If the suggestions of plagarism prove true (my inclination is to think so, although I confess ignorance in this matter), I sincerely hope DisneyCo gets their backsides nailed to the wall for it. BTW, I have to confess a little bit of surprise. I was walking home after the last post thinking, "wow, I pretty much just flamed thirteen million people. I bet somebody's going to take it personally." I'm glad to be wrong - again!
While this whole issue is of questionable relevance to "stuff that matters" I guess I have to admit that it matters enough for me to add my own thought. So here goes: to the question of "are all their creative juices dry?" I have to answer that this is not just a Disney problem - more a Hollywood problem. There seems to be an inherent inability in the California entertainment scene to create anything truly groundbreaking, or even thoughtful and interesting. Note that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was all over the Oscars, which have traditionally been a members-only Hollywood exhibition. Or the way the X-Files started to stink the moment production moved down from British Columbia to LA. There seem to be two issues at hand, and they may be related. First of all, Hollywood is so revenue-driven that they must try to hit the least common denominator with everything they do, which excludes a lot of highly artistic content which might just be too niche-market for the bean counters who run the show to approve. This also leaves out a good deal of stuff that just seems too wierd for the apparantly wierd people who decide what gets produced. The other issue surrounds the culture of Southern California itself - at great risk of generalizing here, I'd describe it as soulless. Everything there has a price value, and that value seems to be the only one that matters. This highlights the age-old battle between Northern and Southern California with the northerners constantly accusing the southerners of being thoughtless and greedy. The fact is, it may not be possible for someone wholly immersed in the SoCal culture ideal to actually come up with much of anything that isn't plasticy and over-glitzy to everyone else. I know people from LA will vehemently disagree with this, but my rebuttal is: where's the content? When the best movies and television (in terms of quality, not ratings) are being made anywhere but hollywood, what is the problem? My biggest concern is that Hollywood seems to behave as though it should be the cultural center for the US, and considering the "role models" it proposes, this would be a very bad thing indeed.
Well, isn't that special? I think you're absolutely right about the nullPointerException, but there is a significant difference between knowing an abstract fact - "Every object variable coded is a pointer," and actually having to deal with pointers and the consequences of screwing them up. An example occurred recently when I was trying to do a compareTo method on a Graphics object, which required an impossible explicit cast. I asked someone for advice, and that person said, "Well, just use a pointer." Great idea - in C. While I was eventually able to solve the problem, I really think it would have been much more informative for me if I were simply able to use the pointer, and see what happened.
And, quite frankly, I really resent the implication you made at the end of your statement. I'm as totally opposed to the Microsoft business practices as you are - my question was with an academic issue regarding Java programming as a teaching language - and since when did Bill Gates benefit from a CS department switching from Java to C++ anyway?
Ok, duffbeer703, you may have a point. I guess I was responding to the brief, abrupt way you were making an if:then statement involving acts of way. Such words are not to be bandied about loosely, even in flamewars.
[BUZZWORD]..hack attack... [BUZZWORD]...Chinese servers... {Knee suddenly jerks}"What? How dare they? Call the cops! Write my congressmen! Facts be damned - we can ask questions after everyone's dead! We have do DO something, right now!"
Silly. We don't even know what part of the world the attacks came from - just that some of the servers were in China. Did you notice that some of them were in Oklahoma, too? Maybe California should start a pr blitz on that account - "Oklahoma is not ok!" Of course that would be ridiculous. Just about as bad as blaming an entire country for one script kiddie who may have been operating out of it. My point isn't to ridicule you, but to strongly encourage you to think before you talk about military attacks. Nobody wins when a country goes to war. The first time somebody dies, everyone loses, simply because we know better, or should.
Let's see... a dev machine in front of the firewall but with internal network access... no tripwire, promiscuous ports all over the place... wow. Wish I could do that. Think about it for a second. If everyone set up their machines like this, the hackers wouldn't be able to pick out a target amid all the noise! Of course, that would be the end of online shopping, but that's overrated:-) Shame on the irresponsible people who would so ignorantly play Russian Roulette with the California electrical grid. The power system is dangerous as it is, and the potential exists for real human suffering if it should collapse. No need for more incompetence (on top of the legislators who created the mess in the first place) to help bring the whole thing down. I hope that the person whose machine that was is aware of just how bad they fscked up.
Imagine the tech support call from this kid?
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 2
[Caller] Er, I need some help with your smoke alarms... [Support tech ID ten-t] Is the battery connected? [Caller] No, that's not the problem at all. You see, I can't seem to find the radioactive part... [ID ten-t] No problem, let me just transfer you to our "radioactive component location" department. One moment, please...
I mean, this kid doesn't even come across as that smart. I don't know about you, but my many foolhardy stunts of youth did not involve blowing up my own house or filling my mom's potting shed with radioactive isotopes, much less putting the stuff in my pants pocket. Maybe he just wants seven-legged children some day. What really suprises me is that this dodo apparently pulled off acts of social engineering that would make Captian Crunch proud. Maybe the rest of us are the idiots.
The way things work here is that fiber is run to "nodes" which then are translated to coax, which is then brought to your home. And at the bandwidth we get (3mbps down, 1 up) and the price (how's $25 a month sound), you'd probably be in for a better deal. Of course, your telco would need to invest considerably for the hardware, but at the current price of fiber, they could almost certainly do better for less than any silly DSL hookup. My suggestion would be to contact someone at the telco who has a brain as well as decision-making authority (I know this might be asking a lot), and see if they're even aware of the concept. It's worth a try - at worst, they'll say no, and at best, you can show those DSLers what's up.
I first went to the following site, as referenced below in the comments: http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/e-tax/checkbrw.h tm
From there, it was clear that everything worked. I was only able to browse the subnet regarding the Self-Assesment Tax Return, which I am hardly eligible for (Living as I do in the US), but if I were British, I could almost certainly do what I needed to do.
From this I can only draw the following conclusion: M$ has set up a series of gateway sites which have no legitimate purpose whatsoever; instead, they appear to be clearly trying to force people to use their garbage. If only Tony Blair knew what a horrible mistake he has made...
The security of an infrastructure is far more the people and dedication to keeping on top of issues...
I really couldn't agree with you more. Which is precisely one of the issues addressed in the article (Did you read it?)
Wurzler found that system administrators working on open source systems tend to be better trained and stay with their employers longer than those at firms using Windows software, where turnover can exceed 33 percent per year. That turnover contributes to another problem: System administrators are not implementing all the patches that have been issued for Windows NT, Wurzler said.
While I think you're absolutely right that "Linux=Secure and NT=Insecure is absurd and simplistic" I also think that that particular argument is a straw man: a better way to put it might be: Linux, due to the fact that the source code is open to anyone interested in looking at it and fixing it, and due to the ease with which it can be upgraded, and due to the generally higher level of expertise of system administrators who prefer to use it, is inherently fairly secure, on average. Windows NT, due to the fact that Microsoft chooses to protect it's business interests, does not disclose its source code, and due to the difficulty people find in upgrading it, and also due to the generally lower level of expertise and experience in system administrators who prefer to use it, is inherently not very secure, on average.
I do think it is important for sourceforge that they make a public post explaining the exploit and how to stop it. My guess is that they will as soon as they figure it out.
I, too, ignored Voyager until later on (Kinda hard to watch anything on tv when you have no power or running water, much less cable). Once I did, I was fortunate to be near a local station that plays reruns every weeknight, so I got to watch pretty much every episode that aired. It sure was irritating at first to see Kate Mulgrew mugging the camera(Patric Stewart she isn't) as the music swelled just before some inane commercial took over the display, and even more recently, I thought the idea of 7 fighting The Rock was a desperate publicity stunt to boost ratings, but all in all, it was fun to watch the actors becoming comfortable with the roles, and to disagree with the author of this story, I thought the premise the series was based upon was interesting, and brought up things to consider.
That said, I felt let down by the finale. (spoilage warning: I won't give it away if possible, but still want to air my gripes) The overall plot could have just as easily have been another weekly episode. Also, the last couple of episodes have felt kind of rushed. Why was Neelix so abrupt when he left the ship? It really wasn't like him to even discuss his plans with a very suddenly grown-up Naomi. IMHO the finale, for that matter, could have used an extra hour to flesh out some of the complications and twists they threw in there. Why not a two- or three-parter, instead of crowding everything into ninety minutes (show-commercials=@90minutes)?
The "big" ending of it all was worse than anticlimactic. There was simply not enough time to finish the job. Now that I've become used to the characters, it's kind of dissappointing that the next series will be set two hundred years before Voyager... guess that leaves out any option for cameo appearanes, with the possible exception of Q. Oh, well, time goes on.
with all the horror stories bandied about regarding dsl companies, the scams they run, the rotten connections people get from them, the company assimilations, and most of all, the ridiculous prices they charge (fifty bucks a month? Get outta here!), why does anyone bother? It seems like dsl is inherently too unstable to be bothered with. Right now, I pay $24.95 a month for cable internet. The only time it has gone down was when some shithead tried to dos the company, and that only lasted an hour and a half. As for bandwidth, I sometimes grumble when I'm only getting 3mbps down and 1 up. I doubt that someone paying fifty bucks a month to a shady dsl company can get the same pipe. Of course, someone has to build the infrastructure for cable to work, but they have to do the same for dsl, too. And the range for cable is much, much better. My suggestion is to get on the provider's case for them to start setting up coax, or better yet, ethernet to the curb. I've yet to see a dsl solution that was worth a squat.
