when was the last time you read a magazine with wider lines than
that? Most publishers know that long lines of text makes it harder for the average person to read.
It's one of the big reasons that most newspapers and magazines break stories up into columns
instead of splaying them accross the whole width of a page.
When was the last time you saw a mail reader -- any mail reader -- that supports multiple columns? No, I'm not counting HTML here, because if you're going to use MIME then you can include any damn thing you want in your email, including a picture of a newspaper page with multiple columns. I don't think that's quite the same as actually supporting multiple columns of ASCII text.
xterm? And here all this time I thought xterms were resizable... silly me...
xterm? And here all this time I was refering to real terminals, like a VT220, not emulated terminals, which AFAIK are resizeable and not fixed at 80 columns.
And besides, when was the last time you read email on an 80 column terminal?
Um, right now. If I showed you a screenshot, you would see that this window is partially covering a
SSH terminal running Mutt and displaying my inbox.
Wow! So, what 80 column terminal supports windows? I'm not familiar with any terminals that do that. At least, my VT220 sure didn't. OH, you meant terminal emulation! I didn't. I meant a real terminal, or I would have said "emulation."
On the other hand, I've recieved way too many emails where the original was way indented and then at some point someone's mailer decided to wrap the lines at 78, so you get something like this:
I think it's a good idea! Proceed.
> I think Ken's proposal has merit. What do you think?
> > Bob, I want you to look at something Ken sent
> > me and forward it to Jeff if you agree.
> > > Fred,
> > > I was talking to Jack and we thought that
> > maybe
> > > we should buy low and sell high. I know
> > it's
> > > a crazy idea, but a crazy idea may be just
> > what
> > > we need! - Ken
While it's nice for mail senders to send 78 character lines, it's even nicer if your mail reader doesn't care and wraps long lines for you, and in some cases it's preferable. At least you should not wrap lines forwarded to you, only lines you create yourself.
And besides, when was the last time you read email on an 80 column terminal?
By this logic, all the government has to do is setup a law enforcment agency which has no
jursidiction in the US and they can gather evidence on its own citizens without regard to the
constitution.
They already have. It's called the CIA. And it already does. It's called Echelon.
Also, US Customs is, by Supreme Court ruling, allowed to violate the Constitution all the time, because until you clear Customs you are not legally in the U.S.A. and thus not legally protected by its laws and Constitution. Pretty cool, eh? Think about that next time you go to Quebec to protest tyranny.
Have Sean take his GED. If he passes, apply to college -- put him in a community college in the meantime if he can't get into Stanford or MIT right away.
If he fails the GED, then you know what areas he needs to study at home to pass next time. Then do the college thing (a high school junior this close to the end of his junior year should be able to pass the GED with just a couple of months of study).
As an alternative, rather than sending Sean to that 'special' school, get him transferred to another school district. Make it seem like he's been kicked out of his current school for being a danger, so it looks to the new school like Sean's the bully -- that way the bullies at the new school will leave him alone.
And if you do decide to fight this, remind the School Board that their policy of removing the victim and letting the bullies go will result in a school full of bullies, or will result in serious violence when the next victim decides they have nothing to lose by using real force to defend themselves (they're gonna get expelled either way, right?).
Are
you sure you WANT the schools to turn out people with a prisoner mindset?
No, I don't, but I'm sure the people who run the schools do. More to the point, the employers looking forward to someday hiring the little snots at minimum wage really do want them to enter the workforce with a prisoner mindset. Only because they can't get the schools to deliver workers with a proper slave mindset.
For what it's worth, when we built our house in 1994 we pre-wired with telephone, cable, and cat5. Most rooms have three drops, one has four, and a few only have one. We love it, but:
I wish we'd wired the deck. Never thought of sitting on the deck on a nice day, surfing the web. Then again, we didn't own laptops back then.
We almost didn't need to bother with the wire. It turns out that with laptops we can compute anywhere, as long as we're within reach of a jack. But the jacks are never where we want them now that we're living in the house. For example, there's a drop in the TV room, but now we need two. The solution is wireless (which will also solve the deck issue).
We didn't run fiber because it wasn't affordable (or even available, really) in 1994. I echo the several comments about conduit, and wish I'd laid that instead. Probably about the same cost with near infinite future options left open (if we'd done conduit we would have left 80% of it empty; what we spent on conduit we would have saved on wire).
