Such a convention would also collectively protect users. If unsecured wireless internet sharing was a common practice, even cultural, it would be much harder for the RIAA to use IPs from server logs to prosecute. The IP adress would finally lose its undeserved and erroneous image of being in any way a reliable tie to a user.
Man, if only network traffic was divided up into loads of different types. That way you could block certain types of traffic from passing through your network by configuring your router...
Not that this would stop http downloads of isos or anything, but most Average Joe heavy bandwidth use is via the likes of bittorrent.
We could call these types "ports", and there should be at least... pulls random number out of ass... 60000 of them!
This can never happen. The simple fact is that a bandwidth-based price scheme that keeps profit at the same level as today would demonstrate to people quite clearly just how badly they are getting ripped off. Light and heavy users alike would be outraged at the suddenly very clear abuse that is being perpetrated by ISPs. This is why they are pushing for a tiered internet instead. All the extra money, none of the extra service.
I got into this article without signing up yesterday. Can't today, so I'm quoting from memory.
...I thought "Oh my God! People could be using my connection too!". Six months later, however, $Person still hasn't secured her wireless network.
My parents were the same. I took my laptop into the garden, showed them that I could get onto their connection from at least 50m from the house, then I connected to the neighbours' connections and changed their essids to demonstrate how easy such things are. Then I opened ethereal and demonstrated to them how easy it was to read peoples' internet traffic.
All I got was "That shouldn't be allowed".
Under my own initiative, I then put a fairly long encryption key on their network and password protected the router config. I know it's weak security, but it's better than none at all.
That is how much people care about security. I explained to my uncle the other day about how spyware can log your key presses and report them back to a server. He was shocked and outraged, for about 1 second. Once his computer was clean enough to be usable, he was satisfied (this is a home & business computer, used for EBAY).
Nobody gives a shit about anything to do with computers. It seems that the current parent generation was lead to believe that technology would make life easier and do all the work for them, when the reality is that it's actually replaced much of the work. God knows what long term effects this will have on computing.
Just to be clear, I'm only posting this under the assumption that OCG will check back at some point
Digg in it's current condition still can't provide the same discussion as Slashdot. The simple fact is that Digg has too much throughput.
I've just realised that there is really a kind of discussion at Digg, but being a stupid Slashdotter, I can't see it. It's a constant discussion about what's interesting and what's not on the internet. By definition, that is exactly what Digg is. It's kind of like polaroid though: we can't see it from here because we're perpendicular to it. Like I said, two completely different sites.
This finally explains to me why I've seen so many Digg/Slashdot comments about how Digg is "exactly what I was waiting for" (yeah, naively I spent a while trying Digg out, but getting the wrong end of the stick and reading the comments. a lot of us here have done the same thing, and it's a big part of why we're so hostile towards the site now.).
Oh, and a few times today I've tried to check out the new comment system at Digg, but after a little less than a minute some acquired intuitive alarm clock sounds, meaning that it's taken too long to load, and I close it. I'll give it as long as it wants and take a proper look before clicking Submit... it took > 2 minutes, but it was worth it. Extending the 'digg' metaphor is a smart touch. If they increased the digg quota required for the front page, or even better, scaled it so that the rate stayed steady at off-peak times, I might even be willing to take the wait a few times a day. Especially if comments show up in real time, which would be one of the first justified implentations of AJAX I've seen. That would also make it into a strange hybrid of IRC and Slashdot. Who knows, maybe that's the future. Here in good old March 5th 2006, I'm a Slashdotter, and it'll take more than the MIRACLE OF REAL TIME COMMUNICATION! to pry me away.
Hey, you've got fairly good responses to my points. The problem is that most of my points are really points of view, opinions:
You like flashy new AJAX technology because of its capabilities. I dislike it because it's overkill and a hack.
I don't like Digg's 'culture', you think Slashdot's is just as bad. The reason I disagree with you on this is tied in later, wait for it.
You find digg comments easy to read, I don't.
Rendering is always subjective. I've never seen a bug on Slashdot myself though.
I find that most of the stuff on Digg doesn't appeal to me, yet it appeals to you.
Story rating is a hot topic. A lot of us here want this for Slashdot. We've got our eye on k5 to see how it works out. It's not a universal opinion though.
Book reviews are different to links to pdfs and 100 Free Programming Books, and this difference reflects the difference in demographic. We like books. Digg users like files. Digg users, being generally younger, have grown up in a more computer oriented environment than most slashdotters. And although the end result is 99% the same, maybe slashdotters have a slight preference towards books over a computer screen for certain things, if only a little more than Digg users.
This last one - discussion - is the main one. It's why I left it to the end of my list. Digg has improved its discussion system, yes, you are correct. However, Digg in it's current condition still can't provide the same discussion as Slashdot. The simple fact is that Digg has too much throughput. A Slashdot story can remain on the front page for a long, long time. This allows people to take time, research a little, and contribute. There is then time for others to read their reply, and reciprocate. A story can be gone or relegated to the lower area of the page on Digg within hours. Even if a discussion gets going, it's doomed to stagnate because no new participants will join after too little time. This has an effect on the way people communicate on Digg in general. I've seen things like points being made through links to blog posts about digg etiquette being dugg to the front page, for example. It's a different balance to Slashdot's, and it's uncomfortable to me.
Oh, and the thing about it taking an age to load has nothing to do with cpu speed. It's connection speed. I've got FasterFox installed, which counts the seconds until a complete page load. Slashdot takes about 20. Imagine Digg. And I have a fairly average connection speed (in global terms).
Hey, if you want to stick with the old and the dying, that's fine. This place, in the year 2006, still uses a -1 to 5 moderation scale for a post. It's insane. Digg is where actual new features and innovation are taking place, and already Digg is overtaking Slashdot's traffic. I'm sure you'll move over eventually.
This is the reason most Slashdot mods reach for the -1 Troll whenever someone mentions Digg. Arrogance like this. You made a reasonable post, and then satirised yourself at the end, as if there was something inherently wrong with the number range -1 to 5 due to the current year, and talking about AJAX, comments, and social bookmarking as if they were invented by Digg. Ignoring my slightly flamey remark there though, I hope I've helped you to see why we won't be moving over to Digg eventually, even if it is "overtaking Slashdot's traffic" (self-satirisation again).
why don't we all go to Digg and set up camp at the new epicenter for geek news on the net?
A few reasons.
AJAX is bloaty. Digg takes an age to load.
The right tool for the right job. AJAX for news? Why?
Digg users are immature. NO DIGG FAGS
Digg comments are a bitch to read through.
The background gradient behind comments is buggy for long comments.
Most front page stories on Digg aren't very good.
Too many front page stories on Digg are blog links.
Slashdot users are an older generation of internet users. Digg is all Web 2.0, and we don't get it.
Lots of front page Digg links are beginner tutorials for css, perl etc. This does not appeal to the Slashdot demographic.
Slashdot is about discussion. Digg isn't. They are completely different sites.
I'm not 'flaming', or trying to be a prick in any way. It just seems that most Digg users don't understand why we aren't deserting Slashdot in droves for their site. You asked, I answered.
The consequence of all this is the dumbing down of the internet, literally. ISPs are whitelisting ports, DRM is undoing decades of information transfer advances, most peoples' opinions on the net are under the control of corporations like Fox because they choose MySpace and Xanga as publishers.
In short, The Media has finally woken up, and it's trying to turn the internet back into television.
So, I ask how smaller distros can get away with out of the box mp3 support, even ones based in the US.
You reply that it is because they can be subject to legal action, and at least three people decide that this is an answer worthy of modding up.
You're not the only one to misunderstand me either. Maybe the treasonous blasphemy phrase is a little ambiguous, but I specifically said less commercial distros.
This is something I don't get. In distros like SuSE and Fedora Core, I've had to spend hours finding and carrying out grandiose hacks to play my legal mp3 collection. In Slackware and Arch, mp3 playback works out of the box.
Is this supposed to be a big secret? Why can the less commercial distros get away with such treasonous blasphemy in this post 9/11 world?
