In case you didn't know already, MS is selling Xbox's at a huge loss. Much to my suprise, MS did not get to it's current position by losing money like this. They're planning on making up the lost money by having a sucessful console that sells tons of games and makes up the money there (Sega anyone?), so I believe the "security holes" might be referring to little snafu's so you can put a different OS on it. Because we all know different OS won't run the games. Every time someone buys an Xbox hoping to turn it into a hella cheap PC, MS loses their money on that machine for good, because that person won't be buying any games for it.
A lot of the security features talk about rom encryption, flashing it with a new bios, accessing the hard drives, etc. All of these thing make it more difficult to turn it into a cheap PC, and supports my theory as stated above.
Doh, hadn't really thought about that yet... thanks for spoiling it... I'm sure yer right, it makes lots of sense:(
Although the previous mention of a leather clad Darth Padme does sound quite intriguing. Probably not gonna happen, but it does bring new meaning to "A New Hope".
I saw that blurb about Reuters trying it, and I don't know what's worse: The cd copy prevention which probably took millions to develop and test getting cracked with a fucking magic marker that somone found in a drawer in between a gummy eraser and a "bop-it" pen... or that Reuters admitted to buying a Celine Dion CD.
Damn... that whole joke just came off as lame, maybe a bit too contrived, oh well... it woulda been funnier had I told it. You gotta have respect for humor writers, it's tough to do and actually be funny.
Basically what everyone calls a Gigabit (Gb) now, is really a gigabit (Gbit). What everyone calls a Gigabyte (GB) now, is really a gibibyte (GiB). Megabit is now megabit (Mbit), Megabyte is now mebibyte (MiB) (not to be confused with Men in Black).
No way... always do one eyed jacks and suicide kings wild....:)
That way, people go.... "what?" and you get to sit back and explain that there are always two jacks with one eye (side view), and two kings with a knife to their head, that is, in all *real* decks at least. Then everyone thinks you're a poker god or something. That is, if you play with newbies....:)
Hah, that's what I don't understand. We had 7:30 tickets, it was 6:15pm, so we decided to grab some food, and got there at 7:10. There was no line, the movie had already been seated. We got 2nd row seats sat for 20 minutes and then watched movie. 2nd row isn't all the bad actually, sound is great, the screen is huge, and the seats are tilted way back with high seat backs so you don't krane your neck. Guess we did cheat a bit since we got the tickets in advance through Fandango.
I guess I technically "got off work" because I normally get in the office at 11am or thereabouts and work until 8pm or so. But eh, it's a small company and as long as I have what work that *needs* to be done, done, it's not a big deal.
People who stand in lines forever continue to amaze me. I suppose it's not about seeing the movie first anymore. It's about getting on the 6 o'clock news.
Not too mention you have to play constantly to build up a half ass character to compete with all the other people that play that game 8 hours a day while doing tech support or some other job that has the potential to give you free time.
I have a real hard time spending $50 a game myself. Ok, buy FFXI and spend $120/year... or buy Dugeon Seige with a one time fee and play agains real life, or previously known net friends whenever I feel like it.
I sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day during work and a fair ammount of time screwing around when at home. So I pick the games I play wisely. Just what a I need, another reason to site in front of my computer. I'm trying to ween myself away form the computer now and then. They don't call it evercrack for nothing...
I've always avoided all games that suck up enourmous ammounts of time like the plauge. Civilaztion, The Simms, Settler, UO, EQ, etc, and now FFXI. Forget that, I wanna be entertained by a game, not sucked into for months on end. There's a reason movies only last 2 hours.:)
Here here.... I've been thinking about doing this recently. I for one, don't have anything auto-billing my cc, just because I hate the thought of dealing with getting it taken off. I've been thinking I really should call my cc card company and ask for a new card every year or so, just in case.
Way too many websites like to keep your cc on file even if it is just a one time charge, I've gotten burned before. Although the card was never used for fradulent purposes, it could have been. I had a guy whom I'd never seen before, popped on an irc channel I was on to track me down and spit out my credit card information to me, needless to say, the next thing I did was call to get a new card number.
About a month later or so (i forget how long) I was contact by the FBI... Talk about eerie... kinda freaked my roomate out, since 2 guys in suits with fbi badges woke him up at 9am when I had a class.:) The funny thing was that I started talking about irc and computers and shit and how I believe this guy found me to gloat, the FBI and local campus PD was dumbfounded about how much I knew about computers and the networking
They both said something to the extent of once I get a degree to look him up and inquire about a job with either of them... I got another offer when I graduated, so I never took him up on it. But I still am curious how my life would be different if I had. This was 3 years ago, you think the law enforcement can be kind of ignorant now, back then it was way worse.:) Knowledgeable computer people are definitely need in law enforcement.
Although I kinda of hate to thing for working for "the man". It would give a sense of satisfaction to track down and help determine just who the "bad guys" are.
I personally keep all my mp3's at home. And if they are at work, then I keep them on a CD. If I want to listen to mp3s that are at home, at work, then I use roomjuice
Though, I do find it rather difficult to keep stuff like that off my work machine sometimes.;)
I totally agree, which is why I play quake3 fortress. ( www.q3f.com ) I used to be a college student with loads of time to waste while I should have been studying, so I got good at doom2, quake1 and 2. Now I enjoy to hop on a q3f server for 30-60 mins to play for a bit and relax, then I'm done. Now since I used to play these games all the time, I'm actually half decent. I still do long for the days of side scrollers though. Also, there's no decent two player games anymore. Whatever happened to junk like Contra? Games like that just don't exist anymore.
Stuff like starcraft can take HOURS to play a single level to completion. Naaaa.. forget it. It's a good game, and is fun, but just too much time is needed when I'd rather being doing other things instead of staring a computer, since I already am a programmer. I gotta take a and look away from the screen every few days ya know.
I actually happen to be partial to my Logitech dual optical mouse. Sure it's big, bulky and klunky, but so are my hands, and it happens to fit them great. I did wish they made two sizes of it so I could recommend it to just anyone, and not just people with big hands. I tracks great, I don't think I ever want to go back to a ball mouse again for gaming.
And as for this poor professor, it sounds like he was just telling the truth. If it he was supposed to be this big star witness to defend microsoft, then microsoft should have done a bit better to prepare him for questions like this. But then again, "What do you mean there are other operating systems? Why don't you just run windows?" Some people are just like that. Lemme guess, this guy was an MIS professor? I sure hope for MIT's sake he wasn't computer science and didn't know about other operating systems.:)
I tried cream just last week, the unfortunate side effect that it made the console mode vim really damn confusing, because there's no menu system with it, and maybe my remote console didn't have all ctrl keys and such working right, I'm not sure.
But when used with gvim, it's great. It takes the "vi" out of "vim" leaving you with just, "m".
Screw all those user space software audio mixers. They all sound like shit and cause nothing but problems, especially since if you have a real sound card and some half ass audio drivers installed (like alsa or the oss/pay drivers, since most oss/free kernel drivers suck ass) then your card will do hardware mixing on it's own, no esd/artd userspace daemon required. Last time I ran kde my sound was all garbled and couldn't figure it out until I found out about artsd which i promptly disabled.
I have a $10 card that does it, ymf724 card with the alsa drivers, I never run esd or artsd or whatever, I can run 10 copies of mpg123 if I want and they all output sound just fine mixing done in hardware.
Yeah, I've been one of those Debian fanatics, but unfortunately with the woody release imminent, sid/unstable has been slacking and holding off on newer things, gnome2 betas, kde3, xfree86 4.2.0, etc. It's damn frustrating, I do have an extra machine lying around, just needs an HD, I should start being more open minded and try new things when my current methods don't satisfy my desires. What's the upgrade path on gentoo like anyway? I really don't want to rebuild my machine every year or so when a new release comes out.
The main reason I use debian is because of ease of upgrades, not only between major versions, but minor versions, I can grab new bugfixed packages after the major release very easily. And also because of ease of installing new packages.
