True, it won't be "pure IPv6"; but who (besides purists) gives a hoot? Saying that you can't NAT in IPv6 is equivalant to saying you can't multitask in IPv6. If you believe that we can't NAT 3 computers, where... a) - Mom is listening to streaming internet radio on her computer b) - Dad is madly typing in messages on Slashdot c) - Geeky son is downloading latest linux updates
Then how would we handle the situation where I'm listening to streaming internet radio, whilst madly typing in messages on Slashdot, and I have linux updates downloading in the background?
If we can do one, we can do the other. Another use for NAT is that you can have a NATting router with 1 external IPv6 address, and multiple LAN-side IPv4 addresses. This means that when IPv6 comes out, you don't throw out all your PCs and all their software. You simply hook them all up to a 4-to-6 NAT-gateway. The outside world sees one IPv6 address with someone multitasking like crazy, and behind the NAT-gateway you've got 3 people running "old-fashioned" IPv4 software+hardware.
The best analogy would be a set-top box that converts Digital TV to old-fashioned NTSC, and allows you to keep on using your old TV set even after the Digital TV switchover.
In both cases, as the customer eventually gets around to buying new equipment (computer or TV) they can get rid of the translation device when it's not required.
The truth is more like write once, crawl anywhere. Years ago, Oracle used a Windows installer to install their Windows client, etc. Then they switched to a Java-based installer for all supported OS's. It sucked dead bunnies through a garden hose. Installing the client went from a few minutes to a couple of hours. It was also so painful and complex, that our office stopped asking people like me ("power user") to install Oracle client and turned over Oracle client installation to CS staff. All this so Oracle can stick more buzzwords in their brochures... bleagh.
Java is being over-used almost as much as Schlockwave-Trash. There are probably are appropriate places for Java, I can't think of any right now.
It originally referred to an episode in "Happy Days" where the lead character literally ski-jumps over a shark. It's now become slang for any pointless, spectacular, diversion/stunt by a TV show or company (or whatever) that has run out of ideas, is on its way down, and can only retain public attention via these stupid stunts.
> what will need to change though is the upgrade every few months deal, people DO NOT want to do that. > incremental upgrades of this or that app, but NOT this geek fixation on upgrading. People want to settle > in and just use what they have for several years, not several *months* or even *weeks*.
Right on. Patches are one thing but wipe and reinstall is something totally different. In most cases, upgrading your OS is much better done by wipe+reinstall, rather than "upgrade". For Linux, that leaves 2 options, one at each end of the expertise spectrum...
1) Debian... some people have ragged on Debian about its slowness to upgrade. But that is what a lot of end-users want, i.e. a system you can *USE*, rather than a continuous series of wipe+reinstall.
2) Gentoo... It's hard to explain to non-users, but here goes. Imagine that you got Windows NT4 years ago. You updated/patched every month or so. Today, the code on your machine is identical to what you would have if you went and bought Windows XP SP2. "Rolling Incremental Upgrade" is the best phrase I can think of.
Microsoft has conditioned people to do a monthly update, with a large download, but it's not considered the same as an OS upgrade. You can launch the update when you go to bed. The following morning, or worst-case when you get back from work that afternoon, your update is done. Gentoo is sort of like that. If you do your updates once or twice a week, the downloads and builds will obviously be smaller. Unlike Windows, you also get your apps upgraded, as well as the OS. Also unlike Windows... *IT'S FREE*!!!
> I'd love to see you try to get Linux with KDE 4 running on that same laptop. It's not like you can compare > Vista to a bare Linux kernel, a modern Linux GUI is just as bloated and needs just as much hardware as Windows.
MS compares Windows vs KDE/GNOME because that's the best-looking comparison for them. A lighter WM, like Blackbox, etc, can run on machines where KDE/GNOME crawls. On linux, *YOU HAVE THE CHOICE* to run a lighter desktop or WM. In Windows, you don't have that choice.
Up until a year ago, my main machine was a 1999 Dell Dimension XPS T450. 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM and an 8 meg ATI Rage Pro video card. BTW "Rage Pro" has a Mach64, *NOT* a Rage128 chip. It originally came with Win98SE. I tried various flavours of linux, and finally settled on Gentoo. Gentoo is an automated build-from-source distro. "emerge" syntax is no more difficult than "rpm" syntax. Building from source has the advantage that you can use all the available compiler flags. In my case... CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse" I run Blackbox as my WM and use pypanel as my launch panel on both the old machine and my current machine (AMD 3000+ with 2 gigs of ram).
The PIII was perfectly adequate for me until last year, when I finally ran into stuff that made me want a new machine...
