Hot nights. Need air-con.
Mentioned to my mum I was going to live in HKU hostel. She took out her map of HK (a book) and started searching. It's not like I care (at the moment) about where it is. She cared, apparently. So she told me it is near some places that I have heard before but don't know where exactly they are. There is not point. I can take the MTR to most places. If any problems arise, I can just ask a local in the hostel. At worst, I can bring the map book.
But I'd still prefer to live in a hotel. At least they have air-conditioning.
Been donating a lot these days. Never changed my laptop's power settings whenever I go away. Instead, I turn on about 15-20 bots before leaving. Usually when I do so for a long period of time, e.g. overnight, half of them will crash and vanish. I don't understand why, nor do I care, because with even 7 of them working overnight, I help donate a heck of a load each night. That is not counting the rice that have been donated by the bots that crashed in the middle of the night, nor those that were donated in the day ( I leave one on all the time).
Sad that no one uses these bots nor know about the website, but I guess I am practically donating more than their share of the rice had they known about this.
Though I cannot prove on my own that these bots really are doing what they're supposed to do, I have not found any websites saying these are frauds. Instead, I have found bloggers analysing some of the bots and making new and better ones. I believe this indirectly shows that these bots aren't trojan horses or viruses.
At a rate of 10 grain/s, I sleep 9 hours a day. That makes 9*3600*10 = 324,000 per bot. 7 of them makes 2,268,000 grains a night. I googled "rice grain weight" and found that a grain of rice weighs 20-30mg. Taking 0.025g, or 0.00025kg as the rice grain weight, I am donating at least 56.7kg of rice a night. And I haven't calculated all the times I went away for meals and etc.
I feel like I am a good man now.
Getting more people joining ntu tmc now. And coincidentally, someone in my French 1 class is joining tmc too.
Apparently, the NOD32 antivirus program I'm using now is supposed to be one of the fastest antivirus program in the world, and one of the best. No fancy awards, probably because it isn't made by some big corporation in the US (it's produced in Slovak). It is one of the fastest, if not the fastest, because it is written mainly in assembly code.
Assembly code is a low-level computer language, compared to high-level languages like C or Java. Low-level languages are more closely related to the basic codes that computers really use, thus making the processes run much faster and the programs smaller. However such languages are not as easy to use relative to stuff like C because they incorporate less syntax and words from human languages, making them more complicated and less intuitive to learn. Also, low-level languages can only be used on specific types of computers.
You can say that these codes are more "primitive", and high-level codes are more "evolved". All games are written in high-level languages because it will take forever to write and take lifetimes to patch up all the bugs. But it is also because of that that makes them so friggin huge.
Good thing it is fast, because I use it all the time, together with an anti-spyware program. Every time someone emails me something, everytime someone sends me something via Messenger, everytime I download something from an unfamiliar source, I scan all downloaded files with both. I may have them monitoring my computer all the time, but preventing them from activating in my disks is way more important.
This is not the only form of caution I employ. Every single link that someone sends to me, especially those that they suddenly send, I google them. Every single email asking for help/donation/forwarding, I google them. This may be the reason why I found out that ALL emails asking us to forward them so that someone would donate some money for each forward are frauds. This also applies to similar messages in Facebook.
There is no possible way to legally track the number of forwards for any email, thus it is lying when it says that money would be donated for each forward. Even when it says that I'd be heartless not to forward it, I don't care. I'm already donating over FIFTY KILOGRAMS OF RICE (or its monetary equivalent) EVERY NIGHT to the poor. No one can say I am heartless. I'm more helpful than anyone who has donated less than 100 bucks in a year. In fact, when I get such messages in Facebook, they're removed right away.
Anyway, so far the caution has saved me from viruses at least thrice, twice from friends through Messenger, once from my own downloads. My laptop has been clean since the day I turned it on the first time. That's not saying much, but I do my best to keep it this way till the day I get a new laptop.
Plus, I get to laugh at everyone who has gotten a virus for being so gullible in the shithole we know as the Internet.
C'mon, there is no police, no customs officer, no security on the Internet except those you set up for yourself. And don't believe in those bullshit Microsoft provides together with Windows, because Windows is notorious (apparently) in the hacking circles. All those Defender and shit only provides a false sense of security. Only the function of backing up your whole hard disks is useful, but that doesn't come with the Vista's Home Premium edition.
Therefore, everyone has to search for the best tools and fend for him or herself. Even NOD32 is not perfect. The time I found the trojan horse in a downloaded file, I was saved by the anti-spyware scanner, not NOD32. Of course, if you're never going to venture into the "dark side" of the internet, if no one is ever going to play a joke on you, if no one around you ever gets a virus, then go on and save that extra bit of disk space for something more meaningful.
No comments:
Post a Comment