I really don't understand what is driving Intel to push out these new chips so damn fast. They are locked into a never ending pissing contest with AMD over who has the highest clocked chip. Nobody is going to win this fight, it will never end.
Intel has a pretty good marketing department behind them, I can't figure out why the hell they don't try and spend some money educating the masses on what really pushes chip performance.
If they ever managed to get full scale developer buy in and good marketing behind some of their extensions to the instruction sets, like the new Pentium 4 stuff, they would really be able to put AMD into the dirt. They just have to wait and release new products when they are stable and have decent (read useful) software that takes advantage of them.
It looks to me like Intel has fallen into the maketroid trap. They are not building bad products, they are executing poorly beacuse they are stuck in a rushed development cycle. How may of you/.ers out there have seen software projects fail because of this?
Intel really needs an engineer back in the CEOs office, without Moore they are lost.
How much of this comes from kids going nuts over these toys and how much of this comes from adults wanting to show off to everyone else what wonderful parents they are.
From waht I've seen most of this hot toy hysteria is spread by parents, not kids.
The reason you are you get so much NETBIOS traffic has nothing to do with being scanned.
When you enable a Windows machine to share resources it needs to decide what machine on the network is the master browser (A machine that contains a table of all of the NETBIOS machines on the network).
When the machine starts it sends out some packets to decide who the master browser is. If nobody replies or if the present master browser is of a lower OS level than your machine, it will start an election to determine who the new master browser is.
I am an @home subscriber in Calgary (shaw @home). I get this stuff bouncing off of my firewall all the time.
Note: Please don't moderate as Funny. Yeah I know, it's rediculous but its' also how Windows OSs actually do this.
But what about the CLONE of Windows that is KDE? As if KDE came up with the Start menu itself.
Umm... are you under the impression that KDE is a whole new idea or something?
KDE is a linux / XFree implimentation of the Common Desktop Environment. Look at a Solaris or HP/UX box. See the little drawer thingy? That's where they both got the idea. It is frankly very impressive to see what the KDE folks have done using ugly, nasty old CDE as a base. I'm sticking to Helix Gnome for now, but its' getting to be a difficult choice.
Okay, first off, I live in Canada. I was just about to lean back in my chair and make some nasty remarks about silly Americans and move on with my day.
I thought to myself, wait a minute these bastards are probably sooping on me too!
We are getting to the point where there are a number of multi national ISPs out here. IIRC my provider (@home) told the FBI to stick their little machine up their a$$ but who says its' going to stay that way. If the FBI did get a machine installed in @home's network I'm going to have some pretty big questions.
Who says that some of my traffic doesn't cross the border on an @home network before going out. With what little knowledge I have about large scale routing I have, I'm going to have to say its' not very likely, this would be waaay to expensive. I think @home has local UUNet connections in most cities, but it is possible that some of my traffic could go by a Carinvore in the future. Not Cool.
Are there not some sort of international rules about this? Who has jurisdiction over packets that are routed across borders?
I can't help but wonder what is stopping these companies from filing civil suits against the defendants in these cases.
If you look at the Etoy vs Etoys case that played out last year you can draw some interesting (prehaps unfounded) conclusions. I saw a lot of prople here that were very skeptical about Etoys' timing, bringing the suit in the fall and then reaching an agreement right after christmas.
Having a District Court aprove an injunction before arbitration may very well become a tactic employed by plaintifs who know they have the ability to litigate above and beyond the financial resources of the defendants. I have yet to see anything in these arbitration schemes that will stop this.
Can anyone else provide more insight to this? I really hope I just overlooked something.
Or you could buy a vax and some terminals. You could proably get one pretty cheap from goverment surplus.
Seriously lots of companys are doing this, or at least doing some of it. Sun has had their little purple thingys (the name escapes me) for a while now. They are really neat, they use Citrix Metaframe to do exactly what you have described.
