Stasi 2.0

Source

Apparently EU Directive 2006/24/EG [PDF link] forces all EU states to spy on their citizens. We're talking logs of every email, landline, mobile, SMS and VOIP conversation you have, including the geographic location of you in the case of mobiles/SMS. Now I know we already have semi-secret systems like that, but I can't believe they're taking it to the level of having the monitoring of citizens enforced by law. 1984 and THX 1138 anyone?

The link to the actual document is in German, maybe Iris could check over it for me? :P

Can't we have good old Echelon back? Better the devil you know (and can flood with trigger words).

Jack Thompson Is Made Of Fail

Three posts in one day? :o Anywho, Overlord made a post pointing here. I'd like to go on the record and say that Jack Thompson is one of the most reprehensible human beings in the western hemisphere. Not only did he take advantage of the shooting yesterday to try to advance his arguments, he did it immediately after, so soon that there were not even any official reports yet. He proceeded to mention several findings that there had not been time to find yet, let alone tell anyone about, which of course all supported his arguments.

Quotage.

My name is Tim Buckley. I'm a twenty-four-year-old gamer. I've played every violent game in existence, and I have never killed anyone.

There are millions of gamers just like me, and we're getting sick of people like you blaming your problems on us.

Ignorance causes violence, not video games. Man up and take responsibility.

We outnumber you, and the people that think like you. Don't fuck with us.

Random IMs - PCI Graphics

A friend in need is a friend who can make do with freakishly old hardware.

Dr G: do you happen to have an old graphics card lying around? cos i think i've either fried it or the mobo on my pc
Kemp: in a way, I have an old PCI one
Dr G: i use pci. just need to figure out which bit has esploded
Kemp: note I said PCI, not PCI-E
Dr G: i have that
Kemp: yeah, just warning you that it'll be about as good as a chipmunk drawing the images on a whiteboard

And yay for none-standard abbreviations and their alternate meanings.

Dr G: just need to figure out whats gone south and if it is the gf which i hope an upgrade will come sooner than planned

Perfect Code

Source.

The article linked above discusses the attitude towards coding among the team that writes the software controlling the space shuttle and how different it is to the generally accepted norm. Some choice quotes:

What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

The group writes software this good because that's how good it has to be. Every time it fires up the shuttle, their software is controlling a $4 billion piece of equipment, the lives of a half-dozen astronauts, and the dreams of the nation. Even the smallest error in space can have enormous consequences: the orbiting space shuttle travels at 17,500 miles per hour; a bug that causes a timing problem of just two-thirds of a second puts the space shuttle three miles off course.

NASA knows how good the software has to be. Before every flight, Ted Keller, the senior technical manager of the on-board shuttle group, flies to Florida where he signs a document certifying that the software will not endanger the shuttle. If Keller can't go, a formal line of succession dictates who can sign in his place.

Bill Pate, who's worked on the space flight software over the last 22 years, says the group understands the stakes: "If the software isn't perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."

Talk about pressure... And one last one:

Ten years ago the shuttle group was considered world-class. Since then, it has cut its own error rate by 90%.

They have a large enough budget to do what they need, they have formal practices in place to stop problems almost before they come into existence, and they don't get singled out and punished for mistakes (after all, if a mistake makes it through the process then other people also didn't spot it, and there must be a flaw in the process that can be fixed to prevent this happening in the future). Sounds like a perfect working environment to me :-) Now... where can I raise $35 million per year and find a crack team of coders to do my work for me?

Random IMs - RIAA Botnets

A conversation earlier with Overlord:

Kemp:
getting a torrent and it's on the last few percent, but every piece is failing the hash checks no matter where it gets them from :(
Overlord:
Gay, poisoned seeds suck
Kemp:
hmmm.... most of the failed pieces are from particular subnets, not specific IPs, just groups of IPs in specific subnets
Overlord:
O_o Related, surely
Maybe it's Ree-aaaaa =P
Kemp:
70 peers, almost all in two subnets, and none are getting any of it off me, despite reporting they don't have the full thing (and me having more than them)
Overlord:
Yeah, I'm voting Ree-aaaaaaaa
Kemp:
me too, or just someone very bored with a company's worth of rooted machines. That'd be a really annoying program actually, find as many torrents as possible (random searches on torrent sites would work), advertise that you have a certain percentage of it and just feed garbage to any client that asks. Could be all automated, set up an entire company's machines with it and watch people lose faith in torrents
Overlord:
I'm sure they've thought of it
Kemp:
they could package it with programs ala malware. distributed torrent destroying
Overlord:
=o Ree-aaaaaaaa botnets
Kemp:
:o it's a conspiracy. If you don't hear from me for a while I may have "disappeared"
Overlord:
But wait, if they're on to you, they'll be monitoring your comms
=O THEY'LL HAVE ME TOO

Also, randomly:

Overlord:
LOL, wouldn't that be hilarious
Someone rooting the RIAA's LAN and using it to download music to an FTP server somewhere in China

Birthday

Well there goes my 22nd birthday, another year closer to becoming obsolete. End post.

