Posts by Daniel B.

You broke mah internet!

Oh great. First they're going for the stupid idea of adding non-ASCII characters, so a lot of software will either break, or cope with it but then we'll have the average Joe baffled on finding how to type Chinese/Cyrillic characters in a qwerty/azerty keyboard.

Now we're also getting free-for-all gTLD's? Oh well, at least now phishers and 419'ers might get .con ... so now you'll know it's a CON, get it???

While I understand that .com has turned into something kind of cliché, well, the other "new" TLD's haven't really taken off, have they? Even with six-digit figures, this is just going to turn ugly.

Worsening FM?

Hm.... taking in mind my experience with analog/digital signals, aren't digital signals more sensitive to noise? I mean, when I go through a small tunnel, I might get a bit of noise, but I still can listen my daily dose of Heavy Metal. Do the same with digital stuff, and I'll probably get the same garbled sound I get when my GSM signal gets weak.

I just don't see why I'd want something like this on a medium that is mostly used on the move. The most useful feature I've seen that actually does help me with my "Radio Experience" would be RDS, which gives me the station ID and sometimes the "Now Playing" song name.

@ Simon Aspinall

"Could you really imagine your Gran running a linux machine. causes my blood to run cold."

Windows is not much better. I recently had to guide my ex-gf by phone on the initial Vista "setup". This is an OEM PC, which should have an easier method for end-users to get it up and running. She was baffled with the EULA screen ... imagine what kind of nightmare it was to walk her through the rest of the process.

Ubuntu's setup (and some other Linux distros like Fedora) are now comparably easier than the standard XP/Vista install, don't confuse end-users with EULA stuff, and don't ask weird questions that the Average Joe is not familiar with.

My aforementioned friend took 7 DAYS to finally get the damn thing working, as I was the only computer-literate person in her circle of friends.

As someone else mentioned, Vista seems to be the new winME; remember back when win2000 was supposed to be "business only"??? I distinctly remember that DirectX was stated to be win2000-incompatible, and that it would be "never, ever released for win2000". Except someone hacked DirectX into win2000, and the masses ditched winME in favor of win2000. Then M$ changed its stance and gave us DirectX for win2000 thru the official channels.

At least they didn't shoot themselves in the foot, as windows server 2008 does support DirectX by default. Though I'd wonder if M$ really wants us to jump from "NT workstation" to "NT Server" as a main platform??? Looks more like a genuine cock-up this time.

Re: Why block ads?

I feel with this one. If you fire up Adblock, you're hurting the site. (And not to mention that Adblock is a FF-only extension.)

I really don't care, for example, if I get google ads or not, as those aren't intrusive; actually some of them are very funny. But some of them (doubleclick.net, cpxinteractive) are annoying enough to cut them out. Especially some of them that for some reason like to show me BIG BUTTS, nag me on watching "girl next door" cams or similars; these kind of ads are actually a threat to you (and no, it isn't in porn sites these come up!) Add up with those stupid "You're the 999999th visitor YOU WON!" crapads, and I've decided I'm fed up.

So my solution has been to set up a squid proxy that blocks the offending domains, and voila! No more annoying ads. Project Wonderful and Google Syndication, on the other hand, still remain in my accepted lists. :)

Don't blanket-ban ads, and maybe the webmasters will get the hint and switch to the nicer ads.

Dogs can be dangerous!

I've got some bad experience ... I remember some jackass leaving his dog right outside his home about 5 years ago at night. One time I was walking back from my girlfriend's house and nearly got attacked by the damn dog, only because I was walking on the same sidewalk this dog was. I then proceeded to get a 5Kg rock and pass thru again. Had the dog attacked me, I'm sure he'd be dead.

Wonder why did the plods bothered anyway? They could've just called in the street sweepers! ;)

@Charles Tsang - "From the web site reading, does that mean if I attack a dog owner or the dog and it bites me, I can then complain of a dangerous dog and have it destroyed?"

Did you see the first Beethoven movie? That's basically what the "bad guy" does.

Dead vulture 'coz he was attacked by the chav's dog.

Goohoo!!!!

