...one wonders about security. I used to have a friend who listened in on local cordless phone calls years ago. How long till there's an exploit and people start getting their lines listened in on? Also, with this, forget about calling the home phone and trusting that because your kid answers it that they are actually at home. "Sure mom. No, I'm no three towns over at the park with my friends. I'm doing homework in my room." If it works, fabulous. I just have minor nitpicking concerns about it.
...they'll make a really crappy movie out of a sort-of-crappy video game and... oh yeah. Wing Commander.
And with that went any idea I ever had for any adaptation of Larry Niven's Kzinti works. It would either look like that or some furry fan's fantasy. Either way, a total clusterfark.
I am of course fearing the worst with the Narnia project.
Litmus test: if you can't translate something as simple as a video game or anime into a live action motion picture that doesn't suck like a Dyson, then you have no business taking on cherished SF or Fantasy classics. Think of it as learning to crawl before you do the Boston Marathon.
Of course, since everything not forbidden is compulsory, adaptations of Anthony's Xanth must be coming soon. Thank G-d that some corners are humongous. Ringworld is supposed to be right around one. For the last five years or so.
Am I the only one who wishes they could get tickets to a Vogon Poetry jam?
...with those Atari games that can now be contained completely within the base of the thing. Now we turn an expensive laptop into a joystick. And I thought it was expensive to get a broken Gravis joystick replaced.
Somewhere in the future as AI/Expert software spreads, "Will you stop freaking shaking me like that and get a gyro mouse already?! I'm getting nauseous and feel like I need to take a hex dump. I think I'm going to reformat..."
And as with the mouse, will have half as many buttons as you expect a phone to have. Steve Jobs will call it insanely great. Logitech, et al, will provide a version with twice as many buttons as you expect. It will be met with deafening silence by Apple.
The very concept that the iPod still has wires all about it is kind of funny though. OTOH, maybe Apple is worried about people sharing iPods with Bluetooth? Somewhat silly thought but not beyond anything else.
...of why software and other ephemeral patents are a bad idea and should only ever be granted with a much more jaundiced eye than anything like a new kind of machine. I agree with adding Amazon to the dead loopback section of the hosts file. More and more and more we need patent reform.
...this almost turned into a PKB dog-eats-its-own-tail spiral of argument between who is more arrogant in their presumption of intelligence, Mensa or Slashdot geeks.
Meanwhile, yet another system administrator and proud Slashdot reader calls me at work to say that "his Internet" is "slow and broken" and then asks, "don't the routers have batteries? I unplugged my router and it stopped working." This followed by, "it must be a Windows problem. I knew we should have used Red Hat." (paraphrased composite of no less then seventeen such calls in the space of two months alone)
should we even care given that Major League Baseball is so closed-source? I mean, have you ever listened to their disclaimers? You'd swear Canseco himself would come beat you into a frothy pulp if you disseminated one iota of MLB information. I'd rather pay attention to the pick-up games of local softball which are FOSB (Free Open Source Baseball) and as such have no restrictions on anything.
(Tongue planted firmly in cheek, here's the pitch...)
They DO hide quantum physics texts from the public. They put them in mysterious repositories called libraries which most people are afraid to enter because they contain information and other stuff that makes their heads hurt.
Pe op le wi th a l ar ge pen is sho uld ha ve mas s iv e, frequ ent, la rge typ os d ue to ina dver tant ap pe nda ge intr usi on on the ke yb oard you wou ld th ink. No te t hat 99.9 99% of pen is spa m is ho rri bl y ful l of typo s. There fore, a ll pe nis spa m is r ea l. Go fo r the si ze in cre ase!
...that all these botnets themselves seem to compromised that journalists and researchers can so easily get into them. If you're going to compromise other people's computers for whatever nefarious use, do you want your system itself wide open for someone to steal away from you or document your doings for law enforcement? The best back doors and holes are ones that no one sees until you're using them and it is too late.
