Even though we have short term protection, we need to lower our profile while still shipping products. We need to examine reducing our exposure on pre-loading Linux by off loading it to the channels exclusively.
We will need to change how we donate software to the open source, probably the type of license we use, lower the profile of our opensource portal, etc.
Basically, "we need to hope Microsoft doesn't see us." I'd love to see "We need to be prepared to stand up to them in court and kick their ass." HP has the money to do it. But this is pathetic.
Put down the keyboard and step away. You know *nothing* about car engines. Nothing.
First, a well-designed engine will use whatever it's designed to use. There's nothing wrong with the vast majority of engines that use 87 octane gasoline.
Second, preignition isn't caused by spark timing. Anyway, no engine fires at TDC. None. It doesn't make sense. The engine fires before TDC, with the advancement being larger as the speed of the engine increases. Pinging is caused by the combustion gases igniting before the spark.
You go, see the movie and if you like it, pay the theater on the way out.
It works that way now, only you pay up front and ask for your money back if the movie sucked. I've never seen a theatre that wouldn't give refunds for shitty movies, most people just don't ask.
A bounty system isn't right, for exactly the reason Steve Linford says. It's preposterous to suggest that the government needs more information.
What we need instead is a law similar to the Tennessee law which simply made spamming a civil offense and set out a clear, punitive civil penalty structure. The problem with the TN law was that the penalty wasn't quite enough.
I suggest a law that simply makes spamming a civil offense, with punitive damages set at $5000/spam and compensatory damages set at $10/spam. There woudl be a 10% bonus for pornographic spam. The law should be worded to give judges little discretion except to determine whether a particular email is spam. If the defendant is on the FTC's list of spammers, then the judge would have no discretion. His job would be to swing the gavel.
Having DA's or AG's go after spammers makes no sense. They have more important cases to deal with usually. Leave this up to people who are the victims. The spammers will die a death of a thousand cuts.
The hardest part is tracking them down, but since the FTC already has a lot of information, they need to make it public to assist.
"Supreme", "92 octane", "premium", whatever you call it- is not *better*. It has a higher octane rating. Oddly, that just means that it's more difficult to ignite it.
If you're getting better gas mileage with it, that means your engine is probably suffering from pre-ignition, aka "pinging", without it. It doesn't mean the higher octane gas has more energy, just that you don't have a cylinder or two working against the rest of the engine. I used to have a jeep that was terrible with pinging unless I used 92 octane, so I am familiar with the situation.
But for most cars, the 87 is just fine. Note that the 92 doesn't have more cleaners or anything else in it. For the vast majority of cars, 87 works fine and there is no reason to get ass-raped by the filling station for 92 octane. It's like shoe size: a size 13 shoe isn't "better" than a size 8, unless your feet are size 13. If your feet are size 8, however, the size 13 doesn't offer you anything more.
The FTC has considered regulating the oil industry by disallowing any terminology suggesting that higher octane is better.
Not to carry this silliness much further, but can you hit alt-f2 and use a Unix shell while yours plays?
Yeah, we each implemented something slightly different, to each his own. The fact is, though, that I have far more flexibility with a Unix shell and true multitasking environment than you'll ever have with DOS. But, sure, yours plays music and mine plays music.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
As a folklorist, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody refutes one urban legend only to invoke another urban legend.
Get this straight, people: Indiana NEVER legislated the value of pi. In fact, the legislation on which the rumor is based actually isn't about pi, per se, but about "circle squaring". Here's a good explanation of what really happened:
I just did a bootable 1.44MB FreeDOS floppy that plays mp3/ogg files with MPXplay, and then put it on to a bootable CD-ROM with all the music content I like. Voila, free, open source, standalone car/home/whatever music player which does not need a hard drive (for swapping). Just boot from ATAPI CD-drive and play some tunes, even at your friend's house!
where it appears to support various plug-in modules
Ultimately, this is where robots will have to go. One of the great things about the PC platform is that we could stick new expansion cards into it, upgrade existing capabilities, add new capabilities, etc.
We need to be in the same position with robots within a few years. The "modules" will be a lot different, though, and will be as much software based as hardware. We need a module for general processing, vision processing, other sensory perceptions (smell, touch, heat, etc.) as well as more physical items such as arms, tools, weapons, etc.
