The other day I had my laptop at a friends place. He doesn't have wifi, but there are at least 20 AP's that show up in this aparment complex.
One of them was completley unprotected, having the name "Belkin Gxxx" whatever the model was. Obviously the people plugged it in and just started using it.
I connected, checked my email, did the other small things I had to do. Then I tried logging into the router, as expected, the username and password were the Belkin defaults. I left it unprotected, but changed the broadcast name to
"Belkin lock up your shit"
Two weeks later I went back and I saw it again, this time named "Belkin says thank you" with WEP encryption.
If they advertise this right they could see big sales among students. I'm going to be taking some programming classes next semester and this looks like it would be great to carry around to practice with.
The solution to this problem is simple: Keep your children under control.
Any good parent will be able to prevent his daughter from being exposed to HPV.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That's fuckin hilarious. Almost as if you're saying "The solution to end all wars is simple, institute world peace!". To think that parents can stop their kids from having sex is absurd. Unless you homeschool your kid and keep them locked up in a closet 24/7, there are some times where children are *gasp* not under direct supervision. News Flash! Kids do things, especially those that their parents tell them not to do. Also, saying "any good parent" would prevent their child from being exposed to HPV is equally absurd. I can see it now...
Me: Hear about Jenny? She got raped and now has HPV.
You: If only she had better parents! Then this never would have happened and we all would have lived happily ever after.
(And I say this as someone who isn't a naive moron.)
Once this technology gets finalized and then made tiny we can implant them in our ears. Of course we'd have to avoid any and all Theta radiation or they'd start malfunctioning. I don't know about you guys but when Rom was trying to find the reset button on Nog's translator implant during episode #77 of DS9 it looked pretty painful.
You probably would have never found out. Your phone number is determined by the SIM card (your old one w/ old phone number) but the previous owners Contacts list was stored on secondary internal phone memory. If you had called the people it wouldn't have shown up saying "Dave" calling, it would be an unkown number (your phone number). So they wouldn't even know who's phone you were calling from.
As has been said it was stupid to make a four letter TLD for a mobil device. The smartest thing to have done would be to make it something easy to type out on a phone keypad. Something like.adg (just hit 1,2,3) or.ptw (7,8,9). Sure they're not catchy but they would be very quick to type out on a cell phone.
I hate Yahoo search, I REALLY hate MSN search...
If they had combined I may have spontaneously combusted from the new, dangerously high levels of hatred coursing through my veins.
That was close.
If you had RTFA you'd see that overclocking this card to 4.1 isn't actually a big strectch because of the unique way this chip was designed by Intel.
Normally the clock multiplier is in the 10's but on this chip it is 20x. That means that a relatively small change to the FSB clock increases the overall clock speed greatly.
The default FSB speed is 133mhz. 20x133 = 2.66ghz (the original speeds)
By raising the FSB by only a bout 70 mhz to 200 we get a huge change. 20x205= 4.1ghz
It's a relativley low increase in FSB speeds that translate to a much higher clockrate.
I haven't actually purchased a Windows disc since 98 SE, and I don't plan on ever having purchase one again. Yet I type this out on Windows XP, an operating system where if I want updates I need to "verify" my copy. Oh wait! 30 seconds on Google and a 500kb download, problem solved.
On to Vista...
Better copy protection at the install level? Perhaps I'll need to "dial in" to Richmond and get a "unique" key. That will take the crackers maybe a few days to get around at the most.
DRM at the OS level you say? I'm sure it will be easily fixed and either removed, or tricked into thinking every file on your drive has been purchased from the concentration camp that is a Windows Media Audio music store.
Is it sad that we will have to go to these measures to get a usable OS just to play games? Yes. But the fact that it will be done (kind of a great challenge for the cracking community) means we don't have to spend a bunch of time spreading FUD about how Vista will take over our systems and make us cry.
Apple has said it time and time again, they consider themselves a hardware company. Most of Apple's profits come from their hardware and not their software. Microsoft is the complete opposite, they make money off their software. Both have different advantages and disadvantages, one downside to relying on software primarily is the whole issue of piracy. You can't pirate a Macbook, I mean, you could steal one but...anyway.
This was said in another comment for the story about Boot Camp but I'll repeat it because its true.
Apple makes it so Windows can run on their hardware = PROFIT (more people on the fence about switching can switch, they sell hardware)
Apple makes it so OS X can run on anything = Not Profit Sure, they would make some money off of the sale of said operating system but the hardware sales they'd lose in the future would make this a very stupid business decision. I'm not gonna buy an expensive Mac when I can grab that $300 Dell box and run OS X on it.
No I don't want to convert all those songs to Ogg or mp3 unless someone knows a way to do it in a batch job with no loss of quality.
Are you joking me? Just a tiny bit of googling could find a solution to your plight. Decompress those files to WAV using Winamp. You change the output to Nullsoft DiskWriter then just put all the files you want in the playlist, voila, WAV files of your AAC files. Next download LAME and RazorLame (front end GUI for LAME), all free, all GNU. Throw all the WAV's into the batch, encode at 320kbps VBR and if you can tell the difference from the AAC's than you sir, are a liar.
Note, doing this also breaks the half baked DRM out there. See? You're converting your music into the almost universal format of MP3 AND sticking it to the RIAA at the same time. Mission Accomplished!
Mod this guy up, he just said it all.
I played SWG from a few weeks after release for almost a year and a half. I currently play WoW and while its fun I still look back at the good ol' days of SWG.
First I went down the path of a Bounty Hunter, then I decided to become a Swordsman but retain my gun fighting skills for ranged combat. Later I dropped guns altogether and became a Chef! I spent almost 5 weeks during the summer becoming a Master Chef and then creating the finest Brandy on the server which I sold for 500k creds a crate making a hefty profit. The crafting was not only complex but rewarding. I had supply chains, various other crafters whose goods I relied upon to make my own goods. I had a fucking contract with some dude for christs sake where he would make x amount of stuff for me per week and I would pick it up on a certain day. Its the only game where I could ever do crafting as a full time gaming experience and have fun, it was like running an actual virtual business. The flexibility was there, people who wanted to craft full time could do it and have fun, those who wanted to fight for fun could do so as well. And they both could live together in the same game world and support eachother.
100% PLAYER DRIVEN ECONOMY
Hardly any "phat l00tz", all of your equipment was created by other players. If you wanted to buy a new sword or rifle you could look on the map for all the player run vendors, player homes with vending bots selling their wares. You could buy the first thing you found for a decent price or shop around, finding the item with the best stats and price. NOT ALL ITEMS ARE THE SAME! In WoW, the [Dwarven Axe of Pillaging] you have is exactly the same as the next guys. Not in SWG! All the items are handcrafted by players and the stats of the materials they used to create the item dictate its final stats. My friend had a flamethrower that was passed down to him from a guy in our guild that had some uber stats, he held on to that thing like it was a valued heirloom.
I could go on but the economy and sheer flexibility of the game is what made it special, from what I hear the NGE destroyed the crafting system and took out more than half the classes that made this game unique. If they did a rollback to before the NGE I'd re-subscribe immediatley.
Remove the battery? And if it STILL tracks you with some kind of magic internal power device get a plastic bag with triple walled aluminum foil...no signal is getting out of there!
Actually use of MSG in a food product sold in the U.S. has to be disclosed, its a chemical...not really a "spice" or "natural flavor". It would technically fit under the label "Artificial Flavors" but since some people are violently alergic to it the law requires it to be put on the label. Even if it wasn't the law, companies would just be setting themselves up for lawsuits if they didn't.
Last time I checked the people who make these cellphones things are doing so as a business...you know, to make money not bring communication devices to the world for the sake of society. You sound as if you're complaining about Christmas being commercialized:
"we're losing the true meaning of Chrismas!!! It's all about the money now:(" This is probably true...replace the word Christmas with Cellphone and it sounds batshitloco.
Everyone on Slashdot loves to bitch and moan whenever a cellphone is discussed, "boohoooo I wish there was a cellphone that you could just CALL people on!!". First of all, these phones are out there...just buy a phone from 2000 and find a carrier that allows you to bring your own phone and use their SIM cards. It's not even like you have to go find an ancient phone. A friend of mine recently bought a new barebones Nokia phone, doesn't have a camera or anything fancy and gets heckuva a lot better reception than my phone. It's not old or archaic, she got it free with a new plan at Cingular.
Or you could just do the much simpler thing. Do not use the device to take picture or send videos...then you don't have to pay the fees (AMAZING I KNOW...BUT TRUE). It's called self-control, just because the feature is available doesn't mean you have to use it.
Gigabyte has something out they call i-RAM. It's a PCI add-in card that allows you to plug regular ram sticks into and then access them as a piece of solid storage space. They say its good for "multimedia applications" and I'm sure it is...if not a little overkill.
