Umm, you forget that it was his screen-name as a cracker/worm-writer. Would you really want to use your real-name for such things, just makes it easier for the feds to find you.
plus the expense of serving up 640x480 video images
Bandwidth, as it becomes more common, seems to be becoming cheaper as time goes on. I don't imagine it costs *too* much to serve up the images, especially if some torrent-based system is used.
Also, given the crap programming on TV I'd be much happier to pay on a per-episode or possibly per-channel basis if it were available (although it won't be yet, because I'm not in the UK).
I'm not sure how this would work, except for perhaps to offer an "official" BBC torrent tracker with a few decent seeds to start it off... put that on a paysite and I'll be digging out my credit card!
My first thought as I read the beginning of the article was that the BBC would go on a witch-hunt against P2P and perhaps internal leaks. A little further in and I am still quite amazed that they've taken such an informed and tolerance approach. In the days where the makers of such technology are sued, and the users sued en-masse... it's very nice indeed to see that somebody actually gets it
If this service becomes available outside of the UK I think I'd probably be quite interested in signing up as I do like a lot of the BBC content.
I've had managers in IT that were generally non-technical, but damn good managers. I've also heard of a great many technical managers who tend to spend more time playing with new ideas and toys, or thinking they can do their employees' job than actually managing.
Semi-unrelated, but I've also noticed that my best managers were women, can anyone else comment on that?
If a shady guy in a dark coat sitting on the sidewalk did the same, would it be less evil? We don't have to demonify this guy because he's a drug deal... selling prescription drugs illegally is not much different from selling crack or heroin.
As far as religion is concerned, evolution is a falsitude. Therefore, we don't have anything in common with amoebas, etc.
They would need to discover life of at least rudimentary intelligence before religious groups could start to accept it, and even then they'd probably be a hard sell.
Such things might prove life is viable on other planets, but they could just claim "of course, because the path is prepared for us by higher powers, and so food etc can grow on other planets... but we're the only intelligence that you'll find in the universe"
"Keeping it updated" doesn't help for the flash-flood viruses though. If you get infected before your AV company comes out with a tool to scan/remove the infection then it really doesn't matter when you last updated.
Actually, rather than a true RAID drive I wish there were options for RAID partitions. How about an integrated SD-card... removable through the bottom but generally not any more visible than the drive. It could run a RAID'ed partition with the hard-disk, perhaps for a documents directory or something similar, but not affect overally power usage much.
Heck, I could already do this with 'nix if my integrated cardreader would work... software RAID doesn't much care what the source devices are.
Why do you think laptops aren't as upgradable. When it dies just past the warrantee period, or a part fails, you either have to pay a premium to acquire/have-installed the new part, or replace the whole machine. Plus you have to pay the big bucks for a real machine because your lower-end video card sucks but is in reality only $50 cheaper.
Profit for them, sucks to be us... why would they change it?
A VIP at my previous job (earlier this year) bought one of those fancy Toshiba Quasmio laptops. Among the features was that it had dual-drives... so we just had scripted backups.
RAID: Good for quick recovery after a loss, but quite often restoration of desktops isn't needed quite as quickly as a server, so this might be less useful
Scripted backup: The script has to actually run, but it's nice when your user deletes an important file and can still get it back (in RAID, the file goes off both drives)
Really, for laptops I'm hoping to see the cost of small-sized removable-rewritable storage media such as pendrives go down. They're quite quick with USB 2.0, so it would be nice to have a little script which would sync-backup your important stuff (the OS can be pre-imaged once) such as documents etc in a short period of time, plus it's safe when somebody drops coffee on the laptop - which can't be said for the two above in some cases.
Hire somebody who can act the part. Some people can act well, but not in all roles, and some are just bubblegum actors who might look good but lack in talent.
I have no problem with sequels. It's when they keep releasing sequels, with no new content/ideas/etc, that it starts to suck. A lot of TV series can be interesting through a whole season... so how come a movie can't be interesting through 1-3 episodes?
Remaking classics... there are a lot of classics out there that are good, but the concepts don't mesh with the modern world. So don't take a classic and 'modernize' it to the point that it takes place in a spaceship in 2733 instead of a pirate ship in 1733.
Comic book films... some are good, some are bad. The problem is that, over time, they're long. You can't just summarize the first 50 comics in a half-hour and then throw together episodes 51-55 in the last hour. By the same token, you can't do a bunch of background and then throw a shit ending at it about how a big green guy becomes a force of pure energy and then ends up in South America saying "you don't want to make me angry"...
Books? I know some books that could make great movies. LOTR was actually pretty good. The biggest problem is not sticking to a timetable. LOTR was a long set of movies, but it was split up and managed to get a good portion of content in it. As much as I'd like to see some of my favorite books onscreen (Narnia could go either way) it kills me when they butcher the main points of the book
Still with #4 Stop editing the main points of a good book to feed the unwashed masses. Books have an audience, and you can't make it please everyone. If you want to make a book-based-movie, don't ignore the book's audience.
Special effects are nice. They can add realism/imagery to a movie, but they can't substitute for plot and decent acting.
#5, write a good story. Many movies nowadays are taken from good stories but butcher them. Doom is going to be another resident evil (I actually found there to be somewhat of a background plot in Doom3).
And my final point... movies don't have to please everyone. If you try and sell a movie to 10,000,000 people and most don't care much for it, and the main audience of the source material hates it, then you've failed despite selling 10,000,000 tickets because people will not trust you to produce something good in the future. Dump some special effects and overpaid actors, stick to the plot, and maybe only sell 8,000,000 tickets... you might gain a few new followers from the general masses and you won't piss off the majority of the longterm fans.
Some sites include an "audio" link by the captchya. I believe that it was yahoo I recently visited to download messenging software, and the captcha had an option to listen to an audio clip that would tell you what to enter.
Each related OS has its own various problems or benefits:
3.1 : No network stack, cluttered, ran on top of DOS, but for non-power-users better than shell commands:-)
95 : TCP/IP and IPX/SPX support. Had various hardware issues (hated the K6-2) and suffered from conflicts in "DLL hell"
98 : Better driver support, some fun/useful addons. Activedesktop (love it or hate it), and more DLL hell. Could use win95 drivers but sometimes didn't like them.
NT: Slower/less-compatible for media apps, but generally more stable
2000: In general more stable, less crashing. NO MORE DLL HELL. RPC vulnerabilities
XP: More RPC vulnerabilities. Incompatabilities with earlier software. Poor 64-bit support in more recent years.
You forgot about Windows ME, as well... but then again I'm sure Microsoft would like to forget it ever existed, as well. It was something like if two family members 98 and 2000 mated and had a bastard inbred child....
I don't know about you, but I found that the controller implied more that the shirt-owner's roots were founded in video games... hardcore geekdom founded in games and other such things (perhaps NES being the first of such).
How many other geeks out there find that the romanticized universes of games, books, and movies have affected their view of life and/or actions. For movies, this is to a lesser extent nowadays, as they are generally more sap and sex than anything.
Various women have mentioned that I tend to have an old-fashioned flair for opening doors or genteel conversion. Most of these mannerisms I've probably picked up from books, some perhaps from games. Does anyone else find this to be the case?
If manufacturers start to take this stance... making machines more efficient and power-friendly as opposed to faster and hotter, perhaps we'll see it happen with coders again. If you look at apps and games developed on earlier hardware, the developers were doing *everything* they could to squeeze as much as they could from your machine. Nowadays with MHZ to spare, you end up with bloated, nasty code that requires machine power many magitudes beyond what it should.
I'd like to see the manufacturers focus on battery life and efficient use of power. We'll see better laptops, and maybe if game companies see that 5Ghz machines aren't going to be just around the corner they'll learn to code efficiently for the current-gen CPUs. In a wonderful world I could see graphics and sound not being the antithesis to battery life and heat...
