Posts by Kevin 6

Brother creates direct retinal imaging specs

nice

Wonder if anyone will make that game from Star Trek TNG (S5ep6) that the crew got addicted to that used a device that looks remarkably similar to this ;)

Anyways I want one.

Trade body doubles efforts against pirate software

ahh spindoctors

"pirated software means malware"

Don't a fair amount of legit software come with that also now a days? Last I checked Securerom acted like malware and can we not forget the sony's rootkit, all of which came with legitimately purchased material and installed itself without notification and is harder to remove than most malware. Last I checked pirated stuff usually strips off the malware software makers put on the PC to try and stop people from copying it or using it on a 2nd pc.

Time to raise ye flag and sset sail on the IRC's and get ye untainted copies.

Hotmail phish exposes most common passwords

Pssh thats nothing

At a charter grammar school where I was a system admin for a few months (almost lost my mind due to the stupidity) 95% of employees passwords were 12345...

I'm not talking worthless general student use accounts I'm talking the schools administration principal and almost every teacher (4 non IT users didn't use 12345 and one had the ultra secure 54321...). Some of these accounts stored extremely sensitive data like CC numbers parents used to buy uniforms, grades, Social Security #'s for staff and students, PAYROLL, access to the rest of the school district, and much more. And no matter what me or my boss said they refused to change their passwords and would bitch us out about security. We were actually ordered to set the firewalls password was 12345 along with the VNC connections password or we would be fired.

My boss and I quit 2 weeks later...

Helpdesk Heroes or unappreciated geeks?

Ahh the helpdesk

I kind of miss it in ways.

I worked helpdesk for 2 years and was actually thanked ONE time by a extremely grateful department who were very sad (among a quite a few other users) to see me quit. I pretty much recovered 2 years of documents off a PC that the hard drive was crapping out, they never bothered to save to their network drive.

I think my favorite call was when we had a new guy who was very optimistic, eager to help people and had a very friendly personality (he became a cynical pessimist in 2 weeks). When the phone rang I said before he picked it up TELL THEM TO TURN THE PC ON. He looked at me with a confused look on his face and asked "How can you say that without listening to them", I replied "Easy I'm psychic and I'm not wasting my time going out because I got enough crap to fix by the end of the shift". So he decided to answer it and be polite and after hanging up I was like "I'll bet you the machine is not on and they are pressing the monitors power button repededly" he replied I doubt anyone here would mix up a monitor power switch and mistake a monitor for a computers case" so i placed a wager on it and sent another new guy with him to learn how stupid our users really are he doubted my psychic helpdesk powers also(BTW I worked in a technical university that specialized in computer programming networking and electronics). So 15 minutes after he left he came back with a surprised look on his face and asked me "how did you know exactly the issue without answering the phone" I told him after working in the department for a few months you kind of can just guess depending on the time of day.

We also had teachers who couldn't remember their friggin passwords even though they never changed them from the default password which was THEIR LAST NAME.

Another call I remember very vividly (mainly due to being bitched out my my boss from it) was from this crazy teacher who thought programming and new students on how to use the network...

OK so the guy calls up asking us to install some bootleg copy of XP on his office machine (It was a leaked pirated copy of XP cause XP came out officially a month later). I said "nope we do not support XP or have any licensing for it", then he asks "Can I install it myself" I replied "Sir, I just said we cannot have it on any of our machines due to not having it licensed" and he hangs up.

3 hours later I see a ticket in the queue from him for his pc not working (take a wild guess where this goes)... So I am forced to go deal with him and took a imaging disk with knowing all too well what he probably did. Well turns out I was right he failed setting up his bootleg XP and deleted his hard drives partitions... Than after I reimage his pc he screams at me (literally) "WHAT YOU DO TO MY GRADES! WHERE ARE THEY! YOU DELETED MY GRADES ON ME!", I asked him if he saved them to the network drive his response "I SAVED THEM ON MY HARD DRIVE SO NO ONE COULD TAMPER WITH THEM" (BTW one teacher who was a psychiatrist that I talked to back then said the guy shows all signs of schizophrenia) I TRIED my best to explain he trashed the partition and lost everything but instead he decided to keep blaming me while screaming till I finally got up and just walked out.

Then he called up the IT director and said that I purposely destroyed his data, was rude, and disrespectful to him... The IT director called up my boss and chewed her out then she called me into her office and bitched me out for 10 minutes not letting me get a word in edgewise till I stood up and started to walk out of the office. Then she asked me "what the hell do you think your doing" I responded "if you want to bitch at me might as well bitch at the wall seeing I did nothing wrong", she finally decided to ask me what happened... After I told her EXACTLY what he did to his pc and why he was mad she apologized to me for not listening, than told the IT director.

I quit a few months after that and a fair amount of users (and the network admins) were actually sad to see me go seeing I was one of the only people who knew what they were doing in the department, and was the only person who knew how to fix any piece of equipment in the place(I memorized every schematic to memory on things I had to solder). A year later I was in the area and ran into a user I dealt with regularly and he told me he missed me and that the people(yes plural I did 4 peoples jobs in 2 departments) they replaced me with were all "fuckin idiots". Also the boss I had quit a few months after I did do to stress issues I heard because of the QUALITY employees she hired (as sarcastically typed as possible) to fill the large gaping hole I left when I err.. left :D

Actually if they would get rid of the night boss I would re-apply there I actually kind of miss it. I had a VERY big argument with her and she is the main reasons I quit (I actually called her a dumb bitch to her face and kept my job over 8 months, till I quit, while she tried to find a replacement for me :D ). Actually her stupidity was the reason 90% of the people we hired would quit within 2 weeks after being hired.

Sorry for the long post ;)

Archos punts 9-inch Windows 7 tablet PC

hmm tempting

I'm tempted to get one but as ElReg!comments!Pierre said its a little too expensive somewhere around $300 would have made it appealing but $500 is too much for what it has inside and with what it lacks ".A VGA port, two additional USB ports, and 10/100BASE-T Ethernet can be added with an optional module." This is a deal killer to me with its price tag if anything it should be included for free if they didn't want to cram it into the case, but like I said around $150 cheaper than it still would look enticing as a PMP.

Also as ZenCoder pointed out its not mentioned if it has portrait mode for using it as a ebook reader which is something I use my Samsung Q1 as a fair bit at times.

Well Archos nice try but my Samsung Q1 won't get its much deserved retirement just yet.

NASA works on robo-podcab scheme

umm

heres why I always though this to be completely impractical beyond the reasons others have stated above.

If you look at the artist rendition where do the un-used pods get stored?

if they are at the station till used how can other people get off or leave for that matter?

This kind of transportation although cool on paper and in the imagination is kind of impractical when you try and figure it out. Also how long will the pod traffic jam be when you get into areas with tons of skyscrapers and thousands of people starting at the same time. Honestly to handle any real volume in a urban area (seeing one pod can carry 3 people) you would need hundreds of lines going down most streets one to two will not cut it.

NOW this might be feasible in more rural areas where the buses only carry a handful of people. But chances are they wouldn't have the funds to build and maintain it.

Only place I can see this actually working is in NASA itself to shuttle their employees from one area to the next.

Texan confronts the legendary chupacabras

the 2nd video

the canine kind of looked like a bull terrier mated with a coyote or something along those lines.

and as AC #2 stated wheres the glowing red eyes and wings of legends? Because I doubt a feral dog (its head structure looks like a Carolina dog) that suffered from mange is what all the Latin American legends were based off.

Microsoft apologizes for digital head transplant

not a bad job

seeing they probably only had MS Paint to work with ;)

ok I lied I pulled off better alterations with MS paint long before I used paintshop or adobe ;)

US women protest for the right to bare

I find it funny

Most women complain enough already that men are only staring at their chest while it is fully clothed. I can only imagine how many men will hear "Where do you think your looking?" while topless...

Sony to make rechargeable batteries last 4x longer

wonder if

they called this new battery Zippo and if they burn 4X brighter and explode 4X faster seeing how well sony batteries have done in the past.

Apple loses students to netbooks and Windows

@Antidisestablishmentarianist

Are you the kind of person that would buy a Pinto and expects it to handle as well, look, and drive as fast as a Ferrari?

I will admit Atoms are not too good unless you have at LEAST 2 gigs of ram.

Also when you buy Dell (or ANY manufacturer for that matter) if you didn't know it the first thing you do is erase all partitions and reinstall windows from scratch because Dell likes to put a ton of garbage that you do not need, and will probably never use on them that hogs all the memory and processor cycles. My sister owns the same dell model as you have, I installed Xp on it myself, and she has never complained once about it being slow but then she also knew what to expect.

I also own 2 atom desktop boards Ones a original atom that I use as a low power NAS, web, and mail server that has a light load. And the other is a dual core that I use for a multimedia PC that can play videos at 720p resolution and under(that I've tried).

and ZenCoder I agree most people that ask me what they should buy I usually tell them get a atom based netbook or desktop seeing they use it mainly for E-mail, light web browsing, and word processing.

and as a side note most students buy windows laptops due to their colleges and universities not supporting mac, and linux on their network so its windows XP or no connection.

