I'm not sure how much my personal experiences relate to this subject (I might not have ADD, but it wouldn't surprise me if I've got something else...), but I'd say that video games increase concentration. Unfortunately for me, it only really applies to increased concentration *when playing video games*. So, I may be able to play Starcraft or something for hours on end, with all attention paid to every detail of the game and none to the world around me (food, hygiene, girls showing off their nipple rings (true story, really.;) ). But when it comes to anything else- classes and writing papers in particular- it can only hold my attention for about five minutes before I have to find something else. Whatever. Just felt I had to comment.
If a "clickwrap" agreement can be made to stick, then stick it to them!. We have a lot more of the web than they do, they must agree to our terms to access it.
I had a similar idea a while ago, soon after this whole mess started. other people probably have too, I'm sure. it's like this: I put a text file on my hard drive, say C:\license.txt, which states my terms for a piece of software installing itself on my computer. something like, "in return for the hard drive space required, and for the use by this consumer of the product, said program and company disclaim any previous click-through or similar license", and, for paranoia and evil 'demographic information gathering', "any internet connection made without prior knowledge and consent of the operator will be made for a fee of US$1000". fun, eh?:-)
In trying to save the movie myself, before reading these comments, I discovered yet another way to do it. It's significantly more complicated than the rest, and I don't really recommend it, but here goes.
1. Get Quicktime Pro (by whatever means necessary) and try to save the movie. It yells at you. Apparently, they don't want you to save the movie. Reminds you of the whole DVD mess, doesn't it? Anyway...
2. Look at the page that launched Quicktime. No hints. Fire up filemon, and notice that it's reading some file in windows\temp.
3. Look at the file. It's zero bytes. What the hell? Quit Quicktime. The file disappears. argh.
4. Download the whole movie again, since they don't want you to save it anywhere... and try to copy the file. Bzzt: Sharing violation. Tricky bastards.
5. Now the fun begins. With Quicktime still running, kill Windows. Entirely. Turn off the power.
6. When the computer restarts, let Scandisk run. It'll find about 28 MB in lost clusters. Save the file.
7. Back in Windows, look at the file with a hex editor. It starts off with something that is apparently the Quicktime file header, and then either random bytes or the actual movie. Assume that it's the movie, and trim off the end of it since there's some extra crap there, but that shouldn't be too hard. (You can also look at other QT4 files and see how many ASCII 0 characters to leave at the end of the file, if you want.)
8. Watch the movie. It works. Brag to your friend about your 1337 sk1lz.
9. Accidentally delete the file that just took two hours of hacking to get. Complain to your friend because you're such a dumbass.
10. Go read the comments on Slashdot to see if anyone else has managed to get the file. Not surprisingly, someone has.
11. Not content to just blindly accept someone else's solution, try it yourself. Load the movie yet again, save it to your favorites, find the file that stores the favorites, and get the URL out of it.
12. Have Quicktime crash, completely screwing up the graphics in Windows, and requiring another restart. (Granted, this step is somewhat out of your control, but with a little luck it'll happen.)
13. Finally, just download the file (it's all one URL... complaints about this later.): http://a912.g.akamai.net/5/912/51/7f33d9e39a6b87/ 1a1a1aaa2198c627970773d80669d84574a8d 80d3 cb12453c02589f25382 f668c9329e0375e81785ea61cd36a 40938a41385e948b71d7cf058bd1c8ef765cc3 f /lo tr_640_full.mov
14. Post your method to Slashdot (Hey Rob, what's a "lameness filter"?) and hope somebody moderates it up as Funny^H^H^H^H^HInformative.
Yeah, I immediately thought of that and wondered what these guys were smoking when they chose that name. Anyway, I also thought it's possible that, sort of like in the movie, they're doing this to set an example as to how wrong such a program would be. But then I remembered:
a) I'm not an optimist, and
b) this is America, a capitalist system, where nobody does anything for anyone else's benefit anymore.