Because if we pretend hard enough that it's lack of Magic Polish that's holding back wider Linux adoption, maybe it'll become true.
(not trolling, at least not deliberately)
I've been reading Mr.Linspire's post about it. It's Click N Run software installation. It's like a frontend to apt/emerge/pacman, but more polished at both ends. Because it already has the billing system, and because Linspire isn't tied to purely free software, it can do things like proprietary game installations too.
It has an extensive software repository too: it would provide *all* an average user would need, which is in fact more than any other package system can say (because of the non-free part).
Unfortunately, its advantages are *all* in its non-free nature (though I'd install it in a flash if it became fast as well as fluffy).
No, the news is that an extreme false positive in some expensive software can be put to hilarious use at the expense of the little brothers of the internet.
I'm surprised to see someone rolling out this particular troll on a topic like this, one which epitomises news for nerds.
There's too much politics in proprietary American software these days. Patriot-Act-induced backdoors, AV companies letting Sony's rootkit through, Microsoft (yeah, just the one word). Sure, FOSS is political, but at least the politics there is to be found in the mailing lists, not the code.
Perfect! Then, when we have to fill in the intergalactic insurance claim form for Earth, we can say that the hole in the Ozone layer was put there for the purposes of science!
Yeah, it's been one of the things they've made the most noise about. Radiant AI, or something like that. Unfortunately, they've focused so much on polishing that they've lost sight of some of the simpler beauties of Morrowind. Oblivion will be way smaller than Morrowind, with less NPCs. This means one of two things:
Less to do.
Halo style now-do-it-backwards misssions.
All of this aside, however, the single reason I won't be buying Oblivion is that I've set myself a personal challenge to not buy any more games whose main selling point is graphical power. Fun gameplay is why I started playing games, not graphics, and my gaming career will live and die based on fun gameplay alone. Incidentally, I've been buying less games lately.
Yeah, a lot of the ones I've seen do. I'm hoping my experience is fairly rare though. The one at the place I work does normal beeps too, but I'd imagine that if you were going to put notes in, you'd only do it for the home market where there are no security consultants to say "omg insecure", and where users might have problems with their eyes, for example, which such a thing might help with. The tune of my parents' alarm system code is something I will carry with me to my grave.
Not quite. After saying the bit about encryption posing a threat to puppies, he explains that they have to present this fairly simply because of the four minute slot. This implies that they might have further opinions on it, that there isn't 'room' for. Also don't forget that as the BBC they aren't supposed to put bias into the information they receive. If the police say that the increased encryption is a challenge, the BBC should present that as is.
Aside from all this, I actually found this article quite heartening. What it all adds up to is that freedom is winning out against security, if only for now. Seems the next big threat isn't from government, but from the sickening greed of the ISPs (whose views were put across very neutrally by the BBC, incidentally).
Anyone in audio range can hear the notes as you dial numbers on lots of home alarm systems too. They're considered fairly secure anyway. Hopefully they've stopped including this 'feature' on newer systems.
Here's why I think this is all irrelevant anyway:
This lock isn't intended, or at least isn't ideal for home use. The fact of the matter is that the locking mechanism on the doors isn't usually the weak point of a person's home. Most break-ins rely on poor security practice and the weak structural strength of the door itself. That's right, they can't decrypt the key, so they just brute force it.
So I think this is for other uses, like warehouses, where it would be handy to be able to store lots of different combos on one clicker. There's no added risk - all your eggs are likely to already be in the one basket in the form of a keyring.
No, although your point is correct, it doesn't undermine any of the facts I presented. Check the SCO Wikipedia article for yourself if you don't believe me. I'm actually thinking of Caldera Systems.
Caldera Systems, owned by Ransom Love, produced Caldera Linux, acquired the IP to OpenServer and Unixware (from the Santa Cruz Operation), and co-founded United Linux along with the likes of SuSE. Then Love sold up, McBride took over and changed the name to The SCO Group, all to thunderous applause in the Senate on Coruscant.
read this other reply
I'd normally have nothing but good to say about free software, it's just that guys like RMS bring up anything negative I can think of. Apart from that, you're the first person I've ever known to say that Richard Stallman isn't a "zealot".
