Messages

101

Living Room / FARK creator doesn't believe in the wisdom of crowds

« on: June 30, 2010, 05:20 PM »

It's pretty telling when the founder of one of the pioneers of news aggregation says the model doesn't work at all. Perhaps that's why FARK has an editorial team that promotes links to the frontpage, while the rest remain in the back.

Of course, the statement has to be taken with a grain of salt, as he's talking about comments, which are personal opinions on a matter, not a combined effort of a group of people in order to reach a single answer. Plus, this is FARK we're talking about.

102

General Software Discussion / Re: How safe is it to run portable apps on public computers?

« on: June 15, 2010, 09:00 AM »

How does KeePass insert the encrypted passwords into the other apps? It would be trivial to add a clipboard watcher to a keylogger...

-f0dder (June 14, 2010, 03:39 PM)

And Dominik would like to see his methods challenged. Note that this is for KeePass 2.x, KeePass 1.x lacks any kind of protection against keyloggers if you rely on AutoType.

Personally, I wouldn't use public computers for anything more than casual browsing these days, unless you know the computers are properly maintained and/or configured (public computers shouldn't be running an account with administrator rights by default), or they have some kind of rollback method. Once you log out, everything you've done disappears.

103

Living Room / Re: New flash player vulnerability (affects Adobe Reader as well)

« on: June 10, 2010, 05:00 PM »

Flash 10.1 out, which is reportedly not affected by this vulnerability. The new version has an unusual number of changes (PDF) for a point release, and among those are a bunch of new features that supposedly will make Flash behave as it should, and make Steve Jobs reconsider including Flash in Apple's iDevices (yeah, sure).

Meanwhile, Adobe Reader is waiting for a patch, so keep those authplay.dll renamed

EDIT: Some Flash animations (for example, the one running in the main Flash Player webpage) when right-clicked won't let the user close its corresponding tab or interact with other GUI elements afterwards. I've only encountered this bug on Opera, but it may affect other browsers as well.

104

Living Room / Re: The 'iPad tax', or 'how not to bailout journalism in America'

« on: June 08, 2010, 02:25 PM »

Ooops, there wasn't any plural on the headline

105

General Software Discussion / Re: chrome getting extensions makes even more evident why Opera doesn't get it

« on: June 08, 2010, 09:24 AM »

nosh has a bright future ahead as an advisor for big corporations

106

Living Room / Re: The 'iPad tax', or 'how not to bailout journalism in America'

« on: June 08, 2010, 09:20 AM »

Heh, never thought I read an article in a newspaper that would call themselves "old" and part of a "fading business model". Then again, we're talking about the newspaper that published legendary headlines like "Headless Bodies in Topless Bars", and looking around their webpage, calling the job they do "journalism" is stretching the concept of it quite a bit.

As I understand it, the FTC is only proposing ideas for discussion that were suggested by interested parties, not making any recommendations. Then again, I don't know why I am discussing something that is completely irrelevant to me :P

107

Living Room / Re: The digital age comes to comics...

« on: June 08, 2010, 08:49 AM »

The LP and cassette transition to CD all over again. Don't be surprised if the companies continue to rip you off when digital media is widely available.

108

General Software Discussion / Re: chrome getting extensions makes even more evident why Opera doesn't get it

« on: June 08, 2010, 08:41 AM »

God dammit, Safari, you were supposed to act as the scapegoat for Opera shortcomings. Who are we going to put the blame on for now on? Lynx?

And what's this, Apple? What happened with your closed ecosystem? Did you crumble under the pressure of the open source commies? You can't trust anybody these days.



So, yeah, as I said before in the thread, the only thing holding Opera Software for implementing an extension system is themselves.

109

Living Room / Re: iTunes Store Alternative?

« on: June 04, 2010, 08:51 PM »

Amazon has Video On Demand, but it's only available in the USA, as well as Netflix. There are rumors the latter ones are planning to expand outside the USA, but who knows to where and when. Living in Australia, it occurs to me that you could use Bigpond, but maybe that would require an ISP change.

And really, subscribing to a pirate video site? I was just thinking in BitTorrent.

110

General Software Discussion / Re: Google's Chrome browser gets a stable tag in version 5

« on: June 04, 2010, 04:16 PM »

I thought Chrome already had replacement extensions for those two

111

Living Room / Re: 10 Suicides at Apple factory this year.

« on: June 04, 2010, 04:06 PM »

Sure thing

I simply wanted to dispel the assumption the media seems to have created, that just because the incidents happened at "Apple's factory", somehow they are the bad guys, though it could have happened with any other company Foxconn works for.

112

Living Room / Re: How to Sell Linux to Schools

« on: June 04, 2010, 03:57 PM »

I wonder what these 3.2 and 3.2.1 versions of OpenOffice I have floating around are

Also, the forks happened way before Oracle bought Sun, and I ignore up to what extent IBM and Novell are improving OpenOffice with their forks, instead of sipping code from the main project and slapping a few key features on top of it.

113

Living Room / Re: 10 Suicides at Apple factory this year.

« on: June 04, 2010, 03:42 PM »

Unfortunately for you, Foxconn also works for other electronic companies, which you may have bought devices from in the past. And this is not the first time that Foxconn has been involved in investigations regarding how they treat their employees, although it's likely the working conditions aren't as bad as the ones reported on one of KYE Systems (a.k.a. Genius) factories.

114

WorldCup Predictor / Re: FIFA World Cup Predictor 2010 - A Contest For Best Predictions?

