Nevertheless, due to my female counterpart’s enticement programme, I end up noticing most of each episode while playing Star Wars – The Old Republic. While I feel it is more important to level my Empire bounty hunter’s black market skills, she thinks we should consume this tripe while holding hands. Which has a negative effect on my 1337 combat tactics and mouse hand

Apparently her twittering SMS messaging obsessive friends agree that she needs to see the show. The pace of twits tweeting and iPhones beeping increases at a rate close to a powertech bounty hunter’s superheated gas dps curve. By the end of the night its ready to explode. Our nerd/male slut watching compromise involves a massive leather Scandanavian Designs couch, giant 120HZ 3dTV, Dell Precision M6500 with dual SSDs, Intel quad core extreme edition, 16GB of ram, beer and a slice of triple chocolate cake from Hacienda Colorado.  That nerds, is what compromise is. My massive cranium unfortunately has extra cycles to burn on the Bachelor noise resulting in a mild bit of analysis. I have two theories for my prediction on the bachelor season 500,321.888:

1. If the show is somewhat real and they have a genuine interest in making profit from a happy couple, Ben will keep the hot horse riding chick. The parents are a good fit, it just works. Baton twirling band girl doesn’t have a chance because her dad is a tool. Which is sad, she is probably at about the nerd level I am so I feel bad for her dabbling in the deep pool when she should be in the plastic pool with me.  Former married girl doesn’t have a shot. Although her dad is cool because he rocks a pen in the pocket sans pocket protector. That means he is rich because he has so many shirts that he does not need to protect his pockets. I suspect he is intelligent enough to know his daughter is a skank. I hope I never have a skanky bachelor daughter.

2. Model “evil” girl will win if the show is completely based on corporate interest, sponsorship, drama, well just money. I feel bad for Ben if he is somehow stuck in this position, well maybe. It could be that Ben is legally blind and the blurry images presented through his distended corneas make  Courtney look somewhat attractive. Hell, maybe he just likes her hair color or the smell of burning silicone and taste of stale botulism on her upturned distorted lip. The girl looks like a confused or poisoned fish and has some obvious daddy issues. If I had to be around her psychotic plastic lip and or personality, I think I would be  as awkward as Mike Myers next to the mole. Fi fi fi fi fiFIIIIISHHH!

Overall I think he is going for the model. The bachelor results in disasters created by the typical beauty pageant operation. 25 girls enter, 24 lose, 1 loses spectacularly a little later. Usually aided by a cocktail of cocaine, liposuction, purse sized dog and a relationship gone bad. The judge at these events gets a smile on his face for a while, until he ends up with a few prescription creams to apply to his junk. I’m glad I’m a socially inept nerd with a penchant for star wars.

People have been calling a threat to a computer a virus for decades. I don’t think it is going to go away because some fanboys get angry at the proper definition. Most windows machines, macs and droids end up with trojans not viruses. Viruses don’t make sense anymore. Sad to see the journalist in this story get it wrong, but we can get used to it.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-malware-for-macs-is-on-its-way/3243

Ed got it right 13 days ago. Mac trojan on a large scale popped up in a big way. The problem with this particular one stems from the press it is already getting. If more news agencies catch on, more dumb users will start to panic. As they start to panic or remember the story about needing antivirus, they will be more likely to fall for the antivirus scam. This problem could grow quite a bit over the next few weeks if mac doesn’t do something clever.

For the fanbois, check out other sites if you don’t believe. Like the apple support forums. There are thousands of page views and hundreds of threads about this problem already.

http://blog.intego.com/

Just pay attention to the numbers. As mac usage increases, threats increase. Lets hope linux stays small so my servers are safe. No OS is safe, all have rootable exploits. Numbers of Google OS phones up = http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216835/Google_moves_fast_to_plug_Android_Wi_Fi_data_leaks

Ok so why not linux? Well because as a desktop it sucks. Normal people can’t run a linux desktop. The people who do won’t fall for these simple attacks. Their desktops and servers are targeted based on their valuable data. Databases full of credit card numbers, sony playstation logins etc. No need for a stupid spyware install when you can root a database with a buffer overflow on an open port.

To the loyal macheads, I wish you luck in your frantic race to download antivirus and hope that there are mature security solutions to protect your mom who you smugly told to buy a mac. The good news is that logmein works on windows and mac so you can take care of this remotely once she gets it. Pretty easy fix. No nasty rootkits yet.

Imagine a fanboy speaking on this timeline about the greatest mac feature:

2005 Macs don’t ever get hacked!

Today Macs don’t get hacked much! Especially compared to Windows!

2015 Macs are really shiny and blingy!

2020 Macs were cool when I was in college!

Overall macs are just computers. Get some antivirus, stay patched, you will be fine.

Here is a link to free av for mac at sophos:   http://www.sophos.com/freemacav

Kaspersky for mac - http://www.kaspersky.com/kav-mac-latest-versions

Symantec for mac - http://us.norton.com/macintosh/antivirus/

Several sources are calling for apple to funnel people to the apps store so that they only get known good downloads. Bad idea:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/05/18/mac-app-store-security-risks/

Out of the box:

1. The case sucks. If I compare things to Ipad, it is because they are close to the same size, and our customers compare them. I know it is apples to oranges, home use vs business. Anyhow they are about the same size, and the ipad standard case is much better. This HP one feels flimsy and does not fit on the device very well. If anyone sees cases/slings for carrying them, shoot me some links in the comments. My target customer is on their feet, in and out of hospital rooms all day.

