I recently moved from the Boston area up over the border to a small town in New Hampshire (insert cow and/or missing teeth joke here). I work out of my house, so if any provider could offer me good reception on their network from my home, I'd buy on in a heartbeat. Sadly, no provider I'm aware of will let you demo a phone in your home. I'm currently using Verizon Wireless, as of those I've been able to "test" by others' reception issues when they visit my home, Verizon's been the best. My wife has Cingular, which is fine outside the home, shit in it. My work had provided my a cell phone from Nextel, which had zippo coverage for at least a mile around my house. I've also had folks test US Cellular and ATT Wireless, neither with any decent results.
So who gives a crap about phone number portability? Give me signal strength out here in the woods, and I'll give you my money. I'd suggest the government include specified coverage guarantees by a given provider next time they auction off some more wavelengths for the Next Big Wireless Technology.
Trillian recently added this aspect of AOL's client feature to their Trillian Pro 2.0 client. Since most of the folks I chat with use AIM, I've definitely noticed the difference in chat sessions. I catch when the person I'm chatting to is replying to my message, and hold back. I tend to type pretty quickly (all those years on MUDs did help:) ), considerably faster than most folks I chat with. Thanks to the feature, I can avoid spamming them with further chats while they reply to mine. It makes for better conversation.
Hell, who really needs varied fonts? Back when I was in high school, I was lucky enough to have an IBM XT system running DOS, Word Perfect (version 2? version 3.x? It's been 10 years...) and an enormous "letter quality" dot matrix printer. Many of my classmates wrote their papers using the various fangled windowed word processors, with their WYSIWYG formatting and varied fonts and font sizes. It drove teachers nuts to see folks turning in papers printed with the equivilent of Comic Sans. My papers appeared typewritten (thanks to the letter-quality printer), and to this day, I think it gave me an edge when it came to grading.
What's more, it definitely taught me how to really write, learning substance over style. I saved bold and underline for page formatting (titles and the like), and kept the paper's body simple. I keep that to this day, preferring monospace fonts, and using formatting tricks only as really needed.
I have one word for you: copycat. Frankly, network admins were quite lucky that there weren't more Blaster copycat virii introduced. Just because the first and most well-known version of this worm was somewhat benign in impact (and easily removed), doesn't mean others don't have additional nastiness thrown on to em. As a former network abuse desk guy, when a customer called us who had an ongoing infection running on a server, we always recommended:
- disconnect the box from the network - perform reasonable local analysis of the system to attempt to discern the source of the infection - wipe the disk and reinstall OS and apps from original media - repatch via disk or LAN (download patches to another server, and install) - reattach to the network, and keep a close eye on said system
Reasonable steps, it would seem. Also, this reminds any admin worth his salt to keep those patches updated, or else be cursed with time-consuming reinstalls.
"The GoVideo Networked DVD Player is a high end, slim-line Progressive Scan DVD player, and is the first player of its kind to be able to stream video files through a wireless network to a consumer electronics component. The Networked DVD Player works with either a wired PCMCIA Ethernet Adapter (included) or an optional PCMCIA 802.11b Wireless Network Card. The D2730 can also stream MP3 and WMA audio files and JPEG image files, as well as MPEG1 and MPEG2 video files."
Yes, I can roll my own (even stylishly, with a Shuttle XPC. Yes, I can do so with a cool Linux distro (can't remember the couple I've examined off the top of my head - anyone? Bueller?). But I sure as hell can't do it for $250, which was the SRP for this unit.
The RIAA could give a rat's ass about the Dead and Phish's concert success. Historically, have their albums sold well? Do they get considerable radio airplay? No, and no. Don't get me wrong - I really like both bands. However, the "R" in RIAA stands for Recording. This is what they care about; control of the output of recorded musical performance. If they can control the flow of musical recordings, they can continue to foist talentless crap on the listening public. If anything, Phish and the Dead are anomolies in their system. The RIAA would squash these performers' direct marketing of music if they felt they could. But they can't, so they take on the ISPs and downloaders, ignoring the ill will this spawns.
