That is largely considered a propaganda piece. Its fake. Hell, look at the production quality, the decapitated dog's head looks like something out of a 50's B-movie. Ed Wood made more believable film.
>If you see an old lady being kicked on the ground by someone trying to rob her, that's everybodys business.
Oh please, there's an obvious difference between being proactive and reactive. Most people engage in altruism everyday without body armor and a super cool secret identity. You're talking about reacting to something that happens to you; the comic-book superhero is the opposite: a vigilante that seeks out and prevents or thwarts trouble.
So what are you going to do to *prevent* this little old lady from being robbed? Profile certain people? Illegally spy on others? Knock a few heads around to get some information? A bit of street torture? Maybe a lynching to teach bad guys a lesson?
Wanna really help on the small scale? Become a cop.
>If, however, you prefer no one helps you when you get mugged, I guess I'll respect your wishes.
Sigh. Again, you're failing to understand the context of the grandparent post. Nice way to take things personally too.
There are no cartoonish supervillians. "Street crime" is usually taken care of by the police and is really none of your business. Imagine some moron busting the heads of the local pot dealer out of respect for "justice." If someone is really concerned about the safety of their streets and trains then they can always get a Guardian Angels' t-shirt and the little matching beret and play vigilante.
Big crime happens all the time by power structures like governments, organized religions, corporations, etc. The tools for fighting these nasties don't involve tights. They involve activism, raising awareness, getting others involved in politics, and other things that don't look real cool in graphic novels.
Not to mention if you had insane wealth, you're probably part of the problem. Check the holdings of some wealthy people, they sometimes fund some very shady companies or governments which do some fairly nasty things. Real world problems are rarely fixed with just a punch in the face and a snazzy batmobile.
I'm sure the editors of Forbes magazine have no problem with the worldview that if we just beat up some low level street criminals then everything would be fine.
>I don't think I should know more than the clerk at the store.
I don't really think that's a valid complaint. In a perfect world, yes, but in retail? Not really.
Running linux is like owning a foreign car and expecting GM/Ford guys to fix it just as easily. Its one of the real liabilities of not running the monopoly/defacto standard OS. As a linux user, you should know what you're buying. I mean, users ofter get criticized for being ignorant of their systems, but you want the same ignorance and expect retailers to spend all this extra time and traning on what is really a minority OS they might get a tiny amount of sales for?
I *always* expect the salesman to be next to useless, that's why I do a little research and buy what I need. The retail sales position is there to push product, not to solve problems. It blows my mind when I see friends and family chat up the salesman and be semi-sweet talked into something thats good for them, but actually costs them an extra couple hundred of dollars or has things they don't need or is missing things they'll want in the future all because they wouldnt spend 10 minutes on the internet researching the purchase or reading reviews.
>Popups may be annoying, but they're hardly dishonest.
Actually, they are incredibly dishonest to the point that they would be illegal if similiar tactics would be used in a more mature industry, like in print ads or television.
Take a look at your typical pop-up. I collect ad servers for my ad blocking hosts file so I'm kinda a connoisseur of this crap. First and foremost, the current trend is to make the ads look like a windows system message. Not just any message, but mimicking the style of the security center and warning of 'unsafe computing.' There are many variations on this theme like, "you have new email," "your computer is unprotected," "click here for updates," etc.
We are way beyond the point of dishonesty, we are in the terrain of fraduelence.
As far as the 'people should learn to deal with the ads' argument goes, I'm all for it, but the first site that gives a 403 to people with adblockers will be replaced with another site that doesnt care. Welcome to the web, you have no contract with the webmasters the same way you dont have to sit down and watch TV commercials. Life is funny that way sometimes, but somehow we manage.
Take the moralist position all you like, but as long as you know the other side laughs at your "everyone place nice" attitude. Pardon me, but I got a pop-up telling me my IP address is exposed and I should buy SupersecurityMonkey 2.0 to fix this for only 39.99!
and that is SSH's biggest problem - no one implements it properly. I can't begin to count the number of servers with nice firewalls that let users ssh tunnel to ports they shouldnt have access to.
I also hear a lot of "well I can just ssh to my home machine and do x, y, and z" which is great until something happens (child porn is found on a library computer thanks to ssh and squid) and policies are suddenly changed and port 22 is blocked all over the place.
I'm hoping the above doesnt happen but I'm kinda waiting for the hammer to fall once people understand how powerful ssh tunnels are. On the bright side, it hasnt happened yet, but I'm still concerned of the promiscious port forwarding for low-priv users.
Its way too late, not to mention disingenious to do this. First off, most users are using p2p, bitorrent, IM, etc which all require open ports for full functionality. Shutting them out or just approving Kazaa and a handful of apps is silly. The phone traffic from someone wanting to open a port would be ridiculous. Imagine how many times a PC wants to listen legitimately. Warcraft update? Call your ISP. IM file receive? Call your ISP. etc.
If you read the article, its not the ports thats the problem its users opening these infected emails. Youre still allowing the biggest hole - email. Zombie software can easily be written so it doesnt have to keep a port open, it can simply initiate the connection to a server someplace on its own.
ISPs eventually will have to police their network, as some are doing right now. So are universities. They'll do port scans and traffic analysis, then shut down the offenders. If these people can't keep their machines clean then the ISP can kick these customers as I'm sure it costs more to keep them than to lose them. After that, lots of people will suddenly renew their AV subscriptions, learn how to patch, etc.
Not to mention better server side email attachment scanning; users shouldnt be getting this stuff to begin with. Or if the big players decided to just block all executable attachments. Sure, everyting will be zipped, but that'll discourage "the double click two-step."
Another issue that hass not been mentioned is good old ISDN. Great latency and if he has a phone line he can probably get it. The bandwidth is on par with these mobile solutions and blows away his old dial-up speeds.
>Work out an agreement with them and then have them setup a line-of-sight wireless (wifi) link to your place.
Err, how practical is this? Sure its possible, but if the AP is a couple miles away youre going to have to pay for some professional radio people to point these things at each other. I see this suggestion all the time and I doubt anyone can just do it. Considering the FCC limitations on ISM band he cant just set up two towers, but haveto build a very, very tight line-of-sight channel which I'm assuming requires some significant radio experience to pull off. A mile is a long way away, and if he's too far for DSL we're talking multi-miles here.
>And I still don't trust SP2 and all the crap it dumps on your box.
"Crap" like pop-up blocking for IE6, a better wireless manager, NX support, firewall on by default, etc? It blows my mind that all these windows users hate the system they use and complain when they get a bunch of needed features. Of course, there are issues with the update, but thats true of any modern OS.
If you're using windows XP you should have migrated to SP2 long ago if you cared about security and stability. Then again this is slashdot, enjoy your ill-informed karma whore points.
Well, you have to understand that coffee is a premium product. If you just wanted caffeine then you could get it anywhere and cheaper than a coffeehouse. Before the big internet/starbucks revolution coffeehouses were a lot more social (the article goes into this). Sure some people would read books, but a stranger would come up to you and ask you if you want to play chess too.
Or you'd find yourself involved into a conversation about philosophy.
Not to mention, coffeehouses are image based, so some people are going to be turned off by a place populated with 10 people staring into their laptops taking up two seats, reaching for power cables, etc. Its like hanging out at kinkos. Might as well walk to the coffee place up the street.
Call them snobs, or whatever, but thats how people act. I do it all the time with bars. If I'm in a place I dont like I suggest we take off. If I dont like the crowd, even though I'm not going to talk to them, I still dont want to hang around them. I dont want to listen to, say, 80s music, in a non-ironic way, etc. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.
I was wondering how long something like this would take to hit the market. I wanted to get a phone for some older members of my family and couldnt find anything with a big diplay, big buttons, and a simple interface.
There's a real senior citizen market out there that doesnt want or need tiny little buttons and confusing features. They just want to be able to make a call like they do with their land line phones. Maybe these phones exist already, but theyre not at the sprint showroom, best buy, etc.
> I guess it kind of sucks that they're gonna get punished for this, but they deserve it.
Fine, but change doesnt happen unless there's some kind of catastrophe or embrassing incident. Gee, I wonder if this school and many other schools are going to take security a lot more seriously now.
Hell, they shouldnt even be using SSN numbers. They should be generating their own unique IDs.
