The term script kiddies creates a negative image of young people using Unix/Linux as being only vandals. I'm 15, and I was almost suspended for sshing into my own computer from the school library as they assumed I was breaking security on some system. While some people may classify young people as immature and reckless, I've been using my knowledge of computers for good since I was young. These people should be called what they are, digital grafitti artists with nothing better to do. Security disclosure is necesary for sysadmins to be able to secure their machines, and by eliminating it, only the people on the other side will have the knowledge, as it will eventually leak anyway. But I'm sick of all this childish behavior, I'm getting port scanned a few times a week by random hosts and at least I have inetpaged to let me know about it. I'm just tired of being lumped in with all the 15 year old AOLers with no morals.
How about asian countries/cultures? It seems that 'piracy' is more socially acceptable over there, I mean, look at Hong Kong, or even your local Chinatown, bootlegs all over the place. Also, look how many average people are now blatantly violating IP laws anyway, using things like Napster to download music and then burn to CD, and its all becoming mainstream. I've got kids in my school who can barely use AOL burning CDs for a small profit, and their parents think its a good idea, because its more money for the kid to be buying some crappy Abercrambie & Fitch clothes. Our future is in these young people, who believe that violating IP law isn't a problem, and this worries outfits like the RIAA to no end.
I believe the reason that CD-RW isn't commonplace in the laptop market is due to the power usage of a CD-RW's laser. Many CD-Rs in a desktop computer have fans in them to help cool the mechanisms inside the drive due to the high heat output from the laser. As far as desktops go Ricoch(sp!) makes a combo DVD/CD-R/RW drive, but its only IDE and will set you back ~$270. IIRC Dell offers a removable CD-RW drive in their Inspiron 5xxx line of computers for a few hundred bucks, but I'm sure that you can't just burn cds for hours on end with one battery.
I've used 2 slot load devices in my (short) lifetime, a Sony CD player in a car and a Pioneer DVD drive in my computer. The Sony CD player is horrendous, the motor which pulls the disc in broke on the 4 of them which my family had before we just gave up. To load a CD, you have to first put a cd in, then ram another cd in to push it onto the spindle, about 1/8 of the time, this results in 2 cds being stuck in the machine, which means having to take the entire reciever apart. My Pioneer drive has been the complete opposite, I've had it for 8 months, and it loads smooth, rips quickly, and is nearly silent. Also, the folks at Pioneer were smart enough to engineer a flap in for the inside of the drive so you can't accidentally get 2 discs stuck in there. Anyone know who OEMs the drives for Apple (I know the iMac uses slot load, and the G4 Cube IIRC)
What are you entitled to as a CD owner?
on
Two-Faced Napster?
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· Score: 2
I use napster on occasion to get some songs from a band which I haven't heard, or which people recomend. Many of these bands I have bought CDs of. But I'm more interested in what people feel they are entitled to as a cd owner. I have bought 2 cds of Steely Dan's, Two Against Nature, and A Decade of Steely Dan. I have also went to see them perform in concert. After the concert I fired up napster to get some of their live tracks, all of which I had on the CDs I owned and paid for, and which there was no cds available (AFAIK). Now I think of this as an ok thing to do. Although I probably broke some copyright law in the process. Also, I for a time had my mp3 collection hosted on my website (it still is sometimes) which was then indexed by google. Its amazing how many people still try to get their mp3s over http. Let's just say that I learned how to use mod_rewrite *very* quickly once I realized that I was the number one match for some band's mp3s. As far as napster goes, like anything it can be used for good or evil, and as far as sampling music goes, I believe it to be an approprite use, getting entire albums to burn to cd-rs and sell, is an inaproprite use. Personally, I wish the RIAA would pull this sticks out of their rear ends and just let the consumers choose.
I'm sick of these bastards. They call and you're like "hello? hello?" for 20 seconds until it multiplexes you over to some idiot who is going to sell you stuff. Of course, they usually call for my parents and I end up interrogating them:
Telemarketer: Hello, is Mr. Tosh there? Me: Yes he's here, what is this in relation to? Telemarketer: We'd like to sell him a... Me: He's got better things to do than talk to you. *click*
I'd rather have messages on my machine, it only takes a second to delete if you've got a digial answerer and you don't have to go through the trouble of talking to the (often) moronic people on the line. However, what ABC is doing seems illegal, but I'm not sure on that, wonder if they got all the numbers off people sigining up for Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
If someone ever gets to making this a commercially viable technology, I would immagine it would be very popular. A combination of supersonic water travel and high speed trains would probably be able to put the airline industry out of business. Would this technology provide a smooth ride? I would assume that people wouldn't appriciate being shot like a torpedo.
