AskReaMaor.com - Computer related blog, i talk abo

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

6 Tech Innovations That Nobody Wants!
2009-06-07 14:21:00
Neal Stephenson pointed out something that struck a chord with me in “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”. He pointed out that car interfaces weren’t cursed with having to be “intuitive”; instead they made up steering wheels and gear shifts and all sorts of arcade controls. He expresses relief that cars weren’t invented in the computer age, or we’d have to steer with a mouse and change gears by clicking a drop-down menu. The moral of this story: some things can’t be improved upon. We have to realize when we got something right, and then leave it alone. Similarly, there are some things that nobody is ever going to want, and we just have to stop trying to invent them. Because – get ready for some politically-incorrect judgment – they are bad ideas! Touch screen computers On a phone, it makes sense. On anything bigger than a phone, up to a desktop computer, it doesn’t make sense. Hey, prove me wrong. As you read...
More About: Tech , Innovations

Torturing Wolfram Alpha
2009-05-25 22:27:00
The latest buzz in knowledge systems is Wolfram Alpha . Let’s make this clear: it is not a Google-killer and doesn’t claim to be. It is billed as an “answer engine”, instead of a search engine. Search engines give you links to websites that answer your query; answer engines just try to give you an answer, full stop. Just to clear that up. I’ll try here to find the border of its knowledge, just to have a good idea of what it can handle and what it can’t. So, let’s calculate the odds of a “royal flush” in draw poker: All it understood was “royal flush”, and gave me odds for five and seven cards. No note as to whether this is natural deal, or discard and draw. “Which country had the most wars?” Here’s a more typical Wolfram Alpha experience: it’s stumped. No idea what I wanted. Neither of the provided links lead me anywhere near the answer I wanted. This is an example of a major problem wit...

If I Ruled Computers
2009-05-22 16:52:00
Hi, I’m running for the President of Computers ! Vote for me, and I promise to: Remove the ‘forward’ button from every email client. You should never forward email. Ever. In the history of ever. Not even if it will save the world. The world doesn’t want to be saved that way. Also, everybody doesn’t love you when you forward them this funny thing you found. The exception is, of course, sharing the hilarious and pithy wisdom of the premium content to be found on that pinnacle of website perfection which is askreamaor.com. Remove the CAPSLOCK key from every keyboard. Why do we still have to tell people this? It must be that Caps-Lock, like the One True Ring, has a will of its own that will not be thwarted. It’s always there just to the left of your pinkie, whispering “Use me! Abuse me!” with an evil hiss. Yes, just thinking about it makes me want to HIT IT RIGHT NOW AND RIDE, BABY RIDE, BECAUSE IT’S CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! You see...

Twitter’s Tweeters and the Twagic Twits They Tweet
2009-05-20 12:00:00
Oh, no! Not again! Yes, again! The tech world is all hot in the pants for some new buzzword! It goes around and around the blog world. They can’t stop talking about it. they fall asleep blogging it. From the people who brought you the AJAX hype machine and the Second Life viral marketing campaign, meet Twitter! Let me make it clear for the one leper colony member who has been locked in a basement for the past two years and thus has not heard the news: What is Twitter? It’s IRC. On mobile. Yeah, that’s it. Oh, OK, let’s back up a little. It’s not IRC. If IRC lost all but one of its servers, had its scripting and commands taken away, was confined to 140 characters, couldn’t share files, and had no moderation, then Twitter would be IRC. The sole innovation is that it runs on mobile devices. One IRC client Perl script ported to the Blackberry and Twitter would be gone faster than the first funk train out of Jivetown. That’s why everybody&rsq...
More About: Tweet