At the moment we really don't fully understand as much about sleep as we could. Certain chemicals flow , other processes slow, and various 'maintenance' tasks initiate whilst our consciousness slumbers. While this drug may help by either replacing chemicals restored by sleep, or reducing chemicals removed during sleep... how about all the other functions of the body that depend on it. By taking a 'magic pill' to restore alertness we're taking a big risk of burning out other systems that just can't be fixed by anything except good, old-fashioned R&R.
I find that less geeks nowadays (and certainly less non-geeks) play games such as chess nowadays. Certainly chess has a place as a portable intellectual game, but elements of strategy-type PC games etc have their appeal. As these games become more mainstream, I wonder if we'll see lunchtime 'tournaments' being shown on lunchtime displays one day, to ultimately take their place among school "sports."
I know in Korea and some other countries gaming as a competetive skill is certainly taken much more seriously... can anyone from there comment on its place in society/schools/etc?
While I agree that in some cases we are losing the higher math/english/etc in favour of helper-technology, assuming that a certain knowledge of technology is not an important part of education would be a serious mistake.
Technology is pervading today's lifestyles. No, you might not need to know how to program, etc, but skills such as typing and/or word-processing are becoming increasingly important in today's world. Email and IM are in many ways replacing letters as a long-distance communication medium. Most workplaces use computers at least to some extent. Hell, even the bigger grocery stores have little machines you can use to check prices on.
Nowadays there really is a lot more to learn. Basic math skills should not be forgotten, nor english skills, but I think that there's also a growing place for technology for schools that should be better integrated alongside the core skills as well.
You might think this ludicrous... after all math and english are important right? But look back not too far and you'll see that your "basic" skills of today 9such as reading, writing, and mathematics) were actually the domain of the elite at one point in time as well.
The flow and general content of the letter, however, seemed quite good. I've worked in school, and I can tell you honestly that it's a much better work than I'd expect from some teachers.
Who said anything about a 30-day policy? I'll tell you right now that even without a password-expiration policy (because we don't have one) users will still sticky-note the fucking passwords on the desks.
If you come up with a good alternative to passwords in general that's cost effective, let me know and then I'll let you rant.
For breaking the encryption on a school computer? Kinds get their asses kicked by bullies - with stitches and permanent injuries - and quite often said bullies get an (oh so scary) suspension... as if they wanted to be in school in the first place.
But guess or find an easy password so that you can browse the internet on non-permitted sites, and you have police action and have to deal down for lesser charges?
Screwed that, continuing is just a scare tactic and I hope that this proceeds, gets a jury, and is laughed out of court. At that point it will show how generic/stupid the law is in the first place and hopefully it will be shot down in flames and the school shown to be run by a bunch of anal-retentive skewed-priority morons.
There have been cases that tested things like this... if I were to write an article, video, etc titled "Windows Vs Linux" and detail the similarities/differences between the two I shouldn't be charged by either MS or AUSLinux. You can't get sued (successfully) in most cases for just mentioning something (unless it happens to be the olympics, it seems)
If I were to write a book on "how to learn Linux in 10 days" or moreso "Linux for Aussies" I might be, however...
This sounds very similar to the letters companies such as the RIAA would send out. That is, they would find a song called something like "Virgin Madonna.mp3" on a website, and supeona the closure of that site for having copyrighted material (even though the mp3 was actually completely unrelated to the Madonna song, maybe it was talking about the religious madonna, not the pop-star).
One of the parts of having a body that collects a fee or enforces the trademark for such things should be proper procedure. Generic messages and threatening letters is not proper procedure.
So what happens if I make something called "Slashdot Linux" which aims at optimizing the braining-draining newreading experience. I'm in Canada, but I put it online so perhaps somebody in Australia can download it.
