I am a PC user eyeing a Mac. I used to be a mac user, as it turns out, but I went over to the "dark side" about five years ago for career reasons. I work in I.T. in a Windows environment.
The biggest barrier for my entry into the Mac market is price. I actually own a Power Computing PowerBase 180, which as you may know is a 603e-based Mac clone from 1996. At the time the machine cost $1500, and a comparable Mac, the Performa 6400, was about $2500.
I recently built a new system at home, consisting of an Athlon XP processor and a nForce architecture motherboard. Total cost was about $600 for a new CPU, Motherboard, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, 512 MB RAM, and 20GB HD. I get the feeling an "equivalent" powerMac would run about $1800. Also, I have Dolby 5.1 surround sound output, does Apple even offer that?
The other concern I have about buying a Mac is: I like to play computer games. Right now I am hacking my way through Baldur's Gate II. The Mac game selection is very slim and I find that quite frustrating. In this regard quality is more important than quantity, but still there's always this feeling of playing last year's PC game.
Maybe I'm not your target audience, and that is a real shame because I was a big time mac fanatic back in 1990-1991. I used the beta of System 7 and was blown away. I learned to hack applications using MacsBug. But five years later Mac was still on System 7 and it took five more years to really take it to the next level. I mean, really, clicking the mouse should not be a system event! But I digress.
You want me to buy a Mac? When I can buy a good mac for about $750, or buy a "bare bones" CPU and MB Apple system, then we'll talk. I'm not willing to pay more AND be limited in good games. One or the other is okay, but the double-whammy is just too much.
I don't know if current Macs have ZIF-socket processors but if you are stil soldering them, that's another reason to stay away from Mac.
Well, not everyone compresses the stuff they put on CD. I have known several prorams that do not compress what's on the CD. I guess the assumption is: Hey, we've got 650 MB here, no need to compress!
I agree, though, that some things on the CD are compressed, or are not very compressable. Like Diablo's huge-ass movies. Still, I think most gamers would give up a movie in order to have a better game. Or perhaps they will start putting the movies in DivX;) or howevr you spell that and that will compress them a whole lot too, making them small enough for the bandwidth limitations of a broadband connection.
I just got Transmission Speed = 1460 Kb/s from pcpitstop.com. I have a cable modem, and most people in Seattle are asleep because it's 1am.
I think a 1x cd-rom is 150KB/sec, so I am getting a little better than that (1460Kb/s = 200 KB/s or so). Okay, I'm not exactly at 40x CD-ROM speeds but I am at about 2x speed.
Mytiply that by the 4x enrcryption over the wire, then my virtual CD speed is at least an 8x CD-rom, which is actually pretty damn good. At 8x you can burn a full CD in about ten minutes.
Depending on how much you need to DL, it could be faster than a CD, if you count the time for the drawer to close and the disc to spin up -- that's about a 10 or 15 second head start for the ethernet card. During those ten or fifteen seconds I can pull down about 15 MB of valve's compressed stream, and then I'll quickly lose the race. But depending on how big the DL is, it might actually be faster than CD.
Ultimately I think faster than a CD might be a bit of an exaggeration but we all read that as "comparabe to a CD" anyway.
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You know, that actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, I know they would never go for it, but look at the way things went down. US builds X, russia says "we need those" and copies it and the copy is better. Like the MiG-29 is a copy of the F-15, only it's better.
A big part of the cold war was Mutually Assured Destruction, right? Like if USA had nuked USSR in the early 50s they might not have been obliterated in turn, but after that it was accepted that no one side would nuke the other because they'd just get nuked back. (Now it's all crazy with terrorists and missing warheads and US will nuke first, but hey we live in different times now. Except that most of the guys in the Bush administration are from the cold war era...)
I think there are a few reasons why consolidated warfare development wouldn't work, but they are all political. To some it would be unPatriotic to go this route. Others would see a loss of American jobs which would of course be Bad.
But from a economics standpoint, it seems a very workable model. Do we really need X number of countries producing fighter jets in state-sanctioned monopolies?
The way things are going I expect to see this issue come before the WTO in the next five years. China will start submitting bids for U.S. defense contracts. Who knows maybe in 10 years the USAF will be flying Saabs.
It sounds ridiculous to me (as an american) but not too many countries see the value in producing from scratch their own jet fighters when the US will grant you the foreign aid money to buy the American product.
1...little ISPs don't have that kind of user base Sit back and watch the Genius of Capitalism at work. Am I the only one who thinks there's a conflict of interest when the head of the FCC is on AOL/Time Warner's Board of Directors?
2...access them through, say, www.anonymizer.com They will block access to anonymyzer.com. And/or they will outlaw anonymizer.com. No unencrpyted traffic on the "last mile." We've seen this before; ISPs whose TOS don't allow a VPN connection. If you use anonymizer.com, then the terrorists win!
3...born-again-Christian-zealot Attorney General defining kiddie porn to further their own agenda It should be pretty easy to find "impure" sites, since under the USA Patriot act all the FBI has to do is tell the ISP that they are doing it for "security" and presto! All your packets are belong to Ashcroft.
Living thru the Internet Revolution exemplifies the old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."
Blocking child pornography is essentially impossible. Blocking any sort of "content" or "IP" is an extremely difficult task. It's one thing to block port 25; unfortunately the IETF has yet to standardize on a port number for kiddie porn.
First, there's the problem of deciding what to block: Let's take the obvious example, of blocking a jpg. This means someone has to determine the age of the person in that jpg. I looked at about 1,000 jpgs last nite, and I pity the fool who has to monitor my drunken pr0n surf.
Perhaps it would be possible to use some VERY sophisticated pattern recognition algorithm, but, like spam filtering, you're never gonna block 100% of the bad stuff while letting 100% of the good stuff through. Nevermind the incredible resource hit of scanning each downloaded jpg, or the fact that your CRC-matching database of known jpgs ain't worth shit once I take the 640x480 jpg and save it as 644x483.
But that's not even the real problem. No, the real problem is THE DEFINITION OF PORNOGRAPHY. Basically it depends on things like "community standards" and such which don't really make sense on the Internet. With child pornography, the definition gets even more complicated; things that are otherwise acceptable become pornography when the subject is under 18, such as a picture which shows the outline of the vulva through clothing isn't porn if the girl is 23 but is porn if she's 9.
(In fact the entire laws about kiddie porn in this country are totally fucked. The gov't can offer to sell you kiddie porn, say from an ad in the back of a magazine, and then sell it to you, and then bust you for possession. This would normally be entrapment, but the Supreme Court decided that kiddie porn is such a scourge that normal constitutional protections are outweighed by the need to lock up pedophiles. Hmmm... "First they came for the pedophiles, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a pedophile. Then they came for the Arabs..." But I digress.)
To make matters worse, pornography doesn't even have to be a picture or movie. Text can be pornography. For instance, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't stop myself from licking 15-year old Timmy's perineum as he lay unconscious. That could be construed as kiddie porn, believe it or not. Of course in this context I won't be going to jail (I hope) since my INTENT isn't prurient (but who can really tell my intent?). But if I logged on to some kiddy chat room and made that comment, I would be in big trouble, esp. if the moderator knows what a perineum is.
So not only do you have to filter the content, which is a subjective process in the first place, you have to ascertain the context of that content. In other words you have to Meta-Moderate, and we all know how much fun that is!
No, this will never work, and the "blacklist" that gets passed from the Penn. A.G. to the ISP's will have all the same problems as the anti-spam blacklists: How do you get off it, do you notify someone that they're on it, or would that just tell them it's time to get a new IP address, etc.
Here are some links to interesting legal stuff: Supreme court def. of pornography (pdf, sorry) has the famous "I know it when I see it" qoute from Justice Potter Stewart Google HTML version Guy in jail for selling videos of girls in their panties Guy acquitted after gov't got him to order kiddie porn thru mail and then busted him. He was acquitted because the gov't hadn't proved intent, not because it was entrapment
Okay, troll, I'll bite and give up my mod points to boot...
Do you really think there's only one correct way to speak English? Based on the name of the language, it would be what's spoken in England, no? You know, the country that that has teh theatre and aluminium and colour.
I'm also pretty sure that your regime of "one way to speak proper English" goes against the grain of your computing common sense. Is there only one "proper" OS?
You see, language is alive; she is ever changing, and subject to geographical and temporal variations. Try to read some Shakespeare or Chaucer and you'll see what I'm talking about.
While we're on the topic, perhaps the rest of the world should adopt the U.S. standard of mm/dd/yy when the obvioud dd/mm/yy makes a lot more sense. Make sure to get the rest of the world to bail on that cutesy metric system while you're at it.
(By the way, your logic doesn't even hold up. Enron is more than one company, in fact it has thousands. But you wouldn't say "Enron are wise to have bought the President" even though, unlike AMD, they are more than one company.)
You can stop being an imperialist troll, or you can continue to be a moron and remain in fine company. Slashdot have many idiot ACs such as yourself.b
I had a funny sig but I'm not gonna waste it on you
Why not do both? If you have some free time,go to your public library and get one of those exam guides and cram your ass off and then go take the test. If you test well, which most computer geeks do, then the tests are actually pretty easy.
_I_ wouldn't hire someone just because they had a cert, but the typical logic is like this: Say you have two exact candidates, but one has certification and one doesn't. Which one would you pick? Now, in the real world it probably matters a whole lot more if you have a personality or a lack of body odor when you want to get a job. but having a cert. isn't a hindrance, and not having a cert. can make you _appear_ less qualified. The truth, however, is that there is NO SUBSTITUTE for hands-on experience. If you wanna learn how to build a computer, take yours apart and put it back together again, don't read some silly book about it.
I took over my at job from an MCSE, and let me tell you the guy obviuosly didn't know the first thing about how to run a Windows network. I am not an MCSE, and I don't really want to be, but while I was out of work I got some MS certs to keep my skillz. (By the way, Skillz in Windows means notepad.exe, regedt32, and Windows-E to open up Explorer. And the LMHOSTS file, if you dare.)
By the way, homeschooling is a nice idea for little kids, but you should try going to a normal high school like the rest of us did. Sure the education sucks, but the whole point of high school is skipping class, learning how to meet girls, and smoking pot. It's not like you'll ever use that class in Ancient and Medieval History once you're a grown-up. Tell your parents that Slashdot told you to go to the public school or you might not ever get laid until you are 30, and then you will marry her because you are so grateful, just like CmdrTaco.
(I only wrote that last part because you set up some unix servers for your friends. methinks they are not girls. by the way if you're gay then get a mac because that is the gay computer of choice.)
