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User: crisco

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  1. Farewell on Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot · · Score: 1

    /. has been pretty influential in my life and career and I want to thank you and the crew still on for all the work.

  2. Thanks Bob on Analog Designer Bob Pease Dies In Car Crash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I appreciate all the insight you lent me and the fact that you opened my eyes to a better way to troubleshoot and think about systems.

  3. Re:What OS? And how annoying? on Simple Virus For Teaching? · · Score: 5, Informative
    Back in the late 80s we had a bunch of 10MHz XT clones in a computer lab networked together using Novel and 10BASE2 or maybe even TokenRing. Some of the games we had ran timing loops for the original 4.77 MHz PC so we had some simple TSR that sat on the interrupt timer and ran some NOPs to slow the computers down. I thought it would be a funny prank to add this to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on most of the boot floppies in the lab, sadly I didn't test it on more than one computer.

    The interrupts and NOPs interfered greatly with the network cards, causing the whole thing to come crashing down when more than a couple of the computers were running at a time. It took at least a couple of days for the sysadmin to sort it out.

    RIP George, thanks for introducing me to the Internet and I'm sorry that you didn't get to stick around for Linux and /. I should have taken your Minix class when I had the chance.

  4. Re:overwritten once CAN be recovered on Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups · · Score: 3, Informative

    Markup Fail! Great Zero Challenge

  5. Re:overwritten once CAN be recovered on Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups · · Score: 5, Informative

    The [a href="http://16systems.com/zero.php"]Great Zero Challenge[/url] says otherwise. They're simply asking for the filename of one of the files on a drive that has been wiped once with zeros. Despite offering the challenge for over a year and actively speaking to data recovery companies, no one has taken them up on the offer.

  6. Intelligent Agents all failed 10 years ago on Intelligent Software Agents - Are We Ready? · · Score: 1

    Intelligent Agents were a big deal at the beginnings of the dotcom bubble era. There are plenty ofBooks and Articles about them. A good part of Java's sandbox security model evolved from the anticipation that we would be allowing agents to come visit our computers to do their intelligent activities. In the real world other technologies did a better job at whatever agents were designed to do. As the article points out, Google and other well constructed search engines are much better at finding online information than a series of wide-flung bits of software. Well designed APIs filled much of the gap for more specific applications. Intelligent Agents did find one toehold in the marketplace though, spyware and botnets show just how useful it can be to have your software running on someone else's machine. Of course they're completely outside of any security 'sandbox' and get to do what they please. It sounds as if someone is making an attempt to capitalize on some IP before it expires.

  7. Re:Low ID Roll call on A Brief History of Slashdot Part 1, Chips & Dips · · Score: 1

    I thought I was slacking when I finally logged in to this one.

  8. Re:bzz bzz on Silverlight Released, Linux Version Coming · · Score: 1

    Clever! (replying to cancel out a mistaken moderation)

  9. Re:The crucial signing key is for Windows Update on DHS Wants Master Key for DNS · · Score: 1

    dumb enough not to run Linux. ... dumb enough not to run something else is what I should have said. Preview FTW!
  10. Re:The crucial signing key is for Windows Update on DHS Wants Master Key for DNS · · Score: 1

    It would be if anyone updated their computers. Based on the installations I see whoever has the Windows Update Signing key would rule the people smart enough to update their systems and dumb enough not to run Linux.

  11. Re:My Guesses & Opinions on Linux Users Banned From World of Warcraft? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is a wonderful set of slides from the BlackHat 2006 that outline the escalating war between the bot writers and Blizzard's Warden, culminating in the proposal to write a rootkit to hide the bot's activities from Warden: http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=543 If Blizzard is now looking for rootkit like behavior, or looking for specific signs of an existing rootkit, Cedega / Linux may very well raise all sort of red flags.

  12. Re:Personally... on The Whys of MMOG Archetypes · · Score: 1

    In WoW at least, when the numbers aren't provided some players do their best to reverse engineer the game mechanics to understand and determine the numbers. For example, a few players have reverse engineered Blizzard's itemisation budget, how stats get allocated to items based on item level, item class, etc. Another example is how the WoW threat or aggro model works, while some of it is still unclear some players have a pretty good model of how the mobs determine who to attack while a fight is going on. I suspect much of this is innate human curiosity. Maybe a little boredom too, as you reach the level cap and exhaust game content it gives people something else to do. A game that kept more behind the scenes would give some players more to try to reverse engineer to understand the game mechanics.

  13. Re:vac+shoutcast = streaming audio with no soundca on Redirecting Audio from PC to PC? · · Score: 1

    What kind of latency does this introduce? Would movies or games be useable or does the encoding, buffering and decoding of audio introduce enough of a delay to make this a headache?

  14. I ran into this recently on Windows XP SP2 and WEP Encryption? · · Score: 1

    I ran into this recently, you have to think the "Microsoft Way". That means using Wizards to accomplish your goal. In that little Wireless Network Connection window that lets you connect to a network there is a link on the right titled "Set up a wireless network for a home or a small office". That allows you to enter a SSID and set your encryption settings.

