Until fiber runs to my home, is cable the way to go?
Short answer: yes, if you can live with (or sneak around) the restrictions.
Long answer: I use Comcast@Home, and in general I'm satisfied. It downloads faster than my office network, tech support is reasonably intelligent, willing to admit when fuckups are their fault, and telephone hold times are short. Setup was easy.
Now the down sides: upload is only a little faster than POTS. Service goes down about once a month for several hours. The included web space is dog slow. They want to charge extra if you have multiple computers -- using a router with NAT is grounds for cutoff. You aren't allowed to run a server of any kind or access VPNs -- you're supposed to buy the identical but higher priced Comcast@Work for that.
...maybe they were really Really REALLY stupid and got infected with Chernobyl. The articles say the crash happened Wednesday in USA time, but what time zone does the ISS use for its computer clocks?
Plus there's that M$ support site infected with FunLove.
Or maybe it was just a hardware failure...
No, no, no. winmail.dat is a good thing. It tells you which companies hire completely incompetent sysadmins. It's a big red flag that says "these idiots are going to get 0WN3D by kiddies and hammered by viruses for the next several years". It's a shame that so many organizations (such as PBS) fall into this category, but it's their loss.
Personally, I just wish that all webmail services provided a "view as plain text" option.
if you don't defend your trademark, then it becomes something anyone can use.
True, but... you can defend your trademark without being an asshole. There was an excellent article in Webtechniqes about this very topic, written by an intellectual property lawyer. A few crucial quotes:
" While lawyers have an obligation to a court to say things in documents that are reasonably based on the law and fact, they have no such obligation when sending the proverbial nasty letter. "
" Rather than litigate against your best customers, license them to use your mark in connection with their fan sites. You maintain control of the trademark; your fan uses that mark strictly in conformance with your corporate trademark policy, and you now have an evangelist instead of an enemy. "
" Every time one of these legal actions backfires against an overreaching lawyer and his or her client or company, I always ask myself, "What were they thinking?" The answer usually turns out to be that they weren't. "
Re:It's not just web pages - MOD THIS GUY UP!
on
AI Movie Promo
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· Score: 2
Sometimes, they seed weblog submissions, too.
Sheesh, you said the single most important thing in this entire conversation, got post #18 even, and no one modded you up? M Silver, you were too subtle. Let me spell it out for the/. public:
The Anonymous Coward who submitted this story is almost certainly an employee of the same marketing agency who made the fake web sites. It was a fake post, and/. fell for it. In other words, YHBT.
Would someone please mod up the parent of this post? I recommend +1 Funny and +1 Insightful.
Damn damn damn. I thought I'd fixed it for IE 5 Win, but I was wrong. Thanks for catching that. The best fix (IMO) would be to put.text after createRange()
I usually use the most compatible browser around, so I sometimes fail to catch the annoying quirks in IE 5 Win. For example, IE 5 Mac supports the Netscape-style getSelection() instead of Microsoft's object stuff, and supports navigator.plugins instead of the equivalent goop in VBScript.
Strip out any spaces and save this in your browser's Favorites bar. Hilite some text, click the bookmark, and get the most relevant hits on the planet.
OpenGL assures there will be no differences in the different OS'es and they will be compatible in network play.
OpenGL can't assure multiplay. Games don't pass polygons to each other during play, they send data about actions and unit positions. How different platforms render that data on screen is irrelevant, as long as the results are consistent.
For compatible play you need a compatible API such as OpenPlay or SDL_Net (personally, I'd like to see those two efforts merge in some way).
What network multiplay API did Loki use? Are their games compatible with either DirectPlay (Win) or NetSprockets (Mac)?
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 10:58:43 -0400
From: Steven Rudich
Subject: New Yorkl Times fails to credit me.
Today, the New York Times had a lively article on a brilliant puzzle going
around mathematical circles.
Just before doing my post-doc, Richard Beigel and I formulated formulated
our voting puzzles. Subsequently, our puzzles were developed into a now
classic paper in theoretical computer science (with M. Furst and J. Aspnes).
There paper can be found at www.rudich.net/papers/voting.ps . My initial
solution to the first voting puzzle was a coding theory solution that is
strictly identical to the much touted solution in the NYT article. When
giving talks on the subject, I mentioned that if my voters had the ability
to abstain, that my coding solution was still optimal and that the voters
would make no errors in a most situations. This is strictly identical to the
hat puzzle in the NYT article. My talks were very popular and many of the
people in the article attended these talks. Subsequently, Burt Enderton gave
a simple solution to my puzzle that did not have the abstention
interpretation and hence is not a solution to the hat puzzle. I liked Burt's
solution and put it in our paper.
In the last few months I have reminded people that *all* the proofs and
connections to coding theory were developed by me. Nonetheless, these same
people ignored me in the Times article.
I have had many ideas stolen, but never featured in vivid detail in the
Times.
no_one@nowhere.com is getting a lot of spam that was intended for me, had I been stupid enough to give my real email address
No, no, no. Fake addresses are the wrong answer. The correct solution is to look up the site's Admin Contact address fromwhois. Let the nosy bastards spam themselves. You can also use their own phone number and snail address if needed.
So you want integrated 100bT, stereo sound, etc? If the PowerBook Titanium had Radeon instead of Rage 128, I'd recommend that in a heartbeat. Apple will probably upgrade the graphics chip this summer.
...or they'd know that AppleTalk has pretty much been eliminated. Yes, it's chatty, but it was an easy robust protocol for small LANs in the early 1980s. And more to the point, Macs using Netware/IP don't need AppleTalk.
Macs Netware is perfectly doable if everyone is willing to work together. (Unfortunately for my PowerBook, the local IT group wasn't willing). Some helpful links I found while trying to solve the problem unilaterally:
they had written plenty of code, guess what though they don't think it is necessary to make the code available to make the point.
Fine. I don't think the code should be released either. But they damn well ought to test it, see how long cracks take under various real world conditions, and publish the results. If it's under an hour, businesses should throw 802.11b out the window immediately. But if it takes a week of constant sniffing, personally I'd be more worried about black hats posing as janitors or some such.
burden of proof lies on the IEEE group to prove that WEP is secure
Sure, I agree that WEP is weak. But all security is relative. Any prime-number-based encryption can be broken with sufficient cycles. So tell me Mr Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of 802.11b?
So yet another academic has written up a mathematical proof of the flaws in 802.11. Hurrah. I see one small flaw in their reasoning -- not a single one of those papers includes a section where the author says "I personally sat down with my laptop outside a WEP-enabled office building and cracked the network in [foo] minutes/hours/days/whatever".
My BS is in Math, so I know for a fact that this old joke is often true: "Mathematicians don't need to be good at counting, we just care if it's countable". Until one of these professors (or more likely their grad students) actually writes the necessary decryption code and does it, we still don't know exactly how easy or difficult the crack is.
a quick search on google turned up this; http://www.cala.com/cala12.htm
"Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse" is not exactly what I'd call a reliable and accurate news source. But much more importantly, they don't provide links or footnotes to any of the frivolous lawsuits they mention in their article. Most US courts now have extensiveonline documentation. Perhaps CALA is making that stuff up to score points.
The great power of the web is that you don't need trust -- you can prove your case by hyperlinking any major claims. Just do it!
the more litigation in a society, the lower the GNP? It's a proven fact.
I usually post this rant anonmyous to protect my karma, but I'm willing to suffer if it will get this point across. Anyone who uses the phrase "it's a proven fact" (or "science has shown", or any of their variants) without providing a damn reputable URL to back it up should be modded down immediately.
the biggest problem is just that a lot of editors aren't active
Also, I'm not impressed with ODP's handling of new applicants. I applied once last year and received NO reply, not even a rejection letter. I had applied to edit the category of "Personal Pages -- Surnames starting with U". It was to get my feet wet, learn how to be an editor, see how time consuming it might be before adding a more serious category. I mentioned that in my application.
I resubmitted it in February and successfully received . . . a rejection letter! They decided I have a personal stake in the category (note my last name) and might be biased. Oh no! We must prevent the potential for abuse of Web Pages about people named U*!
If I'm not allowed to edit for categories that I know something about and I'm interested in, then what exactly should I volunteer for, and why should I?
Dip the completed "computer" into soapy water, and let surace tension and energy minimization do it's job
I thought that soap can only guarantee a local minimum for travelling salesman, not necessarily the global shortest path. Also, if the problem is sufficiently complicated (millions or more nodes, multiple dimensions, etc) it becomes prohibitive to construct a physical representation.
