The simplest solution, imho, assuming money is not a problem: Get a Sony Vaio Picturebook (it has a built-in webcam) and a PC-card cell modem. Then download ConquerCam. Voila, problem solved. You can easily mount the Picturebook on the front of your bike (or anywhere, for that matter) with a bit of duct tape, since it only weighs about 2 pounds. What's more, it's got a Transmeta processor, so it has a nice long battery life.
CmdrTaco's statement is a little misleading. The trojan does not "hijack" your Gnutella node. When executed, it sniffs network traffic looking for Gnutella search requests. When it sees one, no matter what the request is for, it sends back a positive match to the request. If the remote user downloads the matched file (which is always 8,192 bytes in size), they'll get the trojan.
It's pretty easy to determine which Gnutella users are infected. Just do a search for 'nsdkjfnlnponf' or some other completely nonsense phrase. You'll get a bunch of matches, all files 8,192 bytes long. These are infected nodes.
This is by far the best Slashdot article posted in the last few months. We need more investigative reporting like this. Excellent work, jamie. You've tossed a gem into what is otherwise turning into a huge pile of worthless coal.
In other news, CmdrTaco was overheard saying "Fuck Microsoft". Tomorrow's Slashdot headline: "CmdrTaco Wants to have Intimate Sexual Relations with Bill Gates".
Just because a Microsoft employee says he doesn't like open-source does not mean that Microsoft as a company holds that view.
There are so many factors DSL performance depends on that generalizing all DSL users and saying DSL is bad because your father can't get over 50Kb/sec is an invalid comparison. DSL speed varies with each user. For example, I have DSL and I regularly get a sustained throughput of up to 110Kb/s. It also has a lot to do with how much you're paying and the quality of your ISP.
The analogy wasn't implying that installing Linux is the hard part. Anybody can do that. The point I was trying to make, without resorting to the whining that's all too common around these parts nowadays, was that OSes like Windows and Mac OS, while not the best and viewed by many as "evil", have the most extensive support for internationalized versions, whereas Linux, while it may be a better OS, does not.
This fellow was obviously not looking forward to hacking up his own solution, so obviously the easiest course of action for him would be to swallow his pride and use another OS.
Actually, I guess I just wrote the analogy because it was fun to write. Nevermind.
You're traveling through a South American rain forest when you suddenly come upon a massive river. The river is at least 100 yards across, and the water is moving far too rapidly for safe swimming. Off to the east a short way, you see a large group of travelers like yourself boarding a ferry tethered to a rope that spans the width of the river.
You have a choice to make:
Make camp, spend months gathering materials and drawing up plans, and then spend a year or more slowly building a bridge, with the help of a few of the other travelers.
Pay a small fee to the ferry operator and take the ferry to the other side like everyone else.
This is Microsoft's new "reliability" ad campaign, which was launched a week or so before their DNS went down and they got DOSed. There's been talk recently that Microsoft may cut back on the campaign now so as to avoid making it look like a bad joke.
That's not cybersquatting. I run a website at wonko.com, but I also own the domain 'wonkoslice.com', which points to the same site. I have another site at 'stupendousbadass.org' which will soon be pointed to by 'stupendousbadass.com' as well. None of this is cybersquatting. Cybersquatting is when you purchase a domain name for the sole purpose of selling it at a profit.
if you look at the uptime charts on netcraft or uptimes.net, you'll notice that win2k doesn't even compare to some of the *ix based OSes.
...and you'll also notice that Windows 2000 has been out of beta for less than a year, whereas UNIX has been around for decades. Of course someone who installed BSD on a box back in 1993 and left it there will have a higher uptime than someone who put Win2K on a box last year. That's because Win2K didn't exist in 1993. Talk about unfair comparisons...
As the sole developer of the only GUI uptimes.net client for Windows, I spend a good bit of my time explaining to people how comparing Win2K uptimes with *NIX uptimes is comparing apples to oranges. It's gotten to the point now where I just don't even care anymore. If ya' can't figure it out fer yerself, I ain't gonna explain it.
Damn straight. Couldn't have said it better myself.
I run several Windows 2000 servers myself, and I also use Windows 2000 as my full-time desktop OS at home and at work. At one point, I had a web server running Windows 2000 Server RC2, serving a popular dynamic (ASP/MSSQL-driven) site, on hardware that didn't meet Windows' minimum requirements. The server stayed up (and perfectly stable) for 155 days before I finally had to shut it down to move it to my new apartment. And this was on a beta version of Windows, on sub-standard hardware! My desktop installation (running a non-beta version, on hardware that surpasses the OS's requirements) has an average uptime of over 20 days, and this is a machine that I use for software development, testing, and games. Even then, I usually only reboot it to install new hardware or upgrade software. Crashes are very infrequent.