Poor kid. Hope you're reading at -1 because that's where this comment is gonna end up.
Yeah, I agree completely. WHAT HE SAID. Or maybe, take five seconds to update the story on the front page and say Update: Site Slashdotted. Google cache Here.
I mean, really, people bitch when you make comments but don't read the story. Well then cache the site and I'll be able to read it. Otherwise I'm gonna get involved in "off-topic" threads like this one.
Well I'm disappointed to say that the page WASN'T slashdotted when I looked at it.
Of course, now they will sync up the http referrer from slashdot, my ip address, and find out that I looked at their cute jpp. I guess it's off to Camp X-ray for me!
The best move in that game has to be the Jamping Side Kick! That game was pretty awesome, and one of few head to head games around at the time. I think it was more like 20 years ago, too.
A common technique is to stand just outside the range of his farthest reaching attack. The opponent, unnerved by your proximity, lashes out only to whiff just by a pixel. You then counter-attack his extended limb
Okay, first off I didn't become addicted to these sorts of games until Mortal Combat II but this always ended up being the problem. You'd get the two best guys in the arcade playing, and they would just stand there, waiting for the other to attack. Or, if you were just average (like me), you'd eventually get bored and attack your opponent. And then you'd get hit because by simply waiting for your opponent to attack you will always have an advantage.
The other option is the endless cancelling fireballs (or the MK2 version, SubZero ice blasts/frozen patches).
(Where I played it was considered "poor sportsmanship" to throw your opponent, but of course not eveyone played by those rules and while I never saw this lead to a fight it certainly could have. People get annoyed when they get their ass kicked. It even happens in chess.)
So, surely psychology is an important factor, but if you play defensively, and you're good, you will almost never lose. Which is actually a lot like chess come to think of it.
What was Ken saying when he threw those fireball things? To me it always sounded like "COOL whip!"
Or you would realize that we have horrible traffic, shitty roads, and no right-of-way mass transit system. I wouldn't say Microsoft's teeming hordes of progenating perma-grinning yuppies "contribute nothing to society." On the contrary, they've contributed air pollution from wasteful SUVs, a few nails in the coffin of freshwater salmon, and the worst traffic in the nation...
Not that they're bad people. But Microsoft should acknowledge that their success is why 520 is clogged every day, and why real estate has skyrocketed in King County (taxing a few unfortunate old folks right out of their homes). Microsoft the company, not the employees, should pay for infrastrucure improvements. Their unbridled success has outstripped community resources.
The problem with the trickle down theory is that the trickle doesn't reach all the places that need watering. (Okay, so my analogy is a problem too.) From where I work, I can see about a half a dozen construction cranes at work on new office towers. That's not to mention a few new office buildings that just opened. Have any of these construction projects paid for traffic improvement? What can even be done, aside from some sort of railed conveyance, to increase capacity thru downtown Seattle? It's not like they can build more lanes on I-5 under the convention center. Likewise, 45th Ave. in the U-District can't possibly get much wider, yet there's plenty of new buildings in the works.
MAKE MICROSOFT PAY FOR (part of) A FREAKIN' RAIL TRANSIT SYSTEM! SEATTLE TRAFFIC AND AFFLUENCE IS (largely) THEIR DOING, AND THEY'RE SITTING ON $$$ BILLIONS.
Perhaps if companies like Microsoft paid a corporate tax, to account for the huge resource drain that their affluent employees incur, we'd have more federal funding for road improvements or even (gasp) light rail/monorail. Because just giving your employees more money and saying that their income tax is a proxy-tax on the Company doesn't cut it. Why have a corporate tax at all? By your logic we should have none, since the employees pay the tax for the company via income tax and sales tax.
Go ahead, mod me down because I'm not a libertarian.
Ask your supervisor what the functional requirements of the thin client network are. There is no one answer to their question without a LOT more info.
Thin Clients can be very useful in an environment, or they can be crap. The only time I've ever seen a sensible business case for thin clients is this:
A main office with several remote offices needing to run a bloatware database app that requires lots of data bandwidth. Typically the main office has good computers but the remote offices are staffed by 3 or 4 morons (i.e. nontechnical users) and they have PCs ranging from a new Presario w/WinXP the manager bought to a clone Pentium Pro running Windows 95. This is where Citrix shines -- they run the app on the Citrix server and a 56k modem can handle the screen updates on their end.
There's another place where Citrix is useful, and that is to web-demo your software. You publish the app, embedded in a web page, and tell your customer to go to http://demo.html. Then you shadow their session from the Citirx box, and you're both looking at the same screen, clicking the same icons, and so forth. This is a great way to demo a product and I'm surprised more companies don't do it. (That's what we use it for at work, it's very easy to set up too.)
That being said, I don't think a computer lab fits into either scenario too well. Maybe if you have low bandwidth links between the remote labs and the servers it would make sense, but why not spend your money on a better link? The licensing costs add up pretty quickly, although one thing to note is that Windows 2000 Pro (not sure about XP Pro) includes a Terminal Services CAL. The Citrix CALs are pricey, as is the citrix server itself. (last i checked about $3K for MetaFrame 1.8 w/15 CALs).
