Posts by Daniel B.

No sh...

Sheesh, I never thought someone would give "This shit is GOOD!" a literal meaning.

... oooor not. Or maybe I'm out of touch, but I haven't heard about "meth-heads" yet. AND sewage emissions can KILL you; ask anyone who has worked on sewage treatment plants or has had the unfortunate experience of going down a sewage canal. I remember a friend's dad who passed out after inhaling a whiff of sewage on the Canal de Chalco area. Hospitalized for a week because of severe infection, taking in mind the average Mexican is immune to a hell of a lot diseases that would normally take down other people.

YUCK.

Overseas

When I first read 'outsourced developers' I was thinking that even the US military was now outsourcing their damned deathware to India too!!! Now that would be funny, 10 years from now when all those UAV's fire up and go wage war against Pakistan. Oops!

AFAIK, the milnet is split in two, with no links between both of them. One's got the civilian internet, the other one doesn't. I'd be pretty sure these bots would run on the secure one, so maybe they're worried more about some 1337 kiddie hacking, then piggybacking down to the sooper sekrit network.

Mind you, If I were the US military, I would be developing everything by myself, or a closed circuit of contractors... and not MS, I hope.

Funny...

I read this article yesterday. Yesterday was the 5th of November. Maybe the US needs a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask? ;)

As for the privacy issue, I've just given up trying to convince most people to use crypto. I got some using PGP, then they tossed it; same thing happened with SimpLite (that's for IM) or even the use of Hushmail.

The average Joe is still too stoopid to realize how important this is, and won't learn how to do stuff he doesn't see as useful. Oh well, I can give Dubya the finger anyway as I do not live in the US. Though I have the slight feeling that all my free e-mail is being read now ...

IT Security

Someone mentioned that security is about firearms, not OS/Firewalls. Well, actually its both. Working in a bank will open both things up for you; they usually have the best example to set on physical security. Even IT Security folks like me don't have physical access to the datacentre! Even the access door is bulletproof, about 3" thick, and armed guards. Take in mind also that this is *inside the building*. Even getting into the building itself would be a feat requiring James Bond-esque skills.

So basically, physical security ain't a problem for us. We got to worry more about IT, because that is something that can't be protected by twelve-gauges. ;)

Capping

As a sysadmin / network administrator POV, I'd cap the UPlink for my users. Why? Because I can eat all I want on the downstream, but if the upstream's clogged, everything goes down. I absolutely hate those eMule users that don't know, or don't want to set the upload limit, then bringing my link to a complete halt because they're uploading 128 kbit/s and clogging everything up.

That said, I'm talking about *my* network. My DSL is sold as 1Mbit/s (1024kbit/s) downstream, 128 kbit/s upstream; and I expect it to run at that speed and nothing less. Fortunately, I've had no problem with this, not even with torrents. (And yes, I do limit my uploads at 4KByte/s)

Comm Hub

Hm... that would be a cellphone+PDA me thinks. Though that might also mean a PDA with GPRS accessibility, I don't count on WiFi being everywhere.

I'd use my PDA for organization/email and most 'computerish' stuff while off-hook. My cell phone would be for calls, SMS, and mobile banking quickies. Oh, of course ... I think that cellphones should only use WAP sites. In such a small screen, trying to view stuff made for 1024x768 17" displays is downright stoopid and expensive!

Basically I use my cellphone for some online banking transactions or checking balance when on the move, and that is the extent of my internet experience on the mobile. Oh, and I don't have a PDA, so my personal comm hub is incomplete :(

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer

You gotta be real, real stupid to go to any kind of African country *unarmed* to try recovering your money. Even the average Yankee knows how ugly things get down there (even more with that recent Blood Diamond movie) involving rape, mutilation and very, very gruesome deaths.

Wait. Actually, some of the stuff happening on some places there might actually make you wish for death. And a quick one at that.

Oh well, another potential Darwin Award lost...

so ...

Maybe the real definer of the oh-so-bloated media wars on HDDVD / BD will be who gets cracked first?

PSX jumped in popularity in part because the games were 3x cheaper than the N64, but even more because CD copying was relatively cheap, and with modchips you could keep those original CD's in mint condition and wear the backup CD as much as you wanted.

I even remember that sometime around 2000 the famous "black CD's" began to be sold out there, those that curiously look a helluva lot like PSX originals ...

Baltimora

If they had succeded, does that mean that Baltimora would have to cough up the dough for 'Tarzan Boy' ???

This is a load of bollocks. Might as well trademark yodelling ...

MacOS on PCs

Ah, the endless battle... but serves them right for ditching RISC and switching to cheap-ass PC architecture.