I ran "homeruns" for the cat5 and video, but not the telephone. Not a big mistake, but now I wish I had. It would have been more wire, but possibly less work and definately more flexible.
As for audio, we looked into lots of solutions and decided that for the cost of the available whole-house solutions we could buy a small stereo or large boombox for each room. I toyed with the idea of putting a small FM transmitter on the central music source so all the stereos would play the same music, but now there's MP3 so we'll probably go that route, with a computer in each room (connected to the stereo in each room).
One other thing I've learned is that X-10 is good but it's not great. There's a definite delay between pushing a button and something coming on. Also, the wall switches suck. Their failure rate is way high (failure mode is the unit responds to X-10 controllers but pushing the button on the switch does nothing). At approx. $15 each they're expensive and I can understand their desire to keep costs down, but I'd rather pay $25 once than $15 each year or so. Still, nothing beats X-10 for turning all the Christmas lights on and off with one switch.
"Commercial proprietary handhelds are optimized with respect to a couple of narrow application and market niches.
We feel that loosing the energy of the open source community and the interactivity of the web in this space will cause
many new applications to be explored and developed. No single company can afford enough programmers to
outpace the research and open source communities in this regard."
Personally, it's because I want to be able to write programs for it without first having to send large amounts of my limited resources to Redmond for the compiler, etc. That, and my wife works for Them and loves her Jornada, and I'd like an iPaq running Linux just to piss her off:-)
Alas, we just paid our taxes and it seems an iPaq is not in my immediate future...
Two comments, then I'm outta here (this has taken way too much of my time).
You use an SMTP-Host aka Mail-Host aka Mailserver aka smarthost, right? Of your ISP, right?
Which has which IP? One of your ISP, which is/was blocked, right?
So, pray tell, can you still uphold your claim?
I truely don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps it's my lack of networking knowledge. They had a mail server and a news server, both of which I used -- so what? The ISP assigned me an IP address when I dialed into their service. A different IP address every time, which means the aledged spammers got a different IP address, too, and which also means that any of the ISP's customers might get the "offending" IP address when they next got online. This, of course, means that if MAPS works the way they claimed (to me), it would be ineffective. So, since they couldn't target just the aledged spammers, they target all the ISP's customers. This is how MAPS truely works, but not how MAPS told me that it works. They lied.
MAPS said that someone had used IP addresses X, Y, and Z to post spam, so they (MAPS) had blocked those addresses. The specific emails of mine that were blocked were NOT sent out on any of the IP addresses they cited, but they were blocked anyway. I therefore conclude that MAPS blocked all IP addresses from my ISP. In effect, they blocked the entire domain, not just the specific IP addresses that they claim -- with no proof -- were used to send spam. So they lied to me about how their "service" works.
If you don't like MAPS, don't use their services. But don't you dare telling ME to accept your
standards or else.
I guess you can't read. Or you're a hypocrit. Or both. I don't wish to use MAPS's services, but unfortunately I have no choice: If my email is routed through a MAPS customer, my email is rejected. That's telling ME to accept YOUR standards, and in case you missed it that's hypocritical.
I decided to post in this discussion today, rather than moderating you as flamebait (which you are:-).
Yours is the only reply. If this is flamebait is isn't working, is it? Please, since you and your MAPS friends won't define "spam," can you define "flamebait"? I didn't think so. Here, let me try: 'Anything I don't want to read is spam.' 'Any opinions I don't hold are flamebait.' Isn't that about it for you guys?
Excuse me, then you were paying money to a shitty ISP, and it's good that you left. That is
exactly the effect intended when a network refuses to be a responsible member of the Internet
community.
"refuses to be a responsible member of the Internet community" by whose standards? The vigalante's standards, that's who. Not the community's standards. Not legal standards. Your standards. Well, excuse me but Who The Hell Are You? Who died and made you king?
You didn't say whether your ISP was in MAPS RSS or RBL.
How in Hell should I know, or care?
Be proven to have relayed spam mail in the past.
Whose proof? I asked for proof and MAPS refused to provide any.