I guess I'll just have to try out gentoo to see for myself.:)
Thanks for the mini review, after all it's all about the apps and the ease of use. I can easily justify a complex install process if I know the end result is going to be worth it. So install doesn't really matter to me, (as long as I know it's gonna work:)
I do kinda wish there was KDE with mozilla integrated, I suppose it's kinda like Windows now, you get IE (Konq) by default, but you're welcome to switch, but when you switch, it won't be as nicely integrated. It would be nice if the browser wasn't as tied to the OS and allowed you to easily swap it out with another one. (or is this possible now? I dunno, I haven't used it yet)
It's just that as a web developer, I've noticed most things that mozilla can do, IE can do, so if it works under mozilla, it's almost definitely gonna work under IE, so I use mozilla. At least with the type of code I write, mostly html with a little javascript to help it out and give additional features. This could be true in konq also, but I just don't have as much faith in it (yet).
One of my main problems is that I can't get the tuner of the card I have to work. I think I just got a bum card, it's a wintv hauppage bt878 or whatever... tried 2.2 kernel at first awhile back, and now the 2.4 kernel, and still no worky. Well, I can view tv via a video input via the rca->svhs dongle (source from vcr), but the cable tuner doesn't work. Or maybe it's just my cable? I have no idea, whatever, it's pissing me off.
Are there any special drivers I should be using other than the kernel drivers? Any special insmod params?
I suppose I'm going to just have to buy another card so I can use the tuner, but I've been kinda soured by the wintv card that I have now, and fear if I buy another card, the new one won't work either. Unfortunately, my current card way over a year old so there's no way I can take it back...
Originally I thought it was my dumb self not being able to get it to work under linux, but after a year of trying off and on, I think it must be the card, but it still could be me I guess. Any help would be much appreciated.:)
I'd really love to get this sucker working. I've been kinda looking for a new software project to work on, and emulating tivo like functionality under linux is definitely something that's needed, although I don't know if I have what it takes to write it, it never hurt anyone to try.
Well unfortunately there's no software even close to tivo like functionality from reading the other comments so far. So THAT'S not even an option, unless you're going to code it yourself. (which I'm seriously thinking about trying to do, under linux of course)
One thing that's starting to annoy me about debian
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Let me start out with saying that I think the Debian people are doing a good job with the resources they have. I love the distribution and the ease of upgrades. It takes a lot of time to package something correctly ahearing to all the Debian rules, but it's starting to annoy me how if I was just running Redhat, I could be running KDE 3 already, whilst it'll probably take another 4 months or so for KDE 3 to make it into sid. Maybe this is one of the downfalls of Debian, because of the strict packaging guidlines, authors aren't willing to release.debs because of the ammount of time it takes to package them.
I suppose I could just grab and compile it myself.
Or maybe to prove that the people who are in charge of that website are morons. I mean hell, it's not like that site was something seriously complex or anything, it was mostly static content, wasn't it?
The first thing I do to when switching over a dns is make sure you have the new site rock solid, stress test it, etc. They obviously did none of the sort, just switched the dns to point to a win2k box thrown up in a hurry, no firwall, sql server listening on the public side, smb ports open, etc.
I used to spoof my user agent all the time when using mozilla, but about six months ago mozilla did start getting a bit more respect, so I switched to mozilla's default user agent. Basically I see it as this: every time I hit a web page with mozilla, I vote for my browser of choice. Your user agents does still look like IE, and most stats will show that, so you're basically voting for IE. I actually haven't run accross a site in quite awhile that hasn't let me in that I actually cared about. If it doesn't let me in, I'll email every person on the site that I can find about my trouble and am on my way. Now if your bank is blocking you, then you might have to switch the user agent, but both my bank and credit card company let mozilla in and work perfectly.
Well, I finally joined the EFF, thanks to this article.
I felt kinda guitly about having them send me a t-shirt since it's kinda wasteful, but I suppose if I wear the shirt and that gets another person interested, then it's done it's job.
This bill simply scares the shit out of me. I really don't want to have to move to another country to avoid stupid legislation, seeing as how I've kinda grown attached to the USA. Or maybe it's time for another revolution, we haven't had one of those in nearly 226 years.
