I'm guessing that the point of this is that a bunch of really bright (ok, maybe not so bright in this case) people are thinking of a way to solve a problem. Think about how useful a human-powered helicopter would be. Not only that, but how many failed attempts were there before the first successful airplane? Maybe someday someone will get it right, and you'll be able to pedal through the air to work. This helps people think up unusual solutions to interesting problems. Having a generation of people that are taught to think shouldn't be a bad thing in a free society.
No way, the most addictive minesweeperesque online game is proximity.
http://www.newsandentertainment.com/zfproximity.ht ml
Please don't crash the server, I need something to do at work...
WEP by itself sometimes is not enough, especially if you transfer a lot of data through your wireless network in a heavily congested wireless area. Someone can sit outside and analyze the collisions and deduce your key (I believe that's how it works). If you combine high-level WEP with MAC protection and do not broadcast your ID, the vast majority of people will not be able to get onto your network. Luckily, these three things are relatively easy to do if you RTFM. Changing your key every now and then is a good idea too. Of course, there is always the slashdot crowd to prove me wrong...
People talking about Penny Arcade are leaving out the funniest bit. The best part of the Penny Arcade comic is the response from Roberts (or whatever the Infinium guys' name is). He claimed in a forum post that the penny-arcade comic was a response that they put all console designers through as a part of an initiation process and that they were hungry for bandwidth. Kind of funny when talking about a site that gets millions of hits a month. Read the post and the site's response at their site.
Having worked in several retail stores, I can tell you that strips of these things are all over the place if you want to swipe some and cause some havoc. A lot of stores simply keep them by the registers near where they deactivate the tags. Some brick and mortar stores that carry large or boxed merchandise (i.e. Home Depot) have blue carts with silver metal tops used to place anti-theft banding on merchandise, and these carts often have the tags sitting on them. Pretty much any store has loads of the tags sitting at the service/retruns desk since they often need to slap a new one on returned merchandise.
The above information is for informational purposes purely. If you get a kick in the nuts from a friend that you screw with, I claim no responsibility.
I apologize, I should have clarified my statements a little more. I wasn't referring to only economic issues. I just used the example of the stolen pension money to point to what kind of government there is currently in China. What I was getting at is that a story like this will receive a thousand times more attention than one that is a far more flagrant example of violations. How many people even know what I'm talking about with the stolen pensions? I only know about it because of a one-time article in the wall street journal, and can find very little mention of it in any other place. The gist was that the government was using pension money to fund government sponsored businesses that were producing cheap products to sell to the rest of the world, at an incredible loss. The goverment turned to the pension (or whatever they call it there) since they ran out of their own money and wanted new businesses to continue to come into the country.
Comparing something like that to an American government funded project is kind of off. Funding stupid projects from our taxes that anyone can easily find out about is a quite a bit different than funding gigantic failures from what is our equivalent of an IRA or 401k. The government took their money without notification, and completely denied any involvement in the projects. I agree that free speech is a large issue, and needs to be addressed, but destroying a person's future is something that deserves more attention.
This is right up there with blaming gun makers for deaths by guns. China is a bastion of human rights violations, and they chose to whine and moan about censorship by software? Why don't they worry about having a free economy where the government doesn't take your pension money and use it to fund government projects that are always failures before they worry about having the right to complain about those failures? Even having MS stop the software is a band-aid on the problem, which will solve nothing. Start with the big issues, you can worry about the little crap later.
I remember reading an article recently (Wired maybe?) about a company that sells download statistics to record companies and radio broadcasters all over the world. They have software that monitors p2p networks, tracks what people are downloading, determines what general area of the country a person is in (by IP, guess) and puts all this in a nice fat database.
Who cares, right? Well, the music companies are paying these guys for the statistics. The very people that are suing kazaa and their ilk for a piece of software that supposedly only has the major function of piracy are using the same software for a very legitimate and profitable purpose. They love to know that some new song that is the number one download in Omaha isn't even being touched by the radio stations and should thus be put into heavy rotation. When asked about using such data, the radio stations and record companies of course vehemently deny any such affiliation.
I'm really curious as to whether or not kazaa's suit includes any information on this usage to help them along...
Since when was Windows part of a cash cow for IBM? They don't even make their own laptops anymore, and I doubt that they make their desktops or any other consumer product that they deal with. Those lines just aren't very profitable thanks mostly to Dell and their continued domination of the pc market (probably soon the world). What do you see in a lot of magazines when you see an IBM ad? You see consulting. You see support. You see services just as often as you see hardware, if not more. Like amazon.com, IBM's profit centers are their services, not their products. Having some chump pay you $500 an hour to tell them that they need to buy newer pc's and install an ERP is a heck of a lot better than paying Malaysia to churn out pc's at a 1% profit margin, if not a loss.
Ok, now on to the retarded theorizing....
Since IBM makes it's money off of services, and not hardware, what better way to make the moolah than to help clients move to a server and desktop OS that saves the customer a considerable amount of money and is more stable? Customer satisfaction = customer retention, for the most part. Not to mention the fact that it would be a new operating system for many people to deal with, so training will be needed, additional support will be required, etc. IBM will be looking to prove that a migration to Linux is feasible and effective, so it can have clients pay it to do the same for their companies. I can see the dollar signs reflecting off of IBM's eyeballs as I type.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that the point of this is that a bunch of really bright (ok, maybe not so bright in this case) people are thinking of a way to solve a problem. Think about how useful a human-powered helicopter would be. Not only that, but how many failed attempts were there before the first successful airplane? Maybe someday someone will get it right, and you'll be able to pedal through the air to work. This helps people think up unusual solutions to interesting problems. Having a generation of people that are taught to think shouldn't be a bad thing in a free society.