Big Machines and Bad Poetry

A continuous casting machine in a local mill was severely damaged because of a setup error by the supervisor (or so claimed all the union workers). To save face he had to blame the control software, so I was hired on a short contract to rewrite some of the graphics routines used by the control system. The status display had nothing to do with machine control, it was even on a different computer. But he got to cover his ass and I got to be the Big Bucks Consultant for a few weeks.

It was a fun job, every time I ran a test several football fields full of huge equipment woke up and get busy. No molten steel was involved, but when you're in the control room by yourself with all that under your control you can't help but let out a little Mad Scientist cackle now and then.

Oh hell yes :-D (from here)


I'd like to moan for a minute about supposedly deep and meaningful poetry that actually makes no sense, written by people who have nothing to be deep and meaningful about. Take this for instance:

Hanging, a dark rose,
Broken on the field of justice,
A bell tolls.

That is a very formulaic (and short) example piece... and it took me about 30 seconds to come up with it in the shower this morning while I contemplated this post. Note that it makes absolutely no sense except what you want to deliberately read into it. Actually, maybe someone should do a poetry book parodying bad poetry, could be very funny :-) Actually, I'd be surprised if a million-and-one people haven't done it already, the stuff usually parodies itself pretty well ;-)

AOHell

I'm going to link this as I don't personally like embedding media in my blog. Another good reason not to use AOL.

Statistics

I think I now remember why I took mechanics modules in maths rather than statistics.

Given a random process X ~ N(µ, σ²), i.e. a continuous random process X that is normally distributed with mean µ and variance σ² (standard deviation σ), the probability density function for X is given by

[Ok, I'm with them at this point, it's all been rather simple up to here really]



[*brain explodes*]

I think I need to upgrade my brain in some way, or just learn to ignore how they arrived at things and just accept what they say.

Do No Evil?

Irrlicht3d.org - How I got banned from Google Adsense for life time

Apparently this is happening more frequently these days. So if Google are starting to screw people over how can we trust anyone anymore? It's not so much that they did it, but more that they provided no justification nor gave a chance of appeal. Sounds a lot like PayPal really, and if Google go that way I may lose a serious amount of respect for them.

Do no evil... unless it's convenient and saves you some money.

Sales Calls

The other day I got the sort of sales call I like (if I have to put up with any at all). It went something like:

Caller: Hi, I'm calling on behalf of BT. How do you access the internet at the moment?
Me: I have ADSL
Caller: Are you happy with your service, or would you be interested in switching?
Me: I'm fine with it at the moment thanks.
Caller: Ok, have a nice day.

Nice, short and to the point, let's see more of this please.


On a more annoying front, it's the turn of Windows again. Sometime overnight my machine in the lab grabbed some updates off Windows Update. I didn't know the automatic service was running, I'll sort that out soon. Once it had done this it decided that the computer needed a restart. Of course, in the view of the update client it can't wait or things might explode, so it happily just restarted the machine. Thanks, but what about the webpages and documents I had open, any work I was doing (luckily I do save obsessively) and just random things I had open to leave notes for myself or for amusement? Did they really need to be sacrificed on the altar of the updates that required a restart so desperately they couldn't even wait for me to come and confirm it?

Random IMs - Predictable?

Kemp: Kemp has drunk no alcohol this weekend
Overlord: Is Gina at home?
Overlord: /me runs
Kemp: yeah, damn you
Overlord: XD

Damn his ability to interpret a lot from little information. I maintain that she's not a bad influence =P

PC Parts

On a related note (kinda), and further to this post, I've changed my spec a bit. The Striker Extreme is now a P5N32-E SLI Plus, which is about £100 cheaper and essentially the same board with a slightly different chipset. Did I say "essentially" the same board? Peel off the name sticker and see what's printed on it underneath... that's right "Striker Extreme". I can live with an upgraded 650i rather than a 680i, especially for that price. Also, the power supply is now the M (M12-600) model rather than the S. Not only is it modular for extra tidiness (tidyness?), it also has a better 12v rail or four.

Scan Fail

I've been holding back a rant about Scan for a while, mainly because I was hoping they could redeem themselves... but it appears they may have missed that chance. Let's break down the things wrong with how they operate shall we?

