Comment Re:Not just in Soviet Russia (Score 1) 238
Tagged with 'sovietrussia'
New Ads That Watch You 238
Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. "Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens."
Comment Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score 1) 864
Most people have significant gripes with Vista because of an assortment of smaller issues. Like the 'mouse properties' screen hanging for 5 minutes when one changes the mouse sensitivity. I found that one particularly amusing.
Sluggishness is also a huge problem for people. I couldn't stand waiting for 4 freaking minutes for my laptop to start up. XP does it in 2. Shutting down is probably a worse ratio. This problem is common in all Vista installations. Even the basic dialogs to change system settings take fucking ages. It's a feeling I haven't experienced in years, since I was using a 1.6ghz p4 with 256MB RAM.
Sure, they're not show-stoppers. After they fixed file transfers, one could overlook all of these stupid annoyances. But the main thing is.. there are no real improvements over XP. There's nothing major Vista can do that XP can't, aside from DirectX 10. It looks prettier, but that's only skin-deep, and anyway Linux and OSX look even better. Even UAC is easily bypassed by virii.
So instead of nitpicking about bugs, or saying "oooh look all of these bugs really aren't bugs", we should really point out that there's
Science's Alternative To an Intelligent Creator 683
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover magazine has an interesting article on the multiverse theory — a synthesis of string theory and the anthropic principle that explains why our universe seems perfectly tailored for life without invoking an intelligent creator. Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. While most of those universes are barren, some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life. The idea that the universe was made just for us — known as the anthropic principle — debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. The anthropic principle languished on the fringes of science for years, but in 2000, new theoretical work threatened to unravel string theory when researchers calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as 101,000, with each solution representing a unique way to describe the universe. The latest iteration of string theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things." So far xkcd is simulating just one single universe.
Comment Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score 1) 812
The inventors of the internet did not anticipate the xbox-huge bittorrent packets flooding the pipes. What we need is better flow control -- an engineering solution to an engineering problem. It's not a net neutrality thing at all
Gaining System-Level Access To Vista 412
An anonymous reader writes "This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe — this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator. The person who discovered this security hole claims that XP, 2000, 2003 and NT are not vulnerable to it; only Windows Vista is."
