No extreme hazards found in basement workshop that alarmed authorities
None of the materials found at 81 Fremont St. posed a radiological or biological risk,
No mercury or poison was found.
Some of the compounds are potentially explosive, but no more dangerous than typical household cleaning products.
That's right, nothing he had was ANY more dangerous than typical household cleaning products. The authorities confiscated all of his equipment and chemicals. This guy wrote books and taught children. He was not making meth or explosives. He'll likely be charged thousands of dollars to "clean up" his home lab when not a single thing in his lab was illegal or particularly dangerous. At most he was up against a zoning violation, which does not warrant wholesale confiscation of materials.
To me this is a perfect example of how the US government overreacts to even the slightest thing out of the ordinary ever since "9/11". You can't take pictures of public buildings, or even a hotel lobby even anymore. Just being a little different is apparently a crime these days.
And to me this is what's scary, because I can't think of a single instance of someone doing something extroidinary when that person was just a mundane drone following the sheep herd. No, inspiration and innovation are much more likely to occur in "out there" settings with "out there" people. Conformity is not the answer.
How does either candidate expect to move interest in science forward in the US when you can no longer: a) buy a home chemistry set, b) you end up with government agents raiding your house if you have a LEGAL home chemistry lab (ala Mass.), c) experimenting with home-built fireworks or small-scale explosives is now an act of "terrorism"?
No kids are going to get interested in science anymore because all of the cool things we did as children to pique our interest in science are now illegal or acts of international terrorism.
The FDIC only insures customer deposits of $100,000 per customer or up to $250,000 for some special retirement accounts. This is only for the purposes of covering depositors in instances like the recent run on IndyMac Bank. The FDIC does not insure banks or their customers against identity theft, hacking, etc. For this banks purchase bond coverage, except that the stipulations on the bond contracts are so narrowly worded that it's almost not even worth carrying the coverage. Generally when identity theft or hacking incidents happen banks just end up eating the cost.
Three years ago I would have said PGP. Today I'd email this using Zixmail encrypted email if the file size was under 5MB. If the file was over 5MB I'd zip the data with Winzip to an AES256 encrypted file, burn it to a CD/DVD, send it via courier by Fedex/USPS/UPS/etc, and send the encryption password out of band via email or phone.
I run a shop with around 50 users and growing. I looked at various options and did TCO estimates for them and looked at feature sets and easy of management. In the end I chose to outsource our SPAM filtering to a 3rd party, namely MX Logic.
The reasons for choosing outsourced filtering/MX Logic over an inhouse solution:
1) Cost: Less expensive than choosing a commercial inhouse solution that requires annual maintenance for our size of userbase (cost would have favored inhouse solution after around 150 users).
2) Security: I don't have any mail servers open to the internet at large anymore (not even in my dmz). All incoming mail flows from MX Logic so I'm able to filter out all other incoming SMTP traffic at my firewall with an ACL that only allows MX Logic's IP block to access the mail server in my DMZ. I no longer have the whole of the asian pacific rim IP range trying to flood my mail server every day.
3) Ease of management: if a user gets a suspect message that goes to quarantine that individual user gets an email digest alerting them to each quarantined message. The user is able to decide whether to delete or allow the messages. They are also able to set an allow_always for specific senders that got quarantined. I don't have to do anything.
4) Other Features: MX Logic also scans for viruses, blocked attachment types, etc all before anything gets to my internal mail server.
Now implementation cost would be less of an issue using an open-source solution for sure, but I don't think the ease of management or firewall-level security would be as good. The TCO may actually be higher when you consider time spent managing the solution. With MX Logic I haven't had to do jack since implementation. If you do choose to use an outsourced filtering solution like MX Logic or Postini, or whatever I'd recommend using that service to relay your outgoing SMTP and create an SPF record for it also or you may have issues with servers that use greylisting.
There are perfectly good reasons for running virtualized desktop OSes on server hardware. In fact, VMware is already doing this and marketing this as the next big thing in virtualization, called VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/desktop/vdi.html
Basically you take an ESX server that would normally host 2-15 server OS instances and pile it on with 40-50 Windows XP or Windows Vista virtual instances. You fire them all up and let the end users remote desktop into THEIR PC from their thin client, sh*t-box, or less-than-new PC. The endpoint is no longer the endpoint as you can firewall off everything between your clients and ESX servers except RDP port. With tools provided by VMware and various 3rd parties you can more easily patch the clients. With VMotion you have 99.999% uptime. With a VPN your users can get to their desktop from wherever, whenever - you don't need offices.
