So I'm feverishly reading up on A+, Network+ and Linux+... In my massive 1000 page A+ book, we just touched based on networking. (Which I've already been reading in depth with my Network+ book.) The concepts are similarly presented and explained (except Mike Meyers is an awesomely cool writer and is much more fun to toil through)... Except for one thing.

Each chapter has a Q and A with answers that you're supposed to submit to your teacher online. Kind of defeats the purpose with the page numbers right freakin' there, but oh well. Here's a question for you:

Under ideal conditions, the 802.11g standard supports data throughput of up to ____ and has a range of up to ____.

A. 11Mbps/150 feet
B. 11Mbps/300 feet
C. 54Mbps/150 feet
D. 54Mbps/300 feet

Simple, right? (Bet you can tell there's a catch coming up.) Wrong. There's a chart in the book that clearly lists 802.11g at having a maximum theoretical throughput of 54Mbps with an optimal range of 300 feet. The book beats into you the fact that wireless throughput is entire theoretical and is subject to overhead and is thusly much lower than advertised, but he didn't say what the practical throughput was. Under perfectly ideal conditions, it should be 54Mbps and 300 feet, right? So that's what I picked.

Answer is as follows:

B. Under ideal conditions, the 802.11g standard supports data throughput of up to 11Mbps and has a rage of up to 300 feet.

Am I missing something? I could understand a typo if the question said 802.11g and the answers said 802.11b, but it doesn't... It's clearly tacking 802.11b's standards onto 802.11g. G is supposed to be faster, B is supposed to be slower. Router boxes say it, WAP boxes say it, the book says it, the other book says it.

Yeah, that bugs me, because putting down what's clearly the right answer is going to be marked as wrong, but if I put down the wrong answer and the teacher manually reads the work and goes "huh? this guy's wrong" without checking the book, it'll still be wrong.

So I ask you... Am I missing something?

My previous post was 621 words... Great.

At the end of this post, I will have written enough to be done for today if I was writing my book instead.

My previous post was 963 words. That's how much I wrote last night in the space of three hours for my NaNoWriMo novel before I finally just went to bed. I wrote this in about... What? 15 minutes? Because I had something to say.

I hear people say that 50,000 words in 30 days is no big deal. Yes, we know. Really, we do. But there's a difference between writing 50,000 words on something like a collection of blog post or forum posts or chat rooms. I'm not exactly sure what the difference is... I guess since you're usually discussing your own opinions, or what's happened to you in the last few days, or you're writing a report on some history, you've already got an idea for what you want to write! Everything's already thought out and all you have to do is put it into words. 1,667 words a day is easy peasy. I KNOW I write almost that much just navigating around my computers with the command line!

The issue with NaNoWriMo is that you're writing something that you DON'T have all planned out already. (Some do, and I did, but once I actually got writing, I've already changed so much that my plans are all gone.) It gets slow and it gets hard because now you're writing what's coming straight from your mind, and sometimes you just don't have any creative juice pumping. Your writing gets slow and bad because you're working hard to come up with an idea so you can reach your goal, and this makes for some pretty horrible plot points and conversations when you go back to read it. Frankly, it looks like a Harry Potter book. (Oh, yes, I so did go there.)

But see, writing a perfect novel isn't the point of NaNoWriMo. The point is to get down what ideas you DO have for a novel, and then see what happens when you toss a bunch of characters in and let them run around, as defined by a very loose intangible concept of a weak plot. They run around, they BREAK the plot, and you have to rewrite it. Sometimes you don't like the changes, sometimes you do. If you don't like the changes, don't erase it, just keep going. I've written myself into a dead end a couple of times and just went "PFFT! I'm watching Babylon 5 instead." Maybe that's what you need to do, because after I watched and came back, I knew how to finish the dead end, but... If you're stuck on a dead end for longer than you want. Skip it! Move ahead and write what happens next. When you go after the second draft, maybe you'll keep it or chuck it.

