I remember not that long ago my cable went down. It was literally every couple or three minutes I'd come up with something I'd need to google or look up and get as far as loading FF before remembering. It's really amazing just how much we use online these days. Directions, movie times, random tidbits googled at will, communications.... just about everything.
On another topic, FF just blocked a popup from here. I'm not on my normal computer so I guess it could be adware, but popups on Slashdot? Hmm...
I wonder how much longer it will be before Google is the next Microsoft, bashed by the techies for stifling competition in the search engine/service market. Would be cool if they managed to maintain their "do no evil" bit, but I still remember when Netscape was being bashed for a non-standards-compliant browser and people were talking about the fast new Mosaic-derived thing called Internet Explorer....
Thanks for the summary. Thought it went something like that. Hadn't realized it was all done as recently as '84, though being 3 years old it probably wasn't very high on my list of things to notice.
I guess we can always hope for competition from non-traditional sources or consumer pressure, but I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath. It amazes me to no end that people get so caught up on who Jennifer Aniston is dating and what crazy thing Madonna is up to, but give me blank looks when I bring up things like this happening the background that certainly mean a lot more to the future. Guess it's the ol' Bread and Circuses thing.
Never underestimate the power of a group of politicians being given money under the table. I've lost most hope of anything being impossible with either party. If they can get Congress to regulate such a thing, or unregulate things to the point they can get away with it, you bet they will without a second thought.
Having dealt with several ILECs as part of couple of competator companies being allowed use of their lines only by law, I can say their attitude towards competition is... not good.
I admit to being a bit too young to remember the original, but maybe it's time for another breakup similar to the original Bell? Seems the current ones have gotten a bit too monopolistic, IMHO...
I was a long-time minimalist user, with blackbox/fluxbox my normal WM of choice. They made even a 40mhz Quadra 840AV very useable in X (even had Firefox running on the thing). But once my computer(s) reached a certain plateau of power, the hit imposed by the bigger WMs and DEs stopped being as big a concern. Sure, KDE/Gnome might take 40-60 megs, but when you have a gig of RAM that's a drop in the bucket compared to when you might have had 128, 256, or even 512 megs. Likewise when you have a multi-ghz processor and a video card more powerful than computers of a few years back, the hit imposed by the bigger environments is minimal.
Sure, some people prefer minimal interfaces, and that's why they're there. Choice is a beautiful thing. But I like my KDE's configurability and features, and in my experience the performance differences between it and the lighter WMs isn't enough to warrant concern.
There's a problem though. I agree with your reasoning inasmuch as replacing equipment without any benefit except the DRM. If you're leaving the functionality the same but adding a layer of "protection", which requires large expenditure, then it's not going to fly. However, when a new generation of foo comes out, and everything in that new generation has DRM, then there's a problem. Let's say Blu-Ray or HD-DVD or whatever comes next has legislatively-enforced DRM in every component. Now to avoid it not only do you miss out on DRM, but the entire new generation of equipment. Eventually more and more content will be phased over to the new technology and you're faced with the situation of upgrading, or being left behind. Now I know some people still trucking along with Windows 98 on a P2 because it's all they need and they refuse to use XP, but how many people have you met that still use 8-track and/or cassette exclusively because they hate CDs? Even with VHS tapes it's getting harder to find new releases available on them.
That's pretty much what it comes down to. Not only do we have to prevent current-gen from getting replaced with DRM'd crap (possible to prevent, even easy), but we have to watch out for next gen too. And that's where we have to look to.
You'd think after all the high profile cases of stuff like this happening, companies would be more careful with the revision history system. Guess not...
Over Thanksgiving, my family spent an evening with some friends of ours that have a ~13ish year old son that's into computers. We had the TV on in the background and one of those broadband commercials came on with the people trying to dialup and he asked "What does a fax machine have to do with internet?". It took some explaining for him to understand about dialing the internet over the phone lines. Ironically, he thought it was kind of cool that you could get internet access anywhere there's a phone line, which is indeed an oft-overlooked advantage of dialup./300 baud, XM301 modem. Ahh, the good ol' days.
Re:The best anti-spyware measure is between your e
on
Antispyware Shootout
·
· Score: 1
Eh, I'd just toss some mushrooms and snakes just outside the wall. Everybody knows badgers are attracted to those and would leave the inside of the wall alone.
If something sneakily slips in under the radar and manages to trick you into executing it, then a distro's package management system isn't going to impact anything unless you have every single write process under the magnifying glass. Naturally you're not going to apt-get install gator, but if something dropped itself into your homedir via a browser exploit and then executed itself you could still get bit. Of course if you're not running root then your damage is limited to ~, but I rather like my ~.
And this is precicely why some spywares are such a problem on Windows. They exploit no OS holes other than the user. Quite a few of them are set up to present an installation dialog complete with EULA explaining exactly what they do, but people just click through them anyway. I like my Macs too, but I don't believe that Mac users would somehow be that much more intelligent as a group to not fall into the same traps given the same dialog in OS X.
Not to mention the possibilities of finding some way to bypass the dialog.
In my experiences, when users are presented with something unfamiliar or they don't understand, they just click stuff until it goes away. I'd love it if they put down the mouse and picked up the phone. I can't count the number of times I've gone to a friend's house or taken a tech call and the person says "I don't know what happened, something came up and I clicked it and it went away. I didn't read it".
The highways/interstates were never intended as landing strips. Besides, when's the last time you heard of traffic being shut down/diverted for the practice landings?
Probably the same reason you can't buy porn at 17 years, 364 days old but all of a sudden you're "mature" enough to buy it at 18. Or are too young for alcohol at 20 years, 364 days but suddenly are at 21. Arbitrary numbers. Have to have some sort of benchmark, and short of subjective "Is Bobby Ready to Drink?" sort of evaluations. Same with driving
The problem is, while some 16 year olds are clearly ready to drive, some clearly aren't. And right now there's no practical way of determining that short of extensive testing beyond the driving tests used currently in the US (dunno about other states, but where I am they're pretty much a joke).
I don't remember where I was going with this, so I'm just going to submit it now and hope it makes sense:)
Some people consider their identity to be extremely personal, including their appearance. I know a few people who would likely prefer "Disfigured, but it's me!" over "some other guy". I personally would probably go with the transplant if the situation ever came up, but it's definitely not a universal assumption to be made.
There's no reason the customer support agents couldn't be provided the entered information. I've worked in three call centers now with a variety of software of phone systems throughout the years, and all of them had the ability to present us with information about the callers. Caller ID information, which phone tree options they'd chosen, account numbers and such can be made available to the agents easily. Having a customer dial it in, especially if it's long, then asking for it again is silly. My bank has a 15-digit acct number and they used to do this. I called recently and they didn't, and I'm glad.
Not sure where you're based or how old you are (going to assume Canada from your domain and the entries there), but keep in mind that down here in the States the Founding Fathers are held up almost as deities leading the charge of the great nation in it's beginnings. It seems to have increased in the last 20 or 30 years or so. While they definitely did good work against great odds, the idea they might have human foibles and failings will often elicit very strong negative reactions from people. During the whole thing recently when Thomas Jefferson's relations with a black slave resulting in child(ren) came out, there were people calling for the heads of the claimants for even suggesting Jefferson might have done it. Even bringing up that many of the founding fathers had slaves at all will get you criticised.
Ah well, so goes the indoctrination of the masses, I suppose.
Re:"Several posts" on a few boards = "very" unstab
on
Xbox 360 Very Unstable
·
· Score: 1
I have a couple or three old games from the DirectX 5 era that need the compatibility modes to run. Without them, they just bail out saying "Cannot run on Windows NT". With the 98 mode on, they run just fine.
Incidentally, SP4 of Win2k (or was it 3? I forget) added the compatibility modes to Windows 2000, you just have to manually register something with regsvr32 to enable them.
A bit OT, but you know what's more fun? Spinning CDs on dremels. The discs spin on up the spindle with a loud whine, followed by a POP! The plastic shrapnel scatters in a rougly disc-shaped fan and the foil media layer scatters in a snow-like cloud. Really quite fun when proper precautions are taken (I did mine in my backyard with nothing fragile nearby, wearing thick clothes and my full-face racing helmet).
Alternatively, you can get them spun up, but instead of over spinning them you can tip them onto the floor. Sometimes they'll explode upon impact, other times they'll go skittering across the floor and bounce off the wall and shoot up to the ceiling.
It might be an interesting "test" of the DRM'd discs too;)
You say that in jest, but imagine the possibilities for exploits when/if we get the point of direct neural implants for communications and such. Just imagine, instead of porn popups, lockups, and reboots we'll have people suddenly yelling about viagara at the top of their lungs, freezing up and falling over mid-stride, and suddenly forgetting where they are.
I've lately started hearing radio ads for a company that says all they need is a swab from the kid's and a swab from the "alleged father's" mouth to do the test, which doesn't seem too terribly difficult. Having never needed a paternity test, I have no idea what they entail and whether this is something new or not. I suppose it's still a philisophically hostile action, though;)
Seems to me that "Open Source" is starting to turn into a buzzword used by people when they want the geek masses to take notice of something and proclaim it good. And it seems to work sometimes, but I guess we'll see how this goes. Some of the updates don't look promising. Could be neat though.
Bravo! I can't count the number of times this has happened to me too. Plus, non-tech users aren't likely to know what a keylogger is even if they found the box. I'm reminded of a time I was helping someone fix some spyware problems, and I noticed they had a USB -> dual PS/2 HID adapter plugged into a USB port, with a USB mouse plugged into its USB to PS/2 adapter plugged into that. She told me that that was how her regular techy guy set it up and so she'd left it and didn't want me to mess with it.
I've never quite understood why, but the same person that insists on having every detail of their car explained to them, or even their cell phones, simply refuse to understand anything about their computers. Even though they're a lot more ubiquitous, I think people still have the "Computers are complicated and fragile, I couldn't ever understand them and they might break if I mess with them too much" mentality.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember not that long ago my cable went down. It was literally every couple or three minutes I'd come up with something I'd need to google or look up and get as far as loading FF before remembering. It's really amazing just how much we use online these days. Directions, movie times, random tidbits googled at will, communications.... just about everything.
On another topic, FF just blocked a popup from here. I'm not on my normal computer so I guess it could be adware, but popups on Slashdot? Hmm...
I wonder how much longer it will be before Google is the next Microsoft, bashed by the techies for stifling competition in the search engine/service market. Would be cool if they managed to maintain their "do no evil" bit, but I still remember when Netscape was being bashed for a non-standards-compliant browser and people were talking about the fast new Mosaic-derived thing called Internet Explorer....
Thanks for the summary. Thought it went something like that. Hadn't realized it was all done as recently as '84, though being 3 years old it probably wasn't very high on my list of things to notice.
I guess we can always hope for competition from non-traditional sources or consumer pressure, but I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath. It amazes me to no end that people get so caught up on who Jennifer Aniston is dating and what crazy thing Madonna is up to, but give me blank looks when I bring up things like this happening the background that certainly mean a lot more to the future. Guess it's the ol' Bread and Circuses thing.
Thought this looked familiar, but I couldn't find a past Slashdot article. Heh.
Never underestimate the power of a group of politicians being given money under the table. I've lost most hope of anything being impossible with either party. If they can get Congress to regulate such a thing, or unregulate things to the point they can get away with it, you bet they will without a second thought.
Having dealt with several ILECs as part of couple of competator companies being allowed use of their lines only by law, I can say their attitude towards competition is... not good.
I admit to being a bit too young to remember the original, but maybe it's time for another breakup similar to the original Bell? Seems the current ones have gotten a bit too monopolistic, IMHO...
I was a long-time minimalist user, with blackbox/fluxbox my normal WM of choice. They made even a 40mhz Quadra 840AV very useable in X (even had Firefox running on the thing). But once my computer(s) reached a certain plateau of power, the hit imposed by the bigger WMs and DEs stopped being as big a concern. Sure, KDE/Gnome might take 40-60 megs, but when you have a gig of RAM that's a drop in the bucket compared to when you might have had 128, 256, or even 512 megs. Likewise when you have a multi-ghz processor and a video card more powerful than computers of a few years back, the hit imposed by the bigger environments is minimal.
Sure, some people prefer minimal interfaces, and that's why they're there. Choice is a beautiful thing. But I like my KDE's configurability and features, and in my experience the performance differences between it and the lighter WMs isn't enough to warrant concern.
Just my 2 cents
There's a problem though. I agree with your reasoning inasmuch as replacing equipment without any benefit except the DRM. If you're leaving the functionality the same but adding a layer of "protection", which requires large expenditure, then it's not going to fly. However, when a new generation of foo comes out, and everything in that new generation has DRM, then there's a problem. Let's say Blu-Ray or HD-DVD or whatever comes next has legislatively-enforced DRM in every component. Now to avoid it not only do you miss out on DRM, but the entire new generation of equipment. Eventually more and more content will be phased over to the new technology and you're faced with the situation of upgrading, or being left behind. Now I know some people still trucking along with Windows 98 on a P2 because it's all they need and they refuse to use XP, but how many people have you met that still use 8-track and/or cassette exclusively because they hate CDs? Even with VHS tapes it's getting harder to find new releases available on them.
That's pretty much what it comes down to. Not only do we have to prevent current-gen from getting replaced with DRM'd crap (possible to prevent, even easy), but we have to watch out for next gen too. And that's where we have to look to.
You'd think after all the high profile cases of stuff like this happening, companies would be more careful with the revision history system. Guess not...
Over Thanksgiving, my family spent an evening with some friends of ours that have a ~13ish year old son that's into computers. We had the TV on in the background and one of those broadband commercials came on with the people trying to dialup and he asked "What does a fax machine have to do with internet?". It took some explaining for him to understand about dialing the internet over the phone lines. Ironically, he thought it was kind of cool that you could get internet access anywhere there's a phone line, which is indeed an oft-overlooked advantage of dialup. /300 baud, XM301 modem. Ahh, the good ol' days.
Eh, I'd just toss some mushrooms and snakes just outside the wall. Everybody knows badgers are attracted to those and would leave the inside of the wall alone.
*ducks*
If something sneakily slips in under the radar and manages to trick you into executing it, then a distro's package management system isn't going to impact anything unless you have every single write process under the magnifying glass. Naturally you're not going to apt-get install gator, but if something dropped itself into your homedir via a browser exploit and then executed itself you could still get bit. Of course if you're not running root then your damage is limited to ~, but I rather like my ~.
And this is precicely why some spywares are such a problem on Windows. They exploit no OS holes other than the user. Quite a few of them are set up to present an installation dialog complete with EULA explaining exactly what they do, but people just click through them anyway. I like my Macs too, but I don't believe that Mac users would somehow be that much more intelligent as a group to not fall into the same traps given the same dialog in OS X.
Not to mention the possibilities of finding some way to bypass the dialog.
In my experiences, when users are presented with something unfamiliar or they don't understand, they just click stuff until it goes away. I'd love it if they put down the mouse and picked up the phone. I can't count the number of times I've gone to a friend's house or taken a tech call and the person says "I don't know what happened, something came up and I clicked it and it went away. I didn't read it".
Close, but no cigar:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp
The highways/interstates were never intended as landing strips. Besides, when's the last time you heard of traffic being shut down/diverted for the practice landings?
Probably the same reason you can't buy porn at 17 years, 364 days old but all of a sudden you're "mature" enough to buy it at 18. Or are too young for alcohol at 20 years, 364 days but suddenly are at 21. Arbitrary numbers. Have to have some sort of benchmark, and short of subjective "Is Bobby Ready to Drink?" sort of evaluations. Same with driving
:)
The problem is, while some 16 year olds are clearly ready to drive, some clearly aren't. And right now there's no practical way of determining that short of extensive testing beyond the driving tests used currently in the US (dunno about other states, but where I am they're pretty much a joke).
I don't remember where I was going with this, so I'm just going to submit it now and hope it makes sense
Some people consider their identity to be extremely personal, including their appearance. I know a few people who would likely prefer "Disfigured, but it's me!" over "some other guy". I personally would probably go with the transplant if the situation ever came up, but it's definitely not a universal assumption to be made.
There's no reason the customer support agents couldn't be provided the entered information. I've worked in three call centers now with a variety of software of phone systems throughout the years, and all of them had the ability to present us with information about the callers. Caller ID information, which phone tree options they'd chosen, account numbers and such can be made available to the agents easily. Having a customer dial it in, especially if it's long, then asking for it again is silly. My bank has a 15-digit acct number and they used to do this. I called recently and they didn't, and I'm glad.
Not sure where you're based or how old you are (going to assume Canada from your domain and the entries there), but keep in mind that down here in the States the Founding Fathers are held up almost as deities leading the charge of the great nation in it's beginnings. It seems to have increased in the last 20 or 30 years or so. While they definitely did good work against great odds, the idea they might have human foibles and failings will often elicit very strong negative reactions from people. During the whole thing recently when Thomas Jefferson's relations with a black slave resulting in child(ren) came out, there were people calling for the heads of the claimants for even suggesting Jefferson might have done it. Even bringing up that many of the founding fathers had slaves at all will get you criticised.
Ah well, so goes the indoctrination of the masses, I suppose.
I have a couple or three old games from the DirectX 5 era that need the compatibility modes to run. Without them, they just bail out saying "Cannot run on Windows NT". With the 98 mode on, they run just fine.
Incidentally, SP4 of Win2k (or was it 3? I forget) added the compatibility modes to Windows 2000, you just have to manually register something with regsvr32 to enable them.
A bit OT, but you know what's more fun? Spinning CDs on dremels. The discs spin on up the spindle with a loud whine, followed by a POP! The plastic shrapnel scatters in a rougly disc-shaped fan and the foil media layer scatters in a snow-like cloud. Really quite fun when proper precautions are taken (I did mine in my backyard with nothing fragile nearby, wearing thick clothes and my full-face racing helmet).
;)
Alternatively, you can get them spun up, but instead of over spinning them you can tip them onto the floor. Sometimes they'll explode upon impact, other times they'll go skittering across the floor and bounce off the wall and shoot up to the ceiling.
It might be an interesting "test" of the DRM'd discs too
You say that in jest, but imagine the possibilities for exploits when/if we get the point of direct neural implants for communications and such. Just imagine, instead of porn popups, lockups, and reboots we'll have people suddenly yelling about viagara at the top of their lungs, freezing up and falling over mid-stride, and suddenly forgetting where they are.
:)
Maybe anyway
I've lately started hearing radio ads for a company that says all they need is a swab from the kid's and a swab from the "alleged father's" mouth to do the test, which doesn't seem too terribly difficult. Having never needed a paternity test, I have no idea what they entail and whether this is something new or not. I suppose it's still a philisophically hostile action, though ;)
Seems to me that "Open Source" is starting to turn into a buzzword used by people when they want the geek masses to take notice of something and proclaim it good. And it seems to work sometimes, but I guess we'll see how this goes. Some of the updates don't look promising. Could be neat though.
Bravo! I can't count the number of times this has happened to me too. Plus, non-tech users aren't likely to know what a keylogger is even if they found the box. I'm reminded of a time I was helping someone fix some spyware problems, and I noticed they had a USB -> dual PS/2 HID adapter plugged into a USB port, with a USB mouse plugged into its USB to PS/2 adapter plugged into that. She told me that that was how her regular techy guy set it up and so she'd left it and didn't want me to mess with it.
I've never quite understood why, but the same person that insists on having every detail of their car explained to them, or even their cell phones, simply refuse to understand anything about their computers. Even though they're a lot more ubiquitous, I think people still have the "Computers are complicated and fragile, I couldn't ever understand them and they might break if I mess with them too much" mentality.