Because if there's anything the PC gaming market really needs, it's another MMO.
Well, yes and no.
Yes, there's plenty of MMOs out there. However, none of them are making me rich. So, yes, I see room for at least one more MMO, as long as it's the right one that meets the right criterea (making me rich.)
Alas, since I'm not making any MMOs, including this one, it seems unlikely that this one will be the right one, or that the right one is coming any time soon. A pity.
The problem with the joke is that the stereotype that early Internet/Usenet users were fat horny virgins who spent all their time on the computer and didn't bother to bathe and such just isn't true. Sure, there were some like that, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
The most true part of that is the `spent all their time on the computer' -- but it wasn't all their time, just much of it...
Fewer people read Usenet today than ten years ago, yes, but it's way more than nobody.
Spam was a big problem. It's not so much anymore. As for people harvesting email addresses, that's pretty easily foiled by obfuscating your email address, or using an entirely fake one (which I don't like, but I understand why people do it.)
Today, the reason that Usenet is on the decline is more about it not getting any new users, and existing users going where the talk is. New people know the web, and they go to web forums. Usenet requires learning something else, something without pretty pictures and animated icons.
I'm pretty sure people on the Internet back then were unwashed to begin with.
Yes, they were, but they learned. Septembers were bad, of course, but October was a lot better, and November better still. And if they didn't learn, the emails to their admins would often get them kicked off entirely until they learned.
Now, there's no penalty for failing to obey the rules on Usenet (you said Internet earlier, but I'm talking more about Usenet.) Some NSPs will kick you off for abuse (most will kick you off for blatant spam, but few will do it today for simple trolling or off-topic posts) but when that happens they just move to another one.
At least with a forum if somebody causes trouble the admins can kick them off. The problem with this is that some admins run their forums with an iron fist and go way too far...
Usenet isn't quite dead for technical discussions. Some technical groups are alive and well. Others are not.
Your post is basically accurate -- it's just not quite as bad as you make it sound. Almost, but not quite.
Which is really a shame. Archived Usenet posts are a great resource for solving problems. Web forums are OK, but there's a huge `you have to know where to look, and it's different for every topic' factor there that wasn't there with Usenet.
Actually, scanning posts as they come in for something is remarkably easy. What Kibo did (find posts mentioning his name) wasn't hard at all. (Responding to them all and making it funny, that's a lot harder, but then it's not really a technical problem anymore.)
Mounting a disk with bad sectors is never a good plan, due to exactly the issue you ran into.
Instead, use a tool like dd or ddrecover to copy that disk to another disk (or just a file), leaving zeros in unrecoverable sectors, and then mount that copy. It'll work much better. (Unless the zeros are in important places to the filesystem, in which case it won't work at all, no matter what you do. But depending on what's going on with the raid5 setup, that may not be a problem.)
Also, raid5 tends to mark an entire disk bad, not just parts of it. So you should be able to lose that entire disk, and regenerate it based on the other members. So you won't have to mount it...
Very nice. I use par2 for basically the same purpose. I save about 10% of my DVD capacity, and have a program that creates a directory with md5sums of every file, along with par2 files for all the files, so I can recover from a loss of almost up to 10% of the disk's data.
Of course, if the data lost is in the catalog so I can't even find my files, then things get much more complicated. But even so, I've had to use this system a few times (due to damaged DVDs mostly) and it's worked pretty well.
X does not *have* to run the graphics... just because Xorg/Xfree86 and just X before that (usually?) worked that way, that doesn't mean it's the only way it can be done. Counter-examples include X on OS X (yes, I know, it was mentioned), X on Windows, and even things like Xvnc, Xvfb and Xnest.
Just because YOUR X server also manages the graphics hardware, that doesn't mean that's an X thing -- it just means it's something else that YOUR X server does. Others may not.
X is an application. *And* a server. On OS X as well. And under *nix, and even under Windows (when you add an X server to it.)
X's architecture works pretty well for what it was written to do. It was written in a time when lots of people used wimpy X terminals and did their work on a shared beefy central server.
VNC might be more of the architecture you're referring to?
Doesn't Germany also have laws against depictions of blood in video games?
I seem to recall Command and Conquer (the original, 1995 or so) having a German version where everybody fighting was robots instead of people, and when a robot got killed it spilled gray oil rather than red blood. But perhaps I've got the country wrong...
A 99.9% safe maneuver is one you can execute safely 999 times out of a thousand, but one time in a thousand it can kill you.
