2004 May

“Apple has issued an updated version of Mac OS X, which fixes some unspecified vulnerabilities.”

“If you happen to live in certain parts of central Europe, June 8 is going to be a very special day for you. Not only will the transit of Venus across the Sun be visible, but also for a privileged few, the International Space Station ISS will make a daytime appearance, zipping across the solar […]

The US patent office has outdone itself this week, awarding dating company eHarmony a patent covering online matchmaking. In patentese, US patent no. 6,735,568 describes a computer implemented method for ‘identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship’.”

“Indexing files by looking at their audio features is still a work in progress for big search engines, including Google. So NPR eventually hit on a plan to instantly turn audio broadcasts into text files that can be recognized and picked up by search engine spiders.”

“Here’s the problem: the real threat of movie piracy comes not from the independent camcorder enthusiasts, but from the projectionists. High-quality copies come from those small rooms above the audience, where some projectionists pull the audio feed directly from the equipment, and shoot the film using high-quality video equipment.”

“Los Angeles-based Napster has rolled out its services into Canada, following on its launch last week in the UK. The company is now provoding its legal online digital music service across Canada, and has also tapped brewer Molson in a strategic marketing alliance to market the service. Molson will give limited free access to its […]

“Josh’s calculation took just over two weeks on his 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer. The new prime was verified by Tony Reix in just 5 days using only half the power of a Bull NovaScale 5000 HPC running Linux on 16 Itanium II 1.3 GHz CPUs. A second verification was completed by Jeff Gilchrist of […]

“For some time I’ve wondered why in the world we don’t have better interfaces between video games and exercise equipment. With the exception of the very simple and addictive Dance Dance Revolution, game/exercise devices fall into two categories: expensive exercise machines with bad games, or games with bad exercise machines.”

Via GeekExtreme.com: “An AOL representative said that the new software will be based on Mozilla 1.7 code developed by Netscape’s open-source offshoot. She described it as a relatively minor upgrade that will include a few security patches, but leave the interface mostly unchanged. “This is not a huge step forward,” she said. “

Via Geeknews.net: “Stevan Hoffacker follows those rules but commits a different faux pas: He uses the same password everywhere, including access to multiple e-mail accounts, Amazon.com, The New York Times’ website and E-ZPass electronic toll statements. In such cases, should hackers or scammers compromise one account, they potentially have one’s entire online life.”

“The technology is designed as a major search improvement for users trying to grapple with an increasing amount of digital information, offering a single hunting system instead of several different search engines, file management systems or other tools. Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which is on 90 percent of personal computers, provides tools for file management […]

“Unfortunately, in a move that will put the brakes on an emerging industry, Clear Channel has purchased the patent from the inventors of the technology and is asserting that it is the only entity that can sell concert CDs right after gigs.”

“Even the makers of Wi-Fi routers, access points and other gadgets privately say that as many as 80 percent of home users don’t bother to enable basic encryption or other protections against connection theft, eavesdropping and network invasion.”

“My mom is getting bored with learning the basics of email and has mastered Solitaire. She asked me what I do on my computer and I told her that I was teaching myself programming in Scheme. She expressed an interest in learning what I was doing, but I tried to teach it to her with […]

Via WinXPcentral : “I’ve read a number of articles on the internet about changing the text on the Start button in XP. On more than one occasion I’ve seen references to a five (5) letter limitation when the button is renamed. I always wondered if this was true or just an assumption someone made because […]

“The Hfnetchk tool is a command-line tool that administrators can use to centrally assess a computer or group of computers for the absence of security updates. As of the version 1.1 release of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA), Hfnetchk is exposed through the MBSA command-line interface, mbsacli.exe /hf. The latest version of the Hfnetchk […]

Get it here.

“Get detailed information on Windows Server 2003 system and file system commands, command syntax, and command switches with this one-page sample chart from our Quick Reference: Server Commands Pak.”

I don’t know anyone with a BlackBerry…Sounds like a wonk version of toothing.

“…called the Developer’s Certificate of Origin (DCO), tracks contributions and contributors….Linus Torvalds, said, ‘This process improvement makes Linux even stronger. We’ve always had transparency, peer review, pride and personal responsibility behind our open source development method. With the DCO, we’re trying to document the process. We want to make it simpler to link submitted code […]