My Favorite Science Screw-ups In The Star Trek Universe
2009-05-17 06:48:00
With the new 2009 Star Trek movie out, science fiction geeks the world over can once again begin their ritual of dissecting, analyzing, and arguing about Star Trek. And, wow, has it really been eleven movies already? How hip! So here’s my favorite “WTF?” moments which I experience whenever I ponder my favorite show about wearing tight uniforms to trespass all over the galaxy: Mr. Spock: Besides the anomalies like how he always has to stand up and peer into a garbage chute, there’s the mere existence of the pointy-eared one himself. He’s a half-human, half-Vulcan. As Clifford A. Pickover, my favorite mad scientist, points out in this article on the unrealistic science in SF, it shouldn’t be possible for an alien from another planet to impregnate a human. Think how difficult it is to get two Earthling species to cross-breed, even two species of ape. While we’re discussing the problems of breeding aliens and humans, I’d better link La...
More About: Science , Universe

Pirates Aren’t Nearly As Cool As They Used To Be
2009-05-05 14:15:00
Why, I can remember when pirates kicked ass. From The Curse Of The Black Pearl to Captain Hook from Peter Pan to The Pirates of Penzance, pirates have been the magnificent bastards of fame and legend, able to hold their own against zombies and ninjas. After all, whenever somebody hacks your website, what do they leave as a calling card? That’s right, the skull-and-crossbones, because the idea of somebody hacking up a PHP XSS exploit while typing with a hook for a hand is scary. What’s the best we can do for pirates these days? Well, we have Somalia, and what is this? This skinny kid who breaks down crying in court when they tell him that they called his mommy? That’s not a bad guy! What kind of villain is this? He looks like he belongs on MySpace with photos of him posing in front of his weekly hotel room while he fans out his money and tries to look gangsta. It’s even turning out that the Somali pirates aren’t even the bad guys. A better question ...
More About: Cool

Top 10 Reasons Not To Permit Duplicate Submissions On A Social News Site
2009-04-30 13:56:00
I see that Reddit.com is up in arms over duplicate submissions again. While the heat will flare up and die down on Reddit, this is a common complaint of all social news sites from Digg to Slashdot. When a repeat submitter is confronted, they’ll often defend themselves with a claim such as, “This gives people who haven’t seen it before a chance to see it now.” Well, sure, but if we want to see the old news going back to the dawn of the Internet, we know where to find it. And since we’re all on social news sites and many of us browse multiple sites in this age of RSS, chances are good that everybody who cared saw it the first time. Meanwhile, there are very good reasons why duplicates hurt a social news site. These are: 1. It annoys the users. That, right there, would be reason enough in a world where common sense was common. Perhaps the starship Enterprise can discover such a world out there someday. 2. It promotes spam. Spammers find out that they c...
More About: News , Social , Site , Reasons

Top Ten Worst Compulsive Acts In Video Games
2009-04-27 08:56:00
You know what obsessive-compulsives do, don’t you? They repeat the same meaningless activity over and over again for no apparent reason. You know what obsessive-compulsives do, don’t you? They repeat the same meaningless activity over and over again for no apparent reason. And video games, both by design and habit, tend to bring out the worst in compulsive repetition. Here’s the ten cases where it seems to be particularly bad: Jumping over the final punk’s head at the end of stage one in Shinobi. Yeah, this guy. The arcade Shinobi was chock full of villains who spawned at a certain point, and if you memorized their triggers, you could make them spawn over and over again. For instance, if you stood at a certain spot at the end of the second to the last stage in mission two, you could shoot an endless parade of ninja cops dropping out of the helicopter. But the really compulsive one is this plucky little guy. To “win”, you have to make the jump ...
More About: Video , Video Games , Games , Video-Games

Oracle and Sun – Finally, Somebody Might Pull Ahead of Bill Gates!
2009-04-25 00:09:00
It’s amazing that Oracle Corporation doesn’t get more buzz in the blogosphere. Everybody knows about Microsoft and a few have heard of Apple and Mac OS, but you’re still hard-pressed to find somebody outside of the IT profession who’s heard of Linux, BSD, or Solaris. Especially in the English-speaking world. But here we have Larry Ellison. Pay attention to this name; he’s the fourth-richest human being on the planet. The Forbes wealth rank for 2009 runs Bill Gates , Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helú, and then there’s Lawrence Ellison. There used to be a bunch of other names between them, but they’ve gotten weeded out this year thanks to the global real estate and banking crash. Sorry boys, play-money wealth doesn’t last. Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle Corporation, and amongst Oracle’s various holdings pretty much runs the back end of every major business’ server room. And this company releases a Linux distribution ...
More About: Finally

A Return From My Sabbatical Quest For Enlightenment
2009-04-22 20:02:00
I took a break from blogging these past few months, because I sensed that it was time to refresh the well. My good stars were in retrograde, my aura was turning a mildewed green color, my Chi was curdled, my crystals needed salting, my crystal ball was cracked, my runes were all out of alphabetical order and three of them were lost behind the sofa, my biorhythms looked like a roller coaster, and I was all out of mana. So I took off in search of the Meaning Of The Internet. This was no easy journey. I crept about in the dark of night and eavesdropped on counsels of Illuminati. I prayed to the Flying Spaghetti monster. I viewed ‘2 girls 1 cup’ with my eyeballs propped open with toothpicks and my head taped to the chair-back so I couldn’t look away. I unraveled the truth of the Time Cube. I mixed Mentos and Diet Coke in a Klein bottle. I took a binary approach to Zen and became zero with everything. I solved Portal and stole the cake and ate it and came back and con...
More About: Return , Quest , Enlightenment

Ten Exercises to be a Better Geek
2008-09-02 06:20:00
1. View Source It’s right there for free all over the web. Make a habit of it, and pretty soon you’ll train yourself to see the second web – the world of Meta-tags and Javascript libraries and CSS style and comments – some of them quite fun! I’ve known several sites that were easier to read from the source code than they were in the web browser proper. 2. Switch Window Managers Mainly this is for the Linux/BSD crowd. Try a lightweight like Blackbox or Window Maker, if it comes with your distro. Edit a style. By changing your desktop every now and then, it just keeps your mind loose and limber. 3. Try a New Distro From the same reasoning as above. Live CDs are great to shop around, especially the smaller distros that never seem to get any love. You find out about new programs you never would have known about, see new styles and ways of doing things, and you might just get an inspiration for your next project. 4. Bookmark a Cheatsheet For th...
More About: Geek , Exercises

Windows Games on Linux – Abandonware
2008-08-24 17:36:00
I’d like to focus this time on one special site, which goes so well together with Windows game emulation on Linux that it’s frequently mentioned at WineHQ itself: Home of the Underdogs. “Underdogs”, as it’s commonly referred to, is a site devoted to archiving the forgotten video games of history, from the earliest day to titles as recent as last year, which deserve better recognition. You’re almost guaranteed to find something interesting that you’ve never heard of before. There’s games that just didn’t sell well, games that were released by an obscure company with no promotion, games that were produced by a company that went under, and all sorts of odd bits and pieces. Downloading free abandonware makes for some fun Wine tasting. On a random romp where I just grabbed whatever looked interesting and tried it out, I encountered these gems: Sanitarium While I have yet to have the game go to the second stage without crashing,...
More About: Games

An Overview of Wine for Linux
2008-08-09 16:56:00
Wine is not an easy subject in the Linux community. To start with, it’s obviously an emulator. If DOSBox is a DOS emulator and ZSNES is a Super Nintendo emulator, then Wine is a Windows emulator. Except that Wine is an acronym which, you will be corrected, stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. Oh, so it’s a simulator, or virtualator, or masturbator, or whatever-you-call-the-damn-thing. I say it’s an emulator. It creates a virtual Windows environment on a non-Windows operating system, for the purpose of running Windows-specific programs. And once you’ve overcome the first barrier in knowing what it is, you have plenty of hurdles left. Starcraft – Famous for running perfectly on Wine. Bottom line: Wine is a mixed bag, depending on the game or application you’re running. When it works, it is sheer Heaven. When it fails, it will cause some of the most spectacular crashes you have ever witnessed on a Linux desktop. Be prepared for th...
More About: Wine

