I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. I want to see someone do some good network games...I'm going to try and create something similar to Strategic Commander (PalmOS game from www.zindaware.com) that can actually communicate over the cables...maybe even allow disconnects and continuations. Wouldnt that be fun:-)
My usual method of key storage is to have all my keys on a mini-cdr. There exist two copies, one in a safe box of some sore (safe deposit, fire safe, etc) and one under lock and key or on my person at all times. Insert the disk, access the key, remove the disk. I know that one could still parse thru memory, but thats a royal PITA in any case that I don't worry about too much, as my data isnt *that* critical to worry about encrypted swap. When it comes time to change the key, change it, burn the new one to a new pair of mini-cdrs, and destroy the old two (fire works well). Then even if someone downloads your encrypted data and you change the key, they can never recover the old key from a garbage bin or something.
Personally, I think the price gouging is ridiculous. The cable modem service in my area sucks as it is, and is the only thing available besides very slow dialup. And they havent even accepted new customers for almost a year now, because they were transitioning or some such. IMO they need to be more like Canada and give me some decent broadband rates...always turns me green with envy when a Canadian friend in IRC brags about his cable modem which costs him less than my dialup...
On the other hand, in a more pragmatic viewpoint, I can understand the bandwidth costs. The state universities share an OC3 backbone network, and my college, which accounts for 20% of the population accounts for 70% of the bandwidth usage. And I imagine from what I've read here that its a similar ratio for cable modem users...a small portion of us get nailed. I can understand paying higher for higher usage...but I refuse to pay higher to my local company, which uses DHCP and will not allow servers to be run in any way...whats the use of having high traffic availability if I cant even run my webpage off my apache server? Or my mailing lists?
I'd be willing to pay more (not excessive, i'm not rich, but more) than the people who use broadband for just email and surfing. But better yet, since those people use next to no bandwidth, why not drop their rates a little too? Make people get what they pay for...and reduce the bandwidth squandered so the little old rich lady down the street can check her email faster while I'm bleeding myself just to be able to browse 3 webpages at once while sharing my remote desktops at the office, etc...
If they're losing ~$10,000USD in 20 days, can they even afford the legal fees for long? Is it worth it for them, if they are that low profit, to invest thousands and thousands of dollars into lawyers for a court battle?
Think about it all you American/.ers...we could each send them a dollar to recoup their 'losses'.... just make sure you write something nasty about spammers on the bill.
Or we could send the bill to the guy being sued to use in his defense...we'd bury T3 Direct's legal fund in a day;-)
They tell me I'm special at my institution. I even believe it after those nice pills they give me...but no M$ software, unless the psychedelic swirls are a new screensaver....ooh...colors...
"Nonsense. No state institution that I'm aware of runs off of tuition. They almost all run off of massive taxpayer subsidies (state, federal). Tuition barely makes the vig at those places."
Gee, where does that 10 grand a year go to then?
"If you're in college and you feel oppressed by your university because they're holding back on what they "owe" you for your tuition, you're pretty sadly mistaken."
I think you're sadly mistaken on the point of this post: I work for the technology department of the school, and was recently involved in try to decide if it was worth the continuing license costs when less than 15% of the students use the option for cheap M$ software. That money could be put to better use, simply because its not cost effective. And whether the money comes directly from tuition, or from the taxes I get stiffed on every year (in reality, both), it could still be put to more beneficial use than offering an option that a majority of the student body doesn't know about or care to take advantage of.
When we can use M$ in the computer labs for the one+ paper(s) we need to type in a year, why buy it? And the other half of us got Office as part of a computer package from Dell or some company, and don't care if Office XP has newer stuff than their Office2k.
Here in Maryland, the state universities pay a massive license fee that covers every student attending, so they can pay for the cost of media only ($5, real expensive cdrs). But that money comes from your tuition anyways, so the savings are all only perceived...better off using StarOffice, and dropping that license, and saving some of that tuition money for better purposes (I want the old studen center made into a lasertag arena personally, but other improvements could apply too).
As one who's recently converted to Lynx for much of my basic browsing, thanks for the consideration. Of course, I was in the process of digging up that link to post on my own when I saw yours;-)
Well, if they tax CD-Rs, then via an extension of the DMCA anyone who pays their taxes is guilty of possession or supporting hacking tools, and until proven innocent, electricity can be shut off to their home until they prove their CD-R is only for data backups by burning a backup cd and mailing it to the RIAA, IRS, and MPAA.
When will the madness stop?
