h'm, it's supposed to be the apollo 15 landing site but to my untrained eyes it looks suspiciously like dark splotches. anyone know of any better ones out there? maybe some moon rocks or golf balls all lined up to spell HELP or something?
There is already a Tom Baker version of Shada. It's a 2 tape set and I can get it at my local video store. The back of the slick makes reference to production hassles but I've never hired it because I've found that re-watching Dr Who (Blake's 7, Battle of the Planets, etc..) is an effective way of exterminating any sense of fond nostalgia.
A few years back someone found they could get other people's details from the Australian Tax Office's site by manipulating the URL (that's the impression I got anyway). An ultra-quick googling turned this up. What happened to this guy? I can't remember. All I can remember is that he sounded really embarrassed when he was being interviewed and was referred to as a "hacker".
And 100,000 by 2006!! I guess this means that sarge will be released around 2028...
Forget it, mister high-and-mighty Master Control!
on
Downloading The Mind
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
If glow-in-the-dark, striped track suits are good enough for The Dude, then they're good enough for me... and don't forget all the ultimate frisbee you can handle.
That was a great story, but it should've been called something like "Alcoholic Mutants Find Love".;)
Since we're going down the sci-fi path... This article reminded me more of the IR palm implants in Greg Egan's "Quarantine". Great book for the neural mods and other tech gadgets.
But exchanging email addresses with a handshake sounds more like someone's trying to create an evil, networking, Tony Robbins fueled, cyborg-spammer from hell. Like Skynet, but with free university degrees and penis enlarging creams...
Units of measurement are always going to be somewhat arbitrary and dependent upon what we humans have to use as a point of reference. The distance from Earth to the Sun is as reasonable a unit of measurement as the distance between some aristocrat's nose and his forefinger or whatever. Same goes for metres, kilograms and seconds...
Maybe when the aliens drop by they can tell us what the really sensible units are.
I work at a video store that Laurence Fishburne used to come to when he was filming Matrix 2+3 here in Sydney. One time he came in and hired... The Matrix!! Does that make Warner Bros the cheapest distributor on the planet?? Y'reckon they would've given him his own copy. Sheesh.
He also had over $100 in late fees which he paid off in one go and without complaint. An example to you fee-dodging scumbags everywhere...
And hats off to him for having a go at the guy who didn't turn off his mobile phone. Not turning your phone off/down in the movies/theatre/lecture is the kind of thing that needs to be recognised as socially unacceptable, not illegal.
America subsidises its farmers to such an extent that overproduction is inevitable and leads to its being the "Land of the Super-Sized Drinks" (and the rest). The USA's economic policies are killing its population with obesity.
When was the last time you called a Japanese person a fatty and laughed at their man-boobs? Sumo wrestlers excepted, of course. They're athletes.;)
Surprise, surprise the media jumps the gun, sensationalises (is that a word?) and exaggerates to bump up ratings, sell more papers, etc. But it has raised awareness and has hopefully played a part in securing future funding for asteroid early warning programs.
The real danger is that people might become complacent if false alarms like this are seized upon and played up by the media every time.
Dr. Dobb's Journal August 2002 Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at VerityStob@ddj.com.
Verity Stob has developed a new tool that will help you make rapid diagnoses of sick PCs. A rolling computer gathers "cruft." When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that's cruft. It is also the word "seperate," added to a spellchecker's private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by time upon all petty efforts of humankind. There.
At Laboratoires Stob, we have been working on the cruft crisis for a while. Recalling the maxim "to control a problem you must first measure it," we have devised a suitable metric, an index of cruftidity. Our first version, presented below, is based on a typical PC installation running Windows 2000. But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.
We would like to acknowledge our debt, in the construction of this instrument, to Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort. His 1805 scale of windspeeds ("Insurance Claim Force 8. Description on land: Tile blown off roof falls onto litigious neighbour's Toyota Shiny") is as valid and useful today as it ever was. Enough preamble.
Cruft Force 0. Virgin. Description: The "Connect to the Internet" shortcut is still on the desktop, and the "How to use Windows" dialog appears at logon. Menu animations and the various event-based sound effects -- even the dreaded Microsoft Sound -- seem cheerful and amusing. Likewise, a clandestine installation of the Blue Screen Of Death screensaver (complete with simulated reboot, natch) from the Sysinternals web site is hilarious. Compilers run crisply, and report only sensible, easily resolved errors. There are just nine directories off C:\.
