Ok, i haven't reached the bottom of this page yet, but i'm willing to bet a couple dozen posters made this same mistake.
The plural of "virus" is "viruses". Aside from that, Latin plurals end in "i", not "ii". For example, "magus" becomes "magi", not "magii". The notion of Latin plurals ending in "ii" probably comes from such words as "radii" (plural of "radius"). The reason "radii" has two "i"s is because "radi-us-" becomes "radi-i-".
"In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. [...] Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms." (taken from here)
Also, "viri" is Latin for "men", so that's not it either. The word is "viruses".
I know i'm coming off like a jerk here, and normally i don't post just to criticise someone's spelling, but "virii" is a plague. It's because of mistakes like this that we have two words for "disc", and the bizarre spelling of "Thames" (i.e. people trying to make English correspond to its Latin/Greek roots). Anyway, i just thought i'd point that out. That word really bothers me (which i guess is somewhat sad).
Please stop equating/comparing/relating every single fucking thing to 09/11. It's only a similar situation in that they knew but didn't tell anyone. What if i knew the exact time you would be born, but i didn't tell your mom? Similar situation, right? What if i knew how long the cookies were going to last before you bought them, but i didn't tell anyone? Similar situation, right?
Right, it won't have any effect at all on MSN. However, i really doubt that that's the goal. And, like the previous reply said, nobody that has the gall to use Opera will want/need to go to msn.com anyway. And even if they do, it's not like it translates it into some foreign language or something. With just a tiny bit of extra concentration, you can clearly make out what it's saying. I don't know why anyone (Opera user or not) would go to MSN's page anyway, unless they were using the "chat" link or the "Hotmail" link. Nothing else on that page has much original content.
Um... granted, IE6 isn't really a revolutionary leap from IE5.5 (i.e. it doesn't add very many useful features), but how is it not "mature"? The image resizing shit that comes default is like the most retarded feature ever, but that can easily be disabled. After that, it's pretty much exactly the same as IE5.5 for most intents and purposes. What exactly is holding you back? How does Microsoft wanting you to upgrade from your free browser to a newer, presumably better version of your free browser support the Microsoft marketing machine? It's just a software upgrade.
Apple is the only entity that i know that can make ANYTHING pretty. I always regarded X as one of the ugliest, roughest, most uncivilised beasts of modern software. But look at this! Even the logo is pretty.
And now a tip for you! Spend your time learning how to take a joke. Wouldn't that be more worthwhile than flaming people on Slashdot? Perhaps the ability to detect humour stems from being literate. I don't know how you can possibly misspell a punctuation mark, but (congratulations!) you managed to do so... five, maybe six (can't quite tell where one sentence ends and another begins) times. And why did you put "snazzy" in quotes? Are you quoting case modders? Because i know a good few, and they never say "snazzy". My $2e-2.
I myself have a RioVolt SP250, and for an MP3/CD player, it's probably one of the best. I haven't tried the iRiver (which looks cool), but i know it's better than those shitty MP3/CD players that Sony's trying to sell (three of my friends have them, and they're horrible).
Anyway, i fail to see how $199 is over-priced for an MP3/CD player. My brother has a 10-gig iPod, and it's really really nice, but you have to look at a couple of things when considering an iPod:
01.) No CD support. -- That means you can't just pop in one of your friends' audio CDs when, say, you're in the car. It also means that when you get tired of what's on your iPod, you have to hook it up to the computer, delete stuff from it, and then transfer stuff to it; whereas with the MP3/CD player, you could carry a CD booklet in your bookbag or car or whatever, and just switch between 700 megs of MP3s whenever you want.
02.) It's expensive. -- No matter what size of an iPod you get (unless you get a used one off eBay or something), the iPod costs, like you said, $100 more than any MP3/CD player out there today. And add $100 each time you go to a higher size.
03.) Requires FireWire. -- I guess you're all set if you have a newer Mac (and if you do, you can probably afford a 20-gig iPod anyway:p ), but if you don't, there's a very good chance that you're going to have to buy a $40 FireWire PCI card when you order your iPod. This raises the actual price of your iPod, and it depends on you having an extra PCI slot.
Really, the only thing you need for an MP3/CD player is a CD burner, and pretty much any computer you buy today will have one, or will have an option. I can't imagine buying a new computer without at least a CD-RW drive. Then again, you don't really even need that. You could just play regular CDDA if you wanted, heh.
What i'm really looking for is an Ogg/CD player. That would own.
Well... this may not apply to you, because i'm willing to bet you're older than me, but for the younger generation that doesn't just chat about boyfriends and cyber-sex and Ja Rule, Yahoo! and AIM and all those other chat places really suck. I haven't been on an HTTP chat site since, like, when GeoCities chat was still around, but as i remember it, if i joined a computer-related channel, i would usually be surrounded by 25- to 45-year-olds. Nothing wrong with that, i guess, but the people that i have the most in common with are generally between the ages of 15 and 20 or so (being that i fall in that range myself).
