Daily Kos: All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400

How insideous is this. Wanna bet the NSA somehow owns or controls Naru?

Daily Kos: All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400

Ignorance combined.

I've tried for years to get people to stop using Outlook. It's low quality, unstable, poorly designed code is not only annoying in it's frequent ability to crash and lose data, but it's un-fixable security model (or rather the lack of one) make it totally unsuitable for use on the Internet. Remember it was designed originally for internal business e-mail back when Microsoft thought the Internet was a fad.

People's refusal to stop using Outlook combined with their incessant need to click on and install every piece of crap add-on software/gizmo/toolbar/etc. has now been combined to make a truely insidious bit of invasion of privacy. Read more below.

Phil Yanov Blogs...: Spoke.com is Evil

Welcome to the home of the Uber geek...

Apparently the geek standards aren't what they used to be. I guess even geeks are getting stupider these days.

What am I talking about? Well, I took my geek and nerd tests and scored high and off the charts. Now I don't deny that I'm a geek/nerd, but I wouldn't have imagined I'd score that high. They must have lowered the bar.

Well, here for your amusement, my score icons are now included on this blog.

EETimes.com - IBM cranks dual-core Power6 beyond 4GHz

Looks like Apple's story on their Intel move is bunk.
Of course they always blamed IBM/Motorola for not coming up with the performance they needed at the price they needed.
Well, the facts are that Apple never could move enough Mac's to make the volume required for the prices to come down. So, they moved to Intel for two reasons. First, to use the volume generated by Windows PC's to get them a discount on CPU's, and second, to get on the DRM bandwagon.
Apple is becoming a content company. They sell more dollars in iTunes music than they ever will in Mac's. Because of this they do what every content provider does. Get greedy, and get protective of their product. Usually at the consumer's expense.

So, now, instead of being able to ship new Power6 based Mac's that would kill anything Intel powered, they are just another PC maker, and an overpriced one at that.


EETimes.com - IBM cranks dual-core Power6 beyond 4GHz

More "Why I don't buy Dell".

I've said for years that Dell is nothing but one of those companies that sheep seem to buy and buy despite there being no real reason. Those brands that cost more, provide less, and perform less than that competition and yet still manage to draw consumers in like moths to a flame. In Dell's case of course this analogy is pretty realistic. At least the flames part.

There are plenty of companies who have one or more product lines that draw in consumers like crazy despite being blatantly inferior to the competition. I can't tell you why this happens, but it clearly does.

Some other brands or products that fall in this category (short list, off the top of my head)

- Microsoft (of course)
- HP Printers
- Gnome (UNIX/LINUX GUI system)
- Ford
-more to come


Dell Denies It Knew of Overheating Battery Problem for Years
"Exploding" Dell Laptop Destroys Truck, Imperils Outsdoorsmen
Feds Wind Up Ford Engine Fire Probe with Massive Recall - Ford Stalled for Years While Trucks Burned
Windows Is So Slow, but Why?

Gateway, thumbs up.

Whatever your opinion of Gateway's products, my recent experiences with their tech support department was impressive.
First off, they speak actual english. Not that outsourced, learned-in-english-as-a-second-language-class english either, but honest to goodness english.
Secondly, they actually sound like they could turn on a computer without help. You know how it usually is. Some foreign tech support robot reading from a support database question list and if you try to make them deviate, or answer in a way the system doesn't cover, their heads explode. However, Gateway's people actually have a clue. Bravo.
Third, they are polite, and helpful.

Oh yeah, the system I was working on was well designed, feature packed, and stylish looking. Imagine that.

To anyone out there shopping hardware and not considering Gateway, give them a try. And buy the extended service.

Web reliability...

So a recent Netcraft report of the most reliable web hosting companies .
Of the top 7, all tied for first place, 6 run a UNIX variant, including FreeBSD and Linux. The 7th is listed as "OS Unknown", but I can guess what it runs. The first Windows system on the list is half as reliable.

Snapshot

A word to the Gnome zealots out there...

"I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE."

-Linus Torvalds

Jeremy Allison - “Trusted” Computing

While some would twist this into an argument for TCPM, I'd say it's a great argument against it.
You should control your own life and the things you own.

