I used to work for a fairly large Southern California electronics recycling company, as a hardware testing, asset managing server admin with chicken feed for pay, and we had contracts with some fairly large companies, such as Viewsonic and Dreamworks. I got to see some *very* interesting stuff go through, from all computing eras. As an example, I rescued a Motorola 6800, their very first microprocessor, but I let an Intel 8008 slip by me (we had to work fast!). My company even destroyed a beat-up Dreamworks Silicon Graphics O2 that was named after the original Foonly (Google it!). Kind of depressing. This company has a facility in Placerville as well as SoCal and maybe Google is working with them.
On a good day we could expect to completely shred or rehabilitate 20,000 pounds of electronics, the vast majority being CRT glass, with quite a bit of metal and plastics as well, so I suspect Google's output is not beyond a single company's capabilities. The company philosophy frowned on the idea of sending semi-obsolete equipment to third-world companies for a 'lease on life' as those companies are not really equipped for repair or disposal of dead electronics.
Don't you remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 1973? Sometimes simply saying that there's a shortage of something can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wish it really was April Fool's day! I'm not at all familiar with Robert X. Cringely but what he's talking about sounds like tinfoil hattery mixed with John C. Dvorak's generally off-the-wall and consequently pointless speculations.
An old PC video game, Leisure Suit Larry, actually asked you random trivia questions about pop culture from the 1960s and 1970s to verify that you were old enough to play the game (it wasn't exceptionally mature, especially by today's standards). I was about 14 at the time, and I got all the questions right on my first try (I blame my parents).
That depends, opera as reinvented by the Italians dates back to around 1600, well before the birth of composers such as J.S. Bach and Handel, who arguably defined the Baroque period to the modern ear.
While it would be entirely legitimate to appreciate Baroque music while having a particular distaste for opera in general (even Baroque opera), I am curious as to whether you also dislike oratorio or liturgical compositions (Masses and Passions) of the era as well.
A better example might be OS/2 v2.0 (first 32-bit release, by IBM). It required 4MB of RAM in 1992, had full DOS and Windows compatibility and some very nice OS features that average consumers didn't see until Windows XP.
I think the way that you would want to do it, and the way that the grandparent poster probably intended, is to have your friend work at Microsoft, put in his OWN bugs and holes in the code, and tell you what the vulnerabilities are so that YOU to write exploit code for it and get the money.
This would probably work until QA at Microsoft tracked down the singular source of most of the exploited vulnerabilities in the past few months.
Considering the number and regularity of vulnerabilities in Microsoft software recently, I wouldn't be surprised if one of their employees was already doing this, but selling them on the more lucrative black market instead.
The Golden Age of PC gaming began with the popularity of DOS/4GW protected mode and ended with the popularity of Windows 2000/XP, which were not DOSSHELL hacks.
Games with different versions for DOS and Windows (3.1/95/98), which were mostly released between 1994 and 1999, invariably ran better in DOS. Remember the original Grand Theft Auto, with 3D acceleration? That was a nice piece of work.
I don't know where you were in 1987, but in PC-land, that is the exact year that VGA was released as a standard by IBM.
I almost crapped myself the first time I saw 256 colours at the same time in a PC game!
Second Life is probably more comparable to a game from 1997, like Quake II, and it's certainly superior to the graphics on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation.
That's a great story, and good job standing up to the Big Guy.
I have to say, though, that using the HTML <IMG> tag's HEIGHT= and WIDTH= attributes to resize images from digital cameras is probably not best practise, as all of the pixels in the original image must be downloaded from the site. You could probably save 1-2 megabytes of bandwidth every time your page is loaded by cropping and resizing your images to the appropriate size in an image editor. The first image alone is 2048x1536 and displays at only 600x450. Remember: as resolution doubles, filesize quadruples (YMMV with lossy JPEG).
That's okay, Petey, some of us watched it on Something Awful the day your update was posted, over two weeks ago.
In true Slashdot style, I didn't read the article that was linked in the summary, so I had no idea that Something Awful wasn't credited for the video.
I had never heard of Second Life, in fact, until you covered it with the first Safari article in October. I was simultaneously horrified and intrigued and also somewhat glad that I had been totally innocent of the online game.
Keep up the good work. I've been a faithful reader of SA for over 6 years now, and I really feel vindicated for my support because of this stuff.
Earth to Toby, MOST of your posts in response to this article have been modded down as -1, Troll. I read at -1 and with no special modifiers to different types of moderation (everything is at +0, even Funny)
There's at least one Troll mod to your OP. It's already been explained to you that Overrated is often used in place of Troll because it is immune to meta-moderation. Whether or not most of the down-moderation on your original post is due to being modded Overrated is irrelevant to the fact that at least one poster has called you out as a troll and most of your posts are currently -1, Troll. That is how you are being perceived by the readers, like it or not. I blame a healthy respect for the Bill of Rights for this attitude towards your viewpoint. Simply put, you show no respect for freedom of speech or of the press.
Allow me to clarify, with apologies, insulting you was entirely unintentional. I believe the extent of your naievete is such that most people find it incredible, as in, unbelievable, hence, a troll. Please try to take constructive criticism with a little more maturity.
I see you did not address any of my actual logical arguments, which is somewhat disappointing. I'm starting to wonder myself whether you actually are a troll or are just infected with a trollish meme virus (expectation of total privacy in any place? c'mon!).
It was her decision to write about her sexual activity in an outrageously and exclusively public place called the Internet in the first place. I daresay that when she fell to the temptation of greed, getting her licentious book published, that her fate was already sealed and nothing would have stopped her family from knowing. If she was over 18 and not living at home, I don't see how her family knowing would've been a real problem. If either of those conditions were false, she shouldn't have written a public blog about her sexual activity.
Her life was absolutely and totally "devestated" because she was a slut and an attention whore.
I don't really have a problem with the paper as they seem to have only reported the facts. If I was in her situation I would probably have deleted my blog when threatened by the newspaper.
All right, I for one know that you are, in fact, incredibly naive and believe wholeheartedly that what "Anshe Chung" is doing is ethical.
You should try to understand that it is easy for many people to "mistake" your viewpoint for trolling because of several things:
Many of the people who are replying to you have written troll posts or been caught and embarrassed by trolls in the past. The humiliating experience of the latter is not quickly forgotten.
It is a likely viewpoint that a troll might take in order to get many heated replies.
It APPLAUDS the twisting of an extant US copyright law to cover a merely embarrassing situation involving things that happened in a public interview to a virtual avatar that Ailin Graef has probably attached a bit *too* much of her sizable ego to on what amounts to a video game.
You wholeheartedly endorse the overturning of United States case law that states that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place. We came to this understanding over many years in order to accomodate FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. Hence the article title. Whether you marred the distinction between public and private life intentionally or merely fumbled in your conflation thereof due to a grave lack of understanding, I do not ken.
You do all this because you think it's "not nice" to fling animated penises at people who happen to be playing the same computer game as you, so the ends justifies the means, and worse, that Graef's embarrassment over the humiliation her avatar suffered actually makes it "ethical".
These things are fairly outrageous to most reasonable people and whether your post was intended as a troll or not, I hope you can see how it was easily construed as one. Slashdot is subject to a tremendous number of intellectually dishonest and intentional troll posts, perhaps dozens in the larger articles.
Well said, although I would like to point out that since real money trades hands *both* ways in this massively-multiplayer online game, things become a little different.
"Anshe Chung" is a real-life multimillionaire because of "her" Second Life real estate speculation, hence the CNET interview. The economy of Second Life trades about a million USD every day. This, I must note, is also a game where you can put Hermione in bondage gear and have her raped on a rack by a half-naked Santa Claus and anthropomorphic foxes with multiple penises. Hence the griefers and Something Awful's Second Life Safari. I have to congratulate Chris "Petey" Peterson for what he's been doing with that.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it would be impossible for the US to do it any other way, unless North Korea went insane, invaded South Korea and somehow managed to get themselves dug in pretty good within a few days' time.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people would move to Canada faster than you can say "Hello, Selective Service!"