Eventually they'll combine this technology with VMware ACE, so you can synchronize your laptop VM instance from your offline laptop to the Data Center to be backed up and vice-versa if your laptop HD dies, I'd wager.
It's not a bad idea really, but I'm not sure how it benefits me from an IT manager point of view compared to a standard terminal server or Citrix server quite yet, unless the ACE synch thing really does happen. I do know of a few local companies that are testing it out atm though regardless.
It's not so much specifically Kerebos authentication problems that you're having if I'm not mistaken. The problem involves the way that Win2k3 server attempts to digitally encrypt all SMB network traffic by default. This is a good idea in theory as it prevents packet sniffing by a physical network intruder for passwords. However, only Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro clients currently support this authentication type.
Any other client type attempting to authenticate to the Win2k3 server will fail as it is unable to perform the proper authentication. This is true of Windows 98 clients, Linux clients connecting via SMB, and of course Mac clients connecting via SMB. In order to allow any of these non-current MS clients to connect to the Win2k3 server you need to edit the Domain group policy to disable SMB signing.
So far as I've read, currently Windows 2000 servers are working better as file and print servers and sometimes LDAP servers than Windows 2003 servers. This will likely change as Apple and MS continue to release updates to _hopefully_ actually make their products work together like they both claim that they do.
Hurm, ok. Yeah I don't use AFP either, but I'm on a Win2k3 box for a server, and as I understand the difference between Win2k and Win2k3 server when it relates to trying to connect a Mac to it is nearly night and day.
Gotta love it when as-of-yet MS hasn't had a clue on how to fix any of my minor issues that all add up when connecting a Mac to their "standard" SMB implementation on their server, and Apple's theory so far appears to be "It should just work" with no better explanation than that any time I've called or posted in their forums.
The only interesting thing so far has been that myself and several others are having many of the same issues on the Mac OS 10.3.x clients(haven't installed.7 yet) trying to connect to a Linux or BSD Samba server as people have been having trying to connect to Windows 2003 server boxes using SMB shares.
Some of the problems are "random" file loss(I haven't had this one), Mac files loosing their application association because the resource thread isn't saving properly(a problem with Mac file types saving a separate Data and Resource thread instead of putting the resource data into the data thread like an NTFS data thread does), and most common of all having the resource thread not free itself after a file is closed(unless you reboot the Mac) which makes the file unable to save properly if someone else opens the file causing data loss for sure if the end user is not careful(and which ones are?).
I've also had problems with Mac clients being unable to rename container folders that they have full access to and that they created, when the PC clients can rename perfectly. The Mac clients can rename any file, just not folders.
Also had many problems with PC clients being locked out of folders entirely, but with Mac clients being able to access them fine(a server reboot needed to allow PC access again).
All around this has been pretty much a nightmare, with not much fun had by me. I'm getting much closer to trying a 3rd party solution such as Thursby or eXtreme-ZIP.
Have you had any problems with folders being accessed by a Mac client not being accessible from the server itself or any other PC clients until after a server reboot previous to this update or after this update? Specifically while using SMB client connection on the Mac as opposed to AFP.
Joke
n.
1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line.
2. A mischievous trick; a prank.
3. An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation.
4. Informal.
a) Something not to be taken seriously; a triviality: The accident was no joke.
b) An object of amusement or laughter; a laughingstock: His loud tie was the joke of the office.
In return for my services in fixing friends and family's PCs and printers I have recieved:
Beer
Free labor on replacement of my water heater.
Free server hosting
A kitchen faucet (a nice lifetime warranty Moen one, but not the kitchen sink to go with it)
Discounted closing on my home mortgage
Supper
More Beer
Lots more food, including gift certificates to nice restaurants
I'm lead tech at a smallish computer shop. Over the years we've used just about everything to aid us in diagnosing hardware issues. The ones we use most are:
QuickTech Pro - This is great for testing memory, serial ports, video RAM, and just about every other problem that you can experience. In the past we've had so many problems with recieving bad RAM from our vendors that we now run the quick memory test from QuickTech on every PC before it leaves our shop.
