‘A company that took its time, did everything right, and migrated to Vista recounted the full horror of the experience. According to their account, company employees found Vista to be slow, Explorer to be problematic, and other quirks that left them less than satisfied.
The Transit company took the optimal path. They waited for the typical new release bugs to be worked out. They purchased a new PC from a major vendor, Lenovo, that had Vista pre-installed in order to avoid upgrade nightmares. Finally, they kept the installed software on the computer at a minimum to avoid complications.
The verdict? “…we’ve found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish we’d never moved,” Angus Kidman said in a Blog report carried by ITWire.’
‘If you hadn’t heard, TechCrunch20, the conference which alleges to put a sense of merit back into startup conferences, has declared MC Hammer a Web2.0 “expert” and put him on the panel of judges. These judges will select amongst the bajillions of entries the rarified few who will present their wares to VC’s and industries insiders over a two day period.
Who are the other judges?
* Mark Andreeson, founder of Netscape.
* Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief of Wired.
* Dave Winer, grandfather of RSS, and author of one of the first blogs ever.’
Also, stop! It’s hammer time..
(10meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘The internet giant Google has plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.
The company thinks it can glean information about an individual’s preferences and personality type by tracking his or her online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers.
Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be stored for future use, it says.’
‘*Anony-X has joined #mac*
sometimes when im masturbating i look at pictures of dogs. not dogs having sex or anything, just dogs. like chasing frisbees and shit. just the way they move and their bark gets me so hot. i can fit 3 more fingers in my pussy when theres a dog around.
mac users, i swear to god…
*Anony-X has left #mac*’
‘Microsoft’s Windows Update has a component called Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that downloads updates while you’re busy doing other things with your computer. If you get disconnected, the update will pick up where it left off when you get back on the network.
Sounds great, right? Well, generally it is. But since BITS is part of your operating system, your firewall doesn’t really check to see what it’s downloading. And while there is pretty much no risk of automatically downloading a virus or trojan through Windows Update under normal circumstances, hackers are starting to use BITS to download code to computers that have already been affected.’
‘Did you ever log onto Active BBS or Interactive over the past 10 years? If you have, well then.. you are a loser. Wait no! Just kidding.. This myspace was created by Nick (NickZ) and Adela (Cupid) for all us crazy activities who want to stay in touch.. or just to say hi or if you are wondering where everyone is nowdays.’
Blah, MySpace. [shrug] 🙂
‘Ben Carmitchel, president of ESS Data Recovery, claims that hard drives may have an unlikely adversary this Spring: air conditioners.
“On average we see a 20% increase in failed hard drives hitting our lab in the summer as in the winter,” Carmitchel says. “We also see a seasonal change in the types of problems hard drives experience. In the warmer months, we diagnose far more electronic-related issues. From surveying some of our customers, we’ve found that power surges caused by air conditioners may play a significant role in the springtime increase.”‘
‘iPods can cause cardiac implantable pacemakers to malfunction by interfering with the electromagnetic equipment monitoring the heart, according to a study presented by a 17-year-old high school student to a meeting of heart specialists on Thursday.
The study tested the effect of the portable music devices on 100 patients, whose mean age was 77, outfitted with pacemakers. Electrical interference was detected half of the time when the iPod was held just 2 inches from the patient’s chest for 5 to 10 seconds.
The study did not examine any portable music devices other than iPods, which are made by Apple Inc.
In some cases, the iPods caused interference when held 18 inches from the chest. Interfering with the telemetry equipment caused the device to misread the heart’s pacing and in one case caused the pacemaker to stop functioning altogether.’
‘Would you like to be the exclusive owner of a number, with the right to sue other people for knowing your number or telling other people what it is? Now you can.
Last week, the AACS consortium made history by issuing legal threats against the 1.8 million web-pages (and counting) that mentioned its secret code for preventing HD-DVD discs from being copied.
In effect, AACS-LA (the AACS Licensing Authority) claimed that it owned a randomly chosen 128-bit number, and that anyone who possessed or transmitted that number was breaking the law. Moreover, it claimed to own millions more random numbers — claimed that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises telling people how to break anti-copying software, gave it exclusive dominion over its many keys.