No no, I don't mean I hate the zealotry code that pops up an anti-Microsoft statement on my shell every 10 seconds, written by RMS. I meant I hate being associated with him just because he has a loud voice and has a knack for providing useful soundbites to journalists.
The only front man I'd be happy with is Linus, and obviously we don't want him taken away from the kernel. So we're left with something like a power vacuum, and RMS is a nice plump shape to plug such a hole.
Anyway, see my other reply in this thread. You are will must to be like it.
A submitter misplacing the focus? Why? To grab the editors' attention as they scan the submissions list? Does this mean that editors look for key topics that they know are popular here? What's with all these questions? Who am I? King Questionnaire? What kind of a stupid name is that anyway? Why won't you people leave me alone? Stop emailing these pages to my browser? Wait that wasn't a question? Now what's happening?
Slashdot Mirror
Such a convention would also collectively protect users. If unsecured wireless internet sharing was a common practice, even cultural, it would be much harder for the RIAA to use IPs from server logs to prosecute. The IP adress would finally lose its undeserved and erroneous image of being in any way a reliable tie to a user.
Man, if only network traffic was divided up into loads of different types. That way you could block certain types of traffic from passing through your network by configuring your router...
Not that this would stop http downloads of isos or anything, but most Average Joe heavy bandwidth use is via the likes of bittorrent.
We could call these types "ports", and there should be at least... pulls random number out of ass... 60000 of them!
This can never happen. The simple fact is that a bandwidth-based price scheme that keeps profit at the same level as today would demonstrate to people quite clearly just how badly they are getting ripped off. Light and heavy users alike would be outraged at the suddenly very clear abuse that is being perpetrated by ISPs. This is why they are pushing for a tiered internet instead. All the extra money, none of the extra service.
All I got was "That shouldn't be allowed".
Under my own initiative, I then put a fairly long encryption key on their network and password protected the router config. I know it's weak security, but it's better than none at all.
That is how much people care about security. I explained to my uncle the other day about how spyware can log your key presses and report them back to a server. He was shocked and outraged, for about 1 second. Once his computer was clean enough to be usable, he was satisfied (this is a home & business computer, used for EBAY).
Nobody gives a shit about anything to do with computers. It seems that the current parent generation was lead to believe that technology would make life easier and do all the work for them, when the reality is that it's actually replaced much of the work. God knows what long term effects this will have on computing.
Microsoft's most reliable program. It should be their flagship product.
Digg in it's current condition still can't provide the same discussion as Slashdot. The simple fact is that Digg has too much throughput.
I've just realised that there is really a kind of discussion at Digg, but being a stupid Slashdotter, I can't see it. It's a constant discussion about what's interesting and what's not on the internet. By definition, that is exactly what Digg is. It's kind of like polaroid though: we can't see it from here because we're perpendicular to it. Like I said, two completely different sites.
This finally explains to me why I've seen so many Digg/Slashdot comments about how Digg is "exactly what I was waiting for" (yeah, naively I spent a while trying Digg out, but getting the wrong end of the stick and reading the comments. a lot of us here have done the same thing, and it's a big part of why we're so hostile towards the site now.).
Oh, and a few times today I've tried to check out the new comment system at Digg, but after a little less than a minute some acquired intuitive alarm clock sounds, meaning that it's taken too long to load, and I close it. I'll give it as long as it wants and take a proper look before clicking Submit... it took > 2 minutes, but it was worth it. Extending the 'digg' metaphor is a smart touch. If they increased the digg quota required for the front page, or even better, scaled it so that the rate stayed steady at off-peak times, I might even be willing to take the wait a few times a day. Especially if comments show up in real time, which would be one of the first justified implentations of AJAX I've seen. That would also make it into a strange hybrid of IRC and Slashdot. Who knows, maybe that's the future. Here in good old March 5th 2006, I'm a Slashdotter, and it'll take more than the MIRACLE OF REAL TIME COMMUNICATION! to pry me away.
- You like flashy new AJAX technology because of its capabilities. I dislike it because it's overkill and a hack.
