They don't have to release source unless they release binaries, is the best I understand it (it may well be more complex than that, I believe it is).
I think basically, anyone that comes into posession of binaries had to be able to come into posession of source. Perhaps this means that if you only give it to a friend, you only have to give it to them, I dunno. But they could give it to anyone, and source too.
- piecemeal character development
Did the dwarf even have a name?
The dwarf was as much a part of the storyline as the average tree - useless background. You could have replaced him with just about anything else and the movie would have been pretty much unchanged. I consider this a plus, because I didn't like him.
- cheesy RPG style plot
Considering it was based on an RPG, I consider this an upside - I mean, without that (and comments like 'You're a mage! And a low level one at that.'), it wouldn't have been D&D, it woulda been a low-budget fantasy action flick that no one woulda thought highly of (but without the D&D name, it probably wouldn't have been blasted as much).
- a Wayans brother
I seriously would have had less complaints about the movie if they'd replaced him with the actor that played the dwarf - even one actor quite obviously playing two major roles is better than a Wayans brother playing one of them.
Now, my beefs:
The empress couldn't act. I've never winced at acting before. This is almost impressive.
I was hoping for more tongue-in-cheek humour (e.g. someone saying 'This isn't some kind of game!' or something), though maybe that would have ruined it further for some people.
Profion's last scene (I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers) was rather anticlimactic. They built it up so much, and then... poof. He may as well have said 'Oh, you win, I lose' and took the stairs down.
Not enough spellcasting - admittedly a low budget, but still, the little things (light spells, etc) might've been nice. One thing I've always hated about (many) RPGs is that spells are for combat-related stuff only. A break would have been nice.
Israel, for example, is actually smaller than New Hampshire.
Isn't Israel smaller than Lake Ontario?
I proposed to a friend of mine (after she complained about the water shortage there) that we float Israel in one of the Great Lakes, but I don't recall which.
The reason wireless is so prominent in Europe is that the government-provided telephone service is unreliable, expensive, hard-to-get, and inflexible. Yet these telcos were created with the same reasoning that Canada is using for broadband.
And Canada is using the same reasoning for broadband as it is for standard telephone service - and I have never, EVER heard a single good thing about an American telco. Ours, however, are simply beautiful. I can call some places in the US for cheaper than other Americans (even ones that live in the same state sometimes), my phone service will always cost $20/mo, and will always work. If it breaks, Telus will be out here to fix it within a day at the most.
Compare this to a friend in Seattle. They had two phone lines, with extra services on one line (call display, call waiting, etc) that they didn't want. They call the telco to get those services removed. Telco says they'll take those services off. What happens? Their OTHER phone line gets CUT OFF. I was amazed when I heard this, and asked her if she'd called them to have it fixed. She proceeded to tell me that they had called to have it fixed several times over the last six months, and nothing had happened
Another occasion (since remedied): I compared DSL (1.5 down, 640 up) last year, between NW Bell and Telus. Telus charged about $40/month CDN to provide this service, while NW Bell charged approx. $230 I believe (Canadian or American, that's still far too much) to provide it in Seattle. That's just sad.
I'm not trying to US-bash (though these are examples I use when I feel so inclined), but when you compare our regulated telcos to your unregulated telcos, I think the differences are obvious. Yes, it's a shame that the CTRC has to stick their nose into our broadband access, because look what it's done to our telephone companies.
The problem with Sega consoles is not that the games suck, or that the system sucks, it's that Sega sucks.
With the exception of the Genesis, most Sega platforms start out, have a few games made for them, and get cancelled. How many people bought a Sega CD? or a 32X? or even a Saturn? How many of these platforms are still around?
Sega stops supporting their systems pretty fast, all things considered. Hell, I've seen SNESes being sold, and how old are they? Nintendo is still selling Game Boys, admittedly redesigned, and with new features, but it's still the same system. I remember getting my first one over 10 years ago, and it's still going?
No, I'll never buy a DreamCast - not because of crappy games, or poor specs, but because I don't feel like paying $250 (Canadian) to get fucked by Sega. I didn't make that mistake before, and I'm not about to again.
so if there is a bot in the channel, ban the bot. how hard is that?
VERY HARD
They change nicks all the time. Tolfwin one second, podar the next, and sometimes more than 10 bots on our network at any one time
They change IP addresses all the time. When I first encoutered these bots on our network, they were coming from about 4 IP addresses. Now, I've seen dozens of ranges of IPs they come from
They change ISPs. The vast majority of the ones we see on our network are now from the Earthlink dialup pool. Ban all of earthlink from the network? I don't think we should have to akill a whole ISP just for one stupid company.
Even if you ignore the privacy issues, these bots answered our AKILLs by evading them. This is in direct violation of our AUP, and is unauthorized access to the network. Violating our network's rules, entering where they are not welcome... these are not just regular bots.
But don't think the users want them. Our network implemented a workaround that will ban (most of) these bots (As well as dozens of users, don't think it's a perfect solution) from any channel where the feature is enabled. For the next two days after we designed this feature, we had a flood of people into our main help channel asking how to turn this feature off - and ban the bots.
