* Posts by Disco-Legend-Zeke

915 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2007

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Firefox at 5: the Google Cold War

Disco-Legend-Zeke
FAIL

This mistake is ruining American Business.

Americans seem to think that "public companies [are] legally beholden to maximize revenue for their stockholders."

The law does not state that, what it DOES state is that all profits must be returned to the shareholders.

But the corporations believe in the first, and frequently break the law by using profits to buy back shares. In worst cases the entire company is stolen from the shareholders. For example:

"In 2004, Cox Enterprises announced its intention to purchase those shares of Cox Communications which it did not already own. A $6.6 Billion tender offer was completed in December of that year, and Cox Communications has been a wholly owned subsidiary ever since.[8] This was the second time Cox was taken private by Cox Enterprises."

In other words, they have stolen the company TWICE.

Cisco leaps into hosted email, social networking

Disco-Legend-Zeke
FAIL

Maybe they can fill the gap left by the collapse of YAHOO!

Some new booters have rendered the YAHOO! chatrooms almost completely useless.

As soon as the booter runs, nothing works in the rooms except voice.

Complaints on their blog are simply deleted, as if somehow that makes the problem go away.

I have been a YAHOO! fanboi forever, but maybe it is time for some professionals to come along.

'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Boffin

Compressed Photons = the Big Firecracker

Although very small in size, the Big Firecracker contained all the photons that now make up our Universe.

Since Everything is made of Photons, this pinpoint sized object thus contained, well, Everything.

Consider the Yin and Yang symbol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yin_and_Yang.svg

Two very tiny dots, each surrounded by an energy field, and orbiting around each other.

This is a simple conceptual model of a photon, there may be more than two kinds of particles and they are orbiting in 10 or 11 dimensions, but the Universe and everything in it is it made of these. The orbits vary in size and the spinning happens at varying speeds, giving a photon a "frequency." Viewed as it approaches, a photon appears circular, at an angle it traces out a helix, and from the side, it looks like a sine wave.

Although the size of the orbits may very, the particles themselves are probably the same size... VERY VERY tiny. Very! Tiny! So tiny that all of them fit inside a firecracker smaller than a proton.

When ancient boffins lit the Big Firecracker 13.7 (possibly by building a giant accellerator) billion years ago, the photon particles immediately began separating from each other, trying to form traditional photons.

At first there simply was no room for them to do that, so, instead of forming photons, the photonic particles dance around each other in tighter and more compact patterns forming first the very simplest of sub atomic objects, higgs bosons. As the universe becomes larger and larger, more complex objects can be formed, but there is still no room for light.

Finally, after about 10 seconds, the universe was big enough for photons to assume their traditional form, and they began to fly away in all directions at the speed of light, carrying heat away with them, and a few minutes later, the universe is cool enough for atomic nuclei to form.

A nice timeline is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang

Facebook awarded $711m in 'Spamford' Wallace case

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Grenade

Hope they take his house

If i had all the money i have spent on anti-spam measures over the years, i could pay off my mortgage.

I only wish i could afford the legal fees to sue a few of these low-lifes.

Grenade plus lots of lube, pull the pin and shove it.

Thieves target BT cables as scrap value rises

Disco-Legend-Zeke

no modern US coins worth melting.

Valuable metals have been gone from US coinage for many years.

Hack slots hotspots into Windows 7

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

The smaller the cell...

...the higher the bandwidth. The back of a laptop offers the antenna designer a nice stable platform for efficient beam forming, no power wasted in other directions when you MIMO-mesh up with your keyboard, mouse, earpiece, and hundreds of beam connections to other femto cells in the network.. This reusability of spectrum makes public bandwidth almost infinite.

As i have ranted in the past, 802.11n presents us with the capability of creating a public, self forming, mesh network. The more people that join, the higher the overall bandwidth. Google gets this.

The carriers don't.

Paris because she consumes vast quantities of bandwidth.

Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Thumb Up

The Cloud as Water Heater.

Data cloudlets should be sized and installed in residential buildings. Whenever heat is needed, shift in some load.