...has had jump-up icon things like this called "zoomers" for a long while with Object Desktop on Windows. I've used them and if Apple orders them to stop making them availible, you can bet they're going to be torrented. I think it is time for massive rabid peaceful noncompliance via P2P with Apple and other corporations who continue to abuse the word "intellectual" in the phrase "intellectual property" never mind the IP laws.
...the site they need it to work with is Vincent Flander's old webpagesthatsuck.com pages. We don't need more standards compliance from browsers, we need more standards compliance from web coders, the group which actually generates more WTF? responses than all the app coders at MS. Are legibility, ease of use, lack of eye strain, sensible intuitive layout, grammar, and spelling that much to ask for? If so, let's just turn over all web design by law to people who've never visisted the Internet by anything but AOL.
Java powered buttons that jump and prevent you from clicking them, flashing backgrounds, swirling letters flying all over, embedded music forcing you to yank the freaking speakers off the machine... That's where compatibility is at right now.
...doesn't grasp that once you buy the machine, it is yours to use as a doorstop, calculator, whatever you want to do with it that doesn't involve something patently illegal. Anyone think that Mitsubishi should be able to stop people from "modding" their cars?
This would be like Apple trying to stop people from modifying their Mac to work with third party unapproved stuff... (hmmm...) Okay, bad example.
But we would see holy hell raised over this were a motherboard manufacturer to tell you that you were forbidden to do anything with it that they didn't want you to. Or Microsoft try to tell you that you were forbidden from writing any code they didn't want running on Windows. Etc.
BTW, you Aussies have my apologies for ever being exposed to what Americans call beer.
No SCO? I think I feel cheated of the full deck-is-stacked experience.
If the fork rejoins in an arc, shouldn't it then be a spoon?
If it cuts clear and the line ends and the fork becomes the line, shouldn't it then be a knife?
And what's so bad about forks? Is it as though Microsoft hasn't forked up everything already? Every patch and pack might as well be a new kernel for all the incompatibilities between one state and another.
Nope, there's no such thing as scalable *nix. Nope. None whatsoever. Just ask IBM. Or... maybe not. Sun? No, wrong people to ask about scalable *nix. Oh, just Linux is not scalable... Maybe it's just that Linux is not totally in their hands where they can control every aspect and thus every dime you get charged for the support contracts? No, it couldn't be that.
...a band of BSD zealots attempted to one up the Linux crowd by porting it to the Apple IIgs. Not to be outdone, Red Hat announced it was officially supporting Linux on the Commodore 64. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced it was dropping support for anything but Intel and compatible chipsets running at 2.5 terrahertz or better and making the minimum memory for the newest version of Windows 4096 gigabytes.
...wasn't the standard supposed to be that intellectual property owners were supposed to protect their own property? Has anyone noticed that from Sheryl Crow to Kiss to whoever, no one needs to follow that standard anymore? They can allow the RIAA to do it for them. Ditto for the movie industry with the MPAA. Ditto for the European organizations.
The courts here in the US, AND in Europe and everywhere else need to require these third parties to get the active participation of the property owners on an ongoing basis for each case, or butt the heck out. It is wrong for catchall organizations to do all the enforcement as they increase towards near governmental police powers on behalf of individuals and companies versus other individuals and companies, giving them an unfair advantage where the accused is more and more guaranteed to be stomped without a reasonable chance of defense.
It's a good thing to point out that a couple centuries ago, these people would have been summarily executed as soon as captured. I'd say the fortune of unattached guerilla fighters who don't comply with the above mentioned article and section has actually improved somewhat.
...there's an idea out there that despite NASA having sent a small load of astronauts repeatedly to orbit and the moon and back in the sixties and early seventies with the current technology of the day, that somehow, we haven't advanced technologically enough in over thirty years to even manage to do as much as they did back then.
O.o
Does anyone else see that as completely cuckoo?
We can go to the moon right now. We can set up bases there right now. We can do space stations and space colonies right now. We merely don't seem to have the stones we used to.
