I work for an ISP. Lots and lots of equipment comes with widely known default passwords. We have always considered it our resonsiblity to our customers to change the default password on any piece of equipment they buy from us. Things like this are exactly why national ISP's will NEVER have customer service that compares favorably to a local ISP.
This is so freakin' cool. Kmail has been my email client of choice for two years now, and I would love to use both kmail and korganizer without switching from window to window.
The fact that all this is going to tie into a non-proprietary groupware backend is icing on the cake for me. The company I work for has been interested in groupware for some time, and I can finally stop fending off the requests for MS Exchange from our Sales dept.
Things like this are what happen when the news media are owned by giant corporations. They do not care about truly informing the public, they care about selling papers, ads, etc. And what's the best way to do that? Scary headlines.
50% of the news nowadays is reprinted press releases from companies. There should be some kind of accountability, both for the misleading/false statements coming out of these corporations, and for the idiot reporter that took this "news release" off the fax and submitted it for print without any kind of fact checking.
I had a roommate that, while reading textbooks, would literally highlight the ENTIRE TEXT as she read it. I think she may have missed the point of highlighting...
I pity the poor IU student who purchased HER used books. They were completely unreadable when she was done with them.
You could also play up to four players with one controller. My family was so addicted to it that we kept and paid for the copy we rented from the video store. By the time I got an NES, you couldn't find M.U.L.E. in the stores anymore...
M.U.L.E. is the reason I my GPA dropped to ~2.0 in middle school!
Konqueror has per-site User Agent settings, and in my experience is somewhere between Mozilla and Galeon in terms of speed and resource useage. (Mozilla is a hog IMHO, and sloooow)
In case anybody needs inspiration for their own letters, here is the mail I sent to the DOJ. There are several other thoughtful comments by others here as well...
I respectfully submit my comments on the proposed settlement in the case of
United States v. Microsoft Corp. Unfortunately, I feel that the proposed
settlement does little to put an end to Microsoft's monopoly, and has no
provisions for enforcement.
I would strongly recommend that Microsoft be forced to publicly document the
API's for it's various Windows operating systems, and that it be required to
make publicly available any changes to those API's at least six months before
releasing software based on those changes.
Publicly documenting the Windows API's does not mean that anybody could
easily replicate Windows or reverse-engineer it, but it would mean that other
Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) would be able to compete on equal ground
with Microsoft's own software running on Windows. This is an effective
solution because while it still allows Microsoft to innovate and create new
products, it also means that Microsoft cannot further leverage its monopoly
by giving it's other projects unfair access to secret software code.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for considering my opinion.
Amen. I'm the M$ admin here by default, because somebody has to do it.
I 100% swear (and have witnesses that remember) that 6 months ago I patched our server which just got infected yesterday.
Apparently, one of the hotfixes we've applied since then broke this patch, and so we get infected by this stupid thing. Can anyone tell me IN WHICH SPECIFIC ORDER I HAVE TO APPLY AND REAPPLY EACH FUCKING HOTFIX TO BE TRULY PATCHED?
We are also a local ISP, and this is going to put a big strain on us and some of our webhosting customers. SPAM, indeed. This is not going to harm spammers, because they use open relays anyway. All this does is inconvenience their DSL customers so that Verizon can steal their webhosting as well. And pop-before-smtp is still a pain in the tuckus for broken clients that send mail first.
Since their invention in 1982 and subsequent introduction, Nd-Fe-B magnets have been recognized as being a significant advance over prior materials because of their strength and flexibility in manufacturing.
And they just noticed that companies are using these types of magnets 20 fscking years later?!?
IA Most Definitely NAL, but don't you have to defend your intellectual property rights in order to retain them? Even if this claim was valid, they've acted in bad faith by waiting for this type of magnet to saturate the market for 20 years before trying to enforce their patents.
The new new economy apparently consists of companies that use lawsuits as their primary source of income.
I'm still waiting for a major x86 Linux distro with good enough USB support, lacking for over a year, to use my Visor that I don't have to manually upgrade the kernel (I know, short work for some of you kernel hackers, but too much of a PITA for me), preferrably Red Hat, but their 'next several weeks' continues to drag on.
Ummm, Mandrake 7.2? I've been using it "out of the box" to sync with my Visor for 5 months now... Oh, and it's Red-Hat based.
-Wulfhere
Of course, you can always ruin the image of the people who frequent the library (i.e. "I've heard that TEENAGERS sometimes use the library for their own nefarious purposes. And you don't need a poll to know that teens like their books free")
It would be easy for this conglomerate to accuse people of borrowing books from the library only to pirate them...
I grew up very poor, and would not have made very much of myself if not for libraries where I could read for free.
And one more rant. Am I the only one who thinks it should be illegal for someone who currently holds office to be a PAID LOBBYIST?!? I am terribly disappointed to learn that it is possible to buy back one of our basic liberties for only $370,000 a year.
-Wulfhere
Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!
I do tech support for an Internet company, and it is amazing the number of people who call me amazed that they can't dial-up networking won't work after their Win9x machine has been on for more than a few hours. Reboot, and everything magically starts working again.
Windoze is horrible at letting go of resources once it has used them.
Dang! Beat me to it!:-P
Yes, kids, I remember a time when not all colors were named after fruit. There were words called purple and green that were used to describe your grape and meadow colored bits of plastic...
Most of the tech support calls I get are from people who couldn't change skins if their life depended on it. I personally have no problem with the inclusion of skins as a feature. That was what first led me to Gnome!
People who don't understand the interface are NOT going to be able to switch skins and then get lost, so this is not a big problem in my view, but that's just my $0.02
Excellent idea! If Google can do it, so can Slashdot. And Andover/VA could use the opportunity to show more ads to thousands of Slashdotters, so it makes good business sense, too!
Metallica was until recently one of my favorite bands. This is the final straw, and if they carry through with this lawsuit, I and my friends will NEVER buy another Metallica anything, ever again. I find it obnoxious that a band who has made hundreds of dollars off of me would threaten to sue me for downloading their songs WHICH I ALREADY HAVE ON CD!
My defense of Napster is this: I use Napster, like radio, to PREVIEW SONGS BEFORE I BUY THEM. Since I listen to music that most radio stations won't touch (Slipknot, Korn, etc.), the only place I can find out whether a band is worth $15 for the CD is by PREVIEWING SONGS. I am so tired of being ripped off by the fucking music industry.
I just wanted to take a minute and thank Bruce Perens for posting and responding several times to this discussion. By answering people's questions, he has prevented (hopefully) a witchhunt/flamewar against Be, Inc. in what was obviously an accidental violation of the GPL. I wish everyone remained so clear-headed on Slashdot....:-)
Make sure you check out the availability of this at your local Circuit City store before you drive to buy one. When I checked it out, neither of the stores near me had any, and they weren't available for direct shipping, either. Just a heads up...
Slashdot Mirror
I work for an ISP. Lots and lots of equipment comes with widely known default passwords. We have always considered it our resonsiblity to our customers to change the default password on any piece of equipment they buy from us. Things like this are exactly why national ISP's will NEVER have customer service that compares favorably to a local ISP.
This is so freakin' cool. Kmail has been my email client of choice for two years now, and I would love to use both kmail and korganizer without switching from window to window.
The fact that all this is going to tie into a non-proprietary groupware backend is icing on the cake for me. The company I work for has been interested in groupware for some time, and I can finally stop fending off the requests for MS Exchange from our Sales dept.
--Wulfhere
Things like this are what happen when the news media are owned by giant corporations. They do not care about truly informing the public, they care about selling papers, ads, etc. And what's the best way to do that? Scary headlines.
50% of the news nowadays is reprinted press releases from companies. There should be some kind of accountability, both for the misleading/false statements coming out of these corporations, and for the idiot reporter that took this "news release" off the fax and submitted it for print without any kind of fact checking.
-Just my $.02
Wulfhere
I had a roommate that, while reading textbooks, would literally highlight the ENTIRE TEXT as she read it. I think she may have missed the point of highlighting...
I pity the poor IU student who purchased HER used books. They were completely unreadable when she was done with them.
Ugh. Looks like the joke is on I me. :-P I will blame my terrible grammar on the excitement at the thought of playing loved old game again!
You could also play up to four players with one controller. My family was so addicted to it that we kept and paid for the copy we rented from the video store. By the time I got an NES, you couldn't find M.U.L.E. in the stores anymore...
