I'm not sure what an equivalent would be for tech support, though...
This is *completely* someone else's idea, so I'll just link. But I'd seen your comment, and thought it was a novel idea (one of the local Mexican restaurants plays Spanish lessons in their bathrooms; not sure what they do on hold). And then I ran across this comment, much further down the page: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112171&cid =9515430
I realize it's probably unconventional to post a reply linking to another reply in the same discussion, but they seemed so connected, yet not anywhere near each other, so I thought I'd post this.:-P
I have like two acres of grass to mow every week, so trust me, I've thought long and hard about ways to reduce my work.
I decided that I could even go all out and make it really precise; maybe something like GPS for setting approximate bounds for my yard, and then really low-power beacons to mark the edge of the yard.
I decided there were a few main things that would give me problems:
1.) You want your lawn to be straight lines. Things like the Roomba seem to just run around aimlessly until they hit something, then they take off in a new random direction. Your lawn would be the ugliest monstrosity on the street.
2.) Suppose your pet cat runs out in front of it?
3.) Will it crash into the 'ornamental' trees on my lawn? And if you're going to detect it, how do you know exactly how wide tree is? And how do you detect that there's a 3-foot-wide ring of mulch around the tree?
4.) Suppose the 'tree' you avoid is actually my dog running across the lawn. Are you going to constantly recalculate its position?
5.) Out in front, my lawn has a multilayer terrace thing going. How do you avoid driving driving right over the edge? (Like a three foot drop. I've almost gone over this on my ride-on mower a few times.)
6.) Do you know the *exact* bounds of my yard? I don't want strips out by the street where it decided it was getting too close, but I don't want a multi-car-pileup after my lawnmower charges into the street.
Anyway, it's probably possible to overcome these. The problem is that, unlike something like the Roomba, you've got sharp blades spinning at completely lethal speeds. If the Roomba goes haywire, you'll stand there and laugh. If the Lawnba (*please* don't call it that!) malfunctions, run. Fast.
It's really a question of how much faith you have in computers. And between my experience with Windows and Java, I don't have a lot.
This reminds me of one of those completely ridiculous chain letters I received a while back. It essentially said "I was in a chat room, and someone kept using profanity and racial slurs." (There wasn't even a point, you were just supposed to forward it to lots of people.)
Needless to say, I did a quick "Reply All," asking if people really wanted to implement censorship on the Internet.
If you want to promote the Ku Klux Klan on the Internet, those loonies who founded our country made it very clear that it was your right to do such. (Not the Internet in general: *all* speech, be it something from a newfangled printing press or just standing on the street corner; there's no reason it doesn't apply to the Internet.) I'll think you're a complete bigot, the scum of the earth, and I'd never host your trash on my server. But I'll defend your right to say what you want to say.
I can't remember who said it, but the famous quote "I couldn't disagree with you more, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it" (possible paraphrasing occuring) comes to mind right now. There's so much horrible trash polluting the Internet, and I wouldn't miss it if it was gone. But it still has a right to be said, even "saying it" is actually "serving up goatse" or something.
Furthermore, the patents were done in Australia, and the point is that they literally don't read them. In the US, we at least pretend that someone reads them, rather than just stamping them.
If you ran a company, and someone who supplied you with a vital component started issuing press releases about what products *you* were likely to issue, and press releases saying exactly how much you spent with them, wouldn't you take their business elsewhere?
Sure, it's really interesting news. But it seems completely unprofessional for a company to issue a press release speculating on their 'customer's' new products?
Without knowing more, it's hard to say it's an Internet-wide problem, in fact, I'd hazard a guess that your ISP's DNS servers are something like mine. I got so fed up with the poor quality that I set up a spare 486 to provide DNS services; it goes out and grabs stuff from the root servers directly, bypassing the garbage servers my ISP provides.
The site seems to be down, so appologies if I'm missing something covered in it.
What is a "Cisco-style" ping? Does it differ from normal ping? I'm guessing it must, as conventional ping prints lines of text, not providing a means of drawing ASCII art.
For those who keep questioning the modding of this as funny... The reason isn't that they're not serious, it's that at every single time the test proctors read anything from the book, it included a warning about multiple choice questions.
