Something that the business industry already knew? Most companies are not running out and buying the latest and greatest computers for their offices. Why? No need. Why does Bob the data entry clerk need a 3ghz machine with a TI4600 and 2 gigs of ram on an asus board? He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this. Guess what, Bob has a 600mhz machine if hes lucky or if thats the min requirement for his Excel spreadsheet.
Kinda. Why? Well, pretty simple. Its eaisy to skewer and out right lie online (in life too but to a lesser extent). In communities like/. or even ebay, you can skewer your moderation/seller rating and make it seem like your in the right. An uninformed opinion can be modded up here and a horrible seller can make it look like hes a good seller.
Also, post count is used sometimes to deem how popular or right someone is. I could flame all day, have thousands of IBTL posts, and other various ways to boost postcount on a board thus making it look like I have been around forever and that my word should be taken as face value. Not a real problem on smaller or non-commercial boards but on a site that offers some kind of service for pay, this is an issue.
Another issue with online, one person can destroy a business. Getting multiple log ins/ips to register bogus complaints againt a company is easy. Some people even write scripts to do this. The issue here is say you goto buy something from an online vendor and check out their seller rating and its 2.3. Would you buy from them? Proably not. Too bad that horrible rating may have come from one guy who either got a bad deal or could even be a competitor.
What am I saying here? Take all of the things that make someone or some company good or bad with a grain of salt. Do your own research instead of just relying on one source or someones post count.
While Emulation is nice (dont have to buy a famicom to play the japanese titles) it just doenst have the same feel as playing the NES unless you have hacked a nes controler to a serial port and are outputing the video to a tv.
This is why projects like this one (although stupid) are still done. It's like taking a walk back though time to when you were younger. Square controler in your hand, annoingly small buttons, and the small little leap of joy when the cart would work right without having to go though the ritual. THIS is what makes even considering repairing an old unit like this worth while.
While this is pretty bad for the home consumer, its not as bad as it is for a large company who buys in bulk. Many of the larger companies, and even some smaller, will buy say 150 of the exact same type of system for their workers for various reasons. If this is an issue with that board, thats 150 computers that could die out for a known issue.
How many companies do you know have checked what mother board is in the, say, Dell Dimension 1234x Desktop Model? What they look at is they can buy it in bulk under a business license, it has a certain size hdd, and its easy to replace/repair. The Mobo on a business class machine like this isnt even taken into consideration unless you are looking for onboard something.
I understand that certain features are good, but the current trend of distros seems to be to add these in if i want them or not. I just want the ability to have an easy to install linux without all the crap thats added in.
If i want office tools, ill down load some. If I want a wysiwyg editor, ill download it. If i want an irc client... you get the picture.
With all these advocates now trying to push for generic windows like linux, were talking bloat bloat and more bloat. This is NOT the trend that I like seeing here.
Like i said before, I use linux because its not for my mother but for me, someone who knows about computers. As soon as it becomes another OS for my parents, it wont be what im looking for.
Really... is this a good idea? To make my mom use linux youd have to bloat the heck out of it, add in apps that make no sense in the way they work (outlook, etc..) and have a bunch of pointless fluff. All those things are what make windows horrible for people who have more than a basic knowledge of systems.
We, as knowledgeable computer users, want a more streamlined, less fluffed, more stable working enviroment. We know this, apparently others dont. Why this big push for Linux on desktops for the masses im not sure. It want created for this and making it like this is only going to make it bloated and unstable. Is this what we really want out of Linux? Do we want it filled with fluff and unwieldly apps just so Mom and Pop feel comfortable in it?
Now, I know someone is going to say "But you can install it like this and this and..." well that is true, but if the push is successful and it starts to seriously permiate the desktop market, don't you think that most if not ALL the major *nix distrubuters will start to package it like that?
I assumed everyone else did too. Last year it was dead. The number of percipitants was way down along with the retailers. Nothing like it used to be in the late 90's. Kind of sad to see such a staple of up and comming tech going down because of lack of intrest or overall funds.
I work for a small, privatly owned ISP. I do see alot of our older dial up customers going over the broadband, but more and more, they are cancelling because of lack of money. Even at around $20 a month or so many people see internet access as something extra not something they need.
Maybe this tred will turn around but I doubt it. Even if these customers do get back on firm ground, I see them going with broadband via cable, phone company, or even the electric company long before comming back to a dial up.
Looks like this article was written for people who just barely understand computers. It has more buzzwords and made up buzzwords than I've ever seen in an article like this. The steps they outline are ahh, well, kinda a "Well no kidding." setup and the details pretty shallow.
Personaly, I think that this is nothing more than another smoke screen to make people feel safe that the gov will eventually do something about a technology they barley understand but "know" is dangerous.
Also, does anyone else think that even the gov were to take steps to stop any type of worm, that privatly owned companies horribly configured servers and over seas servers that are unpatch are going to get automagicaly fixed cuz the US Gov says so? This is just about FUD if you ask me.
Shouldn't be. This should be on all the sites my mother goes to, like home and garden, etc... This community knows better than to randomly click 'OK' buttons and what not. Most of use don't run windows let alone IE. While its always interesting to hear about the goings on of slimy companies like this, its not really needed out side of a blub really.
On another note, I wonder when the gov will dip its big toe in and make stuff like this illegal. This is almost the equivlant of goign to the gas station and having the attendant try to install a gps device in my car without me asking for such a service first. While I REALLY don't want them to even look crosseyed at stuff like this, you know it will happen. Maybe we should get together with local reps now and try to draw up some kind of bill/law/etc.. with them before they start to do it themselves and mess it all up.
So by your idea of AI, most OS's are AI then? They figure out where to thread a process, allocate a certain amout of memory for it and run it so its not infringing on other programs. It does all this without us telling it to.
The issue here is I think that the term AI has become way to generic. It's being attached to anything that runs on its own doing some kind of function. The heart of what AI is/was/should be, I think, is the ability for it to actually perform some kind of random action or reaction to something random and have it correct.
IMO, I dont even feel that machines like Deep Thought are AI, just huge programs with massive ammouts of caculations with every move stored ever trying to figure out the best move.
Yes my view is pretty narrow and I should probably take off the blinders and look to the sides but its my opinion.
I dont think so. Just a lot of caculations. Its not like its trying to guess what move a human is going to do next then place a piece. This is nothing more than caculating the best possible placement of an object from a limited set of objects. Card counters do this thing all the time and so do machines. Why this even made any type of news outside of it being mildly unique befuddles me.
Arn't they still distributing illegal content even if its in a degraded form?? I'm not 100% positive on this but I really dont think this company legally owns all of these albums.
Now, lets say that the RIAA gives them the right to do so, isn't that also illegal as the DMCA is not out to "protect" the RIAA but the copyrite holders who sometimes may just be the artist in whos music is appearing on P2P networks and this company is corrupting?
At what point now can we or others take a step and use the DMCA against them? Remember, once the DMCA backfires in their faces, they are going to use all their power and money to have it repealed or changed yet again. Some of the parts of it are so ambiguous (sp?) that it can be interperted to suit OUR needs, specially in a case such as this.
Illegal or not, md5 checksums or not, all of this is a moot point really. People who do serious file trading have a list of people/friends who they normaly trade off of anyway. Increaing the trash ration of files in the wild of these networks will only stop a few while the heavy traders will continue along as if nothing happened.
This is yet another example of "Oh, you wont play with our toy? Well then, we will break yours!"
I think so. Seems that general laziness is more of a security threat than any other. It's much eaiser to leave a default password or make a simple one such as this than to generate either a unique one per modem or at the very least a unique one for the company.
Also, them blaming the user is totally bunk. 90% of home dsl users are lucky to beable to even run outlook express let alone go in and change a password on a router. This is more discusting than anything IMO. They should have atleast generated another password for these routers before they shiped them. Yes, people who run these types of connections should have more of a clue but companies have to start owning up to and taking actions to help prevent this when the main consumer for that product are people with little to no knowledge of comptuers.
I don't think so. These have been around in the US for a long time. I used to frequent a place right near where I lived many years ago (well not THAT many) and played Doom, Duke, and a bunch of older games like that. This is NOT something new to the US, its just was not, and probably really still is not, considered "main stream".
That's the problem with most peoples narrow views on subcultures in the US. If its not main stream, and it suddenly starts to become main stream, its something TOTALLY new and we are now behind the times. Nope, sorry, its always been there, not my fault you choose to only look at whats "in" at that moment and ignore various goings on in the non-lime light area's of the states.
that they try and say during the debates (if it goes that far) that games are helping to breed a state of uncaring twords terrorism. It's getting pretty old that the gov is using that excuse time and again to restrict our rights but the sad truth is alot of people are falling for it.
Seems that a car like this should be more geared twords business or people who buy on a leese. For the general buyer, a throw away car will not be all that hot of an idea. Having monthly payments on a limited income is what you try to avoid.
While this idea really isnt new, im suprised that Ford is one of the first to actually come out and say "Hey, this car wont last x yrs and its not made to."
One other thing, how enviromently friendly is a car like this anyway? Ya, it cuts down on emitions and fuel consumption but havning an entire car get retired and destroyed after a short period of time isnt all that great. The car will still have to be gutted, crushed, recycled back to workable material, all this generating waste and other nice byproducts. Looks like we might just be creating the same amout of toxins and waste just in another area.
What is considered "cracking" under these laws though. As far as I understand, cracking your own cd/dvd/playstation etc... disks falls under this.
Now, besides that issue, you have a various degree of things going on out there. Is doing a DDoS against the webs rootservers considered cracking? How about a host of other, non cracking related hacks and script kiddie things that would never EVER fall under the heading of pure cracking?
With the laws as broadly written for cyber crimes if i accidenty ftp into the wrong ftp site because of a typo (ftp.netger.com) I could get slammed with all kinds of illegal activity charges that will now be legal to trump up to these unseen levels.
I don't mind a law that actually helps to procute known crackers and black hats but we all KNOW that this will be used, like every other law lately, to pretty much put anyone who even thinks of doing something on the gray side of the internet into jail.
This is like some bass ackwards logic here. After reading it a few times you could read into it as "Welp, ours costs this much, so should yours, if not we cry foul."
Thats like Porche saying "Hey wtf!! Ford just put out a sports car for only $20k and ours costs $100k!! Your killing the market and its inovation!"
Seems to be the new trend lately though. If your losing either sue on some odd off beat related basis or cry foul cuz the other company is bigger. Instead of making a product BETTER (gasp!) they put up a smoke screen, make people look over there (dont look at our product, look at how much worse/expensive/etc.. there is) and hope and pray that people still buy their product. Inovation is gone. Welcome to the world of smoke and lawyers.
I do. As do other readers of that sight. YOU might not, and a majority of the/. community might not but guess what, it wasnt written for you but for the readers of that sight. Getting a bit greedy now aint ya?
Slashdot Mirror
Something that the business industry already knew? Most companies are not running out and buying the latest and greatest computers for their offices. Why? No need. Why does Bob the data entry clerk need a 3ghz machine with a TI4600 and 2 gigs of ram on an asus board? He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this. Guess what, Bob has a 600mhz machine if hes lucky or if thats the min requirement for his Excel spreadsheet.
Kinda. Why? Well, pretty simple. Its eaisy to skewer and out right lie online (in life too but to a lesser extent). In communities like /. or even ebay, you can skewer your moderation/seller rating and make it seem like your in the right. An uninformed opinion can be modded up here and a horrible seller can make it look like hes a good seller.
Also, post count is used sometimes to deem how popular or right someone is. I could flame all day, have thousands of IBTL posts, and other various ways to boost postcount on a board thus making it look like I have been around forever and that my word should be taken as face value. Not a real problem on smaller or non-commercial boards but on a site that offers some kind of service for pay, this is an issue.
Another issue with online, one person can destroy a business. Getting multiple log ins/ips to register bogus complaints againt a company is easy. Some people even write scripts to do this. The issue here is say you goto buy something from an online vendor and check out their seller rating and its 2.3. Would you buy from them? Proably not. Too bad that horrible rating may have come from one guy who either got a bad deal or could even be a competitor.
What am I saying here? Take all of the things that make someone or some company good or bad with a grain of salt. Do your own research instead of just relying on one source or someones post count.
While Emulation is nice (dont have to buy a famicom to play the japanese titles) it just doenst have the same feel as playing the NES unless you have hacked a nes controler to a serial port and are outputing the video to a tv.
This is why projects like this one (although stupid) are still done. It's like taking a walk back though time to when you were younger. Square controler in your hand, annoingly small buttons, and the small little leap of joy when the cart would work right without having to go though the ritual. THIS is what makes even considering repairing an old unit like this worth while.
end users... you had to ask?
While this is pretty bad for the home consumer, its not as bad as it is for a large company who buys in bulk. Many of the larger companies, and even some smaller, will buy say 150 of the exact same type of system for their workers for various reasons. If this is an issue with that board, thats 150 computers that could die out for a known issue.
How many companies do you know have checked what mother board is in the, say, Dell Dimension 1234x Desktop Model? What they look at is they can buy it in bulk under a business license, it has a certain size hdd, and its easy to replace/repair. The Mobo on a business class machine like this isnt even taken into consideration unless you are looking for onboard something.
This is a lanadmins worse nightmare now.
I understand that certain features are good, but the current trend of distros seems to be to add these in if i want them or not. I just want the ability to have an easy to install linux without all the crap thats added in.
If i want office tools, ill down load some. If I want a wysiwyg editor, ill download it. If i want an irc client... you get the picture.
With all these advocates now trying to push for generic windows like linux, were talking bloat bloat and more bloat. This is NOT the trend that I like seeing here.
Like i said before, I use linux because its not for my mother but for me, someone who knows about computers. As soon as it becomes another OS for my parents, it wont be what im looking for.
Really... is this a good idea? To make my mom use linux youd have to bloat the heck out of it, add in apps that make no sense in the way they work (outlook, etc..) and have a bunch of pointless fluff. All those things are what make windows horrible for people who have more than a basic knowledge of systems.
We, as knowledgeable computer users, want a more streamlined, less fluffed, more stable working enviroment. We know this, apparently others dont. Why this big push for Linux on desktops for the masses im not sure. It want created for this and making it like this is only going to make it bloated and unstable. Is this what we really want out of Linux? Do we want it filled with fluff and unwieldly apps just so Mom and Pop feel comfortable in it?
Now, I know someone is going to say "But you can install it like this and this and..." well that is true, but if the push is successful and it starts to seriously permiate the desktop market, don't you think that most if not ALL the major *nix distrubuters will start to package it like that?
I assumed everyone else did too. Last year it was dead. The number of percipitants was way down along with the retailers. Nothing like it used to be in the late 90's. Kind of sad to see such a staple of up and comming tech going down because of lack of intrest or overall funds.
I work for a small, privatly owned ISP. I do see alot of our older dial up customers going over the broadband, but more and more, they are cancelling because of lack of money. Even at around $20 a month or so many people see internet access as something extra not something they need.
Maybe this tred will turn around but I doubt it. Even if these customers do get back on firm ground, I see them going with broadband via cable, phone company, or even the electric company long before comming back to a dial up.
Looks like this article was written for people who just barely understand computers. It has more buzzwords and made up buzzwords than I've ever seen in an article like this. The steps they outline are ahh, well, kinda a "Well no kidding." setup and the details pretty shallow.
Personaly, I think that this is nothing more than another smoke screen to make people feel safe that the gov will eventually do something about a technology they barley understand but "know" is dangerous.
Also, does anyone else think that even the gov were to take steps to stop any type of worm, that privatly owned companies horribly configured servers and over seas servers that are unpatch are going to get automagicaly fixed cuz the US Gov says so? This is just about FUD if you ask me.
Shouldn't be. This should be on all the sites my mother goes to, like home and garden, etc... This community knows better than to randomly click 'OK' buttons and what not. Most of use don't run windows let alone IE. While its always interesting to hear about the goings on of slimy companies like this, its not really needed out side of a blub really.
On another note, I wonder when the gov will dip its big toe in and make stuff like this illegal. This is almost the equivlant of goign to the gas station and having the attendant try to install a gps device in my car without me asking for such a service first. While I REALLY don't want them to even look crosseyed at stuff like this, you know it will happen. Maybe we should get together with local reps now and try to draw up some kind of bill/law/etc.. with them before they start to do it themselves and mess it all up.
So by your idea of AI, most OS's are AI then? They figure out where to thread a process, allocate a certain amout of memory for it and run it so its not infringing on other programs. It does all this without us telling it to.
The issue here is I think that the term AI has become way to generic. It's being attached to anything that runs on its own doing some kind of function. The heart of what AI is/was/should be, I think, is the ability for it to actually perform some kind of random action or reaction to something random and have it correct.
IMO, I dont even feel that machines like Deep Thought are AI, just huge programs with massive ammouts of caculations with every move stored ever trying to figure out the best move.
Yes my view is pretty narrow and I should probably take off the blinders and look to the sides but its my opinion.
I dont think so. Just a lot of caculations. Its not like its trying to guess what move a human is going to do next then place a piece. This is nothing more than caculating the best possible placement of an object from a limited set of objects. Card counters do this thing all the time and so do machines. Why this even made any type of news outside of it being mildly unique befuddles me.
Mod me to troll of you like but this is not AI.