Sure, AIM and Yahoo! are filled with people in that age range, but... have you ever actually joined an AIM chat? The second you step into one you're flooded with shit like A?S?L??@??#?@#@(#(@*!@!@0// PRESSS 111 FPR CYBARSECHS@?@/2/2//32#L@K#JL@KJl3jl2 LOLOROOFJKLMANOROFLL:K@j32 in yellow-highlighted green 32-point italic Times New Roman.
Not a place i'd like to hang out in. That's why i got "addicted" to IRC. The good majority of people i've met on IRC are actually intelligent. Most of them know how to spell the words "you" and "are", and some of them even separate ideas with punctuation marks and/or new lines.
"IRC", that's what us kids (the ones that know what the fuck they're talking about) call it nowadays. My dad has quite enough money to fail on this endeavour, but thank you for your sincere concern. Even if this whole thing puts us out of tens of thousands of dollars, we have that to spend. I'm not worried about it, he seems pretty confident. And i'll research on that book, just to see what you're talking about. But i'm thinking my dad's ass is pretty well covered. He has two "OC-3s" running right now, and he only has a few thousand dial-up users. He has bandwidth to share, and money to spend. And Mediacom (the cable company here) offers horrible cable service for around $100 per month (including modem leasing). Their service totally dies at night, when everyone gets home from school/work, and their speeds are horrible at any time. Their latency is even worse: game play is almost impossible. I know a few people that would probably give up the slightly higher speeds of cable and downgrade to 128-kbit wireless if they had decent pings. kthxbai suh
I'm not sure. The transceiver itself is $300, and then the external antenna is like $50. I can get more detailed information later, i don't have it on me right now. Most of the antennas themselves (the ones on the water towers) don't actually operate on 2.4 GHz (à la 802.11b), but i think the wireless NICs themselves do. Not sure. We use Lucent/whoever-makes-it-now Orinoco cards at home, they're not that expensive either, but they're all in the house, no externals required.
My dad runs a dial-up ISP, and is currently in the process of setting up high-speed wireless access across a good third or so of Iowa, and i can tell you, it's expensive. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars, just for the antennas that have to go on the water towers. Now multiply that by two or three, in our case, because we need multiple antennas on multiple towers to get such a huge coverage area. So we're already up in the ~60 or 70 thousand dollars range, and we haven't even started selling our service yet. Plus the fact that getting an OC-3/T3/whatever your line is (we happen to be using two "OC-3s" worth of bandwidth right now, which is upgradeable to like, 24 OC-12s worth) is really expensive. So what are we at now? Like ~60 or 70 thousand, plus however many dozen thousands of dollars a dedicated line from Qwest or UUNet or whatever costs (not sure on the exact price of that). And we still haven't sold any wireless accounts. Now the customers need wireless modems. $350 a piece. At $5 a month to lease them, we're losing money on the modems for almost 6 years. Plus, if you want customers (in our case, again), you want to keep all your prices below Mediacom's cable prices (which are currently horrible, by the way), but you also need those low prices to correspond to speeds comparable to cable. That puts you in the hole a bit too, because providing such high-speed access at such low prices is really really difficult.
I don't know, maybe your ISP is genuinely horrible. I couldn't say. But try to think about all that stuff next time you say a wireless service doesn't give a crap. It's really hard to set all this stuff up, and really hard to find some middle ground between price and speed.
Ok, way way way late in the discussion; i can only hope that you will come back to read this. Yes, i supposed there was some information from DAL at at least one point in time, but the fact is, neither i nor the rest of DAL's users check the DALnetizen every day, and neither i nor the rest of DAL's users want to have to dig through links or go out of our way to find information on this. This stuff should be on the FRONT PAGE of www.dal.net (as it is now), or there should be a permanent, highly visible link on the DALnetizen's page(s). We're already "inconvenienced" (yes, i realise DALnet is a privilege, not a right, but nonetheless, it is an inconvenience to some of us) by the fact that this is happening. No, it's not your fault; no, you're not sitting on your asses doing nothing; but that's not an excuse for not presenting information to the user base, and laying all these rumours and conjectures to rest.
I understand fine how DALnet works. There are dozens of persons, like you said, that are working damned hard to keep DALnet going. I know first-hand the effects of a DDoS attack: my dad runs a small (as in, regional) ISP, and it's been under attack by spammers for nearly a year. His single mail server, which had served him well for nearly 6 years, were not adequate to withstand the MILLIONS of spam messages that were being received every day. Even after upgrading to three massive mail servers, he's still getting raped by these spammers. Anyway, i digress. Yes, stopping a DDoS attack can be incredibly difficult. I understand that. I never said you guys were doing a bad job stopping the attacks; i said you guys were doing a bad job informing the masses. That's all.
And, maybe you should read closer. I never insinuated that if DALnet doesn't serve my purpose properly it should be put out of its misery. Mostly all i do is chat on DALnet. I can't use DCC because of my firewall (which i don't control), so any downloading i do is done via FTP. So, in essence, the only purpose i want DALnet to serve is a means of chatting with the people that i like to talk to in the various channels there. I realise DALnet's history; i have no idea what you mean by "DALnet materialized out of thing air". It served a lot of people before i ever "stepped foot" in DALnet, i know.
And i don't want DALnet to die. On the contrary, i hope it lives, but only if it gets better. Getting disconnected constantly and having almost-a-week's worth of downtime is extremely annoying. I realise that the DAL people are doing everything they can to make things better -- it's not their fault. I'm not saying the DAL people are responsible for the problems on DALnet. But DALnet was made for chatting, and if i can't chat efficiently on DALnet, i'll move to somewhere else. The use of the term "put out of its misery" was meant as it normally does in, say, animals: if your animals are suffering, and keeping them alive means continuing their suffering, you put them to sleep. Sure, you can keep DALnet alive. But is that going to stop the DDoS attacks automatically? No, the problem starts there and ends there.
DALnet is great; i love it. It has great people, a great IRCd (services and such), and its administration generally seems extremely tight-knit and caring, as opposed to EFnet, which seems to be just one huge jumble of people and servers that have little contact with one another except when something goes wrong. But DALnet is suffering, it is having problems, it has had adverse effects on its users. That's what i meant. I wasn't attempting to insult DAL's administration, or its handling of the DDoS attacks. I was criticising (in only one part of my comment, mind you) DALnet's representation to its users (i.e. "telling us it'll be alright"). I hope you guys can stop the DDoS attacks, i really do. But the next time DALnet goes down for a week, people will move again. Not because they have no faith in you, not because they're ungrateful, not because they blame you for the attacks, but because they simply want the best tool for the job.
Well, DALnet hasn't been the largest network for a while now, but...
I don't know, could be good, could be bad. Good in the sense that the other networks get massive numbers to add to their communities. Bad in the sense that (01) the DDoSers might move on to those other networks, and (02) a lot of lamers hang out on DALnet that other networks may not exactly welcome with open arms. So it's a trade-off, i guess. If the servers and the administrators try to keep DALnet up indefinitely, they're going to end up alienating their users, and they'll move to other networks anyway (because the attacks will continue). On the other hand, if the DDoSers have a specific goal in mind, they may just give up and move on to other networks, or they may even spread out and attack multiple networks. But who can say what the DDoSers have in mind?
Re:Why should one person have to own 2 computers?
on
DDoS for Fun and Profit
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· Score: 2, Informative
I could be wrong about this, but...
He already activated it, guy. Read again, he said he upgraded his hardware. When you upgrade your hardware, Windows makes you activate it again, because there's a possibility that maybe you just took the hard drive out and stuck it in another computer, i.e. getting two copies of XP out of one disc. XP makes you RE-activate the operating system when you make drastic changes to your hardware.
This is the first i've heard about the other two stories-within-the-story here, but DALnet has been the constant bane of people wanting to get things done (and/or chat) for quite some time now. The DDoS attacks have been going on for a long time, but they really came to a peak a few months ago, where it became extremely difficult to stay connected to DALnet for more than a few hours at a time (at which point you would have to reconnect, usually to a different server, since the servers seemed to just take turns dying).
There have been at least two, possibly three or four, occasions where DALnet just shut down completely for a period of at least a few days (this latest one being in the range of like a week). After the first "big" DALnet shut-down, it seems a lot of channels moved to other networks; most of these channels have even gained numbers. Seems even if DALnet does return, a lot of the channels that left it will stay on their new-found networks. The few anime channels that came back to DALnet are very slowly gaining back their numbers, but they're nowhere near the levels they used to be. As of right now, the highest count is 51 users, which is really low for a DALnet anime channel. Highest warez channel count is 68, which is also really low for a DALnet warez channel. And even the MP3 channels, which probably were some of the biggest channels on DALnet, have lost major numbers. I seem to remember them being in the area of like 600+; current count is 166. So yeah, DALnet has really been taking it in the ass.
