The consumer market always seemed to elude IBM. They should really get out of the desktop PC market altogether -- Craptivas were never really able to compete on cost or technical superiority, and liked to introduce bugs on top of the problems that already existed in Windows:
Rapid Resume ('nuff said)
The Mwave modem
The Mwave was more evil than any Winmodem, although I think it actually had dedicated hardware (it had a DOS config utility). Hmm, do you want a sound card, a modem, or both? Take your pick, then go back to the utility before you start a game or get on the Internet...
28.8 modem w/o sound
14.4 modem with 8 bit audio
no modem and 16 bit sound
IBM would do everyone a favor if they simply dropped the Craptiva line altogether. Radio Shack won't even sell the things anymore, and they peddled those crappy Tandy, then AST machines...
Radio Shack is the *only* game in town for computer supply in America's heartland. It's very simple out there -- among those with computers, the 'haves' own Compaqs, and the 'have nots' own IBMs. Radio Shack *used to* sell IBMs, now they sell Compaqs. It's as simple as that.
Why does our (residents of the U.S.) government still work on ideas based on the notion that information only travels as fast as the horse? I do use the term 'work' lightly...
It takes three hours for Congress to come to a vote on whether to let 'good old' Jesse Helms get out of his chair to take a crap (which would actually explain a few things if it were true), and about thirty years to decide whether to stop testing nuclear weapons.
I guess it's not enough to have enough nukes to destroy the world several times over -- we need to do more R&D with fresh new information, so even more can be leaked to the Chinese! Beneath the tense surface of Sino-American relations, there's a lot of butt kissing going on by U.S. politicians on both sides of the floor -- in another 100 years, China won't have to be quite as nice.
You can't moderate the truth, which this is unless you count the crack about Senator Helms...
This subject shouldn't be affecting me this strongly, but...
If anything, this proves that the poor status of duplicating traditional broadcast media on the unicast Internet is getting worse instead of better. While previous attempts simply ran out of bandwidth, this one can't even get a client stable enough to create the demand. Besides, the Internet isn't simply about changing the delivery method of traditional media, it's about changing the media itself -- most magazines have online content, but none of them simply reformat their page in HTML. It would take forever to download websites, and duplication issues would be regular problems.
The television folks should figure this out, too. Why is there such a push to go beyond the capabilities of new technology, when the existing delivery technology has been working for more than 40 years? If it were such a golden idea, ZDTV wouldn't exist.
Instead, they should be using the Internet as an extension of traditional programming. During a football game (since it is Sunday...), this would mean the delivery of detailed statistics and instant injury reports, instead of waiting for a break in the game. Instead of that annoying 'bloop' sound, relevant and fun facts about a video could be shown on VH1's website, and The Golf Channel could offer special package deals on trips to play at the same course where the tournament they're currently broadcasting is being played. This approach might even (ahem) make money!
Have any of these large scale 'webcasts' ever been successful, or is the concept simply a bandwidth sucking "Spam From Hell"? </RANT>
Yeah, that's totally fair to say, but I don't see streaming multimedia as a 'push' on the OS, and Robin never really specified exactly what was crashing. If it's the web browser (big surprise), it's not really the fault of the OS. Netscape for Linux is just as bad as Netscape for Windows.
So the thing that I'm really griping about is just the blanket dismissal of Windows due to a crash of unspecified scope. In Roblimo's mind, Windows isn't good enough for him, but it's perfectly fine for his wife to use it (ahem). Sensation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hjournalists like Mr. Miller *never* try to stir the pot in order to make their work more noticeable...
BTW: I visited Pixelon's site with an NT machine, and it worked just fine, as long as we're talking about stability -- on the other hand, it took approx. six times longer for me to download each sample clip than it did for me to play one on a 256k DSL connection. So with a dedicated T1, streaming VHS quality (at EP recording speed) video can be yours.
