Posts by Anonymous

Cometh the hour, cometh the iPhone SDK

Don't you get it?

The reason other platforms are utter shite to use is PRECISELY BECAUSE they allow anyone to do anything. Exercising a little quality control, far from being a bad thing, is what keeps Apple ahead of the game. Balls to people who want to flood a platform with crap. Just look at Windoze to see why that is good advice.

I have used a Blackberry and an iPhone at some length. The Blackberry made me want to remove my own jugular vein with a rusty spoon, so dismally, pitifully wank was it to try to use. It was like they had designed it (and I use that term loosely) to be horrifically unintuitive, ugly, clunky and annoying.

The iPhone, by contrast, and while not perfect, is a fucking dream.

Infamous malware group calls it quits

What next?

They'll have to go out and meet girls for the first time I suppose. Still, better late than never.

Bill Gates chuckles at Google Apps

Nail / head interface

"But then if stuff actually worked and were easy to use all those support employees and consultants would be out of a job."

Precisely. It's not in MicroBalls' interests to make quality, working software. Much better to act in ways which perpetuate the massive support industry that's been constructed around its stupidly bloated, pointless crapware.

MicroBalls

Bill Gates may have got extremely wealthy by releasing utterly shit software - and frankly how he managed that will remain a mystery (unless it is in fact true that most people are morons who will buy anything)... but he will stay until the day he dies a joyless, borderline psychotic monkey boy with no mates. Seen that video of him being questioned by the antiturust people and rocking violently like a deranged chimp? That's the real Bill Gates. Bill hates you. He wants you to fight your stupid, crappy PC every step of the way. And you will, you herd-following drones. You want to surf the net? Sorry, can't find the network / got a virus / here's another fucking wizard that does nothing and buggers everything up.

The fact that Gates got so rich and powerful selling shit software that doesn't fucking work and is hated and yet still bought by people who consider themselves sentient humans is depressing beyond words. He should use his vast wealth to buy everyone on the planet an iPhone.

Prosecutors target first 'Facebook harassment' conviction

Extreme

Well that's one way to get ArseBook to delete your personal information!

Nine Inch Nails cracks net distribution (maybe)

Niggy Tardust

Really, when you're giving something away and asking people to pay only if they like it, 18% is a frickin' excellent takeup.

I downloaded the Saul Williams album, and I am one of the 82% who didn't pay. Not because I'm a cheap-ass download whore, but because I flat-out didn't like it. I did drop an email back saying why, though, and I don't have it on my hard drive any more. IMO, the reason for the relative "flop" of the Niggy Tardust album was not so much because people are cheap, but because, well, it was a bit crap really.

Now, Trent, whether you like his output or not, "gets it". Really. He understands that people are fed up with being raped by the music business, and that they are willing to pay for good output. He also has a big fanbase. Hell, he's getting some of my money on this one, sight unseen. He deserves it.

Sure, it would be easy to torrent the album for nowt. But why bother? The price is reasonable, and the money is going more-or-less direct to the artist. On the other hand, I will continue to torrent vinyl rips of my extensive bebop collection rather than pay through the nose for a badly remastered version of something I already own with some "bonus tracks" that weren't considered good enough for release in the 50s. And the RIAA can kiss my fuzzy arse.

Comcast pays Americans to oppose net neutrality

Free Press was trying to pack the auditorium, too.

They sent inflammatory, deceptive fiyers out far and wide, preaching gloom and doom. The Comcast employees who attended the hearing were at least orderly; the Free Press puppets jeered and hissed and booed and were generally obnoxious. And the FCC staffers who arranged the hearing biased the agenda and "lost" the slides of the most effective speaker because his presentation would have disproved the claims made by a misinformed Congressman. (The FCC quakes in fear of Congresscritters, and so tailored the agenda to reinforce Markey's views.) The whole thing was a pointless, misleading circus. What a waste.

ISP data deal with former 'spyware' boss triggers privacy fears

The Information Commissioner's Office 01625 545 745

Spoke to The Information Commissioner's Office - http://www.ico.gov.uk/ and they say they are 'looking into it'. You can ring them on 01625 545 745, so at least the powers at be are aware of current events.

So until this story fully unfolds my advice would be to use TOR - http://www.torproject.org/ and take back the some of that privacy and anonymity that our ISP's have so 'kindly' tossed into the bin!

Bitlocker hack is easily prevented, Microsoft says

Re: Pointing out the obvious

Sure, you can make machine wipe its RAM on shutdown, or on hibernate, and you can make it so that the machine won't boot without a password, but as long as the chhips are accessed "normally" and the keys you're interested are in memory, it *still* doesn't protect against cooling/freezing the chips while the machine is running, yanking the power, and dropping the chips into another machine for content recovery. Of course, if you have the machine running, why not clone the drive...

IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet

The internet is not the web!

It seems like you're confused on that issue, or just exaggerating for poetic effect (and you're supposed to be a journalist, not a poet).

There's a lot more stuff going on on the internet than web servers. adnim's joke about Crysis is actually spot on - this thing surely won't be replacing the dedicated Crysis servers that are a part of the internet.

Ballmer! explains! hostile! Yahoo! bid!

they share a vision

<quote> Ballmer said [...] that the two companies "share a vision for online services". </quote>

They share the same vision with Google, right?

Showdown over encryption password in child porn case

They have no right to the information

It doesn't matter and is completely irrelevant if he's a pedophile pornographer, a terrorist or terrorist sympathiser, a snuffer or a serial killer.

They have no right to the information and that's final.

Oz drafts 'batter an orphaned roo' guidelines

Alternative...

...is that they are raised by razorbacks in the outback, honing their skills until the fateful day of adulthood when their path of vengeance can begin.

