I work for a cable ISP in a town populated with mostly older people (retirement age and up).
And I swear, they ALL buy/sell stuff on eBay. They all bought digital cameras to take pictures of the stuff they are selling on eBay. They all upgraded from dial-up so they could bid faster on eBay.
In fact, retired people dig eBay so much, I'd bet that many of them would trade their Social Security and Medicare for high buyer/seller ratings. We could cut the federal deficit by billions!
So, that's my platform. Vote realmolo in 2004. Contributions accepted via PayPal.
I mean, you've already got Spielberg, who's forgotten how to direct, and Tom Cruise, who never really knew how to act.
Why not Sterling, who can't write a grocery list without going off into goofy, half-assed techno-political rants?
It would be the best movie ever!
To summarize:
Fuck Bruce Sterling.
That title is wrong. It should read:
"Talking on your cell phone when you should be working"
I mean, seriously. I have no problem with a company banning cell phone use.
That said, you OBVIOUSLY have a case for needing your cell phone, and just as obviously, you haven't talked to your boss about it. Instead, you threw a fit.
Re:I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Year
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 1
Amiga was never in competition with SGI.
Newtek and the Video Toaster/Lightwave were. And as great as the Video Toaster was, it really had little to do with the Amiga. The Amiga was just a convenient interface to the Video Toaster.
You're probably thinking of the much-vaunted use of Video Toaster/Amigas/Lightwave to render special effects for TV shows and movies. Which was true, but the key word is "render". Amigas could NEVER display those high-res images. Not even close. In later years you could buy add-on video cars that included SVGA chipsets (as seen on the PC!) so you could have a high-res 24-bit display. But those weren't available in 1992.
I'll say it again- the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis put the final nail in the coffin.
Re:I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Year
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What really killed the Amiga was the price.
By 1992, when the new AGA Amigas finally came out, PC clones with hard drives and VGA cards and everything were getting pretty damn cheap. But Amigas were expensive as hell.
Plus, about 1992 is when the "cool" games started being released for the PC, not to mention the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Once the Amiga was no longer the best game platform (and even the AGA Amigas were only about equal to a Super Nintendo for gaming ability), it was all over.
While the idea of having email addresses that simply forward all mail to authorities isn't a bad idea, the idea of the "DDoP" attack you mention is completely misguided.
Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.
In other words, forcing spammers to send out MORE emails is going to accomplish nothing, except make them more money. They're sending out more emails ANYWAY for that very reason.
You could send out that email every day, with detailed instructions, and it would have very, VERY little effect on the number of infected/hijacked machines.
Most users just won't do that stuff. Especially if it involves anything more complicated than "Click here". Multi-step instructions are not going to be followed. Unless, of course, it's going to win them a free trip to Disneyland.
As far as "don't install spyware"...well, spyware is hard to classify, and a lot of it installs pretty silently. Expecting users to be able to distinguish between "bad" pop-up dialogs asking to install Gator and "good" pop-up windows asking to install Flash (or whatever) is asking too much.
Attachments in emails are just going to be opened, period. No one ever learns their lesson in that regard.
He's not talking about standard VGA/SVGA monitors. He's talking about specialized "arcade" monitors, that don't use VGA connectors, and run at different resolutions and refresh rates.
They aren't cheap, and they are the only thing you can use with the vast majority of arcade hardware.
Funny thing is, they're *inferior* in pretty much every way to your average $150 19" CRT that you get at Best Buy.
Hardware of ALL kinds is so cheap these days, that your time is more expensive.
If you think something is broken, replace it. You should have a stock of "standard" parts, like hard drives and RAM.
If replacing a few parts doesn't work, replace the whole damn PC. You don't want your customers stuck with a PC that has already had severe hardware problems.
Here's what they were asking for:
WANTED-
Extremely experienced Linux coders, familiar with all aspects of security, to verify others undocumented code, so that the federal government doesn't have to do it themselves.
Salary starts at 0 dollars per year. Benefits include-
No health care
No 401k
The point is, NOBODY should be doign NetBIOS over the internet anyway. It's a massive security hole.
If you need to do Windows networking over a WAN, use a VPN. That's why VPNs exist.
It *is* an ISP's job to block ports that do nothing but cause trouble.
I mean, really. All an ISP (or corporate network admin) needs to do to stop Blaster is block incoming/outgoing NetBIOS ports on their main connection to the internet.
It's not hard. And no one should be using them anyway.
I'm surprised that all the routers and firewalls sold aren't blocking these ports by default. They really should. It would save THE WORLD so much hassle.
I've seen this before, long ago. I wasn't impressed in the least.
It's the typical pseudo-philosphical shit that every "independent" filmmaker spews out. And claymation just isn't impressive anymore. Not that it every really was.
The thing is, those unpatched users WOULDN'T be a problem if every one of them was using an ISP that was on top of their firewall configurations, spam filters, attachment filters, snort logs, etc.