I haven't looked into this, but I think Windows 2000 Terminal Services have come a long way since NT4 TSE. I was reading just the other day that they can now publish an application in a web page using ASP, providing the same functionality as the Citrix web-demo I talked about above, for $3000 less. (Technically Citrix can do it using ASP or java, blah blah blah.)
A large portion of whether it's worth pursuing thin clients comes down to how old/disparate is the HW in your labs. If they are all PII 266s it might be worth looking at, however my computer at work is a dell PII 350 laptop and it's absolutely fine for running Win 2K and office xp. I have another user running Win XP, Office XP, and ACT (all resource hogs) on a PII 266 with 64MB RAM -- no complaints. Computers are so fast now that unless you really have junk, or junk from twenty different vendors, then you probably dont' need to upgrade them anyway within the next three to five years.
As for centrally managing software, that is a big plus. It's a nice benefit of Citrix but it's not the primary function. If managing apps is the reason for deploying thin clients, I'd look at something like SMS, which is a lot harder to set up but is much cheaper and addresses that problem specifically.
--Hey Taco, can I just send you $5 in the mail, and then block all the ads with proxomitron?
Re:NOT THEFT but something else
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
I have been wondering about this. Is it a crime for me to burn a zillion copies of, oh, lets say Microsoft Office 2000 and distribute them freely to anyone I meet?
My understanding, from reading the licensing agreement, is that it is the responsibility of the end user to have a valid license to run the software. In other words, I'm not doing anything wrong by trading in warez, it only becomes illegal when I install software that I don't have a license for. That's also the big "disclaimer" at NoCD sites and such -- don't download unless you bought this game and want to play it without putting the CD-ROM in the drive.
From what I've read in the license agreements it's the USE of unlicensed software that gets you into troble, not simply the POSSESSION. Or is it that this burned CD of Pagemaker with the S/N printed on the label that NOONE IS USING here at work constitutes piracy? Because I guarantee that noone here needs Pagemaker or will ever install it. (I don't even know why it's here, though I've noticed that my predecessor did install just about anything regardless of licensing concerns.)
Seriously. I would love to know the answer to that question. (And others, like that laptop on the shelf; user upgraded to a new machine and his old one sits there gathering dust. Do I need a license for that copy of Win98? Noone's using it.)
Is iPod copying a crime? I could see CompUSA banning him from the store but I don't see how it was shoplifting -- unless he deleted Office from the Mac after the copy.
Are you even allowed to post "LOL" on slashdot or does the lameness filter prevent that sort of thing?
I'm laughing not only because of the funny scene in History of The World, but because this is the perfect "I was too lazy to look shit up on google" post. I bet it would have been quicker to find it on google and copy-paste it into this little window, than to type all that stuff, especially with the Caps and *stars* and the freakish lack of spelling errors.
So here I am pointing that out. And I haven't looked anything up either, and I;m not gonna. This is what makes slashdot so great
Is there a way to see ONLY the -1 comments without wading thru all that +3 bullshit?? -1 is where the action is.
Who modded that warmongering diatribe up? Only an "anti-American troll" thinks that we should adhere to the Geneva Convention? Only an anti-American troll thinks it's in America's best interests to conduct the War on Terrorism without alienating our liberal coalition partners in Europe?
You are right that many throughout the world ignore the Geneva Convention. So I guess we'll ignore it too. I'm sure when you were a child, you were asked "If all the other kids were jumping off a bridge, does that mean you would too?"
War is not fought in a vacuum, and there will be ramifications. By not conferring Geneva Convention status to the Guantanamo prisoners we pour gaosile on the fire of Anti-American sentiment (the real kind, not the kind you claim I have) as people around the globe react in horror to the orange-jumpsuited detainees at Guantanamo.
*My love for my country is strong, not blind. I nurture her like a child. I speak out when she has done something wrong, that she may learn from her mistakes*
I inherited an open relay when I came to work for a small company. I never got blacklisted, though once upon a time I got a warning message from ORBL that I was an open relay...I fixed that right away.
I suggest you read through the spamtools mailing list archive at abuse.net, or better yet join the mailing list. I'm sure that you will have more success getting de-blacklisted if you communicate with some of the blacklisters who are on that mailing list.
Realize that there is a huge variety of opinion regarding spam, SPAM, UCE, UBE, and so on. Some people like to/dev/null incoming hotmail.com and yahoo.com because they're fed up with the spam. There are people who will blacklist you if you don't have an abuse@yourdomain.com account set up. It is ultimately up to the mail admin at the receiving side, and you're gonna have to deal with that on a case by case basis.
But, if you've fixed your relay (and maybe your formmail.pl vulnerability too) then you shouldn't have too much of a problem convincing a *reasonable* person to take you off his list. (Unless you are actually a spammer...) Be warned that there are *UNreasonable* people as well, spam Nazis who'd make you wear a yellow "known spammer" armband if they could. Good luck deailng with them. Those guys are proof positive that noone owns the Internet, and you DAMN well better play by THEIR RULES if you want to use THEIR SERVERS!!
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You think China has plans to nuke their largest market??
Hi,
I am a PC user eyeing a Mac. I used to be a mac user, as it turns out, but I went over to the "dark side" about five years ago for career reasons. I work in I.T. in a Windows environment.
The biggest barrier for my entry into the Mac market is price. I actually own a Power Computing PowerBase 180, which as you may know is a 603e-based Mac clone from 1996. At the time the machine cost $1500, and a comparable Mac, the Performa 6400, was about $2500.
