Also: Which Space Computer is your favourite?
(I think the inverted slope ones deserve their own entry. All good Space cockpits have at least one of those, either hanging from the hinged trans-yellow ceiling, or surrounding the intrepid spacedude or dudette, buried deep within his or her windowless, heavily armoured vehicle.)
I was taken off guard when the white-shirt-black-slacks fellow at the door turned out to not be a Mormon (yeah, I know, those come in pairs).
Instead, he rapidly and cheerfully explained that I was eligible for a free month of electricity supply (which struck me as a bit odd - what if I decided to take up aluminium smelting during that one month?), and all I had to do to claim it was bring him one of our electricity bills to look at, then sign the piece of paper he had, which he explained was not a contract, absolutely not, nooooo, despite the fact that it looked very much like one to my untrained eye, what with the signing and everything.
He was really rather good. I didn’t even have time to think of telling him to go and vigorously root a boot, even though that is my usual tendency in such situations.
He was representing Origin Energy, who have apparently been at it for a while (and yes, he was Indian - they come over ‘ere, they take the lousy-paying commission jobs we don’t want to do…). I don’t know whether Origin are in the habit of doing Ombudsman-worthy things; this salesman certainly wasn’t what you’d call frank and up-front, and the just-sign-this-it’s-not-a-contract line is clearly illegal. I failed to record him saying it, though.
My sister, who is very polite and not very rich, was screwed over by one of these guys a while ago. He said the new phone contract would save her money. It, of course, did the opposite. New power reseller contracts in Australia are, I think, much less likely to be an outright rip-off, which could explain why there’s not exactly been a blizzard of complaints (though Origin have apparently been very good at promptly cutting off the power to delinquent customers).
As a Stargate viewer, by the way, I find the Origin Energy Web site mildly hilarious.
“We’ll be welcoming new electricity, LP Gas and serviced hot water customers to Origin. Hallowed be the Ori.”
The Ori aren’t the greatest of sci-fi enemies, but I suppose they’ll do until the end of this, last, series of SG-1.
It’s not as if the Ori do ridiculous things like killing off major characters with explosive tumours or something, after all.
Aaah, this takes me back.
Install new version of Windows, discover that now some of the hardware for which you paid good money does not work any more, and will not ever be fixed. Buy new stuff, sucker. Thank you for playing.
Actually, one of the problems listed in the PC Perspective piece is exactly the same as it was back in the Win98-to-Win2000 days. Apparently positional audio won’t work in many games in Vista, ever.
The same thing happened when people with Aureal Vortex-2-chipset sound cards upgraded from Win98. The sound card still worked, but only in stereo mode, and that was the end of it, no matter how hard you tried.
The Vortex 2 had much better sounding positional audio, then, than any alternative. It still sounds good today. But you’ve got to run Win98 to hear it.
(There might have been Win2000 drivers eventually, except that Aureal went bankrupt around the time Win2000 was coming out, after a legal battle with… Creative. Their assets were then bought by… Creative, who had no particular interest in the Vortex chips. And now, the wheel turns…)
To be fair, the parallel’s not really a perfect one. Games that supported the Aureal 3D sound API and also the newer and crappier Creative one could be returned to proper functionality, back in 2000, if you bought a Creative sound card to replace your Vortex 2. Today, games that support both Creative’s now-mature but still-somewhat-crappy API and the newer OpenAL standard should Just Work on your existing Creative card. Regrettably, though, the grand total of commercial games that support OpenAL at all appears to be 77, including some big names but excluding many others. Those others will have 3D sound on Vista only if they’re patched to support OpenAL, which is Not Bloody Likely for nearly all of them, but is I suppose a bit more likely than it was back in 2000.
Ryan’s complaint about his print server now being a paperweight reminds me of what Win2000 (and every other NT-series Windows version) did to ATA CD changers like this one. They were and are very cool pieces of hardware - six discs in barely more space than a standard single-disc drive! - but they were killed dead by WinNT and later. Win2000 expected you to manually mount and unmount the discs, rather than just switching ‘em automatically like Win98 did. It was much faster to use a single disc drive and carry the rest of your CDs around in a wallet.
