And now a word from our content provider.
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 2, Funny
In other news, the makers of MAKE magazine sue the makers of the popular command "make", forcing hunders of thousands of l{u,i}n{i,u}x users to type "eckyeckyeckySHAZAM" instead.
Man pages proved to be inconclusive and no help to confused sysadmins.
From the looks of it, the real issue here is the fact that the people of CR don't want to pay the prices of the local telco anymore, and as a way to rebel against that (unless the telco also owns the xDSL lines) they can now with Skype et al. The problem is such that the telco happens to also have the control of the police and decisionmakers of the country, so it's a small step to easily criminalize anything that threatens the monopoly.
What's next, opening up government sponsored gameservers and criminalizing people that want to run their own local fps server?
Good idea, but i'm waiting for the first batch of viruses or whatever to disable this rootkit. Probably won't take long either, stuff like this is begging for a bunch of attacks from the hacker community.
But it's a good start, so that johnny q spammer won't be able to hijack as many sites as he had been doing previously. Good work, sysinternals!
For how long will bottom-feeders like this be able to profit off of laziness of others? I'm sure most of these domains are semi-hijacked (even hotmail was sort of in danger of expiring once) when the owner forgets to renew such things for even a few days.
But hey, i'm sure users who go to hardwareinfo.com or any of the other "hijacked" sites will be more than happy to click on a few porn banners like a caffeine addled squirrel.
While Intel recently made this impossible via their Speedstep technology, Cyrix is right on the bleeding edge of multitaskable (computing/ cooking) CPU's. For this, i salute them.
What actually constitutes broadband according to this trainwreck of a law? Is it the medium of delivery (over cable tv lines), datarates or something else (Chicken entrails)? And what about wireless? Surely this won't bring the hammer down on some of the free wireless initiatives that have been popping up? And what about people who unknowingly share their wireless connections with whoever just happens to be in range?
I seriously question the sanity and uncorruptability of whoever dreamed up this telco wet dream of a bill. At any rate, I see long legal battles up ahead, followed by more stories about how this bill is being used to strongarm small communities into paying up the ass to the same companies as get mentioned in the article. When will some kind of authority bring these companies that lobby for legislation to only benefit themselves and at the same time stifle any kind of good initiatives for the normal citizens?
For an article that supposedly showcases "The future of gaming", their current fact checking leaves something to be desired. Afaik, the latest revisions of the xbox still have a harddrive inside. The fact that the XBOX 2 will likely not have one, is not one of cost cutting, but presumably a measure to cut off rampant piracy that is going on with the current iteration. Also the choice for the PPC platform adds credibility to this theory.
Also, the DS supports pseudo surround sound as showcased by Mario DS. Before that, a company called Q-sound made it possible to have pseudo surround via the same phase shifting techniques. And there is no guarantee that ANY of the things mentioned get used somewhere down the line (The machines themselves being subject to constant changes in architecture).
I'm not much of a BASIC programmer, but i fail to see how this would seriously worry the people that make RealBasic. If they don't want to see the patented operator in their language, then I'm guessing neither willmost of the other BASIC vendors. Hence, Microsoft will have built another one of their famous Islands (word macro language, implementations of various standards in IE being other islands) that won't be so easy to turn into a Continent (the dominance of IE in the browser market) of Vendor Lock-in.
And thus Microsoft will have another patent paper to toss onto the pile like so many unwanted gelatine Desserts.
While i don't agree with Apple's too strong stance on this (if it was an RTM copy of Tiger it would be different), BUT the portrait being painted of him as a samaritan made me very nauseous. I doubt volunteers at hospitals are exempt of NDA's, copyrights and other lala fairytales dreamed up by our corporate friends.
Bottom line: he should have known better, but Apple shouldn't be giving themselves bad press by continuing. They probably won't now after outcries like this, preferring to show some teeth to discourage potential "innocent" uploaders leaking more stuff, then back off to act as a "Benevolent" corporate entity. Maybe Steve Jobs would do some p.r. by volunteering at the same place as mr. Gentleman Pirate?
It looks ugly. There, i said it. Now let me explain
While i like the design, it just looks a little like a box on a stand (which it is). Also it looks pretty unstable. This is compounded by the fact that it will have cables hanging off of it (like the dongle for connecting a vga monitor) and the overall smallness of the stand.
What i do like very much are the nice connectivity options (audio out via sp-dif) and the amount of screen real estate you get.
Let this not suck as much as the virtual boy does (or did, rather). The design struck me as really cool and retro, and the 2nd screen can add alot of stuff to games (What exactly is left as an exercise to the reader).
Apart from the usual remix of mario/ sonic/ rpg's, nintendo could make a nice lineup with a compilation of sorts from old game & watch title, if they're not as stingy as the current lineup of flashback NES titles, and bundle a few nice games together for cheap.
