The truism about computer cultures is that the fewer members a culture has, the more rabid they are. While this is probably the result of a selection process (all of the rational people gave up on the system years ago and only the die hards are left), it does mean that the last few holdouts on a system will keep it alive far far longer than they should. See: Amiga, OS/2, BeOS, NeXT, and so on.
Re:more proof the RIAA/MPAA are insane
on
Death By DMCA
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· Score: 1
"Because I saw the ad" isn't the only reason I buy a product. Sometimes it's just superior or it's the only one reasonably available in my area. People aren't complete mindless zombies that must do what advertisers tell them.
Anybody remember the book where right at the beginning it told you that the good ending was on page 78 or something. You could even flip to it and read about how you were in paradise and the universe was at peace or something. After playing the book a few times I decided to see what course of action was necessary to get the good ending, turns out there were no "turn to page 78" references anywhere in the book, the best ending was impossible to achieve.
I had one that was a space adventure where you were in command of a small floatilla trying to cut off the alien invasion. Your floatilla had to rush through space to make it in time (each segement of the book was timed, and if you didn't get there in time you'd lose!). Eventually you got to dice rolling with charts and tables and everything, how well you did usually determined how much time you lost (or sometime if you just lost the campaign right there).
I thought it was really cool except that I was always running out of time about halfway through, so one day I decied to check every branch and assume the best possible outcome for each encounter to see how much time you have to spare. Turns out the book was buggy, it was actually impossible to make it more than about 3/4 of the way to where you needed to be before running out of time, even if you took every risky shortcut and breezed through every encounter.
Having everything encapsulated and only allowing public access through some limited (perhaps authenticated?) means sounds nice on paper, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it would be a nightmare in the real world. As an application (or OS!) developer you have to guess at every single thing another program might want to do and create some sort of API for it by hand? More likely, people won't bother trying to figure out what other people might do and nothing will work with anything. In the Windows world you could probably trudge along like this for awhile (most applications are fairly self contained anyway), but the first time you try to write something the least bit unusual it's going to be a brick wall.
For example, you're interested in IP fragment delays on a Wireless link. You need low level access to the Wireless card driver in the OS. Since it's a mass manufacture card, such thing is obviously not in the normal driver. However, currently there are extensions (winpcap) that you can use instead. In your example, you would instead hit a brick wall since such information would be hidden in the private part of the driver (the public part would just be the part that talks to the IP stack) and you'd be SOL.
In short, your security is too rigid for a multipurpose OS. People would end up turning it off just to get their work done.
The sleep mode gets better with each release of Windows. XP is pretty much as good as the Macs, however because there is a lot of ingrown distrust of Sleep mode in Windows from years of bad experiance with it, many people still instinctivly shut off their machines anyway.
I use the sleep mode on my modern Windows laptop without any trouble.
My laptop has absolutely no trouble finding the lan when I turn it back on. Sometimes if I'm a touch too fast it won't be ready yet, but it's rarely more than a second or two before I'm back online.
I have preconfigured a wireless lan profile for my home though (I have to, I use WEP), maybe that's why it's so fast? I also don't have my AP in stealth (no beacon packet broadcast) mode, because it drives the Windows discovery service nuts.
To me this seems more like an extension of that backyard wrestling thing that was big a few years ago. And before that it was an extension of boys just beating each other up in the backyard.
I don't know what wire service you use, but any transfer that goes through the Federal Reserve (hint: all bank to bank transfers), is going to be sat on for a day or three by the feds.
Your friend has one of those banks that will let him immediately cash checks, although the bank itself doesn't get the money for several days (the feds again). For some banks this convienence outweighs the risk, especially for longtime and reliable customers. You can't just walk in off the street and cash a check though, not without having the bank take some percentage of it to cover their risk. Electronic checking was supposed to fix that, but it turns out that banks still like to sit on funds.
Again, you don't have to have any money at all in your paypal account to make a payment. You can pay for something and if there isn't sufficent funds in your Paypal account they will automatically draw it from your primary fund source and send it directly to the other guy. The other guy will see the payment right away, even though Paypal is still technically waiting on the wire transfer in the case of bank funds (although credit card payments go through right away).
Because in a couple of weeks you'll find something you want to buy online and discover that they only take Paypal.:P
There are a few horror stories about people getting their accounts closed, but it always turns out that they forgot their password and/or username and don't have the email account they used anymore. Seriously, from Paypal's POV you could be any Joe Schmoe trying to get someone else's account closed, which is why they made the people provide so much proof (and OMG, they had to Fax it, horrors!).
