Ok, this one fellow showed us the text the cracker had on the site, then some strange agenda pushing moderators (there are a few out there) mark it all over the board. So another person explains that it was from the original page, and another agenda pushing moderator takes him down.
If you don't MetaModerate, please do and STOP these agenda pushing moderators.
I had to change one of the IPs of my DNS server. It took 3 weeks for the change to finally take hold. During that time, sending aproximately 3 change form mails a day, it changed between the first placeholder IP, the original IP, and other IP -- never settling on the proper one. They are totally incompitent.
McLanahan wanted to build a Web business around the races.com domain name, and shelled out thousands of dollars to acquire it.
So first the poor fellow gave money to a domain squatter (really, don't do that). Then he turned around, transfered it, and noticed it was now in possesion of another squatter. How many times will this happen? How many squatters are out there? How many are in cahoots with NSI? (Speculation) Since NSI is losing its monopoly, it seems to have been more tollerant of people buying names for no reason, and keeping them with nothing on them. Can't the courts step in? ---
Ok, I've read the posts (and some email) regarding the design. The site does mallform a bit at 640x480, and it does have a "bad' colour scheme (hehe:-)). I'm going through an overhaul of the site right now. The "new" layout (not finished design) is located at www.thock.com/thock/. It's a framed mainpage. This solves the problems of 640x480, allows me to have a PHTML nav bar top, and to have the "body" area filled with the body and the toc associated with the body. This means that I can also give "simple" body pages to clients if they don't support frames (basically losing the fanicer layout and extras that aren't essential to the site). This should provide a good balance for Lynx, IE, Netscape, etc, users.
Suggestions for a new colour scheme are welcomed. I'll also be tweaking the "new" layout to incorporate everyone's suggestions. ---
IMHO, it's not just Fox that are at fault here, it's commerical "web design" in general. Ever notice how places like PCWeek, Altavista, mp3.com, and many -- many -- others use pages replete with br and such to force the 640x480 look on people? Most of the time it's not even centred, forcing me to stare at the left 30% of my monitor.
There is no excuse why this should be. Give me my content, give it to me nicely, and, damnit, let me view it in my browser window at proper scaling. There was an artcle on some site about Slashdot long ago. I had to use Opera to magnify the page view 300% for it to show the "content" at a decent size in my 1024x768 desktop. When I started using Linux exclusively (with Windows as a glorfied Nintendo), the problem was exacerbated by the simple fact that the pages designed to look great at 640x480 also assumed a bunch of fonts (which I did later setup, thanks to the ttf font server in the Slackware contrib dir).
Why bother to take the time, spend lots of your company moola, only to come up with a hard-coded, useless, junky site?
Flash? Great -- what's the point? Slow downloads suck, and I'm on a cable modem! The only site I've seen to use Flash in a compelling way (in terms of "mainstream" sites), is After Y2K. With Cascading Style Sheets, it is trivial to implement really nice looking sites that scale well. Netscape, Opera, and (gahck) IE support CSS very well, as does Mozilla. With Lynx, it's a non-issue;-)
If anyone doesn't understand what I mean, go look at my webserver (Thock.com) for an example of how I write my HTML (which is all hand written, and generally tested well). I'll also welcome any comments anyone has on my HTML, I am writing an HTML primer, and related, documents for the webserver. ---
AOL has control of two major "standards" today. AIM (I still don't know why you'd use it), and ICQ. AOL, wanting its own monopoly, has gone and tweaked both protocols all they could. However, the ICQ protocol is still open because of the older v3 and v4 connection clients. However, I've noticed recently that Licq and ICQ 98 (which don't have the latest weird byte-swapping techniques that ICQ 99b uses) seem to have trouble connecting to the network.
Would it be so hard to take the most flexible protocl (ICQ v5), change it around a bit (ie: make it easier to impliment), and produce that as a standard? I'd certainly like to see that RFC. Then we can be free to choose our own clients, ala choice for browsers (well, none for MS users, see "Millenium" installing MSN Messenger by default).
Well, I'm a Slackware fan, and all my RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE/etc experience comes from others (although I've looked through most of them at some point or another on a technical basis).