When I was a kid we played with BB guns, kids taking knives to school and fighting hard behind the gym was a fact of life, we had no use for seatbelts, airbags didn't exist, we had lead paint all over the place, unbalanced diets, heavily sugared sodas, massively caffeinated coffees, and our cars s*cked on gas milage. We also walked to school instead of took the bus if we were closer than two miles away, our parents let us drink beer at home on special occaisions without fearing the foreign substance secret police, and we got to do archery at summer camp AND school gym class with real sharp arrows.
Welcome to the Wuss Age. We might as well let all the decisions be made by the lawyers and insurance adjusters and nanny state wackos now.
Why do I get the feeling the only way to get seriously needed scientific instruments aloft in the future will be to simply take them to China and Russia for launch?
...them to keep having systems that play as well as the Gamecube. My favorites, and you can withhold your laughter, are the Totally Odd Parents games from THQ. Running with one free moving stick and using another to kick the camera pov around is wonderful for 3D. As long as they don't mess with a good thing, I'm fine.
Wireless? Not sure when I'd get to using it, but it makes it easier than laying in CAT5 to the tv area and less expensive than buying another hub or switch to put in there if I've already run it.
I mean, how much does it take to just guess that some of these programs might be loaded with gunk code that doesn't belong on your machine?
eMule runs fine, finds most anything I bother to look for, and doesn't come with crud. Between that and minor torrent useage, who needs Kazaa of any kind?
W/regard to the RIAA and company, how long until they come up with a P2P sharing program put out through a front company to engage in a sting? Tinfoil hat maybe, but as stupid as they are, sheer statistics alone suggest they will eventually hire someone with more than the two brain cells otherwise required to be at the RIAA/MPAA.
Slashdot Mirror
...one wonders about security. I used to have a friend who listened in on local cordless phone calls years ago. How long till there's an exploit and people start getting their lines listened in on? Also, with this, forget about calling the home phone and trusting that because your kid answers it that they are actually at home. "Sure mom. No, I'm no three towns over at the park with my friends. I'm doing homework in my room." If it works, fabulous. I just have minor nitpicking concerns about it.
...they'll make a really crappy movie out of a sort-of-crappy video game and... oh yeah. Wing Commander.
And with that went any idea I ever had for any adaptation of Larry Niven's Kzinti works. It would either look like that or some furry fan's fantasy. Either way, a total clusterfark.
I am of course fearing the worst with the Narnia project.
Litmus test: if you can't translate something as simple as a video game or anime into a live action motion picture that doesn't suck like a Dyson, then you have no business taking on cherished SF or Fantasy classics. Think of it as learning to crawl before you do the Boston Marathon.
Of course, since everything not forbidden is compulsory, adaptations of Anthony's Xanth must be coming soon. Thank G-d that some corners are humongous. Ringworld is supposed to be right around one. For the last five years or so.
Am I the only one who wishes they could get tickets to a Vogon Poetry jam?
...with those Atari games that can now be contained completely within the base of the thing. Now we turn an expensive laptop into a joystick. And I thought it was expensive to get a broken Gravis joystick replaced.
Somewhere in the future as AI/Expert software spreads, "Will you stop freaking shaking me like that and get a gyro mouse already?! I'm getting nauseous and feel like I need to take a hex dump. I think I'm going to reformat..."
And as with the mouse, will have half as many buttons as you expect a phone to have. Steve Jobs will call it insanely great. Logitech, et al, will provide a version with twice as many buttons as you expect. It will be met with deafening silence by Apple.
The very concept that the iPod still has wires all about it is kind of funny though. OTOH, maybe Apple is worried about people sharing iPods with Bluetooth? Somewhat silly thought but not beyond anything else.
...of why software and other ephemeral patents are a bad idea and should only ever be granted with a much more jaundiced eye than anything like a new kind of machine. I agree with adding Amazon to the dead loopback section of the hosts file. More and more and more we need patent reform.
...this almost turned into a PKB dog-eats-its-own-tail spiral of argument between who is more arrogant in their presumption of intelligence, Mensa or Slashdot geeks.
