Admittedly, our backup mail server may be an unusual case, but we do have another server that acts as a wireless router/DHCP server that had almost as good an uptime.
And that's not to be confused with the uptime on my workstation that flipped out after a power-out and suddenly thought it had been up for 800-some odd days. Interestingly enough, every time I check my workstation now, the uptime decreases. I'm hoping I can get it down to zero, but it's still 811, and I know there's no way an actual human-operated Win box will stay up that long.
Oddly enough though, Microsoft sorta has the basics of one of the right ideas with XP.
They just don't do it well enough, of course, because they are still way into taking power away from the users. I think *nix (especially the new Apple flavor) has a better idea of where to go with this. (Well as far as what I've seen of them, unfortunately as a graphic design hobbiest I'm stuck with windows because I can't afford the price tag on the equivalent Mac. Similar to why I drive a Honda and not a Lexus)
Layered complexity. Build the core of the OS for the hardcore power users. Leave everything available to be tinkered with, if you've gained the knowledge to get there, and thus proven you have the right to be tinkering there. Then layer it back up all the way out to the GUI, and layer the GUI back out to the novice level. If you have the time and/or inclination, layer the help as well, so the basic help will help you along with the basic stuff, but also give you an "I'm dissatisfied with this tonka toy, I want a real truck" option, that will clue you in on how to get to the next step if you feel like it.
Shit, maybe that'll be enough to keep noobs off our backs and make tech support a total wasteland, instead of just the mental wasteland it is now (think the high tech equivalent of "you want fries with that?"... maybe "you want dial-up with that?"
Of course, insert standard foolproof/build a better fool disclaimers, etc etc.
Think of a kitchen. Just about any fool can go in there, and make something out of a box (assuming their smart enough to shop for what other ingredients it needs), and it will be edible. Put an experienced Humbolt county stoner or chef in there, and they'll walk out with a masterpiece, made out of whatever they carried in their heads. But when they were our age, they were probably making shit out of boxes too. (okay, the humbolt county stoner was kind of a joke, but I've heard they can do some amazing shit with a near-empty kitchen.)
And Timothy, you might want to encourage your brother to go ahead and buy that new SUV. If his current car is more than five years old, that new SUV will be adding less pollution to the atmosphere.
Wow! Totally unsuported wild claim...sweet! Lets see, small car pollutes more than car that burns twice as much fuel. Suuuuure.
Don't forget that SUVs are classified as light duty trucks and allowed to pollute more per gallon than more fuel effecient cars. So you only get 16 miles per gallon, but your 16 miles also pollutes more than the 30 miles my car gets out of a gallon.
So you're saying it took his parent's an hour to make him? Either you have too much faith in the ability of the guy, or you're taking into account:
A. Dinner and Movie time, which I can see how that would last an hour, with dinner at McD's first and consumation of the deed halfway thru the movie.
B. Foreplay, which would also by definition have to include
C. Pro-rating like mechanics, either the default of charging what the dealer says it should take, or just charging for a min 1 hour job even if it take 2 minutes to fix.
But the RI/MPAA have a way of co-opting even the good music/film movements, and even if we take them out of the action as it is, their member corporations will still own everything that's been produced under their collect umbrella, some things for more than a century.
I don't think everything should be free (hell, i just bought a lot of import cds and collect vinyl for my dj hobby) but I think a better artist/music appreciator dialog needs to get going.
Just because an artist can fill stadiums doesn't mean they have to. I recently saw Paul Oakenfold play in a small ballroom in a tiny podunk town. Total attendance including security and workers was 1000 people. He seems to have a rockin good time, and this is a guy that's used to playing to crowds of tens of thousands (as well as clubs, I'm not thinking I'm special or anything).
Artists are special, because they enrich our lives. The companies that exploit them and us, however, are only 'special' in that it's hard to get around them and get your works out to any sizeable audience....
I don't know how it will affect DI, but if anyone was listening to Tag's Trance Trip, he shut off just before 3pm Pacific Time.