Microsoft have a Vista version of their Hardware Compatibility List (”currently only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and above”), and an Upgrade Advisor you can run to see if there’s stuff in your PC that’s explicitly non-Vista-compatible. Anybody who is for some unfathomable reason thinking about getting Vista at this early date (what, you want to be absolutely totally tip-top ready for DirectX 10 games the very day they come out?) should, at least, run the Advisor.
On drilling down into the HCL to see what Creative sound cards are listed, I note that the answer appears to be “none”. There’s a small list of chipsets, not one of which is from Creative. So I suppose you should be grateful that your Creative card makes a noise at all.
The Advisor will also not save you if the insoluble problem that’s waiting for you is that the print server on the other side of your house will never work with Vista. And it won’t say a thing about software, including your non-OpenAL games.
The coolness of SongTapper is very much the outside scoop (it’s been around for well over a year, now), but I continue to be amazed at how good it is at picking relatively obscure tunes just from their rhythm.
There I was, wondering what the vaguely-Raymond-Scott-ish tune was that people always seem to use without permission as an accompaniment to video of a Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson contraption when they’re not using Powerhouse without permission, so I tried tapping it:
doo doo doo doo dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee doo doo doo doo
Bing! The Tapper told me that it was the unavoidable Danny Elfman’s Breakfast Machine theme from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
(Which I’ve never watched, because I was not a small child at the appropriate time, and because Pee-wee Herman gives me the creeps. Paul Reubens, I’m fine with, but Pee-wee scares me.)
SongTapper was and is not very useful for classical music - although when I tried to get it to recognise hymns and Beethoven it did have a pleasing tendency to put “I Like Big Butts” high in its list of suggestions.
And, obviously, anything whose main theme has an even and unbroken rhythm ain’t gonna get recognised.
But even when it fails, there’s usually something good in the list of suggestions.
(This post was originally titled “Disk space needed: ¶Å§œ‡ megabytes”, but that HTML entity code brilliance caused it to bork a couple of my RSS feeds.)
I’m rehabilitating a non-savvy friend’s old computer. It’s not nearly as disgusting as I feared it would be, but it still has Stuff Doesn’t Work Disease. Everything you try to do - scan for malware, update virus definitions, et cetera - just… doesn’t work, in one way or another.
I’ll dig through it in due course, but the installation window for the latest version of Spybot sums it up.
(PrevX kinda worked, and kinda didn’t, possibly because of the antique version of Norton Antivirus that I just uninstalled because it can’t be updated…)
As it turns out, the strange and suspiciously connected investment opportunity that is Firepower is, I’m happy to say, completely above board, and all of their products work perfectly.
Naaah - only kidding!
Actually, Firepower’s magic fuel pills now seem likely to be the same thing that got another Western Australian company busted and (not very heavily) fined in 2003. And the guy in charge of Firepower was himself exposed as selling a worthless fuel pill in New Zealand back in 1992.
That last one must sting a bit, mustn’t it?
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 05:03:59 +0200
From: “GerX Man” <geremangere@gmail.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: transfer statusHi. This is a very serious business, so, relax into your chair and listen. Do you here something? No. Of course you don’t. Or, if you do, close your window and read carefully. You want money. So do I. I will send you money through paypal but each time you will receive an ammount from me you will have to send me back half. Let me know if we have a deal. Now I’m sure you can hear something. The money sound. To see that I’m serious I will send you right now $50 into your account. This time you won’t have to send me back half. You can do whatever you want. You can geld your dog, cat, (if you have one), you can buy some crack (if you’re narcotic), you can buy a Hustler magazine (if you’re obsessed)… it doesn’t matter. I will wait for your email.
And then, lo and behold, I did indeed receive a $US50 PayPal donation, followed by another separate message from, uh, GerX.
