Single portal for all.xxx requests? You do realize that it's not really easy to determine the TLD of a server given its IP address, no? And that many web servers host the same site with different domain names in different TLDs? And that censoring the already-existing TLDs is just as unenforceable, expensive and limiting to freedom?
Well apparently some people have had similar problems with software applying restrictions to homemade video imported through video capture cards because the software assumed it was a recording of live TV. Of course, the whole point is moot if you're running Free software on reasonably open hardware. One like you, whose tinfoil hat could use an adjustment, would probably claim that the days of such systems are numbered, but I tend to think that as long as there are big companies with investments on the Open Source side of F/OSS there will be hardware platforms open enough to run Free software.
If there becomes a way to tag acoustic instruments... well damn. Let's just say I'm glad my clarinet was made in the 60s. But as you think it's very likely without any evidence that it's even possible, I'll say I can't see it happening without providing any evidence for that either.
What really seems silly about this whole thing is all the speculation about Macs and Windows compatibility. TFA was very eager to call BAPCo a leader in "Windows benchmarking", but nowhere on BAPCo's website is it mentioned that they're a specifically Windows-only company, even if all their current products target Windows. Couldn't it simply be that Apple is joining them to help develop hardware benchmarks that could compare a machine running OSX86 to one running Windows?
Wouldn't a job like Ballmer's drive you crazy? Not just doing it for Microsoft, but for any company. There are plenty of Microsoft evangelists, but most of them (like most GNU/Linux or BSD evangelists) are just dweebs posting on message boards. He actually has a giant stake in Microsoft's success, and he has first-hand knowledge of all kinds of things he can't say because they'd be bad PR (about any weaknesses of MS products, for example...)
Perhaps there's a bit less pressure for lots of F/OSS types, even those with a big stake in what they're doing, because the development process is open and they have nothing to hide. There's no point telling anything but the most brutal truth about your F/OSS project because there's nothing to be gained from a really disappointed downloader (if you want to gain potential developers you would be better off being up-front about the state of your project). In fact, there's probably less pressure for spokespeople for any company other than Microsoft, because Microsoft seems so determined to control everything in the world that has to do with computers. It must be tiring.
A monochrome terminal screen with a blanking cursor is truly a wonderful thing. Any correctly-written website (and even some badly-written ones) will look just fine in lynx, which allows full screen text viewing without obnoxious font changes and distracting flashing graphics, and keyboard navigation that really works. A monochrome terminal with GNU Screen is even better, because with that you can disconnect your session from the terminal and log on from a different one (even a remote one) and continue the session there! Truly a more civilized way to use a computer than these "GUI"s that people have been harping on in recent months:).
It's really easy to "open" another government's secret documents, much harder to "open" one's own. It would be much more interesting, and much more unlikely, to see entire U.S. government documents that have only previously been released full of blank-outs. Or that have not been released at all.
I do not own a cellular phone. Every time I've talked on one I thought the sound quality was poor. Often when people call me with them I find the sound quality poor. I know a bit about the methods used to compress voice sounds for cell phones, and it's a cool concept that gets great compression ratios but it just isn't cutting it quality-wise at this point in my opinion. Furthermore, my friends with cell phones often have to worry about reliability issues (with either the phone or the service) or "running out of minutes".
I bet if cellular phone companies concentrated on making a truly great mobile voice communication device above all else they'd have done a good enough job for me to buy one by now. That said, I can't blame them for doing otherwise; they've got my whole generation as hooked on text messaging and funky ringtones as I am on Slashdot!
I don't remember just how I got this working in the first place, but lm_sensors works great on my Linux machine. I think it's supposed to work with some particular sensor models that don't go through ACPI... so if you've been doing all your Linux installations on machines with different types of sensors you'll probably have to look somewhere else. On the other hand, I have a laptop running FreeBSD and it seems like on there all the sensor-type stuff is handled through ACPI. So maybe if you have the right setup the sensor information will be available to you that way.
The task of "screen reading" is very difficult for computers; it involves actually reading a visual display and extracting a flow of text. This is the type of thing that is very easy for sighted humans; actual intelligence is better than artificial intelligence and all the pages are designed to be easily read by sighted humans. In my opinion there's way too much subtlety involved for a computer program to truly do a good job.
