It requires the web-"designer" to hint, what pages to prefetch. Since, the employer of named designer pays for the bandwith, it surely will be used only at adequate places (Cost/Benefit).
So far as I can tell from the prefetching FAQ, there's nothing built into this to keep it from, say, prefetching banner ads, which are very typically hosted on a different server than 'real' web content. Thus, the designer of a web page can force your browser to download ads for his benefit and without any cost to him. The cost is borne either by you (if you have limted transfer/month, like most Australian cable modem users) or your ISP.
I block popups with Moz and I also block known banner-ad servers. If I used this feature and didn't happen have a sever blocked, then I could be forced to download images from it which would sit in my browser cache and never be displayed. Like I said, it's a worst-case scenario, but a very viable one.
Who ever thought that we'd have to cripple Javascript with pop-up blockers and Moz's anti-JS features to get rid of annoying (and costly) advertising?
Remember all those offline browsers and 'modem accelerators' that sucked up your modem bandwidth by downloading contantly, spidering every link on every page you visited?
While the Mozilla project is an incredible piece of work, I have to question this feature. It appears that they've designed it so that a page designer or webmaster decides what is appropriate for prefetching or not. Still, if used inappropriately, this feature could lead to more information being transmitted across the internet that is either discarded or unwanted. In a worst-case scenario, an inexperienced web designer might routinely run into his bandwidth cap or unintentionally force users who have bandwidth caps to exhaust their allowance.
If you can only download 3GB per month over your cable modem, do you really want the designer of a page deciding that your browser needs to spend time downloading ads or useless images?
For some people, this could be really useful. For others, it could be a real pain. Team-Moz, if you have any consideration at all, please adjust the default configuration of Mozilla so that this feature is turned OFF.
I love the example they use. They talk about sliding a coffin into a grave at a fraction of the speed of light sufficient to length-contract the coffin by 1/5 (or the grave, to the POV of the pall bearers...)
Ultra Undertakers deliver a coffin to the graveyard by sliding it along the ground at such a high velocity that the Lorentz contraction factor is gamma = 5. The gravediggers have dug a hole for the coffin with the same proper length as the proper length of the coffin itself. Thus a snug fit is possible when the coffin is at rest. In the frame of the gravediggers, the coffin is Lorentz contracted by 1/5 and so the coffin readily falls in. However, in the frame of the undertakers, it is the grave which is length contracted and so the coffin will surely not fall in.
The idea is, of course, that the coffin is not rigid and would have to flow into the grave, the front coming to rest before the end:
As so often happens, the resolution of this paradox rests with simultaneity. If we say that the coffin begins to fall in the gravedigger's frame at t=0 (i.e. the instant the rear of the coffin passes over the edge of the grave) then in the undertaker's frame, the rear will also start to fall at t'=0 but the front will start to fall at an earlier time. In fact the coffin must flow into the hole!
What amazes me is that the person who came up with this example never stopped to consider what would happen to a planet if you slugged a coffin-sized missile into it at better than 2/3rds c.
Theoretcially (we'll likely never have building materials struturally sound enough to test this) light should behave in almost exactly this manner close to a black hole. For example, say you've built a circular torus space station around a black hole. If you're within a certain radius to the singularity, but still outside the event horizon, light will bend towards the blackhole, allowing your vision to see 360 degrees around the torus. You can stand in one point and see your back an apparent distance equal to the circumfurence of your imaginary torus away. Closer than that radius means that the torus would appear to bend the wrong way.
Webcasting, at least the individual-run stations I see, could care less about CARP or any fees anyone seeks to impose on them. The individuals I see who do care about it don't have any plans to stop broadcasting, but instead intend to take their broadcasts deeper underground. A tactic I have seen is that a broadcaster will firewall his shoutcast or icecast stream and then do allows on individual IP addresses that want to listen based on e-mail requests. Of course this is easily defeatable by someone with half a brain, but not by automated methods.
Another thing I've seen is webcasters who refuse to play music commercially released in the U.S. They play J-, K-, and C-pop, some of which is quite good. They play German techno and metal, and un-US-released Euro-pop. They also play tracks that are freely available downloads from amature-music sites like Acid Planet
This is, of course, the music industry's largest fear... that the U.S. public will realize that they are not the only, nor even the best source of music in the world.
