Ahhhh... reminds me of dialing into various BBS's that I could get numbers for...
Back in the early 90's a local BBS ran on a 3B2 system (Unix System V, IIRC). Dial-up users got a restricted shell. I had an awful lot of fun creating a news reader that grouped selected articles in one newsgroup by subject. Since access was restricted (no C, no chmod...) it was a Frankenstein monster - shell script, awk, vi and umodem. (Today I would have done it in Perl...)
All of you geeks missed the boat. The real killer app for lasers:
Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Center of Georgia [cosmeticgyn.com]
The most amazing thing about this technology is how a guy who was really good with lasers got close enough to a vagina to test it. There was a scientist with some real vision though.
Advertising for plastic surgery is certainly tasteless, but I think this takes the cake. Here's a quote from their web site which caused me to spew coffee all over my keyboard and screen:
In a patient survey women were asked; Do women want to be loose and relaxed or do women want to be tight? Women answered 100% -women want to be tight.
BTW, using lasers in this area is nothing new. Gynecologists have been using lasers for some time to treat various forms of cervical dysplasia (pre-cancerous changes).
When the switch is complete, broadcasters must return their analog channels to the government for other uses. Methinks this is why the government cares about this - they want their bleedin' bandwidth back.
So... what other uses?
It doesn't matter. They just want to *sell* off the old channels.
Business, government, academics - all the same - anything for revenue.
They didn't mandate that all radios must receive FM when that was started.
No, but they rather suddenly doubled all the frequencies on the FM band after WWII, rendering all of the old FM sets useless.
Articles do not portray spammers correctly
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 1
So far all of the newspaper articles that I have seen to date, including the one from AP in the Salt Lake paper and the one in the Detroit News from last Sunday (which I reported on that day) make light of an important fact about spammers and also neglect a very potent means of attacking them. They gloss over a very important technical detail - how spammers actually send their e-mail out. If you don't read with care, you get the impression that spammers get in trouble from sending out too many individual e-mails from their own ISP accounts or that spammers get in trouble when the recipient gets flooded with e-mails for its customers.
Actually, most spam is relayed from other systems which are open to attack. A single inbound request can trigger *thousands* if not more spams from a targeted zombie system.
We need to start portraying spammers as malicious hackers or perhaps as terrorists. By relaying mail without permission, they are stealing service.
Think of all the textbooks school systems could buy for their students instead of paying the costs to relay mail for spammers.
So if I don't buy into the "everything is disposable" routine and am still using a ten-year old tv in 2006, suddenly I will be treated only to static and a few pirate tv channels being broadcast from teenagers' backyards(until the FCC shuts them down of course).
It's going to be worse than that. Old TV sets are going to be around for a long time to come. I have friends who still have *BETA* tapes and play them on *BETA* equipment. There will still be plenty of VHS and DVD players still putting out NTSC along with video cameras, etc.
Closed circuit TV (security equipment, etc) is also going to be around for a long time. That's analog.
In addition, it's going to be horrible for people who view TV with a set top or roof-top antenna - why - *fringe reception* - analog is tolerant of a degrading signal - but you can still watch a snowy picture. Those big city bureaucrats forget that TV stations get few and far between in rural areas. Not everyone in those areas wants or can get cable or a dish. For example, my G.F.s family lives in Central Michigan. From there you can watch TV from all over the state. With skip you can get TV from Detroit, 120+ miles away. Further north, in prime vacation country, there are almost no TV stations. The nearest stations are at least 120+ miles away.
Finally, I remember the first set top boxes that came in back in the early 60s - converters that allowed watching UHF on an old (VHF) TV. People bought them after a few years because the new stations were worth watching. In our area, the PBS station and a local sports station were on UHF. In other areas, UHF had a well deserved reputation for cheap and cheesy memorialized in a movie by "Wierd Al".
Even with cable, I find very little worth watching on TV. Digital is not going to improve that at all. Currently my cable system has 80+ channels. But take away the shopping channels, the religious broadcasters, and the channels devoted to local school systems and local governments and pay per view movies, and there's very little left except for super specialized broadcasting. Sorry, 20 or 30 new home decorating idea channels won't be very interesting.
Admitting a student means you have to find space for her/him. Empty beds cost you money. The University of Michigan Anne Arbor is notorious for wait-listing students they think will go elsewhere. They wait-listed me and I got into MIT with no wait.
Maybe if you had spelled Ann Arbor correctly, the outcome would have been different.
I wish someone would take this rapier business-changing stuff over to the used pr0n book market. I am so tired of purchasing "like new" books only to find out they come with many "unidentifable" stains.
