and this is what
we are wasting taxpayer dollars on ? Next time they come beg for a bailout they can have a couple of army boots up their behind..
Posts by vincent himpe
828 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2006
Freeway-averse Peapod runabout to go on sale in April
You did what? The trials of supporting remote users
Tuesday 10th February 2009 19:27 GMT
How win95 hacked Solaris
These were the early days of window95. For those who don;t remeber : in win95 or 98 ( with network logon ) you can just create a new logon by entering a name and password on the welcome screen. if the name is not registered it will create an account.
I had a brand new win95 box and jokingly created an account called 'root' with 'user' as password. and proceded to map the drive shared out using a samba session on a solaris fileserver.
I copied some stuff over to the server. all was well... until poepl on the Sun network tried accessing those files.. permission denied ... hmmm. a quick ls later : owner is root ? wtf ? i ran back to the win95 and using a single drag and drop just moved entire directory structures around. whoa. Talk about a mayor bug in samba... Samba must have 'trusted' me since i was apparently successfully logged on as 'root' on the pc. This was flagged and took weeks to fix...
Mozilla comes out in support of Brussels IE on Windows findings
Monday 9th February 2009 21:47 GMT
chicken - egg problem
No browser also means no way to download a different browser ..
I don;t care about internet exploder or vilefox. IE runs once on a Win installation : just to grab opera download and that;s it. I set Opera as default browser and remove the shortcuts to IE. game over.
There is nothing that prevents you from doing the same . Just make sure there is a basic browser included so people can download what they want.
Brits and Yanks struck with embarasment embarrassment
Monday 9th February 2009 21:02 GMT 
Aoccdrnig to rseerach at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy
Aoccdrnig to rseerach at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
Sony demos ultra-expensive, ultra-thin OLED telly
California to get 'space age' three-wheel EV
Thursday 5th February 2009 23:57 GMT
last thing i heard
this thing is goign to be controlled by a neimann-marcus kitchen computer ..... it'll probably go the same way too. Must have been designed by that bloke from IBM that proclaimed he saw a total world market for about 50 computers or so ...
come on.. they have to be joking. 35 grand for a plastic toy like this. Even a Prius at base price and converted to full electric is cheaper than that ...
Thursday 5th February 2009 23:57 GMT
@AC 'i see the luddites'
Sledgehammer yes ... Hummer , Cadillac escalade , Toyota Tundra , err.. that would be a no
yes a sledgehammer can deliver some serious punch, but the place of impact is small. apply the same amount per square inch over the total surface and this thing is flatter than a french crepe that was run over repeatedly by a big steamroller...
IT questions Obama's IT stimulus
Thursday 5th February 2009 16:27 GMT
of course they don't find IT people
willing to work for a reasonable salary. Most IT people expect 100K+ dollar a year with no skills, simple because they buy a house and car way out of what they can afford ( or could ever afford).
Everybody want a very well paid job ( and that is a perfectly normal human behaviour ) but only the ones with experience will get it. If you don't bring something to the discussion table , you won't get it.
I know lots of 'specialists' driving around in luxury cars , living in upscale homes, that have 0 dollars ( or most of the time negative) in the bank. When they have to do something really difficult they bomb out. When they get sacked those are the first ones to complain they got replaced by a foreigner. Those foreigners get the same salary ( can't get a visum if you don't pay the same salary ) but are willing to work to build a future. And they will put in the extra effort. I know a bunch of immigrants too. Their kids are in all sorts of extra classes (mathematics sciences etc) do all sorts of extra work. Western kids are hanging in front of the xbox or wii nad drive big cars when they are 16...)
The parents work fulltime, do weekend or evening school to get an additional degree or training. Westerners ? we loaf around in shopping malls and the beach.
My point is : have reasonable expectations, do an honest days of work , put in some extra effort , and you will get and keep a job. These days it's all gimme gimme gimme.
Unfortunately too many people are being led by example ( examples being: the fat cats in wall street and corporate top) Don't fall in that trap.
One observation : most of the time the real specialists blend in. Over the years i have learned to shy away from the spit and polish guy that arrives in a suit, Nissan Z. and lives in a 750K dollar condo , yet comes straight out of school, or only has 2 or 3 years of 'experience'. That is an alarm bell going off.
Windows 7 UAC flaw silently elevates malware access
Microsoft SKUs Windows 7 clarity
Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'
Tuesday 3rd February 2009 21:51 GMT
@pierre
inkscape ? you're joking right ? Try going to a publisher with drawings made in inkscape... Sorry bud its AI or EMF files they want... none of which inkscape can produce.
it can't even grab correctly from the clipboard. Most (windows) programs post graphics data as EMF to the clipboard so you can grab it as vector data. Illustrator : no problem. Inkscape ? sorry does not work in a lot of cases ( especially elliptoid arcs ).
