Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully.
14. Equipment. Telocity will provide you a "gateway" or certain hardware and software that will allow you to access the Service and any additional services that you may order in the future (all equipment provided by Telocity will be referred to as the "Equipment"). You agree that this does not give you any ownership interest in or title to the Equipment or its accompanying software. You also agree that Telocity may upgrade the equipment and/or software from time to time by providing the upgrade to you. In that event, Telocity will provide you a means of returning the replaced Equipment.
You agree to facilitate the upgrades and return the equipment. At the end of the term of your Service, you agree to return the Equipment in the manner described by Telocity. In either case, if you fail to return the Equipment to Telocity as instructed, within thirty (30) days, then a $499 "Equipment Fee" will apply and will be charged to you in the manner described in Section 3.
I had a support guy go through a complicated debugging procedure having to do with password changes failing under obscure conditions with Win95 clients and NT servers.
Would this be the infamous MIT Realm bug? ("Passwords must be at least 16785 characters in length...")
I hereby nominate this story for the SLASHDOT SHOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD award!
This is just TOO GOOD... Now, I do not condone the unauthorized usage of directtv (THAT'S gonna get me -1 troll), but the sheer level of hacking this entailed is fantastic coding of the highest order! And the implications for directtv are enormous; I can't see them locking this out without completely changing the way their system works.
it wasn't that long ago when we thought the solution to idiots who shouldn't be on the net in the first place was to make an internet license mandatory, complete with a written exam.
fat32 is an interesting control, but in an ideal benchmark, ntfs would have been used, as it is designed closer to other filesystems, as opposed to fat32, which is more like Baby's First Filesystem(tm).
Though I will grant that NTFS would have been hard or impossible to benchmark in this test, given the lack of robust drivers for it.
the quote "If monolith software weren't based in seattel, I would be worried" came from Taiki. I included it because if it didn't have a somewhat witty comment, it would not have been posted.
-Lx?
The internet was designed to move TEXT around. TEXT, and plain ol' ASCII text (none of this WORD,.doc file crap). Then someone created uuencode, the beginning of the end. Now there's streaming audio, Real Audio, streaming video, "vmail", Microsoft Net Meeting, the <whatever> cam, etc. All of this is grinding the net to a halt.
Guess what's been around since TCP/IP was invented? UDP. What was UDP designed for? Packet radio. Gee, guess what Realaudio and the like boil down to? Packet radio running over UDP.
AOL did give a large number of these out as part of a promo for 'You've got mail!'. I picked one up from BlockBuster
I got one at Hollywood Video. It has a grand total of *132KB* of stuff on it. One little shell utility to dial an 800 number and download the 50 meg install that could EASILY fit on the uncut 3" CD...
What REALLY pisses me off is that the brochure that comes with the CD claims that AOL invented the 3" CD. Hello, my Two-Mix 3" single would like to speak with you now...
Information Society did something like that on one of their albums. You hook up your tape deck to a 300 (or was it 1200?) modem and download some story off the album. I never did it myself though.
I used to remember the album name. The "song" title on the jacket was "300n81". Set a modem to 300 baud, no parity, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, have it answer the phone line, and play the song into another phone calling the first. An Xmodem (I think) file transfer will start, and the result for all that work is a text file from the artists about.. well.. everything relating to the album.
Damn, I wish I still had it. The text file, I mean. I no longer have a phone that fits into my 300 baud acoustic. =)
Jurassic Park, Sphere, Airframe, Andromeda Strain, Travels, and maybe a few others are good (by Crichton).
Add Timeline to Crichton's list. Just finished it a few weeks ago and it's damn good. There are about three or four scenes that MIGHT be borderline disturbing for a 13 year old (you'll have to be the judge of that), but there's not explicit sex, no language beyond what you'd hear on the street, and Crichton makes a valiant effort to describe semi-plausible time travel.
-Lx?
Re:Resist censoring, check with parents, & teach D
on
Sci Fi Literature 101?
·
· Score: 1
Hey, and don't forget to teach her a role-playing game or two! I wish I'd started a long time ago. I'd be a cool D&D chick, not the poser I am now.
Bah. To the underworld with D&D. Teach her Shadowrun. Sci-fi, cyberpunk, AND fantasy in one world and a game engine that doesn't require advanced calculus to know if you can climb a tree.
I'm sorry, but since Windows 95 and TAPI, is it REALLY necessary for the program to use its OWN DAMN DRIVERS, that, until 5.0, didn't recognize anything above COM5?! And what if it's a USB modem, What THEN?! Why the hell can't AOL use TAPI like any SANE program?
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!?!?
(In case you haven't noticed, I just came off a 4 hour war with AOL's shitware over an LT Winmodem that only installed on COM5.)
Realplayer became crap after 5.0. I welcome WMA audio streams because Winamp now supports them and I have a HELL of a lot more control over their playback (the least of which is altering the buffer size). If Winamp can implement WMA, then there's no reason other, free players can't.
Go to the damn pet store, get a well built wooden doghouse, put a lockable door on the front, and there ya go. Just make a small hole on the back (which should have a few inches of cover from the overhang of the roof), and run a longwire from the wavelan inside the house to a nearby pole.
Doghouses are DESIGNED to withstand the elements! Just ask Sparky... (Woof.)
My solution: first come, first serve, end of story.
OK. Lemme know when it goes live. I'll be the first to pipe Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford English Dictionary, and the Encyclopedia Brittanica through it.
cybersquatter, n., one who registers domain names for the sole purpose of reselling, leasing, or renting them for a profit, usually pricing it out of the reach of a potential customer. As a result, these domains never sell but instead sit in a domain registry for two years while the squatter goes out of business.
If all these people could be convinced to switch over to a better system (and not a trashy opportunistic one like AlterNIC but a responsible one run by the Net for the Net), things would be a lot better.
::Seriously, I really don't see anything wrong with cybersquatting; someone is smart enough to pick up a commodity at a low price and sell it at a higher price.::
Usually stifling the creativity of someone who can make better use of that name in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
::remember how they cheated in the grapics compo one year? I don't remember who it was, but one of them ripped another persons picture, adjusted a few details, and released as his own::
Not the way I remember it. I believe the picture in question was "Ice Kingdom," which was drawn from scratch by Skaven. It was inspired by another piece of artwork, but was done pixel-by-pixel by Peter.
::Future Crew, in my opinion, were gods.. wonder whatever happened to them..::
A good chunk of the Future Crew went to form Remedy Entertainment. Apogee has put out their Death Rally, and they're working on Max Payne for 3D Realms. Some of the members (Trug and Wildfire I'm almost certain of, and I think Psi too) joined Bitboys Oy and are designing the Glaze3D chipset. They also designed the now-defunct Pyramid3D for Tritech. The bump mapping technology Microsoft licensed for DirectX was created by them, I believe.
Actually, I think this is one of the less stupid trademark cases.
I wholeheartedly agree. They both came on the scene at the same time, and I remember it took me months to get the two of them separate in my mind. For the longest time I was thinking "why is ABC advertising a search engine in all their shows?"
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully.
Then you're blind. Here's the TOS that's burned into the telocity modem and you have to read when you set up the service initially: http://www.xarph.net/archive/tech/telocitytos/
-Lx?
I had a support guy go through a complicated debugging procedure having to do with password changes failing under obscure conditions with Win95 clients and NT servers.
Would this be the infamous MIT Realm bug? ("Passwords must be at least 16785 characters in length...")
-Lx?
I hereby nominate this story for the SLASHDOT SHOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD award!
This is just TOO GOOD... Now, I do not condone the unauthorized usage of directtv (THAT'S gonna get me -1 troll), but the sheer level of hacking this entailed is fantastic coding of the highest order! And the implications for directtv are enormous; I can't see them locking this out without completely changing the way their system works.
-Lx?
GINA - GAIM Is Not AIM
-Lx?
it wasn't that long ago when we thought the solution to idiots who shouldn't be on the net in the first place was to make an internet license mandatory, complete with a written exam.
now these privacy nuts will ruin it all.
-Lx?
fat32 is an interesting control, but in an ideal benchmark, ntfs would have been used, as it is designed closer to other filesystems, as opposed to fat32, which is more like Baby's First Filesystem(tm).
Though I will grant that NTFS would have been hard or impossible to benchmark in this test, given the lack of robust drivers for it.
-Lx?
I knew I was going to screw something up, glad I'm not with NASA.
Oh wait, they can't measure either.
My bad.
the quote "If monolith software weren't based in seattel, I would be worried" came from Taiki. I included it because if it didn't have a somewhat witty comment, it would not have been posted. -Lx?
The internet was designed to move TEXT around. TEXT, and plain ol' ASCII text (none of this WORD, .doc file crap). Then someone created uuencode, the beginning of the end. Now there's streaming audio, Real Audio, streaming video, "vmail", Microsoft Net Meeting, the <whatever> cam, etc. All of this is grinding the net to a halt.
Guess what's been around since TCP/IP was invented? UDP. What was UDP designed for? Packet radio.
Gee, guess what Realaudio and the like boil down to? Packet radio running over UDP.
-Lx?
AOL did give a large number of these out as part of a promo for 'You've got mail!'. I picked one up from BlockBuster
I got one at Hollywood Video. It has a grand total of *132KB* of stuff on it. One little shell utility to dial an 800 number and download the 50 meg install that could EASILY fit on the uncut 3" CD...
