Violence is very rarely a good idea. Harassing spammers as much as they harass you might, though. Leaflets in their mail, rallies outside their doorstop... perhaps somebody could sneak a dead fish or two into a hard-to-find area of their cars. Ah yes.
We're geeks, let's use our brainpower to solve such problems... or at the very least our very sick and twisted imaginations.
My 'nix machine is preferentially intended as a server. 90% of the time it runs in CLI mode, which happily works on the old 14" VGA640x480 monitor I got for $15 (CAD).
I use GNOME when I'm playing with GUI stuff, either for testing stuff that's easier in GUI or for sites requiring JS or something equally annoying that lynx/links won't handle (my moronic ISP's MAC assignment page uses JavaScript).
The GUI looks nice, but that big dialog box thing is a real problem. It's quite annoying when one can't hit the OK or Cancel buttons at the bottom of a dialog.
I'm just waiting to get a bigger monitor for my primary windows machine, that way I can do the hand-me-down cycle and pass a better monitor onto my 'nix box.
Side note:
Stupid things about win9X: GDI allocation.
Stupid things about win9X that are not Microsoft's fault: the Radeon drivers that had win9X a memory leak or other issue that caused my sound card to go wonky about about 1h of gaming, and didn't work worth beans in XP (fine on a GF4 though)
Building the infrastucture but leaving the development to private corps is good in many ways. Tax dollars might indicate a government-run network. A government-run network could easily become a government-controlled network. We wouldn't want the government watching our every move onli... er wait. Well, we wouldn't want it to be worse than it already is, in any case.
Of course, you'll probably end up facing corp greed Vs gov't invasion of privacy (and greed). Sometimes corps are the lesser of two evils though.
In this I must agree, at least in reference to desktops. XP is a RAM pig, and a space pig, but it does a lot of my jobs a whole lot more effectively than 9x/ME did. Less crashing and lockups etc (except in the case of crappy drivers, which were unsigned). It doesn't always run everything 98 did, but at least I'm not seeing "Protection Fault" or "Illegal Operation" over few hours now.
I'm still not entirely happy with windows servers, but a lot of the difficulties do stem from the software being run on them. And almost everyone into webservers probably knows how ugly IIS and friends can be.
Maybe if MS turned towards just making decent desktops, things would improve? Making a Microsoft 'nix would require abandoning their GUI loving ways and actually adding something back-end that made sense.
I might be missing this one, as I don't see it in the article, but...
Since when has the windows community had more developer support? MSDN is a bloody nightmare... in 'nix I've had very little problems tracking down assistance, howtos, and code samples.
Let us not forget to consider that this process also likely spawn a few nasty mutations, that may have otherwise been easier to kill. There are actually a few mutations of AIDS (or maybe it's HIV) out there.
So yeah, despite the pessimists this might not be such a bad way to go about things.
Cool, this I hadn't heard of before. So in most cases it's "dowwwwnn we go", but at a semi-reasonable speed? I suppose if the problem is in the rotors themselves you're pretty much screwed. But then, the same would apply to a plane losing a wing, probably more so:-)
Is there a matter of directional control to the landing, so that you could perhaps steer the aircraft towards a reasonable landing zone.
It's only downfall (he he) is that it lacks any ability to glide in the event of an engine outage
Last time I checked, helicopters didn't tend to glide all that well either (sometimes akin to rocks). I'm guessing that something more planelike would also do easier in the "ejection" or other escape issues in case of a breakdown.
If it's cheap or fast, probably a good method for low-capicity aircraft. From the working models, the plane seems to be mostly (a huge) tail anyhow, so probably not a lot of passenger capacity - although the theoretical pictures show it as a normal plane with fan-wings.
That's the biggest question I have. If MS wants to keep all the cheating hacking losers off of 'live, then hell more power to them. How many stories have we seen where services are hurting because some idiot kid made the newest cheat/hack and distributed to all his friends? Ban the lamers, good!