He was in tears thanking everyone.
Last song on the air was "Days go by" by Dirty Vegas
The anarchy of the net can prevail though. As streams drop off the air (every shoutcast stream may be affected), we must trade the files via FTP and P2P networks if we are to stop the music cartels. Blank cds are cheap, hand out cds full of mp3s with information about what has been done to our beloved streams.
As the streams are shut off, open up the archives and distribute them. Show them how much worse it will get when they block off one avenue of our expression.
Our culture should not be locked away from us and sold back to us. ------------------
The ideas contained herein are free to republish by anyone not affiliated in any way shape or form with the RIAA and MPAA
Seriously, though, I have 2 Seagate Cheetah's running in my home system, a 9 gig boot/program install drive and an 18 gig data drive. Never have any trouble with disk access lagging my system...
until... I try to burn a cd on my 20x Yamaha drive. It pegs my (athlon 1GHz) processor out to 100% CPU and my machine crawls like my first 486dx/100 trying to run Win95. It's HORRIBLE.
I don't have a SCSI burner to test against (oh many a 5 minute span of time have I wished for one though) but copying data off my plextor 40x (again, ultrawide scsi) barely registers on radar.
Of course, I'm not worried about having a hug3 h4rd dr1v3 to fill up with l33t w4r3z, so I don't mind paying my premium for the joys of SCSI. As long as my photoshop loads in under 5 seconds, I'm happy.
Re:Bad Math
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They would need to cover 1% of the lunar surface on BOTH sides of the moon, because only half of the solar panels would be in sunlight at a time.
No, because Luna does not rotate away from Sol. Luna's rotation and orbit times are exactly the same, something like 28 1/2 days. So the same side of Luna always faces Sol.
The 20-40 lunar power bases would be stationed at the east and west edges of the moon so one or the other would always be sunlit as the moon travels around the Earth. Earth-orbiting satellites and mirrors could also help aim the beams towards the terrestrial antennas.
What I got out of the series was that the goal NeRV was trying to accomplish with the Human Instrumentality Project was a breakdown of ego boundaries to allow humans to become something much more, linked, a kind of planetary consciousness.
This is drawn more from the movies than the last two episodes, IIRC, because the last two eps, for me, were more of an "it's okay to be human and fucked up, don't worry about it because everyone else is just as fucked up as you, maybe they just hide it better" message. But it has been a while since I've watched the series so YMMV. (MMMV on a rewatching as well)
I liked the whole bit about "there is a you you, a you in your head, a you in his head, her head, etc. etc." Saying that perceptions matter as much as actual reality because the two are indistinguishable.
And since we already exist multiple times, let's just bypass computer networks and go for direct human networking. Like how the whole OSS/Linux/etc. movement would be much smaller in scope and impact if it weren't for the net to allow collaboration on such a scale. Imagine what might happen if we were to bypass the ego boundaries and join at a pure energy level with one another.
Chaos at first, maybe, but just the building of networks inside your brain produce great (and some technically great but not so good) things like quantum physics and/. (and like nuclear weapons and/. trolls) the speed of idea spawning will accelerate at an exponential pace.
What else would be the next step in human evolution after forming singular conscious, after all?
-neko
p.s. is anyone else pissed off at the fact that when queried about a year ago that ADV said the had no present or future plans to put out a boxed set. Because NGE was so wildly popular that the wanted to milk all the collectors that couldn't be patient. I'm glad I only bought one DVD. At 30 bucks a hit it would cost 240 bucks for the whole set, which I pointed out to them was quite a lot.
Someone stole your laptop? They're going to have to break into your house, steal a key to your room, and stand on your decryption square just to decrypt any of your files. Sounds like an interesting acrobatic scene for Mission Impossible 3.
Fantastic. Stephen Hawking does pretty damned well the way he is know. Imagine what he might be able to do if he were re-unleashed upon the world as Robo-Hawking!
