One interesting thing that didn't really get picked up on was the idea of monitoring and blacklisting networks hosting a lot of zombied machines. This could be the incentive that ISPs will finally need to start adding egress filtering to their routing devices, which at the very least, will allow victims of DDoS an easier time of maintaining their defensive measures.
I'm not sure that Viacom is on the short end of this stick. Viacom only loses the advertising that they can pipe to EchoStar customers, a pretty small portion of their total advertising. On the other hand, EchoStar loses a significant chunk of programming available to EchoStar customers, or their entire customer base.
If Viacom really does decide they're making a mistake, they won't have to twist EchoStar's arm to sign a contract under the previous terms. At that point, Viacom won't have lost much, but EchoStar may have lost a lot of customers to DirecTV. It's a really sad state of affairs, to be honest.
Our local cable provider (Adelphia) is pretty sloppy when it comes to injecting local ads. More often than not, you get to see the last half second or so of whatever spot was originally in the time slot.
Agreed. When I was in high school (coming on ten years ago now!), our Chemistry II textbook was actually a freshman-chem college level textbook. We learned freshman-level chemistry, though it wasn't touted as an AP class. Upon arriving at college, I found that I'd already learned some of the things taught there.
The summer after freshman year of college, I went back to the school and visited my Chem/Physics teacher. She handed me a shiny new textbook, and told me that it was the new county-mandated book for second-year high school chemistry. I started flipping through it and was disgusted - there was virtually no actual chemistry in the book, and most of it was filled with pictures relevant to a text which pondered various politically-charged environmental topics.
I really hope this is the future of academic textbook publishing. Maybe not the wiki model - it tends to leave works unfinished. But a planned "distributed" textbook system, where interested instructors each contribute a chapter or two to the finished book for free, combined with just-in-time at-cost publishing at the local college bookstore, would save college kids a bundle.
Even more important is the application of this concept to our cash-strapped public schools. States, counties, or school districts could JIT-publish their textbooks locally, saving a huge amount of cash and making replacement of ruined textbooks a lot easier and cheaper.
"I'm like anyone else on this planet -- I'm very moved by world hunger. I see the same commercials, with those little kids, starving, and very depressed. I watch those kids and I go, 'Fuck, I know the FILM crew could give this kid a sandwich!' There's a director five feet away going, 'DON'T FEED HIM YET! GET THAT SANDWICH OUTTA HERE! IT DOESN'T WORK UNLESS HE LOOKS HUNGRY!!!' But I'm not trying to make fun of world hunger. Matter of fact, I think I have the answer. You want to stop world hunger? Stop sending these people food. Don't send these people another bite, folks. You want to send them something, you want to help? Send them U-Hauls. Send them U-Hauls, some luggage, send them a guy out there who says, 'Hey, we been driving out here every day with your food, for, like, the last thirty or forty years, and we were driving out here today across the desert, and it occurred to us that there wouldn't BE world hunger, if you people would LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! NOTHING GROWS OUT HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW OUT HERE! YOU SEE THIS? HUH? THIS IS SAND. KNOW WHAT IT'S GONNA BE A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW? IT'S GONNA BE SAND! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! GET YOUR STUFF, GET YOUR SHIT, WE'LL MAKE ONE TRIP, WE'LL TAKE YOU TO WHERE THE FOOD IS! WE HAVE DESERTS IN AMERICA -- WE JUST DON'T LIVE IN THEM, ASSHOLES!"
--Sam Kinison, on Rodney Dangerfield's "It's Not Easy Being Me," 1984.
(Apologies for the caps - but Sam Kinison had a unique talent for speaking in all caps.)
I dunno, it didn't remind me of a dragon in the least. It looked a lot more like a dog.
It did remind me a little bit of the hexapod tank from Ghost in the Shell, though, which means that the way to counter this sucker is to use your "standard big-ass gun".
Well... Ian Holm is no spring chicken, but they did a good job in Fellowship by taping back his jowls and putting a wig on him. I'd much rather see him reprise his role as Bilbo rather than see another actor try to take his place.
Half the battles we have been fighting lately at work involve IE and pop-ups that install crap without any notification.
Just a suggestion: install a browser other than IE, delete the desktop/start menu shortcuts to IE, and have everyone use the other browser. Mozilla Firefox is a good place to start.
this is to keep them from going insane from the silence.
A friend of mine once did some work in an anechoic chamber (no echoes, soundproofed from outside noise). His boss told him that people can start hallucinating from the sensory deprivation, and that he'd be back about every 20 minutes to check on him. Every 20 minutes, the guy actually did show up, he took it that seriously.
I personally haven't ever experienced silence like that. But sometimes in town here on winter nights, when the trees are bare and there's no traffic, it gets really quiet. Creepily quiet, because when you go outside you normally think of it as being a noisy place. Chernobyl is probably something like that, except *all the time*.
The submitter is deceiving himself if he thinks the average MMOG doesn't require skill. They not only require rudimentary skills to be able to succeed at a basic level - something I have found after spending a few months away from EverQuest and returning to find that my skills have waned.... but they also require a high proficiency in order to succeed at many of the more complex encounters.
Planning out a strategy, managing and coordinating dozens of other people to put that strategy into effect, and properly participating in one's role within that larger strategy all require skill (and, judging from the behavior of a lot of people who play MMOGs, this level of skill is nontrivial). Having a great deal of skill can indeed make up for a lack of levels/advancement/gear, even in MMORPGs. And this doesn't even touch on the somewhat more subversive skills that people can make use of, like taking advantage of an in-game market economy or using social engineering to achieve one's goals.
In Cleveland, a large number of crossing signals are synchronized with the stoplights, which are timed, and there's no walk button at all. I know of at least one walk button, however, whose behavior is rather strange: If someone pushes the button, then a period of time goes by, the light changes, and the walk sign illuminates. If nobody pushes the button, then eventually the light will change, but the don't walk sign stays lit. Evidently, you're jaywalking unless you push the button, even if the light changes to be in your favor!
On a related note, ever notice how the "door close" button in most elevators does absolutely nothing? The button in the elevator where I work actually does function properly, letting you send yourself on your way about 6 seconds more quickly than without. If you're standing right by the panel, but you don't push the button - which everyone in the building knows will get you there sooner - everyone else starts shifting around uncomfortably, waiting for you to hurry up and push it. (I've actually seen one professor push the door open in an effort to squeeze another 15ms or so out of it!) But in the next building over, you can pound on the button, hold it in, kick it, or whatever, and the door doesn't close any faster than usual.
Since this is educational content, wouldn't it make sense to give/sell-on-the-cheap the content to a university somewhere to make it publicly available on the tons of available bandwidth most universities have? Some CS department somewhere could probably find student volunteers to maintain the site and update it with externally-submitted articles.
Or is TerraLycos going to sit on it for the next 95 years "just in case"?
This is an unfair comparison in the first place, unless their spam filter only looks at things like Subject, From, and Date. Their filters in all likelihood also analyze the full body of the message; if a person read the body of the message to do that analysis himself, it would make the process of determining spam/not-spam moot, wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're afraid of getting sued.
One interesting thing that didn't really get picked up on was the idea of monitoring and blacklisting networks hosting a lot of zombied machines. This could be the incentive that ISPs will finally need to start adding egress filtering to their routing devices, which at the very least, will allow victims of DDoS an easier time of maintaining their defensive measures.
I'm not sure that Viacom is on the short end of this stick. Viacom only loses the advertising that they can pipe to EchoStar customers, a pretty small portion of their total advertising. On the other hand, EchoStar loses a significant chunk of programming available to EchoStar customers, or their entire customer base.
If Viacom really does decide they're making a mistake, they won't have to twist EchoStar's arm to sign a contract under the previous terms. At that point, Viacom won't have lost much, but EchoStar may have lost a lot of customers to DirecTV. It's a really sad state of affairs, to be honest.
Didn't Microsoft come within a hair's breadth of getting its ass beat for pretty much the same thing?
Our local cable provider (Adelphia) is pretty sloppy when it comes to injecting local ads. More often than not, you get to see the last half second or so of whatever spot was originally in the time slot.
Agreed. When I was in high school (coming on ten years ago now!), our Chemistry II textbook was actually a freshman-chem college level textbook. We learned freshman-level chemistry, though it wasn't touted as an AP class. Upon arriving at college, I found that I'd already learned some of the things taught there.
The summer after freshman year of college, I went back to the school and visited my Chem/Physics teacher. She handed me a shiny new textbook, and told me that it was the new county-mandated book for second-year high school chemistry. I started flipping through it and was disgusted - there was virtually no actual chemistry in the book, and most of it was filled with pictures relevant to a text which pondered various politically-charged environmental topics.
Now I wish I hadn't posted - otherwise I'd hand you a +1 Interesting.
I really hope this is the future of academic textbook publishing. Maybe not the wiki model - it tends to leave works unfinished. But a planned "distributed" textbook system, where interested instructors each contribute a chapter or two to the finished book for free, combined with just-in-time at-cost publishing at the local college bookstore, would save college kids a bundle.