RedHat has mostly included things more for glitz, IMHO, like Gnome before Gnome properly stabilized. Mandrake has just seemed like a more polished RedHat with some value added components (like a nice gui packagemanager). SuSE is what, 6 CDs?:-) Debian is the only distro that comes close in terms of size.
I think it'd be cool if I could properly build a family tree of all the Linux distros. Does anyone know if Caldera Linux is based on anything? I know SuSE has Slackware roots, and Corel Debian roots. Mandrake, of course, has RedHat as a parent (;-). Any info would be appreciated.
Well, I tried Debian here. Debian was an interesting experience after my Slackware youth. Needless to say, I gave up and went back to Slackware. Debian's install process is convoluted, in my opinion. Would it be so hard to use a mini-distro with only a few select libs to bootstrap Debian packages onto a formatted partition, ala Slackware?
As for the info. 2.0.36!? Dear lord, when was the last time the stable branch had a release!? Slackware 3.4 or 3.6 uses a comparably old set of kernel and libs.
Perhaps a stricter release shedule, ala OpenBSD, would be good. Heck, even good ol' Slackware has 2.2. & glibc2, so they must be stable:-) ---
Did anyone else notice how they mixed up what versions of distributions they were reviewing?
Here is their review of Slackware [4.0|7.0]. It's hard to tell which they meant, until you see it came with 2.2.13 (7.0).
They also claimed that Slackware 7.0 didn't come with the video card setup by default. This is a bald lie. It's setup to use the Vesa framebuffer by default. As for the install routine, if you're not using expert install (like I do), you can be queried about each of the (relatively few) packages you want to install. Just choose the disk series you want (networking? X? KDE? etc), and then choose yes or no based on the detailed description of each package that comes up.
The only problem I've found with the Slackware install is that going to current step - 1 is very hard. You have to restart and do most of it over:-/
They take another companys broadcast, and rebroadcasts without their prior permission. In my book, that is a bad thing.
If I tape a bunch of shows, then take them with me and a scout troop that are camping -- is that rebroadcasting w/o prior permission? What about a tower that strengthens or repeats the signal to a local rural area? Once you start putting stuff out into the public (ie: broadcasting the waves, putting up posters, etc), you have to accept the fact that people can come along and take a copy. It's in the public domain.
Less users watch the original broadcasters, and some watch the new one. The originals loses advertisement money, and the rebroadcaster earns them -- by theft.
Uh, what?! Are you familiar at all with how television works? It's a completely passive medium! Advertiser pays Johnny Network to put advertisements about some product in with some program. As long as the adds reach eyes, the advertiser will continue to pay Johhnny Network. It doesn't matter if Johhny Network personally hands out copies of the tapes, broadcasts it, or subcontracts the rebroadcasting to other people. ABC, et all, are still getting mega-dollars for commercial during sporting events, etc, and iCraveTV is not getting on red cent from them. All their profits come from putting ads around the TV signal, thus recouping their rebroadcasting costs.
Therefore I think iCrave should be severly spanked by the canadian law system:-)
Canadian laws support them. TV signals are very like GPLed programs -- I'm allowed to tape them, view them privately, maybe show proper clips of them. I'm also allowed to send them, unmodified, through whatever medium I wish -- so long as I have met the FCC requirements (which are NULL in the case of the internet). iCraveTV sends out unmodified signals, so I don't see a legal problem at all. I'm also horrified at how against this company people seem. ---
Who on earth said anything about porting? I've long been hacking with little asm bootsector OSes and things on older computers. A 100% ASM kernel with simplistic networking is great for doing embeded work, and work with older computers that are too slow running portable kernels:-) ---
So lets get this straight, someone doesn't feel the need to learn computers, or is put off by them, is by default lazy?
No! He said (and the subject still says): it's only easy to do something new if you like to learn. If you're someone who doesn't know how to drive, but wants to -- is it good if you are allowed to just sit down in a bumper car and ride around? Sure. How about a real car? Hmmm. Perhaps that person should take some time to learn about the dangers and benefits of a real car. But look, this person doesn't want to learn! "My day is hectic enough without all this learning phoey!"
could the same thing be said of yourself if you don't want to learn an interest of theirs?
