Lolograms
HP Voodoo thingies
HP have left “trace” on on some of their asp.net pages. This outputs a nice big table of data, some of which shouldn’t be publicly available.
Like the sql queries they’re outputting, which reveals parts of their table structure to anyone with bad intentions.
What’s most amazing is they reveal how many active sessions are on the site. Apparently over 100 people are browsing their retardedly-expensive notebooks. Fucks me why a Voodoo with a paint job makes the machine worth $3000 more than the HP-branded notebooks. No wonder ACER is creeping their way up the ranks.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Come on Dell, Show us the Numbers
It’s been nearly 2 weeks since Dell bowed to the perception of demand for a major computer retailer to provide Linux on computers.
Craploads of people expressed their support for the idea, and Dell figured it might be a good idea to follow through since there was so much demand for the machines. They expressed their support for a few other open-source, fuck Microsoft oriented ideas, essentially hijacking the site and turning into a very boring place to submit and vote on ideas that could never become popular when competing with an ideology that has a following with nothing to do between school and sleep.
So anyway, Dell setup a new section of their website where you could buy a couple of flavours of Linux on known-to-be-compatible hardware and all that.
So where’s the results? You’d think, given the huge number of people demanding it, there’d be a huge number of sales bearing at least some relation to the demand.
After nearly two weeks there’s been no follow up on the Direct2Dell blog and that strikes me as funny. These 11 days have been an ideal time to keep the buzz and the hype burning, to congratulate the open source community for their insight and all that self-validating stuff the younger open source people live for.
But there’s been nothing. No mention, no congratulations, no acknowledgement, not even a hint about whether it’s a success.
This isn’t just an important moment for Dell, this is an important moment for the open source community.
So what’s the story Dell? How many of these machines are you actually selling?
My favourite theory is a bunch of kids hijacked IdeaStorm, created a false demand for products they didn’t want to or couldn’t buy, and in doing so discredited the open source community and the IdeaStorm website. No news means the sales were crap and there’s nothing positive to say about it. I wonder how this’ll affect the rest of the tards’ ideas on IdeaStorm – notably to get rid of Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and to preload a sizable volume of open source junk onto computers instead?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Top 7 reasons I don’t use a Mac
7) You can’t upgrade the hardware except at purchase time. Minor upgrades like ram and hard drives aren’t the same thing as putting a 10x more powerful video card in.
6) The cases just aren’t that pretty or even particularly unique. They’re barely different from other notebooks and PC cases come in so many shapes, sizes and colours anyone who wanted one could build a Mac clone.
5) Being able to switch operating systems by shaking your weiner in front of the camera is a feature people don’t need unless the base operating system is inferior. Windows and the software available on it does pretty much everything you can think of. Windows itself would do more, but it would be anti-competitive if Microsoft shipped what Apple and Ubuntu are allowed to with their operating system.
6) iTunes is such a crappy application I have no faith in the rest of their suite. It’s slow, laggy and awkward to use. Sorry if you think otherwise.
3) I like to maximise windows. I also like to maximise videos. Add Quicktime to the list of Apple software that makes me hate them. $30 to play full screen video, a feature of pretty much every other free and commercial media player from the last decade? Right.
2) The culture is just plain irritating and unattractive. Nobody buys a PC so they can sit in a circle playing with their neighbour. A computer and operating systems are just tools to get to the applications you actually *want* to use. I spend nearly no time at all actually using Windows features, or just playing with the operating system. I wouldn’t feel comfortable joining a society that is obsessed with the second you see an operating system between deciding you want to open an application, and that application opening.
1) I’m not a trendy, hip, wanker.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )When bullshit talks, does money walk?
In the maybe-news today is popular blogspam site Engadget. They deviated from their usual “rehash some other blog” model that allows them to participate in the endless circle of blogspam “reporting” with hilarious results.
A “trusted” source sent them an email that was circulated at Apple claiming the iPhone and OS X Leopard would be delayed till October and January respectively.
They were wrong, which is hardly news, but the results of their post were news. Apple’s stock dropped about $4 a share – each dollar representing close to a BILLION dollars in value to the company), and people lost lots of money.
All I can say is, lol @ engadget. And double lol @ any retard who thinks recycling what other people are writing makes anyone an authority.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )News just in – digg users gamed again with misreported piracy-justification
Does the MPAA and the RIAA skew numbers? Most likely. Does piracy exist and does it cause them to lose money? Undoubtably.
The two don’t cancel each other out – it’s like when guys tell girls they’re packing 237 feet of meat. Doesn’t mean they’re eunuchs, just means they talk shit.
Today on digg there’s a story growing in popularity about how the MPAA lies about piracy statistics. The ironic thing is the article has played digg users for the gullible, seeking validation crowd they are.