Just read this story from the print version (that I pay for, unlike this free link...thanks Wired.com!) in the can and came back to the computer. Refreshed Slashdot and there it is! It's a pretty good article, the beginning is kind of weak but the bulk of it gives you a good perspective on how blog companies make their money and get bloggers.
Say what you will but his company is responsible for Engadget and that sites not half bad...well, they get linked to from Slashdot quite a bit and I guess that means something...actually no, no it does not.
Unfortunatley I forgot to add, if you want to mod this Flamebait you need to go get your head checked. I use Linux (Slackware to be exact). I'm not anti-Linux by any measure. The point though is that Linux is not user friendly by nature, and for something to be shipped in EVERY Dell machine it has to be something that a user of any skill level could use. Linux does not meet this build, fuck, half the people out there can't even install Windows...how are they gonna figure out compiling their own drivers? By the time Linux becomes user friendly enough for it to be shipped on every Dell machine it won't even be called Linux anymore and it shouldn't be, it won't resemble what we know of as Linux.
Quote: "Does it mean that it might soon become possible to order Dell's full line of personal systems with Linux installed, or no OS/FreeDOS to save the Microsoft tax?"
I think if I was drinking milk while I read this I would have had a very dirty keyboard and monitor right now. Maybe this will happen when hell freezes over, or they come out with a distro that is as easy to use as a Mac...whichever comes first. I'd put my money on the former though, not the latter.
I find it slightly disconcerting, as a subscriber to the print version of Wired Magazine, that a lot of the articles I pay to receive every month end up on their website for free and then are subsequently linked to Slashdot. Seems like there isn't much point in paying for the magazine when I can read most of the articles free of charge on their site. And online you don't have every other page being a block of advertisements like you do in the magazine...wow, the more I think about it the more worthless that subscription is. Good thing is was a gift:)
Slashdot Mirror
The other day I had my laptop at a friends place. He doesn't have wifi, but there are at least 20 AP's that show up in this aparment complex.
One of them was completley unprotected, having the name "Belkin Gxxx" whatever the model was. Obviously the people plugged it in and just started using it.
I connected, checked my email, did the other small things I had to do. Then I tried logging into the router, as expected, the username and password were the Belkin defaults. I left it unprotected, but changed the broadcast name to
"Belkin lock up your shit"
Two weeks later I went back and I saw it again, this time named "Belkin says thank you" with WEP encryption.
If they advertise this right they could see big sales among students. I'm going to be taking some programming classes next semester and this looks like it would be great to carry around to practice with.
Jesus..people really can read ANYTHING into ANYTHING.
...thought I'd give Lisa Lampanelli a plug.
Well, you wouldn't be the only one.
*BA-DUM-TSHH*
The solution to this problem is simple: Keep your children under control.
Any good parent will be able to prevent his daughter from being exposed to HPV.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That's fuckin hilarious. Almost as if you're saying "The solution to end all wars is simple, institute world peace!". To think that parents can stop their kids from having sex is absurd. Unless you homeschool your kid and keep them locked up in a closet 24/7, there are some times where children are *gasp* not under direct supervision. News Flash! Kids do things, especially those that their parents tell them not to do. Also, saying "any good parent" would prevent their child from being exposed to HPV is equally absurd. I can see it now...
Me: Hear about Jenny? She got raped and now has HPV.
You: If only she had better parents! Then this never would have happened and we all would have lived happily ever after.
(And I say this as someone who isn't a naive moron.)
Once this technology gets finalized and then made tiny we can implant them in our ears.
Of course we'd have to avoid any and all Theta radiation or they'd start malfunctioning. I don't know about you guys but when Rom was trying to find the reset button on Nog's translator implant during episode #77 of DS9 it looked pretty painful.
You probably would have never found out. Your phone number is determined by the SIM card (your old one w/ old phone number) but the previous owners Contacts list was stored on secondary internal phone memory. If you had called the people it wouldn't have shown up saying "Dave" calling, it would be an unkown number (your phone number). So they wouldn't even know who's phone you were calling from.
If you really used AOL that would have been all in caps, not just the last part.
As has been said it was stupid to make a four letter TLD for a mobil device. The smartest thing to have done would be to make it something easy to type out on a phone keypad. Something like .adg (just hit 1,2,3) or .ptw (7,8,9). Sure they're not catchy but they would be very quick to type out on a cell phone.
I hate Yahoo search, I REALLY hate MSN search... If they had combined I may have spontaneously combusted from the new, dangerously high levels of hatred coursing through my veins. That was close.
