It's not special, hence the lukewarm review. He was simply asked to review the unit honestly and he did. No harm in that, is there? A review of a product that turns out being rather poor is far more useful to most people than either lying about it and saying it's great or simply not reviewing it at all. Wish there were more actual review sites that were this truthful.
If I'm not the first to suggest it, I definitely won't be the last... many of the problems you speak of can be gotten around simply via the use of a capable client software and a secure operating system.
I posit that the use of buggy and insecure software is one major reason that Internet growth hasn't been all that it could have. People are (rightfully) terrified of all the spam, pop-up ads, viruses, privacy concerns that could all be eliminated to a large extent if reliable end-user software were the norm and not the exception. The Internet was built upon open source and I futher argue that it will never reach its fullest potential until better engineered software is on both ends of the network connection.
Agreed, and this "settlement" implies to me that the folks at EFF are not only losing their edge, but their minds as well.
I mean, how is this kind of settlement any different from the one that Microsoft agreed to back in the day? "We're sorry for all of our abusive, monopolistic actions. And to prove it, we're going to give millions of dollars worth of our software to public schools. (Haha, what suckers.)"
Real punishment for Sony would be to have them pay for the actual cost of repairs to machines infected with their rootkit or to have such rootkits made illegal with a punishment that has some real teeth.
A murderer CAN deny access to their property even having a dead body in the freezer, enless the police have a warrant. A company CAN refuse to turn over documents enless the police have a warrant. Police can't walk in anywhere they want and/or just take things because they may or may not be incriminating, it's called probable cause. They must have enough viable reason to further their investigation, you can't just bother every citizen because you may or may not know a partial bit of information about a crime.
I'm guessing you haven't visited the United States in the last five years or so. You surely can't live here or you'd know by now that most of these actions are now perfectly legal and in fact standard operating procedure. All the investigators or police have to do is utter the "T" word, even if there's no evidence to support such uttering.
I'm trying out Camino 1.0 on my new Dell Mac and I noticed that its search bar inserts "sourceid=mozilla2" into the query string. I wonder why they chose that instead of just "mozilla" or even just "firefox" since Camino is based heavily upon Firefox code?
Yes, you can now. Not back when my laptop was new. Initial versions of its BIOS were so buggy that the only way to run X at the proper resolution was by rolling in an unsupported patch and rebuilding the video drivers. Thankfully, someone must have whined enough that Dell fixed the BIOS a few months down the road.
Because a flash drive distro, if not engineered properly, can ruin the device. These things have a limited number of write cycles. For example, if some idiot puts/tmp on the drive rather than in memory, the drive will give up the ghost or would be a lot closer to doing so than it was before after only a few boots.
Well, for a BIOS flash update you could burn your bootable floppy image + flash update utility + BIOS image to a CD-R and boot from that. (Of course, it will be using floppy emulation.) That was the only way I could upgrade the BIOS on my Dell laptop. Which doesn't even have an option for a floppy drive, even though the first step in their official BIOS update procedure said, "Insert a blank, formatted disk into the floppy drive..."
These days, you can do everything on a bootable CD-ROM that you can a bootable floppy. Except, of course, write to it.
Why hasn't anyone yet pointed out the obvious possibility that perhaps it's because of Google's unorthodox methods that they're so successful rather than in spite of them?
The big tech companies are very very afraid of Google, not because Google is going to eat into their market or revenues, but rather because Google is showing the world that it is possible to build a hugely successful business by doing good, making your employees happy, and challenging the status quo. These three things go completely against everything that big business has tried to build up over the last two and a half decades.
It's a surprisingly common myth that when you sign up for military service, that you suddenly lose all protections afforded to you under the United States Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other legal documents that grant Americans specific freedoms. However, the UCMJ also applies and does place some additional restrictions on what military members can say and do, but only in very specific circumstances.
For example, almost all of the restrictions you talk about are those that apply only when in uniform and/or when on duty. Why? Well, because a person in uniform is expected to be held to a higher standard than your average civilian.
Here, let an Airman explain it to you.
* First Amendment - Freedom of speech, press, religion, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government = mostly lost. You are not allowed to speak freely, assemble other then as ordered, nor to petition the government except as through the chain of command.
