It's a shame, too. If only we could somehow instill a David vs. Goliath attitude in all these script kiddies, I'm sure they could put *some* hurt on the big boys, regardless of how much money is thrown at the problem (viz. the Yahoo/CNN/etc. attacks a while back). The problem is the hypocrisy of these people who 1 minute rant on slashdot about how they want to be free and the next go out and because of some petty grudge, destroy the instrument of their freedom. Bleh.
Is it that the protocol for IRC is inherently instable? Or is it just the implementations?
The IRC protocol is a nightmare. On just about any site discussing its technical merits you'll find praise of just how much life the current implementations, as limited as they may be, have managed to squeeze out of the IRC protocol. The problem is that it was designed as a quick hack, and scaling it to today's sizes never entered the creator's minds. (Who can blame them, back then there was probably less people on the 'net in total then today you'll find on Dalnet at any given time)
The problem is that IRC in its current form has no redundancy. A hub server goes down and your network's cut into a dozen pieces. Then, when it all tries to reassemble itself you have to send the information about the entire network's population to all the servers, since (and this is another major problem) all the servers must keep all the channels and clients in memory.
There have been solutions discussed to this, most notably in the IRC3 specs, things such as more compact user identification instead of a plaintext string of nick!user@host, intelligent message routing (i.e. you're not sending any text across the network that doesn't have to get to certain parts of the network), redundant server links, doing without each server mirroring the network's entire population, etc., but so far I've yet to see a working (or any) implementation.
Sometimes I wish I could code, this would be the most appealing open-source project I can think of.
I've never been able to understand why it's the 'good' IRC networks that suffer this way. Something as wonderfully free as EFnet is going down the tubes, yet ultra-lame browser-based chat networks (yahoo, msn, AOL) all seem to be proliferating without any major problems.
I remember when MS started bundling MS-Chat with IE and suddenly you had people getting on to IRC who wanted to "whisper" and always annoyed everyone in the "rooms" especially the "hosts". Yet, the same people who whined the most about this bastardization of IRC from MS, are the ones who end up destroying the networks where there are any 'true' IRC'ers left.
I for one hope to see the day when I'm relegated to commercialized chat services to get in touch with people.
Look at some of the Linux sites.
Netscape outranks IE by far.
Duh. Linux sites. No IE for Linux. Linux users go to Linux sites more than Win users. Linux users mostly use NS. Therefore, NS > IE. Just like IE probably(heh) outranks NS on Windows sites. (And as someone who runs some general-purpose sites that don't have anything to do with OS's, non-OS-specific sites tend to get hit mostly by IE). Perhaps you should take your own advice "and ask WHY/HOW b4 [you] start judging statistics."
Network: Virtually unlimited capacity, variable capacity, variable price. I like the idea of everyone having a little network share that they can always access. It's not too hard to implement, even across platforms. Of course, what do you do when the network is down or you want to take it home to a computer that isn't wired? This makes the option largely moot.. Physical media are a guaranteed thing.
C'mon. If you're in college and don't have 'net access at your place of residence you can't really function anyway. And if the network goes down for 10 hours and you can't do your project, I'm sure that the profs are going to be understanding.
So now that we've eliminated all disk-based media AND flash media, I guess we're right back to suggesting that these people use the net for what it's there for, for godsakes. Even the most braindead college kids that got a computer and a net hookup share MP3's over the network and not via floppies or Zip disks or whatever. So why can't they apply that same simple logic to their personal files? FTP is *NOT* that damn hard. Neither is SSH with rz/sz. And if a school provides something web-based, then these people have absolutely no excuse for not using the internet for this purpose.
Though I don't know if it is true, today, but one used to be able to issue this command (IIRC) under DOS in your autoexec.bat file to force the system to verify every single file that was written: (NOTE: I almost exclusively use the CLI so I have no idea if this setting is recognized when using drag-and-drop to copy files.)
I think any sort of copy operation performed through the GUI is automatically verified. This would explain why (especially floppies) copying via CLI is faster than drag'n'drop or "Send to A:"
I've never had an error pop up on a floppy operation, but I *have* had windows complain when I was copying data from HD to HD with a faulty SCSI controller. I believe that the corruption may not be immediate, in other words, it passes the instant verification, but with unclean heads and bad/old diskette surfaces, the corruption happens mere seconds or minutes after the write is completed, where the magnetic mark degrades to a point where it can't be picked up anywhere else.
Another problem with older drives seems to be that the mechanism itself is worn out and the placement of the tracks isn't quite as precise as it should be (longshot I suppose). I've had this happen as well where I had a perfectly good working floppy drive on an old machine, but the floppies from that drive almost always refused to work on a drive in my new machine.