The payment, however, was not from GerX, at least as far as I can see. It was from one “Alba Lugo”, who has an AOL e-mail account.
Clearly, Alba Lugo and GerX are the same person, and this is all perfectly above board, and I should go along with it and become wealthy. What could possibly go wrong?!
(I’ve refunded the payment.)
PayPal seem to provide no way for me to complain about this. You can drill down in their Security section to a place where you can complain about fraudulent transactions made on your own account, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to complain about scam artists sending you money from other people’s accounts in the expectation that you’ll send money back to their accounts and… oh, my head hurts.
(If I try entering the transaction number in the complain-about-a-fraudulent-transaction-on-your-account box, I get an error, because it’s not a payment that I sent.)
I get e-mail newsletters from PayPal, who’re bright enough to know that I’m in Australia and so should receive their specially pointless Aussie-flavoured newsletter.
Regrettably, they’ve now made a very serious, but quite common, mistake in these newsletters. They’ve made them look like phishing attempts.
Nearly every e-mail everyone in the world receives “from” PayPal is not, of course, from PayPal. It’s from someone trying to send you to a PayPal-lookalike page and steal your account details. The second you see a non-PayPal URL in one of those messages, you know it’s a scam, right?
Regrettably, PayPal have now retained the services of the unfathomable dimwits at “Tipping Point” here in Australia to produce newsletters that look like phishes. They’re full of http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/… URLs, which just scream “Fake!”:
Log in:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=373Security centre:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=372Help centre:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=371Password help:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=370
Those URLs actually do redirect to PayPal’s own servers, but for all you know they do it via some underhanded wizardry or other. They’re exactly the kind of links we’re all trying to teach our dads and aunties to stay the hell away from.
And then there are links like the “Take me shopping” one, which bounce through a PayPal server to somewhere else. In this case it’s merchantoffers.com.au, which belongs to PayPal Australia, but once again smells far too phishy to modern noses.
Lots of other organisations have made this same mistake. But that’s not an excuse. It makes repeating the mistake even worse.
Tipping Point, in case you were wondering, are apparently “An interactive marketing agency strategically focused to deliver business-effective digital solutions that “tip” online customers.”
Thanks to verbiage like this, Tipping Point’s home page wank factor is a respectable 5.34. Most companies have moved on from the kind of corporate cant that the 2000-vintage Wankometer detects, but Tipping Point appear to be waiting for it to come back into fashion. The questionable book they took their name from is the same age as the Wankometer, by the way.
I hope PayPal aren’t paying Tipping Point the kind of money you used to get in 2000 for crap like this.
“CATO” can stand for a number of things, but in rocketry it means an explosion very, very early in the flight.
Opinions differ about whether it stands for “Catastrophe At Take-Off” or something else, but whatever the exact term is, everybody agrees that it involves lots of fuel burning much too early, for one reason or another.
CATOs are often very entertaining, for people who do not have to pay for them.
I remember watching an excellent documentary about Peenemünde that included quite a lot of period footage of V2 tests…
…though obviously not with a voice-over nearly as good as this.
On the subject of voice-overs - if you have the choice of using the word “catastrophe” or the word “anomaly” in a situation like this…
…the former is better.
(And how about that dubbing of the World’s Oldest Explosion Sound over the real thing, huh? I bet that show was produced by the same people who do the “World’s Most Severely Padded Police Videos” series.)When big (unmanned) rockets blow up, it’s got a kind of… corporate… feel to it. You’re not personally connected to the action and feeling sorry for whoever’s losing his job over it.
When amateur rocketry enters CATO land, though, there’s more room for sympathy. Some individual person usually invested considerable time and money in that thing, and wh-BANG, there it all goes to nowhere.
For some reason, though, I find this one quite funny:
This one doesn’t have the same comic timing, though:
One kind of rocket malfunction that can segue from CATO status into a general flight problem is the “blow-by“, in which in which exhaust gases get out through the top of the motor as well as the bottom.
Which is bad.
Get your free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome