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Kazriko's Dive

Unintended consequences of biometrics

I saw this today on a forbes website. It was in one of their screwy slide shows so I won’t link to it.VVT Finnish Walking Bio-Identification PhoneCell phones and laptops are easy marks for thieves, but a group of scientists at the VVT Technical Research Center in Finland has come up with a way to sour the spoils of such high-tech villainy. The VVT scientists would equip mobile phones and notebook computers with sensors and software capable of analyzing and saving their owners’ walking patterns.

Insomniac

With all the controversies around EA and all of the talk of standard business practices in the video game industry, you wouldn’t expect to see any video game company on a list of best places to work. One of them, however, actually made it. Not only did they make it to the list once, but they’ve made it to the list 5 times in a row.Insomniac makes the list of best employers.

Not Invented Here syndrome strikes again.

Intel has decided to sell its xscale division (Link dead) which produces most of the chips for various PDA and Cell Phone devices and other media players. Xscale has always been somewhat of red-haired stepchild to intel. It’s an ARM chip, so they don’t own the arch. Thus, the Xscale tended to get the short end of the stick on many things. Now it’s being offloaded so Intel can focus on their new x86 CORE arch (which is just the same old Pentium Pro arch stepped up a bit.

Disney enforces trademarks...

Disney enforces it’s trademarks A little too tightly. (Link dead) I bet they’re just mad because they lost another potential customer when the baby died. At least they changed their minds, showing that they’re not entirely mean spirited trolls. ;)

Pilfering

Media sure does toss these words around a lot. The media says google “pilfered” dataI agree with the stuff on the bottom though. Likely, the server was either misconfigured, or used http based authentication and someone stuck a link on their website with the username and password located in it. They really should have used a robots.txt file.

Venture Brothers

Venture Brothers Season 2 starts tomorrow…Watch it! Although it may not make sense unless you watched season 1…

Paranoid hardware companies...

Creative Labs has officially lost my sound card business. I know I’ve griped about them before in various contexts but my latest experiences with the two sound cards still in my systems have made me want to completely eliminate them. (I also have an Extigy card that was hooked to my wife’s computer, but it’s no longer in use.)I have an Audigy card in my Linux box and I previously had a Live card in my Windows PC.

It's official: Judges are technologically illiterate

A judge says that the PS2 is not a computerHmm. So, a box that runs linux, has a keyboard and a mouse, can support a hard drive, and can display out to a monitor, can run word processors, etc is not a computer.I can see you making this claim for the slimline PS2’s because they don’t support the hard drive and the linux kit, but the PS2 Original form factor is definitely a computer.

Darwin Award Winner

Darwin Award Winner punches a window trying to break into a house of someone who has a restraining order against him. We can only hope more burglars do the same.

Psychonauts

Psychonauts doesn’t work on the Xbox360 (Link Dead)I would like to point out, however, that Psychonauts works just fine on the PS2 and will likely work perfectly on the PS3. Just sayin’…Did I mention that the PS2 outsold the Xbox360 last month? Well, you should be able to find one then. There’s at least 3x as many PS2’s (100mil) as there are Xboxes (24mil) and Xbox360’s (5mil) combined…