I live ~90km from my job. Driving in takes ~1.5 hours one way, and can take up to 2.5 hours coming home on weekends. As such, I'm only required in the office twice a week. It works beautifully for me. On days I have to be in the office, I'm up at 5am, out the door by 6. On days I don't, I'm out of bed at 9am and working by 9:01. I don't slack off any more or less than when I work in the office (humourously, I'm in the office today and Slashdotting).
I know a lot of people require a separate office with door and all that, but I actually sit with my tablemate and laptop on the couch beside my wife while she's surfing the 'net on her laptop, or watching TV or doing the household chores thing. Our son is usually in school, but in the summer and after school, he does his thing.
I work through lunch since my wife cooks for me, and I still get my work done. It's a win for everyone involved. If I had to be here 5 days a week, I'd have to find a new job, and that would make me sad because I love my job.
I know you're (mostly) kidding, but unfortunately, the cost of electricity to run a computer for such uses over its lifetime will outweigh its usefulness. Especially with its decreased value.
Have they not noticed that they're going after a crime of DUI in the video game, when your character is capable of committing far worse crimes in the game, such as, oh I don't know, MURDER?!
Where're the families of murder victims protesting?
How many people have intentionally downloaded commercials?
I know I have.
If advertisers would be a little smarter about their advertising, and make their advertising work for the consumer, we wouldn't be so annoyed with commercials being crammed down our throats.
Commercials need to be funny, or perhaps provide you with a url to print a coupon for a product (that'd work online really well), or something. If commercials weren't so bloody annoying, things would be so much better.
Many commercials have annoyed me to the point that I boycott the product. Old Navy commercials are a great example. They're not entertaining, they're irritating. Whether its annoying jingles, bad actors, etc.
Yes, I realise you can't please everyone, but most commercials nowadays aren't pleasing anyone.
I, for one, know I wouldn't be bothered so much if commercials were just a little bit entertaining. I love the commercials Bell is currently running here using the two beavers. I intentionally watch those commercials when they come on because they're funny.
If company execs stop hiring idiots to do commercials, and make good, entertaining and/or informative, actually useful commercials, and put 5-10 second clips on the beginning of youtube movies, I'd happily sit through them. Alternatively, they could do as they said, and sell space on their main page for movies put there by advertisers. If they're actually entertaining, they will get watched.
Advertising, imnsho, isn't the evil, horrible thing, most of us make it out to be. Of course there's a limit on its obtrusiveness, but if they make good commercials targeted at the kind of people they're trying to sell to, then people wouldn't get so pissed off with them.
Going to show a video about a car? Run a BMW commercial before it. Going to show a video about some guy opening a beer bottle using only a piece of paper? Show a beer commercial before it.
Bull. It depends on the kid. At 16, I had all the freedoms in the world. I went where I wanted, I did what I wanted, and I acted as I pleased. I had earned it, and my parents knew I would behave myself.
And I did.
My son is only 5 now, but if I think I can trust him to behave himself at 16, I'll give him the freedoms that comes with it.
I dealt with much the same thing with Primus here in Canada last week.
You know how you deal with that? Big companies like Telus are usually publically traded. Either that, or they're members of some large organisations that publish their membership records.
Find the e-mail address and/or phone number of a VP or a CEO/COO/CFO. Call them and/or e-mail them. You instantly start costing the company more than your problem is worth wasting the VPs time, because they're paid hundreds of dollars an hour.
They will find someone who will make your problem go away almost instantaneously, if for no other reason than it's not worth it to fight it out with you.
I e-mailed Primus' VP of residential services, and bitched about all the nonsense going on. I got a phone call the next day from their manager of customer relations & collections. She took care of all of my issues, and then some, and then switched my billing plan to 'mail only' even though they technically don't offer it.
That the format that is accepted and gets bought up is whatever Blockbuster and Walmart stock.
Inevitably the two arguing companies will fight tooth & nail to be the one to land an exclusivity agreement with Walmart, Blockbuster, and whatever other large retailers/renters are out there for media.
I think that, unfortunately, will decide the outcome of this battle.
#1: No, the car has 4 wheel disc. #2: ABS is fucking stupid. I will tell the car how it should stop, I do not want the car telling me. You call it stupid, I call it being responsible for my vehicle myself, thankyouverymuch.
Buying a car nowadays is almost impossible without ABS.
I have a 2004 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V. I wanted all the options: the subwoofer, the power everything, etc.
I had to get ABS if I got all that. The only alternative would have been the 'brembo' braking system. (Read: stupidly expensive to repair). I wasn't interested. I learned how to and know how to drive in a car without ABS. I hate ABS. It kicks in needlessly, and makes my control of the vehicle much WORSE. I have to look into the legality of disabling it (and any insurance implications it may carry.)
