NO kididng on the name pronouncement. My name is Seth Bokelman, I can understand, possibly, the butchering of my last name, although I think it looks like it should be pronounced with a long o sound.
However, when the retard on the other end manages to mangle "Seth", then I know I'm certainly not dealing with anyone who's put more than a half second of thought into the speaking process. They are certainly not calling me because I want them to, or they'd have thought a little more about how to pronounce my name! ---
Right, but the problem is that the harassment has already taken place when you receive the FIRST phone call. It should be an "opt-in" situation rather than an "opt-out" procedure.
The other problem is that I have two roomies. I can't ask for their names to be removed legally, so I get stuck receiving the same phone call from the same company 15 times until they do reach my roomie. Sure, I could claim to be him, and ask that they stop calling, etc. but I'm sure that I'd do that only to find it was someone calling to offer him a job or somesuch, and I'd look like an ass.:)
For the last week, I have had a new service from US Worst, er West, that forces anyone who has their caller ID information blocked to speak their name and push a button. Then my phone rings with a distinctive ring, and I hear their name, and can opt to take the call or not. You can also put 25 numbers on a list to let through, if your parents have an unlisted number, etc.
The result? We've gotten only one telemarketing call in the last week, and that was from the University that I work asking my roomie to donate to the senior class project. They got through because the caller ID said "University of Northern Iowa". This is a DRAMATIC decrease from what was three calls per day before getting the service.
I don't work for US West, or hold any stock or anything stupid like that, and this is kind of pricey at $10 a month, but that includes caller ID service too, which is nice if you don't have it already. Since most of the telemarketers have automatically dialed phones, they can't get through the speak your name and push a button ordeal to reach us, which is just fine with me. ---
Okay, I am not a statistician, but I do have a degree in Psychology.:) I don't think that this data would be all that useful. Don't the Nielsen ratings try to reflect every type of viewer? To have statistics that are even remotely valid for the population as a whole, you'd have to do random sampling, and make sure you got a decent cross-section of the types of viewers in the country.
You'd need old people, young people, people with kids, rich people, poor people, white people, black people, and purple people eaters. Now, this does not lend itself well to the RePlay/TiVo/whatever model where the boxen cost $400. Why? Because the people who are going to buy these are most likely going to be white males in their 20's with disposable income who like gadgets. My parents and my grandparents aren't going to be shelling out $400 for a set-top box anytime soon, neither will most poor households, or households with children in them. Would you let your kids take control of your TiVo? You'd wind up with 20 hours of the TeleTubbies recorded.
The usage statistics generated from this data will be bizarre. The X-Files will have a 95% share, and about 1% of viewers will tune in for Touched by an Angel. This won't exactly be representative of the general viewing public.
I agree completely with the sentiment that the service/device should be free or discounted if they're going to use you for market research. I'd be willing to let them have tons of demo info on me if I got one for free, I can tolerate junk mail just fine, and telemarketers can't get through my phone blocks.:) ---
Was it released on Laserdisc? I've got VHS, Laserdisc, and DVD. I saw this thing rumored yesterday and canceled my order for the VHS Widescreen edition, but I'll buy a Laserdisc version. This is where the DVD story first broke, as far as I can tell. There's also some info about a radio interview with Lucas, where he supposedly said this himself. Anyone have a link to where I can get the Laserdisc? ---
Okay, what about FileMaker Pro? Our office runs a large FileMaker Pro database where we get our jobs from. Computer problems are reported to the office staff who enter them in the database and we retrieve them from there, enter stuff, etc. I can't ditch Windows until I can access FileMaker databases.:) ---
Private Citizen looks useful, but I'm hoping that the new service I signed up for from US Worst, er US West will stop some of my annoying phone calls.
I've been able to strip out most of my IMAP e-mail spam by setting up "Rules" in Outlook to dump the stuff as it comes in.
What would be REALLY useful in an e-mail app would be an equivalent of the RBL for mail clients. You update your spam file daily, and anything from those known spam avenues is automatically deleted or moved into a "Spam?" folder or such. It'd need to be a universal format, something that Netscape/Outlook/Eudora could use, as well as the folks who like Pine/Elm/mail whatever.
My roomies and I receive about 3 Telemarketing calls a day, so yesterday I signed up for an option where anyone who would normally show up on caller-id as "Unavailable" or "Out of area" is prompted to speak their name and press a tone to connect to us. The phone then rings with a unique sound, and we hear their message, and are given the choice to take or deny their call. I'm betting most telemarketers won't even get that far, as they'll be unable to do the necessary button-pushing to enter their name, since the systems are highly automated.
Gaining weight is easy, just take in about 5 Big Macs a day. I think that an individuals metabolism or body chemistry has more to do with it than anything else.
My roomie and I are the same height. He's skinny, I'm not.:) He eats half again as much as I do, we work out together several times a week. We both work at computers and pretty much have the same lifestyle. We're even the same damned height, but I've got probably 80 pounds on him. In essence, I can find nothing about him that says he should be skinny, but he is. Maybe he has worms. ---
I think that the Pinkerton program is going about this all wrong, they're not targeting the truly dangerous group of people in America's high schools. This isn't an anti-jock rant or anything, but I feel that the Columbine killers most likely reacted to the abuse put upon them on a constant basis by the other students in their high school. Just think about it for a moment, most kids don't just decide to up and waste their classmates for no good reason, and I think it's time that educators, parents, and law enforcement stopped treating high school conflicts like playground fights.
I was by no means a jock in high school, but I didn't fit any of these geek stereotypes either. I participated in the Track & Golf teams, as well as Speech, Drama, and Yearbook. I never played a single game of D&D, and we only had Wolf3D, no Doom yet.
When I look back at some of the bastards who made my day hell, I realize that it is terrifyingly easy to understand how anyone could be driven to depression, suicide, or revenge by the purposefully cruel actions of their classmates. I got slammed against lockers, given "titty twisters" in the locker rooms, kicked, hit, and generally verbally abused as well.
I'm not trying to tell my story here, I'm sure most of you experienced things that very similar, and I'm sure many of the "jocks" did as well, especially from upperclassmen in the same sports.
So what do we do about this problem? Blaming the victims will get us nowhere. If you want to create a resource for kids who need help, howabout one where they can go to report the abusive actions of their peers, where school administrators won't tell them to "tough it out" or to "deal with it". I never ONCE felt that any teacher or administrator in my high school would give two craps that Andy Jahnke tried to stuff me in a locker. (He's dead now, head-on car accident, I laughed when I heard that, seriously, maybe there is something to karma.)
My suggestion, Pinkerton, is howabout not rewarding students for turning people in, but providing a resource for students and administrators about what steps to take to stop these abuses. Students should have someone, several someones in fact, at every school who will be their advocates in these cases. There should be a local police liason with the high school, and these cases should result in charges being filed against the abusers.
Too often, I feel that these things are viewed as harmless, when the victims are truly physically and emotionally harmed.
If you leave bruises on a person, it's assault. Period. There should be no suspensions from sports, you're off the team permanently. You do it again, or so-help-me-god retaliate against the person for reporting you, and you're expelled, as well as violating your probation.
There need to be real consequences for those who abuse their fellow students. Not 15 laps, not detention. If I walked into my co-workers office and slugged him in the stomach, would my boss make me work late? No, I'd be charged and sentenced by the legal system, and fired from my job.
Why is this not similar if I'm a senior in high school? Why do those being abused not report the cases of abuse to the police and/or school administrators? Why do we as a society view it as less-severe if the participants in these forms of violence are still in high school? ---
I don't know anything about percentages or what causes them, but I've got two DVD's now that haven't worked, right out of the shrinkwrap. One was a "There's Something About Mary" disc, and the other was Monty Python's Flying Circus volume I. Both of these would just go nuts on multiple players, both my hardware player in my entertainment system and multiple PC/Mac DVD drives. I returned them to Sam's Club and got new ones, but it was weird. Are these type of things caused by copy protection or shitty discs? ---
Not meant as flamebait here, but it's hard enough getting the programs you WANT to run sometimes, I can't imagine that many viruses would be able to get themselves up and running without copious amounts of user stupidity.
I'm not saying that some programs you want to run don't work, I'm just saying that sometimes I get tired of having to install forty-eleven new packages just to get a damned ICQ client to run. ---
No, you're not stealing. You're taking advantage of a company selling things below their cost, because they know that once the average user has one, they'll be forced to shell out more money to the company, rather than give the machine up.
Buying the machine and not using their service is not stealing, because the machine is YOURS. You can drop it off a building, would that be stealing? If I buy a Sony CD Player, am I obligated to buy Sony CD's to play on it? No, I'm not.
Now, if Netpliance is smart, they just make the device free with a 2 year commitment to their service, and if you terminate the service after the first month, you either have to return the device or pay a couple hundred bucks to cover the cost of the machine. That would be completely legal, and ethical.
If you buy something, it is yours to do with as you wish. If you sign a contract, you must abide by the terms of the contract. Netpliance tried to avoid the contracts, which can scare off many users, but they got bitten in the arse by people who could blow a hundred bucks on one of their boxes, add another hundred bucks in parts, and have a machine without the need for their service. Now they're being forced to use contracts, which they probably should have used all along. ---
To me, that bug list just shows that most of the bugs in Windows 2000 are fairly minor things, which only occur in specific situations, and honestly, all OS's have problems like this, Yes, even Linux.
While far from a bug list, here's a couple things that have left me baffled in my brief experience with Linux in the last few weeks.
1. If I install Red Hat on a certain set of Machines (Gateway 2000 P5-120 & P5-166's) X fails to start. Every time, after a clean install, it detects the card right, but doesn't work, just bombs back to the command prompt.
2. X works fine in Mandrake, BUT, the ethernet cards do not! They work fine in Red Hat, however. Again, they're detected, and as far as I can tell are using the same drivers, but they don't work.
3. Corel Linux works fine with both of these things, right out of the box. Yes, I know Corel is based on Debian, not Red Hat. I'm just saying that it works.:)
I tried this on four different machines, same basic configuration, with the same results. And while I didn't spend hours trying to troubleshoot it or anything, I'd consider any of these to be more of a "show-stopping" bug than that list of Windows 2000 glitches.
I'm not trying to say Windows 2000 is better than Linux, don't get me wrong, I just get a little sick of the holier-than-thou attitude around here sometimes, as if Linux is perfect, and doesn't have any bugs. ---
Hmm, I feel the other way, I am mildly amused by the show, but honestly it's never seemed to be even as clever as Beavis & Butthead were. The movie, on the other hand, was great, it had catchy music, an actual message, and enough vulgarity to shock anyone. Now don't get me wrong, I like the show, but it usually seems to be about what taboos they can break this week, rather than carrying a decent story line. ---
What do they do to persuade you to use their proxy servers? I don't use them here, after the clueless cable guy left I removed the Proxy settings from my browsers, and all works fine, been that way for 6 months.