Time for the break between multiple choice and free response? Okay, remember not to discuss multiple choice questions with anyone, at any time. Finished the free response? Remember not to discuss the multiple choice questions with anyone at any time. Done the test? Okay, but don't discuss the multiple choice questions with anyone at any time for any reason. Ever.
Even our somewhat unhumorous test proctor made it quite clear that he found the repetition of this to border on amusing. And by the way, before you finish reading this post, remember not to discuss the multiple choice questions with anyone, at any time.
It almost seems as if most people are overlooking the fact that these blocks mean nothing unless individual server owners set their server up to check and reject mail in the blacklist. My mailserver -- and probably upwards of 99% of the mailservers in the world -- are completely unaffected by this.
Remember SPEWS? They got really overzealous, and more and more server administrators stopped using SPEWS. I think the same thing's going to happen here -- some people who really, really hate spam will use this blacklist, but bigger companies (and especially ISPs) will realize that they're now rejecting a good deal of legitimate mail, and stop using the blacklist.
All that happened was that they were added to a list server administrators could have their mail block. Mine doesn't use this list. Does yours?
I'm only about 10% down downloading from the UDel site, but I've noticed that my speed seems to keep dropping. I use BitTorrent often to download stuff, but I have no experience in creating a torrent. Can someone post a link on how to create a torrent? (Do I need a lot of initial bandwidth? I'm only on a cable modem.)
Same with security tools. Restrict them because they're "More Harmful Than Helpful" and those who use them for harm will still have them, but those who use them for good won't be able to test their networks first.
I don't question for a second that they're widely abused. But banning them will only mean that network administrators can't check their own networks.
While people planning on a purchase might like talking to a live person, I went to RackShack's site one day to see what their prices were like, not really planning on spending $500/month any time soon. Up popped the window. I was somewhat freaked out.
Of course, the very next day I was checking out pricing at ServerBeach, owned by the same people, and had a repeat. I left immediately.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not massively afraid of socialization or whatnot. It's just eerie to have someone pop up out of the blue offering to help, when I'm not at all ready for it. 'Live help' type stuff where I have to initiate the conversation has proven to be pretty great, as I can get questions answered quickly, and get a feel for how professional / friendly the people there are. But when they pop up out of the blue, it's always creepy.
I'm the same way in brick-and-mortar stores. I'm always "just looking" when the salesman comes; if I have a question, I find someone and ask them. IMHO, businesses should focus on making it really easy to get help if you need it, but not bugging people if they don't.
The cameras are (1D)s (parenthesis because the 1Ds is a different camera costing twice as much). They've come down a bit in price now that there's a couple successors to it out, but I think you're still looking at between $3500 and $4500 for the body. The camera's pretty crazy -- up to eight frames a second means it rocks for sports and stuff.
Don't forget, though, that this is the camera body. And in sports, you need a really fast lens if you don't want a big blur -- figure several thousand more for the lens. (And a lot of photographers -- I'm not sure about SI -- carry around multiple lenses. Actually, the really good ones have a camera for each lens, and keep them on a strap, so you drop one camera and pick up one with a longer lens when you need it. Costs rack up real quick.)
By way of being a total 'photogeek,' there are a pair of cameras that 'replace' the 1D now: the 1D Mark II (8.5 fps, 6 megapixels?) for around $4500, and the 1Ds at 11 megapixels (though not nearly as many frames/second as the others), going for about $8,000.
I'm not sure what your point is, though. Why spend $5,000 on a laptop if a $2,000 one works just as well?
I really don't like the point here, but it's hard to articulate why.
As cell phones become more popular, we're enabling instant communication between people. This helps to promote terrorism, as terrorists now have what's essentially instant, private communication with each other. Cell phones are thus leading to a social breakdown through terrorism.
It's preposterous to argue that. You can't really say I'm wrong -- terrorists could use cell phones to communicate more readily. That's how I feel about the whole point here: yes, you can transmit viruses faster, but I think it's really a pointless observation.
Some of Jay-Z's stuff is pretty good, but Jay-Z and the Beatles aren't the best mix. But my motivation for downloading was driven solely by the RIAA's desire to make sure I didn't get it.:)
Is that "Constitution" thing still intact? I seem to recall a portion of it with some silly notion of "freedom of speech" or something, or was it repealed?
