Posts by Ammaross Danan

The Site

The WBC website is likely offline due to the media attention. I think someone phrased it as "The Slashdot Effect"

You should do a little bit of mental work before default-contributing it to Anonymous.

Of course...

"All that is downloadable from the itunes store is the app itself. The content is still hosted and delivered by the publisher."

Of course, we could just save a lot of trouble and allow apps to be downloaded directly from the publishers and not actually be listed in the App Store at all....oh wait...it's Apple... AHAHAHAAHAHA.

Jailbreak your phone. At least then you might actually be able to use it without worrying about your apps disappearing tomorrow.

Better than that

"all they need to do is refuse to mention anything Apple based or carry Apple adverts"

They could do one better: have the music industry as a whole revoke licensing of music on the iTunes store. Or perhaps get greedy like Jobs and charge a 30% "online iTunes content distribution" fee (on top of their current licensing scheme). Then we'll likely see Jobs turn into a Ballmer stage monkey throwing chairs....

Re:

"I can just comb my back hair over my head. Problem solved."

<--- Icon. 'nuff said.

Note

You would be keen to note that it's the Arctic ice that's melting. The Antarctic is actually gaining ice.

Anyway, of all the places in the world, the Antarctic is most likely going to remain the coldest.

RED

RED was a very good film IMHO. Of course, with Hollywood, they can make anyone look young/old (with a margin of success at least....some actors are exempted by this sweeping generalization too....).

As for content, most movies you watch nowadays are as much BS as watching "The NET" was.... "What did you do to stop the upload????" "I injected malicious code in the upload stream and caused a buffer overflow in the router that broke the Internet." "How many were affected?" "All of them...." (last NCIS: LA episode...). They seriously need to get a REAL tech consultant. Or at least become better at shoveling BS....

Either way, I'll likely was DH5, if for no other reason than why I watched Bond last time...or the time before that....and before that....

Of course

Of course, Apple may not actually move to the "rumours suggest a future iPad will sport a 2048 x 1536 display" at all. The most compelling evidence is:

"iOS coders can add two sets of graphics to their apps: one set plainly named for the 'old' resolution and a second, double-size set with "@x2" suffixed to the filename"

However, it's far more likely they'll move to a 16:9 or 16:10 ratio since it's the current fad, and they're likely wanting to push it as a multimedia/video device for "FullHD" viewing. Granted, a 1920x1200 ratio (16:10), which is used for Mac desktops (possible key-in for portability of desktop apps?), is only 2,304,000 vs the current 1,572,864 pixels, so not quite x2. However, some liberal application of marketing rounding, consideration of "Gen2," and programming consideration of "@x2 is simpler than @X1.46484375," and one can start to string together some compelling considerations.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits. (previously (untitiled))

"But no....the American way is to bitch and whine and then do what you are told.

Also, if they pass the cost onto consumers buy increasing content cost I will switch."

I think your second sentence was "the American way," so likely expect an across-the-board bump to content provider pricing. Likely not a full 30%, but definitely higher than the 10% Google is charging. THIS is why everyone is whining: they buy a Droid-based platform (or even the eReader from the company) and still have to pay an Apple Tax because iFans can't live without the new shiney.

Workaround

Kindle isn't a workaround if they stop providing their reader for the iOS platform due to the 30% cut requirement.

Real workaround? Find something more Open.

Custom Button

My BB has a button on the left side that is customizable. However, the default setting is audio profiles. Press the button, and point at the sound profile you want. I usually pick "Loud", however, very easy to switch to "Vibrate Only" or "Silent" for the movies. If you're concerned about silencing a call, pressing any button on the thing (at least mine) stops the ringing. Since my holster is a stretchy-sides flip-top, it's very easy to do.

Radiation

"The answer to the radioactivity question is more related to the impact on daily life. If you consider the question "all radioactivity that people are worried about is man-made ", then the reason for agreeing is more apparent"

One also has to consider that many of these Russians were likely alive (or heard stories from parents) about Chernobyl. This likely has skewed belief into man-made radiation, since Chernobyl was a very public man-made radioactive incident... Just because a single incident shouldn't be extrapolated to an absolute, doesn't mean Sheeple* won't do so.

* Sheeple commonly encompasses the non-educated masses

Thread Management

"In all likelihood it would run even worse by virtue of the fact that it would be competing with the rest of the page content within the same thread for CPU whereas a Flash app could be running on a separate thread."

Thread management introduces its own additional overhead. Having something in a seperate thread just prevents objects on the page from holding up the "flash app" (kinda like the good'ol days of your cursor freezing when windows dekstop locked up....)

Either way, you're likely to get just as poor performance with two threads (browser and flash) as you would with one thread. Unless, that is, you're sporting a Tegra-based dual-core chip like the LG Optimus 2X. I wonder how long it will take for the iPhone to pick up on dual core... Well, without non-Apple-Apps multitasking, it would be more of a moot point anyway....

