Posts by Daniel B.

That pic doesn't look like it has a keyboard...

Smartphones are all about the QWERTY keyboards. T9 is fugly for constant typing!

IIRC, I think that Obama was going to get one of NSA's own secure smartphones for the "really secure" stuff. Can't remember the name for that thing, though.

UP

I was half expecting this geezer to claim he's going down to South America.

I see dead Vultures...

Articles like this make me miss the 'dead vulture' icon ... which would be totally appropiate for this one.

Does wanting vulture brains make one a zombie? Coz zombies want braaaaains!

Ice cream!

Join in a Mexican Ice Cream chain on the lawsuits. It's called Bing as well!

Not all of North America

Here in Mexico, my BB never stopped getting emails. Or at least, not in normal hours ... I doubt I'd ever be in a hurry to get e-mail at 2 am. Anyway, the only "delayed" email I see was one sent at 3am which arrived at 4am. All those chain-letters and social networking site "updates" still arrived on time.

Quick solution

Sell a $500 Slim with OtherOS support, so all the geeks can buy an unsubsidized Linux-capable PS3!!! :)

I really, really want x86 to be displaced ....

Space Solar?

Maybe it's time to get our "space-based" solar energy by now. After all, SimCity 2000 promised me I would have one by 2020... and it seems it will be the case!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10408897-54.html?refresh=1259948006200

That, and Fusion would be the solution for energy stuff. Nuclear's fine as well, but after Chernobyl most ppl seem to be terrified by those.

As for washing, well, I'd complain more about people using their washing machines at half load, but at full water marks. Eek!

Shouldn't they be Exploding Sheep?

It was Concrete Donkey and Exploding Sheep, not Exploding Donkey and ... erm... wait... no sheep?

Oh dear! I'm not playing Worms, am I?

BlackBerry fields forever...

I keep hearing about the iPhone mopping up the smartphone market with the competition, yet I haven't seen the mythic hoards of iPhones in the street. In fact, only 2 coworkers have iPhones... wait, make it 1, because the other one is in fact a dual-SIM hiPhone. However, what I have seen a lot these days are either blackberries (both the Curve/Bold models and the skinny Pearls), the Samsung Messenger (builtin wifi, pre-installed MSN Messenger, and QWERTY physical keyboard for your chatting pleasure), some Palms and a lot of iPAQs.

The iTouch would be more successful, though; it seems that the look & feel works fine for those who want an iPod, but sucks for those who want a phone.

It isn't the Live Banning...

I'll have to use a Clinton-ish phrase to rub it in:

"It's the CORRUPTED SAVEGAMES, stupid!"

MS didn't just stop at banning "hacked" consoles, it went even further and shat over legally-bought licenses, corrupted all savegames *and* crippled basic XBox functionality. It is basically similar to WGA corrupting all your files because you're using a "pirated" Windows.

Thanks to this, even those who *did* mod their consoles for playing pirated games have a legal standing; MS purposely vandalized their personal data. I wish 'em modders luck!

Also, I'd bet this goes down as bad PR for MS, while the PS3 stands well in this matter...

Some good chuckles...

The steam catapult is a Brit invention ... however, it can't be used in the new Royal Navy's carriers!

I'm looking forward to seeing this deployed ... and it would also be nice to see something similar used to put stuff into space!

OMG my games are doing illegal stuff!

Hm... my MGS4 game does an "install" for each act. That means that part of the game is copied to the PS3's HDD, which according to this judge, is a copyright violation. Meh.

Anyway ... I'd like to thank this idiot ruling, as it means that anyone who wants to play overseas games ... will buy a PS3, which doesn't have region-locking. Hell, Sony gave everyone what they wanted: copy protection for the developers, cheap Blu-Rays for the masses, OtherOS for the geeks (though they didn't include those in PS3Slim), and removing region-locking for the overseas game purchasing dudes. Thus there is no motivation to actually do a modchip except for illegal purposes; though Sony's "idea" of dropping OtherOS might actually make the geek crowd want one for the PS3 Slim. Oh well...

AOL sucked even before the merger

I remember them veeery well. There's a reason www.aolsucks.org *still* exists. Their "free" trials required you to give 'em your credit card, and cancelling would be extremely difficult. They also charged $40/month for what was basically dialup services, even when real broadband started to charge $40/month as well.

AOL might have had good ideas on other areas, but they were the dumb man's ISP, and not only in the "internet n00bz" sense. They can burn in hell!

