Cotton-Eye Joe

Gotta love the creativeness of people on 4chan. This one had me in tears (of laughter)

>Be 21
>Girlfriend’s 19
>Been dating for months now
>This guy named Joe comes out of fucking nowhere into my life
>He’s my new coworker at my company
>Find out he has no money, no place of residence.
>Moved here for the job and can no longer afford his hotel
>Decide to open up to him
>Keep him in my apartment for weeks
>Bro is pretty cool
>We play the vidya, drinks beers, watch football
>This continues for months
>Afterwards, find out girlfriend is pregnant
>By all tradition, I have to marry her now.
>One night, eating out at dinner with wife
>Joe stayed late at the office for some overtime
>I pop the question to my wife
>She admits she was raped by Joe and the baby isn’t mine
>She isn’t ready to make a commitment after being violated
>Go home in a fucking rage.
>Throw out all Joe’s shit
>Gonna fucking kill Joe when he gets home.
>Joe gets home about 1 a.m.
>As soon as he opens the door, I fucking punch him in his bastard face
>Eye swells up like a boll of cotton
>He swings at me
>Dodge and sweep his leg
>He falls down
>In a giant fucking rage now
>Go to my room, grab my handgun out of my drawer
>Go back to confront Joe
>Joe jumps in his car and fucking hightails it out of there
>I haven’t seen or heard from him since
>On the phone a month later with my brother
>He finally asks why I’ve been so depressed
>I tell him that if it hadn’t been for cotton-eye Joe
>I’d been married a long time ago
>Where did you come from, where did you go—
>Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?

Piracy is big business

There has been a lot of buzz in the media these past few years about piracy on the internet. There are still some people that believe everything the media tells them, and you see them posting stuff on forums like "all pirates are dirty thieves!" and that sort of thing.

It's a shame they wonder around with their eyes closed, and more than likely they themselves benefit from piracy. Allot of technical achievements have come about because of pirates. Oh yes, both in hardware and in software. The big companies that claim to be losing millions are actually making millions due to these advancements made because of pirates. Let's take a look at a couple of these things:

Digital music formats: The internet was getting more popular, people where downloading things and a music format were needed. The MP3 format came a long which solved the problem of large file sizes while retaining decent enough audio quality. From this came many advancements in audio codecs, audio formats, and hardware to play them on.

Apple somewhat legitimised digital music downloads with iTunes, while also developing the iPod which made them millions of dollars. Of course they were not the first company to make an MP3 player, but they made it popular and so the market grew and grew. Millions of pounds a year is being made from hardware that plays digital music files which are mostly obtained illegally.

So when Sony claims it loses millions because of music pirates: complete bull shit. The Sony walkman is still a popular brand today; they have a HUGE range of portable digital audio players.

Video file formats: pretty much the same thing as audio formats. People wanted to download videos, movies and such. Divx/Xvid took care of this bit. Commercial DVD players support this format, as well as PVRs using the format to record shows from the TV. Advancements where made, better compression, higher quality, higher resolutions in small manageable file sizes. In comes the creation of X/H.264. The Blu-ray format is HEAVLY influenced  by the h.264 codec. Half the work was done for Sony when they joined other big companies to create the Blu-ray format. Work done because of pirates. How much money is made off this format in both hardware and disc sales? BILLIONS.

There is also a big market now for media players that connect to your TV that play all these formats used by pirates. TVs made by the big brand names such as Sony and Samsung also play these formats.

Let’s look at computer hardware, especially storage: hard drives. These of course used to store many types of files, work, media etc. Storage size gets bigger each year; I think to date the biggest commercial hard drive is 4TB. The bigger sizes seem to be the most popular. Why so big though? Do family photographs really take up that much space? No, they don't. That's right; people are using them for music and video. I wonder how much money is being made from sales of these every year.

Piracy is big business and big business is piracy. Welcome to the internet.

Internet Grave Yard

I received an email from Google today on my other, older Google account asking me to move my old blogger blog onto the new system and link it to a Google account. Here is me thinking it's my old 'hobby log' (I had a page about my figure buyings and stuff, but I ran out of money at the time and never got back to it after that!)

To my surprise though, its an older blog from all the way back in 2003 with just two posts. I think quite possibly it was the first time I signed up and used a blog and obviously got bored of it rather quickly.

I've now added it to this account, I might just delete it; but for now as it stands http://ubertron.blogspot.co.uk/ here it is. What a tool the old me was LOL.

Popularity isn't always a good thing

You can always tell in the computer world what the most popular device or what the most popular software is just by the amount of viruses/malicious files that crop up. For example, windows isn't any less secure than Linux or mac; despite what nerds claim.

It's the fact that the more users there are,  the more people to steal credit information, to spam and to generally piss off. And when there is a will, there is ALWAYS a way.

It probably doesn't need to be said, but Android clearly has more users than iPhone's IOS, quite a few malicious files are cropping up taking credit off of phones and stealing personal data. Not so musch on IOS.

You could say though that IOS is more secure, just by the fact that you are not allowed to do anything with it other than what apple tell you. With android though you can add any software you want as long as you select the option to do so.

Secured or not, people have to be care full of the things they install on computers or phones.

As for windows phone, never used one so I don't know much about them. But again: it won't be any less secure than Android or IOS. If it ever did become the dominant product in smart phones you would see allot of malicious start to appear.