I don't like the hype, and I don't like the Cult. It's well packaged mediocrity triumphing over substance. Granted, that makes me a subversive, but it's also the reason why I prefer GNU/Linux to Microsoft.
Funny, that's why I prefer real Unices over Linux.
WorldForge is a very cool Ultima-online style RPG currently in open-source development. Because of the scope of creating an entire online world, as well as multiplatform clients and a complex server, they thrive on participation and feedback from the users. I designed their first village after only knowing of the project for a few hours, and it still stands today:) Anyways, it's a great project, and with many RPGs/MUDs, a great community. They have their own IRC network, and if you are interested in working on a cool and fun game, check these guys out!
This must be the most talked-about posting on Slashdot. I've been watching the news for 4 hours now, and condolences go out to anyone who knows any of the victims of this horrible act.
You'll also note that they have even peformed a few episodes in German, (to be played in Germany), and that The Beatles recorded many songs in German (for a German audience). So, not all Brits are as dumb as they seem.
Here's the greatest joke my Dad ever told me:
DAD: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
SON: I don't know.
DAD: Because he was dead.
I worked at an ISP for a year, and although they went under recently, I can tell you the do's and don'ts that I learned from my company. Firstly, the cheapest and least demanding way to get customers and hence income is definitely not dialup or dsl. The latest equipment is too expensive, and each user only provides a small amount of revenue - less money than your tech support time is worth. After awhile, in fact, we let our dialup users continue to use the system, and we stopped billing them. So when they'd call we'd tell them that support was for paying customers only. If they tried to pay us, we'd tell them that we no longer offered that service (even though they were currently using it):). Hey, it's nicer than shutting them off outright.
So how did we make our money? Simple. Reselling frame relay circuits. This of course cuts out the home user, who has no need for such a big link, but that's better anyways. It's much easier to deal with a dozen customers who give you $500/mo than a hundred that give you $5. We'd buy frame relay circuits in bulk from GTE or Pacbell and resell them to midsize offices as a 'value-added reseller'. Where this value comes in, I'm not sure - I guess it meant that when the circuit went down they'd call us and we'd call GTE/Pacbell for them. But hey, people paid us.:)
Mr Crunch is a shady character, and one I wouldn't trust with my Internet security. He's a complete joke to almost everyone in the scene, and most people consider him a pedophile. He was kicked out of several private parties at the last Defcon, and was generally ridiculed the whole weekend. Why does he get such harsh treatment from the scene? It's likely caused by the fact that he's much older (and looks the part) than almost any one else (with the exception of the outright insane 'Happy Hacker' Carolyn Meinel), and he acts like a cross of a hermit from a Monty Python sketch and grampa from The Simpsons.
I'm not sure what the point of this post is. But it's probably something to the effect of: he won't get supported by the scene on his zany security endeavors because he's got no cred. Or something. I dunno.
Mod this up, please. I'd like to see more people read and enjoy this great tidbit from The Watchmen (a great and vastly important work in funny-books).
Well said. I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you said. As in television, where Felicity and Ally McBeal and other worthless programs steal the attention from good shows like those on the History Channel (my opinion - yours will vary), good comic books are being ignored outside of the comic realm. I'd like to see a movie based on intelligent comics, like the works of Alan Moore (who can do an intelligent super-hero book) or Frank Miller (who can do anything). Although not all super-hero books are mindless (even the iconographic Superman has had great moments in his long career), all the funny-book flicks that Hollywood churns out have been dedicated to that same mindless genre of storytelling that has been making hardcore comic fans yawn for years.
I'd like to rebutt your statement by noting that my last room-mate of mine worked for two of the largest movie companies in Hollywood as the lead-network administrator. He's 20 and he didn't finish high-school. Times have changed.