Back in the late 1950s, the Department of Defense did invent the ultimate computer. It had a typewriter like keyboard and punched out its answers on telegraph tape. The commanding general decided to test it out himself to see if it did indeed know everything. First he asked "What's the wheat output of the Soviet Union?" "Nine million metric tons", it replied - "Correct". "What's Kruschev's shoe size?" - "9 1/2" - "Correct". Finally, the general decided he'd get the better of the electronic beast. "Is there a God?", he typed. The machine sat. Lights blinked, tapes whirred, tubes glowed. After a few minutes the tape slowly printed out "There is one now."
This is like Buying a new car that has automatic transmission, 60mpg, dashboard computer, GPS, and also an 8-track player. And by the way, vacuum tubes and AGP slots were never meant to be in the same picture. I'm sorry, but it just ain't right.
Also incompatible with motherboards, tube sockets are six prong or octal, not hex or binary.
Slashdot just told us that workstations are dirtier than toilets [slashdot.org] and now Sun wants people to share them on a regular basis? Be sure to bring a can of Lysol in your briefcase.
So now GW will have to create a new category of guest worker visa for the hordes we will need to import from the UK to work as phone sanitisers.
Is ITAA worth quoting when they say "more than a million IT jobs are going to be created in the coming year, taking employment back to pre-2001 levels"?
Where are the jobs going to be created? Not in the USA. Already India is screaming that they are being undercut by the Chinese.
Remember that ITAA is a lobbying group. I give their statements the same credibility that I give to those of the Gartner group and other tools of big business.
They certainly seemed to have invented a nice tech gadet. However (I don't know about you) but I don't see how it should help much with carnivore, at least from the article.
I hope this works out better than the ill fated "Clipper" chip, well described in Steven Levy's "Crypto".
http://mosaic.echonyc.com/~steven/crypto.html
The last time the government promoted its wonder privacy gizmo, it didn't work out so well. Not only did Clipper start a political firestorm, but it turned out later not to be secure.
What I wouldn't give to be as nasty as to hook a horse to an AC circuit and electrocute it over the course of 40 minutes to defame my arch-nemesis Westinghouse.
This actually is the story behind the electric chair. Edison wanted to demonstrate that Westinghouse's AC current was dangerous, as opposed to his "safe" DC, so he encouraged the use of AC at Sing Sing for the electric chair, figuring that public revulsion would spread to AC current as well.
If you look at the story behind the light bulb, it shows the use of brute force to solve a problem. Edison's assistant tried hundreds of things before coming up with carbonized thread, instead of understanding something about the situation and guessing what might work well. Putting the filament in a vacuum was also not part of their first attempts.
wouldn't this be similar to say you're watching friends and while you're watching someone enters your house and paints your television pink, puts a sign on top of your tv that says buy tampax, and replaces your remote with a tampax branded remote?
And how does this new remote work? You have to pull the string to change channels, but how do you change the volume or turn it off???
Re:The same geniuses who came up with "Shoshkeles"
on
Browser Becomes Billboard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As reported previously here [slashdot.org], United Virtualities is the same company that came up with those horrible "Shoshkeles" ads!! If you've never seen them, they are ads that run, animated, all over the page, with full sound. Ack!
This sounds like more marketing hype from United Virtualities. If you look at "shoshkeles" and what they actually do, you will see that they like the older "eyeblasters" contain a lot of code that obscures what they really are doing. They simply put a flash animation in a layer, make it transparent and position it with CSS. Flash does the hard work! It's 3 lines of code on IE instead of the steaming heap their scripts turn out.
And ad executives like this? They think people want flying soft drink cans to cover their morning newspaper? Of course they're not human so what did you expect???
Actually, I think of girls as 3 port routers*. And I like to use the full bandwidth on all ports.
* You have to be Australian to fully get this pun.
1. This gives new meaning to the term "rooting" a box.
2. Friend of mine in the navy regularly struck out while on shore leave in Australia. It seems the ladies didn't like it when he introduced himself with "Hi, I'm Randy".
Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"
Suitable punishments:
1. Opening Satan's aspirin bottles.
2. Opening Satan's CDs.
3. Maintaining Satan's Windows 98 SE based network.
4. Watching an endlessly repeating loop of TV commercials for lawyers (Larry, Sam and Lee) interspersed with ads for Debt consolidators and Oxy Clean.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhhh... reminds me of dialing into various BBS's that I could get numbers for...
Back in the early 90's a local BBS ran on a 3B2 system (Unix System V, IIRC). Dial-up users got a restricted shell. I had an awful lot of fun creating a news reader that grouped selected articles in one newsgroup by subject. Since access was restricted (no C, no chmod...) it was a Frankenstein monster - shell script, awk, vi and umodem. (Today I would have done it in Perl...)
