Posts by Gleb

In the interest of fairness...

I think MS is absolutely right about bitching about something, that they themselves got slapped by. Also, as a second thought - it took Ms how many years to cross over into the antitrust zone? Google is on their 9th, and they are already making shady deals. Personally I don't think companies should ever buy each other, but I also enjoy vegitarian lasange so I can't be trusted to have any valid opinions.

@Sceptical Bastard, I love, say, google search. But I hate, say, google ads. I guess there's no one without the other. The "promoting free speach" is, I guess, in reference to bloggers being able to put food on their family (sic), but it does and in many ways is a stinking pile of bull crap, seeing as how monopolies and free speach tend to be each others counterparts.

If only we'd live in a word without advertising - Brainwash article's §1....

Oh, btw

format a cell as "date", type "60" and apparently you'll get 29/2 1900, a day which didn't even exist! A professor said this to me today, so I don't know is it's true or not.

@Daniel van Niekerk

Europe is full or morons? Your analogy is idiotic, hardware can be bundled with hardware to create a product; but to exclusively bundle Windows+Apps is detrimental to the very idea of open market.

Microsoft will claim that not preinstalling windows will only result in piracy galore, and I'm not sure if they'd be wrong, but I belive that a) We should be able to buy "empty" computers, w/o windows licenses and the attached extra cost, and b) At the very least, as someone already mentioned above, it wouldn't be that bad if they put windows XP on it, but left all that cpu hogging nick-nack out of my box please. But then again, the average joe probably does want the bundled and pre-installed operating system, and would love the little alerter apps and AVs and whathave you... So it's a mute point. Obviously this is a laptop specific problem, as enthusiasts can easily build their own desktop systems with any os flavor they like... And in my experience, you often get laptops from the IT dept who clean them (? I assume), and then put corporate apps in instead....

In fact, I think that mots affected users have already commented this article, in a wierd twist of cosmic humor.

A Question

If I flash my iPhone and brick it, how would apple know? I could just claim that i was using it to download the latest nelly album, and blamo - the thing goes black on me. I can even explain the waterdamage - those are my tears, now Pretty please, give me a new one, or I'll sue you.

Finally, this could probably be done at least once. Why am I wrong, or why should anyone care about what apples said?

How's this 419?

419 is when you say "look chummy, I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am. All you need to know, is that I'm going to give you ONE BILLION GILLION FIFFILION GABAZILLION POUNDS STERLING, and all I need is a post mark, and maybe some spare change to feed my uncle, who, by the way was a prince of Kuala Lumpur untill some naughty militants took over just untill very recently. This is a really good deal for you, seeing as how you invest very little, and the rewards are very high." After you rush to the post office to order 1000 pristine postmarks with the Queen depicted upside-down and inside-out, you get the second letter, the one about the lawyers and the banks and the fees. It goes something along the lines of "Hey dear chap, well, since now we are invested into this venture, we might as well go a little further. See, well, if I don't get 2000 pounds right away, I will be chopped to bits, my uncle will starve to death and the money? You can forget about it." This is of course when a lot of even the dimmest of the dimwits bail, but you - you perservere asking the poor black man to join your chirch and to write "I am a chicken, bukaaah!" on a piece of paper. Sometimes you can even make them act out a short scene from Monty Python...

That's what 419 is. Free entertainment at the expense of oppressed people, who want to scam you out of your millions of dollars.

This? This is just rubbish!

I like it how

There's always someone that yells "old! I knew this first, glory to me. You think this is big? Well, I knew it first mister; so you are silly, and your base? Well, you know where that belongs."

Oh and there's always one saying "well, it might be old to you, but this is news to me, don't be such a hater, let's just all get along and not call each others moms anything"

And by the end of it, there's some guy buying a tonne of credibility citing "parallell unixes" and maybe some obscure syscall, and then apologetically procedes to explain why he's stuck with windows.

