I'll have to remember that. Thanks. The way I get a list of all stories is to press the "Search" button at the bottom of the front page, but leave the text box blank. This produces a list of all stories in reverse chronological order. This has a couple of (small) advantages: I can see all the sections and topics that a story has been posted in, and, based on the number of comments, I can make a guess as to whether it really is on the front page. A big disadvantage, of course, is that the story text is cut off after about 100 characters, but that text, plus the headline, is usually enough to let me decide whether I want to read it.
Most of us have probably seen spams pushing various pump-and-dump scams. Many of these are just plain text, bragging that such-and-such a stock is undervalued and will skyrocket in the next few {days|weeks|decades} when the company announces that the {RIAA|FBI|SCOX} have placed a $1 {m|b|tr}illion order for their new whizz-bang {frobnicator|KaZaA-killer|pengiun trap}.
Usually, there's no URL, because if you were stupid enough to buy the shares, you'd buy them from someone else. Some of these spams, though, link to things like the company's stock chart on Yahoo! Finance. I get a lot of mail from people with Yahoo! mail accounts, and I'm also on several Yahoo! Groups mailing lists. Messages from either of those sources usually have a little advert for Yahoo! at the bottom. So, for me, at least, blocking messages that have "yahoo.com" in a URL somewhere would cause me to lose a lot of legitimate mail.
Perhaps I'm being thick, but if you're running some sort of Bayesian filter, would it not automatically flag mail containing the offending domain names as probably spam anyway?
<karma-whore mode="shameless">
I've just put such a link on the front page of my site: http://home.clara.net/pembers/
There's a bit of explanation too, because most of my visitors have probably never heard of SCOX or Linux.
</karma-whore>
Expecting my cease-and-desist from Kevin any minute now...
I detest offshoring as much as the next rabid Slashdotter, but that's one job the Indians are welcome to!
Has anyone else noticed that SCOX are also looking for a "Director of Financial Reporting and SEC/GAAP Compliance", among whose responsibilities are "Financial reporting of quarterly and annual results in accordance with SEC rules and regulations." This has been listed since 8 December 2003, or over six weeks. I wonder why the last one quit? Could it be because there are some things even accountants won't do?
It's encouraging to see that some of those who benefit from Linux are prepared to defend it against predators. But it may mean that they think there is a significant probability that SCOX will not implode before they can file any new lawsuits (as opposed just to threatening to file new lawsuits).
Of course, you won't do something imhumane like they do in Saudi-Arabia - cutting of fingers etc.
Why not? If you want to punish someone who makes a living from computers, I think that would be very fitting. Of course, there's always voice recognition... maybe we'd better cut their larynxes out as well... But then they could strap a stick to their forehead and tap the keys with that... Oh, fuck it, let's just chop the bastards' heads off and be done with it.
Such things already exist. Try a Google search on "realtime blackhole list".
All we would need is one database to keep track of the ratings.
Well, if it's like Slashdot's moderation system, it would be subject to all the same abuses that Slashdot itself (allegedly) is. But it seems the spammers already have pretty goodtools for dealing with centralised blacklist databases.
Ever been faced with a boring situation you'd wish would hurry up (i.e. another boring cutscene, perhaps one you've already seen before)?
Once or twice, yes. The few games I play already seem to have emotion detection built-in: I hit the <Esc> key, and the game fires up its neural network simulator and usually comes to the conclusion: "Hmm, the player seems to be bored with this bit. Maybe I'd better get back to the action."
The USPTO has a search engine. The front page is at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html. It has a full-text search going back to 1976, and you can (apparently) see scanned images of documents all the way back to 1790.
Not forgetting the good old Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Until a few weeks ago, a search on Google News for "SCO" would turn up at least one or two articles about these guys in the first couple of pages. Now, though, the results are completely monopolised by stories about the Smoking Crack Operation. Evidently, McBride and Co are getting more and more media attention. This, of course, is good for keeping the stock price up, but also increases the risk of a little boy shouting: "But the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes at all!"