Seriously, how many more people can complain "I can't send thousands of dollars with just a hotmail account? Paypal Sucks!" before they realize that Paypal is not going to turn themselves into an automated money laundering/fraud service, no matter how convienent it might be for you.
Yeah, or you could use a Wire Transfer...oh wait, the bank's going to sit on your money there too. I suppose you could use a check...oh wait, the bank sits on your money with checks too. You could send cash, but then most places won't take cash through the mail (it's not a good idea).
Also, you are aware that you can pay for something directly with paypal to avoid having to wait for it to appear in your account right? In fact that's how most merchants set up the system.
Honestly, at least half of paypalsucks.com and similar sites smell like BS to me. Or worse, the product of disgruntled scammers who didn't get their money because Paypal stopped the transaction. If you successfully scam someone and are mere moments away from getting the money and running, only to have your account locked when Paypal noticed what you're doing, how would you react? You're sitting there with money in the account and a suddenly wise mark now starting the process of tracking you down, perhaps even calling the cops. If you run now, you lose everything, if you stay you might be caught. If you put up a horror story on paypalsucks.com in the hopes of embarassing Paypal into releasing your money just long enough for you to get out, then hey, it's worth a shot right?
Now, that's not to say Paypal hasn't had some bad service. I'm sure they still offer bad service even now (although not all of the time), but the fact of the matter is that there has been far less trouble with it than those sites would have you believe.
The biggest problem is that Paypal seems to be a little more vigilant about scams than most credit card companies and they have a high level of distrust of anything out of the ordinary. For instance, some well known sites set up paypal accounts for Katrina relief, but almost all of those were locked and the funds eventually returned because Paypal couln't verify that they were legit. That's the story everyone heard, but the other story is that hundreds of other scam Katrina sites were set up just to sucker people out of their money. Those sites were also shut down. From Paypal's point of view it's nearly impossible to tell the former from the latter, especially since neither is a registered charity.
Here's something that might surprise you. _Everything_ is toxic. The question is how hard it is to hit the LD50. Even plain old water can kill you if you drink too much.
That destroys the formatting and makes your work look very unprofessional. There are better ways to redact information from a PDF.
The biggest problem is that it's a paradigm shift for these people and they're not ready for it. The "Black Bars" always worked with regular documents, but when they were forced (against their will) to switch to electronic documents many people tried to find ways to make all of their old procedures work with the new format. This always happens when you force people to switch to technologies they're not comfortable with, and throughout history has been an enormous source of lost productivity and security leaks. The kind of people who are making these mistakes aren't the kind of people who read Slashdot, they're the ones that are thankful when they can finally go home every night and get away from those godforsaken computers for the rest of the day.
I think the developer culture is at fault. Also, OS errors aren't exactly logged either. If you have a program that accidentally whacks an ACL in your system folder, you're not going to get a nice "permission denied trying to access foobar.dll" in your system log, it's going to be some cryptic "access exception" error and you'll never know what's causing it.
The logging API is there, but for some reason nobody uses it in a useful manner, not the OS developer, not driver writers, not even application writers.
I was having trouble reading the article over the constant drone of the grinding ax.
Seriously, AOL was bloated and crashy, but it also didn't assume that the users (like your parents and grandparents) knew how to install Winsock or how to configure DHCP. Most of AOLs competition came from small time ISPs run by and for geeks. Much of the hatred of AOL stemed from them making the Internet a place for everybody (including the stupid people), not just the geeks. Of course there was Compuserve and Prodigy too, but for some reason those services don't seem to draw the kind of hate that AOL does.
Anyway, the rest of the selection is either obvious to Slashdot readers (everybody loves to pick on Bob), or something the columnnist was apparently bitten by (SoftRam is hardly the only $30 utility for Windows or any OS that is a complete rip off).
Interestingly, there is some development towards a greater amount of player created content in games. Secondlife already gives players a ton of flexibility in designing what they see and what it does, although there isn't much of what most people would consider "gameplay" in that game. The upcoming game Spore promises to integrate player created content from all over the internet into each player's game, although it remains to be seen how it will pan out in practice. Neither of these are directly analgous to MOOs and MUSHes, but they are a sort of half step between traditional games (WoW, etc...) and those open ended content creation systems of yesteryear. Perhaps in the next generation we'll have something that's more MOO like, although from a gameplay standpoint it is _very_ difficult to properly balance user created content and still leave the users with enough flexibilty to be really creative. MOOs and MUSHes suffered a lot from that, either limiting players to effectively piecing together exisiting room with just a few lines of description, or being so open ended that anything resembling playblance (or even gameplay at all) was just thrown out the window.
