First of all, running an XP machine with SP1 deserves death penalty. Second: who the heck doesn’t run any form of security app on this kind of machine?! This is beyond me, really. Nonetheless, it’s worth a read, even if it’s just for the sake of a good laugh.

From ZDNET.com:

… Connected a machine running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 to an unsecured wireless network. The machine was running no antivirus, firewall, or anti-spyware software …

“You can download attack tools from the Internet, and even script kiddies can use this one,” said Mick.

…

And blah blah blah. Funny. Ignorant.

I’ve added the card-game ‘Hearts’ to my ‘fun distractions’ page.
Read all about it there.

 The Idealist Website

While filling out the questions, it makes you think about how you pronounce certain words and based on that it gives you an approximation of how Yankee or Rebel you may be. Makes you realize some people say some words in some pretty weird ways

Take the test at AlphaDictionary.com

Click image above for a bigger view of my Reliability Monitor

A few days ago I remembered Paul Thurrott mentioning the Vista Reliability and Performance monitor and since I had purchased a new laptop a month earlier, I was curious to see how things we’re holding up.

The result in the image above is mainly a downhill graph, starting at 10 out of ten and dropped to as low as 1.82 on October 7th. Vista’s running on a new Dell XPS M1710, so it’s pretty astonishing. As of late, the graph has gone up again and is currently at 5.5.

“What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2007, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original.”

The principle is to feed a perfectly normal English sentence into the automated translation, which in turn will process it through ten languages and every time back to English. The result roughly corresponds to the aforementioned description. Some apt examples:

•  ”When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”
  becomes “If the moon fixes its eye like a great vector of Fleischpie of the vector of Pizzapie, is the lover.
• “A cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.”
  becomes “Biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.” [Hilarious!]
• “This machine talks gibberish, more than I do!”
  becomes “The word says more when queerer than this preoccupation in the unit of me.”

Try it out yourself.