Assuming its reasonbly well coded and extensible, I'm all for it. Having worked on a number of GPL projects in the past that often start out as some high school kid coding something for his own enjoyment and it growing much larger, I'd say I'd probably really appreciate having some professional coders start the project.
We can at least have some hope they will do a good job in the organization of it. Young coders may be fine at the actually writing of a line of code, but a lot of the younger programmers seem to not have the level of organization needed to keep the code maintainable.
As far as all you people who say "security through obscurity is required to prevent cheating", I say that's just because the games weren't thought out properly and designed for it. I know that Blacknova has had a few problems with cheating in the past, but access to the source code wasn't needed. There were simply bugs in the program that could be exploited. Access to the code has only helped them, so that they can have assistance in figuring out how to plug the holes.
And sure people who know how to program well can alter their clients to make them more efficient, but people already do that (I recall external macroing to be very effective in UO). What needs to happen is that the server is secure and actually enforces the rules of the world. To often coders have put a lot of the rule checking in the client. That may let you run the server on less powerful machines, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to cheat and then you'll have to start checking it anyway. (eg: quake 2 proxys like speedbot) Better to start out doing the correct checks than just hope nobody will ever figure it out.
Didn't I just see something a few days ago about the dreamcast successor, that would play all dreamcast games, except not on CD, only via download? Normally I see mentions of previous articles that are related. Of course, I read slashdot daily, but some people might have missed it.:)
All that means is that people will start using winelib when they want to port to linux. As long as winelib works well and is fast, that's all we should be worried about.
Of course, what I'd really like is for all the wine developers to work on improving the geforce2 support for Xwindows... TV-out would be a major plus.:) Then all I'd need to convince my gf to use linux would be a good dvd player for linux... maybe one day I'll have time to help out with the programming:)
We've been waiting for this for some time, since it would at the least make it a lot quieter in here, and give us a lot less trouble with heat dissipation. We do web hosting here, and we've been considering buying one of the many x-by-1U server packages, but 4P3x1U seemed like it would be a lot of heat in a very small area. We were about to order some of them anyway, but if we can get Crusoes to do it, all the better. Our boxes seem to be mostly limited by memory, network and other I/O related issues, as opposed to processor.
We'll probably still run at least dual P3s on the dedicated database machines, but there are fewer of them. The space they take up is of less concern, especially since they house the database disk arrays, which are large enough to completely eliminate most if not all 1U and 2U size boxes.
It'll be good to see how they do on benchmarks for serving web pages and the like. I agree with the previous posts that they should be very effective at it, with the code morphing. Maybe it should even be seen if we can take a little cue from khttpd and see if we can get an on-chip web server.:) Not that I really think the bonuses would be a lot better than the kernel web server, but hey, you never know.
Oh, believe me, a lot of people come to us and say, "Can I really make tons of money by going online?" and the very first thing I tell them is "No, you can't." In fact, we've gotten customers who have gone with us because we are the first person who has admitted that to them.
Mostly what we are trying to sell is spam filtered email accounts, that allow a business to look professional (no more @aol.com address) and an easy way to set that up. We also offer dicussion boards, so that they can discuss things intraoffice or interoffice or even with their clients (support forum etc). As a side note, we offer web hosting that ties the whole thing together.
We are priced less than 1/12 of what some of our competitors charge for the same services. We feel we really do have something to offer (unless of course, the internet explodes as you predict:). Basically, we really are trying to offer them something of value, and we're trying to make sure that they are happy with it and the price.
No offense to the people who are trying to be helpful (and I did see a couple), but I didn't see a whole lot of new ideas about drumming up customers. Suggesting traditional media is nice, but if your company has a marketing department, theres an extremely high likelihood they have thought of that already.
Take for example our company. We have a very strong stance against spam, to the point that we are blocking every bit we can find. But we have a continuous problem with advertising. TV spots are nice, but only if you have an awful lot of money. If we were to do TV and radio marketting, we'd probably have to double our rates at least. That's no good.
We've tried banner advertising, and that generally garners 1 click through per 20000 or so, which doesn't make it worth our while. We can spend a few thousand dollars on banner ads, and we'd only get back a few hundred at most.
We offer very generous commissions, and that helps some, as it makes our customers consider the benefits of refering clients to us, but that builds on exist client base. While it is starting to be effective, a lot of businesses might not have a large enough base.
We've produced printed flyers, and distribute them every where we can (of course, we don't give them out to people who are just going to through them aways, since that would be a waste of money). But we can only distribute them as people show interest in hosting, which isn't very often (few people walk down the street talking about wishing for hosting). We've considered even sending out horrible paper spam (which I like slightly less than electronic spam, though about 100 times more than telemarketers), but we don't think the return will be worth while.
We have hired a sales force, to seek out businesses door to door and pitch our product. Not very sucessful, since most businesses seem to think they "don't need that new fangled contraption called the innernit." We show them graphs saying that it makes them look more technologically savvy and modern, that it can boost their image, that it can help with client retention, and lower current customer contact costs by using email, but they just don't see it. For most non-internet based businesses we contact, they really don't care about this sort of thing.
We email people that our sales team have found and thought might be interested in web hosting (what we do). The trouble is, for the 400,000 emails we've sent out so far, about 4 have come back with angry complaints. Now, you might not think that is bad, considering some of our affiliates are running requested email subscription mailers, and they get more complaints than that even, but it isn't acceptable to us. (Of course, we watch carefully to make sure it isn't spam, but their lists only send email to people who have specifically requested that they receive mailings, not part of a free gift form or anything like that.) We are always apologetic to anyone who is upset, and we have people go through every email personally by hand and respond to their concerns.
But really that isn't enough. People get really mad about that (see irritating person who posted earlier saying that all spammers should die or whatever, very productive I might add), and we'd also like to here some alternate methods of advertising, that are even remotely affordable. Verio/AOL may be able to show 10 commercials an hour on every station, but they offer basically 0 tech support and high prices. Is that just the way it has to be? Every company can offer no service because to offer service prevents advertising and getting customers?
Even better yet, what can smaller companies than ours do? We have a lot of web designers who are clients of our because they like our prices and flexibility, but I don't think any of them gets more than 1 new client every other month. I know they'd like more clients than that, and we refer as many clients as we can to them, but how can they afford to get them? (specifically people with very very low budgets.) -- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Just a note, the last time I read Sound and Vision Magazine, they rated the BOSE speakers in the 60s, and the less expensive NHT speakers were 90s. They said the Bose speakers provide good base, but they muddy the sound a lot and don't match the clarity of better speakers. -- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
yeah, I've got some DCMs also, and they aren't bad for a cheaper system. My NHTs put them to shame though, and You could put together a really nice home theatre system for around $2500 total with NHTs... not quite the range that was asked for, but they sound SOOOO nice. I'm still working on getting Linux to play DVDs and output to the SPDIF of my SBLive... it sounds great in winblows, but I don't like having to reboot just for that. -- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
I wandered around in the Microsoft partners pavilion for a long time yesterday, and I asked most of the vendors if their products supported linux... A few said no... The majority said "We aren't supposed to talk about that but yes".. and a few were really gung ho to point out to everyone nearby that they ran under a variety of OSes. Most of the people who said no were M$ people anyway (like that one booth with the freaky looking wizard suit).
There was (sadly) no Corel booth, (contrary to the show listing) and there was no Be booth either, but almost everywhere you went people were talking about linux. As for the Crusoe booth not using Linux, maybe the 3 laptops in the front weren't, but there were several machines in the back (in the "home" section) that were running linux, and they said so about every 3 minutes to everyone who came by.
Granted the linux pavilion itself was small, but that's only because most other people didn't want to limit themselves. As a hardware manufacturer or software company, why would you want to restrict your market share to only a small part of the market? Better to be out in the open with everyone else. -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
I've been using Corel Office 2k at home and at work exclusively since it first came out. And I have not yet had one problem with it's conversions. In fact, there are a number of errors that can occur that make the file unreadable in MS Office, but it still opens perfectly in Corel. So while the 2 might not offer identical renderings, I think Corel does if anything a better job at displaying.Doc than M$ does. -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
As someone who went out of the country to get laser surgery, I must say that the method is interesting, but the results are not new.
My entire family went overseas to a lab in asia and got all our eyes corrected. My father was wearing trifocals before the visit, and now has approximately 20/10 vision. I have the same, and I was legally blind before the visit.
While it is definately a neat approach to doing this, where I went they did a computer scan of the light bouncing off of your retina (sounds a lot like what they claim to do in this story), but then rather than mess with mirrors, they just used the computer to generate and ideal laser pattern to eliminate all irregularities.
Not only was it fast and easy (an outpatient procedure), but it worked wonderfully. And it was cheaper than traditional laser surgery in the US (cheaper than the US versions of both Lasik and PRK). As a form of PRK treatment, it took three days to fully restore vision, but the doctor had done around 4300 operations and had no patients walk out with worse than 20/30 vision. Most came out with 20/10 as we did.
Now if only you didn't have to fly to Asia to get cutting edge healthcare...;/ -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Re:New Slashdot poll: How many people believe this
on
Taking On A Spammer
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· Score: 1
I didn't say it was "impossible" just unlikely... and I didn't say he had to provide his real name and address or anything, just *some* form of contact, some crappo account that can't be traced back to him... aren't there any anon-email servers left?
As for the sharing of their C drives, I must have missed when he said that. That definately would be highly stupid...
Why *not* "hack" an entire site into existance? He seems to think he's hot stuff, so it oughta be easy... and if they are dumb enough to share their C drives full access no password, then they'd probably never be able to figure out how to turn it off... it would at least prove that he could "h4x0r" their systems.:D hell, if he actually has full access to their C drives, he should be able to add a webserver to the system in five seconds flat. -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
He doesn't list any form of contact information, and he is using a free web account, presumably to hide his own identity. And perhaps those people even are spammers. (They don't look familiar to me, but I'm not a 133t h4x0r like "man in the wilderness", so maybe if I was I could take screen shots and find out...)
Anyway, even if they were spammers, that doesn't mean that the whole story isn't BS anyway...Anyone have ANY verification of this stuff? -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
New Slashdot poll: How many people believe this?
on
Taking On A Spammer
·
· Score: 1
As interesting as the story sounds, I think the chances of it being for real are *very* small...
He never says the name of the ISP he claims to work for.
No contact info provided for him at all as far as I could see, no name, no email, no icq, nothing... not even a fake hotmail email address or something...
He doesn't mention how he convinced them to install BO or whatever similar program he used.
He is hosting this site on some crappy free web server. If he really runs an ISP why doesn't he use his ISP for host? Or better yet, why not "hack" some server behind their T1 (they appear to have some at least one according to him) and then host the page on their own servers? That would be *much* more amusing... Perhaps, since he claims to have gotten full access to all of their confidential data, even host the page in their own domain? Maybe http://weareassholes.premierwhatever.com/:) that would be much funnier at least.
My guess is, the people running that domain are putting the site up to discourage others from trying to take them out or something. Or maybe to garner sympathy for their cause... -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Yes, after a less computer literate friend of mine was tricked into paying $2500 for a machine that was slower than the $1800 one I'd bought the year before (that also came with a printer), I decided that they aren't worth dealing with.
Add to that the fact that the video card and the sound card never worked properly, and I think that you have a good argument for never using them. There tech support at the time was horrible which wouldn't have been so bad if the hardware worked, but... it didn't, and they wouldn't just send out replacements.
So instead they just lost a few customers (he, and I, and everyone else I speak to).
I had PRK done in the Philipines, and it cost me only 1700 for both eyes, and a reputable doctor who had done well over 1,000 people before me. Seems that it is a good spot to go... my whole family got it done and no problems for any of us. The doc said that he hadn't had any problems, but that he knew one doc who did a Lasik that had problems. I here that it is almost impossible to screw up a PRK, but Lasik is sometimes dangerous, so I went with the PRK treatment and now I've gone from legally blind to 20/20 vision (of course, I'm still young so things may change once I get past 40 or something... but for many years I should be set.) My father also had it done, and he went from legally blind with astigmatism and reading glasses to only driving glasses now. Pretty good. -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
yeah right. I had cable until 3 months ago when I just switched over to using my companies SMDS connection and not having a computer at home at all. My cable modem never got more than 10kpbs during he last month I used it, and was down around 20% of the time anyway. If I had at least had some access all of the time, I'd have put up with the horrible bandwidth, but if I can't have even that, then I say screw it. I'm hoping for sDSL soon, but the company I'm trying to get it from (flashcom) is taking it's sweet time, and never gets back to me even though I have called there at least 4 times. And I'm getting the $400/mo top of the line service... I'd hate to think how fast they'd respond if I were getting the 40-50/mo service... -- Braeus Sabaco Member of the Roman Legion Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Slashdot Mirror
We can at least have some hope they will do a good job in the organization of it. Young coders may be fine at the actually writing of a line of code, but a lot of the younger programmers seem to not have the level of organization needed to keep the code maintainable.
As far as all you people who say "security through obscurity is required to prevent cheating", I say that's just because the games weren't thought out properly and designed for it. I know that Blacknova has had a few problems with cheating in the past, but access to the source code wasn't needed. There were simply bugs in the program that could be exploited. Access to the code has only helped them, so that they can have assistance in figuring out how to plug the holes.