I don't think it is feasible to use a web browser for everything. I have yet to see an HTML based spreadsheet app, maybe you could make some Java Applet based office apps, if you didn't want them to be fast or work very well of course.
This is going to be a long one and I'm not a great writer, sorry.
I got stuck in a somewhat similar situation to t0qer when I was a kid but the nice helpful counselor types managed to reform me, not for the better.
When I was seven my father was killed in a car accident. This left my mother in a rough position because she had 2 kids to raise and no career outside of "housewife" so we moved into the city so she could go back to school.
I did fine until Junior High, I didn't really have a lot of friends and the ones I did have shared my all consuming intrest in computers and BBSs. We were fine, the other kids were not.
The abuse we took for not fitting in was amazing, it went far beond just being made fun of, we were physically attacked on a regular basis. The school authorities did recognize that something was wrong but assumed it was me that was causing the problem. Having lost my father so suddenly I must be a messed up little kid, right? I had to go through counseling sessions with a shrink once a week, all the guy ever wanted to talk about was my Dad, I couldn't convince him that the other kids were contributing to my problems at all. It was decided that what I needed was to be transfered to a boarding school for problem children, I started there in the 9th grade.
The school was run by Catholic priests and was a really different place. I had some absolutely awesome teachers and my grades went from good to being the top of my class. (the best in the school actually) However is wasn't all good. Like I said, this school was for "problem" children, it wasn't all kids like me, the bullies here made my other school look like a joke.
A ways into the year things started to change, I made friends with Jay, one of the "toughest" kids in the school and he did a lot to protect me. Around this time my family genes kicked in and I went from being the short fat kid to being much more muscular than most of the kids my age in about 6 months. I also decided that the way to get respect from the kids around me (In a very Alpha ape kind of way) was to beat the crap out of anyone I didn't like. We had a realy nasty pecking order going on in that school, I still don't understand it or why I fell into it so easy.
For High School I returned to the public school system. All the same jerks were still there and were still jerks. So I set out to prove myself through violence and was pretty successful. By the 11th grade I was one of the more popular kids in the school. I had lots of friends, girls liked me and I was on the football, rugby and baseball teams. I honestly thought that I had managed to turn everything around but I was very wrong. All my new friends and I did was smoke dope, drink when we were supposed to be in class and pick on the geeks. In November of my senior year I got hurt in a football game and beacause I couldn't play sports any more I decided to drop out.
By this point my mother and brother couldn't stand me any more so I left home and got a crappy little apartment so I could keep the party going. I had recived a pretty good chunk of money from my father's estate and I set out to pitch the entrire amount into drinking, drugs, girls and fast cars.
It was about a year into this that I got a call from my cousin Jon. Jon is a very gifted software engineer about 15 years older than me. We never spent a lot of time together when I was growing up but we just clicked on a lot of things. He was the guy that coached me through the mess I had kept making of my computer as a kid, hooked me up with a Portal account so I could read usenet and encouraged me keep learning.
Jon invited me to come and live with him in Montreal and see if he couldn't turn me into a coder. I took him up on it and spent a little over a year learning what a real hacker and a real human being is. He saved my life.
I'm 24 now and I make a more than decent living turning out Perl and Java stuff for a really cool company. People at work like and respect me because I'm good at what I do and I'm easy to get along with. I don't know what would have happend if Jon hadn't stepped in but it scares me to think about it. I can't absolutely say that my experiences in boarding school turned me into the little asshole I was but I really think that they did. What I don't understand about it is the fact that I got singled out as the problem. I was content to hang out with my geeky friends and argue about who had the better VGA card, I knew I wanted to go to McGill or Stanford or MIT and become an engineer. I think I was okay. By the time I had gone through their crap all I wanted to was get drunk, chase girls and get in trouble (there was lots of trouble by the way). This really reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 in a lot of ways, creepy.
I hope this helps some people understand why this is important. School officials need to be able to understand these situations and not do to some poor kid what they did to me.
I'm going to be fine and to be honest I wouldn't trade the experience and insight I've gained for anything but I fear other people might not be as lucky.