1) I got interested in internet TV. The PIII has no problems at all with 64 kbit streaming audio over ADSL, but even with every optimization, it was dropping frames in streaming video.
2) I got a digital camera. Let's just say that manipulating a 2560x1920 digital photo in Gimp was "liesurely". Plus, with the same monitor, I can push the resolution to 2048x1536. At 4 bytes per pixel, that's 12 megabytes, which is kinda hard on an 8 megabyte video card.
The PIII is now my "hot backup machine". I fire it up once or twice a month and run updates. I back up my current machine (doesn't everybody) twice a month. If it dies, I can copy my latest backups from CD, and be functional in a couple of hours, missing at most a couple of weeks of email.
We should take all their staff, and send them off in a big spaceship, to the farthest corner of the galaxy, along with other useless types like hairdressers, advertising execs, and middle-managers.
...is that it'll be outlawed by "the best legislators that money can buy". Unlike a car, or an audio tape, or a CD, a digital file does not degrade/fall-apart over time. And it can be copied time after time, and the 'nth generation will be bit-for-bit identical with the original. The only problem with MP3 right now is the patent.
The main patent expires in 2012. At that point, anybody can crank out high-quality standard MP3s without any legal impediments. This has the RIAA scared shitless. Watch for *INTENSE* lobbying for "son-of-SSSCA" legislation that will effectively ban MP3 before then.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8FIG FB00.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db has a story about Overstock.com. ==Begin quote==
In its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said its net loss for the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2005, widened to $18.41 million, up from a loss of $10.63 million during the same period the previous year. Net cash provided by operations was negative $28.15 million for the recent period, a sharp turn from $9.53 million cash generated the previous year.
An upgrade of the company's information technology system that Byrne said was "the equivalent of a heart, lung and kidney transplant" didn't go smoothly. In September, the company said it hadn't loaded new products onto its Web site in five weeks. ==End quote==
So rather than admitting that they screwed up...
==Begin quote== Patrick Byrne, the Internet retailer's chief executive officer, has called short selling of his company's shares -- essentially a bet their price will fall -- a conspiracy orchestrated by a "Sith Lord." He later likened the conspiracy to an organization structured like al-Qaida and said his stock has been targeted by "naked short-sellers," a practice he said has ties to Italian, Russian and Israeli mafia. ==End quote==
If Overstock ran their operation properly and showed a profit next quarter, the naked short-sellers would be in for a world of hurt, financially. Instead, Mr. Byrne is whining about web boards just like Darl McBride whines about Groklaw and Rumsfeld whines about Al Jazeera.
The USA seems to have the same mentality. The Bush administration doesn't admit that they earned their bad reputation by invading a country that they knew didn't have WMD, and holding prisoners incommunicado and torturing them. Rather than actually acting kinder-and-gentler, the US wants propaganda to show that it's kinder and gentler.
That mentailty seems to be pervasive in the USA. Overstock and SCOX have had bad financial results. But they blame their falling stock prices on web boards and short sellers. If a company is found to be distributing spyware, they'll SLAPP the anti-spyware companies that fingered them. And let's not forget how spam^H^H^H^H ethikul email marketeers SLAPPed the MAPS RBL into uselessness.
Corporate USA, and its puppet administration, seem to believe that rather than acting nicer, they merely have to spend money on propaganda, and lawyers for injunctions to shut down websites that expose their misdeeds. They're acting uncannily like Soviet Russia, which spent 10 times as much money trying to jam BBC broadcasts as the BBC spent on broadcasting to the Soviets. Remember what happened to the USSR.
> My understanding was that the large universities that had negotiated such agreements > were essentially paying a RIAA tax so that they'd stop getting those pesky legal letters.
Duhhh... nice university/company youse got here. Youse wouldn't want something terrible to happen to it like a meritless, but damn expensive, lawsuit. For only a few million per year in prot^H^H^H^H licence fees, we can guarantee that nothing terrible happens to youse.
Please Google, don't buy Napster. Those assholes should not be rewarded with a buyout any more than Mcbride and Yarro.
Don't get me wrong, the GNOME and KDE groups both make great *APPLICATIONS*, like KOffice and its GNOME equivalant (Gnumeric, AbiWord, etc) and let's not forget Gimp. However, the GOME and KDE *DESKTOPS* both suck dead bunnies through a garden hose.