No way, the most addictive minesweeperesque online game is proximity. http://www.newsandentertainment.com/zfproximity.ht ml
Please don't crash the server, I need something to do at work...
WEP by itself sometimes is not enough, especially if you transfer a lot of data through your wireless network in a heavily congested wireless area. Someone can sit outside and analyze the collisions and deduce your key (I believe that's how it works). If you combine high-level WEP with MAC protection and do not broadcast your ID, the vast majority of people will not be able to get onto your network. Luckily, these three things are relatively easy to do if you RTFM. Changing your key every now and then is a good idea too. Of course, there is always the slashdot crowd to prove me wrong...
People talking about Penny Arcade are leaving out the funniest bit. The best part of the Penny Arcade comic is the response from Roberts (or whatever the Infinium guys' name is). He claimed in a forum post that the penny-arcade comic was a response that they put all console designers through as a part of an initiation process and that they were hungry for bandwidth. Kind of funny when talking about a site that gets millions of hits a month. Read the post and the site's response at their site.
Having worked in several retail stores, I can tell you that strips of these things are all over the place if you want to swipe some and cause some havoc. A lot of stores simply keep them by the registers near where they deactivate the tags. Some brick and mortar stores that carry large or boxed merchandise (i.e. Home Depot) have blue carts with silver metal tops used to place anti-theft banding on merchandise, and these carts often have the tags sitting on them. Pretty much any store has loads of the tags sitting at the service/retruns desk since they often need to slap a new one on returned merchandise.
The above information is for informational purposes purely. If you get a kick in the nuts from a friend that you screw with, I claim no responsibility.
I apologize, I should have clarified my statements a little more. I wasn't referring to only economic issues. I just used the example of the stolen pension money to point to what kind of government there is currently in China. What I was getting at is that a story like this will receive a thousand times more attention than one that is a far more flagrant example of violations. How many people even know what I'm talking about with the stolen pensions? I only know about it because of a one-time article in the wall street journal, and can find very little mention of it in any other place. The gist was that the government was using pension money to fund government sponsored businesses that were producing cheap products to sell to the rest of the world, at an incredible loss. The goverment turned to the pension (or whatever they call it there) since they ran out of their own money and wanted new businesses to continue to come into the country.
Comparing something like that to an American government funded project is kind of off. Funding stupid projects from our taxes that anyone can easily find out about is a quite a bit different than funding gigantic failures from what is our equivalent of an IRA or 401k. The government took their money without notification, and completely denied any involvement in the projects. I agree that free speech is a large issue, and needs to be addressed, but destroying a person's future is something that deserves more attention.
This is right up there with blaming gun makers for deaths by guns. China is a bastion of human rights violations, and they chose to whine and moan about censorship by software? Why don't they worry about having a free economy where the government doesn't take your pension money and use it to fund government projects that are always failures before they worry about having the right to complain about those failures? Even having MS stop the software is a band-aid on the problem, which will solve nothing. Start with the big issues, you can worry about the little crap later.
I remember reading an article recently (Wired maybe?) about a company that sells download statistics to record companies and radio broadcasters all over the world. They have software that monitors p2p networks, tracks what people are downloading, determines what general area of the country a person is in (by IP, guess) and puts all this in a nice fat database.
Who cares, right? Well, the music companies are paying these guys for the statistics. The very people that are suing kazaa and their ilk for a piece of software that supposedly only has the major function of piracy are using the same software for a very legitimate and profitable purpose. They love to know that some new song that is the number one download in Omaha isn't even being touched by the radio stations and should thus be put into heavy rotation. When asked about using such data, the radio stations and record companies of course vehemently deny any such affiliation.
I'm really curious as to whether or not kazaa's suit includes any information on this usage to help them along...
There is some more information here if anyone is interested.
Since when was Windows part of a cash cow for IBM? They don't even make their own laptops anymore, and I doubt that they make their desktops or any other consumer product that they deal with. Those lines just aren't very profitable thanks mostly to Dell and their continued domination of the pc market (probably soon the world). What do you see in a lot of magazines when you see an IBM ad? You see consulting. You see support. You see services just as often as you see hardware, if not more. Like amazon.com, IBM's profit centers are their services, not their products. Having some chump pay you $500 an hour to tell them that they need to buy newer pc's and install an ERP is a heck of a lot better than paying Malaysia to churn out pc's at a 1% profit margin, if not a loss. Ok, now on to the retarded theorizing.... Since IBM makes it's money off of services, and not hardware, what better way to make the moolah than to help clients move to a server and desktop OS that saves the customer a considerable amount of money and is more stable? Customer satisfaction = customer retention, for the most part. Not to mention the fact that it would be a new operating system for many people to deal with, so training will be needed, additional support will be required, etc. IBM will be looking to prove that a migration to Linux is feasible and effective, so it can have clients pay it to do the same for their companies. I can see the dollar signs reflecting off of IBM's eyeballs as I type.