...this idea might at first sound retarded (who'd want to watch TV on their cell phone?), but it's actually something I thought of over a year ago as something that would be a really novel feature, especially for the type of people who find themselves sitting around waiting for extended periods playing games. (For examples, teens who can't yet drive waiting for a ride.)
I'm eager to see the next step: we can now receive TV, and we can now transmit pictures. I'm waiting for the phone that has a built-in camera on the side of the phone you put to your face, so you can hold it at arms length and have a real-time videoconference with someone. It would take a good deal of bandwidth, but it'd be pretty neat to be able to have a videoconference with anyone you could talk to on a cell phone.
No, I wouldn't. It's an interesting approach, but I'd never participate in it. It will COMPLETELY break the way things work, and make communications much more complicated. For example, friends/family/colleagues send me a ton of crap. Let's suppose for a minute that I set my cost as $50 per message. I have multiple addresses, so when people forward some ridiculous chain mail on some topic that I vehemently disagree with them on, I get multiple copies. So let's say I get three copies of this chain mail from someone. With the click of a button, I can set a friend out of $150. Obviously, they wouldn't remain a friend for long, and maybe there's something to be said for making people think twice about forwarding me crap.
But now consider a corporate setting. Let's say I'm really sick of spam at work, and set the price to $500 a message. My boss sends me mail informing me of budget cuts; I'm angered by it, and thus flag it as spam, charging my boss $500.
And I won't even get into the potential for abuse, where I try to impersonate someone else sending me spam, charging random people insane amounts of money.
And this just won't work. Spammers have a 'spam and dump' mentality -- they're sign up for a server, or find a new open relay, dump a ton of spam, and move on. I would fully expect spammers to completely disregard this, running up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt on a credit card they used to purchase the server. They never pay the bill, and move on. In some strange way, it's kind of like the "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" -- spammers will find ways around this, and we'll only inconvience people trying to send legitimate e-mail. And the basic premise sounds to have a ton of potential issues.
Several have pointed out that www.sco.com doesn't even resolve anymore; it looks like they just pulled its DNS records. What no one seems to have pointed out is that sco.com (no www.) seems to be being null-routed before it gets anywhere near their network; a traceroute takes me onto Level3's network (after my ISP), but stops there. Hosts like mail.sco.com and ftp.sco.com go another ~10 hops onto XO's network.
I don't doubt they're being inundated with traffic, but with www.sco.com not even having a DNS record, and sco.com being null-routed, its no wonder their site is down: it's their own doing! That's a pretty interesting approach to handling the attack, especially since a lot of good data centers can easily filter out a lot of common DDoS-type attacks without denying any legitimate traffic. (That said, I have no idea how this particular virus works, so it's possible that it's not as simple.)
My friends and I play CounterStrike pretty regularly; using headsets we've been known to carry on lengthy discussions as we go around killing each other. I'll have to agree that giving your girlfriend a copy of CounterStrike, and a headset, might not be the most romantic thing, though. (Although my friend got his girlfriend a copy, and she's gotten pretty good.)
Anyway, we eventually got sick of the poor sound quality in game, as well as the fact that you can only talk to your own team, and only while you're alive. We ended up using Ventrilo, a nifty little voice chat program. (Although you'll need to find a server capable of running the server.) Ventrilo will let you bind a key to the 'transmit' feature; it's great for in-game talk, but it's also a great all-around chat program. I've spent hours sitting at my computer working, and chatting (voice) with friends. I hate talking on telephones even more -- you could even say I have a paranoia of them -- but I love Ventrilo. And unlike the phone, you're not paying by the minute, so you have no motivation to want to talk unceasingly and hang up the second you don't have anything to say.
Not quite a game, though. Although I think Yahoo has a ton of web-based games, don't they?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what an equivalent would be for tech support, though...
d =9515430
:-P
This is *completely* someone else's idea, so I'll just link. But I'd seen your comment, and thought it was a novel idea (one of the local Mexican restaurants plays Spanish lessons in their bathrooms; not sure what they do on hold). And then I ran across this comment, much further down the page:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112171&ci
I realize it's probably unconventional to post a reply linking to another reply in the same discussion, but they seemed so connected, yet not anywhere near each other, so I thought I'd post this.