If you had RTFA you'd see that overclocking this card to 4.1 isn't actually a big strectch because of the unique way this chip was designed by Intel.
Normally the clock multiplier is in the 10's but on this chip it is 20x. That means that a relatively small change to the FSB clock increases the overall clock speed greatly.
The default FSB speed is 133mhz. 20x133 = 2.66ghz (the original speeds)
By raising the FSB by only a bout 70 mhz to 200 we get a huge change. 20x205= 4.1ghz
It's a relativley low increase in FSB speeds that translate to a much higher clockrate.
I'm not really ready to upgrade my entire rig at the moment but I'm almost tempted to buy a Pentium D 805 now before they're
A) Out of stock everywhere
B) Intel releases Revision B that makes overclocking this particular CPU impossible.
Buy em while they're hot folks...(no pun intended, or was there?)
I haven't actually purchased a Windows disc since 98 SE, and I don't plan on ever having purchase one again. Yet I type this out on Windows XP, an operating system where if I want updates I need to "verify" my copy. Oh wait! 30 seconds on Google and a 500kb download, problem solved.
On to Vista...
Better copy protection at the install level? Perhaps I'll need to "dial in" to Richmond and get a "unique" key. That will take the crackers maybe a few days to get around at the most.
DRM at the OS level you say? I'm sure it will be easily fixed and either removed, or tricked into thinking every file on your drive has been purchased from the concentration camp that is a Windows Media Audio music store.
Is it sad that we will have to go to these measures to get a usable OS just to play games? Yes. But the fact that it will be done (kind of a great challenge for the cracking community) means we don't have to spend a bunch of time spreading FUD about how Vista will take over our systems and make us cry.
Apple has said it time and time again, they consider themselves a hardware company. Most of Apple's profits come from their hardware and not their software. Microsoft is the complete opposite, they make money off their software. Both have different advantages and disadvantages, one downside to relying on software primarily is the whole issue of piracy. You can't pirate a Macbook, I mean, you could steal one but...anyway.
This was said in another comment for the story about Boot Camp but I'll repeat it because its true.
Apple makes it so Windows can run on their hardware = PROFIT (more people on the fence about switching can switch, they sell hardware)
Apple makes it so OS X can run on anything = Not Profit
Sure, they would make some money off of the sale of said operating system but the hardware sales they'd lose in the future would make this a very stupid business decision. I'm not gonna buy an expensive Mac when I can grab that $300 Dell box and run OS X on it.
No I don't want to convert all those songs to Ogg or mp3 unless someone knows a way to do it in a batch job with no loss of quality.
Are you joking me? Just a tiny bit of googling could find a solution to your plight.
Decompress those files to WAV using Winamp. You change the output to Nullsoft DiskWriter then just put all the files you want in the playlist, voila, WAV files of your AAC files. Next download LAME and RazorLame (front end GUI for LAME), all free, all GNU. Throw all the WAV's into the batch, encode at 320kbps VBR and if you can tell the difference from the AAC's than you sir, are a liar.
Note, doing this also breaks the half baked DRM out there. See? You're converting your music into the almost universal format of MP3 AND sticking it to the RIAA at the same time. Mission Accomplished!
Mod this guy up, he just said it all. I played SWG from a few weeks after release for almost a year and a half. I currently play WoW and while its fun I still look back at the good ol' days of SWG. First I went down the path of a Bounty Hunter, then I decided to become a Swordsman but retain my gun fighting skills for ranged combat. Later I dropped guns altogether and became a Chef! I spent almost 5 weeks during the summer becoming a Master Chef and then creating the finest Brandy on the server which I sold for 500k creds a crate making a hefty profit. The crafting was not only complex but rewarding. I had supply chains, various other crafters whose goods I relied upon to make my own goods. I had a fucking contract with some dude for christs sake where he would make x amount of stuff for me per week and I would pick it up on a certain day. Its the only game where I could ever do crafting as a full time gaming experience and have fun, it was like running an actual virtual business. The flexibility was there, people who wanted to craft full time could do it and have fun, those who wanted to fight for fun could do so as well. And they both could live together in the same game world and support eachother. 100% PLAYER DRIVEN ECONOMY Hardly any "phat l00tz", all of your equipment was created by other players. If you wanted to buy a new sword or rifle you could look on the map for all the player run vendors, player homes with vending bots selling their wares. You could buy the first thing you found for a decent price or shop around, finding the item with the best stats and price. NOT ALL ITEMS ARE THE SAME! In WoW, the [Dwarven Axe of Pillaging] you have is exactly the same as the next guys. Not in SWG! All the items are handcrafted by players and the stats of the materials they used to create the item dictate its final stats. My friend had a flamethrower that was passed down to him from a guy in our guild that had some uber stats, he held on to that thing like it was a valued heirloom. I could go on but the economy and sheer flexibility of the game is what made it special, from what I hear the NGE destroyed the crafting system and took out more than half the classes that made this game unique. If they did a rollback to before the NGE I'd re-subscribe immediatley.