Why should the AACS get all the fun? Princeton prof Ed Felten has come up with a great way of giving out legally protected 128-bit numbers to anyone who wants them. If he gives out 2^128 of these, then all 128-bit numbers will be owned and no one will ever be able to use a 128-bit key without breaking the law. Good times.’
BTW, I now own the following numbers:
E5 30 A4 6C BF AF 7B 85 59 26 F6 75 32 B2 02 36
06 80 45 C8 3F 90 1D B6 FC DD AE 35 0B C0 2F 64
C7 7C B3 43 96 66 C6 69 0C 0F 9D DA CC B1 2D 5C
If you wish to use them, please email me and we can discuss licensing fees. 🙂
‘Before he was extradited to the United States, Hew Griffiths, from Berkeley Vale in NSW, had never even set foot in America. But he had pirated software produced by American companies.
Now, having been given up to the US by former justice minister Chris Ellison, Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month.
Griffiths’ case — involving one of the first extraditions for intellectual property crime — has been a triumph for US authorities, demonstrating their ability to enforce US laws protecting US companies against Australians in Australia, with the co-operation of the Australian Government. [..]
In some corners of the Australian legal community, however, there is concern about Griffiths’ case. In a recent article for the Australian Law Journal, NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Peter Young, wrote: “International copyright violations are a great problem. However, there is also the consideration that a country must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of that foreign country are claimed to have been affected by the person’s behaviour in Australia and the foreign country can exercise influence over Australia.”‘
’03/29/2005 at 03:25:55
I go into 2 player mode in fighting games on my gamecube and put one controller down my pants and beat the shit out of the other guy with the other controller to make the one down my pants vibrate. I always end up cumming all over the thing and I have to clean it. It’s a hassle but it’s worth it…’
‘Roll up, roll up and prepare to be dazzled – unless you’re a car-hating arachnophobe. It’s the Spidercar.
Costing $15,000 and twice that amount in work hours, this novel creation took three months to design and six months to build.
Yes, there are some bugs – it’s not the smoothest of rides at the moment and it can only do a top speed of about 5mph.’
see it here »
‘When AACS was revealed as the encryption format of choice for HD DVD and Blu-ray, bets were placed on how long it would take for it to be cracked. Since the first HD DVD and Blu-ray discs began shipping, hackers have been hard at work figuring out how to break the encryption; DVD Jon even registered DeAACS.com. We’ve covered both crackers’ efforts and the attempts by the AACS Licensing Authority to keep those cracks from seeping into the public consciousness. Yesterday, all of that came to a head.’
‘Think your new $1,200 Vista-ready desktop is a bit pricey? Try this on for size: a keyboard that retails for more than $1,500. I’m not talking about your standard, plastic clickity-clak keyboard, mind you. Meet the Optimus Maximus, a much-anticipated — and long-delayed — masterpiece of a keyboard, which has tiny OLED displays on each key that change the layout of the entire keyboard depending on the application you’re running.
The Optimus Maximus first emerged almost two years ago as little more than a lofty concept and some clever graphic renderings of how the dynamic keypad might work. However, while the Maximus looks suspiciously like one of those much-ballyhooed products that never sees the light of day, Engadget is reporting that the keyboard will finally debut in November — albeit in very limited quantities.’
Followup to Optimus keyboard staggeringly expensive.
‘This is Samsung’s trio of concept PCs. What do you think they were called during that process known in the business as Development Hell? My money’s on Wonky Wizard Hat, Lampstand That Thinks It’s a Hatstand That Thinks It’s a Tree, and Balls On a Breakfast Tray.’
‘US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.
The scientists ran a “cortical simulator” that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.
In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.
Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.’
‘Simply plug OhMiBod into your iPod® or any music player and it automatically vibrates to the rhythm and intensity of the music. Let your body feel the vibrations as you get down with your favorite tunes.’
‘The PimpStar is a huge leap forward in the evolution of the wheel. With the PimpStar’s built-in full color LED lights, microprocessor and more… wireless modem, you can display virtually any image, including text, graphics, logos, and even digital photos!’
see it here »
‘The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.
Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who now heads the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying “we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life.”‘
‘A group of American aerospace engineers have written a book on how to defend the earth against alien invasion.
Travis Shane Taylor, Bob Boan, Charles Anding and T Conley Powell hold a variety of PhDs and other degrees in hard sciences and technology. All have worked on weapons and aerospace programmes for defence contractors, NASA and various parts of the US forces. Taylor and Boan also claim expertise in various kinds of technical military intelligence-gathering.
Their book An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion is out now in paperback, and getting a fair bit of play in the media.’
‘After a dot-com merger completed a company had 82 extra computers lying around. A couple of guys lined them up like dominos around the office and knocked them over.’
(1.8meg Windows media)
see it here »
‘The strange boundary between the macroscopic world and the weird realm of quantum physics is about to be probed in a unique experiment.
Scientists have created a minute cantilever arm on the surface of a silicon chip that they hope will leave the world of classical physics and enter the quantum realm when cooled to near absolute zero.
The experiment will be the first time scientists have ever scaled an object in the observable world down into the slippery world of quantum mechanics.
“I think it’s really possible to observe quantum effects (in the cantilever arm) with this experiment,” said Peter Rabl of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who isn’t part of the experiment.
“Either you have a real, macroscopic object in a quantum state — or you find out that quantum mechanics doesn’t work for the macroscopic world,” he said. “In either case, it would be quite fascinating.”‘
‘Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company’s transactions “drug deals” – but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.’
‘A Chinese couple sued Yahoo and its Chinese affiliates on Wednesday, alleging the Internet firms provided information that helped the Chinese government prosecute the man for his Internet writings.
Wang Xiaoning was sentenced to ten years in prison last year for “incitement to subvert state power” after he e-mailed electronic journals advocating democratic reform and a multi-party system.
His house and computer were searched in 2002.
In the complaint filed in U.S. District Court for Northern California, Wang and his wife Yu Ling charged the Internet firms turned over details to prosecutors that helped identify him to authorities.’
‘The technological explosion is even bigger than the mobile phone explosion that preceded it. And, as with mobiles, it is being followed by fears about its effect on health – particularly the health of children. Recent research, which suggests that the worst fears about mobiles are proving to be justified, only heightens concern about the electronic soup in which we are increasingly spending our lives.
Now, as we report today, Sir William Stewart (pictured below right), the man who has issued the most authoritative British warnings about the hazards of mobiles, is becoming worried about the spread of Wi-Fi. The chairman of the Health Protection Agency – and a former chief scientific adviser to the Government – is privately pressing for an official investigation of the risks it may pose.’
‘A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.’
Regular expressions always confuse me. I see now my problem all along has been not enough vine.
‘Seven clusters of cancer and other serious illnesses have been discovered around mobile phone masts, raising concerns over the technology’s potential impact on health.
Studies of the sites show high incidences of cancer, brain haemorrhages and high blood pressure within a radius of 400 yards of mobile phone masts.
One of the studies, in Warwickshire, showed a cluster of 31 cancers around a single street. A quarter of the 30 staff at a special school within sight of the 90ft high mast have developed tumours since 2000, while another quarter have suffered significant health problems.’
‘Officials released a prisoner from a state facility after receiving a phony fax that ordered the man be freed, and didn’t catch the mistake for nearly two weeks.
Timothy Rouse, 19, is charged with beating an elderly western Kentucky man and was at the Kentucky Correctional & Psychiatric Center in La Grange for a mental evaluation. He was released from that facility on April 6 after officials received the fake court order.
It contained grammatical errors, was not typed on letterhead and was faxed from a local grocery store. The fax falsely claimed that the Kentucky Supreme Court “demanded” Rouse be released.
Lexington police arrested Rouse at his mother’s home Thursday evening.’
‘Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia.
The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete, Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at the Russian Economy Ministry, told reporters in Moscow today. State organizations and private companies in partnership would build and control the route, known as TKM-World Link, he said.
A 6,000-kilometer (3,700-mile) transport corridor from Siberia into the U.S. will feed into the tunnel, which at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan. The tunnel would run in three sections to link the two islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and the U.S.’