Then they could remake the look of the portable to look like the game & watch machines themselves, instant retro look and feel (Much more than the GBA nes remake).
Having Jello Biafra at these kinds of conventions is a really good idea, and one that seems to go down extremely well.
I hope they mp3 the speeches again, as i remember them doing with Biafra's last talk in 2002 i believe. Also this speech was brought out on his 'Become the media' spoken word album, which i recommend to anyone.
It's easy to see why the music industry is freaking out. For YEARS there was no real alternative (face it, your collection of creedence tapes doesnt hold candle quality wise to an lp, especially when they get stolen for some reason) to the music that the crackde^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrecord labels put out, until there was mp3. Suddenly, distribution was convenient and doable without a loss of quality between generations. You bet your ass they're gonna fight!
After all, it's not to their advantage to have the music that people really like (And not the crap that gets fed into the public via Clearchannel channels) out there, cheap and uncontrolled. I bet they are going to find even more ways to a). squeeze more cash out of the artists AND the consumers. b). lobby for even tighter restrictions on copying (dmca, italian gvt. handing out jail sentences). All because of the goddamn arrogance of a few satin baseball jackets in the big offices that thought their 'dope' should be the only stuff that young people should smoke/ listen to.
I think there is somewhat of a divide in the browsing market. On the one hand we have the swiss cheese solution, held reasonably firmly into place by a stream of FUD, corporate investments and scared PHB'S.
Next we have the webdevelopers that only care about IE compatibility. Some may care about other browsers, but usually as an afterthought.
Ofcourse this can be a right pain in the rear to fight this. The recent stream of exploits against various IE versions have started to create an anti- IE stance. What needs to be done is create the awareness that IE is unsafe, and now even abandoned by MS themselves until after their duke-nukem forever OS comes out. We(The people "in the know") must bring this our superiors attention that IE just isn't gonna cut it next year (or the year afterwards). It's not gonna be easy, but i'm sure we can have an impact.
I believe this will create a lot of resentment towards Symbian in the long run. The testing basically only gives you a guarantee that it will not run up your phonebill and or delete your range of oh-so cool ringtones/ sounds/ wallpapers/ whatevers. As the Gartner article points out, no work is being done to ensure usability, or even if the product is useful.
It probably also means the developers get the green light to put huge "SYMBIAN APPROVED!!!!1" stickers on their products, which will be misleading to Joe Average PDA/CELL user. This in turn creates alot of resentment when the advertised product doesn't live up to the hype (that symbian indirectly helped create via the sticker), they will feel burned on the product and ultimately on Symbian products.
Hell, even MS certified drivers have snuck by that made stuff break.
The way i see it, the basic principle of determining frequencies by using a step-up board is pretty common. I didn't more than skim the patent, but it seems to me this kind of stuff has been used for years in a similar sort of way in radio's and other tuning equipment.
So either these guys are gonna be the SCO of the semi-conductor world, or their crack is pretty good.
Honestly, what use does one have for such a large mailbox? I'm afraid to think what will happen if this would go live without too much restrictions. The warez guys would be all over this. Then it will be cut & cut until it's basically useless (look at what say geocities have had to do to curb piracy). Still, i'd like to get an account when it goes live (and any storage above say, 1G isn't useful to me.)
For SCO, any publicity is good publicity. It's basically all they have left, to be a blip on the stock market that shoots up a quarter of a point, to prolong the company (not to mention the suffering of the OSS community) one more hour/ day/ weer/ $TIME.
What else to do if your profitable business branch has been run into the ground by McBride types/ free/ better alternatives.
Google is just going to redirect all searches from the ligitious bastards to this money hungry bitch. Does this also mean that when gameshows ask questions about the googol that they are going to get sued? I saw a program about the english version of "weekend millionaires" when someone cheated and won a meeeeeeeeellion dollars from a googol related answer. Does that mean she can sue the pants off of that guy? (who cheated and got shit on by everybody, and rightly so).
Although it sounds like a viable economy on paper, in reality the Everquest economy is extremely fickle, as you can expect in a game. Whenever games & money mix, trouble ensues. I think back to the beginning of the magic the gathering and the subsequent market that sort of grew out of that(and spawned several huge retailers like The Blue Troll). Although in this case the "economy" that evolves from a game is a little bit more viable (real property vs. virtual property), it's still unstable in the sense that it is extremely dangerous (today's prize card/ uber item is yesterday's filler/ twink item). I wouldn't in a million years ever think that anybody could make a 'living' off of EQ in the same way magic(and some other card games) has. Couple this with the evilness of SOE et all, and you have a recipe for disaster.