Arn't they still distributing illegal content even if its in a degraded form?? I'm not 100% positive on this but I really dont think this company legally owns all of these albums.
Now, lets say that the RIAA gives them the right to do so, isn't that also illegal as the DMCA is not out to "protect" the RIAA but the copyrite holders who sometimes may just be the artist in whos music is appearing on P2P networks and this company is corrupting?
At what point now can we or others take a step and use the DMCA against them? Remember, once the DMCA backfires in their faces, they are going to use all their power and money to have it repealed or changed yet again. Some of the parts of it are so ambiguous (sp?) that it can be interperted to suit OUR needs, specially in a case such as this.
Illegal or not, md5 checksums or not, all of this is a moot point really. People who do serious file trading have a list of people/friends who they normaly trade off of anyway. Increaing the trash ration of files in the wild of these networks will only stop a few while the heavy traders will continue along as if nothing happened.
This is yet another example of "Oh, you wont play with our toy? Well then, we will break yours!"
I think so. Seems that general laziness is more of a security threat than any other. It's much eaiser to leave a default password or make a simple one such as this than to generate either a unique one per modem or at the very least a unique one for the company.
Also, them blaming the user is totally bunk. 90% of home dsl users are lucky to beable to even run outlook express let alone go in and change a password on a router. This is more discusting than anything IMO. They should have atleast generated another password for these routers before they shiped them. Yes, people who run these types of connections should have more of a clue but companies have to start owning up to and taking actions to help prevent this when the main consumer for that product are people with little to no knowledge of comptuers.
I don't think so. These have been around in the US for a long time. I used to frequent a place right near where I lived many years ago (well not THAT many) and played Doom, Duke, and a bunch of older games like that. This is NOT something new to the US, its just was not, and probably really still is not, considered "main stream".
That's the problem with most peoples narrow views on subcultures in the US. If its not main stream, and it suddenly starts to become main stream, its something TOTALLY new and we are now behind the times. Nope, sorry, its always been there, not my fault you choose to only look at whats "in" at that moment and ignore various goings on in the non-lime light area's of the states.
that they try and say during the debates (if it goes that far) that games are helping to breed a state of uncaring twords terrorism. It's getting pretty old that the gov is using that excuse time and again to restrict our rights but the sad truth is alot of people are falling for it.
Seems that a car like this should be more geared twords business or people who buy on a leese. For the general buyer, a throw away car will not be all that hot of an idea. Having monthly payments on a limited income is what you try to avoid. While this idea really isnt new, im suprised that Ford is one of the first to actually come out and say "Hey, this car wont last x yrs and its not made to." One other thing, how enviromently friendly is a car like this anyway? Ya, it cuts down on emitions and fuel consumption but havning an entire car get retired and destroyed after a short period of time isnt all that great. The car will still have to be gutted, crushed, recycled back to workable material, all this generating waste and other nice byproducts. Looks like we might just be creating the same amout of toxins and waste just in another area.
What is considered "cracking" under these laws though. As far as I understand, cracking your own cd/dvd/playstation etc... disks falls under this. Now, besides that issue, you have a various degree of things going on out there. Is doing a DDoS against the webs rootservers considered cracking? How about a host of other, non cracking related hacks and script kiddie things that would never EVER fall under the heading of pure cracking? With the laws as broadly written for cyber crimes if i accidenty ftp into the wrong ftp site because of a typo (ftp.netger.com) I could get slammed with all kinds of illegal activity charges that will now be legal to trump up to these unseen levels. I don't mind a law that actually helps to procute known crackers and black hats but we all KNOW that this will be used, like every other law lately, to pretty much put anyone who even thinks of doing something on the gray side of the internet into jail.
This is like some bass ackwards logic here. After reading it a few times you could read into it as "Welp, ours costs this much, so should yours, if not we cry foul." Thats like Porche saying "Hey wtf!! Ford just put out a sports car for only $20k and ours costs $100k!! Your killing the market and its inovation!" Seems to be the new trend lately though. If your losing either sue on some odd off beat related basis or cry foul cuz the other company is bigger. Instead of making a product BETTER (gasp!) they put up a smoke screen, make people look over there (dont look at our product, look at how much worse/expensive/etc.. there is) and hope and pray that people still buy their product. Inovation is gone. Welcome to the world of smoke and lawyers.
I do. As do other readers of that sight. YOU might not, and a majority of the /. community might not but guess what, it wasnt written for you but for the readers of that sight. Getting a bit greedy now aint ya?