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  1. My take so far... on In IE8 and Chrome, Processes Are the New Threads · · Score: 1

    Listening to the explanation of Chrome it sounds like it has a lot of good ideas on paper. When I look at it practically, as an Opera user, it does a lot of things differently in order to solve problems I never had in the first place, but overall it still hasn't implemented things I take for granted now.

  2. Maybe not racial as we think of it... on Researchers Find Racial Bias In Virtual Worlds · · Score: 1

    In Ragnarok Online every single person had a white avatar. I found there was a fair bit of resentment between player classes for some people. As an up close melee fighter, I found a lot of others, and myself too at times, spiting ranged attack players because the system was skewed so far in their favor - they could level in 1/100th the time, and were monsters in 1:1 PvP.

  3. Re:Now that home-grown solutions are growing,,, on Americans Refusing To Wait For Mainstream EVs · · Score: 1

    Oh god, you're right...
    I can just see some unlucky Brit nailed for doing an EV conversion because it skims around the fuel tax... (Hey, it's happened with cooking oil/biodiesel cars)

  4. Re:Snow Crash? on A Photo That Can Steal Your Online Credentials? · · Score: 1

    .TIF /.TIFF files have also been used to build exploits for the iPhone and PSP. The same library is used on so many platforms.

    I know on the PSP it basically just caused a memory overflow, and about 1 in 10 times it would write the exploit code in front of the execution pointer and start running it.

  5. G98G1 on "World's Cheapest Laptop" Available in Bulk Only · · Score: 1

    Ah, so it's like a badly made OLPC, on the "Give 98 get 1" program? ;)

  6. Probable cause? Not at all! on Video Surveillance Tech Detects Abnormal Activity · · Score: 1

    As someone who makes a rule of behaving abnormally, I wonder how abnormal it will find having the lenses shattered at a distance greater than it's set up to see...

    "Probable cause" for searches doesn't mean "my flaky security system thought you were acting suspiciously" and I hope someone immolates these guys in court the first time that's suggested.

    Thankfully this kind of thing is a little way off where I live - the nearest well known "1984" surveillance state is a bit further west in Kelowna, BC. I still plan to fight this stuff tooth and nail where I can though, as so far it's only been abused and of questionable value in deterring crime, but it's definitely encroaching on remaining free cities.

  7. Re:I do not think it means what you think it means on Your Computer and Cell Phone Are Lying To You · · Score: 1

    Truth.

    My Moto KRZR however lies about battery all the time. It will be at 3/3 all week and then one day it slips to 1 or 0. Often it'll show 3/3 and then I plug it in to charge and it realizes it's really 1/3. ...though my Nokia 3220 had 6 or 7 segments and was always right on.

  8. OpenID? on MySpace Joins OpenID Coalition · · Score: 1

    Ah yes, another universal sign-in ID. They've had those for at least a decade now, and they've been moderately more successful than internet money accounts.

    Just the other day I had to sign up for a "universal" "Ning" ID - to sign into the one and only site I've ever heard of it used on. I've never been to an OpenID site.

  9. I like LED on Making Strides Toward Low-Cost LED Lighting · · Score: 1

    LED is my choice already. I have CCFL lights in my house, but they hum, give off harsh fluorescent light tinted with a yellowish hue to be less glaring and cold, and any outdoors in the fall/winter/spring just don't work because it's too cold. Since they come with power transformers that's a big waste of materials (why can't we just buy a quality converter base to plug them into?) and if you get a cheap one, the transformers can even overheat and catch fire - which I guess would be something to watch on LED "bulbs" too.

    Really when I actually need light for a moment or two I've been using a 3-LED handcrank flashlight lately. For house lighting, I think LEDs are so small you could include a mixture of white, red, green, and blue then despite any gaps in the color spectrum, you could still tune the overall color to suit your preference. The biggest plus for me is that they are silent, as CCFL noise irritates me so much I just shut them off - but hey, I guess I'm saving power that way!

