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Comment Compression (Score 1) 294

This isn't really "loudness", it's "compression".
And it's been done for years on commercial radio and, more recently, on TV adverts.
Every album you listen to has been mastered or mixed with compression of some sort on the master tracks.

A good example of how things have changed: listen to Violently Happy by Bjork for an example of when Compression is done correctly (i.e. subtle), then listen to any autotuned crap made within the last 2 years (Ke$ha) for an example of when not to do it.

Comment Starcraft 2 (Score 1) 133

A bit off topic, but I was always amused by the fact that when you play versus the computer 1v1 in Starcraft 2, the computer says "gg" when it realises that they can't possibly win.
And then they surrender.

I'm just waiting for the days when they start swearing at you and you can't tell the difference between AI and a person.

Comment Disclaimers at the bottom of emails (Score 1) 619

Another pet hate of mine is those stupid fucking disclaimers at the bottom of emails sent from companies.
They usually bang on about "if this email has been sent in error you agree to delete it and inform the sender and must not disclose the contents to a third party... " etc.
Yeah right...what a load of bollocks.

I'm not a lawyer but I'm betting that virtually all of this junk is legally unenforceable because to enter into any kind of agreement or legal contract you have to agree to it first - that's why it's called an agreement...
Email sent by mistake can be considered the same as spam - unsolicited email.

Comment I get this all the time (Score 1) 619

I've not got a massively popular surname, but thanks to having a FirstInitialSurname@gmail account, I get tons of the stuff.

I've had the following:

- Job offer for the Vice President of Communications (ha!) for the Carlyle Group
- Invoices from storage companies
- Bills from Qwest Communications which unbelievably include a temporary username/password to log into the customer's account, imagine the fun to be had here
- Party invitations
- Bank statements
- Random email conversations that I have been CC'd into
- Pictures sent from mobile phones (usually by the owner to what they think is their email address)

Occasionally I email back, but most of the time I don't bother - it's their own damn fault.

Comment Re:So Mac Users should expect this? (Score 1) 277

Root does matter, but if I were writing Mac malware I would grab their Safari passwords then try a "sudo -i" with each one on the system.
You can bet most users will use the same password for websites as they do for their computer login.

Also, I'm not sure how feasible it would be - but it would be theoretically possible to flag a binary setuid by modifying the underlying filesystem or exploit another binary which is already set to +s.
And then, boom - root access.

Comment Re:So Mac Users should expect this? (Score 1) 277

Ummm, what viruses would it be looking for? There aren't any real, in the wild Mac viruses unless you count Mac Guard, which barely qualifies and is only delivered via trojan that happens to spawn a separate app at run time.

Windows malware.
Say your colleague gives you .zip archive full of files that he's worked with on a Windows machine and wants you to review some of the data for whatever reason (imagine they are some kind of self-extracting Powerpoint .exe files along with the source .ppt files).
One of the files is infected, but you would have no idea until you email your company CEO the archive and infect his machine...
Most machines in workplaces will share SMB drives between Mac and Windows machines - this is a good example of why you need an AV program for every computer no matter the OS.

Comment Re:Finally... (Score 1) 410

Jobs has headed 3 companies to success: Apple (2 different occasions), Next and Pixar. Gates on the other hand is a one-trick pony.

Which "one trick" would that be?
Making his fortune at Microsoft or giving away half his money to solve real world problems?

Comment Re:Distro isn't the biggie, it's the scheduler (Score 1) 264

I would choose a 'stable' distro though, so no Fedora, no Ubuntu (even their LTS isn't exactly enterprise grade compared to RedHat / Suse or even Debian stable

That would depend on if you mean stable = "ancient" or stable = "modern but secure".
Ubuntu LTS is in the latter category from my experience.

Comment Re:This post is tabloid-fodder (Score 1) 347

The outage* was over by the time Slashdot posted it.

* except that there never was any outage, just some clients that crashed when they updated their XML config from Skype servers.
Where I worked we speculated that they were updating the master IP/hostnames for the login servers when beta testing Azure or some other Microsoft datacenter and some clients received corrupted data.

Comment We were affected (Score 1) 347

It affected my company for a short time today from midday to around 14:00 when we became aware of the fix.
Not everyone was affected but we found it rather odd how this "shared.xml" file would become corrupted and crash Skype just because it was connected to the Internet - there's probably a serious bug waiting to be exploited by malware here.

As a further note, not all people use Skype for phone calls - we use it for secure IM between office workers.

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