Whatever happened to hoodwink'd? That was an excellent service. It required enough of a learning curve to participate that it was never subject to the same lack of intelligence that plagues YouTube comments and the like.
I like exclusivity (when I'm among the included, anyway).:)
I think I see a flaw in the benchmarks. They're using Windows to benchmark the different drives. This is not a dig at Windows, but specifically, the problem is that by default, Windows allocates a percentage of hard drive space to be used as swap space. On the boot times listed, the 1TB drive has the slowest boot time. Could that be because the pagefile on the 1TB drive is by default larger than the pagefile on the smaller drives? Is this particular benchmark skewed? Would the results be different if the testers set a static pagefile size of, say, 1.5GB on all the drives tested, then used SysInternals PageDefrag to make it contiguous?
They left out McAfee SiteAdvisor. I'm surprised, b/c SiteAdvisor doesn't just detect phishing sites, but also sites that spam or provide spyware downloads.
If you're in the United States and ever have to sit on a jury for one of these Internet piracy trials, I hope you'll do your best to portray impartiality in the jury panel interviews, then convince the other jurors of a verdict of "not guilty."
Our founding forefathers intended the jury to be the last line of defense against a tyrannical government. Take for instance prohibition. In the early 20th century, alcohol was illegal. However, because no jury would convict those on trial for violating prohibition, the law was eventually repealed. From this point of view, jurors have an indirect impact on legislation.
Perhaps if enough trials result in failure to punish Internet piracy, the conventional sentencing will be re-examined, intended punishment will become more proportionate to the damage caused by this victimless crime, and the law will develop a little more sanity.
When you go to jail for longer for copyright infringment than for robbery, do you think people who already got jail time for copying would care about what's happening when they sap that old lady to get her purse? Hey, it's a lesser crime, he's getting better!
It's not a lesser crime. It's just a crime with fewer corporate-funded lobbyists pushing for disproportionate punishment. Your sig is probably unintentionally but ironically relevant to this discussion.
In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce.
so I gave them a string which forced the modems to connect at 33.6 baud instead of 56k
I worked for a small dial-up provider with this same issue. Anytime the firmware was upgraded on our modems, we would render hundreds of customers unable to connect until they either upgraded their winmodem firmware, or disabled v.90 / kflex / x2 long enough to download updated firmware. www.808hi.com/56k/trouble2.htm was where I always went to find the appropriate init strings. Looking back at that page now, I can't decide whether to feel nostalgic or nauseous.
Actually, the other pair is for shielding and redundancy. If primary pair shorts, the Telecommunications techs can just switch the room to the other pair without having to run new drops. With thousands of tenants in student housing, as often as trouble tickets come in, not having to drop a new line into each room where there's a problem is a huge saver in productivity and response time.
ies4linux is a simple Bash Script program that installs Internet Explorer 6, 5.5 and 5 on Linux using Wine. The whole process is automatic and very easy.
I've got IE6 installed on Gentoo, and it runs... well, it runs well enough to let me test web pages I'm developing. It also loads mail.live.com after only crashing 2 or 3 times. *shrug*
I forgot to mention that Bubs' plugging his Wireless Extension Cords is an easter egg, appearing when you click the right side of Strongbad's screen_savior at the end.
I remember reading somewhere that the built-in CD burning capabilities of Windows XP is licensed from Roxio, like in a Windows help file or context help or something, but I can't find it at the moment. If this lawsuit is ruled valid, it could possibly affect Windows itself.
What's 40 gigs a month xfer to an ISP? Say (conservatively) that you're paying $30 / month for broadband access. How much of that pays for bandwidth?
Now, alternatively, how can a web hosting company such as Delta Webhosting offer 40 gigs of transfer plus 3 gigs of hard drive space plus some of the best customer service I've ever personally experienced, for $12 / month? Where's the extra $20 going?
It's a sad testament your account was flagged at all. Greedy fux0rs.
The college I work for uses Cisco traffic shapers that not only filter traffic based on traffic type (tcp, icmp) and port source / destination, but also packet type. Somehow, and I don't have a clue how this works, but it's intelligent enough to determine the difference between, say, a Quicktime video loading within a web page and KaZaA traffic, and between a RealMedia broadcast and Shoutcast. It seems very effective at throttling bandwidth not for bandwidth hogs, but for services that are not academic or work related. I can download patches for Windows or ISO's from Ibiblio at 200K/s easily, where Internet radio (except for Spinner, which is RealAudio based) and P2P are pretty much useless, better left for home, but not outright blocked. I'm not saying this same filtering algorithm should be applied to a residential broadband service, but the method could be applied to make residential broadband service as a whole more effective. The end result is that, 55Mbit/s effectively services several thousand users no problem using traffic shaping.
