short random notes about things that I see, hear and do.
If you still don’t read Scott Adams’ blog, you should really start now … I think his blog is even more interesting than Dilbert …
President Bush has unveiled his plan to achieve the top goal of his presidency: a popularity rating of zero
[Quoted from The Dilbert Blog: Vacationing Toward Victory ]
Wanted to buy something through the Mileage Plus Mall. Right now, I can only get this error message:
I think this is a problem.
Wonder if they read blogs …
Update (10:42am PT): This post is on Technorati now …
Scott Adams was doing a Q&A session on his blog - I particularly liked this one here:
The Dilbert Blog: Answers to your questions
How much spare time do you have in a given day???A. I don’t know what “spare” means when you have a family.
According to Google Maps, it’s 272 Miles (5+ hour drive) from San Francisco to Eureka. A bit far for a quick dinner …
I thought this was quite funny …
The Daily WTF - The Tale of a Spam
Adam couldn’t resist, he had to try it. Not only could he FTP in to ——–.com with the username/password of “jspm/aa992V”, he could also telnet in to a shell account. And on top of that, all of the spammer’s files, including the web pages, the mass-mailing program, and a list of over a million email addresses, were all accessible with full rights over the FTP connection. Were accessible: for some reason, that giant email list no longer exists on that server …
Ok, so Hitachi and Seagate both announced hard drives with sizes of 1 TB (or possibly bigger). But how can they say 1 TB when it’s not really 1 TB at all? Hard drive manufacturers have been overstating the capacity of their drives for years. They are the only people who define “1 MB” as “1 million bytes”, “1 GB” as “1 billion bytes”, etc. (see for example the small print in http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_internal_sata.pdf). I doubt that the TB drives will be any different. So what happens is that you will go and buy one of those fancy new 1 TB drives, put it in your computer, format it and then the OS will tell you that you really only have a 931 GB drive - because the OS calculates it properly - where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes.
See also this Wikipedia entry:
As of 2006, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most hard disk manufacturers’ definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (however, computer memory has a natural inclination towards units that are powers of 2), most computer operating systems use the 1,073,741,824 byte definition. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a capacity of 40,000,000,000 bytes would have a reported capacity of only 37.4 GB.
[ via neuerdings.com, CrunchGear & Endgadget ]
What’s the deal with this one? “Do not click”? I thought the whole purpose of spam emails was to get people to click on the links …