I've got a better idea. Buy a whoopee cushion (c'mon, you remember those things.) Then say "hold on, i'll go get them in a sec."
Take phone to bathroom. Forcefully release the whoopie cushion and make something splash into the toilet. Flush. Repeat if necessary and leave the phone there for a few minutes.
Groan appropriately and make satisfied i-just-nuked-the-bathroom-the-roomie's-gonne-be-pi ssed noises. Alternately, pick up the phone and tell them it's gonna be another second, you just plugged the maw of the porcelain god and he will be angry if his mouth is not cleaned.
So now all those sites where the author says "Yeah, I know FrontPage sucks, but I use it because it's all I know" are going to get sued or something?
Cause just about everyone I know that uses FrontPage either has to, or it's all they know, but they still think it sucks (especially the professionals I know that are forced to use it for their jobs).
-dj (who is now wondering if there's something in the license for IE that says you can't use the browser to post comments disparaging MS. am I scrooed too? or maybe they'll make it so you can't view sites that bash MS. soon the http agent logs of/. will stop showing IE:D
This company, founded in 1995, has been doing VRML chat rooms since at least 1995 or 1996. I think this should qualify as prior art, yes?
Sure, they ripped off Snow Crash, but hey, if they fight this patent they can redeem that yes?
When they first started, they had their own custom program interface, it was pretty cool. Then the had version 2.0 which used Java and VRML plugins inside a webpage, which really stunk. They've never been really popular as far as I've seen (maybe because their worlds always sucked, very ugly from what I recall).
I mean, PLEASE! IR is such a pain in the ass most of the time. I'm sure anyone who's ever had to get up and move to use a remote will agree with me on this one. I was so mad when cable boxes went from RF to IR. I have a RF Logitech Keyboard, and I can use it just about anywhere. Not so with IR. Line of sight sucks for remotes. Who's with me here? And if no one's ever snuck something (like electric tape) over your IR sensor and it took you a while to notice while you were screaming at your remote, you don't know what remote rage is like.
Sounds like your splitter is hosed. The splitter is what separates the digital from the analog on the outside of your house. Try and get them to replace it (some of the early ones were crap). Or, if you have a home install kit... I'm sorry. Those work, but seem kinda hokey (those ugly in line filters for the phone. ugh. and that huge plate that mounts over your wall jack to split the dsl. icky) and you'll probably have to get it replaced if you're getting the kind of bleedover you're talking about. If you're losing connections when someone calls, definately splitter.:)
disclaimer: i work for a small ISP that fights with pacbell constantly about their crappy dsl service. when i started work here and switched from pacbell dsl to our own, my connectings went from a spotty 200~700Kbps to a constant 1.5Mbps.
So then, all those website crackers and script kiddies, instead of defacing websites, should just upload decss.zip and decss.tar.gz to the root directory of every website they crack into. Nothing else. Then someone starts a master page that has a listing of all the websites that have been hit. No links, and even if they were, they wouldn't be links to the copies of the code. Just to the sites. The unspoken guarantee that you add decss.zip (or.tar.gz) to the end and you get what you are looking for.
Or, as someone else said, change the variables, or make the source code into something different that performs the same. But go a step beyond that. Publish it. I mean really publish it. Send it to a magazine that will print it for you. Truly get it protected under the first amendment. Or talk to those obfuscated perl contest winners and have one write an obfuscated perl script that will output decss when it is run, and have that published. Write into the letters column of your local newspaper, magazines, any chance you have of getting it published, do so!
Another possibility is to loveletter the source code, either in original or modified form (Note: I do not, repeat NOT endorse this nor would i like to see it. I'm a network admin and do not, repeat NOT need that headache again. The though just occurred to me while writing this ). The more places the code is published or spread, the more the MPAA will have to sue. If it achieves loveletter status in mailing itself around the globe (what, just about every other computer in the world in under 24 hours?) the MPAA will have to send cease-and-desist letters to everyone. Including themselves.