You've missed the point again. It's like wanting to paint, but not wanting to prepare for it by learning something like "what is a brush" when you don't already know what one is. "I just want to paint, what is with all this technical jargon -- brushes, colours, etc!" There are people who want to do everything, but don't want to learn or prepare for it. These same people love "When buildings fall down" and their ilk on Fox.
If you want to use a computer, learn what a keyboard, mouse, monitor, is. Learn what a filesystem is. Learn about viruses, data, programs, and how to be aware of what your computer is doing. From that point, anyone should be able to use a computer effectively. However, people don't do that. They click "default" and let others do that horrible thinking. I mean, clicking "custom" would probably require reading and learning what the program they're installing will have as components. Horrors! ---
But no, we're complacent and lazy, and we get pissed off when people can't understand how to use the tools we make. We blame the users for not knowing as much as we do. That's bullshit.
Wrong. I've dealt with people. Thanks to our good friend, the Bell curve, we can see that 50% of people are less than 65% capable of handling a subject when they are educated and drilled on it. RTFM is not something they're willing or capable of doing. If you don't believe that statement, here's a real world example (annecdotal):
I wrote a client for Win32 (basically a port of a Unix client with a tray icon wrapper code for an easy to use UI) to handle updating ml.org, and a couple of other DynDNS websites. It was written because I used Windows on a computer I owned, and had an account with ml.org. The existing clients they pointed to didn't have the features I wanted, so I wrote mine. It was just a client, all the registrations and related would have been handled by ml.org or whatever DynDNS service they wanted. I included a little "feedback" menu option that would send email to me, in case they found a bug, or wanted to compliment me.
Of the few emails I received via feedback (ml.org collapsed in on itself two weeks after I released it), no less than half were "i luv this prog. u rock. my email is joestupid@cantspell.com, my id I chose was 31337rulers, and my pwd was passwrd. wen will my 31337d00ds.dyn.ml.org site be up w00t" I even received the "Template" email a few times -- basically someone chose feedback, looked at the default things like "Enter email address here," and hit send instead of hitting cancel. Both buttons were right next to each other, too.
People seem to be stuck in this whole "get things done quickly so I can get to doing other things quickly" mindset, and so don't take time to think things through, look around and observe things, or even bother to try to be intelligent. Blaming the programmer for a program that a user can't be bothered to learn, is like blaming a manufacturer of a stick-shifted car model because people can't handle manual transmission.
No, rank amateurs will *not* be able to write an Amazon.com clone. That's a fact of life. But most people just want their email, browser, word processor, and instant messager.
But a computer is not an appliance. You can let a person get away with driving a car around with little understanding of it because it only does one thing: move when operated. It's an appliance with a flowchart that goes through about 8 choices, tops. Even with that level of simplicity, people can still learn a lot more about their car if they bother to observe and be aware of what it going on. With a computer, it's even more important to have some basic understanding available.
In a plane, you have to know if a wind is going to put your plane off its target, otherwise you could be lost without fuel. Operating a computer, if you have just run an attachment without good reason, you could have just given away private data, and destroyed all your precious settings and software. If you don't believe me, look at VCRs. They're very easy to use, but most have 12:00 blink-tagged on the front of them:-) ---
Siggy, it seems the people at alternic.org have beaten us to it:-)
So I'd like to put forward that we should all support the alternic project by including their root servers in our lists, etc.
Good idea, or not?
(Note WRT the Debian thing: it's funny how you didn't notice he's the project leader. When I last checked, he'd had 25 moderator points used on him -- 13 up, 12 down;-) ---
We'd need a chain of 24/7 DNS servers (perhaps the slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, etc, servers). Anyone with a good static IP and Linux should be able to contributed. How will we setup GTLDs? The ".net,.org,.com -- pick one" thing is a bit limited as a global namespace. Once we have our alternate backbone setup, we can use dig and only do business with those who have registered in our database (free if you can prove why you should have the domain, with maybe a 10$ US maintenace fee every few years for server hardware).
I mean, we'd be cheaper than the Internic, and we've certainly got enough hardware between us to do it. Heck, we could even add a gateway feature to let through domains not found in our DNS servers come from an internic area (thus we only get what we don't have, and don't have to worry about the internic people trying to overlap our domains).