Why Paranoia About Video Games Is Bunk
2008-08-06 08:00:00
There are two times when I would have expected vilification of video games: (1) When they first hit the mainstream, as did happen when I was growing up in the 1980s, and (2) whenever Jack Thompson is talking. If you’re a permanent citizen of Batty-Bonkersland, sure, hate on video games. It keeps you off the minorities. And when any young teen during the 80’s, twiddling quarters in their juvenile fingers on their way into a video arcade, would have viewed all the negative media press about video games, they would have done so with a jaundiced eye. Yeah, sure, they go through this about every entertainment medium. They used to raise a flap about novels back in the day. They’ll get over it. Yet here it is, the new millenium, and you still see daily panicky headlines about “OMG! TEH DANGERS OF VIDEO GAMES!”, with yet another self-proclaimed expert ragging on how video games are responsible for every imaginable social ill. After all this time, there do...
More About: Video , Video Games , Games , Video-Games , Paranoia

The Home Computer Security Glossary
2008-07-31 23:18:00
We geeks are so comfortable batting around those techie terms, we often get accused of having a blind spot: not explaining what those terms mean. Especially to the common home user, who is definitely not a geek but just wants to surf the web in peace. And yet, conversely, it is the common home user who is most at risk, frequently targeted for attack by the ne’erdowells of the web. So here, a little jargon list about computer security, just for the people who need the jargon-free “elevator pitch”. First, the Big Three categories: Virus – A nasty program whose mission in life is to spread itself and infect as many computers as it can. The difference with a virus is, it uses another program to reproduce. Just like a flu infects cells in the body to make more flu viruses, a computer virus cannot spread on its own. Worm – So what’s a worm? Another nasty program that spreads itself and tried to infect as many… wait a minute, didn’t...
More About: Security , Computer , Home , Glossary , Computer Security

Geek Insults - Or Things Computer Literates Call You Behind Your Back
2008-06-09 19:43:00
I was browsing Cracked.com and chanced upon 8 Medical Terms Your Doctor Uses to Insult You. Cool idea, I thought, because the computing community has words like that, too. Here’s the list. If you see one of these expressions stamped on your support ticket at the computer repair center, or if the field engineers at your ...
More About: Microsoft , Computer , Geek , Back , Things

How To Run Windows 3.1 on DOSBox - inside Windows or Linux!
2008-05-25 20:36:00
Step one: You’ll need DOSBox installed and running. The latest release, 0.72, runs exceptionally well and gets rid of the old lag issues with previous versions, so that’s what I’m using here. You should probably not go into the DOSBox forums talking about this - running Windows isn’t what they had in mind with this ...
More About: Linux , Microsoft , Inside

If Geek Sexual Roles Were Reversed
2008-05-22 20:40:00
Whether it be in Geek dom, Linux, programming, gaming, web design, or anything else touching the IT sphere, the lament is heard over and over: where are all the girl geeks? Well, guys, let’s try putting ourselves in the ladies’ place and see if we can figure out what it’s like for them… IRC Linux_ghetto chat, Tuesday, ...
More About: Sexual

Baking a Batch of Demotivational Posters
2008-05-12 20:47:00
What’s this? People on the Internet are still confidently striding into the 21st century, sublimely convinced that they are the champions who can conquer the world? Well, I’ll just have to see if I can fix that… Image Sources: absolutely everywhere.
More About: Humor , Baking , Posters , Batch

The Programming Languages Zoo
2008-05-07 06:18:00
It’s time to play our favorite game: “geek analogy”. Where we take a category of objects in a class known to geeks and make up hysterically funny comparisons to a set of real-world objects. Today, I’d like to talk about what animal each of the programming languages would be if they were occupants of a ...
More About: Programming , Humor , Animals , Languages , Programming Languages

Social Online Games
2008-05-03 09:15:00
The more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ve come all the way from IRC chat and Bulletin Board Systems to Twitter and Social News Sites. Which means that after 20 years of booming technology progress, people are still amusing each other primarily by… sending each other strings of text. Big deal! We ...
More About: Games , Online Games , Social Networks , Trivia

Reasons why I havnt blogged
2008-04-26 09:20:00
Top Reasons I Haven’t Updated This Blog in Six Months 1) I’ve been breathlessly watching to see how the MicroHoo soap opera plays out. Will Microsoft buy Yahoo ? Will Yahoo partner with Google? Will Yahoo sell Flickr? Will Microsoft buy Digg? Will Digg sleep with Yahoo to get back at Microsoft while Microsoft blackmails Google and ...

