I hate to make a "me too" kind of post, but what is it with the BSD and Apache sections? The BSD colors aren't *terribly* bad, but the apache?! BLECH. It gives me a headache.
I'm all for universal access, and I generally think that companies who provide these benefits are doing a Good Thing(tm), but I think we need to consider the reasons behind companies giving out connectivity. I mean, who benefits the most from having access to these technologies? Certainly the employees do, but so do the companies, I would think. Isn't giving everyone a free computer and internet access just another way to tie the employees to their jobs? Imagine a situation where an employer gives everyone a free pager -- good deal, right? Well, that freebie can also be used by the employer to stay in touch with the employees 24 hours a day, so the employees are theoretically "on call" all the time. It's a price they pay for the free technology, but is it worth it if you can't escape your workplace?
I guess I'm kind of confused about this. According to this story at cnn.com:
"It's too destructive to become widespread," he said. "When you get hit by Love Letter, you may not notice it. The next time you hear about it is when someone calls you up and complains. But with NewLove, you open the attachment and immediately your machine crashes and won't boot again.
"It's never going to go around like Love Letter," he said, "because it's so obvious."
I understand that the original ILOVEYOU worm would infect other files on your system, so if you executed them you would become infected again, and that since the new worm infects all unused files on your system, your computer would be unusable. So if the original worm infected your mp3s, and you go click on one of them, you would email a bunch of people with the ILOVEYOU worm all over again. With the new worm, however this is not the case, because you won't be able to click on some random mp3 in the furture and reinfect yourself again, since you would have reinstalled everything by then anyway.
This being said, though, it seems to me that reinfecting yourself with the original worm and sending it out to people every time by executing an infected mp3 or jpeg is not going to add much more life to it on the internet, because people are mostly well-aware of ILOVEYOU and will avoid it if they see it in their inbox.
Sorry if this is confusing or incoherent. What I'm trying to say is that the article's reasoning that the new worm won't be as widespread as the original seems flawed to me.
I agree with your refutation of the "CDs are too expensive" argument, but the problem with your argument is that it is overly broad because you are not considering those of us who already own Metallica CDs. Yes, I could rip them myself, but I'm too lazy to do that, especially because I go to a university with a fast internet connection. It's much faster and easier for me to grab the mp3s using Napster than it is to rip and encode them myself. I know this has already been said, but I think it's a good point: How will Metallica prove that I don't own the album?
I know this isn't a KDE help site, but I've been baffled by all the KDE2 binaries (RPMs). I can not, for the life of me, locate "qt21" or "at21-devel" anywhere, although I've unearthed enough information to know that they exist somewhere. I can't install any of the new KDE2 stuff (i.e. konqueror, koffice) without these mysterious qt packages, but I can't find them anywhere. Here is what I currently have installed: qt-1.44-15mdk qt-devel-1.44-15mdk qt2-2.1.0-4mdk qt2-devel-2.1.0-4mdk Alas, no "qt21-xxx.rpm" or "qt21-devel-xxx.rpm" to be found.:-(
He's got a new album out. I've never been a big fan of his, but the new one is actually decent. In one track, he explains how he's been battling his former label, so he probably just wants to make some green to pay his costs. He can't very well let his fans trade his music without paying him now can he? After all, he has legal fees to pay now.;-)
I agree with you. I have very strong opinions about freedom of speech, and I say free speech should be unequivocal. I was probably unclear when I said that some forms are "necessary." What I meant (and should have said) is that some forms of censorship are practical, or perhaps understandable. Sorry about that.;-)
I think that's a valid point, and although we may be leashing the same thing (sex), I think we need to take into account the differences in the distribution of it. For instance, television couldn't show explicit sex because any child can turn on the tv, so the risk is too great that the child would be exposed to it. In the case of the newsstand, there is a built-in filter that (theoretically) wouldn't allow a child to purchase the sexual material. I think the internet is somewhere between these two cases, and therefore I would be reluctant to treat it exactly like either one.
I'm stumped by this as well. But what irks me even more is how legislators (as well as the general public) apparently think that since the internet is accessible by children, then it must be sanitized for them, at the expense of adults' rights. Children can't go to a newstand and legally purchase a Hustler magazine, but that doesn't mean we ban newstands from selling them.
