Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch
858 posts • joined Thursday 8th November 2007 17:09 GMT
Better written in Perl...
package BPI::Cake;
use Quantum::Entanglement;
sub new { bless { state => entangle( 1=> "have cake", 1=> "eat cake" ) }, shift; }
sub measure { print shift -> {state}, "\n"; }
1; # don't lie
Of course, as much as the BPI would like for this to work, the superposition only works so long as the situation is unobserved. As soon as the value is actually measured, the cake superposition will collapse into having one particular value, as demonstrated by successive runs...
# Assume module stored in BPI.pm in current directory
perl -I. -w -e 'use BPI; my $cake=BPI::Cake->new; $cake->measure'
(Perl, eh? Is there anything it can't do?)
qw(The Spanish Inquisition)
that is all.
I hope they open source the OCR bits
so that we can use them against Google's captcha ...
Posted in Palm fishes for devs with $1m lure
re: $ million dollar lottery
dollar million dollar lottery? ahem.
>That's a lot of money for developers and a da*n good incentive!
No, Mr. Anonymous (if that is indeed your real name) Coward, it's not a *fucking* (/Francais entendu/) good incentive. It's like any other promotional contest, where the company that sets it up is looking for two things: free publicity, and as many schmucks as possible to either talk up the brand or do actual, unpaid, work for the company. I don't care whether this is a beauty contest or a lottery (and you don't even seem to know yourself), the chance of actually winning any money out of this are somewhere between slim and zero. If you're the sort of guy whose reason for continuing to exist every week depends on the possibility that you *might* win a lottery, then by all means knock yourself out. I suppose the rest of us will just have to live with the idea that some idiot cretin is going to win the money. Life goes on.
Jeez, don't astroturfers even *try* to come up with convincing patter these days?
damn!
After reading the headline, I thought that was going to be an article about Bono.
The Darwin awards for 2009 should be out around now, after all.
Posted in Ferry giant refuses ID card
article typo
... and O is a letter. So why did the article mention "P & 0" at the start of para. 9?
I presume you mean ...
"a decade can be any ten years be that 2000-2009, 2001-2010, or even 1784-1793!", obiwan?
Posted in Oz anti-censorship site is censored
confusion of terms
I wonder if maybe you've made the classic mistake of thinking that because your PC has an "ethernet" device, that the web somehow lives in the twilight world of the ether. In fact, this is not the case. The Magnificent Mesh Mondial exists in this plane of existence, and can in fact be "sensored" using mundane this-worldly devices.
seconded
'nuf said
Posted in Loud sex woman coughs to ASBO breach
unnatural?
was she yodelling?
Mine's the one with a copy of The Sound of Music in the pocket.
they should go further
... and ban images of torture, too.
Oh wait, that would mean that crucifixes would be out. Ah well, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
"do no evil" refers to you
Always thought that myself whenever that catchprase comes up.
Not AC, 'cos everybody's got something to hide...
... 'cept for my and my monkey...
don't need no steenkin badges
> Lenin would have described you as one of the "Willing fools."
I might be wrong, but wasn't the expression "useful idiot?"
Posted in Write haiku, win home server
feeble (this and that)
I know which I'd choose:
A suffusion of yellow
Or blue screen of death
@Who is the terrorist here?
> If a message has no validity than there are no followers
You've never met any God-botherers (to cite one among *many* delusional beliefs), I take it? Unfortunately people prefer to believe things they want to believe, the evidence (or lack thereof) be damned.
> If you don't like the channel, change it.
Ah, "consumer choice" ... the pinnacle of western Democracy! Shame about the attention span.
> ... messiahs ... nothing more than terrorists.
You should probably learn to save hyperbole for when you really need it...
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity. When Lady Russell not long afterwards, was entering Bath on a wet afternoon, and driving through the long course of streets from the Old Bridge to Camden Place, amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newspapermen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens, she made no complaint. No, these were noises which belonged to the winter pleasures; her spirits rose under their influence; and like Mrs Musgrove, she was feeling, though not saying, that after being long in the country, nothing could be so good for her as a little quiet cheerfulness.
probably more like non-Newtownian fluids
in that they'll put up more resistance the more they're pushed around.
