Posts by Dillon Pyron 852 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2007
"If they can't develop spray reducing mudflaps and those barriers that stop card going under trucks, what chance do they stand of putting a frikin' lay-zer on the truck?"
And just what do you think those rubber thingies with the naked women are? :-)
The Navy has the phalanx. If a wall of lead is good enough for them, it should be good enough for the Army. And it works, right now.
How many of the naive are going to be able to deal with having to manage the burden of 2 APs? Channel management can be a bitch. Personally, I just run FreeSwan from my wirelessly connected laptops to my firewall. It was a real pain encapsulating my wife's Cisco VPN, but it now works. I even use FreeSwan remotely. Just connect to my internal box via FreeSwan and SSH and run my browser and email remotely. But that's not for the naive.
This is a solution looking for a problem. It does nothing to deal with those connected via 100baseT.
About 30% of the spam that hit me in June was PDF. About 30% this month is PDF. My filters have successfully adapted and are catching most of them. I haven't seen a single Excel spam.
Who would even bother opening an email for Hector with the subject "moonlight weights abounding"? Never mind. I can name more than a few.
Ever seen one. Foul, nasty creature. Yes, they'll take geese, swans, ducks and other waterfowl. Large ones (some over 250 pounds) will even take some alligators.
But it takes as much as 60 years for them to reach that size. It takes about 15 years before they reach sexual maturity. Taking the smaller ones (the ones that will only take off fingers, not whole limbs) will eventually wipe the species out.
These are the same Chinese who have fought the protection of the leather back and hawk's bill turtles.
How about Halliburton? Last I heard, they were set to rent 10 floors there.
And yes, Ozzy bin (love that name, thanks) would probably love to drop a tower built by infidel Dubai, which has so embraces the ways of the Satan lovers. The Westerners only beaches where women not only wear bikinis, but sometimes even go topless!!!! Would you believe they still accept the dollar? Even though I can no longer call it "the almighty dollar". Heck, at one point, Disney was rumored to be planning an Islamic friendly park. But still a Disney park, complete with representations of humans. With "the Three Mountains".
In my last two job interviews, the VP of consulting Googled me (is that a real word?). In one case, it was a careless perfunctory job that revealed nothing of any real value. The other was an expert job that turned up quite a bit, including Usenet posts for five or six years ago. I can see the postings from the various "Web 2.0" sites coming back to haunt people in a few years.
I wonder where their server rooms are located. In the basement? Or on the third floor, as current best practices recommend.
Lake Travis was at 687 yesterday. Full is considered 671 and the normal for July is around 650. And it's pouring, again. The lake was reopened on Friday.
The high on Wed was 78. Normal is 96.
If this is global warming, screw you Al.
A few years ago, Best Buy was giving away (crap, bottom of the line) HP desktops with a 2 year AOL membership. So CompUSA joined the fray with (crap, bottom of the line) Compaqs (pre merger) for two years with Earthlink.
They "sold" them to punters (thanks Brits) during Christmas. Never saw the offer again.
When I worked at TI during Desert Storm, I knew the folks who took the original bunker buster from a vague concept to a deliverable product in 29 days. We got to see footage of it blowing through 8 5 foot thick concrete walls in an above ground test. In freefall, it was supposed to reach 450 mph.
There was a proposal for a rocket powered version that would reach 1000 mph.
Yes, the moon is a harsh mistress. And Footfall refined that concept.
Are you kidding me? I expect to hear the DHS is hosting a Jihadi website and the FBI is handling kiddie porn. Meanwhile, the Saudi government will just host hard-core. Spammers get their venture capital from criminals, who hire cracers (not hackers) for more money than they can make at home. So they're one, maybe two steps away from the security geeks.
That pretty much sums it up. Of the eight people in my office, only one uses a smartphone. The rest of us have anything from a 2 1/2 year old Moto to a year old Nokia. AT&T sells, I think, 2 of them. Verizon has three, Sprint/Nextel has a few, but a crap network.
We don't have the top end Nokias or Sony-Ericssons.
Moto's crap, Nokia's crap, S-E is crap, LG is crap, Samsung is crap It's all a matter of picking the best of the worst. Apple just joined the crew, they didn't redefine anything. I read an article hear where they interviewed a 17 year old that had three phones. 17? Three? That's who bought the iPhone. People with more dollars than sense. And frequently, those are the same people who buy phones like the Crackberry, the Treo or WM phones. Just gotta have the neatest technology.
What's the best phone for under $75. All it has to have is GSM, be a clamshell, Bluetooth and MP3 ringtones. Not that I buy the ringtones, I rip them or edit them.
Harry gets popped by the CIA, gets "extraordinarily rended" to some Eastern European country and then shipped off to Gitmo. Which he he waves his wand, mumbles a few words and turns into Sandals Cuba. I won't mention the sex scene, I don't want to get popped for pedophilia, and neither does el Reg.