Good post. I think, however, that the experience I gain now while it is easy to get good tech jobs will allow me to find jobs in the future, when the job market may be less than what it is today. When interviewing for jobs out here (and it was admittedly short - I accepted the second position I interviewed for), I was never once even questioned about education, only experience. Having had some experience doing small independant Unix work, my current boss thought I'd make an ideal candidate for a new Unix dude for him to work with and help mold. And that's just the thing - here in L.A. (which is a VASTLY different world politically and otherwise from my hometown of Boston), all the people I've been interviewing with are your typical geek-friendly, slashdot-reading dudes. They don't -care- about education, they don't care about degrees, they care about the bottom line. "Can you get the job done? If so, jump aboard and we'll get down to business."
You guys are likely living in the wrong place. I moved from Boston out here to L.A. shortly after I dropped out, and the difference is staggering. In Boston, I very much doubt I could even find a job in the field at my age. In L.A., all the employers I've encountered are amazingly liberal and cool about everything, including money. When I walked in for the interview here, my boss had a thinkgeek shirt on; by then I knew getting the job would be easy. We talked Linux and Unix stuff for awhile, and he knew I knew what I was doing, so he hired me. It was only the second interview I went out here, and I was hired.
Excuse me for being proud of my accomplishments and achieving success outside of the system - if this were a Hollywood picture, I'd be the hero for being the "plucky young kid who gains unlikely success on his -own- terms!"
or something. anyhow, I was just trying to show my opinion on the importance (or lack thereof) of school to achieve your goals in life.
Well, I will say that it makes me proud that I am doing extremely well on my own, without "the system" or the help of "the system", despite claims by my teachers and other advocates of "the system" that there is no path outside the walls of academia. I appreciate your post and your view, and I suppose it's a bit easy and wrong to target teachers as proponents of a system I don't like. So I won't target them individually, just rather as a whole; and I think it is fair statement to say the large majority of teachers I have met are incompetant and irresponsible. Such is public education. (Although I'm an admittedly biased opponent of formal education. Damn longhairs.)
Something eerily similar happened to me once, actually. A teachers aide knew I was somewhat knowledgable about their network, and asked me if I thought a determined student could reak havoc on their systems. I told him I could demonstrate just the kind of havoc he could expect, and he asked me to show him. Using a silly NT4 bug that l0pht exploited and publicized, I gained rwx access on all the shares drives in the district (they were all using the same ancient domain controller). Long story short, it set off some serious flags with the admins, and although I didn't modify or destroy any data, I was brought in front of the ruling principal on charges of "Violating the student handbook's computer code and willfully gaining access to unauthorized resources". Even with the testimony of the teacher and teacher's aide, who confirmed I was performing a responsible security audit, I was convicted and sentanced to a two day term out-of-school. That was about the time I realized how much I hated the school system. I dropped out of high-school about a year later (and I'm making more money now as a 17 year old Sysadmin than any of my teachers ever have or will).
I absolutely love comic books AND movies, and I positively hated this movie. It contains all the boring and trite commericial mechanisms that made me fall asleep in The Sixth Sense. It has no sense of pacing, lame-o and contrived dialogue, and rushed and disappointing ending. The only credit I'll give to M. Knight is that some of the dolly shots and master shots in the movie looked nice, and the score suited the tone well. Now if he could just write a script that contained more than five pages of actual content, he might be worth something.
Well. You can always use Catdoc to view doc files in console. Just catdoc and it outputs it in plaintext. Just making a note of a neat little utility I found.
Hey Patrick, What do you see as the single largest difficulty you have had to overcome or are still overcoming in the process of creating Slackware Linux?
Wow, that's pretty interesting. I did some research, and your claims are accurate. That does create sort of a contradiction in the policies of our government. As a side note, I did check out your site and it is really good. Let it stand as a pillar to free speech on the 'net.:)
Slashdot Mirror
This site is the definitive source for information regarding developers.
http://www.echo23.com/domokun/
I urge you all to check it out immediately.
Woot, lots of CM's on here.
I don't like the hype, and I don't like the Cult. It's well packaged mediocrity triumphing over substance. Granted, that makes me a subversive, but it's also the reason why I prefer GNU/Linux to Microsoft.