Then again, my @Home may be non-standard, a friend of mine downloaded a whole CD from me last week, and said "You must not have AT&T @Home" and I told him that I did. He was amazed because I don't have an "upload cap" which apparently others do, he was getting a steady 60K/second FTP'ing from an old CD-ROM drive on a P5-120 in my basement.
If it helps, I'm in Waterloo, Iowa and I'm on the 24.6.200.* subnet.
Does anyone know anymore about this? I've often wondered if I'm on a "main" subnet or something, since the DNS servers are 24.6.200.15 and 24.6.200.17, it just seems strange that they'd have 2 DNS servers for every subnet. ---
It makes total sense to me, when you catch somebody doing something like this, you throw the book at them. Having L0phtCrack isn't illegal, using it to commit a crime is.
IANAL, but I do have a minor in Criminal Justice, and I know that in Iowa at least, you can be charged with posession of burglary tools for having a SCREWDRIVER. Now of course they don't charge everyone who owns a screwdriver, they charge those people who use it as a tool to commit a crime.
I completely understand why the DA filed so many charges, in this kind of case, you never know what you can make stick, you can't try them again later if you don't get them the first time (double jeopardy applies) so you throw the book at them in the hopes to get them on several charges, or, even better from the DA's point of view, you get them to plead guilty to two or three of the charges in return for dropping the other 8 or 9.
This is how the Criminal Justice system works folks, if you don't like it, become a judge! ---
I get very tired with the same plot device being used every time someone uses virtual worlds or gaming in a plot, what we always end up with is "what happens to you in the game, happens to you in life" or somesuch.
The Matrix did it, X-Files did it last night, The Thirteenth Floor (avoid this movie), did it too. The Matrix explained it as "the body cannot live without the mind" as I recall.
I'm getting really tired of this theme, which I understand must be used to actually induce some drama into these worlds, since most people probably wouldn't care about a virtual game or world, if there were very little consequences in the real world for whatever transpired "virtually."
But come on already, enough is enough! Can anyone point me to any study or theory that says Virtual Reality deaths may cause you to die? I doubt it.
Think of dreaming, we've all experienced dreams that seemed very very real to us, more real than any virtual experience is, or probably will be for the next 50 years. Do we have otherwise healthy people dying in their sleep due to violent dreams? Hell no! I've been chased by dinosaurs at least 5 times, and I've yet to wake up clawed, gnawed, and bleeding.
So, my challenge, to all would-be and current sci-fi writers is this: invent a way to make us actually care about what happens virtually with a better plot device than psycho-babble about the mind manifesting injuries and death upon the body.
I'm finished ranting now, so I will return you all to your regularly scheduled trolls.:) ---
Run Win2K, best of both worlds. I'm running it on my home machine, played Unreal Tournament and Age of Empires II: Age of Kings for several hours last night without so much as a hiccup. Most games run on Windows 2000, at least most good ones:) I wanted to slap the local Software Etc. punk when he told me that they weren't supposed to sell Windows 2000 to anyone other than small-business customers "Because you can't play any games on it" I told him I had the beta version, and it had worked just fine for my games for the last 6 months. He told me he had it, and not only couldn't he play games, it didn't work with his cable modem either. I promptly decided he was a retard and left. Useful link: http://ntgamepalace.3dfiles.com/ That site will tell you which games and hardware have been found to work with Windows 2000. Of course, it says that my HP Digital Camera C200 works with Windows 2000, and I can't get it to, so your mileage may vary. ---
I'm not a Mac Zealot by any stretch of the imagination, I rather loathe them, but I have to use them here at work, there's a G3 sitting next to my NT and Red Hat boxes here as I write this. However, I think that Mac OS X could be BIG, very BIG. Here's why:
1. It comes from somebody consumers already know, Apple, and they have a history of making things easy to use. It's a horribly closed platform, but easy to use because Apple controls both hardware and software ends.
2. It runs existing Mac apps. Now, granted, I'll put on my Windows hat here, and say that ain't a whole lot compared to Windows, but it's something.
3. It'll run Linux/BSD apps. Sure, it'll take some recompiling and tweaking, I'm sure, but once it's done, that gives you two of the three big end-user OS's. Why run Linux/BSD when you can run Mac OS X and use Linux-ish apps AND Mac apps? Now throw in WINE and you can run everything! (Okay, I'm getting too farfetched here)
4. It'll run Microsoft Office, the dominant Office Suite. I've used WordPerfect and StarOffice, and they're great products, don't get me wrong, but end-users are terribly stubborn about switching, no matter how little difference you or I see between graphical word processors.
5. It has a flashy user interface, I gave a Professor a new laptop yesterday, nifty new Sony VAIO, she was the most excited about Desktop Themes, yup, not DVD, not that it was twice as fast as her old laptop, not 128MB of RAM or 100Mbit networking, but that it had Desktop Themes.
6. You'll be able to just plug stuff in and it'll work. I can't stress enough how this is important, I reccommend USB devices to people all day long, since I know I'll eventually have to install them. I flatly refuse to install parallel port scanners and zip drives anymore. Sure, I can get them to work the majority of the time, but they suck, and when they don't work, you're screwed. My mom and dad, and yours, want a system they can plug something in, and it works, they don't want to track down text files to edit or re-compile a kernel. If Mac OS X delivers on the promise to keep the console completely hidden for 99% of things, this should happen.
Now what are the downsides?
1. It's not free, Linux is free, that's nice for those of us who are poor, but we're used to an OS coming with our new computer anyhow, and most users don't change that over the life of their computers, so this will be irrellevant to all but those who get fed up with windows and want to switch to something else without buying a new machine.
