...they won't start making deepcuts in the RIAA's "plan" until they stop getting those few extra hundred thousand dollars of money shoved in their pockets.
No, I paid taxes on my "business" and watched the overhead. I still was able to make a great deal of profit from it. I find it ridiculous that some techs would go out, charge a $100 dollars an hour to run a defrag or e2fsck.
Then of course you have the people who charge an absorbent amount of money, when they lack the knowledge and experience. Your HD cable might be loose and causing those horrific I/O errors, the tech might say "replace the HD," without even opening the case.
Plus, (now for my philosophy), I've always felt that by charging ridiculous prices for tech support services, we push people away from computers, instead of towards them. Try to get your local hardware store, to computerize their inventory instead of pencil and paper. "Oh, those darn computers are so 'expensive' to be repaired, and I always have to 'pay' for tech support."
Now you know why people prefer to search the KBs and try to fix it themselves (even though they lack the skills to do so), rather than calling MS/RH ala $21.95 a call.
Even the $50-$60 dollar an hour UNIX sysadmin jobs are disappearing. Now a days, akin to Windoze, any idiot can go out and pickup a copy of Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Red Hat 9 for Dummies. And, yes, they do publish the Debian/BSD ones. What's more shocking is that the publication may actually be useful to dummies in getting them a sysadmin job.
Now you can argue and say, oh no, they'll never be more "elite" than me, or they'll just do a half-assed job. Well, I hate to say it, but most companies just one someone who can 'administrate' Windoze. Added a flavor of *N?X to your resume and you're a shoein. Literally.
Then when the network gets attacked, "Earl Ray" the sysadmin, may just be out of luck; and that's where you come in!
I used to do this for almost two years, before I started working for an ISP. I charged a nice $20 dollars an hour deal, with extra charges for hardware replacement, software installation. My little business was able to "boom" simply because I was cheaper. All the freelance techs out there now think, "Hey, I'm so 'elite' I can charge $75 an hour!" Wrong.
I would see signs/ads, everywhere (literally), begging to have people hire them at prices that reached into the hundreds per hour. I'm a simple guy, without too many expenses, I buy a ton of games, and for me, $20 dollars an hour was great. I got to choose my own hours, and make myself profitable.
As for the "idiots to techs" ratio question, some people obviously haven't worked in the tech field [long enough]. Until the day they make a computer completely crash/idiot-proof, there will always be a need for a technician.
I don't know if I'm the only out there who's noticed, but, Firebird development has slowed considerably with all the Mozilla fuss. The next FB milestone (0.7 Indio) is going to be late almost two months in a few days. Meanwhile we've had the Mozilla 1.4 RC1, RC2, Final and 1.5 Alpha come out.
CVS checkins to the Firebird suite have also lagged behind. Personally, I would like to see FB development accelerated instead of put on the back burner.
...and please file all SCO/Caldera topics under "Caldera." So far I've seen SCO topics crawl up in under Linux in The Business, YRO, Announce, etc. For those who tire of the SCO drama and actually want the "news" that matters, let us filter the garbage.
If I understood the article correctly it seems like they're dropping both the personal and Enterprise editions. This is kind of a dumb move, IMHO. AFAIK, the rollout timeframe for Enterprise/Advanced Server was ~18 months per release, compared to the Personal/Regular ~6 months per release.
Shouldn't their still be time to get Enterprise out to those who need it? Not all of us like to drag around ~10 Enterprise CD-R's:P.
I hate it too, if not more. You'll ask the poor Red Hat kiddie, what kernel are you running? 9.0, why? Erm, no. What version of the kernel are you running? 9.0, didn't you hear me the first time?!
No, 2.2 or 2.4.18/2.4.20/2.4.21? 9.0, OK? I am not an idiot, I'm using Linux 9.0.
While I wish him luck, this doesn't inspire much hope for the rest of us. DSLreports is a large forum with a good-sized userbase. If someone spammed one of my sites, I'd be SOL trying to fight back.
I hate to say this, but "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." One incident of tracking down spammers doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. Others have down near as much as this guy has done.
While I too hate spammers, I think he's going overboard. This crap happens all the time on the Internet. He's just wasting precious seconds of his life trying to wipe this guy out...
...from my experience, even if he does contact the right providers/abuse services, nothing will happen. Upstream/server/hosting providers "generally" (and I say this loosely) don't give a shit. As long as they pay their bills on time they let the spammer do as they please. While this sucks, it's the business of the 'net. Don't get me wrong though, some networks will respond and do take action to stop these scumbags, but alas, these nets are one in few =(.
Flame on, but, I don't think/. should be reporting this kind of story. Aside from all of us story loving, comment posting maniacs,/. does get viewed by our script kiddie "friends." There have been challenges before (as mentioned), this isn't anything new, most of which [however] have not had enough media attention to bother with. Remember the "April Fools Defacement Day" one that a few newspapers picked up on, last April? This is exactly the same thing. The more fuel we give the kiddies, the bigger mess they're going to make...
No idea, really. I know they do it, I've seen them card kids for games like HL and Enter The Matrix. Their store, their rules, I suppose. It's similiar to when B&N stopped selling Maxim/Stuff to people 16 years of age. They put signs up advising of the change and everything.
It just hurts their business, eventually they'll figure it out.
Stores like Wal-Mart and now Hasting, as well as CompUSA now "enforce" the ratings. Say, you're sixteen and you're trying to buy HL, they'll actually ask for a state ID card, or drivers license to see if you're seventeen or older. Same thing with AO, and I think Wal-Mart is now doing the teens rating as well. Kind of stupid if you ask me, it's hurting their business more than they think.
The problem with the rating system is the ESRB is so hypocritical. Alice, the game where evil/demented Alice returns to Wonderland and hacks up card guards with a knife along with other "wicked" stuff is only rated T for teen. The game has blood, gore, it might as well have Alice stripping. Yet, it's rated teen.
Now let's look at Kingpin, filled with racial slurs, lead pipe bludgeonings, f**k in every line, murder, gore, blood, the works. Kingpin even had a yellow tape around it that said "For 18 Years of Age ONLY," when it shipped. Stores were supposed to put it on the top shelf and only sell it to adults. Yet, it's rated M for Mature (17+), not Adults Only.
Finally there is Duke Nukem, Mr. Lieberman's "favorite" scapegoat. If you guys remember he was the first to lobby to the ESRB that the game be boosted from mature to adults only because it had nudity. His case didn't go through, but as far as I know, Duke is the only game that really had and pushed nudity. IIRC, Lieberman lost his case because of the "adult mode" integration.
Never-the-less, I know there is hypocrisy in the ratings, but how does it run? By company, by genre, by name? We need a more impartial rating company, that isn't comprised of Nielsen raters and people like Joe Lieberman.
In all honesty, we shouldn't have legislation for data leaks and the such. Let's say Joe sysadmin sets up a WiFi network. Joe sysadmin locks down said network, board has difficult time accessing network and "orders" John netadmin to reduce the security and make it more "ease of use-ish." Now in the normal IT world there positions aren't filled with morons. In the educational system where tech jobs are filled @ $5.15 an hour, you have the soccer coach, or the part-time janitor doing IT work. Holes open up, since the net/sysadmin knows nothing of what they're doing, they get by.
The question is, would the hole have been discovered? Generally the answer is no, people don't always go looking for security exploits. Hehe, if I had WiFi when I was in HS, I'd be happier about that than anything. It makes me ponder if the news didn't try and get in, would someone have?
I've also worked for the school IT department at my university but quickly quit when I realized the average intelligence around is no higher than a walnut. The one thing I know however, is we don't want the government responsible for private information. Next thing we know is the government pushing DRM and all that other crap.
Yes, but then there would be lawsuit after lawsuit. All of the whiny little turds crying and begging judges for severance packages for their thirty kids, five pets, and four divorced spouses. How will they ever pay the supreme gas bill for their Camaro Z-28, or the fine wine bill at the Everglass.
Then there would be wrongful termination suits from hell. SCO employees crying that they got fired because they're an evil corporation that just got dealt a "bad" hand. You might even have Joe Somebody (pun not intended) who actually was against it all, suing for corporate malignance.
It goes on and on. Better to crush them now and deal with the reprecussions later.
...when IBM (aka the mammoth of all things computer business) crushes SCO instead of buying the little scumbags out. I'm sure having SCO VP will look real good on your resume, especially to a Linux company who got those "notices."
