Posts by sisk

What treasures will the US really find on bin Laden's hard disk?

The difference between us and them

"public celebrations were being held in the Arab nations of the world"

That SHOULD be it. Supposedly we of the Western world put a high value on human life. That being the case, we shouldn't be celebrating a death, even one such as OBL. The Arab world, as a whole, clearly does NOT value human life, as evidenced by people dancing in the streets 10 years ago. Do you REALLY want to be brought down to that level? I sure as hell don't.

Not that I think he got anything less than what he had coming. I do think it would have been better to put him on trial for his crimes as we did with Hussein (who, after all, had far more blood on his hands than Bin Laden).

Will we be told?

"But will we be told? Or fed propaganda instead?"

Um...Duh? When has the US government ever given us anything but propaganda?

CNET sued for giving kids LimeWire

Shhhh

Don't give them any ideas. RIAA and MPAA just might try it.

Want an untracked Android? Here’s how

Huh?

"The downside is that you won’t be able to receive location-based advertisements suggesting nearby restaurants, shopping destinations or coffee joints"

Less ads? How, exactly, is that a downside?

DARPA, NASA look to spawn STARSHIP enterprise

Great idea

I'm going to start fundraising now to start a United Planet of Politicians, or maybe a United Planet of Conservatives and a United Planet of Liberals would work better.

Sony implicates Anonymous in PlayStation Network hack

@Rootkit?

Immoral, yes. Illegal, YES. malicious, YES. Rootkit? That would depend on what level of access it used to do what it did. I would suspect that it grabbed admin level permissions from itself, but I can't say that for sure. If that is, in fact, what it did then it could legitimately be called a rootkit.

Now let me explain. It was illegal because it installed with niether the consent nor the knowledge of the owner of the computer. It was malicious because it caused damage to the system. Their intentions may not have been malicious, but the end result most definately was.

Hacker pwns police cruiser and lives to tell tale

Not likely

Sounds to me like the problem lies with the admin. The fact that they were using the default password screams that the admin was incompetent. With that kind of incompetence it doesn't really matter what OS you have.

Wikileaks: Canadian piracy arrests were favor to movie biz man

Outrage should be felt

The OD is his own fault, unless the Mounties were shoving pills down his throat.

That said, there should be a significant amount of outrage from this. Not because the guy died (which is tragic), but because he was arrested when he hadn't committed a crime as a personal favor. You know what we call that in the states? Police corruption and false arrest. The Mounties who made the arrests and all other officials involved should be shown the door and thrown in jail, in that order.

Sony: 'PSN attacker exploited known vulnerability'

FAIL

So they're refusing to reveal the known exploit that was used in order to prevent another attack. So...they're not going to fix the vulnerability? Given that there's at least one cracker out there who knows what exploit was used that strikes me as....well, stupid.

Giving free movie and music downloads seems like a pretty decent olive branch to the users affected by this, but it's really just an attempt to buy back some angry customers. It'll work for some. As for me, I've bought my last Sony product. Between this example of security incompetence and their insistence on treating their customers like criminals, I've had it with them.

Microsoft profits soar 31% on Office, Xbox

Really?

"The iPad would do /everything else/ that the computer otherwise would be required for."

Really? Word processing? It can do it, but only at a piss poor level. Spreadsheets? Ditto. Creating multimedia? Don't make me laugh. Entertain the three year old? Probably, but it won't survive that treatment the way a keyboard will (and yes, my three year old plays Elmo games on my desktop).

The iPad and other tablets are excellent entertainment machines, but do not try to shoehorn them into a PC replacement role. It's a very bad fit for them. Personally I wouldn't even want to type on email on the things, let alone try to do any 'real' computing.

You have a point, but...

Windows isn't going anywhere. Your average consumer has just two choices: Windows or Mac (the average guy hasn't even heard of Linux, or if he has it's just because he's 'got a nerdy friend who uses that'....sad but true). Most people will look at a Mac, see the price tag, and ask 'What does this do that Windows doesn't'. Not too terribly long ago that answer was 'it's immune to malware', but that's not true anymore. There may not be as much Mac malware floating about as Windows malware, but it's there so the answer to that question today is really nothing. That being the case, most of them will go with Windows. That's not going to change in the near future, so Mac is eternally doomed to have a low market share (unless they drop the premium pricing and sell their computers at a price point that can compete that is. If that ever happens then the devil's gonna need some snow shoes).

And because most average consumers are going to choose Windows, the major software vendors will continue to release their software to Windows only, and maybe Mac as an afterthought. None of them are going to spend the extra resources to release a version for the 2% of us who run Linux as our primary OS. Without those well known programs that everyone uses, Linux is doomed to have minimal market share.

I wish it weren't so, but that's life. Microsoft and Windows will continue to rule the world for the foreseeable future. The only real chance of that ever changing is if people can walk into Wal-Mart or Best Buy and buy a computer running Linux for $100 less than one right next to it with identical specs and Windows (which will never happen) or Apple cut their prices down to what an equivalent PC costs (which will never happen).

That doesn't even take into consideration the billions of dollars worth of enterprise systems that are completely locked into Windows and will be until something forces them to consider other options.

As for the idea of tablets replacing PCs...yeah, not gonna happen. At least not until a tablet can comfortably do what people use their PCs for. Right now they don't even come close. Another 3 or 5 years and we may start seeing that, but I doubt it. Businesses, where the real money is, are not going to give up a keyboard any time soon.

So you'll forgive me if I just roll my eyes and shake my head when you rant that Windows' market share is going to start slipping.

Latvian hack's hack story leads to hack-hacking

100-500Mb/s???

Damn....I'm paying out the arse for 12Mb/s...And that's the fastest I can get here.

Natty Narwahl: Ubuntu marine mammal not fully evolved

Yeah. It was today.

Ubuntu has always been shaky by Linux standards. What I've been hearing about Narwahl's stability oddly reminds me of when I first tried Ubuntu many years ago. It was dodgy then to. Don't go judging the stability Linux based on a distro that's always put appearance above function.

And yes, I realize my title is unfair. It's not that Linux is less stable than it used to be but because Windows is more so. It's not quite up to the stability of Linux yet (I've seen a system stay up and stable after the system drive died, a trick that I sincerly doubt Windows will ever replicate) but it's a whole lot closer than it used to be.

Enlightenment is good

I ran Enlightenment for a while, but I ended up going back to Fluxbox because eye candy drives me bonkers. If you don't mind eye candy though it's a very fine environment.

Google sued over – yes – Android location tracking

Fail

For a company whose motto is 'Don't be evil' they certainly are good at being evil.

Barnes & Noble answers Microsoft's anti-Android suit

Patent troll

Microsoft has officially become a patent troll. These aren't even patents that are likely to stand up in court. I mean, a patent for progress bars? One for highlighting text filed? Come on, these things don't have a prayer of standing up, even in the US. Most of them have prior works and they're all pretty obvious.

Vote now for the best sci-fi film never made

So many good choices

It's a tough choice...gonna have to think about this one.

Though I do have to say I think some of my favorites on the list are much better off being left on paper. Some of them, while damn good books, wouldn't transition well to the big screen. There are others that it would break my heart to see cut down to a point that you could actually get them into a movie that people would sit through.

US Senate weighs in on phone tracking

I get it

At first I was confused trying to figure out why the Senate suddenly seems to be showing interest in our privacy, but then it hit me. Most likely all 100 Senators have smartphones. They aren't concerned with our privacy, they're concerned with THEIR privacy. After all, it wouldn't do for the cell phone companies to have a list of what bedrooms they spend time in when not at home.

Cops hunt man who befouled drugstore's cough drop stash

Well....

He must have been pissed off about something.

I'll go now.

Note to Mozilla: We don't get the Firefox billboards

Eh

"Firefox is by far the slowest of all browsers to launch"

Actually, I find it launches in about the same amount of time as Safari (on Windows that is). Depending on your configuration and plugins IE can be just as slow to launch. Granted that's still dog slow to launch, but not 'by far the slowest of all browsers'.

"has been left behind in JS test even by IE9"

That may be true of tests, but based on my own observations Firefox still processes JS much more quickly than IE9 in the real world.

"and also has the most vulnerabilites in each year for more than half a decade now."

It has the most vulnerabilities found, true, but that's not the only measure for measuring security. In fact, taken by itself, it's not even a good measure.

Sony unsure if PlayStation Network user data was stolen

Wrong

"You're not getting the service you paid for, but it's not Sony's fault."

