Today I address matters of article formatting; what I think matters before I click 'save', and what I don't think matters.
Really, in something written in a conversational tone, the choice of sentence break or semicolon there is up to the author. Similarly, leaving the last two words implied rather than spelled out is a matter of taste.
recognizing that i'm being pedantic (and thus a bit hypocritical given my avoidance of capitalization), i don't think that either a semicolon or a period is correct in that context. the sentence is presenting a list, so the two should be separated with a colon.
There's an open invitation to solutions. As it is, though, a lot of "dupes" are really followups, or revists to old subjects from years past.
the open invitation you link to is an offer to let someone write software to fix the problem. however, this site has editors who are empowered with the ability to bump a submitted story to publication. it seems crazy that a software solution should be necessary when the publishing system requires a personal ok.
while you're right that a lot of the dupes are followups and revisits, an alarming number of them are stories that were published (and sometimes already duped) less than 24 hours previously. from a reader's point of view, it seems that the elite few who are paid to manage the site can't be bothered to read it.
i know it's more complicated than that, and they see a lot of submissions that might confuse them as to what was suggested and what was approved, but i don't think it's too much to expect the editor who approves the story to look through the last day or so of posted stories, at least in the section where the story's being posted.
it's got the "optimized" text that went over sms ("hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing.") and the times (90 seconds to 108).
i'm skeptical of everything i read online, but if the unhappy review is right and the moviemakers don't know that the restarant is at the temporal end of the universe, then i have no faith in them to get the rest right. as far as i'm concerned, mj simpson's review has saved me $8.
Quit trying to change the subject. They didn't say they were limiting bandwidth usage. They said they would yank him off the network for using 'illegal' software. That's not the same thing at all, and you can't just make it that because that's the case you'd rather argue.
just like you can't say authoritatively that they accused him of breaking any laws. the context of those snippets wasn't posted, so i think it's a leap to assume they weren't using "illegal" to indicate that the activity in question violated their network policies. chess moves can be illegal, but it doesn't mean they're in violation of any state or federal laws.
it looks to me like the poster put up two unrelated phrases from his disconnection notice and counted on slashdot to make assumptions and overreact.
there's nothing in the wording that was posted that says any of what the poster wants you to think it says, and regardless of your experience with egomaniacs, nothing there is indicative of an individual's abuse of power. hardly any real information was posted, and i think it's premature to assume that this was an act of malice, since for all we know, the poster's notification came from an automated system that noticed his machine breaking the rules.
it'd be cool, but capability and usage are very different. the argument that a technology should be allowed because it can be used for good is awfully close to the argument that it should be disallowed because it can be used to break the law.
do you know you replied to every one of my initial posts in this thread? well done, i suppose.
They didn't come out and say it was illegal, but they sure did imply it.
...which is different from claiming it's illegal. what they said is that they'll continue to disallow p2p network usage until an act of law forces them to change their policies.
First, I'm assuming his uni is in the states. IIRC there is only one totally private university in the US, the rest are either explicitly public or even if nominally private they are de facto public as well, due to accepting federal grant money with all of the strings that come with it.
So this is not really a private network we're talking about. It's state funded and therefore the administrator does have an obligation to provide the service in a fair and non discriminatory fashion.
exacty. since p2p apps tend to use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, it's only fair to the rest of the network's users to limit their use.
Also, this student is a customer of the school, and as such he has consumer protection as well. He paid for a service, and now after taking his money they unilaterally take it away? They need cause to do that, they can't simply do it because they feel like it, as they could if they were a truly private network and his service was a gift, rather than something he's paid for.
i thought you assumed the network was publicly funded?
regardless, it's the same as any other service. if he tried to use the service outside the bounds of the acceptable use policy, those running the service probably have the authority to deny his use of the service at their discretion.
Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network
This guy is an asshat, clearly. The courts have NOT ruled P2P activity illegal - in fact the most recent decision reinforced sony vs betamax and vindicated P2P!
the letter doesn't say p2p is illegal. the letter says that until there's a legal decision forcing them to allow p2p, they're going to try to keep it off the network. stop slashthinking.
He is begging to get put in his place, and he's given any enemies he has enough rope to hang him with this stance, if only any of them are willing to put some time and resources into frying him. And I hope someone does. There is no place for that sort of combination of ignorance, arrogance, and disrespect for the customer in the field of network administration so far as I am concerned.
he's doing his job. based on the knee-jerking around here, he knows a lot more about keeping a network usable than anyone who's attacking him.
if you have a feasible way to allow thousands of students to run p2p apps at full throttle while keeping things workable for things like the school's mail servers then by all means, suggest it. until then, many academic network admins will see widespread p2p use as a denial of service on their network and do whatever they can to avoid the congestion.
i'd be surprised if any of the student data actually made it off the computer. through a not-really-worth-explaining series of events, a former co-worker of mine had a machine exploited in such a fashion. it became a hub for trading shows of cedric the entertainer. the hard disk quickly filled up and we unplugged the machine after its network activity started looking odd. it turns out that the parties responsible didn't even take the time to notice there was a second drive on the machine they'd be able to use.
i don't have any experience beyond that, but i've heard similar stories from other friends. it seems like the sort of exploit that took place isn't one that's likely to be targetted at retrieving potentially sensitive data from the exploited machine.
of course, one should never assume a particular attacker was ignorant and single-minded based on others' experience.
