How do they get the home addresses of those to send to? Also, with recipients in several countries, there would probably be a large bankruptcy long before stamps were all paid for (not that I would mind seeing spammers bankrupt). I'll wait for the email stating:
Please accept our apology for spam. In order to recieve our free apology letter, please go to the site below. After entering your credit card number to verify your address, we will send you your very own hand-written apology letter...
On the bottom in small font: Credit-card will be charge a one-time processessing fee of USD $5 - phorm
Personally, I wouldn't mind driving an electric car, but I'd be somewhat reticent to get aboard an electric plane "beta." If the batteries for some reason die or don't quite last as long as expected, I'd much rather have my car power down along the side of the highway, than have my plane suddenly choke up in midair.
The first few tests will take a lot of courage. Bravo to those that participate. Chances are we won't be seeing electric-powered helicopters until long afterwards however... they tend to resemble rocks when the power gives out to the rotors.
Just out of curiousity, does anybody know who first used the abbrev/. or the term "slashdott'ed?" I'd guess that perhaps the site creators used/. but it would be interesting to know who first coined slashdotted, slashdot effect, and other slash-related terminology.
I've got a winsock program that allows almost any TCP/UDT data similation. So far I've used this trick to decode basic data:
Find the IP of a server an app is connecting to. Edit my "hosts" file to make that IP point to a local machine.
Run a listener that intercepts data intended for the remote host, on appropriate port.
The program connects to the remote host IP in place of the original client. Any data intended for the host IP from the client gets intercepted logged and routed to the IP. Vise-versa applies to data from the host, so in many situations they act as if normal communication occurs, not realizing they're being logged and router.
This works for simple FTP/telnet and some other connections. I'm going to try it for various apps and chat programs etc and see if I can easily decode the messenging/data structure. Currently, my major problem is that I want to be able to do this with direct-IP connections as well, but it doesn't work via HOSTS of course and this theory won't work as well. Suggestions are welcome
If anyone wants to help, I'll glady share the app and collaborate. It's fun to see the logs of some applications when the data is more or less plaintext.
Hi Bill, I lost my hard drive contents, can you send it back to me on CD? - phorm
Actually, I did enjoy the technical aspect of the show. Making a working battlebot would require some ingenuity and skill, and it was cool to see what people came up with.
However, I must definately agree that a self-contained/controlled bot would be way-cool. Perhaps using one of the mini-ITX boards/setups mentioned previously on slashdot, you could build some decent bot AI. If the bot needed to be controlled remotely, a wireless ethernet card would work.
Anyone on slashdot want to take a shot at a mini-ITX project that makes an AI battlebot?
No T-800's please... killing audience members is frowned upon
Indeed. My GeForce4 had the option to make windows partly transparent while dragging. This seemed a cool function, although I don't bother using it. What confused me is that it uses direct3d to accomplish it (as the feature disables itself when another application is using d3d).
I was wondering why these such effects would be coded integrating the 3d engine, instead of a 2d pixel-blending function based on window regions?
But since mass is a determinate factor in gravity, would not this affect the gravity between the Earth and the moon. I may be mistaken, but I thought that current orbital path of the moon was partly determined by its own gravity as well?
Guess I'll hang up doomsday placard again for awhile - phorm
Are any of these large enough to cause damage were they to go into orbital decay? I suppose there's probably a minimum size limit before something is called a "moon" as opposed to a normal orbiting "satellite."
Moon #1 is stable I'm sure, but it would be somewhat scary if one of these went off course and decided to make a landing.
If you've seen the movie "Time Machine", the moon crashes into Earth once its mass has been lower due to colonization (and blowing big chunks in it). I wonder if something like this might eventually happen if the moon were to be bumped by another satellite, etc.
We probably won't need to do a lot of blasting to colonize though. I remember hearing a long time ago that the moon was actually quite hollow in place. Apparently a semi crash-landing on it had it vibrating a bit gonglike at once point in time.
Another theory I remember reading is that Moon #1 was part of earth before something blew them apart and they eventually spun themselves back into a spheroid shape.
The lunarians are watching us from those crater-holes - phorm
I can run resolutions a fair bit higher than 1024x768... it's just that on a 15" it gets a little bit tiny at times. I haven't heard of cleartype before though, chances are my CRT doesn't have it, as really high do cause me eyestrain with some text.
For general use, I'd rather have multiple-monitor extended desktops at around 1024x768 instead of high resolutions, although high-res is more applicable on most games (though games that truly support multi-monitor extensions kick ass).
A dual/trio flatpanel system would be nice regardless though, as would the afformentioned 22" super-resolution display, but I'm not quite that rich:-)
Where does mp3.com fit into the RIAA scheme of things? I assume that a lot of the artists there are trying to do things independently of the RIAA. Thus far I've got 2 CD's full of (legal) mp3's from Mp3.com. Most of them contain artists I've previously not heard of before.
Every so often somebody hears a tune from one of the CD's and I tell them where to find the artist (hopefully they buy the songs). For several of these artists, I'm waiting for the new compilations so that I can buy CD's.
Artists get noticed, artists get money, I get lots of mp3's and music to listen to, often at a reasonable enough price for something I've been able to completely pre-listen to. Of course, lots of people probably just DL without buying, but that still gives the artists recognition that they may not have already had.
Legal Mp3's/CD's online... that's the way to go for me...
It might be difficult to find a 3d card that renders 3D properly at the max resolution.
Actually, it might be hard to find something that renders 2D at resolution.
I'd rather go for a size 22" with a really good projector or something, instead of paying $8000 for a super-resolution display. As mentioned in the article, this would be pretty good for 3d design stuff... although the mini-pixels would probably hurt they eyes when you're trying to click on 1 little line or dot.
Then again, I only have a 15" monitor that I run at 1024x768, maybe I'm just outdated.
One of these days, my video card will have more RAM than my computer, I just know it - phorm
The internet is often a useful tool for communication. It's also often a tool for complete idiots to share their useless opinions with the masses. This guy has an insecure mail server, gets blacklisted, and asks the blacklisting org to check his mailserver. He then bitches when they find a hole and get in, and decides he should sue them for illegally entering his server.
He claims they caused damage, but all they did was fulfill HIS request to double-check his server, and didn't in any way disrupt any functionality of his server, other than using an existing hole
Another spam-pigeon who thinks his right be leave his ass flapping in the wind overrules the rights of others who don't wish to get a gazillion messages bounced off his insecure server.
A few quotes to laugh at: I asked the blackhole list service if it would kindly re-scan my mail server and make another determination as to whether it was an open relay
For one, the Danish antispam organization falsified an email header to gain access to my mail server
At a minimum, I ought to be able to sue the Danish company for the damage it caused me from its illegal access.
Debating on anonymously spamming this guy with a few, 'got spam? you're a moron' messages from his owner server... - phorm
Transition from HTML, the language of the Web's past, to XML, the language of its future.
XML is nice for many things, but I'd hardly call it the language of the future. Rather than change the world, let's let XML handle some data-bound pages and leave the simple stuff to HTML still shall we?
Support non-traditional devices, from wireless gadgets and web-enabled cell phones fancied by teens and executives to Braille readers and screen readers used by those with disabilities--again without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
Ain't gonna happen. Last time I checked lynx wasn't going to show images anytime soon, and neither would my cellphone. Some things just won't work for everyone. Unless of course, you want to convert your "picture gallery" to ASCII.
neither Mosaic (the first visual browser) nor Netscape 1.0 support HTML table-based layouts
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
And of course... the most important part...
...And more, as this book will show.
In other words, buy my book so I can fill your brain with a bunch of bitching about current lack of standardization and tell you the way I think things should be done, even though chances are that things will never actually happen according to my ideals...
No browsers were harmed in the creation of this document - phorm
So by this I can infer that denser=
a) Higher capacity, fits more into less space
b) Increased retention, memory doesn't blank when power is lost
c) Cheaper, costs less to produce
d) Size. Could fit the same capacity in a smaller space
-How about speed? Is this fast RAM or does density increase latency?
-If it fits into the size of a human hair, could this technology be used to develop really tiny monitoring devices or other PC hardware?