I recently built a new system at home, consisting of an Athlon XP processor and a nForce architecture motherboard. Total cost was about $600 for a new CPU, Motherboard, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, 512 MB RAM, and 20GB HD. I get the feeling an "equivalent" powerMac would run about $1800. Also, I have Dolby 5.1 surround sound output, does Apple even offer that?
The other concern I have about buying a Mac is: I like to play computer games. Right now I am hacking my way through Baldur's Gate II. The Mac game selection is very slim and I find that quite frustrating. In this regard quality is more important than quantity, but still there's always this feeling of playing last year's PC game.
Maybe I'm not your target audience, and that is a real shame because I was a big time mac fanatic back in 1990-1991. I used the beta of System 7 and was blown away. I learned to hack applications using MacsBug. But five years later Mac was still on System 7 and it took five more years to really take it to the next level. I mean, really, clicking the mouse should not be a system event! But I digress.
You want me to buy a Mac? When I can buy a good mac for about $750, or buy a "bare bones" CPU and MB Apple system, then we'll talk. I'm not willing to pay more AND be limited in good games. One or the other is okay, but the double-whammy is just too much.
I don't know if current Macs have ZIF-socket processors but if you are stil soldering them, that's another reason to stay away from Mac.
Thanks for your time.
Well, not everyone compresses the stuff they put on CD. I have known several prorams that do not compress what's on the CD. I guess the assumption is: Hey, we've got 650 MB here, no need to compress!
I agree, though, that some things on the CD are compressed, or are not very compressable. Like Diablo's huge-ass movies. Still, I think most gamers would give up a movie in order to have a better game. Or perhaps they will start putting the movies in DivX;) or howevr you spell that and that will compress them a whole lot too, making them small enough for the bandwidth limitations of a broadband connection.
Wow! where can I get broadband that fast? ;)
I just got Transmission Speed = 1460 Kb/s from pcpitstop.com. I have a cable modem, and most people in Seattle are asleep because it's 1am.
I think a 1x cd-rom is 150KB/sec, so I am getting a little better than that (1460Kb/s = 200 KB/s or so). Okay, I'm not exactly at 40x CD-ROM speeds but I am at about 2x speed.
Mytiply that by the 4x enrcryption over the wire, then my virtual CD speed is at least an 8x CD-rom, which is actually pretty damn good. At 8x you can burn a full CD in about ten minutes.
Depending on how much you need to DL, it could be faster than a CD, if you count the time for the drawer to close and the disc to spin up -- that's about a 10 or 15 second head start for the ethernet card. During those ten or fifteen seconds I can pull down about 15 MB of valve's compressed stream, and then I'll quickly lose the race. But depending on how big the DL is, it might actually be faster than CD.
Ultimately I think faster than a CD might be a bit of an exaggeration but we all read that as "comparabe to a CD" anyway.
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You know, that actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, I know they would never go for it, but look at the way things went down. US builds X, russia says "we need those" and copies it and the copy is better. Like the MiG-29 is a copy of the F-15, only it's better.
A big part of the cold war was Mutually Assured Destruction, right? Like if USA had nuked USSR in the early 50s they might not have been obliterated in turn, but after that it was accepted that no one side would nuke the other because they'd just get nuked back. (Now it's all crazy with terrorists and missing warheads and US will nuke first, but hey we live in different times now. Except that most of the guys in the Bush administration are from the cold war era...)
I think there are a few reasons why consolidated warfare development wouldn't work, but they are all political. To some it would be unPatriotic to go this route. Others would see a loss of American jobs which would of course be Bad.
But from a economics standpoint, it seems a very workable model. Do we really need X number of countries producing fighter jets in state-sanctioned monopolies?
The way things are going I expect to see this issue come before the WTO in the next five years. China will start submitting bids for U.S. defense contracts. Who knows maybe in 10 years the USAF will be flying Saabs.
It sounds ridiculous to me (as an american) but not too many countries see the value in producing from scratch their own jet fighters when the US will grant you the foreign aid money to buy the American product.
Dude, your link has been slashdotted.
Developers: Finally Real P2P With Brains
admittedly, they are using their powers for evil, but if they get rich off everybody warezing, more power to 'em.
Too true.
1...little ISPs don't have that kind of user base
Sit back and watch the Genius of Capitalism at work. Am I the only one who thinks there's a conflict of interest when the head of the FCC is on AOL/Time Warner's Board of Directors?
2...access them through, say, www.anonymizer.com
They will block access to anonymyzer.com. And/or they will outlaw anonymizer.com. No unencrpyted traffic on the "last mile." We've seen this before; ISPs whose TOS don't allow a VPN connection. If you use anonymizer.com, then the terrorists win!
3...born-again-Christian-zealot Attorney General defining kiddie porn to further their own agenda
It should be pretty easy to find "impure" sites, since under the USA Patriot act all the FBI has to do is tell the ISP that they are doing it for "security" and presto! All your packets are belong to Ashcroft.
Living thru the Internet Revolution exemplifies the old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."
Blocking child pornography is essentially impossible. Blocking any sort of "content" or "IP" is an extremely difficult task. It's one thing to block port 25; unfortunately the IETF has yet to standardize on a port number for kiddie porn.
