Just need to bitch here, mostly about the current IT training offerings out there...
I want to work in Networks and Systems. I've been doing ISP helpdesk for just over a year, and it's getting stale fast. So I've been looking around for some courses that offer *nix and MS, and solid networking skills. The edu situation looks like this:
-Private "colleges" (DeVry, CompuCollege, any fly-by-night school that offers MSCE) : 6-12 mnths full-time==$15,000 CDN gets you a certificate, usually MSCE and A+, vouchers to take the tests.
-Community Colleges, and Lesser Colleges (the ones you go to to prepare for University, get a business degree, etc): Part-time/Full-time, poor course offerings or limited curriculuum, tend to focus on CS, not enough Sys/Net offerings. 6-12mnths, $5000-$10,000 CDN, vouchers to take the tests, Certificate.
-University or Tech schools(BCIT): By far the most intensive, thorough offerings of the bunch. Part-time,/Full-time, still focussed mostly on CS, but their Sys/Net courses are a good mix of MS/*nix, Cisco stuff and even Novell sometimes. 12months-2years.
$7000-$15,000. Gets you a Certificate, vouchers to take the vendor exams.
Now, I make piddly as helpdesk drone and even in this economy, I'll have hard time breaking out of the tech support trap. (Once a phonedrone, no one will touch you). I figure that once I finish a course, things will begin to improve. The problem is this: the University of BC offers a 12 month course in Sysadmining, it's a good course, ~$7K, part-time. Good stuff, But part-timers dont qualify for a student-loan. So I'm fucked. And all I want to know is this:
How is it that I can take 4 _full_ years of University and walk out with a BA knowing the sum of 2000 years of human knowledge in a particular discipline for ~$4000-5000 in tuition and books --- but it takes 2 years of part-time, twice-a-week, 5hr-long _seminars_ that are offered once per term, to get a "Certificate" in a discipline that is 30 years old at a cost of $7000-$10,000? WTF? Hell, even the 2 year CSci degree is only $4K, fulltime! $7K to learn how to compile Apache and setup Exchange 2000? Please....
BTW, I already know half the shit any of these courses could teach me, but the paper helps a great deal, and a little formal edu never hurt...
Whatever. I can fill up my desktop with as many folders as it can display. And all that precious real estate will be toast because (at least right now) I can't do a "view->details", and I'll be stuck with oversized icons.
IMNSHO, this idea sucks. If I am stuck on the desktop, how will I get into the Program Files to apply that crack, or rename that binary in/bin?
I *need" all that space, and the ability to create a spiral of categorized porn descending into hell. Sure, get rid of the drive letter designations, but I want to roam free wihtin my partitions and create stuff that I don't *want* on the desktop. The desktop is where I do active work, I don't want every damn thing I have on there. Then I would really have a problem with unecessarily deep subdirectories.
Nope, keep the hard disk, or drive or "mass storage icon" or whever the hell. Instead, create a simple 3d environment. Nothing to elaborate, I don't want to have to collect the red key and frag my way to my browser to view/. Although the *option* to do so would be neat. No, I mean a simple cube, with objects that represent meaningful relationships between what it is you want to do, and where it is.
I login, an am presented with the choice of any number of customized "environments". Office, lounge, gameroom, etc. Each environment loads what is neccessary for that room, and not much more. Maybe I don't want certian drivers loaded if all I am doing is browsing in the "office", or I don't need net connectivity in the "lounge" to listen to music or whatever. Rooms serve the purpose of multiple desktops.
Choose a room, and basically, organise your furniture (functional objects) according to their purpose. And I dont want to have to walk around or fly (optional) to get to my desk. I should have a 360 pan view of the room, and hit the setero and fire up Winamp 9.0, or focus on the window to load my browser. I know quite a few people prefer the cli, and some dont think a 3d desktop is useful. Well, I hate drawing with the cli, just as I hate typing with my mouse. As usual, use the right tool, for the job. 3d will have it's place, as long as the eye candy is kept to a minimum, especially for office workers.
Sound like these guys are fishing for grant money to me. Get rid of the desktop...<chuckle>, yeah and kill the cli too, right? Hehe
>As far as social skills go, I dont have them, I have technical skills. I could develop social skills but to do so while it would balance me, i'd have to become less technical to do so.
You know, at this point in my life, I think a healthy dose of hockey-banter and a desire to have "frivilous" conversation would do me a world of good. I would probably do better in job interviews, get along better with colleagues, and be "on the market" for that sexy and intelligent geektrix. I would like to be balanced. The fact is, socially adept people are the managers, VPs, and CEOs in the world. Those that can read a person's intent. They may not be able to grasp the concept of <insert geek topic >, but they certainly can see that I may/may not fit in with the corp culture within their organisation. And if they are the one doing the hiring, well, I'm SOL.
