I think the best solution in an environment like that is to setup two partitions and have the main drive imaged nightly (or use a program like deepfreeze). This keeps everything running fresh each day, lets people store important documents on the other partition, and gives people freedom to install programs which they might need for work related things (winzip, acrobat, etc.) It's pretty easy to update the image if you have to install a patch or another program, and saves people the trouble of trying to hack their way into installing programs. There is no way (rational way at least) to prevent people from getting past whatever security you put in place as long as they don't have someone watching over their computer 24 hours a day. Even with the best policies you can possibly setup, someone can always boot off a floppy, cd-rom, usb drive, etc and find a way around it. If you disable these options in the bios if the person is determined enough they could always open the case and reset the bios settings to get around this. You could always put a lock on the case, but that never stopped me >:)
And it really pisses me off that you can't spell consequences correctly. How does it feel when someone jumps on you for your mistakes, not so good huh? I think they should ban your Slashdot account for that typo.
Now of course there was some sarcasm intended there, but really...people make mistakes...especially when they're 63 years old. This could have been handled by a simple "uninstall it NOW" and avoided this whole situation which seems to be nothing than some cocky government prick that wants to get a little attention. This reminds me of the RIAA picking on children and old grannies for downloading music on Kazaa. None of us know the whole situation, but I am sure that the termination and senseless public remarks about this poor man hurt him a lot more than a few extra clock cyles ever hurt anyone.
This won't affect me that much even though I do use AIM. Most of my contacts also have other messenger programs, and since trillian is my program of choice it won't change the way I communicate to them one bit. I don't think AOL will charge for it's normal service, in fact I think they will give up on charging for video conference with all the other alternatives out there such as yahoo and msn which also have perfectly capable (and free) video conferencing. Yes they make a little money from advertising, but the end users aren't the ones shelling out the cash, and I don't think they will.
I have played this game for nearly 2 years, and it's getting even better. I find it to be the most realistic games out there. You can check out my clan's website at www.combatlifesavers.us. Try this game out and see how you like it
I opted into the "new and improved" eBay 2.0. There was a way to opt out at first, but ebay took that option away and locked it's users into using eBay 2.0. eBay then offered "workshops" to let users give their input, and after reading pages and pages of people screaming they want to be able to switch back to the older version, they just seemed to ignore them and answer questions related to how they could improve the atrocious interface of their new monster. Ebay seemed to lose a few buyers, and even some of their power-sellers because they would not give us back the link to opt out of eBay 2.0. So now I'm stuck with eBay 2.0, with no way to opt out. All I can say is that I'm glad I don't sell much because I heard it can be a pain in the ass now.:)
More information about eBay's workshops can be found at.... http://www2.ebay.com/aw/marketing.shtml
"Enemy spotted, 100 yards and closing. "Open fire soldier!" "Sir my weapon says it's not responding" "Reboot soldier!" "I did sir, but each time I reboot it still says "Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service terminated unexpectedly."" "Disable your wireless connection soldier and switch to manual override, we're being exploited!"
Meanwhile somewhere in the middle east... "Heheheheh.........silly Americans...."
So how are they going to stop us from using older programs to broadcast the media? I don't feel a need to upgrade my shoutcast server just so I can have a radio broadcast flag that rats me out when I'm broadcasting copyrighted music. They would either have to change the way the internet works, or force a new media type on us other than mp3.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I was expecting to see in the game when I originally bought it. After playing for a while I decided to cancel my subscription because it wasn't what I was really looking for. But I want to renew my subscription after seeing this. Too bad I've already been sucked into Lineage2.
Maybe you should take a different approach to this situation. You say that the school has security problems, and you seem to be knowledgeable in the matter, so why not explain the problem and ask them if they would be willing to pay you to fix it? If all else they might nag their developers to work a little harder after hearing about it.:)
"The survey was conducted online with 3,613 respondents between mid-December and mid-January, the company said."
But while we are playing our fps games (ad free), the women are online playing their web based games and suddenly this window pops up asking them to take a survey. Of course the it's going to be a little biased.
