I've been using Gnome since 0.3 or 0.30 (or something like that), and just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work! It's the best desktop environment I've ever used (I use Windows and OSX regularly, but find Gnome to be the most efficient/least cumbersome). I've had no trouble with customization, but then again I find gconf-editor to be remarkably easy and intuitive to use for all the advanced options I want to configure (such as a ridiculous quantity of keyboard shortcuts). The latter half of the 2.x releases have completely eliminated my chief complaints, i.e., performance, menu editing, and file manager issues. Can't wait to try the next release when Ubuntu 7.10 comes out.
My primary complaint is with the cost of the TV service. At minimum I'd pay $51 per month just for 2-73 basic cable. The HD-DVR effectively adds $30/month. It is Comcast, but the rate structure is a bit different than you mention. I'm in Beaverton, OR.
I think I'm about to set up an old box as a MythTV, switch to $16/month basic cable, and just buy any TV shows I want outside of 2-13 on DVD. If I can manage to get OTA HD, I'll cancel the cable altogether.
For the internet...DSL, as much as I tend to dislike it, is looking better and better every day.
IANAL, but unless there's some Ohio state law that says you don't have to, it really is illegal to not show your license upon request to a police officer.
Interestingly enough, a peace officer also has the obligation to show you an official ID upon your request as well.
And yes, even though you don't drive, you MUST have a state ID with you at all times. It's illegal to do otherwise and if an officer decides to detain you because you can't show a proper ID. Again, this may vary based on state laws, but I can tell you this is the way it is in the past two states I've lived in. This is just plain not true.
You have to identify yourself in certain states. In other states you do not. The identification can be in the form of giving your name and address to the peace officer, no paper/government issued identification is required.
PCs used to come with operating system install discs.
Then they removed the operating system install disc and gave you a "recovery" disc instead.
Now they don't give you anything.
Is that correct? It's been so six years since I bought a PC in a store, and even then the hard drive was wiped almost immediately, after a cursory check with the preinstalled OS to make sure the computer was working properly.
I'm curious if there might be any connection between overloud music and the increasingly popular observation that modern music is inferior to older music? I'm sure engineered bands are somewhat to blame for this, and it does seem that people tend to prefer the music they grew up with during their teens and early twenties.
But then there's the case of bands that have existed for twenty or more years. One of my favorite such bands is Rush. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but their later releases seem to suffer from being overloud. The new Snakes & Arrows album has a track "Far Cry" which I think might have been fantastic had it been mastered 15 years ago.
Upon typing the last statement their, I figured I'd do a quick search for "snakes and arrows loudness". WOW: http://fudgeland.blogspot.com/2007/06/snakes-in-in dustry.html They even used "Far Cry"! I swear I typed the above before I found this link.
It is trivial to write a piece of software that, when installed on a person's computer, will visit web sites of the attacker's choosing. The software could be programmed to do this covertly and with the specific intent of incriminating the victim, e.g., by only visiting illegal/immoral sites at such times when the person was using the computer to browse the Internet. The offending sites would be in the victim's browser history, having been visited at times when he/she was using the computer. The software could be programmed to destroy itself after a duration, with the attacker then providing information to authorities with regard to the victim's illicit surfing habit. Getting the software onto the victim's computer is also trivial, given the number of exploits available, open wireless networks, etc.
I'm expecting this to happen soon, if it has not already. Perhaps even as targetted attacks rather than simply random misanthropy.
I thought it'd be the perfect device...all I'd need would be an SSH client to monitor my server status.
How is it that network integrity is dependent upon the (millions of) client devices. If their network is designed in this way, well, I'll stick with Verizon.
I mean, the Comcast one I have works great! It only took ten minutes to program it to record "The Office" this evening. It showed it as a season pass, but didn't indicate it was going to record tonight's until I set a manual recoding. There were no scheduling conflicts....it apparently just didn't like tonight's episode.
To make matters worse, the *reason* I'm programming the DVR right now is because it deleted all of its content and scheduled recordings last week.
And the formerly fast user interface is now running quite slow. Unplugging/having Comcast reset it does not improve the situation.