So look forward to paying higher taxes so all the slightly odd kids can be put in new Juvenile Detention Centers. Either that or (quite likely) some people will hack the system and turn in everyone in their high school. Fun. It goes without saying that these guys will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
... but I said it anyway. Damn, I'm in a weird mood today.:-)
Tom's Hardware recently ran benchmarks of Intel's chipsets. What I got from this (which may be wildly inaccurate:) is that the i820 (which is probably what you'll get if you buy a P3) is in many cases no better than the 440BX. In order to get a real performance boost, you'll need the i840, which Intel isn't yet releasing in mass quantities, and they're marketing it as a workstation (not desktop) chipset. hmm.
anyway, I've got a P2-350 and don't plan on upgrading anytime soon (and it'll probably be an AMD when I do.:)
The question is, "Should Microsoft now face restrictions to curtail its 'monopoly' position?" and the results are currently (11 am EST) 40% for & 60% against.
Some of the more, um, interesting comments that make me wonder and hope that these people are joking...
Microsoft has "been instrumental in providing us with the lowest unemployment rate in over 20 years."
"Think about the e-mail, Internet and the GUI which was a total Innovation by Microsoft."
Granted, there are a few intelligent responses. A few. The clue factor on internet polls is generally low, isn't it though?
Aren't those the same lenses you can use to incinerate objects at 30 feet away by merely putting the sun between it, and the object in question?!......
somebody had to say it, so here goes: if you've got two objects 30 feet apart, and the Sun in between, I'd be willing to bet something would be incinerated...;-)
yeah, Penna's got some ugly plates, but that's not the most annoying thing...
ok, fine. Virginia gets to be the "Internet C@pital". sounds pretty l33t if you ask me.;)
but anyway... guess what Pennsylvania's drivers get to put up with? Our new plates will have the URL of the state's web page (which is ugly as sin, btw). and They(tm) are trying to say it's a good thing that PA will have the first license plate in the world to have the web site address on it. woohoo. a billboard on every car. you might think I'm just saying that, but those are the words of our Governor in the press release...
bleh. luckily, I think I can get classic plates since my car is old enough. ('83 Honda Accord. yeah!:)
A Microsoft spokesperson today confirmed the hole and said the company has fixed it. "Once we were notified we began investigating," the spokesperson said. "We found it was possible for a malicious hacker to gain access to the Hotmail servers through specific knowledge of advanced Web development languages. We turned off the servers in the interest of security and user privacy.
just to be sure, I checked an account (mine, which I rarely use because I never really trusted M$ to be able to do this sort of thing competently) and lo and behold, "Error 403: Forbidden" (they turned off the permissions for/cgi-bin/start. I'm no expert, but I'm guessing this is only a quick fix.)
but I just love the quote. since when does changing the cgi queries in a URL involve "specific knowledge of advanced Web development technologies"? good ole' Microsoft. at least this time, they actually admitted the problem even existed within a reasonable amount of time.
