i've done quite a bit of travelling around the U.S. and have *always* been able to access a local EarthLink dial-up number. Their coverage is quite good and offers great, dependable service that stays out of your face and never attempts to take-over your networking stack.
oh yah that must have been tough, yeah i heard AOL has had some pretty aggressive service plans throughout Europe to work around per-minute charges limitations the local telco monopolies were imposing to their dial-up users. I have a few friends in France who had an unlimited dial-up line thru AOL, then i heard that whole thing sorta bit AOL in the arse as costs were too elevated. You've got any background on that whole deal?
I find Peng's efforts highly laudable and i'm glad to see they have gotten themselves a brand new home.
but really AOL is always going to try to fight reverse-engineering attempts of their proprietary protocols. face it, they suck.
With all the alternative ISPs out there, why would anyone subject themselves to AOL for connectivity? My guess is many families have had their AOL accounts for a while now, and more educated children of those households attempt to cope with the lameness by using this cool dialer.
I'd say there will come a time when people will have to bite the bullet and give up those AOL screennames. They suck at broadband, they're heavily tied into dial-up, they spam the crap out of you, and shove content down your throat all the while confining you to their obnoxious sandbox and screwing-up your network settings. They do everything in their power to abstract the Internet back into AOL. I find that eeevuuuhl.
I for one have been using EarthLink for years on a slew of operating systems, starting from dial-up up to DSL (over 2 1/2 years now), and it's always been a breeze. They'll send you a CD that'll handle the whole sign-up and installation process, or you can just get an account on-line within minutes, and at the end of the web-based process they'll show you a secure page with your username, password, dial-up number, mail and dns settings with which you can manually configure your OS. And BAM you're done. That's $22/month vs $25/month. And if you are craving spoon-fed content, you can always access your account's "start page". Note that each earthlink account actually comes with uhh i think 7 additional accounts or was it 8 additional? forgot. Each account has its own e-mail box, home page address (10MB quota, not bad) (http://home.earthlink.net/~youraccount), and start page. Oh, also the EarthLink DSL account also gives you.. uh.. i think 20 hours of free modem dial-up access, so you can get on-line while travelling through hotels and what-not. They *will* bill your ass if you go over 20 hours though. careful.
Anyway this was just an example of what i find to be a really good nationwide alternative to AOL, but there are other local ISPs all over the place. I'd stay away from local phone companies for DSL service, and go thru a re-seller of their service instead. Phone companies might give you connectivity but they won't give you nearly as many "on-line" perks as other true ISPs will, make sure you comparison-shop. For example verizon assigns you some obnoxious cryptic email address when you get their DSL package. *lame*.
Also keep in mind that any time a local phone company advertises their DSL service to you, i'm pretty sure there has to be at least one other company that offers you similar service, typically with more features for about the same price albeit potentially slightly different service terms. I know EarthLink is pretty-much everywhere, but you have other companies such as speakeasy dsl or something that offer cool plans for gamers.
DSLReports.com is always a good place to look for competitive offerings from various providers in your area.
hey fair enough, but i never said you *had* to develop games that sell nor appeal to your average testosterones-bursting teenage boy. There are plenty of other demographics.
i'm mainly addressing the parent comment's assertion that no self-respecting chick would ever want to play that game. I maintain that girls with half a brain will not take Lara's disproportionate figure to face value and enjoy the sheer fun of taking a butt-whooping chick thru wild adventures.
where your argument is inherently flawed is its grounding in reality.
you see, games are not real.
So as long as your game manages to appeal to primal instincts, you've got your bases covered. This is not sexism. Even if that is, who gives a shit.
In any case, "Gruff and Muscular" Men are *precisely* what many women are attracted to, sexually. It is just another form of disproportion.
Most men are not in that good of a shape. These things are not about real people. they're about *characters* which are attempts at materializing fantasies.
there are 3 kinds of people who call tomb raider sexist:
1) insecure chicks.
2) geeks who never got laid and who will never get laid.
3) people who really have *so* little else to worry about in their pathetic meaningless existences.
really. who gives a shit. WAKE UP: TITS SELL.
shit if i'm playing a game whose main character is a chick that kicks ass, she might as well have big titz. why the fuck not. All video games that feature chicks are like that. The same way dudes are ribbed and feature washboard abs. Look at Tekken. Is that sexist? NO. it just appeals to primal instincts while escaping from reality. AGAIN PEOPLE THIS IS NOT REAL.
is Lara my type? HELL NO, you see she... *IS NOT REAL*. chicks with half a brain understand that.