It'll be going straight back to Comcast once I get my MythTV set up.
There is a lot of pressure being put on their government by the United States, which just adds to the current tensions.
I don't doubt that the record companies, largely in the U.S are putting copyright protection pressure on other countries, e.g., the Netherlands.
But that said, no one in the United States would stand for a $4/gigabyte tax on personal music players. The only record company bound taxation you see in the U.S. is in places the consumer can't see it, i.e., radio stations (of any kind). Any legislator that tries had better be planning for immediate retirement.
If the people in the Netherlands on the other hand want to elect lawmakers willing to vote a $4/gigabyte tax on MP3 player into place, well, who I am to judge them?
Whether or not search engine rankings are a grounds for recovery in a trademark dispute, this claim seems to be inaccurate.
A quick search for "Tiger" on Google, Altavista, MSN, and Yahoo shows hardly any love for TigerDirect, with the site being displaced by sites about tigers, Tiger Woods, the U.S. "Tiger" project, and so on, in addition to Mac OS X code name "Tiger".
...is that they're heavy. My Sony 36" CRT HDTV weighs just a tad under 300lb. I had to build a special moving crate out of 3/4" plywood and 2x4s in order to move it up a flight of stairs. The crate is basically a plywood box cut in half diagonally with the 2x4s attached outside for structure, and 1" of foam insulation inside for padding. The TV gets secured in the box with ratcheting tie downs, then the box gets secured to an appliance dolly and then four 200lb guys move the whole 400+lb of TV/box/dolly up the stairs one heave at a time. Oh what fun.
Making things better is the fact that these televisions have absolutely no structure to them whatsoever. The whole case bends when you just pick the thing up. It's about the scariest item I've ever moved. One minor error will write the whole thing off.
All that said, I absolutely love the thing on every day except moving day:D
It seems just about every article I read about global warming tends to show a plot from about 1200 or 1400 A.D. to present showing average global temperature. In this plot there are several distinctive sharp increases and decreases in various 50 year periods. The greatest increase is shown between 1950-2000, and tends to be about 50% larger than the next biggest increase.
Perhaps I'm reading articles that are too oriented toward the layman (probably the case), but I never see a reasonable explanation of how the graph is relevant given that it shows several other warming trends that carry 2/3 the magnitude of the current one. I've always looked at these graphs and read them as "we're in a warming trend that is slightly greater than the ones we've had in the past millennium." This has always been a sticking point for me with global warming, though I'm genuinely open to learning more.
Building the Death Star (from Clerks)
on
Star Wars TV Show
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Sorry, can't resist, I just have to post it:) (taken from http://www.whysanity.net/monos/clerks5.html)
Building the Death Star written by Kevin Smith
Randal: So they build another Death Star, right? Dante: Yeah. Randal: Now the first one they built was completed and fully operational before the Rebels destroyed it. Dante: Luke blew it up. Give credit where it's due. Randal:And the second one was still being built when they blew it up. Dante: Compliments of Lando Calrissian. Randal: Something just never sat right with me the second time they destroyed it. I could never put my finger on it-something just wasn't right. Dante: And you figured it out? Randal: Well, the thing is, the first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries- the only people onboard were Imperials. Dante: Basically. Randal: So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished. Dante: And the second time around...? Randal: The second time around, it wasn't even finished yet. They were still under construction. Dante: So? Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers. Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at. Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms. Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction? Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living. (The Blue-Collar Man (Thomas Burke) joins them.) Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about? Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi. Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels. Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs. Randal: Like when? Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was. Dante: Whose house was it? Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's. Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster? Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine. Dante: Based on personal politics. Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.
Rand
Maybe I've been lucky, but I've ran a Windows XP system for about a year now (and a Windows 98SE system for about 2 years prior under the same conditions), doing the occasional patches from Windows Update, without a virus scanner or firewall. If I do something stupid that makes me suspect that I've contracted something, I'll drop over to http://housecall.antivirus.com/ and do a quick scan. This generally only happens when I'm trying to find a crack for something on a P2P network and the bastards have embedded a keystroke logger or some other little nasty in a trojan crack package.
I don't think you're lucky, but rather that you are unaware of the real state of your computer. Not all viruses/worms/cracks make themselves known to the end user, even a savvy user who is checking the process listing. It's very easy to hide processes from the user, regardless of their system-administrative credentials on a Windows system. Malware is designed by folks who know the ins-and-outs of a Windows box far better than you or I, with the goal that it might be able to fool the author himself.
I highly recommend adding a firewall to your situation at the bare minimum.
I do not personally use Antivirus software on my Windows boxen, but only because I use them only for software testing, and do not install any software other than that produced by either myself, the Fortune 500, or well-known open source developers. I also do not use Outlook or MSIE on these boxes, with the exception that MSIE is used in the software testing.
If you're running cracks and warez though, you're putting yourself in a very compromising position even with antivirus software. Running without it is foolish if you value your data, privacy, or have any regard for what your computer does while you're away.
In reading the article it almost sounded as though RPC, NetBios, and friends were still accessible under the default configuration. Is this the case or am I misreading the article or is the article incorrect? I was under the impression that the default firewall configuration in XP SP 2 was "accept nothing"?
And if I may make myself expressly clear on this point, this post contains no statements of fact, only a QUESTION.
Next ten years better than the last ten?
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I hope they have something really good cooked up, because 1994-2004 is going to be tough to beat. Let's see, we have:
1. The Web*. 2. E-Mail*. 3. Home computers go mainstream. 4. Win95/98/NT/2000/XP (poke fun all you want, but you can't argue that these weren't a major improvement over what they replaced). 5. OSS, Linux, GNU, BSD*. 6. 3D games with realistic jibbing. 7. (about a dozen more which I'm forgetting)
* Yes, these were around before 1994, but between 94-04 is when they became tools of the common folk.
In what game was it that "Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques"? Without more evidence, I have a hard time believing Microsoft would create such a product.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Gnome since 0.3 or 0.30 (or something like that), and just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work! It's the best desktop environment I've ever used (I use Windows and OSX regularly, but find Gnome to be the most efficient/least cumbersome). I've had no trouble with customization, but then again I find gconf-editor to be remarkably easy and intuitive to use for all the advanced options I want to configure (such as a ridiculous quantity of keyboard shortcuts). The latter half of the 2.x releases have completely eliminated my chief complaints, i.e., performance, menu editing, and file manager issues. Can't wait to try the next release when Ubuntu 7.10 comes out.
My primary complaint is with the cost of the TV service. At minimum I'd pay $51 per month just for 2-73 basic cable. The HD-DVR effectively adds $30/month. It is Comcast, but the rate structure is a bit different than you mention. I'm in Beaverton, OR.
I think I'm about to set up an old box as a MythTV, switch to $16/month basic cable, and just buy any TV shows I want outside of 2-13 on DVD. If I can manage to get OTA HD, I'll cancel the cable altogether.
For the internet...DSL, as much as I tend to dislike it, is looking better and better every day.
Sorry to not be more clear, $120/month includes the $40 for the Internet. I'm paying $80/month for TV I rarely use.
Currently shopping for alternatives.
Interestingly enough, a peace officer also has the obligation to show you an official ID upon your request as well.
And yes, even though you don't drive, you MUST have a state ID with you at all times. It's illegal to do otherwise and if an officer decides to detain you because you can't show a proper ID. Again, this may vary based on state laws, but I can tell you this is the way it is in the past two states I've lived in. This is just plain not true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify
You have to identify yourself in certain states. In other states you do not. The identification can be in the form of giving your name and address to the peace officer, no paper/government issued identification is required.
- PCs used to come with operating system install discs.
- Then they removed the operating system install disc and gave you a "recovery" disc instead.
- Now they don't give you anything.
Is that correct? It's been so six years since I bought a PC in a store, and even then the hard drive was wiped almost immediately, after a cursory check with the preinstalled OS to make sure the computer was working properly.....give it to them:
/dev/mem | mail -s "Enjoy!" lawyers@mpaa.org
cat
I'm curious if there might be any connection between overloud music and the increasingly popular observation that modern music is inferior to older music? I'm sure engineered bands are somewhat to blame for this, and it does seem that people tend to prefer the music they grew up with during their teens and early twenties.
n dustry.html They even used "Far Cry"! I swear I typed the above before I found this link.