sounds great encoded with AudioCatalyst (high-quality VBR being my personal favorite). so far I've noticed none of the quality problems some people have had (except that every CD seems to skip exactly once in my drive, usually at 3:38 on track #4. weird, huh? oops, never mind, it's just the drive-- I've tried several different rippers and they all do it. still, weird.) and that it's as close to CD-quality as I've been able to find. and in case you didn't know, it's fast. damn fast.:)
yeah, I found VQF a while back, and was, I must admit, rather impressed with it at first. it was great that a 96kbps file sounded much better than a 128kbps MP3. but that's the problem-- that's as high as it goes, while MP3 goes up to 320. and disk space is cheap.:) and the quality, well it depends from song to song. I found a 96kbps VQF roughly the same quality as somewhere between a 160 and 192kbps MP3. but enough about VQF. (and if you want another argument against it, it's proprietary.;)
personally, I seem to always want to be different, so I looked for other formats. AAC was good, but there really isn't a standard yet. RealAudio isn't bad either. I'm never going to try M$ Windows Media format, no matter what anyone says about it.;)
so now I'm back to MP3. specifically, using AudioCatalyst. (and before you complain about Xing dropping the high frequency range, that's fixed in this version). all I can say is, high-quality VBR is very nice. especially on my very nice Altec Lansing speakers.:):):)
yeah, I'd have to agree with this guy. two hours seems a bit extreme. and as much as I'd love to bash Windoze for its instability, this summer I realized that it didn't seem to crash all too often. hardly ever, really. *however*, I just got back to school and got my network hooked up again, and it's back to crashing 5 times a day. my suspicions have been confirmed, the network is the problem. Word never seemed to crash, Quake 2 either (expect network games, or when I switched back to the desktop a few times and the video got screwed up). Ah well, back to good old reliable (cough) CWRUnet. (hey, it's got an entry on Everything.:)
(yes, I realize it probably would be a *lot* more stable if I switched from ATM to plain old boring ethernet, but I like to go fast.:)
(sure this is a tired old joke, but somebody had to say it.) ...if the anti-drug bill actually passes, somehow I have a feeling Clinton will veto... even if he didn't inhale.;-)
God bless America. Where the government has no problem with heavily armed idiots, but is deathly afraid of smart people with cryptography software. Go figure. Yet another reason to move to Canada, eh?;-)
It's Saturday, and MSNBC is continuting with day 8 of their round-the-clock coverage of... well, noone's really sure anymore. Flipping between channels, all I'm seeing on MSNBC is yesterday's(?) services for JFK Jr., 30 year old footage of RFK's funeral, and some other stuff in between. Meanwhile, CNN has gotten over it already, reminding us that things are still happening in Kosovo, the Middle East, and then there's that whole first-female-commander-of-the-space-shuttle thing that was supposed to be a big media event (not that the whole idea of a "big media event" isn't a problem anyway. oh well.) Personally, I don't think I've ever considered MSNBC to be real news. Maybe it's the whole "MS" part of it...;-)
Of course, I haven't been wasting my time watching cable news... I was watching MST3k. And now the Where Are They Now marathon on VH1. I really should find something to do...;-)
...blow up your tv... - not sure where that came from, but it's appropriate...
Physicist Bob writes... So I think I know what I'm talking about.
Well, drawing from what many people have been saying here, there is of course a nonzero probability that you don't.;-)
Re:MS premier alert service costs...
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
From that page:
Is BO2K like the Melissa virus? Only in the sense that both were Trojan horse programs that performed malicious actions, and neither exploited any security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products.
Does anyone else feel that the claim that Melissa didn't exploit any security vulnerabilites in M$ products, is well... if not false, at least on very shaky ground.
of course not. at least according to M$, the ability to run Word macros from Outlook without the user's knowledge (or whatever the exact method was, I forget) is a "feature", remember?;-)
Well, I don't know about everybody else, but I've gotten so used to having my box running all the time that I usually can't get to sleep if it's turned off.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
heh. can't forget the "older" kernels. does 2.2.22 count? how bout 2.0.102 ? :)
Is anyone here going to dispute the fact that when you hear the word Guiness, you don't think of a dark lager?
Yes. Personally, what comes to mind is either the world records people, or Obi-Wan.
they were in essence using the trademark name without the permission of Guiness. That is illegal.
Not quite. Parody and Fair Use and all. But this is Slashdot and everybody knows that, so I won't elaborate.
Atleast "Sting" wasn't given the ability to claim his nickname is a true trademark.Oh, so Guinness can't be a person's name anymore, I guess? Why do I get the feeling I'm feeding the trolls...
I'm not sure how much my personal experiences relate to this subject (I might not have ADD, but it wouldn't surprise me if I've got something else...), but I'd say that video games increase concentration. Unfortunately for me, it only really applies to increased concentration *when playing video games*. So, I may be able to play Starcraft or something for hours on end, with all attention paid to every detail of the game and none to the world around me (food, hygiene, girls showing off their nipple rings (true story, really. ;) ). But when it comes to anything else- classes and writing papers in particular- it can only hold my attention for about five minutes before I have to find something else. Whatever. Just felt I had to comment.