First, there's the problem of deciding what to block: Let's take the obvious example, of blocking a jpg. This means someone has to determine the age of the person in that jpg. I looked at about 1,000 jpgs last nite, and I pity the fool who has to monitor my drunken pr0n surf.
Perhaps it would be possible to use some VERY sophisticated pattern recognition algorithm, but, like spam filtering, you're never gonna block 100% of the bad stuff while letting 100% of the good stuff through. Nevermind the incredible resource hit of scanning each downloaded jpg, or the fact that your CRC-matching database of known jpgs ain't worth shit once I take the 640x480 jpg and save it as 644x483.
But that's not even the real problem. No, the real problem is THE DEFINITION OF PORNOGRAPHY. Basically it depends on things like "community standards" and such which don't really make sense on the Internet. With child pornography, the definition gets even more complicated; things that are otherwise acceptable become pornography when the subject is under 18, such as a picture which shows the outline of the vulva through clothing isn't porn if the girl is 23 but is porn if she's 9.
(In fact the entire laws about kiddie porn in this country are totally fucked. The gov't can offer to sell you kiddie porn, say from an ad in the back of a magazine, and then sell it to you, and then bust you for possession. This would normally be entrapment, but the Supreme Court decided that kiddie porn is such a scourge that normal constitutional protections are outweighed by the need to lock up pedophiles. Hmmm... "First they came for the pedophiles, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a pedophile. Then they came for the Arabs..." But I digress.)
To make matters worse, pornography doesn't even have to be a picture or movie. Text can be pornography. For instance,
I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't stop myself from licking 15-year old Timmy's perineum as he lay unconscious.
That could be construed as kiddie porn, believe it or not. Of course in this context I won't be going to jail (I hope) since my INTENT isn't prurient (but who can really tell my intent?). But if I logged on to some kiddy chat room and made that comment, I would be in big trouble, esp. if the moderator knows what a perineum is.
So not only do you have to filter the content, which is a subjective process in the first place, you have to ascertain the context of that content. In other words you have to Meta-Moderate, and we all know how much fun that is!
No, this will never work, and the "blacklist" that gets passed from the Penn. A.G. to the ISP's will have all the same problems as the anti-spam blacklists: How do you get off it, do you notify someone that they're on it, or would that just tell them it's time to get a new IP address, etc.
Here are some links to interesting legal stuff:
Supreme court def. of pornography (pdf, sorry)
has the famous "I know it when I see it" qoute from Justice Potter Stewart
Google HTML version
Guy in jail for selling videos of girls in their panties
Guy acquitted after gov't got him to order kiddie porn thru mail and then busted him. He was acquitted because the gov't hadn't proved intent, not because it was entrapment
I am not a lawyer, but I play on on Slashdot.
Okay, troll, I'll bite and give up my mod points to boot...
Do you really think there's only one correct way to speak English? Based on the name of the language, it would be what's spoken in England, no? You know, the country that that has teh theatre and aluminium and colour.
I'm also pretty sure that your regime of "one way to speak proper English" goes against the grain of your computing common sense. Is there only one "proper" OS?
You see, language is alive; she is ever changing, and subject to geographical and temporal variations. Try to read some Shakespeare or Chaucer and you'll see what I'm talking about.
While we're on the topic, perhaps the rest of the world should adopt the U.S. standard of mm/dd/yy when the obvioud dd/mm/yy makes a lot more sense. Make sure to get the rest of the world to bail on that cutesy metric system while you're at it.
(By the way, your logic doesn't even hold up. Enron is more than one company, in fact it has thousands. But you wouldn't say "Enron are wise to have bought the President" even though, unlike AMD, they are more than one company.)
You can stop being an imperialist troll, or you can continue to be a moron and remain in fine company. Slashdot have many idiot ACs such as yourself.b
I had a funny sig but I'm not gonna waste it on you
We already have that, they're called military tribunals.
Why not do both? If you have some free time,go to your public library and get one of those exam guides and cram your ass off and then go take the test. If you test well, which most computer geeks do, then the tests are actually pretty easy.
_I_ wouldn't hire someone just because they had a cert, but the typical logic is like this: Say you have two exact candidates, but one has certification and one doesn't. Which one would you pick? Now, in the real world it probably matters a whole lot more if you have a personality or a lack of body odor when you want to get a job. but having a cert. isn't a hindrance, and not having a cert. can make you _appear_ less qualified. The truth, however, is that there is NO SUBSTITUTE for hands-on experience. If you wanna learn how to build a computer, take yours apart and put it back together again, don't read some silly book about it.
I took over my at job from an MCSE, and let me tell you the guy obviuosly didn't know the first thing about how to run a Windows network. I am not an MCSE, and I don't really want to be, but while I was out of work I got some MS certs to keep my skillz. (By the way, Skillz in Windows means notepad.exe, regedt32, and Windows-E to open up Explorer. And the LMHOSTS file, if you dare.)
By the way, homeschooling is a nice idea for little kids, but you should try going to a normal high school like the rest of us did. Sure the education sucks, but the whole point of high school is skipping class, learning how to meet girls, and smoking pot. It's not like you'll ever use that class in Ancient and Medieval History once you're a grown-up. Tell your parents that Slashdot told you to go to the public school or you might not ever get laid until you are 30, and then you will marry her because you are so grateful, just like CmdrTaco.
(I only wrote that last part because you set up some unix servers for your friends. methinks they are not girls. by the way if you're gay then get a mac because that is the gay computer of choice.)
Poor kid. Hope you're reading at -1 because that's where this comment is gonna end up.
Yeah, I agree completely. WHAT HE SAID. Or maybe, take five seconds to update the story on the front page and say Update: Site Slashdotted. Google cache Here.
I mean, really, people bitch when you make comments but don't read the story. Well then cache the site and I'll be able to read it. Otherwise I'm gonna get involved in "off-topic" threads like this one.
CmdrTaco are you listening??
Well I'm disappointed to say that the page WASN'T slashdotted when I looked at it.
Of course, now they will sync up the http referrer from slashdot, my ip address, and find out that I looked at their cute jpp. I guess it's off to Camp X-ray for me!
The best move in that game has to be the Jamping Side Kick! That game was pretty awesome, and one of few head to head games around at the time. I think it was more like 20 years ago, too.
A common technique is to stand just outside the range of his farthest reaching attack. The opponent, unnerved by your proximity, lashes out only to whiff just by a pixel. You then counter-attack his extended limb
Okay, first off I didn't become addicted to these sorts of games until Mortal Combat II but this always ended up being the problem. You'd get the two best guys in the arcade playing, and they would just stand there, waiting for the other to attack. Or, if you were just average (like me), you'd eventually get bored and attack your opponent. And then you'd get hit because by simply waiting for your opponent to attack you will always have an advantage.
The other option is the endless cancelling fireballs (or the MK2 version, SubZero ice blasts/frozen patches).
(Where I played it was considered "poor sportsmanship" to throw your opponent, but of course not eveyone played by those rules and while I never saw this lead to a fight it certainly could have. People get annoyed when they get their ass kicked. It even happens in chess.)
So, surely psychology is an important factor, but if you play defensively, and you're good, you will almost never lose. Which is actually a lot like chess come to think of it.
What was Ken saying when he threw those fireball things? To me it always sounded like "COOL whip!"
Or you would realize that we have horrible traffic, shitty roads, and no right-of-way mass transit system. I wouldn't say Microsoft's teeming hordes of progenating perma-grinning yuppies "contribute nothing to society." On the contrary, they've contributed air pollution from wasteful SUVs, a few nails in the coffin of freshwater salmon, and the worst traffic in the nation...
Not that they're bad people. But Microsoft should acknowledge that their success is why 520 is clogged every day, and why real estate has skyrocketed in King County (taxing a few unfortunate old folks right out of their homes). Microsoft the company, not the employees, should pay for infrastrucure improvements. Their unbridled success has outstripped community resources.
The problem with the trickle down theory is that the trickle doesn't reach all the places that need watering. (Okay, so my analogy is a problem too.) From where I work, I can see about a half a dozen construction cranes at work on new office towers. That's not to mention a few new office buildings that just opened. Have any of these construction projects paid for traffic improvement? What can even be done, aside from some sort of railed conveyance, to increase capacity thru downtown Seattle? It's not like they can build more lanes on I-5 under the convention center. Likewise, 45th Ave. in the U-District can't possibly get much wider, yet there's plenty of new buildings in the works.
MAKE MICROSOFT PAY FOR (part of) A FREAKIN' RAIL TRANSIT SYSTEM! SEATTLE TRAFFIC AND AFFLUENCE IS (largely) THEIR DOING, AND THEY'RE SITTING ON $$$ BILLIONS.
Perhaps if companies like Microsoft paid a corporate tax, to account for the huge resource drain that their affluent employees incur, we'd have more federal funding for road improvements or even (gasp) light rail/monorail. Because just giving your employees more money and saying that their income tax is a proxy-tax on the Company doesn't cut it. Why have a corporate tax at all? By your logic we should have none, since the employees pay the tax for the company via income tax and sales tax.
Go ahead, mod me down because I'm not a libertarian.
Oh my god, CmdrTaco. This is total flamebait. Free software developers not providing any tax revenue?
Neither does Microsoft.
Really, they don't pay a dime!
--CmdrTaco, I'm going to block the ads but I will mail you a $5 bill each year. Is that okay?
Ask your supervisor what the functional requirements of the thin client network are. There is no one answer to their question without a LOT more info.
Thin Clients can be very useful in an environment, or they can be crap. The only time I've ever seen a sensible business case for thin clients is this:
A main office with several remote offices needing to run a bloatware database app that requires lots of data bandwidth. Typically the main office has good computers but the remote offices are staffed by 3 or 4 morons (i.e. nontechnical users) and they have PCs ranging from a new Presario w/WinXP the manager bought to a clone Pentium Pro running Windows 95. This is where Citrix shines -- they run the app on the Citrix server and a 56k modem can handle the screen updates on their end.
There's another place where Citrix is useful, and that is to web-demo your software. You publish the app, embedded in a web page, and tell your customer to go to http://demo.html. Then you shadow their session from the Citirx box, and you're both looking at the same screen, clicking the same icons, and so forth. This is a great way to demo a product and I'm surprised more companies don't do it. (That's what we use it for at work, it's very easy to set up too.)
That being said, I don't think a computer lab fits into either scenario too well. Maybe if you have low bandwidth links between the remote labs and the servers it would make sense, but why not spend your money on a better link? The licensing costs add up pretty quickly, although one thing to note is that Windows 2000 Pro (not sure about XP Pro) includes a Terminal Services CAL. The Citrix CALs are pricey, as is the citrix server itself. (last i checked about $3K for MetaFrame 1.8 w/15 CALs).
