Webcache notwithstanding, just about ANY user of a dial-up network is immune to tracking by IP address just as soon as they disconnect and reconnect. Similarly, some cable modems use DHCP and do not assign static IP addresses. I feel more secure on a dial-up than I do when my computer is left on a high-speed network connection with a static IP. However, the huge speed boost I get from my Ethernet hook-up makes it easy to install things like portsentry and sshd, not to mention ad-blocking software that some Slashdot readers' love so very much.
I tried to visit CNN.com, but it promptly reloaded and overrode the frames, also making IE 5.5 (my browser) render it. Apparently CNN is one of many sites that forces itself out if loaded in a frameset. I guess it's done to prevent typo sites loading it in a full-page frame, among other things.
What about the home page of Berkshire Hathaway? The company was founded by Warren Buffett, who preceded Bill Gates as the nation's richest person. Their stock trades at over $50,000 per share, and they still can't hire anyone who knows HTML.
I tried viewing Slashdot in NCSA Mosaic 0.9, and was able to pull up an article. In Threaded mode, which uses mostly standard UL and LI tags to represent messages, it was surprisingly readable. However, when I changed my settings and clicked "Change," I was presented with the comments rendered entirely in... my current browser, IE5.5!
You should un-check "Automatically load HTML" so that the web server doesn't pick up the fact that you're reading the page and increasing their overall hit count.
Come on. A true Internet revolutionary like yourself should know these things.
Moody notes that Red Hat Linux leads the way with 122 noted vulnerabilities. Given the shockingly high number of holes open in a RH install, not to mention the overall lack of security (Red Hat 5.1 didn't even enable shadow passwords, and this was preserved in updates all the way up to 6.1, when I reformatted and went to Mandrake) this shouldn't surprise anyone.
"Other Linuxes" (sic) total 47 bugs, which means that any one distribution has fewer reported vulnerabilities than the 99 in Windows NT. Aren't numbers fun?
A billion points may be nice, but there's no standard as to what a "point" is. In Outrun and other early Sega racing games, you got 10 (100?) points for every pixel the car moved, plus bonuses for checkpoints and speed, etc. In pinball games, you can easily rack up a few million points by hitting a few targets, and then you get the encouraging "EXTRA BALL AT 5,000,000,000" message when you're on a roll.
But still, 2 1/2 days straight is pretty damn good nonetheless.
My bad. When the article was posted, no Plex86 node had been created. However, in the hours since then, three people have written blurbs about it. Just goes to show one of the advantages of the distributed-encyclopedia model.;)
Quit your whining and use the TOM Conversion Service. It'll let you read any "non-standard" format you want, including Word, PDF, and even LaTeX, in nice, comfortable HTML format. Of course, the formatting will likely be all fouled up because HTML doesn't support all the layout features of PDF, but that's okay because standards are more important than everything else.
Quick, stop the world because Joe Websurfer can't read our documents!
A typical music fan who buys a CD might use that CD at home, take that CD in the car, make a tape of that CD, - or using it as part of a compilation, play that CD with friends and for friends, and keep that CD for many years.
That's funny. Didn't Hilary Rosen say that making copies of your CD, so that you could keep one at home and one in the car, was not an example of "fair use"? Let's all be glad she's not the webmaster there.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but scenes from Simpsons episodes don't count as real-life anecdotes. Please tell me when postal employees have looted greeting cards.
Why don't you give something an honest chance before slamming it? Millions of Americans will gain access to e-mail as a result, and you're pointing out security flaws in a system that does not yet exist.
Congratulations. The cynical moderators have spoken.
I want you to tell me where the article stated that your e-mail address would contain your physical address. They said that the processing would be handled in a central database, where e-mail to your USPS e-mail address would be routed to your physical address internally. Unless someone hacked the database, your security would not be compromised.
Millions of people do NOT have an e-mail address, and many of those who do check it very infrequently. I have relatives that go for months without checking their e-mail, while they check their snail-mail every day. For those people who don't have an e-mail address (or even a computer -- can you imagine?) the USPS will print and hand-deliver e-mail.