I'd rather see Google and Yahoo! merging, than an M$ takeover. In fact, Google-Yahoo are much more compatible in technology base and mindsets than M$-Yahoo.

All the Google and Yahoo stuff for mobile phones, for example, will run seamlessly with my Blackberry, while the MS stuff (MSN Spaces, specifically) will rebuff me with "OS not compatible" crap. As long as Microsoft doesn't have a big share into the web, you can guarantee that most websites can run on other browsers than IE. I'm pretty sure that if MS takes over Yahoo! they'd use it to push their god-awful Silverlight stuff, that only runs in Windows/IE.

Cry all you want, Ballmer. We don't care anyway.

Whoa!

Hm... seems like she left the Time Displacement Portal on during the night.

Or maybe the USS Enterprise was charging its dilithium crystals from her power supply?

Stop dogging me around..

Woof! Woof!

Was this one of those midget-sized dogs? If so, I wouldn't be surprised if the driver didn't notice the mutt. Anyway, who in their right mind would take their dog near an operating street-cleaner? I would wait until the thing passed on to prevent exactly these situations. Dogs have a habit on pulling *away* from their master, so they could easily get in range of a dog-sucking sweeper ... or a speeding car. This is exactly the reason my cousin lost his dog; the mutt thought it was wise to stand on the street to "wait" for traffic... and got hit on the head by incoming 60 km/h traffic.

The dead vulture icon, 'coz that's how it would look like after trying to cross 60 km/h traffic.

I love the smell of burning comments in the morning...

Ok. Seems like a lot of people don't get it. Linkscanner shouldn't load sites *before* I actually click on 'em! Doing so isn't "live" scanning at all. Its eating away my bandwidth, and the site(s) bandwidth as well. I do understand the need for this kind of scan, but you could have this as well done at *load* time, by setting up a local proxy that checks the site, then serves it to the browser if its OK.

I do see some webmasters that would be happy for this, though. I remember some of those "warez" site groups like t100.com or something like that getting paid for clicked-in users (that is, site visitors.) They'd be very happy to get a zillion extra "visitors" thanks to this.

The rest of us, however, really don't want this kind of stuff.

DVD first year?

"Interestingly, BD fared less well than DVD during the formats' respective first year on sale - 2006 and 1999, respectively."

Hm... wait ... 1999 *DVD's first year*??? Geeze, wonder how my dad got hold of his DVD collection back in 1998!

@AC, duplicating lightbeams

The thing is that according to Quantum physics, to know the polarisation you have to measure it. It can be either | and - (the "+" orientations), or \ and / (the X orientations). To measure the photons, you place either a + orientation detector, or X orientation detector. Thing is, if you choose the wrong one, there is a 50% chance that you will "twist" the photon into a wrong orientation, or completely filter out the photon itself. So either way, you are already altering the thing by the mere act of reading it.

However, this is nice in theory, but for key distribution, you'd have to know beforehand the +/X orientations used for transmission, which kind of defeats the purpose. So QC protocols rely on doing transmission totally at random, so security really turns into a matter of probability. So basically, your "secure" key transmission basically counts on *luck* for successful, untampered transmissions. Then again, probability for interception of a QC-transmitted key of say, 1024 bits would be around 1 / (1024 * 2 * 2) or something like that.

Retarded Idiot, and a dangerous one at that.

Nevermind that he didn't cover his tracks well. He's all well deserving the prison time by willfully destroying patient records! He even shut down the backup systems, so it isn't like he intended to do a one-day scare; he practically slaughtered the entire hospital's record!

This guy deserves no parole, no mercy, and a really mean cellmate.

Oh so that's why

I found it funny too, that when I came home Wednesday night I found that ZoneAlarm had detected yacscom.dll as a "Trojan". Good thing I just Quarantined it.

Less funny, though, that last weekend ZoneAlarm decided that the distributed.net client was a Trojan/Botnet and deleted it without prompting me! So it isn't the only false positive...

@Steven Raith

"Pff, everyone knows that when the demons come through, the only thing that will stop them is a lone marine, left in his base while his comrades in the initial assault get slaughtered.

he will then enter the fray armed only with a pistol and his bare fists, to take on the hell-spawn."

Nah, this time he'll be given the BFG9000 from the start, after reciting the holy scriptures of IDKFA and IDDQD.

It has to be said...

In Soviet Russia, DNS resolves YOU!!!!

PA-RISC

Maybe this is a sign for HP to actually revamp their PA-RISC chipset instead of selling off to the Itanic???

The only HP server I'd ever buy is an HP 9000, and they're about to kill that line. Oh well, at least IBM still keeps on churning newer stuff...

Pay per upgrade?

So by this logic, should every single farkin' Service Pack come with a charge???

They could simply state its an OS upgrade and that wouldn't count as a major upgrade. Then again, I am not an expert on US accounting. I barely understand our own laws...

Um...

I'd rather see a Yahoogle! than Microhoo.

Something's rotten in the rural US, and it smells like Icahn...

1024-bit RSA?

Like the one used in, like, most SSL certs? I think I'd be worried if they could actually crack this, as it would basically crack *any* SSL cert.

Bye bye HTTPS!!!

Re: Thank Virgin Records

Just what I thought. Kind of like those reports from "independent" sources bashing Linux that suspiciously end up having a significant Microsoft funding.

Even if they are separate entities, and/or legally barred from "helping" one another, they are doing so under the "legality" banner, which isn't exactly anti-trust material. It isn't like VM is forcing its customers to buy only Virgin Records music, is it??

Yeah, right...

I usually switch my cellphone to 'vibrate' or 'silent' when I go into a "quiet" environment. I expect, however, that even in these situations, calls still go through, as you might actually get important calls in. Ditto with SMS, I would be p*ssed if I got "need 2 go hospital FAST" about 2 hours after my mum sent it because I was in a "restricted" environment.

Restricting digital cameras is even more stupid, as the tech can be abused as some other people have mentioned above. I guess I'll keep my BB on "Connections disabled" while photographing protests...

Oh good

Good, no more waiting.

On the other hand, that means there will be no more 'Constellation Urine'...

Re: Energy re-use.

Heh. You just reminded me of the old computer lab at college. As I was a temp-admin there, I had the keys for the small private office, which gave me a cozy space to sleep when we had to do overnight stuff. The "lab" was actually a "converted" warehouse, so on cold nights it got mighty cold, and we had *no* heating facilities.

So those days, I just fired up the 5-Pentium-class "cluster" and let it heat the small office. Nice energy re-use, even if the cluster itself wasn't really used after its initial demonstration phase.

Penguin 'coz the cluster ran Linux.

Rate my movie

I would rather see this technology to provide for "instant" movie ratings, that is, that I can rate the movie as soon as it's finished. Then cinemas could send shite movies to uglier timeslots and focus on the really good ones.

That way, it might be easier to send stinking turds to the bottom... but then again, maybe not.

I'm immune to this one...

I'm basically immune to this trick, as I have acquired BOFH-level treatment for telemarketers:

Caller: Hi, is this <unkown person>'s house?

Me: No. <SLAM>

Caller: Hi, is this (my name)

Me: Yes

Caller: Hi, we're calling from HSB.... <SLAM>

You can be as rude as you want to telemarketers as you like. I used to redirect my landline to my mobile, but after 5 days of cold calls, I decided to cease this practice. Good thing I can't get cold callers on my mobile :)

Oh, their first blunder!

It seems like the "NY Mellon Bank" is a recently-merged financial entity. It is barely one year old, and they've already done an epic SNAFU. Way to go!

With that name, though, I'd wonder if speaking 'friend' will give me full r00t access...

Stupid users

I think it might be more of an issue that HP must have been overwhelmed by zillions of users forgetting their BIOS password.

Back in 1998 (10 years ago, wow!) one guy in school feared a "hacker" (which I would rather call "script kiddie") would hack his laptop, so he decided to set the BIOS and HDD password on his IBM Thinkpad. Only to forget said password ... 60 *minutes* later.

Setting aside the sheer ignorance of thinking that a BIOS password would protect your laptop from the net, we found it even funnier that this guy was effectively locked out from his 15-day-old laptop; which remained locked for at least one full year. In fact, none of us ever knew if he was able to get it working again.

Oh please...

Demo machines/devices are ASSUMED to be monkeyed about by the customer. I bought the "demo" Fujitsu Lifebook 280Dx back in '98 because it was the only one left, and they gave me a $300 discount for it. Sure the laptop was riddled with bloatware (someone installed the AOL stuff) but I only needed to chuck in the Recovery CD and wait about 60 minutes for the whole thing to do its job. Hard? Not at all.

Around this time I remember having somewhat a similar experience: I was checking out some nice desktop PC's at Office Depot, and found one that had the shareware version of DESCENT. Oooh, nice! So I proceeded to play on it, until some employee came asking if I needed some help. So I rambled a bit on asking if the graphics card could do 1024x768 and 3D acceleration, knowing this dude would be hoplessly lost on this. (Note: all this info was already in the sticker that these boxen usually have.) So he went away, and I kept on playing.

Lo and behold, he had gone for the manager (?) who I also asked the same thing, but instead of answering me, he proceeded to close Descent (whatever, I had just beaten the Level 7 boss anyway) and tell me "we can't let you play on these PCs". So I did my comeback, "oh well then I can't let you SELL me this computer, I can build one myself!". Oh yes, and duly followed by a complaint in the "Suggestions" box.

Had I been "detained" by a store manager for something like this though, I think said bloke would've been introduced to my juicy little 50kV BOFH-approved TASER Gun!

These days, my fun basically relies on having cmd access, and making small assembly programs that read something like "ALL YOUR PC ARE BELONG TO US" or so.

@AC

She was 58 all right, but the actual resident was 57. Kind of "in the age" you know.

Though I'd wonder if the bloke couldn't just offer her the space anyway. Oh well, at least it seems she'll live in "Bar Hotel" for a while...

Wait a moment...

"The initial warning was issued to cover the period until 7pm yesterday, saying that a further 1200 megawatts was required."

There you got it. The 'crisis' was caused by Doc Brown plugging the DeLorean into the National Grid!!!

Red Alert 2

This just in!

We have received these shocking images of a real-time simulation of Russian zeppelin warships in a full-blown invasion of the United States of America!

Mine's the one with the Tesla gun .... >>ZZZZZZAP!<<

Reminds me ...

Of my "line failures" when my dad was scolding me on the phone

Dad: I told you that <SLAM>

*ring*

Dad: Call went dead. Ok, I was telling <SLAM>

*ring*

Dad: Hey why are you hanging up?

Me: I'm not. <SLAM>

For helldesk-style support, though, my favorite is the infinite hold method. If your phone doesn't actually have a "hold" button, you can just leave the phone besides you (on mute, of course) and you get the added benefit of no *other* calls getting in! Ah, those old days...

It figures

Obviously it saw the one-eyed snake and decided to engage into a snake fight!

Mine's the one with the "Snakes in a Toilet" poster.

The Palm

... was my first "true" PDA. The first PalmPilot, that is ... the one that was made by US Robotics. It was fairly decent for its time, and it had the original Graffiti writing system (I was never able to use the Graffiti2 version). The only drawback was that it used AAA batteries, which meant I had to change batteries every 1-2 weeks. Ironically this is why I got the thing in the first place, as my dad couldn't be arsed with changing batteries.

Mine lasted a lot, until a friend accidentally smashed the screen, and I was left without a PDA. By then, the device had been with me for 5 years, and had a total life of about 8 years.

PalmOS is pretty nice for a PDA, but it may need an overhaul for smartphones. On that area, I'd say RIM's got the upper hand.

Please type the letter "bye"...

"After that, you move your call center to India. Ooops! There's a negative backlash. So then you segment your product line, so that the PCs on the low end, you have to call India for support. The higher end (read higher priced) you can get on-site and US based support. (OK, so I'm an American. So that would explain the American centric viewpoint. ;-)"

I don't live in the US, and yet I much prefer to have someone from the US on the line, than someone in India. I once endured the pain of one such call, where I couldn't understand the guy, and I was the only native English speaker in my company! My co-workers had an even harder time with that call. This guy tried to spell a password on the phone, but I got lost after being told to type the letter "bye".