Drivers out there are already bad enough -- but I'm torn. If these add-ons are stopping car accidents from occurring, then great, but if they're making drivers inherently dumber (if that's possible), then I'm afraid for what the future brings in a whole new calibre of shitty drivers.
Those are three registers. The first two are data registers, the second one is the instruction register (Where code locations go.) I've given them 12 hyphens each.
You try and put 18 of the letter 'a' into the FIRST data register. If your code properly validates, you get:
However, if your code DOESNT validate correctly, you get:
So now you have data that's OVERFLOWED into the next register.
Now, instead of just 18 characters, lets put in 36!
Ooh.. we've now overwritten the INSTRUCTION POINTER register with a bunch of As. In Linux, this would usually result in a 'segmentation fault'. In Windows, you'll get "This program has performed an illegal operation.. bla bla bla" or a blue screen of death.
Now, if you know you can overwrite that instruction pointer, then you can craft some code and put it into EIP (the instruction register) and make the system execute the code pointed to by EIP which is code you made to make the system do basically whatever the hell you want.
What the (grand-grand?)-parent was saying was that the x86 architecture should have the ability to mark data as 'data' bytes or 'instruction' bytes, so if those As got thrown into EIP, the system would know better than to do anything with it, because it's not runnable data.
This particular bug *IS* the fault of Microsoft, but it certainly wasn't put there on purpose (or at least it wasn't the result of any 'callback' built into the metafile type.)
I don't give a fuck how much karma I lose for this post and the fact that it'll be modded down as 'troll' or 'offtopic'. THERE IS ONLY ONE FUCKING O IN LOSE.
First, while this is a personal preference, I use xfce4 for my desktop. It's fast, it's lightweight (relatively) and its infinitely configurable.
Then, download devilspie. This allows you to set up various programs like XMMS and gaim to not show up in your tasklist, pin windows to the screen regardless of desktop, etc, and makes ALT-TAB skip programs.
Then, download xbindkeys, and bind all those extraneous keys most new keyboards have to actual functions. If your system doesn't understand the keys (you're getting setkeycodes messages in/var/log/messages), then man setkeycodes, and map all those keys to something, and make xbindkeys use them to do various things. I have a Microsoft Multimedia keyboard here at work, and I've mapped every key to do something useful. Sleep enables my screensaver, log-off, calculator, messenger, web/home, mail all do what you'd expect, media runs xine, mute, play, stop, volume up and down, next song, and previous song all do what you'd think in xmms, my music runs xmms, my pictures runs gimp, and my documents runs xffm (xfce's file manager.)
Learn (or change so you know) the key combinations for switching desktops, swapping applications, etc.
Put SSH keys on all the servers you normally log into, and put ssh-askpass and ssh-agent into your xinitrc file.
Something I use that I find *INCREDIBLY* useful is:
xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"
Which makes X ignore the caps lock key, because in reality, I *never* use it, and the only time it's on, it's on by mistake, and learning that it's on by accident whilst running vim is *never* fun.
alias su to sudo su, so you only have to enter a password every once in a while.
Map one of your keys on your keyboard (if you don't have a multimedia keyboard, make it a ctrl-key combination of some sort) to xscreensaver-command -lock, and make it a habit to hit that button every time you walk away from your computer, so any logged in root shell is never a problem as far as physical security goes.
Also, if you do a lot of programming, and/or use vim a lot, I've found this function I threw together pretty useful in my.bashrc
if [ "x$DISPLAY" != "x" ]; then function vim () {/usr/bin/vim.perl -g $@; } fi
If I type in 'vim', it runs vim.perl (debian package) in X, since vim for x is generally more useful than console.
Also, I've set up my ssh to automatically forward X11 sessions (I only log into hosts I trust) so that if I run vim, and have my bash profile the same on the server I'm logging into, I get pretty graphical vim windows that make proper use of my:set mouse option.
That's all that immediately comes to mind, but it's also 9:25am on Monday.
I hear you on that one. tek-tips.com does it, which is where I find myself a lot when I search for various web development bugs, and tsn.ca, (Canadian sports news site) also does it, which made me start using nhl.com instead (since I only read hockey news anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
They feel like bags of sand, of course!
If Slashdot had an 'obvious' moderator, you'd be +5, obvious, because we *all* went there.
Every few months, another story about a screwup in a Diebold machine comes out.
How fucking hard is it to make a machine that counts?
I live ~90km from my job. Driving in takes ~1.5 hours one way, and can take up to 2.5 hours coming home on weekends. As such, I'm only required in the office twice a week. It works beautifully for me. On days I have to be in the office, I'm up at 5am, out the door by 6. On days I don't, I'm out of bed at 9am and working by 9:01. I don't slack off any more or less than when I work in the office (humourously, I'm in the office today and Slashdotting).