Mr. Bond, I'm afraid your hair is bugged, how does a buzz-cut sound... - phorm
What happens if Salon continues the trend of linking to slashdot and it overloads the slashdot servers? Will we have to rename the/. effect to the Salon effect?:-)
In all seriousness though, it's nice to know that our valuable slashdot comments/opinions do make it out in the wild and are recognised sometimes...
Who is this Yodi of whom you speak? A great Jedi master was he, until he turned to the dark side? Or perhaps an unknown spawn of the scenes cut from SW2, in which Yoda gets jiggy with JarJar (was their gender firmly established?).
In the old days... when somebody had an easily accessed jack to their phone system into which you could plug a phone (or modem, although laptops weren't as popular) and make long distance calls
Today, when people have a wireless "jack" to which large masses of people can plug in and make use of their connection/network/internet.
Seems to me that as technology progresses so do the ways to abuse it, and the stupid ways in which people leave themselves open to abuse...
General Public Ignorance keeps me employed - phorm
The same way anybody backed up the equivilent amount of data before, except that before it was using multiple hard drives to achieve the same capacity.
The amount of available data probably won't change much, as before getting this much storage would have been possible anyways, just not on a single drive. Now you've got multiple partitions on a single drive instead of multiple spanning a few drives. Speed-wise it may still be better to get 2-3 smaller drives anyways. Or you could try using Raid with 3 of these puppies, if you feel like shelling out the cost in triplicate...
Anyways, I'm hoping that (for home use) you won't be filling this puppy to the brim right away and then needing to back it up. It's data used that gets backed up, not the actual capacity of the drive...
So what happens if you get a 16yr and a 14yr, 18 and 16yr etc.
When I was 19 was it illegal for me to be involved with a 17yr?
When I was 16 I was a young perv and downloaded pics of girls near my own age 15-18yr, how does that fall into the law.
Of course, that's the idea.
The problem comes when I am working on other people's code, and they haven't commented correctly. In Perl, you've still got that little @ sign to indicate something was supposed to be an array,etc.
Of course, it would be nice if this applied to the variable when assigning individual values, instead of just when assigned to the overall object as an array (as mentioned in another comment, this is supposed to be dealt with in Perl 6?).
I'd much rather be remembered by a group of people who I closely gamed with and linked with intellectually than a bunch of boozers who I met in a bar and partied with a few times...
I was somewhat wondering who might actually have suggested this, probably not anyone who has made a serious use of Perl.
When I first used Perl, I found the $%@ symbols confusing as all heck, and wished it was more like PHP.
Now that I've used a lot of Perl, I wish PHP would make more use of the $%@ symbols for clarity sakes. Actually, it would be a lot nicer in many languages to use symbol-defined clarifiers, I certainly get tired of "Dim Somevar as sometype" and "sometype somevar" when somebody makes an extremely ambiguous name which doesn't differentiate an array from a scalar or reference variable.
Ignorant people keep educated people employed! - phorm
Seems to me that a large amount of my software woes came from the use of crappy drivers and/or incompatible software. Not that I like MS, but I think it would be pretty hard to dish out a fully functional product when you've got a bazillion people writing software that is not necessarily cross compatible.
We should also count the hardware vendors who design crap drivers (hello ATI, my Radeon AIW sucked in XP and it's YOUR fault so now I've gone GeForce) that were tested by chimpanzees. This is probably one of the reasons behind MS-driver certification, which does often seem to make more compatible drivers, if oftimes less functional
I used to work in a software distribution branch at a large company. Every time we got new software, we tested it to find out which DLL's etc were installed, and if new ones from new software killed old software, or if old software libs worked better on new software. Surprisingly, machines with the right DLL's and certified apps did in fact rarely crash. I got a lot of nasty dialogs and bluescreens while actually testing the inter-ap compatibility though.
If you want something that doesn't crash, get a console (and even that's not always true, I've crashed an NES before).
Good OS, no software. Buggy OS, good software. *sigh* - phorm
Slashdot Mirror
I see one slight problem as per this:
How about 5 million hand-written apology letters
How do they get the home addresses of those to send to? Also, with recipients in several countries, there would probably be a large bankruptcy long before stamps were all paid for (not that I would mind seeing spammers bankrupt). I'll wait for the email stating:
Please accept our apology for spam. In order to recieve our free apology letter, please go to the site below. After entering your credit card number to verify your address, we will send you your very own hand-written apology letter...