Am I infringing on the AU trademark, or am I safe because neither my business nor my person is located in Australia
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, you forget that it was his screen-name as a cracker/worm-writer. Would you really want to use your real-name for such things, just makes it easier for the feds to find you.
plus the expense of serving up 640x480 video images
Bandwidth, as it becomes more common, seems to be becoming cheaper as time goes on. I don't imagine it costs *too* much to serve up the images, especially if some torrent-based system is used.
Also, given the crap programming on TV I'd be much happier to pay on a per-episode or possibly per-channel basis if it were available (although it won't be yet, because I'm not in the UK).
I'm not sure how this would work, except for perhaps to offer an "official" BBC torrent tracker with a few decent seeds to start it off... put that on a paysite and I'll be digging out my credit card!
My first thought as I read the beginning of the article was that the BBC would go on a witch-hunt against P2P and perhaps internal leaks. A little further in and I am still quite amazed that they've taken such an informed and tolerance approach. In the days where the makers of such technology are sued, and the users sued en-masse... it's very nice indeed to see that somebody actually gets it
If this service becomes available outside of the UK I think I'd probably be quite interested in signing up as I do like a lot of the BBC content.
I've had managers in IT that were generally non-technical, but damn good managers. I've also heard of a great many technical managers who tend to spend more time playing with new ideas and toys, or thinking they can do their employees' job than actually managing.
Semi-unrelated, but I've also noticed that my best managers were women, can anyone else comment on that?
If a shady guy in a dark coat sitting on the sidewalk did the same, would it be less evil? We don't have to demonify this guy because he's a drug deal... selling prescription drugs illegally is not much different from selling crack or heroin.
As far as religion is concerned, evolution is a falsitude. Therefore, we don't have anything in common with amoebas, etc.
They would need to discover life of at least rudimentary intelligence before religious groups could start to accept it, and even then they'd probably be a hard sell.
Such things might prove life is viable on other planets, but they could just claim "of course, because the path is prepared for us by higher powers, and so food etc can grow on other planets... but we're the only intelligence that you'll find in the universe"
"Keeping it updated" doesn't help for the flash-flood viruses though. If you get infected before your AV company comes out with a tool to scan/remove the infection then it really doesn't matter when you last updated.
Actually, rather than a true RAID drive I wish there were options for RAID partitions. How about an integrated SD-card... removable through the bottom but generally not any more visible than the drive. It could run a RAID'ed partition with the hard-disk, perhaps for a documents directory or something similar, but not affect overally power usage much.
Heck, I could already do this with 'nix if my integrated cardreader would work... software RAID doesn't much care what the source devices are.
Why do you think laptops aren't as upgradable. When it dies just past the warrantee period, or a part fails, you either have to pay a premium to acquire/have-installed the new part, or replace the whole machine. Plus you have to pay the big bucks for a real machine because your lower-end video card sucks but is in reality only $50 cheaper.
Profit for them, sucks to be us... why would they change it?
A VIP at my previous job (earlier this year) bought one of those fancy Toshiba Quasmio laptops. Among the features was that it had dual-drives... so we just had scripted backups.
RAID: Good for quick recovery after a loss, but quite often restoration of desktops isn't needed quite as quickly as a server, so this might be less useful
Scripted backup: The script has to actually run, but it's nice when your user deletes an important file and can still get it back (in RAID, the file goes off both drives)
Really, for laptops I'm hoping to see the cost of small-sized removable-rewritable storage media such as pendrives go down. They're quite quick with USB 2.0, so it would be nice to have a little script which would sync-backup your important stuff (the OS can be pre-imaged once) such as documents etc in a short period of time, plus it's safe when somebody drops coffee on the laptop - which can't be said for the two above in some cases.
It mostly comes down to #5, but also:
Hire somebody who can act the part. Some people can act well, but not in all roles, and some are just bubblegum actors who might look good but lack in talent.
I have no problem with sequels. It's when they keep releasing sequels, with no new content/ideas/etc, that it starts to suck. A lot of TV series can be interesting through a whole season... so how come a movie can't be interesting through 1-3 episodes?