Meanwhile, yet another system administrator and proud Slashdot reader calls me at work to say that "his Internet" is "slow and broken" and then asks, "don't the routers have batteries? I unplugged my router and it stopped working." This followed by, "it must be a Windows problem. I knew we should have used Red Hat." (paraphrased composite of no less then seventeen such calls in the space of two months alone)
What, are you mad?! You should go watch reruns of Hanging In and be glad you unpatriotic fool!
(If Canadian content is so bad, why do we Americans import so much of it and... oh, answered my own question. Never mind.)
should we even care given that Major League Baseball is so closed-source? I mean, have you ever listened to their disclaimers? You'd swear Canseco himself would come beat you into a frothy pulp if you disseminated one iota of MLB information. I'd rather pay attention to the pick-up games of local softball which are FOSB (Free Open Source Baseball) and as such have no restrictions on anything.
(Tongue planted firmly in cheek, here's the pitch...)
They DO hide quantum physics texts from the public. They put them in mysterious repositories called libraries which most people are afraid to enter because they contain information and other stuff that makes their heads hurt.
Pe op le wi th a l ar ge pen is sho uld ha ve mas s iv e, frequ ent, la rge typ os d ue to ina dver tant ap pe nda ge intr usi on on the ke yb oard you wou ld th ink. No te t hat 99.9 99% of pen is spa m is ho rri bl y ful l of typo s. There fore, a ll pe nis spa m is r ea l. Go fo r the si ze in cre ase!
...that all these botnets themselves seem to compromised that journalists and researchers can so easily get into them. If you're going to compromise other people's computers for whatever nefarious use, do you want your system itself wide open for someone to steal away from you or document your doings for law enforcement? The best back doors and holes are ones that no one sees until you're using them and it is too late.
...CFS: Cascade Failure Sheets. These are CSS which cause IE to crash taking Explorer with it followed by kernel32 and then your sanity...
...has had jump-up icon things like this called "zoomers" for a long while with Object Desktop on Windows. I've used them and if Apple orders them to stop making them availible, you can bet they're going to be torrented. I think it is time for massive rabid peaceful noncompliance via P2P with Apple and other corporations who continue to abuse the word "intellectual" in the phrase "intellectual property" never mind the IP laws.
...the site they need it to work with is Vincent Flander's old webpagesthatsuck.com pages. We don't need more standards compliance from browsers, we need more standards compliance from web coders, the group which actually generates more WTF? responses than all the app coders at MS. Are legibility, ease of use, lack of eye strain, sensible intuitive layout, grammar, and spelling that much to ask for? If so, let's just turn over all web design by law to people who've never visisted the Internet by anything but AOL.
Java powered buttons that jump and prevent you from clicking them, flashing backgrounds, swirling letters flying all over, embedded music forcing you to yank the freaking speakers off the machine... That's where compatibility is at right now.
...doesn't grasp that once you buy the machine, it is yours to use as a doorstop, calculator, whatever you want to do with it that doesn't involve something patently illegal. Anyone think that Mitsubishi should be able to stop people from "modding" their cars?
This would be like Apple trying to stop people from modifying their Mac to work with third party unapproved stuff... (hmmm...) Okay, bad example.
But we would see holy hell raised over this were a motherboard manufacturer to tell you that you were forbidden to do anything with it that they didn't want you to. Or Microsoft try to tell you that you were forbidden from writing any code they didn't want running on Windows. Etc.
BTW, you Aussies have my apologies for ever being exposed to what Americans call beer.
No SCO? I think I feel cheated of the full deck-is-stacked experience.
If the fork rejoins in an arc, shouldn't it then be a spoon?
If it cuts clear and the line ends and the fork becomes the line, shouldn't it then be a knife?
And what's so bad about forks? Is it as though Microsoft hasn't forked up everything already? Every patch and pack might as well be a new kernel for all the incompatibilities between one state and another.
Nope, there's no such thing as scalable *nix. Nope. None whatsoever. Just ask IBM. Or... maybe not. Sun? No, wrong people to ask about scalable *nix. Oh, just Linux is not scalable... Maybe it's just that Linux is not totally in their hands where they can control every aspect and thus every dime you get charged for the support contracts? No, it couldn't be that.
...a band of BSD zealots attempted to one up the Linux crowd by porting it to the Apple IIgs. Not to be outdone, Red Hat announced it was officially supporting Linux on the Commodore 64. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced it was dropping support for anything but Intel and compatible chipsets running at 2.5 terrahertz or better and making the minimum memory for the newest version of Windows 4096 gigabytes.
...some people are really taking their POV-Ray interest way too far.
...wasn't the standard supposed to be that intellectual property owners were supposed to protect their own property? Has anyone noticed that from Sheryl Crow to Kiss to whoever, no one needs to follow that standard anymore? They can allow the RIAA to do it for them. Ditto for the movie industry with the MPAA. Ditto for the European organizations.
The courts here in the US, AND in Europe and everywhere else need to require these third parties to get the active participation of the property owners on an ongoing basis for each case, or butt the heck out. It is wrong for catchall organizations to do all the enforcement as they increase towards near governmental police powers on behalf of individuals and companies versus other individuals and companies, giving them an unfair advantage where the accused is more and more guaranteed to be stomped without a reasonable chance of defense.
It's a good thing to point out that a couple centuries ago, these people would have been summarily executed as soon as captured. I'd say the fortune of unattached guerilla fighters who don't comply with the above mentioned article and section has actually improved somewhat.
...there's an idea out there that despite NASA having sent a small load of astronauts repeatedly to orbit and the moon and back in the sixties and early seventies with the current technology of the day, that somehow, we haven't advanced technologically enough in over thirty years to even manage to do as much as they did back then.
O.o
Does anyone else see that as completely cuckoo?
We can go to the moon right now. We can set up bases there right now. We can do space stations and space colonies right now. We merely don't seem to have the stones we used to.
When I was a kid we played with BB guns, kids taking knives to school and fighting hard behind the gym was a fact of life, we had no use for seatbelts, airbags didn't exist, we had lead paint all over the place, unbalanced diets, heavily sugared sodas, massively caffeinated coffees, and our cars s*cked on gas milage. We also walked to school instead of took the bus if we were closer than two miles away, our parents let us drink beer at home on special occaisions without fearing the foreign substance secret police, and we got to do archery at summer camp AND school gym class with real sharp arrows.
Welcome to the Wuss Age. We might as well let all the decisions be made by the lawyers and insurance adjusters and nanny state wackos now.
Why do I get the feeling the only way to get seriously needed scientific instruments aloft in the future will be to simply take them to China and Russia for launch?
...them to keep having systems that play as well as the Gamecube. My favorites, and you can withhold your laughter, are the Totally Odd Parents games from THQ. Running with one free moving stick and using another to kick the camera pov around is wonderful for 3D. As long as they don't mess with a good thing, I'm fine.
Wireless? Not sure when I'd get to using it, but it makes it easier than laying in CAT5 to the tv area and less expensive than buying another hub or switch to put in there if I've already run it.
Thank you for the rational and sensible response to the question. Concise. Excellent.
..but your call cannot be completed at this time. Please run a complete surface scan and try your call again. This is a recording."
If the drives are modular and easily removable, I smell a great line of repair work to get into.
I mean, how much does it take to just guess that some of these programs might be loaded with gunk code that doesn't belong on your machine?
eMule runs fine, finds most anything I bother to look for, and doesn't come with crud. Between that and minor torrent useage, who needs Kazaa of any kind?
W/regard to the RIAA and company, how long until they come up with a P2P sharing program put out through a front company to engage in a sting? Tinfoil hat maybe, but as stupid as they are, sheer statistics alone suggest they will eventually hire someone with more than the two brain cells otherwise required to be at the RIAA/MPAA.