OnTrack is simply the best when it comes to data recovery. They aren't cheap, but for a small-medium business their software is well worth the price. We've also purchased some of the MS Office add-ins to help us recover corrupted Word/Excel documents better. This program really works, and if it can't recover something off a failing drive (or something that a user deleted by accident) then Ontrack will almost certainly be able to recover the data at their facilities (for a steep price of course).
I'm not a huge fan of the guy that wrote SpinRite, but if you've got a FAT(16/32) partitioned drive that seems to be failing, this tool is great. It will recover bad sectors off most drives (not seagate), especially the ones that happen when Win9x doesn't get shut down properly due to a power surge or the like. This software is free and takes a very long time to run at its highest level.
Other than these 3 programs and a few other niche utilities we generally diagnose all other problems by having known good hardware and swapping out to see if the problem still exists. It is still, without a doubt, the best way to diagnose a hardware problem other than Technician's intiuition.
The "market reality" is that the RIAA and the recording companies that they "represent" have completely lost their sense of reality. They are so afraid of losing the market share they currently posses to new and emerging technologies that they want to litigate and lobby until nobody but them and their archaic means of distribution are legal.
Look at how the movie industry fought against VHS, BetaMax, and more recently DVDs because they would "destroy" the movie industry. Now VHS and DVD rentals and sales are a huge chunk of the movie industry's sales each year. Just as cassettes were once a huge chunk of the RIAA's child company sales.
The simple reality of the situation is that very, very few high quality products are being released in this day and age by large corporate media companies (both music and movie). There are no musical groups that can compete in record sales with the likes of Elvis, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the like and there are no movies any more that can be compared in out-and-out quality with older movies like Scarface, Gone With the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, etc. Everything now is about image and flashy special effects and the simple reality of the market is that this stuff just doesn't sell as well as a good product.
Oh come now. Cribs is a great show. I love to see where all the money I used to spend on buying CDs went to...buying extravagant houses and cars for people with the talent to only create 1 good song and 8-10 songs not even worthy of being dubbed "music". Bling bling.
I'm not a programmer but I do work on computers as a tech. All but 3 people in our shop have dual monitors of one sort or another. The only 3 that don't are two administrative staff and one salesman that should be selling used cars, not computers.
Most of us have dual monitors at home as well. I for one can't stand working on a computer with only one monitor for any extended period of time. At work I keep my Outlook in one monitor off to the side and then do everything else in the other monitor. Also works great for working up quote sheets to have a browser on one screen and our quote program on another. At home I use it for gaming, but not for graphical games, more for MUDing by having multiple windows open on multiple monitors. It makes it so much easier to digest the information when you filter out most of the garbage and send it elsewhere.
The fine folks from the Dept. of Homeland Security and various other government agencies will be breaking down your door in about 2.4 minutes for posting this information. Enjoy life as an "enemy combatent".
"I, for one, welcome our new Insect Overlords." - Kent Brockman
I run, implement, and play on a MUD called Homeland MUD. We've been open to the public since May of 2003 now but we've been in development since 1998. Before 2002 we were known as ExileMUD. The vast majority of our staff used to play or staff on Sojourn, Toril, or Basternae. The feel of the MUD's command structure is similar to that of Sojourn or Toril. Our areas are all original and consist of over 20,000 rooms. There are no stock areas.
Some of our features:
- All original 20,000+ room world
- Based on the Forgotten Realms by TSR
- Fast Hosting
- 22 Player Races ranging from Humans and Elves to as Voadkyn and Yuan-ti
- More than 500 NPC races
- 350+ Spells
- More than 30 Classes and Kits
- Constantly adding fixes, new features and new zones.
- Unique damage and combat systems
- Friendly staff
- Hard Coded Quest system
- Dedicated Quest staff with god-run quest nights
- Several unique kits you'll not see anywhere else
- Many races have racial innates along with vulnerabilities and invulnerabilities to different forms of damage.
If you've been looking for a MUD that has a familiar Forgotten Realms feel, with an easy to use interface, and a growing playerbase then please feel free to stop by Homeland MUD.