Every anti-MS (not necessarily Pro-SS) reader on/., had this mantra about their "trying time with Windows instability" as if they'd hopped up on a 15 foot unicycle and tried riding it for the first time. According to far too many of them, a Linux user can simply turn their head to look at a Windows screen, and it will BSOD. I use a Win98 machine at work. I regularly push it beyond its limits, and I know Win98 in general sucks rocks, but it takes about 60 hours of work time, or triple that if you count SETI@home time. If you'll notice, Roblimo is clearly pandering to those folks -- he didn't even specify what crashed. Could it have simply been the crappy plugin for Netscape, or maybe Netscape itself? Commercial Netscape sure isn't a shining example of well written code on any operating system, is it now? Aren't these webcast things just *lame*? I don't think unicast traffic for these things is ever going to work, even with regional mirror sites. I'd sooner pay $30 for something I really want to see on pay-per-view and actually be able to see it rather than try to watch it on the Internet. Do people just like the novelty, or do they consider "net congestion, buffering..." part of the wonderful Internet experience?
Long before there was a.com in everything, there was "What's Happening"... If a common phrase like that can claimed as a trademark at all, I want the trademark to "cool", so everyone would have to pay me royalties anytime they said "cool" and its derivatives, e.g. "awesome", "rad", "gnarly", or the much more lame (I hope they don't say it anymore) German version: "so geil".
Besides, Raj and Rerun were What's Happening long before this stupid "dot com" thing anyway...
I know a *little bit* about NT, but this guy knows nothing.
I never make an NT Emergency Repair Disk. Why? They don't work. About the only thing that can really be done with them is preserve elements like the system's security ID that can't be recreated if you were to just reinstall. It doesn't save your configuration -- all it will say is that the system cannot be repaired with that disk...
This guy also is confusing NT Administrator with UN*X root. NT can have multiple, fully privileged users, and the first two things you should do when starting NT for the first time are to rename the Administrator account to something else, then create *personal* administrator accounts -- when a few people share a password, it becomes a dozen people. If you give several people root, a lost root password is no problem.
Service Packs are saviors. When peculiar things start happening with NT, a Service Pack is almost always the answer. If something isn't working right in the first place, where's the harm in doing something that *might* ruin it, or more likely will fix it? If this is a production server, you *do* make backups, don't you?
This lamebrain really needs to get information from sources other than his parent company. Sheesh, Ars Technica has much more informative articles on NT...
Each NT system not only has a a unique computer name, it also has a SID (Security ID), which is generated in much the same way as a GUID. If the network has several systems that share the same security ID, there are problems, and *that's* why it's unsupported.
Systems Internals has had an app that allows you set up a new ID for a long time. Take a look at it here.
At first, I thought the moderators were all smoking crack again, but I see that they probably ran out of moderation points... Why is it that the subject of 3D graphics cards seems to bring out such obnoxious folk?
Frankly, I'm just not interested in these new components. Is an extra $100 enough to justify a 5% increase in performance, and if so, how many generations should be skipped after that before upgrading? Nvidia is talking about a 6 month schedule (though nine months to a year seems more realistic).
At the rate things are going, graphics cards will soon be the most expensive component in every system, even with RAM at its current prices. I'm also willing to bet that NetBSD will be ported to exclusively use the GPU, bypassing most components altogether, before the product is even released...
For me at least, I can't justify the costs of upgrading my system every six months just so I can play the newest rehash of a ten year old game. It doesn't impress me that the *new* version gives you more control, gore, levels, and/or 3D graphics -- I liked the *old* game just fine.
The CPU or component speed haven't been the bottleneck in games for a long, long time. The imagination of game developers has been occupied with utilizing the hardware acceleration buzzword of the moment, not with developing new groundbreaking ideas...
If the technology even gets as far as a final product, I'm still wondering several things:
Will this only work with X number of email clients among the Y number that exist, with Y > 2000?
If not, how many OSes would be supported via external viewer?
Why bother with this when it will take very little time to either:
Crack the encryption?
Crack the viewer application?
Why stop at encrypting and securing text messages? If 'expiration dates' could be put on files, old files that are no longer relevant/correct would have to be updated or deleted.
If you are looking for anonymous, self-destructing messages, why not implement something in Java, and simply point to a URL, e.g.: http://www.mail.foo/cgi/destruct.cgi?1003383 The applet would read the QUERY_STRING, decode the intended file, then let the server know when the file was opened and when it could be deleted. Additionally, this would allow the composer to dictate the number of times the file may be shown.
Despite these ideas, nobody is going to be able to get past a screen capture. I'm not at all interested in the technology, and I don't think it will catch on in the rest of the world, either -- it's a fantastic idea, but I just don't see it being practical or secure.
I saw this comment in M2, and thought I might reply even if nobody sees it.
Try -- works for me, but you gotta use <TT> instead, plus use the <BR> tag at the end of each line. <PRE> doesn't automatically wrap, which means you could arbitrarily set the page width by not using a linebreak. <TT> does pretty much the same thing, except it allows the text to automatically wrap, and you have to use <BR> to force line breaks.
I've done this before, and we'll see if I have it right... (Preview ruins any control characters you type in the browser, so that < reverts back to < when you're ready to submit, at least in my browser (Windows IE5 at the moment). BANANA P P L E
Then again, I could preview, hit the BACK button when it's OK, then SUBMIT. Guess it just goes to show TMTOWTDI... --
I know it sounds bad to say this, but if the party that doesn't own the name really, really, wants it, they should start talking money, not court.
The U.S. legal system heavily favors the wealthy -- it doesn't matter if you're wrong or right. You could be dragged through different court for years even if the complaint is halfassed at best. Most individuals don't have the time and financial resources to put up with this crap and eventually give in. Microsoft has killed companies doing this, but it's all legal under U.S. law. God bless america...
I wrote a script for a web interface to WHOIS, and while I was testing it, I found that none of the rational names I had ever considered were avaialable, and even among the nonsensical ones, I could only find one (CCCCCCC.COM, or "Seven C's") that was available.
A prime example of the test works like this: Concatenate any one letter, then a number from 1 to 99. Chances are, the domain is taken. I won't say none are available because I haven't tested them all, but I didn't find a single one while I was playing with it. I had to go back and add some code to strip unusable characters, then I would just pound about ten keystrokes into the text box.
Three and four letter domains, even nondictionary ones, are pretty much gone. I pulled up these examples: GNZT.COM RTWQ.COM VGFM.COM TEYU.COM JRGT.COM
We need new TLD's -- in fact, wasn't there supposed to be a umber of them in place two years ago? I remember *.NOM, *.FIRM, *.WEB, and mayber more, I think. For some reason, Bill Clinton keeps holding this up for one reason or another on his Internet "agenda"...
okay, I forgot that doesn't work with plain text
on
700 MHz Athlon
·
· Score: 1
if ((post.score() != 1) && (post.score() 4)) { post.read() }
Nope, the beowulf and first post things aren't going away -- let's lighten up a bit. If you don't like stupid comments, you can filter out most of the stale ones, and that takes care of most of the "problem".
Frankly, the long winded "informative/interesting/insightful" posts make me weary eyed most of the time. In my book, flames and trolls are much more interesting, especially the grains of truth that they sometimes work from.
Besides, it's Rob's fault for not including a "bad-attitude" option in the recent moderation roundup anyway -- lots of the flames and trolls wouldn't be anonymous if there was room made for them to be disagreeable and contrary without shame. --
You're the first person in St. Paul I've met in any capacity that has been happy with MediaOne hybrid access. 33.6 upload speed is absolutely pathetic, and the fact that it requires a phone line to work doesn't help either. People can complain about @Home's upload throttling, but they're not getting a bad deal, especially for the money they pay. It's definitely better than analog!