Linux User and Developer Magazine - Jeremy Allison - “Trusted” Computing

Dell laptop explodes at Japanese conference

I love listening to all the so called 'computer experts' that are always recommending Dell to their friends, and buying Dell for their employer. You know the type, the typical MCSE know-nothings that are sure they know everything because they can turn their own computer on fairly consistently. Even more annoying is the fact that so much of the public actually believe these guys know their own butt from a hole in the ground.

Well, I'm going to stop trying to contradict these guys. Apparently buying Dell is nature's way of weeding out some of the stupid before they breed as yet again Dell has made a product that can fail so spectacularly it can kill you. Not only is this story scary, but read the title of the three linked stories at the bottom of the article.
Dell recalls 22,000 batteries
Dell recalls a million faulty AC adaptors
Dell notebook adaptor fault: Not many killed

"Not many killed" ?!?!? What the #$*&%?
Nice.


Dell laptop explodes at Japanese conference

SGI announces largest SMP Linux.

I've said for some time, the best general purpose OS is Linux, and the best Linux by far is SuSE.

BIOS: The Quality Tech Guide

Microsoft = Big Brother?

The news broke recently that Microsoft got caught yet again* spying on it's customers.
Funny the timing of this with the announcement by China that all new PC's it buys must be Linux certified mentioned in a previous blog entry.
Can't imagine why China and many others are moving away from Microsoft.

* See:
http://130.94.161.3/KortExplores/articles/files/spy1.php
http://www.windowssecrets.com/comp/060615/ (Scroll down to "Genuine Advantage is Microsoft spyware"
http://www.marketingshift.com/2005/03/is-microsoft-spying-on-you-with.cfm
Note: This is a good time to install the "Fetch text URL" extension for Firefox. You are using Firefox right?

GROKLAW

China starts Linux revolution...

China is huge future market for technology. There are billions to be made. Microsoft is desperate to get a foothold there, and has been up to it's usual tricks. However, they have not been able to make the Chinese government cow to them like some others. China (like Russia) has banned Microsoft OS's from many military and other sensitive systems due to Microsoft's complicity with the NSA in spying on Microsoft users.
China has also promoted the development of it's own Linux distro. Now China is requiring that all PC's there be Linux compatible. Given that most PC hardware comes from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, this WILL affect everyone. And this movement is growing.

I think that if I had long term investment funds that included Microsoft stock, I would sell them. This and the ODF movement combined with Microsoft's general lack of competitive products is really going to hurt them in the next few years.

It explains Microsoft's huge push for the communist like TCPM systems. To enable them to wring the last dollars out of their declining profits at the expense of customers.

Don't buy it though, TCPM is a noose, don't put your neck in it.

Taipei Times - archives

The software protection racket, Part 1 - Network World

The software industry's jackbooted protection scheme branch, the BSA is getting out of hand.
What I want to know is, who gave them the power or right to do any of this? They act like a law enforcement agency. Make sure you read part II as well.

The software protection racket, Part 1 - Network World

Poor Helios, I feel your pain buddy!

While I don't always agree with Helios on everything, I totally understand his feelings in this matter.
We live in a world of computer users who have been conditioned to accept all manner of low quality crap from Microsoft, but they look at you like your crazy if you suggest an alternative. And if they DO bother to try something better, they won't read the manual and will blame you and the software everytime the new program doesn't work exactly the same way Microsoft does it. And worse, most of these sheep don't even know their systems are utterly 0wned and full of virii and trojans etc. I've seen systems with literally hundreds on infections.
Computers are part of every day life. These days not knowing the basics of computer science is like not learning to read, write and do arithmetic. It's ignorant and there's no excuse for it.
People take driver's ed, but expect to walk up and use a computer.
Well, thankfully, as shown by the article, sometimes ignorance is it's own punishment. I have absolutely no sympathy for the people that clicked on that link.


Blog of helios » Blog Archive » What Part of Virus and Spyware Didn’t You Understand?

Pets Mobility

OK, now I've seen everything.
Collar mounted pet cell phones.


