I can't say that I haven't given my address to people who "aren't stupid or assholes", but I doubt that this is the vector for most of the spam I receive.
You say you've had your POP3 account for over a year; I've had mine for nine years. In that time, I've posted it to Usenet, used it as a mailto: on web pages, signed up for things with it, and used this address to register domains, always unmunged, sans "NOSPAM" or "remove this" or "@@@".
Even if I'd done none of these, or did munge my address, I'd still get spam, albeit somewhat less. Spammers use dictionary attacks, too, or they create a list from/users, or your DSL provider "shares" your address with their "strategic partners". Never tasted that canned pink meat? You Will.
Enjoy it while you can, for I see a million penis enlargers in your future.
A few consulting firms and foundations have also surveyed the volume of spam. Jupiter Research estimates that the average e-mail user gets about 2,200 spams a year, and the Gartner Group says that corporate e-mail is 25 to 35 percent spam.
In 2002 I received over 18,000 pieces of spam, for a total of 163 megabytes. Compare this with the year 2000 (6 MB) and 1996 (183 KB). Based on the spam I've gotten so far this year, 2003 should see a bumper crop of 25 to 30 thousand pieces. This is just my POP3 account, and not my venerable Hotmail account that's now a smoking hole in the ground.
If I'm ever lucky enough to meet a spammer in person, I will kick him in the nuts repeatedly, until he sings soprano. Of course, I'll be chanting "Just hit Delete...just hit Delete" the whole time.
It's too wide for an AK-47 (7.62x39mm). It's really a Dragunov magazine (a sniper rifle based on the Kalashnikov action that's chambered for the old 7.62x54R round).
Thanks to the Tandy Corporation, Alec attended Stanford University, all expenses paid, where he earned his degree in Computer Science. After graduation, he was hired by Pets.com as Chief Techology Officer.
However, his life took a turn for the worse, when one of the network administrators discovered his secret cache of kitty porn, thousands of images of underage cats in compromising positions. He was hanging on to his job by a thread when the technology sector crashed, and he was the first to go. Currently, Alec works the midnight-to-8AM shift at Kinko's, where he can indulge his predilection for feline pornography between customers.
Shanna was not nearly as lucky as Alec, having been seduced by an assistant manager at the local Radio Shack, where she bartered sexual favors for boxes of floppy disks and packs of resistors and capacitors (she liked the pretty color codes). When she found out she was pregnant at age 16, the manager tried to induce a miscarriage using a battery-operated remote control monster truck toy. Shanna nearly bled to death in the mall's food court.
Fortunately, she received medical attention just in time, and went on to live a long, happy life as a camgirl, living off of gifts from her Amazon.com wish list sent by middle-aged male admirers. She was recently hired by the National Beef Council as a consultant, aiding them in their quest to feed cheeseburgers to anorexic teenage girls.
...Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC and Kenny G.
And this is a bad thing, how?
I mean, really: suppose an errant Tomahawk cruise missile took out any one of these "artists". My first thought would be "Why couldn't they have killed Bon Jovi, too?".
Now if they started using this copy protection scheme on the works of Zamfir, Master of the Pan Pipe, then I'd be pissed, and rightly so. Can't be mackin' tha ladiez without Masta Z, tha OG.
There are only a handful of weapons and communications systems in the field that weren't used in Gulf War I, such as the JDAM and JSOW air-dropped ordnance, or the IVIS tactical display used by US and British armored vehicles.
Some of the weapons used by both sides are positively ancient. The M2.50 caliber machine guns mounted on tanks, APCs, and Hummers were designed right after World War One, in the early Twenties, and have been in constant use ever since. The B-52H bombers -- the last of which rolled off the assembly line in 1963 -- were first conceived in 1949. Iraqi forces are armed with AK-47s (and the later AK-74 variants) that were first adopted by Soviet forces in the late '40s. The basic Scud missile design is nearly as old, and could be considered an adaptation of the German V-2 from WWII.
What I really find compelling is not these high- and low-tech implements of destruction, but the advances in communication and news-gathering that have taken place over the last 12 years. Not just the Internet, though that's certainly worthy of note, but the satellite phones and cameras used by reporters embedded with the troops and correspondents in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad.