Dancing the Google Dance
2008-01-31 16:42:00
You may have heard the term “Google dance” tossed around on the Internet, and wondered what it means. Well, you know how when you’re looking for something - like your car keys - and you pat your pockets and turn around and stoop over to look under the newspaper and run to the closet to ...
More About: Dancing , Dance , Page , Rank

Things in Technology that Will Not Change in 2008
2008-01-23 13:16:00
I’ve done a few looking-back posts for 2007, now for a looking-forward one. Speculate how you will, but the things in this list are all tried and true technology staples, and 2008 won’t be the year they go away, either. We will never invent the perfect programming language. - As Brian Hayes calculates in one of the best programming essays I’ve read this year, ” The Semicolon Wars”, we have invented one new programming language per week since Fortran came out. And if you count beyond mere languages to platforms, development environments, frameworks, libraries, and so on, you probably get something like a new way to code every day of your life. I like having so many languages to choose from, but isn’t it starting to look like we’re searching for a Holy Grail, here? And all we find are more and more ordinary cups. We will never be free of misologists - Here is the Wiki definition of a misology. And here, published just recently, is a S...
More About: Technology , Change , Things

The Biggest Bad Guys of Technology 2007
2008-01-10 17:26:00
Quick, Commissioner Gorden! Turn on the Bat-signal and summon the Dark Lord of Gotham to rid the city of this nefarious cast of evil-doers. It’s a tough choice narrowing it down to the number one bad guy of technology. The best we can do is round up the usual suspects from 2007 and present them ...
More About: Technology , Live , Guys

The Year of Digg 2007
2008-01-04 20:27:00
The social web has come into its own, become a force to be reckoned with, and has possibly even peaked. But no site tells this story more clearing than the amazing Digg .com. Here’s a look back at the stories which shaped Digg, and by extension, shaped the social web as we know it. Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56 -88-c0 ...
More About: Phone , Social Networks , Ron Paul , Year

People Who?ve Never Run Linux Shouldn?t Write About Linux
2007-12-26 15:46:00
The title of this post occurred to me when I read the post Our Linux Dream. Somehow, even though people get the idea that specialized fields require some experience in that field before you can say anything intelligent about it, people hear the word “Linux” for the first time, Google it long enough to see ...
More About: People , Microsoft , Office , Desktop

What Does XKCD Stand For?
2007-12-20 12:20:00
XKCD is not a Linux X-window program. Just to start with! XKCD is the phenomenally funny comic done by Randall Patrick Munroe, a degree-holder in physics who works for the United States NASA space program. It has become the official cartoon of social news culture, and a large share of geeks and hackers as well. ...
More About: Stand

Top 7 Reasons Why I Didn?t RTFA
2007-12-16 17:44:00
If you don’t go on social news sites a lot (lucky you), I have to explain that “RTFA” stands for “Read The Fine/Fun/F*%#ing Article” and is generally bandied about in the discussion section of said social news site. Anywhere in the comment threads, you’re likely to bump into someone who asks a question or makes ...
More About: Windows , Linux , Apple , Social Networks , Tube

A Look at WebHostingChoice.com
2007-12-12 17:04:00
www.WebHostingChoice.com is a search site for finding web hosting services according to the guild lines you submit. When everybody starts out to get their own web domain, their first question is “Which web host should I choose?” But just searching Google doesn’t get you the answers you want - an impartial recommendation by people like you, ...