However, a permanent ban is a bit much. If somebody is - par example - using a mod to allow them to play out-of-region games they couldn't ever get here, or perhaps to run linux... then no problem. Having a mod that could be turned on/off would solve this, except that the first time you're caught, you get nuked. If you're not cheating, it's not hurting the network (piracy is another matter).
Besides, will it really be all that long before somebody builds a "stealth mod" or something less detectable? I've already seen a lot of mentioning using a hacked ID/w modchip to knock other legit customers off the network. Probably not a good move by Microsoft, but hey - sometimes these companies don't know a bad idea until it blows up in their faces...
How many people actually pirated these movies Vs those who watched/bought them. Harry Potty 2 was sold out before opening night, even though the plot was quite weak in comparison to the first. I may pirate HP3 before seeing it, just to avoid shelling out for a yawner.
Meanwhilst, both of the new Star Wars movies were pretty cool (ignoring JarJar)... Yoda with a lightsaber in SW2 kicked butt. Guess which one I'm more likely to pay to see.
Good movies=good profit. If a movie is worth seeing on the big screen and DVD, then it will sell. I know a lot of consistant pirates who still have very large DVD collections, albeit of very good movies... hell, some of them even get the DVD for stuff they've already pirated.
Not to troll, but perhaps slashdotters should be extra careful of the links they click (for those on IE) in the near future.
Goatse is disturbing and easily detected, but I'd imagine that this script could be setup almost anywhere, making it easy to slip in a slashdot comment.
And yes, I'm sure there are probably enough trolls on here that somebody would try it if they knew how.
If you run a server or can script for one, why not just have an "email me" section wherein people can type the message and be done with it. Throw in a particular key as the message gets sent, protect your script against hacking, and any email coming through should probably be legit.
Safer than putting a href='mailto:spammeupthebutt@myserver.com' tag...
How about this:
Cooling system: None on the media center PC? Oh come on, it at least has a fan and decent heatsink. If they're going to give us stats, then I want to see stats of a system built for the same price (and not by monkeys).
Also, seems that their "page not found" error is slashdotted or something, it shows me the server JScript. Maybe they're running it on one of these navigators:-)
Probably the only way that we will get computers to truly compare to living though processes is by installing some form of wetware. Perhaps 10 years from now, each PC will come with its own little glass jar complete with wired-up spongey brain.
The main issues I see with current electronic mediums is instructions-per-time capability, capacity, bandwidth, and heat.
While computers have been able to beat 90% of humans at math for over a decade, they are still very limited in the realms of action-recognition-response. New machines can recognise, for example, what in a room is human (to some extent) and take a picture. However, they don't recognise particular humans - except at rather precise angles - and last time I heard they even had this annoying tendency to ignore people of darker skin tones as part of the background.
Of course, much of this is a failing of humans ourselves and not the machines, as we are the ones that program the software and thus set its limitations.
So, in truth, a brain-in-a-jar may not be such an outlandish solution for computers in the future. Already we're mixing some organics and electronics, perhaps the next step takes it a bit further. Computers are great for scientific purposes, but with just a bunch of chips and silicon, they don't really "learn" all that well, and that's a big point of separation
And no... I'm not even going to try going into whether we should.
I'm in BC. We had a case awhile ago where a guy went over an embankment and off the road. After a day or two, he tried the cancelled phone and managed to get 9-1-1 and a rescue. Lucky for him though, half of the long highways I can't even get reception on a connected phone... not sure if it's crappy startacs or crappy Telus, perhaps both.
Same here, except actually only half to 3/4 of my house was in the dead. Walking between the bedroom and kitchen my phone would beep at me that I had messages in my inbox. Eventually I just left the phone charger in the kitchen.
For the mostpost, RFID readers is quite limited in range. Ideas that RFID's will have them tracking you by hidden tags on your pants, etc, is not really a legit worry. They *may* be able to track you when you walk through a doorway with a reader, but it's not likely that they'll be able to find you in your car in the middle of an interstate.
The last place I worked used RFID tags in their product. The readers weren't cheap, but even they had to be fairly well calibrated to get a consistent read. Large long-range RFID readers would be really expensive, and probably large. You won't be seeing any helicopters over your car shouting "citizen #3849932919, we have identified you, please come peacefully."
On the flipside, this could be a biatch for advertising. If they tag clothes,etc then they may be able to track you in malls and know your purchasing trends... which would be annoying
Not on the bill, not with the product
on
Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 2
How about products that don't come with all the needed "accessories?" Just installed a printer at a local business, and it came with neither a USB or Parallel cable.
Of course, this has apparently been happening for a long time now, but I haven't bought a printer in many years.
It's one thing to charge people idiotic "hidden" fees on top of the standard rate, it's another to force them to shell out to pay for a part necessary to the functionality of a product.
But, do you ever actually get the money back? Besides, if they tell you they're passing on the fee, then you have a choice. Last time I went to buy upgrade parts they told me it would be +3% to use Visa, so I debited. Sucked, but the prices were cheaper than elsewhere anyhow, and it does otherwise cost them the money.
My question, how does Visahave a right to determine what retailers charge their customers. If the fee is a visible one, and one being incurred from Visa originally, then it's no worse than other idiotic fees like enviro levies on tires (even if I used the tire as a flower-pot and never put it in a landfil;) etc
Depends on if you buy your cellphone or get it "free" with your plan. With local providers, they make the phone out to be a bonus you get with a term contract. Of course, the phone is completely useless on anyone else's network anyways, but the way they advertise you are only paying for the contract service, and the phone is a bonus.
Of course you can buy phones too, and the last phone I bought had the parent company absorbed by a larger one. It ceased to function at all when they ripped the high-range transmitter towers down and moved them to the east (I heard they had a swap deal when one company - Clearnet - traded western to Telus in exchange for eastern customers?). Not only is the phone useless on other networks, but it's useless on the network it was bought for, though it still exists just under different ownership. They were supposed to have a "buy-back" for the old phones and I had my name on a list, but it never happened.
The phone does work on analog but what seems to be piggybacking various networks, does the "our-network-only" restriction only apply to digital?
*Special note: Keep old phones for emergency. Even a disconnected one can still dial 9-1-1
Much as I dislike the local cell service and its "dead areas", it's not like ther's a flip-of-the-switch solution to fix it. Dead spots seem to come in for a variety of reasons. Locally, we have some that seem to have their signals blocked by large obstructions of nature (trees, hills, etc), or degraded by local interference.
It's not like the cell company can just go out and say, blow up a large hill (or business complex) to clear the way for your reception, and putting up repeaters to boost signal for 1 or even a few people is just not worth it.
Another thing is that some businesses/locations actively block signals. In one area of town, cellular reception often dies when you drive past the local call-center. This never happened before the call-center went in (it was a Kmart before), so I would assume that they are doing something that interferes with the standard cellular signal.
I do sympathise, I used to live in a house where my cell didn't work either, but in that case can you get one-touch-call-forwarding to your home phone?
Where I worked, I heard that before me they had a guy on contract. When they put the position up for a regular, he didn't make the cut and had to move on. Fine, except that he was the only one with the passwords. Getting into things again was supposed to have been fun, luckily I didn't start working there until later.
Moral: Passwords are power, make sure you have 'em all before you let somebody go...
I still keep contact with an ex-boss of mine who works in the web industry. I actually have a small part stock in the company based on work I've done, but I really do it because I like him, the company, and what they do. I do the same for other people I know, as long as I'm not super-busy, I'd rather be doing something productive than sitting on the couch with a beer on my stomach.
I'm sure it's different for a big company, but I do what I do because I enjoy it. I've been offered to do more work again recently, but this time it's for pay because I'm more busy and thus my time is valuable.
That being said, it's one thing to ask somebody you're on good terms with. It's another to "demand" assistance and then not give help. Geeze, I work expect to at least be offered dinner or a few drinks in such a circumstance.