If a "clickwrap" agreement can be made to stick, then stick it to them!. We have a lot more of the web than they do, they must agree to our terms to access it.
I had a similar idea a while ago, soon after this whole mess started. other people probably have too, I'm sure. it's like this: I put a text file on my hard drive, say C:\license.txt, which states my terms for a piece of software installing itself on my computer. something like, "in return for the hard drive space required, and for the use by this consumer of the product, said program and company disclaim any previous click-through or similar license", and, for paranoia and evil 'demographic information gathering', "any internet connection made without prior knowledge and consent of the operator will be made for a fee of US$1000". fun, eh? :-)
can't forget this one: what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? :-)
I found this... rather interesting.
:)
:)
:)
major networks - draw your own conclusions.
abc.tv $1M
cbs.tv $500K
nbc.tv $250K
fox.tv $250K
upn.tv $250K
wb.tv $10K (insert your own joke here
pbs.tv $500K (isn't this a *little* evil?)
and then there's cable (and some other stuff)...
$1M: cnn.tv, epsn.tv, web.tv
$500K: mtv.tv, nick.tv, tvguide.tv
$250K: vh1.tv, usa.tv, scifi.tv, comedycentral.tv, guide.tv, bbc.tv
$5000: tnn.tv, tbs.tv, tnt.tv
and... cspan.tv is not available? huh?
In trying to save the movie myself, before reading these comments, I discovered yet another way to do it. It's significantly more complicated than the rest, and I don't really recommend it, but here goes.
1. Get Quicktime Pro (by whatever means necessary) and try to save the movie. It yells at you. Apparently, they don't want you to save the movie. Reminds you of the whole DVD mess, doesn't it? Anyway...
2. Look at the page that launched Quicktime. No hints. Fire up filemon, and notice that it's reading some file in windows\temp.
3. Look at the file. It's zero bytes. What the hell? Quit Quicktime. The file disappears. argh.
4. Download the whole movie again, since they don't want you to save it anywhere... and try to copy the file. Bzzt: Sharing violation. Tricky bastards.
5. Now the fun begins. With Quicktime still running, kill Windows. Entirely. Turn off the power.
6. When the computer restarts, let Scandisk run. It'll find about 28 MB in lost clusters. Save the file.
7. Back in Windows, look at the file with a hex editor. It starts off with something that is apparently the Quicktime file header, and then either random bytes or the actual movie. Assume that it's the movie, and trim off the end of it since there's some extra crap there, but that shouldn't be too hard. (You can also look at other QT4 files and see how many ASCII 0 characters to leave at the end of the file, if you want.)
8. Watch the movie. It works. Brag to your friend about your 1337 sk1lz.
9. Accidentally delete the file that just took two hours of hacking to get. Complain to your friend because you're such a dumbass.
10. Go read the comments on Slashdot to see if anyone else has managed to get the file. Not surprisingly, someone has.
11. Not content to just blindly accept someone else's solution, try it yourself. Load the movie yet again, save it to your favorites, find the file that stores the favorites, and get the URL out of it.
12. Have Quicktime crash, completely screwing up the graphics in Windows, and requiring another restart. (Granted, this step is somewhat out of your control, but with a little luck it'll happen.)
13. Finally, just download the file (it's all one URL... complaints about this later.): http://a912.g.akamai.net/5/912/51/7f33d9e39a6b87/ a 40938a41385e948b71d7cf058bd1c8ef765cc3 f
1a1a1aaa2198c627970773d80669d84574a8d 80d3 cb12453c02589f25382
f668c9329e0375e81785ea61cd36
/lo tr_640_full.mov
14. Post your method to Slashdot (Hey Rob, what's a "lameness filter"?) and hope somebody moderates it up as Funny^H^H^H^H^HInformative.
