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User: prelelat

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  1. Re:Just another level of hacking on Preventing Cheating At Hackathons · · Score: 1

    After further reading ignore what I said I thought we were talking about hackathons like it was some of the games at def con where you hack into systems and play games. Not coding or building hackathons.

  2. Re:Just another level of hacking on Preventing Cheating At Hackathons · · Score: 1

    The fun in cheating in such an event is that you can be caught. Break the rules and you lose. No ill will should be held against a person/team who cheats but it should be seen more as a failure to institute your hack properly. Except this time you are hacking the game.

  3. Re:Good on Michael Dell To Buy Dell Inc. · · Score: 4, Informative

    What are you even talking about. Micheal Dell started that company from the ground up building computers one at a time by himself. He put a lot of hard work and time into that company and he sees it's in trouble. So instead of cashing out and getting the fuck away like most people would he takes it appon himself to buy up the company, make it private and try and fix it. He's definitely tied to that company he's treating it like he would a child that has lost it's way. What you are suggesting is that he's just some random guy who happens to have the same name and it's not a big deal. It's a huge deal, you know he's not going to come in there and run it to maximize profits short term, that he's not going to sell off everything to show profits to investors. A move like this suggests that he wants to go in there an fix the company long term without worrying about investors breathing down his neck.

    Your trivializing this action in a day when it doesn't usually happen with large companies. Even apple was still publicly shared when Jobs took back his roll.

  4. Re:if someone has your iPhone..... on Can the iPhone Popularize Fingerprint Readers? · · Score: 1

    A portion of the A7 that has to be accessible to the OS for login attempts. A firmware update or OS update might allow that user data to be uploaded eventually. Not to say that Apple would do that, just that it could be possible.

  5. Re:i can always wipe my phone remotely on Can the iPhone Popularize Fingerprint Readers? · · Score: 1

    If it has network connectivity sure. If your phone is stolen and removed from any networks you could potentially break into the phone and have an unlimited amount of time to access the data. The best security feature Apple had on the ipad was delays between incorrect login attempts leading to eventual wiping of the data. I wonder if an incorrect finger scan will result in the same delay and wipe or if it's disabled in case of accidental miss entries.

    I'm curious to see if someone can easily circumvent the fingerprint scanner with traditional methods.

  6. Re: Why is Apple the one being sued? on Apple Sued For Dividing Final Season of Breaking Bad Into Two On iTunes · · Score: 2

    If best buy advertised as "Buy the whole 5th season for 22 bucks" yeah it's best buys fault. They didn't advertise correctly. The problem with apple isn't that they sold half the season it's that they sold the full season and then it was broken up and you only got the first half. It's a bait and switch they should get a refund or the second half which they thought they were paying for in the first place.

    If AMC screwed apple then apple could turn around and sue their pants off for damages to them caused by this. Though I doubt that they would, considering they can just take the hit for the cost of lawyer fees and keep their contract with AMC. Apple might not be directly at fault but you have to go after the person who screwed you and Apple screwed it's customers either intentionally or unintentionally.

  7. No one won the cold war, the USSR folded. No one ever wins a war you just lose less. I guess if winning is getting to stick around then you might win but I think that hardly should count. I'm starting to feel like someone is closing the lid on a pressure cooker and about to turn it on.

  8. Not bad at all on BT Prepares To Pull Plug On Dial-Up · · Score: 1

    This seems to be good news for everyone. BT gets to can a part of their business that is already made redundant by an owned property. They can allocate those resources somewhere else. The other telecom gets an increase of around 1000 subscribers increasing revenue for them. For some reason the crazy individuals who were paying more for the same service are now being informed that they should pay this other company less for the same service. The only people who lose are the ones who were technicians working directly on the dialup infrastructure. Hopefully they were doing both and keep their jobs.

  9. Re:Python? Really? on Researchers Reverse-Engineer Dropbox, Cracking Heavily Obfuscated Python App · · Score: 1

    Bad choice in metaphors really. Assembly would be more akin to making a 3D model out of clay and presenting it instead of doing it in software and printing it off on a 3D printer. You end up with the same result, one is easier to do, but one has a more human feel to the fine details of the finished product. Curves are put on the clay were only a tangle mess of excess plastic is on the printed version. In the end both do their job, ones highly more efficient with no excess the other easy to reproduce and build tangents off of.

  10. Re:and yet Amazon is raising prices now on Judge Rules Apple Colluded With Publishers to Fix Ebook Prices · · Score: 1

    A few months ago I read a book called Silo off of amazon it was directly through amazon with no physical counterpart I believe the physical version came out not long ago because it was doing so well. I think the author kept the digital distribution rights. I agree it can be done.

    These industries are changing and if they don't change along with it they will eventually be left in the dust.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_(series)

  11. Re:Open Source... on Sent To Jail Because of a Software Bug · · Score: 1

    There was one post master who claimed to have been charged upward of 30 pounds in theft. There were others with large sums as well that went missing. If they believe there was a bug in the software and got together I'm sure they could find the bug, clear their name and seek restitution for what they had to pay back. If enough of them got together and bought even a couple guys I'm sure they would be better off financially as well as having their names cleared, keeping their houses and contracts.

    That's options 1.

    Option 2 is to have someone start a business that analyses specific problems with the postmasters. They can look at the code and even go over policies and procedures with the post masters. Charge a licensing fee for the extra support that you offer, have it be an unbiased third party.

    With the amount of money at risk to being lost and the number of sub-post masters that they were talking about in the article it wouldn't even have to be a large amount of money from each sub-post master to sustain someone specifically to look at the code for them.

    You talk about communism but I don't think the moment you start working together it's communism nor is it a bad thing. This isn't 1950's U.S. this is 2013 UK.

    I'm not saying they should be open source or not, they could give access to the code to a third party company so that they could trouble shoot it anyways with NDA and all that jazz. In the end the story here is that these folks are apparently being screwed by the post office and they have no recourse to prove it. The same thing could happen to anyone using closed sourced software to do accounting or other sensitive work. One bug could land people in jail and your are shit out of luck to prove it was a bug. Not having the option to hire someone to look at the code is scary in that aspect.

  12. Re:Anonymous Coward on Former Valve Hardware Designer Recounts Management Difficulties · · Score: 1

    I'm hoping you are a troll but you probably don't even know who Jeri Ellsworth is. It is worth noting SHE is very very smart and quite brilliant and quite well known in the hardware hacker community. Jeri was working on some interesting hardware over at valve but I think with the way that the Oculus Rift was advancing Gabe was most likely looking to head in another direction from her tech. I think it was pretty awesome that he signed off on Jeri taking the hardware she was working on with her when she left I don't know of many companies that would knowingly do that. It also indicates that the hardware she was working on was of no interest to Valve any longer and was most likely the reason she was let go.

  13. Re:Boycott VISA MASTERCARD. Start using BITCOIN. on MasterCard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers · · Score: 1

    The worlds becoming a global economy and I have no problems paying someone over seas. I have no hard feelings over it morally, they are people too and they deserve jobs. That is if they are properly compensated and working conditions for that person are fine. If you build a good working relationship with someone and they provide good services and people on both sides are happy then it shouldn't matter. Yes that money could go to someone from your country and they could very well distribute that money back into your economy but as the worlds economies become more and more tied to each other does that really matter so much?

    What's the point anyways wall street can go and fuck up the local economy in the U.S. and not bat an eye even if everyone put their money back into the local economy.

  14. Re:Not really HTML5 on Netflix Ditches Silverlight With HTML5 Support In IE11 · · Score: 1

    In my opinion DRM will never work period let me put that out there to start.

    Now, I'm not sure why you think these other issues you presented are any less of an issue on any other platform. You could rewrite firefox now for windows and do the same thing your describing.

    DRM could very well eventually make it into HTML5 (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/Digest/The-Electronic-Frontier-Foundation-Objects-to-WC-HTML-Standards-90321.asp) it's been discussed to no end all over the place. It's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. On one end you'll have people clamoring for it and if it's not there making plugins possibly multiple ones with no standardization. including it in HTML5 would at least standardize it somewhat and allow one product to be patched for security holes. The other token is, is it HTML5's job to do that standardization and include it? Probably not but if they don't you could end up with a mess of plugins like netflix has. If they do include DRM you will more likely see it implemented in firefox and chrome and have it work on linux. If netflix adopts that standard for DRM then you could very well see netflix on linux.

    I don't see how having netflix on an opensource browser on an opensource OS is different than having it in an opensource browser on a closed system. The OS is most likely not going to be your limiting factor in attacking the DRM in HTML5 because it's going to be written to be able to be used on things from windows, OSX, iOS, android, chromeOS and so forth Linux isn't out of the question.

  15. Re:Not really HTML5 on Netflix Ditches Silverlight With HTML5 Support In IE11 · · Score: 1

    Fair enough.

    My point was more to the fact that by the time netflix drops silverlight XP will most likely be past it's EOL. At that point I don't think people should expect it to be supported. My previous post came across as more harsh than I was expecting now that I reread it with fresh eyes. Sorry if I offended you or the original poster.

  16. Re:Still need to install something on Netflix Ditches Silverlight With HTML5 Support In IE11 · · Score: 4, Informative

    They won't they will require you to download it just like most other plugins you get for FF. That's how it should be at least. I'm not sure what chrome will do. I would hope they would have it as a download, while I would probably install it at home I wouldn't want extra stuff shoved in from a fresh install.

  17. Re:Still need to install something on Netflix Ditches Silverlight With HTML5 Support In IE11 · · Score: 2

    Yeah but they never were, they were using silverlight which was/is considerably better. I think the only reason netflix is dumping it, is because microsoft have basically gave it an EOL. I just hope the new one works on *nix.

  18. Re:Not really HTML5 on Netflix Ditches Silverlight With HTML5 Support In IE11 · · Score: 1

    Yep pretty much but that's what you're stuck with, with HTML5 not having a good drm scheme in it. You're going to find a bunch of different DRM plugins for browsers. More attack vectors and so on.

    I can see both sides to it though, DRM is a piece of shit so why include something comprable in HTML5 people will just find a way to circumvent it if they wish anyways.

    On the other hand the content provider(here netflix) has to give content creators assurances that their content won't just be stolen and distributed. This puts them in a tough spot. Do you risk losing all of your content to support a DRM free system, or do you put in DRM and say the majority of people will still use it. You pick the DRM because you still have content to stream. So I understand that.

    Now your stuck having to implement DRM to satisfy your content providers. How do you do that, well you use silverlight it has DRM protection built in, but now it's 2013 and you're the only people using it and it's going to depreciate in the near future. Do you drop DRM and pray that not everyone runs over to Amazon, Hulu or youtube? Nope you pop in a plugin and call it a day.

    Is different? I hope so. Silverlight had the problem of being a Microsoft plugin so it never EVER showed up on linux. I'm a linux guy so that hurt, a lot. With an HTML5 plugin for firefox and chrome my hope is that it will work cross platform(see no reason why they wouldn't have it) and I can have netflix on my linux machine and my OpenELEC machine.

  19. Re:Not really HTML5 on Netflix Ditches Silverlight With HTML5 Support In IE11 · · Score: 1

    No they haven't dropped silverlight yet, and I suspect that they will not until firefox and chrome all use html5 otherwise that would be silly. Then you could install FF or Chrome on your xp machine to which I have to ask. Why are you still using windows XP as your main media machine? I can understand in, industry why you would maybe have XP for older custom built applications but for a home machine watching netflix? XP is quickly becoming outdated for other reasons it hits EOL in less than a year. Then you have other problems like security vulnerabilities. You have much more to worry about than netflix which as I said, isn't a problem.

  20. Re:The power of love on Industrious Dad Finds the Genetic Culprit To His Daughters Mysterious Disease · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't know if it's intentional but you are trivializing what he did because he used money to get there. Yes there are plenty of parents out there that don't have the resources(which to me seemed more like connections because of his training than money) to get this looked at.

    You don't have to be poor to care and that's how you make it sound. He did work out of his basement yes he most likely spent a some cash on it. That doesn't trivialize the process. People like him are why we have improvements in diseases like ALD. If this genetic mutation starts showing up in others now that they know about it then we are one step ahead of the game on finding a cure.

  21. Re:the return of the Start button on Hands-On With Windows 8.1 Preview · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why not just give windows 8.1 a try. While it doesn't suppress the metro screen completely I see no reason why you would have to use it now if you didn't want to. You can boot directly to the desktop which is basically windows 7. Plus you get all the new feature that windows 8 offers. Also the new Metro screen looks quite nice actually, though the metro apps don't seem to get any love with this update so blah.

    If I were you and still rocking windows 8 I would check out 8.1 it looks pretty nice. I've been using window 8 as well for awhile and I must say outside of the metro stuff it's very nice. But that's personal preference so all the power to you.

  22. Re:Done us all a favor on Wikileaks Aiding Snowden - Chinese Social Media Divided - Relations Strained · · Score: 1

    I assumed because I'm from Canada and we had it that they were talking about conscription. Basically forcing people to join the military and fight and die over seas for something they may or may not care about. As effective as that was and necessary in some cases it is a huge violation for peoples freedoms.

    So I think that's what was meant by that statement, or at least how I took it.

  23. This article makes no sense, the console market was expected to have a drop off in anticipation of the next generation consoles. Console sales and game sales typically drop.

    A controller for iOS this sounds about as good as the Ouya or how ever you spell it. It's a great idea but adoption is far and long off and it's not going to replace the console market any time soon. Don't get me wrong the idea behind this and the Ouya are good concepts but the developers aren't there for AAA titles, the quality doesn't quite match the consoles for 300 more, you get a real video card, blu-ray player, and nice online game community. Seems worth the extra cost for a gamer casual to hard core. Before the next Console comes out? Maybe but Sony and Microsoft have nothing to worry about with Apple for the start of this console generation. Why even bring it up? This is just a piece just to drum up page views and nothing more.

  24. Re:All of them. on Google's Crazy Lack of Focus: Is It Really Serious About Enterprise? · · Score: 1

    That's a more than fair assessment of the situation though the subject of the article seems to suggest that this isn't the core problem with Enterprise adoption but that the fact they are over stretching into some strange projects. Frankly I don't think this is any different than Microsoft expanding into the video game, phone, tablet, and all the other things that they do. It's just that Google is cooler, newer fresher so they get a big chunk of media attention over it.

    My main concern with Google's products in the corp world is, is that it's all cloud based. Google's bread and butter is analyzing all the data they collect to market to you better. It's not something I want. I don't want Google looking at stuff and I don't want a government gag order coming down to collect data and not knowing about it. If we keep it in house and end up with a legal order to submit data that's one thing but if Google gets it with a gag order that's a whole other ball game.

  25. Re:+1, Flamebait on Man Of Steel Leaps Over Record With $125.1 Million To Mixed Reviews · · Score: 1

    Haha oops. Louis Lane would be an awesome alternative story. It could bring a lot of good social commentary, but I doubt we'll see that happen. I think it would work better for an older Billy Batson as I could see DC potentially running it, where as they never would with Superman.