And then, there's always a guy who thinks it's his job to bust some balls, so he gives a one man opinion of why everyone's a mouse in a maze. Dramatically ending his crusade with

"Oh, the internets... we hardly knew ye."

A remainder...

I honestly think that apple did no wrong, and in fact, surprisingly, did a very weird almost good thing. From the start the phone was priced high for a lot of reasons. One of them, was obviously that APPLE didn't know how many devices they were going to flog. Demand for a product can be expressed as a function of price. However, this relationship need not be simple; and in fact, I suspect that in Apples case too low price would somehow confuse the consumer into not taking the product seriously. Much like you wouldn't like to buy buck for a gallon perfume. Besides, if they could sell at higher price, why shouldn't they? It's a business, after all. Now, it seems that they would and did sell a lot of iPhones, but after the 1m mark all the hype is dying down, and the holiday season is coming up. Rebrand/refurbish iPods + slash prices. Business do this all the time, and in apples case, you just can sense a textbook example of perfect execution. Ideally you want to sell your product on individual basis, for the price people can afford. This is what apple did, and I applaud their business savvy.

I don't know any apple products, except an ipod mini that I don't use. And I gave a few "nanos" away as presents. Ironically, i'm typing this on a mac at my university.

@John Stag

It's not like they are going to put up a mining station up there. Not yet anyways. Dang, sometimes I wonder how cool life will be after I'm gone. Moon this, mars that.

This is crazy.

Long words and meaningless abstracts that fail to be adapted to real world matters. If I create a piece of software, and am crazy enough to put a GPL sticker on it wanting only credit in the readme files; and some jerk just steals it and builds himself a golden house and a rocket car, then screw him - he should get an express ticket to the state correctional facilities. Which, by the way, is to say - only in America, ey?

The Ultimate Punishment

But in all honesty, how impossible would it be to disable a the monitoring software? Also, what happend to privacy? I'd love to know what the software was actually monitoring...

internetsky

As far as I can remember, the internet was designed with one special service in mind - communication should't depend on any "one" link, so that in case rusky nuke ussky, DoD can boast that they know all about it. I guess somene's cuttin' corners in hilbilly country.

Thank you!

It's rarely seen in popular media, that google gets its fair bashing. Why, maybe this is a sign of things to come - people shouldn't just listen to the company's claims about how great life is at google campus and how unevil the company is. The bottom line, as it was well illustrated, is that google consumes.

It provides a very good service, but that service creates monopolies, since nobody can afford not to use google any more. And the business model itself is a testiment to counterproductive commercialism - google gets its money from advertising - and not the vanilla kind, but the kind that's intended to mess with (specifically) YOUR brain. The trend is sickening, even outside google labs companies are using medical brainscanning technology to maximize advertising potential - if there would be a way to make you buy something, the companies wouldn't blink to use it.

Bill Hicks, RIP, once said something to the effect of advertisers should commit suicide and stop polluting... this was in the 90s. Now the playing field has changed and the nature of subliminal is revised. Google makes a sickening amount of money by targeting your brain with AdSense online. Wherever you go.

Apart from the obvious monopolistic characteristics that google money can buy - near infinite storage, huge internet cache, buying up a lot of talanted engineers; google's sin is rooted in vanity. I'm not saying that google is useless, far from it - it provides individuals, SMEs and even huge companies with ways of making money. But is money the only thing we need?

I don't know. I was born in the Soviet Union, and I still remember how we had soap that said "soap" on the package. And how different superlative adjectives actually served a purpose....

I wonder if there's a middle way - commercialism without exessive advertisment, heh.

Why is everyone so sour?

Skype will be back in business in a day. I actually like the little bugger, it saves me a ton on phone bills and I use it extensivly instead of MSN (which is bloated with inbuilt money generators beyond belief) as a chat client. In fact, a lot of people do.