Reminds me of back in college, when I accepted food/drinks for fixing people's computers...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Violence is very rarely a good idea. Harassing spammers as much as they harass you might, though. Leaflets in their mail, rallies outside their doorstop... perhaps somebody could sneak a dead fish or two into a hard-to-find area of their cars. Ah yes.
We're geeks, let's use our brainpower to solve such problems... or at the very least our very sick and twisted imaginations.
I use GNOME when I'm playing with GUI stuff, either for testing stuff that's easier in GUI or for sites requiring JS or something equally annoying that lynx/links won't handle (my moronic ISP's MAC assignment page uses JavaScript).
The GUI looks nice, but that big dialog box thing is a real problem. It's quite annoying when one can't hit the OK or Cancel buttons at the bottom of a dialog.
I'm just waiting to get a bigger monitor for my primary windows machine, that way I can do the hand-me-down cycle and pass a better monitor onto my 'nix box.
Side note:
Building the infrastucture but leaving the development to private corps is good in many ways. Tax dollars might indicate a government-run network. A government-run network could easily become a government-controlled network. We wouldn't want the government watching our every move onli... er wait. Well, we wouldn't want it to be worse than it already is, in any case.
Of course, you'll probably end up facing corp greed Vs gov't invasion of privacy (and greed). Sometimes corps are the lesser of two evils though.
In this I must agree, at least in reference to desktops. XP is a RAM pig, and a space pig, but it does a lot of my jobs a whole lot more effectively than 9x/ME did. Less crashing and lockups etc (except in the case of crappy drivers, which were unsigned). It doesn't always run everything 98 did, but at least I'm not seeing "Protection Fault" or "Illegal Operation" over few hours now.
I'm still not entirely happy with windows servers, but a lot of the difficulties do stem from the software being run on them. And almost everyone into webservers probably knows how ugly IIS and friends can be.
Maybe if MS turned towards just making decent desktops, things would improve? Making a Microsoft 'nix would require abandoning their GUI loving ways and actually adding something back-end that made sense.
I might be missing this one, as I don't see it in the article, but...
Since when has the windows community had more developer support? MSDN is a bloody nightmare... in 'nix I've had very little problems tracking down assistance, howtos, and code samples.
Looks like photoshop to me. The eye is green...
Let us not forget to consider that this process also likely spawn a few nasty mutations, that may have otherwise been easier to kill. There are actually a few mutations of AIDS (or maybe it's HIV) out there.
So yeah, despite the pessimists this might not be such a bad way to go about things.
Seriously, are there some pics of the glowing rats? The site is slashdotted.
I read an article about glowing mice about a year ago, but glowing rats would be cool (to those of us deeming rodents as good pets).
Would suck if they used this on humans though...
"Peek-a-boo, I found Billy"
"Oh mannn, hide-and-seek sucks when you glow".
Cool, this I hadn't heard of before. So in most cases it's "dowwwwnn we go", but at a semi-reasonable speed? I suppose if the problem is in the rotors themselves you're pretty much screwed. But then, the same would apply to a plane losing a wing, probably more so :-)
Is there a matter of directional control to the landing, so that you could perhaps steer the aircraft towards a reasonable landing zone.
It's only downfall (he he) is that it lacks any ability to glide in the event of an engine outage
Last time I checked, helicopters didn't tend to glide all that well either (sometimes akin to rocks). I'm guessing that something more planelike would also do easier in the "ejection" or other escape issues in case of a breakdown.
If it's cheap or fast, probably a good method for low-capicity aircraft. From the working models, the plane seems to be mostly (a huge) tail anyhow, so probably not a lot of passenger capacity - although the theoretical pictures show it as a normal plane with fan-wings.
That's the biggest question I have. If MS wants to keep all the cheating hacking losers off of 'live, then hell more power to them. How many stories have we seen where services are hurting because some idiot kid made the newest cheat/hack and distributed to all his friends? Ban the lamers, good!