On the bottom in small font: Credit-card will be charge a one-time processessing fee of USD $5 - phorm
I don't know. Give us your email address and we'll forward it to a few hundred spam-lists to check it out...
Personally, I wouldn't mind driving an electric car, but I'd be somewhat reticent to get aboard an electric plane "beta." If the batteries for some reason die or don't quite last as long as expected, I'd much rather have my car power down along the side of the highway, than have my plane suddenly choke up in midair.
The first few tests will take a lot of courage. Bravo to those that participate. Chances are we won't be seeing electric-powered helicopters until long afterwards however... they tend to resemble rocks when the power gives out to the rotors.
Just out of curiousity, does anybody know who first used the abbrev /. or the term "slashdott'ed?" I'd guess that perhaps the site creators used /. but it would be interesting to know who first coined slashdotted, slashdot effect, and other slash-related terminology.
I've got a winsock program that allows almost any TCP/UDT data similation. So far I've used this trick to decode basic data:
Find the IP of a server an app is connecting to. Edit my "hosts" file to make that IP point to a local machine.
Run a listener that intercepts data intended for the remote host, on appropriate port.
The program connects to the remote host IP in place of the original client. Any data intended for the host IP from the client gets intercepted logged and routed to the IP. Vise-versa applies to data from the host, so in many situations they act as if normal communication occurs, not realizing they're being logged and router.
This works for simple FTP/telnet and some other connections. I'm going to try it for various apps and chat programs etc and see if I can easily decode the messenging/data structure. Currently, my major problem is that I want to be able to do this with direct-IP connections as well, but it doesn't work via HOSTS of course and this theory won't work as well. Suggestions are welcome
If anyone wants to help, I'll glady share the app and collaborate. It's fun to see the logs of some applications when the data is more or less plaintext.
Hi Bill, I lost my hard drive contents, can you send it back to me on CD? - phorm
Actually, I did enjoy the technical aspect of the show. Making a working battlebot would require some ingenuity and skill, and it was cool to see what people came up with.
However, I must definately agree that a self-contained/controlled bot would be way-cool. Perhaps using one of the mini-ITX boards/setups mentioned previously on slashdot, you could build some decent bot AI. If the bot needed to be controlled remotely, a wireless ethernet card would work.
Anyone on slashdot want to take a shot at a mini-ITX project that makes an AI battlebot?
No T-800's please... killing audience members is frowned upon
Indeed. My GeForce4 had the option to make windows partly transparent while dragging. This seemed a cool function, although I don't bother using it. What confused me is that it uses direct3d to accomplish it (as the feature disables itself when another application is using d3d).
I was wondering why these such effects would be coded integrating the 3d engine, instead of a 2d pixel-blending function based on window regions?
It's not really 3d until I get a holodeck - phorm
But since mass is a determinate factor in gravity, would not this affect the gravity between the Earth and the moon. I may be mistaken, but I thought that current orbital path of the moon was partly determined by its own gravity as well?
Guess I'll hang up doomsday placard again for awhile - phorm
Are any of these large enough to cause damage were they to go into orbital decay? I suppose there's probably a minimum size limit before something is called a "moon" as opposed to a normal orbiting "satellite."
Moon #1 is stable I'm sure, but it would be somewhat scary if one of these went off course and decided to make a landing.
If you've seen the movie "Time Machine", the moon crashes into Earth once its mass has been lower due to colonization (and blowing big chunks in it). I wonder if something like this might eventually happen if the moon were to be bumped by another satellite, etc.
We probably won't need to do a lot of blasting to colonize though. I remember hearing a long time ago that the moon was actually quite hollow in place. Apparently a semi crash-landing on it had it vibrating a bit gonglike at once point in time.
Another theory I remember reading is that Moon #1 was part of earth before something blew them apart and they eventually spun themselves back into a spheroid shape.
The lunarians are watching us from those crater-holes - phorm
I can run resolutions a fair bit higher than 1024x768... it's just that on a 15" it gets a little bit tiny at times. I haven't heard of cleartype before though, chances are my CRT doesn't have it, as really high do cause me eyestrain with some text.
:-)
For general use, I'd rather have multiple-monitor extended desktops at around 1024x768 instead of high resolutions, although high-res is more applicable on most games (though games that truly support multi-monitor extensions kick ass).
A dual/trio flatpanel system would be nice regardless though, as would the afformentioned 22" super-resolution display, but I'm not quite that rich
Not that rich... yet - phorm
Where does mp3.com fit into the RIAA scheme of things? I assume that a lot of the artists there are trying to do things independently of the RIAA. Thus far I've got 2 CD's full of (legal) mp3's from Mp3.com. Most of them contain artists I've previously not heard of before.
Every so often somebody hears a tune from one of the CD's and I tell them where to find the artist (hopefully they buy the songs). For several of these artists, I'm waiting for the new compilations so that I can buy CD's.
Artists get noticed, artists get money, I get lots of mp3's and music to listen to, often at a reasonable enough price for something I've been able to completely pre-listen to. Of course, lots of people probably just DL without buying, but that still gives the artists recognition that they may not have already had.
Legal Mp3's/CD's online... that's the way to go for me...
It might be difficult to find a 3d card that renders 3D properly at the max resolution. Actually, it might be hard to find something that renders 2D at resolution.
I'd rather go for a size 22" with a really good projector or something, instead of paying $8000 for a super-resolution display. As mentioned in the article, this would be pretty good for 3d design stuff... although the mini-pixels would probably hurt they eyes when you're trying to click on 1 little line or dot.
Then again, I only have a 15" monitor that I run at 1024x768, maybe I'm just outdated.
One of these days, my video card will have more RAM than my computer, I just know it - phorm
Just go on Kazza and download it, that'll teach those RIAA buggers.
Download it twice today!
The internet is often a useful tool for communication. It's also often a tool for complete idiots to share their useless opinions with the masses. This guy has an insecure mail server, gets blacklisted, and asks the blacklisting org to check his mailserver. He then bitches when they find a hole and get in, and decides he should sue them for illegally entering his server.
He claims they caused damage, but all they did was fulfill HIS request to double-check his server, and didn't in any way disrupt any functionality of his server, other than using an existing hole
Another spam-pigeon who thinks his right be leave his ass flapping in the wind overrules the rights of others who don't wish to get a gazillion messages bounced off his insecure server.
A few quotes to laugh at:
I asked the blackhole list service if it would kindly re-scan my mail server and make another determination as to whether it was an open relay
For one, the Danish antispam organization falsified an email header to gain access to my mail server
At a minimum, I ought to be able to sue the Danish company for the damage it caused me from its illegal access.
Debating on anonymously spamming this guy with a few, 'got spam? you're a moron' messages from his owner server... - phorm
Transition from HTML, the language of the Web's past, to XML, the language of its future.
...And more, as this book will show.
XML is nice for many things, but I'd hardly call it the language of the future. Rather than change the world, let's let XML handle some data-bound pages and leave the simple stuff to HTML still shall we?
Support non-traditional devices, from wireless gadgets and web-enabled cell phones fancied by teens and executives to Braille readers and screen readers used by those with disabilities--again without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
Ain't gonna happen. Last time I checked lynx wasn't going to show images anytime soon, and neither would my cellphone. Some things just won't work for everyone. Unless of course, you want to convert your "picture gallery" to ASCII.
neither Mosaic (the first visual browser) nor Netscape 1.0 support HTML table-based layouts
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
And of course... the most important part...
In other words, buy my book so I can fill your brain with a bunch of bitching about current lack of standardization and tell you the way I think things should be done, even though chances are that things will never actually happen according to my ideals...
No browsers were harmed in the creation of this document - phorm
So by this I can infer that denser=
a) Higher capacity, fits more into less space
b) Increased retention, memory doesn't blank when power is lost
c) Cheaper, costs less to produce
d) Size. Could fit the same capacity in a smaller space
-How about speed? Is this fast RAM or does density increase latency?
-If it fits into the size of a human hair, could this technology be used to develop really tiny monitoring devices or other PC hardware?
Mr. Bond, I'm afraid your hair is bugged, how does a buzz-cut sound... - phorm
What happens if Salon continues the trend of linking to slashdot and it overloads the slashdot servers? Will we have to rename the /. effect to the Salon effect? :-)
In all seriousness though, it's nice to know that our valuable slashdot comments/opinions do make it out in the wild and are recognised sometimes...
Who is this Yodi of whom you speak? A great Jedi master was he, until he turned to the dark side? Or perhaps an unknown spawn of the scenes cut from SW2, in which Yoda gets jiggy with JarJar (was their gender firmly established?).
In the old days... when somebody had an easily accessed jack to their phone system into which you could plug a phone (or modem, although laptops weren't as popular) and make long distance calls
Today, when people have a wireless "jack" to which large masses of people can plug in and make use of their connection/network/internet.
Seems to me that as technology progresses so do the ways to abuse it, and the stupid ways in which people leave themselves open to abuse...
General Public Ignorance keeps me employed - phorm
The same way anybody backed up the equivilent amount of data before, except that before it was using multiple hard drives to achieve the same capacity.
The amount of available data probably won't change much, as before getting this much storage would have been possible anyways, just not on a single drive. Now you've got multiple partitions on a single drive instead of multiple spanning a few drives. Speed-wise it may still be better to get 2-3 smaller drives anyways. Or you could try using Raid with 3 of these puppies, if you feel like shelling out the cost in triplicate...
Anyways, I'm hoping that (for home use) you won't be filling this puppy to the brim right away and then needing to back it up. It's data used that gets backed up, not the actual capacity of the drive...
So what happens if you get a 16yr and a 14yr, 18 and 16yr etc.
When I was 19 was it illegal for me to be involved with a 17yr?
When I was 16 I was a young perv and downloaded pics of girls near my own age 15-18yr, how does that fall into the law.
Just a random dump of semi-related questions...
Of course, that's the idea.
The problem comes when I am working on other people's code, and they haven't commented correctly. In Perl, you've still got that little @ sign to indicate something was supposed to be an array,etc.
Of course, it would be nice if this applied to the variable when assigning individual values, instead of just when assigned to the overall object as an array (as mentioned in another comment, this is supposed to be dealt with in Perl 6?).
I'd much rather be remembered by a group of people who I closely gamed with and linked with intellectually than a bunch of boozers who I met in a bar and partied with a few times...
I was somewhat wondering who might actually have suggested this, probably not anyone who has made a serious use of Perl.
When I first used Perl, I found the $%@ symbols confusing as all heck, and wished it was more like PHP.
Now that I've used a lot of Perl, I wish PHP would make more use of the $%@ symbols for clarity sakes. Actually, it would be a lot nicer in many languages to use symbol-defined clarifiers, I certainly get tired of "Dim Somevar as sometype" and "sometype somevar" when somebody makes an extremely ambiguous name which doesn't differentiate an array from a scalar or reference variable.
Ignorant people keep educated people employed! - phorm
Seems to me that a large amount of my software woes came from the use of crappy drivers and/or incompatible software. Not that I like MS, but I think it would be pretty hard to dish out a fully functional product when you've got a bazillion people writing software that is not necessarily cross compatible.
We should also count the hardware vendors who design crap drivers (hello ATI, my Radeon AIW sucked in XP and it's YOUR fault so now I've gone GeForce) that were tested by chimpanzees. This is probably one of the reasons behind MS-driver certification, which does often seem to make more compatible drivers, if oftimes less functional
I used to work in a software distribution branch at a large company. Every time we got new software, we tested it to find out which DLL's etc were installed, and if new ones from new software killed old software, or if old software libs worked better on new software. Surprisingly, machines with the right DLL's and certified apps did in fact rarely crash. I got a lot of nasty dialogs and bluescreens while actually testing the inter-ap compatibility though.
If you want something that doesn't crash, get a console (and even that's not always true, I've crashed an NES before).
Good OS, no software. Buggy OS, good software. *sigh* - phorm