We are predatory creatures at the same time that we are co-operative, and there is a very subtle dance taking place in front of my eyes every day that I cannot see. Booksmart as I may be, if you cannot interact, it is difficult to "network", schmooze, lie, flatter, whatever the so-called neurotypicals do. Maybe in a 1000 years autistic behaviour will be an advantage and the norm, but today it is a liability.
Remember, the ability to interact with your fellow monkeyman/woman is still far more important than your hacking skillz. The world as we know it could alter significantly at any moment. Think of the traits neccessary during the 72 hrs after an earthquake. Leadership, co-operation, communication; nobody is going to be needing a programmer or network engineer when you're scrounging for food with glass stuck between your toes.
>Yes they do need individual attention, or they need to learn perhaps using computers and technology instead of books and chalkboards
You mean...technology AND books and chalkboards.
Trust me, a kid like those described in the article needs books, perhaps even more so than computers. A good story is a safe, quiet place, and allows the mind to roam.
Well, according to my family, I was a pretty happy and good kid until 2, then "it" started. I was unruly and unmanageable, and just not "ordinary". I was diagnosed as autistic, and supposedly highly intelligent. Most of my problems were behavioural (tantrums, outburts,etc) and later I was "hyperactive". I spent most of late childhood/early adolescence on medication.
Now I am in my late 20's and can honestly say that I am of average or even above-average intelligence, and pretty much fit the description of any of those children. I will admit that pop-culture diagnoses like those in the article are like reading horoscopes alot of the time, but then I see this "social interactions, motor skills, sensory processing, and a tendency toward repetitive behavior" and "Marked impairment in the use of nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction."
It friggin sucks to be like this when others are around. I feel fine when its just me, alone. Then I am "normal". Or maybe it's all another marketable designer disease to capitalise on an information overloaded society. All those wired kids from (wealthy) wired parents ready for the diagnosing. Maybe our species is slowly evolving into specialised groups. We have races that developed along climatological and geographical lines to adapt to the environment, so I have no problem thinking that maybe this is just darwinian environmental pressures in action. There is alot of information out there, and alot of it is highly specialised, requiring a certain mind ( or wetware configuration?)
I don't mean that people like this are superior or anything, although in the short-term it may have an advantage in our economy, but that is only on the scale of a few generations. I am thinking more in terms of ourselves as a species. We have "geeks", "atheletes", "artists" and the ever-numerous "sheeple", which have always been around to an extent, maybe our species is specialising in order to cope with the amount of information neccessary to survive.
How many people can run a triathalon, code up a small mail agent, cook a gourmet dinner, perform simple surgery if the need arose, interpret the latest precedent-setting court case, sculpt a piece of greco-roman inspired art, and read a book to your kids at night? I don't know about you, but I have hard time just getting out of the bed, my stupid body refuses to hear the damn alarm clock sometimes;)
Anyways, I have shit social skills, avoid the company of others, and am basically a misfit. I am not pulling in the huge IT bucks, so despite my intelligence, I won't get the sexy AND intelligent wife, fast car, and nice clothes (in that order please).
So, how many slashdotters out there are well-adjusted, sociable geeks (Hmm, oxymoron?), and how many of you are/have been diagnosed as being "different" from your fellow homo sapiens?
No mention of UDP in the article.
No mention of distributed data in the article.
No mention of compression in the article.
Hmm, perhaps some sheeple*cough*people got lost on the way. Here is the link again. Read it over.
Take a chunk of data, reduce it to an equation. Break equation into symbols. Send. Receive a percentage of symbols. Perform XOR on symbols received. Rebuild equation, solve equation, recreate data. Stop send, stop receive. Thank you for using StarTrek FTP server, goodbye.
As the cost of the boxes are so high, they will probably only be used by backbones. I was hoping this would be a software only solution. The we would really see Digital Convergence. Hell, our processors are fast enough...
Please mod parent up, posters above this are STILL blathering on about distributed data transmission.
Read the article people. It's NOT anything like Kazaa, Morpheus, MojoNation or the like. It's about sending data as a mathematical representation of the data, not the data itself. And you only need a portion of the whole equation to arrive at the "solution". That means less actual packets being transmitted, and less overhead from packet loss and retransmission.
And because the MS settlement says that they are not required to expose "security-related" technologies, they can extend their monopoly further under the guise of anti-piracy measures, all the while without breaching the terms of their "punishment".
If the Xbox is any indication, we might wind up with MS selling hardware (a la Apple) with fully DRM-compliant hardware. Who needs Dell and Hp then?
Microsoft is branching out in a myriad of directions, at full tilt now. They no longer are concerned with the desktop, because they already have it. Now they want to supply you hardware, house your data, and sell you your OS on a monthly basis. Microsoft is poised to become a Information Behemoth, thanks to the toothless DOJ. Be afraid.
Not to downplay your comment or anything, but I think what the AC was getting at was that if the hardware we use won't play nice with non-DRM software, then we're screwed. The sheeple are for the most part unaware of the impact stuff like this can have on "personal freedom". Therfore, if this gets slipped by relatively unoticed in a new CPU, and then relatively unoticed in the new MS XP 2003, then we could find ourselves entrenched with restrictive hardware. A boycott at that point will be akin to the general public being asked to abandon computing, as the only hardware available would be DRM compliant.