Oh yeah, Dumbledore comes back and turns bin Laden into a pig. And turns all the food the Al Queda leadership eats into either ham sandwiches or roast beef and cheese.
It's a great book. Only 1100 pages. An easy read, if you have a week or so.
In truth, the book is due here tomorrow sometime between 11 am and 2 pm. Sometime between 11:01 am and 2:01 pm, I expect to lose my wife for about 12-15 hours. I guess I can surf porn in peace.
I'm with AT&T. But I'm off contract (expired December 29). AT&T has been making me all sorts of offers to sign a new contract, including two iPhones, at the front of the line. Okay, now I can use my current SIM in an iPhone (maybe). But it's still a $600 iPhone. Yes, it's a nice phone (shut up Apple haters). But I've got an iPod for music and I don't normally surf the web on a phone. One of the primary places I use my iPod is on airplanes. Guess where you can't use an iPhone.
When the full function iPhone drops below $300, I'll think about it. When the emasculated iPhone 2 comes out at $300, I'll pass on it.
WRONG! You exclude a lot of other areas. When I worked for Sprint Paranet (RIP), many of the consultants, as well as the management, carried phones from other carriers, mostly AT&T. We couldn't get Sprint coverage in our offices! Admittedly, this was in Austin, but I've heard the same complaint elsewhere.
If there are roaming trolls (not disputing it), then maybe it's time for a little regulation. A story like this should spark and outcry in Congress. Yeah, right.
Will you actually get the key? Will they actually keep your PII secret? These are criminals, after all.
One of these days one of these cyber criminals is going hit either someone in the CIA or in a real organized crime gang (I won't call them the Mafia, since a) there are plenty of other gangs these days and b) according to Tony Soprano, there's no such thing as the Mafia). If they're lucky, they'll die suddenly.
I've had nothing but good times with my 2 1/2 year old V551. Of course, I only paid $50 for it post rebate. In the US, at least, nobody seems to push anything except the rock bottom cheapest phones. AT&T has been advertising the Crackberry some, but all the offers I've seen in the papers and in my mail have been for free phones with a two year contract. Same with Verizon. One of my co-workers couldn't even find what the newest smartphones were the Verizon was selling. He had to go into their store, where they promptly offered him a free phone, even as he stood there with his XV6700. I don't think I've ever even seen any of Nokia's high end phones here. I've never touched anything but a WM phone.
The US carriers are all about cheap. It's probably whey 3G hasn't taken off (that and lack of freqs). The Q only sells through Verizon. If Moto is going to recover, they need to develop new, unique phones for all the carriers. Apple is the only one that can get away with one product/one carrier. Maybe.
So blades are a poor investment? Yet Dell intends, I assume, to roll out some new blades of their own in the future. At which time blades will become a good investment.
For the right purposes, a box of blades is the right thing to do. If you want raw horsepower from one machine, nothing beats a 6U dual processor Itanium (except maybe a quad dual core Opteron, both of which Dell will be more than happy to sell you). But for price per computer, blades can't be beat. I can't build an 8 node cluster out of 1U boxes for anywhere near the price of an 8 blade box. A box that's easier to maintain. And mind you, this knowledge comes from running Dell blades.
Let's see, you have a search company that keeps every search you make for at least a year. And you have an ad company that tracks every site you've been to for only God knows how long.
Wasn't there a certain computer maker's CEO who said something about there being no such thing as privacy. "Get over it". At least until the CEO of a certain database maker went through his trash.
My firewall blocks DoubleClick.
But I listen to NPR's Morning Edition when I "wake up". And by the time I'm out of the shower, Market Place Morning is just about to come on. Weekends, it's the dogs that "wake" me. Toby wants out at 7, at which time I feed him. Then crawl back in bed. So the iPod alarm clock does nothing for me.
BTW, I have a first gen iPod who's battery is now good for about 3 hours. Should I replace the battery or just pop for an 80GB video iPod, given that I'll never watch any video on it?
Looks like you guys are screwed. AT&T hasn't punished me at all (well, not much). Of course, when I go to the UK or Europe, I get a pre-paid since most of my calls there are local and would involve both roaming and international long distance. But calls home are SMS and Skype. "I'm back in the hotel room, call me" "It's two o'clock in the fucking morning and you woke me up" Oh well, the joys of 27 years of marriage.
Please note, this is not DGPS, nor will it ever have that kind of accuracy. In fact, a questionable initial fix will make things worse, not better. I'd almost say that this is "we cocked up GPS. Here's a work around that we'll be calling a feature. Good luck and God speed. And whatever you do, don't make a left turn in the middle of that bridge."