Verizon gives its users 3 servers for translating numbers to names: vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net (4.2.2.1), vnsc.bak.sys.gtei.net (4.2.2.2), vnsc-lc.sys.gtei.net (4.2.2.3), and for internal use, i-will-not-steal-service.gtei.net (4.2.2.4)
Actually, an interesting note on how this is configured. Genuity (aka GTEI aka BBN Planet), who hosts these DNS resolvers, has a simple, but effective distribution system for redundancy. There are actually several servers on AS 1 that will respond as 4.2.2.1 or.2./32 routes are sprinkled into IGP within the network to try and route requests to the "closest" server that can answer the request. If one is in trouble, simply pull the route to it, and requests route elsewhere. It's not foolproof, as a DDOS would likely come from all borders and overwhelm all of the various servers, but it's pretty effective nontheless.
Not really known for its SFX (since it was made for a few thousand dollars), but Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi fits into this vein quite nicely. The dialogue was limited, as was the plot. What remained was a pretty outstanding action flick. There are others that come to mind, but the fact remains that "action" should not be synonymous with "massive budgets for digital SFX and explosions". It's all about presentation, no matter the method.
Off the top of my head, there are plenty of other nVidia resellers still here in the US (eVGA, Gainward and PNY to name 3), along with some of the big boys in motherboards (Abit, Asus, MSI). It's a shame Visiontek couldn't keep fiscally sound, but in this economy, if you're in debt, you're dead.
...how about Trillian? Yeah, I know it's not open-source, and it's for Win32 only
(although one of co-workers uses it with the Crossover plug-in, and it works fine). It's still an outstanding piece of software, that allows these GlobalHyperMegaCorps to play their games, and still give us the functionality we users crave.
The problem with this thinking is that many American consumers remain entirely ignorant about what's under the hood as far as their OS is concerned. From Windows 3.11 to Windows XP, if it came on the PC, it was called "Windows", and it just sort of was there. Thus, if PC retailers buy in to Palladium, the vast majority of consumers will pick it up too. MS will get their cash, the [RI||MP]AA will get their DRM-based OS, and a lot of folks will get screwed in the process.
Rest assured, those of us that build our own systems will rely on Linux and non-DRM'ed Windows (if available). But for the masses, they take what they get, and they use it.
Add one more big thumbs up for Newegg from me. Bought several different components over the last few months (CPUs, hard disks, RAM and a video card). No problems with any of the lot.
If Windows users are scared of change, how come Microsoft's been able to successfully change:
* the kernel * the filesystem * the file manager * the browser * Office file formats (.DOC compatibility? Ha!)
...over their last several releases? The fact is that Windows users aren't scared of change. Rather, they aren't offered any alternative OS from the retail side for new PCs, and so they go along with change. It's Microsoft-managed change, but it's change nontheless.
Fast forward 3-4 years, if this modular Windows exists. Users will be able to pick systems that run componants they like, with features they want, with support from the PC retailer. Funny, this sounds an awful lot like the auto industry, which is where I'd love to see OSs land.
The PlayStation 2 Runtime Environment PlayStation 2 System Manuals
DISC 2
The Linux operating system Kernel version 2.2.1 (my emphasis) Xfree86 X-Windows version 3.3.6 with support for PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer GCC 2.95.2 and GLIBC 2.2.2 An alpha version of Mesa 3D supporting limited graphics acceleration PlayStation 2 Development Libraries, device drivers, tools and sample code
Particularly old kernel, with plenty of known bugs and issues that likely aren't fixed. The other utils are reasonably old as well (gcc 2.95.2, not 2.95.3). Why not at least 2.2.18? Inquiring minds etc.
This is what I've been waiting to see from Bush administration FCC appointees. We've already seen it with his energy policies, and it's only a matter of time before his executive appointments start effecting us in ways we haven't seen in many years.
Despite hanging on to a House and Senate majority throughout the 90's, the Republican party could never sufficiently craft the laws necessary to push their big-money favoritism. The rule of thumb in Congress is always looking at the number of votes necessary to pass the laws that will get you reelected. For many House conservatives, they knew their majorities were too slim to pass laws that would get beyond a Clinton veto, let alone the even-slimmer margins in the Senate.
With the presidency in their back pocket, however, the Republican party placed numerous individuals into prominent Cabinent positions. Their sole goals: protect big-money interests, and get that money to us for use in future elections. It's just that simple. Covad's not going to be contributing a ton of money to Bush's reelection campaign, because they're just barely hanging on. On the other hand, Verizon et al. have hundreds of thousands of employees, who can easily be made party to soft-money contributions.