General consensus around the parts i hang out seems to be that losing DALnet wouldn't be such a bad thing. We'd all move our channels to other networks, and be done with it. Chat channels would really love EsperNet or IRCnet, and warez/MP3/ISO/PlayStation/etc. channels have a half-dozen networks to choose from, most notably EFnet (though i despise it). Anime channels would thrive on Aniverse. DALnet was great, but, unless things see a really dramatic improvement, i think there are many that would agree that it needs to be put out of its misery as soon as possible.
What has made this all really lame has been the fact that DALnet hasn't really said anything about this. Their eZine (the DALnetizen) has truly been the opposite of helpful throughout this whole ordeal. It seemed as though DAL was almost oblivious to what was happening. There would be a paragraph about Christmas, a paragraph about the benefits of PHP, a paragraph about poems, a paragraph about some new op or something, and then tucked away in a little corner would be a little sentence or two along the lines of "ps dalnet si getitng ddosed pls bare w/ us thx". After this most recent attack, however, they've started to get their act together a bit, and have posted a lot more information regarding the situation. Information can really be helpful to their users, if they want to keep them.
Also not helping the situation are rumours(?) to the effect that the DALnet administration has resorted to childish finger-pointing, and have pretty much detached themselves from each other. DALnet isn't really doing a very good job of assuring its user base that it'll be alright.:/ Hopefully, if DALnet is to survive, this will be remedied.
And, finally, the biggest blow to DALnet has been the de-linking of several of its (best) servers. Almost all of the "good" servers, the ones that everyone had as their first picks, have disappeared. Even the "fall-back" servers seem to be gone. Evidently DALnet is picking up a few new (or renamed, maybe, i can't be sure myself) servers, even in light of the attacks, however.
So DALnet's fate is really unknown. No one can be sure, but for now it's functioning, at least in the sense that it has the ability to carry users. Who knows, though, it could be down again tomorrow.
Ha. I wish someone would call me "Doctor" just for talking about anime. Imagine myself, an expert in my field, travelling the globe to respond to anime emergencies!
Ok, wait. Don't they already do this? I'm 16, and nobody will let me buy or rent a rated-M video game. Do you mean to tell me that these retailers/rental places are just being good citizens? What exactly are the current laws regarding the selling of "violent" games? Like i said here, the ESRB is doing a grand job of keeping me from renting/buying "violent" video games. So... what, does my state have its own law regarding this? Or is this kind of like a government "bribe" policy, i.e. the retailers/rental places get money or something if they don't sell violent games to minors?
I also noticed the article said "making it a federal crime to sell or rent violent video games to anyone under 18". So what is this saying? Is it saying that they're going to put an umbrella over "Teen"- and "Mature"-rated games, and put them all in the same category as "Adults Only"? Those categories of games both have "violence" in them. Or, does it simply mean it's bumping the "suitable age" for "Mature"-rated games up to 18 (it being 17 right now), and making the rules regarding selling/renting more strict? If it's the latter, i don't suppose it matters to anyone around here, except for maybe those people that are just about to turn 17, and think they're going to be buying all kinds of M-rated games, heh.
Anyway, from the point of view of someone like myself, who can't rent or buy those games anyway, all it means is that i'll have to have my mom with me on the very rare occasion that i go to a store and buy a violent video game. Generally ordering off the Internet solves that problem, and if this law affects that, i'll just use my parents' credit card instead of my own. The only lame thing is that i'll have to wait an extra year before i'm able to buy the games i've been playing my whole life, because some 70-year-old Congresspersons who've never played a fucking video game in their lives decided that i couldn't handle it yet.
That's the real problem here, i think. These people in Congress, they've never played a video game in their lives, much less a violent one. Why're they doing this, then? Probably because some horrible and over-protective parents called them and told them about how Goldeneye and Metal Gear Solid and Half-Life are undermining their effectiveness as parents. The problem, then, extends to the parents, who obviously can't control their children by themselves, and need the government to hold their hands. Because these super-conservative blame-the-media retards see stuff like Columbine happening, and think to themselves, "gee whiz, this couldn't be caused by people ridiculing and discriminating against these kids, and making their lives miserable, it's gotta be THE GAMES and THE MUSIC!". Which is flawed thinking, either way you look at it.
Anyway, it doesn't bother me too much. As long as they don't pass a law that says my parents have to be in the room with me when i play the games (<COUGH>stupid-fuck-rated-R-laws</COUGH>) , heh.
I've often thought about the fans Microsoft could win over if they decided somewhere along the line to build their next version of Windows on UNIX... after some thought, i've decided that while this might be a good thing, it doesn't automatically come with any benefits just "because it's UNIX". Before i proceed, a disclaimer: Linux and Windows are fairly equal in my mind; each has its own use, and they're both (in my opinion) great operating systems. I'm somewhat biased towards Windows, however (one, because of the "what i'm used to" factor, and two, because Linux is missing some major features that i look for in a desktop OS (i.e. a GUI:p)), but i can't say i dislike Linux. Just wanted to be clear, i'm not a Microsoft fanboy or anything; i can certainly see some of the reasons people dislike Microsoft and their products. With that in mind....
