In the meantime, I'm going to be doing a lot of "sudo chmod 755/Library".
To be safe, and to protect yourself from your local admins, I would do "sudo chown -R root/Library; sudo chmod go-w -R/Library".
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it. A socially engineered trojened executable can be launched or stored just about anywhere. I don't see what is so special about/Library.
An organisation whose entire business model is now to resell the same product over and over again is hardly going to say that buying it once is enough.
For those that do not know, the RIAA is a standardization and PR company, not a record label. They do alright at releasing names of albums that have sold over X copies (gold, platinum, etc), they made the RIAA curve for LP recording and playback, they absolutely suck at PR.
Ripping a purchased CD and playing it on your iPod is entirely legal, ethical, and all of that. Having the RIAA say anything different is deceit and fraud.
Fuck the RIAA and the companies they represent. Music has existed for thousands of years before you, and will exist after you. We want music, not a set of confused middle management guys that can't get laid. Trust me, when we need something like the RIAA or a record label, we will ask for it, but as for now, we are OK without you.
Re:What ever happened to 2AM, $3 overnight shippin
on
A Look Inside Newegg
·
· Score: 1
As far as I can tell, this all ended around the time of the dot com bubble burst. What I don't really understand is why.
Let me refresh my memory. This was the same time period where people thought that paying shipping on 25 pound bag of dog food instead of buying it at the local store was a good idea, and that buying furniture from a 100x200 pixel picture with a 10x10 color swatch AND paying shipping to your house was a good idea, etc? Right?
Back then, everybody and their redheaded stepchild thought that you could make millions because you could sell stuff (insert drumroll here) ONLINE!
Shipping was one of the biggest issues with any non-local purchase, and back then people with all of their startup money were very aggressive about being competitive with the other etailers, and regular retailers. Now that the number of online companies have shrunk and their average size has increased, we are back to the mail order business model of the 80s. Either spend a bunch of money and get "free" shipping, or you've gotta pay.
Seriously, the only time you should be returning something is when it's damaged
I've had to return things to Newegg and other places online that were either manufacturing defects or just DOA. My first and last purchase through Newegg cost me $50 for a known manufacturing defect. Other places gave me PDF return labels that were paid for by the retailer, no questions asked.
Guess who gets my return (no pun intended) business, and who does not?
My first and last experience with Newegg was that I had to pay about $50 to "restock" a defective piece of hardware. Specifically, the hardware had broken firmware on the last two model revisions, and was eventually fixed by the manufacturer.
Fortunately, I got a "free" one from the manufacturer after I bitched extensively about how it was unacceptable for them to ship 2 revs of a product that will repeatedly fail in 20 minutes of use.
If QA had nothing to do with quality and assurance, I might find that term meaningful, but PA is more the norm (Profit Assurance).
Sure, you may be speaking with a scumbag using strong encryption, but he's still a scumbag.
I was proposing better DNS and cert authorities that get rid of the scumbags. Real people monitor and take complaints, kinda like the Better Business Bureau but for names and certs.
The problem with that is, in order for the revocation to take effect the user needs to download the root certs update which will be provided by their browser vendor (which in this case will more than likely mean MS) and lets face facts the majority of users never even bother updating, the fickle masses that they are.
A revoked cert isn't the solution, the solution is fixing the process by which people can get SSL certificates in the first place. There need to be more checks and balances. The current process is essentially; give us your money please, ok here's your certificate.. Enjoy!
So true. Revoking certs basically requires realtime lookup of every cert requested to make sure its not revoked. So, can there be a secure and efficient way to validate every cert on connect? Either way, something needs to be checked on connect, I don't know the solutions.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed. All it does is make a few companies rich.
Well, I guess there is a market for a more trusted group of people that issue identities on the internet. These are the DNS registrars and the certificate authorities.
Think about paying for a DNS server that did not resolve any illegal hosts? I would, and recommend anybody else to do the same.
How? eBay is a service company. The only marketing I've seen is singing about buying crap off of eBay on TV and every single noun that I search for on Google, I can buy on eBay as well.