And sure people who know how to program well can alter their clients to make them more efficient, but people already do that (I recall external macroing to be very effective in UO). What needs to happen is that the server is secure and actually enforces the rules of the world. To often coders have put a lot of the rule checking in the client. That may let you run the server on less powerful machines, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to cheat and then you'll have to start checking it anyway. (eg: quake 2 proxys like speedbot) Better to start out doing the correct checks than just hope nobody will ever figure it out.
Didn't I just see something a few days ago about the dreamcast successor, that would play all dreamcast games, except not on CD, only via download? Normally I see mentions of previous articles that are related. Of course, I read slashdot daily, but some people might have missed it. :)
All that means is that people will start using winelib when they want to port to linux. As long as winelib works well and is fast, that's all we should be worried about. Of course, what I'd really like is for all the wine developers to work on improving the geforce2 support for Xwindows... TV-out would be a major plus. :) Then all I'd need to convince my gf to use linux would be a good dvd player for linux... maybe one day I'll have time to help out with the programming :)
We'll probably still run at least dual P3s on the dedicated database machines, but there are fewer of them. The space they take up is of less concern, especially since they house the database disk arrays, which are large enough to completely eliminate most if not all 1U and 2U size boxes.
It'll be good to see how they do on benchmarks for serving web pages and the like. I agree with the previous posts that they should be very effective at it, with the code morphing. Maybe it should even be seen if we can take a little cue from khttpd and see if we can get an on-chip web server. :) Not that I really think the bonuses would be a lot better than the kernel web server, but hey, you never know.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Mostly what we are trying to sell is spam filtered email accounts, that allow a business to look professional (no more @aol.com address) and an easy way to set that up. We also offer dicussion boards, so that they can discuss things intraoffice or interoffice or even with their clients (support forum etc). As a side note, we offer web hosting that ties the whole thing together.
We are priced less than 1/12 of what some of our competitors charge for the same services. We feel we really do have something to offer (unless of course, the internet explodes as you predict :). Basically, we really are trying to offer them something of value, and we're trying to make sure that they are happy with it and the price.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Take for example our company. We have a very strong stance against spam, to the point that we are blocking every bit we can find. But we have a continuous problem with advertising. TV spots are nice, but only if you have an awful lot of money. If we were to do TV and radio marketting, we'd probably have to double our rates at least. That's no good.
We've tried banner advertising, and that generally garners 1 click through per 20000 or so, which doesn't make it worth our while. We can spend a few thousand dollars on banner ads, and we'd only get back a few hundred at most.
We offer very generous commissions, and that helps some, as it makes our customers consider the benefits of refering clients to us, but that builds on exist client base. While it is starting to be effective, a lot of businesses might not have a large enough base.
We've produced printed flyers, and distribute them every where we can (of course, we don't give them out to people who are just going to through them aways, since that would be a waste of money). But we can only distribute them as people show interest in hosting, which isn't very often (few people walk down the street talking about wishing for hosting). We've considered even sending out horrible paper spam (which I like slightly less than electronic spam, though about 100 times more than telemarketers), but we don't think the return will be worth while.
We have hired a sales force, to seek out businesses door to door and pitch our product. Not very sucessful, since most businesses seem to think they "don't need that new fangled contraption called the innernit." We show them graphs saying that it makes them look more technologically savvy and modern, that it can boost their image, that it can help with client retention, and lower current customer contact costs by using email, but they just don't see it. For most non-internet based businesses we contact, they really don't care about this sort of thing.
We email people that our sales team have found and thought might be interested in web hosting (what we do). The trouble is, for the 400,000 emails we've sent out so far, about 4 have come back with angry complaints. Now, you might not think that is bad, considering some of our affiliates are running requested email subscription mailers, and they get more complaints than that even, but it isn't acceptable to us. (Of course, we watch carefully to make sure it isn't spam, but their lists only send email to people who have specifically requested that they receive mailings, not part of a free gift form or anything like that.) We are always apologetic to anyone who is upset, and we have people go through every email personally by hand and respond to their concerns.
But really that isn't enough. People get really mad about that (see irritating person who posted earlier saying that all spammers should die or whatever, very productive I might add), and we'd also like to here some alternate methods of advertising, that are even remotely affordable. Verio/AOL may be able to show 10 commercials an hour on every station, but they offer basically 0 tech support and high prices. Is that just the way it has to be? Every company can offer no service because to offer service prevents advertising and getting customers?
Even better yet, what can smaller companies than ours do? We have a lot of web designers who are clients of our because they like our prices and flexibility, but I don't think any of them gets more than 1 new client every other month. I know they'd like more clients than that, and we refer as many clients as we can to them, but how can they afford to get them? (specifically people with very very low budgets.)
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Just a note, the last time I read Sound and Vision Magazine, they rated the BOSE speakers in the 60s, and the less expensive NHT speakers were 90s. They said the Bose speakers provide good base, but they muddy the sound a lot and don't match the clarity of better speakers.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
yeah, I've got some DCMs also, and they aren't bad for a cheaper system. My NHTs put them to shame though, and You could put together a really nice home theatre system for around $2500 total with NHTs... not quite the range that was asked for, but they sound SOOOO nice. I'm still working on getting Linux to play DVDs and output to the SPDIF of my SBLive... it sounds great in winblows, but I don't like having to reboot just for that.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
There was (sadly) no Corel booth, (contrary to the show listing) and there was no Be booth either, but almost everywhere you went people were talking about linux. As for the Crusoe booth not using Linux, maybe the 3 laptops in the front weren't, but there were several machines in the back (in the "home" section) that were running linux, and they said so about every 3 minutes to everyone who came by.
Granted the linux pavilion itself was small, but that's only because most other people didn't want to limit themselves. As a hardware manufacturer or software company, why would you want to restrict your market share to only a small part of the market? Better to be out in the open with everyone else.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
I've been using Corel Office 2k at home and at work exclusively since it first came out. And I have not yet had one problem with it's conversions. In fact, there are a number of errors that can occur that make the file unreadable in MS Office, but it still opens perfectly in Corel. So while the 2 might not offer identical renderings, I think Corel does if anything a better job at displaying .Doc than M$ does.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
My entire family went overseas to a lab in asia and got all our eyes corrected. My father was wearing trifocals before the visit, and now has approximately 20/10 vision. I have the same, and I was legally blind before the visit.
While it is definately a neat approach to doing this, where I went they did a computer scan of the light bouncing off of your retina (sounds a lot like what they claim to do in this story), but then rather than mess with mirrors, they just used the computer to generate and ideal laser pattern to eliminate all irregularities.
Not only was it fast and easy (an outpatient procedure), but it worked wonderfully. And it was cheaper than traditional laser surgery in the US (cheaper than the US versions of both Lasik and PRK). As a form of PRK treatment, it took three days to fully restore vision, but the doctor had done around 4300 operations and had no patients walk out with worse than 20/30 vision. Most came out with 20/10 as we did.
Now if only you didn't have to fly to Asia to get cutting edge healthcare... ;/
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
As for the sharing of their C drives, I must have missed when he said that. That definately would be highly stupid...
Why *not* "hack" an entire site into existance? He seems to think he's hot stuff, so it oughta be easy... and if they are dumb enough to share their C drives full access no password, then they'd probably never be able to figure out how to turn it off... it would at least prove that he could "h4x0r" their systems. :D hell, if he actually has full access to their C drives, he should be able to add a webserver to the system in five seconds flat.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Anyway, even if they were spammers, that doesn't mean that the whole story isn't BS anyway...Anyone have ANY verification of this stuff?
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
My guess is, the people running that domain are putting the site up to discourage others from trying to take them out or something. Or maybe to garner sympathy for their cause...
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
Add to that the fact that the video card and the sound card never worked properly, and I think that you have a good argument for never using them. There tech support at the time was horrible which wouldn't have been so bad if the hardware worked, but... it didn't, and they wouldn't just send out replacements.
So instead they just lost a few customers (he, and I, and everyone else I speak to).
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
I had PRK done in the Philipines, and it cost me only 1700 for both eyes, and a reputable doctor who had done well over 1,000 people before me. Seems that it is a good spot to go... my whole family got it done and no problems for any of us. The doc said that he hadn't had any problems, but that he knew one doc who did a Lasik that had problems. I here that it is almost impossible to screw up a PRK, but Lasik is sometimes dangerous, so I went with the PRK treatment and now I've gone from legally blind to 20/20 vision (of course, I'm still young so things may change once I get past 40 or something... but for many years I should be set.) My father also had it done, and he went from legally blind with astigmatism and reading glasses to only driving glasses now. Pretty good.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
yeah right. I had cable until 3 months ago when I just switched over to using my companies SMDS connection and not having a computer at home at all.
My cable modem never got more than 10kpbs during he last month I used it, and was down around 20% of the time anyway. If I had at least had some access all of the time, I'd have put up with the horrible bandwidth, but if I can't have even that, then I say screw it.
I'm hoping for sDSL soon, but the company I'm trying to get it from (flashcom) is taking it's sweet time, and never gets back to me even though I have called there at least 4 times. And I'm getting the $400/mo top of the line service... I'd hate to think how fast they'd respond if I were getting the 40-50/mo service...
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions