There was this BeOS installer that was started from Windows, without having to reboot from a CD. Just take that or something similar (ISTR some old Linux distro that did the same) and mail it around, obviously people will simply execute anything they find in their inbox.
Could please someone find their owners and make sure they never get to operate a computer connected to a public network again? They have clearly shown not to be qualified, and are a threat to others.
What is good about MetroPipe is that they are NOT located in the USA. And they do not keep logs to even give to anyone that even asks.
At least that's what they tell you. But what would stop such a company from logging all the sensitive information that get (and given that you'd use it for everything you don't want to know about, they would probably collect a lot of very interesting info) and later sell it to some spammers, for example, or simply start blackmailing you?
The problem with all these privacy-enhancing proxies is that you have to trust some fishy offshore company first.
There is no way someone would confuse "Lindows" for "Microsoft Windows."
As we speak, the net suffers from MyDoom and the various related worms that could only spread because of morons executing unexpected attachments, despite being told not to time and time again.
Never underestimate the stupidity of Microsoft customers. I would not be surprised if they confuse a rubber duck for "Microsoft Windows".
As far as I know, Iceland and Bolivia don't have access to the source code for Windows. Neither has eEye, but they still found that vulnerability. I wonder how long Iceland and Bolivia have been exploiting this?
I don't know why so many people have trouble understanding that it costs money to put content on the internet.
Probably because they experience that the amout of advertising on a website is inversely proportional to the quality of its content.
Whether this is true for you seems to depend on how you use the net. If you are looking for entertainment, you'll get lots of ads, or crappy content (or you can pay to make the ads go away). If you use it as an information resource, the situation is different. Most newsgroups and mailing lists are ad free, and obviously they don't usually come with singing and dancing flash popups. They still carry a lot of content. Same for the web, many of the sites with really good content are pretty plain, and light on ads.
People still use the net to collaborate. The benefits of being part of a community freely exchanging information about a topic you are interested in far outweight the costs of some webspace or general connectivity and the time you spend contributing to it.
This has not only been said, but done before. The last time, the good, system-patching worm caused much more damage than the one he tried to patch, mostly due to the insane amount of network traffic it caused.
The other 5% of nerds: I bought the Opera web browser just because they support may favourite OS, so I might as well buy stock!
Personally, the small ad banner never really annoyed me, I'm currently using Operare for Solaris with ads. I did pay for my copy of Opera for FreeBSD though, not because of the ad, but because I thought it was great that they chose to support FreeBSD, and that it would be important for FreeBSD to have an example of a commercial software firm supporting it for pure profit reasons.
I mean, that's partly what subscribers are for. And that's also why subscribers can't do comments early. Right?
Do I understand correctly - you actually pay money for being allowed to do the job of the (paid, but incompetent) editors, so that I (freeloader) don't have to read dupes?
No, for these people, the internet is one mighty fine way to communicate.
I am going to be blind in a couple of years (no idea when exactly, I still can see quite fine, but it is going to happen). I am pretty thankfull to know that a) I know how to touch-type and b) a lot of software is accessible for the blind, including a lot of free software (including the main desktop environments like Emacs, Gnome and - although lacking behind - KDE) - and I seldomly had to do anything that I couldn't do in Emacs, so I should be OK. A lot of web sites lack in terms of accessibility and general standards-compliance *cough*slashdot*cough*, but my chances to use the net (with a standard desktop, "smart"phones etc are going to suck) without usable eyes are a lot higher than they are to use television or newspapers. (And let's not talk about radio, OK?)
Fortunatly, this would only apply to one constitution. There are ~120 others to choose from
OK, not all of them are expressed as a formal law, and many are worse than the USAsian one, but it should be easy to find one that has everything that someone raised in western civilization would expect (democracy, free speech, innocent until proven guilty, no death penalty, basic human rights granted,...) and with a sane balance of rights between the rights of a creator and the interests of the general public.
The GPL has been used for for documentation as well (as have other software licenses; for example the license used by the FreeBSD documentation project is virtually identical to the one used for the system itself). It is just a pretty silly idea, because the requirements, and what should be considered appropriate use, are very different.
And that is why Linux will never be successfull on the desktop, unless initialitves like this one get adopted by all major distros. Why is it so complicated for Linux users to be part of a worldwide collaborative effort to bring the net down, when it has been completely transparent for Windows users for years?
Java is obviously a result of many older languages - it's syntax (and hughe parts of the semantics) are derived mostly from C++, the VM/JIT idea is largely a Smalltalk ripoff, garbage collection has been around for at least 40 years before Sun adopted it, some things it owes to earlier Sun research languages like Self (too few, IMHO), you name it.
On the other hand, these are only means to an end. And, as stated in the early Oak/Java papers, this end was creating a language for mediocre programmers, i.e. a language that can be used in huge teams of not-so-skilled, exchangable code monkeys - a PHBs dream come true. And that is why it succeeded, because it was a really great fit for these projects, with all the bondage-and-discipline stuff, the crippled expressiveness, the dumbing-down mistaken as abstraction. And that is probably a good thing, because the huge projects staffed with underskilled code-monkeys happened before as well, only in languages that sucked for this scenario, C++ being the most common example. But why any self-respecting hacker would want to use it any more than COBOL and other languages "designed for other people" still is a mystery to me.
Re:"Co-opt Java"
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Without Microsoft spending years trying to undercut them it's very conceivable that Java would be the lingua-franca of the internet right now.
Then thank god for microsoft. I am rather confident with an open-standards-based, multilingual internet as it is, even if it could have been better.
Tell him that there was a whole ask-slashdot story exclusively dealing with how to make him happy, just because you care enough for him to try to understand how his geeky mind works, instead of simply assuming a default (non-geek) value system.
Accepting his geekiness, and turning to other geeks for advice (even if they turned out to be sexually starved jerks) in an effort to understand his nature better, is a better gift than any iPod or blowjob could be.
Does this jerk really believe he had anything to do with the german reunion? He was popular because he was Michael Knight (hey, we only got private tv channels in the mid-80ies, and that was only in western germany!), not because he was a good singer, a good actor, or his songs had particularly smart texts. Not to mention that knowledge of the english language wasn't exactly widespread among the eastern-german people (who tended to learn russian instead, and who obviously played a more important role in this whole shebang). I was about 12 years old back then, and even I knew that this guy was a pathetic joke.
it may be seen that these people (while malicious) allow security to keep up with that hacks that can be done.
Excuse me, but if these people would not exist, there would be no need to keep up. Unlike natural viruses, malicious code doesn't just evolve, it takes a malevolent human to create an distribute it.
Slashdot Mirror
There was this BeOS installer that was started from Windows, without having to reboot from a CD. Just take that or something similar (ISTR some old Linux distro that did the same) and mail it around, obviously people will simply execute anything they find in their inbox.
Could please someone find their owners and make sure they never get to operate a computer connected to a public network again? They have clearly shown not to be qualified, and are a threat to others.
The problem with all these privacy-enhancing proxies is that you have to trust some fishy offshore company first.
Never underestimate the stupidity of Microsoft customers. I would not be surprised if they confuse a rubber duck for "Microsoft Windows".
As far as I know, Iceland and Bolivia don't have access to the source code for Windows. Neither has eEye, but they still found that vulnerability. I wonder how long Iceland and Bolivia have been exploiting this?
Whether this is true for you seems to depend on how you use the net. If you are looking for entertainment, you'll get lots of ads, or crappy content (or you can pay to make the ads go away). If you use it as an information resource, the situation is different. Most newsgroups and mailing lists are ad free, and obviously they don't usually come with singing and dancing flash popups. They still carry a lot of content. Same for the web, many of the sites with really good content are pretty plain, and light on ads.
People still use the net to collaborate. The benefits of being part of a community freely exchanging information about a topic you are interested in far outweight the costs of some webspace or general connectivity and the time you spend contributing to it.