I think it's a nice service, because it helps to smooth out the "digital divide." The millions of people without computers or e-mail often fit into certain social and even ethnic statistics.
BTW, they did not say that e-mail addresses would be tied to the physical addresses of the recipients. That was merely proposed in a few (Score 3, Funny) comments in this discussion.
The article frequently mentioned that mouse pads would be a thing of the past if users all switched to optical mice. While it's true that optical mice can work on a variety of surfaces, I don't think that the mousepad industry will be shutting its doors any time soon.
I bought an Intellimouse w/Intellieye earlier this month, and proudly set it on my desk without a mousepad. The response was decent, but I switched back to a mouse pad for one reason: comfort. The pad is soft, which minimizes the physical feedback I get from pushing it around. It also provides some traction: I don't want the mouse slipping around all over the place. Lastly, a lot of people have custom mouse pads that have everything from calculators to picture frames built in. It'll really be a vanity thing, IMO.
Mouse pads aren't going away. Not only do they provide ergonomic advantages as detailed above, but there are probably many people out there whose desks just aren't suited for optical mouse technology.
No, Suck was started by some people who decided to post their ramblings while working at Wired. The copyright notice still reads "Wired Digital," which of course is owned by Lycos.
All of this will be made perfectly simple when Lycos is bought by omnipresent megacorporation Microsoft-AOL-TimeWarner-GM-IBM-AT&T in five years.
Although it doesn't necessarily replace a CLI, the nice folks at MIT's Lab for Computer Science have set up Jupiter, a voice interface for weather information. Give it a call at 1-888-573-TALK if you're in the US and have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon. You can ask it simple questions like "What is the weather in Seattle today?" and "Will it rain tomorrow in New York?" and it will respond after a couple of seconds with the answer. Usually it's pretty good, if you're used to the back-and-forth interface. You have to know how it works, though -- you can only speak after the tone it gives, you can't cut it off, and its English isn't that good.
Here's what I heard when I handed the phone to a relative of mine who is hardly computer savvy:
"What's the weather in Baltimore today?" (pause, gets answer) "What about in New York?" (short pause) "New York. NO, not Utica, just New York City. Hello? I don't want to hear the weather in Utica, I don't LIVE in Utica! Just give me the weather for New York City! Oh, I give up." (click)
With all due respect, Artificial Intelligence has a long way to go before it catches up with natural stupidity.:)
In my spare time, I help some people in the area use their computers. One of my clients is an elderly woman with some limitations on the use of her hand. Selecting anything, especially the tiny text links and widgets used in many situations today, can be quite difficult. I didn't even try to do tasks using the command line, since she wouldn't be able to recreate them without calling me up and asking for assistance.
Sure, hardcore *nix hackers will never need a natural language anything -- in fact, one might argue that the standard suite of commands and GNU utilities is their natural language. But for people who don't work with computers all day long, saying something like "Enter a check," "Open a new document," or "Send an e-mail" will do just fine. Each of those documents would require several windows and mouse clicks even with the most intuitive of GUI's.
I was able to download a Palm VII ROM and the emulator (I had previously signed up as a developer) but I couldn't get the PQA's to work. I apparently needed to go through the same activation procedure as any other Palm VII user, including providing a credit card for billing. Are there ways to use PQA's in a developer-type environment without signing up?
Yeah, all your friends are absolutely DROOLING to see the latest epic played out in 480x320 resolution on a 17-inch screen with a few little speakers. But if you turn the lights off and sit real close, it's just like being in a movie theater!
Slashdot Mirror
Webcache notwithstanding, just about ANY user of a dial-up network is immune to tracking by IP address just as soon as they disconnect and reconnect. Similarly, some cable modems use DHCP and do not assign static IP addresses. I feel more secure on a dial-up than I do when my computer is left on a high-speed network connection with a static IP. However, the huge speed boost I get from my Ethernet hook-up makes it easy to install things like portsentry and sshd, not to mention ad-blocking software that some Slashdot readers' love so very much.