For those of you not familiar with the "Weekly World News" publication, it is a tabloid you'll find at most american supermarkets which will feature highly elevating stories such as "mom gives birth to four-headed quintuplets". The above story is just another one of their fictions. This is what tabloids do. They sell fiction. They appeal to the mentally ill-challenged, gulible minus habens.
Yahoo features those articles in their TV/Gossip/Entertainment section. So you don't have to spend money at the supermarket. Go yahoo.
First, OS X supports two-button-mice *natively*. You can buy any non-apple off-the-shelf two-button USB laser mouse for ultra cheap and plug it in any not-too-old mac laptop's *two* USB ports. If there is a 3-button USB mouse out there, i bet you it'll just work on a mac laptop (or desktop), in the worst case you might have to install a vendor-supplied driver.
Apple hardware has *for years* supported USB peripherals, and that includes mice AND keyboards.
ADB serial ports for keyboards have been gone for a WHILE. As far as keyboard remapping, thereis a slew of 3rd party OSX shareware and "how-to's"outthere that'll help you do just that. Keep in mind that the Alpha Geek Community is switching in *strides* over to OS X, thereby building a very strong support-base. Check out a couple of my switching experiencestories to give you a small idea of *some* of the slew of cool things you can do with OS X.
Futhermore, Apple hardware has been increasingly following mainstream peripheral and other device specifications: VGA monitor ports, ATA drive controllers, PCI extension slots. You can pretty-much buy a mac, gut it out, and fill-it up with non-apple components. But at least you have a base system that *just works*, and works well at that.
Please define "Unix Look and Feel". Are you talking about Solaris CDE? Are you talking about GNOME? KDE? I've got X11 and a slew of window managers and other X11 apps installed and running on OS X, using Fink. I would highly recommend that you get used to OS X's Aqua interface which is quite intuitive and powerful.
could anyone out there identify exactly what is happening when clicking on such a referal link?
i am curious if the spyware only switches a "partner id" from the legitimate site's id to their own.
or does it go further and redirects their request to one of their servers so they have more control over the redirection process.
if the request is indeed sent to one of their servers, i can see a number of ways how one could intercept such attempts on their own machine. hosts file anyone? redirect to localhost or some public-service server that runs a CGI or servlet that restores the request back to what it was supposed to be before redirecting the user. mmMMMmMMm. i don't have a PC so i can't figure out how it alll works.
from a win2k dell laptop to an early model TiBook 400mhz/384MB RAM/aiport/10GIG hd... is in my journal. Another journal entry also outlines some of what i've found to be the nicest features of OS X on my TiBook.
Keep in mind i wrote all that quite a few months ago. Now with Jaguar, things are even smoother, faster, just works even better.
In more recent developments...
Where i work, a fairly big corporation, engineers are switching in strides to OS X laptops, usually TiBooks . Even the hard-core "Mac dissers" just can't get over how cool those machines are. I am one of the early adopters here with my ol' 400mhz and only 10GIG hard drive, they're all using later models with faster CPU and brigher screen.
It is simply starting to make less and less sense for professional developers and engineers to be running windows versus OS X, unless you are developing windows software. OS X is just too powerful.
My gf just bought a 700mhz iBook. She loves it. She gets around computers fine but had *never* used a mac before. She adapted just fine: M$ Office for OS X, browsing, emailing. I got her one of those USB microdrives so she brings Office files home from her work desktop PC. She's already playing with iTunes and iPhoto.
The Register has this article about Lindows bundling EarthLink's software to make dial-up easier for novices. From what they're saying, Lindows did have a fairly friendly support for broadband, most likely because it's prolly just DHCP, but dial-up was more challenging, I seriously hope it didn't require manual configuration of pppd heh;]
check out my /.journal for two articles i've posted, the first one about how to keep your apache logs clean from coredred/nimda queries, and a second one posted a few months ago which points you to a list of all unique codered/nimda queries i've received.
A few months ago i posted a follow-up in my/. journal on code red and nimda queries sent to my apache server thru my residential dsl connection. I gathered a list of *all* unique queries i've received so far.
I also came-up with a few shell scripts used as CGI to make HTTP requests back to offending hosts, exploiting the very vulnerabilities they're probing me for to, place "WARNING YOU ARE INFECTED" text messages at strategic locations on their hard drives. drop a note on my journal comments if u need more info on that.
At the end, i look at what the computer platform lets me do.
