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November 29, 2004
Kill whitey......'s servers........
I just saw this link about a new screen saver from lycos. This one is like seti at home or whatever "take advantage of unused cycles" program is hip these days but instead of helping mankind by sequencing genomes or curing cancer, it requests webpages from spammers. This is sweet because if a critical mass of people install it then the web pages spammers use will start cosing them more, due to bandwidth charges. This will make spamming less appealing, hopefully, because it's always depended on the fact that it was so cheap.
I also dig the fact that lycos put some thought into this program. They wanted to make sure they didn't trigger a denial of service attack, which happens when web servers get hit with more traffic than they can take and stop working. Lycos doesn't want to "attack" the servers, just generate enough traffic to make the owners have to pay more. I'm guessing they could be legal remifications if they were responsable for attacks, so that's to be avoided. The article says that computers running this will download about 3 - 4 megs a day from the various sites, about the size of a mp3. The list of sites targeted is pulled from collections of blacklists but they're also verified by actual humans so that no one, hopefully, is falsely targeted.
Posted by bucjos at 05:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Came across this today...
in the msdn help section there is an entry entitled "the red pill". The guy that wrote this entry did all his work on a G3 powerbook running virtual PC. Kinda cool.....
Posted by bucjos at 04:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
grrrrr...
Okay, right now I am rather displeased with my civic. I had to replace the battery two weeks ago because it came to my attention that the old battery didn't play well with cold weather. Whenever the temprature got below 40 or so it would struggle to statt, failing once in the Wells Fargo parking lot where Mr. Boyum was kind enough to jump me.
Well, after replacing said battery my stereo didn't work. It powered up and all that but it wanted a security code. This was rather disheartening because I had no such code. I come to find that I must remove the stereo to find a mystical serial number on the back that will, once told to a honda technician, grant me a security code. I procede to scour the internet for directions to remove the stereo and find this link( warning, it loads an adobe acrobat .pdf file). It takes 10 steps to get the stereo out. And these aren't little steps. One step alone calls for the removal of three screws to remove a large panel of plastic, one of several panels removed.
I follow said instructions, taking two hours to do so, and remove stereo. I copy down the number on the back, replace my stereo, taking only an hour now because I'm well versed in where and how pieces go, and become rather pleased with myself.
So today I go to the dealer to find that I neede a different code off of the back of my stereo. Supposedly there is some "sticker" that should be on it. Well....I don't recall seeing a sticker but, regardless, I must now take my car apart again to see if the sticker is actually there. If it is not.....I must buy a new stereo.......hence the title....grrrrrrrr
Posted by bucjos at 03:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 22, 2004
I'm all for free speach...
...but a game simulating JFK's murder just seems like a bad idea to me. I'm not saying this should be illegal, but it does go against good taste to let people gun down someone's dad/brother/whatever. Especially seeing as how it is viewed as one of the greatest tragedies of a nation that you are not a part of. It's one thing to rip on your own country but to do it to another? What do you think? Should I get to work on programming a game where you get to watch Arafat slip into a coma and die?
Posted by bucjos at 02:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 17, 2004
is the juice worth the squeeze?
That's a line froma pretty poor film that brooke and I saw a while back but it applies to this article. Seems Verizon is introducing Fibre to the Premisis, or FTTP, in Florida. This means that residents will have connections that are significantly faster than cable modems right from their house. In exchange for this newly added spead they are suffering through Verizon employee's breaking all forms of pipes, sewer, water, etc., and even causing sink holes that swallow up child toting mini-vans. The count for things busted by Verizon is over 200 since august. That's pretty impressive work, unless it's your house with a poo geyser errupting in it.
Posted by bucjos at 02:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 11, 2004
I didn't even have to complain and they apologized
So, there was a little incident last night that made me, and many others angry at CBS. They interrupted the last 5 minutes of CSI: NY, which is an hour long, to tell us that Arafat had died. This was not sweet because 1) He's been in a coma for a few days and we all new this was coming. 2) The 10 o'clock news is on right after CSI : NY. By the time the interruption was done we saw the last 5 seconds of the teaser for next week and then the news started.
Turns out they're sorry and are going to reair it on Friday, in it's entirety, so that's cool. They're blaming an over eager news director for this one. Mooney let me know that if we'd had an HD receiver we could have avoided this. Turns out that the HD stations can have substations so CBS just puts a little banner thing on the bottom of the screen and says "flip to sub-channel x to see the news break" and the normal show keeps on a rolling. Man that's a good idea.
ps. I was trying to google for a better press release on CBS apologizing than the one on CBS's site but when I ran the search there were a lot of results. Maybe a few of the eager news directores should be replaced with researchers and/or someone running the censor button during live preformances?
Posted by bucjos at 05:06 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
And SCO goes down in flames
Well, the final blow to SCO's ridiculous claim that it owns linux, and everyone that has ever used it owes them money, has been delivered.
(For those of you unfamiliar with the case, SCO thinks they own the UNIX source, they don't, and that some of it made it's way into linux, it didn't, and are suing several big companies to try and make some money. They've laid off almost all of their developers and were banking on the income from lawsuits for their profit...whoops)
It seems that right before Novell licensed UNIX to SCO both parties agreed that Novell retained all copyright, trademark and licenses for UNIX and anything else that SCO used of theirs.
This makes one wonder, could SCO's stock sink any faster? The lawsuits started in the summer of 2003 which corresponds to the beginning of the end for SCO. I really hope companies see this and realize that suing should not be a valid business plan.
Posted by bucjos at 03:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 05, 2004
The meek shall inherit the earth...but the dumb are apprently in control
So, read about this incident, which could very likely have been an accident, which is pretty scary. Then I read about two lawsuits. We'll call the dumb lawsuit #1 and dumb lawsuit #2. #1 involves a patent covering selling something via a computer and allowing a person to determine the shipping charges by inputting their address. It, functionally, seems to be patenting international commerce involving a computer. Unreal. Dumb lawsuit #2 is even easier to make fun of. It is a lawsuit by a company that appears to have been given a patent for trying to display 3D objects on a 2D screen. So think of pretty much any game you've ever played that's more advanced than Pac-Man and that game broke this patent. That's not exactly true but the vast majority of games, back to the original Wolfenstein, did. I'm still waiting for the descendants of Newton to say they want payment for the use of gravity....for the love...
Posted by bucjos at 12:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack