Can't be done. There are two ways to cure cybersquatting. Either 1) don't buy their wares and let them find real work, or 2) use the internet for what it should be used for: finding their personal information and subsequently using it to ruin their lives.
we have a big spam/scammer problem
No, "we" don't. Spam can be made unprofitable by raising the signal-to-noise ratio. Fight spam with spam by sending 10 fake spams for every spam you recieve. Eventually, people will detune themselves to it and it will die. Scams aren't my problem, and they shouldn't be a public problem, either. If you're dumb enough to give away your bank account information to thieves and the thieves clean out your account, well, tough shit. (However, if my bank gives my info away, that's a different story. My bank's ass should be on the line in that case.)
It's simply a case of retarded and/or unconcerned people attempting to use a tool they have no real ability to use. Get the morons off the network. (That goes for road networks, too. We could lose some of the asshat drivers on the roads and it wouldn't hurt my feelings any.) I'm only 27, but, in short, YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!
It hit 1.0 a while back (currently at 1.0.4, I think), and it's definitely the one to beat.
My only gripe with it so far is that it won't kick my Yahoo user off another client in the (frequent) case that I forgot to shut down my IM client at work and try to use it at home. It has no problem ousting MSN or AIM, and other clients have no trouble with Yahoo either, so I know it's possible. Probably just a bug.
OpenDoc didn't fail, exactly. It was just Microsoft's fastest embrace/extend/extinguish victim. OpenDoc was OLE before OLE was. In fact, OLE is OpenDoc, I would bet. Remember, OpenDoc was aimed squarely at making MS Office for the Mac have a single file format ("MS Office" format containing OLE-like sub-documents containing Excel/Word/Whatever data) and allowing every app to use it equally (high crimes against Microsoft). Interesting how you can now add a space into its name and append "ument Format" and you have Microsoft's latest panic/competitor, which aims to do the same thing.
The quiz show was mostly about "chip butty" (a french-fry and ketchup sandwich, i think) and there was a good question in there about "misery".
Q: "Does misery love company?" (The correct answer is "No, Misery is the show-me state!", IIRC. If it's not the correct answer, it's certainly the best.)
I looked a while back (after discovering OpenTTD) and found nothing. I was hoping there was someone as enthusiastic about SC/2k/3/4 as the rather lively Transport Tycoon community.
SC4 had all kinds of good stuff that SC3 didn't have. Like Regions. Regions are the best idea to hit SimCity in ages. Also good are the technical limitations that came along with Regions, allowing you to create a pollutionless residential area right next to a smog-filled industrial area, yet have neither town complaining about pollution (no pollution in the residential town, no citizens to complain about it in the industrial town).
The micromanagement thing is horrible, though. Why should the mayor have to order fire trucks to the scene of a fire? The school bus coverage thing is child's play by comparison. It's just one more aspect to design your city around, set the setting, then forget. Worse is when schools shut down due to a teachers strike from underfunding. Worse than that is when the same happens because of overcrowding (this essentially un-does any bus coverage settings you made and/or designed your city around). It doesn't scale back the effectiveness of the school... no, it shuts down. That's just stupid.
If they'd just fix SC4's stupid bugs and logic faults (and the micromanagement issues), I'd buy an upgrade. Oh, and throw in seasonal graphics like the SNES version. And if there's time and budget to spare, upgrade the graphics and allow higher resolutions. Release it as SimCity 5. I'd buy it.
I've had no problem with SC4 performance on my PC. It's an Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton) on an A7N8X Deluxe, 1GB DDR333, with Radeon 9600XT (8xAGP), running Win2k. It's not top of the line, but it was when SC4 came out.
The main problem with SC4 is that it's horribly unbalanced. You can't keep anyone happy without spending money that you can't recoup. Occasionally, your town will just stop growing. Period. The only way to get it growing again is to tear the holy living crap out of something, get everyone pissed off at you, then put it all back. This somehow elevates you to "awesome mayor" status, since Sims apparently have no long-term memory. The problem is, it also costs money that would've otherwise bought the hospital or police station that you actually need. So then your city starts growing again, but they're mildly pissed, and you're short on cash. Worst case (and unfortunately, also the most likely case), you'll have a population boom you can't afford. That spells imminent doom and decay for your city, and probably another growth stall. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Swinging the balance the other way is the "region" thing. You build a corner of a town with nothing but residential areas. Go to the town next to it and build nothing but industrial areas and power plants. Connect them with roads, and you get a happy, employed residential population with 0 pollution, and a polluted industrial area with 0 population to complain about it. Pump water in the residential area and pipe it to the industrial area and you can almost get a balanced cash flow in both areas (as well as clean water in a polluted area). Almost. The residential area will soon grow to unstable proportions, and the industrial area will soon be swimming in cash you can't transfer to the residential area that needs it. The water payments won't make it possible, either, so you're pretty much screwed at this point. I'd love SC4 if money didn't become such a limiting issue so soon.