Remaking classics... there are a lot of classics out there that are good, but the concepts don't mesh with the modern world. So don't take a classic and 'modernize' it to the point that it takes place in a spaceship in 2733 instead of a pirate ship in 1733.
Comic book films... some are good, some are bad. The problem is that, over time, they're long. You can't just summarize the first 50 comics in a half-hour and then throw together episodes 51-55 in the last hour. By the same token, you can't do a bunch of background and then throw a shit ending at it about how a big green guy becomes a force of pure energy and then ends up in South America saying "you don't want to make me angry"...
Books? I know some books that could make great movies. LOTR was actually pretty good. The biggest problem is not sticking to a timetable. LOTR was a long set of movies, but it was split up and managed to get a good portion of content in it. As much as I'd like to see some of my favorite books onscreen (Narnia could go either way) it kills me when they butcher the main points of the book
Still with #4 Stop editing the main points of a good book to feed the unwashed masses. Books have an audience, and you can't make it please everyone. If you want to make a book-based-movie, don't ignore the book's audience.
Special effects are nice. They can add realism/imagery to a movie, but they can't substitute for plot and decent acting.
#5, write a good story. Many movies nowadays are taken from good stories but butcher them. Doom is going to be another resident evil (I actually found there to be somewhat of a background plot in Doom3).
And my final point... movies don't have to please everyone. If you try and sell a movie to 10,000,000 people and most don't care much for it, and the main audience of the source material hates it, then you've failed despite selling 10,000,000 tickets because people will not trust you to produce something good in the future. Dump some special effects and overpaid actors, stick to the plot, and maybe only sell 8,000,000 tickets... you might gain a few new followers from the general masses and you won't piss off the majority of the longterm fans.
Some sites include an "audio" link by the captchya. I believe that it was yahoo I recently visited to download messenging software, and the captcha had an option to listen to an audio clip that would tell you what to enter.
Each related OS has its own various problems or benefits:
:-)
3.1 : No network stack, cluttered, ran on top of DOS, but for non-power-users better than shell commands
95 : TCP/IP and IPX/SPX support. Had various hardware issues (hated the K6-2) and suffered from conflicts in "DLL hell" 98 : Better driver support, some fun/useful addons. Activedesktop (love it or hate it), and more DLL hell. Could use win95 drivers but sometimes didn't like them.
NT: Slower/less-compatible for media apps, but generally more stable
2000: In general more stable, less crashing. NO MORE DLL HELL. RPC vulnerabilities
XP: More RPC vulnerabilities. Incompatabilities with earlier software. Poor 64-bit support in more recent years.
You forgot about Windows ME, as well... but then again I'm sure Microsoft would like to forget it ever existed, as well. It was something like if two family members 98 and 2000 mated and had a bastard inbred child....
I don't know about you, but I found that the controller implied more that the shirt-owner's roots were founded in video games... hardcore geekdom founded in games and other such things (perhaps NES being the first of such).
How many other geeks out there find that the romanticized universes of games, books, and movies have affected their view of life and/or actions. For movies, this is to a lesser extent nowadays, as they are generally more sap and sex than anything.
Various women have mentioned that I tend to have an old-fashioned flair for opening doors or genteel conversion. Most of these mannerisms I've probably picked up from books, some perhaps from games. Does anyone else find this to be the case?
If manufacturers start to take this stance... making machines more efficient and power-friendly as opposed to faster and hotter, perhaps we'll see it happen with coders again. If you look at apps and games developed on earlier hardware, the developers were doing *everything* they could to squeeze as much as they could from your machine. Nowadays with MHZ to spare, you end up with bloated, nasty code that requires machine power many magitudes beyond what it should.
I'd like to see the manufacturers focus on battery life and efficient use of power. We'll see better laptops, and maybe if game companies see that 5Ghz machines aren't going to be just around the corner they'll learn to code efficiently for the current-gen CPUs. In a wonderful world I could see graphics and sound not being the antithesis to battery life and heat...
