A First! A funny frenchman

I ran across this on BoingBoing. Arnaud Collery. Who seems to be some French/German [not] Actor/Director/Producer/Writer/Comic [i am pretty sure the last one is his real calling] Kept me pretty entertained. If you have a chance to check out his act. do so.

 

 

When smart people are stupid

I know that sounds weird, but it seems really smart people are doing and saying really stupid things. A LOT

case in point:

Speaking on a conference held yesterday in New York, the Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said that a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will ‘absolutely stop piracy of gameplay‘. The chip is apparently being embedded on most of the new computer motherboards and is said to be ‘uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords’ though it won’t stop movie or music piracy, since ‘if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.’"

So he thinks trusted platform modules will end piracy. WOW what an idiot. And I don’t say that lightly.

this lifted from Wikipedia.

Remote attestation creates a nearly unforgeable hash key summary of the hardware and software configuration. The extent of the summary of the software is decided by the program encrypting the data . This allows a third party to verify that the software has not been changed. Sealing encrypts data in such a way that it may be decrypted only if the TPM releases the associated decryption key, which it only does if the exact same software is present as that present when the data was encrypted. Binding encrypts data using the TPM endorsement key, a unique RSA key burned into the chip during its production, or another trusted key descended from it.

The Stupid part:

Gamers upgrade their hardware more than any other market segment. Ask gamers how many times they have had to call MS’s activation hotline 😦 With a TPM, and a locked game, upgrade your hardware and bam game no longer works, customer is pissed. Wonderful.

what game in the last 2000000000 years has been perfect? Especially in the release it today and patch it tomorrow age of the internet? Ok I install a game, it seals it, ok fine, I an ALMOST live with that. Except, now there can be no mods, there can be not PATCHES without re-wrapping it, which means Game A comes out. 2 months later [or sooner] gets patched and 2 days later it is cracked. But not just that game, but any game using that wrapping scheme. Wonderful.

Keys are bad and here is why

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Market limiting.

Do game makers want their games to only go to 3 people or 3 million people, hopefully most are paying. Limiting your market is a bonehead thing to do.

I could go on and on and on why this is so wrong on so many levels, but I will let you all figure that out on your own.

 

Adios

I find this well. interesting

I’m kind of a Joss Whedon fan [loved the space cowboy show Firefly] and now he is working on something completely different.

Take a gander.

 

http://www.archive.org/flow/FlowPlayerLight.swf?config=embedded:true,showFullScreenButton:true,showMuteVolumeButton:true,showMenu:true,autoBuffering:true,autoPlay:true,initialScale:'fit',menuItems:false,false,false,false,true,false,false,usePlayOverlay:false,showPlayListButtons:true,playList:url:'DollhouseTrailer/dollverse_final_low.flv',controlBarGloss:'high',showVolumeSlider:true,baseURL:'http://www.archive.org/download/',loop:false,controlBarBackgroundColor:'0x000000'

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now

VISTA SUCKS.

It sucks

there is no mistaking it, it blows the big one.

It is slow, it is finicky, file manipulation has been taken back into the stone age.

I beta tested it for MS for like 2 years and all the while it sucks. I went back to XP as soon as the beta was over.

I decided to give it a shot while beta testing SP1 and it didn’t help. VISTA SUCKS

I get less than 5 Mb/s over my gigabit network, nice. I can’t play ANY GAME nice.

VISTA SUCKS so bad I can’t even think of a word for it.

Every now and then you have one of those “BAD” days

and today was mine. I could sit here and whine about all my problems and why I feel there is so much injustice in the world, and as much as I want to, I won’t.

But then again this blog is my way of releasing stress and frustration, and today both of those emotions topped the charts.

I went in Friday and had a bunch of blood tests done in hopes it would better help me understand some of the problems I have been having. I got back far more than I had expected.

I "expected" my blood sugar to be too high, it was, I expected my TSH to be messed up, it was, but I also found out that I may have cancer.  Nice huh. Now I know I am no doctor, and I know that I may be totally misreading the results, but I doubt it.

I have been on a thyroid medicine for a couple of years and lately it is not helping, worse is my symptoms are getting worse. The pain I deal with is getting so bad that I had no choice to get tested to see if there was anything that could be done to help me feel normal again. And as I expected the medicine isn’t doing squat. So I was not only was I expecting this, I was prepared for it.

2 Things came back that concerned me, My good cholesterol is VERY low, though my bad cholesterol is normal [odd] and I have something called Carcinoembryonic Antigen is out of the ball park. Normal is like 0 to 2 and a smoker [me] is like <5 mine was 8.4 and no matter if I am a doctor or not, that is VERY VERY bad. The other markers all point to 1 thing and 1 thing only Colon Cancer. When I saw that my heart sank so low that I am still reeling from the reality. At 40 years old I am starting to fall apart at the seams. All those years of smoking, and drugging, and doing all manners of bad things have finally caught up with me and smacked me square in the face. Now while I may be to afford treatment if it was caught early enough and I really think it will, if it is any worse, there is just no way I can even think about paying for things like Chemo or invasive surgery. And with that realization comes the even scarier though, and that is about ones own mortality. If it has progressed beyond Level "1" then I am truly fucked, and that is both scary and liberating all at once. I know my limitations and having to modify my whole existence just for a few extra years of being on this planet is not something that I think I will be able or willing to do.

I know that last paragraph sounded kind of defeatist, and it was lol, and I am actually dealing with it pretty well all in all. I haven’t even had a chance to go to a real doctor yet and get an "educated’ analysis of the results, so it may be far less than what I am making it out ot be or it could even be far worse. But either way there is only one thing that can be done, and that is deal with it as it comes. I will deal with it no matter what, and I will be around for a long time to come. I am too fucking mean to let something like some screwed up cells take me out. But I am also a wuse when it comes to being sick, and I have a feeling that is exactly what is in store for me in the next 10 or so years. So at least I have that to look forward to :).

Anyway I don’t feel one bit better after writing this, but since it has already taken me about 5 minutes to write I might as well post.

I truly hope you weekend has been much better than mine.

Weezer a band that deserve respect

Even if like me, you don’t care for much of the music, they are definitely one of the smarter bands out there. This new clip just proves it once again. Pure genius.

Worth the watch. oh so worth the watch

 

Darth can sure play the blues

This one REALLY brought a smile to this old soul.

 

Every now and then you stumble on a gem. This is one of those times.

Easy fix for SP3 reboot loop

after It happened to me, it was painfully obvious what has happened.

 

SP3 installs it updates GDI32.dll to version 5.1.2600.3300 (xpsp.080125-2028) but on the last 3 tries on 3 different systems that have not been totally updated via Windows Update or via nlite or what ever. Anyway it leaves the old GDI32.DLL at version 5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158) which freaks out windows user shell on bootup. It looks for some parts of the file that aren’t there and then bluescreens. Problem is, XP is set to auto reboot on BSOD instead of hang at bluescreen.

 

To make sure this doesn’t happen, just after you install SP3 DO NOT REBOOT. LOL, ok not really, just don’t reboot yet. Open my computer. go to C:WindowsSystem32 it will normally say that these files are hidden, just close the big link in the center to show all. Then click search and when it finds C:WindowsSystem32gdi32.dll rename it to old.gdi32.dll and then go to C:Windows and search for gd32.dll and there will be one called C:WINDOWSServicePackFilesi386gdi32.dll right click on this file and copy it. go back to C:WindowsSystem32 and right click and paste.

 

NOW you can reboot and it will not go into a reboot loop.

 

Your welcome.

 

 Below is what you will see