Recent Posts

2526

Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2013, 05:47 PM »

Obligatory joke:

We need a Schrodinger's Movie: That you have simultaneously seen and not seen! 

2527

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 28, 2013, 05:46 PM »

The Scientific and Tech Doc Viewer at http://www.stdutility.com/ reads them all natively.

It's one reason in the discussion of "who do you like as a PDF viewer" I like that program, because it handles topics like this as a bonus! No icky conversions!

 

2528

Living Room / Re: Ad Industry Attacks Firefox

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 27, 2013, 10:38 PM »

 I just wonder if he is that much off his rocker or if he's just trying to use FUD against Firefox users.....  

-Tinman57 (March 27, 2013, 08:17 PM)

I really, really wonder about this very often. He's just one example of some guy with a clear conflict of interest spouting complete lunacy. Do these kinds of people REALLY believe what they're saying? Or are they simply morally bankrupt?

To be honest, I think a lot of these people really and truly believe that up is down and ignorance is strength. And then I really and truly wonder how they managed to deceive themselves into believing stuff like that. Can you lie to yourself over and over until you believe the lie?

-Renegade (March 27, 2013, 08:56 PM)

I came up with a theme some time ago for some of this stuff. The key principle is that they aren't *quite* that stupid, and so the excess force in the phrasing gives it away as fud. But then that's where it gets funny. There's a school of advertising now that apparently believes in the "black hole" approach - abuse the customers/public. Then they become grumpy. So abuse them some more. Then they get angry.

But THEN if you amp it up to waterboarding, their sanity explodes through the far side of the black hole, and then they buy things from you!!

 

2529

Living Room / Re: The Ultimate List of Educational Websites

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 27, 2013, 11:18 AM »

I just signed up for JSTOR. (Academic article library).

It seems like a medium ground for free vs paid - you can have up to three items on your "shelf" that must stay there for 2 weeks (aka to prevent high speed flipping). But it doesn't look like you HAVE to remove them, which is interesting, so if you really like some article you can leave it there for x period of time.

I stuck a couple of asian studies articles up there and am leaving one slot for later.

2530

Living Room / Re: Get More Out of Google

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 27, 2013, 08:21 AM »

The main thing I was reminded of was Google Scholar. I'd glanced at it a couple of times but I want to revisit it in depth for a couple of days this week.

2531

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 25, 2013, 10:47 AM »

I always bloody forget about that forum section.

-Stephen66515 (March 15, 2013, 10:40 PM)

So Mouser's plan to hide the Basement from you worked?
"Open your eyes, Stephen!" 

2532

Living Room / Re: Cheaper Pharmaceutical Drugs

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 22, 2013, 07:50 PM »

USA - when 12 year olds in Civics classics generate fairer results than the courts!  

2533

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 22, 2013, 12:42 PM »

Update:

See this note about the US getting grumpy and applying Money Laundering laws against Bitcoin.

You didn't think they'd allow a brand new currency, did you?!

http://online.wsj.co...374611351125202.html

2534

General Software Discussion / Canonical and China announce collaboration

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 22, 2013, 11:14 AM »

Okay, let me try to answer the top couple of FAQs right out of the gate.

Canonical and Chinese standards body announce Ubuntu collaboration
http://www.canonical...ubuntu-collaboration

1. Concerns about what Canonical is up to.
2. Concerns about what China is up to.
Answer to both: Yes there are.

*But*, *if* they magically agree on a neutral collaboration without the 21st century sneaky agenda trend, this is the *type* of partnership I have wanted to see for a decade.

1. Start with a (mostly!?) FOSS Linux OS that already has some traction.
2. Add China's scary production power.
3. Add China's slightly mysterious user base
4. After they get their act together, (and yes Made In China now means iPhone grade, not new year's novelties), you might just get the mythical Third OS to wedge into the OS wars. I'm thinking long term here, say 7 years. Ignore a few petty cheap power grabs here and there. The Linux community has shuffled around "we're Indie and we like it, that is, until we can't use it for _____ reason."

I'm not sure anyone can really unseat MS - that would be THE biggest tech news of the decade beyond which all else pales. They really are close to Too Big To Fail. But just suppose they did. Would you pick Apple's OS X or a Canonical-China Distro!? I have NO IDEA how to evaluate that one! But just supposing they waited in the wings and began producing $300 machines, they'd slowly begin to seep into the "average user landscape". ("I dunno, it's one of those Chinese Linux machines. I just check my email and Facebook on it. Works for me.")

(I think I'm missing a closing paragraph but I'll just post this.)  : )

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 22, 2013, 10:49 AM »

^Out of curiosity - exactly where and how do you spend them? From what I've personally seen, there isn't much I'd be all that interested in I could use them for. At least so far. But I don't do much in the way of transactions I'd feel the need to stealth, so maybe I'm just not part of that demographic where 'buyer anonymity' seems to be the major selling point.

So I'm genuinely curious...just how usable for mainstream purposes are they as of right now?

Anyone else want to cry?

-Renegade (March 21, 2013, 11:04 PM)

Yup. How about the people who got their accounts cleaned out in any one of several net heists successfully perpetrated on various Bitcoin exchanges? News like this or compilations like this don't exactly give me warm fuzzies...

How bitcoin users seem to imagine bitcoin exchanges.
http://www.youtube.c...ed&v=DwC6IFi6RuU
...
@Ren - sorry. Couldn't resist. (Definitely have way too much free time on my hands these last two days.)

-40hz (March 22, 2013, 08:32 AM)

40 Hz is quotalicious, so I shall fold and spindle his post ruthlessly!

First: Are Bankers like the goblins in the Harry Potter snip?

Second: Does this describe how much time you have on your hands?
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=5XcKBmdfpWs

 

More seriously:
Bitcoins gets my vote for Top-25 most innovative / disruptive concepts this last decade. (A NEW currency!?) Yeah, I agree with the *current* flaws, but long haul, it's something that will either be standard old hat in 10 years or relegated to "only something terrorists use".

2536

Screenshot Captor / Re: Mouse follow option - idea

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 22, 2013, 10:43 AM »

Heh I'll get the obligatory pun out of the way!

A "Mouser Follow Option!"

Follow the latest doings of Mouser!     

2537

Living Room / Re: I think this kid is gonna go far in life.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 21, 2013, 02:51 PM »

"This video contains content from ABC News, who has blocked it from display on this website. Watch it on YouTube."

2538

Living Room / Re: Google Keep note-taking app spotted

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 21, 2013, 02:37 PM »

Well, on the topic of all eggs, it might be useful to separate "the eggs" into categories, and then compare the baskets separately. For various reasons, starting with inertia and then keeping Google at bay, I have used Yahoo Mail for some 8 years now and been mostly satisfied. Yahoo hasn't hit my radar for doing anything particularly evil for ages, so that front seems okay.

Search is of course where Google made their money, but I only use Google when Startpage doesn't give me the best answers. While a bit grumpily, I have an iPhone and not an Android phone, so that's that dept. Then it seems to me that Google's value drops rather steeply off a cliff. I am quite unimpressed by Google Docs, and soon after that I'm hard pressed to even name many more Google offerings.

But just looking at the Reader mess, it seems that one is starting to change a gestalt - that we didn't mind if Google saved a few bucks killing off Wave, or some of those other things. But nuking Reader seems to be a bit of a risky play alienating the "small but important" audience of the skilled tech users. That time it "became personal", and the distrust spread beyond "a product" into casting all future offerings into a distasteful context.

The Tech landscape feels like it's starting to drift a little. It seems that a certain suite of core items has settled into incumbent positions, and while there will always be maneuvering, I don't see what the next blinding new entry is.

2539

Living Room / Re: Can you inagine a world without any personal privacy? Because it's here.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 21, 2013, 05:28 AM »

Here's my latest disturbing realization about the emerging world with no privacy. Remember how much the poobahs like to wheel out "protect the kiddies" as a rationale for evil new online surveillance bills? Yet I just realized that the news media might not even have a clue about how what is supposed to be a "fluff piece for the week" then becomes something that could damage a kid's self confidence for years afterward!

Try it. Imagine you are an HR rep and an applicant is applying for his first job. HR Googles the name. Go on, try it: Google Josh Welch.

Yep. You get the blather story *with photo* about how his half eaten pop tart sorta looked like a gun, so his school suspended him. So his parents allowed that photo to be published ... why? And gawd help us if it was a *family photo* - where's copyright law when it comes to kids and half eaten pop tarts?

 

2540

Living Room / Re: The US Registrar of Copyright herself calls for a mixed bag of reforms

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 06:14 PM »

Nope. You won't.
courtesy of TechDirt's Mike Masnick:

Congressman Already Claims That He Needs To Overturn Supreme Court Ruling In Kirtsaeng
from the and-off-we-go dept

Now that didn't take very long at all did it?  

-40hz (March 20, 2013, 03:54 PM)

  Amazing, it takes congress years and years to get some things done, but totally screwing up something only takes them a few days or less....  

-Tinman57 (March 20, 2013, 05:26 PM)

Actually, you may have stumbled on a post-modern flaw of the "checks and balances" that the framers never intended - pure malice in Congress.

(Trivia: Anyone know how long it took them to get the copyright terms extended as soon as Disney wailed about the Mouse?)

Sometimes troubling rulings pop up at the circuit levels - there's no sensible reason why a ruling from California should be different in the exact same case as one from Texas etc. So for this scenario, we got:

Circuit court: "Selling stuff violates copyright because of four cent piece of plastic from Hong Kong is in there."
Supreme Court: "No it doesn't. That isn't the law. Now stop making us do your job and gtfo."

(One of many congresscritters gets phone call/email from an Important Constituent from ... uh ... "registered in Delaware"...)
Congresscritter to press: "That didn't go my constituent's way, so sudo here's a new law that says it's the law now." (Total time to pass the law: One week.)

Supreme Court: "It will be a year before we get another case to go overturn your new law. We're going to go over here and throw up our hands now."

 

2541

General Software Discussion / Re: Data Execution Prevention notes

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 03:06 PM »

Well, I have the "Tech preview of version 3.5.0" and I saw that option, but by this point I became so frustrated overall, that I just turned it off. Re: the printer, it's not just a printer driver, but printers come bundled with various apps and I didn't feel like getting too fancy trying to dance around the recommended normal install. (It's a Brother multi-function, and the whole design has this slightly sour mood of being inelegant in both software and hardware. Just an example: Every other printer in the world has the cable outlets on the side/back. This one has the USB jack *under the scanner bed*. Really?!)  So in the multi-chained install CD it crashed the install process.

So for DEP, the casualties are:
My sound card additional-functionality app
The printer install
The help file from my note taker app
A couple of lesser things I don't recall.

2542

General Software Discussion / Data Execution Prevention notes

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 10:44 AM »

Elsewhere I'd remarked that I was getting bad user experiences when DEP was kicking in. But what kept bothering me was "it didn't used to be that hard!" Turns out that some time back I installed EMET, which hooked into the DEP settings (and then greyed them out in the normal system properties area!)

So when a printer driver suite bounced today, I went over to EMET and turned DEP off. It's rarely/never caught any malware -the only programs that bounce are mostly legit, if maybe sloppily written.

So it is a total case of what was supposed to be security was making me miserable. 

2543

Living Room / Re: Can you inagine a world without any personal privacy? Because it's here.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 06:18 AM »

Speaking of businesses collecting data, I have a new forum game!

Who can find the web page with the most plugin trackers as reported/blocked by Ghostery?

I'll start it off with this one from Business Insider in that other thread and start the bidding at TWENTY!
 

2544

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 03:43 AM »

I'll have to become a more advanced being now...
 (see attachment in previous post)
http://www.dieselswe...ies.com/archive/3282

-tomos (March 15, 2013, 03:15 AM)

Kind of reminds me of an IM I received from a friend once, where she was in a state of panic over wikipedia being down, which she claimed was causing her a temporary loss of 50+ IQ points. 

-app103 (March 15, 2013, 03:36 AM)

It does. Even Randall Monroe says so, and he's a minor deity so you can't contradict him.
http://xkcd.com/903/

2545

Living Room / Re: When it comes to EA, it just keeps getting better - or worse...

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 03:41 AM »

Too many Quiche Eater programmers?

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

2546

Living Room / Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 20, 2013, 12:46 AM »

But does it have any teeth? A long time ago some **AA type was saying that he was in it for the long game, so yeah maybe we beat SOPA, but they would just introduce another one.

2547

General Software Discussion / Re: New Keyboard Concept: Minuum Keyboard

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 19, 2013, 03:20 AM »

Cute, but I bought an external wireless keyboard for my phone (or tablet if I had one) and I think I like that better. The action is a little slow, so I can't blast off the pairs of letters that I do when I type on the desktop keyboard, but it's decent enough for chatting, and what little other keyboard use I put my phone through.

2548

Living Room / Re: Can you inagine a world without any personal privacy? Because it's here.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 19, 2013, 03:17 AM »

I think that with the coming of Google Glass(es), we'll have a turning point. When people have video-on that is "forever-on" aka their glasses and not even as clunky as pulling out their phone and waving it around, then all kinds of social assumptions will get thrashed around, because you will never ever know when *someone* quietly "clicks a pic/vid and then uploads it on the spot." (And once the "brand leader" breaks open the market segment, then *that* allows room for all of the variants to show up.)

It also might help those freedom fighters catch even more police abuse because then anyone within eyesight of the situation can be a witness and it's far harder for the police to get grumpy and say things like "turn your phone off".

It's unfortunately also easier for anyone to try to catch you in an embarrassing moment hoping for "viral gold".

So in short, there's a big mess coming down the digital highway!

2549

General Software Discussion / Re: ironshield antivirus

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 18, 2013, 10:04 AM »

Given the kind of results google returns, this seems pretty fishy.

-f0dder (March 18, 2013, 10:02 AM)

Sure, I didn't even go that route, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. But sure, in the age of the net, it's far harder for shady characters to play all sides of the fence because it's not like the wild west when you can change states and just re-post your shingle again 5 times. Word gets out.

2550

Living Room / Re: Can you inagine a world without any personal privacy? Because it's here.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on March 18, 2013, 09:56 AM »

I'd just like to separate the "Author" and the "Distributor". You can have opinions of what CNN tends to carry, but Bruce Schneier has been in the game enough to read no matter what outlet he shows up in.