if you are in high school, grab a list of all the jocks and football players
Please don't do that. It's no less biased than Pinkerton's own scheme.
If you're going to Spam it to death, then do it fairly and evenly. Report everyone (yourself included), without exception and favouritism. Naturally you'll need to munge the source addresses
Why is it, that whenever you see that sort of phrase, you just know it's going to be wrong ?
The Colossii weren't for solving Enigma, nor did Stevenson solve it single-handed (neither did Welchman either, despite his book). Bletchley Park didn't touch Purple and certainly didn't know about Pearl Harbour. The Polish Enigma work and the invention of the Bombe pre-dated Heydrich.
If you're going to claim accuracy in a posting like this, then at least get the facts right. After all, there's enough authorative information out on the Net to do it easily (and Bletchley's own site is a good start).
I was one of BTS '82 at Horwood House / Bletchley Park - any other BTS out there ?
Last week I was fortunate to hear Lawrence Lessig, an American law professor, speaking on Internet law (HP Labs, Bristol). He's a superb speaker, and quite changed my views on lawyers 8-)
One of his central points was that although "Form may not quite follow Function" on the 'Net as yet, Usage quite definitely follows Form. Laws are the way they are, not because they're an arbitrary construct errected in a void, but because they're a codification of behaviour that is almost implicit in how the environment already works. This is good law, at least -- a law that tries to go against reality is sen as a bad law and may not be observed with any respect or dutifulness.
So where does that leave deep-linking ? Well, IMHO, if you technically can deep-link, then it's ridiculous to try and simply ban it. It's not going to happen - deep-linking will continue, despite.
Do I support deep-linking ? No, not at all. I think the argument that providing this content costs money and should only be available to those who play ball with the entire revenue stream model (you don't have to buy from there, but you should at least receive the banner ads).
Can we fix this tehnically ? Of course we can! If you're a potentially linked-to site, then it's far from rocket-science to see where the links are coming from, how they're presented, and to take appropriate action. Making all my pages self-unframing is obvious, but there's a lot more too. If ContentPirate.com want to link traffic to my site, then I'd love them to do that - it's better than buying advertising space. If I was a truly dynamic marketeer, then I'd have a range of special offers in pop-up boxes, all ready to launch when I detected the incoming link. "Hi, you've been redirected to GoodInfo.com from ContentPirate.com - look at the special 10% off deals we've built just to steal your business back from them."
I don't believe Macros need to be turned on, or even exist, for the vast majority of users
I work for suit-and-tie corporates much of the time. I write a lot of "Word macros", yet these might be front-ends to content management systems that involve 10Ks of lines of code - not trivial systems. SQL integration, email integration, optical jukeboxes, web publish servers, these are all things that it's core functionality to have available.
I can't do any of this by turning off macros. It's a real problem for me at present to deploy "Word-hosted solutions" to people who are downright technophobic and IT-illiterate, yet do this in a manner that is still rasonably safe. Macros aren't going to go away - we need to find ways to work with them, not just slag off the non-gurus for being inadequate users.
Oh yes, and it really pisses me off to hear my work trivialised as "Word macros". 8-) This stuff is as complex as anything else I write, I just run it under an oddball platform
Reduced to its essentials, the problem with Windows is the non context-sensitivity of the command shell associations.
I can't do much if the shell doesn't execute executables, and I'd really like it to automatically execute Perl scripts. OTOH, my email or news client really shouldn't need to do either of these things (or very infrequently). A big and glaring hole on a typical Windows box is that is has poor facilities to tell the difference between these instances.
How far would Happy99 get if every email client had the sense to say, "This is an executable. I know what I could do with one of those, but trust me, you really don't want to be doing that." ?
The worst case of this is Remote Scripting, and the idea that letting VBScript out of the browser's sandbox and onto an unlimited command shell could ever have been a good thing.
I have this mental image of the woodwork shop at Redmond, "Hey Dude, what's that ?" "Yo, it's a chainsaw. I hear they're made for doing stuff with trees, but I think it would be really cool to try juggling them" "Cool! Let's do it".
I really don't know if Microsoft ever think before they build some of these idiot holes. Wasn't it obvious how broken some of them were ?
This nightmare scenario doesn't need to carry around native viruses for every platform. All we need is an inherently cross-platform scripting language and that's already there (in vague theory) -- VBA. The only thing keeping us from cross platform doom is Micorosft bugginess -- fortunately that's one of the world's more reliable bits of unreliability.