Have a nice day. :-)
- a) I'm not an optimist, and
- b) this is America, a capitalist system, where nobody does anything for anyone else's benefit anymore.
So look forward to paying higher taxes so all the slightly odd kids can be put in new Juvenile Detention Centers. Either that or (quite likely) some people will hack the system and turn in everyone in their high school. Fun.It goes without saying that these guys will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
... but I said it anyway. Damn, I'm in a weird mood today.
Like the chipset, right?
Tom's Hardware recently ran benchmarks of Intel's chipsets. What I got from this (which may be wildly inaccurate :) is that the i820 (which is probably what you'll get if you buy a P3) is in many cases no better than the 440BX. In order to get a real performance boost, you'll need the i840, which Intel isn't yet releasing in mass quantities, and they're marketing it as a workstation (not desktop) chipset. hmm.
anyway, I've got a P2-350 and don't plan on upgrading anytime soon (and it'll probably be an AMD when I do. :)
I've mirrored the whole downloads page here.
I can only hope it stays up for more than a few minutes... I've never gotten to load-test whatever server this is I'm using in Win95. ;-)
Somebody had to say it (and somebody probably has, but why should that stop me?) ;-)
Don't forget babelfish. That's got to be worth something.
more or less what the previous poster said:
What Alta Vista the sell/provide that it could be supposed in the value $5 billion?
Search Engine, which, if popular, the quality of the section of its competition of upstart cannot fit up, google of the IE.
A support, that, if in such a way popular is, not of this no different one a support better good and portal is tenth dollar in dúzia nowadays.
Some jobs of Web Web Web Web bidding that, fully sincerely, do not shift ebay in any height, those soon.
it gives maintenance to jobs Web Web based the email, as if any another fact of this nowadays.
the poll is here.
Some details:
The question is, "Should Microsoft now face restrictions to curtail its 'monopoly' position?" and the results are currently (11 am EST) 40% for & 60% against.
Some of the more, um, interesting comments that make me wonder and hope that these people are joking...
Microsoft has "been instrumental in providing us with the lowest unemployment rate in over 20 years."
"Think about the e-mail, Internet and the GUI which was a total Innovation by Microsoft."
Granted, there are a few intelligent responses. A few. The clue factor on internet polls is generally low, isn't it though?
Aren't those the same lenses you can use to incinerate objects at 30 feet away by merely putting the sun between it, and the object in question?!......
somebody had to say it, so here goes: if you've got two objects 30 feet apart, and the Sun in between, I'd be willing to bet something would be incinerated... ;-)
yeah, Penna's got some ugly plates, but that's not the most annoying thing...
ok, fine. Virginia gets to be the "Internet C@pital". sounds pretty l33t if you ask me. ;)
but anyway... guess what Pennsylvania's drivers get to put up with? Our new plates will have the URL of the state's web page (which is ugly as sin, btw). and They(tm) are trying to say it's a good thing that PA will have the first license plate in the world to have the web site address on it. woohoo. a billboard on every car. you might think I'm just saying that, but those are the words of our Governor in the press release...
bleh. luckily, I think I can get classic plates since my car is old enough. ('83 Honda Accord. yeah! :)
from the ABCnews.com article
A Microsoft spokesperson today confirmed the hole and said the company has fixed it. "Once we were notified we began investigating," the spokesperson said. "We found it was possible for a malicious hacker to gain access to the Hotmail servers through specific knowledge of advanced Web development languages. We turned off the servers in the interest of security and user privacy.
just to be sure, I checked an account (mine, which I rarely use because I never really trusted M$ to be able to do this sort of thing competently) and lo and behold, "Error 403: Forbidden" (they turned off the permissions for /cgi-bin/start. I'm no expert, but I'm guessing this is only a quick fix.)
but I just love the quote. since when does changing the cgi queries in a URL involve "specific knowledge of advanced Web development technologies"? good ole' Microsoft. at least this time, they actually admitted the problem even existed within a reasonable amount of time.