I'm in the same boat at the call center I work at, except I think my monitor is a little older, and yeah we're running NT. We have the stupidest policies setup, no task manager, no internet options, can't change just about anything. Our admins don't fix anything, and about 1/3 of the computers are broken in some way (we have about 600 spots). Now they've installed lockdown software that images them every night, you can't right click on web pages(at all on some computers). Mice are broken, phones are broken, chairs are broken or missing parts, hard drives make nice grinding noises, they have content filters that block out anything with zip, exe, com, dll, and a lot more. Not to mention there's mold growing in some of the drawers where people leave their food, wrappers, drinks, etc. Hmm..maybe we can grow an Ol' Drippy like on Aqua Teen Hunger Force? At my job you don't have an assigned desk, you sit down and take calls wherever there is a seat available, and with the vast amount of broken computers it's not really easy to find one sometimes. They enforce manditory overtime, then when call volume drops they start asking people to go home. They call you on your days off on a regular basis asking you to come into work (or else).
I definitely think that the largest physical harm from video games is done to your eyes. I know that looking at computer monitors set at 60hz definitely can cause some eye strain, and in my case, even some vision problems. I can't say that 100% of my bad eyesight has come from computer monitors and tv screens, but I feel it definitely has had a negative impact on my vision. I'm at the point now where many types of contacts are not available to me because of the strength of my perscription. Bad vision runs in my family, but nobody's is as bad as mine. Since I have started using 85hz or more on my monitors, I have noticed my eyesight has stopped getting worse, and I don't get headaches from those 12 hour gaming sessions. Am I the only one who has noticed that refresh rates have a large impact on eye strain?
And they do help with temperatures a lot here in Texas. I also have a very dark shade put up in my room also to keep the light out. Ahh the sun *hisses like vampire*
Buy the Mini ITX Compact Falsh IDE Adapter!
on
Mini-Box M-100
·
· Score: 1
I always wanted a Falsh IDE Adapter! http://www.mini-box.com/cfadapter.htm
I drive a modified 93 mustang with about 365 horsepower, and I enjoy it. I still get 22-25mpg on the freeway which isn't bad at all for what it is. People for some reason have come to the idea that performance=lack of gas mileage which is completely untrue. Just because more air is able to get into the engine does not mean that it has to. Basically what I'm saying is that you have still have a high horsepower car and not spend more money on gas than someone with the same car and less horsepower provided you don't floor it all of the time. My car actually gets better gas mileage than stock...
I work for an ISP of which name shall remain unknown, and no not AOL, but anyways I have noticed that a lot of the techs there are also very loyal to their OS X. I even admit that I have tampered with it a little and the interface really is kind of nice. If I could afford to buy one I might even do that, maybe some other time...
"Yeah I just bought one of those new 2 Terabyte drives with the 20 gig boot sector...."
Nitto 1320 Challenge
on
Advergames
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I recently started playing the Nitto 1320 challenge, which you can download at http://www.nittoracing.com/
It is a very addicting game; sort of like a Gran Tourismo 3 for drag racing, with far inferior graphics, but it's in flash....give em a break. This game is free, and does the job of advertising quite well without cluttering the game with ads. Perhaps advergames will take this same track towards their development. Remember in Duke Nukem how they had the posters up on the walls in some rooms, what if you could dynamically replace those with advertisements. This wouldn't take away from gameplay in my opinion, because it's not something you have to pay attention to if don't want to. Companies could pay per day/week/whatever to advertise within games, without interfering with the game itself. Another place they could put ads would be at the end of first person shooter rounds. This could provide money for top notch servers, and they could simply put a little "This server is sponsored by..." somewhere noticable, but not intruding, within the screen. I don't think I would mind these methods, but if companies start putting ads up and making you watch them before you can play again, then you can count on the cracks to start rolling out.
Slashdot Mirror
omg I hate clippy! DIE!