Hotmail

Yes, some of us still use Hotmail. And a zillion users still have Hotmail accounts, if only because of MSN Messenger. I shifted most of my email stuff to Gmail, as MS took too much time realizing that 2Mb was a laughable size for an inbox. Even when they started giving out 250Mb inboxes, it still reeked of stupidity; they restricted it to US accounts while any John Doe could open up a Yahoo or Gmail account.

By the time Hotmail started offering 2Gb inboxes, Hotmail was forgotten. If it weren't for MSN Messenger, it would already have gone dead, just like Geocities.

Anyway, cookies to log out? Stooooopid.

I can't avoid laughing at this statement...

"It's application compatibly and familiarly with Office or music applications, and hardware compatibility that Paterson believes will help Windows 7 Home Premium hold its own against Linux - a classic Microsoft argument and one that's partly prevailed on desktops and laptops."

... the same familiarity that has put off users from "upgrading" to MacOS-wannabe Vista, and made power users cringe at the Office 2007 Ribbon. If anything, they've successfully opened up that possibility for either Linux or MacOSX ... in fact, if MacOS X were not locked to Macs, they would've already taken over the Windows market.

ED 209 sans guns?

Because everyone knows what happened with that...

"YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY"

....

"I AM NOW AUTHORIZED TO USE LETHAL FORCE" ... "Oh ****, no guns!"

corrupting savegames

According to some sources, MS isn't just banning the modded xboxen from Live. They're trashing all functionality, the media live center *and* corrupting *every* *single* savegame you've got. That would be the equivalent of WGA overwriting all your files because you have a "non-original" Windows. I'm pretty sure that's highly illegal, and I'd expect MS to get slammed by lawsuits for this.

Oh well, good thing I bought a PS3. ;)

BTW, the "turn 360 degrees" was awesome. Has anybody here seen Last Action Hero?

QT

I actually like this multi-platform GUI environment. It has been the only C++ GUI that I've found easy to learn and use, and was my main platform before I took on Java.

Development for BlackBerry OS is with Java, so it doesn't look weird. WinMo is C#/:NET I suppose (whoever still uses VB should be shot on sight) and I suppose that the Linux-based offers are C++ based (especially those using QT) so it isn't too hard to learn on these ones.

iPhone requires that Smalltalk-wannabe ObjC, but then again, some devs have actually started learning that as well, but the learning curve might be steep for those used to C-like languages.

Yeah, right.

Of course Apple has passed Nokia. An iPhone is much more expensive than your standard Nokia handset, especially the cheap ones which are Nokia's strong product. As the article pointed out, it isn't winning Nokia on number of mobiles, but on gross sales.

I doubt Nintendo has any worries from the iPhone; real gamers will stick to the DS or the PSP, and as other commenters have pointed out, Mario, Resident Evil and similar games are unthinkable without real buttons. In fact, I'd rather play on an N-Gage ;)

0wn3d

The term "0wned" totally applies to this one!

I do wonder how nobody had thought of this one before. Having the botnet executable in your hands means that you can find out any possible C&C server, as the bonet "client" has to find one to properly function.

In fact, I'm thinking about setting up a VM and try to get "botted", just for the kicks. No real harm would be done, as my ISP blocks port 25; the botnet won't be able to send any crap.

Jumpin' Gigawatts!

In part to save energy, and also to lower the fatality rate of would-be suicide jumpers (or legless drunken ladies) the electrified rail doesn't operate at max power 'till the train is near. She's pretty damn lucky that the spark occured while the train wasn't too near, but ouch!

Don't drink & tube, seems to be the moral?

I'm about to see this soon over here...

... as a similar law passed this April in Mexico. The difference is that the cut-off day has been widely publicized. If you buy a new PAYG or enter a new contract, you have to ID yourself and register. If you're an existing customer, well, you can register via SMS giving some personal details. (Of course, there is a possibility for abuse here, as the stuff you get asked for is full name and DOB.) The thing you actually register is your SIM card, and/or the cell number itself in case you're one of the poor sods stuck on CDMA networks.

Oh, and it is similarly easy to UNregister your cellphone, so you can do precisely that when you sell the handset. Second-hand mobile markets are strong over here, so this was an important thing to have.

I still don't trust my government, but it is either registering, or no mobile at all.

Virtualization

VM's usually come into need with Windows environments ... because MS wants you to use a zillion servers to do what other OSen suffice with two. I've been told that I can't achieve real DR capabilities if I don't have *three* DC's running! Then comes SQL Clustering ... add two machines ... IIS needs to be in another one ... blah blah ... and some clusterized apps don't play well with non-clusterized apps. So the need to virtualize becomes critical.

Other stuff I've seen is the development servers problem. It is much easier to just buy one Blade with tons of RAM, hook it up to the SAN and give it gobs o' storage. Then you set up as many dev servers as you want, thus freeing up your budget for the actual production servers, while meeting dev and QA server needs.

I do agree, however, that instead of a zillion "desktop PC" VMs, you could just solve that with a much cheaper solution involving a Win2003/2008 Server with a zillion Terminal Services CALs ... which might be even cheaper than going the VM way. Especially when you can just slap Linux on the PCs and make 'em run rdesktop at boot time. Whoopee!!

My God, it's full of trolls...

Leave it to Macbois to say that a self-replicating program isn't a worm.

The trolls abound these waters...

SORBS overblocked me

SORBS has an ugly "fuck you" policy for spamlisting. I found myself inside one of their listed IP blocks, and found out that they do not honor or maintain any kind of blacklists. This of course means that the only way to get "unblocked" is to pay their $50 fine to unblock the entire netblock I reside in, or wait for SORBS to auto-delist the block. The first option would obviously not work, as whoever's actually spamming on said block will keep on spamming, and get the whole block to get listed again; and the second one, well, I doubt the spammers will cease to spam.

Thanks to this policy, I've discouraged SORBS whenever I can. In these days of colocation and IPv4 address shortages, I can't really decide on who's going to be my IP neighbor.

The LHC guys never played DOOM, it seems

Otherwise they'd know they're supposed to do this on Phobos, not Earth! Anyway, stand by for Hell's invasion into Earth!

Mine's the one with the BFG9000

Looks more like giving Apple the finger

Given that the iPhone is basically a kick in the nads for the "chosen" carriers, as it's basically an Apple gadget with Apple stores and Apple-everything but it doesn't really care about who is the carrier. Android seems to bring the brand back to the carrier.

@magnetik

Actually, Apple does want, and once had a large % of the desktop computer market. PCs used to be the "underdog computer" and Macs were kind of expensive when they were first launched (price tags much higher than now, but quality was high as well) but the Apple II was pretty much THE personal computer of the 80's. Even with the high-priced Macs, the Macintosh was the best computer to have for office stuff; it had a GUI, it had PageMaker, and I'm pretty sure that MS Office began on that platform. Even the "one-button" mouse was considered an improvement, as the two-buttoned mouse for the PC was confusing, as most programs rarely used the second button, so it wasn't seen as something useful.

Apple's opening up didn't "nearly kill" Apple as some seem to argue; it was the incompetence in management that made some projects lag. How can you explain the Newton not gaining traction? It was a damn fine PDA *years* before the term was born, *years* before Palm and however it just never got off the ground. And on the opening up, some point that the problem with Apple was that they opened up *too late* on the Mac; by the time the Power Computing Mac clones came to be, the market share had already tilted to Microsoft's empire. Win95 closed the learning curve gap between Mac System 7 users and Windows users, and this would be the point where most Mac users started to jump ship.

In fact, I'd point out that bad management is actually *limiting* Apple this time around; they'll never have a big market share as long as it stays with the control zealot culture.

I would display my 1986 Mac Plus with pride if I still had it ... but there's very little chance I'll buy an Apple Product as long as Jobs is still in its helm.

@magnetik, @Richard 118

Hm... I wonder if you're aware of the BlackBerry OS security model. I don't get any "security dialog" when I send an SMS or make a call, but I do get 'em when *any* app tries to do these things, unless I've explicitly granted permissions on that app.

In fact, I installed the Google Mobile App about 2 days ago, and it caused a security dialog to tell me that Google Mobile app was trying to access the phone data. This is SOP for *all* apps other than the stock BlackBerryOS apps... why can't Apple manage this?

It does show, however, that the iPhone locked-down environment isn't done for *security* reasons, otherwise something like this would be impossible to pull off. I would definitely say "no" if some game started to ask me for phone data access.

No they're not...

"Mac enthusiast blogs, such as Cult of the Mac, have criticised the move as treating Mac fans as just as dumb as Windows users."

They're actually dumbER. The "Mac has no virus" argument has been toted for so long that Mac fans will no longer be wary of suspicious programs as for them, the Mac will never have malicious stuff like virii or trojans and such.

As for the game ... it looks like something the BOFH would do... does anyone remember the DOOM game where the mobs represented networked-PCs???

BB hasn't lost its share

Palm has lost it to Apple, and then again, this is the US we're talking about. I live in Mexico, and the ones that are getting more sales are the Samsung Messenger phone (oooh! I can CHAT on it!), the Nokia handsets, some of the iPhone lookalikes, or the BlackBerries. The iPhone's PAYG price tag of $700 is a dealbreaker in a country where 90% of mobile users use PAYG.

Looks like the only country to go with the flashy stuff is the US...