Remove the battery? And if it STILL tracks you with some kind of magic internal power device get a plastic bag with triple walled aluminum foil...no signal is getting out of there!
Actually use of MSG in a food product sold in the U.S. has to be disclosed, its a chemical...not really a "spice" or "natural flavor". It would technically fit under the label "Artificial Flavors" but since some people are violently alergic to it the law requires it to be put on the label. Even if it wasn't the law, companies would just be setting themselves up for lawsuits if they didn't.
Cellphones? Commercialized? No shit!
:(" This is probably true...replace the word Christmas with Cellphone and it sounds batshitloco.
Definition of Commercialized
adj : organized principally for financial gain
Last time I checked the people who make these cellphones things are doing so as a business...you know, to make money not bring communication devices to the world for the sake of society. You sound as if you're complaining about Christmas being commercialized:
"we're losing the true meaning of Chrismas!!! It's all about the money now
Everyone on Slashdot loves to bitch and moan whenever a cellphone is discussed, "boohoooo I wish there was a cellphone that you could just CALL people on!!". First of all, these phones are out there...just buy a phone from 2000 and find a carrier that allows you to bring your own phone and use their SIM cards. It's not even like you have to go find an ancient phone. A friend of mine recently bought a new barebones Nokia phone, doesn't have a camera or anything fancy and gets heckuva a lot better reception than my phone. It's not old or archaic, she got it free with a new plan at Cingular.
Or you could just do the much simpler thing. Do not use the device to take picture or send videos...then you don't have to pay the fees (AMAZING I KNOW...BUT TRUE). It's called self-control, just because the feature is available doesn't mean you have to use it.
Gigabyte has something out they call i-RAM. It's a PCI add-in card that allows you to plug regular ram sticks into and then access them as a piece of solid storage space. They say its good for "multimedia applications" and I'm sure it is...if not a little overkill.
Here's a link to a review from Anandtech http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
Just read this story from the print version (that I pay for, unlike this free link...thanks Wired.com!) in the can and came back to the computer. Refreshed Slashdot and there it is! It's a pretty good article, the beginning is kind of weak but the bulk of it gives you a good perspective on how blog companies make their money and get bloggers.
Say what you will but his company is responsible for Engadget and that sites not half bad...well, they get linked to from Slashdot quite a bit and I guess that means something...actually no, no it does not.
Unfortunatley I forgot to add, if you want to mod this Flamebait you need to go get your head checked. I use Linux (Slackware to be exact). I'm not anti-Linux by any measure. The point though is that Linux is not user friendly by nature, and for something to be shipped in EVERY Dell machine it has to be something that a user of any skill level could use. Linux does not meet this build, fuck, half the people out there can't even install Windows...how are they gonna figure out compiling their own drivers? By the time Linux becomes user friendly enough for it to be shipped on every Dell machine it won't even be called Linux anymore and it shouldn't be, it won't resemble what we know of as Linux.
Quote: "Does it mean that it might soon become possible to order Dell's full line of personal systems with Linux installed, or no OS/FreeDOS to save the Microsoft tax?"
I think if I was drinking milk while I read this I would have had a very dirty keyboard and monitor right now. Maybe this will happen when hell freezes over, or they come out with a distro that is as easy to use as a Mac...whichever comes first. I'd put my money on the former though, not the latter.
Correct! Though apparently DirecTV owns not only http://www.directv.com/ but http://www.directtv.com/ as well in case you didn't figure out their oh so clever name!
I find it slightly disconcerting, as a subscriber to the print version of Wired Magazine, that a lot of the articles I pay to receive every month end up on their website for free and then are subsequently linked to Slashdot. Seems like there isn't much point in paying for the magazine when I can read most of the articles free of charge on their site. And online you don't have every other page being a block of advertisements like you do in the magazine...wow, the more I think about it the more worthless that subscription is. Good thing is was a gift :)