Ha! I hear in downtown Baltimore, junkies will break car windows just to rifle through the ashtray for loose pocket change. Some people post signs saying "No valuables inside", but it doesn't work, or is viewed as an invitation (some thieves break in anyway, and leave their own sign: "You're right! But I checked anyway").
Best approach seems to be to just leave the windows open.:-P
Reminds me of when a friend had their radio stolen from their car, however, the thief took the time slimjim the door rather then bust his window. He even locked it up after he was finish. Just because you're gonna be a thief, doesn't mean you have to be a jerk about it.
I think it goes more like:
Couple arrive home from vacation to find their house was broken into and wiped clean. Thieves were nice enough to have left the roll of film from their stolen camera, and most of their bathroom toiletries. So the couple filed their police report, brushed their teeth, and went to sleep on the floor.
A week later after they got the film developed, turns out they had a few extra blurry pictures taken by the thieves of some toothbrushes jammed up someone's ass.
The robot was the only thing I remember from the early TV advertisements. No mention of it in TFA.
Then I moved to Thailand and it was all Famicom... which seemed a lot sleeker at the time... smaller carts and integrated controller holsters. But Nintendo America knew their market wouldn't go for anything that didn't remind them of a VCR.
Meh, I used OO.org for some graphs for my master's thesis and for work. Had lots of instability with graph formatting and consistent crashes with drop-down menus a few years back. Had to struggle to manually install the latest bleeding edge OO.org (3.2 at the time) that finally addressed some of these issues... the versions packaged for my distros were a tad too old. So I understand when people knock at OO.org .
I can see where M$ is threatened by OO.org becoming the de-facto office suite, though. There's a lot of extra features (that are actually useful, like collaborative "track changes") in MS Office and some nice mail merge wizards that I still haven't seen in OO.org. But most people who do office style work have no idea how to use those features, and think I'm some kind of genius when I point out how they can simply autofilter a spreadsheet to generate different reports from one set of data.
For my part, I do little office-style work and still prefer LyX / LaTeX + gnuplot/octave + make for the occasional serious report generation I do. WYSIWYG is fine for quick and dirty, but gets very cumbersome and unmaintainable after a few chapters.
I've been using Linux on the desktop for the past 10 years, but finally dropped it due to NVidia and Valve:-P
NVidia for making an awesome cheap ION platform, so I finally moved all my Linux stuff off my desktop/server to a tiny quiet dedicated server. And then my main desktop machine would be running Linux too, except Valve failed to release a port of Steam for Linux, and these days I'm too lazy to dick around with getting L4D2 working in WINE:-P
But one of these days... I'm getting tired of the weak Windows analogues to of a lot of the Linux apps I'm accustomed to:-/
I had the same conundrum... easy solution was just to buy one of the relatively low-end phones from craigslist (so I wouldn't waste much money) that was supported by CyanogenMOD. That way I get the updates to the latest version of the OS, a pretty vibrant user and troubleshooting community, rooted tethering and backup apps, install apps to SD card, and... well, there's little downside.
Ended up with a myTouch 3G Slide for $300.
Sure, there were some minor downsides to CyanogenMOD update... I lost access to the HTC Sense interface (not a big loss) and some of the T-mobile apps (but I ended up moving to Google Voice voicemail instead of the T-mobile app, and it's easy enough to do the #646# and #225# to check minutes and balance without taking up space with another app.) There might have been a few hardware issues... the Fn and Caps lights on the keyboard don't work anymore, but I can do without them. The camera and prox sensor seemed to be flaky for a while, but they seem to work better now after a few days / reboots.
T-mobile has been promising OTA updates for their entire line of myTouch phones "just next month" for the past year running. CyanogenMOD usually has updates to the current Android within weeks of release, if not sooner.
The only fragmentation issue left is for actual hardware. I was disappointed to learn that my ARMv6 CPU wouldn't run Google Earth Mobile since it lacked the FPU in the ARMv7 CPU used in the much more expensive units. But the regular google maps mobile takes care of my cartographical needs... and I can whip out Google Earth on my tethered eeepc if I want to.
I always wanted a color screen on my calc, if only to do multi color graphing. I loved playing with 3D graphs and variable sliders on computer apps (the Mac OS 9 graphing calculator was the only Mac app I envied), and it would have been neat (and educational!) to do that kind of thing on a calculator as well. Alas, I may not live to see the day, at the rate things are going (insert ob xkcd ref).
Had a TI-83 in HS, got an HP48GX for engineering school. Never touched one again after going professional:P Actually, in order to take the preliminary Fundamentals of Engineering exam, I had to buy a cheaper simpler scientific calculator just for the test (went with the midrange Casio FX100something, since it still had a solver and some other fancy features buried in it).
I've never really regretted spending money on calculators, though. Even though I could run the HP48 emulator on my old PalmT|X, the feel of the real buttons is much nicer, like an extension of yourself. But someday I'm sure this will sound like some old geezer lusting after the slide rule or abacus:P
I think he's just implying that bacteria are easier to attack than fungus, being a bit lower on the organism complexity scale. Live plants and nematodes tend to do well against fungi, but it will probably be troublesome to find something specific that could help the bees.
But yeah, an effective antiviral might be tougher to develop than an effective fungicide, and both probably harder than an antibacterial, since you usually have to prompt an existing immune system's lymphocytes to recognize and attack a specific virus. And then find a way to inject them into all the little bees' knees.
Huh, thanks. Original link still works for me, but probably someone trying to break the internets with URL referral checks or something... Or just trying to break hotlinking ^_^
If only I could go back in time and make things right... there must be some movie about that or something...
If the only thing we do is teach these kids to become the kinds of people who disable autorun (or hold down Shift while inserting untrusted media), then we would have already made the world a slightly better place...
Did it really erase itself? I think they simply use the phone number from your SIM card as part of your user ID (hey, multi-factor authentication, how about that?).
Anyway, it does sound dorky that you can't just log in with your Nookie username... but I've seen a handful of other apps that use your SIM card as your userid and wouldn't log in to your accounts if someone else put in their SIM. So it's probably more of a misapplied "security feature" than something nefarious.
Hmm, the only clever pr0n app I've come across (huhhuh) on Android was something called Tic Tac Toe. It actually is a fully functional Tic Tac Toe game, but if you click on an X three times, you get a link to a bunch of pr0n streaming sites.
Didn't care for the actual content, but it sure looks like they go out of their way to hide/obfuscate your habit:P
Sweet! I grabbed one of those phones for my wife back in March. T-Mobile has been consistently promising an OTA update to the latest Android version for that phone "next month" since Feb 09. Guess what their line on that phone is now?
Any lawyers in the audience want to make a quick buck for false advertising claims?:P
I bought a myTouch Slide for myself a couple months ago. Ran the HTC Sense for a few weeks, then moved to CyanogenMOD. Good times.
The phone was a little more stable under the stock firmware... the Caps / Fn light on the keyboard doesn't work now, and occasionally the camera app crashes, necessitating a reboot. But yes, functionality galore.
Haven't convinced my wife to update her phone yet, though... she's happy with what she knows, I suppose.:/ Maybe when we finally get some Froyo-only VTC app I could convince her to get off 1.6
I'm writing from my laptop tethered to a myTouch Slide running CyanogenMOD and Barnacle wifi tethering, so I'm getting a kick out of these comments.
Getting about 1Mbps HSDPA from inside a building. I really notice when it drops down to 64kbps EDGE, though.
I try to be responsible with me tethering though... I'm not running any streaming music or anything. I've generated about 5MB down, 1MB up in the past hour.
I don't see why they would get so upset about tethering when people running Google Navigation on cross-country drives or Youtube vids would burn through much, much more. Aside from if they want to charge extra for that feature (like SMS, yech... charging extra to use low QoS?)