/w modchip to knock other legit customers off the network. Probably not a good move by Microsoft, but hey - sometimes these companies don't know a bad idea until it blows up in their faces...
However, a permanent ban is a bit much. If somebody is - par example - using a mod to allow them to play out-of-region games they couldn't ever get here, or perhaps to run linux... then no problem. Having a mod that could be turned on/off would solve this, except that the first time you're caught, you get nuked. If you're not cheating, it's not hurting the network (piracy is another matter).
Besides, will it really be all that long before somebody builds a "stealth mod" or something less detectable? I've already seen a lot of mentioning using a hacked ID
How many people actually pirated these movies Vs those who watched/bought them. Harry Potty 2 was sold out before opening night, even though the plot was quite weak in comparison to the first. I may pirate HP3 before seeing it, just to avoid shelling out for a yawner.
Meanwhilst, both of the new Star Wars movies were pretty cool (ignoring JarJar)... Yoda with a lightsaber in SW2 kicked butt. Guess which one I'm more likely to pay to see.
Good movies=good profit. If a movie is worth seeing on the big screen and DVD, then it will sell. I know a lot of consistant pirates who still have very large DVD collections, albeit of very good movies... hell, some of them even get the DVD for stuff they've already pirated.
Not to troll, but perhaps slashdotters should be extra careful of the links they click (for those on IE) in the near future.
Goatse is disturbing and easily detected, but I'd imagine that this script could be setup almost anywhere, making it easy to slip in a slashdot comment.
And yes, I'm sure there are probably enough trolls on here that somebody would try it if they knew how.
If you run a server or can script for one, why not just have an "email me" section wherein people can type the message and be done with it. Throw in a particular key as the message gets sent, protect your script against hacking, and any email coming through should probably be legit.
Safer than putting a href='mailto:spammeupthebutt@myserver.com' tag...
How about this:
:-)
Cooling system: None on the media center PC? Oh come on, it at least has a fan and decent heatsink. If they're going to give us stats, then I want to see stats of a system built for the same price (and not by monkeys).
Also, seems that their "page not found" error is slashdotted or something, it shows me the server JScript. Maybe they're running it on one of these navigators
Probably the only way that we will get computers to truly compare to living though processes is by installing some form of wetware. Perhaps 10 years from now, each PC will come with its own little glass jar complete with wired-up spongey brain.
The main issues I see with current electronic mediums is instructions-per-time capability, capacity, bandwidth, and heat.
While computers have been able to beat 90% of humans at math for over a decade, they are still very limited in the realms of action-recognition-response. New machines can recognise, for example, what in a room is human (to some extent) and take a picture. However, they don't recognise particular humans - except at rather precise angles - and last time I heard they even had this annoying tendency to ignore people of darker skin tones as part of the background.
Of course, much of this is a failing of humans ourselves and not the machines, as we are the ones that program the software and thus set its limitations.
So, in truth, a brain-in-a-jar may not be such an outlandish solution for computers in the future. Already we're mixing some organics and electronics, perhaps the next step takes it a bit further. Computers are great for scientific purposes, but with just a bunch of chips and silicon, they don't really "learn" all that well, and that's a big point of separation
And no... I'm not even going to try going into whether we should.
I'm in BC. We had a case awhile ago where a guy went over an embankment and off the road. After a day or two, he tried the cancelled phone and managed to get 9-1-1 and a rescue. Lucky for him though, half of the long highways I can't even get reception on a connected phone... not sure if it's crappy startacs or crappy Telus, perhaps both.
Same here, except actually only half to 3/4 of my house was in the dead. Walking between the bedroom and kitchen my phone would beep at me that I had messages in my inbox. Eventually I just left the phone charger in the kitchen.
For the mostpost, RFID readers is quite limited in range. Ideas that RFID's will have them tracking you by hidden tags on your pants, etc, is not really a legit worry. They *may* be able to track you when you walk through a doorway with a reader, but it's not likely that they'll be able to find you in your car in the middle of an interstate.