I started out as a rabid mac user, i did a lot of multimedia stuff in the early days, some time around the Quadra 840AV and a few years into the first PowerPC machines. Macs were fun and i could do what i wanted, which would have been way harder on PC platforms.
then when i went into hardcore web applications development and entered the corporate world, well, as cool as BBEdit is, i couldn't justify to my boss to get an expensive Mac Laptop over the DELL everyone gets. Win2K served its purpose, then DELL hardware and win2k started freaking out, randomly freezing the mouse, corrupting sectors on my hard drive. I lost *a lot* of time.
Then Apple came up with unix at the core of its OS. now as a developer, UNIX makes sense. my dell was crap. so my boss got me my early 400mhz TiBook, with OS 10.1. beautiful thing. it never ever crashes, i never need to reboot it aside from software upgrades, it does what i need it to and just WORKS.
What I'm trying to get at is:
How much are you willing to pay for "It Just Works". Frankly, I will wholeheartedly shell out an extra $1000 on an apple system running OS X, over any PC equivalent.
Why? Because:
1) eventhough linux occupies a special place in my heart while i'm running LinuxPPCQ4200 on an old PPC 7500 pci mac at home, it's still not the perfect desktop OS. It's getting very close with office suites, browsers, email clients, but it's not quite there yet.
2) there is no fucking way in hell i'll ever run windoz for any serious computing, in light of all the security holes this thing still has. Should i forget to disable netbios i don't wanna get fucked by script kiddies. plus the SSL issues, IE5/6+ scripting holes, i mean we could go on and on.
3) in the end i want an platform running an OS which has it all. and that's Mac OS X.
Until OS X came along, i'd say "fair enuff, macos is nice but it's really not all that powerful, not really enterprise-grade material and out-of-this-world networking. you can't really hack into it because you can't get command line. it's not super-stable. provided you've got good hardware, a clean install and some luck, you'll get great stability out of win2k. All in all, provided it doesn't crash on me, i can do more things pertinent to my job in win2k than macos, such as running cygwin".
But since mac os 10.1 came out, and now 10.2, in my book there is no other solution for serious computing, for doing work under tight deadlines, for which you are getting paid non-negligeable amounts of money, and where your ass is on the line, i know OS X's got my back.
Don't get me wrong i'm not saying apple systems are good for everyone, they *are* more expensive.
It boils down to this:
How much is dependability worth to you? How much is your time worth to you? to me, priceless.
Oh another thing worth noting... apple's "digital lifestyle" concept works very well. i bought a sony digital camera, an ipod, i don't even own a dvd player but my TiBook does play DVDs so i buy DVDs. apple's iSoftwareSuite freakin' rocks. iPhoto totally ownz.
I've installed GNOME and Oroborus, i play Tetris in xemacs under OS X.
... what's being sent over the network via packet-sniffing. Granted it would be a pain in the butt though. Plus they could encrypt data they send to some level. guh. But if we see data which appears to be encrypted while looking at those packets, and if the software doesn't warrant any kind of encryption, then we can raise the red flags and ask questions.
Slashdot Mirror
i've done quite a bit of travelling around the U.S. and have *always* been able to access a local EarthLink dial-up number. Their coverage is quite good and offers great, dependable service that stays out of your face and never attempts to take-over your networking stack.
oh yah that must have been tough, yeah i heard AOL has had some pretty aggressive service plans throughout Europe to work around per-minute charges limitations the local telco monopolies were imposing to their dial-up users. I have a few friends in France who had an unlimited dial-up line thru AOL, then i heard that whole thing sorta bit AOL in the arse as costs were too elevated. You've got any background on that whole deal?
but really AOL is always going to try to fight reverse-engineering attempts of their proprietary protocols. face it, they suck.
With all the alternative ISPs out there, why would anyone subject themselves to AOL for connectivity? My guess is many families have had their AOL accounts for a while now, and more educated children of those households attempt to cope with the lameness by using this cool dialer.
I'd say there will come a time when people will have to bite the bullet and give up those AOL screennames. They suck at broadband, they're heavily tied into dial-up, they spam the crap out of you, and shove content down your throat all the while confining you to their obnoxious sandbox and screwing-up your network settings. They do everything in their power to abstract the Internet back into AOL. I find that eeevuuuhl.
I for one have been using EarthLink for years on a slew of operating systems, starting from dial-up up to DSL (over 2 1/2 years now), and it's always been a breeze. They'll send you a CD that'll handle the whole sign-up and installation process, or you can just get an account on-line within minutes, and at the end of the web-based process they'll show you a secure page with your username, password, dial-up number, mail and dns settings with which you can manually configure your OS. And BAM you're done. That's $22/month vs $25/month. And if you are craving spoon-fed content, you can always access your account's "start page". Note that each earthlink account actually comes with uhh i think 7 additional accounts or was it 8 additional? forgot. Each account has its own e-mail box, home page address (10MB quota, not bad) (http://home.earthlink.net/~youraccount), and start page. Oh, also the EarthLink DSL account also gives you .. uh .. i think 20 hours of free modem dial-up access, so you can get on-line while travelling through hotels and what-not. They *will* bill your ass if you go over 20 hours though. careful.
