Posts by Hein-Pieter van Braam 20 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2008
"Although the iconic ThinkPad moniker lives on, I don't believe it hold the same weight under the Lenovo brand as it did when it was was Big Blue branded."
Don't worry about it, If you buy the 'Thinkpad' branded Lenovo laptops, that is 'thinkpad' not 'ideapad' or 'thinkpad edge' they are still very, very good. I have an X230 and my girlfriend has a T420s and they are both as solid as my X60 ever was. Their documentation and after-warranty support is also still great (you can still buy an entire thinkpad in spare parts if you want)
Lenovo really is doing a bang-up job.
Not possible if there was a big bang. In the earliest universe the universe was opaque to radiation entirely, forming a 'wall' through which light could not yet have passed. Even if the universe is entirely closed and small enough for the light to have traveled 'around' it still would've hit the wall at the earliest universe.
How can we know this? Because we can still see the microwave background radiation, this is the wall as seen from this side of time. If the universe is closed, we would only be able to see the backs of our own heads once the MBR has entire dissapated
You are probably trolling, but here goes anyway just in case you're not:
Once you include an omnimpotent and omnipresent being with a personality into the equation then science doesn't 'fit together' at all. There would never be a reason to research anything beyond your first assumption.
Originally it was thought that Newton's laws of motion were a perfect description of how the universe worked, except that they didn't always match up entirely, at the time Newton and others then postulated that occasionally a God (Yahweh in this case) stepped in to correct the motions.
Had everyone simply accepted that, and 'included a Creator in the science' as you suggest, today we would not have known about the relativistic nature of the universe, or the quantum effects underpinning the foundations of matter.
If we keep questioning we keep finding new things, 'God did it' is not an answer, it is saying 'I know everything there is to know', it ends inquiry and creativity and progress and ultimately propsperity.
What he's ACTUALLY saying is that software costs ARE a big expense of a startup but that the cost of the software becomes less important once you start scaling up, a lot because then the infrastructure becomes the highest cost.
On a sidenote: Even then, having the ability to customize the software is probably a big bonus, especially if you an epic number of machines, it would be possible to strip everything you don't need and not have to worry about maintaining those bits.
The events were:
1) Googler finds major flaw in a piece of software that a lot of people trust their data to.
2) Googler tells Microsoft that the software that their customers trust them to fix is flawed and needs fixing to preserve their safety
3) Not a squeak from Microsoft for 5 days, essentially giving the middle finger to their customers and their trust in them.
4) Googler publishes the code, forcing Microsoft to react, and showing how little they care about their customers.
What a lot of people seem to forget is that the FLAW IS ALREADY THERE, it's nobody but Microsoft's fault, and there's no reason to assume that this flaw hasn't been exploited before by people who don't disclose their flaws, but SELL THEM.
Five days is in no way an unreasonable time to expect a fix, or at least an advisory from your vendor. Patch turn around time from notice to actual patch in system is measured in days in most cases on free operating systems.
And it's DEFINITELY not unreasonable to expect *some* response like "We're looking into it, please give us a x time to make a patch."
This is just your vendor throwing your trust back in your face, nothing more.
There have been car laser and radar detectors for ages, they are now outlawed in a lot of European countries though since they 'interfere' with detecting people who speed (which is, incidentally exactly what they were designed for)
While they might not be 5 dollars exactly, they are remarkably accurate and I doubt the scatter from a television remote somewhere in the vicinity (as in the same block of buildings) would be enough to trigger an alarm.
There are a whole crop of companies who even sell 'laser warning systems' to the various military around the world to protect planes from laser guided missiles and other equipment like it.
If it were that trivial to make a beam of energy that does not interact with anything you send it to, but does send a measurable information back we have solved the Heisenberg uncertainty principle! :P
The whole point of sniping is to kill high value targets at a long distance without them knowing about it, on account of the long distance.
Sending a nice 'heads up' in advance through an easily detectable fucking laser beam seems to me to be ever so slightly damaging to the whole fucking concept.
IF use of this becomes pervasive, how long until the aforementioned high value target have 5 dollar laser detectors on their coats?
Hell, you could even have a form of laser shield like it was in use in the 'stinger' anti-speed ticket device. (Detect laser, shoot garbage laser beam back confusing the device)
Does this not seem stupid to anyone else?
Actually, no. The point is that because of the vulnerability you DO NOT NEED a Microsoft certificate, you can fake one. That is the whole problem of this epically downplayed vulnerability.
You only need someone with the ability to do a man in the middle attack and I think that this something that governments and large companies SHOULD BE prepared for.
As for the 'source server' the point is that you can verify the code, thus actually KNOWING if there is a rootkit in your patches or not, which is actually he ONLY WAY you can be sure in this case that everything is on the up and up.
Tell me, how DOES Windows verify that it's patches haven't been tampered with?
I DO hope Microsoft has a way of verifying it's patches' certificats that does not use the same codepath as the SSL code. But it almost certainly IS the same, so there is basically no way to be sure if you're either
a) Installing a Microsoft issued patch
b) Installing a rootkit
Luckily the sourcecode patch at Microsoft.com can be hand applied so you can verify that everything is in order yourself.
Ow... whoops!
Too bad this problem won't even be considered by the security experts at your local government.
Once again a solution to a problem that wouldn't exist if you hadn't used Windows desktops.
Why in the hell would you want to bring the worst of thin and fat clients to the same system? I'm sure VMWare and Citrix all love this idea, but for a company? If anything this adds one MORE system to administrate not less.
I mean, come on! Think about this, 'Server based computing' is all the rage now because it's supposedly easier to admin. Yet, on Windows, it isn't because a lot of apps can't cooexist on the same box, a sever design flaw no matter how you look at it. So, server-based computing can't really work but, hey! buzzword!
So, instead of just giving up and moving to an OS that's, you know, sane. We go and put SEPARATE virtual machines on a central server that are, all in all, no easier to manage than separate desktops and are almost certainly MUCH more expensive (if only because of the insane licensing fees associated with this 'VDI')
And because applications STILL can't coexist we will also use 'Application Virtualization' because, well, virtualisation is all the rage too, isn't it? Spending another 60-100 dollars a desktop per year to solve a problem that shouldn't have been here in the first place.
It's amazing, really...
Especially since Novell ZENworks already solves this problem neatly with remote imaging and application deployment if you MUST use a broken desktop OS which makes managing 'real' desktops not any worse than 'virtual' ones...
Wake up and smell the marketing ploys! THIS IS POINTLESS and it's not 'technology' it's a way to make the already insane TCO of Windows desktops go EVEN HIGHER.
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