Nick’s wife leaves him an informative voicemail

Nick gets chewed out for tuning the tv to the wrong station.

Download the mp3:

Nicks_wife_leaves_him_a_voicemail.mp3

Posted in Cubicle Shenanigans | Comments Off

MPAA/RIAA wants us paying repeatedly to use what we already purchased.

Beardy Says:

I’m not a lawyer(*****), but the last time I checked, the original foundation stone on which copyright law was based was that of “the printed work”. Before anyone arcs-up, I know, music and movies, etc are not “printed works”. However, follow the logic as to why “the printed work” should remain the basis of copyright law and the outrageous claims by the MPAA/RIAA/etc show up for what they really are… blatant grabs for money (which is unlikely to be passed on to the original artist either for that matter…). Nothing like a lawyer in the form of one Steven Metalitz (who represents the likes of the MPAA, etc) to decide to modify consumer rights to bolster the profits of a corporation.

Let’s look at this like “John Q. Citizen” when buying a book, Vinyl LP, cassette or “Red Book Standard” CD (ie: non-DRM-encumbered media). He buys it, takes it home, uses it as many times as he likes until it wears out or he tires of it.

Now consider Metalitz’s statement that he rejects the need “to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works” that they have already purchased.  If extended to non-DRM-encumbered media, the implication is staggering.  The logical equivalent of Metalitz’s statement in the real world is that at some indeterminate time after purchase, they are reserving the right to come in and remove or destroy the media from your house and walk away without any compensation.

Now, while that statement may sound outrageous, is it any less outrageous than what amounts to digital vandalism that they are promoting ?

DRM is fundamentally evil.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Copyright and Fair Use | Comments Off

Beardy weighs in on Old School programming methods

by guestblogger “Beardy”

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Ok, I’m “old school” and proud of it, and yes the author of the article linked at the bottom of the page makes some excellent points.

• Yes, I do NOT miss having to write convoluted, upside-down and inside-out self-modifying code just to save a few miserable bytes* ! (*and yes, I know there are still a few bare-metal scenarios where that is still the order of the day…)
• Yes, I do NOT miss having to do all my coding of OO GUI systems using hand-built text objects in CLI text editors!
• Yes, I most certainly am grateful that “GOTO” has been relegated to the dustbin of history in all but hardcore bare-metal work.
• And OH how I do NOT miss writing multithreaded applications with languages and OSes that did not support it inherently.

However…

As onerous is it was to get a handle on initially and hideous to be a support programmer for when the original developer adopted a variation on the more commonly accepted (ie: M$ Win32 API…), Hungarian notation certainly does have advantages, especially when the code has to be viewed in multiple scenarios with various tools, most of which have no concept of the language or types.

(…rant warning…)
More importantly, I take major issue with the blanket statements about memory management. Yes, it has improved a LOT and yes, modern languages, compilers and OSes have far more of it available and *can* use it very efficiently, BUT, many programmers seem to view memory as an inexhaustible resource and rather than just not focussing on being memory misers, they ignore good design templates to reinvent the wheel or worse reinvent a square wheel!!! So rather than take a minute to consider the implications of collecting a massive dataset into a local list or collection “just because it is easier for them” when they could write a more efficient algorithm in the first place and only collect a fraction of the data for the same outcome and let the memory manager worry about dealing with the load. Talk about backward progress…

“Old-school programming techniques you probably don’t miss”
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132061

Posted in Coding | Comments Off

A new twist on “security through obscurity” ?

By Beardy.

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Photo by Henning

Ok, anyone who knows anything about security in IT systems knows that “security through obscurity” is akin to “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. It just does not really provide the desired outcome in the long term.

So, let’s examine the history of this approach. M$ products, getting better, tend to still depend on M$-specific proprietary APIs and protocols, that inevitably lead to “critical” security patch after “critical” security patch ad infinitum, sound familiar?

On the hardware and network design side, many people (some of whom should know better!) think that just because they have what is termed a “NAT firewall”, that their precious LAN is secured from the kiddiots and other nasty denizens of the world-wide-whackfest. WRONG!

First of all, while NAT does provide at least some level of protection (certainly better than the twits who connect their USB ADSL MODEMs directly to the ‘net without even enabling Winblows firewall, nuff sed on that one.), it only really obfuscates things, it is not true protection. Consider the annual C and Perl code obfuscation contests, the result is code that is nearly impossible to read without getting a headache, but it is decipherable in the end. This will eventually become largely academic as IPV6 becomes more pervasive. Remember that NAT was originally created to provide an artificial extension of the internet’s IPV4 address space (well, that combined with non-routable IP address ranges).

All the gurus of internet hacking agree on one thing about NAT as a “firewall” technology; it is limited but fine provided the machines on the inside NEVER open a connection OUT and no ports are forwarded IN. All a potential attacker needs is the details of who and where you came from and they can (in theory at least) use that against you, kinda like identity theft.

So where am I going with this?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Buying Blu-Ray discs from overseas

by guestblogger “Beardy”

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Before you read on, I strongly recommend BUY AUSTRALIAN (whenever possible).
If you buy overseas, you send money and jobs with the purchase, unless of course the product is manufactured exclusively overseas in the first place. In that case, shop “smart”.

Ok, we all know that DVD region encoding is an artificial block to enforce regional pricing. We also know that many DVD players can be made region-free to avoid the problem of having to own multiple DVD players to cover the regions that our DVDs come from.

So with the hassle, why buy overseas? Availability of titles, release dates, optional extras, etc, etc…

While NTSC region-1 disks (USA and Canada) tend to have the widest list of available titles and features, NTSC is not PAL (the Oz video standard). Ignoring the whole digital thing, there are still reasons to stick with PAL disks. Enter the UK as PAL and region-2. Makes a nice source for movies, not to mention frequently faster delivery than the USA.

Blu-Ray players that can be made region-free tend to be somewhat rare still, but mercifully they did not break the regions up as much (see first link). Even better, of the 3 regions, Oz and NZ are in the same region as the EU/UK! So no problem playing UK-sourced blu-ray disks in local players.

Still, why buy from the UK rather than locally ? As much as supporting your local industry is laudable, there are some serious discrepancies in pricing of these foreign-created disks. Since they are imported anyway, how come the local release is so slow and so expensive? Add to that the major annoyance that frequently the Oz importers do not being in everything or large quantities, eg: Van Helsing soundtrack CD, of which how many were brought into the country? According to one major retailer, only 100 physical disks were imported and fewer were ever distributed to stores.

So, the message is simple: Buy Australian (if possible), otherwise have a look at UK-based online sellers.

Oz/NZ/EU/UK all in region B for blu-ray
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc>
Example of price differential (delivered prices):

<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Van-Helsing-Blu-ray-Hugh-Jackman/dp/B001TDKLHO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1242603022&sr=8-1>
£12.98 (+shipping, GBP£3.58)
TTL: AUD$32.96  (GBP£16.56)

<http://www.bigwentertainment.com.au/product/van_helsing_3847516_188284.html>
AUD$35.96 (+shipping, AUD$4.50)
TTL: AUD$40.46

<http://www.ezydvd.com.au/item.zml/805834>
AU$39.97 (+shipping, AUD$1.50)
TTL: AUD$41.47

Posted in Movies | Comments Off