Sure SVG is a neat format. except nobody in the printing industry uses it yet. I had really nice drawings in inkscape... all for nothing
Monday 26th January 2009 20:54 GMT 
we have millions of very smart people
all wasting their time fighting endless vi vs emacs , gnome vs kde, ubunut vs redhat vs debian vs suse battles.
Wanne topple microsoft ? Write a Windows clone: something that can run any of the bajillion existing windows applications straight from the box, and can use any of the windows drivers.
The API's are known. The driver interfaces are known. You could rewrite it from scratch and make it bulletproof.
An Os is picked in function of the applications that run on them. And right now ... windows wins..
Exploding mobile phone kills Chinese man
Unpatched web vulns turn internet into drive-by warzone
Toshiba wows crowds with sexy touch smartphone
Third-gen Apple iPhone in development?
Thursday 29th January 2009 22:51 GMT
maybe
This one will have stereo profile on bluetooth. Imagine that.... world's best music player / phone can only handle mono audio...
And maybe the GPS will have a 3d view and vvoice turn by turn naviagation instead of only being a dumb map reader .... and maybe there sill be an SD card slot like any normal phone...
and maybe just maybe you will be able to save GPS map information so you can find your way around places that have no cell phone coverage , maybe they will even let you install tomtom ...
ah one can only dream. until the above things are not possible , i'm not interested. wake me when something usefull comes along ...
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB hard drive
2TB drives arrive down under
Opera sings praises of Microsoft-browser statement
419ers take Canadian for $150,000
Prolific worm infects 3.5m Windows PCs
Friday 16th January 2009 00:28 GMT
unix is secure...
A couple of years ago this happened. An all Sun/Solaris network. I plugged in a Win95 based ( yes you read that correclty Win95) machine. As you know( or don' know ) you can create as many accounts as you want. Just type a new name in win95 propmts you for a password and creates the account. So i jokingly created an account called 'root' with a blank password on the win95 box. Plug it onto the network , map network drive , and map to the samba server on Solaris.
Guess what .... i had the keys to the kingdom... any file i wrote to the Sun machines had as user 'root'. I could even delete files labeled as root.... i could move systems files. for all that mattered ; i was root... That was an eye-opener ... I don't trust any operating system, even if i have the source. An Os is so large and has so many lines of source you can never be 100% sure that something is not lurking in a corner...
Experts trumpet '25 most dangerous' programming errors
Wednesday 14th January 2009 20:59 GMT
@alain williams
How about the firmware that makes a diskdrive spin ? That is megabytes of embedded firmware. ZERO dynamic memory allocation ! For some portions of that firmware they go so far as to hand allocate the memory locations. This byte here, that word there. And the real critical code is handcrafted assembly. Interrupt handling has to be absolute and deterministic
Wednesday 14th January 2009 10:55 GMT
i blame the likes of RAM and FLASH memory and Von Nuemann architectures
It's all the fault of running code from RAM and FLASH and Von Neumann architectures
If you have a true harvard machine then there is no such thing as code injection from data space. There is code memory and data memory. you can not execute from data memory. Simple as that. And there is also I/O space. And only code can go to I/O space.
Then there is the memories : when processors only had ROM (mask rom or antifuse rom or OTP ) to run from, there were far fewer errors. First of all the code could not be overwritten by something malicious. The rom was masked during fabrication and that was it. Second point: quality control was much bette.r The attitude now is , oh well we'll fix it in the next release . If you have to shell out for a new maskset you will think at least 500000000 times about each and every instruction you put down.
What's my point ? Why does nobody make an OS that can boot from write protected flash ? you install on a clean machine. Load the OS core and drivers that you need. ONce this install is done : powerdown , flip WP switch and restart. If your machine catches a bug : hit the reset button. bye bye virus, spyware or whatever. I don't care. This could easily be done. Make a split registry and program files directory. The stuff that is critical sits in WP block. The visible file system is a logical OR between the flash and harddisk with the flash having priority. So if a nasty throws a couple of DLL's in virtual 'c:\windows\system' . Let it ! who cares. Those files end up on the harddisk. During boot the OS does not load anything from HDD. THe files on the flash have priority. If a duplicate file is found betwene flash and HDD you get a message after boot that file so and so is in location so and so and a duplicate exisits in flash. Cleanup ? yes-no?