At the moment we really don't fully understand as much about sleep as we could. Certain chemicals flow , other processes slow, and various 'maintenance' tasks initiate whilst our consciousness slumbers. While this drug may help by either replacing chemicals restored by sleep, or reducing chemicals removed during sleep... how about all the other functions of the body that depend on it. By taking a 'magic pill' to restore alertness we're taking a big risk of burning out other systems that just can't be fixed by anything except good, old-fashioned R&R.
I find that less geeks nowadays (and certainly less non-geeks) play games such as chess nowadays. Certainly chess has a place as a portable intellectual game, but elements of strategy-type PC games etc have their appeal. As these games become more mainstream, I wonder if we'll see lunchtime 'tournaments' being shown on lunchtime displays one day, to ultimately take their place among school "sports."
I know in Korea and some other countries gaming as a competetive skill is certainly taken much more seriously... can anyone from there comment on its place in society/schools/etc?
While I agree that in some cases we are losing the higher math/english/etc in favour of helper-technology, assuming that a certain knowledge of technology is not an important part of education would be a serious mistake.
Technology is pervading today's lifestyles. No, you might not need to know how to program, etc, but skills such as typing and/or word-processing are becoming increasingly important in today's world. Email and IM are in many ways replacing letters as a long-distance communication medium. Most workplaces use computers at least to some extent. Hell, even the bigger grocery stores have little machines you can use to check prices on.
Nowadays there really is a lot more to learn. Basic math skills should not be forgotten, nor english skills, but I think that there's also a growing place for technology for schools that should be better integrated alongside the core skills as well.
You might think this ludicrous... after all math and english are important right? But look back not too far and you'll see that your "basic" skills of today 9such as reading, writing, and mathematics) were actually the domain of the elite at one point in time as well.
The flow and general content of the letter, however, seemed quite good. I've worked in school, and I can tell you honestly that it's a much better work than I'd expect from some teachers.
Who said anything about a 30-day policy? I'll tell you right now that even without a password-expiration policy (because we don't have one) users will still sticky-note the fucking passwords on the desks.
If you come up with a good alternative to passwords in general that's cost effective, let me know and then I'll let you rant.
For breaking the encryption on a school computer? Kinds get their asses kicked by bullies - with stitches and permanent injuries - and quite often said bullies get an (oh so scary) suspension... as if they wanted to be in school in the first place.
But guess or find an easy password so that you can browse the internet on non-permitted sites, and you have police action and have to deal down for lesser charges?
Screwed that, continuing is just a scare tactic and I hope that this proceeds, gets a jury, and is laughed out of court. At that point it will show how generic/stupid the law is in the first place and hopefully it will be shot down in flames and the school shown to be run by a bunch of anal-retentive skewed-priority morons.
There have been cases that tested things like this... if I were to write an article, video, etc titled "Windows Vs Linux" and detail the similarities/differences between the two I shouldn't be charged by either MS or AUSLinux. You can't get sued (successfully) in most cases for just mentioning something (unless it happens to be the olympics, it seems)
If I were to write a book on "how to learn Linux in 10 days" or moreso "Linux for Aussies" I might be, however...
This sounds very similar to the letters companies such as the RIAA would send out. That is, they would find a song called something like "Virgin Madonna.mp3" on a website, and supeona the closure of that site for having copyrighted material (even though the mp3 was actually completely unrelated to the Madonna song, maybe it was talking about the religious madonna, not the pop-star).
One of the parts of having a body that collects a fee or enforces the trademark for such things should be proper procedure. Generic messages and threatening letters is not proper procedure.
So what happens if I make something called "Slashdot Linux" which aims at optimizing the braining-draining newreading experience. I'm in Canada, but I put it online so perhaps somebody in Australia can download it.
Am I infringing on the AU trademark, or am I safe because neither my business nor my person is located in Australia