Safety is is not an either/or situation -- it's not either `all fine' or `you're dead'.
In the case of a high speed pass, hitting a bunch of sink could kill you, especially if the pilot makes a mistake -- but a much more likely outcome, at least with a good pilot, is that he'll have to land the plane somewhere other than the runway. If it's a nice flat field, probably no problem. If it's a forest, well, the plane will probably be seriously damaged or destroyed, but the pilot will usually survive. (Again, a good pilot. A poor pilot will stall the plane at a low altitude and kill himself.)
As for the danger of hitting sink, that's something every glider pilot has to worry about, all the time. It's not restricted to high speed passes.
You're criminally negligent if you forget the password to YOUR encrypted data on YOUR disk?
I think I'm glad that you don't get to make laws or rewrite the US Constitution. (I'm also glad that the US Courts have ruled the other way -- that giving up your encryption keys IS protected by the fifth amendment. Of course, that only applies in criminal cases, so it's not as useful as one could hope.)
I see what you're saying -- but it's not exactly sex offender registration. The law has these sections --
Article 27A - Sex Offender and Public Protection Registration Programs. * 14-208.5. Purpose. * 14-208.6. Definitions. * 14-208.6A. Lifetime registration requirements for criminal offenders.
... so, if you are forced to register just because you bought alcohol for a minor, it wouldn't mean you're registerring a sex offender, just that your class of offender must also register like a sex offender.
Now, it may be that there's only one registry (I didn't read all the law, after all) and that people just call it the `sex offender registry' and treat it accordingly, but it looks like that legally the law doesn't seem to require non sex offenders to register as sex offenders. Though in practice the difference may not matter.
If the purpose of such a register (sex offender or otherwise) is to protect the public, then it should be restricted to people who are actually a risk, people guilty of violent crimes -- rape, murder, serious assault and battery, etc. People who did things that aren't a risk -- consensual sex with a teenage minor, buying alcohol for a minor, etc. don't belong on such a registry.
And if the purpose of the registry is to punish, then it should be thrown out as being cruel and unusual punishment.
Just to be clear, I'm strongly opposed to `sex offender' registries. What makes a rape (or merely exposing yourself to somebody) so much worse than say, murder? If such registries are to exist, they shouldn't be `sex offender' registries -- they should be `violent offender' or `dangerous offender' registries, and only those convicted of appropriate crimes should qualify.
Alas, politicians want to seem `tough on crime', and `think of the children!' always makes people's hearts melt and obscure their reason, and many (most?) people don't seem to care how poorly criminals of any sort are treated, so I seriously doubt things are going to improve -- only get worse.
... here in North Carolina. You get registered as a sex offender for buying alcohol and tobacco for minors
That seems pretty incredible, and so I went looking to try and confirm it. I couldn't find anything that made this claim... do you have any citations for this?
I found cases where somebody bought alcohol for a minor, and HAD SEX WITH HER and had to register, but that's not quite what you claimed...
You can play chess with one hand on the mouse (or occasionally used to move pieces on the board, if you wanted) and the other hand down your pants. Is chess dumbed down too?
More computer game-ish, NWN and NWN2 played just fine using only the mouse if I recall correctly. Needing only the mouse doesn't mean it's dumbed down (though NWN2 and especially NWN1 was somewhat dumbed down from the traditional non-computer D&D...)
My problem with Diablo II is that it made my clicking finger ache.:)
I would never trust a website to generate my passwords. Sure, it's SSL encrypted, but there's nothing to prevent the web site from logging all the passwords it generates.
Now, the website wouldn't know where each password was being used (though it might also log IP addresses, which might be of some use) but all a cracker would have to do is throw in all the passwords it's generated into their dictionary. Perhaps it's generated 50,000 passwords -- when your password generator does 500,000/second, that's only 0.1 seconds more.
And then there's always the possibility that the passwords aren't really random. Being a web site, the source is closed. Even if they give you the source, it's still closed, because you have no way of verifying that the source they gave you matches the source of what they're actually running.
Either way, it's a risk I'm unwilling to take. Using a program to generate passwords is fine, but make sure it's running under your control. It's also nice if it's open source, so you (or others) can verify that it doesn't do anything funny. I'm not really qualified to critique cryptographic software myself (except for simple stuff), but it's reassuring that others out there will also be looking at it.
Slashdot Mirror
I never watched 24, but it seems to me that if every episode is one hour in a very long day, at some point he's going to need to sleep ...
And so there will be eight episodes where he's just snoozing during the entire thing ...
Can't wait!
Because if there's anything the PC gaming market really needs, it's another MMO.
Well, yes and no.
Yes, there's plenty of MMOs out there. However, none of them are making me rich. So, yes, I see room for at least one more MMO, as long as it's the right one that meets the right criterea (making me rich.)
Alas, since I'm not making any MMOs, including this one, it seems unlikely that this one will be the right one, or that the right one is coming any time soon. A pity.
They haven't gotten a free pass on anything. Look out in the streets -- they're protesting!
The problem with the joke is that the stereotype that early Internet/Usenet users were fat horny virgins who spent all their time on the computer and didn't bother to bathe and such just isn't true. Sure, there were some like that, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
The most true part of that is the `spent all their time on the computer' -- but it wasn't all their time, just much of it ...
Fewer people read Usenet today than ten years ago, yes, but it's way more than nobody.
Spam was a big problem. It's not so much anymore. As for people harvesting email addresses, that's pretty easily foiled by obfuscating your email address, or using an entirely fake one (which I don't like, but I understand why people do it.)
Today, the reason that Usenet is on the decline is more about it not getting any new users, and existing users going where the talk is. New people know the web, and they go to web forums. Usenet requires learning something else, something without pretty pictures and animated icons.
Yet another xkcd fan I see ...
I'm pretty sure people on the Internet back then were unwashed to begin with.
Yes, they were, but they learned. Septembers were bad, of course, but October was a lot better, and November better still. And if they didn't learn, the emails to their admins would often get them kicked off entirely until they learned.
Now, there's no penalty for failing to obey the rules on Usenet (you said Internet earlier, but I'm talking more about Usenet.) Some NSPs will kick you off for abuse (most will kick you off for blatant spam, but few will do it today for simple trolling or off-topic posts) but when that happens they just move to another one.
At least with a forum if somebody causes trouble the admins can kick them off. The problem with this is that some admins run their forums with an iron fist and go way too far ...
Usenet isn't quite dead for technical discussions. Some technical groups are alive and well. Others are not.
Your post is basically accurate -- it's just not quite as bad as you make it sound. Almost, but not quite.
Which is really a shame. Archived Usenet posts are a great resource for solving problems. Web forums are OK, but there's a huge `you have to know where to look, and it's different for every topic' factor there that wasn't there with Usenet.
And in realtime, no less.
Actually, scanning posts as they come in for something is remarkably easy. What Kibo did (find posts mentioning his name) wasn't hard at all. (Responding to them all and making it funny, that's a lot harder, but then it's not really a technical problem anymore.)
Either way, I think Kibo has moved on ...
alt.binaries.* is only a subset of alt.*.
Mounting a disk with bad sectors is never a good plan, due to exactly the issue you ran into.
Instead, use a tool like dd or ddrecover to copy that disk to another disk (or just a file), leaving zeros in unrecoverable sectors, and then mount that copy. It'll work much better. (Unless the zeros are in important places to the filesystem, in which case it won't work at all, no matter what you do. But depending on what's going on with the raid5 setup, that may not be a problem.)
Also, raid5 tends to mark an entire disk bad, not just parts of it. So you should be able to lose that entire disk, and regenerate it based on the other members. So you won't have to mount it ...
Of course, if the data lost is in the catalog so I can't even find my files, then things get much more complicated. But even so, I've had to use this system a few times (due to damaged DVDs mostly) and it's worked pretty well.
Dunno about relaxing, but I always just used `ls -lRa /usr > /dev/dsp' (or /dev/audio) when I needed to make some noise to test my speaker setup ...
Display Postscript sort of worked that way. It died out, however.
X does not *have* to run the graphics ... just because Xorg/Xfree86 and just X before that (usually?) worked that way, that doesn't mean it's the only way it can be done. Counter-examples include X on OS X (yes, I know, it was mentioned), X on Windows, and even things like Xvnc, Xvfb and Xnest.
Just because YOUR X server also manages the graphics hardware, that doesn't mean that's an X thing -- it just means it's something else that YOUR X server does. Others may not.
FishWithAHammer was just not very clear.
X is an application. *And* a server. On OS X as well. And under *nix, and even under Windows (when you add an X server to it.)
X's architecture works pretty well for what it was written to do. It was written in a time when lots of people used wimpy X terminals and did their work on a shared beefy central server.
VNC might be more of the architecture you're referring to?
Nothing happened to slashdot. This is a rare view on /., granted, but it's not an unheard of one, and never was.
Doesn't Germany also have laws against depictions of blood in video games?
I seem to recall Command and Conquer (the original, 1995 or so) having a German version where everybody fighting was robots instead of people, and when a robot got killed it spilled gray oil rather than red blood. But perhaps I've got the country wrong ...
A 99.9% safe maneuver is one you can execute safely 999 times out of a thousand, but one time in a thousand it can kill you.
Safety is is not an either/or situation -- it's not either `all fine' or `you're dead'.
In the case of a high speed pass, hitting a bunch of sink could kill you, especially if the pilot makes a mistake -- but a much more likely outcome, at least with a good pilot, is that he'll have to land the plane somewhere other than the runway. If it's a nice flat field, probably no problem. If it's a forest, well, the plane will probably be seriously damaged or destroyed, but the pilot will usually survive. (Again, a good pilot. A poor pilot will stall the plane at a low altitude and kill himself.)
As for the danger of hitting sink, that's something every glider pilot has to worry about, all the time. It's not restricted to high speed passes.
You're criminally negligent if you forget the password to YOUR encrypted data on YOUR disk?
I think I'm glad that you don't get to make laws or rewrite the US Constitution. (I'm also glad that the US Courts have ruled the other way -- that giving up your encryption keys IS protected by the fifth amendment. Of course, that only applies in criminal cases, so it's not as useful as one could hope.)
... so, if you are forced to register just because you bought alcohol for a minor, it wouldn't mean you're registerring a sex offender, just that your class of offender must also register like a sex offender.
Now, it may be that there's only one registry (I didn't read all the law, after all) and that people just call it the `sex offender registry' and treat it accordingly, but it looks like that legally the law doesn't seem to require non sex offenders to register as sex offenders. Though in practice the difference may not matter.
If the purpose of such a register (sex offender or otherwise) is to protect the public, then it should be restricted to people who are actually a risk, people guilty of violent crimes -- rape, murder, serious assault and battery, etc. People who did things that aren't a risk -- consensual sex with a teenage minor, buying alcohol for a minor, etc. don't belong on such a registry.
And if the purpose of the registry is to punish, then it should be thrown out as being cruel and unusual punishment.
Just to be clear, I'm strongly opposed to `sex offender' registries. What makes a rape (or merely exposing yourself to somebody) so much worse than say, murder? If such registries are to exist, they shouldn't be `sex offender' registries -- they should be `violent offender' or `dangerous offender' registries, and only those convicted of appropriate crimes should qualify.
Alas, politicians want to seem `tough on crime', and `think of the children!' always makes people's hearts melt and obscure their reason, and many (most?) people don't seem to care how poorly criminals of any sort are treated, so I seriously doubt things are going to improve -- only get worse.
So why introduce more legislation?
It makes the people feel that the legislators are doing more to protect the children, of course.
... here in North Carolina. You get registered as a sex offender for buying alcohol and tobacco for minors
That seems pretty incredible, and so I went looking to try and confirm it. I couldn't find anything that made this claim ... do you have any citations for this?
I found cases where somebody bought alcohol for a minor, and HAD SEX WITH HER and had to register, but that's not quite what you claimed ...
You can play chess with one hand on the mouse (or occasionally used to move pieces on the board, if you wanted) and the other hand down your pants. Is chess dumbed down too?
More computer game-ish, NWN and NWN2 played just fine using only the mouse if I recall correctly. Needing only the mouse doesn't mean it's dumbed down (though NWN2 and especially NWN1 was somewhat dumbed down from the traditional non-computer D&D ...)
My problem with Diablo II is that it made my clicking finger ache. :)
I would never trust a website to generate my passwords. Sure, it's SSL encrypted, but there's nothing to prevent the web site from logging all the passwords it generates.
Now, the website wouldn't know where each password was being used (though it might also log IP addresses, which might be of some use) but all a cracker would have to do is throw in all the passwords it's generated into their dictionary. Perhaps it's generated 50,000 passwords -- when your password generator does 500,000/second, that's only 0.1 seconds more.
And then there's always the possibility that the passwords aren't really random. Being a web site, the source is closed. Even if they give you the source, it's still closed, because you have no way of verifying that the source they gave you matches the source of what they're actually running.
Either way, it's a risk I'm unwilling to take. Using a program to generate passwords is fine, but make sure it's running under your control. It's also nice if it's open source, so you (or others) can verify that it doesn't do anything funny. I'm not really qualified to critique cryptographic software myself (except for simple stuff), but it's reassuring that others out there will also be looking at it.