How will alternative OSes deal with DRM hardware?
I'm not a chip designer, so I don't know if instructions can be made/forced to be dependant on "DRM calls". If I am naive on this point, please feel free to enlighten me. Is it possible to "lock out" an OS if it is not using a special subset (like DRM) in the chip design?
An extreme scenario to be sure, but I see that apart from some dissension in the tech media, XP's invasive anti-piracy has been ignored for the most part by the greater public. If you want XP, you gotta deal with the reg key. Will the average Joe/Jane stick with w98 on a P400 forever?
I have been unable to get this to work as described in the article, or by the other attempts posted so far. The closest I have come is to create a Redirect or Rewrite rule that takes a request for a *.txt file and points it to a.bat file (thereby fullfilling the "text" requirement"), which is then soft linked to your malicious executable. This still displays the file's name however. And the dialogue asks you to "run" this program. The extra step of the soft-link bypasses a warning about running the file; if the redirect went straight to the.exe, the browser will complain about security.
Either way, this is entirely server-side. The article states that simple HTML can pull it off. I am wondering if that is just a smoke screen.
- I have tried renaming an.exe file to.txt, that just spits binary data at you in Notepad.
Now, this time the dialogue displays the requested file (.cgi) instead of the executable filename (not a redirect). However, you are then prompted to "choose a program to run this..." which means that the requested file has to have an executable extension, or a known extension. Wav, mp3, mpg won't work as the format is obviously invalid.
3) I tried messing with the mime.types in Apache, various soft links and combos of all 3 methods. Basically I fail to see how standard HTML without any server-side config or scripting can fool the browser or get it to exec code unwillingly, as described in the article.
Maybe if I renamed the file to mayIhaveyouradvice.txt.pif or something, but the extension IS displayed to the user. Maybe the average user doesnt pay attention, but its kind of hard to miss.
Obviously they have ommitted something crucial because (my box - W2K, IE 5.5 SP2) this "bug" is not happening, and it's not happening for other people too. If this is so easy to implement in palin HTML and would affect "millions" then I think other/.ers would have hit on it by now.
>Actually, Slashdot has way more Windows apologizers than it used to. And this is a bad thing.
Apologists? Get stuffed. How about rational and clear-headed. Like being able to spot reverse FUD in action. Again, you are another/.er with an agenda to push. I've said it before, I'll say it again. I don't come here to fucking push a one-sided agenda, and I think that the so-called apologists are just geeks looking for some JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY. If the low UIDs and zealots want to keep the blinders on and circle jerk all the way to non-MS heaven so be it. This board seems to be evolving away from that, thank god. There are some of us who recognise flaws and strengths with many different apps and OSes and are WILLING TO TELL THE FUCKING TRUTH.
Yes this "feature" is a security risk. Yes it is serious. And YES, the tone of Michael's comments border on tabloidism. And YES, I think it is appropriate that the patrons of this board be able to point that fact out and demand a little bit of non-partisan behaviour from the editors.
You're out of line Mister. There will be absolutley NO crticism of any of the motives of the/. editors. 50 LASHES!
MOOOOOOOve along, nothing to see here, keep towing the party line. MOOOOOOOOO.
I think this article is just filler until the newsday starts. Either that, or it's/.'s version of that horrid christmas muzak you hear at the dept store.
Did we not leave that kind drivel in the last century? I actually read the words "freed from the chains of capitalism".
This guy is actually talking about how everything could be GPL'd. This is Marxism with a new name, nothing more. It's fashionable to say "GPL" in a an article, and IIRC it was the same in the 1890's.
The most valuable resource we have is people, and we don't need them creating art and coding another damn window manager. Get over there and answer that phone, sweep that floor, and shovel that turd. Our most valuable resource is the expenditure of energy by the masses. BATTERIES.
If there really was a need for sysadmins, I would see ads for them, and have a better job. If there really was a need for basket weavers and crappy golf players, we would see a demand for it. Face it people, no one cares about your self-unfolding hobby or "talent", we need someone to haul this sack of coffee beans down the mountain for delivery to Seattle.
If this type of system he describes (again, the only reason this got ANY attention at all was because of the OSS software spin) was the optimal system, we would be living it right now.
To think that software will save the day, or that a licensing model will free us from our "chains" is BULLSHIT. Get real. Read the end of the article where this Utter Idiot spouts his simplistic "GPL Society" vision. Same damn flawed arguments put forth by the Marxists. GPL Society??? What, are you going to tell me that my mind/body and any derivatives (does that include my poop?) are open to the public and must be released after any modification? Cool, cuz I'd really like to get busy with Shannon Elizabeth.
Open Source Shannon Elizabeth!
