Maybe we should tell Bill Gates about this. Then he could give up on his Palladium plans and instead make sure every geek gets a significant other - classic win-win proposition.
I always have at least half a dozen terminal windows scattered across my desktop, and so far, nobody noticed that one of them regularly contains a nethack session...plus, nethack is perfect for the office because you can always let the game sit in the background for a while, then switch back to ten minutes of dungeon exploring once your boss is gone:)
This might be a minor point, but I must confess I'm more than a bit worried by the fact that everyone, everywhere is already talking about "war" as if it was the most natural thing to do.
Let's face it, there is simply no clearly defined enemy at the moment, and under these circumstances, *any* military strike *anywhere* is extremely likely to kill many more innocents than the WTC attacks did - and will presumably only serve to increase the problems that caused these attacks in the first place.
When everybody is talking about war, it seems that we've already accepted all the things that usually go with wars - killing innocents, tightening security, etc.
I would feel much better if we were talking about counter-terrorist measures here, but I suppose it's too late for that...
I posted something to this effect as a reply to an earlier comment, so with the risk of being redundant...
Spending the day at work without access to TV or radio forced me to completely rely on the net as a news source, and since all the majot news sites were down, I checked a number of forum sites (mostly slashdot, but maybe a dozen others too) to see what other people knew and discuss my thoughts with others. If this didn't give me a human angle on the events, I don't know what ever could - and it was in fact dozens of different angles, ranging from various eyewitness accounts to people being worried about friends and relatives, to people (usually the ones less personally involved) willing to discuss their take on the politicla background. Differences to TV:
*Not only did the Net present dozens of different viewpoints (as opposed to just getting CNN's angle), but all these people cama forth and spoke of their own accord because they had something to share - no sensationalist journalists sticking microphones in people's faces and asking "how did you feel?", "were you afraid?" or similar crap.
*In addition, it was immediately possible to join in on discussions, tell people they were mistaken about their facts, offer opinions and get comments on them.
As a whole, I was absolutely impressed by the Internet's capabilities as a medium for communication. Make no mistake, the couple of thousand people coming to slashdot and the substantially larger number of people reading news online at cnn.com or bbc.co.uk are nothing compared to the millions who watched the series of events on TV, but the potential is there - and I expect to see more and more activity on the Net with future major news events.
This sounds like a neat idea, but is it actually more than a nice metaphor? ie, how would this look in practice?
The examples the article gives talk about data packets travelling between two destinations (nest and food source) or one data stream travelling between various locations (travelling salesman). Reality in any current network looks pretty different, however - even in the pretty small company I work for (about 50 employees), there are about 200 machines, each with several client and server tasks running at the same time which makes for a hell of a lot of packets to be routed (pretty easy in this example since they are all routed through the same stack of switches, but you get the idea).
For this approach to work, every connection from machine a to machine b would need some sort of unique identifier and then mark its path with its very own pheromones - quite a bit of overhead if you ask me. Imagine billions of simultaneous connections on the internet each leaving a trail of unique identifiers on their way...
(unless you opt for an "intelligent" solution where, say, my connection attempt to slashdot is broken up into several steps like "find best path to isp", "find path from isp to transatlantic cable", etc., but that would require a general map of the whole network's layout already be present on every router - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of ant-routing).
I spent the whole of Tuesday at work, without access to traditional news sources like TV or radio, and instead searched the web for every bit of information I could find. Since most of the major news sited were down most of the time, I (like probably most others on here) turned to various forum sites like this one to see what others had found out so far - in the process, I read tons of eyewitness accounts from people in NY and Washington and discussed with numbers of people from all over the world. In the evening, when I met some frineds who had spent most of the day in frontz of the TV, I was astounded at what totally differnet pictures of the events we had - and I was ambsolutely amazed by the fact that the comparative lack of traditionally respected and resputable news sources on the Net was more than made up for by the hundreds of people who shared what little knowledge they had and discussed their opinions instead of spreading crazy rumours (something I was always worried about whith regard to the Internet as a news source).
If anything good at all came of this tragedy, it is that the internet (and especially slashdot, which was my major news source through most of the day) has proven its worth as a medium for worldwide discussion in times of crises.
While I like your attitude a lot more than that of all those guys running around yelling bloody revenge, I have a couple of problems with your post:
To start off, who exactly do you refer to as "the enemy"? If I read you correctly, the whole of the Islamic/Arabic world. Sorry, sweeping overgeneralization.
