I may accidentally drop into a rant here, so I apologize in advance if I do. I'm not meaning to get into a flame war:). I just find this ridiculous. I work for a university that recently decided to ban Napster. We haven't received any threats, it just happens to be against the policies of network use that have been around for quite awhile, and the policies are also fair. I have an interesting perspective on this - while I work as a programmer/IT jack of all trades for this university, I am also a student. I had been playing around with Napster for awhile, but I prefer other ways of getting multimedia on the net. I was also shocked at the blatant piracy running rampant on Napster. Yes, I know that the company is not liable in a way - it's kind of like IRC. I just don't see how people can justify their use of the program, when instead of going out and buying the latest Eifel 65 album they just grab it off of the net. "But it's my right!", they cry! Your right?!?! Where do you get the idea that it is your right to unlawfully steal someone elses work? I just don't understand the mentality of people that shout out against universities that block Napster. They yell how it is their right to download music, get free this, blah, blah, blah. To be bluntly honest, it isn't your right. I know CD sales are up, I know all the open source arguments, and I am also an open source advocate. I am still do not see how enforcing copyright laws is going to destroy the open source movement. What do you think people are doing when they GPL code? Sure, they are giving it away for free, but there are laws on how and what you can do with it. Just like music! I just wish someone could explain to me how someone can be so arrogant and ignorant as to think it is their right to download, I mean pirate, copyrighted music. If anyone could do that, I would be greatly appreciative.
I'll admit from the start that where I work, we are completely Microsoft. I should also mention that I work at a university, and the IT powers that be have managed to get some good deals on software I guess. I don't want to get into a platform war though, I'm just trying to offer some suggestions on how to improve site efficency. We are running NT4 on all of our servers, MS SQL server, etc. Pretty simple basic server setup overall. All of the stuff that we do is done using JScript in Active Server pages. We were usually doing most of our SQL in our scripts. We had heard of Stored Procedures, but never really looked into them all that much. Once we took the time to sit down and write a few, we've found that our site speed and efficency has increased a LOT. There were a lot of SQL statements that we used a lot, and we had modularized them to function calls, but you just can't beat letting the SQL server do the majority of the work. Try to pass of work to the server that is designed to do it - it may take a little extra work and planning, but it is really worth it, especially if you are doing a lot of heavy database accessing.
To me, this sounds like it would definitely throw a wrench into the machine of the corporations suing everyone over DeCSS and other things (CPHack even). Is there anyone with any knowledge of the law able to give us an idea of what, if anything, this actually means to current and future cases of this variety?
I'm registered and I like playing around with these things. If you are trying to find out some new changes to the kernel, or see how a compiler has improved, this is great. But what about GUI things? It would be kind of cool to have a method to be able to do something graphical, maybe kind of like VNC for MS stuff. Just a thought...
Daikatana is actually available for pre-order now - it's expected ship date is 4/3/00 - I can't wait for this one either, it looks absolutely awesome. You can pre-order it here: www.gamestop.com/product-detail.jsp?origin=sear&sk u=642041
GIS On A Rio 500 - Damn Cool
on
Free Love
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· Score: 1
I had to take a walk across campus to help someone out on some ASP code they were writing, and I had to leave while I was listening to Geeks In Space. I was kinda ticked because I wanted to keep listening. I completely forgot about my new rio player...i quicked dumped the mp3 on the rio, and talk about cool. I was just kinda amazed I guess, to actually listen to GIS somewhere besides my computer. This thing is so cool, and so is geeks in space. Keep up the good work!
I love my Palm Pilot and AvantGo. I would be severely bored and probably risk falling asleep in some meetings and all of my classes if it were not for my ability to read the news during them. I love it - all the greatest tech and financial and political news, all contained in this little toy that I drop into my cradle a few times a day. But, there is a downside. Lets say I read this great article on TopicX and want to to show it to one of my roommates. Oh darn, I did a hotsync before I could show him and now the story is pretty much gone unless I want to spend way too much time digging around on the real web site for it (its usually a pain). The only other gripe that I have with most of the news that I get over the net/my palm pilot is that it has no relevancy to my local city/life. Granted I like reading about AMD's new chip or the Microsoft trial (no flaming or any dumb comments about Microsoft please, its just an example) or whats going on in other big cities. But thats all I hear about. I need to be able to pick up a local newspaper every once in awhile, or else (like this week) I'm wondering why the hell any of my friends on another side of town are without phones (turns out they are replacing a trunk - never caught that one on Wired). I think there is still a definite market for newspapers. Plus, it just doesn't seem the same reading my Palm Pilot over coffee in the morning somedays.