- I don't like Digg's 'culture', you think Slashdot's is just as bad. The reason I disagree with you on this is tied in later, wait for it.
- You find digg comments easy to read, I don't.
- Rendering is always subjective. I've never seen a bug on Slashdot myself though.
- I find that most of the stuff on Digg doesn't appeal to me, yet it appeals to you.
- Story rating is a hot topic. A lot of us here want this for Slashdot. We've got our eye on k5 to see how it works out. It's not a universal opinion though.
- Book reviews are different to links to pdfs and 100 Free Programming Books, and this difference reflects the difference in demographic. We like books. Digg users like files. Digg users, being generally younger, have grown up in a more computer oriented environment than most slashdotters. And although the end result is 99% the same, maybe slashdotters have a slight preference towards books over a computer screen for certain things, if only a little more than Digg users.
- This last one - discussion - is the main one. It's why I left it to the end of my list. Digg has improved its discussion system, yes, you are correct. However, Digg in it's current condition still can't provide the same discussion as Slashdot. The simple fact is that Digg has too much throughput. A Slashdot story can remain on the front page for a long, long time. This allows people to take time, research a little, and contribute. There is then time for others to read their reply, and reciprocate. A story can be gone or relegated to the lower area of the page on Digg within hours. Even if a discussion gets going, it's doomed to stagnate because no new participants will join after too little time. This has an effect on the way people communicate on Digg in general. I've seen things like points being made through links to blog posts about digg etiquette being dugg to the front page, for example. It's a different balance to Slashdot's, and it's uncomfortable to me.
Oh, and the thing about it taking an age to load has nothing to do with cpu speed. It's connection speed. I've got FasterFox installed, which counts the seconds until a complete page load. Slashdot takes about 20. Imagine Digg. And I have a fairly average connection speed (in global terms).This is the reason most Slashdot mods reach for the -1 Troll whenever someone mentions Digg. Arrogance like this. You made a reasonable post, and then satirised yourself at the end, as if there was something inherently wrong with the number range -1 to 5 due to the current year, and talking about AJAX, comments, and social bookmarking as if they were invented by Digg. Ignoring my slightly flamey remark there though, I hope I've helped you to see why we won't be moving over to Digg eventually, even if it is "overtaking Slashdot's traffic" (self-satirisation again).A few reasons.
I'm not 'flaming', or trying to be a prick in any way. It just seems that most Digg users don't understand why we aren't deserting Slashdot in droves for their site. You asked, I answered.
Splendid Discernment!
The consequence of all this is the dumbing down of the internet, literally. ISPs are whitelisting ports, DRM is undoing decades of information transfer advances, most peoples' opinions on the net are under the control of corporations like Fox because they choose MySpace and Xanga as publishers.
In short, The Media has finally woken up, and it's trying to turn the internet back into television.
So, I ask how smaller distros can get away with out of the box mp3 support, even ones based in the US.
You reply that it is because they can be subject to legal action, and at least three people decide that this is an answer worthy of modding up.
You're not the only one to misunderstand me either. Maybe the treasonous blasphemy phrase is a little ambiguous, but I specifically said less commercial distros.
This is something I don't get. In distros like SuSE and Fedora Core, I've had to spend hours finding and carrying out grandiose hacks to play my legal mp3 collection. In Slackware and Arch, mp3 playback works out of the box.
Is this supposed to be a big secret? Why can the less commercial distros get away with such treasonous blasphemy in this post 9/11 world?
Because if we pretend hard enough that it's lack of Magic Polish that's holding back wider Linux adoption, maybe it'll become true.
(not trolling, at least not deliberately)
I've been reading Mr.Linspire's post about it. It's Click N Run software installation. It's like a frontend to apt/emerge/pacman, but more polished at both ends. Because it already has the billing system, and because Linspire isn't tied to purely free software, it can do things like proprietary game installations too.
It has an extensive software repository too: it would provide *all* an average user would need, which is in fact more than any other package system can say (because of the non-free part).
Unfortunately, its advantages are *all* in its non-free nature (though I'd install it in a flash if it became fast as well as fluffy).
No, the news is that an extreme false positive in some expensive software can be put to hilarious use at the expense of the little brothers of the internet.
I'm surprised to see someone rolling out this particular troll on a topic like this, one which epitomises news for nerds.
There's too much politics in proprietary American software these days. Patriot-Act-induced backdoors, AV companies letting Sony's rootkit through, Microsoft (yeah, just the one word). Sure, FOSS is political, but at least the politics there is to be found in the mailing lists, not the code.
Perfect! Then, when we have to fill in the intergalactic insurance claim form for Earth, we can say that the hole in the Ozone layer was put there for the purposes of science!
- Less to do.
- Halo style now-do-it-backwards misssions.
All of this aside, however, the single reason I won't be buying Oblivion is that I've set myself a personal challenge to not buy any more games whose main selling point is graphical power. Fun gameplay is why I started playing games, not graphics, and my gaming career will live and die based on fun gameplay alone. Incidentally, I've been buying less games lately.Yeah, a lot of the ones I've seen do. I'm hoping my experience is fairly rare though. The one at the place I work does normal beeps too, but I'd imagine that if you were going to put notes in, you'd only do it for the home market where there are no security consultants to say "omg insecure", and where users might have problems with their eyes, for example, which such a thing might help with.
The tune of my parents' alarm system code is something I will carry with me to my grave.
Not quite. After saying the bit about encryption posing a threat to puppies, he explains that they have to present this fairly simply because of the four minute slot. This implies that they might have further opinions on it, that there isn't 'room' for. Also don't forget that as the BBC they aren't supposed to put bias into the information they receive. If the police say that the increased encryption is a challenge, the BBC should present that as is.
Aside from all this, I actually found this article quite heartening. What it all adds up to is that freedom is winning out against security, if only for now. Seems the next big threat isn't from government, but from the sickening greed of the ISPs (whose views were put across very neutrally by the BBC, incidentally).
Anyone in audio range can hear the notes as you dial numbers on lots of home alarm systems too. They're considered fairly secure anyway. Hopefully they've stopped including this 'feature' on newer systems.
Here's why I think this is all irrelevant anyway: This lock isn't intended, or at least isn't ideal for home use. The fact of the matter is that the locking mechanism on the doors isn't usually the weak point of a person's home. Most break-ins rely on poor security practice and the weak structural strength of the door itself. That's right, they can't decrypt the key, so they just brute force it.
So I think this is for other uses, like warehouses, where it would be handy to be able to store lots of different combos on one clicker. There's no added risk - all your eggs are likely to already be in the one basket in the form of a keyring.
No, although your point is correct, it doesn't undermine any of the facts I presented. Check the SCO Wikipedia article for yourself if you don't believe me. I'm actually thinking of Caldera Systems.
Caldera Systems, owned by Ransom Love, produced Caldera Linux, acquired the IP to OpenServer and Unixware (from the Santa Cruz Operation), and co-founded United Linux along with the likes of SuSE. Then Love sold up, McBride took over and changed the name to The SCO Group, all to thunderous applause in the Senate on Coruscant.
read this other reply
I'd normally have nothing but good to say about free software, it's just that guys like RMS bring up anything negative I can think of. Apart from that, you're the first person I've ever known to say that Richard Stallman isn't a "zealot".
No no, I don't mean I hate the zealotry code that pops up an anti-Microsoft statement on my shell every 10 seconds, written by RMS. I meant I hate being associated with him just because he has a loud voice and has a knack for providing useful soundbites to journalists.
The only front man I'd be happy with is Linus, and obviously we don't want him taken away from the kernel. So we're left with something like a power vacuum, and RMS is a nice plump shape to plug such a hole.
Anyway, see my other reply in this thread. You are will must to be like it.
A submitter misplacing the focus? Why? To grab the editors' attention as they scan the submissions list? Does this mean that editors look for key topics that they know are popular here? What's with all these questions? Who am I? King Questionnaire? What kind of a stupid name is that anyway? Why won't you people leave me alone? Stop emailing these pages to my browser? Wait that wasn't a question? Now what's happening?