I haven't looked into this, but I think Windows 2000 Terminal Services have come a long way since NT4 TSE. I was reading just the other day that they can now publish an application in a web page using ASP, providing the same functionality as the Citrix web-demo I talked about above, for $3000 less. (Technically Citrix can do it using ASP or java, blah blah blah.)
A large portion of whether it's worth pursuing thin clients comes down to how old/disparate is the HW in your labs. If they are all PII 266s it might be worth looking at, however my computer at work is a dell PII 350 laptop and it's absolutely fine for running Win 2K and office xp. I have another user running Win XP, Office XP, and ACT (all resource hogs) on a PII 266 with 64MB RAM -- no complaints. Computers are so fast now that unless you really have junk, or junk from twenty different vendors, then you probably dont' need to upgrade them anyway within the next three to five years.
As for centrally managing software, that is a big plus. It's a nice benefit of Citrix but it's not the primary function. If managing apps is the reason for deploying thin clients, I'd look at something like SMS, which is a lot harder to set up but is much cheaper and addresses that problem specifically.
--Hey Taco, can I just send you $5 in the mail, and then block all the ads with proxomitron?
I have been wondering about this. Is it a crime for me to burn a zillion copies of, oh, lets say Microsoft Office 2000 and distribute them freely to anyone I meet?
My understanding, from reading the licensing agreement, is that it is the responsibility of the end user to have a valid license to run the software. In other words, I'm not doing anything wrong by trading in warez, it only becomes illegal when I install software that I don't have a license for. That's also the big "disclaimer" at NoCD sites and such -- don't download unless you bought this game and want to play it without putting the CD-ROM in the drive.
From what I've read in the license agreements it's the USE of unlicensed software that gets you into troble, not simply the POSSESSION. Or is it that this burned CD of Pagemaker with the S/N printed on the label that NOONE IS USING here at work constitutes piracy? Because I guarantee that noone here needs Pagemaker or will ever install it. (I don't even know why it's here, though I've noticed that my predecessor did install just about anything regardless of licensing concerns.)
Seriously. I would love to know the answer to that question. (And others, like that laptop on the shelf; user upgraded to a new machine and his old one sits there gathering dust. Do I need a license for that copy of Win98? Noone's using it.)
Is iPod copying a crime? I could see CompUSA banning him from the store but I don't see how it was shoplifting -- unless he deleted Office from the Mac after the copy.
LOL
Are you even allowed to post "LOL" on slashdot or does the lameness filter prevent that sort of thing?
I'm laughing not only because of the funny scene in History of The World, but because this is the perfect "I was too lazy to look shit up on google" post. I bet it would have been quicker to find it on google and copy-paste it into this little window, than to type all that stuff, especially with the Caps and *stars* and the freakish lack of spelling errors.
So here I am pointing that out. And I haven't looked anything up either, and I;m not gonna. This is what makes slashdot so great
Is there a way to see ONLY the -1 comments without wading thru all that +3 bullshit?? -1 is where the action is.
In your high density environment you could go wireless.
Check out guerilla.net they are into what you are talking about.
Who modded that warmongering diatribe up? Only an "anti-American troll" thinks that we should adhere to the Geneva Convention? Only an anti-American troll thinks it's in America's best interests to conduct the War on Terrorism without alienating our liberal coalition partners in Europe?
You are right that many throughout the world ignore the Geneva Convention. So I guess we'll ignore it too. I'm sure when you were a child, you were asked "If all the other kids were jumping off a bridge, does that mean you would too?"
War is not fought in a vacuum, and there will be ramifications. By not conferring Geneva Convention status to the Guantanamo prisoners we pour gaosile on the fire of Anti-American sentiment (the real kind, not the kind you claim I have) as people around the globe react in horror to the orange-jumpsuited detainees at Guantanamo.
*My love for my country is strong, not blind. I nurture her like a child. I speak out when she has done something wrong, that she may learn from her mistakes*
I inherited an open relay when I came to work for a small company. I never got blacklisted, though once upon a time I got a warning message from ORBL that I was an open relay...I fixed that right away.
/dev/null incoming hotmail.com and yahoo.com because they're fed up with the spam. There are people who will blacklist you if you don't have an abuse@yourdomain.com account set up. It is ultimately up to the mail admin at the receiving side, and you're gonna have to deal with that on a case by case basis.
I suggest you read through the spamtools mailing list archive at abuse.net, or better yet join the mailing list. I'm sure that you will have more success getting de-blacklisted if you communicate with some of the blacklisters who are on that mailing list.
Realize that there is a huge variety of opinion regarding spam, SPAM, UCE, UBE, and so on. Some people like to
But, if you've fixed your relay (and maybe your formmail.pl vulnerability too) then you shouldn't have too much of a problem convincing a *reasonable* person to take you off his list. (Unless you are actually a spammer...) Be warned that there are *UNreasonable* people as well, spam Nazis who'd make you wear a yellow "known spammer" armband if they could. Good luck deailng with them. Those guys are proof positive that noone owns the Internet, and you DAMN well better play by THEIR RULES if you want to use THEIR SERVERS!!
I'm glad to see that the Teletubbies get to take their costumes off once in a while!