I've noticed that many people, my self included, try to assign genders to colors, sounds, words, numbers, even letters.
Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Black, Brown Beige - Male Blue, Purple, Pink, Tan, Gray, White - Female
C, D, G, H, J, L, M, N, O, T U, W, Z - Male A, B, E, F, I, K, P, Q, R, S, V, X, Y - Female
1, 4, 5, 7, 0 - Male 2, 3, 6, 8, 9 - Female
Mirrored and transparent surfaces are female, while colored or textured surfaces are male.
Some english-speaking people I've discussed this with have no association. Other people I've discussed this with who have the same association usually have different association. One person who spoke english *and* spanish (a language with gender built in) had much stronger reactions than I did. Note that the association doesn't seem to have anything to with shape, order, or similarity. I really think this is because the neurons that are responsible for recognizing those shapes are stimulating the neurons responsible for recognizing face and body shapes.
One of my favorite web browsing features comes from a project called Pornzilla, an effort to turn Moz into a better poon-viewing platform.
At the link above, there's a neat little javascript-bookmarklet which will open a new window and populated with all images linkd to on any given page. You can then save just the images en-masse or view them without clicking to and fro a bunch.
Yes, it's a neat invention for porn surfers. It's even better for any kind of web artwork or to check image links on a page you're developing. Unfortuneatly, it chokes on donkey balls on sites that check referrer headers before serving images.
A lot of people assume that the ADA is a farce designed to quiet the disgruntled whinings of mentally or physically disabled people. It's a bone tossed to them in much the same way that senior citezens get discounts and prefferential treatment in businesses. It's annoying for other customers and frequently inconvenient.
After all, how many handicapped parking places does the mall need?
What people who think that this is a joke fail to consider, however, is the fact that without the ADA in place, businesses can and will discriminate against handicapped people.
Consider for a second your state's major university. We'll use the University of Texas for an example, because I'm familiar with it. Most of the buildings were constructed in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the multi-story buildings have elevators, but not all of them. During class-time, the elevators are so full that if you want to get to class on time, you have to use the stairs. Remember that Austin is very hilly. There are stairs everywhere, even for one-story buildings.
Now lets assume that you were in a car wreck with a drunk driver and lost the use of your legs. Despite your new disability you are a smart individual who can get a job that does not require the use of your legs.
Without all those nice wheelchair ramps and wheelchair accessable elevators at the university, you are shit out of luck for actually getting to class... to say nothing of managing to cross the stage when you actually manage to earn your diploma.
We look at wheelchair ramps and other disability accomodations as commonplace. The truth is that very few businesses and schools had them before the ADA forced them to. It may be unthinkable now to descriminate against someone because he's deaf, blind, or crippled, but before the ADA went into effect, nobody thought twice about descriminating against people like that.
That's just a little less than three years. Three years with little or no chance of hetero sex. If I had time that I got to spend outside of prison before going inside, you can sure as hell bet that I wouldn't be spending it reading slashdot.
Chris, no clue as to your romantic situation, but put the keyboard down and find yourself a woman to fuck before its too late.
Still, here's a little snippet from the page I was reading before it died:
The iGesture Pad gives you unprecedented control of graphical objects using gestures while providing you with the same functionality of the mouse. The iGesture Pad is thin enough to pack along with your notebook computer and it is a perfect mouse or track ball replacement for your desktop system. It works equally well with either hand.
They way they show this thing being used, you spend as much time making sign-language-like gestures to perform computer commands as you do pointing and dragging your finger around.
On one hand, I think this would be a cool idea, but on the other I wonder how much more or less stress having to effectively communicate in a sign language would be than using a mouse to accomplish the same tasks.
I'll support anything that gets rid of Billy Bass
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Today on Fritz's Hit List: Big Mouth Billy Bass.
That's right, your favorite wall-hanging, singing, dancing, animatronic fish qualifies for regulation as a "digital media device" under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any new Billy Bass will have to incorporate government-approved copy protection technology.