Be unwilling to correct the problem
What problem? You don't like me because you think I'm ugly -- first, that's your problem; second, what do you want me to do, get plastic surgery? My "problem" was that MAPS thought my ISP hosted spammers. What did MAPS want me to do, shoot all my ISP's customers? What they wanted me to do was change ISPs, but to whom? How do I know if my "new" ISP is safe from MAPS's wrath? Why should I have to shop ISPs based on whether or not they've pissed off some 3rd party? Self-appointed 3rd party, at that. I now at least have one guideline: I refuse to use an ISP that subscribes to MAPS, that's for sure! (although I strongly suspect that MAPS's customers are excempt from their list, while all other ISPs are fair game [you wanna get off our blacklist, get on our subscriber list]).
They claim to only block IP addresses, and they claim to not block by domain name, but the
easily-verified truth is that they do block by domain name.
I challenge you to prove otherwise. So far, you are just full of hot air.
They said they had spam from these IP addresses, but I had not used any of those IP addresses. Therefore, they blocked my ISP's domain, not just specific addresses.
What, are you a really good troll or something? MAPS
did put MSN on their blacklist.
Sorry, my mistake. No, I'm not a troll, I'm wrong. Now I'm scratching my head, wondering why MSN didn't sue their asses off. I would have.
I think MAPS is lacking in some areas, but your bad experience with a bad ISP is not going to
convince me you have a legitimate gripe.
I know MAPS is lacking in many areas. I suppose they are actually on to some people who just about anyone would agree are truely spammers, but my bad experience with them is not going to convince me that they have a legitimate right to block any internet traffic they don't like -- especially when they refuse to provide proof of their claims of spamming. In 100% of the cases with which I am personally familiar, they refused to cooperate in any way, including providing proof of their claims. What they did do is provide me a list of the IP addresses they said were used to spread spam from my ISP. I did not use any of those IP addresses, but they blocked my email anyway.
You should not have had to contact MAPS for any reason; your ISP, being the ones blacklisted,
should have done what needed to be done.
You're absolutely right. I should not have had to contact them, but they gave me little choice. As for my chickenshit ISP, you're also right: they should have sued MAPS from here to Hell and back.
You sound like an end-user.
Damn straight. You sound like a vigilante.
Here, at Central Oregon Internet, we've been using MAPS since nearly the beginning
Aha! You are a vigilante, or at least an accessory after the fact. If I have my way, your actions (blocking email based on the recommendations of lawless vigilantes) will be illegal. Of course, if I had my way the government would define "spam" and make it illegal, too. I fear neither will happen anytime soon, especially with this administration.
MAPS doesn't filter anything. Either you or your ISP has to do the filtering, perhaps based on
MAPS recommendations.
Only half-true. Your ISP does _not_ have to "join" MAPS for your email to be "filtered" (censored is more like it -- hijacked, really). If the recipient's ISP uses MAPS, you can^H^H^Hwill be screwed if MAPS considers your ISP "bad". Or, the other way around, if your ISP uses MAPS (without your knowledge or permission) you can lose email you wanted to recieve. Worse, if some intermediate link in the chain joins MAPS, email will be blocked even if both sender and recipient want it to go through.
My ISP got on MAPS' shit list, and my brother's ISP blocked all my email to my brother. My email only got through when I switched ISPs. As much as I hated the idea, it was easier than switching brothers.
Naturally, my attempts to communicate with MAPS and resolve this reasonably were thwarted by MAPS' refusal to accept any of my email! And once I did get through to them they lied to me (and everyone else) about how their "service" works. They claim to only block IP addresses, and they claim to not block by domain name, but the easily-verified truth is that they do block by domain name. Note that they're too chickshit to block AOL or MSN -- I guess even MAPS don't have enough lawyers to fight those guys. Or maybe MAPS is secretly run by AOL and MSN as a way to put all the smaller ISPs out of business.
Lord God Almighty, please protect me from those who would do me harm, especially self-appointed 'net vigilantes and the devil-spawned whores who grant them internet access.
The end does not justify the means. The way to stop spam is not by putting all the small ISPs out of business. The way to stop spam is not by forging cancel messages. The way to stop spam is not by blocking internet traffic that you think is "bad" -- especially while at the same time generating other internet traffic that other people consider bad. Two wrongs do not make a right.
The only advantages an
IPAQ has over a Visor are that it looks cooler, and the potential to play MP3, video,e tc.
You forgot one: The IPAQ can run Linux, the Visor cannot. I had a Visor; I dumped it to get an IPAQ for this very reason. Now, if I could only find one...
If you were subsidizing my email account, you'd be entitled to spam the bejeezus out of it. But
you're not. I'm the owner of my server, and I decide what's a valuable service and what's not. Not
you. Because it's not yours.
Exactly. It's your email account, not the vigilantes, so the vigilantes have no right to block anyone else's email to you, only you should have that right. If you chose to assign that right to a spam filtering company, that's your choice. MAPS and the other vigilanties don't give us that choice, they filter all email for us whether we like it or not, just because they decided that they are better than the rest of us. That's crap and I'm sick of it. Vigilantes on the 'net are as bad as they were in the "old west." I keep waiting for the Gummint to send in the Marshal and clean up this town, but so far the Gummint is more interested in getting my ISP (and phone company, and cable company, and power company, etc.) to spy on me.
Death to Spammers, yes, but Death to Vigilantes too!
Is it possible for MS to lock the hardware to prevent alternative OS images from running on it?
Hey, it's a Game Console, not a PC -- of COURSE they can "lock the hardware"! Consider how long it takes to boot a Win2K PC. Now consider that if the Xbox takes that long to boot, noone will buy it. I would be amazed if the Xbox has a PC BIOS -- it probably has the equivalent of a boot loader that copies the OS from ROM to RAM and goes. Porting Linux -- or anything else -- to this hardware will be difficult. I think Adam Barr is right -- better to write "games" for this box than to port OS's to it.
Now consider how often MS has "extended" otherwise Open standards. Why would anyone assume Xbox will do Eithernet or TCP/IP or IDE or anything else in a standard way? They've already said the USB port isn't really USB. Don't think MS is going to tell anyone how the internals work, that info is proprietary and need-to-know. Game developers don't need to know, so the info will not be released; writing any Linux drivers for this thing will likely be an exercise in reverse-engineering worthy of a Masters degree.
You can't get higher placement on the search engines than those who pay for it. So if you wish to protest, say, General Motors, then you'd better be able to pay Yahoo, Google, et. al. more than GM pays them if you want your page to come up ahead of GM's page. This, of course, is why all search engines suck -- they rank their advertizers higher than "regular folk" like you or I.
No, I think the NYT got it right: Microsoft want to own^H^H^Hhold all your data in a central location where you can reach it from any device. MS is realistic enough to know that your toaster, cell phone, car radio, backpack, watch, eyeglasses, lawnmower, etc. won't all run Windows. So I believe you're wrong: they really don't care which OS you use to access your data, as long as you store it on their servers and pay the.NET access fee. Just as they don't really care if you use MSN, AOL, or @HOME to connect up, as long as you pay the.NET access fee.
I mean, that's gotta hurt! Did anyone ask the monkey if it was happy with it's new body, or was it in too much agony so they had to drug it?
A while ago some nut (same guy?) offered to do this for Christopher Reave (sp?), but since he'd be just as paralized in the "new" body, Chris declined the offer.
OpenBSD and NetBSD are different operating systems, but share the same spirit as FreeBSD.
Why do you people claim to hate Micro$oft yet have not one, not two, but THREE "free"/"open" versions of their (formerly proprietary) Blue Screen of Death? I knew you guys were jealous of their success, but this is rediculous.
A somewhat cheaper alternative to *magnetic* cards would be optical bar-codes.
Yeah, but that's a two-edged sword. It's cheaper for you to make the card, but it's also cheaper (and easier) for someone to copy. All you need is access to a real card for long enough to photocopy the barcode and bingo! you're in the building.
Most secure buildings I've seen use magnetic proximity cards that you hold up to the reader, not pass through a slot. Where I work it's a separate card (ProxCard II by HID Corporation) that hangs behind the badge with our name and photo; where my wife works it's integrated into the badge itself. The badge has a mag stripe but I've never seen it used. The proximity cards are virtually impossible to pirate (it's far easier to use human engineering to get around this system -- you know, walk through the door behind a real employee).
You could also build a system perhaps more secure than that (cheaper, too) using an i-button. They even make rings that hold i-buttons for this very purpose. Not as convenient as the badge/card idea, but just as effective and far geekier!:-)
So whaddaya do when the supporter disappears or decides to support it no longer? Right, you're
stuck.