To: abuse@etoys.com CC: postmaster@etoys.com CC: manager@etoys.com CC: root@etoys.com
How could you go and try and sue a company that had their name before you even existed? They have the legal right, not you. How can you go and squash the rights of other people? I will personally guarantee you that I will never, ever shop at etoys.com, and that I will inform all my friends, relatives, and any other people I speak with, to not shop at your site. If you were afraid some people would misspell your domain name, and not get to the intended site, you should have worked out a linking policy with etoy.com, just like how diamondmm.com and diamond.com have a linking policy. You disgust me. ---
When you went to some newbie webpage with the tacky "Always under construction" animated gif, scrolling status area javascript, and various HTML errors, and you had the "this site uses something called Comet Cursor as silly eye candy -- click to download" popup come up... how many of you actually got the damned thing?
There's not Linux version, so only people who are on Win9x or Mac were affected. Under Win9x, I've never seen one of these popups in the browser I use (Opera), although I get them in Linux (using Netscape). But even not having been directly affected by this, it makes you wonder. What exactly was that flash of the modem/NIC tx/rx lights for? Was it some closed-source app that is designed to work with an internet connection (IE 5.0, Real Player, Comet Cursor, etc) that can just go ahead and give away privacy information?
Don't use closed source if possible. If you have to, limit it, and make sure you have a firewall that blocks things going in and things going out.
.. of this call I made to my local bank. They sent me cheques with "19___" in the date area. As a form of protest, and to poke fun at them, I called them up to complain of "non-y2k compliant cheques."
The funniest bit is when I complain, "but what if I write a check in the year 2000, it will say it's written in 1900!" The lady on staff does not at all contradict me -- she even checks with her boss! It's funny as hell. I'll have to figure out how to get it off of my dictaphone (r), and presented in mp3 format on my webpage some day:-) ---
but in reality you can thank your lucky stars there isn't anymore fluorine on Earth than what we have now. It kills basically whatever biological organism it comes in contact with.
Which is why they put it in the water supply, right?
Johnny's teeth are whiter now. Let's all thank Flouride!
Why don't they just put lead oxide in toothpaste as a similar whitner? We do drink the water... ---
It's a multiplier locked Pentium w/ MMX. The only way to OC it is to increase the bus speed. Right now, it's at 3x75Mhz (225Mhz). This is stable with the SDRAM DIMM I have (lots of kernel recompiling and checking for sig11:-).
I also run my K6-2 with a 75Mhz system bus and a 3.5 clock multiplier because my mobo doesn't natively support the 300Mhz speed the chip could do (and I'm not going to pus the mobo to 83Mhz bus speed). So it's a 262.5Mhz chip:-) ---
It's a multiplier locked Pentium w/ MMX. The only way to OC it is to increase the bus speed. Right now, it's at 3x75Mhz (225Mhz). This is stable with the SDRAM DIMM I have (lots of kernel recompiling and checking for sig11:-).
I also run my K6-2 with a 75Mhz system bus and a 3.5 clock multiplier because my mobo doesn't natively support the 300Mhz speed the chip could do (and I'm not going to pus the mobo to 83Mhz bus speed). So it's a 262.5Mhz chip:-) ---
Slashdot Mirror
HELLO!
Ok, this one fellow showed us the text the cracker had on the site, then some strange agenda pushing moderators (there are a few out there) mark it all over the board. So another person explains that it was from the original page, and another agenda pushing moderator takes him down.
If you don't MetaModerate, please do and STOP these agenda pushing moderators.
This is offtopic, but it is important.
---
The NSI DNS system is, in a word, useless.
I had to change one of the IPs of my DNS server. It took 3 weeks for the change to finally take hold. During that time, sending aproximately 3 change form mails a day, it changed between the first placeholder IP, the original IP, and other IP -- never settling on the proper one. They are totally incompitent.
McLanahan wanted to build a Web business around the races.com domain name, and shelled out thousands of dollars to acquire it.
