I'm amazed at how/.ers make jokes about everything, including people dying in terrorist attacks. We didn't find it very funny when someone crashed planes into our skyscrapers but when Europeans die it's a joke?
Let's be a little bit considerate. Not all/.ers are U.S., i'm sure we have lots of British readers here.
There isn't really any challenge in getting to these areas. People who are running emulated servers can use hacked clients to fly to any area they please.
Heck, they can even teleport directly to some spot on the map if they want to. No point in trying to get to these on the live servers unless you have too much time on your hands.
I truly hope that some of the responses posted here to this story were being sarcastic or joking. Not all of us that read Slashdot are liberally biased like most of the news media. I guess Slashdot never claimed to be an objective reporter of the facts, but perhaps some of those 240,000 complaints came from people who clicked on the link to complain to the FCC from the PTC website?
Also, I think the issue is not that the PTC or other conservative groups want to censor television for everyone, the biggest issue is when some types of objectionable material air. The reason that CBS was cracked down on so hard during the SuperBowl is because the incident occurred around 9 pm which is still considered "prime-time" TV and is not "late-night" (10pm or later). If that incident would have occurred after 10pm, they might not have been fined at all.
I know this will probably get me flamed, but if the majority of people in the nation voted for a conservative Senate, House, and President, does it not perhaps signify A) That the majority of the nation actually *wants* conservative policies or B) That a large number of people are too lazy to vote and then like to complain when they see the results of their inaction.
Just my two cents. And yes, I am a conservative, and yes I DO think that there is far too much foul language and sex on TV during hours when children are watching. If people want to air uncensored nudity or sex on TV - do it on a pay channel that is an optional addition to your Cable so that parents can choose not to purchase it for their household. Otherwise, there is no excuse for this kind of stuff during times when children are watching.
Several people used FRAPS to record people that were using SpeedHacks in the game. So they were not banning people who had not visibly evidenced this behavior several times and been reported by users.
And they were not faking a Gryphon flight while on the ground, they were faking lag to the client making the server lag-o-port them great distances. This is using a method posted on the BlizzHackers website forums.
Seriously, putting these cameras in public places will just increase your awareness that you are being monitored when in most places you go it is already the case.
I tend to look for cameras everywhere I go because I worked at a place where I monitored the security cameras for a while so it always interests me in where companies install them and where they are pointed (no, I am not a thief, I promise!). The other day I noticed that my local post office had cameras watching the mail boxes and also several exterior cameras. Here are a few ways you are monitored during what might be a typical day:
At the airport
At the ATM - smile!
Banks
Wal-Mart (yes, admit it, you do go there sometimes)
The Mall
The Movie Theater
Traffic Cameras in General
Webcams all over the place - there to take live video of places but can also be used to track you
I could go on and on about places that monitor you. Pretty much every medium-sized or larger business has cameras installed monitoring you - and recording you. At the store where I worked we had over 25 cameras on DVR's that stored the data for 1-3 months depending on how we had them set. We caught several people that did hit and runs in our parking lot using camera footage and of course also the occasional thief.
I think the real question at this point isn't whether or not we should be monitored - that time has come and gone. The argument and fight now needs to be focused on how companies and government is allowed to use data gathered from these cameras.
It seems to me that AnandTech seems to be biased in Intel's favor for some odd reason. Either that, or that particular reviewer happens to be. Last week in their other review they said the Intel Xeon processor was way better - even when the results were about the same skewed in Intel's favor. Now that the results are skewed toward AMD the reviewer still refuses to see that the Opteron is a better processor, is available NOW, and is $250 cheaper than the Xeon-yet-to-be-released that they are comparing it too.
*Sigh* I've lost all faith in reviews by some of these hardware sites lately - they seem to be getting paid by someone to make invalid conclusions (or none at all) from fairly conclusive data.
I was just thinking about the wording in the post saying "if you've ever bought something you downloaded". As others have pointed out there are problems with not showing both sides, but I submit that many of the items recorded under that premise are wrong as well. It should have been worded "If you've ever bought something because you downloaded it."