I can't tell if your post is tongue-in-cheek, so excuse me if it is. I know that many people think this way, but I just don't understand it. It's just like saying that since we already are legally required to leash our dogs in public, it's not really a big deal to ask us to leash our kids. There are different kinds of censorship, and while some may be necessary, censorship is not always the best way to deal with a problem. Most people are like me -- we are suspicious about seemingly harmless bits of censorship because of the slippery-slope phenomenon. And I think your reasoning is the type that allows the slope to exist.
I just saw the show with that insane guy from Australia on the Discovery Channel. He was taunting and trapping big-ass crocs and what-not. I remember him talking about how crocs can only make one quick snap before having to rest. Either that, or they can thrash around for like 5 seconds or so. After that, they just go calm because they have to regain their energy. Moral of the story: if you are attacked by a croc, and he misses you on the first lunge, you'll be able to get away. Relevance to this thread: crocs can tear some stuff up (they showed a huge croc snapping a pig's spine in its mouth), but only for a few seconds.
In a press release announcing the suit, publicists for the band and music companies even threw in a statement from Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who said it is "sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."
Pardon me, but WTF?! I've always known that Lars Ulrich is kind of a dolt, but this is got to be one of the dumbest things I've heard in a long time. I'll ignore the fact that blowing your own horn about your music being "art" is a little pretentious, even though I would probably agree that it is art. But if Lars Ulrich is "sickened" by his "art" being treated as a commodity, why are they even selling their albums in the first place? It would be hard to argue that a Metallica CD is not a commodity.
An artist, if you take money out of the equation (which I know is a BIG "if"), produces art for others' and/or his own enjoyment -- the business aspect is secondary. The fact is that Metallica are artists at some level, but when all is said and done, they are making a product first and foremost. As long as they are selling their "art," they are pushing a product, not an art.
Excuse my ignorance, but I was checking out the page for RealServer, and now my face is stuck in this irritable-bowel fashion and I can't fix it. The server costs $2,995?! I thought it was a typo until later I noticed that this price was $800 off the regular price! Can someone tell me how $2,995 is a justifiable price for this?
The reason they took people's credit card information was because they wanted insurance against people breaking it, or not using it often enough (i.e. not seeing the ads often enough to make money for Free-PC). I don't have the paperwork here, but the agreement was that if you broke your Free-PC or didn't use it enough, they would take the computer back from you. However, if you wanted to keep the computer, you could buy it from them. The price you would pay was on a sliding scale based on how long you had it. For example, if I had the machine for a year, but they wanted it back because I didn't use it, I could elect to buy it from them for, say, 50% of the market price. If I had it for 2 years and I wanted to buy it, I would only pay maybe 15% of the price. Eventually, after three years (I think) the price would fall to $0 and the machine was free for you to keep at no cost.
I received notification from them at *least* one week before they discontinued their services. I thought about submitting the info to/. but I saw a news item on Ars-Technica about it, and figured that someone would beat me to it anyway. Guess I should have submitted the story here;-). Anyway, the bottom line is that Free-PC wasn't unfair (at least with me) with notifications and such. This story just didn't get on/. until now.
I did get a Free-PC from them a while back. I got a Compaq with a Cyrix processor and 32MB of RAM. Needless to say, it's annoyingly slow when it's throwing ads in your face with a 56k connection. So, I gave it to my mom so she could learn how to use email and browse the web. When I come home from school on spring break, I'm going to install Linux on it. I just hope it doesn't have a winmodem...;-)
I have a few questions. First, is there any way at all to hack a WinCE palm device (i.e. Cassiopeia) to run UNIX/Linux? Has this ever been done? From what I've read in this thread, it isn't likely to be possible, but in that case, is there any way to get a WinCE device to interface with my computer that runs Linux? I got a Casio Cassiopeia for Christmas, and I like it a lot, but it irritates me that I have to boot to my Windows partition whenever I want to interface the two. This is pretty much the only reason I keep my Windows partition around anymore.
My next question is about the general distaste for WinCE that I've noticed here and there. I'm a Linux freak, and I dislike almost everything about Windows, which irritates me to no end. But given that, I don't see what the big fuss is about WinCE. Why is it so bad? I'm totally happy with my PDA despite the fact that it runs WinCE (although I have never used a Palm Pilot, so I can't compare the two OSes). Can anyone give me some insight about this?
This is from the html version of the findings of fact straight from the gpo.gov website. Isn't it a bit ironic that they apparently used a MS prog to generate the html? Just posted this because I thought it was worth a chuckle..;)
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"] [saved from url=(0034)http://usvms.gpo.gov/findfact.html] [HTML][HEAD][TITLE]Findings of Fact - United States of America v. Microsoft Cor$ [META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type] [META content="MSHTML 5.00.2314.1000" name=GENERATOR]
I don't see getting the one-time pad to your operatives as difficult at all, given that you have some technology available to you. The one-time pad can be reduced to the size of a period in a letter and read by the operative with a microscope (of course, this means the operative must be in a place where he can access a microscope). The guy living next door to you who is secretly a covert op receives his one-time pad in his mail every day and nobody is the wiser because nobody else knows that the letter contains a one-time pad. The OTP could be the period at the end of the first sentence, for example, in a seemingly mundane letter from the op's grandmother or something. I read in an old crypto book several years back that the best codes are the ones that don't appear to be codes at all.
Furthermore, imagine that someone *did* intercept the one-time pad. He still doesn't necessarily know what broadcast it applies to. For example, the op could just know that letters from grandma apply to broadcasts on thursday at 3pm, letters from cousin Phil apply to thursday at 11pm, and so on. The spooks could engineer the whole thing to be so incredibly complex that it would not only be completely impossible to crack, but completely impossible to attempt a crack at all -- and yet still very easy for the op to commit the rules to memory.
Unfortunately, I work for the help desk of a leading IT firm in Chicago. I would estimate that at least 50% of the time, the user's problem is either a request for a reset password or is solved by resetting the password. Think about the time (time=money) we could have back if there weren't so many password issues. We would have twice as much time/resources to devote to serious problems. Think of it this way -- with ~10 help desk employees responsible for 3500+ employees on billable consulting time at client sites around the world, a lot of money is lost to inactivity of the consultants due to thei computer problems. I will admit though, that supporting Winblows causes at least as many headaches... arrgghhh.. I thought I hated Windoze *before* I had to troubleshoot it all damn day. Tangent, sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to make a "me too" kind of post, but what is it with the BSD and Apache sections? The BSD colors aren't *terribly* bad, but the apache?! BLECH. It gives me a headache.
I'm all for universal access, and I generally think that companies who provide these benefits are doing a Good Thing(tm), but I think we need to consider the reasons behind companies giving out connectivity. I mean, who benefits the most from having access to these technologies? Certainly the employees do, but so do the companies, I would think. Isn't giving everyone a free computer and internet access just another way to tie the employees to their jobs? Imagine a situation where an employer gives everyone a free pager -- good deal, right? Well, that freebie can also be used by the employer to stay in touch with the employees 24 hours a day, so the employees are theoretically "on call" all the time. It's a price they pay for the free technology, but is it worth it if you can't escape your workplace?
I guess I'm kind of confused about this. According to this story at cnn.com:
"It's too destructive to become widespread," he said. "When you get hit by Love Letter, you may not notice it. The next time you hear about it is when someone calls you up and complains. But with NewLove, you open the attachment and immediately your machine crashes and won't boot again.
"It's never going to go around like Love Letter," he said, "because it's so obvious."
I understand that the original ILOVEYOU worm would infect other files on your system, so if you executed them you would become infected again, and that since the new worm infects all unused files on your system, your computer would be unusable. So if the original worm infected your mp3s, and you go click on one of them, you would email a bunch of people with the ILOVEYOU worm all over again. With the new worm, however this is not the case, because you won't be able to click on some random mp3 in the furture and reinfect yourself again, since you would have reinstalled everything by then anyway.
This being said, though, it seems to me that reinfecting yourself with the original worm and sending it out to people every time by executing an infected mp3 or jpeg is not going to add much more life to it on the internet, because people are mostly well-aware of ILOVEYOU and will avoid it if they see it in their inbox.
Sorry if this is confusing or incoherent. What I'm trying to say is that the article's reasoning that the new worm won't be as widespread as the original seems flawed to me.
You're right -- imagine if there was a .rox or .bom.. anything that sounds simple and strong will be successful.
I agree with your refutation of the "CDs are too expensive" argument, but the problem with your argument is that it is overly broad because you are not considering those of us who already own Metallica CDs. Yes, I could rip them myself, but I'm too lazy to do that, especially because I go to a university with a fast internet connection. It's much faster and easier for me to grab the mp3s using Napster than it is to rip and encode them myself. I know this has already been said, but I think it's a good point: How will Metallica prove that I don't own the album?