I agree completely. AC was saying that for this reason (it's closed/proprietary) he will not buy Photogenics, but rather will wait until they go out of business and then he'll pick it up as "abandonware." My point was that if he didn't like closed/proprietary commercial software why would he want closed/proprietary abandonware? Either way it's still closed/proprietary.
I cannot...see into the OpenSource(tm) of it for free... Nobody should buy it. Then in a couple of weeks people can start posting it for download as
"abandonware" because that's perfectly fine.
You self-contradict. Why is abandonware "perfectly fine" if it doesn't come with source code? Abandonware that doesn't come with source code is pretty worthless; at least with commercial closed-source software you have some hope of support.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you saw a mail reader -- any mail reader -- that supports multiple columns? No, I'm not counting HTML here, because if you're going to use MIME then you can include any damn thing you want in your email, including a picture of a newspaper page with multiple columns. I don't think that's quite the same as actually supporting multiple columns of ASCII text.
xterm? And here all this time I was refering to real terminals, like a VT220, not emulated terminals, which AFAIK are resizeable and not fixed at 80 columns.
Wow! So, what 80 column terminal supports windows? I'm not familiar with any terminals that do that. At least, my VT220 sure didn't. OH, you meant terminal emulation! I didn't. I meant a real terminal, or I would have said "emulation."
I think it's a good idea! Proceed.
> I think Ken's proposal has merit. What do you think?
> > Bob, I want you to look at something Ken sent
> > me and forward it to Jeff if you agree.
> > > Fred,
> > > I was talking to Jack and we thought that
> > maybe
> > > we should buy low and sell high. I know
> > it's
> > > a crazy idea, but a crazy idea may be just
> > what
> > > we need! - Ken
While it's nice for mail senders to send 78 character lines, it's even nicer if your mail reader doesn't care and wraps long lines for you, and in some cases it's preferable. At least you should not wrap lines forwarded to you, only lines you create yourself.
And besides, when was the last time you read email on an 80 column terminal?
They already have. It's called the CIA. And it already does. It's called Echelon.
Also, US Customs is, by Supreme Court ruling, allowed to violate the Constitution all the time, because until you clear Customs you are not legally in the U.S.A. and thus not legally protected by its laws and Constitution. Pretty cool, eh? Think about that next time you go to Quebec to protest tyranny.
"civil"? "intelligent"? How is this "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters?"
If he fails the GED, then you know what areas he needs to study at home to pass next time. Then do the college thing (a high school junior this close to the end of his junior year should be able to pass the GED with just a couple of months of study).
As an alternative, rather than sending Sean to that 'special' school, get him transferred to another school district. Make it seem like he's been kicked out of his current school for being a danger, so it looks to the new school like Sean's the bully -- that way the bullies at the new school will leave him alone.
And if you do decide to fight this, remind the School Board that their policy of removing the victim and letting the bullies go will result in a school full of bullies, or will result in serious violence when the next victim decides they have nothing to lose by using real force to defend themselves (they're gonna get expelled either way, right?).
Good luck and best wishes for a happy resolution.
No, I don't, but I'm sure the people who run the schools do. More to the point, the employers looking forward to someday hiring the little snots at minimum wage really do want them to enter the workforce with a prisoner mindset. Only because they can't get the schools to deliver workers with a proper slave mindset.
One other thing I've learned is that X-10 is good but it's not great. There's a definite delay between pushing a button and something coming on. Also, the wall switches suck. Their failure rate is way high (failure mode is the unit responds to X-10 controllers but pushing the button on the switch does nothing). At approx. $15 each they're expensive and I can understand their desire to keep costs down, but I'd rather pay $25 once than $15 each year or so. Still, nothing beats X-10 for turning all the Christmas lights on and off with one switch.
From the handhelds.org FAQ: "Why open handhelds?"
Personally, it's because I want to be able to write programs for it without first having to send large amounts of my limited resources to Redmond for the compiler, etc. That, and my wife works for Them and loves her Jornada, and I'd like an iPaq running Linux just to piss her off :-)
Alas, we just paid our taxes and it seems an iPaq is not in my immediate future...
