you.
Saving shipping alone is likely to pay for an hour or consultant time (Expect $50/hour, it's not really high-end stuff) and you get a lot more control over what you get.
This is proven by the simple fact that you can get a Dual Athlon this way, where many major companies (Dell, etc) won't even sell powerful single-CPU Athlons.
I've had great luck buying my computer parts from a hardware consultant. He burns everything in, with the appropriate manufacturer's util when applicable, downloads and burns drivers when needed, and delivers them to my home after 6pm, when I'm back from work. Being that he doesn't have a storefront it usually ends up being the same price (+/- 5%) as the local stores, even the really cheap ones. (With retail products, he doesn't do the volume to get really cheap OEM stuff, but these days I like the warranties.)
AMX is a real-time OS that's available for x86 and many CPUs common in embedded applications.
AMX is royalty free (if distributed in executable form (ie compiled)).
So Palm didn't write everything on the Palm, specifically not the hardest bit, the realtime elements. Palm OS deals with the resource allocation and UI issues, leaving task scheduling and (if they go to ARM) memory protection issues for the AMX segment.
IMHO, it was a very smart move. AMX is incredibly stable, very low overhead, and abstracts a lot of the annoying hardware issues, making it easier to port Palm to a new CPU (AMX already supports ARM, and has for quite a while.)
They mention a player called, I think, EAC, but they have a lot more details.
They also have information on how to do really high-quality rips and which programs to use.
At about 180kbps VBR, with Lame, or another good program, you can get MUCH better quality than Audio Catalyst, or other common ripper, will do at 320kbps, let alone 128kbps. Almost CD quality.
I'd suggest doing a blind test, compress the samples with various programs and bit-rates, then convert them back to wav files. Save them with names like "Rock-Sample1", "Rock-Sample2"... Let people post with their votes on which sounds best. At the end, post the list of which sample came from which program, and a which bit-rate. At that point, post the compressed files as well so people can verify the results.
If you post that story (or email me for help in writing it and such) vote for it!
Gah, why do people insist on using lame metaphors when discussing something?
b) I'm saying people should just cope with it. Scratch these annoyingly complex systems which exist JUST to give people exclusive power over a nick or a channel.
The nick/chan serv elements are more of a problem than they're worth. The only reason I've ever got for keeping them when I've proposed a new, simpler, IRC model, is that people want ops.
My sole problem with ops is people who won't give it up, wanting to damn the system just so they get their power.
If IRC was FIXED, it wouldn't have people trying to DoS servers to split channels, or kick people to get nicks. It also wouldn't need complex and easily broken system for preventing this. People would still try to attack each other, but a/IGNORE that was properly implemented, and hostnames that were properly obfuscated (to prevent people doing a direct DoS) would prevent these problems too.
I've tried to work with IRC developers, I've proposed this idea to hundreds of people. The *ONLY* argument I've ever heard against it is that it doesn't have ops, and people wouldn't be able to kick people, or give ops to their friends.
They say this in various ways "what if someone came into my channel and started..." or such. But/ignore would deal with this. These people don't want to avoid seeing someone who's bugging them, they want to prevent that person from saying anything. If all they cared about was keeping from seeing floods or offensive comments, they'd realize that I proposed a mechanism to prevent that.
To me, this as good as proves that most IRC users are ass-kissing op-wannabees, or power-tripping ops.
Why does the first person into a channel have a right to keep it forever? Just because that's the way the system is? Why does the system have to be that way? Because you're one of those ops and like the power??
The "first person" argument is valid, about nicks and about channels.
Why should one person have the ability to control what nick you can use, or what channel you can use?
Look at how ICQ does names, you can pick any name, even if anyone else uses it. The UIN is the only unique bit. When you want to message 'Batman' or any other common nick you look at the email (or in IRC terms, the hostname) and pick the right one. From then on, you can just use the common name.
That system gets by perfectly without anyone having sole rights to the name. So why couldn't IRC work that way?
Simply because people aren't happy unless they control something. They think their spark of creative genius ("Hey, I'll name myself after a comic-book character!") deserves some special recognition... ("Hey, I'll keep anyone else from doing it!")
The same goes for channels. Why do you need someone to "maintain order" in a channel? If you could just ignore someone and they'd never bug you again, what is really gained from kicking them?
"But I want a private channel!"
Then choose one with a name nobody else will ever want to go into. There's no reason you need to make #marvel, #windows, #quake, or any other commonly-named channel your private one. Create #MyChan348234, +s+i it, and invite your friends (off of one of the commonly-named channels) into it for anything private.
It also makes the system a lot easier. There's no need for the complication of a nick-serv and a chan-serv. If nobody can own anything, you don't need to keep track of ownership.
The system becomes less complex, people stop attacking each other for control because there is no control, etc.
