Posts by Version 1.0 5405 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
"24. A portable computer as in claim 23, further including a sound output device in combination with a radio transceiver whereby cellular or radio telephony networks may be used. "
No - I have no comment - I'm going to get my coat and head for the pub.
Hardware yes - but not, it would seem, Microsoft operating systems - where "bigger and slower" would seem to be what he meant to say.
Microsoft's idea of an "upgrade" involves buying a PC, a new operating system, new printers, scanners etc, and a whole new set of applications software - all because the old versions are not "compatible" with the new version. And to boot - I get a whole raft of features that I don't want, or use, from Microsoft too. Oh yes - and we all have to use that God Damn tool strip thingy that making my life miserable on the one application that I did upgrade.
Still we all have off days.
But it's odd because I thought that creating a Trojan and mailing it to someone was supposed to be a crime? I guess maybe not if you're a newspaper reporter ... or an Israeli secret agent?
My own experience with newspaper reporters leads me to suggest that the the only sensible way to deal with them involves a cinder block and a hammer. Let them crawl away.
Sometimes the end does justify the means.
Wikileaks and Manning have collectively held many governments feet to the fire revealing the policy makers, business leaders, and politicians to be a bunch of lying bastards who ought to be the first up against the wall.
Julian's an asswipe but even asswipes have their uses.
How is this non-obvious? Cute, I'll give you that - but non-obvious?
OK - if you think this is non-obvious and thus patentable - here's my "work-around" for the "patent" - a small, but well formed tit is drawn on the screen - using multi-touch, the user squeezes the titty to direct the stream of data towards the desired device. Cue visual effects.
Come to think of it, we'll add a "lads" option ... I'll leave that to your imagination.
OK, I'm off to the post office to file my patent application.
But here in the good ol' US of A we have problems getting our head around this one ... just One Click (TM) to purchase stuff? Nah, that will never work.
Hey Bubba, ya'll hold me beer while I click this button ....
DANG!
I just bought a Barbie Doll with one click !!!! Let's shoot it.
I was talking on the phone with a customer yesterday on the mainland who needs to purchase a fairly sophisticated ADC unit that we sell for ~$3000 - if he imports it through normal channels he's expecting to pay $7500 additional duty.
The WTO can posture all they like but they've got no balls - and the Chinese know it.
Exactly - there's nothing like churning the structure of large companies to generate big profits for the banks who will sell the breakup as "stimulating innovation" - it's ironic really because how many of these "Masters of Finance" would have invested in a couple of guys setting up a company in a garage - especially since they didn't have a "business plan".
and counseling too . . . and a chocolate biscuit . . . and a nap.
Gimme a break, the whole argument is stupid - Google did much the same and anyone with Wireshark and a laptop can do - WIGLE.NET users upload AP names daily and nobody gives a rats ass.
If it's not encrypted then it's not private - and even it if is encrypted, you'd be a fool to assume that it's private.
QUIT WHINING YOU BUNCH OF BABIES!
Apple has a history of walking up to great design and then sabotaging it, or abandoning it, for a more pedestrian product - obviously commercially successful in that they have made a lot of money but they're making nothing today that gives you the "I want one of those" feelings that The Cube did - a great design (complete with the flaws that cutting edge designs will always have - go look at one of Frank Lloyd Wrights buildings if you doubt this) but technically The Cube was mediocre.
Just think what it could be today . . .
But $2.6 billion in damages when Oracle isn't in the business of selling phones or communications is just stupid. Damages? What, you think that Larry bought SUN because he wanted to get into the phone business?
Nope, I didn't think so either. Larry bought SUN so that he could take a piss in someones' Weetabix.
Although looking at the latest Larry pics - he's starting to look worse than the Jobs boy. Larry was never that handsome but recently he's starting to look downright decrepit.
It's fun to charter an accountant,
And sail the wide accountancy.
To find, explore the funds offshore,
And skirt the shoals of bankruptcy.
It can be manly in insurance.
We'll up your premium semi-annually.
It's all tax-deductible,
We're fairly incorruptible.
We're sailing on the wide accountancy.
Oracle pushed their database services as the way to predict future sales, income and profits from past data - use Oracle and the future is rosy, use Oracle and you will beat your competitors performance, use Oracle and predict ways to boost income etc etc ... go back and read their advertising copy.
OK - so Oracle didn't CAUSE the financial meltdown, the High Street bankers and the likes of Goldman Sachs and friends did that in their relentless pursuit of profit over morality - not that they've changed their ways recently either - BUT I do think that the way that Oracle marketed their services DID have a large effect on the market overall - they provided the tools to help the bankers and friends justify their faulty projections ... just as you can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theater, I don't think you can shout "Free Money" either.
But, to side with you (AC) and put it to in historical terms - Let's say that IBM should be held blameless for tabulating Jewish individuals for the Third Reich. I'd agree that IBM may not have known what was happening when they started in 1933, but it's hard to argue that IBM's must be held blameless by 1939?