Wrong. You ARE allowed to speak freely about any topic you wish, you CAN assemble all you want, and you CAN petition the government. But NOT when not in uniform.
What you're not allowed to do is support or endorse a political group, movement, or perspective while identifying yourself as a member of a military service. Do it as an American citizen, that's fine, but offering your support while publicizing your military status is definitely a no-no. Not only might it lead the clueless to draw an incorrect assumption (that the military itself supports whatever you're supporting), it's also an unethical use of the uniform and rank. Whereas it's ethically wrong for celebrities on TV advertisements to use their status to promote a product, it's wrong and illegal for service members to use their uniform to promote a political opinion.
* Second Amendment - Right to keep and bear arms. = mostly lost. You are only entitled to arms as ordered.
Wrong. Many of my fellow service members owned guns. Depending on base regulations, they had to be registered with or stored at the armory, but those in the military certainly are entitled to arms, so this assertion is just plain false.
* Third Amendment - Protection from quartering of troops. = lost. The army can assign you to bunk with someone or someone to bunk with you at any time, for any reason.
Have you really gone that insane? Just where do you want them to sleep? Individual hotel rooms? (I mean, for those in a branch of service other than the Air Force.)
* Fourth Amendment - Protection from unreasonable search and seizure. = lost. The military can search your private effects at any time.
Wrong. The only time the military can search your residence without a warrant is if you are occupying military barracks, billiting, housing, or lodging. If you own your own home off-base, as many active duty members do, the military police have no jurisdiction over it. The civilian police do. (And if you asked me to choose between the two, I'll take military police, thankyouverymuch.)
* Fifth Amendment - Due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, private property. = IANAL, not sure how many of these are still available during a Court Martial, but I know that many of them DON'T apply. * Sixth Amendment - Trial by jury and other rights of the accused. mostly lost = no jury trial, you get a counsellor, but are tried by a panel. There is not necessarily an appeal, as you can be summarily executed in situations judged to be in extremis.
You may be right here. However, this isn't the full story. The military spends hundreds of thousands of dollars providing for and training a single individual over the course of a four-year enlistment. Since the whole military runs on money, that fact alone means that they have absolutely NO interest whatsoever in locking up their innocent members.
Of all the cases that I've known about first-hand where somebody ended up in a court martial, it's because they really REALLY fucked
Hello moderators, please mod the parent up. I too work in communications in the military and can tell you first hand that any reports of censorship conspiracy are greatly exaggerated.
I read the drivel that Wonkette was spewing about on her site weeks ago and would have challenged her directly on her own website, but surprise, anonymous comments aren't allowed there.
There is no blatant internet censorship going on in the military. Just to make sure my point gets across, allow me to repeat that again, this time in bold letters that are sure to stand out: There is no blatant internet censorship going on in the military. The logic is clear and the logic is simple, so follow along with me if you will.
1. Government computers in general and government military computers in specific are for official use only. This is always made very clear, but of course, it's never stopped people from visiting Slashdot, playing online games, bidding on eBay auctions, and even viewing pornography on government computers when they're supposed to be doing work.
2. A commander or someone high up on the food chain says, "Hey, we've had too many porno incidents and I'm starting to lose face. We need to filter our web access. Since we're the government, we'll put a bid out on it and get a contractor for the solution.
3. A contractor wins the bid. Partially because they're the lowest bidder and partially because their proposal contained all this great-sounding stuff like "increased work productivity".
4. The contracter says, "okay, we can ban access to these different types of pages, sir. Which would you'd like?" To which the commander says, "I want my people to be as productive and hard-working as possible, so we don't want to tempt them with any distractions. Filter all of it! Er, except cnn.com. A guy's gotta read the news in the morning, right?"
5. Contracter sets up filters that prohibit access to porn sites, sports sites, auction sites, classified ad sites, gaming sites, humour sites, entertainment sites, gambling sites, and personal sites.
Read that last one again. "Personal sites." That's what blogs are. I can't access geocities, tripod, blogspot, livejournal, or any of those because they're considered "personal sites" by the web content filter where I work. (I keep wondering when Slashdot will finally be blocked.) The contractors who set up content filters over here are quite often the same ones that set up content filters over there.