Filled with the enthusiasm that goes with having a brand new machine, the user resolves to stick to the new-fangled security-conscious temp directory buried deep somewhere below Documents and Settings.
Cruft Force 1. New. Description: User has taken time to rename cutesy desktop icons incorporating the first person singular possessive pronoun.
Twice, the mouse cursor has done that poltergeist trick where, with the actual mouse stationary, it drifts three inches due east and then stops. For no reason at all. Works fine afterwards though. Brrrrrrr.
Cruft Force 2. Comfortable. Description: User has now got around to resetting Explorer so that "web content in folders" is suppressed. Something has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.
A strange entry is found in the System event log: MRxSmb: The redirector was unable to initialise security context or query context attributes. Assiduous googling of the key phrases, up web site and down newsgroup, establishes that, although many have wondered, nobody knows what this means.
Cruft Force 3. Lived-in. Description: One time in seven when the user starts Word or other Office 2000 app, instead of running, it pretends it is installing itself for the first time and starts a setup program.
Directory count in C:\ up to 17, and something has pooed a Paradox lock control file there, too.
Cruft Force 4. Middle-aged. Description: Amount of time from screen showing "real" Windows background to the logon box appearing is >30 seconds. Sometimes cannot "browse" other machines on LAN.
Get first real BSOD. Uninstall jokey screen saver, replace with SETI.
An extra disk of huge capacity has been installed. CD-ROM moves from drive F: to drive [:
Cruft Force 5. Worn out. Description: Some time after bootup, always get a dialog "A service has failed to start - BLT300." What is BLT300? Nobody knows. Although one can manually remove/disable this service, it always reappears two or three reboots later.
If one double-clicks a document icon, Word takes 4 minutes 30 seconds to start up. But it still works fine if started as a program. Somebody opines that this is due to misconfigured DDE. Or the Mars-Jupiter cusp.
Cruft Force 6. Limping. Description: [Delphi|Visual Basic|Java] suddenly remembers a trial shareware component -- deleted six months ago because it was rubbish -- and refuses to compile anything until it is reinstated.
"Web content in folders" Explorer setting switches itself back on unbidden. "Setup" programs start crashing while unpacking their own decompression DLLs.
Cruft Force 7. Wounded. Description: No longer able to logon using original account as the system freezes, so must logon as "Verity2" or similar.
There are now nine items in BOOT.INI: the original W2K starter, a brace of two-entries-each NT4s (one Turkish), a Windows 98, and three assorted Linuxen. Left to start up by itself, the machine chooses a broken installation of SUSE and halts with a kernel panic.
Cruft Force 8. Decrepit. Description: A virus checker is installed at the insistence of IT. This actually improves performance, apparently violating Newton's laws.
Blue Screens Of Death are served daily. The SETI screen saver, like ET himself, encounters difficulty calling home and despairing during an overnight run creates 312 copies of its icon in an (impressively expanded) system tray that fills half the screen.
Successful connections to the LAN are very rare.
Cruft Force 9. Putrefaction. Description: Can only see the 32-GB D:\ partition -- the one which has all the source code on it -- at every third boot. Directory count in C:\ up to 93, partly because some [one/thing] has put a complete (but non-working) installation of the Eudora e-mail client in the root.
Starting Control Panel shows rolling torch animation. The applet icons never appear.
Cruft Force 10. Expiry. Description: Machine only runs in Safe mode at 16-color 800×600, and even then for about a minute and a half before BSODing. Attempts to start an app are rewarded with a dialog "No font list found."
Ordinary dodges, such as reformatting the hard disk(s) and starting again, are ineffective. Cruft has soaked into the very fabric of the machine, and it should be disposed of safely at a government-approved facility. There it will be encased in cruft-resistant glass and buried in a residential district.
By a strange coincidence, these 2 titles are available as a bundle from Amazon for only $49 (or separately for $24.50 each). Amazon sure knows how to strike a bargain...
I'm sure if Camberley Crick was a teenage starlet, politician or a topless sunbathing member of the Royal Family, this would fall in to the public's right to know category.
But because she writes educational games (2 words that should never be seen together) it's an invasion of privacy story.
Maybe it's just that that page hasn't been updated. As long as the probability of impact remains fairly constant, the Palermo Scale will rise as the event gets closer. This is how it's calculated:
Palermo Scale = log [Probability of impact / (Yearly probability of impact * Years until event)]
Exec1: Hey, here's an idea... Let's get George Lucas and ILM to remake Plan 9 From Outer Space. We can get M. Night Shyamalan to rework the script and a get a few big name stars in there.