Yes it is. They could have fixed the security hole and put the 'old' PSN back up while they were rebuilding a new one instead of taking the whole thing down.

"It's a bunch of whining wannabe pirates, who need to call the waaaambulance because their halfbaked excuses are getting tediously deafening."

Not all (or even most) homebrewers are pirates. The idiotic argument that that's the only reason anyone would want homebrew on a console is what is getting tediously deafening.

"If you genuinely want to do something different and groundbreaking, then I honestly admire that.

Sony didn't make anyone install the update that forced the choice between OtherOS and PSN. But letting both happen at once WOULD have led to my gaming experience getting wrecked for the reasons in my post above, and it had to happen for them to preserve the primary use of the console for the vast, vast majority of users."

Bullshit. Geohotz's original hack only allowed Linux to fully utilize the hardware. It had no affect in the game mode whatsoever. It ONLY affected Linux and didn't pose a piracy threat. As for saying that they didn't force users to take that update, that's like saying the IRS doesn't force you to pay taxes because you can choose to go to jail instead. There's a term for that kind of choice, but it's been a long time since I took philosophy.

"And now a bunch of pathetic losers have potentially got hold of my credit card details because they can't cope with that fact. And that really pisses me of"

Frankly I never trusted PSN with my credit card details to begin with, however I will say this: If this attack is meant to be punitive against Sony then they likely aren't interested in credit card details. If they were after the credit card details then this attack would have happened regardless of what Sony's been doing to homebrewers.

Oh, and for the record, my PS3 isn't jailbroken. I just get sick and tired of Sony pretending that consumer rights don't exist in the face of the phantom threat of piracy. Seriously, how many publishers have quit making PC games because they can't make a prophet or because of cheats in online play?

Wrong on most points

First: it's not about pirating games. As I've said repeatedly the hackers who have the skills to get jailbreaks done initially don't give a damn about pirating games. As for your other points:

1: Yes, it was. Hence GeoHotz's original hack to give it full access to the hardware. That hack posed no real security threat to Sony, but they opened themselves up to hacks that would by forcing people who wanted to run Linux to jailbreak the PS3. Mega dumb move on their part.

2: Dead wrong. It may have been a minuscule percentage, but that minuscule percentage added up to thousands of people. Some of whom would have been upset about losing PSN access, or, more importantly, security updates for their $700 research computer.

3: There are much better and more effective ways of dealing with cheaters than pissing off the homebrew community.

4: Complete bullshit. Most jailbreakers want homebrew games. At the very most maybe half of them want to pirate games. Even if they all wanted to pirate games, as you seem to think, well piracy on PC, Wii, and XBox360 have been widespread for years and they haven't been severely hurt by it. PC in particular. If your argument were valid I would expect developers to have abandoned the PC 10 years ago.

Nintendo confirms Wii 'successor'

What demand?

Demand for the Wii has been down for quite a while anyway. It's still king of this generation of consoles on the strength of sales for the first couple years it was on the market, but PS3 and XBox360 have both been outselling it for at least the last couple years. Most people who wanted a Wii have one now and since the things don't randomly die like certain other consoles (*cough* red ring of death *cough*) they aren't likely to buy another. They aren't likely to do much harm to their bottom line by announcing the next generation now.

'Real' JavaScript benchmark topped by...Microsoft

Who mentioned Linux?

#1, testing a not-even-released bleeding-edge product against current stable products is fair how? That gives IE a distinct advantage as IE10 SHOULD have more advanced tech in it.

#2, No one's bashing MS for mistakes made 2 decades ago. They're bashing MS for recent deceptive marketing BS.

#3, Standards compliance is an important part of the user experience in the "real world". If I code my site to be standards compliant then my customers are going to have a good experience in any standards compliant browser (assuming, of course, that my design carries a good experience to begin with) but will not have a good experience in a browser that doesn't follow standards. On the other hand, if I code my site to work in one specific, non-standards-compliant browser then only the people using that browser will have a good experience. But to be fair IE's standards compliance has gotten markedly better in the last few versions.

Consider the source

"A recent paper coauthored by Microsoft researchers...."

'Nuff said. We now know why the paper pegs IE 10 as the fastest brower.

On every JavaScript application I've ever written (which, given that web development is the biggest portion of my job, is a lot) Chrome is noticable faster than IE. As is Firefox. Safari and IE clock in roughly equal in my experience.

No, iPhone location tracking isn't harmless and here's why

Note the joke alert icon

That is all.

Not suprising

"...Apple isn't taking privacy seriously."

In other news, the sky is blue.

All joking aside though, this is a pretty serious issue. Not as serious as some are making it sound (after all, you have to have access to either the phone or a backup file from it to make use of the data), but still quite serious. As for the law enforcement angle, under no circumstances should that kind of data be made available to cops.

Now don't misunderstand me. I have a lot of respect for cops. They do an extremely tough, thankless, and vital job in our society. However they have the unfortunate tendancy to use everything that points at the person they think did the crime to prove it, even if that person is innocent. The inaccuracy of this information makes this even more of a concern. You could be two blocks away from a crime and your phone can show that you were at the scene. If for some reason a cop suspects you, that could well be enough to sink you.

And that doesn't even begin to touch on the political enemies of abusive authorities. In those situations it would be easy for entire groups of political enemies (plus dozens who just happened to in someone's contact list) to be wiped out. All they have to do is catch one of the group, identify a likely location for a meeting based on his tracking data, then go through his contact list checking other people's phones to see if they were at the same meeting. No doubt in this process a lot of innocents would be nabbed as well, but that type of dictator won't be concerned with that.

Nothing to fear?

And that would be why any competant lawyer (or even an honest cop) will tell you not to say a word to the cops without an attorney present no matter what, right?

Here's a clue: The right to not incriminate yourself is there to protect the innocent, not the guilty. There's a reason it's neccessary.

The best sci-fi film never made: Also-rans take a bow

<- Geek

I've read a good chunk of them myself, probably around half of them. The ones I haven't read I don't recognize (which is probably why I haven't read them). Looks like I've got a few more books on my reading list.

Gmail mystery solved: Google went to Sun for backup

Wait, physical tapes?

Seriously? Storing those things has got to be a nightmare. Heck, storing and cataloging our LTO tapes was getting to be troublesome right before we switched to a VTL, and I'd wager Google has orders of magnitude more data to back up than we do.

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

Cryptonomicon?

I'm not sure I'd call Cryptonomicon sci-fi. It has a few elements of sci-fi in it, true, but I think 99% of the tech was available when it was written and the other 1% was software that hadn't been written yet. Then again, it may have been written earlier than I think or I may have forgotten some of it. It's been a while since I read it.

Now Snow Crash, that would be a good sci-fi movie with the right director.

Seconded!

"Brin Uplift series"

The Uplift saga would make a few good-to-spectacular movies depending on who did the adaptation and who directed it.

Some of Ring world has been done. I rented The Colour of Magic a couple years back. The books are good, but the movie didn't do it justice (but isn't that always the case?)

Wireless devices to break one-billion barrier in 2011

Tinfoil hats

Quick! Everyone put a home made antenna on your head to block the radio waves!

Wait, who's dumb idea was this?

Perverted Justice vigilante sentenced for DDoS attacks

Messy situation

Ok...so what we have here is a guy who went out of his way to expose pedophiles (a good thing) who used the same skills to ruin the life of a colleague (a bad thing) who, rather than suing the crap out of the guy who ruined his life, launched a DDoS against Rolling Stone and other companies (a dumb thing).

Seems to me that the biggest losers in this mess are the victims of the pedophiles these men could have been exposing if they weren't so intent on going after each other and news outlets.

Menorcan politician flashes substantial chesticles

Definately NSFW

If my boss happened to walk up behind me while I was reading that article at work and saw the poster I'd be out on my ass within the hour.

Silverlight's star shines in Microsoft's HTML5 show

Who actually uses it??

Not to be insulting or anything, but the only places I've ever seen Silverlight used in on sites owned by Microsoft. Is it actually being used by anyone else and I'm just missing it?

UK is 15th best place in the world to do IT

India

"Other nations of IT interest could be deemed to include India ... and a very high placement indeed for a nation in the third, low-middle, income group"

Of course they're highly placed for their income group. That's where 90% of the world's call centers are.

Google admits Android 'both open and closed'

Meh

Open or closed it's still the best smart phone choice. The user experience is, IMHO, as good or better than with iPhone (doubly true for WinPho) and it's a hell of a lot less expensive. Besides, they'll open source Honeycomb eventually, probably around the same time that I have the extra money and the wife's blessing to actually get a tablet at the same time.