This is your executive branch. The only way to deal with it is to throw the bums out in 2004.
Re:AIM Releases Linux Client...
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1
Side note have you sent your PayPal support to Trillian, have you ever REALLY supported them?
Actually, I did, the day after I downloaded Trillian. Sent em 5 bucks, their suggested donation. I'd probably send more if they were obviously hurting too. It's the best piece of network client software I've used in several years. Excellent default values combined with reasonably easy XML templates to hack together skins makes it the client of choice.
Good thing mattress and pillow manufacturers don't have a stronger lobby in Congress. Othereidr, we could be railing against the DROTSLTOEA (Don't Rip Off The Stupid Little Tag Or Else! Act).
Seems pretty bloody limiting to me, given the large number of readily available >1Ghz CPUs nowadays. If you're looking for an ultra quiet system with a VIA C3, perhaps their 933Mhz model. These suckers run cool, and generally can use an extremely quiet fan.
If you want something for the higher-end CPUs, Koolance has had a pre-built waterblock tower case for a few months now. Try one of those.
How are *users* supposed to know about this?
How about this:
* write a worm that infects Outlook and IE5/5.5/6 users through the known URL/file types bugs
* the worm then: opens IE to the file URL to download the fix for this XP Universal P&P bug, waits for the download to complete, runs the executable patch, and restarts the user's system.
From what I understand, the latest rev of PhoenixBIOS can recognize USB drives and boot from them.
I could see a pretty decent little business in doing diskless firewalls and routers using an LRP image or an EmBSD firewall image on a microATX x86 box. Just add the configuration files to your keychain, boot it and run in RAM. Sweet.
Nothing beats calling up an ISP and saying "you have a windows/linux/whatever box probing for webservers/mailservers/(insert service) and is attempting to execute a vulnerability of that service".
Actually, one thing does beat that: when you call the ISP's tech support to report it, the person on the other end of the line asks you, "What's probing? What's a web server? What's Linux? These aren't on my script? Have you rebooted your cable modem?"
Sorry, was channelling a little bit of tech support rage. I feel much better now:)
Slashdot Mirror
I recently moved from the Boston area up over the border to a small town in New Hampshire (insert cow and/or missing teeth joke here). I work out of my house, so if any provider could offer me good reception on their network from my home, I'd buy on in a heartbeat. Sadly, no provider I'm aware of will let you demo a phone in your home. I'm currently using Verizon Wireless, as of those I've been able to "test" by others' reception issues when they visit my home, Verizon's been the best. My wife has Cingular, which is fine outside the home, shit in it. My work had provided my a cell phone from Nextel, which had zippo coverage for at least a mile around my house. I've also had folks test US Cellular and ATT Wireless, neither with any decent results.
So who gives a crap about phone number portability? Give me signal strength out here in the woods, and I'll give you my money. I'd suggest the government include specified coverage guarantees by a given provider next time they auction off some more wavelengths for the Next Big Wireless Technology.
Trillian recently added this aspect of AOL's client feature to their Trillian Pro 2.0 client. Since most of the folks I chat with use AIM, I've definitely noticed the difference in chat sessions. I catch when the person I'm chatting to is replying to my message, and hold back. I tend to type pretty quickly (all those years on MUDs did help :) ), considerably faster than most folks I chat with. Thanks to the feature, I can avoid spamming them with further chats while they reply to mine. It makes for better conversation.
Hell, who really needs varied fonts? Back when I was in high school, I was lucky enough to have an IBM XT system running DOS, Word Perfect (version 2? version 3.x? It's been 10 years...) and an enormous "letter quality" dot matrix printer. Many of my classmates wrote their papers using the various fangled windowed word processors, with their WYSIWYG formatting and varied fonts and font sizes. It drove teachers nuts to see folks turning in papers printed with the equivilent of Comic Sans. My papers appeared typewritten (thanks to the letter-quality printer), and to this day, I think it gave me an edge when it came to grading.
What's more, it definitely taught me how to really write, learning substance over style. I saved bold and underline for page formatting (titles and the like), and kept the paper's body simple. I keep that to this day, preferring monospace fonts, and using formatting tricks only as really needed.
