* Posts by Lexx Greatrex

53 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2007

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Cisco posts kit to empty houses to dodge NSA chop shops

Lexx Greatrex

dead dropped

AT&T: Our CRS-X router has gone down. If we lose any more backbone capacity half of the Eastern US will go dark.

Cisco: One moment please... I'm so sorry, but we have no record of AT&T purchasing this model router.

AT&T: We did purchase it! You delivered it to a bus shelter off the I-95 last month.

Cisco: I see... ah... One more moment please... I thought you said you were AT&T? That router went to Hobo Enterprises.

AT&T: Yes, yes. It was actually us. Remember? It was part of that dead drop thing... Remember?

Cisco: Ohhh, I see. Hmm. [Laughs].

AT&T: What's so funny? This is a serious problem. The whole country could be affected by this outage.

Cisco: [Chattering and giggling in the background]. So sorry. It's just that we were all more than a little curious as to how an unknown startup could afford several $800,000 tier-1 routers.

AT&T: For Christ's sake. Are you going to fix this or not?

Cisco: Yes, certainly! Hobo Enterprises is one of our most valued customers. We'll have a technician dispatched to the bus shelter immediately.

AT&T: [Click]

Cisco: Hello? Hello?? Strange, the phone's gone dead... What? Everyone's phones are dead? This is so strange...

Google in freetard-friendly copyright infringement update

Lexx Greatrex
FAIL

Freetard ... journalism

I decided to come back to read the Reg because I felt sorry for you guys being defaced the other day. Editorial shit like this is not only confirms that I made the right decision to stop reading this trashy tabloid but helps me understand the motive behind your defacement. Grow the fuck up, Reg.

Google's next web toolkit thinks it's better than you

Lexx Greatrex
IT Angle

@Graham

Shows you how effective Bush and Cheney have been at warping the minds of the people. Problems are not solved by heedless confrontation and the idiocy of using terror to fight terror and all of the hideous injustices that goes along with such hypocrisies. Once these warmongers have left power and are long buried in the halls of infamy our language can return to normal. GWT will mean what it means in this article and rather than an excuse for embellishing power and committing atrocities in the name of terror.

Facebook CEO capitulates (again) on Beacon

Lexx Greatrex
Happy

@Mark and others

We are social animals; our brain rewards us for gregariousness; and like any reward-reinforced behavior, social networking can easily become addictive. The marketeers have been trying to monetize social networking ever since they found this out (and I mean monetize in the sense of actually making money; not just over-hyping share values, which we all know is ultimately a losing game.)

Beacon is actually quite an innovative approach to monetization of facebook; but in Zuckerberg's frothing-at-the-mouth rush to market, he managed to not only trample all over his customer's privacy by revealing their private purchase habits; but shatter the thin veneer of mystique that separates social networking from being just one giant online circle jerk.

Verizon fondling Google Android?

Lexx Greatrex
Thumb Up

lol @ Fondling

Cade's "personality transplant" article had a classic headline too.

Google slightly less open than Interpol

Lexx Greatrex
Alert

@Svein

I'm guessing you either work for Microsoft or must not read the news much. There's really no excuse for either, but Google have been very responsive (imo overly sickeningly responsive) to people's privacy concerns.

http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=privacy+site:googleblog.blogspot.com

Lexx Greatrex
Dead Vulture

"On social and environmental impact evaluation capabilities Google again scored zero."

Well that is just plain retarded isn't it, General electric one of the biggest polluters in the world scores higher than Google, one of the greenest companies in the world. A company who is fighting for open access. open standards and consumer choice. A corporation who is funding the development of solar energy, hybrid vehicles, wind farms and other green technologies. They really did their research there. I wonder what search engine they used?

Bloody code!

Lexx Greatrex
Black Helicopters

Both styles can produce counter-intuitive results.

Developers who apply the same ruleset dogmatically to every case may actually be making their code less readable in some cases.

The correct solution is to use the format that makes your code easy to understand and easy to maintain. Different problems, different languages, different logic; right down to different levels of method complexity mean different choices.

Frontline Wireless matches Google with 700-MHz bid

Lexx Greatrex
Pirate

Frontline might bid for C Block but

... I seriously doubt they will get anywhere with Verison, Cingular and Google in the mêlée.

