All joking aside, they could institute an alert in between - a purple alert, if you will - it's sort of worse than a blue alert but not quite as bad as a red alert. Could be a mauve alert...
Google wasn't hacked, that's just your browser redirecting to google.com.net because.com was down - it's the default behaviour for Safari, as far as I recall, isn't it? (notice how http://www.google.com.net/ is the page your screenshot shows?). The real issue is the major DNS poisoning going on, seemingly centered around gulli.com, seemingly a German hacking/cracking site (not directly linking, possible spyware risk);
Open a terminal and run a whois on any major search site you can think of - google.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com, etc - you'll get results like:
matt@site-4:~$ whois altavista.com
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
Server Name: ALTAVISTA.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
IP Address: 80.190.192.4
Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH
Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net
Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net/
So wake up Slashdot! No need for the coverup, it wasn't just your baby Google that got damaged, there's something serious going on that definately is 'News for Nerds' and you're posting stories about stem cells (admittedly fairly important) and some loser being picky about his motherboard.
Mod me and all these other posts Offtopic, but please, editor on duty, whoever you are, give us someplace to discuss this.
It's the same for many major sites - check the whois data for Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, Altavista.com and others... All returning similar results seemingly centred around gulli.com, which appears to be a German (registered in Germany) hacking/cracking site. Pick a major search site and do a whois on it, they're all suffering.
Also, my whois is now responding with a message saying VeriSign's whois server is down - maybe they're trying to fix it, or it's been flooded with requests from curious./'ers (another story here.)
While confusing, the styling of the article title is correct - it's just the combination of capitalisation as is normal for titles with the names of the commands all being in lower-case. UNIX commands are case-sensitive, thus there is no commad called 'Cron', only 'cron', and it's good journalistic form to spell names for things with correct case, even if (in this example) it does make things a little confusing/AOL-ish
I stopped watching all trek shows back a few weeks after Deep Space Nine started.
I was a huge fan of Deep Space Nine, I thought it was an utterly fantastic show. Granted, it had too many plot themes based around Quark and the like that nobody really cared about, and also stands guilty for having one of the biggest deus ex machinas in history by having the Prophets make the enemy war-fleet disappear into thin air, but it had some very good moments, especially in the later series when the Dominion plot arc really panned out - if you really did stop watching Trek altogether just a few weeks into DS9, you missed out on a very good show once they worked out the right balance between Space-Opera and Sci-Fi action, something TNG had from almost the very beginning and Voyager/Enterprise never quite managed to find.
For the record, while I'd call myself a huge fan of Deep Space Nine, I'm only a casual fan of Trek in general - I couldn't recite facts about Dilithium crystals, but I could probably look them up in my DS9 Technical Manual that someone once bought for me;-)
It's not a joke about a train-wreck, the phrase 'train-wreck' is a phrase used to describe anything that has gone utterly and disasterously wrong. It's a phrase I use without thinking a lot of the time and it's part of acceptable language. I'm not going to spend all day every day watching every word I say for fear it could be construed as offensive by some group or another following events that happened halfway across the world.
Please, I'm sad the crash happened and I'm sorry people died - I always hate to see loss of life due to tragic accidents, and my thoughts go out to the victims, but please, my language is my language and I'll use it however I want - I wouldn't stoop to the level of cracking jokes about those poor people, but I'm not going to 'watch what I say' at all times to avoid using a phrase that someone just looking to be offended (which a lot of these super-politically-correct people are) might just be able to pull a self-righteous thought-wank out of.
Wouldn't that open them up to antitrust lawsuits? Anticompetetive actions and all..
Now I might have my understanding of what 'anticompetitive' means all wrong, or might simply misunderstand what 'antitrust' means, but anticompetitive how? Photoshop is not a true monopoly, it just happens to be the tool of choice for most professionals. If said professionals still want to use their Nikon gear if Adobe ripped support for them out of Photoshop, there are probably a dozen different software packages they could pick up - CorelDraw, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP team would all be ready and willing to work harder to support the Nikon diehards, and there are probably more lurking on the edges of my vague memory for products.