  10. Re:What is liquid metal? on Liquid Metal CPU Heatsink Beats Water Cooling · · Score: 1

    Others have suggested sodium alloys too.

    Then, I still don't see it. Mercury and alkali metals are too dangerous. Then again, I can see it done with mercury if they can convince regulators it's sealed well enough. It would also explain why they don't dare get more specific than "metal." Otherwise they could patent it, or failing a patent, it should be pretty easy to cut open and analyze if you're a competitor.

    I'll throw my guess in with your suggestion of Ga-In-Sn, or just Ga.

  11. Disband them on FBI Fights Testing For False DNA Matches · · Score: 1

    You just caught the FBI red handed trying to literally block justice. Disband them. Don't laugh, they're supposed to be your government, not you their subjects.

    Then, wasn't there some rule (I'm not American so that's my excuse for not knowing...) about disbanding the FBI if they operated outside the country, and the CIA if they should ever be caught operating INSIDE the country? This is neither, but both have happened flagrantly to no effect on their standing.

  12. Re:Don't doubt it for a minute on Dell Colludes With RIAA, Disables Stereo Mix · · Score: 1

    I set up 0-5, sometimes 30-50 in a month at work, but they're all Dell now and limited to a few models. I'm no stranger to going from scratch, but it's been a few years now.

    These weren't lemons. I was able to check with two other friends who by some strange coincidence, seem to end up with the same mobos/3D cards as I do. The A7N266-C had abysmal chipset drivers the whole time I owned it, and I had to manually assign every IRQ lest they all heap onto one or two and fail. The A7V8X-X has good specs and performance for its time, but would emit a high pitched whistle whenever a USB 2.0 device was plugged in. USB 2 flashdrives would corrupt when being written to. This not only happened to two friends, but one has made a lot of PCs for clients with the A7V8X-X and every one has the USB issue. It could be bad caps, but they ALL seem to have them, bought from different sources over a few years. My A7V8X-X system also had a noisy power supply, so I got an Antec Truepower 550. It was nice and quiet, and the Molex connectors were second to none, but the voltages it supplied were inaccurate from 5-15%!! With either it or the old PSU I would power it on cold and the fans would fire up, but no video, no POST beeps. Then I'd hit reset and it would boot properly. It's not the current at my house, which works with dozens of other PCs I've brought through, is a full 120v, 60Hz, grounded, no brownouts. It also didn't have any lighting or useless mods, though it did have 5 80mm fans - they should be nothing to a PSU like that. On this system, Windows also liked to switch my hard disks back to PIO mode when I wasn't looking, even though I'd applied patches to fix that problem. The disks read well in diagnostics, but I suppose it kept having read errors to cause it to step down like that. It made video editing.... challenging.

    For longer life, I can't comment since the only PC I've ever had cease functioning was a Cyrix 333MHz box. For better performance, that's vague and hard to measure all homemade clones vs all name brand clones, but I certainly have no issues with an XPS710 other than not being able to throw enough at it to max out the CPU. Less heartache? I upgraded my last two clones because they technically worked, but were plagued with so many miserable technical issues and workarounds I couldn't stand them anymore. Really the main reason I went to a name brand is because it was nothing BUT heartache trying to get a custom system to function normally and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

    Also, my last case was a Lian Li, which was very well reviewed way back when I got it.

  13. Re:obviously not about child porn on Why ISPs' "Stand" Against Child Porn Is Actually Not a Stand Against Child Porn · · Score: 1

    Absolutely.
    Usenet is... well, at one point it was kind of "the internet" to most. It's fallen into such disuse now that no one even knows what it is to protest this, and ISPs offered such crap service several years ago that I stopped even discussing things on it because half the discussion would be missing.

    But I don't know why they can't just log and report the IP addresses of these guys. I know many obscure them, but in any other group there would be a majority who is too dumb to do it, and seeing how many people get busted at work with it, I'd imagine there must be in this case too.

    This is basically like blocking access to all webpages because some of them may have child porn on them. pfft. More like they're disabling usenet because it may have warez ISOs and movies on it!

