I don't think a Bittorrent like network is a good idea for this kind of publication.
The way I understand it, a torrent makes downloading the popular files faster and the not-so-popular files stay stagnating at the botttom.
Given that the information at this place is likely to be of interest to exactly 8 people on the planet, one wonders whether this is the way to go.
Disclaimer : I know very little about the way torrents work now - things have probably changed. Also there are probably a whole lot of people to whom this information is useful. However, I believe that each person is likely to be looking up very specialised information.
Aahh...but I think we are talking about something slightly different here.
The law seems to say that websites which actively bring together people to commit suicide will be banned. Now I am NOT in favour of the government and have no faith in its desire to promote free speech, but I think we are talking about a slightly different kind of website.
After posting my comment, I see that someone has modded this "funny".
Did I miss something? I believe that I have a decent sense of humour, but I think I missed the previous joke. Please do explain it to me. I posted the previous reply in good faith...maybe I'm just stupid to try and help people on/.
I think you should seek some profesional help. While I realise that I am an anonyomous entity on one of the internets largest discussion sites and have no idea of your personal problems, I believe that there is no situation in which suicide is a good option.
Please do get in touch with someone who can help, friends, family. If you feel comfortable revealing your address on/., then I'm sure that someone can direct you to a good psychiatrist in the area.
I do not like the idea of people dying,
even if they are in worldwide competition with us for jobs.
(emphasis is mine)
What has the world come too, where we have to qualify that we don't like the idea of people dying - EVEN IF THEY ARE IN COMPETITION WITH US FOR JOBS!
I'm hardly a peace-loving, tree-huggin vegan. But this kind of stuff really makes me think that capitalism has really made a wrong turn somewhere. That and our values of course, but, I'm on slightly more shaky ground there.
This is just a stupid comment. It contributes in no way to the parent.
Video games don't kill. After all, I don't go up to pedestrians/random zombies/presidents/deer/osama/insert as neccesary and press "insert random key combination here.
Why would state-controlled internet kill competition?
From where I'm sitting, in India, we have on one hand, government provided internet and telephone services, and on the other, the private sector.
The government has a really good high-speed(for India) broadband service available for Rs. 500 (~$10) a month. There are approximately 10-12 private ISPs in each city as well.
The same goes for phone services. The government provides a decent basic phone service, and there are on average 5-6 private players as well. The rule-of-thumb is that the governments service is reliable and cheap. The support sucks - think queues - but it's getting better. The private sector provides value-added services - broadband on mobile phones, CDMA-based mobiles, GSM based mobiles etc.
The fear of the Patriot Act is the only real point being made in the parent. However, as numerous other posters point out, it is free - you are not being forced to use it to the exclusion of all else.
In and of itself, it's not going to be a big source of a profit because there will be lots of people with stores out there, but then in terms of making it simple, having it work on all the devices, work with all the stores--that is important to us. The Windows ecosystem provides variety.
Yes, I can have Weatherbug, Gator, GAIN Networks, Alexia...the choices are endless with our friendly, Internet Explorer!
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot speaks his mind on the EA deal With Electronic Arts the new owner of almost 20 percent of Ubisoft, you might expect that company's leader to wobble a bit in the unexpected limelight. Yves Guillemot does anything but.
Just five days before Christmas, with many game industry staffers already on vacation, Electronic Arts dropped an explosive bit of news on the wires. In a short press release, it acknowledged having purchased an estimated $85-$100 million worth of Ubisoft shares.
The move--a surprise to the vast majority of industry observers--gave it a 19.9 percent ownership position in one of its most daunting competitors. Wedbush Morgan senior analyst Michael Pachter told GameSpot, "I think EA is interested in Ubisoft's development talent and in its Gameloft investment [in wireless games]."
But is that all? "I don't know if EA wants to take them out," Pachter said, "but given that Ubi has a pretty strong set of licenses and great development--with a more Euro-centric sales profile--it's a combination that makes sense from EA's perspective."