whatever, just had to get that off my mind. :)
sounds great encoded with AudioCatalyst (high-quality VBR being my personal favorite). so far I've noticed none of the quality problems some people have had (except that every CD seems to skip exactly once in my drive, usually at 3:38 on track #4. weird, huh? oops, never mind, it's just the drive-- I've tried several different rippers and they all do it. still, weird.) and that it's as close to CD-quality as I've been able to find. and in case you didn't know, it's fast. damn fast. :)
yeah, I found VQF a while back, and was, I must admit, rather impressed with it at first. it was great that a 96kbps file sounded much better than a 128kbps MP3. but that's the problem-- that's as high as it goes, while MP3 goes up to 320. and disk space is cheap. :) and the quality, well it depends from song to song. I found a 96kbps VQF roughly the same quality as somewhere between a 160 and 192kbps MP3. but enough about VQF. (and if you want another argument against it, it's proprietary. ;)
personally, I seem to always want to be different, so I looked for other formats. AAC was good, but there really isn't a standard yet. RealAudio isn't bad either. I'm never going to try M$ Windows Media format, no matter what anyone says about it. ;)
so now I'm back to MP3. specifically, using AudioCatalyst. (and before you complain about Xing dropping the high frequency range, that's fixed in this version). all I can say is, high-quality VBR is very nice. especially on my very nice Altec Lansing speakers. :) :) :)
feel free to flame me-- I'll ignore it. ;)
yeah, I'd have to agree with this guy. two hours seems a bit extreme. and as much as I'd love to bash Windoze for its instability, this summer I realized that it didn't seem to crash all too often. hardly ever, really. *however*, I just got back to school and got my network hooked up again, and it's back to crashing 5 times a day. my suspicions have been confirmed, the network is the problem. Word never seemed to crash, Quake 2 either (expect network games, or when I switched back to the desktop a few times and the video got screwed up). Ah well, back to good old reliable (cough) CWRUnet. (hey, it's got an entry on Everything.
(yes, I realize it probably would be a *lot* more stable if I switched from ATM to plain old boring ethernet, but I like to go fast.
(sure this is a tired old joke, but somebody had to say it.) ;-)
...if the anti-drug bill actually passes, somehow I have a feeling Clinton will veto... even if he didn't inhale.
hmm... what happened to my tags? ;-)
God bless America. Where the government has no problem with heavily armed idiots, but is deathly afraid of smart people with cryptography software. Go figure. Yet another reason to move to Canada, eh? ;-)
It's Saturday, and MSNBC is continuting with day 8 of their round-the-clock coverage of... well, noone's really sure anymore. Flipping between channels, all I'm seeing on MSNBC is yesterday's(?) services for JFK Jr., 30 year old footage of RFK's funeral, and some other stuff in between. Meanwhile, CNN has gotten over it already, reminding us that things are still happening in Kosovo, the Middle East, and then there's that whole first-female-commander-of-the-space-shuttle thing that was supposed to be a big media event (not that the whole idea of a "big media event" isn't a problem anyway. oh well.) Personally, I don't think I've ever considered MSNBC to be real news. Maybe it's the whole "MS" part of it... ;-)
;-)
Of course, I haven't been wasting my time watching cable news... I was watching MST3k. And now the Where Are They Now marathon on VH1. I really should find something to do...
...blow up your tv... - not sure where that came from, but it's appropriate...
Physicist Bob writes...
;-)
So I think I know what I'm talking about.
Well, drawing from what many people have been saying here, there is of course a nonzero probability that you don't.
of course not. at least according to M$, the ability to run Word macros from Outlook without the user's knowledge (or whatever the exact method was, I forget) is a "feature", remember?
Am I alone in my quest for quiet computing?
Well, I don't know about everybody else, but I've gotten so used to having my box running all the time that I usually can't get to sleep if it's turned off.;-)