I have to say that, in my extremely limited experience, it seem like this can vary greatly from distro to distro. I tried to install and run Mandrake on a couple of different occasions, and had nothing but trouble, even to the point of system killing hangs and crashes (if there was a way to recover without rebooting, I sure didn't know what it was).
On the other hand, I just installed SUSE 9.1 last week, and the system has been rock solid the entire time. Much closer to the experience I expected from Linux.
It's real easy to sit behind a keyboard and talk tough. I have fortunately never had this experience, but I am quite sure the reality of it is very different from how you envision it sitting safely in your home.
First of all, I'm thinking this idea of acting crazy you keep bringing up is a really bad idea. What purpose would it serve? If someone is threatening you with a weapon, you want to do everything you can to keep the situation calm and in control. If you start behaving erratically, you just increase the likelihood that you'll get shot, stabbed, or whatever.
Screaming and running away is a great idea, if you have the opportunity to do it. A mugger, however, knows this and is going to do everything he can to prevent it. He'll try to get you in a place where there are no other people, and he'll try to corner you, so you have no way to run. In that situation, the only sane thing to do is hand over the wallet/PDA/iPod/whatever.
I'm not even normally afraid of hights... but stick me in a car with a thousand other cars on the bridge and I get vertigo.
I get the same thing, but only if I'm driving. It's weird, I can dodge across four lanes of traffic on the Southeast Expressway in Boston at 85mph during rush hour without even blinking. But heading up the approach to a high bridge, I have to grit my teeth and stare at the white line to make it across.
Somehow I think a lot of Slashdotters would still believe, even when presented with physical evidence and sworn statements to the contrary. The image is just too romantic: a attractive young woman, blasting like a bat out of hell on a motorcycle, through a desolate, radioactive wasteland. It's an image straight out of the movies.
Several years ago I signed up with an ISP for dial-up service. I forget the name, it was a national service as I recall, but I got the impression that their local office was pretty small and possibly independently run. I called up to get the POP server address on what happened to be the day that one of the early e-mail viruses (Melissa, maybe?) was scheduled to deliver a payload. Keep in mind, that a fix for it had been widely available for over a month. The tech picked up the phone and went, "My God man, don't you know what day it is? The Melissa virus went off today! I can't help you today, we've already lost three machines in our back room. Call back tomorrow, and whatever you do, DON'T GO ON THE INTERNET!"
Of course, I'm the fool, because I didn't immediately run to find another ISP.
Well, the (a?) definition of a bad movie is one that is not enjoyable. Movies get reputations as bad films because the majority of the people who see them don't like them. If you enjoyed it, then in your opinion, it wasn't a bad movie.
I think Beavis and Butthead summed it up best: "We don't like things that suck."
Mr. Lucas had this story in his head MANY moons ago. Why in the hell should he not finish his vision?
Watching Ep. I and II, I get the strong impression that Lucas' vision for the first three films was extremely vague. Like he had only really thought about what was going on with Anakin and Padme and Obi Wan, and hadn't really considered the fact that the story would have to be framed in a larger context.
Even then, there are inconsistencies. In the original trilogy, it seemed pretty clear to me that Obi Wan had taken it upon himself to train Anakin. Funny how he totally forgot to mention anything about Qui-Gon Jinn to Luke.
It's definitely not a doppler issue. Drivers on the Massachusetts Turnpike routinely use their cellphones at speeds in excess of 100mph, often while reading the paper or putting on makeup.
Even if they are being scammed, aren't this person and his/her accomplices committing mail/wire fraud?
I wouldn't think so. No actual money has changed hands, since the escrow service is bogus anyway. And I can't imagine that there are any laws against declaring too high a value for a package. If you want to pay extra taxes, I'm quite sure the government will be glad to collect.
Re:Photo and PIN on Cash Card / Credit Card??
on
RFID MasterCard
·
· Score: 1
When I worked as a cashier at Wal-Mart for two summers (a season in hell), I used to check all credit cards, and frequently asked for ID. It always blew me away the number of people who would get pissed off because I was "hassling" them. I just wanted to scream at them, "I'm protecting *your* money, you idiot!!"
I think it is interesting how important security is on slashdot to people, but there is no mention about any anti-(spam | virus | worm).
If you use the IE and Outlook alternatives on the CD and a little common sense, you virtually don't need AV. I haven't used it in years, and I've never had a problem.
I can't recommend it, anyway, because it doesn't have Nethack.
At risk of sounding entirely humorless, I don't think Nethack is released under the GPL.