Exec2: No no no, we need to make another movie based on a comic book.
Exec3: Why don't we come up with something original. Y'know, like a new story, new characters...
[blank stares all round]
Exec3:...or not. Let's get back to that Dr Who concept.
H'm... now there's an argument for not allowing AC posts. Fair enough. Bad joke. But that punishment seems overly harsh to me... and if I used that email address for anything I'd be pissed off.
As your punishment (I'm using the honour system here) you have to watch Dr Dolittle 1 & 2, Little Nicky, The Waterboy and Police Academies 3 through 6 back-to-back.
I can just see a programmer walk up to a dropped pile of punchcards all scattered around... no way to rewrite the program... Now THAT'S a nightmare!
Pick up the cards and put them in the bin. That's called garbage collection, isn't it?
Geddit? Geddit?!
*sigh*
file sharing is effective advertising
on
RIAA Sues Audiogalaxy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Snipped from the latest bit of news on the weezer site.
...a fan writes: "I flicked on Mtv this morning as I was getting ready for school around 7am and Mtv News came on, talking about how Eminem was completely against the use of the internet for the purpose of downloading free music. His argument was that it was taking money away from the artist. The announcer then went on to say that on the other end of the spectrum was Weezer, who released most of their songs from their new album (Maladroit) on their website many months before it even came out! They had a few quotes from Rivers too. Since Maladroit is doing so well (#3!), Weezer is living proof that downloading music online has actually helped record sales by getting their music out there and waking people up to their music." ---Melissa
It's anecdotal, I know. But I'd say that the RIAA spends more money on lawyers than the industry loses as a result of file sharing... They should probably cut Audiogalaxy in on the profits rather than sue them.
I was 3 years old when SW:ANH came out and for some reason my brother had to take me to see it. At around about the time that Luke was saying "Red-5 standing by..." I explained to my brother that I was about to pee my pants. So, he did the hygienic thing and took me to the toilet. When we got back, the death star was history, Luke had called Leia "Carrie" and everyone was getting their medals.
Every bad thing that has happened to me since then I consider cosmic payback.
Oh... and didn't someone get their arm chopped off in a bar fight somewhere in that movie? Is that maybe a little worse than a head butt? What was the rating back then? It was NRC (Not Recommended for Children) in Australia.
I was wondering if members of the Slashdot community know of more examples of community networks...
Telstra Research Labs did a little bit of an information session/recruitment drive at my university a few weeks ago. One of the things they said they were working on was a community network in Launceston. Sounds like the kind of thing you're talking about. There's a link to the community's page but nothing about the results of the research as yet. Not that I could see anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
You maniacs!! You Lucased it up!!!!
h'm, it's supposed to be the apollo 15 landing site but to my untrained eyes it looks suspiciously like dark splotches. anyone know of any better ones out there? maybe some moon rocks or golf balls all lined up to spell HELP or something?
There is already a Tom Baker version of Shada. It's a 2 tape set and I can get it at my local video store. The back of the slick makes reference to production hassles but I've never hired it because I've found that re-watching Dr Who (Blake's 7, Battle of the Planets, etc..) is an effective way of exterminating any sense of fond nostalgia.
...a midi-towering inferno?
A convent data channel? Is that the one the nun's use to talk to god?
A few years back someone found they could get other people's details from the Australian Tax Office's site by manipulating the URL (that's the impression I got anyway). An ultra-quick googling turned this up. What happened to this guy? I can't remember. All I can remember is that he sounded really embarrassed when he was being interviewed and was referred to as a "hacker".
And 100,000 by 2006!!
I guess this means that sarge will be released around 2028...
If glow-in-the-dark, striped track suits are good enough for The Dude, then they're good enough for me... and don't forget all the ultimate frisbee you can handle.
That was a great story, but it should've been called something like "Alcoholic Mutants Find Love". ;)
Since we're going down the sci-fi path... This article reminded me more of the IR palm implants in Greg Egan's "Quarantine". Great book for the neural mods and other tech gadgets.
But exchanging email addresses with a handshake sounds more like someone's trying to create an evil, networking, Tony Robbins fueled, cyborg-spammer from hell. Like Skynet, but with free university degrees and penis enlarging creams...
Units of measurement are always going to be somewhat arbitrary and dependent upon what we humans have to use as a point of reference. The distance from Earth to the Sun is as reasonable a unit of measurement as the distance between some aristocrat's nose and his forefinger or whatever. Same goes for metres, kilograms and seconds...
