Does this make anyone else wonder what the next big thing is going to be that we'll be too old to figure out but the younger generation will be all over?
I guess then we'll know how our parents and grandparents felt about the Internet and computers in general.
"But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Unless they were using a laser to shoot the ball into the number they wanted, there's nothing at all illegal about this in the U.S., and I'm heartened to read the U.K. either.
"No more bets... And the number is 7... ZAP! I mean 19... ZAP! I mean 22... ZAP! I mean 13... ZAP! I mean 3... The winner is 3! You win again."
The sad thing is that some people are going to read this tongue-in-cheek analysis and really think that the Internet is more expensive because of shipping.
From an economic perspective, purchasing commodity items on the Internet is more efficient than slogging around from store to store to find the cheaper price. On the Internet, you have nearly infinite choices. I guess if you compare purchasing an item in Best Buy to purchasing an item on bestbuy.com, you might come to the conclusion that purchasing things in the store is cheaper because of shipping costs. But if you compare the cost of purchasing an item in Best Buy to the cheapest listed cost of buying the same item on pricegrabber.com, pricewatch.com or any of the other thousands of sites that show the cheapest price, provide coupons for purchasing on the Internet, etc... The Internet will win every time.
I returned the X-Arcade two-player controller that I purchased. The joysticks are very low quality. They advertise that they're 4/8-way switchable (you NEED a 4-way joystick to play PacMan or ladder-type games like Donkey Kong or Burger Time) and I found the response of the 4-way mode far less than ideal.
As others have pointed out, Ultimarc is the place to buy the I-Pac to interface to your computer. The joysticks that Ultimarc sells are much higher quality (and the E-stick is high quality and super easy to install to boot!).
I honestly wouldn't buy anything from X-Arcade again. I thought their quality was very low.
Every computer repair shop knows about this trick. Generally it's not done in a freezer, however, it's done with circuit cooler. This only works (obviously) if it's a problem with the circuit board and that the heads haven't in fact crashed or have some other mechanical problem. This works because it causes connections to expand and work for the temporary period that they're cold.
You can also remove the circuit board from a working hard drive and swap it with the non-working hard drive for a permanent effect.
If you have a head crash or other mechanical problem, generally you need the services of a clean room to retrieve the data.
Whenever I sign up a non-technical user for a web mail account (so I don't have re-setup Outlook and hear how they lost all their email everytime their hard drive crashes), I always sign them up for a Yahoo account. Hotmail just plain sucks because they open links in email in a frame. Come on now - they've had that "feature" in there for years. When are they going to get rid of it? I thought when MS modified IE so that it didn't accept cookies in a frame they would HAVE to do it but apparently they didn't agree with me. As a result, clicking on links contained within a Hotmail message is useless.
On the other hand, GMail is really nice. Part of the UI though I'm still up in the air as to whether it's more difficult for me to use because I'm not used to it or because it's just plain not better. For instance, I sent an email to approximately 40 people from my Gmail account and received a single response from just about all of them. Well all of those responses are lumped into a single unit called a conversation that I find very difficult to navigate/cleanup/etc. I know that's the point - that I'm never supposed to delete anything, but I think actually hitting that "ideal" might be counterproductive.
So, I stick with Yahoo - especially since they added the ability to login using SSL. Can you believe for years you had to login with your password in plaintext!! And even now the "Standard" login is plaintext - you have to click on "Secure" mode to make sure nobody gets your login and password.
What an overgeneralization! Tell someone who lives in Manhattan that a six-figure salary makes them rich!
Hell, when I lived in Philadelphia I paid $200 per month for PARKING and that's nothing compared to places in Manhattan! How much do people in Iowa pay to park? Combine parking costs with housing costs with even groceries costs and you'll start to realize there are different costs of living that make overgeneralations like yours very unwise.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Nintendo apologizes to Suicide Girls!
Nintendo sent the email below to the good people at Suicide Girls. Background here and here.
Hello,
We would like to apologize to you and to those who frequent the suicidegirls.com website for inadvertently contacting you about a fan posting on the website.
We know that many of our fans are old enough to make their own choice about what they want to view on the Internet. We value the support of our fans and we respect their decisions. The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake.
As a gesture of goodwill, we would like to offer you (and RuneLateralus) a free Nintendo video game system and game of your choice. (...)
In addition, we would appreciate it if you could provide us with contact information for RuneLateralus, or have him contact us directly, so that we may apologize to him. We would be glad to send him a game and system of his choice through you as well, since we do not have his contact information.
Sincerely,
Christie Hamilton
Nintendo of America Inc.