What if this was an intentional DDOS attack? Someone you don't like runs a dinky little webserver off his DSL account, with some vaguely/. appropriate material. Submit his site, it gets on the front page, and BOOM... instant DOS.
I've been judging the Comp for a few years now, and I have yet to see a scratch-written game that didn't suck. Not to say it couldn't be done, but in the timeframe of the competition, the specialized languages are a huge advantage.
Besides, games written in Inform have (by default, at least) the same look-and-feel as the classic Infocom games. How cool is that?
Except, don't all of the major browsers do this already? Why would you install some third-party app, rather than activate a feature of the browser you're using?
Yeah, but my fried Athlon won't kill anyone. My engine exploding while I'm doing 75MPH on a crowded interstate at rush hour, causing me to lose control of my car, is a little different.
Sure, but if something is so wrong that it's going to cause your engine to "explode" like a bomb, chances are it's going to happen in the driveway when you first start the car. A more likely worst case scenario on the road is something like a blown piston, which will cause a sudden power loss but will likely still give you a chance to get safely to the side of the road. Still potentially dangerous, certainly, but no more so than a blowout or any number of things that happen all the time to totally stock cars.
Actually, I prefer the "Electric Supercharger" eBay scam. Imagine having a leaf blower hooked up to the intake manifold. Guaranteed 50hp... or not.
Re:When NOT to hack
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I can understand this as a hobby, but why mod your day-to-day car so heavily?
Basically, it comes down to: If you have to ask, you'll never understand.
You probably break several laws in doing so, you definitely invalidate your car lease or warranty, and you probably invalidate your insurance as well.
For the most part, modding your car is perfectly legal, as long as you use a little common sense. As long as you can meet the safety, noise, and emissions standards, you can pretty much do what you want.
Modding a leased car is unwise, unless you plan to buy the car at the end of the lease. (Actually, leasing a car is pretty unwise in the first place, but that's another discussion.)
Warranty issues are more of a grey area. Supposedly, a warranty company must prove that a modification caused the problem before the can reject a claim, but I suspect you'd have a hell of a fight if the warranty company really wants to dig in. A serious modder is most likely savvy enough to make his own repairs, and doesn't have much need for a warranty. I'm sure this is more of a problem, however, now that modding is getting more mainstream and popular.
I'm not aware of anything in auto insurance policies about modifying a car, except they will only cover original equipment unless you get a rider for aftermarket add-ons. I'm sure if they felt it was a problem, insurance companies would start checking up and cracking down on modders.
Besides, how confident are you that you'd never screw up?
Modding anything holds the same risk. Screw up overclocking your Athlon, and you could fry the chip. You just use common sense, understand the risks of what you're doing, and don't run home crying if something goes boom.
Re:I don't think that I like the idea of MS...
on
Gates on Winsecurity
·
· Score: 1
You don't know the half of it. I'm just a black-box tester, so I don't know all the gory details, but it turns out that there cases where this new feature can prevent legitimate apps from running. It throws up a nice little message about how it's protecting you, and then crashes the app. The workaround is fairly simple (you can manually exclude the app from the protection), but we're left with a choice between patching our entire product line going back however many versions or fielding a zillion tech support calls. Not much fun, either way.
ECM mods are one way to increase performance, and are important for anyone serious about it, but they're hardly the only way. Simple intake and exhaust mods can yield non-trivial gains, when done properly. And tweaking the power adder on turbo- and supercharged engines can yield significant gains, even with the stock ECM.
Sadly, this sub-set is becoming increasingly large and more mainstream. I saw some show on MTV the other day, where they would take somebody's beat up old car and soup it up. The show I saw they took some guy's '86 Cutlass Supreme... paint, rims, tires, interior, sunroof, DVD, PS2, karoke machine. As far as we saw on the show, they never so much as opened the hood. So now it's a really sharp looking Cutlass with an 18-year-old V6 with God-knows-how-many thousand miles on it.
I wouldn't make such an analogy anywhere other than slashdot, but I could feel that the load average on my brain was as high as it could be. I didn't have any free cycles to think about my day, or have a song in my head, or think of my next joke, as I usually do.
Scary thought... the hook from "Hey Ya" pops into your head and you slam into a tree.
Of course, if you get him involved in role playing games, he'll still get laughed at for having uncombed hair. He'll just have geeky friends with uncombed hair to gripe to when it happens.
Then again, I guess that's how I survived high school.
Oh... my... God... those are the coolest things I have ever seen. Too bad I'm too heavy for the springs. Then again, maybe 250lbs flying through the air is not such a great idea, anyway.
Actually, I don't think Zaphod with an American accent is all that far off. I always took Zaphod's character to be a parody of the stereotypical American anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is NOT obviously more rock solid.
I have to say that, in my extremely limited experience, it seem like this can vary greatly from distro to distro. I tried to install and run Mandrake on a couple of different occasions, and had nothing but trouble, even to the point of system killing hangs and crashes (if there was a way to recover without rebooting, I sure didn't know what it was).
On the other hand, I just installed SUSE 9.1 last week, and the system has been rock solid the entire time. Much closer to the experience I expected from Linux.
It's real easy to sit behind a keyboard and talk tough. I have fortunately never had this experience, but I am quite sure the reality of it is very different from how you envision it sitting safely in your home.
First of all, I'm thinking this idea of acting crazy you keep bringing up is a really bad idea. What purpose would it serve? If someone is threatening you with a weapon, you want to do everything you can to keep the situation calm and in control. If you start behaving erratically, you just increase the likelihood that you'll get shot, stabbed, or whatever.
Screaming and running away is a great idea, if you have the opportunity to do it. A mugger, however, knows this and is going to do everything he can to prevent it. He'll try to get you in a place where there are no other people, and he'll try to corner you, so you have no way to run. In that situation, the only sane thing to do is hand over the wallet/PDA/iPod/whatever.
I'm not even normally afraid of hights... but stick me in a car with a thousand other cars on the bridge and I get vertigo.
I get the same thing, but only if I'm driving. It's weird, I can dodge across four lanes of traffic on the Southeast Expressway in Boston at 85mph during rush hour without even blinking. But heading up the approach to a high bridge, I have to grit my teeth and stare at the white line to make it across.
Somehow I think a lot of Slashdotters would still believe, even when presented with physical evidence and sworn statements to the contrary. The image is just too romantic: a attractive young woman, blasting like a bat out of hell on a motorcycle, through a desolate, radioactive wasteland. It's an image straight out of the movies.
Several years ago I signed up with an ISP for dial-up service. I forget the name, it was a national service as I recall, but I got the impression that their local office was pretty small and possibly independently run. I called up to get the POP server address on what happened to be the day that one of the early e-mail viruses (Melissa, maybe?) was scheduled to deliver a payload. Keep in mind, that a fix for it had been widely available for over a month. The tech picked up the phone and went, "My God man, don't you know what day it is? The Melissa virus went off today! I can't help you today, we've already lost three machines in our back room. Call back tomorrow, and whatever you do, DON'T GO ON THE INTERNET!"
Of course, I'm the fool, because I didn't immediately run to find another ISP.
Well, the (a?) definition of a bad movie is one that is not enjoyable. Movies get reputations as bad films because the majority of the people who see them don't like them. If you enjoyed it, then in your opinion, it wasn't a bad movie.
I think Beavis and Butthead summed it up best: "We don't like things that suck."
Mr. Lucas had this story in his head MANY moons ago. Why in the hell should he not finish his vision?
Watching Ep. I and II, I get the strong impression that Lucas' vision for the first three films was extremely vague. Like he had only really thought about what was going on with Anakin and Padme and Obi Wan, and hadn't really considered the fact that the story would have to be framed in a larger context.
Even then, there are inconsistencies. In the original trilogy, it seemed pretty clear to me that Obi Wan had taken it upon himself to train Anakin. Funny how he totally forgot to mention anything about Qui-Gon Jinn to Luke.
I don't think it's a doppler issue.
It's definitely not a doppler issue. Drivers on the Massachusetts Turnpike routinely use their cellphones at speeds in excess of 100mph, often while reading the paper or putting on makeup.
Even if they are being scammed, aren't this person and his/her accomplices committing mail/wire fraud?
I wouldn't think so. No actual money has changed hands, since the escrow service is bogus anyway. And I can't imagine that there are any laws against declaring too high a value for a package. If you want to pay extra taxes, I'm quite sure the government will be glad to collect.
When I worked as a cashier at Wal-Mart for two summers (a season in hell), I used to check all credit cards, and frequently asked for ID. It always blew me away the number of people who would get pissed off because I was "hassling" them. I just wanted to scream at them, "I'm protecting *your* money, you idiot!!"
I think it is interesting how important security is on slashdot to people, but there is no mention about any anti-(spam | virus | worm).
If you use the IE and Outlook alternatives on the CD and a little common sense, you virtually don't need AV. I haven't used it in years, and I've never had a problem.
I can't recommend it, anyway, because it doesn't have Nethack.
At risk of sounding entirely humorless, I don't think Nethack is released under the GPL.
What if this was an intentional DDOS attack? Someone you don't like runs a dinky little webserver off his DSL account, with some vaguely /. appropriate material. Submit his site, it gets on the front page, and BOOM... instant DOS.