  15. Re:Greasemonkey , sic' em boy ! on Eastern Ink Painting on a Computer · · Score: 1

    Now we need a script to hide all the whiners about Piquepaille on /. As long as he posts interesting stuff, I could care less that he's making money or submitting something once a day.

  16. Re:in other words... on The First Annual Underhanded C Contest · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ah, but any other self respecting, non beer drinking programmer will recognize its value as currency among lesser mortals. Even simply passing the prize along to lesser mortals can induce acts of goodwill.

  17. Re:Concept on The Complicated Way to Turn on a Flashlight · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I think the OP was trying to be funny or sarcastic. The Honda ad was inspired by a short film (that I can't track down at the moment) that was in turn, inspired by Rube Goldberg.

    Of course, by having to explain it, it looses teh funney.

  18. Re:Short Term Effects on Cornering the World of Warcraft Markets · · Score: 1
    I tend to agree.

    I'm on Proudmoore, one of the higher population servers (I guess thats most of them now) and have been watching AH prices on a few items. Most are fairly stable with a slight overall downward trend. I've seen all of a particular item bought out and relisted at double the price and within a day prices were back to normal.

    Blizzard has adjusted a few things, sending prices higher by raising the number of ingredients required to make a particular item.

    Coarse stone was an interesting one, for a long time it was very high priced and I farmed it to get gold for my horse. But when retail copies of WoW started appearing again the price dropped to about 40% of what it was before.

  19. Re:doesn't show anything but XXXXs for me on Mozilla / Firefox Memory Exposure Vulnerability · · Score: 1
    Yeah I noticed same thing and posted about it somewhere here.

    Browser string is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050404 Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu package 1.0.2), the 4/4/05 makes me think a fix was backported for us. Gives me a little more happiness about Ubuntu and Debian, though I'm sure it has made its way into other distributions as well.

  20. Re:IE & Opera Unaffected on Mozilla / Firefox Memory Exposure Vulnerability · · Score: 1
    anyone try this in Linux?

    I'm just getting Xs even after hammering on the link for a bit.

    Browser is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050404 Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu package 1.0.2)

    I guess that even since this is version 1.0.2 that someone in Debian or Ubuntu backported the fix and it was available in my last update.

  21. Re:Anybody using it? on OpenOffice.org Team on OO.org (and Upcoming v2.0) · · Score: 1
    I recieved a new computer a couple of years ago right in the middle of a project. Rather than migrate everything over to the new one I bought a KVM and used new and old side by side for a while. OOo was the only office suite installed on the new computer. I'd estimate only 5% of the time I'd have to switch to the old computer and use MS Office to open or print something.

    Acid test was when one of the owners came in and wanted to edit a spreadsheet for his other business. He sat down, opened his email, loaded up the .xls file and started editting. I hovered for a bit, expecting to explain the difference and help him out but he never seemed to notice.

  22. Re:open source implementation? on Automatic 3D Reconstruction of Scenes · · Score: 1
    I've had much better experience with Autopano-SIFT. While it does pick points that aren't what I would pick manually, it does produce excellent panoramas with little manual cleanup to do afterwards. It has significantly reduced the manual labor necessary to produce quality panoramas.

    Now if only I had a wider angle lens and a pano head tripod...

  23. APXS? on Mars Rovers Have Incorrect Instruments Installed · · Score: 1
    Wow, I'm amazed that they shipped APXS with the rovers. I wonder if the full Apache is in there or if its just they're using APXS for their own purposes.

    If they're using Apache, we can now say with confidence it is the most popular web server in the solor system!

  24. Not enough information... on Open Source Software for ASPs? · · Score: 4, Informative
    What are your goals?

    If you wish to learn ASP.NET you should probably look at using Microsoft's technologies, possibly in conjunction with SharpDevelop. There is a great deal of information about ASP.NET online and in print. If you want to know about SharpDevelop, there is a free digital version of their book linked on the page you linked to, maybe thats a good place to start?

    If you want to learn ASP.NET on a free software platform you are up against a steep learning curve. I'd reccomend learning ASP.NET on Windows first and then making the transition to Free Software. Starting from scratch with Mono and mod_mono or XSP will be tough. As you've seen, there isn't yet a large enough community around these things to generate an abundance of tutorials, documentations and other resources. You can adapt from the Windows versions, but you'll have to deal with translating database interfaces, web server differences and minor differences in the C# libraries themselves.

    If you want to learn web programming in general, Apache with PHP might be a better place to start. While PHP has its drawbacks, it is more widely used and has much more open source software available for it than the ASP.NET platform. Other excellent options have already been suggested, like JSP, Python and Ruby on Rails.

  25. I sold an account. on EULA Confusion w/ Used Copies of WoW? · · Score: 1
    I gave the buyer the login name and password after I removed my billing information. If you're going to buy a previously activated copy, this is the easiest way to do it.

    And no, there were no characters or items on the account and I actually lost a couple of dollars doing it. I sold it to a guildmate so his wife could play, he couldn't track down any more copies in his area. I even have the original box and serial number.