Consumer Service Department
Oh yeah, whenever a law enforcement agency makes a bust, they always like to keep it hush-hush. That way, the person they busted can't be made an example of and discourage additional people from getting into that illegal line of work.
I'm sure they knew exactly waht they were doing. They probably busted everyone involved in the Shadowcrew group and wanted to leave a nice message to every other group that you're probably being investigated too. It's a standard bluff, and will likely at least make other groups less brazen with what they do (hopefully limiting their harm) if not encourage them to find a more legal line of work.
I listened to Howard Stern almost daily for the last 12 years. I wasn't the biggest fan of Stern's, I wasn't the longest running fan of Stern's, but I bought several of his videos, pay per view, both books, the soundtrack he put out, saw his movie in the theater and at home and even liked watching him on the E! network.
I haven't had anything to do with Stern for the last 6 months or so, though. He's just not funny anymore. I would say about 70% of his show is dedicated fully to politics - more specifically, hatred for Bush when for the first half of Bush's presidency all he could do was praise the job he was doing. Of the remaining 30%, it's constant political snipes among the dick jokes. Can't he just go back to 100% dick jokes? I mean, that's really what he's good at.
I know that the majority of Slashdot thinks e-voting machines are evil, but give me a break. Do you have any idea how stupid the average person is? Have you ever walked your computer illiterate mother through clicking on "Start, Settings, Control Panel"? It takes 20 minutes just to do that! Who would think they could handle using a computer to vote any better?
Feel free to mod me down for this opinion, but I'm not sure if you should be voting if you're one of the 1% of people that just can't figure out how to do it. I mean, there are even people who couldn't properly hole-punch a card in the last election! How about people that accidently voted for the wrong name? People that voted for two different people? And these are on paper ballots! What hope do these people have of being able to vote through any mechanism? And should we care if they can't?
I'm surprised that someone submitted a story about a device that can play video files of all sorts from your computer on your TV. There's got to be a dozen of these things, some of them have been around for a few years now.
Linksys has one, Gateway has one, PRISMIQ has one, Hauppage has one, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Skippy Peanut Butter brand media center that could do this at this point. The fact it can play DivX and XVid is old news too. My PRISMIQ unit could do that for the last 18 months, and to top it off it's an open source box running on Linux that I can even telnet to. Oh, and the price isn't $249 like it used to be - I think they're having closeout prices currently for $149. A wireless keyboard for it is an additional $29. And the recording (think PVR) version of it comes out 4Q.
That's the good news on these things. The bad news is that they hardly ever work as advertised. I've tried several of them and they all have their good points and bad points.
It's a universal mantra of any company involved in litigation. "We are unable to comment due to ongoing litigation". Now they're going to be reguarly commenting on active litigation on multiple fronts. They are breaking yet another fundamental rule of the universe (the first being, don't piss off the entire world in a ridiculous attempt to enrich yourself).
Now the only problem that remains is a suitable and reliable means of error correction - which is the biggest problem thus far in QC:-(
The only problem? How about making practical those things they've done at great expense with huge impractical devices in a lab? How about proving that entanglement is for real and isn't just "spooky action at a distance" like Einstein originally derided it?
Quantum computers are decades if not longer from reality.
I believe in your first statement, that wealthy nations can afford the luxury of environmentalism and that goes a long way in curbing pollution from industrial sources.
However, I think that as a developing nation becomes wealthy and enacts pollution controls on industry, any environmentalism is offset by sheer numbers of individuals. This is a very complicated subject, but to take just one example... Currently, 1 in 3,000 Chinese people owns a car (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0 628_040628_chinacars.html). This small number has many reasons not the least of which is that they just can't afford them. As average wealth increase, so too will the number of cars on the road.
As stated, this is a very complicated subject with lots of variables, but I would expect that as China becomes wealthier that they would definitely not see any decreases in the amount of pollution they emit.
Call me picky, but I find even the quietest hard drives (Seagate Barracuda line is the quietest I've found) are unacceptably loud when used in a media PC in my living room. That constant humming is a big annoyance.
Add to that, unless the case is an ITX format or smaller, I find a media PC unacceptably large for my living room as well.
I've experimented with various harddrive-less media players/recorders but haven't found one that I liked enough to even mention by name here.
On your reboots, just add to make sure to boot into "safe mode" no matter what Windows operating system you have before running said anti-spyware applications.
Anyone that's familiar with.Net has probably never used this technique to secure a page on their site.
I believe most people would consider it more secure to set up a virtual folder within your web site and protect the pages within that virtual folder with either Basic or Windows Integrated Authentication.