I believe that at some point we'll have stores offering items like that in the same way I can go to Best Buy and pick up a new hard drive.
It has to be open specifications all around. That way, we'll end up getting a lot of people involved just to hack around on it and expand the platform.
There are some serious possibilities if it's done right.
And if they are running a Unix variant that attachment will only run at user level. No low level system modification can be made, so you can then log in as another user (or root) and delete said infected files which should all be in their home dir and not mixed in with 10000.dll files.
Sigh. How many times do we have to go over this for the slow learners? Two things.
First, all of my important files are in my home directory owned by my user. A virus doesn't need root-level access to destroy everything of importance to me. It's nice that the files in/etc,/usr/bin, etc. are all locked so that my unprivileged user can't destroy them. Who cares? They're safely on a CD here, they're on the Debian site, they're available all over the internet. My own files exist in my directory (and backups). Those are what's important to me.
Second, the modern worm/virus spreads by either remotely exploiting vulnerabilities on other machines or re-emailing itself. Guess what: it doesn't need root privileges for either of those operations. None, nada, zilch.
The only reason a virus would want root privs would be to infect system binaries and spread to other users. This paradigm is mostly dead in the Unix world on 99% or more of the machines in use; everybody has their own machine. Spreading from machine to machine is the game, and that simply doesn't require any privileges.
The bottom line is that if you could trick users into running a Perl script that came through email, which wouldn't be that difficult for a certain percentage of them, you could write a decent worm for Linux. Not a problem now, but when my mother is using Linux, it's a big problem. "But it came from my friend Kate at church and said to save the file and then type this in at the command line..." The extra step will weed out a lot of the real cluebies, to be sure, but with enough of them it'll be a problem.
I've made the same point many times. A real Muslim (i.e. following the Koran) wouldn't do those things. In fact, few Muslims do. There are a billion of them, do the math...
I have to use my own mail server at my hosting company to process my outbound mail. My IP is in a "dialup" blacklist, so I can't send straight out of my cable modem connection. I used Comcast's own mail server for about a week, I was tired of their server being down so much and mail not going out in a timely manner.
Maybe they've improved, but I just don't have the time or patience to find out...
A Christian is someone who tries to follow the example set by Jesus. If someone claimed to be an environmentalist while dumping motor oil into your city reservoir, you would laugh at them. Likewise, if someone wages Crusades and kills innocent people, sorry, not Christians. They may claim to be, but that means nothing.
Ironically, I just got off the phone with sprint, my cell and local land line provider. They're charging me for calls from 7PM to 9PM, but I thought they'd changed that.
Well, for another $5/month they will. What utter bullshit.
But it gets better. I'm paying $65/month for 800 minutes. I get charged 40 cents/minute after it. They can't charge less per minute, or so they say, but I could get 1100 minutes each month if I want. The price? Well, the same $65, they just don't automatically move customers.
Fine. I say switch me. She says there's a two year service agreement. Again, bullshit. I've been with them for 5 years. Then she tells me that I have some 2 year agreement that's up next year. I didn't even know about that faux agreement. It was verbal, according to her, but she was a bit short on details.
I asked to speak to a supervisor and, after a few minutes, lost the connection.
This is stupid. If anybody knows of a better provider, let me know.
I doubt it, seriously. I've yet to find anyone who believes the "lower TCO" bullshit, which is what Microsoft seems to be shoveling in those ads. Most people dismiss it with a snicker. They'll have to try harder to fool anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though we have short term protection, we need to lower our profile while still shipping products. We need to examine reducing our exposure on pre-loading Linux by off loading it to the channels exclusively.
We will need to change how we donate software to the open source, probably the type of license we use, lower the profile of our opensource portal, etc.
Basically, "we need to hope Microsoft doesn't see us." I'd love to see "We need to be prepared to stand up to them in court and kick their ass." HP has the money to do it. But this is pathetic.
How much code was being written into MSN Search?
Obviously not enough...
Um, you apparently don't know the origin of Jeopardy. You know how they give you the answers on Jeopardy instead of a question. Think hard....
It started out as a parody of Quiz Show. But it's on the up and up, Ken's just a smart guy.
Poorly worded, yet true. There are other "browsers" that still use Microsoft's rendering engine, so they're up the same shit creek as IE users.
Put down the keyboard and step away. You know *nothing* about car engines. Nothing.
