* Posts by Bjorg

41 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2012

UN: Fossil fuels should be terminaated 86 years from now

Bjorg

Re: I want to see change in my lifetime. Now.

"The statement "some places will suffer, others will thrive" is spot on"

This is most definitely *not* spot-on. It assumes that places that were previously not hospitable will become hospitable and everyone will move there and start growing the exact crops that the land supports.

The assumption that we can immediately adapt to any situation with perfect results is absurd. The Gobi Desert may be a perfect environment for wheat, corn, soybeans, etc at some point in the future, but will we know it? Will there be anyone there to actually farm it?

We have infrastructure and population centers and farms where it's viable for humans to live precisely because it's *viable for humans to live there* and the converse is also true. And those things aren't so easily moved to new locations as you want them to be.

Net neutrality protestors slam the brakes on their OWN websites

Bjorg

Re: Bjorg Ole Jule Cretins.

"Really? What, no 4G or LTE where you live? How about 3G, or is that not 'fast enough' anymore? The reality is there are always options, especially in city suburbs, it's just you want cheap but fast cable and expect the market to magically provide it for you"

No, unfortunately those aren't fast enough, but I think we're missing on the definition of 'fast' in the world of networks. You didn't seem to get my point about speed vs throughput. I'm a gamer and high-latency cable is frustrating for me. Even higher latency 3G or 4G would be even more frustrating. Look up what latency is. I can go on a 1 Mbps connection (probably much less), I just want it to be fast (i.e. low latency). So really what I want is a cheap DSL or fiber connection, but that's just not an option where I live. I had one several years ago in college. $25/month for 768Kbps. The price was a tad ridiculous, but it worked fine for me and wasn't 'magical' as you claim that it must be.

Bjorg

Re: Ole Jule Cretins.

Matt, it's not just rural areas that don't have choices. I lived in a heavily-populated suburb of Seattle for a while and only had one choice for internet. I now live in a heavily-populated suburb of San Francisco and only have one choice for internet. And coming as a surprise to no one, that 'choice' is Comcast. How much would it cost to pay a decent DSL or fiber provider to dig up the entire city and lay cables for us? Probably not something the average person can afford so yes, I suppose I don't 'place a high enough criteria on high-speed Internet access' because I won't sell a several hundred of my kidneys to get it. You got me. But in seriousness, if I could get a few hundred thousand of my neighbors to pitch in, maybe we could do it? Who do I contact? I suppose I could get the government to implement what is (in this scenario) amounting to socialized internet service, but that would be too simple for 'Murica.

Also, what's high-speed cable? I've never seen low-latency cable before. Perhaps you meant high-throughput?

Watch: Kids slam Apple as 'BORING, the whole thing is BORING'

Bjorg
Joke

Re: When I were a lad

Sounds like you missed the last sign:

Burma Shave

eBay slammed for daft post-hack password swap advice

Bjorg

Re: About http://xkcd.com/936

From a technical standpoing it's terrible, downright stupid advice. "correct" "horse" "battery" and "staple" are all extremely common words (well within top 5000 or so according to the various sources I found via Google). Using a top 5000 word dictionary you could crack passwords like this in days.

When I saw that comic I couldn't tell if he was serious or trolling, and most of his cult following seemed to be on the fence as well. But the advice is definitely wrong.

That being said, like someone else mentioned, just tacking on a few more words would make it much stronger. And like a lot of people have stated on this forum, you usually don't need to worry about someone cracking your password as much as accidentally handing it to them.

Pirate Bay reports pirating anti-piracy group to police

Bjorg

Re: Petty or dense?

The fact that they're aware of their hypocrisy does not excuse it.

Bjorg
Facepalm

Petty or dense?

"It's funny that we have to teach the copyright lobby the meaning of the law. The fact that they wrote it doesn't mean that they are above it."

Granted there's some irony here, but they've glossed over the part where they're litigating on copyright grounds, but as an organization are completely against it. So either they don't recognize that fact (and they'd have to be pretty dense), or are intentionally fighting hypocrisy with hypocrisy (which is quite petty).

