Windows Live OneCare: What virus you want installed today?

I was feeling adventurous today so I went beta hunting, I ended up at Microsoft.com and I found this front page ad about Microsoft Live OneCare. Being a fan of cutting edge technology I was excited with the prospect to be one of the first users to try it out.

Like any good user would do, I checked out the systems requirements first to see if it runs on my old Windows machine, well good enough its on the guide's Step #1 then... WTF!?!



"Step 2. Uninstall other antivirus and firewall programs"

Has MS been on dope!!? I tried to read again, maybe I'm still half-awake after an all-nighter work.. noooooo. It even goes worst than that:



"Antivirus and firewall programs known to conflict with Windows Live OneCare:"

* Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005
* Symantec Norton Antivirus 2005
* Symantec Norton SystemWorks 2005
* McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005
* McAfee VirusScan 8.0/2004
* Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 2005

Ok this is crazy! These are the best anti-viruses available on the market, what is MS thinking of? Ok so what's their suggestion on how to protect myself:

"You do not need to uninstall Windows Firewall, which is a component of the Windows operating system and cannot be removed. It does not conflict with Windows OneCare; in fact, Windows Firewall provides basic firewall protection while you are removing the old software and installing Windows Live OneCare."

Great! I'll be left protected virtually by nothing but a useless firewall that i don't even use. I think this new product's motto is: "Windows Live OneCare: What virus you want installed today?"

Ok Microsoft Live OneCare Beta, i hope you just stay that way forever. i can't even start to imagine what it would want me to uninstall when it comes out of Beta.

Furl: http://www.furl.net/search?search=cache&id=8017707&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.windowsonecare.com%2Fpurchase%2Fs+ysreq.aspx

Google Calendar

Finally Google Calendar is out which makes perfect use of AJAX.

What separates "GCal" from other calendar user interface (UI) is the dynamic date range for all views.

You can highlight consecutive dates and view the entries side by side and auto-switching between time based to date based view.

Unfortunately you cant highlight non-consecutive dates like MS Outlook.

Another plus would be the SMS based alerts and the fact that its integrated with GMail, the alerts went further than just a scheduled alerts. Whenever an attendee accepts or rejects an event, GCal also send alerts whenever someone accepts or cancels an event. The integrated GMap is also interesting, its great when holding parties and making sure your guests wont get lost.

I would be keeping a close eye on GCal, I'm sure there will be a lot of mash-ups services comming out that uses its iCal and XML features.

Is Wifi War Driving Unethical/Illegal?

This is in response to the blog post at PinoyTechBlog.com on the issue on Wifi War Driving.

Is Wifi War Driving Unethical/Illegal?

There are a lot of issues to be considered but let me just focus on what I think has the strongest points.

First on the issue that hot-spot owners must secure their own access point: Yes, it is the responsibility of the operators to secure their access point as much as it is one's responsibility to drive safely. Some establishments offer Wifi access without even having the competency to administer their service; they usually rely of pre-installed setups offered by the dealers. The owners are just interested on driving customers to their establishment but is not concerned on the quality and security of these service which of course affects the safety of the Wifi users (oh well, they are free anyway. right?). These hot-spot owners are compared to people buying a car but doesn't know how to properly drive.

If we are going to debate on "if war driving is illegal or not" then I would only say: Internet is public. period. As long as you network is accessible thru the Internet then it is public, this is the founding concept of the Internet and its never meant to have locks and keys on the first place. But due to the demand of corporations to monetize the use information thru the Internet, the locks were placed and only because of these locks we could differentiate between the public Internet and the private/corporate ones.

This brings me to the issue, hot spot licensing. Since hot-spot owners provide these services to the public then they must kept in check to ensure user's "public safety" (those who prey of the unsecured users and those who uses the Wifi access to commit fraudulent acts on the Internet knowing they can be traced easily). If you need to know how vulnerable Wifi users are against attack then check this little demo done during the Defcon 12 at http://www.evilscheme.org/defcon/. Anyway these Wifi accesses are not free at all in the truest sense; since these are value added services; the cost of the service is actually paid in part by each customer as they buy the products offered by the establishment. Therefore the owners must be obligated to provide a quality service. On how these measures are to be implemented, I leave this to the experts on laws and licensing (maybe the NTC would be interested).