2. It comes from Apple, who tends to screw users from time to time, they abandon hardware standards arbitrarily and without warning. Anyone remember NuBus? ADB? SCSI? Floppy drives? You'll probably have to have an Apple computer to run it, and they're not cheap, despite what Bytemarks and selected Photoshop benchmarks compare PowerPC chips to Pentium III's at.
3. Apple keyboards and mice suck. This really isn't related to the OS thing, but I really hate them, and wanted to say so, again.:)
Will Mac OS X kill Linux? I doubt it. Will it convert Windows users to the Mac platform? Possibly. I don't think it's going to be the Holy Grail of operating systems, but I think it'll have a lot to offer to people who are like me, people who don't care about open-sourciness, they just want something that works well, is easy to use and support, that runs the software that users already know, as well as having the power and flexibility to satisfy advanced users. Don't forget that this will bring all those things that Linux has, Pre-Emptive Multi-Tasking, Protected Memory, etc. to the masses that are the Mac community, all with (hopefully) an easier-to-use paradigm in software and hardware installation. ---
Be careful there, I searched on Deja.com earlier today, and found reports of problems if you mount the image before burning it if you're using OS 9. I just burned an.iso about 15 minutes ago, I DID NOT mount the image first, I just selected Disc Image as the type of CD I wanted to make, then I drug the.iso file onto the data area of the window, and blammo, I churned out both a Corel Linux and a Linux Mandrake CD in no time flat, and they both work. This was using toast on a B&W G3. ---
Well, if you want quality, the new MS Intellimouse Explorers are $70 retail. We've been getting the Intellimouse w/ Intellieye too, those are somewhat cheaper. A good keyboard can easily run ~$70 or so, I have yet to see a USB Mac keyboard that I'm impressed with, our Adesso ergonomic keyboards failed en masse and we shipped them back. The iKey boards work, but their not ergonomic at all, and they're all ugly as sin. Right now I'm leaning toward getting a Kinesis keyboard to preserve my wrists, since there don't seem to be many viable economical models. ---
I don't have a problem with buying another mouse and another keyboard to go with each Apple system we buy, but I want Apple to allow me to NOT order the ones I don't want. We've got a closet full of Blueberry keyboards and the stupid hockey puck mice. It's fine if Apple wants to ship them with iMacs, but if I shell out the big bucks for a new G4, I don't want to shell out another couple hundred for a usuable mouse and keyboard on top of what Apple charges for their crappy ones. ---
I work at the University of Northern Iowa, and Napster has been banned here. Someone mentioned it to me, I ran a traceroute, the connection died at our Gateway. I contacted one of the network admins, and he told me that access to Napster was indeed blocked because:
1. It was used to pirate copyrighted material.
2. It was hogging a lot of bandwidth.
I told him I thought it was rather silly, and that people would just find a way around it in time. *shrug* Wasn't really a big deal to me, since I don't live on campus, I just download my MP3's at home with the cable modem, then FTP them to my work computer for my listening pleasure. ---
I can't say that I've seen much Christian bashing going on on Slashdot. Maybe you should give us a few examples here. I also don't really understand how religion really plays a factor in most of the discussions here, other than the dogmatic hatred of things Microsoft and the demonization of Bill Gates.
Katz has shown his anti-Christian leanings numerous times in the past. I've been forced several times to write letters to Christian groups and articles for Christian websites about some of Katz's more insulting, distasteful articles, and it looks like that time ago. Sorry, JonKatz, but there *ARE* reasons not to like you, and I've just exposed one of them.
Forced? Someone put a gun to your head? I've got nothing against advocacy, but are you trying to call down a Christian hit squad on Katz or something?
I suggest that you either not read Katz' articles (there's even a setting to disable them, as well as any other of the Slashdot crew's postings) or grow some thicker skin.
That said, I'm really not all that worried about the inclusiveness of Slashdot. If some opinion or belief that you hold is different than that of the majority of the users here, so what? So you post something, and a lot of people disagree with you and post something to that effect, where is the harm in this? It may get annoying to have people tell you you're smoking crack when you say you actually like Cyrix CPU's or Winmodems, but maybe they'll point out a reason that will change your mind about something, or show you what they're thinking so that you can respond with more evidence supporting your position.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you're guaranteed your speech will be popular, or that people will like you. It means that no one is preventing you from speaking your piece. I've yet to see a single well-thought out and rational disagreement with Linux, Atheism, Microsoft, Natalie Portman, Grits, or anything else moderated down unfairly.
To Summarize, make a rational statement, hope for rational replies. Try to learn something, don't use the soap box to preach from, use it to teach from, and try to learn from the others who are standing on it.
I think the Dreamcast controllers are the worst ones ever made. Who is the retard who thought it would be a good idea to have the cable come out of the _bottom_ of the controller? It constantly hits your fingers and is just a pain in the arse all around. Why couldn't they just run it out of the top of the controller like everyone else does?
I wish that there was a decent N64 style controller for my PC. I use the original Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad, which works well. But the original N64 controllers are my favorite. I dug out the SNES last weekend for a few games of Street Fighter II Turbo, my hand was cramping up after about 15 minutes of play with those old controllers.
Oh, the original NES Advantage gets props from me for being an excellent controller also. Mine was pretty durable, and when I finally did break it, my local "Authorized Nintendo Repair Center" replaced the broken part for free.
Worst controller of all time? The old NES Max controller. That thing was plain unusable, I don't know anyone who liked them. They had this wheel/directional pad combination that was incredibly touchy and impossible to control. ---
Slashdot Mirror
NO kididng on the name pronouncement. My name is Seth Bokelman, I can understand, possibly, the butchering of my last name, although I think it looks like it should be pronounced with a long o sound.
However, when the retard on the other end manages to mangle "Seth", then I know I'm certainly not dealing with anyone who's put more than a half second of thought into the speaking process. They are certainly not calling me because I want them to, or they'd have thought a little more about how to pronounce my name!
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Right, but the problem is that the harassment has already taken place when you receive the FIRST phone call. It should be an "opt-in" situation rather than an "opt-out" procedure.
:)
The other problem is that I have two roomies. I can't ask for their names to be removed legally, so I get stuck receiving the same phone call from the same company 15 times until they do reach my roomie. Sure, I could claim to be him, and ask that they stop calling, etc. but I'm sure that I'd do that only to find it was someone calling to offer him a job or somesuch, and I'd look like an ass.
For the last week, I have had a new service from US Worst, er West, that forces anyone who has their caller ID information blocked to speak their name and push a button. Then my phone rings with a distinctive ring, and I hear their name, and can opt to take the call or not. You can also put 25 numbers on a list to let through, if your parents have an unlisted number, etc.
The result? We've gotten only one telemarketing call in the last week, and that was from the University that I work asking my roomie to donate to the senior class project. They got through because the caller ID said "University of Northern Iowa". This is a DRAMATIC decrease from what was three calls per day before getting the service.
I don't work for US West, or hold any stock or anything stupid like that, and this is kind of pricey at $10 a month, but that includes caller ID service too, which is nice if you don't have it already. Since most of the telemarketers have automatically dialed phones, they can't get through the speak your name and push a button ordeal to reach us, which is just fine with me.
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Okay, I am not a statistician, but I do have a degree in Psychology. :) I don't think that this data would be all that useful. Don't the Nielsen ratings try to reflect every type of viewer? To have statistics that are even remotely valid for the population as a whole, you'd have to do random sampling, and make sure you got a decent cross-section of the types of viewers in the country.
:)
You'd need old people, young people, people with kids, rich people, poor people, white people, black people, and purple people eaters. Now, this does not lend itself well to the RePlay/TiVo/whatever model where the boxen cost $400. Why? Because the people who are going to buy these are most likely going to be white males in their 20's with disposable income who like gadgets. My parents and my grandparents aren't going to be shelling out $400 for a set-top box anytime soon, neither will most poor households, or households with children in them. Would you let your kids take control of your TiVo? You'd wind up with 20 hours of the TeleTubbies recorded.
The usage statistics generated from this data will be bizarre. The X-Files will have a 95% share, and about 1% of viewers will tune in for Touched by an Angel. This won't exactly be representative of the general viewing public.
I agree completely with the sentiment that the service/device should be free or discounted if they're going to use you for market research. I'd be willing to let them have tons of demo info on me if I got one for free, I can tolerate junk mail just fine, and telemarketers can't get through my phone blocks.
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Was it released on Laserdisc? I've got VHS, Laserdisc, and DVD. I saw this thing rumored yesterday and canceled my order for the VHS Widescreen edition, but I'll buy a Laserdisc version. This is where the DVD story first broke, as far as I can tell. There's also some info about a radio interview with Lucas, where he supposedly said this himself. Anyone have a link to where I can get the Laserdisc?
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Okay, what about FileMaker Pro? Our office runs a large FileMaker Pro database where we get our jobs from. Computer problems are reported to the office staff who enter them in the database and we retrieve them from there, enter stuff, etc. I can't ditch Windows until I can access FileMaker databases. :)
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Private Citizen looks useful, but I'm hoping that the new service I signed up for from US Worst, er US West will stop some of my annoying phone calls.
I've been able to strip out most of my IMAP e-mail spam by setting up "Rules" in Outlook to dump the stuff as it comes in.
What would be REALLY useful in an e-mail app would be an equivalent of the RBL for mail clients. You update your spam file daily, and anything from those known spam avenues is automatically deleted or moved into a "Spam?" folder or such. It'd need to be a universal format, something that Netscape/Outlook/Eudora could use, as well as the folks who like Pine/Elm/mail whatever.
My roomies and I receive about 3 Telemarketing calls a day, so yesterday I signed up for an option where anyone who would normally show up on caller-id as "Unavailable" or "Out of area" is prompted to speak their name and press a tone to connect to us. The phone then rings with a unique sound, and we hear their message, and are given the choice to take or deny their call. I'm betting most telemarketers won't even get that far, as they'll be unable to do the necessary button-pushing to enter their name, since the systems are highly automated.
Anyone have any experience with this?
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Gaining weight is easy, just take in about 5 Big Macs a day. I think that an individuals metabolism or body chemistry has more to do with it than anything else.
:) He eats half again as much as I do, we work out together several times a week. We both work at computers and pretty much have the same lifestyle. We're even the same damned height, but I've got probably 80 pounds on him. In essence, I can find nothing about him that says he should be skinny, but he is. Maybe he has worms.
My roomie and I are the same height. He's skinny, I'm not.
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I think that the Pinkerton program is going about this all wrong, they're not targeting the truly dangerous group of people in America's high schools. This isn't an anti-jock rant or anything, but I feel that the Columbine killers most likely reacted to the abuse put upon them on a constant basis by the other students in their high school. Just think about it for a moment, most kids don't just decide to up and waste their classmates for no good reason, and I think it's time that educators, parents, and law enforcement stopped treating high school conflicts like playground fights.