I have an @home cable connection. Its' really the only available broadband in my city, from what I've been hearing, the local telco has made a real mess out of thier DSL service.
I have had an Open BSD box up as a firewall / router for about 2 months now. I didn't really put a lot of thought into my firewall rules because I wasn't especially concerned about someone comming after me. I just put together someing basic, killed everything I didn't need running and turned on ipmon.
Last week I decided to start messing with ipsec to see if I could set myself up a connection to work and I noticed I was just about out of friggin disk space. On a 1 gig drive!
I'm far from an expert on this stuff but near as I can figure I've been port scanned about 4 times a day the whole time the firewall has been up.
Time to learn more about firewall setup. Ain't life in 24.x.x.x great?
Well I don't have any data to back this up but IMHO, Win2k will be faster on a Multi Proc X86 type machine for spitting up static pages. It threads better. Period.
Now before y'all moderate me down for saying good things about the evil ones, there a few things you will want to bring to your bosses attention.
1. Are you only serving static pages?
2. Kernel 2.4 will probably improve this considerably
3. You would proably be better off using a cluster of cheaper 1U(~$3000) machines and a load balancer(running linux)
4. IIS crashes if you look at it funny
5. If you're going to spend 50 grand or so anyways, check that IIS server versus an Ultra Enterprise 250r. No contest.
You could also ask your boss about just what he expects Microsoft Partners(tm) to say in their adds. I would have been shocked if they claimed linux to be better at anything, probably violate's the contract.
As an example, I have played the demo for Soldier Of Fortune. I would not let my kids play this game until they were of a certain age, say 14. This is a very violent game.
Of course having said that, I don't think this is such a big deal. No store is being forced to enforce this raiting system.
I don't really think raitings work either. I find it very silly that a young child can sit in front if the TV on Saturday afternoon and watch Bruce Willis kill 173 terrorists per hour but can't hear him tell them to fsck off, or see a stray boobie.
I guess the answer is that we have to be careful that little Johnie doesn't see anything we don't want him to do when he grows up. What does little Johnie learn from this? "Boobies and saying fsck are bad, killing people with machine guns is okay". Huh?
Oh sorry, watching people get killed on TV is OK, pretending to kill people in video games is bad.
It strikes me as quite funny that the record companies haven't figured out what Napster does for them.
Personally I have purchased more CDs in the past year than ever before. I think a large part of it is the exposure I get to new artists by being able chuck a couple of MP3s in my playlist and listen to it a few times. I find I enjoy the music and end up purchasing a CD.
As a matter of fact I was in HMV 3 days ago and looked at a 2 CD set from the UK, I liked a few of the artists but was unfamiliar with most of them. I have since aquired MP3s from some of the artists and enjoyed them. I plan to go back to HMV today after work and buy the CDs. Thats $50 I otherwise wouldn't have spent.
These people are going to have to get it through their head that no mater how much they pay radio stations (and they do) I WILL NOT buy a Britney Spears CD.
I don't mean to pick on her specifically but its' an a good example of the type stuff they play on the radio. Is it good marketing if they don't play anything on most Top 40 stations that a CD junky such as myself would ever purchase?
One other, somewhat off-topic point.
Just how am I supposed to take all this whining from the RIAA when its' their members that enable me to pirate music.
I can download a SONY Music artist's songs and play them on my SONY MP3 player.
Or I could borrow a SONY Music artist's cd from my buddy, chuck it in my SONY CD-ROM, and copy it onto a SONY CD blank using my SONY CD-R. Keep in mind I could be using my SONY Viao to do this.
What a joke. You don't want me to do it, but if I do, you'll do your best to make sure I use your hardware to do it?
Right.
Close Jon, but not on the money
on
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I have been up to my neck in Y2K cruft for 2 or 3 years now. I had hoped it was over but as usual the general public didn't get the point.
This wasn't some amazing evil problem, identify the issue and fix it. This is what IT people (should) do. Nobody listened at first, I don't know how many people I talked to that have been voicing concerns about this for 5 years but were blown off by management types. Then CNN started mentioning it on the hour every hour for the last year. (I am not by any means singling out CNN, all the media outlets were equally annoying) All of a sudden everybody was pitching a fit.
What followed was at best disgusting. Consultants selling themselves at ridiculous rates while preaching inevitable destruction. Y2K projects in every corporation staffed by people the main IT groups had no use for. I actually had to threaten the life of some little cretin to get him away from one of my HP/UX boxes that he was going to install the Win95 "update" on. He kept telling me he was an MCSE so he knew what he was doing, it was scary. I don't even like to think what would have happened if I hadn't been there when he stumbled in the door, high on his own ignorance.
For a year I couldn't go for a pint with my friends without some jackass asking me if he should stock up on water and what to do about his VCR. I couldn't watch TV because I was starting to get physically sick when the local news started pestering some poor guy at Ford to find out if everyone's cars were going to suddenly melt.
The sad part of it is this, I am glad the media got a hold of this and made a stink. I am glad that a bunch of slimy consultants are now sitting on their private beaches in the Bahamas. If the hype mobile hadn't hit full swing NOTHING would have been done and all sorts of silly things would have happened.
I can't believe it takes this kind of mass hysteria just to accomplish what all of us geek types new was going to happen and knew how to fix. This is the real question you should look at Mr. Katz. Why does it takes this kind of revolting mess to get everyone to listen to us?
This whole Real Networks thing bothers the hell out of me. I really don't like what they're doing but to be honest I'm not really worried about it.
I looked long and hard and frankly the amount of information they could get off of my machine is minimal. They could get my name, my address and maybe my phone number.
What exactly are they going to do with this? Sell it to other companies? Who cares?
No, I don't like spam. I get all sorts of crap, but its' more of a problem with my regular old mail than it is with my e-mail. I haven't subscribed to a magazine in years just because of this.
If you have information you don't want someone to have access to, don't put it in a place they can get it. I have a cable modem, I'm always connected, so that machine is a public node as far as I'm concerned. I make a point of keeping anything I consider sensitive (don't want people knowing how boring I am) off of that machine. This is the same reason most really sensitive military computers are supposed to be isolated from the public network.
As far a Real Networks goes, this is just one more reason not to install their bloated, crappy software. Yippee!
I had the "tech" from my local cable company come and "help" me setup my machine for the cable modem on Monday.
I was very excited to finally join the broadband age, and then I started looking at this @home crap.
The content provided by @home is useless.
I tried to setup e-mail accounts for me, my brother and my mom. It took at least 10 minutes per address to find a username that wasn't totally out to lunch (hotmail all over again).
Even if the deal were to go through as the article explains I don't think it would be long before AOL starts getting their hooks in somehow. Not that I use the content on @home but I'm sure it would get even more annoying. I don't even want to think what would happen if AOL started imposing their content rules.
The potential for this deal is not dangerous because of the immediate effects. It would however, set a precedent for companies like AOL to get involved in being a broadband services provider. Just wait, the AOL channel cometh.
Some related thoughts on ADSL.
I live in Edmonton, Canada. (Yeah, the place with the mall) Until recently in Canada telephone companies were very strictly regulated, there were only 2 telcos in my province and they were both government owned. Now that they have been privatized a company called Telus owns both of them. They provide ADSL access but it sucks. They not only limit your transfer speeds (both up and down) but use their own IP masking and a very restrictive firewall. This wonderful service cost 15 bucks more a month than cable and its' actually RADSL so you get about 40% of the bandwidth. Joy.
Whatever way you go right now, you're gonna get it somehow
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand what is driving Intel to push out these new chips so damn fast. They are locked into a never ending pissing contest with AMD over who has the highest clocked chip. Nobody is going to win this fight, it will never end.
/.ers out there have seen software projects fail because of this?
