Category: everything

Pixel Parodies’ Rise Of The Mushroom Kingdom 2 – Luigi and the Mushroom people wage warfare on the Koopas to avenge Mario’s death.

Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – A faithful recreation of the DOS classic. Unfortunately it’s just as frustrating.

Orisinal.com’s Cats – Keep the cats following the lead cat by hovering over them with your mouse.

In the D drive currently: I’ve been content on saving a few bucks and just playing demos. Is it just me or are demos getting bigger in size but shorter in gameplay? Tron 2.0 had only one level, and it was only a boss fight with a cranky cyber-snake. Homeworld 2 was better, although I’m a bit disappointed there have been few gameplay enhancements from the original; I think the expansion Homeworld: Cataclysm in 1999 was even more innovative. Excellent story, it appears though, by putting all your struggles in a theological context.

“Your personal income is the biggest loophole; I can drive my Hummer through it.”

– movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger to
political commentator Arianna Huffington during a California recall debate.

“We get what we have now: a system that can be brought down by a teenager with too much time on his hands. Should we blame the teenager? Will that actually fix anything? No. The next geeky kid frustrated about not getting a date on Saturday night will come along and do the same thing without really understanding the consequences. So either we should make it a law that all geeks have dates – I’d have supported such a law when I was a teenager – or the blame is really on the companies who sell and install the systems that are quite that fragile.”

– Linus Torvalds on IT security, interviewed by New York Times Magazine 28 Sep 2003

“It’s so typically Canadian. The pioneer spirit still burns. They want to see if they have the toughest weather strictly for bragging rights.”

– Senior climatologist Dave Phillips of Environment Canada, on having received calls from outraged people in municipalities that rank No. 2 in environmental statistics. Interviewed by London Free Press 30 Sep 2003

Mess up your eyes with these optical illusions – no special plugins required.

Gosh, EA still on the MMORPG fadwagon with the release of Posted on Monday, September 15, 2003Categories everything

Despite this author’s cleverness, I doubt his theory that Canada’s CDR tax levy (Backstory: in Canada, a portion of the price of every CDR, DVDR, cassette tape and other media goes to pay royalties for Canadian musicians) makes Canadians exempt from RIAA-style witchhunts that are currently going on. I doubt his theory will hold much water in court, and the CPCC is the Canadian version of the RIAA, so you can bet they have tremendous lobbying and financial powers.

Interestingly, just like their American counterparts, Canadian musicians have seen little of these “royalties” paid to them. However, the CPCC did seem have enough money in 2002 to take its entire Ottawa office to France for an anti-piracy symposium.

In other words, just because they’re screwing us already, it doesn’t mean they won’t resort to suing grandmothers and 12-year old girls in public housing here. (Although hopefully we have decent people here too when that time comes)

Oh, and yeah, we are heavily taxed here, thanks for noticing. 15% total on goods and services here in Ontario. Coincidentally, we have less homeless sleeping in our parks, and nobody worries about losing a life’s savings if they are diagnosed with a serious illness.

Last weekend, we got a chance to take advantage of the ROM’s very generous Free Friday Nights policy, and take a quick look around (Hey, it was only a short walk from our hotel in Yorkville).

It really got me thinking though: did these ancient civilizations ever imagine their stuff, everything from golden idols to junked clay pots to their own mummified remains, would end up, centuries later, on display on an entirely different continent? Did their wisemen ever contemplated what the future would be like? Futurists from the 1960s envisioned skyscraper-sized computers and flying cars. What did Plato or da Vinci envision?

Surely, many civilizations had their own museums chronicling the lives and downfall of previous civilizations. Did they not realize that one day, their civilization would be nothing but artifacts, documentaries and Sid Meier computer games?

Maybe someday OUR civilization will be in glass cases, everything from pop idol CDs to discarded chocolate bar wrappers to our own cyrogenically frozen remains.

Random phenomena just isn’t as random as you may think – if you think about it, there are so many people on this planet, it would be unusual if the odd person didn’t have a totally unbelieveable event happen to him and her.

The trick is to think logically and rationally, rather than try to attribute such things to conspiracy theories or the paranormal.

On the bookshelf: Dan Simmon’s Endymion. It’s almost like a buddy/roadtrip story than a sci-fi epic, not as good as the first two books of the Hyperion Cantos, and frankly drags on.

Gem-quality artificial diamonds are long due. It is a pity that DeBeers, much like the RIAA, haven’t seen the writing on the wall in their respective industries.

I can see one of two things happening, if Gemesis and Apollo succeed and aren’t sued or bullied out of business:

1. Demand shift from flawless/internally flawless diamonds to diamonds with minor imperfections in them. A similar thing is already with emeralds – the most prized emeralds have some inclusions in them, because you can guarantee they’re real, not “sims”.

2. Diamonds shifting to a service-oriented industry. In other words, the money will be made with how well a jeweller can cut the stone, rather than the actual stone’s attributes (carat, clarity, colour) itself.

P.S. The article’s title may be a nod toward a cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson called The Diamond Age. In that book, diamonds have become so easy to make that they become cheaper than glass, and are used in everyday items like knives, window panes, windshields, etc.
On the bookshelf: Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

In the past few days, one of my favourite technews haunts, Neowin.net, was DDoS’ed to oblivion. By a 13-year old script kiddie with a grudge. Only on the Internet can mosquitoes carry rocket launchers.

There are ways to prevent DDoS attacks, although none of them are 100% effective and the seriously good gear cost a lot of money.

But yes, you can using a intrusion detection system (IDS) in front of a stateful firewall to minimize the impact. These kinds of hardware can scan incoming packets and find malicious traffic patterns (pingstorms, DDoS, spoofs) and then drop the packets.

The problem here is that stopping DDoS attacks is like trying to prevent a leaky ship from sinking – the bigger the flood, the bigger your pail has to be, and the faster you will have to bale.

While computer hardware is usually measured by million instructions per second, or MIPS, network hardware is measured in Kpps, or thousand packets per second. For example, a Cisco 3725 can process 70Kpps – considering an IP packet can be up to 1,518 bytes, that’s a respectable amount of packet processing power.

So with a big DDOS attack, you’ll need big packet buffers and fast CPUs on your IDS and firewall hardware. Some devices sport dual CPUs. The bigger the attack (i.e. more packets), the bigger and faster your hardware has to be, and the more expensive it gets.

So why doesn’t the FBI or police just swoop down and arrest all these punks? The answer is, too many idiots, not enough hours in a day. It’s like being the victim of a break-in. There are dozens of break-ins in a city in any given day, very few leads, and difficult to prosecute. Sadly, the same goes for DoS attacks.

I loved this comment:

Notice that the shape of the winning antenna is a pyramid? There are a lot of theories regarding electromagnetism and the pyramid shape, including a bunch on how the ancient egyptians figured out how to utilize these electromagnetic properties, which is (supposedly) why the pyramids were built that way.

If you want to get kooky, it can also point to the extra terrestrial origins of ancient egyptian civilization.

---

That makes perfect sense! The aliens, feeling like outsiders in this new place, built gigantic 802.11 antennas to download porn and MP3s from their home planet.

If it wasn’t for the unacceptably long ping times, they would still be with us today.