The oldest known Twitter user Ivy Bean, who regularly updated her 56,000 followers, died today aged 104. The great-grandmother passed away at her retirement home in Bradford, northern England, where she lived for three years. Mrs Bean was an active Twitter user and was also on Facebook for the past two years, gathering a star-studded fan base. Among her followers was Aussie singer Peter Andre, who she met last year and later starred on his television show. A picture of the Andre kissing her forehead is the profile picture on her Facebook and Twitter pages.
The announcement of her death was made by the facility’s manager Pat Wright, who had been keeping Bean’s followers updated after she was taken ill with jaundice. “Ivy passed away peacefully at 12.08 this morning,” she tweeted on Ivy’s behalf “I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you but it was a very difficult thing to do.”
Hundreds of tributes poured in for Ivy on Twitter and Facebook, where a page entitled RIP Ivy Bean was set up. Fans called her an “amazing woman” who was an “inspiration” and commended her “humor, spirit and love of adventure.” Bean tried to tweet at least once a day, and her Friday “fish and chip” tweets became legendary among her followers.
The reluctant new ‘oldest user’ title goes to @MaudeWindsor at 103, (Follow) who tweeted today giving her respects to Ivy and family, and adding that using Ivy as inspiration she’ll make an effort to update daily. Maude’s nephew introduced her to Twitter but she never realised that her age made her unique amongst social networkers until today.
“I always enjoy fish and chips they are my favourite hope you all have a good day its dinner time soon,” read one of her tweets. She also recently tweeted a picture of her new great-granddaughter. Mrs Bean also posted the video of her meeting Peter Andre, which featured on his ITV2 reality show. She was cited as being his oldest fan. At the time, she tweeted, “I have been to meet my friend peter it has made me feel a lot better now and looking forward to my tweets.”
Kudos to lasting so long, and being savvy enough to Tweet. <3
Posted: July 29th, 2010
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twitter
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Posted: July 25th, 2010
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twitter
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Most of you would have seen the amusing video I posted of about five seconds of footage filmed off a television by an iPhone 3GS, that was looped into a parody, of a Pakistani ‘special police’ officer dealing with a seige where he .. well, he does a barrel roll. He’s laying down and rolls to the left, then looks around and realised he didn’t go too far, so does it again, and again. Not getting behind any cover and just basically making himself look like a dick.
Well, this morning I recieved a DCMA copyright infringement complaint filed by a “michael Green” [sic] who claims original ownership of the content. Given that it sounds like bullshit, and it is defendable as it’s fair use under the DMCA, I’ve decided to fight it and see where it goes.
I’ll update with more when I find out what YouTube has to say on the matter, given their knee jerk reactions to DCMA. Below is the notification I recieved, dramatically it was in stark red. :)
ATTENTION
We have received copyright complaint(s) regarding material that you posted, as follows:
* from michael Green about Pakistani Police Do a Barrel Roll – bashpr0mpt
Video ID: W9pNOY0qtxw
Please note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos that you have uploaded. Please delete any videos for which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading infringing videos.
If you are unsure what this means, it is very important for you to visit our Copyright Tips guide.
If one of your postings has been misidentified as infringing, you may submit a counter-notification. Information about this process is in our Help Centre.
Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material was disabled due to mistake or misidentification may be liable for damages.
For your reference, a copy of this message has been sent to you via email and can also be located in your Account Warnings page.
Posted: July 22nd, 2010
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epiclullz,
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Flicking through the news and amused by the b-tard trolling of that 11 year old shit talking YouTube user I came across an interesting article that claims this is a valid example of why censorship is a good thing. It’s irony is in the fact that all the dramu and trololol could be stopped simply by deleting everything, turning off her friggen computer, and going outside to play. Something that I, at 11, did a lot of. I definitely didn’t sit online talking smack about killing people gangsta style, whilst dressing like a pedobear magnet slut with my bra showing talking shit about how hot I am. Makes you wonder what kind of parents she has. Oh wait, that’s right. Her dad backtraced it.
I came across something very, very disturbing.
Professor Matt Warren, the head of Deakin University’s School of Information Systems, said as long as parents who don’t understand the internet kept giving their children access to it, there needed to be ways to control its use. “You simply can’t have free access to the internet,” he said. “It has to be controlled, censored and people have to be held accountable for their actions on it. “We punish people who drink, we punish people who speed and we have to implement laws to that effect when it comes to the internet.”
Prof Warren said that parents might think allowing children to access the internet in their bedroom was a way of helping them do their schoolwork, but the reality was, a lot of parents simply didn’t understand the medium. “The child isn’t ethically aware of what they’re doing,” he said.