While I agree with you that Deja has been getting much worse recently, the decision to remove the old archives seems logical. For arguments sake, let's assume that the 1995-1999 archive used 70% of their disk storage. Considering that only 10% of the searches were using this large amount of data. Also, Deja is moving away from usenet searching in favor of the more profitable (I assume) product review services. If Deja wants to stop doing usenet, then they should just stop doing it outright and let someone else step up to the plate.
Damn! Right after I rip out my internal speaker and LEDs to keep my mom from shutting my workstation down while I'm out, I find a use for that beeping thing. *hunts around room for speaker*
Nah, some Excedrin Migraines (100mg+ each) and a Lipton Brisk/Snapple (as much as Jolt (70mg)) or two will do better than your Jolt+Mints, but being wired is cool, until you take the above caffeine combination and stay up until the sun rises even if you *want* to sleep.
I think if America could get it straight that a naked body didn't constitute pornography, that would be a big step in the right direction. Face it, there's a difference from something like a topless woman and a hardcore sex movie. Yet, in America, they are both treated the same. I think we need to remove the poles from our collective asses and realize that kids aren't going to die because they see a boob. Keeping young children away from hardcore/deviant sexual images, fine, but a naked body shouldn't be such a big deal to anyone. Note that the US Govt. never *forced* CN to censor anything, CN is doing it on its own to be more 'family friendly' and not to scare people off, and its their right as a company. The idea of an anime pay-channel for fans seems like a good compormise, nobody complains about a little nudity on HBO/Cinemax now do they?
I used PostgreSQL as a database backend for my squidlog2sql script. Running on a 486/25 with 16mb ram, Postgres was slow, but it ran like a tank, it never went down and would always perform reasonably even under fairly high loads. It also had an ODBC driver for Win32, which allowed non-linux users to access the database without me having to write a CGI interface for it. I haven't tried MySQL, but from what I've heard, its quicker but not as 'professional' because it lacks some features. If MySQL was much faster and easy to install (Postgres is a pain to intsall), I might switch since I don't even need these professional features for what I'm doing.
My god you're an asshole, you complain about how I have no life doing nothing but posting on slashdot, and then you waste even more time trolling. And you're calling me immature? Sorry for being 15, I mean, I can't control when I was born, at least I'm doing something productive with my time, and what are you doing, trying to 'debunk' everything I post.
I've got a friend who is in China right now. This whole 'great firewall' thing seems like a lot of BS, she was able to e-mail me from her friends/relative's houses without a problem as well at talk to me on AIM. Also, I had asked her if any of the computers she was using ran Linux, and she said that they didn't. Not exactly a scientific survey mind you, but I'm sure that Windows is still the OS of choice there. But all of this censorship stuff appears to be overblown. Read some of DMan's posts on everything2 for more insight on China than I could provide.
With Apple seemingly not coming out with any models in the very near future, are they just going to transition their existing machines to NVidia, or wait for their new machines. Also, are they going to use NVidia in thier powerbooks? This would seem to ruin their power consumption. At least my friend will be pissed off, he just bought an iMac DV and complains about how much Unreal sucks on it.
linuxmall and copyleft have linux stickers that are made for your computer case, I'd recommend getting the big sticker sheet from linuxmall, its like $2 and comes with more stickers than most people have computers.
We need some kind of non-partial company to test for linux support. Of course this will cost money for the producers of the hardware, but there's no way you could do it for free (short of giving the hardware away to linux users for testing:) ) A "Tested by Tux Labs" logo on the package would be what we would look for on packaging. It would also make things easier than having 5 redhat/suse/mandrake/debian/slackware ready logos on the box. This is an open space in the Linux business market that I'm sure someone will fill shortly as Linux becomes more mainstream.
OS X isn't Apple's first forray into the world of Unix. They had an OS called A/UX way back when, which was some kind of Unix with a Mac OS shell running under/on it. I don't know much about it, but http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aux-faq might be a good place to start. However, Apple is now combining Unix with a new style of GUI and a bunch of new technologies (Quartz, etc.) I think they may have a winner.
The same thing that seems to be happening in the philipines with SMS is similar to AIM in the US. Many people (mostly teens) use AIM to communicate instead of the phone. This has many advantages, you can talk to more than one person at once and can do other things while talking to them. I have had bad experience trying to get to know Real World people online. There was this girl I know who I only talked to online, she was in a few of my classes, but we rareley talked, but we had many long insightful online chats. I eventually got to know her well, and decided to ask her out, which obviously didn't go well:( But after she rejected me (she was nice about it though) and I got over it, we actually got to talking in class and stuff instead of talking online, and we're actually pretty good friends now. But I think that online is *not* the way to get to know someone/ask someone out.
Most of the quicktime clips available on the 'net use the proprietary Sorensen codec which cannot be licensed outside of Apple's own QuickTime players, the actual QuickTime format is actually pretty open, just that some of the codecs aren't.
This is good, def. worth the time to dl the 10mb static Motif version of RealPlayer 7. Its kinda lame, but funny still the same. I like cr0bar's parody of the Matrix a lot better though. You can see that someone had *way* too much time on their hands, its so funny just because of how silly it is...
People like stability when it comes to how their work is done. If I were to sit down at a Mac and Win9x box and Linux running GNOME or KDE, they would contain many of the same ideals when it came to operating (icons, menus, windows...). I think you could sit any reasonably computer-aware person in front of any of these GUIs and they would be able to sit down and work. For a new style of GUI to become popular it would have to make the work of the user easier without having a high learning curve. Think of how long it took for people to change away from DOS to Windows, and most people didn't use Windows until at least version 3.0 because the original versions had many flaws. If there are new GUI paradigms (god I hate that word) being developed, it will be a long time before they are accepted. Also the new single-purpose 'internet appliance' market may start to change interfaces to something more simplistic that is instantly obvious how to use (think TV/Stereo here), but I doubt people would want such a simple interface for their computer.
I sent this to rob, but I'm posting it here to see what you slashdot readers think:
I'm sure you know of all this autoposting nastyness going on with slashdot. I'm wondering if you've had any ideas on how to combat these auto-posters. Some slashdot readers have recomended letting the users specify regexes to filter out posts, which seems like a good idea, but would put an incredible amount of stress on your servers for sure. The answer isn't just "increase your threshold", I used to browse at 0 so I'd get most good posts and the occasional Posted-as-AC-because-of-company-policy which wouldn't score above zero, now I'm browsing at 1, and since *syringe is making new user names, he's auto-posting at 1 until he gets modded down enough. The real problem may be a lack of mod points, with auto posts, the trolls/spammers can get posts out quicker than they are modded. Also, consider what would happen if they were to write a script which not only would post crap, but would also make new accounts every 10 posts or so. I think a while back, someone had the idea of "make an english question that must be answered before posting such as 'three plus 2=?' " so that autoposters wouldn't be able to post.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to say, you are, Matsushita=Panasonic+Technics, Pioneer is their own company.
I believe the reason that CD-RW isn't commonplace in the laptop market is due to the power usage of a CD-RW's laser. Many CD-Rs in a desktop computer have fans in them to help cool the mechanisms inside the drive due to the high heat output from the laser. As far as desktops go Ricoch(sp!) makes a combo DVD/CD-R/RW drive, but its only IDE and will set you back ~$270. IIRC Dell offers a removable CD-RW drive in their Inspiron 5xxx line of computers for a few hundred bucks, but I'm sure that you can't just burn cds for hours on end with one battery.
Telemarketer: Hello, is Mr. Tosh there?
Me: Yes he's here, what is this in relation to?
Telemarketer: We'd like to sell him a...
Me: He's got better things to do than talk to you.
*click*
I'd rather have messages on my machine, it only takes a second to delete if you've got a digial answerer and you don't have to go through the trouble of talking to the (often) moronic people on the line. However, what ABC is doing seems illegal, but I'm not sure on that, wonder if they got all the numbers off people sigining up for Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Damn! Right after I rip out my internal speaker and LEDs to keep my mom from shutting my workstation down while I'm out, I find a use for that beeping thing. *hunts around room for speaker*
Nah, some Excedrin Migraines (100mg+ each) and a Lipton Brisk/Snapple (as much as Jolt (70mg)) or two will do better than your Jolt+Mints, but being wired is cool, until you take the above caffeine combination and stay up until the sun rises even if you *want* to sleep.
PS: I'm a Coke guy myself, Pepsi is too weak
My god you're an asshole, you complain about how I have no life doing nothing but posting on slashdot, and then you waste even more time trolling. And you're calling me immature? Sorry for being 15, I mean, I can't control when I was born, at least I'm doing something productive with my time, and what are you doing, trying to 'debunk' everything I post.
I'm sure you know of all this autoposting nastyness going on with slashdot. I'm wondering if you've had any ideas on how to combat these auto-posters. Some slashdot readers have recomended letting the users specify regexes to filter out posts, which seems like a good idea, but would put an incredible amount of stress on your servers for sure. The answer isn't just "increase your threshold", I used to browse at 0 so I'd get most good posts and the occasional Posted-as-AC-because-of-company-policy which wouldn't score above zero, now I'm browsing at 1, and since *syringe is making new user names, he's auto-posting at 1 until he gets modded down enough. The real problem may be a lack of mod points, with auto posts, the trolls/spammers can get posts out quicker than they are modded. Also, consider what would happen if they were to write a script which not only would post crap, but would also make new accounts every 10 posts or so. I think a while back, someone had the idea of "make an english question that must be answered before posting such as 'three plus 2=?' " so that autoposters wouldn't be able to post.
(Posted w/o +1 bonus to avoid karma lossage)