They even allow you to run a cookie which will completely disable X-10 Ads. All you have to do is click here [x10.com] and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.
Or, you could just put in a host entry for x10.com pointing to the loop-back interface of your system. Then you would never get one of those ads ever again...
Solaris can be frightening at times. I'm not sure I would really want to run a firewall on it.
I'm curious. What about Solaris would give you that opinion?
IMHO, I would not want to run a firewall on anything else when it protects anything more a home LAN. The OS is quite stable, and it is widely supported by vendors.
It would probably be more secure to run firewall code on something like a Mac (because there are not as many people out there trying to 0wn a Mac. But on the whole, I have no issues with Solaris.
Unfortunately, in the corporate world, unless I can get a 24x7 maintenance contract from a recognized provider (IBM, GE, etc) Linux is a hard sell for mission-critical servers.
If you get hacked, simply restart your machine, and you are back to factory settings.
Why would you allow your firewall to accept any connections? My firewall drops any attemp to access it remotely. The only way it can be accessed is from the system console.
Boot times should not be a great concern with a firewall; you should only be booting it once a year or so anyway.
Once a year? Well, for those people who run firewalls on m$ products, once a week is more like it!
I work for a managed service provider and we run a bunch of firewalls for customers. Everything runs under Solaris on suitable Sun hardware, and even then I would like to see them re-booted 3 or 4 times a year.
Let's face it, UNIX rocks, but it does buffer lots of things in memory. One of my colleagues told me about a system he ran for two years without re-booting it, and when it finally was re-booted, it did not come up again. The occasional re-boot can't hurt it any. Besides, E250's and E450s boot in about a minute.
But I can see how patterns might crop in random data, given a sufficiently large amount of source data to work with.
I think it is a given that patterns will occur in truly random data. Strictly speaking, if the probability of such a pattern existing is greater than 0, it is a certainty that it will eventually occur, given enough trials.
The question is, will a sufficient number of patterns occur often enough that the data can be significantly compressed to warrant the CPU cycles involved?
Why is MS so bad for thinking of this first? Why didn't Real or Apple think about this?
IMHO, DVDs work just fine as they are, and there is no obvious reason why this new "feature" should be added. I suspect because m$ has promised to support strong digital rights management in their format...
I can only wonder how long it will be before DVD players have BSODs.
Maybe that's why MS is so successful.
Probably. I am sure that the fact they operate like a predatory monopoly has nothing to do with it!
Because they have good business people that can think up of new ways to grow the business.
It seems to me that whenever m$ tries to "grow the business" it brings to mind images of Pinky and the Brain:
Balmer: Gee Bill, what are we going to do tonight? Gates: Same thing we do every night Steve: Try to take over the world! Balmer: Developers! Developers! Developers! Zort! Narf!
The whole monopoly seems to be based on the business model of The Borg: co-opt every piece of technology around, add it's distinctiveness to their own - and charge a license to the developers and end users...
since they haven't complied with the U.S.'s demand for 'an optical media licensing regime.'
I wonder how our USian friends would react to a demand that they create/alter some legislation to suit the needs of some non-US multinational?
I guess things like national sovereignty only apply to superpowers, and the industries they represent.
And why is it that when the it is decided that some sort of multi-lateral standard is required, why is the US standard is the one that almost certainly adopted?
What's most ironic about the Daikatana fiasco, the millions spent, egos dissolved, and promises broken, is that the game's title is an *egregious* mistranslation of a Japanese word.
Never mind the booring gameplay, sub-standard graphics, pointless AI, the fact that it was such a resource hog that it could bring a top-notch PC to it's knees, and it was 2+ years late coming to market, it was the title that was the most obnoxious error!
If the Daikatana team had looked in the history books, or consulted a Japanese expert, they could have avoided this travesty, and dumped the tongue-twisting word "Daikatana" in the rubbish heap. A small investment for quality.
Naturally, a better title would have made all the difference in the world.
Not!
The Daikatana team could have avoided this travesty and dumped the whole project in the rubbish heap! It would have been a small investment for quality!
I don't think that Daikatana has any positive lessons for the software or gaming industry. Just lots of bad ones...
Every six months Microsoft faces at best a possible contempt citation for its infractions
Unless they haul Gates, Balmer and the rest of the upper management off to jail for contempt, this "penalty" seems pretty weak.
with the real possibility in the face of poor performance the extension of the term of the Final Judgement because of bad behavior,
But from an m$ perspective, the whole settlement seems like a pretty schweet deal, all things considered. Extending it for another year or three because they do not adhere to the spirit or intent of the agreement is hardly going to deter future monopoly abuses.
We treat murderers on probation less harshly.