Back on topic, this is a _very_ bad move on Intel and Skype. I doubt that MS would even stoop so low.
A) Why would Skype agree to this? What is their benefit by limiting their customer base by splitting hairs on commodity CPU manufacturers?
b) Why would Intel do this when they are already being sued by AMD?
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source. You wouldn't have to worry so much about removal programs, as programs that would "fake" the watermark, basically couterfeiting programs. Of course, those would pop up fifteen minutes later.
Well, for one my media players will not honor the watermarks.
My rippers will not honor the watermarks.
My encoders of the music that I produce will not inject watermarks.
Not really, soon the State Department will realize and officially deem the USofA as "repressive to human rights".
Now that would be ironic.
For those that are not in touch with current events, read about PATRIOT Act, unwarranted email searches, unwarranted phone taps, unwarranted detainment without being charged nor right to legal council, not to include the laundry list of things we have lost over the past 4 years or so years.
Keep in mind that this guy works for the lowest common denominator of business journalism. Its parallel to Red Book for relationships, or Psychology Today for psych literature, and NewsWeek for "news".
The format for all of these magazines is as follows. Take regular mundane topic that most people know a little about, sensationalize it, make some assertions as if the journalist knows what they are talking about it to raise a little controversy, rinse, repeat.
The PS3 will do quite well if it has good games and it plays them well. If the bonus features work well, that will only help sales, not hurt them. If a kid wants a PS3, dad will be better able to sell it to the wife if it also does a nice slideshow of pictures on their HDTV from their digital camera. Its a win-win situation.
Remember the Dreamcast? Dial-up modem, the whole thing. It tried to do too much at the time, before the consumers were ready for it.
Remember the Apple Newton, the TiVo, and plenty of other things that came to market before their time??
The thing is that the Playstation has a following for game developers and gamers. So long as it has good playable games it will do fine. If the other features work as advertised (or better), then that is icing on the cake. Only a few of us/. geeks would ever buy a Playstation or an Xbox with the intention to do things besides games. Believe it or not, we are not like the majority of the human population.
If it works well with slideshows of pictures from a digital camera, and works well with HTPC kind of stuff, then that is only free advertising to sell more of these boxes. If it sucks at playing games, no matter how good the extra stuff is, it will fail. If they are able to pull off all of the extra bells and whistles, I see no problem with it selling or confusing the user, and it will only be an extra plus to the system in general.
I don't even play video games, and I'm planning on buying the 2nd rev of the PS3 when it comes out. The graphics and capabilities of the thing seem amazing, and who knows, maybe I'll learn how to play a game or two.
This has been going on for many years. Gang leaders in prisons here in the US have their own language that mutates over time, and their cryptic texts get carried and translated on the streets and their wishes for the betterment of the world are carried out.
People do this when making drug deals, mafia hits, everything where the literal message of the conversation would be incriminating, a new language is created.
Of course there is stenography, encryption, and other fun and games too.
But our government is only looking for the law abiding criminals that don't take such precautions.
We shouldn't have to revolt. That's what elections, and checks and balances are for.
Well, we don't want to revolt. It takes time, effort, and its a PITA. We all want the same thing, a decent life for ourselves and our families. Things like freedoms, liberties, and a feeling of well being.
Elections. Give me a break. The last two elections were a farce. GWB was appointed on the first one, and he won the second one after Kerry gave up and conceded (right word?).
Checks and balances. Those have long been gone, along with due process. The current administration is doing so many unconstitutional things, I don't see how impeachment has not happened, or some other drastic measure against these criminals.
In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy. However rather than the Orwellian 1984 version of no privacy, he talks about a world where everyone, from the farmer in the field, to the president of the united states having zero secercy.
I'm all for this. As the saying goes, "You're only as sick as your secrets". I'm open and honest about the things that I do, and some of these things include "illegal" activity. I don't care. I basically do what I want, and I'm confident that I can continue to do so.
The thing is, say we make all phone conversations open like talking in a public place. Does that mean that we have to pay for the government to scour through all of our conversations? Is this necessary?