What too many Microsoft-haters fail to realize is that Windows 2000 can be every bit as stable as your favorite *NIX OS. It's not that stable right out of the box (nor is any *NIX distro), but if you tweak it just right and run things smartly, you'll have a server that could take on anything in an uptime contest.
In the interests of not getting modded down for redundancy, I won't go into detail about how retarded this bias is that so many *NIX users (especially that punk CmdrTaco) have against Microsoft.
Regardless of who's responsible, it's not just California who's being affected by this. They're getting the most attention (as they're the main source of the problem and probably in the most pain right now) but Oregon and Washington are also hurting. I live in Portland and word is that my power bill's going to jump up by a nasty percentage in the coming months. This does not make me happy.
As for the cause: Aside from the financial problems of California's power plants, much of Oregon and Washington's power comes from hydroelectric and nuclear plants, both of which depend greatly on natural water to generate power (nuclear plants use water for cooling). Recently, we've been getting much less precipitation than usual, so the rivers are lower, which means the hydroelectric plants are generating less power.
Just the other day, Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Gary Wu of Washington held a press conference in which they warned that rolling blackouts or possible for much of the northwest if the situation doesn't improve.
Finding a child actor both young enough and skilled enough to bring Ender to life is a nearly impossible task. Finding a whole bunch of child actors young enough and skilled anough to bring all the other characters to life as well is even more impossible.
The solution? Easy. Computer animation, my friend.
Anyone who's seen the trailers for Final Fantasy, or even that one computer-animated Saturday morning cartoon on the WB network, will tell you that CGI has come a long, long way, and is now more than capable of telling a story like Ender's Game.
A CGI movie would make things like the massive zero-g battle scenes very easy to do, and special effects would be simple. Furthermore, you don't have to worry about finding a good child actor, just a good voice actor who sounds like a kid. What's more, CGI opens up the potential for sequels -- with real child actors, by the time you got around to doing a sequel, the kid would be older and wrong for the part. With CGI, the actors are ageless.
I think this is something OSC should give serious consideration to. Given the recent massive popularity of CGI movies, I think studios would be much more open to doing a CGI film than a film with a bunch of child actors.
Take a look at the legal documents on the Milberg Weiss site. It seems to me they have a perfectly valid, very strong case against VA Linux, and as someone who participated in the IPO and is thus affected by this, after reading the documents, I've come to the conclusion that I agree with them.
Looks like there were some shady dealings going on with the IPO. No matter how much I like VA Linux, there's no excuse for this, and no company should be allowed to get away with it. Here's hoping they learn a hard lesson.
Several months ago I cashed in my VA Linux stock (several months too late, grumble grumble) and blew it on a home theatre system. I bought a 46-inch Mitsubishi widescreen HDTV (it was a close choice between Toshiba and Mitsubishi...I went with the Mitsu) and a Toshiba SD-5190 dual-disc progressive scan DVD player. I didn't bother buying a surround sound system, since I live in an apartment and it would only piss off my neighbors. In any case, I have never been more pleased with anything I've bought.
Watching DVDs on this system blows me away every time. Anyone who's never seen the output from a progressive scan DVD player has no clue what they're missing. I think it was well worth the extra bucks.
Dear god man! What evil demon led you to make such bad choices?!?? For less than you paid for that crappy 36" Sony TV, you could have bought a much better 42"-46" Toshiba or Mitsubishi rear-projection television. But where you really went wrong is with the DVD player. You shelled out over $2500 for this HDTV-capable television with 480p inputs, and you didn't even get a DVD player with progressive scan output!!!!! If you want a good progressive scan-capable DVD player, look at the Toshiba SD5190.
I'd say get whatever speakers are cheapest. Your home theater system is already screwed up anyway. Getting good speakers won't save you now. Sigh. Another one bites the dust...
What most commenters seem to be missing is the fact that Russia would most likely not be paying the whole bill on this thing. The article mentions that they're talking to the World Bank about this, which means that they could get a pretty sizeable loan. Also, the US would very likely fork over a good bit of cash, and Canada may want to participate as well.
Split $60 billion (£40 billion) three ways and you have $20 billion (£13 billion). Assuming Russia gets a nice loan from the World Bank to help them cover their share, this could easily be pulled off. $60 billion to the US is like $6,000 to your average computer programmer. Sure it's a lot of money, but you could afford to spend it if you really wanted to.
Of course, these odds aren't comparable to each other. The Iridium odds are 1 in 250 that a piece of debris will hit one of the 6,117,737,000 people on this planet. The odds of winning the Oregon Lottery are 1 in 335 out of the Oregon state population of 3,316,154 (only some of whom actually play the Oregon lottery).
Big, big difference in probability calculations there.
Granted, if we actually had some dinosaurs, we could prove or disprove this theory. But my point was that since all the dinosaurs died millions of years ago and time machines exist only in science fiction, we won't be getting the chance to study real dinosaurs anytime soon.:)
Slashdot Mirror
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It's pretty easy to determine which Gnutella users are infected. Just do a search for 'nsdkjfnlnponf' or some other completely nonsense phrase. You'll get a bunch of matches, all files 8,192 bytes long. These are infected nodes.
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Just because a Microsoft employee says he doesn't like open-source does not mean that Microsoft as a company holds that view.
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This fellow was obviously not looking forward to hacking up his own solution, so obviously the easiest course of action for him would be to swallow his pride and use another OS.
Actually, I guess I just wrote the analogy because it was fun to write. Nevermind.
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You have a choice to make:
Which option would you choose?
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As the sole developer of the only GUI uptimes.net client for Windows, I spend a good bit of my time explaining to people how comparing Win2K uptimes with *NIX uptimes is comparing apples to oranges. It's gotten to the point now where I just don't even care anymore. If ya' can't figure it out fer yerself, I ain't gonna explain it.
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I run several Windows 2000 servers myself, and I also use Windows 2000 as my full-time desktop OS at home and at work. At one point, I had a web server running Windows 2000 Server RC2, serving a popular dynamic (ASP/MSSQL-driven) site, on hardware that didn't meet Windows' minimum requirements. The server stayed up (and perfectly stable) for 155 days before I finally had to shut it down to move it to my new apartment. And this was on a beta version of Windows, on sub-standard hardware! My desktop installation (running a non-beta version, on hardware that surpasses the OS's requirements) has an average uptime of over 20 days, and this is a machine that I use for software development, testing, and games. Even then, I usually only reboot it to install new hardware or upgrade software. Crashes are very infrequent.
What too many Microsoft-haters fail to realize is that Windows 2000 can be every bit as stable as your favorite *NIX OS. It's not that stable right out of the box (nor is any *NIX distro), but if you tweak it just right and run things smartly, you'll have a server that could take on anything in an uptime contest.
In the interests of not getting modded down for redundancy, I won't go into detail about how retarded this bias is that so many *NIX users (especially that punk CmdrTaco) have against Microsoft.
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As for the cause: Aside from the financial problems of California's power plants, much of Oregon and Washington's power comes from hydroelectric and nuclear plants, both of which depend greatly on natural water to generate power (nuclear plants use water for cooling). Recently, we've been getting much less precipitation than usual, so the rivers are lower, which means the hydroelectric plants are generating less power.
Just the other day, Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Gary Wu of Washington held a press conference in which they warned that rolling blackouts or possible for much of the northwest if the situation doesn't improve.
Oh, yay.
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The solution? Easy. Computer animation, my friend.
Anyone who's seen the trailers for Final Fantasy, or even that one computer-animated Saturday morning cartoon on the WB network, will tell you that CGI has come a long, long way, and is now more than capable of telling a story like Ender's Game.
A CGI movie would make things like the massive zero-g battle scenes very easy to do, and special effects would be simple. Furthermore, you don't have to worry about finding a good child actor, just a good voice actor who sounds like a kid. What's more, CGI opens up the potential for sequels -- with real child actors, by the time you got around to doing a sequel, the kid would be older and wrong for the part. With CGI, the actors are ageless.
I think this is something OSC should give serious consideration to. Given the recent massive popularity of CGI movies, I think studios would be much more open to doing a CGI film than a film with a bunch of child actors.
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Looks like there were some shady dealings going on with the IPO. No matter how much I like VA Linux, there's no excuse for this, and no company should be allowed to get away with it. Here's hoping they learn a hard lesson.
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Watching DVDs on this system blows me away every time. Anyone who's never seen the output from a progressive scan DVD player has no clue what they're missing. I think it was well worth the extra bucks.
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I'd say get whatever speakers are cheapest. Your home theater system is already screwed up anyway. Getting good speakers won't save you now. Sigh. Another one bites the dust...
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Wanna know how to solve the poverty problem? Feed the homeless to the hungry.
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Split $60 billion (£40 billion) three ways and you have $20 billion (£13 billion). Assuming Russia gets a nice loan from the World Bank to help them cover their share, this could easily be pulled off. $60 billion to the US is like $6,000 to your average computer programmer. Sure it's a lot of money, but you could afford to spend it if you really wanted to.
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Big, big difference in probability calculations there.
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NVidia's Linux Drivers page is full of noncompliant HTML. IE renders it because IE is more forgiving, but Gecko is a lot more strict.
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IE gives you the option to specify your own source viewer. It defaults to notepad.exe, but you can change it to whatever you prefer.
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