Even more important is the application of this concept to our cash-strapped public schools. States, counties, or school districts could JIT-publish their textbooks locally, saving a huge amount of cash and making replacement of ruined textbooks a lot easier and cheaper.
The way Peter Jackson has been handling things, he doesn't seem to be a money grubbing a-hole like Lucas.
That's okay. There are more than enough money grubbing a-holes at New Line to make up for him.
I dunno, it didn't remind me of a dragon in the least. It looked a lot more like a dog.
It did remind me a little bit of the hexapod tank from Ghost in the Shell, though, which means that the way to counter this sucker is to use your "standard big-ass gun".
Well... Ian Holm is no spring chicken, but they did a good job in Fellowship by taping back his jowls and putting a wig on him. I'd much rather see him reprise his role as Bilbo rather than see another actor try to take his place.
In any case, this is fantastic news!
Half the battles we have been fighting lately at work involve IE and pop-ups that install crap without any notification.
Just a suggestion: install a browser other than IE, delete the desktop/start menu shortcuts to IE, and have everyone use the other browser. Mozilla Firefox is a good place to start.
Now all they have to do is make more than a few hundred of them, and convince people other than government agencies to buy them.
Good luck.
this is to keep them from going insane from the silence.
A friend of mine once did some work in an anechoic chamber (no echoes, soundproofed from outside noise). His boss told him that people can start hallucinating from the sensory deprivation, and that he'd be back about every 20 minutes to check on him. Every 20 minutes, the guy actually did show up, he took it that seriously.
I personally haven't ever experienced silence like that. But sometimes in town here on winter nights, when the trees are bare and there's no traffic, it gets really quiet. Creepily quiet, because when you go outside you normally think of it as being a noisy place. Chernobyl is probably something like that, except *all the time*.
You might try playing the games again, and eventually Thief 3, like this.
The bill has been proposed by the French MEP Janelly Fourtou, whose husband is the the head of Vivendi Universal.
Let no American complain about shady dealings with Halliburton when the French can let crap like that happen.
You *have* heard of M2, haven't you?
Fifty times, I think it was. The fifty-first call was a double backflip followed by inexplicable hovering and chicken noises.
Dilbert: "That was just luuuuuck-uck-uck-uck!"
About 34 years too late.
The submitter is deceiving himself if he thinks the average MMOG doesn't require skill. They not only require rudimentary skills to be able to succeed at a basic level - something I have found after spending a few months away from EverQuest and returning to find that my skills have waned.... but they also require a high proficiency in order to succeed at many of the more complex encounters.
Planning out a strategy, managing and coordinating dozens of other people to put that strategy into effect, and properly participating in one's role within that larger strategy all require skill (and, judging from the behavior of a lot of people who play MMOGs, this level of skill is nontrivial). Having a great deal of skill can indeed make up for a lack of levels/advancement/gear, even in MMORPGs. And this doesn't even touch on the somewhat more subversive skills that people can make use of, like taking advantage of an in-game market economy or using social engineering to achieve one's goals.
In Cleveland, a large number of crossing signals are synchronized with the stoplights, which are timed, and there's no walk button at all. I know of at least one walk button, however, whose behavior is rather strange: If someone pushes the button, then a period of time goes by, the light changes, and the walk sign illuminates. If nobody pushes the button, then eventually the light will change, but the don't walk sign stays lit. Evidently, you're jaywalking unless you push the button, even if the light changes to be in your favor!
On a related note, ever notice how the "door close" button in most elevators does absolutely nothing? The button in the elevator where I work actually does function properly, letting you send yourself on your way about 6 seconds more quickly than without. If you're standing right by the panel, but you don't push the button - which everyone in the building knows will get you there sooner - everyone else starts shifting around uncomfortably, waiting for you to hurry up and push it. (I've actually seen one professor push the door open in an effort to squeeze another 15ms or so out of it!) But in the next building over, you can pound on the button, hold it in, kick it, or whatever, and the door doesn't close any faster than usual.
Since this is educational content, wouldn't it make sense to give/sell-on-the-cheap the content to a university somewhere to make it publicly available on the tons of available bandwidth most universities have? Some CS department somewhere could probably find student volunteers to maintain the site and update it with externally-submitted articles.
Or is TerraLycos going to sit on it for the next 95 years "just in case"?
"While most of you will jump on the line identifying sendmail as vulnerable, this isn't false."
Well, now we're all going to jump on you for misreading the news item.
Venerable. As in old.
This is an unfair comparison in the first place, unless their spam filter only looks at things like Subject, From, and Date. Their filters in all likelihood also analyze the full body of the message; if a person read the body of the message to do that analysis himself, it would make the process of determining spam/not-spam moot, wouldn't it?