As a Debian fan that also played with Familiar Linux on the old Compaq/HP Ipaqs of yore, I was lusting after an N900 for a long, long time. But it was still rather expensive for me, and the dev community on Android appeared to be more active.
Ended up getting a myTouch Slide for $300 on craigslist, specifically because it had good CyanogenMOD support. I would not buy another android phone that would not have good CyanogenMOD support. Not really sure how to turn this into a "movement" that the manufacturers would actually pay attention to, though.
Anyway, if I did need a small palmtop, definitely would go for an N900 or N9. But for a relatively cheap and featureful smartphone, I'm pretty happy with the low-end Android devices that can give me a good ssh / vnc session to a full linux box.:-/
My only (minor) regret is that Google Earth mobile doesn't run on the myTouch Slide, since it doesn't have an adequate FPU (we're back to lusting after math coprocessors again?!) . But google maps mobile gives me all the information I need, so I suppose I could live without the 3D version. Wouldn't be worth the extra $300 or so for a slightly faster high-end Android device just so I could run that app.
More app memory would be great, though... 250M internal mem is barely enough for the top 20 "Android Essential" apps, even after pushing as much to the SD card as practical.
The first thing I do is reconfigure the start menu / gnome panel to live on the side, rather than the top/bottom.
Then disable most of the toolbars / status bars in apps (Google Chrome helps a lot with this, since they have an integrated titlebar/tabbar), and a popup status bar / search bar.)
Finally, I just run more sidebar apps (like gkrellm and the Google desktop sidebar) to fill in the side space until my main app windows are more nicely proportioned. Mostly psychological, yes, but whatever, it helps.
I think the technological history has to do with CRTs being cheaper to blow glass in "square" aspect ratios, like 4:3 and ultimately 5:4. But then LCDs came out, and it became cheaper to make displays bigger by making them long and narrow, since the fab process would become more expensive based on how wide the machinery needed to be.
But really, let them focus on the tools. Go for the CS degree. The art will follow. Or rather, develop the art in concert with the tools. But you need the tools!
Learn the programming, then hack in something using the tools and a good existing game engine, such as the Valve Source engine (relatively easy to script for with Garry's Mod) and maybe something more complex with the Unreal Engine. They don't have to be total nerds to grok the code, but you do need to empower them with the ability to make gameplay changes to an existing engine.
On the other hand, evil people won't need botnets to carry out DDoS attacks anymore if all they need to do is to make their targets look like they are infected. Poof! The plug is pulled!
They could build a huge network of sleeper cells, and then suddenly activate them some fine day. Instant kill switch for most of the internet!
Talk about the cure being worse than the disease:P
Rather than punishing people for their ignorance, why don't we punish the source of the infectability, Microsoft? Yes, 7 is the best Windows yet, but it's got a long way to go before it's Apple or Linux.
Hmm, sorry you got modded troll. But ironically, the way corporate intranets deal with infectability is mandate the "trusted OS" scheme, whereas everyone must run a particular version of Windows with a firewall and antivirus, and everyone else (Mac & *NIX) be damned and get their switchports disabled. So I'm not really a fan of such heavy handed measures, because that kind of security policy is pretty much guaranteed to suck.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope the Chinese jump onboard and start making them for cheap.
I really want one installed on my car for some reason.
I hear it's so much better when someone else adjusts all the straps for you.
Ha! I hear in downtown Baltimore, junkies will break car windows just to rifle through the ashtray for loose pocket change. Some people post signs saying "No valuables inside", but it doesn't work, or is viewed as an invitation (some thieves break in anyway, and leave their own sign: "You're right! But I checked anyway").
Best approach seems to be to just leave the windows open. :-P
Reminds me of when a friend had their radio stolen from their car, however, the thief took the time slimjim the door rather then bust his window. He even locked it up after he was finish. Just because you're gonna be a thief, doesn't mean you have to be a jerk about it.