Oh, BTW forgot to add this in there but I've used tinyfugue, TinTin++, zMUD, and MUDMaster. I still like zMUD best of all, but tinyfugue is a close 2nd. I still use both depending on what system I happen to be on at the time.
Also on Sojourn/Toril I played Motog, Wharog, Ghimok, Dlur, Ruld and several others. I also played on Duris for a while as Wharog with Jukahn/Shratz in his guild but I never really cared for the pkill aspect much.
I played Sojourn from around '94 to '98 quite heavily. I stuck with it when they split up into Toril and Duris and went the Toril route. Around '98 myself and some folks from Crimson Sigil left Toril and created our own MUD, ExileMUD. Since then ExileMUD has gone by the wayside and within the past two years we've revamped it and reopened ExileMUD as Homeland. If you're interested in checking out Homeland see my sig.
Sojourn is still around and has gone through numerous incarnations since 1992. Currently a nother politically motivated breakup is going on and Lloth/Miax will no longer be running the main Sojourn MUD. The imms have split in half and the MUD has split again.
Brad McQuaid aka Aradune was in my guild for quite some time on Toril. I've talked to him numerous times since he left Toril to create EverQuest. His main motivation for "ripping off" Sojourn was because he loved Sojourn so much that he thought it would be cool to bring it to the masses as a graphical game in one form or another. I've got quite a few old guildmates and friends from Toril that still work with Brad at Sigil Games working on whatever it is that they'll be releasing through Microsoft's distrubution channels.
Anyways if any of you are looking for a MUD that captures a lot of the gameplay feel of early Sojourn and Toril history then look up Homeland. We've also got quite a few folks from Basternae on our staff as well so there's a bit of that feel there as well.
It's also nice when the screen isn't at the same height as your nipples (applies to all sexes).
Why on earth would a 70 year old lady want to have the screen down by her knees? Don't you realize that old ladies have sagging eyesight as well as sagging...
Sure it does. It costs the phone company both advertising revenue and also it costs them the amount of money they get by selling your phone number to advertising lists.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even read the article?
From the article:
No extreme hazards found in basement workshop that alarmed authorities
None of the materials found at 81 Fremont St. posed a radiological or biological risk,
No mercury or poison was found.
Some of the compounds are potentially explosive, but no more dangerous than typical household cleaning products.
That's right, nothing he had was ANY more dangerous than typical household cleaning products. The authorities confiscated all of his equipment and chemicals. This guy wrote books and taught children. He was not making meth or explosives. He'll likely be charged thousands of dollars to "clean up" his home lab when not a single thing in his lab was illegal or particularly dangerous. At most he was up against a zoning violation, which does not warrant wholesale confiscation of materials.
To me this is a perfect example of how the US government overreacts to even the slightest thing out of the ordinary ever since "9/11". You can't take pictures of public buildings, or even a hotel lobby even anymore. Just being a little different is apparently a crime these days.
And to me this is what's scary, because I can't think of a single instance of someone doing something extroidinary when that person was just a mundane drone following the sheep herd. No, inspiration and innovation are much more likely to occur in "out there" settings with "out there" people. Conformity is not the answer.
How does either candidate expect to move interest in science forward in the US when you can no longer: a) buy a home chemistry set, b) you end up with government agents raiding your house if you have a LEGAL home chemistry lab (ala Mass.), c) experimenting with home-built fireworks or small-scale explosives is now an act of "terrorism"?
No kids are going to get interested in science anymore because all of the cool things we did as children to pique our interest in science are now illegal or acts of international terrorism.
The FDIC only insures customer deposits of $100,000 per customer or up to $250,000 for some special retirement accounts. This is only for the purposes of covering depositors in instances like the recent run on IndyMac Bank. The FDIC does not insure banks or their customers against identity theft, hacking, etc. For this banks purchase bond coverage, except that the stipulations on the bond contracts are so narrowly worded that it's almost not even worth carrying the coverage. Generally when identity theft or hacking incidents happen banks just end up eating the cost.
Not really. Banks end up eating well over half of all credit/debit card fraud.
Three years ago I would have said PGP. Today I'd email this using Zixmail encrypted email if the file size was under 5MB. If the file was over 5MB I'd zip the data with Winzip to an AES256 encrypted file, burn it to a CD/DVD, send it via courier by Fedex/USPS/UPS/etc, and send the encryption password out of band via email or phone.
I run a shop with around 50 users and growing. I looked at various options and did TCO estimates for them and looked at feature sets and easy of management. In the end I chose to outsource our SPAM filtering to a 3rd party, namely MX Logic.
The reasons for choosing outsourced filtering/MX Logic over an inhouse solution:
1) Cost: Less expensive than choosing a commercial inhouse solution that requires annual maintenance for our size of userbase (cost would have favored inhouse solution after around 150 users).
2) Security: I don't have any mail servers open to the internet at large anymore (not even in my dmz). All incoming mail flows from MX Logic so I'm able to filter out all other incoming SMTP traffic at my firewall with an ACL that only allows MX Logic's IP block to access the mail server in my DMZ. I no longer have the whole of the asian pacific rim IP range trying to flood my mail server every day.
3) Ease of management: if a user gets a suspect message that goes to quarantine that individual user gets an email digest alerting them to each quarantined message. The user is able to decide whether to delete or allow the messages. They are also able to set an allow_always for specific senders that got quarantined. I don't have to do anything.
4) Other Features: MX Logic also scans for viruses, blocked attachment types, etc all before anything gets to my internal mail server.
Now implementation cost would be less of an issue using an open-source solution for sure, but I don't think the ease of management or firewall-level security would be as good. The TCO may actually be higher when you consider time spent managing the solution. With MX Logic I haven't had to do jack since implementation. If you do choose to use an outsourced filtering solution like MX Logic or Postini, or whatever I'd recommend using that service to relay your outgoing SMTP and create an SPF record for it also or you may have issues with servers that use greylisting.
There are perfectly good reasons for running virtualized desktop OSes on server hardware. In fact, VMware is already doing this and marketing this as the next big thing in virtualization, called VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/desktop/vdi.html
Basically you take an ESX server that would normally host 2-15 server OS instances and pile it on with 40-50 Windows XP or Windows Vista virtual instances. You fire them all up and let the end users remote desktop into THEIR PC from their thin client, sh*t-box, or less-than-new PC. The endpoint is no longer the endpoint as you can firewall off everything between your clients and ESX servers except RDP port. With tools provided by VMware and various 3rd parties you can more easily patch the clients. With VMotion you have 99.999% uptime. With a VPN your users can get to their desktop from wherever, whenever - you don't need offices.
Eventually they'll combine this technology with VMware ACE, so you can synchronize your laptop VM instance from your offline laptop to the Data Center to be backed up and vice-versa if your laptop HD dies, I'd wager.
It's not a bad idea really, but I'm not sure how it benefits me from an IT manager point of view compared to a standard terminal server or Citrix server quite yet, unless the ACE synch thing really does happen. I do know of a few local companies that are testing it out atm though regardless.
It's actually "The Buffalo Theory" from Cheers.
It's not so much specifically Kerebos authentication problems that you're having if I'm not mistaken. The problem involves the way that Win2k3 server attempts to digitally encrypt all SMB network traffic by default. This is a good idea in theory as it prevents packet sniffing by a physical network intruder for passwords. However, only Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro clients currently support this authentication type.
Any other client type attempting to authenticate to the Win2k3 server will fail as it is unable to perform the proper authentication. This is true of Windows 98 clients, Linux clients connecting via SMB, and of course Mac clients connecting via SMB. In order to allow any of these non-current MS clients to connect to the Win2k3 server you need to edit the Domain group policy to disable SMB signing.
So far as I've read, currently Windows 2000 servers are working better as file and print servers and sometimes LDAP servers than Windows 2003 servers. This will likely change as Apple and MS continue to release updates to _hopefully_ actually make their products work together like they both claim that they do.
Hurm, ok. Yeah I don't use AFP either, but I'm on a Win2k3 box for a server, and as I understand the difference between Win2k and Win2k3 server when it relates to trying to connect a Mac to it is nearly night and day.
Gotta love it when as-of-yet MS hasn't had a clue on how to fix any of my minor issues that all add up when connecting a Mac to their "standard" SMB implementation on their server, and Apple's theory so far appears to be "It should just work" with no better explanation than that any time I've called or posted in their forums.