Forget the law. Both of these groups have a set of beliefs, and both are violating them. And from what I've seen, one is pretending they're not while the other is silent about it.

Björk gives up trying to Kickstart Android music app

Bjorg

Re: £375,000?

Ha! I'll do it for the 15k she's already raised. That's a fair amount of cash for one month's work.

US diplomat: If EU allows 'right to be forgotten' ... it might spark TRADE WAR

Bjorg
Mushroom

Re: Dear USA: You make your laws; we'll make ours.

@Spanners

Food.

Not that countries in the EU don't produce any (and I'm sure many would be fine), but there are countries in the EU that import food out of necessity and the US has the largest surplus in the world, so there's a scary example.

Glider pilot 'swallowed camera memory' say plunge tragedy cops

Bjorg

Re: What a fool

Paraglider Alex Ramont, who helped search for Godinez-Avila's body, says she watched Orders set up the trip and that he missed a crucial safety check.

"I was there pretty much for the entire time that they showed up until the time they launched and I did not see a hang check performed," she said.

This is from the linked article. Granted, Alex isn't at fault here, but I can't help wonder why she didn't say anything *before* someone died. This isn't the sort of mistake you're supposed to let someone learn from. Looks like negligence all-around.

Facebook prospectus shows jump in users, fall in profits

Bjorg
Joke

Better than I thought

"431 active users last year to 901 million this year"

I thought Facebook was reaching a growth ceiling, but a 20,000% increase seems to indicate otherwise :).

Dad sues Apple for pushing cash-draining 'free' games at kids

Bjorg

@Ken Hagan

Okay, I'll bite. If I had to guess, I'd say you're not a parent, based on the fact that you don't see the obvious clues.

One guy said he was a parent, and I believe him :).

The others simply whined that the parent in the article should have been more responsible, which I *only* hear from 20-something non-parents that think they know everything until they have a kid and realize how incredibly difficult it is to keep tabs on them all the time. It's also incredibly difficult to sit your 9-year-old daughter down and tell her "Sorry, but I haven't had the opportunity to review every inch of this game that was billed as free by Apple - a large tech company that I trust with my financial details - and make sure there's no way you could purchase anything" when she's chomping at the bit to play it. You may not believe it when you see it on TV, but it does hurt when your daughter yells "You never let me have any fun, I hate you daddy!" and runs to her room.

But now I have two new figures: based on my up/down votes, I'd day 10 people that read my comment are parents, and 12 aren't. My reasoning is that I don't know a single parent that would disagree with me and I don't know a single 20-something non-parent know-it-all that would agree.

Bjorg
Unhappy

Re: When will parents learn

In this comment thread, I see one person that actually has a child, and four that don't (and it would seem haven't ever met or been a child). I notice the same thing among my friends. It's the ones without kids that don't understand why you can't keep an eye on *everything* each of your three kids is doing at all times, in addition to perfectly pre-screening (i.e. play the game yourself for several hours) everything your kids are about to do.

The four of you that have no idea what you're talking about - when you start having kids - I want you to think back to these comments when they do something stupid, and you're not there to stop it, and remember it's entirely your fault.

And don't think back to when you were a kid and did stupid things and it wasn't your parents fault, because that's WRONG.

550,000-strong army of Mac zombies spreads across world

Bjorg

I think he meant Unix. It's easy for the layman to get the two mixed up sometimes (like affect and effect for most people), so cut him some slack.

Yahoo! axes! 2,000! workers!

Bjorg

As others have said, there's more cost to hiring an employee than base salary, but I don't see that applying to severance pay. What's more appalling to me is:

$125,000,000 / 2000 = $62,500 average severance pay

And that's just the estimated minimum. Considering that's more than the average yearly household income in the US, they're giving their employees more than a year to find a new job.

Of course now that I think about it, it's probably better to use the median severance pay of $0 as the $125 million is being split between two or three execs.