Personally, when I read some articles on the terms of settlement, and Balmer publicly states that this is an honourable compromise and they will stick to their part of the bargain, I figured that the non-m$ camp had been suckered. If Bill Gates was screaming that the government had raped his company, then I would tend to agree that justice had been served.
Doesn't that present a complete turn around from their previous statement?
Yes, but don't let things like the facts get in the way of nationalistic jingoism...
Next thing you know, the USians will be telling us that the telephone was invented in the US and the first long-distance call took place in the US too!
Two weeks ago, Google began quietly testing a Web page voting system that, for the first time on a large scale, could eventually let Web surfers help determine the popularity of sites ranked by the company's search engine.
How long will it take before someone automates a script to rate some site(s) artificially high or low? Any wagers?
If you define intelligence as equal to the mathematically/logically then the IQ is a good measure.
IQ != Intelligence. Since there are different kinds of intelligence, and there does not appear to be any one test that can measure all types of intelligence, no one study will ever be considered the final word on the matter.
Are our principles now to be sacrificed because we want cheap Chinese products?
Actually, our principles are to be sacrificed because we want to sell stuff to the Chinese... There is an untapped market of >1 billion people who don't have enough Nike, Coke, or McDonalds. It's enough to make a marketdroid salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs...
Unfortunately, just because she's against the RIAA doesn't mean she's in favor of P2P.
Funny, when I read the article Courtney says a couple of times that she likes to use Napster, but finds that the variety of music (or lack thereof) tends to limit the usefulness of the service.
Not that there's anything wrong with wanting to get paid, but let's be clear about where Ms. Love stands.
What's your point? She suggests that since the record companies basically rob the artists blind, if her music is distributed via some P2P service to people who would not have otherwise heard her music, at least those new fans might be inclined to attend a concert or something like that, and she might see some return then...
Gosh, she expects to be paid for her work. What an outrage!
Courtney Love gave a speech last year about the topic of music theft, and the roles that Napster and the RIAA play in that theft. A brief quote:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
It is an interesting read, particularly if you contrast it with Rosen's (ahem) desire to protect the artists and ensure that the artists are fairly compensated...
I wonder if Hillary was able to keep a straigh face during her speech!
what do I do with this? Is this in/etc/hosts/deny?
No, it would go in your/etc/hosts file. If you use m$ nt4.0, it goes in
c:\winnt40\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
(Could they have picked a less intuitive directory?)
Anyways, the way it works is that your system will typically check the hosts file before doing a DNS lookup. So, when the your system trys to load an ad from one of those servers, instead of going to the net to get the ad, it finds a hosts entry and trys to pull the data from the loop back interface (127.0.0.1). Since there is no web server operating at that IP address, it puts whitespace in the place the ad was supposed to go.
Voila!
IMHO, the record industry should be free to choose whatever crappy standard that they want, and I should be free to try to hack it. So long as I don't distribute their content, I shouldn't be breaking the law.
But the DMCA has already been passed, and is not going away. And under that statute, it is a criminal offense to circumvent / reverse engineer any copy protection scheme...
I've seen some really STUPID business practices during the past ten years, but i SWEAR TO GOD there have been none more idiotic than those of the RIAA. They are literally shooting themselves in their feet OVER and OVER AGAIN, and they act like they don't even realize it!!!
Yes, but are you still putting money into their pockets? More to the point, has their over-all profitability been decreased as a result of these "stupid" decisions?
Hey, nobody here likes them, but clearly they know how to run their business to maximize the returns. They have the ear (and probably other body parts) of the politicians, and can get laws passed to reinforce their business model...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer's entire premises are in blatant contravention of just about everybody's personal beliefs about the true nature of the universe, but many here would still reckon it's a cool show.
Yes, but is it cool because of the stories and characters, or is it cool because Buffy, Willow, Anya, Harmony, etc. are way hot?
Mind you, the Vulcan Science Officer is nothing to sneeze at either. I'd gladly rub lotion onto her!
Remember, advertising is a legitimate industry. Let's minimize the amount of social control it has over our lives by treating it as such.
This will probably get modded down for being OT, but might I suggest that you read the book No Logo by Naomi Klein? It could change your outlook on this "legitimate" industry and all of the kind-hearted saints who run it...
Slashdot Mirror
They even allow you to run a cookie which will completely disable X-10 Ads. All you have to do is click here [x10.com] and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.
Or, you could just put in a host entry for x10.com pointing to the loop-back interface of your system. Then you would never get one of those ads ever again...
Screw you X10!
Solaris can be frightening at times. I'm not sure I would really want to run a firewall on it.
I'm curious. What about Solaris would give you that opinion?
