I'm all too familiar with how things like this can cycle. You can find my job application joke (with various alterations and claims that it's a real job application) on over 1,000 sites, regularly circulating in e-mail, and it even has its own Snopes.com page.
I wrote it over 7 years ago for my web site, posted it to a couple of humor newsgroups to get some promo. Someone stripped my intro, sent it to a couple of humor lists with the claim it was real, and it exploded.
Learning how to defend against getting hacked by learning how to hack is nothing novel. It sounds like a great idea on the surface, because it gives you the tools to probe your own weaknesses the way your attackers will. But you're always going to have to keep up with the latest methods, scripts, etc. IMO, A net admin who isn't at least a hobbyist hacker probably won't get much from a hacking bootcamp except a false sense of security.
Every time I hear a story about Napster, I feel really sorry for the deluded marketing executives who think it has any sort of "cred" anymore.
It used to be about sharing, now it's about selling. Not that selling is a bad thing or that sharing is a good thing. It's just that the two are very opposite in consumer's minds, yet there are these dumbass MBA's who somehow think that just branding something with the Napster name will make it cool, so they bought the name.
If you could buy cool, Bill Gates would be The Fonz.
Due to his consultant credit on Hackers and "as himself" credits in some documentaries, Goldstein has a page on IMDb. There's also a photo, but that's due to him or someone representing him submitting it.
Just Monday, the "Foxtrot" comic strip was joking how it seemed Doom III would never come out.
Seeing a confirmed date on a reporting site, heck even on ID's site, seems like reading portents in the tea leaves. Even when they announce ship dates, these companies are notorious for having last-minute changes. Thirty-six hours before you should be able to pick up your precious pre-order, it's announced that you'll have to wait another two weeks... maybe three... they're not sure.
I'll believe the release dates when I have a copy in my grubby little hands and not before.
Re:Percy Schmeiser in his own words
on
Open Source Life?
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps the greatest argument against this is that if you shoot these "cops", you'd just have more legal hassles. You might have to prove self defense in court and pay for a criminal lawyer, plus Monsanto would certainly bankroll each cop's personal injury lawsuit against you. Then your legal bills would double or triple, because you'd still have the original legal issues with Monsanto.
You'd be much better off having them arrested and prosecuted for theft and trespassing.
What seems most interesting is that given the tactics of these "cops", I would think (and IANAL) the detective agency could possibly be brought up on RICO (Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations) charges. RICO was designed to prosecute mob extortion and "protection" rackets.
Re:It's Gone Beyond Science Fiction into Mainstrea
on
Open Source Life?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Didn't you see mimic? The won't die because you engineered them to, they'll get bigger and bigger and then start killing humans. Just like the wheat obviouslly would.
It's Gone Beyond Science Fiction into Mainstream
on
Open Source Life?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Sounds a bit like the plot of White Death. In this book, the heroes must stop a megaconglomerate from seeding the seas with genetically engineered fish that will overrun all the native populations and then die, so the conglomerate can corner the market with their GMO farm-raised fish. Anyone wanting to raise fish will need to buy stock from them. Of course, the hero foils their plot.
Sounds strange, outlandish, fantasy... not really.
In the real world, the article mentions the Monsanto Case against Percy Schmeiser. Their seed ended up on his land through no fault of his, yet they claim they have a right to be paid license fees or to force him to spend his time and money removing corn derived from their migrating seed.
It's not just scary that the courts will side with them on this and let them steamroll over innocent parties, but that they cannot control the spread of their lab-grown genes. One of the "fictional" premises of White Death is that even without an evil plot, a GMO could escape its farm environment and reproduce in the wild, gradually replacing the formerly dominant species on a genetic level. The problem is that this GMO has defects and liabilities that are unknown, and while it might last long enough to marginalize the genes of the wild organism it's replacing, something could come along and wipe out the newly dominant GMO en masse, leaving stocks of that animal or plant decimated worldwide.