So we tried leaving them on top of monitors for a few minutes
I always used that technique to resurrect bad CD's! You have no idea how many times I saved documents from corruption by just letting the floppy roast on top of the monitor for a bit and then sticking it back in the drive, and suddenly wow, no more Norton Disk Doctor wanting to mark a buncha sectors bad. Even "fixed" a few "General Read Errors" when the system area of the floppy got screwed. Of course this was only temporary - get my data off and throw the disk out, but it worked...
I'm so grateful that someone had gone out and done something of this nature. I had, in the past, tried to make a decision on what encoder to use to encode my CD collection, and one of the 1st places I looked was the Ask/. story about what the best encoder was.
Ugh... Everybody thought that whatever they were using was the best thing under the sun, no research supporting their claims, and in the several hundred comments, not even a hint of some general concensus.
Finally, something that'll allow me to choose based on fact, something that'll allow me to make an *informed* decision. Thank you.
But nothing beats Tetris. I've been playing that game for years, and I don't think I'll EVER get sick of it. Sure, there will be spans of a month or so where I won't. But I always come back.
I used to be that way with Tetris (not on the NES though), then I got my hands on BlockOut (don't know if that was *ever* available on any console system) and wow, that was the most addicting game I can remember. Even moreso than Zoop:)
"it's places like gnutella that I can get Unreal Tourney or Q3 with about a billion CD keys"
Yeah, and 'cuz of pricks like you downloading illegitimate CD keys of Q3A, I, who've gone out and bought a game that I like (as opposed to pirating a game I just wanna try out) get BAD CD KEY messages when I try to play multiplayer sometimes.
Lower car insurance premiums for women and older drivers?
I'd outlaw those in a heartbeat. The statistics that say women and older drivers are less likely to get into accidents are pure bullshit. A major factor is that women and old people drive LESS, so no wonder they're going to get into less accidents. Hmmm... and when they DO drive, they endanger everyone around them. The stereotype of bad women drivers is a sad truth with very few exceptions. Older drivers probably cause more accidents than they are themselves involved in because they drive as if they've got a load in their pants, thus upping the aggravation of all drivers around them, causing them to act rashly.
Why should a young woman who barrels 150km/h down the highway get half the insurance rate of a man her age when she panics if she has to change lanes? Or get into a tight spot? She's sure as hell not as well equipped to deal with an emergency as a man is (in general) because women tend to panic instead of doing what needs to be done immediately.
Flame away. But I just had to throw this in cuz this sort of idiocy coming from the insurance companies makes me seethe.
When I signed up for amazon, it wasn't just to buy a copy of hitchhiker's guide
Funny, when I signed up for amazon (years ago before all this patent fiasco, get off my back) it was precisely for that and ONLY that reason (getting a copy of H2G2 omnibus hardcover)...
If we have an agreed religion in the society, we have a higher power whose teachings we can follow and use them as the base of our moral code. Without that, it's just people imposing their views on one another
And with religion it's "just people imposing their views on one another" hiding behind the name of whatever higher power they are supposed to represent. I see atheists agreeing on some basic rules (most of the 10 commandsments aren't unreasonable for any straight-thinking person) as being more honest than some blood-drinking yahoos in strange hats and robes telling me how I should live my life.
AIM/ICQ etc always sort of gave me the willies - who knows what's going on when I run them?
On the other hand it should be a lot easier on Linux to detect any sort of rogue transmissions that some snoop program buried inside AIM/ICQ might be sending... how long were all the Windows programs out before anyone found out what dirty tricks were being pulled?
That rumor about Canada (where radar detectors are STILL illegal) is not just a rumor - my dad got busted by one of those radar detector-detectors. The cop even took us to his car to show us how the gizmo works.
Needless to say that the insurance company wasn't thrilled when they found out.
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Re:I bet they are popular...
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 2
Like some woman is going to program hers to say "I'm a victim, abuse me, I have no self-esteem. I don't like sex but if you force me I won't fight."
Not exactly what I meant. Assuming that a woman enters all the info honestly, there could be a way of statistically determining what combination of her own personality traits and of what she looks for in a man constitutes an easily victimized woman. Much like the women who have a tendency to get into one bad, abusive relationship after another, even though they most likely don't enjoy getting beat up by some drunken redneck.
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I bet they are popular...
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 5
Call me a cynic but all I can see is really weird guys programming their pagers with characteristics that'd most appeal to really weak-minded pushover type women. They can be walking down the street identifying potential victims of rape and abduction. And all it would take is a couple of psych classes.
Scary indeed.
