According to CNet, music labels are trying to dampen CD burning yet again. So far, this has never worked. Every method of copy protection fails. This is especially true of audio CDs, because you have to be able to *hear* them for it to make any sense to buy them. Since anything you can hear can be copied, any copy protection of audio (or video) is doomed to failure.
I would think this would be obvious, but apparently it’s not to the music and movie industries, who think fighting with and suing their customers is a good business idea.
Illuminating blacked-out words in redacted (edited/declassified) documents is actually possible with computers today.
Interesting, the government stopped using Courier in its documents recently because it’s ugly compared to Arial or Times New Roman. But, because Courier is a monospace font, it is actually harder to decipher with the method listed in the article. So, the government has made it easier to pierce the veil of secrecy they put around redacted documents. Fantastic.
My cow-orkers tend to say some absurd things that they think make sense. Here are a couple from this week.
“I’m ok with Word until you get into the advanced features. How do you delete a page break?” Um, yeah. That’s not really advanced so much as it is blatantly obvious. DELETE key ring a bell?
“I don’t run an antivirus because it would be a step backward for me. As a programmer, I know how things propagate and I’ve got a good router.” Sure you do. The magical kind of router that is not only a stateful packet sniffer but stops trojan horses and updates itself automatically to prevent file corruption on all computers attached to it. Fantastic technology.
Mess With Texas – it’s fun.
In case you were looking for them, I’ve removed the LJ Userpics I formerly hosted here. I’ve not made a new one in almost a year, and it’s only using 10% of my bandwidth, so it’s gone. Why would I remove something that still gets 100 megs of traffic in a month? Because most of that traffic is from search spiders or from people using some of the animated GIFs as avatars on other sites (that always pisses me off).
If you are actually interested in the templates I made available, let me know. I may put them back up somewhere else.
Desktop Sidebar is like Gkrellm for Windows. This is so geeky, I’m so stoked. Now, if it could get a decent integration with Trillian…
Five out of six pieces of spam are for Cialis or Viagra. Woohoo! I can get a hardon that lasts for days! The other spam is usually trying to get me to refinance my mortgage.
Things break down.
This is an eternal truth, and certainly rings true today. The universal remote, bought to replace the DVD remote which broke after having soda poured on it (thanks kid), has recently decided to stop operating the television. It worked for months, and then – poof. Fine, just use two remotes. Big deal.
More fun in entropy-land – the router. Our wifi router decided to give us 10% instead of 100% ever since we moved. No amount of reconfiguring and rejiggering would make it behave. So, I finally got the tech support guys at DLink to RMA it. Get the new one on Friday, hook it up… woohoo! Full speed ahead. Let’s download a DVD image! Fast forward to Sunday.
Sunday, we get back from the carnival (much cotton candy and funnel cakes and spinning rides), and the wifi connection begins to crap out. Looks like the router is randomly rebooting. Then, it begins a cycle of reboots every 15-20 seconds. WTF? Am I getting a DDOS attack, or is it just a piece of shit? Who can tell? Reset the router. Works. Whew. 30 minutes later, stops working to reboot. And reboot. And reboot.
So far, it’s been 90 minutes since it reset itself. I immediately assumed the router was faulty, but now I wonder if it’s possible that there is a DDOS crashing it. Why would someone target me, though? Seems absurd. Also unlikely, considering I have reset the modem and been issued two different IPs during this ordeal, and both of them have had reboot problems. Sigh. Besides, if it’s an attack, wouldn’t it take down the modem, not the router? The modem is first, after all. Anyone have any insight there?
I downloaded the DVD image from Project Gutenberg’s CD and DVD Project this weekend. The replacement router fixed my bandwidth issues, so it took only a few hours instead of weeks.
So I now have this wonderful DVD-ROM containing almost ten thousand electronic texts. That rocks. Anyone want a copy?
There must be a seriously large group of people who buy erection-causing drugs online, or I wouldn’t get so many pieces of spam (even with Spamassassin) for Cialis and Viagra. Daily. Huge numbers.
Is it horrible when you think, “eh, 64 piece of spam in one day – it’s slowing down a little”?
The cool Zipdecode Java applet sure can keep me amused for extended periods of time. Kind of neato, you type in a zip code and watch the white dots that show its area. For example, 9 is West Coast, 90 is Los Angeles area, etc. Got to see it to understand its evil addictive ability.
According to Reuters, Kodak will stop selling traditional cameras in the near future. They will continue to sell disposable film cameras and non-disposable digital cameras.
Ya’know, I remember when APS (aka Advantix) film came out 7 years ago. I was wondering at the time if the new film format was coming out just in time to get stomped by the then-pathetic but promising digital cameras. I guess we got the answer to that one.
Just in case you’re wondering, I did buy an APS camera in 1997, but then replaced it with a 2.3 megapixel digital in 2000. I’ve very rarely wished for film since.
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
Really, the title says it all. Except, of course, that astronauts may have died because Powerpoint is a tool of stupid shit.
Anyone else look at The Dobbertin Surface Orbiter and think, Ark II or maybe the vehicle in Damnation Alley?
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