Fight piracy -- regulate singing fish novelties!
I thought the CDBPABST was supposed to be a bad law. How can anything that aims to regulate the proliferation of Singing Billy Bass be evil?
After all, when I use my PC, I'm plugged into a pair of headphones. Any noise my box makes is easily filtered out if not drowned out entirely. I don't work inside a data center (unlike some of my fellows), so moderation of headphone volume is the only thing I need to consider when I protect my hearing. PC and Harddrive noise shouldn't matter...
That is, until I decided to put together a multimedia PC for use in my living room. A 52x CD spin-up is painfully loud during the quiet moments during a movie or my favorite anime. Don't even ask me about a hard-drive wake-up grind or cooling fans.
In the end, my option was to hide the PC behind a soft fabric cover rather than to try to diminish the noise from the box.
It broadens the mind by introducing you to subgenres of pr0n that you never knew existed.
While the above post was joking, the idea is true. The internet has done more to make sexuality and sexual practices that were 'deviant' before the mid 1990's into more normal every day things.
In some respects this is very good. People who were otherwise unable to express themselves now have an outlet. People can find partners and build relationships that they would never have had a chance to in the past.
In some respects this is very bad. People who are truly sick-- those who sexually molest children to get their jollies-- are lulled into a sense of normalcy by the apparent 'commonness' of their illness.
The really sad thing is that this is probably true.
The gaming ban allowed gaming only in government-sanctioned (read: politician-owned) casinos. If you wanted to play games, you could... you just had to pay the equivalent of a bribe to do so.
It would be nice if open source were too accomplish these features first.
If open source is first in implimenting this kind of functionality, it'll be a tossup wether there was a legitimate itch to scratch or that the content and media cartels have stifled advancement.
We wouldn't *need* Vorbis or Theora if FhG weren't so adamant about pursuing their patents. (On2 has patented VP3, but the Ogg guys negotiated a permanent, irrevocable license for public use for its use in Theora... efectively, if not legally, placing it in the public domain.)
I can load relevant headlines without waiting for my browser to time out on CNN's AOL/Netscape banner every time.
Still, I wonder how the other news sources are going to react. They make their revenue on advertisting and if Google is skimming off the top of their viewership, I have to wonder if they're not going to start kvetching pretty quickly.
Being a bad guy on a server with 1500 other bad guys, all trying to plunder the city, would be a blast.
You'd think it would be, wouldn't you?
Just check with the guys who play 'Teams' PvP on EQ. On the servers were the alignment works as 'Good', 'Evil' and 'Neutral', there is a massive number of evil characters, a few more 'Neutral' characters and a really small percentage of 'Good' characters. The evil characters are so numerous that they don't really get into the whole PVP vibe until much later in the game and then only to make sure that the other teams can't havea successful raids or dungeon crawls.
PVP is just not enjoyable for people who enjoy roleplaying (as compared to people who like player-killing) in the context of MMORPG's.
What MS did do *very* effectively was to stop WindowsXP from being casually copied from neighbor to neighbor, multi-PCs in one house, etc.
Unfortuneately for MS, this was also supposed to be the case with the original version. A certain company's volume discount license was boosted, probably by an employee, and posted via various distribution methods. Most of the people who pirated XP did so by downloading a copy and burning it themselves. A few gave it to friends, yes, but probably not that many. Those who could burn it to CD could also easily follow the numerous step-by-step guides to installing sp1 on this released.
So, in effect, the only people MS is really hampering with this is people (Mostly far-eastern and central asians, I would imagine.)
Slashdot Mirror
It requires the web-"designer" to hint, what pages to prefetch. Since, the employer of named designer pays for the bandwith, it surely will be used only at adequate places (Cost/Benefit).
So far as I can tell from the prefetching FAQ, there's nothing built into this to keep it from, say, prefetching banner ads, which are very typically hosted on a different server than 'real' web content. Thus, the designer of a web page can force your browser to download ads for his benefit and without any cost to him. The cost is borne either by you (if you have limted transfer/month, like most Australian cable modem users) or your ISP.