Anyway this was just an example of what i find to be a really good nationwide alternative to AOL, but there are other local ISPs all over the place. I'd stay away from local phone companies for DSL service, and go thru a re-seller of their service instead. Phone companies might give you connectivity but they won't give you nearly as many "on-line" perks as other true ISPs will, make sure you comparison-shop. For example verizon assigns you some obnoxious cryptic email address when you get their DSL package. *lame*.
Also keep in mind that any time a local phone company advertises their DSL service to you, i'm pretty sure there has to be at least one other company that offers you similar service, typically with more features for about the same price albeit potentially slightly different service terms. I know EarthLink is pretty-much everywhere, but you have other companies such as speakeasy dsl or something that offer cool plans for gamers.
DSLReports.com is always a good place to look for competitive offerings from various providers in your area.
hey fair enough, but i never said you *had* to develop games that sell nor appeal to your average testosterones-bursting teenage boy. There are plenty of other demographics.
i'm mainly addressing the parent comment's assertion that no self-respecting chick would ever want to play that game. I maintain that girls with half a brain will not take Lara's disproportionate figure to face value and enjoy the sheer fun of taking a butt-whooping chick thru wild adventures.
you see, games are not real.
So as long as your game manages to appeal to primal instincts, you've got your bases covered. This is not sexism. Even if that is, who gives a shit.
In any case, "Gruff and Muscular" Men are *precisely* what many women are attracted to, sexually. It is just another form of disproportion.
Most men are not in that good of a shape. These things are not about real people. they're about *characters* which are attempts at materializing fantasies.
there are 3 kinds of people who call tomb raider sexist:
1) insecure chicks.
2) geeks who never got laid and who will never get laid.
3) people who really have *so* little else to worry about in their pathetic meaningless existences.
really. who gives a shit. WAKE UP: TITS SELL.
shit if i'm playing a game whose main character is a chick that kicks ass, she might as well have big titz. why the fuck not. All video games that feature chicks are like that. The same way dudes are ribbed and feature washboard abs. Look at Tekken. Is that sexist? NO. it just appeals to primal instincts while escaping from reality. AGAIN PEOPLE THIS IS NOT REAL.
is Lara my type? HELL NO, you see she ... *IS NOT REAL*. chicks with half a brain understand that.
Yeah. all those canadians. they're out to warp our fragile little miiiiinds.
heh. word up ;] my crenshaw homies r on it.
Oh gawd, i can't wait 'till the onion gets a field day out of those stories.
Uncle Owwweeeeeeeeeeen
For those of you not familiar with the "Weekly World News" publication, it is a tabloid you'll find at most american supermarkets which will feature highly elevating stories such as "mom gives birth to four-headed quintuplets". The above story is just another one of their fictions. This is what tabloids do. They sell fiction. They appeal to the mentally ill-challenged, gulible minus habens.
Yahoo features those articles in their TV/Gossip/Entertainment section. So you don't have to spend money at the supermarket. Go yahoo.
Nothing to see here, move along.
ack i meant to say ADB. sorry
sorry, so i'm not too clear on what the limitations of an DB keyboard are? can't he still re-map his keyboard?
First, OS X supports two-button-mice *natively*. You can buy any non-apple off-the-shelf two-button USB laser mouse for ultra cheap and plug it in any not-too-old mac laptop's *two* USB ports. If there is a 3-button USB mouse out there, i bet you it'll just work on a mac laptop (or desktop), in the worst case you might have to install a vendor-supplied driver.
Apple hardware has *for years* supported USB peripherals, and that includes mice AND keyboards.
ADB serial ports for keyboards have been gone for a WHILE. As far as keyboard remapping, there is a slew of 3rd party OSX shareware and "how-to's" out there that'll help you do just that. Keep in mind that the Alpha Geek Community is switching in *strides* over to OS X, thereby building a very strong support-base. Check out a couple of my switching experience stories to give you a small idea of *some* of the slew of cool things you can do with OS X.
Futhermore, Apple hardware has been increasingly following mainstream peripheral and other device specifications: VGA monitor ports, ATA drive controllers, PCI extension slots. You can pretty-much buy a mac, gut it out, and fill-it up with non-apple components. But at least you have a base system that *just works*, and works well at that.