What a crackpot. Some things are more valuable than others. I have something you want/need, but it is in short supply. If you want it, you will have to trade/barter with me for something of equal value. How hard is this to grasp? I can't believe that this issue is still being questioned. The only thing he did get right was that free software is available because the basic needs of others were already met, allowing them to create Free software. I have stated the same before and been flamed for it. Fuck that. Nobody has time to code, and then give it away, all the while with an empty belly. Free Software is a luxury. Someone, somewhere had to get stepped on in order for you to sit in a comfy chair and write software for free. Now how utopian and altruistic is that?
The article did have a great deal of political commentary in it. Blah blah, capitalism,blah, blah Marxism---BORING. That article was way too long. Honestly, that whole information wants to be free argument is crap. Information has and never will be free. It always has a cost. Food, energy, competition, whatever. It will always cost something to aquire a resource of any kind, and always at a loss (entropy).
Second, the reason capitalism as an applied practice works ( for the most part) is because it's mechanisms are closest to those of nature and evolution. Eat or be eaten. Socialism and Marxism are in stark contrast to natural history. Especially in terms of human society and civilisation. There will always be a gap between the haves and have-nots, and no half-baked theory is going to prevent that.
Software may be free-speech, or gratis, but it will always cost something, at the very least it will cost time. And time is one of the most valuable things we have. Time is brushing your teeth and taking a crap and feeding yourself so you can code for free. Time has a cost, because it is a fixed resource. So, information may want to be free, but so does that nice new car I want.
Too bad the time it took create/grow those goods you need to continue your time here cost someone else theirs and they want compensation.
Even star trek replicators have an associated cost, in terms of how may atoms of whatever raw resource is utilised, in terms of the limited energy resource used to power the generators to run the ship.
Everything can be reduced to data, (on/off, existant/non-existent, here/there), and the data available is finite. Add to that the fact that the data is corrupting constantly and is lost (no permanent storage). Therefore everything has a value (relative to all else) and a price tag for it's use.
Don't expect software to deliver us to utopia until we discover a nutritional value to bytes.
You may have value as a coder because your obtuse language is difficult for the masses to grasp, and because you are few. So were priests back in the Dark Ages. But to think that an information society solves the fundamental problems of humanity and that OSS or FS can deliver us from the dank fossil fuel cave of the post-industrial era is being naive. Software is a limited technology. Sooner or later, DNA and amino acids will be the language du jour, and you will all be out of work. We need to get out of this consumerism-based culture because it is not sustainable, and its not capitalism that is the problem, but the fact that our economies are based on fossil fuel. We need to begin producing replicable bio-products, not another window manager.
Software is never free, and software's time in the sun is coming to a close. Bioware is on it's way.
I tried out blender a couple years ago, when I was seriously shopping for a 3d package. It's interface is a real nightmare, even for a 3d app, and that says something. Further more, the rendering engine (at the time mind you) was primitive. I will admit it had alot of features that you only find in the higher end 3d packages, but overall, the learning curve is pretty steep.
You will spend far more time trying to figure out what you just did, what happened to your view, and how to get it back, then you will modelling.
The only way to figure out how to use it to cough up $199 for the manual (cannot find anything on the site right now).
I admit it's been a couple of years since I checked it out, my info may be outdated, but in the end, I settled for Cinema 4D. The interface is pretty clean, good animation and modelling tools, one of the fastest rendering engines out there, and the price is decent for a commercial app. Good thing too, because not only am I a poor artist, but I am a poor (read: crappy) 3D artist too;)
Hear, hear! I say the ISPs just provide bandwidth, let another service handle your mail, any personal/commercial web storage, etc. Competition will go up in the market, and more job opportunites will come about, as well as some simplification. Too much expense and time is spent hand-holding the masses for every little thing involving their net experience.
I say the services should be seperated until this industry gets it's shit together.
Seems it was all just marketing and hype. Now we have chemical imbalances, ADD and ADHD and other snazzy marketable names to describe a general tendency to become easily distracted and/or frustrated. Personally I think our brains are having a difficult time evolving to our increasingly input-intensive environment, and need to catch-up.
I think I would feel better about things if I grew up thinking I was just "an asshole" rather than chemically unbalanced.
Slashdot Mirror
Just need to bitch here, mostly about the current IT training offerings out there...
I want to work in Networks and Systems. I've been doing ISP helpdesk for just over a year, and it's getting stale fast. So I've been looking around for some courses that offer *nix and MS, and solid networking skills. The edu situation looks like this:
-Private "colleges" (DeVry, CompuCollege, any fly-by-night school that offers MSCE) : 6-12 mnths full-time==$15,000 CDN gets you a certificate, usually MSCE and A+, vouchers to take the tests.
-Community Colleges, and Lesser Colleges (the ones you go to to prepare for University, get a business degree, etc): Part-time/Full-time, poor course offerings or limited curriculuum, tend to focus on CS, not enough Sys/Net offerings. 6-12mnths, $5000-$10,000 CDN, vouchers to take the tests, Certificate.
-University or Tech schools(BCIT): By far the most intensive, thorough offerings of the bunch. Part-time,/Full-time, still focussed mostly on CS, but their Sys/Net courses are a good mix of MS/*nix, Cisco stuff and even Novell sometimes. 12months-2years.
$7000-$15,000. Gets you a Certificate, vouchers to take the vendor exams.
Now, I make piddly as helpdesk drone and even in this economy, I'll have hard time breaking out of the tech support trap. (Once a phonedrone, no one will touch you). I figure that once I finish a course, things will begin to improve. The problem is this: the University of BC offers a 12 month course in Sysadmining, it's a good course, ~$7K, part-time. Good stuff, But part-timers dont qualify for a student-loan. So I'm fucked. And all I want to know is this:
How is it that I can take 4 _full_ years of University and walk out with a BA knowing the sum of 2000 years of human knowledge in a particular discipline for ~$4000-5000 in tuition and books --- but it takes 2 years of part-time, twice-a-week, 5hr-long _seminars_ that are offered once per term, to get a "Certificate" in a discipline that is 30 years old at a cost of $7000-$10,000? WTF? Hell, even the 2 year CSci degree is only $4K, fulltime! $7K to learn how to compile Apache and setup Exchange 2000? Please....
BTW, I already know half the shit any of these courses could teach me, but the paper helps a great deal, and a little formal edu never hurt...
>I just want to go to the friggin' grocery store, why do I have to do this crazy dancing shit with the 3 goofy foot pedals!
ROFL! Amen brother! The number of times I have conversed with that same person...
Whatever. I can fill up my desktop with as many folders as it can display. And all that precious real estate will be toast because (at least right now) I can't do a "view->details", and I'll be stuck with oversized icons.
/bin?
/. Although the *option* to do so would be neat. No, I mean a simple cube, with objects that represent meaningful relationships between what it is you want to do, and where it is.
IMNSHO, this idea sucks. If I am stuck on the desktop, how will I get into the Program Files to apply that crack, or rename that binary in
I *need" all that space, and the ability to create a spiral of categorized porn descending into hell. Sure, get rid of the drive letter designations, but I want to roam free wihtin my partitions and create stuff that I don't *want* on the desktop. The desktop is where I do active work, I don't want every damn thing I have on there. Then I would really have a problem with unecessarily deep subdirectories.
Nope, keep the hard disk, or drive or "mass storage icon" or whever the hell. Instead, create a simple 3d environment. Nothing to elaborate, I don't want to have to collect the red key and frag my way to my browser to view
I login, an am presented with the choice of any number of customized "environments". Office, lounge, gameroom, etc. Each environment loads what is neccessary for that room, and not much more. Maybe I don't want certian drivers loaded if all I am doing is browsing in the "office", or I don't need net connectivity in the "lounge" to listen to music or whatever. Rooms serve the purpose of multiple desktops.
Choose a room, and basically, organise your furniture (functional objects) according to their purpose. And I dont want to have to walk around or fly (optional) to get to my desk. I should have a 360 pan view of the room, and hit the setero and fire up Winamp 9.0, or focus on the window to load my browser. I know quite a few people prefer the cli, and some dont think a 3d desktop is useful. Well, I hate drawing with the cli, just as I hate typing with my mouse. As usual, use the right tool, for the job. 3d will have it's place, as long as the eye candy is kept to a minimum, especially for office workers.
Sound like these guys are fishing for grant money to me. Get rid of the desktop...<chuckle>, yeah and kill the cli too, right? Hehe
>As far as social skills go, I dont have them, I have technical skills. I could develop social skills but to do so while it would balance me, i'd have to become less technical to do so.
You know, at this point in my life, I think a healthy dose of hockey-banter and a desire to have "frivilous" conversation would do me a world of good. I would probably do better in job interviews, get along better with colleagues, and be "on the market" for that sexy and intelligent geektrix. I would like to be balanced. The fact is, socially adept people are the managers, VPs, and CEOs in the world. Those that can read a person's intent. They may not be able to grasp the concept of <insert geek topic >, but they certainly can see that I may/may not fit in with the corp culture within their organisation. And if they are the one doing the hiring, well, I'm SOL.
We are predatory creatures at the same time that we are co-operative, and there is a very subtle dance taking place in front of my eyes every day that I cannot see. Booksmart as I may be, if you cannot interact, it is difficult to "network", schmooze, lie, flatter, whatever the so-called neurotypicals do. Maybe in a 1000 years autistic behaviour will be an advantage and the norm, but today it is a liability.
Remember, the ability to interact with your fellow monkeyman/woman is still far more important than your hacking skillz. The world as we know it could alter significantly at any moment. Think of the traits neccessary during the 72 hrs after an earthquake. Leadership, co-operation, communication; nobody is going to be needing a programmer or network engineer when you're scrounging for food with glass stuck between your toes.