As much as I love OSX, I can't see it running on intel anytime soon. Take a look at apple's hardware prices, they're outrageous, do you really think Apple's going to give up the little racket they got going? They're happy with growing small, and charging way too much for their hardware. OSX is what $100? XP Pro is what $299?
It's simply ignorant to think that apple wouldn't loose money on hardware sales if their junk ran on x86 hardware. I know a few Apple people who would be more than willing to give up their wimpy G4 for a dual AMD 2100+'s that costs half a much and has 4x the power. (warning, I made those stats up).
Now Apple might be able to compete with MS on the OS market, but that would probably mean no more IE5 for OSX, no more msoffice for OSX, etc. Wow, suddendly OSX sucks without all the pointly clicky MS apps for it. They might be able to make a go of it with bundling open office and mozilla, but is apple really willing to try? Do they even have the resources to support that many people on the OS level? Probabably not, that means Apple would have to seriously ramp things up, hire more people, whoa, now we're getting really risky. Apple's always been inovative, but as long as it still allows them to remain conservative regarding growth.
Did people stop drinking during prohibition? No. Will people stop burning DVDs and stealing software? No. It WILL still happen. The gov't will just force it underground like it did illegal bars and what have you. You'll have to pry my computer from my cold dead fingers before I switch to some gov't spyware retardedness of a computer, and I'm sure many other people feel the same way, in a sense, ensuring everyone elses freedom.
Prohibition was repealed in part because there weren't enough police to enforce it from my understanding. And even the police themselves wanted a drink. Once the minority opinion becomes majority, things change.
So in a sense, everyone does have a vote about what is right and what is wrong. The idea being that the people keep the gov't and laws from getting too out of control. If the people don't like something, they revolt by having a drink, burning a dvd, etc.
Of course this is just my view on things now, tommorrow is a totally different story.:)
Slashdot Mirror
In case you didn't know already, MS is selling Xbox's at a huge loss. Much to my suprise, MS did not get to it's current position by losing money like this. They're planning on making up the lost money by having a sucessful console that sells tons of games and makes up the money there (Sega anyone?), so I believe the "security holes" might be referring to little snafu's so you can put a different OS on it. Because we all know different OS won't run the games. Every time someone buys an Xbox hoping to turn it into a hella cheap PC, MS loses their money on that machine for good, because that person won't be buying any games for it.
A lot of the security features talk about rom encryption, flashing it with a new bios, accessing the hard drives, etc. All of these thing make it more difficult to turn it into a cheap PC, and supports my theory as stated above.
Doh, hadn't really thought about that yet... thanks for spoiling it... I'm sure yer right, it makes lots of sense :(
Although the previous mention of a leather clad Darth Padme does sound quite intriguing. Probably not gonna happen, but it does bring new meaning to "A New Hope".
I saw that blurb about Reuters trying it, and I don't know what's worse: The cd copy prevention which probably took millions to develop and test getting cracked with a fucking magic marker that somone found in a drawer in between a gummy eraser and a "bop-it" pen... or that Reuters admitted to buying a Celine Dion CD.
Damn... that whole joke just came off as lame, maybe a bit too contrived, oh well... it woulda been funnier had I told it. You gotta have respect for humor writers, it's tough to do and actually be funny.
Actually if you want to get technical, you're wrong too. Go read over the new IEC standard (issued in 1998)
Basically what everyone calls a Gigabit (Gb) now, is really a gigabit (Gbit).
What everyone calls a Gigabyte (GB) now, is really a gibibyte (GiB).
Megabit is now megabit (Mbit), Megabyte is now mebibyte (MiB) (not to be confused with Men in Black).
No way... always do one eyed jacks and suicide kings wild.... :)
:)
That way, people go.... "what?" and you get to sit back and explain that there are always two jacks with one eye (side view), and two kings with a knife to their head, that is, in all *real* decks at least. Then everyone thinks you're a poker god or something. That is, if you play with newbies....
