Look wat ‘experts’ are still telling in the courtroom:
The HP Pavilion computer obtained from McGuire’s attorney’s office had a 60 gigabyte hard drive, and not all of it was searched by Seymour.
She told the jury that it is known in the computer industry that if information stored on a 12 gigabyte computer was put on paper it would create a stack of paper higher than the Empire State Building.
from dailyrecord.com
There was a time once when PCs were just overevolved typewriters and it made sense to express everything in “number of pages”. That time has long gone. Let’s convert that 12 GB into today’s storage currencies:
- 12 GB is the equivalent of 17 CD-ROMs of data (700MB)
- not yet 3 full DVDs (4.7GB)
- Not even one HD-DVD (15/30GB) or Blu-Ray (25/50GB) disc
- 4000 3MB (+-8 megapixel) pictures in JPG format
- 12 days of MP3 recordings (at 96Kbps)
- 16 episodes (not even one full season) of Lost, Prison Break or Heroes
Moreover, a conversion to typed-out A4s only makes sense if you specify font-size, spacing, margins and usage of duplex printing, in which case it remains an impractical antiquated unit.
A jury full of technophobes/non-experts shouldn’t be baffled with exaggerations like a “tower the size of the Empire State”. If you do not take into account the operating system, programs, images, music and movies, what remains on a hard disk of searchable data created by the owner? Maybe 2-5 gigabytes, thanks to MS Office’s bloated file formats. And the most important stuff for computer forensics is maybe 5MB: browser history, cookies, IM transcripts, emails and Office documents converted to text.
I just received the following email:
Attention Mr. Forret,
It has been brought to our attention that you published or caused to be published an e-mail communication and/or internet bulletin containing words that are false, misleading and defamatory to our firm. More specifically, these publications can be found at:
blog.forret.com/2004/12/domain-registry-of-america-scam/
More specifically your statement “Domain Registry of America scam”. That statement is false and misleading in many ways:
1) The title of the publication accuses Domain Registry of America as being involved or perpetrating some type of scam, which his false.
2) Domain Registry of America’s mailings do not “urge” or “scare” anyone to take any action towards the mailing. It informs domain name holders that they now have the option to “transfer and renew” their domain name with any Registrar of their choice and take advantage of lower pricing and better service.
3) Your use of the phrase “it’s a scam”
4) Unaware to you, this mailing has been approved by the Federal Trade Commission as clearly describing it meaning and purpose. (PF: Actually they’ve done quite the opposite)
Your publication has caused and continues to cause Domain Registry of America irreparable damages and we intend to hold you responsible for these damages both past and present. You are hereby notified that we demand these false, misleading and defamatory statements mentioned above that you have published or have caused to be published be removed by no later than 15 days of your receipt of this notice.
If we do not receive written notification that these publications have been removed by the above deadline we will without further warning, advise our lawyers to commence a lawsuit in an Ontario court for damages and a permanent and interlocutory injunction restraining you, your employees, agents and representatives from making and publishing such publications. Domain Registry of America/Canada has successfully taken legal action in the past against other publishers of similar false, misleading and defamatory statements.
Govern yourselves accordingly,
Domain Registry of America/Canada
Relations Department
legal@droa.com
Continue reading ‘Govern yourselves accordingly’
Published on
March 16, 2007 in
Belgium.
Bloggers love lists. Bloggers adore lists of bloggers, certainly when they’re featured in the said lists. I started making top 30 and 60 lists of Belgian bloggers a way back, and somewhere in Nov 2005 Bruno took over the position as ranking specialist. He has just finished making a new list based on Pagerank, Technorati backlinks, Bloglines subscribers and some other indicators. I came out #3, which proves that the bribe worked as expected.
Let’s take a look at only 2 of those indicators for the top 20: Pagerank and Technorati backlinks (using the Pagerank checker)
Two surprises jump out:
- the good position of U2U’er Patrick (#11) which must be deserved through some other indicator, because a PR of 0 and 24 backlinks aren’t to write home about (*)
- the low position of Flanders’ premier shockblog (and provider of premium bootie) Zattevrienden (#13). They go through all that effort collecting pictures of crashing bikers and naked blondes, frame those delicately in contemporary culture through intelligent conversation, but are not sufficiently rewarded for it. Oh well …
In any case: if you want to meet some of the bloggers in the top 20 and buy them a drink, talk about interesting stuff or maybe even get a back link, put the following dates in your agenda:
>> March 23rd, Bwards, Antwerp
>> May 5th, Barcamp Brussels, Brussels
This blog now runs on a Lighttpd (Lighty) webserver instead of Apache, and this means the configuration for ‘pretty URLs’ or permalinks of Wordpress doesn’t work like it used to.
(As you might have noticed, I use permalinks like /2007/02/this-is-permalink/)
Whereas Wordpress can automatically adapt the Apache .htacccess file to something like
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
it does not do anything automatically for your Lighty .conf configuration file (which is logical, since an application should not be allowed to mess with a central config file).
Continue reading ‘url.rewrite for Wordpress on Lighttpd’
Published on
March 14, 2007 in
news.
You might have noticed the last couple of days that my blog (and some other of the dozen sites I run) was not always available. You might have experienced time-outs and Error 500 messages. I apologize for that. Let me give you a brief overview of what I went through between last Friday and now.
My (former) hosting company Dreamhost began having intermittent problems one week ago. Some of my sites would go down and then up again. The Dreamhost Status blog talked about “Sporadic brief network outages” and promised to fix them, so I waited. Then, by the end of last week, suddenly all my blogs started going down with the “Error 500: Internal Server Error” message. I got emails from friends to warn me, but thanks to my Montastic account, I had a pretty good idea of when they went down, and up again, and down … A friggin’ Christmas tree!
Continue reading ‘Dream turned to nightmare’
Published on
March 8, 2007 in
movie.
I wanted to see a movie this weekend and when I discovered at the counter that my first choice “Night at the museum” was dubbed in French, the only other option was “Ghost Rider“. That’s how I ended up in a movie that I actually hadn’t planned on seeing. The movie features Nicholas Cage and Eva Mendes and can be summarized in two words: fire and cleavage. Cage plays a Marvel Comics superhero on a seriously pimped up bike, who’s main characteristics would be superforce, a really low voice and being on fire. Mendes plays the girlfriend, with seriously pimped up boobs.
“The original Roxanne was blonde and blue-eyed, but she also had huge bajoongas… I figured since I can’t be blond and blue-eyed, I’ll at least have her bra size. So the bajoongas got big: they were out of control.”
from Mendes perks up for new role
If you’re a demanding movie-goer, don’t see this one. The bad acting is not fully evened out by the abundant cleavage. But try to use the word “Bajoongas” at least once in the next week. You’ll love the way it bounces in your mouth.
It has been decided, the bullet is through the church (*)!
Barcamp Brussels#3 will take place on Saturday May 5th at the Halles Des Tanneurs, the renovated Wine Palace right in the Brussels Marolles!
For those of you who want to participate
- add your name to the official Barcamp wiki
- Block the date in your agenda (duh!)
- Between now and the end of April, add the topic that you will talk about
We will again have the help of Skynet for the organisation. Keep an eye on this blog for more info as the event approaches!
via barcamp.forret.com
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