I have one word for you: copycat. Frankly, network admins were quite lucky that there weren't more Blaster copycat virii introduced. Just because the first and most well-known version of this worm was somewhat benign in impact (and easily removed), doesn't mean others don't have additional nastiness thrown on to em. As a former network abuse desk guy, when a customer called us who had an ongoing infection running on a server, we always recommended:
- disconnect the box from the network
- perform reasonable local analysis of the system to attempt to discern the source of the infection
- wipe the disk and reinstall OS and apps from original media
- repatch via disk or LAN (download patches to another server, and install)
- reattach to the network, and keep a close eye on said system
Reasonable steps, it would seem. Also, this reminds any admin worth his salt to keep those patches updated, or else be cursed with time-consuming reinstalls.
With the pending bankruptcy, this product might have been vaporware used to stoke investor interest. But man, do I wanna buy one:
GoVideo® D2730 Networked DVD - World's First Networked DVD Player!
"The GoVideo Networked DVD Player is a high end, slim-line Progressive Scan DVD player, and is the first player of its kind to be able to stream video files through a wireless network to a consumer electronics component. The Networked DVD Player works with either a wired PCMCIA Ethernet Adapter (included) or an optional PCMCIA 802.11b Wireless Network Card. The D2730 can also stream MP3 and WMA audio files and JPEG image files, as well as MPEG1 and MPEG2 video files."
Yes, I can roll my own (even stylishly, with a Shuttle XPC. Yes, I can do so with a cool Linux distro (can't remember the couple I've examined off the top of my head - anyone? Bueller?). But I sure as hell can't do it for $250, which was the SRP for this unit.
The RIAA could give a rat's ass about the Dead and Phish's concert success. Historically, have their albums sold well? Do they get considerable radio airplay? No, and no. Don't get me wrong - I really like both bands. However, the "R" in RIAA stands for Recording. This is what they care about; control of the output of recorded musical performance. If they can control the flow of musical recordings, they can continue to foist talentless crap on the listening public. If anything, Phish and the Dead are anomolies in their system. The RIAA would squash these performers' direct marketing of music if they felt they could. But they can't, so they take on the ISPs and downloaders, ignoring the ill will this spawns.
I rarely traffic in bumps, but mod the parent up. Really good catch on this patent.
Verizon gives its users 3 servers for translating numbers to names: vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net (4.2.2.1), vnsc.bak.sys.gtei.net (4.2.2.2), vnsc-lc.sys.gtei.net (4.2.2.3), and for internal use, i-will-not-steal-service.gtei.net (4.2.2.4) Actually, an interesting note on how this is configured. Genuity (aka GTEI aka BBN Planet), who hosts these DNS resolvers, has a simple, but effective distribution system for redundancy. There are actually several servers on AS 1 that will respond as 4.2.2.1 or .2. /32 routes are sprinkled into IGP within the network to try and route requests to the "closest" server that can answer the request. If one is in trouble, simply pull the route to it, and requests route elsewhere. It's not foolproof, as a DDOS would likely come from all borders and overwhelm all of the various servers, but it's pretty effective nontheless.
Not really known for its SFX (since it was made for a few thousand dollars), but Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi fits into this vein quite nicely. The dialogue was limited, as was the plot. What remained was a pretty outstanding action flick. There are others that come to mind, but the fact remains that "action" should not be synonymous with "massive budgets for digital SFX and explosions". It's all about presentation, no matter the method.
Off the top of my head, there are plenty of other nVidia resellers still here in the US (eVGA, Gainward and PNY to name 3), along with some of the big boys in motherboards (Abit, Asus, MSI). It's a shame Visiontek couldn't keep fiscally sound, but in this economy, if you're in debt, you're dead.
...how about Trillian? Yeah, I know it's not open-source, and it's for Win32 only (although one of co-workers uses it with the Crossover plug-in, and it works fine). It's still an outstanding piece of software, that allows these GlobalHyperMegaCorps to play their games, and still give us the functionality we users crave.
The problem with this thinking is that many American consumers remain entirely ignorant about what's under the hood as far as their OS is concerned. From Windows 3.11 to Windows XP, if it came on the PC, it was called "Windows", and it just sort of was there. Thus, if PC retailers buy in to Palladium, the vast majority of consumers will pick it up too. MS will get their cash, the [RI||MP]AA will get their DRM-based OS, and a lot of folks will get screwed in the process.
