Um as for the trouble with WinXP activation... I upgraded parts on an older system [this is a while ago]. Yeah it bitched. I called the toll-free number and explained "I upgraded my HD to a new one" and they gave me the activation data on the spot.
Yeah it's a pain to call [it's even 100% automated now... no operators!] but it's impossible. However, without a valid key it's easy to get shut out of updates [specially SP1 as I learned...;-)].
As for the stupid customers... well that's to be expected:-) Though sometimes it pays off. I recently moved from my AMD Barton to a P4 2.8C [it's ice cold during gentoo stage1 install... that makes me happy]. Anyways point is the shop where I brought my computer to had the cpu listed as 261$ [cdn]. While they were working on my computer [took a few days to order the parts] I found it cheaper in town. I told them and they lowered their price... So I guess it does pay to shop around a bit. All in all They did an awesome job and their prices were competitive.
Back to the matter at hand though. Just because people are stupid and will spend hours pirating software... doesn't mean it's good for business. Game developers [in particular] often release playable demos for the sole purpose of showing the game off so you can decide before you buy.
As for other software [OS, office] there are free alternatives... so why people resort to piracy is just plain beyond me. I mean sure I could pirate WinXP to run on my PC... or I could just run Gentoo which along with being free has a myriad of other benefits [like source based installs and very fine-tuned builds]....
Meh... all confused... I go sleep now;-)
BTW if you really opt for a piracy free shop I commend you on that. Honest business is good business.
No. I'm sure if WinXP didn't have annoying license issues [e.g. requires a valid key you have to activate] people wouldn't really buy WinXP. I recall shops where a single key would be used to install dozens of copies of Win95/98. And it isn't as if WinXP is that much more spectacular than Win98SE for the vast majority of PC users.
Even if piracy drives sales that's why they make demos. Share the demos with your buddies [or ask developers to make more interesting demos].
As for "following the logic" I only have one buddy who is likely to pirate games [cuz he has to have the latest and greatest FPS]. My other buddies would rather buy full copies from stores than put up with lousy P2P or warez sites. Quite frankly spending 50$ on a game I know I'm going to enjoy is better [to me at least] than downloading some virus ridden poorly cracked copy off the net that I can't use to play on the net and am not likely to be able to use patches/upgrades for.
I don't know about you... but the hours it takes to get an ISO off P2P put to better use more than pays for the game... of course that's just me... you know with a job that pays money;-)
Not only was the parent [grandparent in my case] redundant but it's not a good point.
It takes time and effort to make a decent program/game/util/etc. 40$ for a multimedia rich game [like UT2k4] is certainly not asking too much.
And quite frankly, if you can't afford a game or don't agree with the price don't buy it. Where the "it costs money so it's ok to steal" logic comes from I'll never fully understand...
Um, whatever. I don't see how DMCA applies... let's see...
I setup a fake SMTP server to trap spammers by wasting gobs of time and gathering information about them.
How is that a copyright violation?
How is that a crime at all?
Me thinks the "honeyd" are either doing something outside of that scope or the develoeprs are just overreacting as many people do. Mostly to get attention to themselves...
Oh, sorry guys, I would provide you with that for loop but they may lock me up and throw away the key... LOOK AT ME!
Bah. Honeypots are not illegal and really can't ever be [without being seriously challenged and overturned].
I don't see it as a huge problem. I'm sure we will run out of fossil fuels [or at least the cost will become insane] long before we make earth inhabitable from the exhaust.
Note that I don't agree with the "mybotsu monstrosity" drivers out there nor with the "oh it's disposable that makes it good" mentality of the swifter/etc. I think the world could be best served by public transportation, better use of materials [less packaging, plastics, etc], less selfish attitudes....
My point though is that you can't focus so closely on a locality. It's like studying a random number generator. You can't just take 8 numbers from a stream of billions and tell if it's seemingly random or not. You have to look at the big picture.
The fact that the last 20 years have gone hotter doesn't mean we're doomed. We're doomed for other reasons alltogether. Like the war-mongering americans who are trying to turn a country I used to favour into a "war industry". All the news talks about is war this and war that. It's as if the US doesn't have any other industry or goals. That's a bad thing.
Um whoever modded that as interesting is a fucking moron.
A honeypot is just a pseudo-server meant to trap, delay and/or observe a client. Useful for wasting spammers time/bandwidth, looking for spiders or in this case looking for active worm traffic.