And that's only made worse by the way city services shut down (teachers/doctors strike) when they're underfunded or overloaded. If you could just tell the citizens to make do with poor services, that'd be one thing. But if you try, the services shut down completely and everybody gets pissed. Yet another stupid balance issue.
Argh! I wish they'd just fix the old one. I'd even pay for a SimCity 4 v2.0 if they'd just fix it! Don't wow me with graphics or new gimmicks! Just make the already good game better! ARGH!!!
what's the advantage if you don't have any security problems with Windows?
The joy of being able to use the internet and still have no security problems.
Re:What's changed in 30 years?
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Macs have always been PC's. They are computers, and they are personal (except for the servers, and even then, the recent ones could be used as a workstation). They are not and never will be "IBM PC Compatible", though right now is the closest they've ever been.
Just to remind you... the IBM PC lived and died by its BIOS. Without a BIOS, it can't be an "IBM PC Compatible". The Mac used to live (and potentially die) by its ROM, but Apple wisely turned it into an intangible brand and got rid of that thing.
The Mac Pro is the only Mac currently built for any serious upgrades or expansion. If you click that link, you'll find that the case is anything but compact, and is quite probably the best case ever for upgrades.
My DSL service has a dynamic IP. The lease length is about a week. Regardless of whether I leave it on or not, it gets a new IP at least once a week.
Re:Public DNS is corrupt, but Private DNS is subli
on
DNS Complexity
·
· Score: 1
I don't think that we can legally take the names back, anyway.
I'm pretty sure that ICANN. All puns aside, think about what that acronym means. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They get to assign the names and numbers, and therefore they also have the authority to un-assign those names and numbers. ICANN giveth, ICANN taketh away. Ugh. That one wasn't intended. I'll stop now, but hopefully you get my point.
Again, you only need to look at the fuzzy-brain effect of bad Powerpoint presentations to see just that in practice. Forced to try to process two streams at the same time (speech and text), people just make a hash of both.
There's way more to it than that. The brain is an efficient organizer and sorter. It also tends to be great at estimating the relative importance of things and discarding the lesser ones it can't deal with. Thus, 99.999999999% of the time, I ignore Powerpoint presentations. It goes in my eyes, the brain deciphers the signal, decides that the Powerpoint stuff is useless drivel, and it continues processing the audio (in parallel!) and terminates the visual processing thread. Shortly thereafter, the audio signal is also determined to be of minimal benefit and is discarded as useless drivel as well, leaving more processing time for other things. Things like pondering the answer to the age-old question, "What's for lunch?"
Split program processing into "1 event dispatcher + N worker threads", like Apache or Squid. This by itself would be a good way to reduce blocking in most applications. Why should the interface be locked up when expensive processing is happening in a program? Maybe while Photoshop/GIMP runs some filter on my image, I'd like to browse the help documents or scroll around the viewport.
This is probably the simplest way to parallelize your code. I wrote a bulk emailer in Java once (for messages generated by the system I was building, not for spam!) and it was only sending about 2 emails a second because the SMTP server was running on an overburdened box. This "emailer" was also capable of building PDF's and sending them to a networked printer to be snail-mailed. So I built an "EmailThread" object and a "PrintThread" object (each implementing Thread) and had the main program instantiate thousands of these at a time. Each object was responsible for updating its status in the database (the DB server was alone on its box, so performance wasn't an issue), performing its "send" operation, and terminating. Probably 50 lines of code in total. The controller spawned an object, set some data in it, and called the threaded object's Run(). Thus the emailer could operate at the speed the SMTP server was capable of, yet not get tangled in itself (the controller was cronned to run every 5 minutes), and not destroy the message queue in the database.
I had never used any sort of parallel programming tactics before, and this was easy enough even for me to understand without any help (nobody else that worked on that project had any clue about multithreading either, since you don't use it much in webapps).
Slashdot Mirror
eradicate cybersquatters by legislation
Can't be done. There are two ways to cure cybersquatting. Either 1) don't buy their wares and let them find real work, or 2) use the internet for what it should be used for: finding their personal information and subsequently using it to ruin their lives.
we have a big spam/scammer problem
No, "we" don't. Spam can be made unprofitable by raising the signal-to-noise ratio. Fight spam with spam by sending 10 fake spams for every spam you recieve. Eventually, people will detune themselves to it and it will die. Scams aren't my problem, and they shouldn't be a public problem, either. If you're dumb enough to give away your bank account information to thieves and the thieves clean out your account, well, tough shit. (However, if my bank gives my info away, that's a different story. My bank's ass should be on the line in that case.)
It's simply a case of retarded and/or unconcerned people attempting to use a tool they have no real ability to use. Get the morons off the network. (That goes for road networks, too. We could lose some of the asshat drivers on the roads and it wouldn't hurt my feelings any.) I'm only 27, but, in short, YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!
Dropbear-in-a-box.
They won't come after you. Or breathe.
It hit 1.0 a while back (currently at 1.0.4, I think), and it's definitely the one to beat.
My only gripe with it so far is that it won't kick my Yahoo user off another client in the (frequent) case that I forgot to shut down my IM client at work and try to use it at home. It has no problem ousting MSN or AIM, and other clients have no trouble with Yahoo either, so I know it's possible. Probably just a bug.
OpenDoc didn't fail, exactly. It was just Microsoft's fastest embrace/extend/extinguish victim. OpenDoc was OLE before OLE was. In fact, OLE is OpenDoc, I would bet. Remember, OpenDoc was aimed squarely at making MS Office for the Mac have a single file format ("MS Office" format containing OLE-like sub-documents containing Excel/Word/Whatever data) and allowing every app to use it equally (high crimes against Microsoft). Interesting how you can now add a space into its name and append "ument Format" and you have Microsoft's latest panic/competitor, which aims to do the same thing.
That level is entitled "Villi People".
The quiz show was mostly about "chip butty" (a french-fry and ketchup sandwich, i think) and there was a good question in there about "misery".
Q: "Does misery love company?" (The correct answer is "No, Misery is the show-me state!", IIRC. If it's not the correct answer, it's certainly the best.)
True. It makes for a poor game, though.
I looked a while back (after discovering OpenTTD) and found nothing. I was hoping there was someone as enthusiastic about SC/2k/3/4 as the rather lively Transport Tycoon community.
No. I go so far as to actually like most of what SC4 had.
U-Drive-It was part of the expansion pack.
SC4 had all kinds of good stuff that SC3 didn't have. Like Regions. Regions are the best idea to hit SimCity in ages. Also good are the technical limitations that came along with Regions, allowing you to create a pollutionless residential area right next to a smog-filled industrial area, yet have neither town complaining about pollution (no pollution in the residential town, no citizens to complain about it in the industrial town).
The micromanagement thing is horrible, though. Why should the mayor have to order fire trucks to the scene of a fire? The school bus coverage thing is child's play by comparison. It's just one more aspect to design your city around, set the setting, then forget. Worse is when schools shut down due to a teachers strike from underfunding. Worse than that is when the same happens because of overcrowding (this essentially un-does any bus coverage settings you made and/or designed your city around). It doesn't scale back the effectiveness of the school... no, it shuts down. That's just stupid.
If they'd just fix SC4's stupid bugs and logic faults (and the micromanagement issues), I'd buy an upgrade. Oh, and throw in seasonal graphics like the SNES version. And if there's time and budget to spare, upgrade the graphics and allow higher resolutions. Release it as SimCity 5. I'd buy it.
I've had no problem with SC4 performance on my PC. It's an Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton) on an A7N8X Deluxe, 1GB DDR333, with Radeon 9600XT (8xAGP), running Win2k. It's not top of the line, but it was when SC4 came out.
The main problem with SC4 is that it's horribly unbalanced. You can't keep anyone happy without spending money that you can't recoup. Occasionally, your town will just stop growing. Period. The only way to get it growing again is to tear the holy living crap out of something, get everyone pissed off at you, then put it all back. This somehow elevates you to "awesome mayor" status, since Sims apparently have no long-term memory. The problem is, it also costs money that would've otherwise bought the hospital or police station that you actually need. So then your city starts growing again, but they're mildly pissed, and you're short on cash. Worst case (and unfortunately, also the most likely case), you'll have a population boom you can't afford. That spells imminent doom and decay for your city, and probably another growth stall. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Swinging the balance the other way is the "region" thing. You build a corner of a town with nothing but residential areas. Go to the town next to it and build nothing but industrial areas and power plants. Connect them with roads, and you get a happy, employed residential population with 0 pollution, and a polluted industrial area with 0 population to complain about it. Pump water in the residential area and pipe it to the industrial area and you can almost get a balanced cash flow in both areas (as well as clean water in a polluted area). Almost. The residential area will soon grow to unstable proportions, and the industrial area will soon be swimming in cash you can't transfer to the residential area that needs it. The water payments won't make it possible, either, so you're pretty much screwed at this point. I'd love SC4 if money didn't become such a limiting issue so soon.