All of you geeks missed the boat. The real killer app for lasers:
Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Center of Georgia [cosmeticgyn.com]
The most amazing thing about this technology is how a guy who was really good with lasers got close enough to a vagina to test it. There was a scientist with some real vision though.
Advertising for plastic surgery is certainly tasteless, but I think this takes the cake. Here's a quote from their web site which caused me to spew coffee all over my keyboard and screen:
In a patient survey women were asked; Do women want to be loose and relaxed or do women want to be tight? Women answered 100% -women want to be tight.
BTW, using lasers in this area is nothing new. Gynecologists have been using lasers for some time to treat various forms of cervical dysplasia (pre-cancerous changes).
When the switch is complete, broadcasters must return their analog channels to the government for other uses.
Methinks this is why the government cares about this - they want their bleedin' bandwidth back.
So... what other uses?
It doesn't matter. They just want to *sell* off the old channels.
Business, government, academics - all the same - anything for revenue.
They didn't mandate that all radios must receive FM when that was started.
No, but they rather suddenly doubled all the frequencies on the FM band after WWII, rendering all of the old FM sets useless.
So far all of the newspaper articles that I have seen to date, including the one from AP in the Salt Lake paper and the one in the Detroit News from last Sunday (which I reported on that day) make light of an important fact about spammers and also neglect a very potent means of attacking them. They gloss over a very important technical detail - how spammers actually send their e-mail out. If you don't read with care, you get the impression that spammers get in trouble from sending out too many individual e-mails from their own ISP accounts or that spammers get in trouble when the recipient gets flooded with e-mails for its customers.
Actually, most spam is relayed from other systems which are open to attack. A single inbound request can trigger *thousands* if not more spams from a targeted zombie system.
We need to start portraying spammers as malicious hackers or perhaps as terrorists. By relaying mail without permission, they are stealing service.
Think of all the textbooks school systems could buy for their students instead of paying the costs to relay mail for spammers.
It's a paperless school, so no diplomas, just floppy disks. Don't forget to write protect your diplomas.
So if I don't buy into the "everything is disposable" routine and am still using a ten-year old tv in 2006, suddenly I will be treated only to static and a few pirate tv channels being broadcast from teenagers' backyards(until the FCC shuts them down of course).
It's going to be worse than that. Old TV sets are going to be around for a long time to come. I have friends who still have *BETA* tapes and play them on *BETA* equipment. There will still be plenty of VHS and DVD players still putting out NTSC along with video cameras, etc.
Closed circuit TV (security equipment, etc) is also going to be around for a long time. That's analog.
In addition, it's going to be horrible for people who view TV with a set top or roof-top antenna - why - *fringe reception* - analog is tolerant of a degrading signal - but you can still watch a snowy picture. Those big city bureaucrats forget that TV stations get few and far between in rural areas. Not everyone in those areas wants or can get cable or a dish. For example, my G.F.s family lives in Central Michigan. From there you can watch TV from all over the state. With skip you can get TV from Detroit, 120+ miles away. Further north, in prime vacation country, there are almost no TV stations. The nearest stations are at least 120+ miles away.
Finally, I remember the first set top boxes that came in back in the early 60s - converters that allowed watching UHF on an old (VHF) TV. People bought them after a few years because the new stations were worth watching. In our area, the PBS station and a local sports station were on UHF. In other areas, UHF had a well deserved reputation for cheap and cheesy memorialized in a movie by "Wierd Al".
Even with cable, I find very little worth watching on TV. Digital is not going to improve that at all. Currently my cable system has 80+ channels. But take away the shopping channels, the religious broadcasters, and the channels devoted to local school systems and local governments and pay per view movies, and there's very little left except for super specialized broadcasting. Sorry, 20 or 30 new home decorating idea channels won't be very interesting.
Admitting a student means you have to find space for her/him. Empty beds cost you money. The University of Michigan Anne Arbor is notorious for wait-listing students they think will go elsewhere. They wait-listed me and I got into MIT with no wait.
Maybe if you had spelled Ann Arbor correctly, the outcome would have been different.
[i]Autonomous sounds scary.[/i]
as in autonomous mobile sword? Does anyone remember the movie "Screamers"?
I wish someone would take this rapier business-changing stuff over to the used pr0n book market. I am so tired of purchasing "like new" books only to find out they come with many "unidentifable" stains.
You mean that they are not glued shut?
Another is John King in Detroit.