They might have fixed it somewhere in the TC Metro, but nowhere that I've heard about... --
I've written this a million times (OK, only three of those were on Slashdot) but I'll keep doing it until Netscape gets it right, which stopped happening sometime in the 3.x generation.
Open the Internet control panel, go to Security.
1) (Optional) Change the security level of "Trusted Sites" to the default, which is medium security.
2) Add the site you want to accept cookies from to the "Trusted Sites".
Face it, Netscape stinks compared to IE in all but maybe two features, which I couldn't even name. I s'pose Netscape's browser only makes (loses?) money by those stupid popups, while MS makes money from the cost of Windows. Congratulations to JWZ for both mentioning that Communicator stinks, and for leaving the project altogether.
You might think this is a flame/troll/whatever, but face it, netscape does kinda suck, and I've got some backing on that notion above -- I feel kind of cranky since I'm out of cigarettes, too... My $0.02 --
Printers are completely overused; electronic documents have a number of advantages over paper for most computing circumstances. Intranets save time, space, and money, while keeping your data more secure. In the workplace, paper adds up to a lot of money.
Convenience The act of pulling up a web browser and navigating through a series of links is much more convenient than sifting through a file cabinet, or going to the coffee machine, then down the hall to wait for your 20 page document to come out of the print queue, or a little less time if you want a crummy looking photocopied version. Should there be a change to be made, you just open a file, make the changes, and save it (dare I say that Office 97 made this *extremely* easy?).
Cost Efficient Startup costs for a sufficient Linux intranet server (e.g. Cobalt Qube) with 6GB of storage space will cost ~$1500. At a generous 200k per page (with graphics), that holds 30,000,000 pages of information. You can't steal enough file cabinets to hold that many pages for less than $1500, then tack on the cost of printing!
Space Saving Over the long term, file cabinets take up room for at least one desk, while you may never see that Cobalt Qube again until you move! Whether your office space is expensive or not, you've saved some money by not wasting floor space for dozens of file cabinets.
Security Any server OS, including NT, is much more secure than lock and key, though you can do this additionally. If there's a fire that destroys your building, a recent offsite backup (you do keep important info in multiple locations, right?) can get you back into the swing of things. I don't think it's quite as easy to update thousands of pages in offsite archive than it is to send a CD-R or tape of a recent backup to your bank's safe deposit box.
A basic intranet handles virtually all the necessary print work of most businesses -- when you need hard copy for proof reasons (though I'd argue that most of this is software-generated and editable anyway), go ahead and print. PDF's look terrible onscreen, and the Adobe reader sucks, so I can accept printed Acrobat files, as well. As far as taking printing stuff for the bathroom, if you're gonna be in there that long, you should probably apply some vegetable fiber to your diet, not to paper... --
This isn't offtopic - Rob himself makes mention of waiting for his CD (presumably from CDNow, since some of us are supporting his "Who habit"). Oops, I guess that makes this something of a rip on a/. sponsor. I didn't start it, tho'... --
I used to like CDNow, but now I don't feel that way. According to their Toshiba DVD Player offer, you're supposed to get the player at the same price Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. charge, plus a $50 gift certificate, *almost* enough points for a free CD if you're enrolled in their rewards program, plus about six movies, none of which I care for -- still, it's a good deal, and ultimately a better deal to the tune of ~$100.
That was two weeks ago, and I chose overnight shipping -- they haven't sent it yet. It took them two days to even acknowledge my order, then another two for them to tell me that the item was backordered... Hmm, that's a little strange, because when I visit the website and add it to my cart, it's shown as being: "In Stock Shipping Ctr A".
I understand that they can't ship something if they don't really have it, but they *can* at least correct the information on their website, which I have pointed out via phone and several emails.
Sun likes to mention that they "dot-commed" CDNow -- did CDNow forget to put the *thought* in "dot-com", or have I been "dot-conned"? --
Slashdot Mirror
(my apologies to The Register staff for 'deep linking'...)