I know a lot of people require a separate office with door and all that, but I actually sit with my tablemate and laptop on the couch beside my wife while she's surfing the 'net on her laptop, or watching TV or doing the household chores thing. Our son is usually in school, but in the summer and after school, he does his thing.
I work through lunch since my wife cooks for me, and I still get my work done. It's a win for everyone involved. If I had to be here 5 days a week, I'd have to find a new job, and that would make me sad because I love my job.
The local part of my e-mail is drunkennewfiemidget.
I don't consume alcohol. At all.
Although my father is a newfie, I was born in Toronto.
I'm 6' tall.
It's just a fun name I made up.
I know you're (mostly) kidding, but unfortunately, the cost of electricity to run a computer for such uses over its lifetime will outweigh its usefulness. Especially with its decreased value.
Have they not noticed that they're going after a crime of DUI in the video game, when your character is capable of committing far worse crimes in the game, such as, oh I don't know, MURDER?!
Where're the families of murder victims protesting?
Oh wait, ITS A FUCKING VIDEO GAME.
How many people have intentionally downloaded commercials?
I know I have.
If advertisers would be a little smarter about their advertising, and make their advertising work for the consumer, we wouldn't be so annoyed with commercials being crammed down our throats.
Commercials need to be funny, or perhaps provide you with a url to print a coupon for a product (that'd work online really well), or something. If commercials weren't so bloody annoying, things would be so much better.
Many commercials have annoyed me to the point that I boycott the product. Old Navy commercials are a great example. They're not entertaining, they're irritating. Whether its annoying jingles, bad actors, etc.
Yes, I realise you can't please everyone, but most commercials nowadays aren't pleasing anyone.
I, for one, know I wouldn't be bothered so much if commercials were just a little bit entertaining. I love the commercials Bell is currently running here using the two beavers. I intentionally watch those commercials when they come on because they're funny.
If company execs stop hiring idiots to do commercials, and make good, entertaining and/or informative, actually useful commercials, and put 5-10 second clips on the beginning of youtube movies, I'd happily sit through them. Alternatively, they could do as they said, and sell space on their main page for movies put there by advertisers. If they're actually entertaining, they will get watched.
Advertising, imnsho, isn't the evil, horrible thing, most of us make it out to be. Of course there's a limit on its obtrusiveness, but if they make good commercials targeted at the kind of people they're trying to sell to, then people wouldn't get so pissed off with them.
Going to show a video about a car? Run a BMW commercial before it.
Going to show a video about some guy opening a beer bottle using only a piece of paper? Show a beer commercial before it.
Just don't make them suck.
Bull. It depends on the kid. At 16, I had all the freedoms in the world. I went where I wanted, I did what I wanted, and I acted as I pleased. I had earned it, and my parents knew I would behave myself.
And I did.
My son is only 5 now, but if I think I can trust him to behave himself at 16, I'll give him the freedoms that comes with it.
I dealt with much the same thing with Primus here in Canada last week.
You know how you deal with that? Big companies like Telus are usually publically traded. Either that, or they're members of some large organisations that publish their membership records.
Find the e-mail address and/or phone number of a VP or a CEO/COO/CFO. Call them and/or e-mail them. You instantly start costing the company more than your problem is worth wasting the VPs time, because they're paid hundreds of dollars an hour.
They will find someone who will make your problem go away almost instantaneously, if for no other reason than it's not worth it to fight it out with you.
I e-mailed Primus' VP of residential services, and bitched about all the nonsense going on. I got a phone call the next day from their manager of customer relations & collections. She took care of all of my issues, and then some, and then switched my billing plan to 'mail only' even though they technically don't offer it.
Unfortunately, I'm sure that's next on their list. :(
Walmart is already just like myspace.
They both suck, and their claim to fame are a bunch of teenagers, and losers.
I have some waterfront property in Lousiana I'd love to sell you.
That the format that is accepted and gets bought up is whatever Blockbuster and Walmart stock.
Inevitably the two arguing companies will fight tooth & nail to be the one to land an exclusivity agreement with Walmart, Blockbuster, and whatever other large retailers/renters are out there for media.
I think that, unfortunately, will decide the outcome of this battle.
#1: No, the car has 4 wheel disc.
#2: ABS is fucking stupid. I will tell the car how it should stop, I do not want the car telling me. You call it stupid, I call it being responsible for my vehicle myself, thankyouverymuch.
Buying a car nowadays is almost impossible without ABS.
I have a 2004 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V. I wanted all the options: the subwoofer, the power everything, etc.
I had to get ABS if I got all that. The only alternative would have been the 'brembo' braking system. (Read: stupidly expensive to repair). I wasn't interested. I learned how to and know how to drive in a car without ABS. I hate ABS. It kicks in needlessly, and makes my control of the vehicle much WORSE. I have to look into the legality of disabling it (and any insurance implications it may carry.)
