* Posts by Steven Swenson

47 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jan 2008

Public rejects Time Warner metered-bandwidth tests

Steven Swenson
Boffin

Outpace Capacity my ass...

With the millions of dollars they're making off of people for this service, don't tell me they don't have the funds to expand their capacity.

The more people who use an ISP for internet, the more bandwidth they use, yes. But the more money the ISP makes as well. As long as they're making profits, they have the means to expand their capacity at any time as long as their profits scale with the number of users.

New ISS piss-extractor drinks unit to go up on Discovery

Steven Swenson
Joke

Is it really that expensive?

I seem to remember the Urine Processor Assembly was a much simpler device in Waterworld.

US lawmaker wants health warnings on video games

Steven Swenson
Stop

Responsibility

"The video game industry has a responsibility to parents, families and to consumers--"

Never mind the parents who have a responsibility to raise their children competently and shouldn't need these kinds of warnings in the first place.

AMD unleashes open-source 3D code

Steven Swenson
Thumb Up

Finally

I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time. Maybe now I won't have to turn off Compiz whenever I play a direct rendered game.

folding@home gpu functionality anyone?

World goes mad as Bill and Jerry eat churros

Steven Swenson

Mojave

I wonder how many people they didn't show on the Mojave Experiment site (which, by the way, wouldn't even show anything other than a plain white screen with noscript enabled) who didn't like neither Vista nor Mojave.

Houston, we have a virus

Steven Swenson
Unhappy

@Anonymous Coward

If Linux is such crap, why can't it catch viruses?

Seriously though, everybody should know by now that you DO NOT use Windows for anything remotely important. Whether it be keeping multibillion dollar space stations in orbit, powering government organizations, or running a life support machine.

Yes, there is a life support machine with Windows on it. If any hospital ever tried to hook up any loved one of mine to a Windows life support machine, I would take them to another hospital.

Red Hat hack prompts critical OpenSSH update

Steven Swenson
Flame

@Bruce && @The Mighty Spang

"They should have used Windows Server 2003."

Let's not get riled up now. Surely Bruce jests.

And no, it wouldn't be news if someone breaks into a Windows server. Everyone has come to expect Windows to be compromised.

Scientists unravel galactic spaghetti monster

Steven Swenson
Alien

@Re: Space Craft

Those pictures on your page look even more startlingly like Him than the one chosen for this article.

Who woulda thought.

US PS3 sales fell 45% in July

Steven Swenson
Thumb Up

Another way to look at it.

In one hand, you have the fact that the PS3 only dropped because it the metal gear solid 4 release was over. On the other hand, you have the fact that its sales could not rise at all without using such a popular release as a crutch.

Oh well. Maybe another game worth playing will come along and once again temporarily bolster sales.

Mystery web attack hijacks your clipboard

Steven Swenson
Thumb Down

Keylogger 2.0

If a website can run code that loops and continuously inserts a link, who's to say it can't run a loop that continuously copies data from your clipboard and sends it off to a bot?

US says the next war will be all in our minds

Steven Swenson
Unhappy

@Seán

If thought was a weapon, the right to bear arms wouldn't matter much anyway.

Most of our fellow Americans are unarmed.

Swedish men left frustrated by state sex aid policy

Steven Swenson
Thumb Up

Only blowups?

Tell them to stock fleshlights.

Filesharing teen gets damages reduced in ignorance claim

Steven Swenson
Flame

Oh, and...

She's gonna have to pay $7400 just because she downloaded songs?

Thank you american justice system. Rather than help keep our quality of life by stopping crime, you've just ruined a little girl's life with more debt than most people can ever pay off.

How does it feel to be a debt collector?

Steven Swenson
Thumb Down

A lesson in copyright

Copyright doesn't mean you're not allowed to take a copy of something. It means you're not allowed to take it and claim that you made it.

This whole case is bullshit.

Oz man cracks one off while speeding in drug-packed car

Steven Swenson
Thumb Up

He lost

It sounds to me like he lost a bet.

Quantum porn engine foiled by strawberries and muffins

Steven Swenson

Conversion much?

Since when is 2000 euros $5 million?

Google penetrates fake sex world with Lively

Steven Swenson
Thumb Down

Aww...

I can't get a good, free furry avatar like I can on SL. Granted those default animals are really adorable.

SL has a huge population of furries, the most prominent species amongst them being wolves and foxes. I can see Google making tons of money off of furries alone when they go to purchase an avatar of their desired species.

