While setting up a new machine I got this message:

45056 x 19207 pixel… not that bad…

Watching the daily dose of news television could become the start of a rant.

Found in the german “heute journal” show from the 14th of May 2009. So guys – 526 is bigger than 527 at last!

Auf dem täglichen Weg ins Büro und von dort wieder nach Hause höre ich die verschiedensten Podcasts. Ein Stammpodcast seit nahezu der ersten Stunde ist Bitsundso und die verschiedenen Ableger davon: Games und so, Videogames und so, usw.

Und da Herr Hetzel und Crew seit wenigen Tagen hochoffiziell die Möglichkeit anbieten sie finanziell direkt zu unterstützen und dafür sogar noch zusätzlichen Nutzen (neben dem guten Gefühl) zu erhalten habe ich mir sozusagen direkt dieses famose Bits und so Plus Abo gegönnt.

Auf das da reichlich wunderbare Unterhaltung (wie in den letzten Jahren schon) kommen möge. Kaufe Bits und so Plus und werde glücklich!

Source: http://www.bitsundso.de/plus/

Man lernt ja nicht aus! Und heute habe ich etwas ganz ganz wichtiges gelernt: Unter Zuhilfenahme von zusammengewürfelten CD Images aus zweifelhaften Quellen (die nächste Piratenbucht zum Beispiel) kann man wertvolle Zeit sparen!

Zeit ist Geld! Und das Geld rechtfertigt so manches.

Nunja genug der Satire – ich bin ja nun auch von der softwareschreibenden Zunft und letztlich wie jeder andere darauf angewiesen dass eben keine nicht lizensierten oder nicht zweifelsfrei von mir selbst stammenden Kopien meiner Produkte im Umlauf sind.

Das geht schon los bei so Sachen wie Support – den zu leisten ist nämlich schwer wenn man nicht weiss was der nette Herr von der CD-Image erstellenden Zunft so alles noch mit dazugemischt hat – und endet bei so Sachen wie den Raubkopien.

Berichten gestandener IT-Servicedienstleistern zufolge bedient man sich selbst auch gerne mal am “All-you-can-Eat” Buffet. Natürlich hat das dann nichts mit Raubkopien zu tun sondern dient nur dazu ein wenig Zeit einzusparen. Ohje – die Satire kommt schonwieder durch. Gut gut Zeit für ein Zitat:

“Jede Raubkopie ist in der Regel eine unerlaubte Vervielfältigung oder Verbreitung von urheberrechtlich geschützten Werken. Gemäß § 106 Urhebergesetz mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu 3 Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft. Auch der Versuch selbst ist strafbar. Heftiger werden die Strafen bei einer gewerbsmäßigen unerlaubten Verwertung. Eine gewerbsmäßige Verwertung liegt immer dann vor, wenn dies in Gewinnerzielungsabsicht erfolgt. Hier droht gemäß § 108 a Urhebergesetz eine Freiheitsstrafe von bis zu 5 Jahren oder Geldstrafe. Selbstverständlich bestehen zivilrechtliche Ansprüche neben der Strafbarkeit.”

So kommt man dann – obwohl man natürlich nur die besten Absichten hatte – in Teufels Küche. Meines Erachtens ist etwas was man nicht eindeutig aus einer vom Hersteller abgesegneten Quelle bezogen hat ersteinmal eine unerlaubte Kopie. Das wird dann je nach Einzelfall – im Falle eines IT-Dienstleisters – schneller als einem lieb ist zu einer unlizensierten “Raubkopie”. Auch wenn man noch soviele Lizenzen im Schrank liegen hat wird aus dem kopierten Datenträger und der damit erstellten Installation rein rechtlich kein Original. Jedenfalls nicht gezwungenermassen.

Source: http://www.internetrecht-rostock.de/raubkopierer.htm

Microsoft did a fairly good job hiding the end user license agreement in the .NET Framework 3.5 installer dialog:

Hmm… maybe something in the current Menu Meters version is wrong:

So..in 2009 Windows Mobile 7 will start and some things point towards an AppStore equivalent called Skymarket for the Microsoft mobile operating system… hmm… Why not… earlier? Like before Apple… way to go Microsoft.