Otherwise, you will be accounting for things people downloaded but were planning on buying anyway! I don't think a registry of items can accurately pick up consumer intent, which is what they seem to be trying to gauge.
I have many friends who like to argue that downloading is not stealing because their definition of steal is "to deprive someone of something". They say that if they steal a candy bar from the store they have deprived the store owner of it, but when they download something the original still exists on the game company's computers. It is sentiment like that that IS hurting the gaming industry.
It may not be easily measurable, but there is a significant amount of people downloading games/movies/apps and not buying them later. Saying in the crack.nfo file "Buy it if you like it!" just isn't going to cut it.
All Microsoft bashing aside, there was one thing I noticed that I'd like to see in Google's news service.
It was a feature similar to Amazon.Com's "Other people who bought this item also bought.." idea. When you click on a news story you are taken to a page with all associated stories with that story and also a list of links to other news that people who read that article also read. I've always liked the idea of showing me things that I might be interested in as well as long as unique identifying data is not being collected.
Now, perhaps Google has this already, and if so please give me a link to an example of their news service doing it.
I switched to Mozilla 6 months ago and have been enjoying it ever since.
When I got home for the summer and started work back at a Jewelry Store in my hometown, I was able to switch three of the people at work over to Mozilla FireFox. The biggest thing they were impressed with is that 99% of the spyware/ad-ware just doesn't work on it because the coders of those products only code for the dominant browser (IE crap-ola). They also love the Tabbed browsing, the nice clean interface, and the easy access to all your privacy controls (cache, cookies, history etc.). Overall, it's been a great experience with FireFox except for the occasional VBScript-using site with which we have to open up the evil IE to use. I look forward to switching more people over to the dark side of th....never mind.
The only issue I had initially with FireFox and Mozilla is how slow they seem to load picture-heavy sites such as www.cnn.com
To speed up the load times of all sites add the following to your user.js file (if it doesnt exist - for Windows users, go to the run menu and type: %AppData% and then browse through the Mozilla folder and any sub folders until you get to your profile folder - inside of this create a new text document and call it user.js):
// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q =");
The other two changes are ones i've found useful as well - the second one changes the browser to do a normal Google search from the location bar instead of doing an "I'm Lucky" Google search (this is more useful in Mozilla than FireFox since FireFox comes w/ the Google search bar built in).
The third change makes Mozilla and FireFox display error pages like IE instead of annoying dialog boxes when an error occurs (such as page not found). This helps a TON when doing tabbed browsing.
Hope those tips are helpful for everyone else as much as they were for me. For more of them go to http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html
My reasoning at the time was that Intel was a stronger stock, even though I buy AMD processors and only recommend AMD to my customers because of its high price-to-performance ratio (I know - i'm such a traitor to the company I own stock in!).
I've been thinking about selling my stock lately, and this type of news is not bound to be good for the stock prices. Is anyone else stuck in this dilemma of thinking that Intel is a stronger stock option because their business model does not rely entirely on processors, or do you all have stock in AMD? (Btw, I was proven partially right when AMD's stock price has stayed at the levels it was at over a year ago while Intel has gone up to over $30 per share from about $7 that I bought it at).
I think those preaching "run out and spend all your money to buy Google stock because you'll get rich" need to sit back and think realistically for a few minutes.
The main thing to remember is: the 1990's are over. That was last decade, this is now. Over-inflated stock prices with P/E (Price to Earning) ratios that are ridiculous are mostly gone now. Sure, Google's stock will probably do ridiculously well for the first few months. However, if everyone thinks this, it will just be artificial inflation waiting to fall out as long-term investors realize that the stock price is way higher than it should be for their earnings. No matter how much some of us dislike Microsoft, would it make any sense for Google, whose earnings are only an inkling of Microsofts to have a stock price that soars far beyond Microsofts and through the roof to match the likes of what Intel and Amazon used to trade at (hundreds of dollars per share)?
Those are just a few of my thoughts. I plan on investing in Google but only as a long-term option, because I believe that they will do well in the long run, but that their stock price will be overly affected by "announcements" of new features etc. Their business model is fairly narrow (e-mail, search services / advertisements, price-searching etc...) and does not have many sources of revenue. Who knows, maybe they can get rich off the search boxes they sell to companies to use to search data on company networks?
You have not truly reached the pinnacle of geekdom until you have fought over dice.
One of our players has a tendency to "acquire" other player's dice whenever we play. Eventually his collection grew quite large and other players began to notice and demand their dice back. He was quite adamant that the dice were his until one of the other players pointed out the "Bicycle" stamp on their D6's indicating that he had been stealing their dice.
I doubt that he was doing it on purpose, but it was still quite hilarious that we were arguing over hundreds of pieces of plastic.
You never can get enough D8's though in those pound-o-dice bags off E-bay. Anyone else have that problem? (You need them for playing Star Wars D&D especially as every weapon does D8 dmg usually).
Ha! They've been doing this for years. Its a boardgame called "Operation". Picture of Boardgame
I never could get the pieces of the patient out without setting off the alarms. Hopefully the real doctors are good at this game.
Due to the ultra small size, they probably werent able to include enough cooling to stop spontaneous combustion from high-res pictures loading on thousands of/. user's computers.
Not the only problem on the station right now..
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 1
I was watching NASA TV earlier today before the news conference at 12:00 P.M. EST and they were discussing a problem with the ISS. Apparently, the main oxygen generating component is not functioning correctly right now either, and the astronauts are relying on oxygen generating canisters. They are said to have enough backup canisters to last for months, not counting the ones on the Progress supply ship currently docked. The person on Nasa TV said that more canisters and hopefully replacement parts would be shipped up on the next Progress supply ship.
It amazes me how calm NASA sounds when talking about problems like these. Perhaps they have just been hiring lots of really good media spinsters from Russia lately: "Pieces of Mir disintegrating in the atmosphere will not be a problem at all. In fact, if one falls on your house, its a great souvenir we'll let you keep for free!"
To respond to your statement that Blaster was due to lazy admins - this is not always true.
For example, our IT Department sent an e-mail to all of the faculty/staff explaining the RPC vulnerability a full week before Blaster hit (luckily students had not arrived on campus yet).
The problem is not always with lazy admins, in this case it is with complacent users who are used to ignoring security updates because there are so many of them, and luckily, they are not usually exploited as severely as blaster was.
Speaking as a phone tech support drone for a large university, many of these changes will be most welcome. The "Blaster" incident cost our university thousands of dollars in overtime and set back all of the activities that were going on at the beginning of the school year.
However, i'm not so sure that the fancier firewall will be such a good thing unless it is implemented properly. Ever since the newer version of AIM that came out in August or September 2003, we have been flooded with calls of it blinking on and off. These problems have been traced to ZoneAlarm - another free firewall that many people use because the one in XP was insufficient. If the new firewall has trouble with an application that is as popular as AIM is among our college students, it could create more problems then its worth for IT departments everywhere.
It may sound as if i'm overreacting for such a simple thing, but try working in IT for a few weeks and receiving over 150 phone calls a day from disgruntled students cussing you out because they can't chat with their friends.
Overall, its long past due that Microsoft focus on security instead of whizz-bang features that serve to slow down the O/S and cause it to be more unstable. XP Professional was a step in the right direction as far as stability, but the security issues are most definitely a large concern, especially to those of us with a phone to our ear.
People keep commenting on the black and white quality of these pictures. AFAIK, these are lower resolution black and white photos taken for initial analysis to keep the file sizes low. The nice color pictures we all want to see should be here later today (around 12:00 P.M. PST 3:00 P.M. EST).
Overall, i'm impressed that we have once again gotten something on Mars without unit conversion issues or just plain bad luck. Now it could only be topped if our President (or the next one) would announce a manned mission to mars challenge, similar to the one issued by Kennedy to go to the moon in the 60s.
If people would actually read the article linked to, it mentions at the bottom (yes, a place most people never make it to) that this project will be open-sourced in January.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed at how /.ers make jokes about everything, including people dying in terrorist attacks. We didn't find it very funny when someone crashed planes into our skyscrapers but when Europeans die it's a joke?