The consumer market always seemed to elude IBM. They should really get out of the desktop PC market altogether -- Craptivas were never really able to compete on cost or technical superiority, and liked to introduce bugs on top of the problems that already existed in Windows:
The Mwave was more evil than any Winmodem, although I think it actually had dedicated hardware (it had a DOS config utility). Hmm, do you want a sound card, a modem, or both? Take your pick, then go back to the utility before you start a game or get on the Internet...
IBM would do everyone a favor if they simply dropped the Craptiva line altogether. Radio Shack won't even sell the things anymore, and they peddled those crappy Tandy, then AST machines...
Radio Shack is the *only* game in town for computer supply in America's heartland. It's very simple out there -- among those with computers, the 'haves' own Compaqs, and the 'have nots' own IBMs. Radio Shack *used to* sell IBMs, now they sell Compaqs. It's as simple as that.
Why does our (residents of the U.S.) government still work on ideas based on the notion that information only travels as fast as the horse? I do use the term 'work' lightly...
It takes three hours for Congress to come to a vote on whether to let 'good old' Jesse Helms get out of his chair to take a crap (which would actually explain a few things if it were true), and about thirty years to decide whether to stop testing nuclear weapons.
I guess it's not enough to have enough nukes to destroy the world several times over -- we need to do more R&D with fresh new information, so even more can be leaked to the Chinese! Beneath the tense surface of Sino-American relations, there's a lot of butt kissing going on by U.S. politicians on both sides of the floor -- in another 100 years, China won't have to be quite as nice.
You can't moderate the truth, which this is unless you count the crack about Senator Helms...
This subject shouldn't be affecting me this strongly, but...
If anything, this proves that the poor status of duplicating traditional broadcast media on the unicast Internet is getting worse instead of better. While previous attempts simply ran out of bandwidth, this one can't even get a client stable enough to create the demand. Besides, the Internet isn't simply about changing the delivery method of traditional media, it's about changing the media itself -- most magazines have online content, but none of them simply reformat their page in HTML. It would take forever to download websites, and duplication issues would be regular problems.
The television folks should figure this out, too. Why is there such a push to go beyond the capabilities of new technology, when the existing delivery technology has been working for more than 40 years? If it were such a golden idea, ZDTV wouldn't exist.
Instead, they should be using the Internet as an extension of traditional programming. During a football game (since it is Sunday...), this would mean the delivery of detailed statistics and instant injury reports, instead of waiting for a break in the game. Instead of that annoying 'bloop' sound, relevant and fun facts about a video could be shown on VH1's website, and The Golf Channel could offer special package deals on trips to play at the same course where the tournament they're currently broadcasting is being played. This approach might even (ahem) make money!
Have any of these large scale 'webcasts' ever been successful, or is the concept simply a bandwidth sucking "Spam From Hell"?
</RANT>
Yeah, that's totally fair to say, but I don't see streaming multimedia as a 'push' on the OS, and Robin never really specified exactly what was crashing. If it's the web browser (big surprise), it's not really the fault of the OS. Netscape for Linux is just as bad as Netscape for Windows.
So the thing that I'm really griping about is just the blanket dismissal of Windows due to a crash of unspecified scope. In Roblimo's mind, Windows isn't good enough for him, but it's perfectly fine for his wife to use it (ahem). Sensation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hjournalists like Mr. Miller *never* try to stir the pot in order to make their work more noticeable...
BTW:
I visited Pixelon's site with an NT machine, and it worked just fine, as long as we're talking about stability -- on the other hand, it took approx. six times longer for me to download each sample clip than it did for me to play one on a 256k DSL connection. So with a dedicated T1, streaming VHS quality (at EP recording speed) video can be yours.