Euro Android devs: Google's hanging on to our pay

Bjorg

Correction needed

"the very people Android needs to attract to provide an iOS alternative"

Is this statement necessary? If I read this four years ago it would be sound, but Android has already established itself as an iOS alternative. You should be saying this about Windows Phone.

Android clobbers Siri in Japanese... and English

Bjorg

Your horse is a bit high

You credit your stellar non-mumbling skills to watching British television, but what do you credit your spectacular arrogance to? You sounds like my few friends that bought an Apple product, were disappointed that they paid 2 - 3 times as much as I did for the something worse, and attempt to justify their purchases. They say the same things like "I'm *grateful* I make poor financial decisions, because now I watch my diction."

Tim Cook scoffs $11m slice of warm Apple pie

Bjorg

Re: I am such a loser

I'm with you. I've never understood these "stock awards as incentive" programs. Tim Cook got a $5m bonus in 2010. If it were me, I'd be gone then and there (probably much sooner since he likely got similar bonuses in previous years). Screw your millions and millions worth of stock, with just one bonus you gave me all the incentive I need to RETIRE RIGHT NOW. Maybe someone who's super filthy-rich can explain to me why, if you already have enough money to never need money again, you still feel the need to get more money?

Microsoft hikes SQL Server 2012 price 'by 20 per cent'

Bjorg

Re: Why use SQL Server

Plenty of reasons, though you wouldn't think of them if you're a small company and the only thing you care about is price. If I was an IT manager at a large company, this is what I'd be concerned about:

1. SQL Server has a proven track record. I've never even heard of Firebird until now, so I would have to do a lot of research and a lot of testing before putting it to real use.

2. Are there benchmarks comparing performance? Firebird is cross-platform and that *usually* means at least some hit to performance. Plus, I'm sure they perform differently with different tasks so performance-wise one might not be a right fit for what I'm doing.

3. Have any of my employees ever used Firebird? How difficult will it be for them to learn a new system? Keep in mind if I have to spend $30,000 training my employees on Firebird, I'm not really saving money.

4. How many new hires will have experience with Firebird? Tons of websites are built with PHP because tons of people have PHP experience. Far fewer are built with Ruby or ColdFusion because if your programmer leaves your hiring pool is limited.

5. How secure is Firebird? Can I hold the Firebird team accountable if we have a breach of security? Security bugs in SQL Server would be a huge problem for MS because they need to make money and no one will buy the product if it's not secure. A couple of open source developers don't have a business incentive to care.

6. Will Firebird be around in three years? Let's say the product is really good, but instead of eating Ramen for the rest of their lives the open source developers want to earn some money, abandon the project, and leave me high and dry.

And I'm not even an IT manager. I imagine someone that does this for a living could give you a dozen more reasons. And FYI, all open source software claims to be "robust, reliable and fast" (i.e. Android, which I've found to be rickety, unreliable and slow).

40,000 XO PCs destroyed in Peru fire

Bjorg

Yes

All of the laptops from the OLPC program are donated, right? So if they're insured, it's free money when they go up in flames. I always thought about what I would do if I won a high-end sports car when what I really need is money. Now I know :)

Bjorg
Thumb Up

Re: And here *I* though...

I decided not to support the OLPC project because I found them to be a bit shady. I really wanted a laptop that didn't never needed to be plugged in. However, I read the fine print on that "buy one for you and someone else" thing. I bet a lot of people were really disappointed when they found out that they did *not* include the crank with it. In fact, the entire mechanism for powering it with a crank was removed so you couldn't even make your own crank. And I don't recall them being powered by solar back then. So you basically got a really crappy, regular laptop.

I agree. If they really sold these laptops I think they would get a lot of buyers. Just look at the response the Raspberry Pi got, and it's not even a full computer powered by clean, renewable energy!

Apple claims its 'innovation' creates 514,000 US jobs

Bjorg
WTF?