IMHO, I would not want to run a firewall on anything else when it protects anything more a home LAN. The OS is quite stable, and it is widely supported by vendors.
It would probably be more secure to run firewall code on something like a Mac (because there are not as many people out there trying to 0wn a Mac. But on the whole, I have no issues with Solaris.
Unfortunately, in the corporate world, unless I can get a 24x7 maintenance contract from a recognized provider (IBM, GE, etc) Linux is a hard sell for mission-critical servers.
If you get hacked, simply restart your machine, and you are back to factory settings.
Why would you allow your firewall to accept any connections? My firewall drops any attemp to access it remotely. The only way it can be accessed is from the system console.
Boot times should not be a great concern with a firewall; you should only be booting it once a year or so anyway.
Once a year? Well, for those people who run firewalls on m$ products, once a week is more like it!
I work for a managed service provider and we run a bunch of firewalls for customers. Everything runs under Solaris on suitable Sun hardware, and even then I would like to see them re-booted 3 or 4 times a year.
Let's face it, UNIX rocks, but it does buffer lots of things in memory. One of my colleagues told me about a system he ran for two years without re-booting it, and when it finally was re-booted, it did not come up again. The occasional re-boot can't hurt it any. Besides, E250's and E450s boot in about a minute.
Duke Nukem Forever should really be renamed Dikatana2.
I have heard it said that the title isn't Duke Nuken Forever, that's just how long it will take to get to market...
But I can see how patterns might crop in random data, given a sufficiently large amount of source data to work with.
I think it is a given that patterns will occur in truly random data. Strictly speaking, if the probability of such a pattern existing is greater than 0, it is a certainty that it will eventually occur, given enough trials.
The question is, will a sufficient number of patterns occur often enough that the data can be significantly compressed to warrant the CPU cycles involved?
I agree, it does not seem possible.
Why is MS so bad for thinking of this first? Why didn't Real or Apple think about this?
IMHO, DVDs work just fine as they are, and there is no obvious reason why this new "feature" should be added. I suspect because m$ has promised to support strong digital rights management in their format...
I can only wonder how long it will be before DVD players have BSODs.
Maybe that's why MS is so successful.
Probably. I am sure that the fact they operate like a predatory monopoly has nothing to do with it!
Because they have good business people that can think up of new ways to grow the business.
It seems to me that whenever m$ tries to "grow the business" it brings to mind images of Pinky and the Brain:
Balmer: Gee Bill, what are we going to do tonight?
Gates: Same thing we do every night Steve: Try to take over the world!
Balmer: Developers! Developers! Developers! Zort! Narf!
The whole monopoly seems to be based on the business model of The Borg: co-opt every piece of technology around, add it's distinctiveness to their own - and charge a license to the developers and end users...
since they haven't complied with the U.S.'s demand for 'an optical media licensing regime.'
I wonder how our USian friends would react to a demand that they create/alter some legislation to suit the needs of some non-US multinational? I guess things like national sovereignty only apply to superpowers, and the industries they represent.
And why is it that when the it is decided that some sort of multi-lateral standard is required, why is the US standard is the one that almost certainly adopted?
What's most ironic about the Daikatana fiasco, the millions spent, egos dissolved, and promises broken, is that the game's title is an *egregious* mistranslation of a Japanese word.
Never mind the booring gameplay, sub-standard graphics, pointless AI, the fact that it was such a resource hog that it could bring a top-notch PC to it's knees, and it was 2+ years late coming to market, it was the title that was the most obnoxious error!
If the Daikatana team had looked in the history books, or consulted a Japanese expert, they could have avoided this travesty, and dumped the tongue-twisting word "Daikatana" in the rubbish heap. A small investment for quality.
Naturally, a better title would have made all the difference in the world.
Not!
The Daikatana team could have avoided this travesty and dumped the whole project in the rubbish heap! It would have been a small investment for quality!
I don't think that Daikatana has any positive lessons for the software or gaming industry. Just lots of bad ones...
Every six months Microsoft faces at best a possible contempt citation for its infractions
Unless they haul Gates, Balmer and the rest of the upper management off to jail for contempt, this "penalty" seems pretty weak.
with the real possibility in the face of poor performance the extension of the term of the Final Judgement because of bad behavior,
But from an m$ perspective, the whole settlement seems like a pretty schweet deal, all things considered. Extending it for another year or three because they do not adhere to the spirit or intent of the agreement is hardly going to deter future monopoly abuses.
We treat murderers on probation less harshly.