The Wright brothers didn't get the plane into the air on their first attempt either. A google search revealed a website containing the following information:
On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville Wright climbed into a 600 pound flying machine and made his historic flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Three days before, with Wilbur as pilot, the Wrights had tried but failed to get off the ground. The 17th turned out to be the fateful day for the Akron, Ohio-born brothers who had tinkered for months before finally unlocking the key to powered flight. They made four flights that day -- Orville's first lasted 12 seconds and spanned 120 feet; Wilbur's best was a 59 seconds, 852 foot leap. It wasn't long before the brothers had formed the Wright Company, which bought and sold airplanes.
That particular story has been told not only regarding Word Perfect's tech support, but several other service providers and software support lines. Check out this explanation of the origins of this particular story, which probably didn't really happen at all.
Good story though. Quite relevant =) I wish I could tell my users that just about every day.
This could be addressed with a Peltier cooler. Of course the Peltier has a hot side as well. But we wouldn't be using the Peltier for a cooler for the system -- just for the Stirling engine.
If you hook a Peltier cooler up to a power supply and turn it on without attaching it to anything, within 15 seconds you'll notice condensation on the ceramic part. Within another 15 seconds that condensation will start to freeze. I had a friend who used a Peltier on his AMD K6 CPU years ago. He wasn't much into over-clocking his machine, but just over-clocked it 33MHz or so. After about a month his machine started performing very unstable. We opened it up and, I shit you not, there was mold or mildew or something growing on the CPU! It was great! Except for the, uhh, dead cpu. . . Anyway. . . bye.
"The screen on my PC is really dim" The woman at the other end says "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
"NO!" I scream "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers"
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
"Have you got a spare power cord?"
"No.."
"Oh well, never mind, we'll have to do the power surge idea... Ok, quick as you can, I want you to flick the power switch of your PC on and off 30 times"
"Should I take my disks out?"
"NO! Do you want to lose all your data!?!"
"Oh! NO! Ok.."
I listen carefully.......clicky..clikcy...clikky.........clicky....cliccy.. . . BOOM!
Amazing, it probably made it to 27 - the power supply usually shits itself at 15 or so...
"MY COMPUTER BLEW UP!!!" she screams at me down the line
"Really? Must've been a dodgy power supply! Lucky we found out now! Is your machine still under warranty?"
"NO!"
"Dear oh dear. Well, Best get it repaired then. Did you backup your files?"
"Yes, to the system, Yesterday, but all this morning's work is gone!"
"Oh dear. What was your username, I'll just check that your backups worked ok?"
I think it's because most people consider Microsoft Office to be the Industry Standard (R) office suite. If you're emailing a document to a client, better make sure you're emailing it in an MS Office format. If you're reading people's resumes, better have MS Word installed. I'm not saying I agree with this -- just that I know it's *unthinkable* that the university I work for would have any computers that might not have at least some version of Office installed. And since our email system has recently been downgra^H^H^H^H^H^H^H converted to a MAPI service on an MS Exchange server which only MS Outlook can access, every computer on campus has to have at least Office 2000 Professional. Our Mac users are just screwed for email, having to use either the no-longer updated, weak-featured, POS version of Outlook 2001, or our web-based Outlook which is so cumbersome and takes forever to load. MS Office is not the only program that the proprietary format of Office has locked Office users into using.
How exactly is Digital Rights Management expected to work? Is the idea sort of a "this message will self destruct in five seconds" kind of deal? From DRM story to DRM story posted on Slashdot, I see the discussions range from privacy and data integrity to piracy or rights. The ability to cause sensitive data to disappear seems more like a technological tool that can be added to other tools for specific types of communication, not some imposition of our rights to download w4r3z on KaZaA or whatever. In fact, if I get sent an email that will self-destruct, what's keeping me from forwarding that message to a sendmail server with no such mechanism for message self-destruction, copying / pasting the message into a text document, or even screenshotting the contents? This comment isn't meant to flame or troll -- I simply want to know what I don't.