  14. Re:Might as well end communications as we know it. on US ISPs Announce Anti-Child-Porn Agreement · · Score: 1

    Precisely. It's a bogeyman.
    I've always thought a pedo would have to be insane to use usenet anyway - can't their ISP just log which articles they download? (Yes, and search the log among the millions of others after a court order, but still...)

    Big businesses didn't care too much about the internet when it was opened to the public, and we got used to a big sharing free for all for any file type, now that it's become relevant, they're trying to change what the internet is. I think that ultimately they'd like to see it looking like AOL, or Compuserve - a tidy, strongly policed finite set of places to visit, trading only approved files, saying only what is approved.

    I hardly think it's possible to put that cat back in the bag, but then again, these days it's sometimes shocking how much they can restrict by lobbying politicians to pass previously illegal laws.

  15. Full-disk is the way on Schneier, UW Team Show Flaw In TrueCrypt Deniability · · Score: 1

    I prefer full-disk encryption anyway, IMO there is just less worrying to be done. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if Word put stuff in C:\Windows\TEMP\ by default.

    I love FileVault in OSX though I never really researched the encryption used since I just use it out of habit and not for anything important. By all means, tell me why I'm a fool for using it...

  16. Re:What does it take? on What Does It Take To Get a PC With XP? · · Score: 1

    Seriously. I bought my last copy of XP so it would be worry-free, but if I got a new PC and they wouldn't sell it to me... well, I'm getting it one way or the other!

  17. Re:What? on Estimating the Time-To-Own of an Unpatched Windows PC · · Score: 1

    You're right. It is a valid concern. I just think that anyone with "common sense" when it comes to comptuers will avoid this. I actually update fresh installs online because they don't really matter for the most part. I just ALWAYS do it from behind a router that blocks any port that isn't needed. I don't know how it took with the general public, but I remember a few years ago that was given as a (the?) basic Internet security tip.

    I wrote about FUD really unclearly, but what I meant was that this kind of thing on a site like this is usually FUD, though this is a valid lab test from a trusted source - it's just not neccesarily that relevant in itself. Haven't new XP boxes supposedly been owned in 5 min for a year or two now? Being posted here it feels like just another trumpeting of Linux's supposed strengths - kind of like showing how badly a car performs in crash tests after you disable the airbags and remove the seatbelts - SOME people may drive like that, but it takes some manual safety disabling to do, and most are probably smarter, or at least I'd like to think that...

  18. Re:What? on Estimating the Time-To-Own of an Unpatched Windows PC · · Score: 1

    Because, you actually know more Windows than "clicking teh pretty picshurz" so the FUD doesn't apply to you.

    My last virus was SubSeven, back in Win98 because evidently I clicked on an executable that installed it. I scan occasionally, but don't run resident protection. I log in as admin. I've even knowingly installed adware, to later remove it along with the program it supports when I'm done. If you have any awareness of what's going on on your system, you can protect a Windows installation pretty easily. That would be why we're not 80% Mac OS now.

    Then, on a Linux centric site, many users haven't touched Windows since the early to mid 1990s so a lot of obsolete complaints are raised, more as back-patting than real argument. That said, this case is ostensibly an experiment, but I've found if they stuck it behind a cheap home router the time to infection would probably stretch to at least 5 years if it were properly set up for 5 min.

  19. Re:Don't doubt it for a minute on Dell Colludes With RIAA, Disables Stereo Mix · · Score: 1

    I used clones at home, but my last two Asus boards had dealbreaking issues with them and I got sick of always having a PC that was one off from working properly. Now my XPS makes about 1/3 the noise of my old case and is way easier to get into and work in. Inside the box, I've encountered zero issues with it so far, which after the last several years of Asus-based systems is a little surreal. I can even run two nVidias in SLI or two ATIs in Crossfire as I please...

    That said, I may have to find a free fix for this at work now, and if Dell ever tried this with me I'd make them rue the day they ever tried... It's possible to enjoy convenience and NOT take BS.