*I DON'T RUN DESKTOPS, I RUN APPLICATIONS*. If I really wanted a fat, bloated, pointy-clicky-touchey-feeley-oowee-GUI, I would never have left Windows in the first place. Blackbox with fbpanel as the "launchbar" is just right. My emergency backup machine is a 6-year-old Dell, 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM. For everything except internet TV and manipulating 2560x1920 digital photos in Gimp, it is perfectly OK with Blackbox. As for KDE or GNOME, when they started up, I got to watch the "desktop icons" being painted in slow motion. It was painful. On my current AMD64, 3000+ cpu with 2 gigs of RAM (running Gentoo linux in 32-bit mode) GNOME/KDE are OK. Blackbox screams along.
What the companies are doing is *OUTSOURCING SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION*. I run Gentoo at home for free and MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc are free. I handle any problems that arise, and if I can't, I have to post questions on the appropriate mailing lists. If I didn't feel like doing that, I can hire a freelance contracter to come in and do all that for me... of course, he would charge money. Companies aren't paying for free linux. Some of their beancounters have run the numbers and decided that it costs less for Redhat or IBM to do the system admin stuff than to hire their own system admin in-house.
> NAT makes it very expensive to deploy most innovative new IP applications > (VOIP, IPTV, Peer-to-peer) as each app typeically needs some type of gateway > "middlebox" to get around NAT in order to connect users.
Have you considered the implications... of the average home user running a server accepting unsolicited connections from the internet? Have you considered the implications... of the average home user running ***A WINDOWS SERVER*** accepting unsolicited connections from the internet??? No thanks.
> You read right - when it is absolutely known that only one device is there, > give it a/128. IE, for the end of a point-to-point interface. In your > hypothetical situation the ISP is playing games. They should be giving out >/48s or/64s since home networks are so abundant these days.
Planet earth calling asdfghjklqwertyuiop... have you ever considered the logistitics of stashing ***2^64 PHYSICAL DEVICES IN YOUR HOME***??? You can't get that many RFID tags into a large mansion, let alone cellphones or PC's. Even a/120 (internet-connected 256 devices) would be sufficient thank you. As a side benefit, you wouldn't have any heating bills in the middle of winter. Electricity bills for air-conditioning yes, heating no.
> if such a system has been proposed or patented, i'd be interested in reading more about it.
Here's how it worked back then.
- to run a protected program, you had to start it with the "key floppy" in the A: drive *WITH WRITE-PROTECT TURNED OFF*
- most of the key floppy was writable, just like an ordinary floppy
- small portions of the key floppy were *NOT* writable
- on startup, the program would read certain sectors of the floppy, write to them, and read them again
- if the writable sectors had changed *AND THE NON-WRITABLE SECTORS HAD NOT CHANGED*, only then would the main program launch. Which sectors were writable and which were non-writable was presumably encrypted in the startup code.
You could make a bit-for-bit-identical copy of the key floppy, but the copy would be a regular floppy. The "non-writable" sectors would be written to, and the data changed, alerting the program that it wasn't using a genuine key floppy, and it would refuse to start.
So it's not really a new idea. But what the F, go for a patent anyways. Microsoft recently got a patent for re-inventing sudo http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/221230 so originality isn't a requirement at the office of Patenting The Obvious.
..in case a tourist who doesn't speak the local language wanted to ask locals for directions. A Hungarian tourist with such a device in their hands comes along and asks you to fondle their bum, and you can give them directions to the station, which the device will translate into Hungarian for them,
Pilots are *ALWAYS* better than the show
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 1
> Quick! Cover it up! People aren't supposed to know > we're rejecting the GOOD shows in favor of more idiocy!
Pilots are to TV series what demos are to software. Remember the original Star Trek series (or were you even born then)? There was a 2-part special with Captain Christopher Pike (a basket case with only his head functional) and the crew of the Enterprise being shanghaid to a "forbidden planet". Apparently, *THAT* used significant chunks of the Star Trek pilot.
Compared to that pilot, the Star Trek we got was crap. We got a show with 2 plot lines repeated over and over...
1) Captain Kirk involved in a transporter malfunction... Gene Roddenberry trying to make some deep statement about human values.
2) Enterprise discovers a planet just like earth, where everybody is human and speaks English (even the 20th century Roman Empire), but just *ONE* facet of today's society has been changed... Gene Roddenberry trying to make some deep statement about human values.
After a while it got old, and I stopped watching, as did many others. Hence the show's cancellation. Knowing the difference between the pilot and the actual series (the demo and the actual software release) I can see why TV networks might skeptical of high quality pilots. I wonder what the pilots for a lot of today's shows looked like.
See tech_sec.blog.ca/index.php?blog=10347&p=34561 for my reply to his article. Sorry about not making it clickable. I've run into a Slashdot bug. If I try to post a URL, it *INSISTS* on changing "tech_sec" to "techsec", which obviously doesn't work.
Everyone is having orgasms over SVG static images. They're ignoring the abuse potential of dancing, blinking ads. And unlike Fuckwave-Slash, it won't be possible to "remove a plugin". If it can't be disabled via a user setting, watch for somebody to fork Firefox. Anyone remember XFree86?
The two biggest pains-in-the-butt that the average linux user runs into are the abortions called "winmodem" and "winprinter". They shave $5 or $10 off the price of each unit by dispensing with part of the modem or printer hardware.
In order to function without all the parts, these cheapskate components require *ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE DRIVERS* to emulate the functions of the missing hardware. Not only that, but they require a separate driver version for each OS, each major point release of each OS, and in some cases, each separate distro of linux or *BSD. It ain't worth the hassle.
A modem built over two decades ago for the IBM PC will run under just about any OS that supports PC hardware, without extra work. But Rockwell decided one day to cheap out with RPI (Rockwell Protocol Interface) "modems" that made the computer's cpu do part of the work. This was the model for "winmodems".
Even if a driver exists in Windows or linux, a v90 "winmodem" is slower than a real v90 modem. The CPU has to devote 100% of its attention to the download or else the modem drops characters, causing retransmits etc. Even playing solitaire while downloading may slow the download. This is *NOT* supposed to happen on a real multi-tasking computer, folks. Similar remarks for "winprinters".
This is not aimed against USB modems or printers; they're OK, although linux support for them may not be 100% mature. I'm complaining against incomplete peripherals that treat the computer's cpu as a substitute for missing hardware.
These are the number of email delivery attempts blocked by month between Jan 2004 to Feb 2005 to my personal email address (a personal.org domain). I live in Toronto, Canada but have a remote inbox at a US ISP that allows me to set my own blocking rules.
672 573 706 891 3357 2997 1328 1870 1063 1154 1376 1142 1054 797 JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC JAN FEB
When spammers first discovered "bot networks", they went berserk May through August of 2004. That was when Comcast IP addresses were sending out 800 million emails per day, but only 100 million per day were via Comcast's official mailservers. See http://news.com.com/2010-1034-5218178.html
for details.
Compared to the peak, before Comcast started going after zombies, and many people (including me) blocked 24.0.0.0/8, today's levels are down. But that was an artificial peak. The overall trend is still up. My blocks rejected 35% more this February than last February.
Call me an old fart if you will, but I prefer real text for email, usenet news, and everything else that doesn't require GUI (spreadsheet, web-browsing, etc). That was one of the things that drove me to linux. I flip back and forth from X to text console at will. Console mode apps just aren't being written for Windows any more.
On linux, "VGA=6" in lilo/GRUB sets the text console to 640 pixels X 480 scalines. The standard 8 X 16 VGA font gives 80 columns X 30 lines. Ye olde CGA font (8 x 8) gives 80 columns X 60 lines, but it's painful to read. There are intermediate fonts available. I prefer 8 X 10 fonts for an 80 columns by 48 row display. It's *MUCH* nicer than "mode co80,50" on DOS/WIndows (640 pixels X 400 scanlines using 8 x 8 font).
Does anyone have any experience with *TEXT CONSOLE* modes other than 80 X 25 on LCDs?
Something that many people seem to miss. You *CAN* run GNOME/KDE applications *WITHOUT* the corresponding desktop. Install *BOTH* GNOME and KDE and a lightweight Window Manager like BlackBox.
I have a Dell Dimension XPS, 450 mhz PIII, and 128 megs of RAM. It's over 5 years old. If my only options were Windows XP, or Linux with GNOME or KDE *DESKTOP*, the machine would now be sitting in the local landfill. The GNOME and KDE *DESKTOPS* are *PAINFULLY* slow on it.
Instead, I installed GNOME and KDE and BlackBox. I use BlackBox as my UI. I can still run KOffice (KMail, KSpread, etc) and useful GNOME apps like AbiWord, Gimp, gqview, etc, because the GNOME/KDE base libraries are installed.
In the next couple of years, MS will be bringing out Longhorn. Have you read the hardware requirements on it? Absolutely ridiculous. Instead of a contest to prove that Linux desktops can be just as fat and bloated as Windows, we should be working on a lean+mean GUI. When Longhorn comes out, businesses can have a choice between
- throwing out their old PCs and paying for brand new semi-mainframes to run Longhorn, or
- they can switch to a lean/mean Linux with useful applications, and not have to throw out all their current desktop hardware.
This will be our golden opportunity to push for a large switchover from Windows to linux. Please don't throw it away by dragging down linux's performance with useless eye-candy.
Any API "powerful enough" to let a "good webpage" do "creative multimedia" on your system is also "powerful enough" to let a rogue webpage infect/install/subvert your OS, regardless of whether it's Windows, linux, Mac, BSD, whatever. I have to wonder about the intelligence/computer-literacy of anyone who wants to follow in Microsoft's Active-Hacks footsteps.
Slashdot Mirror
True, it won't be "pure IPv6"; but who (besides purists) gives a hoot? Saying that you can't NAT in IPv6 is equivalant to saying you can't multitask in IPv6. If you believe that we can't NAT 3 computers, where...
a) - Mom is listening to streaming internet radio on her computer
b) - Dad is madly typing in messages on Slashdot
c) - Geeky son is downloading latest linux updates
Then how would we handle the situation where I'm listening to streaming internet radio, whilst madly typing in messages on Slashdot, and I have linux updates downloading in the background?
If we can do one, we can do the other. Another use for NAT is that you can have a NATting router with 1 external IPv6 address, and multiple LAN-side IPv4 addresses. This means that when IPv6 comes out, you don't throw out all your PCs and all their software. You simply hook them all up to a 4-to-6 NAT-gateway. The outside world sees one IPv6 address with someone multitasking like crazy, and behind the NAT-gateway you've got 3 people running "old-fashioned" IPv4 software+hardware.
The best analogy would be a set-top box that converts Digital TV to old-fashioned NTSC, and allows you to keep on using your old TV set even after the Digital TV switchover.
In both cases, as the customer eventually gets around to buying new equipment (computer or TV) they can get rid of the translation device when it's not required.
The truth is more like write once, crawl anywhere. Years ago, Oracle used a Windows installer to install their Windows client, etc. Then they switched to a Java-based installer for all supported OS's. It sucked dead bunnies through a garden hose. Installing the client went from a few minutes to a couple of hours. It was also so painful and complex, that our office stopped asking people like me ("power user") to install Oracle client and turned over Oracle client installation to CS staff. All this so Oracle can stick more buzzwords in their brochures... bleagh.
Java is being over-used almost as much as Schlockwave-Trash. There are probably are appropriate places for Java, I can't think of any right now.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark and http://jumptheshark.com/
It originally referred to an episode in "Happy Days" where the lead character literally ski-jumps over a shark. It's now become slang for any pointless, spectacular, diversion/stunt by a TV show or company (or whatever) that has run out of ideas, is on its way down, and can only retain public attention via these stupid stunts.
> what will need to change though is the upgrade every few months deal, people DO NOT want to do that.
> incremental upgrades of this or that app, but NOT this geek fixation on upgrading. People want to settle > in and just use what they have for several years, not several *months* or even *weeks*.
Right on. Patches are one thing but wipe and reinstall is something totally different. In most cases, upgrading your OS is much better done by wipe+reinstall, rather than "upgrade". For Linux, that leaves 2 options, one at each end of the expertise spectrum...
1) Debian... some people have ragged on Debian about its slowness to upgrade. But that is what a lot of end-users want, i.e. a system you can *USE*, rather than a continuous series of wipe+reinstall.
2) Gentoo... It's hard to explain to non-users, but here goes. Imagine that you got Windows NT4 years ago. You updated/patched every month or so. Today, the code on your machine is identical to what you would have if you went and bought Windows XP SP2. "Rolling Incremental Upgrade" is the best phrase I can think of.
Microsoft has conditioned people to do a monthly update, with a large download, but it's not considered the same as an OS upgrade. You can launch the update when you go to bed. The following morning, or worst-case when you get back from work that afternoon, your update is done. Gentoo is sort of like that. If you do your updates once or twice a week, the downloads and builds will obviously be smaller. Unlike Windows, you also get your apps upgraded, as well as the OS. Also unlike Windows... *IT'S FREE*!!!
> I'd love to see you try to get Linux with KDE 4 running on that same laptop. It's not like you can compare
> Vista to a bare Linux kernel, a modern Linux GUI is just as bloated and needs just as much hardware as Windows.
MS compares Windows vs KDE/GNOME because that's the best-looking comparison for them. A lighter WM, like Blackbox, etc, can run on machines where KDE/GNOME crawls. On linux, *YOU HAVE THE CHOICE* to run a lighter desktop or WM. In Windows, you don't have that choice.