And even aside from these nefarious uses, would you ever trust a person to program those things *honestly*? What woman's going to program hers with "nagging b*tch who only wants men for their money"
Maybe for some... I for one enjoy takin' the car out and driving around, walkin' through the mall, etc. It's just more fun than sitting in front of a computer, something which I do all day at work. The only reason I *HAVE* bought things off the internet is because they were a) significantly cheaper or b) they were simply not available at local retailers.
I was going to sign up for the beta program, until I saw the application form and I decided not to - 35 mandatory fields
I think they're hoping that only the most rabid techies will sign up for this, and aren't interested in 'casual' beta testers.
I think I can offer a reason for this too - I worked as part of my co-op work experience at Corel, doing QA...
The bugs they receive from beta sites that we have to duplicate and pass onto the developers are often atrocious - and naturally this time they decided that they, if we're gonna do a public beta, we're gonna accept only those who are willing, from the start, to give us the whole story.
they apparently dont know about irc ("chat rooms" for the less informed). its fairly easy to find at least one person who can, if nothing else, offer insight to a problem. the major irc networks all have linux channels, afaik
While it's true that most irc networks (notably Undernet and Efnet) have linux channels, fairly well populated, I've found that actually getting help there is an exercise in futility - in the 7 channels on 3 different networks i visited, either everyone was idling, or I was simply told "You don't have it configured right" when i asked for some insight for LILO refusing to run off an HD.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame, too. If only we could somehow instill a David vs. Goliath attitude in all these script kiddies, I'm sure they could put *some* hurt on the big boys, regardless of how much money is thrown at the problem (viz. the Yahoo/CNN/etc. attacks a while back). The problem is the hypocrisy of these people who 1 minute rant on slashdot about how they want to be free and the next go out and because of some petty grudge, destroy the instrument of their freedom. Bleh.
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The IRC protocol is a nightmare. On just about any site discussing its technical merits you'll find praise of just how much life the current implementations, as limited as they may be, have managed to squeeze out of the IRC protocol. The problem is that it was designed as a quick hack, and scaling it to today's sizes never entered the creator's minds. (Who can blame them, back then there was probably less people on the 'net in total then today you'll find on Dalnet at any given time)
The problem is that IRC in its current form has no redundancy. A hub server goes down and your network's cut into a dozen pieces. Then, when it all tries to reassemble itself you have to send the information about the entire network's population to all the servers, since (and this is another major problem) all the servers must keep all the channels and clients in memory.
There have been solutions discussed to this, most notably in the IRC3 specs, things such as more compact user identification instead of a plaintext string of nick!user@host, intelligent message routing (i.e. you're not sending any text across the network that doesn't have to get to certain parts of the network), redundant server links, doing without each server mirroring the network's entire population, etc., but so far I've yet to see a working (or any) implementation.
Sometimes I wish I could code, this would be the most appealing open-source project I can think of.
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I remember when MS started bundling MS-Chat with IE and suddenly you had people getting on to IRC who wanted to "whisper" and always annoyed everyone in the "rooms" especially the "hosts". Yet, the same people who whined the most about this bastardization of IRC from MS, are the ones who end up destroying the networks where there are any 'true' IRC'ers left.
I for one hope to see the day when I'm relegated to commercialized chat services to get in touch with people.
---
Duh. Linux sites. No IE for Linux. Linux users go to Linux sites more than Win users. Linux users mostly use NS. Therefore, NS > IE. Just like IE probably(heh) outranks NS on Windows sites. (And as someone who runs some general-purpose sites that don't have anything to do with OS's, non-OS-specific sites tend to get hit mostly by IE). Perhaps you should take your own advice "and ask WHY/HOW b4 [you] start judging statistics."
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C'mon. If you're in college and don't have 'net access at your place of residence you can't really function anyway. And if the network goes down for 10 hours and you can't do your project, I'm sure that the profs are going to be understanding.
---
So now that we've eliminated all disk-based media AND flash media, I guess we're right back to suggesting that these people use the net for what it's there for, for godsakes. Even the most braindead college kids that got a computer and a net hookup share MP3's over the network and not via floppies or Zip disks or whatever. So why can't they apply that same simple logic to their personal files? FTP is *NOT* that damn hard. Neither is SSH with rz/sz. And if a school provides something web-based, then these people have absolutely no excuse for not using the internet for this purpose.
---
I think any sort of copy operation performed through the GUI is automatically verified. This would explain why (especially floppies) copying via CLI is faster than drag'n'drop or "Send to A:"
I've never had an error pop up on a floppy operation, but I *have* had windows complain when I was copying data from HD to HD with a faulty SCSI controller. I believe that the corruption may not be immediate, in other words, it passes the instant verification, but with unclean heads and bad/old diskette surfaces, the corruption happens mere seconds or minutes after the write is completed, where the magnetic mark degrades to a point where it can't be picked up anywhere else.
Another problem with older drives seems to be that the mechanism itself is worn out and the placement of the tracks isn't quite as precise as it should be (longshot I suppose). I've had this happen as well where I had a perfectly good working floppy drive on an old machine, but the floppies from that drive almost always refused to work on a drive in my new machine.
---
I always used that technique to resurrect bad CD's! You have no idea how many times I saved documents from corruption by just letting the floppy roast on top of the monitor for a bit and then sticking it back in the drive, and suddenly wow, no more Norton Disk Doctor wanting to mark a buncha sectors bad. Even "fixed" a few "General Read Errors" when the system area of the floppy got screwed. Of course this was only temporary - get my data off and throw the disk out, but it worked...
---
Ugh... Everybody thought that whatever they were using was the best thing under the sun, no research supporting their claims, and in the several hundred comments, not even a hint of some general concensus.
Finally, something that'll allow me to choose based on fact, something that'll allow me to make an *informed* decision. Thank you.
---
Yeah. Exactly. *First* Pentium processors. This microcode update is only available on the PPro and up (P6 cores), not the P5s.
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My copy of the Guide says "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover.
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I used to be that way with Tetris (not on the NES though), then I got my hands on BlockOut (don't know if that was *ever* available on any console system) and wow, that was the most addicting game I can remember. Even moreso than Zoop :)
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Yeah, and 'cuz of pricks like you downloading illegitimate CD keys of Q3A, I, who've gone out and bought a game that I like (as opposed to pirating a game I just wanna try out) get BAD CD KEY messages when I try to play multiplayer sometimes.
Fuck.
---
I'd outlaw those in a heartbeat. The statistics that say women and older drivers are less likely to get into accidents are pure bullshit. A major factor is that women and old people drive LESS, so no wonder they're going to get into less accidents. Hmmm... and when they DO drive, they endanger everyone around them. The stereotype of bad women drivers is a sad truth with very few exceptions. Older drivers probably cause more accidents than they are themselves involved in because they drive as if they've got a load in their pants, thus upping the aggravation of all drivers around them, causing them to act rashly. Why should a young woman who barrels 150km/h down the highway get half the insurance rate of a man her age when she panics if she has to change lanes? Or get into a tight spot? She's sure as hell not as well equipped to deal with an emergency as a man is (in general) because women tend to panic instead of doing what needs to be done immediately.
Flame away. But I just had to throw this in cuz this sort of idiocy coming from the insurance companies makes me seethe.
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Funny, when I signed up for amazon (years ago before all this patent fiasco, get off my back) it was precisely for that and ONLY that reason (getting a copy of H2G2 omnibus hardcover)...
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And with religion it's "just people imposing their views on one another" hiding behind the name of whatever higher power they are supposed to represent. I see atheists agreeing on some basic rules (most of the 10 commandsments aren't unreasonable for any straight-thinking person) as being more honest than some blood-drinking yahoos in strange hats and robes telling me how I should live my life.
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On the other hand it should be a lot easier on Linux to detect any sort of rogue transmissions that some snoop program buried inside AIM/ICQ might be sending... how long were all the Windows programs out before anyone found out what dirty tricks were being pulled?
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If you're interested...
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Needless to say that the insurance company wasn't thrilled when they found out.
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Not exactly what I meant. Assuming that a woman enters all the info honestly, there could be a way of statistically determining what combination of her own personality traits and of what she looks for in a man constitutes an easily victimized woman. Much like the women who have a tendency to get into one bad, abusive relationship after another, even though they most likely don't enjoy getting beat up by some drunken redneck.
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Scary indeed.
And even aside from these nefarious uses, would you ever trust a person to program those things *honestly*? What woman's going to program hers with "nagging b*tch who only wants men for their money"
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ETOYS DROPS SUIT AGAINST ARTISTS. Public outcry led toy site to abandon action against artists using eToy.com.
Uh huh... "dropped" the lawsuit eh? Ya don't say. I wonder how much this "ad space" cost Etoys? :)
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I think they're hoping that only the most rabid techies will sign up for this, and aren't interested in 'casual' beta testers.
I think I can offer a reason for this too - I worked as part of my co-op work experience at Corel, doing QA...
The bugs they receive from beta sites that we have to duplicate and pass onto the developers are often atrocious - and naturally this time they decided that they, if we're gonna do a public beta, we're gonna accept only those who are willing, from the start, to give us the whole story.
While it's true that most irc networks (notably Undernet and Efnet) have linux channels, fairly well populated, I've found that actually getting help there is an exercise in futility - in the 7 channels on 3 different networks i visited, either everyone was idling, or I was simply told "You don't have it configured right" when i asked for some insight for LILO refusing to run off an HD.