Rest assured, those of us that build our own systems will rely on Linux and non-DRM'ed Windows (if available). But for the masses, they take what they get, and they use it.
Add one more big thumbs up for Newegg from me. Bought several different components over the last few months (CPUs, hard disks, RAM and a video card). No problems with any of the lot.
(us Windows users are scared of change...)
If Windows users are scared of change, how come Microsoft's been able to successfully change:
* the kernel
* the filesystem
* the file manager
* the browser
* Office file formats (.DOC compatibility? Ha!)
...over their last several releases? The fact is that Windows users aren't scared of change. Rather, they aren't offered any alternative OS from the retail side for new PCs, and so they go along with change. It's Microsoft-managed change, but it's change nontheless.
Fast forward 3-4 years, if this modular Windows exists. Users will be able to pick systems that run componants they like, with features they want, with support from the PC retailer. Funny, this sounds an awful lot like the auto industry, which is where I'd love to see OSs land.
What is on the DVD discs ?
DISC 1
The PlayStation 2 Runtime Environment
PlayStation 2 System Manuals
DISC 2
The Linux operating system
Kernel version 2.2.1 (my emphasis)
Xfree86 X-Windows version 3.3.6 with support for PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer
GCC 2.95.2 and GLIBC 2.2.2
An alpha version of Mesa 3D supporting limited graphics acceleration
PlayStation 2 Development Libraries, device drivers, tools and sample code
Particularly old kernel, with plenty of known bugs and issues that likely aren't fixed. The other utils are reasonably old as well (gcc 2.95.2, not 2.95.3). Why not at least 2.2.18? Inquiring minds etc.
ALLCHIN -
A Lying Lawyer? Clearly, He Is Not!
This is what I've been waiting to see from Bush administration FCC appointees. We've already seen it with his energy policies, and it's only a matter of time before his executive appointments start effecting us in ways we haven't seen in many years.
Despite hanging on to a House and Senate majority throughout the 90's, the Republican party could never sufficiently craft the laws necessary to push their big-money favoritism. The rule of thumb in Congress is always looking at the number of votes necessary to pass the laws that will get you reelected. For many House conservatives, they knew their majorities were too slim to pass laws that would get beyond a Clinton veto, let alone the even-slimmer margins in the Senate.
With the presidency in their back pocket, however, the Republican party placed numerous individuals into prominent Cabinent positions. Their sole goals: protect big-money interests, and get that money to us for use in future elections. It's just that simple. Covad's not going to be contributing a ton of money to Bush's reelection campaign, because they're just barely hanging on. On the other hand, Verizon et al. have hundreds of thousands of employees, who can easily be made party to soft-money contributions.
This is your executive branch. The only way to deal with it is to throw the bums out in 2004.
Actually, I did, the day after I downloaded Trillian. Sent em 5 bucks, their suggested donation. I'd probably send more if they were obviously hurting too. It's the best piece of network client software I've used in several years. Excellent default values combined with reasonably easy XML templates to hack together skins makes it the client of choice.
Good thing mattress and pillow manufacturers don't have a stronger lobby in Congress. Othereidr, we could be railing against the DROTSLTOEA (Don't Rip Off The Stupid Little Tag Or Else! Act).
If you want something for the higher-end CPUs, Koolance has had a pre-built waterblock tower case for a few months now. Try one of those.
* write a worm that infects Outlook and IE5/5.5/6 users through the known URL/file types bugs
* the worm then: opens IE to the file URL to download the fix for this XP Universal P&P bug, waits for the download to complete, runs the executable patch, and restarts the user's system.
Now, why hasn't Microsoft thought of this? :)
That said, the latest PhoenixBIOS does support booting from a USB storage device.
I could see a pretty decent little business in doing diskless firewalls and routers using an LRP image or an EmBSD firewall image on a microATX x86 box. Just add the configuration files to your keychain, boot it and run in RAM. Sweet.
Aw, give em a break. After all, they already apologized for Brian Adams on numerous occasions...
Actually, one thing does beat that: when you call the ISP's tech support to report it, the person on the other end of the line asks you, "What's probing? What's a web server? What's Linux? These aren't on my script? Have you rebooted your cable modem?"
Sorry, was channelling a little bit of tech support rage. I feel much better now :)