While i love rpc1.org (been using their custom firmware for my nec-1300A with good results), this sounds more like a mostly untested, evil kludge of a hack. They _might_ be able to stabilize it, but i for one don't welcome our new faster-dvd burning overlords. The last thing you want is a fast deteriorating 2nd layer that dvd players will choke on, and data will become corrupt faster than you can say "Wow, these blanks were expensive". And all for what, the convenience of not having to swap out your pirated copy of lotr halfway through the big smoochy scene between aragorn & that elf chick. I'll keep using my old, boring as fuck single layer burner for now.
I just hope they can keep this out of the hands of the police. They would LOVE to get their hands on a database like this (even with the inevitable false positives you get when people just want to prank the system with mcbride/ hello.jpg type stuff). If you think i'm being too serious about this, think of the blurred lines between the media and serious business that is already the case in some countries.
Keeping in the vein of the article, spot the quote: "Now i can feel like Matt Dillon instead of an asshole."
I doubt it. They're asking sysadmins, not some kind of demographic like women barbers.
The disproportionate amount of slashdot readers who are in fact sysadmins will be (on average) just as well paid as non slashdot reading sysadmins (is this making it sound like a cult to anyone yet?).
Imo this new "multiple cpu's per chip" is the way forward. And the huge power savings is an added bonus.
One question springs to mind though, how much performance can you gain by using this technique? i mean, sooner or later you will hit the limits of say, the memory bus or the graphics bus or whatever(speaking in layman's terms obviously), especially in environments where power consumption is an issue, and huge memory banks take alot of power to keep them refreshed. Still, i welcome the development, smp type deals can make a computing experience easier to cope with during intensive use like compiling and other cpu intensive tasks.
In other news, the makers of MAKE magazine sue the makers of the popular command "make", forcing hunders of thousands of l{u,i}n{i,u}x users to type "eckyeckyeckySHAZAM" instead. Man pages proved to be inconclusive and no help to confused sysadmins.
What's next, opening up government sponsored gameservers and criminalizing people that want to run their own local fps server?
But it's a good start, so that johnny q spammer won't be able to hijack as many sites as he had been doing previously. Good work, sysinternals!
But hey, i'm sure users who go to hardwareinfo.com or any of the other "hijacked" sites will be more than happy to click on a few porn banners like a caffeine addled squirrel.
While Intel recently made this impossible via their Speedstep technology, Cyrix is right on the bleeding edge of multitaskable (computing/ cooking) CPU's. For this, i salute them.
I seriously question the sanity and uncorruptability of whoever dreamed up this telco wet dream of a bill. At any rate, I see long legal battles up ahead, followed by more stories about how this bill is being used to strongarm small communities into paying up the ass to the same companies as get mentioned in the article. When will some kind of authority bring these companies that lobby for legislation to only benefit themselves and at the same time stifle any kind of good initiatives for the normal citizens?
Also, the DS supports pseudo surround sound as showcased by Mario DS. Before that, a company called Q-sound made it possible to have pseudo surround via the same phase shifting techniques. And there is no guarantee that ANY of the things mentioned get used somewhere down the line (The machines themselves being subject to constant changes in architecture).
And thus Microsoft will have another patent paper to toss onto the pile like so many unwanted gelatine Desserts.
Bottom line: he should have known better, but Apple shouldn't be giving themselves bad press by continuing. They probably won't now after outcries like this, preferring to show some teeth to discourage potential "innocent" uploaders leaking more stuff, then back off to act as a "Benevolent" corporate entity. Maybe Steve Jobs would do some p.r. by volunteering at the same place as mr. Gentleman Pirate?
While i like the design, it just looks a little like a box on a stand (which it is). Also it looks pretty unstable. This is compounded by the fact that it will have cables hanging off of it (like the dongle for connecting a vga monitor) and the overall smallness of the stand.
What i do like very much are the nice connectivity options (audio out via sp-dif) and the amount of screen real estate you get.
Let this not suck as much as the virtual boy does (or did, rather). The design struck me as really cool and retro, and the 2nd screen can add alot of stuff to games (What exactly is left as an exercise to the reader). Apart from the usual remix of mario/ sonic/ rpg's, nintendo could make a nice lineup with a compilation of sorts from old game & watch title, if they're not as stingy as the current lineup of flashback NES titles, and bundle a few nice games together for cheap. Then they could remake the look of the portable to look like the game & watch machines themselves, instant retro look and feel (Much more than the GBA nes remake).
Having Jello Biafra at these kinds of conventions is a really good idea, and one that seems to go down extremely well. I hope they mp3 the speeches again, as i remember them doing with Biafra's last talk in 2002 i believe. Also this speech was brought out on his 'Become the media' spoken word album, which i recommend to anyone.