Building Windows on UNIX, presumably Linux, doesn't mean anything. Define "build". Microsoft can take Linux, and taint it in any way they see fit. They would no doubt use "non-standard" calls, APIs, etc. (i'm no programming expert, heh), even if they did build Windows on UNIX. The prospect of a universal standards system is one of the things that gets UNIX guys so hot. Everything pretty much runs the same way on UNIX, no matter what distribution you have, what "form" you have (Linux/BSD/commercial UNIX/whatever), mostly not even what processor you have. UNIX is UNIX. Microsoft would certainly change that if UNIX was a factor in Windows. Microsoft wants you to buy Microsoft UNIX, and buy products made for Microsoft UNIX; they don't want to be compliant with other operating systems. As such, you've lost a high proportion of UNIX guys already.
Assuming, however, that Microsoft did manage to make a good OS built on UNIX, and even a lot of the UNIX guys liked it, you still have the "monopoly" argument. Microsoft likes their income. They like the fact that their products are used all around the world. They're still going to employ the "monopoly" tactics. High prices, less-than-satisfying licences, FUD, Palladium-type stuff, etc.. Microsoft will never just one day turn around and start playing ball with everyone that hates them.
Also, what the fuck is Cringely talking about? XP is a windowing system? What the Hell. Firstly, KDE and GNOME don't just "sit atop Linux"; they sit atop X, which sits atop Linux. Secondly, the ability to get a C:\ prompt in XP does not mean that MS-DOS is hiding underneath. I mean, don't they call "the C:\ prompt" in Linux a terminal emulator? Windows emulates MS-DOS.
Anyway, really the point of that article shouldn't have been the whole thing about DOS, the point should've been building the OS itself on the Linux kernel. Either way, not going to happen.:p
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Hmpf. All the proposed names (official and otherwise) sound really lame to me. Wouldn't "Chimaera" work?
adj.
1. Feeling or showing a lack of interest or concern; indifferent.
2. Feeling or showing little or no emotion; unresponsive.
The plural of "virus" is "viruses". Aside from that, Latin plurals end in "i", not "ii". For example, "magus" becomes "magi", not "magii". The notion of Latin plurals ending in "ii" probably comes from such words as "radii" (plural of "radius"). The reason "radii" has two "i"s is because "radi-us-" becomes "radi-i-".
"In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. [...] Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms." (taken from here) Also, "viri" is Latin for "men", so that's not it either. The word is "viruses".
I know i'm coming off like a jerk here, and normally i don't post just to criticise someone's spelling, but "virii" is a plague. It's because of mistakes like this that we have two words for "disc", and the bizarre spelling of "Thames" (i.e. people trying to make English correspond to its Latin/Greek roots). Anyway, i just thought i'd point that out. That word really bothers me (which i guess is somewhat sad).
Sources:/ v/virus.html
- http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language
- http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html
PS: Otherwise an interesting post, heh.
Please stop equating/comparing/relating every single fucking thing to 09/11. It's only a similar situation in that they knew but didn't tell anyone. What if i knew the exact time you would be born, but i didn't tell your mom? Similar situation, right? What if i knew how long the cookies were going to last before you bought them, but i didn't tell anyone? Similar situation, right?
Right, it won't have any effect at all on MSN. However, i really doubt that that's the goal. And, like the previous reply said, nobody that has the gall to use Opera will want/need to go to msn.com anyway. And even if they do, it's not like it translates it into some foreign language or something. With just a tiny bit of extra concentration, you can clearly make out what it's saying. I don't know why anyone (Opera user or not) would go to MSN's page anyway, unless they were using the "chat" link or the "Hotmail" link. Nothing else on that page has much original content.
Um... granted, IE6 isn't really a revolutionary leap from IE5.5 (i.e. it doesn't add very many useful features), but how is it not "mature"? The image resizing shit that comes default is like the most retarded feature ever, but that can easily be disabled. After that, it's pretty much exactly the same as IE5.5 for most intents and purposes. What exactly is holding you back? How does Microsoft wanting you to upgrade from your free browser to a newer, presumably better version of your free browser support the Microsoft marketing machine? It's just a software upgrade.
To go even further, here's your typical implementation of AIM for Windows. And then there's Apple's implementation of AIM.
And i don't even have to mention their hardware. Sigh... i hope you get paid handsomely, noble Apple design team. WE SALUTE YOU!