Users don't want them, IRCops dont' want them, admins don't want them, who DOES want them? The company that probably hopes to make money off advertising on their page. These bots don't benefit anyone but eNow, and I don't think we should have to spend our time and energy designing ways to ban bots that no one wants there anyway.
Because of Slade's actions (which I hope he continues, for this reason), we already have freakin John Carmack defendig the GPL. =]
I think the money would thus be better spent elsewhere. As another poster suggested, XFree needs a LOT of work, and some funding would be a good way to help them out.
Wait! Are you telling me Capt'n Crunch is *not* geeky? Corn Puffs is not geeky? Lucky Charms is not geeky?
No, but those are geeky in different ways. I'm just saying that if I'm up at 3 AM coding PHP3 for a website that has to be up in 2 hours, chances are I'm going to leave the cereal for a few minutes, and it'll get soggy, or I'll drip milk or corn flakes on my keyboard.
Besides, cereals don't go well with cola, coffee, and so on. They go with with juice, which, for an all-night hacking run, is very ungeekly.
Don't complain... Mine's based on TC++ 3.0, which is a DOS-based compiler... meaning that under Win95, it's rather unstable, and just testing a program can cause it to lock up, forcing you to force quit your test app, and TC along with it, losing your code.
I know, save before you run, but you can't just ALT-F-S, you have to ALT-F-S-ENTER-Y... And most of the people in my class haven't gotten to the 'hit enter to get rid of a dialog' stage yet. They're typing, they hit CTRL-F9, an error comes up, so they reach for the mouse find the cursor, find the button, click it, and go back to the keyboard. Ugh.
While the page *does* say that it provides 100% of many vitamins and minerals, the above is clearly not 100%.
True, but really, how easy do you think it is to make a microwavable burrito that completely fills every dietary requirement the average person has by just eating one a day?
Besides, I don't know about the rest of you geeks, but *this* geek would prefer to eat more than one burrito a day.
If something with "100% of your Daily Requirements" were the ultimate geek food, Total would be much more popular than ramen.
Again, I don't know about your local geek cultures, but all the ones I've been in (as I've moved) have required that geek foods be long-term (so that after a big contract, you can buy bulk), microwavable (a hot meal and a warm monitor, what combo), and taste good.
IMHO, Total does not taste good.
Besides, cereal is so... ungeekly, especially while coding late at night.
Combine this with some microwavable pasta or entrees or something that has some protien, and you're set for life. A deep freeze and a microwave, that's all you need.
And wouldn't win95 boxes on dial-up connections be the ideal host to launch distributed DoS attacks from?
Yeah, of course. See, I'm on a cable modem with a maximum theoretical bandwidth (downstream) of approx. a T3, but I'm not certain. (Many web servers have T3s. I don't know the stats, but I'll bet Yahoo makes a T3 look like smoke signals.) In other words, let's assume I have 500 kilobytes/sec. This is rather funny, since I average 80, but oh well.
As I understand them, modems 28.8 and faster can upload only at 28.8, meaning approx. 3.0 kbps. By this calculation, we can figure that about 167 28.8+ dial-up Win95 boxes would be needed, as well as tools. Linux would be more cost-effective, since 167 copies of Win98 would chomp the wallet, and ping -f is easier to do.
I don't think most script kiddies can afford 167 computers just to DOS one cable user, let alone ten times as many for a pretty good server.
Also, it would (theoretically) take 100 56k users to knock me down, 32 dual channel ISDN lines, 10 other cable users, two and a half T1s, or a T3.
Thus, logically, the best solution would be to use at least cable modems, if not T1s/T3s or better.
I just hope no one on an OC-48 reads this post and gets my IP address. Eep. =]
My web browsers do not accept cookies, and Cookie Monster helps me with that. Personally, I have no traceable web presence. However, there are always sites that require a username/e-mail address.
I remember the good old days when cookies were a good thing, except the mass hysteria about letting a web page write to your hard drive (like Netscape can't do that already).
But I'll point out that there are some sites that use cookies for no reason other than conveniance. On my page for example, I use cookies. I'm going to re-code it so that it doesn't *require* them to (bad implementation of a good idea), but the cookie my page sets is one of conveniance.
When you hit my page for the first time, you'll see a poem. I used to have Invictus, but now it's The Raven.
After you read the poem (or scroll to the bottom), you click on the link to the main page. The link has an HREF="/", which is where you already are, but since the server sets a cookie, you get the main page of my site instead of the poem, and never see the poem again, unless you don't come back for 30 days, delete the cookie, or I change the poem.
Pretty harmless, I think. I set a cookie Raven=1 if you've seen the poem already, and you never have to see it again (which, I think, is a good approach to splash pages). I'm going to re-code it so that any cookie-denying browsers have my cookie policy explained to them, and a link to the main page shown, but until then, my cookies aren't a privacy issue, they're a bad-requirement issue.
The ironic thing is that if I wanted to do it without cookies, I'd have to implement a tracking database somehow, which would be even worse. *sigh* Oh well. I'll just have to fix it up I guess.