What's even worse is the total disregard for cultures other than our own your post shows - there is nothing inherently better in modern Western culture than in traditional Islamic culture (which was, as can not be pointed out often enough, a haven of learning and tolerance for centuries during which European crusaders lined their way to the holy land with corpses). Sure, there are extremists, and there's not the slightest reason to defend them and their sick actions, but these extremists are by no means a majority, and they are by far not the only thing that makes up Islamic culture.
I have a gut feeling that this sort of (sorry) cultural chauvinism is at the heart of much of the terror we have been witnessing during recent years...
Umm, yeah, but...
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...there is still a slight difference between the criminal himself and someone helping a criminal - and criminal law fully recognizes that difference: the murderer gets the chair (at least in your civilized country, over here, he'll have to settle for lifelong imprisonment), the guy who hides him gets away with maybe a couple of years.
And, by the way, killing innocent people was acceptable in WW2 and should be equally acceptable now? Did it ever occur to you that that was propably exactly what those suicide pilots were thinking?
This might sound cynical, but I'm pretty happy whoever did this decided to go for symbolic rather than effective attacks (destroying WTC and the Pentagon as symbols of perceived US supremacy)...imagine these planes hitting nuclear power plants...
Amen to that. I play mostly strategy games, and I have a feeling the single-player component of RTS games is slowly dying. Companies seem to invest way more time in multiplayer balancing/tweaking than in creating compelling single-player missions with interesting storylines.
I've been hanging out on various AOE/AOK forums for a couple of years, and as good as nobody there is talking about how to create good, playable scenarios - it's all about build orders and practicing your multiplayer skills for several hours a day. It's a frickin' game, goddammit!
(needless to say, I almost completely quit playing FPS because almost every FPS game recently released was multiplayer only)
The patch *was* announced
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1
Alright, I'm not a big fan of MS either, but it must be said in all fairness that both the vulnerability and the patch were announced very early by Microsoft on their security bulletin newsletter. Subscribing to that newsletter is a matter of seconds, you don't even have to be a registered customer or anything (see here)
They sent out a warning to remove the isapi mappings the same day Code Red was discovered, and as soon as the patch was out, they sent out a notification...premier customers also received a mail message about a week later, but at that time, our servers were already patched:)
It has been said too often already, but the main responsibility lies with admins who don't care to install patches and with clueless home users who don't even know they have a web server running...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, being German, I quite like the sound of 'ubermenchen'...but then you should spell it correctly: Uebermaennchen :)
Maybe we should tell Bill Gates about this. Then he could give up on his Palladium plans and instead make sure every geek gets a significant other - classic win-win proposition.
Can anyone tell me why I read that subject as "security through obesity" ?
I always have at least half a dozen terminal windows scattered across my desktop, and so far, nobody noticed that one of them regularly contains a nethack session...plus, nethack is perfect for the office because you can always let the game sit in the background for a while, then switch back to ten minutes of dungeon exploring once your boss is gone :)
i *hope* you meant assets :)
This might be a minor point, but I must confess I'm more than a bit worried by the fact that everyone, everywhere is already talking about "war" as if it was the most natural thing to do.
Let's face it, there is simply no clearly defined enemy at the moment, and under these circumstances, *any* military strike *anywhere* is extremely likely to kill many more innocents than the WTC attacks did - and will presumably only serve to increase the problems that caused these attacks in the first place.
When everybody is talking about war, it seems that we've already accepted all the things that usually go with wars - killing innocents, tightening security, etc.
I would feel much better if we were talking about counter-terrorist measures here, but I suppose it's too late for that...
I posted something to this effect as a reply to an earlier comment, so with the risk of being redundant...
Spending the day at work without access to TV or radio forced me to completely rely on the net as a news source, and since all the majot news sites were down, I checked a number of forum sites (mostly slashdot, but maybe a dozen others too) to see what other people knew and discuss my thoughts with others. If this didn't give me a human angle on the events, I don't know what ever could - and it was in fact dozens of different angles, ranging from various eyewitness accounts to people being worried about friends and relatives, to people (usually the ones less personally involved) willing to discuss their take on the politicla background. Differences to TV:
*Not only did the Net present dozens of different viewpoints (as opposed to just getting CNN's angle), but all these people cama forth and spoke of their own accord because they had something to share - no sensationalist journalists sticking microphones in people's faces and asking "how did you feel?", "were you afraid?" or similar crap.
*In addition, it was immediately possible to join in on discussions, tell people they were mistaken about their facts, offer opinions and get comments on them.
As a whole, I was absolutely impressed by the Internet's capabilities as a medium for communication. Make no mistake, the couple of thousand people coming to slashdot and the substantially larger number of people reading news online at cnn.com or bbc.co.uk are nothing compared to the millions who watched the series of events on TV, but the potential is there - and I expect to see more and more activity on the Net with future major news events.