The only interesting thing so far has been that myself and several others are having many of the same issues on the Mac OS 10.3.x clients(haven't installed .7 yet) trying to connect to a Linux or BSD Samba server as people have been having trying to connect to Windows 2003 server boxes using SMB shares.
Some of the problems are "random" file loss(I haven't had this one), Mac files loosing their application association because the resource thread isn't saving properly(a problem with Mac file types saving a separate Data and Resource thread instead of putting the resource data into the data thread like an NTFS data thread does), and most common of all having the resource thread not free itself after a file is closed(unless you reboot the Mac) which makes the file unable to save properly if someone else opens the file causing data loss for sure if the end user is not careful(and which ones are?).
I've also had problems with Mac clients being unable to rename container folders that they have full access to and that they created, when the PC clients can rename perfectly. The Mac clients can rename any file, just not folders. Also had many problems with PC clients being locked out of folders entirely, but with Mac clients being able to access them fine(a server reboot needed to allow PC access again).
All around this has been pretty much a nightmare, with not much fun had by me. I'm getting much closer to trying a 3rd party solution such as Thursby or eXtreme-ZIP.
Have you had any problems with folders being accessed by a Mac client not being accessible from the server itself or any other PC clients until after a server reboot previous to this update or after this update? Specifically while using SMB client connection on the Mac as opposed to AFP.
Joke n. 1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line. 2. A mischievous trick; a prank. 3. An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation. 4. Informal. a) Something not to be taken seriously; a triviality: The accident was no joke. b) An object of amusement or laughter; a laughingstock: His loud tie was the joke of the office.
The "government" did not develop the internet. Everyone knows that Al Gore invented it. Geesh, get your facts straight.
In return for my services in fixing friends and family's PCs and printers I have recieved:
Beer
Free labor on replacement of my water heater.
Free server hosting
A kitchen faucet (a nice lifetime warranty Moen one, but not the kitchen sink to go with it)
Discounted closing on my home mortgage
Supper
More Beer
Lots more food, including gift certificates to nice restaurants
This is the most insightful comment in this entire thread, perhaps on the entire slashdot site today. I was thinking the very same thing.
I'm lead tech at a smallish computer shop. Over the years we've used just about everything to aid us in diagnosing hardware issues. The ones we use most are:
QuickTech Pro - This is great for testing memory, serial ports, video RAM, and just about every other problem that you can experience. In the past we've had so many problems with recieving bad RAM from our vendors that we now run the quick memory test from QuickTech on every PC before it leaves our shop.
OnTrack is simply the best when it comes to data recovery. They aren't cheap, but for a small-medium business their software is well worth the price. We've also purchased some of the MS Office add-ins to help us recover corrupted Word/Excel documents better. This program really works, and if it can't recover something off a failing drive (or something that a user deleted by accident) then Ontrack will almost certainly be able to recover the data at their facilities (for a steep price of course).
I'm not a huge fan of the guy that wrote SpinRite, but if you've got a FAT(16/32) partitioned drive that seems to be failing, this tool is great. It will recover bad sectors off most drives (not seagate), especially the ones that happen when Win9x doesn't get shut down properly due to a power surge or the like. This software is free and takes a very long time to run at its highest level.
Other than these 3 programs and a few other niche utilities we generally diagnose all other problems by having known good hardware and swapping out to see if the problem still exists. It is still, without a doubt, the best way to diagnose a hardware problem other than Technician's intiuition.
The "market reality" is that the RIAA and the recording companies that they "represent" have completely lost their sense of reality. They are so afraid of losing the market share they currently posses to new and emerging technologies that they want to litigate and lobby until nobody but them and their archaic means of distribution are legal.
Look at how the movie industry fought against VHS, BetaMax, and more recently DVDs because they would "destroy" the movie industry. Now VHS and DVD rentals and sales are a huge chunk of the movie industry's sales each year. Just as cassettes were once a huge chunk of the RIAA's child company sales.
The simple reality of the situation is that very, very few high quality products are being released in this day and age by large corporate media companies (both music and movie). There are no musical groups that can compete in record sales with the likes of Elvis, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the like and there are no movies any more that can be compared in out-and-out quality with older movies like Scarface, Gone With the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, etc. Everything now is about image and flashy special effects and the simple reality of the market is that this stuff just doesn't sell as well as a good product.
