One of the only things that has kept the general non-evils-of-copyright-aware public out of this mess up until now is the fact that it has been relatively difficult to trade MP3's online.
I mean, if you know more than absolutely nothing about the internet, you can download agent or x-news and point it at the MP3 binaries groups and get a wealth of high-quality audio, that has usually been encoded by people who know what they're doing. The same goes for IRC channels.
What Napster has done is to remove that first little bit of knowledge necessary to start yourself down the good-intentioned road to MP3 hell. It's all point and grunt. Even Journalism Majors can use it. My step-dad can use it, and that's pretty damn scary.
So Napster's effectively gone away. If Mr. Berry's figures are to beleived, this means that the RIAA doesn't have a few ingenious crackers and hackers on their hands trading MP3z on undergound IRC and Usenet channels. They have 30 MILLION FRUSTRATED, ANGRY, PISSED OFF users from all classes and races! Worse, they have a veritable legion of crackers and hackers who want to support these people's dirty MP3 habits in order to make money/points/karma/etc...
What's the old saw? If one man owes you a lot of money and won't pay, then he's in trouble, but if many men owe you money and won't pay, then you're in trouble.
This applies here. It was one thing for RIAA companies to pick on the hackers. Now they have visibly, audible, and a finacially insulted the American Public as a whole. Now all that's left is to whip the addled mob into a blood-thirsty frenzy.
Good bye, Napster. You'll make a wonderful martyr.
I saw a reference to cars, and I think it applies here. Even if everyone has them, the people who get the most from their cars are the people who have the time, skill, effort and money to maintain the cars themselves.
We're already seeing the end of free tech support, especially in the business world, so I think that this maxim will hold true for computers and software as well. Those who build, maintain, and know how to most effectively use their own code, web sites, etc... will always be the ones on top.
To create 'award winning' websites, for example, one must know the ins and outs of inter-connected systems. A good knowledge of HTML, Javascript, any of the several graphics editors, and the minute differences between the major browsers is necessary to create the front-end of a 'good' site. A better than average knowledge of SQL, a scripting language like Perl, PHP, or something more robust and clunky like Java is necessary for the back-end.
Those who say that 'Microsoft FrontPage' can eliminate the barrier between content producers and users have obviously never to use FrontPage to make a sell-able website.
By the same token, Granny just ain't gonna up and start making kernel patches despite the fact that Junior came over and installed Mozilla and StarOffice on her clunky old P2-200 machine. Even if Granny can wrap her aged mind around the interface, which the folks withe Gnome and KDE have been making better and better, you need some real computer skillz to get down and start editing conf files to make your computer do what you want it to.
While I used an improbable example above, it holds true for every OS. To make it perform... to be a 'digerati' so to speak, you gots to gots to gots to know what you're doing.
I concur. A quick search for Metallica, which *should* be the most heavily filtered name on the service, returned the maximum 100 matches. Most were songs. I did see a few pig latin variations... A few were non-metallica songs in metallica folders.
Of course the point of this whole mess is to force the RIAA, MPAA, etc... into fighting the DMCA in court. Ironic yes, but I wonder if we're not actually starting to use the protections offered by the act they way they should be used.
Since Napster is no longer a suitable example, I'll refer to Gnutella. With a fairly simple layer of 'copy control' encryption layered on top of the file transfer protocol, it becomes illegal for the RIAA to try to stop users from trading files. It forces them to fight the DMCA, which they lobbied for, but at the same time, it protects individual's rights to do as they will with the stuff they have bought. I want to share all my Eminem CD's, which is legal under 'fair use' but will get me whipped with a garden-hose if the RIAA has their way? This scheme allows me to do so and makes it a crime for RIAA to try to figure out that I'm doing it.
Perhaps we should take this seriously, not to get rid of the DMCA, but to exploit the hell out of all the protections it offers to those who know how to use and abuse them while we still have the chance.
Aimster claims to do this with some pretty good encryption, but alas, it is entirely dependant on AIM, which, frankly, sucks donkey balls. I'd much rather see the OpenNap or Gnutella guys develop something similiar.
C'mon, Aimster. Let's see a non-AOL dependant version of your software!
... Not so good when you're playing EQ or Q3A while stuck in downtown traffic.