Re:We are going in the WRONG direction for desktop
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More On PS3 and Xbox 2
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· Score: 1
We need more parallel processing applications. We need to drop the intel isa architecture(heat,effectiveness).
The reason why we use AMD and Intel is because of applications are all intel isa based. We need effective parallel processing compilers . Who cares about word processing software that might get slowed down . Graphics,mathematics and sciences,and supercomputing will get a BIG BOOST.
i think slashdot linked to this article on the ps3's cell processor a few days ago, and i found it to be good light reading on this topic.
i disagree with the author on the general use pc-killing potential of the cell because it's hard to parallelize most operations. most people want one thing to run really quickly at a time, and for those people, x86 is serving them very well. a compiler won't be able to do much to split something like X or a media player into lots of parallel threads, so the only applications that'll benefit from such a radical change are those expressly written to use that. so while a cluster of playstation 3's has huge potential for stream processing, it wouldn't really be relevant to the average user running the applications that such average users put on their average computers.
it's more likely that a cell processor may be used to complement an x86 cpu in future pc's to accelerate things along the lines of the gpu-accelerated video editor mentioned on slashdot earlier today.
i was wondering if you were asking for a clarification on which lights can be off, or if it was just another case of a slashdot user being unable to communicate via text.
thank you for clearing that up, and i do apologize for giving you the benefit of the doubt.
why did they release exploit code before a fixed kernel was released and mirrored throughout kernel.org? and on a friday afternoon?
i'm not too impressed with the timing of this announcement, and i have to wonder what their motives were. it doesn't hurt their cause that slashdot is advertising for them.
please, people. there's no reason that a situation like this should ever happen.
Good lord there are some illiterate dumbasses on Slashdot.
just fyi, you're one of them. the post you replied to said:
This is not banning violent video games. Repeat after me, this is not a ban on violent video games. The games are still legal, they can still be bought and sold, this is not censorship to repress violent video games.
and you said:
Wrong.
the original poster was entirely correct. you're presuming that a restriction on the sale of video games equates to a restriction of usage, and that's foolish.
thought it was funny when a newspaper sued Moore because they say he represented a letter to the editor as a front page headline story, and changed the date of the letter. I wonder what happened to that suit.
iirc, they sued him for $1, since that's the minimal amount they could ask. the suit was only a means to seek a formal apology, which i believe they got.
just because it looks like nobody else has mentioned it, i nominate zardoz, which stars sean connery's chest hair in a red diaper and opens with a giant stone head saying "the gun is good. the penis is evil."
rtfa (was: Re:Mystery solved?)
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Life After Doom
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· Score: 1
Did the article get updated, or am I missing something:
i'd say you're missing something. read it again and note the conjunction.
Raven Software has licensed the engine for the still-under-wraps "Quake 4". And an as-yet unidentified developer will use it for a forthcoming game.
Slashdot Mirror
to be fair, the dance-fighting was limited to a single dress sphere. once you dressed all the girls as dark knights, they were nicely hardcore (imo).
recognizing that i'm being pedantic (and thus a bit hypocritical given my avoidance of capitalization), i don't think that either a semicolon or a period is correct in that context. the sentence is presenting a list, so the two should be separated with a colon.
in this context, public probably means that the server's listed by pool.ntp.org. isc also maintains a list of stratum 1 and 2 servers, some of which are publicly-accessible.
why not just use a bigger font in the xterm? it seems a good bit simpler.
the open invitation you link to is an offer to let someone write software to fix the problem. however, this site has editors who are empowered with the ability to bump a submitted story to publication. it seems crazy that a software solution should be necessary when the publishing system requires a personal ok.
while you're right that a lot of the dupes are followups and revisits, an alarming number of them are stories that were published (and sometimes already duped) less than 24 hours previously. from a reader's point of view, it seems that the elite few who are paid to manage the site can't be bothered to read it.
i know it's more complicated than that, and they see a lot of submissions that might confuse them as to what was suggested and what was approved, but i don't think it's too much to expect the editor who approves the story to look through the last day or so of posted stories, at least in the section where the story's being posted.
i'm not sure why the story links to engadget, since it's just summarizing another site's summary of the real story, found at:
- 1571664,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-2
it's got the "optimized" text that went over sms ("hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing.") and the times (90 seconds to 108).