I tried to visit CNN.com, but it promptly reloaded and overrode the frames, also making IE 5.5 (my browser) render it. Apparently CNN is one of many sites that forces itself out if loaded in a frameset. I guess it's done to prevent typo sites loading it in a full-page frame, among other things.
What about the home page of Berkshire Hathaway? The company was founded by Warren Buffett, who preceded Bill Gates as the nation's richest person. Their stock trades at over $50,000 per share, and they still can't hire anyone who knows HTML.
I tried viewing Slashdot in NCSA Mosaic 0.9, and was able to pull up an article. In Threaded mode, which uses mostly standard UL and LI tags to represent messages, it was surprisingly readable. However, when I changed my settings and clicked "Change," I was presented with the comments rendered entirely in... my current browser, IE5.5!
Guess it doesn't do forms just yet.
You should un-check "Automatically load HTML" so that the web server doesn't pick up the fact that you're reading the page and increasing their overall hit count.
Come on. A true Internet revolutionary like yourself should know these things.
Moody notes that Red Hat Linux leads the way with 122 noted vulnerabilities. Given the shockingly high number of holes open in a RH install, not to mention the overall lack of security (Red Hat 5.1 didn't even enable shadow passwords, and this was preserved in updates all the way up to 6.1, when I reformatted and went to Mandrake) this shouldn't surprise anyone.
"Other Linuxes" (sic) total 47 bugs, which means that any one distribution has fewer reported vulnerabilities than the 99 in Windows NT. Aren't numbers fun?
A billion points may be nice, but there's no standard as to what a "point" is. In Outrun and other early Sega racing games, you got 10 (100?) points for every pixel the car moved, plus bonuses for checkpoints and speed, etc. In pinball games, you can easily rack up a few million points by hitting a few targets, and then you get the encouraging "EXTRA BALL AT 5,000,000,000" message when you're on a roll.
But still, 2 1/2 days straight is pretty damn good nonetheless.
My bad. When the article was posted, no Plex86 node had been created. However, in the hours since then, three people have written blurbs about it. Just goes to show one of the advantages of the distributed-encyclopedia model. ;)
Nobody wrote a node for Plex86 on Everything2 yet, so the [?] link doesn't work. Maybe this story will let someone write one.
Just goes to show one of the downsides of the distributed-encyclopedia model Everything2 and other sites (h2g2, for one) use for content.
But can I get an original, mint-in-the-box copy of Custer's Revenge?
I just downloaded it yesterday, and the ROM was well worth the 0.8 seconds it took to download over my 33.6kbps modem. Absolutely hilarious.
Personally, I think the world would be a better place if we just banned children outright.
Quit your whining and use the TOM Conversion Service. It'll let you read any "non-standard" format you want, including Word, PDF, and even LaTeX, in nice, comfortable HTML format. Of course, the formatting will likely be all fouled up because HTML doesn't support all the layout features of PDF, but that's okay because standards are more important than everything else.
Quick, stop the world because Joe Websurfer can't read our documents!
Either that, or III) they used inconsistent numbering in their reasoning.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
A typical music fan who buys a CD might use that CD at home, take that CD in the car, make a tape of that CD, - or using it as part of a compilation, play that CD with friends and for friends, and keep that CD for many years.
That's funny. Didn't Hilary Rosen say that making copies of your CD, so that you could keep one at home and one in the car, was not an example of "fair use"? Let's all be glad she's not the webmaster there.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but scenes from Simpsons episodes don't count as real-life anecdotes. Please tell me when postal employees have looted greeting cards.
Why don't you give something an honest chance before slamming it? Millions of Americans will gain access to e-mail as a result, and you're pointing out security flaws in a system that does not yet exist.
Congratulations. The cynical moderators have spoken.
I want you to tell me where the article stated that your e-mail address would contain your physical address. They said that the processing would be handled in a central database, where e-mail to your USPS e-mail address would be routed to your physical address internally. Unless someone hacked the database, your security would not be compromised.
Please read the article.