M.U.L.E. is the reason I my GPA dropped to ~2.0 in middle school!
Konqueror has per-site User Agent settings, and in my experience is somewhere between Mozilla and Galeon in terms of speed and resource useage. (Mozilla is a hog IMHO, and sloooow)
-Wulfhere
I respectfully submit my comments on the proposed settlement in the case of United States v. Microsoft Corp. Unfortunately, I feel that the proposed settlement does little to put an end to Microsoft's monopoly, and has no provisions for enforcement.
I would strongly recommend that Microsoft be forced to publicly document the API's for it's various Windows operating systems, and that it be required to make publicly available any changes to those API's at least six months before releasing software based on those changes.
Publicly documenting the Windows API's does not mean that anybody could easily replicate Windows or reverse-engineer it, but it would mean that other Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) would be able to compete on equal ground with Microsoft's own software running on Windows. This is an effective solution because while it still allows Microsoft to innovate and create new products, it also means that Microsoft cannot further leverage its monopoly by giving it's other projects unfair access to secret software code.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for considering my opinion.
Real Name
Real Address
No, this is obviously what their QA department does all day. ;-)
And when the Hell is Method for Madness being published, Mr. Gerrold ?!?
Amen. I'm the M$ admin here by default, because somebody has to do it.
I 100% swear (and have witnesses that remember) that 6 months ago I patched our server which just got infected yesterday.
Apparently, one of the hotfixes we've applied since then broke this patch, and so we get infected by this stupid thing. Can anyone tell me IN WHICH SPECIFIC ORDER I HAVE TO APPLY AND REAPPLY EACH FUCKING HOTFIX TO BE TRULY PATCHED?
We are also a local ISP, and this is going to put a big strain on us and some of our webhosting customers. SPAM, indeed. This is not going to harm spammers, because they use open relays anyway. All this does is inconvenience their DSL customers so that Verizon can steal their webhosting as well. And pop-before-smtp is still a pain in the tuckus for broken clients that send mail first.
And they just noticed that companies are using these types of magnets 20 fscking years later?!? IA Most Definitely NAL, but don't you have to defend your intellectual property rights in order to retain them? Even if this claim was valid, they've acted in bad faith by waiting for this type of magnet to saturate the market for 20 years before trying to enforce their patents.
The new new economy apparently consists of companies that use lawsuits as their primary source of income.
Ummm, Mandrake 7.2? I've been using it "out of the box" to sync with my Visor for 5 months now... Oh, and it's Red-Hat based. -Wulfhere
It would be easy for this conglomerate to accuse people of borrowing books from the library only to pirate them...
I grew up very poor, and would not have made very much of myself if not for libraries where I could read for free.
And one more rant. Am I the only one who thinks it should be illegal for someone who currently holds office to be a PAID LOBBYIST?!? I am terribly disappointed to learn that it is possible to buy back one of our basic liberties for only $370,000 a year.
-Wulfhere
Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!
Windoze is horrible at letting go of resources once it has used them.
Dang! Beat me to it! :-P
Yes, kids, I remember a time when not all colors were named after fruit. There were words called purple and green that were used to describe your grape and meadow colored bits of plastic...
People who don't understand the interface are NOT going to be able to switch skins and then get lost, so this is not a big problem in my view, but that's just my $0.02
Excellent idea! If Google can do it, so can Slashdot. And Andover/VA could use the opportunity to show more ads to thousands of Slashdotters, so it makes good business sense, too!
My defense of Napster is this: I use Napster, like radio, to PREVIEW SONGS BEFORE I BUY THEM. Since I listen to music that most radio stations won't touch (Slipknot, Korn, etc.), the only place I can find out whether a band is worth $15 for the CD is by PREVIEWING SONGS. I am so tired of being ripped off by the fucking music industry.
I wish regular people could buy some justice.
I just wanted to take a minute and thank Bruce Perens for posting and responding several times to this discussion. By answering people's questions, he has prevented (hopefully) a witchhunt/flamewar against Be, Inc. in what was obviously an accidental violation of the GPL. I wish everyone remained so clear-headed on Slashdot.... :-)
Make sure you check out the availability of this at your local Circuit City store before you drive to buy one. When I checked it out, neither of the stores near me had any, and they weren't available for direct shipping, either. Just a heads up...