True, Peter Arnett was reporting from his room in 1991, when the 43-day air war started, but he was tied to landlines and an Iraqi-controlled dish. Now he can send realtime audio and video with gear that can fit in a briefcase. Sat phones have gotten smaller, better, clearer. Yes, the frame rate suffers when more than 10% of the picture changes, and there are visible compression artifacts, but given time I'm sure it'll be just as good (or crappy) as NTSC video.
At the risk of sounding flippant in the face of the inevitable loss of human life and injuries, military and civilian, I can't help but think that this is the first High Definition War, and that they'll have the DVD box sets on the shelves for Christmas.
Except for the first year of his administration (gays in the military, health care reform), Clinton was not a liberal. He was a centrist, especially after the 1994 mid-term elections that swung control of Congress to the Republicans.
This is the president who signed into law welfare reform (over the objections of the League of Women Voters), pushed NAFTA (over the objections of the Democratic Party), and who had a number of Republican holdovers in his administration (Alan Greenspan, David Gergen, etc.).
And liberals aren't the only ones opposed to intervention: remember Pat Buchanan's opposition to Gulf War I and involvement in the Balkans? For most of the last decade, conservative lawmakers and pundits advocated a neo-isolationist policy, especially where national interest were hazy at best, and other institutions (such as the European Union) might have stepped up to resolve such situations.
Opposition to involvement in Kosovo was muted (though not non-existant; there were protests, but the participants numbered in the hundreds, not thousands) because of these two words: ethnic cleansing. Bombing Serbia to halt a genocide in the making fulfilled some people's definition of a "righteous war". Not all, and not exclusively liberals, conservatives, or any of the other misnomers that cheapen political dialog in the US.
Labeling Clinton a liberal is laughable. Jacob Javits was a liberal (and a Republican). Tip O'Neill was a liberal. Clinton was not, just as Tony Blair is a departure from the Labour party socialists of the '60s and '70s.
Have you ever heard someone talk about an x86 box this way?
Yes, but massive amounts of case-modding were involved.
Pardon the hackneyed analogy, but if NeXT was a Shelby Cobra, and Macs are like a gull-wing Mercedes, x86 boxes are '57 Chevys that get chopped, channeled, lowered, louvered, with chrome-plated exhausts, baby moon hubcaps, and 17 coats of hand-rubbed candy apple red paint and lacquer.
I can recall maybe two case-modded Macs mentioned on Slashdot (and a magnesium NeXT chassis that someone put into a furnace to see how well it would burn), but the number of articles on case-modded x86 PCs boggle the mind, like the Hello Kitty laptop, or the PC embedded in the mound of foam, or the PC-in-a-toolbox, or the one in the toaster...
Of course, my favorite case mod was the Vax (or was it an SGI?) that was converted into a mini refrigerator.
My father introduced me to the world of computing when I was just four years old. His company had bought an IBM System/360 for the Accounting Department and I was in awe. Keypunch machines, card sorters, massive line printers, banks of tape storage, a huge console with blinkenlights. This was back in the day when system administrators still wore long white lab coats.
I watched as my father, a CPA and comptroller, pulled himself into computer literacy by his bootstraps, poring over COBOL manuals and making flow charts with those green plastic templates. We assembled a DigiComp, and learned binary math together.
Fast forward forty years: he's retired, using a white-box PC running Win95 and three different versions of AOL to send mail and browse the Web. Every time I visit I need to diagnose a minor problem, a balky modem, not enough disk space, or just do some maintenance, like a defrag or scan, or clean up the cruft on his Taskbar (damn you Real Player!). I do it happily, because hey, family. At least I save my bitching for Slashdot.
My mother, on the other hand, is reasonably clueful. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that she writes software for payroll systems, or can rely on her employees for advice and assistance. Sometimes she'll ask me about tech stuff, but it's often general questions about things like Linux or XML (her products run on Windows).
Again, I'm happy to help when I can, though once I sent her to/., only because there was a relevant article on the front page. I received an e-mail about an hour later, with "What's all this about 'Hot Grits'? Is that something like Java? And what's a 'Beowulf cluster'?". I am grateful she didn't click on the wrong link, you know the one I mean.
So there's the two sides of the coin: one parent needs help with AOL, while the other can answer any question I might have about C++, even if troubleshooting hardware is outside of her skill set.