Still, I wonder if Leopard would actually fare better than Vista, at least more Macolytes are willing to jump on the Leopard than Windozers on Vista. Given the small percentage of Macs in the computer industry as a whole, I doubt it would surpass Vista sales (especially with MS force-feeding it to OEMs), however if we take in mind the Leopard adoption % *for Mac users* and Vista adoption % *for Vista users*, Mac would definitely win over. ;)

When Computers Crash

Hm... I don't know, someone above mentioned how modern laptop HD's work, but that pic surely brought back memories of exactly the mere fault we originally called a 'crash'.

A "crash", in computer jargon, originally meant that the head "crashed", that is, fell down and smashed against the platters ... and bye-bye, data!!! Talk about a data wipe... That pic looks a helluva lot like damage caused by a HD crash. This is the very same reason those of us who got into computing in the early 80's know that HDD's are to be treated with respect, even the 'portable' ones.

As for Apple ... I put the blame on Seagate sending manufacturing to China. Want quality components? Manufacture in places where workers are well paid! Underpaid workers will do underquality stuff.

Toy money ... not that much.

Even though the in-world L$ are "legally" just tokens, well some people did buy into the hype and do an actual living from in-world businesses. Though most of them seem to use their net "income" to pay the land fees or other in-world stuff, but they do use it.

That's why the Ginko bank run and the Tizzy Bank scam had a really bad effect on the SL economy. I've seen at least one in-world biz go down in flames because of this, and well, I lost 20k of those "toy L$" on one of those "toy banks". Do the math, and that is roughly 75 bucks... and I was a minor depositor. So, its understandable when someone loses sometimes thousands of dollars, virtual or not.

Me? Most of the L$ comes from my premium stipend, so basically there is no "real-world" investment involved. Not that I would invest into anything there, mind you. I've seen three banks go poof (one where I had L$), an entire industry shafted overnight (casinos) and some dudes "doing an Enron" there.

The downside of regulation is that it would bring all the nasty "real-world" rules into the system, and it would now end up being as dull as your real-life. Oops!

Separate DNS...

In Soviet Russia, DNS queries YOU!!!

In Soviet Russia, Internet connects to YOU!!!!

In Soviet Russia, mp3 downloads YOU!!!

Please, the USSR set the examples, China copies them. Putin, don't do the backwards thing now!!!

Dumb and Dumber

Sooo ... it seems they will be able to get their money back... because the scammers were too stupid to withdraw the money on time!

Of course, them falling for the scam without verifying is stupid, but even more stupid for the scammers to assume the transfers would go indefinitely to them. Providers *will* notice the sudden stop in the cash flow, triggering an inquiry to the client. Which will then notice "Gee, I did pay 10 million bucks to account X ... what? That's not your account??"

And with those amounts, its bound to happen sooner than later.

This is James T. Kirk ...

Well, maybe Shatner has been a little bit of an ass in his later life, but he *is* the one and true Captain of the Enterprise. Actually, as a kid I kind of liked the TOS characters more, maybe because of the movies? I just seem to like better the TOS crew than the TNG one.

That said, the TNG crew rocks too! ;) but I'm more fond of the original ones ...

Something stinks in the Shares of Denmark...

Yet another reason I hate the so-called "capitalist free-market" of the US. On one side, you have hungry conglomerates doing either "hostile-takeover then shutdown competitors" or "eat your competitors so they are you" tactics. As an example of the first one I call CompUSA vs. Computer City.

On the other side, we have greedy investors shouting "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" and selling out to said conglomos, only because its a get-rich-quicker solution than actually helping said company. Its sad enough to see a lot of start-ups that are being made on the dream of "oooh soon MS, Oracle, IBM et al will buy me up!!!" without 'investors' trying to bully established biz to sell up.

Screw Icahn. Keep it up BEA ... and if they want to get sold but at a higher price, well, let them be.

DST sucks, Yank changes suck even more!

I really, really, *hate* Bush for his stupid extension on an already stupid idea like DST. Here we were smacked with DST back in '97 under the premise of "energy savings". Trash talk, the real reason is that the Mexican finantial institutions want to be ever in-sync with the USA; anyone living in Mexico City would attest that it is useless as people here wake up at 5am, or even *4 am*.

Oh, and thanks to Bush, we had to do an all-night standoff because some clumsy provider set up a lot of servers with US timezones instead of the Mexican Daylight/Std timezones. Go figure, we didn't follow the changes (thank God for our currently burly congress) but still have to watch out on servers going crazy. Oh, and they're all UNIX...

Re: Ah! The old chupacabra rises once again...

Heh. I always get giggles as this is the only 'Mexican myth' that seems to have gone international.

EMP's can be made with current tech, but I think the range isn't just feasible (a few meters) for them to be practical. The only proven one would be the high-altitude nuke, it seems.