That said, it's likely that organic or quantum solutions are the right approach due to their built-in massive parallelisms.
I'm a raving evangelista, but you really don't need Sorenson for low resolution paper cutouts like South Park. Each character only has a half dozen moving parts and 3 poses (front, side, rear). A Flash animation could do it with BETTER image quality, lower file size, and of course wider compatibility.
(Alternately, someone could try to convince Steve Jobs to release QT5 for *nix)
Compare to AYB.swf -- Flash works freaking great for animation. Lastly, compare to the classic Star Wars ASCIImation. If you want to talk about "2 Much Time" -- just watching that one for a couple minutes makes me feel like the world's biggest slacker. Imagine the amount of brain drain it took to make the damn thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer: yes, if you can live with (or sneak around) the restrictions.
Long answer: I use Comcast@Home, and in general I'm satisfied. It downloads faster than my office network, tech support is reasonably intelligent, willing to admit when fuckups are their fault, and telephone hold times are short. Setup was easy.
Now the down sides: upload is only a little faster than POTS. Service goes down about once a month for several hours. The included web space is dog slow. They want to charge extra if you have multiple computers -- using a router with NAT is grounds for cutoff. You aren't allowed to run a server of any kind or access VPNs -- you're supposed to buy the identical but higher priced Comcast@Work for that.
...maybe they were really Really REALLY stupid and got infected with Chernobyl. The articles say the crash happened Wednesday in USA time, but what time zone does the ISS use for its computer clocks?
Plus there's that M$ support site infected with FunLove. Or maybe it was just a hardware failure...
No, no, no. winmail.dat is a good thing. It tells you which companies hire completely incompetent sysadmins. It's a big red flag that says "these idiots are going to get 0WN3D by kiddies and hammered by viruses for the next several years". It's a shame that so many organizations (such as PBS) fall into this category, but it's their loss.
Personally, I just wish that all webmail services provided a "view as plain text" option.
True, but... you can defend your trademark without being an asshole. There was an excellent article in Webtechniqes about this very topic, written by an intellectual property lawyer. A few crucial quotes:
Sheesh, you said the single most important thing in this entire conversation, got post #18 even, and no one modded you up? M Silver, you were too subtle. Let me spell it out for the /. public:
The Anonymous Coward who submitted this story is almost certainly an employee of the same marketing agency who made the fake web sites. It was a fake post, andWould someone please mod up the parent of this post? I recommend +1 Funny and +1 Insightful.
Damn damn damn. I thought I'd fixed it for IE 5 Win, but I was wrong. Thanks for catching that. The best fix (IMO) would be to put .text after createRange()
I usually use the most compatible browser around, so I sometimes fail to catch the annoying quirks in IE 5 Win. For example, IE 5 Mac supports the Netscape-style getSelection() instead of Microsoft's object stuff, and supports navigator.plugins instead of the equivalent goop in VBScript.
Strip out any spaces and save this in your browser's Favorites bar. Hilite some text, click the bookmark, and get the most relevant hits on the planet.
javascript:q=(document.getSelection)? document.getSelection(): document.selection.createRange(); if(!q)q=prompt('Search:',''); if(q)location= 'http://www.google.com/search?q='+escape(q);Also, AutoGoogler doesn't send a continuous feed of click data back to a multinational corporation's marketing department. Your choice.
OpenGL can't assure multiplay. Games don't pass polygons to each other during play, they send data about actions and unit positions. How different platforms render that data on screen is irrelevant, as long as the results are consistent.
For compatible play you need a compatible API such as OpenPlay or SDL_Net (personally, I'd like to see those two efforts merge in some way).
What network multiplay API did Loki use? Are their games compatible with either DirectPlay (Win) or NetSprockets (Mac)?
This puzzle comes from a paper by James Aspnes, Richard Beigel, Merrick Furst, and Steven Rudich. Attribution: I got this information from my friends on Mattababy.
No, no, no. Fake addresses are the wrong answer. The correct solution is to look up the site's Admin Contact address from whois . Let the nosy bastards spam themselves. You can also use their own phone number and snail address if needed.
Umm...ATI already has a comparable laptop chip.
So you want integrated 100bT, stereo sound, etc? If the PowerBook Titanium had Radeon instead of Rage 128, I'd recommend that in a heartbeat. Apple will probably upgrade the graphics chip this summer.
Macs Netware is perfectly doable if everyone is willing to work together. (Unfortunately for my PowerBook, the local IT group wasn't willing). Some helpful links I found while trying to solve the problem unilaterally:
Fine. I don't think the code should be released either. But they damn well ought to test it, see how long cracks take under various real world conditions, and publish the results. If it's under an hour, businesses should throw 802.11b out the window immediately. But if it takes a week of constant sniffing, personally I'd be more worried about black hats posing as janitors or some such.
burden of proof lies on the IEEE group to prove that WEP is secureSure, I agree that WEP is weak. But all security is relative. Any prime-number-based encryption can be broken with sufficient cycles. So tell me Mr Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of 802.11b?
So yet another academic has written up a mathematical proof of the flaws in 802.11. Hurrah. I see one small flaw in their reasoning -- not a single one of those papers includes a section where the author says "I personally sat down with my laptop outside a WEP-enabled office building and cracked the network in [foo] minutes/hours/days/whatever".
My BS is in Math, so I know for a fact that this old joke is often true: "Mathematicians don't need to be good at counting, we just care if it's countable". Until one of these professors (or more likely their grad students) actually writes the necessary decryption code and does it, we still don't know exactly how easy or difficult the crack is.
"Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse" is not exactly what I'd call a reliable and accurate news source. But much more importantly, they don't provide links or footnotes to any of the frivolous lawsuits they mention in their article. Most US courts now have extensive online documentation. Perhaps CALA is making that stuff up to score points.
The great power of the web is that you don't need trust -- you can prove your case by hyperlinking any major claims. Just do it!
I usually post this rant anonmyous to protect my karma, but I'm willing to suffer if it will get this point across. Anyone who uses the phrase "it's a proven fact" (or "science has shown", or any of their variants) without providing a damn reputable URL to back it up should be modded down immediately.
Silly troll. You're living way Way WAY in the past, and even then you were still wrong.
Also, I'm not impressed with ODP's handling of new applicants. I applied once last year and received NO reply, not even a rejection letter. I had applied to edit the category of "Personal Pages -- Surnames starting with U". It was to get my feet wet, learn how to be an editor, see how time consuming it might be before adding a more serious category. I mentioned that in my application.
I resubmitted it in February and successfully received . . . a rejection letter! They decided I have a personal stake in the category (note my last name) and might be biased. Oh no! We must prevent the potential for abuse of Web Pages about people named U*!
If I'm not allowed to edit for categories that I know something about and I'm interested in, then what exactly should I volunteer for, and why should I?
Why do people even ask questions like this? It's easy enough to look up. Remember, Google makes all computing simple.
I thought that soap can only guarantee a local minimum for travelling salesman, not necessarily the global shortest path. Also, if the problem is sufficiently complicated (millions or more nodes, multiple dimensions, etc) it becomes prohibitive to construct a physical representation.
That said, it's likely that organic or quantum solutions are the right approach due to their built-in massive parallelisms.
...to push game programmers not to use DirectX in the first place? Stick to open standards and you can port the games to just about anything.
Of course, Intel doesn't have the very cool Blue Man Group using their products.
Huh? What exactly is +1 about nyet's post? I could let "Funny" slide, maybe the moderator has a juvenile sense of humor, but "Insightful"???
To answer: I, for one, would not mind a user-obsequious airplane for your cousin if Lear satisfied the following conditions:Computers and aircraft are comparable in that they are both industrial products made of metal and plastic. That's about it.
I'm a raving evangelista, but you really don't need Sorenson for low resolution paper cutouts like South Park. Each character only has a half dozen moving parts and 3 poses (front, side, rear). A Flash animation could do it with BETTER image quality, lower file size, and of course wider compatibility.
(Alternately, someone could try to convince Steve Jobs to release QT5 for *nix)Compare to AYB.swf -- Flash works freaking great for animation. Lastly, compare to the classic Star Wars ASCIImation. If you want to talk about "2 Much Time" -- just watching that one for a couple minutes makes me feel like the world's biggest slacker. Imagine the amount of brain drain it took to make the damn thing.
Stop! VGS is not Bleem! Repeat after me: The list of supported titles for VGS is NOT short.
See also this completely off-topic link.