I mean, when someone's behavior is bad enough and it affects other people, don't people call the authorities, and let them take it from there? Its what I do. If reminders to a neighbor to keep the noise down late at night doesn't do any good, I'll call the police and let them handle it. After repeated requests, what can I do after that? I'm left with violence or threat of violence, which could come back to hurt me. So, I take it up with a third person that has protocols and procedures for taking care of such disputes.
So, are noisy neighbors any different that a so called terrorist or some other harmful or potentially harmful person? I don't see so.
If I knew of someone that was buying 5 tons of fertilizer and some other goodies to make a nice bomb to blow up somebody, I would be on the phone in a heartbeat. Who wouldn't? In fact, isn't knowledge of such activities a crime as well? Depending on how involved you are, there are things like conspiracy, obstruction of justice, or whatever crimes there are to ensure that everybody is a criminal.
Why not just tell all communication corporations that they are taking them over and they will now be owned by the government so that surveillance can be conducted on the civilian populace? I'll tell you why..... It would be Revolution! So, our government(s) are slowly, methodically, chipping away at individual freedoms under the guise of "protecting" us.
So, how bad does it have to get before we revolt?
I had no clue that they were surveilling so much that it was taxing the providers. Do they get compensated for this? Regular citizens do for things like jury duty.
I also wish the flow of information from the government to the people was much more open. Trial information is open, and we would know if over 50% of the people accused of a crime were acquitted, then we would know that the police and DAs were doing a crappy job of bringing good cases to court. How many of these 1,700+ wiretaps lead to interesting information? If its less than say 25%, I believe that the government is wasting our tax dollars and abusing the subpoena system, and just listening in on our conversations because they are nosy, not because they are out to protect and serve us.
So again, how bad does it have to get before we revolt?
Why don't they just charge for a functional operating system instead of a broken one, plus a service to keep it working?
Believe it or not, there are companies that do this.
Besides games and legacy MSC applications, Windows is dying. Actually, once Intel Macs take off and games are available via OpenGL for both OSes, and with a good emulator for legacy MFC apps, I don't see these things being an issue anymore either in the near future.
Moderation works OK here, but I don't think it would work well for wikipedia.
I suggested here once before to make time the element of data integrity.
If a particular article is "hot", slow down the number of edits per day, week, month or whatever. Especially edits from the same person and/or IP address or subnet.
Slashdot has implemented things similar to this like taking 60 seconds between posts (Slow down cowboy!), and by punishing logged in users that have submitted posts anonymously. Its been a while since the latter has affected me, and I don't remember the details, but it sucked, and I wished that the slashcode was telling me what I was being punished for.
But its simple. If an article is modified X times in a certain period of time, then it is "hot". Just slow down the rate that people can make changes. The majority of the people out there are more OK than evil, so slowing down the evil people will allow more of the good guys to make the truth to be known.
Again, a good quote from a nice lunatic:
"There's no right, there's no wrong, there's only popular opinion."
Slashdot Mirror
In the meantime, I'm going to be doing a lot of "sudo chmod 755 /Library".
/Library; sudo chmod go-w -R /Library".
/Library.
To be safe, and to protect yourself from your local admins, I would do "sudo chown -R root
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it. A socially engineered trojened executable can be launched or stored just about anywhere. I don't see what is so special about
An organisation whose entire business model is now to resell the same product over and over again is hardly going to say that buying it once is enough.
For those that do not know, the RIAA is a standardization and PR company, not a record label. They do alright at releasing names of albums that have sold over X copies (gold, platinum, etc), they made the RIAA curve for LP recording and playback, they absolutely suck at PR.
Ripping a purchased CD and playing it on your iPod is entirely legal, ethical, and all of that. Having the RIAA say anything different is deceit and fraud.
Fuck the RIAA and the companies they represent. Music has existed for thousands of years before you, and will exist after you. We want music, not a set of confused middle management guys that can't get laid. Trust me, when we need something like the RIAA or a record label, we will ask for it, but as for now, we are OK without you.
As far as I can tell, this all ended around the time of the dot com bubble burst. What I don't really understand is why.