Pets Mobility

iTWire - Microsoft Office users ready to jump ship: poll

This is no shock to me. I think users are fed up with Microsoft's strong arm tactics. The constant paid upgrades that don't really fix problems, just add more bloat.

iTWire - Microsoft Office users ready to jump ship: poll

The Fallacy of DRM [timj.co.uk]

This is a good read. Call your congressmen, MP, etc. and tell them you do not want "Trusted Computing" or any other DRM.


The Fallacy of DRM [timj.co.uk]

The closed source quality myth...

One of the key points of the anti OpenSource crowd is the idea that commercial, closed source development produces better quality code.
Sorry...

Linux Today - Community: Open Scrutiny of Open Source Code

Has Linux patching surpassed Mac and Windows?

Test shows how vulnerable unpatched Windows is.

When did this happen?

Ok, like any true geek, I'm fascinated by robotics.
The state of robotics has however been very disappointing for someone raised in the C3-PO, R2-D2 age. Sure there have been the ocassional bright spots here and there, but generally it seems like robotics has advanced at a pace only exceeding the pace of windshield wiper technology. (This is a rant for another day, but really, these stinking things haven't advanced since theywere invented, and they suck)

However, today I came across this site and it really blew my mind. Watch the videos and see these things in action. Especially BigDog and RiSE. What was really impressive to me is that they aren't trailing control wires, support cables, power lines etc. They are running self contained.
BigDog is a little freaky to watch, but very impressive. Watch when they kick him.


Boston Dynamics: The Leader in Lifelike Human Simulation

Olympic Scoring System, RC1

Ok, so after much thought and wasted time, here's a shot of the first release candidate of the ultimate Olympic Scoring system for countries.

Medals are weighted, and also countries are given a weight based on population.
For example, if a country has a weighted medal points score of 50 and that country's population is 10% of the population sum of all countries attending, then that country would have a total weighted score of 45. Or 90% of their original weighted points.

This seems fair to us since a country with a huge population has a much larger pool of potential athletes to pick from than a smaller country.

As you can see this works out to be quite fair. While the US gets a larger penalty than a smaller country, their total medal count was proportionately higher too, balancing out the penalty. China on the other hand performs well under it's expected rate for it's size.

Check it out. And any news agencies that want to use this system, it's copyrighted to us, so you'll have to get permission first, credit us, and have us on the air via satellite to comment.

Anyway, here it is, the ultimate ranking of 2006 Winter Olympic competitors.

ThinkPad 770X Revival - **UPDATE**

Ok so I'm going to post some pictures of the update process and give an overview of the process.
I'll do this slowly as I have time and just update this same post and add to it.

---

First, here's the old girl before surgery. give a click for the full size image and check the specs.
A tired old PII 300 and 66MHz Bus. Note that I had already installed the new RAM as I wanted to test it first.

---

Here's the new 500MHz PIII MMC2 module waiting to be installed. This shows the top and bottom of the module and the inset is a blow-up of the processor ID. This indicates a 500MHz non-speedstep II module with 256K full speed ATC (Advanced Transfer Cache).

---

Here's a montage of the disassembly process.
Top left: Keyboard and lid removed.
Top Right: Shield, speakers, modular items removed.
Bottom left: GFX board removed, looking at CPU module, DC<->DC board waiting to come out.
Bottom right: My big paw installing the new module.

Out-geeked!

Ok, so as cool as I thought my Olympic Medal scoring system is, I was out-geeked by my buddy the spreadsheet guru.

So my original idea weights medals to make it worth winning Gold.
His system goes a step further (several steps actually).

First, he takes the original, mildly useful original TV sports system which just adds medals equally and then calculates each country's medal count as a percentage of total medals. Cool. Now the useless system becomes more useful.
He then applied the same idea to my weighted system. Giving a percentage of weighted medal points of total medal points for the games. Now that's cool.

Finally he adds a hybrid score which averages my weighted system scores with the unweighted scores. Whew.

Anyway, I like his idea. Though in my opinion, if you want to talk bragging rights for your country, then I like column L of his spreadsheet. This is the percent of total weighted points. Basically his idea and mine combined, ignoring the original TV sports unweighted scores.

Below is a pic of his Excel spreadsheet that I (of course) imported into OpenOffice and prettied up a bit for web use.

Now, as long as we are taking this scoring thing too far, how about we also weight the scores relative to population of each country? After all, how hard is it to find 30 medal winners from a pool of 300 million as opposed to a pool of say 5 million?
(note: I noticed this 300 million pool didn't stop the US from importing a Canadian Ringer with a special act of congress for their ice dancing medal ;')

Don't forget you can click on any of these pics for the full size, readable original.


The Scooter method applied to the old and Tachyon systems. Note I prefer column L over F or N.

Microsoft Promotes Linux on the Desktop

What's the number one impediment to Linux taking over the desktop?

-Too hard to install?
Nope, this hasn't been true for any good Linux distro in years, in fact it's easier to install SuSE Linux than Windows XP.

-Lack of applications?
Not much of a problem these days, there are thousands of high quality, open source and commercial applicatinos for Linux. And between WINE/Crossover Office and other technologies you can pretty much run anything.

-Hardware support?
About a wash. Windows support is limited to pretty much only spanking new hardware. Linux supports older HW and nearly all mainstream HW. Plus stuff just works with Linux, no downloading drivers, "run this CD First", or other Windows type nonsense.

No, the real answer is games.
The unfortunate problem is that:
A) Game manufacturers are purely short term profit driven, with low margins. They support only the most popular, widespread platforms.
B) Linux developers and hackers are often more interested in other things besides gaming.
(I rarelyplay any games myself. There's just too much other, more interesting stuff to do).

Not being a gamer myself, I always told people "Who cares if Linux supports games? If you really need to play them, buy a console"
However, console's haven't really had the gaming power, and the graphics that a good gaming PC can provide. Heck, the X-Box was nothing but a crappy PC in a big ugly plastic box, with low, TV resolution graphics. After all, the cheapest monitor blows away the resolution, detail, and colour clarity of television. Even at 640x480. So for serious gamers, this wasn't really a solution.

However, thanks to two recent introductions, this has all changed.
The first of course is HDTV. Now that your living room television can give you 54 inches of hi-resolution glory, your monitor looks puny and lifeless.
The second is high-end, HDTV supporting consoles.
Combine the two and PC gaming is on the way out.

Now here comes Microsoft finally selling a decent, high powered, HDTV supporting console in the X-Box 360.

So today I was blown-away to realize that Microsoft is spending millions promoting the solution to the final impediment to Linux on the desktop.

So head on down to your local computer store, buy an inexpensive PC, load SuSE Linux on it, and with the money you save on the hardware* and on the software** you can buy an X-Box 360 (or even better, wait for the sure to be superior Playstation III) and still have change left over.

Thanks Microsoft for supporting the move to quality, inexpensive, Linux operating systems on the desktop.

---

*(it can be cheaper now that you don't need it to support gaming and windows bloat)
**($59 for SuSE with 2500 applications, versus hundreds just for Windows XP, and Office and a few other apps)

Olympic Medal ranking of countries...

I've been watching the Olympics and I'm a little bit perplexed at how all the news agencies have used seemingly random criteria or at least something stupid like total medal count to decide the order to list countries in the medal standings.

I created my own simple, and I would think obvious, scoring system.
Each medal receives a value and the countries are ranked by total score.

Here's the simple point system:
Gold medal = 3 points
Silver medal = 2 points
Bronze medal = 1 points

So if a country has the following medals:

Lower Slobovia:
4 gold, 1 silver, 2 Bronze

Then their overall points are determined as follows:
(4x3)+(1x2)+(2x1)=16

I've created a spreadsheet to calculate this and input all the countries with at least 2 medals.

It looks like this as of Friday February 21st. ***UPDATED***



If anyone wants this spreadsheet, let me know. It's pretty simplistic.

ThinkPad 770x revival

So I've wanted a new laptop for a while now, but I haven't gotten one for two main reasons. First I haven't had the money to buy a decent one. Second, I can't really find a laptop worthy of replacing my current model. I did however recently setup a ThinkPad T42 for a friend and I'm thinking that the T series will be my next laptop. But that still leaves problem one. Money. I did find a good T series for $750, so that's my savings goal. In the meantime, I'm still holding on to my old ThinkPad 770X.

I'm pretty picky about my laptops. I want a specific set of features. I don't play games on my computers so a lot of the consumer oriented laptops are not anything I want.