That's what I'm talking about. A properly configured network minimizes damage from errant users, if it doesn't eliminate it completely.
Yeah, he's a tool, but he has a point.
There are SO many people/businesses (including man ISPs) out their running servers, and routers, that have no clue how to set them up correctly and securely. And god forbid there's a PROBLEM, because they won't know how to fix it.
I'm all for requiring all kind of hoops,licenses,tests and fees before you are allowed to setup your own mail server, or DNS server, or router if you are going to let your stuff be accessible by the "world". Let ONLY the people that know what they are doing onto the "internet-at-large". If you don't know what you are doing, figure it out on a private network.
It's too easy for a screwed-up router or server configuration to trash ALL kinds of stuff for huge chunks of the world's internet users to let amateurs, penny-pinchers, and/or idiots run their own stuff.
Photoshop and Illustrator should be one application. In fact, almost every "new" feature in Photoshop over the past few version has simply been a "raster" version of something already available in Illustrator. It's ridiculous.
The only reason they are still separate is because Adobe knows that they can sell you both for twice the price.
You guys misunderstand. I'm all for game playing over the net, that's why I don't limit it, or plan to. In fact, I've thought about prioritizing game traffic for a few of the big ones (Half-Life, BF1942, Q3) just so that games work extremely well.
The "even games" bit was supposed to reflect how many people don't see games as a priority.
I work for a cable ISP, and I set up an Allot NetEnforcer to do some packet-shaping.
The P2P apps just KILL us, and really any other broadband provider. I throttled that shit down to 16 kilobytes/sec down/8 kb/sec up (per user), and watched in amazement as network utilization by 40% during peak hours. And so far, no one has complained. Keep in mind that I throttled ONLY P2P stuff.
It's not that we want to screw you, but the truth is that P2P apps use up more than their share. E-mail and web pages and even games are a higher priority.
It's all kind of a moot point anyway. I expect that within the next year or so, most ISPs will simply block all the P2P stuff to avoid the legal hassles.
900 pages? Again?
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I liked Snow Crash- I didn't even mind the "non-ending". I also liked Zodiac.
But both the Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon left me...bored. Stephenson apparently has decided that he'd rather show-off all his historical research than tell an interesting story.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a cable ISP in a town populated with mostly older people (retirement age and up). And I swear, they ALL buy/sell stuff on eBay. They all bought digital cameras to take pictures of the stuff they are selling on eBay. They all upgraded from dial-up so they could bid faster on eBay. In fact, retired people dig eBay so much, I'd bet that many of them would trade their Social Security and Medicare for high buyer/seller ratings. We could cut the federal deficit by billions! So, that's my platform. Vote realmolo in 2004. Contributions accepted via PayPal.
I mean, you've already got Spielberg, who's forgotten how to direct, and Tom Cruise, who never really knew how to act. Why not Sterling, who can't write a grocery list without going off into goofy, half-assed techno-political rants? It would be the best movie ever! To summarize: Fuck Bruce Sterling.
That title is wrong. It should read: "Talking on your cell phone when you should be working" I mean, seriously. I have no problem with a company banning cell phone use. That said, you OBVIOUSLY have a case for needing your cell phone, and just as obviously, you haven't talked to your boss about it. Instead, you threw a fit.
Amiga was never in competition with SGI. Newtek and the Video Toaster/Lightwave were. And as great as the Video Toaster was, it really had little to do with the Amiga. The Amiga was just a convenient interface to the Video Toaster. You're probably thinking of the much-vaunted use of Video Toaster/Amigas/Lightwave to render special effects for TV shows and movies. Which was true, but the key word is "render". Amigas could NEVER display those high-res images. Not even close. In later years you could buy add-on video cars that included SVGA chipsets (as seen on the PC!) so you could have a high-res 24-bit display. But those weren't available in 1992. I'll say it again- the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis put the final nail in the coffin.
What really killed the Amiga was the price. By 1992, when the new AGA Amigas finally came out, PC clones with hard drives and VGA cards and everything were getting pretty damn cheap. But Amigas were expensive as hell. Plus, about 1992 is when the "cool" games started being released for the PC, not to mention the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Once the Amiga was no longer the best game platform (and even the AGA Amigas were only about equal to a Super Nintendo for gaming ability), it was all over.
Ummm...no.
While the idea of having email addresses that simply forward all mail to authorities isn't a bad idea, the idea of the "DDoP" attack you mention is completely misguided.
Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.
In other words, forcing spammers to send out MORE emails is going to accomplish nothing, except make them more money. They're sending out more emails ANYWAY for that very reason.
I'm sorry, but cleaning the keyboards on computers that you service is incredibly anal.
Just hook up your own keyboard to the thing while you're working on it.
You obviously have never worked as tech support.
You could send out that email every day, with detailed instructions, and it would have very, VERY little effect on the number of infected/hijacked machines.