  20. Mine on Learn a Foreign Language As an Engineer? · · Score: 1

    I took Japanese first (well, forced to take French in elementary school...) and while it took about a decade to reach a useful level, it quickly improves from there. Just... get ready for a loooooong journey to literacy.

    Modern standard Arabic may also be useful, but I like learning languages and the difficulty scares me off. Then, I don't do anything with languages that apply gender to inanimate objects.

    Korean looks fun personally, I don't know how useful it would be for a random given person, but S.Korea doesn't strike me as a bad place to live. The alphabet is super simple and I learned it in about a day - yes, a day - I'm not that amazing, but it is that easy. My vocab is way behind, but what little I know looks like an easy leap from Japanese.

    I also learned a bit of Cyrillic, but I don't know... I think it would be more fun reading Russian blogs and literature than it would be doing business or living there.

    And if you're feeling brave, standard Cantonese - at least in Canada here it would be very useful with the tons of people from Hong Kong. Again, get ready for a rough trip - Japanese kanji and Chinese characters draw from the same pool, and it's not like you just get the general idea one day and know them all - you have to learn each one and exercise it so it doesn't get forgotten in the thousands of others. At least in Japanese there's hiragana and katakana that are easy enough to pick up.

  21. Favorite apps on Linux For Housewives. XP For Geeks. · · Score: 1

    That makes sense to me.
    If you're already a Linux geek... you're going to use Linux.
    If you're already a Windows geek... you probably already have a few hundred of your favorite apps you don't want to leave behind or emulate, working in a system you understand, and can easily troubleshoot if need be.
    And if you're not really into computers, you just want to surf the web, check mail, send IMs, and maybe type up a document or two - anything can do that, so why NOT Linux?

    I run OS X and XP on my main laptop, XP on my secondary laptop, XP on my main desktop, 2003 Server on my secondary, and Linux on my OLPC XO-1... each has its uses.

  22. Re:I think the (tinfoil hat) joke is on us this ti on Ray Gun Puts Voices Inside Your Head · · Score: 1

    So very true.
    The most effective way to silence those who mention such things is not to debate them, but to mock them as nuts and ignore them.

  23. Not really on AT&T To Offer No-Contract iPhone · · Score: 1

    If you're going to use it with them anyway, I think paying full price would only make sense if you got the phone fully unlocked that way and COULDN'T just plug it into your computer and run an app to hack it wide open.

  24. No surprise on Apple Laptop Upgrades Costing 200% More Than Dells · · Score: 1

    You know, I like Dells. Typically they are very reliable, both in design and reality. I've found sometimes they give you cheap RAM that dies in a month or two, maybe about 0.5-1.0% of the time.

    I'd recommend a Dell to someone - especially if they know what they're doing when it comes to building a PC, but want a good system from day 1, with an easy to work in case.

    I'd consider an Apple myself since I got hooked at work. Don't know if I'd buy one, but I've checked it out.

    But for EITHER one, I'd say buy it stock and upgrade it later!!! Both are kind of "brand names" in more of a fashion sense than typical hardware vendors. Dell offers cheap systems despite this, Apple... thinks they are. Apple is definitely the "Gap" of home computers though - you will pay a premium just for the Apple logo. That said, the OS is... very comfortable.

  25. Magnitogorsk. on The World's 10 Dirtiest Cities · · Score: 1

    I ordered some cheap radiation detectors on eBay from Magnitogorsk. (In a word: don't. After dealing with "Annakozub" I started getting a ton of Cyrillic spam immediately out of the blue on an account I don't normally share, that included my name and home address!)

    Anyway, I looked up Magnitogorsk and it was supposed to be Stalin's own Pittsburgh.

    Magnitogorsk has recently been included in the top 25 Worst Polluted Cities by a survey carried out by the Blacksmith Institute. Pollutants include lead, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals and other air pollutants. According to the local hospital, only 1% of all children living in the city are in good health. The Blacksmith Institute says that, according to a local newspaper report, "only 28% of infants born in 1992 were healthy, and only 27% had healthy mothers."