This is Slashdot. Most of the people who post here can't even read TFS, let alone TFA. Don't introduce complex ideas like that to them, they will never cope.
Instead, put a big sign in the windscreen that flashes up every 10 seconds reminding them that they should only go fast enough to brake to a stop in the distance that is visibly clear in front of their vehicle.
Although, that would be too open and shut. The lawyers who profit from this crap might not make enough money to want that law pushed by their favourite congresscritter.
It would seem that if any company were going to do this it would be HTC.
They make so many models and have so many OSs on them that they could just smash out phone after phone after phone with no OS and have either the carriers buy them and somehow justify the cost by putting their own Android OS on it or have resellers (even a department of their own) put basic Win/Droid/iOS (ha ha, yeah, whatever)/WebOS/Symbian/MeeGo etc. systems on with or without that carrier branding that is so popular around the world.
xda-developers, MoDaCo and the like show us that hackers (not crackers, except when necessary) can shoehorn alternative OSs into the metal, different versions can be squeezed in, original "hardware specs" can be altered to reflect the enabling of feaures that were disabled by the manufacturer.
After having a crapload of HTC devices running WinCE(+) and being on Android now, I fail to see why there is still the wild-eyed demonic look on the faces of the carriers and manufacturers whenever someone suggests that we could actually do what we want with our phones.
Most people who care soon go searching. The number of n00bs asking questions about it is staggering. More and more people are taking control of their devices and running what they want on them. Without permission...
This website, "Facebook.com", is sometimes datamined by lawyers for information to hold against people in legal situations. This can be legal. It is sometimes facilitated by Facebook or through wiretapping/bugging of computers and/or phones.
I would like to make a declaration of fact to the effect that any and or all information contained in my Facebook Profile could be inaccurate, either on purpose or by accident or omission.
I sometimes exaggerate times, I have been known to make up events that I then pretended to attend and I deny being at events that I did in reality attend. Reasons for this are many and varied and my own business.
I may or may not use my real name, date of birth, family details or my real physical address.
This Facebook Profile is not a journal, diary, log nor record of my life and should not be taken to be accurate or true for any reason.
If anyone were to attempt to use information from this, my Facebook Profile, in a Court of Law I could in all good conscience hold my hand up on penalty of Perjury and deny actions that may appear to be truth if evidence for them was garnered in full or in part from this Facebook Profile.
This does not preclude the possibility that some events and statements are true.
This statement may or may not carry legal weight, and to the best of my knowledge has never been used as a defence in Court, but it stands as truth and if necessary I will swear under oath that I stand by the spirit of it.
I'm seriously considering putting this as a note on my profile.
Might get me out of a sticky situation if I ever get faced with this crap.
One step nearer to my E17 desktop being actually E17 instead of E16.999999
I've been using E17 for over a year as my primary desktop environment and the number of crashes is liveably low and a quick restart (of Enlightenment, not the OS, not a logout event, takes less than a second) makes it all better.
Menu is TinyMenu, Back/Forward appear and disappear depending on where in the tab's history you are, the "B" is bookmarks. User agent, ABP and a few other useful plugins make FF 3.6 a firm favourite of mine for the foreseeable future.
I could have read it, disagreed, and then formatted the hard drive, knowing that it voided my warranty.
After that I believe the computer belongs to me, to do with as I wish, seeing as I paid for it.
I should really be able to send Sony a letter asking them to reimburse me for their software licence seeing as I didn't use it.
You mean Skype that you could install under Yellow Dog Linux before they broke my VOIP device with their mandatory (penalty being not being able to play online) and unfair (took away advertised features) firmware update?
Seriously Your Honour, all I was doing was trying to do was fix my phone!
Shame you have to root to use it, but as I have rooted (typical geek with Android, rooted and perma-rooted custom Froyo ROM) it works great.
Up and down, left or right, the trigger pixels are mostly undetectable in daily use and there are a few themes included.
I can't see my < £100 phone's buttons lasting very long so this is a great option.
PS If the developer reads this; saviour. That is all.
And you're doing this on your cell/SIM/mobile data plan?
I've just been hit by the T-Mobile "unlimited" debacle, but for anything like that I'd be creating a new user and logging it in to a coffee shop WiFi (McGonads is free) to do crap like that, if I didn't have home internets.
I'd never log my user in whilst on a hostile network. Downloading some RPMs/DEBs or (in my case) doing a "pacman -Syu" can be quite easily done from a temporary account, providing moody OS updates in a timely manner is a bit beyond your local coffee shop skiddie.
And yet if someone rips through the thread and redacts all the "Me too!" and "I know this is OT but..." and "IT NOT WORK 4 ME" posts they get called a Nazi and the banhammer comes out...
