Just because it's low tech doesn't mean it's unimportant.
Nobody said it was unimportant, simply offtopic for a post entitled "Ten Technology Disasters". The Texas City explosion happened because of poor planning and horrible placement along the waterfront of refineries.
I agree. I've been playing with my Xircom 802.11b module for my Palm M505 and I can say I really regret that we didn't purchase iPaqs or some other WinCE based machines for PDAs. If you're just looking for an organizer the Palm is fine, but if you're actually looking to do wireless web browsing, check your mail, etc. then the Palm is sorely lacking. I still can't find a full fledged browser that doesn't use some kind of proxy sitting on a remote machine to strip out graphics whereas Pocket Internet Explorer works fine on the WinCE machines without it.
Also note that the Xircom adapter is big. It's a little bit thicker than the M505 itself and it has it's own battery built into it. To charge it you use the AC adapter that came with your Palm's cradle (if you have the adapter attached to the Palm while charging it'll charge the Palm as well).
You really need to decide what you want to do with this though. If you're looking to just do wireless network hotsyncs and update your address book and todo list once in awhile, the Palm works fine, otherwise I'd avoid them if possible.
It has been argued that the deign of the internet will make large scale streaming media basicly impossible.
This is only true if people continue to attempt to use unicast protocols to distribute their content. This issue was solved long ago by multicast. The trouble is, nobody seems to want to support it for the average consumer. In a perfect world that Internet broadcaster would only be sending one feed per upstream provider, their upstream providers would split it off to anyone requesting the feed downstream, and it would continue to split on until it reaches the end customer requesting the stream. It's really pretty efficient, especially when compared to the current notion of broadcasting 10,000 56Kbps streams. You could replace that with a single multicast stream that uses far less bandwidth but reaches a hundred thousand customers.
considering the fact that most people use kazaa to illegally download music, which does (!) harm musicians, using your spare CPU-cycles and bandwidth to pay these guys isn't even that ridiculous.
Thinking that ANY of the money raised through these trojans will go into the hands of musicians is ridiculous thinking on your part. It will either go to bolster "Brilliant's" income or go into the RIAA anti-piracy coffers. The day people turn over and decide that letting someone install a trojan onto their system in return for using a supposedly legitimate piece of software is the day we should just pull the plug. The Internet is broken. Kick the commercial noobs off.
Maybe that's cause my targets in real life or in the arcade games aren't bouncing around like Quake addicts on a double dose of ampethamines or calling each other "L4M3R CAMp3R f4GzZz" though...
Afterall, in the real world nobody camps right?:-) I mean, your only job in life is to protect these hostages and stop the other side from rescuing them. Do you: a) "camp" and protect the hostages, or b) run out and exchange gunfire with the offensive side (and most likely die because it's 8 against 1 or 2 rushers) because you don't want to get kicked from the server for being a camper?
Fantasy worlds are really screwed up in that way. In real life you'd lay your ass prone on the ground for hours, cover yourself with camoflauge and sit lying quiet until the moron enemy guys came rushing by guns blasting blindly at anything that moves. Then you quietly pick them off one by one with your silenced sniper rifle from 50 yards away in the brush.
what's scary is that you could almost see something like this happening. how fucked up is that?
Almost happening!? It already does happen! I don't remember what channel it was but they were showing some movie and had this big ass graphics overlay run across the screen advertising another television show that was coming "next month" to their channel. Why in the FUCK do they think I care? Does they really need to inform you of that in the middle of the program? Then you get the clowns like TNN and the E network who put a huge band across the bottom of the screen and scroll text across it while the show is on. Also, pretty much every channel now puts their big old logo sitting in the corner of the screen now. Yes, thank you NBC, home of the Olympics. Thank you for putting your huge ass logo on the screen all the time. If it wasn't there I would forget to look at the channel indicator and might think I was watching CBS.
Since when does copyright law force you to read anything you don't want to? The example in the post of reading the first 36 pages before you can view page 37 is exactly right. When I go to read a magazine I'm not compelled to read the table of contents (complete with blinking flashy full size ads) before I go to read an article, why would the web be any different?
In other news, footnotes in term papers and publications are now illegal according to these idiots in Texas. hehe.
Since when was Optimus Prime a damned fire truck!? And Megatron... what did they do to poor Megatron? He's supposed to transform into a big ass handgun! That's screwed up. Hasbro really needs to fix those.
What I want to know is, what kind of fire alarm system drops two airtight walls around the person pulling the fire alarm? Did they have a problem with kids pulling the alarm and decided to setup a mantrap so it'd hold them until the police came? What if the building was on fire and collapsed around them?
I saw a blurb about Washington, D.C. wanting to install a massive system of cameras like London has and now I understand why there is such a backlash. There are cameras everywhere in our society now. Our homes are just about the only place left that we can hope to not be captured on camera without our consent, but how long will that last? Why do Americans allow our government to slowly eradicate our civil rights in the name of safety and security? Benjamin Franklin would be turning over in his grave if he heard some of the twaddle people are blathering about these days. What you say? Yes, we should ban guns.. they're dangerous and can be used to kill people. Hmm, yes.. privacy.. that's an odd issue too, maybe we don't need privacy. Let's install cameras everywhere and use them in a court as evidence. Freedom of speech? Well, only when it is convenient and when it doesn't offend anyone. We wouldn't want to be politically incorrect now would we? The PC police might come and haul us away for being insensitive. What? You plead the 5th? What do you have to hide? Are you a TERRORIST or something? Only terrorists plead the 5th Sir! You must be hiding something. Let's go review the video cameras for the last month of your movements.
Anyway, I'm getting a little off topic, but from what I've seen, the London camera system was installed to combat the IRA terrorists (sound familiar Americans?) but according to the program hasn't ever actually resulted in capturing an IRA terrorist. So, pray tell, what is the massive camera system in London used for? Spying on the citizens of course. Am I paranoid? A little, but without paranoid people we would not have a Bill of Rights in the US. We'd all be ignorant trusting twats who believe evil men don't exist and believe everything spoon-fed to us by the media and our government.
That was part of the problem with NAI. They integrated too much together on the desktop suite. You had the VPN client (ipsec based), PGP client for encrypting mail and files, PGPDisk for creating what is basically just a loopback encrypting disk image that looks like a drive to users, the PGP desktop firewall software, the PGP desktop IDS software bundled with that firewall, etc.
GPG is just the equivalent of the mail and file encrypting tool that was part of the PGP Desktop package. It has nothing to do with VPN access, firewall software, etc.
On the other hand, the Gauntlet firewall which used to be under the PGP division did find a buyer thankfully. Secure Computing acquired it and IIRC the support people. Now, whether they bought it just to strip the proxy technology from it and integrate it into Sidewinder (x86 based) or if they plan on continuing to develop the Solaris and HP-UX based Gauntlet itself has yet to be seen. As for PGP, like people said, use GnuPGP. Lately PGP has seemed like it turned down a dark path of distrust. I can't ensure that what I've encrypted with the latest versions are actually secure because I don't know what impact 9/11 has had on this proprietary closed source piece of software and any backdoors it may contain.
If I could search for a song, pay a penny for it and download a 'known perfect' copy at my choice of bitrates (e.g. 128, 160, etc.) then sure as heck I'd do it.
A penny? Don't you think it might cost a bit more to run a distribution system and still pay royalties to the bands while continuing to make a profit for their shareholders? Would you pay a dollar a song? If you would then you might grab their attention, especially if you can live with the copy-protected proprietary formats they would insist on using. What we need to do is find some kind of middle-ground between the two radically opposite sides. There are the music pirates on one side that want songs for free. That's not going to work because record companies need to make profits to pay artists and artists need to eat Then on the other side you have the record companies that want to charge $18 for a CD while charging much less for a cassette.. even though the CD's only cost a fraction of the cassette copy to produce. Have a nice simple flat $1/song fee, electronic distribution, copy-protected format, etc. Then everyone is happy. Well, except the cheap music pirates who will continue to sit on slashdot and whine that people are taking away their "Freedom" by demanding that they not steal their intellectual property.
Again, I will pay. Have have paid for several "ad-free" sites in the last months. There are other sites that I will pay for. But for the sake of the gods, I will not use PayPal. I don't trust them to deliver my money.
See, the problem I have with paying for Internet web sites is that it becomes quickly unmanageable from an end-user perspective. Get 5 or 6 different web sits all charging different rates, different ways to pay, different people to pay, etc. I have enough of that in the "real" world between utilities, phones, car payments, house payments, etc., etc. What we need is something like Microsoft's Passport service where sites interested in subscription services could band together. Register and pay ONE place, one monthly fee and select the sites from there you want your money to allow you to access depending on how many sites your "subscription" level allows. Hmm, why do I have this awful feeling I'm writing some dot-com disaster's business plan?
Wow, did I submit this earlier today? Let's see...
2002-02-14 17:24:02 Texas A&M Clones a Cat (articles,news) (rejected)
Oh, I guess I did! Wow, and to think that I was actually hoping for consistency with the Slashdot editors. I guess that's too much to ask.
Well, assuming that 17:24 is UTC time and the story was posted only a half hour later at 17:54 UTC there's a strong possibility that texchanchan sent in his version earlier than yours. Don't worry about it, wait about 5 hours. Hemos or Michael will come online for the night shift and post it again.
Why did Christopher Columbus climb Mount Everest? Why did Lewis and Clark make their historic journey to China? Why did Davy Crockett discover the New World when everyone around him insisted the world was flat and he'd fall off the edge? Why did Marconi make that first flight? Because it was a challenge! It had never been done before and it was exciting! Why run Linux on your iMac G4? In the immortal words of the greatest starship captain of all time: Because it was there.
I agree. I can't comprehend how we got along without.NET before. My life has been much more fulfilled and vibrant since it has been announced. I still have no idea what.NET is but I'm sure it will be yet another slam dunk for Microsoft's innovation team. I hope.NET is something really cool that will completely innovate the hell out of the computer industry because it's been so stagnant and lacking buzzwords lately.
What kind of rule is that? Imagine the phone company telling you "you can use the phone as often as you like but you're not allowed to speak Japanese on the phone".
Naw, it's more like the phone company telling you you can't receive phone calls on your line, only dial out. If you want to receive phone calls you need to upgrade to a business plan and pay per minute charges. They don't make any distinctions between you receiving phone calls 24/7, thousands a day or one or two from your grandmother.
That reminds me, I don't know where the hell the tape manufacturers think they're marketing to, but with 80 GB hard drives common now, it's rare to find a tape backup solution that is affordable for a consumer that can handle that much. By affordable I mean drives around $250 and tapes under $10/piece for at least 50GB of storage. I've seen some of the proprietary drives but the tapes cost almost as much as the drive! 5 or 6 years ago the backup drives available to consumers could handle backing up the entire average hard drive of the time onto a $15 tape (Travan), but now people are probably just doing without backups which is a disaster waiting to happen.
The only difference between Red Hat and Microsoft is 40 billion dollars and a 95% market share. I *guarentee* you if Red Hat was in Microsoft's position they'd be using just as many dirty tricks and semi-shady tactics to maintain their monopoly of Red Hat Linux on the desktop. Never trust a corporation farther than the next stockholders' meeting. Corporations exist to make money for shareholders not to bring peace and love into the world.
Beyond the cosmetic similarities, there's a world of difference between your CD-audio disc and your DVD-video movie. An audio CD is little more than a flat, 16-bit 44kHz stereo audio stream. Aside from easy track markings, a CD audio stream isn't much more flexible than a cassette or vinyl record, and because of this an audio CD hardly qualifies as software.
Nonono.. Sorry, I wasn't clear on that. I meant software CDs literally. Games, applications, discs of mp3 files, etc. There's nothing stopping you from copying a regular old data CD.
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Just because it's low tech doesn't mean it's unimportant.
Nobody said it was unimportant, simply offtopic for a post entitled "Ten Technology Disasters". The Texas City explosion happened because of poor planning and horrible placement along the waterfront of refineries.
I agree. I've been playing with my Xircom 802.11b module for my Palm M505 and I can say I really regret that we didn't purchase iPaqs or some other WinCE based machines for PDAs. If you're just looking for an organizer the Palm is fine, but if you're actually looking to do wireless web browsing, check your mail, etc. then the Palm is sorely lacking. I still can't find a full fledged browser that doesn't use some kind of proxy sitting on a remote machine to strip out graphics whereas Pocket Internet Explorer works fine on the WinCE machines without it.
Also note that the Xircom adapter is big. It's a little bit thicker than the M505 itself and it has it's own battery built into it. To charge it you use the AC adapter that came with your Palm's cradle (if you have the adapter attached to the Palm while charging it'll charge the Palm as well).
You really need to decide what you want to do with this though. If you're looking to just do wireless network hotsyncs and update your address book and todo list once in awhile, the Palm works fine, otherwise I'd avoid them if possible.
It has been argued that the deign of the internet will make large scale streaming media basicly impossible.
This is only true if people continue to attempt to use unicast protocols to distribute their content. This issue was solved long ago by multicast. The trouble is, nobody seems to want to support it for the average consumer. In a perfect world that Internet broadcaster would only be sending one feed per upstream provider, their upstream providers would split it off to anyone requesting the feed downstream, and it would continue to split on until it reaches the end customer requesting the stream. It's really pretty efficient, especially when compared to the current notion of broadcasting 10,000 56Kbps streams. You could replace that with a single multicast stream that uses far less bandwidth but reaches a hundred thousand customers.
considering the fact that most people use kazaa to illegally download music, which does (!) harm musicians, using your spare CPU-cycles and bandwidth to pay these guys isn't even that ridiculous.
Thinking that ANY of the money raised through these trojans will go into the hands of musicians is ridiculous thinking on your part. It will either go to bolster "Brilliant's" income or go into the RIAA anti-piracy coffers. The day people turn over and decide that letting someone install a trojan onto their system in return for using a supposedly legitimate piece of software is the day we should just pull the plug. The Internet is broken. Kick the commercial noobs off.
Maybe that's cause my targets in real life or in the arcade games aren't bouncing around like Quake addicts on a double dose of ampethamines or calling each other "L4M3R CAMp3R f4GzZz" though...
:-) I mean, your only job in life is to protect these hostages and stop the other side from rescuing them. Do you: a) "camp" and protect the hostages, or b) run out and exchange gunfire with the offensive side (and most likely die because it's 8 against 1 or 2 rushers) because you don't want to get kicked from the server for being a camper?
Afterall, in the real world nobody camps right?
Fantasy worlds are really screwed up in that way. In real life you'd lay your ass prone on the ground for hours, cover yourself with camoflauge and sit lying quiet until the moron enemy guys came rushing by guns blasting blindly at anything that moves. Then you quietly pick them off one by one with your silenced sniper rifle from 50 yards away in the brush.
what's scary is that you could almost see something like this happening. how fucked up is that?
Almost happening!? It already does happen! I don't remember what channel it was but they were showing some movie and had this big ass graphics overlay run across the screen advertising another television show that was coming "next month" to their channel. Why in the FUCK do they think I care? Does they really need to inform you of that in the middle of the program? Then you get the clowns like TNN and the E network who put a huge band across the bottom of the screen and scroll text across it while the show is on. Also, pretty much every channel now puts their big old logo sitting in the corner of the screen now. Yes, thank you NBC, home of the Olympics. Thank you for putting your huge ass logo on the screen all the time. If it wasn't there I would forget to look at the channel indicator and might think I was watching CBS.
Since when does copyright law force you to read anything you don't want to? The example in the post of reading the first 36 pages before you can view page 37 is exactly right. When I go to read a magazine I'm not compelled to read the table of contents (complete with blinking flashy full size ads) before I go to read an article, why would the web be any different?
In other news, footnotes in term papers and publications are now illegal according to these idiots in Texas. hehe.
Since when was Optimus Prime a damned fire truck!? And Megatron... what did they do to poor Megatron? He's supposed to transform into a big ass handgun! That's screwed up. Hasbro really needs to fix those.
