I'm seeing a lot of comments from people who seem to believe that the "file sharers" being targetted were people trading warez software. However, I believe that the "problem" as DALnet saw it was people trading mp3s. Some of you may say "so what, who cares," but allow me to make a case for those of us being displaced.
I like techno/euro/rave/house music. There's not a very big shelf for that kind of thing down at the local CD shop. Much of the best of this kind of music isn't even available on store shelves anywhere. But it *could* be found, lurking on the Internet. Like many others, I tried Kazaa, and was immediately turned off by all the adware and spyware. I uninstalled it, ran AdAware, and did the best I could to clean up my system.
That's where IRC came in. I really liked getting my underground music through DALnet's IRC network. Sure, it took a little more work than using Kazaa, but I liked knowing that I had complete control over what was being downloaded onto my computer. DALnet's network was always pretty well stocked. However, as the DDOS attacks persisted, it became more and more difficult to get onto DALnet at a convenient time to find the latest tracks from the likes of Mistress Barbara, Carl Cox, et. al.
I view this as a loss. I've gone ahead and installed KazaaLite on my desktop, but I'm still leery about software that indiscriminately writes to my disk and offers up arbitrary folders for sharing. I don't have the source code for it, so I don't know what it's doing.
No such thing [as code that wasn't designed to be unit tested]. IF it can't be unit tested, then it's really, really bad code. The like of which no one has seen before
Well, that's a pretty gratuitous oversimplification. Obviously, you've never written a lick of code that has to deal with I/O, GUIs, or multi-threading. How exactly do you propose to unit test a low-level class that formats a drive? How about your GUI? What about a class that interacts with DNS's? Or hosts an FTP site? Are you going to create/delete a thousand files on your drive, just to do your test? Are you going to write up a bunch of dummy/proxy network clients to test your socket traffic?
At some point, once you've gained a little coding experience, you'll learn that if you have to write more testing code than code being tested, than chances are your testing code has more bugs than the original code. You'll realize that there are some cases, albeit isolated ones, where the effort involved in writing unit tests for a particular component outweigh the potential time savings compared to testing it manually and leaving it alone.
Intelligent, fine-grained class factorization can minimize the occurrence of these classes, but nevertheless, they'll come up eventually.
However, there is a very agressive pornography industry that would like nothing better then to sell porography to my child.
That is absolutely ludicrous. The adult entertainment industry has absolutely no interest in selling their products to children, for several reasons, not the least of which are they have no money, it's illegal, and it's immoral. Sexual instinct is one of the most powerful instincts, and needs no encouragement, or "pre-seeding" like the tobacco industry allegedly resorts to.
Your next paragraph, however, about the video game industry marketing to kids is right on the mark, and makes sense. It's still not the kids paying for the games, it's the parents, but still, the advertising aims to get the kid so enamoured with the game that they nag their parents into mindlessly buying it for them, in lieu of actual affection and attention.
Video game makers advertise on kids TV channels, and during cartoon time slots, and in magazines read by kids. The porno industry does not, never has, and never complains about it because, I repeat, they have no interest in kids.
So what? So companies want to track my interests so they can target advertising at me. So? Big deal. I say GOOD! I'm tired of getting coupons for panty shields and fliers for a new daycare opening down the street. But if Best Buy is having a sale on digital cameras, I'd like to hear about that.
Why is everyone so uptight about companies fine-tuning targeted advertising? Why can't people see the benefits of this? Maybe the local butcher can't afford to send a bulk mailing to the whole neighborhood, but if they could exclude mailings to all known vegetarians and folks of particular religions, then maybe they could afford to send the ads to the remaining few hundred. Why is this a bad thing? People are more informed of options that are relevant to their interests, companies can save money and increase profits (which, I suppose, is bad, unless like 90% of you reading this, you WORK for a company), everybody wins!
... the seemingly instant appearance and remarkably quick subsequent overuse of the trendy new geek buzzword "blog?" I mean, it was even thrown into the subject and description of this story twice, and it's not even relevant! All of a sudden, it seems you're not cool unless you've got a blog, and you're even LESS cool if you don't even know what it means.
Nevermind that the word itself has been appropriated as if it were brand new, and that the geeks using it are apparently ignorant to the fact that it's not even a new word. It was a collectible toy back in the 90's. Remember those stupid little coloured disks with the characters on them, that kids were trading in the playgrounds?
I don't know why it bugs me so much, but it does. Every time I see the word, I just want to slap the person using it. It seems to objectify everything that the Linux community professes to abhor. Trendy buzzwords with no substance, just for the sake of inclusion in an elite subculture that is completely manufactured simply for the sole purpose of being an elite subculture.
I mean really... how is a blog any different than any other web page? When I load up a page, how can I tell whether it's a blog or just a normal webpage. You can't! It's all in how the page was created. So why don't people say "I've got to get home, I've got some FrontPaging to do."? Because up until now, no one thought it was cool to adopt such a shameless, blatant buzzword in a community such as ours.
The sooner this idiotic "blogging" craze dies, the better, IMHO.
Even though the issue is clearly about an imposter who was fraudulently posing as an ISC^2 representive, trying to extort money from unsuspecting netizens?
"logging an IP" is the same as "the government coming to get you?"
THAT is a ridiculous comparison. Logging an IP is a harmless, passive audit activity. Being arrested is... forget it, I can't believe I even wasted this much thought on your absurd comment.
When will Nintendo catch up with the 90's?
on
New Gameboy Announced
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is great and all, but it is still frontlit. When will Nintendo realize that people want a backlit, colour LCD display. They're cheaper than ever nowadays, and Sega had such a beast in the early 90's (or was it even the late 80's?) with the GameGear.
No it is not. VB is more popular than C, C#, or C++. It is the most widely used programming language in the world.
VB.NET and C#.NET both compile to the same intermediate bytecodes. The.NET runtime runs these bytecode classes and can't tell (nor does it care) what language the original code was written in.
Just an FYI, but it is incorrect to say that companies are moving "from VB to.NET." If they are moving to.NET, then they still must program in either VB or C# (yes, yes, or J#, fine). Since these companies are not likely to retrain their staff in C#, or dump them all and recruit C# coders, they will probably move from ASP in VB to ASP.NET in VB.NET. They'll still be using VB and ASP - just the newest versions of them.
I can go to any university and sit in on any lecture I want WITHOUT paying for it.
This is just plain false. Universities are private property. If you try to sit in on a class you didn't pay for, you are TRESSPASSING.
Granted, some institutions permit people to "audit" certain classes - that is, sit in on them without getting credit for the course or paying for it. But that is usually reserved for special cases, or at least students who are already paying for OTHER courses. Not just some Joe Schmoe off the street.
While I agree with your point of view (it is the students' responsibility to learn, not the prof's), your last comment disturbs me. I, for one, and somewhat reassured that the profs are getting so riled up over this. I don't think it means that they're "behind the times," I think it means that they're genuinely and sincerely devoted to helping people learn. I believe they're concerned that most of the people who are not paying attention do not already understand the material, and are in fact just being lazy and distracted.
True, their final marks will bear this out, but I still like to think that the profs are just trying to make a difference, rather than just fulfilling their contract obligations and spewing out the info for those who want it, and damn those who don't.
Re:So whats the role of the professor that you pay
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 4, Informative
Profs are not there to spoonfeed you. The real world doesn't spoon feed you. They are there to offer up the info on a silver platter, but you still must make the effort to reach out and grab it.
Colleges and universities don't owe you an education. They owe you access to information in a format optimal for learning. You still must actually do something to get it.
Virtually all of the info you'd learn in university is available in libraries and on the internet. So why then do companies still prefer people with little pieces of paper? Because actions speak louder than words. Any basement-dwelling sociopathic geek can SAY they could learn how to calculate the Big O of various fibonnacci algorithms, but the paper proves that this person actually did learn what he was asked to learn. And that demonstrates that he could learn virtually anything else you ask him do. He's already demonstrated that he's a do-er, a go-getter. He's the one who actually participated in classes and made the effort to really understand the course material.
And that doesn't just mean paying attention in class - that means actually putting in effort outside of the classroom.
What people do not realize is that people have become multi-tasking capable.
*raises eyebrows* Excuse me? We've "become" multi-tasking capable? Humans have been multi-tasking capable for thousands of years. It's part of our nature. And who, exactly, doesn't "realize" this, as you assert?
I don't mean to rip on you SerpentMage, I just get irritated at people who not only think they've just "discovered" something that's obviously extremely old, but who also think they're in some sort of elite few who know it. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not that special. Virtually everyone multi-tasks, you just don't see it because you're too in awe of your own mastery of simultaneously reading Slashdot and watching Star Trek, while compiling a kernel.
Classes do not have to be boring! That is what many professeurs do not understand.
Again, this is a ridiculous statement, offered only to serve your own ego. I challenge you to find me one single professor anywhere on the planet who sincerely believes that "classes are supposed to be boring." That's absurd. No one thinks that.
And at the risk of turning this into a spelling flame, perhaps you should have paid more attention to your English professor while you were busy learning to multi-task in grade 8.
If the class is interesting then the students will stay on task
Not everyone finds network analysis interesting, but it is a required part of the cirriculum for many comp sci degrees. Some people find it fascinating.
It is not the material that makes it boring or interesting, it is the student. People have different interests. Not all subjects are inherently interesting to everyone. But they still must learn it, if they want that piece of paper.
You totally missed the point. Read his post again. The submitter claims TIVO mistook a man for being pregnant and gay, while the article clearly indicates that it was AMAZON.COM that made that mistake in regards to one user buying books.
Please ensure your brain is fully in place before engaging your loud, rude mouth, next time.
Also, why are they redirecting you to another site? It's because they want to track you across the web.
Bull pucky. They're redirecting you across the web because they don't own the server on which they're advertising. Slashdot carries IBM ads. When you click on the link, you are redirected to IBM's website. The reason for this is obvious - IBM doesn't mirror their entire website onto the server of every site they advertise on.
The fact that you seem to think that the reason is to track you shows just how clueless you are about web design. FYI, it is far, far easier to "track" a visitor across content on a single server, rather than across multiple, widely diverse servers. You might want to consider taking off your tinfoil hat and reading a book or two.
Sure. Mod me down. Censor me. If they can't hear me, it can't be true, right? But the truth is, Slashdot makes such a huge deal over tiny little token decisions like this, and ignores the literally hundreds of opposite decisions (i.e, choosing Microsoft) every day. I'm a Linux guy, but I don't think any service is done to Linux by trying to hide our own insecurities through modding down those who speak the truth.
Wow, one little obscure region that no one's ever heard of, in a country on the other side of the world (not to mention poverty line), switched too Linux. Woot.
And in other news, another 238 states embraced Microsoft products in their civil offices today.
Slashdot Mirror
I like techno/euro/rave/house music. There's not a very big shelf for that kind of thing down at the local CD shop. Much of the best of this kind of music isn't even available on store shelves anywhere. But it *could* be found, lurking on the Internet. Like many others, I tried Kazaa, and was immediately turned off by all the adware and spyware. I uninstalled it, ran AdAware, and did the best I could to clean up my system.
That's where IRC came in. I really liked getting my underground music through DALnet's IRC network. Sure, it took a little more work than using Kazaa, but I liked knowing that I had complete control over what was being downloaded onto my computer. DALnet's network was always pretty well stocked. However, as the DDOS attacks persisted, it became more and more difficult to get onto DALnet at a convenient time to find the latest tracks from the likes of Mistress Barbara, Carl Cox, et. al.
I view this as a loss. I've gone ahead and installed KazaaLite on my desktop, but I'm still leery about software that indiscriminately writes to my disk and offers up arbitrary folders for sharing. I don't have the source code for it, so I don't know what it's doing.
Flame away,
Kombat
Well, that's a pretty gratuitous oversimplification. Obviously, you've never written a lick of code that has to deal with I/O, GUIs, or multi-threading. How exactly do you propose to unit test a low-level class that formats a drive? How about your GUI? What about a class that interacts with DNS's? Or hosts an FTP site? Are you going to create/delete a thousand files on your drive, just to do your test? Are you going to write up a bunch of dummy/proxy network clients to test your socket traffic?
At some point, once you've gained a little coding experience, you'll learn that if you have to write more testing code than code being tested, than chances are your testing code has more bugs than the original code. You'll realize that there are some cases, albeit isolated ones, where the effort involved in writing unit tests for a particular component outweigh the potential time savings compared to testing it manually and leaving it alone.
Intelligent, fine-grained class factorization can minimize the occurrence of these classes, but nevertheless, they'll come up eventually.
That is absolutely ludicrous. The adult entertainment industry has absolutely no interest in selling their products to children, for several reasons, not the least of which are they have no money, it's illegal, and it's immoral. Sexual instinct is one of the most powerful instincts, and needs no encouragement, or "pre-seeding" like the tobacco industry allegedly resorts to.
Your next paragraph, however, about the video game industry marketing to kids is right on the mark, and makes sense. It's still not the kids paying for the games, it's the parents, but still, the advertising aims to get the kid so enamoured with the game that they nag their parents into mindlessly buying it for them, in lieu of actual affection and attention.
Video game makers advertise on kids TV channels, and during cartoon time slots, and in magazines read by kids. The porno industry does not, never has, and never complains about it because, I repeat, they have no interest in kids.
I can't believe you'd say something so ignorant.
Why is everyone so uptight about companies fine-tuning targeted advertising? Why can't people see the benefits of this? Maybe the local butcher can't afford to send a bulk mailing to the whole neighborhood, but if they could exclude mailings to all known vegetarians and folks of particular religions, then maybe they could afford to send the ads to the remaining few hundred. Why is this a bad thing? People are more informed of options that are relevant to their interests, companies can save money and increase profits (which, I suppose, is bad, unless like 90% of you reading this, you WORK for a company), everybody wins!
What's the problem here?
*Insert MIDI of swanky-sounding porno synth music here*
Take some friggin' pride in your work, kid.
LOL! Right you are. I got my names mixed up. :) But I still detest this "blogging" flash in the pan.
Nevermind that the word itself has been appropriated as if it were brand new, and that the geeks using it are apparently ignorant to the fact that it's not even a new word. It was a collectible toy back in the 90's. Remember those stupid little coloured disks with the characters on them, that kids were trading in the playgrounds?
I don't know why it bugs me so much, but it does. Every time I see the word, I just want to slap the person using it. It seems to objectify everything that the Linux community professes to abhor. Trendy buzzwords with no substance, just for the sake of inclusion in an elite subculture that is completely manufactured simply for the sole purpose of being an elite subculture.
I mean really... how is a blog any different than any other web page? When I load up a page, how can I tell whether it's a blog or just a normal webpage. You can't! It's all in how the page was created. So why don't people say "I've got to get home, I've got some FrontPaging to do."? Because up until now, no one thought it was cool to adopt such a shameless, blatant buzzword in a community such as ours.
The sooner this idiotic "blogging" craze dies, the better, IMHO.
Even though the issue is clearly about an imposter who was fraudulently posing as an ISC^2 representive, trying to extort money from unsuspecting netizens?
THAT is a ridiculous comparison. Logging an IP is a harmless, passive audit activity. Being arrested is ... forget it, I can't believe I even wasted this much thought on your absurd comment.
This is great and all, but it is still frontlit. When will Nintendo realize that people want a backlit, colour LCD display. They're cheaper than ever nowadays, and Sega had such a beast in the early 90's (or was it even the late 80's?) with the GameGear.
VB.NET and C#.NET both compile to the same intermediate bytecodes. The .NET runtime runs these bytecode classes and can't tell (nor does it care) what language the original code was written in.
Just an FYI, but it is incorrect to say that companies are moving "from VB to .NET." If they are moving to .NET, then they still must program in either VB or C# (yes, yes, or J#, fine). Since these companies are not likely to retrain their staff in C#, or dump them all and recruit C# coders, they will probably move from ASP in VB to ASP.NET in VB.NET. They'll still be using VB and ASP - just the newest versions of them.