Oh come now. Cribs is a great show. I love to see where all the money I used to spend on buying CDs went to...buying extravagant houses and cars for people with the talent to only create 1 good song and 8-10 songs not even worthy of being dubbed "music". Bling bling.
I'm not a programmer but I do work on computers as a tech. All but 3 people in our shop have dual monitors of one sort or another. The only 3 that don't are two administrative staff and one salesman that should be selling used cars, not computers.
Most of us have dual monitors at home as well. I for one can't stand working on a computer with only one monitor for any extended period of time. At work I keep my Outlook in one monitor off to the side and then do everything else in the other monitor. Also works great for working up quote sheets to have a browser on one screen and our quote program on another. At home I use it for gaming, but not for graphical games, more for MUDing by having multiple windows open on multiple monitors. It makes it so much easier to digest the information when you filter out most of the garbage and send it elsewhere.
The fine folks from the Dept. of Homeland Security and various other government agencies will be breaking down your door in about 2.4 minutes for posting this information. Enjoy life as an "enemy combatent".
"I, for one, welcome our new Insect Overlords." - Kent Brockman
I run, implement, and play on a MUD called Homeland MUD. We've been open to the public since May of 2003 now but we've been in development since 1998. Before 2002 we were known as ExileMUD. The vast majority of our staff used to play or staff on Sojourn, Toril, or Basternae. The feel of the MUD's command structure is similar to that of Sojourn or Toril. Our areas are all original and consist of over 20,000 rooms. There are no stock areas.
Some of our features:
- All original 20,000+ room world - Based on the Forgotten Realms by TSR - Fast Hosting - 22 Player Races ranging from Humans and Elves to as Voadkyn and Yuan-ti - More than 500 NPC races - 350+ Spells - More than 30 Classes and Kits - Constantly adding fixes, new features and new zones. - Unique damage and combat systems - Friendly staff - Hard Coded Quest system - Dedicated Quest staff with god-run quest nights - Several unique kits you'll not see anywhere else - Many races have racial innates along with vulnerabilities and invulnerabilities to different forms of damage.
If you've been looking for a MUD that has a familiar Forgotten Realms feel, with an easy to use interface, and a growing playerbase then please feel free to stop by Homeland MUD.
Oh, BTW forgot to add this in there but I've used tinyfugue, TinTin++, zMUD, and MUDMaster. I still like zMUD best of all, but tinyfugue is a close 2nd. I still use both depending on what system I happen to be on at the time.
Also on Sojourn/Toril I played Motog, Wharog, Ghimok, Dlur, Ruld and several others. I also played on Duris for a while as Wharog with Jukahn/Shratz in his guild but I never really cared for the pkill aspect much.
I played Sojourn from around '94 to '98 quite heavily. I stuck with it when they split up into Toril and Duris and went the Toril route. Around '98 myself and some folks from Crimson Sigil left Toril and created our own MUD, ExileMUD. Since then ExileMUD has gone by the wayside and within the past two years we've revamped it and reopened ExileMUD as Homeland. If you're interested in checking out Homeland see my sig.
Sojourn is still around and has gone through numerous incarnations since 1992. Currently a nother politically motivated breakup is going on and Lloth/Miax will no longer be running the main Sojourn MUD. The imms have split in half and the MUD has split again.
Brad McQuaid aka Aradune was in my guild for quite some time on Toril. I've talked to him numerous times since he left Toril to create EverQuest. His main motivation for "ripping off" Sojourn was because he loved Sojourn so much that he thought it would be cool to bring it to the masses as a graphical game in one form or another. I've got quite a few old guildmates and friends from Toril that still work with Brad at Sigil Games working on whatever it is that they'll be releasing through Microsoft's distrubution channels.
Anyways if any of you are looking for a MUD that captures a lot of the gameplay feel of early Sojourn and Toril history then look up Homeland. We've also got quite a few folks from Basternae on our staff as well so there's a bit of that feel there as well.
Sure it does. It costs the phone company both advertising revenue and also it costs them the amount of money they get by selling your phone number to advertising lists.