A much easier job than making a "screen reader" is making a "markup language reader". Markup languages like HTML or XHTML should be used in such a way that the flow of text from beginning to end makes sense, and then styling and placement can be done in a styling language like CSS. This work can be done reasonably easily by a content creator, as long as the creator is a human. Dreamweaver will have a hard time deciding which of your columns in your column-layout website should actually go in the document first, especially if you use a template in a way it wasn't really intended to be used.
It's much easier for a web designer to write good markup (or create/use templates in a way that assures the generation of good markup) than it is for any programmer to solve the problem of actual screen reading. I've never actually taken a look at screen-reading software, so I don't know how bad it is. Personally, I believe it shouldn't have to be any more sophisticated than lynx. With lynx, if you get garbage markup in it often produces garbage for output. We shouldn't be seeing garbage markup when we have real standards that work for these things.
It's not the people that actually bombed abortion clinics that are the truly analogous case here. It would be people that feel that such actions are ethical, but that they should not not be performed because they are illegal. You could probably find plenty of people who would agree with that, especially if you pushed them in that direction by starting with their belief on abortion and using some combination of logical reasoning and quotes from religious texts they may believe in. A lot of these people would also probably agree that bombing abortion clinics is not a very wise way to protest abortions because you'll be found out and arrested quickly, and because mainstream society would more likely turn against you than be inpired by you if you did such a thing.
Firefox interface looking ancient? What would you replace it with, FisherPrice-looking crap? Ugly blue gradients like Office and now OO.o? Apple-style glass effects? Why is it that every time Microsoft or Apple comes out with an ugly new look people think sensible designs are outdated? Count me out! I'd rather have FF look like Motif than Office or the current Netscape version!
Oh, yeah, plenty of other kinds. I wouldn't say that Blago's awfulness is due to incompetence or immorality. He is probably the epitome of a "divider, not a uniter" politician, because he is power-hungry, hates everything that he can't control and presents himself as a populist crusader and anyone that holds power that he wants as an "enemy"/"corporate whore"/whatever.
That said, he probably was the best candidate in all the elections he won.
I haven't really been able to find much information on this, so maybe you know: with Xen 3 and the VT extentions does the guest OS still need special drivers? It seems to me that there would still be a performance advantage to having special drivers rather than having to virtualize devices. But maybe there's some clever trick in the VT extensions that I'm not taking into account.
To put it simply (I don't know the more in-depth stuff off the top of my head) Xen won't run an unmodified x86 OS as a guest (DomU). Instead of actually emulating the physical devices it provides ways for the guest OSes to request services from it through specialized "drivers", for one thing. Once the kernel/driver work is done, however, the fact that you're running under Xen does not affect your userspace apps.
So you can only run operating systems that have been modified to run under Xen. So far Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Plan9 have undergone modification, at least according to http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/OSCompatibility
After you get the "238 files in/etc need updating" thing, issue "etc-update". It will lead to a menu-based program where you can view the diff between the old and new files and choose either to use the old, use the new or merge manually.
I suppose if you had a binary in/etc somewhere it might throw you in $EDITOR to edit that file out of mild ignorance. Perhaps a check must be done on file types. I've never run into this myself; must not have any binaries in my/etc tree.
In the case of the syslog thing, I'd have to wholeheartedly agree with you. On the other hand, if you're a Perl ninja and a weakling at sed/awk you might be better off just using Perl if you only need sed/awk's particular functionality occasionally.
Maybe I'm a hopeless desktop-fed n00b, but I've only used awk once, to take some experimental data that I'd previously entered into a file by hand, transform it a bit to provide input to gnuplot, then mangle it into a TeX table. It took a bit of time to learn, and you know, if I had to use it again I'd have to learn most of it over! I'm not entirely sure it was worth the time. Perhaps people like me should try to learn Sprog instead... or maybe just give in to the supposed "dark side" and enter the table into a spreadsheet and paste it into one of those hellish beasts they call "word processors"... NEVER!
Yeah, those Palomino core chips run quite hot. Mine is running at 1733MHz (that's 2100 in hype numbering) and idles at 55C, during big compiles gets around 63. Recently (perhaps from the case being jostled?) the thermal paste got pushed off the area of the die and the thing began to idle at 78C.
I wish it were easy to underclock the CPU, because I really need nowhere near that much CPU and would definitely prefer lower temperatures. Unfortunately you have to physically unlock it, which carries a bit too high of a risk factor for me.