Microsoft having a 90%+ market dominance of the office suite market and making their formats proprietary so if companies switched to other vendors they wouldn't be able to read their data is anticompetitive. I fail to see how refusal to support a particular camera is anticompetitive, even if Photoshop had a 90% monopoly (which I doubt). The only way this could be construed as anticompetitive would be if, say, Adobe and Canon were in cahoots to make Photoshop only work with Canon cameras, which I very much doubt, too.
Editors, original posters... someone's dropped a loaded term in there, and it's the editor's job to pick up on these biases and change them so that hundreds of Slashdotters go off half-cocked at 'teh eval spyware companie' 'luring' innocent webfolk into their den of spying evilness...
As for the first sentence, it wasn't the usual 'go-on-mod-me-down', 'karma-to-burn' piece, I genuinely thought I'd get a Troll mod there for daring to question the evil of violating web privacy, even with the user's permission...:P
This is going to nuke my karma to all Hell, but what the hey...
A lot of Slashdotters are, as usual, not RTFA/web page in question and assuming that this is the usual spyware trick of clandestinely trojanised software pretending to be a legitimate tool - allow me to explain;
The word 'lure' used in the summary is a loaded term - it implies (in the context the editors used) that they are somehow using this free AntiVirus tool as a means of covertly installing spyware - This company is simply offering a free antivirus product if you accept the *up front agreement* that their little utility can spy on your web browsing habits - they're not doing anything clandestine here, they're just offering their service to you for free, so they can sell the results on to advertisers to recoup costs;
From the company's website: In exchange for having their Internet browsing and purchasing activity observed, members have access to free email virus scanning and other benefits.
This is just a new way of offering a product - "here, you can have this for free, but in exchange you've got to give us stuff we can sell to our avertisers" (though they promise not to sell personal info, so presumably they'll just be selling 'web trends' data) or rather, it's the same way that a lot of so-called 'adware' operates, only they're rarely this up-front.
Sure, it's spyware, but the text above is located right on their front page, is in easily-understandable English, and is not hidden, obscured of obfusicated in any way - if people want to give their permission for Marketscore to monitor their browsing in exchange for free software, who are/. to stop them? If you're concerned about web privacy, don't download it, but it's not like they're trying to trick anyone here.
I dont know it feels like I am one of those big shot buisness men walking the streets around the capital when I am waring a suit. On days when I don't wear a suit walking around the capital. I just feel like ordanary joe.
This is very true, and it rubs off on other people and changes how they react to you as well - A British sociologist once did research into this by dressing as a workman and standing outside a major British railway terminal asking for directions, and then repeating the experiment dressed in a formal business suit. He found that people were generally much more helpful and respectful to him when he was dressed in the business suit than when he was dressed as a workman - This shows that if you're looking to get people to agree with you or sell to you, you're better off wearing a suit as people tend to respond positively to that style of dress.
However, you could argue that standing outside a major London railway terminal is not a place to encounter many workmen, but many businessmen, however it may be more an issue of identification with others rather than a particular style commanding more respect, so perhaps you've got the right idea dressing like your customers - Hell, it's the approach I use:)
hardwarebeschleunigung = Hardware accelleration.
videoaufzeichnung = Video drawing/rendering.
There seriously wasn't an English site on this? and Babelfish is a useless translation engine anyway, I had to go back and read the original German article to avoid getting a headache - my German isn't perfect, but the English-with-German-technical-terms was addling my brain...
how is this news for nerds? Yes they probably used computers to do the research - but this is the type of news that goes into a health journal not/.
Slashdot is, contrary to popular opinion, more than a computer-nerd site - it's a site for all nerds - look at the categories availible! we have;
- Computer nerds
- Science nerds
- Space nerds
- Sci-Fi nerds
- Politics nerds
- Anime/RPG nerds
- Legal nerds
- Every other type of nerd imaginable.
Not every nerd out there is fascinated by computers, and we have many, many physicians/chemists/medical researchers among the near-million UIDs we have. While they might not fit the stereotypical 'nerd' image of a kid with bottle-bottom glasses sitting in his parents' basement, they are proud to call themselves nerds, and are likely to be deeply interested in stories such as this. Sure, this might not be news for your brand of nerdiness, but there are plenty of people out there different to you.
I think the gist the grandparent was trying to get across is that it is supposed to be a static text document for printing out, etc - a purpose which makes things like embedded music, video, etc obviously pointless. What the GP failed to take into account, however, was the fact that the Word format, like so many others, MS or otherwise, has been extended to do things far outside the scope for which they were originally created.
However, as Word is still primarily a letter- and other dead-tree-distribution tool, I do agree that it is a little silly to have embedded video, etc - The only reason we ever do it where I work is to sneak pr0n and music clips through the filters, which drop multimedia formats but let Word docs sail through. I've never seen anyone, geek or not, send me a Word document with an embedded video in for a purpose other than that - our PHB's are far more traditional, and do all their irritating all-singing, all-dancing multimedia eyesploder documents in PowerPoint anyway.
Refusal to support one of the biggest vectors of spyware infiltration is not arrogant, it is common sense, at least for the average desktop user.
For the business world, admittedly, with the entrenched position of ActiveX-based systems on corporate intranets, it's perhaps a little silly and a bit of a barrier to business adoption, but for home users one of the biggest complaints about Windows is the fact their machine can be 0wned by Virtual Bouncer, CoolWebSearch, ABetterInternet and God knows how many other drive-by-installed apps and toolbars just by visiting a slightly wrong-side-of-the-tracks website.
My ex-girlfriend was a 1337 hax0r... or at least she thought she was. Basically her 1337ness boiled down to having a few 'hacking tools' (nukers and the like) lying around in a folder on her Windows desktop, all (or almost all) of which were clearly just trojans. She had Norton AntiVirus installed, and it did it's valiant best to warn her that her 1337 hax0ring 't00lz' were doing nothing but fucking up her own box, but to no avail. There was no telling this girl that she wasn't a 1337 hax0r. A conversation to try to explain the concept of trojans to her went, as far as I can recall, something like this...
Me: You know those programs there are trojans, don't you? Her: No hun, they're my little proggies... and anyway, I've got antivirus, so can't damage my machine anyway! Me: You have antivirus? Surely that'd stop them running - how come you can still run them? Her: Oh, when I run them now I get a red box come up that tells me it's a dangerous program or whatever, but it has a 'Run Anyway' option so it's OK. Me: Umm.. you realise that choosing 'Run Anyway'... lets it do all the nasty stuff it was trying to do before the AntiVirus stopped it, don't you? Her: Yeah, but it's OK, cos it's AntiVirus! Me: Have you ever *run* a scan on it? Her: Yeah, but it deleted them all, and I had to download them all again! Then the boxes came back! Me: Because they're trying to tell you that they're fucking TROJANS! Her: But it's OK, I've got AntiVirus! Me: THAT'S WHAT THE FUCKING RED BOXES ARE! AND YOU'RE TELLING IT IT'S OK TO RUN THEM!
This went on for a good 20 minutes, went nowhere, and in the end I just went into the configuration and 'turned the red boxes off'. She was happy with that.
Her computer is fucked. She still thinks she's a 1337 hax0r.
It's cute now I'm not the one that has to clean it up.
That ignores the fact that Opera identifies as IE6 by default, and that seems to have a pretty big following around these parts. It also ignores the fact that Konqueror and the Mozilla babies can all, either through Preferences or extensions, identify as IE as well (unfortunately, I can't speak for Safari).
It also ignores all the Slashdotters reading the site while skiving off work on a locked-down Windows box, where IE is the only option availible. That's not to say 'OMG NO1 ON/. HAS IE J00 TROLL LOLZ0RZ!!!', but just suggesting that user-agent strings aren't the most accurate way of assessing who's using what browser, and even if they were they'd still not be a 100% reliable source of information on people's preferred browser.
Now it hurts me to say this, but a lot of what many other posters are saying about Debian dying off are true. Don't get me wrong, I like (K)Ubuntu - it's going to be the next distro I hop over to - but I love Debian like a brother - After disasterous misadventures with restrictive RedHat and Mandrake installs, Debian gave me just the right level of ease where I wanted it and power where it was needed. To me, RedHat and Mandrake just felt like an equal to Windows, but with Debian I genuinely felt more productive. I learnt my Linux skills on Debian and it still faithfully hauls my two main machines like a loyal pack-horse, but one I know is slowly preparing to lay down and go to sleep for that final time. Kubuntu is the next choice for my main work machine and will be slipped on next time I get around to doing it (which will probably be around August), and the reasons are simple;
- I want up-to-date packages. I want KDE 3.4 out-of-the-box, I want X.org and the full support for my graphics card it brings - I want all the things Debian doesn't have but with Ubuntu are just an apt-get away.
- I want to feel my system is modern. I know, I know, if I want cutting-edge, use Gentoo, but I don't want cutting-edge, I just want modern - with Debian I feel I'm being left behind.
- Better (easier) installation. I'm trying to prise my mother off of Windows, and while Ubuntu's installer still isnt GUI, it's not quite the CLI terror that is the Debian installer - how am I supposed to convert her to Linux when even the installer scares the shit out of her?
- More frequent updates. OK sure, they might have stupid names (Hoary Hedgehog?), but Ubuntu updates are frequent and on-time, and they keep things up to date - Debian updates seem very few and far between, and serve only to make sure the disto stays a good three or four years behind the competiton in the name of stability.
On the final point, granted, Debian is absolutely rock-solid, and for that reason if that reason alone I will be keeping it on my server box (sitting blinking in the corner as I type this), but as for my work box, it's getting Kubuntu as soon as I get round to it.
As I said, I love Debian like a brother, but I'm growing to love Kubuntu like the hot girl down the street (and no, not through a telephoto lens) - you love them both for different reasons, and while all your family loyalty might tell you to sit in with your brother, reality has to step in and tell you to go off with the sleeker, sexier option.
But what is your definition of pornography? is it going to be the same as Howard Stern's definition of pornography? is it going to be the same as the Relgious Right's definition? A lot of legitimate art contains nudity, or representations thereof - should art galleries be forced into the.xxx category? What about plastic surgery clinic websites with 'before' and 'after' pictures of things such as breast enlargement?
Sure, filtering out hardcore pornography would be made a lot easier if all sites were forced to use the.xxx domain (it would sure make managing the blocklist for the average large UK college easier, *ahem*), but there is a lot of overlap and disagreement over what constitutes 'pornography' or 'objectionable content', and I don't think one organization or committee should be handed that much power, especially with the way the Religious Right controls much of the power in America.
I'm personally of the opinion that the only person capable of making a judgement about what your kids can and can't see is you, and handing the power to do so over to a government committee is just letting the government raise your children for you, which would be a sad, sad day for parenthood. Just look at the furore Janet Jackson's nipple-slip caused amongst the Religious Right, who found it perfectly alright to proudly show 'shock and awe' footage of cities being devastated on prime-time TV - are these the people you want dictating what's right and wrong for your children to see? I consider the desensitizing effect of proudly showing off the devastation of enemies at war far more damaging to young minds than the odd celebrity nipple-slip
A lot of people in the world have a seriously messed-up system of morals, and they've already got far too much power - don't jump on the.xxx bandwagon - hardcore pornography needs to be kept away from kids, but a dedicated TLD for 'objectional content' is the first step on a very slippery slope.
Re:Last Live Musical Performance...
on
EZTree Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
But this is one instance where they can't claim that every download is a lost sale - in my case, there are bands who's music I enjoy that have long since disbanded, some of them many years before I was born, who I'd quite like to have heard give a live performance. I'd like to see the RIAA argue how me downloading a recording of a concert I wasn't alive to go to is a lost sale of, in this case, the concert ticket.
On behalf of the whole /. readership...
on
EU to Ban Macs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"...And I said, I don't care if they update again either, because I told, I told Jobs that if they update one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Ballmer too, because they've updated my SP two times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Jaguar to the Panther release, but I bought my Jaguar release because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the disc for the Jaguar release and it's not okay because if they update to 10.4 Tiger then I'll set the building on fire..."
(With apologies to the fine people who wrote, produced and directed Office Space)
Slashdot Mirror
All joking aside, they could institute an alert in between - a purple alert, if you will - it's sort of worse than a blue alert but not quite as bad as a red alert. Could be a mauve alert...
/inevitable.
Hitler was Austrian, dear.