This sounds like a neat idea, but is it actually more than a nice metaphor? ie, how would this look in practice?
The examples the article gives talk about data packets travelling between two destinations (nest and food source) or one data stream travelling between various locations (travelling salesman). Reality in any current network looks pretty different, however - even in the pretty small company I work for (about 50 employees), there are about 200 machines, each with several client and server tasks running at the same time which makes for a hell of a lot of packets to be routed (pretty easy in this example since they are all routed through the same stack of switches, but you get the idea).
For this approach to work, every connection from machine a to machine b would need some sort of unique identifier and then mark its path with its very own pheromones - quite a bit of overhead if you ask me. Imagine billions of simultaneous connections on the internet each leaving a trail of unique identifiers on their way...
(unless you opt for an "intelligent" solution where, say, my connection attempt to slashdot is broken up into several steps like "find best path to isp", "find path from isp to transatlantic cable", etc., but that would require a general map of the whole network's layout already be present on every router - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of ant-routing).
I spent the whole of Tuesday at work, without access to traditional news sources like TV or radio, and instead searched the web for every bit of information I could find. Since most of the major news sited were down most of the time, I (like probably most others on here) turned to various forum sites like this one to see what others had found out so far - in the process, I read tons of eyewitness accounts from people in NY and Washington and discussed with numbers of people from all over the world. In the evening, when I met some frineds who had spent most of the day in frontz of the TV, I was astounded at what totally differnet pictures of the events we had - and I was ambsolutely amazed by the fact that the comparative lack of traditionally respected and resputable news sources on the Net was more than made up for by the hundreds of people who shared what little knowledge they had and discussed their opinions instead of spreading crazy rumours (something I was always worried about whith regard to the Internet as a news source).
If anything good at all came of this tragedy, it is that the internet (and especially slashdot, which was my major news source through most of the day) has proven its worth as a medium for worldwide discussion in times of crises.
While I like your attitude a lot more than that of all those guys running around yelling bloody revenge, I have a couple of problems with your post:
To start off, who exactly do you refer to as "the enemy"? If I read you correctly, the whole of the Islamic/Arabic world. Sorry, sweeping overgeneralization.
What's even worse is the total disregard for cultures other than our own your post shows - there is nothing inherently better in modern Western culture than in traditional Islamic culture (which was, as can not be pointed out often enough, a haven of learning and tolerance for centuries during which European crusaders lined their way to the holy land with corpses). Sure, there are extremists, and there's not the slightest reason to defend them and their sick actions, but these extremists are by no means a majority, and they are by far not the only thing that makes up Islamic culture.
I have a gut feeling that this sort of (sorry) cultural chauvinism is at the heart of much of the terror we have been witnessing during recent years...
...there is still a slight difference between the criminal himself and someone helping a criminal - and criminal law fully recognizes that difference: the murderer gets the chair (at least in your civilized country, over here, he'll have to settle for lifelong imprisonment), the guy who hides him gets away with maybe a couple of years.
And, by the way, killing innocent people was acceptable in WW2 and should be equally acceptable now? Did it ever occur to you that that was propably exactly what those suicide pilots were thinking?
...at Bionicsonics
This might sound cynical, but I'm pretty happy whoever did this decided to go for symbolic rather than effective attacks (destroying WTC and the Pentagon as symbols of perceived US supremacy)...imagine these planes hitting nuclear power plants...
Amen to that. I play mostly strategy games, and I have a feeling the single-player component of RTS games is slowly dying. Companies seem to invest way more time in multiplayer balancing/tweaking than in creating compelling single-player missions with interesting storylines.
I've been hanging out on various AOE/AOK forums for a couple of years, and as good as nobody there is talking about how to create good, playable scenarios - it's all about build orders and practicing your multiplayer skills for several hours a day. It's a frickin' game, goddammit!
(needless to say, I almost completely quit playing FPS because almost every FPS game recently released was multiplayer only)
as in beer or as in speech?
Alright, I'm not a big fan of MS either, but it must be said in all fairness that both the vulnerability and the patch were announced very early by Microsoft on their security bulletin newsletter. Subscribing to that newsletter is a matter of seconds, you don't even have to be a registered customer or anything (see here) :)
It has been said too often already, but the main responsibility lies with admins who don't care to install patches and with clueless home users who don't even know they have a web server running...
They sent out a warning to remove the isapi mappings the same day Code Red was discovered, and as soon as the patch was out, they sent out a notification...premier customers also received a mail message about a week later, but at that time, our servers were already patched