Every anti-MS (not necessarily Pro-SS) reader on /., had this mantra about their "trying time with Windows instability" as if they'd hopped up on a 15 foot unicycle and tried riding it for the first time. According to far too many of them, a Linux user can simply turn their head to look at a Windows screen, and it will BSOD. I use a Win98 machine at work. I regularly push it beyond its limits, and I know Win98 in general sucks rocks, but it takes about 60 hours of work time, or triple that if you count SETI@home time. If you'll notice, Roblimo is clearly pandering to those folks -- he didn't even specify what crashed. Could it have simply been the crappy plugin for Netscape, or maybe Netscape itself? Commercial Netscape sure isn't a shining example of well written code on any operating system, is it now? Aren't these webcast things just *lame*? I don't think unicast traffic for these things is ever going to work, even with regional mirror sites. I'd sooner pay $30 for something I really want to see on pay-per-view and actually be able to see it rather than try to watch it on the Internet. Do people just like the novelty, or do they consider "net congestion, buffering..." part of the wonderful Internet experience?
" from the coopertion-not-competition dept "
Coopertion sure isn't competition, but it ain't cooperation , either...
from the tyop-not-typo dept...
Long before there was a .com in everything, there was "What's Happening"... If a common phrase like that can claimed as a trademark at all, I want the trademark to "cool", so everyone would have to pay me royalties anytime they said "cool" and its derivatives, e.g. "awesome", "rad", "gnarly", or the much more lame (I hope they don't say it anymore) German version: "so geil".
Besides, Raj and Rerun were What's Happening long before this stupid "dot com" thing anyway...
I know a *little bit* about NT, but this guy knows nothing.
I never make an NT Emergency Repair Disk. Why? They don't work. About the only thing that can really be done with them is preserve elements like the system's security ID that can't be recreated if you were to just reinstall. It doesn't save your configuration -- all it will say is that the system cannot be repaired with that disk...
This guy also is confusing NT Administrator with UN*X root. NT can have multiple, fully privileged users, and the first two things you should do when starting NT for the first time are to rename the Administrator account to something else, then create *personal* administrator accounts -- when a few people share a password, it becomes a dozen people. If you give several people root, a lost root password is no problem.
Service Packs are saviors. When peculiar things start happening with NT, a Service Pack is almost always the answer. If something isn't working right in the first place, where's the harm in doing something that *might* ruin it, or more likely will fix it? If this is a production server, you *do* make backups, don't you?
This lamebrain really needs to get information from sources other than his parent company. Sheesh, Ars Technica has much more informative articles on NT...
Each NT system not only has a a unique computer name, it also has a SID (Security ID), which is generated in much the same way as a GUID. If the network has several systems that share the same security ID, there are problems, and *that's* why it's unsupported.
Systems Internals has had an app that allows you set up a new ID for a long time. Take a look at it here.
Hostess cupcakes and frozen pizza really couldn't be much farther away from food...
At first, I thought the moderators were all smoking crack again, but I see that they probably ran out of moderation points... Why is it that the subject of 3D graphics cards seems to bring out such obnoxious folk?
:)
Frankly, I'm just not interested in these new components. Is an extra $100 enough to justify a 5% increase in performance, and if so, how many generations should be skipped after that before upgrading? Nvidia is talking about a 6 month schedule (though nine months to a year seems more realistic).
At the rate things are going, graphics cards will soon be the most expensive component in every system, even with RAM at its current prices. I'm also willing to bet that NetBSD will be ported to exclusively use the GPU, bypassing most components altogether, before the product is even released...
For me at least, I can't justify the costs of upgrading my system every six months just so I can play the newest rehash of a ten year old game. It doesn't impress me that the *new* version gives you more control, gore, levels, and/or 3D graphics -- I liked the *old* game just fine.
The CPU or component speed haven't been the bottleneck in games for a long, long time. The imagination of game developers has been occupied with utilizing the hardware acceleration buzzword of the moment, not with developing new groundbreaking ideas...
My US$0.01 (lousy Canadian pennies
Why stop at encrypting and securing text messages? If 'expiration dates' could be put on files, old files that are no longer relevant/correct would have to be updated or deleted.