I think the best solution in an environment like that is to setup two partitions and have the main drive imaged nightly (or use a program like deepfreeze). This keeps everything running fresh each day, lets people store important documents on the other partition, and gives people freedom to install programs which they might need for work related things (winzip, acrobat, etc.) It's pretty easy to update the image if you have to install a patch or another program, and saves people the trouble of trying to hack their way into installing programs. There is no way (rational way at least) to prevent people from getting past whatever security you put in place as long as they don't have someone watching over their computer 24 hours a day. Even with the best policies you can possibly setup, someone can always boot off a floppy, cd-rom, usb drive, etc and find a way around it. If you disable these options in the bios if the person is determined enough they could always open the case and reset the bios settings to get around this. You could always put a lock on the case, but that never stopped me >:)
Oops I missed a C in cyles, guess you should ban me too. *sigh*
And it really pisses me off that you can't spell consequences correctly. How does it feel when someone jumps on you for your mistakes, not so good huh? I think they should ban your Slashdot account for that typo.
Now of course there was some sarcasm intended there, but really...people make mistakes...especially when they're 63 years old. This could have been handled by a simple "uninstall it NOW" and avoided this whole situation which seems to be nothing than some cocky government prick that wants to get a little attention. This reminds me of the RIAA picking on children and old grannies for downloading music on Kazaa. None of us know the whole situation, but I am sure that the termination and senseless public remarks about this poor man hurt him a lot more than a few extra clock cyles ever hurt anyone.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of....oh nevermind I don't feel like getting redundancy points.
This won't affect me that much even though I do use AIM. Most of my contacts also have other messenger programs, and since trillian is my program of choice it won't change the way I communicate to them one bit. I don't think AOL will charge for it's normal service, in fact I think they will give up on charging for video conference with all the other alternatives out there such as yahoo and msn which also have perfectly capable (and free) video conferencing. Yes they make a little money from advertising, but the end users aren't the ones shelling out the cash, and I don't think they will.
I have played this game for nearly 2 years, and it's getting even better. I find it to be the most realistic games out there. You can check out my clan's website at www.combatlifesavers.us. Try this game out and see how you like it
I opted into the "new and improved" eBay 2.0. There was a way to opt out at first, but ebay took that option away and locked it's users into using eBay 2.0. eBay then offered "workshops" to let users give their input, and after reading pages and pages of people screaming they want to be able to switch back to the older version, they just seemed to ignore them and answer questions related to how they could improve the atrocious interface of their new monster. Ebay seemed to lose a few buyers, and even some of their power-sellers because they would not give us back the link to opt out of eBay 2.0. So now I'm stuck with eBay 2.0, with no way to opt out. All I can say is that I'm glad I don't sell much because I heard it can be a pain in the ass now. :)
More information about eBay's workshops can be found at....
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/marketing.shtml
"Enemy spotted, 100 yards and closing.
"Open fire soldier!"
"Sir my weapon says it's not responding"
"Reboot soldier!"
"I did sir, but each time I reboot it still says "Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service terminated unexpectedly.""
"Disable your wireless connection soldier and switch to manual override, we're being exploited!"
Meanwhile somewhere in the middle east...
"Heheheheh.........silly Americans...."
So how are they going to stop us from using older programs to broadcast the media? I don't feel a need to upgrade my shoutcast server just so I can have a radio broadcast flag that rats me out when I'm broadcasting copyrighted music. They would either have to change the way the internet works, or force a new media type on us other than mp3.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I was expecting to see in the game when I originally bought it. After playing for a while I decided to cancel my subscription because it wasn't what I was really looking for. But I want to renew my subscription after seeing this. Too bad I've already been sucked into Lineage2.
Maybe you should take a different approach to this situation. You say that the school has security problems, and you seem to be knowledgeable in the matter, so why not explain the problem and ask them if they would be willing to pay you to fix it? If all else they might nag their developers to work a little harder after hearing about it. :)
Try going to www.download.com and searching under programs with freeware licenses.
"The survey was conducted online with 3,613 respondents between mid-December and mid-January, the company said."