I was by no means a jock in high school, but I didn't fit any of these geek stereotypes either. I participated in the Track & Golf teams, as well as Speech, Drama, and Yearbook. I never played a single game of D&D, and we only had Wolf3D, no Doom yet.
When I look back at some of the bastards who made my day hell, I realize that it is terrifyingly easy to understand how anyone could be driven to depression, suicide, or revenge by the purposefully cruel actions of their classmates. I got slammed against lockers, given "titty twisters" in the locker rooms, kicked, hit, and generally verbally abused as well.
I'm not trying to tell my story here, I'm sure most of you experienced things that very similar, and I'm sure many of the "jocks" did as well, especially from upperclassmen in the same sports.
So what do we do about this problem? Blaming the victims will get us nowhere. If you want to create a resource for kids who need help, howabout one where they can go to report the abusive actions of their peers, where school administrators won't tell them to "tough it out" or to "deal with it". I never ONCE felt that any teacher or administrator in my high school would give two craps that Andy Jahnke tried to stuff me in a locker. (He's dead now, head-on car accident, I laughed when I heard that, seriously, maybe there is something to karma.)
My suggestion, Pinkerton, is howabout not rewarding students for turning people in, but providing a resource for students and administrators about what steps to take to stop these abuses. Students should have someone, several someones in fact, at every school who will be their advocates in these cases. There should be a local police liason with the high school, and these cases should result in charges being filed against the abusers.
Too often, I feel that these things are viewed as harmless, when the victims are truly physically and emotionally harmed.
If you leave bruises on a person, it's assault. Period. There should be no suspensions from sports, you're off the team permanently. You do it again, or so-help-me-god retaliate against the person for reporting you, and you're expelled, as well as violating your probation.
There need to be real consequences for those who abuse their fellow students. Not 15 laps, not detention. If I walked into my co-workers office and slugged him in the stomach, would my boss make me work late? No, I'd be charged and sentenced by the legal system, and fired from my job.
Why is this not similar if I'm a senior in high school? Why do those being abused not report the cases of abuse to the police and/or school administrators? Why do we as a society view it as less-severe if the participants in these forms of violence are still in high school?
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I don't know anything about percentages or what causes them, but I've got two DVD's now that haven't worked, right out of the shrinkwrap. One was a "There's Something About Mary" disc, and the other was Monty Python's Flying Circus volume I. Both of these would just go nuts on multiple players, both my hardware player in my entertainment system and multiple PC/Mac DVD drives. I returned them to Sam's Club and got new ones, but it was weird. Are these type of things caused by copy protection or shitty discs?
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I've got it almost done, does anyone have a place to mirror it at? If so, I can give them a fast download, I just can't get slashdotted.
e-mail me: seth.bokelman@uni.edu
ICQ: 6497760
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Not meant as flamebait here, but it's hard enough getting the programs you WANT to run sometimes, I can't imagine that many viruses would be able to get themselves up and running without copious amounts of user stupidity.
I'm not saying that some programs you want to run don't work, I'm just saying that sometimes I get tired of having to install forty-eleven new packages just to get a damned ICQ client to run.
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No, you're not stealing. You're taking advantage of a company selling things below their cost, because they know that once the average user has one, they'll be forced to shell out more money to the company, rather than give the machine up.
Buying the machine and not using their service is not stealing, because the machine is YOURS. You can drop it off a building, would that be stealing? If I buy a Sony CD Player, am I obligated to buy Sony CD's to play on it? No, I'm not.
Now, if Netpliance is smart, they just make the device free with a 2 year commitment to their service, and if you terminate the service after the first month, you either have to return the device or pay a couple hundred bucks to cover the cost of the machine. That would be completely legal, and ethical.
If you buy something, it is yours to do with as you wish. If you sign a contract, you must abide by the terms of the contract. Netpliance tried to avoid the contracts, which can scare off many users, but they got bitten in the arse by people who could blow a hundred bucks on one of their boxes, add another hundred bucks in parts, and have a machine without the need for their service. Now they're being forced to use contracts, which they probably should have used all along.
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To me, that bug list just shows that most of the bugs in Windows 2000 are fairly minor things, which only occur in specific situations, and honestly, all OS's have problems like this, Yes, even Linux.
:)
While far from a bug list, here's a couple things that have left me baffled in my brief experience with Linux in the last few weeks.
1. If I install Red Hat on a certain set of Machines (Gateway 2000 P5-120 & P5-166's) X fails to start. Every time, after a clean install, it detects the card right, but doesn't work, just bombs back to the command prompt.
2. X works fine in Mandrake, BUT, the ethernet cards do not! They work fine in Red Hat, however. Again, they're detected, and as far as I can tell are using the same drivers, but they don't work.
3. Corel Linux works fine with both of these things, right out of the box. Yes, I know Corel is based on Debian, not Red Hat. I'm just saying that it works.
I tried this on four different machines, same basic configuration, with the same results. And while I didn't spend hours trying to troubleshoot it or anything, I'd consider any of these to be more of a "show-stopping" bug than that list of Windows 2000 glitches.
I'm not trying to say Windows 2000 is better than Linux, don't get me wrong, I just get a little sick of the holier-than-thou attitude around here sometimes, as if Linux is perfect, and doesn't have any bugs.
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Hmm, I feel the other way, I am mildly amused by the show, but honestly it's never seemed to be even as clever as Beavis & Butthead were. The movie, on the other hand, was great, it had catchy music, an actual message, and enough vulgarity to shock anyone. Now don't get me wrong, I like the show, but it usually seems to be about what taboos they can break this week, rather than carrying a decent story line.
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What do they do to persuade you to use their proxy servers? I don't use them here, after the clueless cable guy left I removed the Proxy settings from my browsers, and all works fine, been that way for 6 months.
Then again, my @Home may be non-standard, a friend of mine downloaded a whole CD from me last week, and said "You must not have AT&T @Home" and I told him that I did. He was amazed because I don't have an "upload cap" which apparently others do, he was getting a steady 60K/second FTP'ing from an old CD-ROM drive on a P5-120 in my basement.
If it helps, I'm in Waterloo, Iowa and I'm on the 24.6.200.* subnet.
Does anyone know anymore about this? I've often wondered if I'm on a "main" subnet or something, since the DNS servers are 24.6.200.15 and 24.6.200.17, it just seems strange that they'd have 2 DNS servers for every subnet.
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It makes total sense to me, when you catch somebody doing something like this, you throw the book at them. Having L0phtCrack isn't illegal, using it to commit a crime is.
IANAL, but I do have a minor in Criminal Justice, and I know that in Iowa at least, you can be charged with posession of burglary tools for having a SCREWDRIVER. Now of course they don't charge everyone who owns a screwdriver, they charge those people who use it as a tool to commit a crime.
I completely understand why the DA filed so many charges, in this kind of case, you never know what you can make stick, you can't try them again later if you don't get them the first time (double jeopardy applies) so you throw the book at them in the hopes to get them on several charges, or, even better from the DA's point of view, you get them to plead guilty to two or three of the charges in return for dropping the other 8 or 9.
This is how the Criminal Justice system works folks, if you don't like it, become a judge!
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I get very tired with the same plot device being used every time someone uses virtual worlds or gaming in a plot, what we always end up with is "what happens to you in the game, happens to you in life" or somesuch.
:)
The Matrix did it, X-Files did it last night, The Thirteenth Floor (avoid this movie), did it too. The Matrix explained it as "the body cannot live without the mind" as I recall.
I'm getting really tired of this theme, which I understand must be used to actually induce some drama into these worlds, since most people probably wouldn't care about a virtual game or world, if there were very little consequences in the real world for whatever transpired "virtually."
But come on already, enough is enough! Can anyone point me to any study or theory that says Virtual Reality deaths may cause you to die? I doubt it.
Think of dreaming, we've all experienced dreams that seemed very very real to us, more real than any virtual experience is, or probably will be for the next 50 years. Do we have otherwise healthy people dying in their sleep due to violent dreams? Hell no! I've been chased by dinosaurs at least 5 times, and I've yet to wake up clawed, gnawed, and bleeding.
So, my challenge, to all would-be and current sci-fi writers is this: invent a way to make us actually care about what happens virtually with a better plot device than psycho-babble about the mind manifesting injuries and death upon the body.
I'm finished ranting now, so I will return you all to your regularly scheduled trolls.
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Run Win2K, best of both worlds. I'm running it on my home machine, played Unreal Tournament and Age of Empires II: Age of Kings for several hours last night without so much as a hiccup. Most games run on Windows 2000, at least most good ones :) I wanted to slap the local Software Etc. punk when he told me that they weren't supposed to sell Windows 2000 to anyone other than small-business customers "Because you can't play any games on it" I told him I had the beta version, and it had worked just fine for my games for the last 6 months. He told me he had it, and not only couldn't he play games, it didn't work with his cable modem either. I promptly decided he was a retard and left. Useful link: http://ntgamepalace.3dfiles.com/ That site will tell you which games and hardware have been found to work with Windows 2000. Of course, it says that my HP Digital Camera C200 works with Windows 2000, and I can't get it to, so your mileage may vary.
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I respectfully disagree.
:)
I'm not a Mac Zealot by any stretch of the imagination, I rather loathe them, but I have to use them here at work, there's a G3 sitting next to my NT and Red Hat boxes here as I write this. However, I think that Mac OS X could be BIG, very BIG. Here's why:
1. It comes from somebody consumers already know, Apple, and they have a history of making things easy to use. It's a horribly closed platform, but easy to use because Apple controls both hardware and software ends.
2. It runs existing Mac apps. Now, granted, I'll put on my Windows hat here, and say that ain't a whole lot compared to Windows, but it's something.
3. It'll run Linux/BSD apps. Sure, it'll take some recompiling and tweaking, I'm sure, but once it's done, that gives you two of the three big end-user OS's. Why run Linux/BSD when you can run Mac OS X and use Linux-ish apps AND Mac apps? Now throw in WINE and you can run everything! (Okay, I'm getting too farfetched here)
4. It'll run Microsoft Office, the dominant Office Suite. I've used WordPerfect and StarOffice, and they're great products, don't get me wrong, but end-users are terribly stubborn about switching, no matter how little difference you or I see between graphical word processors.
5. It has a flashy user interface, I gave a Professor a new laptop yesterday, nifty new Sony VAIO, she was the most excited about Desktop Themes, yup, not DVD, not that it was twice as fast as her old laptop, not 128MB of RAM or 100Mbit networking, but that it had Desktop Themes.
6. You'll be able to just plug stuff in and it'll work. I can't stress enough how this is important, I reccommend USB devices to people all day long, since I know I'll eventually have to install them. I flatly refuse to install parallel port scanners and zip drives anymore. Sure, I can get them to work the majority of the time, but they suck, and when they don't work, you're screwed. My mom and dad, and yours, want a system they can plug something in, and it works, they don't want to track down text files to edit or re-compile a kernel. If Mac OS X delivers on the promise to keep the console completely hidden for 99% of things, this should happen.
