Grumblings within Microsoft over Vista launch delay

via /. and minimsft

right now, there are people working within Microsoft wanting to fire the likes of CEO Steve Ballmer and Windows chief Jim Allchin.

If they could, that is…

At the very least, an interesting look into internal corporate grumblings.

Al-Qaeda hacker “irhabi007″ finally caught

via /. and the washington post
irhabi = terrorist

real name: Younis Tsouli

occupation: Al-Qaeda’s top hacker

age: 22

base: West London

skills: web defacement, web cracking, anonymous browsing, hacking, programming, executing online attacks, mastering digital and media design, stealing creditcard info etc (more…)

Highest data transmission speed is now 2.5TBps

via /.:

A team of Japanese and German scientists broke the old record of 1.28TBps held by another team of Japanese scientists.

That’s equivalent to 60 DVDs!
This, of course is in R&D mode. The current highest commercially-available speed is 50 times slower i.e. 40Gbps.

Afghan Christian convert could be executed

from the BBC:

Pope Benedict XVI has asked the Afghan president to show clemency towards Abdul Rahman, who’s facing possible execution for converting to Christianity.

jerryc - guitar wizard from taiwan

I think jerryc deserves as much plugging as possible, and I dare say he’s one of the best unknown guitarists out there. Could he be better than Malaysia’s guitar heroes Sham Kamikaze, Man Keedal and the others?

IMHO, among all his online videos “Rock on” is the best, showcasing his talents perfectly.

Apart from google video (and probably other sites too), his website has more downloadable audio/video.

after reading this, i might cancel my plans on taking up videogaming again

According to an article at chosun.com, gaming turns our kids into antisocial criminals.

Contender for geek project of the year

It’s the RedShark v2 by rin3y

100355312_231a75ee44.jpg

It’s a car audio storage system made up of the following components:

  • A Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage Link, an embedded Linux box. It boots a variant of Debian called OpenDebianSlug from a 1 GB USB memstick. It runs MPD (Music Player Daemon), which provides socket-based control over playing music, creating playlists ++. (more…)

Dell XPS 600 Renegade: most high end CBU branded consumer PC in the world?

as claimed by Dell with its XPS 600 Renegade

among the specs

  • 4 x GeForce 7900 GPUs combined to give 2GB dedicated graphics memory [apparently the first time ever this was showcased - using NVIDIA Quad SLI technology]
  • 1 x Intel Pentium D Extreme Edition (dualcore) “factory overclocked” to 4.26GHz
  • 2 x Western Digital 10K RPM hard disks at RAID0, plus another 400GB 7200rpm hdd
  • 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 RAM
  • 30″ flatpanel monitor
  • dual DVR+-RW drive + another DVD ROM drive
  • the highest end speakers + soundcards

…and last but not least……autographed by Michael Dell himself!

Cost? USD10,000

not available for sale in Malaysia

Commonwealth Games 2006

it’s time to get cranky again

Hockey

semifinals

Australia 6-0 Malaysia

after such promise, the most dreaded thing, collapse of will,  happened, yet again. Why??? How many psychology sessions do we need???

US cyber security department is itself insecure

On 15th March, The Washington Post reported that for the 3rd consecutive year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gets another F in computer security.

Why is this so special? The DHS is “charged with charting the federal government’s cyber security agenda .” (more…)

Internet exposed CIA’s secrets

According to a report by the Chicago Tribune (free registration required to read article), it’s easy to track America’s covert operatives - all you need to know is how to navigate the Internet. Or rather, in this case, an unnamed commercial online data service.

Apparently, the Tribune found the identities of over 2600 CIA employees (including an undisclosed number of covert operatives) as well as locations of more than 20 CIA facilities across the U.S., internal phone numbers and info on 17 aircraft. (more…)

Microsoft Consults Ethical Hackers

…for 2nd year running, in an event called BlueHat
Attendance was by invitation only. Six of of the world’s best ethical (whitehat) hackers were invited, including:

Microsoft salary guidelines leaked

As mentioned in original article from nwsource.com:

Microsoft declined to comment specifically on the documents, or confirm their authenticity, but in a statement, it called its overall compensation “highly competitive” in the industry.

An image of one of the documents entitled “Microsoft Corporation FY06 Compensation Guidelines,” with figures across a range of salary categories. (more…)

No one interested to find bigfoot in Johor

Looks like my suspicion have been confirmed, that the purported existence of bigfoots in Johor is yet another hoax. (more…)

A huge list of Google Adsense tips

Courtesy of wongkeenhing.com

As liewcf said, after all is said and done, testing is the keyword i.e. you need to test what you’ve done.

Ang Lee has achieved the impossible: first Asian to win best director award at the Oscars

In his heyday, P “Ibu Mertuaku” Ramlee was probably only second to the legendary Akira “Shichinin No Samurai” Kurosawa as the greatest movie director in Asia.

Now Ang Lee has surpassed them both. Never mind that the movie he directed (Brokeback Mountain) is highly controversial. (more…)

Malaysian Income Tax e-filing reviewed

Sharing some info on Income Tax e-filing.

The catchphrase is: forget the forms, better use e-filing. No more lost forms, or ink issue.

You have to go to the nearest LHDN branch to personally to get the digicert (bring your MyKad) if you choose the softcert option. When I went there last Friday afternoon, there were hardly anyone getting their certs registered. There were 2 booths open for registration. The booth I went to had about 300+ in the list. Therefore, putting the 2 lists together, there’s less than 1,000

people so far having registered. Judging by the front page news today (promoting use of e-filing), the queue will be longer now. So hurry! (more…)

StudioTraffic going down like 12dailypro…

StudioTraffic is possibly the 2nd most popular “e-money” program in Malaysia after 12dailypro.

After reading about the 12dailypro issue, I started to look around if StudioTraffic also had problems.

Surprise surprise, it didnt have a few issues, it had tons of issues, even as far back as August 2005, which of course shows how out-of-touch I am in these things after my Spedia days.

Are all autosurf programs scams?

Now that Charis Johnson’s (yes, it’s a lady) 12dailypro is confirmed to be a ponzi scheme by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), I’m getting more than a little suspicious of all similar programs.

12dailypro apparently got 300K members with USD50mil in Stormpay, Johnson apparently pocketed USD1.9 million into her personal a/c. (more…)