"There is no income from the royalties, so artists in China record single songs for radio play instead of albums for consumers," said Lachie Rutherford, the president of Warner Music Asia-Pacific. "Stars need to look elsewhere to finance the rock-star lifestyle."
So how is this different from the U.S? The RIAA keeps all the money from album sales. Or, according to those wacky flash animations with Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield -- you know what I'm talking about (reliable source of factual information), a few pennies of each CD. The real money comes from concerts or other live performances. Or, in Will Smith's and DMX's case, movies =)
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to hoodwink'd? That was an excellent service. It required enough of a learning curve to participate that it was never subject to the same lack of intelligence that plagues YouTube comments and the like.
I like exclusivity (when I'm among the included, anyway). :)
Now that you mention it, Strongbad is topless far too often....
I think I see a flaw in the benchmarks. They're using Windows to benchmark the different drives. This is not a dig at Windows, but specifically, the problem is that by default, Windows allocates a percentage of hard drive space to be used as swap space. On the boot times listed, the 1TB drive has the slowest boot time. Could that be because the pagefile on the 1TB drive is by default larger than the pagefile on the smaller drives? Is this particular benchmark skewed? Would the results be different if the testers set a static pagefile size of, say, 1.5GB on all the drives tested, then used SysInternals PageDefrag to make it contiguous?
They left out McAfee SiteAdvisor. I'm surprised, b/c SiteAdvisor doesn't just detect phishing sites, but also sites that spam or provide spyware downloads.
See Jury nullification. If you're bored, see "I Don't Care What The Judge Said!"
If you're in the United States and ever have to sit on a jury for one of these Internet piracy trials, I hope you'll do your best to portray impartiality in the jury panel interviews, then convince the other jurors of a verdict of "not guilty."
Our founding forefathers intended the jury to be the last line of defense against a tyrannical government. Take for instance prohibition. In the early 20th century, alcohol was illegal. However, because no jury would convict those on trial for violating prohibition, the law was eventually repealed. From this point of view, jurors have an indirect impact on legislation.
Perhaps if enough trials result in failure to punish Internet piracy, the conventional sentencing will be re-examined, intended punishment will become more proportionate to the damage caused by this victimless crime, and the law will develop a little more sanity.
It's not a lesser crime. It's just a crime with fewer corporate-funded lobbyists pushing for disproportionate punishment. Your sig is probably unintentionally but ironically relevant to this discussion.
I worked for a small dial-up provider with this same issue. Anytime the firmware was upgraded on our modems, we would render hundreds of customers unable to connect until they either upgraded their winmodem firmware, or disabled v.90 / kflex / x2 long enough to download updated firmware. www.808hi.com/56k/trouble2.htm was where I always went to find the appropriate init strings. Looking back at that page now, I can't decide whether to feel nostalgic or nauseous.
Actually, the other pair is for shielding and redundancy. If primary pair shorts, the Telecommunications techs can just switch the room to the other pair without having to run new drops. With thousands of tenants in student housing, as often as trouble tickets come in, not having to drop a new line into each room where there's a problem is a huge saver in productivity and response time.
ies4linux is a simple Bash Script program that installs Internet Explorer 6, 5.5 and 5 on Linux using Wine. The whole process is automatic and very easy.
I've got IE6 installed on Gentoo, and it runs... well, it runs well enough to let me test web pages I'm developing. It also loads mail.live.com after only crashing 2 or 3 times. *shrug*
I forgot to mention that Bubs' plugging his Wireless Extension Cords is an easter egg, appearing when you click the right side of Strongbad's screen_savior at the end.
Bubs' Concession Stand has sold wireless extension cords for a long time.
I remember reading somewhere that the built-in CD burning capabilities of Windows XP is licensed from Roxio, like in a Windows help file or context help or something, but I can't find it at the moment. If this lawsuit is ruled valid, it could possibly affect Windows itself.
What's 40 gigs a month xfer to an ISP? Say (conservatively) that you're paying $30 / month for broadband access. How much of that pays for bandwidth?
Now, alternatively, how can a web hosting company such as Delta Webhosting offer 40 gigs of transfer plus 3 gigs of hard drive space plus some of the best customer service I've ever personally experienced, for $12 / month? Where's the extra $20 going?
It's a sad testament your account was flagged at all. Greedy fux0rs.
The college I work for uses Cisco traffic shapers that not only filter traffic based on traffic type (tcp, icmp) and port source / destination, but also packet type. Somehow, and I don't have a clue how this works, but it's intelligent enough to determine the difference between, say, a Quicktime video loading within a web page and KaZaA traffic, and between a RealMedia broadcast and Shoutcast. It seems very effective at throttling bandwidth not for bandwidth hogs, but for services that are not academic or work related. I can download patches for Windows or ISO's from Ibiblio at 200K/s easily, where Internet radio (except for Spinner, which is RealAudio based) and P2P are pretty much useless, better left for home, but not outright blocked. I'm not saying this same filtering algorithm should be applied to a residential broadband service, but the method could be applied to make residential broadband service as a whole more effective. The end result is that, 55Mbit/s effectively services several thousand users no problem using traffic shaping.
That particular story has been told not only regarding Word Perfect's tech support, but several other service providers and software support lines. Check out this explanation of the origins of this particular story, which probably didn't really happen at all.
Good story though. Quite relevant =) I wish I could tell my users that just about every day.
Sorry about that. Someone told me your site had some good porn.
-- B. Gates
This could be addressed with a Peltier cooler. Of course the Peltier has a hot side as well. But we wouldn't be using the Peltier for a cooler for the system -- just for the Stirling engine.
If you hook a Peltier cooler up to a power supply and turn it on without attaching it to anything, within 15 seconds you'll notice condensation on the ceramic part. Within another 15 seconds that condensation will start to freeze. I had a friend who used a Peltier on his AMD K6 CPU years ago. He wasn't much into over-clocking his machine, but just over-clocked it 33MHz or so. After about a month his machine started performing very unstable. We opened it up and, I shit you not, there was mold or mildew or something growing on the CPU! It was great! Except for the, uhh, dead cpu. . . Anyway. . . bye.
And how difficult is this file, or other commonly needed Windows libraries such as msvcrt, the VB6 runtime library, comdlg32.ocx, etc. to obtain without a Windows installation?
. . . and not have a BOFH quotation? =)
.. ...clicky..clikcy...clikky.. .. .. ...clicky. ...cliccy.. . . BOOM!
"The screen on my PC is really dim" The woman at the other end says "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
"NO!" I scream "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers"
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
"Have you got a spare power cord?"
"No.."
"Oh well, never mind, we'll have to do the power surge idea... Ok, quick as you can, I want you to flick the power switch of your PC on and off 30 times"
"Should I take my disks out?"
"NO! Do you want to lose all your data!?!"
"Oh! NO! Ok.."
I listen carefully..
Amazing, it probably made it to 27 - the power supply usually shits itself at 15 or so...
"MY COMPUTER BLEW UP!!!" she screams at me down the line
"Really? Must've been a dodgy power supply! Lucky we found out now! Is your machine still under warranty?"
"NO!"
"Dear oh dear. Well, Best get it repaired then. Did you backup your files?"
"Yes, to the system, Yesterday, but all this morning's work is gone!"
"Oh dear. What was your username, I'll just check that your backups worked ok?"
She tells me....
LOL check out this Amazon.com patent.
[grin]
I think it's because most people consider Microsoft Office to be the Industry Standard (R) office suite. If you're emailing a document to a client, better make sure you're emailing it in an MS Office format. If you're reading people's resumes, better have MS Word installed. I'm not saying I agree with this -- just that I know it's *unthinkable* that the university I work for would have any computers that might not have at least some version of Office installed. And since our email system has recently been downgra^H^H^H^H^H^H^H converted to a MAPI service on an MS Exchange server which only MS Outlook can access, every computer on campus has to have at least Office 2000 Professional. Our Mac users are just screwed for email, having to use either the no-longer updated, weak-featured, POS version of Outlook 2001, or our web-based Outlook which is so cumbersome and takes forever to load. MS Office is not the only program that the proprietary format of Office has locked Office users into using.
How exactly is Digital Rights Management expected to work? Is the idea sort of a "this message will self destruct in five seconds" kind of deal? From DRM story to DRM story posted on Slashdot, I see the discussions range from privacy and data integrity to piracy or rights. The ability to cause sensitive data to disappear seems more like a technological tool that can be added to other tools for specific types of communication, not some imposition of our rights to download w4r3z on KaZaA or whatever. In fact, if I get sent an email that will self-destruct, what's keeping me from forwarding that message to a sendmail server with no such mechanism for message self-destruction, copying / pasting the message into a text document, or even screenshotting the contents? This comment isn't meant to flame or troll -- I simply want to know what I don't.