Posts by Kurgan116 posts • joined Tuesday 15th September 2009 09:08 GMT
Not only to play Diablo, but we also play Diablo. We eat, chat, drink, then someone goes to sleep and someone pulls a Diablo all-nighter.
... but I like to play Diablo 2 offline in coop mode with some friends, on a LAN with no internet connection (at a cottage with flaky cellular connection and no phone and dsl line). This "online only" mode, that is not actually required (except for DRM purposes) when playing solo or in a LAN environment will spoil our Diablo nights at the cottage.
So I', not buying it, at least not until we find a way to play offline in our LAN, which may be possible by cracking the DRM, or may not be possible at all, if the game can only talk to its servers to setup a multiplayer coop game, instead of talking to the other local installations.
I really HOPE that there will be an IP bubble, with patent trolls paying millions for patents and then going bakrupt in the most gruesome way.
... does it mean that you have to enter www.something.com/smut/ instead of www.something.com?
How technically difficult. How hard to explain. It must be kept secret and undisclosed. Just say "follow a particular digital path", do not help criminals understand this technology.
If the operators were willing to share all of the informations gathered with the users, then I'd consider installing such a spyware on my phone, because it would be useful to me, too.
If they don't, or they just share half of what they gather, then it's a big "NO, THANKS" for me.
Software Patents: a complete failure. That's all.
While such a solution can be nice for a fibre patch cable (that you buy already "terminated" with such opto-electronic integration), it is quite useless for longer runs where you have to lay the fibre for hundreds of meters (or feet, o furlongs, or whatever) and then cut it and connect it. You should have the fibre pre-cut and pre-terminated at the right lenght, before you buy it.
It's a little too late, isn't it?
Well, when someone really thinks that a big non-touch monitor needs to run the same interface as a small touch one, I think it's time to say "sure, go on with this madness" and promptly choose another distro or another desktop manager.
I like the Android touch-friendly interface on my phone and on my tablet, but I DON'T WANT the same interface on my 28 inch non-touch monitor.
Interface designers in commercial products think that users are stupid, suffer from attention disorder, and cannot focus on more that one simple task on one big window that covers all of the screen, with no more that two big buttons at a time. Everything more complex is absolutely too hard to use. And while there are smarter users in the commercial software world, there are also a lot of brain damaged users.
But, if we keep helping the brain damaged users, sooner or later the smart users will die of boredom.
Have you seen the movie "Idiocracy"? It is a perfect example of where we are headed.
What we need is reliable disks, not 10-terabytes disks. They should focus on reliability, and the do exactly the opposite.
Uhm... too much crapware, and too low screen resolution.
My wife went to the just opened Apple Store in Bologna, Italy and she also told me that it stinks. Too much people, not enough air conditioning. An enormous, new and beautiful store, very nice to see, not very nice to smell.
If you have a severe failure, a day or so of data that could be lost, and 150 workers that cannot work, well, this is NOT so boring.
I believe that being a BOFH is like being a passenger airline pilot. You get months of boring work and then some really terrifying minutes (or hours) now and then.
I'm sorry for being italian. Please, come and conquer us, and hang all of these idiots.
Good and cheap(ish) e-readers other than the Kindle series do not exist, and I'm really happy to see that someone is trying to offer some alternative product. I'm just waiting for the first touch screen e-readers to decide which suites me best. And I am taking into account the flexibility of the reader, as opposed to the closeness of the market that Amazon is trying to obtain. (sorry if I express myself as a monkey, my mother tongue is not English)
So, if I can buy an e-book reader that is as good as the Kindle, but with added extra formats support (epub, mobi, html, pdf, rtf, text...) then that is my preferred choice.
... that it is likey made by a government! LOLLASTIC!
By the way, do terrorist still use Windows?
Try also to search for "microsoft security essentials" on Bing using IE. The first two links are malware sites. If you use Firefox it behaves differently...
I have always run Debian on servers, and I have run Ubuntu on my desktop since 6.04 if I remember correctly. Now, given the fact that EVERY new interface looks like Barbie's kid computer, it's time to switch to Debian also on the desktop. Maybe I'll look at KDE4, but it's time do say bye bye to Ubuntu anyway, I don't like its philosophy any more.
I'd need an EXTRA-FAIL icon...
So what you are saying is that the ribbon interface is OK for people with cognitive problems, and is annoying for "normal" people. This post says it all about what Microsoft thinks about its customers.
RSA uses Windows (fail), does not have enough in-depth security (fail), has never trained staff about basic security (fail). Or worse, a top manager opened that email. A manager of the kind that WANT to have admin access to everything, and is so dull and gullible that he is the perfect target for every phishing scam in the world. Either way, this is an EXTRA SUPER DUPER FAIL.
Apps for a dead OS? Why bother?
I can see that quite all of the comments are from paranoid enough people. I keep the fingers on random keys while waiting for the ATM to show me a lot of useless information that cannot be skipped, then enter the pin at lightning speed (I am good at typing fast), and then I keep the fingers on random keys again. I do all of this while keeping my wallet over the keypad with my other hand. (I suppose that we can all enter the pin without looking at the keys, do we?)
If my atm pin is hard to get, and everyone else's is easy to get, guess who will lose his money? Everyone else. It's "security by being such a bitch". If stealing from me is hard, and stealing from someone else is easy, why should the thief steal from me?
I happen to know a little about the history of pinball machines (a friend of mine is one of the bigger pinball collectors in Italy). In the fifties, pinball machines had scores that advanced by one when you hit some target. In the sixties, they advanced by ten. In the seventies, by one hundred. The latest ones, by thousands. I call this the "score inflation". It's psychologically pleasing for the player to score "1 billion, 234 millions and 9 thousands" points instead of "12.349" points. But if you look at the pinball machine code (or mechanical relays, depending on the year) you will see that the two scores need the same effort to be reached.
Now, it seems a little silly, but I believe that later on we will see version numbers increase by ten, then by a hundred, and so on.
Now we have Firefox 6. In 6 months we will have firefox 12, then Opera could switch from 12 to 22 to play "catch up" with Firefox, and IE from 9 to 19... then Firefox will release version 23, and Opera version 40 (to make it even, they will jump over version 32), and eventually Firefox vill release version 100, and so on.
I suppose I will see somebrowers release "345K" (as in 345.000) before I die.
It all depends on the meaning of "hack". I think that changing the clock is still a hack, expecially when dealing with internet-connected, part-server and part-client-side software. If the programmes is a fool and trusts the client's clock, then it's a hack. An easy, stupid hack, but still a hack.
Then there are really clever hacks, like takign control of the firmware of a NIC remotely and use it to mess wit OS memory using DMA.
I unserstand that changing the clock is easy and messing with NIC firmware is a truly cool hack, buth I still stand that both are hacks.
Yes, setting the clock forward to gain an advantage in online gaming is a (simple) hack. If you can make the program behave in an unintended way, you are hacking it. It is hacking as is setting the clock backward to fool "trial" software into a "forever trial" status, for example. Easy, stupid, but still a hack.
Now, if she could find a way to nuke farms (from orbit, eventually) I'd sign up to farmville just to nuke my friend's farms and make them stop bothering me with "please click here to give me more cows" idiocy.
Now, seriously... our IT industry runs on some very wrong assumptions. ("ass" is the word)
We assume that software has to be insecure and prone to bugs and crashes, and that nothing can be done to fix it. We have to thank Microsoft for this. And after them, every software maker has decided that it was OK to sell bug-ridden and insecure software, to maximize profit. And since software crashed a lot, hardware vendors began selling crap hardware, no one will notice anyway, since the computers keep crashing all the time.
And here we are, running crap software on crap hardware. Oh, sure, it costs less than a half (or maybe far less than a half) of good software and good hardware, but would you bet your life on it?
Well, if you use crap software and crap hardware to run critical infrastructure, you are actually betting your life on it.
I mean, come on... windows should only be used to play videogames, and any software that has blatant security issues like a hard-coded root password (which is not a bug, it's by fucking design) should be just laughed at and thrown away.
PS: Please excuse me for my poor english.
AC has got a point. If you can live without the "most targetted applications" (which maybe also means "the motu buggy applications") just uninstall them. And before yelling "I can't live without flash/adobe/office/windows" just think twice. You *REALLY* can't, or you just don't want to try?
I have tried, and I can. I run Linux, and I suggest my customers that need windows to run openoffice, some other pdf viewer, some other browser, no flash, no silverlight, and so on.
Why do we need to change the way the UI works? I want to to WORK with my computer, not waste my time trying to guess where I have to click or what key combination I have to use to do what I need to do.
Unity is a complete loss, useful for a kiosk, useless for a PC.
Maybe it's time to use Debian also for desktop use, and not only for server use?
Oh, my...
This seems to be a sort of "Movie OS" (as in every computer you see in a movie) interface. A lot of "oooh, cool!" but no usability at all. Should I give up graphical interface and move to a text-only shell, to get some usability back?
Oh, what a glorious FAILURE!
I have always used Debian on servers (without X) and I am currently using Ubuntu on desktops, but if Ubuntu goes on in this nonsense of changing the UI just to taste like an Apple, I will go Debian for the desktops, too.
I own an N900. It's a geeky phone that only geek people (like me) would like. And it's still buggy, and Nokia abandoned it, so bugs are here to stay, forever.
I surely won't buy the first (and last) meego device, I have already spent 500 Euros in a phone that could have been good, but actually is not. I will not spend more on a phone that we all know is dead even before being born.
Come on, Nokia, you failed and failed and failed again. You changed course a million times (symbian, maemo, symbian, meego, symbian, windows, maybe meego again?) Do you think I will put my faith and my money in your next failure?
Uhm... Symbian, then Maemo and also Symbian, then they said "no more Symbian", then a single Maemo phone, then more Symbian, then Meego (the "Duke Nukem Forever" of phone operating systems) , and now Win7?
I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with F. **CAPITAL FAIL**
So now we have the two losers of the phone market, one of which has been the leader for years, that think that joining their forces they can fly again. I bet they will simply sink faster.
Even if my icon does not show a coat, mine is the one with a new Android phone in the pocket.
So thatm being loud AND slow, they will disturb you for a longer time.
it does not seem so obvious to a lot of people. And Stallman is just explaining this to people who don't think about it by themselves. He is actually doing something useful, and I'd like to see him on TV, telling everyone how things work. Because a lot of us reader of ElReg do not need such an explanation, but quite everyone else in fact does.
While I understand the whole "the user is the first security problem", I think that Stallman is right. Pushing incompetent or lazy people to store their data out of their computers makes for a perfectly wrong world, where we own nothing. Think Apple, only bigger. The phone (you can insert "computer" here) that I have paid for requires a subscription to be useful, and then I can only install the apps that Apple (you can insert "Google" here) wants me to install. I have to pay, if required to do so. I cannot install any free alternative app. I have to accept that Google (or you can insert "Apple" here) has access to all of my data, can disable or enable apps at their like (even easier when the apps are not actually loaded on my computer). I have basically no enforceable rights on anything. Anything I have bought, installed, or written by myself. All of the apps and data "are belong to Google" (if you pardon my nerdy reference here).
Stallman is absolutely right. While "commodity computing" is a great thing in terms of usability, it surely is not in terms of privacy and civil rights.
Come on, please. Stop trolling. We all know that nothing is 100% secure.
I have just patched 25 servers yesterday, I believe (but I have not tested it) that if you cannot patch Exim itself, you can try to avoid being vulnerable by using these 3 settings:
log_selector= -rejected_header
smtp_banner="something ESMTP server ready"
smtp_accept_max_per_connection = 1
The idea is:
- do not log rejected email headers (AFAIK, this is part of the buffer overflow)
- do not announce yourself as Exim, maybe script kiddies will skip you.
- do not accept more tha one email per connection, as this is part of the attack too. (The attacker overwrites ACL tables memory with the first enormous mail, then sends a second email on the same connection, having your code executed. If he cannot send a second email in the same connection, the attack should fail)
I HAVE NOT TESTED THESE SETTINGS!
How much money did these geniuses get for this highly professional job?
I would have just sold FB to M$, cashed the huge pile of money, and retired.
And he does it all by itself? Please....
He was asked by someone in a higher position to spy on other managers, and when he was caught, he said "oh, yes, it was my fault, and my idea". Now he has just to wait untile he gets out of jail (that will be real soon) and he can spend all of the money he was given to play scapegoat in this show.
The "first comers" on the Internet (mainly large US corporations) are still using lots of /8 classes as their private (and firewalled) IP space. These addresses are useless (they could be allocated using private subnets) and should be returned.
I was asked to set up a communication system for tele-medicine. Basically, it was a system that should connect medical monitoring equipment at terminally ill people's house to a monitoring centre, and give a single medic an overview over the conditions of lots of patients. While these patients are going to die anyway, and the monitoring does not in fact require immediate action (otherwise they should have been at the hospital and not at home) I anyway did not like the idea that if a malfunction happens, while this does not actually kill anyone, it could anyway lead to questions like "Could he have been saved? Did he die because of a monitoring glitch?".
And since it was an under-funded and understaffed project, I did refuse to work on it.
The correct behaviour should be to ask the user. Offending programs should ask the user "do you want to install plugin?". Firefox should then ask the users "Do you want me to accept this newly-installed plugin?"
The hard part is that Firefox would then need to remember the decision of the user. And that then the plug-in installing program should simply set the "ok to use" flag in FF configuration by itself, rendering the FF "plugin lock" usless. Unless FF uses some form of complex encryption to store its data. And here we go again, adding complexity to programs because other people do not behave properly. And if an "anti-plugin" defence is required in a browser, I can safely say that such plug-ins are in fact malware, otherwise a defence would not be necessary.
IT people, the *Real ones*, the ones that actually do the job, and not the "IT manager" types, are far from being optimistic. As in IT contractor and consultant I constantly try to warn my customers that new is not necessarily good (and in fact it tends to be really bad), that cutting costs leads to failure, sometimes to catastrophic failure that could be avoided by spending just 10% more, that if a project looks trivial, maybe you have missed some hidden problem, and you'd better check twice.
And when disaster hits (that is, 90% of the times that I have predicted it), I have to fix it, instead of laughing and screaming "told you so!". Well, at least I have never worked on projects that can kill people in case of failure, and will never do it. (I was asked once, but refused)
Simply copy all of your mp3, flac and ogg files from one machine to the other.
Easy, isn't it?
Oh, and I don't need itunes, too.
They will kill OpenSuse, they will sell IP to Microsoft, then Microsoft will promptly sue like hell, and spread FUD as if there is no tomorrow. This is what will happen. Just wait and see.
That's really a nice idea. First, create a reader that works. Then, add bloat. Then, more bloat. Then, download manager, toolbars, spyware, and so on. Then, a little more bloat.
In the end, add even more bloat to keep the bugs inside.
TOTAL FAILURE!
I use Linux, so I don't care. But when I have to use Windows, I use something else to read PDF files.
I think that by looking at the videos we should be able to tell more about the dynamics of the release / balloon pop. Anyway, in my opinion, the best explanation is that ice (formed when water from the clouds condensed on the plane+box and then friezed when temperature dropped further) has kept the plane stuck to the box (after all, plane is very light and the air was calm, as we can see, so no wind to rip it off the box) also because if I get it right from the video, the plane was firmly kept pressed under the box by the release cable, so we have a big contact surface between the box and the plane that can become stuck with ice.
Then the balloon popping made the plane break free because of the shock, not because of the gravity or of the parachute deployment, because otherwise we could have seen some seconds of descent with plane and box still stuck together.
The video (box spinning) and the audio (wind noise) make it clear to me that the balloon popped exactly at release time, not one second after.
Thinking of Vulture 2, a new release mechanism is needed, I suppose. But consider that if you hang the plane by the tail from a long wire, while it's good to avoid ice and to make a proper acceleration when launched, it is not good then going up in strong winds. The plane could swing and hit the box.