But then there's the case of bands that have existed for twenty or more years. One of my favorite such bands is Rush. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but their later releases seem to suffer from being overloud. The new Snakes & Arrows album has a track "Far Cry" which I think might have been fantastic had it been mastered 15 years ago.
Upon typing the last statement their, I figured I'd do a quick search for "snakes and arrows loudness". WOW:
http://fudgeland.blogspot.com/2007/06/snakes-in-i
Has anyone checked ebay yet?
I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this:
p ng
http://www.catastrophicerror.com/~endo/Ignignokt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUhrkuLo8y4
It is trivial to write a piece of software that, when installed on a person's computer, will visit web sites of the attacker's choosing. The software could be programmed to do this covertly and with the specific intent of incriminating the victim, e.g., by only visiting illegal/immoral sites at such times when the person was using the computer to browse the Internet. The offending sites would be in the victim's browser history, having been visited at times when he/she was using the computer. The software could be programmed to destroy itself after a duration, with the attacker then providing information to authorities with regard to the victim's illicit surfing habit. Getting the software onto the victim's computer is also trivial, given the number of exploits available, open wireless networks, etc.
I'm expecting this to happen soon, if it has not already. Perhaps even as targetted attacks rather than simply random misanthropy.
I thought it'd be the perfect device...all I'd need would be an SSH client to monitor my server status.
How is it that network integrity is dependent upon the (millions of) client devices. If their network is designed in this way, well, I'll stick with Verizon.
I mean, the Comcast one I have works great! It only took ten minutes to program it to record "The Office" this evening. It showed it as a season pass, but didn't indicate it was going to record tonight's until I set a manual recoding. There were no scheduling conflicts....it apparently just didn't like tonight's episode.
To make matters worse, the *reason* I'm programming the DVR right now is because it deleted all of its content and scheduled recordings last week.
And the formerly fast user interface is now running quite slow. Unplugging/having Comcast reset it does not improve the situation.
It'll be going straight back to Comcast once I get my MythTV set up.
Mmmmm iptables
[0:0] -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 26 -j REDIRECT --to-port 25
(You have to add that to your server machine, not your client machine)
There is a lot of pressure being put on their government by the United States, which just adds to the current tensions.
I don't doubt that the record companies, largely in the U.S are putting copyright protection pressure on other countries, e.g., the Netherlands.
But that said, no one in the United States would stand for a $4/gigabyte tax on personal music players. The only record company bound taxation you see in the U.S. is in places the consumer can't see it, i.e., radio stations (of any kind). Any legislator that tries had better be planning for immediate retirement.
If the people in the Netherlands on the other hand want to elect lawmakers willing to vote a $4/gigabyte tax on MP3 player into place, well, who I am to judge them?
Whether or not search engine rankings are a grounds for recovery in a trademark dispute, this claim seems to be inaccurate.
A quick search for "Tiger" on Google, Altavista, MSN, and Yahoo shows hardly any love for TigerDirect, with the site being displaced by sites about tigers, Tiger Woods, the U.S. "Tiger" project, and so on, in addition to Mac OS X code name "Tiger".
...is that they're heavy. My Sony 36" CRT HDTV weighs just a tad under 300lb. I had to build a special moving crate out of 3/4" plywood and 2x4s in order to move it up a flight of stairs. The crate is basically a plywood box cut in half diagonally with the 2x4s attached outside for structure, and 1" of foam insulation inside for padding. The TV gets secured in the box with ratcheting tie downs, then the box gets secured to an appliance dolly and then four 200lb guys move the whole 400+lb of TV/box/dolly up the stairs one heave at a time. Oh what fun.
:D
Making things better is the fact that these televisions have absolutely no structure to them whatsoever. The whole case bends when you just pick the thing up. It's about the scariest item I've ever moved. One minor error will write the whole thing off.
All that said, I absolutely love the thing on every day except moving day
They just upped the chance of impact significantly...I can't believe this isn't making bigger news!
Updated Impact Probability
It seems just about every article I read about global warming tends to show a plot from about 1200 or 1400 A.D. to present showing average global temperature. In this plot there are several distinctive sharp increases and decreases in various 50 year periods. The greatest increase is shown between 1950-2000, and tends to be about 50% larger than the next biggest increase.
Perhaps I'm reading articles that are too oriented toward the layman (probably the case), but I never see a reasonable explanation of how the graph is relevant given that it shows several other warming trends that carry 2/3 the magnitude of the current one. I've always looked at these graphs and read them as "we're in a warming trend that is slightly greater than the ones we've had in the past millennium." This has always been a sticking point for me with global warming, though I'm genuinely open to learning more.
Sorry, can't resist, I just have to post it :)
(taken from http://www.whysanity.net/monos/clerks5.html)
Building the Death Star
written by Kevin Smith
Randal: So they build another Death Star, right?
Dante: Yeah.
Randal: Now the first one they built was completed and fully operational before the Rebels destroyed it.
Dante: Luke blew it up. Give credit where it's due.
Randal:And the second one was still being built when they blew it up.
Dante: Compliments of Lando Calrissian.
Randal: Something just never sat right with me the second time they destroyed it. I could never put my finger on it-something just wasn't right.
Dante: And you figured it out?
Randal: Well, the thing is, the first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries- the only people onboard were Imperials.
Dante: Basically.
Randal: So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished.
Dante: And the second time around...?
Randal: The second time around, it wasn't even finished yet. They were still under construction.
Dante: So?
Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at.
Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.
(The Blue-Collar Man (Thomas Burke) joins them.)
Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?
Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.
Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
Randal: Like when?
Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.
Dante: Whose house was it?
Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's.
Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?
Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.
Dante: Based on personal politics.
Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.
Rand
Maybe I've been lucky, but I've ran a Windows XP system for about a year now (and a Windows 98SE system for about 2 years prior under the same conditions), doing the occasional patches from Windows Update, without a virus scanner or firewall. If I do something stupid that makes me suspect that I've contracted something, I'll drop over to http://housecall.antivirus.com/ and do a quick scan. This generally only happens when I'm trying to find a crack for something on a P2P network and the bastards have embedded a keystroke logger or some other little nasty in a trojan crack package.
I don't think you're lucky, but rather that you are unaware of the real state of your computer. Not all viruses/worms/cracks make themselves known to the end user, even a savvy user who is checking the process listing. It's very easy to hide processes from the user, regardless of their system-administrative credentials on a Windows system. Malware is designed by folks who know the ins-and-outs of a Windows box far better than you or I, with the goal that it might be able to fool the author himself.
I highly recommend adding a firewall to your situation at the bare minimum.
I do not personally use Antivirus software on my Windows boxen, but only because I use them only for software testing, and do not install any software other than that produced by either myself, the Fortune 500, or well-known open source developers. I also do not use Outlook or MSIE on these boxes, with the exception that MSIE is used in the software testing.
If you're running cracks and warez though, you're putting yourself in a very compromising position even with antivirus software. Running without it is foolish if you value your data, privacy, or have any regard for what your computer does while you're away.
In reading the article it almost sounded as though RPC, NetBios, and friends were still accessible under the default configuration. Is this the case or am I misreading the article or is the article incorrect? I was under the impression that the default firewall configuration in XP SP 2 was "accept nothing"?
And if I may make myself expressly clear on this point, this post contains no statements of fact, only a QUESTION.
I hope they have something really good cooked up, because 1994-2004 is going to be tough to beat. Let's see, we have:
1. The Web*.
2. E-Mail*.
3. Home computers go mainstream.
4. Win95/98/NT/2000/XP (poke fun all you want, but you can't argue that these weren't a major improvement over what they replaced).
5. OSS, Linux, GNU, BSD*.
6. 3D games with realistic jibbing.
7. (about a dozen more which I'm forgetting)
* Yes, these were around before 1994, but between 94-04 is when they became tools of the common folk.
In what game was it that "Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques"? Without more evidence, I have a hard time believing Microsoft would create such a product.