What I don't like about most current laptops:
- cheaply made, too much plastic.
- everything integrated, not modular or upradeable.
- Stinking dragpad pointers. These things are worthless. And to prove it, look at everyone who has one. They almost ALL use an external mouse.
- horrible mushy, short throw, odd layout keyboards.
- crappy screens. Why on earth are laptops shipping with such low resolution screens? What good is 1280x768 or 1280x800? it's worthless for browsing and wordprocessing etc.


What I want/demand:
- USB 2.0
- PC-CARD slots
- Sturdy case
- good keyboard
- Trackpoint, the best laptop mouse controller period. **
- good, hires display. 1280x1024 minimum.
- Modular and upgradeable
- firewire
- CD/DVD burner combo
- dual monitor support
- ATI Radeon or nVidia graphics
- cool running AMD or Intel processor. I'll trade a little speed for heat any day. laptops these days run too hot. You can't even actually put them on your lap or they'll almost burn you. And heat is bad for components anyway. Heat equals short life. In this regard I think AMD's latest mobile CPU might have the advantage. I'd even try a Transmeta CPU.
- modular networking with standard, Linux supported chipsets. Ideally I'd like to see bottom panels with 2 or 3 mini-PCI slots. One for WiFi, with a good, built in antenna in the screen lid frame. One for Ethernet. 10/100 is fine for now, I mean who needs gigabit on their laptop anyway? What would you hook it to?
- Built in long range Bluetooth.
- IrDA with a transceiver on the top of the lid frame pointing toward the rear and one on the right or left side.
- removeable HD in a caddy.

I'm sure there's more I can't think of right now.

Now, back to reality. My current laptop is one I bought back when I was a CEO and had money to burn on toys. At that time I bought a new laptop every year and I always got the best. {Sigh} Those were the days. Anyway, the last laptop I bought before leaving the rat-race was an IBM ThinkPad 770x 9549-7AO. I love it. I've used it steadily since I bought it '99. That alone is a testament to how well built and, for the time, high-end the 770X was that I can still be using it 7 years later.
Granted, I'm not a typical user. I don't play huge 3D games and I don't go in for a lot of the CPU wasting addons and crap that people do to their systems. I work on software, browse, type, edit, word process, compile, etc.
For 95% of what I do, the system was enough as it came. The real problem has been the steady bloat of OS's and applications. Programmers get lazier, and RAD tools get crappier, and the baseline system gets bigger so programmers don't have to be as efficient. So slowly this bloat has crept up on me and finally my trusty old ThinkPad had become too slow to use through no fault of it's own.
Recently I decided to do something about it.
I did a lot of research and a lot of cross referencing and came up with a plan to upgrade the old girl.
Here's the original specs, FYI:

ThinkPad 770X 9549-7AO
Intel 440BX chipset
Pentium II 300 with 512k L2
128MB PC-66 SDRAM (64MB SODIMM on motherboard, 64MB SODIMM on trapdoor slot)
Trident Cyber 9397DVD graphics chipset, 64bit AGP graphics with hardware video acceleration and 3D acceleration.
8MB SGRAM video memory
13.7" active matrix hires LCD screen, 1280x1024 resolution
8.1GB IDE hard drive in modular HD bay (uses caddy)
real 3 button TrackPoint mouse pointer
long throw, keyboard with full size keys
UltraBay II for CD, DVD, Zip, Superdisk, HD or battery
DVD ROM Ultrabay II drive
Lithium Ion battery
56k V.90 MWave DSP modem
Crystal 4236 audio with 3D surround
IBM DEVA card (DVD Enhanced Video Accelerator) provides hardware MPEG acceleration for DVD playback. Also provides video capture with composite and S-Video input. Video output with composite and S-Video output, and Digital SPDIF surround sound output.

That's the basics, you can see more specs on IBM/Lenovo's website.