Funny, that's why I prefer real Unices over Linux.
Phillip K Dick.
Represent, yo.
WorldForge is a very cool Ultima-online style RPG currently in open-source development. Because of the scope of creating an entire online world, as well as multiplatform clients and a complex server, they thrive on participation and feedback from the users. I designed their first village after only knowing of the project for a few hours, and it still stands today :) Anyways, it's a great project, and with many RPGs/MUDs, a great community. They have their own IRC network, and if you are interested in working on a cool and fun game, check these guys out!
This must be the most talked-about posting on Slashdot. I've been watching the news for 4 hours now, and condolences go out to anyone who knows any of the victims of this horrible act.
Sean
You'll also note that they have even peformed a few episodes in German, (to be played in Germany), and that The Beatles recorded many songs in German (for a German audience). So, not all Brits are as dumb as they seem.
Here's the greatest joke my Dad ever told me:
DAD: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
SON: I don't know.
DAD: Because he was dead.
He has a strange sense of humor...
I worked at an ISP for a year, and although they went under recently, I can tell you the do's and don'ts that I learned from my company. Firstly, the cheapest and least demanding way to get customers and hence income is definitely not dialup or dsl. The latest equipment is too expensive, and each user only provides a small amount of revenue - less money than your tech support time is worth. After awhile, in fact, we let our dialup users continue to use the system, and we stopped billing them. So when they'd call we'd tell them that support was for paying customers only. If they tried to pay us, we'd tell them that we no longer offered that service (even though they were currently using it) :). Hey, it's nicer than shutting them off outright.
So how did we make our money? Simple. Reselling frame relay circuits. This of course cuts out the home user, who has no need for such a big link, but that's better anyways. It's much easier to deal with a dozen customers who give you $500/mo than a hundred that give you $5. We'd buy frame relay circuits in bulk from GTE or Pacbell and resell them to midsize offices as a 'value-added reseller'. Where this value comes in, I'm not sure - I guess it meant that when the circuit went down they'd call us and we'd call GTE/Pacbell for them. But hey, people paid us. :)
Mr Crunch is a shady character, and one I wouldn't trust with my Internet security. He's a complete joke to almost everyone in the scene, and most people consider him a pedophile. He was kicked out of several private parties at the last Defcon, and was generally ridiculed the whole weekend. Why does he get such harsh treatment from the scene? It's likely caused by the fact that he's much older (and looks the part) than almost any one else (with the exception of the outright insane 'Happy Hacker' Carolyn Meinel), and he acts like a cross of a hermit from a Monty Python sketch and grampa from The Simpsons. I'm not sure what the point of this post is. But it's probably something to the effect of: he won't get supported by the scene on his zany security endeavors because he's got no cred. Or something. I dunno.
Well, this is a start, I suppose, but this is really the right way to go about it.
Mod this up, please. I'd like to see more people read and enjoy this great tidbit from The Watchmen (a great and vastly important work in funny-books).
Well said. I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you said. As in television, where Felicity and Ally McBeal and other worthless programs steal the attention from good shows like those on the History Channel (my opinion - yours will vary), good comic books are being ignored outside of the comic realm. I'd like to see a movie based on intelligent comics, like the works of Alan Moore (who can do an intelligent super-hero book) or Frank Miller (who can do anything). Although not all super-hero books are mindless (even the iconographic Superman has had great moments in his long career), all the funny-book flicks that Hollywood churns out have been dedicated to that same mindless genre of storytelling that has been making hardcore comic fans yawn for years.
I'd like to rebutt your statement by noting that my last room-mate of mine worked for two of the largest movie companies in Hollywood as the lead-network administrator. He's 20 and he didn't finish high-school.
Times have changed.
Good post. I think, however, that the experience I gain now while it is easy to get good tech jobs will allow me to find jobs in the future, when the job market may be less than what it is today. When interviewing for jobs out here (and it was admittedly short - I accepted the second position I interviewed for), I was never once even questioned about education, only experience. Having had some experience doing small independant Unix work, my current boss thought I'd make an ideal candidate for a new Unix dude for him to work with and help mold. And that's just the thing - here in L.A. (which is a VASTLY different world politically and otherwise from my hometown of Boston), all the people I've been interviewing with are your typical geek-friendly, slashdot-reading dudes. They don't -care- about education, they don't care about degrees, they care about the bottom line. "Can you get the job done? If so, jump aboard and we'll get down to business."
And.
I hate raves.
You guys are likely living in the wrong place. I moved from Boston out here to L.A. shortly after I dropped out, and the difference is staggering. In Boston, I very much doubt I could even find a job in the field at my age. In L.A., all the employers I've encountered are amazingly liberal and cool about everything, including money. When I walked in for the interview here, my boss had a thinkgeek shirt on; by then I knew getting the job would be easy. We talked Linux and Unix stuff for awhile, and he knew I knew what I was doing, so he hired me. It was only the second interview I went out here, and I was hired.
Trollspotting!$!@$!@
:)
Excuse me for being proud of my accomplishments and achieving success outside of the system - if this were a Hollywood picture, I'd be the hero for being the "plucky young kid who gains unlikely success on his -own- terms!"
or something. anyhow, I was just trying to show my opinion on the importance (or lack thereof) of school to achieve your goals in life.
I fear this is true. :)
/. trolls, really.
Wait, I *do* care about
Well, I will say that it makes me proud that I am doing extremely well on my own, without "the system" or the help of "the system", despite claims by my teachers and other advocates of "the system" that there is no path outside the walls of academia. I appreciate your post and your view, and I suppose it's a bit easy and wrong to target teachers as proponents of a system I don't like. So I won't target them individually, just rather as a whole; and I think it is fair statement to say the large majority of teachers I have met are incompetant and irresponsible. Such is public education. (Although I'm an admittedly biased opponent of formal education. Damn longhairs.)
Something eerily similar happened to me once, actually. A teachers aide knew I was somewhat knowledgable about their network, and asked me if I thought a determined student could reak havoc on their systems. I told him I could demonstrate just the kind of havoc he could expect, and he asked me to show him. Using a silly NT4 bug that l0pht exploited and publicized, I gained rwx access on all the shares drives in the district (they were all using the same ancient domain controller). Long story short, it set off some serious flags with the admins, and although I didn't modify or destroy any data, I was brought in front of the ruling principal on charges of "Violating the student handbook's computer code and willfully gaining access to unauthorized resources". Even with the testimony of the teacher and teacher's aide, who confirmed I was performing a responsible security audit, I was convicted and sentanced to a two day term out-of-school. That was about the time I realized how much I hated the school system. I dropped out of high-school about a year later (and I'm making more money now as a 17 year old Sysadmin than any of my teachers ever have or will).
I absolutely love comic books AND movies, and I positively hated this movie. It contains all the boring and trite commericial mechanisms that made me fall asleep in The Sixth Sense. It has no sense of pacing, lame-o and contrived dialogue, and rushed and disappointing ending. The only credit I'll give to M. Knight is that some of the dolly shots and master shots in the movie looked nice, and the score suited the tone well. Now if he could just write a script that contained more than five pages of actual content, he might be worth something.
If he is a troll, he must be the damned coolest troll I've ever seen. Bravo!
# SlapAyoda
# SlapAyoda@yahoo.com
Well. You can always use Catdoc to view doc files in console. Just catdoc and it outputs it in plaintext.
Just making a note of a neat little utility I found.
Cheers,
SlapAyoda.
# SlapAyoda
# SlapAyoda@yahoo.com
Hey Patrick, What do you see as the single largest difficulty you have had to overcome or are still overcoming in the process of creating Slackware Linux?
Wow, that's pretty interesting. I did some research, and your claims are accurate. That does create sort of a contradiction in the policies of our government. As a side note, I did check out your site and it is really good. Let it stand as a pillar to free speech on the 'net. :)