Now what are the downsides?
1. It's not free, Linux is free, that's nice for those of us who are poor, but we're used to an OS coming with our new computer anyhow, and most users don't change that over the life of their computers, so this will be irrellevant to all but those who get fed up with windows and want to switch to something else without buying a new machine.
2. It comes from Apple, who tends to screw users from time to time, they abandon hardware standards arbitrarily and without warning. Anyone remember NuBus? ADB? SCSI? Floppy drives? You'll probably have to have an Apple computer to run it, and they're not cheap, despite what Bytemarks and selected Photoshop benchmarks compare PowerPC chips to Pentium III's at.
3. Apple keyboards and mice suck. This really isn't related to the OS thing, but I really hate them, and wanted to say so, again.
Will Mac OS X kill Linux? I doubt it. Will it convert Windows users to the Mac platform? Possibly. I don't think it's going to be the Holy Grail of operating systems, but I think it'll have a lot to offer to people who are like me, people who don't care about open-sourciness, they just want something that works well, is easy to use and support, that runs the software that users already know, as well as having the power and flexibility to satisfy advanced users. Don't forget that this will bring all those things that Linux has, Pre-Emptive Multi-Tasking, Protected Memory, etc. to the masses that are the Mac community, all with (hopefully) an easier-to-use paradigm in software and hardware installation.
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Be careful there, I searched on Deja.com earlier today, and found reports of problems if you mount the image before burning it if you're using OS 9. I just burned an .iso about 15 minutes ago, I DID NOT mount the image first, I just selected Disc Image as the type of CD I wanted to make, then I drug the .iso file onto the data area of the window, and blammo, I churned out both a Corel Linux and a Linux Mandrake CD in no time flat, and they both work. This was using toast on a B&W G3.
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Well, if you want quality, the new MS Intellimouse Explorers are $70 retail. We've been getting the Intellimouse w/ Intellieye too, those are somewhat cheaper. A good keyboard can easily run ~$70 or so, I have yet to see a USB Mac keyboard that I'm impressed with, our Adesso ergonomic keyboards failed en masse and we shipped them back. The iKey boards work, but their not ergonomic at all, and they're all ugly as sin. Right now I'm leaning toward getting a Kinesis keyboard to preserve my wrists, since there don't seem to be many viable economical models.
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I don't have a problem with buying another mouse and another keyboard to go with each Apple system we buy, but I want Apple to allow me to NOT order the ones I don't want. We've got a closet full of Blueberry keyboards and the stupid hockey puck mice. It's fine if Apple wants to ship them with iMacs, but if I shell out the big bucks for a new G4, I don't want to shell out another couple hundred for a usuable mouse and keyboard on top of what Apple charges for their crappy ones.
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1. It was used to pirate copyrighted material.
2. It was hogging a lot of bandwidth.
I told him I thought it was rather silly, and that people would just find a way around it in time. *shrug* Wasn't really a big deal to me, since I don't live on campus, I just download my MP3's at home with the cable modem, then FTP them to my work computer for my listening pleasure.
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I can't say that I've seen much Christian bashing going on on Slashdot. Maybe you should give us a few examples here. I also don't really understand how religion really plays a factor in most of the discussions here, other than the dogmatic hatred of things Microsoft and the demonization of Bill Gates.
Katz has shown his anti-Christian leanings numerous times in the past. I've been forced several times to write letters to Christian groups and articles for Christian websites about some of Katz's more insulting, distasteful articles, and it looks like that time ago. Sorry, JonKatz, but there *ARE* reasons not to like you, and I've just exposed one of them.
Forced? Someone put a gun to your head? I've got nothing against advocacy, but are you trying to call down a Christian hit squad on Katz or something?
I suggest that you either not read Katz' articles (there's even a setting to disable them, as well as any other of the Slashdot crew's postings) or grow some thicker skin.
That said, I'm really not all that worried about the inclusiveness of Slashdot. If some opinion or belief that you hold is different than that of the majority of the users here, so what? So you post something, and a lot of people disagree with you and post something to that effect, where is the harm in this? It may get annoying to have people tell you you're smoking crack when you say you actually like Cyrix CPU's or Winmodems, but maybe they'll point out a reason that will change your mind about something, or show you what they're thinking so that you can respond with more evidence supporting your position.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you're guaranteed your speech will be popular, or that people will like you. It means that no one is preventing you from speaking your piece. I've yet to see a single well-thought out and rational disagreement with Linux, Atheism, Microsoft, Natalie Portman, Grits, or anything else moderated down unfairly.
To Summarize, make a rational statement, hope for rational replies. Try to learn something, don't use the soap box to preach from, use it to teach from, and try to learn from the others who are standing on it.
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I think the Dreamcast controllers are the worst ones ever made. Who is the retard who thought it would be a good idea to have the cable come out of the _bottom_ of the controller? It constantly hits your fingers and is just a pain in the arse all around. Why couldn't they just run it out of the top of the controller like everyone else does?
I wish that there was a decent N64 style controller for my PC. I use the original Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad, which works well. But the original N64 controllers are my favorite. I dug out the SNES last weekend for a few games of Street Fighter II Turbo, my hand was cramping up after about 15 minutes of play with those old controllers.
Oh, the original NES Advantage gets props from me for being an excellent controller also. Mine was pretty durable, and when I finally did break it, my local "Authorized Nintendo Repair Center" replaced the broken part for free.
Worst controller of all time? The old NES Max controller. That thing was plain unusable, I don't know anyone who liked them. They had this wheel/directional pad combination that was incredibly touchy and impossible to control.
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