Throwing away perfectly good energy does not make economic sense.

The showering demand of the population should exceed the cooling demand of the cloud.

SCO boots boss McBride

Disco-Legend-Zeke

aside...

The Microsoft tcp/ip stack was purchased from BSDI UNIX. In the command prompt, you will recognze many commands such as tracert, which is traceroute renamed.

MS claims early success for freebie security scanner

Disco-Legend-Zeke

@statistics

It woud be logical that those who had Win7 would be wanting to try all the latest toys.

Bridgeworks sidesteps latency with pipelining and AI

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Isn't that what "power upload" does?

I use FTP Voyager. One of the features called "power upload" is that it will open n threads (default 4) to keep the pipe full.

But then, why not just use UDP and a back connection to verify correct receipt.

Ralph Lauren stick insect sacked for being 'too fat'

Disco-Legend-Zeke

so sad

When women buy a new dress, they generally take the hangar off the rack and then look at the dress. As a result, except for the really good stuff, clothes are designed to look good on a hanger.

To make the stuff look good on a model, they choose a model built like a coat hanger.

Then real, actual, women look at their sexy, curvy, boinkable, bodies and either:

1. Diet till they are too thin to enjoy any part of their life.

-or-

2. Become depressed and binge-feed till they balloon to near-bear size.

*sigh*

Google: Servers are DIMM witted

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

Cosmic Ray hits

I think Julian has one of the keys.

I recall early chip makers were plagued with unexplained errors which were found to be radiation induced.

Thanks, Google, for sharing some very interesting info.

Paris because she causes memory errors.

Did the FCC bribe US carriers on net neutrality?

Disco-Legend-Zeke
FAIL

Selling _MY_ spectrum to the greedy telcos.

Just about the worst idea the FCC ever had was to SELL spectrum to the highest bidder.

Just like the air we breathe, spectrum belongs to the people. By retaining control, the FCC could force net neutrality and more efficient use.

"The highest bidder" often merely wants to keep spectrum out of the reach of competition.

Toshiba reveals Cell TV specs

Disco-Legend-Zeke

toshiba and linux

i would not be too surprised to discover linux as the engine inside their TV. I have a couple Toshiba HD-DVD players which are, in fact, PC's running Linux and BUSYBOX.

The HD-DVD did a fantastic job of upscaling regular DVD's., and i would also expect Toshiba to have very good handle on image processing.

As far as boot-up time, even my dang light bulbs (tose curly ones) have to boot up these days.

US Navy boffins put an end to drought

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

Solar Distillation

Small solar stills are being used even where drinking water is available. For example in refilling engine cooling systems, labs, etc.

A small unit, in the western US can purify 5 gallons per day with only tiny amounts of electricity (for flushing valve and optional fan.)

In addition to commercially built units, it's pretty easy to make one from scratch... a tub, preferably black, an enclosure of wood, metal, or plastic, a slanted piece of glass, and a trough to catch the condensate as it rolls down the glass.

Paris just bacause.

LaCie LaCinema Black MAX

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

Why include a Hard Drive

A couple days ago i installed a cheap ($119 US) ATSC tuner with composite, S-video, and RGB component connectors.

The RGB connectors went to a legacy DVR, and thence to RGB inputs of our TV. The only downside of this arrangement is the DVR/DVD combo limits resolution to 720X480i.

Interestingly, however, the tuner also features ethernet and USB connectors, so a simple software revision would make the perfect product, a tuner that lets you record onto your own external hard drives. Building a hard drive inside a product almost guarantees that it will cost too much because Hard drive prices are falling so rapidly. Consumers can then fill up hard drives with shows they believe they will watch again someday, and put them on a shelf instead of tediously choosing what shows to erase to clear space for the next recording.

You could even plug in one hard drive for a specific series or repurpose all those old 120G harddrives that are laying around.

On the other hand, COX Cable, the provider here in Las Vegas, provides virtual DVR service, recording EVERY network programme and making it available for playback on demand the day after airing.