I block popups with Moz and I also block known banner-ad servers. If I used this feature and didn't happen have a sever blocked, then I could be forced to download images from it which would sit in my browser cache and never be displayed. Like I said, it's a worst-case scenario, but a very viable one.
Who ever thought that we'd have to cripple Javascript with pop-up blockers and Moz's anti-JS features to get rid of annoying (and costly) advertising?
Remember all those offline browsers and 'modem accelerators' that sucked up your modem bandwidth by downloading contantly, spidering every link on every page you visited?
While the Mozilla project is an incredible piece of work, I have to question this feature. It appears that they've designed it so that a page designer or webmaster decides what is appropriate for prefetching or not. Still, if used inappropriately, this feature could lead to more information being transmitted across the internet that is either discarded or unwanted. In a worst-case scenario, an inexperienced web designer might routinely run into his bandwidth cap or unintentionally force users who have bandwidth caps to exhaust their allowance.
If you can only download 3GB per month over your cable modem, do you really want the designer of a page deciding that your browser needs to spend time downloading ads or useless images?
For some people, this could be really useful. For others, it could be a real pain. Team-Moz, if you have any consideration at all, please adjust the default configuration of Mozilla so that this feature is turned OFF.
I love the example they use. They talk about sliding a coffin into a grave at a fraction of the speed of light sufficient to length-contract the coffin by 1/5 (or the grave, to the POV of the pall bearers...)
Ultra Undertakers deliver a coffin to the graveyard by sliding it along the ground at such a high velocity that the Lorentz contraction factor is gamma = 5. The gravediggers have dug a hole for the coffin with the same proper length as the proper length of the coffin itself. Thus a snug fit is possible when the coffin is at rest. In the frame of the gravediggers, the coffin is Lorentz contracted by 1/5 and so the coffin readily falls in. However, in the frame of the undertakers, it is the grave which is length contracted and so the coffin will surely not fall in.
The idea is, of course, that the coffin is not rigid and would have to flow into the grave, the front coming to rest before the end:
As so often happens, the resolution of this paradox rests with simultaneity. If we say that the coffin begins to fall in the gravedigger's frame at t=0 (i.e. the instant the rear of the coffin passes over the edge of the grave) then in the undertaker's frame, the rear will also start to fall at t'=0 but the front will start to fall at an earlier time. In fact the coffin must flow into the hole!
What amazes me is that the person who came up with this example never stopped to consider what would happen to a planet if you slugged a coffin-sized missile into it at better than 2/3rds c.
Theoretcially (we'll likely never have building materials struturally sound enough to test this) light should behave in almost exactly this manner close to a black hole. For example, say you've built a circular torus space station around a black hole. If you're within a certain radius to the singularity, but still outside the event horizon, light will bend towards the blackhole, allowing your vision to see 360 degrees around the torus. You can stand in one point and see your back an apparent distance equal to the circumfurence of your imaginary torus away. Closer than that radius means that the torus would appear to bend the wrong way.
Webcasting, at least the individual-run stations I see, could care less about CARP or any fees anyone seeks to impose on them. The individuals I see who do care about it don't have any plans to stop broadcasting, but instead intend to take their broadcasts deeper underground. A tactic I have seen is that a broadcaster will firewall his shoutcast or icecast stream and then do allows on individual IP addresses that want to listen based on e-mail requests. Of course this is easily defeatable by someone with half a brain, but not by automated methods.
Another thing I've seen is webcasters who refuse to play music commercially released in the U.S. They play J-, K-, and C-pop, some of which is quite good. They play German techno and metal, and un-US-released Euro-pop. They also play tracks that are freely available downloads from amature-music sites like Acid Planet
This is, of course, the music industry's largest fear... that the U.S. public will realize that they are not the only, nor even the best source of music in the world.
A clue for the clueless -- DO NOT PUNCTURE WARTS UNLESS YOU WANT MORE OF THEM!
The virus that causes warts is easily spread from lymphatic fluid from a punctured wart.
If you could add features to the x86 processor or architecture to make clustering work better, what features would you add?
I've noticed that many people, my self included, try to assign genders to colors, sounds, words, numbers, even letters.
Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Black, Brown Beige - Male
Blue, Purple, Pink, Tan, Gray, White - Female
C, D, G, H, J, L, M, N, O, T U, W, Z - Male
A, B, E, F, I, K, P, Q, R, S, V, X, Y - Female
1, 4, 5, 7, 0 - Male
2, 3, 6, 8, 9 - Female
Mirrored and transparent surfaces are female,
while colored or textured surfaces are male.
Some english-speaking people I've discussed this with have no association. Other people I've discussed this with who have the same association usually have different association. One person who spoke english *and* spanish (a language with gender built in) had much stronger reactions than I did. Note that the association doesn't seem to have anything to with shape, order, or similarity. I really think this is because the neurons that are responsible for recognizing those shapes are stimulating the neurons responsible for recognizing face and body shapes.
Funny you should mention porn support.
One of my favorite web browsing features comes from a project called Pornzilla, an effort to turn Moz into a better poon-viewing platform.
At the link above, there's a neat little javascript-bookmarklet which will open a new window and populated with all images linkd to on any given page. You can then save just the images en-masse or view them without clicking to and fro a bunch.
Yes, it's a neat invention for porn surfers. It's even better for any kind of web artwork or to check image links on a page you're developing. Unfortuneatly, it chokes on donkey balls on sites that check referrer headers before serving images.
A lot of people assume that the ADA is a farce designed to quiet the disgruntled whinings of mentally or physically disabled people. It's a bone tossed to them in much the same way that senior citezens get discounts and prefferential treatment in businesses. It's annoying for other customers and frequently inconvenient.
After all, how many handicapped parking places does the mall need?
What people who think that this is a joke fail to consider, however, is the fact that without the ADA in place, businesses can and will discriminate against handicapped people.
Consider for a second your state's major university. We'll use the University of Texas for an example, because I'm familiar with it. Most of the buildings were constructed in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the multi-story buildings have elevators, but not all of them. During class-time, the elevators are so full that if you want to get to class on time, you have to use the stairs. Remember that Austin is very hilly. There are stairs everywhere, even for one-story buildings.
Now lets assume that you were in a car wreck with a drunk driver and lost the use of your legs. Despite your new disability you are a smart individual who can get a job that does not require the use of your legs.
Without all those nice wheelchair ramps and wheelchair accessable elevators at the university, you are shit out of luck for actually getting to class... to say nothing of managing to cross the stage when you actually manage to earn your diploma.
We look at wheelchair ramps and other disability accomodations as commonplace. The truth is that very few businesses and schools had them before the ADA forced them to. It may be unthinkable now to descriminate against someone because he's deaf, blind, or crippled, but before the ADA went into effect, nobody thought twice about descriminating against people like that.
The ADA is not a joke.
That's just a little less than three years. Three years with little or no chance of hetero sex. If I had time that I got to spend outside of prison before going inside, you can sure as hell bet that I wouldn't be spending it reading slashdot.
Chris, no clue as to your romantic situation, but put the keyboard down and find yourself a woman to fuck before its too late.
Well, *that* didn't take long to Slashdot.
Still, here's a little snippet from the page I was reading before it died:
The iGesture Pad gives you unprecedented control of graphical objects using gestures while providing you with the same functionality of the mouse. The iGesture Pad is thin enough to pack along with your notebook computer and it is a perfect mouse or track ball replacement for your desktop system. It works equally well with either hand.
They way they show this thing being used, you spend as much time making sign-language-like gestures to perform computer commands as you do pointing and dragging your finger around.
On one hand, I think this would be a cool idea, but on the other I wonder how much more or less stress having to effectively communicate in a sign language would be than using a mouse to accomplish the same tasks.
Today on Fritz's Hit List: Big Mouth Billy Bass.
That's right, your favorite wall-hanging, singing, dancing, animatronic fish qualifies for regulation as a "digital media device" under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any new Billy Bass will have to incorporate government-approved copy protection technology.
Fight piracy -- regulate singing fish novelties!
I thought the CDBPABST was supposed to be a bad law. How can anything that aims to regulate the proliferation of Singing Billy Bass be evil?
I love you, Fritz Hollings!
After all, when I use my PC, I'm plugged into a pair of headphones. Any noise my box makes is easily filtered out if not drowned out entirely. I don't work inside a data center (unlike some of my fellows), so moderation of headphone volume is the only thing I need to consider when I protect my hearing. PC and Harddrive noise shouldn't matter...
That is, until I decided to put together a multimedia PC for use in my living room. A 52x CD spin-up is painfully loud during the quiet moments during a movie or my favorite anime. Don't even ask me about a hard-drive wake-up grind or cooling fans.
In the end, my option was to hide the PC behind a soft fabric cover rather than to try to diminish the noise from the box.
Oh wait, it's not the monitor, it's just the double post on Slashdot!
It broadens the mind by introducing you to subgenres of pr0n that you never knew existed.
While the above post was joking, the idea is true. The internet has done more to make sexuality and sexual practices that were 'deviant' before the mid 1990's into more normal every day things.
In some respects this is very good. People who were otherwise unable to express themselves now have an outlet. People can find partners and build relationships that they would never have had a chance to in the past.
In some respects this is very bad. People who are truly sick-- those who sexually molest children to get their jollies-- are lulled into a sense of normalcy by the apparent 'commonness' of their illness.
The really sad thing is that this is probably true.
The gaming ban allowed gaming only in government-sanctioned (read: politician-owned) casinos. If you wanted to play games, you could... you just had to pay the equivalent of a bribe to do so.
It would be nice if open source were too accomplish these features first.
If open source is first in implimenting this kind of functionality, it'll be a tossup wether there was a legitimate itch to scratch or that the content and media cartels have stifled advancement.
We wouldn't *need* Vorbis or Theora if FhG weren't so adamant about pursuing their patents. (On2 has patented VP3, but the Ogg guys negotiated a permanent, irrevocable license for public use for its use in Theora... efectively, if not legally, placing it in the public domain.)
I can load relevant headlines without waiting for my browser to time out on CNN's AOL/Netscape banner every time.
Still, I wonder how the other news sources are going to react. They make their revenue on advertisting and if Google is skimming off the top of their viewership, I have to wonder if they're not going to start kvetching pretty quickly.
I am also NAL, but I understand that you cannot sign away your right to sue.
Being a bad guy on a server with 1500 other bad guys, all trying to plunder the city, would be a blast.
You'd think it would be, wouldn't you?
Just check with the guys who play 'Teams' PvP on EQ. On the servers were the alignment works as 'Good', 'Evil' and 'Neutral', there is a massive number of evil characters, a few more 'Neutral' characters and a really small percentage of 'Good' characters. The evil characters are so numerous that they don't really get into the whole PVP vibe until much later in the game and then only to make sure that the other teams can't havea successful raids or dungeon crawls.
PVP is just not enjoyable for people who enjoy roleplaying (as compared to people who like player-killing) in the context of MMORPG's.
BayTSP's website IP address is 209.204.138.224
Assuming they have a class C netblock, this means you can block 209.204.138.* and eliminate most probing from them.
Anyone else know of any other netblocks or IPs that belong to them?
Chances are that it's a turboprop jet. It's still a jet engine, but rather than using the jet itself to generate thrust, the jet turns rotors instead.
What MS did do *very* effectively was to stop WindowsXP from being casually copied from neighbor to neighbor, multi-PCs in one house, etc.
Unfortuneately for MS, this was also supposed to be the case with the original version. A certain company's volume discount license was boosted, probably by an employee, and posted via various distribution methods. Most of the people who pirated XP did so by downloading a copy and burning it themselves. A few gave it to friends, yes, but probably not that many. Those who could burn it to CD could also easily follow the numerous step-by-step guides to installing sp1 on this released.
So, in effect, the only people MS is really hampering with this is people (Mostly far-eastern and central asians, I would imagine.)
I get irritated if I don't have eyecandy to look at while I work. I've made several anime- and movie-themed wallpapers of various kinds. While not a program that generates art, I do make the photoshop files containing both 'borrowed' and original art available for others to modify.
I like to see this behavior, particularly in games like 'Freesim', where you can download and edit the tiles.