With the exception of text mode, Knoppix is just too bloated for older machines, and by "older" I mean anything less than a Pentium Pro 200, and even then I doubt you'd find it usable.
I recently had to diagnose a couple of computers a friend had found while dumpster diving, a P166 and a P-II 350, both with 32MB RAM. KDE ran like frozen molasses on the 166, though it was fine in text mode and I found out what I needed to know. The 350, however, a six-year-old Dell Optiplex, GX1 wouldn't boot from the CD, not even with the boot floppy inserted in A:\ (one of its problems was a busted IDE controller). I ended up using old Slackware boot/root floppies instead.
So yeah, Knoppix is useful when it's useful, but I'd suggest having a back-up plan, like the Linux-on-a-floppy distro, or Tom's Boot Disk, or even a Windows Rescue disk or DOS boot floppy, just in case.
I think your idea is short-sighted. First of all, there are works that can only be produced by a collaborative effort, movies and television shows for example. Prohibiting a corporate entity from holding the rights to their product would simply make them seek an alternative, a loop hole, such as assigning copyright to the producers or a studio attorney.
Second, this would penalize artists who make a living by selling the rights to their work to another party, such as authors who sell their books and articles to publishers, or professional songwriters who compose for non-writing singers. By not being allowed to sell their works, the value of their efforts would drop, even if they were able to license these works. Assigning a copyright is the equivalent of a permanent and exclusive license to reproduce a work.
Finally, and though you did not make this point, I fail to see the harm an extension of copyright (for everyone, not just Disney) does to the consumer. If a work has value, even an eighty-year-old cartoon like Steamboat Willie, people with buy it. If it doesn't, they won't. Just because something becomes public domain and becomes cheaper or free to own and enjoy, doesn't mean that people will prefer this over protected works. The commonly trotted out counter-example, that of out-of-print books or "abandonware" games and software, is a failure of the marketplace, not of copyright. If demand had been high enough, those books would never have gone out of print, and those games would still be distrubuted, even on an as-is no-tech-support basis, on shovelware CDs. Copyright is not the issue in these cases; it's simple supply-and-demand economics.
No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
So, how does one reconcile Mr. Gates's words with the words quoted in this post from yesterday's discussion about the development of Windows NT? "It's in Longhorn. Next bug." goes against Gates's words like the semen stains on Monica's blue dress contradicts the phrase "I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman".
I've tried hard to refrain from MSFT bashing, but when Bill opens his mouth and spouts bullshit like this, I just want to kick his teeth down his smug fucking throat. Monopolize this, asshole.
Since you've ruled out the iBook, I'd suggest that you look for a laptop that meets your requirements on the used market (eBay, local want ads, computer resellers, outlets that deal in refurbished and formerly leased equipment). Someone else will have already paid the Windows Tax for you, and the money you save will more than compensate for the time you'll have to spend scraping Windows off the hard drive and installing your operating system of choice.
I did write a letter to the Boston Globe about this new voting system, but apart from their automated reply, there was no "human" response. They've actually printed a couple of my letters, like the time I took them to task for conflating the Tuskegee Experiment with the Tuskegee Airmen. The Globe's a pretty good paper, on a par with the Washington Post, but sometimes even they fall back on the bad habits of lazy journalists (note to Jon Katz: Junis says all is forgiven, please come home).
Your link to the RISKS digest reminds me that I should submit this story to them; it's right up their alley, though RISKS seems to be more concerned with why the barn door was left open rather than preventing the horses from escaping.
And Mayor LaGuardia might be dead, but I'll bet he still casts a vote for the Manhattan Borough President every few years. Long live Tammany Hall.
Here in Allston, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, our votes were cast in a manner similar to many urban areas, with a mechanical voting machine older than I am, the kind that has a big lever that closes a curtain and a myriad small switches for selecting candidates or casting votes for referenda.
I know that these machines have many drawbacks: they cost a lot of money to maintain, store, and "program", though I've always assumed that to "rig" these machines too commit wholesale fraudulent voting would be to time consuming and complex to pull off. Hence, I had a certain amount of faith that the lever I'd pull would actually correspond to the name on the paper strip, and my desired vote would be tallied. I know also that this faith was rooted in sentimentality; I'd accompanied my parents into machines just like that when I was a kid, back in the Sixties.
Two elections ago, however, during a primary vote in September, there was a man at the polling place who was demonstrating a new system, produced by LHS Associtates of Methuen, MA, the "Accu-Vote" system. It used paper ballots, with small circles like on a standardized multiple choice test (like SATs, except without the need for the No. 2 pencil). There was an optical scanner that looked somewhat like a paper shredder, the kind that fits on top of a wastepaper basket. You fed the ballot through the scanner and it read the marks, ejecting the paper out the other end, into a bag, thus preserving a paper trail in case of a recount.
I filled out one of these sample ballots. There were "joke" choices on the ballot, and I intentionally mis-voted, to see how fault-tolerant the system was. Under "Mayor", I placed a check mark in the box next to "Fiorello LaGuardia". For "Board of Cartoon Characters", I put a tiny dot next to "Bugs Bunny". Under "Superhero Committee", I filled in the box for "Wonder Woman", intentionally overfilling the mark, and for "Sports Authority" I filled two boxes, "Babe Ruth" and "Jackie Robinson".
I went over to the company representative who was showing the demo system and handed him my ballot. He fed it into the machine and it was spit out the other side. Though I'd intentionally cast a faulty ballot, there was no indication that anything was wrong, and I showed him the marks I'd made, pointing out my screw-ups.
"Well, this is just a demonstration," he said.
"So, all this does is roll the paper through the mechanism?" I asked.
"Um, well, it's just a demonstration."
"You mean it's not a real machine?"
"Right," he replied.
"So the real machine would reject this ballot, right?"
"I assume that this will be the case." He didn't sound too sure. At this point, the police who work the election detail started paying attention to our conversation. I guess election detail is pretty boring for them.
"So who audits the code that runs this machine?" I asked him.
"I don't know, maybe the Board of Elections," he said. "I can give you the name of the project manager. Maybe he can answer your questions." He wrote a name on the back of a business card. I took it and thanked him for his time. I called a few times but never got a callback, and I doubt I'd get a satisfactory answer.
My fear is that it's trivial for this sort of machine to register a vote for Foo to actually be tallied as a vote for Bar. With the old mechanical machines, this sort of fraud would take days, considering the hundreds or thousands of machines and the dozens of people from the Board of Elections that set them up. However a "black box" system like Accu-Vote need only be programmed with fraudulent code once, after which that code is distributed to hundreds or thousands of EEPROMS or Flash cards or whatever the Accu-Vote uses to store its programming. The barrier to entry for wholesale voting fraud has been lowered, and if the winning margin is large enough, there will never be a recount.
The Accu-Vote system was deployed for the November 2002 elections here in Boston. If there was a public hearing about this change from mechanical systems, I never heard about it, and I read the Boston Globe every day without fail.
Does that mean someone's going to release a patch for it then?
When the Morris Worm hit back in 1988, it had a few bugs that prevented it from becoming even more virulent. Keith Bostic at Berkeley suggested posting a patch.
So I goto the indian store (not where you buy indians) and I ask them "for the spiciest thing they sell", they goto the back and get me this big clear plastic bottle full of ketchupy looking stuff with a rooster on the front and a green squirt top (does anyone know what this is?) so they are all handling it like its plutonium or something and they sell it to me...
It's Sriracha, a piquant blend of chillis and garlic in a convenient plastic squeeze bottle. And you're right: it's not that hot.
No surprise that the 486 was faster: the Performa 640 used a 68LC040 which lacked an FPU and had no L1/L2 cache, while the 486/DX2-66 had an integrated FPU and often came with 256K of L2 cache memory.
Oddly enough, the Performa 640/Quadra 630 was one of those Macs that came with a 80486 daughtercard that plugged into the 68040 motherboard.
System 7.x and Windows 3.x: the worst of both worlds.
k.
Re:Wait'll the nurses...
on
The Aging Gamer
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Up down up down left right left right start select = unlimited nurses.
It may be my bias as a long-time 3DStudio user (dating back to R2 for DOS), but my opinion is that the.3DS file format (not.MAX) seems to be widely supported (e.g., Lightwave, Rhino, Multigen Creator, Sense8 WCT, ElectricImage, etc.) as an import/export option.
DXF is supported by more packages, but isn't as feature-rich (no textures, hierarchies, smoothing groups).
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't look like anyone's writing any Amos 'n' Andy slash fanfic.
Yet.
k.