Antivirus vs Antimalware

Malware/spyware are likely not considered "virii" by the AV companies. If you want to keep malware off your computer, get AntiMalware products (MalwareBytes has a decent one). It's sad that AV products don't (or in some cases, just not very well) catch malware.

Tools for the job, and all that.

BSODs et al

Apparently you have some configuration issues. Our Symantec EPP runs happily with our VI and actual end points and I have yet to see a single BSOD from it. LiveUpdates, albeit beefy (7GB for the mix of machines on our network) works fine. Reporting is great. Catches most virii, but some malware (browser toolbars mainly) still make it in. I know which machines are affected by such malware because EPP catches the virii that the malware tries to stuff on the machine, thus flagging it in the manager for me to have properly sanitized.

Granted, our setup is no where near as Nazi'd as the situation the poor author ran into, which is why the AC is getting BSODs, likely utilizing such measures.

Not a thing

Not missing a thing. IE9 don't even acknowledge load requests for "blocked" sites. FF & Chrome's method is to respond, but add a meta tag saying essentially "Here's my info, but don't track me." Don't believe it's not your info? They'll have your IP and the referrer site at the very least.

FYI

You are more than welcome to dump a newer version of Android on your phone if you desire. It's out there and free to do. Whether your provider or phone manufacturer will offer any form of support on your new 2.3 install on your old 2.1 device is another matter....

I ask you this

What was earth's global average temperature during the Cretaceous as opposed to now? Climate change happens. We were lucky enough to land in a moderate ice-age period as opposed to a warmer period.

Totally misleading...

The Author of this article obviously doesn't have a full understanding of what is going on with the whole Google debacale. I totally agree with job514 and several other commenters.

"that Google's Univerisal Search setup is unfairly promoting the company's own services – including Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Product Search – over those of its competitors."

If I ran a store (say Acme Computers) and was selling MS-based PCs. Would I be required, by law or otherwise, to recommend or refer my customers to Cheap Computers down the street, merely because they came to me (the largest and most well-known retailer in the area) first? Even if their prices were lower, better quality, etc? The first result on Google shouldn't be Bing's results for what I'm looking for. The first page of Google results shouldn't be a list of scraping websites' results for what I'm looking for. It would be like having your first page of results be links to Scroogles' results for what I'm looking for... (think about that recursion algorithm for a bit!).

"de-indexed because about 87 per cent was "copied" from elsewhere."

This is blately evident (the remaining 13% is likely ads), and can be summed up with another sentence from the article: "other copied content can be very useful indeed. Foundem does copy a majority of its content, but it's a search engine," which takes us back to argument #1: don't index the result page of other search engines.

A bit of a note toward Bing's theft of index results: They aren't necessarily stealing the result and indexing it in their engine. The site was already indexed. They're merely using Google's engine ranking as an additional (albeit heavy) weight to determine it's ranking on Bing. This is an underhanded way to hide the fact that one's search ranking algorithms are crap compared to the targeted competitor. So no, their not stealing results nor indexes, their stealing the index RANKING, at which point, they might as well just be another Scroogle.

Worse Yet

@Trevor_Pott

"I think that CMOS resets are still time consuming enough and awkward-looking enough..."

Worse yet, the network admin will know the CMOS was reset (and yes, all boards support it, just pop the battery). If the CMOS was reset, then just review the security tapes (yes, anyone paranoid about booting from a USB device is likely to have tapes) to see who did it. They likely have monitoring on their firewall and can see which IP the VPN tunnel (if used) went to, which can help determine the benefactor. Of course, at that point you can press criminal charges for tampering and perhaps corporate espionage. Enough for a warrant for the connected-to network machines.

Anyway, a truly paranoid environment will have their PCs under lock and key (non-user-accessible), or at the very least be running a VDI setup of some sort.

Of course, WPA2 is still "safe" for now. The article points out that WEP and WPA(1) is easily crackable.

Now, extreme potentials out of the way, this article points out how easy it is for most networks to be penetrated and siphoned by an insider. Short of making your user's job impossible to do (blocking access to data), or extreme measures (VM farm with thin clients under lock and key, no periphrials), you'll likely always have some vulnerability to be exploited by the truly industrious.

Fail

You failed to actually read and comprehend the article, because the author was positing the idea of incorporating a timestamp or counter in the barcode, because the app DOES NOT DO IT ALREADY.

Please, read the article effectively next time.

Fail, for two reasons

"...that's the end of Dell's Android tablets then. MS will simply not allow Dell to ship non-Windows units (not without swingeing penalties at any rate)."

1) MS isn't going to be so blatently obvious with their anti-competitive practices now.

2) Windows doesn't (yet) run on the ARM chips that the Android tablets are living on, so not much for MS to complain about besides competeting hardware (which MS doesn't make [yet] in the first place).

App For That?

Perhaps someone should write an app that monitors the rear camera and alerts you to any hazards while you're fondling the slab? Oh wait...that would require allowing downloadable apps to actually multitask....

""Death by iPod" epidemic." - Evidence that technology is helping cull the gene pool.

/mines the (only?) one without the iKiller in the pocket

If it's that bad...

"But should we expect some horrific traversty for the in-between film"

If it is horrific, then it will become like the Matrix:

"The Matrix was a great film."

"Yeah, what about the sequels?"

*bang!*

"There were no sequels."

@Bilgepipe

"Or perhaps a flat, rectangular-shape with a screen on one face is pretty much the only form factor a tablet computer can take."

It isn't so much that it's the only form one can take, and thus it Must Look Like This. It's the fact that Apple patented it claiming it was a unique "invention" having no (known) prior art. Now we have proven prior art (again), their design patent should be void.

Patents

Surely, if HP is already pushing product demos, they've been working on this long before the Jobisan 2009 patent application. If it gets granted, HP should definately challenge it (assuming they didn't just read Apple's patent and decide to beat them to it).

Since it hasn't been said yet:

"I'll stick to calling people who are accountable (to me as a voter) and abide by the law as the "good guys"."

Actually, the general population votes don't really matter. There's plenty of sheeple that will cause your vote to get drowned out. Therefore, you don't matter, unless you can convince a majority of voters to vote like you.

"And if you don't like some law (or what your government is doing) get off your arse and change it. You know you are living in a democracy?"

The USA is actually a democratic republic. Representatives are voted in democratically (democratic is basically "everyone gets to vote"). These representatives then vote on actual meaningful stuff, such as laws. Therefore, not only does your vote not really count (see above), but you're even one step removed from the true voting process for laws. And if you think you voted for Obama, you should Google "Electorial College."

.

Tossers

"surprising that Catalonia is allowing hunting with bow and arrow at the same time that it's establishing itself as a society at the forefront of animal rights"

Animal Rights activists....can't please them. If the regulation had be "hunters can go in with guns and shoot the boars," they would have complained that guns give an unfair advantage to the hunters and disturbs the natural habitat. Tossers the lot of them!

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"The only thing keeping Flash off Apple devices is Adobe"

Flash has ActionScript. It interprets a scripted language, and thus is banned from the App Store due to that reason. Jobs is just diminishing the importance by saying how buggy and bloated Adobe Flash products are (which is true). It's a PR smear campaign trying to convince people they are better off not viewing YouTube or other Flash media.

"you can send it to the Kindle app without Apple taking a cut — and Apple can't do a thing about it unless they want to selectively block downloads, and I don't think that's likely."

No, but they could just block the App as a whole until the developer puts code in that pays Apple 30% when a book is "allowed" to be viewed from iOS. If that "feature" isn't there, they can block it. Just look at Sony. Amazon is bigger, so likely not one to piss off just yet.

"'Oh crap, we didn't think of that, let us work through it'"

Desired quote from Apple on issues: "Oh crap, we didn't think of that, let us work through it'

Actual response from Apple on issues:

"Your business model is wrong.

-Sent from my iPad"

Lazy

Lazy would be posting a link to say "type it into Google," but not doing it yourself and realizing there's a flood of stuff on the guy, but very few actual pictures. Not to mention verifying they're of the correct guy, especially when he goes by "Niki":

http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/speaker.php?date=2011-02-04

Geocentric much?

"In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction"

I'm quite frankly surprised at the short-sightedness of some to think that planetary formation is soley unique to our solar system. That extrasolar planets were ever considered science fiction is saddening. (Yes, a bit of correction for using "extraterrestrial planets" since we've known of "extraterrestrial" planets such as Mars for a long while now...."extrasolar" please)

In Response

As for Opera, at least FF4 displays the pages correctly, even if a handful of crap-code sites (yes, MS Hotmail) don't work 100%.

I think FF has a great model of heavily testing their releases and isn't willing to throw a beta/buggy build out in the wild posing as a release build. Too many software people do this just to make deadlines or even simply to make it to market before a competitor.

/mine's the one with a UML diagram in the pocket

Prototypes

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if this prototype spotted was 9 months old. Once Apple decided they wanted to incorporate FaceTime into the iPad, they'd have to build a prototype with a front-facing camera to test it. Perhaps since it may be an early prototype, it would explain the lack of other more-recent features....

The Problem

First, the analogy is wrong in the fact that gun ownership is a one-off purchase vs medical insurance which is an ongoing commitment.

Secondly, the problem isn't so much people don't want healthcare. They do. It's the fact that some people (like my wife) who are young, in excellect health, visit the doctor only once or twice a year for a wellness exam, still have to pay $250/mo. for "insurance." And that wonderful insurance requires the usual $50/visit copay, and only covers 75% (sometimes 90% depending, but sometimes 50% or less depending too) of whatever services rendered. If you get into decent plans that don't cost you 50% of a visit out-of-pocket, you're looking at $400+/mo. And to mandate everyone fork over such fees, especially when some young (no longer on parent's plan) blokes only earn $6-10/hr, would utterly destroy their ability to be self-sufficient. So no, the problem isn't the healthcare, it's the incumbant cost of the insurance, in addition to the out-of-pocket costs of actually having to use it.