THINK

Most statistics against software piracy assumes that each pirated software equals one lost sale, and goes on to further “estimate” the total number of illegal duplicates. The total lost is often cited as 200 billion per year at least. But this methodology is questionable.

1. There are many copies of illegal software used by people who can do without them. In other words, they would never spend money to purchase them.
2. If piracy were not possible, sofware companies could potentially lose the same 200 billion per year worth of users who are interested in the product and may make a purchase decision thereafter.
3. Software piracy allows people to work more efficiently at infitnite gains (per dollar spent for the sofware) and generates additional disposable income (from the savings) that can and will be injected back into the economy.

After the series of very interesting lectures on Nueral Networks, I just suddenly revived my interests in physics.

Just a few years back, probably during army days, I was reading on all these things about relativity and seriously, I could hardly understand any of it all. Somehow, after going through university, everything seems crystal clear this time around. Much to my own surprise, I realised the first time I ever spontaneously thought about relativity on my own was during my secondary school days about the “A housefly in a bus” problem, I still recall relating the problem to friends who probably only took slight interest in the topic.

Basically, I was kind of intrigued by the observation that houseflies seems to fly at their normal speeds in a moving bus. A search in google tells you housefly fly at 2m/s, that’s defnitely slower than the bus! I had always wondered why they do not get hit by the rear of the bus, which is moving much faster in the forward direction. Furthermore, there are other problems:

1. If we assume that the bus and housefly travel at the same forward speed of 60km/h, which is approx 17m/s, how did the housefly manage to accelerate so fast to maintain that speed?.
2. If now the houselfy is flying in an arbitary circular path, how does the fly so amazingly manage the precise flight control system, accounting for the difference in “relative” (secondary school physics sense)velocity?
3. If the bus comes to an emergency stop, how does the fly even know to detected and react to the suddenly change in relative velocity when it is in mid air, particularly, how it decelerates so fast?

Although Theory of Special Relativity may seem like an easy way out, actually, even now it still feels weird and I don’t really understand how. It may well be that my observations are wrong and housefly really just stick to the windows. Anyhow, I won’t do an experiement on that.

Acer laptops (I believe all) comes loaded with a hidden recovery partition in the hard disk. To boot from this partition, simply press ALT+F10 (at least for the Aspire series) at the “boot up” screen where it says press F2 to enter settings.

So if the next time you go for a repair and all they are going to do is a “format”, “reinstall”, or “recovery”, then you can also do it yourself. Save that $80 (or whatever the amount).

人啊！

沒錢的時候，養豬；
有錢的時候，養狗。

沒錢的時候，在家裡吃野菜；
有錢的時候，在酒店吃野菜。

沒錢的時候，在馬路上騎自行車；
有錢的時候，在客廳裡騎自行車。

沒錢的時候想結婚；
有錢的時候想離婚。

沒錢的時候老婆兼秘書；
有錢的時候秘書兼老婆。

沒錢的時候假裝有錢；
有錢的時候假裝沒錢。

人啊，都不講實話：

說股票是毒品，都在玩；
說金錢是罪惡，都在撈；

說美女是禍水，都想要；
說高處不勝寒，都在爬；

說煙酒傷身體，就不戒；
說天堂最美好，都不去!!!

當今社會，窮吃肉，富吃蝦，領導幹部吃王八；

男想高，女想瘦，狗穿衣裳人露肉；

過去把第一次留給丈夫；
現在把第一胎留給丈夫。

鄉下早晨雞叫人，
城裡晚上人叫雞；

舊社會戲子賣藝不賣身，
新社會演員賣身不賣藝。

人生是什麼?
只 用 了 4 4 個 字 , 就 把 人 生 講 完 了 ….
所 以 人 與 人 , 有 啥 好 計 較 的 咧 ?
快樂好相處比較重要啦！

1 歲 時 出場亮相
10 歲 時 功課至上
20 歲 時 春心盪漾
30 歲 時 職場對抗
40 歲 時 身材發胖
50 歲 時 打打麻將
60 歲 時 老當益壯
70 歲 時 常常健忘
80 歲 時 搖搖晃晃
90 歲 時 迷失方向
100 歲 時 掛在牆上

祝大家愉快，好好做人!

Lesson #1. Never judge a file by its icon. I was mislead to believe it was an installation exe because of the icon image. I should have been more careful.

First day of chinese new year and my itchy fingers got myself into some really serious trouble: I saw a mysterious “installation” exe in my downloads folder and, as I always did, wanted to double click it to see what installation is that that I downloaded (I download installations files every now and then).

Lession #2. Turn off all network connections immediately when you get infected to prevent further damage and quarantine your computer, unless you know it’s safe not to do do.

I realised my mistake immediately after the double click. And a moment later, Windows Defender poped up telling me that it has detected Adware:win32/rugo. Luckily for me, I consider Adwares as the least harmful among the many other types of irritants. Knowing that it is an Adware and not some trojan or keylogger that takes control over your system, I can safely keep the Internet connection on without having to worry of spreading the virus to other computers in the network or getting my computer compromised by some hacker.

Lesson #4. Once you think you are infected, do not simply turn off or restart your computer.

Complete infection may not start immediately, and sometimes requires further action before the full power will be unleashed. Hence, the next best step is actually not to do anything on the computer. Not even restarting the computer. A restart can usually be the worse thing to do as it allows the infection to enjoy a clean startup procedure. If you have access to another computer, use that to proceed. Otherwise, with the infected computer, the next thing to do is…

Lesson #3. Find out that the malware does.

More often than not, you probably won’t find any direct recipe for the antidote. This is because the malware changes its appearance over different released versions. However, the behavior and the method of infection generally does not change. Hence, the first thing to look out for when researching for the malware is to understand how it operates.

Lesson #4. Look out for location and names of process, files and registry.

On XP and Vista systems: Many infection start as such.

1. You run a poisonous program file directly by clicking on it, or indirectly by allowing some other program to start it.
2. The program file creates poison files, registry keys, configurations and permissions and injects them to various locations in the computer.
3. Amongst created poison files, a watchdog program is created and started. When this watchdog starts, something known as a “process” is created. This process will have a permission configuration such that there is no way to cancel/stop it during normal operation. Deleting the watchdog program will not remove the process. By now, you are infected.
4. The watchdog process runs every now and then to ensure that the poison files are not deleted, including the watchdog program. If the converse is ture, the process will recreate them. Recreated files may have completely different locations and filenames, making you think you had already deleted them.
5. Sometimes, the process is programmed to complete some final stages of the infection work on shutdown/restart . Hence give it the chance to do so.
6. Since the watchdog program can never be deleted normally, every time the computer enter Windows, the process will be started by the watchdog program and the cycle repeats.

Hence the the period where the infection takes place is really the time you enter Windows until the time you shutdown completely. If there is any chance for you, it is the ability to interrupt the watchdog process. However, for very powerful virus, they can infect you even before you enter windows, before you have any chance to interrupt the boot sequence. Once you can stop the process, poison files will not be recreated and the infection can be removed successfully.