Posts by Bill Stewart

New 'Madi' cyber-espionage campaign targets Iran AND Israel

"Mahdi", not "Madi"

Look at the code - the file is mahdi.c, directory is /Mahdi/. It's approximately the Muslim equivalent of "Messiah", depending on which branch of Islam you're talking to, so it's kind of an arrogant thing to name your program.

France: All your books are belong to us

If the state steals your copyright, it's not piracy.

It's <i>privateering</i>. Yarrr!

RIAA-led mob threatens innovation, Senator warns

Citizens United was a correct decision

Wyden's right about lots of things.

But <i>Citizens United</i> was a correct decision by the Supreme Court - if whiny liberals like Michael Moore can make movies about how evil the Bush Gang was, then whiny right-wingers can make whiny right-wing movies about how evil Hillary Clinton was. If it's ok for media-focused corporations like MSNBC, NPR, and Fox Noise to express political preferences in their news/entertainment programming, it's ok for non-media-focused corporations to do so also, and if blocking the media corps from having opinions is obvious censorship, blocking the non-media corps from doing that is also censorship.

And yes, that means I'm saying it's wrong to censor those evil right-wing greedy thug corporations. And while NPR is mostly in there as a throwaway line, if you don't think they and the BBC are biased pushers of The Establishment's worldview, you haven't been listening very critically.

Attention metal thieves: Buy BT, get 75 MILLION miles of copper

But who would you sell the copper to?

The problem with this Clever Plan is that the big customers for copper wire are companies like BT, so buying BT in order to steal all its copper and sell it back to BT just doesn't quite work... Sure, you can also sell it to electrical contractors, but the telcos are a big part of the business.

Norwegian diplomats brush up on black metal

Black Metal Edvard Grieg?

If you want to do Norwegian music, do it right. Metalheads could probably do something reasonable with In The Hall of the Mountain King.

And then there's the Vegan Black Metal Chef on Youtube. "CUT the Tofu! Turn The Plate! You don't need to use a knife as Awesome as Mine".

It's the Folk Music Process - So write your own!

Other people have done things with Abba music, like Terence Chua's Cthulhu Abba filk - you can too!

Making a storage mountain out of a molecule

Too Cold To Be Practical

Liquid Nitrogen at 77K is cheap, available in large volume, and only somewhat inconvenient - you won't use it at home, but might use it in a data center. Unfortunately, most useful superconductors can't run at this high a temperature, a mere -I96 Celsius.

Liquid Helium at 4K is expensive, and helium's in short supply, and you'd mainly use it in a laboratory or very special application.

This storage runs at 2K, which means that merely cooling it with liquid helium isn't good enough - you have to actively cool it after that. It's really really difficult. It's extremely valuable to have this kind of discovery in a lab, because it points out directions for interesting research, and maybe some of that will lead to something practical.

Five amazing computers for under £100

Psion 3a totally rocked

I had one of them for years, until the hinge finally cracked too badly. Gorgeous screen, I could run a 24x80 terminal emulator on it, organizer and notes than synced with Outlook. I replaced it with a Palm III, which did a much better job of being pocket sized but wasn't very good for taking notes with (even though I was good at Graffiti, it was still slower than typing on the 3a.) My current Android phone is much shinier, and almost as useful as the 3a, but not quite.

How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

SSD vs. USB Stick ?

Obviously you wouldn't use a USB stick for a laptop, because it would stick out and get broken off, but how do SSDs compare with a relatively fast USB stick. They're pretty cheap for 32GB, and that's certainly enough for a boot drive that's going to be read-mostly.

Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation

Unix vs. Virtualization

Unix systems do a great job of managing disk and cache and multitasking scheduling - VMware doesn't improve that by wrapping an extra layer of emulation underneath. (I won't quibble if you want to criticize Windows's limitations, though it's also gotten better over the years.)

What VMware really gives you is administrative separation, so you can have different systems administered by different people all running applications that want to be Root or Administrator, and by doing hardware emulation it makes it easy to snapshot machines and move them between different physical sets of hardware without the applications having to know about it, which is great for backups, hardware replacement, and debugging.

Apple 'gay-cure' app severely slapped

Their Arguments are Attacking the Organization instead of the App Itself

So far, everything I've seen from the organizations attacking the app talks a lot about the organization that's publishing the app, but says exactly nothing about the app itself, and it appears that they're attacking it without having actually seen it.

That's inappropriate - yes, they have lots of good reasons to dislike the organization, and no reasons to suspect that an application from them _won'_ be something they dislike, but they really ought to look at the application and criticize _it_ before they go calling for its ban.

Google opens curtain on 'manual' search penalties

Google got big by being better

Google didn't become the most popular search engine by being evil capitalist monopolizers exploiting their size - they got popular by doing an amazingly good job of providing fast searches that yielded good results. They *were* the upstart with a revolutionary new search system, which is why you're using them and not Yahoo or Altavista or Hotbot. Microsoft became a big player in the search business by using the size and money they got from their other businesses, and Yahoo's been playing the search game for a long time, and has managed to survive for a long time by doing other things besides search.

Utilitybidder gets disconnected by developer

Site Functions are still off-line, snarky comments still in page source

If it was down, it was probably because of all the people logging on and laughing at them. The web page is back, but it just says that the site is down, and while there are no longer snarky comments displayed (at least in Firefox), they're still there if you do View Page Source, so it's unlikely that they've paid up.

The cost of beating Apple's shrewd screws? £2

Every time I've owned a GM car

I've needed to buy Yet Another Stupid Torx Driver to adjust the headlights or something else that has gratuitously silly screws to prevent owners from fixing their own cars. Now, sometimes that's because it's been long enough since I bought that last one that one of the Two Gratuitously Different Stupid Torx Drivers has wandered off, but it's still annoying.