Forum Rules are usually posted in a sticky at the top of the forum, and they should be read. We need to be a little militant with n00bs and fools to get the message across. Breed a generation of people who will actually RTFM and learn how to ask questions intelligently.
Open box, say "oh wow"
Get out CD with Arch Linux on
Power up laptop long enough to open DVD tray, turn off quickly
Power on with Arch disc in, remove three partitions of crap
Install* Arch, and E17 (yeah yeah, OK, 16.99999 or whatever...), get the thing up and running, love every minute of it.
CBA sending the sticker underneath back to Redmond for a few quid back, used it to install Win7 DVD (from Piratebay) in a VM that never will be let on the internet because Photoshop is essential for me and WINE just doesn't cope well with it in my personal experience.
* New hardware required WiFi driver to be downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Fortunately I'm a geek and this presented no significant difficulty.
the lusers as you call them are whom the internet is for
or accept reality.
The reality in most cases is that if the people "whom the internet is for" don't wise up a bit, with our help (welcome or otherwise) they will get malware, viruses (or virii, your choice), their computers will run like crap, their smartphones won't have flash/custom ROMs/nice apps that work better than the carrier provided dross, their computers will crash, their "internet isn't working" cry will resound around the net like the cry of a baby lost in the woods.
They need us, we need them. I'm not going to argue a lot of your points, we agree a lot, but I must insist that they should listen and it is to their own detriment if they don't, and that when they inevitably end up in the proverbial tears, they come to us to lift them out of their pit of ignorance induced woe and blame the technology for their problems, not their own lack of interest in the technology.
I'm a realist, I don't blame them. I'm a geek, I'm not one of them. I'm a human, I feel for them. I'm a git, it's their own fault, they should have listened to me.
Pick your response. We need education in schools to teach that RTFM is actually good advice, and that thick skin is important when dealing with people who you are preparing to ignore.
The information is there for you to read, should you care to look it up.
This article will be "google-able" within a week by 100% of the internet.
People who have read about this outage will be more informed, should anyone care to ask around "about this Skype thing I've heard about" and information from geeks is immensely free-flowing (sometimes you can't shut us up).
Don't go shouting and swearing at the GP who is trying to point out that lusers - don't fucking care - about the stuff we try and tell them, they just roll their eyes and "oh $deity, the geek is at it again. Take it from me (the uninformed peer) that this just works and it isn't evil".
Millions of attempts to find some variation of "phpmyadmin" showed me that the easiest thing to do was to put a script on the default site's 404.php that added the requesting IP to hosts.deny.
Having only the default site running on the IP and the rest of the server serving up NamedHosts made it easy to determine if it was a real request for a page or if it was a script trying to find vulnerabilities.
Moving SSHd off 22 dropped the attempts on that service by an order of magnitude.
Security is a journey, not a destination and everything you can do to either waste their time, or keep them out is another step towards your goal.
Think up a new password. Just one.
Pass = "PcbEn!"
The mnemonic for that password is "Passwords Can Be Easy Now!"
Now use that one simple password to create stupidly complex passwords for the sites you visit by using Password Hasher.
Every site you go to will have it's own unique mix of 26 upper, lower, numbers, symbols (if it supports it) that can be easily recreated in seconds without ever being written down or stored electronically.
All you have to remember is that passwords can be easy now.
Example password for Slashdot using this example is "nRP2zGk56sYN8IMUyFR/XpIx45" which is out of the brute force range this year and probably next year too.
I've just looked at Tesco (UK supermarket) to see what they are selling the PS3 for now and the cheapest is £245.
Three years ago (IIRC) I bought mine from there bundled with LittleBigPlanet (die you horrible game) for £275.
That isn't much of a saving, but the unit is now half the size (ish) and has twice the HDD space. I hesitate to list the litany of features that are missing from the slim over my 80GB unit, be they hardware or software.
Hello, my name is Mike, I hear you need to get out more and meet more people like me.
If you're ever in the UK, come and have a drink with me and some people who use something wonderful called "Linux" that is just like Windows but free!
If you don't like the thought of meeting a random stranger off the internet, you could just use the word "Linux" in conversation until you meet someone who knows what it is and then cultivate your new friends circle around some contacts that this person knows too.
Either way, good luck meeting intelligent, educated people in the future!
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot. Most of the people who post here can't even read TFS, let alone TFA. Don't introduce complex ideas like that to them, they will never cope.
Instead, put a big sign in the windscreen that flashes up every 10 seconds reminding them that they should only go fast enough to brake to a stop in the distance that is visibly clear in front of their vehicle.
Although, that would be too open and shut. The lawyers who profit from this crap might not make enough money to want that law pushed by their favourite congresscritter.
It would seem that if any company were going to do this it would be HTC.
...