You have to connect to the honeypot for it to be active so in absolutely no way can this be "illegal".
If anything I think the seasons are just shifting. It gets colder [winter] and warmer [summer] later in Ottawa. I used to recall 6' snowbanks in mid November. In the last few years we would get the huge snowfalls around x-mas time.
Similarly it used to be t-shirt and shorts weather Around the first of April. Now it's still long pants and jacket weather.
Big woop. All this proves is there is a lot about the weather people don't understand. Like I doubt seasons actually follow a strict 4 month cycle;-)
The problem with this though is the only reason the inet works is because people share and co-operate. Well at least that's what they were supposed to do.
Co-operating means not hogging resoures. You may not know that driving 5mph down the center of a two-lane road causes problems for other people.... but you ought to. Similarly I place the onus on the driver to not polute more than absolutely required [e.g. I think SUV drivers in the city are morons and should be shot].
Similarly you may not know that running every application and never patching [tuning up] with your computer is a bad thing... but you should. It's not my job to work around other people being jackasses and ruining the net for me and others.
Can't keep your computer running properly? Don't hook it up to the internet.
Can't drive your car properly and responsibly? Don't drive it on the public roads.
I'll bite. Why do you have 488 users [unique or multiple logins]? I mean I just did the same thing on my box [one shell open, in X/icewm, firefox/tvtime/gaim open] and got "2".
So either you have way too many of shells open or have a lot of users of one computer...
If I wrote software to get rich I wouldn't GPL it. I would put it in a box and sell it retail.
I wrote software so that people would use it. Whether it's free projects [DropBear, SRP, Agent++, etc] or closed projects [BitKeeper, Sony's various PS2, SOE and SCEA projects].
Ideally ya, I'd like someone to take notice of the free stuff and give me a chance at a career. That isn't the driving factor though.
I think if I was solely motivated by the rewards [in terms of money] I wouldn't have been able to network so successfully [like meeting various VPs of huge corporations, tons of academics, getting free trips] and the resulting code would have not addressed my users requirements as close as I could get it.
I mean look at [in this case] half of the crappy crypto software out there. Virtually all of the commercial software seems to be "written quickly, out the door now" style. They often ignore vast security holes [e.g. no MACs, using ciphers wrong, etc.] and aren't willing to share the design of their algorithms for peer-review.../rant
Licenses are not required. That's just a myth spread by the FSF fudmachine.
For example, you can quite easily give out public domain software. Of course you get the all-oft repeated argument "what if someone takes your code than turns it closed-source" to which I reply big fucking deal. I still can release my code openly. So if some company wants to use it on their own big deal. All the power.
Actually a public domain approach is more free/open because it allows commercial developers to create solutions faster without having to re-invent the wheel [while getting it all wrong] and not having to release stuff openly [e.g. works well for BitMover and Sony so far;-)].
And before anyone replies with stupidity. I do appreciate GNU and GPLed software. I just don't use it for my own software. I can happily co-exist with the two licenses...
I really am not going to race to my cell phone to pay someone to tell me what annoying song is on the radio. If it's mainstream radio it will be on 3599 more times during the same day. If it's NPR than I'll just call them and ask.
Man oh man are people gullible. I guess that includes me for having a cell phone but at least it doesn't cost much and I can rationalize it.
Yeah, they canceled the shows "by mistake" and that's why they're bringing em back...
Or is just that they took it away, brought it back as "new coke" and sold it for twice the price?
I mean I like the cartoons and all but mostly I catch them by accident. E.g. flipping channels and happen to hit on it. I'm not really that excited that they're "back on the air" because that's what they want you to think.
Tom
Re:Damn! Debian screwed up
on
Kernel 2.4.26 Out
·
· Score: 1, Informative
As to point #2 if you install your kernel correctly in your/boot there is no need to overwrite previous kernels. Simply rename bzImage to something like kernel-2.x.yz and you're set.
in fact I have 2.4.22 upto 2.4.26 in my/boot. All of them work [if I really wanted to I could boot 2.4.22 and use it just fine].
Sure I "waste" a bit of space in/lib/modules for all five kernels [it's 35M total btw] but I have some peace of mind that if the latest and greatest kernel is bunk I can revert trivially by rebooting;-)
Code blocks like that don't really impress me. Anyone can write code, remove all white-space, use terse meaningless variable names and call it "l33t". My classes are full of people like that. Except they're not doing it intentionally.