Grasping at straws

First off, I'm incredibly surprised that Apple is pulling a defensive maneuver like this. Don't they usually just not give a crap what people think? So why bother bragging about how many jobs you've created in the US?

Second, does anyone else think statistics like this are always bogus? Unless those people have a skillset that is only valuable at Apple and no other company, they'll find employment elsewhere. Tech companies can't get enough employees, so it's not like they're drawing from an oversaturated market.

Third, healthcare? Really? Is it just me, or are they seriously claiming that because their employees get sick, then by the transitive property they're responsible for employing doctors and the like? If Apple were a man, his ego would rival George Clooney's.

Online advertising isn't creepy enough

Bjorg

Re: On targeting and Rossignol skis

I know nothing about skiing, but from the website, Rossignol "Provides ranges of skis, snowboards, boots, bindings, poles, softgoods and accessories.". So you bought some Rossignol skis, but maybe you hadn't heard, there's a great deal on Rossignol boots! Or Rossignol snowboards! I think that's what he's hoping for. Yes, eventually you'll have a Rossignol everything and then what ad do you display? But by that time, advertising already did it's job 10 times over and can take a day off by providing something more "random".

Linode hackers escape with $70K in daring bitcoin heist

Bjorg

Just like real currency?

I've heard people say that bitcoins are just like real currency (but probably even better because you get nerd cred for using them). If someone hacks my bank and steals my money, I'm protected by law if I catch it soon enough. So what happens if someone steals by bitcoins? Are they gauranteed in any way? Because if not, it's not at all like real currency.

Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board

Bjorg

Decades away?

What sort of keyboard do they have that takes decades to type anything besides "admin"? Write as many files as you want to the image directory, you're just going to annoy the server admin and they'll patch that up real quick. You might think "well if there are things as simple as shell injection and a default username/password, you have to wonder what else there is" and that's a valid point, but this particular team didn't prove anything except that they know the first rule of hacking: always try the default username/password. Presumably before any system goes live they have at least one person with at least some experience test it? They would easily find this vulnerability and change the password, but maybe I give the government too much credit.

Dotcom bail survives appeal, extradition hearing in August

Bjorg

Re: As far as anyone here can tell...

Living hell? I'll trade places with him. Lounging around a mansion in New Zealand with $30,000 is a called a vacation where I'm from. And a nice one, at that. For the amount of fraud and other illegal activity this guy has comitted in his life time and got away with it scot-free, I'd say he's probably just going to get another slap on the wrist. He's living the good life, on other people's money, and has been all his life, and you're ashamed that the government put him in this situation (you know, the one I call a vacation)? You must be filthy rich and earned your money in a similar manner to possibly be upset about this. I'm ashamed to share the same species as you.

Tick-like banking Trojan drills into Firefox, sucks out info

Bjorg
Trollface

Re: This is a MICROSOFT PROBLEM

The headline targets Firefox because it's the worst offender. And like most malware, it's not an OS or application problem, it's a user problem. If you're stupid enough to install every bit of malware that asks you politely, then you deserve to get your banking details stolen. I... don't even know why I'm responding to this. Slow day at work, I guess. Next time don't tie it back into your political views and you won't be such an obvious troll. And don't use caps lock so much. And spell a majority of your words correctly. And oh my god I should have been an English teacher just so I could fail kids like you over and over again.

US shuts down Canadian gambling site with Verisign's help

Bjorg

Re: Re: There should be clear advice in the terms and conditions

The only way I can see this being remotely reasonable is the advertisements and possibly where the servers are located. I didn't see mention in the article, but if the servers are on US soil, then just like with megaupload, you're doing business on US soil and they can shut you down. As far as extradition, a lot of people don't understand it and I don't blame them. It's necessary because if I murder/rob/rape/pillage in the US and then flee to a US ally like Canada, I should get a clean slate? Hell no. However, it's taken too far in this case. If the advertisements are specifically targeted to US citizens, I could see some sort of legal dispute, but I'm not sure what (i.e. the laws of other cultures should be respected, even if that other culture is the US). Shutting down the site and attempting to extradite the owners sounds like total nonsense to me, but then again you can't have the upside of globalization without the downside.