Would you just quit your bitching?!/. is a website last I checked (hold on a sec...yep, still is) and I have yet to hear about a web site article being forced upon someone. Katz is actually a pretty good writer. He's spent his time on quite a few other jobs, and he knows what he's doing. If you don't want to read him, or he just pisses you off, take a hint from clueboy - don't click on the link!!!. If you really hate him that much, or complain about the quality that much, submit your own essays to/. and then see how much crap you get. Today has been a slow day anyway, and its interesting to read a few new things every once in awhile. And in reference to your statement on who cares about Leonard DiCrapio, it's not about the actor. The film does have a bit of a theme about living away from this plugged in world that enjoy. Broaden your horizons a little. It's amazing what it can do for your life.
In the post on the homepage it said that this release was unexpected. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't believe that this is all they are doing for Linux. Considering the way that Microsoft usually works, I'm surprised they haven't announced their very own distribution of Linux. Do they have the same mindset they had about the internet - do they think Linux is just a fad that is going to die out in several years? Considering the way their marketing minds think, Office for Linux should be on the shelves soon. It would be smart of them to start making software for Linux actually - not that I would like to see it though.
Although I agree with what you were doing, how can you honestly expect to defend your actions, and say that your work would be used for legitimate purposes only? It is almost like the disclaimer that you see on many crack download sites - "This is for educational use only." Do you/did you honestly believe that no one would use this for ripping DVD's?
I'm surprised to see this on Slashdot. There was a huge article about this in last months Wired magazine. It was actually the cover story (there was this really disgusting cover, with a fake scratch 'n' sniff sticker in cartoon characters armpit) that month. It seemed like a pretty neat technology, but is it really worth the money put into it? Would we really want people sending us smells like they do spam? About the only good use I could see for it were to be if you bought groceries/wine/cigars over the internet. But if you truly enjoy wines and cigars, I can't believe that a little gadget is going to be able to reproduce the smell of a product good enough to learn much about it. It just seems like a frivolous use of technology to me.
At least this proves all of those people wrong that he was doing this for his own benefit/monetary gain. He's even going to donate some of his own money to the charity. Way to go!
At my university too. I don't think a single one of my professors (except the one guy that is retiring that knows C like the back of his hand - gonna miss him) has ever programmed in anything that doesn't have the word "Visual" in front of it. It's pretty sad. I'm glad I have a job with a boss that actually knows how to program (he's not a managerial type boss - pretty much a guy I work with that has seniority over me).
Please! I lived in the dorm for a year. My university has a policy that you are supposed to stay in the dorms for two years. I had to pull a few tricks and hope I didn't get caught so that I could live off campus. Living off of campus is now kind of a bummer. Sure, I've got my own room, but I have to share the bathroom with three other guys. The social atmosphere in the dorms can't be beat, either. Where else can you live when directly above your head there are roughly 300 women! Two more floors up, another 300! I mean seriously...I still go visit my friends in the dorms quite a bit for the social atmosphere (its actually how i met my girlfriend of six months). If it weren't for the fact that I'm a programmer/networking/jack of all trades here at the same time, i would probably have moved back into the dorms for the connection. And yes, I do have a life outside of computers, but hey:). Nothing like transferring a couple of gigs of data between friends in under an hour if you need to:)
Congratulations Jon first of all. On a humorous side (read: no flames please:-P) shouldn't the guys be getting royalties from this? I thought the book was about them (kindof). Anyway, like I said, this isn't completely serious:)
If not for Microsoft, maybe we'd be accessing the Web on Macs, Amigas, Ataris, etc. which would be more reliable, easier to use, and ironically, make sharing information easier because many platforms would have to stick to standards like HTML in order to survive in a multi-platform world.
True, I don't disagree with you there. I was just saying that Microsoft was one of the first companies to actually get a lot of people using home machines. Now that I think about, I should have been more specific in my comment maybe, and just mentioned that it was Microsofts marketing department that was so innovative. *grin* Who knows. I do appreciate the constructive replies though...its actually nice to have a real discussion on here instead of seeing everyone yell at each other.