So first the poor fellow gave money to a domain squatter (really, don't do that). Then he turned around, transfered it, and noticed it was now in possesion of another squatter. How many times will this happen? How many squatters are out there? How many are in cahoots with NSI? (Speculation) Since NSI is losing its monopoly, it seems to have been more tollerant of people buying names for no reason, and keeping them with nothing on them. Can't the courts step in?
---
Ok, I've read the posts (and some email) regarding the design. The site does mallform a bit at 640x480, and it does have a "bad' colour scheme (hehe :-)). I'm going through an overhaul of the site right now. The "new" layout (not finished design) is located at www.thock.com/thock/. It's a framed mainpage. This solves the problems of 640x480, allows me to have a PHTML nav bar top, and to have the "body" area filled with the body and the toc associated with the body. This means that I can also give "simple" body pages to clients if they don't support frames (basically losing the fanicer layout and extras that aren't essential to the site). This should provide a good balance for Lynx, IE, Netscape, etc, users.
Suggestions for a new colour scheme are welcomed. I'll also be tweaking the "new" layout to incorporate everyone's suggestions.
---
IMHO, it's not just Fox that are at fault here, it's commerical "web design" in general. Ever notice how places like PCWeek, Altavista, mp3.com, and many -- many -- others use pages replete with br and such to force the 640x480 look on people? Most of the time it's not even centred, forcing me to stare at the left 30% of my monitor.
;-)
There is no excuse why this should be. Give me my content, give it to me nicely, and, damnit, let me view it in my browser window at proper scaling. There was an artcle on some site about Slashdot long ago. I had to use Opera to magnify the page view 300% for it to show the "content" at a decent size in my 1024x768 desktop. When I started using Linux exclusively (with Windows as a glorfied Nintendo), the problem was exacerbated by the simple fact that the pages designed to look great at 640x480 also assumed a bunch of fonts (which I did later setup, thanks to the ttf font server in the Slackware contrib dir).
Why bother to take the time, spend lots of your company moola, only to come up with a hard-coded, useless, junky site?
Flash? Great -- what's the point? Slow downloads suck, and I'm on a cable modem! The only site I've seen to use Flash in a compelling way (in terms of "mainstream" sites), is After Y2K. With Cascading Style Sheets, it is trivial to implement really nice looking sites that scale well. Netscape, Opera, and (gahck) IE support CSS very well, as does Mozilla. With Lynx, it's a non-issue
If anyone doesn't understand what I mean, go look at my webserver (Thock.com) for an example of how I write my HTML (which is all hand written, and generally tested well). I'll also welcome any comments anyone has on my HTML, I am writing an HTML primer, and related, documents for the webserver.
---
AOL has control of two major "standards" today. AIM (I still don't know why you'd use it), and ICQ. AOL, wanting its own monopoly, has gone and tweaked both protocols all they could. However, the ICQ protocol is still open because of the older v3 and v4 connection clients. However, I've noticed recently that Licq and ICQ 98 (which don't have the latest weird byte-swapping techniques that ICQ 99b uses) seem to have trouble connecting to the network.
Would it be so hard to take the most flexible protocl (ICQ v5), change it around a bit (ie: make it easier to impliment), and produce that as a standard? I'd certainly like to see that RFC. Then we can be free to choose our own clients, ala choice for browsers (well, none for MS users, see "Millenium" installing MSN Messenger by default).
Anyone willing to write an RFC about this?
---
Well, I'm a Slackware fan, and all my RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE/etc experience comes from others (although I've looked through most of them at some point or another on a technical basis).
:-) Debian is the only distro that comes close in terms of size.
RedHat has mostly included things more for glitz, IMHO, like Gnome before Gnome properly stabilized. Mandrake has just seemed like a more polished RedHat with some value added components (like a nice gui packagemanager). SuSE is what, 6 CDs?
I think it'd be cool if I could properly build a family tree of all the Linux distros. Does anyone know if Caldera Linux is based on anything? I know SuSE has Slackware roots, and Corel Debian roots. Mandrake, of course, has RedHat as a parent (;-). Any info would be appreciated.
---
Caldera OpenLinux 2.3: "If it's Tetris-like or business-like, we put it in."
:-)
Red Hat Linux 6.1 Deluxe: "If it's eyecandy, we put it in."
