Bet you anything he works longer hours than he did at his 'real job' to make anywhere near as much money.
I wouldn't be so sure. When I was playing UO actively (I sold my accounts in July 2002, only to open a new one earlier this year, though I haven't logged in for months) there was already a buzzing business surrounding ingame items. At the time, the exchange was generally something like:
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100 2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and sell it as 10 lots of 1 million gold at $15 a pop 3) !!!Profit!!!
Or:
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100 2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and buy up tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of cut leather with the gold you got from eBay, 3) Sell the cut leather in lots of 60,000 on eBay 4) !!!Profit!!!
Often the deals wouldn't involve eBay, you'd just arrange 3 or 4 in-game bulk trades at bargain prices for some item, and then resell smaller quantities of that item right back on Tradespot for a higher price.
The people who are really making money from UO aren't the ones sitting around mining all day. They're the ones who spend a few hours making smart trades. It's sort of like the stock market; the guys working the factory are making minimum wage, but people trading that company's stock are the ones making real money.
Oh, and blockquoth the article,
"It has more than 225,000 active players, who spend up to 20 hours per week in Britannia."
Geez, I used to spend 10 or more hours a day playing UO. I guess that qualifies me as a reformed addict...
I've always thought that Microsoft brought quite a bit of entertainment value to Usenet newsgroups. There's nothing like loading up alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.$YOUR_TASTE and seeing a post thusly:
From: Jason Doe <jason@example.com> Subject: Writing In Sick
Bob,
I haven't been feeling well lately. I will probably be staying home today and perhaps tomorrow unless I feel better. Please tell Mark that I will be completing my assignments as soon as I get back to the office. I hope to be back Monday but it may be later than that before I'm feeling OK again.
Thanks,
Jason
-- Jason Doe Senior Programmer ABC Corporation, Inc. 202-555-1212 Ext. 555 jason@example.com
Microsoft(TM), we combine your email and newsgroup program into one. To which porno newsgroup do you want to accidentally send your personal email today?
Ah, right. Let me guess... You're a MIT student, and you need to justify your hording of an entire class A block.
An entire class A? MIT has 10317 students. When you divide MIT's/8 (16387064 addressable IPs, excluding.0s and.255s) among these students, that means that each MIT student only has a paltry 1588 IP addresses. Let's assume that, for each student, a quarter of his IPs are used up by administrative servers around campus, now all of a sudden each MIT student has only 1191 IP addresses for his or her own personal use!
An entire class A, hah! What is a poor student supposed to do with such few IPs, you insensitive clod?! That's barely enough to assign a unique network address to each pr0n movie;)
I've heard rumors of how AOL users are more immune, simply because of their Time Warner affiliation.
If AOL users are more immune, it's probably because of their dialup affiliation, not their Time Warner affiliation (who's sharing many MP3s on a 33.6 connection? Broadband users likely make up a proportionally larger number of sharers.).
This probably won't be on any.gov sites yet as it hasn't been introduced... It's just a draft. If you check the PDF, the date of presentation is still blank.
I'd keep an eye on Thomas over the next week or so. Once it's been read on the floor, it'll wind up there.
How many DMCA cases have actually been run through the system?
Very few that I'm aware of, and that's the whole problem.
The DMCA essentially presupposes guilt, so ABC Corp doesn't even have to bother going to court... They just fire off a DMCA takedown notice. ISPs or other third parties little choice but to shutdown the target site - even if there's nothing illegal going on - lest they be found a party to any infringement that might be taking place.
If you look at the chart, 2 of the top 5 ARE running Windows 2000.
I presume you're talking about this chart (the one linked in the story doesn't show OS), which lists the top hosting providers over the last 24 hours... Not for the month of June.
In any case, I'm a bit skeptical of the data. They seem to be monitoring the providers' own websites, not their clients' machines or sites. For example, the 24 hour chart shows Interland listed as Win2K... That may be true of www.interland.com, but most of the Interland clients I know are either running dedicated *nix boxen, or running off Solaris virtual hosting accounts at Interland's Communitech branch.
Regardless, I certainly wouldn't rank a host based on their ability to keep their site up. Most if not all of them serve their corporate site from a server unrelated to their clients, and the site (and server itself) are rarely messed with. This is especially true with shared/dedicated hosts.
Am I the only one whose hide has been saved by "worthless GPS navigation and DVD units"?
Well, I can't say as I've ever used an in-car GPS, but I'm interested in your method of saving your hide with the DVD unit. How does it work, exactly; do you just pop in The Matrix and consult the oracle?
Instead of "Spam Arrest" they could just change their names to "Fuck Shitters"
Dear AssFace,
I am writing to you as an agent of Slashdot user Motherfucking Shit, sole owner of copyright to the mark "Motherfucking Shit."
It has come to my attention that your recent Slashdot post makes use of the terms "Fuck" and "Shit" in close proximity. My client, the esteemed Motherfucking Shit, has taken great pains to establish a reputable presence on Slashdot, and it is our position that your use of the term "Fuck Shitters" is confusingly similar to Motherfucking Shit's intellectual property.
I hereby request that you immediately cease and desist all usage of the term "fuck shitters."
Regards,
Sleazebag J. Sleazebag III, Esq. The Law Firm of Bend, Emover, and Screw
Re:Problems with newer versions
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The PHP people need to provide ways that people can upgrade the versions of PHP on their system such that they can be reasonably sure that existing users aren't suddenly going to find their sites don't work.
The only major compatibility issue that I can think of between, say, the 4.1 branch and the 4.3 branch is that register_globals defaults to 'Off' in newer versions. If you leave it that way after installing, then yes, a lot of older scripts will break. Most of the shared/virtual hosting providers I've had to do script installs on, which have actually upgraded their PHP versions, just installed 4.2x or 4.3x and then manually turned register_globals back to 'On' in the php.ini file.
To the best of my recollection, there isn't much else that's not backwards-compatible. Even where functions have been renamed (e.g. socket_get_status), the old function names still work, and while deprecated, they don't seem to be going anywhere soon. I have no trouble digging up stuff I wrote back in '99 or 2000 and getting it to work under PHP 4.3; though I do have to enable register_globals in those cases.
Only problem I ever ran into with PHP where stuff quit working after an upgrade was on a test Apache2 server. It turned out to be a bug related to posted form data. I wouldn't use Apache2/PHP on a production server yet anyway, though; and 1.3.27 still gets the job done. I haven't had time to play with PHP5 yet, so I'm not sure what the differences are in that version.
I agree at the surprising number of hosts who simply haven't updated, though. There are a lot of hosts still running 4.1x, and even (yikes) 4.06, who just won't upgrade for whatever reason. I do most of my coding these days on 4.2 or 4.3, and have run into plenty of belligerent hosts who refuse to upgrade from a two-year-old release. Typically I just have my clients move to a better host; the providers who don't stay reasonably with the times will eventually figure out that it's hurting their bottom line.
What else do you expect?
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday afternoon that Orwell's dystopian vision of the future, in which Big Brother used technology as a form of social control, 'didn't come true, and I don't believe it will.'"
Does anyone expect Bill Gates to say "Yes, Big Brother is coming alive and we're helping to make it happen?" Or "Total Information Awareness will really take hold once Longhorn is released to consumers?"
Let's get real. Microsoft may be innocent in terms of Orwellian observations, or they may be a massive conspirator in making such surveillance happen. Microsoft may be a willing participant in the Magic Lantern conspiracy, or they may be a virulent detractor to such a program. The truth is that none of us will ever really know for sure until it's too late.
Do I think Bill himself hates the idea of an Orwellian technological see-all-evil? Yes, I do - the man is human, after all, and quite the philanthropist to boot. Do I trust his company to follow up? No, I don't.
BillG can say what he likes. It doesn't make me any more confident.
who cares if his hired webmaster uses unliscenced JS? it's not the senator, i'll tell you that - he probably doesn't even know about it.
Try telling that to, say, the BSA - "So our webmaster was using some pirated software, we didn't know, it's not our fault!" - and see how far that gets you...
I've mirrored the.torrent file here. I removed the spaces from the filename, but it's otherwise identical to the copy from ByteMonsoon and I'm downloading from it now.
do you not think SCO's lawyers would realize if they just made up a bunch of crap that IBM's massive legal team wouldn't crush them to a pulp?
Yes, I think they would. I seem to recall a certain giant software company submitting faked videos during antitrust hearings, and the federal government could (at least in theory) deal a much bigger blow than IBM.
If Microsoft is willing to purjure itself by throwing a bunch of bullshit into court, why wouldn't SCO be willing to do so? After all, SCO stands to lose far more than MS would have.
For example I really wish there was some way to do gradiated speed limits. Some sort of transponder (similar to the tolls) or a broadcasting black box that lets the police know you are qualified to go that speed (so one doesn't get stopped without cause/waste police time etc...).
You aren't the only one who's been dreaming of this.
Been driving for 5 years, accident-free? I think you should be allowed to go +5 on the interstate without the cops bugging - not that they generally do anyway for 5 miles over the limit - but this could give younger drivers a bit of leeway. You'd earn an additional +5mph per 5 years, until you hit 30; at which time your bonus caps at +15. Speed limit's 65? If you're 30 and you've been driving for 15 years wreck-free, you should be able to do 80 without being pulled over. Again, this is only the interstate I'm thinking of, the bonus would only apply there.
When you hit 30, assuming you remained accident-free, you'd get 10 years worth of +15mph driving. As soon as you hit 40, the bonus starts dropping by 5mph every 5 years, to compensate for the facts that a) aging drivers generally have slower response times and b) older drivers are generally more likely to have health or vision issues.
In short, assuming a healthy and wreck-free driver all the way:
15 years old: +0 20 years old: +5 25 years old: +10 30 years old: +15 35 years old: +15 40 years old: +15 45 years old: +10 50 years old: +5 55 years old: +0
If at any time you had a wreck, developed a vision problem, or had any other physical issue which impaired your driving, you'd lose your bonus forever. States differ on the number of years before a drivers' license renewal is necessary (here it's 4 years) so they'd have to all settle on a 5 year interval. Not a bad thing IMO.
I always envisioned such a system using specially-hued license plates, but in this day and age a transponder might not be such a bad idea. Though I imagine both the specially-hued tags _and_ the transponders would be popular on the black market.
The article says that an infected machine will try to get on to the internet, and will try dialing the modem if it has to. Surely the most interesting machines are those with fast good connections - not people on crappy slow modems...
No, the most interesting machines are those which aren't connected to the public network at all. The servers at your bank which track your balance, those mysterious "power grid" servers that HomeSec keeps spreading cyberterror FUD about, military computers with Top Secret documents, etc.
These machines are unlikely to be interfaced with a public net at all, especially not sitting on a fat pipe; but many of them have to network _somehow_. Regular modems, ISDN, etc. aren't quite dead yet.
Something cannot be "blatantly obvious." "Blatant," by definition, is "Offensively obvious." Thus, saying something is "blatantly obvious" is the equivalent of saying it is "offensively obvious obvious." It's like saying "PIN number," or "UPC code."
I take it you'd prefer "patently obvious" instead?:)
The Supreme Court, Justice White, held that defendants did
not have reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth
Amendment in garbage which they placed in opaque bags outside their
house for collection by trash collector.
The problem is that the case doesn't involve dumpster diving. Essentially, the cops suspected that a guy was a drug dealer. He put out the garbage, they picked it up and went through it, and got a search warrant based upon the fact that they found paraphernalia among his trash. When they served the warrant, they found narcotics in his house and busted him.
There are two obvious and different interpretations of this ruling:
1) When you place your garbage outside your house [I saw no mention of refuse from businesses], it's not illegal for anyone to take it.
or,
2) When you place your garbage outside your house, it's not illegal for the police to take it and use what they find to obtain a search warrant.
IANAL, but I lean toward #2. This was a 4th Amendment case (illegal search and seizure) as best as I can tell, not a trespassing or theft case. I looked, but couldn't find any other related rulings or court opinions. I'd be interested in seeing em, though, if others can dig up more.
...how come nobody seems to be putting up gag avatars? The parent post was made in jest, but hey, this is Slashdot; I was expecting to see at least one person with a pic of the Goatse Guy next to their profile! I guess maybe it's because we geeks are the type to have a digicam and a self pic, and thus no need to upload something bogus, but I'm really surprised to see so many apparently legit photos. I wonder how that ratio pans out for the total userbase.
I stuck up a pic of John Ashcroft for the time being, but I'm trying to find (or crop) some hardcore porn that's just the right size...
Slashdot Mirror
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100
2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and sell it as 10 lots of 1 million gold at $15 a pop
3) !!!Profit!!!
Or:
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100
2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and buy up tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of cut leather with the gold you got from eBay,
3) Sell the cut leather in lots of 60,000 on eBay
4) !!!Profit!!!
Often the deals wouldn't involve eBay, you'd just arrange 3 or 4 in-game bulk trades at bargain prices for some item, and then resell smaller quantities of that item right back on Tradespot for a higher price.
The people who are really making money from UO aren't the ones sitting around mining all day. They're the ones who spend a few hours making smart trades. It's sort of like the stock market; the guys working the factory are making minimum wage, but people trading that company's stock are the ones making real money.
Oh, and blockquoth the article,Geez, I used to spend 10 or more hours a day playing UO. I guess that qualifies me as a reformed addict...
An entire class A, hah! What is a poor student supposed to do with such few IPs, you insensitive clod?! That's barely enough to assign a unique network address to each pr0n movie
In fact, the infamous munkyspanker21 KaZaA user's subpoena was sent to Time Warner - the good 'spanker apparently uses RoadRunner cable.
This probably won't be on any .gov sites yet as it hasn't been introduced... It's just a draft. If you check the PDF, the date of presentation is still blank.
I'd keep an eye on Thomas over the next week or so. Once it's been read on the floor, it'll wind up there.
Lions and tigers and BearShares, oh my...
The DMCA essentially presupposes guilt, so ABC Corp doesn't even have to bother going to court... They just fire off a DMCA takedown notice. ISPs or other third parties little choice but to shutdown the target site - even if there's nothing illegal going on - lest they be found a party to any infringement that might be taking place.
In any case, I'm a bit skeptical of the data. They seem to be monitoring the providers' own websites, not their clients' machines or sites. For example, the 24 hour chart shows Interland listed as Win2K... That may be true of www.interland.com, but most of the Interland clients I know are either running dedicated *nix boxen, or running off Solaris virtual hosting accounts at Interland's Communitech branch.
Regardless, I certainly wouldn't rank a host based on their ability to keep their site up. Most if not all of them serve their corporate site from a server unrelated to their clients, and the site (and server itself) are rarely messed with. This is especially true with shared/dedicated hosts.
I am writing to you as an agent of Slashdot user Motherfucking Shit, sole owner of copyright to the mark "Motherfucking Shit."
It has come to my attention that your recent Slashdot post makes use of the terms "Fuck" and "Shit" in close proximity. My client, the esteemed Motherfucking Shit, has taken great pains to establish a reputable presence on Slashdot, and it is our position that your use of the term "Fuck Shitters" is confusingly similar to Motherfucking Shit's intellectual property.
I hereby request that you immediately cease and desist all usage of the term "fuck shitters."
Regards,
Sleazebag J. Sleazebag III, Esq.
The Law Firm of Bend, Emover, and Screw
To the best of my recollection, there isn't much else that's not backwards-compatible. Even where functions have been renamed (e.g. socket_get_status), the old function names still work, and while deprecated, they don't seem to be going anywhere soon. I have no trouble digging up stuff I wrote back in '99 or 2000 and getting it to work under PHP 4.3; though I do have to enable register_globals in those cases.
Only problem I ever ran into with PHP where stuff quit working after an upgrade was on a test Apache2 server. It turned out to be a bug related to posted form data. I wouldn't use Apache2/PHP on a production server yet anyway, though; and 1.3.27 still gets the job done. I haven't had time to play with PHP5 yet, so I'm not sure what the differences are in that version.
I agree at the surprising number of hosts who simply haven't updated, though. There are a lot of hosts still running 4.1x, and even (yikes) 4.06, who just won't upgrade for whatever reason. I do most of my coding these days on 4.2 or 4.3, and have run into plenty of belligerent hosts who refuse to upgrade from a two-year-old release. Typically I just have my clients move to a better host; the providers who don't stay reasonably with the times will eventually figure out that it's hurting their bottom line.
Let's get real. Microsoft may be innocent in terms of Orwellian observations, or they may be a massive conspirator in making such surveillance happen. Microsoft may be a willing participant in the Magic Lantern conspiracy, or they may be a virulent detractor to such a program. The truth is that none of us will ever really know for sure until it's too late.
Do I think Bill himself hates the idea of an Orwellian technological see-all-evil? Yes, I do - the man is human, after all, and quite the philanthropist to boot. Do I trust his company to follow up? No, I don't.
BillG can say what he likes. It doesn't make me any more confident.
I've mirrored the .torrent file here. I removed the spaces from the filename, but it's otherwise identical to the copy from ByteMonsoon and I'm downloading from it now.
:)
Any other mirrors?
If Microsoft is willing to purjure itself by throwing a bunch of bullshit into court, why wouldn't SCO be willing to do so? After all, SCO stands to lose far more than MS would have.
Been driving for 5 years, accident-free? I think you should be allowed to go +5 on the interstate without the cops bugging - not that they generally do anyway for 5 miles over the limit - but this could give younger drivers a bit of leeway. You'd earn an additional +5mph per 5 years, until you hit 30; at which time your bonus caps at +15. Speed limit's 65? If you're 30 and you've been driving for 15 years wreck-free, you should be able to do 80 without being pulled over. Again, this is only the interstate I'm thinking of, the bonus would only apply there.
When you hit 30, assuming you remained accident-free, you'd get 10 years worth of +15mph driving. As soon as you hit 40, the bonus starts dropping by 5mph every 5 years, to compensate for the facts that a) aging drivers generally have slower response times and b) older drivers are generally more likely to have health or vision issues.
In short, assuming a healthy and wreck-free driver all the way:
15 years old: +0
20 years old: +5
25 years old: +10
30 years old: +15
35 years old: +15
40 years old: +15
45 years old: +10
50 years old: +5
55 years old: +0
If at any time you had a wreck, developed a vision problem, or had any other physical issue which impaired your driving, you'd lose your bonus forever. States differ on the number of years before a drivers' license renewal is necessary (here it's 4 years) so they'd have to all settle on a 5 year interval. Not a bad thing IMO.
I always envisioned such a system using specially-hued license plates, but in this day and age a transponder might not be such a bad idea. Though I imagine both the specially-hued tags _and_ the transponders would be popular on the black market.
These machines are unlikely to be interfaced with a public net at all, especially not sitting on a fat pipe; but many of them have to network _somehow_. Regular modems, ISDN, etc. aren't quite dead yet.
http://www.lumiere.net/~fib/trash/5337i15.txt
An excerpt:The problem is that the case doesn't involve dumpster diving. Essentially, the cops suspected that a guy was a drug dealer. He put out the garbage, they picked it up and went through it, and got a search warrant based upon the fact that they found paraphernalia among his trash. When they served the warrant, they found narcotics in his house and busted him.
There are two obvious and different interpretations of this ruling:
1) When you place your garbage outside your house [I saw no mention of refuse from businesses], it's not illegal for anyone to take it.
or,
2) When you place your garbage outside your house, it's not illegal for the police to take it and use what they find to obtain a search warrant.
IANAL, but I lean toward #2. This was a 4th Amendment case (illegal search and seizure) as best as I can tell, not a trespassing or theft case. I looked, but couldn't find any other related rulings or court opinions. I'd be interested in seeing em, though, if others can dig up more.
Step 1: Register as many "first name" usernames as you can think of
Step 2: (???)
Step 3: PROFIT!!!
Assuming Step 2 turns out to be "Trepia reaches ICQ-esque saturation," I'll be living the high life with One. Hundred. Billion. Dollars.
...how come nobody seems to be putting up gag avatars? The parent post was made in jest, but hey, this is Slashdot; I was expecting to see at least one person with a pic of the Goatse Guy next to their profile! I guess maybe it's because we geeks are the type to have a digicam and a self pic, and thus no need to upload something bogus, but I'm really surprised to see so many apparently legit photos. I wonder how that ratio pans out for the total userbase.
I stuck up a pic of John Ashcroft for the time being, but I'm trying to find (or crop) some hardcore porn that's just the right size...