Let me refresh my memory. This was the same time period where people thought that paying shipping on 25 pound bag of dog food instead of buying it at the local store was a good idea, and that buying furniture from a 100x200 pixel picture with a 10x10 color swatch AND paying shipping to your house was a good idea, etc? Right?
Back then, everybody and their redheaded stepchild thought that you could make millions because you could sell stuff (insert drumroll here) ONLINE!
Shipping was one of the biggest issues with any non-local purchase, and back then people with all of their startup money were very aggressive about being competitive with the other etailers, and regular retailers. Now that the number of online companies have shrunk and their average size has increased, we are back to the mail order business model of the 80s. Either spend a bunch of money and get "free" shipping, or you've gotta pay.
Its just dollars and cents.
Seriously, the only time you should be returning something is when it's damaged
I've had to return things to Newegg and other places online that were either manufacturing defects or just DOA. My first and last purchase through Newegg cost me $50 for a known manufacturing defect. Other places gave me PDF return labels that were paid for by the retailer, no questions asked.
Guess who gets my return (no pun intended) business, and who does not?
It's nice that they have wicked cool facility, but if you really want to see some supply chain stuff in action, visit Wal-mart.
Cosco has them beat. 1) Cosco's warehouse is the store 2) they move everything out of the "warehouse and store" every 3 months.
Most other retailers, Wal-mart included, take 1 year to clear their shelves, and they have to pay for warehouse space.
Once I heard about the merchandise turnover at Cosco, I was impressed. Now, if I only needed a 50lb bag of potato chips.
My first and last experience with Newegg was that I had to pay about $50 to "restock" a defective piece of hardware. Specifically, the hardware had broken firmware on the last two model revisions, and was eventually fixed by the manufacturer.
Fortunately, I got a "free" one from the manufacturer after I bitched extensively about how it was unacceptable for them to ship 2 revs of a product that will repeatedly fail in 20 minutes of use.
If QA had nothing to do with quality and assurance, I might find that term meaningful, but PA is more the norm (Profit Assurance).
Sure, you may be speaking with a scumbag using strong encryption, but he's still a scumbag.
I was proposing better DNS and cert authorities that get rid of the scumbags. Real people monitor and take complaints, kinda like the Better Business Bureau but for names and certs.
The problem with that is, in order for the revocation to take effect the user needs to download the root certs update which will be provided by their browser vendor (which in this case will more than likely mean MS) and lets face facts the majority of users never even bother updating, the fickle masses that they are.
A revoked cert isn't the solution, the solution is fixing the process by which people can get SSL certificates in the first place. There need to be more checks and balances. The current process is essentially; give us your money please, ok here's your certificate.. Enjoy!
So true. Revoking certs basically requires realtime lookup of every cert requested to make sure its not revoked. So, can there be a secure and efficient way to validate every cert on connect? Either way, something needs to be checked on connect, I don't know the solutions.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed. All it does is make a few companies rich.
Well, I guess there is a market for a more trusted group of people that issue identities on the internet. These are the DNS registrars and the certificate authorities.
Think about paying for a DNS server that did not resolve any illegal hosts? I would, and recommend anybody else to do the same.
I didn't know Bill gates was for sale...
& q=bill+gates&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 yields the text ad that says, "Bill Gate, Looking for Bill Gate?" with the following ad URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=l&ai=B-L2WiAvxQ7iWKqT iqQK0wf3XAqmhmRLdltOJAvvIjLUIwJoMEAEYASC5VCgHSJI5U J3b-KIDmAG9jgaqAQJlbsgBAZUCHXFKCg&num=1&q=http://a dfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/711-33994-2056-0%3Ftype% 3Dsearch%26mpre%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fsearch.ebay.c om%252Fsearch%252Fsearch.dll%253Fquery%253DBill%25 20Gate%2526krd%253D1%2526newu%253D1%2526xpufu%253D x%26keyword%3DBill%2520Gate
The top ad off of this search, http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en
Close enough for me, Mr. AC.
eBay knows product marketing
How? eBay is a service company. The only marketing I've seen is singing about buying crap off of eBay on TV and every single noun that I search for on Google, I can buy on eBay as well.