You're confusing them with the Four Teletubbies of the Apocalypse.
I am become Tinky-Wink, destroyer of worlds.
Sorry.
k.
I can't say that I haven't given my address to people who "aren't stupid or assholes", but I doubt that this is the vector for most of the spam I receive.
/users, or your DSL provider "shares" your address with their "strategic partners". Never tasted that canned pink meat? You Will.
You say you've had your POP3 account for over a year; I've had mine for nine years. In that time, I've posted it to Usenet, used it as a mailto: on web pages, signed up for things with it, and used this address to register domains, always unmunged, sans "NOSPAM" or "remove this" or "@@@".
Even if I'd done none of these, or did munge my address, I'd still get spam, albeit somewhat less. Spammers use dictionary attacks, too, or they create a list from
Enjoy it while you can, for I see a million penis enlargers in your future.
k.
In 2002 I received over 18,000 pieces of spam, for a total of 163 megabytes. Compare this with the year 2000 (6 MB) and 1996 (183 KB). Based on the spam I've gotten so far this year, 2003 should see a bumper crop of 25 to 30 thousand pieces. This is just my POP3 account, and not my venerable Hotmail account that's now a smoking hole in the ground.
If I'm ever lucky enough to meet a spammer in person, I will kick him in the nuts repeatedly, until he sings soprano. Of course, I'll be chanting "Just hit Delete...just hit Delete" the whole time.
k.
It's too wide for an AK-47 (7.62x39mm). It's really a Dragunov magazine (a sniper rifle based on the Kalashnikov action that's chambered for the old 7.62x54R round).
k.
Thanks to the Tandy Corporation, Alec attended Stanford University, all expenses paid, where he earned his degree in Computer Science. After graduation, he was hired by Pets.com as Chief Techology Officer.
However, his life took a turn for the worse, when one of the network administrators discovered his secret cache of kitty porn, thousands of images of underage cats in compromising positions. He was hanging on to his job by a thread when the technology sector crashed, and he was the first to go. Currently, Alec works the midnight-to-8AM shift at Kinko's, where he can indulge his predilection for feline pornography between customers.
Shanna was not nearly as lucky as Alec, having been seduced by an assistant manager at the local Radio Shack, where she bartered sexual favors for boxes of floppy disks and packs of resistors and capacitors (she liked the pretty color codes). When she found out she was pregnant at age 16, the manager tried to induce a miscarriage using a battery-operated remote control monster truck toy. Shanna nearly bled to death in the mall's food court.
Fortunately, she received medical attention just in time, and went on to live a long, happy life as a camgirl, living off of gifts from her Amazon.com wish list sent by middle-aged male admirers. She was recently hired by the National Beef Council as a consultant, aiding them in their quest to feed cheeseburgers to anorexic teenage girls.
And now you know the rest of the story.
This is Paul Harvey...good day!
k.
And this is a bad thing, how?
I mean, really: suppose an errant Tomahawk cruise missile took out any one of these "artists". My first thought would be "Why couldn't they have killed Bon Jovi, too?".
Now if they started using this copy protection scheme on the works of Zamfir, Master of the Pan Pipe, then I'd be pissed, and rightly so. Can't be mackin' tha ladiez without Masta Z, tha OG.
Word.
k.
There are only a handful of weapons and communications systems in the field that weren't used in Gulf War I, such as the JDAM and JSOW air-dropped ordnance, or the IVIS tactical display used by US and British armored vehicles.
.50 caliber machine guns mounted on tanks, APCs, and Hummers were designed right after World War One, in the early Twenties, and have been in constant use ever since. The B-52H bombers -- the last of which rolled off the assembly line in 1963 -- were first conceived in 1949. Iraqi forces are armed with AK-47s (and the later AK-74 variants) that were first adopted by Soviet forces in the late '40s. The basic Scud missile design is nearly as old, and could be considered an adaptation of the German V-2 from WWII.
Some of the weapons used by both sides are positively ancient. The M2
What I really find compelling is not these high- and low-tech implements of destruction, but the advances in communication and news-gathering that have taken place over the last 12 years. Not just the Internet, though that's certainly worthy of note, but the satellite phones and cameras used by reporters embedded with the troops and correspondents in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad.
True, Peter Arnett was reporting from his room in 1991, when the 43-day air war started, but he was tied to landlines and an Iraqi-controlled dish. Now he can send realtime audio and video with gear that can fit in a briefcase. Sat phones have gotten smaller, better, clearer. Yes, the frame rate suffers when more than 10% of the picture changes, and there are visible compression artifacts, but given time I'm sure it'll be just as good (or crappy) as NTSC video.
At the risk of sounding flippant in the face of the inevitable loss of human life and injuries, military and civilian, I can't help but think that this is the first High Definition War, and that they'll have the DVD box sets on the shelves for Christmas.
k.
Except for the first year of his administration (gays in the military, health care reform), Clinton was not a liberal. He was a centrist, especially after the 1994 mid-term elections that swung control of Congress to the Republicans.
This is the president who signed into law welfare reform (over the objections of the League of Women Voters), pushed NAFTA (over the objections of the Democratic Party), and who had a number of Republican holdovers in his administration (Alan Greenspan, David Gergen, etc.).
And liberals aren't the only ones opposed to intervention: remember Pat Buchanan's opposition to Gulf War I and involvement in the Balkans? For most of the last decade, conservative lawmakers and pundits advocated a neo-isolationist policy, especially where national interest were hazy at best, and other institutions (such as the European Union) might have stepped up to resolve such situations.
Opposition to involvement in Kosovo was muted (though not non-existant; there were protests, but the participants numbered in the hundreds, not thousands) because of these two words: ethnic cleansing. Bombing Serbia to halt a genocide in the making fulfilled some people's definition of a "righteous war". Not all, and not exclusively liberals, conservatives, or any of the other misnomers that cheapen political dialog in the US.
Labeling Clinton a liberal is laughable. Jacob Javits was a liberal (and a Republican). Tip O'Neill was a liberal. Clinton was not, just as Tony Blair is a departure from the Labour party socialists of the '60s and '70s.
k.
Yes, but massive amounts of case-modding were involved.
Pardon the hackneyed analogy, but if NeXT was a Shelby Cobra, and Macs are like a gull-wing Mercedes, x86 boxes are '57 Chevys that get chopped, channeled, lowered, louvered, with chrome-plated exhausts, baby moon hubcaps, and 17 coats of hand-rubbed candy apple red paint and lacquer.
I can recall maybe two case-modded Macs mentioned on Slashdot (and a magnesium NeXT chassis that someone put into a furnace to see how well it would burn), but the number of articles on case-modded x86 PCs boggle the mind, like the Hello Kitty laptop, or the PC embedded in the mound of foam, or the PC-in-a-toolbox, or the one in the toaster...
Of course, my favorite case mod was the Vax (or was it an SGI?) that was converted into a mini refrigerator.
k.
My father introduced me to the world of computing when I was just four years old. His company had bought an IBM System/360 for the Accounting Department and I was in awe. Keypunch machines, card sorters, massive line printers, banks of tape storage, a huge console with blinkenlights. This was back in the day when system administrators still wore long white lab coats.
/., only because there was a relevant article on the front page. I received an e-mail about an hour later, with "What's all this about 'Hot Grits'? Is that something like Java? And what's a 'Beowulf cluster'?". I am grateful she didn't click on the wrong link, you know the one I mean.
I watched as my father, a CPA and comptroller, pulled himself into computer literacy by his bootstraps, poring over COBOL manuals and making flow charts with those green plastic templates. We assembled a DigiComp, and learned binary math together.
Fast forward forty years: he's retired, using a white-box PC running Win95 and three different versions of AOL to send mail and browse the Web. Every time I visit I need to diagnose a minor problem, a balky modem, not enough disk space, or just do some maintenance, like a defrag or scan, or clean up the cruft on his Taskbar (damn you Real Player!). I do it happily, because hey, family. At least I save my bitching for Slashdot.
My mother, on the other hand, is reasonably clueful. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that she writes software for payroll systems, or can rely on her employees for advice and assistance. Sometimes she'll ask me about tech stuff, but it's often general questions about things like Linux or XML (her products run on Windows).
Again, I'm happy to help when I can, though once I sent her to
So there's the two sides of the coin: one parent needs help with AOL, while the other can answer any question I might have about C++, even if troubleshooting hardware is outside of her skill set.
k.
Amen to that, but with a caveat...