Sony exec: quad-core CPUs bad for today's phones

Bjorg
Trollface

Re: Re: You have no idea what the point of the article was, do you?

Your everything is "elluding" me. I could actually understand your first post, but this? I understood two things: you need a cooker and you're so awfully, terribly bad at analogies. So I'll respond to that. Do you need 2 cookers? 4 cookers? The head of Sony's kitchen department says that FOUR ovens have no place in the kitchen, and certainly not running hot all the time, even when you're not cooking anything. On that rare occasion that you have 200 people over for dinner, they'll just have to wait on your one oven.

Bjorg

Re: Re: About time!

And I wouldn't trust most developers to optimize their code anyway. That optimization you just spent 4 hours on? Yeah, the compiler already does that.

Apple 7.85in 'iPad Mini' on course for Q3 intro

Bjorg

Re: Re: Still having input?

Huh?

Q: Why do they _need_ to compete with the Fire?

A: It's target audience is a different bracket to the current iPad's audience.

And yet your post indicates that you *don't* think you answered your own question immediately. Why did they need to create the iPad when the target audience of competitor's tablets was different than the iPhone? Why did they need to create the Macbook Air when the target audience of competitor's thin laptops was different than the regular Macbook? They see it as a new market they can earn money in. You knew that, but at the same time you didn't...

Powerful, wallet-sized Raspberry Pi computer sells out in SECONDS

Bjorg

@Mike Flex

Are you saying that most people don't own a computer so if they want to learn how to program they would have to do it in school? Because (at least in the developed world), that's wrong. Also, what makes the school environment a good place to learn to program? I don't know of any schools that allow you to stay in the classrooms unless it's for an approved after-school activity (which could be some sort of programming club, which would invalidate your hypothesis that it's not available for hacking code). So you're implying that school PCs *should* be available for hacking code during school hours, when you should be learning Math and English. Someone that can't do basic math, read, write, or speak well isn't going to do anyone any good and isn't going to get a job, even if he can program.

Microsoft demos 3D desktop with transparent OLED

Bjorg

Re: Question

1) Too easy. Kinect. And that's just the one I *know* came out of MS research. Like someone else commented, the general public has no idea how much stuff actually comes out of there, and we probably never will. Yes, blah blah blah they bought a *part* of the tech from another company, not the whole damn thing.

2) No, but then again I haven't thought about it. I'm sure there are a *ton* of uses though, but what do you want to bet MS screws it up and Apple creates the exact same thing, advertises how it's actually useful for playing angry birds, claims that it's "innovation", claims they came up with it on their own and everyone else copied them despite this article and thousands of other sources proving otherwise, puts an enormous price tag on it, and gobbles up even more money from people that can't afford it, but buy everything from Apple anyway. It probably would be useful for CAD/Modeling, but it will never see the light of day because MS says "dur, we created something, someone else find a use for it".

Child abuse suspect won't be forced to decrypt hard drive

Bjorg
Unhappy

Or better yet, what happens if I have a combination lock on the door to my meth lab house? Can the police still get a search warrant, bust the door down and arrest me? To take the analogy to the furthest extreme, they must make really, REALLY big safes. So can I buy one and live in it? And put my meth lab in it? Assume I do all of the smart things that would make it livable involving gas masks, oxygen, and anything else I can't think of, but that would keep the safe analogy perfect and me living and breathing inside of it.

Can they cut/blow/melt/whatever it open? I had never heard that you don't have to supply a combination lock and it sounds like an ugly precedent. And the same goes for passwords on encrypted hard drives. Every product we consume or create can be stored in a safe or hard drive, so unless authorites catch them *in the act* of doing something illegal, intelligent criminals will never get caught.