I truely don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps it's my lack of networking knowledge. They had a mail server and a news server, both of which I used -- so what? The ISP assigned me an IP address when I dialed into their service. A different IP address every time, which means the aledged spammers got a different IP address, too, and which also means that any of the ISP's customers might get the "offending" IP address when they next got online. This, of course, means that if MAPS works the way they claimed (to me), it would be ineffective. So, since they couldn't target just the aledged spammers, they target all the ISP's customers. This is how MAPS truely works, but not how MAPS told me that it works. They lied.
MAPS said that someone had used IP addresses X, Y, and Z to post spam, so they (MAPS) had blocked those addresses. The specific emails of mine that were blocked were NOT sent out on any of the IP addresses they cited, but they were blocked anyway. I therefore conclude that MAPS blocked all IP addresses from my ISP. In effect, they blocked the entire domain, not just the specific IP addresses that they claim -- with no proof -- were used to send spam. So they lied to me about how their "service" works.
I guess you can't read. Or you're a hypocrit. Or both. I don't wish to use MAPS's services, but unfortunately I have no choice: If my email is routed through a MAPS customer, my email is rejected. That's telling ME to accept YOUR standards, and in case you missed it that's hypocritical.
Yours is the only reply. If this is flamebait is isn't working, is it? Please, since you and your MAPS friends won't define "spam," can you define "flamebait"? I didn't think so. Here, let me try: 'Anything I don't want to read is spam.' 'Any opinions I don't hold are flamebait.' Isn't that about it for you guys?
"refuses to be a responsible member of the Internet community" by whose standards? The vigalante's standards, that's who. Not the community's standards. Not legal standards. Your standards. Well, excuse me but Who The Hell Are You? Who died and made you king?
How in Hell should I know, or care?
Whose proof? I asked for proof and MAPS refused to provide any.
What problem? You don't like me because you think I'm ugly -- first, that's your problem; second, what do you want me to do, get plastic surgery? My "problem" was that MAPS thought my ISP hosted spammers. What did MAPS want me to do, shoot all my ISP's customers? What they wanted me to do was change ISPs, but to whom? How do I know if my "new" ISP is safe from MAPS's wrath? Why should I have to shop ISPs based on whether or not they've pissed off some 3rd party? Self-appointed 3rd party, at that. I now at least have one guideline: I refuse to use an ISP that subscribes to MAPS, that's for sure! (although I strongly suspect that MAPS's customers are excempt from their list, while all other ISPs are fair game [you wanna get off our blacklist, get on our subscriber list]).
They said they had spam from these IP addresses, but I had not used any of those IP addresses. Therefore, they blocked my ISP's domain, not just specific addresses.
Sorry, my mistake. No, I'm not a troll, I'm wrong. Now I'm scratching my head, wondering why MSN didn't sue their asses off. I would have.
I know MAPS is lacking in many areas. I suppose they are actually on to some people who just about anyone would agree are truely spammers, but my bad experience with them is not going to convince me that they have a legitimate right to block any internet traffic they don't like -- especially when they refuse to provide proof of their claims of spamming. In 100% of the cases with which I am personally familiar, they refused to cooperate in any way, including providing proof of their claims. What they did do is provide me a list of the IP addresses they said were used to spread spam from my ISP. I did not use any of those IP addresses, but they blocked my email anyway.
You're absolutely right. I should not have had to contact them, but they gave me little choice. As for my chickenshit ISP, you're also right: they should have sued MAPS from here to Hell and back.
Damn straight. You sound like a vigilante.
Aha! You are a vigilante, or at least an accessory after the fact. If I have my way, your actions (blocking email based on the recommendations of lawless vigilantes) will be illegal. Of course, if I had my way the government would define "spam" and make it illegal, too. I fear neither will happen anytime soon, especially with this administration.
Only half-true. Your ISP does _not_ have to "join" MAPS for your email to be "filtered" (censored is more like it -- hijacked, really). If the recipient's ISP uses MAPS, you can^H^H^Hwill be screwed if MAPS considers your ISP "bad". Or, the other way around, if your ISP uses MAPS (without your knowledge or permission) you can lose email you wanted to recieve. Worse, if some intermediate link in the chain joins MAPS, email will be blocked even if both sender and recipient want it to go through.
My ISP got on MAPS' shit list, and my brother's ISP blocked all my email to my brother. My email only got through when I switched ISPs. As much as I hated the idea, it was easier than switching brothers.