« on: June 04, 2010, 03:37 PM »

EA's own simulation agrees with your initial findings, mouser. My rarely used national pride is betting hard on that outcome as well

115

Living Room / Re: iTunes Store Alternative?

« on: June 04, 2010, 03:22 PM »

I'm really tempted to say the forbidden word, but, first things first, are you still living in Korea? What do you prefer, digital or physical copies?

116

Living Room / Re: Google Ditches Windows on Security Concerns

« on: June 02, 2010, 09:37 AM »

Considering the attack in China was made possible by a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, one wonders why you have to throw the baby out with the bath water despite you have your own browser, and development of Firefox and the desktop version of Opera rely on Google's financial support, at least try to eat your own dogfood for a while. Besides, switching to Mac or Linux doesn't solve the fundamental problems that allowed the attack to be successful, nor will rule out the possibility of another targeted threat that takes advantage of the 'superior security' offered by OS X.

There are other question as well. Why do you recommend your people to use the OS developed by your brand-new biggest enemy, down there in Cupertino? Why, despite having some of best and brightest engineers and system administrators in the world, you chicken out at the first sign of problems in the horizon? How do you intend to continue to develop Windows-based software without Windows? A virtual machine is not the solution.

I don't know guys, but without an official confirmation from Google, this 'Google ditching Windows' report seems bunk to me. Unless we're talking about ditching Windows for personal use and regular employees, not developers, which would make more sense.

117

Living Room / Re: The Story of Conficker

« on: May 16, 2010, 12:11 PM »

Thanks for reminding me of that thread, app, looks like Ehtyar managed to summarize the most (if not all) important points about Conficker covered by the article.

118

Living Room / The Story of Conficker

« on: May 16, 2010, 09:14 AM »

A really nice writeup on one of the most devilishly designed computer worm ever: Conficker. Its origins, evolution, and how security companies are facing a fight the worm seems to be winning for now.

For the technical details, I suggest the Wikipedia article on Conficker^w, and, of course, the thread started by Ehtyar in this same forum, which acts as a summary of sorts of both sources, with a healthy discussion as a cool bonus.
via Daring Fireball

119

Living Room / Re: It's official: Steam is coming to Linux

« on: May 16, 2010, 07:17 AM »

You can actually play Wolfenstein 3D. For the time being you will probably need to grab a Linux build of DOSBox, since the Steam version only includes the Windows build, but I don't see any reason for id/Valve not making it a cross platform game.

120

DC Gamer Club / Re: Portal is FREE! (Until May 24th)

« on: May 15, 2010, 04:35 PM »

Although you could buy Portal separately on Steam (I think it was being sold for $15), most people bought The Orange Box, which apart from Portal, included a few trinkets, like Team Fortress 2 and the entire Half-Life 2 saga.

Also, I fail to see how come Valve deserves to go bankrupt just because they made a "short" (there is more than just one game mode), albeit well done game. Other companies sell you 60 hours of emptiness for $60, and instead of getting a bad rap, they sell millions of copies and get critical acclaim.

121

Living Room / Re: Company releases cracked version of their game rather than recompile it

« on: May 13, 2010, 05:07 PM »

If the group still was around, I suppose so

But really, this shows the hypocrisy surrounding game companies, DRM'ing the hell out of games, making things harder to honest gamers, and downplaying the gravity of the matter, while later finding out the same DRM they promoted as a Good Thing is also a pain in the ass for them for various reasons: lack of knowledge on how to decouple the DRM protection from the game, not having access to the source code, or just sheer laziness and the burning desire of making a quick buck. The case of Max Payne 2 is even more egregious, as Rockstar substituted one DRM system for another. Being a 2003 game, you could go and make the game entirely DRM free, eh? But noooo.

I guess we'll keep seeing more cases like this as digital services add more and more old games for which a crack is easily obtainable to their catalogue. Max Payne 2 is the third case this year, the previous ones being Arcanum and FlatOut, sold by GOG, which at least they're entirely DRM-free.

122

DC Gamer Club / Re: Humble Indie Bundle (pay what you want sale)

« on: May 11, 2010, 03:24 PM »

The offer has been extended for another week to celebrate that the total amount of money collected from donators went over $1,000,000. What's more, as promised, all games included except for World of Goo and Samorost 2, will be open sourced under liberal licenses, with Lugaru already available for anyone to grab from a Mercurial repository, and free to do whatever you like with it as long as it's within the terms of the GPL.

123

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Steam Sale: 50% off Guild Wars Trilogy

« on: May 11, 2010, 10:10 AM »

But think of all the money you would have saved if you had played what you already own.

-p3lb0x (May 09, 2010, 04:56 PM)

Not really, you only delay the inevitable

124

Living Room / Re: My new digital camera...

« on: May 07, 2010, 03:13 PM »

Thanks for the new wallpaper, ham!

125

Living Room / Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

« on: April 19, 2010, 02:15 PM »

An interesting discussion on URL shorteners on DonationCoder - Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation - https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=22478

Clocks in at over 160 by 22 characters.

-wraith808 (April 19, 2010, 01:16 PM)

2 characters, actually. Didn't see the ellipsis.

An interesting discussion on URL shorteners on DonationCoder: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

And, hey, look, a mere 98 characters line (170 internally, including BBcode and HTTP link).

I wonder if all this paranoia comes because of the hack done to the Apache issue-tracking server (which used TinyURL to deliver the XSS attack that started everything), because last week a friend sent me a bit.ly URL that redirected to at least one other URL shortener before showing me the true URL, and worked perfectly, without any warning message. Considering how distasteful the content hosted at the site URL was, I wish it worked back then, it would have saved me one more terrible picture ingrained in my brain >_<