They make so many models and have so many OSs on them that they could just smash out phone after phone after phone with no OS and have either the carriers buy them and somehow justify the cost by putting their own Android OS on it or have resellers (even a department of their own) put basic Win/Droid/iOS (ha ha, yeah, whatever)/WebOS/Symbian/MeeGo etc. systems on with or without that carrier branding that is so popular around the world.
xda-developers, MoDaCo and the like show us that hackers (not crackers, except when necessary) can shoehorn alternative OSs into the metal, different versions can be squeezed in, original "hardware specs" can be altered to reflect the enabling of feaures that were disabled by the manufacturer.
After having a crapload of HTC devices running WinCE(+) and being on Android now, I fail to see why there is still the wild-eyed demonic look on the faces of the carriers and manufacturers whenever someone suggests that we could actually do what we want with our phones.
Most people who care soon go searching. The number of n00bs asking questions about it is staggering. More and more people are taking control of their devices and running what they want on them. Without permission
This website, "Facebook.com", is sometimes datamined by lawyers for information to hold against people in legal situations. This can be legal. It is sometimes facilitated by Facebook or through wiretapping/bugging of computers and/or phones.
I would like to make a declaration of fact to the effect that any and or all information contained in my Facebook Profile could be inaccurate, either on purpose or by accident or omission.
I sometimes exaggerate times, I have been known to make up events that I then pretended to attend and I deny being at events that I did in reality attend. Reasons for this are many and varied and my own business.
I may or may not use my real name, date of birth, family details or my real physical address.
This Facebook Profile is not a journal, diary, log nor record of my life and should not be taken to be accurate or true for any reason.
If anyone were to attempt to use information from this, my Facebook Profile, in a Court of Law I could in all good conscience hold my hand up on penalty of Perjury and deny actions that may appear to be truth if evidence for them was garnered in full or in part from this Facebook Profile.
This does not preclude the possibility that some events and statements are true.
This statement may or may not carry legal weight, and to the best of my knowledge has never been used as a defence in Court, but it stands as truth and if necessary I will swear under oath that I stand by the spirit of it.
I'm seriously considering putting this as a note on my profile.
Might get me out of a sticky situation if I ever get faced with this crap.
One step nearer to my E17 desktop being actually E17 instead of E16.999999
I've been using E17 for over a year as my primary desktop environment and the number of crashes is liveably low and a quick restart (of Enlightenment, not the OS, not a logout event, takes less than a second) makes it all better.
Avoid Panasonic.
Like this?
Menu is TinyMenu, Back/Forward appear and disappear depending on where in the tab's history you are, the "B" is bookmarks. User agent, ABP and a few other useful plugins make FF 3.6 a firm favourite of mine for the foreseeable future.
I could have read it, disagreed, and then formatted the hard drive, knowing that it voided my warranty.
After that I believe the computer belongs to me, to do with as I wish, seeing as I paid for it.
I should really be able to send Sony a letter asking them to reimburse me for their software licence seeing as I didn't use it.
You mean Skype that you could install under Yellow Dog Linux before they broke my VOIP device with their mandatory (penalty being not being able to play online) and unfair (took away advertised features) firmware update?
Seriously Your Honour, all I was doing was trying to do was fix my phone!
http://www.appbrain.com/app/button-savior-(root)/com.smart.swkey
Shame you have to root to use it, but as I have rooted (typical geek with Android, rooted and perma-rooted custom Froyo ROM) it works great.
Up and down, left or right, the trigger pixels are mostly undetectable in daily use and there are a few themes included.
I can't see my < £100 phone's buttons lasting very long so this is a great option.
PS If the developer reads this; saviour. That is all.
And you're doing this on your cell/SIM/mobile data plan?
I've just been hit by the T-Mobile "unlimited" debacle, but for anything like that I'd be creating a new user and logging it in to a coffee shop WiFi (McGonads is free) to do crap like that, if I didn't have home internets.
I'd never log my user in whilst on a hostile network. Downloading some RPMs/DEBs or (in my case) doing a "pacman -Syu" can be quite easily done from a temporary account, providing moody OS updates in a timely manner is a bit beyond your local coffee shop skiddie.
Chris (Luke): Well, I guess I'll go bulls-eye some womp rats in my T-16.
Quagmire (C-3PO): My god, you shoot small animals for fun? That's the first indicator of a serial killer, ya freak.
Chris (Luke): There's two suns and no women, what the hell am I supposed to do?
And yet if someone rips through the thread and redacts all the "Me too!" and "I know this is OT but ..." and "IT NOT WORK 4 ME" posts they get called a Nazi and the banhammer comes out ...
Forum Rules are usually posted in a sticky at the top of the forum, and they should be read. We need to be a little militant with n00bs and fools to get the message across. Breed a generation of people who will actually RTFM and learn how to ask questions intelligently.