Can you see a problem with this system, or are you just upset at the idea of losing ops?
I'd be devestated by your comments if I'd spent more than an hour on IRC in the last few years.
I realized it was just a political game for people and left when IMs became a decent alternative to IRC for coordinating with a group of net friends in realtime.
I just happen to be able to see that the problem is people like you. Op lovers who'll do anything to defend their little habit.
Say it with me, "I'm not a control freak! I never kick anyone... unless they mouth me off."
It's people with your attitude who resist having an op-free network where nobody can lord their power over anyone else. If you'd step back and look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't want to have to play nice to some teenage kid with ops just because he wants to chat, you'd see the inherent problems in the system.
I guess from the position of that young kid with their first taste of power, it's pretty cool though.
Come back to this conversation in ten years, if you've got any friends in real life, you'll see it a bit differently. If you're still on IRC all the time, well, you won't have aged much.
Oh wow, without your sage wisdom, nobody would ever be able to properly converse. I mean, you're an op, not just because you were the first person to create a certain channel, but because you are somehow a wise arbiter of what should and should not be said. I bow to your mighty wisdom.
If you didn't have ops and instead had to rely on/ignore, you still wouldn't have to listen to anyone you didn't like. The only difference is that you couldn't force your will on them.
It's easy to tell. People who resort to person insults over the issue are people whose social standing rests completely on the '@'.
Tell you what. Get a tattoo of an @ sign on your face. That'll let people know you're to be respected.
If channels had random names, cybersquatting wouldn't be a problem. But if someone wants to talk Counterstrike (for example), which channel do you think they'll try. Starting another channel by another name isn't going to do any good because nobody would ever go there.
Thus, the first person to start a channel (and thus get ops) gets to lord it over everyone who goes there after that.
The only people who like the ops system are those who've kissed enough ass to get ops and thus are waiting their turn, for some sycophant to latch onto their sphincter.
And if the people aren't mature, it ends up with the op kicking the non-op over whatever disagreement they have.
Nick protection is just plain silly. It's like bob@server.com ranting that bob@aol.com should have to change his email address. If you want to see who you're talking to, look at their hostname.
I don't think invite-only channel are a bad idea, if they don't have names...
The problem with someone +s or +i'ing a channel is that they take a name someone else might want to use (because, face it, #perl is an obvious channel to talk to perl programmers, etc) and make it off-limits.
I think people should be able to make private channels that are assigned some unique identifier (ie, random characters) and be able to control that. Other channels, with names that attract others? No. Why is your claim to #starwars any better than anyone else's? Why do you have to right to kick/silence someone? Chances are from the viewpoint of an outsider, you were as big an ass to the guy you want to kick as he was to you.
Having the server do a few regexps isn't going to take a lot of CPU and it'd save sending a message through a web of servers, DoSing the receiver, who was just going to throw it away anyways.
If people just acted like grown-ups and ignored jerks, those jerks would go away. However, if people rely of ops or irc-ops to kick someone off, that person will be justifiably annoyed. And it also gives them attention.
A/ignore that actually worked would be best. It'd take away all attention and it wouldn't censor people who just have a different view. I've often been kicked off of channels for not toeing the party line. I mentioned on #c once (after fighting with a half-assed regexp library) that I really wished there was a regexp library as powerful and integrated as in perl. I got banned for that. Not a biggy, I didn't IRC much, but it annoyed me that instead of talking someone just relied on ops. The last refuge of the idiot.
Later I mentioned an idea of getting rid of ops and the only objections I heard were that people wouldn't be able to give friends ops. Nobody had any serious concerns about how the system would work, just that they wouldn't be able to give ops to people they liked. (And ban people they didn't.) Wow, that opened my eyes to the type of people who tend to hang out in that environment.
If you didn't ban people, you wouldn't have to worry about designing a whole system just to allow banning.
Implement/ignore at the server level (like on some networks) so that when you ignore someone it doesn't even send you anything anymore. That remove the personal-level DoS attacks. (Well, that and not displaying the user's address.)
Get rid of ops at the same time. Let people deal with anyone they dislike by simply ignoring them.
The problem?
It'll never be done. The lusers who crave ops don't just want to ignore someone, it irks them that this person should be allowed to say something that they don't like. They want to kick these people off of a channel just to keep them from saying whatever it is they say.
Which is why most people play with IRC for a while but then quit using it, they get fed up with the bullshit politicing you have to go through.
Because people who prefer Undernet and DALnet tend to prefer them because of channel/nick protection.
That means that if they got there first and made a channel with a popular name (#quake, #perl, #pokemon, etc) that they will control it until the end of time. Alternatively, if they suck up to one of these people, they can get ops. With the @X or @W 'bots', they can log in any time of the day and get ops. Then they be an op. With ops. Did I mention they tend to be op-happy?
They also rarely tend to be happy with just having ops. They tend to use it... Kick anyone who disagrees with them, or the party line. Offer ops to people who will kiss their ass, etc.
Regular (EFNet) IRC has a bit of this, but with the complete channel ownership it gets worse.
You know, the facist attitude of most IRCers is exactly the opposite of what is required.
Ops, nick protection, and channel protection. All worthless. All designed to beef up the ego of people who have to prove that they're on the bot and can k1x0r your ass. Wow, so l33t. The hackers are preferable to that.
All you really need on a system like IRC is/ignore that works at the server level. Someone bothering you? Ignore them.
Someone coming into YOUR channel and doing things you don't like? Deal with it. It's not for you to tell everyone else on the channel that they can't listen to this person (by kicking them). They can make that decision on their own. It's for you to ignore them and get on with your life.
But, I'm sure you don't want to hear any of this. Most IRCers I know all live for ops, it's all about sucking up until they're added to the ops list, so that they get to kick people, etc. They're just like the script kiddies but without the ability to use back orifice or sub-seven.
As far as I'm concerned, you can have Dalnet. It's sole use is collecting gits like you and keeping them far away from someone who just wants to use a chat system and doesn't want a life based around a little '@'.
I really hope you work in manual labour, because if you work with computers you're running a huge scam on any employers.
Some basics.
1) If they determined the computers who untrustworthy now they'd pay one junior tech to install Windows, that's 20 minutes. They'd do one install of any needed application, maybe 40 minutes, if we assume a lot of programs. Then they'd ghost it, burn the image, and ghost it onto the other terminals. Figure 10 minutes per station, but it's parallizable, burn multiple copies, have multiple techs working. At ~12 minutes (rolling in some overhead to make the math pretty) per terminal, that's 5/hour, for maybe $4 each at a junior tech's likely wage. Multiply that by 200 and you've repaired all the machines for $800...
2) If you did hire a security consultant, he'd only need to look at one machine to determine if there was a problem. He'd then pass it off to the junior techs mentioned in #1.
3) The university isn't selling bandwidth, they're claiming it was stolen. That means they can only claim their cost. As shown in many posts, this cost is just a few dollars.
4) The RC5 client isn't any more likely to become a security hole than Scandisk. It doesn't listen for an outside connection so it's a whole lot different than the type of thing you're thinking of.
5) The dnet client doesn't slow down the machines it's running on, that's the whole point in running it at IDLE priority, it only runs when the machine isn't doing anything, and it consumes about 2.5MB of memory, all of which is easily swapped out for a higher-priority process. (I saw benchmarks that showed the computer performing exactly the same with and without the RC5 client running.)
Sheesh.
As I said, I really hope you don't represent yourself as a computer expert.
Actually, the view that everyone needs to develop on their own timescale is the rational one.
There are many people who are not emotionally ready for sex into their thirties.
Is it hard to believe that there are people who would mature faster than average, and be on the other side of any arbitrary limit that you set?
Should all people be forbidden to have sex until the age at which the lowest common denominator should?
The only reason we have arbitrary limits for things like this (and drinking, military service, etc) are because it's too complex to decide on a case-by-case basis. But who is to say that the arbitrary limit we picked is better than anyone else's? We need to study the effects on their children before we can claim to have the superior law.
Not to imply anything about the rest of the post...
You don't need enough gold for the whole GDP, much of that money is spent multiple times. You need enough to back up all the money in circulation.
Anyways, I think it was a mistake to get rid of some absolute limit on the ammount of currency printed. IMHO it didn't have to be gold, which has the drawback of being mined regularly. But the fact that you get poorer every time the government prints out more money is just ridiculous.
Of course, the government would never say this, they're the ones who made the change. Admitting it wasn't the greatest move ever would be tantamount to admitting their guilt for the rampant inflation of the recent past.
Now, I think the gold standard had some drawbacks too, but not as many as going to a nothing-standard.
Re:You twisted the question though.
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If spam was actually marked as spam, then yes, it would be much faster to delete it. Or, write a filter to do so.
But it's not. It's intentionally disguised to look like non-spam email.
I'm on a few mailing lists, and have a bunch of people contacting me from places like Slashdot, Kuroshin, etc. Not to mention potential clients.
A lot of them send me mail with subjects like "Hi!", "Re: posting", or "We talked at COMDEX"... I can't just whip through and delete spam, I actually have to look at every message.
This takes probably a minute for every five messages I get, because some of my potential clients actually send me gaudy HTML email.
For 75 messages then, spam costs me about $45, my billable rate for general consulting. It's time I spend on work-related matters, for which I can't actually bill.
And 75 messages of spam is fairly common, sometimes I get many more.
Ggreat answer. Anyone who complains about the system must be a criminal. Way to marginalize everyone.
Maybe I simply realize that laws which allow the police to permanently seize (ie, not impound overnight) any property without a trial are bad laws.
Sorry, but I don't expect much justice from a system where the police have often been the rented thugs for $cientology, where the courts are corrupt (2600 DeCSS) and there's no recourse again the judge, where a company can break anyone they wish simply by trumping up charges and dragging you through court until you go broke.
I realize that this is rare and 99.9% of people won't encounter any of this. But for those who do, what good are our supposed protections if we don't force the police to respect them? If we don't remove judges who ignore them.
We both recognize that the system has problems, rare as they may be. The difference is that I care about fixing them now, regardless of who they affect. You want to wait because they don't affect you. I think the smart thing to do is fix it now, before it affects anyone else, let alone you.
If our system mistreats even one person, that's too many. I don't support throwing it all away because of that and picking up some new system, but I think we should keep fixing it until it's perfect. It never will be, but if we keep fixing bugs as they pop up (by recognizing them as bugs worth fixing) then we can keep it from degrading slowly.
Yeah, but it makes slightly more sense than if you think about it the other direction where open source authors are in the wrong.
Having more software doesn't encourage users to pirate MS software. It'd be having no choices that would encourage that.
And the rest of it is based on MS's lies. They claim that all computers sold are only to run their software, so if it hasn't been bought for a computer, that computer will inevitably be running pirated copies.
They also claim that they lose money from piracy. That's obviously false, all they lose is a potential sale, and usually because it's some 13-year old kid who wouldn't have paid $500 for an OS, it's a very small potential.
So, it's mainly MS's logic that's circular. But, I'm quite willing to exploit it, after all, they've lied to government and exploited us long enough.
Of yeah, keep saying that MS's actions don't affect your stock price.
You *directly* profit from MS's actions, because public perception of the stock price is (usually) based on the actions of Bill and friends.
If it weren't, you wouldn't care what the court did to Billy boy. But, you seem to mind, so... maybe it does matter?
I'm not saying you're directly responsible to their actions, but by supporting them, you and people like you, are driving up their stock price, rewarding them by increasing the value of their stock options.
Most MS stockholders I've talked to have wanted all the charges against MS dropped, even as they've acknowledged their validity, because it hurts their precious stock price. That's a perfect example of selling out the rest of humanity just so you benefit, regardless of the kind of scum you're supporting.
Sorry, but I'd rather support all the companies MS crushed along the way with their unfair trade practices, insane lawsuits, and "piracy" raids, than to support MS themselves. But maybe if you rationalize it enough, you don't even see this anymore.
Wow! Thanks for posting that, it made my day. I'm so used to seeing rich CEOs get off scott-free. It's very heartening to see they get punished every now and then.
*Your* purchase, along with that of all other purchasers, is the reason that MS stock has any value at all. If you hadn't purchased, it'd be that tiny bit lower.
Supply and demand. Supply is fixed, you upped the demand, the price increased accordingly.
Now, you happened to do this at a really bad time, but, all else being equal, MS's stock price is higher (if only by a fraction of a cent) than it would have been without you.
You don't really seem to care what you profit from though, so I'm not upset that you bought as it plummeted. Almost makes me believe in karma.
You're just a crackpot troll, but you're also completely wrong, so I'll smack you around for it...
Even if open source developers had anything to do with this, their writing free software, in a price sense, means that less people will pirate software because they have free alternatives.
And we know that pirated software is a LOSS for microsoft. For every copy of Office that someone copies, Microsoft basically has to burn $300.
So... Microsoft and the BSA should PAY Linus for every copy of Linux in use, because that's someone who isn't copying windows. And ditto with Star Office, there's someone who doesn't need to copy MS Office.
Open source developing would be very profitable if Microsoft would actually pay the people who keep it from losing money.
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Actually, yes. It does please me that these problems are becoming widespread.
It's the same as releasing an exploit to crash webservers. If script-kiddies take out a bunch of high-profile sites, like amazon or the whitehouse, it'll force people to beef up security. This prevents someone with a more insidious motive from doing the same thing later. (ie bn.com DoSing amazon (or paying kiddies to do it.))
Similarly, if a large number of people get their identity stolen by small-time crooks, it'll force us to fix the system before someone organizaed gets into it and really fucks us up.
Hmmm. Would be an interesting DoS... Automate identity theft, rack up huge charges to overseas companies for non-refundable products. Because the order was with a valid card, Visa/MC wouldn't be able to reverse the charges to the company. Hit them with a few billion in bad charges all in a month.
You know, we're almost at the point where a skilled hacker could wipe out a good chunk of the western economic world. The benefit is that the hardest hit would be those with the least real value, companies whose holdings are mostly stock, or debts, etc.