Hah, that's what I don't understand. We had 7:30 tickets, it was 6:15pm, so we decided to grab some food, and got there at 7:10. There was no line, the movie had already been seated. We got 2nd row seats sat for 20 minutes and then watched movie. 2nd row isn't all the bad actually, sound is great, the screen is huge, and the seats are tilted way back with high seat backs so you don't krane your neck. Guess we did cheat a bit since we got the tickets in advance through Fandango.
I guess I technically "got off work" because I normally get in the office at 11am or thereabouts and work until 8pm or so. But eh, it's a small company and as long as I have what work that *needs* to be done, done, it's not a big deal.
People who stand in lines forever continue to amaze me. I suppose it's not about seeing the movie first anymore. It's about getting on the 6 o'clock news.
Not too mention you have to play constantly to build up a half ass character to compete with all the other people that play that game 8 hours a day while doing tech support or some other job that has the potential to give you free time.
:)
I have a real hard time spending $50 a game myself. Ok, buy FFXI and spend $120/year... or buy Dugeon Seige with a one time fee and play agains real life, or previously known net friends whenever I feel like it.
I sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day during work and a fair ammount of time screwing around when at home. So I pick the games I play wisely. Just what a I need, another reason to site in front of my computer. I'm trying to ween myself away form the computer now and then. They don't call it evercrack for nothing...
I've always avoided all games that suck up enourmous ammounts of time like the plauge. Civilaztion, The Simms, Settler, UO, EQ, etc, and now FFXI. Forget that, I wanna be entertained by a game, not sucked into for months on end. There's a reason movies only last 2 hours.
Here here.... I've been thinking about doing this recently. I for one, don't have anything auto-billing my cc, just because I hate the thought of dealing with getting it taken off. I've been thinking I really should call my cc card company and ask for a new card every year or so, just in case.
:) The funny thing was that I started talking about irc and computers and shit and how I believe this guy found me to gloat, the FBI and local campus PD was dumbfounded about how much I knew about computers and the networking
:) Knowledgeable computer people are definitely need in law enforcement.
:)
Way too many websites like to keep your cc on file even if it is just a one time charge, I've gotten burned before. Although the card was never used for fradulent purposes, it could have been. I had a guy whom I'd never seen before, popped on an irc channel I was on to track me down and spit out my credit card information to me, needless to say, the next thing I did was call to get a new card number.
About a month later or so (i forget how long) I was contact by the FBI... Talk about eerie... kinda freaked my roomate out, since 2 guys in suits with fbi badges woke him up at 9am when I had a class.
They both said something to the extent of once I get a degree to look him up and inquire about a job with either of them... I got another offer when I graduated, so I never took him up on it. But I still am curious how my life would be different if I had. This was 3 years ago, you think the law enforcement can be kind of ignorant now, back then it was way worse.
Although I kinda of hate to thing for working for "the man". It would give a sense of satisfaction to track down and help determine just who the "bad guys" are.
K, enough of my ramblins... back to work.
I hate all consoles.
Most of the games are shitty.
I'll keep my PC.
I personally keep all my mp3's at home. And if they are at work, then I keep them on a CD. If I want to listen to mp3s that are at home, at work, then I use roomjuice
;)
Though, I do find it rather difficult to keep stuff like that off my work machine sometimes.
I totally agree, which is why I play quake3 fortress. ( www.q3f.com )
I used to be a college student with loads of time to waste while I should have been studying, so I got good at doom2, quake1 and 2. Now I enjoy to hop on a q3f server for 30-60 mins to play for a bit and relax, then I'm done. Now since I used to play these games all the time, I'm actually half decent. I still do long for the days of side scrollers though. Also, there's no decent two player games anymore. Whatever happened to junk like Contra? Games like that just don't exist anymore.
Stuff like starcraft can take HOURS to play a single level to completion. Naaaa.. forget it. It's a good game, and is fun, but just too much time is needed when I'd rather being doing other things instead of staring a computer, since I already am a programmer. I gotta take a and look away from the screen every few days ya know.
I actually happen to be partial to my Logitech dual optical mouse. Sure it's big, bulky and klunky, but so are my hands, and it happens to fit them great. I did wish they made two sizes of it so I could recommend it to just anyone, and not just people with big hands. I tracks great, I don't think I ever want to go back to a ball mouse again for gaming.
:)
And as for this poor professor, it sounds like he was just telling the truth. If it he was supposed to be this big star witness to defend microsoft, then microsoft should have done a bit better to prepare him for questions like this. But then again, "What do you mean there are other operating systems? Why don't you just run windows?" Some people are just like that. Lemme guess, this guy was an MIS professor? I sure hope for MIT's sake he wasn't computer science and didn't know about other operating systems.
I tried cream just last week, the unfortunate side effect that it made the console mode vim really damn confusing, because there's no menu system with it, and maybe my remote console didn't have all ctrl keys and such working right, I'm not sure.
But when used with gvim, it's great. It takes the "vi" out of "vim" leaving you with just, "m".
Screw all those user space software audio mixers. They all sound like shit and cause nothing but problems, especially since if you have a real sound card and some half ass audio drivers installed (like alsa or the oss/pay drivers, since most oss/free kernel drivers suck ass) then your card will do hardware mixing on it's own, no esd/artd userspace daemon required. Last time I ran kde my sound was all garbled and couldn't figure it out until I found out about artsd which i promptly disabled.
I have a $10 card that does it, ymf724 card with the alsa drivers, I never run esd or artsd or whatever, I can run 10 copies of mpg123 if I want and they all output sound just fine mixing done in hardware.
Yeah, I've been one of those Debian fanatics, but unfortunately with the woody release imminent, sid/unstable has been slacking and holding off on newer things, gnome2 betas, kde3, xfree86 4.2.0, etc. It's damn frustrating, I do have an extra machine lying around, just needs an HD, I should start being more open minded and try new things when my current methods don't satisfy my desires. What's the upgrade path on gentoo like anyway? I really don't want to rebuild my machine every year or so when a new release comes out.
:)
The main reason I use debian is because of ease of upgrades, not only between major versions, but minor versions, I can grab new bugfixed packages after the major release very easily. And also because of ease of installing new packages.
I guess I'll just have to try out gentoo to see for myself.
Thanks for the mini review, after all it's all about the apps and the ease of use. I can easily justify a complex install process if I know the end result is going to be worth it. So install doesn't really matter to me, (as long as I know it's gonna work :)
I do kinda wish there was KDE with mozilla integrated, I suppose it's kinda like Windows now, you get IE (Konq) by default, but you're welcome to switch, but when you switch, it won't be as nicely integrated. It would be nice if the browser wasn't as tied to the OS and allowed you to easily swap it out with another one. (or is this possible now? I dunno, I haven't used it yet)
It's just that as a web developer, I've noticed most things that mozilla can do, IE can do, so if it works under mozilla, it's almost definitely gonna work under IE, so I use mozilla. At least with the type of code I write, mostly html with a little javascript to help it out and give additional features. This could be true in konq also, but I just don't have as much faith in it (yet).
One of my main problems is that I can't get the tuner of the card I have to work. I think I just got a bum card, it's a wintv hauppage bt878 or whatever... tried 2.2 kernel at first awhile back, and now the 2.4 kernel, and still no worky. Well, I can view tv via a video input via the rca->svhs dongle (source from vcr), but the cable tuner doesn't work. Or maybe it's just my cable? I have no idea, whatever, it's pissing me off.
:)
Are there any special drivers I should be using other than the kernel drivers? Any special insmod params?
I suppose I'm going to just have to buy another card so I can use the tuner, but I've been kinda soured by the wintv card that I have now, and fear if I buy another card, the new one won't work either. Unfortunately, my current card way over a year old so there's no way I can take it back...
Originally I thought it was my dumb self not being able to get it to work under linux, but after a year of trying off and on, I think it must be the card, but it still could be me I guess. Any help would be much appreciated.
I'd really love to get this sucker working. I've been kinda looking for a new software project to work on, and emulating tivo like functionality under linux is definitely something that's needed, although I don't know if I have what it takes to write it, it never hurt anyone to try.
Well unfortunately there's no software even close to tivo like functionality from reading the other comments so far. So THAT'S not even an option, unless you're going to code it yourself. (which I'm seriously thinking about trying to do, under linux of course)
Let me start out with saying that I think the Debian people are doing a good job with the resources they have. I love the distribution and the ease of upgrades. It takes a lot of time to package something correctly ahearing to all the Debian rules, but it's starting to annoy me how if I was just running Redhat, I could be running KDE 3 already, whilst it'll probably take another 4 months or so for KDE 3 to make it into sid. Maybe this is one of the downfalls of Debian, because of the strict packaging guidlines, authors aren't willing to release .debs because of the ammount of time it takes to package them.
I suppose I could just grab and compile it myself.
What kind of retarded webserver has bin/ls accesable anyway? apache certainly doesn't do that.
This file could simply be left over from them copying the webroot over to the new windows box.
Or maybe to prove that the people who are in charge of that website are morons. I mean hell, it's not like that site was something seriously complex or anything, it was mostly static content, wasn't it?
The first thing I do to when switching over a dns is make sure you have the new site rock solid, stress test it, etc. They obviously did none of the sort, just switched the dns to point to a win2k box thrown up in a hurry, no firwall, sql server listening on the public side, smb ports open, etc.
I used to spoof my user agent all the time when using mozilla, but about six months ago mozilla did start getting a bit more respect, so I switched to mozilla's default user agent. Basically I see it as this: every time I hit a web page with mozilla, I vote for my browser of choice. Your user agents does still look like IE, and most stats will show that, so you're basically voting for IE. I actually haven't run accross a site in quite awhile that hasn't let me in that I actually cared about. If it doesn't let me in, I'll email every person on the site that I can find about my trouble and am on my way. Now if your bank is blocking you, then you might have to switch the user agent, but both my bank and credit card company let mozilla in and work perfectly.
Well, I finally joined the EFF, thanks to this article.
I felt kinda guitly about having them send me a t-shirt since it's kinda wasteful, but I suppose if I wear the shirt and that gets another person interested, then it's done it's job.
This bill simply scares the shit out of me. I really don't want to have to move to another country to avoid stupid legislation, seeing as how I've kinda grown attached to the USA. Or maybe it's time for another revolution, we haven't had one of those in nearly 226 years.
As much as I love OSX, I can't see it running on intel anytime soon. Take a look at apple's hardware prices, they're outrageous, do you really think Apple's going to give up the little racket they got going? They're happy with growing small, and charging way too much for their hardware. OSX is what $100? XP Pro is what $299?
It's simply ignorant to think that apple wouldn't loose money on hardware sales if their junk ran on x86 hardware. I know a few Apple people who would be more than willing to give up their wimpy G4 for a dual AMD 2100+'s that costs half a much and has 4x the power. (warning, I made those stats up).
Now Apple might be able to compete with MS on the OS market, but that would probably mean no more IE5 for OSX, no more msoffice for OSX, etc. Wow, suddendly OSX sucks without all the pointly clicky MS apps for it. They might be able to make a go of it with bundling open office and mozilla, but is apple really willing to try? Do they even have the resources to support that many people on the OS level? Probabably not, that means Apple would have to seriously ramp things up, hire more people, whoa, now we're getting really risky. Apple's always been inovative, but as long as it still allows them to remain conservative regarding growth.
Did people stop drinking during prohibition? No. Will people stop burning DVDs and stealing software? No. It WILL still happen. The gov't will just force it underground like it did illegal bars and what have you. You'll have to pry my computer from my cold dead fingers before I switch to some gov't spyware retardedness of a computer, and I'm sure many other people feel the same way, in a sense, ensuring everyone elses freedom.
:)
Prohibition was repealed in part because there weren't enough police to enforce it from my understanding. And even the police themselves wanted a drink. Once the minority opinion becomes majority, things change.
So in a sense, everyone does have a vote about what is right and what is wrong. The idea being that the people keep the gov't and laws from getting too out of control. If the people don't like something, they revolt by having a drink, burning a dvd, etc.
Of course this is just my view on things now, tommorrow is a totally different story.