Back on topic, this is a _very_ bad move on Intel and Skype. I doubt that MS would even stoop so low.
A) Why would Skype agree to this? What is their benefit by limiting their customer base by splitting hairs on commodity CPU manufacturers?
b) Why would Intel do this when they are already being sued by AMD?
Is Sony involved in these decisions?
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source. You wouldn't have to worry so much about removal programs, as programs that would "fake" the watermark, basically couterfeiting programs. Of course, those would pop up fifteen minutes later.
Well, for one my media players will not honor the watermarks.
My rippers will not honor the watermarks.
My encoders of the music that I produce will not inject watermarks.
Seems almost ironic doesn't it?
Not really, soon the State Department will realize and officially deem the USofA as "repressive to human rights".
Now that would be ironic.
For those that are not in touch with current events, read about PATRIOT Act, unwarranted email searches, unwarranted phone taps, unwarranted detainment without being charged nor right to legal council, not to include the laundry list of things we have lost over the past 4 years or so years.
Keep in mind that this guy works for the lowest common denominator of business journalism. Its parallel to Red Book for relationships, or Psychology Today for psych literature, and NewsWeek for "news".
The format for all of these magazines is as follows. Take regular mundane topic that most people know a little about, sensationalize it, make some assertions as if the journalist knows what they are talking about it to raise a little controversy, rinse, repeat.
The PS3 will do quite well if it has good games and it plays them well. If the bonus features work well, that will only help sales, not hurt them. If a kid wants a PS3, dad will be better able to sell it to the wife if it also does a nice slideshow of pictures on their HDTV from their digital camera. Its a win-win situation.
No sensationalism necessary.
Remember the Dreamcast? Dial-up modem, the whole thing. It tried to do too much at the time, before the consumers were ready for it.
/. geeks would ever buy a Playstation or an Xbox with the intention to do things besides games. Believe it or not, we are not like the majority of the human population.
Remember the Apple Newton, the TiVo, and plenty of other things that came to market before their time??
The thing is that the Playstation has a following for game developers and gamers. So long as it has good playable games it will do fine. If the other features work as advertised (or better), then that is icing on the cake. Only a few of us
If it works well with slideshows of pictures from a digital camera, and works well with HTPC kind of stuff, then that is only free advertising to sell more of these boxes. If it sucks at playing games, no matter how good the extra stuff is, it will fail. If they are able to pull off all of the extra bells and whistles, I see no problem with it selling or confusing the user, and it will only be an extra plus to the system in general.
I don't even play video games, and I'm planning on buying the 2nd rev of the PS3 when it comes out. The graphics and capabilities of the thing seem amazing, and who knows, maybe I'll learn how to play a game or two.
This has been going on for many years. Gang leaders in prisons here in the US have their own language that mutates over time, and their cryptic texts get carried and translated on the streets and their wishes for the betterment of the world are carried out.
People do this when making drug deals, mafia hits, everything where the literal message of the conversation would be incriminating, a new language is created.
Of course there is stenography, encryption, and other fun and games too.
But our government is only looking for the law abiding criminals that don't take such precautions.
I also find it ironic that you get extra time for doing a "hate crime" against a homosexual, yet the homosexual has no rights under the law.
We shouldn't have to revolt. That's what elections, and checks and balances are for.
Well, we don't want to revolt. It takes time, effort, and its a PITA. We all want the same thing, a decent life for ourselves and our families. Things like freedoms, liberties, and a feeling of well being.
Elections. Give me a break. The last two elections were a farce. GWB was appointed on the first one, and he won the second one after Kerry gave up and conceded (right word?).
Checks and balances. Those have long been gone, along with due process. The current administration is doing so many unconstitutional things, I don't see how impeachment has not happened, or some other drastic measure against these criminals.
In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy. However rather than the Orwellian 1984 version of no privacy, he talks about a world where everyone, from the farmer in the field, to the president of the united states having zero secercy.
I'm all for this. As the saying goes, "You're only as sick as your secrets". I'm open and honest about the things that I do, and some of these things include "illegal" activity. I don't care. I basically do what I want, and I'm confident that I can continue to do so.
The thing is, say we make all phone conversations open like talking in a public place. Does that mean that we have to pay for the government to scour through all of our conversations? Is this necessary?
I mean, when someone's behavior is bad enough and it affects other people, don't people call the authorities, and let them take it from there? Its what I do. If reminders to a neighbor to keep the noise down late at night doesn't do any good, I'll call the police and let them handle it. After repeated requests, what can I do after that? I'm left with violence or threat of violence, which could come back to hurt me. So, I take it up with a third person that has protocols and procedures for taking care of such disputes.
So, are noisy neighbors any different that a so called terrorist or some other harmful or potentially harmful person? I don't see so.
If I knew of someone that was buying 5 tons of fertilizer and some other goodies to make a nice bomb to blow up somebody, I would be on the phone in a heartbeat. Who wouldn't? In fact, isn't knowledge of such activities a crime as well? Depending on how involved you are, there are things like conspiracy, obstruction of justice, or whatever crimes there are to ensure that everybody is a criminal.
Why not just tell all communication corporations that they are taking them over and they will now be owned by the government so that surveillance can be conducted on the civilian populace? I'll tell you why..... It would be Revolution! So, our government(s) are slowly, methodically, chipping away at individual freedoms under the guise of "protecting" us.
So, how bad does it have to get before we revolt?
I had no clue that they were surveilling so much that it was taxing the providers. Do they get compensated for this? Regular citizens do for things like jury duty.
I also wish the flow of information from the government to the people was much more open. Trial information is open, and we would know if over 50% of the people accused of a crime were acquitted, then we would know that the police and DAs were doing a crappy job of bringing good cases to court. How many of these 1,700+ wiretaps lead to interesting information? If its less than say 25%, I believe that the government is wasting our tax dollars and abusing the subpoena system, and just listening in on our conversations because they are nosy, not because they are out to protect and serve us.
So again, how bad does it have to get before we revolt?
Why don't they just charge for a functional operating system instead of a broken one, plus a service to keep it working?
Believe it or not, there are companies that do this.
Besides games and legacy MSC applications, Windows is dying. Actually, once Intel Macs take off and games are available via OpenGL for both OSes, and with a good emulator for legacy MFC apps, I don't see these things being an issue anymore either in the near future.
So, how much is this AV subscription again?
Those who make history should not be the ones who write it, or they'll put themselves in a favorable light.
A man wiser than you or me disagrees:
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-- Winston Churchill
Moderation works OK here, but I don't think it would work well for wikipedia.
I suggested here once before to make time the element of data integrity.
If a particular article is "hot", slow down the number of edits per day, week, month or whatever. Especially edits from the same person and/or IP address or subnet.
Slashdot has implemented things similar to this like taking 60 seconds between posts (Slow down cowboy!), and by punishing logged in users that have submitted posts anonymously. Its been a while since the latter has affected me, and I don't remember the details, but it sucked, and I wished that the slashcode was telling me what I was being punished for.
But its simple. If an article is modified X times in a certain period of time, then it is "hot". Just slow down the rate that people can make changes. The majority of the people out there are more OK than evil, so slowing down the evil people will allow more of the good guys to make the truth to be known.
Again, a good quote from a nice lunatic:
"There's no right, there's no wrong, there's only popular opinion."
-- Jeffrey Goines, 12 Monkeys
We, as a society, are continually failing our men--encouraging them to behave in ways that shorten their lives and lower their quality of life.
:)
Evidence of that includes mandatory motorcycle helmet laws, air bags, children playing with helmets on, OSHA, mandatory seatbelt laws, etc.
Has it really gotten to the point that people are that scared to do things anymore?
Go and read about the Hoover dam or the digging of the Panama Canal if you want to hear about men dying at work.
People hardly die in wars anymore (at least Americans don't).
Sheep must sleep better at night now
That isn't true, and the gender disparity only shows up much later in life. I'm not sure why the difference exists
Some men develop testicles later in life which produces testosterone -- the male hormone.
Evidence of the contrary is here.