Actually, for all the crap that we give Microsoft now, we probably have to thank them a little bit. Before you go hitting the reply link with a flamethrower in hand, realize that I don't like the company much anymore either. One of the reasons we probably have to thank them, is that without them many of us would probably not be the computer geeks that we are, or have the jobs that we have. Windows is the software that has brought computing to the masses. I mean face it, even though I like Linux, its stable, its fun to work with, and it actually takes a little bit of thinking every once in awhile, it is most definitely not for the average home user. Without all these home users, we wouldn't have the net the way it is today, we wouldn't have people investing so much money in tech, etc. Even if you are developing some huge e-commerce site and serving it on Linux, its all the Windows using home users that are going to be flocking to the site and making you money. Anyway...while Microsoft has been unfair/scandalous/*insert phrase here* in the past several years, they definitely deserve their place in history.
For all the crap that we get about cows and cheese, it all comes down to that, doesn't it? Up to the wee hours writing some obscure piece of code that you won't understand in the morning but seems to do everything but bring world peace at the time you're writing it. You get thirsty and see that it's late at night...but wait! The gas station just a few blocks out of town still has its nuclear powered mini-sun lights glaring, and the beer cooler is still open. God, I love this state somedays.
Just edit your user info...but then again, Anonymous Coward really doesn't have any user info I guess *grin*. Seriously though just creat a user account, and then go to the Customize Comments page. Works pretty slick.
Definitely! My entire family and I (several of my roomates even) do I lot of investing. About 60% of us do it over E*Trade or some other online brokerage. Quite a few have asked me about LinuxOne and I've been glad to rip on them thoroughly . It's not that I mind that they are selling someone elses distribution, its the fact that they are so blatantly scamming everyone, and not even doing any original work/innovation. It just bugs me. There is a line between distributing open source and outright BS. Anyway...my $.02 worth of ranting.
When I was about 10 years old, my grandmother got me a hand drawn cartoon from Sergio Aragonez (another cartoonist for Mad). It had a picture of Sergio and a picture of Neuman both waving and saying "Hi, Jason!". I still have that picture, and I still love Mad. Although Sergio has always been my favorite artist, I am really going to miss Don Martin. Ah well...heres to another rant and sad times. -=Omicron=-
I like a lot of the designs that this company has, but I have one problem. I've got a beast of tower (around three feet tall) next to my desk that darn near creates a windstorm because of all the fans. It doesn't have a 300 watt power supply either (too small for all my cards and drives). Does anyone know of any places that have cool cases for full towers? I've been thinking about painting it myself, but I'm not sure how to paint the drives (especially the Zip and floppy) without destroying them. I'd rather not void too many warranties at once. Anyway...thanks for the help if you can give it:)
Slashdot Mirror
I may accidentally drop into a rant here, so I apologize in advance if I do. I'm not meaning to get into a flame war :). I just find this ridiculous. I work for a university that recently decided to ban Napster. We haven't received any threats, it just happens to be against the policies of network use that have been around for quite awhile, and the policies are also fair. I have an interesting perspective on this - while I work as a programmer/IT jack of all trades for this university, I am also a student. I had been playing around with Napster for awhile, but I prefer other ways of getting multimedia on the net. I was also shocked at the blatant piracy running rampant on Napster. Yes, I know that the company is not liable in a way - it's kind of like IRC. I just don't see how people can justify their use of the program, when instead of going out and buying the latest Eifel 65 album they just grab it off of the net. "But it's my right!", they cry! Your right?!?! Where do you get the idea that it is your right to unlawfully steal someone elses work? I just don't understand the mentality of people that shout out against universities that block Napster. They yell how it is their right to download music, get free this, blah, blah, blah. To be bluntly honest, it isn't your right. I know CD sales are up, I know all the open source arguments, and I am also an open source advocate. I am still do not see how enforcing copyright laws is going to destroy the open source movement. What do you think people are doing when they GPL code? Sure, they are giving it away for free, but there are laws on how and what you can do with it. Just like music! I just wish someone could explain to me how someone can be so arrogant and ignorant as to think it is their right to download, I mean pirate, copyrighted music. If anyone could do that, I would be greatly appreciative.
I'll admit from the start that where I work, we are completely Microsoft. I should also mention that I work at a university, and the IT powers that be have managed to get some good deals on software I guess. I don't want to get into a platform war though, I'm just trying to offer some suggestions on how to improve site efficency. We are running NT4 on all of our servers, MS SQL server, etc. Pretty simple basic server setup overall. All of the stuff that we do is done using JScript in Active Server pages. We were usually doing most of our SQL in our scripts. We had heard of Stored Procedures, but never really looked into them all that much. Once we took the time to sit down and write a few, we've found that our site speed and efficency has increased a LOT. There were a lot of SQL statements that we used a lot, and we had modularized them to function calls, but you just can't beat letting the SQL server do the majority of the work. Try to pass of work to the server that is designed to do it - it may take a little extra work and planning, but it is really worth it, especially if you are doing a lot of heavy database accessing.
s _release/04172000_3.jsp>Click Here For More Info</a>
To me, this sounds like it would definitely throw a wrench into the machine of the corporations suing everyone over DeCSS and other things (CPHack even). Is there anyone with any knowledge of the law able to give us an idea of what, if anything, this actually means to current and future cases of this variety?