Heck, if the source in under 6000 characters, send it into that French space-time capsule that will be up for 50000 years. If not, break it up amongst several people with instructions on how to reassemble the code. Convert it into as many other programming languages as possible, convert the variables into other languages. Write a mathematical equation that is answered with the decss code. The possibilities are endless for this type of civil disobedience. Remember, you (i.e. dedicated hackers) are the smart ones, not them. If they were, you wouldn't have cracked the encryption in the first place.
Rent some time on public access TV and spend the half hour or so teaching people how to compile the source code, and then tell them to tape your show, and halfway thru have the source scroll up the screen so they can type it in later on. Or just dictate it. All those old floppy disks that you've been itching to throw away? Copy the source onto that and some literature about the whole case and the evils of the MPAA and distribute it to people at political rallies.
It can be done. Hell, I'm stupid and look at all these ideas I came up with. Maybe someone smart can think of something that will actually work!
-dj
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly, our backup mail server may be an unusual case, but we do have another server that acts as a wireless router/DHCP server that had almost as good an uptime.
And that's not to be confused with the uptime on my workstation that flipped out after a power-out and suddenly thought it had been up for 800-some odd days. Interestingly enough, every time I check my workstation now, the uptime decreases. I'm hoping I can get it down to zero, but it's still 811, and I know there's no way an actual human-operated Win box will stay up that long.
You think that's scary, buddy, you got another think coming. :D
Oddly enough though, Microsoft sorta has the basics of one of the right ideas with XP.
They just don't do it well enough, of course, because they are still way into taking power away from the users. I think *nix (especially the new Apple flavor) has a better idea of where to go with this. (Well as far as what I've seen of them, unfortunately as a graphic design hobbiest I'm stuck with windows because I can't afford the price tag on the equivalent Mac. Similar to why I drive a Honda and not a Lexus)
Layered complexity. Build the core of the OS for the hardcore power users. Leave everything available to be tinkered with, if you've gained the knowledge to get there, and thus proven you have the right to be tinkering there. Then layer it back up all the way out to the GUI, and layer the GUI back out to the novice level. If you have the time and/or inclination, layer the help as well, so the basic help will help you along with the basic stuff, but also give you an "I'm dissatisfied with this tonka toy, I want a real truck" option, that will clue you in on how to get to the next step if you feel like it.
Shit, maybe that'll be enough to keep noobs off our backs and make tech support a total wasteland, instead of just the mental wasteland it is now (think the high tech equivalent of "you want fries with that?"... maybe "you want dial-up with that?"
Of course, insert standard foolproof/build a better fool disclaimers, etc etc.
Think of a kitchen. Just about any fool can go in there, and make something out of a box (assuming their smart enough to shop for what other ingredients it needs), and it will be edible. Put an experienced Humbolt county stoner or chef in there, and they'll walk out with a masterpiece, made out of whatever they carried in their heads. But when they were our age, they were probably making shit out of boxes too. (okay, the humbolt county stoner was kind of a joke, but I've heard they can do some amazing shit with a near-empty kitchen.)
long enough,
neko
Anyone else notice that their acronym would be NYFU?
I thought that 60 yr old streaker looked a bit too well hung to be a mere human.
So you're saying it took his parent's an hour to make him? Either you have too much faith in the ability of the guy, or you're taking into account:
A. Dinner and Movie time, which I can see how that would last an hour, with dinner at McD's first and consumation of the deed halfway thru the movie.
B. Foreplay, which would also by definition have to include
C. Pro-rating like mechanics, either the default of charging what the dealer says it should take, or just charging for a min 1 hour job even if it take 2 minutes to fix.
I was suprised too, when I saw him alive and well, rolling down the Market Street in SF, CA, in a drop top beamer, at the Gay Pride Parade.
I was like, WTF? how did he survive that fall with the Balrog?
I've been TV free for 7 years and going.
But the RI/MPAA have a way of co-opting even the good music/film movements, and even if we take them out of the action as it is, their member corporations will still own everything that's been produced under their collect umbrella, some things for more than a century.
I don't think everything should be free (hell, i just bought a lot of import cds and collect vinyl for my dj hobby) but I think a better artist/music appreciator dialog needs to get going.
Just because an artist can fill stadiums doesn't mean they have to. I recently saw Paul Oakenfold play in a small ballroom in a tiny podunk town. Total attendance including security and workers was 1000 people. He seems to have a rockin good time, and this is a guy that's used to playing to crowds of tens of thousands (as well as clubs, I'm not thinking I'm special or anything).
Artists are special, because they enrich our lives. The companies that exploit them and us, however, are only 'special' in that it's hard to get around them and get your works out to any sizeable audience....
until the net grew, anyway.
Reposted from digitally imported's forums
I don't know how it will affect DI, but if anyone was listening to Tag's Trance Trip, he shut off just before 3pm Pacific Time.
He was in tears thanking everyone.
Last song on the air was "Days go by" by Dirty Vegas
The anarchy of the net can prevail though. As streams drop off the air (every shoutcast stream may be affected), we must trade the files via FTP and P2P networks if we are to stop the music cartels. Blank cds are cheap, hand out cds full of mp3s with information about what has been done to our beloved streams.
As the streams are shut off, open up the archives and distribute them. Show them how much worse it will get when they block off one avenue of our expression.
Our culture should not be locked away from us and sold back to us.
------------------
The ideas contained herein are free to republish by anyone not affiliated in any way shape or form with the RIAA and MPAA
Preach on, brutha-man.
Seriously, though, I have 2 Seagate Cheetah's running in my home system, a 9 gig boot/program install drive and an 18 gig data drive. Never have any trouble with disk access lagging my system...
until... I try to burn a cd on my 20x Yamaha drive. It pegs my (athlon 1GHz) processor out to 100% CPU and my machine crawls like my first 486dx/100 trying to run Win95. It's HORRIBLE.
I don't have a SCSI burner to test against (oh many a 5 minute span of time have I wished for one though) but copying data off my plextor 40x (again, ultrawide scsi) barely registers on radar.
Of course, I'm not worried about having a hug3 h4rd dr1v3 to fill up with l33t w4r3z, so I don't mind paying my premium for the joys of SCSI. As long as my photoshop loads in under 5 seconds, I'm happy.
No, because Luna does not rotate away from Sol. Luna's rotation and orbit times are exactly the same, something like 28 1/2 days. So the same side of Luna always faces Sol.
The 20-40 lunar power bases would be stationed at the east and west edges of the moon so one or the other would always be sunlit as the moon travels around the Earth. Earth-orbiting satellites and mirrors could also help aim the beams towards the terrestrial antennas.
And if you'd bothered to read the article...
Too bad we're the ones that are paying for all their new toner and paper.
The only problem with that is when it removes the spyware Kazaa refuses to function until you reinstall Kazaa.
What I got out of the series was that the goal NeRV was trying to accomplish with the Human Instrumentality Project was a breakdown of ego boundaries to allow humans to become something much more, linked, a kind of planetary consciousness.
/. (and like nuclear weapons and /. trolls) the speed of idea spawning will accelerate at an exponential pace.
This is drawn more from the movies than the last two episodes, IIRC, because the last two eps, for me, were more of an "it's okay to be human and fucked up, don't worry about it because everyone else is just as fucked up as you, maybe they just hide it better" message. But it has been a while since I've watched the series so YMMV. (MMMV on a rewatching as well)
I liked the whole bit about "there is a you you, a you in your head, a you in his head, her head, etc. etc." Saying that perceptions matter as much as actual reality because the two are indistinguishable.
And since we already exist multiple times, let's just bypass computer networks and go for direct human networking. Like how the whole OSS/Linux/etc. movement would be much smaller in scope and impact if it weren't for the net to allow collaboration on such a scale. Imagine what might happen if we were to bypass the ego boundaries and join at a pure energy level with one another.
Chaos at first, maybe, but just the building of networks inside your brain produce great (and some technically great but not so good) things like quantum physics and
What else would be the next step in human evolution after forming singular conscious, after all?
-neko
p.s. is anyone else pissed off at the fact that when queried about a year ago that ADV said the had no present or future plans to put out a boxed set. Because NGE was so wildly popular that the wanted to milk all the collectors that couldn't be patient. I'm glad I only bought one DVD. At 30 bucks a hit it would cost 240 bucks for the whole set, which I pointed out to them was quite a lot.
Or walk around on your roof.
Maybe they just sent out an Outlook Virus that only mailed to microsoft.com addresses and automatically voted. :D
Take phone to bathroom. Forcefully release the whoopie cushion and make something splash into the toilet. Flush. Repeat if necessary and leave the phone there for a few minutes.
Groan appropriately and make satisfied i-just-nuked-the-bathroom-the-roomie's-gonne-be-pi ssed noises. Alternately, pick up the phone and tell them it's gonna be another second, you just plugged the maw of the porcelain god and he will be angry if his mouth is not cleaned.
See if you get a repeat call after that.
Cause just about everyone I know that uses FrontPage either has to, or it's all they know, but they still think it sucks (especially the professionals I know that are forced to use it for their jobs).
-dj (who is now wondering if there's something in the license for IE that says you can't use the browser to post comments disparaging MS. am I scrooed too? or maybe they'll make it so you can't view sites that bash MS. soon the http agent logs of /. will stop showing IE :D
Sure, they ripped off Snow Crash, but hey, if they fight this patent they can redeem that yes?
When they first started, they had their own custom program interface, it was pretty cool. Then the had version 2.0 which used Java and VRML plugins inside a webpage, which really stunk. They've never been really popular as far as I've seen (maybe because their worlds always sucked, very ugly from what I recall).
But, they beat the date.
neko
disclaimer: i work for a small ISP that fights with pacbell constantly about their crappy dsl service. when i started work here and switched from pacbell dsl to our own, my connectings went from a spotty 200~700Kbps to a constant 1.5Mbps.
Or, as someone else said, change the variables, or make the source code into something different that performs the same. But go a step beyond that. Publish it. I mean really publish it. Send it to a magazine that will print it for you. Truly get it protected under the first amendment. Or talk to those obfuscated perl contest winners and have one write an obfuscated perl script that will output decss when it is run, and have that published. Write into the letters column of your local newspaper, magazines, any chance you have of getting it published, do so!
Another possibility is to loveletter the source code, either in original or modified form (Note: I do not, repeat NOT endorse this nor would i like to see it. I'm a network admin and do not, repeat NOT need that headache again. The though just occurred to me while writing this ). The more places the code is published or spread, the more the MPAA will have to sue. If it achieves loveletter status in mailing itself around the globe (what, just about every other computer in the world in under 24 hours?) the MPAA will have to send cease-and-desist letters to everyone. Including themselves.
Heck, if the source in under 6000 characters, send it into that French space-time capsule that will be up for 50000 years. If not, break it up amongst several people with instructions on how to reassemble the code. Convert it into as many other programming languages as possible, convert the variables into other languages. Write a mathematical equation that is answered with the decss code. The possibilities are endless for this type of civil disobedience. Remember, you (i.e. dedicated hackers) are the smart ones, not them. If they were, you wouldn't have cracked the encryption in the first place.
Rent some time on public access TV and spend the half hour or so teaching people how to compile the source code, and then tell them to tape your show, and halfway thru have the source scroll up the screen so they can type it in later on. Or just dictate it. All those old floppy disks that you've been itching to throw away? Copy the source onto that and some literature about the whole case and the evils of the MPAA and distribute it to people at political rallies.
It can be done. Hell, I'm stupid and look at all these ideas I came up with. Maybe someone smart can think of something that will actually work! -dj