This might be reasonable if Oracle was a phone company ... instead of an organization running the business databases that enabled many of the leading financial companies to completely fail to see the last meltdown. If Oracle, and it's bloody yacht with Larry onboard, sailed off the end of the world - would anyone actually care?
Runs faster. Costs less. And never gives a toss either.
Frankly I think Oracle OWES us money.
Early life forms evolve, and eat the lesser evolved for lunch.
If it's blacklisting other virus servers then it should be fairly easy to see if you're infected ... then I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure... I believe that's the new US policy and I'd guess that we'd only have to do it a couple of times before the lads from Latvia got the message.
I've seen it done ... initially the intercept is a little flaky but after a couple of dozen words it's very accurate. But it does require a real keyboard - at least the demo I saw did - so I doubt that it's going to work so well on a glass keyboard.
But there are other ways of attacking a glass keyboard.
Yes - very useful. Anything that appears in the logs often get added to our honey pot list and further missives cause the senders to be added to the banned IP list. There's no need to seed the alt.sex newsgroups any more ... it's jolly decent of the spammers to relieve me of that task.
All of which would have been collected via credit cards ... and therefore leaving a trail. Of course, if they'd been running a gambling site or streaming football programs then they would have been caught much earlier.
But assuming they have 50% overhead then that still leaves $36m - how do you stash that sort of loot away? Where's the money? It's harder than you'd think to stash that sort of amount away and not leave traces - so either the total amount is wrong - or there's more going on than we're told?
At $72m then the credit card fees to Visa and Master-card alone would have been well over $2m.
"This is just the way Wikipedia works. It's a flaw of the medium. The line between participant and documentarian is inherently blurred."
But this has always been the case - even with the printed word and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. All that's happened with Wikipedia is that the connection is now obvious - the end result is that any serious "student" must now question their sources, even if those sources aren't Wikipedia.
I for one think this is an improvement.
Living on the Gulf Coast over the years I've been though storms taking our the local AC power at the drop of a hat, drunks taking out whole sub-divisions (and themselves) with one poorly aimed Hummer and the occasional 7-10 day outage when a Hurricane wanders past (Katrina, Gustave etc) when everything eventually goes silent no matter how big the UPS.
Just about everything on my system is stored in ASCII files - email, contacts, tasks, calendars, public files - and I've yet to lose a single file or email. Backups? Sure - one every night to a big grab and run USB disk and hourly incremental backups to a separate drive on the machine - they are occasionally useful for rescuing the poor luser who deletes stuff that they shouldn't (IF they are nice to me and say please) but otherwise (8+ years and counting) I've never had to rebuild a database on the server.
But then, I'm not using Exchange . . .
We'll find out where Lord Lucan went ...
I'd imagine that this sort of information would be a big deal for the genealogists and family tree folks but as for the rest of us ... well, I don't give a rats' arse. There's probably some good material there for Armstrong and Miller - now THAT, I'm looking forward to!
Fair comment - basically they were spec'd with the idea of reasonably easy implementation among a small number of computer literate academics (both commercial and educational) with little thought for security or trustiness. Sure - they were open specs and many people commented and suggested improvements most of which were implemented at the time ... 30 years ago. Having seen what spammers and hackers have done with these protocols, I don't think that there's any disagreement that if we'd know then what we know now - we'd have done things differently.
And my point is that not all change is a bad thing - and that even walled gardens can be opened ...
While Twitter and Facebook may seem invincible today - as does Apple - I wonder how long before they join the ranks of MySpace and GeoCities?
Realistically, if we were starting out from scratch, then we'd never have designed the current POP, SMTP, IMAP methods the way they are today ... but we're stuck with them for the moment. I don't see the harm in Apple, RIM etc trying out new systems and protocols - if they are worthy then they will be adopted and extended ... much as POP and SMTP have been. These protocols and designed were - in the beginning - as much products of the ivory towers as anything that seems to be proposed at present.
A Blade Runner quote from Gaff because, well the movie and the positions that the characters find themselves in just seems to be more prescient as the years pass.
As in "We did not know that they did not have weapons on mass destruction", "We did not know that the Jews were being gassed", "We did not know that Banking Deregulation would cause a crisis", "We did not know that the NOTW was bugging your phones" etc etc etc.
Maybe this is why the wife's PC has just gotten two fresh copies of Malware Defender in two days? The last one after she opened a page on the Daily Mail ... and I'd only just finished cleaning the Damn thing last night.
And this on a fully patched version of XP while running the current release of Firefox and SpyBot Defender - all updated last night.
Whatever you may, or may not, think of Julian and the legion of "followers" who appear to manage to kick their own behinds, that fact remains that WikiLeaks has done a brilliant job of releasing information that DOES change the world for the better.
How odd that just as they threaten to release the Bank of America's dirty secrets they are suddenly shown to be in league with hackers and fools... assuming of course that the people defacing the web sites aren't employed by BoA and other embarrassed parties.
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