"outside the jursidiction of EU law?"
That would surely also include Norway, eh?, since it's not actually in the EU...
not exactly new
I remember an article from comp.risks many years ago about a couple having sex when they inadvertently hit the redial button on the phone next to the bed. IIRC, the phone was a kind of speakerphone, so the last person to have been dialled (the woman's mother) was privy to all the kinds of ambient grunting and groaning sounds you would imagine. Believing her daughter to be in trouble (I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I think she recognised the voice rather than having caller ID), she called the police to investigate. Red faces all round, as you would expect...
I haven't been able to find the article in question (probably on a backup tape somewhere)... actually, scratch that... here's a link (in case anyone worried I was setting you up for an urban legend with a ring of truth):
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.risks/tree/browse_frm/month/1994-07?_done=%2Fgroup%2Fcomp.risks%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F1994-07%3F&
Posted in Burger King cooks up Windows 7 Whopper
more on the Japanese
mentions "13cm of American-sized buns". Was wondering if it was a subtle dig at American largeness, but 13cm "buns" would be abnormally small (unless you work for Ralph Lauren, I suppose). So I guess it's not a paradoy, though why they think largeness (or Win7, for that matter) is a selling point, I've no idea.
re: meat patties, the ad actually says "beef patties"... so not quite as disgusting-sounding. Shame that the picture does that job all by itself.
PS this is far from the only strange re-imagining of western food out there. Pizza with mashed potatoes comes to mind as one of the odder dishes I've come across...
router or rootkit?
Because from the description in the article, it seems to fall into the latter category. No actual mention of routing functions there either.
@Antoinette Lacroix
> On *Nix, nothing that is downloaded is executable."
Not quite true. Haven't you seen stuff like:
wget http://example.com/progs/script.sh && sh ./script.sh
Plus, just because you download a tarball and do sh ./configure && make, does that really mean that you've examined the code to make sure that no evil was lurking within? Or, indeed, have you actually set your umask so that downloaded files *don't* have the executable bit set?
I know I'm being pedantic, and almost beside the point. But don't rule out the possibility of doing stupid things on *nix systems either. You don't have to go as far as Denis Ritchie's Reflections on Trust to come up with ways of duping a *nix admin. The smug attitude that you're above such deceptions as tainted downloads or that your machine is practically immune to viral code could be the fatal step before your downfall...
To be fair to Microsoft here, it's pretty clear that user stupidity or momentary lapse of judgement on their part is the main problem. Put these users on a Linux or BSD system, and you'll still see them falling for tricks like I mentioned above.
That's not to say that I agree with the article, mind. It's a pretty pathetic piece of trollbait, if you ask me. I'm not saying that MS doesn't deserve flak for its laissez-fair attitude to security, but why doesn't the article heap equal blame at the foot of the banks? Trollbait, as I said...
Posted in 45th Mersenne prime revealed
"but there could be only one"?
... at least until the next largest is discovered, of course, assuming there is no maximum Mersenne prime, which doesn't seem unreasonable.
Besides, I don't know what all the fuss is about.. it's just eleventyone...eleventyone recurring!1!!
@Mike007
As I understand it, all searches on compromised machines go through the one IP address, but that doesn't mean that that same IP address has to be the one that makes the queries to Google. Could be a multi-homed machine, could use proxies. Could even route the requests back through infected machines, for all that.
Are you even sure, though, that Google actually implements the system you're talking about? How would it handle large networks behind NAT gateways and IP address changes to said gateways?
Posted in 'Stop NASA bombing the Moon!'
@The Word According to the Shatner
> he did a little too much LDS.
Got too much involved with the Mormons? WTF?
"digital forensics"
> [most popular password was "123456"]
perl -nalF: -e 'print $F[1]' | sort | uniq -c | head -10
*ahem*
PlayMobil not "real news reportage"?
I'm shocked. Thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Lowe.
@Steven Knox
> * Netbooks don't count.
Of course most (all?) netbooks are Atom-based. Atom has hyperthreading which makes it look a little bit like dual core (at least to Linux). Of course, it doesn't mean 2x performance. Maybe 1.3x, with a good headwind?
<--- also assuming pirate ships
buy two ferraris
top speed twice the speed of each individually ... assuming you want to crash them head-on into each other...
Love the terminology
I can just imagine the new marketing literature...
Anouncing the new digital loom from the leader in clacking technology. Based on innovative new floor-space layouts and inter-loom conveyancing techniques, our new loom achieves clacking rates equivalent to 1 million Jacquard-Acres. Each warp is capable of simultaneously handling over 700 wefts, so even your most complex designs can be programmed without the need for hand weaving.
etc...
They may want to consider dropping that new-fangled "Fermi" name, though. Maybe call it the GargantuRood or something more in keeping.
Posted in Botnet buries commands in image files
steganography?
Will the Register have an exciting follow up where a malware author uses "advanced stegonography" by putting the commands in a Jpeg/PNG/GIF comment section with a "sophisticated self-identification mechanism" (ie, a "start-of-message" indicator at the start, and an "end of messsage" indicator along with a checksum at the end). When you do get around to writing that article, don't forget to mention that the message contents are "encrypted" with a "variable key" (stored right after the start of message indicator, and used to XOR the command data, natch).
Posted in iPod nano busted for upskirting
"man in the crowd ...
with the multi-coloured mirrors on his hob-nail boots". Now where have I heard that one before?
It was also interesting to note talk of banning such devices from locker rooms. Didn't El Reg have a locker-room snap in its review of the new Nano?
probabalistic infection
Obviously 50% isn't considered serious enough. Never mind the impact of a successful attack, I suppose.
but what about violation of the letter/spirit of the relevant copyright act?
Surely a mere exposition of facts in response to a specific question doesn't warrant copyright protection? Also, what's the actual legal status of click-through licenses? Obviously content providers would love it if they were enforceable, and love to act as if they have legal validity, but has this ever been tested in court?
"the process that *bread* it"?
Excuse me?
Posted in The internet celebrates the Big Four-O
synonymous with buffer overflows, eh?
Still, kudos for building a complete TCP/IP stack in isolation and having it almost work on the first try.
I say we ...
extradite this Unu fellow. Then bring back hanging. That's the only way to deal with these "hacker" types.
windows 7's ins?
I thought they wanted them out?
/confused
light and shadow
One other thing that seems to be wrong is the lighting. The new head appears to be predominantly lit from the left side. Everything else is being lit from the right. A bit glaring, that, if you'll pardon the expression.
Posted in MS phishing filter blacklists everything
regression testing?
I'm sure they do use regression testing on lot of their code at MS. I'd hope so, anyway. Doesn't look like this particular component gets that sort of attention before being pushed out the door.
Posted in 4chan pwns Christians on Facebook
Plain Text??
> Honestly, what kind of site stores it's users passwords in plain text! You should always hash your password column in your databases to foil these kind of attacks.
The perlmonks website comes to mind as a recent example...
Not too bright.
Charles Darwin?
He might get all the press, but I think you'll find it's Linnaeus who pioneered modern taxonomy.
puts paid to the idea that linux is expensive
If people aren't paying for external support because they have enough experience internally...
@Bringing down those odds
Short answer: no.
Slightly longer answer, courtesy of The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/19/daugman_multi_biometrics/
Posted in Robo soup chefs wrangle ramen
oh the humanity?
That calls for some monkey noodle goodness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-hzT1zBRjs
@Justin Clements
> Linux is always going to gather pace as its in its own *hermetically sealed* vacuum
Er, nice words at the end, but exactly which part of "open" do you not understand?
Posted in Marines mobilize to block Web 2.0
Grooming...
I wonder shall the NZ government be censoring US military recruitment sites on that basis?