Only because they volunteer...
on
Linux Win In Schools
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Honestly, they're volunteering so they're taking time to do things right the first time around. My old high school (which i keep tabs on, as I was the sole computer expert there for years) is horrendous with computers. Using the easily circumventedd security program known as Fortress, they wondered how everyone still played games. And the crappy cyber patrol software would block search engines and leave www.lotsofsexforyou.com open for anyone. For a county with more than 25 schools, all of them running through a single shared T1 (roughly), its pretty bad. Linux could fix a lot of it. The current problem is version differences, they've switched about half the staff over to Windows 2000 servers, leaving the other half on Novell. Thus, no one can access anything as the servers dont have access to the databases any more because the techs are ID10Ts. Rather than pouring money that should be going to teacher payraises and better books, they just upgrade windows again and break more stuff.
Sorry, ranting a little there...but the computer mishaps that my poor HS goes through really bothers me, as it has a negative impact on perceptions of computers and the internet...
EBay is the last place I'd go to buy computer stuff. The prices there are hardly going to be a match for computer show prices and yard sales, plus there is the uncertainty factor. And the shipping charges. But the biggest factor is having to haggle and bid against several million people, instead of just you, the vendor, and maybe 2 others at a swap table...the prices definitely vary, and you can personally inspect the product, unlike Ebay.
(Dont get my wrong, Ebay is prolly the best for vintage computers (except certain yard sales as in another post of mine) but for newer stuff shows and trading in person is much safer and cheaper).
On a similar note, if you are near a military housing area, check the yardsales on saturday and sunday mornings. My uncle does this at the Marine Base in Kaneohe, Hawaii, and has literally tons of computer stuff that the military people didnt want to ship to their new deployment. You can usually haggle the price down to almost nothing and get a lot of vintage stuff, and occasionally some very good stuff.
We don't have much in that department. There are of course the Martket Pro shows, which is where I get almost everything, but they just sell, no swaps. The only other close thing is a place called SmartCo, which is local to St Mary's county to my knowledge. It takes surplus and old computer equipment from the local naval base and has volunteers rebuild them for schools. The old policy also allowed you to scavenge for yourself on occasion if you volunteered enough.
Due to the dismal lack of such things locally to my knowledge, I'm also much anticipating the results of this inquiry...
"Beyond that, gamers are smarter, more likely to go to college, have more friends, read more, and get better-paying jobs than non-gamers."
...And if you act now, you can also make millions just like other gamers! Get some Viagra cheap! and improve your high score!! Get the X10 and be the envy of all your gaming friends!
Jeesh, isn't it kinda reckless to make generalizations without a basis case to reflect upon?
But this time its the FBI pointing the guns and taking him away...so its legal. So how much of his vaunted spirtuality (the the article linked in the parent) bothering him now that he's holding a non-US citizen for committing a crime in a country where his company is the illegal one?
"I can say that bioterrorism scares the shit out of me."
Agreed. I had a biochemical expert from (name slips my mind at the moment, but it was a gov't agency) come and lecture to my class on the history of modern espionage, and the stuff he talked about was bone chilling. The ease with which anthrax and other agents can be grown in large quantities is startling, and distribution is as simple as a canister and a small commuter plane. And the US is woefully unprepared for such a disaster, with hospitals being private industry. I think the only nations that could possibly have a chance of dealing with a large bioterrorist act would be those with government subsized health care over in Europe. Even then the sheer quantity of people versus that of drugs or vaccines is bound to cause trouble.
Detection methods, such as Portable Spectrometers, are researched and quite feasible, but according to our expert, they arent used everywhere the should/could be. As it stands, only severly Draconian measures could ensure national survival, but at the same time destroying national cohesion. While it is used as a buzz-word for defense spending, it is a very real and very deadly threat...one of the things that makes me not want to live near Washington DC and attend school near Baltimore..inviting targets there:-\
"Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?"
I dont know if anyone else did this, but I was confused by this statement for a good several minutes... I thought he was referring to items that Blizzard had disabled temporarily until bugs could be worked out...oops. But these items do exists and go for a lot of money at times, since Blizzard's 'secure' Realms make them rather hard to find and hard to cheat into your possession. However, there is not much excuse for these outages, Blizzard has had over a year (not counting beta tests) to tweak this system, and still has made little to no progress. And with the recent influx of cold hard cash from the overpriced Expansion pack, they have no shortage of cash to pour on these problems to help them go away. I'm usually reading alt.games.diablo rather than the forums, and I know there is a growing discontent there, with many old players just giving up. (I dont speak for everyone, I know many people are still happy as well...Probably most of them just play on a local LAN with friends like I do instead of depending on Blizzard Quality Assurance....)
Yup, I agree. Poor quality, low budget humor, stealing badly from Swift's writings, glossed over some political commentary on the death penalty. Must be nice to have such a big audience to bitch to, most of us just have coworkers and family.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate lots of humor, including a lot of bad movies and such. I have a soft spot for a lot of bad movies and books. But this one didn't even evoke a grin, just a disgusted shake of the head.
Re:Moral of the story: He's a Moron
on
The Joys of HDTV
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· Score: 1
What I want to know, is how can a reporter afford stuff like that as if it were a drop in the hat? Heck, I'll switch to journalism from ComSci in a heartbeat if the Times will pay me the way he seems to be getting paid...
We seem to have missed the boat, reporting is where the money's at now fellows!
I think the box would get torn apart on an early theft attempt, limiting the potential humor. Even better would be a box with several remote control options, such as electroshock antitheft (current running through case), a gyro to make the case bounce (thus scaring the wits out of whoever is carrying it) and maybe silly string from a front panel or something when someone bends down to look at it. A clever person with a couple extra dollars could have a lot of fun with this...
I'd love to see a more indepth article on this. Most people I talk to don't believe me when I say that we've hit a breakeven point, and seeing this is refreshing. Its interesting, the plasma almost seems to be snagging on field imperfections, magnetic friction or something weird like that. Can anyone find a meatier version?
Slightly offtopic, but has anyone read the Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton? Earth was a rather nasty place due to heat pollution from fusion reactors...some funny comments on Chaos theory and weather too, an armada of butterflys...
...right up until a user has a real question. I've done helpdesk for years now, in a variety of environments and for support bases ranging from 600 to over ten thousand people. I'm going to remain very skeptical of any expert system's ability to handle this until I see it, as one of the more important aspects of a lot of helpdesk calls is proper human interaction. Often customers are very irate, and prone to misnomers in terminology. A calm helpdesk technician can sort through this, calm the customer, and solve the problem. A machine stands an even chance of making an irate customer even more upset, as it most definitely lacks in the calming people skills...
Otherwise though, this is at least a neat idea for solving some of the dummy password problems that do take a lot of time. Just don't expect to get rid of helpdesk that easily...and besides, who do you call when the system itself messes up? I can just see two of these systems trying to talk back and forth and troubleshoot themselves...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm paying less than 1/3 of what you are
I will now smack you mightily.
I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. I want to see someone do some good network games...I'm going to try and create something similar to Strategic Commander (PalmOS game from www.zindaware.com) that can actually communicate over the cables...maybe even allow disconnects and continuations. Wouldnt that be fun :-)
::Drools::
::Wipes chin::
::drools more::
I was just looking at this the other day...pity with the config I wanted it would cost more than 2 desktops for me...almost $3000.
Still...::drools even more::
My usual method of key storage is to have all my keys on a mini-cdr. There exist two copies, one in a safe box of some sore (safe deposit, fire safe, etc) and one under lock and key or on my person at all times. Insert the disk, access the key, remove the disk. I know that one could still parse thru memory, but thats a royal PITA in any case that I don't worry about too much, as my data isnt *that* critical to worry about encrypted swap. When it comes time to change the key, change it, burn the new one to a new pair of mini-cdrs, and destroy the old two (fire works well). Then even if someone downloads your encrypted data and you change the key, they can never recover the old key from a garbage bin or something.
Personally, I think the price gouging is ridiculous. The cable modem service in my area sucks as it is, and is the only thing available besides very slow dialup. And they havent even accepted new customers for almost a year now, because they were transitioning or some such. IMO they need to be more like Canada and give me some decent broadband rates...always turns me green with envy when a Canadian friend in IRC brags about his cable modem which costs him less than my dialup...
On the other hand, in a more pragmatic viewpoint, I can understand the bandwidth costs. The state universities share an OC3 backbone network, and my college, which accounts for 20% of the population accounts for 70% of the bandwidth usage. And I imagine from what I've read here that its a similar ratio for cable modem users...a small portion of us get nailed. I can understand paying higher for higher usage...but I refuse to pay higher to my local company, which uses DHCP and will not allow servers to be run in any way...whats the use of having high traffic availability if I cant even run my webpage off my apache server? Or my mailing lists?
I'd be willing to pay more (not excessive, i'm not rich, but more) than the people who use broadband for just email and surfing. But better yet, since those people use next to no bandwidth, why not drop their rates a little too? Make people get what they pay for...and reduce the bandwidth squandered so the little old rich lady down the street can check her email faster while I'm bleeding myself just to be able to browse 3 webpages at once while sharing my remote desktops at the office, etc...
If they're losing ~$10,000USD in 20 days, can they even afford the legal fees for long? Is it worth it for them, if they are that low profit, to invest thousands and thousands of dollars into lawyers for a court battle?
/.ers...we could each send them a dollar to recoup their 'losses'.... just make sure you write something nasty about spammers on the bill.
;-)
Think about it all you American
Or we could send the bill to the guy being sued to use in his defense...we'd bury T3 Direct's legal fund in a day
Or...I could buy a soda. Mmmm...caffeine...
They tell me I'm special at my institution. I even believe it after those nice pills they give me...but no M$ software, unless the psychedelic swirls are a new screensaver....ooh...colors...
"Nonsense. No state institution that I'm aware of runs off of tuition. They almost all run off of massive taxpayer subsidies (state, federal). Tuition barely makes the vig at those places."
Gee, where does that 10 grand a year go to then?
"If you're in college and you feel oppressed by your university because they're holding back on what they "owe" you for your tuition, you're pretty sadly mistaken."
I think you're sadly mistaken on the point of this post: I work for the technology department of the school, and was recently involved in try to decide if it was worth the continuing license costs when less than 15% of the students use the option for cheap M$ software. That money could be put to better use, simply because its not cost effective. And whether the money comes directly from tuition, or from the taxes I get stiffed on every year (in reality, both), it could still be put to more beneficial use than offering an option that a majority of the student body doesn't know about or care to take advantage of.
When we can use M$ in the computer labs for the one+ paper(s) we need to type in a year, why buy it? And the other half of us got Office as part of a computer package from Dell or some company, and don't care if Office XP has newer stuff than their Office2k.
So regardless, my original point stands.
This is great news!
Here in Maryland, the state universities pay a massive license fee that covers every student attending, so they can pay for the cost of media only ($5, real expensive cdrs). But that money comes from your tuition anyways, so the savings are all only perceived...better off using StarOffice, and dropping that license, and saving some of that tuition money for better purposes (I want the old studen center made into a lasertag arena personally, but other improvements could apply too).
As one who's recently converted to Lynx for much of my basic browsing, thanks for the consideration. Of course, I was in the process of digging up that link to post on my own when I saw yours ;-)
Well, if they tax CD-Rs, then via an extension of the DMCA anyone who pays their taxes is guilty of possession or supporting hacking tools, and until proven innocent, electricity can be shut off to their home until they prove their CD-R is only for data backups by burning a backup cd and mailing it to the RIAA, IRS, and MPAA.
When will the madness stop?
Honestly, they're volunteering so they're taking time to do things right the first time around. My old high school (which i keep tabs on, as I was the sole computer expert there for years) is horrendous with computers. Using the easily circumventedd security program known as Fortress, they wondered how everyone still played games. And the crappy cyber patrol software would block search engines and leave www.lotsofsexforyou.com open for anyone. For a county with more than 25 schools, all of them running through a single shared T1 (roughly), its pretty bad. Linux could fix a lot of it. The current problem is version differences, they've switched about half the staff over to Windows 2000 servers, leaving the other half on Novell. Thus, no one can access anything as the servers dont have access to the databases any more because the techs are ID10Ts. Rather than pouring money that should be going to teacher payraises and better books, they just upgrade windows again and break more stuff.
Sorry, ranting a little there...but the computer mishaps that my poor HS goes through really bothers me, as it has a negative impact on perceptions of computers and the internet...
EBay is the last place I'd go to buy computer stuff. The prices there are hardly going to be a match for computer show prices and yard sales, plus there is the uncertainty factor. And the shipping charges. But the biggest factor is having to haggle and bid against several million people, instead of just you, the vendor, and maybe 2 others at a swap table...the prices definitely vary, and you can personally inspect the product, unlike Ebay.
(Dont get my wrong, Ebay is prolly the best for vintage computers (except certain yard sales as in another post of mine) but for newer stuff shows and trading in person is much safer and cheaper).
On a similar note, if you are near a military housing area, check the yardsales on saturday and sunday mornings. My uncle does this at the Marine Base in Kaneohe, Hawaii, and has literally tons of computer stuff that the military people didnt want to ship to their new deployment. You can usually haggle the price down to almost nothing and get a lot of vintage stuff, and occasionally some very good stuff.
We don't have much in that department. There are of course the Martket Pro shows, which is where I get almost everything, but they just sell, no swaps. The only other close thing is a place called SmartCo, which is local to St Mary's county to my knowledge. It takes surplus and old computer equipment from the local naval base and has volunteers rebuild them for schools. The old policy also allowed you to scavenge for yourself on occasion if you volunteered enough.
Due to the dismal lack of such things locally to my knowledge, I'm also much anticipating the results of this inquiry...
"Beyond that, gamers are smarter, more likely to go to college, have more friends, read more, and get better-paying jobs than non-gamers."
...And if you act now, you can also make millions just like other gamers! Get some Viagra cheap! and improve your high score!! Get the X10 and be the envy of all your gaming friends!
Jeesh, isn't it kinda reckless to make generalizations without a basis case to reflect upon?
But this time its the FBI pointing the guns and taking him away...so its legal. So how much of his vaunted spirtuality (the the article linked in the parent) bothering him now that he's holding a non-US citizen for committing a crime in a country where his company is the illegal one?
"I can say that bioterrorism scares the shit out of me."
:-\
Agreed. I had a biochemical expert from (name slips my mind at the moment, but it was a gov't agency) come and lecture to my class on the history of modern espionage, and the stuff he talked about was bone chilling. The ease with which anthrax and other agents can be grown in large quantities is startling, and distribution is as simple as a canister and a small commuter plane. And the US is woefully unprepared for such a disaster, with hospitals being private industry. I think the only nations that could possibly have a chance of dealing with a large bioterrorist act would be those with government subsized health care over in Europe. Even then the sheer quantity of people versus that of drugs or vaccines is bound to cause trouble.
Detection methods, such as Portable Spectrometers, are researched and quite feasible, but according to our expert, they arent used everywhere the should/could be. As it stands, only severly Draconian measures could ensure national survival, but at the same time destroying national cohesion. While it is used as a buzz-word for defense spending, it is a very real and very deadly threat...one of the things that makes me not want to live near Washington DC and attend school near Baltimore..inviting targets there
"Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?"
I dont know if anyone else did this, but I was confused by this statement for a good several minutes... I thought he was referring to items that Blizzard had disabled temporarily until bugs could be worked out...oops. But these items do exists and go for a lot of money at times, since Blizzard's 'secure' Realms make them rather hard to find and hard to cheat into your possession. However, there is not much excuse for these outages, Blizzard has had over a year (not counting beta tests) to tweak this system, and still has made little to no progress. And with the recent influx of cold hard cash from the overpriced Expansion pack, they have no shortage of cash to pour on these problems to help them go away. I'm usually reading alt.games.diablo rather than the forums, and I know there is a growing discontent there, with many old players just giving up. (I dont speak for everyone, I know many people are still happy as well...Probably most of them just play on a local LAN with friends like I do instead of depending on Blizzard Quality Assurance....)
Yup, I agree. Poor quality, low budget humor, stealing badly from Swift's writings, glossed over some political commentary on the death penalty. Must be nice to have such a big audience to bitch to, most of us just have coworkers and family.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate lots of humor, including a lot of bad movies and such. I have a soft spot for a lot of bad movies and books. But this one didn't even evoke a grin, just a disgusted shake of the head.
What I want to know, is how can a reporter afford stuff like that as if it were a drop in the hat? Heck, I'll switch to journalism from ComSci in a heartbeat if the Times will pay me the way he seems to be getting paid...
We seem to have missed the boat, reporting is where the money's at now fellows!
I think the box would get torn apart on an early theft attempt, limiting the potential humor. Even better would be a box with several remote control options, such as electroshock antitheft (current running through case), a gyro to make the case bounce (thus scaring the wits out of whoever is carrying it) and maybe silly string from a front panel or something when someone bends down to look at it. A clever person with a couple extra dollars could have a lot of fun with this...
If its a project with government involvement, he's being far too optimistic...
I'd love to see a more indepth article on this. Most people I talk to don't believe me when I say that we've hit a breakeven point, and seeing this is refreshing. Its interesting, the plasma almost seems to be snagging on field imperfections, magnetic friction or something weird like that. Can anyone find a meatier version?
Slightly offtopic, but has anyone read the Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton? Earth was a rather nasty place due to heat pollution from fusion reactors...some funny comments on Chaos theory and weather too, an armada of butterflys...
...right up until a user has a real question. I've done helpdesk for years now, in a variety of environments and for support bases ranging from 600 to over ten thousand people. I'm going to remain very skeptical of any expert system's ability to handle this until I see it, as one of the more important aspects of a lot of helpdesk calls is proper human interaction. Often customers are very irate, and prone to misnomers in terminology. A calm helpdesk technician can sort through this, calm the customer, and solve the problem. A machine stands an even chance of making an irate customer even more upset, as it most definitely lacks in the calming people skills...
Otherwise though, this is at least a neat idea for solving some of the dummy password problems that do take a lot of time. Just don't expect to get rid of helpdesk that easily...and besides, who do you call when the system itself messes up? I can just see two of these systems trying to talk back and forth and troubleshoot themselves...