~Sentry21~
Re:Can we put this in the Hall of Fame?
on
Geeks in Suits
·
· Score: 1
I dunno about a Hall of Fame, but for future reference, I've mirrored it. I wish there was some way to find the original author, but sadly, it was an AC. Oh well.
Download.com is where I got my copy of DeCSS, but I just checked now, and it's not there anymore. Looks like they bowed to pressure just like everyone else.
Uhh... The last school I was at had a jukebox that used records... Yes, vinyl... And this was last year, they still have it I imagine... And we had to suffer through Hanson thaht some sadistic trolls would choose and then run out of the cafeteria before anyone could catch and harm them. So I think that if we can get Hanson on vinyl, you can get Eiffel 65 on tape.
Consider that the volumes of spam we're talking about - probably gigabytes upon gigabytes - would easily paralyze a cable modem connection, particularly when, for most @Home users, the upload cap is approximately 128Kbps (approx. ISDN speed). For anyone to make use of this exploit would require probably a dozen cracked systems per spammer.
On the contrary, that's only to other @home subscribers and external sites. To the @Home servers themselves ('www', 'proxy', 'mail', and 'news' as examples) you can get larger bandwidths - I've personally clocked approximately 261.12 kilobytes/sec bandwidth to the news server (http://cdslash.tdhosting.com/misc/ throughput.txt holds bandwidth statistics I made not two minutes ago) - this is much higher than the max rated speed of an ISDN line.
However, even given that fact, I doubt that proxies could have made up the bulk of the problem - @Home users are spamming, @Home's lazy, and that's that.
I can tell you right now @Home does NOT scan anything except forwindows filesharing. Some of the @Home network blocks windowsfilesharing at the router, others scan for it and disable it.
Guess mine disables it at the router, because I've had sharing on for a while (yeah, I know, I'm gonna be h4x0r3d, nothing yet) and no one's said anything to me.
On a semi-related note, I got an e-mail from @Home's fraud and whatever department a few months ago. They were actually forwarding me a copy of an e-mail that was sent to them, a complaint by a company, about how I had accessed 'an illegal warez drop box' that had been created on their FTP server.
Of course, I immediately went to the URL they specified, and took a look around, and there was nothing there. However, if their server was so important and private, they shouldn't allow anonymous access. And besides, the logs, which they C&P'ed into the e-mail, showed that I was logged in for approx. 1 second. But despite all that, not only was the complaint not dealt with (i.e. I was not reprimanded), but they forwarded it to me. I don't know how other ISPs work, but that doesn't seem to be a good thing to me.
As far as portscanning goes, I've run NMAP scans, as well as WS_Pingpack Pro scans (whee) on various subnets, and no one's even bothered to say hello. I did find a lot of ICQ homepages, FTP sites, web site, POP3 servers, and so on on my own subnet (about half the people had some sort of server)
@Home doesn't bother with security, because they probably don't want to deal with the huge amount of customers they have. Oh well, makes my life a little easier.
They came for the Jews, and I did not speak out for them, for I was not Jewish.
And then they came for the blacks, and I did not speak out for them because I was not Black.
And they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.
And then they came for me, and when they took me away, there was no one left to speak out for me.
You can't just say that you won't fight back until it applies to you. Perhaps you don't support anti-privacy legislation because you have nothing to hide. But then if you do want to keep something private, what will you do? Will you say 'I want my privacy back, because now your laws apply to me'?
If you oppose the principles, then get involved, study other cases, or at the very least, consider the implications. The point here is not that the libraries are going to restrict access to pornography. The point, or at least one of them, is that when the blocking software is installed on these computers, it won't help any problems, and will in fact cause them.
The blocking software prevents users from accessing (most) pornography on the internet. I say most because I could easily make a page that wouldn't get blocked by any of them, I'm sure. But also, studies have shown that they block out sites that have nothing to do with pornography. They might block out sites on reproduction (bye-bye biology research) or, as jamie mentioned, even Yahoo.
In order to solve the problem of 1 in 26,000 people looking at 'objectionable' materials which may have been pornography, or may just as easily not have, the group is going to be adding a check box on the primary which, as I understand the voting system (which I don't, being Canadian) most Liberals won't go to for some reason, so that the conservative people of Holland, MI, but no one else that pays for the library, can protect their kids from the evils of internet pornography, which will instantly leap out from the computers at them as soon as they sit down at the computers in the well-lit, public, and open internet access area in the adult section of the library.
Just wait until they come for you too. Historians learned the hard way, from Normandy among others, that if you let them get a foothold, it's easier for them to spread. This is a view from the trenches, it lets the uninformed, like yourself, know what is going on, and experience it second-hand, instead of in MSNBCBCNN articles.
When I was setting up X recently, on my nice little Debian box, I had a rather lot of trouble getting my accelerated X server working with my monitor and video card.
The problem was that when I ran the SVGA server, it worked fine, perfect, wonderful. But when I ran the setup programs, told it what I wanted, told it what I had, and everything, the Mach_64 server ended up thinking my monitor was a little too bic - the top and bottom of the screen were an inch above and below the top and bottom of the actual monitor.