Then, they will go on an unprecedented killing spree, laying waste to the human ogres who tried to kill them, but got the ones they loved instead.

The carnage would be unspeakable. Rogue kangaroos would destroy civilisation.

No, the only sane way to do this is to grind the joeys to death using a pumice stone.

Mother launches attack on epilepsy inducing video games

come on people, we need to cater for those less fortunate!

YOU'RE ALL VERY WRONG!! I can see why people are taking this route, but is that really fair, to stamp a sticker saying 'warning - may do such and such' - no!

If you're allergic to nuts - ie: your life ends - you die without immediate treatment, and even with immediate treatment, you still have a 45% chance of dying, then what use is a "MAY CONTAIN NUTS!" warning on the label?

Epilepsy and seizures are actually very similar between people, so testing for them is in fact very easy. It's extremely viable and a fantastic idea for games developers/companies to test for these issues, to ensure people with these issues can still play the game. We can't simply exlude these people for possessing an illness which is definitely not their fault.

Nobody's suggesting playing a normal tame game is bad for a child, 'in moderation' a small time playing a computer game is fine, so to the idiot who posted 'get outside and play softball' (obvioulsy an american, as such, what a typically expected comment, given the dire parents who can't even regulate or teach a child to eat correctly or properly...) - a balance, as with all things in life, is required.

Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs

Poor hardware options from Dell

When I went to purchase an Ubuntu Dell PC, the choices for video and sound card were poor compared to what you could get with a Vista PC.

So, what I did is buy a Vista PC from Dell, and then I installed Ubuntu on the drive.

I think a lot of Linux supporters have done this, based on the other comments.

Record industry pushes ISPs to cut off file sharers

@Teh_Vermicious_Knid

"So firstly in order to finger print the files they will need to see all of the file which would be difficult for something downloaded over possibly several days from probably multiple different peers".

"This is not the case.

The popular mobile music identification service SHAZAM can identify an audio track

by hashing a very brief sample and comparing it with its vast database, typically managing to identify a track from a 2 second sample."

Thats his point. You need to have the whole audio track in the first place *before* you can make a hash of it or perform any meaningful fingerprinting

You also need to consider the medium in which its being transmitted - tcp/ip. Its not a continuous audio wave like the telephone - its a series of packets which in the case of p2p come from different directions on the internet at different rates. You would need to assemble at least some of the track in the correct order before being able to check and see what it is. The more of the track you intercept, the better the accuracy of the match.

Czech Olympic Committee annihilates English language

Spam-glish

You mean half of those spam emails we got with obscure phrases were actually press releases from this lot?

Why Microsoft vs Mankind still matters

Viruses, and Apple, and the like

Yeah, "Elk Cloner" was the first. Well, actually, it wasn't, Creeper was, which ran on Tanex. But that's as may be.

Elk Cloner ran on Apple DOS, the operating system for the Apple II. No, not OSX. Not the operating system for the older Macs, either, that was Macintosh OS, and before that, System. Nor for the Lisa, the Mac's forerunner. No, the Apple II was a 6502 based machine, much like the Commodore 64 and all those other 8-bit greats. It was actually a very good and capable business machine for its time. But its OS bears about the same resemblance to OSX as CP/M running on an 8080 does to Windows.

In the 80s and 90s, there were a fair number of viruses for System/MacOS. But again, this OS bears little to no resemblance to current-day OSX. You simply can't run those viruses under OSX except under an emulator, and all they could hurt would be the emulated machine.

The first DOS virus, more or less, was "Brain", written for MS-DOS running on an 8086. It can still infect Windows today.

Zero virus is referring to OSX (which, although being released as OSX in 2001, goes back to NeXTStep, of 1991 vintage). It is susceptible to *zero* viruses. None. Nada. Zilch.

This doesn't mean it's immune to viruses, I'm sure that eventually it will be susceptible, it doesn't mean it's super-secure (it has its own litany of security flaws) or bug-free. But, for the moment, it's virus-free.

Makes a big difference, that does.

Microsoft dispels rumors of stealth Windows updates

HIPAA problem

Seems to me that anyone with a HIPAA-compliant computer has a serious problem here, since the updates are being made outside of their control

SanDisk guns for iPod Nano with slim video viewer

8.8 mm thick & Press Release Link

Here is the press release link:

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3959

Which states that it is 8.8 mm at its thinnest point.

Kind of sad that an article emphasizing the new, thin media player doesn't list the thickness.

US special forces buy electric stealth golf carts

Nice BMP

Wasting my bandwidth like that! You know I only have 15 seconds a month.

IPTV/VoD: The tortoise and the hare

Too complicated

My father, who is nearly 60 and not particularly geeky, recently sidestepped all this IP streaming nonsense and replaced his (broken) TV with a PC and a USB tuner.

He self-built the PC so it was pretty inexpensive, and he could make sure it was quiet, and PC monitors are a lot cheaper than a decent flatscreen of the same size so he actually saved a little money. It also gives him a brilliant upscaling DVD player. Hook it into the wifi (which is perfectly reliable, I don't know why the article dismisses such a great solution) and he has a program guide and can surf to youtube if required, though he isn't much of a pirate.

It is a little more complicated than a TV, but considering that my parents have been using computers for 20+ years and Windows for most of that time the interface is hardly going to confuse them...

US phish feeder jailed for seven years

Stupid crook

Who pulls out $148,000 out of an ATM?

Seriously, that's just asking for trouble.

UK Gov boots intelligent design back into 'religious' margins

Creation Myths

Here's an interesting article.

http://www.livescience.com/history/top10_intelligent_designs-1.html

Also highlights the fact that the Judeo mythology is just one among many.

"We are all atheists. You just believe in one more God than we do."