Back in the late 1950s, the Department of Defense did invent the ultimate computer. It had a typewriter like keyboard and punched out its answers on telegraph tape. The commanding general decided to test it out himself to see if it did indeed know everything. First he asked "What's the wheat output of the Soviet Union?" "Nine million metric tons", it replied - "Correct". "What's Kruschev's shoe size?" - "9 1/2" - "Correct". Finally, the general decided he'd get the better of the electronic beast. "Is there a God?", he typed. The machine sat. Lights blinked, tapes whirred, tubes glowed. After a few minutes the tape slowly printed out "There is one now."
This is like Buying a new car that has automatic transmission, 60mpg, dashboard computer, GPS, and also an 8-track player. And by the way, vacuum tubes and AGP slots were never meant to be in the same picture. I'm sorry, but it just ain't right.
Also incompatible with motherboards, tube sockets are six prong or octal, not hex or binary.
Coming soon - core memory cards (1,000,000 wait states).
Slashdot just told us that workstations are dirtier than toilets [slashdot.org] and now Sun wants people to share them on a regular basis? Be sure to bring a can of Lysol in your briefcase.
So now GW will have to create a new category of guest worker visa for the hordes we will need to import from the UK to work as phone sanitisers.
The study revealed that telephones had the highest levels of bacteria. So does this mean that we need phone sanitizers after all?
It's impossible, Lois could never have Superman's baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle the sperm?
Larry Niven asks similar questions in a slightly more serious vein in his short story "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex".
Is ITAA worth quoting when they say "more than a million IT jobs are going to be created in the coming year, taking employment back to pre-2001 levels"?
Where are the jobs going to be created? Not in the USA. Already India is screaming that they are being undercut by the Chinese.
Remember that ITAA is a lobbying group. I give their statements the same credibility that I give to those of the Gartner group and other tools of big business.
They certainly seemed to have invented a nice tech gadet. However (I don't know about you) but I don't see how it should help much with carnivore, at least from the article.
I hope this works out better than the ill fated "Clipper" chip, well described in Steven Levy's "Crypto".
http://mosaic.echonyc.com/~steven/crypto.html
The last time the government promoted its wonder privacy gizmo, it didn't work out so well. Not only did Clipper start a political firestorm, but it turned out later not to be secure.
I'm waiting for the sequel:
"Managing Programmers who Think They're Einsteins
(but who are really idiots)"
It's already out, it's called "Secrets of Herding Cats" by EDS.
What I wouldn't give to be as nasty as to
hook a horse to an AC circuit and electrocute
it over the course of 40 minutes to defame
my arch-nemesis Westinghouse.
This actually is the story behind the electric chair. Edison wanted to demonstrate that Westinghouse's AC current was dangerous, as opposed to his "safe" DC, so he encouraged the use of AC at Sing Sing for the electric chair, figuring that public revulsion would spread to AC current as well.
If you look at the story behind the light bulb, it shows the use of brute force to solve a problem. Edison's assistant tried hundreds of things before coming up with carbonized thread, instead of understanding something about the situation and guessing what might work well. Putting the filament in a vacuum was also not part of their first attempts.
wouldn't this be similar to say you're watching friends and while you're watching someone enters your house and paints your television pink, puts a sign on top of your tv that says buy tampax, and replaces your remote with a tampax branded remote?
And how does this new remote work? You have to pull the string to change channels, but how do you change the volume or turn it off???
As reported previously here [slashdot.org], United Virtualities is the same company that came up with those horrible "Shoshkeles" ads!! If you've never seen them, they are ads that run, animated, all over the page, with full sound. Ack!
This sounds like more marketing hype from United Virtualities. If you look at "shoshkeles" and what they actually do, you will see that they like the older "eyeblasters" contain a lot of code that obscures what they really are doing. They simply put a flash animation in a layer, make it transparent and position it with CSS. Flash does the hard work! It's 3 lines of code on IE instead of the steaming heap their scripts turn out.
And ad executives like this? They think people want flying soft drink cans to cover their morning newspaper? Of course they're not human so what did you expect???
What's next? Software that burns ads permanently into your CRT...without the inconvenience of having to install any special program?
My bank's ATM machines already have this feature. The bank ad alternates with the operating screen so it's burned in.
Actually, I think of girls as 3 port routers*. And I like to use the full bandwidth on all ports.
* You have to be Australian to fully get this pun.
1. This gives new meaning to the term "rooting" a box.
2. Friend of mine in the navy regularly struck out while on shore leave in Australia. It seems the ladies didn't like it when he introduced himself with "Hi, I'm Randy".
Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"
Suitable punishments:
1. Opening Satan's aspirin bottles.
2. Opening Satan's CDs.
3. Maintaining Satan's Windows 98 SE based network.
4. Watching an endlessly repeating loop of TV commercials for lawyers (Larry, Sam and Lee) interspersed with ads for Debt consolidators and Oxy Clean.
5. Sharing a dungeon with Al Gore.