Most users just won't do that stuff. Especially if it involves anything more complicated than "Click here". Multi-step instructions are not going to be followed. Unless, of course, it's going to win them a free trip to Disneyland.
As far as "don't install spyware"...well, spyware is hard to classify, and a lot of it installs pretty silently. Expecting users to be able to distinguish between "bad" pop-up dialogs asking to install Gator and "good" pop-up windows asking to install Flash (or whatever) is asking too much.
Attachments in emails are just going to be opened, period. No one ever learns their lesson in that regard.
He's not talking about standard VGA/SVGA monitors. He's talking about specialized "arcade" monitors, that don't use VGA connectors, and run at different resolutions and refresh rates.
They aren't cheap, and they are the only thing you can use with the vast majority of arcade hardware.
Funny thing is, they're *inferior* in pretty much every way to your average $150 19" CRT that you get at Best Buy.
Hardware of ALL kinds is so cheap these days, that your time is more expensive.
If you think something is broken, replace it. You should have a stock of "standard" parts, like hard drives and RAM.
If replacing a few parts doesn't work, replace the whole damn PC. You don't want your customers stuck with a PC that has already had severe hardware problems.
Here's what they were asking for: WANTED- Extremely experienced Linux coders, familiar with all aspects of security, to verify others undocumented code, so that the federal government doesn't have to do it themselves. Salary starts at 0 dollars per year. Benefits include- No health care No 401k
Dude, you plagiarized my stuff.
0 27 381
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=79523&cid=7
How...weird.
The point is, NOBODY should be doign NetBIOS over the internet anyway. It's a massive security hole. If you need to do Windows networking over a WAN, use a VPN. That's why VPNs exist. It *is* an ISP's job to block ports that do nothing but cause trouble.
I mean, really. All an ISP (or corporate network admin) needs to do to stop Blaster is block incoming/outgoing NetBIOS ports on their main connection to the internet. It's not hard. And no one should be using them anyway. I'm surprised that all the routers and firewalls sold aren't blocking these ports by default. They really should. It would save THE WORLD so much hassle.
I've seen this before, long ago. I wasn't impressed in the least. It's the typical pseudo-philosphical shit that every "independent" filmmaker spews out. And claymation just isn't impressive anymore. Not that it every really was.
The thing is, those unpatched users WOULDN'T be a problem if every one of them was using an ISP that was on top of their firewall configurations, spam filters, attachment filters, snort logs, etc. That's what I'm talking about. A properly configured network minimizes damage from errant users, if it doesn't eliminate it completely.
Yeah, he's a tool, but he has a point. There are SO many people/businesses (including man ISPs) out their running servers, and routers, that have no clue how to set them up correctly and securely. And god forbid there's a PROBLEM, because they won't know how to fix it. I'm all for requiring all kind of hoops,licenses,tests and fees before you are allowed to setup your own mail server, or DNS server, or router if you are going to let your stuff be accessible by the "world". Let ONLY the people that know what they are doing onto the "internet-at-large". If you don't know what you are doing, figure it out on a private network. It's too easy for a screwed-up router or server configuration to trash ALL kinds of stuff for huge chunks of the world's internet users to let amateurs, penny-pinchers, and/or idiots run their own stuff.
Linux training centers open IBM!
User Friendly isn't fit to sniff Penny Arcade's shit.
And now for the obligatory Simpson's quote: "Mr. Burns: your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?"
I agree absolutely.
Photoshop and Illustrator should be one application. In fact, almost every "new" feature in Photoshop over the past few version has simply been a "raster" version of something already available in Illustrator. It's ridiculous.
The only reason they are still separate is because Adobe knows that they can sell you both for twice the price.
You guys misunderstand. I'm all for game playing over the net, that's why I don't limit it, or plan to. In fact, I've thought about prioritizing game traffic for a few of the big ones (Half-Life, BF1942, Q3) just so that games work extremely well. The "even games" bit was supposed to reflect how many people don't see games as a priority.
I work for a cable ISP, and I set up an Allot NetEnforcer to do some packet-shaping. The P2P apps just KILL us, and really any other broadband provider. I throttled that shit down to 16 kilobytes/sec down/8 kb/sec up (per user), and watched in amazement as network utilization by 40% during peak hours. And so far, no one has complained. Keep in mind that I throttled ONLY P2P stuff. It's not that we want to screw you, but the truth is that P2P apps use up more than their share. E-mail and web pages and even games are a higher priority. It's all kind of a moot point anyway. I expect that within the next year or so, most ISPs will simply block all the P2P stuff to avoid the legal hassles.
I liked Snow Crash- I didn't even mind the "non-ending". I also liked Zodiac. But both the Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon left me...bored. Stephenson apparently has decided that he'd rather show-off all his historical research than tell an interesting story.
I can buy a faster AMD keypad for less money. Of course, VIA hasn't released a decent set of drivers for it yet.