But while we are playing our fps games (ad free), the women are online playing their web based games and suddenly this window pops up asking them to take a survey. Of course the it's going to be a little biased.
I'm in the same boat at the call center I work at, except I think my monitor is a little older, and yeah we're running NT. We have the stupidest policies setup, no task manager, no internet options, can't change just about anything. Our admins don't fix anything, and about 1/3 of the computers are broken in some way (we have about 600 spots). Now they've installed lockdown software that images them every night, you can't right click on web pages(at all on some computers). Mice are broken, phones are broken, chairs are broken or missing parts, hard drives make nice grinding noises, they have content filters that block out anything with zip, exe, com, dll, and a lot more. Not to mention there's mold growing in some of the drawers where people leave their food, wrappers, drinks, etc. Hmm..maybe we can grow an Ol' Drippy like on Aqua Teen Hunger Force? At my job you don't have an assigned desk, you sit down and take calls wherever there is a seat available, and with the vast amount of broken computers it's not really easy to find one sometimes. They enforce manditory overtime, then when call volume drops they start asking people to go home. They call you on your days off on a regular basis asking you to come into work (or else).
Hey look at me mommy, I'm a corporate whore!
All that would teach me is to pick the smaller box next year. :)
I definitely think that the largest physical harm from video games is done to your eyes. I know that looking at computer monitors set at 60hz definitely can cause some eye strain, and in my case, even some vision problems. I can't say that 100% of my bad eyesight has come from computer monitors and tv screens, but I feel it definitely has had a negative impact on my vision. I'm at the point now where many types of contacts are not available to me because of the strength of my perscription. Bad vision runs in my family, but nobody's is as bad as mine. Since I have started using 85hz or more on my monitors, I have noticed my eyesight has stopped getting worse, and I don't get headaches from those 12 hour gaming sessions. Am I the only one who has noticed that refresh rates have a large impact on eye strain?
It is just me, or does this remind you of a gigantic CD changer for cars?
And they do help with temperatures a lot here in Texas. I also have a very dark shade put up in my room also to keep the light out. Ahh the sun *hisses like vampire*
I always wanted a Falsh IDE Adapter!
http://www.mini-box.com/cfadapter.htm
You can?! *hides all his porn*
I drive a modified 93 mustang with about 365 horsepower, and I enjoy it. I still get 22-25mpg on the freeway which isn't bad at all for what it is. People for some reason have come to the idea that performance=lack of gas mileage which is completely untrue. Just because more air is able to get into the engine does not mean that it has to. Basically what I'm saying is that you have still have a high horsepower car and not spend more money on gas than someone with the same car and less horsepower provided you don't floor it
all of the time. My car actually gets better gas mileage than stock...
I work for an ISP of which name shall remain unknown, and no not AOL, but anyways I have noticed that a lot of the techs there are also very loyal to their OS X. I even admit that I have tampered with it a little and the interface really is kind of nice. If I could afford to buy one I might even do that, maybe some other time...
"Yeah I just bought one of those new 2 Terabyte drives with the 20 gig boot sector...."
I recently started playing the Nitto 1320 challenge, which you can download at http://www.nittoracing.com/
It is a very addicting game; sort of like a Gran Tourismo 3 for drag racing, with far inferior graphics, but it's in flash....give em a break. This game is free, and does the job of advertising quite well without cluttering the game with ads. Perhaps advergames will take this same track towards their development. Remember in Duke Nukem how they had the posters up on the walls in some rooms, what if you could dynamically replace those with advertisements. This wouldn't take away from gameplay in my opinion, because it's not something you have to pay attention to if don't want to. Companies could pay per day/week/whatever to advertise within games, without interfering with the game itself. Another place they could put ads would be at the end of first person shooter rounds. This could provide money for top notch servers, and they could simply put a little "This server is sponsored by..." somewhere noticable, but not intruding, within the screen. I don't think I would mind these methods, but if companies start putting ads up and making you watch them before you can play again, then you can count on the cracks to start rolling out.