Finally, I forget how, me, the newbie Linux user, who could find no help online, nothing in the man pages, nothing at all, somehow managed to figure out two things:
I needed to set one of the scan rates from 31.5 to 31.15
The file I was told to edit wasn't the file X was using, so for three days I couldn't understand why it wasn't working.
After this harrowing, or rather pain-in-the-ass, ordeal, I was rather fed-up. I mean, I put in all the data, I have a supported card, a generic monitor, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and probably every other Windows out there, supports my configuration out of the box. Linux requires me to hunt around for three or four days just to change a number that I don't even know what it was!
Now, I love Linux, don't get me wrong, but the obvious problem here is that if a Linux lover like myself is willing to throw in the towel, nuke the partition, and give up the goose, then how can we expect to attract anyone but power-users?
I don't know, I just think that tools that write out the config file for you should write out a config file that is compatible with your configuration.
Finally, after days, I did get it installed, set up, and working properly, but I was pretty frustrated when I did. Then Debian screwed up all my Enlightenment packages so my install got borked, but that's another story.
Here's what I want to see out there, an IM client that does the following:
Instant messages, a la ICQ.
Chat functions, a la ICQ
Chat/IM function, a la MSNM/Yahoo
File transfers, a la ICQ
Invisible mode with a visible list, a la ICQ
Visible mode with block list, a la MSNM
One person to each username, a la all except ICQ
A better DB management system than ICQ
Plug-in architecture, a la ICQ, for ANYTHING ELSE THAT GETS ADDED
My biggest complaint about ICQ is that there are features in there which I never use... Birthdays, pictures, phone info, ActiveLists, multi-users per computer, the 'services' menu (ICQ pages, reminders, notes, todo, white pages), chat rooms, webdirect whatever, e-maildirect soemthing, directories, peoplespace, internet telephony support, greeting cards... I don't want any of it! Yet it's forced upon me, and it sits there, sucking up 10+ megs of memory that I could use otherwise (only 48 megs, I know, upgrade) and CPU time that I could really use.
I remember when ICQ was awesome... I have an old-school number, down in the millions (2513xxx), and I've been using it for three years or so. It used to load like a snap. Now, it takes forever to load, and once it does, usually I don't use it except now and then.
I suppose what I should say is I want MSNM and ICQ, but without the bloat. Eventually, ICQ is going to have a built in e-mail client (oh, wait, it does), and a built in browser, newsgroup reader, IRC client, dial-up and networking software, it's own TCP stack... I don't want an OS, I want an IM!
Okay, my scheme is simple, but effective... I just use things that people wouldn't guess, but make them long enough so that you couldn't brute-force them easily.
Example: qrweoupiyt
Ten characters long and impossible to guess. Not the most secure, but oh well. Add a number or some punctuation on there (qrweoupiyt5! or qrwe72oupi#yt) just to make brute-forcers have to use everything.
My problem is sites that assign passwords. Ive been assigned passwords like 'smellycamel' (which I changed), or even 348751 (which I couldn't change). Great, a site with only 1M combinations of passwords per account. That has barely more protection than a 'strong' password 3 characters long! Come on!
Another problem is Microsoft. When I log into their site for whatever reason (download, MSDN, etc), I have to play a guessing game. One of my usernames for one of the services is something like 3216921, the other two, for different things, are 'sentry21'.
Okay, so I have three accounts. I do remember what the password for my numerical account is, so that's no problem. Then I go to my two 'sentry21' accounts. One has an MS generated password (secureish, like L8sj4Ke), the other is the password of my choosing. Not only do I have to get them to e-mail my password, which I don't know, I have to get them to e-mail me my username! One day, when I was feeling lazy, my inbox ended up with like five e-mails from Microsoft with usernames and passwords.
I swear, it's insane. Use MSDN and Hotmail, and then whenever you try and get into the MSDN site, someone cracks your hotmail and where are we now?
If we gave power back to the people to recognize this, to act together to stop it, the tidal forces of change would rip through this country the likes of which haven't been seen since the Civil War. That is the power of information.
Are you referring to how the Civil War changed lots of living people into dead people?
Anyway, almost sounds to me like you're proposing anarchy, or a form thereof. Informational Anarchy. Let everyone get anything they want whenever they want it. Let the people control the media, let the people disseminate the information. Isn't that kind of the principle of the Internet, or at least what it's become? That's what I like about it anyway. I don't have to go to a certain place for info.
I dunno, but it seems like this is just a way to make money. I mean, if I want to find some info, I go to http://www.altavista.com (and now, if I want weather too). If I can't find it there, then I go to Yahoo. If I can't find it there... Well I dunno, I've never gotten as far as Yahoo.
If they were really interested in spreading information, they'd have a public question-answer forum or something... This is either a brilliant way to get gullible people to reward greedy people, or an interesting but flawed way to try and get around the trick that anyone can post info on the net and present it as fact.
I was in the mall today, and I happened to walk past a laser eye care place while I was there (it was properly located next to a computer hardware store you see), so the following is out of the brochure (I'm not copying the propaganda).