Pachter clearly assesed the stock acquisition as something less benign than how EA had earlier portrayed it. "EA is not in the business of making passive investments in public companies," Pachter concluded.
Regardless of its motives, the builders of famous franchises that include Madden and Medal of Honor now own a block of Ubisoft shares second in size only to the chunk owned by the company's founders, one of whom is its CEO and president, Yves Guillemot.
We spoke to Guillemot shortly after the transaction was announced.
GameSpot: Yves, to most observers, EA and Ubisoft are arch rivals who compete for market share, mind share, shelf space, and talent. It's hard to believe the two parties can work toward common goals. Assuming all regulatory issues are cleared, your board of directors will have to acknowledge EA's wishes as they might other shareholder's. How do you expect this marriage to get on?
Yves Guillemot: Although EA and Ubisoft are both leading game publishers, I wouldn't say we are arch rivals. All players in the industry compete for market share, shelf space, and talent, but as the past few months have shown, the market is growing, and the more outstanding titles that hit the shelves, the more the market grows. So getting great games out there is a common goal that all publishers share.
GS: So how do you read the move by Electronic Arts?
YG: I have stated on the record that I view this action on the part of EA as hostile.
GS: Do you see malevolence at its core?
YG: Until we have further information we cannot say what EA's goals might be.
GS: How does having EA as a shareholder affect the issue of disclosure, specifically company strategy?
YG: In terms of the company's confidential strategy, that information is not provided to any of our shareholders. This has always been our policy, and we have consistently shown ourselves worthy of the confidence of our shareholders.
GS: Are there remaining shares of the company that are vulnerable to acquisition by Electronic Arts, and if so, is Ubisoft management considering options if EA were to become a majority shareholder?
YG: Ubisoft is a publicly traded company, with 22.8 percent of its voting rights held by the company's founders. Of the remaining capital publicly held, 13 percent of voting rights are in the hands of financial institutions and 44.5 percent are in the hands of small shareholders. The management is studying all its options under several different scenarios.
GS: Given this twist in the company's timeline, what does the future hold for Ubisoft?
YG: For the immediate future, we are still looking forward to a record-breaking fourth quarter, with the release of several titles which you [in the press] also seem to be eagerly anticipating.
GS: What about the long-term outlook?
YG: When looking at the longer-term, our only concern is the
...the penalty for distributing spyware be using a computer, only with Internet Explorer, NO access to Ad-Aware/Spybot/etc and forced to keep the "Cute Kitty" screensaver that somebody reffered to in the SETI story?
I think he can then do his thing. Well, maybe he can use Gator to remember his passwords.
Okay somebody said this already. 20 IE windows? Sheesh. This is the editor of a hardcore tech site?
IE faster than firefox? Is he on E? What the hell? Since when has Gecko been slower than Mosaic? Also has he heard about spyware?
www.getfirefox.com
Rehabilitating Damaged Laptops
Submitted by Lineman
Sun, 10/03/2004 - 10:48
Hardware
It breaks my heart to see a computer in need of a good home. For years, I've driven my wife crazy with all the "strays" I've brought home with me. After all, the last thing my house needs is a few more cubic feet devoted to kenneling old and abused computers.
That being said, laptops present very unique opportunities. No matter what caused you or someone else to ditch that old laptop, there still may be some way to integrate it back into society. For every kind of laptop lemon, I've found that there's plenty of lemonade to be made.
Damaged Display
This has to be the most common laptop problem that I've seen, particularly among my own. Unfortunately, replacing a damaged LCD can easily end up costing more than a brand new laptop.
Without a display, you can still make use of even a moderately old laptop as a Web server. Install some stripped-down version of Windows and install EasyPHP or just use Linux with MySQL and Apache and you'll soon have your own personal Web "sandbox." Since you don't need a graphics card for a game server, you could even run your own local or Internet Quake server.
If the battery is still good, you even have a built-in UPS of sorts to keep your server from crashing during any short power outages. This may not sound like much of a benefit since you will lose power on everything else during power failure, but consider this: since you don't have to worry about it shutting down, you can stash it in a closet or on top of a shelf without worrying about physically rebooting it.
Tiny or Dead Hard Drive
If your old laptop has a tiny hard drive, and by small I mean under 100 MB of space, you may or may not be able to upgrade it. Even if you can, you are certainly looking at no more than a gigabyte of space and will probably be making use of someone else's used drive. Still worse, maybe the drive in your laptop is completely dead. Since we are talking about an older laptop in this case, we are fortunate because unlike newer models, older laptops almost always came with a built-in floppy drive.
With a small drive, you might be able to squeeze an early edition of Windows 95 onto it (I've done this but it's painful). However, Windows 3.1 will comfortable fit on such a drive just fine. With a few floppy disks, you can install that and a compatible word processor from that era like Microsoft Works or Word Perfect. You now have a small and portable word processor to use while on the road or to write that novel you've secretly been working on.
But what if the drive is dead or nonexistent? There's still hope. Some of you may not remember using computers before they had hard drives, but I can assure you that it is possible to get by without one on many tasks. You'll need to create a bootable DOS disk. If you aren't terribly familiar with DOS, you may want to make sure DOSSHELL is on it to help you navigate files without fumbling around on the command line. Once you've booted into DOS, you can use the built-in EDIT utility as a word processor. Once you have EDIT running, you can swap out the disk and use a second disk to store your documents on. You might even be able to install an older word processor on a third disk that you can load ofter booting that will have more functionality than DOS's EDIT.
Low Memory
If you find yourself with custody of a really old laptop, you may not have enough memory to do much of anything. Those of you who can still remember measuring memory in kilobytes can probably still appreciate how much of an issue RAM used to be. Maybe you have a laptop with only a few megabytes of memory and still refuse to throw it away like it's going to grow more RAM over time.
What you can use such a system for hearkens back to the days when memory and drive space was such a premium that most computing was done with a single mainframe holding all the major resources and terminals were used to access them. If you have a Linux or BSD server on your network, you can share its resources by installing a very bare vers
Slashdot Mirror
Well - what are you doing on /. then?
Don't reply to the troll... ...damn.
Whom do you want to slashdot today?
Well...reliable sources tell me that since they decided to combine The Hobbit with a remake of Dr. Who, a certain hobbit may be missing a finger....
The way I understand it, a torrent makes downloading the popular files faster and the not-so-popular files stay stagnating at the botttom.
Given that the information at this place is likely to be of interest to exactly 8 people on the planet, one wonders whether this is the way to go.
Disclaimer : I know very little about the way torrents work now - things have probably changed. Also there are probably a whole lot of people to whom this information is useful. However, I believe that each person is likely to be looking up very specialised information.
The law seems to say that websites which actively bring together people to commit suicide will be banned. Now I am NOT in favour of the government and have no faith in its desire to promote free speech, but I think we are talking about a slightly different kind of website.
Just my 2 cents.
Did I miss something? I believe that I have a decent sense of humour, but I think I missed the previous joke. Please do explain it to me. I posted the previous reply in good faith...maybe I'm just stupid to try and help people on /.
Please do get in touch with someone who can help, friends, family. If you feel comfortable revealing your address on
Windows - high maintanence
OS X - sexy and suave...
Linux - its really sweet of you to help it out...
Unix - hardcore BDSM fanatic
Oh damn, this is slashdot. Sorry - search wikipedia for "GIRL" and then "FRIEND"...
So - QotD - do geeks like girls better or linux?
"Click of death?" "Volcano picture server melts?"
(emphasis is mine)
What has the world come too, where we have to qualify that we don't like the idea of people dying - EVEN IF THEY ARE IN COMPETITION WITH US FOR JOBS!
I'm hardly a peace-loving, tree-huggin vegan. But this kind of stuff really makes me think that capitalism has really made a wrong turn somewhere. That and our values of course, but, I'm on slightly more shaky ground there.
In other news, hordes of dissapointed Slashdotters find that they can't /. the servers because there is no direct link.