Google wasn't hacked, that's just your browser redirecting to google.com.net because .com was down - it's the default behaviour for Safari, as far as I recall, isn't it? (notice how http://www.google.com.net/ is the page your screenshot shows?). The real issue is the major DNS poisoning going on, seemingly centered around gulli.com, seemingly a German hacking/cracking site (not directly linking, possible spyware risk);
.com and .net domains can now be registered
Open a terminal and run a whois on any major search site you can think of - google.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com, etc - you'll get results like:
matt@site-4:~$ whois altavista.com
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
Server Name: ALTAVISTA.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
IP Address: 80.190.192.4
Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH
Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net
Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net/
So wake up Slashdot! No need for the coverup, it wasn't just your baby Google that got damaged, there's something serious going on that definately is 'News for Nerds' and you're posting stories about stem cells (admittedly fairly important) and some loser being picky about his motherboard.
Mod me and all these other posts Offtopic, but please, editor on duty, whoever you are, give us someplace to discuss this.
It's the same for many major sites - check the whois data for Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, Altavista.com and others... All returning similar results seemingly centred around gulli.com, which appears to be a German (registered in Germany) hacking/cracking site. Pick a major search site and do a whois on it, they're all suffering.
./'ers (another story here.)
Also, my whois is now responding with a message saying VeriSign's whois server is down - maybe they're trying to fix it, or it's been flooded with requests from curious
While confusing, the styling of the article title is correct - it's just the combination of capitalisation as is normal for titles with the names of the commands all being in lower-case. UNIX commands are case-sensitive, thus there is no commad called 'Cron', only 'cron', and it's good journalistic form to spell names for things with correct case, even if (in this example) it does make things a little confusing/AOL-ish
I stopped watching all trek shows back a few weeks after Deep Space Nine started.
;-)
I was a huge fan of Deep Space Nine, I thought it was an utterly fantastic show. Granted, it had too many plot themes based around Quark and the like that nobody really cared about, and also stands guilty for having one of the biggest deus ex machinas in history by having the Prophets make the enemy war-fleet disappear into thin air, but it had some very good moments, especially in the later series when the Dominion plot arc really panned out - if you really did stop watching Trek altogether just a few weeks into DS9, you missed out on a very good show once they worked out the right balance between Space-Opera and Sci-Fi action, something TNG had from almost the very beginning and Voyager/Enterprise never quite managed to find.
For the record, while I'd call myself a huge fan of Deep Space Nine, I'm only a casual fan of Trek in general - I couldn't recite facts about Dilithium crystals, but I could probably look them up in my DS9 Technical Manual that someone once bought for me
It's not a joke about a train-wreck, the phrase 'train-wreck' is a phrase used to describe anything that has gone utterly and disasterously wrong. It's a phrase I use without thinking a lot of the time and it's part of acceptable language. I'm not going to spend all day every day watching every word I say for fear it could be construed as offensive by some group or another following events that happened halfway across the world.
Please, I'm sad the crash happened and I'm sorry people died - I always hate to see loss of life due to tragic accidents, and my thoughts go out to the victims, but please, my language is my language and I'll use it however I want - I wouldn't stoop to the level of cracking jokes about those poor people, but I'm not going to 'watch what I say' at all times to avoid using a phrase that someone just looking to be offended (which a lot of these super-politically-correct people are) might just be able to pull a self-righteous thought-wank out of.
Wouldn't that open them up to antitrust lawsuits? Anticompetetive actions and all..
Now I might have my understanding of what 'anticompetitive' means all wrong, or might simply misunderstand what 'antitrust' means, but anticompetitive how? Photoshop is not a true monopoly, it just happens to be the tool of choice for most professionals. If said professionals still want to use their Nikon gear if Adobe ripped support for them out of Photoshop, there are probably a dozen different software packages they could pick up - CorelDraw, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP team would all be ready and willing to work harder to support the Nikon diehards, and there are probably more lurking on the edges of my vague memory for products.
Microsoft having a 90%+ market dominance of the office suite market and making their formats proprietary so if companies switched to other vendors they wouldn't be able to read their data is anticompetitive. I fail to see how refusal to support a particular camera is anticompetitive, even if Photoshop had a 90% monopoly (which I doubt). The only way this could be construed as anticompetitive would be if, say, Adobe and Canon were in cahoots to make Photoshop only work with Canon cameras, which I very much doubt, too.
Editors, original posters... someone's dropped a loaded term in there, and it's the editor's job to pick up on these biases and change them so that hundreds of Slashdotters go off half-cocked at 'teh eval spyware companie' 'luring' innocent webfolk into their den of spying evilness...
:P
As for the first sentence, it wasn't the usual 'go-on-mod-me-down', 'karma-to-burn' piece, I genuinely thought I'd get a Troll mod there for daring to question the evil of violating web privacy, even with the user's permission...
This is going to nuke my karma to all Hell, but what the hey...
/. to stop them? If you're concerned about web privacy, don't download it, but it's not like they're trying to trick anyone here.
A lot of Slashdotters are, as usual, not RTFA/web page in question and assuming that this is the usual spyware trick of clandestinely trojanised software pretending to be a legitimate tool - allow me to explain;
The word 'lure' used in the summary is a loaded term - it implies (in the context the editors used) that they are somehow using this free AntiVirus tool as a means of covertly installing spyware - This company is simply offering a free antivirus product if you accept the *up front agreement* that their little utility can spy on your web browsing habits - they're not doing anything clandestine here, they're just offering their service to you for free, so they can sell the results on to advertisers to recoup costs;
From the company's website:
In exchange for having their Internet browsing and purchasing activity observed, members have access to free email virus scanning and other benefits.
This is just a new way of offering a product - "here, you can have this for free, but in exchange you've got to give us stuff we can sell to our avertisers" (though they promise not to sell personal info, so presumably they'll just be selling 'web trends' data) or rather, it's the same way that a lot of so-called 'adware' operates, only they're rarely this up-front.
Sure, it's spyware, but the text above is located right on their front page, is in easily-understandable English, and is not hidden, obscured of obfusicated in any way - if people want to give their permission for Marketscore to monitor their browsing in exchange for free software, who are
I dont know it feels like I am one of those big shot buisness men walking the streets around the capital when I am waring a suit. On days when I don't wear a suit walking around the capital. I just feel like ordanary joe.
:)
This is very true, and it rubs off on other people and changes how they react to you as well - A British sociologist once did research into this by dressing as a workman and standing outside a major British railway terminal asking for directions, and then repeating the experiment dressed in a formal business suit. He found that people were generally much more helpful and respectful to him when he was dressed in the business suit than when he was dressed as a workman - This shows that if you're looking to get people to agree with you or sell to you, you're better off wearing a suit as people tend to respond positively to that style of dress.
However, you could argue that standing outside a major London railway terminal is not a place to encounter many workmen, but many businessmen, however it may be more an issue of identification with others rather than a particular style commanding more respect, so perhaps you've got the right idea dressing like your customers - Hell, it's the approach I use
hardwarebeschleunigung = Hardware accelleration.
videoaufzeichnung = Video drawing/rendering.
There seriously wasn't an English site on this? and Babelfish is a useless translation engine anyway, I had to go back and read the original German article to avoid getting a headache - my German isn't perfect, but the English-with-German-technical-terms was addling my brain...
'abgekupfert' means 'plagiarised' - the comment translates as 'with open source, [there] is too much plagiarism'. Take from that what you will...
(IANANGS - I Am Not a Native German Speaker)
how is this news for nerds? Yes they probably used computers to do the research - but this is the type of news that goes into a health journal not /.
Slashdot is, contrary to popular opinion, more than a computer-nerd site - it's a site for all nerds - look at the categories availible! we have;
- Computer nerds
- Science nerds
- Space nerds
- Sci-Fi nerds
- Politics nerds
- Anime/RPG nerds
- Legal nerds
- Every other type of nerd imaginable.
Not every nerd out there is fascinated by computers, and we have many, many physicians/chemists/medical researchers among the near-million UIDs we have. While they might not fit the stereotypical 'nerd' image of a kid with bottle-bottom glasses sitting in his parents' basement, they are proud to call themselves nerds, and are likely to be deeply interested in stories such as this. Sure, this might not be news for your brand of nerdiness, but there are plenty of people out there different to you.