Dammit, where's my tinfoil hat??
"yeah but nobody wants to buy a text-based game"
Which is probably why they're free these days.
I've been judging the Comp for a few years now, and I have yet to see a scratch-written game that didn't suck. Not to say it couldn't be done, but in the timeframe of the competition, the specialized languages are a huge advantage.
Besides, games written in Inform have (by default, at least) the same look-and-feel as the classic Infocom games. How cool is that?
Except, don't all of the major browsers do this already? Why would you install some third-party app, rather than activate a feature of the browser you're using?
Yeah, but my fried Athlon won't kill anyone. My engine exploding while I'm doing 75MPH on a crowded interstate at rush hour, causing me to lose control of my car, is a little different.
Sure, but if something is so wrong that it's going to cause your engine to "explode" like a bomb, chances are it's going to happen in the driveway when you first start the car. A more likely worst case scenario on the road is something like a blown piston, which will cause a sudden power loss but will likely still give you a chance to get safely to the side of the road. Still potentially dangerous, certainly, but no more so than a blowout or any number of things that happen all the time to totally stock cars.
Actually, I prefer the "Electric Supercharger" eBay scam. Imagine having a leaf blower hooked up to the intake manifold. Guaranteed 50hp... or not.
I can understand this as a hobby, but why mod your day-to-day car so heavily?
Basically, it comes down to: If you have to ask, you'll never understand.
You probably break several laws in doing so, you definitely invalidate your car lease or warranty, and you probably invalidate your insurance as well.
For the most part, modding your car is perfectly legal, as long as you use a little common sense. As long as you can meet the safety, noise, and emissions standards, you can pretty much do what you want.
Modding a leased car is unwise, unless you plan to buy the car at the end of the lease. (Actually, leasing a car is pretty unwise in the first place, but that's another discussion.)
Warranty issues are more of a grey area. Supposedly, a warranty company must prove that a modification caused the problem before the can reject a claim, but I suspect you'd have a hell of a fight if the warranty company really wants to dig in. A serious modder is most likely savvy enough to make his own repairs, and doesn't have much need for a warranty. I'm sure this is more of a problem, however, now that modding is getting more mainstream and popular.
I'm not aware of anything in auto insurance policies about modifying a car, except they will only cover original equipment unless you get a rider for aftermarket add-ons. I'm sure if they felt it was a problem, insurance companies would start checking up and cracking down on modders.
Besides, how confident are you that you'd never screw up?
Modding anything holds the same risk. Screw up overclocking your Athlon, and you could fry the chip. You just use common sense, understand the risks of what you're doing, and don't run home crying if something goes boom.
You don't know the half of it. I'm just a black-box tester, so I don't know all the gory details, but it turns out that there cases where this new feature can prevent legitimate apps from running. It throws up a nice little message about how it's protecting you, and then crashes the app. The workaround is fairly simple (you can manually exclude the app from the protection), but we're left with a choice between patching our entire product line going back however many versions or fielding a zillion tech support calls. Not much fun, either way.
It's the only way to tweak a stock engine.
ECM mods are one way to increase performance, and are important for anyone serious about it, but they're hardly the only way. Simple intake and exhaust mods can yield non-trivial gains, when done properly. And tweaking the power adder on turbo- and supercharged engines can yield significant gains, even with the stock ECM.
Sadly, this sub-set is becoming increasingly large and more mainstream. I saw some show on MTV the other day, where they would take somebody's beat up old car and soup it up. The show I saw they took some guy's '86 Cutlass Supreme... paint, rims, tires, interior, sunroof, DVD, PS2, karoke machine. As far as we saw on the show, they never so much as opened the hood. So now it's a really sharp looking Cutlass with an 18-year-old V6 with God-knows-how-many thousand miles on it.
I wouldn't make such an analogy anywhere other than slashdot, but I could feel that the load average on my brain was as high as it could be. I didn't have any free cycles to think about my day, or have a song in my head, or think of my next joke, as I usually do.
Scary thought... the hook from "Hey Ya" pops into your head and you slam into a tree.
Of course, if you get him involved in role playing games, he'll still get laughed at for having uncombed hair. He'll just have geeky friends with uncombed hair to gripe to when it happens.
Then again, I guess that's how I survived high school.
Oh... my... God... those are the coolest things I have ever seen. Too bad I'm too heavy for the springs. Then again, maybe 250lbs flying through the air is not such a great idea, anyway.
Actually, I don't think Zaphod with an American accent is all that far off. I always took Zaphod's character to be a parody of the stereotypical American anyway.