The last place I worked used RFID tags in their product. The readers weren't cheap, but even they had to be fairly well calibrated to get a consistent read. Large long-range RFID readers would be really expensive, and probably large. You won't be seeing any helicopters over your car shouting "citizen #3849932919, we have identified you, please come peacefully."
On the flipside, this could be a biatch for advertising. If they tag clothes,etc then they may be able to track you in malls and know your purchasing trends... which would be annoying
How about products that don't come with all the needed "accessories?" Just installed a printer at a local business, and it came with neither a USB or Parallel cable.
Of course, this has apparently been happening for a long time now, but I haven't bought a printer in many years.
It's one thing to charge people idiotic "hidden" fees on top of the standard rate, it's another to force them to shell out to pay for a part necessary to the functionality of a product.
But, do you ever actually get the money back? Besides, if they tell you they're passing on the fee, then you have a choice. Last time I went to buy upgrade parts they told me it would be +3% to use Visa, so I debited. Sucked, but the prices were cheaper than elsewhere anyhow, and it does otherwise cost them the money.
My question, how does Visahave a right to determine what retailers charge their customers. If the fee is a visible one, and one being incurred from Visa originally, then it's no worse than other idiotic fees like enviro levies on tires (even if I used the tire as a flower-pot and never put it in a landfil;) etc
Depends on if you buy your cellphone or get it "free" with your plan. With local providers, they make the phone out to be a bonus you get with a term contract. Of course, the phone is completely useless on anyone else's network anyways, but the way they advertise you are only paying for the contract service, and the phone is a bonus.
Of course you can buy phones too, and the last phone I bought had the parent company absorbed by a larger one. It ceased to function at all when they ripped the high-range transmitter towers down and moved them to the east (I heard they had a swap deal when one company - Clearnet - traded western to Telus in exchange for eastern customers?). Not only is the phone useless on other networks, but it's useless on the network it was bought for, though it still exists just under different ownership. They were supposed to have a "buy-back" for the old phones and I had my name on a list, but it never happened.
The phone does work on analog but what seems to be piggybacking various networks, does the "our-network-only" restriction only apply to digital?
*Special note: Keep old phones for emergency. Even a disconnected one can still dial 9-1-1
Much as I dislike the local cell service and its "dead areas", it's not like ther's a flip-of-the-switch solution to fix it. Dead spots seem to come in for a variety of reasons. Locally, we have some that seem to have their signals blocked by large obstructions of nature (trees, hills, etc), or degraded by local interference.
It's not like the cell company can just go out and say, blow up a large hill (or business complex) to clear the way for your reception, and putting up repeaters to boost signal for 1 or even a few people is just not worth it.
Another thing is that some businesses/locations actively block signals. In one area of town, cellular reception often dies when you drive past the local call-center. This never happened before the call-center went in (it was a Kmart before), so I would assume that they are doing something that interferes with the standard cellular signal.
I do sympathise, I used to live in a house where my cell didn't work either, but in that case can you get one-touch-call-forwarding to your home phone?
Where I worked, I heard that before me they had a guy on contract. When they put the position up for a regular, he didn't make the cut and had to move on. Fine, except that he was the only one with the passwords. Getting into things again was supposed to have been fun, luckily I didn't start working there until later.
Moral: Passwords are power, make sure you have 'em all before you let somebody go...
I still keep contact with an ex-boss of mine who works in the web industry. I actually have a small part stock in the company based on work I've done, but I really do it because I like him, the company, and what they do. I do the same for other people I know, as long as I'm not super-busy, I'd rather be doing something productive than sitting on the couch with a beer on my stomach.
:-)
I'm sure it's different for a big company, but I do what I do because I enjoy it. I've been offered to do more work again recently, but this time it's for pay because I'm more busy and thus my time is valuable.
That being said, it's one thing to ask somebody you're on good terms with. It's another to "demand" assistance and then not give help. Geeze, I work expect to at least be offered dinner or a few drinks in such a circumstance.
Reminds me of back in college, when I accepted food/drinks for fixing people's computers...