I'm registered and I like playing around with these things. If you are trying to find out some new changes to the kernel, or see how a compiler has improved, this is great. But what about GUI things? It would be kind of cool to have a method to be able to do something graphical, maybe kind of like VNC for MS stuff. Just a thought...
Daikatana is actually available for pre-order now - it's expected ship date is 4/3/00 - I can't wait for this one either, it looks absolutely awesome. You can pre-order it here: www.gamestop.com/product-detail.jsp?origin=sear&sk u=642041
I had to take a walk across campus to help someone out on some ASP code they were writing, and I had to leave while I was listening to Geeks In Space. I was kinda ticked because I wanted to keep listening. I completely forgot about my new rio player...i quicked dumped the mp3 on the rio, and talk about cool. I was just kinda amazed I guess, to actually listen to GIS somewhere besides my computer. This thing is so cool, and so is geeks in space. Keep up the good work!
I love my Palm Pilot and AvantGo. I would be severely bored and probably risk falling asleep in some meetings and all of my classes if it were not for my ability to read the news during them. I love it - all the greatest tech and financial and political news, all contained in this little toy that I drop into my cradle a few times a day. But, there is a downside. Lets say I read this great article on TopicX and want to to show it to one of my roommates. Oh darn, I did a hotsync before I could show him and now the story is pretty much gone unless I want to spend way too much time digging around on the real web site for it (its usually a pain). The only other gripe that I have with most of the news that I get over the net/my palm pilot is that it has no relevancy to my local city/life. Granted I like reading about AMD's new chip or the Microsoft trial (no flaming or any dumb comments about Microsoft please, its just an example) or whats going on in other big cities. But thats all I hear about. I need to be able to pick up a local newspaper every once in awhile, or else (like this week) I'm wondering why the hell any of my friends on another side of town are without phones (turns out they are replacing a trunk - never caught that one on Wired). I think there is still a definite market for newspapers. Plus, it just doesn't seem the same reading my Palm Pilot over coffee in the morning somedays.
Would you just quit your bitching?! /. is a website last I checked (hold on a sec...yep, still is) and I have yet to hear about a web site article being forced upon someone. Katz is actually a pretty good writer. He's spent his time on quite a few other jobs, and he knows what he's doing. If you don't want to read him, or he just pisses you off, take a hint from clueboy - don't click on the link!!!. If you really hate him that much, or complain about the quality that much, submit your own essays to /. and then see how much crap you get. Today has been a slow day anyway, and its interesting to read a few new things every once in awhile. And in reference to your statement on who cares about Leonard DiCrapio, it's not about the actor. The film does have a bit of a theme about living away from this plugged in world that enjoy. Broaden your horizons a little. It's amazing what it can do for your life.
In the post on the homepage it said that this release was unexpected. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't believe that this is all they are doing for Linux. Considering the way that Microsoft usually works, I'm surprised they haven't announced their very own distribution of Linux. Do they have the same mindset they had about the internet - do they think Linux is just a fad that is going to die out in several years? Considering the way their marketing minds think, Office for Linux should be on the shelves soon. It would be smart of them to start making software for Linux actually - not that I would like to see it though.
Although I agree with what you were doing, how can you honestly expect to defend your actions, and say that your work would be used for legitimate purposes only? It is almost like the disclaimer that you see on many crack download sites - "This is for educational use only." Do you/did you honestly believe that no one would use this for ripping DVD's?
I'm surprised to see this on Slashdot. There was a huge article about this in last months Wired magazine. It was actually the cover story (there was this really disgusting cover, with a fake scratch 'n' sniff sticker in cartoon characters armpit) that month. It seemed like a pretty neat technology, but is it really worth the money put into it? Would we really want people sending us smells like they do spam? About the only good use I could see for it were to be if you bought groceries/wine/cigars over the internet. But if you truly enjoy wines and cigars, I can't believe that a little gadget is going to be able to reproduce the smell of a product good enough to learn much about it. It just seems like a frivolous use of technology to me.
At least this proves all of those people wrong that he was doing this for his own benefit/monetary gain. He's even going to donate some of his own money to the charity. Way to go!