Cops are not always bullies. They are not always trying to intimidate you. They don't know you from Adam, and the moment you start showing instability, they do not know what you're going to do next. If they don't protect themselves by restraining you, they could die. DIE. They are not required to risk their lives just so you can have a hissy fit unmolested.
When you deal with police, be nice, be polite, be unemotional, and move slowly. If they are committing an injustice, let it go, gather your evidence, then sue. Do not threaten to have their badge, do not threaten them in any way. Let them threaten you.
And you know what... show that video to a black man over 50 or 60 and you ask him if Hiibel got off easy.
Worst of all, the ruling doesn't say you have to show your "papers". You just have to tell the cop your name on demand, which they deemed did not constitute potentially incriminating evidence to the police. Unless they make having a stupid white drash name like Dudley Hiibel a crime in and of itself, you can't be arrested for telling the cops your name. And if your name allows them to pull up warrants on you.... GOOOOOD!!!! Your name wasn't incriminating. The crimes that inspired the warrants were.
If a cop asks my name, I'll tell him. I'll be cooperative. I'll say yes sir and no sir. I will give him absolutely no reason whatsoever to accuse me of being troublesome or resisting. I will not be an unsympathetic, arrogant trailer trash prick like Hiibel.
You should register a domain. Then you're safe until some big company decides to challenge you for it.
When my host bailed on me without warning, I registered my last name as a domain. I've had it for over 7 years, changed hosts 3 or 4 times, but my e-mail always gets to me, my homepage is always at the same URL.
But there is a caveat. Domain ownership can be addictive. I currently own 16 domains.
So say someone has backed up everything and moves it somewhere else, how do their readers find them? More to the point, how do they find their readers??
March 1997, one of my little weekly columns (didn't call them "blogs" back then) gets a mention in Us. Unfortunately I'd been hosting it in donated/~username space, and right after the magazine puts the blurb to bed, the owners of the bookstore hosting my site decide they don't want to run a server anymore.
No warning, no forwarding, no nothing. I have everything backed up, so I register a domain, get hosting, and my site's back online within a few days... only at another address. I'm running around trying to update my entries at all the major search engines, posting to appropriate newsgroups, just trying to get the word out that my columns had moved.
Then Us comes out, glowing little blurb recommending my column... and the *old* URL. My first major national press and no one can find me.
That is the most insidious part of what Winer has done. He has separated all those bloggers from their readers, leaving them no way to leave a forwarding address. Anyone who doesn't backup their content takes their chances, but how do you backup your audience?
If Microsoft's marketing strategy is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), I'd say Mac's is HSD (Hope, Speculation, and Disappointment). Their new top-of-the-line product revisions are so few and far between that the perceived speed gap almost always falls in x86's favor.
The last time Apple announced a top-end speed bump was when they announced the G5, a year ago. Since then, AMD and Intel have announced a plethora of new chips. The average (not always on schedule, but usually) is 3-4 months between top-end speed bumps for the x86/Wintel crowd. There's a constant perception that they're making the fastest faster and they keep inertia from setting in with the regular bumps. Look at how much delaying Prescott and going with the EE chip hurt Intel vs. AMD.
For all Apple tries to claim "FAST", their speed bumps come at a snail's pace. And then, when they announce it, it's still 4-6 weeks (or more) until the first ships to consumers. On top of that, because it's so far between bumps, you're dealing with huge pent-up demand by the time they finally announce a bump. It ensures the newest hot Apple processor will be so backordered, you'll wait another 6-8 weeks for it.
By the time it's on your desk, whatever was the hot new Pentium when you ordered your hot new Apple will already be a generation old. Plus you'll have to show a LOT of patience, waiting 12-14 weeks for your new Mac, when Dell can get you the best Pentium possible in 12-14 days.
Forget about pricing and relative tech merits, Microsoft vs. the world, whatever. If Apple wants to compete with Wintel, IMO, Apple needs to update their top-of-the-line hardware more often, announce it closer to the ship date, and get it out the door in a reasonable time.