Intel has a pretty good marketing department behind them, I can't figure out why the hell they don't try and spend some money educating the masses on what really pushes chip performance.
If they ever managed to get full scale developer buy in and good marketing behind some of their extensions to the instruction sets, like the new Pentium 4 stuff, they would really be able to put AMD into the dirt. They just have to wait and release new products when they are stable and have decent (read useful) software that takes advantage of them.
It looks to me like Intel has fallen into the maketroid trap. They are not building bad products, they are executing poorly beacuse they are stuck in a rushed development cycle. How may of you
Intel really needs an engineer back in the CEOs office, without Moore they are lost.
Here's an interesting question:
How much of this comes from kids going nuts over these toys and how much of this comes from adults wanting to show off to everyone else what wonderful parents they are.
From waht I've seen most of this hot toy hysteria is spread by parents, not kids.
The reason you are you get so much NETBIOS traffic has nothing to do with being scanned.
When you enable a Windows machine to share resources it needs to decide what machine on the network is the master browser (A machine that contains a table of all of the NETBIOS machines on the network).
When the machine starts it sends out some packets to decide who the master browser is. If nobody replies or if the present master browser is of a lower OS level than your machine, it will start an election to determine who the new master browser is.
I am an @home subscriber in Calgary (shaw @home). I get this stuff bouncing off of my firewall all the time.
Note: Please don't moderate as Funny. Yeah I know, it's rediculous but its' also how Windows OSs actually do this.
Umm... are you under the impression that KDE is a whole new idea or something?
KDE is a linux / XFree implimentation of the Common Desktop Environment. Look at a Solaris or HP/UX box. See the little drawer thingy? That's where they both got the idea. It is frankly very impressive to see what the KDE folks have done using ugly, nasty old CDE as a base. I'm sticking to Helix Gnome for now, but its' getting to be a difficult choice.
Good work is happening everywhere right now.
Okay, first off, I live in Canada. I was just about to lean back in my chair and make some nasty remarks about silly Americans and move on with my day.
I thought to myself, wait a minute these bastards are probably sooping on me too!
We are getting to the point where there are a number of multi national ISPs out here. IIRC my provider (@home) told the FBI to stick their little machine up their a$$ but who says its' going to stay that way. If the FBI did get a machine installed in @home's network I'm going to have some pretty big questions.
Who says that some of my traffic doesn't cross the border on an @home network before going out. With what little knowledge I have about large scale routing I have, I'm going to have to say its' not very likely, this would be waaay to expensive. I think @home has local UUNet connections in most cities, but it is possible that some of my traffic could go by a Carinvore in the future. Not Cool.
Are there not some sort of international rules about this? Who has jurisdiction over packets that are routed across borders?
Aaron
I can't help but wonder what is stopping these companies from filing civil suits against the defendants in these cases.
If you look at the Etoy vs Etoys case that played out last year you can draw some interesting (prehaps unfounded) conclusions. I saw a lot of prople here that were very skeptical about Etoys' timing, bringing the suit in the fall and then reaching an agreement right after christmas.
Having a District Court aprove an injunction before arbitration may very well become a tactic employed by plaintifs who know they have the ability to litigate above and beyond the financial resources of the defendants. I have yet to see anything in these arbitration schemes that will stop this.
Can anyone else provide more insight to this? I really hope I just overlooked something.
Or you could buy a vax and some terminals. You could proably get one pretty cheap from goverment surplus.
Seriously lots of companys are doing this, or at least doing some of it. Sun has had their little purple thingys (the name escapes me) for a while now. They are really neat, they use Citrix Metaframe to do exactly what you have described.
I don't think it is feasible to use a web browser for everything. I have yet to see an HTML based spreadsheet app, maybe you could make some Java Applet based office apps, if you didn't want them to be fast or work very well of course.
Good luck and keep dreaming!
I'd also like to add my thoughts to this series.
This is going to be a long one and I'm not a great writer, sorry.
I got stuck in a somewhat similar situation to t0qer when I was a kid but the nice helpful counselor types managed to reform me, not for the better.
When I was seven my father was killed in a car accident. This left my mother in a rough position because she had 2 kids to raise and no career outside of "housewife" so we moved into the city so she could go back to school.
I did fine until Junior High, I didn't really have a lot of friends and the ones I did have shared my all consuming intrest in computers and BBSs. We were fine, the other kids were not.
The abuse we took for not fitting in was amazing, it went far beond just being made fun of, we were physically attacked on a regular basis. The school authorities did recognize that something was wrong but assumed it was me that was causing the problem. Having lost my father so suddenly I must be a messed up little kid, right? I had to go through counseling sessions with a shrink once a week, all the guy ever wanted to talk about was my Dad, I couldn't convince him that the other kids were contributing to my problems at all. It was decided that what I needed was to be transfered to a boarding school for problem children, I started there in the 9th grade.
The school was run by Catholic priests and was a really different place. I had some absolutely awesome teachers and my grades went from good to being the top of my class. (the best in the school actually) However is wasn't all good. Like I said, this school was for "problem" children, it wasn't all kids like me, the bullies here made my other school look like a joke.
A ways into the year things started to change, I made friends with Jay, one of the "toughest" kids in the school and he did a lot to protect me. Around this time my family genes kicked in and I went from being the short fat kid to being much more muscular than most of the kids my age in about 6 months. I also decided that the way to get respect from the kids around me (In a very Alpha ape kind of way) was to beat the crap out of anyone I didn't like. We had a realy nasty pecking order going on in that school, I still don't understand it or why I fell into it so easy.
For High School I returned to the public school system. All the same jerks were still there and were still jerks. So I set out to prove myself through violence and was pretty successful. By the 11th grade I was one of the more popular kids in the school. I had lots of friends, girls liked me and I was on the football, rugby and baseball teams. I honestly thought that I had managed to turn everything around but I was very wrong. All my new friends and I did was smoke dope, drink when we were supposed to be in class and pick on the geeks. In November of my senior year I got hurt in a football game and beacause I couldn't play sports any more I decided to drop out.
By this point my mother and brother couldn't stand me any more so I left home and got a crappy little apartment so I could keep the party going. I had recived a pretty good chunk of money from my father's estate and I set out to pitch the entrire amount into drinking, drugs, girls and fast cars.
It was about a year into this that I got a call from my cousin Jon. Jon is a very gifted software engineer about 15 years older than me. We never spent a lot of time together when I was growing up but we just clicked on a lot of things. He was the guy that coached me through the mess I had kept making of my computer as a kid, hooked me up with a Portal account so I could read usenet and encouraged me keep learning.
Jon invited me to come and live with him in Montreal and see if he couldn't turn me into a coder. I took him up on it and spent a little over a year learning what a real hacker and a real human being is. He saved my life.
I'm 24 now and I make a more than decent living turning out Perl and Java stuff for a really cool company. People at work like and respect me because I'm good at what I do and I'm easy to get along with. I don't know what would have happend if Jon hadn't stepped in but it scares me to think about it. I can't absolutely say that my experiences in boarding school turned me into the little asshole I was but I really think that they did. What I don't understand about it is the fact that I got singled out as the problem. I was content to hang out with my geeky friends and argue about who had the better VGA card, I knew I wanted to go to McGill or Stanford or MIT and become an engineer. I think I was okay. By the time I had gone through their crap all I wanted to was get drunk, chase girls and get in trouble (there was lots of trouble by the way). This really reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 in a lot of ways, creepy.
I hope this helps some people understand why this is important. School officials need to be able to understand these situations and not do to some poor kid what they did to me.
I'm going to be fine and to be honest I wouldn't trade the experience and insight I've gained for anything but I fear other people might not be as lucky.
Aaron
I have an @home cable connection. Its' really the only available broadband in my city, from what I've been hearing, the local telco has made a real mess out of thier DSL service.