This is simply human nature. A memo saying "the system is vulnerable" is meaningless. Action isn't. Action gets usually results and the kids who do this do get in trouble but in the long run it helps others. In other words, its ideology. And ideology isnt practical for the idealists. But the apathetics benefit from it quite well.
I don't see why people are making these demands. If open source developers just want to make a free version of something proprietary then more power to them. If you want tons of new features then go buy a product from a company working hard on R&D, UI, etc.
The grand-daddy of OSS is simply a free unix. The idea that OSS is perfect beyond measure and will outperform all commercial software is pretty flawed and having this expectation that innovations will happen mostly in the OSS world is really unfair to those of us who put in our free time to make free software for you to use.
Not to mention, if you dont like the status quo then please come up with good ideas, implement them, advertise them, and try to get people to use them. Its harder than you think. Sure the FF people have a high profile, but how many other OSS projects can joe sixpack name? One more? Two?
Last I checked Opera sans ads was thirty dollars. FF is free. Something is bound to get lost when you're losing thirty dollars per download. Like a full-time HCI, QA, etc staff. Like support. Like long-term business planning. Like a patent team and a legal department. Like talented people willing to put in 45+ hrs of work per week for free when they have bills to pay.
>Firefox has managed to take ~7% of the market in a short period of time from a massively well-funded competitor on an ultra, ultra, ultra shoestring budget.
Are you crazy? If it wasnt for the spyware and security issues IE would still be 98% if not more. Alternabrowsers got lucky MS dropped the ball so badly in regards to keeping up their products and keeping spyware off their customer's systems. And they didn't keep up their product because it dominated the market because of MS's monopolistic position.
FF is getting around 5%, if that, in more conservative estimates. That's not competition. Thats a blip on the radar. Maybe. All the "competition" is hoping for is that maybe, just maybe, they hit a critical mass in which MS's plan to lock them out using ActiveX and IE-only rendering and scripting will not happen because 7 or 8% of customers *might* complain.
MS is still a harmful monopoly. They havent even been taken down a peg. More like a nano-peg. This isn't the "invisible hand of the market" at work. This is just a small minority of users sick of spyware trying something different for a while. IE7 is going to hurt the altrabrowsers too. And its gonna be bundled with windows as usual.
Or religious holidays. Or the first "beach day" of summer. Or when Lynard Skynard/Rolling Stones comes to town and all the baby boomers try to squeeze into blue jeans they bought 25 years ago. Or hang-over day after cinco de mayo. Or April 20th.
Oh wait, the double standard.
Picking on geeks is easy. Picking on religion, the boomers who run business, and minorities isn't. Its like the New York Post is high school all over again.
The wooden dialogue and the stoic nature of the characters really did hurt those movies. I'm not sure why they went this route, perhaps to say "Look how sophisticated people in the old Republic were!" There's a difference between sophistication and a complete lack of human expression, wit, etc.
I guess Randall Curtis, err Lucas took the Bart's and Lisa's advice.
Exactly. People think google is a "web search" company. Whatever that means. They are data miners. The toolbar tracked you also. The non-expiring google cookie is for tracking also. This is how they make money.
Re:PC-based DVRs have massive drawbacks...
on
Build Your Own DVR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>Two tuner units came out six months ago at best, if my memory serves me correctly.
Not true. My old hughes tivo has been doing two tuners for three years now. I paid next to nothing for it (well under $200) when I got DirecTV and am floored by what people are spending on DIY approaches. To each is own indeed, but when the DIY costs twice as much as a stand-alone its a geek hobby like case-moding or building the fastest and latest and greatest for idle cycles or the occasional game.
>The user interface on a lot of the DVRs that come from the cable companies is awful.
I can't speak for other brands, but my Tivo has a great interface and remote.
>My demographics aren't sent to some company.
You can opt-out of Tivo demographic data. Call em.
>My DVR doesn't pop up ads on me.
Mine doesnt either.
Granted, if you want a file server, DVD burner, etc then go the DIY approach, but the commercial products certainly are not as bad as you make them out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
That is largely considered a propaganda piece. Its fake. Hell, look at the production quality, the decapitated dog's head looks like something out of a 50's B-movie. Ed Wood made more believable film.
>If you see an old lady being kicked on the ground by someone trying to rob her, that's everybodys business.