>Yes they do need individual attention, or they need to learn perhaps using computers and technology instead of books and chalkboards
...technology AND books and chalkboards.
You mean
Trust me, a kid like those described in the article needs books, perhaps even more so than computers. A good story is a safe, quiet place, and allows the mind to roam.
Well, according to my family, I was a pretty happy and good kid until 2, then "it" started. I was unruly and unmanageable, and just not "ordinary". I was diagnosed as autistic, and supposedly highly intelligent. Most of my problems were behavioural (tantrums, outburts,etc) and later I was "hyperactive". I spent most of late childhood/early adolescence on medication.
;)
Now I am in my late 20's and can honestly say that I am of average or even above-average intelligence, and pretty much fit the description of any of those children. I will admit that pop-culture diagnoses like those in the article are like reading horoscopes alot of the time, but then I see this "social interactions, motor skills, sensory processing, and a tendency toward repetitive behavior" and "Marked impairment in the use of nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction."
It friggin sucks to be like this when others are around. I feel fine when its just me, alone. Then I am "normal". Or maybe it's all another marketable designer disease to capitalise on an information overloaded society. All those wired kids from (wealthy) wired parents ready for the diagnosing. Maybe our species is slowly evolving into specialised groups. We have races that developed along climatological and geographical lines to adapt to the environment, so I have no problem thinking that maybe this is just darwinian environmental pressures in action. There is alot of information out there, and alot of it is highly specialised, requiring a certain mind ( or wetware configuration?)
I don't mean that people like this are superior or anything, although in the short-term it may have an advantage in our economy, but that is only on the scale of a few generations. I am thinking more in terms of ourselves as a species. We have "geeks", "atheletes", "artists" and the ever-numerous "sheeple", which have always been around to an extent, maybe our species is specialising in order to cope with the amount of information neccessary to survive.
How many people can run a triathalon, code up a small mail agent, cook a gourmet dinner, perform simple surgery if the need arose, interpret the latest precedent-setting court case, sculpt a piece of greco-roman inspired art, and read a book to your kids at night? I don't know about you, but I have hard time just getting out of the bed, my stupid body refuses to hear the damn alarm clock sometimes
Anyways, I have shit social skills, avoid the company of others, and am basically a misfit. I am not pulling in the huge IT bucks, so despite my intelligence, I won't get the sexy AND intelligent wife, fast car, and nice clothes (in that order please).
So, how many slashdotters out there are well-adjusted, sociable geeks (Hmm, oxymoron?), and how many of you are/have been diagnosed as being "different" from your fellow homo sapiens?
< raises hand >
No mention of UDP in the article.
No mention of distributed data in the article.
No mention of compression in the article.
Hmm, perhaps some sheeple*cough*people got lost on the way. Here is the link again. Read it over.
Take a chunk of data, reduce it to an equation. Break equation into symbols. Send. Receive a percentage of symbols. Perform XOR on symbols received. Rebuild equation, solve equation, recreate data. Stop send, stop receive. Thank you for using StarTrek FTP server, goodbye.
As the cost of the boxes are so high, they will probably only be used by backbones. I was hoping this would be a software only solution. The we would really see Digital Convergence. Hell, our processors are fast enough...
Please mod parent up, posters above this are STILL blathering on about distributed data transmission.
Read the article people. It's NOT anything like Kazaa, Morpheus, MojoNation or the like. It's about sending data as a mathematical representation of the data, not the data itself. And you only need a portion of the whole equation to arrive at the "solution". That means less actual packets being transmitted, and less overhead from packet loss and retransmission.
General Computing Public: 98%
Geeks: 1%
Non-Users: 1%
Joe Public: Who cares, anyway? I just want to surf the 'Net.
Seen the ads touting MSN as a "friendly alternative" to AOL yet?
Damn, I meant to respond specifically to this:
;)
>This can be seen as a response to MS agreeing to allow OEMs to produce dual-boot machines.
Insert my above comment here. Clarity helps
And because the MS settlement says that they are not required to expose "security-related" technologies, they can extend their monopoly further under the guise of anti-piracy measures, all the while without breaching the terms of their "punishment".
Hooray.<heavy sarcasm>
If the Xbox is any indication, we might wind up with MS selling hardware (a la Apple) with fully DRM-compliant hardware. Who needs Dell and Hp then?
Microsoft is branching out in a myriad of directions, at full tilt now. They no longer are concerned with the desktop, because they already have it. Now they want to supply you hardware, house your data, and sell you your OS on a monthly basis. Microsoft is poised to become a Information Behemoth, thanks to the toothless DOJ. Be afraid.
Not to downplay your comment or anything, but I think what the AC was getting at was that if the hardware we use won't play nice with non-DRM software, then we're screwed. The sheeple are for the most part unaware of the impact stuff like this can have on "personal freedom". Therfore, if this gets slipped by relatively unoticed in a new CPU, and then relatively unoticed in the new MS XP 2003, then we could find ourselves entrenched with restrictive hardware. A boycott at that point will be akin to the general public being asked to abandon computing, as the only hardware available would be DRM compliant.