It won't be all that long...
Really, for the hour or two every year, you might want to consider building your own system. If you go with decent parts (ie, nothing from a company going bankrupt) you won't have any install issues. These days you can boot off of CD and have an install going in minutes.
But I dislike using an OS I didn't install myself because I've got strong preferences for what gets installed, etc. Well worth the 20m it takes to install Win2k, or 45m for Linux (Takes longer, cause I always install a bunch more stuff.)
If that hour or two is really that hard to come by, or if you never do it and it would take a lot longer, consider making a list of parts and getting a local consultant or small store to do it for you.
Saving shipping alone is likely to pay for an hour or consultant time (Expect $50/hour, it's not really high-end stuff) and you get a lot more control over what you get.
This is proven by the simple fact that you can get a Dual Athlon this way, where many major companies (Dell, etc) won't even sell powerful single-CPU Athlons.
I've had great luck buying my computer parts from a hardware consultant. He burns everything in, with the appropriate manufacturer's util when applicable, downloads and burns drivers when needed, and delivers them to my home after 6pm, when I'm back from work. Being that he doesn't have a storefront it usually ends up being the same price (+/- 5%) as the local stores, even the really cheap ones. (With retail products, he doesn't do the volume to get really cheap OEM stuff, but these days I like the warranties.)
Palm OS is running on top of AMX.
http://www.kadak.com/html/kdkp1400.htm
AMX is a real-time OS that's available for x86 and many CPUs common in embedded applications.
AMX is royalty free (if distributed in executable form (ie compiled)).
So Palm didn't write everything on the Palm, specifically not the hardest bit, the realtime elements. Palm OS deals with the resource allocation and UI issues, leaving task scheduling and (if they go to ARM) memory protection issues for the AMX segment.
IMHO, it was a very smart move. AMX is incredibly stable, very low overhead, and abstracts a lot of the annoying hardware issues, making it easier to port Palm to a new CPU (AMX already supports ARM, and has for quite a while.)
Check out www.r3mix.com
They mention a player called, I think, EAC, but they have a lot more details.
They also have information on how to do really high-quality rips and which programs to use.
At about 180kbps VBR, with Lame, or another good program, you can get MUCH better quality than Audio Catalyst, or other common ripper, will do at 320kbps, let alone 128kbps. Almost CD quality.
When you're done, post it on www.kuro5hin.org
... Let people post with their votes on which sounds best. At the end, post the list of which sample came from which program, and a which bit-rate. At that point, post the compressed files as well so people can verify the results.
I'd suggest doing a blind test, compress the samples with various programs and bit-rates, then convert them back to wav files. Save them with names like "Rock-Sample1", "Rock-Sample2"
If you post that story (or email me for help in writing it and such) vote for it!
Gah, why do people insist on using lame metaphors when discussing something?
/IGNORE that was properly implemented, and hostnames that were properly obfuscated (to prevent people doing a direct DoS) would prevent these problems too.
/ignore would deal with this. These people don't want to avoid seeing someone who's bugging them, they want to prevent that person from saying anything. If all they cared about was keeping from seeing floods or offensive comments, they'd realize that I proposed a mechanism to prevent that.
b) I'm saying people should just cope with it. Scratch these annoyingly complex systems which exist JUST to give people exclusive power over a nick or a channel.
The nick/chan serv elements are more of a problem than they're worth. The only reason I've ever got for keeping them when I've proposed a new, simpler, IRC model, is that people want ops.
My sole problem with ops is people who won't give it up, wanting to damn the system just so they get their power.
If IRC was FIXED, it wouldn't have people trying to DoS servers to split channels, or kick people to get nicks. It also wouldn't need complex and easily broken system for preventing this. People would still try to attack each other, but a
I've tried to work with IRC developers, I've proposed this idea to hundreds of people. The *ONLY* argument I've ever heard against it is that it doesn't have ops, and people wouldn't be able to kick people, or give ops to their friends.
They say this in various ways "what if someone came into my channel and started..." or such. But
To me, this as good as proves that most IRC users are ass-kissing op-wannabees, or power-tripping ops.
Why does the first person into a channel have a right to keep it forever? Just because that's the way the system is? Why does the system have to be that way? Because you're one of those ops and like the power??
The "first person" argument is valid, about nicks and about channels.
Why should one person have the ability to control what nick you can use, or what channel you can use?
Look at how ICQ does names, you can pick any name, even if anyone else uses it. The UIN is the only unique bit. When you want to message 'Batman' or any other common nick you look at the email (or in IRC terms, the hostname) and pick the right one. From then on, you can just use the common name.
That system gets by perfectly without anyone having sole rights to the name. So why couldn't IRC work that way?