And now a tip for you! Spend your time learning how to take a joke. Wouldn't that be more worthwhile than flaming people on Slashdot? Perhaps the ability to detect humour stems from being literate. I don't know how you can possibly misspell a punctuation mark, but (congratulations!) you managed to do so... five, maybe six (can't quite tell where one sentence ends and another begins) times. And why did you put "snazzy" in quotes? Are you quoting case modders? Because i know a good few, and they never say "snazzy". My $2e-2.
Um, no? When the poster says "the recently-released Opera 7.0", they mean Opera 7 FINAL.
Two, Nintendo is not making this. Read the article, kthx.
Three, Nintendo is not dying.
Anyway, i fail to see how $199 is over-priced for an MP3/CD player. My brother has a 10-gig iPod, and it's really really nice, but you have to look at a couple of things when considering an iPod:
01.) No CD support. -- That means you can't just pop in one of your friends' audio CDs when, say, you're in the car. It also means that when you get tired of what's on your iPod, you have to hook it up to the computer, delete stuff from it, and then transfer stuff to it; whereas with the MP3/CD player, you could carry a CD booklet in your bookbag or car or whatever, and just switch between 700 megs of MP3s whenever you want.
02.) It's expensive. -- No matter what size of an iPod you get (unless you get a used one off eBay or something), the iPod costs, like you said, $100 more than any MP3/CD player out there today. And add $100 each time you go to a higher size.
03.) Requires FireWire. -- I guess you're all set if you have a newer Mac (and if you do, you can probably afford a 20-gig iPod anyway :p ), but if you don't, there's a very good chance that you're going to have to buy a $40 FireWire PCI card when you order your iPod. This raises the actual price of your iPod, and it depends on you having an extra PCI slot.
Really, the only thing you need for an MP3/CD player is a CD burner, and pretty much any computer you buy today will have one, or will have an option. I can't imagine buying a new computer without at least a CD-RW drive. Then again, you don't really even need that. You could just play regular CDDA if you wanted, heh.
What i'm really looking for is an Ogg/CD player. That would own.
Sure, AIM and Yahoo! are filled with people in that age range, but... have you ever actually joined an AIM chat? The second you step into one you're flooded with shit like A?S?L??@??#?@#@(#(@*!@!@0// PRESSS 111 FPR CYBARSECHS@?@/2/2//32#L@K#JL@KJl3jl2 LOLOROOFJKLMANOROFLL:K@j32 in yellow-highlighted green 32-point italic Times New Roman.
Not a place i'd like to hang out in. That's why i got "addicted" to IRC. The good majority of people i've met on IRC are actually intelligent. Most of them know how to spell the words "you" and "are", and some of them even separate ideas with punctuation marks and/or new lines.
"IRC", that's what us kids (the ones that know what the fuck they're talking about) call it nowadays. My dad has quite enough money to fail on this endeavour, but thank you for your sincere concern. Even if this whole thing puts us out of tens of thousands of dollars, we have that to spend. I'm not worried about it, he seems pretty confident. And i'll research on that book, just to see what you're talking about. But i'm thinking my dad's ass is pretty well covered. He has two "OC-3s" running right now, and he only has a few thousand dial-up users. He has bandwidth to share, and money to spend. And Mediacom (the cable company here) offers horrible cable service for around $100 per month (including modem leasing). Their service totally dies at night, when everyone gets home from school/work, and their speeds are horrible at any time. Their latency is even worse: game play is almost impossible. I know a few people that would probably give up the slightly higher speeds of cable and downgrade to 128-kbit wireless if they had decent pings. kthxbai suh
I'm not sure. The transceiver itself is $300, and then the external antenna is like $50. I can get more detailed information later, i don't have it on me right now. Most of the antennas themselves (the ones on the water towers) don't actually operate on 2.4 GHz (à la 802.11b), but i think the wireless NICs themselves do. Not sure. We use Lucent/whoever-makes-it-now Orinoco cards at home, they're not that expensive either, but they're all in the house, no externals required.
I don't know, maybe your ISP is genuinely horrible. I couldn't say. But try to think about all that stuff next time you say a wireless service doesn't give a crap. It's really hard to set all this stuff up, and really hard to find some middle ground between price and speed.
I understand fine how DALnet works. There are dozens of persons, like you said, that are working damned hard to keep DALnet going. I know first-hand the effects of a DDoS attack: my dad runs a small (as in, regional) ISP, and it's been under attack by spammers for nearly a year. His single mail server, which had served him well for nearly 6 years, were not adequate to withstand the MILLIONS of spam messages that were being received every day. Even after upgrading to three massive mail servers, he's still getting raped by these spammers. Anyway, i digress. Yes, stopping a DDoS attack can be incredibly difficult. I understand that. I never said you guys were doing a bad job stopping the attacks; i said you guys were doing a bad job informing the masses. That's all.
And, maybe you should read closer. I never insinuated that if DALnet doesn't serve my purpose properly it should be put out of its misery. Mostly all i do is chat on DALnet. I can't use DCC because of my firewall (which i don't control), so any downloading i do is done via FTP. So, in essence, the only purpose i want DALnet to serve is a means of chatting with the people that i like to talk to in the various channels there. I realise DALnet's history; i have no idea what you mean by "DALnet materialized out of thing air". It served a lot of people before i ever "stepped foot" in DALnet, i know.
And i don't want DALnet to die. On the contrary, i hope it lives, but only if it gets better. Getting disconnected constantly and having almost-a-week's worth of downtime is extremely annoying. I realise that the DAL people are doing everything they can to make things better -- it's not their fault. I'm not saying the DAL people are responsible for the problems on DALnet. But DALnet was made for chatting, and if i can't chat efficiently on DALnet, i'll move to somewhere else. The use of the term "put out of its misery" was meant as it normally does in, say, animals: if your animals are suffering, and keeping them alive means continuing their suffering, you put them to sleep. Sure, you can keep DALnet alive. But is that going to stop the DDoS attacks automatically? No, the problem starts there and ends there.
DALnet is great; i love it. It has great people, a great IRCd (services and such), and its administration generally seems extremely tight-knit and caring, as opposed to EFnet, which seems to be just one huge jumble of people and servers that have little contact with one another except when something goes wrong. But DALnet is suffering, it is having problems, it has had adverse effects on its users. That's what i meant. I wasn't attempting to insult DAL's administration, or its handling of the DDoS attacks. I was criticising (in only one part of my comment, mind you) DALnet's representation to its users (i.e. "telling us it'll be alright"). I hope you guys can stop the DDoS attacks, i really do. But the next time DALnet goes down for a week, people will move again. Not because they have no faith in you, not because they're ungrateful, not because they blame you for the attacks, but because they simply want the best tool for the job.
Yeah. :/
I don't know, could be good, could be bad. Good in the sense that the other networks get massive numbers to add to their communities. Bad in the sense that (01) the DDoSers might move on to those other networks, and (02) a lot of lamers hang out on DALnet that other networks may not exactly welcome with open arms. So it's a trade-off, i guess. If the servers and the administrators try to keep DALnet up indefinitely, they're going to end up alienating their users, and they'll move to other networks anyway (because the attacks will continue). On the other hand, if the DDoSers have a specific goal in mind, they may just give up and move on to other networks, or they may even spread out and attack multiple networks. But who can say what the DDoSers have in mind?
He already activated it, guy. Read again, he said he upgraded his hardware. When you upgrade your hardware, Windows makes you activate it again, because there's a possibility that maybe you just took the hard drive out and stuck it in another computer, i.e. getting two copies of XP out of one disc. XP makes you RE-activate the operating system when you make drastic changes to your hardware.
There have been at least two, possibly three or four, occasions where DALnet just shut down completely for a period of at least a few days (this latest one being in the range of like a week). After the first "big" DALnet shut-down, it seems a lot of channels moved to other networks; most of these channels have even gained numbers. Seems even if DALnet does return, a lot of the channels that left it will stay on their new-found networks. The few anime channels that came back to DALnet are very slowly gaining back their numbers, but they're nowhere near the levels they used to be. As of right now, the highest count is 51 users, which is really low for a DALnet anime channel. Highest warez channel count is 68, which is also really low for a DALnet warez channel. And even the MP3 channels, which probably were some of the biggest channels on DALnet, have lost major numbers. I seem to remember them being in the area of like 600+; current count is 166. So yeah, DALnet has really been taking it in the ass.
General consensus around the parts i hang out seems to be that losing DALnet wouldn't be such a bad thing. We'd all move our channels to other networks, and be done with it. Chat channels would really love EsperNet or IRCnet, and warez/MP3/ISO/PlayStation/etc. channels have a half-dozen networks to choose from, most notably EFnet (though i despise it). Anime channels would thrive on Aniverse. DALnet was great, but, unless things see a really dramatic improvement, i think there are many that would agree that it needs to be put out of its misery as soon as possible.
What has made this all really lame has been the fact that DALnet hasn't really said anything about this. Their eZine (the DALnetizen) has truly been the opposite of helpful throughout this whole ordeal. It seemed as though DAL was almost oblivious to what was happening. There would be a paragraph about Christmas, a paragraph about the benefits of PHP, a paragraph about poems, a paragraph about some new op or something, and then tucked away in a little corner would be a little sentence or two along the lines of "ps dalnet si getitng ddosed pls bare w/ us thx". After this most recent attack, however, they've started to get their act together a bit, and have posted a lot more information regarding the situation. Information can really be helpful to their users, if they want to keep them.
Also not helping the situation are rumours(?) to the effect that the DALnet administration has resorted to childish finger-pointing, and have pretty much detached themselves from each other. DALnet isn't really doing a very good job of assuring its user base that it'll be alright. :/ Hopefully, if DALnet is to survive, this will be remedied.
And, finally, the biggest blow to DALnet has been the de-linking of several of its (best) servers. Almost all of the "good" servers, the ones that everyone had as their first picks, have disappeared. Even the "fall-back" servers seem to be gone. Evidently DALnet is picking up a few new (or renamed, maybe, i can't be sure myself) servers, even in light of the attacks, however.
So DALnet's fate is really unknown. No one can be sure, but for now it's functioning, at least in the sense that it has the ability to carry users. Who knows, though, it could be down again tomorrow.
Ha. I wish someone would call me "Doctor" just for talking about anime. Imagine myself, an expert in my field, travelling the globe to respond to anime emergencies!
(5) to profit!!
Somebody had to say it.
... Were you beaten as a child?
I also noticed the article said "making it a federal crime to sell or rent violent video games to anyone under 18". So what is this saying? Is it saying that they're going to put an umbrella over "Teen"- and "Mature"-rated games, and put them all in the same category as "Adults Only"? Those categories of games both have "violence" in them. Or, does it simply mean it's bumping the "suitable age" for "Mature"-rated games up to 18 (it being 17 right now), and making the rules regarding selling/renting more strict? If it's the latter, i don't suppose it matters to anyone around here, except for maybe those people that are just about to turn 17, and think they're going to be buying all kinds of M-rated games, heh.
Anyway, from the point of view of someone like myself, who can't rent or buy those games anyway, all it means is that i'll have to have my mom with me on the very rare occasion that i go to a store and buy a violent video game. Generally ordering off the Internet solves that problem, and if this law affects that, i'll just use my parents' credit card instead of my own. The only lame thing is that i'll have to wait an extra year before i'm able to buy the games i've been playing my whole life, because some 70-year-old Congresspersons who've never played a fucking video game in their lives decided that i couldn't handle it yet.
That's the real problem here, i think. These people in Congress, they've never played a video game in their lives, much less a violent one. Why're they doing this, then? Probably because some horrible and over-protective parents called them and told them about how Goldeneye and Metal Gear Solid and Half-Life are undermining their effectiveness as parents. The problem, then, extends to the parents, who obviously can't control their children by themselves, and need the government to hold their hands. Because these super-conservative blame-the-media retards see stuff like Columbine happening, and think to themselves, "gee whiz, this couldn't be caused by people ridiculing and discriminating against these kids, and making their lives miserable, it's gotta be THE GAMES and THE MUSIC!". Which is flawed thinking, either way you look at it.
Anyway, it doesn't bother me too much. As long as they don't pass a law that says my parents have to be in the room with me when i play the games (<COUGH>stupid-fuck-rated-R-laws</COUGH>) , heh.
Building Windows on UNIX, presumably Linux, doesn't mean anything. Define "build". Microsoft can take Linux, and taint it in any way they see fit. They would no doubt use "non-standard" calls, APIs, etc. (i'm no programming expert, heh), even if they did build Windows on UNIX. The prospect of a universal standards system is one of the things that gets UNIX guys so hot. Everything pretty much runs the same way on UNIX, no matter what distribution you have, what "form" you have (Linux/BSD/commercial UNIX/whatever), mostly not even what processor you have. UNIX is UNIX. Microsoft would certainly change that if UNIX was a factor in Windows. Microsoft wants you to buy Microsoft UNIX, and buy products made for Microsoft UNIX; they don't want to be compliant with other operating systems. As such, you've lost a high proportion of UNIX guys already.
Assuming, however, that Microsoft did manage to make a good OS built on UNIX, and even a lot of the UNIX guys liked it, you still have the "monopoly" argument. Microsoft likes their income. They like the fact that their products are used all around the world. They're still going to employ the "monopoly" tactics. High prices, less-than-satisfying licences, FUD, Palladium-type stuff, etc.. Microsoft will never just one day turn around and start playing ball with everyone that hates them.
Also, what the fuck is Cringely talking about? XP is a windowing system? What the Hell. Firstly, KDE and GNOME don't just "sit atop Linux"; they sit atop X, which sits atop Linux. Secondly, the ability to get a C:\ prompt in XP does not mean that MS-DOS is hiding underneath. I mean, don't they call "the C:\ prompt" in Linux a terminal emulator? Windows emulates MS-DOS.
Anyway, really the point of that article shouldn't have been the whole thing about DOS, the point should've been building the OS itself on the Linux kernel. Either way, not going to happen. :p