Given that an OS + APPS is small. Couple of gigabyte and flash cost pennies : what are we waiting for ? I would immediatel ybuy such a machine. Primary volume : 8 or 16 or 32Gbyte flashdrive with mechanical WP ( a switch ), data volume : standard harddisk.
The only pain : when you need to install or do an upgrade you need to power down flick a switch and then do that again. Advantage : you always boot from a known good system. If an update is in order : download file. power down. flick switch , launch system ( now in known good state ) deploy update , power down , flick switch to safe , power up. Done. But then again. how many times a year do you install new software ? And when installing software you can give option : to safe zone or to harddisk. ( remember the visible filesystem is a logical OR between flash and HDD ( not at bit level of course but at file/directory level), with the files in flash having priority. So you can install your game to harddisk. but some app that is more critical to flash, in whihc case the installation procedure requires you to do the switch toggling. I would make the switch toggle something like : you need to press this button while powering up. That way you force people from doing the safe procedure.
It's so simple , i wonder why nobody has thought about this before. Especially these days when flash is 1$ a gigabyte...
US teen clocks up 14,528 text messages
New chip aims HD video at iPhone
Virus peddlers set up shop on Google code project
Linux: this year's silver lining?
Tuesday 6th January 2009 20:55 GMT 
@dyslectic NarC (Mark)
Learn how to read , then maybe you will find the support phone numbers. ( and be able to write names correclty.)
I stated 'it is psychologically'. Most people that need (legal) software go to a store , browse through the shelves and buy something from a well known brand. Maybe that's not the case where you come from , but it is where i live.
No matter how you twist it, fact remains that 9/10 of the stuff out there (hardware) has no drivers for linux, and, for most of the stuff you need to interact with there is no linux solution. You know there is other people outside you in the world. Those voices you keep hearing are not figments of your imagination. Most of these 'other people' do not run linux.
First thing that needs to be done is to convince hardware and software vendors to port their stuff to linux. When that is done , linux will take over. Then you will have a real choice of operating system, because you will not be restricted to what can run on what and what works with what.
Tuesday 6th January 2009 09:58 GMT
unless
People can go to a store , buy a computer with linux pre installed , and browse through the shelves and look at all the boxed software that runs on Linux, that comes with nice self deploying installers , a manual and a phone nu,ber you can caall for help ( i know its psychologically). it will NEVER get an inrush on the desktop.
Something that fails to register with all the afficionados is that people are in a mindset : we go to a store , buy a computer and some software. This stuff is made by a big company . if it doesn't work we can get our money back, or there is a helldesk we can call.
If i produce something using this machine i can give this to someone else who can open the file.
A very simple example. I want to buy a computer new computer so i can store my pictures from my nice camera , sort them , and use some software to make a nice photobook to have printed by snapfish or picaboo or mypublisher. I will then burn a couple of DVD's with slideshows using either Nero or Pinnacle studio. And also print some locally on my nice inkjet printer
Linux is not an option. Simply because :
- There is an oddball collection of stuff out there on the web that all does bits and pieces , some only work on distro so andd so , some are dependent on package so and so.
- printer drivers ? try finding a hardware manufacturer that provides drivers for linux ...
- all popular on-line printing software out there is written for windows. Wherever you go the answer is . sorry windows only.
- some nice software like pinnacle studio or premiere elements ? sorry.
the only other option is : get an overpriced Mac...
no thank you i will stick to windows.
Don't shout at your disk drives, warns Sun engineer
Android runs (on) free(runner)
Saturday 3rd January 2009 18:17 GMT 
@e & Alex rose
You miss my point. IT'S A PHONE ! First thing it has to be able to do is answer a call and make a call correctly. Everything else is eye candy , bling and nice to have.
Look at all the cell phones that had monochrome digit only or minimalistic displays. They seldomly crashed, had no OS. The Mobira Talkman ran on a CDP1802 processor with an executable program of roughly 12Kilobyte ... and it always worked.
It just seems to me that now you need 120 million transistors and 5 megs of code to turn on a lightbulb ... Everything is so over engineered ( and shoddiliy because everyone is desperate to be first to market) that nothing works right anymore. It's the bling that gets all the attention, while the base isn't ready yet.
Wednesday 31st December 2008 19:05 GMT 
far more reliable ... (david hicks)
i laughed so hard coffee came out my nose.
Quote : it doesn't work properly, bluetooth doesn't work in the later releases, though there is now a software keyboard so you can at least answer a call. GPRS doesn't work, as far as I can tell. WiFi neither. The system won't switch off. Sometimes it doesn't recover from suspend.
However, the software is far more reliable and responsive ....
its a phone that cant even perform the basic phone functions very well ( like answering a call )
If architects would design buildings like open source code.. the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation...
Mine is the one with the samsung blackjack that has the blueman group 'chicken' ringtone.
Microsoft plague threatens 30GB Zune extinction
Thursday 1st January 2009 19:50 GMT
laugh all you want.
i got a zune + dock + fm transceiver cheap when compusa went out of business. Ripped it apart , After some soldering and a dab of hot glue here and there i built it into the car (sits underneath the cneter console. Entire thing is hidden. Plays through cars sound system. Works perfectly.
Try that with those ipods. You can't even hack the hardware on those. Its all 'proprietary'.
The original zune is a Toshiba player in disguise. All standard parts.
If you can fart, you can earn $10,000
Walmart's Jesus Phone no better, no worse
Saturday 27th December 2008 03:37 GMT
cheapskates
tss. what has the world come to. It used to be that only wealthy people could afford a 600$ iPhone. You could flash it in front of someone , people would kiss the ground you walked on.
People would marvel at the sght of one. ( You could say to people : i distinctly saw you marvel at my iPhone. Jes, the iPhone used to be fit for the emperor of Queppu )
Now every lowlife can buy one at wallfart. There is nothing anymore that makes them stand out.
Maybe it's time for Prada to release a new one.
Last major VHS supplier ejects from tape biz
Wednesday 24th December 2008 08:08 GMT
a cr@p movie stays a cr@p movie , even on blu-ray
I watch one or 2 movies a week. Get them through netflix. The ones i like i buy . And the only thing worth buying this year was Wall-e. All the rest was only worth renting, watching , and mark it off the list.
As for the movies i really like, i strongly doubt they will ever bring Laurel and Hardy movies to blu-ray.
US.gov questions DNS liberalisation plans
Microsoft gives XP another four months to live
Tuesday 23rd December 2008 20:45 GMT
@greg
Stuff i use at home: Adobe Premiere in conjunction with a Matrox RTx2 for video editing .
Various microcontroller devtools that use USB based JTAG probes. None of those work right (under wine). Altera Quartus.
Stuff i use professionally: Various high end cad software. Some variants are flavor x of linux only, others are flavor y only. Others are windows only. I would need at least 3 different Os's to keep everything running. Same software is all available for, and runs happily on win XP. And the really high end stuff i use is solaris-only anyway. Simply run an xterm on win Xp.
There is a wildgrow of linux distros these days. It's almost monty pythons twit race... They all take off in different directions. It is too much hassle to keep everything running and in working order. The computer is a tool for me , just like a screwdriver and a soldering iron is. some people like making their own screwdrivers and soldering irons, or making adapters to fit a tip from manufacturer x on an iron from y. That's all fine. I am not interested. I just buy the tool i need. Right now , linux and MacOs have nothing to offer that i can use. ( Yes, i have 2 linux boxes. One is a lamp server to run a documentation wiki. Fine. works flawless. The other one is the 'toy' machine. But for everyday productive usage ? sorry its XP.. ( And maybe in the future win7. Vista i am not interested in. I have a lpatop with Vista and a media centre running vista. and that is fine. But there is too much annoyances in vista like dimming screens every time some stupid program wants to poll for an update.
I wish they would make a univeral updating mechanism that every program has to adhere to. A program would simply enter the URL where the ehceck has to be done. A central updater can then go and grab self deploying updaters from those URL's. There would be 1 little icon in the system tray 'there are updates available'. When you click it opens a box that show the list of avaialble updates. Like the updater in ubuntu. That is actually a useful tool.
Tuesday 23rd December 2008 00:28 GMT
@joe earl: vista has annoyances
every frickin 5 minutes the screen dims and that uac pops up. 'wa wa wa wants to perform an update check allow-deny' ( replace wawawa with adobe acrobat , hp printer driver , java , flash , and a ton of other things. )
Every time i boot the computer i have to sit through that. and then when i am browsing the web the adobe and flash things come to annoy me too. There should at least have been a button ALLOW-ALWAYS. Just like on a firewall. you set the rules once. But no , you have to be bugged contonuously by this pest.
Apart from that. Vista is pretty stable.
Just file copying could be a lot faster. it takes forever to move large files. I have 2 identical machines ( one with vista one with xp. copying a memroy card from my camera. is 3 times faster on xp than on vista. Vista absolutely wants to catalog , extract exif data , prepare thumbnails and all kinds of other stuff i do not need right at that moment. just copy the bloody files and get it over with. i have work to do.
Mac OS 10.5.6 problems? Apple suggests shampoo
Western Digital WD TV HDD-to-HDTV adaptor
Friday 19th December 2008 01:51 GMT
eh ...
How is not being able to play Apple DRM crippled files a problem ? Simply boycott DRM crippled stuff.
And if you want a serious mediaplayer : buy a Tvix6500 or one of the other devices made by Dvico.
Lots of players claim they can handle 1080. Sure they will output in 1080 , but has anyone fed them a true 1080 stream ? Like an M2T stream containing HDV video data ? Most of these small box media players roll over and die if they have to play that , simply because they don't have the horsepower nor the memory needed to tackle it.
NASA will give away old Shuttles for free
Microsoft issues emergency IE patch as attacks escalate
Apologies after teacher's 'Linux holding back kids' claim
Wednesday 17th December 2008 01:19 GMT
she has a point though...
In the real world no software is fully free.... go talk to red hat or novell. Maybe they will give you the os for free, but if you need support they will pull money from each and every orifice in your body..... and they will require you to smile and say things like 'thank you' and 'i am not worthy' when they do it too.
And if you need any kind of decent application that can run on it ... prepare to be ransacked for more money.... novell or oracle db anyone ? tools from cadence and mentor anyone ? solidworks ? SAP ? . fill in your own serious business or cad appliaction...
free .... the cost of the hardware/os is NOTHING compared to support costs and cost of applications. 1000$ gets you a good workstation ( quad core + quadro gfx + os of choice ) these days. 99 $ for a wintendo licence is nothing compared to that. And the total system cost is nothing compared to licences that run in the millions every year for the applications.
Plus if there is a major update to your linux you run the risk that half your hardware no longer works because they DELIBERATELY break the api.... i call it sabotage.
And 'free' in the other sense ... whenever you touch something that has open source in it you have to pay a bloody bunch of bloody lawyers to cover your behind. You might just have created something that may fall under GPL or LGPL and you may have to give out the keys to the kingdom... you need a lawyer to translate the legalese. Otherwise you may feel the wrath of the fsf ... I'll take commercial compilers. Those come with a licence to sell whatever i produce with them and the freedom to include whatever libraries come with a licence. ( and yes i have the source to those libraries and can make derivates. )
Its only free for hobbyists. they can install distros to their hearts content.
Yes i play with linux too. Here is my history
- version 0.89 on a 720k floppy was soo cool. look a *nix command prompt...
- the first port of x-server. look man, i have x-eyes on my screen... all you have is win3.1 with a ton of applications
- look i have a cool LAMP based on 6.xx of ubunut. Until an automated update broke the whole config to the point it wuld not boot, and i had to find a way to access the reiserfs volume from a windows pc....
I still have a linux machine. To browse the big bad web. There it shines.
Something to think about : if all people in the world were honest , we would not need virusscanners and spyware removers and we wouldn't need linux or windows ( we'd long time ago had something that works. )
coat please. i have to go boot iRMX now.
Man trademarks ;-) emoticon
Apple files 3D-interface patent
Friday 12th December 2008 20:01 GMT 
gimme that
forget top and left and right.
the bottom looks perfect. i want an interface without bottom dock or toolbar. when mouse approaches this 3 d things swoops in and shows snapshots of open documents categorized per type. ( kind of like an old filing tray with cards in it ) click on the card and the application and document swoop back into place.
i often have 3 or 4 spreadsheets, 2 or 3 docuemtns and a bunch of pdf's open at the same time (some minimized . instead of haveing to go to a menu to switch or go to the windows bar and read the text on all the buttons to pop them to the foreground i can simply pick them from this 3d tray.
gimme gimme !!! let me at it. this is genius ! ( and yes i am an apple-hater by the way )
Firm touts anti-radiation chip for phones
Brute force SSH attack confounds defenders
MIT boffins crack fusion plasma snag
Python 3.0 appears, strangles 2.x compatibility
Friday 5th December 2008 19:50 GMT
@mattk
i was making a pun. when MS migrated from VB6 to .NEt they also broke tons of existing stuff. Same with vista: it was supposed to be faster . turned out to be slower and a resource hog. Many 'XP' programs experience trouble when running on vista.
Anyway. Not my problem. I don't use python. I tried it. I didn't like the forced 'indentation' it has. don;t know if that is still so in 3.0. also the lack of good editor ( read an editor that fixes my typos like missing brackets and semicolons. I like the intellisense in visual studio. ) but again. that was like 2 years ago.