With the exception of text mode, Knoppix is just too bloated for older machines, and by "older" I mean anything less than a Pentium Pro 200, and even then I doubt you'd find it usable.
I recently had to diagnose a couple of computers a friend had found while dumpster diving, a P166 and a P-II 350, both with 32MB RAM. KDE ran like frozen molasses on the 166, though it was fine in text mode and I found out what I needed to know. The 350, however, a six-year-old Dell Optiplex, GX1 wouldn't boot from the CD, not even with the boot floppy inserted in A:\ (one of its problems was a busted IDE controller). I ended up using old Slackware boot/root floppies instead.
So yeah, Knoppix is useful when it's useful, but I'd suggest having a back-up plan, like the Linux-on-a-floppy distro, or Tom's Boot Disk, or even a Windows Rescue disk or DOS boot floppy, just in case.
k.
I think your idea is short-sighted. First of all, there are works that can only be produced by a collaborative effort, movies and television shows for example. Prohibiting a corporate entity from holding the rights to their product would simply make them seek an alternative, a loop hole, such as assigning copyright to the producers or a studio attorney.
Second, this would penalize artists who make a living by selling the rights to their work to another party, such as authors who sell their books and articles to publishers, or professional songwriters who compose for non-writing singers. By not being allowed to sell their works, the value of their efforts would drop, even if they were able to license these works. Assigning a copyright is the equivalent of a permanent and exclusive license to reproduce a work.
Finally, and though you did not make this point, I fail to see the harm an extension of copyright (for everyone, not just Disney) does to the consumer. If a work has value, even an eighty-year-old cartoon like Steamboat Willie, people with buy it. If it doesn't, they won't. Just because something becomes public domain and becomes cheaper or free to own and enjoy, doesn't mean that people will prefer this over protected works. The commonly trotted out counter-example, that of out-of-print books or "abandonware" games and software, is a failure of the marketplace, not of copyright. If demand had been high enough, those books would never have gone out of print, and those games would still be distrubuted, even on an as-is no-tech-support basis, on shovelware CDs. Copyright is not the issue in these cases; it's simple supply-and-demand economics.
k.
So, how does one reconcile Mr. Gates's words with the words quoted in this post from yesterday's discussion about the development of Windows NT? "It's in Longhorn. Next bug." goes against Gates's words like the semen stains on Monica's blue dress contradicts the phrase "I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman".
I've tried hard to refrain from MSFT bashing, but when Bill opens his mouth and spouts bullshit like this, I just want to kick his teeth down his smug fucking throat. Monopolize this, asshole.
k.
Since you've ruled out the iBook, I'd suggest that you look for a laptop that meets your requirements on the used market (eBay, local want ads, computer resellers, outlets that deal in refurbished and formerly leased equipment). Someone else will have already paid the Windows Tax for you, and the money you save will more than compensate for the time you'll have to spend scraping Windows off the hard drive and installing your operating system of choice.
k.
I did write a letter to the Boston Globe about this new voting system, but apart from their automated reply, there was no "human" response. They've actually printed a couple of my letters, like the time I took them to task for conflating the Tuskegee Experiment with the Tuskegee Airmen. The Globe's a pretty good paper, on a par with the Washington Post, but sometimes even they fall back on the bad habits of lazy journalists (note to Jon Katz: Junis says all is forgiven, please come home).
Your link to the RISKS digest reminds me that I should submit this story to them; it's right up their alley, though RISKS seems to be more concerned with why the barn door was left open rather than preventing the horses from escaping.
And Mayor LaGuardia might be dead, but I'll bet he still casts a vote for the Manhattan Borough President every few years. Long live Tammany Hall.
k.
Here in Allston, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, our votes were cast in a manner similar to many urban areas, with a mechanical voting machine older than I am, the kind that has a big lever that closes a curtain and a myriad small switches for selecting candidates or casting votes for referenda.
I know that these machines have many drawbacks: they cost a lot of money to maintain, store, and "program", though I've always assumed that to "rig" these machines too commit wholesale fraudulent voting would be to time consuming and complex to pull off. Hence, I had a certain amount of faith that the lever I'd pull would actually correspond to the name on the paper strip, and my desired vote would be tallied. I know also that this faith was rooted in sentimentality; I'd accompanied my parents into machines just like that when I was a kid, back in the Sixties.