I actually had a horrible time in an online economics course I was taking for my university. I really hate driving for thirty minutes to get to my classes and I figured I'd knock out some of the easy courses online and work with my "own" schedule.
We had a similiar online forum or web board to discuss with other students and get help from the teacher. The problem was the teacher was supposed to answer any questions and reply to each of your posts, ours never bothered. This wasn't too bad, as some of the students had a better grasp of the subject than others.
The worst problem I encountered, was that our teacher was not computer literate. She had problems opening my RTF, TXT, and PDF files. Claiming they were "too large" for her computer or giving her "virii." These are only little paltry 100K files, and she's griping.
She would assign 0's for these assignments without any dispute because they violated her "on-time" policy. Out of all the worst experience I had with her was with deadlines. When Christmas vacation rolled around, I synced all of the January dates in my PDA and on my wall calendar so I could do them on-time when the break ended. When I came back to turn them in, the datches were mysteriously changed to the last day of the break.
Now assignments are always spaced by almost three days a piece, and these were too before the change. When I tried to contact her about the late assignments, and why the dates were changed (especially why I wasn't notified) she said I should have been checking the calendar during Christmas when they were changed. Sure. An email would have been nice.
Finally she gets feud up of my complaints, and writes my course liasion (the guy who sets you up for the course). The irony is that she forged the date on the email to look as if she sent it a week earlier. Sadly headers proved her horribly wrong and caught in a lie. I showed the liasion and he called the "school." Her claim was that she doesn't make sure her rig's clock is set appropriately. Sure. Her clock magically jumped a week back.
When the course ended, I had failed miserably, I would get the correct answers but 0's for her inability to open (or willingness to do so) my files. I called the school and asked for a refund to which they complied.
Sadly to this day she still spams me with "You are late," emails...
This idea is a clever one but will never take off. From what I've heard of Mr. Robinson's company he lacks the expertise in some of the "higher-level" blackhat ideas. I doubt his kids will be able to do much, except maybe bypass a HTaccess file or play script kiddy.
If you really wish to teach "hacking" you need experience in the "darkside" as well as the white. Get inside the box, perhaps?
Honestly, the patent office seems to be issuing patents for anyone who seems to throw money at them. If this isn't a hoax, I can see (literally) a ton of reprecussions. This is almost as bad as the porn master trying to patent the pop-up ad. Give me a break.
In all honesty, I'm quite curious why Mozilla just didn't rename Phoenix straight to Thunderbird. Since the Thunderbird mail client is now known as Minotaur, what was wrong with abandoning Thunderbird. I realize the infringement potential with the car company, but I doubt they'd squak much; as it's a browser versus a car.
Slashdot Mirror
...they won't start making deepcuts in the RIAA's "plan" until they stop getting those few extra hundred thousand dollars of money shoved in their pockets.
Then of course you have the people who charge an absorbent amount of money, when they lack the knowledge and experience. Your HD cable might be loose and causing those horrific I/O errors, the tech might say "replace the HD," without even opening the case.
Plus, (now for my philosophy), I've always felt that by charging ridiculous prices for tech support services, we push people away from computers, instead of towards them. Try to get your local hardware store, to computerize their inventory instead of pencil and paper. "Oh, those darn computers are so 'expensive' to be repaired, and I always have to 'pay' for tech support."
Now you know why people prefer to search the KBs and try to fix it themselves (even though they lack the skills to do so), rather than calling MS/RH ala $21.95 a call.
Now you can argue and say, oh no, they'll never be more "elite" than me, or they'll just do a half-assed job. Well, I hate to say it, but most companies just one someone who can 'administrate' Windoze. Added a flavor of *N?X to your resume and you're a shoein. Literally.
Then when the network gets attacked, "Earl Ray" the sysadmin, may just be out of luck; and that's where you come in!
I would see signs/ads, everywhere (literally), begging to have people hire them at prices that reached into the hundreds per hour. I'm a simple guy, without too many expenses, I buy a ton of games, and for me, $20 dollars an hour was great. I got to choose my own hours, and make myself profitable.
As for the "idiots to techs" ratio question, some people obviously haven't worked in the tech field [long enough]. Until the day they make a computer completely crash/idiot-proof, there will always be a need for a technician.
My two cents...
I don't know if I'm the only out there who's noticed, but, Firebird development has slowed considerably with all the Mozilla fuss. The next FB milestone (0.7 Indio) is going to be late almost two months in a few days. Meanwhile we've had the Mozilla 1.4 RC1, RC2, Final and 1.5 Alpha come out.
CVS checkins to the Firebird suite have also lagged behind. Personally, I would like to see FB development accelerated instead of put on the back burner.
...and please file all SCO/Caldera topics under "Caldera." So far I've seen SCO topics crawl up in under Linux in The Business, YRO, Announce, etc. For those who tire of the SCO drama and actually want the "news" that matters, let us filter the garbage.
Shouldn't their still be time to get Enterprise out to those who need it? Not all of us like to drag around ~10 Enterprise CD-R's :P.
No, 2.2 or 2.4.18/2.4.20/2.4.21? 9.0, OK? I am not an idiot, I'm using Linux 9.0.
While I wish him luck, this doesn't inspire much hope for the rest of us. DSLreports is a large forum with a good-sized userbase. If someone spammed one of my sites, I'd be SOL trying to fight back.
I hate to say this, but "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." One incident of tracking down spammers doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. Others have down near as much as this guy has done.
...from my experience, even if he does contact the right providers/abuse services, nothing will happen. Upstream/server/hosting providers "generally" (and I say this loosely) don't give a shit. As long as they pay their bills on time they let the spammer do as they please. While this sucks, it's the business of the 'net. Don't get me wrong though, some networks will respond and do take action to stop these scumbags, but alas, these nets are one in few =(.
While I too hate spammers, I think he's going overboard. This crap happens all the time on the Internet. He's just wasting precious seconds of his life trying to wipe this guy out...
oSCOn, 'nuff said...
Flame on, but, I don't think /. should be reporting this kind of story. Aside from all of us story loving, comment posting maniacs, /. does get viewed by our script kiddie "friends." There have been challenges before (as mentioned), this isn't anything new, most of which [however] have not had enough media attention to bother with. Remember the "April Fools Defacement Day" one that a few newspapers picked up on, last April? This is exactly the same thing. The more fuel we give the kiddies, the bigger mess they're going to make...
No idea, really. I know they do it, I've seen them card kids for games like HL and Enter The Matrix. Their store, their rules, I suppose. It's similiar to when B&N stopped selling Maxim/Stuff to people 16 years of age. They put signs up advising of the change and everything.
It just hurts their business, eventually they'll figure it out.
Stores like Wal-Mart and now Hasting, as well as CompUSA now "enforce" the ratings. Say, you're sixteen and you're trying to buy HL, they'll actually ask for a state ID card, or drivers license to see if you're seventeen or older. Same thing with AO, and I think Wal-Mart is now doing the teens rating as well. Kind of stupid if you ask me, it's hurting their business more than they think.
Thank god, I'm not a minor.
The problem with the rating system is the ESRB is so hypocritical. Alice, the game where evil/demented Alice returns to Wonderland and hacks up card guards with a knife along with other "wicked" stuff is only rated T for teen. The game has blood, gore, it might as well have Alice stripping. Yet, it's rated teen.
Now let's look at Kingpin, filled with racial slurs, lead pipe bludgeonings, f**k in every line, murder, gore, blood, the works. Kingpin even had a yellow tape around it that said "For 18 Years of Age ONLY," when it shipped. Stores were supposed to put it on the top shelf and only sell it to adults. Yet, it's rated M for Mature (17+), not Adults Only.
Finally there is Duke Nukem, Mr. Lieberman's "favorite" scapegoat. If you guys remember he was the first to lobby to the ESRB that the game be boosted from mature to adults only because it had nudity. His case didn't go through, but as far as I know, Duke is the only game that really had and pushed nudity. IIRC, Lieberman lost his case because of the "adult mode" integration.
Never-the-less, I know there is hypocrisy in the ratings, but how does it run? By company, by genre, by name? We need a more impartial rating company, that isn't comprised of Nielsen raters and people like Joe Lieberman.
In all honesty, we shouldn't have legislation for data leaks and the such. Let's say Joe sysadmin sets up a WiFi network. Joe sysadmin locks down said network, board has difficult time accessing network and "orders" John netadmin to reduce the security and make it more "ease of use-ish." Now in the normal IT world there positions aren't filled with morons. In the educational system where tech jobs are filled @ $5.15 an hour, you have the soccer coach, or the part-time janitor doing IT work. Holes open up, since the net/sysadmin knows nothing of what they're doing, they get by.
The question is, would the hole have been discovered? Generally the answer is no, people don't always go looking for security exploits. Hehe, if I had WiFi when I was in HS, I'd be happier about that than anything. It makes me ponder if the news didn't try and get in, would someone have?
I've also worked for the school IT department at my university but quickly quit when I realized the average intelligence around is no higher than a walnut. The one thing I know however, is we don't want the government responsible for private information. Next thing we know is the government pushing DRM and all that other crap.
Perhaps, he was looking for interoperability.
Yes, but then there would be lawsuit after lawsuit. All of the whiny little turds crying and begging judges for severance packages for their thirty kids, five pets, and four divorced spouses. How will they ever pay the supreme gas bill for their Camaro Z-28, or the fine wine bill at the Everglass.
Then there would be wrongful termination suits from hell. SCO employees crying that they got fired because they're an evil corporation that just got dealt a "bad" hand. You might even have Joe Somebody (pun not intended) who actually was against it all, suing for corporate malignance.
It goes on and on. Better to crush them now and deal with the reprecussions later.
...when IBM (aka the mammoth of all things computer business) crushes SCO instead of buying the little scumbags out. I'm sure having SCO VP will look real good on your resume, especially to a Linux company who got those "notices."
Don't you mean Palestine?
I actually had a horrible time in an online economics course I was taking for my university. I really hate driving for thirty minutes to get to my classes and I figured I'd knock out some of the easy courses online and work with my "own" schedule.
We had a similiar online forum or web board to discuss with other students and get help from the teacher. The problem was the teacher was supposed to answer any questions and reply to each of your posts, ours never bothered. This wasn't too bad, as some of the students had a better grasp of the subject than others.
The worst problem I encountered, was that our teacher was not computer literate. She had problems opening my RTF, TXT, and PDF files. Claiming they were "too large" for her computer or giving her "virii." These are only little paltry 100K files, and she's griping.
She would assign 0's for these assignments without any dispute because they violated her "on-time" policy. Out of all the worst experience I had with her was with deadlines. When Christmas vacation rolled around, I synced all of the January dates in my PDA and on my wall calendar so I could do them on-time when the break ended. When I came back to turn them in, the datches were mysteriously changed to the last day of the break.
Now assignments are always spaced by almost three days a piece, and these were too before the change. When I tried to contact her about the late assignments, and why the dates were changed (especially why I wasn't notified) she said I should have been checking the calendar during Christmas when they were changed. Sure. An email would have been nice.
Finally she gets feud up of my complaints, and writes my course liasion (the guy who sets you up for the course). The irony is that she forged the date on the email to look as if she sent it a week earlier. Sadly headers proved her horribly wrong and caught in a lie. I showed the liasion and he called the "school." Her claim was that she doesn't make sure her rig's clock is set appropriately. Sure. Her clock magically jumped a week back.
When the course ended, I had failed miserably, I would get the correct answers but 0's for her inability to open (or willingness to do so) my files. I called the school and asked for a refund to which they complied.
Sadly to this day she still spams me with "You are late," emails...
This idea is a clever one but will never take off. From what I've heard of Mr. Robinson's company he lacks the expertise in some of the "higher-level" blackhat ideas. I doubt his kids will be able to do much, except maybe bypass a HTaccess file or play script kiddy. If you really wish to teach "hacking" you need experience in the "darkside" as well as the white. Get inside the box, perhaps?
We need a new ultra unique Slashdot topic icon...the SCO logo combined with the Microsoft logo, alongside a sickle and a hammer.
Honestly, the patent office seems to be issuing patents for anyone who seems to throw money at them. If this isn't a hoax, I can see (literally) a ton of reprecussions. This is almost as bad as the porn master trying to patent the pop-up ad. Give me a break.
In all honesty, I'm quite curious why Mozilla just didn't rename Phoenix straight to Thunderbird. Since the Thunderbird mail client is now known as Minotaur, what was wrong with abandoning Thunderbird. I realize the infringement potential with the car company, but I doubt they'd squak much; as it's a browser versus a car.