That really gets to the crux of the matter. Window's current logging is utterly pointless. I have never _ever_ been able to track down a problem by looking at the system event log, which is extremely frustrating because it's the first place I look when Unix based systems have problems. For some reason no windows application (or driver) ever logs anything more informative than "permission denied--but I'm not going to tell you where" or "crashed". They will happily log umpteen zillion useless "everything's Ok!" messages. Because of this, it's many many times harder to track down problems on Windows machines than it is on pretty much any other platform. Seriously, do the developers think their users would be scared if they actually told them what the problem was instead of just tossing up a generic "access violation" message?
I'm not saying it's OK behavior by any means, but it doesn't seem like something that should put the poor dumb 18 year old on a sex offender registry. It's certainly something the school should punish him for, but the last thing the kid needs is a felony conviction.
Additionally, Microsoft's new image format allows such things as rotating the image without the need to decode it and subsequently encode it again, he said.
Uh, JPEG already does this. Has nobody at C|Net ever heard of jpegtran? Does the MS format allow non 90 degree turns or something?
They tried, but the law got bogged down in committe and never made it onto the floor. Don't worry, it'll show up as an 11th hour rider on some war appropriations bill at some point.
As I think about it, it might really make sense for them to sell 10,000 or 20,000 laptops in the States and do the tech support just to root out the problems before they're deployed in the field. The last thing they need is to build a million laptops, send them to the remote corners of the earth, and then discover that the manufacturer cut corners on the LCD backlight causing them to fail at an unacceptable rate. Once it's in some village with no road in the middle of Africa, nobody is going to be able to do anything with it when it breaks.
Someone who cops a feel is a little different than a sexual predator at least in my mind.
You also hear stories of college guys hiding out in the women's bathrooms to sneak a peek. That doesn't make them sexual predators either in my book.
On the other hand, the RFID systems implemented at colleges seems like a good method of detering pervets like these, at least until they overwrite a card with someone else's ID and get them in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
The truism about computer cultures is that the fewer members a culture has, the more rabid they are. While this is probably the result of a selection process (all of the rational people gave up on the system years ago and only the die hards are left), it does mean that the last few holdouts on a system will keep it alive far far longer than they should. See: Amiga, OS/2, BeOS, NeXT, and so on.
"Because I saw the ad" isn't the only reason I buy a product. Sometimes it's just superior or it's the only one reasonably available in my area. People aren't complete mindless zombies that must do what advertisers tell them.
Anybody remember the book where right at the beginning it told you that the good ending was on page 78 or something. You could even flip to it and read about how you were in paradise and the universe was at peace or something. After playing the book a few times I decided to see what course of action was necessary to get the good ending, turns out there were no "turn to page 78" references anywhere in the book, the best ending was impossible to achieve.
I had one that was a space adventure where you were in command of a small floatilla trying to cut off the alien invasion. Your floatilla had to rush through space to make it in time (each segement of the book was timed, and if you didn't get there in time you'd lose!). Eventually you got to dice rolling with charts and tables and everything, how well you did usually determined how much time you lost (or sometime if you just lost the campaign right there).
I thought it was really cool except that I was always running out of time about halfway through, so one day I decied to check every branch and assume the best possible outcome for each encounter to see how much time you have to spare. Turns out the book was buggy, it was actually impossible to make it more than about 3/4 of the way to where you needed to be before running out of time, even if you took every risky shortcut and breezed through every encounter.
Well, except for possibly Greco-Roman Wrestling, that sport is pretty gay. :)
Having everything encapsulated and only allowing public access through some limited (perhaps authenticated?) means sounds nice on paper, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it would be a nightmare in the real world. As an application (or OS!) developer you have to guess at every single thing another program might want to do and create some sort of API for it by hand? More likely, people won't bother trying to figure out what other people might do and nothing will work with anything. In the Windows world you could probably trudge along like this for awhile (most applications are fairly self contained anyway), but the first time you try to write something the least bit unusual it's going to be a brick wall.