I have like two acres of grass to mow every week, so trust me, I've thought long and hard about ways to reduce my work.
I decided that I could even go all out and make it really precise; maybe something like GPS for setting approximate bounds for my yard, and then really low-power beacons to mark the edge of the yard.
I decided there were a few main things that would give me problems:
1.) You want your lawn to be straight lines. Things like the Roomba seem to just run around aimlessly until they hit something, then they take off in a new random direction. Your lawn would be the ugliest monstrosity on the street.
2.) Suppose your pet cat runs out in front of it?
3.) Will it crash into the 'ornamental' trees on my lawn? And if you're going to detect it, how do you know exactly how wide tree is? And how do you detect that there's a 3-foot-wide ring of mulch around the tree?
4.) Suppose the 'tree' you avoid is actually my dog running across the lawn. Are you going to constantly recalculate its position?
5.) Out in front, my lawn has a multilayer terrace thing going. How do you avoid driving driving right over the edge? (Like a three foot drop. I've almost gone over this on my ride-on mower a few times.)
6.) Do you know the *exact* bounds of my yard? I don't want strips out by the street where it decided it was getting too close, but I don't want a multi-car-pileup after my lawnmower charges into the street.
Anyway, it's probably possible to overcome these. The problem is that, unlike something like the Roomba, you've got sharp blades spinning at completely lethal speeds. If the Roomba goes haywire, you'll stand there and laugh. If the Lawnba (*please* don't call it that!) malfunctions, run. Fast.
It's really a question of how much faith you have in computers. And between my experience with Windows and Java, I don't have a lot.
This reminds me of one of those completely ridiculous chain letters I received a while back. It essentially said "I was in a chat room, and someone kept using profanity and racial slurs." (There wasn't even a point, you were just supposed to forward it to lots of people.)
Needless to say, I did a quick "Reply All," asking if people really wanted to implement censorship on the Internet.
If you want to promote the Ku Klux Klan on the Internet, those loonies who founded our country made it very clear that it was your right to do such. (Not the Internet in general: *all* speech, be it something from a newfangled printing press or just standing on the street corner; there's no reason it doesn't apply to the Internet.) I'll think you're a complete bigot, the scum of the earth, and I'd never host your trash on my server. But I'll defend your right to say what you want to say.
I can't remember who said it, but the famous quote "I couldn't disagree with you more, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it" (possible paraphrasing occuring) comes to mind right now. There's so much horrible trash polluting the Internet, and I wouldn't miss it if it was gone. But it still has a right to be said, even "saying it" is actually "serving up goatse" or something.
Slashdot's just a little slow on reporting current news.
Oh no, it runs stories in a pretty timely fashion. The Zip drive story is just a dupe.
Furthermore, the patents were done in Australia, and the point is that they literally don't read them. In the US, we at least pretend that someone reads them, rather than just stamping them.
I'm surprised no one's said this yet.
If you ran a company, and someone who supplied you with a vital component started issuing press releases about what products *you* were likely to issue, and press releases saying exactly how much you spent with them, wouldn't you take their business elsewhere?
Sure, it's really interesting news. But it seems completely unprofessional for a company to issue a press release speculating on their 'customer's' new products?
Without knowing more, it's hard to say it's an Internet-wide problem, in fact, I'd hazard a guess that your ISP's DNS servers are something like mine. I got so fed up with the poor quality that I set up a spare 486 to provide DNS services; it goes out and grabs stuff from the root servers directly, bypassing the garbage servers my ISP provides.
The site seems to be down, so appologies if I'm missing something covered in it.
What is a "Cisco-style" ping? Does it differ from normal ping? I'm guessing it must, as conventional ping prints lines of text, not providing a means of drawing ASCII art.
For those who keep questioning the modding of this as funny... The reason isn't that they're not serious, it's that at every single time the test proctors read anything from the book, it included a warning about multiple choice questions.
Time for the break between multiple choice and free response? Okay, remember not to discuss multiple choice questions with anyone, at any time. Finished the free response? Remember not to discuss the multiple choice questions with anyone at any time. Done the test? Okay, but don't discuss the multiple choice questions with anyone at any time for any reason. Ever.
