Virii?
What's Latin for malware? Come on, come on!
Virus.
Goes like?
Annus
Plural is?
Anni.
Viri. Understand? Now write it out a hundred times.
Posts by ratfox
3465 posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Page:
China is world's most malware-ridden nation
When open-source eats itself, we win
Boffins find 17,425,170-digit prime number
Wednesday 6th February 2013 14:39 GMT 
Re: Here's a fun question for you
I say 45 = 3 x 3 x 5.
It cannot be a power of a prime, and I take this to mean it cannot be a prime itself. Power by one is a power.
It cannot be the product of two primes, so it must be the product of three primes at least.
It cannot be the sum of two primes, so it is not even, because every even number small enough to be tested is the sum of two primes. See Goldbach Conjecture.
So I choose the smallest possible three primes, none of them 2, not all of them equal, which are 3, 3 and 5.
I am excluding zero and negative integers on grounds of not being interesting.
Schmidt slams China as world's most prolific hacker
Samsung's squillionaire supremo scuttles siblings' shares snatch
Senators propose permanent ban on internet sales and access tax
Car dashboards get Nokia HERE without a phone in sight
Surface left on shelves as world+dog slurps up small slates
Thursday 31st January 2013 15:49 GMT
Re: Windows 8
Lack of apps.
The reason they shoehorned the TIFKAM into desktops is that they hope to attract more developers for it. The developers would not bother for their current market share on mobile, and the market share will not improve unless developers write apps. It's a chicken and egg problem, and they are trying to solve it by having their cash cow lay the egg. Er… Yes.
Official: Fandroids are smarter/tighter* than iPhone fanbois
Thursday 31st January 2013 15:43 GMT
Re: Why are American prices so much higher?
Both, I think. Also, less regulated. Confusion is a form of art when it comes to phone bills in the US; the better to advertise "$50 a month plans" which swell to $90 plans when all fees and taxes are added.
Then again, Americans are used to pay $20 for a $15 item on the menu, unlike Europeans who for some reason expect the price to be exactly as indicated.
Report: DDoS attacks now MORE ANGRY, complex and targeted
Muslim vid protest hackers turn web-flood hosepipe away from US banks
Amazon: We have great cash flow - it flows straight out of our hands
Apple, Google tumble off top 20 trusted companies list
Microsoft tries to sell home Office users on subscription pricing
Google fills in the blanks on North Korea map data
Iran develops working ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Monkey
Tuesday 29th January 2013 08:03 GMT 
Never mind the nuke angle, there are more important questions:
How are their space-faring people going to be called??
As everyone knows, Russians are called cosmonauts, Americans are called astronauts, French are called spationauts, and Chinese are called taikonauts. Now we need a word for the Iranians.
Google offers $3.14159 MILLION in prizes for hacking Chrome OS
Google reveals TAPE-TASTIC data centre in saucy vid
Don't like your cell network? Legal unlocking ends TONIGHT in US
Friday 25th January 2013 21:30 GMT 
I never understood how this can be legal
Currently, you can get an iPhone 4 for free (well, $1), if you take it with a two-years plan of $60 per month — That is $1440 in total. The phone itself costs about a third of that price. Each month, $40 of what you pay for the plan pays for the actual service, and $20 pays for the phone.
Which means that if you don't get a new phone, you are paying 50% more than what you should. How is this not bundling? Isn't bundling normally illegal?
Imagine if Microsoft suddenly announced that from now on, Windows costs 50% more, but with any purchase of Windows, you get the possibility to buy Word for $1… What are the chances this would fly?? I thought that was exactly what got them in trouble with Internet Explorer…
Activists urge Skype: Tell us who is spying on us
Twitter adds loopy videos with Vine integration
Victims of 'revenge pr0n' sue GoDaddy, smut site
Google: Gov demands for YOUR web data up 70% in just 3 years
Oh, those crazy Frenchies: Facebook faces family photo tax in France
Thursday 24th January 2013 12:05 GMT
Honest laws
I think that governments in general should state honestly what is the purpose of the laws. Creating a tax on data, and justifying it by saying the users are workers collecting valuable information for the company sounds more like insane troll logic than anything else. They might as well come out and say honestly, we are taxing you people because we need the money and you can afford it.