...and then I realised it would kill mailing lists, too.
Then again, it might be made to work if, instead of the government taxing every outgoing mail spool, ISPs charged other ISPs for the privilege of sending mail to their users. That is, when fred@aol.com sends a mail to jim@hotmail.com, AOL has to pay Hotmail 1/10 cent, or however much the "tax" is set at. These charges would be aggregated, so there would be one monthly bill instead of trillions of nano-payments. Your ISP subscription could include, say, 1000 free emails per month, or 12,000 per year.
I would expect that for normal email traffic, the amount flowing in each direction would be about equal. When someone starts spamming, though, their ISP is slapped with large invoices. If the ISP has any sense, they pass those invoices on to the spammer. If the invoices aren't paid, the ISP that sent them refuses any traffic from those IP blocks.
For spam that comes through open relays or proxies, invoice whoever runs the open machine, and let them worry about where it really came from. If they can find the spammer and recover the cost from him, great. If not, they'll have learned a valuable lesson about not leaving an unsecured box on the open Internet.
A scheme that requires all (or many) ISPs to change their behaviour would be difficult to get working, but easier than one that requires all (or many) email users to change. The biggest problem I foresee is that it's notoriously hard to extract money from a spammer. Still, if ISPs who are currently spam-friendly know that selling connectivity to a spammer will cost them a large amount of money, they might be more careful about whom they sign up.
(Posting this from Mozilla 1.3 on Mandrake 9.1...)
I've been using Mandrake as my main OS at home for maybe a year and a half now. A couple of applications (Mozilla and KPPP are the main culprits) tend to hang or become unresponsive after they've been running for a few weeks, but that's my only real complaint with it. I wouldn't describe Mandrake as unstable. I've only ever once managed to crash the desktop (on 8.2), and I've never had a kernel panic.
I use Gnome rather than KDE, so I don't know if the latter is more problematic. I was under the impression that KDE was the default environment on Mandrake, so I would've expected them to put more effort into making it work properly.
...is thousands of Psion users gnashing their teeth in frustration. Of all the changes Psion could have made to revive their fortunes as a maker of PDA-type computers, this is quite possibly the most stupid. Their EPOC operating system and the software that came with it was, in my opinion, the best part of the Psion computers I've used (series 3c, 3mx, 5 and 5mx).
Over the last six years, I've owned five Psions, two of which I bought as spares after I found out Psion were going to stop making them. (From other comments here, I see I'm not alone in doing this. That should give Psion some clue how loyal their users are - or were.) I'm still using the 5mx, mainly for writing the novels that I'm plugging in my.sig.
In all the time I've been using Psions, I've had precisely two crashes that caused me to lose data. That makes EPOC by far the most stable system I've ever used. (I should say that I use the built-in applications almost exclusively, so I don't know how easy or hard it would be for a third-party program to mess things up.)
The hardware side is another matter altogether. My first Psion, a 3c, lasted about 15 months before the screen gave out, losing about half the columns. (It was second-hand, admittedly, so I don't know how much abuse it had had previously.) The next one, a new Series 5, managed 18 months before one of the bits of metal that holds everything together when you open it popped out of place. Not wanting to be bitten again, I took out a 3-year warranty on the 5mx that I bought after that. Sure enough, after about 2 years, the touch screen stopped working. By this time, Psion had stopped manufacture, so while I was waiting for the 5mx to be repaired, I bought not one, but two second-hand Series 5s.
So, after all that, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that the government would have to make pen and paper illegal before I'd use a PDA with a Microsoft OS on it.
A post further down says the page about the roadshow on the SCO site no longer mentions HP. Instead, it says the sponsor is a company called Microlite, whom I'd never heard of before today. From a cursory glance around their site, it appears they do backup systems for UNIX and Linux. I'd suggest letting them know how you feel about their sponsorship of these events, but they mention some SCO products by name, so presumably, they already have some idea of the kind of people they're dealing with...
Chart. As I write this, it's down nearly $3, or 17%, on yesterday's close. McBride and his cronies have less than an hour before the markets close to innovate another press release to try to pump it back up again. Grab some popcorn - this is gonna be fun.
From yesterday's article article about Smart 1 at the BBC:
"We think we know what the Moon is made of because the Apollo astronauts went there and brought back half a tonne of rock samples.
But they went to the Earth side, on the equator and on the flat bits," said Professor Manuel Grande, on the instrument team.
"Those areas aren't typical and, importantly, they're not the ancient ones. What we need to do is a global survey of what the Moon is made of - and Smart 1 with our X-ray spectrometer will do that."
I can't reach it either. The connection is timing out. I'm in the UK, if that makes any difference.
Re:SCO also filed their 10Q with the SEC yesterday
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
·
· Score: 1
Hmm... that one's definitely juicier than the one I pointed to. Thanks. It looks like the one on Yahoo is an edited version of it. Is it legal to do that? There's no indication that the version on Yahoo doesn't tell the full story.
SCO also filed their 10Q with the SEC yesterday...
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Revenue is down on last year for almost every part of the business, except SCOsource, to which they attribute their first two quarters of profitable operation.
They have cut back on R&D, but also on sales and marketing.
They admit to having no clue about how much revenue they'll have in future:
While our SCOsource initiative has already resulted in revenue of $15,530,000 during the last two quarters and we continue negotiations with other industry participants that we believe may lead to additional SCOsource license agreements, we are currently unable to predict the level or timing of future revenue from this source, if any.
They make no specific mention of their plan to exto^H^H^H^Hobtain money from anyone who uses Linux. Does this come under SCOsource? Do they not think it'll make enough money to make a difference to the balance sheet? Or is it just that they realise it's not a good idea to admit to the government that they're running a protection racket?
I'm still waiting for the invoice for my single-CPU Linux box...
I had a look at the product's website. Something I thought was odd was that I couldn't find out what the hardware and OS requirements were. The page you linked to says (not very prominently) that it runs on Windows, but doesn't say which versions.
The people who are saying that you can't stop piracy are, I'm afraid, right. Your efforts would be better spent trying to get the more honest users to buy the product. In the days when I bought shareware (I mainly run Linux now), something that always encouraged me to buy was having more features in the registered version.
I didn't like nag screens (one when the program started was OK), or arbitrary limits on the number of objects you could process, or the amount of time you could use the program. Being a programmer myself, I had a fair idea of how little code is involved in applying these limits. Asking me to pay you for a program that's identical to the one I already have, except that it has that small amount of code removed, seems rather cheeky.
I would imagine they give it to shareholders in the form of dividends, or give it to executives in the form of whatever perks the executives want. The BBC doesn't have either of those outgoings. It also makes money by licensing its programmes to broadcasters in other countries, and by selling videos and DVDs of them to the public. A cable or satellite company that (generally) broadcasts programmes made by others wouldn't have those options.
Also, consider that (probably):
number_of_TV_licence_payers * tv_licence_fee = k * number_of_cable_subscribers * average_cable_subscription
where k is some large value. The BBC also receives a subsidy from the Government, although I'm not sure how large it is in relation to the income from the licence fee.
...is the addition of a progress bar to the splash screen. (See this page, under "Other Enhancements", near the bottom.) This would normally be a sign that your code is getting a wee bit bloated.
That said, I use OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 a lot at home, and am very pleased with it. It is slow to start, but is quite fast afterwards, and normally I have it running all the time. (This is on a 1.3GHz Athlon with 512Mb, running Mandrake 9.1.) I use mostly the wordprocessor, with a bit of the spreadsheet, and for my relatively simple needs, I've yet to find anything it can't do.
I've never owned a copy of MS Office, so the improvements in compatability with it will pass me by. Occasionally, lusers send me Word documents, and OOo already does a good job of getting the gist across. Most of the time, they're not saying anything that couldn't be said just as effectively in plain text. If the formatting is too complicated for OOo to unmangle, well... the document probably wasn't worth reading anyway:-p
...and not by the obvious method of printing a file containing nothing but 500 form feeds.
When I was at university, about 10 years ago, one of my fellow students came up with a way to tie up one of our shiny new Apple Laserwriters. They were quite expensive to run, and so the university charged us for each page that we printed. The nice thing about this hack, from the evil point of view, was that it produced only one page of output, so the cost to the hacker was negligible - at least in financial terms.
What was this hack? Well, the Laserwriters supported PostScript, which is a complete programming language. So this student wrote a little PostScript program that made the printer output a one-page, high-resolution copy of the Mandelbrot set...
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to remember that. Thanks. The way I get a list of all stories is to press the "Search" button at the bottom of the front page, but leave the text box blank. This produces a list of all stories in reverse chronological order. This has a couple of (small) advantages: I can see all the sections and topics that a story has been posted in, and, based on the number of comments, I can make a guess as to whether it really is on the front page. A big disadvantage, of course, is that the story text is cut off after about 100 characters, but that text, plus the headline, is usually enough to let me decide whether I want to read it.
Most of us have probably seen spams pushing various pump-and-dump scams. Many of these are just plain text, bragging that such-and-such a stock is undervalued and will skyrocket in the next few {days|weeks|decades} when the company announces that the {RIAA|FBI|SCOX} have placed a $1 {m|b|tr}illion order for their new whizz-bang {frobnicator|KaZaA-killer|pengiun trap}.
Usually, there's no URL, because if you were stupid enough to buy the shares, you'd buy them from someone else. Some of these spams, though, link to things like the company's stock chart on Yahoo! Finance. I get a lot of mail from people with Yahoo! mail accounts, and I'm also on several Yahoo! Groups mailing lists. Messages from either of those sources usually have a little advert for Yahoo! at the bottom. So, for me, at least, blocking messages that have "yahoo.com" in a URL somewhere would cause me to lose a lot of legitimate mail.
Perhaps I'm being thick, but if you're running some sort of Bayesian filter, would it not automatically flag mail containing the offending domain names as probably spam anyway?
<karma-whore mode="shameless"> I've just put such a link on the front page of my site: http://home.clara.net/pembers/ There's a bit of explanation too, because most of my visitors have probably never heard of SCOX or Linux. </karma-whore>
Expecting my cease-and-desist from Kevin any minute now...
I detest offshoring as much as the next rabid Slashdotter, but that's one job the Indians are welcome to!
Has anyone else noticed that SCOX are also looking for a "Director of Financial Reporting and SEC/GAAP Compliance", among whose responsibilities are "Financial reporting of quarterly and annual results in accordance with SEC rules and regulations." This has been listed since 8 December 2003, or over six weeks. I wonder why the last one quit? Could it be because there are some things even accountants won't do?
It's encouraging to see that some of those who benefit from Linux are prepared to defend it against predators. But it may mean that they think there is a significant probability that SCOX will not implode before they can file any new lawsuits (as opposed just to threatening to file new lawsuits).
Why not? If you want to punish someone who makes a living from computers, I think that would be very fitting. Of course, there's always voice recognition... maybe we'd better cut their larynxes out as well... But then they could strap a stick to their forehead and tap the keys with that... Oh, fuck it, let's just chop the bastards' heads off and be done with it.
Such things already exist. Try a Google search on "realtime blackhole list".
Well, if it's like Slashdot's moderation system, it would be subject to all the same abuses that Slashdot itself (allegedly) is. But it seems the spammers already have pretty good tools for dealing with centralised blacklist databases.
Once or twice, yes. The few games I play already seem to have emotion detection built-in: I hit the <Esc> key, and the game fires up its neural network simulator and usually comes to the conclusion: "Hmm, the player seems to be bored with this bit. Maybe I'd better get back to the action."
IANAP, but as I understand it, our own sun is too small to go supernova.