Personally, when I read some articles on the terms of settlement, and Balmer publicly states that this is an honourable compromise and they will stick to their part of the bargain, I figured that the non-m$ camp had been suckered. If Bill Gates was screaming that the government had raped his company, then I would tend to agree that justice had been served.
the FBI are saying: All your keystrokes are belong to us
Doesn't that present a complete turn around from their previous statement?
Yes, but don't let things like the facts get in the way of nationalistic jingoism...
Next thing you know, the USians will be telling us that the telephone was invented in the US and the first long-distance call took place in the US too!
Two weeks ago, Google began quietly testing a Web page voting system that, for the first time on a large scale, could eventually let Web surfers help determine the popularity of sites ranked by the company's search engine.
How long will it take before someone automates a script to rate some site(s) artificially high or low? Any wagers?
If you define intelligence as equal to the mathematically/logically then the IQ is a good measure.
IQ != Intelligence. Since there are different kinds of intelligence, and there does not appear to be any one test that can measure all types of intelligence, no one study will ever be considered the final word on the matter.
Sounds like you answered your own question
Dude, I think the original posting was intended as a joke.
At least, I hope it was an attempt at humour...
Are our principles now to be sacrificed because we want cheap Chinese products?
Actually, our principles are to be sacrificed because we want to sell stuff to the Chinese... There is an untapped market of >1 billion people who don't have enough Nike, Coke, or McDonalds. It's enough to make a marketdroid salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs...
Unfortunately, just because she's against the RIAA doesn't mean she's in favor of P2P.
Funny, when I read the article Courtney says a couple of times that she likes to use Napster, but finds that the variety of music (or lack thereof) tends to limit the usefulness of the service.
Not that there's anything wrong with wanting to get paid, but let's be clear about where Ms. Love stands.
What's your point? She suggests that since the record companies basically rob the artists blind, if her music is distributed via some P2P service to people who would not have otherwise heard her music, at least those new fans might be inclined to attend a concert or something like that, and she might see some return then...
Gosh, she expects to be paid for her work. What an outrage!
Courtney Love gave a speech last year about the topic of music theft, and the roles that Napster and the RIAA play in that theft. A brief quote:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
The full text of Love's speech can be found here.
It is an interesting read, particularly if you contrast it with Rosen's (ahem) desire to protect the artists and ensure that the artists are fairly compensated...
I wonder if Hillary was able to keep a straigh face during her speech!
what do I do with this? Is this in /etc/hosts/deny?
/etc/hosts file. If you use m$ nt4.0, it goes in
c:\winnt40\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
No, it would go in your
(Could they have picked a less intuitive directory?)
Anyways, the way it works is that your system will typically check the hosts file before doing a DNS lookup. So, when the your system trys to load an ad from one of those servers, instead of going to the net to get the ad, it finds a hosts entry and trys to pull the data from the loop back interface (127.0.0.1). Since there is no web server operating at that IP address, it puts whitespace in the place the ad was supposed to go.
Voila!
IMHO, the record industry should be free to choose whatever crappy standard that they want, and I should be free to try to hack it. So long as I don't distribute their content, I shouldn't be breaking the law.
But the DMCA has already been passed, and is not going away. And under that statute, it is a criminal offense to circumvent / reverse engineer any copy protection scheme...
I've seen some really STUPID business practices during the past ten years, but i SWEAR TO GOD there have been none more idiotic than those of the RIAA. They are literally shooting themselves in their feet OVER and OVER AGAIN, and they act like they don't even realize it!!!
Yes, but are you still putting money into their pockets? More to the point, has their over-all profitability been decreased as a result of these "stupid" decisions?
Hey, nobody here likes them, but clearly they know how to run their business to maximize the returns. They have the ear (and probably other body parts) of the politicians, and can get laws passed to reinforce their business model...
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Dude I think you mis-spelled tolerance...
As well as undermining the credibility of Mensa...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer's entire premises are in blatant contravention of just about everybody's personal beliefs about the true nature of the universe, but many here would still reckon it's a cool show.
Yes, but is it cool because of the stories and characters, or is it cool because Buffy, Willow, Anya, Harmony, etc. are way hot?
Mind you, the Vulcan Science Officer is nothing to sneeze at either. I'd gladly rub lotion onto her!
Remember, advertising is a legitimate industry. Let's minimize the amount of social control it has over our lives by treating it as such.
This will probably get modded down for being OT, but might I suggest that you read the book No Logo by Naomi Klein? It could change your outlook on this "legitimate" industry and all of the kind-hearted saints who run it...
It would be nice, though, if you could register with advertising agencies so advertising would be taylored to the things you enjoy.
Why would I want to register with an ad agency? Why would I give them any information about myself? I hate ads, so why make their job any easier?
Screw them! Let them pay big bucks for the results of the data mining someone else has already done.