So, instead of slagging at him here, in trying to find a way to contact him directly I found that Deaken University had ‘locked’ access to their staff database. A phone call later, and: -
Don’t abuse it, but definitely give him a call (far better than an email) and explain to him that his views are detached from reality, and frankly he’s a dick who shouldn’t be teaching let alone a professor of anything. He brings the entire concept of a University into disrepute, given that uni’s generally promote openness of communication and education and censorship is never the right answer, period.
Posted: July 20th, 2010
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This started as a tweet but I couldn’t limit it to 140 characters. It’s 2010, why are there still single use batteries? They’re absurd and a huge environment raper. Rechargable batteries are also near redundant as they hold few recharges.
Replacing or even handling batteries in this era is as absurd as replacing the engine in your car rather than shoving a petrol bowser nozzle into it.
Everything that requires power should have a lithium ion battery and be rechargeable from a wall socket. Fuck Kyoto and big daunting steps that narrow minded voters find fickle politic in, a small logical (albeit technological) step forward would be ridding our shelves in supermarkets of batteries as we did old incandescent bulbs, which we replaced with ‘energy saver’ bulbs half a decade ago.
Just a thought.
Posted: July 19th, 2010
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general
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Posted: July 18th, 2010
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twitter
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South Korea deployed a sentry robot capable of detecting and killing intruders along the heavily fortified border with North Korea, officials said overnight.
“Our military has been testing such robots along the border,” a defence ministry spokesman said.
Two robots with surveillance, tracking, firing and voice recognition systems were integrated into a single unit, he said, declining to give details.
The robot unit costing 400 million won ($US330,000) was installed last month at a guard post in the central section of the Demilitarized Zone which bisects the peninsula, Yonhap news agency said.
It quoted an unidentified military official as saying the ministry would deploy sentry robots along the world’s last Cold War frontier if the test is successful.
The robot uses heat and motion detectors to sense possible threats, and alerts command centres, Yonhap said.
If the command centre operator cannot identify possible intruders through the robot’s audio or video communications system, the operator can order it to fire its gun or automatic grenade launcher.
South Korea is also developing highly sophisticated combat robots armed with weapons and sensors that could complement human soldiers on battlefields.
It has a largely conscripted military of 655,000 against Pyongyang’s 1.2 million-strong force, but a falling birth rate means Seoul will struggle in the future to maintain troop numbers.
Posted: July 14th, 2010
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A New York judge has issued a temporary restraining order restricting the transfer of Facebook Inc.’s assets, following a suit by a New York man who claims to own an 84% stake in the social-networking company.
Paul D. Ceglia filed a suit in the Supreme Court of New York’s Allegany County on June 30, claiming that a 2003 contract he signed with Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg entitles him to ownership of the company and monetary damages.
The suit is being heard by Judge Thomas Brown, who issued the temporary restraining order earlier this month. Facebook has requested that the case be moved to federal court.
In his suit, Mr. Ceglia claims he signed a contract with Mr. Zuckerberg on April 28, 2003, to develop and design a website, paying a $1,000 fee but getting a 50% stake in the product. The contract stipulated that Mr. Ceglia would get an additional 1% interest in the business for every day after Jan. 1, 2004, until it was completed.
In a statement, a spokesman for closely held Facebook said, “We believe this suit is completely frivolous and we will fight it vigorously.”
Mr. Ceglia didn’t return calls seeking comment. His lawyer, Paul A. Argentieri, also didn’t return a call for comment.
It’s unclear how Mr. Ceglia might have become involved with Mr. Zuckerberg.
A copy of the contract seen by The Wall Street Journal says it is “for the purchase and design of a suitable website for the project Seller [Mr. Zuckerberg] has already initiated that is designed to offer the students of Harvard university [sic] access to a wesite [sic] similar to a live functioning yearbook with the working title of ‘The Face Book.’”
The date of the contract appears to conflict with previous accounts of the creation of Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg built a predecessor to Facebook called Facemash in October and November 2003, but Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t register the domain thefacebook.com until January 2004.
In 2009, New York’s Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo accused Mr. Ceglia of defrauding customers of his wood-pellet fuel company, according to a news release from the Attorney General’s office.
The state claimed that he took more than $200,000 from consumers and then failed to deliver any products or refunds. The wood-pellet case is ongoing.
Victor P. Goldberg, who teaches contracts at Columbia University’s Law School, said the Facebook contract lawsuit may get tripped up by the statute of limitations, which is six years in New York.
He also said the contract itself was unusual, because it doesn’t stipulate what else Mr. Zuckerberg would have gotten from Mr. Ceglia aside from $1,000.
Adam Oliveri, managing director of New York-based SecondMarket, a company that helps early employees and investors in Facebook trade shares of the private company, said such trading continues and that he didn’t expect the suit would have much impact on such deals.
“I think people will read this and take it to be a lawsuit that will be dealt with pretty quickly by Facebook,” said Mr. Oliveri.
