Posts by Kevin

Obama releases Dubya's secret anti-terror memos

This is not news

This is not news. The Patriot Act in its original form included these things as well. Congress passed it overwhelmingly, and the Supreme Court ruled that these things were not Constitutional and struck them down. That was the end of it, and anybody who believes otherwise needs to head to Roswell on a fact-finding mission. The fact that this is being released is just Obama trying to distract from the ridiculous spending that is happening, with Hoover-esque tax hikes to follow in 2010, and an increase in spending by $1.5T by 2012. He doesn't know how to lead, so he continues to campaign in hopes of making himself look better by bashing others.

Red Hat to help liberate Oracle 'hostages'

JBOSS is good quality and cheaper

My company is finishing a migration from Weblogic to JBOSS for our apps. WL is much nicer, particularly the administrative console and ease of support because of it, but the licensing costs a fortune and the upgrade from version to version was causing way too many headaches for our developers.

US House OKs Obama's IT stimulus

Excuses

The guise of a "stimulus" package are merely excuses for getting a boat load of socialist spending through Congress. Look at some of the projects. Anti-smoking campaigns (no new jobs), birth control measures (no new jobs, fortunately this one was pulled yesterday for its idiocy). These are a couple of the more ridiculous "stimulus" plans proposed. Half of them won't create too many jobs, and almost all of them will create ZERO permanent jobs. I seem to remember the democrats criticizing Bush's job creation a few years ago as "short term jobs" that will go away when the job is done. This is the majority of Obama's "stimulus" plan.

$350B in bad decisions, with another $350B blank check waiting. Add in another $825B and we have a $1.5T mistake, when the economy will be no better off because of it. The free market always corrects itself. It did so in 2000-2002 when the dot com bubble burst. It did so again when the socialist tinkering with mortgages blew up in everyone's face and burst the housing bubble in 2007-2008. The worst things that can be done is putting the government in charge of anything, and now the US government pretty much owns half the banks in the country, and is about to be given free will to waste more taxpayer dollars to try and "fix" it. The best way to fix anything is to keep the government bureaucracy out of it. $2 go in, $1 comes out.

I'm just happy my job is safe, and I am in a growing company even still. My bonus will be fat, and intend to blow most of that on stocks. Recessions are just garage sales for rich people, and while I may not be rich, I can certainly get a piece of the pie as it recovers. And it will recover. Mike Tyson could be president and the economy would recover. The ONLY thing that can keep the free market down is the government crushing it by over taxation, over involvement/regulation in every aspect of lives, and redistribution of wealth.

Paris because we all need some eye candy.

Storm worm smackdown as researchers unpick control system

This is how all battles are fought

The good guys always have a harder job because they follow the rules. It would be nice to be able to spread cleanup code in the same way that malicious code is spread, but you can't. Just because you are trying to do good does not mean you are exempt from the law. At the same time, would it be such a bad thing for governments to pass laws that allow for cleanup like this? A case by case situation? Sort of deputizing security companies to take down an organized crime institution.

Windows 7 beta washes up on Pirate Bay

Version numbers for Windows

It's been stated and overstated what the reality is up to Vista. I'm actually surprised that nobody has brought it up yet. Windows 7 should actually probably be version 6.1 or 6.5.

2000:XP is like Vista:Windows7

It is prettied up and cleaned up. Nothing major changed with Windows 7, they just got around to finally cleaning up the mess that Vista is. A lot of people are calling Windows7 more like another Vista service pack. Don;t forget, even though Vista was over 2 years late, it was rushed out the door. The win7 kernel is basically the same as vista, this has been noted as a plus for driver support. M$ just finally got around to fixing Vista, and they'll sell it as a new OS to disassociate it with Vista completely. It shouldn't be a major version number, it should be 6.5 at best. Marketing made this one a major version, not the code.

And for the left out ME in this discussion, there was Windows98, then Windows98 SE. WindowsME was just another extension of that line and should really be considered Windows 98 3rd Edition. As has already been stated, that kernel line died (really, it was merged) and the NT line took over with Windows 2000, known internally prior to release as NT5.

Just to set it straight, I am no fan of Microsoft, see devil bill to the left.

Wikipedia exceeds $6m donation goal

Maybe they'll stop censoring views that disagree with the editors now

I'm glad that wikipedia is going to continue on, but at the same time, I would have rather seen them bought out and get some new management in there. Perhaps new management wouldn't censor so many things, and push their agenda out as "fact". There are way too many biased articles out there, where the opposite viewpoint is censored. See overstock.com for more details, and this is a small example.

Designer sets sights on visual impairment iPhone case

This is a great idea, especially to get it rolling early

I know its not perfect now, but this is a really great idea. The latest fad seems to be touchscreens and these completely ignore the needs of the blind. I don't know anyone who is blind, nor can I begin to appreciate the difficulties they must have in this ever increasing technology driven world, but I can speculate at the frustrations this would present when all the latest and greatest new devices don't offer tactile response. I for one, can't stand touch screen because I like to feel the keys under my fingers, but I never considered it a necessity.

VMware to cut desktop storage by 80 per cent

Similar idea to Sun's smart card setup

Centralized server that stores your session, accessible from thin clients. Sounds very familiar to Sun's project a number of years ago. Plug your smart card into a thin client connected to the network, and your desktop and files popup for you to use, just as you left it before. The portability between platforms is big difference here, but that was more McNealy's stubbornness than limitation of the technology.

This is nothing new. Just rehashed with a shiny new label on it, and the trendy tag of "virtualization". The same problems that existed with the ASCII terminal, and every thin client before this, will still exist on this one.

Sons of Macintosh - shaking the Apple family tree

Disappointed in El Reg for ignoring the dark side of Apple

In all 3 articles on the Apple report card, there has not been one mention of ethics, and ignored legal problems. I refer to the iPod that revived the company. Nobody argues this, and the graphs in article #2 support it. Apple is making its comeback not because Apple computer users are buying up other consumer electronics, but because purchasers of Apple's consumer electronics are deciding to be Apple-only folks and buying the computers to stay in line. This is most definitely a result of good marketing, anybody who is aware of this agrees.

What disappoints me about El Reg's report card thus far is the failure to even mention Apple's skirting (disregard) for the law. They applied for a patent on the iPod's interface in 2000. This patent application was rejected because it was ALREADY OWNED by Creativ. Apple ignored this and released their product anyways. The result has been Apple's revival as a company, and it can tied wholly to the iPod and good marketing (the "buying into a club" approach). I am disappointed that El Reg has thus far ignored this, and probably will continue to.

It also speaks to the state of the patent system here in the US, and how it is not built to handle the tech explosion of the past 15-20 years. It is an eerily similar situation to Charles Goodyear and his rubber patent that was blatantly ignored and the orders of courts were blatantly ignored. Difference is, Goodyear is still a leader, whereas Creativ is just about dead. What should have been is very similar to Kodak, releasing a Polaroid like camera in the mid-late 80s and being ordered to desist, except that Kodak obeyed the court order and is still viable today for anyone who still uses film.

Apple has ignored everything, with the mindset that they will pay up later (which they did) to Creativ. It has worked very well for them, and the fact that nobody seems to care about it further damages the patent system in that companies know that they can safely ignore them and pay a relatively small fine 4 years down the road.

Shrinking primary databases

Nice concept, but...

How do I then archive it off for "reasonable" availability any better than I do now? A good DBA has already taken measures to ensure critical production data is available, and production database access is fast. What if you're in the situation where you're production environment generates 30 million rows per day, that you need to archive off nightly (like my company...) and keep available for 2 years? How does this system improve that? It sounds to me like a very good idea, but if your company has DBAs that are worth a spit, you don't need it. Everything it does is BETTER done by good management of partitions, diskspace, and good backup/archive procedures. Once the procedure is regular, it can be scripted out, like everything else....

Judge sides with eBay in fake jewelry spat

Where could this lead?

The decision that a website is not responsible for proactively monitoring the trademark infringements taking place on its site is huge. I bet Google wishes this had been decided regarding Viacom and YouTube

Seagate ships 1 billionth drive

Rhetoric from the uninformed

A few comments have hit on it, but the top 3 just scream too much ignorance to be left alone.

MB = 1,000,000 bytes

MiB = 2^20 Bytes (1,048,576 bytes)

GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes

GiB = 2^30 bytes (1,073,741,824 bytes)

So when you buy a 500GB drive you get 500,000,000,000 bytes of storage. Not 500*2^30 bytes of storage.

We all know that 1024 does not equal 1000, don't make your stupidity known by ignoring long existing standards. Try following Acme Fixer's link, and you'll see that this standard was adopted about 10 years ago for dealing with binary quantities. I will agree with Wiernicki that nobody should adopt these in speech, but but at least be aware of the facts.

"It's better to remain silent and appear foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" - take note

Devil bill because too much of that 79TB is housing bill's handy work (rather, somebody else's handy work that bill bought and subsequently ruined, quite infectiously)

John Denver classic provokes Thai karaoke gun massacre

Coincidence

Ironically, I just saw a little bit of a John Denver special last night, and I learned why he is so popular in SE Asia. The way it was said, "If there is one western song that everybody in China knows, it is "Take me home, country roads". Stems from a visit the Premier made to the US, ad the President took him to a John Denver concert. He was so impressed, he asked for 500 copies of the tape, and for a while it was the only western music allowed to play on radio stations. I know this incident wasn't China, but still. SE Asia, and very ironic that I just saw something about this very song.

Countdown for IBM Project Zero

@tok- typical response from an open source fanatic

I hear your argument, and you make good points, most of all that IBM doesn't contribute as much as they boast. But your point is tainted by your attitude towards it. You sounds like a typical open source zealot that confuses "contributing to open source" with "giving everything to open source". IBM donates, but you're upset because you don't think they donate enough. Well, Ian nailed it, they are a huge company with a lot of people working on things for them, and they would be out of business if they gave everything away. Just because they don't contribute everything they do to open source, does not mean they don't contribute.

If you want to wag a finger, wag it at google. They heavily use open source, and do not contribute their coding to the community. Why? Because technically they don't distribute it, they just use it across the company. They are a prime of example of using and not contributing, "violating" the spirit of open source.

Rogue servers point users to impostor sites

In response to Lance

"Publishing an IP goes against what DNS is for!"

Actually, the purpose of DNS is so you can enter a human readable address, rather than an IP address to get to a website. And no, DNS servers do not handle the load balancing of your web server farm/cluster. DNS will resolve a human readable address to one IP address. The balancing is handled internally, as is the resolution of sub-domains for the big ones. www.google.com will pull up one IP from the DNS servers. Mail.google.com is probably resolved by a google DNS server that received a question for the mail. portion of the known google.com.

Interestingly, this is not the first example of name resolution being used to trick people. In a much more devious manner, Best Buy had an internal web page that matched their publicly available website but with different prices. So, when you go to the store and say you saw this TV at this price online, they can pull up the "internet" and show that you are wrong, when in reality they are pulling up an intranet mirror. They will ask to go home and print it out to prove it. They were caught and have played dumb, we'll see what happens. It should be criminal, but it probably won't some to anything more than a "stiff" fine and a hit in the court of public opinion.