Seriously, depending on the range of this kind of WAN, assuming it's going to run something like cellular or PCS, this could be a serious boon to those who like the in-car navigation systems or services like OnStar. Since OnStar is supposed to be able to do things like unlock your car doors, I'd want a data-firewall to go along with my engine firewall to keep some l33t script-kiddies from haxxoring my car and going for joy-rides.
The idea of being able to play EQ (I think Q3 or Unreal Tournament wouldn't be able to hack the lag) as a *passenger* during a long commute or roadtrip would be a pretty damn nifty.
"Billy, you stop downloading porn back there or I'm turning this car right back around!"
As I write this, the link to the information has been slashdotted out of existence, so I'll have to make some assumptions.
First of all is the fact that this is going to have to intercept pretty much all file-system calls and do some pretty damn nifty conversion to get the different shells to work properly. Heaven help you if you try to chmod kernel32.dll or something like that... ^_^
Second is the fact that this is going to be a popular program amoung 'amature' hackers, and people who consider themselves hackers because they know a little more about their workstation than the guy in the next cube. For every guy who manages to get 'xeyes' to run, you're going to end up with two or three calls to any given IT department like this:
'My computer won't boot into Windows any more!'
'What did you do to it?'
'I tried to run linuxcfg, but it crashed and deleted my Windows directory when it couldn't find/etc or/conf'
'Hybrid' sytems are never fun to support.
If this works, however, and starts working reliably, it could be a great boon to getting certain apps ported over to Linux. If a Windoze software developer can run an app that will allow him to a compile a linux binary of his Windows program, it will start to open the door for a lot of 'effortless' porting work between the two OS's.
Accordiing to the article:
Computer experts raided the offices of an information technology company in Stockholm last month and found a copy of the source codes for the software program OS/COMET
Since when are 'computer experts' policemen? Did they have a warrant?
This reminds me of Jon Johansen's statement wondering about why the police in his country arrested him for a 'crime' theoretically committed in the U.S..
In 1970, there was a non-peaceful protest, (read semi-riot) in and around Kent State University. Students, draft-dodgers, and Vietnam war veterans were protesting continuing involvement in the Vietnam campaign. While there was 'violence' per se, it didn't really amount to a lot more than public vandalism of government offices.
The second night of protests, Kent-State's ROTC building was 'mysteriously' set fire. The National Guard arrived armed with assault rifles and bayonets to 'put down' the violence and began to harras and intimidate the protestors. Several students were cut, stabbed, and beaten.
On the fourth day of protests, students began to throw rocks at national guardsmen. The guard responded by firing upon the otherwise unarmed students, killing 13. Nine more were wounded.
The pro-war senator said that these people, some of whom were innocent bystanders, deserved exactly what they got.
You may be misunderestimating people's ability to be "stupid". Also, I've discovered in a rather painful way that stupidity runs downhill.
When my company infected itself with the 'AnnaKournikova' virus, it was only *after* I had sent out a general warning.
One of the VP's, who *does* know better, opened the message while he wasn't paying attention, clicked on the file, and sent it to everyone else. Everyone else, those who didn't figure it out, opened it because it was from the VP.
I have mixed feelings on this, since this technology eventually *will* be used on humans, and on Americans who choose to riot or protest.
Don't beleive me? Ask survivors of the Kent State Massacre exactly what the U.S. military will do and to whom.
One one hand, it's great that this technology has 'proven' (I'd really like to see those classified studies) not to be lethal. Like pepper-spray, however, there is serious application for misuse, torture and serious human-rights abuse. It's one thing to use an energy beam to make a dangerous crowd uncomfortble enough to disperse, it's quite another to 'teach them a lesson' by repeated application as police all around the country are known to do with pepper spray, batons, and/or their firearms.
Who's definition of 'dangerous' do we use, and who watches the watchers?
While I cannot personally comment on this book's contents as I have not read it, it seems that the market is being glutted with various biographies, histories, and 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' type stories.
Think about it folks, the 1970's, when most of the initial development of the PC took place was 30 years ago! These events are becoming a lot less relevant to modern PC design and more like... well... History.
The real danger here is inspiring new, talented creators and inventors to continue to think like the people who originally developed the first PC's. These people were innovative, but the technology is aging... badly... and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
The Computer Revolution was over in the mid 90's. We're more in sort of the Computer Middle Age now. Let's just hope we can avoid a 'Dark Age' by not making religous text out of historical fact.
This is neat stuff, and he looks like he is really onto something. The real trick is going to getting enough 'market saturation' so that drivers and apps are ported to this.
Star Office and Mozilla, being OS, are givens. The real trick, far down the line, is getting Adobe to do ports for their 'industry standard' (*sigh*) software to AtheOS. They *almost* committed for BeOS.
While the various *nix's and BSD's are most likely going to be the major targets of this research, what I'd really love to see come out of this is a new Open Source OS, ala BeOS, that was built on a GUI base and had shell functionality rather than the other way 'round.
Not a lot of difference, you say? Sit Granny down in front of BeOS and and a shell prompt and see which one she prefers. Gnome and GTK are a little better, but to make any real changes to the OS, you still have to drop down to shell-level controls.
As a graphic artist, this is bit of a dream of mine.... *sigh*...
Of course, the problems here are that DARPA is going to be a lot more concerned with things like number-cruching, DB manipulation, and cryptography rather than pixel-pushing or artistic representation. There's also the fact that vast majority of developers who are even moderately going to be interested in this project are going to be *nix hackers. Artistic skill and coding skill are often found in hackers, but for some reason, you seldom see them combined.
My wife used to work at a Walmart here in the Texas panhandle. For several months, she did the overnight shift.
Now, the way Texas's blue laws work, you cannot buy alcohol period after 2 A.M. After 12 A.M. you can only buy from a bar, and after 9 P.M. you cannot buy from liquor stores. This means no hard alcohol for mixers after 9 and 24 stores like Walmart and Albertsons have to refuse alcohol purchases after midnight and until noon on Sundays. This *really* makes sense in a state where the biggest pastime is sitting around the tube watching football all day sunday with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.
As you can imagine, the Mrs. got some very angry customers who couldn't buy alcohol when they wanted to.
One day, a former Texas Representitive walked into the store at 4 A.M. Sunday morning. He picked up several bottles of wine, and a couple nice cases of beer. He was getting ready for an all day family get together, see?
So when my wife told him that no, he could *not* buy the booze, he slapped himself on the forehead and said, "I just had to sign on that renewal bill, didn't I?"
Most legislation is passed by people who aren't even paying attention to what they're doing.
When locking down a M$ workstation or server, one of the first things you have to do if you want it to be as completely secure as you can get it is to forget about 'file-sharing'.
It's a shame, because there are really good ways to do file-sharing besides sftp that are secure. Unfortuneately, Microsoft doesn't beleive in security. In the default installations, which everyone else is going to want to connect to your shares with, every protocol is bound to every adapter, etc. It takes a skilled hand to break the uneccessary bindings or use a Non-MS Filesharing service. Because Microsoft refuses to make a *sane* default Network configuration for Joe-Bestbuy, those of use who care about security will never be able to run shares across TCP-IP.
You must be one of those listening to the 'propogandistic lies'.
Have you ever heard of the MSDN program? You get just about every piece of software and development tool that Microsoft publishes for less than $2000 a year for 'development purposes'. 'Street' value on this software is easily tens of thounsands of dollars. These prices are set arbitrarily. This 'theft induced price raise' is a complete fabrication.
Has been pretty bad. The ISP I used to work for was pressured constantly by community religous leaders and 'society' folk to impliment filtering of porn sites so that their kids couldn't get to them.
The ISP rigourously refused despite the fact that one of those society folk was one of the big shareholders. Finally, when N2H2 came out, we signed a contract for them to provide proxy filtering service.
For a week or so before we added 'Filtering Service' for an extra fee for customers who wanted it, we tested it internally by browsing with it until it wouldn't display a site we wanted to go to and then using another browser to figure out if the site was banned correctly.
It was pretty miserable. It banned all of my art pages (http://www.furinkan.net/art/)(which have some non-photographic nude images), yet did nothing to filter out some of the worst hard-core porn. R-rated Fanfiction? It would trash it every time, but Nerve Magazine went completely unfiltered at the time. I dunno if this is still the case since I haven't used Bess since the testing period. At the time, it seemed to unfairly ban *most* anime pages.
After the testing period, the ISP announced the filtering service for availability. We had many, many customers calling in, interested in the service, but when we explained that it couldn't tell the difference between them and their children and/or spouses, they promptly lost interest. By the time I left, less than a year later, we had a user-base of around 40000 dial-in accounts. Less than 20 of them used Bess.
