Posts by J.Goodwin

Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity

The IRS not having their own software for filing doesn't prevent most US taxpayers from e-filing for free using online software. The existing vendors offer free filing to those under 66k USD income, as they have for years (at varying dollar amounts).

The one that was painful to me was when my own state changed online filing systems and eliminated the system used for individuals in favor of "enhancing" the one for businesses. I was kind of hoping they would have remediated that by now, but no such luck. Now I have to *shudder* put a stamp on an envelope and walk all the way to my front door then lean out and raise the flag on my mailbox to avoid paying 20 dollars for e-filing.

McDonald's tells Atos to burger off: Da da da da da, we're lobbing IT ...

Having end user experience with both Atos and CapGemini, I'd much rather deal with CapGemini.

HP is somewhere down with Atos, and the poor bastards who lost their jobs when CompUSA went under are somewhere in the middle.

On site IT would be lovely, but in most large companies that's kind of a fantasy.

You've got petabytes of unused storage, says Formation. Er, do we?

Data duplication?

Data duplication sounds like a great way to sell you more storage.

After Death Star II blew: Dissecting the tech of Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Military technology Joneses

Military technology tends to stay static until it meets opposing technology head on that it can't defeat.

The aircraft of world war two didn't change until they met up with MIGs. Since then there has continued to be very little change, the continuing next generation development notwithstanding.

The rebels/republic didn't and possibly still don't have what it takes to build weaponry superior to what the empire already has, so there's no reason to build fighters etc that are a radically different design, or which incorporate design elements from the rebels.

Additionally, it's clear that in the Star Wars universe, they never invented the transistor.

So, was it really the Commies that caused the early 20th Century inequality collapse?

Of course the allies also basically nationalized all of the German businesses and IP that they could get their grubby paws on during and after the war.

Pharmaceuticals, radio, recording, aircraft, rocketry, improvements great and small all then free for everyone to use.

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

Re: Windows only though

It's complimentary to the process that allows you to install windows onto major vendor laptops without a key (the vendor authorization keys are stored in the bios in a similar manner).

Sounds like a well-intentioned feature that wasn't quite thought through properly. Another possible attack vector if you have physical access to the machine, and a really poor use of it by Lenovo.

WTF happened to Pac-Man?

The modern update to Pac-Man is Pac-Man Championship Edition (and the success Pac-Man Championship Edition DX). This game is a successor to Pac-Land (based on the original shitty 1980s Pac-Man animated series), based on the current animated series.

From the screens, it appears to be an entirely faithful realization of that vision.

If you want good gameplay reminiscent of the original, you should check out Championship Edition or DX instead.

Microsoft Silverlight to copy Flash video tricks, Adobe responds

Too Late? Hardly

Adobe has yet to deliver a 64-bit version of flash. This prevents it from working properly in the browsers that are shipping as the defaults in newer operating systems.

The greater portion of the market for new processors is now 64-bit, so the problem is likely to continue to get worse. Meanwhile, Adobe has indicated that the flash source is tuned in nasty and unpredictable ways for 32-bit systems and is turning out to be a real piece of work to get working in 64-bit mode.

The platform change is creating an opening for Microsoft to launch a competing format, and with their browser dominance on windows based PCs, they're probably going to be able to make a good run of at least installing capability to run this content on their systems, which has proven to be plenty to get such things up and running in the past (including Flash itself).