Developers make an application great, not language.

In response to blog post http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jag?entry=scripting_flamewar. I see it as nothing but a the flame war.

It's not the language that makes an application great, its the developers.

PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl and many others can scale, can use both free or proprietary DB and Http servers and I always believed a good programmer can create his own framework depending on the systems he/she is working on to avoid the following pitfalls:

1. Insisting on using a framework that doesn't fit to the system because developer has adept skills in using the framework. Try to learn to build your own and never depend on a third party framework since you'll never know how long it will be supported as well as the possibility that certain frameworks has its disadvantages that isn't announced publicly.

2. Modifying the system to fit the framework which would eventually cause the system run inefficiently. This should be the last case.

3. Insisting on using costly software because they provide the functionality that the developer cannot create. I'm skeptical to persons who says this, its like saying that only certain developers can acquire the required knowledge while others can never learn it. I often find developers insisting on using costly DB's like Oracle because it provides easiest way to cluster DBs while doing the same thing

4. Insisting on using open source because the source is freely available. This is not always be for the better since most of the times we are working on proprietary systems that are already in place. We must first make use of the proprietary APIs included.

5. Insisting the system can do everything. This is a nice goal but it may come with a hefly price. Sometimes its better to make things work first efficiently before making it possible for everything to work; the same experience developers encounter that sometimes its better to start from scratch than continue on a design that doesn't fit well (an example is Firefox 3 -- which rumored to be designed from a separate HEAD).

Finally, Lets us invest on our developers, they are the IT industry's raw materials. The one that truly makes great software and designs the best hardware.

Yahoo's Publisher Networks ads surpasses Google Adsense.

I was surfing You Tube looking for current events about Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (PGMA), after submitting my search to YouTube's engine I was surprise how clever Yahoo's Ads was able to heuristically find the relation between "Gloria Macapagal Arroyo" and "Dwarf and Love" (http://www.LittlePeopleMeet.com).

Background: Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was always been called by her critics as a "midget", checkout PGMA's Political Friendster profile.

Google Buys Search Algorithm Invented by Israeli Student

Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by an Israeli student. Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating.

read more | digg story

Playing around with Web 2.0

Click image to view comic strip :D

Gospel of Judas

The most significant find of the century is about to be unveiled on TV, will the Gospel of Judas provides us the missing link about Jesus Christ and will this eventually change our views about the Church.

Nationalgeographic.com

Direct Link: Video of Israeli Made "Forcefield"

Developed by Israeli company Rafael, it creates a sort of protective bubble defending ground vehicles against RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and tank rounds. Video in swf form.

read more | digg story

'Gospel of Judas' Surfaces After 1,700 Years

Apparently Jesus made him do it!

read more | digg story

U.S. Rolls Out Plan to Build 125 Nukes per Year.

The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.

read more | digg story

Time to buy a new phone to use 3G

I was a bit curious on how 3G works and why it requires newer phone models (if firmware upgrade is just enough). Let's first look at the technology and how it evolved.

[1G]
First we started on 1G which is the grassroot technology; there were 2 different types of network implementation namely TDMA and CDMA which powered the first Mobile Call and SMS. I won't discuss the properties of the two but the difference is basically the first uses time division scheme and the other is by using different frequencies, both has it's pros and cons.

[2G]
The second stage is 2G which gave us MMS capabilities, this is where TDMA networks evolve to GSM. Although WAP is present its not yet widely used and it’s mostly constrained to delivery of MMS due to bandwidth restriction 2G imposes. However converting WML to WBXML can greatly speed up WAP by transforming WML to binary format but it didn’t work well with dynamic pages.

[2.5G]
Shortly GSPR-EDGE started the 2.5G by piggy-backing on base CDMA technology to arrive compatibility with GSM and NT Do Como, this gave us the MMS inter-compatibility between to networks (however the 2 network can also exchange MMS via MX servers over the Internet but this complicates things by encapsulating MMS into Mail and back to MMS, its a nasty hack but it works). WAP is widely used and newer phone were release that has XHTML capabilities, compared to WML, XHTML gave the first true mobile Internet experience since the protocol is more flexible (XHTML sites take up more bytes compared to WAP but 2.5G's bandwidth is just right for this)

[3G]
With the advent of 3G, CDMA networks enjoyed a direct migratory path by just upgrading the software (according to Nokia) to CDMA1X (other version include CDMA20001XRTT and CDNA ED-VO) while GSM suffered a complicated migration to W-CDMA or UTMS due to the piggy-backing. 3G boosted not only mobile browsing but also the interest in streaming data and that is where the video compression H.263 came into play giving us the true viable video call feature. If you’re a fan of video compression you can check out: http://www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk/peter/h263/h263.html

So for my question why we need to buy 3G phone? The old phone model lacks the chip that can process the video and the speed of the 3G that is also why the migration required telecoms to license higher frequencies (licensing is required to make sure frequencies doesn’t overlap, you wouldn’t want your phone calls interrupting your frequency for TV, Radio and other networks). 3G also required newer changes to be incorporated in your SIM to upgrade it into a UTMS SIM (that’s basically what you download to activate your 3G, its a 3G profile for your SIM)

If your interested to dig more into UTMS visit: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/1582, it also shows a detailed diagram of components for the Telco 3-phase migration from 2/2,5G to 3G without disrupting service.

I found an article before (which I forgot to take down the URL) that non-3G SonyErricson phones can be upgraded to 3G phones by downloading the firmware from SE's site (so maybe you don’t need to buy newer SE phones).

Another important fact is that 3G phones is required to be tri-band or quad-band, i'm guessing that aside from the required bandwidth, video call routes its video delivery on the extra-bands so it wont disrupt your voice calls. I still need to dig into Nokia technology to verify this.

That's basically answered my question and I therefore conclude that I have to buy a new phone. Damn :))

Shameless plug:
BTW if you’re interested on deploying newest mobile stuff just contact us at info@fingerapps.com, we have tons of bleeding-edge technology that might suit your needs :)

Child porn investigators raid NASA

The Register has an interesting story about a NASA manager who has (not only) passion for peeping into stars and also on naked children.

how fast can they crack your password

An interesting article on the speed at which passwords can by cracked. Comparing types of passwords.

read more | digg story

NEW Internet Explorer Exploit

This one is VERY VERY Bad Phiser's are using it already! Digg This so Others can do the Test, Click on the Link and go to the "Start Test" link on the page

read more | digg story

There is a God: Alcohol cloud spotted in Deep Space

Astronomers say they have spotted a cloud of alcohol in deep space that measures 463 billion kilometres across, a finding that could shed light on how giant stars are formed from primordial gas. Mmmm Beer...

read more | digg story

18 New Ajax Programming Patterns

Full text for 18 new Ajax patterns, completing a first-cut draft for all Programming Patterns content, which will be one part of the book. This section bridges the gap between the very basics of Ajax - XMLHttpRequest, DOM, etc - and the high-level stuff like widgets and visual effects.

read more | digg story

Google Music Launching - ITunes Competition

Late last week, Google met with a group of music industry executives and described the private event as merely for "networking." But Caris analyst Mark Stahlman suspects that Google is getting ready to launch a Music Store to rival Apple Computer iTunes.

read more | digg story

More on Theorems

Dilbert's Theorem of Salary

Here's an interesting bit of science...
Dilbert's Theorem on Salary states that engineers and scientists can never earn as much salary as business executives and sales people. This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following three postulates:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power (Knowledge = Power)
Postulate 2: Time is Money (Time = Money)
Postulate 3: (as every engineer and scientist knows): Power = Work / Time

It therefore follows:

Knowledge = Work / Time

and since

Time = Money,

we have:

Knowledge = Work / Money.

Solving for Money, we get:

Money = Work / Knowledge

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work done.

Conclusion 1: The Less you Know, the More you Make.
Conclusion 2: This is the reason why bosses are paid more than you!!!

Take note: you still have to work so that Money will not be zero, because if Work = 0, and if its divided to any number, the number will be 0, then

Money = 0. I wonder if you could replace Work with something different like "Pretending"?

AIDS - the number 1 disease in the office. (As If Doing Something)

Google Releases 3" Resolution Aerial Photos of Las Vegas

For a small area of downtown Las Vegas you can see VERY high resolution photos in Google Earth (NOT Google Maps). You can easily see car types, even see people and their shadows, see dolphins swimming in an aquarium, see the duplicate Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel, and more.

read more | digg story