Toshiba laptop for Wintereenmas, Win7 on it.
...), get the thing up and running, love every minute of it.
Open box, say "oh wow"
Get out CD with Arch Linux on
Power up laptop long enough to open DVD tray, turn off quickly
Power on with Arch disc in, remove three partitions of crap
Install* Arch, and E17 (yeah yeah, OK, 16.99999 or whatever
CBA sending the sticker underneath back to Redmond for a few quid back, used it to install Win7 DVD (from Piratebay) in a VM that never will be let on the internet because Photoshop is essential for me and WINE just doesn't cope well with it in my personal experience.
* New hardware required WiFi driver to be downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Fortunately I'm a geek and this presented no significant difficulty.
Here you go.
You're welcome.
the lusers as you call them are whom the internet is for
or accept reality.
The reality in most cases is that if the people "whom the internet is for" don't wise up a bit, with our help (welcome or otherwise) they will get malware, viruses (or virii, your choice), their computers will run like crap, their smartphones won't have flash/custom ROMs/nice apps that work better than the carrier provided dross, their computers will crash, their "internet isn't working" cry will resound around the net like the cry of a baby lost in the woods.
They need us, we need them. I'm not going to argue a lot of your points, we agree a lot, but I must insist that they should listen and it is to their own detriment if they don't, and that when they inevitably end up in the proverbial tears, they come to us to lift them out of their pit of ignorance induced woe and blame the technology for their problems, not their own lack of interest in the technology.
I'm a realist, I don't blame them. I'm a geek, I'm not one of them. I'm a human, I feel for them. I'm a git, it's their own fault, they should have listened to me.
Pick your response. We need education in schools to teach that RTFM is actually good advice, and that thick skin is important when dealing with people who you are preparing to ignore.
The information is there for you to read, should you care to look it up.
This article will be "google-able" within a week by 100% of the internet.
People who have read about this outage will be more informed, should anyone care to ask around "about this Skype thing I've heard about" and information from geeks is immensely free-flowing (sometimes you can't shut us up).
Don't go shouting and swearing at the GP who is trying to point out that lusers - don't fucking care - about the stuff we try and tell them, they just roll their eyes and "oh $deity, the geek is at it again. Take it from me (the uninformed peer) that this just works and it isn't evil".
Or read the book "Food of the gods" by Terrence McKenna.
Amazon UK has it, as does Amazon US.
Millions of attempts to find some variation of "phpmyadmin" showed me that the easiest thing to do was to put a script on the default site's 404.php that added the requesting IP to hosts.deny.
Having only the default site running on the IP and the rest of the server serving up NamedHosts made it easy to determine if it was a real request for a page or if it was a script trying to find vulnerabilities.
Moving SSHd off 22 dropped the attempts on that service by an order of magnitude.
Security is a journey, not a destination and everything you can do to either waste their time, or keep them out is another step towards your goal.
I'd rather have multiple passwords and this happening every few years than OpenID, for the record.
One leak of the OpenID db, one PFY with a grudge, one Swedish website later and we're all screwed.
Plus whoever owns OpenID knows every site you visit and the frequency.
Keep it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3282/
Think up a new password. Just one.
Pass = "PcbEn!"
The mnemonic for that password is "Passwords Can Be Easy Now!"
Now use that one simple password to create stupidly complex passwords for the sites you visit by using Password Hasher.
Every site you go to will have it's own unique mix of 26 upper, lower, numbers, symbols (if it supports it) that can be easily recreated in seconds without ever being written down or stored electronically.
All you have to remember is that passwords can be easy now.
Example password for Slashdot using this example is "nRP2zGk56sYN8IMUyFR/XpIx45" which is out of the brute force range this year and probably next year too.
And carried on selling it at the same price.
I've just looked at Tesco (UK supermarket) to see what they are selling the PS3 for now and the cheapest is £245.
Three years ago (IIRC) I bought mine from there bundled with LittleBigPlanet (die you horrible game) for £275.
That isn't much of a saving, but the unit is now half the size (ish) and has twice the HDD space. I hesitate to list the litany of features that are missing from the slim over my 80GB unit, be they hardware or software.
Disagreeing with something doesn't make it a troll.
Hello, my name is Mike, I hear you need to get out more and meet more people like me.
If you're ever in the UK, come and have a drink with me and some people who use something wonderful called "Linux" that is just like Windows but free!
If you don't like the thought of meeting a random stranger off the internet, you could just use the word "Linux" in conversation until you meet someone who knows what it is and then cultivate your new friends circle around some contacts that this person knows too.
Either way, good luck meeting intelligent, educated people in the future!
Isn't that what nice is for?
LXDE on Arch Linux. Absolutely fine on my EEE 4G.
Runs great on my Athlon laptop and did a suitable job on my T22 (P3/900, 256MB).