Spooky... Loch Ness Monster Found?
Ok, where's Rod Serling when you need him? I wonder if this find is legit or just another hoax. Either way, it's just more fuel for the fire on the debate about whether ol' Nessy is real or simply legend. Pretty interesting find if it turns out to be a legitimate find. I need to look up to see just how old the legend of the Loch Ness Monster is...
A Scottish retiree has discovered a fossil of a 150-million-year-old reptile on the shores of Scotland's mythical Loch Ness, press reports said Wednesday.
Retired junkyard dealer Gerald McSorley, 67, said he "literally tripped over" the algae-covered fossil in shallow water near Loch Ness, Scotland's most famous inland body of water.
He took it to experts at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where the fossil was confirmed to be that of a plesiosaur, a long-necked sea reptile about 150 million years old.
Microsoft warns of critical Windows flaw
Windows users should expect to have another update from Microsoft waiting for them on their computers.
The software giant issued a patch Wednesday morning to plug a critical security hole that could allow an attacker to take control of computers running any version of Windows except for Windows ME.
A group of Polish hackers and independent security consultants, known as the Last Stage of Delirium, discovered the flaw and worked with Microsoft to fix it.
"It should be emphasized that this vulnerability poses an enormous threat, and appropriate patches provided by Microsoft should be immediately applied," the group said in an advisory posted to its Web site. The group said that programs designed to exploit the vulnerability will likely be available on the Internet soon.
The flaw is in a component of the operating system that allows other computers to request the Windows system perform an action or service. The component, known as the remote procedure call (RPC) process, facilitates such activities such as sharing files and allowing others to use the computer's printer.
Commodore 64: Don't Call It A Comeback...
Tulip Computers, which owns the Commodore brand name, plans to relaunch the brand to take advantage in an upsurge of interest in the obsolete Commodore 64 (C64) computer and its 1980s-era games, the company said in a statement Friday.
I find this announcement by Tulip Computers to be interesting. There are a ton of C64 emulators on the market already, so it's interesting that they'll be licensing an official software emulator.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of hardware emulators they ship. Are they looking to do some kind of PDA form factor device? I wouldn't mind playing some of my old C64 games on a small portable device. I think I need to dust off that old C64 of mine... :)
Macromedia's New Product Activation/Pirating Software
Macromedia announced their new product activation initiative. It makes me wonder how much money they spent coming up w/this method to try to bypass people pirating their software.
While this method will certainly curtail those buddies who simply share their serial numbers with friends, I don't think it'll make much of an impact on the overall scale. People who a content w/stealing software are always going to find ways to break product activation procedures. The problem with implementing any kind of copy protection, is that the copy protection itself always ends up having to be implementing in the software itself—which means somebody with a memory monitoring and little bit of knowledge can hack the executable to bypass the copy protection—or in this case can simply figure out the registration algorithm and implement a key generator for calculate validate keys to use in the telephone registration.
If you use a commercial software package and rely on it to do work, you should pay for it. The only way a company can stay in business is to make money and the way a software company makes money is by selling it's product. While I think you need some level of protection in there—to bypass the casual user sharing serial numbers—I also think it's a waste of money R&D money to spend a bunch of time trying to come up with new ways to thwart pirates from stealing your software. If there's a will, there's a way...
Is Mozilla Dying?
Mozilla.org, the organization that coordinates Mozilla open source development, today announced the launch of a new foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the award-winning Mozilla standards-based web applications and core technologies, including the Gecko browser layout engine. The Mozilla Foundation will continue and expand on the efforts of mozilla.org, the group managing the daily operations of the Mozilla project since its inception.
Ok, AOL announced today that their breaking off Mozilla into it's own foundation called The Mozilla Foundation. They're providing $2 million in funding over the next 2 years, but that's not really that much money (but should last them get them through 2 years if they're budget conscious.) As Robi's often stated, open source really needs financial backing in order for projects to prosper—with AOL backing out financially, will anyone else step in? If not, is this the beginning of the end for Mozilla? With Microsoft claiming their discontinuing Internet Explorer as a standalone product and this news, there hasn't been much good news in the browser market over the past 2 months.
Mozilla's a pretty strong product right now—at least it's getting better and better with each release—so I'm sure if things are handled correctly over the next 2 years it won't go away. I still am complexed on why AOL never tried to leverage this product. I always assumed they were putting money in this project to use it as the basis for their AOL Software, but that obviously isn't the direction they chose to go with it. I'm really curious as to why they never leverage Mozilla into their software.
Mel Gibson's Religious Epic: "The Passion"
Ain't It Cool News posted a copy of the trailer for The Passion—which is the new film written and directed by Mel Gibson (well, Mel did the screenplay anyway.) This film is geared at detailing the final hours of Jesus as well as his crucifixion. It'll be interesting to see how this film holds up for a number of reasons.
First, the film was shot using only Latin dialect—this I'm sure will affect mass appeal. Second, hard core religious movies tend not to do well w/the general moving going public. I know Mel is a devote Catholic, so it'll be interesting to see how the Catholic Church responds to this movie.
This movie has sparked my interest since I first saw details appear on AICN and from what I've seen of the trailer, the movie appeals to me even more. All religious/spirtual beliefs put aside, this movie looks like it's going to be a well told story. I always enjoy a well told story.
All-In-One Security And Convenience
Are you tired of remembering all of your computer and online passwords? There's one to log on to your computer, another one for your e-mail at work, one more for your AOL, Yahoo! or MSN account and potentially another for your ISP at home. If you bank or trade shares online, then you have to remember those passwords as well.
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[Fellowes'] Secure Touch Optical Mouse allows users to replace their passwords with a fingerprint reader. When you arrive at the logon screen, just place your fingerprint on the sensor built on to the mouse and you're in. The same goes for anything on the Web that requires a password.
This is an interesting idea, maybe a step backwards in ergo dynamics, but and interesting idea. I certainly hope that when creating a password for each application that it uses some kind of hash algorithm with a unique key for each password—the last thing you want to have happen is to use the same password for each site. If all the device is doing is converting your fingerprint signature into an ASCII key, then it might be using the same password for every site/application. That would be a real no-no—never use one password for everything you do.
I also wonder how it would work in a network environment. If you have a bunch of PCs all connected using this mouse, could you go from one computer to the next and have it work on each box? I'd imagine you could—if not, that's a problem that would need to be resolved.
Love Pump/Band Practice
Well, we had band practice again last night. I ended up burning the recording from last night (and the practice before that) to CD. I was a bit off all night last night—my timing was really bad last night. Not sure why either, I had practice a couple of times over the past couple of days. I had a bit of a headache last night, so maybe that contributed to things. Regardless, when we play out live I can't afford to have off nights.
PS - "Love Pump" isn't the actual name of the band—we still haven't decided on a name—it's just our joke reference from the movie "This Is Spinal Tap."
Microsoft patches holes in Windows
Microsoft on Wednesday warned of three new security gaps in its software, including one "critical" Windows flaw that could allow a hacker to run unauthorized code on victims' PCs.
The most serious of the flaws is what is known as a buffer overrun vulnerability, which could allow an attacker to use an unchecked buffer to run their own executable code.
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Because the security hole can be exploited without any action on the part of the user, Microsoft described it as critical, the highest rating in the software maker's four-level system.
Microsoft patches holes in Windows
Weekend of the 4th
First, I hope everyone in the U.S. had a nice, relaxing Fourth of July weekend. I spent Thursday night w/friends, Friday (the 4th) with family and spent Saturday and Sunday with Jenn's parents in Niles, OH. Busy weekend, but I had fun.
Jenn & I went to see T3: Rise of the Machines today. I've been hearing lots of good things about it of late, so my desire to see it really increased. It turned out to be what I originally thought it would be—just a big budget action flick that's very short on story. It was definitely the worst of the three. I'm not saying there's not good action, it's just very predictable and I found myself losing interest. If I were watching it at home, I probably wouldn't have bothered pausing if I left the room. I just wasn't fond of the story at all. I think they could have done something much more interesting. Why are all these action flicks being done like we're all cerebrally challenged?