I know this isn't a KDE help site, but I've been baffled by all the KDE2 binaries (RPMs). I can not, for the life of me, locate "qt21" or "at21-devel" anywhere, although I've unearthed enough information to know that they exist somewhere. I can't install any of the new KDE2 stuff (i.e. konqueror, koffice) without these mysterious qt packages, but I can't find them anywhere. Here is what I currently have installed: qt-1.44-15mdk qt-devel-1.44-15mdk qt2-2.1.0-4mdk qt2-devel-2.1.0-4mdk Alas, no "qt21-xxx.rpm" or "qt21-devel-xxx.rpm" to be found. :-(
He's got a new album out. I've never been a big fan of his, but the new one is actually decent. In one track, he explains how he's been battling his former label, so he probably just wants to make some green to pay his costs. He can't very well let his fans trade his music without paying him now can he? After all, he has legal fees to pay now. ;-)
I agree with you. I have very strong opinions about freedom of speech, and I say free speech should be unequivocal. I was probably unclear when I said that some forms are "necessary." What I meant (and should have said) is that some forms of censorship are practical, or perhaps understandable. Sorry about that. ;-)
I think that's a valid point, and although we may be leashing the same thing (sex), I think we need to take into account the differences in the distribution of it. For instance, television couldn't show explicit sex because any child can turn on the tv, so the risk is too great that the child would be exposed to it. In the case of the newsstand, there is a built-in filter that (theoretically) wouldn't allow a child to purchase the sexual material. I think the internet is somewhere between these two cases, and therefore I would be reluctant to treat it exactly like either one.
I'm stumped by this as well. But what irks me even more is how legislators (as well as the general public) apparently think that since the internet is accessible by children, then it must be sanitized for them, at the expense of adults' rights. Children can't go to a newstand and legally purchase a Hustler magazine, but that doesn't mean we ban newstands from selling them.
I can't tell if your post is tongue-in-cheek, so excuse me if it is. I know that many people think this way, but I just don't understand it. It's just like saying that since we already are legally required to leash our dogs in public, it's not really a big deal to ask us to leash our kids. There are different kinds of censorship, and while some may be necessary, censorship is not always the best way to deal with a problem. Most people are like me -- we are suspicious about seemingly harmless bits of censorship because of the slippery-slope phenomenon. And I think your reasoning is the type that allows the slope to exist.
I just saw the show with that insane guy from Australia on the Discovery Channel. He was taunting and trapping big-ass crocs and what-not. I remember him talking about how crocs can only make one quick snap before having to rest. Either that, or they can thrash around for like 5 seconds or so. After that, they just go calm because they have to regain their energy. Moral of the story: if you are attacked by a croc, and he misses you on the first lunge, you'll be able to get away. Relevance to this thread: crocs can tear some stuff up (they showed a huge croc snapping a pig's spine in its mouth), but only for a few seconds.
In a press release announcing the suit, publicists for the band and music companies even threw in a statement from Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who said it is "sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."
Pardon me, but WTF?! I've always known that Lars Ulrich is kind of a dolt, but this is got to be one of the dumbest things I've heard in a long time. I'll ignore the fact that blowing your own horn about your music being "art" is a little pretentious, even though I would probably agree that it is art. But if Lars Ulrich is "sickened" by his "art" being treated as a commodity, why are they even selling their albums in the first place? It would be hard to argue that a Metallica CD is not a commodity.
An artist, if you take money out of the equation (which I know is a BIG "if"), produces art for others' and/or his own enjoyment -- the business aspect is secondary. The fact is that Metallica are artists at some level, but when all is said and done, they are making a product first and foremost. As long as they are selling their "art," they are pushing a product, not an art.
Your total: $0.02
ARRGH! You mean Scream 3 has Ewoks?!
;-P
Excuse my ignorance, but I was checking out the page for RealServer, and now my face is stuck in this irritable-bowel fashion and I can't fix it. The server costs $2,995?! I thought it was a typo until later I noticed that this price was $800 off the regular price! Can someone tell me how $2,995 is a justifiable price for this?