US school cheat hack suspect faces 38 years jail

Steven Swenson
Boffin

Challenging Classes?

He probably needed more challenging classes. I failed almost everything in high school, yet I always did amazingly well on tests in the very classes I failed. When I took my GED tests, I completed each one in 1/2 to 2/3 the time required, becoming the first student to ever earn a GED on that day of the week at that testing center. (I finished the last one just in time. There was only supposed to be time to take two or three of them that day. I did all five.)

Here I sit now, self taught in XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP, and having written a PHP OOP image gallery with dynamic thumbnail generation and server-side caching of the thumbnails, from the ground up, in a simple text editor. (Using the GD library of course.)

There's something wrong with the schooling system when you fail because you're too smart for their classes and can't focus on your work. A good friend of mine tells me I should have been taking honors classes...

ICANN approves customized top-level domains

Steven Swenson
Stop

How useless.

Six figures!?

For the little man who wants to register himself a neat site, this is utterly useless. Way to give the multibillion dollar corporations a leg up.

Won't we all just be so jealous when we get to click links like shop.bestbuy or savings.target, knowing we can never have one for ourselves?

Yahoo! Mail! vuln! fixed!

Steven Swenson

Why use web-based chat?

It's a good thing I never do. If possible, I install a client.

Trojan heralds OS X's 'new phase of exposure to malware'

Steven Swenson
Linux

It's not hard

to trick someone who switched to Mac because they couldn't figure out how to work a PC.

"My PC and printer... they just weren't talking to each other." "I couldn't even turn it on." etc.

"With Mac, it just works."

Exploits that trick the user are pretty much imminent on a mac.

MySpace hides in bathroom ahead of make-over

Steven Swenson
Thumb Down

I am guilty

of having a myspace. However, I coded the layout, colors, etc myself. I first got it because a friend of mine wanted me to view their profile, which was private because of their age. My myspace sat blank for several months before I decided one day to spend a few hours coding it to look nice and adding a small autobiography of myself to it.

I thought to myself "Finally, a place where coders can be cool because they know how to make their pages look cool. Everyone will want to befriend us programmers so that we can spiffy out their pages too!"

Boy, was I naive...

Becta schools deal stuns British open-istas

Steven Swenson
Paris Hilton

Not sure what to think.

It feels a little odd that the task went to an unknown firm. But on the other hand, we don't need the big boys pushing their own software over others.

Canonical and Red Hat can still contribute to the project. That's the beauty of Open Source.

I say make them learn Gentoo! Muahaha.

Paris, because her soft wares also go to the highest bidder.

Congressmen say Chinese hacked their PCs

Steven Swenson
Linux

A secure system--

--has the penguin on it.

Politicians have a hard enough time using windows though, not to mention the series of tubes that connects them to the internets. They'd be hopeless on linux.

Didn't these people graduate from prominent universities?

Legal experts wary of MySpace hacking charges

Steven Swenson

New Law

They should push for a new type of law in which you can be at least partially held responsible if you maliciously cause someone to commit suicide through means such as harassment, emotional torment, etc. Trying to prosecute through internet/computer laws is the wrong way to go about it. They need a standalone law that has nothing to do with computers that they can apply to cases like this.

'Great tits cope well with warming'

Steven Swenson
Happy

Great Tits,

Make bird watching fun again.

Texas graverobbers 'used skull to smoke dope'

Steven Swenson

Rotting Hallucinogens

Jenkem 2.0?

Wanted: Americans to join Al Qaeda

Steven Swenson
Thumb Down

Why us?

Islamic fundamentalist terrorists hate us and want us dead. Why would they try to convince us to join them?

Just more scare tactics from our government, ladies and gentlemen.

I Was A Teenage Bot Master

Steven Swenson
Stop

@@Another Skiddie bites the dust..

If people had secured their computers, this script kiddy would not have been able to get any bots and he would have gotten bored and perhaps used his talents for better things.

I'm not saying it's the victim's fault. But the victims' stupidity is partially to blame. To use your rape victim analogy, these victims didn't just walk down the street with a short skirt. They pranced through gangster- and thug-filled alleys naked, breasts-a-waving, ass-a-shaking, expecting to come out untouched.

Windows Vista update 'kills' USB devices

Steven Swenson
Linux

@At least with linux

you don't suffer.

Move over Storm - there's a bigger, stealthier botnet in town

Steven Swenson
Boffin

Hidden extension isn't the only way.