Maybe when the aliens drop by they can tell us what the really sensible units are.
I work at a video store that Laurence Fishburne used to come to when he was filming Matrix 2+3 here in Sydney. One time he came in and hired... The Matrix!! Does that make Warner Bros the cheapest distributor on the planet?? Y'reckon they would've given him his own copy. Sheesh.
He also had over $100 in late fees which he paid off in one go and without complaint. An example to you fee-dodging scumbags everywhere...
And hats off to him for having a go at the guy who didn't turn off his mobile phone. Not turning your phone off/down in the movies/theatre/lecture is the kind of thing that needs to be recognised as socially unacceptable, not illegal.
Yes, it is.
;)
America subsidises its farmers to such an extent that overproduction is inevitable and leads to its being the "Land of the Super-Sized Drinks" (and the rest). The USA's economic policies are killing its population with obesity.
When was the last time you called a Japanese person a fatty and laughed at their man-boobs? Sumo wrestlers excepted, of course. They're athletes.
Life, Liberty and All-You-Can-Eat...
The real danger is that people might become complacent if false alarms like this are seized upon and played up by the media every time.
The New Adventures of Verity Stob
Dr. Dobb's Journal August 2002
Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at VerityStob@ddj.com.
Verity Stob has developed a new tool that will help you make rapid diagnoses of sick PCs. A rolling computer gathers "cruft." When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that's cruft. It is also the word "seperate," added to a spellchecker's private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by time upon all petty efforts of humankind. There.
At Laboratoires Stob, we have been working on the cruft crisis for a while. Recalling the maxim "to control a problem you must first measure it," we have devised a suitable metric, an index of cruftidity. Our first version, presented below, is based on a typical PC installation running Windows 2000. But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.
We would like to acknowledge our debt, in the construction of this instrument, to Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort. His 1805 scale of windspeeds ("Insurance Claim Force 8. Description on land: Tile blown off roof falls onto litigious neighbour's Toyota Shiny") is as valid and useful today as it ever was. Enough preamble.
Cruft Force 0. Virgin. Description: The "Connect to the Internet" shortcut is still on the desktop, and the "How to use Windows" dialog appears at logon. Menu animations and the various event-based sound effects -- even the dreaded Microsoft Sound -- seem cheerful and amusing. Likewise, a clandestine installation of the Blue Screen Of Death screensaver (complete with simulated reboot, natch) from the Sysinternals web site is hilarious. Compilers run crisply, and report only sensible, easily resolved errors. There are just nine directories off C:\.
Filled with the enthusiasm that goes with having a brand new machine, the user resolves to stick to the new-fangled security-conscious temp directory buried deep somewhere below Documents and Settings.
Cruft Force 1. New. Description: User has taken time to rename cutesy desktop icons incorporating the first person singular possessive pronoun.
Twice, the mouse cursor has done that poltergeist trick where, with the actual mouse stationary, it drifts three inches due east and then stops. For no reason at all. Works fine afterwards though. Brrrrrrr.
Cruft Force 2. Comfortable. Description: User has now got around to resetting Explorer so that "web content in folders" is suppressed. Something has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.
A strange entry is found in the System event log: MRxSmb: The redirector was unable to initialise security context or query context attributes. Assiduous googling of the key phrases, up web site and down newsgroup, establishes that, although many have wondered, nobody knows what this means.
Cruft Force 3. Lived-in. Description: One time in seven when the user starts Word or other Office 2000 app, instead of running, it pretends it is installing itself for the first time and starts a setup program.
Directory count in C:\ up to 17, and something has pooed a Paradox lock control file there, too.
Cruft Force 4. Middle-aged. Description: Amount of time from screen showing "real" Windows background to the logon box appearing is >30 seconds. Sometimes cannot "browse" other machines on LAN.
Get first real BSOD. Uninstall jokey screen saver, replace with SETI.
An extra disk of huge capacity has been installed. CD-ROM moves from drive F: to drive [:
Cruft Force 5. Worn out. Description: Some time after bootup, always get a dialog "A service has failed to start - BLT300." What is BLT300? Nobody knows. Although one can manually remove/disable this service, it always reappears two or three reboots later.
If one double-clicks a document icon, Word takes 4 minutes 30 seconds to start up. But it still works fine if started as a program. Somebody opines that this is due to misconfigured DDE. Or the Mars-Jupiter cusp.
