Thanks to a strange new law, computer repair shops in Texas will have to have PI licenses.
Assuming the law doesn't get overturned, this means getting a criminal justice degree or undergoing a 3 year apprenticeship or get hit with fines and jail time. That goes for their customers too, apparently.
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
July 2, 2008
Private Investigators? Really?
June 27, 2008
End of An Era
For those who didn't know, today is/was Bill Gate's last day at Microsoft.
It's not quite retirement from the company though: he'll still be the chairman, and he's going to be taking a more active hand in the administration of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I was going to segue into a geeky marriage proposal story (like Richard Garfield's custom magic card, "Proposal", that it apparently took him 4 games to put into play legally), but it turns out it wasn't really. No point to it, but it would be an interesting highlight.
June 26, 2008
The Internet Crazies
Apparently in Sweden, children are becoming increasingly concerned about their parent's internet habits.
I think this falls into the category with school shooting being blamed on video games and suicides blamed on roleplaying games: they would be doing these things or something similar without the internet.
The dads surfing for porn or hooking up with younger women would just be out surfing bars and buying Playboys. The mom addicted to WoW would just be addicted to something else, whether benign or malignant.
That's my opinion anyway.
June 18, 2008
What did we name that again?
Though it may be somewhat arcane knowledge, the browser now known as Firefox was once named Firebird, and before that Phoenix. One of, if not the, most popular browsers out there, too (well, at least if you count IE7 and IE6 as two different browsers).
In case you didn't know, there's a new version out there. If you download it, all I ask is that you check out "about:robots".
Zombie Coffee Maker
This is just a weird story. Someone can turn your PC into a zombie via your internet-enabled coffee maker.
Read More......May 17, 2008
News of the....oh, who cares?
Firefox 3 is out in Release Candidate 1. For those of you not familiar with this aspect of software development (ha, that's maybe 1 of 3-4 people who read this), this means that they now think it's probably ready to be put out, but they want to iron out any last minute issues.
Something I'm looking forward to next TV season is Dollhouse, a joint effort between Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku's production company, will be airing on FOX. The concept is interesting: this place has "blank slate" people that they can program according to their customers desires and then wipe clean afterwards. Of course Echo (one of the Dolls, played by Eliza Dushku), is starting to remember things from her personality imprints. Aint It Cool News has a promo picture of the cast.
In a related announcement, The Hollywood Reporter is, well, reporting that FOX is going to air Dollhouse and Fringe with only 5 minutes of commercials. It's an interesting idea, and is possibly the least of amount of commercial time that television has ever aired with. I say this because the DVDs of classic Star Trek that I have run at 50 uninterrupted minutes an episode.
May 16, 2008
Reflections on Trusting Trust
If you've never read it before, this could potentially make you paranoid about your computer: Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson.
For those after the "TL,DR" version, it describes a C compiler, written in C, designed to do two things other than standard compiling:
- If it detects that it's compiling the UNIX login command, it inserts a backdoor that gives someone the ability to run as any user on the system.
- If it detects that it's compiling itself (with or without the additional code), it instead produces the binary for this "broken" version.
May 6, 2008
Random Stuff (1)
Apparently, Twitter is turning Japanese for some people.
A Florida judge has smacked down one of the RIAA's member corporations.
Peter Gabriel's servers were stolen from their data center. Apparently this isn't the first theft like this to happen recently.
That is all.
April 9, 2008
The Zen of OS Installation
Or lack thereof. It's kinda frustrating when you have a situation like I did this morning. I wanted to expand the Boot Camp partition on my laptop and reinstall Windows (migrating, in the course of this, from XP to Vista...yeah, don't ask), but it wouldn't let me allocate the partition the way I wanted.
HFS and HFS+, the journaled file systems on which OS X runs, are pretty decent at keeping individual files unfragmented (analysis shows that after over a year of decent usage file fragmentation was about 0.2%), it sucks at keeping free-space in one place (same analysis, 56% fragmented). That makes it pretty darn near impossible to mess around with partitions on older systems unless you're willing to pay for solution or backup your whole system and do a restore from the backup. Something just stinks about that situation.
Ah well, storms coming through town and all (Hello, Tornado Sirens!). Probably see some more chatter from me in the morning.
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