Even if you have the extension hiding turned off, it has been revealed that unicode left-to-right and right-to-left control characters' effects are rendered in Vista filenames. I could easily make a [right-to-left]gpj.[left-to-right]hot_picture.exe that would render as hot_picture.exe.jpg, or an s[right-to-left]iva.exe that would render as sexe.avi

There's good news for Windows users though. It doesn't work on XP.

Microsoft gives XP an extra two years to live (kinda)

Steven Swenson
Boffin

Support is fleeting.

At least us Linux users don't have to worry about the open source community deciding they're not going to support us anymore. Our distros will receive support for all eternity.

Vista SP1 kills and maims security apps, utilities

Steven Swenson
IT Angle

@Anonymous Coward - Dear Linux Users and Developers

Dear Linux Users and Developers,

We regret to inform you that a troll has recently addressed a letter to you on our behalf.

The truth of the matter is that while we do make upgrades every six months, our software for that particular update is already ready for circulation. This is due to the vast amounts of programmers who devote their free time to the collaborative improvement of our products.

While some products may require dependencies to be met, our package manager will automatically detect, download and install these for you, in addition to downloading and installing the program itself for you with a single command. (Something you simply cannot do via the competition.) The only time you will ever have to download hundreds of megabytes is when you go through the actual upgrade. If your internet connection is insufficient, feel free to burn a LiveCD via a computer that does have a sufficient internet connection. If one is not available to you, feel free to order a free LiveCD from our website.

If you feel content with your current OS version (especially if it is an LTS release), you may keep this version as long as you want.

No upgrade will ever be delivered to you without your sayso. (We can't exactly say that of the competition, now can we?)

Signed, yourfavoritelinuxdistro.

Opera screeches at Mozilla over security disclosure

Steven Swenson
Thumb Up

@Patrick O'Reilly

Acid2 compliance is coming along nicely actually. In Firefox2 Acid2 renders much better than the convoluted render in IE7. I've heard Firefox3 renders it perfectly. IE8 also apparently renders it perfectly, though I hear you're going to need a special meta tag to turn on IE's "compliance mode". A tag that I don't think is included in the Acid2 test page...

Steven Swenson
Stop

@Ilgaz Öcal

"All I hear about Firefox these days: Looking for excuse to send your private browsing data to Google"

Edit > Preferences > Security tab.

[X]Tell me if the site I'm using is a suspected forgery.

*Check using a downloaded list of suspected sites.

*Check by asking [Google] about each site I visit.

Oh, you mean -that- excuse to send your browsing data to Google?

How sneaky of them. Hiding it right there in your preferences.

Judge accuses hacks of hacking cannibal ruling

Steven Swenson
Thumb Up

Or maybe...

The judge had a virus. Looking at a little too much gay porn perhaps?

Script Kiddy 1: Duude, I have a judge's computer on my botnet.

Script Kiddy 2: Haha! Nice man! What's that she just emailed to herself.

Script Kiddy 1: Dunno man. Looks like some gnarly confidential documentation.

Script Kiddy 2: Duuuuuuuude. Send it to the mass media.

Steven Swenson
Joke

I'm in ur computer, hacking ur rulings.

Everybody knows the real hackers spend all their time stealing emails that judges send to themselves.

Or maybe the script kiddies scrounged up the intellect to know to check her home computer and how to obtain her IP/email address to plug into one of their downloaded tools.

Heaven forbid one of the people who she actually shared the ruling with in person could have distributed such information.

New York subpoenas Comcast 'reasonable network management' records

Steven Swenson
Flame

Pressure goes a long way.

Maybe this is why my bittorrent suddenly started working. Torrents have never worked for me before this.

Reasonable network management my ass.

FBI screwed up, spied on entire email network

Steven Swenson
Stop

Oops...

"We accidentally gave you access to every email address we have when you only 'asked' for one.

We are happy to cooperate and look forward to doing such lucrative business again."

$$$

FBI sought approval to use spyware against terror suspects

Steven Swenson
Flame

Fear Tactics

Oh geez. Yet another ploy by the government to try and put us under their control in the name of protecting us. Do they seriously think they're protecting us from terrorists when they pull this kind of bullcrap?

We haven't been hit by terrorists since 9/11. And as long as the administration doesn't go ignoring intelligence suggesting there's going to be a terrorist attack, there won't be another one for a long time.

It's been almost seven and a half years. If the terrorists were really as determined to strike us on our own soil as the government makes them out to be, they would have already infiltrated our borders and done so already.

The government hasn't been tirelessly working day in and day out to stop countless terrorist attacks. The government hasn't been arresting terrorists left and right in the act of trying to attack us.

There are no terrorists here to attack us. They're so poor and undersupplied hiding in a cave somewhere that they can't even get to america much less attack america. If we really were catching terrorists in the act of trying to attack us on US soil, the news reports of their capture would be interspersed with the news reports of suicide bombings in Iraq.

Where are the "Islamic fundamentalist terrorist captured on U.S. soil" news reports? There are none. So stop feeding us this "it's for fighting terrorists" bullsh**.

If the terrorists were really that well funded and that determined, they'd hop a plane to mexico, build a bomb there, and smuggle it across the border alongside a bunch of illegal aliens. I haven't seen any reports of illegal immigrants walking across the border with bombs strapped to their chests. Have you?

@Joe Cooper

Even though Ubuntu is one of the more user-friendly distros out there, it's still secure enough to be impenetrable to viruses. If I were stupid enough to accept a file from you or anyone else I don't know, and if I were stupid enough to run it with root privilages (which requires the command to be prepended with "sudo", folowed by entering your root user password, by the way), I would still be using Windows like you most likely are.

US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul

Steven Swenson
Boffin

No wonder...

Windows based satellite tracking system? No wonder the international space station fell to earth.

Blue Screen Of Death -> Blue Planet Of Death

Steven Swenson
Alert

Er...

I mean Spy Satellite.

Microsoft's smiley browser face turns sour

Steven Swenson
Boffin

I should've known.

I should've known they'd pull something like this. A meta tag to turn on standards compliance!? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

There's a reason for web standards, and that reason is to make it easier for developers to make a site that works right in every browser.

I'm not one of those shortcut coders who uses conditionals to execute different code for different browsers. I write my code in a normal text editor and I write it so that the same block of code achieves desirable results cross-browser. I don't even use <noscript> to tell people that they need javascript. I code so that they still have at least minimal functionality if they don't have js enabled.

I take every pain I can to write my code so that it works no matter what.

When I heard that IE8 was going to be standards compliant, both me and a friend of mine cheered. Finally, us web-designers can write one page of code without having to compare the result on different browsers and tweak it until it fits.

Hearing this latest news, however, is infuriating. I use Linux and Firefox, and I'd like to be able to code a site and expect it to work the same on IE. The idea of testing a website only to find out later that it looks terrible on IE because I forgot a single meta tag is an idiotic one.

It just goes to show you that Microsoft is completely, utterly unwilling to play along with anything that anybody else says. They're unwilling to implement standards without making their own version of them. It's a big middle finger to the rest of the browser developers and to the web-development community as a whole accompanied by an "If you're not willing to play by our rules, screw you."

It's nothing but an attempt to leverage M$'s larger market share against everybody else in the world, and I'm sure everybody has been sick of it for a long time now.

Caffeine doubles miscarriage risk

Steven Swenson
Boffin

The drink of intelligence. A plan for the human race.

One study has shown that people who have higher functioning brains get an intelligence boost from coffee. Unfortunately, people who have lower functioning brains, aka are stupid, just get stupider from coffee.

I propose all aspiring parents are put on a regimen of coffee and studied. If they don't both show more intelligence from the coffee, the mother must remain on the coffee regimen throughout the pregnancy.

Mystery web infection grows, but cause remains elusive

Steven Swenson
Boffin

@Shared Ad Server

You could be right. Perhaps it isn't an ad server though, so much as it is a malicious advertisement. Many people who elect to give out ad space on their site will often insert code that lets the ad server generate a little box that can randomly show one or multiple ads.

If one ad is infected, the javascript will only be inserted when that ad is randomly selected. The elusive nature of this virus could very well be that researchers simply aren't viewing the site when that ad shows up.

Poisoned MySpace page masquerades as Windows Update

Steven Swenson
Boffin

Easy trick

At first I wondered how on earth they made it do that, since myspace filters out any attempts to place javascript on their pages. Then I realized that it's just a simple image with some CSS to place it. How do they catch you clicking near it? The image file itself is bigger than the depicted window with a transparent filling.

Seriously though, something like that would never fool me. Seeing my mouse pointer change before I even got to the button would alert me. Even if I didn't use Ubuntu now.

Kid's 'new' MP3 player was preloaded with smut

Steven Swenson

Does she really need that?

Like a 10 year old will really know how to use an mp3 player.