That would really suck for the 30% of the population who can only blink one eye.
Well I guess they'd have to use a Mac.
Reminds me of the retail box on the hard drive I bought that listed capacities in number of hours of MP3s that could be stored on it. :-)
What I want to know is, what kind of fire alarm system drops two airtight walls around the person pulling the fire alarm? Did they have a problem with kids pulling the alarm and decided to setup a mantrap so it'd hold them until the police came? What if the building was on fire and collapsed around them?
I saw a blurb about Washington, D.C. wanting to install a massive system of cameras like London has and now I understand why there is such a backlash. There are cameras everywhere in our society now. Our homes are just about the only place left that we can hope to not be captured on camera without our consent, but how long will that last? Why do Americans allow our government to slowly eradicate our civil rights in the name of safety and security? Benjamin Franklin would be turning over in his grave if he heard some of the twaddle people are blathering about these days. What you say? Yes, we should ban guns.. they're dangerous and can be used to kill people. Hmm, yes.. privacy.. that's an odd issue too, maybe we don't need privacy. Let's install cameras everywhere and use them in a court as evidence. Freedom of speech? Well, only when it is convenient and when it doesn't offend anyone. We wouldn't want to be politically incorrect now would we? The PC police might come and haul us away for being insensitive. What? You plead the 5th? What do you have to hide? Are you a TERRORIST or something? Only terrorists plead the 5th Sir! You must be hiding something. Let's go review the video cameras for the last month of your movements.
Anyway, I'm getting a little off topic, but from what I've seen, the London camera system was installed to combat the IRA terrorists (sound familiar Americans?) but according to the program hasn't ever actually resulted in capturing an IRA terrorist. So, pray tell, what is the massive camera system in London used for? Spying on the citizens of course. Am I paranoid? A little, but without paranoid people we would not have a Bill of Rights in the US. We'd all be ignorant trusting twats who believe evil men don't exist and believe everything spoon-fed to us by the media and our government.
That was part of the problem with NAI. They integrated too much together on the desktop suite. You had the VPN client (ipsec based), PGP client for encrypting mail and files, PGPDisk for creating what is basically just a loopback encrypting disk image that looks like a drive to users, the PGP desktop firewall software, the PGP desktop IDS software bundled with that firewall, etc.
GPG is just the equivalent of the mail and file encrypting tool that was part of the PGP Desktop package. It has nothing to do with VPN access, firewall software, etc.
On the other hand, the Gauntlet firewall which used to be under the PGP division did find a buyer thankfully. Secure Computing acquired it and IIRC the support people. Now, whether they bought it just to strip the proxy technology from it and integrate it into Sidewinder (x86 based) or if they plan on continuing to develop the Solaris and HP-UX based Gauntlet itself has yet to be seen. As for PGP, like people said, use GnuPGP. Lately PGP has seemed like it turned down a dark path of distrust. I can't ensure that what I've encrypted with the latest versions are actually secure because I don't know what impact 9/11 has had on this proprietary closed source piece of software and any backdoors it may contain.
In Morocco, try finding somewhere open to serve you food at 3.30pm when you just finished hacking your mail server and you haven't eaten since 7am.
You can't find a restaurant open at 3:30pm in Morocco? Why? Does the entire place close up for Siesta or something?
If I could search for a song, pay a penny for it and download a 'known perfect' copy at my choice of bitrates (e.g. 128, 160, etc.) then sure as heck I'd do it.
A penny? Don't you think it might cost a bit more to run a distribution system and still pay royalties to the bands while continuing to make a profit for their shareholders? Would you pay a dollar a song? If you would then you might grab their attention, especially if you can live with the copy-protected proprietary formats they would insist on using. What we need to do is find some kind of middle-ground between the two radically opposite sides. There are the music pirates on one side that want songs for free. That's not going to work because record companies need to make profits to pay artists and artists need to eat Then on the other side you have the record companies that want to charge $18 for a CD while charging much less for a cassette.. even though the CD's only cost a fraction of the cassette copy to produce. Have a nice simple flat $1/song fee, electronic distribution, copy-protected format, etc. Then everyone is happy. Well, except the cheap music pirates who will continue to sit on slashdot and whine that people are taking away their "Freedom" by demanding that they not steal their intellectual property.