Not to burst your methane bubble or anything.
/., right?
Cos we'd hate to kick up a stink on
Yeah, yeah, methane doesn't really smell, just go with the funny - try the veal...
I think the gist the grandparent was trying to get across is that it is supposed to be a static text document for printing out, etc - a purpose which makes things like embedded music, video, etc obviously pointless. What the GP failed to take into account, however, was the fact that the Word format, like so many others, MS or otherwise, has been extended to do things far outside the scope for which they were originally created.
However, as Word is still primarily a letter- and other dead-tree-distribution tool, I do agree that it is a little silly to have embedded video, etc - The only reason we ever do it where I work is to sneak pr0n and music clips through the filters, which drop multimedia formats but let Word docs sail through. I've never seen anyone, geek or not, send me a Word document with an embedded video in for a purpose other than that - our PHB's are far more traditional, and do all their irritating all-singing, all-dancing multimedia eyesploder documents in PowerPoint anyway.
Refusal to support one of the biggest vectors of spyware infiltration is not arrogant, it is common sense, at least for the average desktop user.
For the business world, admittedly, with the entrenched position of ActiveX-based systems on corporate intranets, it's perhaps a little silly and a bit of a barrier to business adoption, but for home users one of the biggest complaints about Windows is the fact their machine can be 0wned by Virtual Bouncer, CoolWebSearch, ABetterInternet and God knows how many other drive-by-installed apps and toolbars just by visiting a slightly wrong-side-of-the-tracks website.
My ex-girlfriend was a 1337 hax0r... or at least she thought she was. Basically her 1337ness boiled down to having a few 'hacking tools' (nukers and the like) lying around in a folder on her Windows desktop, all (or almost all) of which were clearly just trojans. She had Norton AntiVirus installed, and it did it's valiant best to warn her that her 1337 hax0ring 't00lz' were doing nothing but fucking up her own box, but to no avail. There was no telling this girl that she wasn't a 1337 hax0r. A conversation to try to explain the concept of trojans to her went, as far as I can recall, something like this...
Me: You know those programs there are trojans, don't you?
Her: No hun, they're my little proggies... and anyway, I've got antivirus, so can't damage my machine anyway!
Me: You have antivirus? Surely that'd stop them running - how come you can still run them?
Her: Oh, when I run them now I get a red box come up that tells me it's a dangerous program or whatever, but it has a 'Run Anyway' option so it's OK.
Me: Umm.. you realise that choosing 'Run Anyway'... lets it do all the nasty stuff it was trying to do before the AntiVirus stopped it, don't you?
Her: Yeah, but it's OK, cos it's AntiVirus!
Me: Have you ever *run* a scan on it?
Her: Yeah, but it deleted them all, and I had to download them all again! Then the boxes came back!
Me: Because they're trying to tell you that they're fucking TROJANS!
Her: But it's OK, I've got AntiVirus!
Me: THAT'S WHAT THE FUCKING RED BOXES ARE! AND YOU'RE TELLING IT IT'S OK TO RUN THEM!
This went on for a good 20 minutes, went nowhere, and in the end I just went into the configuration and 'turned the red boxes off'. She was happy with that.
Her computer is fucked. She still thinks she's a 1337 hax0r.
It's cute now I'm not the one that has to clean it up.
That ignores the fact that Opera identifies as IE6 by default, and that seems to have a pretty big following around these parts. It also ignores the fact that Konqueror and the Mozilla babies can all, either through Preferences or extensions, identify as IE as well (unfortunately, I can't speak for Safari).
/. HAS IE J00 TROLL LOLZ0RZ!!!', but just suggesting that user-agent strings aren't the most accurate way of assessing who's using what browser, and even if they were they'd still not be a 100% reliable source of information on people's preferred browser.