Drivers out there are already bad enough -- but I'm torn. If these add-ons are stopping car accidents from occurring, then great, but if they're making drivers inherently dumber (if that's possible), then I'm afraid for what the future brings in a whole new calibre of shitty drivers.
Gah. I had written a bunch of lame ascii diagrams using [------] to show the registers, but I kept hitting the 'lame filter'.
Fucking slashdot.
Let me try and dumb this down for you a bit.
;)
This is your CPU:
Those are three registers. The first two are data registers, the second one is the instruction register (Where code locations go.) I've given them 12 hyphens each.
You try and put 18 of the letter 'a' into the FIRST data register. If your code properly validates, you get:
However, if your code DOESNT validate correctly, you get:
So now you have data that's OVERFLOWED into the next register.
Now, instead of just 18 characters, lets put in 36!
Ooh.. we've now overwritten the INSTRUCTION POINTER register with a bunch of As. In Linux, this would usually result in a 'segmentation fault'. In Windows, you'll get "This program has performed an illegal operation.. bla bla bla" or a blue screen of death.
Now, if you know you can overwrite that instruction pointer, then you can craft some code and put it into EIP (the instruction register) and make the system execute the code pointed to by EIP which is code you made to make the system do basically whatever the hell you want.
What the (grand-grand?)-parent was saying was that the x86 architecture should have the ability to mark data as 'data' bytes or 'instruction' bytes, so if those As got thrown into EIP, the system would know better than to do anything with it, because it's not runnable data.
This particular bug *IS* the fault of Microsoft, but it certainly wasn't put there on purpose (or at least it wasn't the result of any 'callback' built into the metafile type.)
IANAL, YMMV, IMNSHO, I could be wrong.
It did it at 23:59:60 UTC, regardless of your timezone.
I don't give a fuck how much karma I lose for this post and the fact that it'll be modded down as 'troll' or 'offtopic'. THERE IS ONLY ONE FUCKING O IN LOSE.
Celine Dion naked should be grounds for RUNNING THE FUCK AWAY.
Nobody wants to see that, do they? *shudder*
Olaf: My love for you is like a truck, BERZERKER! Would you like some making fuck, BERZERKER!
First, while this is a personal preference, I use xfce4 for my desktop. It's fast, it's lightweight (relatively) and its infinitely configurable.
Then, download devilspie. This allows you to set up various programs like XMMS and gaim to not show up in your tasklist, pin windows to the screen regardless of desktop, etc, and makes ALT-TAB skip programs.
Then, download xbindkeys, and bind all those extraneous keys most new keyboards have to actual functions. If your system doesn't understand the keys (you're getting setkeycodes messages in /var/log/messages), then man setkeycodes, and map all those keys to something, and make xbindkeys use them to do various things. I have a Microsoft Multimedia keyboard here at work, and I've mapped every key to do something useful. Sleep enables my screensaver, log-off, calculator, messenger, web/home, mail all do what you'd expect, media runs xine, mute, play, stop, volume up and down, next song, and previous song all do what you'd think in xmms, my music runs xmms, my pictures runs gimp, and my documents runs xffm (xfce's file manager.)
Learn (or change so you know) the key combinations for switching desktops, swapping applications, etc.
Put SSH keys on all the servers you normally log into, and put ssh-askpass and ssh-agent into your xinitrc file.
Something I use that I find *INCREDIBLY* useful is:
Which makes X ignore the caps lock key, because in reality, I *never* use it, and the only time it's on, it's on by mistake, and learning that it's on by accident whilst running vim is *never* fun.
alias su to sudo su, so you only have to enter a password every once in a while.
Map one of your keys on your keyboard (if you don't have a multimedia keyboard, make it a ctrl-key combination of some sort) to xscreensaver-command -lock, and make it a habit to hit that button every time you walk away from your computer, so any logged in root shell is never a problem as far as physical security goes.
Also, if you do a lot of programming, and/or use vim a lot, I've found this function I threw together pretty useful in my .bashrc
If I type in 'vim', it runs vim.perl (debian package) in X, since vim for x is generally more useful than console.
Also, I've set up my ssh to automatically forward X11 sessions (I only log into hosts I trust) so that if I run vim, and have my bash profile the same on the server I'm logging into, I get pretty graphical vim windows that make proper use of my :set mouse option.
That's all that immediately comes to mind, but it's also 9:25am on Monday.
In other news, Satan says murder is fun!
I hear you on that one. tek-tips.com does it, which is where I find myself a lot when I search for various web development bugs, and tsn.ca, (Canadian sports news site) also does it, which made me start using nhl.com instead (since I only read hockey news anyway.)