How will alternative OSes deal with DRM hardware?
I'm not a chip designer, so I don't know if instructions can be made/forced to be dependant on "DRM calls". If I am naive on this point, please feel free to enlighten me. Is it possible to "lock out" an OS if it is not using a special subset (like DRM) in the chip design?
An extreme scenario to be sure, but I see that apart from some dissension in the tech media, XP's invasive anti-piracy has been ignored for the most part by the greater public. If you want XP, you gotta deal with the reg key. Will the average Joe/Jane stick with w98 on a P400 forever?
(Score: +1) Bizarre
I have been unable to get this to work as described in the article, or by the other attempts posted so far. The closest I have come is to create a Redirect or Rewrite rule that takes a request for a *.txt file and points it to a .bat file (thereby fullfilling the "text" requirement"), which is then soft linked to your malicious executable. This still displays the file's name however. And the dialogue asks you to "run" this program. The extra step of the soft-link bypasses a warning about running the file; if the redirect went straight to the .exe, the browser will complain about security.
.exe file to .txt, that just spits binary data at you in Notepad.
/.ers would have hit on it by now.
Either way, this is entirely server-side. The article states that simple HTML can pull it off. I am wondering if that is just a smoke screen.
- I have tried renaming an
- I tried a cgi (source is here).
Now, this time the dialogue displays the requested file (.cgi) instead of the executable filename (not a redirect). However, you are then prompted to "choose a program to run this..." which means that the requested file has to have an executable extension, or a known extension. Wav, mp3, mpg won't work as the format is obviously invalid.
3) I tried messing with the mime.types in Apache, various soft links and combos of all 3 methods. Basically I fail to see how standard HTML without any server-side config or scripting can fool the browser or get it to exec code unwillingly, as described in the article.
Maybe if I renamed the file to mayIhaveyouradvice.txt.pif or something, but the extension IS displayed to the user. Maybe the average user doesnt pay attention, but its kind of hard to miss.
Obviously they have ommitted something crucial because (my box - W2K, IE 5.5 SP2) this "bug" is not happening, and it's not happening for other people too. If this is so easy to implement in palin HTML and would affect "millions" then I think other
>Actually, Slashdot has way more Windows apologizers than it used to. And this is a bad thing.
/.er with an agenda to push. I've said it before, I'll say it again. I don't come here to fucking push a one-sided agenda, and I think that the so-called apologists are just geeks looking for some JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY. If the low UIDs and zealots want to keep the blinders on and circle jerk all the way to non-MS heaven so be it. This board seems to be evolving away from that, thank god. There are some of us who recognise flaws and strengths with many different apps and OSes and are WILLING TO TELL THE FUCKING TRUTH.
Apologists? Get stuffed. How about rational and clear-headed. Like being able to spot reverse FUD in action. Again, you are another
Yes this "feature" is a security risk. Yes it is serious. And YES, the tone of Michael's comments border on tabloidism. And YES, I think it is appropriate that the patrons of this board be able to point that fact out and demand a little bit of non-partisan behaviour from the editors.
You're out of line Mister. There will be absolutley NO crticism of any of the motives of the /. editors. 50 LASHES!
/.'s version of that horrid christmas muzak you hear at the dept store.
MOOOOOOOve along, nothing to see here, keep towing the party line. MOOOOOOOOO.
I think this article is just filler until the newsday starts. Either that, or it's
Did we not leave that kind drivel in the last century? I actually read the words "freed from the chains of capitalism".
This guy is actually talking about how everything could be GPL'd. This is Marxism with a new name, nothing more. It's fashionable to say "GPL" in a an article, and IIRC it was the same in the 1890's.
The most valuable resource we have is people, and we don't need them creating art and coding another damn window manager. Get over there and answer that phone, sweep that floor, and shovel that turd. Our most valuable resource is the expenditure of energy by the masses. BATTERIES.
If there really was a need for sysadmins, I would see ads for them, and have a better job. If there really was a need for basket weavers and crappy golf players, we would see a demand for it. Face it people, no one cares about your self-unfolding hobby or "talent", we need someone to haul this sack of coffee beans down the mountain for delivery to Seattle.
If this type of system he describes (again, the only reason this got ANY attention at all was because of the OSS software spin) was the optimal system, we would be living it right now.
To think that software will save the day, or that a licensing model will free us from our "chains" is BULLSHIT. Get real. Read the end of the article where this Utter Idiot spouts his simplistic "GPL Society" vision. Same damn flawed arguments put forth by the Marxists. GPL Society??? What, are you going to tell me that my mind/body and any derivatives (does that include my poop?) are open to the public and must be released after any modification? Cool, cuz I'd really like to get busy with Shannon Elizabeth.
Open Source Shannon Elizabeth!