BASIC stands for *Beginner's* All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. That's what I started with in 1980. I never pursued programming academically, but this year when I wanted to learn some Perl and PHP to help me do some back-end processing, my old knowledge of BASIC was the perfect stepping stone.
It has simple control structures (if... then, for... next), simple arrays, boolean and mathematical comparison operators, and if you avoid the spaghetti programming concept of the GOTO, the GOSUB will help you teach structured programming. And it's all a great stepping stone into functions, while, wend, arrays, hashes, and eventually objects and inheritance.
The BASIC programming I did for fun on my Commodore was *excellent* preparation for Perl and PHP. Find some good old-fashioned basic and teach your mom that, starting with "Hello World", moving to a guessing game (computer picks random number between one and 10 - you try to guess it while it says "higher" and "lower")... just keep it easy and fun, gradually adding more complexity.
Some IT does matter, some doesn't
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Despite the question's polarizing phrasing, the real issue seems to be "how much should you budget for IT this year?"
If you have a small business, are you going to have a competitive advantage against your competitors by upgrading every seat from 10/100 ethernet to 10/100/1000 ethernet? Do you need to upgrade everyone to the latest version of MS Office? How many old CPU's need to be replaced with new ones? According to 3com, Microsoft, and Intel, the answers are "Yes", "Yes", and "All of them". According to others, the answers are "Maybe", "No", and "Depends on how old each one is".
...it appears that some of the major characters from the Bradbury story aren't in the credits.
Don't imagine that because a character isn't listed on IMDb 4.5 months before release, the character isn't in the film. IMDb rarely has complete credits this far before release. I'm surprised the Slashdot editors let such a silly claim through.
I'm sure the folks at IMDb appreciate that you take their listings so literally, but they try to get a title into the database as soon as it's confirmed that the film is actually greenlighted. That initial listing may have nothing more than the studio, writer, director and one or two stars. Then they add more credits and other info as they become available.
I know people there. They won't have "full" / "official" credits until they get them from a studio source (a month or two before release), a press kit (a week or two before release), or if the studio is still afraid of the Internet (and some are), they get the full credits after the film is released, usually from dedicated users who sat through the credits in theaters, scribbling furiously.
Just got off the phone with Jim Bromley, president of Nordstrom Direct, who took it upon himself to personally call in response to the customer service form I e-mailed last night and answer my concerns about their relationship with Claria.
He said they have not done business with Claria and they have no idea why L.L. Bean is making this claim, other than to try to add weight to existing suits L.L. Bean has going against Claria. He said Nordstrom's is very anti-spyware.
He also suggested that Nordstrom's may end up suing L.L. Bean for slander.
I'm sorry that it takes specific law suits to identify a handful of companies, because I'd really love to see a full list of Claria's customers. Perhaps L.L. Bean will subpoena it in discovery and then media interests will file motions to get access to it (for publication, not to ID the companies for their ad sales teams).
I have notified Nordstrom's (where I shop a little and my wife shops somewhat often) that my wife and I will be boycotting them for one year, and it will become permanent if they do not make a public apology and publicly distance themselves from spyware-based advertising.
I also went to Claria.com, filled out an ad rate request form with a fake ID, and used the comment portion to let them know that I have notified Nordstrom's of my 1 year boycott and specifically attributed it to them using Claria.
Of course, Nordstrom's apology won't be likely, because if they make an apology before the lawsuit is settled, L.L. Bean may be able to turn it against them.
As noted in the article, this is 0.1 version software. As well, it runs on top of Windows. That makes the "40x slower than the normal processor" claim seem somewhere about right.
Now, the tricks as I see it are:
Optimize the code in future releases for better speed.
Build a version that boots out of Linux or BSD to minimize overhead. Seems that since OSX is PPC BSD at its heart, there might be some sort of way to lower redundancy if the emulator were running in x386 BSD.
Plan9 is not unix. And not in the same way that GNU is not unix.
