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Comment Re:Or, stay low tech ... (Score 3, Interesting) 133

By all means, apply technology as you see fit. But for some things, many of us have found that old fashioned pen and paper is still superior. Everything else is a temporary solution which will eventually fail on you or go away completely.

I good middle ground is when the page is full take a picture and put it on evernote which will do OCR (so long as you don't write too bad) and then you have an index of all your notes somewhere.

Comment How is this bad (compared to before)? (Score 1) 188

So by using a generated id that changes on device reset and giving users the option to opt out this is just as bad as before? Sure you're opted in by default but you can disable it. Before it used an id that was tied to phone and you had no control over when it got used. Also they tried to hide it but that's nothing new.

Microsoft

Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design 215

kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, 'What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.'"

Comment I use both svn and git (Score 1) 244

We purely use subversion at work (after years of trying to convince them, prior to this all work was done on live server, by multiple devs at once). I've switched to git for most personal projects. Of all the benefits and downsides of git vs svn, I just feel more comfortable in a distributed VCS workflow. My home directory is still subversion though. Seems to address the problem better for wanting to keep my different home directories in sync. Don't want to login to a server and go "oh crap, I forgot to push my changes from other computer".

I've tried converting work to git but it just isn't going to happen. I just snicker when something happens in subversion that I know git can do easier.

(rant)To revert changes in subversion you do a non-intuitive reverse merge? With git it's... git revert. Anytime someone needs to revert a commit in subversion they ask me and I always have to look up the syntax because it doesn't make sense(/rant)

Comment I used to work tech support at a small ISP (Score 1) 486

It was customary for the sysadmin to block users that he saw a lot of traffic on various ports the bots use (back when bots always used a specific port). The part that I didn't aggree with was he would just cut them off. Then when they call in to tech support pissed off that their internets are down we realize they were shutoff because they had spyware. It was mainly cut the user off so they didn't waste company resources than it was looking out for the users.

Comment Re:So. (Score 1) 457

Depends on what their definitions are.

Exactly. How many of those people just walking off with their red swingline stapler and how many are walking away with customer's credit card information? It doesn't say the purpose of those "electronic files". What if it's an owner's manual for something I own? or some random funny pictures? Sure it's electronic files, sure it's considered company property if you save it on your work computer, but it's not files that are privileged corporate information that could be used against them.

It's like just saying "Have you ever stolen anything in your life?" Stealing a pen from work is one thing, stealing the database that stores all clients personal data is another.

Comment Re:Use GPS (Score 1) 178

I have a gps receiver at home (the infamous Garmin GPS 18 LVC) and my current offset is 0.000 msec with a jitter of 0.001 msec (so 1 microsecond). Actually I've hit the limit in linux at that point since last I checked linux can only resolve down to millisecond. BSD can go down to nanosecond. That GPS receiver cost a whopping US$90

Comment Let me try to sum things up (Score 5, Informative) 526

(yes, I read the entire investigation part of the affidavit)

According to Brian Hogan's room mate (pg 14) an "intoxicated male" gave him a phone believing it was his. Hogan remained at the bar "a little while longer" and no one claimed the phone.

According to Powel (the employee who lost the phone) (pg 16) he states his last memory of the phone was placing it in his bag and then placing the bag by his feet.he was there till closing at 11:00 PM local time. He left when the restaurant started to close and he thinks the phone could not have remained in the restaurant more than 15 minutes.

Brian's room mate called the police because the phone was synced to her computer and Hogan's and was afraid law enforcement could get the ip address and trace it back to her (pg 12). So she was calling to absolve herself from legal issues. Also when she was shown the phone it appeared apple may have already done a remote wipe of the phone.

George Riley says (pg 12) that the phone was invaluable and that the $8500 (yes, supposedly he got $8500 total, no source on the other $2500 though) that Hogan got the phone was worth the price of the phone if not more.

Brian Hogan and someone else (sorry, I'm getting tired of finding this in the pdf) knew the police were investigating and was in the process of destroying/hiding evidence. The police went to hogan's father's house and found Hogan with his girlfriend. He said that the other person had some of the evidence. Eventually they got a hold of him and he placed the other items in front of a church.

Only other gem I found in there is a quote as stated by brian's room mate when she urged him not to sell the phone as it would ruin Robert Powel's image he told her "Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn't have lost his phone"

Comment Re:Apple's activity is criminal here, Palm's is le (Score 1) 656

Link? Apple has a pretty extensive developer site at http://developer.apple.com/ so if there was a way for non-apple devices to work in itunes then it should be documented there. I'm not even going to bother looking because if such a document existed there would be a lot more devices that support itunes. If this interoperable standard exists then palm would much prefer to use that instead of this constant can and mouse game of changing vendor id's.

Television

Nielsen Struggles To Track Modern Viewing Habits 248

RobotRunAmok writes "The Nielsen Company has been the principal entity tracking TV shows' popularity, and, by extension, their potential profitability. But as our media consumption practices change, some believe that Nielsen's methods have not kept pace. A new consortium including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery, and Walt Disney — along with major advertisers — is calling for the creation of a new audience measurement service, and planning to solicit bids from outside firms by the fourth quarter of this year. Nielsen says they're not worried about so many of their customers ganging up on them, having just invested more than a billion dollars in research to stay modern. Except that today Nielsen announced they would pointedly not be adding weights to DVR households, and that adding weights for the presence of a personal computer or Internet access in under-represented households would provide 'no significant change or enhancement' to its national TV ratings sample. The pundits deride Nielsen's 'archaic' methodology and 'disco-era tactics,' but others scoff that such a consortium will only 'put the foxes in charge of the henhouse.' Stay tuned..."

Comment Re:It would be really nice... (Score 1) 427

This is why I don't understand why Sony doesn't do this. Supposedly the ps1 games are selling good, why not add ps2 games to that list? And it's not like they don't know how to code the software compatibility because it was in the launch 60gb ps3 (I think). Just seems like a no brainer to me as it's something that would make money. Although sony never really seems to "get it" when it comes to... anything

Comment Re:This article is too forgiving. (Score 1) 259

Open up dictionary app on os x, or even just use the spotlight search (dictionary gives you more suggestions though) and you can search for any of the common 4 letter swear words. The word that fuck has a TON of suggestions as to what you mean all include said word. Also all the other words you mention can be found in the dictionary app on os x.

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