Now, for the upgrades, I decided on an advanced, technically difficult, but slightly conservative plan. Here's the items I upgraded and how:

--Component-----------------------------Replaced with
- MMC2 PII 300MHz processor module------MMC2 PIII 500MHZ module
- 256MB PC66 SODIMM RAM-----------------384MB PC100 SODIMM SDRAM (128MB x3)
- 8.1 GB 12.7mm 2.5" HD-----------------40GB 9mm 2.5" HD (actually several caddies
  --------------------------------------for different HD's and multiple OS's)

------------------------Additional Upgrades or addons------------------------
- D-Link DWL G650 802.11g PC-Card WiFI Atheros chipset supports 54/108 Mbps
- SMC 2532W-B PCMCIA high power 802.11b WiFi, prism2.5 chipset, 200mw output, removeable antenna with external antenna connector. (war drive special ;')
- Hawking 6db antenna
- D-Link DUB-C2 PC-CARD 2 port USB 2.0 adapter
- 3COM PC-CARD 10/100 Ethernet
- Data one USB 2.0 steel external 5.25" HD enclosure
- HP dvd530i DVD +/- R/W Dual layer DVD/CD RW
- Crossfire Smartdisk 160 GB external USB 2.0 / Firewire HD
- IBM PC Camera USB
- D-Link DBT-120 Bluetooth dongle
- iomega external USB Zip drive
- Canon BJC-50 portable colour printer with scanner attachment
- other stuff.

The system runs multiple OS's on multiple HD's. The main two are:

- SuSE Linux 10.0 Professional, Not only the best Linux, but the best all around desktop OS available.

- Windows 2000 SP4 *

*I run 2000 and not XP because I don't like XP. It provides no discernable advantage over 2000 and lots of disadvantages. Like crippled user levels, annoying wizards, resource wasting eye-candy, really annoying PnP habits, etc. Plus it's slower than 2000 and wastes more resources.

I'm planning to detail some of this upgrade here later in case anyone is interested. I really have to thank the ThinkPad forum users (they don't know me, I just lurk there and read their helpful posts) and of course the original ThinkPad upgrade genius, Sharedoc at Wim's BIOS site.
Thanks all.

Anyway, all this was a lot of work, but really inexpensive, at least compared to a new laptop. The PIII 500MHz MMC2 module and 256MB of the PC100 RAM only cost me $50!
$10 for the CPU and $20 each for the 128MB SODIMM's. I scavenged the other 128MB SODIMM and one of the 40GB HD's from a dead laptop.
I got the other HD for $50 about 2 years ago.

The results were amazing. It's like a whole new computer, and I suppose for all intents and purposes, it is. Boot times are much quicker. The system and UI are much snappier and more responsive. Applications are smoother and faster. Multimedia is more functional, playback is smoother.

In fact I'm so happy with the system now that I may not replace it for a couple more years. If anything I'll give a go at trying another, faster CPU. Probably a PIII 750 speedstep. Though right now, I'm fine with the 500.
The reason I didn't do this in the first place is that the 500MHz is the fastest non-speedstep II CPU you can get. Using a speedstep processor on a non-speedstep supporting motherboard is a problem and requires more hardware hacking than I wanted to try all in one shot. You have to modify the module itself. Thought I'd do the non-speedstep first and work out all the bugs and issues involved in that before I took the big leap.
But for now, the old girl is a pleasure to use. peppy, responsive, and comfortable. Great keyboard, beautiful, hires screen, and the awesome Trackpoint II pointer.
All she need's now is a new battery for those rare mobile moments.

Remember, if you are going to replace something anyway, try hacking it first. You might just save some money, have some fun, and learn something.

Later,
Tachyon

**NOTE to laptop manufacturers. License the Tackpoint technology.
Don't whine and tell me about studies and customer surveys etc. The Trackpoint is the best controller there is. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't acutually used one for more than 5 minutes.
My company's first time ThinkPad customers used to complain about the TrackPoint and ask for a mouse. I used to make them a deal. Use the TrackPoint for 2 weeks and if you still want a mouse after that, I'll give you one for free. I only ever gave out one mouse.

ATTENTION e-mail programmers!

Ok, I've got a pet peeve about e-mail that I've had since the first days of attachments.

Why on earth doesn't every piece of e-mail software (web based especially) allow your to separate messages from attachments??!!

I mean come on, I very often want to keep the content of an e-mail, but once I've downloaded the attachment, I don't want it any more. It just clutters up my mail-box.

You'd think the stupid web mail providers would get this. I mean heck, they just keep upping the quota's (gmail is like a GB now) and or charging more for bigger quota's.