The USPTO has a search engine. The front page is at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html. It has a full-text search going back to 1976, and you can (apparently) see scanned images of documents all the way back to 1790.
Not forgetting the good old Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Until a few weeks ago, a search on Google News for "SCO" would turn up at least one or two articles about these guys in the first couple of pages. Now, though, the results are completely monopolised by stories about the Smoking Crack Operation. Evidently, McBride and Co are getting more and more media attention. This, of course, is good for keeping the stock price up, but also increases the risk of a little boy shouting: "But the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes at all!"
...and then I realised it would kill mailing lists, too.
Then again, it might be made to work if, instead of the government taxing every outgoing mail spool, ISPs charged other ISPs for the privilege of sending mail to their users. That is, when fred@aol.com sends a mail to jim@hotmail.com, AOL has to pay Hotmail 1/10 cent, or however much the "tax" is set at. These charges would be aggregated, so there would be one monthly bill instead of trillions of nano-payments. Your ISP subscription could include, say, 1000 free emails per month, or 12,000 per year.
I would expect that for normal email traffic, the amount flowing in each direction would be about equal. When someone starts spamming, though, their ISP is slapped with large invoices. If the ISP has any sense, they pass those invoices on to the spammer. If the invoices aren't paid, the ISP that sent them refuses any traffic from those IP blocks.
For spam that comes through open relays or proxies, invoice whoever runs the open machine, and let them worry about where it really came from. If they can find the spammer and recover the cost from him, great. If not, they'll have learned a valuable lesson about not leaving an unsecured box on the open Internet.
A scheme that requires all (or many) ISPs to change their behaviour would be difficult to get working, but easier than one that requires all (or many) email users to change. The biggest problem I foresee is that it's notoriously hard to extract money from a spammer. Still, if ISPs who are currently spam-friendly know that selling connectivity to a spammer will cost them a large amount of money, they might be more careful about whom they sign up.
(Posting this from Mozilla 1.3 on Mandrake 9.1...)
I've been using Mandrake as my main OS at home for maybe a year and a half now. A couple of applications (Mozilla and KPPP are the main culprits) tend to hang or become unresponsive after they've been running for a few weeks, but that's my only real complaint with it. I wouldn't describe Mandrake as unstable. I've only ever once managed to crash the desktop (on 8.2), and I've never had a kernel panic.
I use Gnome rather than KDE, so I don't know if the latter is more problematic. I was under the impression that KDE was the default environment on Mandrake, so I would've expected them to put more effort into making it work properly.
...is thousands of Psion users gnashing their teeth in frustration. Of all the changes Psion could have made to revive their fortunes as a maker of PDA-type computers, this is quite possibly the most stupid. Their EPOC operating system and the software that came with it was, in my opinion, the best part of the Psion computers I've used (series 3c, 3mx, 5 and 5mx).
Over the last six years, I've owned five Psions, two of which I bought as spares after I found out Psion were going to stop making them. (From other comments here, I see I'm not alone in doing this. That should give Psion some clue how loyal their users are - or were.) I'm still using the 5mx, mainly for writing the novels that I'm plugging in my .sig.
In all the time I've been using Psions, I've had precisely two crashes that caused me to lose data. That makes EPOC by far the most stable system I've ever used. (I should say that I use the built-in applications almost exclusively, so I don't know how easy or hard it would be for a third-party program to mess things up.)
The hardware side is another matter altogether. My first Psion, a 3c, lasted about 15 months before the screen gave out, losing about half the columns. (It was second-hand, admittedly, so I don't know how much abuse it had had previously.) The next one, a new Series 5, managed 18 months before one of the bits of metal that holds everything together when you open it popped out of place. Not wanting to be bitten again, I took out a 3-year warranty on the 5mx that I bought after that. Sure enough, after about 2 years, the touch screen stopped working. By this time, Psion had stopped manufacture, so while I was waiting for the 5mx to be repaired, I bought not one, but two second-hand Series 5s.
So, after all that, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that the government would have to make pen and paper illegal before I'd use a PDA with a Microsoft OS on it.