Simply because people aren't happy unless they control something. They think their spark of creative genius ("Hey, I'll name myself after a comic-book character!") deserves some special recognition... ("Hey, I'll keep anyone else from doing it!")
The same goes for channels. Why do you need someone to "maintain order" in a channel? If you could just ignore someone and they'd never bug you again, what is really gained from kicking them?
"But I want a private channel!"
Then choose one with a name nobody else will ever want to go into. There's no reason you need to make #marvel, #windows, #quake, or any other commonly-named channel your private one. Create #MyChan348234, +s+i it, and invite your friends (off of one of the commonly-named channels) into it for anything private.
It also makes the system a lot easier. There's no need for the complication of a nick-serv and a chan-serv. If nobody can own anything, you don't need to keep track of ownership.
The system becomes less complex, people stop attacking each other for control because there is no control, etc.
Can you see a problem with this system, or are you just upset at the idea of losing ops?
I'd be devestated by your comments if I'd spent more than an hour on IRC in the last few years.
I realized it was just a political game for people and left when IMs became a decent alternative to IRC for coordinating with a group of net friends in realtime.
I just happen to be able to see that the problem is people like you. Op lovers who'll do anything to defend their little habit.
Say it with me, "I'm not a control freak! I never kick anyone... unless they mouth me off."
It's people with your attitude who resist having an op-free network where nobody can lord their power over anyone else. If you'd step back and look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't want to have to play nice to some teenage kid with ops just because he wants to chat, you'd see the inherent problems in the system.
I guess from the position of that young kid with their first taste of power, it's pretty cool though.
Come back to this conversation in ten years, if you've got any friends in real life, you'll see it a bit differently. If you're still on IRC all the time, well, you won't have aged much.
Oh wow, without your sage wisdom, nobody would ever be able to properly converse. I mean, you're an op, not just because you were the first person to create a certain channel, but because you are somehow a wise arbiter of what should and should not be said. I bow to your mighty wisdom.
/ignore, you still wouldn't have to listen to anyone you didn't like. The only difference is that you couldn't force your will on them.
If you didn't have ops and instead had to rely on
Yup, you're an op on some channel.
It's easy to tell. People who resort to person insults over the issue are people whose social standing rests completely on the '@'.
Tell you what. Get a tattoo of an @ sign on your face. That'll let people know you're to be respected.
If channels had random names, cybersquatting wouldn't be a problem. But if someone wants to talk Counterstrike (for example), which channel do you think they'll try. Starting another channel by another name isn't going to do any good because nobody would ever go there.
Thus, the first person to start a channel (and thus get ops) gets to lord it over everyone who goes there after that.
The only people who like the ops system are those who've kissed enough ass to get ops and thus are waiting their turn, for some sycophant to latch onto their sphincter.
And if the people aren't mature, it ends up with the op kicking the non-op over whatever disagreement they have.
Nick protection is just plain silly. It's like bob@server.com ranting that bob@aol.com should have to change his email address. If you want to see who you're talking to, look at their hostname.
Just another example of people wanting control...
I don't think invite-only channel are a bad idea, if they don't have names...
/ignore that actually worked would be best. It'd take away all attention and it wouldn't censor people who just have a different view. I've often been kicked off of channels for not toeing the party line. I mentioned on #c once (after fighting with a half-assed regexp library) that I really wished there was a regexp library as powerful and integrated as in perl. I got banned for that. Not a biggy, I didn't IRC much, but it annoyed me that instead of talking someone just relied on ops. The last refuge of the idiot.
The problem with someone +s or +i'ing a channel is that they take a name someone else might want to use (because, face it, #perl is an obvious channel to talk to perl programmers, etc) and make it off-limits.
I think people should be able to make private channels that are assigned some unique identifier (ie, random characters) and be able to control that. Other channels, with names that attract others? No. Why is your claim to #starwars any better than anyone else's? Why do you have to right to kick/silence someone? Chances are from the viewpoint of an outsider, you were as big an ass to the guy you want to kick as he was to you.
Having the server do a few regexps isn't going to take a lot of CPU and it'd save sending a message through a web of servers, DoSing the receiver, who was just going to throw it away anyways.
If people just acted like grown-ups and ignored jerks, those jerks would go away. However, if people rely of ops or irc-ops to kick someone off, that person will be justifiably annoyed. And it also gives them attention.
A
Later I mentioned an idea of getting rid of ops and the only objections I heard were that people wouldn't be able to give friends ops. Nobody had any serious concerns about how the system would work, just that they wouldn't be able to give ops to people they liked. (And ban people they didn't.) Wow, that opened my eyes to the type of people who tend to hang out in that environment.
If you didn't ban people, you wouldn't have to worry about designing a whole system just to allow banning.