First, a well-designed engine will use whatever it's designed to use. There's nothing wrong with the vast majority of engines that use 87 octane gasoline.
Second, preignition isn't caused by spark timing. Anyway, no engine fires at TDC. None. It doesn't make sense. The engine fires before TDC, with the advancement being larger as the speed of the engine increases. Pinging is caused by the combustion gases igniting before the spark.
You go, see the movie and if you like it, pay the theater on the way out.
It works that way now, only you pay up front and ask for your money back if the movie sucked. I've never seen a theatre that wouldn't give refunds for shitty movies, most people just don't ask.
A bounty system isn't right, for exactly the reason Steve Linford says. It's preposterous to suggest that the government needs more information.
What we need instead is a law similar to the Tennessee law which simply made spamming a civil offense and set out a clear, punitive civil penalty structure. The problem with the TN law was that the penalty wasn't quite enough.
I suggest a law that simply makes spamming a civil offense, with punitive damages set at $5000/spam and compensatory damages set at $10/spam. There woudl be a 10% bonus for pornographic spam. The law should be worded to give judges little discretion except to determine whether a particular email is spam. If the defendant is on the FTC's list of spammers, then the judge would have no discretion. His job would be to swing the gavel.
Having DA's or AG's go after spammers makes no sense. They have more important cases to deal with usually. Leave this up to people who are the victims. The spammers will die a death of a thousand cuts.
The hardest part is tracking them down, but since the FTC already has a lot of information, they need to make it public to assist.
"Supreme", "92 octane", "premium", whatever you call it- is not *better*. It has a higher octane rating. Oddly, that just means that it's more difficult to ignite it.
If you're getting better gas mileage with it, that means your engine is probably suffering from pre-ignition, aka "pinging", without it. It doesn't mean the higher octane gas has more energy, just that you don't have a cylinder or two working against the rest of the engine. I used to have a jeep that was terrible with pinging unless I used 92 octane, so I am familiar with the situation.
But for most cars, the 87 is just fine. Note that the 92 doesn't have more cleaners or anything else in it. For the vast majority of cars, 87 works fine and there is no reason to get ass-raped by the filling station for 92 octane. It's like shoe size: a size 13 shoe isn't "better" than a size 8, unless your feet are size 13. If your feet are size 8, however, the size 13 doesn't offer you anything more.
The FTC has considered regulating the oil industry by disallowing any terminology suggesting that higher octane is better.
The Low-Down on High Octane Gasoline
Not to carry this silliness much further, but can you hit alt-f2 and use a Unix shell while yours plays?
Yeah, we each implemented something slightly different, to each his own. The fact is, though, that I have far more flexibility with a Unix shell and true multitasking environment than you'll ever have with DOS. But, sure, yours plays music and mine plays music.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
As a folklorist, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody refutes one urban legend only to invoke another urban legend.
Get this straight, people: Indiana NEVER legislated the value of pi. In fact, the legislation on which the rumor is based actually isn't about pi, per se, but about "circle squaring". Here's a good explanation of what really happened:
http://www.simonsingh.net/Pi.html
(One minor mistake on this page, the digits in pi are anything but random)
You can also check out "A History of Pi" (Beckmann) for a more detailed explanation and a picture of the actual bill.
I just did a bootable 1.44MB FreeDOS floppy that plays mp3/ogg files with MPXplay, and then put it on to a bootable CD-ROM with all the music content I like. Voila, free, open source, standalone car/home/whatever music player which does not need a hard drive (for swapping). Just boot from ATAPI CD-drive and play some tunes, even at your friend's house!
Now try to do that with Linux/Windows/*BSD.
I did it three years ago:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mjbd/
He pegs the cost at $10 billion...NASA already has given more than $500,000 to study the idea, and Congress has earmarked $2.5 million more.
Wow, at this rate, we'll have the money in, oh, 1000 years...
where it appears to support various plug-in modules
Ultimately, this is where robots will have to go. One of the great things about the PC platform is that we could stick new expansion cards into it, upgrade existing capabilities, add new capabilities, etc.
We need to be in the same position with robots within a few years. The "modules" will be a lot different, though, and will be as much software based as hardware. We need a module for general processing, vision processing, other sensory perceptions (smell, touch, heat, etc.) as well as more physical items such as arms, tools, weapons, etc.
