Posts by Daniel B. 3134 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2007
Too picky? Yes, we know that the USA is actually an implementation of a funny model called "polity". However, the House/Senate combo is something they share with fully democratic regimes, and operates on the same rules. If SOPA/PIPA were a constitutional amendment, the different rules would apply, but in this case it is only a regular bill. Therefore, the process can be compared with regular democracies.
I'm guessing that all of this is moot, as home users will probably get shafted. What do I mean? Well, MS is bound to put this feature as a "Business/Ultimate only" or whatever, so everyone buying PCs will have to pay double to MS (the OEM license, then the upgrade) to get Storage Spaces. Already the case with their software RAID, Remote Desktop, Hyper-V integration stuff... Bad bad MS.
My company is actually planning on going Apple thanks to that. They rather pay less on MS licensing. :/
"The only thing you seem to want is for Apple to be restricted instead of other companies."
Nope, what the tech industry wants is for the bully to be punished for patent misuse. If Apple wants to use its legal rights to quash competition with its patents, the competition can easily cease to license their own patents in the same manner Apple has been blocking them.
Other companies will be as restricted as Apple. Unless one of them actually innovate instead of doing litigation...
True gamers actually want mobile gaming devices. The 3DS didn't sell so hot because SURPRISE SURPRISE most gamers already had a DS-something and 3D is mostly seen as a fad.
Smartphone games are something an actual gamer will grow tired of pretty quickly before falling back to more traditional games. The ones that are truly hooked up on smartphone gaming are more of the casual gamers: old farts in the 40+ age group (who probably never put their hands on anything post-Atari, or didn't do games at all) and the small tots crowd, for which the games are pretty good as well.
Too much hype on smartphone games. It is mostly the Wii effect: most Wii owners weren't gamers either.
I consider it a security risk as well, because WhatsApp requires you to exchange mobile numbers. I don't like to dole away my mobile number to the world+dog; MSN and BBM PINs sure, I can block annoying people if I need to and they would still be ignorant of my actual phone number.
Oh, and by the way WhatsApp is buggy on non-US numbers. It suffers from artificial stupidity, it tacks on a leading 1 on our phones! so instead of, say
+525555545352
WhatsApp stores the ID as
+5215555545352
Sheesh.
RIM actually blocks a stolen BlackBerry's PIN so it can't be used by thieves. Using your new Blackberry and restoring your last backup file from your nicked BB will result in all your contactlist receiving and updating their contactlist to have your new PIN.... and this is done automagically. Same thing when you switch Blackberries.
The fact that the iPhone isn't doing this shows that security isn't really Apple's concern. EPIC FAIL on Apple's part!
".....no gamers."
I take offense at that. I got screwed by this *because* I used my PS3 for both gaming and Linux. PS3 Linux wasn't really there for Desktop use though; the real meat on it is the CellBE processor, which coincidentally *isn't* sold outside of the PS3 since some months before Sony b0rked OtherOS.
After a year and a half of getting stuck with old games, I finally bought another PS3, a phat BC-enabled one. That one is now my gaming rig.
Oh and I'll buy an XBOX 360 when pigs fly. There's no effin' way I'll ever buy the shitbox; I don't like getting pimped for online play. But then, that's MS we're talking about.
However, if YouTube were to pull something like that... BOOM. I'd like Google to shut down YouTube and put up a banner saying "closed until SOPA is voted down. If SOPA passes, this closure will be PERMANENT. Call your representative NOW!"
The sheeple might live without Wikipedia, but you'll have to pry their lolcat videos out of their cold, dead hands!
Quicktime USED TO BE awesome when it came out; and even then, only in Macs. There was multimedia stuff that actually exploited the wider QuickTime stuff in the early 90's. But then something happened, QT on Windows sucked (same thing with iTunes), and QT suddenly became the same as realplayer, only with the fugly OSX theming stuck in it. No fullscreen mode, low resolution, etc. But realplayer at least could do fullscreen, and didn't look odd with forced OSX theming.
Sometime during the early 2000's QT became bloatware. :(
This basically would create a CA's CA. Another SPOF, and one that would be like OCSP: good if you have it, useless if you don't.
It would be much more easier for CAs to use real secure stuff like FIPS level 3 compliant HSMs requiring Operator Cards/Tokens to actually *sign* the stupid certs. Sure it's slower, but at least it means that some shady hacker won't get his rogue cert signed w/o physical access to the CA's site. Make some CA standard requiring this and blacklist non-conforming CA entities!
The other option is simply to use the Convergence alternative.
FOSS, even the "commie" GPLy bits create jobs. The consulting sector can now grab FOSS and offer support or tailor-made versions of these products to their clients and get paid for it instead of acting as glorified salesmen for closed & crappy products.
The GPLy FOSS merely forces you to release the source code with the software.
I really, really HATE sites that don't let you set up your own custom security question. "My pets name" is stupid (see Paris Hilton's SideKick hack); street, teacher... Easy for anyone who knows you; and "mothers maiden name" ain't worth using for Latin Americans and Spaniards as we use *both* surnames; my mother's "maiden" surname is right there in my ID.
While I might not do these stoopid games, I wouldn't risk my security questions by doing so. I'm smarter than that!
Make a Google doodle saying "SOPA Act - Applying Chinese Censorship in America, Act NOW!" or something like that would wake up public conciousness on a large segment of the population and would bring public opinion against this crap bill.
As it stands, only the tech bubbles know about it. It has to be known by the American public before the MAFIAA breaks the intertubez!