Cruft Force 6. Limping. Description: [Delphi|Visual Basic|Java] suddenly remembers a trial shareware component -- deleted six months ago because it was rubbish -- and refuses to compile anything until it is reinstated.
"Web content in folders" Explorer setting switches itself back on unbidden. "Setup" programs start crashing while unpacking their own decompression DLLs.
Cruft Force 7. Wounded. Description: No longer able to logon using original account as the system freezes, so must logon as "Verity2" or similar.
There are now nine items in BOOT.INI: the original W2K starter, a brace of two-entries-each NT4s (one Turkish), a Windows 98, and three assorted Linuxen. Left to start up by itself, the machine chooses a broken installation of SUSE and halts with a kernel panic.
Cruft Force 8. Decrepit. Description: A virus checker is installed at the insistence of IT. This actually improves performance, apparently violating Newton's laws.
Blue Screens Of Death are served daily. The SETI screen saver, like ET himself, encounters difficulty calling home and despairing during an overnight run creates 312 copies of its icon in an (impressively expanded) system tray that fills half the screen.
Successful connections to the LAN are very rare.
Cruft Force 9. Putrefaction. Description: Can only see the 32-GB D:\ partition -- the one which has all the source code on it -- at every third boot. Directory count in C:\ up to 93, partly because some [one/thing] has put a complete (but non-working) installation of the Eudora e-mail client in the root.
Starting Control Panel shows rolling torch animation. The applet icons never appear.
Cruft Force 10. Expiry. Description: Machine only runs in Safe mode at 16-color 800×600, and even then for about a minute and a half before BSODing. Attempts to start an app are rewarded with a dialog "No font list found."
Ordinary dodges, such as reformatting the hard disk(s) and starting again, are ineffective. Cruft has soaked into the very fabric of the machine, and it should be disposed of safely at a government-approved facility. There it will be encased in cruft-resistant glass and buried in a residential district.
DDJ
By a strange coincidence, these 2 titles are available as a bundle from Amazon for only $49 (or separately for $24.50 each). Amazon sure knows how to strike a bargain...
But because she writes educational games (2 words that should never be seen together) it's an invasion of privacy story.
Maybe it's just that that page hasn't been updated. As long as the probability of impact remains fairly constant, the Palermo Scale will rise as the event gets closer. This is how it's calculated:
Palermo Scale = log [Probability of impact / (Yearly probability of impact * Years until event)]
More detail here.
And a side order of inverse tachyon pulses?
Exec1: Hey, here's an idea... Let's get George Lucas and ILM to remake Plan 9 From Outer Space. We can get M. Night Shyamalan to rework the script and a get a few big name stars in there.
Exec2: No no no, we need to make another movie based on a comic book.
Exec3: Why don't we come up with something original. Y'know, like a new story, new characters...
[blank stares all round]
Exec3: ...or not. Let's get back to that Dr Who concept.
Buffy getting an Emmy would be like your grandmother telling you you look very smart in your new trousers and then pinching your arse.
It's praise, but it's not the praise you were looking for. Emmys Schmemmys.
As your punishment (I'm using the honour system here) you have to watch Dr Dolittle 1 & 2, Little Nicky, The Waterboy and Police Academies 3 through 6 back-to-back.
Pick up the cards and put them in the bin. That's called garbage collection, isn't it?
Geddit? Geddit?!
*sigh*
Snipped from the latest bit of news on the weezer site.
It's anecdotal, I know. But I'd say that the RIAA spends more money on lawyers than the industry loses as a result of file sharing... They should probably cut Audiogalaxy in on the profits rather than sue them.
I was 3 years old when SW:ANH came out and for some reason my brother had to take me to see it. At around about the time that Luke was saying "Red-5 standing by..." I explained to my brother that I was about to pee my pants. So, he did the hygienic thing and took me to the toilet. When we got back, the death star was history, Luke had called Leia "Carrie" and everyone was getting their medals.
Every bad thing that has happened to me since then I consider cosmic payback.
Oh... and didn't someone get their arm chopped off in a bar fight somewhere in that movie? Is that maybe a little worse than a head butt? What was the rating back then? It was NRC (Not Recommended for Children) in Australia.
I was wondering if members of the Slashdot community know of more examples of community networks...
Telstra Research Labs did a little bit of an information session/recruitment drive at my university a few weeks ago. One of the things they said they were working on was a community network in Launceston. Sounds like the kind of thing you're talking about. There's a link to the community's page but nothing about the results of the research as yet. Not that I could see anyway.