I've never used the web.config file technique to attempt to secure pages that really needed to be secure, and I doubt many other people have either. If you did without taking any other security steps, well... time to re-think that situation.
This security vulnerability will prove to be a dud; nothing along the lines of the old::$DATA exploits and what-not.
I'm sure everyone else has noticed that the reason quoted for doing just about anything in the real world lately has been "to defeat terrorists". In fact, that's why I handed my latest project in late at work.
It seems Microsoft is starting a trend to make spammers the cyber-equivalent of the terrorist scapegoat in the real world.
This seems to me to be plain and simple that because of GMail, Microsoft can't use a ridiculous amount of storage (2 pitiful megs)as an incentive to pay them money that now they're looking for other features to take away to encourage people to pay up.
I have a free Hotmail account and do use the Outlook Express option. It's a nice enough feature with plenty of annoyances, which is why I'm glad I switched my primary email account to Gmail some time ago.
I don't believe the upgrades are in chronological order. If so, they skipped me. My (still) 2 meg hotmail account is from mid-1997.
Before a "my hotmail account is older than yours" flamewar erupts; I acknowledge that Hotmail was around for well over a year before I received an account.
Anyway, I use my old Hotmail account for every non-important email that I want sent to me and it gets spammed like crazy but Hotmail only squeaks through maybe 4 false negatives per day. I use my GMail account for every important email that I want sent to me.
Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time playing poker in the casino knows to be on the lookout for colluding partners at your table. (i.e. Two or more friends sitting at the same poker table that are able to exchange information about their hands between each other or even to use various combined betting styles to bluff or raise the pot to artificial levels).
When done properly, having a colluding partner at a poker table is a significant advantage for you. On the Internet it would be very easy to have, say 3 or 4 seats of a 10-seat table controlled by you. Or hell, have 9 of 10. Just load additional casino accounts into web browers that go through different gateways. Or any number of dozens of other ways to make it appear to be coming from a different machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this make anyone else wonder what the next big thing is going to be that we'll be too old to figure out but the younger generation will be all over?
I guess then we'll know how our parents and grandparents felt about the Internet and computers in general.
I strongly disagree with what you say:
Resources
Quote:
"But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
First the 2000 election was stolen from him, now the vast right-wing conspiracy is attempting to defrock him of his Internet-Inventor title.
When will Republicans stop picking on this man?
Unless they were using a laser to shoot the ball into the number they wanted, there's nothing at all illegal about this in the U.S., and I'm heartened to read the U.K. either.
"No more bets... And the number is 7... ZAP! I mean 19... ZAP! I mean 22... ZAP! I mean 13... ZAP! I mean 3... The winner is 3! You win again."
The sad thing is that some people are going to read this tongue-in-cheek analysis and really think that the Internet is more expensive because of shipping. From an economic perspective, purchasing commodity items on the Internet is more efficient than slogging around from store to store to find the cheaper price. On the Internet, you have nearly infinite choices. I guess if you compare purchasing an item in Best Buy to purchasing an item on bestbuy.com, you might come to the conclusion that purchasing things in the store is cheaper because of shipping costs. But if you compare the cost of purchasing an item in Best Buy to the cheapest listed cost of buying the same item on pricegrabber.com, pricewatch.com or any of the other thousands of sites that show the cheapest price, provide coupons for purchasing on the Internet, etc... The Internet will win every time.
I returned the X-Arcade two-player controller that I purchased. The joysticks are very low quality. They advertise that they're 4/8-way switchable (you NEED a 4-way joystick to play PacMan or ladder-type games like Donkey Kong or Burger Time) and I found the response of the 4-way mode far less than ideal.
As others have pointed out, Ultimarc is the place to buy the I-Pac to interface to your computer. The joysticks that Ultimarc sells are much higher quality (and the E-stick is high quality and super easy to install to boot!).
I honestly wouldn't buy anything from X-Arcade again. I thought their quality was very low.
I hesitate a bit to divulege this on Slashdot... but here goes.
/.'d.
Fans of Stargate-SG1 and Stargate Atlantis can download every episode ever made via IRC on irc.rizon.net in the channel #stargate-atlantis
There are at present over 500 users in the channel along with dozens of XDCC and other bots there waiting to serve the files to you.
Eh, I'm sure this isn't the first time an IRC channel has been
Every computer repair shop knows about this trick. Generally it's not done in a freezer, however, it's done with circuit cooler. This only works (obviously) if it's a problem with the circuit board and that the heads haven't in fact crashed or have some other mechanical problem. This works because it causes connections to expand and work for the temporary period that they're cold. You can also remove the circuit board from a working hard drive and swap it with the non-working hard drive for a permanent effect. If you have a head crash or other mechanical problem, generally you need the services of a clean room to retrieve the data.
Whenever I sign up a non-technical user for a web mail account (so I don't have re-setup Outlook and hear how they lost all their email everytime their hard drive crashes), I always sign them up for a Yahoo account. Hotmail just plain sucks because they open links in email in a frame. Come on now - they've had that "feature" in there for years. When are they going to get rid of it? I thought when MS modified IE so that it didn't accept cookies in a frame they would HAVE to do it but apparently they didn't agree with me. As a result, clicking on links contained within a Hotmail message is useless.
On the other hand, GMail is really nice. Part of the UI though I'm still up in the air as to whether it's more difficult for me to use because I'm not used to it or because it's just plain not better. For instance, I sent an email to approximately 40 people from my Gmail account and received a single response from just about all of them. Well all of those responses are lumped into a single unit called a conversation that I find very difficult to navigate/cleanup/etc. I know that's the point - that I'm never supposed to delete anything, but I think actually hitting that "ideal" might be counterproductive. So, I stick with Yahoo - especially since they added the ability to login using SSL. Can you believe for years you had to login with your password in plaintext!! And even now the "Standard" login is plaintext - you have to click on "Secure" mode to make sure nobody gets your login and password.
Everyone buddy up and sue each other now! Microsoft will have to defend us against ourselves.
What an overgeneralization! Tell someone who lives in Manhattan that a six-figure salary makes them rich! Hell, when I lived in Philadelphia I paid $200 per month for PARKING and that's nothing compared to places in Manhattan! How much do people in Iowa pay to park? Combine parking costs with housing costs with even groceries costs and you'll start to realize there are different costs of living that make overgeneralations like yours very unwise.
Thursday, October 28, 2004 Nintendo apologizes to Suicide Girls! Nintendo sent the email below to the good people at Suicide Girls. Background here and here. Hello, We would like to apologize to you and to those who frequent the suicidegirls.com website for inadvertently contacting you about a fan posting on the website. We know that many of our fans are old enough to make their own choice about what they want to view on the Internet. We value the support of our fans and we respect their decisions. The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake. As a gesture of goodwill, we would like to offer you (and RuneLateralus) a free Nintendo video game system and game of your choice. (...) In addition, we would appreciate it if you could provide us with contact information for RuneLateralus, or have him contact us directly, so that we may apologize to him. We would be glad to send him a game and system of his choice through you as well, since we do not have his contact information. Sincerely, Christie Hamilton Nintendo of America Inc. Consumer Service Department
Oh yeah, whenever a law enforcement agency makes a bust, they always like to keep it hush-hush. That way, the person they busted can't be made an example of and discourage additional people from getting into that illegal line of work.
I'm sure they knew exactly waht they were doing. They probably busted everyone involved in the Shadowcrew group and wanted to leave a nice message to every other group that you're probably being investigated too. It's a standard bluff, and will likely at least make other groups less brazen with what they do (hopefully limiting their harm) if not encourage them to find a more legal line of work.
I listened to Howard Stern almost daily for the last 12 years. I wasn't the biggest fan of Stern's, I wasn't the longest running fan of Stern's, but I bought several of his videos, pay per view, both books, the soundtrack he put out, saw his movie in the theater and at home and even liked watching him on the E! network.
I haven't had anything to do with Stern for the last 6 months or so, though. He's just not funny anymore. I would say about 70% of his show is dedicated fully to politics - more specifically, hatred for Bush when for the first half of Bush's presidency all he could do was praise the job he was doing. Of the remaining 30%, it's constant political snipes among the dick jokes. Can't he just go back to 100% dick jokes? I mean, that's really what he's good at.
I know that the majority of Slashdot thinks e-voting machines are evil, but give me a break. Do you have any idea how stupid the average person is? Have you ever walked your computer illiterate mother through clicking on "Start, Settings, Control Panel"? It takes 20 minutes just to do that! Who would think they could handle using a computer to vote any better?
Feel free to mod me down for this opinion, but I'm not sure if you should be voting if you're one of the 1% of people that just can't figure out how to do it. I mean, there are even people who couldn't properly hole-punch a card in the last election! How about people that accidently voted for the wrong name? People that voted for two different people? And these are on paper ballots! What hope do these people have of being able to vote through any mechanism? And should we care if they can't?