The French government seems adept at these disingenuous justifications. E.g: The law which forbids people from covering their face in public is claimed to be a matter of security, and not at all a way to push Muslim integration by stopping the practice of wearing a veil. Never mind that the same law prescribes especially harsh punishment for a person who forces other people to cover their face, like a Muslim husband might do to his wives and daughters. Relation to security: None.
Dotcom says German authors' society canned Mega launch vid
'Op! Op! Op!' Gangnam Style earns Google $8m
Dead Steve Jobs' patent war threat to Palm over 'no-hire pact'
UK taxmen turn heat on tax-swerving big biz, hope to smoke out £1bn
Tuesday 22nd January 2013 12:17 GMT
Re: Sellers paying the VAT
This actually seems more philosophical to me than anything else. In practice, the price of things is exactly how much consumers are willing to pay for it. The company ultimately receives an amount which is slightly smaller. Whether the difference between the two is VAT paid by the consumer, collected by the business and transferred to the state, or whether it is a turnover tax paid for by the business is hardly more than a matter of semantics. Just change the variables in the equations and give them a different name, but the effect on the economy, actors, business incentives etc. remains the same.
Oz library finds Lance Armstrong books a new home: The fiction section
Google pulls 'racist' Make Me Asian app
Google files patent for eyewear that SHOOTS LASERS
Google sinks millions into plush new £1bn London HQ
PR people 'put duty to the public ahead of employers' interests'
eBay's festive sales soar, but what's this? Profit DOWN 62%?
Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work
Thursday 17th January 2013 10:19 GMT
Nobody linked to the Onion yet?
http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourcing-own-jobs-oversea,14329/
This was from 2009.
White House raises the signature threshold for petitions to 100,000
Privacy winds blow through Clouds towards Switzerland
Tuesday 15th January 2013 15:00 GMT 
Switzerland does not cooperate when sources were acquired illegally
So, suppose just for instance that a rogue bank employee went to the German government with a CD full of Germans trying to hide their money in Swiss banks. Since revealing the name of bank customers is a crime in Switzerland, Switzerland will not help with the investigation.
This is of course a purely hypothetical example!
China's Android users warned of giant botnet
Tuesday 15th January 2013 07:43 GMT
This is why
Android should let users block any apps they want from network access.
I hear you say: "yes but poor developers need ads revenue to survive and apps need network access to fetch ads". Fine. Provide an API which allows apps to fetch ads in a [i]controlled[/i] manner.
I mean, this is not paranoia. There [i]are[/i] people out to get you. It is now standard on non-mobile machines to get a warning whenever a program accesses the web for the first time, giving you the choice to block it. I see no reason why it should not be the case for phones.
Hey, open sourcers: Who's your code's daddy?
Monday 14th January 2013 11:11 GMT 
Yeah, fork it.
Create on github a separate project called vert.ks, inform contributors of the change. Let vert.x disappear for lack of maintenance. That is what Open Source is about…
Possibly, learn in the process that VMware is better than you at maintaining the project, and that contributors will not move.
EU antitrust chief growls at Google, hopes to avoid sanctions
Friday 11th January 2013 15:00 GMT
Not the point
Google for an address like "17 baker street london": You will get a map on top of the page, created by Google Maps. As you would expect, clicking on that map brings you to Google Maps.
You might think this is obvious. But Google for "AAPL": You will get a chart on top of the page showing the evolution of the Apple stock; but clicking on that chart brings you nowhere. You actually have to choose between three (tiny and hard to see) options below the graph, which are Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. No assumption is made that since you are searching on Google, you necessarily want the Google product.
Note that this behavior could be argued to be worse for the user than just linking the graph to Google Finance. After all, the user who mostly does not care probably expects that he can click on the graph to get more information. He does not know that he has to click on one of the tiny links, he might indeed spend a few seconds figuring that out. This normally counts as bad user experience.
There might be many reasons why the assumption would be made that you want Google Maps, instead of Bing Maps or (god forbid) Mapquest. Probably, Google Maps is much more popular than its competitors, which might not be the case for Google Finance.
Of course, Bing and Yahoo do the "natural" thing and link to their own products…