It seems that mobile TV is a solution looking for a problem. I just (just, this morning, still sitting in the box in the living room just) bought a 42" LCD (1080p). WTF would I want to watch TV on a, at best, 2" display? Maybe, just maybe, the news. But even sports would be crazy. The puck wouldn't even be visible, the football (your choice) would be less than the size of a pin head.
And how much are you going to pay for this content? Is it going to be a per minute thing? Or per k byte? Or per show? I know people who have been surprised to find out how much it costs to send a one minute video.
At least I can get AT&T or Verizon across the whole US. Heck, I think Houston is almost as big as the BeNeLux.
iAgree.
I wonder how hard this stuff would be to crack, once you've pulled the drive from the laptop. At $90, why not just stuff a new drive in the thing and install a hot copy of the software? The disks are not the price issue.
If you're worried about proprietary data getting stolen, DON'T LET PEOPLE PUT IT ON THEIR LAPTOPS!!!!! How many data breaches is it going to take?
Not the panel, the Pentagon (okay, it's a rhetorical question). Every commercial aircraft built after 2000 not only uses GPS, but depends on it. LAX mandates Cat 3C landings for anything less than perfect conditions. Used to be that only DC10s and L1011s had that capability. Now everybody does, thanks to GPS. I've even seen a Super King Air autoland.
And that's only one application.
In 1990, SA was turned off for Desert Storm because the military didn't have enough CA capable receivers.
The Bern Convention makes the creation of any human readable document the property of the creator. It's really important to put the words "copyright 2007, Dillon Pyron, all rights reserved", but not neccesary. In fact, every thing here is copyright the original author, if I understand copyright law (at least as it pertains to the US). But I'm willing to bet you signed those over to the Reg when you signed up. If that's not in the Ts&Cs, if should be.
But, remember, copyright only applies to human readable. So they would have to prove that this mysterious person did, in fact, steal the source code. I'm not sure about what happens if you steal the object, I've never tried to patent software, I've always objected to that. Now the UK and EU have different laws, so the above may or may not apply. But the Bern Convention does.
BTW, since I did technically copyright this post, I grant The Register, it's parent company, all affiliated companies and any successor or heirs full rights to publish, broadcast or otherwise distribute this material in any media now known or to be discovered in the future.
It's a hard case to prove, but people have successfully done it before. She could also claim that the RIAA pursued her case in an "arbitrary and capricious manner", also tough to prove, but it's been done before (although mostly in criminal cases).
Austin, you guys are slipping. Not once did I see the word "pigopolists".
"I'm waiting as BluRay and HD-DVD player prices fall, and hoping one standard emerges."
I just bought a 1080p. But my 2 year old DVD changer (Sony) only plays 720p. My cable box (TW AS8300HD DVR) only plays 720p or 1080i. TW says they hope to have a 1080p box out "soon", but all the broadcast is in 1080i, so what does that help? And I'm not replacing a 2 year old box anytime soon, it's that amortization thing. As far as that standards thing, I've now seen a couple of makers either selling or announcing (or hinting) dual mode players. BluRay is winning the software war, HD-DVD is winning the hardware war. But HDMI/HDCP is the big issue and will remain so for at least the next 5-7 years. Two year old TVs don't have HDMI or support HDCP.
And until we can get 10Gb to the house, IP-TV is still a dream. And ISP packet shaping will limit our choices.
I'm no Apple fanboi (although when they used the PPC and my wife was designing them I might have been). But I've had similar "customer service" and performance issues from at least two other computer makers. **** and *******. Incompetent service, rude or brainless help desk, mail in support (at least she had a store, I was dealing with two mail only vendors). They are both gone, returned for what was, thankfully, a full refund. Now I have a 5 year old Sony Viao that's starting to show it's age and a year old HP. I am afraid that my next laptop will have V**** running on it. At least until I install Ubuntu.
If you want to talk about customer service, ask me about my dealings with a Brooklyn camera shop. Actually, Google "Brooklyn camera shop rip off" and pick one.
In the last twenty years, I've seen a definite decline in the number of pelagic sharks. White tips and nurse sharks have no problems, but I haven't seen a mako or a blue in probably 10 years. I've been surrounded by hundreds of hammerheads, but the Gulf of Mexico isn't exactly prime fishing for the Chinese.
If you haven't seen any video of shark finning, you should. It will sicken you to protest. They pull the sharks on board, slash the fins off and toss them back in the water to drown. It takes maybe 30 seconds per shark.
BTW
“Customers mostly order it in banquets or large parties. It’s one of our most asked for specialty soups,” said San Jose restaurant owner Chun-Ming Wong. “People order it to impress their guests.”
Asian Week, June 25-July 5, 2000
http://www.asianweek.com/2000_06_29/news2_sharkfinningbill.html
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