i'm skeptical of everything i read online, but if the unhappy review is right and the moviemakers don't know that the restarant is at the temporal end of the universe, then i have no faith in them to get the rest right. as far as i'm concerned, mj simpson's review has saved me $8.
what relevance does the kernel have in all this?
just like you can't say authoritatively that they accused him of breaking any laws. the context of those snippets wasn't posted, so i think it's a leap to assume they weren't using "illegal" to indicate that the activity in question violated their network policies. chess moves can be illegal, but it doesn't mean they're in violation of any state or federal laws.
it looks to me like the poster put up two unrelated phrases from his disconnection notice and counted on slashdot to make assumptions and overreact.
there's nothing in the wording that was posted that says any of what the poster wants you to think it says, and regardless of your experience with egomaniacs, nothing there is indicative of an individual's abuse of power. hardly any real information was posted, and i think it's premature to assume that this was an act of malice, since for all we know, the poster's notification came from an automated system that noticed his machine breaking the rules.
it'd be cool, but capability and usage are very different. the argument that a technology should be allowed because it can be used for good is awfully close to the argument that it should be disallowed because it can be used to break the law.
do you know you replied to every one of my initial posts in this thread? well done, i suppose.
which package managers pull down their updates via bittorrent?
exacty. since p2p apps tend to use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, it's only fair to the rest of the network's users to limit their use.
i thought you assumed the network was publicly funded?
regardless, it's the same as any other service. if he tried to use the service outside the bounds of the acceptable use policy, those running the service probably have the authority to deny his use of the service at their discretion.
the letter doesn't say p2p is illegal. the letter says that until there's a legal decision forcing them to allow p2p, they're going to try to keep it off the network. stop slashthinking.
he's doing his job. based on the knee-jerking around here, he knows a lot more about keeping a network usable than anyone who's attacking him.
if you have a feasible way to allow thousands of students to run p2p apps at full throttle while keeping things workable for things like the school's mail servers then by all means, suggest it. until then, many academic network admins will see widespread p2p use as a denial of service on their network and do whatever they can to avoid the congestion.
all the designs in the article look like they'd fit into the current sony line. they're much to complicated and black to be apple products.
i'd be surprised if any of the student data actually made it off the computer. through a not-really-worth-explaining series of events, a former co-worker of mine had a machine exploited in such a fashion. it became a hub for trading shows of cedric the entertainer. the hard disk quickly filled up and we unplugged the machine after its network activity started looking odd. it turns out that the parties responsible didn't even take the time to notice there was a second drive on the machine they'd be able to use.
i don't have any experience beyond that, but i've heard similar stories from other friends. it seems like the sort of exploit that took place isn't one that's likely to be targetted at retrieving potentially sensitive data from the exploited machine.
of course, one should never assume a particular attacker was ignorant and single-minded based on others' experience.
i think slashdot linked to this article on the ps3's cell processor a few days ago, and i found it to be good light reading on this topic.
i disagree with the author on the general use pc-killing potential of the cell because it's hard to parallelize most operations. most people want one thing to run really quickly at a time, and for those people, x86 is serving them very well. a compiler won't be able to do much to split something like X or a media player into lots of parallel threads, so the only applications that'll benefit from such a radical change are those expressly written to use that. so while a cluster of playstation 3's has huge potential for stream processing, it wouldn't really be relevant to the average user running the applications that such average users put on their average computers.
it's more likely that a cell processor may be used to complement an x86 cpu in future pc's to accelerate things along the lines of the gpu-accelerated video editor mentioned on slashdot earlier today.
i was wondering if you were asking for a clarification on which lights can be off, or if it was just another case of a slashdot user being unable to communicate via text.
thank you for clearing that up, and i do apologize for giving you the benefit of the doubt.
lom requires power to operate, but once power's restored, it can be used to power on machines remotely.
why did they release exploit code before a fixed kernel was released and mirrored throughout kernel.org? and on a friday afternoon?
i'm not too impressed with the timing of this announcement, and i have to wonder what their motives were. it doesn't hurt their cause that slashdot is advertising for them.
please, people. there's no reason that a situation like this should ever happen.
just fyi, you're one of them. the post you replied to said:
and you said:
the original poster was entirely correct. you're presuming that a restriction on the sale of video games equates to a restriction of usage, and that's foolish.
it's a mat... with conclusions on it.
that's cute. i guess i should go make a game about owning a ferrari so someone will give me that f360 modena i've been drooling at (red, of course).
iirc, they sued him for $1, since that's the minimal amount they could ask. the suit was only a means to seek a formal apology, which i believe they got.
from the horse's mouth on the view askew forums:
just because it looks like nobody else has mentioned it, i nominate zardoz, which stars sean connery's chest hair in a red diaper and opens with a giant stone head saying "the gun is good. the penis is evil."
i'd say you're missing something. read it again and note the conjunction.