Commanders and contractors are not deliberately censoring United States Military personnel. They're trying to keep people focused on their work. They have no interest in censoring what troops want to say. I should be the last person in the world to lecture about this, but troops are supposed to keep in mind that using the government computer for personal reasons is wrong and technically illegal. Like the parent said, even overseas there are ways to check your email, post to your blog, or whatever without doing it on the taxpayer's dime.
I haven't used osCommerce myself, but my cow-orkers have and they declare it to be one of the biggest, steamiest piles of bovine excrement that the open source world has ever seen.
What they considered to be the worst feature of osCommerce were its "modules". Like many software products, you can install "modules" for added functionality. There were dozens of "modules" available. Imagine our surprise when we found out that osCommerce "modules" were really just patches against the already horrible code base. Most, not all, went in cleanly on a brand spanking new osCommerce installation. However, these module "authors" hardly, if ever, verified that their mod^H^H^Hpatches applied cleanly with other patches already installed. The result is obvious: modules rarely coexisted with each other.
Which, of course, defeated the whole purpose of modules. We also found out that customers really don't take it all that well when you tell them that their website can only have one feature or another but not both. They take their business elsewhere.
Okay, this is the 4th comment that I've received along these lines, telling me to just buy the darn books. Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough when I said that I didn't want to buy the books. I need more than just a few tutorials and API reference in order to decide whether or not RoR is right for me. I'm not in a financial position to throw $50+ down the tube in case it isn't.
From time to time, I'll probably glance at new tutorials, maybe ask some questions in the Ruby community, and prod my employer to splurge on the books.
I understand that Ruby is new (in terms of popularity, not age, of course) and that Rails is still practically in its infancy and that I can't expect there to be tons of free documentation floating about the interweb. But that assurance doesn't help my position any.
Maybe because he isn't an all-or-nothing zealot like some of the characters who push free software. A Mac computer places no restrictions on what software you can run on it. Thus, although I fully support free and open source software, I wouldn't have a problem buying a Powerbook and using OS X if the two happened to fit my needs.
I've seen Cory speak before, but I wasn't at the same conference(s) you were, so maybe you could tell me... was he extolling the virtues of iTunes or iTMS? Remember, iTunes is a music player and organizer that will play anything while iTMS is Apple's DRM music store. I've heard lots of people say that iTunes is great. Perhaps Cory merely agrees. If he was saying that iTMS is great, well, that's a bit more of a grey area.
Perhaps he feels that the relatively weak DRM in iTMS is there primarily to satisfy the music industry so that Apple can provide music that (most) people want to listen to. AFAIK, even with its DRM, Apple allowed and encourages you to make non-DRM backups of all the music you buy, something which traditional DRM explicitly disallows.
If he did in fact claim that OS X is an open source OS, well, that's obviously just plain wrong. It is based on another open source OS, but I'd find it hard to believe he would deny or fail to make that distinction.
The authors of rails books need to stop writing tutorials and write some comprehensive documentation.
This is what pushed me away from Rails not long after I started looking into it. Aside from API guides and the like, all real documentation on Rails and Ruby is outdated or sparse. Sure, there are lots of Rails tutorials out now, plus there's Why's Poignant Guide, but these alone are not nearly enough. The RoR community's answer is, of course, to simply buy the Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails books.
Right, spend over $50 on books just to see what RoR is all about? No thanks. The authors must be making a killing right now since there really is no other up-to-date documentation for these technologies out right now.
And in other news: Microsoft rejects Europe's monopoly concerns, conservatives reject liberals' pro-choice concerns, and suspected shooter rejects plaintiff's murder concerns.
I don't know why this article is all over the web recently. Lots of flashy words, but it says absolutely nothing that we didn't already know or expect.
Creepy......but at least it's not another post about video games. That Zonk must be angling for that coveted Most Slashdot Stories About Video Games In a Single Day award.
So, if you evaluated all of the free PCB design software out there and none of the ones worth mentioning fit your needs, then why are you even asking?
Use some logic here. If there was some up-to-date, well-maintained, and open source PCB design program that trumped all the ones you mentioned, wouldn't you have run across it already?
There sure have been a lot of these questions on Ask Slashdot recently.
When your entire livelihood rests on getting a handful of responses out of millions of emails sent, there's not much incentive to expend the time and money it would take to physically trek around to different cities and ask for a few thousand email addresses from each. Not when they can get many times more that number by running a harvester on the web for a few hours or by buying a truckload of addresses from another spammer.
Besides, I'd wager that 98% of those addresses probably are already on several spamlists.
Oh yes, MDK. I was a junior in high school, I think. The day the demo was released, I started downloading it right before going to bed. We had 28.8k dialup with an... unreliable ISP. The next morning, I woke up, and found to my astonishment that it had all downloaded. Got ready for school EXTRA quick with 15 minutes to spare, so I began installing the demo.
Installation took 5 minutes, leaving me 10 minutes to revel in beautful 640x480 3D bad-guy killing with exceptionally smooth control and frame rate. The fact that this was even possible on a Pentium 100 Packard Hell with no video acceleration astounded me enough on its own. The fact that it was a strange and gorgeous game made it even better.
Let me tell you, I have no idea what went on at school that day. None. Probably missed an assignment or two. Might have even gotten yelled at by a teacher for not paying attention in class. All I can remember is playing that 10 minutes of MDK over and over in my head throughout the whole day. It was absolutely agonizing having to wait months for the retail version to hit the shelves.
I was, of course, very careful not to reveal the (rumored) meaning of the acronym "MDK" to my mother until *after* she helped me to purchase it...
I am a registered Republican (lesser of two evils, etc.).
Huh? You're registered with a political party whose representatives have lied, spied on their own citizens, started bloody wars under false pretenses, legalized convictions without a fair trial, wantonly censor free speech and choice, endorse monopolies, and justify political decisions based on religious beliefs.
If this is the lesser of two evils, I can only assume that the only other alternative was sending your campaign contribution to the Legions of Satan.
I can't say everything was all roses and buttercups under Democratic rule, but at least then we had a good economy, weren't continually at war with faraway places, and had reasonable expectations of privay. Oh, and the world at large didn't hate us.
how are we better than the damn Islamist's
Evidently, you still have quite way to go if your first reaction is to damn an entire religion based on the actions a few. I can clearly imagine the "Islamist's" sitting over there on the other side of the world wondering when the damn Christian Americans are going to stop invading and occupying Islamic countries.
Purely anecdotal and highly unscientific evidence follows.
During my gaming years, I often thrived on fast-paced action-oriented games. We used to call them "twitch" games. Titles like Street Fighter II, Quake1-3, WipeOut XL. With some practice, I was always pretty good at these, despite being a relatively slow thinker. Not a slow learner, but a slow thinker in that it usually takes me a minute or two to come up with the best solution for some IT problem while my cow-orkers will usually arrive at the same solution almost instantly.
Anyway, like I said, I had a knack for twitch games for some reason, but I always found that I did poorly when I tried to concentrate on the game itself and my reactions to what was happening on-screen. Imagine my surprise when I found that I did *significantly* better in these games when I put about 60% of my attention into some other task and just sorta played the game in the "backgound," if you will. Tasks like mentally disassembling the in-game music into separate instruments, reviewing the plot of my favorite movie, marvelling at the excellent background art or clever level design, or deciding what to have for lunch. Even with this tactic, I never quite achieved Video Game Superhuman Powers, but usually landed comfortably in 2nd or 3rd place in a room full of expert Quake players, for instance.
All that would come to an end, however, if the thought entered my head, "Man, I gotta concentrate on this," because then I would suddenly find myself beaten, fragged, or crashed more often than not.
Indeed. I have a friend who wants to do awesome things with his artistic and musical skills online. And he really could, except that he and his wife can't afford broadband. Nor groceries half the time. Their cable bill, however, is often well over $100 what with all the channels and pay-per-view on-demand crud that they watch.
Broadband is great and good for me because I use it to both make money and further my self-education in the geekly arts. But two things I don't foresee myself ever having are cable/sat TV or a cell phone because they are WAY too expensive for how little I'd use them. I suspect that those who are quite happy with their dialup feel pretty much the same way about broadband.
Phishing scams have been using SSL in attacks since 2004. Last year Netcraft identified more than 450 phishing attacks that used SSL certificates in one form or another.
Clearly, SSL is dying. The hand-writing is on the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not special, hence the lukewarm review. He was simply asked to review the unit honestly and he did. No harm in that, is there? A review of a product that turns out being rather poor is far more useful to most people than either lying about it and saying it's great or simply not reviewing it at all. Wish there were more actual review sites that were this truthful.
