Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"if we were all meant to get along, there would be no people who wait until all the groceries are rung up before starting to look for their damn debit card." -- Dexter Dotnetsky I just had to laugh at how incredibly stupid people can be after reading this Wired story about how some schmuck got the "Administrator" Keypad password (which you can get right out of the PDF manual, which you can search for, find, and download online -- and that's not the only ATM model you can do this with). The password basically allows you to reconfigure the machine to think it is holding $5 bills instead of twenties and dispense four times the amount of money you ask for. Use an untraceable prepaid debit card to get the cash, and you got some fun times. Nine days went by until some Good Samaritan customer informed the store owner that she had gotten more money out of the ATM than she asked for. The crook had never reset the Admin password back to "normal". The lesson he...

Here's the deal: Pope (who ostensibly represents tolerance, love for humankind, etc. around the world) says something that one particular group (Muslims) can misinterpret to be slanderous to Islam. Actually, he was quoting someone else, trying to explain the Vatican's policy that there is no room for violence in religion, but the Muslim fanatics went nuts. Why? Because of the way the MEDIA reported it. Fanatic Islamic groups around the world respond by protesting and burning Christian Churches. Yo, man!-- It's a self-fulfilling prophecy! Even if the Pope did not -- in any way -- intend for his utterances to be interpreted to say that Islam is bad, Islamist extremists will dutifully react and start burning Christian symbols, knowing full well that the media will report it, thereby proving to all the world that Islam is indeed "bad" - when in actual fact, Islam is a peaceful religion that does not preach violence at all. Who is responsible for this? THE MEDIA. Beca...

Well the good news is out: Microsoft invented Remote Scripting (not a very sexy term, to be sure) and Jesse James Garrett coined AJAX, which has now further been modified to "AB" - see my post here where I make the case that we don't need an acronym at all, based on my interpretation of the new "rules". They have decided to drop the "ATLAS" moniker and replace it with more "product-y" sounding names, which include the ever - popular but now defunct (according to the guru himself) "AJAX" name: 1) The client-side Atlas javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library. This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server. 2) The server-side Atlas functionality that nicely integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. As part of this change the tag prefix for the Atlas controls will change from <atlas:>to <asp:>(Jeesh! I thought they would change it to <aja...

"We were guessing about Iraq. We are not guessing about Iran. If they get nuclear weapons they will foster terror on a scale that cannot be imagined." -- Benjamin Netanyahu Well, they put out RC1 today and I think I have been getting wiser in my young age with BETAs and stuff -- I've been smart enough to hold off on the various Vista Betas. Not a bad decision after reading some of the horror story blog entries. But you know, "RC1" is by definition so substantially a final release that I decided to down it and install on my second hard drive - the one that currently runs Windows XP x64 - and which I hardly use anyway. So I burned the DVD, booted up into the XP OS, and inserted the DVD and let it come up. Guess what? The Upgrade section is greyed out! I'm like, "Wait a minute! This is a Release Candidate!" Bottom line, this is what people are going to get when they buy this and you can't even upgrade over a valid Windows XP x64 edition? Well the...