For example, you're interested in IP fragment delays on a Wireless link. You need low level access to the Wireless card driver in the OS. Since it's a mass manufacture card, such thing is obviously not in the normal driver. However, currently there are extensions (winpcap) that you can use instead. In your example, you would instead hit a brick wall since such information would be hidden in the private part of the driver (the public part would just be the part that talks to the IP stack) and you'd be SOL.
In short, your security is too rigid for a multipurpose OS. People would end up turning it off just to get their work done.
The sleep mode gets better with each release of Windows. XP is pretty much as good as the Macs, however because there is a lot of ingrown distrust of Sleep mode in Windows from years of bad experiance with it, many people still instinctivly shut off their machines anyway.
I use the sleep mode on my modern Windows laptop without any trouble.
My laptop has absolutely no trouble finding the lan when I turn it back on. Sometimes if I'm a touch too fast it won't be ready yet, but it's rarely more than a second or two before I'm back online.
I have preconfigured a wireless lan profile for my home though (I have to, I use WEP), maybe that's why it's so fast? I also don't have my AP in stealth (no beacon packet broadcast) mode, because it drives the Windows discovery service nuts.
To me this seems more like an extension of that backyard wrestling thing that was big a few years ago. And before that it was an extension of boys just beating each other up in the backyard.
I don't know what wire service you use, but any transfer that goes through the Federal Reserve (hint: all bank to bank transfers), is going to be sat on for a day or three by the feds.
Your friend has one of those banks that will let him immediately cash checks, although the bank itself doesn't get the money for several days (the feds again). For some banks this convienence outweighs the risk, especially for longtime and reliable customers. You can't just walk in off the street and cash a check though, not without having the bank take some percentage of it to cover their risk. Electronic checking was supposed to fix that, but it turns out that banks still like to sit on funds.
Again, you don't have to have any money at all in your paypal account to make a payment. You can pay for something and if there isn't sufficent funds in your Paypal account they will automatically draw it from your primary fund source and send it directly to the other guy. The other guy will see the payment right away, even though Paypal is still technically waiting on the wire transfer in the case of bank funds (although credit card payments go through right away).
Because in a couple of weeks you'll find something you want to buy online and discover that they only take Paypal. :P
There are a few horror stories about people getting their accounts closed, but it always turns out that they forgot their password and/or username and don't have the email account they used anymore. Seriously, from Paypal's POV you could be any Joe Schmoe trying to get someone else's account closed, which is why they made the people provide so much proof (and OMG, they had to Fax it, horrors!).
Seriously, how many more people can complain "I can't send thousands of dollars with just a hotmail account? Paypal Sucks!" before they realize that Paypal is not going to turn themselves into an automated money laundering/fraud service, no matter how convienent it might be for you.
Yeah, or you could use a Wire Transfer...oh wait, the bank's going to sit on your money there too. I suppose you could use a check...oh wait, the bank sits on your money with checks too. You could send cash, but then most places won't take cash through the mail (it's not a good idea).
Also, you are aware that you can pay for something directly with paypal to avoid having to wait for it to appear in your account right? In fact that's how most merchants set up the system.
Honestly, at least half of paypalsucks.com and similar sites smell like BS to me. Or worse, the product of disgruntled scammers who didn't get their money because Paypal stopped the transaction. If you successfully scam someone and are mere moments away from getting the money and running, only to have your account locked when Paypal noticed what you're doing, how would you react? You're sitting there with money in the account and a suddenly wise mark now starting the process of tracking you down, perhaps even calling the cops. If you run now, you lose everything, if you stay you might be caught. If you put up a horror story on paypalsucks.com in the hopes of embarassing Paypal into releasing your money just long enough for you to get out, then hey, it's worth a shot right?
Now, that's not to say Paypal hasn't had some bad service. I'm sure they still offer bad service even now (although not all of the time), but the fact of the matter is that there has been far less trouble with it than those sites would have you believe.
The biggest problem is that Paypal seems to be a little more vigilant about scams than most credit card companies and they have a high level of distrust of anything out of the ordinary. For instance, some well known sites set up paypal accounts for Katrina relief, but almost all of those were locked and the funds eventually returned because Paypal couln't verify that they were legit. That's the story everyone heard, but the other story is that hundreds of other scam Katrina sites were set up just to sucker people out of their money. Those sites were also shut down. From Paypal's point of view it's nearly impossible to tell the former from the latter, especially since neither is a registered charity.