Mozilla tries to shunt Firefox 3.0 users over to 3.5

@Zid

agree just like with 3.0 and the damn awful bar how hard would it have been to add DO NOT USE AWFUL BAR check box in the configuration but noooo had to download a addon and go set settings manually in the about:config

some people like that POS bar trying to auto fillin your stuff I cant stand it. occasionally FF freezes due to the damn auto complete. and I always wanted to know why when I type ebay.com google.com pops up as a auto completed URL...

mozillas main rant on the planet is about giving people browser options but ironically their browsers now giving us less options in allowing us to disable things and instead forcing what they think is cool onto the users almost like microsoft and IE...

Hackintosher denies Apple's documents allegation

I aint no lawyer but...

"Although the letter goes on to enumerate the destroyed evidence, large chunks of it are blacked out, presumably to protect Apple's trade secrets. Apple alleges Psystar has overwritten earlier versions of its code before Apple had a chance to examine them, deleted or lost relevant emails, and failed to satisfy "other deficiencies in... document production.""

If apple didn't have a chance to examine them in the 1st place how can they say they were even relevant? And what kind of document production wasn't satisfied? Apple mad that Psystars R&D probably consisted of 1-2 people who kept it all in their heads and didn't document how they did stuff very well? Apple almost sounds scared that they might lose on some accounts and are trying to get documentation stuff was illegally destroyed to make sure the final judgment goes completely in apples favor

Blaster anniversary recalls network worm heyday

I miss those days

I loved the blaster virus it netted me and my co-workers a nice chunk of change in overtime at the college I worked at. Especially since we had disinfect the whole network with it 2-3 times a week due to students and our IT Director re-infecting it.

People might talk trash and hate MS I love them personally, because they earned me some very nice paychecks in the past.

Blade Runner tops sci-fi movie poll

@Peter Flynn

personally I actually hated all the star wars but the empire strikes back only one that I found watchable but I'm a startrek person personally ;)

Spaceballs deserves a spot on that list more than starwars ;)

Also I wasn't a fan of Alien and ET, Predator, Logan's Run, or even Death Race 2000 I think are more deserving of the spot more.

Dutch court clogs Pirate Bay

WOW

lets face it how hard is it to make a fake log of online conversations?

also who in the hell is going to believe a e-mail/shitter... err I mean twitter/blog entry/on-line chat saying you got to report to another country on this day cause I'm suing you. I sure as hell know I wouldn't go without a hard copy.

makes me glad it still requires a paper summons to be signed for where I live ;)

Wii and PS3 sales slide

@The Avangelist

I'm more sure the reason that Wii sales are dipping is more closely related to the market saturation instead of your 1 title per year thing. Nintendo's main game problem is that I hardly ever see a advertisement for Wii games vs seeing Xbox and PS3 adverts non stop. There have been around 8 games I really wanted that and I never knew were released on the Wii or DS while they were being sold and by the time I found out about them I was unable to locate them for a reasonable amount of money (one I found 2nd hand on ebay for over 2X its MSRP). The Gamecube also suffered the same issues with the lack of advertising for games.

The PS3 lets face it the thing is a Blu-ray playing boat anchor that has almost the same exact titles as the lower priced Xbox 360.

And lets face it the Wii and PS3 have under a 1% failure rate (according to a search on google and looking at multiple video game related sites) vs the 360's 15-35% (the percentages tend to fluctuate drastically seen one place quoted it over 60% failure rate). Now lets see Nintendo and even Sony doesn't sell as many replacements systems as Microsoft. So is it any real surprise MS ships more 360's?

IE icon too familiar for Microsoft EU settlement?

Is it microsofts fault

Operas logo is a pile of crap? Their logo took what 15 seconds to make in MS paint? not many people will be attracted to a White O in a red box. Shocked their not trying to get fines put on Apple, Mozilla, and Google also for having more attractive icons.

and like others have said it doesn't help that their browser is a pile of crap.

AVG update gags iTunes

@Steve Evans

surely AVG8 should detect and delete itself then as well.

Last good AVG was 7.5 I installed 8 2 weeks ago and find its a piece of crap. For some reason it felt the need to consume 200 megs of ram and 10% of my processors utilization while I selected in its options to have all everything completely disabled. I don't know about anyone else but personally I do not need actively running shields, programs that monitor web use, and have other pointless programs loaded and always running I just want a program I can run a simple scan every now and then for piece of mind. Which AVG 8 is not.

I actually find it sad and ironic that the viruses, and trojans utilize less CPU time and ram than the thing that is supposed to clean them and make your system run better.

Japanese nuke lab erects 200 teraflop super

@Gobot

Yea right with Aero active its performance will still probably still drop to that of a 386 running windows 95.

Apple sued over shrink-wrapped Mafia death threats

He belongs where I work

I work at a long term closed door mental health facility and hear stuff like that ALL the time from the residents.

Heres 3 examples.

One 75 year old African American women was running around with a picture of Rebeca Romain and saying it was a picture of her all while the demons in her head were telling her things.

We also had a guy that ripped his skin open due to believing that he had a transmitter shoved into him by aliens working with the CIA (I am NOT making any of this up).

We also have a person who thinks L Ron Hubbard was the most brilliant man alive and dianetics is the most thought profound book ever written and will spit on you if you disagree.

In the least he has severe schizophrenia. And I when schizophrenics snap I've seen everything from feces to billiard tables flung at employees or whoever they think is against them. And this is a place where we have control over what they can get a hold of. I would not want to be anywhere near this guy when he finally snaps because innocent people are going to get hurt. So this is not really a laughing matter IMO, but I do se why some people would laugh.

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

I wonder

If I am the only one that misread "Cyclone Power Technologies" as Cylon Power Technologies?

Speculation mounts over AVG plans for OS X client

@Mike Moyle

Mactards are generally the most smug people on the planet. They believe OSX is made by some superior being and has no security holes what so ever and love to flame people who disagree.

About a year back mactards flamed me to high hell when I said it is only a matter of time before malware pops up for the mac they were saying something similar to that there will never going to be a virus on OSX or any malware. And that the reason was not due to OSX being a niche market at the time, it was due to it being the most secure OS ever made and will never need a AV.

Web swoons as Jackson dies

personally

My favorite was the local news talking about his death while showing footage from Thriller when MJ was dancing as a zombie and they kept looping that segment while the reporter kept talking for 2 minutes.

Transformers helmsman demolishes English language

My 2 cents.

Well the issue I had with TF1 was that instead of a plot (the old Cartoon 30 min episodes had more in dept plots) they put as many references to Pepsi products (mostly mountain dew), Ford, Ebay, and Nokia as possible also he added a bunch of explosions. Then he shoots almost every action scene (I don't remember any where the cameraman doesn't seem to be suffering from Parkinson's disease) with a shaky camera, so you can't see any action very clearly so they end up looking like shit.

And to defend Paramount wouldn't advertising a hour and a half long Ford commercial be kind of repetitive?

Transformers 1 was the 1st and last Michael Bay film I will ever see. Actually TF1 was so bad it was the last movie I've seen in the theaters that's how ripped off I felt. Now I just wait for movies to come on satellite instead of wasting $25 to see the shit Hollywood is putting out.. Wish Hollywood would learn pirates are not the reason their revenue is down its horrendous movies made by people like Michael Bay driving people away from the theaters.

And to the people who are thinking OHH HE PROBABLY WILL PIRATE IT I have not downloaded ANYTHING Hollywood has put out period. I don't feel like wasting my bandwidth on that drivel.

Microsoft forbids changes to Windows 7 netbook wallpaper

Well

At least Microsoft saved me the money I was tempting to spend on Vist.. err I mean windows 7.

Guess I'll stick with Windows 2000 till nothing works (or can be hacked to work) on it anymore. Hopefully by then the penguin army will sort out the nightmare that is Linux. Or someone makes a hack for the 1st Beta of Windows 7 to work without a time limit.

I actually wanted the starter edition for my desktop seeing it sounded almost like the original windows 7 beta release, not that clunky RC release.

US city demands FaceSpaceGooHoo log-ins from job seekers

Wonder

What if you tell them you don't have any?

My E-mail is POP3 only so if they would check it they would delete my e-mails. I do not use facebook, myspace, shitte.. err i mean twitter, or any of those other "social" networking sites. I would probably be turned down due to them thinking I'm lying ;)

Grand Theft Auto firm praises controller-free gaming

Err

Feder stopped short of specifically praising either Microsoft’s Project Natal or Sony’s Motion Control, but hinted that although Nintendo “did a great job with the Wii controller” - gamers now want controller-free videogames.

I think Feder should speak for himself almost every gamer I know wishes all Wii games would allow use of the Game Cubes controller. Feder doesn't seem to understand TRUE gamers are generally kind of lazy, out of shape, and love playing for 3+ hours at a time. Try playing Wii bowling or any other kind of motion game that requires you to stand long periods, wave your arms around like a loon, and not wake up with sore muscles the next morning. Then there is the accuracy level lets face it the accelerometer devices are no where near as accurate as a analog joystick or digital D-pad. Than you also get into the problems of the amount of space you need to do the motions. Remember how many people broke TVs with Wiimotes? Imagine how many people would break a bone when they fall over coffee tables/dogs/cats/children while jacking a car in GTA. Hell what about the 1st guy to hit his wife by accident while beating a hooker to death on screen?

One fifth of humanity deprived of Milky Way

Wow

you mean to tell me there are actually little lights up in the sky? I call BS as we can clearly see from the Apollo moon landing pictures there are no little lights in the sky. There is only the blackness of space as seen from the ground in majorly overpopulated cities like I live in.

on a serious note I do miss looking up and actually seeing the stars.