Stuff string theory - try E8 to explain the universe

Lexx Greatrex

@BKB

You missed the whole point of science. Theories are testable models capable of predicting something. You can never prove a theory right but you sure can shoot one down if it fails to predict what it claims to. This is the beauty of Lisi's theory: When expanded it will be able to produce predictions that can actually be tested as early as next year. In physics this kind of thing is golden! You are right to be skeptical. All scientists are skeptics, including Lisi.

Lexx Greatrex
Boffin

@Yousuf

You are so right about Motl. He's the physicist version of a rabid pit bull. Motl was fired from Harvard University last year for his shameful behavior; which appears to have actually increased the size of the chip on his shoulder.

It's SST zealots like Motil and their monopoly on research funding that made Lisi shun mainstream academia for the last ten years. Maybe it was a good thing that he did.

Lexx Greatrex

"gravitons smavitons"

Yep, nobody has ever seen a graviton, but just like you can't normally see the wind, but you can see the effects of it, it may be possible to see the effects of gravitons as gravity waves in the near future: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/

Lexx Greatrex
Thumb Up

Before y'all start shovelling shit over this theory...

Lisi's theory has had great support from a few prominent mainstream physicists and nobody that I know can fault it mathematically. The excellent thing about this compared to similar GUT's, is Lisi's theory can produce testable predictions that can be verified as early as next year when the LHC comes online in Geneva.

For those of you who find the maths of E8 hard to understand, New Scientist produced this excellent vid explaining how Lisi mapped the standard model and general relativity onto the E8 structure, and how it all seems to fit together exactly. Physicists have noticed remarkable similarities between the maths of E8 and quantum physics for a long time..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xHw9zcCvRQ

PS @ the author... love headline

FBI crackdown on botnets gets results, but damage continues

Lexx Greatrex
Boffin

US citizens

All these folks are US citizens. Not only that these guys appear to be nowhere near the birghtest stars in the constellation. I really don't think these FBI scare tactics are going to work very successfully on the botmasters who control the gigantic botnets and who live well outside US jurisdiction.

Virgin Mary appears in Google's Iowa data center

Lexx Greatrex
Dead Vulture

30 Jobs now...

Google is a rapidly growing business diversifying into many arenas. What might be 30 jobs now for Iowa may turn into hundreds or thousands in future.

It makes sense for corporations to escape the big cities for so many obvious reasons it borders on a self-evident truth.

Over the last century industry has deserted the smaller towns. Many places outside urban America feel like they have been gutted and left to die. I am glad corporations are making a move in this direction. It not only shows financial responsibility but insight and social conscience.

Perhaps journalists looking to evoke a corporate pariah to bolster circulation could take heed of these values? I somehow doubt it.

Comet Holmes and the case of the Disappearing Tail

Lexx Greatrex
Thumb Up

Nicely written article Reg :)

Plus: burst my colon laughing @Anton and @AngrySup

Yahoo! Ratchets! Open! Source! Grid! Platform!

Lexx Greatrex
Stop

Reg! Your! Exclamation! Marks! Are! Lame!!!

It was funny once! Maybe even twice!!

But ten years later?

!

Court date for challenge to 'new' patent rules

Lexx Greatrex
IT Angle

Software patents are rediculous

Patents were originally created as a way to protect physical inventions (for 20 years) in return for publication of the technology's specifications and for use of the technology in the monopolist's products. Patents only exist because they foster innovation by allowing inventors (and investors) to reap the rewards of their toil.

Software patents, on the other hand cover inventive "concepts", not physical inventions. Applying patents designed to protect physical inventions to intangible, often broad and sweeping software concepts, benefits no one but those who have the resources to litigate; resulting in the stifling of innovation across the entire industry. This has been demonstrated time after time in the US; and until the advent of the General Public License and other Open Source initiatives, had caused the stagnation of innovation in many areas of IT. Abusive monopolists in the US are to this day targeting the Open Source industry with absurd patent litigation; hence the formulation of the Open Innovation Network as a consortium designed to fight such attacks.

Software is a very innovative area technology; and like other intangibles (such as art and music) deserves protection from theft. Copyright laws go a long way to protecting software publishers, but because they only protect the "form of material expression" from theft then this is considered by some to be insufficient. However it is important to realise that Copyright does cover the creation of derivative works. If that area of Copyright was strengthened, it could better satisfy those wishing to get protection from the likes of reverse engineering of sophisticated algorithms for example; and do it in a far less expensive way that is beneficial to the whole of society rather than the privileged few.

Get into data with Groovy

Lexx Greatrex
Thumb Down

Groovy it is not!

This stuff seems totally retarded. Not only is it a giant step backward to the bad old days of recordsets, it appears like it will generate the most god awfully inefficient queries ever conceived.

GSM jumps from the pocket to the desk top

Lexx Greatrex

"But the cost of mobile calls is dropping fast"

You obviously don't live in New Zealand

Man wrongly detained for 50 days has ISP to thank

Lexx Greatrex
Coat

Nothing to hide...

This poor Lakshmana sap not only didn't have anything to hide, he may not have even been using Internet at all. Even Dan (the author) got this wrong: "if you live in a country where freedom of speech is not protected, you can be imprisoned for weeks at a time for no other reason than you use the net" The ISP screwed up the access logs. He could have been prostrate at the alter (if there is such a thing) of this Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj person when the boot boys came around.

So to paraphrase ... "If you have nowhere to hide... you're screwed"

Lexx Greatrex

@Lindsay

LOL! Yeah Fox have the best news team the republicans can buy.

Paris Hilton exits missionary position to save Universe

Lexx Greatrex
Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton judges in Japan, Rwanda no contest

Paris Hilton sacrifices Rwanda to save beauty pageant

Paris Hilton judges starving Japanese ahead of Rwanda

Paris Hilton torn between Rwanda and shopping

Nope, it's not a Gphone

Lexx Greatrex

Re: Linux

Android is fully Linux because Android /is/ a Linux distribution released under the GPL (and Apache) licensing models so (unlike symbian, for example) everything is completely open.

And not just the kernel but everything right up the stack from drivers to applications. As you may understand, the demands of the mobile platform are different to PC or desktop platforms, so Android has a whole slew of optimisations necessary for a mobile platform; for example: Voice, graphics, video codecs, messaging, databases, smart card integration, optimised browsing, camera interfaces; essentially everything that is needed to run on a piece of handset hardware to release a competitive, high-end smartphone to market.

Hope this clarifies.

Lexx Greatrex
Dead Vulture

Why the history lesson ?

I fail to see why the author spent so much effort trying to fit this narrative into the historical context of turnkey systems. The issue has nothing to do whatsoever with 'turnkey'. Sure, mobile phones are turnkey (generally). So what? Android won't change this much. This is about an alliance to create an open operating system for mobile devices, which is unprecedented in our industry. /That/ is the news.

This whole story could be compressed down to the following sentence: "Android is not the Gphone, but an open operating system development kit for a previously closed mobile platform." Wouldn't commentary be more enlightening from that starting point?

Google OpenSocial: after the hype, the holes

Lexx Greatrex
Dead Vulture

Open social versus closed journalism

There is nothing sinister whatsoever about Open Social. It was developed collaboratively by a wide cross section of the industry. Its licensing is open, and it costs nothing to use or implement. This is no different to how any other open standard works. Often a large player like Google needs to put its weight behind standardisation or it simply never happens.

The same happened with Microsoft, IBM and co with XML, the same is happening with Nokia, Sony Ericsson et al with compact memory card specs. The list goes on. It is heartening to see competitors in this industry putting aside their differences and working together to produce standards.

This is nothing like how SNA was developed and licensed by IBM in the bad old days. So I must ask the author if he is criticising the standard because v1.0 is not perfect; or is he just hitching an easy ride on the Google bashing bandwagon?

As the author may or may not be aware, even poorly conceived standards (HTML1.0 for example) can benefit the entire IT industry and ultimately the end user. To me as an Open Social developer, the 1.0 specification is not perfect but is a very good start.

Reg lexicographical Shock Army liberates mobe

Lexx Greatrex

Lester, what ever it is you are taking...

... I want some!

Student taser victim spared electric chair

Lexx Greatrex
Alien

I am a far more reasoned member of the collective now that I have been assimilated

I am on sabbatical while the scars from the implants heal.

All hail the the American night

Ballmer again: AT&T and Verizon should rule the airwaves

Lexx Greatrex
Jobs Horns

Google doesn't want to run its own wireless network?

Does the author know something we don't about Google's plans? What has been stated is that Google wants to openly license the spectrum to third parties, that does not mean they wont be keeping the lions share of it for the gPhone.

Of course Microsoft favors a status quo that doesn't threaten their monoply with innovative new products and services. Why Ballmer has to state this ernestly and repetitively and make Microsoft appear as even more of a pariah just proves that he is an aged bumbling disaster at the wheel of the Titanic.

Erratic fleshies sabotage, wreck innocent flying robot

Lexx Greatrex

And they said size didn't matter...

They need to have large wingspans for a number of reasons, the most important of which is to minimise fuel consumption at high altitudes.

Lexx Greatrex
Paris Hilton

Generous offer to the US military to correct the problem...

Um, the failover mode should restore all aircraft parameters (including the fuel supply) to a default state. Just a few lines of extra code and a diode soldered in there somewhere should do the trick. I think I'll become a military contractor and charge them 40 million for the upgrade.

Unholy trinity of flaws put Google users at risk

Lexx Greatrex

None of the 'exploits' work

Yeah very classy article, and excellent research too! Well done Reg!

Oh, wait a minute, these exploits are a bunch of crap and don't work.

Did the author test the code before he submitted this article?

Google readies Pacific-spanning, Verizon-battling underwater comm cable

Lexx Greatrex

Hey, Google, Don't forget to stop in New Zealand on your way!

Just a little detour south and you can hook us Kiwi's into the cable too. We are also totally fed up with the telco's charging horrendous rates for international traffic. Because of this we New Zealanders enjoy the dishonor of paying some of the highest fees for broadband in the world. Save us too Google!

Next-gen Intel vPro platform to get hardware encryption

Lexx Greatrex

Encryption is not security

Encryption is just a technology, so much more is needed to 'secure' something. Encryption alone is a combination lock looking for a safe. Admittedly this will be an impressive combination lock but still the rest of the architecture needs to be secured somewhat before it gets into tinfoil hat territory.

Google malware watchdogs bite mom-and-pop shops

Lexx Greatrex

Another example of a non-story with a trumped up headline

Good one Reg. Maybe you should consider running stories about cute animals stuck up trees as well? Oh the injustice!

What does Microsoft's European defeat mean?

Lexx Greatrex

Utter socialist garbage!!!

"She said for multinational companies dealing with many different jurisdictions a situation could develop where rather than operate under many different sets of rules, companies instead choose the most rigorous set of rules in order that they are in fact compliant with everyone's regulations."

By extension to this UTTERLY flawed argument, the Internet should be subject to oppressive restrictions on freedom of speech because the content is available in places like China and the Middle East? WRONG!

ENOUGH of this rule by the lowest common denominator. ENOUGH of this socialist "We know what's better for you than you do" crap!

When you choose to PURCHASE a product or VISIT a web site or any of the myriad choices you make as an adult human being, you must accept at least most of the accountability for that choice. If you don't like Windows Media Player or Microsoft Windows then step AWAY from the checkout counter, moron. Nobody forces ANYONE to buy anything.

Monopoly? Who makes them a monopoly? The IDIOTS who buy their products. The same idiots who cheer when a court hands down an obvious verdict and fines Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros. Why are you cheering fools? YOU are the ones who paid this fine, You paid it months or years ago when you purchased the same software you are now bemoaning. And guess what? It had Media Player and IE in it then and it will have it in there tomorrow and forever because it's the law of consumption which drives companies like Microsoft to act, not misguided and impotent court actions.

Why misguided? Because this anti-competitive crap was valid in the 90's but NOW users have a choice to replace any Microsoft product with a cheaper (or free) and probably better product that does not hinder them or impede them in any way.

Why impotent? Because Microsoft would have probably paid more to settle this case in the first place and now this establishes a precedent whereby the European courts can bash Microsoft's competitors who are now much stronger in the Server space than they are. Microsoft must have soiled itself laughing.

Google punts ads on the move

Lexx Greatrex

I question if it is Google who has a lot to learn or the author?

The outcomes from queries made on mobile devices will determine the content, not the other way around. To use the author's example, pub advertisers will quickly realise that having a signup page as their touchdown is a stupid idea in the context of their business, when they can gain more revenue from directing people to their doorstep using the mobile platform than from any gimmicky sign-up crapola. I use my phone regularly for searching out addresses using the Google Maps mobile application. It is incredibly handy to have that function accessible from the palm of your hand. The next generation of adverts when they roll out on Google maps will not only be tolerated by mobile users it will be demanded. Cheers!

Novell owns Unix copyrights after all

Lexx Greatrex

@Brett Brennan Nicely hypothesised!

I like where your reasoning is leading, however there are a couple of possible gotchas in this: KDE, Gnome are Post Microsoft (PMS); It might be GNU tools; M$ marketing machinery may also be lumping Open Office into the bucket for propaganda purposes.

I agree that hedging for M$ would be a sensible business strategy, especially since they have paid horrendous amounts of cash to both Novell and SCO.

If you want my lame prediction... it would make sense for MSFT buy Novell.

Lexx Greatrex

I won't be mourning at the funeral

So that's one long standing travesty that worked out for the better. Now all we need to do is get M$ to follow Novell's lead and join the Open Invention Network... yeah ok, one miracle at a time...

Google's permanent video sales less-than-permanent

Lexx Greatrex

Re: What if apple in future decided to discontinue itunes?

Does a snowball fly? Does hell have pigs? Er ... maybe

Apple /is/ iTunes. It's their bread and butter, their cash cow and their lock-in to keep the customers "loyal" to them. They will never, can never get rid of it.

But this does highlight the disturbing feature of DRM: If Universal, for example, were to go out of business tomorrow (ha!), all of the songs and movies and brain transplants we purchased from them would still work, not so with DRM that requires a "ping" to some server somewhere to validate a license.

What if Steve Jobs decided to start his own religion, yes another one; so he puts a 3000% "Praise Me" tax on every iTune sold? I don't think the fannys are going to rush over to the dark side to Zuneafy themselves. Those who do make it through deprogramming will find there is a brave new world out there where companies are starting to realise that if they treat their customers fairly, give them choice and don't overcharge them, ... ah wait I had the Fiction Lock button held down. Crap. Back to sleep...

Harry Potter and the Virus of Doom

Lexx Greatrex

Several errors...

1. Percy Weasley was not a "sympathiser with the Death Eaters" but merely a sycophantic brown nose to the minister; who himself was decieved by, but by no means sympathetic with the death eaters.

2. I am beginning to suspect that the author of this article hasn't actually read the Deathly Hallows yet. Arthur Weasley no longer has two tearaway sons. Fred was killed by a death eater at the final battle in Hogwarts.

3. This whole paragraph, apart from being a grammatical travesty, makes absolutely no sense at all. Even after the fifth read: "Lord Peter Wimsey became an amateur sleuth. And he was needed. And in the world of Harry Potter, such people are, clearly, going to be equally vital to the future. Such enforcers of Magic Law as exist have shown themselves to be easily daunted by authority, which seems to desire nothing more than a quiet life, and by bureaucracy which takes intervention in people's private lives as an absolute right, and has powers which no mere computer database or ID card could ever convey."

4. Once again Reg writers were able to choose a headline "Harry Potter and the Virus of Doom" which bears absolutely no meaningful relationship to the article whatsoever. What are you feeding these people Reg?

Sunspots make the world hot and wet

Lexx Greatrex

"But climate change still down to humans"??

You byline reads "But climate change still down to humans" but where in the article does it say that?

What kind of journalism is this Reg?

Did Al Gore invent journalistic integrity as well?

Google builds own phone

Lexx Greatrex

Google, I will buy your phone on the condition you....

Wish 1: Please try to be as open as possible; not just in aspects of the phone design but also in choice of carriers as well as your billing and ancillary services. This gives your customers more freedoms and will cut the costs of ownership. While other companies may see giving customers freedom of choice as a threat; you might see this as an opportunity to win a great deal more business through customer satisfaction and loyalty than your competitors will ever have through control and manipulation.

Wish 2. Whatever the interface you select for the phone, please keep it simple and clean. For example, don't make me tap 5 times to send a single SMS message. Give me the same freedoms and simplicity we are accustomed to with the Web. We don't expect your phone to look or feel like an operating system or anything other than an easy-to-use phone.

Wish 3. Make your phone capable of connecting at 3G or better speeds. You can not hope to provide a media rich platform for services like YouTube, while at the same time forcing your users to connect at modem speeds. This will be seen by some as a deliberate limitation built in to force people to upgrade before they truly need to.

Wish 4. Allow your phone to connect to WiFi networks for surfing and even for calls when WiFi is available. That way your end users will benefit from cheap or free service while they are at work, at home or near a hotspot. Surely this kind of thing will force the carriers to adopt better pricing for their networks; and will ultimately benefit you by making your services easier and cheaper to access by all.

Wish 5. Please do not make 'DRM' media mandatory; and if you do support DRM, allow the user a range of choices rather than locking them in to a proprietary service, say “gTunes”, for example. People will slowly wise up to this approach and grow to resent having to re-purchase media they already paid for if they choose to move computer platforms or phones at some future point.

Wish 6. Allow the phone to sync with contacts, calenders and offline files, as well as connect to other devices. You will probably want it to sync with your own services, but please keep it open enough to connect with services and devices that are in popular usage. This will reduce the cost to us of changing to your services and will result in more sales for you.

Wish 7. Consider other countries and other markets in your rollout of your services. Appreciating you are a US-based corporation, the true marketplace for your services is global. Lack of adoption of universal standards and short-sited tactics like regional lock-ins will only create inertia and damage the credibility of your offering.

Wish 8. Keep it simple. Simplicity reduces price, size and battery consumption. Complex systems are hard to use, slow and more prone to security problems.

Congress sniffing Google-DoubleClick deal

Lexx Greatrex

Hehe I'm no Google fanboy

Nor am I a Microsoft hater. I did come on a bit strong there making me look like both of the above; but my intention was to highlight the hypocrisy of the situation, which i am definitely a hater of, rather than laud Google or hate MS.

Lexx Greatrex

THANK YOU Microsoft

For being a watchdog on the lookout for anti-competitive behavior. Perhaps this scurrilous hypocrisy is a sign you yourself will stop the tyranny of monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior that has devastated competition and stifled creativity and growth in the IT industry for the last 20 years. Or perhaps you are sore that Google, with it's sturdy moral philosophy of "Do no Evil" is beating you in every single marketplace it chooses to compete with you in; forcing you to resort to tactics so underhanded they make even you usual insidious business practices look mildly ethical by comparison: Honestly, if you could understand the meaning of that word: Making MS drone gameboys search LIVE search to rig a 1% gain in ranking against Google? Locking down the Vista desktop to try and prevent the Google search engine from being selected by your users? Releasing propagandist tripe from disgruntled ex Google employees who were misguided enough to go work for you?

You are failing not because Google is richer than you or they have smarter people or better lawyers; but because people know you are a corrupt and amoral organization. To have a search engine that is sponsored by paid advertisers means your user base has to trust you to not rig the results to suit yourselves or your sponsors, as was the horrible mistake of AltaVista. People are far smarter than your smug high-minded analysis of us seems to indicate.

These tactics, despicably ingenious as they may be, are only ever going to make you more hated - if indeed that is still possible,

Take heed. Do no evil.

Second Life will dwarf the web in ten years

Lexx Greatrex

Television is crap and it will never succeed...

The first still photograph was transmitted over wires in 1862 by Abbe Giovanna Caselli. One hundred years later we had The Lucy Show and Coronation Street in black and white. Even now, 145 years later, public television still has crappy resolution and disputed merits. But there is no doubt in anyone's mind that television is one of the most successful technologies ever invented. Why? Because TV is much much more than just radio with pictures. The ability to watch and hear human beings and events from a distance immerses us, captivates us and seduces us in ways that radio or print or moving pictures alone were ever able to do. The combination of audio and moving pictures conveyed to our senses in real-time has an effect on us that is far greater than the sum of its parts; and ever closer to satisfying our visceral need for contact and communication.

But television is a one-way street. Enter the Internet, which has enabled us to shift boldly from the role as passive spectator to one where we interact, commune, collaborate, feed back, argue. Is it not liberating to be able to post to a blog? Is it not satisfying to email or IM to someone, to build relationships with people you have never met in person? Even if there is little chance of someone reading your opinion, to let it be known. The answer is of course, yes! Or people would not be doing it.

Enter Second Life. Not a game. Not a blog. Not a web site. Not an Instant Messaging tool or Groupware or any of those things, singularly; but all of them, and more. In the same way Television was a brand-new sensory experience for human beings and not just radio with pictures, Second Life brings us closer to fulfilling the insatiable gregariousness that defines us as human beings. The adoption of this new sensory medium suggests that it satisfies a deep human need for immersion, creativity, collaboration and affiliation on a plateau greater than most if not all of the aforementioned technologies have been able to achieve in the past.

Is Second Life clunky? Low resolution? Expensive? Yes Indeed! But doubters heed the lessons of history: A medium need not be perfect to be successful, nor does it need to be cheap or readily available. Like television, like the Web, success is inevitable when a new combination of technologies extends our reach, captures our minds and affords us new possibilities for creativity and communion that were not possible in the past.

Lexx Greatrex

MS V-Chat

I do remember VChat. It was clunky and buggy and limited but nonetheless inspiring. I think it failed because the Internet got in it's way. It became a huge priority for Microsoft to just get its basic Internet infrastructure in place. Internet Explorer, IIS and Email were still on the drawing board for Microsoft back then. And they came up with MSN... sadly lacking... not a mover and a shaker, just a frantic attempt to keep up with the pack... So if you want a prediction, since Second Life is built on .NET and C# they are pretty much flying the MS flag anyway. Microsoft will buy Second Life; hell they may even buy the whole of Linden Lab: It would be pocket money for them anyway; thus enabling the gigantic investment in infrastructure needed to cope with the explosive growth of this new medium.

Lexx Greatrex

VRML and Doubters!

Arrrrrhh VRML! I remember making a 3d box with only 1300 lines of code that only took 3 minutes for Netscape Navigator to render! Those were the days all right.

All you doubters and naysayers sound exactly like those who laughed at the rickety, clump of computers and modems that was once called "internet"... without the capital "I".

You are the same haters who condemned television. The same mouths who rallied against the evils of radio and back we travel into the furthest recesses of innovation where your carrion voices decry every single extension of communication technology which now ubiquitously binds this planet together.

The thing you doubters do not understand is that Second Life, for all its clunkiness and lag is not just another application of the technologies of the Internet; it is not just another 3d massively online game; it is not a VR conferencing tool. It actually defies all of these descriptions. Why? Because, just like television was to radio, and just like the Internet was to television it defies definition within the paradigm of existing technologies.

Second Life is the beginning of a totally new context of human communication and collaboration, and just like those innovations before it which have extended the reach and breadth of the human spirit, it will grow to become a part of everyone's lives; and what is more, if it enables our creativity, charges our voices and challenges our minds as much as it promises to, it will unstoppably rise to become the dominant technology of this new century.

El Reg lobs iPhone at Genius Bar

Lexx Greatrex

It's quite simple fanboys READ the article before getting emotional

The writer gave the primary reason for abandoning the iPhone to be the Internet connection being limited to AT&T's less than 3G network. Anything less than 3G makes for a VERY frustrating Internet experience even for HTML based content let alone flash or video.

This fundamental lack of bandiwdth coupled with the huge cost of the iPhone and the dogmatic marketing hysteria just sealed the deal for him, as it has with many others.

I am sure there will be people out there using the iPhone as a regular phone and an iPod and not for anything that demands a decent Internet connection.

People who expected more, like myself, and now and feel conned by the Apple hype machine into thinking this will replace both your smart phone and iPod, should do the same and return the damn thing. I personally would like nothing more than to wipe the smirk off Jobs' concieted face with a mass consumer reovolt. Return it, get your money back (or most of it at least) and send a message that we demand more than just clever marketing.

Time to blacklist blacklists

Lexx Greatrex

Don't use antibiotics to fight cancer

"One of the greatest of human follies is belief in a panacea."

I have been a security consultant for about 15 years and it still amazes me that people believe in a silver bullet that will cure all security ills. It's ridiculous to place too much reliance on any one technology. Blacklists are just one such example of this. Others include...

"I have a firewall... why do I need anything else?"

"I have AV... why do I need anything else?"

"I have SpywareUberKiller Mega Edition 2008 v99... why do I need anything else?"

and my favorite one...

"I have a Mac... why do I need anything else?"

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