/.ers are U.S., i'm sure we have lots of British readers here.
Let's be a little bit considerate. Not all
There isn't really any challenge in getting to these areas. People who are running emulated servers can use hacked clients to fly to any area they please.
Heck, they can even teleport directly to some spot on the map if they want to. No point in trying to get to these on the live servers unless you have too much time on your hands.
I truly hope that some of the responses posted here to this story were being sarcastic or joking. Not all of us that read Slashdot are liberally biased like most of the news media. I guess Slashdot never claimed to be an objective reporter of the facts, but perhaps some of those 240,000 complaints came from people who clicked on the link to complain to the FCC from the PTC website?
Also, I think the issue is not that the PTC or other conservative groups want to censor television for everyone, the biggest issue is when some types of objectionable material air. The reason that CBS was cracked down on so hard during the SuperBowl is because the incident occurred around 9 pm which is still considered "prime-time" TV and is not "late-night" (10pm or later). If that incident would have occurred after 10pm, they might not have been fined at all.
I know this will probably get me flamed, but if the majority of people in the nation voted for a conservative Senate, House, and President, does it not perhaps signify A) That the majority of the nation actually *wants* conservative policies or B) That a large number of people are too lazy to vote and then like to complain when they see the results of their inaction.
Just my two cents. And yes, I am a conservative, and yes I DO think that there is far too much foul language and sex on TV during hours when children are watching. If people want to air uncensored nudity or sex on TV - do it on a pay channel that is an optional addition to your Cable so that parents can choose not to purchase it for their household. Otherwise, there is no excuse for this kind of stuff during times when children are watching.
Several people used FRAPS to record people that were using SpeedHacks in the game. So they were not banning people who had not visibly evidenced this behavior several times and been reported by users.
And they were not faking a Gryphon flight while on the ground, they were faking lag to the client making the server lag-o-port them great distances. This is using a method posted on the BlizzHackers website forums.
Seriously, putting these cameras in public places will just increase your awareness that you are being monitored when in most places you go it is already the case.
I tend to look for cameras everywhere I go because I worked at a place where I monitored the security cameras for a while so it always interests me in where companies install them and where they are pointed (no, I am not a thief, I promise!). The other day I noticed that my local post office had cameras watching the mail boxes and also several exterior cameras. Here are a few ways you are monitored during what might be a typical day:
At the airport
At the ATM - smile!
Banks
Wal-Mart (yes, admit it, you do go there sometimes)
The Mall
The Movie Theater
Traffic Cameras in General
Webcams all over the place - there to take live video of places but can also be used to track you
I could go on and on about places that monitor you. Pretty much every medium-sized or larger business has cameras installed monitoring you - and recording you. At the store where I worked we had over 25 cameras on DVR's that stored the data for 1-3 months depending on how we had them set. We caught several people that did hit and runs in our parking lot using camera footage and of course also the occasional thief.
I think the real question at this point isn't whether or not we should be monitored - that time has come and gone. The argument and fight now needs to be focused on how companies and government is allowed to use data gathered from these cameras.
It seems to me that AnandTech seems to be biased in Intel's favor for some odd reason. Either that, or that particular reviewer happens to be. Last week in their other review they said the Intel Xeon processor was way better - even when the results were about the same skewed in Intel's favor. Now that the results are skewed toward AMD the reviewer still refuses to see that the Opteron is a better processor, is available NOW, and is $250 cheaper than the Xeon-yet-to-be-released that they are comparing it too.
*Sigh* I've lost all faith in reviews by some of these hardware sites lately - they seem to be getting paid by someone to make invalid conclusions (or none at all) from fairly conclusive data.
I was just thinking about the wording in the post saying "if you've ever bought something you downloaded". As others have pointed out there are problems with not showing both sides, but I submit that many of the items recorded under that premise are wrong as well. It should have been worded "If you've ever bought something because you downloaded it."
.nfo file "Buy it if you like it!" just isn't going to cut it.
/my 2 cents
Otherwise, you will be accounting for things people downloaded but were planning on buying anyway! I don't think a registry of items can accurately pick up consumer intent, which is what they seem to be trying to gauge.
I have many friends who like to argue that downloading is not stealing because their definition of steal is "to deprive someone of something". They say that if they steal a candy bar from the store they have deprived the store owner of it, but when they download something the original still exists on the game company's computers. It is sentiment like that that IS hurting the gaming industry.
It may not be easily measurable, but there is a significant amount of people downloading games/movies/apps and not buying them later. Saying in the crack
All Microsoft bashing aside, there was one thing I noticed that I'd like to see in Google's news service.
It was a feature similar to Amazon.Com's "Other people who bought this item also bought.." idea. When you click on a news story you are taken to a page with all associated stories with that story and also a list of links to other news that people who read that article also read. I've always liked the idea of showing me things that I might be interested in as well as long as unique identifying data is not being collected.
Now, perhaps Google has this already, and if so please give me a link to an example of their news service doing it.
Thanks
I switched to Mozilla 6 months ago and have been enjoying it ever since.
When I got home for the summer and started work back at a Jewelry Store in my hometown, I was able to switch three of the people at work over to Mozilla FireFox. The biggest thing they were impressed with is that 99% of the spyware/ad-ware just doesn't work on it because the coders of those products only code for the dominant browser (IE crap-ola). They also love the Tabbed browsing, the nice clean interface, and the easy access to all your privacy controls (cache, cookies, history etc.). Overall, it's been a great experience with FireFox except for the occasional VBScript-using site with which we have to open up the evil IE to use. I look forward to switching more people over to the dark side of th....never mind.
The only issue I had initially with FireFox and Mozilla is how slow they seem to load picture-heavy sites such as www.cnn.com
// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
// Change to normal Google search: q =");
// Instead of annoying error dialog messages, display pages:
To speed up the load times of all sites add the following to your user.js file (if it doesnt exist - for Windows users, go to the run menu and type: %AppData% and then browse through the Mozilla folder and any sub folders until you get to your profile folder - inside of this create a new text document and call it user.js):
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&
user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true);
The other two changes are ones i've found useful as well - the second one changes the browser to do a normal Google search from the location bar instead of doing an "I'm Lucky" Google search (this is more useful in Mozilla than FireFox since FireFox comes w/ the Google search bar built in).
The third change makes Mozilla and FireFox display error pages like IE instead of annoying dialog boxes when an error occurs (such as page not found). This helps a TON when doing tabbed browsing.
Hope those tips are helpful for everyone else as much as they were for me. For more of them go to http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html
Should I sell my Intel stock?
My reasoning at the time was that Intel was a stronger stock, even though I buy AMD processors and only recommend AMD to my customers because of its high price-to-performance ratio (I know - i'm such a traitor to the company I own stock in!).
I've been thinking about selling my stock lately, and this type of news is not bound to be good for the stock prices. Is anyone else stuck in this dilemma of thinking that Intel is a stronger stock option because their business model does not rely entirely on processors, or do you all have stock in AMD? (Btw, I was proven partially right when AMD's stock price has stayed at the levels it was at over a year ago while Intel has gone up to over $30 per share from about $7 that I bought it at).
I think those preaching "run out and spend all your money to buy Google stock because you'll get rich" need to sit back and think realistically for a few minutes.
The main thing to remember is: the 1990's are over. That was last decade, this is now. Over-inflated stock prices with P/E (Price to Earning) ratios that are ridiculous are mostly gone now. Sure, Google's stock will probably do ridiculously well for the first few months. However, if everyone thinks this, it will just be artificial inflation waiting to fall out as long-term investors realize that the stock price is way higher than it should be for their earnings. No matter how much some of us dislike Microsoft, would it make any sense for Google, whose earnings are only an inkling of Microsofts to have a stock price that soars far beyond Microsofts and through the roof to match the likes of what Intel and Amazon used to trade at (hundreds of dollars per share)?
Those are just a few of my thoughts. I plan on investing in Google but only as a long-term option, because I believe that they will do well in the long run, but that their stock price will be overly affected by "announcements" of new features etc. Their business model is fairly narrow (e-mail, search services / advertisements, price-searching etc...) and does not have many sources of revenue. Who knows, maybe they can get rich off the search boxes they sell to companies to use to search data on company networks?
You have not truly reached the pinnacle of geekdom until you have fought over dice.
One of our players has a tendency to "acquire" other player's dice whenever we play. Eventually his collection grew quite large and other players began to notice and demand their dice back. He was quite adamant that the dice were his until one of the other players pointed out the "Bicycle" stamp on their D6's indicating that he had been stealing their dice.
I doubt that he was doing it on purpose, but it was still quite hilarious that we were arguing over hundreds of pieces of plastic.
You never can get enough D8's though in those pound-o-dice bags off E-bay. Anyone else have that problem? (You need them for playing Star Wars D&D especially as every weapon does D8 dmg usually).
Ha! They've been doing this for years. Its a boardgame called "Operation". Picture of Boardgame I never could get the pieces of the patient out without setting off the alarms. Hopefully the real doctors are good at this game.
Due to the ultra small size, they probably werent able to include enough cooling to stop spontaneous combustion from high-res pictures loading on thousands of /. user's computers.
I was watching NASA TV earlier today before the news conference at 12:00 P.M. EST and they were discussing a problem with the ISS. Apparently, the main oxygen generating component is not functioning correctly right now either, and the astronauts are relying on oxygen generating canisters. They are said to have enough backup canisters to last for months, not counting the ones on the Progress supply ship currently docked. The person on Nasa TV said that more canisters and hopefully replacement parts would be shipped up on the next Progress supply ship.
It amazes me how calm NASA sounds when talking about problems like these. Perhaps they have just been hiring lots of really good media spinsters from Russia lately: "Pieces of Mir disintegrating in the atmosphere will not be a problem at all. In fact, if one falls on your house, its a great souvenir we'll let you keep for free!"
To respond to your statement that Blaster was due to lazy admins - this is not always true.
For example, our IT Department sent an e-mail to all of the faculty/staff explaining the RPC vulnerability a full week before Blaster hit (luckily students had not arrived on campus yet).
The problem is not always with lazy admins, in this case it is with complacent users who are used to ignoring security updates because there are so many of them, and luckily, they are not usually exploited as severely as blaster was.
Speaking as a phone tech support drone for a large university, many of these changes will be most welcome. The "Blaster" incident cost our university thousands of dollars in overtime and set back all of the activities that were going on at the beginning of the school year.
However, i'm not so sure that the fancier firewall will be such a good thing unless it is implemented properly. Ever since the newer version of AIM that came out in August or September 2003, we have been flooded with calls of it blinking on and off. These problems have been traced to ZoneAlarm - another free firewall that many people use because the one in XP was insufficient. If the new firewall has trouble with an application that is as popular as AIM is among our college students, it could create more problems then its worth for IT departments everywhere.
It may sound as if i'm overreacting for such a simple thing, but try working in IT for a few weeks and receiving over 150 phone calls a day from disgruntled students cussing you out because they can't chat with their friends.
Overall, its long past due that Microsoft focus on security instead of whizz-bang features that serve to slow down the O/S and cause it to be more unstable. XP Professional was a step in the right direction as far as stability, but the security issues are most definitely a large concern, especially to those of us with a phone to our ear.
People keep commenting on the black and white quality of these pictures. AFAIK, these are lower resolution black and white photos taken for initial analysis to keep the file sizes low. The nice color pictures we all want to see should be here later today (around 12:00 P.M. PST 3:00 P.M. EST). Overall, i'm impressed that we have once again gotten something on Mars without unit conversion issues or just plain bad luck. Now it could only be topped if our President (or the next one) would announce a manned mission to mars challenge, similar to the one issued by Kennedy to go to the moon in the 60s.
If people would actually read the article linked to, it mentions at the bottom (yes, a place most people never make it to) that this project will be open-sourced in January.