At my university too. I don't think a single one of my professors (except the one guy that is retiring that knows C like the back of his hand - gonna miss him) has ever programmed in anything that doesn't have the word "Visual" in front of it. It's pretty sad. I'm glad I have a job with a boss that actually knows how to program (he's not a managerial type boss - pretty much a guy I work with that has seniority over me).
Please! I lived in the dorm for a year. My university has a policy that you are supposed to stay in the dorms for two years. I had to pull a few tricks and hope I didn't get caught so that I could live off campus. Living off of campus is now kind of a bummer. Sure, I've got my own room, but I have to share the bathroom with three other guys. The social atmosphere in the dorms can't be beat, either. Where else can you live when directly above your head there are roughly 300 women! Two more floors up, another 300! I mean seriously...I still go visit my friends in the dorms quite a bit for the social atmosphere (its actually how i met my girlfriend of six months). If it weren't for the fact that I'm a programmer/networking/jack of all trades here at the same time, i would probably have moved back into the dorms for the connection. And yes, I do have a life outside of computers, but hey :). Nothing like transferring a couple of gigs of data between friends in under an hour if you need to :)
Congratulations Jon first of all. On a humorous side (read: no flames please :-P) shouldn't the guys be getting royalties from this? I thought the book was about them (kindof). Anyway, like I said, this isn't completely serious :)
True, I don't disagree with you there. I was just saying that Microsoft was one of the first companies to actually get a lot of people using home machines. Now that I think about, I should have been more specific in my comment maybe, and just mentioned that it was Microsofts marketing department that was so innovative. *grin* Who knows. I do appreciate the constructive replies though...its actually nice to have a real discussion on here instead of seeing everyone yell at each other.
Actually, for all the crap that we give Microsoft now, we probably have to thank them a little bit. Before you go hitting the reply link with a flamethrower in hand, realize that I don't like the company much anymore either. One of the reasons we probably have to thank them, is that without them many of us would probably not be the computer geeks that we are, or have the jobs that we have. Windows is the software that has brought computing to the masses. I mean face it, even though I like Linux, its stable, its fun to work with, and it actually takes a little bit of thinking every once in awhile, it is most definitely not for the average home user. Without all these home users, we wouldn't have the net the way it is today, we wouldn't have people investing so much money in tech, etc. Even if you are developing some huge e-commerce site and serving it on Linux, its all the Windows using home users that are going to be flocking to the site and making you money. Anyway...while Microsoft has been unfair/scandalous/*insert phrase here* in the past several years, they definitely deserve their place in history.
For all the crap that we get about cows and cheese, it all comes down to that, doesn't it? Up to the wee hours writing some obscure piece of code that you won't understand in the morning but seems to do everything but bring world peace at the time you're writing it. You get thirsty and see that it's late at night...but wait! The gas station just a few blocks out of town still has its nuclear powered mini-sun lights glaring, and the beer cooler is still open. God, I love this state somedays.
Just edit your user info...but then again, Anonymous Coward really doesn't have any user info I guess *grin*. Seriously though just creat a user account, and then go to the Customize Comments page. Works pretty slick.
Definitely! My entire family and I (several of my roomates even) do I lot of investing. About 60% of us do it over E*Trade or some other online brokerage. Quite a few have asked me about LinuxOne and I've been glad to rip on them thoroughly . It's not that I mind that they are selling someone elses distribution, its the fact that they are so blatantly scamming everyone, and not even doing any original work/innovation. It just bugs me. There is a line between distributing open source and outright BS. Anyway...my $.02 worth of ranting.
Of all the sites that could use a good defacing, this would be one of them. At least redirect their traffic to RedHat or some other decent Linux site.
That's me in that scary thing we all call real life :)
When I was about 10 years old, my grandmother got me a hand drawn cartoon from Sergio Aragonez (another cartoonist for Mad). It had a picture of Sergio and a picture of Neuman both waving and saying "Hi, Jason!". I still have that picture, and I still love Mad. Although Sergio has always been my favorite artist, I am really going to miss Don Martin. Ah well...heres to another rant and sad times.
-=Omicron=-
I like a lot of the designs that this company has, but I have one problem. I've got a beast of tower (around three feet tall) next to my desk that darn near creates a windstorm because of all the fans. It doesn't have a 300 watt power supply either (too small for all my cards and drives). Does anyone know of any places that have cool cases for full towers? I've been thinking about painting it myself, but I'm not sure how to paint the drives (especially the Zip and floppy) without destroying them. I'd rather not void too many warranties at once. Anyway...thanks for the help if you can give it :)