I also recieved my Spock's BeardFeel Euphoria: Special Edition today. The special edition included two bonus tracks and also included a sampler CD of a bunch of other artists being distributed by InsideOut Music.
Comedy Club/Missed Concert...
Jenn & I went to The Funny Bone last night for the second time in 5 days (we went Saturday night and saw Heywood Banks.) Mark Sweeney was the headliner last night and was funny as hell. The feature act was just as good, but I can't recall his name. I know he was one of the ten finalist for a contest on Comedy Central. He's also from Cincy, so there was a lot of "local" humor.
I'm really bummed I missed the Fates Warning/Dream Theater/Queensryche concert last night. They're playing in Cleveland and Cincy this month as well, so I think I'll have to hit the Cincy show—which is on a Friday. Part of the reason I'm so bummed, is I just found out that Nick D'Virgilio, who's the drummer and now lead vocalist for Spock's Beard, is playing drums for Fates Warning on this tour. He's probably my favorite drummer at the moment, and Spock's Beard is definitely one of my favorite bands. Anyway, I want to see the show even more now.
DataGlyphs Are Cool
It always amazes me how much cool stuff has come from Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) branch. Graphical user interfaces (i.e. Windows and the Mac both use GUIs), the mouse, Ethernet, e-mail, WYSIWYG editors—all of these and more came from the minds of employees at PARC. Xerox really failed in the early 70s by not jumping on these experiments. However, that didn't stop people like Steve Jobs—who based many of the Apple features on things he saw during a trip to PARC—from capitalizing on the things the creative minds at PARC were creating.
Something the guys at PARC have been working on for a while now is DataGlyphs(r). I first remember reading about this probably a few years ago and at the time I didn't really give it much thought (other than to say: "Hey, that's cool.") I was watching TechTV last night and they brought on a researcher from PARC. He gave a demo on using a normal scanner with some custom built software that relied on DataGlyphs to read in the positions of chess pieces on the board. While this in itself wasn't all that practical of a use, DataGlyphs themselves are.
Essentially DataGlyphs give you the ability to embed binary data into a print-ready material that in unobtrusive to the human eye. It essentially is a replacement for the barcode system we currently use. To represent data, it uses a series of backward and forward slashes that represent ones and zeros.
Winamp 3, Good Riddance...
In a setback to Nullsoft's plans, Winamp3 in March gave way to the earlier Winamp 2.x version, pending a broader overhaul that will incorporate aspects of both in Winamp 5. In the meantime, AOL has discontinued supporting plug-ins developed using Wasabi and will instead fold Winamp3 graphical interface designs, or "skins," into Winamp 2.x.
I just ran across this in the news. Good to see the Nullsoft developers are smart enough to listen to the community. I know they spent a lot of time working on WA3—and it's always hard to turn your back on code you've spent a lot of time developing—but let's face it, WA3 blew. I upgraded for like a day, but quickly went back to WA2.
I don't want lots of gimmicks with my mp3 player. I want a small thin visual interface and it should use as little system resources as possible. In my opinion, no other mp3 player has even tempted to switch from WA2—except for WA3 of course, which I had high hopes for.
BestBuy, Bad Idea...
I just went to BestBuy's website and got the screen below. Talk about bad ideas. Why would you purposly limit the number of users to your site—especially for an e-commerce site? Come on guys, why not pop a few more servers on the ol' server farm? This is ridiculous.
Open Source Code Ultimately Better?
Reasoning recently did a review of Apache's code and found that the defects per thousand lines of code were on par with commercial products in the same stage of development. Although the number of defects were slightly higher (by .02 per thousand lines of code,) Reasoning determined that the end result may turn out to be a better product due to the nature of open source projects—implying that bugs found are more likely to be addressed quickly by the public, since anyone has the ability to track down and repair the bugs.
"The open-source code seems to start at the same defect rate for early commercial code as well," Jeff Klagenberg, director of project management, said in an interview. "Over time, it can gain higher levels of quality. That appears to be because of the natural inspection process inherent in open source."
I hate to see blanket statements like this. I do think when an open source project has financial backing by a large company, that this probably holds true, but let's face it, there's only so much energy someone will put into a open source project before needing some kind of monetary return.