And that's only made worse by the way city services shut down (teachers/doctors strike) when they're underfunded or overloaded. If you could just tell the citizens to make do with poor services, that'd be one thing. But if you try, the services shut down completely and everybody gets pissed. Yet another stupid balance issue.
Argh! I wish they'd just fix the old one. I'd even pay for a SimCity 4 v2.0 if they'd just fix it! Don't wow me with graphics or new gimmicks! Just make the already good game better! ARGH!!!
Quite well, I might add.
/. back in October, and I was hooked within about 5 minutes. It runs like a dream on a MBP 2.16/1GB/X1600.
Someone posted a link to OpenTTD on
Two words: Public Domain.
The GPL isn't free. BSD isn't free. They're both "copyleft" licenses.
The public domain is truly free, and once something is there, it can't go back into the private domain without a damned good reason.
what's the advantage if you don't have any security problems with Windows?
The joy of being able to use the internet and still have no security problems.
Macs have always been PC's. They are computers, and they are personal (except for the servers, and even then, the recent ones could be used as a workstation). They are not and never will be "IBM PC Compatible", though right now is the closest they've ever been.
Just to remind you... the IBM PC lived and died by its BIOS. Without a BIOS, it can't be an "IBM PC Compatible". The Mac used to live (and potentially die) by its ROM, but Apple wisely turned it into an intangible brand and got rid of that thing.
The Mac Pro is the only Mac currently built for any serious upgrades or expansion. If you click that link, you'll find that the case is anything but compact, and is quite probably the best case ever for upgrades.
Not likely. Let's bash some heads.
Yes. She should "write" my "code".
Though I guess it could be considered a meatspace write operation to conceive offspring...
I suppose a "materialize a 5'4 asian Girl Friend" command would be useful too. I think we should push for that in the next revision.
Once that's implemented, the whole vi vs. Emacs thing is over.
Hot asian girlfriend FTW!
I think Apple could sue Microsoft over the iSnot patent.
So double ROT13 encryption is stronger than single ROT13, right?
No, but if I ROT17, then AES, then ROT3, you're probably going to be spending a few nights at work.
Yeah, Heidi is such a slut.
My DSL service has a dynamic IP. The lease length is about a week. Regardless of whether I leave it on or not, it gets a new IP at least once a week.
I don't think that we can legally take the names back, anyway.
I'm pretty sure that ICANN. All puns aside, think about what that acronym means. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They get to assign the names and numbers, and therefore they also have the authority to un-assign those names and numbers. ICANN giveth, ICANN taketh away. Ugh. That one wasn't intended. I'll stop now, but hopefully you get my point.
Again, you only need to look at the fuzzy-brain effect of bad Powerpoint presentations to see just that in practice. Forced to try to process two streams at the same time (speech and text), people just make a hash of both.
There's way more to it than that. The brain is an efficient organizer and sorter. It also tends to be great at estimating the relative importance of things and discarding the lesser ones it can't deal with. Thus, 99.999999999% of the time, I ignore Powerpoint presentations. It goes in my eyes, the brain deciphers the signal, decides that the Powerpoint stuff is useless drivel, and it continues processing the audio (in parallel!) and terminates the visual processing thread. Shortly thereafter, the audio signal is also determined to be of minimal benefit and is discarded as useless drivel as well, leaving more processing time for other things. Things like pondering the answer to the age-old question, "What's for lunch?"
Split program processing into "1 event dispatcher + N worker threads", like Apache or Squid. This by itself would be a good way to reduce blocking in most applications. Why should the interface be locked up when expensive processing is happening in a program? Maybe while Photoshop/GIMP runs some filter on my image, I'd like to browse the help documents or scroll around the viewport.
This is probably the simplest way to parallelize your code. I wrote a bulk emailer in Java once (for messages generated by the system I was building, not for spam!) and it was only sending about 2 emails a second because the SMTP server was running on an overburdened box. This "emailer" was also capable of building PDF's and sending them to a networked printer to be snail-mailed. So I built an "EmailThread" object and a "PrintThread" object (each implementing Thread) and had the main program instantiate thousands of these at a time. Each object was responsible for updating its status in the database (the DB server was alone on its box, so performance wasn't an issue), performing its "send" operation, and terminating. Probably 50 lines of code in total. The controller spawned an object, set some data in it, and called the threaded object's Run(). Thus the emailer could operate at the speed the SMTP server was capable of, yet not get tangled in itself (the controller was cronned to run every 5 minutes), and not destroy the message queue in the database.
I had never used any sort of parallel programming tactics before, and this was easy enough even for me to understand without any help (nobody else that worked on that project had any clue about multithreading either, since you don't use it much in webapps).