The article makes the sensationalist claim that 70% of piracy occurs in Canada, while 40% occurs in New York.
Anyone can see instantly that that adds up to 110%, without even factoring in the thieves in the rest of the world.
And predictably the digg crowd jumped up and down, stamped their pubescant feet and proclaimed the MPAA is full of crap and that if they expect money for a movie they should make a good movie. Hah. Nobody’s forcing you to watch them, nobody’s forcing you to steal them. You steal them because you want them, you don’t pay for them because you’re thieves. Grow some balls and admit it instead of trying to blame somebody else for your pirating habits.
Some particularly dull sparks believe they should be able to watch a movie and then decide if they should pay for it. Why don’t you try that crap on your landlord and see how it gets you? Or next time you’re in a restaurant, walk out without paying, after you’ve had your meal. Idiots.
If you want to preview whether or not something is worth paying for, then watch the previews. Read reviews. Make a decision based on freely available information and releases. That’s why movies release previews and ship advance copies to critics – to help you make a decision.
The actual quotes are:
Original 50% pirated in Canada was claimed by Fox.
http://www.cynicsunlimited.com/2007/01/25/the-movie-industry-threatens-canada-foolishly/Current 70% was claimed by Warner Bros and was for Warner Bros films only.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_en_mo/canada_film_piracyThe only MPAA stat was the 43% of pirated movies in New York.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070503/film_nm/piracy_dc
It’s really very simple. If you want something that costs money you have to pay for it. It’s just like rent, food, computers, internet connections, shoes, clothes, iPods, Coca Cola, cigarettes, alchohol, lightbulbs and all the other things that power our days.
Don’t try and pretend it’s not stealing to take without paying. Don’t try and justify it based on your opinion of whether it’s quality or not, or whether it’s too expensive or not. I think Porsche’s are too expensive, doesn’t mean I should have to pay nothing for one.
You’re tight bastards and you’re deliberately breaking the law and the most hilarious part is – you think the world’s going to change just because you’ve got BitTorrent.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Poor Dell
A whil ago Dell released a new website called IdeaStorm, allowing anyone to contribute ideas with other users voting on the ones they like.
They made one terrible and expensive mistake, and the results are likely to make you ache with laughter.
The mistake
Dell forgot to limit IdeaStorm to just their customers! They allowed and still allow open registration.
In and of itself that isn’t particularly bad, but when you’re one of the world’s biggest pc manufacturers and you’re taking ideas in a digg-style site, all the silly little retards come along with their ideas and logic-defying justification that wouldn’t even make sense drunk.
The suggestions
These are the current popular suggestions. In some cases they contrast quite sharply with themselves and some good ideas get dwarfed by the votes of assloads of teenagers demanding to be heard when they have no buying power and more importantly, nothing to say.
Most of the popular suggestions can be broken down into 3 categories: Give us open source software / operating systems, give us no software / operating systems, and hardware.
- Pre-install Open Office and a bunch of other crap
106,793 retards think Dell should pre-install even more stuff on people’s computers.Not just Open Office, but Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, PDF Creator, Scribus, Inkscape , GIMP, Audacity, VLC, Stellarium and Celestia.12 *more* applications, in addition to the crapware Dell already bundles.
MS Office is not particularly cheap, but it is particularly industry standard, powerful and featureful. Open Office is good but it’s not as good.
As an alternative to Microsoft Works, which blows, it’s a great idea. As an alternative to Microsoft Office, it’s stupid sorry.
Firefox is a stupid idea but I’ll cover that shortly.
- Have Firefox pre-installed as the default browser
88,503 idiots want this. Oh yes, please do. It would be too hilarious not to – if you have any sense of humour at all you’ll do this Dell!Until the Mozilla Corporation pull their well funded fingers out of their well rounded asses and actually fix their browser, this is a retarded idea.Firefox is over 4 years old. It is unacceptable for an application to be so buggy, unstable and mind-boggingly resource intensive. Mozilla’s biggest achievement isn’t Firefox, it’s convincing retards everywhere that such awful code is acceptable.
Dell can’t pre-install it and make it the default browser. They undoubtably test everything they put on their computers, and that’s going to undoubtably show intermittent crashing, memory leaks, profile corrupting and sluggish performance on some percentage of their computers.
On a system with 256 or 512mb of memory, both of which Dell provide to consumers, Firefox could best be described as “crippling”.
The justification for this suggestion is reason enough to avoid it –
“Firefox OWNZ everything else. Plain and simple. I love firefox, IE7 is pathetic in comparison, it’s attempt at tabbed browsing blows.”, says some dick.Another retard explains how Firefox is “exciting” because it does more without “feature bloat”. Opera does more out of the box, faster, lighter and their quality assurance actually does their job, unlike Asa “Watch me Embarass Myself” Dotzler. For a giggle read this post – he says “Firefox on Mac just doesn’t work as well as Firefox on Windows”, neatly omitting that it’s his job to make sure it *does*.
- No extra software option
77,628 people think this is a good idea and so do I, but it kind of constrast sharply with the previous two. - Student discounts
By all means, give students a discount. Unfortunately only 13,403 people support this real and valuable suggestion.Some people argue that it’s already available in the USA – but um, there’s kind of 96% of the world “outside” the USA. - Pre-installed Linux
This is the big one. 140,839 kids managed to register and create the illusion of actual market demand for Linux.Dell is going to trial this soon, offering Ubuntu on some of their home/smb desktops.It slipped the attention of these users that Dell has offered RedHat on workstations for years, or it was unacceptable to them because that’s a “commercial” version of Linux?Some of the realists posting comments suggested just a “no OS” version that doesn’t limit people to a specific distro, while others wandered off into some fantasy land where consumers might want to dual boot. Most consumers can barely handle single-booting.
The Ubuntu fans won the day and Dell is going to make Ubuntu available on a few of their products – the question remains though – is anyone going to buy it?
I doubt it. There’s a difference between a 16 year old Microsoft-hater registering on a site so they can vote for Linux, and someone who say, has a job and buys stuff like computers.
- Pre-installed software must be optional
Unfortunately only 26,524 people supported this idea although it’s under consideration.Personally I think no software, as opposed to the somewhat more popular “craploads more software” is a great idea.Last year I dropped a couple of grand on a new HP desktop, which took 2 fucking hours to remove all the crap. - Provide Linux drivers
60,377 people voted for this and it’s a sound idea, except Dell doesn’t actually make the hardware. They possibly have enough clout to force hardware manufacturers to release drivers. - Sell Linux PC’s woldwide
Since only 4% of the world’s population is in the United States, it makes sense to at least target the entire possible market if you’re going to do something.Only 6950 people supported this idea. - LinuxBIOS instead of proprietry bios32,106 people voted for this idea. I’m not sure what difference it actually makes, someone mentioned better support for virtualisation which sounds cool.
- More RAM
34,169 people think 512mb of ram isn’t enough for the base memory anymore. It probably isn’t anymore.There’s two sides of the argument – the RAM can already be increased during the configuration process, and increasing the minimum will bump up the price.Both are valid. I’m capable of clicking the option to have more, others won’t know what that means or why they should. - Don’t elimated XP just yet
20,470 people must have heard the rule of thumb – don’t get an OS until the OS gets a service pack!There’s nothing wrong with early adoption, but the chances of a bumpy ride are higher than 6 – 12 months later when 300 things have been patched. - No OS pre-installed
I’m not sure how 140,000 people can demand Linux when 80,000 of the same people don’t want an operating system installed at all.One of the common trends in the OS-related ideas is the notion people will save money by not “buying” Windows. The ironic thing is Windows is “given” to you because the bundled crapware covers the license cost and then some. - Silent / Quiet computers
29,177 agree with this great idea. Better fans, sound dampening etc. Computers are too noisy. - Include software cd’s
Only 4,030 people agreed with this one. Being able to reinstall the software you want and the operating system without the bundled bullshit is a good idea. - Become the open source OEM
27,608 people think Dell should capture this tiny market, without realising it’s the hardware manufacturers they need to target.Having Dell sort through Linux-compatible hardware for you doesn’t really change that.
FUD Flows Both Ways at Mozilla Corporation
Whenever a report is released that says something positive about Microsoft the open source world rises up in anger and announces it is FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – or even just plain lies.
It is inconceivable to them that one of the largest software companies in the world could get something right, even though they have an impressive and industry standard lineup of software – Exchange, Office, SQL Server etc. Ironically a lot of open source software aspires or is created specifically to counter Microsoft titles.
Late last year Microsoft sponsored a comparison between Internet Explorer 7’s anti-phishing capabilities, which found it to be better than Firefox’s. This is no surprise – often when Microsoft sponsors a comparison the results are found in their favour.
The surprise is that Mozilla sponsored a comparison as well, that showed their results are not just better, but significantly better.
The Microsoft report
The report can be read in full here, with reviews here, here and here.
Generally unbiased, it found that both Microsoft and Google (Firefox uses Google for their anti-phishing feature) got no false positives and were both pretty good, with Microsoft being a little better. The runner up was Netcraft’s toolbar which scored only slightly less than Internet Explorer 7.
IE 7.0 ended up with a score of 172, only four ahead Netcraft’s toolbar which scored 168. Google/Firefox was a distant third with 106, eBay fourth on 92, Earthlink ScamBlocker fifth on 76, GeoTrust Trustwatch sixth with 67, Netscape 8.1 seventh with 56, and McAfee SiteAdvisor coming in last place with an almost useless 3.
The Mozilla report
I had to double-check this when I first read it because it didn’t make sense. After re-reading it and doing some Googling I realised it was correct, but it still didn’t make much sense.
The Mozilla-funded comparison found that the Firefox/Google combo for anti-phishing was not just better, but significantly better than Internet Explorers.
You can read various reviews of their findings here, here, here, here and here.
Essentially they found that
- Mozilla’s anti-phishing detected slightly more than Internet Explorer’s in that test – 79% vs 66%
- Mozilla’s anti-phishing detected significantly more than Internet Explorer when IE’s phishing detection is turned off.
Huh?? Their phish-finding works better than Microsoft’s when Microsoft’s is disabled.
Well “duh”.
Firefox also loads pages faster than Internet Explorer when IE is “closed”.
The Mozilla funded report talks a lot about this “local list” without actually explaining what it is. It’s a list of known phishing urls that is updated twice hourly. Just using the local list means you’re just using a list of known-to-be-evil urls that is at most 29 minutes, 59 seconds old. Compared to Internet Explorer which compares the url to a remote database in real time, which Firefox also offers.
The real results?
By averaging out the two reports maybe a better figure can be found?
- The Microsoft report gave IE 7 a score of 172 out of 200. That’s 86%
- The Mozilla report gave IE 7 a score of 66%
- The Microsoft report gave Google/Firefox a score of 106 out of 200, 53%
- The Mozilla report gave Google/Firefox a score of 79%
Internet Explorer got an average score of 76%, while Mozilla got an average score of 66%.
While that’s a noticable difference it suggests pretty clearly that both browsers have made impressive first-steps in their efforts to combat phishing. Is one better than the other? I don’t know. What I do know is that Mozilla funded a report that used a ridiculously uneven playing field, and from that I must conclude that they’re retarded.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Patently Stupid
Fortunately being retarded isn’t patented, so anyone is free to do it.
This is quite evident in the software and technology industry, where patents are the same sort of currency white men are in prison.
But the process of patenting is so heavily flawed that an invention can range from say, clicking a button, to Apple‘s latest effort – a cube for navigation.
Remember back years ago when cheesy websites were using those ugly Java cubes to browse the site? Apple’s had this great idea to do the same thing with OS X Leopard. Guess they were too busy re-inventing the cube to look for prior art?
Using Google’s relatively new patent search (patent probably pending), I’ve managed to track down some other classic examples of patent retardation.
Note: There are real and valid uses for patents – they’re designed to protect ideas and inventions, and sometimes they do. Usually they’re just a trading card for businesses to extort each other with, or they’re rather obvious “inventions” someone is hoping to extort a business with when they infringe on it.
- US Pat. 5960411: Amazon, and their apparent invention of “one click purchasing“. After brainstorming they came up with a way to reduce the number of clicks to purchase something, to one. Kind of like eBay’s “Buy It Now” button, or the “Checkout” button on any ecommerce site.
- US Pat. 6368227: Steven Olson came up with a ripper of an idea – how to use a “swing”. You know those things that hang from a tree branch or bar that you swing on? This chump actually owns the patent for swinging back and forth on one.
- US Pat. 4300473: Donald B. Poynter invented a way to lick a stamp without using your tongue, except it may use your tongue as the “applicator”.
- US Pat. 6994809: Walter H. Prior invented a way to patch holes in walls, by creating a same-shape plug and then plastering over it. This incredible invention was only a 100 years too late to be patented by someone who’s not an idiot, but fortunately the Patent Office is full of them and it got through.
- US Pat. 6360693: Ross Eugene Long, III, that’s Ross Eugene Long, THE THIRD!!!!, managed to patent a device that lets you play with your dog. It’s like a stick but synthetic. Ross Eugene Long THE THIRD!!!! managed to sketch a concept for his invention – check it out – it looks exactly like some sort of “stick”.
- US Pat. 4151613: In 1973 Jhoon G Rhee invented an “ass pad” so you wouldn’t hurt your ass if you fell off a skateboard.
- US Pat. 1167502: Almost 100 years ago, Ernest Peck invented the scarecrow. Or patented it. Pretty much the same thing but mechanical was patented in 1978.
- US Pat. D203446: In 1964 Gary R. Napier invented the Christmas tree, apparently.
- US Pat. 4447093: The wheel, yes, THE wheel, was apparently invented by Joel C. Cunard and William H. Ziegler, Jr just a short 24 years ago. Prior to that I believe cars, carts, bicycles, skateboards, rollerskates and everything else used some sort of “round thing”.
Clearly the patent system is quite retarded, but evidently it’s been that way for a long time now. Silly little muppets.
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