Writing a macro virus for 1-2-3, Quattro or WordPerfect was well-nigh impossible, because the macro facilities just weren't up to it. I tried, but never succeeded (and I used to write a lot of WordPerfect macros back around 1989)
The first macro virus I saw was one I wrote myself and distributed to a selected few people on the CIX system (Dr Solly included) back in '91 or so, when Word 1 first shipped. I was tired of hearing "You can't transmit viruses by email" arguments, because even if you couldn't, it was only a matter of time before you could. Word 1 macros were sufficiently powerful (albeit buggy) to do this.
When OLE Automation finally started to work right (about '94 ?) and especially when mail user agents (like Outlook or some MAPI clients) started to offer an API that was usable from Word, then things really took off (especially for self-propagation).
I'm continually surprised just how primitive most macro viruses are. If you wanted to be a total Gibsonian Super-Bastard, then there's a lot more scope for havoc than is being used even yet. Cross-Office viruses scare the hell out of me, especially if they can travel via PowerPoint and the most technically illiterate of the userbase.
So where does this leave Linux ? Well Linux already does have two powerful vectors for virus havoc (shell scripting and Perl) that are already reasonably likely to be available to anything executing under the user's shell. It doesn't need a WP macro language to find itself a home.
I'd agree that Linux is generally more secure at present (higher competence, compilation from source, user permissions being sub-root) but isn't the very acceptance of Linux going to be indicated by all 3 of those being eroded ?
Can you imagine your parents running Windows ? Can you imagine them running Linux ? Can you imagine them compiling under a store-bought Linux distro and a "just slap in the CD" install ?
I don't agree that ending the transient state will be a good thing.
A crunch is a crunch. People get hurt. Small investors will take a very big hit on the collapse of the ecomm boom. Let's face it, we like to think of VCs as those lovely rich people who keep us in big lunches and new G4s, while we bleed them dry, but where did their money come from ? A lot of the fund money floating around now is either Joe Sixpack's own little day-trading adventure, or it's Doreen Bluerinse's life-savings in a Fund that was late into.com and still can't tell the difference between Amazon and Lastminute, or Cisco and Iridium.
What happened in '29 ? Banks got burned, and when a bank gets burned, it takes it out on its smaller creditors. Rockefeller didn't find a bank trying to repossess his mansion, but a lot of poor Okie farmers did.
The child says "don't get the one with Linux on it! It can't run Bozo Spacewars XXVII!!"
I'm already having this problem, with an OS that's long-overdue for replacement, has poor game support and no USB support. I'm forced into using it to do server-related stuff, but it can't even play a decent game of Battlezone.
To implement (2) we first need a resource of how to identify the various filters; how many filters there are out there, and what identifiable headers they send - then we let the coders rip on it. Does anyone already have this info ?
Secondly, any thoughts on building a site that's a bit like Netcraft's "What is that server running ?" script ? As a webmaster, I'd like to be able to enter a URL and receive a report akin to "NetNazi blocks entire site, WebWorrier gives it a PG rating". For my own sites, I might even part with money for this.
Need a cute fat penguin ? Go and read UK broadsheet newspaper TheGuardian. Steve Bell's overweight penguins have been a regular cartoon strip for nearly twenty years (since the Falklands conflict).
What's to stop VeriSign from extracting a larger percent of the "e-commerce" tax that they already take out
There's always talk about government imposing e-commerce taxation. Maybe this is a route by which they'll do it ? The idea of horse-trading between a government wanting a finger in every transactional pie, and a VeriSign DNS monopoly wanting something in exchange -- now that really is a scary prospect.
If the rate of Internet$ / Real$ continues to move as it does, maybe Verisgin will just buy Washington !
As a sole trader, I might legitimately call myself "Fred's PCs" as a trading name, but how can any one person claim to be the moral representative of an organisation that he's deliberately opposing ?
"another individual" covers a wide range. I'd suggest that the Slashdot hive-mind opinion is that Old McDonald's burger shop (flippin 'em since 1812) is a legitimate holder of mcdonalds.com, if they registered it first as their claim to the name is equally as good as the golden arches people. OTOH, a domain squatter who simply sees an oppportunity for a new business name and grabs it should have no moral claim to retaining it. Doing it to an Open Source project is simply evil.
So what ? I think the warning about collecting IP numbers is a very real worry. If I were a bvendor of asnake-oil crypto, I'd love to have the browser IPs of a list of people who wandered past the false OpenSSH site. Expect incoming junkmail !
Well, we've already got a penguin as a mascot -- how about Antarctica ?
Re:pops up out of nowhere and saves the day *SPOIL
on
Inversions
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· Score: 2
That was a spoiler.