Seriously, one more piece of unquestionable evidence is going to do nothing to dissuade the revisionist religious right that the first few pages of the bible are untarnished fact. These people have been fighting in the face of darwin, hundreds of archeological discoveries, hundred of biological studies, daily evidence of natural selection, and sight of their own inbred hillbilly children for so long that genetic proof of the evolution of man has no chance in making a dent in these luddites' brains.
Useless without a monitor or keyboard
on
Portable Linux Box
·
· Score: 2
Unless I'm missing my guess, this thing has no built in display, making it pretty useless as a portable device. This puts it in pretty much the same category as the G4 cube: Pretty, but as much under the hood as we were led to beleive.
Come on, guys! Let's see some low-priced tablet computers!
...like Starcraft or Sim City.
In Starcraft, the learning curve is pretty, steep, but once you have that mastered the gameplay is in the strategy. It's learning the best tactics to beat the computer and/or your neighbor. The narrative is there, but I've played 'Brood War' for hundreds of hours without ever touching the included campaigns.
In Simcity, the learning curve is also pretty steep, and you continue to learn every time you play. That's the point of the game, learning how the game works.
EQ players will recognize that they have a mix of tactics and 'cheatsheet' style games. The bulk of Everquest is played learning the best tactics and strategy, while the backstory is created with detailed maps and long quests, 99.9% of which are documented online.
The interviewers were pretty damn lucky that Berke Breathed is apparently such a nice guy. Despite Mr. Breathed's influence on modern comices, the tone of the interview and the fact that he was upset that they got his phone number more or less points to the fact that Breathed is not interested in drawing comic strips anymore and shouldn't be bothered about his old work, which he is clearly uncomfortable discussing.
Now, all that aside, it was neat to hear from him again.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the only things that has kept the general non-evils-of-copyright-aware public out of this mess up until now is the fact that it has been relatively difficult to trade MP3's online.
I mean, if you know more than absolutely nothing about the internet, you can download agent or x-news and point it at the MP3 binaries groups and get a wealth of high-quality audio, that has usually been encoded by people who know what they're doing. The same goes for IRC channels.
What Napster has done is to remove that first little bit of knowledge necessary to start yourself down the good-intentioned road to MP3 hell. It's all point and grunt. Even Journalism Majors can use it. My step-dad can use it, and that's pretty damn scary.
So Napster's effectively gone away. If Mr. Berry's figures are to beleived, this means that the RIAA doesn't have a few ingenious crackers and hackers on their hands trading MP3z on undergound IRC and Usenet channels. They have 30 MILLION FRUSTRATED, ANGRY, PISSED OFF users from all classes and races! Worse, they have a veritable legion of crackers and hackers who want to support these people's dirty MP3 habits in order to make money/points/karma/etc...
What's the old saw? If one man owes you a lot of money and won't pay, then he's in trouble, but if many men owe you money and won't pay, then you're in trouble.
This applies here. It was one thing for RIAA companies to pick on the hackers. Now they have visibly, audible, and a finacially insulted the American Public as a whole. Now all that's left is to whip the addled mob into a blood-thirsty frenzy.
Good bye, Napster. You'll make a wonderful martyr.
I saw a reference to cars, and I think it applies here. Even if everyone has them, the people who get the most from their cars are the people who have the time, skill, effort and money to maintain the cars themselves.
We're already seeing the end of free tech support, especially in the business world, so I think that this maxim will hold true for computers and software as well. Those who build, maintain, and know how to most effectively use their own code, web sites, etc... will always be the ones on top.
To create 'award winning' websites, for example, one must know the ins and outs of inter-connected systems. A good knowledge of HTML, Javascript, any of the several graphics editors, and the minute differences between the major browsers is necessary to create the front-end of a 'good' site. A better than average knowledge of SQL, a scripting language like Perl, PHP, or something more robust and clunky like Java is necessary for the back-end.
Those who say that 'Microsoft FrontPage' can eliminate the barrier between content producers and users have obviously never to use FrontPage to make a sell-able website.
By the same token, Granny just ain't gonna up and start making kernel patches despite the fact that Junior came over and installed Mozilla and StarOffice on her clunky old P2-200 machine. Even if Granny can wrap her aged mind around the interface, which the folks withe Gnome and KDE have been making better and better, you need some real computer skillz to get down and start editing conf files to make your computer do what you want it to.