Even our somewhat unhumorous test proctor made it quite clear that he found the repetition of this to border on amusing. And by the way, before you finish reading this post, remember not to discuss the multiple choice questions with anyone, at any time.
It almost seems as if most people are overlooking the fact that these blocks mean nothing unless individual server owners set their server up to check and reject mail in the blacklist. My mailserver -- and probably upwards of 99% of the mailservers in the world -- are completely unaffected by this.
Remember SPEWS? They got really overzealous, and more and more server administrators stopped using SPEWS. I think the same thing's going to happen here -- some people who really, really hate spam will use this blacklist, but bigger companies (and especially ISPs) will realize that they're now rejecting a good deal of legitimate mail, and stop using the blacklist.
All that happened was that they were added to a list server administrators could have their mail block. Mine doesn't use this list. Does yours?
I think you're thinking of Prefix 2.0
Another site I visit frequently, Slashdot, covered this a few days back. You can view their coverage on the same article here.
Oh, wait...
I'm only about 10% down downloading from the UDel site, but I've noticed that my speed seems to keep dropping. I use BitTorrent often to download stuff, but I have no experience in creating a torrent. Can someone post a link on how to create a torrent? (Do I need a lot of initial bandwidth? I'm only on a cable modem.)
Actually, it seems the other way around: I got a better deal on my full-size ones than I did on the mini CDs.
...only outlaws will have guns.
Same with security tools. Restrict them because they're "More Harmful Than Helpful" and those who use them for harm will still have them, but those who use them for good won't be able to test their networks first.
I don't question for a second that they're widely abused. But banning them will only mean that network administrators can't check their own networks.
While people planning on a purchase might like talking to a live person, I went to RackShack's site one day to see what their prices were like, not really planning on spending $500/month any time soon. Up popped the window. I was somewhat freaked out.
Of course, the very next day I was checking out pricing at ServerBeach, owned by the same people, and had a repeat. I left immediately.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not massively afraid of socialization or whatnot. It's just eerie to have someone pop up out of the blue offering to help, when I'm not at all ready for it. 'Live help' type stuff where I have to initiate the conversation has proven to be pretty great, as I can get questions answered quickly, and get a feel for how professional / friendly the people there are. But when they pop up out of the blue, it's always creepy.
I'm the same way in brick-and-mortar stores. I'm always "just looking" when the salesman comes; if I have a question, I find someone and ask them. IMHO, businesses should focus on making it really easy to get help if you need it, but not bugging people if they don't.
Anyone know how much that camera costs?
The cameras are (1D)s (parenthesis because the 1Ds is a different camera costing twice as much). They've come down a bit in price now that there's a couple successors to it out, but I think you're still looking at between $3500 and $4500 for the body. The camera's pretty crazy -- up to eight frames a second means it rocks for sports and stuff.
Don't forget, though, that this is the camera body. And in sports, you need a really fast lens if you don't want a big blur -- figure several thousand more for the lens. (And a lot of photographers -- I'm not sure about SI -- carry around multiple lenses. Actually, the really good ones have a camera for each lens, and keep them on a strap, so you drop one camera and pick up one with a longer lens when you need it. Costs rack up real quick.)
By way of being a total 'photogeek,' there are a pair of cameras that 'replace' the 1D now: the 1D Mark II (8.5 fps, 6 megapixels?) for around $4500, and the 1Ds at 11 megapixels (though not nearly as many frames/second as the others), going for about $8,000.
I'm not sure what your point is, though. Why spend $5,000 on a laptop if a $2,000 one works just as well?
I really don't like the point here, but it's hard to articulate why.
As cell phones become more popular, we're enabling instant communication between people. This helps to promote terrorism, as terrorists now have what's essentially instant, private communication with each other. Cell phones are thus leading to a social breakdown through terrorism.
It's preposterous to argue that. You can't really say I'm wrong -- terrorists could use cell phones to communicate more readily. That's how I feel about the whole point here: yes, you can transmit viruses faster, but I think it's really a pointless observation.
If the FBI shoed up at my door...
For a minute I thought you were going to say you lived in Holland.