Paris because her sister is coming to vegas for my Halloween party.

Wireless carriers gear up to fight FCC’s net neutrality plans

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

The Walled Garden, The Internet Gate

When you connect to any provider, you begin in a (fire)walled garden. Within the garden, providers can compete by providing proprietary content, tunes, movies, news, whatever.

This garden will usually also feature gates to additional features and services, for example a back-net credit card processing gateway, the PSTN (public switched telephone network,) Internet (r) brand connection to the network of networks, KidSafe (tm) brand filtered network connection, if they can think of it, they can offer it.

So long as there is clear disclosure, they should be allowed to offer, or not offer, whatever they choose. But if a provider chooses to use the Internet Brand Name for one of their gates, then they should be required to meet net neutrality rules.

Consumers should be able to choose the features and speeds they want, and access the provider with any legal device they select.

Paris because her sister is coming to my Halloween party.

IEEE finally approves 802.11n

Disco-Legend-Zeke
FAIL

No Accident

the cellphone companies are living in fear of consumer owned mesh forming gear.

They put their own engineers in the working group to delay ratification.

Well designed 802.11n will perform better and be more robust (no single point of failure) than cell tower deployment.

Slime-powered Toyota Prius demoed

Disco-Legend-Zeke

random comments

Flywheel:

It's not necessary to store the equivilant of a full tank of gas, just the kinetic energy from the last stop.

Compressed air:

This is already being proposed for electrical storage.

Algae:

So easy to grow, plenty of room. I read that fossel oil is mostly from algae, not Dino the dinosaur.

A yield per acre would be helpful. If grown in glass tubes, water losses would be limited to the water broken down to derive hydrogen.

Other oil crops:

The top seems to be palm trees (600+ pounds per acre) but requiring complex harvesting. Palm trees can be grown with salt water, and since palm oil is really unhealthy to eat, not too much competition with food chain. Palms are a perennial, and require non-productive years between planting and production. The leading annnual oil crop is cannabis (400+ pounds per acre.) This could be improved by breeding. Anybody that had an overlooked pot seed explode can attest to the energy content. An added benfit is that the hemp fiber provides economic value to the farmer and displaces petrolium based plastic rope and fabrics. A side benefit... smoking the leftover flowers would make people sit on the couch and watch TV, leading to an overall reduction in driving.

Turning off Air Conditioner:

In the city this pays off, in highway driving, the aerodynamic losses of open windows are more consumptive than running the AC. That said, I personally turn off the AC during hill climbing, and let gravity cool the car on the down side.

Side effects:

In every attempt to fix one problem, we need to consider unexpected side effects. Burning corn as ethanol, for example, led to food riots in Mexico and drove the price of a dozen eggs from $.50-$1 to $1.50-$2. The end of life on earth will probably be something as unexpected as all the mercury from those curly lightbulbs, or some bioengineered algae that escapes into the ocean and kills krill.

Firefox to warn users of insecure Adobe Flash

Disco-Legend-Zeke

blocking port 25

has been standard for at least 10 years now.

at one point i was making a phone call to ISP's where spam originated, and half didn't understand what my issue was. Of course back then spam was only 20% of all mail.

I am one of the oldest ISP's in the world, andover the years, spam filtering has cost me many, many thousands of dollars.

So, spay and neuter your pets and spammers. The world will be a better place.

The Prisoner of Blogger

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Your Money Cheerfully Refunded

or, as john Arbuckle says, "you get what you pay for"

Mass infection turns websites into exploit launch pads

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Grenade

Now that the army....

has a cyber squad, on hopes they will be sharpening their bayonets in exploits like this.

Swedish court orders The Pirate Bay shutdown

Disco-Legend-Zeke
FAIL

What's so sad...

...is that cascade distribution is the solution to bandwidth problems for legetimate distribution od entertainment (movies) software.

If a torrent client were built into every set top box, customers woulld be getting their movie downloads from the guy across the street.

But the movie and tune companies are so afraid of it that it may never happen.