A post further down says the page about the roadshow on the SCO site no longer mentions HP. Instead, it says the sponsor is a company called Microlite, whom I'd never heard of before today. From a cursory glance around their site, it appears they do backup systems for UNIX and Linux. I'd suggest letting them know how you feel about their sponsorship of these events, but they mention some SCO products by name, so presumably, they already have some idea of the kind of people they're dealing with...
Chart. As I write this, it's down nearly $3, or 17%, on yesterday's close. McBride and his cronies have less than an hour before the markets close to innovate another press release to try to pump it back up again. Grab some popcorn - this is gonna be fun.
From yesterday's article article about Smart 1 at the BBC:
I can't reach it either. The connection is timing out. I'm in the UK, if that makes any difference.
Hmm... that one's definitely juicier than the one I pointed to. Thanks. It looks like the one on Yahoo is an edited version of it. Is it legal to do that? There's no indication that the version on Yahoo doesn't tell the full story.
...a copy is here.
Interesting points:
I'm still waiting for the invoice for my single-CPU Linux box...
I had a look at the product's website. Something I thought was odd was that I couldn't find out what the hardware and OS requirements were. The page you linked to says (not very prominently) that it runs on Windows, but doesn't say which versions.
The people who are saying that you can't stop piracy are, I'm afraid, right. Your efforts would be better spent trying to get the more honest users to buy the product. In the days when I bought shareware (I mainly run Linux now), something that always encouraged me to buy was having more features in the registered version.
I didn't like nag screens (one when the program started was OK), or arbitrary limits on the number of objects you could process, or the amount of time you could use the program. Being a programmer myself, I had a fair idea of how little code is involved in applying these limits. Asking me to pay you for a program that's identical to the one I already have, except that it has that small amount of code removed, seems rather cheeky.
What are you going to do when you lose the scanner? Better put an RFID tag in that as well, so that you can use the scanner to... oh, never mind...
I would imagine they give it to shareholders in the form of dividends, or give it to executives in the form of whatever perks the executives want. The BBC doesn't have either of those outgoings. It also makes money by licensing its programmes to broadcasters in other countries, and by selling videos and DVDs of them to the public. A cable or satellite company that (generally) broadcasts programmes made by others wouldn't have those options.
Also, consider that (probably):
number_of_TV_licence_payers * tv_licence_fee = k * number_of_cable_subscribers * average_cable_subscription
where k is some large value. The BBC also receives a subsidy from the Government, although I'm not sure how large it is in relation to the income from the licence fee.
...is the addition of a progress bar to the splash screen. (See this page, under "Other Enhancements", near the bottom.) This would normally be a sign that your code is getting a wee bit bloated.
That said, I use OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 a lot at home, and am very pleased with it. It is slow to start, but is quite fast afterwards, and normally I have it running all the time. (This is on a 1.3GHz Athlon with 512Mb, running Mandrake 9.1.) I use mostly the wordprocessor, with a bit of the spreadsheet, and for my relatively simple needs, I've yet to find anything it can't do.
I've never owned a copy of MS Office, so the improvements in compatability with it will pass me by. Occasionally, lusers send me Word documents, and OOo already does a good job of getting the gist across. Most of the time, they're not saying anything that couldn't be said just as effectively in plain text. If the formatting is too complicated for OOo to unmangle, well... the document probably wasn't worth reading anyway :-p
...and not by the obvious method of printing a file containing nothing but 500 form feeds.
When I was at university, about 10 years ago, one of my fellow students came up with a way to tie up one of our shiny new Apple Laserwriters. They were quite expensive to run, and so the university charged us for each page that we printed. The nice thing about this hack, from the evil point of view, was that it produced only one page of output, so the cost to the hacker was negligible - at least in financial terms.
What was this hack? Well, the Laserwriters supported PostScript, which is a complete programming language. So this student wrote a little PostScript program that made the printer output a one-page, high-resolution copy of the Mandelbrot set...