This provides evidence how?
From where I'm sitting, in India, we have on one hand, government provided internet and telephone services, and on the other, the private sector.
The government has a really good high-speed(for India) broadband service available for Rs. 500 (~$10) a month. There are approximately 10-12 private ISPs in each city as well.
The same goes for phone services. The government provides a decent basic phone service, and there are on average 5-6 private players as well. The rule-of-thumb is that the governments service is reliable and cheap. The support sucks - think queues - but it's getting better. The private sector provides value-added services - broadband on mobile phones, CDMA-based mobiles, GSM based mobiles etc.
The fear of the Patriot Act is the only real point being made in the parent. However, as numerous other posters point out, it is free - you are not being forced to use it to the exclusion of all else.
Cheers,
Rahul.
In and of itself, it's not going to be a big source of a profit because there will be lots of people with stores out there, but then in terms of making it simple, having it work on all the devices, work with all the stores--that is important to us. The Windows ecosystem provides variety.
Yes, I can have Weatherbug, Gator, GAIN Networks, Alexia...the choices are endless with our friendly, Internet Explorer!
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot speaks his mind on the EA deal
With Electronic Arts the new owner of almost 20 percent of Ubisoft, you might expect that company's leader to wobble a bit in the unexpected limelight. Yves Guillemot does anything but.
Just five days before Christmas, with many game industry staffers already on vacation, Electronic Arts dropped an explosive bit of news on the wires. In a short press release, it acknowledged having purchased an estimated $85-$100 million worth of Ubisoft shares.
The move--a surprise to the vast majority of industry observers--gave it a 19.9 percent ownership position in one of its most daunting competitors. Wedbush Morgan senior analyst Michael Pachter told GameSpot, "I think EA is interested in Ubisoft's development talent and in its Gameloft investment [in wireless games]."
But is that all? "I don't know if EA wants to take them out," Pachter said, "but given that Ubi has a pretty strong set of licenses and great development--with a more Euro-centric sales profile--it's a combination that makes sense from EA's perspective."
Pachter clearly assesed the stock acquisition as something less benign than how EA had earlier portrayed it. "EA is not in the business of making passive investments in public companies," Pachter concluded.
Regardless of its motives, the builders of famous franchises that include Madden and Medal of Honor now own a block of Ubisoft shares second in size only to the chunk owned by the company's founders, one of whom is its CEO and president, Yves Guillemot.
We spoke to Guillemot shortly after the transaction was announced.
GameSpot: Yves, to most observers, EA and Ubisoft are arch rivals who compete for market share, mind share, shelf space, and talent. It's hard to believe the two parties can work toward common goals. Assuming all regulatory issues are cleared, your board of directors will have to acknowledge EA's wishes as they might other shareholder's. How do you expect this marriage to get on?
Yves Guillemot: Although EA and Ubisoft are both leading game publishers, I wouldn't say we are arch rivals. All players in the industry compete for market share, shelf space, and talent, but as the past few months have shown, the market is growing, and the more outstanding titles that hit the shelves, the more the market grows. So getting great games out there is a common goal that all publishers share.
GS: So how do you read the move by Electronic Arts?
YG: I have stated on the record that I view this action on the part of EA as hostile.
GS: Do you see malevolence at its core?
YG: Until we have further information we cannot say what EA's goals might be.
GS: How does having EA as a shareholder affect the issue of disclosure, specifically company strategy?
YG: In terms of the company's confidential strategy, that information is not provided to any of our shareholders. This has always been our policy, and we have consistently shown ourselves worthy of the confidence of our shareholders.
GS: Are there remaining shares of the company that are vulnerable to acquisition by Electronic Arts, and if so, is Ubisoft management considering options if EA were to become a majority shareholder?
YG: Ubisoft is a publicly traded company, with 22.8 percent of its voting rights held by the company's founders. Of the remaining capital publicly held, 13 percent of voting rights are in the hands of financial institutions and 44.5 percent are in the hands of small shareholders. The management is studying all its options under several different scenarios.