4chan pwns Christians on Facebook

Disco-Legend-Zeke

God is gonna be pissed.

and thats NOT a good thing

Rogue admin charges cut to size

Disco-Legend-Zeke

It's a MACK truck!

Never a peterbilt or a white.

This according to my mom, who used the Mack truck scenario to make me always wear clean underwear. (just in case(

Model-slag blogger sues Google for blowing her cover

Disco-Legend-Zeke

expectation of privacy?

hahahahahahahahahha

private like the village square.

Aussie birds 'desperate to copulate with brainy males'

Disco-Legend-Zeke

At spring break...

The guys at the beach build "bowers" for the same reason, to attract sex partners.

humbly submitted http://bikinibreak.com/CHRON/2000/03/19/images/BikiniBreak-Lake_Havasu_Spring_Break-2000-03-19-800X-dsc01002.jpg

Boffins in 'let's create black holes in the lab' jape

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Black holes and BASIC

The original Dartmouth BASIC time sharing computer and the computer programming language of the same name also came from there.

Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo! to join anti-Googlebook war

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

No Matter Who

gets the rights and ad revenue, making very written word available is a positive thing.

Money, in spite of what you might believe, is secondary.

Paris... well.. because

Follow the money: Chasing cheap data centre power

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Computer as Water Heater

with sufficiently agile load switching, power used for computing can be resold as heat for apartment and office buildings.

Minister attacks drunken topless lovelies with tangler-bazooka

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Henderson (Nevada) Police just shoot to kill

They just settled a $25M lawsuit (for $700K) for shooting a little old lady with a butter knife.

Similar Las Vegas area killings have involved similarly under-armed individuals. One i seem to recall with a tinfoil wrapped sandwich.

I have long lamented the absence of net flinging kit to safely and humanely incapacitate knife and bludgeon wielding individuals.

Twitter transformed into botnet command channel

Disco-Legend-Zeke

i see crypto lines in yahoo chatrooms

but they don't have the reach of twitter.

i always assumed they were being used as stego communications

Government stamp of approval for fake weed

Disco-Legend-Zeke

If pot were legal....

we would save a hella lot of fuel.... everybody would just kick back and...

the war on drugs ahs killed thousands in Mexico and South America.

Legalize... Tax... and, most importantly, EDUCATE.

Brain-jacking fungus turns living victims into 'zombies'

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Syphillis

Makes you insanely smart.

Obviously so that you can find more sex partners.

Side note... Under a microscope syphillis and Tooth Decay germs look almost identical.

Exploding iPhone injures French teen

Disco-Legend-Zeke

The Ford Pinto of electronics.

The amount of energy stored in a modern battery is about the same as it's weight of black powder.

But still he didn't lose an eye... so it's therefore safer than a pointy stick.

Vulture 1: Calling all electronics wizards

Disco-Legend-Zeke

something simple for release

like a sugar cube and solvent

Japan's central bankers look in brothels for green shoots

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Only Nevada in the USA

And even then, the 35,000 working girls in Las Vegas are unlicensed and un-taxed.

Feds seek $566m from man in online gambling case

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Win the war on [drugs|gambling|prostitution]

Governments never seem to learn that fighting a war on popular pastimes is a foolish waste of resources.

Banning alcohol created the mafia, banning other drugs created street gangs and cartel war machines. Even the taliban derives its power from poppy fields.

Ditto gambling, it just chases the money out of the country, and away from the tax collector.

Scareware package mimics Windows Blue Screen of Death

Disco-Legend-Zeke

scareware site CAME UP #2 on bing

The network news showed a car being disabled with something called clunker bomb.

Curious, I did a search for "clunker bobm" (note misspelling, very typical of me.)

Bing asked if i meant clunker bomb, and listed two links.

The first was a real site that told me what i wanted to know, eg. clunker bomb is the US government approved method of permanently destroying an engine. The oil is drained, and sodium silicate (aka water glass) is poured in. The engine is started and runs just a few seconds till the water evaporates, basically coating the internal engine parts with glass.

The second was a scareware site.

Takeout: Hot News terms are promptly search engine spammed by scammers.