If I'm not the first to suggest it, I definitely won't be the last... many of the problems you speak of can be gotten around simply via the use of a capable client software and a secure operating system.
I posit that the use of buggy and insecure software is one major reason that Internet growth hasn't been all that it could have. People are (rightfully) terrified of all the spam, pop-up ads, viruses, privacy concerns that could all be eliminated to a large extent if reliable end-user software were the norm and not the exception. The Internet was built upon open source and I futher argue that it will never reach its fullest potential until better engineered software is on both ends of the network connection.
Agreed, and this "settlement" implies to me that the folks at EFF are not only losing their edge, but their minds as well.
I mean, how is this kind of settlement any different from the one that Microsoft agreed to back in the day? "We're sorry for all of our abusive, monopolistic actions. And to prove it, we're going to give millions of dollars worth of our software to public schools. (Haha, what suckers.)"
Real punishment for Sony would be to have them pay for the actual cost of repairs to machines infected with their rootkit or to have such rootkits made illegal with a punishment that has some real teeth.
A murderer CAN deny access to their property even having a dead body in the freezer, enless the police have a warrant. A company CAN refuse to turn over documents enless the police have a warrant. Police can't walk in anywhere they want and/or just take things because they may or may not be incriminating, it's called probable cause. They must have enough viable reason to further their investigation, you can't just bother every citizen because you may or may not know a partial bit of information about a crime.
I'm guessing you haven't visited the United States in the last five years or so. You surely can't live here or you'd know by now that most of these actions are now perfectly legal and in fact standard operating procedure. All the investigators or police have to do is utter the "T" word, even if there's no evidence to support such uttering.
I'm trying out Camino 1.0 on my new Dell Mac and I noticed that its search bar inserts "sourceid=mozilla2" into the query string. I wonder why they chose that instead of just "mozilla" or even just "firefox" since Camino is based heavily upon Firefox code?
Yes, you can now. Not back when my laptop was new. Initial versions of its BIOS were so buggy that the only way to run X at the proper resolution was by rolling in an unsupported patch and rebuilding the video drivers. Thankfully, someone must have whined enough that Dell fixed the BIOS a few months down the road.
Because a flash drive distro, if not engineered properly, can ruin the device. These things have a limited number of write cycles. For example, if some idiot puts /tmp on the drive rather than in memory, the drive will give up the ghost or would be a lot closer to doing so than it was before after only a few boots.
Well, for a BIOS flash update you could burn your bootable floppy image + flash update utility + BIOS image to a CD-R and boot from that. (Of course, it will be using floppy emulation.) That was the only way I could upgrade the BIOS on my Dell laptop. Which doesn't even have an option for a floppy drive, even though the first step in their official BIOS update procedure said, "Insert a blank, formatted disk into the floppy drive..."
These days, you can do everything on a bootable CD-ROM that you can a bootable floppy. Except, of course, write to it.
Why hasn't anyone yet pointed out the obvious possibility that perhaps it's because of Google's unorthodox methods that they're so successful rather than in spite of them?
The big tech companies are very very afraid of Google, not because Google is going to eat into their market or revenues, but rather because Google is showing the world that it is possible to build a hugely successful business by doing good, making your employees happy, and challenging the status quo. These three things go completely against everything that big business has tried to build up over the last two and a half decades.
Eh, you mean...
"I'm deeply and terribly sorry, Mr. Culver, your name is indeed on the guest list, but I'm afraid I cannot allow you to enter."
"Well why not?!"
"It seems, sir, that your watch is of the, er, digital persuasion."
Funny old world you must live in...
You, sir, are on crack.
It's a surprisingly common myth that when you sign up for military service, that you suddenly lose all protections afforded to you under the United States Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other legal documents that grant Americans specific freedoms. However, the UCMJ also applies and does place some additional restrictions on what military members can say and do, but only in very specific circumstances.
For example, almost all of the restrictions you talk about are those that apply only when in uniform and/or when on duty. Why? Well, because a person in uniform is expected to be held to a higher standard than your average civilian.
Here, let an Airman explain it to you.