The post you're replying to said *nix, not Unix. AFAIK, that's shorthand for "Unix-like operating systems". Plan9, Inferno, Linux, etc. are not Unix. But I thought calling OSes in their class *nix was acceptable. If I am mistaken, I apologize.
Considering it runs as a service, it sounds like it might be marketed as an alternative to VMWare if it had a decent ports collection... at least for those who want to have a generic GUI *nix they can access from Windows instead of dual booting.
First, let's assume that all overhead being equal as a percentage of performance, that the base equipment costs (processors, MoBos, controllers, interconnects, RAM) would come out to a 4:1 price advantage for Opteron.
Assuming the 16,384 Opteron processors have a speed of "1", and the 4096 Itaniums are 27% faster or "1.27", the Opteron system would have a speed of 16384 vs. a speed of 5202 for the Itanium system.
Seems like apples to apples... but 4x as many processors, motherboards, RAM, power supplies, etc. are going to generate a LOT more heat, requiring more cooling equipment and more electricity to power it. Add to that the added space requirements. Add to that all the additional electricity the greater number of systems will use. Last, recoding from IA64 to X86-64 is another cost.
It's never apples to apples. I'd love to champion AMD against Intel, and I have an AMD FX-51, but I can't make it fit any purpose. Itanium is good for big iron and will own that for a while yet... IMO.
"Actually your[sic] totally wrong. The intentions for the bear suit were hibernation research, which could lead to things like a stasis drug for deep space missions."
So we'd have big fat astronauts when they left Earth, and they would have shed all that fat by the time they reached Mars. Then, prior to leaving Mars, they'd be eating sticks of butter and washing them down with milkshakes to fatten up for the trip home? And why bears? There are smaller, much less dangerous animals that hibernate, ya know.
Anyone who sells a bear-proof suit to the highest bidder is inviting them to go bear-baiting.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap! A former subscriber??? Guess the robots from the future haven't found and killed all of you yet.
- Greg
I wrote it over 7 years ago for my web site, posted it to a couple of humor newsgroups to get some promo. Someone stripped my intro, sent it to a couple of humor lists with the claim it was real, and it exploded.
Sadly, my Shit Nickels Fast chain letter parody did not do as well.
- Greg
Learning how to defend against getting hacked by learning how to hack is nothing novel. It sounds like a great idea on the surface, because it gives you the tools to probe your own weaknesses the way your attackers will. But you're always going to have to keep up with the latest methods, scripts, etc. IMO, A net admin who isn't at least a hobbyist hacker probably won't get much from a hacking bootcamp except a false sense of security.
- Greg
It used to be about sharing, now it's about selling. Not that selling is a bad thing or that sharing is a good thing. It's just that the two are very opposite in consumer's minds, yet there are these dumbass MBA's who somehow think that just branding something with the Napster name will make it cool, so they bought the name.
If you could buy cool, Bill Gates would be The Fonz.
- Greg
No pictures of Woz on IMDb, but there are photos from Pirates of Silicon Valley (with one showing Joey Slotnick playing Woz).
- Greg
Seeing a confirmed date on a reporting site, heck even on ID's site, seems like reading portents in the tea leaves. Even when they announce ship dates, these companies are notorious for having last-minute changes. Thirty-six hours before you should be able to pick up your precious pre-order, it's announced that you'll have to wait another two weeks... maybe three... they're not sure.
I'll believe the release dates when I have a copy in my grubby little hands and not before.
You'd be much better off having them arrested and prosecuted for theft and trespassing.
What seems most interesting is that given the tactics of these "cops", I would think (and IANAL) the detective agency could possibly be brought up on RICO (Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations) charges. RICO was designed to prosecute mob extortion and "protection" rackets.
Murderous, rampaging plant life is generally best combatted with the strains of "Puberty Love".
Sounds strange, outlandish, fantasy... not really.
In the real world, the article mentions the Monsanto Case against Percy Schmeiser. Their seed ended up on his land through no fault of his, yet they claim they have a right to be paid license fees or to force him to spend his time and money removing corn derived from their migrating seed.
It's not just scary that the courts will side with them on this and let them steamroll over innocent parties, but that they cannot control the spread of their lab-grown genes. One of the "fictional" premises of White Death is that even without an evil plot, a GMO could escape its farm environment and reproduce in the wild, gradually replacing the formerly dominant species on a genetic level. The problem is that this GMO has defects and liabilities that are unknown, and while it might last long enough to marginalize the genes of the wild organism it's replacing, something could come along and wipe out the newly dominant GMO en masse, leaving stocks of that animal or plant decimated worldwide.
Frightening.
When you deal with police, be nice, be polite, be unemotional, and move slowly. If they are committing an injustice, let it go, gather your evidence, then sue. Do not threaten to have their badge, do not threaten them in any way. Let them threaten you.
And you know what... show that video to a black man over 50 or 60 and you ask him if Hiibel got off easy.
Worst of all, the ruling doesn't say you have to show your "papers". You just have to tell the cop your name on demand, which they deemed did not constitute potentially incriminating evidence to the police. Unless they make having a stupid white drash name like Dudley Hiibel a crime in and of itself, you can't be arrested for telling the cops your name. And if your name allows them to pull up warrants on you.... GOOOOOD!!!! Your name wasn't incriminating. The crimes that inspired the warrants were.
If a cop asks my name, I'll tell him. I'll be cooperative. I'll say yes sir and no sir. I will give him absolutely no reason whatsoever to accuse me of being troublesome or resisting. I will not be an unsympathetic, arrogant trailer trash prick like Hiibel.
When my host bailed on me without warning, I registered my last name as a domain. I've had it for over 7 years, changed hosts 3 or 4 times, but my e-mail always gets to me, my homepage is always at the same URL.
But there is a caveat. Domain ownership can be addictive. I currently own 16 domains.
Impressive stuff, and nice that IMDb has Hammerhead credited.
Greg
March 1997, one of my little weekly columns (didn't call them "blogs" back then) gets a mention in Us. Unfortunately I'd been hosting it in donated /~username space, and right after the magazine puts the blurb to bed, the owners of the bookstore hosting my site decide they don't want to run a server anymore.
No warning, no forwarding, no nothing. I have everything backed up, so I register a domain, get hosting, and my site's back online within a few days... only at another address. I'm running around trying to update my entries at all the major search engines, posting to appropriate newsgroups, just trying to get the word out that my columns had moved.
Then Us comes out, glowing little blurb recommending my column... and the *old* URL. My first major national press and no one can find me.
That is the most insidious part of what Winer has done. He has separated all those bloggers from their readers, leaving them no way to leave a forwarding address. Anyone who doesn't backup their content takes their chances, but how do you backup your audience?
- Greg
The last time Apple announced a top-end speed bump was when they announced the G5, a year ago. Since then, AMD and Intel have announced a plethora of new chips. The average (not always on schedule, but usually) is 3-4 months between top-end speed bumps for the x86/Wintel crowd. There's a constant perception that they're making the fastest faster and they keep inertia from setting in with the regular bumps. Look at how much delaying Prescott and going with the EE chip hurt Intel vs. AMD.
For all Apple tries to claim "FAST", their speed bumps come at a snail's pace. And then, when they announce it, it's still 4-6 weeks (or more) until the first ships to consumers. On top of that, because it's so far between bumps, you're dealing with huge pent-up demand by the time they finally announce a bump. It ensures the newest hot Apple processor will be so backordered, you'll wait another 6-8 weeks for it.
By the time it's on your desk, whatever was the hot new Pentium when you ordered your hot new Apple will already be a generation old. Plus you'll have to show a LOT of patience, waiting 12-14 weeks for your new Mac, when Dell can get you the best Pentium possible in 12-14 days.
Forget about pricing and relative tech merits, Microsoft vs. the world, whatever. If Apple wants to compete with Wintel, IMO, Apple needs to update their top-of-the-line hardware more often, announce it closer to the ship date, and get it out the door in a reasonable time.
It has simple control structures (if... then, for... next), simple arrays, boolean and mathematical comparison operators, and if you avoid the spaghetti programming concept of the GOTO, the GOSUB will help you teach structured programming. And it's all a great stepping stone into functions, while, wend, arrays, hashes, and eventually objects and inheritance.
The BASIC programming I did for fun on my Commodore was *excellent* preparation for Perl and PHP. Find some good old-fashioned basic and teach your mom that, starting with "Hello World", moving to a guessing game (computer picks random number between one and 10 - you try to guess it while it says "higher" and "lower")... just keep it easy and fun, gradually adding more complexity.
If you have a small business, are you going to have a competitive advantage against your competitors by upgrading every seat from 10/100 ethernet to 10/100/1000 ethernet? Do you need to upgrade everyone to the latest version of MS Office? How many old CPU's need to be replaced with new ones? According to 3com, Microsoft, and Intel, the answers are "Yes", "Yes", and "All of them". According to others, the answers are "Maybe", "No", and "Depends on how old each one is".
Don't imagine that because a character isn't listed on IMDb 4.5 months before release, the character isn't in the film. IMDb rarely has complete credits this far before release. I'm surprised the Slashdot editors let such a silly claim through.
I'm sure the folks at IMDb appreciate that you take their listings so literally, but they try to get a title into the database as soon as it's confirmed that the film is actually greenlighted. That initial listing may have nothing more than the studio, writer, director and one or two stars. Then they add more credits and other info as they become available.
I know people there. They won't have "full" / "official" credits until they get them from a studio source (a month or two before release), a press kit (a week or two before release), or if the studio is still afraid of the Internet (and some are), they get the full credits after the film is released, usually from dedicated users who sat through the credits in theaters, scribbling furiously.
- Greg
He said they have not done business with Claria and they have no idea why L.L. Bean is making this claim, other than to try to add weight to existing suits L.L. Bean has going against Claria. He said Nordstrom's is very anti-spyware.
He also suggested that Nordstrom's may end up suing L.L. Bean for slander.
Just FYI.
I have notified Nordstrom's (where I shop a little and my wife shops somewhat often) that my wife and I will be boycotting them for one year, and it will become permanent if they do not make a public apology and publicly distance themselves from spyware-based advertising.
I also went to Claria.com, filled out an ad rate request form with a fake ID, and used the comment portion to let them know that I have notified Nordstrom's of my 1 year boycott and specifically attributed it to them using Claria. Of course, Nordstrom's apology won't be likely, because if they make an apology before the lawsuit is settled, L.L. Bean may be able to turn it against them.
But a boy can dream...
Now, the tricks as I see it are:
The post you're replying to said *nix, not Unix. AFAIK, that's shorthand for "Unix-like operating systems". Plan9, Inferno, Linux, etc. are not Unix. But I thought calling OSes in their class *nix was acceptable. If I am mistaken, I apologize.
Assuming the 16,384 Opteron processors have a speed of "1", and the 4096 Itaniums are 27% faster or "1.27", the Opteron system would have a speed of 16384 vs. a speed of 5202 for the Itanium system.
Seems like apples to apples... but 4x as many processors, motherboards, RAM, power supplies, etc. are going to generate a LOT more heat, requiring more cooling equipment and more electricity to power it. Add to that the added space requirements. Add to that all the additional electricity the greater number of systems will use. Last, recoding from IA64 to X86-64 is another cost.
It's never apples to apples. I'd love to champion AMD against Intel, and I have an AMD FX-51, but I can't make it fit any purpose. Itanium is good for big iron and will own that for a while yet... IMO.
So we'd have big fat astronauts when they left Earth, and they would have shed all that fat by the time they reached Mars. Then, prior to leaving Mars, they'd be eating sticks of butter and washing them down with milkshakes to fatten up for the trip home? And why bears? There are smaller, much less dangerous animals that hibernate, ya know.
Anyone who sells a bear-proof suit to the highest bidder is inviting them to go bear-baiting.