I have had an Open BSD box up as a firewall / router for about 2 months now. I didn't really put a lot of thought into my firewall rules because I wasn't especially concerned about someone comming after me. I just put together someing basic, killed everything I didn't need running and turned on ipmon.
Last week I decided to start messing with ipsec to see if I could set myself up a connection to work and I noticed I was just about out of friggin disk space. On a 1 gig drive!
I'm far from an expert on this stuff but near as I can figure I've been port scanned about 4 times a day the whole time the firewall has been up.
Time to learn more about firewall setup. Ain't life in 24.x.x.x great?
You're lucky. I could never member the dreams exactly but I do know I had a dream about being chased by a cyber demon a couple of times.
I used to wake up scared out of my wits.
I played way too much of that game.
Aaron
Well I don't have any data to back this up but IMHO, Win2k will be faster on a Multi Proc X86 type machine for spitting up static pages. It threads better. Period.
Now before y'all moderate me down for saying good things about the evil ones, there a few things you will want to bring to your bosses attention.
1. Are you only serving static pages?
2. Kernel 2.4 will probably improve this considerably
3. You would proably be better off using a cluster of cheaper 1U(~$3000) machines and a load balancer(running linux)
4. IIS crashes if you look at it funny
5. If you're going to spend 50 grand or so anyways, check that IIS server versus an Ultra Enterprise 250r. No contest.
You could also ask your boss about just what he expects Microsoft Partners(tm) to say in their adds. I would have been shocked if they claimed linux to be better at anything, probably violate's the contract.
Aaron
As an example, I have played the demo for Soldier Of Fortune. I would not let my kids play this game until they were of a certain age, say 14. This is a very violent game.
Of course having said that, I don't think this is such a big deal. No store is being forced to enforce this raiting system.
I don't really think raitings work either. I find it very silly that a young child can sit in front if the TV on Saturday afternoon and watch Bruce Willis kill 173 terrorists per hour but can't hear him tell them to fsck off, or see a stray boobie.
I guess the answer is that we have to be careful that little Johnie doesn't see anything we don't want him to do when he grows up. What does little Johnie learn from this? "Boobies and saying fsck are bad, killing people with machine guns is okay". Huh?
Oh sorry, watching people get killed on TV is OK, pretending to kill people in video games is bad.
does this strike anyone else as silly?
A simple plug adapter for the car so Mom and Dad can tune out the kids in the back of the mini-van.
I would love to have one of these things for flying, most airlines provide AC plugs for laptops now.
Cool
A .sig should reflect you personality. Mine is blank....
It strikes me as quite funny that the record companies haven't figured out what Napster does for them.
Personally I have purchased more CDs in the past year than ever before. I think a large part of it is the exposure I get to new artists by being able chuck a couple of MP3s in my playlist and listen to it a few times. I find I enjoy the music and end up purchasing a CD.
As a matter of fact I was in HMV 3 days ago and looked at a 2 CD set from the UK, I liked a few of the artists but was unfamiliar with most of them. I have since aquired MP3s from some of the artists and enjoyed them. I plan to go back to HMV today after work and buy the CDs. Thats $50 I otherwise wouldn't have spent.
These people are going to have to get it through their head that no mater how much they pay radio stations (and they do) I WILL NOT buy a Britney Spears CD.
I don't mean to pick on her specifically but its' an a good example of the type stuff they play on the radio. Is it good marketing if they don't play anything on most Top 40 stations that a CD junky such as myself would ever purchase?
One other, somewhat off-topic point.
Just how am I supposed to take all this whining from the RIAA when its' their members that enable me to pirate music.
I can download a SONY Music artist's songs and play them on my SONY MP3 player.
Or I could borrow a SONY Music artist's cd from my buddy, chuck it in my SONY CD-ROM, and copy it onto a SONY CD blank using my SONY CD-R. Keep in mind I could be using my SONY Viao to do this.
What a joke. You don't want me to do it, but if I do, you'll do your best to make sure I use your hardware to do it?
Right.
I have been up to my neck in Y2K cruft for 2 or 3 years now. I had hoped it was over but as usual the general public didn't get the point.
This wasn't some amazing evil problem, identify the issue and fix it. This is what IT people (should) do. Nobody listened at first, I don't know how many people I talked to that have been voicing concerns about this for 5 years but were blown off by management types. Then CNN started mentioning it on the hour every hour for the last year. (I am not by any means singling out CNN, all the media outlets were equally annoying) All of a sudden everybody was pitching a fit.
What followed was at best disgusting. Consultants selling themselves at ridiculous rates while preaching inevitable destruction. Y2K projects in every corporation staffed by people the main IT groups had no use for. I actually had to threaten the life of some little cretin to get him away from one of my HP/UX boxes that he was going to install the Win95 "update" on. He kept telling me he was an MCSE so he knew what he was doing, it was scary. I don't even like to think what would have happened if I hadn't been there when he stumbled in the door, high on his own ignorance.
For a year I couldn't go for a pint with my friends without some jackass asking me if he should stock up on water and what to do about his VCR. I couldn't watch TV because I was starting to get physically sick when the local news started pestering some poor guy at Ford to find out if everyone's cars were going to suddenly melt.
The sad part of it is this, I am glad the media got a hold of this and made a stink. I am glad that a bunch of slimy consultants are now sitting on their private beaches in the Bahamas. If the hype mobile hadn't hit full swing NOTHING would have been done and all sorts of silly things would have happened.
I can't believe it takes this kind of mass hysteria just to accomplish what all of us geek types new was going to happen and knew how to fix. This is the real question you should look at Mr. Katz. Why does it takes this kind of revolting mess to get everyone to listen to us?
This whole Real Networks thing bothers the hell out of me. I really don't like what they're doing but to be honest I'm not really worried about it.
I looked long and hard and frankly the amount of information they could get off of my machine is minimal. They could get my name, my address and maybe my phone number.
What exactly are they going to do with this? Sell it to other companies? Who cares?
No, I don't like spam. I get all sorts of crap, but its' more of a problem with my regular old mail than it is with my e-mail. I haven't subscribed to a magazine in years just because of this.
If you have information you don't want someone to have access to, don't put it in a place they can get it. I have a cable modem, I'm always connected, so that machine is a public node as far as I'm concerned. I make a point of keeping anything I consider sensitive (don't want people knowing how boring I am) off of that machine. This is the same reason most really sensitive military computers are supposed to be isolated from the public network.
As far a Real Networks goes, this is just one more reason not to install their bloated, crappy software. Yippee!
I had the "tech" from my local cable company come and "help" me setup my machine for the cable modem on Monday.
I was very excited to finally join the broadband age, and then I started looking at this @home crap.
The content provided by @home is useless.
I tried to setup e-mail accounts for me, my brother and my mom. It took at least 10 minutes per address to find a username that wasn't totally out to lunch (hotmail all over again).
Even if the deal were to go through as the article explains I don't think it would be long before AOL starts getting their hooks in somehow. Not that I use the content on @home but I'm sure it would get even more annoying. I don't even want to think what would happen if AOL started imposing their content rules.
The potential for this deal is not dangerous because of the immediate effects. It would however, set a precedent for companies like AOL to get involved in being a broadband services provider. Just wait, the AOL channel cometh.
Some related thoughts on ADSL.
I live in Edmonton, Canada. (Yeah, the place with the mall) Until recently in Canada telephone companies were very strictly regulated, there were only 2 telcos in my province and they were both government owned. Now that they have been privatized a company called Telus owns both of them. They provide ADSL access but it sucks. They not only limit your transfer speeds (both up and down) but use their own IP masking and a very restrictive firewall. This wonderful service cost 15 bucks more a month than cable and its' actually RADSL so you get about 40% of the bandwidth. Joy.
Whatever way you go right now, you're gonna get it somehow