Haha, in all the/etc/init.d scripts you can at least put comments. That's one of the really nice things about plain text config files, even the ones that are just lists of variable settings. I always mark my edits to config files with #AWD and usually some comment as to why I made the change, so if I ever need to go back it's easy to remember why I did what I did.
Shipman's response attacks Petreley for saying things that he didn't say. Petreley never said that the Free Software community shouldn't do things in a consistent way, he just said that they should stop imitating Microsoft. Yes, there's a good reason to have desktop environments where ctrl-c copies and ctrl-v pastes. Users expect that. It's also nice to be able to enable emacs/readline keybindings in your desktop apps, because a different kind of user expects that (fortunately gtk+ makes it quite easy, though I don't know how to do it for qt-based programs). There's no reason that when Microsoft decided that blue gradient toolbars were a good look for Office OO.o had to make the same awful decision, and there's no reason to duplicate the registry. That's what Petreley said. And Shipman claims that that makes him some kind of hacker-elitist that wants new users out, when that's simply not the case; he says in his article that skimming the cream of Microsoft's ideas is good!
We always hear the smug statement that those that don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it badly. Perhaps those that don't understand Windows are doomed to reinvent it even worse. If we don't understand what's useful and what's not in Windows we'll continue to duplicate some of its good ideas and some of its bad ones, and some will be completely out of context with the goals of our Unix-like Free operating systems. If you want Free Windows, wait for ReactOS to finish its code audit and contribute to that; that is the place to really duplicate all of Microsoft's design decisions, for better or worse, in the name of ABI compatibility. Our Free environments should make the best decisions and offer a choice. Everyone likes to pose vi/vim's editing style against more Windows-like editing styles and claim one is superior, citing "efficiency" or "consistency". For some people a text editor should be consistent with the other programs they use. They should run nedit, or the MSVS editor, or kate. I'm in my editor enough that it only needs to be consistent with itself, and as efficient as possible; vim is a good choice for me. Petreley doesn't call for kate to be vim-ized; he simply says that OO.o shouldn't have those garish blue gradients in its toolbars.
Having 'Net access doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you have money and the desire to have it.
I am in college now, and I can tell ya for sure that colleges are full of idiots, again, people with some money that want to be in college. Oh yeah, and they think they're smarter than everyone, and have networked with people that can help get them cushy well-paying jobs.
People don't work the crap shifts at McDonald's because they're stupid; the stupidity is that enough people want to eat junk food at midnight that they stay open (similarly, Hummer isn't hurting the environment by building SUVs that get 10mpg, consumers are hurting it by driving them around mall parking lots). As long as there's a wage paid for working the night shift at McDonald's people will do the work because they need the money.
There are lots of stupid people in America, and all over the world. Many of them are members of your so-called "Intelligentsia" (by the way, you misspelled and misused the word; my use of it was more appropriate but maybe a bit melodramatic, check a dictionary or wikipedia or something). Your stereotypes of intelligence simply don't hold water.
You can get compensation if you have proof you own one of the CDs. Now quit trolling. The CDs had correct audio information on them and any computer that just read that information and ignored the autoplay stuff would be fine. As it happens I own a CD that looks like it's affected (though it's not listed on the linked site). And I haven't booted my Windows partition in about a month and a half, but if I did, and put the CD in, it would just sit there. I would start up whatever cheesy little CD player app I chose, and run it without consequence.
Actually supposedly there was a MacOS version too, but you had to run it manually and enter your password, which would raise a red flag for knowledgeable people (kinda like that recent "Mac virus" that relied on the user for both the "code execution" and "privledge escalation" portions). Kinda like it raised a red flag for Windows users running as non-Admin users when the autorun program told them they had to be admin.
Oddly enough, I can't find a reference to this within 5 minutes on Google, but here's the basic idea: someone planted a worm in GCC that planted itself in everything that GCC compiled. If I recall correctly, when one of these infected programs was run it would modify your GCC installation. There may have been something else to it, I don't recall.
Verizon's not a cable TV company. If memory serves, though, the mobile phone companies, DSL providers and satellite TV broadcasters have been selling bundles together lately. So perhaps instead a satellite contract with one of their affiliates?