First, the clinic and I are Canadian, so if the first poster is right about the Canada thing, then hey, rock on. Cost at this particular clinic, and likely at others nearby (I live an hour from Vancouver) is CDN$995/eye (about $680 USD), and there's no tax on that.
Time taken, likely just for the actual slicing and dicing is apparantly 'a few minutes'. The procedure, two eyes at once, usually takes about an hour they say, so all the prep work, and making sure you can still see. You return to normal vision in a few days, so do this on a friday long weekend or Easter or something.
On the safety bit, here's a quote from the brochure:
The Health Protection Branch of Health and Welfare Canada and the FDA have recognized laser vision correction for nearsightedness and astigmatism and has found the treatment safe and effective for patients within certain ranges.
Don't take my word for it. Go out, talk to yor optometrist. Or come up to Canada and talk to one of ours.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have to release source unless they release binaries, is the best I understand it (it may well be more complex than that, I believe it is).
I think basically, anyone that comes into posession of binaries had to be able to come into posession of source. Perhaps this means that if you only give it to a friend, you only have to give it to them, I dunno. But they could give it to anyone, and source too.
~Sentry21~
The dwarf was as much a part of the storyline as the average tree - useless background. You could have replaced him with just about anything else and the movie would have been pretty much unchanged. I consider this a plus, because I didn't like him.
Considering it was based on an RPG, I consider this an upside - I mean, without that (and comments like 'You're a mage! And a low level one at that.'), it wouldn't have been D&D, it woulda been a low-budget fantasy action flick that no one woulda thought highly of (but without the D&D name, it probably wouldn't have been blasted as much).
I seriously would have had less complaints about the movie if they'd replaced him with the actor that played the dwarf - even one actor quite obviously playing two major roles is better than a Wayans brother playing one of them.
Now, my beefs:
Just my two bits
~Sentry21~
Israel, for example, is actually smaller than New Hampshire.
Isn't Israel smaller than Lake Ontario?
I proposed to a friend of mine (after she complained about the water shortage there) that we float Israel in one of the Great Lakes, but I don't recall which.
~Sentry21~
The reason wireless is so prominent in Europe is that the government-provided telephone service is unreliable, expensive, hard-to-get, and inflexible. Yet these telcos were created with the same reasoning that Canada is using for broadband.
And Canada is using the same reasoning for broadband as it is for standard telephone service - and I have never, EVER heard a single good thing about an American telco. Ours, however, are simply beautiful. I can call some places in the US for cheaper than other Americans (even ones that live in the same state sometimes), my phone service will always cost $20/mo, and will always work. If it breaks, Telus will be out here to fix it within a day at the most.
Compare this to a friend in Seattle. They had two phone lines, with extra services on one line (call display, call waiting, etc) that they didn't want. They call the telco to get those services removed. Telco says they'll take those services off. What happens? Their OTHER phone line gets CUT OFF. I was amazed when I heard this, and asked her if she'd called them to have it fixed. She proceeded to tell me that they had called to have it fixed several times over the last six months, and nothing had happened
Another occasion (since remedied): I compared DSL (1.5 down, 640 up) last year, between NW Bell and Telus. Telus charged about $40/month CDN to provide this service, while NW Bell charged approx. $230 I believe (Canadian or American, that's still far too much) to provide it in Seattle. That's just sad.
I'm not trying to US-bash (though these are examples I use when I feel so inclined), but when you compare our regulated telcos to your unregulated telcos, I think the differences are obvious. Yes, it's a shame that the CTRC has to stick their nose into our broadband access, because look what it's done to our telephone companies.
~Sentry21~
The problem with Sega consoles is not that the games suck, or that the system sucks, it's that Sega sucks.
With the exception of the Genesis, most Sega platforms start out, have a few games made for them, and get cancelled. How many people bought a Sega CD? or a 32X? or even a Saturn? How many of these platforms are still around?
Sega stops supporting their systems pretty fast, all things considered. Hell, I've seen SNESes being sold, and how old are they? Nintendo is still selling Game Boys, admittedly redesigned, and with new features, but it's still the same system. I remember getting my first one over 10 years ago, and it's still going?
No, I'll never buy a DreamCast - not because of crappy games, or poor specs, but because I don't feel like paying $250 (Canadian) to get fucked by Sega. I didn't make that mistake before, and I'm not about to again.
~Sentry21~
so if there is a bot in the channel, ban the bot. how hard is that?
VERY HARD
Even if you ignore the privacy issues, these bots answered our AKILLs by evading them. This is in direct violation of our AUP, and is unauthorized access to the network. Violating our network's rules, entering where they are not welcome... these are not just regular bots.
But don't think the users want them. Our network implemented a workaround that will ban (most of) these bots (As well as dozens of users, don't think it's a perfect solution) from any channel where the feature is enabled. For the next two days after we designed this feature, we had a flood of people into our main help channel asking how to turn this feature off - and ban the bots.
Users don't want them, IRCops dont' want them, admins don't want them, who DOES want them? The company that probably hopes to make money off advertising on their page. These bots don't benefit anyone but eNow, and I don't think we should have to spend our time and energy designing ways to ban bots that no one wants there anyway.
~Sentry21~As I understand it, the GNOME project was taken over by HelixCode, thusly Gnome == HelixCode. (My source is 'man gnome' but I may remember wrongly)
~Sentry21~
Because of Slade's actions (which I hope he continues, for this reason), we already have freakin John Carmack defendig the GPL. =]
I think the money would thus be better spent elsewhere. As another poster suggested, XFree needs a LOT of work, and some funding would be a good way to help them out.
~Sentry21~
No, but those are geeky in different ways. I'm just saying that if I'm up at 3 AM coding PHP3 for a website that has to be up in 2 hours, chances are I'm going to leave the cereal for a few minutes, and it'll get soggy, or I'll drip milk or corn flakes on my keyboard.
Besides, cereals don't go well with cola, coffee, and so on. They go with with juice, which, for an all-night hacking run, is very ungeekly.
Don't complain... Mine's based on TC++ 3.0, which is a DOS-based compiler... meaning that under Win95, it's rather unstable, and just testing a program can cause it to lock up, forcing you to force quit your test app, and TC along with it, losing your code.
I know, save before you run, but you can't just ALT-F-S, you have to ALT-F-S-ENTER-Y... And most of the people in my class haven't gotten to the 'hit enter to get rid of a dialog' stage yet. They're typing, they hit CTRL-F9, an error comes up, so they reach for the mouse find the cursor, find the button, click it, and go back to the keyboard. Ugh.
True, but really, how easy do you think it is to make a microwavable burrito that completely fills every dietary requirement the average person has by just eating one a day?
Besides, I don't know about the rest of you geeks, but *this* geek would prefer to eat more than one burrito a day.
Again, I don't know about your local geek cultures, but all the ones I've been in (as I've moved) have required that geek foods be long-term (so that after a big contract, you can buy bulk), microwavable (a hot meal and a warm monitor, what combo), and taste good.
IMHO, Total does not taste good.
Besides, cereal is so... ungeekly, especially while coding late at night.
Combine this with some microwavable pasta or entrees or something that has some protien, and you're set for life. A deep freeze and a microwave, that's all you need.
~Sentry21~
And wouldn't win95 boxes on dial-up connections be the ideal host to launch distributed DoS attacks from?
Yeah, of course. See, I'm on a cable modem with a maximum theoretical bandwidth (downstream) of approx. a T3, but I'm not certain. (Many web servers have T3s. I don't know the stats, but I'll bet Yahoo makes a T3 look like smoke signals.) In other words, let's assume I have 500 kilobytes/sec. This is rather funny, since I average 80, but oh well.
As I understand them, modems 28.8 and faster can upload only at 28.8, meaning approx. 3.0 kbps. By this calculation, we can figure that about 167 28.8+ dial-up Win95 boxes would be needed, as well as tools. Linux would be more cost-effective, since 167 copies of Win98 would chomp the wallet, and ping -f is easier to do.
I don't think most script kiddies can afford 167 computers just to DOS one cable user, let alone ten times as many for a pretty good server.
Also, it would (theoretically) take 100 56k users to knock me down, 32 dual channel ISDN lines, 10 other cable users, two and a half T1s, or a T3.
Thus, logically, the best solution would be to use at least cable modems, if not T1s/T3s or better.
I just hope no one on an OC-48 reads this post and gets my IP address. Eep. =]
~Sentry21~
My web browsers do not accept cookies, and Cookie Monster helps me with that. Personally, I have no traceable web presence. However, there are always sites that require a username/e-mail address.
I remember the good old days when cookies were a good thing, except the mass hysteria about letting a web page write to your hard drive (like Netscape can't do that already).
But I'll point out that there are some sites that use cookies for no reason other than conveniance. On my page for example, I use cookies. I'm going to re-code it so that it doesn't *require* them to (bad implementation of a good idea), but the cookie my page sets is one of conveniance.
When you hit my page for the first time, you'll see a poem. I used to have Invictus, but now it's The Raven.
After you read the poem (or scroll to the bottom), you click on the link to the main page. The link has an HREF="/", which is where you already are, but since the server sets a cookie, you get the main page of my site instead of the poem, and never see the poem again, unless you don't come back for 30 days, delete the cookie, or I change the poem.
Here's what my cookie looks like:
cdslash.tdhosting.com FALSE FALSE 951471364 Raven 1Pretty harmless, I think. I set a cookie Raven=1 if you've seen the poem already, and you never have to see it again (which, I think, is a good approach to splash pages). I'm going to re-code it so that any cookie-denying browsers have my cookie policy explained to them, and a link to the main page shown, but until then, my cookies aren't a privacy issue, they're a bad-requirement issue.
The ironic thing is that if I wanted to do it without cookies, I'd have to implement a tracking database somehow, which would be even worse. *sigh* Oh well. I'll just have to fix it up I guess.