Facebook has grown explosively in recent years, and has about 500 million users globally. Along the way, the company has wrestled with other challenges over its early ownership and origins, and with user privacy issues.Facebook
Posted: July 13th, 2010
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Posted: July 11th, 2010
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twitter
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What do these three have in common? 100% of ‘unfollower’ script users I’ve encountered match this demographic. On further examination, all of them are wannabe Twitter rockstars, following Justin Beiber, and maybe three or four others, while bragging about their awesome fanbase of 50 – 60 followers, almost all of which are spambots on closer scrutiny. 100%. 100% of ALL unfollower script users. For those who don’t know, they’re lame scripts that spam and try and ‘shame’ people who’ve unfollowed these twats into adding them back or otherwise giving a crap you unfollowed them.
Thus, this is an urgent plea. If you are female, live in Indonesia, and have ‘beiber’ in any way shape or form in your username, biography, or fuck .. anywhere, please, please, please remove me and go drown yourself in the bathtub. You’re not a Twitter rockstar, you’re just some fucking crazed fangirl, and you’re fat. Yes, you are. No, your mother was lying, she’s biased. Go fuck a yak.
Posted: July 9th, 2010
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- Fault on iPhone 4G yields no service
- Apple blames firmware
- Industry experts blame design
- 30 day refund period offered
Apple says a fault on its new iPhone 4 is causing it to incorrectly display the phone’s signal. Most of you are aware of the fault with the iPhone 4G, where users who gripped the phone on the lower left-hand side noticed the signal strength and reception fell away. This is happening because the metal band around the chassis is broken into two insulated parts, one being a wifi antenna and the other being for telephonic usage. By bridging the gap between these two parts it faults out the signal and kills it outright.
Apple says the problem relates to an error on how the signal bars are displayed, rather than the signal, which even a cusory glance at the fault is incorrect and merely the cheapest way to ‘fix’ the problem and try and make customers happy. Many industry experts say that there may be a deeper signal problem than a cosmetic design flaw. While Apple is promising a patch fix “within a few weeks” (which ultimately will NOT fix the issue) they have also stated that users may also choose to get a full refund within 30 days of purchase.
In a statement, Apple said the iPhone 4 had been “the most successful product launch in Apple’s history” and that all phones gripped in “certain ways will reduce its reception by one or more bars”. “We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising,” the statement read. “Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.
“Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays two more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display four bars when we should be displaying as few as two bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying four or five bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”
Apple said it was going to adopt AT&T’s formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength.
The theory now is that, once the patch update has been applied, iPhone’s bars will report signal strength “far more accurately” providing users a better indication of the reception in a given area.
But Stuart Miles, editor of technology site Pocket Lint, was sceptical. Speaking to BBC News, Mr Miles said the news raised a few questions. “Why, for the first time, has Apple released a bumper for their phone, and why does no one else have this problem,” he asked. “HTC makes metal phones, but they seem to work just fine. Changing the display may make some people feel better, but it doesn’t really fix the problem,” he added.
Apple said the new software to fix this would be released in a few weeks, claiming that as the problem also existed in the original iPhone, it would also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G. However, there have been few – if any – complaints about older iPhones losing signal strength when held in a certain way, although users with them can immediately kill their signal by locating the antenna portion of the phone from schemata online and then obstructing it with their hands.
Apple’s previous advice for iPhone 4 owners to overcome the problem of the device losing signal was to not place your hand on the lower left corner. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said: “Just avoid holding it in that way.” This latest approach is an unusual admission from the company, which has apologised for “any anxiety we may have caused”.
The iPhone 4 went on sale on in June, with hundreds of people queuing Apple’s flagship stores across the globe. Many new owners reported that signal strength dropped when the phone was held. The problem is thought to be particularly acute for left-handed owners who naturally touch the phone in the sensitive area. Apple sells a rubber “bumper” that shields the sensitive area, as do many other firms.
When Mr Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, he described the integrated antenna as “really cool engineering”.
Extended antennae can be bought on eBay, and for most users who aren’t in an urban environment, extended antennae are the essential item for almost all phones given that phone producers seem to make their internal antenna out of diamonds and gold held together with baby seal eyeballs and thus are stupifyingly idiotic about how little ribbon you actually get in your phone, given how small ribbon antenna technology is they could easily afford to provide a huge antenna in quite a small case; something many mobile phone users would be willing to even pay a higher optional fee to obtain IN the cosmetic case instead of having to attach an external.
Posted: July 4th, 2010
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Posted: July 4th, 2010
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twitter
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Having finally bothered to upgrade to the latest iPhone OS and firmware I was rather unimpressed with the changes. The ‘multitasking’ is bullshit, you can double tap the home button and get a hot swap menu like a mini version of the windows task bar, but swapping to another program halts the current program. So it’s not multitasking at all, it’s merely hot swapping.
Aside from that there’s a lame animation cut scene between all actions of menu items exploding out or in depending on whether you’re entering or exiting a program. There’s red underline under typographical errors, yet it still refuses to learn profanity.
Oh, also during the upgrade expect to lose all your thumbnails of prior images, they’re still there but you can only access them from a computer. Also you’ll lose most of your apps, and all your SMS backlog; even a restore of prior phone records does not seem to rectify this.
Posted: July 3rd, 2010
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The other night I caught Soylent Green on late night TV. I got to pondering the disposal of humans on mass scales, such as in a future world of great overpopulation, which led me to the most obvious example of mass deaths we have in history, the holocaust. I wondered how the German’s got rid of so many victims, there’s actually not much out there on the subject aside from allusions to mass graves, which is inefficient.
So I contemplated what the makers of Audi, BMW and Mercedes, et al would do to efficiently dispose of corpses and assumed they’d incinerate the vast majority if not all of them. Let’s take Auschwitz as one example to work with, whilst I can only find reference images of mass graves at that location I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they had an inkling of guilt enough to try and cover up their crimes and thus incinerated their victims. This is where it got gross. Whilst the only figures I can find online are from some lass named Lucy Dawidowicz or a bunch of batshit historical revisionists (who usually claim that the Jews weren’t killed and were merely talented at playing hide and seek) we’ll work with Lucy’s figures.
She estimates that 6,000,000 died, but her break down of the deathcamps gives us 8,000,000 plus.
Her figure for Auschwitz is 1.1 million to 1.4 million. We’ll work with the smaller of those figures. Now assuming that the average person produces a density of 30cm cubed of 10kg’s of ashes (this is original research, sadly, I admit, based purely on the several dozen creepy encounters I’ve had with ash remains of dead folk sans urns (no you sick fucks, they were in boxes from the funeral home)) by modern standards, so let’s double that to reflect the haste required of mass murder then assuming that the average mass grave was a good depth, say 3 meter trenches with at least 1 meter topsoil above them, that gives us 1.1m * 60 / 1000 (to give us the result in meters) gives us 66,000 meters of surface area divided by the 2 usable meters depth gives us 33,000 meters.
Or 33 square kilometers.
Now open Google Earth, and go to 50° 2′ 9″ N, 19° 10′ 42″ E, the location of Auchwitz.
Notice that it’s only about 2 kilometers square? Notice what’s around it as far as the eye can see?
… FARMS. D: D: D: D: D: D:
Now this is with the assumption that they burnt all their victims, which they probably didn’t. So this figure is relatively conservative, albeit the scientific aspect of it is hillariously poor given that it’s got more assumptions in it than a first year law class and a lot of my assumptions were based on the stereotype of German’s, but seriously … I went through each and every other prison camp registered as having carried out mass executions (that we KNOW of!) and around each and every one of them were farms. Farms for kilooometers. Nothing but farms.
That being said, these are only figures of the Jewish death toll, not taking into account Russians, Poles, Romani, the disabled, Freemasons, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and just about anyone else who looked at them funny. So whilst flawed, these figures may even be more conservative than expected when taking the grand scale of the executions into account.
I’d end this like I do most hypotheticals with the comment of ‘food for thought?’ but in this case I think I may just take up breatharianism.
Posted: July 3rd, 2010
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Many of you may have missed my review of Final Fantasy XIXIVUXCHGGG in all it’s absolutel crapness, one thing I noted was that it felt like it was trying to be an MMO, a single player MMO, with all the elements of World of Warcraft, except if such a project was executed by a mildly retarded chimp on mesculine. Well, sure enough, Final Fantasy XIV was announced as ‘Final Fantasy Online’. It’ll probably be subscription only and take 80,000 hours game play before letting you meet another human being, but they’re sticking with their fantasy roots instead of physics defying stupidly thought out and animated future-tech spin on the franchise.
Square Enix fans (aka: franchise bitches) will buy this and love it, but because most Square Enix fans are 40 year old virgins they’ve never played WoW and won’t appreciate just how comical Final Fantasy Online is compared to it. You have the Horde, you have giant steampunk creations, you have a pretty bad knock off of Stormwind, complete with harbour and lame boats, there’s implied naval combat in FFO but this is probably only a cut scene because we all know that aside from cut scenes all you have to do it mosh the green button to play the game. From lame racial dance moves through to gnome asshats, from Stitches rendered green to their very own take of the Dark Portal, you’ve got plainstriders, and even a dodgy attempt at the Horde, oh wait, I already said that.
Click here to see the latest trailer of Final Fantasy XIV Online and remember to keep an eye out at 1:57 for the elven Harry Potter. Either way, my guess is this will suck as much as every other FF game I’ve played, but they seem to have developed the perfect method of making their games suck more as the franchise matures.
Posted: July 1st, 2010
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game reviews,
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