2. Keyboard input will take some getting used to. Same with an Ipad for me. I don’t type well on a screen. For customers this will be an issue with either device.

3. HP comes with a stylus. I am already writing just fine, but I have experience back to the palm/hp200/hp Jornada 430. I’ve also been working on the tablet XP, vista and 7 OS’ for quite a while.

4. Win 7 pro looks good. Internect connection fired right up on the wireless. Everything is working well.

5. IE needs a fullscreen button to hit with your finger. Maybe someone wrote something already? Let me know.

6. Right click in IE needs the following:

• fullscreen
• Go to url:
• exit
• lock rotation (so if I want it to stay portrait while working even though I am physically setting it down etc)

7. Joined my Windows 2008 R2 Active directory just like any other Windows 7 Pro machine. It did not bring up a keyboard or stylus interface right away when I clicked in the text boxes to type in the domain name to join. That was a little odd, but I am already getting used to using the keyboard button on the side of the slate to pop it up when I need it.

8. HA! No need to sync with another computer for itunes. Or anything. It is it’s own computer which I intend to manage for now with a Dell Kbox 1000.

9. My screen is broken. There is a small dent or something under the glass on the lcd about an inch down from the camera if you hold it portrait mode. If there is a blue background, you can see about a 1/4 by 1/8th inch distortion area and the line where it is cracked. Nice work HP quality control. I’ll be starting a trouble ticket and asking for a replacement soon.

I know ipad lovers are going to find this and want to tear me apart. Please, if you want to help, email apple and tell them to get FIPS-140-2 certified. For anything. Apple does not have a single entry on the FIPS-140-2 list of approved algorithms, devices etc. This means you can NOT use an Iphone, Ipad, Ianything for access to patient data.

Things LOTRO shines on:

When you ride from city to city, you can jump off at any time. Can’t jump off a bird in wow. This is so nice when leveling up your mining or heading to a quest in the middle of a flight path.

Max quests is 40 vs 25. I hate this in WoW because sometimes I want to be working on a few quest chains in several zones, then add the seasonal quests. I run out.

Graphics are different, sometimes better. Water looks good, but a river has to go uphill at the last second before becoming a waterfall. If you have a good video card the graphics are awesome. There are huge fields of tall grass and flowers that sway in the breeze, looks good on the tv computer.

There are really cool combo moves we haven’t quite figured out yet. So different classes working together can end up with a combo move coming up where if you all hit the same color, it does something awesome like summon an Ent to stomp your enemy.

The pace of some of the instances is fast and exciting.

WoW is better:

Plugins!!!! The biggest strength of WoW is the vast library of plugins available. If you use the curse gaming client you can download, search, manage all of your plugins in a snap. Things like healbot, bagnon, dpsmeter just aren’t available for LORTO yet. I haven’t studied the API, but so far I don’t think you can do much for LORTO besides skin the UI.

standing in a fire burns you in WoW

Bag space! UGH. I am so used to bagnon in WoW, having one giant bag pop up that I can’t stand the individual bags on LORTO. I don’t know yet if you can upgrade the bag slot numbers. If you can’t it is going to really suck long term.

Even after they opened free players up, the population of WoW is so vast that everything works better. The autodungeon finder, auction house, battlegrounds. Life is a lot easier because  there are always people online outside your guild/kinship to accomplish what you need at the moment.

Autorun works with a mouse button (easily fixed by mapping in LOTRO)

Dragging items from bag to bag, or bag to vendor is awkward, slow, jerky in LORTO

For a 10GB download, the background music sucks. WoW music gets turned off on my machine, but once in a while i flip it back on cause i love running in to Stormwind and looking around. They picked their majestic music well. LORTO music is more accurate for the theme of the game. It sounds like a wandering band of minstrels with old instruments. Others may love this, just personal opinion.

No signs to be found in LORTO, I can’t find a trainer anywhere. Well that is how it started. Once you learn the interface it is easy to find things. I like being able to ask a guard in WoW and have my destination show up red on the map, or use the tool built in to the minimap. Questhelper handicapped my ability to go find things myself, it is a time saver that I would love to see in Lorto.

The map sort of kind of tells you an area. Sometimes it is right. I don’t like the icons they use to explain different points of interest because they aren’t very obvious.

The button interface is just awful. This weird grey wicker looking thing. The buttons make very little sense so far. I’l figure it out as I go.

It seems you have to have a bag open to keep your 3 additional spell bars open. This is easily fixed by going in to the options.

The learning curve for a minstrel is high, and the effects of each action you are capable of are confusing. The buffing doesn’t last very long, and you need to memorize what each one does because they aren’t self explanatory in the name.

Just different, not better or worse either way

jumping down far hurts you in WoW, jumping down breaks your leg and slows you down in LORTO.

Overall-

I like LORTO a lot. It is different and refreshing to play something that is easy to pick up with WoW skills. I love the graphics and the theme. My concern is that it won’t pick up enough players to drive development. And what happens when they finish the books? Do they have the rights to build new story or will the movie studios shoot them down? For now I’ll keep switching between both.