If they *can* get inside via brute force, then I assume the same goes for an encrypted drive, but the difference is that it only takes a few hours/days (probably?) to get into a safe, while it can take hundreds of years to crack even the simplest of passwords. So now I'll just make the walls of my safe arbitrarily thick (300 feet maybe?). The door takes an hour to open, but it takes a lot more time and resources to cut through.

And this one might be a stretch, but if they guy stored media on his drives that he created, cracking the password (or any attempt to cirumvent the protection measures) would violate the DMCA, right? I hate law. Situations like this always make me think you have to be really stupid or really ignorant to intrepret it with any efficiency.

Note to authorities: I don't have a meth lab.

We're! not! a! social! network! yells! Yahoo!

Bjorg

Re: I reckon they're an ANTI-social network,

Simply not true. It's a tactic to expose your site to as many people as possible. Annoying, sure, but smart. You can't possibly think that Google doesn't think their site is good enough. Google was (possibly still is) the biggest offender here through the 2000s. They still bundle the toolbar with Firefox and paid a ton of money to do it.

Dead gamer sat unnoticed for nine hours in net cafe

Bjorg
Facepalm

23 years old and he couldn't just go for a jog. And all of his buddies didn't notice? Was this a WOW gold farming operation? I had days in high school when I would play games with my friends, but we were never so engrossed in our games that we wouldn't notice that someone DIED.

Apple FileVault cracked in under an hour by forensics biz

Bjorg

@Gerhard den Hollander

If I remember correctly, I read an article some 3 years back or so on the Register detailing how easy it was to capture in-memory contents of a recently powered down computer. It went something like:

1. Remove memory.

2. Whip out can of compressed air.

3. Turn can of compressed air upside-down.

4. Blast memory with freezing liquid.

5. You have a suprising amount of time (several minutes, if I remember correctly) to hook up the memory and read it's contents.

EFF helps MegaUpload users claw legit stuff back from Feds

Bjorg
Stop

@JEDIDIAH

The government didn't seize any property except for servers owned by hosting companies and leased by MegaUpload. I have an open wireless network. You can come to my house and start putting files in a public share on my computer. In fact, I even named the folder "feel free to upload files here but i cannot gaurantee them and they they will be cleaned out every 3 days via an automated script". It's not the best name for a folder, but it gets the point across. So when the government seizes my computer as evidence in a trial, and three days later my automated script deletes your files, what right do you have to get all pissed off at them? If you honestly think you have a right to the data you put in MY public folder, regardless of whether the government seized my computer, then I have to wonder what you did with your education.

40,000 Apple fanbois demand ethical iPhone 5

Bjorg
WTF?

@RogerThat

You don't see the irony in your statement, do you? A mere *one* paragraph before you wrote "No logic. No reasoning. No gathering of facts.", you made a sweeping generalization that no company, in the entire world, does anything to improve the lives of these people, but "Apple at least tries". Safe working conditions is such a new and innovative concept that only Apple could have come up with it, right? From where I'm standing, you seem like the oatmeal-brained one.

Airbrushed Rachel Weisz gets watchdog hot under the collar

Bjorg
Unhappy

You would be surprised.

There are plenty of things like this that I think are common knowledge, but my dumber (for lack of a better word) friends have no idea.

Angry Birds boss: Piracy helps us 'get more business'

Bjorg
Happy

Angry Turds

I signed up for an account here just to tell you I had almost this exact same idea. A year or so back when Rovio said that an Angry Birds release for Windows Phone was going to take a long time because the platform was "harder to develop for" than iPhone/Android, I took them up on the challenge. It took me 20 hours to create the game (graphics, sound, physics, etc). I had every intention of releasing "Angry Turds" before Angry Birds could be released, but it turns out that making the levels themselves is the really difficult part and not wanting to spend hundreds of hours on levels outweighed my goal to show Rovio that their developers suck. I could have released it with just one level, but I wanted it to be polished so people would actually play it. Instead of angry media execs, the name "Angry Turds" came from my imagining angry developers at Rovio staring at some C# code and complaining "it's too hard!" to their bosses.