Two elections ago, however, during a primary vote in September, there was a man at the polling place who was demonstrating a new system, produced by LHS Associtates of Methuen, MA, the "Accu-Vote" system. It used paper ballots, with small circles like on a standardized multiple choice test (like SATs, except without the need for the No. 2 pencil). There was an optical scanner that looked somewhat like a paper shredder, the kind that fits on top of a wastepaper basket. You fed the ballot through the scanner and it read the marks, ejecting the paper out the other end, into a bag, thus preserving a paper trail in case of a recount.
I filled out one of these sample ballots. There were "joke" choices on the ballot, and I intentionally mis-voted, to see how fault-tolerant the system was. Under "Mayor", I placed a check mark in the box next to "Fiorello LaGuardia". For "Board of Cartoon Characters", I put a tiny dot next to "Bugs Bunny". Under "Superhero Committee", I filled in the box for "Wonder Woman", intentionally overfilling the mark, and for "Sports Authority" I filled two boxes, "Babe Ruth" and "Jackie Robinson".
I went over to the company representative who was showing the demo system and handed him my ballot. He fed it into the machine and it was spit out the other side. Though I'd intentionally cast a faulty ballot, there was no indication that anything was wrong, and I showed him the marks I'd made, pointing out my screw-ups.
"Well, this is just a demonstration," he said.
"So, all this does is roll the paper through the mechanism?" I asked.
"Um, well, it's just a demonstration."
"You mean it's not a real machine?"
"Right," he replied.
"So the real machine would reject this ballot, right?"
"I assume that this will be the case." He didn't sound too sure. At this point, the police who work the election detail started paying attention to our conversation. I guess election detail is pretty boring for them.
"So who audits the code that runs this machine?" I asked him.
"I don't know, maybe the Board of Elections," he said. "I can give you the name of the project manager. Maybe he can answer your questions." He wrote a name on the back of a business card. I took it and thanked him for his time. I called a few times but never got a callback, and I doubt I'd get a satisfactory answer.
My fear is that it's trivial for this sort of machine to register a vote for Foo to actually be tallied as a vote for Bar. With the old mechanical machines, this sort of fraud would take days, considering the hundreds or thousands of machines and the dozens of people from the Board of Elections that set them up. However a "black box" system like Accu-Vote need only be programmed with fraudulent code once, after which that code is distributed to hundreds or thousands of EEPROMS or Flash cards or whatever the Accu-Vote uses to store its programming. The barrier to entry for wholesale voting fraud has been lowered, and if the winning margin is large enough, there will never be a recount.
The Accu-Vote system was deployed for the November 2002 elections here in Boston. If there was a public hearing about this change from mechanical systems, I never heard about it, and I read the Boston Globe every day without fail.
k.
When the Morris Worm hit back in 1988, it had a few bugs that prevented it from becoming even more virulent. Keith Bostic at Berkeley suggested posting a patch.
k.
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It's Sriracha, a piquant blend of chillis and garlic in a convenient plastic squeeze bottle. And you're right: it's not that hot.
But it sure is tasty.
k.
No surprise that the 486 was faster: the Performa 640 used a 68LC040 which lacked an FPU and had no L1/L2 cache, while the 486/DX2-66 had an integrated FPU and often came with 256K of L2 cache memory.
Oddly enough, the Performa 640/Quadra 630 was one of those Macs that came with a 80486 daughtercard that plugged into the 68040 motherboard.
System 7.x and Windows 3.x: the worst of both worlds.
k.
Up down up down left right left right start select = unlimited nurses.
k.
Windows is a fairly quick install, which makes those yearly re-installs a breeze!
And I see that MS-DOS 1.0 is 21 years old. Let's take DOS out to a bar and get it drunk, watch it stagger home and puke in the bushes.
k.
After I signed up for this I realized...
...you can't spell "MEETUP" without M-E-E-P-T.
IHBT. IHL.
I hope I have a nice day. Though I doubt it.
k.
It may be my bias as a long-time 3DStudio user (dating back to R2 for DOS), but my opinion is that the .3DS file format (not.MAX) seems to be widely supported (e.g., Lightwave, Rhino, Multigen Creator, Sense8 WCT, ElectricImage, etc.) as an import/export option.
DXF is supported by more packages, but isn't as feature-rich (no textures, hierarchies, smoothing groups).
k.