Yes, maybe. I hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone (and I don't think I have) but I certainly wouldn't give any more detail than that.
Was the Culture telegraphed from halfway through the book ? Well I don't know what cover you had in the USA, but the UK cover screams "Another Culture Novel" all over it (and Iain "M." Banks is a big hint). Then you read it; there's no use of the Culture (one of Banks' better inventions) and you sit through most of the book waiting for it to happen. The final revelation is poor, ineffective and IMHO gratuitous. It would have been a better book without the Culture involvement -- after all, it added nothing. If the Culture was to make an appearance, then it should have been a full-blown invasion of Arrakis scenario, with helicopter drop-ships and a commanding officer obsessed with medieval jousting, "I love the smell of middens in the morning. Smells of -- feudalism". The Amazon links have some Slack (yeah, strange concept). They're auto-generated inside my browser, with a bit of code I wrote to deal with writing pages of book recommendations that needed associated links. Enter the title, set it off and another browser window goes off and searches, then pastes the ISBN back (maybe I should patent the concept 8-) ). Yes, I hate Amazon's patent usage, but I'm in the UK; we don't have FatBrain and BOL doesn't carry enough tech books.
A bad book by Banks' standards
on
Inversions
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· Score: 2
If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.
This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.
Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.
I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable:- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.
Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.
This sounds great - practical solutions to a real problem.
OTOH, there are already far too many sites where there just isn't an accessible URL anyway. Some are frame-based, some are dynamically generated. They all have the problem of not being bookmarkable (from within the browser's normal "Bookmark Here" function). Some do try to solve this though, by separately publishing a bookmark that will take you back to the same content.
If this idea is to really work, then it needs to be supported by dynamic sites publishing their Robust Hyperlinks, even for pages that don't have a "traditional" URL to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
if you are in high school, grab a list of all the jocks and football players
Please don't do that. It's no less biased than Pinkerton's own scheme.
If you're going to Spam it to death, then do it fairly and evenly. Report everyone (yourself included), without exception and favouritism. Naturally you'll need to munge the source addresses
You don't have to look as far as the Nazis. Look at Pinkerton's murderous history in putting down American trade unionism (particularly in mining).
So, there you are, the real history of the ENIGMA
Why is it, that whenever you see that sort of phrase, you just know it's going to be wrong ?
The Colossii weren't for solving Enigma, nor did Stevenson solve it single-handed (neither did Welchman either, despite his book). Bletchley Park didn't touch Purple and certainly didn't know about Pearl Harbour. The Polish Enigma work and the invention of the Bombe pre-dated Heydrich.
If you're going to claim accuracy in a posting like this, then at least get the facts right. After all, there's enough authorative information out on the Net to do it easily (and Bletchley's own site is a good start).
I was one of BTS '82 at Horwood House / Bletchley Park - any other BTS out there ?
Last week I was fortunate to hear Lawrence Lessig, an American law professor, speaking on Internet law (HP Labs, Bristol).
He's a superb speaker, and quite changed my views on lawyers 8-)
One of his central points was that although "Form may not quite follow Function" on the 'Net as yet, Usage quite definitely follows Form. Laws are the way they are, not because they're an arbitrary construct errected in a void, but because they're a codification of behaviour that is almost implicit in how the environment already works. This is good law, at least -- a law that tries to go against reality is sen as a bad law and may not be observed with any respect or dutifulness.
So where does that leave deep-linking ? Well, IMHO, if you technically can deep-link, then it's ridiculous to try and simply ban it. It's not going to happen - deep-linking will continue, despite.
Do I support deep-linking ? No, not at all. I think the argument that providing this content costs money and should only be available to those who play ball with the entire revenue stream model (you don't have to buy from there, but you should at least receive the banner ads).
Can we fix this tehnically ? Of course we can! If you're a potentially linked-to site, then it's far from rocket-science to see where the links are coming from, how they're presented, and to take appropriate action. Making all my pages self-unframing is obvious, but there's a lot more too. If ContentPirate.com want to link traffic to my site, then I'd love them to do that - it's better than buying advertising space. If I was a truly dynamic marketeer, then I'd have a range of special offers in pop-up boxes, all ready to launch when I detected the incoming link. "Hi, you've been redirected to GoodInfo.com from ContentPirate.com - look at the special 10% off deals we've built just to steal your business back from them."
Lawrence Lessig has a book out Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, on this and other topics. I strongly recommend it.
I don't believe Macros need to be turned on, or even exist, for the vast majority of users
I work for suit-and-tie corporates much of the time. I write a lot of "Word macros", yet these might be front-ends to content management systems that involve 10Ks of lines of code - not trivial systems. SQL integration, email integration, optical jukeboxes, web publish servers, these are all things that it's core functionality to have available.
I can't do any of this by turning off macros. It's a real problem for me at present to deploy "Word-hosted solutions" to people who are downright technophobic and IT-illiterate, yet do this in a manner that is still rasonably safe. Macros aren't going to go away - we need to find ways to work with them, not just slag off the non-gurus for being inadequate users.
Oh yes, and it really pisses me off to hear my work trivialised as "Word macros". 8-)
This stuff is as complex as anything else I write, I just run it under an oddball platform
Reduced to its essentials, the problem with Windows is the non context-sensitivity of the command shell associations.
I can't do much if the shell doesn't execute executables, and I'd really like it to automatically execute Perl scripts. OTOH, my email or news client really shouldn't need to do either of these things (or very infrequently). A big and glaring hole on a typical Windows box is that is has poor facilities to tell the difference between these instances.
How far would Happy99 get if every email client had the sense to say, "This is an executable. I know what I could do with one of those, but trust me, you really don't want to be doing that." ?
The worst case of this is Remote Scripting, and the idea that letting VBScript out of the browser's sandbox and onto an unlimited command shell could ever have been a good thing.
I have this mental image of the woodwork shop at Redmond, "Hey Dude, what's that ?"
"Yo, it's a chainsaw. I hear they're made for doing stuff with trees, but I think it would be really cool to try juggling them"
"Cool! Let's do it".
I really don't know if Microsoft ever think before they build some of these idiot holes. Wasn't it obvious how broken some of them were ?
This nightmare scenario doesn't need to carry around native viruses for every platform. All we need is an inherently cross-platform scripting language and that's already there (in vague theory) -- VBA. The only thing keeping us from cross platform doom is Micorosft bugginess -- fortunately that's one of the world's more reliable bits of unreliability.
Writing a macro virus for 1-2-3, Quattro or WordPerfect was well-nigh impossible, because the macro facilities just weren't up to it. I tried, but never succeeded (and I used to write a lot of WordPerfect macros back around 1989)
The first macro virus I saw was one I wrote myself and distributed to a selected few people on the CIX system (Dr Solly included) back in '91 or so, when Word 1 first shipped. I was tired of hearing "You can't transmit viruses by email" arguments, because even if you couldn't, it was only a matter of time before you could. Word 1 macros were sufficiently powerful (albeit buggy) to do this.
When OLE Automation finally started to work right (about '94 ?) and especially when mail user agents (like Outlook or some MAPI clients) started to offer an API that was usable from Word, then things really took off (especially for self-propagation).
I'm continually surprised just how primitive most macro viruses are. If you wanted to be a total Gibsonian Super-Bastard, then there's a lot more scope for havoc than is being used even yet. Cross-Office viruses scare the hell out of me, especially if they can travel via PowerPoint and the most technically illiterate of the userbase.
So where does this leave Linux ? Well Linux already does have two powerful vectors for virus havoc (shell scripting and Perl) that are already reasonably likely to be available to anything executing under the user's shell. It doesn't need a WP macro language to find itself a home.
I'd agree that Linux is generally more secure at present (higher competence, compilation from source, user permissions being sub-root) but isn't the very acceptance of Linux going to be indicated by all 3 of those being eroded ?
Can you imagine your parents running Windows ? Can you imagine them running Linux ? Can you imagine them compiling under a store-bought Linux distro and a "just slap in the CD" install ?
I don't agree that ending the transient state will be a good thing.
A crunch is a crunch. People get hurt. Small investors will take a very big hit on the collapse of the ecomm boom. Let's face it, we like to think of VCs as those lovely rich people who keep us in big lunches and new G4s, while we bleed them dry, but where did their money come from ? A lot of the fund money floating around now is either Joe Sixpack's own little day-trading adventure, or it's Doreen Bluerinse's life-savings in a Fund that was late into .com and still can't tell the difference between Amazon and Lastminute, or Cisco and Iridium.
What happened in '29 ? Banks got burned, and when a bank gets burned, it takes it out on its smaller creditors. Rockefeller didn't find a bank trying to repossess his mansion, but a lot of poor Okie farmers did.
This gives me the idea that they are bitter overgrown adolescents getting off on their 'subversiveness'.
Jealousy of Seattle ? The NW Slackers got to have their revolution, and now SF wants its own.
-- Reclaim The TrustfundsI have three Battlezones:
A twenty year old Vectrex home console with a genuine vector screen (crusty, but still cool).
Activision's DirectX version. Terrible gameplay, uncontrollable vehicles, but beautiful to look at.