While I used an improbable example above, it holds true for every OS. To make it perform... to be a 'digerati' so to speak, you gots to gots to gots to know what you're doing.
Trust me. I'm a professional....
I concur. A quick search for Metallica, which *should* be the most heavily filtered name on the service, returned the maximum 100 matches. Most were songs. I did see a few pig latin variations... A few were non-metallica songs in metallica folders.
Is this a good thing?
Of course the point of this whole mess is to force the RIAA, MPAA, etc... into fighting the DMCA in court. Ironic yes, but I wonder if we're not actually starting to use the protections offered by the act they way they should be used.
Since Napster is no longer a suitable example, I'll refer to Gnutella. With a fairly simple layer of 'copy control' encryption layered on top of the file transfer protocol, it becomes illegal for the RIAA to try to stop users from trading files. It forces them to fight the DMCA, which they lobbied for, but at the same time, it protects individual's rights to do as they will with the stuff they have bought. I want to share all my Eminem CD's, which is legal under 'fair use' but will get me whipped with a garden-hose if the RIAA has their way? This scheme allows me to do so and makes it a crime for RIAA to try to figure out that I'm doing it.
Perhaps we should take this seriously, not to get rid of the DMCA, but to exploit the hell out of all the protections it offers to those who know how to use and abuse them while we still have the chance.
Aimster claims to do this with some pretty good encryption, but alas, it is entirely dependant on AIM, which, frankly, sucks donkey balls. I'd much rather see the OpenNap or Gnutella guys develop something similiar.
C'mon, Aimster. Let's see a non-AOL dependant version of your software!
... Not so good when you're playing EQ or Q3A while stuck in downtown traffic.
Seriously, depending on the range of this kind of WAN, assuming it's going to run something like cellular or PCS, this could be a serious boon to those who like the in-car navigation systems or services like OnStar. Since OnStar is supposed to be able to do things like unlock your car doors, I'd want a data-firewall to go along with my engine firewall to keep some l33t script-kiddies from haxxoring my car and going for joy-rides.
The idea of being able to play EQ (I think Q3 or Unreal Tournament wouldn't be able to hack the lag) as a *passenger* during a long commute or roadtrip would be a pretty damn nifty.
"Billy, you stop downloading porn back there or I'm turning this car right back around!"
Not so great for creating stability.
/etc or /conf'
As I write this, the link to the information has been slashdotted out of existence, so I'll have to make some assumptions.
First of all is the fact that this is going to have to intercept pretty much all file-system calls and do some pretty damn nifty conversion to get the different shells to work properly. Heaven help you if you try to chmod kernel32.dll or something like that... ^_^
Second is the fact that this is going to be a popular program amoung 'amature' hackers, and people who consider themselves hackers because they know a little more about their workstation than the guy in the next cube. For every guy who manages to get 'xeyes' to run, you're going to end up with two or three calls to any given IT department like this:
'My computer won't boot into Windows any more!'
'What did you do to it?'
'I tried to run linuxcfg, but it crashed and deleted my Windows directory when it couldn't find
'Hybrid' sytems are never fun to support.
If this works, however, and starts working reliably, it could be a great boon to getting certain apps ported over to Linux. If a Windoze software developer can run an app that will allow him to a compile a linux binary of his Windows program, it will start to open the door for a lot of 'effortless' porting work between the two OS's.
Accordiing to the article: Computer experts raided the offices of an information technology company in Stockholm last month and found a copy of the source codes for the software program OS/COMET Since when are 'computer experts' policemen? Did they have a warrant? This reminds me of Jon Johansen's statement wondering about why the police in his country arrested him for a 'crime' theoretically committed in the U.S..
As has been pointed out, my numbers are wrong. 4 killed, + 9 wounded (1 in a wheelchair for life) = 13.
In 1970, there was a non-peaceful protest, (read semi-riot) in and around Kent State University. Students, draft-dodgers, and Vietnam war veterans were protesting continuing involvement in the Vietnam campaign. While there was 'violence' per se, it didn't really amount to a lot more than public vandalism of government offices.
The second night of protests, Kent-State's ROTC building was 'mysteriously' set fire. The National Guard arrived armed with assault rifles and bayonets to 'put down' the violence and began to harras and intimidate the protestors. Several students were cut, stabbed, and beaten.
On the fourth day of protests, students began to throw rocks at national guardsmen. The guard responded by firing upon the otherwise unarmed students, killing 13. Nine more were wounded.
The pro-war senator said that these people, some of whom were innocent bystanders, deserved exactly what they got.
American justice in action, folks.
You may be misunderestimating people's ability to be "stupid". Also, I've discovered in a rather painful way that stupidity runs downhill.
When my company infected itself with the 'AnnaKournikova' virus, it was only *after* I had sent out a general warning.
One of the VP's, who *does* know better, opened the message while he wasn't paying attention, clicked on the file, and sent it to everyone else. Everyone else, those who didn't figure it out, opened it because it was from the VP.
I have mixed feelings on this, since this technology eventually *will* be used on humans, and on Americans who choose to riot or protest.
Don't beleive me? Ask survivors of the Kent State Massacre exactly what the U.S. military will do and to whom.
One one hand, it's great that this technology has 'proven' (I'd really like to see those classified studies) not to be lethal. Like pepper-spray, however, there is serious application for misuse, torture and serious human-rights abuse. It's one thing to use an energy beam to make a dangerous crowd uncomfortble enough to disperse, it's quite another to 'teach them a lesson' by repeated application as police all around the country are known to do with pepper spray, batons, and/or their firearms.
Who's definition of 'dangerous' do we use, and who watches the watchers?
While I cannot personally comment on this book's contents as I have not read it, it seems that the market is being glutted with various biographies, histories, and 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' type stories.
Think about it folks, the 1970's, when most of the initial development of the PC took place was 30 years ago! These events are becoming a lot less relevant to modern PC design and more like... well... History.
The real danger here is inspiring new, talented creators and inventors to continue to think like the people who originally developed the first PC's. These people were innovative, but the technology is aging... badly... and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
The Computer Revolution was over in the mid 90's. We're more in sort of the Computer Middle Age now. Let's just hope we can avoid a 'Dark Age' by not making religous text out of historical fact.
Hmmm... I was not aware of this guy!
This is neat stuff, and he looks like he is really onto something. The real trick is going to getting enough 'market saturation' so that drivers and apps are ported to this.
Star Office and Mozilla, being OS, are givens. The real trick, far down the line, is getting Adobe to do ports for their 'industry standard' (*sigh*) software to AtheOS. They *almost* committed for BeOS.
While the various *nix's and BSD's are most likely going to be the major targets of this research, what I'd really love to see come out of this is a new Open Source OS, ala BeOS, that was built on a GUI base and had shell functionality rather than the other way 'round. Not a lot of difference, you say? Sit Granny down in front of BeOS and and a shell prompt and see which one she prefers. Gnome and GTK are a little better, but to make any real changes to the OS, you still have to drop down to shell-level controls. As a graphic artist, this is bit of a dream of mine.... *sigh*... Of course, the problems here are that DARPA is going to be a lot more concerned with things like number-cruching, DB manipulation, and cryptography rather than pixel-pushing or artistic representation. There's also the fact that vast majority of developers who are even moderately going to be interested in this project are going to be *nix hackers. Artistic skill and coding skill are often found in hackers, but for some reason, you seldom see them combined.
My wife used to work at a Walmart here in the Texas panhandle. For several months, she did the overnight shift.
Now, the way Texas's blue laws work, you cannot buy alcohol period after 2 A.M. After 12 A.M. you can only buy from a bar, and after 9 P.M. you cannot buy from liquor stores. This means no hard alcohol for mixers after 9 and 24 stores like Walmart and Albertsons have to refuse alcohol purchases after midnight and until noon on Sundays. This *really* makes sense in a state where the biggest pastime is sitting around the tube watching football all day sunday with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.
As you can imagine, the Mrs. got some very angry customers who couldn't buy alcohol when they wanted to.
One day, a former Texas Representitive walked into the store at 4 A.M. Sunday morning. He picked up several bottles of wine, and a couple nice cases of beer. He was getting ready for an all day family get together, see?
So when my wife told him that no, he could *not* buy the booze, he slapped himself on the forehead and said, "I just had to sign on that renewal bill, didn't I?"
Most legislation is passed by people who aren't even paying attention to what they're doing.
IT Manager: Well, I'm afraid we're taking your workstation away. Security will be by in a few minutes to escort you out of the building.
Developer: What? Why? I didn't do anything to get fired over!
IT Manager: We found all sorts of obscene materials on your harddrive in shared folders.
Developer: Huh?
IT Manager: Like German schisse porn and crushing videos.
Developer: That's ridiculous-- Oh my god! What are they doing to that poor German Shepard? Wait a second, I didn't put this on here! I swear!
IT Manager: It's your own fault. You didn't *have* to share those drives.
Developer: Yes I did! My manager told me to!
IT Manager: We're firing him, too. Seem's he has goat.cx pictures all over *his* hard drive.
When locking down a M$ workstation or server, one of the first things you have to do if you want it to be as completely secure as you can get it is to forget about 'file-sharing'.
It's a shame, because there are really good ways to do file-sharing besides sftp that are secure. Unfortuneately, Microsoft doesn't beleive in security. In the default installations, which everyone else is going to want to connect to your shares with, every protocol is bound to every adapter, etc. It takes a skilled hand to break the uneccessary bindings or use a Non-MS Filesharing service. Because Microsoft refuses to make a *sane* default Network configuration for Joe-Bestbuy, those of use who care about security will never be able to run shares across TCP-IP.
before it got it's Napster-like interface.
Scour, we miss ye...
You must be one of those listening to the 'propogandistic lies'. Have you ever heard of the MSDN program? You get just about every piece of software and development tool that Microsoft publishes for less than $2000 a year for 'development purposes'. 'Street' value on this software is easily tens of thounsands of dollars. These prices are set arbitrarily. This 'theft induced price raise' is a complete fabrication.
Has been pretty bad. The ISP I used to work for was pressured constantly by community religous leaders and 'society' folk to impliment filtering of porn sites so that their kids couldn't get to them. The ISP rigourously refused despite the fact that one of those society folk was one of the big shareholders. Finally, when N2H2 came out, we signed a contract for them to provide proxy filtering service. For a week or so before we added 'Filtering Service' for an extra fee for customers who wanted it, we tested it internally by browsing with it until it wouldn't display a site we wanted to go to and then using another browser to figure out if the site was banned correctly. It was pretty miserable. It banned all of my art pages (http://www.furinkan.net/art/)(which have some non-photographic nude images), yet did nothing to filter out some of the worst hard-core porn. R-rated Fanfiction? It would trash it every time, but Nerve Magazine went completely unfiltered at the time. I dunno if this is still the case since I haven't used Bess since the testing period. At the time, it seemed to unfairly ban *most* anime pages. After the testing period, the ISP announced the filtering service for availability. We had many, many customers calling in, interested in the service, but when we explained that it couldn't tell the difference between them and their children and/or spouses, they promptly lost interest. By the time I left, less than a year later, we had a user-base of around 40000 dial-in accounts. Less than 20 of them used Bess.
Saddam Hussein: Quickly, let us get to our modified playstation 2 devices to use this Rijindael encryption!
Seriously, one more piece of unquestionable evidence is going to do nothing to dissuade the revisionist religious right that the first few pages of the bible are untarnished fact. These people have been fighting in the face of darwin, hundreds of archeological discoveries, hundred of biological studies, daily evidence of natural selection, and sight of their own inbred hillbilly children for so long that genetic proof of the evolution of man has no chance in making a dent in these luddites' brains.
Unless I'm missing my guess, this thing has no built in display, making it pretty useless as a portable device. This puts it in pretty much the same category as the G4 cube: Pretty, but as much under the hood as we were led to beleive.
Come on, guys! Let's see some low-priced tablet computers!
...like Starcraft or Sim City. In Starcraft, the learning curve is pretty, steep, but once you have that mastered the gameplay is in the strategy. It's learning the best tactics to beat the computer and/or your neighbor. The narrative is there, but I've played 'Brood War' for hundreds of hours without ever touching the included campaigns. In Simcity, the learning curve is also pretty steep, and you continue to learn every time you play. That's the point of the game, learning how the game works. EQ players will recognize that they have a mix of tactics and 'cheatsheet' style games. The bulk of Everquest is played learning the best tactics and strategy, while the backstory is created with detailed maps and long quests, 99.9% of which are documented online.
The interviewers were pretty damn lucky that Berke Breathed is apparently such a nice guy. Despite Mr. Breathed's influence on modern comices, the tone of the interview and the fact that he was upset that they got his phone number more or less points to the fact that Breathed is not interested in drawing comic strips anymore and shouldn't be bothered about his old work, which he is clearly uncomfortable discussing.
Now, all that aside, it was neat to hear from him again.