Slashdot Mirror
Single portal for all .xxx requests? You do realize that it's not really easy to determine the TLD of a server given its IP address, no? And that many web servers host the same site with different domain names in different TLDs? And that censoring the already-existing TLDs is just as unenforceable, expensive and limiting to freedom?
Well apparently some people have had similar problems with software applying restrictions to homemade video imported through video capture cards because the software assumed it was a recording of live TV. Of course, the whole point is moot if you're running Free software on reasonably open hardware. One like you, whose tinfoil hat could use an adjustment, would probably claim that the days of such systems are numbered, but I tend to think that as long as there are big companies with investments on the Open Source side of F/OSS there will be hardware platforms open enough to run Free software.
If there becomes a way to tag acoustic instruments... well damn. Let's just say I'm glad my clarinet was made in the 60s. But as you think it's very likely without any evidence that it's even possible, I'll say I can't see it happening without providing any evidence for that either.
What really seems silly about this whole thing is all the speculation about Macs and Windows compatibility. TFA was very eager to call BAPCo a leader in "Windows benchmarking", but nowhere on BAPCo's website is it mentioned that they're a specifically Windows-only company, even if all their current products target Windows. Couldn't it simply be that Apple is joining them to help develop hardware benchmarks that could compare a machine running OSX86 to one running Windows?
Wouldn't a job like Ballmer's drive you crazy? Not just doing it for Microsoft, but for any company. There are plenty of Microsoft evangelists, but most of them (like most GNU/Linux or BSD evangelists) are just dweebs posting on message boards. He actually has a giant stake in Microsoft's success, and he has first-hand knowledge of all kinds of things he can't say because they'd be bad PR (about any weaknesses of MS products, for example...)
Perhaps there's a bit less pressure for lots of F/OSS types, even those with a big stake in what they're doing, because the development process is open and they have nothing to hide. There's no point telling anything but the most brutal truth about your F/OSS project because there's nothing to be gained from a really disappointed downloader (if you want to gain potential developers you would be better off being up-front about the state of your project). In fact, there's probably less pressure for spokespeople for any company other than Microsoft, because Microsoft seems so determined to control everything in the world that has to do with computers. It must be tiring.
I keep hearing about tagging articles, but I've never actually seen how to do it. It seems like a useful feature, so... anyone know how?
A monochrome terminal screen with a blanking cursor is truly a wonderful thing. Any correctly-written website (and even some badly-written ones) will look just fine in lynx, which allows full screen text viewing without obnoxious font changes and distracting flashing graphics, and keyboard navigation that really works. A monochrome terminal with GNU Screen is even better, because with that you can disconnect your session from the terminal and log on from a different one (even a remote one) and continue the session there! Truly a more civilized way to use a computer than these "GUI"s that people have been harping on in recent months :).
It's really easy to "open" another government's secret documents, much harder to "open" one's own. It would be much more interesting, and much more unlikely, to see entire U.S. government documents that have only previously been released full of blank-outs. Or that have not been released at all.
I do not own a cellular phone. Every time I've talked on one I thought the sound quality was poor. Often when people call me with them I find the sound quality poor. I know a bit about the methods used to compress voice sounds for cell phones, and it's a cool concept that gets great compression ratios but it just isn't cutting it quality-wise at this point in my opinion. Furthermore, my friends with cell phones often have to worry about reliability issues (with either the phone or the service) or "running out of minutes".
I bet if cellular phone companies concentrated on making a truly great mobile voice communication device above all else they'd have done a good enough job for me to buy one by now. That said, I can't blame them for doing otherwise; they've got my whole generation as hooked on text messaging and funky ringtones as I am on Slashdot!
I don't remember just how I got this working in the first place, but lm_sensors works great on my Linux machine. I think it's supposed to work with some particular sensor models that don't go through ACPI... so if you've been doing all your Linux installations on machines with different types of sensors you'll probably have to look somewhere else. On the other hand, I have a laptop running FreeBSD and it seems like on there all the sensor-type stuff is handled through ACPI. So maybe if you have the right setup the sensor information will be available to you that way.
The task of "screen reading" is very difficult for computers; it involves actually reading a visual display and extracting a flow of text. This is the type of thing that is very easy for sighted humans; actual intelligence is better than artificial intelligence and all the pages are designed to be easily read by sighted humans. In my opinion there's way too much subtlety involved for a computer program to truly do a good job.
