Microsoft’s newest operating system, Vista, has just hit retail. The previews were a giant mixed bag, with the draconian built-in DRM, the incessant “Are you really, really sure?” dialog boxes and the sky-high system requirements on the bad side.

On the good side, we had security and eye-candy. Don’t knock the former, it’s apparently a huge improvement over XP.

In any case, it hit retail, and Bill Gates even showed up on The Daily Show to promote it. Field reports are just starting to come in.

First, the upgrade version of Windows Vista will invalidate your Windows XP key once you activate it. That means no re-installing that copy of XP, anywhere. Not to belabour the point, but that means your legitimately purchased copy of windows XP is no longer usable once it’s been “upgraded”.

Second, is the little workaround that lets customers purchase “upgrade” versions of Windows Vista and perform a full install. Full instructions are available, go and take a look-see before Microsoft sends a cease-and-desist.

Third, is the bewildering array of Windows Vista versions available to purchase. The Joy of Tech comic puts it more succinctly than I could. It’s an operating system, Microsoft, not a finely aged wine. Get over yourselves.

Then we get this story about internal Microsoft e-mails showing them drooling over Mac OS X. Specifically, Tiger’s spotlight. *Snore*.

If you’re having difficulty deciding, this flowchart might help (original).

Reports continue to trickle in. I’m waiting to see what’s going to happen, but I doubt I will be upgrading from XP any time soon.

This time, it’s Windows Vista’s DRM scheme.

The hack allows a user to bypass Windows Vista’s Protected Media Path, allowing premium content to play. Quote:

The great thing about the code I’ve written is that it does NOT use test signing mode and it does NOT load an unsigned driver into the system. Therefore, to any A/V application running, the system seems totally safe — when in fact, it’s not. Now, because I’m still booting with a special flag, it’s possible for Microsoft to patch the PMP and have it report that this flag is set, thereby disabling premium content. However, beause I already have kernel-mode code running at this point, I can disable this flag in memory, and PMP will never know that it was enabled. Again, Microsoft could fight this by caching the value, or obfuscating it somewhere inside PMP’s kernel-mode code, but as long as it’s in kernel-mode, and I’ve got code in kernel-mode, I can patch it.

The creator, Alex Ionescu, does not want to release the code for fear of lawsuit. So it’s hard to verify what he’s done. But if it really works, expect somebody else to duplicate the feat soon.

Singapore beat Malaysia in a penalty shoot-out. The victory lets the Lions move on to the finals in the Asean Cup, probably against Thailand. Two snippets from the conversation between me and Zeng immediately after the game:

Me (on the “extended” match): penalty kick is not pwnage leh

Zeng (on the final Malaysian kick that let Singapore win): haha did you see the noob kick hahah
Zeng: such a weak kick…

I wonder how far we’ll go this time.

I need one of these for my cat. If just for the entertainment value.

(No, I don’t hate my cat. But you have to admit the video is hilarious).

(Updated 17 feb 2007: apparently a lot of people came to this page looking for a “cat washing machine”. When I checked, the youtube video was no longer available. So I replaced it.)

There’s an interview with two of thePirateBay’s founders on torrentfreak. What I found very interesting is that every time they’re asked how much money they make off ad revenue, they decline to answer.

Eventually, one person asks why they’re so reticent about the whole thing:

CS asks: Why won’t you answer questions about your profits?

Peter: It feels like a cheap way to make us look like hipocrits. We would rather have people focusing on the issues of copyright.

Gottfrid: We are not involved in the financing part ourselves. We simply don’t have the time, the energy or the market know-how ourselves, instead we want to be able to focus on the technical stuff. In the childhood of the Pirate Bay, just before we got ourselves out of the stage where we were just a bunch of old second-hand computer gear in a closet, and needed more money than we could put in ourselves or get through donations, I was the one handling the ads. It was very stressful and didn’t work very well, with cynical ad buyers and low incomes as a result. It was really very re leaving to be able to hand this part over to professionals.

Hmm, I smell a rat.

If their profits are low, then they should be openly trumpeting the fact. It makes them look better, like the copyfighters they claim to be.

If they’re keeping mum, the only inference the reader can draw is that they’re keeping silent because they’re making a lot of money. Possibly a lot more than the $84,000 per month they were discovered to be making.

Come on, guys. Own up!

So proclaims this reuters article and an International Herald Tribune article.

Good news indeed. What was interesting is Warner Music’s blurb from reuters:

“We at Warner have put out a series of premium products and … we immediately doubled the amount of digital albums that we were selling by just attaching a video, attaching some special lyrics or a photo gallery.”

I told you so!

People will buy, if the product has something extra. Granted, it doesn’t make any mention of whether or not one of those “extras” is a DRM scheme. But it’s a start.

In any case, DRM has been going through its own woes for the past month. Apple’s iTunes DRM has been slammed again and again by European countries. And the HD-DVD protection scheme was cracked, with the Blu-Ray scheme following soon after.