I believe that at some point we'll have stores offering items like that in the same way I can go to Best Buy and pick up a new hard drive.
It has to be open specifications all around. That way, we'll end up getting a lot of people involved just to hack around on it and expand the platform.
There are some serious possibilities if it's done right.
So now I have to root for Comcast, DirecTV and Charter? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's hard to believe that a band that has prided itself on pushing the envelope and being controversial would do something like this.
I'm sorry, isn't the article on /. because it *is* controversial, or am I missing something?
I'm not a racket scientist or anythign remotly close.
Certainly true if your spelling skills are any indicator.
And if they are running a Unix variant that attachment will only run at user level. No low level system modification can be made, so you can then log in as another user (or root) and delete said infected files which should all be in their home dir and not mixed in with 10000 .dll files.
Sigh. How many times do we have to go over this for the slow learners? Two things.
First, all of my important files are in my home directory owned by my user. A virus doesn't need root-level access to destroy everything of importance to me. It's nice that the files in /etc, /usr/bin, etc. are all locked so that my unprivileged user can't destroy them. Who cares? They're safely on a CD here, they're on the Debian site, they're available all over the internet. My own files exist in my directory (and backups). Those are what's important to me.
Second, the modern worm/virus spreads by either remotely exploiting vulnerabilities on other machines or re-emailing itself. Guess what: it doesn't need root privileges for either of those operations. None, nada, zilch.
The only reason a virus would want root privs would be to infect system binaries and spread to other users. This paradigm is mostly dead in the Unix world on 99% or more of the machines in use; everybody has their own machine. Spreading from machine to machine is the game, and that simply doesn't require any privileges.
The bottom line is that if you could trick users into running a Perl script that came through email, which wouldn't be that difficult for a certain percentage of them, you could write a decent worm for Linux. Not a problem now, but when my mother is using Linux, it's a big problem. "But it came from my friend Kate at church and said to save the file and then type this in at the command line..." The extra step will weed out a lot of the real cluebies, to be sure, but with enough of them it'll be a problem.
I've made the same point many times. A real Muslim (i.e. following the Koran) wouldn't do those things. In fact, few Muslims do. There are a billion of them, do the math...
I have to use my own mail server at my hosting company to process my outbound mail. My IP is in a "dialup" blacklist, so I can't send straight out of my cable modem connection. I used Comcast's own mail server for about a week, I was tired of their server being down so much and mail not going out in a timely manner.
Maybe they've improved, but I just don't have the time or patience to find out...
A Christian is someone who tries to follow the example set by Jesus. If someone claimed to be an environmentalist while dumping motor oil into your city reservoir, you would laugh at them. Likewise, if someone wages Crusades and kills innocent people, sorry, not Christians. They may claim to be, but that means nothing.
Actions, not words.
Luckily, the White Christian ex-Marine
Good try, but McVeigh was an agnostic. By definition, Christians don't go blowing up innocent people.
Ironically, I just got off the phone with sprint, my cell and local land line provider. They're charging me for calls from 7PM to 9PM, but I thought they'd changed that.
Well, for another $5/month they will. What utter bullshit.
But it gets better. I'm paying $65/month for 800 minutes. I get charged 40 cents/minute after it. They can't charge less per minute, or so they say, but I could get 1100 minutes each month if I want. The price? Well, the same $65, they just don't automatically move customers.
Fine. I say switch me. She says there's a two year service agreement. Again, bullshit. I've been with them for 5 years. Then she tells me that I have some 2 year agreement that's up next year. I didn't even know about that faux agreement. It was verbal, according to her, but she was a bit short on details.
I asked to speak to a supervisor and, after a few minutes, lost the connection.
This is stupid. If anybody knows of a better provider, let me know.
With automated upgrade tools and self-updating software, will sysadmins be in such high demand that they enjoy today?
Nope. This should have been made obvious when Visual Basic and Access caused all programmers to lose their jobs.
In the end, many people go with the brand-name they prefer and that's where the tech demo comes in.
Many people are also like me who just look to see who has the best Linux drivers. (nvidia, for those wondering)
I doubt it, seriously. I've yet to find anyone who believes the "lower TCO" bullshit, which is what Microsoft seems to be shoveling in those ads. Most people dismiss it with a snicker. They'll have to try harder to fool anybody.