BattleZone for the Palm ! Best of the lot, noises, volcanoes and everything.
The child says "don't get the one with Linux on it! It can't run Bozo Spacewars XXVII!!"
I'm already having this problem, with an OS that's long-overdue for replacement, has poor game support and no USB support. I'm forced into using it to do server-related stuff, but it can't even play a decent game of Battlezone.
It's Windows NT
Giant karmic-based moderator-rating system built on top of Google ? FMR, that's almost a business plan...
(Get you hands off Bezos - this is publication, so no patenting it)
Nice ideas.
To implement (2) we first need a resource of how to identify the various filters; how many filters there are out there, and what identifiable headers they send - then we let the coders rip on it. Does anyone already have this info ?
Secondly, any thoughts on building a site that's a bit like Netcraft's "What is that server running ?" script ? As a webmaster, I'd like to be able to enter a URL and receive a report akin to "NetNazi blocks entire site, WebWorrier gives it a PG rating". For my own sites, I might even part with money for this.
Who's going to print up a few T shirts for the next Quake-meet ? Something like "Mario Party, a game with real frags" 8-)
a penguin that looks like Fat Bastard
Need a cute fat penguin ? Go and read UK broadsheet newspaper The Guardian . Steve Bell's overweight penguins have been a regular cartoon strip for nearly twenty years (since the Falklands conflict).
What's to stop VeriSign from extracting a larger percent of the "e-commerce" tax that they already take out
There's always talk about government imposing e-commerce taxation. Maybe this is a route by which they'll do it ? The idea of horse-trading between a government wanting a finger in every transactional pie, and a VeriSign DNS monopoly wanting something in exchange -- now that really is a scary prospect.
If the rate of Internet$ / Real$ continues to move as it does, maybe Verisgin will just buy Washington !
How can any one person "own" a .org ?
As a sole trader, I might legitimately call myself "Fred's PCs" as a trading name, but how can any one person claim to be the moral representative of an organisation that he's deliberately opposing ?
legitimately registered by another individual
"another individual" covers a wide range. I'd suggest that the Slashdot hive-mind opinion is that Old McDonald's burger shop (flippin 'em since 1812) is a legitimate holder of mcdonalds.com, if they registered it first as their claim to the name is equally as good as the golden arches people. OTOH, a domain squatter who simply sees an oppportunity for a new business name and grabs it should have no moral claim to retaining it. Doing it to an Open Source project is simply evil.
So what ? I think the warning about collecting IP numbers is a very real worry. If I were a bvendor of asnake-oil crypto, I'd love to have the browser IPs of a list of people who wandered past the false OpenSSH site. Expect incoming junkmail !
Well, we've already got a penguin as a mascot -- how about Antarctica ?
That was a spoiler.
Yes, maybe. I hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone (and I don't think I have) but I certainly wouldn't give any more detail than that.
Was the Culture telegraphed from halfway through the book ? Well I don't know what cover you had in the USA, but the UK cover screams "Another Culture Novel" all over it (and Iain "M." Banks is a big hint). Then you read it; there's no use of the Culture (one of Banks' better inventions) and you sit through most of the book waiting for it to happen. The final revelation is poor, ineffective and IMHO gratuitous. It would have been a better book without the Culture involvement -- after all, it added nothing. If the Culture was to make an appearance, then it should have been a full-blown invasion of Arrakis scenario, with helicopter drop-ships and a commanding officer obsessed with medieval jousting, "I love the smell of middens in the morning. Smells of -- feudalism". The Amazon links have some Slack (yeah, strange concept). They're auto-generated inside my browser, with a bit of code I wrote to deal with writing pages of book recommendations that needed associated links. Enter the title, set it off and another browser window goes off and searches, then pastes the ISBN back (maybe I should patent the concept 8-) ). Yes, I hate Amazon's patent usage, but I'm in the UK; we don't have FatBrain and BOL doesn't carry enough tech books.
If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.
This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.
Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.
I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.
Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.
You like 404s ? Try this one: http://www.g-wizz.net/wibblewibblewibble.swf.
Yes, that file extension is a hint...
This sounds great - practical solutions to a real problem.
OTOH, there are already far too many sites where there just isn't an accessible URL anyway. Some are frame-based, some are dynamically generated. They all have the problem of not being bookmarkable (from within the browser's normal "Bookmark Here" function). Some do try to solve this though, by separately publishing a bookmark that will take you back to the same content.
If this idea is to really work, then it needs to be supported by dynamic sites publishing their Robust Hyperlinks, even for pages that don't have a "traditional" URL to begin with.