Os’s Blog

Ebay Sandisk Ultra IIs – Caveat Emptor

I read on the DSLR Blog about fake Sandisk Ultra II compact flash cards, which are, apparently, rampant on Ebay.

I bought three Ultra IIs off their a few months ago, for a decent price, undercutting other online stores by over £30. Bargain!

Guided by information on this page, I checked them out.

They’re fake.

They’re probably cheap nasty generic compact flash cards with pretty Sandisk logos stuck to them, put in fake packaging. I thought they didn’t feel particularly fast when I was using them, but the type of shooting I do doesn’t normally require fast writes, so I was prepared to put the blame on my 20D and the fact I always use RAW + JPEG, which produces two files per picture taken. They haven't failed in any way, yet, but I will no longer entrust my most important shoots to them.

From now on, I’m spending the extra cash.

Caveat emptor indeed.

July 27th, 2006

More End Times Wackiness

Over the years I’ve known a few fundamentalist Christians, those who take the vast majority of the bible as being literally true. I’ve debated them a few times and they always have one trump card – they know they’re right, always. There is no point of logic that you can make them concede that will change their view. Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, since they have ‘faith’, that logic-sapping state of mind that lets them believe 10 impossible things before breakfast. You can argue around the edges all you like, show them discrepancies in the bible, even outright contradictions, but they ‘know’ it’s the divine words of their god so logic plays no part of the equation. The bible is right, therefore anyone who shows them that it’s not is obviously wrong. Simple. Cut and dried.

It’s that kind of thinking that makes people blow themselves up in crowded bars.

However, I digress. Via Harpers, ultimately from the Rapture Ready Bulletin Board, quotes from various fundies who believe that the current conflict in the Middle East are the final, definitive, not-to-be-mistaken signs of the end times.

A few choice quotes:

A question just popped in my head. Do you think children of around say 7 or 8 (but before the age of accountability) that have been indoctrinated up until that time by their parents religious beliefs will be raptured? . . . For example, would a 7 year old muslim be raptured? I know G-d will do right but I was just wondering everyone's thoughts. I hate to think of kids being left here.

I too am soooo excited!! I get goose bumps, literally, when I watch what's going on in the M.E.!! And Watcherboy, you were so right when saying it was quite a day yesterday, in the world news, and I add in local news here in the Boston area!! Tunnel ceiling collapsed on a car and killed a woman of faith, and we had the most terrifying storms I have ever seen here!! But, yes, oh happy day, like in your screen name , it is most indeed a time to be happy and excited, right there with ya!!

I am excited beyond words that the struggle of this life may be over soon and I can finally be FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Revelling in death and suffering, presumably in a means to an end, the end being the physical transportation of a select few thousand into heaven, aka the Rapture, followed by decades of suffering on earth for the rest of us sinners before the final battle between god and satan.

Yes, it does sound like a bad Steven King novel, it doesn’t stop millions of fundies believing it.

Naturally, there is little in the way of verifiable facts involved here – after all, everything from the Catholic church, the European Union, Stalin and Arthur Scargill have been candidates for the anti-christ, so they’re following a long tradition of making shit up to fit their desire to get up into heaven with all the other pixies.

Ok, Arthur Scargill isn’t really on their list of anti-christs, I made that one up in the 1980’s when I heard one fundy explain how the beast would come from a city on seven hills. He assumed it was Rome, but I knew that Sheffield is also built on seven hills, and at the time that was where the NUM were based, so my logic was just as inescapable as his.

The one major difference between then and now is that we currently have an American president who actually believes all this rot (Ronald Reagan also did, but his antichrist was the USSR, and that, somewhat inconveniently for the rapture groupies, disappeared). The USA’s (and, naturally, lap dog Blair’s) failure to demand that Israel stop blowing up unrelated bits of the Lebanon to stop Hezbollah launching rockets only gives the fundies more joy. It’s akin to Spain blowing up bits of the Basque region to stop ETA, or the UK blowing up bits of Ireland to stop the IRA, or indeed the UK blowing up bits of Palestine to stop the pro-Israeli terrorists trying to form the state of Israel in the 1940’s (oh how people forget that Israel was formed by, what can only be described as, terrorists).

Of course, no rapture will occur, it’s a silly fiction beloved by simple-minded biblical literalists who want to smirk at the rest of us when they go up to heaven and we’re left in a living hell. It’s a kind of holier-than-thou attitude based upon enjoying the suffering of others. It’s inevitable really, when their religion revolves around holding sacred the image of a gallows, going so far as to decorate their houses with it, or wearing it as an item of jewellery.

Thank god I’m an atheist…

[edited for some typos]

July 27th, 2006

Long boring meme thingy

Via my ol' mucker Kay (whom I must get in touch with again), a long (too long) meme thing where I do nothing but talk about myself.

I did, however, get one one of them wrong, and couldn't be bothered to fix it, and the formatting will look bad with this blog's theme. In fact, pass the whole thing over, it'll probably be for the best.

(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)

1 comment July 10th, 2006

Religious fundamentalist campaigned for Bush in 2004

Though, I bet you weren’t thinking that it was Osama bin-Laden. According to Robert Parry, the CIA thought that ol’ beardy was trying hard to get Bush re-elected in 2004, as it would serve to add to al-Qaeda’s numbers:

‘That way bin-Laden helped ensure that George W. Bush would stay in power, would continue his clumsy “war on terror” – and would drive thousands of new recruits into al-Qaeda’s welcoming arms.’

Upon reflection, I think he was right – after all, Iraq is a shining beacon of democracy and stability now, isn't it?

July 6th, 2006

The solution to malware isn’t getting a Mac

Sophos are advising people to switch to Macs to avoid getting malware on their pcs. Their logic being that since the top ten bits of malware of last year were for Windows, switching to the Mac platform will save you.

I have no major problems with the Mac, it’s quite pretty, beloved by many in the media and photographic realms (mainly for historic reasons, Macs don’t do anything that PCs don’t any more, in fact quite the opposite in most instances) and ‘cool’.

But saying that ‘Macs will save you from Malware because they’re not PCs’ is correct only because malware authors don’t give a crap about the Mac, it simply isn’t on their radar. Why? Because Macs make up at most 3% of the desktop PC marketplace. As a software author myself, unless I had a very specific reason to do so, I wouldn’t bother writing something that the remaining 97% of the market couldn’t use. Now, if I could release simultaneous versions for both Mac and Windows, then it’s another issue, and Adobe, for instance, do this mainly because of the aforementioned media and photographic demographic.

If, for example, Macs had 50% market share, I can guarantee that OSX would be crawling with malware just as much as Windows, the phishers, porn, pills and pandemonium brotherhood of morons wouldn’t ignore that amount of wetware.

Which comes to the crux of the problem – it’s not the platform, it’s the people. Since Microsoft woke up and smelled the firefox coffee, they have made great strides to make IE less of an insecure mess designed to maximally propagate crapware just because the user was looking for free screensavers. But, even with the enhanced security feedback, making it hard to install ActiveX controls without positive confirmation, people will still do it. Why? Because people want their free screensavers, dancing kittens and what not, and no attempt to dissuade them is going to work.

Mac users are no more or less stupid than PC users, they’re just using a minority platform that the scumware people don’t care about, if (and in my opinion, not when) Macs become ubiquitous then they, too, can enjoy flying penis popups and having their bank details sent to Romania for ‘processing’. Until then, just practising some common sense will prevent the overwhelming majority of infections:

• Don’t use IE, get Firefox and enjoy using a safer, better browser.
• Have anti-virus software, and keep it up to date. In my experience, using the big boys like Norton or McAfee leave you open to new junkware for longer than the smaller players, like BitDefender (which I currently use), Kaspersky, Panda, NOD32 et al.
• Think! If some website is saying ‘you need to say yes at the following prompt to view this site’ then ask yourself why. The warnings are there for a reason.

I’ve never had a spyware, virus or trojan infestation even though I don’t exactly match the profile of a safe web-surfer, I often to go less savoury sites out there, and it’s not because I use a Mac, it’s because I don’t use IE, keep the defences up to date and use common sense.

July 5th, 2006