This has not only been said, but done before. The last time, the good, system-patching worm caused much more damage than the one he tried to patch, mostly due to the insane amount of network traffic it caused.
Personally, the small ad banner never really annoyed me, I'm currently using Operare for Solaris with ads. I did pay for my copy of Opera for FreeBSD though, not because of the ad, but because I thought it was great that they chose to support FreeBSD, and that it would be important for FreeBSD to have an example of a commercial software firm supporting it for pure profit reasons.
I am going to be blind in a couple of years (no idea when exactly, I still can see quite fine, but it is going to happen). I am pretty thankfull to know that a) I know how to touch-type and b) a lot of software is accessible for the blind, including a lot of free software (including the main desktop environments like Emacs, Gnome and - although lacking behind - KDE) - and I seldomly had to do anything that I couldn't do in Emacs, so I should be OK. A lot of web sites lack in terms of accessibility and general standards-compliance *cough*slashdot*cough*, but my chances to use the net (with a standard desktop, "smart"phones etc are going to suck) without usable eyes are a lot higher than they are to use television or newspapers. (And let's not talk about radio, OK?)
If it makes you feel better, I forgot that Perl was dual-licensed under Artistic and GPL. So make it 1.5 projects under the GPL :-)
OK, not all of them are expressed as a formal law, and many are worse than the USAsian one, but it should be easy to find one that has everything that someone raised in western civilization would expect (democracy, free speech, innocent until proven guilty, no death penalty, basic human rights granted, ...) and with a sane balance of rights between the rights of a creator and the interests of the general public.
The GPL has been used for for documentation as well (as have other software licenses; for example the license used by the FreeBSD documentation project is virtually identical to the one used for the system itself). It is just a pretty silly idea, because the requirements, and what should be considered appropriate use, are very different.
Wow, one of your four examples even is under the GPL. This is more accuracy as could be expected from a slashdotter.
And that is why Linux will never be successfull on the desktop, unless initialitves like this one get adopted by all major distros. Why is it so complicated for Linux users to be part of a worldwide collaborative effort to bring the net down, when it has been completely transparent for Windows users for years?
On the other hand, these are only means to an end. And, as stated in the early Oak/Java papers, this end was creating a language for mediocre programmers, i.e. a language that can be used in huge teams of not-so-skilled, exchangable code monkeys - a PHBs dream come true. And that is why it succeeded, because it was a really great fit for these projects, with all the bondage-and-discipline stuff, the crippled expressiveness, the dumbing-down mistaken as abstraction. And that is probably a good thing, because the huge projects staffed with underskilled code-monkeys happened before as well, only in languages that sucked for this scenario, C++ being the most common example. But why any self-respecting hacker would want to use it any more than COBOL and other languages "designed for other people" still is a mystery to me.
If you know where to get such a workstation for 100 bucks, I'd be very interested! (2 Opterons would do, actually. I'm not greedy.)
Tell him that there was a whole ask-slashdot story exclusively dealing with how to make him happy, just because you care enough for him to try to understand how his geeky mind works, instead of simply assuming a default (non-geek) value system.
Accepting his geekiness, and turning to other geeks for advice (even if they turned out to be sexually starved jerks) in an effort to understand his nature better, is a better gift than any iPod or blowjob could be.
Insensitive clod!
And never wear 402 in public.
Where "out of the box" means "after setting some obscure registry key to an even more obscure value". And people complain about text config files.
(And I'm indeed going back to uni. I'd rather not have to pay, however.)
Does this jerk really believe he had anything to do with the german reunion? He was popular because he was Michael Knight (hey, we only got private tv channels in the mid-80ies, and that was only in western germany!), not because he was a good singer, a good actor, or his songs had particularly smart texts. Not to mention that knowledge of the english language wasn't exactly widespread among the eastern-german people (who tended to learn russian instead, and who obviously played a more important role in this whole shebang). I was about 12 years old back then, and even I knew that this guy was a pathetic joke.