What is at least somewhat cool is people who make designs out of code that still compile [e.g. dolphins, trees, etc...]
Also I saw a "fork"in there.... i dunno if I would run a Perl script that I can't decipher with a fork in there.... actually I wouldn't run perl scripts like that at all unless I was some dummy user without access to my home dir...
Minor nitpick but didn't the original GB use 4 AA batteries? It was only the pocket and GBC that moved to 2 AA batteries [and longer life to boot].
From what I recall with the original GB it would last 6 or so hours on 2 AA batteries. I used a battery pack for the most part cuz I loved FFII and didn't have the $$$ for fresh batteries.
Though I agree with the comments on the game gear. I had one and the few games I had were decent but killing AA batteries in 15 minutes [I had some noname red batteries] was a killing point for me.
Slashdot Mirror
> File transfers don't always work.
;-)
That's what a webserver is for
> Can't send/receive directories.
That's what zip or tar are for.
> CPU hog
Running latest GAIM right now. 0% cpu usage logged into AIM, Yahoo and MSN.
> Can make a tray icon on minimizing, but can't remove task bar icon.
On what OS? In Windows and icewm/gnome/kde the tray icon works just fine.
> Chunky IM Screen gui (Wasted space)
The GUIs are tabbed and resizable.
> No ability to set/unset auto-foreground on IM (uses a default scheme)
It can popup just I think the default is not.
Any more retarded GAIM comments you have to share? Otherwise that was the lamest trolling I've seen..
Tom
Um as for the trouble with WinXP activation... I upgraded parts on an older system [this is a while ago]. Yeah it bitched. I called the toll-free number and explained "I upgraded my HD to a new one" and they gave me the activation data on the spot.
;-)].
:-) Though sometimes it pays off. I recently moved from my AMD Barton to a P4 2.8C [it's ice cold during gentoo stage1 install... that makes me happy]. Anyways point is the shop where I brought my computer to had the cpu listed as 261$ [cdn]. While they were working on my computer [took a few days to order the parts] I found it cheaper in town. I told them and they lowered their price... So I guess it does pay to shop around a bit. All in all They did an awesome job and their prices were competitive.
;-)
Yeah it's a pain to call [it's even 100% automated now... no operators!] but it's impossible. However, without a valid key it's easy to get shut out of updates [specially SP1 as I learned...
As for the stupid customers... well that's to be expected
Back to the matter at hand though. Just because people are stupid and will spend hours pirating software... doesn't mean it's good for business. Game developers [in particular] often release playable demos for the sole purpose of showing the game off so you can decide before you buy.
As for other software [OS, office] there are free alternatives... so why people resort to piracy is just plain beyond me. I mean sure I could pirate WinXP to run on my PC... or I could just run Gentoo which along with being free has a myriad of other benefits [like source based installs and very fine-tuned builds]....
Meh... all confused... I go sleep now
BTW if you really opt for a piracy free shop I commend you on that. Honest business is good business.
No. I'm sure if WinXP didn't have annoying license issues [e.g. requires a valid key you have to activate] people wouldn't really buy WinXP. I recall shops where a single key would be used to install dozens of copies of Win95/98. And it isn't as if WinXP is that much more spectacular than Win98SE for the vast majority of PC users.
;-)
Even if piracy drives sales that's why they make demos. Share the demos with your buddies [or ask developers to make more interesting demos].
As for "following the logic" I only have one buddy who is likely to pirate games [cuz he has to have the latest and greatest FPS]. My other buddies would rather buy full copies from stores than put up with lousy P2P or warez sites. Quite frankly spending 50$ on a game I know I'm going to enjoy is better [to me at least] than downloading some virus ridden poorly cracked copy off the net that I can't use to play on the net and am not likely to be able to use patches/upgrades for.
I don't know about you... but the hours it takes to get an ISO off P2P put to better use more than pays for the game... of course that's just me... you know with a job that pays money
Tom
Not only was the parent [grandparent in my case] redundant but it's not a good point.
It takes time and effort to make a decent program/game/util/etc. 40$ for a multimedia rich game [like UT2k4] is certainly not asking too much.
And quite frankly, if you can't afford a game or don't agree with the price don't buy it. Where the "it costs money so it's ok to steal" logic comes from I'll never fully understand...
Tom
Um, whatever. I don't see how DMCA applies... let's see...
I setup a fake SMTP server to trap spammers by wasting gobs of time and gathering information about them.
How is that a copyright violation?
How is that a crime at all?
Me thinks the "honeyd" are either doing something outside of that scope or the develoeprs are just overreacting as many people do. Mostly to get attention to themselves...
Oh, sorry guys, I would provide you with that for loop but they may lock me up and throw away the key... LOOK AT ME!
Bah. Honeypots are not illegal and really can't ever be [without being seriously challenged and overturned].
Tom
I don't see it as a huge problem. I'm sure we will run out of fossil fuels [or at least the cost will become insane] long before we make earth inhabitable from the exhaust.
Note that I don't agree with the "mybotsu monstrosity" drivers out there nor with the "oh it's disposable that makes it good" mentality of the swifter/etc. I think the world could be best served by public transportation, better use of materials [less packaging, plastics, etc], less selfish attitudes....
My point though is that you can't focus so closely on a locality. It's like studying a random number generator. You can't just take 8 numbers from a stream of billions and tell if it's seemingly random or not. You have to look at the big picture.
The fact that the last 20 years have gone hotter doesn't mean we're doomed. We're doomed for other reasons alltogether. Like the war-mongering americans who are trying to turn a country I used to favour into a "war industry". All the news talks about is war this and war that. It's as if the US doesn't have any other industry or goals. That's a bad thing.
Tom
Um whoever modded that as interesting is a fucking moron.
A honeypot is just a pseudo-server meant to trap, delay and/or observe a client. Useful for wasting spammers time/bandwidth, looking for spiders or in this case looking for active worm traffic.
You have to connect to the honeypot for it to be active so in absolutely no way can this be "illegal".
Tom
Um it was +20C two days ago and +3C today.
;-)
What's your point?
If anything I think the seasons are just shifting. It gets colder [winter] and warmer [summer] later in Ottawa. I used to recall 6' snowbanks in mid November. In the last few years we would get the huge snowfalls around x-mas time.
Similarly it used to be t-shirt and shorts weather Around the first of April. Now it's still long pants and jacket weather.
Big woop. All this proves is there is a lot about the weather people don't understand. Like I doubt seasons actually follow a strict 4 month cycle
Tom
Oh common, it's about the "music" not the image.... ;-)
See what I don't get though... is that the music isn't that good and the net has way better porn. So why again is there a market for titney spears?
Tom
Well I don't see how what you were writing was supposed to be "funny" or factually interesting.
First off, "pepsi" is a drink of... um...sugar and stuff.
Second, "is meant for pepsi" is just stupid for "I'm addicted to pepsi".
Third, any lewd act with pepsi can translate to an action with the pepsi spokesmodel titney spears who is actually a few months older than I am.
So even if you were thinking "dirty" I don't see how. A chick my age with huge fake tits.
Tom
Not really. Compress a 640x480 photo image to ~50KB with PNG ;-) [and still look decent].
PNG is meant for *lossless* raster art.
JPEG is meant for *lossy* "photo realistic" art.
TOM is meant for pepsi.... need more pepsi....
Shut up you anti-life hate monger!
;-)
The best way to save the world is to meddle in all affairs because us few arrogant people with paper signs and peta-stickers know best!
Yes that was sarcasm. The point is meddling is what cause these "problems" in the first place. Why not just stop meddling?
Of course that's too obvious. Must take immediate and knee-jerk reaction to all of lifes problems.
You're all DORKs. Dork dork dorky.
dorky dorky malorky korky dork!
DORK
The problem with this though is the only reason the inet works is because people share and co-operate. Well at least that's what they were supposed to do.
Co-operating means not hogging resoures. You may not know that driving 5mph down the center of a two-lane road causes problems for other people.... but you ought to. Similarly I place the onus on the driver to not polute more than absolutely required [e.g. I think SUV drivers in the city are morons and should be shot].
Similarly you may not know that running every application and never patching [tuning up] with your computer is a bad thing... but you should. It's not my job to work around other people being jackasses and ruining the net for me and others.
Can't keep your computer running properly? Don't hook it up to the internet.
Can't drive your car properly and responsibly? Don't drive it on the public roads.
Tom
I'll bite. Why do you have 488 users [unique or multiple logins]? I mean I just did the same thing on my box [one shell open, in X/icewm, firefox/tvtime/gaim open] and got "2".
So either you have way too many of shells open or have a lot of users of one computer...
As for the uptime that's nothing spectacular.
Tom
I don't normally post my real links cuz it's just fuels up the /. trolls...
What the heck...
http://libtomcrypt.org
If I wrote software to get rich I wouldn't GPL it. I would put it in a box and sell it retail.
/rant
I wrote software so that people would use it. Whether it's free projects [DropBear, SRP, Agent++, etc] or closed projects [BitKeeper, Sony's various PS2, SOE and SCEA projects].
Ideally ya, I'd like someone to take notice of the free stuff and give me a chance at a career. That isn't the driving factor though.
I think if I was solely motivated by the rewards [in terms of money] I wouldn't have been able to network so successfully [like meeting various VPs of huge corporations, tons of academics, getting free trips] and the resulting code would have not addressed my users requirements as close as I could get it.
I mean look at [in this case] half of the crappy crypto software out there. Virtually all of the commercial software seems to be "written quickly, out the door now" style. They often ignore vast security holes [e.g. no MACs, using ciphers wrong, etc.] and aren't willing to share the design of their algorithms for peer-review...
Tom
Licenses are not required. That's just a myth spread by the FSF fudmachine.
;-)].
For example, you can quite easily give out public domain software. Of course you get the all-oft repeated argument "what if someone takes your code than turns it closed-source" to which I reply big fucking deal. I still can release my code openly. So if some company wants to use it on their own big deal. All the power.
Actually a public domain approach is more free/open because it allows commercial developers to create solutions faster without having to re-invent the wheel [while getting it all wrong] and not having to release stuff openly [e.g. works well for BitMover and Sony so far
And before anyone replies with stupidity. I do appreciate GNU and GPLed software. I just don't use it for my own software. I can happily co-exist with the two licenses...
Tom
I really am not going to race to my cell phone to pay someone to tell me what annoying song is on the radio. If it's mainstream radio it will be on 3599 more times during the same day. If it's NPR than I'll just call them and ask.
Man oh man are people gullible. I guess that includes me for having a cell phone but at least it doesn't cost much and I can rationalize it.
Tom
Yeah, they canceled the shows "by mistake" and that's why they're bringing em back...
Or is just that they took it away, brought it back as "new coke" and sold it for twice the price?
I mean I like the cartoons and all but mostly I catch them by accident. E.g. flipping channels and happen to hit on it. I'm not really that excited that they're "back on the air" because that's what they want you to think.
Tom
As to point #2 if you install your kernel correctly in your /boot there is no need to overwrite previous kernels. Simply rename bzImage to something like kernel-2.x.yz and you're set.
/boot. All of them work [if I really wanted to I could boot 2.4.22 and use it just fine].
/lib/modules for all five kernels [it's 35M total btw] but I have some peace of mind that if the latest and greatest kernel is bunk I can revert trivially by rebooting ;-)
in fact I have 2.4.22 upto 2.4.26 in my
Sure I "waste" a bit of space in
Tom
Code blocks like that don't really impress me. Anyone can write code, remove all white-space, use terse meaningless variable names and call it "l33t". My classes are full of people like that. Except they're not doing it intentionally.
What is at least somewhat cool is people who make designs out of code that still compile [e.g. dolphins, trees, etc...]
Also I saw a "fork"in there.... i dunno if I would run a Perl script that I can't decipher with a fork in there.... actually I wouldn't run perl scripts like that at all unless I was some dummy user without access to my home dir...
Tom
Minor nitpick but didn't the original GB use 4 AA batteries? It was only the pocket and GBC that moved to 2 AA batteries [and longer life to boot].
From what I recall with the original GB it would last 6 or so hours on 2 AA batteries. I used a battery pack for the most part cuz I loved FFII and didn't have the $$$ for fresh batteries.
Though I agree with the comments on the game gear. I had one and the few games I had were decent but killing AA batteries in 15 minutes [I had some noname red batteries] was a killing point for me.
Tom
For those that don't understand what I meant....
The "shitter theorem" is attributed to when you get up, walk to the washroom and take a nice long break to think about the world.
The "quiznos theorem" is when you get up, goto quiznos and while eating perhaps the bestest sub ever you figure something out.
I've personally used the latter on several occasions.
Tom