Depends on what you're looking at:) Actually, I tried Opera, and I loved the gesture-based navigation. I didn't like Opera very much, though. Since KDE is my primary desktop, this project interests me very much.
This smacks with a special irony after some recentarticles we've seen.
IBM is in the midst of a major Linux push this year, with CEO Lou Gerstner pledging to spend $1 billion on the operating system in 2001.
I realize this isn't exactly a desktop (imagine one of these machines in your house - much less in your office!), but if Big Blue is about to spend a Billion bucks on Linux development, it can only stand to reason that we can look forward to more and better apps for our boxes (not boxen! Ich bin nicht ein Deuitcher!) I only hope they don't screw it up with greed.
I wonder if the person who wrote that tome of a sig for Warburg ever wrote EULAs for Microsoft. Can you imagine what would happen if they ever sent out spam? Or if somebody in the office got an email worm, and started jamming that one on the wires? Locusts would surely swarm...
So these routers can analyze my packets and "determine the most efficient way to transmit them?" Is anyone else just a little bit uncomfortable with this? I agree with those who say the Internet is not running up to spec, but I'd sure like to see a thorough discussion on how the technology can avoid actually looking at the content, not just the content type. I agree with michael (for once) that this introduces an ability for ISPs which may not be in the best interests of free expression of ideas - something I was led to believe the internet would bring us.
once Microsoft wins the patent it has applied for:
Bipedal locomotion, associated with manipulation of external objects by means of axial appendages terminating in five-part fine manipulators: Use of above for movement, daily activities, and interactivity with technology devices. Applicant:Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington
taken down more.edu sites than all the script kiddies put together. I can imagine the sysadmins there right now - running around trying to figure out what the hell - who's running a napster server off the web frontend, and then... "Somebody posted a link to Slashdot!" After that, things will settle down a bit, until they figure out that it's related to Quake, and not some "real" academic situation. Seriously, though, I can't possibly imagine how this would help me avoid getting fragged.
Now, if we could just convince those knuckle-draggers down in administration who insist on sending everything with a message like "Details on the last Board Meeting - big changes!" and then send it out in MS Word format, complete with macros. No amount of logic seems to convince these people that "Copy" and "Paste" are a good idea.
Since I refuse to eat them, I really can't say how they taste. What I can say (and this was substantiated by none other than my girlfriends seven-year-old), is that they smell like fish! Pretty bad idea that - eating tomatoes that smell like fish. It was only later that I was told that the GM tomatoes actually do contain some fish chromosomes. No thanks.
That post, even coming from an AC, is probably the most sincere expression of emotion on this site. I only wish I was so in touch with my own emotions.
Slashdot Mirror
If the suggestions of plagarism prove true (my inclination is to think so, although I confess ignorance in this matter), I sincerely hope DisneyCo gets their backsides nailed to the wall for it.
BTW, I have to confess a little bit of surprise. I was walking home after the last post thinking, "wow, I pretty much just flamed thirteen million people. I bet somebody's going to take it personally." I'm glad to be wrong - again!
While this whole issue is of questionable relevance to "stuff that matters" I guess I have to admit that it matters enough for me to add my own thought. So here goes: to the question of "are all their creative juices dry?" I have to answer that this is not just a Disney problem - more a Hollywood problem. There seems to be an inherent inability in the California entertainment scene to create anything truly groundbreaking, or even thoughtful and interesting. Note that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was all over the Oscars, which have traditionally been a members-only Hollywood exhibition. Or the way the X-Files started to stink the moment production moved down from British Columbia to LA.
There seem to be two issues at hand, and they may be related. First of all, Hollywood is so revenue-driven that they must try to hit the least common denominator with everything they do, which excludes a lot of highly artistic content which might just be too niche-market for the bean counters who run the show to approve. This also leaves out a good deal of stuff that just seems too wierd for the apparantly wierd people who decide what gets produced.