What a crackpot. Some things are more valuable than others. I have something you want/need, but it is in short supply. If you want it, you will have to trade/barter with me for something of equal value. How hard is this to grasp? I can't believe that this issue is still being questioned. The only thing he did get right was that free software is available because the basic needs of others were already met, allowing them to create Free software. I have stated the same before and been flamed for it. Fuck that. Nobody has time to code, and then give it away, all the while with an empty belly. Free Software is a luxury. Someone, somewhere had to get stepped on in order for you to sit in a comfy chair and write software for free. Now how utopian and altruistic is that?
The article did have a great deal of political commentary in it. Blah blah, capitalism,blah, blah Marxism---BORING. That article was way too long. Honestly, that whole information wants to be free argument is crap. Information has and never will be free. It always has a cost. Food, energy, competition, whatever. It will always cost something to aquire a resource of any kind, and always at a loss (entropy).
Second, the reason capitalism as an applied practice works ( for the most part) is because it's mechanisms are closest to those of nature and evolution. Eat or be eaten. Socialism and Marxism are in stark contrast to natural history. Especially in terms of human society and civilisation. There will always be a gap between the haves and have-nots, and no half-baked theory is going to prevent that.
Software may be free-speech, or gratis, but it will always cost something, at the very least it will cost time. And time is one of the most valuable things we have. Time is brushing your teeth and taking a crap and feeding yourself so you can code for free. Time has a cost, because it is a fixed resource. So, information may want to be free, but so does that nice new car I want.
Too bad the time it took create/grow those goods you need to continue your time here cost someone else theirs and they want compensation.
Even star trek replicators have an associated cost, in terms of how may atoms of whatever raw resource is utilised, in terms of the limited energy resource used to power the generators to run the ship.
Everything can be reduced to data, (on/off, existant/non-existent, here/there), and the data available is finite. Add to that the fact that the data is corrupting constantly and is lost (no permanent storage). Therefore everything has a value (relative to all else) and a price tag for it's use.
Don't expect software to deliver us to utopia until we discover a nutritional value to bytes.
You may have value as a coder because your obtuse language is difficult for the masses to grasp, and because you are few. So were priests back in the Dark Ages. But to think that an information society solves the fundamental problems of humanity and that OSS or FS can deliver us from the dank fossil fuel cave of the post-industrial era is being naive. Software is a limited technology. Sooner or later, DNA and amino acids will be the language du jour, and you will all be out of work. We need to get out of this consumerism-based culture because it is not sustainable, and its not capitalism that is the problem, but the fact that our economies are based on fossil fuel. We need to begin producing replicable bio-products, not another window manager.
Software is never free, and software's time in the sun is coming to a close. Bioware is on it's way.
Yuck.
Spam spread?
Dear God, who on earth would eat such a thing?!? And I thought Marmite was foul...
Pardon me, you are correct. It was the C-key I was thinking of.
I tried out blender a couple years ago, when I was seriously shopping for a 3d package. It's interface is a real nightmare, even for a 3d app, and that says something. Further more, the rendering engine (at the time mind you) was primitive. I will admit it had alot of features that you only find in the higher end 3d packages, but overall, the learning curve is pretty steep.
;)
You will spend far more time trying to figure out what you just did, what happened to your view, and how to get it back, then you will modelling.
The only way to figure out how to use it to cough up $199 for the manual (cannot find anything on the site right now).
I admit it's been a couple of years since I checked it out, my info may be outdated, but in the end, I settled for Cinema 4D. The interface is pretty clean, good animation and modelling tools, one of the fastest rendering engines out there, and the price is decent for a commercial app. Good thing too, because not only am I a poor artist, but I am a poor (read: crappy) 3D artist too
Hear, hear! I say the ISPs just provide bandwidth, let another service handle your mail, any personal/commercial web storage, etc. Competition will go up in the market, and more job opportunites will come about, as well as some simplification. Too much expense and time is spent hand-holding the masses for every little thing involving their net experience.
I say the services should be seperated until this industry gets it's shit together.
Good points. Too bad you got modded as a Troll :(
I was born when Ritalin was a big thing for unruly children, although I was too young to take it. I was diagnosed as autistic at age 2, then as hyper-intelligent, then it was determined that I suffered from Hyperactive Disorder©, and put on a special sugar-free diet for a couple of years. By age 8 I was Manic Depressive© and hospitalized and spent most of my late childhood/adolescence on antidepressives. I stopped needing to take meds by my late teens and for a while I was OK, but I don't feel so good or interact that well anymore. The thing is though, no matter what "it" is called and what meds I took, I never did interact well anyway.
Seems it was all just marketing and hype. Now we have chemical imbalances, ADD and ADHD and other snazzy marketable names to describe a general tendency to become easily distracted and/or frustrated. Personally I think our brains are having a difficult time evolving to our increasingly input-intensive environment, and need to catch-up.
I think I would feel better about things if I grew up thinking I was just "an asshole" rather than chemically unbalanced.