/ignore at the server level (like on some networks) so that when you ignore someone it doesn't even send you anything anymore. That remove the personal-level DoS attacks. (Well, that and not displaying the user's address.)
Implement
Get rid of ops at the same time. Let people deal with anyone they dislike by simply ignoring them.
The problem?
It'll never be done. The lusers who crave ops don't just want to ignore someone, it irks them that this person should be allowed to say something that they don't like. They want to kick these people off of a channel just to keep them from saying whatever it is they say.
Which is why most people play with IRC for a while but then quit using it, they get fed up with the bullshit politicing you have to go through.
Because people who prefer Undernet and DALnet tend to prefer them because of channel/nick protection.
That means that if they got there first and made a channel with a popular name (#quake, #perl, #pokemon, etc) that they will control it until the end of time. Alternatively, if they suck up to one of these people, they can get ops. With the @X or @W 'bots', they can log in any time of the day and get ops. Then they be an op. With ops. Did I mention they tend to be op-happy?
They also rarely tend to be happy with just having ops. They tend to use it... Kick anyone who disagrees with them, or the party line. Offer ops to people who will kiss their ass, etc.
Regular (EFNet) IRC has a bit of this, but with the complete channel ownership it gets worse.
You know, the facist attitude of most IRCers is exactly the opposite of what is required.
/ignore that works at the server level. Someone bothering you? Ignore them.
Ops, nick protection, and channel protection. All worthless. All designed to beef up the ego of people who have to prove that they're on the bot and can k1x0r your ass. Wow, so l33t. The hackers are preferable to that.
All you really need on a system like IRC is
Someone coming into YOUR channel and doing things you don't like? Deal with it. It's not for you to tell everyone else on the channel that they can't listen to this person (by kicking them). They can make that decision on their own. It's for you to ignore them and get on with your life.
But, I'm sure you don't want to hear any of this. Most IRCers I know all live for ops, it's all about sucking up until they're added to the ops list, so that they get to kick people, etc. They're just like the script kiddies but without the ability to use back orifice or sub-seven.
As far as I'm concerned, you can have Dalnet. It's sole use is collecting gits like you and keeping them far away from someone who just wants to use a chat system and doesn't want a life based around a little '@'.
I really hope you work in manual labour, because if you work with computers you're running a huge scam on any employers.
Some basics.
1) If they determined the computers who untrustworthy now they'd pay one junior tech to install Windows, that's 20 minutes. They'd do one install of any needed application, maybe 40 minutes, if we assume a lot of programs. Then they'd ghost it, burn the image, and ghost it onto the other terminals. Figure 10 minutes per station, but it's parallizable, burn multiple copies, have multiple techs working. At ~12 minutes (rolling in some overhead to make the math pretty) per terminal, that's 5/hour, for maybe $4 each at a junior tech's likely wage. Multiply that by 200 and you've repaired all the machines for $800...
2) If you did hire a security consultant, he'd only need to look at one machine to determine if there was a problem. He'd then pass it off to the junior techs mentioned in #1.
3) The university isn't selling bandwidth, they're claiming it was stolen. That means they can only claim their cost. As shown in many posts, this cost is just a few dollars.
4) The RC5 client isn't any more likely to become a security hole than Scandisk. It doesn't listen for an outside connection so it's a whole lot different than the type of thing you're thinking of.
5) The dnet client doesn't slow down the machines it's running on, that's the whole point in running it at IDLE priority, it only runs when the machine isn't doing anything, and it consumes about 2.5MB of memory, all of which is easily swapped out for a higher-priority process. (I saw benchmarks that showed the computer performing exactly the same with and without the RC5 client running.)
Sheesh.
As I said, I really hope you don't represent yourself as a computer expert.
Actually, the view that everyone needs to develop on their own timescale is the rational one.
There are many people who are not emotionally ready for sex into their thirties.
Is it hard to believe that there are people who would mature faster than average, and be on the other side of any arbitrary limit that you set?
Should all people be forbidden to have sex until the age at which the lowest common denominator should?
The only reason we have arbitrary limits for things like this (and drinking, military service, etc) are because it's too complex to decide on a case-by-case basis. But who is to say that the arbitrary limit we picked is better than anyone else's? We need to study the effects on their children before we can claim to have the superior law.
Not to imply anything about the rest of the post...
You don't need enough gold for the whole GDP, much of that money is spent multiple times. You need enough to back up all the money in circulation.
Anyways, I think it was a mistake to get rid of some absolute limit on the ammount of currency printed. IMHO it didn't have to be gold, which has the drawback of being mined regularly. But the fact that you get poorer every time the government prints out more money is just ridiculous.
Of course, the government would never say this, they're the ones who made the change. Admitting it wasn't the greatest move ever would be tantamount to admitting their guilt for the rampant inflation of the recent past.