.torrent (thanks to SuprNova.org). Or over HTTP from illegal-art.org.
:)
Some of Jay-Z's stuff is pretty good, but Jay-Z and the Beatles aren't the best mix. But my motivation for downloading was driven solely by the RIAA's desire to make sure I didn't get it.
Is that "Constitution" thing still intact? I seem to recall a portion of it with some silly notion of "freedom of speech" or something, or was it repealed?
...this idea might at first sound retarded (who'd want to watch TV on their cell phone?), but it's actually something I thought of over a year ago as something that would be a really novel feature, especially for the type of people who find themselves sitting around waiting for extended periods playing games. (For examples, teens who can't yet drive waiting for a ride.)
I'm eager to see the next step: we can now receive TV, and we can now transmit pictures. I'm waiting for the phone that has a built-in camera on the side of the phone you put to your face, so you can hold it at arms length and have a real-time videoconference with someone. It would take a good deal of bandwidth, but it'd be pretty neat to be able to have a videoconference with anyone you could talk to on a cell phone.
Would you Warranty Your Email?
No, I wouldn't. It's an interesting approach, but I'd never participate in it. It will COMPLETELY break the way things work, and make communications much more complicated. For example, friends/family/colleagues send me a ton of crap. Let's suppose for a minute that I set my cost as $50 per message. I have multiple addresses, so when people forward some ridiculous chain mail on some topic that I vehemently disagree with them on, I get multiple copies. So let's say I get three copies of this chain mail from someone. With the click of a button, I can set a friend out of $150. Obviously, they wouldn't remain a friend for long, and maybe there's something to be said for making people think twice about forwarding me crap.
But now consider a corporate setting. Let's say I'm really sick of spam at work, and set the price to $500 a message. My boss sends me mail informing me of budget cuts; I'm angered by it, and thus flag it as spam, charging my boss $500.
And I won't even get into the potential for abuse, where I try to impersonate someone else sending me spam, charging random people insane amounts of money.
And this just won't work. Spammers have a 'spam and dump' mentality -- they're sign up for a server, or find a new open relay, dump a ton of spam, and move on. I would fully expect spammers to completely disregard this, running up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt on a credit card they used to purchase the server. They never pay the bill, and move on. In some strange way, it's kind of like the "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" -- spammers will find ways around this, and we'll only inconvience people trying to send legitimate e-mail. And the basic premise sounds to have a ton of potential issues.
Several have pointed out that www.sco.com doesn't even resolve anymore; it looks like they just pulled its DNS records. What no one seems to have pointed out is that sco.com (no www.) seems to be being null-routed before it gets anywhere near their network; a traceroute takes me onto Level3's network (after my ISP), but stops there. Hosts like mail.sco.com and ftp.sco.com go another ~10 hops onto XO's network.
I don't doubt they're being inundated with traffic, but with www.sco.com not even having a DNS record, and sco.com being null-routed, its no wonder their site is down: it's their own doing! That's a pretty interesting approach to handling the attack, especially since a lot of good data centers can easily filter out a lot of common DDoS-type attacks without denying any legitimate traffic. (That said, I have no idea how this particular virus works, so it's possible that it's not as simple.)
My friends and I play CounterStrike pretty regularly; using headsets we've been known to carry on lengthy discussions as we go around killing each other. I'll have to agree that giving your girlfriend a copy of CounterStrike, and a headset, might not be the most romantic thing, though. (Although my friend got his girlfriend a copy, and she's gotten pretty good.)
Anyway, we eventually got sick of the poor sound quality in game, as well as the fact that you can only talk to your own team, and only while you're alive. We ended up using Ventrilo, a nifty little voice chat program. (Although you'll need to find a server capable of running the server.) Ventrilo will let you bind a key to the 'transmit' feature; it's great for in-game talk, but it's also a great all-around chat program. I've spent hours sitting at my computer working, and chatting (voice) with friends. I hate talking on telephones even more -- you could even say I have a paranoia of them -- but I love Ventrilo. And unlike the phone, you're not paying by the minute, so you have no motivation to want to talk unceasingly and hang up the second you don't have anything to say.
Not quite a game, though. Although I think Yahoo has a ton of web-based games, don't they?