A much easier job than making a "screen reader" is making a "markup language reader". Markup languages like HTML or XHTML should be used in such a way that the flow of text from beginning to end makes sense, and then styling and placement can be done in a styling language like CSS. This work can be done reasonably easily by a content creator, as long as the creator is a human. Dreamweaver will have a hard time deciding which of your columns in your column-layout website should actually go in the document first, especially if you use a template in a way it wasn't really intended to be used.
It's much easier for a web designer to write good markup (or create/use templates in a way that assures the generation of good markup) than it is for any programmer to solve the problem of actual screen reading. I've never actually taken a look at screen-reading software, so I don't know how bad it is. Personally, I believe it shouldn't have to be any more sophisticated than lynx. With lynx, if you get garbage markup in it often produces garbage for output. We shouldn't be seeing garbage markup when we have real standards that work for these things.
It's not the people that actually bombed abortion clinics that are the truly analogous case here. It would be people that feel that such actions are ethical, but that they should not not be performed because they are illegal. You could probably find plenty of people who would agree with that, especially if you pushed them in that direction by starting with their belief on abortion and using some combination of logical reasoning and quotes from religious texts they may believe in. A lot of these people would also probably agree that bombing abortion clinics is not a very wise way to protest abortions because you'll be found out and arrested quickly, and because mainstream society would more likely turn against you than be inpired by you if you did such a thing.
Yeah, but where are you going to find a storage device capable of holding 1,015,384 perfect studio recordings of 4'33"?
Firefox interface looking ancient? What would you replace it with, FisherPrice-looking crap? Ugly blue gradients like Office and now OO.o? Apple-style glass effects? Why is it that every time Microsoft or Apple comes out with an ugly new look people think sensible designs are outdated? Count me out! I'd rather have FF look like Motif than Office or the current Netscape version!
Oh, yeah, plenty of other kinds. I wouldn't say that Blago's awfulness is due to incompetence or immorality. He is probably the epitome of a "divider, not a uniter" politician, because he is power-hungry, hates everything that he can't control and presents himself as a populist crusader and anyone that holds power that he wants as an "enemy"/"corporate whore"/whatever.
That said, he probably was the best candidate in all the elections he won.
I haven't really been able to find much information on this, so maybe you know: with Xen 3 and the VT extentions does the guest OS still need special drivers? It seems to me that there would still be a performance advantage to having special drivers rather than having to virtualize devices. But maybe there's some clever trick in the VT extensions that I'm not taking into account.
To put it simply (I don't know the more in-depth stuff off the top of my head) Xen won't run an unmodified x86 OS as a guest (DomU). Instead of actually emulating the physical devices it provides ways for the guest OSes to request services from it through specialized "drivers", for one thing. Once the kernel/driver work is done, however, the fact that you're running under Xen does not affect your userspace apps.
So you can only run operating systems that have been modified to run under Xen. So far Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Plan9 have undergone modification, at least according to http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/OSCompatibility
After you get the "238 files in /etc need updating" thing, issue "etc-update". It will lead to a menu-based program where you can view the diff between the old and new files and choose either to use the old, use the new or merge manually.
/etc somewhere it might throw you in $EDITOR to edit that file out of mild ignorance. Perhaps a check must be done on file types. I've never run into this myself; must not have any binaries in my /etc tree.
I suppose if you had a binary in
In the case of the syslog thing, I'd have to wholeheartedly agree with you. On the other hand, if you're a Perl ninja and a weakling at sed/awk you might be better off just using Perl if you only need sed/awk's particular functionality occasionally.
Maybe I'm a hopeless desktop-fed n00b, but I've only used awk once, to take some experimental data that I'd previously entered into a file by hand, transform it a bit to provide input to gnuplot, then mangle it into a TeX table. It took a bit of time to learn, and you know, if I had to use it again I'd have to learn most of it over! I'm not entirely sure it was worth the time. Perhaps people like me should try to learn Sprog instead... or maybe just give in to the supposed "dark side" and enter the table into a spreadsheet and paste it into one of those hellish beasts they call "word processors"... NEVER!
Yeah, those Palomino core chips run quite hot. Mine is running at 1733MHz (that's 2100 in hype numbering) and idles at 55C, during big compiles gets around 63. Recently (perhaps from the case being jostled?) the thermal paste got pushed off the area of the die and the thing began to idle at 78C.