(Before you start railing on how this will open the doors to piracy, consider that HD-DVDs on thePirateBay weigh in at 12-20+ GigaBytes. Until compression technology or bandwidth makes that kind of download feasible, the industry has nothing to worry about. See also “Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn’t about piracy” on arstechnica).

All in all, it looks like DRM is going down. I hope! We’ll see how this turns out.

Recently, news of a new, simple and effective way of fighting cancer was released [link].

The chemical dichloroacetate (DCA), works by re-activating the mitochondria in cancerous cells. This sets off a cell’s self-destruct sequence (I don’t exactly know how the biology of this works, I’m accepting the reported explanation for now).

Unfortunately, many websites are proclaiming that DCA will not be developed by pharmaceutical companies because DCA is unpatentable. Since no pharmaceutical companies can patent it, they are therefore not likely to want to spend the money to develop it. A smattering of websites spreading this FUD are (is?) here, here and here.

It has sparked the usual lively discussion in the slashdot thread (Patents are bad! Patents are good! Governments are bad! Pharmaceutical companies are bad! etc).

But I sincerely doubt there is reason to worry. A brief search through the US Patent Office’s records turns up US Patent 4,558,050: Treatment of metabolic disorders with dichloroacetate-thiamine preparations. This is probably the previous use the New Scientist article refers to. It’s limited to the treatment of said metabolic disorders. The claim also doesn’t appear to use DCA directly: it uses the DCA to produce something else, which is what they’re claiming.

There is, apparently, nothing preventing a pharmaceutical company or the University of Alberta filing a patent to use DCA to treat cancer.

As for the manufacture of DCA itself, I didn’t find it (probably because it’s pre-1930s), but that patent has probably expired a long time ago. So what? It has no bearing on the use the DCA can be put to.

To summarize:

1) The method of producing DCA is unpatentable.
2) But the uses to which DCA may be put have not been explored.
3) If someone finds a novel, non-obvious use for DCA through diligent research and work, it should be patentable.

Ergo, there is nothing to worry about. We have a possible breakthrough in cancer cures coming soon to a hospital near you.

(If any of my readers think I’m writing nonsense, please tell me!)

From the “how the hell did they do that?!” department, comes a custom run of Dragonforce’s Through the Fire and Flames for Guitar Hero.

It’s mind-boggling. One of the commentors says exactly what’s on everybody’s mind.

MeHimself (5 hours ago)
Holy f**king shit. What just happened…

Can’t believe I missed this. It’s a really cool algorithm that can automatically map itself to faces, then lets you animate those faces. Famous people morphed include: Tom Hanks, Audrey Hepburn, The Mona Lisa.

Audrey Hepburn is particularly alluring when she’s made to smile =).

Numb3rs is a geeky little show that dramatizes how mathematics is used in FBI investigations. It stars a rather unrecognizable David Krumholtz as Charlie Epps, a mathematical genius who helps his FBI investigator brother solve a plethora of crimes.

In a recent episode, a racing ship smuggling illicit weapons sinks just off the coast of Los Angeles.

Where did they pick them up? Singapore!

Don Epps: Whatever the Cheetah was smuggling, apparently it picked up in Singapore

NSA guy: How do you know that?

Don: ‘Cos Charlie says it was moving slower after it left its port. So does that mean anything to you guys?

NSA: It could. A couple of [unintelligible] - missile guidance systems - four units disappeared from a Pakistani army base 12 weeks ago. NSA’s been tracking them, but we lost them crossing into Thailand. If they continue on that trajectory…

Don: Right. Singapore.

Oh noes, we harbour terrorist smugglers! Better tell the CID, so we can hang the fella.

More proof that the record labels hate you: Universal and Sony prohibit the Zune from sharing songs from certain artists. If you’re not in the know, Microsoft’s Zune, their soon-to-be-crushed competitor to Apple’s iPod, can send songs to each other via wireless transmission. It seems like a good idea, until you realize that all songs sent in this manner can only be played either three times or three days. Oh, and Microsoft pays Universal every time a Zune is sold. And now it’s revealed that roughly half of all songs from Universal and Sony can’t even get shared! Way to go, UMG and Sony.

Hot on the heels of this news, a British startup company called Streamburst has decided to do away with DRM altogether. Instead, they inject a watermark into the file, so it can be tracked. While I admire their idealism, I can think of so many ways the system will fail it’s ridiculous. It’s trivial to cut out the watermark. It’s also trivial to just go and download a non-watermarked version. And what happens when your watermarked file is stolen? Do you get sued, too? How do you defend yourself? We all know how reliable computer evidence is.

No, the best way to compete with pirates is to offer something better and personal. Extra content like behind-the-scenes interviews. Making the user somehow attached to the file he pays for - maybe have the artists record a personal message, that sort of thing. These are things media coglomerates can do, but they’re not, because obviously it’s more expensive than developing multi-million dollar DRM schemes that get cracked within a week.

I am currently digesting Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Kudos to the National Library of Singapore for having books available for borrowing so quickly after their publication. Whereas I earlier doubted Dawkins’ own fundamentalist-atheist style, I must say his book is turning out to be much more reasonable than I expected it to be.