Then again, who needs EMP when we have the etherkiller?? Cheap and most effective on frying electronics ;)

Maybe the BOFH will develop the real EMP???

If it is APE ...

... then I wouldn't fully blame Apple on this one. I do remember some similar shoddy extensions crapping out after some System 7 updates back in '94 me thinks. Apps that do low-level kernel interaction should check versions before running, though the OS should do them too ;)

That said, I think the worst OS bug I've *ever* seen (bar Vista) might be the "disk 1" we got in some 7.5.x update. For those who don't know:

Back then, floppy disk installations were still common, and with multi-disk installs you usually inserted disk 1, run the installer, and for disks 2 and beyond you would insert disk 2, or insert disk 1, then insert disk X and go on. Except on this particular update, something weird happened, and now after disk 2 you would enter the "endless cycle of doom" where you insert disk 2, OS reads a sector, pukes disk 2, ask disk 1, read sector, puke it, ask disk 2 ... you get the idea.

After 200 cycles of "disk 1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3" my dad just went "aaah fuck it!" and returned to the older OS version. Now that was bad, real bad. Of course, Apple issued a fix pretty quick, but these were the days before broadband Internet, or even used for such updates: that fix would be sent by mail, which in our case took weeks.

Still, much quicker than the major fixing overhaul required by Vista...

Oh and by the way, I hate what Jobs has done to my formerly beloved Apple, but at least they are still kicking MS ass.

Black Helicopters

So, I suppose this gives that "black helicopters" icon a whole new meaning then?

He had a *car*???

I thought with all that technological hatred, Pol Pot's "voiture" would be a 2 HP ... well... 2-horse-pulled cab. Wouldn't it?

Mac to PC? PC to Mac?

"After years of windows-based developers treating the Mac with contempt and refusing to port their apps"

Hm... I remember the reverse thing happening back when Mac was THE desktop OS of choice. Hell, even Works and Word/Excel were first seen in the Mac, IIRC. Hypercard kicked Powerpoint's butt even for "simple" presentations.

That said, I doubt the iPhone will really kick in without an SDK, which I doubt Jobs wants to release. We're talking about the same Jobs announcing 'you can run webapps and do the same things a native app can' much in the same manner Gates said '640K is enough for anyone'.

Me? I'll keep on coding my MIDP apps.

Green mails and spam

@Franklin

"Even if it seems like it comes from someone you're bargaining with on eBay. Even if Norton says it's okay."

Yipes. That sounded like something out of Dr. Seuss.

I would not like them

here or there.

I would not like them

anywhere.

I do not like

e-mails and spam.

I do not like them,

Sam-I-am.

@Richard Kay

True. For services such as GMail, I'd rather use IMAP. But for most non-free email, I tend to use POP3, not just because I'm used to it (using internet since 1996). I use it because most email addys I use are changed, deleted or something frequently. Using IMAP usually makes all that e-mail go bye-bye, POP3 will keep it on my PC for all eternity.

These problems were very standard when I was in HS/college, as the IT folks loved to wipe student accounts every semester, or change our addys. That, and well, I've switched so many ISP/work email accounts I have lost count of those.

Of course, I still have to backup all that stuff, as having locally stored e-mail can increase the risk of losing everything... as I did back in '97 when a virus ate my HD.

@ Graham T

Maybe US TV producers won't, but at least the Russians might! They did a reality show about astronaut training, the winner would get to go to the ISS. Maybe they'll do something like that???

@ throttle bittorrent clients

"I've never seen *any* bittorrent client really allow you to throttle your own uploads."

"I've never seen *any* bittorrent client really allow you to throttle your own uploads."

What clients do you use? My BitTornado clients have a nice --max_upload_rate flag that works pretty much as it must, it keeps upload rate at the speed I ask it for. My previous ISP barfed if my upload rate hit the advertised max, and as a result any non-P2P traffic went dead. I found this out because when a friend jacked into my network, his eMule/Azureus/etc apps would eat away the upload and immediately kill everything else.

Anyway, my current ISP doesn't throttle network traffic, and in fact service hasn't been the least bit bad. Cable companies however throttle AND block their connections; they even give private addys (10.x.x.x) so setting up servers in there is *impossible*. Those who still use cable ISP's are either too stupid to realize it or don't want to spend $30 USD on a 1Mbps ADSL link.

Local monopoly Telmex may be bad on some stuff, but it is the best broadband ISP over here.

That said, I do reserve the right to throttle uplinks/downlinks on my local network to avoid p2p'ers from choking my upload pipe.

Eeeeek.

"households who are ready to dip their toe into multichannel pay-TV, but don't want Sky Sports"

Hmmm... sounds like the reason my mom *didn't* buy in to the Sky salesmen. Their only selling point seemed to be footy, and my mom hates that. Plus, most "basic channels" are crap anyway... so just like in Cable I'd end up paying even more to get the premium chans, 'coz I can't drop the crap ones.