* First Amendment - Freedom of speech, press, religion, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government = mostly lost. You are not allowed to speak freely, assemble other then as ordered, nor to petition the government except as through the chain of command.
Wrong. You ARE allowed to speak freely about any topic you wish, you CAN assemble all you want, and you CAN petition the government. But NOT when not in uniform.
What you're not allowed to do is support or endorse a political group, movement, or perspective while identifying yourself as a member of a military service. Do it as an American citizen, that's fine, but offering your support while publicizing your military status is definitely a no-no. Not only might it lead the clueless to draw an incorrect assumption (that the military itself supports whatever you're supporting), it's also an unethical use of the uniform and rank. Whereas it's ethically wrong for celebrities on TV advertisements to use their status to promote a product, it's wrong and illegal for service members to use their uniform to promote a political opinion.
* Second Amendment - Right to keep and bear arms. = mostly lost. You are only entitled to arms as ordered.
Wrong. Many of my fellow service members owned guns. Depending on base regulations, they had to be registered with or stored at the armory, but those in the military certainly are entitled to arms, so this assertion is just plain false.
* Third Amendment - Protection from quartering of troops. = lost. The army can assign you to bunk with someone or someone to bunk with you at any time, for any reason.
Have you really gone that insane? Just where do you want them to sleep? Individual hotel rooms? (I mean, for those in a branch of service other than the Air Force.)
* Fourth Amendment - Protection from unreasonable search and seizure. = lost. The military can search your private effects at any time.
Wrong. The only time the military can search your residence without a warrant is if you are occupying military barracks, billiting, housing, or lodging. If you own your own home off-base, as many active duty members do, the military police have no jurisdiction over it. The civilian police do. (And if you asked me to choose between the two, I'll take military police, thankyouverymuch.)
* Fifth Amendment - Due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, private property. = IANAL, not sure how many of these are still available during a Court Martial, but I know that many of them DON'T apply.
* Sixth Amendment - Trial by jury and other rights of the accused. mostly lost = no jury trial, you get a counsellor, but are tried by a panel. There is not necessarily an appeal, as you can be summarily executed in situations judged to be in extremis.
You may be right here. However, this isn't the full story. The military spends hundreds of thousands of dollars providing for and training a single individual over the course of a four-year enlistment. Since the whole military runs on money, that fact alone means that they have absolutely NO interest whatsoever in locking up their innocent members.
Of all the cases that I've known about first-hand where somebody ended up in a court martial, it's because they really REALLY fucked
Hello moderators, please mod the parent up. I too work in communications in the military and can tell you first hand that any reports of censorship conspiracy are greatly exaggerated.
I read the drivel that Wonkette was spewing about on her site weeks ago and would have challenged her directly on her own website, but surprise, anonymous comments aren't allowed there.
There is no blatant internet censorship going on in the military. Just to make sure my point gets across, allow me to repeat that again, this time in bold letters that are sure to stand out: There is no blatant internet censorship going on in the military. The logic is clear and the logic is simple, so follow along with me if you will.
1. Government computers in general and government military computers in specific are for official use only. This is always made very clear, but of course, it's never stopped people from visiting Slashdot, playing online games, bidding on eBay auctions, and even viewing pornography on government computers when they're supposed to be doing work.
2. A commander or someone high up on the food chain says, "Hey, we've had too many porno incidents and I'm starting to lose face. We need to filter our web access. Since we're the government, we'll put a bid out on it and get a contractor for the solution.
3. A contractor wins the bid. Partially because they're the lowest bidder and partially because their proposal contained all this great-sounding stuff like "increased work productivity".
4. The contracter says, "okay, we can ban access to these different types of pages, sir. Which would you'd like?" To which the commander says, "I want my people to be as productive and hard-working as possible, so we don't want to tempt them with any distractions. Filter all of it! Er, except cnn.com. A guy's gotta read the news in the morning, right?"
5. Contracter sets up filters that prohibit access to porn sites, sports sites, auction sites, classified ad sites, gaming sites, humour sites, entertainment sites, gambling sites, and personal sites.
Read that last one again. "Personal sites." That's what blogs are. I can't access geocities, tripod, blogspot, livejournal, or any of those because they're considered "personal sites" by the web content filter where I work. (I keep wondering when Slashdot will finally be blocked.) The contractors who set up content filters over here are quite often the same ones that set up content filters over there.