FCC barks at Apple for silencing Google Voice

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Ma Bell, The mum from Hell

In spite of years of deregulation, AT&T continues to operate like a monopoly, abusing that position whenever it can.

In general, it uses its big guns to silence competition, but frequently shoots itself in the foot.

We can safely bet that Clear ( http://clear.com ) will eat Ma Bell's shorts in the mobile Internet arena. They Are now in Las Vegas, and offer two fast connections, one for your house, and one mobile, via WIMAX, for $45 a month. They just announced ten additional cities.

With no mobile voice cash cow ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H infrastructure to protect, they will certainly welcome voice and email users as customers.

In my never to be written book "Bean Counters Spoil the Soup" i recount how AT&T invented local wireless broadband, invested $200 mil, launched a very successful test market. In the USA, where due to divestiture, they no longer owned last mile, it would have given them access to every home and business at a fraction of the price of laying copper or glass. However, they were forced to kill the product because the $30 a month Internet service was seen as a threat to their $1200 a month T-1 business.

Fake ATM scam rumbled by Defcon hackers

Disco-Legend-Zeke
Paris Hilton

Unt the US... beware card slots in gas (er, petrol) pumps.

Apparently the security on gasoline pumps is rather sparse; i heard on TV that one key opens every pump in las vegas.

Thus adding a skimmer becomes rather trivial. You are a bit safer paying inside. Safer yet getting cash at your bank ATM and using it to pay for yourl fuel.

Paris cause she just got a kitty that looks like my last cat.

eBay hands badges to top-rated sellers

Disco-Legend-Zeke

@ebay: be careful what you wish for.

Ebay expressly wanted to get rid of the "little" sellers just before the economic downturn.

Now that they have what they wanted, they are begging us to come back.

Time Warner swallows Google's AOL stake

Disco-Legend-Zeke

AOL started as an "Online service"...

They were very late to the Internet (tm) party.

They had a great walled garden, but the hourly connection fees chased customers out into the jungle.

Microsoft airbrushes anti-Apple ad

Disco-Legend-Zeke

History correction. Old idea...

Here let me show you in my copy of 1984...

Hmmm it's right here on my Kindle...

WTF?

802.11n Wi-Fi to be standardised... at last

Disco-Legend-Zeke

The cell phone companies have so much to lose.

Fully meshed networking will replace single-cell, and the cell phone companies have been doing whatever they can to block it.

German cops cuff Brit potato iPod scammer

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Similar scam running in Vegas.

In the Las Vegas version, the scammer offers users a sealed box adorned with pretty printed sales literature glued on.

The mark is told she cannot open the box till he has the cash.

In the particular news story the guy is in the parking lot outside a BEST BUY electronics store with 5 or 6 identical boxes inside his trunk.

Upon opening, the victim finds laptop sized clay tiles hinged with duct tape.

Tasered Oz man bursts into flames

Disco-Legend-Zeke

But it was MEDICAL petrol.

Somehow i think legal pot would be a better answer.

At least America doesn't have a monopoly on murdering indigenous people and stealing their land.

Swine flu will [enter scare words here]...

Disco-Legend-Zeke

If H1N1 follows 1918 pattern...

The people that survive will be two groups:

1. The one in 6 people that qualify for the vaccine. (USA figures)

2. Those lucky enough to get infected now while the virus is still fairly mild.

The reason humans shake hands and kiss is to spread cold and flu viruses as soon as possible so that natural immunity is transferred.

The more we prevent the spread now, the more people will get the deadly version when^H^H^H^H if it emerges next winter.

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

Disco-Legend-Zeke

the Berserkers

they dropped a bit and started destroying ALL life, instead of only the "enemy"

an organized resistance could probably poison it with boron laced fuels.

US edges towards mobile antitrust case

Disco-Legend-Zeke

Texting... Just another name for email

since texting is simply email, and a curtailed version at that, prices should be comprable to prices via Internet brand network of networks.

When AT&T introduced SMS, it was a free service to intice you to buy a text capable phone.

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