Please define "Unix Look and Feel". Are you talking about Solaris CDE? Are you talking about GNOME? KDE? I've got X11 and a slew of window managers and other X11 apps installed and running on OS X, using Fink. I would highly recommend that you get used to OS X's Aqua interface which is quite intuitive and powerful.
i am curious if the spyware only switches a "partner id" from the legitimate site's id to their own.
or does it go further and redirects their request to one of their servers so they have more control over the redirection process.
if the request is indeed sent to one of their servers, i can see a number of ways how one could intercept such attempts on their own machine. hosts file anyone? redirect to localhost or some public-service server that runs a CGI or servlet that restores the request back to what it was supposed to be before redirecting the user. mmMMMmMMm. i don't have a PC so i can't figure out how it alll works.
Keep in mind i wrote all that quite a few months ago. Now with Jaguar, things are even smoother, faster, just works even better.
In more recent developments ...
Where i work, a fairly big corporation, engineers are switching in strides to OS X laptops, usually TiBooks . Even the hard-core "Mac dissers" just can't get over how cool those machines are. I am one of the early adopters here with my ol' 400mhz and only 10GIG hard drive, they're all using later models with faster CPU and brigher screen.
It is simply starting to make less and less sense for professional developers and engineers to be running windows versus OS X, unless you are developing windows software. OS X is just too powerful.
My gf just bought a 700mhz iBook. She loves it. She gets around computers fine but had *never* used a mac before. She adapted just fine: M$ Office for OS X, browsing, emailing. I got her one of those USB microdrives so she brings Office files home from her work desktop PC. She's already playing with iTunes and iPhoto.
I also came-up with a few shell scripts used as CGI to make HTTP requests back to offending hosts, exploiting the very vulnerabilities they're probing me for to, place "WARNING YOU ARE INFECTED" text messages at strategic locations on their hard drives. drop a note on my journal comments if u need more info on that.
I started out as a rabid mac user, i did a lot of multimedia stuff in the early days, some time around the Quadra 840AV and a few years into the first PowerPC machines. Macs were fun and i could do what i wanted, which would have been way harder on PC platforms.
then when i went into hardcore web applications development and entered the corporate world, well, as cool as BBEdit is, i couldn't justify to my boss to get an expensive Mac Laptop over the DELL everyone gets. Win2K served its purpose, then DELL hardware and win2k started freaking out, randomly freezing the mouse, corrupting sectors on my hard drive. I lost *a lot* of time.
Then Apple came up with unix at the core of its OS. now as a developer, UNIX makes sense. my dell was crap. so my boss got me my early 400mhz TiBook, with OS 10.1. beautiful thing. it never ever crashes, i never need to reboot it aside from software upgrades, it does what i need it to and just WORKS.
What I'm trying to get at is:
How much are you willing to pay for "It Just Works". Frankly, I will wholeheartedly shell out an extra $1000 on an apple system running OS X, over any PC equivalent.
Why? Because:
1) eventhough linux occupies a special place in my heart while i'm running LinuxPPCQ4200 on an old PPC 7500 pci mac at home, it's still not the perfect desktop OS. It's getting very close with office suites, browsers, email clients, but it's not quite there yet.
2) there is no fucking way in hell i'll ever run windoz for any serious computing, in light of all the security holes this thing still has. Should i forget to disable netbios i don't wanna get fucked by script kiddies. plus the SSL issues, IE5/6+ scripting holes, i mean we could go on and on.
3) in the end i want an platform running an OS which has it all. and that's Mac OS X.
Until OS X came along, i'd say "fair enuff, macos is nice but it's really not all that powerful, not really enterprise-grade material and out-of-this-world networking. you can't really hack into it because you can't get command line. it's not super-stable. provided you've got good hardware, a clean install and some luck, you'll get great stability out of win2k. All in all, provided it doesn't crash on me, i can do more things pertinent to my job in win2k than macos, such as running cygwin".
But since mac os 10.1 came out, and now 10.2, in my book there is no other solution for serious computing, for doing work under tight deadlines, for which you are getting paid non-negligeable amounts of money, and where your ass is on the line, i know OS X's got my back.
Don't get me wrong i'm not saying apple systems are good for everyone, they *are* more expensive.
It boils down to this:
How much is dependability worth to you? How much is your time worth to you? to me, priceless.
Oh another thing worth noting ... apple's "digital lifestyle" concept works very well. i bought a sony digital camera, an ipod, i don't even own a dvd player but my TiBook does play DVDs so i buy DVDs. apple's iSoftwareSuite freakin' rocks. iPhoto totally ownz.
I've installed GNOME and Oroborus, i play Tetris in xemacs under OS X.