Commanders and contractors are not deliberately censoring United States Military personnel. They're trying to keep people focused on their work. They have no interest in censoring what troops want to say. I should be the last person in the world to lecture about this, but troops are supposed to keep in mind that using the government computer for personal reasons is wrong and technically illegal. Like the parent said, even overseas there are ways to check your email, post to your blog, or whatever without doing it on the taxpayer's dime.
I haven't used osCommerce myself, but my cow-orkers have and they declare it to be one of the biggest, steamiest piles of bovine excrement that the open source world has ever seen.
/dev/null.
What they considered to be the worst feature of osCommerce were its "modules". Like many software products, you can install "modules" for added functionality. There were dozens of "modules" available. Imagine our surprise when we found out that osCommerce "modules" were really just patches against the already horrible code base. Most, not all, went in cleanly on a brand spanking new osCommerce installation. However, these module "authors" hardly, if ever, verified that their mod^H^H^Hpatches applied cleanly with other patches already installed. The result is obvious: modules rarely coexisted with each other.
Which, of course, defeated the whole purpose of modules. We also found out that customers really don't take it all that well when you tell them that their website can only have one feature or another but not both. They take their business elsewhere.
We took osCommerce to
Okay, this is the 4th comment that I've received along these lines, telling me to just buy the darn books. Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough when I said that I didn't want to buy the books. I need more than just a few tutorials and API reference in order to decide whether or not RoR is right for me. I'm not in a financial position to throw $50+ down the tube in case it isn't.
From time to time, I'll probably glance at new tutorials, maybe ask some questions in the Ruby community, and prod my employer to splurge on the books.
I understand that Ruby is new (in terms of popularity, not age, of course) and that Rails is still practically in its infancy and that I can't expect there to be tons of free documentation floating about the interweb. But that assurance doesn't help my position any.
Maybe because he isn't an all-or-nothing zealot like some of the characters who push free software. A Mac computer places no restrictions on what software you can run on it. Thus, although I fully support free and open source software, I wouldn't have a problem buying a Powerbook and using OS X if the two happened to fit my needs.
I've seen Cory speak before, but I wasn't at the same conference(s) you were, so maybe you could tell me... was he extolling the virtues of iTunes or iTMS? Remember, iTunes is a music player and organizer that will play anything while iTMS is Apple's DRM music store. I've heard lots of people say that iTunes is great. Perhaps Cory merely agrees. If he was saying that iTMS is great, well, that's a bit more of a grey area.
Perhaps he feels that the relatively weak DRM in iTMS is there primarily to satisfy the music industry so that Apple can provide music that (most) people want to listen to. AFAIK, even with its DRM, Apple allowed and encourages you to make non-DRM backups of all the music you buy, something which traditional DRM explicitly disallows.
If he did in fact claim that OS X is an open source OS, well, that's obviously just plain wrong. It is based on another open source OS, but I'd find it hard to believe he would deny or fail to make that distinction.
The authors of rails books need to stop writing tutorials and write some comprehensive documentation.
This is what pushed me away from Rails not long after I started looking into it. Aside from API guides and the like, all real documentation on Rails and Ruby is outdated or sparse. Sure, there are lots of Rails tutorials out now, plus there's Why's Poignant Guide, but these alone are not nearly enough. The RoR community's answer is, of course, to simply buy the Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails books.
Right, spend over $50 on books just to see what RoR is all about? No thanks. The authors must be making a killing right now since there really is no other up-to-date documentation for these technologies out right now.
And in other news: Microsoft rejects Europe's monopoly concerns, conservatives reject liberals' pro-choice concerns, and suspected shooter rejects plaintiff's murder concerns.
I don't know why this article is all over the web recently. Lots of flashy words, but it says absolutely nothing that we didn't already know or expect.
Creepy...
So, if you evaluated all of the free PCB design software out there and none of the ones worth mentioning fit your needs, then why are you even asking?
Use some logic here. If there was some up-to-date, well-maintained, and open source PCB design program that trumped all the ones you mentioned, wouldn't you have run across it already?
There sure have been a lot of these questions on Ask Slashdot recently.
When your entire livelihood rests on getting a handful of responses out of millions of emails sent, there's not much incentive to expend the time and money it would take to physically trek around to different cities and ask for a few thousand email addresses from each. Not when they can get many times more that number by running a harvester on the web for a few hours or by buying a truckload of addresses from another spammer.
Besides, I'd wager that 98% of those addresses probably are already on several spamlists.
Oh yes, MDK. I was a junior in high school, I think. The day the demo was released, I started downloading it right before going to bed. We had 28.8k dialup with an... unreliable ISP. The next morning, I woke up, and found to my astonishment that it had all downloaded. Got ready for school EXTRA quick with 15 minutes to spare, so I began installing the demo.
Installation took 5 minutes, leaving me 10 minutes to revel in beautful 640x480 3D bad-guy killing with exceptionally smooth control and frame rate. The fact that this was even possible on a Pentium 100 Packard Hell with no video acceleration astounded me enough on its own. The fact that it was a strange and gorgeous game made it even better.
Let me tell you, I have no idea what went on at school that day. None. Probably missed an assignment or two. Might have even gotten yelled at by a teacher for not paying attention in class. All I can remember is playing that 10 minutes of MDK over and over in my head throughout the whole day. It was absolutely agonizing having to wait months for the retail version to hit the shelves.
I was, of course, very careful not to reveal the (rumored) meaning of the acronym "MDK" to my mother until *after* she helped me to purchase it...
I am a registered Republican (lesser of two evils, etc.).
Huh? You're registered with a political party whose representatives have lied, spied on their own citizens, started bloody wars under false pretenses, legalized convictions without a fair trial, wantonly censor free speech and choice, endorse monopolies, and justify political decisions based on religious beliefs.
If this is the lesser of two evils, I can only assume that the only other alternative was sending your campaign contribution to the Legions of Satan.
I can't say everything was all roses and buttercups under Democratic rule, but at least then we had a good economy, weren't continually at war with faraway places, and had reasonable expectations of privay. Oh, and the world at large didn't hate us.
how are we better than the damn Islamist's
Evidently, you still have quite way to go if your first reaction is to damn an entire religion based on the actions a few. I can clearly imagine the "Islamist's" sitting over there on the other side of the world wondering when the damn Christian Americans are going to stop invading and occupying Islamic countries.
Purely anecdotal and highly unscientific evidence follows.
During my gaming years, I often thrived on fast-paced action-oriented games. We used to call them "twitch" games. Titles like Street Fighter II, Quake1-3, WipeOut XL. With some practice, I was always pretty good at these, despite being a relatively slow thinker. Not a slow learner, but a slow thinker in that it usually takes me a minute or two to come up with the best solution for some IT problem while my cow-orkers will usually arrive at the same solution almost instantly.
Anyway, like I said, I had a knack for twitch games for some reason, but I always found that I did poorly when I tried to concentrate on the game itself and my reactions to what was happening on-screen. Imagine my surprise when I found that I did *significantly* better in these games when I put about 60% of my attention into some other task and just sorta played the game in the "backgound," if you will. Tasks like mentally disassembling the in-game music into separate instruments, reviewing the plot of my favorite movie, marvelling at the excellent background art or clever level design, or deciding what to have for lunch. Even with this tactic, I never quite achieved Video Game Superhuman Powers, but usually landed comfortably in 2nd or 3rd place in a room full of expert Quake players, for instance.
All that would come to an end, however, if the thought entered my head, "Man, I gotta concentrate on this," because then I would suddenly find myself beaten, fragged, or crashed more often than not.
Indeed. I have a friend who wants to do awesome things with his artistic and musical skills online. And he really could, except that he and his wife can't afford broadband. Nor groceries half the time. Their cable bill, however, is often well over $100 what with all the channels and pay-per-view on-demand crud that they watch.
Broadband is great and good for me because I use it to both make money and further my self-education in the geekly arts. But two things I don't foresee myself ever having are cable/sat TV or a cell phone because they are WAY too expensive for how little I'd use them. I suspect that those who are quite happy with their dialup feel pretty much the same way about broadband.
Phishing scams have been using SSL in attacks since 2004. Last year Netcraft identified more than 450 phishing attacks that used SSL certificates in one form or another.
Clearly, SSL is dying. The hand-writing is on the wall.