Again, I will pay. Have have paid for several "ad-free" sites in the last months. There are other sites that I will pay for. But for the sake of the gods, I will not use PayPal. I don't trust them to deliver my money.
See, the problem I have with paying for Internet web sites is that it becomes quickly unmanageable from an end-user perspective. Get 5 or 6 different web sits all charging different rates, different ways to pay, different people to pay, etc. I have enough of that in the "real" world between utilities, phones, car payments, house payments, etc., etc. What we need is something like Microsoft's Passport service where sites interested in subscription services could band together. Register and pay ONE place, one monthly fee and select the sites from there you want your money to allow you to access depending on how many sites your "subscription" level allows. Hmm, why do I have this awful feeling I'm writing some dot-com disaster's business plan?
Wow, did I submit this earlier today? Let's see...
2002-02-14 17:24:02 Texas A&M Clones a Cat (articles,news) (rejected)
Oh, I guess I did! Wow, and to think that I was actually hoping for consistency with the Slashdot editors. I guess that's too much to ask.
Well, assuming that 17:24 is UTC time and the story was posted only a half hour later at 17:54 UTC there's a strong possibility that texchanchan sent in his version earlier than yours. Don't worry about it, wait about 5 hours. Hemos or Michael will come online for the night shift and post it again.
Oh come on, it's not flamebait, it's funny! Laugh. You guys have no sense of humor.
Why did Christopher Columbus climb Mount Everest? Why did Lewis and Clark make their historic journey to China? Why did Davy Crockett discover the New World when everyone around him insisted the world was flat and he'd fall off the edge? Why did Marconi make that first flight? Because it was a challenge! It had never been done before and it was exciting! Why run Linux on your iMac G4? In the immortal words of the greatest starship captain of all time: Because it was there.
I agree. I can't comprehend how we got along without .NET before. My life has been much more fulfilled and vibrant since it has been announced. I still have no idea what .NET is but I'm sure it will be yet another slam dunk for Microsoft's innovation team. I hope .NET is something really cool that will completely innovate the hell out of the computer industry because it's been so stagnant and lacking buzzwords lately.
What kind of rule is that? Imagine the phone company telling you "you can use the phone as often as you like but you're not allowed to speak Japanese on the phone".
Naw, it's more like the phone company telling you you can't receive phone calls on your line, only dial out. If you want to receive phone calls you need to upgrade to a business plan and pay per minute charges. They don't make any distinctions between you receiving phone calls 24/7, thousands a day or one or two from your grandmother.
That reminds me, I don't know where the hell the tape manufacturers think they're marketing to, but with 80 GB hard drives common now, it's rare to find a tape backup solution that is affordable for a consumer that can handle that much. By affordable I mean drives around $250 and tapes under $10/piece for at least 50GB of storage. I've seen some of the proprietary drives but the tapes cost almost as much as the drive! 5 or 6 years ago the backup drives available to consumers could handle backing up the entire average hard drive of the time onto a $15 tape (Travan), but now people are probably just doing without backups which is a disaster waiting to happen.
The only difference between Red Hat and Microsoft is 40 billion dollars and a 95% market share. I *guarentee* you if Red Hat was in Microsoft's position they'd be using just as many dirty tricks and semi-shady tactics to maintain their monopoly of Red Hat Linux on the desktop. Never trust a corporation farther than the next stockholders' meeting. Corporations exist to make money for shareholders not to bring peace and love into the world.
Beyond the cosmetic similarities, there's a world of difference between your CD-audio disc and your DVD-video movie. An audio CD is little more than a flat, 16-bit 44kHz stereo audio stream. Aside from easy track markings, a CD audio stream isn't much more flexible than a cassette or vinyl record, and because of this an audio CD hardly qualifies as software.
Nonono.. Sorry, I wasn't clear on that. I meant software CDs literally. Games, applications, discs of mp3 files, etc. There's nothing stopping you from copying a regular old data CD.