Oh please, there's an obvious difference between being proactive and reactive. Most people engage in altruism everyday without body armor and a super cool secret identity. You're talking about reacting to something that happens to you; the comic-book superhero is the opposite: a vigilante that seeks out and prevents or thwarts trouble.
So what are you going to do to *prevent* this little old lady from being robbed? Profile certain people? Illegally spy on others? Knock a few heads around to get some information? A bit of street torture? Maybe a lynching to teach bad guys a lesson?
Wanna really help on the small scale? Become a cop.
>If, however, you prefer no one helps you when you get mugged, I guess I'll respect your wishes.
Sigh. Again, you're failing to understand the context of the grandparent post. Nice way to take things personally too.
and if you had the riches what would you do?
There are no cartoonish supervillians. "Street crime" is usually taken care of by the police and is really none of your business. Imagine some moron busting the heads of the local pot dealer out of respect for "justice." If someone is really concerned about the safety of their streets and trains then they can always get a Guardian Angels' t-shirt and the little matching beret and play vigilante.
Big crime happens all the time by power structures like governments, organized religions, corporations, etc. The tools for fighting these nasties don't involve tights. They involve activism, raising awareness, getting others involved in politics, and other things that don't look real cool in graphic novels.
Not to mention if you had insane wealth, you're probably part of the problem. Check the holdings of some wealthy people, they sometimes fund some very shady companies or governments which do some fairly nasty things. Real world problems are rarely fixed with just a punch in the face and a snazzy batmobile.
I'm sure the editors of Forbes magazine have no problem with the worldview that if we just beat up some low level street criminals then everything would be fine.
>I don't think I should know more than the clerk at the store.
I don't really think that's a valid complaint. In a perfect world, yes, but in retail? Not really.
Running linux is like owning a foreign car and expecting GM/Ford guys to fix it just as easily. Its one of the real liabilities of not running the monopoly/defacto standard OS. As a linux user, you should know what you're buying. I mean, users ofter get criticized for being ignorant of their systems, but you want the same ignorance and expect retailers to spend all this extra time and traning on what is really a minority OS they might get a tiny amount of sales for?
I *always* expect the salesman to be next to useless, that's why I do a little research and buy what I need. The retail sales position is there to push product, not to solve problems. It blows my mind when I see friends and family chat up the salesman and be semi-sweet talked into something thats good for them, but actually costs them an extra couple hundred of dollars or has things they don't need or is missing things they'll want in the future all because they wouldnt spend 10 minutes on the internet researching the purchase or reading reviews.
What youre looking for is the Drake Equation.
>Popups may be annoying, but they're hardly dishonest.
Actually, they are incredibly dishonest to the point that they would be illegal if similiar tactics would be used in a more mature industry, like in print ads or television.
Take a look at your typical pop-up. I collect ad servers for my ad blocking hosts file so I'm kinda a connoisseur of this crap. First and foremost, the current trend is to make the ads look like a windows system message. Not just any message, but mimicking the style of the security center and warning of 'unsafe computing.' There are many variations on this theme like, "you have new email," "your computer is unprotected," "click here for updates," etc.
We are way beyond the point of dishonesty, we are in the terrain of fraduelence.
As far as the 'people should learn to deal with the ads' argument goes, I'm all for it, but the first site that gives a 403 to people with adblockers will be replaced with another site that doesnt care. Welcome to the web, you have no contract with the webmasters the same way you dont have to sit down and watch TV commercials. Life is funny that way sometimes, but somehow we manage.
Take the moralist position all you like, but as long as you know the other side laughs at your "everyone place nice" attitude. Pardon me, but I got a pop-up telling me my IP address is exposed and I should buy SupersecurityMonkey 2.0 to fix this for only 39.99!
and that is SSH's biggest problem - no one implements it properly. I can't begin to count the number of servers with nice firewalls that let users ssh tunnel to ports they shouldnt have access to.
I also hear a lot of "well I can just ssh to my home machine and do x, y, and z" which is great until something happens (child porn is found on a library computer thanks to ssh and squid) and policies are suddenly changed and port 22 is blocked all over the place.
I'm hoping the above doesnt happen but I'm kinda waiting for the hammer to fall once people understand how powerful ssh tunnels are. On the bright side, it hasnt happened yet, but I'm still concerned of the promiscious port forwarding for low-priv users.