~Sentry21~
I dunno about a Hall of Fame, but for future reference, I've mirrored it. I wish there was some way to find the original author, but sadly, it was an AC. Oh well.
http://cdslash.tdhosting.com/misc/too sexy.txt
~Sentry21~
Download.com is where I got my copy of DeCSS, but I just checked now, and it's not there anymore. Looks like they bowed to pressure just like everyone else.
~Sentry21~
try finding a new release on cassete
Uhh... The last school I was at had a jukebox that used records... Yes, vinyl... And this was last year, they still have it I imagine... And we had to suffer through Hanson thaht some sadistic trolls would choose and then run out of the cafeteria before anyone could catch and harm them. So I think that if we can get Hanson on vinyl, you can get Eiffel 65 on tape.
~Sentry21~
Consider that the volumes of spam we're talking about - probably gigabytes upon gigabytes - would easily paralyze a cable modem connection, particularly when, for most @Home users, the upload cap is approximately 128Kbps (approx. ISDN speed). For anyone to make use of this exploit would require probably a dozen cracked systems per spammer.
On the contrary, that's only to other @home subscribers and external sites. To the @Home servers themselves ('www', 'proxy', 'mail', and 'news' as examples) you can get larger bandwidths - I've personally clocked approximately 261.12 kilobytes/sec bandwidth to the news server (http://cdslash.tdhosting.com/misc/ throughput.txt holds bandwidth statistics I made not two minutes ago) - this is much higher than the max rated speed of an ISDN line.
However, even given that fact, I doubt that proxies could have made up the bulk of the problem - @Home users are spamming, @Home's lazy, and that's that.
~Sentry21~
I can tell you right now @Home does NOT scan anything except forwindows filesharing. Some of the @Home network blocks windowsfilesharing at the router, others scan for it and disable it.
Guess mine disables it at the router, because I've had sharing on for a while (yeah, I know, I'm gonna be h4x0r3d, nothing yet) and no one's said anything to me.
On a semi-related note, I got an e-mail from @Home's fraud and whatever department a few months ago. They were actually forwarding me a copy of an e-mail that was sent to them, a complaint by a company, about how I had accessed 'an illegal warez drop box' that had been created on their FTP server.
Of course, I immediately went to the URL they specified, and took a look around, and there was nothing there. However, if their server was so important and private, they shouldn't allow anonymous access. And besides, the logs, which they C&P'ed into the e-mail, showed that I was logged in for approx. 1 second. But despite all that, not only was the complaint not dealt with (i.e. I was not reprimanded), but they forwarded it to me. I don't know how other ISPs work, but that doesn't seem to be a good thing to me.
As far as portscanning goes, I've run NMAP scans, as well as WS_Pingpack Pro scans (whee) on various subnets, and no one's even bothered to say hello. I did find a lot of ICQ homepages, FTP sites, web site, POP3 servers, and so on on my own subnet (about half the people had some sort of server)
@Home doesn't bother with security, because they probably don't want to deal with the huge amount of customers they have. Oh well, makes my life a little easier.
~Sentry21~
They came for the Jews, and I did not speak out for them, for I was not Jewish.
And then they came for the blacks, and I did not speak out for them because I was not Black.
And they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.
And then they came for me, and when they took me away, there was no one left to speak out for me.
You can't just say that you won't fight back until it applies to you. Perhaps you don't support anti-privacy legislation because you have nothing to hide. But then if you do want to keep something private, what will you do? Will you say 'I want my privacy back, because now your laws apply to me'?
If you oppose the principles, then get involved, study other cases, or at the very least, consider the implications. The point here is not that the libraries are going to restrict access to pornography. The point, or at least one of them, is that when the blocking software is installed on these computers, it won't help any problems, and will in fact cause them.
The blocking software prevents users from accessing (most) pornography on the internet. I say most because I could easily make a page that wouldn't get blocked by any of them, I'm sure. But also, studies have shown that they block out sites that have nothing to do with pornography. They might block out sites on reproduction (bye-bye biology research) or, as jamie mentioned, even Yahoo.
In order to solve the problem of 1 in 26,000 people looking at 'objectionable' materials which may have been pornography, or may just as easily not have, the group is going to be adding a check box on the primary which, as I understand the voting system (which I don't, being Canadian) most Liberals won't go to for some reason, so that the conservative people of Holland, MI, but no one else that pays for the library, can protect their kids from the evils of internet pornography, which will instantly leap out from the computers at them as soon as they sit down at the computers in the well-lit, public, and open internet access area in the adult section of the library.
Just wait until they come for you too. Historians learned the hard way, from Normandy among others, that if you let them get a foothold, it's easier for them to spread. This is a view from the trenches, it lets the uninformed, like yourself, know what is going on, and experience it second-hand, instead of in MSNBCBCNN articles.
The problem was that when I ran the SVGA server, it worked fine, perfect, wonderful. But when I ran the setup programs, told it what I wanted, told it what I had, and everything, the Mach_64 server ended up thinking my monitor was a little too bic - the top and bottom of the screen were an inch above and below the top and bottom of the actual monitor.
