Category: Tech

Grapevines are completely overrated these days

So, any of you “old birds” remember a wee little site going by the name of Tom’s Hardware Guide? No? Then gather around the fire, all ye young ‘injuns, for we are about to speak of The Years Not Beginning With Two. A certain Doktor Tom Pabst started what was possibly the first of its kind to hit the enthusiast mainstream. Back then, it WAS something relatively new, a forefather of sorts for the IT hardware review sites that are common today. Which is not to say it was an exemplar of tech journalism, but it was at least somewhat respectable. Then the bubble burst, and the site subsequently entered the Void of Dubious Quality and hasn’t looked back since as it plunged gleefully into the stygian depths. So why bring up all this tl:dr stuff, you might ask?

Why….

This. Taken on its own, the hilarity is already pretty obvious, but this shooting of the foot makes it far more delicious. That’s not even taking in account the irony that it jumped the gun on Firefox 4’s release by pointing to non-final builds of the browser, which is emblematic of the sorry levels of tech journalism these days.

When did Korean girls transform from fuddy-duddy to smoking hot?

I don’t have the answer.

But I distinctly remembered that the Koreans girls were once seen as the poor cousins of Japanese girls.  Japanese girls were the cute/sexy/hot ones while the Koreans girls were… well, motherly.  In a Kim Jong Il manner.

Is it the Korean dramas that sport ridiculously looking gay dudes who sent girls swooning over some stupid sit-up scene? A nefarious soft power projection by the South Korea gov? The vast improvement in skillsets of the Korean plastic surgeons? All of the above?

Anyway, who cares? A couple of years down the road, I’ll be too old to be looking at teenage girls prancing on the stage without feeling like a dirty old bastard. Might as well enjoy the ride it last.

Random Korean girl group

elemantary my dear watson

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I’m not Sherlock’s sidekick nor that shop you buy tissue paper from!

I was just ‘glancing’ through the list of torrents for the day when I came across eztv offering “Jeopardy: IBM Challenge” for download, coincidentally the game was brought up again during the end segment of video podcast ‘The Totally Rad Show”.  Naturally, this aroused my interest, so I checked out what exactly is going on… turns out, IBM had invented their latest AI, nicknamed Watson.

Being a non-tech head, I can only explain Watson is really er…smart.  Watching it compete against two of Jeopardy’s best players ever totally blows your mind.  I’ll give you a spoiler, Watson won.

No, it didn’t just win.  It blew away the competition.

You really gotta take your hats off to the folks at IBM for being able to create this…but on the other hand, you kinda wonder when it’s gonna come ‘online ‘ and set the nukes on us. ha!

The wiki entry says that Watson will be used for advancing medical science… but why just limit it to that?

Here’s a few TSC suggestions of our own :

  1. Let Batman finally have his Batcomputer!
  2. let it crack the DaVinci Code
  3. teach George Lucas how to direct movies
  4. show us the tactics to defeat FC Barcelona
  5. what women REALLY want from men
  6. run for our next General Election
  7. fansub all anime
  8. tell us if the world really ending in 2012?
  9. predict the Toto
  10. explain what does “42” really mean?

 

Jarring progress (with a swab of Vaseline)

D2D/Directwrite will become more of an issue the closer we get to FF4’s release date. It will not be a good idea to subject new users to something as basic as font readability…that’s too much of a comfort zone shock for new converts. Disabling D2D/DirectWrite by default off the bat (corrected with a point release down the road) is a saner approach, because I think Mozilla is underestimating the user pushback once the non beta testers (who generally have more conservative machine setups) are involved.

I guess there is some solace (depending on how you look at it) in that IE9 will probably beat FF4 in coming out first. That should increase significantly the chances Microsoft will fix the DirectWrite issues in the near future.

Another day, another spilled database

This has been making the rounds these few days. I don’t think I have a AMO account, that is, I don’t REMEMBER having one. Hard to sort ’em out these days, with a million and one sites requiring seperate (and generally badly hashed) logins…

That being said, this leak isn’t the scale of others that involve financial transactions (sometimes of an embarrassing nature.) And accounts of this kind are littered with dummy personal particulars, since as a rule of thumb the users are technologically savvy. There’s also the consideration that anything dealing with money and/or security clearances always require a heavier burden of security. If your throwaway blog poster account is compromised, the site only (nine out of 10) gets a spam infestation with possible malware links. If your favorite e-commerce account is 0wn3d by Mordor the Russian Mafia, you might be considerably out of pocket. Still, the stunning number of sites still using MD5 hashes (and Mozilla only switched in 2009) should put a chilling fear into any paranoid netizen’s heart and mind.

For whom the bell tolls

I’m no fan of FB, but this probably is a good, strong mark in the Yahoo! is DOOMED! ledger. Every step towards a diminished user base pushes Yahoo that much closer to the criticial mass threshold, but it’s a return trip this time round.

Once one of the undisputed giants of the tech industry, it’s now tottering around with many wounds, most of them self-inflicted. It’s name is synonymous with the screwing up of promising tech startups that were bought but left to rot through terminal mismanagement or just plain neglect. It will join the list of failed search engine companies that expanded for a time, caught “Management Syndrome” and died a slow lingering death. Within a few years Microsoft will pick up the choiciest bones and move on, and this time round no cajoling will be needed.