If you are looking for anonymous, self-destructing messages, why not implement something in Java, and simply point to a URL, e.g.:
http://www.mail.foo/cgi/destruct.cgi?1003383
The applet would read the QUERY_STRING, decode the intended file, then let the server know when the file was opened and when it could be deleted. Additionally, this would allow the composer to dictate the number of times the file may be shown.
Despite these ideas, nobody is going to be able to get past a screen capture. I'm not at all interested in the technology, and I don't think it will catch on in the rest of the world, either -- it's a fantastic idea, but I just don't see it being practical or secure.
I saw this comment in M2, and thought I might reply even if nobody sees it.
Try -- works for me, but you gotta use <TT> instead, plus use the <BR> tag at the end of each line. <PRE> doesn't automatically wrap, which means you could arbitrarily set the page width by not using a linebreak. <TT> does pretty much the same thing, except it allows the text to automatically wrap, and you have to use <BR> to force line breaks.
I've done this before, and we'll see if I have it right... (Preview ruins any control characters you type in the browser, so that < reverts back to < when you're ready to submit, at least in my browser (Windows IE5 at the moment).
BANANA
P
P
L
E
Then again, I could preview, hit the BACK button when it's OK, then SUBMIT. Guess it just goes to show TMTOWTDI...
--
I know it sounds bad to say this, but if the party that doesn't own the name really, really, wants it, they should start talking money, not court.
The U.S. legal system heavily favors the wealthy -- it doesn't matter if you're wrong or right. You could be dragged through different court for years even if the complaint is halfassed at best. Most individuals don't have the time and financial resources to put up with this crap and eventually give in. Microsoft has killed companies doing this, but it's all legal under U.S. law. God bless america...
I wrote a script for a web interface to WHOIS, and while I was testing it, I found that none of the rational names I had ever considered were avaialable, and even among the nonsensical ones, I could only find one (CCCCCCC.COM, or "Seven C's") that was available.
A prime example of the test works like this: Concatenate any one letter, then a number from 1 to 99. Chances are, the domain is taken. I won't say none are available because I haven't tested them all, but I didn't find a single one while I was playing with it. I had to go back and add some code to strip unusable characters, then I would just pound about ten keystrokes into the text box.
Three and four letter domains, even nondictionary ones, are pretty much gone. I pulled up these examples:
GNZT.COM
RTWQ.COM
VGFM.COM
TEYU.COM
JRGT.COM
We need new TLD's -- in fact, wasn't there supposed to be a umber of them in place two years ago? I remember *.NOM, *.FIRM, *.WEB, and mayber more, I think. For some reason, Bill Clinton keeps holding this up for one reason or another on his Internet "agenda"...
if ((post.score() != 1) && (post.score() < 4)) { post.read() }
--
if ((post.score() != 1) && (post.score() 4)) { post.read() }
--
if ((post.score() != 1) && (post.score() 4)) { post.read() }
Nope, the beowulf and first post things aren't going away -- let's lighten up a bit. If you don't like stupid comments, you can filter out most of the stale ones, and that takes care of most of the "problem".
Frankly, the long winded "informative/interesting/insightful" posts make me weary eyed most of the time. In my book, flames and trolls are much more interesting, especially the grains of truth that they sometimes work from.
Besides, it's Rob's fault for not including a "bad-attitude" option in the recent moderation roundup anyway -- lots of the flames and trolls wouldn't be anonymous if there was room made for them to be disagreeable and contrary without shame.
--
Mindcraft ran some bechmarks and concluded that NT is faster than NT, too...
--
You're the first person in St. Paul I've met in any capacity that has been happy with MediaOne hybrid access. 33.6 upload speed is absolutely pathetic, and the fact that it requires a phone line to work doesn't help either. People can complain about @Home's upload throttling, but they're not getting a bad deal, especially for the money they pay. It's definitely better than analog!
They might have fixed it somewhere in the TC Metro, but nowhere that I've heard about...
--
I've written this a million times (OK, only three of those were on Slashdot) but I'll keep doing it until Netscape gets it right, which stopped happening sometime in the 3.x generation.
Open the Internet control panel, go to Security.
1) (Optional) Change the security level of
"Trusted Sites" to the default, which is
medium security.
2) Add the site you want to accept cookies
from to the "Trusted Sites".
Face it, Netscape stinks compared to IE in all but maybe two features, which I couldn't even name. I s'pose Netscape's browser only makes (loses?) money by those stupid popups, while MS makes money from the cost of Windows. Congratulations to JWZ for both mentioning that Communicator stinks, and for leaving the project altogether.
You might think this is a flame/troll/whatever, but face it, netscape does kinda suck, and I've got some backing on that notion above -- I feel kind of cranky since I'm out of cigarettes, too...
My $0.02
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Printers are completely overused; electronic documents have a number of advantages over paper for most computing circumstances. Intranets save time, space, and money, while keeping your data more secure. In the workplace, paper adds up to a lot of money.
Convenience
The act of pulling up a web browser and navigating through a series of links is much more convenient than sifting through a file cabinet, or going to the coffee machine, then down the hall to wait for your 20 page document to come out of the print queue, or a little less time if you want a crummy looking photocopied version. Should there be a change to be made, you just open a file, make the changes, and save it (dare I say that Office 97 made this *extremely* easy?).
Cost Efficient
Startup costs for a sufficient Linux intranet server (e.g. Cobalt Qube) with 6GB of storage space will cost ~$1500. At a generous 200k per page (with graphics), that holds 30,000,000 pages of information. You can't steal enough file cabinets to hold that many pages for less than $1500, then tack on the cost of printing!
Space Saving
Over the long term, file cabinets take up room for at least one desk, while you may never see that Cobalt Qube again until you move! Whether your office space is expensive or not, you've saved some money by not wasting floor space for dozens of file cabinets.
Security
Any server OS, including NT, is much more secure than lock and key, though you can do this additionally. If there's a fire that destroys your building, a recent offsite backup (you do keep important info in multiple locations, right?) can get you back into the swing of things. I don't think it's quite as easy to update thousands of pages in offsite archive than it is to send a CD-R or tape of a recent backup to your bank's safe deposit box.
A basic intranet handles virtually all the necessary print work of most businesses -- when you need hard copy for proof reasons (though I'd argue that most of this is software-generated and editable anyway), go ahead and print. PDF's look terrible onscreen, and the Adobe reader sucks, so I can accept printed Acrobat files, as well. As far as taking printing stuff for the bathroom, if you're gonna be in there that long, you should probably apply some vegetable fiber to your diet, not to paper...
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This isn't offtopic - Rob himself makes mention of waiting for his CD (presumably from CDNow, since some of us are supporting his "Who habit"). Oops, I guess that makes this something of a rip on a /. sponsor. I didn't start it, tho'...
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I used to like CDNow, but now I don't feel that way. According to their Toshiba DVD Player offer, you're supposed to get the player at the same price Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. charge, plus a $50 gift certificate, *almost* enough points for a free CD if you're enrolled in their rewards program, plus about six movies, none of which I care for -- still, it's a good deal, and ultimately a better deal to the tune of ~$100.
That was two weeks ago, and I chose overnight shipping -- they haven't sent it yet. It took them two days to even acknowledge my order, then another two for them to tell me that the item was backordered... Hmm, that's a little strange, because when I visit the website and add it to my cart, it's shown as being: "In Stock Shipping Ctr A".
I understand that they can't ship something if they don't really have it, but they *can* at least correct the information on their website, which I have pointed out via phone and several emails.
Sun likes to mention that they "dot-commed" CDNow -- did CDNow forget to put the *thought* in "dot-com", or have I been "dot-conned"?
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