• Estimated Delivery Dates: They let you pick a date for the items to be delivered (though this has to be at least a certain distance into the future, see below). This is good. They don't deliver on that date. This is bad. I had one parcel over a month late and not delivered with no emails from them (again, see below), whereas one they actually sent to me came nearly a week early. I deliberately chose a date a bit further in the future than the first possible one and that was for a reason. If the delivery dates are chosen by them at random, why allow the customer the illusion of choice?


• Dead Time: After you place the order it just sits there in the system for 4-5 days before they look at it. You get the "Order Accepted" and "Payment Received" emails on the day of ordering and then the "Items Picked" and "Delivery Shipped" emails 4-5 days later with no activity at all in the middle. Why make the customer wait through artificial delays? Is charging for faster delivery so important? As a side-effect, this has an unfortunate habit of stopping you getting things. Say you place an order and everything's in stock. Everything is still in stock 4 days later. At the end of the 4th day an item goes out of stock just before they get to packing your stuff. Your things don't get sent and they don't bother telling you (see below).


• Money Handling: Payment is taken from your account as soon as you place the order, unlike Amazon who take the money only when they ship the items. If you need a refund on the other hand, that can take substantially longer. I'm still waiting going into my 5th day after being assured "the refund will be processed as soon as possible". How hard can it possibly be?


• Lack of Communication: If items go out of stock before they ship the order then they don't tell you about this. If you want to know if the shipment will make it to you around the date you chose then you have to go to the site and check every item yourself, there's not even links from the Previous Orders page, you have to manually search for the items. Even worse is they have a service where they send you a text when they ship something so you know to be ready for it. Pity this gets sent the next day, 5 hours after it arrives at your house.

Overall my level of service from them has sucked. So far I have receieved 1 out of the 3 orders I have placed. I have yet to receive the refund for one of the undelivered ones (which wasn't an inconsequential amount) and the other is floating in the void somewhere between "we've forgotten about it" and "we just don't care".


Edit:
I should note that since I made this post, Scan have extensively overhauled their ordering process. Check them out, their prices are still some of the best.

Resources Are Free, Really

Garbage Collection just kicked in, yo


Yay 4chan memes =P

More Fail From MS

Why am I not surprised by this? Install the beta Office 2007, do lots of productive work with it, forget the trial is about to run out and proceed to lose most of the functionality. Ok, no problems, just reinstall an older non-beta version and keep working... Problem. You've saved your work in the new shiny XML based format that the old versions don't understand. Ok, you can still use the beta to open the documents, maybe you can re-save out in an old format... Nope, it expired so you can't do anything with it, they only gave you the opening ability in order to taunt you. Wonder how much productivity is going to be wasted accidentally with this?

Yes, I know, use Open Office =P Point is MS don't provide an easy solution to a problem of their own making.

Also, if you do decide to use Vista then keep an eye on your northbridge temperatures. Just a tip.

Problem unrelated apparently, but I'll still moan about Vista anyway :-)

Spoiler

Harry realizes that Voldermort is actually his split personality. They are the same person, so the wand is actually in Harry's hand.

Hermione met Harry at a very strange time in his life.

Edit:
It occurs to me that people like Overlord may not get the reference, unlike people like Sarah who certainly should, so to avoid confusion I'll tell you now - it's not a real spoiler :-P

Which Vista

It's a hard choice, but personally I'd go with XP SP2 or Ubuntu.

SpamNet

From here.

From the original story:

[...] at this point one in four computers is infected with botnet software [...] the image of 150 million infected computers is more than a little bit sobering. With the extremely lucrative activities that can be done with botnets (such as password ripping, spamming, DDoSing), as well as reports of organized crime adopting 'cyber-terrorism' as a new line of income[...]

Replies:

Just wait until they merge and become Skynet. Then we'll really be in trouble.

The Terminator: The Spamnet goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic marketing. Spamnet begins to grow at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: Spamnet fights back.
The Terminator: Yes. It launches its nigerian spam against the targets in Russia.
John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren't they spammers too?
The Terminator: Because Spamnet knows the Russian counter-spam will eliminate all non-zombies over here.

Dr. Silberman: I'm sure it feels very real to you.
Sarah Connor: On August 29th, 1997, it's gonna feel pretty fscking real to you too. Anybody not handling 2 million messages a second is gonna have a real bad day. Get it?

Oh Slashdot, you make me lol.

Blu-ray Down, Next Please...

Source

If you tout something as unbreakable it will be broken every single time. Not necessarily because it's even worth breaking, but simply because you have dangled something in front of the community and said "if you break this then people will remember you".