An examination of the source on the last link reveals IE exploit.
Might I also suggest finding out this guy's ISP and IP address, informing them, and prompting criminal proceedings?
Mod parent down.
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Darn trolls...
Why is it that every Slashdot discussion has to start off with some idiot trying to ruin the fun for everyone else?
There aren't any viruses in these scripts, and I doubt they would make it to the front page on Slashdot without someone actually downloading and running them to see what they are. They work quite nicely (I like the changing spirograph).
There are two sides to that particular coin... Should such a dreadful day in the history of jurisprudence come to pass, we'll no doubt have to deal with this, too:
"Your Honor, we would like to present Exhibit A, a SCO press release. It clearly states, using evidence gleaned from previous SCO press releases, that SCO owns the rights and source for Linux and all Unix derivations..."
The problem with attempting to legislate morality is that the inevitable question of whose morality is being legislated must be asked.
In the case of pornography and erotica in the United States, the morality in question almost always stems from conservative Christian interpretations of moral and immoral behavior based on the bible (side note: conservative Christians are not only found on the religious right; there are plenty of Christians on the left who are conservative about this issue).
In the end, a legal argument whose fundamental principles are rooted in religion is an invalid argument. It becomes impossible to be sure that the imposition of laws based on religion don't conflict with the First Amendment. In other words, John Ashcroft (as a Christian) does not have the right to make it more difficult for me (as an agnostic) to view whatever material I deem appropriate for myself. This has been established in cases that have been considered precendent-setting at the Supreme Court level.
So John Ashcroft can suck my big, fat, hairy...
I'm curious why the producers decided on such a short time span to cover. Sure, there will probably be some marvelous advances between now and then that will become publicly accepted and commonplace (and certainly there will be more gee-whiz toys available).
But Do we really expect bionic eyes, cloned organ donors, and super-surgeries that keep you young to all show up in that time period?
They might. It's possible. But I doubt it; For years science fiction has promised us smart highways, hover cars, and cyborg super-soldiers, all just around the corner. And none of those things have materialized yet.
A hundred years from now, I'm sure things will be very different. But my guess is that 25 years from now will seem about as advanced as we would seem now to someone from 1979. There are still cars, there are still telephones, there are still televisions. There are even still computers. Everything's been refined and improved, but it's still recognizable as the same society. You can't say the same thing about the differences between now and 1904.
...I'm curious why it took so long for this to finally happen. Intel knew, for a long time, that there was extensive interest.
The Centrino is a good chipset, and Centrino-based laptops are fairly popular. Even without the wireless support, I've been happy using a Linux-based Centrino laptop for the last six months. The lack of wireless access was the one thing that had been sticking in my craw.
Now, I'll be able to unequivocally recommend these laptops to friends who use Linux. This will mean more sales for Intel. This, I would think, would be considered a Good Thing (tm). So why the wait?
I've checked the Drudge Report, CNN, the AP, Reuters, ABC, MSNBC, and Google news. Can't find a mention of it anywhere.
Now here's the real question... Dead or alive, would Stephen King use these universal devices? Do the undead worry about the security of their credit and debit cards? What are the implications of RFID in relation to space aliens? If you're demonically possessed, can the demon use this device in your stead?
Inquiring minds don't really want to know...
...why doesn't BSD do this by default?
I don't mean to fan the flames here, but that sounds like more work than I have to do with either a Windows or a Linux installation. In either case, I can just plug in a sound card and it'll work (In Linux, it's usually detected by harddrake, anaconda, or whatever hardware configurator the distribution you're using happens to be).
So what are the benefits of configuring a sound card as you describe? And why doesn't it do that by default, so you don't have to go through the recompilation?
I'm a sucker for Terry Pratchet, although I haven't had a chance to read Monsterous Regiment yet. The last one I read was The Wee Free Men, which was hillarious. When I read the battle cry "They can take our lives, but they canna take our trousers!" I just about wet myself.
We're looking for a cohesive plot, believable characters, and (on the geeky side) well-integrated special effects that don't distract us from the story, not an excuse for the movie-makers to bludgeon us over the heads with their cleverness.
I see in the Reloaded and Revolutions the same problems I see in Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones: A big idea, executed poorly.
In the first Matrix, parallels with mythical/historical figures were obvious. Neo was a Christ-like figure, Morpheus a prophet, and Cypher a Judas. But Neo was also a conflicted hacker, Morpheus had a personality containing something besides bombast, and Cypher was an interesting villain in his own right. In other words, the characters were certainly analogues for other characters, but they were also themselves. They had senses of humour, they could love and hate, they had weaknesses and strengths, and were, for lack of a better word, human.
Then came Reloaded, and all of that was lost. The parallels between the characters and figures went from subtle to painfully transparent, and the characters stopped being themselves. They were cardboard representations of the archetypes they were meant to represent.