Millions of people do NOT have an e-mail address, and many of those who do check it very infrequently. I have relatives that go for months without checking their e-mail, while they check their snail-mail every day. For those people who don't have an e-mail address (or even a computer -- can you imagine?) the USPS will print and hand-deliver e-mail.
I think it's a nice service, because it helps to smooth out the "digital divide." The millions of people without computers or e-mail often fit into certain social and even ethnic statistics.
BTW, they did not say that e-mail addresses would be tied to the physical addresses of the recipients. That was merely proposed in a few (Score 3, Funny) comments in this discussion.
The article frequently mentioned that mouse pads would be a thing of the past if users all switched to optical mice. While it's true that optical mice can work on a variety of surfaces, I don't think that the mousepad industry will be shutting its doors any time soon.
I bought an Intellimouse w/Intellieye earlier this month, and proudly set it on my desk without a mousepad. The response was decent, but I switched back to a mouse pad for one reason: comfort. The pad is soft, which minimizes the physical feedback I get from pushing it around. It also provides some traction: I don't want the mouse slipping around all over the place. Lastly, a lot of people have custom mouse pads that have everything from calculators to picture frames built in. It'll really be a vanity thing, IMO.
Mouse pads aren't going away. Not only do they provide ergonomic advantages as detailed above, but there are probably many people out there whose desks just aren't suited for optical mouse technology.
No, Suck was started by some people who decided to post their ramblings while working at Wired. The copyright notice still reads "Wired Digital," which of course is owned by Lycos.
All of this will be made perfectly simple when Lycos is bought by omnipresent megacorporation Microsoft-AOL-TimeWarner-GM-IBM-AT&T in five years.
Would you pay $10 for a free "patch" (most likely Napigator) that lets you use Napster even after the official servers get shut down?
Some people would. God bless eBay.
Although it doesn't necessarily replace a CLI, the nice folks at MIT's Lab for Computer Science have set up Jupiter, a voice interface for weather information. Give it a call at 1-888-573-TALK if you're in the US and have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon. You can ask it simple questions like "What is the weather in Seattle today?" and "Will it rain tomorrow in New York?" and it will respond after a couple of seconds with the answer. Usually it's pretty good, if you're used to the back-and-forth interface. You have to know how it works, though -- you can only speak after the tone it gives, you can't cut it off, and its English isn't that good.
:)
Here's what I heard when I handed the phone to a relative of mine who is hardly computer savvy:
"What's the weather in Baltimore today?" (pause, gets answer) "What about in New York?" (short pause) "New York. NO, not Utica, just New York City. Hello? I don't want to hear the weather in Utica, I don't LIVE in Utica! Just give me the weather for New York City! Oh, I give up." (click)
With all due respect, Artificial Intelligence has a long way to go before it catches up with natural stupidity.
In my spare time, I help some people in the area use their computers. One of my clients is an elderly woman with some limitations on the use of her hand. Selecting anything, especially the tiny text links and widgets used in many situations today, can be quite difficult. I didn't even try to do tasks using the command line, since she wouldn't be able to recreate them without calling me up and asking for assistance.
Sure, hardcore *nix hackers will never need a natural language anything -- in fact, one might argue that the standard suite of commands and GNU utilities is their natural language. But for people who don't work with computers all day long, saying something like "Enter a check," "Open a new document," or "Send an e-mail" will do just fine. Each of those documents would require several windows and mouse clicks even with the most intuitive of GUI's.
I was able to download a Palm VII ROM and the emulator (I had previously signed up as a developer) but I couldn't get the PQA's to work. I apparently needed to go through the same activation procedure as any other Palm VII user, including providing a credit card for billing. Are there ways to use PQA's in a developer-type environment without signing up?
...and I haven't tried it, but this PQA has been out since April of last year, according to Palm.net's web site.
:)
Almost makes me want to get a Palm VII, though...
Yeah, all your friends are absolutely DROOLING to see the latest epic played out in 480x320 resolution on a 17-inch screen with a few little speakers. But if you turn the lights off and sit real close, it's just like being in a movie theater!