I wish it were easy to underclock the CPU, because I really need nowhere near that much CPU and would definitely prefer lower temperatures. Unfortunately you have to physically unlock it, which carries a bit too high of a risk factor for me.
Haha, in all the /etc/init.d scripts you can at least put comments. That's one of the really nice things about plain text config files, even the ones that are just lists of variable settings. I always mark my edits to config files with #AWD and usually some comment as to why I made the change, so if I ever need to go back it's easy to remember why I did what I did.
Shipman's response attacks Petreley for saying things that he didn't say. Petreley never said that the Free Software community shouldn't do things in a consistent way, he just said that they should stop imitating Microsoft. Yes, there's a good reason to have desktop environments where ctrl-c copies and ctrl-v pastes. Users expect that. It's also nice to be able to enable emacs/readline keybindings in your desktop apps, because a different kind of user expects that (fortunately gtk+ makes it quite easy, though I don't know how to do it for qt-based programs). There's no reason that when Microsoft decided that blue gradient toolbars were a good look for Office OO.o had to make the same awful decision, and there's no reason to duplicate the registry. That's what Petreley said. And Shipman claims that that makes him some kind of hacker-elitist that wants new users out, when that's simply not the case; he says in his article that skimming the cream of Microsoft's ideas is good!
We always hear the smug statement that those that don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it badly. Perhaps those that don't understand Windows are doomed to reinvent it even worse. If we don't understand what's useful and what's not in Windows we'll continue to duplicate some of its good ideas and some of its bad ones, and some will be completely out of context with the goals of our Unix-like Free operating systems. If you want Free Windows, wait for ReactOS to finish its code audit and contribute to that; that is the place to really duplicate all of Microsoft's design decisions, for better or worse, in the name of ABI compatibility. Our Free environments should make the best decisions and offer a choice. Everyone likes to pose vi/vim's editing style against more Windows-like editing styles and claim one is superior, citing "efficiency" or "consistency". For some people a text editor should be consistent with the other programs they use. They should run nedit, or the MSVS editor, or kate. I'm in my editor enough that it only needs to be consistent with itself, and as efficient as possible; vim is a good choice for me. Petreley doesn't call for kate to be vim-ized; he simply says that OO.o shouldn't have those garish blue gradients in its toolbars.
Having 'Net access doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you have money and the desire to have it.
I am in college now, and I can tell ya for sure that colleges are full of idiots, again, people with some money that want to be in college. Oh yeah, and they think they're smarter than everyone, and have networked with people that can help get them cushy well-paying jobs.
People don't work the crap shifts at McDonald's because they're stupid; the stupidity is that enough people want to eat junk food at midnight that they stay open (similarly, Hummer isn't hurting the environment by building SUVs that get 10mpg, consumers are hurting it by driving them around mall parking lots). As long as there's a wage paid for working the night shift at McDonald's people will do the work because they need the money.
There are lots of stupid people in America, and all over the world. Many of them are members of your so-called "Intelligentsia" (by the way, you misspelled and misused the word; my use of it was more appropriate but maybe a bit melodramatic, check a dictionary or wikipedia or something). Your stereotypes of intelligence simply don't hold water.
You can get compensation if you have proof you own one of the CDs. Now quit trolling. The CDs had correct audio information on them and any computer that just read that information and ignored the autoplay stuff would be fine. As it happens I own a CD that looks like it's affected (though it's not listed on the linked site). And I haven't booted my Windows partition in about a month and a half, but if I did, and put the CD in, it would just sit there. I would start up whatever cheesy little CD player app I chose, and run it without consequence.
Actually supposedly there was a MacOS version too, but you had to run it manually and enter your password, which would raise a red flag for knowledgeable people (kinda like that recent "Mac virus" that relied on the user for both the "code execution" and "privledge escalation" portions). Kinda like it raised a red flag for Windows users running as non-Admin users when the autorun program told them they had to be admin.
Oddly enough, I can't find a reference to this within 5 minutes on Google, but here's the basic idea: someone planted a worm in GCC that planted itself in everything that GCC compiled. If I recall correctly, when one of these infected programs was run it would modify your GCC installation. There may have been something else to it, I don't recall.
Verizon's not a cable TV company. If memory serves, though, the mobile phone companies, DSL providers and satellite TV broadcasters have been selling bundles together lately. So perhaps instead a satellite contract with one of their affiliates?