What REALLY pisses me off is that the brochure that comes with the CD claims that AOL invented the 3" CD. Hello, my Two-Mix 3" single would like to speak with you now...
-Lx?
Information Society did something like that on one of their albums. You hook up your tape deck to a 300 (or was it 1200?) modem and download some story off the album. I never did it myself though.
I used to remember the album name. The "song" title on the jacket was "300n81". Set a modem to 300 baud, no parity, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, have it answer the phone line, and play the song into another phone calling the first. An Xmodem (I think) file transfer will start, and the result for all that work is a text file from the artists about.. well.. everything relating to the album.
Damn, I wish I still had it. The text file, I mean. I no longer have a phone that fits into my 300 baud acoustic. =)
-Lx?
Jurassic Park, Sphere, Airframe, Andromeda Strain, Travels, and maybe a few others are good (by Crichton).
Add Timeline to Crichton's list. Just finished it a few weeks ago and it's damn good. There are about three or four scenes that MIGHT be borderline disturbing for a 13 year old (you'll have to be the judge of that), but there's not explicit sex, no language beyond what you'd hear on the street, and Crichton makes a valiant effort to describe semi-plausible time travel.
-Lx?
Hey, and don't forget to teach her a role-playing game or two! I wish I'd started a long time ago. I'd be a cool D&D chick, not the poser I am now.
Bah. To the underworld with D&D. Teach her Shadowrun. Sci-fi, cyberpunk, AND fantasy in one world and a game engine that doesn't require advanced calculus to know if you can climb a tree.
-Lx?
I'm sorry, but since Windows 95 and TAPI, is it REALLY necessary for the program to use its OWN DAMN DRIVERS, that, until 5.0, didn't recognize anything above COM5?! And what if it's a USB modem, What THEN?! Why the hell can't AOL use TAPI like any SANE program?
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!?!?
(In case you haven't noticed, I just came off a 4 hour war with AOL's shitware over an LT Winmodem that only installed on COM5.)
-Lx?
Realplayer became crap after 5.0. I welcome WMA audio streams because Winamp now supports them and I have a HELL of a lot more control over their playback (the least of which is altering the buffer size).
If Winamp can implement WMA, then there's no reason other, free players can't.
-Lx?
Go to the damn pet store, get a well built wooden doghouse, put a lockable door on the front, and there ya go. Just make a small hole on the back (which should have a few inches of cover from the overhang of the roof), and run a longwire from the wavelan inside the house to a nearby pole.
Doghouses are DESIGNED to withstand the elements! Just ask Sparky...
(Woof.)
-Lx?
Amen! I've always thought the same thing since TNG premiered... =)
-Lx?
My solution: first come, first serve, end of story.
OK. Lemme know when it goes live. I'll be the first to pipe Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford English Dictionary, and the Encyclopedia Brittanica through it.
-Lx?
But what would be considered a squatter?
cybersquatter, n., one who registers domain names for the sole purpose of reselling, leasing, or renting them for a profit, usually pricing it out of the reach of a potential customer. As a result, these domains never sell but instead sit in a domain registry for two years while the squatter goes out of business.
-Lx?
If all these people could be convinced to switch over to a better system (and not a trashy opportunistic one like AlterNIC but a responsible one run by the Net for the Net), things would be a lot better.
OpenDNS?
-Lx?
::Seriously, I really don't see anything wrong with cybersquatting; someone is smart enough to pick up a commodity at a low price and sell it at a higher price.::
Usually stifling the creativity of someone who can make better use of that name in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
Of course, there are also enough complete idiots to go around.
-Lx?
::remember how they cheated in the grapics compo one year? I don't remember who it was, but one of them ripped another persons picture, adjusted a few details, and released as his own::
Not the way I remember it. I believe the picture in question was "Ice Kingdom," which was drawn from scratch by Skaven. It was inspired by another piece of artwork, but was done pixel-by-pixel by Peter.
-Lx?
::Future Crew, in my opinion, were gods.. wonder whatever happened to them.. ::
A good chunk of the Future Crew went to form Remedy Entertainment. Apogee has put out their Death Rally, and they're working on Max Payne for 3D Realms. Some of the members (Trug and Wildfire I'm almost certain of, and I think Psi too) joined Bitboys Oy and are designing the Glaze3D chipset. They also designed the now-defunct Pyramid3D for Tritech. The bump mapping technology Microsoft licensed for DirectX was created by them, I believe.
-Lx?
Actually, I think this is one of the less stupid trademark cases.
I wholeheartedly agree. They both came on the scene at the same time, and I remember it took me months to get the two of them separate in my mind. For the longest time I was thinking "why is ABC advertising a search engine in all their shows?"
-Lx?
An apparatus for firebombing the US patent office.
"A governmental authority for the approval and issuance of patents."
That has a nice ring to it... let's go patent the patent office!
-Lx?