This is just plain false. Universities are private property. If you try to sit in on a class you didn't pay for, you are TRESSPASSING.
Granted, some institutions permit people to "audit" certain classes - that is, sit in on them without getting credit for the course or paying for it. But that is usually reserved for special cases, or at least students who are already paying for OTHER courses. Not just some Joe Schmoe off the street.
While I agree with your point of view (it is the students' responsibility to learn, not the prof's), your last comment disturbs me. I, for one, and somewhat reassured that the profs are getting so riled up over this. I don't think it means that they're "behind the times," I think it means that they're genuinely and sincerely devoted to helping people learn. I believe they're concerned that most of the people who are not paying attention do not already understand the material, and are in fact just being lazy and distracted.
True, their final marks will bear this out, but I still like to think that the profs are just trying to make a difference, rather than just fulfilling their contract obligations and spewing out the info for those who want it, and damn those who don't.
Colleges and universities don't owe you an education. They owe you access to information in a format optimal for learning. You still must actually do something to get it.
Virtually all of the info you'd learn in university is available in libraries and on the internet. So why then do companies still prefer people with little pieces of paper? Because actions speak louder than words. Any basement-dwelling sociopathic geek can SAY they could learn how to calculate the Big O of various fibonnacci algorithms, but the paper proves that this person actually did learn what he was asked to learn. And that demonstrates that he could learn virtually anything else you ask him do. He's already demonstrated that he's a do-er, a go-getter. He's the one who actually participated in classes and made the effort to really understand the course material.
And that doesn't just mean paying attention in class - that means actually putting in effort outside of the classroom.
*raises eyebrows* Excuse me? We've "become" multi-tasking capable? Humans have been multi-tasking capable for thousands of years. It's part of our nature. And who, exactly, doesn't "realize" this, as you assert?
I don't mean to rip on you SerpentMage, I just get irritated at people who not only think they've just "discovered" something that's obviously extremely old, but who also think they're in some sort of elite few who know it. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not that special. Virtually everyone multi-tasks, you just don't see it because you're too in awe of your own mastery of simultaneously reading Slashdot and watching Star Trek, while compiling a kernel.
Classes do not have to be boring! That is what many professeurs do not understand.
Again, this is a ridiculous statement, offered only to serve your own ego. I challenge you to find me one single professor anywhere on the planet who sincerely believes that "classes are supposed to be boring." That's absurd. No one thinks that.
And at the risk of turning this into a spelling flame, perhaps you should have paid more attention to your English professor while you were busy learning to multi-task in grade 8.
Not everyone finds network analysis interesting, but it is a required part of the cirriculum for many comp sci degrees. Some people find it fascinating.
It is not the material that makes it boring or interesting, it is the student. People have different interests. Not all subjects are inherently interesting to everyone. But they still must learn it, if they want that piece of paper.
Not to mention, provoking an exciting visit to your home by some very concerned feds...
Please ensure your brain is fully in place before engaging your loud, rude mouth, next time.
Bull pucky. They're redirecting you across the web because they don't own the server on which they're advertising. Slashdot carries IBM ads. When you click on the link, you are redirected to IBM's website. The reason for this is obvious - IBM doesn't mirror their entire website onto the server of every site they advertise on.
The fact that you seem to think that the reason is to track you shows just how clueless you are about web design. FYI, it is far, far easier to "track" a visitor across content on a single server, rather than across multiple, widely diverse servers. You might want to consider taking off your tinfoil hat and reading a book or two.
If you've encased your car with lead, then you wouldn't be listening to ANY radio frequency. It works both ways, you know.
Sure. Mod me down. Censor me. If they can't hear me, it can't be true, right? But the truth is, Slashdot makes such a huge deal over tiny little token decisions like this, and ignores the literally hundreds of opposite decisions (i.e, choosing Microsoft) every day. I'm a Linux guy, but I don't think any service is done to Linux by trying to hide our own insecurities through modding down those who speak the truth.
Wow, one little obscure region that no one's ever heard of, in a country on the other side of the world (not to mention poverty line), switched too Linux. Woot.
And in other news, another 238 states embraced Microsoft products in their civil offices today.