Corel Linux: "If it's for adults only, we put it in."
Debian GNU/Linux 2.1r2: "If it's free as in freedom, we put it in."
Linux Mandrake PowerPack 6.1: "If it's in Redhat, we put it in."
Slackware Linux 7.0: "If it's stable, we put it in."
SuSE Linux 6.2: "If it exists, we put it in."
Thanks for your time
---
Well, I tried Debian here. Debian was an interesting experience after my Slackware youth. Needless to say, I gave up and went back to Slackware. Debian's install process is convoluted, in my opinion. Would it be so hard to use a mini-distro with only a few select libs to bootstrap Debian packages onto a formatted partition, ala Slackware?
:-)
As for the info. 2.0.36!? Dear lord, when was the last time the stable branch had a release!? Slackware 3.4 or 3.6 uses a comparably old set of kernel and libs.
Perhaps a stricter release shedule, ala OpenBSD, would be good. Heck, even good ol' Slackware has 2.2. & glibc2, so they must be stable
---
Did anyone else notice how they mixed up what versions of distributions they were reviewing?
:-/
:-)
Here is their review of Slackware [4.0|7.0]. It's hard to tell which they meant, until you see it came with 2.2.13 (7.0).
They also claimed that Slackware 7.0 didn't come with the video card setup by default. This is a bald lie. It's setup to use the Vesa framebuffer by default. As for the install routine, if you're not using expert install (like I do), you can be queried about each of the (relatively few) packages you want to install. Just choose the disk series you want (networking? X? KDE? etc), and then choose yes or no based on the detailed description of each package that comes up.
The only problem I've found with the Slackware install is that going to current step - 1 is very hard. You have to restart and do most of it over
But then -- you only install once
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They take another companys broadcast, and rebroadcasts without their prior permission. In my book, that is a bad thing.
:-)
If I tape a bunch of shows, then take them with me and a scout troop that are camping -- is that rebroadcasting w/o prior permission? What about a tower that strengthens or repeats the signal to a local rural area? Once you start putting stuff out into the public (ie: broadcasting the waves, putting up posters, etc), you have to accept the fact that people can come along and take a copy. It's in the public domain.
Less users watch the original broadcasters, and some watch the new one. The originals loses advertisement money, and the rebroadcaster earns them -- by theft.
Uh, what?! Are you familiar at all with how television works? It's a completely passive medium! Advertiser pays Johnny Network to put advertisements about some product in with some program. As long as the adds reach eyes, the advertiser will continue to pay Johhnny Network. It doesn't matter if Johhny Network personally hands out copies of the tapes, broadcasts it, or subcontracts the rebroadcasting to other people. ABC, et all, are still getting mega-dollars for commercial during sporting events, etc, and iCraveTV is not getting on red cent from them. All their profits come from putting ads around the TV signal, thus recouping their rebroadcasting costs.
Therefore I think iCrave should be severly spanked by the canadian law system
Canadian laws support them. TV signals are very like GPLed programs -- I'm allowed to tape them, view them privately, maybe show proper clips of them. I'm also allowed to send them, unmodified, through whatever medium I wish -- so long as I have met the FCC requirements (which are NULL in the case of the internet). iCraveTV sends out unmodified signals, so I don't see a legal problem at all. I'm also horrified at how against this company people seem.
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The MBAs out there probably read that and said, "there, but for the grace of Cobol, go I"
:-)
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Who on earth said anything about porting? I've long been hacking with little asm bootsector OSes and things on older computers. A 100% ASM kernel with simplistic networking is great for doing embeded work, and work with older computers that are too slow running portable kernels :-)
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So lets get this straight, someone doesn't feel the need to learn computers, or is put off by them, is by default lazy?
No! He said (and the subject still says): it's only easy to do something new if you like to learn. If you're someone who doesn't know how to drive, but wants to -- is it good if you are allowed to just sit down in a bumper car and ride around? Sure. How about a real car? Hmmm. Perhaps that person should take some time to learn about the dangers and benefits of a real car. But look, this person doesn't want to learn! "My day is hectic enough without all this learning phoey!"
could the same thing be said of yourself if you don't want to learn an interest of theirs?
You've missed the point again. It's like wanting to paint, but not wanting to prepare for it by learning something like "what is a brush" when you don't already know what one is. "I just want to paint, what is with all this technical jargon -- brushes, colours, etc!" There are people who want to do everything, but don't want to learn or prepare for it. These same people love "When buildings fall down" and their ilk on Fox.
If you want to use a computer, learn what a keyboard, mouse, monitor, is. Learn what a filesystem is. Learn about viruses, data, programs, and how to be aware of what your computer is doing. From that point, anyone should be able to use a computer effectively. However, people don't do that. They click "default" and let others do that horrible thinking. I mean, clicking "custom" would probably require reading and learning what the program they're installing will have as components. Horrors!
---
But no, we're complacent and lazy, and we get pissed off when people can't understand how to use the tools we make. We blame the users for not knowing as much as we do. That's bullshit.
:-)
Wrong. I've dealt with people. Thanks to our good friend, the Bell curve, we can see that 50% of people are less than 65% capable of handling a subject when they are educated and drilled on it. RTFM is not something they're willing or capable of doing. If you don't believe that statement, here's a real world example (annecdotal):
I wrote a client for Win32 (basically a port of a Unix client with a tray icon wrapper code for an easy to use UI) to handle updating ml.org, and a couple of other DynDNS websites. It was written because I used Windows on a computer I owned, and had an account with ml.org. The existing clients they pointed to didn't have the features I wanted, so I wrote mine. It was just a client, all the registrations and related would have been handled by ml.org or whatever DynDNS service they wanted. I included a little "feedback" menu option that would send email to me, in case they found a bug, or wanted to compliment me.
Of the few emails I received via feedback (ml.org collapsed in on itself two weeks after I released it), no less than half were "i luv this prog. u rock. my email is joestupid@cantspell.com, my id I chose was 31337rulers, and my pwd was passwrd. wen will my 31337d00ds.dyn.ml.org site be up w00t"
I even received the "Template" email a few times -- basically someone chose feedback, looked at the default things like "Enter email address here," and hit send instead of hitting cancel. Both buttons were right next to each other, too.
People seem to be stuck in this whole "get things done quickly so I can get to doing other things quickly" mindset, and so don't take time to think things through, look around and observe things, or even bother to try to be intelligent. Blaming the programmer for a program that a user can't be bothered to learn, is like blaming a manufacturer of a stick-shifted car model because people can't handle manual transmission.
No, rank amateurs will *not* be able to write an Amazon.com clone. That's a fact of life. But most people just want their email, browser, word processor, and instant messager.
But a computer is not an appliance. You can let a person get away with driving a car around with little understanding of it because it only does one thing: move when operated. It's an appliance with a flowchart that goes through about 8 choices, tops. Even with that level of simplicity, people can still learn a lot more about their car if they bother to observe and be aware of what it going on. With a computer, it's even more important to have some basic understanding available.
In a plane, you have to know if a wind is going to put your plane off its target, otherwise you could be lost without fuel. Operating a computer, if you have just run an attachment without good reason, you could have just given away private data, and destroyed all your precious settings and software. If you don't believe me, look at VCRs. They're very easy to use, but most have 12:00 blink-tagged on the front of them
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The name was also a hit among the NewCo rank and file. "It's funny, because 'Agilent' isn't even a real word," muses Redhill.
:-)
Neither is Itanium, Pentium, Athlon, etc. Names != words
Now let's play some word association based on what it sounds like:
Agilent
-- Flatulent
Pentium
-- Pentagram
Pentium Pro
-- Professional evil
Pentium ][
-- Crap v2.0
Celeron
-- Cheap vegetables
Pentium ]I[
-- 1984
Itanium
-- I think not
Athlon
-- Bicathlon
Crusoe
-- Coconuts
Inprise
-- Inbred
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Siggy, it seems the people at alternic.org have beaten us to it :-)
;-)
So I'd like to put forward that we should all support the alternic project by including their root servers in our lists, etc.
Good idea, or not?
(Note WRT the Debian thing: it's funny how you didn't notice he's the project leader. When I last checked, he'd had 25 moderator points used on him -- 13 up, 12 down
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It looks like a placeholder for some domain name prospector. Feh.