Why?

Wanna bet that if they let people delete just the attachments and keep the message it was attached to that in-boxes worldwide would shrink?


While I'm on the subject, I'd sure like a way to filter all the crap attached to the e-e-mail sent by the dummies still using Outlook.
Leave it to Microsoft to leave Outlook an unstable pile of security holes after umpteen revisions, but go and add worthless crap like e-mail themes and backgrounds.
I just 'love' getting a 400k message from some schmuck using Outlook that only contains 10 words, but has a flower border, a flashing signature and an attached midi file playing some crap the sender would smack you for playing at their party.

Gahh... Get a clue.

Microsoft Shoots Own customers...er foot.

Well, M$ finally kicked in it's anti-piracy scheme.
You now have to authenticate your system before you can download updates.
What a load of crap.
Of course they and all their supporting sheep will have a 101 excuses why this is good, necessary, not-evil, etc. But whatever they say, they won't be able to deny the results. It will cause more customer alienation and give the competition another chink in their armour to exploit.

This is exactly the same kind of nonsense that Wal-Mart pulls with their 'greeters'.
Yeah, right. If you treat your customers like thieving scum, that's how they'll act, and how they'll re-act. After all, look around Wal-Mart. All the real good trash shops there. And their losses to theft are higher than their competition. Imagine that.

Here's Microsoft facing more and more pressure from OpenSource and others, they go and decide to start treating their customers like pirating scum. Good move morons.

Now, what about the poor hard working IT fools that have to deal with what will be a huge pain in the ass with regards to updates. What will they be asking Sysadmins to do to get updates now? What about systems with no Internet access?
Everyone has Internet these days you say? oh please. Many companies and government agencies have to isolate their internal networks from any Internet access because Windows is way too insecure to expose to the Internet.

Fortunately we live in a world of morons who will believe in anything, and buy anything. But as soon as a generation with an average IQ higher than the average annual temperature of Norway arrives, Microsoft will go out of business.

[UPDATE]
Apparently ZDNet agrees with me. See http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=389

I wonder if anyone realizes the degree to which Microsoft products are pirated. I mean I've never met anyone that bought a full, legit copy of MS Office. They either got it with their computer, or got it on some other deal like a student price or upgrade version. That or most of the rest of them pirate it. What happens when MS start checking every piece of their software?
People will flock away from Office in droves. I mean come on, there's not anyone that really believes Office is worth $300-$500. Probably because it isn't worth anywhere near that.
So many people pirate without thinking about it. Imagine what will happen when people have to buy every piece of software they use. Winzip, Nero, Office, Acrobat, etc.

Most people have software worth several times the cost of their computer. What will happen when they actually have to pay for it all. Suddenly they won't be so smug about Windows superiority anymore I think.
Open Source will start to sound pretty good. It's like piracy without the guilt.
Suddenly 7z, and OpenOffice and Gimp on Windows (Or heaven forbid, Linux) starts to have some real value.

I know I'd rather pay ($99) now $59 for SuSE Linux Pro and get an OS plus over two thousand appliactions, an office suite, graphics programs etc.

Filesystem Blues

Ok, so I'm not the average marketing sheep. I do my own thing. Because of that I have several (my wife might say a plethora) computers in the house. I use Linux primarily, but I have the requisite Windows boxes, and even a Mac or three.
They each have their areas of usefulness. One of the ways I share files is using external storage devices. USB or Firewire. While this is a great, fast, handy thing, I have one big complaint. Why the heck isn't there a decent common filesystem I can use?

I've had to settle for using the crappy FAT32 filesystem on them mostly. Even though it's probably the most useless filesystem available, it has the single advantage that nearly everything can read and write FAT32 cleanly.

Here's what I want from a filesystem under all my OS's:

- native, stable support in MacOS, Windows, and Linux
- Read write support in all OS's
- >4Gb file supoprt
- ACL supoprt (or at least a concept of ownership and write access)
- robust (can handle power loss etc.) possibly some kind of journalling

Fat32 only meets the first two.
NTFS only meets the third and fourth
HFS is too bizzare
NFS defeats the purpose of an external drive
SMBFS " " "

sigh.