After all, it's not to their advantage to have the music that people really like (And not the crap that gets fed into the public via Clearchannel channels) out there, cheap and uncontrolled. I bet they are going to find even more ways to a). squeeze more cash out of the artists AND the consumers. b). lobby for even tighter restrictions on copying (dmca, italian gvt. handing out jail sentences). All because of the goddamn arrogance of a few satin baseball jackets in the big offices that thought their 'dope' should be the only stuff that young people should smoke/ listen to.
Next we have the webdevelopers that only care about IE compatibility. Some may care about other browsers, but usually as an afterthought.
Ofcourse this can be a right pain in the rear to fight this. The recent stream of exploits against various IE versions have started to create an anti- IE stance. What needs to be done is create the awareness that IE is unsafe, and now even abandoned by MS themselves until after their duke-nukem forever OS comes out. We(The people "in the know") must bring this our superiors attention that IE just isn't gonna cut it next year (or the year afterwards). It's not gonna be easy, but i'm sure we can have an impact.
It probably also means the developers get the green light to put huge "SYMBIAN APPROVED!!!!1" stickers on their products, which will be misleading to Joe Average PDA/CELL user. This in turn creates alot of resentment when the advertised product doesn't live up to the hype (that symbian indirectly helped create via the sticker), they will feel burned on the product and ultimately on Symbian products.
Hell, even MS certified drivers have snuck by that made stuff break.
So either these guys are gonna be the SCO of the semi-conductor world, or their crack is pretty good.
Honestly, what use does one have for such a large mailbox? I'm afraid to think what will happen if this would go live without too much restrictions. The warez guys would be all over this. Then it will be cut & cut until it's basically useless (look at what say geocities have had to do to curb piracy). Still, i'd like to get an account when it goes live (and any storage above say, 1G isn't useful to me.)
For SCO, any publicity is good publicity. It's basically all they have left, to be a blip on the stock market that shoots up a quarter of a point, to prolong the company (not to mention the suffering of the OSS community) one more hour/ day/ weer/ $TIME. What else to do if your profitable business branch has been run into the ground by McBride types/ free/ better alternatives.
Google is just going to redirect all searches from the ligitious bastards to this money hungry bitch. Does this also mean that when gameshows ask questions about the googol that they are going to get sued? I saw a program about the english version of "weekend millionaires" when someone cheated and won a meeeeeeeeellion dollars from a googol related answer. Does that mean she can sue the pants off of that guy? (who cheated and got shit on by everybody, and rightly so).
Although it sounds like a viable economy on paper, in reality the Everquest economy is extremely fickle, as you can expect in a game. Whenever games & money mix, trouble ensues. I think back to the beginning of the magic the gathering and the subsequent market that sort of grew out of that(and spawned several huge retailers like The Blue Troll). Although in this case the "economy" that evolves from a game is a little bit more viable (real property vs. virtual property), it's still unstable in the sense that it is extremely dangerous (today's prize card/ uber item is yesterday's filler/ twink item). I wouldn't in a million years ever think that anybody could make a 'living' off of EQ in the same way magic(and some other card games) has. Couple this with the evilness of SOE et all, and you have a recipe for disaster.
While i love rpc1.org (been using their custom firmware for my nec-1300A with good results), this sounds more like a mostly untested, evil kludge of a hack. They _might_ be able to stabilize it, but i for one don't welcome our new faster-dvd burning overlords. The last thing you want is a fast deteriorating 2nd layer that dvd players will choke on, and data will become corrupt faster than you can say "Wow, these blanks were expensive". And all for what, the convenience of not having to swap out your pirated copy of lotr halfway through the big smoochy scene between aragorn & that elf chick. I'll keep using my old, boring as fuck single layer burner for now.
I just hope they can keep this out of the hands of the police. They would LOVE to get their hands on a database like this (even with the inevitable false positives you get when people just want to prank the system with mcbride/ hello.jpg type stuff). If you think i'm being too serious about this, think of the blurred lines between the media and serious business that is already the case in some countries. Keeping in the vein of the article, spot the quote: "Now i can feel like Matt Dillon instead of an asshole."
I doubt it. They're asking sysadmins, not some kind of demographic like women barbers. The disproportionate amount of slashdot readers who are in fact sysadmins will be (on average) just as well paid as non slashdot reading sysadmins (is this making it sound like a cult to anyone yet?).
Imo this new "multiple cpu's per chip" is the way forward. And the huge power savings is an added bonus. One question springs to mind though, how much performance can you gain by using this technique? i mean, sooner or later you will hit the limits of say, the memory bus or the graphics bus or whatever(speaking in layman's terms obviously), especially in environments where power consumption is an issue, and huge memory banks take alot of power to keep them refreshed. Still, i welcome the development, smp type deals can make a computing experience easier to cope with during intensive use like compiling and other cpu intensive tasks.
Strap Scott Richter to this baby, and voila: SPAM-Radio! (would make a nice splash on the ground also.)