Naturally, my attempts to communicate with MAPS and resolve this reasonably were thwarted by MAPS' refusal to accept any of my email! And once I did get through to them they lied to me (and everyone else) about how their "service" works. They claim to only block IP addresses, and they claim to not block by domain name, but the easily-verified truth is that they do block by domain name. Note that they're too chickshit to block AOL or MSN -- I guess even MAPS don't have enough lawyers to fight those guys. Or maybe MAPS is secretly run by AOL and MSN as a way to put all the smaller ISPs out of business.
Lord God Almighty, please protect me from those who would do me harm, especially self-appointed 'net vigilantes and the devil-spawned whores who grant them internet access.
The end does not justify the means. The way to stop spam is not by putting all the small ISPs out of business. The way to stop spam is not by forging cancel messages. The way to stop spam is not by blocking internet traffic that you think is "bad" -- especially while at the same time generating other internet traffic that other people consider bad. Two wrongs do not make a right.
You forgot one: The IPAQ can run Linux, the Visor cannot. I had a Visor; I dumped it to get an IPAQ for this very reason. Now, if I could only find one...
Exactly. It's your email account, not the vigilantes, so the vigilantes have no right to block anyone else's email to you, only you should have that right. If you chose to assign that right to a spam filtering company, that's your choice. MAPS and the other vigilanties don't give us that choice, they filter all email for us whether we like it or not, just because they decided that they are better than the rest of us. That's crap and I'm sick of it. Vigilantes on the 'net are as bad as they were in the "old west." I keep waiting for the Gummint to send in the Marshal and clean up this town, but so far the Gummint is more interested in getting my ISP (and phone company, and cable company, and power company, etc.) to spy on me.
Death to Spammers, yes, but Death to Vigilantes too!
Hey, it's a Game Console, not a PC -- of COURSE they can "lock the hardware"! Consider how long it takes to boot a Win2K PC. Now consider that if the Xbox takes that long to boot, noone will buy it. I would be amazed if the Xbox has a PC BIOS -- it probably has the equivalent of a boot loader that copies the OS from ROM to RAM and goes. Porting Linux -- or anything else -- to this hardware will be difficult. I think Adam Barr is right -- better to write "games" for this box than to port OS's to it.
Now consider how often MS has "extended" otherwise Open standards. Why would anyone assume Xbox will do Eithernet or TCP/IP or IDE or anything else in a standard way? They've already said the USB port isn't really USB. Don't think MS is going to tell anyone how the internals work, that info is proprietary and need-to-know. Game developers don't need to know, so the info will not be released; writing any Linux drivers for this thing will likely be an exercise in reverse-engineering worthy of a Masters degree.
I can't wait to get mine!
A while ago some nut (same guy?) offered to do this for Christopher Reave (sp?), but since he'd be just as paralized in the "new" body, Chris declined the offer.
Why do you people claim to hate Micro$oft yet have not one, not two, but THREE "free"/"open" versions of their (formerly proprietary) Blue Screen of Death? I knew you guys were jealous of their success, but this is rediculous.
Yeah, but that's a two-edged sword. It's cheaper for you to make the card, but it's also cheaper (and easier) for someone to copy. All you need is access to a real card for long enough to photocopy the barcode and bingo! you're in the building.
Most secure buildings I've seen use magnetic proximity cards that you hold up to the reader, not pass through a slot. Where I work it's a separate card (ProxCard II by HID Corporation) that hangs behind the badge with our name and photo; where my wife works it's integrated into the badge itself. The badge has a mag stripe but I've never seen it used. The proximity cards are virtually impossible to pirate (it's far easier to use human engineering to get around this system -- you know, walk through the door behind a real employee).
You could also build a system perhaps more secure than that (cheaper, too) using an i-button. They even make rings that hold i-buttons for this very purpose. Not as convenient as the badge/card idea, but just as effective and far geekier! :-)
I agree completely. AC was saying that for this reason (it's closed/proprietary) he will not buy Photogenics, but rather will wait until they go out of business and then he'll pick it up as "abandonware." My point was that if he didn't like closed/proprietary commercial software why would he want closed/proprietary abandonware? Either way it's still closed/proprietary.
You self-contradict. Why is abandonware "perfectly fine" if it doesn't come with source code? Abandonware that doesn't come with source code is pretty worthless; at least with commercial closed-source software you have some hope of support.