Finally, I forget how, me, the newbie Linux user, who could find no help online, nothing in the man pages, nothing at all, somehow managed to figure out two things:
After this harrowing, or rather pain-in-the-ass, ordeal, I was rather fed-up. I mean, I put in all the data, I have a supported card, a generic monitor, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and probably every other Windows out there, supports my configuration out of the box. Linux requires me to hunt around for three or four days just to change a number that I don't even know what it was!
Now, I love Linux, don't get me wrong, but the obvious problem here is that if a Linux lover like myself is willing to throw in the towel, nuke the partition, and give up the goose, then how can we expect to attract anyone but power-users?
I don't know, I just think that tools that write out the config file for you should write out a config file that is compatible with your configuration.
Finally, after days, I did get it installed, set up, and working properly, but I was pretty frustrated when I did. Then Debian screwed up all my Enlightenment packages so my install got borked, but that's another story.
~Sentry21~
Here's what I want to see out there, an IM client that does the following:
My biggest complaint about ICQ is that there are features in there which I never use... Birthdays, pictures, phone info, ActiveLists, multi-users per computer, the 'services' menu (ICQ pages, reminders, notes, todo, white pages), chat rooms, webdirect whatever, e-maildirect soemthing, directories, peoplespace, internet telephony support, greeting cards... I don't want any of it! Yet it's forced upon me, and it sits there, sucking up 10+ megs of memory that I could use otherwise (only 48 megs, I know, upgrade) and CPU time that I could really use.
I remember when ICQ was awesome... I have an old-school number, down in the millions (2513xxx), and I've been using it for three years or so. It used to load like a snap. Now, it takes forever to load, and once it does, usually I don't use it except now and then.
I suppose what I should say is I want MSNM and ICQ, but without the bloat. Eventually, ICQ is going to have a built in e-mail client (oh, wait, it does), and a built in browser, newsgroup reader, IRC client, dial-up and networking software, it's own TCP stack... I don't want an OS, I want an IM!
~Sentry21~
Okay, my scheme is simple, but effective... I just use things that people wouldn't guess, but make them long enough so that you couldn't brute-force them easily.
Example: qrweoupiyt
Ten characters long and impossible to guess. Not the most secure, but oh well. Add a number or some punctuation on there (qrweoupiyt5! or qrwe72oupi#yt) just to make brute-forcers have to use everything.
My problem is sites that assign passwords. Ive been assigned passwords like 'smellycamel' (which I changed), or even 348751 (which I couldn't change). Great, a site with only 1M combinations of passwords per account. That has barely more protection than a 'strong' password 3 characters long! Come on!
Another problem is Microsoft. When I log into their site for whatever reason (download, MSDN, etc), I have to play a guessing game. One of my usernames for one of the services is something like 3216921, the other two, for different things, are 'sentry21'.
Okay, so I have three accounts. I do remember what the password for my numerical account is, so that's no problem. Then I go to my two 'sentry21' accounts. One has an MS generated password (secureish, like L8sj4Ke), the other is the password of my choosing. Not only do I have to get them to e-mail my password, which I don't know, I have to get them to e-mail me my username! One day, when I was feeling lazy, my inbox ended up with like five e-mails from Microsoft with usernames and passwords.
I swear, it's insane. Use MSDN and Hotmail, and then whenever you try and get into the MSDN site, someone cracks your hotmail and where are we now?
Hmm... I wonder what my PGP password is...
~Sentry21~
Are you referring to how the Civil War changed lots of living people into dead people?
Anyway, almost sounds to me like you're proposing anarchy, or a form thereof. Informational Anarchy. Let everyone get anything they want whenever they want it. Let the people control the media, let the people disseminate the information. Isn't that kind of the principle of the Internet, or at least what it's become? That's what I like about it anyway. I don't have to go to a certain place for info.
I dunno, but it seems like this is just a way to make money. I mean, if I want to find some info, I go to http://www.altavista.com (and now, if I want weather too). If I can't find it there, then I go to Yahoo. If I can't find it there... Well I dunno, I've never gotten as far as Yahoo.
If they were really interested in spreading information, they'd have a public question-answer forum or something... This is either a brilliant way to get gullible people to reward greedy people, or an interesting but flawed way to try and get around the trick that anyone can post info on the net and present it as fact.
Oh well, Altavista for me.
~Sentry21~
~Sentry21~
I was in the mall today, and I happened to walk past a laser eye care place while I was there (it was properly located next to a computer hardware store you see), so the following is out of the brochure (I'm not copying the propaganda).
First, the clinic and I are Canadian, so if the first poster is right about the Canada thing, then hey, rock on. Cost at this particular clinic, and likely at others nearby (I live an hour from Vancouver) is CDN$995/eye (about $680 USD), and there's no tax on that.
Time taken, likely just for the actual slicing and dicing is apparantly 'a few minutes'. The procedure, two eyes at once, usually takes about an hour they say, so all the prep work, and making sure you can still see. You return to normal vision in a few days, so do this on a friday long weekend or Easter or something.
On the safety bit, here's a quote from the brochure:
Don't take my word for it. Go out, talk to yor optometrist. Or come up to Canada and talk to one of ours.
~Sentry21~