Slashdot Mirror
On a good day we could expect to completely shred or rehabilitate 20,000 pounds of electronics, the vast majority being CRT glass, with quite a bit of metal and plastics as well, so I suspect Google's output is not beyond a single company's capabilities. The company philosophy frowned on the idea of sending semi-obsolete equipment to third-world companies for a 'lease on life' as those companies are not really equipped for repair or disposal of dead electronics.
Yeah, H&R Block for me as well. My only mistake was in filing married, jointly.
You're right. On further investigation, Cringely reminds me more of Art Bell.
Don't you remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 1973? Sometimes simply saying that there's a shortage of something can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wish it really was April Fool's day! I'm not at all familiar with Robert X. Cringely but what he's talking about sounds like tinfoil hattery mixed with John C. Dvorak's generally off-the-wall and consequently pointless speculations.
Quit your whining; at least your roads are paved.
I've been waiting for something faster than dial-up for ten years!
An old PC video game, Leisure Suit Larry, actually asked you random trivia questions about pop culture from the 1960s and 1970s to verify that you were old enough to play the game (it wasn't exceptionally mature, especially by today's standards). I was about 14 at the time, and I got all the questions right on my first try (I blame my parents).
That depends, opera as reinvented by the Italians dates back to around 1600, well before the birth of composers such as J.S. Bach and Handel, who arguably defined the Baroque period to the modern ear.
While it would be entirely legitimate to appreciate Baroque music while having a particular distaste for opera in general (even Baroque opera), I am curious as to whether you also dislike oratorio or liturgical compositions (Masses and Passions) of the era as well.
Windows 3.1 was not an operating system.
A better example might be OS/2 v2.0 (first 32-bit release, by IBM). It required 4MB of RAM in 1992, had full DOS and Windows compatibility and some very nice OS features that average consumers didn't see until Windows XP.
Dude, please! Use the spoilers tag next time!
That second disc isn't technically an HD-DVD. It's a Windows Media-compatible file in HD resolution on a standard DVD.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Doubleplusgood upration of Corp expansion outwardly. Oldthinkers not fullwise bellyfeel dayorder.
Many brave pretzels have made the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to end Bush's life.
He's not as safe from harm as you might think.
I think the way that you would want to do it, and the way that the grandparent poster probably intended, is to have your friend work at Microsoft, put in his OWN bugs and holes in the code, and tell you what the vulnerabilities are so that YOU to write exploit code for it and get the money.
This would probably work until QA at Microsoft tracked down the singular source of most of the exploited vulnerabilities in the past few months.
Considering the number and regularity of vulnerabilities in Microsoft software recently, I wouldn't be surprised if one of their employees was already doing this, but selling them on the more lucrative black market instead.
The Golden Age of PC gaming began with the popularity of DOS/4GW protected mode and ended with the popularity of Windows 2000/XP, which were not DOSSHELL hacks.
Games with different versions for DOS and Windows (3.1/95/98), which were mostly released between 1994 and 1999, invariably ran better in DOS. Remember the original Grand Theft Auto, with 3D acceleration? That was a nice piece of work.
I don't know where you were in 1987, but in PC-land, that is the exact year that VGA was released as a standard by IBM.
I almost crapped myself the first time I saw 256 colours at the same time in a PC game!
Second Life is probably more comparable to a game from 1997, like Quake II, and it's certainly superior to the graphics on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation.
That's a great story, and good job standing up to the Big Guy.
I have to say, though, that using the HTML <IMG> tag's HEIGHT= and WIDTH= attributes to resize images from digital cameras is probably not best practise, as all of the pixels in the original image must be downloaded from the site. You could probably save 1-2 megabytes of bandwidth every time your page is loaded by cropping and resizing your images to the appropriate size in an image editor. The first image alone is 2048x1536 and displays at only 600x450. Remember: as resolution doubles, filesize quadruples (YMMV with lossy JPEG).
That's okay, Petey, some of us watched it on Something Awful the day your update was posted, over two weeks ago.
In true Slashdot style, I didn't read the article that was linked in the summary, so I had no idea that Something Awful wasn't credited for the video.
I had never heard of Second Life, in fact, until you covered it with the first Safari article in October. I was simultaneously horrified and intrigued and also somewhat glad that I had been totally innocent of the online game.
Keep up the good work. I've been a faithful reader of SA for over 6 years now, and I really feel vindicated for my support because of this stuff.
You should see his outrageous thread here: Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom. 13 posts, and only 7 are modded Troll so far.
Earth to Toby, MOST of your posts in response to this article have been modded down as -1, Troll. I read at -1 and with no special modifiers to different types of moderation (everything is at +0, even Funny)
There's at least one Troll mod to your OP. It's already been explained to you that Overrated is often used in place of Troll because it is immune to meta-moderation. Whether or not most of the down-moderation on your original post is due to being modded Overrated is irrelevant to the fact that at least one poster has called you out as a troll and most of your posts are currently -1, Troll. That is how you are being perceived by the readers, like it or not. I blame a healthy respect for the Bill of Rights for this attitude towards your viewpoint. Simply put, you show no respect for freedom of speech or of the press.
Allow me to clarify, with apologies, insulting you was entirely unintentional. I believe the extent of your naievete is such that most people find it incredible, as in, unbelievable, hence, a troll. Please try to take constructive criticism with a little more maturity.
I see you did not address any of my actual logical arguments, which is somewhat disappointing. I'm starting to wonder myself whether you actually are a troll or are just infected with a trollish meme virus (expectation of total privacy in any place? c'mon!).
It was her decision to write about her sexual activity in an outrageously and exclusively public place called the Internet in the first place. I daresay that when she fell to the temptation of greed, getting her licentious book published, that her fate was already sealed and nothing would have stopped her family from knowing. If she was over 18 and not living at home, I don't see how her family knowing would've been a real problem. If either of those conditions were false, she shouldn't have written a public blog about her sexual activity.
Her life was absolutely and totally "devestated" because she was a slut and an attention whore.
I don't really have a problem with the paper as they seem to have only reported the facts.
If I was in her situation I would probably have deleted my blog when threatened by the newspaper.
All right, I for one know that you are, in fact, incredibly naive and believe wholeheartedly that what "Anshe Chung" is doing is ethical.
You should try to understand that it is easy for many people to "mistake" your viewpoint for trolling because of several things:
Many of the people who are replying to you have written troll posts or been caught and embarrassed by trolls in the past. The humiliating experience of the latter is not quickly forgotten.
It is a likely viewpoint that a troll might take in order to get many heated replies.
It APPLAUDS the twisting of an extant US copyright law to cover a merely embarrassing situation involving things that happened in a public interview to a virtual avatar that Ailin Graef has probably attached a bit *too* much of her sizable ego to on what amounts to a video game.
You wholeheartedly endorse the overturning of United States case law that states that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place. We came to this understanding over many years in order to accomodate FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. Hence the article title. Whether you marred the distinction between public and private life intentionally or merely fumbled in your conflation thereof due to a grave lack of understanding, I do not ken.
You do all this because you think it's "not nice" to fling animated penises at people who happen to be playing the same computer game as you, so the ends justifies the means, and worse, that Graef's embarrassment over the humiliation her avatar suffered actually makes it "ethical".
These things are fairly outrageous to most reasonable people and whether your post was intended as a troll or not, I hope you can see how it was easily construed as one. Slashdot is subject to a tremendous number of intellectually dishonest and intentional troll posts, perhaps dozens in the larger articles.
Well said, although I would like to point out that since real money trades hands *both* ways in this massively-multiplayer online game, things become a little different.
"Anshe Chung" is a real-life multimillionaire because of "her" Second Life real estate speculation, hence the CNET interview. The economy of Second Life trades about a million USD every day. This, I must note, is also a game where you can put Hermione in bondage gear and have her raped on a rack by a half-naked Santa Claus and anthropomorphic foxes with multiple penises. Hence the griefers and Something Awful's Second Life Safari. I have to congratulate Chris "Petey" Peterson for what he's been doing with that.
Go home. You're worse than Prokofy Neva.
Whether publication is justifiable or not is irrelevant to its legality.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it would be impossible for the US to do it any other way, unless North Korea went insane, invaded South Korea and somehow managed to get themselves dug in pretty good within a few days' time.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people would move to Canada faster than you can say "Hello, Selective Service!"