Basically, who cares if they want to let their partners have first dibs?

Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

ENOUGH WITH THE ******* WHITEWASH!

#1) Officials don't raise warning levels in response to public fear. Doing so would be counter productive. Nor do they do so because they're being 'badgered'.

#2) I dare say that the officials on site know more about both the current situation and the long term consequences of radioactive pollution than a reporter sitting in Britan.

#3) Would you feed your child food from that area? Yeah, I thought not.

Ok, so the quake and the tsunami were worse. That doesn't mean that this isn't a disaster.

As for Chernoble

Artificial leaf produces electricity through photosynthesis

Already sustainable

"...the leaf could be a significant step towards green energy becoming a sustainable reality."

It's already a sustainable reality. Freiburg, Germany proves it.

Still, a very potentially cool discovery. A lot of important details are missing from the article, but there's a lot of promise there.

Rift

Meh, my fault

I should have looked closer at the authors name instead of just reading the article. Sorry bout that Lucy.

Need read no further

"I loved Neverwinter Nights 2 "

Anyone who loved that turd need not be writing reviews on RPGs. NWN2 flopped for a reason, and it certainly wasn't because they yanked the Linux support that it's awesome predecessor had. It was simply a bad game. The fact that the author admits to loving it screams loudly that he has poor taste in games.

RUSTOCK TAKEDOWN: How the world's worst botnet was KO'd

Eh

I'm a long time Linux geek myself, but Microsoft stopped being the devil years ago. They've been at the plate fighting malware and spam, so to speak, for most of this decade. It would be more accurate to say "about time they finally accomplished something significant". Their products are still lacking IMHO, but the company on the whole is getting more resposible.

@OH: Read again

"This kit was often not owned by the hosting providers themselves". Besides, they jumped through the proper hoops to get the warrents and do it all legal like.

Apple bashes 'gay cure' app

Cure for homosexuality??

Ok, born gay vs made gay debates aside, what could they possibly have put in an app that anyone would believe could 'cure' homosexuality?? I know people joke about the iPhone being able to do anything and all, but surely convincing a gay man that they want to be with the fairer sex is beyond the capabilities of any software in existance outside the human brain. And that's even assuming such a feat would be possible at all (which I do not assume). Call me crazy, but I'm just a little confused that the app is in existance at all and my confusion has nothing to do with the offensive-to-many nature of such an app.

Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

Um, wrong.

You do realize that there are a growing number of people powering their homes with wind and solar power, right? In most cases thier personal wind turbines and solar collectors make more power than they can use. As for the wind stopping and the sun going down, ever hear of batteries? You know, the things you charge during the day and use at night?

Seriously, the sun is about as reliable as you can get. You KNOW it's going to rise every day. Some days you may get reduced power from it, but you will still get some and the average will stay pretty static from year to year. In some areas the wind is just as reliable (it NEVER stops blowing here.

NOT a minor incident

A level 5 nuclear hazard does not equate a minor incident. This is equivalent to Three Mile Island. The media hysteria is bad, admittedly, but your constant downplaying of the severity of the incident is even worse. The hysteria is prompted by ignorance. You seem to know enough about nuclear power to know better, which makes you either a shill for nuclear power or an ostrich with your head in the sand.

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

No credibility

Lewis lost all credibility with me when he said that a situation which prompted the evacuation of thousands from their homes posed 'no public health risk'. If there's no public health risk, why did they evacuate people? Hell, even the Japanese government is saying this is the worst thing to happen to Japan since Nagasaki. There's nothing worse than a shill who also happens to be a reporter.

Tell ya what, design a reactor which has 0 risk of radiation escaping and give me something better than Yucca Mountain to deal with the speant fuel rods for the next 5000 years and I'll get behind nuclear power. Till then I can't in good conscious support it.

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

I was thinking it

I REALLY hope he knocked on wood after he wrote that. I can think of several things that would be more devestating than a huge earthquake.

Spooks' secret TEMPEST-busting tech reinvented by US student

Just what I was thinking

That exact thought occured to me as well. There could possibly be hundreds of ways to achieve this goal. There's absolutely no proof that I've seen that these two are the same.