The reason they took people's credit card information was because they wanted insurance against people breaking it, or not using it often enough (i.e. not seeing the ads often enough to make money for Free-PC). I don't have the paperwork here, but the agreement was that if you broke your Free-PC or didn't use it enough, they would take the computer back from you. However, if you wanted to keep the computer, you could buy it from them. The price you would pay was on a sliding scale based on how long you had it. For example, if I had the machine for a year, but they wanted it back because I didn't use it, I could elect to buy it from them for, say, 50% of the market price. If I had it for 2 years and I wanted to buy it, I would only pay maybe 15% of the price. Eventually, after three years (I think) the price would fall to $0 and the machine was free for you to keep at no cost.
I received notification from them at *least* one week before they discontinued their services. I thought about submitting the info to /. but I saw a news item on Ars-Technica about it, and figured that someone would beat me to it anyway. Guess I should have submitted the story here ;-). Anyway, the bottom line is that Free-PC wasn't unfair (at least with me) with notifications and such. This story just didn't get on /. until now.
I did get a Free-PC from them a while back. I got a Compaq with a Cyrix processor and 32MB of RAM. Needless to say, it's annoyingly slow when it's throwing ads in your face with a 56k connection. So, I gave it to my mom so she could learn how to use email and browse the web. When I come home from school on spring break, I'm going to install Linux on it. I just hope it doesn't have a winmodem... ;-)
I have a few questions. First, is there any way at all to hack a WinCE palm device (i.e. Cassiopeia) to run UNIX/Linux? Has this ever been done? From what I've read in this thread, it isn't likely to be possible, but in that case, is there any way to get a WinCE device to interface with my computer that runs Linux? I got a Casio Cassiopeia for Christmas, and I like it a lot, but it irritates me that I have to boot to my Windows partition whenever I want to interface the two. This is pretty much the only reason I keep my Windows partition around anymore.
My next question is about the general distaste for WinCE that I've noticed here and there. I'm a Linux freak, and I dislike almost everything about Windows, which irritates me to no end. But given that, I don't see what the big fuss is about WinCE. Why is it so bad? I'm totally happy with my PDA despite the fact that it runs WinCE (although I have never used a Palm Pilot, so I can't compare the two OSes). Can anyone give me some insight about this?
Thanks in advance.
Oh, thanks for this useful correction. I had no idea that he actually meant "voices" even though he typed "vouces". That was really helpful.
Science will not prove that God doesn't exist, but it will prove that God is irrelevant.
ummm... not the one i looked at.. hrmmmm.. oh well. : /
This is from the html version of the findings of fact straight from the gpo.gov website. Isn't it a bit ironic that they apparently used a MS prog to generate the html? Just posted this because I thought it was worth a chuckle.. ;)
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"]
[saved from url=(0034)http://usvms.gpo.gov/findfact.html]
[HTML][HEAD][TITLE]Findings of Fact - United States of America v. Microsoft Cor$
[META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type]
[META content="MSHTML 5.00.2314.1000" name=GENERATOR]
I don't see getting the one-time pad to your operatives as difficult at all, given that you have some technology available to you. The one-time pad can be reduced to the size of a period in a letter and read by the operative with a microscope (of course, this means the operative must be in a place where he can access a microscope). The guy living next door to you who is secretly a covert op receives his one-time pad in his mail every day and nobody is the wiser because nobody else knows that the letter contains a one-time pad. The OTP could be the period at the end of the first sentence, for example, in a seemingly mundane letter from the op's grandmother or something. I read in an old crypto book several years back that the best codes are the ones that don't appear to be codes at all.
Furthermore, imagine that someone *did* intercept the one-time pad. He still doesn't necessarily know what broadcast it applies to. For example, the op could just know that letters from grandma apply to broadcasts on thursday at 3pm, letters from cousin Phil apply to thursday at 11pm, and so on. The spooks could engineer the whole thing to be so incredibly complex that it would not only be completely impossible to crack, but completely impossible to attempt a crack at all -- and yet still very easy for the op to commit the rules to memory.
Unfortunately, I work for the help desk of a leading IT firm in Chicago. I would estimate that at least 50% of the time, the user's problem is either a request for a reset password or is solved by resetting the password. Think about the time (time=money) we could have back if there weren't so many password issues. We would have twice as much time/resources to devote to serious problems. Think of it this way -- with ~10 help desk employees responsible for 3500+ employees on billable consulting time at client sites around the world, a lot of money is lost to inactivity of the consultants due to thei computer problems. I will admit though, that supporting Winblows causes at least as many headaches... arrgghhh.. I thought I hated Windoze *before* I had to troubleshoot it all damn day. Tangent, sorry.