Here's something that might surprise you. _Everything_ is toxic. The question is how hard it is to hit the LD50. Even plain old water can kill you if you drink too much.
That destroys the formatting and makes your work look very unprofessional. There are better ways to redact information from a PDF.
The biggest problem is that it's a paradigm shift for these people and they're not ready for it. The "Black Bars" always worked with regular documents, but when they were forced (against their will) to switch to electronic documents many people tried to find ways to make all of their old procedures work with the new format. This always happens when you force people to switch to technologies they're not comfortable with, and throughout history has been an enormous source of lost productivity and security leaks. The kind of people who are making these mistakes aren't the kind of people who read Slashdot, they're the ones that are thankful when they can finally go home every night and get away from those godforsaken computers for the rest of the day.
I think the developer culture is at fault. Also, OS errors aren't exactly logged either. If you have a program that accidentally whacks an ACL in your system folder, you're not going to get a nice "permission denied trying to access foobar.dll" in your system log, it's going to be some cryptic "access exception" error and you'll never know what's causing it.
The logging API is there, but for some reason nobody uses it in a useful manner, not the OS developer, not driver writers, not even application writers.
I was having trouble reading the article over the constant drone of the grinding ax.
Seriously, AOL was bloated and crashy, but it also didn't assume that the users (like your parents and grandparents) knew how to install Winsock or how to configure DHCP. Most of AOLs competition came from small time ISPs run by and for geeks. Much of the hatred of AOL stemed from them making the Internet a place for everybody (including the stupid people), not just the geeks. Of course there was Compuserve and Prodigy too, but for some reason those services don't seem to draw the kind of hate that AOL does.
Anyway, the rest of the selection is either obvious to Slashdot readers (everybody loves to pick on Bob), or something the columnnist was apparently bitten by (SoftRam is hardly the only $30 utility for Windows or any OS that is a complete rip off).
Interestingly, there is some development towards a greater amount of player created content in games. Secondlife already gives players a ton of flexibility in designing what they see and what it does, although there isn't much of what most people would consider "gameplay" in that game. The upcoming game Spore promises to integrate player created content from all over the internet into each player's game, although it remains to be seen how it will pan out in practice. Neither of these are directly analgous to MOOs and MUSHes, but they are a sort of half step between traditional games (WoW, etc...) and those open ended content creation systems of yesteryear. Perhaps in the next generation we'll have something that's more MOO like, although from a gameplay standpoint it is _very_ difficult to properly balance user created content and still leave the users with enough flexibilty to be really creative. MOOs and MUSHes suffered a lot from that, either limiting players to effectively piecing together exisiting room with just a few lines of description, or being so open ended that anything resembling playblance (or even gameplay at all) was just thrown out the window.
That really gets to the crux of the matter. Window's current logging is utterly pointless. I have never _ever_ been able to track down a problem by looking at the system event log, which is extremely frustrating because it's the first place I look when Unix based systems have problems. For some reason no windows application (or driver) ever logs anything more informative than "permission denied--but I'm not going to tell you where" or "crashed". They will happily log umpteen zillion useless "everything's Ok!" messages. Because of this, it's many many times harder to track down problems on Windows machines than it is on pretty much any other platform. Seriously, do the developers think their users would be scared if they actually told them what the problem was instead of just tossing up a generic "access violation" message?
I'm not saying it's OK behavior by any means, but it doesn't seem like something that should put the poor dumb 18 year old on a sex offender registry. It's certainly something the school should punish him for, but the last thing the kid needs is a felony conviction.
They tried, but the law got bogged down in committe and never made it onto the floor. Don't worry, it'll show up as an 11th hour rider on some war appropriations bill at some point.
As I think about it, it might really make sense for them to sell 10,000 or 20,000 laptops in the States and do the tech support just to root out the problems before they're deployed in the field. The last thing they need is to build a million laptops, send them to the remote corners of the earth, and then discover that the manufacturer cut corners on the LCD backlight causing them to fail at an unacceptable rate. Once it's in some village with no road in the middle of Africa, nobody is going to be able to do anything with it when it breaks.
Someone who cops a feel is a little different than a sexual predator at least in my mind.
You also hear stories of college guys hiding out in the women's bathrooms to sneak a peek. That doesn't make them sexual predators either in my book.
On the other hand, the RFID systems implemented at colleges seems like a good method of detering pervets like these, at least until they overwrite a card with someone else's ID and get them in trouble.