So this is just something I needed to say (which is also what makes writing so easy). I've heard the arguments for why NaNo is dumb, and I'm in the middle of week 3 and behind (like everyone else is) and think my NaNo is dumb, but... You know what? It's supposed to be. Tolkien didn't write Lord of the Rings in a month. It took him 40 years with much encouragement from friends. If you're doing NaNo and you think it's starting to seem dumb, don't worry! Lord of the Rings is one of the best stories ever written and Tolkien also thought it was dumb. If you're NOT doing NaNo because you think it's dumb... Then you just don't know what it takes to write a novel and there's no need to tell everyone else that NaNo is dumb, because, frankly, they're at that point in the month where they think it's dumb, too, and they don't need the discouragement.

Here we go again...

I remember when Blizzard Warden first came out. Everyone went insane over the fact that Blizzard dare install a program that scans their system! After all, a program that scans your computer could pick up your credit card information, right? Let's ignore the fact that... It doesn't, didn't and won't. The mere thought of something capable of doing that is worth the freaking-out-itude. Especially when said scanners "call home". Ah, such a powerful phrase. Call home. Anyway, people freak out that Blizzard was listening to their complaints and developed a program that scans for cheatware and keyloggers. (Cheatware: applications used willingly by players to achieve an unearthly amount of automation in an effort to... well... cheat! Keylogger: applications unknowingly installed on your system by poking around in warez or by social engineering that monitors what you type in to your accounts!) Basically, Warden made sure you weren't cheating and made sure you weren't getting taken advantage of. Prevention and protection.

Guess what? It worked. Accounts are banned at an almost alarming rate with a very, very low rating of false positives. Warden works, that much is clear. Eventually, the whining died off. They either canceled their account or they got smart and figured out that less cheaters and spammers in the game was better than whining about what the scanning software COULD be used for, but wasn't. (Honestly, who stores their banking information in plain-text in the first place? Only idiots. There is not a single reason for you to have your credit card information in scannable form on your hard drive.) People whined about the polymorphist nature of Warden, but, uhm. Yeah. If the program didn't change, hackers would learn how to bypass it. So Blizzard changes it a lot to prevent that. It works. Yes, it's the nature of a virus, but it isn't a viral feature.

Well, now Blizzard has strengthened Warden once again. I'm not even sure what the huge deal is. The article just spouted complicated phrases like "random hash algorithms" without actually talking about what they were used for, so I'm going to decipher it as much as I can, based on the general resulting outcry.

Either Warden has been beefed up in its searching (I know it uses a list of known hashes to detect cheating and keylogging applications) or its own checksum has been changed so that it could essentially be impossible to determine if it's really Warden or not. I don't know, but whatever it is, Blizzard can change this algorithm at their will. Apparently, this is given rise to a new batch of whiners who claim that a "rogue Blizzard operative" could use Warden to "harvest bank information" without anyone knowing. (As if the majority of WoW subscribers haven't already given Blizzard their bank and contact information, haha.) Warden is known to scan your registry and active processes and compare what it finds to the hash database it has and then transmit anything it finds to Blizzard. The key here is that it doesn't transmit everything it finds, only the problems it thinks it's found.

I don't even clearly understand HOW or WHY this is a bad thing, but the post I linked to is convinced that this makes it impossible to tell if Warden has been compromised... by someone at Blizzard... who somehow had total unmonitored access to Warden's code... and managed to push the new, malicious Warden out to all 7 million subscribers... and have no other employees notice. Somehow. That's the idea they're going for. That's all they have. Let's forget the fact that Blizzard has not done this and is not doing this and has absolutely no compelling reason to do this in the future. But that 1 in a 1000000 chance is enough to make people go "OH MY GOSH IT'S THE END OF OUR PRIVACY AS WE KNOW IT."

Fine. If that's what you think it is, and you think the chance of an evil Blizzard employee stealing your credit card information (stored in plain text) from your computer and receiving it via Warden is an all too real danger? Stop playing World of Warcraft. It's actually quite simple. You can even tell them  WHY you quit. Just say "I quit because I think that Warden is compromising my privacy" and be done with it... Because out of the 10 loudly outspoken people who think this is an issue, there are 6,999,990 people who think Warden is perfectly safe and who think Warden is an essential tool in stopping cheaters and keyloggers and we LIKE IT. Some of us have played other MMOs before that didn't give a hoot about who was cheating. Blizzard cares enough to hunt out these lowlifes and it WORKS. If there were people being banned left and right for false positives, I think they wouldn't hesitate to scream about it. We might get one or two people banned for some weird circumstances, like the guy who macro'd all kinds of moves into a single keyboard key (cheating) or the guy emulating WoW in Linux and Warden wasn't operating correctly. I think 2 out of 7 million in the entire time since it's been released is pretty good odds.

So in the end, yes. We know Warden scans our systems. Thanks, we already know that. Yes, we know it reports anything bad it finds to Blizzard. Thanks, we already know that. Yes, we know that Warden could, in some unimaginable circumstance, be used to harvest personal information. Thanks, we already know that. If it's bothering you that much, feel free to uninstall WoW. If you're not willing to do that, please, for the love of all that is good in this world, STOP TELLING US WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW.

iTunes scrollbars on Leopard? "OMG MAC R AWESOME"
Random number generator decoded in Windows 2000? "OMG M$ R DUM"

Seriously, Apple users are the only people I wouldn't have been surprised to see clambering over a hack to change the color of the scroll bars. If that makes Apple products all the more worth it for them, then more power to them! To me? Well... A scroll bar is a scroll bar.

As for the number generator loophole. Apparently, someone managed to reconstruct and therefore predict the random number generator in Windows 2000, used for encryption and various things like that. Passwords and stuff. They go on and on about how this is such a horrible, horrible security risk and it needs to be fixed. Then they go on to say how they only tested Windows 2000, not XP or Vista, but "assume that newer versions of Windows" are also affected by this problem.

What? You're not sure? You didn't bother testing the latest Windows? You decided to randomly pick... Windows 2000 to crack? The version of Windows no longer officially supported by Microsoft? I guess it's good in the sense that you're making people aware of the problem, but to assume that newer versions of Windows are also affected sounds more like an anti-Microsoft fanatic and less like a scientific paper.

I'm not saying that such a thing is hard to believe, but come on. Why don't you channel this research money into trying to crack the latest operating system instead of the one 8 years old. That way, all the money you spent on this research might actually mean something.

And the comments on these articles are, of course, in the vicinity of "Microsoft cant code security worth squat lol Apple so better". What if, say, Mac OS X 10.1 was brushed over with a fine-tooth comb and they found the algorithm used to encode passwords or something that allowed someone, with local access, the ability to get into your system with some difficult work. What would the reaction be? I'm going to bet it'll be something along the lngs of: "Are you kidding? Apple doesn't even update 10.1 anymore. If you upgraded like you should have, you wouldn't have this problem! Another lame attempt to say Macs are just as insecure."

Let's apply that to this scenario! "Are you kidding? Microsoft doesn't even support Windows 2000 anymore. If you upgraded like you should have, you wouldn't have this problem! Another lame attempt to say Windows is the worst OS there is."

Then, of course, there'll be the people quick to point out that lots of people still use Windows 2000, and then I'd be quick to point out that they've had plenty of time to upgrade to at least XP, even since 2000 support was dropped, and this security risk was only just discovered a few days ago? That's a pretty good track record for an 8 year old operating system.

I could go on with all the different types of responses people will give to somehow try to make this discovery significant in one way or the other, but that would take too long and be too boring. Come back when you learn, for sure, that Vista and XP have this problem, and then it might mean something.

So one of my daily rounds consists of browsing deviantArt for the latest in Okami fan art. Most of it is... Eh. And some if it is... Ew. But sometimes, very rarely, some of it will be... Ehh?! Like, for example, when Amaterasu looks less like a wolf and more like a llama. Come on people. I'm pretty loose in my browsing. If I find something I don't like, I'll just move on. But sometimes, very rarely, I'll come across something that looks so horrific that I just kind of sit there and look at it for a while.

I know you're all aspiring artists, and I can barely draw worth squat myself, but honestly... Wolves don't have three foot necks. And they have a muzzle. It's that thing on their face with their nose and mouth. They have those. So, they're short, with a nose. Not tall, with a llama head. Some of these images of Ammy that I see? I can just see her spitting. Or eating grass. I guess it depends on the pose she's in. Or maybe she's just kind of standing there with this periscope face scanning the horizon for enemy ships.

I just thought I should say something, since it seems to be a trend.

So, as you may know, with the advent of Earth: Final Conflict Season 5 turning out to be something far more terrible than any TV show I've ever seen before, I decided to start watching the next show on my list! Babylon 5. I had seen it ages ago, and didn't like it. I don't remember what episode it was (actually, I did at one time, because I watched Season 1 just a few weeks ago and recognized a lot of episodes, but I've forgotten them again), but I didn't like it. But, if you know me well enough, I would have told you that I also didn't like Stargate when I first saw it and I also didn't like Battlestar Galactica when I first saw it. (The real BSG, mind you. Not the trash that's on today.)

So I decided to watch B5 again! And, man... I thought Earth: Final Conflict was deep and political. E:FC was political in the sense of "we're the Taelons, saviors of the human race, we will do what we want because you humans are foolish enough to believe that we're your friends", and the Taelons would manipulate and twist the truth around and when the humans woke up to what was happening, it was usually too late, and there was always a sense of "humanity was careless enough to throw away their independence and now they'll never get it back". And at the end of every episode, you felt that even though something right had been done, there was always a feeling of "but it didn't matter".

Then there's Babylon 5. It's political in the sense of "we're humans, risking everything in an attempt to stop another war like the one that nearly wiped us out. Why can't anyone else see that?", and then everything slowly begins to fall apart. It's not like Star Trek with the perfect unified Federation on a mission to harvest peace across the galaxy, it's more like... Earth was scared that another war would destroy them completely, so they tried to make a neutral zone where they could conduct diplomatic talks, but now that Earth has forgotten about how devastating the war was, they think they can handle anything, and now there's massive political in-fighting. Not at all the perfectly unified Star Trek Federation. And to top it all off, other alien conflicts progress to war and everything's a complete mess, with Babylon 5 stuck in the middle, still trying to keep the peace when everyone, including Earth, is only looking out for themselves. Basically, it's how I always pictured space fiction to be. Earth is interacting with other aliens, but Earth is still the petty humanity fighting themselves for ultimate control.

It's hard to say which one is better. E:FC or B5. Both are amazing at pulling out emotions and making you feel for the different characters. Whether it's pure disgust at one's who can't see the bigger picture, or pure despair when you see entire races falling victim to the shortsightedness. So I'm not sure which is better of the two, if it's even possible for one to be better. They were both so amazing, with awesome storylines. (And then E:FC hit season 5 and that all went to heck.) One thing's for sure. I'm watching Babylon 5 now and, like when I was watching E:FC, my interest in Stargate has sharply fallen. Sure, I still watch it, but I'll always rush back to the deeper stories. To be honest, Stargate is no longer my favorite series. It's good, but not nearly as good as E:FC and B5. Sorry, but I've been spoiled by political complexity!

In short: Watch. Now. Season One, is, of course, a little choppy and boring, but it's essential. As E:FC, Babylon 5 is heavily dependent on previous episodes, but probably less so. You wouldn't be completely lost if you jumped into B5. You could easily pick up "okay, they did this, so that's why this is happening", whereas E:FC was "wait, what are they talking about?" So, basically, watch now! But don't skip, and try not to give up in the first season, because the second is where it starts getting good!