Its way too late, not to mention disingenious to do this. First off, most users are using p2p, bitorrent, IM, etc which all require open ports for full functionality. Shutting them out or just approving Kazaa and a handful of apps is silly. The phone traffic from someone wanting to open a port would be ridiculous. Imagine how many times a PC wants to listen legitimately. Warcraft update? Call your ISP. IM file receive? Call your ISP. etc.
If you read the article, its not the ports thats the problem its users opening these infected emails. Youre still allowing the biggest hole - email. Zombie software can easily be written so it doesnt have to keep a port open, it can simply initiate the connection to a server someplace on its own.
ISPs eventually will have to police their network, as some are doing right now. So are universities. They'll do port scans and traffic analysis, then shut down the offenders. If these people can't keep their machines clean then the ISP can kick these customers as I'm sure it costs more to keep them than to lose them. After that, lots of people will suddenly renew their AV subscriptions, learn how to patch, etc.
Not to mention better server side email attachment scanning; users shouldnt be getting this stuff to begin with. Or if the big players decided to just block all executable attachments. Sure, everyting will be zipped, but that'll discourage "the double click two-step."
Another issue that hass not been mentioned is good old ISDN. Great latency and if he has a phone line he can probably get it. The bandwidth is on par with these mobile solutions and blows away his old dial-up speeds.
>Work out an agreement with them and then have them setup a line-of-sight wireless (wifi) link to your place.
Err, how practical is this? Sure its possible, but if the AP is a couple miles away youre going to have to pay for some professional radio people to point these things at each other. I see this suggestion all the time and I doubt anyone can just do it. Considering the FCC limitations on ISM band he cant just set up two towers, but haveto build a very, very tight line-of-sight channel which I'm assuming requires some significant radio experience to pull off. A mile is a long way away, and if he's too far for DSL we're talking multi-miles here.
>And I still don't trust SP2 and all the crap it dumps on your box.
"Crap" like pop-up blocking for IE6, a better wireless manager, NX support, firewall on by default, etc? It blows my mind that all these windows users hate the system they use and complain when they get a bunch of needed features. Of course, there are issues with the update, but thats true of any modern OS.
If you're using windows XP you should have migrated to SP2 long ago if you cared about security and stability. Then again this is slashdot, enjoy your ill-informed karma whore points.
Well, you have to understand that coffee is a premium product. If you just wanted caffeine then you could get it anywhere and cheaper than a coffeehouse. Before the big internet/starbucks revolution coffeehouses were a lot more social (the article goes into this). Sure some people would read books, but a stranger would come up to you and ask you if you want to play chess too.
Or you'd find yourself involved into a conversation about philosophy.
Not to mention, coffeehouses are image based, so some people are going to be turned off by a place populated with 10 people staring into their laptops taking up two seats, reaching for power cables, etc. Its like hanging out at kinkos. Might as well walk to the coffee place up the street.
Call them snobs, or whatever, but thats how people act. I do it all the time with bars. If I'm in a place I dont like I suggest we take off. If I dont like the crowd, even though I'm not going to talk to them, I still dont want to hang around them. I dont want to listen to, say, 80s music, in a non-ironic way, etc. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.
*whoosh*
The site's a gag, man. That's part of the joke. The magazine line should be a tip off not a starting point for some anti-blog comment.
> It also helped that I was into distopian literature; fans of 1984 will love it.
Then you should pick up other 2000AD-like titles. Its a shame that the black comedy/dystopian future comic died sometime in the 80s.
I was wondering how long something like this would take to hit the market. I wanted to get a phone for some older members of my family and couldnt find anything with a big diplay, big buttons, and a simple interface.
There's a real senior citizen market out there that doesnt want or need tiny little buttons and confusing features. They just want to be able to make a call like they do with their land line phones. Maybe these phones exist already, but theyre not at the sprint showroom, best buy, etc.
Welcome to the field of teledildonics.
> I guess it kind of sucks that they're gonna get punished for this, but they deserve it.
Fine, but change doesnt happen unless there's some kind of catastrophe or embrassing incident. Gee, I wonder if this school and many other schools are going to take security a lot more seriously now.
Hell, they shouldnt even be using SSN numbers. They should be generating their own unique IDs.
This is simply human nature. A memo saying "the system is vulnerable" is meaningless. Action isn't. Action gets usually results and the kids who do this do get in trouble but in the long run it helps others. In other words, its ideology. And ideology isnt practical for the idealists. But the apathetics benefit from it quite well.
> I want my open-source innovation!
I don't see why people are making these demands. If open source developers just want to make a free version of something proprietary then more power to them. If you want tons of new features then go buy a product from a company working hard on R&D, UI, etc.
The grand-daddy of OSS is simply a free unix. The idea that OSS is perfect beyond measure and will outperform all commercial software is pretty flawed and having this expectation that innovations will happen mostly in the OSS world is really unfair to those of us who put in our free time to make free software for you to use.
Not to mention, if you dont like the status quo then please come up with good ideas, implement them, advertise them, and try to get people to use them. Its harder than you think. Sure the FF people have a high profile, but how many other OSS projects can joe sixpack name? One more? Two?
Last I checked Opera sans ads was thirty dollars. FF is free. Something is bound to get lost when you're losing thirty dollars per download. Like a full-time HCI, QA, etc staff. Like support. Like long-term business planning. Like a patent team and a legal department. Like talented people willing to put in 45+ hrs of work per week for free when they have bills to pay.
>Firefox has managed to take ~7% of the market in a short period of time from a massively well-funded competitor on an ultra, ultra, ultra shoestring budget.
Are you crazy? If it wasnt for the spyware and security issues IE would still be 98% if not more. Alternabrowsers got lucky MS dropped the ball so badly in regards to keeping up their products and keeping spyware off their customer's systems. And they didn't keep up their product because it dominated the market because of MS's monopolistic position.
FF is getting around 5%, if that, in more conservative estimates. That's not competition. Thats a blip on the radar. Maybe. All the "competition" is hoping for is that maybe, just maybe, they hit a critical mass in which MS's plan to lock them out using ActiveX and IE-only rendering and scripting will not happen because 7 or 8% of customers *might* complain.
MS is still a harmful monopoly. They havent even been taken down a peg. More like a nano-peg. This isn't the "invisible hand of the market" at work. This is just a small minority of users sick of spyware trying something different for a while. IE7 is going to hurt the altrabrowsers too. And its gonna be bundled with windows as usual.
Or religious holidays. Or the first "beach day" of summer. Or when Lynard Skynard/Rolling Stones comes to town and all the baby boomers try to squeeze into blue jeans they bought 25 years ago. Or hang-over day after cinco de mayo. Or April 20th.
Oh wait, the double standard.
Picking on geeks is easy. Picking on religion, the boomers who run business, and minorities isn't. Its like the New York Post is high school all over again.
>And people wonder why I don't watch television.
So this vision of 24 came to you in a fever dream then?
Geez, its just an executable.
Anyway, digg.com is the new slashdot. You'll probably like it.
The wooden dialogue and the stoic nature of the characters really did hurt those movies. I'm not sure why they went this route, perhaps to say "Look how sophisticated people in the old Republic were!" There's a difference between sophistication and a complete lack of human expression, wit, etc.
I guess Randall Curtis, err Lucas took the Bart's and Lisa's advice.
"To the video store!"
No.
Version 2 of the malware would take screenshots on click. Some do already.
Exactly. People think google is a "web search" company. Whatever that means. They are data miners. The toolbar tracked you also. The non-expiring google cookie is for tracking also. This is how they make money.
>Two tuner units came out six months ago at best, if my memory serves me correctly.
Not true. My old hughes tivo has been doing two tuners for three years now. I paid next to nothing for it (well under $200) when I got DirecTV and am floored by what people are spending on DIY approaches. To each is own indeed, but when the DIY costs twice as much as a stand-alone its a geek hobby like case-moding or building the fastest and latest and greatest for idle cycles or the occasional game.
>The user interface on a lot of the DVRs that come from the cable companies is awful.
I can't speak for other brands, but my Tivo has a great interface and remote.
>My demographics aren't sent to some company.
You can opt-out of Tivo demographic data. Call em.
>My DVR doesn't pop up ads on me.
Mine doesnt either.
Granted, if you want a file server, DVD burner, etc then go the DIY approach, but the commercial products certainly are not as bad as you make them out to be.