Now, I think the gold standard had some drawbacks too, but not as many as going to a nothing-standard.
If spam was actually marked as spam, then yes, it would be much faster to delete it. Or, write a filter to do so.
But it's not. It's intentionally disguised to look like non-spam email.
I'm on a few mailing lists, and have a bunch of people contacting me from places like Slashdot, Kuroshin, etc. Not to mention potential clients.
A lot of them send me mail with subjects like "Hi!", "Re: posting", or "We talked at COMDEX"... I can't just whip through and delete spam, I actually have to look at every message.
This takes probably a minute for every five messages I get, because some of my potential clients actually send me gaudy HTML email.
For 75 messages then, spam costs me about $45, my billable rate for general consulting. It's time I spend on work-related matters, for which I can't actually bill.
And 75 messages of spam is fairly common, sometimes I get many more.
Ggreat answer. Anyone who complains about the system must be a criminal. Way to marginalize everyone.
Maybe I simply realize that laws which allow the police to permanently seize (ie, not impound overnight) any property without a trial are bad laws.
Sorry, but I don't expect much justice from a system where the police have often been the rented thugs for $cientology, where the courts are corrupt (2600 DeCSS) and there's no recourse again the judge, where a company can break anyone they wish simply by trumping up charges and dragging you through court until you go broke.
I realize that this is rare and 99.9% of people won't encounter any of this. But for those who do, what good are our supposed protections if we don't force the police to respect them? If we don't remove judges who ignore them.
We both recognize that the system has problems, rare as they may be. The difference is that I care about fixing them now, regardless of who they affect. You want to wait because they don't affect you. I think the smart thing to do is fix it now, before it affects anyone else, let alone you.
If our system mistreats even one person, that's too many. I don't support throwing it all away because of that and picking up some new system, but I think we should keep fixing it until it's perfect. It never will be, but if we keep fixing bugs as they pop up (by recognizing them as bugs worth fixing) then we can keep it from degrading slowly.
Yeah, but it makes slightly more sense than if you think about it the other direction where open source authors are in the wrong.
Having more software doesn't encourage users to pirate MS software. It'd be having no choices that would encourage that.
And the rest of it is based on MS's lies. They claim that all computers sold are only to run their software, so if it hasn't been bought for a computer, that computer will inevitably be running pirated copies.
They also claim that they lose money from piracy. That's obviously false, all they lose is a potential sale, and usually because it's some 13-year old kid who wouldn't have paid $500 for an OS, it's a very small potential.
So, it's mainly MS's logic that's circular. But, I'm quite willing to exploit it, after all, they've lied to government and exploited us long enough.
Of yeah, keep saying that MS's actions don't affect your stock price.
You *directly* profit from MS's actions, because public perception of the stock price is (usually) based on the actions of Bill and friends.
If it weren't, you wouldn't care what the court did to Billy boy. But, you seem to mind, so... maybe it does matter?
I'm not saying you're directly responsible to their actions, but by supporting them, you and people like you, are driving up their stock price, rewarding them by increasing the value of their stock options.
Most MS stockholders I've talked to have wanted all the charges against MS dropped, even as they've acknowledged their validity, because it hurts their precious stock price. That's a perfect example of selling out the rest of humanity just so you benefit, regardless of the kind of scum you're supporting.
Sorry, but I'd rather support all the companies MS crushed along the way with their unfair trade practices, insane lawsuits, and "piracy" raids, than to support MS themselves. But maybe if you rationalize it enough, you don't even see this anymore.
Wow! Thanks for posting that, it made my day. I'm so used to seeing rich CEOs get off scott-free. It's very heartening to see they get punished every now and then.
*Your* purchase, along with that of all other purchasers, is the reason that MS stock has any value at all. If you hadn't purchased, it'd be that tiny bit lower.
Supply and demand. Supply is fixed, you upped the demand, the price increased accordingly.
Now, you happened to do this at a really bad time, but, all else being equal, MS's stock price is higher (if only by a fraction of a cent) than it would have been without you.
You don't really seem to care what you profit from though, so I'm not upset that you bought as it plummeted. Almost makes me believe in karma.
You're just a crackpot troll, but you're also completely wrong, so I'll smack you around for it...
Even if open source developers had anything to do with this, their writing free software, in a price sense, means that less people will pirate software because they have free alternatives.
And we know that pirated software is a LOSS for microsoft. For every copy of Office that someone copies, Microsoft basically has to burn $300.
So... Microsoft and the BSA should PAY Linus for every copy of Linux in use, because that's someone who isn't copying windows. And ditto with Star Office, there's someone who doesn't need to copy MS Office.
Open source developing would be very profitable if Microsoft would actually pay the people who keep it from losing money.