I think it goes more like:
Couple arrive home from vacation to find their house was broken into and wiped clean. Thieves were nice enough to have left the roll of film from their stolen camera, and most of their bathroom toiletries. So the couple filed their police report, brushed their teeth, and went to sleep on the floor.
A week later after they got the film developed, turns out they had a few extra blurry pictures taken by the thieves of some toothbrushes jammed up someone's ass.
The robot was the only thing I remember from the early TV advertisements. No mention of it in TFA.
Then I moved to Thailand and it was all Famicom... which seemed a lot sleeker at the time... smaller carts and integrated controller holsters. But Nintendo America knew their market wouldn't go for anything that didn't remind them of a VCR.
Meh, I used OO.org for some graphs for my master's thesis and for work. Had lots of instability with graph formatting and consistent crashes with drop-down menus a few years back. Had to struggle to manually install the latest bleeding edge OO.org (3.2 at the time) that finally addressed some of these issues... the versions packaged for my distros were a tad too old. So I understand when people knock at OO.org .
I can see where M$ is threatened by OO.org becoming the de-facto office suite, though. There's a lot of extra features (that are actually useful, like collaborative "track changes") in MS Office and some nice mail merge wizards that I still haven't seen in OO.org. But most people who do office style work have no idea how to use those features, and think I'm some kind of genius when I point out how they can simply autofilter a spreadsheet to generate different reports from one set of data.
For my part, I do little office-style work and still prefer LyX / LaTeX + gnuplot/octave + make for the occasional serious report generation I do. WYSIWYG is fine for quick and dirty, but gets very cumbersome and unmaintainable after a few chapters.
I've been using Linux on the desktop for the past 10 years, but finally dropped it due to NVidia and Valve :-P
NVidia for making an awesome cheap ION platform, so I finally moved all my Linux stuff off my desktop/server to a tiny quiet dedicated server. And then my main desktop machine would be running Linux too, except Valve failed to release a port of Steam for Linux, and these days I'm too lazy to dick around with getting L4D2 working in WINE :-P
But one of these days... I'm getting tired of the weak Windows analogues to of a lot of the Linux apps I'm accustomed to :-/
I had the same conundrum... easy solution was just to buy one of the relatively low-end phones from craigslist (so I wouldn't waste much money) that was supported by CyanogenMOD. That way I get the updates to the latest version of the OS, a pretty vibrant user and troubleshooting community, rooted tethering and backup apps, install apps to SD card, and... well, there's little downside.
Ended up with a myTouch 3G Slide for $300.
Sure, there were some minor downsides to CyanogenMOD update... I lost access to the HTC Sense interface (not a big loss) and some of the T-mobile apps (but I ended up moving to Google Voice voicemail instead of the T-mobile app, and it's easy enough to do the #646# and #225# to check minutes and balance without taking up space with another app.) There might have been a few hardware issues... the Fn and Caps lights on the keyboard don't work anymore, but I can do without them. The camera and prox sensor seemed to be flaky for a while, but they seem to work better now after a few days / reboots.
T-mobile has been promising OTA updates for their entire line of myTouch phones "just next month" for the past year running. CyanogenMOD usually has updates to the current Android within weeks of release, if not sooner.
The only fragmentation issue left is for actual hardware. I was disappointed to learn that my ARMv6 CPU wouldn't run Google Earth Mobile since it lacked the FPU in the ARMv7 CPU used in the much more expensive units. But the regular google maps mobile takes care of my cartographical needs... and I can whip out Google Earth on my tethered eeepc if I want to.
I always wanted a color screen on my calc, if only to do multi color graphing. I loved playing with 3D graphs and variable sliders on computer apps (the Mac OS 9 graphing calculator was the only Mac app I envied), and it would have been neat (and educational!) to do that kind of thing on a calculator as well. Alas, I may not live to see the day, at the rate things are going (insert ob xkcd ref).
Had a TI-83 in HS, got an HP48GX for engineering school. Never touched one again after going professional :P Actually, in order to take the preliminary Fundamentals of Engineering exam, I had to buy a cheaper simpler scientific calculator just for the test (went with the midrange Casio FX100something, since it still had a solver and some other fancy features buried in it).
I've never really regretted spending money on calculators, though. Even though I could run the HP48 emulator on my old PalmT|X, the feel of the real buttons is much nicer, like an extension of yourself. But someday I'm sure this will sound like some old geezer lusting after the slide rule or abacus :P
Whoosh.
I think he's just implying that bacteria are easier to attack than fungus, being a bit lower on the organism complexity scale. Live plants and nematodes tend to do well against fungi, but it will probably be troublesome to find something specific that could help the bees.
But yeah, an effective antiviral might be tougher to develop than an effective fungicide, and both probably harder than an antibacterial, since you usually have to prompt an existing immune system's lymphocytes to recognize and attack a specific virus. And then find a way to inject them into all the little bees' knees.
Huh, thanks. Original link still works for me, but probably someone trying to break the internets with URL referral checks or something. .. Or just trying to break hotlinking ^_^
If only I could go back in time and make things right... there must be some movie about that or something...
xkcd didn't really have to bungle up the Primer timeline as much as they did, though that does sort of defeat the joke:
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com.nyud.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/primer_timeline.jpg
http://megatokyo.com/strip/9
"Does anyone here speak 133+?"
Probably MegaTokyo's finest moment, and blatantly ripped from "Airplane!" at that :P
If the only thing we do is teach these kids to become the kinds of people who disable autorun (or hold down Shift while inserting untrusted media), then we would have already made the world a slightly better place...
if UAC is enabled, Explorer is not running with privileges that can write to the All Users profile.
For that matter, this will fail on any system where the profile directory isn't in "C:\Documents and Settings", which includes any non-English OS.
Use
copy installpopup.bat "%userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup" instead
Thanks! I'm by no means a Windows guru, nor have anything other than my corporate WinXP box to test on :P
It's Windows, so it's easy... just create a CD or USB drive with two files:
autorun.inf :
[autorun]
open=installpopup.bat
installpopup.bat : /k echo "Hi I am a virus"
cmd.exe
copy installpopup.bat "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"
Bonus is that it has plenty of legitimate uses for system automation for your little script kiddies as well.
Did it really erase itself? I think they simply use the phone number from your SIM card as part of your user ID (hey, multi-factor authentication, how about that?).
Anyway, it does sound dorky that you can't just log in with your Nookie username... but I've seen a handful of other apps that use your SIM card as your userid and wouldn't log in to your accounts if someone else put in their SIM. So it's probably more of a misapplied "security feature" than something nefarious.
Hmm, the only clever pr0n app I've come across (huhhuh) on Android was something called Tic Tac Toe. It actually is a fully functional Tic Tac Toe game, but if you click on an X three times, you get a link to a bunch of pr0n streaming sites.
Didn't care for the actual content, but it sure looks like they go out of their way to hide/obfuscate your habit :P
Sweet! I grabbed one of those phones for my wife back in March. T-Mobile has been consistently promising an OTA update to the latest Android version for that phone "next month" since Feb 09. Guess what their line on that phone is now?
Any lawyers in the audience want to make a quick buck for false advertising claims? :P
I bought a myTouch Slide for myself a couple months ago. Ran the HTC Sense for a few weeks, then moved to CyanogenMOD. Good times.
The phone was a little more stable under the stock firmware... the Caps / Fn light on the keyboard doesn't work now, and occasionally the camera app crashes, necessitating a reboot. But yes, functionality galore.
Haven't convinced my wife to update her phone yet, though... she's happy with what she knows, I suppose. :/ Maybe when we finally get some Froyo-only VTC app I could convince her to get off 1.6
I'm writing from my laptop tethered to a myTouch Slide running CyanogenMOD and Barnacle wifi tethering, so I'm getting a kick out of these comments.
Getting about 1Mbps HSDPA from inside a building. I really notice when it drops down to 64kbps EDGE, though.
I try to be responsible with me tethering though... I'm not running any streaming music or anything. I've generated about 5MB down, 1MB up in the past hour.
I don't see why they would get so upset about tethering when people running Google Navigation on cross-country drives or Youtube vids would burn through much, much more. Aside from if they want to charge extra for that feature (like SMS, yech... charging extra to use low QoS?)
As a Debian fan that also played with Familiar Linux on the old Compaq/HP Ipaqs of yore, I was lusting after an N900 for a long, long time. But it was still rather expensive for me, and the dev community on Android appeared to be more active.
Ended up getting a myTouch Slide for $300 on craigslist, specifically because it had good CyanogenMOD support. I would not buy another android phone that would not have good CyanogenMOD support. Not really sure how to turn this into a "movement" that the manufacturers would actually pay attention to, though.
Anyway, if I did need a small palmtop, definitely would go for an N900 or N9. But for a relatively cheap and featureful smartphone, I'm pretty happy with the low-end Android devices that can give me a good ssh / vnc session to a full linux box. :-/
My only (minor) regret is that Google Earth mobile doesn't run on the myTouch Slide, since it doesn't have an adequate FPU (we're back to lusting after math coprocessors again?!) . But google maps mobile gives me all the information I need, so I suppose I could live without the 3D version. Wouldn't be worth the extra $300 or so for a slightly faster high-end Android device just so I could run that app.
More app memory would be great, though... 250M internal mem is barely enough for the top 20 "Android Essential" apps, even after pushing as much to the SD card as practical.
http://j-walkblog.com/images/too_many_toolbars.jpg
The first thing I do is reconfigure the start menu / gnome panel to live on the side, rather than the top/bottom.
Then disable most of the toolbars / status bars in apps (Google Chrome helps a lot with this, since they have an integrated titlebar/tabbar), and a popup status bar / search bar.)
Finally, I just run more sidebar apps (like gkrellm and the Google desktop sidebar) to fill in the side space until my main app windows are more nicely proportioned. Mostly psychological, yes, but whatever, it helps.
I think the technological history has to do with CRTs being cheaper to blow glass in "square" aspect ratios, like 4:3 and ultimately 5:4. But then LCDs came out, and it became cheaper to make displays bigger by making them long and narrow, since the fab process would become more expensive based on how wide the machinery needed to be.
But really, let them focus on the tools. Go for the CS degree. The art will follow. Or rather, develop the art in concert with the tools. But you need the tools!
Learn the programming, then hack in something using the tools and a good existing game engine, such as the Valve Source engine (relatively easy to script for with Garry's Mod) and maybe something more complex with the Unreal Engine. They don't have to be total nerds to grok the code, but you do need to empower them with the ability to make gameplay changes to an existing engine.
On the other hand, evil people won't need botnets to carry out DDoS attacks anymore if all they need to do is to make their targets look like they are infected. Poof! The plug is pulled!
They could build a huge network of sleeper cells, and then suddenly activate them some fine day. Instant kill switch for most of the internet!
Talk about the cure being worse than the disease :P
Rather than punishing people for their ignorance, why don't we punish the source of the infectability, Microsoft? Yes, 7 is the best Windows yet, but it's got a long way to go before it's Apple or Linux.
Hmm, sorry you got modded troll. But ironically, the way corporate intranets deal with infectability is mandate the "trusted OS" scheme, whereas everyone must run a particular version of Windows with a firewall and antivirus, and everyone else (Mac & *NIX) be damned and get their switchports disabled. So I'm not really a fan of such heavy handed measures, because that kind of security policy is pretty much guaranteed to suck.