What made the first Matrix so compelling was the human element, which was lost in the sequels. Instead, we got Link and his wife as sort of an afterthought, and they are utterly forgettable. We have the guy I can only think of as "Spoon-boy," whose dialogue was so painful to watch I almost asked for my money back. We have Morpheus going from desperate searcher to religious zealot, while the commander who doesn't believe him (the only person in Zion with an ounce of common sense) portrayed as a one-dimensional obstacle to truth and light and all that crap.
These movies were bad. I mean BAD. But the worst thing about them was that the story concept was still good.
My suspicion is that the Wachowski brothers suffer from the same problem George Lucas does now. No one will tell them "uhh, guys, this dialogue sucks!" Or better yet "why don't you guys stick to directing and coming up with plotline, and let other people do the writing." Or even "for the love of god, guys, let an editor have a crack at this tripe!"
It looked fake. That simple. A technical achievement it might have been, but it was painfully easy to spot when reality was supplanted by CG.
In order to be worthy of real recognition, a special effect really needs to work with the movie it's in. In this case, it needed to have the hyper-real look of the rest of the Matrix. It didn't, and instead jarred the viewer out of the movie. I found myself thinking "Oh, gee, that's a neat looking special effect" instead of "Holy flap-jacks, what the hell is Neo gonna do to get outta this?!?"
In comparison, the special effects in Lord Of The Rings did their job just about perfectly. After RotK, I find myself unable to imagine Elijah Wood as a normal-sized human being, even though I know he is one. I find myself thinking of John Rhys-Davies as rather small (the guy's actually huge).
In fact, even the craptacular special effects in The Hulk didn't rip me out of the movie experience, because I knew I was watching a comic book, and they never tried to disguise that fact. The Matrix deserves its snub this year, because, despite the technical brilliance of their work, the special effects failed.
What's wrong with Mandrake?
on
Xandros version 2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If there's one thing I would like to see change in the Linux user community, it's the attitude we all sometimes display concerning our favorite distributions. We all have our reasons for using the distributions that we use, and there's no need for us to rip on the choices of others.
Mandrake is still a perfectly good "newbie distro," and one of the things I really like about it is that it has also matured way past being just for newbies. I find Mandrake, even with the recent cd-rom debacle, to be a highly usable, very powerful, and really stable OS now, with all the developer tools I like at my fingertips, too. This in no way detracts from Xandros, Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, LindowsOS, SuSE, or any other distro's quality.
When I mention an OS I like, I try to do so without dissing an OS that I choose not to use. I don't always succeed, but it would be nice to see others at least put forth similar effort.
You're right, of course. This is an instance of a real security hole discovered in the kernel itself, and not of the garden-variety "could-theoretically-happen-under-XYZ-circumstance s" type you usually see with Linux.
So that makes...hmmm...one. One real hole in the Linux kernel this year.
Congratulations! You've proven that Linux isn't perfect. Which those of us who aren't trolls or delusional already know.
...wants to suppress my rights as a red-blooded American to talk about any damn thing I want? If Diebold's election machines are crap and they've admitted it in speech that's reached the public, it smacks of authoritarian communism to try to undermine knowledge of it.
I'm an American, damn it. We've got a little something called the U.S. Constitution that protects my right to criticize any business, politician, or organization any way I see fit!
And if you don't like it when I have my say on Diebold, Microsoft, the Bush administration, the religious right, or anything else I choose to talk about... Well, you can just go right back to communist China or try to get the Soviet Union up and running again!
America! Love it or leave it!
((My god, that felt good! I feel liberated! In fact, I feel liberal! And proud! I love this country!))
Having seen the screenshots available for this distro, I'm not terribly impressed with the user interfaces for the configuration screens. It's nice to have a GUI for a lot of those things, but the Mandrake control center and SuSE YaST seem to do it in a friendlier way.
That said, there's something nice about elegant simplicity, too. There don't appear to be that many bells and whistles, and each utility appears to do exactly what it describes, no more and no less. That's something I find attractive in a configuration tool.
From what I've seen, it's not enough to make me switch distros (I'm a Mandrake and SuSE fan, personally), but I think this sort of thing has real potential for the crowd that thinks of themselves as power users, who nevertheless want a simple method to do a lot of the otherwise time-consuming busy work.
The download version is 100% OSS software. If you join the Mandrake Club, you get access to additional commercial applications. These applications also come with the retail package, which is a nice little box including Mandrake 9.2, the commercial applications, and lots of documentation.
You wouldn't be confusing applications with the operating system, would you?;)
Slashdot Mirror
An examination of the source on the last link reveals IE exploit.
Might I also suggest finding out this guy's ISP and IP address, informing them, and prompting criminal proceedings?
Darn trolls...
Why is it that every Slashdot discussion has to start off with some idiot trying to ruin the fun for everyone else?
There aren't any viruses in these scripts, and I doubt they would make it to the front page on Slashdot without someone actually downloading and running them to see what they are. They work quite nicely (I like the changing spirograph).
There are two sides to that particular coin... Should such a dreadful day in the history of jurisprudence come to pass, we'll no doubt have to deal with this, too:
"Your Honor, we would like to present Exhibit A, a SCO press release. It clearly states, using evidence gleaned from previous SCO press releases, that SCO owns the rights and source for Linux and all Unix derivations..."
The problem with attempting to legislate morality is that the inevitable question of whose morality is being legislated must be asked.
In the case of pornography and erotica in the United States, the morality in question almost always stems from conservative Christian interpretations of moral and immoral behavior based on the bible (side note: conservative Christians are not only found on the religious right; there are plenty of Christians on the left who are conservative about this issue).
In the end, a legal argument whose fundamental principles are rooted in religion is an invalid argument. It becomes impossible to be sure that the imposition of laws based on religion don't conflict with the First Amendment. In other words, John Ashcroft (as a Christian) does not have the right to make it more difficult for me (as an agnostic) to view whatever material I deem appropriate for myself. This has been established in cases that have been considered precendent-setting at the Supreme Court level.
So John Ashcroft can suck my big, fat, hairy...
I want to be first in line for one of the cold-fusion-hybrid-flying-recumbent-bikes. I'm having trouble even picturing it, but I know I want one.
I'm curious why the producers decided on such a short time span to cover. Sure, there will probably be some marvelous advances between now and then that will become publicly accepted and commonplace (and certainly there will be more gee-whiz toys available).
But Do we really expect bionic eyes, cloned organ donors, and super-surgeries that keep you young to all show up in that time period?
They might. It's possible. But I doubt it; For years science fiction has promised us smart highways, hover cars, and cyborg super-soldiers, all just around the corner. And none of those things have materialized yet.
A hundred years from now, I'm sure things will be very different. But my guess is that 25 years from now will seem about as advanced as we would seem now to someone from 1979. There are still cars, there are still telephones, there are still televisions. There are even still computers. Everything's been refined and improved, but it's still recognizable as the same society. You can't say the same thing about the differences between now and 1904.
...I'm curious why it took so long for this to finally happen. Intel knew, for a long time, that there was extensive interest.
The Centrino is a good chipset, and Centrino-based laptops are fairly popular. Even without the wireless support, I've been happy using a Linux-based Centrino laptop for the last six months. The lack of wireless access was the one thing that had been sticking in my craw.
Now, I'll be able to unequivocally recommend these laptops to friends who use Linux. This will mean more sales for Intel. This, I would think, would be considered a Good Thing (tm). So why the wait?
Heh... Might as well have been. After *ahem* vigorous research, I've discovered that this isn't the first time that troll has been used.
:)
Which, I guess, everyone else already knew. Darn it.
I've checked the Drudge Report, CNN, the AP, Reuters, ABC, MSNBC, and Google news. Can't find a mention of it anywhere. Now here's the real question... Dead or alive, would Stephen King use these universal devices? Do the undead worry about the security of their credit and debit cards? What are the implications of RFID in relation to space aliens? If you're demonically possessed, can the demon use this device in your stead? Inquiring minds don't really want to know...
Sterile? That I can deal with. But hairless.... Ye Gods, people! Think of the children! Bald children!
Oh, wait...
...why doesn't BSD do this by default? I don't mean to fan the flames here, but that sounds like more work than I have to do with either a Windows or a Linux installation. In either case, I can just plug in a sound card and it'll work (In Linux, it's usually detected by harddrake, anaconda, or whatever hardware configurator the distribution you're using happens to be). So what are the benefits of configuring a sound card as you describe? And why doesn't it do that by default, so you don't have to go through the recompilation?
...where to get a definitive list of security holes in Windows (not Office or other add-ons) for the month of December?
I'm a sucker for Terry Pratchet, although I haven't had a chance to read Monsterous Regiment yet. The last one I read was The Wee Free Men, which was hillarious. When I read the battle cry "They can take our lives, but they canna take our trousers!" I just about wet myself.
We're looking for a cohesive plot, believable characters, and (on the geeky side) well-integrated special effects that don't distract us from the story, not an excuse for the movie-makers to bludgeon us over the heads with their cleverness.
I see in the Reloaded and Revolutions the same problems I see in Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones: A big idea, executed poorly.
In the first Matrix, parallels with mythical/historical figures were obvious. Neo was a Christ-like figure, Morpheus a prophet, and Cypher a Judas. But Neo was also a conflicted hacker, Morpheus had a personality containing something besides bombast, and Cypher was an interesting villain in his own right. In other words, the characters were certainly analogues for other characters, but they were also themselves. They had senses of humour, they could love and hate, they had weaknesses and strengths, and were, for lack of a better word, human.
Then came Reloaded, and all of that was lost. The parallels between the characters and figures went from subtle to painfully transparent, and the characters stopped being themselves. They were cardboard representations of the archetypes they were meant to represent.
What made the first Matrix so compelling was the human element, which was lost in the sequels. Instead, we got Link and his wife as sort of an afterthought, and they are utterly forgettable. We have the guy I can only think of as "Spoon-boy," whose dialogue was so painful to watch I almost asked for my money back. We have Morpheus going from desperate searcher to religious zealot, while the commander who doesn't believe him (the only person in Zion with an ounce of common sense) portrayed as a one-dimensional obstacle to truth and light and all that crap.
These movies were bad. I mean BAD. But the worst thing about them was that the story concept was still good.
My suspicion is that the Wachowski brothers suffer from the same problem George Lucas does now. No one will tell them "uhh, guys, this dialogue sucks!" Or better yet "why don't you guys stick to directing and coming up with plotline, and let other people do the writing." Or even "for the love of god, guys, let an editor have a crack at this tripe!"
It looked fake. That simple. A technical achievement it might have been, but it was painfully easy to spot when reality was supplanted by CG.
In order to be worthy of real recognition, a special effect really needs to work with the movie it's in. In this case, it needed to have the hyper-real look of the rest of the Matrix. It didn't, and instead jarred the viewer out of the movie. I found myself thinking "Oh, gee, that's a neat looking special effect" instead of "Holy flap-jacks, what the hell is Neo gonna do to get outta this?!?"
In comparison, the special effects in Lord Of The Rings did their job just about perfectly. After RotK, I find myself unable to imagine Elijah Wood as a normal-sized human being, even though I know he is one. I find myself thinking of John Rhys-Davies as rather small (the guy's actually huge).
In fact, even the craptacular special effects in The Hulk didn't rip me out of the movie experience, because I knew I was watching a comic book, and they never tried to disguise that fact. The Matrix deserves its snub this year, because, despite the technical brilliance of their work, the special effects failed.
If there's one thing I would like to see change in the Linux user community, it's the attitude we all sometimes display concerning our favorite distributions. We all have our reasons for using the distributions that we use, and there's no need for us to rip on the choices of others. Mandrake is still a perfectly good "newbie distro," and one of the things I really like about it is that it has also matured way past being just for newbies. I find Mandrake, even with the recent cd-rom debacle, to be a highly usable, very powerful, and really stable OS now, with all the developer tools I like at my fingertips, too. This in no way detracts from Xandros, Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, LindowsOS, SuSE, or any other distro's quality. When I mention an OS I like, I try to do so without dissing an OS that I choose not to use. I don't always succeed, but it would be nice to see others at least put forth similar effort.
You're right, of course. This is an instance of a real security hole discovered in the kernel itself, and not of the garden-variety "could-theoretically-happen-under-XYZ-circumstance s" type you usually see with Linux.
So that makes...hmmm...one. One real hole in the Linux kernel this year.
Congratulations! You've proven that Linux isn't perfect. Which those of us who aren't trolls or delusional already know.
...wants to suppress my rights as a red-blooded American to talk about any damn thing I want? If Diebold's election machines are crap and they've admitted it in speech that's reached the public, it smacks of authoritarian communism to try to undermine knowledge of it. I'm an American, damn it. We've got a little something called the U.S. Constitution that protects my right to criticize any business, politician, or organization any way I see fit! And if you don't like it when I have my say on Diebold, Microsoft, the Bush administration, the religious right, or anything else I choose to talk about... Well, you can just go right back to communist China or try to get the Soviet Union up and running again! America! Love it or leave it! ((My god, that felt good! I feel liberated! In fact, I feel liberal! And proud! I love this country!))
Having seen the screenshots available for this distro, I'm not terribly impressed with the user interfaces for the configuration screens. It's nice to have a GUI for a lot of those things, but the Mandrake control center and SuSE YaST seem to do it in a friendlier way.
That said, there's something nice about elegant simplicity, too. There don't appear to be that many bells and whistles, and each utility appears to do exactly what it describes, no more and no less. That's something I find attractive in a configuration tool.
From what I've seen, it's not enough to make me switch distros (I'm a Mandrake and SuSE fan, personally), but I think this sort of thing has real potential for the crowd that thinks of themselves as power users, who nevertheless want a simple method to do a lot of the otherwise time-consuming busy work.
The download version is 100% OSS software. If you join the Mandrake Club, you get access to additional commercial applications. These applications also come with the retail package, which is a nice little box including Mandrake 9.2, the commercial applications, and lots of documentation. You wouldn't be confusing applications with the operating system, would you? ;)