As for broadband over cable ... I'll stick with my ADSL thank you very much. It seems Virgin Media gives the same kind of service the dudes over here, the difference is the speed. Mexico's cable ISP's advertise 512kbps, and then give like 128k, block P2P, use private IPs (10.x.x.x) and other ugly things.

So ADSL for ISP, cable for TV.

Cleartext Passwords?!?!

Now that's the reason my banking passwords are never the same. Two-factor auth apart, it is just calling for something like this to happen. While cleartext passwords are usually product of lazy programmers, there are a LOT of lazy programmers out there.

I know of at least one application that not only does this, but also puts the cleartext password *in the log*. Sheesh, even FOSS dudes can use the PASSWORD() function in MySQL, or hash functions in PHP. Stop being lazy.

@Andy

"And what happens if you interfere with a plane's navigation system anyway?"

Hm... do you know what "flying with instruments" means?? Its when you have ZERO visibility, and have to rely on your instruments to fly. Not knowing how to use instruments is what made JFK Jr. crash into the sea.

Interfering with instruments on zero visibility conditions, during final approach would be pretty educational.

If you've driven under fog conditions, surely you've had to slow down to 20mph in some occasions, even less. Airplanes have to go at 130+mph speeds *at a minimum*, even if they can't see. So instruments are very, very important to keep them flying and not crash into something.

That said, I wonder why not use the airphones instead? There is an "incoming call" service if you need incoming calls. The only reason they aren't used much is the extortionate rates on those.

Re: Lucky he didn't cross state lines

For all legal purposes, he did.

"Police allege Randall Ellis of Mukilteo, Washington, illegally accessed a phone system in Orange County, California"

The SWAT team was wrought upon a California home, but the dude's in Washington. That constitutes over-the-state-line crime, especially for "hackers". I remember that being mentioned in "Hackers", and I think it has been used before to unleash the FBI against them.

Ethernet-on-mains

Hm... I wonder if this 400 Mbps capability is compatible with the 120V power lines used over here? Or if it depends on the 240V standard. We're stuck with the US standard, though as a fun note, data links use the European standard (E1, E3 instead of T1, T3).

This technology always gives me the chuckles, as when it goes mainstream, it will be all the more easier to convince someone to plug in an Etherkiller to his PC ;)

White Noise?

So I suppose, if they turn channel 5 into say, the Network Channel, well fine. But what if a new TV broadcaster wants to transmit there? "Oops, sorry, but all channels available are now for unlicensed transmissions".

And well, there is no way to recover such "whitespace", as now a zillion devices will be using the frequency. I side with the networks on this one, in fact I'm not really keen on wireless stuff anyway. WiFi is for mobile access on open spaces, public areas with lots of laptops, or (sometimes) residential use. For long-distance coverage, there's that thing called "optic fiber", isn't there??? The one they promised us to run directly into our homes.

Smashing Pumpkins

Hm... Machina II was released for free, on mp3, by the Smashing Pumpkins right when they were breaking up. So yeah, Radiohead isn't the first one. However, Radiohead is pretty well known; that and the fact that Smashing Pumpkins actually gave away the "album" for nothing, it was more like a final "f**k you" against the record labels.

So Radiohead would be the first "big player" that actually moves into this arena. Some indie groups have already done it, though I don't really think they have done it the "right way"; local group "Veo Muertos" (literal translation: I SEE DEAD PEOPLE) decided to sell online its album ... on iTunes. Which sucks as His Jobsness has not opened iTunes for Mexico.

Anyway, it seems it would be these indie groups the ones that may have motivated Radiohead and Madonna to ditch their records, and with this, maybe more will follow...

Idiots 2.0

Ok. It seems like even after the first incident (the MySpace dork), kids haven't learned yet the lesson: SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE PUBLIC!!! 2 years ago my sister got a major scolding by me and my mom when Mum found out she had put her full home address in the MSN profile.

Hell, I usually don't even put my full surname in most sites ;) and most places I do place a Location field, usually have Mexico City there. (Find me! I challenge you! bwahahahaha)

Last time I did a party-by-invite (5 years ago), someone decided to do some rumpy-pumpy in my bedroom, get the dog drunk, steal my pencam (but not the USB cable), make out in my sister's closet ... let's say that my mom was not very happy back then. And that was *without* using electronic media.

Oh, and those two punks who went to my previous apartment and thrashed the place because they were drunk and "felt like thrashing around". The landlord was not happy either. Did I mention they were not even *my* guests? They were my roommates' guests.

Can you see a trend here? More unknown people == more damage.