The other issue surrounds the culture of Southern California itself - at great risk of generalizing here, I'd describe it as soulless. Everything there has a price value, and that value seems to be the only one that matters. This highlights the age-old battle between Northern and Southern California with the northerners constantly accusing the southerners of being thoughtless and greedy. The fact is, it may not be possible for someone wholly immersed in the SoCal culture ideal to actually come up with much of anything that isn't plasticy and over-glitzy to everyone else. I know people from LA will vehemently disagree with this, but my rebuttal is: where's the content? When the best movies and television (in terms of quality, not ratings) are being made anywhere but hollywood, what is the problem?
My biggest concern is that Hollywood seems to behave as though it should be the cultural center for the US, and considering the "role models" it proposes, this would be a very bad thing indeed.
Insert flames here:
Well, isn't that special? I think you're absolutely right about the nullPointerException, but there is a significant difference between knowing an abstract fact - "Every object variable coded is a pointer," and actually having to deal with pointers and the consequences of screwing them up. An example occurred recently when I was trying to do a compareTo method on a Graphics object, which required an impossible explicit cast. I asked someone for advice, and that person said, "Well, just use a pointer." Great idea - in C. While I was eventually able to solve the problem, I really think it would have been much more informative for me if I were simply able to use the pointer, and see what happened.
And, quite frankly, I really resent the implication you made at the end of your statement. I'm as totally opposed to the Microsoft business practices as you are - my question was with an academic issue regarding Java programming as a teaching language - and since when did Bill Gates benefit from a CS department switching from Java to C++ anyway?
Er... I meant to say acts of war. I think acts of way would have an entirely different meaning :)
Ok, duffbeer703, you may have a point. I guess I was responding to the brief, abrupt way you were making an if:then statement involving acts of way. Such words are not to be bandied about loosely, even in flamewars.
My point isn't to ridicule you, but to strongly encourage you to think before you talk about military attacks. Nobody wins when a country goes to war. The first time somebody dies, everyone loses, simply because we know better, or should.
Let's see... a dev machine in front of the firewall but with internal network access... no tripwire, promiscuous ports all over the place... wow. Wish I could do that. :-)
Think about it for a second. If everyone set up their machines like this, the hackers wouldn't be able to pick out a target amid all the noise! Of course, that would be the end of online shopping, but that's overrated
Shame on the irresponsible people who would so ignorantly play Russian Roulette with the California electrical grid. The power system is dangerous as it is, and the potential exists for real human suffering if it should collapse. No need for more incompetence (on top of the legislators who created the mess in the first place) to help bring the whole thing down. I hope that the person whose machine that was is aware of just how bad they fscked up.
[Caller] Er, I need some help with your smoke alarms...
[Support tech ID ten-t] Is the battery connected?
[Caller] No, that's not the problem at all. You see, I can't seem to find the radioactive part...
[ID ten-t] No problem, let me just transfer you to our "radioactive component location" department. One moment, please...
I mean, this kid doesn't even come across as that smart. I don't know about you, but my many foolhardy stunts of youth did not involve blowing up my own house or filling my mom's potting shed with radioactive isotopes, much less putting the stuff in my pants pocket. Maybe he just wants seven-legged children some day. What really suprises me is that this dodo apparently pulled off acts of social engineering that would make Captian Crunch proud. Maybe the rest of us are the idiots.
The way things work here is that fiber is run to "nodes" which then are translated to coax, which is then brought to your home. And at the bandwidth we get (3mbps down, 1 up) and the price (how's $25 a month sound), you'd probably be in for a better deal.
Of course, your telco would need to invest considerably for the hardware, but at the current price of fiber, they could almost certainly do better for less than any silly DSL hookup. My suggestion would be to contact someone at the telco who has a brain as well as decision-making authority (I know this might be asking a lot), and see if they're even aware of the concept. It's worth a try - at worst, they'll say no, and at best, you can show those DSLers what's up.
I first went to the following site, as referenced below in the comments:h tm
http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/e-tax/checkbrw.
From there, it was clear that everything worked. I was only able to browse the subnet regarding the Self-Assesment Tax Return, which I am hardly eligible for (Living as I do in the US), but if I were British, I could almost certainly do what I needed to do.
From this I can only draw the following conclusion: M$ has set up a series of gateway sites which have no legitimate purpose whatsoever; instead, they appear to be clearly trying to force people to use their garbage. If only Tony Blair knew what a horrible mistake he has made...
Linux, due to the fact that the source code is open to anyone interested in looking at it and fixing it, and due to the ease with which it can be upgraded, and due to the generally higher level of expertise of system administrators who prefer to use it, is inherently fairly secure, on average.
Windows NT, due to the fact that Microsoft chooses to protect it's business interests, does not disclose its source code, and due to the difficulty people find in upgrading it, and also due to the generally lower level of expertise and experience in system administrators who prefer to use it, is inherently not very secure, on average.
I do think it is important for sourceforge that they make a public post explaining the exploit and how to stop it. My guess is that they will as soon as they figure it out.
I, too, ignored Voyager until later on (Kinda hard to watch anything on tv when you have no power or running water, much less cable). Once I did, I was fortunate to be near a local station that plays reruns every weeknight, so I got to watch pretty much every episode that aired. It sure was irritating at first to see Kate Mulgrew mugging the camera(Patric Stewart she isn't) as the music swelled just before some inane commercial took over the display, and even more recently, I thought the idea of 7 fighting The Rock was a desperate publicity stunt to boost ratings, but all in all, it was fun to watch the actors becoming comfortable with the roles, and to disagree with the author of this story, I thought the premise the series was based upon was interesting, and brought up things to consider.
That said, I felt let down by the finale. (spoilage warning: I won't give it away if possible, but still want to air my gripes) The overall plot could have just as easily have been another weekly episode. Also, the last couple of episodes have felt kind of rushed. Why was Neelix so abrupt when he left the ship? It really wasn't like him to even discuss his plans with a very suddenly grown-up Naomi. IMHO the finale, for that matter, could have used an extra hour to flesh out some of the complications and twists they threw in there. Why not a two- or three-parter, instead of crowding everything into ninety minutes (show-commercials=@90minutes)?
The "big" ending of it all was worse than anticlimactic. There was simply not enough time to finish the job. Now that I've become used to the characters, it's kind of dissappointing that the next series will be set two hundred years before Voyager... guess that leaves out any option for cameo appearanes, with the possible exception of Q. Oh, well, time goes on.
with all the horror stories bandied about regarding dsl companies, the scams they run, the rotten connections people get from them, the company assimilations, and most of all, the ridiculous prices they charge (fifty bucks a month? Get outta here!), why does anyone bother? It seems like dsl is inherently too unstable to be bothered with. Right now, I pay $24.95 a month for cable internet. The only time it has gone down was when some shithead tried to dos the company, and that only lasted an hour and a half.
As for bandwidth, I sometimes grumble when I'm only getting 3mbps down and 1 up. I doubt that someone paying fifty bucks a month to a shady dsl company can get the same pipe. Of course, someone has to build the infrastructure for cable to work, but they have to do the same for dsl, too. And the range for cable is much, much better. My suggestion is to get on the provider's case for them to start setting up coax, or better yet, ethernet to the curb. I've yet to see a dsl solution that was worth a squat.
Depends on what you're looking at :)
Actually, I tried Opera, and I loved the gesture-based navigation. I didn't like Opera very much, though. Since KDE is my primary desktop, this project interests me very much.
I wonder if the person who wrote that tome of a sig for Warburg ever wrote EULAs for Microsoft. Can you imagine what would happen if they ever sent out spam? Or if somebody in the office got an email worm, and started jamming that one on the wires? Locusts would surely swarm...
So these routers can analyze my packets and "determine the most efficient way to transmit them?" Is anyone else just a little bit uncomfortable with this?
I agree with those who say the Internet is not running up to spec, but I'd sure like to see a thorough discussion on how the technology can avoid actually looking at the content, not just the content type. I agree with michael (for once) that this introduces an ability for ISPs which may not be in the best interests of free expression of ideas - something I was led to believe the internet would bring us.
taken down more .edu sites than all the script kiddies put together. I can imagine the sysadmins there right now - running around trying to figure out what the hell - who's running a napster server off the web frontend, and then... "Somebody posted a link to Slashdot!" After that, things will settle down a bit, until they figure out that it's related to Quake, and not some "real" academic situation.
Seriously, though, I can't possibly imagine how this would help me avoid getting fragged.
Now, if we could just convince those knuckle-draggers down in administration who insist on sending everything with a message like "Details on the last Board Meeting - big changes!" and then send it out in MS Word format, complete with macros.
No amount of logic seems to convince these people that "Copy" and "Paste" are a good idea.
Most likely running under Netware...
Since I refuse to eat them, I really can't say how they taste. What I can say (and this was substantiated by none other than my girlfriends seven-year-old), is that they smell like fish! Pretty bad idea that - eating tomatoes that smell like fish. It was only later that I was told that the GM tomatoes actually do contain some fish chromosomes. No thanks.
That post, even coming from an AC, is probably the most sincere expression of emotion on this site. I only wish I was so in touch with my own emotions.