Posts by stizzleswick

Consumer group slams 'unfair' software licenses

Fix the according laws.

That worked in several countries. IANAL, btw., but I know that e.g. in France and Germany, approx. half of Microsoft's EULAs for Windows and Office is void because it contradicts existing laws and fair practice rulings. The non-reselling paragraph in particular has been successfully defeated in the courts (reasoning given was that once you buy a license, it is yours to do with as you like, which includes selling it to a third party. If the supplier doesn't like this, it shouldn't sell the product in the first place).

Similar rulings several years ago have led to Adobe changing their licensing terms so you can install one license on several computers and they'll accept your word that you won't abuse this goodwill.

@David Wiernicki: "Just out of curiosity, what unusable software did you successfully write that oh-so-biting post with?"

My guess is he was using some OpenSource bit of software, like e.g. Firefox.

Opera screeches at Mozilla over security disclosure

@Thomas Hurst

" it's not like keeping the exploit embargoed for a couple more days would hurt, and that's precisely what Mozilla would expect from others were the situation reversed."

From what I know of the Mozilla community, that's precisely what they would not expect of others. They'd just dig in and plug the hole.

"Did Opera kill your dog or something? Sheesh."

Nope. They have a good product, but honestly, they take too bloody long to fix documented security bugs. Then they complain that others have fixed it first. And yes, I know it takes a few days to do it. That's no reason to whine though.

Perens: 'Badgeware' threat to open source's next decade

@Nigel

"The history of public domain software in the 60s/70s/80s/90s is an interesting one, and well worth looking into"

I agree there, though public domain ≠ opensource; much of that PD software was very definitely closed-source with only the binaries in the public domain, thereby missing out on the benefits of a developer community.

And yes, BSD was there first. The developer community was pretty small though, being restricted by the networking infrastructure of the time. And yes also, I agree that something similar to the OSI would have evolved anyway; the exploding number of computer-savvy people together with the general availability to the public of the internet in the early 1990s practically guaranteed that.

Rebit: This is your grandmother's data backup

@James

"What is the point of continully backing up the OS drive?"

Windows has something called the "Registry" which changes every time one installs or uninstalls software on the machine, and sometimes also when changing settings in applications (MS Office is a great Registry-trasher). So... install a bit of software, be smart and have the installer use one of the data drives instead of C:\programs... and after a backup, your software won't work. And if you install on C:, you have to re-install everything you installed after the initial backup, which can be quite a lot. Plus, all your Office settings will be at the earlier setting... security fixes not installed... the lot.

New Mexico bets future on promiscuous supercomputer

@Space & follow-ups

Good point on the cooling. The bigger point is CPUs, however: space-hardened hardware is, by today's standards, agonizingly slow with IBM's space-certified POWER chips topping out at approx. 200 MHz and Intel, IIRC, currently offering an 80486 for space use. Any current off-the-rack CPUs would be toast within a very short period of time due to all sorts of irradiation that we down here on terra firma are shielded from thanks to our atmosphere plus magnetic field.

So a space supercomputer would have approx. the effectiveness of, say... oh shucks, just go to Walmart and pick up their top-of-the-line office PC. It'll have more oomph and be lots cheaper to operate. Plus, far easier to repair.

Ordinary-fuel scramjet prototype suffers test failure

@ Martin

Actually, Terminal velocity depends on several factors,including the speed of the connection to the mainframe and the typing skills of the operator...

On the serious side, streamlining an object does not increase its terminal velocity; not streamlining it may reduce it though.

Automated crack for Windows Live captcha goes wild

@Simpson

"Wouldn't it be nice, to have a database that has its content and meta data redundantly spread over thousands or hundreds of thousands of systems?"

That already exists. It's called the "Internet."

US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul

@Justin

How can you imagine that what the US armed forces will actually run would be accessible to anyone but the US armed forces?

The idea here AFAIK is to take the basics already existing in OSS code and adapt them to the needs of the military.

This does not necessarily include the publication of any code written by the military (OK, I guess the FSF would take issue because this would be a breach of the GPL and LGPL... somehow, I cannot really imagine they are going to sue the US armed forces over this issue, though...)

Funny that few here got the point of the exercise...

...which is that the U.S. armed forces want to detach themselves from a closed-in, closed-source codebase and get onto something THEY can control. More power to them (figure of speech only, mind you...)

The basic thing here is codebase access and standards compliance. BSD is OK here, but has a few limitations that were noted in earlier posts here, which I can imagine would rule out their use in a situation like the U.S. armed forces.

In my view, the advantages of breaking out of the MS box outweigh any possible advantage of any closed-source OS: Unlike DOS or NT (the latter includes w2k, xp and vista, the former all MS PC OSs up to WMe), stable BSD and Linux kernels are already available for just about any piece of hardware that was commercially available since the mid-1970s. Compare to a comparatively unstable NT kernel available exclusively for one processor architecture totally dominated by only two vendors.

Compared to any closed-source OS, Linux (or BSD for that matter, but note that BSD seems to be out because of other issues) is almost trivial to port to new (or modified) special-purpose chips and chipsets used in weapons systems. That alone is going to save billions on development costs in the next few years. Which, as far as I can follow the reasoning of the DoD, is exactly the point.

@ theotherone: "'the Army has largely been prepping new Linux-friendly weapons'...funny that, seeing as Linux was largely developed by pacifists and peace-pipe smoking hippies!"

Actually, Linux has so far for the most part been programmed by experienced software developers. Many do it in their spare time; a large number are even paid to develop Linux full-time by companies like Silicon Graphics, Novell, IBM and many other recognizable names in IT.

Time Warner splitting up AOL

Re: AOL IM

AFAIK the AIM _protocol_ is not going to be impacted at all; it is used by a large group of messenger clients both commercially developed and OSS who have precious little to do with AOL itself.

Worry about the AIM servers instead. I don't know whether any are run independently from AOL.

Bunker-nobbling US megabomb test delayed

Re: Instead of going deeper...

"Cover it with canvas and plywood painted to look like heavy thick concrete."

Wouldn't work. Ground-penetrating RADAR would unmask your scheme literally within milliseconds. Heck, with canvas and plywould, you wouldn't even withstand a cursory glance from normal RADAR.

SCO details bleak future

Way to go, SCO

Let SCO's case be a lesson to all patent trolls everywhere... "cashing in" does not necessarily have to be cashing in ON something...

Apple iPhone storms world smartphone biz

@Julian

So wait about a month... the SDK is out there. And if I remember correctly, SAP already wrote an app for the Jesus Phone but were reined in by Apple at the time.

Not a fanboi, btw; I don't have an iPhone and not going to get one.

MIT and TI to produce low energy chips

@Scott

"...could that produce an over-voltage situation and blow out the chip?"

Preventing overvoltage to reach the chip is a trivial affair consisting of about a dozen off-the-shelf electronics components. Alternatively, if you just want to prevent toasting the chip without ensuring it keeps running, say "fuse."

French police plan Windows-free jails, offices

Re: Re: Re: Echo chamber (and a discourse on irony)

"As a graphic designer I think I can say with some authority it looks like crap. KDE 4 - the latest and greatest - looks like crap."

Then build your own fripping desktop theme and use it. It's easy. Been there. Done that. All your points can be addressed simply by either installing a different icon set and theme or building your own. Which is as simple as making a few PNG graphics and twiddling the desktop settings a little until everything is to your liking.

Good luck on the same issue with Windows (the UI of which, btw, has been looking like crap since v. 1.0 and has taken a turn for the worse with XP and Vista, IMHO).

Hat, tuxedo, cab...

Paul Burrell pulls website amid 'hate mail' blitz

Surely the first against the wall...

...when the revolution comes will be the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation?

IBM snubs OS/2 open source plea

Still good for retro-gaming

If you want to play old, DOS-based games (e.g. Discworld, Return to Zork), then OS/2 is probably the quickest way to get them running -- giving a DOS app the full 640 k RAM is a neat trick that saves a good amount of fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up memory for greedy games.

Plus, I still remember Warp w/WinOS/2 fondly for running MS-written 16-bit Windows applications rather more stably than DOS/Windows did...

iPhone turns blue as IBM creates Lotus client

@Alan

The iPhone is already legitimately available in France and Germany w/o any provider lock-in. The price premium for that seriously sucks, though.

Microsoft plugs 'critical' hole in Vista

@Don Mitchell

With the OSS community, you don't have to wait for a tuesday several months hence until the patch is posted... and that's one of the great points about OSS. If you don't like to wait until somebody else fixes the problem, you can even fix it yourself. Try talking any commercial software developer into giving you access to their code so you can fix their problem for them...

'First' iPhone Trojan rolls into town

Secure by nature

@Nathan: Thank you for pointing out my mistake; of course it's not OpenBSD -- I didn't remember which flavour of BSD it was and grabbed the wrong one instead of looking it up first. My bad.

@heystoopid: "by your definition..." I didn't define anything in my earlier post... and it seems you completely failed to address the one question I had opened up, namely the issue of any OS being "secure by nature."

I should probably mention that I am a long time user of various flavours of Linux, BSD et al and prefer them to other operating systems. But that does not blind me to the fact that they are not, in fact, "secure by nature," nor flawless in any other way.

@heystoopid

"Can't wait for the better and safer and secure by nature Linux version !"

Er... lemme see... "secure by nature?" *shaking head sadly*

Let me clue you in: No multi-purpose operating system is "secure by nature." Not even OpenBSD. Which is already running on the iPhone underneath all the neat iCandy.

Yahoo! joins rush to get widgets onto mobile phones

I! agree! with! Stone! Fox!

and! nickj!

Beware of pickpockets and malware-laced banner ads

Ad-blockers are nice...

...but none that I know of can consistently take care of layer ads yet. And yep, so far I have seen precious little mal-adware for anything other than Windows, so using a different OS helps a little. Of course, once the percentage of non-Windows users rises, they will also be targeted.

@ LaeMi Qian: I have seen tainted ads on otherwise perfectly good and trustworthy web sites -- the owner of the URL can't do much if the ad service is letting malware through without noticing. I once got the message "Your Windows computer is unsafe! Install XXXX (Yes) (cancel)" on the homepage of a renowned newspaper. And no, I was not running Windows...

AOL tosses Netscape into the dustbin of history

@ Roger Campbell

You might want to try Amaya, available from the W3C.

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

'bye, 'scape...

Having started out with Mosaic and lynx, I think I can say that Netscape in its early versions was a pretty good browser, before the browser wars began to add useless features to both MS Internet Exploder and Netscape Navigator. Among my favourites are such non-standard niceties as the marquee and blink tags.

When the Netscape source code was opensourced, something typical of OSS projects in the startup phase happened: nothing visible for about a year. Netscape stagnated on a geriatric codebase while Opera grabbed market share with good standards compliance while also supporting MSIE quirks.

Then, the Mozilla project began putting out early versions of the upcoming web suite (yes, it was still a suite back then), and began picking up steam.

I tend to think that the Netscape suite as a product was practically dead at that point. The Mozilla project very quickly overtook MSIE and most other browsers on the market in standards compliance and speed (though it has been overtaken itself in the meantime), and Netscape began putting out Netscape-branded Mozillas that were at least half a year out of date, full of AOL cruft, and shy some nice features the OSS version had.

For Netscape users, changing to Firefox (or Seamonkey, for that matter) will be a good choice; they're up to date and don't drown the desktop in AOL icons during installation.

So, no need to kill Netscape Navigator; it's been dead for a few years. Just bury it and plant a filesystem tree on its grave.

And in memoriam Netscape, occasionally go to the URL about:mozilla in your Firefox/Seamonkey/Netscape browser.

Apple gives MacBooks some Santa Rosa loving

Prices

Comparing prices for similar performance and spec before I bought a new notebook two months ago, the comparison came out like this:

Dell: EUR 2,600.--

HP: EUR 2,800.--

Toshiba: Nothing similar offered at the time

Acer: EUR 2,300.--

Apple: EUR 2,000,--

Guess which I chose. As to the US/non-US pricing, Nathan is right with the sales tax not being included in US prices. Plus, there is such a thing as import duty in most countries, remember?

Carmack's X-Prize rocket explodes on pad

@Ex Pat, The Other Steve

@ Ex Pat: Well, Ex Pat, it seems you are blissfully unaware of how OSS development actually works. If I don't like a module, I just leave it out or rewrite it. In most proprietary offers, I get very little choice in which modules I install, even if they are flawed. And I don't have a chance to rewrite them either.

Your comment about compiling also shows you don't seem to know much about that process either, but with you being an obvious Gates fanboi, that was not to be expected. Run over Linux if you like... but unlike Windows, you can expect it to keep its kernel services running even afterwards, and not block the whole system because of one improperly programmed counting loop. Ever tried recompiling the NT kernel...? ;)

Oh, and there is such a thing as peer review in most OSS projects; unreviewed modifications don't tend to make it into a distribution -- especially since most of the peers reviewing them are experienced software developers, not pimply would-be haXors as you seem to assume.

@ The Other Steve: I agree, an RTOS is a fine thing. Like the one they used on the first launch attempt of the Ariane 5. Or why is it that Cisco and co. are all turning away from RTOSs and offer more and more carrier grade hardware running Linux?

Also, Linux is only as bloated as you let it get; it is entirely possible to run a functioning Linux system including bash from a floppy disk. More practically, though, Linux is beautifully adaptable to most hardware combinations one can currently come up with, including space-hardened CPUs and chipsets, which is probably why it was chosen to run the Armadillo contraption. IMHO, Solaris might have been a better choice, but a source licence would cost more than the entire failed vessel.

And I haven't been flamed yet for any of the bug reports I filed with any of the Linux developer groups; on one occasion I was asked a few short and quite relevant questions though. Of course, if one regards relevant questions as a flame... (and of course, one _can_ get flamed if one reports unnecessary duplicates -- so you check before posting. SOP. That's what Bugzilla was written for.)

That all notwithstanding I should probably note that I'm not a "fanboi" of any OS; I am a sysadmin and use a variety of operating systems on a variety of hardware and try to use the what fits the purpose best. Speaking from experience, so far, no version of NT-based Windows has reached anywhere near the security, speed and uptime of the various Unices.

Go ahead. Bake my clay.

@Ex Pat

So you'd rather run a lunar lander on Windows? Blue Screen of Death would take on a whole new meaning for anybody on board... plus, of course, with Linux, you can actually *fix* any bugs you encounter on your own terms.

In the case of closed-source software, you have to beg the manufacturer to be so kind and fix it for you, and it can take forever. In the case of Microsoft, they have been known to fix one bug and create a whole bundle of new ones with the "fix"...

Hypersonic hydrogen airliner to bitchslap Concorde

@ A.Lewis

In the 1970s and 80s SR-72s flew over my living area on their way home every few days, at above 60,000 feet. When they did, the sonic boom was enough to occasionally damage stacked cups in the cupboard. _That's_ why Concorde was not allowed to go supersonic above populated areas, and other civilian planes won't be either.