Ture for *any* dubbed movie. The Spanish dubbed version of "Grown-Ups" ruined the "maize" joke, because the Spanish word for "corn" is "maiz". So all the jokes related to using "maize" instead of "corn" turned into using "maiz" instead of "maiz".
This is the main reason why I really, REALLY hate dubbed movies.
At home, I actually am pondering on upgrading my PC.
But that's because I'm planning on setting one single PC with 4 VM's, and having everyone else use said VMs instead of building four separate PCs.
I'm going to do that as soon as spice comes out for ARM. The rest of our "PCs" are going to be thin ARM clients...
In fact, the "end" is more or less the Mayan equivalent of Y2K as their units span much more than 12 baktuns. The difference is that Y2k was caused by us humans writing last-2 digits encompassing 100 year intervals, while the Mayan Long Count was commonly written in a 5000 year period. The "common day" calendar used a 54 year cycle, which resets much quicker than the LongCount. Yet nobody was shouting "end o the world"!!!!
iSCSI Targets can be implemented, for free, with Linux and a bog-standard x86 server. Hell, it can even be done with the plug computers, NAS appliances with custom firmware and most ARM hardware running Linux. It is also supported out of the box by most OSes, even the creaky ole winXP. Why would we want AoE at all?
The fun thing with DNF is that most sites went on saying that it was a 90's FPS that felt dated, blah blah. I found the true problem with DNF to be that it was basically Halo with Duke-themed stuff. The things that hamper DNF are the same ones hampering Halo:
- Linear level design, can't really explore everything: Check
- Carry only two weapons: Check
- Regen health that gets you killed quickly while waiting for refill: Check
I'd add the long loading times, and the surprisingly LESS interaction with the environment compared even to older games like Doom3. Hopefully they'll fix this on a sequel.
Interesting tidbit: my 15 year-old stepson (who was porn after Duke3d came out!) actually liked DNF, sans the loading times. Maybe it isn't that much dated?
While it is pretty bad that we'll lose the 5 PS3 activations, the ability to remotely deactivate PS3s compensates for that. I'm on my third PS3 (first one had defective BD drive, second never got past 3.15 because of the OtherOS issue) so I'd be screwed if they didn't add the deactivation feature!
The industry has been waving dicks everywhere trying to switch all digital purchases to "licenses". Not just the music industry; the movie & gaming industry has taken steps to do this as well. Now this seems to be backfiring because artists will now have a lot of legal precedents given to them by the labels themselves!
Now if only we could fix copyright terms as well, to lower them back to reasonable timeframes...
Millions bought a Wii, eclipsing both PS3 and Xbox360... yet a lot of 'em are now gathering dust somewhere. If you want to make a point about flash games ... those have been around for far longer than Apple's iDictatorship. Newgrounds spawned that genre, even if it was free; some actually pulled off transitioning to consoles (Alien Hominid).
If 400 million Angry Birds downloads are to count, what about err... Snake? Tetris? Brickbreaker? Mobile gaming is the gaming dev ghetto, you have to sell 'em cheap or give 'em away for free, with an ad-supported version. The only platforms where this doesn't have to hold true are the DS and PSP ones.
If Jobs and Berners-Lee are influental game guys, we might as well put up Edison right there for providing power to those consoles as well!
It was a case of both countries waving their dicks to stop their freefalling popularity. The Junta was pretty much on a low point by 1982, so they needed to do something popular, counting on the UK not responding. What they *didn't* see was that Thatcher was also in a very, very low point and was probably going to lose to Labour, thus *also* needing to do something popular.
Ironically, the Argentines were the ones who ended up better off after the Malvinas/Falklands war; they got to overthrow the Junta, while the UK went on and voted Conservative. So the UK won the war, but ended up getting 10 more years of Thatcher, culminating in Labour turning into "NuLabour".
Ouch.
Last year, we were promised on a good thing called the Smartbook, which was supposed to be a netbook, only running Linux on ARM. Then came that stupid iSlab that killed the market for the Smartbook and we're once again stuck with shit Intel stuff. I ended up buying a craptel netbook.
Now they're selling something called an 'Ultrabook' which might look nice .. except it still has Intel turds inside and coming at fruity prices ... no thanks. I'm sticking to the netbook and my full-blown laptop for now. As much as I'd like to see Apple take a beating, I'd wish it were an actual good product and not yet another WINTEL garbage computer. Meh.
They used to be the cool phones back in 2004-2007. My first "colorful, internetty" handset was the W300i, which was the first phone I got that actually had music playback capability, AM/FM radio and an integrated camera. That phone is almost 5 years old, and it is still working! SE however blew it because they phased out the clamshell handsets. I refused to buy a "candybar" phone, I hated big phones until I got a Blackberry. At least I could do much more stuff on that one than a standard candybar phone.
SE failed to cash in on its huge market circa 2006, the whole slew of smartphones and the iBones took over its main market overnight. Sad for them.
NAT is security theather. The only reason that IT newcomers *think* it is secure is because NAT devices have default firewall rules that block incoming traffic. But NAT by itself won't protect you. If you do want to have stuff inaccessible to the internet, that's what the site scope was made for. People asking for NAT on IPv6 actually fail at grasping IPv6.
NAT is a cheap hack added to IPv4, intended to alleviate the addy space exhaustion; it breaks a LOT of stuff but ppl don't see the breakage because of cheap hacks made on apps to "fix" it.
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