It also ignores all the Slashdotters reading the site while skiving off work on a locked-down Windows box, where IE is the only option availible. That's not to say 'OMG NO1 ON
Now it hurts me to say this, but a lot of what many other posters are saying about Debian dying off are true. Don't get me wrong, I like (K)Ubuntu - it's going to be the next distro I hop over to - but I love Debian like a brother - After disasterous misadventures with restrictive RedHat and Mandrake installs, Debian gave me just the right level of ease where I wanted it and power where it was needed. To me, RedHat and Mandrake just felt like an equal to Windows, but with Debian I genuinely felt more productive. I learnt my Linux skills on Debian and it still faithfully hauls my two main machines like a loyal pack-horse, but one I know is slowly preparing to lay down and go to sleep for that final time. Kubuntu is the next choice for my main work machine and will be slipped on next time I get around to doing it (which will probably be around August), and the reasons are simple;
- I want up-to-date packages. I want KDE 3.4 out-of-the-box, I want X.org and the full support for my graphics card it brings - I want all the things Debian doesn't have but with Ubuntu are just an apt-get away.
- I want to feel my system is modern. I know, I know, if I want cutting-edge, use Gentoo, but I don't want cutting-edge, I just want modern - with Debian I feel I'm being left behind.
- Better (easier) installation. I'm trying to prise my mother off of Windows, and while Ubuntu's installer still isnt GUI, it's not quite the CLI terror that is the Debian installer - how am I supposed to convert her to Linux when even the installer scares the shit out of her?
- More frequent updates. OK sure, they might have stupid names (Hoary Hedgehog?), but Ubuntu updates are frequent and on-time, and they keep things up to date - Debian updates seem very few and far between, and serve only to make sure the disto stays a good three or four years behind the competiton in the name of stability.
On the final point, granted, Debian is absolutely rock-solid, and for that reason if that reason alone I will be keeping it on my server box (sitting blinking in the corner as I type this), but as for my work box, it's getting Kubuntu as soon as I get round to it.
As I said, I love Debian like a brother, but I'm growing to love Kubuntu like the hot girl down the street (and no, not through a telephoto lens) - you love them both for different reasons, and while all your family loyalty might tell you to sit in with your brother, reality has to step in and tell you to go off with the sleeker, sexier option.
Target anything that moves and doesn't have a valid RFID signature.
"You're looking at the future, Mr Grossman: people translated as data." (Bryce, Max Headroom)
But what is your definition of pornography? is it going to be the same as Howard Stern's definition of pornography? is it going to be the same as the Relgious Right's definition? A lot of legitimate art contains nudity, or representations thereof - should art galleries be forced into the .xxx category? What about plastic surgery clinic websites with 'before' and 'after' pictures of things such as breast enlargement?
.xxx domain (it would sure make managing the blocklist for the average large UK college easier, *ahem*), but there is a lot of overlap and disagreement over what constitutes 'pornography' or 'objectionable content', and I don't think one organization or committee should be handed that much power, especially with the way the Religious Right controls much of the power in America.
.xxx bandwagon - hardcore pornography needs to be kept away from kids, but a dedicated TLD for 'objectional content' is the first step on a very slippery slope.
Sure, filtering out hardcore pornography would be made a lot easier if all sites were forced to use the
I'm personally of the opinion that the only person capable of making a judgement about what your kids can and can't see is you, and handing the power to do so over to a government committee is just letting the government raise your children for you, which would be a sad, sad day for parenthood. Just look at the furore Janet Jackson's nipple-slip caused amongst the Religious Right, who found it perfectly alright to proudly show 'shock and awe' footage of cities being devastated on prime-time TV - are these the people you want dictating what's right and wrong for your children to see? I consider the desensitizing effect of proudly showing off the devastation of enemies at war far more damaging to young minds than the odd celebrity nipple-slip
A lot of people in the world have a seriously messed-up system of morals, and they've already got far too much power - don't jump on the
But this is one instance where they can't claim that every download is a lost sale - in my case, there are bands who's music I enjoy that have long since disbanded, some of them many years before I was born, who I'd quite like to have heard give a live performance. I'd like to see the RIAA argue how me downloading a recording of a concert I wasn't alive to go to is a lost sale of, in this case, the concert ticket.
Stop it.
"...And I said, I don't care if they update again either, because I told, I told Jobs that if they update one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Ballmer too, because they've updated my SP two times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Jaguar to the Panther release, but I bought my Jaguar release because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the disc for the Jaguar release and it's not okay because if they update to 10.4 Tiger then I'll set the building on fire..."
(With apologies to the fine people who wrote, produced and directed Office Space)