Source: Skymarket @ Computerworld

I found the almost complete “Computer Chronicles” recordings on archive.org – and boy this is fun!

I picked some episodes and found very interesting things – like this particular episode from 1985. It’s about Unix and obviously one of the presenters has his very own opinion about Unix.

Source: Computer Chronicles 1985 “Unix”

Hmm… dabei wollte ich gerade nach Arbeitssuchenden suchen…

… build ourselves a case for the test machines with lego duplo blocks… like the founders of google did.

“It’d be hard to believe but yes, Sergey Brin and Larry Page made their first 40GB Google Storage Server with lego casing.”

Source: http://zedomax.com/blog/2008/08/04/original-google-storage-server-made-with-legos/

I am reading through the normal gadget blogs and I stumble upon this:

“Hailed as the “planet’s first on and off-site backup solution to use ZFS,” these units provide up to 1TB of local and off-site storage, optional RAID 1 local redundancy, twin gigabit Ethernet ports, OS X / Windows / Linux compatibility and the obligatory rock-solid stability that ZFS is known for.”

Why is ZFS known for anything like rock-solid stability? The last thing I know was that a certain consumer OS manufacturer released his ZFS implementation to the public in read-only-configuration.

Source: Engadget

You may – just like me – be curious about the things that might or might not be inside of the plastic housing of a SD card:

Vegetarier die Fisch essen sind mir suspekt. Womit entschuldigen die den Ausrutscher hin zum Tiermord?

I had a Skype call today with a colleague and we came across the remaining 1,40 Euros on his SkypeOut balance… As many of you will know this SkypeOut balance is limited to 180 days. So when you’re not using it for 180 days it’ll be deactivated. We didn’t know this at that very moment we just talked about it what would happen.

And minutes later this happens:

I did not do anything with skype. I did not search on skype.com nor did I do anything else except talking about the subject with my colleague over skype. And there it is: The information we just talked about… you have to do a call once every 180 days to keep your SkypeOut activated…

Am I a bit to paranoid on that matter? It just matches a bit too well … and that would explain why Skype is using that much CPU cycles while calls are made…

Hmm… Once upon a time there was a guy with an idea. The idea simply breaks down to this:

“Sell full price games to people and get an extra revenue out of in-game advertising.”

So here we are: I just found pacific city in crackdown literally plastered with Dodge advertising. Once day it was Dell… if you’re playing in the UK you’ll probably get army ads… how sick is that.

The first game that got this kind of in-game advertising was Testdrive Unlimited. The advertising was only available in the US of A and when you bought the game there it wasn’t full-price but $20 less than a full price title – because of that in-game ads. As an european player you didn’t see any ads and you had to pay the full price.

To be clear: I don’t think in-game advertising sucks. I just think that if you’re gaining revenue from in-game advertising you should share it with the players who actually bought the game. (e.g. lower the game price).

In the case of crackdown there’s no lower price. And that sucks.

It looks to me just like something that might explode….

thanks do #blogs.de irc channel for the link.

Source: Google Maps

“As everyone knows, it is possible to get quite a speed boost out of Mail.app by stripping all the bloat out of its Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on.”

It can lead to a speedup of Mail.App. Despite the fact it decreased the Envelope Index for me it wasn’t really noticable… but your mileage may vary.

Source: hawkwings

“In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.“

Oh what an interesing find today. Seems like the Wikipedia already backed away from the statement but the damage is done.

Scott Water writes:

“…, but to me this is just dumb.

They are sitting on an advertising gold mine. To even say it may be close to running out of money is inexcusable. Think about all the time individuals have dedicated to that site. Because of a lack of funds all that work could disappear? I understand businesses come and go, but to not even attempt to be a business…ehh..”

I don’t think that advertising would solve anything here. Way to many religious thoughts have gone and will go into that. Just because of that: the inability to agree in any possible way because of contradicting beliefs has and will always be in the way of such projects. I don’t say that there should be a dictatorship that guides the way – but not even trying to agree on such simple things is the problem of many many $open projects. I came across such inabilities several times in the last months. It ended in all cases with the worst solution for everyone, just because the open-guys/girls were not able to compromise for the sake of the best solution.

(goddamn! I just used that $lame placeholder statement for the first time, getting old…)

Source: http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/no-cash-for-wikipedia/

hmm..remember some months ago when I wrote about this great flash game named flOw?

Well Sony innovated once again, and here it is. The official rip-off:

Source: original article

I am a PC and Mac user…and the apple ads are just…insanely dumb. So listen up to this:

Source: http://www.bestweekever.tv/2006/07/07/bwe-mac-ads/

Watch and learn!

Source: derdickemann

So. Who knows what this is?

use the comments to answer please…

What happens when an API uses guessing to identify which character encoding is actually used in a text file:

Open Notepad


1. Type the text “this app can break” (without quotes)
   
2. Save the file
   
3. Re-open the file in Notepad

And the explanation: Notepad uses as windows system method called “IsTextUnicode()“. In the MSDN Library article on this method you can read:

“This function uses various statistical and deterministic methods to make its determination, under the control of flags passed in the lpi parameter. When the function returns, the results of such tests are reported using the same parameter.

The IS_TEXT_UNICODE_STATISTICS and IS_TEXT_UNICODE_REVERSE_STATISTICS tests use statistical analysis. These tests are not foolproof. The statistical tests assume certain amounts of variation between low and high bytes in a string, and some ASCII strings can slip through. For example, if lpBuffer indicates the ASCII string 0×41, 0x0A, 0x0D, 0x1D (A\n\r^Z), the string passes the IS_TEXT_UNICODE_STATISTICS test, although failure would be preferable. “

That simply means, that the method fails on detecting the correct character encoding. Aftermarket Pipes tells us:

“It actually runs a couple of heuristics over the first 256 bytes of the data and provides its best guess. As it turns out, these tests aren’t terribly reliable for very short ASCII strings that contain an even number of lower-case letters, like “this app can break”, “

Source 1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/intl/unicode_81np.asp?frame=true
Source 2: http://apipes.blogspot.com/2006/06/this-api-can-break.html

Sorry for the caps…:

“ON A TRIP TO THE HAMPTONS THIS WEEKEND I STOPPED AT A GARAGE SALE. AS I WALKED UP TO THE HOUSE I NOTICED A BIG PILE OF SUPER NINTENDO/NINTENDO GAMES. AFTER SELLING ME AROUND 100 GAMES FOR $40.”

“THE SELLER TOLD ME HE WORKED AT NINTENDO FOR 10 YEARS AND PART OF HIS JOB WAS TO GO AROUND TO THESE NINTENDO COMPETITIONS. HE SOLD ME ALL TYPES OF GAMES THAT HE SAID WERE PROTOTYPES(INCLUDING 5 COPIES OF THE STARFOX COMPETITION GAME.”"

What a serious find!

Source: http://pixpipeline.com/users/jollerancher

Vertical-axis wind turbines not only look very sci-fi, but when you add LEDs to the border of the turbine you can use them as a display:

So I leave you with a patent pending revolution which produces power and is virtually silent…whatever that means.

Source: http://www.quietrevolution.co.uk/

This is what is called the first official screenshots of a Playstation 3 game…:

Well… that looks a little bit different from the pre-rendered screenshots we where shown earlier… the final devkits will be available in June… Launch in November… Blue-Ray drive…Cell Processor… 60 GB hard-disk… what’s this thing going to cost? My first born? A 1000 Euro? In my opinion the only reason why Sony does not allow a closer look is, because people would see what die PS3 really is capable of…which is in no way more than a 360… I for myself expect exactly the same graphics and features the 360 delivers today… but when I look at the screenshots… well – maybe I was to optimistic with the graphics….

Source: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/695/695890p1.html

patented isolatr technology: Helping you find where other people aren’t…great idea in fact not new

Thanks to wiseguy for the tip…

Source: http://isolatr.com/

Martin pointed me to this promising company which is out there to bring us great Portale Media Players…but at the moment… no real information is available on their website…but the start is done…international blogging…good way to start…

Source: http://www.venzero.com

That’s great “news”. There will be at least one new Sam & Max game and I really hope it’ll be as good as the original-Lucas Arts one… I loved to play that game…

Source: http://www.telltalegames.com/sam_and_max

Rumors and more rumors about the IBM eFuse circuits in the XBOX 360 CPU… Funny if it’s true and I can think of funny things to do with the CPU when modding is detected… B-)

(IBM)

“Some may say that I should strap on my tin foil hat, but in fact VID data is stored in the eFuses, it may be possible to shut power off to the CPU permanently or increase the core supply to the point of self-destruct.

Remember that VID “111111″ or “111110″ (VID order 4,3,2,1,0,5) indicated “NO CPU” therefore no supply power to the core.

This is just one possible scenario and may give new meaning to “FRAG your opponent”.

Source 1: XBOX CPU Design
Source 2: http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=efuse+IBM
Source 3: http://www.xbox-scene.com/tech-info-xbox360.php

That looks like the first serious Super Mario Brothers game for years…

And if it’s true what I’ve seen in some gameplay movies… I really really would like to play it.

Oh well that’s not really news. Some say that Google utilizes the “big harddrive” that’s inside our planet earth… and some say that even gravity does not apply for google employees….

In fact… that’s all bullshit. Please Google. Be careful with words like “unlimited” … more text over here

Source 1: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1113
Source 2: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/669.html

I am not that much into VWs but this site is really great. You can configure the VW Golf and then view a video of that particular car… and the video is worth the watching…oh I love that german accent…

Source: http://www.vwfeatures.com/

hmm… is it just me or is there a Mac GUI shown on the desktop in this mysterious project origami ad:

Whatever the GUI might be… I want one of those ultra portable “notebook-desktop-inbetweens”

Source: http://www.origamiproject.com/

Vor eininger Zeit habe ich schonmal einen Beitrag zum Thema Technologietransfer und die Blauäugigkeit europäischer Konzerne in China verfasst. Jetzt gibt es erneut einen dramatischen Ideenklau.

Da haben die Strategen bei Siemens und ThyssenKrupp gedacht, mit dem Transrapid das große Geschäft gemacht zu haben inklusive Teststrecke. Die Eurozeichen in den Augen haben alle Beteiligten aber mal wieder blind vor Gier gemacht. Außer 1 Mrd. € Kosten gesellte sich jetzt nur noch die bittere Erkenntnis hinzu, dass man niemals etwas in China verdienen wird, denn die Chinesen bauen mittlerweile (wen wunderts) ihre eigene Magnetschwebebahn (natürlich billiger).

Der nächste Über-den-Tisch-Gezogene steht übrigens auch schon fest: Airbus. Erst bauen die ein Werk, dann bauen die Chinesen die Flugzeuge.

Quelle: http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,401081,00.html

Jens Heymann

I really really hate those moments. This morning around 0100 AM the server that hosts schrankmonster and some more websites crashed after more than 200 days of flawless operation. I arrived at the server room at around 2 and rebooted the machine – but it did not boot – instead it kept rebooting and rebooting…

I turned it off and decided to come back after some hours of sleep with fresh diagnose software and a just-in-case operating system install cd…

Well I turned the machine on, booted into memtest86 and no errors were found… I rebooted and voilá – the machine came up and everything worked.

What the hell was that? Any hints? (no there is nothing of interest in the system event logs)

That’s exactly what I was frightened off. If it’s true – what are those morons thinking?! (are they?)

Anyways – they have to fill at least 9 Gbytes of space. And in times of MPEG4/AVC/WMVHD when 720p movies with full 5.1 sound are only around 4-5 Gbytes… you have to find a way to fuck the customer.

So – expect great MPEG2 HDTV movies with 3-4 times the size of their current-generation encoded equivalents… and all that just to fill the space… What’s the point in having the space and the technology when we’re not going to use it?

Source: the news

We all know that some of the newer Pentium 4 processors have the EMT64 extensions – which are just the licensed AMD64 commandsets poorly emulated by the Intel processor.

Now the news came up that the current “Intel Core Duo” Chip – whose codename is “Yonah” also has such a EMT64 extensions. That would make it quite interesting to see how some of the 64 bit operating systems perform on the chip…I doubt it would be faster than the 32 bit – but at least more features means more fun for the geek.

Source: Intel Yonah hidden features exposed

I just updated the warfare website… go and have a look – and subscribe.

Source: http://www.thesuck.de