Up until a year ago, my main machine was a 1999 Dell Dimension XPS T450. 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM and an 8 meg ATI Rage Pro video card. BTW "Rage Pro" has a Mach64, *NOT* a Rage128 chip. It originally came with Win98SE. I tried various flavours of linux, and finally settled on Gentoo. Gentoo is an automated build-from-source distro. "emerge" syntax is no more difficult than "rpm" syntax. Building from source has the advantage that you can use all the available compiler flags. In my case...
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse"
I run Blackbox as my WM and use pypanel as my launch panel on both the old machine and my current machine (AMD 3000+ with 2 gigs of ram).
The PIII was perfectly adequate for me until last year, when I finally ran into stuff that made me want a new machine...
1) I got interested in internet TV. The PIII has no problems at all with 64 kbit streaming audio over ADSL, but even with every optimization, it was dropping frames in streaming video.
2) I got a digital camera. Let's just say that manipulating a 2560x1920 digital photo in Gimp was "liesurely". Plus, with the same monitor, I can push the resolution to 2048x1536. At 4 bytes per pixel, that's 12 megabytes, which is kinda hard on an 8 megabyte video card.
The PIII is now my "hot backup machine". I fire it up once or twice a month and run updates. I back up my current machine (doesn't everybody) twice a month. If it dies, I can copy my latest backups from CD, and be functional in a couple of hours, missing at most a couple of weeks of email.
We should take all their staff, and send them off in a big spaceship, to the farthest corner of the galaxy, along with other useless types like hairdressers, advertising execs, and middle-managers.
The main patent expires in 2012. At that point, anybody can crank out high-quality standard MP3s without any legal impediments. This has the RIAA scared shitless. Watch for *INTENSE* lobbying for "son-of-SSSCA" legislation that will effectively ban MP3 before then.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8FIG FB00.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db has a story about Overstock.com.
==Begin quote==
In its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said its net loss for the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2005, widened to $18.41 million, up from a loss of $10.63 million during the same period the previous year. Net cash provided by operations was negative $28.15 million for the recent period, a sharp turn from $9.53 million cash generated the previous year.
An upgrade of the company's information technology system that Byrne said was "the equivalent of a heart, lung and kidney transplant" didn't go smoothly. In September, the company said it hadn't loaded new products onto its Web site in five weeks.
==End quote==
So rather than admitting that they screwed up...
==Begin quote==
Patrick Byrne, the Internet retailer's chief executive officer, has called short selling of his company's shares -- essentially a bet their price will fall -- a conspiracy orchestrated by a "Sith Lord." He later likened the conspiracy to an organization structured like al-Qaida and said his stock has been targeted by "naked short-sellers," a practice he said has ties to Italian, Russian and Israeli mafia.
==End quote==
If Overstock ran their operation properly and showed a profit next quarter, the naked short-sellers would be in for a world of hurt, financially. Instead, Mr. Byrne is whining about web boards just like Darl McBride whines about Groklaw and Rumsfeld whines about Al Jazeera.
The USA seems to have the same mentality. The Bush administration doesn't admit that they earned their bad reputation by invading a country that they knew didn't have WMD, and holding prisoners incommunicado and torturing them. Rather than actually acting kinder-and-gentler, the US wants propaganda to show that it's kinder and gentler.
That mentailty seems to be pervasive in the USA. Overstock and SCOX have had bad financial results. But they blame their falling stock prices on web boards and short sellers. If a company is found to be distributing spyware, they'll SLAPP the anti-spyware companies that fingered them. And let's not forget how spam^H^H^H^H ethikul email marketeers SLAPPed the MAPS RBL into uselessness.
Corporate USA, and its puppet administration, seem to believe that rather than acting nicer, they merely have to spend money on propaganda, and lawyers for injunctions to shut down websites that expose their misdeeds. They're acting uncannily like Soviet Russia, which spent 10 times as much money trying to jam BBC broadcasts as the BBC spent on broadcasting to the Soviets. Remember what happened to the USSR.
> My understanding was that the large universities that had negotiated such agreements
> were essentially paying a RIAA tax so that they'd stop getting those pesky legal letters.
Duhhh... nice university/company youse got here. Youse wouldn't want something terrible to happen to it like a meritless, but damn expensive, lawsuit. For only a few million per year in prot^H^H^H^H licence fees, we can guarantee that nothing terrible happens to youse.
Please Google, don't buy Napster. Those assholes should not be rewarded with a buyout any more than Mcbride and Yarro.
Don't get me wrong, the GNOME and KDE groups both make great *APPLICATIONS*, like KOffice and its GNOME equivalant (Gnumeric, AbiWord, etc) and let's not forget Gimp. However, the GOME and KDE *DESKTOPS* both suck dead bunnies through a garden hose.
*I DON'T RUN DESKTOPS, I RUN APPLICATIONS*. If I really wanted a fat, bloated, pointy-clicky-touchey-feeley-oowee-GUI, I would never have left Windows in the first place. Blackbox with fbpanel as the "launchbar" is just right. My emergency backup machine is a 6-year-old Dell, 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM. For everything except internet TV and manipulating 2560x1920 digital photos in Gimp, it is perfectly OK with Blackbox. As for KDE or GNOME, when they started up, I got to watch the "desktop icons" being painted in slow motion. It was painful. On my current AMD64, 3000+ cpu with 2 gigs of RAM (running Gentoo linux in 32-bit mode) GNOME/KDE are OK. Blackbox screams along.
What the companies are doing is *OUTSOURCING SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION*. I run Gentoo at home for free and MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc are free. I handle any problems that arise, and if I can't, I have to post questions on the appropriate mailing lists. If I didn't feel like doing that, I can hire a freelance contracter to come in and do all that for me... of course, he would charge money. Companies aren't paying for free linux. Some of their beancounters have run the numbers and decided that it costs less for Redhat or IBM to do the system admin stuff than to hire their own system admin in-house.
(NT)
> NAT makes it very expensive to deploy most innovative new IP applications
> (VOIP, IPTV, Peer-to-peer) as each app typeically needs some type of gateway
> "middlebox" to get around NAT in order to connect users.
Have you considered the implications... of the average home user running a server accepting unsolicited connections from the internet? Have you considered the implications... of the average home user running ***A WINDOWS SERVER*** accepting unsolicited connections from the internet??? No thanks.
> You read right - when it is absolutely known that only one device is there, /128. IE, for the end of a point-to-point interface. In your /48s or /64s since home networks are so abundant these days.
/120 (internet-connected 256 devices) would be sufficient thank you. As a side benefit, you wouldn't have any heating bills in the middle of winter. Electricity bills for air-conditioning yes, heating no.
> give it a
> hypothetical situation the ISP is playing games. They should be giving out
>
Planet earth calling asdfghjklqwertyuiop... have you ever considered the logistitics of stashing ***2^64 PHYSICAL DEVICES IN YOUR HOME***??? You can't get that many RFID tags into a large mansion, let alone cellphones or PC's. Even a
> if such a system has been proposed or patented, i'd be interested in reading more about it.
0 so originality isn't a requirement at the office of Patenting The Obvious.
Here's how it worked back then.
- to run a protected program, you had to start it with the "key floppy" in the A: drive *WITH WRITE-PROTECT TURNED OFF*
- most of the key floppy was writable, just like an ordinary floppy
- small portions of the key floppy were *NOT* writable
- on startup, the program would read certain sectors of the floppy, write to them, and read them again
- if the writable sectors had changed *AND THE NON-WRITABLE SECTORS HAD NOT CHANGED*, only then would the main program launch. Which sectors were writable and which were non-writable was presumably encrypted in the startup code.
You could make a bit-for-bit-identical copy of the key floppy, but the copy would be a regular floppy. The "non-writable" sectors would be written to, and the data changed, alerting the program that it wasn't using a genuine key floppy, and it would refuse to start.
So it's not really a new idea. But what the F, go for a patent anyways. Microsoft recently got a patent for re-inventing sudo http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/22123
..in case a tourist who doesn't speak the local language wanted to ask locals for directions. A Hungarian tourist with such a device in their hands comes along and asks you to fondle their bum, and you can give them directions to the station, which the device will translate into Hungarian for them,
> Quick! Cover it up! People aren't supposed to know
> we're rejecting the GOOD shows in favor of more idiocy!
Pilots are to TV series what demos are to software. Remember the original Star Trek series (or were you even born then)? There was a 2-part special with Captain Christopher Pike (a basket case with only his head functional) and the crew of the Enterprise being shanghaid to a "forbidden planet". Apparently, *THAT* used significant chunks of the Star Trek pilot.
Compared to that pilot, the Star Trek we got was crap. We got a show with 2 plot lines repeated over and over...
1) Captain Kirk involved in a transporter malfunction... Gene Roddenberry trying to make some deep statement about human values.
2) Enterprise discovers a planet just like earth, where everybody is human and speaks English (even the 20th century Roman Empire), but just *ONE* facet of today's society has been changed... Gene Roddenberry trying to make some deep statement about human values.
After a while it got old, and I stopped watching, as did many others. Hence the show's cancellation. Knowing the difference between the pilot and the actual series (the demo and the actual software release) I can see why TV networks might skeptical of high quality pilots. I wonder what the pilots for a lot of today's shows looked like.
See1
tech_sec.blog.ca/index.php?blog=10347&p=3456
for my reply to his article. Sorry about not making it clickable. I've run into a Slashdot bug. If I try to post a URL, it *INSISTS* on changing "tech_sec" to "techsec", which obviously doesn't work.
I hope it will be disableable, but I'm having a tinfoil moment now. This will probably be an ego issue for the Firefox developers.
Everyone is having orgasms over SVG static images. They're ignoring the abuse potential of dancing, blinking ads. And unlike Fuckwave-Slash, it won't be possible to "remove a plugin". If it can't be disabled via a user setting, watch for somebody to fork Firefox. Anyone remember XFree86?
PLEASE use *REAL* modems and printers
The two biggest pains-in-the-butt that the average linux user runs into are the abortions called "winmodem" and "winprinter". They shave $5 or $10 off the price of each unit by dispensing with part of the modem or printer hardware.
In order to function without all the parts, these cheapskate components require *ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE DRIVERS* to emulate the functions of the missing hardware. Not only that, but they require a separate driver version for each OS, each major point release of each OS, and in some cases, each separate distro of linux or *BSD. It ain't worth the hassle.
A modem built over two decades ago for the IBM PC will run under just about any OS that supports PC hardware, without extra work. But Rockwell decided one day to cheap out with RPI (Rockwell Protocol Interface) "modems" that made the computer's cpu do part of the work. This was the model for "winmodems".
Even if a driver exists in Windows or linux, a v90 "winmodem" is slower than a real v90 modem. The CPU has to devote 100% of its attention to the download or else the modem drops characters, causing retransmits etc. Even playing solitaire while downloading may slow the download. This is *NOT* supposed to happen on a real multi-tasking computer, folks. Similar remarks for "winprinters".
This is not aimed against USB modems or printers; they're OK, although linux support for them may not be 100% mature. I'm complaining against incomplete peripherals that treat the computer's cpu as a substitute for missing hardware.
Call me an old fart if you will, but I prefer real text for email, usenet news, and everything else that doesn't require GUI (spreadsheet, web-browsing, etc). That was one of the things that drove me to linux. I flip back and forth from X to text console at will. Console mode apps just aren't being written for Windows any more.
On linux, "VGA=6" in lilo/GRUB sets the text console to 640 pixels X 480 scalines. The standard 8 X 16 VGA font gives 80 columns X 30 lines. Ye olde CGA font (8 x 8) gives 80 columns X 60 lines, but it's painful to read. There are intermediate fonts available. I prefer 8 X 10 fonts for an 80 columns by 48 row display. It's *MUCH* nicer than "mode co80,50" on DOS/WIndows (640 pixels X 400 scanlines using 8 x 8 font).
Does anyone have any experience with *TEXT CONSOLE* modes other than 80 X 25 on LCDs?
I run applications, not desktops.
Something that many people seem to miss. You *CAN* run GNOME/KDE applications *WITHOUT* the corresponding desktop. Install *BOTH* GNOME and KDE and a lightweight Window Manager like BlackBox.
I have a Dell Dimension XPS, 450 mhz PIII, and 128 megs of RAM. It's over 5 years old. If my only options were Windows XP, or Linux with GNOME or KDE *DESKTOP*, the machine would now be sitting in the local landfill. The GNOME and KDE *DESKTOPS* are *PAINFULLY* slow on it.
Instead, I installed GNOME and KDE and BlackBox. I use BlackBox as my UI. I can still run KOffice (KMail, KSpread, etc) and useful GNOME apps like AbiWord, Gimp, gqview, etc, because the GNOME/KDE base libraries are installed.
In the next couple of years, MS will be bringing out Longhorn. Have you read the hardware requirements on it? Absolutely ridiculous. Instead of a contest to prove that Linux desktops can be just as fat and bloated as Windows, we should be working on a lean+mean GUI. When Longhorn comes out, businesses can have a choice between
- throwing out their old PCs and paying for brand new semi-mainframes to run Longhorn, or
- they can switch to a lean/mean Linux with useful applications, and not have to throw out all their current desktop hardware.
This will be our golden opportunity to push for a large switchover from Windows to linux. Please don't throw it away by dragging down linux's performance with useless eye-candy.
Any API "powerful enough" to let a "good webpage" do "creative multimedia" on your system is also "powerful enough" to let a rogue webpage infect/install/subvert your OS, regardless of whether it's Windows, linux, Mac, BSD, whatever. I have to wonder about the intelligence/computer-literacy of anyone who wants to follow in Microsoft's Active-Hacks footsteps.