I'm surprised that someone submitted a story about a device that can play video files of all sorts from your computer on your TV. There's got to be a dozen of these things, some of them have been around for a few years now. Linksys has one, Gateway has one, PRISMIQ has one, Hauppage has one, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Skippy Peanut Butter brand media center that could do this at this point. The fact it can play DivX and XVid is old news too. My PRISMIQ unit could do that for the last 18 months, and to top it off it's an open source box running on Linux that I can even telnet to. Oh, and the price isn't $249 like it used to be - I think they're having closeout prices currently for $149. A wireless keyboard for it is an additional $29. And the recording (think PVR) version of it comes out 4Q. That's the good news on these things. The bad news is that they hardly ever work as advertised. I've tried several of them and they all have their good points and bad points.
It's a universal mantra of any company involved in litigation. "We are unable to comment due to ongoing litigation". Now they're going to be reguarly commenting on active litigation on multiple fronts. They are breaking yet another fundamental rule of the universe (the first being, don't piss off the entire world in a ridiculous attempt to enrich yourself).
Now the only problem that remains is a suitable and reliable means of error correction - which is the biggest problem thus far in QC :-(
The only problem? How about making practical those things they've done at great expense with huge impractical devices in a lab? How about proving that entanglement is for real and isn't just "spooky action at a distance" like Einstein originally derided it?
Quantum computers are decades if not longer from reality.
I believe in your first statement, that wealthy nations can afford the luxury of environmentalism and that goes a long way in curbing pollution from industrial sources. However, I think that as a developing nation becomes wealthy and enacts pollution controls on industry, any environmentalism is offset by sheer numbers of individuals. This is a very complicated subject, but to take just one example... Currently, 1 in 3,000 Chinese people owns a car (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0 628_040628_chinacars.html). This small number has many reasons not the least of which is that they just can't afford them. As average wealth increase, so too will the number of cars on the road.
As stated, this is a very complicated subject with lots of variables, but I would expect that as China becomes wealthier that they would definitely not see any decreases in the amount of pollution they emit.
Call me picky, but I find even the quietest hard drives (Seagate Barracuda line is the quietest I've found) are unacceptably loud when used in a media PC in my living room. That constant humming is a big annoyance. Add to that, unless the case is an ITX format or smaller, I find a media PC unacceptably large for my living room as well. I've experimented with various harddrive-less media players/recorders but haven't found one that I liked enough to even mention by name here.
On your reboots, just add to make sure to boot into "safe mode" no matter what Windows operating system you have before running said anti-spyware applications.
Anyone that's familiar with .Net has probably never used this technique to secure a page on their site.
I believe most people would consider it more secure to set up a virtual folder within your web site and protect the pages within that virtual folder with either Basic or Windows Integrated Authentication.
I've never used the web.config file technique to attempt to secure pages that really needed to be secure, and I doubt many other people have either. If you did without taking any other security steps, well... time to re-think that situation.
This security vulnerability will prove to be a dud; nothing along the lines of the old ::$DATA exploits and what-not.
I'm sure everyone else has noticed that the reason quoted for doing just about anything in the real world lately has been "to defeat terrorists". In fact, that's why I handed my latest project in late at work. It seems Microsoft is starting a trend to make spammers the cyber-equivalent of the terrorist scapegoat in the real world. This seems to me to be plain and simple that because of GMail, Microsoft can't use a ridiculous amount of storage (2 pitiful megs)as an incentive to pay them money that now they're looking for other features to take away to encourage people to pay up. I have a free Hotmail account and do use the Outlook Express option. It's a nice enough feature with plenty of annoyances, which is why I'm glad I switched my primary email account to Gmail some time ago.
I don't believe the upgrades are in chronological order. If so, they skipped me. My (still) 2 meg hotmail account is from mid-1997. Before a "my hotmail account is older than yours" flamewar erupts; I acknowledge that Hotmail was around for well over a year before I received an account. Anyway, I use my old Hotmail account for every non-important email that I want sent to me and it gets spammed like crazy but Hotmail only squeaks through maybe 4 false negatives per day. I use my GMail account for every important email that I want sent to me.
Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time playing poker in the casino knows to be on the lookout for colluding partners at your table. (i.e. Two or more friends sitting at the same poker table that are able to exchange information about their hands between each other or even to use various combined betting styles to bluff or raise the pot to artificial levels). When done properly, having a colluding partner at a poker table is a significant advantage for you. On the Internet it would be very easy to have, say 3 or 4 seats of a 10-seat table controlled by you. Or hell, have 9 of 10. Just load additional casino accounts into web browers that go through different gateways. Or any number of dozens of other ways to make it appear to be coming from a different machine.