GS: Given this twist in the company's timeline, what does the future hold for Ubisoft?
YG: For the immediate future, we are still looking forward to a record-breaking fourth quarter, with the release of several titles which you [in the press] also seem to be eagerly anticipating.
GS: What about the long-term outlook?
YG: When looking at the longer-term, our only concern is the
I think he can then do his thing. Well, maybe he can use Gator to remember his passwords.
Waste these assholes...
Okay somebody said this already. 20 IE windows? Sheesh. This is the editor of a hardcore tech site? IE faster than firefox? Is he on E? What the hell? Since when has Gecko been slower than Mosaic? Also has he heard about spyware? www.getfirefox.com
Rehabilitating Damaged Laptops Submitted by Lineman Sun, 10/03/2004 - 10:48 Hardware It breaks my heart to see a computer in need of a good home. For years, I've driven my wife crazy with all the "strays" I've brought home with me. After all, the last thing my house needs is a few more cubic feet devoted to kenneling old and abused computers. That being said, laptops present very unique opportunities. No matter what caused you or someone else to ditch that old laptop, there still may be some way to integrate it back into society. For every kind of laptop lemon, I've found that there's plenty of lemonade to be made. Damaged Display This has to be the most common laptop problem that I've seen, particularly among my own. Unfortunately, replacing a damaged LCD can easily end up costing more than a brand new laptop. Without a display, you can still make use of even a moderately old laptop as a Web server. Install some stripped-down version of Windows and install EasyPHP or just use Linux with MySQL and Apache and you'll soon have your own personal Web "sandbox." Since you don't need a graphics card for a game server, you could even run your own local or Internet Quake server. If the battery is still good, you even have a built-in UPS of sorts to keep your server from crashing during any short power outages. This may not sound like much of a benefit since you will lose power on everything else during power failure, but consider this: since you don't have to worry about it shutting down, you can stash it in a closet or on top of a shelf without worrying about physically rebooting it. Tiny or Dead Hard Drive If your old laptop has a tiny hard drive, and by small I mean under 100 MB of space, you may or may not be able to upgrade it. Even if you can, you are certainly looking at no more than a gigabyte of space and will probably be making use of someone else's used drive. Still worse, maybe the drive in your laptop is completely dead. Since we are talking about an older laptop in this case, we are fortunate because unlike newer models, older laptops almost always came with a built-in floppy drive. With a small drive, you might be able to squeeze an early edition of Windows 95 onto it (I've done this but it's painful). However, Windows 3.1 will comfortable fit on such a drive just fine. With a few floppy disks, you can install that and a compatible word processor from that era like Microsoft Works or Word Perfect. You now have a small and portable word processor to use while on the road or to write that novel you've secretly been working on. But what if the drive is dead or nonexistent? There's still hope. Some of you may not remember using computers before they had hard drives, but I can assure you that it is possible to get by without one on many tasks. You'll need to create a bootable DOS disk. If you aren't terribly familiar with DOS, you may want to make sure DOSSHELL is on it to help you navigate files without fumbling around on the command line. Once you've booted into DOS, you can use the built-in EDIT utility as a word processor. Once you have EDIT running, you can swap out the disk and use a second disk to store your documents on. You might even be able to install an older word processor on a third disk that you can load ofter booting that will have more functionality than DOS's EDIT. Low Memory If you find yourself with custody of a really old laptop, you may not have enough memory to do much of anything. Those of you who can still remember measuring memory in kilobytes can probably still appreciate how much of an issue RAM used to be. Maybe you have a laptop with only a few megabytes of memory and still refuse to throw it away like it's going to grow more RAM over time. What you can use such a system for hearkens back to the days when memory and drive space was such a premium that most computing was done with a single mainframe holding all the major resources and terminals were used to access them. If you have a Linux or BSD server on your network, you can share its resources by installing a very bare vers
Yeah right. And the Chinese are stockpiling nuclear weapons. WAit - we have both.