The cost of not deduping

DeDuping's easier than changing corporate behaviour

Look, the marketing and management people who keep spamming you with Powerpoint decks when a single text file would be easier for both you and them aren't going to stop that kind of behaviour. And the employees who save the files in their directories where they've got control over them instead of leaving them in their email aren't going to stop doing that, even if the email system operators relax their "please don't keep files longer than 60 days" rules to 90 or 180 or 365, because management has told them they need to hang on to this content and they've learned not to trust the Email Operators not to delete anything actually important, so even if the email system dedupes messages, you'll still have multiple copies.

But if you send them 42 copies of the request for deduping equipment for your shiny new Storage Area Network, somebody's going to buy it, and it probably will save you a lot of storage; maybe it'll even save enough to pay for itself, since the SAN storage costs you far more per very fast terabyte than medium-speed Terabyte drives you bought at your local consumer products store.

When one oligopoly screws another

Alaska's a bit different

Alaska's basically a small town with some really distant suburbs (total population 700000, half of them live in Anchorage). It really is a much smaller market than Australia.

Canada, on the other hand, has about the same population and area as Aus, and similar population density (almost everybody's near the southern border, though not always in the cities.) You could argue that shipping costs are cheaper there (closer to the US, good railroad system), but container ships mean that shipping stuff across the Pacific doesn't actually cost anything, and you can get food products from Southeast Asia at least as cheaply as the US or Canada can get them from South America in the winter.

So basically, yeah, you're getting ripped off.

US census takers fight angry Americans for their data

Why we don't trust the Census Bureau with our data

During World War 2, the US Army used Census data about race to identify Japanese-Americans to round up and send to internment camps. Now they don't care so much about race if you're Asian or European, but they really obsess about it if you're from Latin America, and the right-wing politicians obsess about sending all those Latino immigrants back home.

The Census Bureau consistently lies about how private your data is, and how the law keeps it private for 75 years. But data they've collected is data they control, and the law can be changed any time the politicians want to. If we can't keep the government pinned down with Constitutional requirements about habeas corpus or not torturing people, how can we expect census data to stay protected. Maybe the 2011 edition of the Patriot Act will allow Homeland Security to protect our American jobs from Mexican farmworkers, who knows? Or maybe it'll stay private except for internal government use, so you still can't find out who Grandma's real parents were until she's 75, but they can deport you today if they want to.

I don't care if they want to know how many toilets are in my house - they could ask the local tax assessors, so just because it's none of their business doesn't mean it's that secret. But I really don't want the government asking me about race, or national origin, or markers for that like what languages we speak at home (even though I agree that it's useful if they know what percentage of the population would benefit from government services in Spanish or Chinese.) I certainly don't want them asking questions about religion, but fortunately the US stopped that. But even something as simple as gender can be a problem - homosexuality was illegal in about 1/3 of the US until a Supreme Court case a few years ago, and I don't want the government poking into why two men or two women are roommates.

Why we love to hate Microsoft

Open Source calls it "Reusing Ideas" and "Freedom"

That's really what open source is about - it's letting people use the stuff you've developed, and being free to use the stuff other people have developed. Even if they're only doing the half of "software freedom" that's using other people's ideas, it's still a start.

My reason for not liking Microsoft software is the 25-30 years of experience I've had using their products, and while they do actually produce some fine things these days, they've gotten sufficiently big and bloated that it's still not friendly and doesn't either stay out of my way or let me adjust things easily myself. It didn't help them that I'd been using computers for some years before Microsoft - DOS was much less flexible and friendly than Unix, but a PC wasn't significantly less powerful than a PDP-11/45, and it wasn't even more friendly than RSTS-11. Sure, it was a nicer (but less powerful) than TSO, CMS, or the punch-card OSs for IBM mainframes, and I'd rather develop communication software for DOS than SNA or its predecessors. And Windows 98 had almost caught up with Macintosh 1984 in usability. And today's MS help systems are probably slightly more friendly than the ones we used on VMS.

Some of the problems were PC-related rather than purely Microsoft related; mysterious hardware crashes, inaccessible structures on disk drives, etc. It took over 20 years before my Windows machine at work had better screen resolution than the Sun-3/50 I'd used in the late 80s, although that was partly because I was using laptops. (And yeah, now I've got 32-bit color instead of 8-bit, but most of what I do is text anyway.)

Google News serves up...Wikipedia links

Regular news isn't authoritative either

Yeah, Wikipedia isn't authoritative, the accuracy is random, and the editorial process isn't as deep as the New York Times's, but think about the last time you were at a newsworthy event and compared the press reports with what you saw for yourself. If the news-reading public was lucky, the reporter actually had some understanding of the topic (that's often not true about technology or science or war or world politics, but reporters are often perceptive even if they're not knowledgeable.)

A big part of a news editor's job is to make sure the reporting covers stories that are interesting, where interesting is usually defined as "sells newspapers or attracts viewers/listeners". In some news sources, that means making sure that the story is accurate; in some it means making sure that the story matches the correct political slant or artistic preferences. We'll see if including Wikipedia gets Google enough interestingness.

Wikipedia articles are fairly good about accuracy, because they're usually written by people who care about the topic they're writing about and may even know something. Occasionally you get, say, news about elephants and Stephen Colbert, but even that's still somewhere on the accuracy scale between Fox News and the Weekly World News.

Conservative US shock-jock to sue Wacky Jacqui

Jacqui vs. Savage? Such a tough choice

Could somebody just lock the two of them in a room together? Maybe in a nice mid-Atlantic location like St. Helena? Savage is offensive, and advocates the kind of governmental abuse of civil rights that Smith routinely engages in.