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Now we need information.
.org, .com -- pick one" thing is a bit limited as a global namespace. Once we have our alternate backbone setup, we can use dig and only do business with those who have registered in our database (free if you can prove why you should have the domain, with maybe a 10$ US maintenace fee every few years for server hardware).
We'd need a chain of 24/7 DNS servers (perhaps the slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, etc, servers). Anyone with a good static IP and Linux should be able to contributed. How will we setup GTLDs? The ".net,
I mean, we'd be cheaper than the Internic, and we've certainly got enough hardware between us to do it. Heck, we could even add a gateway feature to let through domains not found in our DNS servers come from an internic area (thus we only get what we don't have, and don't have to worry about the internic people trying to overlap our domains).
Am I the only one who thinks this could work?
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To: abuse@etoys.com
CC: postmaster@etoys.com
CC: manager@etoys.com
CC: root@etoys.com
How could you go and try and sue a company that had their name before you even existed? They have the legal right, not you. How can you go and squash the rights of other people? I will personally guarantee you that I will never, ever shop at etoys.com, and that I will inform all my friends, relatives, and any other people I speak with, to not shop at your site. If you were afraid some people would misspell your domain name, and not get to the intended site, you should have worked out a linking policy with etoy.com, just like how diamondmm.com and diamond.com have a linking policy.
You disgust me.
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slap some real looking slimy skin onto it,
Damnit, snakes are not slimy. Their clean, dry scales just reflect light in a way similar to that of slime (mucous?).
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When you went to some newbie webpage with the tacky "Always under construction" animated gif, scrolling status area javascript, and various HTML errors, and you had the "this site uses something called Comet Cursor as silly eye candy -- click to download" popup come up... how many of you actually got the damned thing?
There's not Linux version, so only people who are on Win9x or Mac were affected. Under Win9x, I've never seen one of these popups in the browser I use (Opera), although I get them in Linux (using Netscape). But even not having been directly affected by this, it makes you wonder. What exactly was that flash of the modem/NIC tx/rx lights for? Was it some closed-source app that is designed to work with an internet connection (IE 5.0, Real Player, Comet Cursor, etc) that can just go ahead and give away privacy information?
Don't use closed source if possible. If you have to, limit it, and make sure you have a firewall that blocks things going in and things going out.
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.. of this call I made to my local bank. They sent me cheques with "19___" in the date area. As a form of protest, and to poke fun at them, I called them up to complain of "non-y2k compliant cheques."
:-)
The funniest bit is when I complain, "but what if I write a check in the year 2000, it will say it's written in 1900!" The lady on staff does not at all contradict me -- she even checks with her boss! It's funny as hell. I'll have to figure out how to get it off of my dictaphone (r), and presented in mp3 format on my webpage some day
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but in reality you can thank your lucky stars there isn't anymore fluorine on Earth than what we have now. It kills basically whatever biological organism it comes in contact with.
Which is why they put it in the water supply, right?
Johnny's teeth are whiter now. Let's all thank Flouride!
Why don't they just put lead oxide in toothpaste as a similar whitner? We do drink the water...
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It's a multiplier locked Pentium w/ MMX. The only way to OC it is to increase the bus speed. Right now, it's at 3x75Mhz (225Mhz). This is stable with the SDRAM DIMM I have (lots of kernel recompiling and checking for sig11 :-).
:-)
I also run my K6-2 with a 75Mhz system bus and a 3.5 clock multiplier because my mobo doesn't natively support the 300Mhz speed the chip could do (and I'm not going to pus the mobo to 83Mhz bus speed). So it's a 262.5Mhz chip
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It's a multiplier locked Pentium w/ MMX. The only way to OC it is to increase the bus speed. Right now, it's at 3x75Mhz (225Mhz). This is stable with the SDRAM DIMM I have (lots of kernel recompiling and checking for sig11 :-).
:-)
I also run my K6-2 with a 75Mhz system bus and a 3.5 clock multiplier because my mobo doesn't natively support the 300Mhz speed the chip could do (and I'm not going to pus the mobo to 83Mhz bus speed). So it's a 262.5Mhz chip
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