As for the algorithms/codecs - they are, as they should be, invisible to the end user. I understand that businesses might struggle with skype eating all their bandwidth, but they do what they gotta do - besides, if people want to chat instead of working, the business has more problems than just vanilla bandwidth consuption.

Technology isn't in Extras.

The only reason for one format to win over the other, is corporate strategy. Sony is doing it's best to have their more expensive, yet technologically superior product out there by targeting family entertainment sector more virally. Playstation 3 came with a BluRay-rom, and enough hardware to play it in full resolution. What does HD-DVD have?

The example above is a technological benefit, and I totally disagree with calling featured extras same. What's so technological about having the actors talk about the movie, or having 400 hours of bloopers footage? Albeit in this particular case, the latter might rekindle the internet's "Spaaartaaa!" fad.

sources

Would it kill you to cite your sources, or at least link to the hub of these videos?

Live Lives

To be fair to MS, I don't think they are going to put this into, say "wordpad" or whatever software you think you normally use. It's oriented toward the MSN-like features, such as messanger and maybe in the future toward software that is free, but with a small, sponsored, twist.

Obviously the privacy will be an issue, and you just know that you absolutely can't trust these companies, because as the track record shows - sooner or later there will be a slip up, and ID data will leak.

Suppose thought, that the system is designed to look for some keywords and if such are found, display the relevant ad, without actually retaining any data on remote servers; It might not be all that bad, if you get something free in return.

For now the Google's advertising model seems to be holding up better than the rest, but Google is only a virtual god. In the truRealm (tm) of our everyday lives, advertisment companies DO want to know who you are, how much money you have and what are you interested in: data, which is a total violation of privacy, at least in my opinon. And the model these companies will use is clear - sexy girls (if that's your thing) will at random spawn here and there to sell you stuff you can barely afford but desperately want. Microsoft is just thinking ahead on this one.

I love the comment section...

Apparently the writer of the original piece has it all wrong. While reading it I was scratching my head in disbelief - is it april first, again?

Everyone's got their piece in, but I would like to point out that even if the numbers are wrong, and it would make sense to tax hardware - THAT would and could never happen. Noam chomsky says that there are only two super powers left in the world - one of them is public opinion, and thankfully nobody in our beloved [hacker infested] community would stand for hardware tax.

As far as levy on blank media goes - that too is a great imposition. That's why I'm not using any optical media - and I've never felt the need to, either. Another fun way of looking at it, is that practically nobody (I'm guessing, of course feel free to disagree) actually burns CDA tracks anymore. If people burn, they burn mp3s or oggs or something compressed so tightly that a lot of songs fit on a single optical disk. With the media tax mesured in cents the price per actual infringed copywright is very small, while the price for burning, say, linux is infinitly injust. The records recover their "lost" profits by taxing people that have nothing to do with the infringment in the first place. That's a bit leninist for my taste!

The future

It just seems that every once in a while a format or technology pops up that offers you virtually unlimited this or that. But be it processor speed, storage space or something else - the progress is always continues gradually. Quantum leaps in technolgy, though almost seeming natural - just don't occur. Why? Either it's the people at the top trying to make more money, or all of these technologies are overhyped nonsense. By "developed a technology" the writer might mean "on paper", and by "1TB" - "Until it comes out of a clean room".

Further, when talking about media - there is also the need to consider. Who would want 500 GB discs? Pirates, yes. Backup techies? If the discs retains data longer than 5 years - shure. But these are not mainstream uses! DVDs out there today already offer potentially unlimited storage for the average Joe. Apart from really high quality imagery (which most people don't have) and high quality long video seqences (which are most likely illegal to copy anyway) - such technolgy would help no one. Just consider the format wars - BluRay offers more storage than HDDvD, but the latter one still has a chance and does reasonably well.

Hashes

It's a safe bet that since spammers are distorting text, they are creating enough unique pdfs that identification through hashes becomes impractical. The good' ol' : Message->Distort->Send to x, where x is a small positive integer.