I have not yet finished, but one section in Chapter 2 reminded me of a pet peeve of mine: the uselessness of prayer. The amusing quote is on page 60:

Remember Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in [sic] behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.’

One thing I’ve always hated is whenever I’m going through a tough time, the only thing my Christian friends can offer me is “I will pray for you.” That’s all I get. I don’t even know if I actually get prayed for; I can only assume I am dutifully added to the prayer diary, sitting right next to your copy of Our Daily Bread and the Bible.

It’s weird. When one of my friends have trouble, I do my best to help. I listen. I give them a call on the phone. Arrange lunches, or dinners, or alcohol-imbibing sessions. Let them know I’m available. Check up on them and make sure they’re okay. You know, being there for your friend.

Surely you, as a moral, caring Christian, can do better? Isn’t “I will pray for you” the equivalent of saying “I’m too lazy to do anything for you, my friend, so I shall assuage my guilt by mouthing empty platitudes”? Now, not all my Christian friends are like this; most of them are actually decent people. But every time I hear those vacuous words, I feel like introducing the speaker to the bottom of my shoe.

And empty they are, you have to admit that. Prayer does not work, and you know it. Every time I hear an anecdotal story about how a prayer was “answered”, I cringe. Prayer and other miracles appear to work because there are external factors that you never noticed at work. I give you two personal anecdotes.

In one, my sunday school teacher was late for an important church event. As she sat there waiting for the bus, she bowed her head in prayer. Lord, please do not let me be late to do Your holy work. When she looked up, lo and behold, the bus was just pulling up into the bay. She got on, and was not late.

In another, a classmate was listening to gospel songs on her discman when her battery ran out. Saddened by the loss, she put her discman away. Later in the day, as she was going back home, she decided to try the discman out; lo and behold, sweet praise for the Lord flowed from the earphones. “Isn’t it an amazing miracle?” she told me, eyes glowing with wonder. “God helps in the smallest ways.”

In neither situation does divine power come into play. The first anecdote is a remarkable exposition on the egocentric nature of prayer, and how it can distort the simplest of events into divine guidance. The second anecdote is easily explained away with science: as batteries are used, chemicals build up around the tips. These chemicals increase a battery’s resistance, and eventually the battery is too weak to overcome it. Let your battery rest for a while, however, and the chemicals dissipate; the battery functions again.

But those are negative examples, I hear you protest. Prayer does work, it’s just that you don’t have enough faith yourself. Or the praying person lacks faith. Or the existence of sin has made God turn away. Or it is not meant to be answered, and some greater path awaits you if you just wait.

I don’t propose to deal with all these protests individually. What I will say is this. Let us assume that prayer actually will help in some measurable fashion. Let us also accept that prayer does not always work.

Why then do you offer me something that may or may not work, instead of showing me more concrete support that’s guaranteed to help?

Why?

You’re lazy, that’s why. Prayer helps you fill that imperceptible twinge the vestiges of your conscience gives you. I really don’t need that kind of person around me when I’m slogging through crap, thank you very much.

So to all of you who have nothing to offer but empty statements: the game is up. We all know you’re only doing it to score brownie points.

But it’s okay. You can carry on muttering ineffectually under your breath for whatever you happen to want for the moment. Just count me out of it.

A 9-year-old boy ran away from home. He stole a car, boarded a plane and reached San Antonio before he was caught [link].

But how did the kid get past airport security?

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Jennifer Peppin said travelers must have a boarding pass to go through airport security checkpoints, although adults can use an escort pass to bring young children or seniors to a flight gate.

“That young man would’ve had to have a boarding pass,” Peppin said.

That says a lot about airport security. I wonder when the TSA will realize that what they’re doing makes terrorists very, very happy. Researchers have even managed to sneak bombs on board planes! Either do it right, like Singapore does, or don’t do it at all.

(Singapore does individual security screenings at each and every gate, just before boarding. American airports have one mass security checkpoint at the beginning. It’s crowded, takes hours to go through, and I bet the personnel are so harried they can’t even do their jobs properly.)

And what’s with blaming videogames?

Police pursued young Booker on Highway 512 at 80 to 90 mph until he took an exit and the engine blew, after which the car went over a curb and coasted into a tree.

He refused to come out of the car, so officers broke a window to unlock a door and immediately recognized him as a frequent runaway and car thief, Gutto said. Last month he also crashed a stolen car before being caught by police in Tacoma, and more recently he was caught in Seattle in a stolen car that had run out of gas, his mother said.

She believes he learned to drive from playing video games on a PlayStation.

Dear mom: if your kid runs away to try and reach Grandpa, you have a bigger problem on your hands.

Anyone who thinks they can learn to drive from playing PS games is plain stupid. I don’t even know where to begin. It’s far more likely he learnt to drive while watching you, mom. I drove my first car around the parking lot at 11, under parents’ supervision. No PlayStations when I was a kid. Nothing beats practical experience.

Just move already.

Anyone had this experience before?

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